Invisible Girls Read online

  Some girls get really freaked out if they have violent sexual fantasies. They can’t believe they get turned on by fantasies of violence and feel a lot of shame about them. Or they fear that the only way they’ll be able to get turned on is through being violently dominated. Just talking about this and admitting it, even on a hotline, can be really helpful. You are not alone. Many people who have been tortured have such fantasies. You are not alone. As long as you are open to looking at them and talking about them, they will pass. You will begin to understand that you are not a freak and that you are simply responding to what’s been done to you. Eventually, you will be relieved of the shame by getting more control over your fantasy life.

  Many girls talk about being afraid to be touched, being afraid that if they are touched in the same way their abuser touched them, they might freak out. Some girls are afraid of physical intimacy. For some, severe pain accompanies any sexual intimacy. Others report feeling nothing when they are touched because they spent so long escaping their bodies during the abuse.

  If any of this is happening to you, give yourself time. You can and will have healthy, loving, affectionate, intimate, and sexual relationships after abuse.

  Once you are in a relationship with a sensitive lover who understands (and if he or she doesn’t, he or she is probably not the person for you!), refer them to a book by Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child. As the subtitle suggests, it has some wonderful insights for partners of girls and women who were sexually abused.

  Let’s get one thing clear right now: You are not damaged goods. You are entitled to a fine, satisfying sexual life—with someone who respects your boundaries. The act of sex, when accompanied by love and desire and deep attraction and connection, is the opposite of rape, sex abuse, and incest. So consider your first sexual love affair your first. Don’t worry and don’t be afraid if in the beginning you have triggers and déjà vu. It’s okay to take it slow and be honest with your partner, who respects you, about what you’re feeling and how much touch and what kind of touch you are comfortable with. Those feelings will be replaced eventually with healthy sexual and sensual pleasures. Just give yourself time.

  LET GO

  I sealed myself off from my emotions, locked them in a Ziploc bag, and put them in the freezer. Now I am ready to defrost that frozen bag.

  —a twenty-year-old survivor of date rape

  However you choose to face and reveal your abuse—through your poetry or art or dancing or track, whether you’ve told one friend or many, told your parents or not—don’t worry about how it’s coming out. And don’t worry if some days you want to talk about it a lot and other days you don’t want to talk about it at all. It’s all okay. These are your feelings, and you get to determine what to do with them. You may feel embarrassed after telling people, or you may feel an incredible burden lifted right away. The bottom line is, by telling your story, you are letting go of the shame and the guilt that have been keeping you conflicted and full of self-doubt. You are building new road maps, undergoing a kind of metamorphosis, and taking back what the abuser tried to steal but never could. There is so much power in the simple act of speaking out.

  Whatever your age, you are the right age to come out and tell your truth. Find someone to tell—and tell, tell, tell until your lungs ache. Tell until you can’t tell anymore. It won’t take away what happened to you, but it will re-map your life and take away the power from the abuse and the abuser. Read on—and remember, you are strong and resilient, beautiful, and righteous. And you are not alone.

  PART TWO

  BEFORE WE OPEN THE BOX

  CHAPTER 6

  GIRLS’ GENIUS

  How Girls Get Through the Actual Abuse Experience (Zinnia’s Story, Lily’s Story)

  While my father was molesting me I would look at the wallpaper with all the little fairies. I would pretend they were my friends and that they were sprinkling fairy dust on me. I made up names for all the fairies and I was the queen fairy and I could protect every little girl in my world.

  —a seventeen-year-old incest survivor

  When I was being molested I would picture myself swimming and then diving into beautiful blue water. There was coral and beautiful shells, I could breathe underwater and all the little fishes were swimming with me protecting me. I had magical powers, and the water was cleaning me over and over again. The water was making me pure.

  —a twenty-year-old incest survivor

  If you are not a sexual-abuse survivor, you may be wondering how on earth girls get through such experiences, but if you are a survivor, you probably understand all too well. You too have lived through the unbearable and gotten up the next day and dragged yourself to school, sat through classes as if nothing had happened, played on the soccer team, debated on the debate team, created art or music or poetry. Somehow survivors learn how to live with their abuse. They have to—it’s the only way they can function.

  One of my clients recounted an amazing dream she had several years after the abuse had stopped, in which she was her younger self in her childhood bed. In the dream her father came to her as usual, got on top of her, and started to have sex with her. As he started raping her, a part of her—what she called her “transparent self”—got up out of the bed to watch “the girl” and her father. Then she saw all these healing little angels surrounding the girl on the bed. They lifted the father off her and made him disappear, and then the hovering girl descended back onto the bed and melted into her own body.

  This dream depicts what so many young women experience, whether consciously or unconsciously: leaving their bodies to survive their abuse. Clinically, this is called “dissociation,” and many inexperienced clinicians working with sex-abuse survivors think of this leaving of the body, this floating, as a psychological problem. Clinically, dissociation can be thought of as a negative, as a way to not be grounded in reality. But who wants to feel and be grounded in reality while being sexually abused? You’ll learn in this chapter, not only is it not a problem, or something negative, it is a lifeline, a brilliant strategy for trauma survival. Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise!

