Living with Incest, Family Secrets Exposed

Watching this documentary, made me realize how easy it was for siblings and family members to picture me as nothing but a liar, out for some hidden, non-existant gain. Seriously, what possible motivation does a child or an adult have that they would blatantly talk about being sexually abused, raped by a family member? The only reason is to free themselves from the pain and shame of being forced to keep secrets for years and decades. Freedom can be found in words, truth spoken. The emotional pain is lessened and can start healing Only with the spoken words.

People see what they want to see, especially in families deeply entrenched with physical and sexual abuses. No one wants to believe a father could molest his daughter week after week, year after year.

If so, why didn't she tell anybody? Like anyone would believe one little girl over a family's rally cry behind the good husbandfather. Threats were constant, violent and frequent. 

It's good to see incest being talked about.

Truth is truth, even if it's ugly and makes your stomach turn and you don't want to believe it.

Incest Happens

Talk about it

Don't ever let the perpetrators win

Start healing

Speak your truth

I write a book and went into a fog

I published on the 25th of August. Immediately we shifted into a clouded room, ethereal and removed from reality. Couldn't think straight or form a complete sentence. 

10 days out and I've had hours of clarity. Then, I felt the return. Sentences broke apart in my head as soon as they formed. I muddle empty handed from room to room. I think a thought only to know I've list it seconds later. Looking around. Can't find the line, the path. I know I'm missing something. Mostly, my lost thought.

I am cloudy and removed now. Thinking time is over.

Slowly getting used to post publish, our new 🌎 world.

Visiting a Middling Land

In the ten days since publishing, Surviving Incest and Childhood Prostitution, I have been as if in a daze, numbingly walking through reality, relatively unaware and Highly Dissociative. 

It's like I'm sitting in a large, round room, with elongated near ceiling to floor windows, open with soft white drapes gently billowing. Around me are Others also sitting. The room is filled with cloud and we can't clearly see each other.

I hit the Publish button on Amazon KDP and everything changed.

The seven years of intense therapy had coalesced into words spread upon 91 pages. Memories that were written and experienced first person from 2to3 to 9, all flowed into neat, concise, informative chapters.

And all the secrets we have kept hidden and locked away, became unlocked. We became real. We became free. So, please pardon me if we continue to sit in stunned silence as we ponder the top of this very tall mountain. The view is amazing.

Surviving Incest and Childhood Prostitution

I wrote a book. It's awesome and scary and new and freeing and amazing!!

Despicable, My Mother Trained Me to be a Child Prostitute

The memories of being 5 years old have become quite clear these past two, three weeks. When I was 5, my mother struck a deal with the neighborhood, corner store grocery man. I would sexually service him every Monday in exchange for a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, and flour or sugar or baking powder. I also received one or two quarters and a sucker or handful of candy.

I would feel so proud carrying the grocery box home to my mom. She would smile big with her red lipstick. She said I could keep the candy for myself, I didn't have to share it with my brothers, because I earned it. Just like daddy earns his paycheck, I earn my candy and quarters.

Mom called me "whore 1". I don't know if that was a joke or what but she smiled when she said it. She smiled with the grocery box. She smiled when she called me to go over to take care of my customer.

Mom said that working with Gustav, the German grocer, was like doing the stuff I did with daddy but different. She said each man liked it different, their way, a certain way. My job was to pay attention so I would automatically know how to do them without them having to ask. That was a big part of my job.

Mom didn't want me to talk about being with Gustav to daddy much. She said daddy would get jealous so I should mostly just talk to her about it.

I don't know if it was ever said or if it was just another straight index finger held on lips but it definitely was a secret not to be talked about to anyone but her.

How much can you do with a penny on your knee

I had a dream that was broken and fresh when I awoke.

Seeing my father, sitting beside me, in an ultra, bizarrely small car, at the top of lookout hill, in Grand Rapids Michigan, after a treacherous drive up the narrow road lined with large, sharp rocks, and he was looking at me and I could readily see he was holding up a Lincoln penny between index finger and thumb, as he said, "how much can you do with a penny on your knee?"

It makes me queasy and sick inside to recount this turn of phrase as it is a ditty, dirty, a dare, a task, a secret, an allusion to something of an illicit and sexual nature, an act repeatedly performed, yet another sporting "game" that only my father and I would play alone and away.

Maybe it was a "car game" as those were different and only enacted in a vehicle. 

I don't know much for sure, other than this phrase elicits inner emotional distress and makes me want to run and recoil. 

I Didn't Know How To Make The Incest Stop

 My dad molesting me was my normal. He had begun sexually abusing me from before I could walk or talk. I remember. I was there. This happened daily or every other day for my pre-school years. Kindergarten it seemed to skip a day here and there. The incest grew more infrequent as I got older, partially due to dad being less sexually wanton and partly due to his finding and using other victims. My dad raped dozens of children within his own family.

I was in my teens and dad was still raping me. Once I started working I managed to find an older boyfriend in order to escape dad's house and the city he lived in. It's difficult to admit but I was so brainwashed and my mind so fractured by dissociation that the incest continued till I was in my twenties.

Getting married and moving away worked to quell it. Divorce and being unable to work forced me back to my hometown, even living within my parent's house. My mental illness and subsequent disability determination meant I had very little income and resources. I was awash in blackouts, anxiety, substance abuse and incest. I could not figure out how to make the incest stop.

In my early twenties, I began admitting myself to psychiatric hospitals because I wasn't able to cope with every day life. Each visit produced a different diagnosis along with new medications. I was seeking mental health care, yet the incest remained deeply hidden within my psyche and away from public view.

Even if the Incest had been in my conscious awareness, there was not a soul in my family who could have stopped my dad. I was unable to confront him alone. I could not figure out how to make it stop. There was no family member safe. My mother had known about the abuse thus agreeing it was okay, in my mind. She would be of no help. Where would I live if I had to pay for my own apartment on my meager disability income? Who in the family would even believe that dad, a father, would be capable of doing such things to his own biological daughter? 

One on One, dad and me, I could not make him stop. 

I was trapped with no way out.

I was 26 year old. My dad was still forcing me to have sex with him.

I had little money. No human resources to turn to for guidance or assistance.

I could see no solution. I would either be committed to a psych institution for the remainder of my life or my life would end by my will.

There was Only One Solution, I realize thirty years later. I had to leave my entire family, drive 120 miles in the dark in a rickety old VW Beetle that had only one working headlight, and throw myself upon the mercy of the psych hospital I had been to three times prior. From that point, from the in-patient hospitalization, what would happen after, I could not fathom. 

I escaped the incest. I ran in the middle of the night. I begged for admission to the psych hospital and I started, at 26 years old, I started talking about the incest and child prostitution that had been taking place since as long as I could remember.

The waking nightmare of incest and forced prostitution had stopped.

My new fresh Hell was discovering, uncovering and revealing the extreme extent of my sexual abuses.

I Survived. I did the only thing I could to save my own life. I stopped the incest.

After years of twice weekly therapy, I started publicly writing and talking about my experiences. I told my family what dad did. Most chose not to believe me, some even being others he molested, too.

Incest has been part of my family for at least three generations on my father's side as both his mother and grandmother sexually molested me as well. It's the Cavanaugh family way of life.

Stop Incest. Start Talking.