national child abuse prevention month

Look, the guy who raped me is probably an okay guy.

The babysitter who kissed me when I was five and she wasn't, the way babysitters aren't supposed to kiss you, the way their parents probably don't want them kissing anybody at all, turned out to have serious issues that came to light as an adult many years later and wound up in legal trouble of a kind that, when you hear about it, you wonder how she thought she could get away with it if she were in her right mind. And while the one kind of transgression doesn't seem to have anything to do with the other, the whole fractured picture makes you wonder, well, was she just some kind of ... all around fucked-up? To employ the technical term.

But this guy, is what I'm saying, is probably not a villain. There was actually more than one guy. Separate occasions (he said, as though to safeguard the image of his virtue). But this one guy had been through a lot. Worse than me at least up to that point, and odds are pretty good he was reenacting what had been done to him, and that it had been done to him more than once.

I've talked before about being a victim of childhood sexual abuse, and April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, and March was National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, so this is when I tend to talk about this. There were three molesters, rapists, assailants, whatever you want to call them, over the course of more than three occasions spread out over my childhood. None of them relatives -- I mention that because "survivors of incest" is a big subset, and not my tribe.

This guy was a minor still and had been through a lot, and he's gone and grown up and hopefully has worked through whatever happened to him, whatever many things happened to him, and hopefully it didn't take him as long as it did me, but if it did he's still had time to get around to it. And if so there's a good chance he's an okay guy. You get a pretty long timeline to figure shit out if you stay out of traffic.

So there's that.

Whatever happened to those individuals after they left those events they created, though, those events still had their effect on me. Those events resulted in my post-traumatic stress, contributing to claustrophobia, anxiety, exaggerated startle response, nightmares, hearing voices and seeing things, psychotic breaks, this whole thing where I imagined an older version of myself to give me advice to survive and then the older version of myself turned into a constant source of criticism instead of a wacky turn of events where he turns into a 5th-dimensional Mxyzpltk instead, panic and anxiety attacks, not letting anyone cut my hair for fucking years because how the fuck can I let a stranger stand that close to me by my fucking neck with fucking sharp objects, a nervous breakdown, problems with affect regulation and self-criticism, and the list goes on, a list thankfully growing ever shorter thanks to therapy -- but a list, nonetheless, oh what a list. Those effects are not mitigated by anything that happened to those people later in life or by my ability to understand that their actions came from somewhere -- that they were not random, that they became people able to act that way (or unable to act any other way) because of events in their own lives or chemicals in their own brains, forces burning and churning and acidulating as powerful an effect on them (if not moreso) as these events have on me.

The third one, the one I haven't actually mentioned, the one who did the most, I don't know anything mitigating about him. I don't have any context to excuse anything. All I know is what's human, which is that mostly life isn't a thriller novel and mostly nobody's just born rotten and stunkout, which is that mostly the bad that's done by us, it started somewhere. Some people do more bad than the bad that's been done to them, don't get me wrong, and I'm not talking about excuses or rationales or justifications, I'm talking about mechanisms, I'm talking about the drinky bird that pecks the mousetrap that snaps broke whatever last glass gasp inside you had to break before you could do what you done. All I know is that bad doesn't just rain down on you from nowhere and it doesn't just happen in a day.

So what I'm saying is I can know, without knowing what, without knowing why, I can know there was something, I can know there was a wrong somehow, there was a break somewhere, a crack somewhere, I can know that because people aren't supposed to do that and he did, that something happened to him, whether it was done to him from without or within, to make him do it.

I can understand this about all of them, and my understanding does not lift the yoke off my neck.

Can I separate the rape from the rapist?

Woody Allen's adopted daughter Dylan Farrow has for over 20 years claimed that he molested her when she was 7; police failed to pursue a case due to lack of physical evidence and a "rehearsed quality" to Dylan's statements. Comedians like Johnny Carson had been making jokes about Woody's interest in underage girls since at least Manhattan, and of course he married his stepdaughter.

Purple Rose of Cairo is one of my all-time favorite movies. Annie Hall, What's Up Tiger Lily, Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex, Midnight in Paris, and yes, Manhattan -- all genius movies.

Victor Salva was convicted of filming himself having sex with one of the 12 year old actors in his early feature Clownhouse before going on to make the Jeepers Creepers movies and the Disney magic albino movie Powder. It's worth pointing out -- in the context of all of this it has to be pointed out -- that Powder has a strong pedophile subtext that's lost on children and most parents but clear to people familiar with what to look for.

