My publisher, Victor Volkman of Loving Healing Press, recently asked me to write a revised edition of Repair Your Life. Many new problems have emerged into the public eye since the first edition was published in 2008 and need to be addressed. I am currently working on it and it will be released in January, 2015.
One of the chapters will be devoted to the ACE Study. It is near and dear to my heart as at the inception of the study I met Dr. Vincent Felitti, Director of the Preventive Medicine Dept. in San Diego, who initiated it. For those of you not familiar with it, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, a collaborative effort between Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control (CC) involved over 17,000 adults in a major retrospective and prospective epidemiologic analysis. It revealed how ten categories of adverse life experiences in childhood have a demonstrable impact, decades later, on health risks, disease burden, social malfunction, medical care costs, and life expectancy. It found that experiencing six or more categories of adverse life experience in infancy, childhood or adolescence shortens an individual’s life expectancy by almost twenty years. For more information about the ACE study go to
http://acestudy.org/ and http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/ (There is even a link to calculate your own ACE score)
After meeting with Dr. Felitti, I was scheduled to begin teaching Repair, a program for recovery from child sexual abuse I had spent years developing to Kaiser Permanente Positive Choice patients (a weight loss program) in all of the different Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers in California, especially at the San Diego clinic. At the time, just before I began to teach the Repair program, the impending implementation of which had been received with some excitement, my boss told me she would fire me if I tried to teach it. Since she had initially given me the go-ahead and was supportive I was stunned and dismayed that I would now have to let the different clinics and Psychiatry Departments know that I was unable to follow through. My boss had said it was a conflict of interest, which it wasn’t, as I worked as an Administrative Assistant in the Preventive Medicine Dept. in Riverside, CA which was in no way a conflict in teaching the Repair program. I had planned on teaching the classes in my off hours so it in no way would interfere with my day job. My disappointment was acute.
On the positive side I treasured the days I spent with Dr. Felitti, who was supportive of me teaching the Repair program. He shared some of the findings of the ACE study he was working on at the time, even giving me a copy of the original study. It was an exciting time and I had high hopes that once this study’s findings were published the world would look differently at child sexual abuse. I was certain that what was once a shameful secret so many of us carried in our hearts would be spoken of openly with no shame attached to that which was never our fault.
“Efforts to integrate the ACE study findings into public health practice are meeting with encouraging success. Information from the ACE study is now rapidly gaining traction both nationally and internationally. When the use of comprehensive medical history, including routing inquiry into traumatic life experiences in the developmental years, ultimately penetrates clinical primary care, it may be one of the major public health advances of our time.” (from The Lifelong Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences by Vincent J. Felitti, MD and Dr. Robert F. Anda, MD, MS as reported in Chadwick’s Child Maltreatment, Sexual Abuse and Psychological Maltreatment – Fourth Edition)
After all these years, despite the success of the study and its historic and monumental findings, most victims of child sexual abuse still hide terror stricken in the closet.
On the other hand, being gay has now come out of the closet; it is, in fact, something the gay population are tremendously proud of. The advances in the past few years in the acceptance of the world of homosexuality are truly remarkable. They no longer carry their sexual preference as a shameful secret. They have parades, rallies, are interviewed on national television, are widely supported by the Democratic Party and are now even getting married. It is such wonderful excitement about something that once was a shameful secret.
Why then is there a problem with being a victim of child sexual abuse? Why is it something that we still whisper about; we are still shunned. Our family members, for the most part, think we are lying, and even if they believed us they are angry and ashamed of us for wanting to make it public. My granddaughter, who is old enough to know better, still refers to the subject of the books I write on recovering from child sexual abuse as “that yucky sex stuff”. Despite having three daughters who were sexually abused themselves, not one of them has even attempted to work the Repair program. My family never asks how many chapters I have in the Lamplighter Movement, an international movement for recovery from child sexual abuse that I started several years ago. We have 84 chapters in ten countries. Not one asks how the sale of my books is doing. Not one is even vaguely interested in my second edition due out after the first of the year. In fact, what I am doing as my life’s work is ignored.
It has become invisible.
