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…. 

Like many modern families, my son’s has included a lot of family friends, godparents, parents’ partners, and other more ephemeral members. Of course, many of us do not have any legal rights as far as protecting him goes. In theory that’s good; ideally, sane, healthy parents use their rights to filter out people who are not safe for their children to be around. Sadly, in his case it has instead meant that his abusive birth parents slowly cut anyone out of the family who challenged their abusive ways.

There are many, many stories connected with that, and I may tell more of them over time. For the moment, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve been able to do to help him survive a smorgasboard of abuses.

Thing the First: Talking to him about abuse.

Like many people, I used to be afraid to talk to my child about abuse. I associated talking about trauma with the trauma itself: on some level, I feared that it would traumatize him to even hear about the possibility of abuse or to learn that his mother’s yelling, violence, and neglect would be called abusive. As if telling him it was abuse would magically turn it from “maybe okay” in his mind to “horribly painful.” Plus, I knew how important denial was to my survival as a child and I feared what would happen to him if I broke that denial.

But I couldn’t just ignore it and condone it with silence. I knew, too, how harmful it was to survivors to have their abuse go ignored and unchallenged and how hugely that contributes to the trauma. If I continued to stay silent, I would become an accomplice. Sure, there were things I could do, and had been doing, to mitigate the abuse – like arranging to have him more of the time, refusing to drive him to see the nearly-absent parent who had admitted to sexually abusing him and then tried to recant, and teaching him healthy coping skills. But it seemed to me that from a child’s perspective, there was a huge difference between someone subtly trying to intercede to prevent abuse in a way that might not be obvious for years, and someone flat-out saying “What is happening to you is not okay.”

I found that at first, especially when he was younger, he was afraid to talk about what had happened. He was afraid to admit that, for example, he was afraid of his mother’s anger and afraid that she would hurt him, even when he had brought it up before. Paying attention to his art helped; he would sometimes draw very telling pictures, such as one that he said was a monster: his mommy, angry, with long sharp claws. That also gave me a conversational opening, and some idea of what was going on inside his head and what he was experiencing away from me.

Sometimes we would ask him questions about how his teachers and other family members handled discipline, or if they ever hit him or yelled at him – each time asking about them one after the other by name. It helped a lot not just to give him a big vague group question like “does anyone ever yell at you,” which is too wide a net to throw a three-year-old. What helped me, too, was that he had been to a preschool where the teachers did yell at the children and slap their hands and arms, so when I felt afraid that he would think I was obsessed (and really, I didn’t bring this up that often) I at least knew that we both knew there were grounds for asking these questions. Of course, in reality, we both knew that anyway. It also helped to use the same one-by-one question format to ask about things like how different teachers and family members put him in time out – which was how we discovered that his preschool teacher had grabbed him by the ear to drag him back into time out one day, which was the last time he went to that school. So these are great things to ask kids about even if you don’t think they are being abused by another family member at all….

Sometimes he would talk about being afraid of his mommy, or we would ask if she ever hit him, and he would say yes and then take it back. Or take back having ever said he was afraid of her. It helped to remind him of things he’d said in the past; like when he tried to take back calling her a monster, and claim that the picture wasn’t of her but really was just of a monster, I could casually agree that I remembered him calling her a monster before, and move on. It helped to gently let him know that I believed what he said about the violence and fear he experienced, and that I had witnessed it myself more than once – without pushing him or trying to argue with him.

As he got older and I learned more about abuse and recovery, I started talking to him directly about abuse. The way I chose to explain it was that abuse was something that someone did to you that was Not Okay. I suggested that this might include things like hitting and yelling and asked if he could think of any examples. To my surprise, he immediately jumped in to bring up his mother spanking him.

Personally, I do think that spanking is always child abuse and always harmful – and whether or not it’s harmful, it’s also really pointless. It doesn’t teach children WHY they shouldn’t do something, even running into traffic (an example that is often given by those who sit on the fence about spanking) – it just teaches them that you do not want them to do it and they will get spanked if they do it. Which then means that once they are too old or too big to spank, they are left without any idea of why they should make the choices you were trying to teach them.

