When I was sixteen he encouraged me to have a boyfriend, and I actually did. His name was James. We were not sexual, except for kissing. My father encouraged me to talk about James. I gave him minimal information, but he always pushed. One evening after raping me, my father said, “Go out with James, have fun.” Unbeknownst to me, my father had given me this huge hickey, and when I met up with James, of course he noticed it right away. He asked where I got it, but I wouldn’t say. So he broke up with me. My father always had ways of trapping me like that.
What makes me so angry now is that I realize how much he knew and how much I did not know, and how much he took from me while he had absolutely no regard for me as a human being. That is the ultimate affront to the human spirit.
I used to think that my mother was not to blame. After all, I never told her about the abuse. But a memory that came back to me during therapy changed my view of her.
When I was about fourteen, my father needed a photo of himself for a literary magazine cover and decided to have me stand naked in front of him. He would be dressed all in black, his eyes closed. He had my mother take the picture. You could not make out my face, but my body was clearly visible. The idea was that the professor can resist the temptation of the naked woman. Through my therapy I realized that my mother was really a coconspirator.
My therapy has helped me to realize that I had no options during my childhood and adolescence and that the incest was not my fault. I now understand that my mother was weak and would not protect me. She did not want to see what was right in front of her eyes. Also, there was no modesty allowed in my home. My parents walked around naked and expected me to do so as well. I was ridiculed by both of them if I expressed a desire to behave modestly. I did anyway. There was not even a door on the bathroom. When I was twelve years old and wanted a bathing suit top, my mother teased me and said that I was to continue to go topless at the beaches. My mother was exploiting me at the pleasure of my father.
Coming to New York for college when I was eighteen, I felt like an immigrant from the beginning of the twentieth century, when everyone came here from war-torn or poverty-stricken places. I was out of my own private war zone at last. The first couple of years were especially difficult for me. I spent a lot of time numb or floating and would spout my father’s belief systems about art, music, and politics. His influence was huge and inescapable.
Even though I’ve been free of my parents for several years now, I still heard my father’s voice inside my head controlling me at times for the first years that I left home. As the years move on, his voice is quieter and quieter. My therapist assures me that someday it will be so faint I will barely hear it. And after that I will not hear it at all.
Getting some perspective has helped me to begin to forgive myself. I still feel depressed at times. During my adolescence I developed severe headaches and frequent nausea, which I continue to suffer from. Some days I feel worthless. But I realize now that as a child and adolescent I did my best to keep myself alive. My mother was passive and frightened of the world. My father defined her every move. He molded her and tried to mold me, too. But with me he did not succeed.
It’s taken a while, but I have begun to see things through my own eyes. I have started to hear my own voice. Three years ago, I changed my name so I would no longer have to share a name with my father. I will never go back to Holland, and I will never go back to what my life was. I have choices and freedoms, and I accept my incest as something that happened to me. But it no longer defines who I am.
At the time I was being molested, I thought I was the only one. My father controlled everything in our house, and he always said that what was happening to me was natural and that I should accommodate him. Even though I have to look back sometimes, I am moving forward. And even though it’s painful for me to face my mother’s complacency, doing so has helped me understand that it wasn’t my fault. If I could have read something at the time about sex abuse, if people had talked openly about it, I could have been saved so many years of guilt and shame and secrecy. Each time I talk about my incest, I get rid of some of that shame and guilt. Each person I share with, no matter what their response, takes another piece of the pain away. If my story has reached you, I am forever grateful.
Last week I had a remarkable dream. I was in the forest. Suddenly my father appeared. As I looked at him I had fire coming out of my eyes, rays of fire, and as I looked at him I was burning him with my eyes, and he became smaller and smaller and smaller, until he was as small as an ant and I stepped on him.
MY THOUGHTS
Even after Coral moved out of her house, her father still had power over her. For two years after her move to New York, she still did work for him, keeping up with lectures and submitting reviews to literary and academic magazines based in New York City.
It wasn’t until he sent her a pornographic version of “Cinderella” that she snapped. She had literally blocked out the abuse since she had this boyfriend, but seeing his pornographic re-writing of Cinderella, the incest all came back to her. She called him to say she would not represent the story and said, “I think you know why!” Then she started sobbing and cried over and over again into the phone, “Why did you hurt me? Why did you hurt me?” Of course, he did not answer. They hung up.
A few minutes later Coral’s mother called her, demanding to know why Coral would not help her father. It was then that she told her mother about the incest, and she urged her mother to get out of the house. Her mother was unhappy in the marriage since Coral had moved out. Her father had become more and more moody and full of rage, and she was looking for a way out. Coral gave her that way out, and she left her husband. That was three years ago, and Coral has not spoken to her father since. She confronted him that day on the phone and then decided to cut him out of her life.
