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

during sessions or who falls asleep) should also look for another therapist.
Mike Lew pointed out to me that incest survivors have lived lives governed by secrecy
and the lies they've been told by their abuser. They are told that what happened didn't
happen. They are told that terrible things were good things. They are told that they are
to blame for their abuse. In therapy they need to be able to reality-check. They need
human contact, warmth, and engaged conversation.
Eliana Gil adds that survivors need help dealing with memories: "You can't say goodbye
to a memory until you've said hello."
Most therapists insist that therapeutic abreaction—reexperiencing a trauma with the
help of the therapist so that the feelings can be reprocessed in a less frightening way—
is necessary to recovery. As Alice Miller says: "As long as feelings can be talked about,
they cannot really be felt. And as long as feelings are not felt, the self-damaging
blockages remain." Therapist Karin C. Meiselman, however, disagrees. "Therapists'
insistence on abreaction scares some people into staying away from therapy," she says.
"In my experience, it is sometimes possible to retrieve and work with memories without
abreaction."
When memories return as uncontrollable flashbacks, says Philadelphia therapist and
incest survivor Roz Dutton, a client has tolearn to "bracket" them—to separate the self
from the memory. In order to heal, she says, "survivors must reexperience the memory
with feeling and in a safe environment and then eventually let it go."
Neither the number nor the detail of abuse memories, however, makes the difference in
healing. Nor does forgiveness of the abuser. Therapists who specialize in incest and
child sexual abuse—and a growing number of clergy and pastoral counselors, as well—
realize that forgiving the abuser is not only irrelevant to healing but often impossible.
More to the point, survivors need to forgive themselves. They must not hold themselves
responsible for what happened.
Mike Lew keeps a photograph in his office of a group of little boys lined up to cross a
street. "I have it here," he says, "so people can look at it and see what a child that age
looks like. We forget how small we were."
Janice went into therapy because she wanted to kill herself over the breakup of an
affair. When her therapist asked about her past, Janice said, "I don't remember a lot
about my childhood. For example, I know my parents and I lived together in the same
house, but I have no memories of my father until after I left home." She reported that
both her parents were alcoholics. Her mother would become so depressed that she'd
lock herself in her room for weeks on end. Janice had to cook for herself, her father, and
her mother.
Janice told her therapist about the affair that had just ended. It had lasted only three
months. The man had abused her verbally but not physically. Most of Janice's previous
lovers—eight in the past two years—had abused her physically.
Janice acknowledged that she drank too much and smoked dope. The therapist
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