About the time she had her first baby, vague and fleeting memories of something that happened when she was a little girl started flickering in Anne’s head. Right after she confided in her mother about it, Anne recalled, her parents divorced. Thinking about these things left the area mom all jittery inside.
After the pregnancy, Anne fell into what she thought was one of the worst cases of postpartum depression ever. “I was in a state of high anxiety all the time,” she says. “I was very hyper-aware. I had high-adrenaline emotional responses like I was in a very scary situation, even though I was actually in a secure place in my life.”
After four years of counseling, Anne knows what made her first childbirth so tough. Now, she is sure that memories of her father touching her inappropriately triggered emotions buried in her brain for years.
Anne is among the one in four American moms who were sexually abused in some way before she turned 18. And Dad? One in six of our guys were sexually assaulted as a child. Think Penn State. All across North Texas – and the nation – survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) are facing parenthood while nursing open wounds from maltreatment they endured when they were kids themselves. Theirs is a story that comes with two completely opposite endings, advocates say.
“There are two kinds of parents who are survivors of childhood abuse,” says Heather Cawthon, clinical director at Children First in Grand Prairie. “There are people who deal with the issues and people who haven’t.”
The war within
Anne knew about the Women’s Center of Tarrant County, but it took her a long time to make the call. “I wasn’t sure if I deserved counseling,” she says. “I wasn’t sure if my case was severe enough.”
Many parents enter into counseling carrying the fear that they will somehow perpetuate a legacy of abuse, says Ellen Magnis, chief of external affairs at the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center. Victims of physical violence are far more likely to pass abuse forward to their own families, experts say. But parents who’ve been sexually abused don’t usually cycle into abusers themselves.
Studies show childhood victims of sexual abuse do not demonstrate a “vampire cycle” by growing up to be abusers. A 1996 Government Accountability Office report pretty much turned out the lights on that theory. At a time when public angst over pedophilia was rising, research showed that the risk of CSA survivors becoming abusers was lower than people thought.
“They find other ways of hurting themselves rather than repeating the abuse,” Magnis says. Teen pregnancy, drugs, alcohol, self-mutilation and abusive relationships are weapons of choice in this war within the self.
Parents who find the will to work through their issues, however, can become some of the strongest advocates for their children. They will be more likely to listen to their children in a way they wish their parents could have heard them. They can be more emotionally tuned in and able to understand how their kids are feeling about their lives and relationships.
But for those who don’t reach out for help, unresolved pain can take its toll. Parents who never deal with the emotional fallout of sexual abuse will often act in ways they themselves don’t understand. They can be oppressive, controlling or recklessly permissive. They may become over-responsible, meeting the needs of the people around them before their own. Or they could go the opposite direction. They might act out in manipulative or abusive ways to fulfill psychological needs they don’t understand.
Worse, a survivor may turn to self-destructive behaviors such as substance abuse, eating disorders or acting out sexually as ways to smother the memory of abuse. Those who don’t get to the resources available to work through their childhood nightmares can fall prey to despair masked as self-hate.
And still worse, in an ironic but behaviorally predictable replay of their childhood relationships, CSA survivors may be drawn to abusive relationships that are not the best environments for raising children. We’re talking about some major dysfunction – alcoholism, physical violence, day-to-day verbal abuse.
But there is always hope for recovery. The tools for healing are close at hand, experts say. There can be a happy ending for those who are brave enough to shine the lights of disclosure and introspection on the periodic bouts of blowback that they’re likely to experience all the way through to the Golden Years.
“The best possible advice I can give any parent is to heal yourself,” Magnis says. “If all the things you need to work on aren’t resolved, it won’t be possible to pay attention to your child, to protect your child and to be present for them.”
It isn’t hard to find help. It isn’t even expensive. Counseling with highly trained specialists is available at sexual assault support centers scattered conveniently throughout the area and even in rural locales. Treatment is free; few questions asked. So access is not the problem.
