Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
Renita and Melinda reveal the predominant dread or the life of grief82 that seems to follow a survivor throughout her lifetime. Melinda claims, “The most painful part of it was that there was nowhere to go and talk about it. And so I had to hold all this in myself.” Too often people cannot hear what is happening to a child because the event is too awful to believe or it threatens the family system—the idea that must be maintained is that parents are benevolent and all is right with the world. Melinda articulates how such naïveté wounded her in her family:
This atrocity was happening to me in my own home, in my own back yard. And—and the severe pain of it—physical pain. I mean, I’m just talking about outrageous physical pain. There was no place [tearfully]—there was nowhere to go to talk. And so when you’re a child, you have to—you have to find a way. And I remember that as a child.
Janine claims she did not know whom to tell or what to tell them; all she knew was that she “couldn’t take the falseness anymore.” She reported feeling suicidal for six years of her life. In her words, “Several times, after getting my driver’s license, I would run stop signs in the hope of being killed. I was afraid to take my own life, though I often wanted someone else to take away my pain by ending my life. Even in college, I often imagined myself walking in front of a truck. Ironically, my dad owned a trucking company.”
Passive suicide or indirect self-destruction also reveals (in the extreme) generalized manifestations of trauma: helplessness, lethargy, lack of personal efficacy and depression.83
Most survivors who become extremely depressed tend to withdraw from potentially healthy relationships and avoid seeking social or medical assistance. The feeling of being malignantly marked, of being placed outside the covenant of normal social relationships, caused many of the women interviewed intense pain. The isolation they felt was compounded by their difficulty in forming trusting relationships. The legacy of their childhood was a feeling of having been profoundly betrayed by both parents. As a result, they normalized this experience and came to expect abuse and disappointment in all intimate relationships: to be invalidated in their felt experience, as they felt their mothers had invalidated and abandoned them, and to be exploited, as their fathers, uncles, brothers, grandfathers (and in rarer cases, aunts and mothers) used and exploited them. This nightmarish isolation and sequential rejection reinforce what becomes for the victim the most painful reality of incest: “It’s my fault. I brought it on myself. I’m so bad I invite trouble and make trouble for others. I’m not worth caring for. There’s no place for me in the world of reasonable, decent people. I’ll never be reasonable or decent. I’m crazy. I’m nothing but a whore.”84
A study done by Judith Herman in 1981 with forty female incest survivors found that 60 percent of the incest survivors complained of major depressive symptoms in adult life. Thirty-eight percent became so depressed at some point in their lives that they attempted suicide. Twenty percent had times when they became alcoholic or drug-dependent. To cope with their despair and hopelessness of ever attaining a rewarding relationship with anyone, they vacillated between protective isolation and self-destructive activities.85
Of the survivors interviewed for this study, four of the nine are regular attendees of Alcoholics Anonymous. Samantha was drug dependent on barbiturates for fifteen years, as she raised four children. In her words, “I lost so much weight after my last child was born and wasn’t sleeping much 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