I'm going to begin this book with a story. Mine. Hopefully, everyone reading will identify with parts of it and realize they're in the right place. We all have stories that are different. We all have stories that are the same. Repercussions in the life of an incest victim ripple like waves in a body of water, ones that eventually turn into riptides, undercurrents and sometimes tidal waves.
My story is a classic example.
In July of 1988, I walked into the office of therapist Marci Taylor, a specialist in the field of childhood sexual abuse. The damage done by my incest had accelerated to the point of despair. It was six months before my third marriage and I had a long history of relationships with alcoholics and abusers, two of them former husbands. Suicidal since my early teens, I had been hospitalized for two nervous breakdowns in my twenties, one the result of a failed suicide attempt. I had hidden my pain behind too much alcohol, promiscuity, compulsive behavior, obsessive relationships and extremes of emotional highs and lows. Only medication, intermittently taken, had kept me functioning for almost twenty-five years.
Two years earlier, I had been engaged to my daughter's father-in-law. Chuck was the first healthy male in my life, a man whose primary aim was making me happy. He became convinced that something traumatizing had happened in my childhood that I didn't remember. His comment, “How could someone as wonderful as you wind up with so many abusive men,” not only went right over my head, but irritated me as he began a personal crusade to find out what had happened. I retaliated with anger, tried to end the engagement, and when he refused, began an affair outside the relationship. His response was, “I'll never leave you except through death.” Within months, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Filled with shame and fear for Chuck, I ended the affair and took care of him while he was ill. Even then, a few days before he died, still unable to control my own sexual addiction, I slept not only with another man, but a married one. After Chuck's death my guilt and shame at what I had done caused despair so great I wished only that I had never failed in my many suicide attempts.
Within a few weeks, I was living with the man who would ultimately set off a trail of such severe abuse that I had to choose between death and entering recovery. I had hit bottom. Having read my private journals without permission, he used my descriptions of previous lovers and infidelities as a whip to taunt me, especially the night I had spent in bed with a married man while Chuck lay dying. Like Pavlov's dog, every time he rang the bell by shaming me about my past, I obeyed whatever his current demand was, for I learned quickly that giving in caused the torment to cease. Subject to his whims, I lived like a prisoner, crippled by his several-times-a-day sexual addiction—which quickly turned into brutal rapes—his need to control what I wore, who I spoke with, what I said, and even whether I laughed or not.
Within months, my beautiful home looked like a battleground, with bathroom doors he had split in half when I cowered behind them hiding from his rages and sexual obsessions, broken furniture and holes in walls, all evidence of my out-of-control emotions from the terror of his rapes. Once he forced
