This seems the conscience opinion of some people
Sexual abuse survivors of all genders and
sexual orientations are deprived of the right to grow gradually
into a mature sexuality and, instead, are forced or seduced into premature sexual encounters they are emotionally ill equipped
to handle. As adults, therefore, these men and women often spin between periods of promiscuous and self-destructive sexual
acting out and times of complete sexual shutdown during which, like burn victims, they experience the gentlest physical contact
as excruciatingly painful.
Finally, there is a characteristic relational stance assumed by many sexual abuse survivors
that is particularly germane to these proceedings. It involves others who did not abuse them but also did not protect them.
If
it takes a community to raise a child, it also takes a community to abuse one so that whenever a minor is sexually violated,
someone's eyes are closed. Throughout history and in every segment of society, the most common response to the suspicion or
even the disclosure of childhood sexual abuse has been self-defensive denial and dissociation. No one finds it easy to stand
in the overwhelming and destabilizing reality of sexual abuse. Thus, blindness, deafness, and elective mutism are responses
endemic to many confronted by a victimized child, an adult survivor, or a perpetrating adult. To the extent, however, that
the sexual victimization of a minor depends upon the silence of adults who knew, suspected, or should have known about the
abuse, the burdens of shame and reparation reach beyond the perpetrator. In the case of the Church, it is not just abusing
priests and abetting bishops who must lift a symbolic Sword of Shannara and face what is reflected back to them in its blade.
Rather, every rectory housekeeper, every parish maintenance man, every religious woman or lay teacher, every parishioner -
any of these individuals who once felt uneasy about a priest's relationship with a young boy or girl and said nothing need
ponder their inaction and resolve to behave protectively in the future. Zero tolerance must include the silent as well as
the predatory.
What is important to recognize at this conference is that adult survivors of sexual abuse frequently
are, at least initially, even angrier with adults who failed to protect them than they are with the perpetrator himself. Because
the survivor's internal relationship with his abuser often is organized around competing feelings of attachment and hate,
he often feels freer to turn the full blast of his long pent-up rage and bitterness on those who did not protect him and who,
in addition, failed to provide for him in ways the perpetrator seemed to, albeit at an unholy cost to the exploited child
or adolescent.
How turning down another corridor on our tour of a psyche ravaged by early sexual trauma, we examine
the impact of sexual abuse on the cognitive functioning of the victim and survivor. Part of what is overwhelmed during sexual
abuse is the young person's ability cognitively to contain, process, and put into words the enormity of the relational betrayal
and physical impingement with which he is faced. It is striking and often bewildering to observe in adult survivors completely
contradictory thought processes that ebb and flow with little predictability. One moment, you are speaking with an intelligent
adult, capable of complex, flexible, abstract, and self decentered thinking. Under sufficient internal or external stress,
however, or in situations somehow reminiscent of past abuse, the cognitive integrity of the survivor shatters and becomes
locked in rigidly inflexible, self-centered thought patterns, simplistic black and white opinions devoid of nuance and an
immutable conviction that the future is destined to be both short and unalterably empty. For example, one survivor patient
who worked as an investment banker was so intellectually gifted that she was considered a brilliant whiz kid in the competitive
New York world of finance. When beset by psychological or interpersonal stimuli linked to her uncle's sexual abuse, however,
she became in her own words, "stupid minded." At those times, she literally could not think at all or could access only immature,
disorganizing and panicky ways of thinking.
If a survivor's cognitive functioning is severely ruptured by sexual abuse,
his affective life, the next stop on our tour, is even more impaired. When a young person is sexually traumatized, the hyperarousal
of the autonomic nervous system and the body's subsequent attempt to restore order disrupt the brain's neurochemical regulation
of emotion. In addition, we are now learning that attachment relationships also impact upon the brain's ability to modulate
feelings, with traumatic attachment experiences interfering with effective neuropsychological regulation of affect. The brain
of the sexually abused minor thus suffers a double assault. Both the sexual traumas themselves and the betrayal of an attachment
relationship assail the flow of affect modulating neurochemicals.
