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 love How I Met Your Mother. Recently, they showed an episode that I just thought was so perfect for us here: The Bracket.

Barney (played by Doogie Howser, I mean Neil Patrick Harris) discovers that one of the women he slept with has started following him around, telling any woman he talks to that he is just saying whatever it takes to get in their pants and that sleeping with him was the biggest mistake of her life. Inspired by March Madness, they create an elaborate “bracket” to narrow down which of the 64 biggest disasters he perpetrated could have motivated a woman to do this. And then his friend Lily (my favorite Buffy actress, Alyson Hannigan) insists that he go to each of the top four and apologize to them. 

What more could you ask for? (A), his character is a glorious fountain of the signs of addiction, which are also the effects of abuse. The grandiosity and arrogance that overlie a searing pit of low self-esteem… the rigid (and ironic) fear of displaying emotions like (especially) fear… the web of lies that he weaves to get his way and stay in denial…. 

And of course, (B), he’s a total sex addict – in his case, obsessing about, using, and pursuing sex compulsively to fill the same pit of self-esteem that he tries so hard to hide from everyone. Which, almost inevitably, is a result of either overt or covert sexual abuse. (Overt means out in the open, comparatively: blatant, physical sexual abuse of any kind. Covert means it’s murky, and ironically because of that can literally be out in the open: things like talking explicitly and inappropriately about sex in front of children, exposing them to inappropriate sexual experiences, or in any way treating them like a partner instead of a child.) 

And then, (C) the greatest thing is that, just like in My Name is Earl, Barney in this one episode is (albeit accidentally, unwillingly, and out of order) engaging in recovery. He’s going around to women he screwed over and (sort of) trying to make things right, and sometimes finding out that things are already okay. Just like when people in 12-step programs make amends! He’s seeing a little bit of what effect his acting out has had on people. (Hey, that must be why we call it acting out – because we’re always acting out the pain and chaos of our abuse on some level until we become able to turn it over.) 

Also, (D), it’s freaking hilarious. Especially the end. Enjoy…. 

Repressed Memories
A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
by Renee Fredrickson, Ph.D.
Fireside/Parkside, 1992

As with anything psychological, or medical, or indeed anything in the world, “the more you know about what to look for… the more you find.” Fredrickson’s first client came to her to deal with fourteen years of rape by her father. Her 1970s education as a psychotherapist had not made a single reference to sexual abuse, and she set out to learn more. Eventually, she says, “the appalling lack of available resources for treating sexual abuse influenced me to specialize in this area.”

She found that what she learned working with “very young children applied to adult survivors as well.” As the years wore on, she established clinics in St. Paul, Minnesota and Dallas, Texas, and became a consultant on child abuse to the U.S. Army. This book is one result of her eighteen years of experience in working with sexual abuse survivors around the United States.

Repressed Memories is a tremendous gift. Renee Fredrickson takes on an issue which often seems incredibly obscure, unclear, and mired in political claims, and explains it clearly and directly. This book is an oasis in a desert of wild claims and accusations.

A Sampling

She begins by explaining the phenomenon of repressed memories in a non-sensationalistic way, answering many of the assumptions and questions that people have about repressed memories. I’ll present a few of her ideas here, in question and answer format.

• Recall Memory: These are “normal memories.” Your memory of what you did yesterday – assuming that you remember what you did yesterday – is a recall memory. They are memories that you feel like you experienced directly, vividly, which come with images and feelings and thoughts about the experience. This is the only kind of memory “that requires maturation to be of use” – that is, it’s the kind that people are talking about when they say we can’t remember things that happened before we turn two or three. The other kinds are, actually, accessible to infants.
• Imagistic Memory: These are memories that come in the form of images. They can come as visual flashbacks, slide shows, or flickers of images. The U.S. Army has actually done studies of Army personnel with PTSD who experienced intrusive flashes related to traumatic events, which found that the things they were seeing were always directly related to what they had been doing in the disaster that caused their post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Feeling Memory: These might better be called emotional memories, because that’s the kind of “feeling” involved – as opposed to a physical sensation. Depression and anxiety disorders are often “feeling memories;” it is rare for people to have emotions that are truly coming out of nowhere. Feeling memories also often take the form of a wave of seemingly unrelated emotion, like feeling rage way out of proportion to what is going on around you, or fear at the sight of something seemingly mundane.
• Body Memory: Everyone’s favorite! Body memory comes in the form of physical sensations. They are often confusing, because we may have no way of knowing whether something is a physical illness or injury or whether it is a memory. I have a friend, in fact, who had what appeared to be seizures and was diagnosed epileptic despite not having medical indicators besides seizures. He was put on anti-seizure medication and banned from driving for many years before his seizures slowly disappeared. Later he discovered that what he had been experiencing were body memories from violent electric shocks in his childhood. Fredrickson also notes that “Even when there is little physical pain or intrusion, body memories can occur. Nausea is a frequent physical reaction to sexual abuse. Infants will sometimes spontaneously vomit on their perpetrator, even though they are not being physically hurt by the abuse.”
• Acting-Out Memory: As the author explains it, “Acting-out memory is a form of unconscious memory in which the forgotten incident is spontaneously acted out through some physical action.” She gives the example of a two-year-old who had been physically abused and then adopted into another family, who would hit herself on the left ear whenever she got angry. One of the few things they knew for sure about her abuse was that that ear had been burned with a cigarette when she was only two months old. Acting-out memory can also take the form of survivors blurting out or suddenly writing things about which they had no conscious memory so far – just like any other flashback, except with an eerie “automatic writing” aspect to it.

