INCEST AND OTHER CHILDHOOD ABUSE: FUSING PAIN WITH SECURITY
How can the unspeakable experience of incest or other childhood abuse, committed by someone familiar to or related by blood to a child, result in a desire on the child’s part to recreate the pain humiliation, and isolation experienced? Here we will see how emotional pain can resurface in the victims of such abuse in the disguised form of self-mutiliation.
Taking the Bad with the Good
Common sense suggests that if we have experienced something frightening, painful, humiliating, or destabilizing, we will try to avoid such negative experiences in the future at all costs.
Why, then, do some victims of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse “return to the scene of the crime” committed against them, again and again? Previously we have examined the concept of the “fusing of incompatible feelings,” the paradox—though contrary to common sense—which describes the fusing of the desires to be loved and punished or harmed by the same person.
We have all heard the expression, “You have to take the bad with the good.”We understand this to mean that in life, one’s expectations may not take into consideration the trials and tribulations that come our way. What we all expect, however, from this mixture is that on balance, the good will outweigh the bad.
How do we apply such a tried-and-true principle to individuals who seem to seek out situations where the bad clearly outweighs the good?
A child who is abused tries to see the abuse as a form of love, attention, or some other valuable attachment, in order to make the abuse tolerable at the time of original occurrence. This not only causes her to overlook the painful experience her abuser is inflicting upon her but also to fail to distinguish between the abuse and the benefits in the relationship. They are all fused together into one relationship, one experience. She literally takes the “good” and the “bad” as a blending, a compound, and accepts them as one experience with two components that are inseparable. As she becomes deeply involved in this valued-abusive relationship, she even learns to distrust kind behavior if it doesn’t include abusive elements. Here we see the powerful influence of early development.
Emmy: When Harm and Help Collide
Emmy was the youngest of three children, the daughter of a prominent general surgeon in a small city in the Midwest. Emmy’s father was regarded as a community hero due to his medical ability to save lives in the emergency room and in cardiac bypass surgery. Emmy grew up in a time and a place where medical specialists were a luxury that this city and the hospital couldn’t afford. She was well aware that her father was regarded as special, good, and powerful by her community. He was the one who set her broken arm when she fell off her bicycle at five. He was also the man who raped her in the middle of the night that same year, telling her to “be a big girl and don’t cry.” He warned her not to tell her mother or anyone else.
“Virgil,” as Emmy referred to her father, repeated this behavior two or three times a week until she was twelve years old. During these years he taught her sailing, fly-fishing, horseback riding, and ornithology. He taught her methodically and patiently, and she excelled in all of these activities. She was nearly always present when the city bestowed various awards on her father. He was present when she received an award for her ornithology project, and another for her “junior sailing skills.”
In public, she always addressed him as “Dr. Whitelaw,” never “Daddy,” though occasionally “Father” at large family dinners.
When her father “completed” his sexual act, which Emmy experienced as painful and nearly suffocating, due to his enormous size in contrast to her small body, he left her room and closed the door. She immediately forgot the episode.
In fact, Emmy forgot all of these events. She only began to remember them in her late twenties, after her marriage failed and her husband left her. Her husband said that he always felt that she was coldly and reluctantly submissive when he wanted to be romantic or sexual. “I’m tired of you doing me favors. I’m tired of feeling like a beggar sexually.”
She describes her husband as a warm person, who she was sure would always be gentle. He was, and she felt little, if any, passion with him. She did care for him very much, though, and his leaving brought her to such a state of incapacity that she could barely take care of their two children.
It was several months after he left her that Emmy started having dreams of being pursued by a “giant of a man.”“He began to look more and more like my father. In my dreams, he caught me. Each dream brought back more details until I realized that they were not symbolic of anything but actual events I was not ready to remember when I was awake. I finally sat down and wrote them all out, remembering them as events, not dreams. That’s when I decided to enter therapy.”
Emmy didn’t dare “remember” her experiences during childhood. If she had, it would have meant losing the positive side of her relationship with her father, all the things they did together, the protection of his community’s esteem, and his daytime vigilance when he could take care of any injury that might befall her. Somehow she made an unconscious decision that the “good” outweighed the “bad.”
Her adolescence was punctuated by romances with boys from the “wrong side of the tracks” whom her father objected to strenuously though she kept most of them a secret. She was the object of abuse in each of her relationships with these angry young men. But she always told them that if they ever hit her in the face, she would leave them. She was pushed, punched, shoved into walls, verbally abused, and raped. When the boys weren’t abusing her, they were apologetic, guilty, sad, tender, loving, and gallant.
