May the Scales Fall From Our Eyes
Perry J. Hazeltine, Ph.D.
The greatest stumbling block to recognizing the behavioral signs of sexual abuse in children is ourselves. Children, especially those beloved to us, are innocent and represent an innocence we have lost, which we may experience vicariously through them. Each new milestone a child accomplishes or new marvel discovered helps us to see these things through new eyes.
It is, in fact, because of this very innocence that we, as adults, have the obligation to protect them. This is a heavy burden that we undertake with great love. Our desire to protect is boundless but our ability is limited. It is, however, our less than perfect job that brings about the fledgling awareness in the maturing child that they are separate. Gradually, they learn to take care of themselves, losing their innocence only to rediscover it one day in their own beloved children.
But what if the unthinkable happens? What if this beautiful child is injured deeply on our watch but without our awareness? Imagine that a 7 year old, who has adjusted well to first grade, begins to develop stomachaches and headaches. She may regress into earlier behaviors, such as being clingier. Maybe she also has more trouble sleeping and complains of nightmares. Perhaps certain things, inexplicably, cause her to panic. Maybe she even tries to tell us something. Maybe we even have an intuition of some vague but serious threat, but we tell ourselves it is just our anxiety. Intuition is the natural ability to sense something without knowing what or why we are sensing it. It is a reliable source of information. In the case of intuiting that a child has been harmed, many people inadvertently short circuit their intuition with a denial rooted in the fear of loss of innocence: a fear, too often, greater than the fear that the child has been harmed.
This is particularly true of psychological trauma. There is a prevalence of disinformation, that the young child is impervious to the same event that would traumatize the typical adult. The indifference exhibited by small children when traumatized is easily misinterpreted as calm. It is more likely dissociation, the ability that children have even more than adults to compartmentalize their experience, separating it from the present. The consequence is that psychological trauma which is dissociated is cut-off, and may never become processed and integrated. Or a child’s regression may even be viewed with disgust by some adults who shake their heads at what appears to be a spoiled child who cannot suppress his self-centeredness even in a time of crisis.
I counsel a young woman who was sexually abused by a man in her neighborhood from the time she was in second grade until she was in sixth grade. He ended the relationship sending her into a tailspin of acting-out. She had great difficulty in the break-up of relationships with boys her own age. Her acting-out included self-destructive behavior. Her parents were frightened and her behavior became the focus of attention. I began seeing her in counseling which began in her seventh grade year. Even as she moved beyond her crises and beyond the overt acting-out, she remained depressed, fatalistic, writing dark poems, reluctant to trust and making cryptic references to “a wall” between her and everyone else that could never be scaled.
Despite psychological testing to try to determine why this bright young woman had a lack luster academic record, and despite investigations into possible causes, I missed what her parents had missed much earlier.
It wasn’t until she was ready, despite my blindness, to trust me to tell me in small and halting steps what had happen to her, that I came to know. It is a terrible thing to recognize ones own blindness. But, it is made less terrible if we can learn to see; to not allow ourselves to be blinded be our own fantasy that a child is untouched, or unwounded.
My client has an uncanny ability to sense when other teens have experienced a similar wound. Or maybe it is not uncanny and certainly is not uncommon in survivors. I asked her how she knew, and she spoke of her ability to sense it; to feel it. A sense, that I believe we each have if we do not turn it off. She has paid a great price to learn to trust her intuition. If we can learn to trust ours in reading the signs of a wounded child, her suffering will have more meaning.
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