On Life After Incest

TRIGGER WARNING: Sexual Assault/Incest  
Please, if you choose to read this and feel you need some support phone Victim Support on 0800 842 846 or if in Auckland the HELP foundation crisis line on 09 623 1700

I write this in the hopes that in creating dialogue around this issue I can in a small way make it easier to talk about incestuous sexual abuse.  I write from the position of having family live through this, and it directly impacting on relationships within my family at the present time.  Incestuous abuse has affected many people within my wider family and there has been more than one perpetrator.  While I write this with one person in mind (I had her read this before I posted it), I write with all those people affected in my heart and I am sure there are more of you than I know.  I write from a place of love and sadness.  I write because I have hope.

Not just for my own family, but the many other families who live with this.  Because there are many.  Incest is not uncommon here in NZ, so it feels wrong that we don't talk about it.  One study of 3,000 Kiwi women showed that 1 in 8 women experience incest during their lifetime, which is about 12%*.  This may seem high, but given that in New Zealand we have the 5th worst child abuse record in the OECD, high rates of sexual assault (1 in 5) and extremely high rates of domestic and intimate violence rates (1 in 3) I think it may be even higher.

And we don't talk about it.

While we have the #metoo movement empowering those who have experienced sexual assault to speak out about their experiences, how many of those relate to incest?  Very few.  And while it is fantastic that people are finding their voices through this movement, for those who have experienced incest I can only imagine it makes them feel even more invisible and further alienated in their experience**.  And it saddens me because it is such a common experience.  So the truth is, victims are incest are far from alone in their experiences, yet can still feel so isolated.

In 2017 we elected the highest number of women MP's in NZ history; 46 women.  Of that number, statistically 6 of them will have experienced incest.  2,436,790(ish) women live in New Zealand, of that number 292,415(ish) will have experienced incest.  And those numbers do not include the many boys and men that also experience incest.  And those are not just arbitrary numbers, they represent real human lives.  Think about how many women there are in your family and do the math.

We don't talk about it, but it effects a great deal of us.

For those who live with the experience of incest the impact can be huge.  Associated issues include:***

• Problems with close relationships
• Depression
• Self-destructive behaviours
• Difficulty/fears around parenting
• Issues with sex
• Chronic pain/health issues 

Imagine living with this, living with the associated issues and not telling anyone?  Imagine how lonely and scary that might feel?

Why we don't talk about it isn't difficult to guess.  Shame and fear.  When someone close to you hurts you like this you wonder why they did it.  What did you do to bring this on yourself?  The perpetrator will often tell the victim that for whatever reason, the abuse is their fault.  For victims of incest, the fear is completely rational.  Telling someone can hugely impact every aspect of your life.  What happens when the abuser lives with you?  What happens if your abuser is your caregiver?  What will I lose if I tell someone?  What will happen if no-one believes me?  In speaking up, victims of incest stand to lose a lot.  Telling someone can feel like a huge gamble.

I am writing this because someone in my family gambled on telling us.

There is no need to go into specifics over the many abuses she has survived.  All I will say is that the abuse happened for years over her childhood and beyond and it was violent.  The reason it has only come out recently is because she (like many other victims of sexual assault) had repressed memories that started surfacing.  The impact on her life has been huge.  She cannot remember a time in her life before she was abused.  As a consequence, she is neurologically wired differently to those who grow up with healthy childhoods****.

There were a lot of signs that something was wrong, but we missed them.

So what happened when her abuse was finally revealed?  Suppression.  Minimisation.  Interrogation.  Thinly veiled disbelief.  Fear of the family being 'outed', fear of what others would think.  After years of keeping this to herself and her partner, when she finally did talk she was told to keep it to herself until her revelation could be 'managed'.  Her wider family did not learn of this until well over a year after she first told her parents.  Another lonely year.  Once her closer family members were told she gained some support, but not without cost.  And once the larger family were told what came about was anger, blame and abuse.

And amongst all this the craziest thing that happened was that none of the extended family***** reached out to her.  No-one called to say 'I'm sorry this happened to you, how can I help?'  No-one.  I cannot speak for how this must have felt for her, but for me it broke the illusion that our family was close.  Would they do the same if it were me?  Would my truth be met with silence?  Unlike many other families my extended family comes together regularly to celebrate.  So why is it that we couldn't come together to help when we learned one of us had suffered so much for so long?  I have waited in hope that this would change, but it hasn't.

I can only give an educated guess as to why this is.  My guess is that her parents response has set the tone for how others in the family respond.  I guess that this is something people don't know how to approach so they don't approach it at all, or that they feel it is not their place.  I know how difficult it is for many to believe they have spent so much time with the abuser and had no idea he was doing this.  I have faced this disbelief regarding my own history.  I know these things can be easier not to believe.  If the abuse never happened then there is no need to question our ability to judge the morality of others.  Then we don't feel guilty for 'letting' the abuse happen or stupid for not realising it could.  It is easier to blame the victim than to hold the abuser to account for their actions.  It is easier to pretend it never happened.

My current family situation reminds me of The Beach by Alex Garland; what will people sacrifice to continue living in 'paradise?'  What will they give up to maintain the status quo?

