I was doing really well on writing blog postings in July and August of this year, working on installments of the "Recovery" focus -- which I plan to return to soon. But, around that time, a whole new set of events occurred that encouraged me, at least temporarily, to set aside that focus and concentrate on another path.
Over this past year, when I made connections on LinkedIn -- as people accepted my invitation to 'link' -- I sent out a 7-paragraph 'bio' that talked about what my activities had been, in terms of men's emotional wellness, how I had arrived at 'where I was presently', and listed the Internet links to the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute [MMWI] website and blog. I was gratified that about 50% of the people to whom I sent my bio responded. Most of the replies were in the nature of "thanks for the information, it's good to connect", which was pleasant, but additionally a number of people said "I really like what you're talking about and want to connect at a stronger professional level". For those replies, I wrote back and engaged in a short, but vital conversation. And then, a few people 'acted upon' the information in my bio and said they wanted to interview me for articles or radio shows. That was the most amazing part: it's gratifying when I am able to 'link with lots of other professional people', but it's even more empowering to carry on real conversations with LinkedIn connections and make the connections 'real'.
So, I am going to discuss the most resilient of links that I made and what has resulted from them heretofore.
KETC, Channel 9 Community Producer Class
Before talking about the links, I want to focus on a Video Editing class I took at KETC, the St. Louis PBS channel (it ties into what follows). KETC sent out an invitation in August, inviting nonprofit organizations to engage in a Video Editing class at the station, with a special emphasis on Community Producers who had taken the class before. I had taken the class in 2012 and produced a short video for their "Homeland" project.
We had a choice of any community focus that we wanted to engage in, for our projects. Most of the class decided to focus on the events in Ferguson, Missouri, following the murder of Michael Brown by a white police officer, Darren Wilson. That had been dominating the news for several weeks and had raised (for very good reasons) community anger about police brutality and the overt discriminatory enforcement of the law at the expense of African American citizens -- which, frankly, has been going on for a very long time in Missouri. But this death, in particular, was 'the straw that broke the camel's back' and finally lit the fuse of anger in the African American, and St. Louis antiracism, community.
As much I have been, throughout my community organizing career, focused on antiracism issues, I decided to focus my own video on the issues of adult male sexual abuse survivors, which is the primary focus of MMWI. The class lasted 6 weeks, and I completed my video right before I left for New Mexico (see below). Given the time constraints, I decided to interview myself [as a male sexual abuse survivor], Linda Fiehler, my significant female partner, and Rev. Dr. Mark Robinson, my therapist. The class agreed, at the final session when we showed our 'product', that I had the most professional video, the most 'completed' one, at least in part because I had the advantage of having taken the class once before.
The subject of my video, which was posted on the KETC website, is "Achieving Intimacy After The Devastation of Male Sexual Child Abuse". The video can be accessed at: http://youtu.be/b9BcIr3GhVs.
(If you reach a 'Something went wrong' point, just ignore that and hit the 'follow this link' in the lower right corner, which will take you to the video.)
St. Louis Business Journal - Part 1
One of the people to whom I offered an invitation to connect on LinkedIn was the publisher of the St. Louis Business Journal. I didn't 'know' her beforehand, mainly I was reaching out and making connections to people within my own community whom I thought had interesting positions and ideas that would be beneficial to MMWI. In addition to people in Missouri, I focused on connections with people in New Mexico [where I lived for 32 years before moving to St. Louis], Native Americans, plus professionals working in the fields of psychology, mental health, human anti-trafficking, domestic abuse, art therapy, and other fields that related to the mission of MMWI. I was also focused on spreading my connections worldwide, and managed to make connections in Canada, Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. I enjoy having that 'global perspective' and accessing ideas and approaches to issues from many different perspectives.
Anyway, to my delightful surprise, the publisher at the St. Louis Business Journal (I found out later) read my bio and thought 'this would be an interesting person to interview' for their "Character Profile" article, which they have in every weekly edition. She directed one of her editors to pursue the interview and he in turn contacted Meg Crane, who is one of their writers, who in turn contacted me. This all occurred in mid-September. Meg called and asked me for an interview. This was the first time in over 10 years that anyone had taken an interest in finding out more about the mission of MMWI (there had been two articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2001 and 2002 about the organization, which had generated some community interest, but then media coverage had fallen silent).
It took a while to set things up, but finally we engaged in the interview in mid-October. As it turned out the only day we could do it was right before I was headed off to the Southwest to visit Bryce, Zion, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon, see friends and family in Albuquerque, and attend the New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference at Ghost Ranch. The schedule was so tight that we arranged a photo session and the interview on the Friday before I was leaving on Sunday. At the time of the interview, the KETC video (noted above) had not yet been posted, but I told Meg I would encourage KETC to post it before the publication of the St. Louis Business Journal article, so they could include the link in the article.
The interview was really quite enjoyable (Meg Crane is a very professional interviewer). We scheduled it to last an hour, but it ended up going for 2 1/2 hours! At the end, Meg said she hoped that someone would 'take the bait' and be willing to fund MMWI, based on its focus on men's emotional wellness and the issues of male sexual abuse survivors, especially given how that no nonprofits in Missouri have that dual focus.
Off to the Southwest, and An Interview in Albuquerque
After a delightful week traveling with my long-time significant female partner to Bryce and Zion Canyons, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon, we returned to Albuquerque to visit with my brother and sister-in-law, and visit my close friends. On the second morning we were in town, we turned on the local news, mainly to see what the weather was going to be that day. As it turned out, there was an announcement about some police-community relations hearings at the Albuquerque Convention Center that evening. Albuquerque has had it own share of police brutality problems over this past year, with 37 police killings of citizens (some of them caught on video, which lead many citizens to be concerned that the killings were more like executions); a recent Economist article talked about Albuquerque having the most violent police department in the United States.
I noted to my significant partner that I should attend those hearings, given my former role as the Chair of the Albuquerque Policy Advisory Board (1981-82). After a day of seeing friends, we attended the hearings that evening. As it turned out, the forum was mainly a presentation about how a series of meetings were going to be held in the spring of 2015, to address citizen concerns about police behavior. One of the speakers was the mayor, who encouraged people to talk to him afterwards. I took that opportunity offered, and approached him and talked about my former role on the APAB. After giving him my business card and noting that I now lived in St. Louis, I offered my advise on how to set up an effective police-community review board.
As I was leaving the meeting, I noticed that there were several reporters from the local Albuquerque television stations in the back of the room, and being a 'media savvy' person, I approached one of them and noted that she might be interested to know that I was the former Chair of the Albuquerque Police Advisory Board. Immediately she turned to the cameraman and said "turn on that camera" and conducted an interview. Upon returning home, I told my brother about it, and we recorded the broadcast of the 10 p.m. news on KOB Channel 4, which had a portion of the interview. The following morning, Linda and I had breakfast with Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a former supervisor of mine, who is now a New Mexico State Senator. Jerry smiled and laughed "you've only been in Albuquerque 24 hours and you are already on the news!" He was happy that my experience with that Board had gotten some coverage again.
New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference
I hadn't been at the New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference since 2005, mainly due to financial constraints. But it was great to return and see old friends. This year's conference was the 30th Annual and I felt that was a great reason to come back. Many of my old comrades thanked me for returning, noting that "we're happy you've returned, because you have been a constructive critic of this conference over the years and we've been motivated to change some of it's foci as a result of your comments." I thoroughly enjoyed myself, making new friends in the process.
One thing that made the whole experience so empowering for me was that I came back to the conference having 'accomplished' something, concerning men's wellness, in Missouri. I had been a critic of the conference over the years, feeling that it's focus had been almost exclusively on both white, middle- and upper-middle class college educated men and on men in only the larger New Mexican cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces -- thereby ignoring men of color and men from the smaller towns in the state. [I had organized Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute in Missouri precisely to counter those limitations and more inclusively spread the message about men's wellness to communities of color and working-class males.] To my delighted surprise, several of the attendees were non-white males, and there were several men from other New Mexico cities and from out-of-state, which told me that their 'outreach' efforts had been successful. This year, I had, to my delight, had the interview with the St. Louis Business Journal before coming to the Conference, and I told my friends about it. I had been trying to motivate the Organizing Committee to promote men's wellness 'far and wide' and had, in the most serendipitous sort of way, successfully promoted it in Missouri. Many of the guys were very happy for me, and encouraged me to send them information about the article once it was published.
St. Louis Business Journal - Part 2
When I was visiting Zion Canyon, Meg Crane had called to tell me what she had written for the article and asked me to confirm that she had gotten the information correct. Shortly after I returned from New Mexico, the article was published (in the October 31-November 6 edition). I sent links to the article to a great many friends in Missouri and New Mexico. Unfortunately, KETC posted the video too late for the information about that link to appear in the St. Louis Business Journal article. But I was able to tell lots of my friends and colleagues about the video, and many people had a chance to view it, as well as read the Journal article. Many people responded warmly, thanking me for giving them the opportunity to know me better and to know about the mission of Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute.
In addition to many other positive outcomes, my Unitarian church is assisting me in setting up a Men's Wellness Ministry. The title of the St. Louis Business Journal article was Mariposa ministry and Meg had included, following upon my encouragement, a note about how my minister at First Unitarian had been working with me on the organization of that program. My plans for the ministry are widespread and inclusive, and I'll be talking about them in more detail in subsequent blog postings.
The one thing, though, that hasn't been generated from the Journal article, not really to any surprise, is 'someone coming forward to fund MMWI'. I never figured it would 'happen by osmosis'. I knew I would have to pursue that connection if it was going to lead to funding. But years ago, when I was in the Nonprofit Management and Leadership Certificate program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, one of my professors had noted that it was unlikely I would ever be funded unless I could find someone, hopefully who had experienced sexual abuse as a child, who had their own 'deep pockets' who would be willing to fund the nonprofit, given how few foundations fund men's wellness issues (Meg had repeated this advice in the Journal article). And, frankly, I don't know those kinds of people. So, while the article was powerful and personally empowering, and it has given me the opportunity to let my many connections know what I do professionally, it hasn't, heretofore, generated any income for the organization.
A Fine Time for Healing
Now, I arrive at the 2nd major result of my LinkedIn connections. Randi Fine, a psychotherapist who is one of my LinkedIn connections in Florida, offered me the opportunity to appear on her BlogTalkRadio show to discuss the issues of male sexual child abuse survivors. She felt the subject is rarely discussed (something I have noted extensively on the MMWI website and blog) and wanted to give me the opportunity to talk about in on a national forum.
Hence, I will be the featured speaker on the A Fine Time for Healing BlogTalkRadio show this coming Friday, September 26 (the day after Christmas) at 11 a.m. EST. The link for the show is: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/randi-fine/2014/12/23/promoting-male-sexual-abuse-awareness-with-donald-b-jeffries.
Listeners can call in to talk to me at (424) 220-1801. If anyone misses the show on Friday, they can still access the link at a late date and listen to the show, as it is archived.
Focused Serendipity
I used that terminology because of my sense that it is about being 'focused', in that I engaged in efforts to send my professional biography to my LinkedIn connections, but 'serendipitous' in that I had no idea what would result from my efforts and the results have been quite amazing! As my brother advised many years ago, "just keep planting those seeds and you never know which ones will sprout". Between the St. Louis Business Journal article, my reconnections with my friends at the New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference (I've volunteered to be on their Outreach Committee and to assist in organizing next year's conference), my antiracism work in St. Louis, the development of the Men's Wellness Ministry at the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, and the BlogTalkRadio show this week, who knows what will result from the 'planting of these seeds'. I'm excited and empowered by all these wonderful events of the past several months.
One last note: after doing the interview in Albuquerque, about police-community relations, upon returning to St. Louis I followed up by forwarding a letter I had written last year to the St. Louis Mayor's Office -- concerning my experiences with the Albuquerque Police Advisory Board -- to Alderman Terry Kennedy, who recently introduced a bill before the St. Louis Board of Alderman to form a Citizen's Review Board for the City of St. Louis. I also sent copies of the letter to the Chief Sam Dodson at the St. Louis Police Department, and to Ray Hartmann, publisher at St. Louis Magazine, who has been quite vocal about the need for such a local Board. I haven't heard back from any of them, but I've 'put out the word' about my experience with that process, and hence 'planted another seed'.
Who knows which of these seeds will sprout and how that will effect the long-term outcome of my life and/or Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute? I wait with positive feelings, even while continuing to "do the work that needs to be done" concerning men's emotional wellness, male sexual child abuse survivors, and antiracism community organizing. As a close female friend said to me years ago "Sometimes you have to sit back and allow the Universe to express an opinion". I await those continuing empowered results.
Monday, December 22, 2014
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Recovery: It's More A Verb Than A Noun (Part 3)
For this 3rd installment of my articles on the outcomes of recovery, I am going to focus on the sexual issues that arise for survivors of sexual child abuse. As usual, given that this blog is related to the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute, I will focus on the ways in which sexual trauma has deleterious aftereffects on male survivors, with the understanding that such outcomes can affect female survivors in similar ways.
Defining, for ourselves, what our 'original' sexual orientation or identity was
This is a difficult journey, indeed. When a survivor is sexually abused, especially when it occurs in childhood, the abuse is truly 'age inappropriate' (abuse is abuse, but what I'm referring to is that for the child the nature of the sexual child abuse is so thoroughly outside the realm of anything they can conceptualize as 'normal' or 'understandable', given that sexuality of any kind at that age is completely bizarre to them). As a result, a 'message' about what their future sexual 'nature' is or should be becomes imprinted at a time in life when all the child really knows is that the abuse is painful and unwanted. 'Knowing' what one 'should become' later in life [sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual desire], based on the 'natural' constitution of the child, is completely messed up by the profoundly age inappropriate sexual nature of the child abuse.
This is even difficult to discuss, and hence I have to approach all of this very delicately.
As the child grows into adolescence, and the hormones of puberty 'kick in' (and adult sexuality begins to 'make some degree of sense'), the sexual confusion evoked by the earlier sexual child abuse comes to fruition. For victims of sexual child abuse, having any clear idea of what one's original sexual nature 'is' or 'was' becomes frightfully difficult to access. In most human societies, the 'sexual messages' are strongly tilted toward heterosexuality; which is fine, if the young person has a comfortable ease with an attraction toward members of the other sex. But what if their 'sense of themselves' is manifested by an attraction for members of their own sex? While I feel that a sexual desire rooted in heterosexuality or homosexuality (or any wide variety of other mixtures on the sexual spectrum) is quite appropriate -- given the mutual 'consenting' comfort with the behavior by both partners in a sexual interaction -- my point about the problem for survivors of sexual child abuse is that they have no earthly idea if their sexual orientation or identity is rooted in personal desire or the aftereffects of the sexual trauma that they experienced in their childhood [and even, possibly, are containing to experience]. There is no way to 'know' or objectively distinguish between what 'the original nature is' and what is the 'manufactured nature, resulting from the sexual child abuse'.
I stress this issue of 'original nature' because, as a survivor of sexual child abuse, I have always wondered what choices I would have made in life -- about my own sexual identity or my sexual orientation -- if I had not be sexually abused from infancy forward. What choices would I have made, based upon my own 'natural emotional constitution', if my perception of the world around me had not been so effectively obliterated by the painful sexual trauma? I'm well aware that it is sort of an exercise in futility: it's like knowing the outcome of the null proposition (if it hadn't been what it was, what would have been the outcome). And yet it is important to me because it effects my healing journey of recovery.
Let me quote, here, from Mike Lew's book Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse, p. 41, to make my point clearer.
Since men "are not supposed to be victims," abuse (and particularly sexual abuse) becomes a process of demasculinization (or emasculation). If men aren't to be victims (the equation reads), then victims aren't men. The victimized male wonders and worries about what the abuse has turned him into. Believing that he is no longer an adequate man, he may see himself as a child, a woman, gay, or less than human -- an irreparably damaged freak. Some survivors resort to broad parodies of "acceptably masculine" behavior in order to counteract this self-perception.
