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"The Experience of the Victim of Sexual Abuse:" A Reflection
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
June 14, 2002
Good Morning. I am honored to join the groups of speakers we have heard
so far today. It has been a morning filled with great gifts and great
grace. My own offering to you today is to contextualize the
characteristics of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse; to present the
experience of early sexual trauma through the lens of the victim; to
make accessible the most common after-effects of childhood sexual abuse;
and to suggest a few vital components of the healing process. I do this
based on fifteen years of clinical work with men and women who were
sexually violated as young people. To succeed, however, I need your help
and a brief story best conveys what I mean by that.
Several years ago, my stepson, Daniel Patrick O'Dea, recommended that I
read a fantasy trilogy authored by Terry Brooks. In the first book of
the series, the young hero sets out on a quest in search of the magIcal
Sword of Shannara (Brooks, 1978). A weapon of enormous power, the secret
of the sword is that, when lifted by the sword bearer, it reveals to
him every aspect of his being. All the good, unpleasant and truly
hideous facets of his personality are reflected back to him in the blade
of the sword. If the sword carrier can stand what he sees, he then can
wield the sworn to do great good and to fend off the worst evil. Most
who raise the Sword of Shannara, however, cannot bear to see themselves
so fully revealed and are destroyed.
Today, I ask each of you metaphorically lift a Sword of Shannara; to
open your hearts and souls to all that the Catholic Church has been,
is, and could be under your care. I ask you to stare courageously at the
full complement of great good and great harm enacted by you and
your, brethren and especially, to reflect on your role in the devastation of childhood and adolescent sexual abuse perpetrated by priests.
Claude Levi-Strauss declared that, "the prohibition of Incest stands at
the dawn of culture," and, if fact, represents culture itself. Make no
mistake about it. The violation of child or adolescent by a priest IS
incest. The sexual and relational transgression perpetrated by the
father of the child extended family; a man whom the child is taught
from birth to trust above everyone else in his life, to trust second
only to God. Priest abuse IS incest.
Despite the cultural universality of the incest taboo, violation of
sexual boundaries between adults and children is a universal phenomenon.
Data collected over the past two decades inform us that about one
third of all females and one fourth of all males are sexually abused in
some way prior to the age of 18. These numbers hold up worldwide. From
Italy to Ireland to India; from Thailand to Mexico, in Canada and the
Middle East, children's physical and psychic boundaries are violated
sexually with alarming frequency. Thus, the sexual victimization of
minors is not just an American problem nor is it just a priestly
problem. Rather, sexual exploitation of the young is a worldwide
scandal in which Catholic priest have participated as fully and as
secretly as have other men across the globe.
So far in these remarks. I have used the commonly accepted term, "sexual
abuse," to describe an adult's sexual traumatization of a child or
adolescent. In fact, however, "sexual abuse," is shorthand terminology
for what more accurately is named the relational betrayal of a minor by
an adult who is in a position of authority with the child and who
exploits his own and victim's sexuality to subjective empower himself by
utterly dominating the physical, psychological, and spiritual
experiences of the victim. No wonder we use shorthand. From the victim's
perspective, however, sexually executed relational abuse is the most
meaningful way of conceptualizing that which we call sexual abuse.
As we have read in the media and heard today, sexual abuse victims often
are young people for whom something or someone is missing. They yearn
for an adult who sees them, hears them, understands them, makes time for
them, and enjoys their company. Unfortunately, the sexual predator is
exquisitely attuned to the emotional and relational needs of the
potential victims. Like Fr. Geoghan seeking out fatherless children,
sexual abusers ingratiate themselves into the lives of their victims,
evoking respect trust and dependency long before the first touch takes
place. When the confused child or adolescent is frequently so
emotionally entwined with his victimizer so fearful of losing the
abuser's affection or simply so terrified that he readily and silently
complies with the sexual activities imposed upon him.
There are those who devalue survivors of childhood and, especially
adolescent sexual abuse for not disclosing their victimizations when
they were occurring. Secrecy, however, is the acknowledged cornerstone
of sexual abuse. Some perpetrators overtly extract secrecy by suggesting
that the victim will be blamed for the abuse, then taken from her home
and placed in an orphanage. They say that telling would destroy and even
kill the perpetrator, or they threaten that if the victim discloses,
the perpetrator will harm her or members of her family. Sexual abusers
may also blame the victim, accusing her of seducing the predator, thus
filling the victim with the sham and self-loathing more appropriately
experienced by the victimizer. In a more covert covenant of secrecy,
the abuser provides the victim with gifts and special privileges that
both silence and instill terrible and long lasting guilt.
