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Agoraphobia and Sexual Abuse, Part 3 - The DUH Syndrome

© Katherine E. Rabenau

In her wonderful article last week, Dorothy Neddermeyer talked about the feelings of loss of control which plague survivors of sexual abuse and of our inability to trust. One way in which this plays itself out is what I think of as the "DUH Syndrome," because although we have difficulty trusting others, the most profound and difficult problem - for me anyway- is that we lose our ability to trust ourselves. Growing up in a world where the most profound forms of deceit (physical, emotional and intellectual) are - for many - the food and drink of daily living makes it virtually impossible to trust one's own instincts. While emotional abuse may exist without sexual traumatization, sexual and emotional abuse are Siamese twins. Sexual abuse is not only, or even primarily, physical. It messes with the mind and the spirit through the instrument of the body, particularly when victims are very young. It messes with a child's ability to trust his or her perceptions of reality. As I have discussed earlier, children in alcoholic families live with the insanity of an elephant in the living room, which everyone pretends isn't there (see http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/agor... ). Well living with sexual abuse and incest is like having a hungry tiger pacing the rooms of your home and periodically attacking you while everyone either ignores it or tells you it's just a sweet little kitty and that if it scratched you, well you probably provoked it. Little wonder then, that many victims of sexual abuse have trouble standing up for themselves as they move through life.

In science fiction movies, when the robots are trying to rule the world and humans need to regain control, they inevitably defeat them by overloading their circuits with logically unresolvable problems to solve or by feeding them nonsense verses. The robots heads start to smoke and they stand there saying things like "Illogical. Does not compute. Illogical." And then they grind to a halt. Confrontation and fear for many survivers of sexual and emotional abuse feels a bit like that robotic burn-out, only it's like there's a permanent short circuit which clicks on almost instantly which when we are confronted by lies or situations in which we feel threatened in some way. It is one of the most frustrasting aspects of being me. I'm not stupid, yet if someone I feel unsafe with were to walk into my home and tell me that my cat was really a dog, instead of laughing at them and even though the real, logical, healthy me knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Abby is a kitty, it is almost as though that healthy part of me gets shunted off into outer space or shot with some kind of stun ray and instead of saying "don't be silly," I start thinking, "she's a dog? But she can't be a dog! I'm sure she's a cat. But maybe I was just confused. Maybe she really is a dog." And once this insane conundrum is set into motion, it can continue to rattle on and on in my brain for days or weeks or even years, no matter how absurd it may be. I think sometimes my head even begins to smoke but I'm not sure because I'm too caught up in trying to resolve the grave issue of whether my cat is really a dog.

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