Why now?

I will call this day 17 of my recovery as an incest survivor. I have spoken of it before. I have written about it before, in the context of a “first” sexual experience. That was more than 20 years ago. No one was capable of having the conversation, except for one other individual whom I was told by my editor at The Daily Nebraskan to interview as a first “female” sheriff in Nebraska. When I asked her what the most under-reported crime was in the state, without hesitation, she replied, “incest.” I don’t recall asking her how that could possibly be. I already knew that to speak out was to be humiliated, derided and blamed.

I knew that human beings find endless creative ways to victimize the less powerful. I knew people who twisted and perverted what the Christian bible informed me was responsibility for others and stewardship over Creation, not some bleak sickness justifying the torture and torment of other living things. These were, to me, the very people Jesus warned of. Sick, perverted, sad, blackened things, flailing blindly in darkness and harming everything in their path.

I knew this of human beings when I was a child. I saw sad sickness hiding in secrecy and darkness. To not speak of this plague is to give oneself over to darkness, yet to speak of it is to risk being shunned, slandered and shamed. How can this possibly be? How can we continue to enable something that brings so much costly harm to our species?

I believe we cannot, and that is “why now.”

The body never, ever forgets. It will never forget, as Marilyn van Derbur reminds us, even one time. The flood of cortisol etches grooves into the brain, the resilience of which rival years of practice on an instrument, or almost any less harmful activity. The more it is repeated, the deeper the wound and the more tragic the effect, which quite often includes death by suicide or long-term self-destructive behavior, particularly substance abuse, including prescription drugs.

I guarantee this without hesitation—that unless we address the source of the pain running through our culture and our kind, we will never, ever move the needle on opioid addiction. No sort of implanted serotonin booster chip will bring an end to the perversions of power that leave nothing but damage in their wake.

I am angry. I am grateful. I have gone to monumental lengths to suppress the rage of a violated child. And it is quite clear to me that continuing to do so will destroy me.

I choose to live, and I hope the words I write here may help others choose to live. I write this in part because it is no easy course of action to find the treatment resources necessary for recovery. This is not just a quick confession, nor is talk therapy alone sufficient (even if you’re fortunate enough to find a competent therapist). It must be wholistic and simultaneous of mind and body, as well as a support community.

Thus, since I do not have all these things handy to me at this time, I write, and will continue to write, about finding what is necessary heal, and raging at the assumptions, behaviors and complicity that allowed the existence of an atmosphere in which even one person is shamed for violations perpetrated upon them by others.

This is a journey into light, for me and millions of others like me, taught to swallow shame like poison and feel guilty about the resulting sickness.

Light is the only antidote.

Silence is deadly

People who read this may think I’ve gone off the deep end.
And that is OK. It’s about time.

They may say, “she is making this up for attention.”
And that is OK, although stupid.

They may shake their head in pity and say, “shame on her for embarrassing her family.”
And that is OK, because my family should be embarrassed, but I have nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone who ever made me feel as if I do should be ashamed of themselves.

The adults who judged me as a child acting out should be ashamed.

Anyone who ever shut down a conversation about inappropriate touching between children should hide their faces in shame right now!

Every person who ever blamed a victim because she is female should be exposed as a vestigial cave dweller left behind in the cognitive revolution.

Anyone who’s ever assumed “just one time” won’t hurt should be on an offender registry.

We should all be ashamed of the silence, and in being silent, that we have perpetuated one of the most wasteful of human potential and costliest behaviors that runs rampant through the populace like a plague, leaving in its wake severe depression; immuno, sleep and attachment disorders; lingering physical pain, paralysis, addiction and suicide.

When will we stop looking at these things as if they are the source of what’s causing them? When will we finally address human behavior as causation? Are we truly that baffled about an “opioid epidemic?” Are we really that dense about the epidemic of depression? These hurtful things are the price we pay to remain silent. We are so afraid of a simple and singular truth that we can’t even utter the sound of it.

I am an incest survivor. I am a child incest survivor.

I deserve to be heard.

I deserve to be helped.

I deserve to be respected.

I deserve to be recognized for surviving.

I deserve to be heeded.

I deserve to ignore the ignorant questions and remarks.

I deserve to not concern myself with anyone else’s discomfort.

I deserve an apology from every single human who’s ever used religion to justify harm to another, weaker human being. How dare you show your face?

I deserve to determine my own beliefs in the wake of all of my life experience, about which you know nothing.

I am an incest survivor, and that makes me stronger than you, unless you are an incest survivor, too. Then let me talk to you.

You were wronged. You were violated by someone who wronged you. They may have been weeks, months, years older. Mostly they were stronger, or you had just been beaten down into nothing already. What did it matter if you drank too much, took drugs or slept around? You were already “ruined” in the eyes of others, and so you let yourself believe it was true.

