You can heal your life after experiencing incest / sexual abuse. The book BEYOND VICTIM is a step-by-step guide through the stages of the healing process as I've lived it myself and have shared it with my psychotherapy clients. This book is not a substitute for therapy. Working with a competent therapist who is skilled in dealing with these issues is an essential part of the healing process. A therapist provides prospective, confrontation, feedback, healthy boundaries, support and encouragement for you on this sometimes discouraging, but intensely challenging path.

As you clear your life from the ravages of sexual abuse, your therapist also can help you spot what I term your Internal Saboteur. Your Saboteur is the negative, fearful-thinking part of you who accompanies you every step of the way. Its mission is to fill your mind with suggestions designed to persuade or con you into stopping short of completely healing your life. You may notice its activity now, because chances are it will object to you reading this book. As you will discover, your Internal Saboteur is dedicated to your self-punishment, self-sabotage, and eventual self-destruction. It doesn't like books or therapists that blow its cover.

If you're still with me, here is a map of the path that lies ahead. Section I of BEYOND VICTIM is an overview of the issues involved in dealing with incest / sexual abuse. It includes a description of 23 patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that are common in the lives of women who were sexually abused as children or adolescents. In addition, there are seven payoffs for keeping the abuse secret and refusing to resolve it. All these patterns, translated to their masculine counterparts, are also evident in men who were abused sexually. Though I have addressed this book to women because incest / sexual abuse is so prevalent in their lives. I believe it is much more frequent among men than existing reports indicate. The healing process I describe is just as relevant for men as it is for women. However, the constraints of the English language make it simpler to direct the book to one sex. I hope male readers will be willing to make the necessary translations from she to he.

Section II of this book is the story of my own healing experiences. Writing it has been an important part of releasing and forgiving my parents and myself for what happened in our family. Section III begins with an outline of the stages and steps involved in healing your life after sexual abuse. This portion of the book describes each stage of the healing process. It also introduces you to the members of a women's therapy group, which meets once a week to deal with these issues. You will share their experiences as they acknowledge the presence of abuse patterns in their lives and remember and express their intense feelings about incest / sexual abuse. We will explore the fundamental elements that are crucial to healing after sexual abuse. You will be part of the entire process as we work our way through forgiveness and confrontation to transformation, the ultimate healing and release.

My incest memories were blocked until I was forty-one years old. At that time, I had been married and divorced twice. When my memories returned, I gradually realized that before I was four years old, I had had sexual experiences with both my father and my mother. Mother stopped her abuse of me after her brother's death. My father continued to have sexual encounters with me until I was nine and he suffered an emotional breakdown.

During the break-up of my first marriage, I sought healing for the pain I had always known. I searched in every way I could find to understand myself. I undertook and completed eight years of psychoanalytically oriented therapy, attended a wide variety of workshops and conferences, and worked with Transactional Analysis, Gestalt Therapy, Neurolinguistic Programming and Transformational Therapy. Despite all my searching, I still couldn't understand how I could be so successful in many areas of my life and not be able to have what I wanted most: a normal, happy, sane relationship with a man I loved who also loved me.

My male psychoanalytic therapist kept strict boundaries in place throughout my work with him. He was adamant on the subject of limits and their importance. Through our work together, I experienced sane boundaries in a relationship with a man. When I left that relationship with those boundaries intact, I was ready to face the violation of boundaries that had occurred with my father. Less than two weeks after ending therapy, I began having fleeing visual images of sexual contacts with my father.

At this time, I was deeply involved in a relationship with a man who was eighteen years older than I. It was a wonderfully exciting experience. I loved him and was overjoyed with our relationship. But, outside my conscious awareness, I was recreating the dynamics in my relationship with my father. Being with Jason felt familiar. He loved me in the same overwhelming, smothering, sometimes irrational way my father had. I was either extremely happy with him or devastated by his latest blaming rage when I failed to satisfy his expectations. I was addicted to the relationship, though my better judgment told me to be careful and protect myself. Despite my knowledge and capacity to see how destructive the patterns between us were, I was drawn to him in a way that defied reason.  So I used my well-developed capacity to disassociate in order to ignore the dark side of our relationship and cling to the part I craved. With Jason in my life, I relived what I had hidden from myself for more than thirty years.

