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Agoraphobia and Sexual Abuse, Part 1

© Katherine E. Rabenau

I have resisted and postponed and talked myself out of writing on the subject of sexual abuse as it relates to agoraphobia for months now, but with all the coverage in the news about the Catholic Church and it's difficulties, it seems like the right time to bring this subject up.

Let me begin by saying that as with everything I write in this column, I am not a researcher or scientist. What I share comes from my heart and my soul and my personal life experience. Next week we'll hear from psychotherapist Dorothy Neddermeyer ( http://www.gen-assist.com/ ) who IS an expert on sexual abuse. For now, though, I want to introduce the topic from my personal perspective.

Obviously, not everyone who is agoraphobic is a survivor of incest or sexual abuse, nor is sexual abuse the sole cause (in my opinion) for someone to fear going out into the world. That said, there is no question that for myself and many others, the damage done by our experience of being raped as very young children is profoundly damaging in very complex ways. I have written before about why I call it "rape" and how complicated the emotional and psychological impact on a child's spirit can be ( see http://www.geocities.krabenau/phobia.html ). As children we are, by and large, not equipped to grasp intellectually the impact of what is happening to us, so often it is only as adults that we can even begin to emotionally process these devastating experiences. Sexual abuse is a vile and unwanted "gift" and it keeps on giving.

Early in the column I wrote about the huge component that shame plays in holding agoraphobics inside our homes.( http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/agor... ). Children are taught shame in many ways. My mother fed it to me by osmosis because she herself was so filled with shame on so many levels. One of the biggest scars on the spirit of those who have been molested is a deep and pervasive sense of shame. Again, because we are too young to process our experiences - I was five - the shame we experience is almost like a cancer injected into our bone marrow. We become it without consciously understanding that we have done so. We live in bodies which are agents of fear to us. Because as children we are egocentric, we assume that we are to blame for our experiences. There is more and more evidence that these kinds of traumatic experiences alter our brain chemistry. Everyone I know who has been molested (and there is a painfully large number of them) carries operational scars in how they are able to manage in the world. Most of us have difficulty standing up for ourselves. Our brains may be sending us one message but a kind of brain dead compliancy takes over in the face of any form of confrontation. This isn't always true, but it is often the case. I have a friend who has to check the stove twenty times before she leaves the house. She grew up in a world out of control where danger was ever-present. Even though she knows the stove is off, she has to check it again. For me, one of the most painful residues of my experience is a profound fear of my own body - not just of my sexuality - but of any form of physicality. I am ashamed of my body. I was ashamed of it when I was slim and am more ashamed now that I am obese. Obesity is another one of those psychological paradoxes. In our (unconscious) effort to ward off sexual attention to our bodies, we actually end up drawing a kind of negative attention to them which reinforces our own hatred of our physical self. Again, this is my experience of obesity. Obesity too has many faces and many root causes. Sexual abuse is definitely one of them.