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.

Healing From Trauma and 'Normalizing' The Location Where It Occurred

Earlier this month, I attended the 45th Reunion of my high school in Derby, Kansas. Generally, attendance at a high school reunion is a relatively low-key event, especially one that I had attended over half a lifetime ago. And indeed, in that I knew very few people at this reunion (I had attended the school for only a year and a half), it was a rather mild, though pleasant, occasion.

However, for me this visit represented a significant 'watershed' event. In 2009, I had attended the 40th Reunion, which was the first one I had ever attended. Like many military dependents, where I went to school was a rather 'chance' event. I had gone to 2 kindergartens, 2 grade schools, 2 junior high schools, and 3 high schools (in the Azores, California, Illinois, Japan, New Mexico, and Kansas). This was not at all an unusual number of schools, in various locations in the United States and around the world, for a child of a military officer. Years ago, when I was in a book club in Albuquerque, I met a fellow who's father had been in the Air Force real estate business [I hadn't known till then that the military even had a real estate arm!], who had attended 20 schools in his 12 years of secondary school education. His father would be stationed at a location and then the family would move 3 months later; talk about attachment problems!! So, my having attended 9 different schools was only moderate by comparison, and quite common for a military dependent.

But it wasn't the lack of a particular devotion to that particular high school in Kansas that had precluded my attendance at the reunions for 40 years. Rather, as I discussed in the 'Journal' on the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute website, it was due to Wichita, Kansas being the home of McConnell AFB, where we lived in military housing, and that location being where my father had gone from being a severe disciplinarian to be a sadistic tormentor. The last year of my high school attendance, which happened to have occurred in Wichita, was a time of extreme pain and trauma, and the ripple effects of his behavior toward me had had profoundly negative results for quite a number of years thereafter.

I note 'occurred in Wichita' in italics because, as I discovered when I finally returned Wichita for the 40th Reunion in 2009, it wasn't the place which was the problem, but rather the time [developmentally in my life and chronologically in American society], personality of my father (and mother, who participated indirectly in the torture), and events that occurred in that place that 'got in the way' of my feeling safe to attend the high school reunions for four decades. My intimate partner had lovingly agreed to attend the reunion with me, because I was simply far to frightened to go on my own.

Now, it's not as though I'm unable, in the present, to 'defend myself' from attack; I am after all a 6'8", 220 lb. man, and am reasonably competent physically. Rather, it was the 'terrorized Inner Child', who had had to experience all those years of sexual and physical trauma at the hands of my parents. who was feeling the fear. It was one of those "that was then, this is now" issues. Except that, due to the PTSD nature of the trauma, the 'inner child' had never successfully grown beyond that horrific fear, in spite of many years of very careful mental health therapy; in other words, I often had a difficult time differentiating between 'then and now', in that many of the ragged edges of past trauma kept reappearing, on a regular basis, in my present life, and continued to disrupt my emotional life.

On the other hand, the adult 'part of Self' had done a lot of healing in the intervening years, and felt prepared to face that place and time, and give myself the chance to 'revision' the city. And revision it I did, quite successfully so. As a result, when I and my intimate partner returned this time, in 2014, I did so with the intent to 'normalize' the experience, to instill in my emotional heart that Wichita and Derby were 'safe spaces', and to take pleasure in the visit, rather than the high state of anxiety I had experienced five years previously. I wanted to 'have the experience' of those cities as 'just regular places to visit' and to take pleasure in that excursion. Which I did. Wichita is a pleasant enough city, with some interesting places to visit (we returned to see Botanica, the Wichita Botanical Gardens, which we had seen on the previous visit, and to visit the Mid-American Indian Center). And the Reunion, itself, was an equally pleasurable event.

My point in writing about this visit is to stress that what was an otherwise 'regular', everyday kind of visit was, for me, a significant chance to 'normalize' the experience and clear away a mountain of traumatic emotional debris that had blocked my desire to go to the place all those years before 2009. That it was 'normal' and maybe even a bit mundane was a triumph and a resounding victory, given the association I had previously had with the place.

As to the actual reunion itself, there were very few members of the Class of 1969 (my graduation year); most of the attendees were from the Class of 1968. More may have attended the Saturday night 'formal dinner', but I could only attend the Friday night BBQ, since I and my partner wanted to drive back, via Kansas City, on our return trip, to minimize and break-up the exhaustion caused by the 7 hour drive from St. Louis.

Though I only knew one or two people at the event, whom I had reconnected with at the 40th Reunion, I made use of two 'skills' I'd learned over the years, to meet many more people. The first is that, as a military dependent, one learned to 'make friends fast', since moving to a new location was something that often occurred every year or two. If one was to have any friends, they had been 'connected with' fairly quickly. The second skill, definitely influenced by the first, was that from many years of electoral campaigning (at this point in my life, I've worked on over 65 Democratic Party electoral campaigns, at all levels of political office) I've 'learned how to know people', how to 'connect quickly', since, on the campaign trail, one often makes contacts who are important at the time, but whom you're unlikely to ever see again. Hence, with those 'skill sets' in hand, I simply approached people I didn't know, but who appeared to be interesting to talk to, and 'met' them. And engaged in heart-to-heart conversations about our mutual lives.

One of the factors that impinges upon 'growing older', especially at such events marking a stage much earlier in one's life, is that, on the walls lining the event location, were pictures and obituaries of fellow students who had passed away in the intervening years, several as recent as 2013 or 2014. I only remembered one of them, a fellow who had been on the tennis team with me, who had died in 2007 of brain cancer (whom I had been unable to connect with before his passing, since 2009 had been my first attendance at the reunions). I thought as I looked at those pictures that I was glad to have attended this time around, since it was likely [it's increasingly likely at this stage of life] that some of the people at this reunion would not be alive at the next one in 2019 [potentially, of course, that could include myself, but then if I did pass away, I wouldn't see any of these people again anyway!]. Additionally, though, I've been a 'people person' for a long time, which was one reason why I enjoyed community organizing and electoral campaigning. I enjoy talking to people at more than a superficial level, 'getting to know them' and the patterns of their lives.

I distributed a wealth of my MMWI business cards, told people about my work with men's wellness, and hoped they would access the website and blog, as well as, potentially, keeping online contact with me. That last hope is probably less likely, but just letting people know about my unusual profession [well, my nonprofit, no wage profession] was enjoyable enough.

Now I can 'put that behind me', having revisioned that location, and 'knowing in my heart' that I can move beyond the trauma which is associated in my personal history with Wichita and Derby. I'm not saying that the 'ripple effects of those months of torture' in 1968-69 in Kansas will ever be completely healed, but at least that I can 'close that chapter' and have more confidence about moving forward emotionally. And that's saying a lot, given the level of trauma I've had to cope with throughout my life. Being a trauma and sexual abuse survivor is a triumph, but a difficult one of which to be proud [being a member of a club that one would rather have preferred to never have been forced to join]. But I'm here, still alive at 62, still healing and growing and transforming. There are still many more mountains to cross, many more levels of trauma to uncover, but at least that one has been laid to rest.