patient while I learn to parent her. She seems satisfied with that. She doesn’t trust adults, but she thinks I’m a lot better than most grown-ups. She likes me. Maybe not full-out, but
she does like me. She has seen me parent my son and she trusts me to proceed with integrity. I’m educable, she has decided.
She’s such a smart, alive, spunky little thing. If she thinks I can do it, I can do it. She’s an excellent judge of character. I’m hopeful. I have a new chance. I begin now.
You can draw pictures or play hide-and-seek in twilight. One woman got her husband to read her children’s books every night be-fore going to sleep. Another sat down bebe-fore she went to bed and wrote a letter to the child within. “I’d tell her all these nice things.
And then I’d get up and read it in the morning.”
Your job is to give that child pleasure and to listen to the stories she has to tell. As one survivor, Gizelle, explained:
I began to listen to her and honor her, to do nice things for her. I needed to be her mother. That awakened my own healing energy. And I began to respond to that child: whether she needed to wear soft clothes, or eat an ice cream cone, or watch I Love Lucy, or sit out in the flowers. She knew what she needed to heal.
And this I’m discovering more and more. She will guide me. She’s the one who’s been wounded. She knows if she
needs to be held. There may be times she just needs to have her hair brushed. She knows and I do as much as I can. I hold myself. I stroke myself. Or I rock. I comfort the child.
(See more of Gizelle’s story.)
(See the basic method for writing exercises, page 25.)
This is a chance to talk to the child within. If you’re capable of loving and comforting the child within, if you can let your adult self express the compassion you have for this child, write to her now and let her know. You can write a letter directly to her. Or you can engage in a written dialogue with her, first writing as the adult, and then as the child responding.
If you don’t feel any allegiance, tenderness, or connection with the child yet, start with how you honestly feel. You can’t write “I love you, I’ll take care of you” if that’s a lie. Start with: “I’m willing to sit down and write to you even though I’m not quite sure you exist,” or
“I don’t sympathize with you yet,” or even, “I hate you. You got me into this mess to begin with.” Any point of contact is a start. You can’t have a loving relationship until you make contact. Take the first step.
If you feel totally alienated from the child in you, imagine anoth-er child the age you wanoth-ere during your abuse. Try writing to hanoth-er in-stead.
This is a good exercise to do more than once, particularly if you’re not starting from a place of compassion. Eventually you’ll be able to tell the child she’s not to blame, that she’s innocent, and that you’ll protect her.
What I’ve had to tell myself again and again is “Trust yourself.” When my body tells me to stop, I stop. When my body tells me to go, I go. I used to push myself beyond my limits, and I’d always get sick. Now I’ve learned to listen so I don’t have to go to that point. I trust myself because I’m my own greatest healer. Even the best therapist can’t help me heal unless I lis-ten to my body.
When children are abused, their perceptions become threatening to them. To acknowledge that the neighbor who pushed you on the swings and gave you birthday presents was also the man who made you suck his penis was unbearable. To admit that your father, who went to work to support you and stayed up late to make you a doll house, had a scary smile on his face when he touched your genitals was too terrifying. So you pretended they weren’t doing these things or that these things were really all right. The lengths to which chil-dren go to distort their perceptions are striking.
When my father would come into my room at night, I would think, “That’s not my father. That’s an alien being.”
I’d look at these people doing these things to me and think,
“Invaders have taken over their bodies.” And these invaders were doing things to me. The original was still out there
somewhere and why wouldn’t they come back? I’d think,
“Daddy, why did you let those aliens take your body over?”
If the significant adults in your life told you that your experiences didn’t really happen, or that they happened in ways radically different from the way you perceived them, you probably became confused and distressed, unsure what was real.
A father can touch his daughter’s breast and explain it away by saying, “I’m just tucking you in.” A daughter can tell her mother that her stepfather touched her in a funny way. The mother can respond,
“Oh, honey, that was just a dream.”
Family members aren’t the only ones to perpetuate this invalida-tion. Many young girls try to tell teachers, counselors, ministers, or other adults, only to be told, “You must be mistaken. Your Uncle
Jimmy is a deacon in the church.” Survivors have gone to therapists for help and been told, “You should be over that by now,” or “It was just your brother; all kids do that.”
