“HE SEDUCED ME into the basement, in the dark, while the rest of the family was outside having a picnic,” the young woman with the feathered haircut and large glasses told the circle of women who were assembled in a living room–like setting at Woman to Woman. “And I remember saying, ‘That hurts me,’ and he said, ‘That’s okay, it’ll only hurt for a little while.’”
The camera moved gently from her and pulled in for a close-up on me.
“Incest is the most secret of crimes, and in many ways, it is the most tragic,” I told the audience. “It betrays the innocent love of a child and it destroys all trust in a family, and it’s happening much more frequently than we ever knew. I’m Pat Mitchell, and today on Woman to Woman, we’ll talk to incest survivors and to mothers who knew too late what was happening to their daughters.”
The camera returned to the group, and the next woman spoke.
“My father forced me to have sex with him from the time I was five to fifteen,” she said, her eyes tearing. The faces of the other incest survivors clearly showed that this was a familiar story and a shared pain.
Another said, “My grandfather was my hero, so I did what he asked, even though I hated it. I never told anyone. I didn’t feel I had a choice.”
Another confessed her father’s violations. “Here I’m thirty-eight, and I held it in for such a long time. Now I can talk about it and it’s like giving other people permission to talk about it too.”
As the stories continued, one by one, around the circle of women on set, I noticed how unusually quiet the studio was, almost church-like.
I tried not to probe beyond the details already freely shared but asked questions that might help our audience comprehend how such abuse could go on, often for years, in seemingly respectable homes, amid seemingly perfect families, in small and large cities, among the well-to-do and the poor.
There were no easy answers. One guest suggested that incest was often intergenerational—a father is abused, so he abuses. Others attributed their abuse to other causes, from male power paradigms to mental illness.
Suddenly, a wave of nausea passed over me, and I had to steady myself for a minute before moving the conversation away from the horror stories of the abuse to the inspiring stories of survival. I focused on the accomplishments of the women in this circle—physicians, lawyers, teachers, therapists, mothers, and grandmothers—who had all overcome their childhood trauma and gone on to become successful and seemingly well-adjusted adults.
In preparing for this program I’d been surprised to discover that surviving incest is uncannily aligned with becoming an overachiever. These women spoke of having to prove they were good girls deserving of respect and unconditional love, rather than bad girls hiding shame on top of shame. Incest, several of my guests reported, had driven them to spend the rest of their lives struggling to earn love since they had never received it as children themselves, as the natural entitlement expected and needed from a parent.
Suddenly, another wave of nausea enveloped me, and I felt as if I was going to faint or throw up. A quick thank-you to the guests and I ran to my dressing room, quickly closed the door, and fell to my knees, sobbing, out of control.
“Pat? Can Deanna come in and refresh your makeup?” Mary Muldoon shouted from the other side of the dressing room door. I couldn’t answer. “Pat, are you okay?” More knocking, and both Deanna and Mary entered to find me in a fetal position, unable to move or talk, sobbing as if I’d never cried before.
I couldn’t tell them what was wrong because I had no idea. All I knew is that I wanted to disappear or die, a frightening darkness welling up and taking over my mind and body.
MARY CANCELED THE next two shows, sending the guests home with a promise to reschedule, and called one of my close friends in Santa Barbara to confide my symptoms and seek advice.
Sylvia suggested Dr. Lambert, a highly respected psychiatrist, and the next morning I was sitting in his office when a tall, slim, tanned man with a white beard entered, incongruously holding a surfboard. “I’m so sorry for being late,” he told me, taking his place in a chair very close to mine. “Surfing’s my morning routine.” The sight of an elder statesman psychiatrist in his late seventies wielding a surfboard was a sign that I was going on a journey with a very experienced and very fit guide.
We began to talk. At first, I relied heavily on my well-practiced skills of conversation, trying to appear as normal and likeable as if I were interviewing for a job. I recited my accomplishments to assure Dr. Lambert that I wasn’t some out-of-control woman having a nervous breakdown. I wanted him to know that I was a successful woman who had no reason to be crying and canceling programs and sitting in this office.
Dr. Lambert listened with a patient smile, one that was knowing, but not condescending. Finally he leaned forward and asked very gently, “Are you ready to stop the very impressive forward movement in your life long enough to feel where you have been and where you are?”
That hit my panic button and I had to resist an urge to bolt. “I can’t stop! If I stopped, I’d end up back in Swainsboro, Georgia. If I stopped, everyone would lose interest in me and I would be broke and alone. If I stopped, what would keep me interesting to myself and other people? If I stopped, I’d have to think and…” I paused, realizing that my voice was rising, as was my blood pressure.
