Blinder than Bats

I want to talk about incest. About the family members, the perpetrators and their wives and mothers, who almost invariably deny that anything has happened.

Fathers, step-fathers, and boyfriends are usually the perpetrators. I guess I can understand when they don’t come out and admit their crimes. They don’t want to go to jail.

But what sort of mental gymnastics are the women doing, the women defending these men, when they deny their daughters and granddaughters were molested?

Over and over again, I hear it: my mom said I was lying; my grandmother told my mom it was a bunch of lies.

What in God’s name is wrong with these women? I guess they’re afraid of jail, too. The problem is, they seem to believe their self-deception.

Is there anything more dangerous than when blunder around this earth with our eyes shut tight? Is there anything more harmful than ignorance, especially of the willful variety? The Buddha had it right: the root of suffering is ignorance.

I don't know how a victim of incest deals with it. The brick wall is formidable. How is a person supposed to feel any justice has been achieved, or any resolution obtained? Unfortunately, it seems in sexual abuse cases oftentimes the only justice is gotten by a belief that people get their just deserts somehow -- what goes around comes around, or at the least, the lives they lead are ones of darkness. Or maybe they'll be reincarnated as dung beetles.

I have my own ignorance to deal with: One of the greatest problems I seem to have right now because of the rape is one that simultaneously developed out of my divorce around the same time: I haven't accepted the aspect of human nature that is completely self-absorbed, blind to the pain caused others, and capable of such enormous self-deception without remorse or sense of shame. I haven't accepted how people are duplicitous and can change from one thing into a person who appears totally different. I haven't accepted how or why I could be so trusting, and then betrayed – it is so totally contrary to what I grew up believing I deserved. It came as a shock. And then I look back and think, "did I REALLY know I deserved better, or is there something about me that drew these betrayers into my life?" And then I think, I no longer know what is real, who I am, and who other people are. It's very troubling.

I'm turning to Buddhism and meditation to cultivate an open-eyed acceptance of life as it is. And I'm also returning to my Christian roots and looking for a church that welcomes people with diverse beliefs. I can’t seem to get around Jesus as the cultural lens through which my limited eyes are most able to see a very big God. I've spent several decades being an agnostic and sometime-militant atheist. But I'm finding that despair is far worse than just about anything that can happen. Hope is the only thing that makes it worth it to look for goodness in the midst of outrage. And I'm finding that faith is the way I am able, now, to find hope. It may seem ridiculous to people of greater faith, pathetic . . . but a part of me feels defeated in turning to religion, like I have failed to find sufficient meaning and be satisfied with the privilege of simply being alive on a beautiful and fascinating planet. Perhaps I'll look back on this reluctant experiment differently in a few years.

I don't know how to accept that a man could rape me. I don't know how to accept that my first husband, an intelligent, well-educated and well-liked man, can boldly and without remorse refuse to follow the divorce agreement and treat the mother of his child with carelessness and disrespect. I don't know how to accept that families of childhood sexual abuse are so often blind to the pain they cause, and can live with their deceptions.

The only thing I know is that I can't let myself ever be so self-deceiving. I have to look at my intentions clearly, no matter how uncomfortable. And I have to restrain my actions, even where they seem perfectly natural and justified, if it means treating others in ways I don't want to be treated. I continue to believe human beings have that capacity for introspection and restraint. I want to hold onto that belief.

But I’m afraid. I am afraid that in opening my eyes, in allowing my blind idealism to transform into clear-eyed acceptance of reality, I will lose it.

And I guess there lies the tipping point, the murky edge between despair and hope: faith.

Lucky

There is a perplexing thing I do. The victim’s advocate four years ago said I was doing it, and the moderator for a support group I attend says I still do it. I minimize the crime committed against me.

You may say, right, uhuh, you have a blog totally devoted to trauma, you write about it ad nauseum, and you think you minimize it?

This is how I (along with so many trauma victims) do it:

I feel lucky that the rapist didn't cut me with the knife. He didn't use physical force except to originally subdue me -- he didn't seem to use violence gratuitously.

