Health/Psychology: The Children of Sexual Abuse

Carlos Santana is my brother. We are not related by blood, nor are we likely to ever meet, but he is my brother just the same. I discovered this while reading the March 16th, 2000 edition of "Rolling Stone," where he told writer Chris Heath about his painful experiences as a victim of a child molester. Since I am also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, we belong to a brotherhood, a strange kinship defined by a shared experience. With due respect to Santana, I would be just as happy if he was not my brother, if I were an orphan in the family of abuse victims. No child should have to suffer sexual abuse.

Santana's abuse and my abuse were not the same. He was about ten years old, a child living in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico, when he was seduced by an American man with food, clothes and the almighty Yankee dollar. I was four years old and my abuser was not a stranger but my father, the one who was supposed to protect me, to love me and to guide me so that I would grow-up to be a healthy and well adjusted human being. Even though our abuse was not the same, however, he is still my brother as I am his sister, for our experience of abuse has affected us in much the same way.

Santana told "Rolling Stone" that his abuse had crippled him for most of his life. Like many victims, he didn't recognize the devastating toll that his childhood experience was having on his adult life, until that fact was pointed-out by a loved one, in this case his wife, who gave him the ultimatum to either get help or face a breakup of their marriage. While working with a therapist, he learned that for years he'd played a losing hand against the demons of "guilt, shame, judgment and fear."

I know these four demons well, and have come to call them the children of sexual abuse. After we have been abused, they live within us always, becoming "a part of us that is not a part of us." They are like people who reside in our heads and, more devastatingly, in our hearts. We feel guilt, even when we have done nothing wrong, and are ashamed for no apparent reason. Likewise, we constantly judge ourselves by a yardstick that is not our own, and we are nearly always afraid, even when we know that we are safe and secure with loved ones who will protect us.

Victims of sexual abuse have literally tons of stuff to feel guilty about, beginning with the abuse itself. When abuse happens to an older child, as in Santana's case, he will almost always blame himself for what's happened to him. This is probably also true for children like me, who were abused as infants or toddlers, though the evidence is less clear in these cases. We do know that suppressed memories of abuse never die but continue to lurk in the unconscious, even if the child is an infant, even if the memory seems totally gone.

"I must've made daddy do it," is our first experience of guilt. As we grow up and move away from the abusive situation, our guilt becomes less focused on the abuse and looks elsewhere for fulfillment. We are guilty of everything, and find plenty of opportunity to beat ourselves up. Often, we go on to marry abusive husbands, and blame ourselves for the beatings he inflicts on us, believing him when he tells us, "You made me do it." Or we begin abusing ourselves with alcohol and drugs, figuring we might as well abuse ourselves since abuse is what we've learned that we deserve.

Shame, a sister of guilt, is something that is familiar to every survivor of childhood sexual abuse. In my case, I find it's impossible to describe the incredible shame that's haunted me for a lifetime, even before I knew about my own abuse. That's because shame always hides her face, which makes it impossible to truly know her. Suffice it to say that, like most abuse victims, I constantly walk with the shame of what was done to me, the suspicion that I was somehow responsible, and the actions I've taken as a result.

Adult rape victims are frequently overcome by shame after their attack, and I've come to think that there's a similar process at work. A rape victim is often ashamed when her body responds physically and she becomes aroused during the attack, which is not unlike the process that goes-on inside a victim of childhood sexual abuse. We would like to think that our bodies would cooperate with us, be disgusted by our attack and not give-in to some automatic physiological response. Since our bodies derived pleasure from the abuse, then we must somehow be responsible for it.

Judgment, the third child of abuse, is an angry god that says, "I know that I am only one voice of many in your head, but I command you to listen to me." A psychologist would say that judgment is the “internalized parent,” an opinion with which I agree since my own self-judgmental voice seems to speak like my father and seems to hold his values, which I do not share. Often, I loath myself for things that I would readily accept in others, because I’m seeing myself through his eyes instead of my own.

Judgment begins when we victims tell ourselves, in childlike terms, that we are bad people, that we couldn't have a normal relationship with our father, uncle or family friend without turning it into something dirty. We then pass judgment on ourselves and sentence ourselves to having nothing that we don't deserve, and we know that we don't deserve anything. We don't deserve financial security, so we sentence ourselves to a life of poverty. We don't deserve a fulfilling relationship, so we set ourselves up with so many jerks that we finally quit looking. That childhood sexual abuse victims don't deserve anything is a judgment that was passed on us long ago by our abusers.

The final child of abuse is fear. I’ve been afraid for most of my life, afraid of almost everything. Sometimes there is good reason for my fear, like when I become ill and, because of my “self-inflicted” poverty, have no money for a doctor. More often, the object I fear is faceless and nameless, a crippling anxiety that tells me that no matter how hard I try, I will not survive.

Like most victims, I’ve become an expert at putting on a strong, confident front when out in public. But when I come home and slip back into myself, I am afraid that I will become a bag lady and end-up back on the streets of New York City, that my lover doesn’t love me, because I’m unlovable, but is merely tolerating me, that I don’t understand life, that I am all alone and that I have been all alone ever since the abuse started, maybe even before.

The effects that these children of abuse have on their victims are devastating and manifest in many ways. Sometimes, the child imitates the behavior of the abuser and begins acting-out sexually against siblings. Often, boys who are abused grow up to be abusive husbands or fathers. Nearly all adults who abuse children were themselves abused as children, making incest and child molestation something of an inherited disease.

Most children who are abused do not grow up to be abusers, however, but turn the abuse on themselves, becoming masters of self-destructive behavior. In my case, as a young teen-ager I allowed myself to be molested by numerous pedophiles and willingly put myself into some extremely degrading sexual situations, a pattern that continued well into my adult years.

This behavior, of course, only served as a source for more guilt, shame, judgment and fear, until I realized that my actions hadn't actually been so willing after all, but were a response to what had happened to me so many years before. This dynamic is fairly typical among victims. The father, friend or other family member abuses and degrades the child while telling her that he loves her. The child then grows up to believe that love must contain abuse and degradation to be real.

Almost all therapies for dealing with victims of childhood sexual abuse eventually involve work with the “inner child,” the self that existed before the abuse started. When I first became aware of the earliest instances of my abuse, a great feeling of compassion welled-up inside me, not for myself but for the innocent child that had been me. Santana expressed a similar sentiment when he showed the “Rolling Stone” writer a photograph of a smiling young schoolboy holding a science textbook. It was a picture of himself, before the abuse. “This is the guy I want to honor,” he said, “because this is before all that happened... That is Carlos before all that went down.”

He then offered a word of advice for anyone struggling with this issue: “Sometimes it makes me sad, because I want to go back to feeling all the purity and innocence. So somebody throws black ink at you? You’re still pure. There’s a part of you that can never be corrupt.”

©Copyright 2003 by AlternativeApproaches.com

About the illustrations: We have no knowledge that any of the children pictured in this article have been abused, and that’s our point. You can’t tell from looking at a child whether that child is in an abusive home situation. We also chose these photographs to illustrate the fact that abuse can affect children in all age groups and across cultural lines.