Before There Was the Cornell Seven, There Was Alex Kelly

Journal #2: What Our Bodies Remember Before We Have Words for It

Some stories become headlines.

Others become part of a generation's nervous system.

When I saw the headlines about the Cornell Seven, I felt something familiar before I had formed an opinion. Not because the cases are the same. They aren't. The facts, legal processes and circumstances are different.

It was because, in some strange way, my body had been here before.

Long before social media.
Long before #MeToo.
Long before Senate hearings.

There was Alex Kelly.

In 1996, I was a young television reporter for RNN, standing outside Stamford Superior Court. I was there specifically for the trial. Like everyone else in the press pack, we were hunting for Alex Kelly.

Everyone wanted the money shot.

The video of Alex walking toward the courthouse. The few seconds that would make it onto the evening news. We were competing for the image, the angle, the moment.

There was adrenaline everywhere.

And then he appeared.

He squinted at us with what I remember as attitude. The cameras moved toward him. Reporters crowded in.

He sneered.

I was so close, I felt it.

I remember the shiver that went down my spine.

At the time, I didn't analyze it. I was a reporter. My job was to get the shot, ask the question and keep moving.

So that's what I did.

Back in the newsroom, we edited the footage and talked about the shots. There was a lot of energy around the story—and, looking back, a lot of presumption of guilt.

The case made many of the female reporters uncomfortable.

I remember that.

What I didn't have then was language for why.

I was a young woman doing my job. But I was also a young woman in a culture where girls learned things about danger without anyone necessarily sitting us down and teaching us.

Don't walk alone.

Watch your drink.

Know where the exits are.

Be careful with men you don't know.

Trust your instincts—but don't make a scene.

We absorbed those lessons almost as background noise. They became part of how we moved through the world.

Sometimes they became part of our bodies before they ever became words.

Nearly thirty years later, when I saw the headlines about the Cornell Seven, something in me recognized that feeling.

Again, I am not saying these cases are the same. They aren't.

I'm talking about something different: the cultural experience of women watching stories about sexual violence unfold in public, and the complicated recognition that can happen before we have consciously decided what we think.

For my generation, Alex Kelly was one of those stories.

For another generation, it may be Cornell.

For many people, it was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

Different circumstances. Different allegations. Different evidence and legal processes.

But each became part of a much larger conversation about what women experience, what they remember, what they disclose, what they fear, and whether they will be believed.

And there is another part of this conversation that deserves to be said clearly:

Sexual violence happens to men, too.

As a therapist, I have worked with both men and women carrying trauma, shame, fear and experiences that can be extraordinarily difficult to put into words. I don't have the same reference point from my years as a reporter; I don't remember covering male sexual-violence cases in court.

But that absence has never struck me as evidence that those experiences weren't happening.

What I have learned as a therapist is how much shame and silence can surround experiences that people are not ready—or do not feel safe enough—to name.

The absence of a headline doesn't mean the absence of an experience.

Sometimes it means the story was never told.

I understand these things differently now than I did in 1996.

Years after standing outside that courthouse, I became a therapist. I trained in Somatic Experiencing. I began to understand that the body is constantly taking in information—sometimes faster than our conscious mind can organize it.

That doesn't mean the body is a lie detector.

My physical reaction that day wasn't proof of anyone's guilt.

It was information about my experience of that moment.

Something had registered.

I didn't have words for it.

I didn't need to.

My body had already responded.

That's one of the things I find most interesting about trauma and the nervous system. We often imagine memory as something that lives in a story: This happened. Then this happened. Then I felt this.

But sometimes memory begins somewhere else.

In a tightening.

A startle.

A change in breathing.

A feeling in the stomach.

A sudden urge to move away.

A shiver down the spine.

Sometimes we remember the feeling long before we understand the story.

When I look at that old photograph now—the one of me, the blonde reporter behind the camera—I don't just see a young journalist chasing a story.

I see a young woman who was doing her job.

I see the intensity of that moment.

I see the media pack.

And I remember being close enough to feel the force of that encounter.

I also see how much I didn't know yet.

I didn't know the language of the nervous system.

I didn't know about Somatic Experiencing.

I didn't know that something could be registered by the body before the mind had a coherent explanation for it.

I only knew that I felt a shiver.

Nearly thirty years later, I still remember it.

Maybe that's what some stories do.

They don't simply stay in our minds.

They become part of the way we understand safety, danger, trust and ourselves.

And sometimes, long before we can tell the story—

the body already knows that something happened.

Before Words.

Why Before Words

Some of life's most important experiences happen before we have language for them.

Before memory.

Before explanation.

Before Words is a journal exploring how movies, books, music, relationships, and everyday moments help us understand what the body has known all along through the lens of Somatic Experiencing, trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, attachment, and becoming.

Because the body often knows first.

And healing is what happens when we learn to live beyond the stories that first shaped us.

Jennifer Goggin, LPC, LMHC, SEP

Providing Somatic Experiencing, PTSD therapy, anxiety therapy, depression therapy, and trauma therapy for adults in Palm Beach Gardens throughout Florida, and virtually across Connecticut.