Strong At The Heart

On the young feminist blog fbomb there’s an article that examines the developing awareness of a young woman whose mother was a survivor of sexual abuse.The blog post includes an essay that the author wrote three years ago, when she was 17.

Liz P talks about her feelings of isolation and the effect that knowing her mother was abused had on her own childhood. Many of the same feelings of isolation and “this doesn’t happen to normal people” that survivors of abuse experience, resonated in her own, second generation experience.

She looks at, among other influences, the role of a children’s book, Promise Not to Tell, that I wrote years ago. It was given to her to let her know “how something like that can possibly happen.”

Liz’ post raises a little-discussed consideration. When a parent has been abused as a child, and I’m thinking here of those of us who have done significant healing, what is the impact on his or her own children?

A lot has been written on the generational impact of the Holocaust, how the secondary trauma–and the secondary resiliency–gets expressed in the second and third generations. And the meme of “abusers were once abused themselves” is everywhere (not so frequently cited is that the great majority of child abuse survivors do NOT go on to abuse children).

But what about the secondary trauma of having a parent with PTSD or other post traumatic issues? What about, as Liz points out, the disruption of normal, and expected, family relations? What other ways are the lives of daughters and sons affected–for worse and for better?

I think this whole consideration is under explored. We know how prevalent child sexual abuse is. We know that it has profound consequences for those who experience it. A lot of work has been done on how people heal. But the secondary trauma/adaptation issues are playing themselves out without much notice–yet.

Just now I opened a puffy envelope from McMillan, the company that now owns my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Inside, amazing, four copies of Strong at the Heart in Japanese!

This edition has two new interviews, one at the beginning and one at the end of the book. Each is with a young Japanese woman. I can’t wait to take it to one of my Japanese speaking friends so I can hear what these new people say!

The translator, or perhaps the author of the Japanese material is, Atsuko Konishi. I haven’t found her on line yet, but I’ll let you know when I do. On Japanese Amazon, it is being marketed with a book called Stand. The cover of Stand has a photograph that is also used in one of the new chapters—an intriguing looking photographer looking out at the reader with her camera covering one eye—a little like the half face of Akaya on the cover of the American edition.

It’s really quite wonderful to realize that this book will reach a whole new audience of child sexual abuse survivors and their supporters, to see the photos and to know that eleven amazing survivors’ stories are in front of me (nine of which I know so well) in a text I cannot yet read!

If you like to read fantasy, fairy tales and books that honestly address issues that child sexual abuse survivors face, you should not miss Tender Morsels by Australian author Margo Lanagan.

Loosely based on the Grimm Brothers fairytale Snow White and Rose Red (which is NOT the Snow White of Disney fame), this young adult novel is a home run for adult fantasy readers as well. You have to be a little tough to read the first few chapters which include a positive scene of sexual awakening and the not-so-graphic depiction of incest and rape.

But then, oh, my, Lanagan uses fantasy memes to explore both the saving grace and the limitations of dissociation. Now that is inspired.

Liga, the girl who is abused and later raped, escapes this damaging world by going into her own personal heaven–a safe, if limited, world of her imagining. There she raises two daughters, the very real children of sexual assault who are also the charming and loving sisters of the Grimm story.

The trouble with Liga’s dissociation from the world is that her children grow up, and they begin to differentiate themselves from Mom. It is through the crusty dwarf of the fairytale that her daughter Urrda enters the real world. Urrda eventually leads mother and sister across the amnestic barrier as well.

It is a hard adjustment to a place where people can be cruel as well as kind, which life is uncertain, where futures can be made and love truly felt. Lanagan has done a rare thing, mapping the emotional territory of dissociation and recovery as she tells a compelling fantasy.

You can read my full review for School Library journal at Amazon. But consider purchasing this book at one of your local independent bookstores. They need our support.

Okay, this is the third novel about a young teen girl who escapes from forced marriage in a polygamist cult that has cross my desk in the space of a year. Keep Sweet, by Michele Dominguez Greene, is a good read. Like the other two I’ve reviewed here, this book has its virtues, but laid side by side all three beg the question “Why are we so fascinated by this one story line?”

