Dismantling
My Story
I am a person of strong values and high integrity. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that. In large part, I came to learn my ethics from my father. My dad was a good man. It has taken me years to be able to say this, but he was. That’s why it was so hard for me to believe that he was a child molester.
My dad was also a very sick man and an alcoholic. And in his sickness he was terribly confused about love and power and sex. Hard to reconcile such extremes, you know—a good man and a child molester.
I loved my dad. He protected me from my stepfather. The world I lived in with my stepfather was a very dangerous one. He was a madman—terribly, overtly abusive. So, my dad felt safe by comparison. How could I ever believe, as a child, that what my dad was doing to me was wrong? How could I believe that my protector was also my abuser?
For months a scene had been intruding into my mind. Flashing without warning. Coming for no apparent reason. It was the beginning of an emerging memory. I was terribly afraid of it.
The scene in my mind was simple. It was of a black wrought-iron stairway against a brick wall. I knew where it was. It was halfway across the country in Houston. I climbed this stairway every time I went to my father’s apartment as a child after my parents divorced.
But as my mind’s eye saw the scene, there was something amiss in it. The angle of view was off. Remembering how the apartments were laid out, I couldn’t imagine where I could have been standing to have that particular angle of view. It seemed physically impossible—as if I would have to have been floating in air between two apartment buildings.
The image simply wouldn’t go away. Over and over I saw this stairway from the strange angle. It haunted me. I knew it would lead to another piece of the puzzle of my past. I was terrified, because I knew it was about my father.
I decided to do what, in retrospect, was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done. With my husband, I went to Houston. We drove to my father’s old neighborhood and found the apartment complex. I sat in the parking lot thinking about whether I could do what I had come to do. The entire experience was surreal.
We got out of the car and walked to his old building. There it was. The stairway. But from the wrong angle. Where could I have been when I saw the angle in the image? Paul and I climbed up the stairs. There was my father’s old apartment. There was the door. The window. His hand had touched that doorknob. A chill ran down my spine.
I had to find the angle of view in my memory. We walked downstairs again and up the stairs of an adjacent building. Again, not quite the right angle. Then it hit me. The only place I could have been to see the stairway from that particular angle was looking out the window of the apartment next to my father’s. The physical impact of this realization was incredible. I said to my husband, “Feel my skin.” I had broken out in a cold sweat. I was drenched. My heart was racing. I felt frozen in place.
It came back over time, this memory of my father. It was horrible. I was six years old. I had been swimming all afternoon in the pool. My father had been drinking a lot. He said it was time to go back to his apartment. We did. I was in my bathing suit. He started talking nonsense. He scared me. He was getting mad. He cornered me in the dressing room and pushed me against the wall. He began to force himself on me. I tried to get away, but he was six feet tall and I was six years old. I was trapped and horrified.
Suddenly, I felt his weight leave me. He started to get sick and ran into the bathroom. I ran out of the apartment, pulling my bathing suit up. I banged on the door next to my father’s. Relief flooded me when a woman opened the door. I told her that my father had been drinking and that I needed to call my mother to come get me. She let me use her phone. I dialed my mother’s number. It rang and rang. My mother was not home. The hopelessness of the situation pierced me like a knife.
The woman didn’t know what to do with me. I asked her if I could stay there until my mother came home. She said I could. I went to the window and knelt on the bed under it. I put my chin on the windowsill. That’s where I stared at the stairway. Stared at it until that was all there was in my world. Stared at it until the horror of the afternoon could be forgotten.
A sudden, hard knock sounded on the door. It was my father. He was clean and straight talking. He admonished me for bothering this lady and said it was time to come home. I had no choice. I went back with him. Then I forgot everything that happened and didn’t remember it for the next 30 years.
Accepting child sexual abuse as a part of my past meant dismantling the story I had told myself about my life. It meant seeing people as they really were, not as I had wanted them to be. It meant knowing that the people I loved had hurt me deliberately. It meant accepting that my mother, whom I treasured, had left me unprotected with unsafe people. It meant acknowledging that many of the men I trusted had misused their power over me.
This rocked my world.
For a while, it felt like everything I ever believed in had been shattered. And it pretty much had. I remember feeling like I had been gutted—ripped apart with nothing left inside. I felt like there was absolutely nothing I could believe in. I said this one night in our survivor group. One of the therapists asked me if there was anything I could say was true. I couldn’t think of one thing. She said “What about that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening?” Yes. I could believe in that.
It was a beginning.
My dad was also a very sick man and an alcoholic. And in his sickness he was terribly confused about love and power and sex. Hard to reconcile such extremes, you know—a good man and a child molester.
I loved my dad. He protected me from my stepfather. The world I lived in with my stepfather was a very dangerous one. He was a madman—terribly, overtly abusive. So, my dad felt safe by comparison. How could I ever believe, as a child, that what my dad was doing to me was wrong? How could I believe that my protector was also my abuser?
For months a scene had been intruding into my mind. Flashing without warning. Coming for no apparent reason. It was the beginning of an emerging memory. I was terribly afraid of it.
