This is Day 47, the longest period in which I have not had an alcoholic beverage in roughly four years. Never has a break been so noticeably improving of my health and mindset. Dark clouds are fewer and further between.
So something is working in this process, which heavily comprises nesting. Thankfully, I have a partner who is supplying the fireside space where I now nest in yoga pants, watching snow clouds release enough tiny six-sided water crystals to cover a mountain range.
I take my comfort and cues from nature. I have always felt safer with animals and the elements than with people, but I don’t fully equate that with the incest, abuse and absence of protection in childhood. All people buzz with energy. If you need confirmation, step into an elevator with a large angry man.
I am exhausted by the energies of people—our unwritten stories, hidden motives, needs and wants, styles of communication, layers of aware and unaware, trigger points and general inability to just sit quietly and look out of a window at a snowstorm in the mountains.
Drinking helped me endure people and the predatory energies that victimization attracts. Uninformed people like to parrot the phrase, “stop being a victim,” but the transit from victim to survivor is different for everyone. It doesn’t come easy. It takes time, and the support of other survivors—many of whom are just now starting to speak up.
For me, recovery involves more “being” and less “doing.” “Doing” is how we think we pass the time while it’s actually passing us. “Being” is naturally aligned with time. It has no preoccupation future or past. Attention is brought constantly into the moment. This takes practice, particularly in a stimuli-addicted society where getting our attention for even a few seconds at a time generates an enormous amount of money for someone who is not either of us.
As with all practices, having an instructor helps. I listen to the mindfulness lectures of Borscht Belt Buddhist philosopher Tara Brach. I recommend her podcast to anyone who deals with depression and anxiety. If you’re a survivor, you probably do.
Mindfulness is the practice of noticing but not identifying with your own thoughts. As simple as it sounds, mindfulness takes great effort because the survival brain is constantly convincing us that we are our thoughts. Noticing thoughts in a non-identified way first requires recognition of one’s own ego and the occasional willingness to part with it.
The ego may project pomposity or anxiety, but both are based on false constructs, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Mindfulness helps us remember to pull back the curtain when we’re in the grip of thought loops that drag us into depression and anxiety.
These loops—laid down into our developing brains like electrochemical grooves—cannot be re-recorded, but they can be replaced with a healthier habitual thought. One of the most helpful I have ever employed in my lifetime of negotiating depression and suicidal ideation is, “This, too, shall pass.” Not in terms of a dismissal, but with a stubborn perseverance that outlasts the depressive thought loop and thus reinforces itself.
Eventually, a space opens where depressive and suicidal thoughts no longer gain purchase, but float by like barely noticeable debris on the wind. When triggers fling us back into contact with them, we can always bring to mind the feeling of that larger space, where we know there’s room to contemplate that a snowflake is miracle of nature; a unique, ephemeral sculpture we have to look for to see.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Trusting Intuition
I am an incest survivor and I feel safe. I am here to tell other survivors that it’s possible to feel safe. My hope is, if you’re half my age or less, it will not take nearly as long. If you’re mid-fifties, like me, or older, please know that it will feel no less powerful. Your own body will no longer be frozen between fight or flight.
This paralysis happens because childhood sexual violations are like putting a hot branding iron to brain chemistry. The experience is traumatic, and the human body is programmed to register danger in order to avoid it in the future. Even people empowered enough as children to evade violators distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable during the encounter. The creepy uncle who made children sit in his lap. A groping grandma. A family friend who wouldn’t stop staring. Children intuitively recognize danger. Their bodies recognize danger.
As children, we learn how to respond to our intuition by watching adults. If an adult intervenes on our behalf, they empower us to trust our intuition. If they tease or ridicule us, we learn quickly that we are, at the very least, alone in dealing with danger. The most common response is denial, and it’s the most destructive.
Denial negates not only the intuition of the child but denies the child’s right to an identity. Sexual abuse continues within families throughout generations because of denial. We use denial to gaslight our children and ourselves into over-riding the single most important survival mechanism we have—our intuition. In “The Gift of Fear,” security specialist Gavin de Becker, who survived a horrible childhood, repeatedly stresses the importance of intuition in avoiding violence as an adult.
Our intuition has always been to tell someone when we’ve been violated, and to believe they will help us. Too often, however, we encounter denial. What we are finally seeing in our culture is the united voices of survivors shouting over the rote banalities of denial—and being heard! We are finally being heard, by one another, and by others who want to believe in the better angels of our nature and can no longer ignore the shouting.