In Keep Sweet, 14-year-old Alva Jane is an obedient daughter of the third—and favored—wife of her father. (He has a total of seven wives and 29 children.) Alva Jane has never questioned life in the FLDS compound or the authority of the older men who rule it. Although her life is physically hard (she and her mother bake bread every morning for the whole household) she is privileged by her father’s position, privileged enough to dream of being a first wife herself to the handsome and kind John Joseph, her 17-year-old math tutor.

But jealousy runs high in the huge family. Her father’s spurned first wife is out for revenge on Alva Jane’s mother. When Sister Cora discovers Alva Jane and John Joseph in a stolen kiss, all hell breaks loose. Alva Jane is beaten and imprisoned, John Joseph is run off the plantation. Then Alma Jane is married to a particularly violent man three times her age, a man who beats and humiliates his wives into obedience.

Despite the rapes, despite the poverty of opportunity, despite the culture of submission, hope stays alive in Alva Jane. With the help of another unhappy sister wife she prepares to make a run for it.

Clearly the audience for this book is not young girls stuck in polygamist cults. They will never be allowed to read it with its message of hope and its clues to successful escape.

Why does the story matter to the rest of us? There is a creepy fascination with polygamy right now. Just have a look at the “just folks” photo on the cover of the February National Geographic. It isn’t just the snow on the ground that gives you a chill.

Each of the novels centers on a girl who is just coming of age for critical thought. Right at the time she could begin to think and act for herself, she is married off to a controlling man. Each girl comes, eventually, to think for herself enough to attempt escape.

Are we asking, “What would I do if I were one of those girls in prairie dresses? Surely I’d get out of there. How?”

Could it be that the polygamist compound is a metaphor for societal expectations? Do the abusive marriages stand in for garden variety abusive homes?

One thing that haunts me is how unprepared any of the children—Lost Boys or escaped girls—are for life beyond the compound. A real girl, if she could cut herself loose from family and siblings, her culture, religion and home, would be a sitting duck for exploitation. What is waiting for her in the outside world?

Right now I am reading a brand new book The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse by Nancy Whittier.

It’s the first study of the movement to end child sexual abuse in the United States. And unlike the other books I’ve reviewed here, it is not for teens or a popular audience. But it’s well worth reading for anyone concerned about child welfare and social justice movements.

Caveat: I am not finished reading it, but I am already nodding my head and making notes in the margins. Nancy Whittier looks at the movement from its feminist roots through the self help and mutual help era of the 1980′s and mid 1990′s, on through the backlash and into the present. She observes how the movement has changed public perceptions of incest survivors and perpetrators and how its success has also meant the loss of control over the language and meaning given to the survivor experience. She asks questions that are well worth examining, like why have the personal narratives of male survivors of clergy abuse received so much media attention, while those of female survivors have not?

For me, this book provides a larger context for my own story. Social denial in the 50′s and 60′s (I didn’t even have a word for it as a child). Struggling–as a childrens book writer in the 70′s–to explore and represent the heroism it takes for kids to face and report abuse. Publication in 1985 of Promise Not to Tell and a raft of public speaking engagements as the subject broke open. My own major healing in early ’90′s and involvement in the The Healing Woman and Run Riot. The mainstream publication acceptance of Strong at the Heart: How It Feels to Heal from Sexual Abuse a book for young adult readers just a few years ago which includes a wide range of abuse and healing experiences.

But for survivors not of my particular generation, there’s a lot here, too. The social roots that the author traces, the analysis of the roles of government and media–all this is our history and informs our identity as survivors. If you want to change the world, it’s well worth seeing what happened when we tried–and did. (And it didn’t all come out roses.)

This is a scholarly work, not an easy read. But the scrupulous research is rooted in lived experiences of survivors and activists. I know. I’m one of the hundreds of people Nancy interviewed over ten years of research and writing. Now, to get back to reading…

As a survivor of childhood abuse, do you ever find yourself accommodating obnoxious behavior? Putting up with crap you really needn’t? Do you trash yourself over it? Or do you give yourself a break?