I feel lucky my daughter wasn't there to witness the attack.

I feel lucky I got a condom on him so I didn't have as much fear of AIDS or pregnancy afterwards, which is fortunate because I was allergic to the HIV prophylactic drugs.

I feel lucky that the cops caught him in my bed after I'd escaped to the neighbor's.

I feel lucky to be one of 2% of rape cases that are successfully prosecuted.

I read about women in the Congo gang-raped by soldiers at the wells, their genitals so severely mutilated that if they don’t die, they live with constant pain, incontinence, and an inability to farm for their families -- and then on top of everything, they are ostracized from their communities as though they are now worthless and, basically, left to die.

I feel lucky I wasn't them.

Although I'm very open about talking about the rape, and almost militant in my activism in some ways -- I still minimize what happened to me, because there are people who have had it so much worse.

I'm trying to figure out exactly why I minimize. I know intellectually it must make it easier for my mind to embrace what has happened, a sort of denial that facilitates recovery in some ways, a self-protection. I think it also is an attempt to temper what feels -- and I fear looks like to others -- like self-absorption in victimhood. It's furthermore probably a manifestation of low self-esteem that comes from having someone so completely disregard one's own will and wishes, which is what rape is -- a very clear message from the rapist that your voice means nothing.

I know this in my head. But it still doesn't FEEL right to completely embrace the full horror of my experience, without qualification. Sometimes I manage it, like in what I write at times in this blog. But then I feel simultaneously satisfied and yucky afterward, like I've done something not quite accepted. All the gender programming mixed in there reminds me the not-at-all demure female is threatening, not least to my own self-image.

The support group moderator said I minimize the crime committed against me. She said, "every person's story has it's own particular kind of damage and repercussions". I keep looking at those words, trying to soak them up through my skin, digest them, make them a part of how I feel, and not just what I know to be true. But I don’t feel it yet.

I still feel lucky.

Guest Post

The following piece was contributed by a member of the public.


"In the Overall Scheme of Things"
by Michaela Léan Chauvin

I have never shared with anyone all of the gory details of the abuse that I endured, not even my therapist. It took awhile before I even acknowledged to myself that it happened at all. That is why the flashbacks were so disturbing.

When I first started having them, I was devastated. The experience was absolutely horrifying and at first I thought I was imagining things, there was no way that those things could have happened. If they did, why didn’t I remember them until now?

About the time they began I was experiencing a particularly stressful time in my life. While I had had other stressors prior to this, this period was a trigger for these memories. I may never know what exactly the trigger was, and it really doesn’t matter. The fact is, it happened and it forced me to acknowledge the abuse. I still don’t talk about the details but for the first time in my life I can actually verbalize and acknowledge that I was raped, multiple times, over a period of years. There, now I have said it, in public.

Sometimes I get wrapped up in the bad things that have happened. They are part of who I am and they have shaped me. As much as I try, I cannot deny these things occurred. Even though I repressed my memory of these experiences, too painful to remember, they still impact me daily. Now that the memories have resurfaced I can see patterns of behavior that did not make sense at the time but are now perfectly clear. These “aha” moments are amazing and while the flashbacks have been painful, there is a bright side. Really!

For the first time in a long time I feel peaceful. I haven’t been looking over my shoulder and certain situations no longer cause me to bristle or withdraw. I still have a lot of work to do, but at least I am now on the road to working through everything. Notice I didn’t say “recovering” from my experiences. I don’t feel that I will ever recover, I can only move forward.

I was already seeing a mental health professional when the flashbacks started. Thank goodness for that! Part of my counseling included the development of a timeline of events in my life, from my earliest memory to the present. I found this exercise to be very therapeutic. When I look at my life from this vantage point I immediately recognize that the positive experiences far outweigh what I call the “dark periods”. I am also able to identify my strengths and support systems. I have after all survived and thrived over the long haul.

If I had a choice, I would choose to forego the trauma, but if that meant that I would be different than I am today, as a person, I would experience it all over again. Ultimately, I like the person that I have become and I am not sure that I would be who I am had I not experienced ALL of my life, the good and the bad.