As an adult, the survivor shifts--sometimes quite
rapidly--between states of chaotically intense hyperarousal and deadened states of psychic numbing. This inability to modulate
emotional arousal often leads to interpersonally inappropriate verbal or motoric actions when the survivor is hyperstimulated,
and to similarly inappropriate emotional and psychomotor constriction as the individual moves into psychic numbing. Further,
autonomic arousal becomes a generalized reaction to stress in the midst of which the sexual abuse survivor is unable to discern
realistically the severity of a perceived threat. Instead of reacting at the actual level of psychological danger, the survivor
may engage in seemingly irrational behaviors like temper tantrums or terrified withdrawal. These behaviors do no fit the present
day situation but are perfectly complimentary to the now affectively revived earlier trauma.
Because of the damage
done by sexual abuse to affective brain functioning, adult survivors often need psychotropic medications for periods of time
during recovery. For some, their impairments are sufficiently intractable to require lifelong medication. These drugs are
expensive and it would be a specific and reparative use of Church funds to provide survivors who are under the care of psychiatric
professionals with the medications they need to function more adaptively.
We now are almost finished with our psychological
tour and are about to enter what can be the most shocking corridor of all. Also partly due to disrupted brain functioning,
sexual abuse survivors often display a truly spectacular array of self-destructive behaviors. They slice their arms, thighs,
and genitalia with knives, razors, or shards of broken glass. They burn themselves with cigarettes, pull hair from their heads
and pubic areas, walk through
dark parks alone at night, play chicken with trains at railroad crossings, pick up strangers
in bars to have unprotected and anonymous sex, drive recklessly at high speeds, gamble compulsively, and/or further destroy
their minds and bodies with alcohol and the whole range of street drugs. Both male and female prostitutes tend to have backgrounds
of early sexual abuse. Survivors also are two to three times more likely than adults without abuse histories to make at least
one suicide attempt in their lives (Briere & Runtz, 1986). Sometimes they die.
Survivor self-abuse performs a
myriad of functions too complex to address adequately today. A quick inventory of a survivor's motivations to act self-destructively
includes: punishment for the abuse he blames himself for; mastering victimization by taking charge of the timing and execution
of harm; self-medication of turbulent affective storms; and unconsciously seeking states of hyperarousal that then trigger
the release of brain opiods, providing the survivor with a temporary sense of calm. At an even more deeply unconscious level,
frighteningly self-destructive sexual abuse survivors want to turn the table on present day stand-ins for those who violated
and neglected them. Unconsciously, they long to see their own terror, helplessness, impotent rage, and shocked recognition
of utter betrayal reflected now on the face of someone in their lives. Who can blame them?
As we exit now from our
tour of the terrifyingly disorienting psychological House of Horrors, constructed amidst sexual abuse, and maintained by its
aftermath, it should be clear that a survivor's recovery is a long, complicated, sometimes treacherous process. There is a
cohort in this country of professional men and women who have labored long and hard in the clinical trenches of trauma since
the sexual abuse of children was dragged out of society's skeleton closet in the early 1980's. The bishops and priests of
the Catholic Church need the expertise of professionals to effect healing both within the Church and in relationship with
survivors. Please call on us to help you.
Psychoanalyst Le.onard Shengold entitled his book on the effects of childhood
sexual abuse, Soul Murder (Shengold, 1989). I do not think that early sexual trauma necessarily has to result in soul murder
but it most surely batters and deadens the soul of the young victim and the adult survivor. That this ravaging of souls has
been administered by priests entrusted with a sacred covenant to protect and enliven souls is despicable; it is evil itself.
The Catholic Church and you, its American shepherds, are at a crossroads. Like the recovering victim of sexual abuse,
you can choose to defend, deny, retrench, and rigidify. You can refuse the reflection of a Sword of Shannara and turn away
from all your decency, all your love and generosity, all your arrogance and indifference. When a survivor takes that familiar
and well-worn road, further fragmentation and diminished integrity of mind and soul ensues. But, as is the case for so many
sexual abuse survivors, another road can be chosen. Collectively wielding a blade shining with truth and courageous determination,
you can decide to lead the American Church on a path of recovery, growth, and restored faith. This conference could become
a new epicenter from which ripples the revitalization and restoration of souls. It is a matter of your will which road is
taken. May great grace walk with you and guide you in the days to come. It has been a great grace to me to address you today.
