On Incest

You asked me to write on incest but I think I already did months ago. I have treated a number of prostitutes, including one in France who was the daughter of a Nazi officer. Nearly all of the prostitutes had incest as a child. Of all the women psychotics I have treated a good ninety percent of them had incest very young. There is nothing more devastating than incest for a woman. Also for boys but that is very very rare. I have seen one case; he was in great pain but not psychotic. In incest the person who is supposed to be your protector becomes the danger, and since the mother is nearly always complicit in this crime, and it is a serious crime, the child has no place to turn. She keeps it all in to horrendous effects. It is not less a crime when person of the church, those holy beings, commit it. The result a lifelong misery. No amount of money or apologies will help. It can mean I am helpless and hopeless not worth anything, not worthy of proper love---worthless. There are many reasons they turn to prostitution but they learn soon that their only key role in life is to serve and to be abused. They come to expect it and lead lives of great danger as a result. And worse, the mothers, glad to be relieved of sexual importuning, blame the child for seducing the father; as if a young child could ever think of that or calculate such behavior. So the pain is doubled: they are abused and then blamed for it. How can anyone survive it? And of course, several of my patients were warned that if they told they would be killed.

The amount of pain this all leads to is beyond imagination; it takes months and months of reliving before they can even get to it. It is most often deeply buried. Do not think that any other therapy that avoids feeling the pain can even touch the problem. We have films of some of these women reliving incest. It will be shown in some months. You cannot begin to imagine what happens to these girls. The fury they feel, pounding the walls for months on end. And of course they are usually into drinks and alcohol because of their pain. My German girl did not crack up until her father abandoned her for her younger sister. She was a severe alcoholic, coming to sessions dead drunk. I had to discharge her because she was too drunk to benefit from sessions. She needed in-house therapy, something we cannot do. Churches who allow abusive behavior are nothing more than a criminal enterprise. If any other groups, not religious, did the same thing there would be an outcry for prison for them. Religion covers a multitude of sins.

The girls are forced to keep the terrible secret inside until they literally explode, their thinking crashes; they are often ADD as that pain keeps bubbling up interrupting thinking. One girl who I wrote about, starting hallucinating on the street. She was a former patient who now realized something bad was happening. She came back and opened up to her incest which was totally unconscious. The amount of pain she was carrying around was enormous; no wonder she was barely functional. Of course many of girls become lesbians; men are dangerous and to be avoided. The avoid pain by avoiding anything that reminds them of men. Will medication help? Of course. But it helps repress. Is that what we want? The pain needs to be expressed, in small titrated doses.

We do not want these women to be overwhelmed. So we go slow and never enter that area until the patient is ready for it. When they finally get there they cannot wait to relive it; they know that they are finally going to eliminate their suffering. To be rid of the pain you have to feel it; there is nothing else we can do.