What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [119]
The curmudgeon speaks: In their zealotry, the authors of these articles abandon methodological niceties like adequate control groups and consideration of rival explanations. Often, the survivors in the studies are very self-selected. They are recruited because they are troubled adults: They are in therapy or in self-help groups, or they even, literally, answered an ad for “incest victims.” It is no surprise that they have more problems than the control group. And the control groups are suspect, too (when there even is one); they fail to match the incest victims for the most obvious, critical variables. What these studies fail to control for (this is the unmentioned alternative) are genetic differences and other environmental differences confounded with incest. The kind of fathers, brothers, and uncles who abuse young children are men with major problems of their own. Incest victims, more often than not, come from very troubled families with much more mental illness than the control groups have. Some of the mental illness and some of the family problems are probably genetic. So it remains entirely possible that the depression, anxiety, anger, and sexual problems in the incest survivors do not come from incest. They may stem from some of the other nasty events so frequent in a dysfunctional family, or they may be genetic. Once the ideology is stripped away, we still remain ignorant about whether sexual abuse in childhood wreaks damage in adult life and, if so, how much.
Often forgotten is the child herself. What can we do to best contain the damage? What can we do that will best help the adult who was abused years before as a child?
In talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, my main conclusion was that awful events have lasting ill effects that therapy seems to do little to alleviate. Concentration camps, torture, brutal rape, all leave lasting scars. This is true when the event occurs in adulthood, and this is also true when the event occurs in childhood. But contrary to the inner-child premises, I know of no data that childhood trauma has more power than adult trauma.
My impression is that the natural healing of children is, on the whole, better than for adults. There have been several follow-up studies of sexually abused children, and each shows surprisingly good recovery. More than half the kids improve markedly within a year or two, and the number of kids with severe problems diminishes markedly. A few, tragically, get worse.7
Child sexual abuse varies in objective severity from brutal rape at one extreme to erotic fondling at the other. In post-traumatic stress disorder, objective severity, short of violence and life threat, does not determine how long the symptoms last and how intense they are. Suffering identical traumas, some adults are scarred for life while others are unchanged. A few are even strengthened. (“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” says Nietzsche.) This is also true of children. Consistently, a quarter to a third of sexually abused kids show no symptoms, and contrary to theories of “repression” and “denial,” these children stay symptom free. Our job as therapists and parents is to contain the damage. With our help, brutal assault need not get translated into full-blown PTSD, and mild fondling need not get escalated into PTSD.
If we do things to magnify the trauma in the child’s mind, we will amplify the symptoms; if we do things to mute the trauma, we will reduce the symptoms. Natural healing occurs, but well-meaning parents, therapists, and courts of law can slow healing. Sometimes they even repeatedly rip the protective scar tissue off the wound. Children involved in lengthy criminal cases are ten times more likely to remain disturbed than children whose cases are resolved quickly.8
This is the message of my story about Myron. My parents and the police—in those unenlightened