Dangerous Families

Queer Writing on Surviving

Edited by Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein-Sycamore

[an imprint of the Haworth Press|Harrington Park Press], [2004]

Dangerous Families is a ground-breaking book: an anthology of writings by queer survivors of childhood abuse.

People have only been speaking out publicly in great numbers about abuse for a few decades, and been allowed mainstream visibility to talk about this for even less time, perhaps twenty years.

For much of that time, the discussion was moderated by therapists analyzing people’s experiences, as in The Flock or The Minds of Billy Milligan, or as currently happens on talk shows like the loathsome Sally Jessy Raphael. In fact, old-timers in our local Survivors of Incest Anonymous meetings talk about an era when meetings fell apart partly because therapists would come just to goggle at the survivors who were, inexplicably, getting healing without their help. (“You… talk to other abuse survivors? But… everyone knows that’s bad for you! You’re just going to get re-traumatized! There should be a therapist guiding the discussion at least!”)

Queerness is usually erased from the discussion, too, except for the unfortunate and now-rare occasions in which a mental health professional of some kind is attempting to “blame” queerness on abuse. Because, you see, they’re both so rare. And sexual. (Never, oddly, because they’re both so common.) And as a result of this, for some people it became forbidden to talk about being queer and being raped, for fear of reinforcing that farcical link and helping reduce a community to some Freudian wet dream.

Furthermore, most if not all writing about abuse is partitioned off: it is just about child sexual abuse, or specifically about domestic violence, or focusing on spanking. There is a sense that we must deal with our problems one at a time, a societal tendency to “divide and conquer” – a tactic which never serves anyone but the abusers, regardless of the milieu in which it is being used.

And maybe most importantly, the little speaking and writing about abuse allowed is usually limited to white women – or really, to straight, able-bodied, affluent white women. The effects of abuse and the silence around it pose two more barriers to communities which already have many hurdles between them and writing and publishing and the visual media. On top of that, there is a perception that abuse is already weird enough – we don’t need to alienate people more by talking about male survivors, survivors of color, queer survivors, Deaf survivors, working-class transgendered Latina ritual abuse survivors… mainstream culture, in the United States at least, reduces these different communities to the punch lines of anti-P.C. jokes.

Dangerous Families breaks all of those unspoken rules.

And a good thing, too. It is difficult to effectively break the rule of silence surrounding all abuse while sticking to all the other rules that keep us in line.

Dangerous Families is an amazing collection of essays for more reasons than those. Those are all the political reasons to read it; the personal are just as compelling.

It is a book full of stories in which the authors tell nothing but the truth, bold and clear and direct, the truth as it is right this minute. Some of the authors’ stories have arced up and down all the way into safety and healing; others are caught in the middle of figuring it all out, in chaos, or on some other bump or valley in the journey. In that way it offers both recognition and hope to its readers.

So whenever that magic moment came when I needed to slide over on the couch or run my hand down her ass, I felt like I was becoming her perp. It shocked the shit out of me when I started having friends who touched one another casually. It shocked me when I popped my cherry a second time, casually sleeping with a not-friend. “Fuck, this is weird,” I remember thinking, “he’s not leaving his body.” And neither was I.

– leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, “gonna get my girl body back”

In the introduction, the editor observes all that is left out of writing on childhood abuse and talks about how it we need “literature that focuses on something more than the time line of events, the feelings involved, and the process of recovery.”

There is another book, called The Memory Bird, which collects personal writings about abuse. It focuses specifically on sexual abuse, but it is similar to this in many ways, as a collection solely of people’s thoughts and experiences instead of a prescription for life. I remember, when I first read it, how intensely struck I was by seeing my experiences and opinions echoed in the words of a few other survivors halfway around the world. It was amazing.

Dangerous Families serves a similar purpose with a wider scope. It can be difficult to read, particularly with its wider range of abuses: the more abuse is involved, the more readers are likely to see themselves reflected therein. There will be people who never thought of what happened to them as abuse before, and people who thought they had “dealt with it,” who find that something in them is opened up by reading this book. For those who are willing to see that part of themselves, this anthology can bring amazing fellowship and revelations about life.

