I may have blogged about this before but it bears repeating. Trying to help child sexual abuse survivors is a thankless business for the most part. I know the stats: 60 million survivors in the United States alone, and that’s just the ones reported, the tip of the ice berg. I offer tested help for people who have been abused, not only with my Lamplighter movement but with my books: REPAIR Your Life: A Program for Recovery from Incest & Childhood Sexual Abuse, REPAIR For Kids, and REPAIR For Toddlers. We will soon be publishing a REPAIR Your Life Workbook. The Lamplighter movement currently has 74 chapters in 14 countries. I am terribly proud of each and everyone of my facilitators. They work constantly to get people to come to their chapters. It’s a tough job. I know all the excuses: “It didn’t impact my life” (check the Abuse Victim Profile on our website http://www.thelamplighters.org), “I’m too old to try recovery”, “I wasn’t penetrated so it doesn’t count,” “My family would disown me”, “I’m too ashamed,” and many more. Lately I’ve been thinking about a comment I heard from my granddaughter. She referred to that “yucky sex book” I had written.” I know it’s yucky, you know it’s yucky, the world knows it’s yucky. So what! If you’d been beaten and robbed and it impacted your emotional well being would you refuse to get counseling and refer to it as that “yucky beating”? It’s a body! Get over it! Get help if you need it. When I was a kid I was punished because I used the word “body”. My husband was spanked for using the word, “back end.” Today we don’t want to think about child sexual abuse because it has to do with someone hurting our “body”, our “back end”. Doesn’t that strike you as weird? Someone hurting our body should be a number one reason why we should get help.
Something else dawned on me lately. I remember when I was in my late teens hearing someone joke, “Incest is all right as long as you keep it in the family.” That one sentence terrified me. I did not have the courage yet to face the nightmare of what had happened to me when I was thirteen. I have a feeling there’s a lot of people out there who think that sex between a father and a daughter is consensual on the part of the daughter and that’s why it’s such a disgusting subject. I mean they must have wanted it if they went along with it. If it was rape why didn’t they get help? Why didn’t they report it to the police? I’ve heard these comments before and they make me very angry. Why would anyone think that sex between a father and a daughter was consensual? Is getting robbed and beaten consensual. I mean you must have wanted it otherwise why were you in the vicinity where it happened? Why didn’t you have your house better protected? No one would ever say that. Yes, getting raped or sexually abused is “yucky”. But it’s more than that. It’s terrifying, humiliating, painful emotionally, physically and mentally. It can destroy your life if you don’t get help.
I’m going to reiterate my definition of child sexual abuse from my book REPAIR Your Life: “Webster defines incest as “sexual intercourse between persons too closely related to marry legally.” It is a simple, almost clinical description that does not in any way imply trauma or abuse. The all-encompassing and often unspoken reality is much broader. Anyone in a position of power who coerces a person of lesser power into any sort of boundary violation dealing with their sexuality, either emotionally, mentally, or physically, is a sexual abuse perpetrator. This includes a grandfather who pins his granddaughter down while he fondles her breasts; a father who insists on watching his daughter, against her wishes, while she bathes; an older brother who forces his sister to do oral sex; and any other such boundary violation from the most minor to actual forcible entry and rape. It does not have to be a family member to have the same resultant despair. That despair, whether by a family member or an outsider, can be a life sentence of pain.
Please, if you need help, get it. Check out my website. I’m here to help. I’m evidence that the REPAIR Your Life works. It took me from being married to my third abuser, suicidal, in acute despair and living part time in a women’s shelter to being the happiest person I know. When I completed my recovery program my motto was: “If I’d have known life was going to turn out this good I would have started it sooner.” Reach out to the Lamplighters. We understand. We’ve been there.
