You always feel as if you stand alone in memories that have no top and no bottom in an endless landscape of shame and guilt and pain. There is nowhere to run and no place to hide, because your tormentor lives somewhere in your head behind billowing, scary curtains of denial and confusion. I have been to a lot of therapists over the years. Some actually hurt me. Some helped me a little just by listening, and some helped me a lot to overcome soul-wrenching suffering. But regardless of any disappointments, I always kept going back in hopes of finding my way out of a long, dark, bitter night that went on for decades. One of the most helpful tools that I was ever given, is to find pictures of myself close to the time of the traumas and examine them to see how well they match up with the stories that are told.
The above photo is me at nine years old in front of my uncle’s car and our neighbor’s house. My father said I seduced him at this age. The half-brother who raped me said, “She ain’t never been nothin’ but a liar!” Various and assorted others would have similar stories about me.
I don’t look like a seductive, evil Jezebel who has demoralized boys and men from birth. I just look like a lonely, damaged child. Like most survivors of abuse, I was slow in learning to defend my dignity and truth. Sexual abuse is a form of death, and I spent far too many years of my life living as if my body resided somewhere else. I couldn’t look at myself fully in a mirror for decades. If I was putting on lipstick, I saw only my lips. Mascara was the same. I refused ownership of my body because it no longer belonged to me. Once the ownership of our body is stripped away, recovering that power can be seemingly impossible. And that loss of my body was, of course, my fault. It was always my fault. I had fully accepted responsibility for my own abuse and there was always someone eager to keep me in my place if I should ever try to stray.
Mama sent me over to find my father at a construction site once when I was eighteen years old. I didn’t like being there because it was empty except for a small trailer at the side of it. Scared, but even more scared of disappointing mama, I knocked on the door. An older, lanky man opened it and stared down at me. “Is my dad here? His name is Lyman Hopkins.”
He said nothing for the longest time. He just stared with a twisted expression of pure disgust and hate. “I know what you did,” he muttered. “You’re the one that ruined your daddy’s life! He done told me all about it.”
He continued staring coldly without offering information on dad’s whereabouts, apparently wanting to allow time for his rage at the seduction of my father and ruining his life in the process to sink in. I obviously didn’t merit a response. He slammed the door in my face before I stumbled away unable to think or feel.
Logic didn’t factor in. What mattered then, and now, are the deep underlying beliefs in our sub-conscious minds. Beliefs that we absorbed from others. Beliefs that were handed down from one generation to another. Beliefs that have been around for so long that it would be irreligious to doubt them. I can remember my mother plopping me down next to the neighbor’s boys while they were digging up pastel-colored grass roots with tablespoons. “Get ‘er out o’ here! We don’t want to play with her! She’s just a girl.”
Everyone could chuckle at that one and reflect on the silliness of a preschooler’s philosophy on life, but the following are quotes and reflections from some world and early church leaders who have shaped our present social structure with the same silliness. Most people don’t understand that Eve eating the forbidden fruit continues to wreak havoc today. Being kicked out of Paradise has never really been forgiven by an angry few. A German proverb says, “Adam must have his Eva so that he may blame her for what he himself has done.”
“Women”, wrote Tertullian, ” The curse God pronounced on your sex still weighs on the world. You are the Devil’s doorway. You have led astray one whom the Devil would not attack directly. You are the first that deserted the divine laws. All too easily, you destroyed the image of God, Adam. Because you deserved death, it was the Son of God who had to die. You shall always go in mourning and rags.”
It’s noteworthy that early Church Fathers did not view a woman as being in the image of God as Adam was. She was more of an inferior sub-species with a weak, pathetic ill-suited body. Tertullian further insulted the daughters of Eve, “Woman is a temple built over a sewer.”
Where did they get such rage and contempt for women? They did not take their cue from Christ because New Testament sources do not contain a single negative statement about women from him. It appears to have arisen out of a need to attribute blame for a large number of mistresses and sexual conquests that had soiled their collective histories.
Fast forward to our not-so-distant past. Assessing sexual abuse yet rests on the research of men like Freud who listened to ‘hysterical’ females claim that their fathers had sexually abused them as children. He uncovered abuse and then covered it back up. He stated that the accusations were sexual fantasies. This preserved a nice surface of Victorian respectability for the men.
“To remove the responsibility from the father, Freud found it necessary to undermine the perceptions of his female patients. Therefore, since any attempt on the part of the child or for her family to expose the violator exposes her own innate sexual motives and shamed her more than the offender, concealment is her only recourse.” The Freudian Coverup
Freud drew the blueprint for sex offenders to this day. The victim will often be humiliated, ridiculed, shamed, and called a liar. Survivors have scuttled like rats for centuries keeping their secrets in dark places and hiding from the light. I was in such pain for years after being raped at nine years old that I couldn’t sleep. My father had been aware of the pain and told my mother that I had seduced him. I cried at her bedside hoping to go to a doctor but she would always say, “Hush up now, and go back to bed”. By minimizing the experience and my pain, she made me worthless. The shame I felt over the years of abuse and subsequent feelings of unworthiness eventually swallowed away any dreams or hope or feelings of lovability. I grew accustomed to the pain and numb to the possibility of happiness.
There should be no more shame or secrecy in being a survivor of sexual abuse than there is in being the survivor of a car accident. By denying me the right and the freedom to openly express my experiences, I was also denied the right to fully live. I couldn’t show up for life without those experiences and society has refused to let me, and so many others, in with them. The real shame here is that tens of thousands of us are still waiting to live.
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