It took more than 150 women to bring down Larry Nassar. It took just one voice to start the chorus. Every person who speaks out makes it less difficult for the next, and so on. Now, more men are starting to feel safe enough to talk about their own childhood sexual abuse. Many men are denied their truth by a culture that labels them “lucky” enough to be introduced to their “manhood” early.
“Transparent” character Josh Pfefferman is a good example. Josh was statutorily raped by an adult female babysitter when he was a young teen. His entire family remained in denial even when the grown child of their illicit union joined them for dinner. The character is said to have “troubled relationships with women,” as if the two are somehow unrelated.
Nothing that I know is more healing than naming the truth. I say this after decades of meditation, mindfulness practice, yoga, fitness of every sort, journaling hundreds of pages and leaning into work as if my life depended on it, which it did. There are frenetic decades of “doing” to remove oneself from the original experience. The body will carry its own violation for decades before presenting a bill.
Some will die with the secret. Others will live with the truth, and it will set them free. New neural pathways will slowly override those created by trauma, so that even an incest survivor can feel safe.
This paralysis happens because childhood sexual violations are like putting a hot branding iron to brain chemistry. The experience is traumatic, and the human body is programmed to register danger in order to avoid it in the future. Even people empowered enough as children to evade violators distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable during the encounter. The creepy uncle who made children sit in his lap. A groping grandma. A family friend who wouldn’t stop staring. Children intuitively recognize danger. Their bodies recognize danger.
As children, we learn how to respond to our intuition by watching adults. If an adult intervenes on our behalf, they empower us to trust our intuition. If they tease or ridicule us, we learn quickly that we are, at the very least, alone in dealing with danger. The most common response is denial, and it’s the most destructive.
Denial negates not only the intuition of the child but denies the child’s right to an identity. Sexual abuse continues within families throughout generations because of denial. We use denial to gaslight our children and ourselves into over-riding the single most important survival mechanism we have—our intuition. In “The Gift of Fear,” security specialist Gavin de Becker, who survived a horrible childhood, repeatedly stresses the importance of intuition in avoiding violence as an adult.
Our intuition has always been to tell someone when we’ve been violated, and to believe they will help us. Too often, however, we encounter denial. What we are finally seeing in our culture is the united voices of survivors shouting over the rote banalities of denial—and being heard! We are finally being heard, by one another, and by others who want to believe in the better angels of our nature and can no longer ignore the shouting.
It took more than 150 women to bring down Larry Nassar. It took just one voice to start the chorus. Every person who speaks out makes it less difficult for the next, and so on. Now, more men are starting to feel safe enough to talk about their own childhood sexual abuse. Many men are denied their truth by a culture that labels them “lucky” enough to be introduced to their “manhood” early.
“Transparent” character Josh Pfefferman is a good example. Josh was statutorily raped by an adult female babysitter when he was a young teen. His entire family remained in denial even when the grown child of their illicit union joined them for dinner. The character is said to have “troubled relationships with women,” as if the two are somehow unrelated.
Nothing that I know is more healing than naming the truth. I say this after decades of meditation, mindfulness practice, yoga, fitness of every sort, journaling hundreds of pages and leaning into work as if my life depended on it, which it did. There are frenetic decades of “doing” to remove oneself from the original experience. The body will carry its own violation for decades before presenting a bill.
Some will die with the secret. Others will live with the truth, and it will set them free. New neural pathways will slowly override those created by trauma, so that even an incest survivor can feel safe.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
This is About Boundaries
I feel an obligation to check in here, which is good because I would otherwise be basking in absolute enjoyment of life. That is how I have felt for the last few days, having taken a difficult action to establish a necessary boundary—something incest and childhood abuse survivors are not wired for. We are devoted to, and protective of, those who abuse us because they were literally all we had. They count on this trauma bondage to outlive life.
Breaking free involves learning to establish boundaries in the wake of having them violated again and again by those we were supposed to be able to trust with our well-being, and who failed us. Families are the most fraught place to establish boundaries even in the best of circumstances and toxic quicksand in the worst. Family ties are frequently twisted in weird and difficult ways. We get trapped in the unresolved traumas of those before us.
Healing from trauma is not a single passage, but many passages along an intuitive path from victim to survivor. No one else can truly direct our healing, but compassionate witnesses and a conducive environment are critical. I currently have both for which I am deeply grateful, and I am in no hurry venture far beyond either, hence my continued boundary of relative anonymity.
We’ll call this Day No. 27 of recovery. Strength of body and mind began to return once I named my trauma. Once I started writing and saying, “I am an incest survivor,” even quietly here or out loud to myself, on my own. The mere act of being able to say those words lifted a large, heavy, black cloud from my life. The cost of carrying the shame of others is illness, depression, physical pain and too often our lives.
