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

suggested that she join Alcoholics Anonymous, but Janice said she could quit by
herself. For several weeks she abstained from alcohol and drugs. Without the numbing
effect of drinks and dope, Janice began to have troubling memories. She remembered
slats of light from the venetian blinds in her bedroom falling on her pillow. She
remembered her father's hand—was it her father's?—lowering the blinds. She
remembered pretending to be asleep. She remembered fear.
Janice complained to her therapist that she was in pain all the time now, sick to her
stomach, dizzy, headachy. She had bizarre pains in her rectum and vagina, and she felt
like gagging. The therapist suggested that Janice join an incest survivors' group. She
agreed that she would but insisted that she didn't really belong there.
In the group Janice met eight women who had been sexually abused. Two of them had
only vague memories, like hers. One had knowledge of the abuse in the form of
physical scars, but no memories. Three women were in the process of regaining their
memories and suffered flashbacks. One was preparing to sue her parents in civil court,
and another had already taken her abuser to court and won a judgment for damages.
"I watched people who felt angry and showed it," Janice says now. "I was still too
scared to feel anger. But I learned from them. I saw, too, that there were things, like
confronting our abusers or going to court, that we—that I—could do. When I told my
mother about the abuse and she screamed at me and asked why I had allowed it to
happen, I went to the group for sup-port. Most of them had had the same experience.
But some had been able to work through it with their moms and now they have good
relationships. I modeled myself on them."
Because so much of what survivors have experienced is negative and painful, good
feelings can feel like abuse. People who are recovering have to learn to tolerate positive
feelings about themselves and others. As author and incest survivor Laura Davis says:
"I thought healing was just another punishment. I thought it was the endless processing
of pain. I thought I was sentenced to healing for the rest of my life."
Eventually, for most, there is resolution. It comes at different times to different people—
for some it takes a year or so, for others it takes decades. The talk therapy, group
therapy, self-help groups, art therapy, the body therapy—in time they work. The past
recedes until it is in the past. Memories are more often memories than flashbacks.
Anger is appropriately directed at the abuser. Sex and intimacy are possible.
Survivors find they have choices, that their actions are not the inevitable result of their
abuse. They can talk about other things. As Alice Miller writes: "The goal of therapy is to
allow the once silenced child in us to speak and feel. Gradually the banishment of our
knowledge is revoked ... we discover our history, our self, and our buried capacity for
love."
"Incest' does not tell the awful things you did to me," writes incest survivor Louise M.
Wisechild in The Obsidian Mirror. "But I will name them out loud, in public."
"Use my name," pleads a woman talking to me on the phone. "All my life I've been
thought of as crazy. I want even one person to know what happened and that I am not
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