But in his case, spanking was a particularly obvious problem. It was a fairly clear-cut case of covert sexual abuse, because his mother had already made it clear in front of him, on many occasions, that she thought of spanking as a sexual act. She often talked loudly to friends and acquaintances about the latest sex party she had gone to, in front of her small child, in that common grownup fallacy that if a child isn’t looking directly at them they’re not listening. Or possibly that he wouldn’t understand anything he was hearing. I call it the “little pitchers don’t have ears” theory. So not long after, when she tried spanking him as a form of punishment, he was considerably more upset than even your average kid would have been – and, of course, too young to articulate why it was not okay with him.

I am very proud of him for being able to articulate, later on, that that had not been okay with him and that it was a kind of abuse. And I think that it is evidence that this way of talking to children works. I had asked him in the past about her spanking; talked to him about it at length on another occasion when he said she had taught him how to spank her friends (which she, a longterm BDSM safety advocate, confirmed was her response when he went around her party spanking them too high up on their spines….), and told him more than once, especially when he was terrified of getting in trouble for one thing or another, that I did not think that her spanking him had been okay and that I would never spank him. At one point, he was even brave enough to ask me and another one of his parental figures to talk to his mom for him and tell her that he did not want her to spank him or yell at him anymore. (I think that the spanking thing took, or perhaps that she had already abandoned it; the yelling part did not.)

And over several years of this tentative conversation, he became able to bring it up himself and vehemently, firmly say that it had not been okay with him. The miracle of this, to me, is that not only was he able to bring it up – this child who was terrified to talk about even thinking his mommy was scary, and who had never been willing to tell anyone that I know of about the overt sexual abuse he experienced – but that he became able to talk about it without any shame whatsoever. I think most if not all survivors reading this will know the kind of guilt and shame we take on: the fear of ever talking about what happened to us, of admitting that it was not okay with us, the secret deep-seated belief that we did something to deserve it or could and should have done something to stop it even if consciously we know that’s not true. It gives me a lot of hope to know that in at least one area, consistent support from at least one adult in his life let him let go of that shame within just a few years. And I think that is the area in which I was able to give him the most consistent support.

Next time: suggested dos and don’ts!

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Total shout-out! You remember Amy Winehouse’s excellent demonstration of Lifetime Alcoholic Hair? (She sometimes sports a wonderfully intense version where all her hair looks as dead and dull as a really cheap wig, which I think may be linked to crack consumption.)

Well, apparently two months ago the Daily Mail made the same connection. They told Amy she needed “rehairb” and photoshopped other stars’ hair onto her head. Their snarkiest moment: “Whatever else you could say about troubled songstress Amy Winehouse, you couldn’t say she learns from her mistakes.”

(My friend Cola is now singing, “Pants on! Pants off! Pants on pants off… the stripper.“)

Amy Winehouse also helps us segue into the topic of the day by appearing naked in a British magazine called Easy Living. She did it for a photo spread that… somehow educated people about breast cancer? I have yet to see an explanation that made sense to me, honestly. It’s like when people sell water-droplet-shaped necklaces to raise awareness of water crises, except that presumably they are donating the money to help the issue and informing people about it when they come to order it so that they can inform people about it when they wear it… how are you going to do that with Amy Winehouse? “Oh, yeah, she’s standing there naked with electrical tape on her nipples because… um… breast cancer is… bad.” “Yeah, I’ve always thought of her as a really good health care advocate, you know? I mean, she uses all that morphine, and they use that in hospitals too, so… she’s practically a doctor, is what I’m saying.”

It seems like it’s become the topic of the week, actually, not for this blog but for the media. I keep seeing stories about celebrities appearing naked on purpose, naked photos of them being leaked, sex tapes being leaked, on and on and on. All of a sudden, nobody can keep their clothes on! (Everything linked here, by the way, is Safe For Work unless stated otherwise.)