There are two issues raised in Mike's quote: knowing 'what' a victim's sexual orientation or identity was before the sexual abuse, and being at all comfortable with 'being a victim' in a society that has major problems with allowing males to be seen as victims. The further issue Mr. Lew brings up, later in his book (and it has been a significant theme of both my articles and my nonprofit) is that, by not allowing men to see themselves as having been victimized as children, by perpetrators who had 'power over' them, they have a difficult time admitting that victimization -- either to themselves or to others, including their intimate partners -- and therefore often don't seek mental health resources to deal with the very painful emotional outcomes of the abuse. [Whether such resources are actually available, given that most incest groups and mental health therapists focus their resources almost exclusively on female survivors, is questionable. But that is separate issue, and one that I have dealt with extensively on the MMWI website.]
My point is that many survivors [and I personally] were really messed up by the sexual child abuse. I did not have a consistent idea, as an adolescent, about what 'sexual identity' I had or wanted to have (to the extent that I had conscious choice) or what sexual orientation felt 'natural or desirable'. And that confusion has continued to plague me throughout my life. It's still a major struggle. For now, and for the past decade or so, my orientation has been heterosexual, and I have been able to manifest a mutual long-term loving intimacy with a female with whom I feel a strong emotional and sexual attachment. But while that heterosexual orientation was generally the case in the past, it hasn't always been so. Given the confusing sexual messages I was given by the sexual child abuse and the peculiar unresolved traumas of my perpetrators, I've both been attracted to and rejecting of females, and I have sought other avenues of intimate fulfillment at various points in my life journey. (In many ways, even though I wanted to manifest a loving relationship with heterosexual women, I had conflicted feelings about that desire. I felt a fair amount of anger toward females, primarily based upon what I perceived to be their often unilateral financial, sexual and emotional expectations of me, as a male, which I found painfully discounting of 'who I was'.)
And as for any kind of consistent sexual identity, well, that has been problematic itself. I 'know' that I am male [since the age of 16, I have been a 6'8" man, with a deep and resonating voice], but whether I have felt comfortable with that fact has been, and continues, in some ways, to be problematic. I think for now that's all I want to say about that, given the delicacy of this issue (as I noted at the start of this installment) and the need to remain 'safe'. Let me simply say, at this juncture, that the emotionally confusing nature of this issue was one of the major motivations for becoming involved with the men's wellness movement and focusing my life's work on men's emotional wellness.
For many male survivors (for many survivors of either sex) having a consistent 'sense of one's sexual nature' is truly a problematic issue. Being sexually victimized as such an early age simply destroys that personal sense of 'comfort' with one's personal sexual identity. And when the sexual abuse occurs in infancy, before the brain even has a chance to actually 'remember' anything (more on this later) -- when one has only, at best, 'body memories' of the trauma -- having any grounded idea what one's 'original sexual identity' was, or is presently, is thrown into a place of profound confusion.
Which brings me back to the original point of this article: that recovery is a process, not a destination. One rarely reaches a point of 'being recovered', for more than a very short period, before it's necessary to 'continue the healing journey', uncovering deeper and often more traumatic aspects of one's abuse.
Taking responsibility for our own sexuality
Again, a very difficult issue (the rationale for this installment is a willingness to finally face some of those really difficult 'sexual' issues on the road to recovery from sexual child abuse). How can one take responsibility for their own sexuality if an individual has no rational basis upon which to support a sense of what personal responsibility looks like? The very nature of sexual child abuse is that responsibly for the child's 'sexuality' was in the hands of a perpetrator who cared little for the child's safety or care. That they are or were perpetrating behavior which is completely traumatizing for the child (or infant) is not something that a pedophile is concerned about: this is a behavior which is based far more on power and control than upon caring in the least about the feelings of the victim.
And the result for the victim, as they grow up chronologically (I'm being careful not to say 'matures', simply because maturation is such a major confusing issue for a trauma survivor), is that 'having control over our sexuality' is, itself, deeply problematic. How can one exercise effective conscious control over one's sexuality if the message they have received from the trauma is that they have no control over how others treat them sexually?
And yet, it is entirely necessary to reach that point, however one does it (hopefully, with good mental health intervention, often over many years of therapy). It is necessary both because one needs to have a consistent idea of what kind of behavior is healthy and non-abusive, and because it is the only way to truly recover from the sexual trauma. To know that you personally are 'in control' (to the extent that anyone is in control of anything in their lives), rather than their partner or another perpetrator, is the point one needs to 'reach' if there is to be any kind of healthy long-term sexual outcome.
In this regard, I want to make a point about 'sexual objectification'. We live in a society where, in reaction to a discomfort with true intimacy, people of both sexes are apt to 'sexually objectify' potential partners. The 'classic' pattern is that men objectify women sexually and women objectify men financially. Men who are fearful of healthy intimacy (of deeply connecting on an emotional level with another human being) look at women as 'body parts', as an 'object that can be manipulated in order to fulfill one's short-term sexual desires'. Women who are fearful of healthy intimacy look at men as paychecks, as 'an object that can be manipulated in order to fulfill one's desired economic lifestyle or as the primary financial supporters of children and family'. My own experience has shown me that there is a secondary level of objectivity: that if a man doesn't believe he can objectify a woman sexually, he will objectify her financially (abuse the relationship to obtain economic support), and that if a woman doesn't believe she can objectify a man financially, she will objectify him sexually (abuse the relationship to obtain non-reciprocal sexual satisfaction).
I sometimes hear other males say, in mock 'humor', in response to the often stated female complaint about being sexually objectified, "Boy, I'd love it if a woman would treat me as a sexual object!" And I say in response (either directly to them, or 'in my head') "No, you really would not want to be treated as a sexual object; what you want is for women to be more sexually responsive to your overtures, not to abuse you sexually." I say this from experience. In my early sexual life, when I was deep in the aftereffects of the sexual child abuse I had experienced (and had not recovered from the abuse, on any rational level, largely because I was not, at the time, aware that I had been the victim of incest as a child), I often was either treated as a sexual object by females, or unconsciously 'presented' myself for such abusive objectification, because 'that's the message I had received from the trauma' [that my only value was as a sexual object]. And, further, since I had few economic resources, the women who I met saw no point in pursuing me as a financial object. They wanted company and they wanted sexual satisfaction, but only at the level that they felt comfortable with [which often, as noted before, was basically "I want what I want, and will offer not much of anything in return"].
One night (among many) in particular made this situation clear. I went to a party in my mid-20's, and met a woman whom I found attractive. As is the nature of 'hitting on' and 'sexually socializing', we mutually seduced each other and ended up driving back to her house, in her car, and having sex. The following morning, she needed to go to work. I requested that she give me a ride back to the party location, on her way to work, so I could pick up my car. Her response, delivered quite pertly, was "No, I won't. Have someone else drive you there. I need to get to work and you need to leave my house. Now!" In other words, in the most clear of intentions, "I got what I wanted sexually and you need to leave. We may have used each other last night, but there is no intended reciprocity, from me, this morning. I got what I wanted and now get out of my house!" As I left her house, finding myself a bit geographically and emotionally lost and looking for a phone booth to call someone I knew to help me, I thought "Oh! This is what it means to be a sexual object. Now I get what women have been talking about for years. She got what she wanted, with very little reciprocal investment in return, at my expense. That's abuse!!"
Now, don't get me wrong. It was a 'one-night stand'. Neither of us was in doubt about the dynamic surrounding the sexual encounter. But my experience, in talking to female friends, was that they felt if a man had sex with them and the following morning basically threw them out of their house, in a most undignified manner, they felt (I believe quite justifiably) like they had been treated as a sexual object by a man who only wanted a 'piece of ass', without any degree of even minimal polite care. Knowing that, whenever I had had a superficial sexual interaction with a woman, I always had the courtesy to offer her a ride home, to display a basic degree of human care. That this woman clearly behaved like the men my female friends saw as abusive made me realize how uncomfortable that 'objectification' was. Hence, having first been expected to provide the majority of the sexual pleasure, to my partner, the night before, and then having that partner unceremoniously kick me out of her house, without the 'socially expected decency' to drive me back to get my vehicle, was not simply discourteous, but downright abusive. Which is why I felt like I had been treated like 'a piece of ass' (or a 'roving penis') -- as, in fact, a sexual object -- by this woman. Context is important in defining any human interaction!
This sense that I as being treated as a sexual object was further evidenced over the years of my life when various female 'partners' would say they wanted to talk about 'the deep pain in my life' and made it clear that my willingness to listen, with care, would signify loving investment. Having heard that clearly, I intently listened to their often painful emotional stories. But when I felt it was 'my turn', to talk about my own pain (which, objectively, was damned profound, almost like laying molten lava on someone else) their reaction, quite often, was "I need to go somewhere else, do something else, etc.", or in other words I don't want to hear about your pain because your primary utility in my life is as a sexual performer and an ear for my pain. Beyond that, knowing you and caring about you is not something I want to engage in. That was clear and definite. It only changed as I slowly and gradually healed emotionally and sexually. The world began to look and feel different as I recovered from the sexual child abuse, and as I learned to 'present myself' to others as other than a sexual object or a person who was open to be victimized. In other words (and this is the difficult transition of recovery) I learned to be less of a victim and therefore others were less likely to victimize me.
When I began participating in the New Mexico men's movement in the mid-1980's, I finally 'began to know' that I had 'sexual choice', that I had the 'right' to say 'no' to the sexual overtures of females and that I had a 'right' to decide with whom I had sexual relations. And that I had a 'right' -- and responsibility -- to 'own' my personal sexuality. And further, and most importantly for the continuation of my sexual healing journey, that I had 'human value' in other areas of my life beyond as a 'unilateral sexual satisfier'. It finally dawned on me that I had might have human value other than as a sexual object who was expected to fulfill other people's desires, with minimal expectation or hope for mutual pleasure. Wow! That arose in my consciousness both as a profound revelation and as a needed transition for deeper emotional healing.
To 'seal the knowledge' in my own head (and to assist other males who had experienced similar trauma) in 1993 I gave a presentation at the New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference (held each year, since 1984, at Ghost Ranch, near Abiqui, New Mexico) on "The Sexual Abuse of Men By Women". When I first began my talk, there was significant questioning in the eyes of the audience; but as I dove deeper into my topic, distinct lights of understanding arose, to chants of acknowledgement. Afterward, in private, several men approached, noting that the pattern I was describing had occurred in their lives, but that since men aren't supposed to be victims, they hadn't come to grips with the behavior and how they were abused by it. My willingness to confront this subject, and my openness about how it is not simply something that happens only to females, as a result of abusive male behavior, was enlightening to them and allowed them to more deeply explore their own healing journey.
The real 'leap' that I finally made in my sexual healing came about in the mid-1990s, when I finally had the courage of my emotional convictions to decide, firmly and consciously, that I would not have sexual relations with women unless and until they evidenced a clear willingness to invest emotionally in the relationship. That constituted a major 'ownership' of my own sexuality. It also resulted in a significant drop in the number of females who were willing to date me (or that I was willing to date). For all the vaunted desire of females to engage in emotionally invested relationships, my painful -- but necessary -- experience was that, in demanding emotional investment initially, the 'pool' of potential partners plummeted.
When I had been available as a sexual victim who could be used, women were quite willing to use me for the satisfaction of their sexual needs while only rarely feeling a minimal responsibility to fulfill my stated desires in return. And as a sexual abuse victim/survivor, I was 'trained' to accept that, no matter how painful I felt it to be [at the least, it was 'familiar' to me]. But when I made it clear that I would not engage in that kind of sexual activity -- or any sexual play -- unless they were willing to evidence a willingness to invest emotionally, I hit a wall of rejection. But, as I say, this was necessary, because it was 'what it took' to heal from a lifetime of being used sexually by other people. Eventually, as noted above, about twelve years later I finally found a female who was willing to make that kind of emotional investment. I surely felt rather hopeless until it was finally manifested in my mid-50s!
And now, though, with that positive, loving, and intimate emotional foundation beneath me, I can 'pass forward' the healing lessons I have learned from a lifetime of sexual abuse and emotional rejection. There is a light at the end of the tunnel! There are no guarantees in this life, and there is, hence, no guarantee that working diligently on our healing journeys that we will find a partner who cares about us and is willing to work through the emotionally and sexually 'tough spots' with us. But, as a survivor of sexual child abuse, I can say, definitively, that it is possible. I have now had that experience in my life. It was grueling and painful and exhausting 'getting here', but I thankfully lived long enough to see and feel it within this lifetime. For that I'm very appreciative. And while there are still many healing journeys to engage in within my life -- recovery being an ongoing process, one that never really ends until our death -- I've enough 'success' under my belt, within my emotional toolkit, to know that the journey is well worth the effort.
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That's enough for this installment of my 'recovery' article. I'll talk about other outcomes of the sexual trauma of males in the next part of this continuing series.
Defining, for ourselves, what our 'original' sexual orientation or identity was
This is a difficult journey, indeed. When a survivor is sexually abused, especially when it occurs in childhood, the abuse is truly 'age inappropriate' (abuse is abuse, but what I'm referring to is that for the child the nature of the sexual child abuse is so thoroughly outside the realm of anything they can conceptualize as 'normal' or 'understandable', given that sexuality of any kind at that age is completely bizarre to them). As a result, a 'message' about what their future sexual 'nature' is or should be becomes imprinted at a time in life when all the child really knows is that the abuse is painful and unwanted. 'Knowing' what one 'should become' later in life [sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual desire], based on the 'natural' constitution of the child, is completely messed up by the profoundly age inappropriate sexual nature of the child abuse.
This is even difficult to discuss, and hence I have to approach all of this very delicately.
As the child grows into adolescence, and the hormones of puberty 'kick in' (and adult sexuality begins to 'make some degree of sense'), the sexual confusion evoked by the earlier sexual child abuse comes to fruition. For victims of sexual child abuse, having any clear idea of what one's original sexual nature 'is' or 'was' becomes frightfully difficult to access. In most human societies, the 'sexual messages' are strongly tilted toward heterosexuality; which is fine, if the young person has a comfortable ease with an attraction toward members of the other sex. But what if their 'sense of themselves' is manifested by an attraction for members of their own sex? While I feel that a sexual desire rooted in heterosexuality or homosexuality (or any wide variety of other mixtures on the sexual spectrum) is quite appropriate -- given the mutual 'consenting' comfort with the behavior by both partners in a sexual interaction -- my point about the problem for survivors of sexual child abuse is that they have no earthly idea if their sexual orientation or identity is rooted in personal desire or the aftereffects of the sexual trauma that they experienced in their childhood [and even, possibly, are containing to experience]. There is no way to 'know' or objectively distinguish between what 'the original nature is' and what is the 'manufactured nature, resulting from the sexual child abuse'.
I stress this issue of 'original nature' because, as a survivor of sexual child abuse, I have always wondered what choices I would have made in life -- about my own sexual identity or my sexual orientation -- if I had not be sexually abused from infancy forward. What choices would I have made, based upon my own 'natural emotional constitution', if my perception of the world around me had not been so effectively obliterated by the painful sexual trauma? I'm well aware that it is sort of an exercise in futility: it's like knowing the outcome of the null proposition (if it hadn't been what it was, what would have been the outcome). And yet it is important to me because it effects my healing journey of recovery.
Let me quote, here, from Mike Lew's book Victims No Longer: Men Recovering from Incest and Other Sexual Child Abuse, p. 41, to make my point clearer.
Since men "are not supposed to be victims," abuse (and particularly sexual abuse) becomes a process of demasculinization (or emasculation). If men aren't to be victims (the equation reads), then victims aren't men. The victimized male wonders and worries about what the abuse has turned him into. Believing that he is no longer an adequate man, he may see himself as a child, a woman, gay, or less than human -- an irreparably damaged freak. Some survivors resort to broad parodies of "acceptably masculine" behavior in order to counteract this self-perception.