Sin addition man abused minors maintain silence because they accurately
perceive that there is no one in their environment who will help them if
they disclose. It is more hopeful for a child to preserve a fantasy
that IF he told, someone would protect him than it is to reveal the
abuse to another who ignores, blames, or re-abuses him. Finally,
children and teenagers do not disclose the sexual abuse secret because
they care for the perpetrator. A central cruelty of sexual abuse, in
fact, is the perpetrator's trampling of the young person's generously
and freely bestowed affection or respect.
It is from this epicenter of betrayed trust that the mind splitting
impact of sexual abuse ripples outward. The victim, of early sexual
violation simply cannot reconcile the respected figure who may help him
with his homework, teach him how to throw a curve ball, or take him to
the local hockey game with the sexually overstimulated and
overstimulating man presenting an erect penis to suck. It is simply too
much and the resulting fracture of the victim's mind and experience
often leads to a debilitating post- traumatic stress disorder that
affects every domain of the victim's functioning and lasts for years and
years after the abuse has stopped.
Let me now guide you on a tour through the corridors of a psyche twisted
by sexual transgression. It is a trip through a traumatogenically
constructed, psychological House of Horrors in which experiences of self
and other are grotesquely distorted and terrifying images unexpectedly
pop out from seemingly safe places. The visitor lurches from one
emotional shock to another in an interior atmosphere of darkness, one
punctuated only by frightening flashing lights and nightmarish
unreality. Our first stop is the organization of the victim's images of
self and others.
When a young person is being abused, the psychological shock is so great
that the normal self cannot absorb or make sense of what is happening
to it. In a valiant attempt to cope with the overwhelming
overstimulation and sense of betrayal literally embodied in sexual
trauma, the self splits using the psychic mechanism of dissociation. The
normal operation of dissociation allows, for example, each of us to
drive ten miles and then "come to" with no memory of the time just past.
For the victim of child or adolescent sexual violation, however,
dissociation is an exponentially more dramatic process, one that serves
as both a blessing and a curse.
On the one hand, by entering into an entirely different state of
consciousness while being abused, the victim preserves a functional and
safe self who is removed from the trauma and is therefore able learn,
grow, play, and work. Many a patient has reported for instance, that
she--the self recognized as "I"--floated above the bed on which that
"other kid"--the alienated victim self--was being abused. On the other
hand, the curse of dissociation condemns the state of self who
experienced the abuse to a trapped existence in the inner world of the
survivor, a place dominated by terror, impotent but seething rage, and
grief for which there literally are no words. Because trauma impels the
brain to process events quickly and in a state of hyperarousal,
verbalizing pathways are bypassed. Instead, the sexual violations are
encoded by the child and retrieved by the survivor as non-verbal, often
highly disorganizing feelings, somatic states, anxieties, recurring
nightmares, flashbacks, and sometimes dangerous behaviors.
Often, the adult survivor's life is wracked by unexpected regressions to
his victimized self that are triggered by seemingly neutral stimuli.
Much as the Vietnam Vet who hits the floor during a thunderstorm is, in a
very real way, back in the Mekong Delta seconds before his buddy's
sckull is blown off, so too the sexual abuse survivor may be triggered
into a regression by something or someone reminiscent of his earlier
traumas. No longer firmly located in the present, the survivor thinks,
feels, experiences his body, and behaves as the victim he once was,
badly confusing himself and those around him. For victims of priest
abuse, a Roman collar, the scent of incense, light streaming through
stained glass at a certain time of day, organ music, or most certainly,
interacting with priests and bishops about their abuse may well evoke
the appearance of usually dissociated self states.
Coexisting with the violated, terrorized, grief stricken victim self,
the adult survivor of sexual abuse has within her a state of being that
is identified with the perpetrator. Through this unconscious ongoing
bond to the predator, the survivor preserves an attachment to the abuser
by becoming like him in some ways. When threatened by experiences of
helplessness, vulnerability or anticipated betrayal, the survivor
unconsciously accesses this self-state to gain a sense of empowerment.
Subjectively experiencing themselves as righteously indignant,
survivors may enact at times breathtaking boundary smashing, cold
contempt, and red-hot rage. Not surprisingly, survivors are sickened by
the thought that they resemble in any way their perpetrators and
therefore avert their gaze from their own Swords of Shannara for long
periods of time lest they fragment even further at the sight of their
own abusive tendencies. I want to be clear that, here, I do not mean
that survivors become sexually abusive. While that can happen, it is
exceedingly rare. Rather, they enact some aspect's of there abuser's
lack of respect for others. It is important for therapists and, in this
case bishops, to recognize that the clay of the survivor's abuser self
was molded quite literally by the hands of a master–-their own sexual
and relational victimizer. While those in relationship with survivors
can model setting limits on what they will tolerate in relationship with
another, an empathic understanding of the source of the survivor's
sometimes outrageous behavior is essential to hold in mind.