The scene in my mind was simple. It was of a black wrought-iron stairway against a brick wall. I knew where it was. It was halfway across the country in Houston. I climbed this stairway every time I went to my father’s apartment as a child after my parents divorced.
But as my mind’s eye saw the scene, there was something amiss in it. The angle of view was off. Remembering how the apartments were laid out, I couldn’t imagine where I could have been standing to have that particular angle of view. It seemed physically impossible—as if I would have to have been floating in air between two apartment buildings.
The image simply wouldn’t go away. Over and over I saw this stairway from the strange angle. It haunted me. I knew it would lead to another piece of the puzzle of my past. I was terrified, because I knew it was about my father.
I decided to do what, in retrospect, was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done. With my husband, I went to Houston. We drove to my father’s old neighborhood and found the apartment complex. I sat in the parking lot thinking about whether I could do what I had come to do. The entire experience was surreal.
We got out of the car and walked to his old building. There it was. The stairway. But from the wrong angle. Where could I have been when I saw the angle in the image? Paul and I climbed up the stairs. There was my father’s old apartment. There was the door. The window. His hand had touched that doorknob. A chill ran down my spine.
I had to find the angle of view in my memory. We walked downstairs again and up the stairs of an adjacent building. Again, not quite the right angle. Then it hit me. The only place I could have been to see the stairway from that particular angle was looking out the window of the apartment next to my father’s. The physical impact of this realization was incredible. I said to my husband, “Feel my skin.” I had broken out in a cold sweat. I was drenched. My heart was racing. I felt frozen in place.
It came back over time, this memory of my father. It was horrible. I was six years old. I had been swimming all afternoon in the pool. My father had been drinking a lot. He said it was time to go back to his apartment. We did. I was in my bathing suit. He started talking nonsense. He scared me. He was getting mad. He cornered me in the dressing room and pushed me against the wall. He began to force himself on me. I tried to get away, but he was six feet tall and I was six years old. I was trapped and horrified.
Suddenly, I felt his weight leave me. He started to get sick and ran into the bathroom. I ran out of the apartment, pulling my bathing suit up. I banged on the door next to my father’s. Relief flooded me when a woman opened the door. I told her that my father had been drinking and that I needed to call my mother to come get me. She let me use her phone. I dialed my mother’s number. It rang and rang. My mother was not home. The hopelessness of the situation pierced me like a knife.
The woman didn’t know what to do with me. I asked her if I could stay there until my mother came home. She said I could. I went to the window and knelt on the bed under it. I put my chin on the windowsill. That’s where I stared at the stairway. Stared at it until that was all there was in my world. Stared at it until the horror of the afternoon could be forgotten.
A sudden, hard knock sounded on the door. It was my father. He was clean and straight talking. He admonished me for bothering this lady and said it was time to come home. I had no choice. I went back with him. Then I forgot everything that happened and didn’t remember it for the next 30 years.
Accepting child sexual abuse as a part of my past meant dismantling the story I had told myself about my life. It meant seeing people as they really were, not as I had wanted them to be. It meant knowing that the people I loved had hurt me deliberately. It meant accepting that my mother, whom I treasured, had left me unprotected with unsafe people. It meant acknowledging that many of the men I trusted had misused their power over me.
This rocked my world.
For a while, it felt like everything I ever believed in had been shattered. And it pretty much had. I remember feeling like I had been gutted—ripped apart with nothing left inside. I felt like there was absolutely nothing I could believe in. I said this one night in our survivor group. One of the therapists asked me if there was anything I could say was true. I couldn’t think of one thing. She said “What about that the sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening?” Yes. I could believe in that.
It was a beginning.
Our Walk Together - Questions and Answers
Why do you use the word “dismantling”? Seems like an odd choice of words.
For me, “dismantling” means to consciously take apart the myths we once needed to survive. They are not serving us well now. And we can’t move forward very far while they are still in place. It means taking down the old structure of survival, built on unconscious denial and avoidance of feelings, to have clean ground on which to build the healthy new structure of our future.
Did you really do it consciously? Sounds more like it just happened to you.
It felt like it just happened to me, but as I look back, I made decisions every day to look at certain myths and decide whether to carry them forward.
Tell me more about the “myths” you mentioned.
One myth was that my father was my protector, the one I could really trust. The truth was that my father was a very sick man. He was an alcoholic—something that no one in the family ever identified as a problem. He focused on his relationship with me when my mother divorced him. What I thought was protection was actually his way of taking care of himself. He looked to his daughter inappropriately for the kind of relationship he should have found with mature women. My father sexualized his relationship with me after he and my mother divorced.
Another myth was that my mother was my protector. In many ways, she was a good mother. She always let me know how much she loved me. We had many close times together. But she didn’t protect me. She was so absorbed in her issues that she was not vigilant relative to her daughter. She lived in denial a lot of the time because of the very abusive relationship she was in with my stepfather. Many times she traded my security for peace with him. Bad trade off for me.
I had protected my parents by going along with the myth that they were my protectors, fulfilling that part of their job as parents. In order to move on, I had to look at those myths directly, dismantle them, tell the truth to myself and eventually to the world.
