Toxic Parents (36 page)

A day did come, however, when Ivy was astounded to meet an emancipator. “Who are you?” asked Ivy in wonder. “I am your Fairy Godmother, otherwise known as Susan of the North. Pack your bags and make it snappy. You are about to be uprooted.” Ivy panicked. “But there’s no way over the river,” she cried. “Yes there is,” cooed Susan victoriously. “You may ride on my outrage. It has carried me far, and it will carry you too.”

Clinging to the outrage that no one had ever held for her before, Ivy allowed herself to be jet propelled—swept up and out of the valley of her discontent.

In addition to her insights, Tracy’s wonderful use of imagination and humor allowed her to recapture some of the playfulness that was so badly trampled in her childhood.

Some of my clients protest when I assign the fairy tale, claiming that they can’t write or that the assignment is frivolous. But the fairy
tale always turns out to be one of our most moving and healing exercises.

L
ETTER TO
Y
OUR
P
ARTNER

Your next letter should be to your partner. If you have no spouse, lover, or live-in companion, a former lover or ex-husband will do (remember, you do not have to mail this letter). Explain to him or her how your childhood trauma is affecting your relationship. You don’t have to take responsibility for every problem the two of you have, but your inability to trust, your need to be compliant, and your experience of sexuality may be taking their toll. The most important thing about this letter is that you talk openly and honestly about what happened to you. This is an important part of letting go of your shame.

L
ETTER TO
Y
OUR
C
HILDREN

Your series of letters ends with a letter to each of your children. If you have no children, you may write to the child you plan to have, or to the child you never had. Use this letter to reaffirm your ability to love and to understand that by experiencing your pain and coming through it, you are gaining the inner strength to be a better parent.

The Power of Role Playing

In group, after all the letters are read, we set up brief improvised scenes to deal with issues brought up in the letters. I have found these psychodrama or role-playing scenes to be a wonderfully insightful and effective means of working through the incest trauma and dealing with the other concerns in my clients’ lives.

Role playing cuts through the intellectualizing and denial that
you may be using as a defense against your feelings. It offers you a chance to express the full range of your emotions toward family members before you are ready to face them. It provides a safe atmosphere for you to try out new behaviors. All of these factors are essential for successful treatment.

Three months into group, Connie was feeling strong enough to mail her letters to her father and mother. But she realized that once her letters arrived, she would need a lot of support. I asked her whether her husband, Wayne, could provide it, and she sheepishly admitted that she still hadn’t told him about her father’s sexual abuse.

Like most incest victims, Connie was convinced that he would lose his attraction to her, that it would make her disgusting and repellent to him. Even though she had many years of evidence that Wayne was a loving, supportive man, her anxiety still prevented her from revealing her painful secret. But now she needed him to know.

To help ease Connie’s fears, I asked her to use role playing in group to rehearse telling Wayne before she ventured to attempt the real thing. We played out a number of scenes with myself or another group member playing Wayne and reacting in a variety of ways, ranging from total acceptance to total rejection.

In one particularly dramatic scene, Connie herself played Wayne so that she could try to experience some of his feelings. I played Connie. After telling “Wayne” about what my father had done to me, I told him what I needed from him.

SUSAN (as Connie):
I really need your love and support right now. I need to know that none of this makes any difference to you and that you don’t hate me or think I’m dirty.

CONNIE (as Wayne):
Of course I don’t hate you. I just wish you had told me sooner so I could have been there for you. If anything, knowing this makes you even more precious to me. I’ve always known that there was something painful inside you that made you so suspicious and angry all the time, and now that I know what it is, it all starts to make sense. I wish I could do something to make the hurt go away, and I wish you had trusted me enough to have told me sooner.. . .

At this point Connie stopped the role playing.

CONNIE:
I could really feel his love for me when I was being him. It’s going to be all right. I know it is. And if it isn’t [she smiled], I’ll just punch him out.

You can use role playing to embolden yourself to break the silence. When Connie actually told Wayne about her childhood, she found that the rehearsals in group had eased her anxiety considerably. Wayne was indeed as understanding as she had sensed he would be, and his support throughout the remainder of her therapy was enormously helpful to her.

Exercises for Healing the Inner Child

In addition to the letter writing and the role playing, there are a number of extremely potent group exercises for healing. Following are two of the most powerful.

R
EWRITING
H
ISTORY
—T
HE
“N
O
” E
XERCISE

If you’re like the great majority of incest victims, you don’t know how to say “no.” You may believe you are powerless, that you have to do whatever anyone asks. These beliefs have their genesis in your expereince of having been coerced, intimidated, and humiliated by a powerful parent.

To give yourself a rebirth of power, close your eyes and visualize the first time you remember being molested, but this time, change what happened. See the room where it took place. See your aggressor. Put your hands out and push your aggressor away, saying, “No!
You can’t! I won’t let you! Go away! I’ll tell! I’ll scream!” Visualize the aggressor obeying you. Watch him turn around and leave the room, becoming smaller and smaller as he walks out the door.