It was me or that burden. I chose to live. I do so each day. I must consciously act on my own behalf every day. I must protect the child I was from those who would further exploit her. I learned as painfully as most survivors do that health-care and legal professionals will often fail them and can sometimes do grave injury, like a surgeon slicing someone open and then handing them a bill to be sewed up. Even well-meaning folks can make the most ignorant statements or conjure the most egregious and discredited theories. It takes a survivor to know a survivor and all that it means to be one. We must be the ones who lead one another out from beneath the dark cloud of silence and pain.
Incest survivors share a lot with sexual trauma and physical abuse survivors. The sanctity of our very bodies has been violated, from the Latin, violare, “treated violently.” But incest survivors are unique in the bond we have with our violators and we are gaslighted into believing we must protect them and the family that did not protect us and may never do so. In almost every sense of the word, we have to learn how to care for ourselves. We were not taught properly, but in contradiction to our own well-being.
For me, right now, there is a great healing in quiet activity and meditation, reading, listening to music, doing yoga, hiking and taking care of the partner who is truly taking care of me and helping me learn to be cared for. I know well my good fortune in this circumstance. I worked very hard to create it.
Healing is not a gift, as Marilyn van Durbur reminds us. It is not. It is a practice.
Breaking free involves learning to establish boundaries in the wake of having them violated again and again by those we were supposed to be able to trust with our well-being, and who failed us. Families are the most fraught place to establish boundaries even in the best of circumstances and toxic quicksand in the worst. Family ties are frequently twisted in weird and difficult ways. We get trapped in the unresolved traumas of those before us.
Healing from trauma is not a single passage, but many passages along an intuitive path from victim to survivor. No one else can truly direct our healing, but compassionate witnesses and a conducive environment are critical. I currently have both for which I am deeply grateful, and I am in no hurry venture far beyond either, hence my continued boundary of relative anonymity.
We’ll call this Day No. 27 of recovery. Strength of body and mind began to return once I named my trauma. Once I started writing and saying, “I am an incest survivor,” even quietly here or out loud to myself, on my own. The mere act of being able to say those words lifted a large, heavy, black cloud from my life. The cost of carrying the shame of others is illness, depression, physical pain and too often our lives.
It was me or that burden. I chose to live. I do so each day. I must consciously act on my own behalf every day. I must protect the child I was from those who would further exploit her. I learned as painfully as most survivors do that health-care and legal professionals will often fail them and can sometimes do grave injury, like a surgeon slicing someone open and then handing them a bill to be sewed up. Even well-meaning folks can make the most ignorant statements or conjure the most egregious and discredited theories. It takes a survivor to know a survivor and all that it means to be one. We must be the ones who lead one another out from beneath the dark cloud of silence and pain.
Incest survivors share a lot with sexual trauma and physical abuse survivors. The sanctity of our very bodies has been violated, from the Latin, violare, “treated violently.” But incest survivors are unique in the bond we have with our violators and we are gaslighted into believing we must protect them and the family that did not protect us and may never do so. In almost every sense of the word, we have to learn how to care for ourselves. We were not taught properly, but in contradiction to our own well-being.
For me, right now, there is a great healing in quiet activity and meditation, reading, listening to music, doing yoga, hiking and taking care of the partner who is truly taking care of me and helping me learn to be cared for. I know well my good fortune in this circumstance. I worked very hard to create it.
Healing is not a gift, as Marilyn van Durbur reminds us. It is not. It is a practice.
Monday, January 29, 2018
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
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 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.
Monday, January 22, 2018
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.”
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.”
Sunday, January 21, 2018
#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.
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.
Sunday, October 12, 2014
When love is a minefield of triggers
Love is complicated
for me. It stings. It’s dangerous. The people who taught me love were
injured. Their scar patterns unique, as with most people. Carrying
the violations upon our forming selves driving everything we do. Wounds we
can’t see; can’t remember; can’t acknowledge.
Maybe I see them everywhere because I know them, or because they are everywhere. We hurt one another. We are hurt by our parents, who were by their parents, and so on. We inevitably hurt our children with what remains unresolved.
Sometimes the hurting is overt, sometimes insidious. Emotional bondage, oppression, dependence. Furtive emotional violence. A hand brushed over tiny genitals; perhaps kissed, or just one little finger. Maybe worse. Much, much worse.
Violations of human boundaries just as the soul is knitting itself to the physical body, creating gaping wounds that we can’t understand, but others of our kind can see and hone in on. To weaken us. To bring us down, because we are animals. Hairless monkeys. Less compassionate than cats. By far.
