When Fairbairn was asked, “But could not the child simply reject the bad objects?” he answered, “No, for however bad the parents may appear to be, the child cannot do without them; the child “is ‘possessed’ by them, as if by evil spirits.”39 This claim is demonstrated in the experiences of Stephanie (one of the survivors I interviewed who was raped by her grandfather and ignored by her parents). Stephanie claims that her abuser inseminated her with evil through incest: “It has always been my firm conviction that you were not born sinful, that somebody had to plant a seed of sin deep inside of you.”
Fairbairn sees the task of therapy as one of releasing bad objects from the unconscious. For him, the psychotherapist is the true successor to the exorcist. “[The therapist’s] business is not to pronounce the forgiveness of sins, but to cast out devils.”40 One among my many aims in this project is to help the reader see that adaptive coping behaviors emerge for the survivor of incest largely to repress the post-traumatic terror—which often feels as real as the atrocious abuse events themselves. A further traumatic sense is due to the terror of betrayal—having no social (outer) acknowledgment of or protection from such a horror. Such adaptive behaviors—as multiple personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, creating a false-self, self-injury, binging, starving, or binge-purging—are often adaptive aspects of surviving a traumatic childhood. Too often the aftereffects and the survivor of incest herself are quickly labeled pathological. Such easy dismissal is tantamount to denying her the integrity of her survival skills and the devastating impact of her incest history.
Early Onset of Abuse
Seven of the nine women interviewed suffered their first sexual violation in the first five years of life. Two remember being in diapers when they were first violated. An early onset of sexual trauma is one shared theme.
“In your memory, when did the abuse start?”
Stephanie remembered being abused at age three. She claims, “It’s my first memory ever.” She was left at her maternal grandparents on the weekends:
At night my (maternal) grandfather would come in and I would see his face with eyes glazed over, looking at me. His eyes are a particularly terrifying memory to me. This weird smile. He’d then hold a pillow over my face and would touch me with his hand and genitals, and my sister says she’s had weird dreams of remembering him doing that to me in the same way, that she witnessed it.
Threats of violence may always be present even if violence is not exercised. Feeling terrorized, Stephanie spoke of feeling “so alone.” Stephanie’s sister, twenty years later, confirmed Stephanie’s experience of incest in the family right after being raped by a stranger—the family abuse memories burst into her consciousness.
Haddock grew up in a family where incest was the way her parents, grandparents, and relatives related to the children. The vehicle for the incest was a religious cult. This cult group performed ritual abuse and held religious ceremonies41 that usually involved sadistic violence against children and animals. Every adult relative of Haddock’s belonged to this cult and participated in sadistic incestuous abuse.
I remember Aunt Maude was masturbating me for sure at 18 months. I don’t know—if she’s the only memory I have, I just remember her long red fingers inserting themselves inside my little kid vagina. I have no memories of anal abuse, although I was given enemas before the ceremony ... apparently it was part of their technique to arouse the child so the damage was minimal. Uncle Tom was first. I mean, he—he just shoved it in . . . and there’s blood all over the place and I’m gone. And then behind Uncle Tom, hidden from my view was my dad, and he’s masturbating and he comes up and performs oral sex, and there’s blood all over his mouth, and his eyes are like in Mars. He has no—it’s like I’m not even a person. Then he puts his penis inside me, and then he thrusts—but he pulls out and ejaculates on the floor. And then—that’s the end of the memory. There is blood all over these guys. I only saw my dad excited like that once—once more in my life, it was Aunt Maude’s funeral when he was looking at my six-year-old cousin Mike. So I believe dad’s a pedophile, pure, plain, and simple.
Emotional numbness, sometimes referred to as emotional anesthesia or an “arrest in the development of affect,” characterizes the most severely traumatized children. In the worst case, the child may become psychologically dead and psychically closed off. Haddock speaks of being gone in reference to how she coped with the horror of her abuse. She then repressed these threatening feelings in childhood because there was no other way to survive them. There was no place for her to be validated in them. She split-off a range of feelings to cope and did not even “know” or remember what happened to her until she found a safe place to go to be heard and supported in integrating these hidden emotional fragments of herself.
In the case of Natalie, she is not able to recall the full details of what happened to her, which is far more common in incest reporting.
I’m not sure exactly when my dad started molesting me. It could have been even in infancy, but I know it was going on when I was about three, and possibly up through five, six, maybe later than that. So I’m not really sure about when it started and when it ended but I know it was happening when I was three, four, five . . . and the way that I know is because I’ve gotten in touch with that part of me that has body memories. And that’s how old I am at that—at that stage.
Many survivors can remember detailed images, feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes as clearly as though the abuse were happening in the moment. Most find their memories to be confusing and vague. Important parts of the story may be missing, and survivors may have difficulty putting the pieces together to form a complete narrative with an accurate time sequence. Although traumatic childhood memories are deeply engraved, they are not stored or retrieved in the same way as ordinary memories. Many survivors have a period of amnesia after the abuse, followed by delayed recall. In a recent, careful follow-up study of two hundred women with documented childhood histories of sexual abuse, one in three did not remember the abuse twenty years later. In 1992, a well-funded organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation sprung up arguing that victims of sexual abuse are brainwashed to think they are victims by their support groups and overzealous therapists. Such a group takes the spotlight off alleged perpetrators and places it back on victims of sexual crimes in the family—a familiar focus that keeps the cycle of public and family denial in place.42
Samantha also has a vague sense of her incest experience,
I think my abuse was—I think it must have been when I was really, really little. Something happened where I was penetrated orally and vaginally while my diapers were being changed, I think by my nanny—like I have this image of a screaming baby. I mean it’s a feeling of terror, you know? Another time, when I was twelve, I can even remember the dress I was wearing. I remember my mom saying to my father, “Samantha is growing breasts.” My father got this look on his face that I—you know, once I remembered it, I see it before me. It—this sort of [long pause] ecstatical—it was, you know ecstatic happiness, sort of, “Oh, look, I am going to be a really bad little boy here.” I don’t know, I can’t explain it. And he came over and felt my breasts.
With a deep sense of despair, Samantha sighed, “My whole life has been affected as a result of abuse, and it’s hard to know whether the damage was mostly sexual, physical, or emotional, because all of it went on.”
Women who abuse children in their care often are reenacting their own abuse or are expressing hostility or projected self-hatred.43 Other mothers, like Samantha’s, do not directly abuse the child but facilitate the abuse of their daughters by the men in their family and minimize the offenses against them by normalizing sexual objectification in the family. Samantha’s mother would often bring her