Toxic Parents (19 page)

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that “it’s all my fault” is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a “dirty, disgusting” person.

Liz was terrified of being found out.

I was only ten, but I felt like I was the worst slut there ever was. I really wanted to tell on my stepfather, but I was afraid everyone, including my mom, would hate me for it. I knew that everybody would think I was bad. I couldn’t stand the thought that I would be the one coming off as evil, even though that’s how I felt. So I just pushed it all down inside.

It’s hard for outsiders to understand why a 10-year-old whose stepfather is forcing her to have intercourse with him would feel guilty. The answer, of course, lies in the child’s unwillingness to see the trusted parent as bad. Somebody has to take the blame for these shameful, humiliating, frightening acts, and since it can’t be the parent, it must be the child.

The feelings of being dirty, bad, and responsible create tremendous psychological isolation for incest victims. They feel totally alone, both within the family and in the outside world. They think no one will believe their horrible secret, yet that secret so
overshadows their lives that it often prevents them from making friends. This isolation in turn can force them back to the aggressor, who is often their only source of attention, no matter how perverse.

If the victim experiences any pleasure from the incest, his or her shame is magnified. A few adults who were victims recall sexual arousal from the experience, regardless of the confusion or embarrassment they felt. It is even harder for these victims to later renounce their sense of responsibility. Tracy actually had orgasms. She explained:

I knew it was wrong, but it did feel good. The guy was a real bastard to do it to me, but I’m as guilty as him because I liked it.

I’d heard the same story before, but it still tore at my heart. I told Tracy, as I’d told others before her:

There’s nothing wrong with liking the stimulation. Your body is biologically programmed to like those feelings. But the fact that it felt good didn’t make what he was doing right and it didn’t make you wrong. You were still a victim. It was
his
responsibility, as an adult, to control himself, no matter what you felt.

There is one more guilt that is unique to many incest victims: taking father away from mother. Father-daughter victims often talk about having felt like “the other woman.” This, of course, made it even harder for them to seek help from the one person they might have had reason to expect it from—their mother. Instead, they felt they were betraying Mother, adding yet another layer of guilt to their inner world.

Insane Jealousy: “You Belong to Me”

Incest fuses the victim to the aggressor in a crazy and intense way. In father-daughter incest in particular, the father often becomes obsessed with his daughter and insanely jealous of her boyfriends. He may beat her or verbally abuse her to drive home the message that she belongs to only one man: Daddy.

This obsession dramatically distorts the normal developmental stages of childhood and adolescence. Instead of being able to become progressively more independent from parental control, the incest victim is increasingly bonded to the aggressor.

In Tracy’s case, she knew that her father’s jealousy was crazy, but she didn’t see how cruel and degrading it was because she confused it with love. It is common for incest victims to mistake obsession for love. Not only does this drastically alter their ability to understand that they are being victimized, but it can wreak havoc with their expectations of love later in life.

Most parents experience some anxiety when their children begin dating and start bonding to people outside the family. But the incestuous father experiences this normal stage of development as betrayal, rejection, disloyalty, and even abandonment. Tracy’s father’s reaction was typical—rage, accusations, and punishment:

He would wait up when I was out on a date, and when I got home, he’d give me the third degree. He would question me endlessly about who I was going out with, what was I doing with him, where was I letting him touch me, and did I let him put his tongue in my mouth. If he so much as caught me kissing a boy good night, he’d come out of the house screaming “tramp,” and scare the guy off.

When Tracy’s father called her vile and insulting names, he was doing what many incestuous fathers do: removing the badness, the
evil, and the blame from himself and projecting it onto her. But other aggressors bond their victims with tenderness, making it even harder for the child to resolve the conflicting emotions of guilt and love.

“Y
OU’RE
M
Y
W
HOLE
L
IFE
”

Doug, 46, a slight, tense man who worked as a machinist, came to me because of a wide range of sexual difficulties including recurrent impotence. He had been molested by his mother from the age of 7 to his late teens.

She would fondle my genitals until I had an orgasm, but I always thought that because there was no intercourse it was no big deal. She made me do the same to her. She told me I was her whole life and that this was her special way of showing her love to me. But now, every time I try to get close to a woman, I feel like I’m cheating on my mother.

The enormous secret Doug shared with his mother bound him tightly to her. Her sick behavior may have confused him, but her message was clear: she was the only woman in his life. This message was in many ways as damaging as the incest itself. As a result, when he attempted to separate and have adult relationships with other women, his feelings of disloyalty and guilt took a terrible toll on his emotional well-being and sexuality.

C
APPING THE
V
OLCANO

The only way many victims can survive their early incest traumas is to mount a psychological cover-up, pushing these memories so far beneath conscious awareness that they may not surface for many years, if ever.

Incest memories often come flooding back unexpectedly because
of some particular life event. I’ve had clients report memories being triggered by such things as the birth of a child, marriage, death of a family member, seeing something about incest in the media, or even reliving the trauma in a dream.

It is also common for these memories to surface if the victim is in therapy working on other issues, though many victims still won’t mention the incest without prodding from the therapist.

Even when these memories emerge, many victims panic and try to push them back by refusing to believe them.