So once you decided to not carry on with a myth, what did you do?
I told myself the truth. This was usually through journaling or talking to my therapist or in group. It’s important that as you dismantle your survival structure, you do it in a way that doesn’t leave you high and dry. So, I did it in the presence of others who would help support me while I rebuilt.
I’m really put off by the fact that you say your father was both a good man and a child abuser. How can you assert that one person can be both? Sounds to me as if you still believe the myth.
I respect your position. And I understand it. In fact, I held that same position for years. When I remembered what my father had done to me, I could only see him as all bad. That felt right to me for a long time. But eventually something in that thinking felt out of line. I knew he had a sense of integrity that he had passed on to me. I knew there were times he was genuinely kind and loving. He wasn’t evil like my stepfather. He was sick. He did horrible things. I had to piece him together for my own sake, reclaiming the parts of my father that I loved and that had been good for me. I had to tell the whole truth.
I still don’t buy it.
That’s okay. I understand. It’s a tough question, “Can someone who is a child abuser also be a good person?” I encourage you to revisit this question over time and notice if your answer changes at all.
For me, “dismantling” means to consciously take apart the myths we once needed to survive. They are not serving us well now. And we can’t move forward very far while they are still in place. It means taking down the old structure of survival, built on unconscious denial and avoidance of feelings, to have clean ground on which to build the healthy new structure of our future.
Did you really do it consciously? Sounds more like it just happened to you.
It felt like it just happened to me, but as I look back, I made decisions every day to look at certain myths and decide whether to carry them forward.
Tell me more about the “myths” you mentioned.
One myth was that my father was my protector, the one I could really trust. The truth was that my father was a very sick man. He was an alcoholic—something that no one in the family ever identified as a problem. He focused on his relationship with me when my mother divorced him. What I thought was protection was actually his way of taking care of himself. He looked to his daughter inappropriately for the kind of relationship he should have found with mature women. My father sexualized his relationship with me after he and my mother divorced.
Another myth was that my mother was my protector. In many ways, she was a good mother. She always let me know how much she loved me. We had many close times together. But she didn’t protect me. She was so absorbed in her issues that she was not vigilant relative to her daughter. She lived in denial a lot of the time because of the very abusive relationship she was in with my stepfather. Many times she traded my security for peace with him. Bad trade off for me.
I had protected my parents by going along with the myth that they were my protectors, fulfilling that part of their job as parents. In order to move on, I had to look at those myths directly, dismantle them, tell the truth to myself and eventually to the world.
So once you decided to not carry on with a myth, what did you do?
I told myself the truth. This was usually through journaling or talking to my therapist or in group. It’s important that as you dismantle your survival structure, you do it in a way that doesn’t leave you high and dry. So, I did it in the presence of others who would help support me while I rebuilt.
I’m really put off by the fact that you say your father was both a good man and a child abuser. How can you assert that one person can be both? Sounds to me as if you still believe the myth.
I respect your position. And I understand it. In fact, I held that same position for years. When I remembered what my father had done to me, I could only see him as all bad. That felt right to me for a long time. But eventually something in that thinking felt out of line. I knew he had a sense of integrity that he had passed on to me. I knew there were times he was genuinely kind and loving. He wasn’t evil like my stepfather. He was sick. He did horrible things. I had to piece him together for my own sake, reclaiming the parts of my father that I loved and that had been good for me. I had to tell the whole truth.
I still don’t buy it.
That’s okay. I understand. It’s a tough question, “Can someone who is a child abuser also be a good person?” I encourage you to revisit this question over time and notice if your answer changes at all.
Action Steps
STEP ONE: On a document or piece of paper, draw a line down the middle to make two columns. On the left hand side, make a list of all the myths that have been part of your survival structure. Write this list knowing that you don’t have to give up any of the myths until you want to.
STEP TWO: Go to the right hand column. For each myth, describe what new support would have to be in place for you to let go of that myth.
Example: I had a myth that my mother protected me. In order to dismantle the myth, I had to create a safe place for myself as an adult that did not depend on her protection. Then I could let go of the myth and tell the truth: While my mother was a very good mother in many ways, she allowed me to be with dangerous people and either didn’t notice or didn’t respond to the changes in me when I was suffering so terribly.
STEP THREE: Once you have new support in place for an old myth, write the truth about that myth.
STEP FOUR: Let go of the myth. This may take time. You may need to let go of it over and over again.
STEP TWO: Go to the right hand column. For each myth, describe what new support would have to be in place for you to let go of that myth.
Example: I had a myth that my mother protected me. In order to dismantle the myth, I had to create a safe place for myself as an adult that did not depend on her protection. Then I could let go of the myth and tell the truth: While my mother was a very good mother in many ways, she allowed me to be with dangerous people and either didn’t notice or didn’t respond to the changes in me when I was suffering so terribly.
STEP THREE: Once you have new support in place for an old myth, write the truth about that myth.
STEP FOUR: Let go of the myth. This may take time. You may need to let go of it over and over again.
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Copyright 2006 Journey Publishing LLC |
