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Consultations
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Listed below is one example of my work. It is a copy of a twenty minute address I gave at the "Sexual Betrayal and Scandal in the Catholic Church: Psychoanalytic, Religious and Social Perspectives conference which was held on November 13, 2004 at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. It was co-sponsored by the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis Trauma Treatment Center and the William Alanson White Institute. The name of my presentation was "Moving from Victim to Survivor to Activist".
MOVING FROM VICTIM TO SURVIVOR TO ACTIVIST “Peace Be With Who?” “May the Peace of the Lord Be with you Always…” And the sun shone through the stained glass windows, embracing statues, robes and people. And that evening, as the sun began to set, she slowly crawled into his bed, “The Mass Has Ended…Go In Peace” And the penis became the exploding bomb, “Remember O’Lord, Those who have Died… And she still doesn’t understand why death seems a viable alternative to life. “May the Souls of the Faithfully Departed Rest in Peace” Amen! Good Morning, I want to thank all the people who have worked so hard to put this conference together with special thanks to Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea not only for asking me to speak this morning but also for her tireless effort working against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and recognizing that there is a much larger picture we also need to be looking at. The poem I just read I wrote in 1984 and submitted it as part of my application to the Women’s Theological Center, which is a one year post-graduate program that is committed to doing anti-racism work as well as Social Justice Work in general. The poem was a reflection of both my personal journey and of the larger system we, however differently, all walk in. This morning I will touch on my personal experiences of moving from victim to survivor to activist… a process that may sound linear but I assure you is anything but. Not unlike you I am sure, some days are better than others for me. There are days when the past intrudes in the present like the sharpest, longest sword that exists; and then there are other days that the past is very far away and I find myself thinking that I am just the coolest woman around. Most days however, are somewhere in between with my past being part of who I am…a part that can both disrupt and inform the present. Therefore, whenever I speak I always begin by making a request to audiences. And so, I make that request of you as well: I ask that should I speak to you this morning without stuttering… without filling with tears…without crying or going silent for a noticeable amount of time do not assume I am strong or healed or that I am not impacted everyday, or indeed, immobilized on some days, by what was done to me. I am a survivor, it is what I and others who have survived do everyday. And…should I speak to you this morning and stutter…and fill with tears…and cry or go silent for a noticeable amount of time do not assume I am fragile or weak or stuck in the past or that I am not strong or healing. I am a survivor, it is what I and others who have survived do everyday. I also would ask that you keep three other things in mind as I speak this morning: The first is that while my experiences are similar to the experiences of many, including undoubtedly some of you sitting in the audience, my healing process is mine…it is what has and continues to work for me but may or may not necessarily work for another. My personal job is to discover what works for me, and my job as a friend or as a professional is to help others discover what works for them. The second thing is that my experiences do not negate yours but neither do your experiences negate mine. There is a wonderful exercise that my first therapist used with me early on in therapy and that I continue to share with others. It is quite simple and can be done with just two people or with groups of people. What you do is have two people stand back to back and say out loud everything they see. After they finish you ask which person was lying. Hopefully the response is neither and after you double check their answer you say “Oh, so what you are saying is that you can be in the same place at the same time and have different experiences? This exercise has been very helpful in working with many people, including some of the laity that still finds it difficult to believe that the very same priest that may have celebrated, supported and grieved with them through births, marriages and deaths also molested, raped and tortured others. Of course, the dualistic way of thinking we are taught both in the Catholic Church and in the larger culture as well, also adds to the difficulty of recognizing many truths. The third thing comes from my belief in the power of language. Just as I prefer to call myself a survivor rather than a victim, I have started to say that I will have long-term effects rather than life-long. About a year ago, in one of my infrequent but rather healthy angry states, I wrote a poem about what I perceived as the denial of so many. It is too long to read here, but perhaps the last stanza will give you an idea of what I am trying to say…after two pages of raving about the privilege of denial and the structures that help support that denial, I end the poem by saying:
But don’t you dare preordain my life and the lives of others who have been abused After writing this, I thought about what “life long effects” meant and how most likely everyone has life-long effects from events in their lives too. Yet, when it came to survivors there seemed to be a lack of hope or potential. I mean it’s not like survivors are the only ones who bring “baggage” with them wherever they go. Please know that I am not trying to minimize the effects of what we survivors have experienced. Nor am I talking about getting to a point where I act or feel like what was done to me did not happen…all of that, as well as other things, informs me and has made me the woman I am today. What I am saying is that life long effects can only be pronounced on me after I die not before it and until then, I prefer to call the effects long term, with my goal being to keep decreasing the power my past has over me. It is to walk in consciousness I seek and to become as whole as I can be before it is my time to pass over.
