Contradictory Feelings (Miss America by Day Re-Read-16: Chapter 2 – The Night Child (continued))

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(The following is the 16th in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

Adding to my previous posts on Chapter 2 of Miss America by Day, something else that stood out and that I found myself thinking of as I’ve re-read this chapter:

. . . it feels good . . . I hate the feeling.

This is how Ms. Van Derbur describes the torment of contradictory feelings a sexually abused child can have about feeling pleasure during abuse.

Ms. Van Derbur attributes her hatred of feeling pleasure during the abuse to her desire to maintain control, as much as possible, over her body and feelings in the face of her father’s onslaughts. For her body to experience pleasure was to lose control and, thereby, allow her father to “win.” I can certainly identify with such loss of control as a factor in my own contradictory feelings—including of pleasure and hating the pleasure—when being abused by my father.

There are, in addition, two other aspects to the extreme emotional-sensory dissonance I experienced while being abused that I can think of:

One aspect could be termed the “punishment guilt factor”: just before raping me, when I was nine years old, my father told me that I had misbehaved and that he was going to have to spank me for it, and then, instead of spanking me, raped me. (You can see me reading passages from Preludes, my short story, that describe this lead-up in the Preludes promo video on the top page and “Preludes” page of this site.) So I believe that, while I was experiencing pleasure during my father’s abuse, a part of me was feeling, if the feeling could have been put into words: But I shouldn’t be feeling good—my father said he was punishing me! And so this part of me would have been feeling a sense of guilt highly dissonant with the sensory pleasure I experienced during the abuse (not when I was being raped but at some other times).

The other additional aspect of emotional-sensory dissonance, for me, involved a feeling of physical pain rising up through my solar plexus that countervailed against the feelings of pleasure I was experiencing in my genitals (at least until my penis became swollen, raw, and sore from the abuse and all pleasurable sensation there vanished), nipples, and brain. As I describe it in Preludes:

At some point the boy—as his father continued to stroke and fondle—began to feel the pulses of pain rising up slowly through his solar plexus from a place that felt infinitely deep. He placed his right hand over the spot where the pain was rising, then tried to keep his body as rigid, unmoving as he could make it. If only he could achieve a perfection of stillness, it would be easier to believe he wasn’t there, in his alcove with his father; that none of this was happening. But the pain continued pulsing slowly up through his solar plexus . . .

And so on.

Power and Frenzy (Miss America by Day Re-Read-15: Chapter 2 – The Night Child (continued))

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(The following is the 15th in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

He was determined to bring my body to orgasm.

                                            Miss America by Day, Chapter 2

The idea expressed here by Ms. Van Derbur is consistent with comments regarding Chapter 2 in my previous post and can be thought of as the abuser’s “orgasm power trip”— that stimulating the abused child to feel sexual pleasure, including to the point of experiencing the ultimate pleasure of orgasm, is,  for the child sexual abuser, basically an egocentric power trip, and, based on my experience with my father, I would agree completely, for, when abusing me, my father seemed utterly uncaring of whether or not I wished to experience whatever pleasure—and agony—that he, by virtue of his abuse, was causing me feel.

Tied in with this is what could be thought of as the frenzy factor. Ms. Van Derbur’s description of the state her father would be in when abusing her—”His hands were hot and his fingers pulsated. He breathed quickly and heavily . . . “—reminded me of my own father’s similarly frenzied state when abusing me.

As for orgasm, one thing I would add is that for me reaching orgasm actually offered a blessing: it took me to a place where I was no longer aware of my father’s presence; where I could feel myself entirely free of his abuse. As I describe how the abused son experienced it in Preludes:

. . . the feeling of being carried away from his bed, his body further and further distant, free from his father and everything else until everything was forgotten and all he was . . . was the feeling of floating on and on through deepest space . . .

Orgasm, ironically, provide this blessing of respite.

