Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Marjorie's Story

When I was thirteen, my father entered my bedroom, where I slept on the bottom bunk with my rosary under my pillow, and raped me. I screamed repeatedly for my mother, who was a heavy sleeper. By the time she entered my bedroom, my father, holding his robe closed, was standing nearby. She told me I'd had a nightmare. I clung to her with hysteria, begging her to help me, sobbing that it wasn't a nightmare. It did no good. She was convinced I'd had a nightmare and left the room, closing the door firmly. Within days, she found out what my father was doing, had him get me out of bed and come into the living room, where she began interrogating me wanting to know what was happening during my father's middle-of-the-night raids. Terrified that if I described to her what was happening, our happy Catholic family would fall apart, I kept insisting that nothing was happening. I didn't know anyway. I was two years away from finding out how babies were made and at this stage, I thought you bought them at the hospital. That's where we'd bought my baby sister.

My mother told my father to get the belt and then began her litany of "hit her again, hit her again", as he kept hitting me with the belt. We had a framed Declaration of Independence hanging on the wall over our piano. I kept reading the words over and over, "When in the course of human events ..." in the hope that I could leave my body. Finally, unable to bear anymore, I screamed, "It's not daddy's fault. It's mine! It's mine!" The beating stopped.

The impact on my family was devastating. My father found a job in a town an hour away and began coming home only on the weekends. Mom covered the windows with Marine Corps blankets and spent all day in bed, sobbing. Where previously mom had fixed all the meals, my four siblings and I began fixing our own breakfast. When we came home from school, there was no dinner waiting. Mom made me her personal servant as she had me bathe her and shave her under-arms and legs. Frightened and sullen at the changes in our life, my siblings and I rarely spoke to each other.

My family life reminded me of a camp of mutilated and injured soldiers from some forgotten war, indescribable in its agony. All the figures were shadowy and disoriented, as if only half-alive and that half living in a well of misery. We moved in and out of our days appearing to wait for some catastrophic event, all of us knowing that once it did, we were ill-prepared to handle it.

At the age of eighteen, after five years of severe sexual, physical, emotional, and mental abuse and one final beating from my father that almost killed me, I stuffed a few belongings into a pillowcase and ran away. Once on my own, I entered what was to become 27 years of unhealthy choices and abusive relationships. I became addicted to sex, had such low self-esteem that I was afraid to have children in case they looked like me, married three abusers, lived part-time in a women's shelter, and wound up twice in a psychiatric ward because of failed suicide attempts. There would be more.

This and much more await those who were sexually abused as a child, if they don't get help before they become an adult. I entered recovery in my mid-forties. My family doctor, who once again asked me whether my father had ever sexually abused me, this time would not take "no" for an answer. He had me see Marcie Taylor, a child sexual abuse specialist in the Los Angeles area, a woman who had been kidnapped at the age of five by two older teenage boys and sexually molested by them at knifepoint. She had also suffered repeated sexual abuse at the hands of her father, who was a Bishop in a Cathedral in Washington DC.

Meeting Marcie, who literally saved my life, was the first step on a long journey, one that took five years to complete. I was married to my third abuser at the time I entered recovery, a man whose abuse was so severe that Marcie said I would never live through it. Trying to go through recovery while you're married to an abuser is like trying to swim upstream with a heavy chain around your neck. In hopes it would help me, I began writing my memoir, titling it Let Me Hurt You and Don't Cry Out. It had become the war cry of the perpetrators. I kept writing, knowing that without a happy ending, the book would be pointless.

In the middle of my recovery, my youngest daughter inadvertently commented on what had happened sexually to her two older sisters when they were little. I froze with terror and within minutes, after calling my two older daughters, discovered that they too had been "incested" by my second husband while we were married. Grief and guilt strangled me as my need to become totally healthy accelerated in the hope that it would change the lives of my children. My youngest daughter had been raped at gunpoint by a masked bandit while she worked at a fast food place. That made four out of four in our family to have been sexually abused. Ironically, my only son was a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. He had been the Officer of the Year in 1998. I found out that children of an untreated incest victim stand a five-times-greater chance of being sexually abused themselves, for child sexual abuse is a multi-generational illness. At the time I entered recovery, all three of my daughters were married to abusers. By the time I completed recovery, two had rid themselves of their abusers and the third would follow a few years later. As I thought of my grandchildren and their children, a sense of urgency overwhelmed me, compounding my guilt.

