The Impact of Child Sexual Abuse on Families

With much anguish and difficulty we make our way through life after being a child sexual abuse survivor and rarely think of the impact this had on our family

In my family I had four siblings, two sisters and two older brothers. One sister, a year younger than me, slept on the top bunk. She told me when I was going through recovery that she witnessed it (calling me back the next day to say that her husband said that I had made up my sexual abuse and denying that we had had the previous day’s communication). We have been estranged for many years. In today’s language she would probably be diagnosed as bi-polar as she is intermittently loving and gracious and then screaming and angry. Over the years I wearied of her many up and down moods and despite periodic attempts through the years to become close it has never happened and I have pretty much given up hope that it ever will. It’s best we don’t communicate. I have heard that sometimes witnesses to a trauma are more traumatized than the actual victim. Perhaps this is what happened.

My baby sister, sleeping in the crib next to our bunk bed saw my father rape me. She wet the bed till she was ten and didn’t speak until she was ten except in baby prattle and a confusing lisp that only I could understand. When she was born my mother turned her over to me to raise. I was nine years old. As the only child who actually liked working hard I had already become the family housekeeper at the age of eight and now I was a mother (and my father’s unwilling mistress at the age of 13). Jeanne was killed in a car accident at the age of 25 after sending me a letter, followed by a phone call saying she didn’t have long to live. Despite the accident being the fault of the other driver I think she had a death wish.

My oldest brother was an alcoholic from the age of 15 till in his early 70s. He died at the age of 74 unable to have a coherent conversation, always mumbling about his life, he couldn’t remember how many times he had been married and thought he might have one child but thinks he was disowned by him, his anger at dad about what he had done to me and alternately raging against his life and struggling to make sense out of the broken pieces of our family. My other brother is still alive. He has hidden his anguish behind the Catholic religion. One would think that would be a good thing but it has turned him into a controlling and dogmatic zealot. The last time we had a phone conversation he badgered me over and over because I do not believe only Catholics go to heaven, something he is adamant about. I finally hung up on him.  He writes cruel letters to family members. My aunt who was dying of cancer received one from him saying that because she wasn’t Catholic she wouldn’t go to heaven. When my daughter lost her 25 year old son to a motorcycle accident he wrote her telling her that her son would not go to heaven as he wasn’t Catholic.

There’s not a normal one in the bunch, unless you count me and it took me five years of intense recovery to get my head on straight.

Every family member in a house of child sexual abuse is impacted. The mother who wished she could do more to save her daughter but has been brainwashed by the patriarchal father who tells her there is nothing wrong with this. They do it in the Appalachian District all the time.  We are all connected, emotionally and mentally. We all know this is a house of deep despair and sadness. We are unable to communicate, unable to reach out to one another, scarred for life unless we enter a program of recovery. The patriarchal father always has a codependent mother.  If it is a house of domestic violence on top of child sexual abuse there seems no hope for the children or the mother who is intimidated into being a slave of all her husband’s dictates.

Keep in mind that children of an untreated child sexual abuse victim stand a five times greater chance of being molested themselves. You don’t want your child to live a life of despair. Get help before it is too late. Child sexual abuse is a multi-generational problem. Untreated it will impact generation after generation. Three quarters of my female friends were sexually abused in some way as a child. Is this just a coincidence? No. One in four girls and one in six boys is sexually abused as a child. When you think of the ripple effect it had on all the family members in all of these victims the number becomes enormous. These are the future adults in our lives.

In my memoir, I Never Heard A Robin Sing, I write:

My family life reminded me of a camp of mutilated and injured soldiers from some obsolete war, indescribable in its agony.  All the figures were shadowy and disoriented, as if only half alive and that half living in a well of misery.  We moved in and out of our days appearing to wait for some catastrophic happening, all of us knowing that once it did, we were ill prepared to handle it.

Even in times of anguish, the wounded family seems unable to bond together and fight the battle from within.  Lost and desolate, we carry our pain, a load that grows with each passing day, until it becomes more burdensome than our lives can handle.

 

 

 

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