Toxic Parents (35 page)

Letters

I ask every group member to write one letter a week, especially in the beginning. They write these letters at home, then read them aloud to the group. Although no one is
required
to mail their letters, many group members
choose
to, especially when they begin to feel stronger. I ask my clients to write their letters in the following order:

1. to the aggressor(s)
   

2. to the other parent (assuming that one parent was the aggressor; adults who were molested by a family member other than a parent need to write first to the aggressor and then to each parent)
   

3. to the damaged child from your adult self
   

4. a “fairy tale” about your life
   

5. to your partner or lover (if you have one)
   

6. to each of your children
   

After this series of letters is completed, I ask my group members to begin the series again. In this way the letters become not only powerful
tools for healing but clear barometers of progress. A letter written during the first few weeks of therapy will be very different, in both tone and content, from a letter written three or four months later.

L
ETTER TO THE
A
GGRESSOR

In the first letter—to the aggressor—I want you to let it all out, to get as outraged as you can. Use phrases like “how dare you . . .” and “how could you . . .” as often as possible. These phrases will make it easier for you to contact your outrage.

When I first met Janine, a gentle, petite, blond 36-year-old, she rarely spoke above a whisper. Her father had molested her from the time she was 7 until she was 11—but Janine was still clinging to the hope that she could somehow win his love. She was especially reluctant to acknowledge her inner rage at him. She wept through her initiation and was noticeably uncomfortable when I asked her to write her father a letter. I encouraged her to use her letter to get outraged at how her father had hurt and betrayed her. I reminded her that her father didn’t ever have to see this letter.

From our work together, I expected her first letter to be tentative, full of yearning and wishful thinking. Was
I in
for a surprise:

Dear Dad,

You’re not really “dear” and you only got to be my dad because you shot your sperm into Mom one night. I hate you and I pity you. How dare you violate your own little girl?

Where’s my apology, Dad? Where’s my virginity? Where’s my self-respect?

I didn’t do anything to make you hate me. I didn’t try to turn you on. Are little girls tighter, is that it? Do small new breasts make you hard, you bastard? I should have spit on you. I hate myself for not having the courage to fight you. How dare you use your power as my daddy to rape me? How dare you make me hurt? How dare you not talk to me?

When I was really little you’d take me in the ocean and hold my hand and we would go through the waves, remember? I had your blue eyes, I trusted you. I wanted you to respect me so bad. I wanted you to be proud of me. You were more to me than just a child molester, but you didn’t care, did you? I won’t stand for pretending it didn’t happen anymore. It did happen, Dad, and it’s still alive in me.

Janine

Janine’s letter brought more feelings to the surface than hours of talking ever could have. She was frightened by the intensity of her feelings, but comforted by the knowledge that she had a safe place to explore and express them for the first time.

Connie—the redheaded loan officer whose father had molested her from an early age and who later acted out her self-loathing by sleeping with hundreds of men—had entered this same group several months before Janine. Connie displayed a quick temper and had an aggressive, angry way about her. I called her my “tough guy,” but I knew how small and vulnerable she really felt. In her first letter to her father, Connie’s feelings spilled haphazardly across the page, without boundaries, without form. But when Connie read her second letter to her father, it was clear that both her feelings and her perceptions had become much more organized and focused:

Dear Daddy,

A lifetime has passed since I wrote my first letter for Susan’s group—so much has changed. When I started you were still a terrifying ogre and in some ways I had become like you. Incest was bad enough, but I also had to live with your violence and threats of violence all the time. You were a bully and a tyrant. How dare you steal my childhood from me? How dare you ruin my life?

I’m finally beginning to put the pieces together. You are a very sick, disturbed man. You used me in every way that a man can use a person. You made me love you in ways that no father should make a daughter love him and I was powerless to stop you. I don’t feel normal, I feel dirty. Things have been so bad and I have behaved in such self-destructive ways that anything, ANYTHING that changes has to be an improvement.

I can’t solve your problems or Mother’s problems but I can solve mine. And in the process, if either or both of you are hurt, there is nothing I can do. I didn’t ask to be molested.

Connie

As Connie expressed her outrage she was able to leave behind much of her self-hatred and self-disgust. The more this happened, the more she strengthened her commitment to personal growth and healing.

L
ETTER TO THE
S
ILENT
P
ARTNER

After you’ve written your letter to your aggressor, you’ll write to your other parent, in most cases your mother. If you think your mother didn’t know about the incest, this letter may be the first time you’ve put these experiences into words for her.

If you think your mother
did
know about the incest, or if you actually told her while it was going on, there is an enormous amount of outrage that you need to express to her: outrage for the lack of protection, for being disbelieved or blamed, for having been used as a sacrificial lamb to keep a destructive marriage and a destructive family intact, and outrage at having been less important to your mother than her need for financial security or maintaining the status quo.

Connie’s letter to her mother offers a poignant example of the tremendous ambivalence most incest victims feel toward their mothers. The letter began with a recounting of the sexual abuses she had suffered from her father. She moved on to express her view of her mother’s role in this family drama:

. . . I feel that you betrayed me, too. Mothers are supposed to protect little girls, but you didn’t do that. You didn’t take care of me and because of that he hurt me.

