Toxic Parents (18 page)

REALITY
:
The typical incest aggressor can be anybody. There is no common denominator or profile. They are often hardworking, respectable, churchgoing, seemingly average men and women. I’ve
seen aggressors who were police officers, schoolteachers, captains of industry, society matrons, bricklayers, doctors, alcoholics, and clergymen. The traits they possess in common are psychological rather than social, cultural, racial, or economic.

MYTH
:
Incest is a reaction to sexual deprivation.

REALITY
:
Most aggressors have active sex lives within marriage, and often through extramarital affairs as well. They turn to children either for feelings of power and control or for the unconditional, nonthreatening love that only children can provide. Although these needs and drives become sexualized, sexual deprivation is rarely the trigger.

MYTH
:
Children—especially teenage girls—are seductive and at least partially responsible for being molested.

REALITY
:
Most children try out their sexual feelings and impulses in innocent and exploratory ways with people to whom they are bonded. Little girls flirt with their fathers and little boys with their mothers. Some teenagers are openly provocative. However, it is always 100 percent the adult’s responsibility to exercise appropriate control in these situations and not to act out their own impulses.

MYTH
:
Most incest stories are not true. They are actually fantasies derived from the child’s own sexual yearnings.

REALITY
:
This myth was created by Sigmund Freud and has permeated psychiatric teaching and practice since the beginning of the century. In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud was getting so many reports of incest from the daughters of respected, middle-class Viennese families that he groundlessly decided they couldn’t all be true. To explain their frequency, he concluded that the events occurred primarily in his patients’ imaginations. The legacy of Freud’s error is that thousands, perhaps millions, of incest victims have been, and in some cases continue to be, denied the validation and support they need, even when they are able to muster the courage to seek professional help.

MYTH
:
Children are molested more often by strangers than by someone they know.

REALITY
:
The majority of sexual crimes committed against children are perpetrated by trusted members of the family.

S
UCH A
N
ICE
F
AMILY

As with physical abusers, most incest families look normal to the rest of the world. The parents may even be community or religious leaders, with reputations for high moral standards. It’s amazing how people can change behind closed doors.

Tracy, 38, is a slender, brown-haired, brown-eyed woman who owns a small bookshop in a suburb of Los Angeles. She came from one of these “normal families.”

We looked like everybody else. My father was an insurance salesman and my mother was an executive secretary. We went to church every Sunday, and we went on family vacations every summer. Real Normal Rockwell stuff . . . except, when I was about ten, my father started pushing his body up against mine. About a year later, I caught him watching me get dressed through a hole he had drilled in the wall of my bedroom. As I started developing, he would come up behind me and grab my breasts. Then, he’d offer me money to lie on the floor with my clothes off . . . so he could look at me. I felt really dirty, but I was afraid to say no. I didn’t want to embarrass him. Then one day he took my hand and put it on his penis. I was so scared.. . . When he started to fondle my genitals, I didn’t know what to do, so I just did what he wanted.

To the outside world, Tracy’s father was a typical middle-class family man, an image that added to Tracy’s confusion. Most incest families maintain this facade of normalcy for many years, sometimes forever.

Liz, an athletic-looking, blue-eyed blond videotape editor,
provides a particularly dramatic example of the split between outward appearance and reality:

Everything was so unreal. My stepfather was this popular minister with a real big congregation. The people who came to church on Sunday just loved him. I remember sitting in church and listening to him sermonize about mortal sin. I just wanted to scream out that this man is a hypocrite. I wanted to stand up and testify in front of the whole church that this wonderful man of God is screwing his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter!

Liz, like Tracy, came from a seemingly model family. Her neighbors would have been astounded to discover what their minister was doing. But there was nothing unusual about the fact that he held a position of moral leadership, authority, and trust. A prestigious career or a graduate degree does nothing to curb incestuous impulses.

How Could This Ever Happen?

Controversial theories abound about the family climate and the role that other family members play. In my experience, however, one factor always holds true: incest simply doesn’t happen in open, loving, communicative families.

Instead, incest occurs in families where there is a great deal of emotional isolation, secrecy, neediness, stress, and lack of respect. In many ways incest can be viewed as part of a total family breakdown. But it is the aggressor and the aggressor alone who commits the sexual violence. Tracy described what it was like in her house:

We never talked about how we felt. If something bothered me, I just pushed it down. I do remember my mom cuddling me when I was little. But I never saw any affection between my mother and father. We did things together as a family, but there was no real closeness. I think that was what my father was looking for. Sometimes he would ask me if he could kiss me and I would say I didn’t want to. Then he’d beg me and say he wouldn’t hurt me, he just wanted to be close to me.

It had not occurred to Tracy that if her father was lonely and frustrated, he had alternatives to molesting his daughter. Like many aggressors, Tracy’s father looked within the family, to his daughter, in an attempt to make up for whatever deprivation he experienced. This distorted use of a child to take care of an adult’s emotional needs can easily become sexualized if that adult cannot control his impulses.

T
HE
M
ANY
F
ACES OF
C
OERCION

There is a tremendous amount of psychological coercion inherent in the parent-child relationship. Tracy’s father didn’t need to force his daughter into a sexual relationship.