The sexual abuse that was done to me was done for years by my father, periodically by my maternal grandfather, once by neighborhood boys and two or three times by a priest and two members of the K of C. Growing up, church was family and family was church with both supporting the others behaviors. Not surprisingly, the abuse done to me by my father, the priest and the two members of the K of C has been the most difficult to name, claim it as part of who I am and to change the ways it limits me. I first came to memory of some of the abuse in the early 80’s. By 1984 I joined mostly other women in breaking our silences about fathers and other male perpetrators in what the title of Sandra Butler’s book refers to as, “The Conspiracy of Silence”. Although in smaller numbers, other women and men began to speak out about mother and other female perpetrators. As my personal and academic work continued, not unlike in clergy abuse, I noticed the absence of survivors of Color. Yet, as I moved into the professional arena, my work with women of color indicated that they too were sexually abused in similar frequency; however, their experience of racism in this culture as well as their experience of “church” made their way of healing and breaking silences quite different from that of most white women and men, including myself. I say this to acknowledge some of the survivors who may not be as visible as we who are white…who have support…who have our hearing and our eyesight and can walk. We were all invisible once…so I find it important to not assume if “they” are not here, it did not happen to them. Part of my healing has always involved looking at the larger picture. When I first really called myself a “survivor” I was humbled to join so many other individuals and groups of individuals that had survived so much. I came to understand both how small and big what happened to me was and like the society I live in, for change to happen I first had to accept my experiences for I cannot move from a place I deny I am. There are also other obstacles in creating change. One is the False Memory Syndrome. I remember thinking how much more difficult it would have been for me if I had come to memory after the “False Memory Syndrome” appeared. I, and most other survivors I know really didn’t want their memories to be true and would have preferred being “crazy” rather than having to accept that someone who was supposed to love and protect us instead sexually abused us. I remember saying to my therapist as I was terminating from my first round of therapy that it seemed to me that once again victim blaming was taking place…if not, why wouldn’t they call it “Falsely Accused Syndrome”, something that I know can occasionally happen, but does not give so many perpetrators an “instant defense”. Another obstacle I realized was this society’s need for victims, which allows “us” to become the “exception” or the “other”. Two of the many things this does is it helps some people to minimize the events of their own lives and still others to feel good about being “nice” to us. I often tell supporters not to do this work for us but rather do it for themselves and their loved ones. I fear if people don’t eventually get that the problem of sexual abuse is everyone’s problem not just survivors, they will eventually leave. Confronting sexual abuse and being societal instruments of change is difficult, despite living in a society that in 1993 estimated that there were 60 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse in America.* After a seven-year break from therapy, in 1994 I felt myself spiraling downward. In spite of all my accomplishments, the suicidal thoughts along with the self-hate, feeling crazy, dirty and ugly, not to mention still not liking sex or being able to remember when I first began to menstruate returned. Some never left but now surviving became more and more difficult. I knew more memories were coming and felt strongly if I didn’t get some help soon, I would finally act on my long-time desire to kill myself. Fortunately, I was able to find another therapist who I still work with today. She, like my first therapist, has a spiritual and systemic dimension to her work. After the first three years of therapy, other parts of who I am revealed themselves, and by 1999, I began to remember the abuse done to me by my church family. I remembered my father bringing me to our church and leading me down to the basement. There, he opened a door to a room that I had never been in before but still remains locked at this church even today. There, I was stripped of my clothes and dressed in a white slip, which would eventually be removed and my young body would be raped. When the priest and two members of the K of C entered the room, they began a ceremony that led to the ritual, sexual and spiritual abuse of me and my kitten while my father watched on. In late 2000 I drew an 8’ mural of the abuse and wrote the following poem about it: It’s Hard to Believe It’s hard to believe that wholeness is a possibility It is hard to imagine that cleansing can ever come It is hard to think that healing can happen Maybe only when the spirit returns to where it began ~~~~~~~~ This was and, at times can still be, an extremely difficult time for me. It felt as if in some ways I hadn’t done any previous healing work and old behaviors, except for drinking, returned. Cutting once again became part of my survival, as did my isolating behavior. Even though I knew that speaking my truth had been helpful in the past, what I now knew about my own survival and the church abuse felt too much to tell others. Yet, with my therapist encouragement, I did begin to speak to others, initially a few close friends and then gradually a few more. And then, in January of 2002, news broke about the crimes of sexual abuse and the cover-up within the Catholic Church. It seemed as if there was nowhere I could go where I didn’t hear some male survivor speaking of what was done to him. While I identified with so much that I heard, I wondered where the women survivors were. I began to feel very alone and afraid. I feared that without women’s voices the church was going to try and scapegoat the Gay community yet I knew that sexual abuse of children was not about sexual orientation but rather about abuse of power. By February I decided I wanted to “come out” if you will for several reasons. The first was that I wanted people to know that priest and other church members also abused girls. The second was that I wanted to give back the responsibility and shame for the abuse to the church. And the third reason was that if anyone else