Child Abuse Survivor

I wrote a review for a book title It’s OK to Tell earlier today on the News and Reviews Blog, and I won’t repeat what I said about the book here, but reading it I did have a thought that was completely unrelated to the book.

In it, Lauren talks about the “absence” of her mother due to health issues, and the void that left in her live. She goes on to talk about how she was a lonely child who never felt like she belonged anywhere, and how the pedophile in her life sensed that, and used that to groom her for abuse. It’s not an unfamiliar story to me, and I’m sure it’s not to many others. It’s pretty common for kids who are missing positive role models, who have an underdeveloped sense of themselves, to fall prey to abusers. I’d say it’s the same thing when you look at kids who are being destroyed by bullying as well. It’s the kids without a healthy sense of themselves; who they are, what their place in the world is, etc. who are hurt, yet we continually focus all of our prevention attempts on the outside behavior of strangers we can’t control.

Instead of raising kids with a healthy sense of themselves, who feel loved, safe, and have the tools available to them to deal with bullying, or to possibly protect themselves from abusers, we spend all of our resources trying to keep abusers away from them, or launch giant anti-bullying campaigns that will only do some marginal amount of good.

Look, I’m not saying that those attempts aren’t good things, but if we think we can completely wipe out any bad thing from invading the childhoods of millions of kids, we’re sadly mistaken. What kids need most are the tools that help them deal with being bullied, to avoid being targeted because they feel safe, confidant, and loved, no matter what else may be coming at them from the outside world. They need positive role models, people who are capable of listening to them, and who they know they are safe with.

Simply put, the best thing you can do to protect your kids from abuse and bullying, is to be a good parent. Short of that, the best thing an extended family can do is fill in the gaps and provide a good, safe, loving atmosphere for the children in it, and lastly, a community can provide good role models, leaders, teachers, social workers, etc. who do the same. Give kids the tools to protect themselves, and you’ll find a lot less abuse and bullying, because there won’t be easy targets.

I came across this blog post the other day, entitled 12 Things Successful People Do Differently, and it occurred to me that many of the traits set out in the article also serve as good advice for survivors going through recovery.

Think about your own recovery and see how some of these apply:

• They create and pursue S.M.A.R.T. goals

• They work outside of their comfort zone.

• They focus on making small, continuous improvements.

• They maintain a positive outlook as they learn from their mistakes.

• They spend time with the right people.

• They maintain balance in their life.

As I look back on the years I spent in therapy and trying to rebuild my life as an adult, I can not only see where these things were useful, I can see even more how much not doing some of these things set me back. Not maintaining a positive outlook, partially created by surrounding myself with negative people, can do real damage to you as you heal, not to mention trying to do too much, or trying to do things that are impossible.

Take a look at the whole article, and despite the fact that it’s not focused on healing, think about how some of these skills are actually quite transferable. Then, figure out ways you can incorporate some of them into your healing. I think you’ll be glad you did!

I had actually been giving some thought to writing on this subject before Joe Paterno passed away earlier today, but he certainly does provide the latest example of what I wanted to talk about. With the news of his passing, there seem to be two schools of thought. He’s either being remembered as the coach and leader of the young men who played for him, an untiring advocate for education, sportsmanship, and a generous donor to the school that made him famous, or he’s the guy who utterly failed to do anything to protect innocent children who were being molested in the very building where he did his work, by a man who he chose to believe in instead of those young boys.

The truth is, Joe Paterno was both of those things, and that’s the problem when we make him, or anyone else, out to be a hero. For all the good, there are always faults, and the more you make someone a role model to be admired, the more you have to look closely at them, and the more likely it is that you will see those faults.

Living in South Carolina, as I do now, you see this very clearly in the history of this place. The Civil War and the Reconstruction provide many examples of Southern leaders who did great things for their states, rebuilding after the devastation of war, sacrificing their personal gain to remain loyal to their home state, giving up family fortunes to serve in public institutions and aid their fellow man, yet these same folks were also, in many cases, supporters of the KKK, or turned a blind eye to some of the most aggressive intimidation the country has ever seen.

Were these folks great leaders, or unrepentant racists? Again, they were probably both. History has too many examples of this to count. The people we view as “heroes”, when closely examined, did a lot of things we would not want to be associated with.