The editor goes on to comment that,

“I always conceived of Dangerous Families as an anthology of non-fiction stories that goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation…. These stories… go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back. As survivors, we become hyperaware; our vigilance enables us to dissect everything.”

This anthology has definitely achieved its goal. Each piece packs in powerful layers of experience and imagery, asking for multiple readings. As a whole, the layers of pieces and experiences and identities add up to something densely packed, multi-dimensional, world-changing, and amazing.

Eli Clare’s work, always lush and powerful in this way, goes even farther in this anthology, and serves as a good example of how much is contained within:

What I have to tell makes language a club, a bludgeon, sticks and stones wielded against advancing tanks and trucks. Yes, a weapon. Not even a tool, much less the snow tracings of the last wet storm before spring, bending the boxwood, elderberry, scrubby pine almost double. A story, yet another story.

Last night at the theater Jeffrey Dahmer’s voice came alive in one brilliant monologue – that black gay performance artist, cross-gendered and beautiful, leading us from hair salon to drum to Jeffrey’s seductive murder of black boys. I fled the building, bolting from the memory of blood. Dahmer the lone crazy man taking his full.

Let me tell you, my father was Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey lived in my hometown over and over again. Too many people to count. We drank blood, decorated our bodies with blood, shaped symbols in blood. Human blood, animal blood. Sometimes I wake up in the deep of night, that taste still on my lips.

This book is incredible and important: important for survivors to read to see they are not alone, important for survivors of any kind of abuse to see the commonalities between abuse of all kinds, important for (those extremely few) people who have never been abused in any way to read to understand their friends and loved ones and the world in which we live. Read it piece by piece, slowly, read it in giant gulping banquets, read it alone, read it with support, but definitely, as soon as you can. Read it.

I’ve been seeing a lot of visitors led here by queries about repressed memories. Especially over the past few days, seems like. People have come here by googling stuff like…

how do I know if I have repressed memories
can an 8 year old repress a sexual abuse incident?
memory loss sexual abuse
child abuse body memory

And only that last searcher found what they were looking for, if you believe the server stats. That was the only visitor of those four who stuck around and looked at various pages, anyway – but I am not sure whether to believe the stats when they say someone was here for “0 seconds,” so who knows what the other folks did.

So I thought maybe I could address some of that for this week’s Thursday Thirteen!

Thirteen Things about REPRESSED MEMORIES

1. Yes, an eight-year-old can repress an experience of sexual abuse. Even an adult can repress memories of a traumatic adult experience. Adults are likely, in my experience, to recover the memory sooner than a child would, for a few reasons:

