Ending The Cycle Of Abuse

The Stories Of Women Abused As Children & The Group Therapy Techniques That Helped Them Heal

Philip G. Ney, Anna Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135823672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1995. Offering group therapy techniques for post-abuse children and adults, this book exposes the relationship between doctor and patient, neither one more important than other. A moving and disturbing read that presents information in a honest and straightforward form and for anyone that cares about people, they will gain great benefit from this book.

1

Realization: Knowing and Feeling What Happened to Me

History of Anna Peters

Darkness, time—no memory.

New home, new father, new sibling, a chance to be loved and accepted.

Hope and promise. An exciting happy day to begin life. I am eight.

I step out of the classroom. My sister is screaming. She runs frantically past me to the principal’s office. I follow terrified. Of what? I don’t know. Everyone is upset: teachers, Mommy, my stepdad. The police are called. Our birth father has come to take her. Later no one talks about it. He must be very bad. He didn’t want me…I am nine.

“Go to the nurse’s room and get measured and weighed.” His words rang in my ears like a death sentence. I’d lied, said I was sick so I would miss this class, and now I had to do it alone, in front of everyone. I hate him. I hate me. I hate, hate, hate. Frantically looking to the board, I find the heaviest weight: 155. Mine is much higher. “In front,” he demands. Head down, I mumble my lie: 157I am ashamed. I wish I could die. The familiar tittering of my classmates cuts deep. Hesitantly, I share this experience with my mom, who says, “He’s only trying to help.” I hate her, I hate me: no one understands. Alone, always alone. I eat. I am 10.

Grabbing, poking, tickling. “Dad,” whose touch always makes me uncomfortable. Please, I love you, why do I always have to push you away? Your constant sexual innuendos shame me and keep my few girlfriends away. I can’t do anything good enough to please you, “Mom.” I am fat and you are uncomfortable. I embarrass you. I am not small, cute, athletic, popular, submissive, quiet, conforming. I want to be heard, understood. I want to think. Let me think. I am growing.

Looking in the mirror, a head on a grossly overweight body stares hollowly back at me. Anger wells up. Fists clenched, I beat my stomach over and over saying, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” I am 14.

Boys? No, only the men looked. I want to be loved. Please love me. You want me? I owe you. Beginning to be sexually active. I am 15.

Ravenous! Mom’s diet, my diet, stealing lunches, taking money from the cash box at work, using my pay check and baby-sitting money for food and clothes. Look good! Sabotage looking good. Alone, isolated, peering out at a world that judges by appearance and performance. I perform. I owe the world. I am fat and ugly. I am 16.

Graduate, get away. Get married. My choice: a drug addict who uses physical, verbal, and emotional abuse to maintain control while wres-tling with his own sexual ambivalence. Two children, full-blown bulimia, and four chaotic years later, I escape. I am 21.

Divorced and living with an alcoholic. Looking good, successfully self-employed, in control, anorexic. Constant tug-of-war between my children and my man. No commitment, day-to-day hoping…(I don’t realize he is an alcoholic until therapy 14 years later). I am 24.

Only four months on my own, then I married a workaholic, passive/ aggressive, emotionally unavailable father of two. Bouts of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse toward me and the kids left me feeling trapped and helpless again. Fighting bulimia with an endless diet cycle, I was emotionally broken and diagnosed as manic depressive. Found God—or should I say, he found me?

Church support, friends, and hope and strength again. I moved to an isolated community where the church bias was submission. Now I tasted spiritual abuse. I was trying hard to be good: do more, pray, fast, submit, give, love, surrender, support, obey, honor, don’t interfere, suffer. I discover that my husband sexually abused our girls. Send them away, protect them, stand by him, keep the boys, uphold our name, God’s name. Think: if I do what is right, God will fix everything. I wait. Silence. I am 26 going on 45.

My world crumbling, I can’t be responsible any more. I can’t hold everything and everybody together any more. I can’t function. My body is quitting. I have intense physical pain. I am unable to be the perfect mother, wife, homemaker, Christian, leader, counselor, employee. I can’t perform at my usual accelerated pace. I manage the basics only. Friends drop off because I am unable to fix or fulfill their needs. Covered by a shroud of sadness, God whispers to me, “You have never grieved.” I begin to grieve for the first time in my life, months of overwhelming sorrow. I don’t understand nor do I trust myself to have heard God correctly, and I am too tired to fight. I just let it happen. I can’t stop it. Many doctors, many tests, no answers. Am I losing it? I must be losing it. Oh God, help me! The dreaded door, one I haven’t tried. I seek a psychiatrist. He must be a Christian. My faith is all I have left. I can’t let that be challenged…. He thinks he can help me. He said I could quit going for more tests; I am so tired of tests. Why did I need his permission? Yet somehow I did, and now I feel safe, relieved by just stopping. He says, “It will cost you a lot, more than you can imagine.” I am willing. What more can I lose? I am willing to do anything. I am so afraid for my sanity. Four months before the next therapy group starts—an eternity! How will I ever keep it together that long? “You can come back to see me before the group begins if you need to.” If I need to? He’s got to be kidding. Clinically depressed, frightened, and yet…not without hope. I am 45.