Dr. Lambert leaned in closer. “If you stopped, you might remember why you’re running.”
Just like that, in our first five minutes together, this kind, compassionate, patient, and remarkably intuitive being opened the door to long-hidden memories.
DRIVING HOME, I struggled with the choice: continue with this new therapist on a journey of discovery and, hopefully, recovery from the pain I was now carrying in my head and heart, or cancel the next appointment and return to a life so jam-packed morning, noon, and night with activities and people and responsibilities that I wouldn’t have time to really think about this incident again. That seemed like a reasonable decision, I thought. I would feel better by Monday, I told myself, and we would resume taping, and everything would be as before.
But before the weekend was over, I knew what I needed to do. I couldn’t pretend my father’s abuse had never happened, or that my breakdown at work was something I could dismiss. I’d been stopped in a way I could not ignore. Dr. Lambert started me on a journey toward remembering what had happened, and until I faced that, it would be impossible to move forward.
The five-year-old girl inside me had to tell her story. Over the next six months, my memories slowly were recovered.
A memory. We are living in a small duplex in our new hometown. Mother is pregnant and sick a lot. My father is working in an appliance store and never smiles. He misses the military. My bedroom is across the hall from theirs, and I’m awake, frightened by what I am sure is a ghost at the foot of my bed. I’ve just turned six. My father comes into my room, slips into my bed, and pulls me close to him, whispering for me to be quiet so as not to wake Mother. Then he moves his hands all over my body, whispering that he’s showing me how much he loves me. I hate the feeling of his tough hands touching me. I want to scream or run away, but what would I say? Who would believe me?
Sometimes I pretended to be asleep; sometimes I tried to believe it was a dream and not really happening. It didn’t happen every night but often enough to be a nightly fear of the door opening, my father’s rough hands turning my small body toward him, the forced touching. “I love you,” he’d whisper each time, telling me how special I was to him. “This has to be our secret,” he’d remind me each time, “because others wouldn’t understand.” As I grew older and he knew the day was coming when I would resist, push back, or refuse to go along, he’d repeat his dire warning: “If you ever tell anyone, terrible things will happen to our family.” I’d believed him and kept the secret.
It all happened in the dark. In the light of day, no touching, no fatherly hugs, no clues that he had pressed his body against mine, almost whimpering and childlike in his own child’s bed.
It went on until I became a teenager and put a lock on my bedroom door.
Keeping that dark secret led to a kind of compartmentalizing of my life, as I filed the horrible memories into a “don’t think about” file, which I kept shut tight. After that one time I’d threatened to reveal the secret when my father tried to make me leave college, I suppressed the memory any time it pushed forward to a conscious level. I also did what many other incest survivors, like the ones I’d interviewed, did: filled life with nonstop activities, leaving little time for true reflection, always moving forward to leave the past behind.
But I couldn’t outrun the shame. “Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself,” Anaïs Nin once said. According to Beverly Engel, author of The Compassion Chronicles, about healing the shame of childhood abuse, “The chances are high that you blame yourself in some way for being submissive, for not telling someone, for having the abuse continue, for ‘enticing’ the abuser with your behavior or dress, or because you felt some physical pleasure.”
All this leads to what she calls Perfectionist Syndrome, whose symptoms include “fear of being caught in a mistake, believing you don’t really deserve good things—commonly known as the Imposter Syndrome”—and the one that hit hardest for me, “people pleasing.” Survivors often feel “defective, worthless, bad, unlovable,” Dr. Engel wrote. “Abuse victims often cope with these false yet powerful beliefs by trying to ignore them or convince themselves otherwise by overachieving or becoming perfectionistic.”
Be the best. Prove yourself. Keep moving, moving, moving.
In addition to helping me understand the roots of my endless drive, Dr. Lambert helped me slowly recover more specifics of my lost memories. It was painful, and many times, I almost ended the therapy.
“Why do I need to revisit this all the time?” I asked him. “Maybe it’s not going to make anything better by trying to remember now that I’m doing so well.”
“Let’s keep going, Pat,” Dr. Lambert suggested, gentle as always. “I think this is helping you.”
Dr. Lambert might have been the first man I ever trusted enough to believe him when he said what he thought was best for me. When men had told me that in the past, deep down, I’d felt that there was something they expected in return, that what they said was good for me was in fact good for them.
