Years later, when Dr. Bradford told me about another meeting of incest victims to be held at the student counselling services in White Rapids, I was more prepared: Mark and Jenny were married then, and Uncle Walt and Cal were dead.
The participants were women of another generation, and again I envied those who remembered what’d happened to them. The incidents they related were pretty much the same, although they also added incidents that the women in that first meeting I attended wouldn’t have thought of as incest: fathers who questioned them minutely and constantly about what they did on dates, or followed them on dates as if they were in competition with their dates, giving their daughters flowers and negligees; fathers undressing in the room or entering their bedrooms when they were dressing; brushing against their daughters, engaging in dirty talk, and cuddling “Daddy’s little girl” on their laps long after childhood. They would tell a daughter how cold their mother was, and how the daughter could keep the family together, and threaten to kill the family pet if not allowed to show “their affection.”
Maybe times were changing, that things were being recognized for what they were, just as I was becoming more cognizant of the damage that’d been done to me. Whatever the reasons, there was an awareness now of how fathers convey their sexual preoccupations with their daughter’s sexuality—the effects I was still uncovering like some many layered onion. As soon as I’d conclude that there couldn’t be anything more to uncover, another layer would come off in the light of dreams, counselling, reading, and reflection, that’d make me feel I couldn’t breathe and was about to fall into a murky pit. Each time, each revelation would catch me off guard, and it would seem that I was about to shatter, as in the recurring dream of trying to scream and no sound coming when Uncle Walt bent over me in bed. I noticed at the meeting the emphasis placed on trusting gut feelings. It hadn’t been the case years before. This was progress—to be able to trust an inner sensor that what had gone on was indeed sexual. In response to the examples the women brought up, the counsellor noted that the definition of abuse was changing, becoming more inclusive. “An adult’s sexual traumatization of a child,” she stated, “is the betrayal of a minor by an adult who is in a position of authority and who exploits his own sexuality to dominate the child physically, spiritually, or psychologically. Incest is still held by many as being an unmentionable topic to be shoved under the rug.”
She seemed more knowledgeable than the one who spoke at the other incest meeting, but like before, the women were paying very close attention. She looked like a professor and maybe she was.
“Surveys have found that childhood sexual abuse is a very strong predictor of the likelihood of PTSD.” Likelihood, I reassured myself, doesn’t mean for sure. “The trauma most likely to produce PTSD has been established to be rape. Again, the word likely, provided reassurance that the dreaded word, rape, might not apply in my case. “Research has shown that trauma is the most severe when it is by a guardian of a child’s safety and well-being. The abused tend to take on aspects of the person who had abused them, since they’d had so much control and influence over them as a child.” That sent a ripple of dreaded apprehension through me, of being too near a cliff. “Victims usually didn’t abuse children themselves, but often adopted some characteristic of the one wielding so much power over them.”
I told myself it would be a cold day in hell before I’d be anything like my uncle, then realized with a racing heart that I’d used one of his expressions.
The counsellor sounded even more like a professor when she said, “Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t even in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association until 1980; even now, the disorder is often not diagnosed. Incest is a crime in which the victim is stigmatized as unstable, destined for victimization again if she tells, while the perpetrator almost always goes free. Some victims of abuse develop multiple personalities.” When she concluded, “Trauma destroys the synthesizing capacity of the brain, the normal connection of memory, emotion, and knowledge,” I wrote it down to try and figure it out later.
The women around me appeared more vocal about what they wouldn’t tolerate, and I was glad that this new generation of women didn’t need to see their reflections in men. I thought of the popular detergent ad in my generation: looking at the dishes you washed to see your reflection, proof that you were a good housewife, a normal woman. But I’d seen things written in chalk on the campus sidewalks revealing an undercurrent against women. A flyer that was distributed noted that one out of three, or four out of ten women have experienced some form of sexual abuse. Things were indeed changing, but they weren’t there yet; for me, not for any of us.
“Nervous breakdown,” someone said.
“I overdosed.”
“Not to tell”
“Destroy the family”
“What would people think?”
“Thought I was bad”
The voices blended together like a chorus in a Greek Tragedy or a Catholic litany.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”] By Carol Smallwood. Excerpt from Lily’s Odyssey (print novel 2010) published with permission by All Things That Matter Press. Its first chapter was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in Best New Writing. If you liked this excerpt, buy the book!
