Information sheet: Sexual Abuse
Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse denotes sexual acts enforced upon powerless victims.
Only in the last few decades has the extent of the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults in the family and the community been acknowledged. It is now well-known that Freud learned directly from many of his patients of the frequency of incestuous child abuse as far back as the early 1900s, and that he chose to suppress the evidence so as to give a veneer of respectability to the new "science" of psychoanalysis. This resulted in a treatment structure based on explaining away the objective nature of victims’ experiences as subjective Oedipal fantasies. Even today, with the rise of belief in so-called "false memory syndrome," some psychiatrists are to be found casting doubt upon the reality of childhood abuse experiences, while the victims themselves may have been so traumatised that they are willing to collude in denial.
Childhood sexual abuse has far-reaching effects.
When our well-being and sense of self-respect, and even our belief in our ability to survive, have been undermined by sexual demands made by an adult upon whom we are perhaps emotionally and materially dependent, it is as if the ground is pulled out from under our feet. It is hardly surprising if throughout later life we feel we can only relate to others from behind self-protective barriers. We will fear opening up to any relationship that could invite us into dependency, and hence vulnerability.
Our silence might have been secured by threats of greater violence or even murder; or, more insidiously, we might have been persuaded that the consequence of telling would be the destruction of the family unit and the loss of our parents and siblings.
We are likely to have been deeply disturbed by the sexually mature adult's demands upon our undeveloped body. This disturbance could have become excruciating as we entered puberty and began to experience sexual feelings of our own. Our mature sexual needs will have been contaminated by the terror and incomprehension that accompanied enforced intimacy. It may be that at some stage involuntary sexual arousal occurred, and this may have caused us to suffer guilt, as if we had connived with the abuser or even invited the abuse.
We might also feel a profound rage and may fear we could be in danger of inflicting violence upon others if they get close enough for us to experience arousal. Or we may symbolically avenge ourselves upon the original abuser by unconsciously attracting others only to reject them. When we do this, we taste something of the power we were unable to exercise in the past.
We may unconsciously be drawn towards abusive people if abuse was the closest thing to affection we ever received and if we were conditioned to expect attention under no other circumstances. And we may feel flabbergas-ted when anyone shows affection that is not motivated by sexual demand: we won't understand where they are coming from. In our social lives we are likely to feel like puppets being manipulated by incomprehensible forces. We might have an uncertain hold on reality. If our abuser scared us into secrecy about abnormal acts while the normal routines of life carried on as if everything was okay, we may have become programmed to experience reality as a surreal parade of bizarre contradictions.
Such patterned responses are more concrete than mere "attitudes".
They have been structured into our bodies and minds by the impact of repeated shocks to our systems. Shocks invariably give rise to a complex sequence of physiological responses designed to resolve the emergency and release the stress. As abused children, however, we had no power to follow these responses through, so the fight-or-flight emergency state will have become internalised. Such alternations of arousal and inhibition of our stress-release responses will have placed great strain on our young organisms during formative growing periods.
Gradually, our bodies will have been drained of reflexive muscular power and we will have offered little or no resistance. The secretion of endorphins (the body's natural painkillers) to numb the physical pain will have anaesthetised our bodily distress and frozen our responses. Reduction of oxygen supply to the brain will have induced a degree of mental confusion that added to our passive compliance. Over time, regularly repeated states of alarm may have created ongoing patterns of inhibited breathing, tensed muscles, distorted posture, confusion, depression, unfocussed anger, guilt, self-doubt, and troubled sexuality, all of which may have persisted into adulthood and led to long-established dysfunctional behaviours and organic illnesses.
Sexual abuse can have disturbing consequences.
Dissociation is a natural defence against experiences which would have been physically and emotionally shattering in the context of full awareness. We learned to survive what was happening to us by splitting-off from identification with our bodies and becoming inert. We may continue in later life to escape from difficulties by unconsciously switching channels and involun-tarily entering alternative realities. We may become up-in-the-head, substituting mental phenomena for the sensual life of the body. But events from which we dissociated ourselves are still imprinted in the brain and body due to the physiological effects of held inhalations and muscle tension during repeated startle experiences. Their effects cannot be held at bay indefinitely.
Flashbacks are discharges of held memories that are finding natural outlets, either when triggered by fear of abuse in present circumstances or when we are relaxed or asleep, or startled by something evocative of past events on TV. A flashback can feel as traumatic as the original event. GPs will routinely dispense tranquillisers to block flashbacks, rarely understanding that this is a natural release process that needs not suppression but sympathetic and sensitive acceptance by a skilled therapist in a safe environment.
Projection is a related but less vivid process and can be experienced when emotions from dissociated events in the past get evoked by events in the present. This results in the eerie projection of a past feeling state into a present situation. For example, there may be an inexplicable sense of unease about going to bed or having a bath, nausea at certain food substances, oppression by certain people and places, a sense of foreboding about certain seasons or times of day or night, or outright terror in certain situations.
Counselling & Therapy can help us move beyond our abusers.
An experienced listener can help us help ourselves by providing a fully confidential opportunity to get things off our chests. This could be an arduous process as we are revisiting extremely painful areas, but a skilled and sensitive worker will help us explore our past at our own pace. In this way our innate self-healing powers can be gently encouraged and brought to bear upon our pain. Memories held in our bodies and minds can be released naturally and effectively.
Childhood sexual abuse can represent a powerful opposing force to our inborn talents and capacities. It is through recovering the energy that has been blocked by abuse that we become able to rediscover our life's direction and our place in the world. This can mean so much more than just being "a survivor".