I loved Jeepers Creepers.

Bill Cosby ...

I don't even need to summarize that one, and of course grew up on Fat Albert and the Cosby Show.

Can you separate the art from the artist?

Is it morally better to not watch Woody Allen's new Amazon show when it comes out? I don't know. I do know that I have decided that I am not going to be comfortable watching it. I have not made this decision for you, which is to say, I have not decided that you are a lesser person if you watch it. I have decided what I am comfortable with.

Is it better to take the Cosby Show off the air? I Spy? Fat Albert? I don't know that either.

Is the Victor Salva part of the conversation affected by the fact that, unlike Cosby and Allen, he was arrested, convicted, and served his time?

Are we talking about crimes that simply say something about who you are on a deeper level than fraud or theft or drug use or drunk and disorderly? Not the "we" of a law-making society -- that is, it wouldn't be right to define laws in such a way -- but the "we" of a consumer society, the "we" of many me's and you's who can decide which vendors and entertainers deserve our dollars, and maybe the ones who might use those dollars to buy child porn or roofies are less deserving.

Is the first half of this entry related to the second?

I don't really know that either.

I know that the second conversation happens a lot. Cosby more often than Woody, though Woody should come up more often. Salva not as often -- he's obviously not a big name, though he pops up in the news every so often (he's in it at the moment).

Does it seem strange to want to find the good, the explicable, the human or humane or survivable about my own abusers -- to want to separate the rape from the rapist -- while resisting the temptation to separate the art from the artists when it comes to these other assaults that don't personally impact me? The thing is, those other assaults are not mine to contextualize or humanize. I am not the one bearing that weight.

Listen. I wrote this quickly, trying to articulate a stream of thought. I understand that this may not be as coherent an entry on this topic as I've had in the past. These topics feel connected to me -- public and private shaming and forgiveness, public and private personas.

The reason I talk about this every year is because the most important thing to me when it comes to sexual abuse is to fight the stigma. Abuse goes unreported because of the stigma that attaches to the victim -- child or otherwise. Victims of abuse feel ashamed, guilty, sure that they brought it on themselves, that something must be wrong with them for it to happen to them -- that somehow the bad that has been done to them is just the bad that was inside them all along, made manifest through the universe's sense of justice, the bad that they deserved -- there are many child sexual abuse analogues to the "she must have been asking for it" myth of adult rape. They feel guilty about the consequences they may be "responsible" for: the stress they cause their parents and the people they report it to, the fuss, the circus, the consequences to the abuser. They don't want to be a "tattletale," a "troublemaker." They don't want to draw attention to themselves -- especially now, after this, oh especially after this, believe me.

That's why I need to talk about it, why we need to talk about it. The stigma allows it to continue. Not talking about it punishes the victims and protects the abusers. It creates a culture in which abusers thrive. That culture needs to end.

The most important thing is to remain aware of child abuse, sexual and otherwise, and support important causes like:

The National Alliance on Mental Illness

and

RAINN

self-judgment and self-compassion

This is actually expanding from a Facebook post, but going into new territory for this blog, insofar as I haven't previously discussed being in therapy here, I don't think. I don't think that's something I can go into a lot of detail about too often or anything, but I do think this particular concept is useful to talk about.

What I'm working on lately in therapy is self-compassion. Words like self-compassion are why therapy can sound like a lot of hug-yourself rigmarole, I know, and that's one reason it took so long for me to find a therapist I was comfortable with (and admit the need for therapy), but bear with me here.

The broad strokes of the backstory that you need to understand are that I was abused as a kid, intermittently over a period of years in a series of instances involving multiple abusers (only one abuser at a time, to be clear, none of them relatives; so many books aimed at child abuse survivors, especially male ones, are aimed at survivors of incest, because it's so commonly the case). As is typically the case with male victims, I didn't begin really dealing with this until my late thirties -- I didn't "forget," these aren't recovered memories, I just didn't deal with it.

The effects of abuse are not always the obvious ones. I have all kinds of jumpiness tics -- I have trouble sitting with my back to the door, if someone wakes me up I wake up fast and violently, I have what they call an exaggerated startle response. These are things you might start to think of if you were to make a list predicting the adult-onset effects of childhood trauma. Other things I think are less predictable unless you have experience in this area, like my habit of self-judgment.