Motherhood trigger point
Motherhood is the perfect pressure point for buried feelings from our emotional past, people who work in the field say. As if to intensify the overwhelming burden of responsibility for a tiny, dependent creature, motherhood sweeps in on a wave of helplessness and vulnerability.
“Victimization is all about vulnerability,” Magnis says. “And there is no more vulnerable feeling than realizing that you are now responsible for this helpless little baby.”
It’s not unusual for adults like Anne who’ve been sexually abused to struggle with the clarity of their abuse memories, says Becka Meier, clinical coordinator for the Rape Crisis and Victim Services Program at The Women's Center. That struggle can be a result of how early in life the abuse occurs; cognitive and memory development at that particular age; and the havoc that traumatic events often play with brain development and memory, she says.
Caring for children can stir up ghosts of the new mom’s unmet childhood needs, disguised as sadness and depression. This is when the terror that they may abuse their own children assaults the psyche. Unusually severe bouts of the baby blues such as Anne suffered are common in CSA survivors.
A characteristically social and outgoing person, Anne says she “just kind of shut down.” Eying everyone around her as potential predators, she couldn’t trust her children’s safety to day care or babysitters. Donning the battle gear of a stay-at-home soldier mom devoted to protecting her three children from threats lurking in every corner, Anne watched her world slowly shrinking. “My life got very small,” she says. “I wanted to control everything around us all.”
Hyper-vigilance is a common symptom of moms and dads who’ve suffered abuse, Cawthon says. “They’ll deny their kids things like sleepovers and trips to the park, to the point where it interferes with the child’s life and the parents’ too,” she says.
After years of therapy, Anne’s world is taking on air again. She understands she can’t control every iota of chance in her children’s lives. They go to sleepovers at homes of families they know well. Anne and her husband leave the three kids – 9, 7 and 2 – with babysitters they trust.
“I’ve learned to ease up on myself a little,” she says. “More and more, it’s about the kids having their own experience. I’m learning how to watch closely without hovering or smothering.”
Legacies of little ones lost
Rosie’s mother looked the other way when Rosie disclosed that her stepfather was sexually abusing her. At 15, Rosie ran away from home. She found herself married with an infant son within a year.
By the time her toddler was old enough to start getting into mischief, Rosie’s rage came out in a backlash of physical violence. She’d slap or pinch her little boy when he misbehaved. It wasn’t until a close friend intervened that she started trying to figure out where all that anger was coming from.
“I finally realized that he had nothing to do with it,” Rosie says. “I realized it came from my own childhood and my lack of a mother and a father figure and that I had never really taken time to deal with my sexual abuse.”
Feelings rooted in childhood trauma will probably keep bubbling up at important junctures in a survivor’s life, therapists say. The death of a parent can also stir up buried emotions lingering from the abuse.
“When a woman has a baby, when the child reaches the age the parent was when they were abused, those are things that trigger feelings that will need more processing,” says Renee Fromm, Heart Program manager with Community Partners of Dallas.
Parents deal with their tough childhoods in many different ways. Many, like Rosie, turn to physical abuse as a reflex response. “I never had that role model to base my mothering on,” she says.
Some put the needs of others above their own, making it their job to protect everyone around them. Rosie did that as well. “When I ran away,” Rosie says, “I worried and felt guilty about what he [her stepfather] would do to my mom and my sisters left at home,” she says.
These children may learn to hide their feelings of shame or inadequacy by overachieving. Starved of nurturing and support when they were children, they think they don’t deserve love and respect if they show their inner selves when they grow up to be parents. This throws a wrench into building intimacy in committed relationships.
“The people they trusted the most pulled the trigger against the child,” Cawthon says. “They learn the lesson that the people they trusted most are people who can’t be trusted.”
Like Anne, many CSA parents “do not do well with boundaries,” says Sandra Parker, a therapist who works one-on-one with parents at the Women’s Center. “Childhood sexual abuse is all about boundaries, so as parents they tend to be too loose or too rigid.”
When a sexually abused person goes to pick a mate, he or she might develop love matches based on the most unhealthy models of what love is, Fromm says. “They may be drawn to people who repeat that early role model of the abusive person.”