First it was Kristen Davis of Sex and the City, whose ex-boyfriend took pictures (back in ‘92) and sold them to someone from whom they were stolen. Then I heard what turned out to be crazy rumors about Lindsay Lohan (language in this link is Not Safe For Work!) and a leaked sex tape – “freaking out because she can’t remember it being filmed.” It all sounded pretty plausible to me – it could have been a pretty solid example of blackouts from drug or alcohol abuse or just plain intense dissociation. But, happily for her, it’s not her in those tapes at all.

Next came Audrina Partridge, who I admit I had never heard of before. Apparently she’s on a reality show called “The Hills.” Which I had also never heard of before. Seems she auditioned to model for Playboy in 2004 (is that still called modeling?) and now has to deal with naked pictures of herself being leaked to the media.

Hers strikes me as a particularly sad story. She made the statement that “I took these photos years ago when I was just out of high school and beginning to model. I was young and very trusting of others and I didn’t know to protect myself. It is a lesson learned, for myself, and hopefully for the young girls who look up to me.” There’s just something so true and so full of pathos to me in “I didn’t know how to protect myself.”

A commenter over at I’m Not Obsessed said, “Please! All she needed to do was ask a mature adult (i.e., her mother) what she thought about the idea of topless shots??? I think mom would have told her it was a bad idea that may haunt her one day. I don’t believe she didn’t know how to protect herself. Anyone with common sense knows shots like those will surface sooner or later.” Other commenters called these celebrities “stupid little whores” who aren’t thinking about their futures, or defended all the naked pictures currently surfacing as proof of a generation’s pride and love for its bodies.

It’s interesting to see the rage that some people express. It’s enough for its own blog post – the way that rage against women and objectification of women go together, the way that they seem to become essentially the same reaction even when only one of them is being expressed. But what I am really interested in is the action itself, not the reactions.

In a lot of cases, letting people take nude pictures of you – whether for money or fame or something else – comes, paradoxically, out of shame and fear around sex. If you have physically been sexually abused, or grew up with more subtle (covert) sexual abuse, you’re not going to feel comfortable asking your mother if she thinks it’s a good idea for you to take topless pictures for Playboy. Survivors of sexual abuse don’t usually feel safe talking to their family members about sex and nudity, especially not their own – and for good reason.

If you were sexually abused and haven’t healed from it, you’re not going to have a good idea of how to keep yourself safe around this stuff. You’re going to have a lot more trouble learning boundaries around sexual stuff, or knowing what you are actually okay with and what you are just agreeing to because you don’t think you’re allowed to say no.

Sure, some people take pictures of their own bodies to share with their partners, but that’s not usually the kind of thing that gets leaked. Because if they’re doing it themselves with someone they trust, they don’t have those problems of shame and acting out and boundaries and all that stuff. There are still people who take pictures of themselves for untrustworthy partners because they’re asked to or they think it will make them more attractive or something, but I think it’s rarer. And I think it’s significant that Kristen Davis’ boyfriend, someone who would sell naked pictures of his ex if he got mad at her, was the one holding the camera. I think it says something about the power dynamic that led to him taking the pictures, the dynamic that led to her letting him take naked pictures, the dynamic that comes from abuse.

I think, in fact, that it’s a pretty good rule of thumb to say that having naked pictures or sex tapes leaked to the media is a sign of sexual abuse. In fact, hey – it’s a FORM of sexual abuse. Publishing naked pictures of someone? Selling them to people so that they can publish them? In national, if not international, media outlets? Knowing that within days they will be all over other magazines and the blogosphere? If someone did that to me, I’d have to nail the skin on their inner thighs to the wall. It’s just amazing to me that so many people think it’s okay to participate in that. I suppose that it says a lot about sexual abuse and its effects in our society (like sex addiction and horrible boundaries and a dissociation between cause and effect) that that stuff even sells.