The damage from these abuses was as invisible as her father’s rapes had been. Most importantly, Emmy felt that these relationships were normal. She was quite attracted to these boys; there were, in fact, four separate romances in sequence. One for each year of high school. She explained that she found these boys the most exciting and arousing of all who pursued her.
Emmy came to her first session with her diary notes in hand. Her manner was matter-of-fact, her dress seductive. Her skirt was shorter than most. It kept getting shorter during the interview as she slid down the seat of the chair, readjusted her position, then repeated the action. Her blouse was unbuttoned to the point of indiscretion, and she leaned over in my direction every time she referred to her notes about her dreams and memories.
“Are you dating men now?” I asked her.
“Well, it’s been a year since Tom left me. I think that it’s about time I moved on with my life, although I still miss him and probably always will.”
She showed a momentary sadness when speaking about Tom. She was wearing a shiny pink silk blouse with long sleeves and french cuffs, and large cufflinks—gold squares with big pearls in the center.
I commented, “Your cufflinks are pretty, feminine and large. They almost suggest ‘locks’ at the ends of your sleeves.”
She looked at me cautiously, then said, “Yes, they are locks. The boyfriends I had in high school were not allowed to harm my face. That would give it all away—that I was getting beaten. They were not the only ones who were allowed to harm me. I am also allowed to harm myself. Since I have told you everything else, I might as well tell all, as they say.”
With that she undid one of her massive cufflinks and rolled up the broad sleeve almost to her shoulder, to reveal dozens of small to medium cuts on her lower and upper arm. She then proceeded to undo the other cufflink—her right—and rolled up that sleeve to reveal fewer but much larger cuts, and laceration scars running two inches long and quite broad. Some of them were still pink and angry-looking.
“I should really keep two cufflinks on the right sleeve. I don’t own any short-sleeve blouses. I would buy long-sleeve bras if they sold them.” The seductive smile returned.
“I find it interesting and contradictory that you are so careful to cover up your scars of self-abuse when at the same time you carefully uncover your thighs and breasts to socially acceptable limits and perhaps a bit beyond. Do you think that there is any connection between these contrasting behaviors?”
She quickly pulled her skirt hem down and buttoned a button on her blouse. She looked up at me, crossed her legs, and began to cry. The seductive look and tone were gone.
“I guess there are two Emmys inside of me. If I show you both at once, I ‘short out.’ I had to show you both at once. Anyway, you knew. Your comment about my cufflinks was a giveaway.
“I don’t think that they, those two Emmys, are really in contrast with each other,” she went on. “I think they are each half of me. If I lost either half I might disintegrate, like the witch in TheWizard of Oz when Dorothy poured water on her. You know, I only cut myself when I am not involved with a man. I started cutting myself when ‘Dr. Whitelaw’ went away on lecture tours. He could be gone for a week at a time. In the light of what I remember now, you’d think I would be happy and take the best care of my body when he wasn’t around to hurt it. I guess I must have always been crazy, because when he didn’t hurt me, I did. Why?”
I waited a minute or so for her to hear what she had just said. “Maybe everything he did with you and to you were integral parts of one relationship. When he was away, you might have gone bird-watching. That was something you did with him. Instead, you evoked pain and damage to yourself. That was something else that he did to you. The pain and damage were a stronger reminder of him than the pleasant things you did together. It was also your secret, for better or worse. That combination made hurting yourself a way of feeling closer to him. Despite the monstrous things he did to you, those things registered as ‘fathering’ just as the nice things did.
“Children cannot really judge their parents, as parents. They are in no position to decide that they’re being parented by evildoers, or incompetents. If they were to make that decision, they would be erasing the feeling that they had parents. They would experience a ‘separation anxiety’ more painful than all the harmful deeds done to them by their parents. So they choose to side with their parents, warts and all.”
“So does that mean I’m crazy?”she demanded. “You were right. I was ‘flashing’ you like I do with all men, whether I like them or not. You see both sides of me. Will I have to be like this the rest of my life? Will I have to keep seducing men and alternately cutting myself? I’m thirty-two years old. I’m intelligent. I have a college degree and two graduate degrees. Shouldn’t I know better? He can’t come into my bedroom to rape me anymore. Am I addicted to that, or something that resembles that?”
Emmy was “addicted to that,” as she put it, because it was a powerful part of her formative years’ development. That didn’t mean that she would have to remain attached to the terrible triad of seduction–rape–self-mutilation. But it would take years of therapy to undo the damage done during her formative years. I explained this to her.
“How can that damage be undone?” she asked.