Abuse survivors know this all too well. Society likes to imagine that we know evil when we see it. That there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, just like in the movies. The good guys always do the right thing, and the bad guys are always out to hurt everyone else. Real life simply doesn’t work that way. The person who volunteers at the hospital, or works with a youth sports league, can be the same person who goes home after having a few and beats their kids. The teacher being fired for molesting a young child can be the same woman who has spent her free time and dedicated herself to educating those same children.

On the other hand, many survivors so want to cling to that belief that their abusers were totally and completely evil, that they create heroes of people who have done good things for them. Suddenly authors, or famous figures who fight against abuse, become their heroes, the people the model their lives after, because those are the “good” people. Eventually though, those heroes prove to be unable to live up to these unrealistic expectations, and disappointment ensues.

The truth is, there isn’t another human alive who is perfectly evil, and there isn’t one who is perfectly good. There are a great many people who have done things that we can admire. We should attempt to emulate those behaviors, and we should allow them the grace to have faults as well. At the end of the day, Joe Paterno was a great coach, and a great teacher to a large number of people. He was also someone who did not live up to his responsibility to the children who looked up to him within the State College community. He, like all of us, was a great number of other things as well, some good, some not so much. His good deeds were admirable, his faults came with consequences, end of story. He wasn’t a hero, nor was he a monster.

No one else is a hero or a monster either. Spend enough time examining any life, and you’ll find plenty of both types of behaviors. Even our biggest heroes have bad days, and behave poorly. All that does is prove that no one really deserves to be a considered a hero. They should simply be respected for the good things they’ve done, or judged for the bad things they have done. We can all have our own opinions about which side anyone falls on that fence, but we shouldn’t be looking for someone else to be the total example of how we should behave. They will always fall short.

Over the long holiday weekend, someone left a comment on an old post, that happened to also be the 1,000th comment on this iteration of the blog. I won’t go into the whole comment that was left, but the opening line of the comment left me thinking:

I cannot say that I’m a survivor, I’m still alive. That’s it.

In responding to the comment, my first thought was, well if you can survive the childhood you lived through, then yes, you are a survivor. Survivor’s don’t necessarily have all the answers, and survivors aren’t the folks who have spent years healing, and who seem to have figured out some way to struggle less with their demons, and survivors certainly don’t all have “happy” lives.

Survivors are those of us who have lived through the horrors of an abusive childhood, and yet still keep going. Being a survivor of child abuse does not depend on having a nice, healthy, drama-free, adult life. It does depend on going forward. How tragic would it be for us to have the strength and character to survive a childhood full of abuse only to allow it to destroy us later in life? It doesn’t have to be that way.

You are strong, you are resilient, you have gotten through a childhood that many others could not, and moved into adulthood despite attempts to crush you as a child. If that’s not something to be proud of, it’s that’s not “surviving”, then I don’t know what is.

This is a quote from Dr. Wayne Dyer that I saw someone share on Twitter earlier today, and it got me thinking about abuse survivors, especially those of us who were abused within the family unit. On one hand, speaking from my own experience with the friendships I’ve developed over the years, I can honestly say that I agree with the quote. My friends (including my wife, who is my best friend as well) are a huge source of support, love and laughter in my adult life.

On the other hand, I also remember what it was like early in my adult years, when I kept people at arms distance, hard a difficult time relating to other people, and generally distrusted, and disliked, most people I came in contact with. That was a legacy of being an abused child, and it was that legacy that had to be overcome before I could really see the value of good friends.

So, the odd thing about Dr. Dyer’s statement is that even if friends are the apology for your family, you still have to overcome the abuse suffered, sometimes within that family, to truly enjoy them. That can be quite a challenge for survivors, but it’s worth going after. There truly are people in the world who are good friends, and who will be great additions to your life. Not everyone, obviously, but it’s worth it to try and find those who are.

I know that the friends I have add so much to my life, and I wouldn’t be having as much fun without them!

From a highly recommended article on Slate, How what happened in State College forced me to confront my own abuse.

Several of my friends, for example, were shocked when Rick Reilly reported that, according to a 1998 study on child sexual abuse by Boston University Medical School, one in six boys in America will be abused by age 16. For girls, it’s one in four by the age of 14. They were shocked, no doubt, because concrete examples of abuse are not as available to them as the statistics suggest. Most people don’t think they know any abuse victims.