This was just one of the realizations that began to unfold about my so-called successful, well-adjusted life, and each one was painful, to be sure, but after each session, I felt a new kind of lightness, too, as layers of memories were recovered and replaced with a more integrated understanding of what I needed and how to find it. So much of my life, I realized, was driven by people pleasing. I didn’t want to be disliked or rejected, so I wasn’t as courageous as I could have been, going along when I shouldn’t have.
I could have been a leader even earlier if I’d used my natural leadership attributes—but I was too busy testing people’s feelings for me instead of saying, “This is who I am, with these imperfections.” All along, there were good men who’d wanted to marry me, but I wouldn’t even give them a shot; what if they found out my secret and learned I wasn’t perfect? Of course, I was in a double bind; I couldn’t be perfect because of the incest, yet I was constantly trying to be that way.
There were times I thought I was looking for forgiveness… for myself and, perhaps, even for my father. But I wasn’t ready to even think about how to do that. Dr. Lambert encouraged me to stay focused on how to integrate the past with my present, how to take in the transformational changes I was going through and make them a part of my life, not to compartmentalize them again into a victimization or even to search for compassion or forgiveness. That might come later, he assured me, but for now, our work centered on recovery of memory and of the little girl I left behind with the past. She needed to be heard, seen, loved.
DURING ALL THIS time, I was in a loving and committed relationship with a man I thought I would marry. For the first time since my divorce, I came very close to making a lifetime commitment. But once I started therapy, we began to have trouble. I had to find ways to stuff it all back down into a dark secret place after each session because the truth of what I was remembering was too hard for him to hear. A father himself, he couldn’t imagine the possibility of a father violating a young daughter this way, even though he knew that it happens to millions of girls around the world. Most are living and dying with this secret shame and pain. I didn’t talk about the sessions, and we tried to go on with our life outside Dr. Lambert’s office as if I weren’t going into the hell of recovered abuse every Saturday.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end for us, as I recognized that this was someone with whom I couldn’t communicate my deepest secrets and pain. Being asked to remain complicit in keeping my silence was too great a burden. I realized that I still didn’t have unconditional love, and I was ready to take another more holistic and emotionally healthy look at my relationships at work and in life.
I felt that I needed to acknowledge the little girl with big secrets, to remember her and honor her. I began to understand the connections between so much of who I was now and that little girl who had, in spite of what had happened to her, never given up—on herself or on men or even on unconditional love. I needed to offer myself more love and self-compassion. I began to try to appreciate myself more, seeing myself more fully instead of focusing on all the ways I wasn’t measuring up. I’d never before looked at my life and said, “Well, this is pretty successful,” instead always pushing forward to the next thing. Now I started to pause and appreciate my achievements. I could stop moving forward as a way to run away and instead construct the rest of my life as a way forward toward a more integrated life.
It would take a few months before I could make it through a day and night without a private episode of tears. I kept hosting and producing Woman to Woman throughout my therapy, and the work helped, not only as a distraction but also because I actually felt I was getting better. My therapy continued to make me an even better listener, more compassionate, and even more convinced of the positive effects of sharing stories.
Toward the end of our sessions, Dr. Lambert and I talked about the need to confront my father with the truth.
“You’re doing pretty well, Pat,” he told me, but he didn’t think I could fully get rid of the shame, anger, and guilt if I didn’t tell my father that I remembered. “You know, your father has had the luxury of either assuming you don’t remember or believing that you maybe were more complicit—so he’s relieving himself of the guilt in that delusion.”
The matter had some urgency: my father was sick. A three-pack-a-day Camel smoker, he had cancer that was spreading quickly.
“He’s going downhill fast. You need to come home,” Mother called to say, unaware of course that I would be arriving with a different purpose than providing comfort to a dying man. All the way on the cross-country flight, I rehearsed what I would say, imagining his various responses. Was I seeking an apology? Would that seem so slight for such an injury? An explanation? That was what I really wanted, to understand how and why this otherwise decent man—a military officer who cared for his men, a deacon in the church, a kind grandfather to my son—could do what he did to his only daughter. No matter what I would hear for explanations or excuses, I told myself, I wasn’t ready to forgive or forget again.
My father died before I could confront him, and at the funeral, I cried more than anyone… not from sadness but from anger. I had wanted and needed that moment of recognition. It didn’t come, and I was once again stuck with my dark secret. I couldn’t confront my mother now in this time of grief and loss, and it seemed insensitive, even selfish, to share such potentially devastating information with my brother, who adored my father, or my son, who idolized him.
