Incest Repressed: Faith and Healing

By Ann B

Ann B grew up in seeming luxury and privilege. To the outside world, she lived an idyllic life, but at age five, when the family moved to Beverly Hills, her world becomes anything but perfect. Her father and the family butler began to sexually abuse her. Detachment, or mentally separating herself from the shame, emotional turmoil, and abuse, becomes Ann's means of survival. Over time, she becomes so successful at detaching; she fully suppresses the horrific memories. But in her mid-twenties, Ann begins experiencing abhorrent images of herself as a child being subjected to the abuse. Where are these images coming from? Is she making them up? Is something wrong with her? Could they possibly be real? What kind of person could she be to make up these stories about her father, a respected member of their community? Ann is nearly crazy with doubt, self-recrimination, and the horror that what she is experiencing may have a basis in fact. At about the same time the flashbacks begin, Ann starts down a path of spiritual exploration. Raised as an Orthodox Jew, the mere mention of Jesus Christ unnerved her. And yet her journey ultimately leads to her belief in Jesus as the Messiah. In these pages, Ann describes her arduous forty-year path to healing. Ann struggles to accept the truth of her recovered memories as she fails at two marriages before finding her true-life partner in her third husband. And she suffers at the hands of incompetent, even harmful, psychologists before finding the therapeutic approach that ultimately helps her. At the heart of her story is the healing Ann B experiences through faith and her relationship with Jesus Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635259094

Book preview

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Incest Repressed

Faith and Healing

Ann B

ISBN 978-1-63525-908-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63525-909-4 (Digital)

Copyright © 2017 by Ann B

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

To all the women who doubt their own life’s story.

Thank you to my faithful readers, Valerie, Julie, Judy, Kathryn, Susie, and Jennifer and the ongoing support and encouragement of my wonderful husband.

To my sisters whom I love so very much.

Most of all, thank you to the Great Physician and Healer, my Lord Jesus Christ.

Foreword

How could this have happened to my friend at age five and no one knew? No one came to protect her? In this book, you will read and see why no one helped her.

Her protector was her predator.

As young teenagers, Ann B and I were good friends. Even though she came from an orthodox Jewish family and I was a Gentile, we were inseparable. However, when we were at her house, it was like I was an invisible ghost looking at a dark, strange, foreign land. We scurried through pitch-black rooms on weekend nights because her strict father allowed us to turn on only one light in a room. Once, Ann jumped out in the pitch darkness and scared me mightily. Our laughter sliced through the overwhelming silence of their home. Her mother, equally strict, hardly ever spoke to Ann, except to admonish her. Her older sister was almost always gone. It was a house of rules, huge spaces, and dense emptiness. Reading the many drafts of this book brought back that hollow, joyless environment.

Like Little Orphan Annie who spied on the grownups, Ann and I did the same thing with her parents. We witnessed the odd chilliness between them, one that mirrored the same chilliness of the house. A house so vast and so oddly laid out. A house where every bedroom came with its own suite, all allowing the abuse to remain undetected.

Her father looms in my memory as a forbidding, mysterious figure. A man, who even though I was there, would insist that Ann have her daily Hebrew lesson. A man, who appeared to be devoutly religious, who was either silent or reading his prayer book while eating dinner, and a man who frightened me. How painfully ironic to learn all these years later that this praying man was preying on his daughter.

As I read and reread these pages, I had no doubt that Ann’s story was true, but the distressing thing has been that Ann herself did not share my certainty. She harbored huge fears that she had made it all up. That doubt caused her to put this manuscript away for twenty years.

Even five years ago, the doubt still tortured her. Yet she knew that the Lord was leading her to know that it was vital for her well being to pick up this book, to finish it, and send it out into the world.

I watched her go through the excruciating work of facing the pain and the sorting through these agonizing memories. But deep within, Ann knew it was essential to get this in the hands of others who have buried and doubted their own memories of abuse.

I was and am her partner in believing in the truth of Ann B’s story. Your reading it fulfills her goal of telling it to others who have suffered with the doubt of repressed memories as she has. I feel honored to have been a part of the process.

Valerie W.

