REPAIR Your Life (eBook)

I'm going to begin this book with a story. Mine. Hopefully, everyone reading will identify with parts of it and realize they're in the right place. We all have stories that are different. We all have stories that are the same. Repercussions in the life of an incest victim ripple like waves in a body of water, ones that eventually turn into riptides, undercurrents and sometimes tidal waves.

My story is a classic example.

In July of 1988, I walked into the office of therapist Marci Taylor, a specialist in the field of childhood sexual abuse. The damage done by my incest had accelerated to the point of despair. It was six months before my third marriage and I had a long history of relationships with alcoholics and abusers, two of them former husbands. Suicidal since my early teens, I had been hospitalized for two nervous breakdowns in my twenties, one the result of a failed suicide attempt. I had hidden my pain behind too much alcohol, promiscuity, compulsive behavior, obsessive relationships and extremes of emotional highs and lows. Only medication, intermittently taken, had kept me functioning for almost twenty-five years.

Two years earlier, I had been engaged to my daughter's father-in-law. Chuck was the first healthy male in my life, a man whose primary aim was making me happy. He became convinced that something traumatizing had happened in my childhood that I didn't remember. His comment, “How could someone as wonderful as you wind up with so many abusive men,” not only went right over my head, but irritated me as he began a personal crusade to find out what had happened. I retaliated with anger, tried to end the engagement, and when he refused, began an affair outside the relationship. His response was, “I'll never leave you except through death.” Within months, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Filled with shame and fear for Chuck, I ended the affair and took care of him while he was ill. Even then, a few days before he died, still unable to control my own sexual addiction, I slept not only with another man, but a married one. After Chuck's death my guilt and shame at what I had done caused despair so great I wished only that I had never failed in my many suicide attempts.

Within a few weeks, I was living with the man who would ultimately set off a trail of such severe abuse that I had to choose between death and entering recovery. I had hit bottom. Having read my private journals without permission, he used my descriptions of previous lovers and infidelities as a whip to taunt me, especially the night I had spent in bed with a married man while Chuck lay dying. Like Pavlov's dog, every time he rang the bell by shaming me about my past, I obeyed whatever his current demand was, for I learned quickly that giving in caused the torment to cease. Subject to his whims, I lived like a prisoner, crippled by his several-times-a-day sexual addiction—which quickly turned into brutal rapes—his need to control what I wore, who I spoke with, what I said, and even whether I laughed or not.

Within months, my beautiful home looked like a battleground, with bathroom doors he had split in half when I cowered behind them hiding from his rages and sexual obsessions, broken furniture and holes in walls, all evidence of my out-of-control emotions from the terror of his rapes. Once he forced me into making sex videotapes by taunting me about previous infidelities. In the process, I lost my mind as I lay in a fetal position on the floor calling for my mother. Before we'd been together a year, his need for frequent middle-of-the-night sex was causing painful and confusing flashbacks.

One time, years earlier, in the office of a therapist, I had spied a cartoon. It was of a woman standing in a cage with her hands clenched on the bars, looking outward with terror. The cage had only three sides. That cartoon was so painful that I averted my eyes every time I saw it. It haunted me for years, and became one of the spurs to my entering recovery, for now I could see that I was that woman.

My self-image was so poor that once, in a department store, I saw a woman on the other side of the room and thought desperately, I would give anything if only I looked like her. As I walked closer, I realized that her body movements matched mine. I'd been staring in a mirror! Even then, I waved my arms and made faces, then finally touched the glass before I became convinced it was me. You'd think it would have caused me to look at myself in a different light. It didn't. I wasn't ready to believe that there was anything beautiful about me. Even my frequent quip over the years, “If you took sex out of my life, I'd be a near-perfect person,” did not encourage me to see that although I had a dark side, there were many gems beneath my surface.

Despite the use of various therapists over the years who had probed my life, none had ever identified incest as the culprit. In my early thirties, my father had admitted to his wrongdoing, making the comment, “It really wasn't so bad, kiddo, they do it in the Appalachian district all the time.” Shortly before he died, he again brought it up, then abruptly dropped it. Both times I buried the reality, the pain too monumental to consider. I was not even sure what the word “incest” meant and other than a nightmare I'd had when I was younger, one where a steamroller was suffocating me as I lay in my bottom bunk, I had no memory of such things happening. I had relived the “nightmare” hundreds of times throughout my life, on each occasion waking up screaming as I felt the paralyzing terror of being overpowered by an unknown force. The nightmares didn't cease until after my father's death in 1985.

Now, shaking with continuous tremors, I turned once more to therapy. This time it was at the insistence of my family doctor, who had been convinced for many years that incest was the source of my problems.

Marci began my treatment with several sessions of discussions concerning my childhood. I gave her the same story I had given the others. I was the oldest daughter in a Midwestern Catholic family. My father had delivered me in the middle of a blizzard in northern Minnesota. As the years went by, his interest in me became obsessive. My mother, worn down from having four children in as many years, turned her fifth child, a daughter, over to me to raise. At the age of eight, I had become the family housekeeper and at the age of nine, a mother. When I was thirteen I had the “nightmare” that was to haunt me for so many years.

For reasons I didn't understand at the time, during this period our family life changed dramatically. Mom and Dad discarded any semblance of love and togetherness. My siblings and I became like mutilated soldiers in the midst of a war, as we wandered through our days in a continual state of anxiety and terror of Dad. He began a crusade to prove me no good, referring to me as “unclean.” Most of the time Mom lay in bed sobbing or in an alcoholic-like stupor where she had me shave her legs, bathe her, and care for her as if she were in the midst of a debilitating illness. I spiraled into despair, becoming not only manic depressive, but suicidal.

I had come from a long line of patriarchal families with fathers who had a strong sense of their own importance and mothers who subjugated their needs to those of the head of the family. We walked on eggs if Dad was in the house, lest we offend in some way. His word was not only law, but any opinions contrary to his were punishable. This way of life duplicated my father's growing-up years as well as my mother's. It felt normal to me. My mother's motto was: Even when your father is wrong, he's right. A few years later she developed breast cancer, and Dad convinced her that all doctors were quacks, depriving her of the medical care that might have saved her life. She died angry, resentful, and confused about her own value system.

At the age of 18, after a beating from my father that almost killed me, I stuffed a few belongings into a pillowcase and ran. Once on my own, I entered what was to become more than thirty years of unhealthy choices and abusive relationships.

After hearing the story of my life and descriptions of my current victimization, Marci gave me an assignment. I was to draw pictures at various intervals of my life with my left hand, depicting emotions in different colors. I found the exercise rather silly until I sat at the kitchen table and began drawing. There, memories I had forgotten surfaced. When I got to the age of 13, I drew a picture of a young girl lying on a bottom bunk bed. A gray haired man stood in the doorway. I grabbed a red crayon and wrote: Help me! Help me! across the face of it, before bursting into tears.

Within days, I entered a twelve-step program, and through hypnosis and more therapy sessions with Marci, began to see the truth, not only of what had happened to me, but the impact it had on my life and the kind of decisions I had made. At the age of thirteen, I had become my father's unwilling mistress. Eventually, my mother discovered Dad's middle-of-the-night rapes while I slept with a rosary clutched in my hand. Unable to deal with the thought that her husband was the perpetrator of such a crime, she made me the scapegoat, frequently taunting my father into beating me with a belt. Even those memories were never defined in my head as child abuse, only as strict...