Relentless, Oblivious Ego Trip (Miss America by Day Re-Read-14: Chapter 2 – The Night Child (continued))

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(The following is the 14th in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

Continuing with Chapter 2 of Miss America By Day, one paragraph begins:

The night child [the phrase Ms. Van Derbur uses to describe the part of her that experienced the abuse, in contrast to “the day child,” which, having no memory of the abuse, functioned during the other, normal parts of her day-to-day life as a child] tried everything to keep my father out.

And goes on to describe several stratagems she employed in an effort to keep her father from sexually abusing her, such as opening the windows of her bedroom during winter to make the room freezing cold and, thereby, as unwelcoming as possible; hanging a sign she’d taken from a passenger train on her bedroom door that said, “Please go ‘way  and let me sleep”; not taking a bath for days to make herself as smelly as possible; and, as a teenager, wearing Kotex even on nights when she didn’t have her period.

The result of her efforts?

It never stopped him. . . . It didn’t stop him. . . . It didn’t stop him. . . . It didn’t stop him.

Such manic relentlessness on the part of a child sexual abuser in carrying out their abuse is, to my knowledge, quite typical, and, most importantly, in my opinion, reflects the abuser’s utter obliviousness to—and / or utter lack of caring for—the wishes of the child. The abuser, in their completely ego-centric mind state when carrying out their abuse, may attempt to rationalize their actions, including any use of force, by viewing the abused child’s resistance as a barrier that merits being broken through in order to enable the child to experience sexual pleasure. Such seems indicated in the case of Ms. Van Derbur’s father when, the efforts of what could be thought of as her first line of defense (noted above) having failed, he would proceed with his abuse, in response to which Ms. Van Derbur would resort to her second line of defense—attempting to completely shut down her body:

Sometimes I would like on my stomach, tighten my legs and my buttocks, and bring my arms up across my breasts, tightly against my sides.

In response to which Ms. Van Derbur’s father would . . .

. . . slowly begin to rub my back gently, rhythmically and then slowly he would begin to force his hands between my upper arms and my body. Forcefully. Powerfully. Until his hands were fondling my newly forming breasts.

And in response to Ms. Van Derbur’s further attempts to shut down—”I would fight with every ounce of my being to not feel anything he was doing. My mantra was ‘shut down.’ Shut all feelings down.”— her father would say, “Just let go. Just go with it,” in response to which, Ms. Van Derbur writes, “I would tighten my body and then I would tight it more.”

But her father would continue.

Could any disregard for a child’s clear wishes be more blatant?

Whatever the abuser’s particular rationalization or set of rationalizations for their abuse—whether it be that they are teaching the child they’re abusing to experience sexual pleasure, that they’re punishing the child for some wrong committed (as was the case with my father, when he raped me when I was nine, as I describe in Preludes), or something else—it typically shares in common with other rationalizations this blatant disregard of the wishes of the child that the abuse cease immediately.

Shattering and Dissociation (Miss America by Day Re-Read-13: Chapter 2 – The Night Child)

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(The following is the 13th in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

Ms. Van Derbur begins the second chapter of Miss America By Day by describing her father’s abuse in detail and the effects that it had on her in passages such as the following:

He pried me open night after night, lacerating my mind, my body and my soul. Like a delicate piece of crystal smashed into concrete, my father took my belief system, my sense of self, my very soul and shattered it into shards.

Such body- and soul-shattering effects of child sexual abuse are, based on my own experience as well as the experiences of a number of other survivors I’ve known personally or read about, commonly shared by child sexual abuse survivors.

Something else often shared by children being sexually abused is the defensive response of dissociating the abuse experiences from the rest of their lives. Ms. Van Derbur describes this in terms of a “night child,” who experienced the abuse her father inflicted upon her in her bedroom at night, and a “day child,” who led a normal life during the day and had no memory whatsoever that any abuse was occurring. As Ms. Van Derbur says,

In order to survive, my mind created another separate self to stay [in her bedroom] and endure the invasions of my body.

As described in my ebook, Preludes, my mind utilized the same survival strategy by protecting me from all memories, when I was going through my normal daily and evening routines, of what my father was doing to me when he would come to my bed in the middle of the night:

In the daytime the boy did not remember what happened at night. Even at night . . . as . . . he would make his way, despairing, from bed to bathtub, he would begin to forget what he’d seen when he opened his eyes and lifted his hand to look down his body at what his father was doing to him . . . .