Why would people repress memories of abuse? It seems like that’s too big a deal to not remember it. 

Perhaps the most important fact she offers in this area is that “the traumatic and the trivial are the two kinds of information your mind represses.”

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All of the characteristics of addiction that she listed in her book led me to one word….

ABUSE

The most valuable thing I got from When Society Becomes an Addict was something which Anne Wilson Schaef did not even appear to see.

I found her analysis of society’s addictions to be very powerful, and it helped me understand a lot more about the world in which I live and answer many questions which had been plaguing me about it. But as I read the book, I discovered something even more interesting to me. The more she talked about the behaviors involved in addiction, the more convinced I became that addicts and abuse survivors are one and the same. Every behavior she described was either something I already understood as being caused by abuse, or something new which I could now see would come from abuse.

For example:

She states that we create crises in order to feel, and that addicts are often so out of touch with our emotions that we feel dead, unable to respond to the world. Creating crises becomes a form of self-injury, serving one of the same purposes: to feel something, to know that we are alive. In reality, she says, we feel very deeply but don’t know how to handle that, and we have little abilty to know what exactly it is that we are feeling. And this is all very characteristic of abuse survivors: we have had to block off our emotions in order to survive our abuse. It was not safe to feel; if we had really known at the time how scared or angry or sad we were, what our abuse really felt like, we would not have survived it. (And some of us don’t.)

Schaef talks about dissociation at length, but calls it “forgetfulness” and “blackouts.” She explains that when people are deep in addictive behavior, they can drive around, go drinking, get into fights, fly to another country, and do almost anything wide awake with no memory of it. This is a form of dissociation (losing time) which will be familiar to most multiples — in fact, to most self-aware abuse survivors. I suspect that addictive forgetfulness and blackouts are part of the same thing, particularly given the high correlation between abuse and addiction.

The process of recovery, ideally, is one which slowly heals this forgetfulness and allows us to feel safe being present in our lives. Schaef connects it to addiction even further, saying that “any addictive pattern or process can blur our thinking and block our memory. It causes us to lose contact with what we know and have learned.” This is part of the reason that addiction is considered a “progressive illness” in twelve-step circles — that is, among people who understand it and are working to recover from it. When we engage in our addictive behavior, we can lose all the healthy behaviors that we have learned.

Low self-esteem is also a common, if not guaranteed, effect of abuse prior to recovery. Schaef states that addicts perceive the world in negatives, are hypercritical and judgmental, focused on perfection. Our society’s ideas of luxury and decadence, according to the media, are things like eating dessert without feeling guilty: we are struggling with extreme self-judgement and the codependence of obsessing about what others think. All of these things are forms of low self-esteem and effects of abuse. Abuse survivors become hypercritical and judgmental because we have learned that we are bad people — otherwise, why would we have been abused? Even when we intellectually know that the abuse was not our fault, it is very hard to internalize that fact.

We struggle to be good enough to avoid further abuse even after we have escaped our abusers. Codependence is also essentially an automatic result of abuse. It is Stockholm Syndrome: we have to identify with our abusers in some way to survive. We internalize the abuse and continue it through things like believing terrible things about ourselves and creating more chaotic and damaging environments in which to live, as well as more obviously addictive behaviors. Essentially, we judge and abuse ourselves emotionally (if not physically as well) to escape further abuse, as if we were being chased by a mad gorilla and had to attack ourselves to calm it down.

She also talks about the way that addicts equate responsibility with blame. And this, too, is an effect of abuse. Addicts, Schaef says, think that “cause and effect” means “if something happened it is because I made it happen.” The effect of abuse is to sever cause and effect — to break those concepts so that we don’t have a real sense of what cause and effect mean or how they go together. After all, abuse is the least logical thing in the world, the act with the least apparent or reasonable cause. The mother who explodes in rage when her child loses a library card, or the boy who fondles his baby cousin, is proving that people’s actions don’t make sense. Survivors often spend their entire lives trying to find the sense in these behaviors, which usually leads to the above experience of attacking oneself for experiencing (and therefore causing) them. Many of us are convinced that we must have done something to bring it on ourselves, because it’s easier to believe that than that people can do something so damaging for no good reason.

This also feeds into the confusion of addictive thinking: it’s much easier to believe that “Because it’s 5 p.m. somewhere in the world” is a fine reason to drink if you don’t see connections between things. Personally, I get tripped up by my loss of cause and effect all too often. Some time ago, someone was “spoofing” people in a chatroom I was in, which I realized when I saw that I had apparently said “san fransisco” (sic) without noticing it. And yet, even though my first instinct was that there was a spoofer, even though I didn’t remember typing anything of the sort and I had just been reading and not typing anything, even though I live near San Francisco and can damn well spell it, I still seriously and repeatedly questioned whether I hadn’t just typed it by accident somehow and sent it all without noticing.

Equating responsibility with blame, furthermore, makes people very defensive. We always have to be on guard against attack, or we might get abused again. (This, of course, does not stop that from happening.) And this defensiveness makes it difficult for people to deal with their own abuse, both for fear of being blamed for it again as well as simply out of fear of the pain they have already experienced. As a society, we accuse survivors of “victimology” when they speak out about their abuse — “You just want attention!” And, usually, that kind of attack comes from abuse survivors who resent that someone else can talk openly about the same abuse that they suffered.

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