Until there are enough voices saying the same thing; crying in the same agony. Like soldiers. Soldiers who fight an entirely new battle once they leave the battlefield. One they’re not trained for. One inside their souls. The casualties have been great—one suicide a day for active duty personnel; one an hour for veterans.
Once every hour, a U.S. military veteran commits suicide. 1
After generations of being told to suck it up, to stay strong, to bury it, to let it go, to “be a man.” How much of this buried agony from past generations has transmuted us; our race, our beings from birth? We can't know. We can only know it is enough.
Now we want to help, but we’re sure how. Psychological counseling is practiced by cats. They toss labels at your wounds like they're a beach ball instead of a hand grenade, and you’re supposed to accept them as if it doesn’t hurt to get blown apart.
“Love addiction.
“Low self-esteem.”
“Attachment disorder.”
“Post traumatic stress disorder.”
And… “You’ll get over it.”
“It’s in the past.”
"Let it go.”
“That shouldn't bother you”
“It’s all in your head.”
It is in the head and the body. Molecules shift. Cells behave differently. The brain rewires to see and feel danger everywhere. Every person is a predator. Peace, contentment and love are impossible.
The mind doesn’t understand, runs away and buries. The body keeps a ledger like an accountant.2 Accounts come due. The body won't let the mind get away with ignoring it forever. The body remembers everything, from the brutality of war to the little finger in the crib.
I’ve wondered if that was it; what happened to me there in the Immanuel Deaconess Orphanage, Nursing School and Home for Aged, where young women were taught by men how to care for the broken as if they were not. What happened there?
I don’t know, but I stopped crying before the people who would parent me took me home. My mother said I did not like to be held, and never cried, except for when my leg was broken and no one realized to for weeks.
Did I really tumble in my walker, or was it that child’s rocking chair pinning my body to the floor while my diaper was being changed? I don’t remember falling in my walker. I remember that chair, it’s rockers on either side of my body.
Could she really have done that, the sweet resilient and tiny woman I now know as my mom? She was younger once, and different as we all are when we’re younger and our wounds are still raw with ragged edges.
She was raised with wolves. Wolfish people, hard and deprived. Always looking to survive by taking out all competition. Predators at the core, confused and injured themselves.
It just takes a split second to revert into what we know; to what our cells have been wrought. I know, because I was once young like her, easily provoked, oversensitive to threat. I still can be. It shocks the unversed.
She was once young girl whose half-Cherokee father left when she was a baby, leaving her mother to beat rugs for bankers’ wives in Depression-era Kansas. Children without fathers are easy prey. Poor, mixed-race children are as vulnerable as they come.
I have a picture of her at maybe eight or nine. Her eyes are too old, wise, needful and threatening. I can only suspect what’s buried there because I’ll never ask. It was enough that she lived through it. She may or may not have hurt me that day. I know she wouldn’t have meant to. She would have been terrified to realize it.
I do not blame her because I am her. My wounds resemble hers. I’m sure of it. But she was German-Cherokee, blood of iron. All personal violations were locked in a vault. I am said to be Scots. Blood of fire. All things are felt. All the pain running through generations like poison.
I did not let that continue. I knew when I was two that I would not have children. It was not her fault. It was no one’s fault. I was a foundling. She raised me. Gave me more than she ever had. But the echoes of unsaid things bouncing off the walls of that house lacerated me.
Sometimes I hear,“stop being a victim,” as if the generational ravages that formed me can be reversed on the spot.
“Rewire you brain,” chirped a veteran psychotherapist when I spoke of my struggles. She, who grew up with her own blood, in her own tribe, affluent enough for college, after which she married her high school sweetheart and had a family. As if she had a clue how to understand what I was. As if she had a clue about how utterly difficult it can be to rearrange cells formed in unpredictable volatility.
Her kind subjected me to years of recounting my horrors and then counseling me to intentionally alter my internal dialog, reinforced by the the years of recounting.
All along I needed witnesses. Witnesses who revered me for what I survived, instead of condescending to me in psychological jargon. Witnesses who see within and beyond us, and how we came to be this way. No explanations required. Compassionate.
I’ve had two. One is dead; one is dying. Almost everything is forgivable when you’re dying. That’s how Spike evolved. He let things go inside, but still wouldn’t tolerate many people. Forgiveness is easier when others become abstract.
Spike was just one of the men who hurt me, even though he saved my life. He hurt me because he’d been hurt like me. His wounds lined up with mine.
Others since have been the same, all shattered boundaries and gaping wounds. Men who don’t know they’re hurt. Left fragile from being told for generations to suck it up. Stop crying. Stand up. Be a man. The man of the house.
