Rachel Brown
speaker
1,264 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 5 Aug
Rachel Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
That's an age when many of us have our first memories of eating a soft serve ice cream cone, of fighting over candy with a sibling,
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But for Ruth, her first memories were of being abused by her neighbor, someone her family had trusted.
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During her psychoanalysis, Ruth only spoke about her abuse in the third person, as if she were witnessing it.
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Here's how journalist Jean Stone understands it.
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As a coping mechanism while the abuse was taking place, Ruth created a type of separate self, a little girl in a white dress.
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And therefore burying the memory.
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Right around the time of the abuse, Ruth received a gift from her aunt, a book of poetry.
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She would sit outside on her front porch while her aunt read it to her.
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These are Ruth's words, read for us by an actor.
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So these memories all swirled together, the trauma and the poems and the little girl in a white dress, and they got pushed down for decades.
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That same swirl of memories then became a weapon she used against herself.
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Repression became a habit for Ruth.
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So why would Ruth's subconscious create this tormentor?
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Maybe, Dr. Pickens thought, it was a cry for help.
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Not the attention-seeking some people might have believed, but as a way to call attention to her pain.
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Support she never got when she was a child being abused.
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And the terror Wichita was facing offered the perfect environment for Ruth's repressed memories to surface.
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Larry Hatteberg, a local TV reporter who got to know Ruth, thought maybe the poet was a way for her to act on her desire to take her own life.
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Jean Stone isn't sure it's quite that simple.
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I wish I could ask Ruth why she thinks her mind would create the poet.
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Showing 81–100 of 1,264 · page 5 of 64
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