It can also be terrifying to trust your inner voice if you’re afraid of what it will tell you. One survivor explained: “My greatest fear is that if I listen to my insides, I will become crazy like my Mom. She’s often said to me, ‘You have the same kind of powers I do.’ So the message is if I listen to my insides, I will really become off the wall.
If I listen to my inner voice, I will drift into my own inner world, which is really crazy.”
Although you may find it difficult to have faith in your own per-ceptions, it is possible to develop the capacity to trust your inner voice.
Within all of us, there is an inner voice that can tell us how we feel. If it’s been covered over, or if you are not practiced at listening to that voice, it may be very small, just a pipsqueak. Yet it is there.
And the more you listen and act on it, the stronger and clearer that voice will grow.
* Sometimes, the Inner Voice is referred to as the Fragment of God, the Spark of Life, the Mystery Moni-tor, or the Thought Adjuster. The best description of this phenomenon you can find in the Fifth Epochal Revela-tion, Paper 107: Origin and Nature of Thought Adjusters.
In child assault prevention programs, children are taught to iden-tify the voice inside that warns them that something isn’t right. They refer to this voice, intuition, as the uh-oh feeling. With encourage-ment, children easily recognize this feeling as danger—uh-oh, some-thing’s wrong here.
The uh-oh feeling is the one that tells you if you’re in danger on the street. It tells you to cross the street and walk the other way. It’s the sixth sense that warns you that something is about to happen.
Everyone experiences her inner voice differently. You may have bad dreams. You may get headaches. You may become exhausted.
You may have a sudden urge to binge on crackers. Or you may notice you’ve cleaned the house twice in two days. The important thing is not what you experience, but that you recognize it as a message.
Ellen discovered a few years ago that every time she was about to make a poor decision for herself, she’d get a tight, anxious feeling in her stomach:
Looking back, I could see that that simple physical warn-ing had been there throughout my life, but I’d never before given it a hearing. I’d never stopped and said, hey, what is this squeamish feeling in my stomach telling me? Once I be-gan to listen and to respect this feeling, I bebe-gan making much better decisions for myself. Now, whenever I feel it, I stop what I’m doing and take a minute to trace where the feeling originated. This information has been immensely valuable.
For more on getting in touch with your inner voice, see “Feel-ings”.
Sometimes I think I’m going to die from the sadness. Not that anyone ever died from crying for two hours, but it sure feels like it.
As a survivor of child sexual abuse, you have a lot to grieve for.
You must grieve for the loss of your feelings. You must grieve for your abandonment. You must grieve for the past and grieve for the present, for the damage you now have to heal, for the time it takes, for the money it costs, for the relationships ruined, the pleasure missed. You grieve for the opportunities lost while you were too busy coping.
And sometimes the losses are extremely personal:
I don’t remember ever being a virgin. It wasn’t fair. Eve-rybody else got to be one. It has always really hurt me. I still have a real anger that that was taken away. Nobody asked. It was just gone. I didn’t have that to give. I know that’s just
“The American Dream,” but I heard that dream the same as any other woman did. Whether it’s important now or not, it was to me.
If you maintained the fantasy that your childhood was “happy,”
then you have to grieve for the childhood you thought you had. If your abuser was a parent, or if you weren’t protected or listened to, you must give up the idea that your parents had your best interests at heart. Part of grieving is replacing the unconditional love you held for your family as a child with a realistic assessment. Your childhood may have been completely awful. On the other hand, there may have been a lot of good times mixed in with the abuse. If you have any lov-ing feellov-ings toward your abuser, you must reconcile that love with the fact that he abused you.
You may have to grieve over the fact that you don’t have an ex-tended family for your children, that you’ll never receive an inher-itance, that you don’t have family roots.
You must also grieve for the shattered image of a world that is just, where children are cared for, where people respect each other.
You grieve for your lost innocence, your belief that it’s safe to trust.