No wonder there is a rape culture. No wonder men are angry. No wonder they hurt others; go to war, leave their children—either emotionally or physically or both. Their pain transmutes to anger, rage and violence.
Those in my adult life, I can forgive once I’ve made them abstract. The one who abused me throughout my childhood, I can forgive. Perhaps even the one in the orphanage, if indeed there was one.
But not so much the adult men who took advantage of my wounds when I was a teenager. They should be in jail. Instead, I was labeled a slut because they perpetuated the violence of others before them. But that was OK, because men are supposed to be sexually aggressive. It’s part of being a man.
A damaged one.
I remember one in particular who looked me up when I was in my 30s, working my way through college as a landscaper. He thought we might be friends. I was horrified and nauseated.
He was surely injured by someone. He was left alone with his mother, who never remarried after his father abandoned them. He was probably set up as the “man of the house.” He deserves compassion. He deserves forgiveness. But not from me.
I’ve heard it said that what we don’t forgive only hurts us, but that’s not true. Not forgiving can protect you from getting hurt again.
“We cannot throw anger out the window and don forgiveness as if it were a costume, “ Karla McLaren says.2 It’s messy, difficult and ongoing.
I’m trying to forgive someone now. I fell in love. I don’t know why. I was unimpressed when he showed me pictures of his car and his motorcycle. The neon insecurity sign. Later, when we talked, there was a real person. I walked away and had an unbidden intuition that he would be my husband. I’d never had that before. I let myself believe it. I don’t know how love works, so why not? People talk all the time about how they just saw each other and knew.
He was disastrous. Destructive, mean and seemingly unconscious about it. He made a mockery of my feelings; exploited my vulnerabilities. If this person was my match, what was I? I was Somerset Maugham’s Philip Carey. It was hard to comprehend. I was sickened by my own vulnerability; my own weakness for him. It took some doing, but I finally drove him away.
Why would I feel so strongly about someone so utterly without compassion for me? Welcome to my scar pattern. His matched mine precisely, and reignited the traumas McLaren says must be healed by witnesses; with a welcoming back to the tribe.
Like what those wounded soldiers are doing. Witnessing and welcoming one another back into their own tribe. In this way, they are still fighting for the rest of us also cut off from the larger tribe, but in my case and that of many others like me—we can't find each other.
The support group community erroneously lumps traumas together. Soldiers are not going to see themselves among survivors of early sexual abuse, and vice versa.
Further, survivors of early sexual abuse don’t often relate to each other, because the wounds are as specific in characteristics as a person’s relationship to the abuser. Father-on-daughter, stranger-on-child, brother-on-sister, mother-on-son.
I’ve met two women who experienced what I went through growing up. It can only be whispered once, in a drunken moment, when it can’t be fully felt. But you know immediately when they are one of your kind.
Our pain has been denied. Our healing has been denied. Because everyone who was around at that time is culpable, and they can’t bear the truth. They tell us to forget, move on, let it go. As if we can just “rewire our brain,” and suddenly live safely in a world we know as inherently unsafe, because those charged with protecting us when we were completely helpless left us broken and wounded.
So we carry the weight of their transgressions throughout our lives, spending on it the energy we might otherwise have to fulfill our potential. And we are blamed for that, too.
How, then, do we heal ourselves, in the absence of witnesses and without a tribe? I know of only one thing. To tell our stories. So I’ll tell mine.
Harper’s, October 2014, p. 58, “You
Are Not Alone Across Time; Using Sophecles to Treat PTSD,” by Wyatt Mason
“BodyMind,” by Ken Dychtwald
“The Language of Emotions,” by
Kalra McLaren
Maybe I see them everywhere because I know them, or because they are everywhere. We hurt one another. We are hurt by our parents, who were by their parents, and so on. We inevitably hurt our children with what remains unresolved.
Sometimes the hurting is overt, sometimes insidious. Emotional bondage, oppression, dependence. Furtive emotional violence. A hand brushed over tiny genitals; perhaps kissed, or just one little finger. Maybe worse. Much, much worse.
Violations of human boundaries just as the soul is knitting itself to the physical body, creating gaping wounds that we can’t understand, but others of our kind can see and hone in on. To weaken us. To bring us down, because we are animals. Hairless monkeys. Less compassionate than cats. By far.
Until there are enough voices saying the same thing; crying in the same agony. Like soldiers. Soldiers who fight an entirely new battle once they leave the battlefield. One they’re not trained for. One inside their souls. The casualties have been great—one suicide a day for active duty personnel; one an hour for veterans.
