Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
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Название: Faith Born of Seduction
Автор: Jennifer L Manlowe
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Религия: прочее
isbn: 9780814796399
isbn:
Sexual Abuse, Faith, and Eating Problems Matched
Below I will briefly describe the respondents and their abuse history, their present faith, their coping techniques with food, and the nature of their present involvement with their families-of-origin. This is to better aid readers in keeping core themes together. In the following chapters, I will go into greater detail regarding each of their narratives.
Cherise calls herself an evangelical Christian. She is a sufferer of compulsive overeating (with bouts of self-starvation in between) and alcoholism. She was physically and sexually abused by her father from age seven until age twelve. She is the only one in her family that has chosen not to kill herself.
Natalie calls herself a Christian who imagines God to be female. She is a sufferer of bulimia who was physically and sexually abused by her father from age two to age five. She has intermittent contact with her family of origin.
Margery considers herself to be a Christian. She is a chronic dieter who breaks her diet with a binge. She was sexually abused by her maternal grandfather throughout her childhood. She lives within a few miles of her family of origin.
Haddock grew up in a cult and now considers herself a Twelve-Stepper. Her faith is in a Higher Power. She suffers from anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive overeating. She also considers herself an alcoholic. She was sexually and physically abused by her father, uncle, aunt, and mother from infancy until early adolescence. She has chosen to cut off all contact from her nuclear and extended families.
Melinda is a former Christian and now considers herself a non-denominationally affiliated “spiritual person.” She is a sufferer of compulsive overeating. She has an early history of fasting. She was sexually and physically abused by her father and gang-raped by her older brother and his friends. She remembers the abuse occurring from age four until her early teens. She has attempted to confront her father with his abuse; because he denies the incidents, she has severed all contact with him and her brother.
Janine is a former Christian who now considers herself an agnostic. She has been diagnosed as anorexic with bulimic episodes. She was sadistically tortured and sexually abused by her father, and sexually molested by her step-uncle and a male babysitter. Her first memory of sexual abuse was at age four. She has yearly contact with her family of origin.
Stephanie considers herself a “practicing Christian.” She suffers from chronic dieting which she “breaks” by compulsive overeating. She was sexually abused by her maternal grandfather from age four until age eight. She has intermittent contact with her family of origin.
Samantha calls herself a Twelve-Stepper who believes in a Higher Power. She is a self-starver who rarely eats and when she does it’s something sweet. She considers herself “a sugar addict” in addition to being an alcoholic and former valium addict. She recalls being sexually abused by her nanny in early childhood and by her father in adolescence. She has yearly contact with her siblings and extended family.
Renita describes herself as a Twelve-Stepper who believes in God as her Higher Power. She is a sufferer of bulimia and anorexia. Her paternal grandfather, her father, and her two older brothers sexually abused her. She periodically lives with her family of origin, in between jobs.
2
A Horror beyond Tears: Reflections on a History of Abuse
It’s hard to explain, but a certain kind of horror is beyond tears. Tears would be like worrying about watermarks on the furniture when the house is burning down.1
Incest is generally thought of as a rare occurrence in society, yet, it is extraordinarily common. Within the patriarchal nuclear family, approximately 38 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys are sexually assaulted.2 Every incest survivor with whom I have spoken has reported incest to be a horrendous and disorienting experience whether the incest was committed by a father, a brother, an uncle, a grandfather, a babysitter, an aunt, or a mother. The trauma is immense whether it was done in a manner that was seductive, tender, or brutal, or whether it happened a few times in a short period of time or it occurred over many years.
Incest robs children of their childhoods, of their sexual selves, of the basic ingredients necessary for relationships—trust, bodily integrity, boundaries, security, and self-esteem. One perspective on incest is that it “may result in different responses—sensuous and sexual, fear and terror, powerlessness and loss of self, loss of large blocks of time; but regardless of its form and the child’s response, incest is a devastating experience and leaves a devastating mark on its victim.”3
As a way of coping with sexual abuse, children develop behavioral skills to help them survive their childhoods. “[These] survival skills may include dissociation, hypervigilance, isolation, and/or using sex as a negotiating tool.”4 These techniques are necessary to help the child-victim survive a pathological adult-child relationship and as such are logical responses to chaotic childhoods.
Historical Origins of Trauma
To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature.5 According to psychiatrist Judith Herman, “Three times over the past century, a particular form of psychological trauma has surfaced into public consciousness.”6 Taken together, they have deepened our knowledge of contemporary psychological trauma. The first to emerge was hysteria, the prototypical psychological “disorder” of women. Most of the patients who were referred to Freud by his colleagues were diagnosed as “untreatable liars.” The study of hysteria grew out of the republican, anticlerical political movement of late nineteenth-century France. The second type of trauma was combat neurosis. It began to be studied in England and the United States after the First World War and reached its peak after the Vietnam War. The last and most recent trauma to come into public awareness is domestic violence—sexual and physical abuse in the home. Its political context is the feminist movement in Western Europe and North America.7
Hysteria was called “the Great Neurosis” by the French neurologist and mentor to Sigmund Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot focused on the symptoms of hysteria that resembled neurological damage: motor paralyses, sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias.8 By 1880 he had demonstrated that these symptoms were psychological, since they could be artificially induced and relieved through the use of hypnosis.
Competition to discover the origins of hysteria was particularly intense between two other famous neurological physicians besides Charcot: Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. By the mid-1890s Janet in France and Freud, with his collaborator Joseph Breuer, in Vienna, had each arrived at strikingly similar formulations: hysteria was a condition caused by psychological trauma. Each found that “unbearable emotional reactions to traumatic events produced an altered state of consciousness, which in turn induced hysterical symptoms.”9 Janet named this alteration in consciousness dissociation.10 Breuer and Freud called it double consciousness.11 Perhaps a more accurate label would be divided self-construction.
By the early 1890s, Freud had СКАЧАТЬ