Healing From Child Sexual Abuse - Learning to Trust

TRUST is a big issue for anyone who suffered child abuse.  Survivors tend to fall into two categories:  those who trust everybody and those who trust nobody.  When you think about it, neither style represents true trust. 

It’s no wonder trust is a big issue for those of us who were neglected or abused as children.   When we were vulnerable and helpless, the very adults who were supposed to be looking after us, betrayed us.  Lacking models of trustworthy people, we never learned who was safe to trust.

What is real trust and how do you know somebody’s trustworthy?  This is important to learn.  If you didn’t learn it as a small child, you can get the hang of it as an adult.  To discover whether you can trust someone, you need to observe people over time. Observing a person in many different situations gradually lets you know how he or she treats others.  Is this a person who tells lies in order to get his way or cheats when she thinks she won’t get caught?  Does this person recognize and respect others’ feelings?  Does he or she remain loyal to friends?  Check it out.  Be an astute observer.

My next post will be about survivors and relationships.

How knowledge of child sex abuse retreated into the shadows

Within a year of announcing his discovery that child sexual abuse was the underlying cause of hysteria, Sigmund Freud repudiated his findings because of public opinion.

He’d told the world that child sexual abuse was the cause of dissociation and behaviours we associate with trauma.  In other words, child sexual abuse was a very common experience.

In his book Freud, A Life For Our Times, Peter Gay explains that Freud could not afford to offend the influential men of his century.  As well, he had a family to support and needed referrals for his practice as an analyst. Perhaps most of all, Freud craved fame.

As a result, he stopped listening to his patients.  He still focused on their sexuality, but no longer acknowledged the exploitation and abuse they had suffered. 

This drove him to invent his convoluted theory that his women patients imagined and longed for the abusive sexual encounters of which they complained.  Freud announced, “I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”

And so it is that the prevalence of child sexual abuse went back into the shadows until our own time.  Now it is our job to make sure it never lurks in secrecy again. 

Child abuse can exist only if we deny it and refuse to see the signs. 

My future posts will contain guidelines to help you, your friends or your clients heal from childhood trauma.

Freud exposed child abuse 100 years ago

This article continues the discussion of how child sexual abuse was uncovered and then buried again, this time over 100 years ago by Sigmund Freud (who had discovered that child sexual abuse was the cause of hysteria.)

In 1896, Freud shocked his peers when he presented his paper “The Etiology of Hysteria” in which he unequivocally stated that the origin of hysteria lay in child sexual abuse.  By simply listening to his women patients, Freud heard their stories of sexual assault, abuse and incest.  Following back the thread of memory, Freud and his patients uncovered traumatic events of childhood underlying more recent, often relatively trivial experiences that had actually triggered the onset of hysterical symptoms in the present.

Judith Herman says:
“A century later, this paper still rivals contemporary clinical descriptions of the effects of childhood sexual abuse.  It is a brilliant, compassionate, eloquently argued, closely reasoned document.  Its triumphant  title and exultant tone suggest Freud viewed his contribution as the crowning achievement in the field.”

Freud couldn’t have been clearer or more certain when he presented his eighteen case studies.  “I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experiences, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of intervening decades.”

So what happened?  Here we have a clear understanding of childhood sexual trauma as the underlying cause of the signs and symptoms recognized as “hysteria.”  Where did that clarity go?   How come society denied the sad reality of what was being done to its children? 

My next post will unravel the mystery.