Tag: Betrayal Blindness

On Forgiving and Forgetting

My brother Tedd is a compassionate man. An ordained Christian minister, he takes his faith seriously and works hard to be a force for good in the world. He has a special interest in helping those living through trying times. He and a friend do grief counseling with people whose spouses have died. He also has an active music ministry, booking concerts and sharing his story of personal struggle and growth with church congregations.

Were someone to approach my brother after one of these concerts and ask him to pray with them about the wounds they carry from childhood abuse, he would be glad for the chance to offer comfort. He would not ask the person if they are sure the abuse really happened.

But when the confessor is a sibling and the abuser is our father, my brother has asked more than once: How do you know?

Most of us don’t realize how devastating that kind of skepticism can be. We haven’t learned that abuse victims often expect not to be believed when they disclose their abuse, which makes speaking up especially risky. The abused tend to doubt their own credibility. Maybe I made the whole thing up. Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell write that children abused by parents often blame themselves, harboring great shame. “With repeated betrayal, the shame becomes chronic.”  It “makes us feel crazy at times and silences us.”

That crushing, silencing shame is something my sibs and I are familiar with. It’s difficult to shake the feeling that we somehow provoked our father to mistreat us. When he angrily pulled me out of my chair and hoisted me up to the mirror, insisting I see what a bad girl looked like, I was sure I’d brought it on myself.

Tedd’s less than sympathetic reaction to the mention of our father’s abusive behaviors makes him seem indifferent to the ways we’ve suffered. Which makes me wonder what’s really going on.

It’s possible my brother’s repeated questioning–how do you know?– is a kind of willed forgetting. Freyed and Birrell call it betrayal blindness. “We remain blind to betrayal in order to protect ourselves,” they write. Violating a child’s physical, emotional or sexual safety is the greatest act of betrayal a parent can commit. The child depends on the parent for her very survival, so how can she protest? She can’t. Instead, she hides the abuse from herself and others. She pretends, ignores, forgets. Because “forgetting and unawareness help the abuse victim survive.”

As I wrote in a previous post, at one time in his life Tedd believed that he, too, had been sexually abused by our father. He has since changed his mind, following a pattern of disclosure and retraction identified by clinical research. For many people, the possibility of abuse is too monstrous or terrifying to entertain for long. So they take it back. When a brother or sister dredges it up again, they deflect it.

Are you sure? How do you know?

Because he is not an unkind or uncaring man, my brother is willing to concede that others of us could have been abused. He doesn’t deny our reality. But lately he has taken to defending our father’s behavior. Making excuses for him. He tells me he can understand what drove our father to prey on his family and his patients sexually. Living for years with a sickly, bedridden wife the way our father did with Tedd’s mother would give any man large sexual appetites, my brother explained to me. He’d felt some of that himself during his wife’s protracted battle with cancer.

It’s hard to believe my brother would willingly identify with his abuser. That is, until you consider the other options. Like admitting our father threw him under the bus. Like bumping up against his own rage.

After reading what I wrote about our father in my memoir, Tedd brought up forgiveness. Our father helped a lot of people during his life, my brother insisted. Had my therapist encouraged me to consider that and forgive our father for the wrong he did to our family? I explained that what therapy taught me about forgiveness was how to begin to forgive myself. To surrender the self-blame and shame. That’s not the sort of forgiveness my brother was driving at, though. He wanted me to turn my burden over to God and find the freedom he believed would come from granting our father pardon.

No doubt about it, forgiveness can be powerful medicine. But if you don’t first acknowledge the truth of what a person has done, how can you meaningfully forgive him for it? How can any measure of real freedom flow from refusing to face what happened to you and how you really feel about it?

In The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists, Eleanor Payson writes that often we would rather believe we are to blame for the painful parenting we received than “look directly into our feelings of hurt and anger.” Furthermore, “we have multiple messages from society and religious teachings that tell us the only way to release these feelings is through forgiveness.”

“Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on,” Alice Miller writes in For Your Own Good.