Once every hour, a U.S. military veteran commits suicide. 1
After generations of being told to suck it up, to stay strong, to bury it, to let it go, to “be a man.” How much of this buried agony from past generations has transmuted us; our race, our beings from birth? We can't know. We can only know it is enough.
Now we want to help, but we’re sure how. Psychological counseling is practiced by cats. They toss labels at your wounds like they're a beach ball instead of a hand grenade, and you’re supposed to accept them as if it doesn’t hurt to get blown apart.
“Love addiction.
“Low self-esteem.”
“Attachment disorder.”
“Post traumatic stress disorder.”
And… “You’ll get over it.”
“It’s in the past.”
"Let it go.”
“That shouldn't bother you”
“It’s all in your head.”
It is in the head and the body. Molecules shift. Cells behave differently. The brain rewires to see and feel danger everywhere. Every person is a predator. Peace, contentment and love are impossible.
The mind doesn’t understand, runs away and buries. The body keeps a ledger like an accountant.2 Accounts come due. The body won't let the mind get away with ignoring it forever. The body remembers everything, from the brutality of war to the little finger in the crib.
I’ve wondered if that was it; what happened to me there in the Immanuel Deaconess Orphanage, Nursing School and Home for Aged, where young women were taught by men how to care for the broken as if they were not. What happened there?
I don’t know, but I stopped crying before the people who would parent me took me home. My mother said I did not like to be held, and never cried, except for when my leg was broken and no one realized to for weeks.
Did I really tumble in my walker, or was it that child’s rocking chair pinning my body to the floor while my diaper was being changed? I don’t remember falling in my walker. I remember that chair, it’s rockers on either side of my body.
Could she really have done that, the sweet resilient and tiny woman I now know as my mom? She was younger once, and different as we all are when we’re younger and our wounds are still raw with ragged edges.
She was raised with wolves. Wolfish people, hard and deprived. Always looking to survive by taking out all competition. Predators at the core, confused and injured themselves.
It just takes a split second to revert into what we know; to what our cells have been wrought. I know, because I was once young like her, easily provoked, oversensitive to threat. I still can be. It shocks the unversed.
She was once young girl whose half-Cherokee father left when she was a baby, leaving her mother to beat rugs for bankers’ wives in Depression-era Kansas. Children without fathers are easy prey. Poor, mixed-race children are as vulnerable as they come.
I have a picture of her at maybe eight or nine. Her eyes are too old, wise, needful and threatening. I can only suspect what’s buried there because I’ll never ask. It was enough that she lived through it. She may or may not have hurt me that day. I know she wouldn’t have meant to. She would have been terrified to realize it.
I do not blame her because I am her. My wounds resemble hers. I’m sure of it. But she was German-Cherokee, blood of iron. All personal violations were locked in a vault. I am said to be Scots. Blood of fire. All things are felt. All the pain running through generations like poison.
I did not let that continue. I knew when I was two that I would not have children. It was not her fault. It was no one’s fault. I was a foundling. She raised me. Gave me more than she ever had. But the echoes of unsaid things bouncing off the walls of that house lacerated me.
Sometimes I hear,“stop being a victim,” as if the generational ravages that formed me can be reversed on the spot.
“Rewire you brain,” chirped a veteran psychotherapist when I spoke of my struggles. She, who grew up with her own blood, in her own tribe, affluent enough for college, after which she married her high school sweetheart and had a family. As if she had a clue how to understand what I was. As if she had a clue about how utterly difficult it can be to rearrange cells formed in unpredictable volatility.
Her kind subjected me to years of recounting my horrors and then counseling me to intentionally alter my internal dialog, reinforced by the the years of recounting.
All along I needed witnesses. Witnesses who revered me for what I survived, instead of condescending to me in psychological jargon. Witnesses who see within and beyond us, and how we came to be this way. No explanations required. Compassionate.
I’ve had two. One is dead; one is dying. Almost everything is forgivable when you’re dying. That’s how Spike evolved. He let things go inside, but still wouldn’t tolerate many people. Forgiveness is easier when others become abstract.
Spike was just one of the men who hurt me, even though he saved my life. He hurt me because he’d been hurt like me. His wounds lined up with mine.
Others since have been the same, all shattered boundaries and gaping wounds. Men who don’t know they’re hurt. Left fragile from being told for generations to suck it up. Stop crying. Stand up. Be a man. The man of the house.
No wonder there is a rape culture. No wonder men are angry. No wonder they hurt others; go to war, leave their children—either emotionally or physically or both. Their pain transmutes to anger, rage and violence.
Those in my adult life, I can forgive once I’ve made them abstract. The one who abused me throughout my childhood, I can forgive. Perhaps even the one in the orphanage, if indeed there was one.
