| There is such a entry in this topic, it is number 202, which I have
skimmed in its entirety (thru .103) as I write this.
Offered here are only my observations which illuminate in a different
light the issues so excellently covered in the responses to the
basenote of 202.
Each survivor's tale is different, yet similar; each is a tale in which
the central theme is the violation of the integrity of a person
(a child).
I offer here a missive with two parts. The first is my tale, briefly
told, with my advice to readers who are survivors or suspect that they
might be survivors. The second consists of observations drawn strictly
from my family intended for those readers who are not survivors but
wish to hear and understand more about this Emotional Virus that
affects humanity. I am a male survivor. I doubt I'll live to see the
day when the care and nurturing of Small People is commonly regarded by
society as a role for all human beings rather than just half of
humanity. A tip of the hat to the gentle souls who oversee this topic.
At age 38 I've spent eight years in therapy with a psychiatrist. The
first four years were spent simply trying to reach a point where I
could begin to remember the physical, sexual and emotional abuse I
suffered at the hands of my father from the time I was moved from a
crib until I was about four and a half years old. Don't misunderstand
what I feel is an extremely important point (which, you note, I make
first) that at age 30 (when I began therapy), I had No Recall
Whatsoever of my abuse. Had you asked me then if I had a happy
childhood, I would have answered without hesitation: yes. But at 30,
I was clinically depressed, unable to form lasting intimate
relationships with women, unable to concentrate on my own ideas or to
effectively compete or advance professionally. I was Very Unhappy,
with no real idea why, and only the vaguest notion that there was
something "wrong" with me. (When being depressed has been all you've
ever known, you don't know that it is not "normal"!).
As is typical the abuse started furtively, with fondling of my body
while I was "asleep" (a defense on my part) in my bedroom. Over the
first years of my life it gradually escalated into violent behavior
including fellatio (I almost choked to death the first time as I recall
now) with wild and crazy behavior by my father (he would enter my room,
and begin shouting, addressing me while he faced away from me towards the
wall opposite me). It stopped abruptly at about age 4 when my mother
almost caught him in my room and I witnessed him flee in terror at her
arrival. My threat to him to tell her was effectively turned back by his
announcement to me that if I did, everyone in the family would die.
Shortly thereafter, everyone in the family "forgot" this upheaval. I
"forgot" it because the feelings were too painful to deal with (the
shrinky people call this "repressing the memories" I believe). We all
pretended we were happy.
All was unhappily serene until I was about twelve years old when my
father enrolled me into the rape of another younger family member.
This quite shattered me, as I swore I'd never touch anyone for fear of
becoming exactly like my father was to me.
Now dear reader, I invite you to take a moment to look inward on
your own feelings. If, as you read my tale, you felt vaguely uneasy,
slightly fearful, edgey or perhaps a touch anxious, the odds are
rather substantial that you too are a survivor of childhood abuse. If
so, Take Heart! With Time and Energy and a good therapist, it has been
my experience that the past can successfully be overthrown to leave one
free for living one's life (instead of existing through it). If you
felt anger or disgust, my guess is either you managed to slip through
childhood without being abused, or your defense mechanisms are as
formidable as mine were eight years ago.
I pushed my feelings deep down, far away from my conscious mind when I
was a child because there was no one there to help me deal with my
feelings. Feelings always desire to be felt. This is the essence of
being human. To not feel feelings requires constant effort to avert
one's consciousness away from thoughts that could lead to feelings that
seem to scary to be felt. For me, the effort itself became regular and
routine, so much so that the exertion itself became unconscious. The
cost of this effort was shown in the way I led my life: without
enthusiasm, joy or good feelings. It is almost as though I had to take
a loan out of an Emotional Bank to cover the cost of Not Feeling those
horrible feelings... and each moment of my life is consumed by paying
the interest on that loan in terms of by daily happiness...Until I paid
off the principle by literally going back to being a child in my
therapist's office under his attendance to finally feel those feelings.
They were indeed awful: a horrible blend of disgust, anger, fear,
bitterness and sadness at lost moments of childhood. So it goes.