  Some girls leave their bodies or create fantasy worlds; others focus all their mental energy on something in the room or outside the window as a way of walling themselves off from what’s happening to their bodies. Girls have been known to count, catalog, sing silently, memorize flowers, design elaborate gardens, create a piece of art, choreograph a dance, memorize complex mathematical problems, write lyrics, design a room, renovate a building, swim with dolphins, surf the waves, create poetry, do their homework, memorize a movie, take a plane ride, build a cabinet, become a superhero, learn a language, project themselves into a painting on the wall, grow wings and fly—all ways of separating their minds from the situation.

  In the coming pages, you will be hearing from Lily, who recounts envisioning herself as a heroine rescuing trapped children. Garnet will describe repeatedly singing the childhood song “Miss Mary Mac” in her head. Other girls will talk about focusing on the color of the wallpaper, the nuances of the light coming in through the window, the sounds of the birds outside. One of my clients even counted the flowers on her wallpaper until she reached the number 643. One girl talked about disappearing into a painting of a boat and sailing away. I spoke to one girl who recounted memorizing the lyrics to an Italian opera. One of my clients even used a different name at work so she wouldn’t have to identify with the soiled name her abuser-father called her.

  The point is that often the only way to get through traumas like these is to not feel. And that’s exactly what these fantasy worlds allow: they give girls a place to go so they don’t have to be present in their violated bodies.

  In 1992 Judith Herman, one of the major contributors to the field of understanding sexual abuse, published a book called Trauma and Recovery. In this groundbreaking book, Herman compares the violence of being a war prisoner to the violence of being a sexu
al-abuse survivor. She brilliantly brings out the similarities between being politically terrorized and being sexually terrorized. She shows us that both types of survivors suffer through overwhelming feelings of guilt and shame, often with nowhere to go and no one to talk to about it. And so they turn inward. By 2018 it is common knowledge that soldiers commonly suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, as do sex-abuse survivors. Soldiers in confinement have been known to survive by making obsessive lists or by counting. Girls do these same things while they are being abused. Their minds and spirits will invent fantastically creative ways to survive torture.

  Herman talks about how the Vietnam War Memorial, by acknowledging the reality of all the death, suffering, and trauma, gave vets a kind of container for their pain. It gave their suffering credibility. Our book is meant to be that memorial for sexual-abuse survivors—that proof of pain, that acknowledgment that you are still alive inside and out after your perpetrator tried to kill your spirit and rob you of your rights.

  That doesn’t mean it’s easy to talk about your fantasy world. Girls know it can sound “a little crazy” to divulge the details of their fantasies. But I have found in my work with girls that over time, as they become more comfortable talking about the abuse itself, they will reveal some strategy they used to get through it. If they ask me whether I think they’re crazy, I always reassure them that the worlds they created are a measure of their extraordinary resourcefulness and that I admire their skill at surviving. The fact is, a girl’s ability to go elsewhere during her sexual abuse, to create a safe, inviolable place for herself, only means that she won’t allow her abuser to kill off her spirit. However much he may violate her, this is one thing he cannot steal.

  Often, a therapist will not fully understand these strategies. I have had several clients come to me only after having worked with a therapist who wanted to help them “resolve” their fantasy “problem.” But these girls knew intuitively that there was nothing at all wrong with their fantasizing and that it was, in fact, what had enabled them to get through the abuse. Their fantasies are like a baby’s security blanket, accessible when they need them for comfort or to get through a transition, but not a substitute for reality.

  Of course, some girls simply can’t disappear into fantasies during molestation. If your father or molester keeps talking and talking or instructs you to do certain things, you have to stay present to be safe; you can’t escape. For example, the uncle of one of my Asian clients used to make her go through a ritual of bowing down at his feet and reciting a statement that she worshipped and adored him and wanted to have his baby as soon as she came of age. During the molestation, he also forced her to repeat these things. She was fourteen at that time. Another client talked about her father forcing her to comment on his body and male prowess continuously during the molestation. Another girl told of her father forcing her to say how much she “wanted daddy.” Although often girls don’t have the option of taking themselves away, stopping their abuse, they still manage to leave their bodies most of the time they are being abused.

  And girls who do have options use them. In this chapter, Zinnia and Lily will tell you about the amazing fantasy worlds they constructed to survive their rapes and molestation. If you have any doubts about their sanity or your own, read on. These are remarkable, strong, courageous, and perfectly sane girls who used their minds to survive the unspeakable.

  ZINNIA

  Zinnia is one of those girls whose experience was so brutal you may wonder how she survived it. It’s hard to believe that a girl could be trapped with an abuser for ten years with no one to help her. Zinnia suffered this long-term incest at the hands of her stepfather. Her mentally ill mother knew about the abuse and didn’t stop it. In her story, Zinnia takes us inside the elaborate fantasy world she created to escape from her stepfather time after time.

