Growing Up and Healing from Sexual Trauma

Last night, I watched the HBO documentary Twist of Faith. It is a very powerful and intensely painful story about the sexual abuse of children (primarily boys) by Catholic priests, with a specific emphasis on Tony Comes, an individual sexual trauma survivor, and the effects that the abuse has had on his life. Tony had the courage (with the support of his family) to challenge the Diocese of Toledo, Ohio in a lawsuit. He was willing to go through the pain of forcing the Catholic Church officials to publicly admit to the abuse and start the process of manifesting a policy which will hopefully stop the abuse of other children by priests. As the documentary portrays, his courageous action very nearly tore his family apart and it surely challenged his faith and that of his community.

Several statements made in the documentary deeply resonated with my own trauma experiences. Tony's wife, Wendy, talked about how there was encouragement (and not-so-veiled criticism) by people who have not been similarly abused to "just grow up and get over it"; and how the abuse affected 'cycles of relationships' within their family, among their friends, and in the wider community. What struck me as particularly poignant about those statements was that, while sexual abuse survivors often desire to 'have it all go away', it simply doesn't. And even if it somehow miraculously could, the survivor wouldn't be able to help others who have experienced (or are presently experiencing) the same kind of sexual trauma.

It truly isn't that 'simple'. The memory of the trauma just doesn't, and can't, evaporate and allow the survivors to 'move on' in their life. Unfortunately, in order to move beyond the trauma, it is necessary to go through it, to heal from the pain. Stuffing the memory simply does not work and is quite counterproductive. Tony Comes at one point talks about how every time he's making love to his wife the specter of his perpetrator walks across his mental picture. Telling a survivor to 'wake up' and 'grow up', without working through the trauma, ignores the very nature of the original trauma. As he relates, the teenage boys would be encouraged to become intoxicated at the priest's country cottage and then the next day, as he was waking up, the priest was engaging in oral and anal copulation with him. And then an hour later the priest was conducting Mass for the area congregants -- as though nothing had happened, as though the two events were entirely unconnected.

A person would have a difficult time safely falling asleep for the rest of their lives, in fear that upon waking they would be sexually violated and raped by someone they had respected and trusted. How can one 'wake up', in a literal sense, when their experience of 'waking up' was rape?

Wendy Comes' point about how the abuse continued to affect the 'cycles of relationships' around Tony is most illuminating. Sexual abuse survivors can't simply walk away from the memories and 'move on' in their life. Surely they must eventually learn how to 'cope' with the trauma enough to function and love and live a more or less 'normal' life, but until they have the ability (with ample assistance and intervention from a competent therapist, caring friends, and intimate partners) to confront the deep sense of betrayal that they experienced, and time to heal that wound, the trauma is going to continue to affect all the relationships, personal and professional, they have in their lives.

Learning to 'trust again' is a very slow process and one that involves a multiplicity of layers of healing. The healing process reminds me of what one of my therapists mentioned years ago, that "it's like peeling the layers of an onion: you peel one layer at a time and often it provokes tears." And it seems like an infinite onion, like the layers will simply go on forever. But it also reminds me of Baba Ram Dass' observation in Remember, Be Here Now, in his discussion of the 'thirteen pointers to help you keep your perspective along the path of your spiritual journey' (a document which I often re-read and which represents a major 'touchstone' for me in my own healing journey):

As you further purify yourself, your impurities will seem grosser and larger. Understand that it's not that you are getting more caught in the illusion, it's just that you are seeing more clearly. The lions guarding the gates of the temples [of truth] get fiercer as you proceed toward each inner temple. But of course the light is brighter also. It all become more intense because of the additional energy involved at each stage of 'sadhana' [spiritual practice].

Trust is such a deeply integral aspect of human emotion that, without it, living one's life with grace is almost impossible. Wrapped up in trust is also the need for safety. If you can't trust people around you, especially [in Tony Comes' case] people to whom your family and community have delegated so much authority due to their faith tradition, then having a sufficient sense of personal safety is also undermined. An individual in that bind literally has no one to turn to, no one they can depend upon not to hurt them. Such a dilemma tears away at the foundation of one's personal 'sense of emotional solidity' and negatively impacts all the relationships one has, especially those that an individual attempts to construct on an intimate level in the years following the sexual abuse. You have to know, at a deep emotional level, that you can safely 'move beyond the fear of the lion's roar' and continue your journey toward your emotional and spiritual healing.

Each time you peel back another layer and heal from that level of trauma, yet another layer lays before you to be peeled back. First it's necessary to move beyond a sense that others around you will, for truly the slightest minor altercation, betray you with impunity. Then you are amazed that your intimate partner finds you worthy of their love and caring and you start to trust (rather feebly at first, growing stronger over time) that the love they are investing won't be pulled from under your feet without a moment's notice. All the time, you are fighting with your inner voices which tell you that what you are experiencing is only an illusion, nothing more, and that you'll wake up from this dream at any moment. Yet, if the connection is resonant for both parties, the love grows stronger and deeper, rather than fleeting like your past relationships. And the 'new normal' is that this intimate connection (between yourself and your lover, or between yourself and your close friends) won't instantly evaporate.

Of course, each individual sexual trauma survivor's healing journey will look different. The nature of the trauma is different, each survivor has a different 'personal constitution', the personalities of the perpetrators are different. But expecting a sexual trauma survivor to simply 'grow up and get on with life', without extensive and often painful healing, is to ignore the extensive destruction the trauma has wrought in that individual's life. It is possible to heal and have a happy life, but the memories will never go away [short of amnesia], nor will the low level fear that all of one's years of hard emotional work will be obliterated by a 'triggering event', resurfacing the dynamics of the original trauma in later years.

To sum up this discussion, I end with Ram Dass' 13th pointer:

What is happening to you is nothing less than death and rebirth. What is dying is the entire way in which you understood "who you are" and "how it all is". What is being reborn is the child of the Spirit for whom all things are new. This process of attending an ego that is dying at the same time as you are going through a birth process is awesome. Be gentle and honor him/her (self) who is dying, as well as him/her (Self) who is being born.