So I returned to California, newly determined to move on past the memories, the therapy, to reclaim my active and accomplished life. But I did feel different inside. I had a new understanding about the lasting impact of the ultimate violation of trust: this theft of unconditional love from a child who needed it to be able to separate simply being loved from needing to do something to earn love. This was a critical understanding that I now intended to apply to all the rest of the choices I was making about my life and my work.
I never got to close the circle with my mother either. She developed Alzheimer’s disease—the deepest kind of forgetting—and the one time I tried to tell her, the pain in her eyes alerted me to go no further. And until the writing of this book, I’ve never shared this with my brother or son. They both know now.
I’VE SHARED THIS personal story to raise awareness of the vast number of women carrying the lasting wounds and pain of incest, and coping with this violence and violation in their lives now.
I also hope to encourage any who have not dealt with their past or current abuse to do so. You may not know that the woman walking beside you as a friend or colleague or whose life you wish to emulate likewise survived incest to move forward to success and even happiness. Millions have survived and thrived and found their way to some kind of resolution. I’m one of them and I am grateful for being at a place in my life now where I am willing to risk the disbelief and even blame, which is possible when the perpetrator is family, because I believe my story might free others to break their silence and to survive the shadows.
DANGEROUS TIMES CALL FOR DANGEROUS WOMEN
In Conversation with Christine Schuler Deschryver
From my very first meeting with Christine Schuler Deschryver in Bukavu, Congo, I knew that I was in the presence of a tenacious woman who had survived more dangers and seen more violence than I could begin to comprehend.
Christine spent more than twenty years working for a nonprofit in her beloved Congo, trying to help women who had been raped during the fifteen-year war fought there on the battlefields of women’s bodies. She found herself at her lowest point when she held a nine-month-old baby who died in her arms following a gang rape. She despaired of ever making enough of a difference to the women who lined up by the dozens outside of Panzi Hospital, hoping for a spare bed so their insides could be put back together after horrific sexual violence.
Then she met Eve Ensler, who partnered with Christine to realize the dream of a community where the survivors of the epic sexual violence in Eastern Congo could be healed, physically and emotionally. Eve, with the support of V-Day activists and others, raised the funds to build a healing and leadership community center called City of Joy, a safe haven built brick by brick by the survivors themselves. More than 1,200 survivors have come to City of Joy since the opening in 2010 to receive skills and training that make it possible for them to transform their pain to power, to be prepared to become the leaders who can return to their villages and help build a far better future for the Congo. Time magazine called City of Joy the single most effective healing and training for survivors of sexual violence they’d ever seen, and a very successful Netflix film documents the extraordinary work that Christine leads there.
In a quiet moment of self-reflection during a recent visit, she answered my questions about how she became a dangerous woman.
What led you to become a dangerous woman?
Christine: I became a dangerous woman in 1998, during the [Congolese Rally for Democracy] rebellion, when a rebel group was fighting to overthrow President Kabila. I became dangerous for these rebels because I did not want to go along with their policies. I got involved in social mobilizations that we initiated in order to carry out citizen actions and civil disobedience against the rebellion. It was also the year they killed my best friend and her husband. I had felt danger on a daily basis and now I had to become dangerous myself.
What keeps you going in this work when you live with so much danger and violence?
Christine: Congolese women always have inspired me on my personal journey toward dangerousness. I always get encouragement from people who want things to change and who are willing to become a part of revolution to bring about change in the world. I have always been encouraged by people outside Congo who risk danger to come and support our work to heal and train women—people who know that in order for Congo to be free of violence and to have a future, women must be free to become leaders.
How does being considered a dangerous woman affect your work and life?
Christine: Being considered a dangerous woman is a huge challenge in my community because of the way our patriarchal Congolese society misunderstands the true meaning of dangerous woman. I constantly have to fight against the stereotypes and customs that degrade women. I sometimes frighten men—the officials and decision makers—because they know how committed I am to changing the lives of Congolese women; to fighting against the violence and abuse; to giving more women a chance to become dangerous enough to resist and to lead the change.
What advice do you give to other women confronting the dangers of violence in their lives, community, or country?
Christine: My best advice comes from Eve Ensler: “Focus only on what you can do and be the brightest light wherever you are, even in hell.” I tell others that if they want to become dangerous women, they need to stride boldly beyond the shadow of fear, to persevere when they try to frighten us into submission, and to seek allies to take action!