Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
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 response among incest survivors. Currently it is well recognized as a coping mechanism by many clinicians. Dissociating serves many purposes. It provides a way out of the intolerable and psychologically incongruous situation (double-bind), it erects memory barriers (amnesia) to keep painful events and memories out of awareness, it functions as an analgesic to prevent feeling pain, it allows an escape from experiencing guilt, it may even serve as a hypnotic negation of the sense of self.51
Most psychologists believe that a secure sense of attachment with caring others is the foundation of personality development.52 When this connection is shattered, the traumatized person experiences psychic dissonance, she loses her basic sense of self. Developmental conflicts of childhood and adolescence—struggles over autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy—are destined to be replete with a sense of powerlessness. Because the developing child’s positive sense of self depends on a caregiver’s benign use of power and the parent perverts that power by sexually objectifying her, the child never feels an innate sense of self-regard, integrity, value, or self-respect. Her chance for developing a sense of interdependence in relation and personal sense of agency are seriously hindered from the onset of the abuse.
At the moment of trauma, almost by definition, the individual’s point of view counts for nothing. In rape, for example, the purpose of the attack is precisely to demonstrate contempt for the victim’s autonomy and dignity. The traumatic event thus destroys the belief that one can be oneself in relation to others.53
A betrayal of trust also destroys the trust one could otherwise develop in oneself. A hypervigilant preoccupation with one’s appetites (both sexual and physiological), seen with women survivors who develop eating disorders, makes perfect sense if we understand the core dynamic to be one of abandonment. Such emotional desertion by caretakers results in an inability to trust and naturally manifests itself in one’s relationships to others, the self, and the body.
Psychologist David Finkelhor integrates the dynamics, the psychological impact, and the behavioral manifestations of the effects of sexual abuse.54 He names these effects traumagenic and divides them into four categories: (1) traumatic sexualization, (2) stigmatization, (3) betrayal, and (4) powerlessness.55
Traumatic sexualization refers to a process in which an individual’s sexuality, including both sexual feelings and attitudes, is shaped in a developmentally inappropriate and interpersonally dysfunctional fashion. This process may result in a premature eroticization of the abused child, who then relates to others in an erotic manner.56 Traumatic sexualization may also result in the persistent intertwining of sexuality and arousal with the sense of shame and guilt often associated with the traumatic event. And while unsatisfactory resolution of developmental conflicts over autonomy leaves any person prone to shame and doubt, these feelings are felt acutely in the trauma survivor.
Shame is a response to helplessness, the violation of bodily integrity, and the indignity suffered in the eyes of another person.57 Doubt reflects the inability to maintain one’s own separate point of view while remaining in connection with others. In the aftermath of episodes of abuse, survivors doubt both others and themselves. Many diagnose themselves as “crazy.”
A related concept is psychiatrist Frank Ochberg’s negative intimacy, a component of post-traumatic stress that the victim must confront therapeutically to resolve feelings of repulsion and degradation.58 Negative intimacy is the intrusion of an undesired sexual experience, by someone known to the victim, which invades personal space and provokes associations of disgust and even self-loathing. The one being exploited is made a spectacle not only to her exploiter but to herself. She is forced to watch and experience herself being exposed. Sexual and physical attraction, which in her future might be desirable, is forever tainted by these earlier exploitive experiences. What could be desirable