Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
without realizing what I was doing, I began to use my particular creativity to explore the incest of which (some would say) I was victim, from which (some would say) I survived. ... At this point on my journey, I would say we are much more than victims. Survivors, yes, but always damaged, always scarred, most often with wounds forever raw.20
Incest is the sexual seduction, molestation, and/or rape of a child by any relative (blood, step, adoptive), trusted care-giver, or friend of the family.21 The term victim is used to identify the one who was sexually abused. The term survivor is used by those who prefer to see themselves as having survived sexual victimization. The term I use for parents who were conscious of the abuse but remained silent witnesses is co-offenders.
Eating Disorders
I use the term eating disorder to describe what seems to be a universal preoccupation among the nine survivors of incest whom I interviewed—whether they are affected by anorexia, bulimia, extensive dieting, or chronic overeating. When I use the term I am referring to the process whereby a woman develops a distorted relationship to food, her body consciousness, and her weight because of living in a sex-exploitive family and culture where her power and worth are defined along a bodily plane. I see these behaviors as gendered tools used to manage and express the trauma of sexual abuse. I do not use the term eating disorder in the traditional sense (referring to an individual disease) because it categorizes food and weight problems as individual pathologies and deflects attention away from social and traumatic contexts that underlie them.
I use the term relentless pursuit of thinness interchangeably with eating disorder. When I do so I do not wish to imply that the survivor’s emphasis on slenderness reflects a vain “obsession” with appearance. In fact, throughout I argue that the eating strategies that women develop begin as adaptive solutions to, as well as disguised expressions of, sexual trauma.
Trauma
By trauma, I mean a violating experience that has long-term emotional, physical, and/or spiritual consequences that may have immediate or delayed effects. One reason the term trauma is useful conceptually is its association with the diagnostic label Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).22 PTSD is one of the few clinical diagnostic categories that recognizes social problems (such as war or the Holocaust) as partially responsible for the symptoms identified.23 One perspective on PTSD is that it “adapts well to the feminist assertion that a woman’s symptoms cannot be understood as solely individual, considered outside of her social context, or prevented without significant changes in social conditions.”24 For any woman who develops a distorted relationship to food, to her body, and to weight, introjecting cultural expectations and gender-degrading experiences (including the plethora of media images of women as sexual objects) set the tone for how she relates to her self. Sexual abuse in the family further imprints these cultural messages.
Psychohistorian Robert Lifton has delineated five key characteristics of trauma:
1. Trauma leaves an indelible imprint in the form of intense, sometimes repressed, memories that are often death-related. There is no time limit on trauma, and its pain can endure with fresh intensity for a lifetime. There are always residual feelings around the trauma, including anxiety. Sometimes, paradoxically, the behavioral and emotional response to trauma is a mask of invulnerability.
2. Trauma can generate death guilt or other forms of self-condemnation. The victim tends to blame himself or herself for not having done enough to prevent the trauma or the events leading up to the trauma. There is a sense of failed enactment.
3. Trauma creates psychic numbing, the diminished capacity to feel, in its victims. Numbing begins as a necessary form of adaptation. Feelings must be closed out as a way to survive the traumatic experience. Later, however, the numbing itself tends to continue and endure as an inappropriate and self-constricting defensive posture.
4. Trauma profoundly affects human relationships which can become infused with suspicion and vulnerable to disruption. Help or friendship may be perceived as counterfeit nurturance, as insincere and unreliable. Trust in people and one’s general community can be impaired and difficult to recover.
5. Trauma brings on a struggle with meaning at various levels of existence. One seeks to give inner form to one’s experience. One’s sense of personal continuity—indeed one’s lifeline—has been interrupted, and there is an effort to find new grounding and connectedness for the self.25
Most survivors feel pursued by a chronic sense of loss, what Lifton calls the survivor’s life of grief.26 A survivor mourns for lost family, lost faith, lost hope, and her former self—who she was prior to the violations. What has been “taken” from her cannot be returned and will not be acknowledged in a culture that refuses to recognize the atrocity. The concept of PTSD has helped bring the inner reality and the outer reality of the survivor together. It is my intention to draw out the gendered nature of PTSD as it manifests itself in the form of food, body, and weight preoccupations for the survivor of incest. I will also expose the religious roots that often give meaning to such traumatic experiences and symptoms among the women interviewed.
Recovery
Usually when the term recovery is employed, it is done so in reference to a chemical-addiction therapy based on a disease (medical) model. One who is “recovering” or “in recovery” is thought to be refraining from using her former addictive substance or habit. Such concepts have been psycho-spiritualized and popularized by the human potential movement and, in particular, by Twelve-Step groups of Alcoholics Anonymous and their offspring—Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Incest Survivors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and the like.27 By actively using such spirituality groups and “working” the steps, one is said to be “on her way to recovery.” Since incest is not a disease or an addiction one might wonder why the term “recovery” would be used at all. The women interviewed frequently referred to their “healing journey” as their “recovery.” For the sake of this project then, I refer to recovery as a self-oriented vocabulary that reveals the wish to move from victim to survivor. Many sexually violated women prefer to see themselves as no longer victimizable, with esteem reclaimed and bodily confidence reaffirmed, or affirmed for the first time. This language of recovery gives them a sense of hope, a sense of self-empowerment. In later chapters, I will explore to what degree such language is pragmatically helpful.
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