Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ so my doctor gave me a prescription for phenobarbital. ... I was hooked on it for fifteen years, plus two martinis with lunch and dinner.” Natalie claims she is concerned that she might abuse alcohol and drugs as she did when she was in high school and college—as a way to escape the experience of feeling like a perpetual victim. Natalie used these narcotizing substances to elevate her moods of depression and anxiety, “especially in relation to sexual encounters with the opposite sex.” Haddock vacillated between alcohol binges and eating binges for most of her adult life. Melinda begrudgingly attends Alcoholics Anonymous because she knows she “needs support in not drinking,” but claims that AA is extremely harsh and the people there lack compassion for her history as a survivor of incest. She has decided never to share the primary reasons she would need to “pick up” the alcohol because she claims she knows she would only be scolded as “a typical alcoholic trying to make excuses for her addiction.”⁸⁶ All of the above survivors are on psychiatrist-prescribed medication to enable them to cope with the overwhelming feelings of anxiety, a sense of guilt, and depression, the very feelings that set a compulsion to escape (through a mood-altering substance) into motion.

      Survivors who abuse substances usually begin doing so as a way to manage the emotional pain, but then the substance becomes a problem in and of itself. These addictive behaviors tend to increase feelings of powerlessness, shame, and self-loathing, which in turn intensify the need to use and abuse substances.⁸⁷ Furthermore, abusing alcohol and drugs decreases one’s ability to make and implement informed decisions and perpetuates a self-sabotaging cycle. In a climate of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, a survivor of incest who is unconscious of these patterns is, in particular, at risk for infection.⁸⁸

       Self-Injury

      Abused children discover at some point that the feeling of perceived (and sometimes real, as in Janine’s, Haddock’s, and Melinda’s case studies) threats of death and abandonment cannot be abated with ordinary means of self-soothing. They learn at some point that these overwhelming feelings of fear and despair may be most effectively terminated by a major jolt to the body. Some survivors experience this result through the deliberate infliction of injury. These repetitive gestures and forms of attacks on the body seem to develop most commonly in those victims whose abuse began early in childhood.⁸⁹ Observe the cases of Janine, Natalie, Melinda, and Haddock, all of whom were abused by age four.

       “Have you ever abused yourself as a result of being abused? “

      Natalie answers this way:

      I would scratch holes in my skin until I was just bleeding and had horrible scars that became infected. If I got a bee sting or a mosquito bite or anything that was itchy or that was a bump or that wasn’t smooth, I would scratch it down to make it smooth you know. Sometimes I would just literally dig holes in my skin [she shows me her right upper arm] and I have horrible scars on my legs and arms from that.

      Natalie injured herself when she was feeling afraid or anxious. She said, “Inside I’d get panicky and feel like I was going to be a danger to somebody else; instead I would hurt myself.”

      Melinda said she is most abusive to herself when she does not reach out for help when she needs it: “I tend to isolate.” She did recall a time when she would dissociate from memories through cutting herself.

      There were times when I didn’t know I was doing this, but I would cut my hand and I wasn’t aware of it, it wasn’t totally conscious. I would just cut it, my hand, with a knife. Not really severely at all, but just [she shows me by angling her right finger across her left open hand] and then all of a sudden I would—you know, I would—I would wake up or I would notice that my hand had this cut. And you know, for a while I didn’t think anything of it. But then it was always like in the same place.

      The goal of self-mutilation is usually the act itself (to injure) and not to cause death. A survivor may engage in it to demonstrate control and ownership over her body, to enact the abuse, to prevent further abuse, to feel something, or to feel anything other than the intolerable emotional pain. Haddock indicates a sense of not feeling ownership of her body and face and seems to abuse herself to break her denial.

      I’m really surprised that I haven’t tried to mutilate my face a lot, because, you know, it’s just—I look at it and it’s not even mine. I have burned myself but the last time I did it on purpose was on Halloween, the anniversary of my first abuse memory. One of my alters wanted me to burn myself so that I wouldn’t feel anything. They used to do this to me without creating any real scars but finally this last time the blister popped and I can finally break the denial when I look at that scar and say, “Yes, it really happened.” You know, the blisters that didn’t pop you can hardly see. The one that did you can see [she shows me]. Every now and then I just kind of look at it, you know?

      “Could harm done to women make them more willing to harm themselves?” A Radiance magazine finding showed that 50 percent of anorexics in one clinic had been sexually abused. Plastic surgeon Elizabeth Morgan explored the relationship between incest and the desire for plastic surgery after many of her patients admitted they had been victims of child sexual abuse: “I came to understand that many of them wanted to erase the memory of the children they looked like when they were abused.”⁹⁰

      There are many reasons a woman who has been abused might injure herself. Janine used self-injury to get her mother’s attention. Like Haddock she wanted to break out of the denial.

      One time I sprained my wrist doing gymnastics and when I reported the injury to my mom, she said, “This is the fourth time this month that we’ve had to run to the doctor for some minor sprain or another. If we go to the doctor’s this time and he doesn’t find anything wrong I’m going to be furious with you!” While I waited in the car for my mom to take me to the doctor’s, I lifted my sprained [gestures with arm] wrist and swung it down hard against the dashboard with all my might. The doctor claimed it was just a hairline fracture but I remember feeling relief knowing that there was visible evidence to prove to my mom that I was in fact injured.

      Survivors who self-mutilate consistently describe a profound dissociative state preceding the act. Depersonalization, derealization, and anesthesia are accompanied by a feeling of unbearable agitation and a compulsion to attack the body. The initial injuries often produce no pain at all. The mutilation continues until it produces a powerful feeling of calm and relief; physical pain is much preferable to the emotional pain that it replaces.⁹¹ Many do it to prove that they in fact have been hurt. As Haddock says, “I look at that scar and say, ‘Yes, it really happened.’” In all four cases cited above, the survivor needed to show me (the interviewer) the reality of her emotionally injured self by showing me where she had physically undergone injury.

      Self-injury is also frequently mistaken for a suicidal gesture. Though many (38 percent) survivors of childhood abuse do indeed attempt suicide,⁹² there is a clear distinction between repetitive self-injury and suicide attempts. One theory purports that “self injury is intended not to kill but rather to relieve unbearable emotional pain, and many survivors regard it, paradoxically, as a form of self-preservation.”⁹³ Self-injury is perhaps the most dramatic of the auto-destructive soothing mechanisms, but it is only one among many.

      Female survivors, socially engendered to be docile, are far more likely to be victimized or to harm themselves than to victimize other people. There are more female perpetrators, however, than are reported.⁹⁴ Yet it is surprising that survivors do not become perpetrators of abuse more often. Perhaps because of their cultural devaluation and deep feelings of self-loathing, due to internalizing the perpetrator’s perspective, female survivors, unlike males, seem most likely to direct their aggression at themselves. While СКАЧАТЬ