Ann’s friend for over fifty years

A Poem

My father was a wicked, wicked man, and Martin was his name

My father was an evil, evil man, and cruel was his name

My father was a lying, cheating man, and deceit was his name

My father was a gentle, gentle man, and molester was his name

My father was a wise, wise man, and ignorant was his name

My father was a pious, pious man, and heathen was his name

My father was a Jewish, Jewish man, and hypocrite was his name

My father was an anxious, anxious man, and secretive was his name

My father was an angry, angry man, and destroyer was his name

My father was a distant, distant man, and unavailable was his name

My father, gentleman, scholar, teacher

My father, whore, debaser, pervert

My father, the two-sided coin

My father, the flip of all he seemed to be

A gentleman to those who cared to see

A whore to those weaker than he

My father, the great holder of knowledge and facts

A giant of language, history, and law

A student, teacher, and scholar

A perverter of the innocent

A user of the abused

A leech that sucks the life of babes

An imposter who took and never protected

A thief who stole innocence and purity

A cheat who broke all the rules

A betrayer who earned no trust

A deceiver who lied to all who didn’t hear

A depraved shell of a soul

A tormentor and a tormented

My destroyer

My life given; my life taken away

My childhood robbed; never to be returned, gone forever

Lost to his perversion

Soiled by his shame

Crushed by his betrayal

My father

The loser

The lost

My father

Burning in torment

My father a lost and tortured man

And sadness was his name.

Prologue

It has been a long and difficult journey—a spiritual and emotional journey—that began when I was twenty-five and has brought me at last to mature adulthood. Today, as I write, I am seventy. I spent forty years uncovering what happened to me as a little girl and the devastating effect the events of my childhood had on my life.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, the youngest of three daughters. Our father was retired, and our mother was a housewife. We were upper-middle-class Jews. We moved to Beverly Hills, California, when I was five. I believe my father and our butler sexually abused me, separately and together. The abuse began when we moved to Beverly Hills and continued over several years. I don’t know exactly how or when it ended, but I believe it ended when the butler left, and I was seven years old.

I used tentative words, such as I believe versus strong declarative statements for two reasons. First, the climate around childhood sexual abuse and delayed memories is heavy with skepticism and disbelief. I feel it’s important to address the skepticism around delayed memories or what some call false memories. Second, I share in the confusion of what is real and what is made up. Yet at the same time, I know with absolute certainty that I have suffered terribly, trying to reconcile my heinous flashbacks with the image of the respectable, upstanding family we portrayed to the world.

How do we know what is the truth? The reality is that none of us can know for sure what is true. Short of a confession from my perpetrators, one dead and one who vanished many years ago, I will never be blessed with the peace of conviction. My father died in 1972, and I chose not to confront him because I was just beginning to grapple with flashbacks. At one time, I hired a private investigator to find the butler, only to come up blank, and if he were found, what then? He would most likely deny everything.

I cannot describe the anguish I have gone through to accept these new memories as truth, as part of what happened to me as a little girl. I couldn’t believe such horrors could have happened. I didn’t want to believe such betrayal by my parents. It’s still difficult to accept, but at last, I do.

Until I was twenty-five years old, I had no recollection of being sexually abused. I knew I had an unhappy childhood and a less-than satisfactory life. I also knew I suffered from daily severe headaches, a chronic ulcer-like condition and deep depression. The flashbacks began without prompting from any source—person or otherwise. The first one came while my first husband and I were having sex. I saw myself being sexually assaulted by a man who lived with us when I was five years old. He was our African-American butler. It was so vivid and seemed so real.

I did not seek professional help when I started remembering different violent sexual scenes with this same man. I thought I was crazy. I thought I was making it up.

I have categorized my memories. The ones I remember ever since I was a child, I call my real memories. Generally, I don’t doubt the veracity of these memories. They came into adulthood with me. The memories that have come back since I have been an adult, I call flashbacks or new memories. It has been very difficult to be completely convinced that my new memories are true.

I wonder if I’ll ever be completely convinced. Will I always struggle with some doubt? In a bad moment, I imagine what will happen when I face God, and He asks me why I made up all those horrible stories about my father. However, for several important reasons, I have come to believe there is truth in these new memories. After many years of therapy, which focused on the abuse, my physical, somatic symptoms went away. No more headaches. No more stomachaches. Where I had once been a self-destructive person, I began to make healthier, more conscious choices about my life. Of course, therapy was vitally important, but my relationship with Jesus Christ, as my Lord and my Healer, was vital in this healing process. I knew in my heart that therapy without Jesus would not bring the deep heart healing that I needed. Jesus said that He came to set the captives free, and I believed and still do believe that promise.

Did I have any confirmation from my family? When I told my middle sister what had happened to me, she corroborated that it also had happened to her, although she had no specific memories. In addition, when I told my oldest sister, I was amazed to hear her say that she was not surprised. I had expected both of my sisters to tell me I was crazy and evil for making up horrific lies about our kind and gentle father.

Being Jewish was a significant part of my upbringing. My father was very religious and enforced strict observance of Jewish law. I continually battled with what I considered hypocrisy and bigotry in my parents, trying to reconcile their pretentious religious righteousness with their behavior.