There are two issues raised in Mike's quote: knowing 'what' a victim's sexual orientation or identity was before the sexual abuse, and being at all comfortable with 'being a victim' in a society that has major problems with allowing males to be seen as victims. The further issue Mr. Lew brings up, later in his book (and it has been a significant theme of both my articles and my nonprofit) is that, by not allowing men to see themselves as having been victimized as children, by perpetrators who had 'power over' them, they have a difficult time admitting that victimization -- either to themselves or to others, including their intimate partners -- and therefore often don't seek mental health resources to deal with the very painful emotional outcomes of the abuse. [Whether such resources are actually available, given that most incest groups and mental health therapists focus their resources almost exclusively on female survivors, is questionable. But that is separate issue, and one that I have dealt with extensively on the MMWI website.]
My point is that many survivors [and I personally] were really messed up by the sexual child abuse. I did not have a consistent idea, as an adolescent, about what 'sexual identity' I had or wanted to have (to the extent that I had conscious choice) or what sexual orientation felt 'natural or desirable'. And that confusion has continued to plague me throughout my life. It's still a major struggle. For now, and for the past decade or so, my orientation has been heterosexual, and I have been able to manifest a mutual long-term loving intimacy with a female with whom I feel a strong emotional and sexual attachment. But while that heterosexual orientation was generally the case in the past, it hasn't always been so. Given the confusing sexual messages I was given by the sexual child abuse and the peculiar unresolved traumas of my perpetrators, I've both been attracted to and rejecting of females, and I have sought other avenues of intimate fulfillment at various points in my life journey. (In many ways, even though I wanted to manifest a loving relationship with heterosexual women, I had conflicted feelings about that desire. I felt a fair amount of anger toward females, primarily based upon what I perceived to be their often unilateral financial, sexual and emotional expectations of me, as a male, which I found painfully discounting of 'who I was'.)
And as for any kind of consistent sexual identity, well, that has been problematic itself. I 'know' that I am male [since the age of 16, I have been a 6'8" man, with a deep and resonating voice], but whether I have felt comfortable with that fact has been, and continues, in some ways, to be problematic. I think for now that's all I want to say about that, given the delicacy of this issue (as I noted at the start of this installment) and the need to remain 'safe'. Let me simply say, at this juncture, that the emotionally confusing nature of this issue was one of the major motivations for becoming involved with the men's wellness movement and focusing my life's work on men's emotional wellness.
For many male survivors (for many survivors of either sex) having a consistent 'sense of one's sexual nature' is truly a problematic issue. Being sexually victimized as such an early age simply destroys that personal sense of 'comfort' with one's personal sexual identity. And when the sexual abuse occurs in infancy, before the brain even has a chance to actually 'remember' anything (more on this later) -- when one has only, at best, 'body memories' of the trauma -- having any grounded idea what one's 'original sexual identity' was, or is presently, is thrown into a place of profound confusion.
Which brings me back to the original point of this article: that recovery is a process, not a destination. One rarely reaches a point of 'being recovered', for more than a very short period, before it's necessary to 'continue the healing journey', uncovering deeper and often more traumatic aspects of one's abuse.
Taking responsibility for our own sexuality
Again, a very difficult issue (the rationale for this installment is a willingness to finally face some of those really difficult 'sexual' issues on the road to recovery from sexual child abuse). How can one take responsibility for their own sexuality if an individual has no rational basis upon which to support a sense of what personal responsibility looks like? The very nature of sexual child abuse is that responsibly for the child's 'sexuality' was in the hands of a perpetrator who cared little for the child's safety or care. That they are or were perpetrating behavior which is completely traumatizing for the child (or infant) is not something that a pedophile is concerned about: this is a behavior which is based far more on power and control than upon caring in the least about the feelings of the victim.
And the result for the victim, as they grow up chronologically (I'm being careful not to say 'matures', simply because maturation is such a major confusing issue for a trauma survivor), is that 'having control over our sexuality' is, itself, deeply problematic. How can one exercise effective conscious control over one's sexuality if the message they have received from the trauma is that they have no control over how others treat them sexually?
And yet, it is entirely necessary to reach that point, however one does it (hopefully, with good mental health intervention, often over many years of therapy). It is necessary both because one needs to have a consistent idea of what kind of behavior is healthy and non-abusive, and because it is the only way to truly recover from the sexual trauma. To know that you personally are 'in control' (to the extent that anyone is in control of anything in their lives), rather than their partner or another perpetrator, is the point one needs to 'reach' if there is to be any kind of healthy long-term sexual outcome.
In this regard, I want to make a point about 'sexual objectification'. We live in a society where, in reaction to a discomfort with true intimacy, people of both sexes are apt to 'sexually objectify' potential partners. The 'classic' pattern is that men objectify women sexually and women objectify men financially. Men who are fearful of healthy intimacy (of deeply connecting on an emotional level with another human being) look at women as 'body parts', as an 'object that can be manipulated in order to fulfill one's short-term sexual desires'. Women who are fearful of healthy intimacy look at men as paychecks, as 'an object that can be manipulated in order to fulfill one's desired economic lifestyle or as the primary financial supporters of children and family'. My own experience has shown me that there is a secondary level of objectivity: that if a man doesn't believe he can objectify a woman sexually, he will objectify her financially (abuse the relationship to obtain economic support), and that if a woman doesn't believe she can objectify a man financially, she will objectify him sexually (abuse the relationship to obtain non-reciprocal sexual satisfaction).
I sometimes hear other males say, in mock 'humor', in response to the often stated female complaint about being sexually objectified, "Boy, I'd love it if a woman would treat me as a sexual object!" And I say in response (either directly to them, or 'in my head') "No, you really would not want to be treated as a sexual object; what you want is for women to be more sexually responsive to your overtures, not to abuse you sexually." I say this from experience. In my early sexual life, when I was deep in the aftereffects of the sexual child abuse I had experienced (and had not recovered from the abuse, on any rational level, largely because I was not, at the time, aware that I had been the victim of incest as a child), I often was either treated as a sexual object by females, or unconsciously 'presented' myself for such abusive objectification, because 'that's the message I had received from the trauma' [that my only value was as a sexual object]. And, further, since I had few economic resources, the women who I met saw no point in pursuing me as a financial object. They wanted company and they wanted sexual satisfaction, but only at the level that they felt comfortable with [which often, as noted before, was basically "I want what I want, and will offer not much of anything in return"].
One night (among many) in particular made this situation clear. I went to a party in my mid-20's, and met a woman whom I found attractive. As is the nature of 'hitting on' and 'sexually socializing', we mutually seduced each other and ended up driving back to her house, in her car, and having sex. The following morning, she needed to go to work. I requested that she give me a ride back to the party location, on her way to work, so I could pick up my car. Her response, delivered quite pertly, was "No, I won't. Have someone else drive you there. I need to get to work and you need to leave my house. Now!" In other words, in the most clear of intentions, "I got what I wanted sexually and you need to leave. We may have used each other last night, but there is no intended reciprocity, from me, this morning. I got what I wanted and now get out of my house!" As I left her house, finding myself a bit geographically and emotionally lost and looking for a phone booth to call someone I knew to help me, I thought "Oh! This is what it means to be a sexual object. Now I get what women have been talking about for years. She got what she wanted, with very little reciprocal investment in return, at my expense. That's abuse!!"
Now, don't get me wrong. It was a 'one-night stand'. Neither of us was in doubt about the dynamic surrounding the sexual encounter. But my experience, in talking to female friends, was that they felt if a man had sex with them and the following morning basically threw them out of their house, in a most undignified manner, they felt (I believe quite justifiably) like they had been treated as a sexual object by a man who only wanted a 'piece of ass', without any degree of even minimal polite care. Knowing that, whenever I had had a superficial sexual interaction with a woman, I always had the courtesy to offer her a ride home, to display a basic degree of human care. That this woman clearly behaved like the men my female friends saw as abusive made me realize how uncomfortable that 'objectification' was. Hence, having first been expected to provide the majority of the sexual pleasure, to my partner, the night before, and then having that partner unceremoniously kick me out of her house, without the 'socially expected decency' to drive me back to get my vehicle, was not simply discourteous, but downright abusive. Which is why I felt like I had been treated like 'a piece of ass' (or a 'roving penis') -- as, in fact, a sexual object -- by this woman. Context is important in defining any human interaction!
This sense that I as being treated as a sexual object was further evidenced over the years of my life when various female 'partners' would say they wanted to talk about 'the deep pain in my life' and made it clear that my willingness to listen, with care, would signify loving investment. Having heard that clearly, I intently listened to their often painful emotional stories. But when I felt it was 'my turn', to talk about my own pain (which, objectively, was damned profound, almost like laying molten lava on someone else) their reaction, quite often, was "I need to go somewhere else, do something else, etc.", or in other words I don't want to hear about your pain because your primary utility in my life is as a sexual performer and an ear for my pain. Beyond that, knowing you and caring about you is not something I want to engage in. That was clear and definite. It only changed as I slowly and gradually healed emotionally and sexually. The world began to look and feel different as I recovered from the sexual child abuse, and as I learned to 'present myself' to others as other than a sexual object or a person who was open to be victimized. In other words (and this is the difficult transition of recovery) I learned to be less of a victim and therefore others were less likely to victimize me.
When I began participating in the New Mexico men's movement in the mid-1980's, I finally 'began to know' that I had 'sexual choice', that I had the 'right' to say 'no' to the sexual overtures of females and that I had a 'right' to decide with whom I had sexual relations. And that I had a 'right' -- and responsibility -- to 'own' my personal sexuality. And further, and most importantly for the continuation of my sexual healing journey, that I had 'human value' in other areas of my life beyond as a 'unilateral sexual satisfier'. It finally dawned on me that I had might have human value other than as a sexual object who was expected to fulfill other people's desires, with minimal expectation or hope for mutual pleasure. Wow! That arose in my consciousness both as a profound revelation and as a needed transition for deeper emotional healing.
To 'seal the knowledge' in my own head (and to assist other males who had experienced similar trauma) in 1993 I gave a presentation at the New Mexico Men's Wellness Conference (held each year, since 1984, at Ghost Ranch, near Abiqui, New Mexico) on "The Sexual Abuse of Men By Women". When I first began my talk, there was significant questioning in the eyes of the audience; but as I dove deeper into my topic, distinct lights of understanding arose, to chants of acknowledgement. Afterward, in private, several men approached, noting that the pattern I was describing had occurred in their lives, but that since men aren't supposed to be victims, they hadn't come to grips with the behavior and how they were abused by it. My willingness to confront this subject, and my openness about how it is not simply something that happens only to females, as a result of abusive male behavior, was enlightening to them and allowed them to more deeply explore their own healing journey.
The real 'leap' that I finally made in my sexual healing came about in the mid-1990s, when I finally had the courage of my emotional convictions to decide, firmly and consciously, that I would not have sexual relations with women unless and until they evidenced a clear willingness to invest emotionally in the relationship. That constituted a major 'ownership' of my own sexuality. It also resulted in a significant drop in the number of females who were willing to date me (or that I was willing to date). For all the vaunted desire of females to engage in emotionally invested relationships, my painful -- but necessary -- experience was that, in demanding emotional investment initially, the 'pool' of potential partners plummeted.
When I had been available as a sexual victim who could be used, women were quite willing to use me for the satisfaction of their sexual needs while only rarely feeling a minimal responsibility to fulfill my stated desires in return. And as a sexual abuse victim/survivor, I was 'trained' to accept that, no matter how painful I felt it to be [at the least, it was 'familiar' to me]. But when I made it clear that I would not engage in that kind of sexual activity -- or any sexual play -- unless they were willing to evidence a willingness to invest emotionally, I hit a wall of rejection. But, as I say, this was necessary, because it was 'what it took' to heal from a lifetime of being used sexually by other people. Eventually, as noted above, about twelve years later I finally found a female who was willing to make that kind of emotional investment. I surely felt rather hopeless until it was finally manifested in my mid-50s!
And now, though, with that positive, loving, and intimate emotional foundation beneath me, I can 'pass forward' the healing lessons I have learned from a lifetime of sexual abuse and emotional rejection. There is a light at the end of the tunnel! There are no guarantees in this life, and there is, hence, no guarantee that working diligently on our healing journeys that we will find a partner who cares about us and is willing to work through the emotionally and sexually 'tough spots' with us. But, as a survivor of sexual child abuse, I can say, definitively, that it is possible. I have now had that experience in my life. It was grueling and painful and exhausting 'getting here', but I thankfully lived long enough to see and feel it within this lifetime. For that I'm very appreciative. And while there are still many healing journeys to engage in within my life -- recovery being an ongoing process, one that never really ends until our death -- I've enough 'success' under my belt, within my emotional toolkit, to know that the journey is well worth the effort.
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That's enough for this installment of my 'recovery' article. I'll talk about other outcomes of the sexual trauma of males in the next part of this continuing series.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Recovery: It's More A Verb Than A Noun (Part 2)
Today, I will continue my writing on the subject of 'recovery'. This is the 2nd installment of a multi-part article. See Part 1 for the previous issues addressed.
Believing that recovery will be a linear process is illusionary
I often feel that I would be happier if the process of healing from traumatic abuse were more linear, more 'straight-line' continuous, without so many bumps and detours in the road. The problem, though, is that the world around us changes while we're "on the spiritual journey". We change, and part of that change is the changes we've made before. What we had originally imagined would be the outcome of our journey becomes different as we move along the journey. The very nature of change is that change occurs within and at the same time as we heal and grow.
Thankfully growth is continuous even when we fear that we're stuck in a rut. Baba Ram Dass, in his book Be Here Now talks about the 13 steps of the spiritual journey (I highly recommend to any seeker of truth and healing that this book be read; written back in 1971, it still greatly inspires me and serves as a thoughtful guide). In terms of being 'stuck', he says "At some stages you will experience a plateau -- as if everything had stopped. This is a hard point in the journey. Know that once the process has started, it doesn't stop; it only appears to stop from where you are looking. Just keep going. It doesn't really matter whether you think "it's happening" or not. In fact, the thought "it's happening" is just another obstacle." Any person who has suffered traumatic abuse gets 'stuck' often enough due to serious depression or feelings of inadequacy -- those are constant 'demons' haunting us. But the further constraint is the hope, the strong desire, to continually move uphill and pray that you don't fall back into the abyss from which you've struggled so hard to extricate yourself.
The problem with that hope, which in our desire to have it be true becomes an expectation, is that it is incredibly illusionary. The stronger, more accurate probability is that we'll be moving along on our journey, finally making progress, and we will stumble and fall back. We'll lose our footing, we'll get sick, some tragedy will befall us, an addiction that we hoped had been cured will return, and we will lose the gains we've made before that point in the journey. The sort of "one step forward, two steps back" analogy. And it will seem like 'you'll never recover' from this setback. But if you just 'keep on trucking', as the cliche from the '70's goes, eventually you will gain some traction again and move forward once more.
It helps to have the assistance of a competent mental health therapist, plus non-abusive/supportive friends, maybe a supportive spiritual or religious community, and a healthy intimate relationship helps, as well, to solidify your gains. Of course, if you're having problems with one of those areas, reach out to the others with greater urgency.
One of the other problems with the journey is that as we grow and move toward the 'truth' and healing of our life, we add more elements to the mix. We uncover deeper realities that were unavailable to us before, either because we've now changed and other doors are being opened to us, or as we clear away some of the debris of the trauma, deeper truths reveal themselves (although, at the time they appear, they often don't feel like 'truths', but rather like more 'stuff' from which we have to heal). Here again, Baba Ram Dass comes in handy. Another of the steps of the spiritual journey that he enunciates is "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 get fiercer as you proceed toward each inner temple. But of course the light is brighter also. It all becomes more intense because of the additional energy involved at each stage of 'sadhana' [the spiritual journey]."