When my memories of sexual experiences with my father returned to consciousness, I was both enraged and relieved to find the missing pieces in the puzzle of my life. Now I understood why all my previous therapy had not been complete. The vulnerability, pain, and confusion I had experienced in relationships with men made sense. I knew I no longer had to resign myself to believing I was somehow defective in a way I did not understand. As painful as it was, I welcomed this opening that I knew would allow me finally to complete my healing. I was not sure how I would work my way through my memories and feelings, but I knew I would find the way now that I had discovered the prices to the puzzle that I had blocked from consciousness for so long.

The path I followed unfolded in numerous ways and opened unexpected doors. Along the way I worked with many men and women who had similar experiences. Their sharing enhanced my won growth and healing as we moved together beyond being the "victims" or incest. Giving up my old, familiar "victim" posture wasn't easy. But gradually, by learning to nurture and encourage myself, I grew up, let go of my pain and anger, and found healing and forgiveness. I reclaimed my self-esteem by extricating myself from the labyrinth of emotional pain and confusing behavior I had endured and accepted as inevitable since childhood.

I have made peace with myself and with my parents and transformed my old destructive behavior into creative activity. When my writing and my work as a therapist help others heal their lives, the pain and hurt I experienced have a larger purpose. Now, from a deep sense of the beauty and meaning in every facet of life's unfolding, I open my heart to share with you what I have discovered through my journey to this point in my life.

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INCEST / SEXUAL ABUSE:  AN OVERVIEW

Sexual abuse occurs when an adult takes sexual liberties and crosses sexual boundaries with a child. It includes fondling and touching the child's breasts or genitals as well as actual oral, genital, or anal intercourse. If the abuser is a family member, the sexual experiences are incestuous and more emotionally damaging to the child than abuse by a stranger, who is not so closely tied to the child's emerging identity. Sexual experiences between older and younger siblings, cousins, or neighborhood children, where the older child or adolescent knows that he is violating the younger child's innocence and vulnerability, are also abusive and destructive. Where this occurs, the older abusing child may have been abused by an adult himself. Sexual play among young children who are peers is normal. Such early sexual experiences are not harmful unless parents' reactions are violent, abusive, or guilt producing.

If a child reports sexual abuse to a parent, or to another trusted adult, that adult's response to her sharing has a powerful impact on the abused child. If the adult believes the child, takes her needs seriously, and sees that she gets help, the healing process can begin. If, however, the adult discounts what the child tells him, implies that she must be mistaken or imagining things, or accuses the child of lying and responds in an angry, abusive way, the child is devastated and buries her secret as deeply as she can. Chances are she won't risk telling anyone and being doubted again.

Abused children suffer pain and confusion that follow them into adulthood and distort their lives and relationships. Unresolved sexual abuse experiences bear their painful fruit for years after the final sexual act has ended. They gestate in the darkest reaches of the psyche, expressing themselves in patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that create pain, confusion, guilt, and self-punishment. These patterns dominate the lives of those who were sexually abused until they are ready to face their childhood sexual experiences and acknowledge, express, and release the deeply buried rage, sorrow, guilt and fear they have hidden and suppressed for years.

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PATTERNS THAT INDICATE POSSIBLE CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE

Patterns of self-sacrifice and self-abuse are common in the lives of women who were sexually abused as children or adolescents. The abused child's feelings and her physical body are violated to satisfy someone else's sexual desires. Frequently this someone else is an adult who occupies a position of trust and authority in the child's life. If he is her father, he is someone whose love she craves and needs for emotional support. This many also be true with step-fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and cousins.

The sexually abused child learns that the price of "love" is self-sacrifice; unconsciously, she accepts abuse as an inevitable part of her life. She learns not to trust other people. She experiences little power over what happens to her. She feels guilty and different from other children. Unless she brings her abuse experiences into conscious awareness and works through the stages of the healing process, she will continue repeating patterns of self-sacrifice and self-abuse, and perpetuating her life position as a victim.

I have identified twenty-three patterns that frequently emerge in the lives of women who were sexually abused as children. (Again, I hope men will make the necessary translations and be aware that similar behavioral patterns and stages of healing are applicable to their lives as well.) Not all patterns are present in every woman, nor does the presence of four or five patterns necessarily indicate you are are sexual abuse victim. Some of these patterns reflect emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse, but not necessarily all three. They are marked "e/p/s" in the list below. Other patterns are more directly related to sexual abuse though they also include elements of physical and emotional abuse. They are marked "e/p/S." A few of the patterns are strongly indicative of sexual abuse and are marked "S." Recognizing that ten or more of the patterns from these three categories are operating in your life gives a strong indication that sexual abuse may have occurred even though you may not remember it. Seeing these patterns and understanding how they may relate to childhood abuse experiences will help you free yourself from the compulsive re-enactment and re-experiencing of the pain, isolation, and vulnerability you felt as a child.