2. Even an adult in an abusive relationship is safer, better-off, than a child in an abusive relationship, because they have more coping skills under their belt, and more freedom – more options in general.
3. Adults also have a better-developed sense of what’s normal. Kids, especially younger kids, are still learning what is “normal,” and so they are much more likely to accept that abuse is deserved and standard and unquestionable – even though it’s NOT. (It is, however, pretty common.) So an adult is more likely to notice something like missing time, because they know it’s not normal. They’re also more likely to have friends who are not part of the abusive system, who have strong senses of what is normal, who may point out blank spaces in their memory or effects of the trauma that aren’t apparent to the survivor themselves.
4. Adults, even those who have had parts of their emotional development arrested by childhood abuse, are usually farther along developmentally than children. Which means they have more reasoning skills to devote to the various clues of repressed memories that might come up. It also means their psyches are more willing to release the experience of trauma, because they know on some level that they are somewhat safe.
5. Repressed memories are surprisingly common. The most common argument I’ve heard against them is “How could anyone ever forget something so unusual and traumatic?” The answer, as Jennifer Freyd pointed out in Betrayal Trauma, is that people (most often children) repress traumatic experiences when there is secrecy, betrayal, involved: when they have the sense, for whatever reason, that it is not safe to talk about it. When we are denied any other options for healing, we try to protect ourselves by sealing away the traumatic experience – but we can’t seal away its effects.
6. Repressed memories come in several flavors. We can remember things – any memories, not just repressed ones – through feelings in our bodies (body memories), through emotions that seem to come out of nowhere and be connected to nothing in our everyday lives, through words that come out of our mouths (or our pens) when we had no intention of writing or saying or drawing any such thing, through dreams, through intrusive mental images, through phantom smells or sounds that aren’t coming from the present day, even through full-on surround-sound PTSD-style flashbacks which make it seem as though we are back in the abusive experience. And more.
7. Usually, it is sort of unreasonably undramatic. Our memories leak out of our psyches in all these more minor ways, waiting for us to put the pieces back together.
8. How do you know if you have repressed memories? The best way I know of is to look back at your life. What is missing? It’s easy for us to assume that our memories, however patchy they may be, are normal, unless we take time to examine them and compare them to others’.
9. For example: I always assumed it was “normal” (in the sense, I thought, of healthy – instead of just common) to not remember anything much before age 5. I could name a few memories, but I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be 5 – I had no sense of what my life was like, in general, before that. Even after that, I had some pretty fragmentary memories going on: I couldn’t honestly tell you all that much about any specific age in elementary school, but I knew a lot about what I did in elementary school and that let me overlook not having a sense of really being there for most of it. P.S.: that’s not “normal.”
10. For a while, I went around telling people I knew that I was taking a poll: if someone told them that they didn’t remember anything much before about age 5, what would they think? It was amazing how many people would say that they’d figure something terrible had happened to that person – and then, when asked when they started having real substantial memories, would quote some age like 5 or 7 or even in their early teens – and insist that there was no reason for it. I’m related to some of those people.
11. Repressed memories aren’t all Hideous Trauma. In my case, for example, I dissociated a whole lot of regular everyday stuff because what I learned from Hideous Trauma was that it wasn’t safe to be present in my life. Hence the lack of much of my elementary school years. I’ve heard other people talk about having tons of everyday memories of childhood but nothing after, say, bedtime or sunset, or all the school memories but nothing much at home, or just having little patches missing that they almost didn’t notice at first, or missing an entire year or two, or not having concrete memories of summer trips to relatives, or…. Those are more easily tagged as Probably Hiding Hideous Trauma – although there are also people who experience abuse both in school and home settings (for example) and lose most of their time because of that, not because of being generally dissociative.
12. Repressed memories, both of trivial everyday things and of abuse, can be recovered. I can think of three particular ways off the top of my head. One is to learn about repressed memories, read others’ experiences about them or more literature about how they work, in order to be able to recognize any that have been coming up for you. (I overlooked body memories of rape for years because I didn’t know what they meant – my survivor’s logic was something like “It’s either some horrible STD or nothing, and I don’t want it to be an STD so I won’t get it checked out.” Fortunately, it was not a horrible STD…. And I’ve known one person who was diagnosed with epilepsy and medicated for years, even though they could find no other indications of epilepsy, until he realized that his seizures were actually body memories of electroshock stuff. Which is fairly common in ritual abuse scenarios.)
13. A related way is, when memories come up (in any form), to see if you have a sense of what was coming next, or what came before, or where this stuff was happening. It’s easy to get caught up in the specificity of just a feeling of abuse or a remembered phrase, and not even think to see if your memory will throw anything else up there. Renee Fredrickson talks about this in her book Repressed Memories. And a third way – and my preferred way – is to work on recovery, even in seemingly unrelated ways. Like via working the twelve steps on abuse issues, or in general. Because working on our stuff makes life much safer and better. And in my experience, not only are memories more likely to come up in recognizable ways when I have safety in my life, but I am a million times more able to just learn from them, deal with the feelings in painless ways, understand everything better, and move on.

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Cody’s on Telegraph

Originally uploaded by Steve Rhodes

Cody’s Books is a famous and beloved local chain that began in Berkeley in 1965. It’s been struggling for at least ten years, I think, despite (or, in my opinion, because of) trying to expand across several cities to at one point three whole locations. On Friday, with very little warning, it closed its final location.

It’s tempting to color this in as a story about multinational conglomerates crushing local chains, or about the painful losses caused by an ailing economy. But the fact is that Cody’s struggled with the same circular, self-sabotaging addict behavior that is so familiar to many survivors.