To use my own journey as an example (as I often do in these blogs), when I first started working on my therapy, it was to confront my father's physical torture when I was a child -- though he actually continued to hit me until I was 22, when I finally had enough courage to 'stand up for myself' and put an end to it. Then, as I uncovered the layers of the abuse, I realized the part my mother had played in the dynamic, how she had actively arranged for the beatings to take place (and had been in continuous denial that turning us over to our father for 'discipline' would result in profound physical abuse). Further down the road, I began confronting the various addictions I had added to my world, to overcome the depression I often felt, and the deep-seated feeling of 'emptiness' I had in my heart. Then, after many bouts of suicidal ideation, my therapist presented the Incest Model to me -- which both answered many questions I had about feelings I'd had my whole life (about sexuality, sexual identity, comfort with gender, etc.) and presented me with a whole new set of issues to face.
Each step of the healing journey, of necessity, presents the survivor with a whole new set of problems to overcome. Finding solutions to those problems -- or at least manifesting coping skills while you are healing, so the abuse issues don't continue to drag you down emotionally -- is necessary if one is to move forward on the healing journey.
Hence, 'stuff will arise' at every point in the healing journey, and how well you are able to cope with it will help to define how far you've progressed. Don't expect that you won't fall back, even while you're moving forward. There are also side-steps, loss of equilibrium, all the ills of aging, etc. to cope with. You're climbing a mountain and it's a difficult process to scale such an imposing structure. But take the time, periodically, to rest in the mountain valleys, before continuing the climb. The healing journey will, in the best of circumstances, take your whole life. That's the good news.
People in my family will understand; being raised together, they've had a similar experience
Not very likely!! Even assuming your siblings lived with you throughout your childhood, they are different people and their experiences are different from yours. If you were an only child, or if you were raised in a divided family, due to the divorce of your parents or the death of one of them, and being raised by in-laws or grandparents, etc. (there could be many permutations to this familial arrangement), that will not assist others to understand your experience. Plus, whomever in the family was 'the problem', from your perspective, the person [or persons] who perpetrated the traumatic abuse, is not likely to admit their responsibility or the part they play [or played] in the dysfunctional family dynamic. So, they surely won't understand, believe, or agree to what you say happened to you or how it negatively affected you.
Within my own family, my eldest brother very strongly denies that any sexual abuse occurred. Like all three of the brothers, he has clear memories, though, about the physical abuse. But he adamantly denies that any incest occurred. And, for all I know, maybe it didn't 'happen' to him. Maybe it only occurred to the two younger brothers, or he is simply in denial about his own experience, or he doesn't remember. In any case, talking to him about it is quite worthless, because for him it 'didn't happen'. My middle brother has his own incest memories, but as is true for many survivors, they are vague. Still, he admits that there is a strong probability that it occurred, and he has been on his own traumatic abuse healing journey for many years (though not to the degree that I have been, since both of us suspect that I had the worst end of the abuse).
I simply don't expect that other members of my family will see the issue 'from my perspective'. It would be foolish to have such an expectation. I ended up severing relations with my father 20 years before he died; he had shown some desire to 'connect' with his son after his divorce from my mother, but by then the relationship was so thoroughly poisoned from the abuse and incest that I had no desire to continue the interaction. Quite simply, I did not trust him or feel safe in his company. And my mother was, until her passing, in more or less total denial about her husband's sexual abuse (frankly, she largely denied the severity of his physical abuse). As noted in a previous article, I never did confront her about the issues concerning her own sexual abuse, primarily because since she was already in profound denial about everything else, I realized how futile it would be to 'go there' in conversation.
Hence, for survivors of traumatic abuse: remember, it's your journey and it's unlikely anyone, except maybe your mental health therapist, or your minister, or your intimate partner, will 'understand' and 'accept' that reality of what occurred to you. (An excellent resource to give to someone who cares about you and wants to understand how best to be sensitive to your experience is Allies In Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child, by Laura Davis.) But that someone who cares about you accepts and validates your experience -- that's the key, that's what helps to encourage you to continue the healing. It surely helps to have self-confidence and 'to believe in yourself', but that will take some time to manifest. You're not alone, no matter how much it may seem otherwise at times. There are many, many survivors of sexual child abuse who can help you on your healing journey, who can validate that "yes, it's true, it happened, and it happens to many others". Physical and sexual child abuse has occurred for something like 42 million Americans, and many hundreds of millions more worldwide. It's an epidemic. If you have 'outcomes' which appear to be related to such traumatic abuse, seek help. It is important, though, to remember that assuming the other members of your family will agree that it occurred (or is presently still occurring) is unlikely. Helpful if true, wonderfully supportive if available, but not to be readily expected.
Mental health therapy may be the 'ticket' to healing, but it is too painful
That is very true, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, healing from traumatic abuse is emotionally painful. The traumatic abuse was already painful enough, we say to ourselves: why would I want to subject myself to further emotional pain?
The problem is that the only way out of the trauma is to go through the trauma again, with a support system (therapist, friends, intimate partners, spiritual community, men's or women's wellness groups). Avoiding the feelings of depression, or trying to overcome the awful angst through the use of alcohol or substance abuse, or 'acting out' your rage about the abuse, are all 'avoidance techniques' which, in the long run, are going to hurt you even more. It's a rare healing journey that isn't filled with pain. But with a competent mental health therapist assisting, you can take the journey in small steps, ones which aren't going to throw you headlong back into the midst of the abuse.
On the other hand, it's like getting a college degree and then expecting that you'll find a great paying job. Getting the degree is often the basic 'entry ticket' to professional employment (unless you're some kind of software tech wiz who drops out of college and becomes a multimillionaire), but having one doesn't guarantee anything. You may be unemployed for many years, or underemployed in some field that has little to do with your skills. Therapy is the same, in that even when a survivor has gone through many years of sometimes horrifically painful healing, the 'light at the end of the tunnel' seems, if anything, even more distant. There are no guarantees in this life, and that applies equally to emotional and sexual healing. Recovering from traumatic physical, emotional, spiritual, and/or sexual abuse is often just damned difficult and it's a life-long endeavor. There aren't any 'silver bullets' or 'magical pills' that one can take (and frankly, for anyone who has tried to suppress their painful angst with substance abuse, one becomes rather wary of any kind of 'pill', no matter how much it is purported to be a 'magical cure').
There is also no guarantee that the pain will disappear with extensive therapy. It is similar to "the infinite onion" analogy: you peel back a layer at a time and often you cry. And there are an infinite number of layers to peel back (at least infinite within the bounds of your existence on this physical plane). On the other hand, like the college education, engaging in the healing journey is the basic necessity for moving toward recovery. It surely helps, and it will, with competent assistance, increase your coping strategies; and it may, potentially, 'heal the wound' of the trauma, at least to the extent of allowing you to have a reasonably happy life.
But pain-free? Not likely. But is there any other route to our healing? If there is, I'm not aware of it. We'll get to the 'promised land' eventually, as long as we have the expectation that the 'promise' is something we make to ourselves, and only require ourselves to fulfill it. Others can help, though. As Lord Byron said "we enter this world alone and we leave this world alone", which doesn't mean we can't develop some wonderful friendships and intimacies along the journey to help us achieve emotional, sexual, and spiritual healing. Those help immensely, and without them, this life can be intolerably empty. We are social creatures. We need social, sexual, and emotionally connective relationships with others to help us grow in this life.
Just remember that it is your journey, you 'own it', you're paying the bills for it's occurrence and growth. Others can help, others can advise, but be careful to not allow those others to further perpetuate the abuse from which you're trying to recover. There's no need to further replicate the pain that you experienced as a child, you have had enough of that already (in your memory, in traumatic flashbacks, in the often dysfunctional behaviors that result, in adulthood, from severe trauma). Life can and often is inherently painful. No one leaves this life without some pain in their lives. Hence, approach mental health therapy with the knowledge that while it may indeed be a painful journey, it can, with the best of outcomes, be ultimately redemptive.
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That's enough for this installment of my article on recovery. I'll return with Part 3 soon, with more observations about the healing journey.
Believing that recovery will be a linear process is illusionary
I often feel that I would be happier if the process of healing from traumatic abuse were more linear, more 'straight-line' continuous, without so many bumps and detours in the road. The problem, though, is that the world around us changes while we're "on the spiritual journey". We change, and part of that change is the changes we've made before. What we had originally imagined would be the outcome of our journey becomes different as we move along the journey. The very nature of change is that change occurs within and at the same time as we heal and grow.
Thankfully growth is continuous even when we fear that we're stuck in a rut. Baba Ram Dass, in his book Be Here Now talks about the 13 steps of the spiritual journey (I highly recommend to any seeker of truth and healing that this book be read; written back in 1971, it still greatly inspires me and serves as a thoughtful guide). In terms of being 'stuck', he says "At some stages you will experience a plateau -- as if everything had stopped. This is a hard point in the journey. Know that once the process has started, it doesn't stop; it only appears to stop from where you are looking. Just keep going. It doesn't really matter whether you think "it's happening" or not. In fact, the thought "it's happening" is just another obstacle." Any person who has suffered traumatic abuse gets 'stuck' often enough due to serious depression or feelings of inadequacy -- those are constant 'demons' haunting us. But the further constraint is the hope, the strong desire, to continually move uphill and pray that you don't fall back into the abyss from which you've struggled so hard to extricate yourself.
The problem with that hope, which in our desire to have it be true becomes an expectation, is that it is incredibly illusionary. The stronger, more accurate probability is that we'll be moving along on our journey, finally making progress, and we will stumble and fall back. We'll lose our footing, we'll get sick, some tragedy will befall us, an addiction that we hoped had been cured will return, and we will lose the gains we've made before that point in the journey. The sort of "one step forward, two steps back" analogy. And it will seem like 'you'll never recover' from this setback. But if you just 'keep on trucking', as the cliche from the '70's goes, eventually you will gain some traction again and move forward once more.
It helps to have the assistance of a competent mental health therapist, plus non-abusive/supportive friends, maybe a supportive spiritual or religious community, and a healthy intimate relationship helps, as well, to solidify your gains. Of course, if you're having problems with one of those areas, reach out to the others with greater urgency.
One of the other problems with the journey is that as we grow and move toward the 'truth' and healing of our life, we add more elements to the mix. We uncover deeper realities that were unavailable to us before, either because we've now changed and other doors are being opened to us, or as we clear away some of the debris of the trauma, deeper truths reveal themselves (although, at the time they appear, they often don't feel like 'truths', but rather like more 'stuff' from which we have to heal). Here again, Baba Ram Dass comes in handy. Another of the steps of the spiritual journey that he enunciates is "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 get fiercer as you proceed toward each inner temple. But of course the light is brighter also. It all becomes more intense because of the additional energy involved at each stage of 'sadhana' [the spiritual journey]."
To use my own journey as an example (as I often do in these blogs), when I first started working on my therapy, it was to confront my father's physical torture when I was a child -- though he actually continued to hit me until I was 22, when I finally had enough courage to 'stand up for myself' and put an end to it. Then, as I uncovered the layers of the abuse, I realized the part my mother had played in the dynamic, how she had actively arranged for the beatings to take place (and had been in continuous denial that turning us over to our father for 'discipline' would result in profound physical abuse). Further down the road, I began confronting the various addictions I had added to my world, to overcome the depression I often felt, and the deep-seated feeling of 'emptiness' I had in my heart. Then, after many bouts of suicidal ideation, my therapist presented the Incest Model to me -- which both answered many questions I had about feelings I'd had my whole life (about sexuality, sexual identity, comfort with gender, etc.) and presented me with a whole new set of issues to face.
Each step of the healing journey, of necessity, presents the survivor with a whole new set of problems to overcome. Finding solutions to those problems -- or at least manifesting coping skills while you are healing, so the abuse issues don't continue to drag you down emotionally -- is necessary if one is to move forward on the healing journey.
Hence, 'stuff will arise' at every point in the healing journey, and how well you are able to cope with it will help to define how far you've progressed. Don't expect that you won't fall back, even while you're moving forward. There are also side-steps, loss of equilibrium, all the ills of aging, etc. to cope with. You're climbing a mountain and it's a difficult process to scale such an imposing structure. But take the time, periodically, to rest in the mountain valleys, before continuing the climb. The healing journey will, in the best of circumstances, take your whole life. That's the good news.
People in my family will understand; being raised together, they've had a similar experience
Not very likely!! Even assuming your siblings lived with you throughout your childhood, they are different people and their experiences are different from yours. If you were an only child, or if you were raised in a divided family, due to the divorce of your parents or the death of one of them, and being raised by in-laws or grandparents, etc. (there could be many permutations to this familial arrangement), that will not assist others to understand your experience. Plus, whomever in the family was 'the problem', from your perspective, the person [or persons] who perpetrated the traumatic abuse, is not likely to admit their responsibility or the part they play [or played] in the dysfunctional family dynamic. So, they surely won't understand, believe, or agree to what you say happened to you or how it negatively affected you.
Within my own family, my eldest brother very strongly denies that any sexual abuse occurred. Like all three of the brothers, he has clear memories, though, about the physical abuse. But he adamantly denies that any incest occurred. And, for all I know, maybe it didn't 'happen' to him. Maybe it only occurred to the two younger brothers, or he is simply in denial about his own experience, or he doesn't remember. In any case, talking to him about it is quite worthless, because for him it 'didn't happen'. My middle brother has his own incest memories, but as is true for many survivors, they are vague. Still, he admits that there is a strong probability that it occurred, and he has been on his own traumatic abuse healing journey for many years (though not to the degree that I have been, since both of us suspect that I had the worst end of the abuse).
I simply don't expect that other members of my family will see the issue 'from my perspective'. It would be foolish to have such an expectation. I ended up severing relations with my father 20 years before he died; he had shown some desire to 'connect' with his son after his divorce from my mother, but by then the relationship was so thoroughly poisoned from the abuse and incest that I had no desire to continue the interaction. Quite simply, I did not trust him or feel safe in his company. And my mother was, until her passing, in more or less total denial about her husband's sexual abuse (frankly, she largely denied the severity of his physical abuse). As noted in a previous article, I never did confront her about the issues concerning her own sexual abuse, primarily because since she was already in profound denial about everything else, I realized how futile it would be to 'go there' in conversation.
Hence, for survivors of traumatic abuse: remember, it's your journey and it's unlikely anyone, except maybe your mental health therapist, or your minister, or your intimate partner, will 'understand' and 'accept' that reality of what occurred to you. (An excellent resource to give to someone who cares about you and wants to understand how best to be sensitive to your experience is Allies In Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child, by Laura Davis.) But that someone who cares about you accepts and validates your experience -- that's the key, that's what helps to encourage you to continue the healing. It surely helps to have self-confidence and 'to believe in yourself', but that will take some time to manifest. You're not alone, no matter how much it may seem otherwise at times. There are many, many survivors of sexual child abuse who can help you on your healing journey, who can validate that "yes, it's true, it happened, and it happens to many others". Physical and sexual child abuse has occurred for something like 42 million Americans, and many hundreds of millions more worldwide. It's an epidemic. If you have 'outcomes' which appear to be related to such traumatic abuse, seek help. It is important, though, to remember that assuming the other members of your family will agree that it occurred (or is presently still occurring) is unlikely. Helpful if true, wonderfully supportive if available, but not to be readily expected.
Mental health therapy may be the 'ticket' to healing, but it is too painful
That is very true, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, healing from traumatic abuse is emotionally painful. The traumatic abuse was already painful enough, we say to ourselves: why would I want to subject myself to further emotional pain?
The problem is that the only way out of the trauma is to go through the trauma again, with a support system (therapist, friends, intimate partners, spiritual community, men's or women's wellness groups). Avoiding the feelings of depression, or trying to overcome the awful angst through the use of alcohol or substance abuse, or 'acting out' your rage about the abuse, are all 'avoidance techniques' which, in the long run, are going to hurt you even more. It's a rare healing journey that isn't filled with pain. But with a competent mental health therapist assisting, you can take the journey in small steps, ones which aren't going to throw you headlong back into the midst of the abuse.