It’s not true. You deserved to be rescued. Right then and there—before it ever reached the point where the sanctity of your body was violated in any way, shape or form. You deserved to have an adult step in and protect you. You did not have that then, but you do, now. You have you, and you are far stronger than you can even begin to believe, because once you speak your truth, you’ll realize the weight of the shame you’ve been carrying for decades. Once you put it down, you will feel weightless. I am here to tell you this is true.

You are not alone. It was not your fault.
You are the victim of a crime.
Demand justice.

I am not ashamed

I am an incest survivor, and I am not sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. In fact, let me help you with that.

I AM AN INCEST SURVIVOR!!!

I am not sorry to say that I am an incest survivor. I am sorry—to me and every other incest survivor in the world who ever lived and who ever will—that I did not stand up and shout it sooner, every chance I had, to wake up the world to this wretched, nauseating nightmare.

I am an incest survivor. I am a child incest survivor. No one except for the army of child incest survivors could understand the lifelong legacy of depression, exhaustion, pain, emotional chaos, addiction and predatory experiences that go along with silence.

I am an incest survivor and I am proud to say “survivor,” because silence chases so many incested people to the grave, and they never live free of the burden of someone else’s shame and failure.

We know it hurts people, yet we leave victims on their own, justifying it on the grounds of family sanctity—a refuge for abusers. There’s always gossip, as well—like the new couple in town that are “really” brother and sister—or the sickness pervertedly romanticized in “Game of Thrones.” Somehow, in the midst of all this, coerced, systematic sexual contact from an older sibling or cousin is characterized as “kids being kids.”

No. That’s kids being predators, and adults not dealing with it, to the extent that we have children committing suicide from online bullying.

Bullies, in my experience, grow up to be bullies. They don’t know how to stop until something wakes up their humanity. But what in the name of heaven is going to finally wake us up? Acid attacks? A child pornography “industry?” How in the world is that even a thing? What is this strain of illness coursing through the human species and why aren’t we insisting unrelentingly that it be stopped, forever?

What further evidence do we need to know to be motivated to step up and stop this now? What exactly do we need to address the violence that begins within and around us as children?

I know that I am done. I am done being shamed, and being ashamed. The notion that I or someone like me ever was shamed is a deep corruption in collective human perception. Children are suffering—and becoming addictive, depressive, suicidal adults—right now, because we are not willing to wake up and acknowledge what children do to children. What relatives do to children. What we allow to happen to children, and what we then blame on them for the rest of their lives.

Shame on all of us for letting this continue another, single minute. If something I say here wakes up just one person, and they wake up one person, and so on down the line, perhaps the world can be immunized with awareness and moved to action.

Even now, a neighborhood in Perris, Calif., is waking up. The whole of Hollywood is waking up to what it’s done to Dylan Farrow. We have to wake up to the realities of children if we are ever to hope for a world of peace in which our own kind can be sustained. We must leave our simian ways behind.

I am an incest survivor, and I am not going away. I am not going to be quiet, and I am not going to give it a rest. Not anymore. I will not be a party to one more child being harmed because I could not be bothered.

I am an incest survivor

I am an incest survivor.

Just saying it, out loud, alone in this room, is having a visceral effect on me. As if something inside is ever-so-slowly releasing.

I am an incest survivor, and not in the past tense. As I long as I live and breathe, I am an incest survivor, and I have to do what it takes to continue surviving. So now I am writing this.

The post I shared yesterday was actually an email I sent to Marilyn van Derbur. I found her when I was looking for help online. There isn’t much out there. Survivors of Incest Anonymous seems to have fallen silent. There are no support groups near me. There aren’t enough members to keep one going at the Barbara Sinatra Center, and they have no therapists or resources to recommend. Sarambula-at-emc.org said she would send me some information. She did not.

I don’t take this mean that there are not enough incest survivors to merit support groups. I take this as evidence of the sheer physical and emotional difficulty of embodying this truth. Of giving a voice to the child whose very right to her own body was violated.

Marilyn van Derbur is a former Miss America and a motivational speaker. She was outed as an incest survivor when she was 53 years old. She is now 80. She says she has answered emails from thousands of survivors. She answered mine.

“Dear Deborah, “Thank you for trusting me. I understand viscerally.

“I was 53 before I was finally able to let go of shame and anger and overwhelming anxiety.

“I am so grateful this wonderful man has come into your life. How I wish it were possible to just bury the feelings and ‘move on.’ Unfortunately, the stuffed down feelings need light.

“I’m always here.
Blessings
Marilyn”

I’ve never buried anything or forgot it, although there is dissociation, which could be why my back and the back of my scalp have been itching mercilessly for weeks now.