I’m no expert on Cody’s Books history; I’ve only watched and read about the drama for the short time (12 years) that I’ve lived in the area. But in that time, I’ve seen them shoot themselves in the foot over and over, each time crying out to everyone who will listen that they are just victims of gun violence.

First, they opened their Fourth Street location, a nice big store in a swankier part of Berkeley than their original spot – and, when it naturally drained some traffic from the first location, they complained loudly that their decreased revenues there were because of the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue. They began hustling the neighborhood and the city to “clean up” Telegraph, increasing the police presence on the street and instituting new policies trying to keep homeless people away from the area around the store.

The San Francisco store opening came next – an odd choice at a time when the business was already struggling financially. It stayed open for only 18 months in the high-rent, high-profile downtown location. Owner Andy Ross mortgaged his house to open the San Francisco location: a basement-level local bookstore, with just the door and sign at street level, in an area that caters to tourists who want the familiar and the visible.

When it hemorrhaged money and closed, Ross again searched for someone to blame. He seemed baffled by the possibility that any big store in the busy area could fail: “In spite of the location and the size, it just didn’t work. I can’t interview the customers who didn’t come. The customers who did come liked the store.” Well, that’s all there is to business, right? You see if the people who become your customers like you, and if they do, then you should make a profit? You spend all your money on a fancy spot and wait for it to pay off? No?

In the end, Ross concluded, the killer was… construction of a nearby Barney’s. Even though they chose not to stay open through the end of construction because they weren’t sure it would make enough of a difference.

That store closed April 20, 2007. All that was left was the Cody’s Books on Fourth Street, which – depending on your viewpoint – either closed or simply moved to Shattuck Avenue in April of this year.

APRIL.

The Shattuck location was open for TWO MONTHS before its abrupt closing. This was the most shocking development of them all, and the most telling. Nobody knew that the store was going to close. There were no press releases sent out; no signs announcing its departure; no inventory close-out sales; no attempts to find a new owner or new investors; and certainly no attempts to do anything differently.

It’s shocking because when the original store on Telegraph closed, the community was up in arms. People begged them not to close. Every newspaper, both the daily and the free weekly papers, wrote about it – often more than once. There were letters to the editor, calls for action, and a huge closing event where people came all day to pay their respects.

Which means that Cody’s had options. They had a huge fan base to call upon: not only whatever customers they normally had, but also the many bibliophiles and radicals all over who had fond memories of the store. They just chose not to call on that community at all.

The funny thing is that when the San Francisco store closed just over a year ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the Fourth Street location is thriving and Ross said he plans to keep it going,” and quoted him as saying, “The Cody’s brand lives strong in the East Bay, and that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

It’s frustrating because the store, inasmuch as a store can be, was the victim of addict behavior. It suffered from the classic signs of addiction, which of course are also classic signs of abuse. The Chronicle’s article about it today had a telling quote:

One local Pulitzer Prize winner, Berkeley author Michael Chabon, said of Cody’s closing, “I think it’s a terrible shame. It was a wonderful bookstore. It’s painful, sort of like watching someone suffering from a chronic illness painfully and slowly die. (Cody’s was) part of the fabric of Berkeley, the social fabric and commercial fabric.”

It was very much like that, and the chronic illness killing it was abuse. And, of course, addiction – untreated abuse – is a progressive disease. If you don’t deal with it, it will get worse and worse until it kills you. This is not only true for drug addicts or alcoholics; any abuse survivor who does not have a way of dealing with the effects of that abuse will have an increasingly numbed, deadened, painful, difficult life until they can begin reversing that damage with the tools of recovery.

There was even a twelve-step program for Cody’s Books. Business Debtors Anonymous is a sub-group of Debtors Anonymous which provides lots of clarity and guidance about what does and doesn’t work for people in business. They have a huge emphasis on being clear about spending, assets, business plans, agreements, and detaching from drama with customers, competitors, and employees. It seems as though Cody’s management was missing a lot of those tools.

There was the tunnel vision, that special form of denial where people look at everything as an isolated incident in a desperate attempt to make it controllable and deny the big picture.