For anyone familiar, personally or through reading accounts by survivors of their abuse, with the psychological dynamics of child sexual abuse, it’s not at all difficult to imagine an abused child’s mind utilizing dissociation as the best possible stop-gap solution to the overwhelming onslaught of their abuse experience.

Additional Thoughts (Miss America by Day Re-Read-12: Chapter 1 – A Not So Perfect Family (continued))

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(The following is the 12th in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

Some additional thoughts that reflecting on my re-reading of Chapter 1 of Miss America By Day has brought to mind:

(1)
That a child sexual abuser can have sexual relations with other adults which he or she genuinely, thoroughly enjoys, with the abuser not, in the least, carrying on such relations for the purpose of constructing a false front or cover for their sexual abuse of children (although such relations may, without any necessary intent on the abuser’s part, serve such a function, as I believe they did for my and Ms. Van Derbur’s fathers); with such relations, rather, forming as much a part of the abuser’s core identity as their sexual relations with children.

(2)
That, comparing (non-sexual) physical abuse of children with child sexual abuse, it’s ironic that, while growing up, if I recall correctly, I would sometimes feel myself lucky not to have suffered physical abuse, at least of any significant sort, such as a whipping with a belt or birch stick, or a beating, or anything that would leave welts or other marks, when, in fact, I was experiencing sexual abuse which eventually reached the point of rape—abuse which I was blocking from my mind almost all of the time when I wasn’t actually experiencing it.

Of course, one can’t make any perfect comparison of forms of suffering, and, of course, it makes sense that sexual abuse would be far more something to conceal in a society in which depictions of physical violence are much more readily and graphically shown in mainstream media than depictions of sexual violence.

(3)
One difference between my mother and Ms. Van Derbur’s is that, in contrast to Ms. Van Derbur’s mother’s seeming lack of any interest in the sermons preached at the Presbyterian Church she and her children attended in Denver, my mother took a serious interest in the content of the sermons at Westminster Presbyterian in Nashville, and, in general, seemed to enjoy discussing theological matters. Perhaps this was due, in part, to the influence of my mother’s paternal grandfather, who had been the minister of First Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

(4)
Unlike Ms. Van Derbur’s father, who, unlike his wife and daughters, never attended church, my father attended church regularly with his wife and children.

(5)
My and Ms. Van Derbur’s feelings, while growing up, about the atmosphere of church seem similar, with both of such disliking its authoritarian tendencies, in particular those of a paternalistic nature—not at all surprising considering we were both sexually abused by our fathers. (Ms. Van Derbur notes that, “It would be many years before I understood why I didn’t want another father—certainly not a more powerful one.”)

(6)
The dangers of one parent being largely or completely dominant over the other—as was the case for my and Ms. Van Derbur’s fathers with respect to our mothers—are, indeed, great in situations in which the dominant parent is abusive towards the children and views the children as little or nothing more than his chattel. (Ms. Van Derbur notes: “My father believed he owned my mother and his four daughters. We were his property and he could do anything he wanted with us.”)

I’m reminded of a comment my mother made when I interviewed her about the abuse—that she had been raised to believe that a wife should submit to her husband’s authority more or less without question. Such a belief certainly didn’t serve her well as far as being able to recognize or effectively combat any sexual abuse by her husband of their children.

(7)
That a child can feel great admiration, even adoration, for a parent who is sexually abusing them, regarding, of course, aspects of the parent’s behavior, personality, etc. not directly related to the abuse. Ms. Van Derbur says, “My father was my role model and I adored him.” In my case, I admired, among other things, my father’s intelligence and his having a position as a professor in the Economics Department at Vanderbilt University, and I adored his sense of humor.

Such admiration and adoration can, of course, make it all the more difficult for a child to accept that the very same parent is sexually abusing them, and can, thereby, increase the possibility of a child’s having no memory of abuse episodes or any sort of awareness of the abuse except when it’s actually occurring.