That can be a huge blow to children caught up in the drama. “Parents may get into bad relationships with violence, alcoholism and drugs that aren’t good for the safety and well-being of their children,” Magnis says.
While parents who were physically abused are most likely to be violent with their own children, sex abuse gets handed down from one generation to the next in a different pattern. “Often, a grandfather will abuse both a daughter and granddaughter, so you’ll have a whole family of dysfunction where nobody has a role models or skills for healthy communication,” Fromm says.
The code of secrecy like the one Rosie’s mother fostered sent the rest of the family members diving headlong into a denial that lasts to this day. Rosie doesn’t communicate with them anymore.
The sooner a victim finds the courage to tell someone, the healing process can begin. “It only has power over you if you continue to keep it a secret,” Cawthon says.
Never too late
What is the one thing survivors of childhood abuse and their advocates want parents to know most? That it’s never too late to start sorting through the byproducts of the mistreatment they bore as children. “We want people to know it’s never too late, and they should always have hope,” Meier says.
Therapy is the best path to healing but confiding in a friend can be a first step. “Just talking to someone about it can get the ball rolling,” Fromm says. “The first step is to say out loud that it happened.”
Abuse survivors can actually be more informed, more proactive, more knowledgeable and more understanding, she says. They can put into play how they felt and parent their own children from a special place of compassion. “Parents who have worked through their issues lots of times have more to bring the table,” she says.
Meier will never forget what happened when a mom we’ll call Jane – while in therapy to work through her childhood abuse issues – got the crushing news that her own daughter had been sexually assaulted. Sadly, Meier says, it’s a recurring scenario among the parents who come to the Women’s Center for counseling.
“She was all like, ‘How could I have let this happen?’ And ‘Oh my God, now my daughter is going to go through everything I went through,’ and she was just beside herself,” Meier says.
But that’s not the way it turned out. Jane’s daughter wasn’t going through the same suffering that she had, Meier helped the anguished mom to see. Unlike so many of the older generation of sex abuse survivors, Jane’s girl had some huge head starts. First, she had the open ear of someone who believed her. Jane did not employ excruciating emotional measures to enforce the cult of family secrecy. She was a strong advocate who could rally. She was well equipped to tap into the resources available.
“The daughter had a safe ear, a person to cry out to, someone who was on her team,” Meier says. “Her mom never had that.”
All parents have problems
Most help centers for victims of sexual assault offer free parenting classes where moms and dads can find a tool box of skills they can use to help their children grow up to feel secure. They can arm their kids against sexual predators by helping them understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touch at an early age. They should teach kids to call body parts by their correct anatomical name. They can make sure their young ones trust that Mom and Dad will listen and be there for them.
Fathers of a daughter who has been sexually abused can help the healing by something as simple as telling her that Dad is sorry he couldn’t protect her from this horribly hurtful thing. “Just letting them know that, as a father, you wish you could do something to this guy lets them know that, even though you couldn’t control it, you still have remorse and compassion for their suffering,” Cawthon says.
The most important thing parents can do is to pursue healing for themselves. “Taking all this pain out and looking at it can be a very scary thing to do,” Cawthon says. “But walking through the process of healing will make us better parents.”
Now 40 and married a second time with two teenage daughters, Rosie continues therapy at Children First with her entire family. Sometimes her counselor works with the whole group, sometimes in one-on-one sessions with son, daughters and husband.
“He’s been our rock,” Rosie says about her husband. “The girls respect him because his attitude through all of this has been ‘whatever it takes, we’re willing to do it.’”
Whether childhood abuse is sexual, physical or verbal, Rosie tells us, therapy is the indisputable starting gate to strong relationships and parenting. “There’s no way to dust it under the rug like my family tried to do,” she says. “Anybody who thinks they can get to a healthy place without looking at the abuses in their past is fooling themselves.’
Parents with abuse in their childhoods are people who have challenges, Fromm says. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be bad parents.
“All parents have problems,” she says. “We just have to remember they can be overcome and find the ways to overcome them.”