Darkness engulfs me. Fear—lots of fear. Death, darkness, evil. I can’t see. I can feel but I can’t see. Two hours pass. I am exhausted, yet exhilarated. I hold my hands gently on my chest and feel a warm, secure place deep within, a sense of being. I have been called into life by the Father of life himself. He has a special destiny for me. He told me wondrous and fearsome things. He loves me and created me and called me, and I can face whatever he shows me because I have a safe place deep within where he is. “This really messes up my theology: a womb experience?” I ask him. We laugh together. My Father, God, laughing with his child. I am born.

Again the fear, the darkness. I’ve been here before. I know where to go. I put my hands on my chest. I feel the warm, safe place deep inside that my Father created. I let the darkness come. I can’t move my hands. They are curled in tight against my chest. I can feel saliva trickling from the corner of my mouth. My face feels numb. I hear unearthly moans—oh God, they are mine! I whisper “Jesus” over and over in my mind. I will to trust him and let the darkness cover me. “Daddy! Daddy! Stop. Please don’t hurt me!” Screaming, sobbing, curled up, my hands covering my genitals. The memory lasted about an hour. It was like I was there! Three years old. I could remember, feel everything. Afterwards my body was in shock; first hot, then cold, sweating profusely and nauseous. I had been rectally raped. I was three.

Two more months pass. I am not used to the truth of my abuse yet and find myself wandering aimlessly through life. Numb best describes me. I feel like I am living some long-ago movie about someone else.

My husband decided that we needed a holiday. While on vacation, we attended an out-of-province Christian conference. Usually I would have been keen to go; these days it really didn’t matter. During the time when thousands of people gathered to worship, I sat, unable to sing. I could feel God’s presence all around me, yet I was unable to respond. God seemed to be telling me just to rest and trust. The second day, immediately after a lecture session and the closing worship, I experienced that intense presence again, the one that I was beginning to recognize as preparation for releasing a memory. I was afraid, excited, and trusting at the same time.

I decided to remain seated during the upcoming two-and-a-half-hour break and face this thing, alone if necessary. I was willing. I sat quietly with my eyes shut as the room cleared. I began to hear low moans escaping from deep within me. The last thing I remember before I hit the floor was acknowledging his power and protection and asking for someone knowledgeable and wise to look after me. I felt detached as my body was literally thrown to the floor. I writhed in pain and terror, my arms flailing at some unseen enemy. Cries of torment and despair escaped my lips. Several people helped me out of the room. I could hear them talking and felt their touch, but it seemed filtered, as though from far away. I was unable to see. Apparently, my eyes were wide open; however, I never saw one face. I was terrified of some of the men in the room and filled with rage toward others. Pulling away and hiding, I once even struck out and spat at one young man. The men had to leave before I would settle down. After a lengthy time of fighting my unseen enemies, thoughts began to focus and I again began to recall and relive sexual-abuse memories. Although the person’s face never came into focus, I remembered the pain and the raw presence of evil during the abuse. Afterwards I lay bruised and exhausted. I had some kind of heavy vaginal discharge during the body memory and needed to return to my room. I was unable to handle contact with anyone except my husband. I felt violated, dirty, and shaken. After a long bath, I curled up in my bed, where sleep lovingly took me. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.

I was still disoriented as I entered the auditorium the next day. I spent most of the time with my own thoughts, just sitting and thinking about yesterday’s darkness and the terror. I was afraid of that sense of evil and intuitively knew it was still a part of who I was. I whispered my fears to God and pleaded for freedom. I didn’t want to go on hiding the darkness inside me. I was willing to face it all if only it would go away forever. As I began to moan, my husband had his own battle. Protective of me as a result of watching the horrors of yesterday’s memory release, he didn’t think it fair or necessary for God to let me suffer any more. He later shared with me that, at one point, he just knew he was supposed to let me be. It was necessary; God would take care of me. Thus began the longest and hardest session of all.

