Incest: Does the Pain Ever Stop? A Personal Story

This will be my last post for a while in recognition of April being Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. It is a continuation of my previous posts of April 16, April 12, and April 11. In this post I write of the pain and trauma of incest and its on-going effects not only on the victims, but also on the people who love her/him.

My now ex-wife and I married in March of 1970 while I was a newly commissioned Second Lieutenant in the army and preparing to go to (then) West Germany. During our brief courtship, she told me of the sexual abuse she and her three sisters suffered at the hands of their natural father. I was appalled and angry at my soon-to-be-father-in-law and when my soon-to-be-mother-in-law said I must ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage, I mumbled something akin to “I’d much rather ram my fist down his throat.”

My wife-to-be and her mother were alarmed by my words. They told me that one must never upset “him” (they seldom referred to “him” by name) because one never knew when he would blow up and hurt someone. I had already heard their stories of the terrible beatings he had given his only son, who was by then out of the home and serving in the Air Force. God forgive me, because I played along with their game and did so for many years afterwards.

When we married I knew that my bride had been sexually abused because she had told me. She shared that information, but few of the details and I was too young and inexperienced to understand the horror and dynamics of what she had endured. Still, her pain and suffering were evident to me and increased my love for her and my desire to protect her.

I shall not write about the details of the sexual abuse. I will only say that for many years my wife and her three sisters shared the same bedroom; at night their father would come into it and abuse one or more of the four. My wife said that she was usually awake when he entered the room (sleep was not easy under the circumstances in which she and her sisters lived) and she would close her eyes and pray that he selected one of her sisters to abuse. (Even as I write these words, I feel my stomach tightening and rage building in my clenched fists).

A couple of weeks after our marriage I went to Germany. She joined me about two months later. We remained in Germany for a bit over two years and it was there that our first son was born. When I was discharged, we returned to my hometown of Louisville and I found a job as a social worker.

Our marriage had seemed “normal” to me. However, I grew up in an alcoholic home and can now admit I had no idea what “normal” was. However, within a year of our return to the States, my wife’s moodiness and bouts of depression became more and more frequent. I now suspect that the source of this was the more frequent contact with her family. In Germany we had been separated from both of our families by the Atlantic Ocean; now we had relatively frequent contacts with them.

Being who I am, I began to think there might be something wrong with me causing my wife's depression. My work as a frontline social worker often exhausted me emotionally, especially the encounters with the situations of my clients, which were unlike anything I had ever formerly experienced. I went to see a psychiatrist, which was a mistake because his treatment was exclusively a prescription for an antidepressant medication whose side effects were ghastly. Shortly afterwards my wife began what eventually became many years of psychotherapy.

In her early therapy, the therapist discounted the effects of the incest of her childhood on her present life. Likewise, in our attempts at marriage counseling, the therapist did not believe that sexual abuse could impact our marital relationship. Both were wrong—very wrong.

After fourteen years of marriage, I left my job, which was by then as a social work county supervisor, and we moved to St. Louis where I attended seminary. The almost three years spent in seminary were good for us, except the studies were demanding of my time and the time I would have spent with my family. My wife obtained an excellent and highly respected job and seemed happier than I had ever known her to be.

After graduation, I was called to pastor a medium sized church in southern Indiana. The town was problematic at best: it was economically and emotionally depressed and there was a high rate of alcoholism, drug addiction, domestic violence, and child abuse. My wife went into an almost immediate depression, which was not unusual for outsiders moving into that community. (The new local bank president’s wife did the same thing; he and I decided it was the result of “cultural shock").

About six months into my wife’s depression, I confronted her and told her that she had to do something about it. She agreed to enter therapy as long as it was not in the community in which we lived. So we located a therapist in Louisville. This therapist was trained in the dynamics of sexual abuse and incest and keyed in on that with my wife.

Over the next several years my wife suffered as she began to recall more and more details of what her father had done to her and her sisters—as well as the beatings he had inflected on her brother. At times the memories were so traumatic that she would curl up in a fetal position on the floor and cry. I did not know how to help her: if I knelt beside her to hold and comfort her, she would scream at me to get away; if I did not offer to comfort her, when she stopped crying she would accuse me of being uncaring and callous.

So I, too, again went into therapy. I had learned quite a bit about sexual abuse and incest during the years I had been a social worker; however, my knowledge and skills did not help when the victim was my wife. I searched for any resource I could find and eventually located two books that gave me insight into what my wife was experiencing and how I could help her.

The first was entitled Ghosts in the Bedroom : A Guide for the Partners of Incest Survivors. It was written by Ken Graber, a trained social worker like me, who also married a survivor of incest. He wrote about how confusing and disturbing it can be when memories of sexual abuse—especially incest—begin to return to a person. He spoke of the long process it takes for one to recover from sexual abuse and how the recovery process is draining on the person as well as their immediate family. He also listed a series of stages in the recovery process (see the above link to Ken’s book and read the sample provided). When I obtained the book, my ex-wife was in the third stage—Remembering—and I realized how much further we had to go in the process. Thankfully, because Ken had been through the process with his incest survivor wife, I trusted his observations and the recommendations he made. What I did not appreciate or accept was his caution that the healing process might bring an end to our marriage.

The second book was entitled Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child. This book was written by Laura Davis, herself a survivor of incest. Where Ken’s book gave me insight into what my wife was experiencing from the viewpoint of one who, like me, was going through the healing with her, Laura’s book expressed the needs of the survivor who was in the processand the role of the survivor's partner—“the ally in healing.” She also included stories of nine partners of survivors and the issues each faced. Both books, along with continued therapy, helped me through the traumatic those harrowing times.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, I consider my ex-wife a very heroic and courageous person, although she repeatedly denied that what she did was laudable. At the suggestion of her therapy group, she contacted the then Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and using Kentucky’s delayed prosecution law—which states that the statute of limitations on a crime does not begin until the crime is discovered—based upon her recovered memories of the abuse, charges were brought against her father. In this process, only her youngest sister in her family of origin supported her actions. Eventually her mother admitted that all that my wife had remembered was true. Her father pleaded “no contest”—an Alfred plea—and was sentenced to prison for his crimes.

Following the conviction of my father-in-law, we hoped to get on with our lives, But that was not to be. Ken Graber’s words proved true and after thirty years of marriage, at my wife’s insistence, we divorced. My now ex-wife has now chosen to live a Lesbian lifestyle; I hold no hard feelings toward her. I do believe than our marriage was another casualty of the horror of incest.

It has taken quite a bit of emotional energy for me to write the post. Thus, I am going to take a break from posting on Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I shall, however, make one final post on the subject before the end of the month, in which I shall list resources regarding sexual assault, abuse, and incest.