“On the Apparent Invisibility of Incest”

How we see and don’t see betrayal trauma

“It is all of society, not just those immediately affected, that protects the secret of child sexual abuse. We have overlooked or outrageously trivialized this subject, not because it is peripheral to major social interests, but because it is so central that we have not yet dared to conceptualize its scope. Much as the individual victim is compelled into silence, self-punishment, dissociation, and identification with the aggressor, we as a society move thoughtlessly to deny sexual abuse and to conceal vast aggregates of pain and rage.”                                                                                                                                             -Roland Summit, “Hidden Victims, Hidden Pain: Societal Avoidance of Child Sexual Abuse” from Lasting effects of child sexual abuse, 1988

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At the end of the last post I wrote:

In August, Mike—vacationing with a friend—came for me in Portland and drove us back to our hometown by way of Yellowstone National Park.

(If the thought passes through your mind: “Well, sounds like a nice brother, but why is she mentioning this? It doesn’t seem relevant or important,” I would ask you to consider why I might mention it, why it might be important.)

I wrote that last sentence because the people I first gave that essay to read told me this is what they thought. Two advised me to delete this mention of traveling with my brother because it didn’t seem important to the essay. One said he couldn’t remember who Mike was, even though I had previously written, and they had read, that my brother Mike had abused me sexually.

They didn’t remember. Or they didn’t connect. In other words, they dissociated two facts: the fact that Mike had abused me and the fact that he was a helpful brother who twice went to a lot of trouble to give me a ride (or maybe just that he was my brother.) None of them considered the possibility that Mike had sexually abused me during that trip. That he possibly picked me up with the intent of abusing me. None even thought: “Oh, God, what was it like for her to drive for days, literally days, with the person who sexually abused her five years earlier? And his friend? Even with amnesia, it must have triggered her.”

With nothing like this passing through their minds, they thought the trip unnoteworthy and naturally suggested that I leave it out.

It’s as Roland Summit wrote:

It is all of society, not just those immediately affected, that protects the secret of child sexual abuse.

Even if you personally made the connection, I ask you to consider this information. It’s as significant as anything I will ever write about. Arguably, it’s a demonstration of a particular fact of human nature. That we all have great difficulty grokking the reality of how a brother—an ordinary guy—could repeatedly rape his sister, or, more generally, how someone who is helpful in one situation can be hurtful in another. It seems our minds are actually designed to not get it—a mechanism that keeps our knowledge of human beings fragmented.

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Jennifer Freyd wrote an entire book about this—Betrayal Trauma—referring to not only child sexual abuse but to any form of betrayal. She saw this need we have to trust the people around us, the people we depend on, as the primary reason we dissociate knowledge of betrayal. This is strongest when we’re children, because we’re the most dependent then, but it’s also true for adults.

This makes sense. We need other people. Specifically, we need other people to help us. We cannot get by in life on our own. We need community. We need family, friends, partners, professionals, and employers. So if someone is good to us—or even if we see that they are good to others—this acts as a block to seeing how hurtful they are. If we truly perceive how hurtful they are, we may separate from them or get angry and alienate them. Either way, they can no longer help us.

Whatever we call it—repression, dissociation, psychological defense, denial, amnesia, unawareness, or betrayal blindness—the failure to know some significant and negative aspect of reality is an aspect of human experience that remains at once elusive and of central importance. -J. Freyd, Betrayal Trauma, 1996

This mechanism is operating most powerfully for the victim of intrafamilial abuse. She can’t see the people who she loves and needs as the same people who violate her. It may annihilate her psychically. It is also dangerous. It is necessary to split, to dissociate. Roland Summit again: “The individual victim “is compelled into silence, self-punishment, dissociation, and identification with the aggressor. . . “

Indeed, I have forgotten/dissociated time and time again, even to the present day.

This mechanism accounts for one of the most horrific facts of child sexual abuse—that more often than not children aren’t protected from abuse by the non-abusing parents or other relatives. Even if a child tells, even if an adult observes the abuse, the adult may not do anything to stop it. Often—incredibly—the child is punished rather than the abuser. To fully acknowledge the fact that their spouse, or another of their children, or their own parent, sibling, or friend has sexually violated someone is one of the most difficult things a human being can do. So, usually, incest is only partially acknowledged. Freyd continues:

Although I propose that not knowing is ubiquitous, I also propose that knowledge is multi-stranded, and that we can at the same time not know and know about a betrayal. Indeed, it is the human condition simultaneously to know and not to know about a given betrayal. The knowing is often the kind of knowledge memory that cognitive psychologists call “implicit knowledge” or “implicit memory.”

This inability to fully know has tragic results. However traumatic it is to be abused, if the fact is fully recognized and one is comforted, supported, and protected soon after the fact, the hurt may not turn into lifelong PTSD and its associated miseries. If, on the other hand, the adults who should protect and comfort are unable to do so, the trauma is compounded.

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What about clinical psychologists? One might think that they, at least, would be educated to recognize this mechanism of denial and dissociation in themselves and in their patients. That they would be the one group of people able to get above it and offer guidance and support. No. Not so. Psychologists are just as prone to dissociation as anyone else. Worse, at least since Freud, clinical psychologists have actually been trained in denial of intrafamilial abuse, particularly incest, and the dissociative amnesia that often results.

Even though many writers, researchers, and clinicians like Freyd, Summit, Herman, and van der Kolk point out the prevalence of incest, it seems that the strength of denial is so great that the truth can’t be maintained.

