Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe

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СКАЧАТЬ in telling anyone about being abused; she was sure she’d be blamed: “I thought that the physical punishment would be much worse than carrying around all that shame.”

      In a patriarchal culture, more often than not, a heterosexual woman’s first loyalty is to her male partner, on whom she is financially and emotionally dependent, regardless of his behavior. She sees no other choice. One theory is that maternal collusion in incest, when it occurs, is a measure of maternal powerlessness.⁴⁵

      Melinda believed her mother knew about the sexual abuse of her by her father and brother and his friends, though she hesitates to blame her mother: “She never said anything to me directly about it. And I—and I don’t remember trying to tell her about the rapes. I—I don’t remember. Though it seemed to me that I was screaming it in my body and in my mind, but I don’t remember words.”

      Stephanie spoke of frequently being dropped off with her maternal grandparents for weekend visits. It was during her stay there that she and her siblings were molested by their grandfather. She remembers when her parents would come back to pick them up on Sunday nights: “When they arrived, I wouldn’t look at them, and I wouldn’t go to them. I was in a shell for a long time. But they don’t make any connection with sexual abuse about that, they think it’s a kind of cute little story.” Stephanie recalls that when she had to stay with her grandparents she felt “horrified.” In her words, “I mean I was in absolute terror, just absolute, heart-stopping terror.” Stephanie later told me she felt her perpetrating grandfather had the power to kill her: “I think I might have been smothered a little bit by him so that I wouldn’t talk or scream or whatever.” She told me she felt he had the power to taint, even ruin her: “He was decimating me as well.” It is clear to me that Stephanie has taken in her offender’s shame and gives religious meaning to such shame by calling it an “evil force.” In her words, “I felt that this man planted this evil root and that this evil root took hold inside of me because of what was happening. As I child I thought he was a monster.”

      In situations of terror, people spontaneously seek their first source of comfort and protection. “Wounded soldiers and raped women cry for their mothers or for God.”⁴⁶ When this cry is not answered, the sense of basic trust is shattered. One theory on trauma and abandonment holds that “traumatized people feel utterly abandoned, utterly alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life. Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community and religion.”⁴⁷

      Most of the survivors interviewed knew without question and learned through devastatingly painful experiences that nobody would give serious credence to their fears. A mother may have been the most incredulous and punishing after being told, not because she was indifferent to the child but because she has been culturally constructed (and thus psychologically compelled) to protect her trust in the basic decency of her male partner and the fundamental security of adult society. Psychiatrist Roland Summit claims, “Since an adult assumes that other decent adults don’t commit incest, and since it is generally believed that children wishfully imagine incestuous experiences or fabricate groundless accusations of sexual assault, it is predictable that most women will reject any hint of incest given by their children.”⁴⁸ Only an unusually secure and perceptive woman can reward her child for sharing with her the bad news of an incestuous relationship. How many women have networks of support available to help them find safety and shelter for their family and resist further abuse?

       Identity Confusion/Divided Selves

      Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented.”

      —Shakespeare, Richard II

      Because incest is a form of chronic traumatic stress, it can lead to a host of initial and long-term aftereffects. Especially when a child-victim has nowhere to turn for validation of her reality, she may begin to doubt her understanding of that reality. Because she is experiencing one thing (sexual abuse) but is told that she is actually experiencing something else (love, care, protection, or nothing at all), she feels divided in her perception and in her self-construction. This mistrust of her perception often follows her into adulthood. She continues to doubt her perception of the world. Her confusion is felt microcosmically both in her body consciousness and her sense of who she is in relation to others.

      Most survivors experience a sense of identity confusion or a divided self-construction. One part of the self performs as a “normal” obedient child and the other part or parts carry the child’s emotional world, which is the result of her experience of being terrorized.

       “How did you cope with these experiences during and after the abuse?”

      Haddock gives the following account:

      [After my uncle raped me when I was five] . . . the rest of my memory is I’m up to the right looking down on this little kid. At other times when I was being tortured or molested, I would mentally hide behind things and watch or underneath things and peek out periodically.

      And Melinda:

      I can remember learning how to float up to the ceiling and I could even float out the window, I was very talented. I learned to do that around age four. I remember searching inside myself since I had nowhere else to search, for how to do that. I remember doing that. I split . . . split off from myself. Too, I created parts of myself to handle these things. It’s a survival mechanism, and it has nothing to do with your creativity and intelligence. It has to do with a survival instinct.

      Both Haddock and Melinda have been diagnosed as having dissociative disorders. Dissociative disorders, including multiple personality disorder, are diagnoses particularly applicable to severely abused incest survivors.⁴⁹ The DSM-III-R lists the essential feature of dissociative disorders as a disturbance or alteration in the normal integrative functions of identity, memory, or consciousness. The aim of dissociation is not to experience, not to remember.

      Milder forms of dissociation include separating oneself from real and present atrocities through dreams and fantasies. Cherise’s story is a good example of a milder form of dissociation:

      I dreamed that there was this alien family that would come and tell me that I really didn’t belong to this man and they were gonna take me away. I couldn’t wait to go to bed at night, it was my comfort, this family. This went on for years. And it wasn’t until I was twelve, I—I remember mentioning it to a teacher, we were discussing dreams and how every night we dream and we don’t remember. And I said, “I do.” She said, “Oh, well tell us one of your dreams.” And I told her my dream and she just looked at me. She said, “My God!” And I said, “I’ve had the same dream since I was eight years old.” And the look—it was the first time I realized that this was not a normal dream. And I never shared it with anybody else.

      Janine remembers the time she told her mother she was “splitting in half, I mean it . . . right down the middle.” Janine recalls her mother’s response, “Oh honey, all young kids feel that way during adolescence.” It is as if Janine’s mother knew firsthand what her daughter was talking about and yet could not validate her daughter’s experience, possibly to avoid being threatened by her own memories of abuse. Janine posits her divided self at that time, “I think at that point I was truly living a double existence. On the outside I was this friendly cheerleader-type who was always smiling and affirming everybody, and on the inside I vacillated between crying for help and wanting to die.”

      One label for this dynamic is called vertical splitting.⁵⁰ It is thought to be a common СКАЧАТЬ