Corpus Delicti and Trauma

Corpus Delicti is a concept out of Western jurisprudence that states for someone to be punished for a crime, there must be evidence that the crime was committed. For the longest time, that’s all the phrase meant to me: body of crime.

But things changed when my therapist brought it up. She asked if I knew the term, and I couldn't make the connection at first. I looked it up and tried to make sense of what she meant. To her credit, it was a great analogy, and it did the job. I went home, searched it, and came to my own conclusion — one that, importantly, didn't feel like she was trying to invalidate my experiences.

Reading about the concept, I realized what she was pointing at: a dead body proves a murder happened. In my case, my being miserable, my holding on to my insecurities, proved that I had gone through what I went through. I was holding on to that experience because it was my reality, and to move on would mean erasing it. Dysfunctional as it is, it's understandable — I clung to my problems because they were evidence of what I'd survived.

Realizing this triggered a small bout of anger — did my therapist not understand the effect my childhood had on me? That anger faded as I understood something else: I was basically forcing myself into situations that made me feel shitty because they were familiar. But was that really it — was I gravitating toward them because they were familiar, or because some part of me didn't want to part ways with them?

I think that was the defining moment of my recovery: realizing I had grown too attached to who I was — specifically, to the parts of myself that had proven detrimental to me in the past — and that attachment was what was stopping me from becoming someone better.