1. There were serious emotional problems in your family when you were a child. (e/p/s)

If your parents were blatantly dysfunctional and you trusted your own perception of their behavior, you are aware of the pain you experienced growing up in such a crippling environment. But, if you learned not to trust your own perceptions, you may have misperceived the situation in your family and believed it was normal, even "wonderful." You learned to disassociate yourself from your painful experiences and erased them from your memory in order not to notice the double standards, double messages, and parental abuses of power you faced. Yours may have been a "nice" family, respected in the community. You assumed that what was wrong was with you, not your parents. They supported this assumption, often blaming you and attributing power to you that you did not possess.

Alcohol and drug abuse are common in families where sexual abuse occurs. Compulsive behavior like overworking, overeating, excessive spending, constant dieting, and obsessive cleanliness are also common. Rigid ideas about religion, politics, sex, and the ways children should behave are prevalent. Physical abuse and constant arguing may be the family norm. Other abusive families may appear to be tranquil on the surface until massive fits of rage erupt. Frightened family members walk on eggshells, trying to keep the peace and avoid the next explosion.

2. As an adult, you become extremely vulnerable to and dependent upon your sexual partner. (e/p/s)

Your needs for security and stability were not met when you were a child. You long to feel safe in your relationship, but your deep-seated fears keep you terrified that your partner may abandon you. Consequently, you experience childlike feelings of helplessness at the prospect of a conflict with him. You are blindly devoted to him and feel that you could not survive without his love and continued presence in your life. You overlook his negative behavior and hold onto the possibilities you see for what your man can become if only you are able to nurture him to mental health and success through the magic of your love.

3. You are strongly attracted to men who are destructive, insensitive, infantile, and self-centered. They mirror similar tendencies which are hard for you to see in yourself. (e/p/s)

Destructive, emotionally unavailable men are stand-ins for your parents whose love you craved but didn't receive. Now you devote yourself to trying to get love from a man who is similarly unable to give it to you. You are trying to work trough your childhood pain by means of your relationship with him. he is trying to bolster his shaky self-esteem with the feelings of power he experiences in the relationship with you. He exploits your devotion and childlike attitude of helplessness.

4. You may be a high achiever who is driven, but quite successful professionally. (e/p/s)

You are driven to earn the right to be happy and to purge yourself of the deep guilt you feel. If you were sexually abused by your father, you also may have felt unconsciously empowered by him; you are his special girl and you can do and be whatever you choose (as long as you don't replace daddy with a new man in your life with whom you can be truly intimate). Your troubled relationships with men present a sharp contrast to other areas of your life.

5. Unconsciously, you are hostile toward men, especially your mate. (e/p/s)

Your hostility is expressed directly in crazy, destructive outbursts of rage that occur when events in the present trigger buried rage from the past. Your hostility also is expressed covertly through exaggerated helplessness (being a burden), illnesses that interfere with life and pleasure, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual inhibition. You try to control your man through attempts to help him or save him. When these efforts fail, you are enraged and see him as responsible for the buried pain and unhappiness you have carried inside yourself since childhood.

6. You do not trust men. (e/p/S)

You hear yourself make statements like, "You can't trust men," or "I don't trust any man I meet." You expect the worst from men and usually you get it. You don't trust yourself either. Your self-esteem is low, and you don't believe you deserve or ever will find genuine, lasting happiness.

7. You are afraid of closeness with men and avoid a complete, whole relationship that includes a healthy sexual relationship. (e/p/S)

You may establish a stable marriage based on friendship with very little sex or very volatile love-hate relationships with passionate sex. Or you may choose not to marry. The net result is unconscious loyalty to your original incestuous marriage to father (or the man who abused you).

8. You have no sense of the boundaries between what is appropriate and inappropriate in a relationship with a man. (e/p/S)

You are confused about what love is, and you accept destructive, negative behavior from men as an inevitable price for their affection.

9. You have difficulty saying "no" to men and maintaining your autonomy and self-direction when you are dealing with a man. (S)

This is particularly true once you establish a sexual relationship. But even before becoming sexually intimate, you may feel that you can't refuse his advances even though you don't like him and are not attracted to him.

