I can easily travel back in my mind to that dark November night when my world shattered, drove me to my knees with fear and shame, guilt and despair. At the age of thirteen I was more like a child of nine. Our folks were very strict and did what they could to make sure we, as mom used to put it, “stayed a child forever”. When you’re not allowed to ask questions, you learn no answers. When everything you do is subject to a lecture and loads of negative energy, you build no self-esteem. Either you didn’t do it good enough and you had to do it over or you did it okay but, “young lady, there is always room for improvement.” Subject to continual daily controls: checking behind our ears to make sure we washed there, feeling under the bed covers to make sure we slept with our legs straight (otherwise, you’ll have poor circulation my mom said) and since I loved sleeping in the fetal position that meant my legs were always yanked down, asking permision to go to the bathroom, told never to interrupt adults, never have any opinions (“we’ll tell you, young lady, what your opinion on that is supposed to be”), prepare your examination of conscience for Saturday night confession (“young lady, don’t tell me you didn’t do anything wrong this week. If you think about it long enough you’ll find something to confess”) etc. I usually made something up although I’m not sure Fr. Sudbeck bought me committing adultery five times that week when I was only nine years old. I thought adultery had something to do with farming. At least that meant I’d have something to confess the next Saturday, lying to the priest.
Then just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, incest reared its ugly head and I was damned forever. Before then I had no fear, no shame, no guilt and no despair. I had no fear when climbing the tallest tree, diving off the highest rock, going to the cemetery at a full moon to tell ghost stories, hopping the freight car as it rumbled through town and climbing up the ladder to the top of the grain elevator where we played in bins of corn. (One of the Reick’s kids suffocated years later doing the same thing.) These were all regular playtime events for me. I certainly had no shame. I’d never done a single thing to experience that. And guilt and despair were strangers. The worst thing I ever did was to taunt my younger sister by singing the song, “Slowpoke” when she took too long to dry the dishes. I figured she deserved it. I couldn’t go outside and play till she finished her part. I think she dawdled on purpose since it was the only means of control she had over anyone. And despair? Nope, none of that. I was basically a happy, if overly controlled kid. I was audacious enough to find ways to get around my folk’s strict rulings.
These four responses: fear, shame, guilt and despair are the gifts your perpetrator leaves you. When I was in recovery many decades later I began listing my experiences into either PM or AM times. PM was “pre-molestation” and included qualities such as high spirited, confident, filled with good humor, optimistic and playful. Despite my parent’s rigid controls I managed to find meaning to life. But categorizing AM or “after molestation” was like entering another world, one that was dark and terrifiying, one where I had become another person and the real me was lost forever. When my mother found out about my father’s middle of the night raids she blamed me and her dreaded words the next day, “Get the belt, Bernie”, still have the ability to haunt me.
To take an innocent child and twist their life into a mangled mess where they are stripped of any joy and made to bear like four crosses, fear, shame, guilt and despair, is the worst crime anyone can ever do.
60 million survivors of child sexual abuse live in the United States alone and that is just the number of reported cases. The rest lie in murky shadows where the child lives, too fearful to get help for herself. What a dismal future they face. But there is a way out of their pain. They can be what I call REPAIRed. In recovery I learned how to repair myself. I had a lot of false starts, wrong roads I went down, people I trusted that I should have avoided and so on. But little by little I began a journey across what I called the Bridge of Recovery. Behind me lay all the darkness, all the pain, and in front of me was a whole different life, filled with emotional stability, happiness, healthy choices and a glowing light that wanted only to be entered into. I kept on going even on days when I wanted to lay my burden down and end my life instead. I wrote a memoir of my experiences eventually titling it “Let Me Hurt You and Don’t Cry Out”, which to me was the cry of the perpetrators. Looking back to where I’d been, helped me to figure out where I was going. When I emerged from recovery, I was the happiest person I knew and the motto on my desk read, “If I’d known life was going to turn out this good, I would have started it sooner.”
Child sexual abuse does not have to be a permanent sentence of fear, shame, guilt and despair. It is never too late to be REPAIRed.