No one I’ve come across has described this crippling blindness quite so vividly and personally as the psychiatrist Richard Kluft in an essay titled “On the Apparent Invisibility of Incest” which appears in a book he edited: Incest-Related Syndromes of Adult Psychopathology, 1990. In this piece, he puts technical language aside and describes nine instances in his life where he encountered victims of incest but did not recognize what he was seeing.

The first was a beautiful girl he called “the goddess” who he met when he was 8 and had a crush on. She worked at her family’s store in a town Kluft’s family vacationed in. He noticed that over the years the girl began to fade, to lose her luster, and seemed sad and distracted. Eventually he didn’t visit the store anymore.

In his late 20s, he visited the area and noticed the store had changed ownership. As his car was being fixed by a local mechanic, he asked about it:

The mechanic looked at me kind of funny and said nothing. Curious, I asked what had happened. Finally, he sighed and said that the store had been sold when the man who ran it went to jail. “To jail! What for?” I asked. The mechanic looked uncomfortable, as if he might not speak. Very slowly and painfully, he told me that the man had been his customer for more than 20 years, and he had never heard a bad word about him. “But you never know about people, do you?” I guessed that we did not.

“They locked him up for what he did to his daughter. She got pregnant and they said it was him who did it. You never know, do you?”

I had to ask, “What happened to the daughter? I sort of knew her a little when I was a kid.”

“Oh, she went crazy. State hospital. A real good-looking kid. Do you remember?”

Did I remember? How could I not remember?

Kluft drove back to the city where he was a resident in psychiatry and forgot about the girl, and forgot about what the mechanic had told him. To the best of his knowledge he didn’t think about her again for more than 18 years, even though he became a psychiatrist who worked with victims of incest. He didn’t remember until he began putting together the book he edited: Incest-Related Syndromes of Adult Psychopathology. He writes:

I have no other choice but to assume that I found what I had been told intolerable and sequestered it in short order. The very next day after learning that she had been an incest victim, I was back at my residency, routinely maintaining a polite skepticism about patients’ accounts of mistreatment and listening to lectures on the psychodynamics of patients’ delusional accusations against those in their lives.

“Patients’ delusional accusations”!

For a boy to not understand is one thing, for a man to forget a horrible fact —a tragedy of the most extreme magnitude—about someone he once adored and still cared about enough to ask after—that is . . . well, that is what we do. And it wasn’t just this one girl, he describes more than nine individual instances where he observed girls or women who he only much later realized had been victims of incest.

And so the title of his essay: “On the Apparent Invisibility of Incest”

There is at least one set of people for whom incest and its effects aren’t invisible. Pimps. Kluft also writes about meeting a pimp who explained that his prostitutes learned obedience to him by originally having sex with “their fathers, their uncles, their brothers—you know, someone they love and fear to lose so that they do not dare to defy.”

So there you have it. Pimps understand. Psychologists rarely do. Kluft is one of the few who had the courage to finally integrate his personal experiences with his intellectual knowledge and write about it. But how many have read this essay or something similar and absorbed these essential insights?

I suggest buying or borrowing the book and reading the whole essay. Meanwhile, I quote Kluft again:

Unfortunately, incest is a commonplace occurrence. Despite this, it has long been considered rare, and relatively few clinicians develop an index of suspicion for it and for the indirect expressions of its impact. . . The human mind is capable of defending itself from what it finds unacceptable and overwhelming. The pressure to deny the sordid realities of the widespread abuse of children in incest and any number of other forms of mistreatment is profoundly entrenched within ourselves and our society. The naïveté I ascribe to myself in these vignettes is not so much a personal as a societal stance.

I found it disconcerting to realize how much I knew or could have known, but had forgotten, distorted, or otherwise failed to manage straightforwardly. Clearly, I was unprepared to convert the raw material of my experiences into an awareness of incest until many years had passed and I had both achieved some emotional distance from those events and acquired an intellectual scheme in which I could begin to organize and study my awarenesses and was motivated to do so.

And the following which is specifically directed at clinicians (the term “countertransference” refers to the therapist’s emotional reaction to the patient):

Incest provokes extreme countertransference difficulties. Sgroi et al. (1982) remarked that incest is a clinical situation in which the payoff for denial on the part of the clinician may equal or exceed the payoff for denial on the part of the victim. We tend to dismiss the incest victim’s accounts all too often. We often become skeptical detectives rather than compassionate healers and approach the incest victim with incredulity. We make sure that incest is the province of the patient and is remote from our own experiences, and then we further detoxify the impact of the patent’s account by wrapping ourselves in speculations that the incest may not have occurred. The “objectivity” of the clinician who takes an incredulous stance is not objective; it is a retreat from anxiety-provoking issues and candid exploration of countertransference concerns into the realm of wishful (or even magical) thinking.

“Wishful (or even magical) thinking”—this is the history of clinical psychology when it comes to incest. Kluft wrote in the late 80s, a time when psychology, aided by feminism, was recovering knowledge of incest from the damage done by Freud. The 90s saw a new backlash and further damage done by the “false memory” proponents whose falsehoods were uncritically accepted by the media, the general public, and also many psychologists in positions of authority. Any excuse to not fully acknowledge the fact that “unfortunately, incest is a commonplace occurrence” will be seized on.

Thus, society and psychologists still, as Roland Summit wrote, “move thoughtlessly to deny sexual abuse and to conceal vast aggregates of pain and rage.”

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See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.