There is a lot of good in my life and I am thankful for that. One thing that has helped me cope and keeps me moving forward is acknowledging that in the overall scheme of things I have a lot of positive experiences to draw upon.

It's a Cultural Thing

Afghanistan passed a law recently making marital rape legal. I don’t know which is more disturbing – the fact this law was passed, or the comments supporting this law in the ether (http://www.thestar.com/article/617179).

I think most people reading this blog will agree with Obama that the law is “abhorrent”. As my mother would add, “abhorrent, period.” End of story. Get the law off the books. And don’t give me any of that wishy washy relativism that we feminists coming of age in the 80s were saddled with. My values may be Western and theirs may be based on Sharia, but we’re all human beings, and this law is contrary to universal human rights.

Why is it that when it comes to rights for the female half of the population, people comment that “it’s not our affair”, or “It’s cultural, we can’t possibly understand it, so we should stay out of it”? Do we say that when Congolese soldiers chop off the hands of thousands? Or when armies draft child soldiers? Or when skinheads attack Jews and Blacks? Or when governments engage in torture? If we say those horrors are “cultural”, it’s to say “wow, that’s a pretty f’d up part of the culture” – and then we call our leaders or march in the streets or at least express our disdain at cocktail parties to show how much we know about world affairs. But we don’t say, “It’s none of our business.” We did that with the Tutsis and the Serbs for a while, but we started to learn our lesson with those debacles – hundreds of thousands die when we say “it’s cultural”.

But we’re still saying it when it comes to women around the world. Ok, it’s gotten better. Aid packages from Western nations usually have strings attached indicating human rights for women have to be observed by the recipient countries. Western presidents are expressing outrage about this Afghan law. But then you get comments like this in response to a news story about the Afghan law:

“Their laws are none of our afair. We may totally disagree with the way they understand and enforce their laws but its non of our business. Not minding our own business is how we get into these messes in the first place. The Afgan affair is just another holly was in "wolves clothing"! Submitted by ef at 11:37 AM Sunday, April 12 2009

All those mistakes, spelling and otherwise, indicate this writer isn’t the tastiest pea in the pod. But isn’t that what our world is made up of? That, and the below:

“Rape in definition is "to use force". If a woman signs this marriage contract than she is agreeing to ready herself every four days. If she agrees to the contract than she is not being forced to have sex. If she is forced to get married/to sign the contract, that is a problem that should be dealt with. Educate your women and treat them equally. BUT all women should have sex with their husbands! It's not that big of a deal if they are not sick, menstruating or recovering from childbirth. If they love the person they chose to marry than they SHOULD ready themselves at least every four days. Not for religious reasons but for his sanity!” Submitted by mel1976 at 11:02 AM Sunday, April 12 2009

These comments came from readers of the Toronto Star. Westerners, for all intents and purposes. And although their arguments are different in content, I say they are part and parcel of the same cowardice: an unwillingness to defend women’s human rights because to do so would entail a property loss to men.

Now, I haven’t sounded off like this – on how men view women as property – for a long time. I’ve gone off that shtick. It’s too ideological. Doesn’t get at the complexity of human motivation and interaction.

But I will call a spade a spade. The oppression of women is tied in with culture, but that is no excuse or justification. There are universal ethics. Cultures, including religious aspects, must change in order for universal ethics to be upheld. And one of the aspects of ALL cultures – not just those under the sway of Sharia, but our own beloved Western cultures – that must change is the notion that what men do to women is what men do to their property, and is therefore private, and none of our business.

Clearly, the Afghan law treats women as the property of their husbands. Don’t say it’s their business, and then claim you simply respect the cultural integrity of Afghani Shiites. What you really respect is the right of men to certain behaviors on the part of women. If you don’t believe Nazi skinheads have the right to attack Jews and Blacks on the streets; if you don’t believe soldiers have the right to draft children into military service – you can’t believe Afghani Shiite men have the right to pass a law forcing their wives to have sex. If you do believe the latter, then, well – it’s as I said: you are defending the right of men to hold women as property.

