FCYU-Feature Story

Breaking the Cycle
Why sexual abuse won't just go away.

An interview with Dr. Sylvia Lester, a practicing psychologist in New York City.

Q: How does sexual abuse repeat itself?

A: In sexual abuse, the whole balance of power is the issue-someone has the power and someone's helpless. That's a dangerous interaction that the victim repeats over and over from both sides.

Once you've been sexually abused, I think you are at a greater risk for being abused again, for many reasons. One is that quality of familiarity. We always look for what's familiar to us. It's almost like an addiction to helplessness, because that feeling of being helpless is so familiar.

On the other hand, the idea of being helpless is something that we all hate, so often victims will try to turn it around and do things that make them feel in control. Sometimes victims will develop eating disorders, because that's about having control over your body and what happens to it. Or they'll become promiscuous or even sexually abuse others.

They might become self-destructive in any number of ways. The idea is that now you're choosing to do this, and you're the powerful one. I think that's hard to get away from. But very often what happens is you do stuff and you think it's by choice but then it makes you feel helpless and ashamed. So you're actually getting yourself back into the cycle of bad feelings that you thought you were choosing to not go into.

You really can be doing things that make you feel helpless and in control at the same time. It's very hard to break the pattern of shame and feeling unsafe.

Q: What happens if you don't deal with the abuse?

A: If you don't deal with sexual abuse, it will keep coming up for you in some way. Just because you're not thinking of it all the time doesn't mean it's gone. It's almost like a virus.

Sometimes it comes up in a pattern of unsafe behaviors, like those I mentioned. Other times it comes up in flashbacks (when you experience a past event so vividly it's as if you're reliving it). Even years later, flashbacks are a sign that the trauma is still active, and you need help with it.

What you want to do is sort of defuse it so it can become a memory but doesn't have the reality of being in the same situation again and again with all the same feelings and bodily reactions. This stuff sits in us and anything can trigger it, like pushing a button, and all of those feelings become alive. That really needs to be addressed for it to go away.

Even if the abuse doesn't come into your thoughts in a constant kind of way, it can repeat itself generationally, in your own kids. In most cases, a parent who has failed to protect their child from abuse is someone who herself was abused and never dealt with it.

Q: How can you break the cycle?

A: The first thing is to find a person that you can tell, who will actually respond, and who will not make you feel ashamed-it's almost as if you need to find a person who will feel the outrage that it would have been appropriate for a parent to feel. Someone's got to acknowledge and want to protect the victim and help them find safety.

But it's very common that either someone doesn't believe you or they blame you for it. And that makes it much harder to tell somebody else. It's very important to believe yourself no matter what anybody says and believes that this was something bad that happened to you. Even if you're out of the situation the other real piece of trauma is that you haven't been believed. That's a whole other thing to deal with.

Q: Where can you get help?

A: There are a lot of places out there to get help. Looking for a place where the abuse can be spoken about is really important. There are self-help groups for survivors of incest or any sexual abuse. There's also individual therapy, and treatments like hypnosis.

In cases of sexual abuse, the victim is never seen. To recover, they have to figure out how they can get themselves seen and acknowledged, as people. They need to be with other people who can look at them and recognize them. After being abused it's like they go into hiding, so the work is to come out of hiding, in a way. That work needs a safe place, a therapy where you can feel accepted and acceptable.

Q: Why is it so difficult to recover from sexual abuse?

A: For kids who get abused, what doesn't get developed is the feeling that you have a choice. Somebody else is more powerful and there's no choice around it. To develop a sense of having a choice is a hard thing.

I think the other thing is that people don't have just one feeling about this. Very often an abusive relationship can be with someone who you do feel loved by or who you admire.

There may be something good about it, or at least it may feel that way in the beginning, so it's a complicated thing. There can be a certain amount of helplessness but excitement at the same time. You might be scared but like the attention. That's why it's so hard to break the cycle-it's hard to disentangle when there's more than one feeling.

Q: How long does it take to recover?

A: It's hard to say. I think it is a process, and some people spend their whole lives repeating abusive relationships or staying out of relationships because they can't stay safe. It really is almost like dealing with an addiction.

To develop the ability to protect yourself takes work. Survivors of sexual abuse don't have a way of trusting their judgment about who will keep them safe. That's a learning process.

It takes a certain amount of work and a certain amount of looking for people who may be unfamiliar-people who can care for you and be careful with you. Talk therapy also helps. It takes courage to talk about what have been secret and painful experiences. The pain may be hidden in what we do, in our bodies, but we need to listen for it and make sure we are with others who listen too.

Where to Get Help

In New York:

Fostering Connections tries to match foster youth with a therapist who will stick with you for as long as you want therapy, for free.

Call director Barbara Pichler:
212-769-2607

Nationwide:

You can find information and search for a counseling center near you on the RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) website: www.rainn.org

Or call their hotline:
1-800-656-HOPE

Your social worker can also help you find therapy in your neighborhood.