Toxic Parents (34 page)
On the other hand, the family member may give you some surprising validation and even an apology on your parents’ behalf. This happened to Kim—whose father controlled her with money and unpredictable moods. Even though her father had been dead for more than five years, she felt the need to confront some member of the family. She decided on her father’s younger sister, Shirley, and invited her to lunch.
At the session following their meeting, I could see that Kim was clearly delighted with the results.
You know, everybody was always in awe of my father. He was the superstar of the family and Shirley always acted like she adored him. So you can imagine how hard it was for me to tell her what a bastard he had been to me. But the damnedest thing happened when I did. She told me she had always been afraid of my father, that he was horrible to her when they were kids, and that she wasn’t at all surprised by anything I was telling her. Then she told me—and this was the best—that about eight years ago she gave him a brown shirt for his birthday—you know, the kind the Nazis used to wear. She said she wanted to sew a swastika on it but that would have been going too far. We laughed, we cried, it was wonderful. The people at the restaurant must have thought we were nuts.
When Shirley opened up to Kim, she was saying, in essence, “I understand how you feel and I know that it’s all real and true.” Kim found that by taking the experience back to the generation from which it came, she was able to release a lot of her pent-up anxiety and guilt about the reality of what her father had done to her.
I realize that this technique may seem unkind, since in most cases these relatives are not responsible for your negative experiences. But you have to weigh the pros against the cons. If using a relative as a substitute parent helps you to heal self-defeating mental and emotional wounds, it certainly seems worth subjecting that
relative to a possibly unpleasant conversation that may cause temporary upset.
There’s No Such Thing as a Bad Confrontation
Confrontation is the climactic phase in the journey toward autonomy.
No matter what happens during or after any confrontation, you come out a winner because you had the courage to do it.
Even if you didn’t come home with a trophy, even if you didn’t get to say everything you’d planned to, even if you became defensive and ended up explaining yourself, and even if your parents got up and walked out on you . . .
you still did it.
You have told the truth about your life to yourself and your parents, and the fear that kept you trapped in your old role with them can no longer control you.
14 |
Healing the Incest Wound
P
rofessional help is a
must
for adults who were sexually abused as children. Nothing in my experience responds more dramatically and completely to therapy, despite the depth of the damage.
In this chapter I’m going to show you the treatment techniques that I have devised and refined in the process of working with more than a thousand incest victims. I am showing them to you because I want you to see how much hope there is for you and how extraordinary your recovery can be. I do
not
, however, want you to attempt this work on your own.
If you are currently in therapy, I suggest you encourage your therapist to do this work with you. This particular treatment process has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The roadmap is specific and clearly marked. If you follow it, you will reclaim your dignity and self-respect.
I know that some therapists and incest clients prefer the term
incest survivor
to the term
incest victim
, and that’s fine. But for me,
incest victim
is a more accurate description of the individual’s experience. I am certainly sympathetic to this semantic attempt to ease the pain, as long as the word
survivor
is not used to deny how much work needs to be done.
“Why Do I Need Therapy?”
If you were molested as a child, all or most of the statements on the following list will be true for you.
You have deep-seated feelings of unworthiness, guilt, and shame.
You are easily used and exploited by others.
You believe everybody else is more important than you are.
You believe the only way to get love is by catering to the needs of others at the expense of your own.
You have a very difficult time setting limits, expressing anger, or saying “no.”
You draw cruel or abusive people into your life and are convinced that you can get them to love you or be nice to you.
You find it difficult to trust, and you expect people to betray you or hurt you.
You are uncomfortable with sex or your sexuality.
You have learned to act “as if” things are okay when they’re not.
You don’t believe you deserve success, happiness, or a good relationship.
You have a difficult time being playful or spontaneous.
You feel you never had a childhood.
You often feel angry at your own child or children and resent the fact that they have it better than you did.
You wonder what it would feel like to be normal.
These patterns of victimization started early. They are tenacious and difficult to break by yourself, but therapy can successfully end their hold on your life.
C
HOOSING A
T
HERAPIST
It is important to shop for a therapist specifically educated or experienced in working with incest victims. Many therapists are unqualified in this highly specialized area, and virtually no therapists learn anything about incest in graduate school. Question each prospective therapist about his or her special training and experience. If he or she has not worked with incest victims before or has not attended any workshops, seminars, conferences, or classes on incest treatment, I suggest you find someone else.
Those who are trained in family dynamics, and who use action-oriented techniques such as role playing, make the best therapists for incest victims. Freudian psychiatrists make the worst, because Freud significantly reversed his original (and accurate) positions on both the prevalence and the damage of incest; as a result, many Freudian psychiatrists and psychoanalysts meet their patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse with skepticism or disbelief.
In the last decade many self-help groups for incest victims have been formed around the country. While these groups do provide some support and a sense of community to many incest victims, they lack the guidance of a therapist with the expertise to provide structure and direction for the work. A self-help group is better than no group at all, but it’s far better to be in a group led by a professional.
