A tale of incest and recovery

The Boston Herald

She did it for her children. You listen to her and you know that there is good in people, that the good is innate, a gift from God, because she didn't learn good in her house, she wasn't exposed to it there. There she learned evil and hurt and hate.

Her father put her on a pedestal, called her his little princess, bought her party dresses, then he got drunk and sexually abused her.

Her mother hated her. She not only allowed the sexual abuse, she encouraged it, and when she was alone with her daughter added cruel tortures of her own.

Her brother was the worst. He violated her in malevolent ways. He shared her with his friends and all her screams and tears and terror only made him smile more.

Yet if you had asked her just three years ago about her childhood, she would have told you she had a wonderful one. She believed she'd grown up in the best of homes. She believed she had the kindest father. That's the past she invented and memorized, because to remember the truth would have destroyed her.

But the truth encroached upon her perfect life. It lived in her subconscious and festered there, poisoning what should have been happy times. When she was 31 years old she was married, and had a three-year-old son and a one-year-old daughter, and lived in a nice house with a man she adored. She had everything she had ever wanted.

And yet she was miserable.

"I didn't trust anyone," she says nearly three years later. "I was aggressive, confrontational and so unhappy that I thought I was going crazy. I was horrible to live with and was afraid that if I didn't do something to change, I would lose my husband and my children."

And so she picked up the telephone and called a psychologist for help. It was as easy and it was as difficult as that.

Help came slowly, in small, sometimes imperceptible, steps. She had assumed that she would go to a psychologist and be "cured." She believed that whatever was affecting her mind would be eradicated as quickly as a mild infection.

But it didn't work that way. In the beginning she had no memories of her youth. She had blocked them all, the good and the bad. She hadn't remembered that her parents were alcoholics. She hadn't remembered that she cleaned and cooked while her mother sat at the kitchen table and drank.

The flashbacks began about six months into therapy. An image of her father in bed with her was the first. She had shared a bed with him. He had slept with her and not her mother. Why hadn't she remembered this? What else was her mind hiding?

In the diaries she kept, you read about these memories and can see her change. Sharp strokes of the pen eventually become softer and more uniform. Raw anger is reduced to acceptance. Hate almost disappears.

But it takes pages and pages to see the changes, notebooks full of painful words and feelings and memories. And you think, people don't do these things to one another. Families don't act this way.

"That's what I believed," she says. "I thought I was going crazy. I thought that I'd rather be crazy than have what I was remembering be true."

A book about incest, "The Courage to Heal," showed her she was not alone. Meetings with other victims of incest proved she wasn't alone. "You think you are. You think it hasn't ever happened to anyone else. And then you walk into a room and everyone there has been abused, too. And though it makes you feel better, makes you feel that you're not insane, it breaks your heart, too."

"But I'm a survivor now," she says in voice that is strong, but not sharp. "That's what's important, that I'm no longer a victim. I need to tell people this so they'll know there is a way out. I was miserable before I found out I was sexually abused. Would I have been miserable my whole life, if I hadn't called for help? Would I have turned into my mother? Would I have hurt my children? I don't think so. I think I'm a good, kind, loving person. But I don't know. I don't know what would have happened.

"I know that it wasn't easy making that first call. It's probably the most difficult thing you have to do. But what I want to tell people is that if you suspect, if you think you might be a victim of incest, please go for help. Because afterward, when you face what happened, when you deal with the past, you can feel happy. I never felt happy before. I never knew what happy was. Now I do. Now I can trust and love. Now I'm not afraid anymore."