‘It Is Absurdly, Obscenely Common’: Incest Survivors Speak Out
We must discuss a form of abuse that society has stigmatized for far too long.
Content warning: descriptions of sexual violence
Recently, I email interviewed other survivors of incest — people who were sexually traumatized by family members during childhood. What I found is that each survivor had worked through a journey, a detective’s case of their own life, to navigate how the abuse happened to them.
When I was 25 — spurred by triggering incidents and my first foray into therapy — I launched my own investigation into why I’d always felt a “sickening awareness,” as I’d read it once described. My discovery: I’d been sexually assaulted during childhood.
An image of my mother raping me as a kid had haunted me since I’d recovered the memory, though I couldn’t make sense of it, or place where it was from. As emphasized during my many interviews with survivors, trauma memories — sometimes remembered since the event of abuse, or sometimes later recovered — can operate differently than normal, more narrative memories.
