http://www.votf.org/Bishops/saeffects.html
"The Experience of the Victim
of Sexual Abuse:" A Reflection
Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, Ph.D.
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
June 14, 2002
G
ood 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 abus — 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 Leonard 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.