  Zinnia came to me through the underground network of girls who bring their friends in for help. She had been working with kids at a camp when she broke down. She had seen a little boy try to put his hands down a little girl’s pants and freaked out. She actually fainted. When she came to, she told her supervisor she felt ill and needed to go home. That night she called a friend who she knew had gotten some therapy and told her she was an incest survivor and was having flashbacks. She asked her friend to take her to her next therapy session.

  I met Zinnia when she was twenty-three. A beautiful Mexican woman, she was tall and strong and articulate beyond her years. But, when she began to talk about her abuse, her voice became very, very small. She said she was sorry to burden me with her story and explained that she’d thought it was all behind her. After all, the abuse had stopped four years earlier and she had pressed charges already and had seen a court-appointed counselor for five sessions. She felt ashamed that she had more work to do.

  I assured her that there was nothing to be ashamed of, and we began our therapy and the opening of the depth of Zinnia’s long-held secrets.

  Zinnia told me that her mother is a schizophrenic, her stepfather an alcoholic, and she an only child. Zinnia’s biological father abandoned the family soon after Zinnia’s birth, and Zinnia was just six when her mother married a man who had already served a jail sentence for child molestation. He waited two years before starting to molest Zinnia. He then continued to molest her until she was eighteen.

  The family lived in an old trailer in a dirt-poor area of the Texas foothills. Her mother was on welfare, and her stepfather never worked. Zinnia often went without food. When she entered school and spoke only Spanish, she was put into special education.

  But she proved the school wrong and went on to become a perfect student. That was Zinnia’s MO. During those many years in which she was being molested, to the world Zinnia showed only a perfect girl: a perfect student, a perfect friend, a perfect daughter. She did exactly as she was told, and she took care of her sick mother as well as she could. She excelled in school and received several scholarships to top universities. She was the compliant girl at home, at school, and everywhere.

  Until she went to college, that is. During her freshman year she tried to kill herself with an overdose of pills. Luckily, her roommate found her in time, and in the hospital Zinnia told social services about her home life. Her stepfather was arrested and arraigned, and her mother put into psychiatric treatment. Zinnia’s roommate had a friend who was my client—that’s how Zinnia came to me.

  Zinnia has been in therapy with me for the past four years, and it has been a real roller-coaster ride. Because she finds it so difficult to trust anyone, it was a full year before Zinnia opened up to me and had any faith that the therapy could help her.

  When she started therapy, she had never been in a relationship, and she was terrified to let anyone get to know her, including me. Now, at twenty-seven, she is in a doctoral program in social work on a full scholarship at Columbia University. She has slowly begun to date and has developed new friendships. She is passionate about her work and wants to help socially disadvantaged children. I believe Zinnia will reach and save many children. I also believe that her story and depth of honesty will help incest survivors come out on the other side, knowing they are not alone.

  ZINNIA’S STORY

  Building Houses, Building Dreams

  All through my childhood, I was the one in charge of things. At least, that was the illusion I liked to maintain. I had control. Of course, I knew this control was only available to me as long as I didn’t shake things up, as long as I played my role. This role included being quiet about the rapes I suffered for ten long years at the hands of my drunk, old, disgusting stepfather. The first time he attacked me, he must have been at least seventy already. I was alone in the trailer with him. I was around eight. He approached me, pinned me down on the dirty couch, and put his fingers inside my vagina, forcing his dirty, drunk mouth on mine. When he was done with me, he pushed me aside.

  When my mother came home that night, she found me huddled in a corner, shaking and crying. I told h
er what had happened. I pleaded with her to help me, but she just stared back at me blankly and said, “Look, he helps us with money. Just try not to put up so much of a fight.” I knew my mother was crazy, but I had no idea she’d make me put up with this. She heard voices that weren’t talking and saw people who weren’t there, but she was all I had. So I began my retreat.

  I ignored the smell of cat pee everywhere, the dirty dishes always filling the sink, the overgrown lawn, the empty cupboards, but I couldn’t ignore my stepfather. I remember the gun closet, repository of the switch and the rifles. These were the weapons my stepfather threatened to hurt me with if I told the authorities about him. Tell the authorities? That was the last thing I wanted. I just wanted to be as walled off as possible from everyone. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would ever take care of me.

  I retreated deeply into books and school. I would stay after school whenever possible and read until the building closed at 6 P.M. I joined the Girl Scouts, then 4-H club. As I got older, I was on the swim team, the debate team, the cheerleading squad, school government—anything to keep me away from home.

  I tried everything I could think of to stay away from my stepfather, but he managed to corner me and would mess with me whenever he could get his hands on me. But when I hit adolescence, I began to fight back. I started keeping a knife under my pillow, so that if he came to me in the middle of the night in a drunken stupor, I could pull it on him and threaten him. Sometimes that worked, and he’d leave me alone. But it wasn’t always that easy. A lot of times he would just sneak up behind me and pull me to him in situations where I could not get away. Even though he was an old man by then, he was still very strong because he had been a construction worker.