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

urden of life," writes T. Thomas pseudonymously in Men Surviving Incest: A Male
Survivor Shares on the Process of Recovery. "Today I long to live."
"Every survivor deserves to heal," says Laura Davis, coauthor of The Courage to Heal
and author of Allies in Healing. From the time she was 3 until she was 10, Davis was
molested by her grandfather. He began by fondling her, then progressed to rape. She
learned to leave her body by concentrating on the ceiling light. It seemed clean and
pure to her. She split off from herself. She forgot what her grandfather did to her. All she
knew was that he loved her. When he died 12 years ago, she wrote a eulogy. Several
years after he was buried, she remembered.
"I read everything I could find on the subject of incest," she says. "Seven years ago I
found a grand total of three books. Those books helped me to know that I wasn't alone,
but the message I got from them was that my life was ruined. I was now a grim statistic
of child sexual abuse. No one was talking about healing yet. I wanted to find out if I
could heal and how to go about it. Then I decided to write a book about it."
As recently as a decade ago, healing from incest was problematic at best. The
psychiatric community, still in thrall to the teachings of Freud, either disbelieved that
incest occurred or minimized its importance. Therapists often tried to convince patients
that their abuse was a fantasy. If there was an irrefutable history of incest, many refused
to accept the patient.
Over the last ten years, however, therapists who were influenced by the feminist
movement began to listen to their clients, believed them, and pioneered new and
effective treatments. Other therapists followed. Now survivors can use talk therapy,
group therapy, art therapy, and body and movement therapy—the last two of which help
release memories locked in the body. (Last summer I hurt my back. The instant the
physical therapist touched my ribs I had vivid flashbacks to a specific beating that I had
long forgotten. This was not like feeling an old bruise. This was having the entire event
recur.)
Now there are dozens of books on incest and its consequences, self-help workshops,
and 12-step programs to use in conjunction with other therapies. There are even
wilderness trips to help survivors experience their bodies as strong and trustworthy and
to re-pattern reactions to fear. There are also role models to look to: survivors who have
transcended their victimization, traversed their rage, and emerged into the complex
happiness of health.
The earlier a survivor goes for help, the better the prognosis. Victims of incest who
receive appropriate treatment make spectacular recoveries. But effective treatment is
often long-term, and many survivors lead lives too chaotic to accommodate it. Longterm
therapy can also be expensive—so much so that only the solvent and/or insured
can afford it, and many survivors don't have health insurance because they are
unemployed and indigent. Free clinics, which may be able to offer only short-term
treatment, have waiting lists that are months long. Most areas don't even have a clinic to
wait for
In The Obsidian Mirror: An Adult Healing from Incest, Louise M. Wisechild writes: "As a
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