Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ so they could get to know one another, and occasionally we went for walks or into town to shop and to go to the cinema.

      When I worked in Sydney as an educational psychologist, the only office I had was my car. I worked in schools and often visited a child’s family at home. This I found invaluable, because it allowed me to discover aspects of the child’s life which the family either kept secret or simply did not think to mention to me. Accordingly, though I had met Karen’s parents when they came to visit her, I wanted to see the family home.

      Karen’s parents made me welcome. Her mother was quiet and undemonstrative, not given to hugging or kissing her daughter. Her father was much more lively and demonstrative. I felt that the parents had secrets, but it was not until one particular visit, when I was getting into the father’s van while he stood holding the door, that I had a clue as to what these secrets might be. I glanced up and saw him looking at me. He did not look away. He wanted me to see him looking at me with a searing sexual gaze that was both a threat and an invitation. Now I knew that the family secrets were, in part at least, sexual.

      My psychiatrist colleagues did not think that my concerns about the family were in any way significant. Months passed. Karen started at a school close to the unit. She studied successfully and fitted into the school routine. Her physiological tests showed nothing of significance and so, eventually, she went home.

      Karen and I kept in touch by cards and letters. Thirty years went by. Every Christmas she sent me a card and a letter with a summary of her year’s events. She left school, got a job, met and married a fine man. She continued working and had children who did well academically. We met socially sometimes when I was in her part of the UK, but it was not until after her father died that she phoned me and asked whether she could talk to me. Over the years she had suffered periods of depression, but she and her husband had learned to recognize the danger signs and deal with it effectively. Now, however, what was happening was different.

      Karen remembered remarkably little of her childhood, and she did not speculate about the significance of what she did remember. She had not linked one memory of her father forcing her to eat baked beans with the fact that her choice of diet was extremely limited and not based on any theory of nutrition. There was a wide range of ordinary foods she could not bring herself to eat, just as she could not possibly eat baked beans.

      Karen had a similar problem with sex. She loved her husband and she wanted to respond fully to him, but, while she could approach him with passion, at the critical moment she would pull back, frightened and not knowing why she was afraid. It seemed that from early childhood she had been operating under four internalized injunctions: Don’t remember, don’t ask questions, be afraid, know that you can never be good enough.

      Karen had remained close to her parents and, when her father became seriously ill, she shared her mother’s anxiety. However, very shortly after her father died her mother spoke of him being a wonderful man who had devoted himself to his family. Karen suddenly felt very angry. This was not like her. She did not get angry with people. Whenever something went wrong she always blamed herself. She should have tried harder, been a better person. However, now not only was she angry, she was not blaming herself for getting angry.

      Karen had always found it difficult to talk about herself, so when she came to see me after her father’s death she spoke haltingly, sidling up to something rather than confronting it head on. Thus we sidled up to the question of what her father had or had not done when she was a child and a teenager. I knew that this could not be a conversation between client and therapist because I was part of Karen’s past, just as her father had been. Our conversation had to be like that of two family members who were trying to remember and understand the past. So I told Karen what I remembered of my visit to her family, and how her father had looked at me. She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘That’s what he did to all my girlfriends. I didn’t like to invite them home.’

      I did not feel it was necessary for Karen to dig in her memory for particular events and lay them out like the contents of a trunk that had stood unopened for many years. If she had had no one to talk to she and I might have done that, but she and her husband did talk to one another. They knew each other very well.

      How very different Karen’s life would have been had the first doctor who saw her said to himself, ‘I wonder what’s going on in this child’s home that makes her so frightened she can hardly move?’ Nowadays most doctors would ask themselves this question, and most child psychiatrists would know that to understand why a child behaves as he does he must be looked at in the context of the family. Many, though not all, child psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know the truth of the advice I was given back in 1961. It was: ‘The presenting problem is never the real problem.’ Family therapists are no doubt well aware that the real problem has something to do with the family member who refuses to attend discussions with the therapist.

      Karen’s main interest seemed to be to fill in the gaps in her family story. Until she knew the full story she would feel incomplete and thus inadequate. I gave her some of my papers from all those years ago, and she spoke to several family members whom she felt could bear the burden of uncovering family secrets. She would not speak about these matters to her mother because she did not feel that her mother, now old, could bear to be forced to remember the past.

      Karen’s principal problem, as I saw it, was that her propensity to blame herself for every disaster turned the natural sadness she felt into depression. Otherwise she managed her life very well. Had she been having greater and more diverse difficulties I would have recommended that she read Carolyn Ainscough and Kay Toon’s book Breaking Free: Help for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse?³⁸ and perhaps join a self-help group of adult survivors. This kind of group has enabled many men and women to confront the demons from their past and defeat them. Alas, such groups are sparse, and few are a regular part of mental healthcare.

      For all the people who have suffered sexual abuse in childhood to receive appropriate help, governments would have to recognize and deal with the incidence of abuse not just in families but in certain institutions. A great deal of fuss is made about strangers who prey upon children. When the News of the World printed the photographs of a number of convicted paedophiles now living in the community, there were noisy demonstrations and the homes of suspected paedophiles were attacked. What was ignored in all this was that the majority of children who suffer abuse do so at the hands of a parent or someone they know and trust. It is far worse to be abused by someone you know and trust than by a stranger. Recovery from abuse by a stranger can be relatively straightforward, though not easy, by seeing it as a chance event for which you are not responsible and do not deserve, and the offender as being completely in the wrong and meriting punishment. However, when the offender is someone in whom you have placed your trust, someone whom you love and you hope loves you, recovery is not simple. We all long for a parent who loves us and looks after us, and when our parent falls far short of the mark the longing we have for the parent they might have been can tie us to the parent who harms us. Our longing for the perfect parent can prevent us from seeing the parent who harms us as a mere human-sized human being. Instead we see this parent as looming over us, wielding massive parental power which we dare not ignore or disobey.

      Powerful though a parent may seem to be, how much more powerful is a man who has access to God’s power. The Catholic Church demands from its clergy and its flock obedience and silence. Any institution which operates on principles of obedience and silence creates the conditions for the abuse of power. Catholic children were, and sometimes still are, fiercely and brutally beaten. When I was a child in Australia the Christian Brothers’ schools for boys were notorious for the priests’ brutality against the pupils. Martin McGuinness, now Minister for Education in Northern Ireland, and Conor McPherson, the brilliant young Irish playwright, have spoken of the beatings they received at Catholic schools. In recent years some Catholics have broken the order of silence and have spoken, not just of physical abuse, but СКАЧАТЬ