Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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СКАЧАТЬ described her night terrors and claimed at times she could “hear things.” At other times she told me she could see things: “At that point it felt so real I thought it was the real thing and it was always a man coming into my bedroom. I would feel an intense fear.” Melinda lived with that fear from age four until age forty, at which point she found a medical doctor (and practicing psychologist) who in her words, “understood and was able to help me.” She was able to reexperience memories of her abuse in the presence of an empathic listener. Melinda says, “Since I started seeing her [four years prior to the interview] I rarely have this flipping and spinning stuff.”

      Stephanie had dreams of her grandfather trying to kill her. She recalled:

      He was an engineer so he had a lot of electrical equipment and blippy things and stuff like that in his little workroom where we slept. To this day I wake up in a cold sweat remembering the terror. I still get panic attacks when I feel those evil eyes staring at me. I can remember the fear—the fear was especially horrible at night. I would imagine monsters coming. I could see—I actually hallucinated almost—monsters.

      To this day Stephanie cannot see scary movies, or read scary books because she “becomes disoriented.” She told me, “I lose my sense of who I am. It’s almost like being the same terrified little girl that I was with my grandfather and I have to leave and pull myself together. I have to find a place where I can’t even hear it going on, I can’t hear the music, anything occult just drives me totally back.”

      Janine told me of a period in her life when she would wake up in the middle of the night, “because I truly felt a dangerous presence in my room. I could hear my father’s voice say, ‘Shut up you bitch.’ “Such night sounds occurred right around the first year that Janine had started believing that she was an incest survivor. She said, “I felt I was being tyrannized by his spirit to keep quiet . . . and he wasn’t even dead. I rarely slept through the night that year.”

      According to Judith Herman, many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder fall into three main categories: hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction,⁷⁸ Hyperarousal reflects the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment; constriction reflects the numbing response of surrender.⁷⁹ “People with post-traumatic stress disorder . . . have an elevated baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger . . . they take longer to fall asleep, are more sensitive to noise, and awaken more frequently during the night than ordinary people. Thus traumatic events appear to recondition the human nervous system.”⁸⁰ PTSD, as noted previously, is a result of more than the sexually abusive events. Such traumatic symptoms are socially sustained as long as a survivor feels unsafe, is watched in a voyeuristic way, or feels vulnerable to further attack. Living in a patriarchal and violent culture where one in three women is raped at least once in her lifetime means a survivor must face a traumatic context daily, simply because she is female.⁸¹ Her fears are not without justification. She is not paranoid.

      Isolation/Suicidality

       “How did you feel carrying around this secret of being abused by a trusted family member?”

      For most of Natalie’s childhood she blocked the traumatic experience from her memory. However, she could not avoid the memory of molesting her own brother when she was ten and he was five. Such an experience confirmed Natalie’s (offender inflicted) sense of shame: “This felt like total proof that I was a horrible person that I could do something so awful. I felt like, I’m perverted in some way, that I’m stained, that I’m no good, that I’m horrible, that I’m a bad person, and that I’ve got this gunk inside of me, this like blackness, this rottenness.” Several times Natalie referred to a “rottenness inside of me that I am to blame for.” Clearly, she has internalized the perpetrator’s messages and protects him by identifying with his guilt through acting it out.

      Renita also articulates the internalized shame of the perpetrator. Such feelings of guilt and shame are taken in through the abuse itself.

      After my brother molested me I felt that something just happened to me that I can’t tell anyone about. And that changed my relationship with everybody, because now I could never be a part of someone, I am always going to be separate or I am not going to be in one [an intimate relationship]. I mean, no one would want me the way I am. I don’t know how to explain it. Like if today my life ended it would be no big deal.

      Both Renita and Melinda reveal the predominant dread or the life of grief⁸² that seems to follow a survivor throughout her lifetime. Melinda claims, “The most painful part of it was that there was nowhere to go and talk about it. And so I had to hold all this in myself.” Too often people cannot hear what is happening to a child because the event is too awful to believe or it threatens the family system—the idea that must be maintained is that parents are benevolent and all is right with the world. Melinda articulates how such naïveté wounded her in her family:

      This atrocity was happening to me in my own home, in my own back yard. And—and the severe pain of it—physical pain. I mean, I’m just talking about outrageous physical pain. There was no place [tearfully]—there was nowhere to go to talk. And so when you’re a child, you have to—you have to find a way. And I remember that as a child.

      Janine claims she did not know whom to tell or what to tell them; all she knew was that she “couldn’t take the falseness anymore.” She reported feeling suicidal for six years of her life. In her words, “Several times, after getting my driver’s license, I would run stop signs in the hope of being killed. I was afraid to take my own life, though I often wanted someone else to take away my pain by ending my life. Even in college, I often imagined myself walking in front of a truck. Ironically, my dad owned a trucking company.”

      Passive suicide or indirect self-destruction also reveals (in the extreme) generalized manifestations of trauma: helplessness, lethargy, lack of personal efficacy and depression.⁸³

      Most survivors who become extremely depressed tend to withdraw from potentially healthy relationships and avoid seeking social or medical assistance. The feeling of being malignantly marked, of being placed outside the covenant of normal social relationships, caused many of the women interviewed intense pain. The isolation they felt was compounded by their difficulty in forming trusting relationships. The legacy of their childhood was a feeling of having been profoundly betrayed by both parents. As a result, they normalized this experience and came to expect abuse and disappointment in all intimate relationships: to be invalidated in their felt experience, as they felt their mothers had invalidated and abandoned them, and to be exploited, as their fathers, uncles, brothers, grandfathers (and in rarer cases, aunts and mothers) used and exploited them. This nightmarish isolation and sequential rejection reinforce what becomes for the victim the most painful reality of incest: “It’s my fault. I brought it on myself. I’m so bad I invite trouble and make trouble for others. I’m not worth caring for. There’s no place for me in the world of reasonable, decent people. I’ll never be reasonable or decent. I’m crazy. I’m nothing but a whore.”⁸⁴

      A study done by Judith Herman in 1981 with forty female incest survivors found that 60 percent of the incest survivors complained of major depressive symptoms in adult life. Thirty-eight percent became so depressed at some point in their lives that they attempted suicide. Twenty percent had times when they became alcoholic or drug-dependent. To cope with their despair and hopelessness of ever attaining a rewarding relationship with anyone, they vacillated between protective isolation and self-destructive activities.⁸⁵

      Of the survivors interviewed for this study, four of the nine are regular attendees of Alcoholics Anonymous. Samantha was drug dependent on barbiturates for fifteen years, as she СКАЧАТЬ