I
NDIVIDUAL OR
G
ROUP
T
HERAPY
The best way to work through the incest experience is to join a group made up of victims like yourself led by a therapist who is experienced and comfortable with the issue.
One almost universal symptom of incest is a feeling of total isolation.
But when you’re surrounded by people talking about feelings and experiences that sound just like yours, the isolation begins to fade. Group members nurture and support you. In essence, they say: “We know how it feels, we believe you, we hurt for you, we care about you, we want you to be the best you can.”
There are very few people who do not thrive in group, although most people are apprehensive about it at first. You may feel tense and self-conscious about talking about “it” in front of other people. Believe me, those feelings usually last no more than ten minutes.
A small number of incest victims are too emotionally fragile to handle the intensity of group. For them, one-to-one therapy is the alternative.
I always put male and female victims together in group. The gender may be different, but the feelings and traumas are the same.
The incest therapy groups at my treatment center are open-ended. This means that a new member can enter at any time. It also means that someone who is just beginning this work will be in group with people at different stages of progress. It’s wonderfully encouraging for a new group member to see someone ready to graduate and leave the incest experience behind.
T
HE
F
IRST
T
IME IN
G
ROUP
When a new client comes into group, we begin the session with an initiation exercise in which every group member tells about his or her incest experience: who it was with, what it involved, when it began, how long it went on, and who else knows about it. The new member goes last.
This initiation helps break the ice so that you can join the group in an active way. You will find yourself talking about your experience in detail for perhaps the first time. You will see that you are not alone, that other people have experienced similar traumas.
Your initiation will also continue the vital process of desensitization to the trauma for the other group members. Every time a new member is initiated, group members must repeat what has long
been unspoken. The more often this happens, the more everyone in the group is desensitized to the shame and the guilt. The first time through is very difficult for any new member. There is a great deal of weeping and embarrassment. By the third or fourth time the experiences become easier to talk about, and the embarrassment subsides noticeably. By the time someone has told his or her story ten or twelve times, it is not much more difficult than talking about any other unhappy life event.
Stages of Treatment
I take incest victims through three basic stages: outrage, grief, and release.
Outrage is the deep anger that arises from feelings of violation and betrayal of the very core of one’s being. It is the first essential part of this work and the most difficult.
Most adults who were molested as children have had plenty of practice at feeling sad, lonely, and bad. Grief is familiar to them, but outrage is not. As a result, they often try to skip over their outrage and move on to grief as quickly as possible. This is a mistake. Outrage
must
precede grief. Of course, it is impossible to keep intense feelings totally separate—there is grief in outrage and outrage in grief. But for the purpose of this work, they are distinct stages.
T
HE
V
ICTIM’S
O
UTRAGE
In order to put the responsibility firmly where it belongs, you must acknowledge your outrage and learn, in the safety of therapy, to let it out.
For many of you, this is easier said than done. You’ve spent years keeping the lid on. You may have repressed your outrage so effectively that you’ve become a submissive, self-sacrificing perfectionist. It’s as if you’ve been saying, “I’m not damaged and I can prove it by being perfect. I sacrifice everything for others, I don’t get angry,
and I do as I’m told.” Releasing your outrage is like uncapping a volcano. The resulting eruption may feel overwhelming.
If you’ve pushed your rage totally out of conscious awareness, you are also especially vulnerable to physical or emotional symptoms such as headaches or depression.
For others, the problem isn’t how to get in touch with their outrage, it’s how to control it. You may seethe with outrage at everyone around you except those at whom you’re really angry—your parents. You may have a perpetual chip on your shoulder, displacing your outrage from your parents to whomever happens to come along. You may act so tough and belligerent that you scare people away.
The techniques I’ll show you later in this chapter will allow you to externalize your outrage in
manageable
ways, to prevent you from losing control, and to allow you to open the pressure valve and let your outrage go.
T
HE
V
ICTIM’S
G
RIEF
During the healing process, you’re going to actively grieve over many losses—the loss of the “good family” fantasy, of innocence, of love, of childhood, of years that might otherwise have been happy and productive. This grief may overwhelm you. Your therapist must have the courage and the experience to lead you through it and bring you out the other end. As with any grief, there are no easy ways around it, no shortcuts.
R
ELEASE AND
E
MPOWERMENT
In the last stage of treatment, when you have exhausted your outrage and your grief, you will learn to take the energy they were consuming and use it to rebuild your life and your self-image. By this time, many of your symptoms will have either diminished significantly or become manageable. You’ll have a new dignity and a new sense of yourself as a valuable and lovable person. You will be faced
with a new option for the first time in your life—that of no longer feeling or behaving like a victim.
Treatment Techniques
The two primary techniques I use for treating clients are letter writing and role playing. I have also designed a number of group exercises that have proved especially helpful for incest victims and other adult children of toxic parents. These techniques can be used in both individual and group therapy. Since only a small percentage of the incest therapy at my treatment centers is done on an individual basis, I’ve selected my examples from group sessions.