Finally, the sexual abuse survivor sometimes may enact an aspect of self
that is greedy, grandiose, and insatiably entitled, an element of self
that remains out of awareness for a long time. There comes a day in
every survivor's recovery upon which he fully comprehends what was so
cruelly taken from him. Further personal growth and healing requires
that the survivor then mourn the childhood or adolescence that never
was, the defensively idealized caretakers who never existed, and perhaps
most poignantly, the self that could have been had trust, hope, and
possibility not been so brutally shattered.
I cannot exaggerate nor can I adequately convey the soul searing pain of
this phase of recovery. One patient, at this point in treatment, cried,
"This is too much. I can't stand it– I won't–-you can't make me. I can
deal with the abuse--maybe, perhaps. But the idea that I can't go back,
that my childhood is broken forever–-I can't live with that. I won't
know that I never was and never will be just a kid."
Quite understandably, the sexual abuse survivor may act to avoid the
ultimate mourning necessary to move on from the abuse and all that was
stolen from him. Launching a lawsuit against the perpetrator or against
those who abetted the abuser may be one strategy employed to deny
unrecoverable loss, while instead pursuing an illusion of full
restitution of that which, tragically, never can be restored. No matter
the amount of the ensuing financial settlement, a residue of emptiness
and lost hope persists. At the core of the survivor's being, the worst
has happened yet again; he has been paid off to go away while life goes
on relatively untouched for the perpetrator and those who shielded him.
Now let me be absolutely clear. Money can be a little better than
nothing
and is what the Church too often historically offered victims. Many
survivors, in fact, resorted to lawsuits only after being stonewalled in
their quest for more personal reparative gestures. Legal action, in
this situation, represents a last ditch effort by the survivor to become
an agent in his own life. Further, a lawsuit, when all else has failed,
puts into action an understandable demand that the truth be told one
way or another. In addition, many survivors need financial assistance
for therapy, substance abuse rehabilitation, and educational or
vocational training previously unattainable because of post-traumatic
stress symptoms plaguing the victims. But money is not nearly enough,
no mater how much it is, and lump sum payments that are not
individualized to meet the specific needs of each survivor fail to meet
recovery needs. Rather, what serves healing well it much more difficult,
much more personal, and much more humbling for clergy.
Real healing for survivors requires that priests, bishops, and cardinals
conform to the template upon which rests the Sacrament of
Reconciliation, te ritual cleansing of the soul in which Catholic
priests profoundly believe. Real healing thus demands that Catholic
clergy apologize
personally to each and every victim of priest
abuse; not through eloquent public letters but in face-to-face
encounters. Bless me, my son or daughter, for I have sinned. The Vatican
recently cautioned that the administration of group absolution is not
an acceptable venue and that confessions should be heard individually
and in private. So, too, survivors deserve to meet with those who have
harmed them and to hear from clergy genuine confessions of failings and
remorse.
Real healing must draw from the Church a deeply meaningful commitment
that every priest, bishop, and cardinal will do everything in his power
to prevent further priest abuse, and that he will act swiftly,
decisively, and above all, publicly to remove abusers from his ranks.
Finally, cardinals, bishops and priest must do penance to restore each
survivor's trust in humanity as well as in the Church. Retreats and
group processing sessions that include survivors, clergy, and
professionals are just some possible approaches to restorative penance.
Whatever penitential road is chosen, it is essential that the clergy of
the Catholic Church put their mouths, souls, and physical beings where
heretofore mostly only their money has been. It is right and it is
needed for survivors of priest abuse to heal.
Leaving the realm of sexual abuse survivor's organization of self, we
enter a related corridor on our tour, one in which we explore typical
characteristics of the victim's interpersonal relationships.
A survivor's relationships with other people are hued and shaded by
expectations and anxieties forged during their traumatic experiences.
Approaching others from within the psychological confines of
post-traumatic stress disorder, the trauma survivor exhibits rapidly
shifting relational stances, painfully lurching from periods of
extremely dependent clinging, to those marked by vicious rage aimed at
the same person. Stark terror and tears can switch in an instant to cold
aloofness, while warmth and vivacity may turn kaleidoscopically to
paranoid suspicion. All this, of course, leads to many chaotically
unstable relationships, often alternating with stretches of the
loneliest isolation.