My friend poet Molly Fisk wrote and performed a fine radio segment on Stockholm Syndrome in her experience as a survivor. (Her first book of poetry Listening to Winter is one of my favorites and has some great insights into survivor experience.) This is what she wrote:

Stockholm Syndrome, by Molly Fisk

So here’s the story. Last week I went out to dinner with some good friends. During the course of the meal, I said that an organization where I volunteer was going to have a sexual harrassment training. The man I was sitting beside also volunteers there, and without missing a beat he said, “I’ve always wanted to get sexually harassed, but no one ever chooses me!”

Now, this is a stupid thing to say. Anyone who thinks it would be fun to get sexually harrassed a) has probably never experienced any kind of harassment, and b) is probably not a woman. Because women know the score about sexual harassment. It was also a fairly hard thing for me to hear, since I was raped as a child, and rape is harassment in its extreme form.

The guy, like many guys before him, was responding to the word sexual, and discounting the word harrassment – making a kind of guy-like joke out of the thing. A different kind of man might have asked why we needed the training, or engaged me in talking about it more seriously.

What’s interesting to me, though, is not his reaction, but mine. I didn’t say, “Shut up, you bozo” in a friendly tone of voice. I didn’t get ticked off and give him the double-barrel-feminist-shotgun response, explaining, with dripping sarcasm, how offensive it was for him to say this, not to mention unkind. I didn’t admit that I was one of the women who had spent almost a year organizing the training.

I did this really weird thing: I laughed loudly and played along. I patted him on his knee and said in a sexy voice that if he ever wanted some sexual harrassment he should just let me know. Even as I was doing this, part of my brain was yelling in outrage, “Are you crazy?!!? What are you doing? You’re supposed to help stop assinine reactions like this, not foster them for God’s sake!”

It took me three days and one sleepless night to sort it out. He’s a big guy, my friend, and he was crowded in next to me in a booth. I wouldn’t have been able to get out if I had wanted to. He has a big-guy voice. I’d been having a hard day and was exhausted before we even sat down to eat. I think those factors greased the way so that I slipped into the prudent response of my childhood when a large man said anything, which was to agree, no matter what I thought, so I wouldn’t get hurt.

There’s a name for this: it’s called Stockholm Syndrome, after a Swedish bank robbery in 1973 when hostages were taken. It refers to the allegiance of victims to their perpetrators, when those perps have been in control for long enough and the violence or threat of violence has been great enough – the most famous example being Patty Hearst joining her kidnappers in the Symbionese Liberation Army and calling herself “Tanya.” It’s prevalent among child abuse survivors, battered women, and other victims of violent crimes, as well as prisoners of war.

Once I had figured out what was going on, I stopped beating myself up for being a jerk. I’m going to stop beating my friend up for being a jerk, too. People aren’t always careful about what they say, unless they’ve been taught that it matters.

Gentlemen, please consider this story your training in the fact that it matters. It really matters. Don’t be a bozo and crack jokes about it.

–

Molly’s essays can be heard at KVRM on Thursday nights at 6:55 pm, Pacific time, closing out the News Hour. (89.5 FM on your dial in much of Northern California) You can read them all and listen to many of them at her website.

I receive Molly’s essays via email, and you can, too, by writing her at molly@mollyfisk.com. Receiving these essays via e-mail is free, but I encourage you to support Molly’s writing with a $36 subscription for 2009; I do each year. More about this on her website listed above. Molly’s CD of radio essays, Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace, is available at CD Baby.

I just stumbled on an excellent website with great resources for child advocates or for anyone concerned with child abuse/recovery/offender issues. Best Interests calls itself “a website for children’s advocates” and it certainly is a great place for people like CASA volunteers, therapists and social workers. Survivors, too, find news and useful information.

The books section is especially rich. Navigating through the subject heading toolbar on the left or the search engine will bring you to a wealth of good titles, mostly for adults. To my joy, I found an excellent page there on Strong at the Heart.

The links page is extensive and hard to use because there are so MANY links in alphabetical order and no way to jump forward or scan. But the subject tool bar works great.

The book pages link to Powell’s Books one of the last, great independent bookstores.