I would’ve done anything to make him happy. I was always terrified when he was doing that stuff to me, but at least he never got violent with me.

Victims like Tracy, who have not been physically coerced, often underestimate the damage they’ve suffered because they don’t realize that emotional violence is every bit as destructive as physical violence. Children are by nature loving and trusting, easy marks for a needy, irresponsible adult. A child’s emotional vulnerability is usually the only leverage some incest aggressors need.

Other aggressors reinforce their psychological advantage with threats of bodily harm, public humiliation, or abandonment. One of my clients was 7 when her father told her he would put her up for adoption if she didn’t give in to his sexual demands. To a little girl, the threat that she would never see her family or friends again was terrifying enough to persuade her to do anything.

Incest aggressors will also use threats to guarantee their victims’ silence. Among the most common:

• If you tell, I’ll kill you.
  

• If you tell, I’ll beat you up.
  

• If you tell, Mommy will get sick.
  

• If you tell, people will think you’re crazy.
  

• If you tell, nobody’s going to believe you.
  

• If you tell, Mommy will get mad at both of us.
  

• If you tell, I’ll hate you for as long as you live.
  

• If you tell, they’ll send me to jail and there won’t be anyone to support the family.
  

These sorts of threats constitute emotional blackmail, preying on the naïve victim’s fears and vulnerabilities.

In addition to psychological coercions, many aggressors resort to
physical
violence to force their children to submit to incest. Incest victims are rarely favored children, even apart from the sexual abuse. A few may receive money or gifts or special treatment as part of the coercion, but the majority are abused emotionally and often physically.

Liz remembers what happened when she tried to resist her minister stepfather:

When I was almost out of junior high, I got real brave and told him that I’d decided he had to stop coming into my room at night. He got furious and started choking me. And then he started screaming that God didn’t want me to make my own decisions. The Lord wanted him to decide for me. Like God really wanted him to have sex with me or something. By the time he got through choking me I could hardly breathe. I was so scared that I let him do it to me right then and there.

Why Children Don’t Tell

Ninety percent of all incest victims never tell anyone what has happened, or what is happening, to them. They remain silent not only because they are afraid of getting hurt themselves, but to a great extent because they are afraid of breaking up the family by getting a parent into trouble. Incest may be frightening, but the thought of being responsible for the destruction of the family is even worse. Family loyalty is an incredibly powerful force in most children’s lives, no matter how corrupt that family may be.

Connie, 36, a dynamic redhead who is a loan officer for a large bank, was the classic loyal child. Her fear of hurting her father and losing his love was more powerful than any desire to get help for herself:

Looking back, I realize that he had me right where he wanted me. He told me that it would be the end of the family if I said anything to anybody about what we were doing, that my mother would send him away and I wouldn’t have a daddy anymore, that they’d send me away to a foster home, and that everyone in the family would hate me.

In those rare instances where incest is discovered, the family unit very often
is
shattered. Whether by divorce, other legal proceedings, removal of the child from the home, or the intense stress of public disgrace, many families cannot survive the exposure of incest. Even though the breakup of the family may well be in the child’s best interests, the child invariably feels responsible for that breakup. This adds greatly to his or her already overwhelming emotional burden.

T
HE
C
REDIBILITY
G
AP

Sexually abused children realize early that their credibility is nothing compared to their aggressors’. It doesn’t matter if the parent is
alcoholic, chronically unemployed, or prone to violence; in our society, an adult is almost always more believable than a child. If the parent has attained a certain measure of success in life, the credibility gap becomes a chasm.

Dan, 45, an aerospace engineer, was sexually abused by his father from the time he was 5 until he went away to college:

Even when I was little, I knew I could never tell anybody about what my father was doing to me. My mother was totally dominated by him, and I knew she’d never believe me in a million years. He was a big-deal businessman, he knew everybody worth knowing. Can you imagine me trying to get people to believe that this big honcho was making his six-year-old son give him blow jobs almost every night in the bathroom. Who’d believe me? They’d all think I was trying to get my father into trouble or something. I just couldn’t win.

Dan was caught in a terrible trap. Not only was he being molested, but it was by a parent of the same sex. This compounded both his shame and his conviction that no one would believe him.

Father-son incest is far more common than most people realize. Such fathers usually appear to be heterosexual, but they are probably driven by strong homosexual impulses. Rather than admit their true feelings, they attempt to repress their homosexuality by marrying and becoming parents. With no outlet for their true sexual preference, their repressed impulses continue to grow until, eventually, they outweigh their defenses.

Dan’s father’s assaults began forty years ago, when incest (as well as homosexuality) was shrouded in misconceptions and myths. Like most other incest victims, Dan sensed the hopelessness of trying to seek help because it seemed preposterous that a man of his father’s social status could commit such a crime. Parents, no matter how toxic, have a monopoly on power and credibility.

“I F
EEL
S
O
D
IRTY
”

The shame of the incest victim is unique. Even very young victims know that incest must be kept secret. Whether or not they’re told to keep silent, they sense the forbiddenness and shame in the behavior of the aggressor. They know that they are being violated, even if they are too young to understand sexuality. They feel dirty.