One of the most dramatic, emotional experiences I’ve ever had as a therapist was with Julie, 46, a Ph.D. in biochemistry who was on the staff of a large research center in Los Angeles. Julie came to see me after hearing me discuss incest on one of my radio programs. She told me that she had been molested by her brother from the age of 8 until she was 15.

I’ve been having these terrible fantasies about dying or going crazy and ending up in an institution. Lately, I’ve been spending most of my time in bed with the covers pulled up over my head. I never leave the house except to go to work, and I’m barely functioning there. Everyone’s really worried about me. I know it’s all connected to my brother, but I just can’t talk about it. I feel like I’m drowning in this.

Julie was very fragile, apparently on the verge of a serious breakdown. She would laugh hysterically one minute and break into convulsive sobs the next. She had almost no control over the emotions that were overwhelming her.

My brother raped me the first time when I was eight. He was fourteen and really strong for his age. After that he forced himself on me at least three or four times a week. The pain was so unbearable that I sort of went away from myself. I realize now that he must have been pretty crazy, because he’d tie me up and torture me with knives, scissors, razor blades, screwdrivers, anything he could find. The only way I could survive was to pretend that this was happening to someone else.

I asked Julie where her parents were while these horrors were taking place.

I never told my parents anything about what Tommy was doing to me because he threatened to kill me if I did, and I believed him. My dad was a lawyer who put in sixteen-hour days including weekends, and my mom was a pill junkie. Neither one of them ever protected me. The few hours that Dad was home, he wanted peace and quiet, and he expected me to look after Mom. My whole childhood seems like one big blur of nothing but pain.

Julie had been badly damaged and was frightened of therapy, but she mustered the courage to enter one of my incest-victim groups. For the next several months, she worked hard on healing from her brother’s torturous sexual abuse. Her emotional health improved noticeably during those months, and she no longer felt as if she was walking a tightrope between hysteria and depression. Yet, despite her improvement, my instincts told me that something was missing. There was still something dark and hidden festering inside her.

One night she came to group looking distraught. She had had a sudden memory that frightened her:

A couple of nights ago, I had this real clear memory of my mother forcing me to perform oral sex on her. I really must be going crazy. I was probably imagining all those things about my brother, too. This could just never have happened with my mother. Sure, she was doped up all the time, but she just couldn’t have done that to me. I’m really losing it, Susan. You’ve got to put me in the hospital.

I said, “Sweetie, if you imagined the experiences with your brother, then how come you’ve improved so much by working on them?” That made some sense to her. I continued, “You know, these things don’t generally come out of people’s imaginations. If you’re remembering this incident with your mother now, it’s because you’re stronger than you were—you’re more able to deal with it now.”

I told Julie that her unconscious had been very protective of her. Had she remembered this episode when she was as fragile as when I first met her, she might have had a total emotional collapse. But, through her work in group, her emotional world was becoming more stable. Her unconscious had allowed this repressed memory to surface because she was ready to cope with it.

Few people talk about mother-daughter incest, but I have treated at least a dozen victims of it. The motivation appears to be a grotesque distortion of the need for tenderness, physical contact, and affection. Mothers who are capable of violating normal maternal bonding in this way are usually extremely disturbed and often psychotic.

It was Julie’s struggle to repress her memories that brought her close to a breakdown. Yet, as painful and disturbing as those memories were, their release was the key to Julie’s progressive recovery.

A D
OUBLE
L
IFE

Incest victims often become very skillful child actors. In their inner world, there is so much terror, confusion, sadness, loneliness, and isolation that many develop a false self with which to relate to the outside world, to act as if things were fine and normal. Tracy talked about her “as if” self with considerable insight:

I felt like I was two people inside one body. In front of my friends, I was very outgoing and friendly. But as soon as I was in our apartment, I became a total recluse. I’d have these crying jags that just wouldn’t stop. I hated socializing with my family because I had to pretend that everything was fine. You have no idea how hard it was to keep playing these two roles all the time. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t have an ounce of strength left.

Dan, too, deserved an Oscar. He described:

I was feeling so guilty about what my father was doing to me at night. I really felt like an object; I hated myself. But I played the part of a happy me and nobody in the family caught on. Then, all of a sudden, I stopped dreaming. I even stopped crying. I’d pretend I was a happy kid. I was the class clown, and I was a good piano player. I loved to entertain . . . anything to get people to like me. But, inside I was aching. I was a secret drunk by the time I was thirteen.

By entertaining other people, Dan was able to feel some sense of acceptance and accomplishment. But, because the real self inside him was in such agony, he experienced very little genuine pleasure. This is the cost of living a lie.

T
HE
S
ILENT
P
ARTNER

The aggressor and the victim put on good performances to keep their secret inside the house. But what about the other parent?

When I first began working with adults who were sexually abused as children, I found that many father-daughter victims seemed angrier at their mothers than at their fathers. Many victims tortured themselves with the often unanswerable question of how much their mothers knew about the incest. Many were convinced that their mothers must have known something, because in some instances the signs of abuse were quite blatant. Others were convinced that their mothers
should
have known, should have picked up the behavioral changes in their daughters, should have sensed something was wrong, and should have been more tuned in to what was going on in the family.