On the other hand, it's like getting a college degree and then expecting that you'll find a great paying job. Getting the degree is often the basic 'entry ticket' to professional employment (unless you're some kind of software tech wiz who drops out of college and becomes a multimillionaire), but having one doesn't guarantee anything. You may be unemployed for many years, or underemployed in some field that has little to do with your skills. Therapy is the same, in that even when a survivor has gone through many years of sometimes horrifically painful healing, the 'light at the end of the tunnel' seems, if anything, even more distant. There are no guarantees in this life, and that applies equally to emotional and sexual healing. Recovering from traumatic physical, emotional, spiritual, and/or sexual abuse is often just damned difficult and it's a life-long endeavor. There aren't any 'silver bullets' or 'magical pills' that one can take (and frankly, for anyone who has tried to suppress their painful angst with substance abuse, one becomes rather wary of any kind of 'pill', no matter how much it is purported to be a 'magical cure').
There is also no guarantee that the pain will disappear with extensive therapy. It is similar to "the infinite onion" analogy: you peel back a layer at a time and often you cry. And there are an infinite number of layers to peel back (at least infinite within the bounds of your existence on this physical plane). On the other hand, like the college education, engaging in the healing journey is the basic necessity for moving toward recovery. It surely helps, and it will, with competent assistance, increase your coping strategies; and it may, potentially, 'heal the wound' of the trauma, at least to the extent of allowing you to have a reasonably happy life.
But pain-free? Not likely. But is there any other route to our healing? If there is, I'm not aware of it. We'll get to the 'promised land' eventually, as long as we have the expectation that the 'promise' is something we make to ourselves, and only require ourselves to fulfill it. Others can help, though. As Lord Byron said "we enter this world alone and we leave this world alone", which doesn't mean we can't develop some wonderful friendships and intimacies along the journey to help us achieve emotional, sexual, and spiritual healing. Those help immensely, and without them, this life can be intolerably empty. We are social creatures. We need social, sexual, and emotionally connective relationships with others to help us grow in this life.
Just remember that it is your journey, you 'own it', you're paying the bills for it's occurrence and growth. Others can help, others can advise, but be careful to not allow those others to further perpetuate the abuse from which you're trying to recover. There's no need to further replicate the pain that you experienced as a child, you have had enough of that already (in your memory, in traumatic flashbacks, in the often dysfunctional behaviors that result, in adulthood, from severe trauma). Life can and often is inherently painful. No one leaves this life without some pain in their lives. Hence, approach mental health therapy with the knowledge that while it may indeed be a painful journey, it can, with the best of outcomes, be ultimately redemptive.
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That's enough for this installment of my article on recovery. I'll return with Part 3 soon, with more observations about the healing journey.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Recovery: It's More A Verb Than A Noun (Part 1)
Prologue
I've been contemplating -- and outlining -- this article for a couple of weeks, and trying to find the time (a sustained period when I can work non-stop) to write it. Various other projects come about which get in the way of its being addressed, and then, today, when I wanted to finally tackle it, my health took a nasty turn. But it's that kind of 'health issue' that is involved with the issue of recovery itself.
I used some therapeutic saline (given by my eye doctor) to add moisture to my eye, much like most people use eye drops. He told me that, given that it is 'pure' liquid, the side-effects would be so much more tolerable than eye drops with chemicals in them (the most majority on the market). Mmmm…. Yes and no. The problem is that, as a person who suffers from PTSD, and who therefore has quite 'taxed' adrenal glands, I tend to have hypersensitive reactions to medications, foods, materials, liquids, etc. that don't even affect other people. That said, I put a couple of drops of the saline in my eye last night, and for the last 18 hours my GI tract has truly been 'blown out' with serious nausea. Thankfully, for me, Maalox is kind of a 'magical elixir', as it tends to be the one medication that I can tolerate, though even it makes me frightfully nauseous for the first 45 minutes after ingesting it. So, I've taken two doses today, 'babied' my stomach, and slowly I'm recovering. But, of course, now I have the other issue, in that my eyes are drying out and I have no solution that I can tolerate. One of the many serious dilemmas that survivors of traumatic abuse face! Damned if you do, damned if you don't….
Anyway, let me get back to the subject at hand. I want to write this article about recovery, and I realize that, both due to chronic health issues, and the shear volume of topics I want to address, I need to write it as a multi-part article. Hence, here is Part 1.
Recovery
The title I have chosen for this article refers to something that arose for me recently, as I've slowly healed from my own traumatic childhood sexual and physical abuse, and which I've observed in other survivors, both whom I've personally talked to, or have read about. That is: that often we talk about recovery from traumatic abuse as though we "had recovered" from the abuse, as though an 'end point' had been reached. As though after years of working diligently on our emotional recovery, we had 'graduated' into the light of true understanding.
And what I've realized, after more than 30 years of my own mental health recovery work, is that I'm not so much reaching a point of recovery, as continually being engaged in recovering. As in the 'action' of living life that leads toward recovery, rather than reaching a destination of 'being recovered'.
Hence, what I want to do in this article, and subsequent ones under the same title, is address 'aspects' of the process of recovery: what I've learned, what expectations I've had and how my life has taught me whether those expectations are realistic or illusionary. I will do this by using a subtitle for each subject area and then giving my response to the subject. So, here goes.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood
Well, actually, it is too late. Childhood 'happened', it's in the past. Like virginity, you can only experience it once. If it was loving or if it was horrific, it's past and gone. On the other hand, what you can do, as an adult, is work with the 'inner child' who experienced the trauma -- and continues to experience it, in dissociative flashbacks and triggering mechanisms, fairly often.
The child whom you were experienced trauma; he or she had to deal with that in whatever way was available to them. Often the options were extremely limited, and many times our inability to defend ourselves (especially when we were infants or very young children) has resulted in feelings of shame. That we now know -- with good mental health intervention -- that it 'wasn't our fault', that it had to do with the dysfunctional behavior and unresolved emotional traumas of our so-called caregivers [parents, siblings, teachers, priests/religious personnel, the weird pervert in the park, or whomever subjected us to traumatic abuse] is helpful, and allows us to move toward resolution of the initial abuse. But have a happy childhood? Not really. Nice phrase, fine sentiments, but not realistic. It is too late to have a happy childhood, but it's not too late to help that frightened child, who experienced that traumatic abuse, to move toward 'knowing' that there is an adult who can come to his or her aid, now, in the present. That's what healing is about: not changing the past, but healing in the present, in the best ways that are available to us, hopefully with the assistance of competent mental health providers, friends, loving partners, and personal self-confidence. No easy task, but possible 'in the here and now'.
If I had only met my parents' expectations, they would have loved me
Very, very unlikely! Our parents are living out and through their own emotional issues. As the cliche goes, people have to take a driving test to take a vehicle on the roads, but no one has to take a parenting test in order to produce children. (And, frankly, who would conduct the training and test, who didn't have their own issues to confront? Which doesn't mean some helpful 'parenting training' wouldn't, indeed, help a lot of prospective parents.) To small children, our parents are 'like gods': they control every aspect of our lives, they rule our worlds, and they are a lot bigger than we are.
Which is fine, except when those parents decide -- either consciously, because they see their children as 'property' or 'chattel', to do with as they so choose, or unconsciously, because they are acting out their own unresolved emotional traumas -- to engage in sexual, emotional, religious, or physical abuse of their children. No matter how hard those of us who are survivors of abuse tried as children to meet our parents' expectations, and therefore not be subjected to that abuse, we couldn't 'measure up'. This was primarily because what was considered appropriate behavior today -- or even an hour ago -- is tomorrow, or the next hour, considered to be inappropriate behavior.
And, of course, it really has little to do with anything we are doing, it has far more to do with the 'crazy-making' discipline system of our parents. Abuse is abuse and there is no way, in most cases, to escape it. Our parents (or other caregivers) were bound and determined to 'get what they wanted' and whether that resulted in competent child-raising is rather beside the point. We were going to be abused, no matter how much or how little we met our parents' expectations-of-the-moment; it was about them, not about us.
And that is a hard lesson to learn, as we grow older. We often end up trying to meet the expectations of our intimate partners, or our supervisors, or our teachers, or almost any other person with whom we interact, instead of realizing that meeting our own expectations (once we figure out what those are, and once we construct ones that lead to our emotional and sexual healing) is a far more important and critical 'life lesson'.
If I were the other gender, I would have been (or would be now) safe
Unfortunately, that's a bit of 'magical thinking'. What cross-gender abuse studies have consistently shown is that boys often think that if they could have been female, they would not have been beaten or raped, and girls often believe that if they had been boys, they could have adequately defended themselves from rape or other abuse. And, it simply isn't true. Being a different gender would not have changed the abuse. As most rape crisis counselors point out, sexual abuse is an issue of power, not sex. Yes, the perpetrator is 'getting a sexual charge' or 'obtaining a sexual release' when perpetrating the rape of a child, but that's not why they are doing it. Adults can obtain sexual release through other means -- such as masturbation or sex with other adults, as two examples -- that do not involve the abuse of children. Pedophiles may have diseased minds and be quite adolescent in their understanding of adult sexuality, but I would suspect (though I'm not an expert in this area, by any means) they know that the abuse of children is not only criminal, but has little to do with the well-being of the child, no matter how much they twist the 'concept of love' to obtain their dysfunctional outcomes.
I surely thought, as a boy child, that if only I had been a girl, I would have been loved by my parents. But I now know, as an adult, that if I had been a girl, I still would have been raped by my parents, and frankly, I surely would not have had access to any more of an objectively 'true love' than I was as a boy child. My father, in particular, thousands of times stated "I only beat you because I love you". Really?? Under that rationale, I would have been far better off to have been 'loved' a lot less!
Now, from my perspective, this is different from the issue of 'gender dysphoria', where children of one sex have, since childhood, a deep-seated sense of 'being the wrong gender'. I've read numerous studies of about transsexuality and have read over 20 autobiographies written primarily by transsexual females, and a few written by transsexual males, and I feel strongly that there can definitely be 'good and logical reasons' why having a sex-change, when a person reaches adolescence or later, 'makes good sense'. But I also know that some children are motivated in that direction by sexual child abuse, which, when competently addressed, allows them to make other choices which are less socially and sexually traumatic. (No matter how much many studies say trans-people are 'more satisfied with themselves' post sex-change, in spite of the often rampant social and cultural discrimination and violence that they end up experiencing, such as change is, nonetheless, often wrought with serious physical, sexual, and emotional disruptions on a somatic and psychological level, at least initially.)
So, what I'm addressing here is not gender dysphoria, but the illusion that "if I were only the other sex, I would have been safe". I posit that often that simply is not true; abuse, especially sexual abuse, would likely have been perpetrated regardless of one's sex. Power is the issue, not sex, and as a result, the sex of the child is secondary to the abuse of power by the 'caregiver'. Sad, but often true.
The other point is that when we are small children, we are truly defenseless, regardless of gender. I strongly suspect that I was raped as an infant, and my being a boy didn't help me nor allow me to defend myself anymore than if I had been a girl. Small children are quite simply at the mercy of their 'caregivers' (somehow there must be a better and more accurate term here -- maybe 'dysfunctional parental perpetrators').
I'd rather have had any other life, than the one in which I was terrorized
While the sentiment is quite understandable, it isn't very operational. Any other life? My intimate partner and I, over the past month, watched a PBS video series, Russia At War, which covered not only Russia during WWII, but the whole period of Stalin's rule of the U.S.S.R. My God, the horror, violence, duplicity, treachery, terror, and 'no way out' for the people living in Russia! Truly, damed if you do, damned if you don't!! People who had done nothing wrong at all were brought to trial on trumped-up, completely fabricated charges, and thrown into forced labor camps and gulags for long periods of time (often, with the intent that they would not live through the experience) long before the Nazis invaded Russia. Then all the extermination of the Germans during WWII, followed by Stalin being paranoid about the Russian prisoners of the Nazis (they had been exposed to outside ideas), who following the end of the war were thrown into prison by their own government!
My point is that, truly, sometimes bad things happen to good people, for no defensible reason. The only rationale being the insanity of madmen, or racists, or people who want what you have for themselves, at any cost, including your life. So, while childhood sexual, physical, emotional, and religious trauma is horrible [frankly, if you're the one experiencing it, it surely feels like a holocaust], there can be and have been far worse situations people have been put into that make your own abuse seem trivial by comparison.
That's not to say, by any means at all, that childhood sexual and physical abuse is a trivial matter. It isn't, by any stretch of the imagination. I know that, and every survivor of such abuse and competent mental health providers, know that it's a horrible existence. My only point is that, no matter how horrible it was (or continues to be, due to ongoing abuse or dissociative flashbacks) it was the life that you had and frankly it's the one you have to deal with, face up to, and heal from. Wishing you had lived another life isn't very helpful. Wishful thinking and dreaming sometimes help to relieve the stress, but such fantasies don't help resolve the issues at hand. This is the life you were born into, no matter how dysfunctional it was or continues to be, and wishing you had another life doesn't lead to a solution-orientation. There truly can be worse lives to live, and thank god you didn't have to live those. What you did live through was bad enough, all by itself.
No one will ever love me; I'm not deserving of love
That was surely a feeling I had as I grew up. Coming from a family where 'love' meant 'sexual and physical trauma and emotional neglect' (often, though not always -- my parents did try, at times, to show nurturing love; that supportive behavior, though, was often cruelly trampled by their other dysfunctional behaviors) I doubted, as I entered adulthood, that I was ever going to find nurturing love. And frankly, didn't quite know what to look for, since I had only rarely experienced it as a child.
But, thankfully, it turned out to be an illusion. A quite negative illusion, to be sure; but slowly, with the assistance of my mental health therapists, I gained trust in people around me and made better determinations about whom to trust and whom to avoid. One of the major 'lessons' we learn as survivors of childhood sexual abuse is (1) that our only 'human value' is as a sexual object for use by others [with our own sexual pleasure a profoundly secondary issue, both to our partners and to ourselves], and (2) that, since we were victimized by our parents, we continue to 'act out of that victimhood', almost encouraging others to victimize us further. Now, I'm not saying that we are being consciously masochistic; what I'm referring to is that having been raised in an environment where our victimization was real, we often don't know 'how' to behave in any other way.
For a very long time (until I was in my late 30's), I rarely had any idea how to ask for or manifest an intimate outcome that would not result in my further sexual or emotional victimization by my partners (or in my emotionally victimizing my partners, which is the other side of the same coin). I'm also now aware, looking back, that I often probably chose female partners who were themselves sexual abuse survivors. After all, that's the 'sense of the world' that I was used to myself. [Like the old psychological observation that if you're in a room of 100 people, and most are reasonably healthy emotionally, the one you'll pick for a partner is one of the few who are equally dysfunctional as yourself, because 'that's what you're used to'.] But, as I slowly gained a stronger 'sense of self', as I healed more of my 'open emotional wounds', I started attracting more healthy people into my orbit.
To further the 'orbit' cliche, I know from my study of cosmology that the larger a celestial object, the greater its gravitational pull. The problem for myself (and I suspect the problem for many sexual, emotional, and physical trauma survivors, who are still suffering from rampant PTSD) was that I had no deep 'sense' of an emotional center. I had no 'core' upon which to start building 'an emotional mass that would then start attracting healthy people into my orbit'. I often felt like there was no 'center in my heart' from which I could move into the world. And therefore, it took many years of emotional recovery work to construct, almost 'whole-cloth', a 'self of sense' that was competent and felt 'like me', at least a 'me' that I felt comfortable with and upon which I could begin to build a 'solid core'.
For now, that's enough
As I said at the start of this article, I have many subjects to discuss under the title of 'recovery', so it's not like I'm going to run out of material! But I am running out of energy, for now. So, I will stop soon, and return to this subject at a later time, with more 'parts' to this article.
In closing, for now, let me reiterate that the journey of recovery for sexual, physical, emotional, and religious trauma survivors, and for anyone experiencing PTSD, including warfare-related mental trauma, is about 'healing' as an active, ongoing process, not an 'end point' where one reaches a conclusion and then stops.
