Toxic Parents (20 page)

Tracy, who seemed very businesslike when she described how her insurance-salesman father graduated from watching her undress to fondling her genitals, cried several times as she talked about her mother:

I always seem to be angry with my mother. I could love her and hate her at the same time. Here’s this woman who’d always see me depressed, crying hysterically in my room, and she’d never say one goddamned word. Can you believe that any mother in her right mind wouldn’t find it unusual to see her own daughter in tears all the time? I couldn’t just tell her what was going on, but maybe if she’d asked . . . I don’t know. Maybe I couldn’t have told her anyway. God, I wish she could have found out about what he was doing to me.

Tracy expressed a wish that I have heard from thousands of incest victims—that somehow, someone, especially their mother, would discover the incest without the victim’s having to go through the pain of telling.

I agreed with Tracy that her mother was incredibly insensitive to her daughter’s unhappiness, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Tracy’s mother had any knowledge of what was going on.

There are three types of mothers in incest families: those who genuinely
don’t
know, those who
may
know, and those who
do
know.

Is it possible for a mother to live in an incest family and not know? Several theories contend that it is not, that every mother would somehow sense incest in her family. I disagree. I am convinced that some mothers truly don’t know.

The second type of mother is the classic silent partner. She wears blinders. The incest clues are there, but she chooses to ignore them in a misguided attempt to protect herself and her family.

The final type is the most reprehensible: the mother who is told of the molestation by her children but does nothing about it. When this happens, the victim is doubly betrayed.

When Liz was 13, she made one desperate attempt to tell her mother about her stepfather’s escalating sexual assaults:

I really felt trapped. I thought if I told my mother she would at least talk to him. What a joke. She almost collapsed in tears and said . . . I’ll never forget her words: “Why are you telling me this, what are you trying to do to me? I’ve lived with your stepfather for nine years. I know he couldn’t do this. He’s a minister. Everyone respects us. You must have been dreaming. Why are you trying to ruin my life? God will punish you.” I couldn’t believe it. It had taken so much out of me just to tell her, but she just turned on me. I ended up comforting her.

Liz began to cry. I hugged her for several minutes as she relieved the pain and the grief of her mother’s all-too-typical response to the truth. Liz’s mother was a classic silent partner—passive, dependent, and infantile. She was intensely preoccupied with her own survival and with keeping the family intact. As a result, she needed to deny anything that might rock the family boat.

Many silent partners were abused children themselves. They suffer from extremely low self-esteem and may be reenacting the struggles of their own childhoods. They usually become overwhelmed by any conflict that threatens the status quo because they don’t want to confront their own fears and dependency. As is often the case, Liz wound up taking care of her mother emotionally, even though it was Liz who most needed support.

A few mothers actually push their daughters into incest. Debra, a member of Liz’s incest group, told a particularly shocking story:

People tell me I’m pretty—I know men are always looking—but I’ve spent most of my life thinking I look like the creature from
Alien.
I’ve always felt slimy, you know, disgusting. What my father did to me was bad enough, but what really hurt was my mother. She was the middleman. She set up the time and place, and sometimes she even held my head in her lap while he did it. I kept begging her not to make me do it, but she’d say, “Please, honey, do it for me. I’m not enough for him, and if you don’t give him what he wants, he’ll go find some other woman. Then we’ll be out on the street.”

I try to understand why she did what she did, but I have two children of my own and it seems like the most inconceivable thing that any mother could ever do.

Many psychologists believe that silent partners transfer their wife/maternal role to their daughters. This was certainly true of Debra’s mother, though it is unusual for this transfer to be done so overtly.

But in my experience, most silent partners do not so much transfer their role as abdicate their personal power. They don’t usually push their daughters to replace them, but they allow themselves and their daughters to become dominated by the aggressor. Their fears and dependency needs prove more powerful than their maternal instincts, leaving their daughters unprotected.

T
HE
L
EGACY OF
I
NCEST

Every adult who was molested as a child brings from his or her childhood pervasive feelings of being hopelessly inadequate, worthless, and genuinely bad. No matter how different their lives may appear on the surface, all adult victims of incest share a legacy of tragic feelings, The Three D’s of incest: Dirty, Damaged, and Different. Connie’s life was severely distorted by The Three D’s. As she described:

I used to feel like I went to school with a sign on my forehead that said “incest victim.” I still think a lot of the time that people can look right inside me and see how disgusting I am. I’m just not like other people. I’m not normal.

Over the years, other victims have described themselves as feeling like “the Elephant Man,” “a creature from outer space,” “an escapee from the funny farm,” and “lower than the lowest scum on earth.”

Incest is a form of psychological cancer. It is not terminal, but treatment is necessary and sometimes painful. Connie let hers go untreated for more than twenty years. It took a terrible toll on her life, especially in the area of relationships.