The progress toward greater human rights in the last two centuries has been about one thing, in essence: a refutation of the idea that humans can hold property rights in other humans. It started with the abolition of serfdom (property rights by virtue of class, title, and economic circumstance), continued with the abolition of slavery (property rights by virtue of nationality or ethnic group), progressed to the regulation of employment conditions (rights of employers by virtue of owning property – a business) and other civil issues (entertainment and eating establishments, schools, landlords – their right to dictate who gets to use their property). The world has progressed in its thinking about what rights one person can have over another. We have progressed in our thinking about how men can control women.

But we have a long ways to go. And it’s not just in Afghanistan that we see how men view women as property. It’s right here, right now, in our own homes and social circles and political arenas. One indication is how we still hear “it’s none of our business”, “it’s cultural”, and “it’s private”, where relations between men and women are concerned. There are myriad other indications from our everyday lives, often very subtle indications, and women often bind themselves as much as they let men do the binding. But that’s for another blog entry.

For now, can we just have a resounding, “WTF is Karzai doing, thinking he can get away with signing that horrendous law!?”, and make sure he doesn’t, in fact, get away with it?

Guest Post

The following piece was contributed by a member of the public.


"What Goes Around Comes Around"
by Anonymous

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” his brother said, “Jon died six years ago, you didn’t know?” How would I, I haven’t spoken to him in over 15 years. “What goes around comes around” were the last words that Jon ever said to me, as if my husband’s cancer was the result of some karmic energy paying me back for leaving him. The only thing that I can remember from that phone conversation with Jon’s brother is me singing the song from the Wizard of OZ in my head “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

It is hard to describe exactly what I was feeling when I first heard the news. It hit me a few days later. I cried, but it wasn’t because I was grieving his death. I cried because I thought I was a terrible person. I was glad that he was dead, and relieved to know that I would never see him again.

There were times with Jon that I lay in bed, wondering how I could kill him and make it look like an accident. Others may have become suicidal, but that thought never crossed my mind. He hadn’t beaten me down that far. He wasn’t going to win. It had to look like an accident because I didn’t want to pay for his life with the rest of mine. He had already taken enough of my life.

Jon was very clear that I wasn’t going to leave him. He would never let me go. If he couldn’t have me then no one could. The .357 Magnum kept next to our bed enforced that point clearly and he didn’t hesitate to pull it out of the nightstand on a regular basis to remind me.

An opportunity presented itself when he moved out of state for his work and had been gone for about a month. I was absolutely insistent that I would not get married until I finished my college degree so I didn’t go with him. It was probably the one thing that saved my life, the one thing that he knew that he could not get me to change my mind on. It scared him to think that I wasn’t going with him and he called me every day and night to check in on me. Even from a distance he frightened me, he knew where I was and he knew how to find me. At one point I believed that he was having me watched. I could only hope that I would have some warning before he actually arrived back in the state.

I remember watching a movie one night, “Sleeping with the Enemy”. The title resonated with me and it was chilling. Too close to home but not quite the same story. I had never spoken with anyone about what was happening. Not even my best girl friend. How could I have gotten myself into this mess? It was at that moment that I realized even strong, confident women get drawn into abusive relationships. I never thought I was one of “those women”. You know, the weak woman with the bad family history, the one who was raised in violence and expected nothing less from her relationships. It was her own fault, right? She didn’t have to take it. She could leave any time. How naïve. I wasn’t any better than anyone else, I had been drawn into the same pattern of abuse, and I just didn’t realize it.

He had been dead six years and I didn’t realize how much he affected my daily habits, how frightened I had been, and watchful. I am still living with the effects of that relationship and the experience still haunts me in ways that I don’t expect. My husband occasionally experiences the aftermath of the lingering emotional damage. Every once in awhile he will do something that sets me off and I will scream at him at the top of my lungs as he stares blankly at me, having no idea what he has just done. He knew that I had issues as a result of my ex but I never really discussed them in detail. There are just some things he doesn’t need to know.