At my Unitarian congregation here in St. Louis, I'm the Chair of the Public Relations Committee. For our church 'slogan', we've chosen "The Search Is The Answer". By that, we mean that the essence of truth is that one needs to search for it. If at any point, you stop searching, you've lost truth, because what is important is the search, and the ongoing, continual, life-long search. "The Truth" is continually changing, we as individuals are continually changing, the world in which we live is continually changing -- as the paradoxical spiritual phrase goes "the most constant, never-changing reality in life is change".
Hence, for me, recovery is about an active, ongoing, continual quest for healing and emotional resolution. It doesn't have an end point, except our death, and we have no idea if that's truly 'the end' of the search; we only know it's the end of the search on this plane of existence. But for practical reasons, let's say that while I'm around now, in this world, recovery will continue. Exhausting, to be sure, but what else is there? Once you're on the journey, you're on the journey. There's no getting 'off', and there's no going back. And surely, after all this work, I don't want to go back to the older, more frightful world I inhabited.
So, onward. On to the next realization, the next breakthrough of this most important life work, whatever that may be.
I've been contemplating -- and outlining -- this article for a couple of weeks, and trying to find the time (a sustained period when I can work non-stop) to write it. Various other projects come about which get in the way of its being addressed, and then, today, when I wanted to finally tackle it, my health took a nasty turn. But it's that kind of 'health issue' that is involved with the issue of recovery itself.
I used some therapeutic saline (given by my eye doctor) to add moisture to my eye, much like most people use eye drops. He told me that, given that it is 'pure' liquid, the side-effects would be so much more tolerable than eye drops with chemicals in them (the most majority on the market). Mmmm…. Yes and no. The problem is that, as a person who suffers from PTSD, and who therefore has quite 'taxed' adrenal glands, I tend to have hypersensitive reactions to medications, foods, materials, liquids, etc. that don't even affect other people. That said, I put a couple of drops of the saline in my eye last night, and for the last 18 hours my GI tract has truly been 'blown out' with serious nausea. Thankfully, for me, Maalox is kind of a 'magical elixir', as it tends to be the one medication that I can tolerate, though even it makes me frightfully nauseous for the first 45 minutes after ingesting it. So, I've taken two doses today, 'babied' my stomach, and slowly I'm recovering. But, of course, now I have the other issue, in that my eyes are drying out and I have no solution that I can tolerate. One of the many serious dilemmas that survivors of traumatic abuse face! Damned if you do, damned if you don't….
Anyway, let me get back to the subject at hand. I want to write this article about recovery, and I realize that, both due to chronic health issues, and the shear volume of topics I want to address, I need to write it as a multi-part article. Hence, here is Part 1.
Recovery
The title I have chosen for this article refers to something that arose for me recently, as I've slowly healed from my own traumatic childhood sexual and physical abuse, and which I've observed in other survivors, both whom I've personally talked to, or have read about. That is: that often we talk about recovery from traumatic abuse as though we "had recovered" from the abuse, as though an 'end point' had been reached. As though after years of working diligently on our emotional recovery, we had 'graduated' into the light of true understanding.
And what I've realized, after more than 30 years of my own mental health recovery work, is that I'm not so much reaching a point of recovery, as continually being engaged in recovering. As in the 'action' of living life that leads toward recovery, rather than reaching a destination of 'being recovered'.
Hence, what I want to do in this article, and subsequent ones under the same title, is address 'aspects' of the process of recovery: what I've learned, what expectations I've had and how my life has taught me whether those expectations are realistic or illusionary. I will do this by using a subtitle for each subject area and then giving my response to the subject. So, here goes.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood
Well, actually, it is too late. Childhood 'happened', it's in the past. Like virginity, you can only experience it once. If it was loving or if it was horrific, it's past and gone. On the other hand, what you can do, as an adult, is work with the 'inner child' who experienced the trauma -- and continues to experience it, in dissociative flashbacks and triggering mechanisms, fairly often.
The child whom you were experienced trauma; he or she had to deal with that in whatever way was available to them. Often the options were extremely limited, and many times our inability to defend ourselves (especially when we were infants or very young children) has resulted in feelings of shame. That we now know -- with good mental health intervention -- that it 'wasn't our fault', that it had to do with the dysfunctional behavior and unresolved emotional traumas of our so-called caregivers [parents, siblings, teachers, priests/religious personnel, the weird pervert in the park, or whomever subjected us to traumatic abuse] is helpful, and allows us to move toward resolution of the initial abuse. But have a happy childhood? Not really. Nice phrase, fine sentiments, but not realistic. It is too late to have a happy childhood, but it's not too late to help that frightened child, who experienced that traumatic abuse, to move toward 'knowing' that there is an adult who can come to his or her aid, now, in the present. That's what healing is about: not changing the past, but healing in the present, in the best ways that are available to us, hopefully with the assistance of competent mental health providers, friends, loving partners, and personal self-confidence. No easy task, but possible 'in the here and now'.
If I had only met my parents' expectations, they would have loved me
Very, very unlikely! Our parents are living out and through their own emotional issues. As the cliche goes, people have to take a driving test to take a vehicle on the roads, but no one has to take a parenting test in order to produce children. (And, frankly, who would conduct the training and test, who didn't have their own issues to confront? Which doesn't mean some helpful 'parenting training' wouldn't, indeed, help a lot of prospective parents.) To small children, our parents are 'like gods': they control every aspect of our lives, they rule our worlds, and they are a lot bigger than we are.
Which is fine, except when those parents decide -- either consciously, because they see their children as 'property' or 'chattel', to do with as they so choose, or unconsciously, because they are acting out their own unresolved emotional traumas -- to engage in sexual, emotional, religious, or physical abuse of their children. No matter how hard those of us who are survivors of abuse tried as children to meet our parents' expectations, and therefore not be subjected to that abuse, we couldn't 'measure up'. This was primarily because what was considered appropriate behavior today -- or even an hour ago -- is tomorrow, or the next hour, considered to be inappropriate behavior.
And, of course, it really has little to do with anything we are doing, it has far more to do with the 'crazy-making' discipline system of our parents. Abuse is abuse and there is no way, in most cases, to escape it. Our parents (or other caregivers) were bound and determined to 'get what they wanted' and whether that resulted in competent child-raising is rather beside the point. We were going to be abused, no matter how much or how little we met our parents' expectations-of-the-moment; it was about them, not about us.
And that is a hard lesson to learn, as we grow older. We often end up trying to meet the expectations of our intimate partners, or our supervisors, or our teachers, or almost any other person with whom we interact, instead of realizing that meeting our own expectations (once we figure out what those are, and once we construct ones that lead to our emotional and sexual healing) is a far more important and critical 'life lesson'.
If I were the other gender, I would have been (or would be now) safe
Unfortunately, that's a bit of 'magical thinking'. What cross-gender abuse studies have consistently shown is that boys often think that if they could have been female, they would not have been beaten or raped, and girls often believe that if they had been boys, they could have adequately defended themselves from rape or other abuse. And, it simply isn't true. Being a different gender would not have changed the abuse. As most rape crisis counselors point out, sexual abuse is an issue of power, not sex. Yes, the perpetrator is 'getting a sexual charge' or 'obtaining a sexual release' when perpetrating the rape of a child, but that's not why they are doing it. Adults can obtain sexual release through other means -- such as masturbation or sex with other adults, as two examples -- that do not involve the abuse of children. Pedophiles may have diseased minds and be quite adolescent in their understanding of adult sexuality, but I would suspect (though I'm not an expert in this area, by any means) they know that the abuse of children is not only criminal, but has little to do with the well-being of the child, no matter how much they twist the 'concept of love' to obtain their dysfunctional outcomes.
I surely thought, as a boy child, that if only I had been a girl, I would have been loved by my parents. But I now know, as an adult, that if I had been a girl, I still would have been raped by my parents, and frankly, I surely would not have had access to any more of an objectively 'true love' than I was as a boy child. My father, in particular, thousands of times stated "I only beat you because I love you". Really?? Under that rationale, I would have been far better off to have been 'loved' a lot less!
Now, from my perspective, this is different from the issue of 'gender dysphoria', where children of one sex have, since childhood, a deep-seated sense of 'being the wrong gender'. I've read numerous studies of about transsexuality and have read over 20 autobiographies written primarily by transsexual females, and a few written by transsexual males, and I feel strongly that there can definitely be 'good and logical reasons' why having a sex-change, when a person reaches adolescence or later, 'makes good sense'. But I also know that some children are motivated in that direction by sexual child abuse, which, when competently addressed, allows them to make other choices which are less socially and sexually traumatic. (No matter how much many studies say trans-people are 'more satisfied with themselves' post sex-change, in spite of the often rampant social and cultural discrimination and violence that they end up experiencing, such as change is, nonetheless, often wrought with serious physical, sexual, and emotional disruptions on a somatic and psychological level, at least initially.)
So, what I'm addressing here is not gender dysphoria, but the illusion that "if I were only the other sex, I would have been safe". I posit that often that simply is not true; abuse, especially sexual abuse, would likely have been perpetrated regardless of one's sex. Power is the issue, not sex, and as a result, the sex of the child is secondary to the abuse of power by the 'caregiver'. Sad, but often true.
The other point is that when we are small children, we are truly defenseless, regardless of gender. I strongly suspect that I was raped as an infant, and my being a boy didn't help me nor allow me to defend myself anymore than if I had been a girl. Small children are quite simply at the mercy of their 'caregivers' (somehow there must be a better and more accurate term here -- maybe 'dysfunctional parental perpetrators').
I'd rather have had any other life, than the one in which I was terrorized
While the sentiment is quite understandable, it isn't very operational. Any other life? My intimate partner and I, over the past month, watched a PBS video series, Russia At War, which covered not only Russia during WWII, but the whole period of Stalin's rule of the U.S.S.R. My God, the horror, violence, duplicity, treachery, terror, and 'no way out' for the people living in Russia! Truly, damed if you do, damned if you don't!! People who had done nothing wrong at all were brought to trial on trumped-up, completely fabricated charges, and thrown into forced labor camps and gulags for long periods of time (often, with the intent that they would not live through the experience) long before the Nazis invaded Russia. Then all the extermination of the Germans during WWII, followed by Stalin being paranoid about the Russian prisoners of the Nazis (they had been exposed to outside ideas), who following the end of the war were thrown into prison by their own government!
My point is that, truly, sometimes bad things happen to good people, for no defensible reason. The only rationale being the insanity of madmen, or racists, or people who want what you have for themselves, at any cost, including your life. So, while childhood sexual, physical, emotional, and religious trauma is horrible [frankly, if you're the one experiencing it, it surely feels like a holocaust], there can be and have been far worse situations people have been put into that make your own abuse seem trivial by comparison.
That's not to say, by any means at all, that childhood sexual and physical abuse is a trivial matter. It isn't, by any stretch of the imagination. I know that, and every survivor of such abuse and competent mental health providers, know that it's a horrible existence. My only point is that, no matter how horrible it was (or continues to be, due to ongoing abuse or dissociative flashbacks) it was the life that you had and frankly it's the one you have to deal with, face up to, and heal from. Wishing you had lived another life isn't very helpful. Wishful thinking and dreaming sometimes help to relieve the stress, but such fantasies don't help resolve the issues at hand. This is the life you were born into, no matter how dysfunctional it was or continues to be, and wishing you had another life doesn't lead to a solution-orientation. There truly can be worse lives to live, and thank god you didn't have to live those. What you did live through was bad enough, all by itself.
No one will ever love me; I'm not deserving of love
That was surely a feeling I had as I grew up. Coming from a family where 'love' meant 'sexual and physical trauma and emotional neglect' (often, though not always -- my parents did try, at times, to show nurturing love; that supportive behavior, though, was often cruelly trampled by their other dysfunctional behaviors) I doubted, as I entered adulthood, that I was ever going to find nurturing love. And frankly, didn't quite know what to look for, since I had only rarely experienced it as a child.
But, thankfully, it turned out to be an illusion. A quite negative illusion, to be sure; but slowly, with the assistance of my mental health therapists, I gained trust in people around me and made better determinations about whom to trust and whom to avoid. One of the major 'lessons' we learn as survivors of childhood sexual abuse is (1) that our only 'human value' is as a sexual object for use by others [with our own sexual pleasure a profoundly secondary issue, both to our partners and to ourselves], and (2) that, since we were victimized by our parents, we continue to 'act out of that victimhood', almost encouraging others to victimize us further. Now, I'm not saying that we are being consciously masochistic; what I'm referring to is that having been raised in an environment where our victimization was real, we often don't know 'how' to behave in any other way.
For a very long time (until I was in my late 30's), I rarely had any idea how to ask for or manifest an intimate outcome that would not result in my further sexual or emotional victimization by my partners (or in my emotionally victimizing my partners, which is the other side of the same coin). I'm also now aware, looking back, that I often probably chose female partners who were themselves sexual abuse survivors. After all, that's the 'sense of the world' that I was used to myself. [Like the old psychological observation that if you're in a room of 100 people, and most are reasonably healthy emotionally, the one you'll pick for a partner is one of the few who are equally dysfunctional as yourself, because 'that's what you're used to'.] But, as I slowly gained a stronger 'sense of self', as I healed more of my 'open emotional wounds', I started attracting more healthy people into my orbit.
To further the 'orbit' cliche, I know from my study of cosmology that the larger a celestial object, the greater its gravitational pull. The problem for myself (and I suspect the problem for many sexual, emotional, and physical trauma survivors, who are still suffering from rampant PTSD) was that I had no deep 'sense' of an emotional center. I had no 'core' upon which to start building 'an emotional mass that would then start attracting healthy people into my orbit'. I often felt like there was no 'center in my heart' from which I could move into the world. And therefore, it took many years of emotional recovery work to construct, almost 'whole-cloth', a 'self of sense' that was competent and felt 'like me', at least a 'me' that I felt comfortable with and upon which I could begin to build a 'solid core'.
For now, that's enough
As I said at the start of this article, I have many subjects to discuss under the title of 'recovery', so it's not like I'm going to run out of material! But I am running out of energy, for now. So, I will stop soon, and return to this subject at a later time, with more 'parts' to this article.
In closing, for now, let me reiterate that the journey of recovery for sexual, physical, emotional, and religious trauma survivors, and for anyone experiencing PTSD, including warfare-related mental trauma, is about 'healing' as an active, ongoing process, not an 'end point' where one reaches a conclusion and then stops.
At my Unitarian congregation here in St. Louis, I'm the Chair of the Public Relations Committee. For our church 'slogan', we've chosen "The Search Is The Answer". By that, we mean that the essence of truth is that one needs to search for it. If at any point, you stop searching, you've lost truth, because what is important is the search, and the ongoing, continual, life-long search. "The Truth" is continually changing, we as individuals are continually changing, the world in which we live is continually changing -- as the paradoxical spiritual phrase goes "the most constant, never-changing reality in life is change".
Hence, for me, recovery is about an active, ongoing, continual quest for healing and emotional resolution. It doesn't have an end point, except our death, and we have no idea if that's truly 'the end' of the search; we only know it's the end of the search on this plane of existence. But for practical reasons, let's say that while I'm around now, in this world, recovery will continue. Exhausting, to be sure, but what else is there? Once you're on the journey, you're on the journey. There's no getting 'off', and there's no going back. And surely, after all this work, I don't want to go back to the older, more frightful world I inhabited.
So, onward. On to the next realization, the next breakthrough of this most important life work, whatever that may be.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Challenging 'Sainted Motherhood': The Female Sexual Abuse of Children
Today, I'm going to write an article about a subject that has been 'tearing at my heart' for the past twenty years, and the effects of it have twisted my self image for much of my life, since my earliest memories. I've been 'writing this article in my mind' for the past several weeks, as is my habit, massaging the elements that I want to cover and trying to figure out how to say what needs to be said while still keeping myself safe.
At the outset let me note that this may well be one article of many on the subject of the female sexual abuse of children; I doubt I can cover the whole subject, to my own satisfaction, in one article. But I will try to make a substantial dent.