I relived an abuse memory where objects were pushed into my mouth and rectum. I was one year old. Discarded after the abuse like so much garbage, and touched by pain so intense it took my breath away, a swirling maze of terror, pain, confusion, anger, shame, rejection, rage, and hatred consumed me for what seemed like hours. Unbelievable as it seems, I can remember most of it very clearly and understood what was happening almost all the time. Somehow, in the midst of it all, a sense of peace prevailed, allowing me to do the hard work that was demanded. When it was finally over, I knew God’s intimacy within me in a way I’ve never known. I expect it will be like that always when we are with him forever.

INTRODUCTION TO WEEK 1

Their pain is acute; their confusion becomes ours. What can be done for them and for their children? These women clearly recognize that they are both hurt and hurters, victims and perpetrators. They also watched their siblings or mother or father hurt, and thus they are also observers. Whether they fill the role of victim, perpetrator, or observer depends on time and circumstance. For now, in this group, they are victims. The object of the first phase of their treatment is to both recognize and realize how they were abused and neglected. They have to remember many painful events.

It cannot be assumed that adults who were abused or neglected as children now realize that they were or are victims. Too often their experience of life is the only one they have ever known. What happened to them as children continues to happen to them as adults. Although they may have seen other families, they had to believe that the children in those families probably suffered the same maltreatment that they did.

Often children and adults, for both practical and psychological rea-sons, have been afraid to extract themselves from miserable experiences and to view them more objectively. Some never have the opportunity to examine and evaluate what is happening to them because they are so busy just surviving. In some instances, they become such an integral part of a vicious circle that it is almost impossible to state who is abusing whom. As adults, they may be abusing their children. Thus they can’t look at their past experience without considering the harm they are doing to their own children.

It is very hard for children to disentangle themselves from the demands of developing and to view their experiences objectively. They depend on the very persons who abuse or neglect them. As adults, they still look to their parents, hoping that somehow they will mature and be able to meet their needs. Or the patients may depend on a spouse who is no better than the parents at meeting their needs. Their continued experience of neglect and abuse may make them even more dependent, but also increasingly skeptical about the ability of anyone to meet their needs.

To remember, and relive, conflicted experience for the purposes of treatment is very difficult and painful. Often traumatic experiences are locked tightly away in memory banks, inaccessible to voluntary recall. The traumatic experience may have occurred when they were too young to have language and thus there may be no way of describing it. The memories may be so conflicted that all the vocabulary the child had at that age cannot do them justice. The memory may be only a feeling, a somatic gut-wrenching experience. Thus the beginning of treatment must be to help patients remember not only the event, but all of the people involved in the event. Most particularly, they need to recall their mixed feelings and the motives surrounding the events. Part of the importance of listening is that it provides validation of what people felt and perceived. If they are validated, then there is a possibility that their expressions of needs are real. If their needs are real and heard by somebody, then it is possible that someone will actually meet them. Adults tend not to listen to children. If they did, they would probably cry most of the time.

The initial stage of group therapy is designed to help patients remem-ber and reexperience those painful, frightening, and confusing experiences. This is more likely to occur when (1) the group members feel they can trust the leaders of the group and trust each other and (2) they feel well supported and encouraged. It is partly for this reason that we have always had nourishment available on the coffee table in the middle of the group room. Although some women complained that they didn’t need the calories, most of them found that the atmosphere of camaraderie and food helped them to feel sufficiently well cared for that they could engage in this difficult journey.

In this day and age when so much litigation surrounds abuse and ne-glect, it is hard even for adults not to feel an involuntary defensiveness. Children know that placement in a foster home may ensue if their parents are not supportive. All the fables and fears associated with being deprived of parents lead them to believe they could be placed in a government institution. Children also read news reports of parents who have been prosecuted and imprisoned for harming their children. Parents feel that if they were to divulge information about their past experience, they would have to talk about their abusing of children, and they too could be reported and prosecuted. Thus there are many fears, realistic and unfounded, that have to be dealt with one by one in order that people can begin to realize how badly they were mistreated.

The deepest pain comes with the realization that they were deprived of a reasonable childhood, a childhood that could have provided the necessary ingredients for building them into the kind of persons they could have become. Although this is a theme that crops up again when the group members deal with letting go of parts of themselves that never properly developed, at this earlier stage, the loss can be felt and given at least a cursory examination.

There are many double binds conveyed by actions that are incongruent with the words. This happens particularly with parents with holes in their superego. They tend to say, “I expect you will become a thief or a prostitute. Don’t you dare do it, but let me hear and vicariously enjoy your latest exploits.” This and other double binds make it hard for victims to express their distress.

The recognition that they were victims only takes place when they begin to realize the full range of feelings that transpired. Not only did they feel fear and pain, frustration and abandonment, but many of these feelings happened concurrently. To help them understand the complexity of ...