But not so much the adult men who took advantage of my wounds when I was a teenager. They should be in jail. Instead, I was labeled a slut because they perpetuated the violence of others before them. But that was OK, because men are supposed to be sexually aggressive. It’s part of being a man.
A damaged one.
I remember one in particular who looked me up when I was in my 30s, working my way through college as a landscaper. He thought we might be friends. I was horrified and nauseated.
He was surely injured by someone. He was left alone with his mother, who never remarried after his father abandoned them. He was probably set up as the “man of the house.” He deserves compassion. He deserves forgiveness. But not from me.
I’ve heard it said that what we don’t forgive only hurts us, but that’s not true. Not forgiving can protect you from getting hurt again.
“We cannot throw anger out the window and don forgiveness as if it were a costume, “ Karla McLaren says.2 It’s messy, difficult and ongoing.
I’m trying to forgive someone now. I fell in love. I don’t know why. I was unimpressed when he showed me pictures of his car and his motorcycle. The neon insecurity sign. Later, when we talked, there was a real person. I walked away and had an unbidden intuition that he would be my husband. I’d never had that before. I let myself believe it. I don’t know how love works, so why not? People talk all the time about how they just saw each other and knew.
He was disastrous. Destructive, mean and seemingly unconscious about it. He made a mockery of my feelings; exploited my vulnerabilities. If this person was my match, what was I? I was Somerset Maugham’s Philip Carey. It was hard to comprehend. I was sickened by my own vulnerability; my own weakness for him. It took some doing, but I finally drove him away.
Why would I feel so strongly about someone so utterly without compassion for me? Welcome to my scar pattern. His matched mine precisely, and reignited the traumas McLaren says must be healed by witnesses; with a welcoming back to the tribe.
Like what those wounded soldiers are doing. Witnessing and welcoming one another back into their own tribe. In this way, they are still fighting for the rest of us also cut off from the larger tribe, but in my case and that of many others like me—we can't find each other.
The support group community erroneously lumps traumas together. Soldiers are not going to see themselves among survivors of early sexual abuse, and vice versa.
Further, survivors of early sexual abuse don’t often relate to each other, because the wounds are as specific in characteristics as a person’s relationship to the abuser. Father-on-daughter, stranger-on-child, brother-on-sister, mother-on-son.
I’ve met two women who experienced what I went through growing up. It can only be whispered once, in a drunken moment, when it can’t be fully felt. But you know immediately when they are one of your kind.
Our pain has been denied. Our healing has been denied. Because everyone who was around at that time is culpable, and they can’t bear the truth. They tell us to forget, move on, let it go. As if we can just “rewire our brain,” and suddenly live safely in a world we know as inherently unsafe, because those charged with protecting us when we were completely helpless left us broken and wounded.
So we carry the weight of their transgressions throughout our lives, spending on it the energy we might otherwise have to fulfill our potential. And we are blamed for that, too.
How, then, do we heal ourselves, in the absence of witnesses and without a tribe? I know of only one thing. To tell our stories. So I’ll tell mine.
Friday, July 11, 2014
On the space aliens among us
Let's say a "tesseractal" is the three-dimensional being's generic for a fourth-dimensional being.
A tesseractal would see the three-dimensional world clearly but not be perceived entirely by its inhabitants. As with Edwin Abbott Abbott's A Square in "Flatland," whose two-dimensional mind is blown by a close encounter of the spherical kind.
I'm explaining this to a friend who asked me over lunch if I believed in extraterrestrials. He was making indignant noises over "billions of dollars" being spent on SETI, the club for radio astronomy nerds who decipher space noise. And why would "they" do this when there are already extraterrestrials right here, he said conspiratorially.
I'm guessing "they" is the government. The government of the United States. The one made up of some lawyers, the occasional car salesman, a doctor or two, a few businessfolk and a lot of spoiled rich dudes who pretty much repeat what their 24-year-old aides tell them to say. These are the people covering up the existence of alien life forms walking among us here on Earth.
He is giving "they" way too much credit.
Even cursory observation suggests that bungled coincidences outnumber actual conspiracies by a ratio of about 1,000:1. Most actual conspiracies are really a string of small, coincidental farces. Conspiracies reside primarily within people's hindsight, but we love them.
My lunch date is a guy who will say anything in a confrontational way just to see what he gets back. He just finished telling me how he intentionally incensed the wife of a mutual friend by ripping women of a "certain age" just within earshot of her. She takes herself too seriously. Instead of shooting him down with a single Viagra crack, she came unglued.
He said she was scary.
I said don't sleep. Ever.