A note of clarity
We are raised in a society that has, at least since the Industrial Revolution, seen mothers as more or less sainted figures, people who were almost venerated. That's not to say that women don't experience incredible amounts of oppression, nor does it ignore that they are often emotionally abused by many members of the family, including their spouses.
During the change from an agrarian society to an industrial one, to contrast the activities that men had to engage in out in the grimy, dog-eat-dog world, the culture manufactured the myth that the home was a safe place to which to return at the end of the day, and women were the caregivers of all (unfortunately, all except themselves, but that's a subject for another day). It is, indeed, that myth which I plan to challenge in this article. I'm not saying there aren't, indeed, many very loving, caring and nurturing women who are mothers; rather, I'm noting that, like all myths, there are truths and falsehoods, misunderstandings and alternative understandings underpinning this view of women's roles as mothers.
The most recent estimates of the prevalence of the sexual child abuse of women are that 1 out of 5 females were molested as children (with a corresponding estimate of 1 out of 7 for males). Those of us in the field of sexual abuse know that many cases go unreported, and even the ones that evoke intervention often don't receive adequate mental health services for the women [and men] involved to adequately heal from the trauma. Unresolved trauma is rampant in the culture, and even when one is able to find -- and economically afford -- good therapeutic intervention, healing takes many, many years, sometimes a lifetime. The intensity of the trauma, how long it lasts, who the perpetrator was, their relationship to the victim, the larger family dynamic, what kinds of support systems are available or unavailable as the child matures -- these and other factors impact how much and to what degree a child can recover from sexual child abuse. Additionally, without intervention of some sort, multi-generational sexual abuse often continues, with each generation perpetrating upon succeeding generations the abuse they suffered from, even while they are bitter about their own abuse. We are what we are, we are the products of our upbringing, we are our parents' children, they impart upon us all their hopes, their dreams, and their traumas, many unresolved and unaddressed.
My point in noting this is to stress that why should anyone be surprised when cases arise of females sexually abusing their children, when so many of these women have been sexually abused as children themselves? Without good mental health intervention and adequate services, many people are bound to perpetrate the very traumas they have experienced, as children, upon their children.
The problematic nature of traumatic memory retrieval
My second note of clarity, which is necessary to understand in consideration of what I am discussing in this article, is that traumatic memories are 'difficult animals' to access. Due to the very nature of the trauma, and especially the often profound physical and emotional disorientation of the abuse, many of those memories are locked in a dissociative part of our brains, often just as easily locked away in our 'body memories'; therefore relying solely on 'conscious memory', as an adequate source for what truly occurred, is simply insufficient. Renee Fredrickson talks a lot about this in her book Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse. Many of those memories are 'locked away', often in other 'parts' of ourselves and retrieving them is a long, painful, and often difficult process. One of the ways of doing that is to focus on these 'parts', and learn how to talk to them as separate (though often integrated) sub-personalities (such as is portrayed in Embracing Ourselves, by Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman). That is a method that I have been working with, in my own mental health recovery, for the past 20 years.
The nature of memory retrieval is that, to be effective, we have to rely on 'conscious memory', dreams (especially ones that reoccur with great frequency), and visions that arise in the midst of severe stress or modified or full-blown nervous breakdowns, and then compare those memories with what is known clinically about incest and sexual child abuse models. We have to also rely upon the 'outcomes' of those traumas, how and to what degree a child is able to adequately cope with their world, the extent to which they are able to gain and maintain a consistent self-image, the degree to which they are 'triggered' by events and circumstances throughout the remainder of their lives, what the triggers are, and to what extent their 'sense of their own gender' is negatively impacted by unknown or unremembered [dissociated] sexual child abuse trauma.
My own story, in regard to this subject
I wrote, several years ago (in the MMWI Blog article The End of A Particularly Terrifying Era), about the sexual child abuse that I had experienced at the hands of my father, of how he was a pedophile and a sadist, and how I was really quite relieved when he died in November 2011. I had retrieved, from many different sources (dreams, family history, semi-conscious memory, knowledge of psychological outcomes, research concerning medical processes) a clear knowledge that I had been, to a high degree of probability, anally raped by him when I was less than a year old, again when I was 2 and 3 years of age, and was orally raped when I was 10. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th incidences resulted in seizures, which were later misdiagnosed as epilepsy. I still have severe periodic pain in the intercostal muscles on either side of my chest where I've theorized my father held me, pressing his thumbs into my infant body, while he engaged in the anal rape.
Hence, I've talked a fair amount about his sexual child abuse of me. What I have avoided discussing, simply because it was far too painful to talk about, was my mother's role in that sexual child abuse. Yet, 'it's time to face the music' and talk about this as well. In doing so, I hope, as is always my objective in writing this blog, to assist other male [and female] survivors of sexual child abuse to know that what they remember could, indeed, well have happened, that they are not alone, that there are others of us in the world who have had similar traumas and similar outcomes. [For more information on the sexual child abuse of males, I encourage the reading of Victims No Longer: Men Recovering From Sexual Child Abuse, by Mike Lew, and Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse, by Mic Hunter, two male authors for whom I have immense respect.]
Like most children, I desperately wanted to believe that my mother wanted to be my protector, was someone I could physically and emotionally depend on, and was a person who wouldn't do anything to hurt her children. After all, like many children in America [and, frankly, most of the world] we are raised primarily by our mothers, and finding out that our mother did not have our best interests in her heart is, frankly, devastating.
In my family, what was clear from early in my childhood -- long before I had any objective knowledge of psychological processes -- was that my mother wielded an immense amount of power in the family, albeit manipulative power. She used her 'sexual power' over my father to motivate him to 'discipline the children', rather than doing it herself. The trouble, of course, was that in our family 'discipline' was carried out with the use of unrestrained violence by a man who didn't need much of any excuse or 'reason' to carry out the torture. So, my mother's encouragement to view a particular behavior of her children as 'inappropriate' [even if it was a behavior that the previous day had been 'quite appropriate'] was sufficient justification, in the mind of our father, to exercise intensely malicious behavior toward the children [I was the youngest of three brothers].
Dissociation, theirs and mine
While there are some truly evil people who carry out their sexual abuse of children in a fairly conscious state, my understanding from my 30 years of research into the subject is that most abusers are acting out when they are in their own dissociative state. To say they aren't responsible for their behavior is unreasonable and legally incorrect; but it is not unlikely that their behavior occurs, to at least some degree, in a 'semi-conscious' mental state, where they are reacting to their own unresolved traumas and behaving in a manner that, if they could see it 'objectively', would even to themselves appear to be profoundly negative.
The trouble for children who are impacted by such repeated, incessant abuse is that when it occurs, they are thrown into their own dissociative state, and -- if the abuse continues repeatedly, consistently, and is accompanied [as is likely] by emotional abuse combined with severe ignorance of a child's right to exist as an independent 'being' -- the child is often stuck in that dissociative state much of their lives. It is simply too difficult to break through that 'out-of-body', 'out-of-self' experience. And frankly fairly frightening to do so.
I spent much of my childhood in a more or less dissociative condition. One has to see this carefully: it's not as though I couldn't function in the world or do the things that took adequate care of basic mental and physical processes, or that I didn't have access to what appeared to be a more or less 'normal' childhood. It is rather that whenever I was around my parents and they went into their 'rage states', I was simply not in my body much of the time it was occurring. I had very little 'sense of my body' until my late '30's. It's not that I didn't know it was there -- clearly I inhabited this form and I carried myself around in a gender that was recognized as male -- rather it was that the form and the gender that I was 'seen as' was not a gender that I had any comfort with. Being a boy was simply a terrifying experience.
Now, for contrast, I have to note that females who are victims of sexual child abuse often don't feel 'in their bodies' and often wish they had been born male, thinking that that would solve the abuse issue. So, my thinking that 'if only I had been born a girl, these constant beatings wouldn't occur' was "magical thinking". It's one of the products of trauma from boys and girls, hoping, wishing, that if they were only 'the other gender' this trauma wouldn't be occurring and their parents would love them and care about their well-being.
But I knew, even at the age of 5, that growing up a boy was not going to be a 'safe' outcome, and started wishing I was a girl. Not because being a girl was (objectively, as I now know as an adult) any more safe or protected, but frankly, from where I stood as that 5 year old child, any other outcome would be better than the one that was occurring and was likely to continue to occur. Between the physical torture and the sexual abuse, for much of my life it was simply 'unsafe' to have a penis, to be a boy, since that 'organ' was the object of [and seemingly the reason for] intense abuse.
Incest perpetrated by my mother
In the early 1980's, after years of trying to control my intense depression and suicidal ideation with substance abuse, I finally started getting some very competent mental health therapy. My therapists helped me to overcome the substance abuse (illicit street drugs and alcoholism) that I was using, somewhat unconsciously, to overcome the horrible feelings I had about who I was and the result my life had reached. I seemed to be 'going nowhere'. Sure, I had an M.A. in Public Administration by then, had had a number of short-term professional jobs, but my life felt like it was 'in the toilet', and I was being rejected, across the board, by every woman I dated, for any kind of long-term emotional investment. [I should note, for the record, that there were a couple of women, who had children by previous marriages, who took an interest in fostering a long-term involvement, but given my own far too troubled childhood, the idea of fathering children produced, in my heart, tremendous anxiety and a distinct avoidance of such a relationship.]
After I had experienced a quite devastating nervous breakdown [or break-through, as my therapist, following the event, encouraged me to view it as being] that lasted, in its worst state, for about 10 months, followed by another 2 years of panic attacks two or three times a week, I began mental health therapy with a wonderful, engaging therapist, Shoshona Blankman (she still practices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I highly recommend her services to any sexual abuse survivor who lives in that part of the country) who really started me on the 'road to recovery' from my childhood trauma. I was around 34 at the time.
In the process of our therapy, I began having a series of dreams, over several months, which occurred almost every night, where my mother was trying to encourage me to have sex with her, saying "don't worry, your father will never find out". In the dreams, I was 10 or 11 years old, and I was totally freaked out and trying to escape the situation. That was when I started 'suspecting' that I had been a victim of incest perpetrated by my mother. In the late 1980's, after another particularly bad suicidal episode, Shoshona showed me a 'model' to contemplate. I looked it over and exclaimed that "it addresses the 20% of my therapy that never seems to be adequately addressed" and asked what it was. When Shoshona told me it was an Incest Model, I was stunned.
Oh no, not another level of crap to face!!
As Baba Ram Dass notes in Be Here Now, in discussing the stages of a spiritual journey: "as we get nearer the Temple of Truth, the lions grow fiercer and growl more viciously". It's like that Infinite Onion: each time we peel off a layer, we often cry. Uncovering trauma is not for the faint-hearted; let me be clear, it is a painful journey. But one which is ultimately necessary if one is ever to heal and move progressively forward in one's life journey.
But I was still at the level of "it probably occurred, but I'm not sure". In other words, I remained in a state of denial. I was dissociating all over the landscape, I was having one incredibly poor relationship with women after another, I couldn't hold a job for more than 3 years, my mother continuously 'perpetrated emotional incest' on me, especially after my father divorced her, and my life continued to be 'in the toilet' in any manner that I felt was 'successful'. I surely didn't feel comfortable with my maleness, and the outcomes of my life simply seemed to confirm that I was an abject failure as a man.
With Shoshona's help and that of Paul Marcus, in who's incest therapy group I began to grow emotionally, I found the men's wellness movement in New Mexico. It was and continues to be my lifeboat. As I often note to friends, I'm not motivated by men's wellness 'because it's a nice idea -- without it I would be lost'. The image of manhood that my father conveyed to me was that men were violent, sexual abusers, without feeling, and malicious in every aspect of their personages. Surely not a person I wanted to be! The more my father had screamed "Be A Man! Be A Man!" while he was pummeling me with his fists and whipping me unmercifully with his belt, the more I surely didn't want to be a man. That I had very little other choice made the problem worse; that I hadn't wanted to be a boy, even as a child, drove that dissociation even deeper. But the men's wellness movement allowed me to see a 'kind of manhood' that was healthy and had hope attached to it.
Finally, moving beyond denial
Several years ago, when I had been rejected as an ESL tutor for some frankly bizarre behavior toward younger women in the program [asking out women who were young enough to be my grandchildren, if I had ever had children of my own], because I was feeling so across-the-board rejected by females, I spent an afternoon talking to my female Unitarian minister, with whom I had a very positive working relationship. She had worked, in her early employment, at a mental hospital and therefore had some therapeutic perspectives. She laid it down clearly: (1) you're attracted to women who are 10 - 15 years your senior; (2) your experience with sex has often been to feel like your 'job' was to service women sexually, with no expectation of pleasure in return; (3) you've often felt suicidal in your life when you weren't having sex, like that was your only 'value' as a human being; and (4) in spite of all your feminist education and knowledge of cultural and sexual oppression, you still believe, in your heart, that women have all the power and that being female is far more advantageous than being male. What does this result from? That and other factors pointed, clearly and profoundly, to having been sexually molested by my mother.
It finally broke through my wall of denial.
My mother had died two years before, and I guess I was at the point where I 'could hear' the information. And all of my therapists over the years had been 'edging me toward that realization', allowing me to get there on my own, but knowing clearly that that was the 'answer' to much of my sexual dissociation.
In conclusion, at least of this installment
Well, that's enough, more than enough for this first installment about the female sexual abuse of children. I'm exhausted from this writing, 'spent emotionally'. But I've 'said what needed to be said', and had the opportunity to 'tell my truth', as a testimonial. There's more, but each layer has a time and place for exposure. Don't worry, I'll never talk about all of it in an open forum; that's the point of the confidentiality of therapy. But I want to talk openly enough that hopefully my story will be of assistance to other survivors of sexual child abuse.
In closing, I want to say one final thing. For years, every time I tried to read Female Sexual Abuse of Children by Michele Elliott, I couldn't get past page 12, because what I was reading about was simply too painful to contemplate, even though a 'part of my Self' knew the incest had been real. After my talk with my female minister about the reality of my life and what had resulted from the sexual trauma, which helped me to break out of my guarded denial, I was able to go back and read the book more fully. I knew it was true, and I was ready to work through the pain.
Of course, given that we all want to view our mothers as having been our protectors, given how much that cultural myth pervades every aspect of the society, it's still quite painful to 'know in my heart' that she wasn't the kind of mother that I could love and respect unguardedly. I felt sorry for her in her later years, as she slowly died from multiple sclerosis, but to her dying day, she was in complete denial about my father's torture of his children, and I never had the courage (or meanness, as one might see it) to confront her about her own abuse. So, I've had to work that out on my own, in my own time, without a parent to bounce the information off. Maybe that's just as well. My mother was dissociative much of the time, even before she became physically ill. She surely didn't have a very happy life with my father, though she fought tooth and nail to keep her marriage when he tried to divorce her (to no good end; he succeeded, which was fine with his sons, since it gave us a chance to emotionally divorce ourselves from him).
My own healing is my own journey. It's always that way. Our parents did what they did, acted how they did, often acted out of their own unresolved trauma. Once we become adults, we have to recover on our own. Blaming them will resolve nothing, and it surely won't allow us to have happy childhoods. What was is what was. Life moves on, hopefully forward in an emotionally healing manner. As children, we spend 20 or so years with our parents and then, as adults, another 60 to 80 years recovering from that experience. Some people have what they consider to have been truly happy and satisfying childhoods. I laud them (to the extent that they aren't simply in denial). I still cry every time I see a movie where a warm, loving parent-child relationship is portrayed. I'm skeptical that it can be real, but I'm open to the possibility. Life has it's positive outcomes, just as much as it's negative ones.
I will continue to work on my healing from physical torture and sexual child abuse. I've made wonderful and empowering progress over many years of very painful therapy and emotional growth. And that growth will continue, because I'm devoted to the 'process' and because I'm devoted to men's emotional wellness.