Didn’t you want to see? Or didn’t you care enough to see? I’m so angry at you for all the lonely scared years I had. You abandoned me. Peace with him was so damned important to you that you sacrificed me to him. It hurt so much to know that I wasn’t important enough to protect. It hurt so much that I shut my pain away. I can’t even feel things like a normal person. My parents not only stole my childhood, they stole my emotions, too. I hate and love you so much that I’m really confused. Why didn’t you take care of me, Mommy? Why didn’t you just love me? What was wrong with me? Will I ever get any answers?

Connie’s eloquent expression of her confusion echoes the confusion felt by all incest victims about why their mothers failed to protect them. As Connie put it, “Even animals protect their cubs.”

L
ETTER TO THE
D
AMAGED
C
HILD

In many ways the letter to the damaged child within you may be the most difficult letter for you to write, but it may also be the most important. This letter begins the process of “reparenting” yourself.

Reparenting means to dig deep within yourself to find a loving, validating parent for the hurting child you still carry inside. This is the parent who, through this letter, comforts, reassures, and protects that part of you that is still vulnerable and frightened.

Many of you who were sexually abused as children have become alienated from your inner child. Your shame translates into contempt and loathing for that “tainted,” helpless child. To defend against some of these extremely painful feelings, you may have tried to disown this child, but the child within you can only be hidden, not abandoned.

In this letter I want you to embrace that child and reintegrate him or her into your personality. Be a loving parent. Give the child
the nurturing and support you never had. Make the child feel loved and worthwhile for the first time. Dan—the engineer who was sexually abused by his father during his entire childhood and adolescence—had long felt loathing for the little boy he once was, the little boy who was too weak to resist his father. This portion of his letter to that little boy shows how dramatically those feelings had changed after only a few group sessions:

Dear Little Dan,

You were a beautiful child, an innocent. You were pure love. I’m going to take care of you from now on. You were talented and creative. I’m going to express you. You’re safe now. You can love and you can let love in. You won’t be hurt. You can discern now. I’ll take care of us. I’ll pull us together. We were always apart, playing different roles, learning to cope. You’re not crazy. You were afraid. He can’t hurt you anymore. I’ve stopped taking the alcohol and drugs that were concealing your anger, your rage, your sadness, your depression, your guilt, and your anxiety. You can let go of those feelings now. I’ve stopped punishing us, like he did. I’ve surrendered to God. We are worthwhile. I am worthwhile. The world we made up is over now. We are waking up. It still hurts, but not as much. And it’s finally real.

Dan

Dan used this letter not only to communicate with the child within but to reassure himself that his decision to renounce drugs and alcohol was a self-affirming step. He understood for the first time, as he wrote this letter, the connection between his self-defeating behavior and his childhood pain.

T
HE
F
AIRY
T
ALE

After you have written these three letters, I want you to write a story describing your life in fairy-tale language and images. You’ll write
about yourself as the little princess or the gentle young prince who lived with evil kings or ugly monsters or dragons in dark forests or crumbling castles. You’ll write about the incest as the Black Plague or the thunderstorm or the end of joy or whatever your imagination creates.

This fairy tale is the first assignment you’ll write in the third person; instead of using the point of view of “I,” you’ll write about “he” or “she.” This will help you see your inner world from a new, more objective perspective, putting some emotional distance between you and your childhood traumas. By referring to the little girl as “her” instead of “me,” the sharp pain of your experiences will begin to fade. When you bring your feelings to life through symbols, you will be able to deal with them on a level you’ve never approached before, and you will come away with a new, clearer understanding of what happened to you.

The only limitation I set is that your fairy tale, despite its sad beginning, have a hopeful ending. After all, the fairy tale is an allegory for your life, and there
is
hope. You may not really believe that when you begin this work, but by writing optimistically about your future, you will start to draw more positive pictures in your mind. This is especially important for people who cannot imagine a happy future for themselves. By imagining a better life, you can begin to develop concrete, attainable goals, and once you have goals, you have something to inspire you.

I’ll never forget the day Tracy—who was molested by her insurance-salesman father—read her fairy tale. It was very long, so I’ve included only parts of it here, but the truth and the hope she was able to find through this exercise forever changed her perspective on her situation:

Once upon a time lived a little plant in a rather isolated valley surrounded by mountains. The little plant, whose name was “Ivy,” [an acronym for “incest victim”] was quite miserable, so she would often gaze over the river, secretly wishing to escape to the other side.

Ivy’s little corner of the world was ruled by the notorious King Morris Lester, known to most everyone as Moe. You’ll notice that when you put the nickname and the surname together, you come out with Moe Lester, and what you hear is actually what you get.

Moe had a passion for tender young plants. When Ivy was just beginning to bloom, Moe spied her and was taken by the fact that she was ripe yet as green as could be. Moe performed one ill deed after another with Ivy, but even so, she held him in reverence and treated him like a king.

Moe had no shame at all, but what he lacked, Ivy made up for. Poor Ivy withdrew from the world almost completely, and in her terrible aloneness she had only one companion: Gil Trip.

Gil was a lowly creature who slithered all over Ivy, nibbling at her leaves, her stem, and her roots. It was Gil, as much as anyone else, who kept Ivy sick and shackled in that valley.