“When you came in here, you did your characteristic behavior; your formative years’ learning was guiding you. I did not respond to reinforce it, and now you aren’t behaving that way at all with me. That will have to happen over and over for you to learn new behaviors and responses to replace your childhood learning, and you will need a very constant and consistent person to play it off against—your therapist.”
She looked startled and suspicious. “I can see that therapy will make me feel vulnerable, self-conscious, embarrassed. And when you pointed out my flashing you, it made me feel like a whore. What if I can’t take it . . . this therapy?”
“Do you feel embarrassed now? Do you feel like a whore now?”
“No.”
“Then it was a painful, though brief moment for you?”
“I guess so.”
“Then I guess that you can take it.”
She smiled, relieved. “I guess you’re right. This is weird, talking to you like this. I never have talked to anyone like this before.”
“So the upside of this risky experience which could make you feel all the ‘bad’ feelings you just mentioned is that it could also make you feel some ‘safe’ feelings that are new to you?”
She nodded.
I knew that the most difficult task we had ahead involved the deconstruction of the part of her personality that had aligned her self-abuse, the cutting, with the abuse she elicits from the men she becomes involved with, and the rapes that she experienced from her father.
“You mean, no more cutting—no more raping?”
“It does sound strange that I’m asking you to give up seeking what most people would regard as a living hell.”
I noticed that Emmy took a certain pleasure in deliberately using the word “raping,” referring to her own experience in being the victim of acts that people normally describe with reluctance and hesitation. I thought that she had been wanting to tell on her father for a long time, and in the privacy of the therapy office, she was paradoxically “shouting it from the rooftops.”
She was more comfortable talking about the rapes than her cutting. She could express her righteous rage at what was done to her by another. She was ashamed at what she had done to herself.
“I wonder how long it will take you to remove the ‘locks’ from your sleeves?” I commented at the end of our session.
She looked down at the massive cufflinks, stared at them for a moment, and without looking up, shrugged her shoulders. Tears splashed on her blouse.
She finally looked up at me. “I guess, for some weird reason, I would rather tell the world on my father than what’s under my sleeves.”
“I guess that you’re more confident about the assaults being over than you are about your ability to stop assaulting yourself. I think that when you told me about them, for the first time you realized that they were more than your secret. They were also your shame.”
“Yeah, that was a real surprise to me.”
“Perhaps we can weave a lot of surprises together that will become the fabric of your recovery.”
“I hope so,” she responded with an optimistic nod.
“I am going to ask you to ‘unlock’ your sleeves at each session, in the future, you know?”
She drew a long breath. “Yeah, I guess you better do that.”
Emmy has been in therapy for three years now. The work has had three major focuses:
• Examining how she was affected by what her father did to her at the time it was happening, when it stopped, and in the present.
• Examining her relationships with men, including how she coped with me as a male therapist.
• Reducing and eventually eliminating her need to use cutting herself as a substitute for communicating mental and emotional pain.
Future sessions will involve her relationships with other women, including her anger toward her mother; her first anger after realizing what had been happening; her making a positive adjustment to her sexual arousal; and her ability to eliminate self-hate when it occurs, and to feel as if it belongs to her, not her abusers. If and when she becomes involved in a romantic relationship, these issues will have to be reexamined to check her progress so that her past doesn’t distort or sabotage the relationship.
Emmy’s inability to remember the assaults she experienced from her father was necessary until enough time had passed and she was far enough away from his power over her. This “power” also included the opportunity for him to offset the assaults with positive and protective behaviors that were part of his relationship with her. These positive acts on his part were valuable to Emmy and to lose them would cause her to lose whatever self-esteem she had. Her father had come to symbolize that fusion of security, pain, and humiliation discussed earlier in this chapter. If he would not be the source of her pain, then she would become the source of her own pain. This would simultaneously produce a sense of security as well.
The “filing system” Emmy had developed of using her left arm for the ‘lesser’ pains, and smaller cuts, and her right arm for the greater pain and the larger cuts developed over the length of time since she first began cutting. She didn’t want to make one cut over another; this would diminish the statement made by the earlier cut. She simply ran out of room on her left arm. She also developed a need for greater pain and damage to herself as she became used to the threshold of pain she was creating.
Emmy stopped cutting herself after the first eighteen months in treatment and hasn’t cut herself for the past year and a half. The other treatment issues will take longer to resolve since they involve personality reconstruction and building skills of relating emotionally that didn’t exist before. Her family system hadn’t allowed them to develop.
Loretta: How Bad Becomes Good
Nonincestuous emotional, physical, and sexual abuse can produce a fusion of abuse, pain, and attachment similar to that produced by incest.