BTW, Cody’s Books, that great Berkeley, California, institution has just sunk under the waves. If you want to be able to open a book before you buy it, explore quirky or deliberately focused collections, and keep your local economy strong remember to walk in to your locally owned bookstore and spend some money there!

I can’t imagine life without my hometown bookstore, Northtown Books. The owner, Dante, tells me that he will be upgrading the web presence soon and include a searchable inventory and book ordering feature. In the mean time, he’s keeping a book blog that’s worth checking out.

Earlier this summer a reader in a small cattle town in a rural Western state wrote a letter on a typewriter and mailed it to my publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York. The letter went on to my editor, Melanie Kroupa, in Boston. She faxed it to me in northwestern California.

Here, with the writer’s permission and with identifying details taken out, is her letter:

“I just read Carolyn Lehman’s wonderful book, Strong at the Heart: How It Feels to Heal from Sexual Abuse. I love this book and I found it to be very helpful. I was sexually abused some of my childhood years and when I was 14. I go to the library often and look for books on this subject. There aren’t many, not at my library. When I found this book, at first, I was afraid to read it. I read it with caution, because I didn’t know what to expect. I read the whole book in an hour. I even had to stop and wipe away tears every now and then. This book, the people who wrote their stories…they’ve inspired me to pick up the shattered pieces of my life and move on. It will be a long healing process. This book has helped tremendously.”

When I wrote asking her permission to quote her on this site, she responded in part:

“Please know how grateful I am that you put such a book together–it’s an incredible feeling, knowing that I’m not alone. ”

And isn’t that the heart of it? That feeling of isolation is the worst. Yet we are really not alone at all. We are surrounded by other survivors of sexual abuse. It’s the stigma of abuse that prevents us from connecting with and supporting each other. I’m so glad this reader found an opening at her public library and role models for her own healing.

She also said, “I was amazed that an author wrote to me! A famous person!” (Well, hardly famous.) Authors and editors and publishers are human beings. Her letter let a lot of people involved in the publication of Strong at the Heart know the impact of their choice to publish this book.

She’s right, too, it can be hard to find good resources. Letters like hers give support to those with the courage to publish books that are needed, not just potential blockbusters. I wish librarians and booksellers could hear from readers like her, too.

Here are some of my favorite books and films about healing from sexual abuse.

Here’s a young adult book to look for. SAFE, by Susan Shaw, won’t be out until October, but I’m reading it now in publisher’s galleys for a book review.

There is no mystery about what happened. Walking home on the last day of 7th grade, Tracy is abducted by an older teen, raped, and left for dead. We know it happened, so does she. The story takes place over that awful summer, the aftermath, while she struggles to find enough security in her life so that she can begin to deal with the reality of the assault.

At last, a novel that really focuses on healing. What I like about this book is that Tracy is no pitiful victim. Even as she goes through a period of agraphobia and isolation, she is finding ways to help herself, figuring out how to live after overwhelming trauma and loss.

She has a lot to draw on, a kind father, the memory of a loving mother, good friends who wait in the wings for her “return.” But in the depths of her post trauma reaction she also discovers strength within herself. She draws on the power of music and her own creativity long before she is ready for talk therapy and all that comes with it.
The violence is all off stage. Tracy’s feelings are front and center. Her growth is realistic and hopeful. This is a good book.

Have you seen the new young adult novel, Touching Snow, by M. Sindy Felin? It’s just been published by Atheneum.

The story is bluntly told through the eyes of a teenaged Haitian American girl, Karina, who chronicles her family’s suffering under her despotic stepfather. What I found particularly interesting was the examination of how culture and immigrant status play out in the lives of all the family members.

There’s also a very interesting side story that shows the young girls in the neighborhood navigating around–and sometimes making use of–the neighborhood pedophile who has a car.

Felin explores some very tricky areas. My only cavil is that the abuse is stopped when the abuser is murdered by his victims. Oh, yes, it is satisfying on an emotional level. (And this is not a spoiler. The book begins with the statement, “The best way to avoid being picked on by high school bullies is to kill someone.”) But you know that family is not really going to be better off in the long run.

Sigh. Sometimes there are no easy answers.