But they do know victims. They just don’t realize it, because so many of us have been unable to reveal ourselves. This breeds a false sense of security, with too many adults believing abuse is someone else’s problem.

By now I’m sure most of you are familiar with the recent charges brought against former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, as well as charges of perjury and failure to report against Penn State officials. If you aren’t familiar with the details, you can read them here, although they are quite disturbing.

When I first saw the story, Sunday night, it made me absolutely sick that this person was seen in a shower with a “10 year old boy”, 9 years ago, and was just now being charged with a crime.

After having a couple of days to digest the allegations, and read up on the details, I have to say, that as sick as it makes me, I’m not necessarily surprised. This is the Catholic Church, various boarding schools, junior hockey coaches, etc. all over again. Claims are made against “one of us”, whether it be a priest, a fellow coach, a board member, and we are hesitant to believe them or pursue them. The people in positions of authority don’t want to believe that this sort of things is happening under their noses, or being done by the same people they live and work with daily, so they do the minimum, if that. After all, Sandusky was one of them, and they wouldn’t do this, so surely there must be some misunderstanding, right? It’s called cognitive dissonance, and it’s actually quite normal, this ability we have to filter information in favor of what we already believe to be true. This is what makes it possible for abuse to go on right in front of us, with all the signals and hints visible, without people really seeing them, because we already believe good things about the people we are close to. Bad things struggle to crack our awareness.

Obviously, in this case, a couple of officials have been charged with not even doing the minimum, legally, but the focus has now switched to head coach Joe Paterno, and the graduate assistant who made the initial claim. They, apparently, met the minimum requirements of reporting it to their superiors, but did they really do the “right” thing? Did Paterno owe it to those kids to see past his dissonance when it came to his long time assistant, and personally get involved in making sure this was investigated? Did the university have an obligation to do more than simply tell Sandusky not to bring children to campus?

Personally, I believe that they did, but I also acknowledge that it’s sometimes easier said than done. I’d like to believe I would take serious any charge of child abuse, even if it was levied against someone I am close to, but when push comes to shove, are any of us willing to believe that our best friend, our spouse, our family members, our friends and neighbors, are capable of such heinous acts? Aren’t we sure they are just like us, and incapable of such things?

If this tragedy teaches us anything, it should teach us that abusers come in all shapes and sizes, ages, make and female, and just because we think we know someone, doesn’t mean they aren’t hiding horrific secrets. We owe it to these children, and the potential future victims to put aside our dissonance and take these kinds of claims seriously.

We should also raise our awareness of who pedophiles are. We like to think of pedophiles as those creepy guys from the TV movies, who we all know to avoid, but the reality is much more complicated than that. Pedophiles can be anywhere, and the best way to protect children is to stay closely involved in their lives, including keeping up with the people they are spending time with. Jerry Sandusky couldn’t have had a cleaner image at Penn State, and it was that image and prominence in the community that he used to cover up what he was doing, allegedly.  Abusers don’t announce themselves, assuming kids are safe just because no one “creepy” is around, is a huge mistake.

I was listening to the latest BS Report podcast on ESPN today, an interview done by Bill Simmons with Sugar Ray Leonard. I was aware that Ray openly discusses the sexual abuse he suffered as a child in his recent autobiography, but I hardly expected that to be a major portion of the interview.

If you want to hear that part, and don’t care much about the boxing talk, skip the first 20 minutes or so.

The interesting thing that I took away from the discussion, among a few really interesting things about the difficulty of talking about sexual abuse in a macho culture, was his description of telling his wife early in his marriage. Actually, the same scene played out in both of his marriages. He told his wife, she just stared at him, not knowing what to say, and he changed the subject, never to bring it up again.

It got me thinking that, even as a survivor myself, when people tell me about being abused, I’m not sure what to say either. I hate to think that is causing them to change the subject and never talk about it again. I hope that hasn’t ever happened, but if it has, I hope whoever it was is reading this now!

So survivors, here’s your chance to let folks know, how should people respond, what should they say? Is it ok to not know what to say? For me, I think it’s ok to not know what to say, but say that. Don’t stare at me like I’m a freak, I already feel like a freak for having experienced this, and now talking about it. Just admit, you don’t know what to say, and show that you care. It goes a long, long way!

