Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

Child incest victims often become adult rape victims. Almost one quarter of the incest
victims Mary W. Armsworth studied went on to be sexually abused by their therapists.
Many incest victims as adults choose abusive partners.
Judy
Judy, who was abused from infancy by her grandmother, grew up with what she
describes as free-floating feelings of shame. "I always felt there was something wrong
about me," she says, "something loathsome."
She married a violent man. She believed that when he beat her it was her fault and
what she deserved. She believed the beatings were a sign of his love. She stayed with
him for more than a decade, leaving him only when she became afraid that her suicidal
feelings would overwhelm her and that she would die, leaving her child alone and in
danger from his father.
Only later did Judy remember the abuse at the hands of her grandmother. "Every night,
I lay awake listening for the sound of her feet on the hall carpet," she now recalls. "I
taught myself to leave my body when she came into the room, and to forget. I forgot so
well that whole years vanished from my life."
When victims do finally remember their abuse, they are often hushed by friends and told
to "put it in the past," to "forgive and forget." But that is precisely what they unwittingly
had done so very long ago. In Incest and Sexuality: A Guide to Understanding and
Healing, psychotherapists Wendy Maltz and Beverly Holman point out that "many
women (estimates run as high as 50 percent) do not remember their incestuous
experiences until something triggers the memory in adulthood."
Roz
"Sometimes my body remembered," says therapist Roz Dutton of Philadelphia, "and
sometimes my mind remembered." Roz was an infant when her father began coming
into her room at night. He placed one hand on het back and inserted a finger in her
anus. He continued doing this until she was two and her baby sister was born. As a
teenager and young woman Roz had no conscious memory of these events, though her
life had been punctuated with "nudging feelings and disturbing thoughts."
Roz became a therapist with a thriving practice. In working with her clients, she noticed
that she had "triggers"—things she heard or saw that sent her into a dissociative state.
These things tended to have to do with certain settings but included once the
unexpected sight at a professional meeting of man's hairy hands. Though she
questioned herself for years in therapy and in clinical supervision, it wasn't until she was
in her early 40s that a chance remark to a colleague about brainwashing—and the
colleague's reply that maybe Roz was afraid of brainwashing herself—evoked memories
of her father.
Says Roz: "As I talked about myself and my symptoms—eating disorders, depression
inability to protect myself from emotion danger, dissociating emotionally—I began to
make clear connections between myself and other abuse victims." Roz's memories
were of early infancy. She remembered feelings of dread and terror associated with her
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