As for extraterrestrials, I told him that few things, for me, were matters of "belief," but rather of deduction. And because we keep receiving and decoding new information throughout our lifetimes, deduction is a continuing versus a conclusive process. For me—a single unit of a known species of 7 billion living on a tiny wet clod in the solar system, itself a miniscule dust spec in the galaxy, itself a infinitesimally small dust bunny in the universe, itself one of an infinite number—to presume I can achieve conclusive knowledge of anything other than my own experience and maybe not even that seems not merely the height of hubris but also insanity.
But he really wanted to go there. I searched his features. He was kidding but he was not. He certainly didn't want to be dismissed as a wackjob, and I knew if he was, he'd persist until I said anything just to get him to shut up.
Him: "You don't seem to feel very strongly about aliens walking around right here."
Me, looking directly at him: "Not at all. All people seem oddly alien to me."
It never occurred to him that he might be A Square, so I told him about it. Between dimensional and string theories, it seems more logical than alarming that other sentient things we cannot perceive of are walking around us. Why not? People talk about experiences with angels and ghosts all the time. Ever have that experience where it seems like you should have just had a car wreck but the vehicles seemed to kind of pass through one another? Me, too. Perfectly sober. Who's to say?
Our propensity to vilify everything we don't understand is more curious to me than those mysteries themselves. It's one thing when there's evidence of malfeasance; another when there's none. There seems to be more malfeasance in human nature than in nature itself. Nature is one indifferent mistress. Humanity it scared of its shadows.
It's always a good idea to question one's way of seeing the world as much as questioning what one does or does not see in it.
Here's an alien kitty:
A tesseractal would see the three-dimensional world clearly but not be perceived entirely by its inhabitants. As with Edwin Abbott Abbott's A Square in "Flatland," whose two-dimensional mind is blown by a close encounter of the spherical kind.
I'm explaining this to a friend who asked me over lunch if I believed in extraterrestrials. He was making indignant noises over "billions of dollars" being spent on SETI, the club for radio astronomy nerds who decipher space noise. And why would "they" do this when there are already extraterrestrials right here, he said conspiratorially.
I'm guessing "they" is the government. The government of the United States. The one made up of some lawyers, the occasional car salesman, a doctor or two, a few businessfolk and a lot of spoiled rich dudes who pretty much repeat what their 24-year-old aides tell them to say. These are the people covering up the existence of alien life forms walking among us here on Earth.
He is giving "they" way too much credit.
Even cursory observation suggests that bungled coincidences outnumber actual conspiracies by a ratio of about 1,000:1. Most actual conspiracies are really a string of small, coincidental farces. Conspiracies reside primarily within people's hindsight, but we love them.
My lunch date is a guy who will say anything in a confrontational way just to see what he gets back. He just finished telling me how he intentionally incensed the wife of a mutual friend by ripping women of a "certain age" just within earshot of her. She takes herself too seriously. Instead of shooting him down with a single Viagra crack, she came unglued.
He said she was scary.
I said don't sleep. Ever.
As for extraterrestrials, I told him that few things, for me, were matters of "belief," but rather of deduction. And because we keep receiving and decoding new information throughout our lifetimes, deduction is a continuing versus a conclusive process. For me—a single unit of a known species of 7 billion living on a tiny wet clod in the solar system, itself a miniscule dust spec in the galaxy, itself a infinitesimally small dust bunny in the universe, itself one of an infinite number—to presume I can achieve conclusive knowledge of anything other than my own experience and maybe not even that seems not merely the height of hubris but also insanity.
But he really wanted to go there. I searched his features. He was kidding but he was not. He certainly didn't want to be dismissed as a wackjob, and I knew if he was, he'd persist until I said anything just to get him to shut up.
Him: "You don't seem to feel very strongly about aliens walking around right here."
Me, looking directly at him: "Not at all. All people seem oddly alien to me."
It never occurred to him that he might be A Square, so I told him about it. Between dimensional and string theories, it seems more logical than alarming that other sentient things we cannot perceive of are walking around us. Why not? People talk about experiences with angels and ghosts all the time. Ever have that experience where it seems like you should have just had a car wreck but the vehicles seemed to kind of pass through one another? Me, too. Perfectly sober. Who's to say?
Our propensity to vilify everything we don't understand is more curious to me than those mysteries themselves. It's one thing when there's evidence of malfeasance; another when there's none. There seems to be more malfeasance in human nature than in nature itself. Nature is one indifferent mistress. Humanity it scared of its shadows.
It's always a good idea to question one's way of seeing the world as much as questioning what one does or does not see in it.
Here's an alien kitty:
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