Perhaps needless to say, normal sexual functioning is almost impossible
for most survivors until well into their recovery. Too often, sex, even
with a trusted other, triggers terrifyingly disorganizing flashbacks
during which survivors sometimes literally see the face of their abuser
superimposed on the visage of their sexual partner and experience
dreadful relivings of their sexual traumas. In addition, survivors
frequently are disgusted by and ashamed of their own bodies and sexual
strivings. Unreasonably blaming the abuse on their own sexuality, they
often desperately insist that it never would have happened were it not
for their self-perceived horribly seductive bodies and deplorable sexual
desires. Heterosexual boys abused by men additionally are tormented,
wondering what it was about them that attracted the perpetrator. Sexual
abuse survivors of all genders and sexual orientations are deprived of
the right to grow gradually into a mature sexuality and, instead, are
forced or seduced into premature sexual encounters they are emotionally
ill equipped to handle. As adults, therefore, these men and women often
spin between periods of promiscuous and self-destructive sexual acting
out and times of complete sexual shutdown during which, like burn
victims, they experience the gentlest physical contact as excruciatingly
painful.
Finally, there is a characteristic relational stance assumed by many
sexual abuse survivors that is particularly germane to these
proceedings. It involves others who did not abuse them but also did not
protect them.
If it takes a community to raise a child, it also takes a community to
abuse one so that whenever a minor is sexually violated, someone's eyes
are closed. Throughout history and in every segment of society, the most
common response to the suspicion or even the disclosure of childhood
sexual abuse has been self-defensive denial and dissociation.
No
one finds it easy to stand in the overwhelming and destabilizing reality
of sexual abuse. Thus, blindness, deafness, and elective mutism are
responses endemic to many confronted by a victimized child, an adult
survivor, or a perpetrating adult. To the extent, however, that the
sexual victimization of a minor depends upon the silence of adults who
knew, suspected, or should have known about the abuse, the burdens of
shame and reparation reach beyond the perpetrator. In the case of the
Church, it is not just abusing priests and abetting bishops who must
lift a symbolic Sword of Shannara and face what is reflected back to
them in its blade. Rather, every rectory housekeeper, every parish
maintenance man, every religious woman or lay teacher, every parishioner
- any of these individuals who once felt uneasy about a priest's
relationship with a young boy or girl and said nothing need ponder their
inaction and resolve to behave protectively in the future. Zero
tolerance must include the silent as well as the predatory.
What is important to recognize at this conference is that adult
survivors of sexual abuse frequently are, at least initially, even
angrier with adults who failed to protect them than they are with the
perpetrator himself. Because the survivor's internal relationship with
his abuser often is organized around competing feelings of attachment
and hate, he often feels freer to turn the full blast of his long
pent-up rage and bitterness on those who did not protect him and who, in
addition, failed to provide for him in ways the perpetrator seemed to,
albeit at an unholy cost to the exploited child or adolescent.
How turning down another corridor on our tour of a psyche ravaged by
early sexual trauma, we examine the impact of sexual abuse on the
cognitive functioning of the victim and survivor. Part of what is
overwhelmed during sexual abuse is the young person's ability
cognitively to contain, process, and put into words the enormity of the
relational betrayal and physical impingement with which he is faced. It
is striking and often bewildering to observe in adult survivors
completely contradictory thought processes that ebb and flow with little
predictability. One moment, you are speaking with an intelligent adult,
capable of complex, flexible, abstract, and self decentered thinking.
Under sufficient internal or external stress, however, or in situations
somehow reminiscent of past abuse, the cognitive integrity of the
survivor shatters and becomes locked in rigidly inflexible,
self-centered thought patterns, simplistic black and white opinions
devoid of nuance and an immutable conviction that the future is destined
to be both short and unalterably empty. For example, one survivor
patient who worked as an investment banker was so intellectually gifted
that she was considered a brilliant whiz kid in the competitive New York
world of finance. When beset by psychological or interpersonal stimuli
linked to her uncle's sexual abuse, however, she became in her own
words, "stupid minded." At those times, she literally could not think at
all or could access only immature, disorganizing and panicky ways of
thinking.
If a survivor's cognitive functioning is severely ruptured by sexual
abuse, his affective life, the next stop on our tour, is even more
impaired. When a young person is sexually traumatized, the hyperarousal
of the autonomic nervous system and the body's subsequent attempt to
restore order disrupt the brain's neurochemical regulation of emotion.
In addition, we are now learning that attachment relationships also
impact upon the brain's ability to modulate feelings, with traumatic
attachment experiences interfering with effective neuropsychological
regulation of affect. The brain of the sexually abused minor thus
suffers a double assault. Both the sexual traumas themselves and the
betrayal of an attachment relationship assail the flow of affect
modulating neurochemicals.