There was the constant attempt to pass the buck, the refusal of appropriate responsibility for anything that was happening. “Appropriate” because it’s quite common for abuse survivors to feel tremendous shame and guilt for things that we’re not actually responsible for – while continuing to feel like powerless victims in our lives because we have no idea how to set boundaries, take care of business, or reclaim our power. And because we want to find proof that what happened to us is not our fault, and misguidedly look for that in our present day instead of in the past. It’s the homeless people’s fault! It’s because there’s not enough parking here! It’s because of the construction! It’s because of the internet! Because of the chains! Because the darn students aren’t buying their books from us anymore! Because people don’t read!

I read business books and business blogs like they’re chick lit, and let me tell you: from a business perspective, all those things are challenges, not business-killers. So revenues dropped from $30,000 a month to $10,000 a month between 1990 and 2000 – so what? As long as your doors are still open, that’s an opportunity to take inventory of what you could be doing better, and to come up with some really exciting and innovative changes.

Powell’s Books is a fantastic, if over-used, example of this: like Cody’s, they had a huge store and a huge following before the internet came along. And the market changed, and they changed with it; now they have a huge internet following, and more thriving stores. They evaluate what is working for them, and change what is not, and try new things, and evaluate those too.

Surprise: this corresponds exactly to what people in recovery do. It’s just like the twelve steps, where people learn to take inventory of what has and has not worked for them and make it right, without beating themselves up along the way.

Then there was the search for a quick fix: moving stores around, closing stores, selling the business, mortgaging the house, trying San Francisco, anything but change what they were actually doing within the business.

And the relentless negativity that goes with searching for someone to blame. They were literally surrounded by thriving independent bookstores: Moe’s Books, Half Price Books, Shakespeare & Co., Black Oak Books, Pegasus Books, and many more, in a community that still supports as many as three bookstores on the same block. And yet, they had this growing chant of complaints about how terrible everything was, which rose eventually to drown out even their ability to do business.

And, my favorite, the all or nothing thinking – either we have to be doing the same thing we were doing before, or we have to just close everything down and run. They could never seem to see any other possible solutions than keep trying what they were doing or close down.

This spiraled out of control, by the end, to the point where they left with a store full of books and a pile of paperwork on the street. On the street!

I was there today. I came with three friends, in part specifically to go to Cody’s. (Which, by the way, was in what we thought was finally the perfect location for it: right next to the university campus, on a huge street with lots of bookstores but none right next door to it, with tons of foot traffic and enormous windows to show them what it had, right next to BART and lots of bus stops, next to the Berkeley City College campus as well….)

We were surprised to find the still-full bookstore locked, with printed-out notices on the front doors explaining that they had shut those doors forever on Friday. And we weren’t the only ones who were surprised: during the course of hanging out on Shattuck for a few hours that afternoon, we saw at least a dozen other people try the doors or collect in front of the store staring at it in shock, at several different times. There must have been dozens of surprised would-be customers who went through this on Sunday alone. What the hell was Cody’s doing that meant that that kind of foot traffic wasn’t enough to support one store?

I’m guessing that at least part of it was the former owner’s lust for opening new stores. (Ross sold the business in September of 2006 but stayed on as president, which – along with the store’s continuous bad choices – makes me suspect that not much changed at Cody’s with the sale.) When the San Francisco store closed, the Chronicle quoted Ross as saying, “This is the second store I’ve had to close in two years. This is not what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to open stores.” While clearly at least some of that cost came out of his pocket, I suspect that the business took a series of financial hits too, hits it was still trying to overcome.

From BDA’s Signs of Compulsive Debting in Business:

• We confused our personal finances with our business finances and drew from one set of funds to cover the other.

• We lived in a state of self-deprivation for the sake of our business. (Ross had to sell his mortgaged house after the SF store closed.)
• We did not or were unable to ask for help when we needed it most.

The most intense sign of the chaos, to me, was that stack of papers. One of my friends spotted a dumpster full of boxes as we were about to leave, and ran to snag them for her upcoming move, with my girlfriend’s help. A long while later, they returned with news: the boxes were full of discarded paperwork from Cody’s Books.

So, not only did they not even bother to pack up the books and clean out the store either before or after closing it, but they for some reason spent some time throwing out papers first? How very fishy.

