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“I Loved a Pedophile”
Ugh! Doesn’t sound like a compelling read, does it? Truth be told, I don’t know if the old man can be classified as a pedophile (lover of children?). In any event he loved me in ways that did not work for me. Yet must I confess I’m not sure I really loved him. Feared, yes. Depended on, yes. Indebted to the seminal contribution he made to my life, yes. But the whole childhood morass is too convoluted to stake a claim there for love.
I share a few thoughts and feelings now just because I have some distance from the rage and outrage that have burned within over the old man’s perversities. Civilizations, authorities, moralizers, and victims have raged galore about the phenomenon of child abuse. I am impressed that the rage has not enlightened us about the problem — and that disturbs me. Hence the present journey to the land I’d rather not revisit...
Grieving and Recovering
As with a stage of grief, anger is a phase in healing from the trauma of childhood sexual abuse. The earlier recovery stages include the shock, disbelief, and denial that come in the aftermath of any loss. The fact that these stages often occur so long after the physical contact of the abuse - years or decades - suggests that in some way the abuse is continuing during those silent years. In fact the silence of all (or most) parties involved (including through noninvolvement) is a nonsterile bandage over a dirty, infected wound. Under this cover the wound festers and the patient deteriorates while hiding it from delicate sight of easily offended friends, of family, even of patient. Pustules of numbness, anger, and depression line up to erupt from the infection as the adult survivor tears the crude filth of infected bandage off the mental-emotional wounds left by childhood abuse.
No Taboo against Incest
That headline is outrageous, intentionally so. The full quote should read, “There is no taboo in our society against incest: only against talking about it.” The exageration is only partial. The damning kernel of truth within it is two-fold: 1) in effect there is no taboo against sexual use of children by their parents: prevalence statistics reveal that from 10% to 25% of American children are victimized; 2) the powerlessness of children and the ease with which they are intimidated into silence is legendary. The myth of the wholesome American family and the widespread presumption that only some perverted beast would so treat their own child shields perpetrators from scrutiny.
Take my own family. Please. Take it. As I contemplate them they are too bizarre to relate. Both my parents were professionals: my father a Ph.D. psychologist, my mother a social worker. Wait: it gets better. My father’s specialty was child psychology. My mother’s social work position in a couple large California counties required her to place children in foster homes. This was stressful work for Mom, dealing with children who had to be removed from their birth parents for some reason - things like physical or sexual abuse. It should have seemed weird to me to hear about her work when she would occasionally share a few details at the dinner table, but I had pretty well trained myself to block out all thoughts of “Dad’s games” except when I was desperately trying to wheedle my way out of them.
So viciously complicit in the infection is the silence... [ to be continued ]
© Richard Pinneau, 2003 Your feedback is appreciated: rp@richardpinneau.com |
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