And this probably sounds like my family are terrible people.  But they are just regular people.  This response is very common.  It is awful, but it is normal and I think this is because so many of us are taught to value public perception over reality.  To value keeping things 'in the family.'  To say nothing, if we have nothing nice to say.  We are taught not to talk about this stuff and in not talking we allow the abuse to continue.  In this, our family is not unique and this is just so sad.

It's a cycle.  As a consequence of valuing family ties over honesty, victims are alienated and disempowered.  Abusers are free to continue on in their lives without consequence.  Society continues to support abusers and alienate victims therefore abuse can continue unchecked and violence begets violence.  I don't believe any well person wakes up one morning and just decides 'Hey!  I think I'm going to rape someone today.'  I believe getting to this point is a gradual process of unhealthy behaviours going largely unhindered and is aided by how women are treated by society.  And males who are abused by relatives in childhood are more likely to become abusers.  Abuse begets abuse.

So when we don't talk about incest, when we shut down conversations about incest, when we disbelieve victims of incest we perpetuate that cycle.  And this is not only in the worst interests of the victims, but the abusers too.  I have no doubt in my mind that most abusers feel as much guilt over their actions as their victims feel shame, and while there are many other factors involved, could this guilt also play a part in our high male suicide statistics?  I do not believe that all New Zealand's terrible statistics are islands unto themselves.  If we give abusers the opportunity to talk about what happened, the opportunity to make changes, the opportunity to raise their children differently, we may start to solve many other problems too.

While NZ is often touted as a pillar of Woman's Suffrage due to being the first to give women the vote******, our rates of incest, our domestic violence rates and our sexual violence rates (one of the top 5 in the OECD) tell a very different story of how women are treated here.  Because while these are issues for men too, the perpetrators of this violence are predominantly male and offending primarily against women.  And we have the capacity to change this.

So what can we do to prevent incest within our own families?

• Create a safe environment in which your children feel like they can trust you and talk to you freely.
• Teach your children about consent
• Teach your children the correct words for genitalia
• Know the signs of sexual abuse in children.  Read about them here.
• If you see any of these signs, talk to your kids about it.
• Get professional help and support if you need it

And what can we do if incest has happened within our own families?

• Believe the person who has been abused.  Remember that only 2 - 10% of victims of sexual assault falsely accuse the perpetrator.  That means that 90 - 98% of the time victims are telling the truth.
• Focus on the needs of the victim first.  What boundaries need to be in place to help them feel safe?  What can you do to ensure those boundaries are enforced?
• Make sure they have professional support.  For abuse of this type therapy is funded through ACC regardless of how long ago the abuse occurred.
• Make sure you have professional support yourself.
• Talk to the abuser and encourage them to get professional support.  Remember that many abusers have been abused themselves.
• If abuse is suspected to be ongoing, ensure your family is safe from further abuse.  It is possible to do this whilst still giving support to the victim and the abuser.

I for one do not want to maintain the status quo.  I want better for my family and my children.  Our silence leaves victims alone, and frees abusers to continue abusing.  There is no shame in being honest about abuse.

I am so proud of my family member for taking a gamble on speaking out.  I can only imagine how hard that was for her.  But in doing so, she is paving a way for all our children to grow up differently and she has my full support in this.  We have the capacity to change our statistics.  Silence is not the solution.

* To equate this to another statistic, this is the same reported rate as that which boys/men are sexually assaulted in New Zealand.

** There's a fantastic blog post about this here

*** Taken from the NZ Rape Prevention Education website

**** Just as I am.  I did an intensive Circle of Security parenting course because I have no idea how to be a 'normal' parent and raise healthy children.  All we can do is try and re-wire our brains using methodologies from psycho-therapy and the reality is that we will never 'get over it'.  We will never be 'fixed', all we can do is work on recovery and conscious acts of doing things differently for our children.

***** Besides my Mum and myself.  I think this is largely due to what we lived through, our understanding of how it feels to be a victim of abuse and what we have learned over years of therapy.


****** Sorry to burst your bubble here but that was mostly due to an attempt at getting prohibition through in NZ.  Kate Sheppard was a strong prohibitionist and a certain group of politicians believed if they allowed women to vote, Kate Sheppard's voice along other women's would aid in pushing through new laws prohibiting alcohol.  While women won the right to vote, they didn't vote for prohibition at that time as expected.  But this is why we got the vote so early, not because we value our women's rights, but due to drinking issues in the goldfields...

On How Time Flies... And Setting Goals

 Had I not gone off fiction I may    

never have read this wonderful book

 

So I've been feeling super guilty about the fact that I haven't blogged in about four months...

It's a ridiculously long time.  BUT, in my defense, the reason I haven't been writing here is because I've been working on other writing projects.

For my entire life I've had a 'long time listener first time caller' relationship with literature.  I love books.  Aside from when I was decimated by pregnancy and lack of sleep, I have always read every day.  I have lots of friends that are writers, and lots of friends that, like myself, are also avid readers.  With these things smooshed together plus my personality, I am quite critical of a lot of writing, and have a strong sense of what I think is good.  I mean, I have spent huge chunks of time only reading non-fiction because I'd picked up too many badly written stories and was scared to jump back in.                               