Even though you may feel considerable pain over the fact that you couldn’t do this at the time, this rewriting of history is an exciting and empowering exercise. As Dan said:

God, I would have given anything in the world to have been able to really do that. But even doing it now really put me in touch with strengths I didn’t even know I had. None of us was able to protect ourselves then, but we can sure as hell learn to do it now!

C
HOOSING TO
B
E
A C
HILD
, C
HOOSING TO
B
E AN
A
DULT

One of the most poignant group exercises we do involves members playing themselves at whatever age their molestations began.

In this exercise, it’s important to recapture the feelings of being a child. To help you do this, try sitting on the floor—chairs and sofas are for grown-ups. Remember that little kids don’t speak like adults—they have their own vocabulary and their own ways of perceiving the world. Once you’ve formed your group of abused children, tell your group leader about the “weird stuff” that’s going on in your house. The other “children” can ask questions as well as comfort you. In the following excerpt from a recent group session, Connie had a major breakthrough.

SUSAN:
Hi, sweetie, how old are you?

LITTLE CONNIE (in a childlike voice):
Seven.

SUSAN:
I understand that your daddy is doing some really yucky stuff to you. It can help if you tell us all about it.

LITTLE CONNIE:
Well. . . it’s real hard to talk about. I feel real ashamed, but my daddy . . . he comes into my room and he . . . he pulls my panties down and he touches me and he licks me . . . you know, down there, on my pee-pee. Then he rubs his pee-pee on my leg and he breathes real hard and after a while this gooey white stuff comes out and then he tells me to get a towel and clean it up and he tells me if I ever tell anybody he’ll beat me up.

SUSAN:
How do you feel when your daddy does those things to you?

LITTLE CONNIE:
I feel really scared and sick in my tummy. I guess I must be a really bad girl for my daddy to do this to me. Sometimes I just wish I could die ’cause then he would know how icky I feel and if I was dead he’d have to stop doing that to me.

At this point Connie’s “tough guy” defenses crumbled. The other members of the group formed a circle around her and cradled her as she wept for several minutes.

Between sobs, Connie told us that she hadn’t cried for years and that she was frightened by how defenseless it made her feel. I assured her that freeing up her soft, vulnerable side would be a great source of strength, not weakness. The frightened, hurting child inside her wouldn’t have to hide anymore.

After your “child” has had a chance to express herself, and has been comforted and validated, you need to make a conscious choice to return to your adult self. Stand up and experience the size of your body. Feel your adult power. The ability to return to your adult self is a source of great strength that you can summon whenever you feel like a helpless child.

These are just a few of the many group exercises that your therapist may draw from. Along with letter writing and role playing, the group exercises are major steps along the road to devictimization.

Confronting Your Parents

As I write this I feel a deep sadness at having to warn you that the people who were supposed to nurture, love, and protect you will, in
all likelihood, assault you emotionally when you dare to tell the truth. Everything I’ve told you about confrontation goes double when you confront the incest aggressor.

• You must have a strong support system.
  

• You must rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse.
  

• You must have shifted your beliefs about who is responsible.
  

• You must be prepared to significantly change your relationship with your parents, or even to sacrifice it.
  

If your parents are still together you can confront them at the same time or separately. However, I have found that in incest cases, it is usually less explosive to confront parents separately. Confronted together, parents of incest victims often close ranks to defend their marriage against what they perceive as an all-out attack. In that case, it will be two against one, and it becomes especially important for you to have a support person with you.

While there is no way to predict how any aggressor will react, confronting him by himself does seem to take some of the heat out. Your aggressor may deny that the incest ever happened, may become enraged and leave the session, may attack your therapist for encouraging you to hurt the family, may try to minimize his crimes, or may even acknowledge what he did. You must be prepared for anything. If he
does
acknowledge his crimes, beware of excuses. Aggressors often try to manipulate their victims into feeling sorry for them.

Though the steps of confrontation are the same as with other toxic parents, there are some very specific things you need to include in “this is what I want from you now.” Your aggressor’s response to these requests will be your only accurate indicator of your future relationship with him.

Here’s what you want:

1. Full acknowledgement of what happened. If the aggressor claims not to remember, ask him to acknowledge that even though
   he
   doesn’t remember, it must be true because
   you
   remember.
   

2. An apology.
   

3. Full acceptance of responsibility and explicit removal of any responsibility from you.
   

4. Willingness to make reparations. For example, he can go into therapy, pay for your therapy, apologize to other people in your life for the pain he’s caused, and be available to talk about this with you when you need to.
   

A word of warning: apologies can be very seductive and can create false hope that things will change significantly in your relationship. If apologies are not followed by behavioral changes in the aggressor, however, nothing will change. He must be willing to
do
something about the problem. Otherwise, apologies are empty words that will only set you up for further hurt and disappointment.

Obviously, few victims get a positive response to all or even most of these requests, but it is essential for your growth that you make them. You need to define the ground rules for any future relationship. You must show clearly that you will no longer live with lies, half-truths, secrecy, and denial. Most important, you must make it clear that you will no longer accept the responsibility for the violence committed against you—that you are no longer willing to be a victim.