“I D
ON’T
K
NOW
W
HAT A
L
OVING
R
ELATIONSHIP
F
EELS
L
IKE
”

Connie’s feelings of self-disgust led her through a series of degrading relationships with men. Because her first relationship with a man (her father) involved betrayal and exploitation, love and abuse were woven tightly together in her mind. As an adult, she was attracted to men who enabled her to reenact this familiar scenario. A healthy relationship, one involving caring and respect, would have felt unnatural, out of sync with her view of herself.

Most incest victims have an especially difficult time with adult love relationships. If by chance a victim should manage to find a loving relationship, the ghosts from the past usually contaminate it—often in the area of sexuality.

R
OBBED OF
S
EXUALITY

Tracy’s incest trauma seriously affected her marriage to a kind and caring man. She told me:

My relationship with David is falling apart. He’s a terrific guy, but how long can he put up with this? Sex is just terrible. It always has been. I don’t even want to go through the motions anymore. I hate his touching me. I wish sex had never been invented.

It’s quite common for a victim to feel revulsion at the thought of sex. This is a normal reaction to incest. Sex becomes an indelible reminder
of the pain and betrayal. The tape starts playing in her head: “Sex is dirty, sex is bad. . . . I did terrible things when I was little . . . if I do those terrible things now, I’ll feel like a bad person again.”

Many victims talk about being unable to have sex without being haunted by flashbacks. They try to be intimate with someone they care about, but in their minds they are vividly reliving the original incest traumas. During sex, adults who were victims often see or hear their aggressors in the room with them. These flashbacks bring up all their negative feelings about themselves, and their sexuality fizzles like a doused fire.

Other incest victims, like Connie, use their sexuality in self-denigrating ways because they’ve grown to believe that sex is all they’re good for. Though they may have slept with hundreds of men in exchange for a little affection, many of these victims still feel repelled by sex.

“W
HY
D
O
G
OOD
F
EELINGS
M
AKE
M
E
F
EEL
B
AD
?”

A victim who, as an adult, has managed to become sexually responsive and orgasmic (and many do) may still feel guilty about her sexual feelings, making them difficult if not impossible to enjoy. Guilt can make good feelings feel bad.

In contrast to Tracy, Liz was very responsive sexually, but the ghosts from the past were no less intrusive:

I have lots of orgasms. I love to have sex every way possible. Where it gets really bad for me is afterwards. I get so depressed. When it’s over, I don’t want to be held or touched.. . . I just want the guy to get away from me. He doesn’t understand it. A couple of times when sex has been especially good for me, I had fantasies about killing myself afterwards.

Even though Liz experienced sexual pleasure, she still had intense feelings of self-loathing. As a result, she needed to atone for this
pleasure by punishing herself, even to the extent of visualizing suicide. It was as if by having these self-abasing feelings and fantasies, she could somehow make up for her “sinful” and “shameful” sexual arousal.

“I C
AN’T
P
UNISH
M
YSELF
E
NOUGH
”

In the preceding chapter we saw victims of physical abuse turn their pain and rage against themselves—or in some cases against others. Incest victims tend to follow the same patterns, releasing their repressed rage and unresolved grief in a wide variety of ways.

Depression is an extremely common expression of suppressed incest conflicts. It may range from a general sense of sadness to nearly total immobilization.

A disproportionate number of incest victims, particularly women, allow themselves to become overweight as adults. The weight serves two important purposes for the victim: (1) she imagines it will keep men away from her, and (2) the body mass creates a false illusion of strength and power. Many victims become terrified when they first begin to lose weight because it makes them feel helpless and vulnerable once again.

Recurrent headaches are also common among incest victims. These headaches are not only a physical manifestation of repressed rage and anxiety but are also a form of self-punishment.

Many incest victims lose themselves in a haze of alcohol and drug abuse. This provides a temporary deadening of their feelings of loss and emptiness. However, this delay in confronting the real problem only prolongs the victim’s suffering.

A great number of incest victims also seek punishment from the world at large. They sabotage relationships, seeking punishment from the ones they love. They sabotage themselves at work, seeking punishment from colleagues or employers. A few commit violent crimes, seeking punishment from society. Others become prostitutes, seeking punishment from pimps, from patrons—or even from God.

“T
HIS
T
IME
I
T’S
G
OING TO
B
E
B
ETTER
”

There is a baffling paradox in the fact that no matter how painful their lives have been, a great number of incest victims remain fused to their toxic parents. The pain came from those parents, but the victims still look to them to alleviate it. It is very hard for adult incest victims to give up the myth of the happy family.

One of the most powerful legacies of incest is this never-ending search for the magic key that will unlock the treasure chest of your parents’ love and approval. This search is like emotional quicksand, bogging the victim down in an impossible dream, preventing her from getting on with her life.

Liz summed it up:

I keep thinking that someday they will reach out and say, “We think you’re wonderful and we love you the way you are.” Even though I know that my stepfather is a child molester, and even though my mother chose him and didn’t protect me . . . it’s like I need to have
them
forgive
me.