Being in this position has meant the idea of writing anything myself - outside of the sphere of blog land, is terrifying.  Poetry didn't really count.  Not because I don't value it, I wouldn't have produced two chapbooks if I didn't.  I've just always written it and each piece is so short I never got caught up in the loop of editing.  About 18 years ago I decided to write a novel.  I wrote a plan, a list of characters and I started writing it.  About 10,000 words in I decided it was awful and deleted everything.  This was not the last time I did something like that.  Any time I tried to write anything substantial at some point I'd deem it terrible and erase it so I didn't have to look at it and feel that secret shame.

       Me on stage with the Boomshack 5.
Looking absolutely terrified (lots of fun though)

I had thought getting through art school where you have no time to be a perfectionist or edit compulsively or obsess over anything would have helped me in this.  Because it really did with my art.  Not so with writing.  I think because I have not studied it formally I never had the confidence to overcome my self criticism and maybe that's why I saw it differently to art.  Attempts at writing reminded me of all I didn't know, like that one time I got to play with a big band in Wellington and discovered I was the only person there who hadn't studied music (besides Samuel Flynn Scott, but his Dad was a producer).  They terrified me.

But I've always wanted to be a writer.

And something changed for me last year.  I got through a whole year of photographing birds daily.  And while I knew that none of those photographs were perfect I kept doing it anyway and it ended up culminating in an exhibition that was, in my eyes, successful.  It showed me that sometimes, you just have to do.  And after that year I decided that I should do annual 'give it a go' challenges.  The challenge for this year has been to write one short story a month.  It doesn't seem like much.  But for someone who hasn't written any fiction besides poetry (and none of that for about five years) since High School, it's a decent challenge.

And I have been following through.  I am fairly up to date with my writing challenge (I owe one extra story this month for earlier in the year, but I've almost finished my first October story and I'm only three days in, so feeling positive).  BUT with time and brain invested in fiction my blog has fallen by the wayside.  And I'm sorry.  I do think that now I'm in the swing of things I may get back atop the blog writing horse.  I hope so anyway.  And the reason I am writing this today, aside from guilt, is that the kids are playing nicely!  So I have a little more time.  And maybe, this might happen more in the future.

So basically, the purpose of this post besides profuse apology is to say I think it's really important to try new things, and to set goals.  Not only does trying new things help your brain make neurological connections which keeps it healthy as you age, but you never know, you might discover you're really good at something.  My workmate told me her Aunt who is in her 70's just took up drawing and painting.  And her work is really good!  She has started having annual exhibitions and gives the proceeds to her brothers church to give to the needy in their community in the Philippines.  How cool is that?  And she would never have been able to do any of that had she not just decided to try something new.

I don't think it matters too much what your goals are, so long as you have them.  At the moment I set short, medium and long terms creative goals.  Currently these are:

Lefthanded Wax-eye from current drawing series      

 

• Take one bird photo a day (nearly up to two years now!)
• Try to do 2 - 4 drawings (of birds) a week
• Complete one short story a month
• Have one exhibition of visual work each year

It's not really a lot.  But with work and Mumming and family and attempting to manage actually seeing my friends sometimes, it's plenty.  I think the other thing about goal setting is making your goals achievable.  Not comparing your goals, or your ability or what you are doing with what other people are doing.  We are all different.  The time and energy we have available to dedicate to whatever is important to us is different.

But the key factor in achieving goals is just doing it.  Whatever it is.  Working past our fear that we are not good enough, and just getting stuck in and doing it regardless, gets it done.  Because the more you do it, the better you will get at it.  What has been really helpful with me in terms of feeling ok about writing is reading well known authors early work.  A lot of Stephen King's early stuff borrows from other influential horror writers.  It's not perfect, but it is published, and it is good.  I'm currently reading a collection of short stories by Tennessee Williams and seeing how so many of his stories were not published for more than five years.

And that if you hit a hump, like I have, you just keep on working.  The first story I submitted for publishing miraculously was published.  The only problem with that was my fear of failure got bigger.  What if I never write anything as good as that again?  What if it's the only thing I ever get published?  This probably isn't how many people think.  I think loads of people would have this happen and just think that meant they were bad ass and start writing themselves to death anticipating bigger victories.  I guess maybe this is one of the big differences between 'normies' and those of us with anxiety.  I had to work through it.

And yesterday, finally (first time since April) I sent some of my subsequent work off to a publisher.  It was scary.  It may be rejected.  But if I do not try, I will never know.  And the truth is, I really do like my stories.  And I feel there are so many more of them there.  And I never ever would have known this at all, had I not stopped thinking and procrastinating and being critical of myself, and just started doing.

With my first cheque from that first published story I decided to buy something special to commemorate the event.  I finally did that today.  What I bought was what I will call my muse bracelet, a bracelet featuring the covers of nine of the most influential books on my writing.  Hopefully, I will wear it while I'm writing to remind me what's important, what I'm aspiring to.

So excited for this to come in the post!

And then I will just sit down and do.