My teenage years were turbulent, full of wild rebellion and deep depression culminating in a suicide attempt when I was sixteen. I married at twenty-one, had three children, divorced at thirty-three, married again at thirty-five, divorced at thirty-nine, and married again at forty-eight and am still married to husband number three.

In the early 1970s, I became a Christian or, more specifically, a Jew who believes in Jesus Christ as the Messiah. My spiritual journey and my healing from childhood sexual abuse came hand in hand. Jesus truly is and was my Savior. Not only for the gift of eternal life to come, but saving me from the pain and anguish of my wounded and scarred life on earth. It is hard to describe how my relationship with Jesus has brought healing. I remember praying early on in my new faith that Jesus would make me a whole person. I felt fragmented and always deep in depression. In answer to my prayer that day, I saw my heart with stones built up around it. In my mind, I heard Jesus say that he would remove one stone at a time because if he took them all away at once it would be emotionally overwhelming.

Late in 1986, in the midst of an unhappy love affair, which I could not break free from, I began therapy with a psychologist who specialized in treatment for adult women who had been sexually abused in childhood. This, along with my relationship with Jesus was the key to my healing process.

My path to healing included a journaling process that I used for more than twenty years. Many of these entries are scattered throughout this book. The book contains several different writing forms. There are many narrative sections that describe actual scenes that took place. There are entries from my journal. There are dialogues that I wrote generally with another person, an event, or my body—a unique process that helps to bring out confusing and ambiguous issues and feelings. Before writing a dialogue, I would write what Ira Progoff describes as steppingstones. I would write eight to ten events or thoughts or images about that person as if I was that person. For example, I was born in New York City. This was a technique to help me better understand the person while writing the dialogue. In the dialogues, I have called them milestones. Here is how Ira Progoff describes Steppingstones.

A Steppingstone is an event, image, sensation, a thought, or milestone of your life that comes to mind when you review your life from the beginning to the present. Select Steppingstones spontaneously, without a lot of mulling and conscious direction, but with an intuitive sense of selecting the right ones and you do not need to be concerned if the events you list are not in perfect chronological order.

How does imagination play in this type of writing? Imagination, like memories, is tricky business. When I would write a dialogue with myself or another person, place or thing, I would imagine what I thought the other would say. The dialogues are pure imagination, and I do not attempt to say they are real events.

On the other hand, a journal entry or a narrative chapter about a specific event is not imagination. I did not sit down and calculate how I thought something might have happened. The scene would be there as if I was watching a news program. Is there a difference? In a dialogue, I consciously used my imagination. In a narrative, I wrote what I thought to be true.

There are many people involved in my story. I have chosen to use only the first names of family members, friends, and key players. Here is a brief sketch of each.

Martin – my father, born in 1890, died in 1972. I never confronted him about the molestation.

Elsa – my mother, born 1923, died 1994. I confronted her about the molestation with the butler, but not about my father.

Oma – my maternal grandmother, born 1883, died 1972. I never told her about the molestation.

Brenda – my oldest sister, born 1938. I told her about both the butler and our father.

Monica – my middle sister, born 1940. I told her about both the butler and our father.

Joseph – my first husband, born 1937. We married in 1965 and divorced in 1977. I told him about the butler, but not about my father.

Dean, David, and Deena - my three children with Joseph. I told them about the butler and my father.

Gordon – my second husband, born 1944. We married in 1978 and divorced in 1982. I told him about the butler, but not about my father.

Bert – my third husband, born 1939. We married in 1991. He knows about both the butler and my father.

Harry – my first psychotherapist from 1977–1978. He knew about both the butler and my father.

Marilyn – my second psychotherapist from 1986–1993. I told her everything.

Jefferson – the butler who lived with us from 1948–1950. I never saw or heard of him again after 1950.

John – a boyfriend from 1986–1987. He knew about the butler and my father.

Betty – my best friend from 1974–1978. She knew about the butler and my father.

Laurel – my current therapist

I have to believe that I spent the first twenty-five years of my life carefully and methodically denying the reality of my everyday life as a child. When my father and his lover, our butler, violated me as part of their sexual tryst, within hours, I immersed myself in my favorite TV shows Howdy Doody and The Lone Ranger, so I could forget. I could not tolerate or face the profound sense of shame and guilt that I felt. I worked assiduously to repress those feelings and the events that caused them. Once the memories began to surface, it has been hard work, a lot of pain and, at times, I have been overwhelmed with doubt and confusion.

Part 1

In the Beginning

A Narrative:

Why Is