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Sexual Molestation
Many of the clients who come to me have already experienced
another method of therapy before coming to me. On many occasions
clients will state that they have been told by other therapists
that they have probably been sexually molested. In most cases the
client shares this with me because he (or she) feels traumatized
enough that he believes only something like being molested could
have caused such a scar on his psyche, yet there is no conscious
memory of ever having been molested.
Many of you contacting my website might have been told the same
thing…and feel the same anguish, and confusion. It is definitely
possible to have been sexually molested but have intentionally
buried it beyond conscious recall. Based on my 10 years of
experience I would say that probably no more than 10-12% of all
people who have been sexually molested have no conscious memory of
it. Therefore I generally assume that when a client has no
knowledge of being sexually molested it is because it never
happened.
But what is commonly misunderstood is that the damaging aspect of
sexual molestation is not because it is a sexual experience but
because it is an interruption of the victim's journey in life.
Imagine a nine-year-old girl playing dolls in her room…or coloring
in her coloring book. She is perhaps thinking of one of her
friends she will see in school the next day. Imagine, then, that
in the next few moments her father, or perhaps step-father, enters
the room with the intention of sexually molesting her in some way.
He is not considering her needs…her state of mind. He is totally
preoccupied with his needs. Soon something has happened that this
little girl knows is perverse.
It is perverse not because it is sexual but because it is not
something that should happen to her. This man's regard of her is
perverted and she participated in it. She can not help but
conclude that she is not like her friends. She is not the same
little girl any more. Her friends are not like her. They do not
have the same experience of life as her. She is immediately lost
in some limbo between the world of her peers that she used to
belong to and the way the world was while being molested, which
she can not bear to belong to. Either way, life is not the same.
She belongs nowhere. This alienation…and sense of being different,
and probably tainted and "wrong," now sends her into a red-alert
state. She must do something to compensate for this stain, or do
something to apologize to God for participating in something that
is clearly wrong. Because nothing she does ever really makes her
feel safe, or normal, this sense of being damaged, or "less than,"
never goes away.
What I have discovered is that events other than being sexually
molested can trigger this same alienation. It can be the first
time a young boy (or girl) discovers that a parent doesn't really
love him, or value him. It can be a teenager discovering that the
man she thought was her father is not. The shock of this news can
create in a psyche the exact same sense of being flawed, or on
red-alert, that is produced by sexual molestation. Experiences in
life that make us doubt our sense of the universe…our sense of
order or fairness…shock our systems to the core. If we can not be
sure of what's fair…of how God, or the universe, intercedes in our
lives on a daily basis…or how much God values us, especially
compared to peers, then how do we go about the business of living
our lives? What is important? What matters? If we try to ignore
these questions and go about living our lives without these
answers, they will demand to be dealt with.
If you know you were sexually molested as a child, this experience
may be directly related to you having difficulty expressing your
sexual needs as an adult, but it is important to remember that the
worst aspect of the experience doesn't need to have anything to do
with sex, and sexuality. It is the experience of being sideswiped
in life. Also, if you feel like you were molested but can't
remember experiencing it, then you probably were not molested, but
had a similar shock to your system.
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