I spotted this post by Faith Allen on her blog recently, and have been enjoying the various comments that came pouring in.

In it she talks about how healing has become a challenge within her marriage because she is not the wife her husband expects her to be any more. She has been spending her time healing from her child abuse, and becoming  a stronger and more independent woman, and that’s not who he married. I can identify with what she is going through, because I went through a similar experience.

As I began healing, being married actually became quite a problem for me. Not necessarily because my marriage was horrible, but because trying to be the husband my wife expected me to be, and allowing myself the freedom to heal and change created a huge internal conflict.

As it turned out, in my case, that conflict became the source of even more depression and mental health issues, causing my wife to decide she couldn’t stay and watch me make myself worse. In essence, she solved the conflict for me, by filing for divorce. Not every marriage that experiences this sort of issue fails in the way mine did, but it is a challenge.

Healing requires us throwing off some of our old coping mechanisms and learn to become full-fledged adults. That adult is going to be a different person than the one you were when you first got married. It’s not that this new, healthy, person is worse, or a bad spouse or anything along those lines. They’re just different. In my case, it means wanting different things from life than my wife did. I suddenly felt pulled away from the lifestyle and views she held very dear. I was no longer what the kind pf man she wanted to spend her life with. I think I sensed that as I healed. I was moving away from the religious views that had been a very important part of our marriage, (Not religion or spirituality in general, but away from the specific church that we were heavily involved in) and away from the sort of family life that was important to her. Attempting to somehow reach a compromise within myself and heal while remaining that guy was a horrible, horrible idea!

Some marriages survive this sort of thing. Sometimes a spouse can change along with the one who is healing, and they both can become better for each other than they were before. Sometimes you just can’t. It doesn’t always mean that you’re a failure or that the marriage is a failure. It’s ok to simply want something out of life that your spouse doesn’t want anymore, and it’s ok for them to be free to find what they were looking for. I don’t resent my first wife for leaving me when I was at the lowest point in my life. I’m grateful that she set me free to heal and have the wonderful life I have now. Hopefully she has been able to pursue the life she wanted as well, the one I could no longer give her.

On the other hand, if you can heal and stay married, more power to you. I can only imagine that having gone through all of that with a supportive spouse is an amazing experience, but I also know it was probably very hard, and not for everyone!

As I’ve said many times, we’re all different as survivors, and for those who are healing, and married, your marriages are all different too. There’s no telling where it’ll end up, but know that as long as you pursue healing, you’ll be better off, regardless of what happens!

I was slightly bemused when I saw that Tracie had made change the theme of September’s Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse.

Why, you ask? Because I had been thinking quite a bit about the topic of late. It’s been almost 6 months since I packed what I could fit in my car, and drove from Ohio down to South Carolina to start my new job. At that time, I knew I was going to a better job, in a brand new place, where I didn’t know anyone, and that I’d be apart from my wife for slightly more than 6 months. As I now prepare for her moving down here, looking to get out of my temporary apartment and into a more permanent place to live, I can see that this experience has not only been a big change, but it has changed me as well.

Sure, I knew this move, and the circumstances surrounding it would be a challenge. In fact, I would now say it’s been a bigger challenge than I even imagined at that time. On the other hand, I am so glad that this happened.

Oh sure, I’m glad to be in a better job, living in an area of the country that we had dreamed of moving to for years now. But it’s more than that. This experience has changed who I am in profound ways. It has challenged me to be more independent, and has given me a confidence in myself, and in my marriage, that I would not otherwise have. I now know that when big changes get thrown at me in the future, and they will, I can handle it. I know that if something causes my wife and I to be apart for a time, or our marriage gets some other challenge thrown at us, we’ll hang in there and get through it together.

Maybe the most interesting thing about these past 6 months has been learning how change is a good thing. Even negative changes can be a good thing. As survivors, most of us are fearful of any change, anything that upsets the carefully crafted, and controlled, life we’ve made to keep ourselves safe. Yet, no matter how hard we try, some things will change, and getting through those changes will only help you on your journey. So embrace the small changes, and learn from them. Let them change you.