Prime Time - Jane Fonda [15]
By the time I read my mother’s reports I already knew that sexual abuse, be it a one-time trauma or a long-term violation, is not only a physical trauma; its memories carry a powerful emotional and psychic charge and can lead to emotional and psychosomatic illnesses and difficulties with intimacy. The ability to connect deeply with others is broken, and it becomes difficult to experience trust, feel competent, have a sense of self. Thus, another piece of the family’s intimacy puzzle fell into place.
I also knew that sexual abuse robs a young person of her sense of autonomy. The boundaries of her personhood become porous, and she no longer feels the right to claim her psychic or bodily integrity. For this reason, it is not unusual for survivors to become promiscuous starting in adolescence. The message that abuse delivers to the fragile young one is: “All you have to offer is your sexuality, and you have no right to keep it off-limits.” Boys, boys, boys.
GUILT
Then there’s the issue of guilt. It seems counterintuitive that a child would feel guilty about being abused by an adult whom they are incapable of fending off. But children, I learned, are developmentally unable to blame adults. They must believe that adults, on whom they depend for life and nurturing, are trustworthy. Instead, guilt is internalized and carried in the body, often for a lifetime—a dark, free-floating anxiety and depression that can cross generations. This can lead to hatred of one’s body, excessive plastic surgery, and self-mutilation.
I had learned, years before I’d read my mother’s history of abuse, that these feelings of guilt and shame, the sense of never being good enough, and hatred of one’s body can cast a long shadow. These emotions can span generations, carried on what feels like a cellular level to daughters and even granddaughters. So that’s partly where they came from, my own body issues, my feeling of not being good enough!
Reading my mother’s typed history, with her little penciled notes in the margins, filled me with sadness and with compassion for my mother, as well as gratitude that, fifty years later, her history would allow me to forgive her—and myself. Again the realization swept over me: Her remoteness, her suicide had nothing to do with me. I don’t have to feel guilty. This was an important lesson, this understanding that other people have lives and problems you know nothing about—their behavior is not all about you!
Talking to her few remaining friends and family members, I discovered that my mother, whom I remembered as a nervous, fragile, nonsexual victim, was viewed by her contemporaries as a “rock” on which they could lean in times of need, an icon, an extremely sophisticated, sexy, ebullient woman who attracted men “like moths to a flame.” It took me a while before I managed to replace the pathological version of a mother whose genes I share but had rejected for six decades with this new, powerful vision of her. Maybe she wasn’t able to be the mother my brother and I needed, but she had so many other fascinating, capable, lovable parts to her. I was finally able to see more of the totality of her. This was a mother I wanted to own, and owning her meant that the love-denying defenses I had erected against her came tumbling down. I felt a new lightness of being and knew I was finally coming into my own.
I have written about much of this in my memoirs, but I repeat the stories here because they are so important to me. Perhaps my telling them will trigger your own remembrances of formative experiences. Especially important for me was the discovery of my mother’s childhood sexual abuse. One out of three girls is an abuse survivor, and