I finished working the REPAIR program about the same time that I finished working a Twelve-Step program and was able to rid myself of my abuser. I then went on to do six months of post recovery work. I now had my happy ending.

If you work the REPAIR program vigorously and honestly, you will emerge stronger, happier, safer and with a large number of tools at your reach, tools that will change your life. Parts of this program may be difficult, even painful; parts may be fun and engaging. But you must work the complete program as it is written. Take as long as you need for each step. Some you'll finish immediately; some may take longer.

We use the symbol of the Bridge of Recovery to help you work through this. The Bridge will come up often so that you keep your eyes on the goal and never lose sight of where you are in your recovery and where you are going.

I encourage you to join a Twelve-Step program while you are going through REPAIR. Codependents Anonymous is the easiest one to find. Just call the operator and she'll give you the phone number of the one closest to you. Incest Survivors Anonymous is a bit more difficult to find. There is a list of Resources at the end of this book and includes an 800 number for Twelve-Step Programs.

Use your head, stay positive and one day, you'll be what I am today, "The happiest person I know."

Welcome to the wonderful world of REPAIR!

A Program called R. E. P. A. I. R.

The Stages

• Recognition: Recognizing and accepting that your adult problems stem from childhood sexual abuse

• Entry: Entering a program of commitment to change your life for the better

• Process: Learning tools and techniques that will enable you to become healthy

• Awareness: The coming together of reality as you gather the pieces of the broken puzzle your life became, and begin assembling them to see the complete picture. Here you discover the properties of awareness that were God-given promises at birth, but lost at the moment of incest.

• Insight: Seeing the complete picture and beginning to return to that which you were prior to being sexually violated

• Rhythm: Developing the natural rhythm you had before the incest happened; the blueprint that is the essence of your true nature, becoming who you really are.

CHAPTER 2

REPAIR Overview

We are born and we die. Somewhere between those two major events lie opportunities to be and do all that we want. It's not a difficult goal —

Unless you were sexually molested as a child.

Webster defines incest as "sexual intercourse between persons too closely related to marry legally". It is a simple, almost clinical description that does not in any way imply trauma or abuse. The all-encompassing and often unspoken reality of child sexual abuse and incest is much broader (both of these words will be used during this program but what is true for one is also true of the other). Anyone in a position of power, who coerces a person of lesser power into any sort of boundary violation dealing with their sexuality, either emotionally, verbally or physically, is a sexual abuse perpetrator. This includes a grandfather who pins his granddaughter down while he fondles her breasts; a father who insists on watching his daughter, against her wishes, while she bathes; an older brother who forces his sister to do oral sex; and any other such boundary violation from the most minor to actual forcible entry and rape. It does not have to be a family member to have the same resultant despair. That despair, whether by a family member or an outsider, can be a life sentence of pain.

This chapter gives you a glimpse of what waits for you if you have been sexually abused as a child or a teenager. It also starts you on your journey of REPAIR.

No one would willingly choose a painful life. But sometimes, early victimization leads you down a path where all you experience is the dark side. Negativity, which has an actual energy field, contains great power and, once it grabs hold, is not easily removed, neither are the wounds that incest causes.

Wounded to their very soul, if not treated, an incest victim either stumbles through a life of despair or dies from it. The tragedy of incest is that, unlike a physical wound, the aftermath can spread to the children, who in turn are either sexually abused or begin a lifetime of unhealthy choices, the direct result of a poor self-image created from shame.

Guilt is the driving force that causes that shame and erodes your self-esteem. The egocentric child perceives all that happens to him as an event they have created and, therefore, are responsible for. A sexually abused child experiences the humiliation and degradation of shame in a monumental way. They either sense the need to keep it secret or are told by their perpetrator that they must remain silent about what is happening, thereby creating more shame. If one could but talk about the pain, incest could be brought into the open and exposed as the real enemy; but humiliation keeps them from speaking the truth. Perpetrators know this, and use that secrecy as a way to protect themselves, and diminish their wrongdoing. They look for the following qualities in their victims: obedience, weak boundaries, innocence and naiveté, as well as someone smaller and easy to manipulate.

Childhood sexual abuse has nothing to do with sex. It is an act of violence with its origins in the need for power and control. Most of the time, the perpetrator was abused himself as a child and is acting out what was perpetrated on him. As an adult, he often becomes the abusive partner in domestic violence and his mate someone who has made victimization a way of life.