Upon investigation, they found a wide selection of different kinds of paperwork. There were records of orders the store had made, of advertising and ad prices. There were in-store memos and recent store newsletters. There was at least one whole box of personal correspondence from customers, complete with names and addresses as well as any other personal information the customers had happened to give them. And there was another entire layer of sealed boxes, which they speculated might have been the bookstore’s way of getting rid of more sensitive information. Of course, in a way you don’t need to have more sensitive information when a person or organization is already telling you at top volume how crazy it is.

So that’s Cody’s coda. After decades of passionate work with books, they chose to go under unannounced, unnoticed, and unsung. Maybe over the coming days we’ll see a community response to their closing, or more explanation of it, or some kind of good-bye from the long-lived store. Otherwise, fans will have to get their closure from the awareness that the beloved bookstore was just another victim of the same patterns we see all around us every day: the effects of abuse in our society.

Mrs. S. said something I really identified with in reply to my last post. And I realized that my comment was turning into a whole blog post of its own, so I decided I’d better do it here. We can do lots of Sunday Salons, right? I don’t see any rules about this

So, she had written:

I have a similar issue when I’m travelling. Like tomorrow I have to spend about 3.5 hours ona train – so what should I read. The book I want to read next is heavy – so not good for travelling – so I need to pick another – but what if I finish it? Then I need a spare one – or what if I don’t like either of them once I’ve started?? EEk.

Now this is why I want to buy a Kindle… then I’d have 200 books in my pocket and no stress

Exactly! That’s the exact issue! I don’t think Kindle is the solution tho, at least for me. I mean, it’s one solution for that particular problem… although if I had had Kindle I think I would have then freaked out about whether any of the 200 books it had on it were going to be What I Wanted To Read or not.

The problem, for me, was… basically a lack of serenity. Not trusting that I could sit without books. Not trusting that I would feel okay if I didn’t have something to use to check out. It was a total carryover from using books to survive in childhood. I used them to escape bullying (and got bullied for that!), I used them to have my own life outside of my dysfunctional family, I used them to find my own voice and write about what happened to me… they were a great escape valve, but there was a point where I hadn’t yet truly escaped, where I was still clinging really hard to the books.

I think that there are layers of escape from abuse. There’s actually getting out, of course, but even after leaving abusive relationships or situations there’s still a lot more to go through to get the abuse out of our heads. Because it’s natural to internalize it to some extent. Especially as children. And often we get out of abusive adult relationships without knowing about the internalized stuff from our childhoods that brought us into an abusive relationship in the first place. And often we internalize a lot more of an adult partner’s abuse than we otherwise might in the process of trying to make the relationship work. Adapting and adapting and adapting to a partner (or boss, or friend, or whoever) who isn’t meeting us halfway. (and how much more so as children, when escape is so much harder?)

I think a lot of readers are like me: we have many many reasons to love books, and one is that they were a great escape. And when something saves your life like that, it’s hard to let go of – and it’s also hard to trust that it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t think I set out consciously to Not Need Books All The Time, in any kind of planned way. I set out to escape the abuse in my head: codependency, shame, control issues, dissociation. I worked on my trust issues, and learned how to tell who was trustworthy. I learned what my boundaries were and how to set boundaries with others. I learned what I really liked and disliked and what I felt at any given moment. I learned how to turn things over when I had done whatever I could to change them (or when there was no need to do anything). I learned to listen to and follow my intuition. I learned how I had harmed myself and others as a result of my abuse and to heal that harm so I could trust and love myself. A lot of things just fell away in the process; compulsive reading was one of them. I still read a lot; my relationship with reading has just evolved.

And that’s the kind of stuff that Life More Awesome is going to be about. Near-daily writing and weekly challenges for making our lives more awesome – in part, how to set boundaries, how to trust ourselves, how to love ourselves, how to deal with feelings and shame and control issues and all that other crap that gets in the way of truly enjoying life. That gets between us and serenity, so that we have to work around it, carrying around extra books and extra work and extra beliefs that don’t end up serving us. Taking those big rocks out of the stream of life.

The first challenge will be posted soon….