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?

Survivor Guilt

In the days and weeks following my family’s airplane crash, people kept assuring me I’d be fine. “You’re young,” they’d say. “You’ll bounce back in no time.” It would be a different story for my parents, these same people confided. A parent should never have to bury his child. One day when I had children of my own I’d understand, they promised. Losing a sister just wasn’t the same. And I still had my whole life ahead of me. I was lucky to be alive!

I listened. I tried to feel lucky. But all I could think was: Nancy is dead. I wasn’t even wearing my seatbelt. Why am I still here?

When my father told me he wished Nancy had been the one to survive, the guilt bloomed inside of me like a fungus. Gradually, I made myself a living corpse. I took shallow sips of air I didn’t deserve to breathe. I slogged through heavily freighted days.

Survivor syndrome emerged in the 1960s as psychotherapists began to identify a pattern of symptoms present in Holocaust survivors: depression and persistent anxiety, social withdrawal, emotional numbness, nightmares, mood swings, loss of physical drive. Survivors of natural disasters, warfare and terrorist attacks often suffer the same conditions. Our traumas differ, but we shoulder a common guilt at having lived through the horror that killed others around us.

I was forty years old when I finally began to invite myself back to life. First my therapist gave me the words “survivor guilt.” Then she gave me the eye movement therapy EMDR. (Hang on to your hats. There is much to come about EMDR in subsequent posts.)

Six months into therapy I wrote in my journal: “If everything I do has to be good enough to justify my LIFE, my having been allowed to live when Nancy died, how do I even get out of bed in the morning?” I was beginning to plumb the depths of my guilty self-punishment. Beginning to sense that every single day might not require me to defend my existence.

At the same time, I was realizing that my second father was not the only one who wanted to negate my life. My earliest childhood memories predate the plane crash by at least a decade. In them, my first father tells me again and again that my life has no value. To him or anyone else.

Survivor guilt gave me language to explore a big part of what had happened in my life. It helped explain why I behaved as if I didn’t deserve to occupy my own skin. But there was more. That guilt was compounded by the message I received from both of my fathers: We don’t want you.

My journal entry ended this way: “I’ve been raised by men who, given the choice, wouldn’t have had me live. Now I have to grow up, grow out from under them, grow past them, tell them to BACK OFF because I’m here to stay.”

Eye Movement What?

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It sounds like an alien plot to hypnotize us and turn our brains to hamburger. I was skeptical, to say the least, when my therapist suggested I try it. So I started googling. I checked out a few library books and searched journal articles to find out what this thing was supposed to do, and how it was supposed to do it.

EMDR evolved from discoveries Francine Shapiro made in the late 1980s as a PhD candidate in clinical psychology. She was taking a walk one day, a distressing thought churning in her head, when suddenly her distress vanished. She decided to pay close attention to what was happening as she walked. The next time her mind seized on a disturbing thought, her eyes began to move rapidly back and forth of their own accord. Once again, the thought vanished. When she tried to call it back, it no longer troubled her the way it had moments earlier.

Shapiro began experimenting, first on herself, then with friends and family, and got similar outcomes. In the protocol she developed, the patient holds a traumatic event in mind while the therapist guides his eyes rapidly back and forth. The published results of Shapiro’s first controlled study, done in 1988 with a group of twenty-two survivors of rape, sexual abuse and military service in Vietnam, began to draw the attention of the profession.

Today EMDR is an internationally recognized trauma treatment that more than 60,000 therapists are trained to practice. Initially, the therapist moved a finger or a pencil back and forth in front of the patient’s face, instructing her to follow it. Soon it became clear that other modes of bilateral stimulation worked as well. Some patients now wear headphones plugged into a device that makes an alternating tone from one ear to the other. Some hold touch pads that buzz between the left palm and the right. Some watch a point of light move back and forth across a light bar.

Author and clinical professor of psychiatry David Servan-Schreiber theorizes that EMDR is effective because the eye movements “capture attention” and help the patient focus on the present while accessing emotions linked to traumas from the past. He writes, “It may be this dual state of attention—one foot in the past and one foot in the present—that triggers a reorganization of the traumatic memory in the brain.”

Scott Borelli of the European EMDR Association writes that trauma-afflicted patients often live as if there were little or no difference between past events and the present. One key element of healthy human motivation and behavior, Borelli points out, is the ability to look to the future with “hope and anticipation.” Trauma freezes people in past time, creating “anxiety rather than hopeful expectation.”

I related to this state of perpetual hopelessness. In my head, there was a video clip playing in a continuous loop. I saw myself trying to walk down an ordinary street. Every movement required a terrible effort, as if my legs were strapped to cement weights. When the camera panned down, I noticed something attached to my ankles. It looked like my shadow at first. Then I realized I was dragging myself along, face down on the pavement, hands clamped like leg irons to my upright self. I watched this wordless struggle over and over and over again, believing it would never end.

EMDR erased that video clip.

I went into therapy convinced that all the interesting things about my life were finished. I expected to just go on hobbling down the street until it was time to die. Slowly, as the EMDR sessions ticked by, I found myself becoming curious about the future. About what possibilities lay in store. I pictured myself in new situations, doing things I’d been too dejected to let myself imagine. Things like making my living as a writer.

It’s funny what happens when the head learns to recognize the past as passed. Seeding the heart with hope.

You can read about trauma and EMDR and learn more about what happens in an EMDR session on my husband’s website, AndyWeisskoff.com. He’s a licensed clinical social worker who’s been using EMDR in his practice for the past eight years. (And no, he’s not my therapist.)

Have you had an experience with EMDR? Leave a comment about it.