As for the sexually abused person often trapped in this cycle, what began as a joyful child becomes a human being who must hide their real self; hence alcohol, drugs, promiscuity, overeating, cutting, and compulsive behavior develop, all designed to create self-loathing. As the years pass, the victim piles shame upon shame with unhealthy choices; their self-image spirals into an all-time low. But you are not the sum total of what you have done. It is necessary during recovery to separate what you have done from who you are, to see that you are not a body with a soul; you are a soul with a body. No matter what has been done to your body, no one can ever touch your soul. It remains pure and innocent. Once you arrive at that realization, you begin to let go of the shame.

Since, after being sexually abused, your self-worth plunges, it is almost impossible to pull out of the negative energy field that has been established and enter one of positive energy. If you add a non-supportive, codependent parent, a society that doesn't want to hear about sexual abuse, and an environment that encourages a lack of boundary setting, the continuing of a life of negativity is almost guaranteed. Also, societal structures such as police procedures, lawyers' tricks, and the media can punish and blame the victim and support the perpetrator.

You all know what it feels like to get out of bed on the wrong side and how it colors your entire day. Incest victims get out of bed on the wrong side every day. They may learn how to hide and deny it, but it's always with them, lurking somewhere in the shadows. "I've learned how to live with it," is a comment I've heard frequently. Why should anyone learn how to live with something as if it were a disease that they could do nothing about, especially when there is an option to heal? Most of the time, child sexual abuse victims are unaware that they have the power to change their own life. Unable to see the light, they become comfortable with the pain.

People with low self-esteem feel they don't deserve the wonderful opportunities available in life. When one presents itself, it is almost as if a master puppeteer pulls their strings and causes them to veer off the path that could have proven a way out of their torment. Most sexual abuse victims move through their days as if that puppeteer were an inescapable part of their lives.

If you can take this negative energy field and, through the use of REPAIR, turn it into a positive one, it will impact the lives of not only your children, but every human you touch. Like the reverse of an epidemic — and incest is at epidemic proportions — the light of REPAIR has the potential to change both the culture of sexual abuse and silence about sexual abuse.

Positive (or healthy) energy repairs and negative (or unhealthy) energy destroys. The negative energy of one person can impact an entire room, and what's worse, an entire day. Destructive emotions increase stress, which lowers the immune system and is thus one of the primary causes of disease.

A wounded child attracts negative people. Somehow, adults who were sexually abused as children, find perpetrators as mates; codependents pair off with alcoholics; bullies find waiting victims; and obedient people wind up with controlling partners. The good news is that once you complete REPAIR, you'll be healthy and your ability to pull in one of a similar nature increases a thousand fold. Doing your small part in a world that doesn't yet see the devastation of childhood sexual abuse has overwhelming rewards.

Despite being a society that is drawn to horror, intrigued with sex scandals, and compelled to watch tragedies on television, we continue to show aversion at the mention of sexual abuse. Like an ostrich burying his head in the sand, we don't want to know about such things. If truth of the sheer number of victims in our society and the far-reaching impact of their trauma was brought to bear on the majority of the population, feelings about a need to take action would change dramatically. Since sexual abuse is so prevalent, we are literally breeding a nation of children with a hole in their soul.

Recovery, in part, is about overcoming that aversion to discussing it. If we can talk openly about the troubles of alcoholism (and today we do), we can talk about incest. Not talking about it is the main reason why incest is epidemic. When wrongdoing is not addressed, it is not dealt with; and when not dealt with, it multiplies. Silence means implied approval and becomes a secrecy that is deadly, for it builds more shame into victims that are already overwhelmed with it.

Recovery is like a bridge that you need to cross to change your life. In REPAIR the bridge is used as a visualization tool. On one side are the things destroying you. If you turn back, depression, loneliness, despair, suicidal tendencies, addictions, shame-based low self-esteem, and fear of abandonment await you. The list is endless.

On the other side is all the good stuff. There you will find peace, healthy choices, strong self-esteem, a feeling of being centered and stable. There you will find joy. Imagine a life free from pain and emotional instability; a life where waking each morning brings happy anticipation rather than dread; a life where you can stop waiting for someone to rescue you and begin to rescue yourself. All you have to do is keep moving across that bridge. At some point in your recovery, you will learn that, like a carrot on a stick, the other side of the bridge beckons and you will no longer be tempted to turn back.

While the Bridge of Recovery is a visual tool, the REPAIR program is a map to take you across that bridge.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Repair for Teens"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Marjorie McKinnon.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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