For those of you who may be survivors, here is the "Bad News". It
may take a lot of time to get over it. We aren't talking one or two
visits to a therapist's office. A good therapist seems to me to be
indispensible: I needed someone to be with me and assure the child in
me that it would survive. The Good News: Except for the time lost to
the sadness of childhood, and the time lost as an adult to the struggle
to relive the feelings successfully, a complete cure seems entirely
possible to me. I'm about to end my regular therapy, and the days dawn
brightly with anticipation of a full life now, much as they seemed to
me when I would crawl in the sunbeams in the dining room as a two or
three year old. Don't hesitate! I wish I had done it when I was much
younger... but it is never too late, start now!
About therapists: There seems to me to be an perfect asymmetry about
Mental Health Doctors as opposed to Physical Health Doctors that I want
to share with you. When you go to a Physician, you present an
environment where the doctor does the work: he cuts out a tumor or
somesuch thing, and you feel better. When you go to see a Mental
Health Doctor (social worker, clinical psychologist), the Doctor
creates the environment (of safety, confidentiality, attention) and YOU
DO THE WORK... and you feel better, bit by bit. The rate you progress
is directly correlated to the amount of effort you expend (the amount
of feeling felt, the amount of insight gained). You do the work, you
get the reward, the doctor gets paid for paying attention to your pain
(and believe me, it is not easy work if they are truly there for you).
And now, some closing observations and personal conclusions for those
who do not have a tale to tell.
* My experience leads me to believe that there are untold numbers of
people (mostly men I suspect, since our society rewards men who "do"
rather than "feel", whereas it is comparatively "OK" for women to "feel"
in certain circumscribed circumstances) passing through their lives
completely unaware of the depth of their unhappiness, the daily cost
of not feeling feelings. I come to this conclusion on the basis of
my own life.
* The failure to nurture children is the source of almost all of
society's woes. I've read surveys reporting as much as 80% of
prostitutes can recall being abused sexually as children. The survey
did not report what I suspect: the remaining 20% had it so bad they've
repressed it completely as I did. (When the experiences are so violent
and so awfull that the repression mechanism fails to protect the child,
one possible outcome that is only recently becoming apparent is that
such children may develop multiple personalities).
Society's Woes:
Adolph Hitler was raised in a family where both parents were alcoholic,
(which to me means they didn't know how to deal with painful feelings
and incompetently used alcohol to dull them) and his father
beat his mother badly. I mean to invite no good light on this man, he
was responsible for his awful behaviour, but I have no difficulty
understanding an anger as deep as it seems he may have had. Joseph
Stalin's wife committed suicide and murder was a mainstay of his
political career: care to wager on the happiness of his childhood? If
no one attends a child in need of help with his feelings, any wonder
that when that child gains power (and indeed may actively seek it) this
child transformed into an adult will act according to the unfelt
child's feelings? I have no difficulty believing this. If, as an
adult you have feelings so strong and hard to deal with, alcohol will
dull the feeling of them... won't it? Care to guess what sort of
behaviour might ensue when judgment is impaired and balance lost?
* Many of the accounts in this topic refer to a single abuser,
oftentimes within the family. If there is one, my experience is that
it is NOT the result of "one bad apple", the likelihood is that the entire
family (and I mean multi-generational family) is dysfunctional: people
in this family have no good means of dealing with feelings. Such
people go on to pass such emotional traits to their children who grow
up and seek out other people whose emotional background is the same:
hence the perpetuation of this Emotional Virus. Witness my family:
I've cracked the petri dish full of secrecy, the medium in which this
Emotional Virus thrived in our family: here is what I found. Sexual
and physical abuse was rampant through three generations back (at
least) on my father's side I suspect, and most probably on my mother's
side. My father's brother's family was not spared. My mother's
brother's family is disturbed. Can you see a pattern on my father's side?
* My Father abused me.
* My Father reports growing up in dread fear of being abused sexually
(although he has not yet been able to recall specific
instances). He doesn't drink.. and still feels his father's
wrath in his mind toward anyone who drank. (My father has done some
therapy but is still much in the dark from my perspective).
* My Father's father tried to abuse me. This grandfather was an
ardent teetotaler, reviling anyone who drank.
* My Father's Father's Father was a ship's captain in the late
1800's. The culture of being an officer on a seagoing vessel
of that era is now only a dim memory. The reality was that the
captains' power was absolute, abuse was the standard of the day,
and drinking was a regular daily activity aboard ship.