In therapy, we keep coming back to one of the examples that I used when I first brought up the problem I was having: the awesome pan Caitlin got me. So let me use that to explain.

Caitlin got me this awesome pan. It was a non-stick pan with high sides, big enough to cook a couple burgers or chops on, high enough to cook tomato sauce or curry in ... basically, I found out quickly that I could use it for almost anything, and it was such a joy to cook with that I cooked everything in it. Sure, it aged a little like all pans do, especially since I was using it multiple times a day, but it held up remarkably well.

Until I braised beef shanks in it.

One of the things you aren't supposed to do is cook bones in it, especially if you're braising, where the bones can move around. The bones scrape the nonstick coating. When they're braising, and moving around, they scrape it a lot.

That one meal ended the pan. And this is the nature of nonstick pans (especially the good ones): they don't go from "great non-stick pans" to "decent non-stick pans" to "eh, decent pans." They go from "non-stick pans" to "very very sticky pans." Once you ruin a non-stick pan, it doesn't become as mediocre as your other pans, it becomes worse than them. The pan was unusable except to boil water -- and even then, pasta would stick to the bottom if I cooked too much of it.

It took me a long time to throw that pan out.

When I finally did, I felt horribly guilty. I had felt guilty about ruining it anyway -- ruining a gift! -- but I felt worse for throwing it away, even though I couldn't use it and it was taking up space in our tiny kitchen which we had just put considerable effort into rearranging -- we had just bought new furniture, relocated the liquor cabinet to a different room, moved the appliances and changed what went in which cabinet ... all to maximize the little bit of space in there ... and yet I couldn't bring myself to throw out the largest pan in the kitchen, or even to put it in the loft for storage, even though I never used it and never would. And I waited until she wasn't home to throw it out!

Caitlin did not feel bad about me throwing it away at all. She was not at any time mad at me for ruining the pan, and pointed out that I had used it so much that I had gotten more value out of it than a lot of other kitchen things we own.

But I felt terribly guilty and ashamed for ruining this pan. I still feel bad when I think about it.

There are many mechanisms feeding into this. The one that ties the most directly into self-compassion is this: it is very difficult for me to feel sadness.

That sounds crazy.

I know it sounds ridiculous, especially when I say I didn't really realize it until I was 40, but the sort of "sadness algorithm" for me has worked like this:

* SADNESS EVENT occurs.

* SADNESS begins.

* SADNESS truncated, as SELF-JUDGMENT kicks in, flooding the system with SHAME, GUILT, or sometimes ANGER.

So, something that causes sadness occurs, I feel negative emotions, and I think "well, I'm feeling sad about this," but it's not actual sadness I'm feeling. Even typing this, it sounds nuts, or it sounds like something that should have been obvious. But you feel bad, so maybe you need a third party to point out that it's not the context-appropriate flavor of bad.

To underscore the point here: I don't just feel disproportionate shame or guilt in response to shame- or guilt-provoking events; I also feel shame or guilt instead of most other negative emotions. (Anger is easier to feel than sadness, but it's also easy to direct back on myself.)

Self-judgment is the, like, engine that powers the machines doing all of this. I don't wallow in problems and feel like I'm the only one they happen to, but I do over-identify with them and feel like they are the result of my choices, character, or inaction, rather than bad luck or the actions of other agents.

Self-compassion, then, is the alternative, or the healthy thing that is supposed to be happening instead. Self-compassion is the ability to respond to ruining the pan by saying "oh shit, my favorite pan, now I can't cook with my favorite pan anymore, this fucking sucks," and feeling sad about it, instead of getting angry at myself for it. This is the thing I need to work on. Without talking too much about my history of abuse here, it is true that I have not, historically, done a very good job about letting myself feel sad about it having happened, as opposed to angry with myself for not having prevented it. So there are a lot of seeds there. And I won't lie, even typing that, the angry part of me is nodding and saying, well yes, you should be angry. This is something I'm working on, not something I have fixed. It's something I'm still only now learning to see.

When I posted about this on Facebook, thinking this was some crazy thing nobody else has trouble with, enough other people responded with "oh yeah, I talk about that in therapy too" that I thought I would post something more expansive, because who knows, maybe this is a problem for somebody else too, and you've just never heard it articulated.