And sometimes, you must even grieve for a part of you that didn’t make it:
I went down to see the children inside me. The first one I noticed just sat on the curb in my abdomen. She’d sit there with her head in her hand, looking very sad, or she’d be jumping up and down, being manic. Then there was one in my heart who would sit in a room behind a door. She’d open the door and peek out, and then shut the door, ‘cause she got scared. Then there was the one who was dead. I’d been wait-ing for her to wake up. And one day I was lywait-ing in bed cry-ing, and I said, “Okay, it’s time for you to wake up,” but she was dead. I sobbed and mourned that a part of me had died.
The part of me that had really wanted to believe in the good of the family and the good of everyone just died.
Some survivors grieve not just for themselves, but for the abuse that was done to the people who abused them, for the generations of victims continuing to perpetuate abuse. A woman who was abused by her mother explains:
There was a lot of grief, lots of tears realizing I didn’t have the kind of family I thought everybody else had. It really hurt. It still hurts. It comes in waves. Those kinds of tears go real deep. It’s a sadness for what I didn’t have; it’s also a sadness for my mother. It hurts that she’s so sick. It hurts that she never realized her beauty, and still doesn’t. Because she had so much self-hate, she had to abuse me. For a long time I was angry about that, but then there was a stage of grieving
for her because she is beautiful, she is loving; it’s just that her sick side is overwhelming to her.
Buried grief poisons, limiting your capacity for joy, for spontane-ity, for life. An essential part of healing from traumatic experiences is to express and share your feelings. When you were young, you could not do this. To fully feel the agony, the terror, the fury, without any support would have been too devastating to bear. And so you sup-pressed those feelings. But you have not gotten rid of them.
To release these painful feelings and to move forward in your life, it is necessary, paradoxically, to go back and to relive the experi-ences you had as a child—to grieve, this time with the support of a caring person and with the support of your adult self.
What you need to heal is not fancy or esoteric. It is remarkably simple, though for many survivors it has been hard to find. All you need is the safety and support that enable you to go back to the source of your pain, to feel the feelings you had to repress, to be heard, to be comforted, and to learn to comfort yourself.
And in this way, a transformation takes place. Once you have ful-ly felt a feeling, known it and lived in it, shared it, acted it, given it full expression, the feeling begins to transform. The way to move be-yond the grief and pain is to experience them fully, to honor them, to
express them with someone else, thus assimilating what happened to you as a child into your adult life.
You may feel foolish crying over events that happened so long ago. But grief waits for expression. When you do not allow yourself to honor grief, it festers. It can limit your vitality, make you sick, de-crease your capacity for love.
Grief has its own rhythms. You can’t say, “Okay, I’m going to grieve now.” Rather you must allow room for those feelings when they arise. Grief needs space. You can only really grieve when you give yourself the time, security, and permission to grieve.
After I had been in therapy for several months my whole self began to respond to that environment, within which I could allow my feelings. There were weeks I entered the building, went up the stairs, checked in with the receptionist, all with a smile on my face and cheerfulness in my step. Then I’d enter the office, my therapist would close the door, and before she’d even get to her chair, I’d be crying. Deep within me I held those feelings, waiting until I knew there would be time and compassion.
In order not to stifle your feelings of grief, take this period of mourning as seriously as if someone close to you had died. One sur-vivor, whose abusive parents were still very much alive, spent many months dressed in black, telling everyone her parents had died. An-other woman wrote a eulogy for her abuser, imagining herself at his grave, telling everyone exactly what she would remember him for. A third held a wake. Rituals such as these can be powerful channels for grief.
I wrote a divorce decree from my mother, because I kept having these dreams of wanting to cut the umbilical cord and her not letting me. I just couldn’t figure out how to separate from her. We weren’t talking. We weren’t seeing each other, but I was still feeling too connected.
You may not be inclined to ritual or ceremony. You may simply cry a lot. As one woman put it: “I hadn’t cried in years. It’s only re-cently that that’s been restored. I’m not sure I’m happy about it. It’s like Niagara Falls at times.”
However you grieve, allow yourself to release the emotions you have struggled all your life to smother. Grieving can be a great relief.