It is largely circumstantial evidence once we get as far back as my
great grandfather, but patterns of incompetent (and terribly damaging)
emotional behavior leap out at me now as I review our family.
Why does an adult abuse? Because the adult FEELS LIKE A CHILD
oftentimes, oftentimes just the way he or she felt when being abused.
Sometimes it is an attempt to relive the abusive episodes but to try to
make it "come out differently", sweetly. Sometimes it is just to turn
the tables and live the other side of the experience: to have power in
an intimate encounter. Sometimes an abused adult cannot really open up
to a fully emotionally mature adult, and instead seeks out people whose
emotionally development is on a par with their own: a child, a readily
available child, who wants (needs) to please. I believe all these
scenarios occurred for my father with me.
Low self-esteem in an adult is a trait of an abuser, a trait engendered
by having one's integrity violated as a child. An inability or impaired
ability to join in social intercourse (ie "being a loner") is another trait.
Substance abuse (including food abuse) as a societal problem will never
disappear unless the underlying problems of incompetency in dealing
with feelings is dealt with, I believe. Substance abuse is viewed by
me as nothing more than an incompetent move by someone attempting to
deal with unfelt feelings. It stands to reason why alcohol then is
such a devastating substance to abuse: it clouds the very facility a
human being needs in order to address emotional problems: his or her
intellect.
The sunlight of discussion disrupts this Emotional Virus, just as
ultraviolet light disrupts a physical virus. We as humanity must talk,
and as we talk, we must feel.
This is my talk. I feel damn good. How do you feel?
|
| The following entry is from a member of our community who wishes
to be anonymous at this time.
If you wish to write to the author I will be glad to forward mail
to him.
Bonnie J
=wn= comod
__________________________________________________________________
Recently, nearly 25 years after my father died, I spoke to my mother
about the beatings I received as a child. It's taken all those years
for me to finally come to terms with myself. Through most of my life
I have felt myself to be guilty, wrong and unworthy. Now I realize that
I was not at fault.
When I asked my mother how she could allow my father to beat me, she
denied ever knowing anything about it. This is what has prompted this
note. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, please watch over your "sissy" boys.
Unhappily, my father's attitude and behavior are not unusual in our
society. This quote from a man who was twice voted "the hero of young
America" illustrates how acceptable this violence is.
"If I had a son and he was watching some guy making music on television,
and he came downstairs with makeup on and his mother's shoes and said I
want to be like so-and-so, I'd beat the shit out of him..."
Eddie Murphy in a 1985 interview with
"Cosmopolitan" magazine
Further witness to these attitudes is the incident in Texas a few weeks
ago where a young boy was given a bottle of hard liquor and told to
drink it "like a man" and then died from alcohol poisoning. Or this more
graphic account from Bob Green's syndicated column dated 1/26/90.
Chicago Criminal Court Judge Michael Getty has delayed until Feb. 5
the sentencing of Johnny Campbell 40, and Alicia Abraham, 28, for the
August 1987 murder of Abraham's son, Lattie McGee, 4. The delay is so
that Campbell can be examined by psychiatrists to see if he is "mentally
fit for sentencing."
...
You may already know the essence of what Campbell and Abraham did to that
little boy. Campbell -- who accused the 4-year old of being "effeminate"
-- tortured him for months. He beat Lattie with fists and sticks, he
burned him with cigarettes and an iron, he repeatedly stuck him with
sewing needles. he dunked in scalding water, and he routinely lefts him
hanging upside down in a darkened closet overnight. On the night before
Lattie died, Campbell stuffed a rag in the boy's mouth, taped potato
peelings over his eyes, and hung him in the closet (testimony showed
that on at least one occasion Alicia Abraham assisted in binding her son's
hands before he was hung in the closet). The next morning, when Lattie
was taken down from the closet, he begged Campbell for water. Campbell
stuck him; Lattie collapsed and died.
I've learned to endure the gibes ("abomination" "digusting" "immoral"
"perverted") but there's not much I can do to stem the abuse done to the
children. Not much but to plead to you, please have compassion on these
little ones who can't defend themselves and protect them from those who
would do them harm.
|