came forward with an experience similar to mine they would know they were not “the only one”. And so, with 8’ mural in hand, some of my poetry and drawings as well as a written statement I and a dear friend who is also a Physcologist met with who I refer to as “The Church Lady”. Not unlike most clergy abuse survivors in Boston and elsewhere, I found the experience to be horrible, the church lady insensitive and the experience re-abusive. As a result of it however, I began attending SNAP meetings, where by the way, the majority of people there were women. I also became, and remain, one of the “Side Walk Protesters” which allowed me to meet not only other women and men survivors but also people who believed and supported us. My therapist and I, in Sept. of 2002, met for a second time with a new church lady. Although this meeting was very positive, the church continued to lie and protect perpetrators and re-victimize survivors. My commitment to holding the church accountable deepened and I felt that because the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church had been made public, the potential existed to break the larger society’s denial around this crime. Finally, I thought, not only an institution had been caught nurturing and perpetuating the crimes of sexual abuse, but it was a religious institution and one that claimed to be the moral authority of our country as well. I believed that the church had an incredible opportunity as well as resources, including survivors, if they chose to use them and could role model for our entire culture appropriate responses, accountability and internal changes. I thought that even if they refused to do the right thing, they would have to, for surely the documents in their own writing supported everything survivors had been saying for years and the laity specifically and our society in general would demand accountability and change, not just in the church but in other institutions as well, including the family. Finally, people in this culture would begin to hear that the typical sex offender molests an average of 117 children** and agree that something must be done to protect children, help victims and yes, learn to effectively treat perpetrators, most of who had also been victims as children. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Not only did the church hierarchy blow this opportunity but it also “role modeled” that, depending on the power you have, the people you know and the money that fills your pockets, you can get away with molesting, raping and torturing children. In the dualistic culture of the church and our society, the laity, following the churches lead, rationalized and blamed others for the sexual abuse, as did most people in our culture. Those who protected perpetrators and the church were rewarded and all but a handful of those who perpetrated the crimes remain free with some living and working in our communities. Even the Boston Attorney Generals Grand Jury report, that supported countless allegations, left him claiming that he was unable to indict anyone due to Statute of Limitation laws and that MA had no Child Endangerment Laws. Most non-Catholics behaved as if the “Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church”, was only a “Catholic problem”. And finally, the church manipulated, and continues to do so, our First Amendment from one of insuring our right to practice any religion we choose without fear of retribution from the state to mean that the church can behave anyway it pleases, including the commission of crimes and the state cannot do a damn thing about it. Cannon Law and church secrecy has resulted in the church justifying holding the largest number of names of unregistered sex offenders. While this may all sound discouraging I am grateful that some of us have moved from being just victims…others have moved from just sitting in their pews…while still others who thought it was not their problem because they were not Catholic are recognizing that the sexual abuse of our children and the generational patterns that continue without intervention is every ones problem. Conferences like today, legislative reform committees like the one I am part of in Boston which is working to repeal the statute of limitation and some of laity saying no to secrecy are slowly increasing the foundation for accountability and change in the Catholic Church and hopefully, will ultimately increase the foundation for accountability and change in the culture we all share. The cost of victimization on both a personal and collective level is high and on-going movement from victim to survivor to activist requires support and challenge. It requires looking at power dynamics and naming the power I do have in any given situation and then making a decision about how I will use it. It requires acknowledging that there are many types of abuse, both individual and collective and, in the case of the church, however differently, all people of faith were victimized and betrayed. And it requires truth telling and soul searching and understanding that there can be many truths. Therefore, my work is about so much more than just me or any other individual survivor. As I began to understand that surviving is what I know and living is what I am learning, I also began to understand the responsibility that comes with living. Today, along with so many others, I am an active participant in my own life and an activist in the society we all share. In that vain, let me close with one more poem . I wrote this after hearing, watching and feeling Maya Angelou perform one night. I wanted to write something up beat…something with power and rhythm…something that was very different from what I normally write and reflected more of who I and other survivors really are. I dedicate it to survivors everywhere: We Are More Than… Listen! Something ARE YOU LISTENING? We are more than just victims… you know all about that part of us…but… No longer do we try to rationalize… We used to…yes…that’s true And it’s true some of us were immobilized…paralyzed… terrorized… And while we know we will No longer do we have to analyze…sanctify…fantasize… WE ARE WOMEN ..... WE ARE MEN Moving gracefully…deliberately…confidently… Victimized……YES........ Victims…… NO WE ARE WOMEN AND MEN WHO SURVIVED! By Kathleen M. Dwyer *It is estimated that there are 60 million survivors of childhood sexual abuse in America today. **The typical child sex offender molests an average of 117 children, most of who do not report the offense.
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Copyright © 2005 Kathleen M. Dwyer. All rights reserved. |