10. You feel powerless in important relationships and are terrified of honest confrontations. Yet you try to control and manipulate other people. (e/p/S)

The adults in your life when you were a child abused their power with you. Now you tend to alternate between feeling powerless and becoming abusive yourself in stressful situations. Under stress, you become confused, helpless, and demanding, like a child looking for comfort, love and support from a nurturing adult. Because of the confusion of boundaries that took place in your family, you confuse boundaries, too. You play martyr, discounting yourself and others, trying to hold other people responsible for meeting your needs, and ignoring the pain you cause them with your controlling behavior, your demands, and your suffering.

11. Your capacity to nurture and protect yourself adequately is severely impaired. Instead you nurture others, giving them what you long to receive but don't know how to give yourself. Unconsciously, you hope they will become dependent on you and never abandon you. Yet you secretly resent their insensitivity to your feelings and lay martyr, laying guilt trips on those you serve and sometimes becoming enraged with them for their lack of regard for you. (e/p/S)

You live for other people, sacrificing yourself and your personal needs in an effort to take care of those whose love seems necessary for your survival. You are insensitive to your own needs and feelings while being accurately attuned to subtle nuances and feelings in others. You project your needs onto them and take care of them while rejecting yourself. Your rejected self is enrages and expresses itself in distorted ways that create pain for you and for others. As a child, you may have functioned as a parent for your immature parents, taking on major responsibilities and emotional burdens that were overwhelming and inappropriate for a child.

12. You may be afraid of money and money matters, exhibit helplessness about money, and long for a man to take care of you financially. (e/p/S)

You may have careless, childlike, and impulsive spending habits and try to use money and material items as a substitute for love. Your father (or other abuser) may have given you money and material advantages to allay his guilt for his sexual activity with you.

13. You may engage in promiscuous, impulsive sexual behavior, which often is coupled with alcohol and drug abuse, and is extremely dangerous and self-destructive. (S)

You may have frequent sexual liaisons with men who are not available for anything more than sex with you (affairs with married men, for example). Or you may frequent bars, drink heavily, and pick up strange men for sexual encounters. You may lead a double life. Your night-life might shock people who know you as responsible and successful professionally. In extreme cases, you may disassociate completely from different aspects of yourself and manifest multiple personalities.

14. You may experience various degrees of sexual dysfunction, from vaginismus, where intercourse is extremely painful or impossible, to lack of interest in and desire for sex, or extreme fear of any kind of sexual activity. (S)

15. You may engage in prostitution and experience your sexuality as your only attribute. (S)

16. There are powerful blocks to the free flow of energy in your body, especially in the thighs, hips, and genitals. (S)

You may keep your pelvic muscles tensed so that feeling in your genitals is blocked. (Rolfing is very helpful in releasing these blocks and the accompanying memories and feelings.)

17. You may eat compulsively and use food as a weapon against yourself. (e/p/S)

You believe that eating is bad. This reflects your belief that you are bad and guilty and therefore don't deserve to be nurtured and fed. You alternate starving yourself with binge eating. You may be anorexic or extremely obese. Both are ways of hiding your sexuality, which you fear and seek to disown.

18. You are sometimes depressed and suicidal, plagued by anxiety attacks, and overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness, confusion, guilt, and futility. (e/p/S)

You doubt you will ever be healthy, happy, and well, and live dreading your next painful episode of anxiety and depression. You may be addicted to tranquilizers or antidepressant medications that have been prescribed for you to treat your emotional pain.

19. You may have experienced psychosis precipitated by a threat to your blocked memory of sexual abuse. (S)

For example, a psychotic episode occurs in response to an affair with an older man who relates to you as your father did, and taps into deeply buried childhood feelings of pain, rage, and confusion. You  are terrified and retreat into psychosis to avoid the near return of blocked memories. Psychosis also may be triggered by rejection and abandonment by a mate or lover.

20. You may experience recurrent nightmares or compulsive recurrent mental images. You also may be afraid of the the dark. (e/p/S)

Sexual imagery is common in your dreams as are bathroom scenes, sewers, and toilets that need flushing. You also may have memory pictures that haunt you because they are like still-movie shots that have no scene that precedes or follows them. As you r memory returns, you may find that the scenes that precede and follow these isolated still pictures are abuse experiences you hid from yourself.