Through therapy, Coral began to understand how both she and her mother were controlled by her father. She began to see her mother’s silent complicity regarding the incest and now understands her true place and function in the family. She was the sacrificial lamb, her father’s sexual object. And she served an important function for her mother, too, serving her father’s every need when her mother wasn’t there to do so, or even when she was. (It’s important to note that throughout the years of incest her father never stopped having sex with his wife or with prostitutes, from whom he contracted AIDS.)
After Coral disclosed her sexual abuse to her mother, her mother admitted that the marriage had disintegrated, and that her father was having sex with young prostitutes on a regular basis. It was then that her mother told her that her father had AIDS. She even admitted that she had continued having sex with her husband knowing he had AIDS.
Coral’s mother had grown up in a household without a father and with an emotionally abusive mother. Coral’s mother never had insight into her own home situation or sought any sort of counseling. At twenty, she married the first man who asked her, simply to get out of her mother’s house.
When Coral asked her mother what she would have done if she had told her about the incest as a child, she replied, “I really don’t know. I can’t say for sure that I would have left him, but now the marriage is really bad so I am ready to leave.”
Coral’s mother claims to love her, and I believe that she does—as much as she can love anyone. But this love has many limitations. She was never really capable of parenting Coral. Coral was left on her own from a very young age, and her mother was completely complicit in the incest. She did nothing to protect her daughter. She left Coral alone with her father for weeks at a time, even when Coral begged her not to travel without her. Never once did she tell Coral that she had choices.
Coral has described many incidents in which her mother failed to prevent her father from exercising his many forms of control and abuse. There was the time Coral describes in her own words above, when she was around twelve and she was trying on bathing suits. Her mother called her father in to see the suits, and he just laughed and said, “Sh
e will be topless on the beach!” So her mother took the tops away from Coral.
Holidays were never celebrated in Coral’s home. Once, when friends brought over a birthday cake for Coral, her father ridiculed her and her mother for participating in such a ridiculous ritual. Coral’s mother told her she could not have a birthday cake again.
And then there was Coral’s high school graduation. She wanted very much to attend, but her father forbade it and her mother backed him up. Coral could not receive her degree unless she attended, so in the end she did. Of course, she was one of the only graduates there without a family member in attendance.
Through Coral’s story, we come to understand how a girl who is strong and directed can nonetheless become the prey of a very strong and very sick man. Coral’s insights help us understand how a girl stays in the incestuous relationship. Coral did not know she had a choice. She lived in a world where her father’s word was the law. She coped by learning to numb her body so that she could barely feel the rapes. She intuitively knew that if she told her mother, nothing may have changed, and she endured the rapes rather than risk her mother not coming to her rescue.
The special place Coral could go in her mind during the rapes, with its song lyrics and lists and homework, saved her. Numbing her body and being totally disconnected from it helped her live through the parallel reality of being forced to be her father’s “lover” (as he called her) for six years. Also, because she spent so many summers in her early years at her paternal grandmother’s home with her cousins, she had a sense of being loved. Sometimes having just one person reach out with love can pull a girl through her trauma. Girls find all sorts of ways to survive incest. Some leave their bodies, others catalog plants in their head, some even develop a totally separate personality during the molestation. These are all survival strategies.
Coral is still with the same boyfriend. They now live together. They have been together for five years, and for the first time in her life Coral is able to enjoy sexual intimacy as a normal part of a romantic relationship, as an expression of love. Trusting her boyfriend and standing up for herself in the relationship are still big issues for her, and because she never learned to trust there is some tension. Coral struggled for a while to identify her pure artistic, intellectual, and musical sensibility and to weed out her father’s influence. But, as we learned earlier from other girls reclaiming their joy in life, she has reclaimed her love of music and not only composes but also teaches music to children and teenagers. She is kind and warm and makes any child comfortable and safe at the piano. She has reclaimed those terrified moments at her piano lesson over and over and over again. She has a sense of her agency in every aspect of her life now. She hopes that her truth has touched you in some way that will help you to triumph too.
As a girl, when she wasn’t being molested, Coral hung out with her friends and got into music and art. Garnet, another incest survivor, got into some pretty destructive behaviors after the molestation ended. She started smoking a lot of pot and cutting her arms, and she isolated herself from her friends. Garnet thought that all this would help her forget about her father molesting her, and it almost did—until he began to molest her sister.
GARNET
Garnet came to see me when she was nineteen. She was having trouble sleeping because she was afraid that her father, who had molested her over a time many years earlier, was now molesting her younger sister. The experience of her own molestation was also coming back to haunt her.
She had spent some of her young teen years cutting herself, and her parents and teachers never noticed. By the age of sixteen, she had a pretty serious drug and drinking problem. She’d been in a few bad relationships, had had bouts of serious depression, and always felt the shadow of her father’s abuse. By the time I met Garnet, she had begun to settle down. She was teaching two art classes to young children and was going to college. She was working hard in her courses and at the teaching, which she really liked. But when she began to suspect that her father was abusing her younger sister and confronted him, he denied it. He denied molesting her sister, and he denied molesting Garnet. He told her that she was imagining things and that she needed help.