I was sitting in the airport the other day when I realized that for the first time in years I was relaxed. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder wondering if he was going to sneak up behind me. He is gone and I never have to worry about him again.

He died of a gunshot wound to the groin. He was out at his cabin and bled to death before they got him to a hospital. As terrible as it sounds, I couldn’t think of a better way for him to die. A gunshot wound to the groin, how fitting. The abuse that I suffered over the years came back to haunt him. I wonder if he shot himself with his .357 Magnum.

When his brother told me how he died, all I could think of were the words he said to me the last time we spoke. “What goes around comes around.”

Trauma Recovery and PTSD: Scuba Therapy

I've not until recently felt kinship with soldiers.

My parents were raised in Berkeley during the 60s, and although they had zero good things to say about "those hippies", I did the Birkenstock/calico skirts/Mexican ruffle top/hairy armpit Seattle thing, perhaps to spite them. This rebellion included campus organizing for abortion rights, protesting Iran-Contra, and holding signs down by the Pike Place Market against the war in El Salvador.

Two things bridged the gap I felt between myself and those who are trained to kill.

Being raped at knifepoint by an intruder to my home was the first. Now, my sentiments after the attack could well have swung me in the other direction. After all, rape is often a weapon of war, and Nicolas Kristoff of the NYT is a hero for exposing so publicly this blight on our humanity. We know that even our soldiers have raped, and often the victims are fellow United States soldiers. I hold this wariness of soldiers' training, of anything-can-happen-in-the-jungle mentality, very close. It is always on the tip of my tongue, ready to release invective. But I feel it in my bones, how close I came to dying. I was on that precipice, for about 3 hours. Soldiers on assignment, they feel it every minute of every day, for months, or years at a time.

I don't have to view soldiers as victims in the way I do the survivors of rape. After all, those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan signed up for it all. But when it comes to recovery, does it matter whether or not we chose our circumstances? In some respects, yes, perhaps. But which story am I to be less troubled by? That of a veteran who can neither sleep nor get out of bed for the flashbacks and the terror of stepping out into the raw outside world? Or that of a raped mother who can't listen to her child or pay the bills or shop for food because she's paralyzed with grief and depression? Suffering is the great equalizer. All who have seen death around the corner -- whether it's the left corner or the right, it doesn't matter -- share a kinship that makes for an odd family. But then what family isn't.

The second thing that bridged the gap was dating a soldier. I come from a line of Marines -- my father, two uncles, a cousin. But knowing a Marine, and kissing (et cetera) one, are two completely different scenarios. I was appalled at first to hear of his going upstate to play war games in the woods with his ex-Marine buddies. I blushed at the military humor bumper stickers plastered all over his car. I thought to myself, how in God's name did I end up here with him? But there was something tantalizing about exploring someone so, well, weird when considered in the context of my lefty world. I listened to him talk about discipline, loyalty, and self-control. I considered the parallels between Eastern martial arts and our military. And I frankly swooned at his confident bearing and "no, sir" and "yes, ma'am" replies to my colleagues at work. We didn't last, of course. Our worlds were just too far apart.

But I have that bridge now. I can step over and hold the hand of a soldier, and feel the common turf beneath us. I feel it in my bones, as keenly as I feel the terror, even now almost four years later. And so when I watch wounded soldiers getting scuba therapy, I think of the scuba certification I got in Mexico last year. I had gone to Mexico for a reason: the man who raped me was Mexican. I wanted to face my fear, look in the eyes of Mexican men, and not just see rapists. I wanted to purge the prejudice that poisoned me after the attack. It was the sea turtles off Playa del Carmen who helped me do that. I mean, how you can you look a sea turtle in the eye and not be grateful to be alive? After seeing those turtles, I was able to see men with a little more joy as well.

We need more of these programs like scuba therapy for returning soldiers. They are our brothers and sisters, and when they suffer . . . we need to feel it as our own, and act accordingly.