21. Fear and guilt are dominant forces in your life. (e/p/S)

You engage in repeated efforts to make your life worthwhile despite your deep inner feelings of worthlessness and despair. Yet you are afraid of success and expect to lose whatever you gain, anticipating eternal punishment for your childhood sins.

22. "My father was perfect. My mother was nuts." (e/p/S)

You over-idealize your father and fail to see his destructive side while seeing the negative side of your mother and ignoring her positive attributes. Consequently, you over-value and misperceive men while devaluing and discounting women. (Or you may over-idealize your mother and see your father as totally bad. this pattern is common with men who were sexually abused by either their mothers or their fathers.)

23. Your thinking is impaired when you try to analyze your relationships with others. (e/p/S)

You tend to see things as you want them to be rather than as they actually are. You refuse to consider the consequences of what you are ignoring, going against your own better judgment and setting yourself up to be victim time and time.

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DID YOU EXPERIENCE SEXUAL ABUSE?

Various reports indicate that more than 36% of all women seeking treatment at all kinds of mental health facilities know they were sexually abused as children. Many have been in therapy repeatedly and have never told a therapist what happened to them as children. They are embarrassed and ashamed to reveal their guilty secret. Because it is a difficult subject for many people to discuss, I routinely ask my clients if they experienced any kind of sexual abuse as children.

Even if their honest answer is "no" when I make this inquiry, the possibility that abuse occurred still exists. Many women have blocked their memories of sexual encounters, especially if those encounters were with their natural fathers. Women are more likely to remember sexual abuse when the abuser was a grandfather, step-father, uncle, brother, or cousin. Though some women do remember being sexually abused by their natural fathers, many have blocked their memory completely. In these instances, the presence of the behavior patterns I have described above may be the only available clue to the underlying cause of the woman's difficulty.

If you remember and know that you were sexually abused as a child, you will benefit from identifying the sexual abuse patterns that are relevant in your life. By recognizing and taking responsibility for these patterns in your behavior, you create new choices for yourself for your healing, health, and successful relationships. You also will want to enter a therapy program for assistance and support as you work through the stages of the recovery process.

If you have no memory of sexual abuse, but a number of these sexual abuse patterns are present in your life, you also will want to enter a therapy program. As you read about these patterns and identify them in yourself, notice your reaction to allowing yourself even to entertain the possibility that you might have experienced sexual abuse that you have blocked from your conscious memory. If you are heavily invested in denying the possibility, you may be expressing the strength of your desire to keep the abuse secret hidden in order to protect your abuser and yourself form facing what happened.

When this occurs with a client I am working with in therapy, I do not push her, but simply maintain that I see this as a possibility she may want to consider, and give her time and space to integrate what I have said. Since I ask my clients to keep a dram journal, we can watch her dreams and notice what her conscious mind is communicating. Sometime, several months later, she may have a particularly vivid dream or she may remember some incident that surprises her and again suggests the possibility we have discussed. Other memories and dreams may emerge gradually. Or she may continue to deny the possibility that abuse occurred and concentrate on other issues in her life. If her difficulties persist, I again may suggest that she consider the possibility that she has blocked her memory of events in her childhood that are causing her pain in the present.

If my client is open to the possibility that sexual abuse might have occurred, but upon reflection and consideration, concludes that it simply doesn't fit with her experience, I assume she is correct and that abuse probably did not occur. If she has no other strong reactions like illness, acting out, intense anger, or missed sessions, and if she makes progress in her therapy, feels better, and is more successful in her life and her relationships, the possibility that sexual abuse might have occurred is dismissed.

If, however, she is drawn to the possibility, has dreams that appear to confirm it, continues her therapy, and begins to feel better after talking about the abuse issue, she may begin to remember as we proceed. Hypnotic regression can be very helpful, though usually a gradual process is necessary. In a relaxed state of consciousness, I invite her unconscious mind and her higher self to take her back in time and space to whatever earlier time in her life she needs to remember and take into account in order to heal her life. This suggestion honors whatever pace she sets as she approaches her memories, sees partial pictures, blocks the next step, and gradually readies herself to see the whole of what she experienced. It is crucial that she not be pushed to go too quickly, but simply be assured that if abuse did occur she will remember as she is ready to handle those memories and the feelings that accompany them.