At the outset let me note that this may well be one article of many on the subject of the female sexual abuse of children; I doubt I can cover the whole subject, to my own satisfaction, in one article. But I will try to make a substantial dent.
A note of clarity
We are raised in a society that has, at least since the Industrial Revolution, seen mothers as more or less sainted figures, people who were almost venerated. That's not to say that women don't experience incredible amounts of oppression, nor does it ignore that they are often emotionally abused by many members of the family, including their spouses.
During the change from an agrarian society to an industrial one, to contrast the activities that men had to engage in out in the grimy, dog-eat-dog world, the culture manufactured the myth that the home was a safe place to which to return at the end of the day, and women were the caregivers of all (unfortunately, all except themselves, but that's a subject for another day). It is, indeed, that myth which I plan to challenge in this article. I'm not saying there aren't, indeed, many very loving, caring and nurturing women who are mothers; rather, I'm noting that, like all myths, there are truths and falsehoods, misunderstandings and alternative understandings underpinning this view of women's roles as mothers.
The most recent estimates of the prevalence of the sexual child abuse of women are that 1 out of 5 females were molested as children (with a corresponding estimate of 1 out of 7 for males). Those of us in the field of sexual abuse know that many cases go unreported, and even the ones that evoke intervention often don't receive adequate mental health services for the women [and men] involved to adequately heal from the trauma. Unresolved trauma is rampant in the culture, and even when one is able to find -- and economically afford -- good therapeutic intervention, healing takes many, many years, sometimes a lifetime. The intensity of the trauma, how long it lasts, who the perpetrator was, their relationship to the victim, the larger family dynamic, what kinds of support systems are available or unavailable as the child matures -- these and other factors impact how much and to what degree a child can recover from sexual child abuse. Additionally, without intervention of some sort, multi-generational sexual abuse often continues, with each generation perpetrating upon succeeding generations the abuse they suffered from, even while they are bitter about their own abuse. We are what we are, we are the products of our upbringing, we are our parents' children, they impart upon us all their hopes, their dreams, and their traumas, many unresolved and unaddressed.
My point in noting this is to stress that why should anyone be surprised when cases arise of females sexually abusing their children, when so many of these women have been sexually abused as children themselves? Without good mental health intervention and adequate services, many people are bound to perpetrate the very traumas they have experienced, as children, upon their children.
The problematic nature of traumatic memory retrieval
My second note of clarity, which is necessary to understand in consideration of what I am discussing in this article, is that traumatic memories are 'difficult animals' to access. Due to the very nature of the trauma, and especially the often profound physical and emotional disorientation of the abuse, many of those memories are locked in a dissociative part of our brains, often just as easily locked away in our 'body memories'; therefore relying solely on 'conscious memory', as an adequate source for what truly occurred, is simply insufficient. Renee Fredrickson talks a lot about this in her book Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse. Many of those memories are 'locked away', often in other 'parts' of ourselves and retrieving them is a long, painful, and often difficult process. One of the ways of doing that is to focus on these 'parts', and learn how to talk to them as separate (though often integrated) sub-personalities (such as is portrayed in Embracing Ourselves, by Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman). That is a method that I have been working with, in my own mental health recovery, for the past 20 years.
The nature of memory retrieval is that, to be effective, we have to rely on 'conscious memory', dreams (especially ones that reoccur with great frequency), and visions that arise in the midst of severe stress or modified or full-blown nervous breakdowns, and then compare those memories with what is known clinically about incest and sexual child abuse models. We have to also rely upon the 'outcomes' of those traumas, how and to what degree a child is able to adequately cope with their world, the extent to which they are able to gain and maintain a consistent self-image, the degree to which they are 'triggered' by events and circumstances throughout the remainder of their lives, what the triggers are, and to what extent their 'sense of their own gender' is negatively impacted by unknown or unremembered [dissociated] sexual child abuse trauma.
My own story, in regard to this subject
I wrote, several years ago (in the MMWI Blog article The End of A Particularly Terrifying Era), about the sexual child abuse that I had experienced at the hands of my father, of how he was a pedophile and a sadist, and how I was really quite relieved when he died in November 2011. I had retrieved, from many different sources (dreams, family history, semi-conscious memory, knowledge of psychological outcomes, research concerning medical processes) a clear knowledge that I had been, to a high degree of probability, anally raped by him when I was less than a year old, again when I was 2 and 3 years of age, and was orally raped when I was 10. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th incidences resulted in seizures, which were later misdiagnosed as epilepsy. I still have severe periodic pain in the intercostal muscles on either side of my chest where I've theorized my father held me, pressing his thumbs into my infant body, while he engaged in the anal rape.
Hence, I've talked a fair amount about his sexual child abuse of me. What I have avoided discussing, simply because it was far too painful to talk about, was my mother's role in that sexual child abuse. Yet, 'it's time to face the music' and talk about this as well. In doing so, I hope, as is always my objective in writing this blog, to assist other male [and female] survivors of sexual child abuse to know that what they remember could, indeed, well have happened, that they are not alone, that there are others of us in the world who have had similar traumas and similar outcomes. [For more information on the sexual child abuse of males, I encourage the reading of Victims No Longer: Men Recovering From Sexual Child Abuse, by Mike Lew, and Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse, by Mic Hunter, two male authors for whom I have immense respect.]
Like most children, I desperately wanted to believe that my mother wanted to be my protector, was someone I could physically and emotionally depend on, and was a person who wouldn't do anything to hurt her children. After all, like many children in America [and, frankly, most of the world] we are raised primarily by our mothers, and finding out that our mother did not have our best interests in her heart is, frankly, devastating.
In my family, what was clear from early in my childhood -- long before I had any objective knowledge of psychological processes -- was that my mother wielded an immense amount of power in the family, albeit manipulative power. She used her 'sexual power' over my father to motivate him to 'discipline the children', rather than doing it herself. The trouble, of course, was that in our family 'discipline' was carried out with the use of unrestrained violence by a man who didn't need much of any excuse or 'reason' to carry out the torture. So, my mother's encouragement to view a particular behavior of her children as 'inappropriate' [even if it was a behavior that the previous day had been 'quite appropriate'] was sufficient justification, in the mind of our father, to exercise intensely malicious behavior toward the children [I was the youngest of three brothers].
Dissociation, theirs and mine
While there are some truly evil people who carry out their sexual abuse of children in a fairly conscious state, my understanding from my 30 years of research into the subject is that most abusers are acting out when they are in their own dissociative state. To say they aren't responsible for their behavior is unreasonable and legally incorrect; but it is not unlikely that their behavior occurs, to at least some degree, in a 'semi-conscious' mental state, where they are reacting to their own unresolved traumas and behaving in a manner that, if they could see it 'objectively', would even to themselves appear to be profoundly negative.
The trouble for children who are impacted by such repeated, incessant abuse is that when it occurs, they are thrown into their own dissociative state, and -- if the abuse continues repeatedly, consistently, and is accompanied [as is likely] by emotional abuse combined with severe ignorance of a child's right to exist as an independent 'being' -- the child is often stuck in that dissociative state much of their lives. It is simply too difficult to break through that 'out-of-body', 'out-of-self' experience. And frankly fairly frightening to do so.
I spent much of my childhood in a more or less dissociative condition. One has to see this carefully: it's not as though I couldn't function in the world or do the things that took adequate care of basic mental and physical processes, or that I didn't have access to what appeared to be a more or less 'normal' childhood. It is rather that whenever I was around my parents and they went into their 'rage states', I was simply not in my body much of the time it was occurring. I had very little 'sense of my body' until my late '30's. It's not that I didn't know it was there -- clearly I inhabited this form and I carried myself around in a gender that was recognized as male -- rather it was that the form and the gender that I was 'seen as' was not a gender that I had any comfort with. Being a boy was simply a terrifying experience.
Now, for contrast, I have to note that females who are victims of sexual child abuse often don't feel 'in their bodies' and often wish they had been born male, thinking that that would solve the abuse issue. So, my thinking that 'if only I had been born a girl, these constant beatings wouldn't occur' was "magical thinking". It's one of the products of trauma from boys and girls, hoping, wishing, that if they were only 'the other gender' this trauma wouldn't be occurring and their parents would love them and care about their well-being.
But I knew, even at the age of 5, that growing up a boy was not going to be a 'safe' outcome, and started wishing I was a girl. Not because being a girl was (objectively, as I now know as an adult) any more safe or protected, but frankly, from where I stood as that 5 year old child, any other outcome would be better than the one that was occurring and was likely to continue to occur. Between the physical torture and the sexual abuse, for much of my life it was simply 'unsafe' to have a penis, to be a boy, since that 'organ' was the object of [and seemingly the reason for] intense abuse.
Incest perpetrated by my mother
In the early 1980's, after years of trying to control my intense depression and suicidal ideation with substance abuse, I finally started getting some very competent mental health therapy. My therapists helped me to overcome the substance abuse (illicit street drugs and alcoholism) that I was using, somewhat unconsciously, to overcome the horrible feelings I had about who I was and the result my life had reached. I seemed to be 'going nowhere'. Sure, I had an M.A. in Public Administration by then, had had a number of short-term professional jobs, but my life felt like it was 'in the toilet', and I was being rejected, across the board, by every woman I dated, for any kind of long-term emotional investment. [I should note, for the record, that there were a couple of women, who had children by previous marriages, who took an interest in fostering a long-term involvement, but given my own far too troubled childhood, the idea of fathering children produced, in my heart, tremendous anxiety and a distinct avoidance of such a relationship.]
After I had experienced a quite devastating nervous breakdown [or break-through, as my therapist, following the event, encouraged me to view it as being] that lasted, in its worst state, for about 10 months, followed by another 2 years of panic attacks two or three times a week, I began mental health therapy with a wonderful, engaging therapist, Shoshona Blankman (she still practices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I highly recommend her services to any sexual abuse survivor who lives in that part of the country) who really started me on the 'road to recovery' from my childhood trauma. I was around 34 at the time.
In the process of our therapy, I began having a series of dreams, over several months, which occurred almost every night, where my mother was trying to encourage me to have sex with her, saying "don't worry, your father will never find out". In the dreams, I was 10 or 11 years old, and I was totally freaked out and trying to escape the situation. That was when I started 'suspecting' that I had been a victim of incest perpetrated by my mother. In the late 1980's, after another particularly bad suicidal episode, Shoshona showed me a 'model' to contemplate. I looked it over and exclaimed that "it addresses the 20% of my therapy that never seems to be adequately addressed" and asked what it was. When Shoshona told me it was an Incest Model, I was stunned.
Oh no, not another level of crap to face!!
As Baba Ram Dass notes in Be Here Now, in discussing the stages of a spiritual journey: "as we get nearer the Temple of Truth, the lions grow fiercer and growl more viciously". It's like that Infinite Onion: each time we peel off a layer, we often cry. Uncovering trauma is not for the faint-hearted; let me be clear, it is a painful journey. But one which is ultimately necessary if one is ever to heal and move progressively forward in one's life journey.
But I was still at the level of "it probably occurred, but I'm not sure". In other words, I remained in a state of denial. I was dissociating all over the landscape, I was having one incredibly poor relationship with women after another, I couldn't hold a job for more than 3 years, my mother continuously 'perpetrated emotional incest' on me, especially after my father divorced her, and my life continued to be 'in the toilet' in any manner that I felt was 'successful'. I surely didn't feel comfortable with my maleness, and the outcomes of my life simply seemed to confirm that I was an abject failure as a man.
With Shoshona's help and that of Paul Marcus, in who's incest therapy group I began to grow emotionally, I found the men's wellness movement in New Mexico. It was and continues to be my lifeboat. As I often note to friends, I'm not motivated by men's wellness 'because it's a nice idea -- without it I would be lost'. The image of manhood that my father conveyed to me was that men were violent, sexual abusers, without feeling, and malicious in every aspect of their personages. Surely not a person I wanted to be! The more my father had screamed "Be A Man! Be A Man!" while he was pummeling me with his fists and whipping me unmercifully with his belt, the more I surely didn't want to be a man. That I had very little other choice made the problem worse; that I hadn't wanted to be a boy, even as a child, drove that dissociation even deeper. But the men's wellness movement allowed me to see a 'kind of manhood' that was healthy and had hope attached to it.
Finally, moving beyond denial
Several years ago, when I had been rejected as an ESL tutor for some frankly bizarre behavior toward younger women in the program [asking out women who were young enough to be my grandchildren, if I had ever had children of my own], because I was feeling so across-the-board rejected by females, I spent an afternoon talking to my female Unitarian minister, with whom I had a very positive working relationship. She had worked, in her early employment, at a mental hospital and therefore had some therapeutic perspectives. She laid it down clearly: (1) you're attracted to women who are 10 - 15 years your senior; (2) your experience with sex has often been to feel like your 'job' was to service women sexually, with no expectation of pleasure in return; (3) you've often felt suicidal in your life when you weren't having sex, like that was your only 'value' as a human being; and (4) in spite of all your feminist education and knowledge of cultural and sexual oppression, you still believe, in your heart, that women have all the power and that being female is far more advantageous than being male. What does this result from? That and other factors pointed, clearly and profoundly, to having been sexually molested by my mother.
It finally broke through my wall of denial.
My mother had died two years before, and I guess I was at the point where I 'could hear' the information. And all of my therapists over the years had been 'edging me toward that realization', allowing me to get there on my own, but knowing clearly that that was the 'answer' to much of my sexual dissociation.
In conclusion, at least of this installment
Well, that's enough, more than enough for this first installment about the female sexual abuse of children. I'm exhausted from this writing, 'spent emotionally'. But I've 'said what needed to be said', and had the opportunity to 'tell my truth', as a testimonial. There's more, but each layer has a time and place for exposure. Don't worry, I'll never talk about all of it in an open forum; that's the point of the confidentiality of therapy. But I want to talk openly enough that hopefully my story will be of assistance to other survivors of sexual child abuse.
In closing, I want to say one final thing. For years, every time I tried to read Female Sexual Abuse of Children by Michele Elliott, I couldn't get past page 12, because what I was reading about was simply too painful to contemplate, even though a 'part of my Self' knew the incest had been real. After my talk with my female minister about the reality of my life and what had resulted from the sexual trauma, which helped me to break out of my guarded denial, I was able to go back and read the book more fully. I knew it was true, and I was ready to work through the pain.
Of course, given that we all want to view our mothers as having been our protectors, given how much that cultural myth pervades every aspect of the society, it's still quite painful to 'know in my heart' that she wasn't the kind of mother that I could love and respect unguardedly. I felt sorry for her in her later years, as she slowly died from multiple sclerosis, but to her dying day, she was in complete denial about my father's torture of his children, and I never had the courage (or meanness, as one might see it) to confront her about her own abuse. So, I've had to work that out on my own, in my own time, without a parent to bounce the information off. Maybe that's just as well. My mother was dissociative much of the time, even before she became physically ill. She surely didn't have a very happy life with my father, though she fought tooth and nail to keep her marriage when he tried to divorce her (to no good end; he succeeded, which was fine with his sons, since it gave us a chance to emotionally divorce ourselves from him).
My own healing is my own journey. It's always that way. Our parents did what they did, acted how they did, often acted out of their own unresolved trauma. Once we become adults, we have to recover on our own. Blaming them will resolve nothing, and it surely won't allow us to have happy childhoods. What was is what was. Life moves on, hopefully forward in an emotionally healing manner. As children, we spend 20 or so years with our parents and then, as adults, another 60 to 80 years recovering from that experience. Some people have what they consider to have been truly happy and satisfying childhoods. I laud them (to the extent that they aren't simply in denial). I still cry every time I see a movie where a warm, loving parent-child relationship is portrayed. I'm skeptical that it can be real, but I'm open to the possibility. Life has it's positive outcomes, just as much as it's negative ones.
I will continue to work on my healing from physical torture and sexual child abuse. I've made wonderful and empowering progress over many years of very painful therapy and emotional growth. And that growth will continue, because I'm devoted to the 'process' and because I'm devoted to men's emotional wellness.
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