Loretta grew up in a family that reorganized several times. The first time occurred when her father left her mother when Loretta was five. He simply disappeared. Her mother stayed at home crying for the first year, then took a job with a computer company, where she met another man. After a brief courtship, they were married. Loretta’s mother was needy, taking many medications, suffering from anxiety and depression. Nick found this damsel-in-distress just what he needed. She was pretty and she wanted someone who would “take command” of her life—and, unfortunately, Loretta’s.
Nick would impose all sorts of rules and restrictions on Loretta. She had lots of chores to do and little time for herself. It was easy for Nick to convince his helpless wife that he was building character in his stepdaughter. When Loretta reached puberty, Nick noticed how boys and men looked at his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter and increased his restrictions on her free time. By now, however, she was becoming more resourceful at “escaping” for an hour here and there, especially during the day while Nick was at work. She discovered that boys at the nearby high school would treat her much better than her stepfather did. She found time both in and out of school to hang out with some of the more disreputable boys who were cutting classes and getting involved in gang violence, and violence in general.
At thirteen, Loretta looked three years older. The boys she became involved with wanted sexual activities that she wasn’t ready for. But at the same time she didn’t want to lose the physical and sexual affection that came with their compliments. She allowed herself to be mistreated by the older boys, who seemed to take pleasure in their mistreatment of her. She made the best of this situation by believing she had to put up with the bad to get the good. At home she didn’t experience any “good” and there was plenty of “bad”: Nick was critical of her, and she felt restricted in a loveless, noncaring environment. So if the “bad” she was putting up with from this gang of boys was more physical and sexual, the praise, even if it was crude, was worth it.
After a while, Loretta began to enjoy the sex play as well. It included physical exposure, embarrassment, and being treated roughly; smacked, hit, or cursed at by more than one boy at a time. When the boys grew tired of her, she developed the habit of picking at her face, which made her skin increasingly unattractive.
One day, fearing impending expulsion from the group, Loretta banged her head against the wall, and her reaction to the painful jolt it gave her was mixed. Later that week, when she was alone in one of the boy’s houses, she took a fork and cut the back of her left hand with the last tine, which was bent slightly away from the others. She pressed hard and moved the tine slowly, pulling at the skin in its wake to cause the tine to penetrate more effectively. She made a small cut, a quarter-inch long, and stared at the droplets of blood that trickled across the back of her hand until the small stream fell between her middle and ring finger. She became so immersed in the process that it took away her fear of being abandoned by the boys. Loretta had found a way to drive away the fears of abandonment, loneliness, and emptiness so familiar to her at home and now amid these boys.
The boys eventually grew tired of her. The mainstream of students, labeling her a tramp, shunned her as well. She took to cutting herself with kitchen implements that she found at home. She enjoyed the irony of using objects that Nick had purchased, to cut herself. Occasionally, she would leave a little blood on one of them and watch his confusion over finding a paring knife with blood on it. Nick asked his wife whether she had cut herself using it. He never bothered to ask Loretta if she had cut herself. It was only when she made several cuts on her hand and was sent to the school nurse by a concerned gym teacher that all of this came out. She was then referred to a psychiatrist to determine if she was suicidal. He was unsure, but since he found so many small cuts on her hands, he diagnosed her as a “cutter,” and referred her for therapy and medication.
Through cutting, Loretta became the master of her own pain. Cutting was better than the neglect and invisibility she experienced at home, from both her stepfather and her mother, who was too ill and needy to focus on her or his treatment of her. The boys mixed “appreciation” with their mistreatment of her, so that kind of pain was “part good,” as she later explained. Like the incest victim, Loretta used self-inflicted pain to relieve her loneliness and emptiness. She had no faith in other people’s ability to relieve these feelings for her.
When after two years in therapy (and medication for depression) she “realized” this connection, Loretta discontinued all self-harming behavior and began to work on her other ways of sabotaging her chances for social and academic success. At the same time her parents were seen as a couple, mandated by the county in order to avoid being designated neglectful parents, and they worked on improving positive communication with Loretta.
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There are many possible reasons why a person can fuse pain with pleasure, perhaps not very different from those who fuse violence or inflict cruelty upon others with pleasure. People who make themselves their own target are more sympathetic to us, but arouse fear instead of anger within us. Most of us would not make ourselves the target of our own anger, nor would we use blood and pain to satisfy that anger, loneliness, and emptiness in this manner. Yet this is more common than we would like to believe, and heartbreaking to witness in someone we care about or love.