As an adult, the survivor shifts--sometimes quite rapidly--between
states of chaotically intense hyperarousal and deadened states of
psychic numbing. This inability to modulate emotional arousal often
leads to interpersonally inappropriate verbal or motoric actions when
the survivor is hyperstimulated, and to similarly inappropriate
emotional and psychomotor constriction as the individual moves into
psychic numbing. Further, autonomic arousal becomes a generalized
reaction to stress in the midst of which the sexual abuse survivor is
unable to discern realistically the severity of a perceived threat.
Instead of reacting at the actual level of psychological danger, the
survivor may engage in seemingly irrational behaviors like temper
tantrums or terrified withdrawal. These behaviors do no fit the present
day situation but are perfectly complimentary to the now affectively
revived earlier trauma.
Because of the damage done by sexual abuse to affective brain
functioning, adult survivors often need psychotropic medications for
periods of time during recovery. For some, their impairments are
sufficiently intractable to require lifelong medication. These drugs are
expensive and it would be a specific and reparative use of Church funds
to provide survivors who are under the care of psychiatric
professionals with the medications they need to function more
adaptively.
We now are almost finished with our psychological tour and are about to
enter what can be the most shocking corridor of all. Also partly due to
disrupted brain functioning, sexual abuse survivors often display a
truly spectacular array of self-destructive behaviors. They slice their
arms, thighs, and genitalia with knives, razors, or shards of broken
glass. They burn themselves with cigarettes, pull hair from their heads
and pubic areas, walk through
dark parks alone at night, play chicken with trains at railroad
crossings, pick up strangers in bars to have unprotected and anonymous
sex, drive recklessly at high speeds, gamble compulsively, and/or
further destroy their minds and bodies with alcohol and the whole range
of street drugs. Both male and female prostitutes tend to have
backgrounds of early sexual abuse. Survivors also are two to three times
more likely than adults without abuse histories to make at least one
suicide attempt in their lives (Briere & Runtz, 1986). Sometimes
they die.
Survivor self-abuse performs a myriad of functions too complex to
address adequately today. A quick inventory of a survivor's motivations
to act self-destructively includes: punishment for the abuse he blames
himself for; mastering victimization by taking charge of the timing and
execution of harm; self-medication of turbulent affective storms; and
unconsciously seeking states of hyperarousal that then trigger the
release of brain opiods, providing the survivor with a temporary sense
of calm. At an even more deeply unconscious level, frighteningly
self-destructive sexual abuse survivors want to turn the table on
present day stand-ins for those who violated and neglected them.
Unconsciously, they long to see their own terror, helplessness, impotent
rage, and shocked recognition of utter betrayal reflected now on the
face of someone in their lives. Who can blame them?
As we exit now from our tour of the terrifyingly disorienting
psychological House of Horrors, constructed amidst sexual abuse, and
maintained by its aftermath, it should be clear that a survivor's
recovery is a long, complicated, sometimes treacherous process. There is
a cohort in this country of professional men and women who have labored
long and hard in the clinical trenches of trauma since the sexual abuse
of children was dragged out of society's skeleton closet in the early
1980's. The bishops and priests of the Catholic Church need the
expertise of professionals to effect healing both within the Church and
in relationship with survivors. Please call on us to help you.
Psychoanalyst Le.onard Shengold entitled his book on the effects of childhood sexual abuse,
Soul Murder (Shengold, 1989). I do not think that early sexual trauma necessarily has to result in soul murder
but it most surely batters and deadens the soul of the young victim and
the adult survivor. That this ravaging of souls has been administered
by priests entrusted with a sacred covenant to protect and enliven souls
is despicable; it is evil itself.
The Catholic Church and you, its American shepherds, are at a
crossroads. Like the recovering victim of sexual abuse, you can choose
to defend, deny, retrench, and rigidify. You can refuse the reflection
of a Sword of Shannara and turn away from all your decency, all your
love and generosity, all your arrogance and indifference. When a
survivor takes that familiar and well-worn road, further fragmentation
and diminished integrity of mind and soul ensues. But, as is the case
for so many sexual abuse survivors, another road can be chosen.
Collectively wielding a blade shining with truth and courageous
determination, you can decide to lead the American Church on a path of
recovery, growth, and restored faith. This conference could become a new
epicenter from which ripples the revitalization and restoration of
souls. It is a matter of your will which road is taken. May great grace
walk with you and guide you in the days to come. It has been a great
grace to me to address you today.