I was on my back in the hay. He was on top of me.

I am still trying to get the feeling of the hay off of me.

And I am still trying to find help. I am trying to find a female doctor in my insurance network to make sure my lungs are clear. My immune system is being compromised by the memories. The only time I was safe in that house is when I was sick. The first doctor has a concierge-only practice for an additional $2,500 a year. The second one I called went to a switchboard. I reached out to a friend in medical IT. An old therapist. A friend who is a massage therapist.

And so it goes. I am an incest survivor, and I am legion. “Every eight minutes, child protective services substantiates, or finds evidence for, a claim of child sexual abuse,” according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Every eight minutes. Yet no one wants to talk about this. After an initial #MeToo social media post, crickets.

I am not giving up, and if you’re reading this and can relate, then you shouldn’t either. Watch this interview with Marilyn van Derbur on local news last November, and this speech she gave to a group in Denver. Write to her. Tell someone. Speak your truth. Out loud. If there is no one else there to hear it, at least you will, and in doing so, the grip it has on your life will slowly begin to let go.

“I am an incest survivor.”

#MeToo: I am 56 years old and paralyzed by grief

#MeToo has shattered me into a state of having to deal with a burden I've carried for five decades. I was adopted into a Midwestern farm household where I had no rights as a female, and everything that happened to me was my fault—because I was "a girl." My older adopted brother was allowed to abuse me freely. While my parents were distracted by serious health issues, they were also good at willful blindness and reiterating the rights of "the boy." 

By my teens, I was abusing alcohol and allowing myself to be abused by others outside the family because that's all I knew, and because vulnerable damaged girls are easy prey. My other abusers included a winning high-school wrestling coach. Of course, the community wrote me off as being promiscuous.

Not one single person ever suggested that maybe I deserved any kind of help.

I would attempt suicide at age 18 and marry an abusive alcoholic 10 years my senior the following year. He, too, was damaged, but we somehow gave each other enough stability to be in the world, though not well. We both drank excessively. I would eventually leave him and put myself through college—one class at a time for 10 years—on the end of a shovel installing landscapes. I went on to a 20-year-career in technology and policy journalism that I left last summer after burning out.

I intended to continue doing contract work but increasingly found myself in a state of low-level depression and complete lack of motivation. I've experienced depression since I was a child and have mostly managed with a vegetarian diet, exercise and yoga, but I think my body is rebelling against the demands of carrying this grief, as well it should. I have run marathons, skydived, earned a black belt, taught fitness classes, SCUBA-dived and hiked virtually thousands of miles among other things. Physical exertion was also my way of balancing my alcohol consumption. That's one thing at age 40. It's another at 56.

Right now, I haven't had a drink for a week, and neither have I been out of bed much nor eaten during that period. It was possibly triggered by an elderly aunt whose estate management fell to me, and who is one of those emotionally abusive older folks who seems to utterly sweet. She felt it necessary to bring up my "lovely" brother, who has not seen nor contacted her in decades. She also only respects what men have to tell her, so I feel nauseated every time I have to deal with her on administrative issues.

It's like I'm trapped in that farmhouse in the middle of nowhere once again—where, by the way, my 94-year-old mother continues to live and thus I have to stay when I go see her to help her do things she can no longer do.

I have been seeing therapists off and on for 40 years. I was diagnosed with childhood-abuse-related PTSD a few years ago. That's when I earned a black belt—by learning to fight back on the dojo floor. It helped, but nothing seems to be enough.

A few years ago I had to move to a smaller community with fewer resources. I've yet to find a helpful therapist. One gets tired of telling one's messy story again and again, especially when it doesn't help. One therapist I saw was a sweet Jewish grandma who'd been married most of her life to her childhood sweetheart. She didn't have a damn clue about the damage of incest.

Right before writing this, I reached out to the Barbara Sinatra Children's Center. The website says they have an Adults Molested as Children support group for women. I hope I hear back from someone. I am afraid for myself. Not so much that I will end my own life. I've danced with that demon since I was two years old, when I knew I would never bring children into the world I had come to know.

I am afraid because I have been robbed of so much happiness in my life. So much joy, and I am now in a relationship with a wonderful and understanding man with whom I really feel as if we can make this work and see each other through to the end. I don't want to be an anchor or a shadow to this man. I want him to see the best of who I can be. I want him to see the light within me. I want to know who I could be if I weren't being consumed by the guilt, shame, grief and horror of how I was treated the whole time my brain and body were forming.

I had a robust and dynamic life for most of 40 years, even if it wasn't the happiest and even if I failed repeatedly at relationships. I was able to avoid the abuses of my past and convince myself I was beyond them. I lived and worked in New York, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Now, at 56, it feels as if I never left home.