Blanket statements of forgiveness that suppress or circumvent our real feelings are not the starting point for healing. Instead, Payson continues, “all healing must start with awareness and the retrieval of our authentic thoughts and feelings.” In Where to Draw the Line, Anne Katherine describes the freeing encounter with genuine emotions this way: “Expressing our true feeling about a true incident lightens and enlightens. All the energy tied up in keeping the anger contained is released. After we’ve been angry in a healthy way, we have more energy.”

“Only the truth will shift a feeling,” Katherine writes.

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” Jesus Christ promised his followers.

I am not a religious person. But I claim that promise for my siblings and me. When we elect not to forget, not to blind ourselves, but keep charting our way through the minefield of our own explosive feelings, we’re making ourselves free. We’re navigating toward lasting forgiveness.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Sexual Abuse

 

sexual-abuse-in-families

My brother Bruce decided to go for counseling after seeing the great benefit I got from EMDR and talk therapy. In an early session, his therapist gave him a children’s book to read, a story about a servant of the king who takes pity on a street urchin and invites the boy to the castle for a meal. After the boy stuffs himself at a banquet table, the servant offers him new clothes to replace his rags. They stop first at the castle baths, where the servant prevails upon the boy to discard his filthy clothes and climb into a warm tub. While the boy is soaking and the servant is off fetching clean things for him, another man, the king, comes into the room to speak to the boy.

My brother’s immediate thought, before he had time to quash it, was this: What is that man going to do to the naked boy?

Bruce told me this story while we were picking blueberries together in Maine. Blueberrying has been one of our very favorite things since we were little kids. Our aunties would set off with metal pails and milking stools, a parade of kids in tow carrying empty Cool Whip tubs. The tiny, taut berries gave us blue teeth and a row of warm pies oozing juice on the counter.

Not everything about our childhood scared us. We have our cinnamonned memories. But there are so many shadowy fragments. Hunches, nagging feelings, questions like the one that ambushed Bruce. Intimations and awful possibilities.

My oldest brother, Allon, has told me a few times on the phone recently that he’s pretty sure our father had sex in the office with his secretary, a woman from church.

While she was dying of cancer, my mother talked about the time she walked into the waiting area of my father’s medical practice and heard the sounds of rutting coming from a treatment room. “Don’t you dare open this door,” my father’s voice commanded from inside.

When my middle brother, Tedd, started counseling people in his church who were struggling with memories of abuse, he realized that he had suppressed similar memories himself. Our father used to take him along when he made house calls to female patients. Tedd was posted outside the closed door and told to give the signal if he heard anyone coming. Maybe there was more, my brother admitted.

Today Tedd chooses to remember his version of blueberrying, the good things about our father. His generous support of missionary organizations. His role in founding a Christian academy and Bible college in Maine. The relief from suffering he gave his patients. Tedd says these deeds more than make up for whatever hurt our father caused. He urges me to join him in offering forgiveness.

But forgiveness for what, I have to wonder. How can you forgive what you don’t see? What you can’t quite pull into focus?

My sister Sue confessed as an adult that she suspected our father had sexually abused her. Maybe over a prolonged period. She was reluctant to say so, even though he’d been dead for decades, because she had no proof, just a feeling. We learned to keep our feelings to ourselves in my family. Airing them was an invitation to a trampling. But Sue was brave and spoke aloud what her gut had been telling her for a long while. She wanted corroboration. Maybe our mother saw or heard something all those years before. Maybe she could shed some light, dredge up some kind of confirmation.

Our mother was familiar with our father’s predilections. At the end of her life, she talked pointedly about the ways he forced himself on her. He did so even in the presence of my siblings and me.

Although she shared a bed with our father for fourteen years, our mother could not say unequivocally to my sister, “Trust you instinct. This happened to you. I believe.” Our mother preferred to “just drop it.” She believed the past was behind us.

To her credit, my sister has not let it go. She works with an exceedingly kind therapist and sometimes, together, they use EMDR to address her history of abuse. I know from experience a very little bit about how brave Sue is to do this, and how paralyzingly scary it must be.

Still. What do families talk about when we talk about sexual abuse? About a doctor who violates his patients? A husband who violates his wife? A parent who violates his child? Where are the words? How do we begin?