Remembering the incest secret is like recognizing that daddy had a dark, crazy side. When the secret is blocked from memory, daughter is able to keep an idealized memory of her father intact. She does this at great cost to herself, because she will find the rejected aspects of her father in the men she attracts. She will be surprised and confused when her lover/husband shows his dark side and will be angry, hurt, and outraged by his behavior. "How can he do this to me?" As long as she keeps her illusion of her father's perfection, she will be drawn into relationships with men that are painful and destructive and that mirror the crazy father she has hidden from herself, inside herself.

Blocked memory of the incest secret also keeps her from seeing the whole picture of her mother. She sees her mother as bad, crazy, weak, helpless, and jealous. She is alienated from her mother and sees the dark side of her quiet clearly. But she misses the good mother, the nurturing mother, the side of mother that may have been bright, light, and beautiful. And she cannot incorporate this blocked side of her mother within herself.

Missing this valuable, nurturing energy is also enormously costly to her. She feels inadequate to care for herself and nurture herself. Instead she nurtures others, and then expects that they will reciprocate, nurturing her in return. She looks for this essential nurturing energy especially in the man she loves. She projects the disowned good, nurturing mother onto her lover/husband and feels that her survival depends upon his presence in her life. This creates a massive dilemma. She sees her nurturing as coming from her man. At the same time, she disowns the dark-sided crazy father in herself and sees it in this same lover/husband. As long as she continues to split herself in this way, she is doomed to survive by ignoring the crazy, hurtful side of both herself and her lover/husband in order to have the nurturing mother energy disowned in herself and projected onto him.

He is engaged in the complimentary side of this projection. He is attracted to the good, strong father in her, often having had a cold, distant, alcoholic, isolated father himself. He sees his father as bad and troubled; a poor model for him as a male. He views his mother as his savior, the one who took care of him despite his father's bad treatment of her. He fails to see the dark side of mother and instead finds that in his lover/wife. She manifests the crazy mother he fails to see and the strong father he missed as well. Their positions are complimentary. He plays crazy father to her crazy mother and good mother to her good father. he may have been sexually abused as a child, also.

In relationships like this, both partners are challenged to see, claim, accept, and express their feelings about both their parents. At the same time, they must develop healthy, nurturing parent parts within themselves to care for the hurt, damaged child parts within each of them. Only then can they forgive the whole of both their parents in order o heal their own lives. Once they become whole and healed as individuals, they can relate to each other in a healthy, centered, loving energy rather than from the abusive, fearful energy they incorporated from their parents.

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THE INCEST / ABUSE SECRET AND THE PAYOFFS FOR KEEPING IT

The incest / abuse secret is a burden that destroys the one who clings to it, either because of blocked memory, or after memory returns, because of fear of releasing the self-sabotaging "payoffs" that derive from its hold her life. As long as she holds onto the secret, the woman who was sexually abused as a child remains a victim, sabotaging her life, and clinging to destructive payoffs like these:

1. The incest/abuse victim feels special and different from others. She may feel that she has a special mission that sets her apart from others, or she may feel hopelessly isolated and helpless.

2. She may be driven to achieve by the powerful energy of the guilt she carries, or she may be addicted to repeated failures and guilty, suicidal fantasies. Often, she is a workaholic, exhausting herself by taking care of others but resenting them for letting her.

3. She is addicted to being a victim, a tragic figure with all the attendant pain, drama, and excitement a martyr generates. She cherishes pain and illness and clings to it, using it to abuse and manipulate other people whose presence she thinks she needs in order to survive.

4. She avoids growing up and instead continues to blame her problems on others, especially the man in her life and her children.

5. She fears her power (because she is afraid of being abusive herself and doesn't like to notice the subtle, indirect ways she hurts others) and blocks her creativity. She fascinates others with what she might do if she ever owned her strengths and resources.

6. She spends her energy trying to fix others while refusing to face herself.

7. She clings to relationships that are destructive and debilitating rather than finding the strength to face herself and risk losing the relationship if it cannot survive her healing.

Letting go of the incest/abuse secret means letting go of these payoffs. It further includes re-deciding about one's identity, which has been tied to keeping the secret. It is a big step and a process that requires time, patience, and a treatment program that assists the abuse survivor in cleansing her beliefs, her thinking, her emotions, her behavior, and her physical body from the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse.

With this overview of the issues involved in facing sexual abuse, I invited you to join me on the journey I made through the healing process. In my personal sharing, I have changed some name and identifying details to respect the privacy of those who were my teachers and companions along the way.

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