She came to therapy to try to get some sense of what to do for her sister. Why didn’t she go to her mother? Because she didn’t trust her mother and was afraid that she would permanently reject her. In fact, by the time she wrote this story, she had told her mother and confronted her father, and they had both betrayed her.
GARNET’S STORY
My Worry Spot
I was brought up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. From the outside, my family looked oh-so-respectable. My mom is a high school guidance counselor, and my dad is a lawyer. We are Jewish, and when I was a kid we went to temple every Friday night. We looked like the perfect family—close and connected. But, behind closed doors, we barely spoke.
There are two kids in my family. I’m the oldest. My little sister is seven years younger than I am. Right before my adolescence, when my sister was a little kid, my dad started molesting me, and this went on for years. During adolescence, I got really depressed and started cutting myself. No one knew why—and they didn’t even really seem to care. The few times my mom clued in to my depression, she just sort of brushed it off and said stuff like, “Oh, whatever it is you’re going through, it will pass. Teens always get stressed out.” You see, for a couple of years my dad and I had been acting as if nothing sexual had ever happened between us. I thought I could just forget about it and move on.
My dad first molested me when I was around nine. I remember the first time it happened. We were watching wrestling on TV. My dad and I were sitting on this big easy chair. The fireplace jutted out of the wall, and there was a space between the fireplace and the wall. We moved the chair closer to the TV into that little niche in the wall.
My father put his hand around the top of my jeans. I thought, “This is weird.” Then he started to touch me. He groped around inside my underpants. I pushed his hand away and he put my hand under his butt and sat on it. I pretended nothing was happening and that I was just watching the wrestling. You see, my dad had always paid a lot of attention to me. He would take me hiking, he helped me with my homework, stuff like that. My mom was pretty checked out and never gave me much attention or showed much affection. My father was silent. He was putting his fingers in and around my vagina, and it really hurt. I do remember that, feeling the physical pain and then just watching the wrestling. (Needless to say, to this day I cannot watch wrestling. I have to go to the bathroom and vomit if I see it for more than a moment when the channels are changing.)
It’s hard for me to explain how I just let him do this to me. Sure, it is crazy to have your dad put his hands into your underwear, and I even surprised myself by not doing anything, but there was this odd combination of trust and fear and shame and terror that I did not want to deal with, so I actually pretended it wasn’t happening.
After that incident, my father was all nice to me again. For about two weeks everything was normal, and I tried to pretend it had never happened. Then one night my father came into my bedroom. I had a very high bunk bed, and he asked me to come down. I said no, I was tired, and he started climbing up the ladder. I’d tried to kid myself that I had forgotten all about the other incident, but obviously I had not. I got this creepy feeling all over and gave the ladder a shove. He fell onto his back. When he stood up again, he said with a sick grin, “What’s the matter, Garnet? Daddy just wants to kiss you good night.”
I was so scared. He told me that I was Daddy’s princess and that he would never hurt me. He asked me to please make him happy. Then he climbed into my bed and started to fondle me. He told me that this was the right thing and that it was time that I learned about men. He said that he would teach me what I needed to know. This felt really weird for about a minute, and then I blocked out the feeling and began to recite childhood hand-clapping games in my head (“Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac, all dressed in blac
k black black, with silver buttons buttons buttons, all down her back back back, she asked her mother mother mother, for fifty cents cents cents, to see the elephants elephants elephants, jump over the fence fence fence, they jumped so high high high, they reached the sky sky sky, and they never came back back back, till the fourth of July -ly -ly… Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac”). And then he was gone. I pulled up my panties and fell asleep.
My mother was involved in a lot of educational committees at the school she worked in, and many evenings my father stayed home and took care of me and my baby sister. Those were the nights I ended up in my father’s bed. It’s so strange. I don’t even know how I got in there. It was like I was in a fog. He’d laugh this sick laugh and call out for me, and the next thing I knew my wrists were being tied to the bedposts of my parents’ bed with this ugly pale purple scarf. It was one of those cheap ones from a ninety-nine-cent store. (I know that scarf is still in the house.) He always put a pillow over my head, too. He didn’t want to see me or me to see him.
I remember the first time he tied me up. All of a sudden his mouth was there. I remember thinking, this feels weird, but I just pretended water had gotten down there. I was just going into puberty. What the hell did I know? At first, I thought, I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay, but then I realized how totally gross this was, and I was desperate to focus on something else. Of course, it was always really hard to focus on anything with that pillow over my face; it was easier when my face wasn’t covered. I would try to pretend that I was floating in a fog, seeing beautiful colors.
He molested me in other parts of the house, too, and in the car; and he almost always kept my back to him. That made it easier for me, too. I could focus out the window of the car or at the TV.
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