Why I Sued my Dad
I wanted to be able to watch TV shows and movies without being tormented with flashbacks, the somatic nausea and other gastrointestinal symptoms hallmark to surviving CSA. I wanted to be able to be and feel comfortable with myself, exactly as I was, without my father’s perverse voice echoing in my head whenever I found a woman romantically attractive. I wanted to get over the basic yet blood-curdling reality that my parents would never, ever acknowledge the severity of how their actions impacted me. How I was expected to maintain the veneer of successful relations, of equanimity between us. After everything.
I wanted both of them to stop contacting me. To leave me alone after I said “f*$! you” and “go to hell.” I wanted them to stop getting off on pathologizing me to justify their continued harassment. I wanted them to accept that I was a grown-ass person whose boundaries deserved to be respected.
I wanted them to understand I wasn’t kidding around. And especially, for my father to know in absolutely no uncertain terms, that he could not lie to me, and he remained unsuccessful in his serial attempts to coerce me into denying my own reality for the benefit of some kind of pseudo-validation around my life, from him.
I wanted him to know that I had won in the battle over my own existence, over my own sense of morality, right to autonomy and truth to my narrative. I wanted him to know he had no more chances and no more time left. It was my time, and I was going to be able to live without the ghostly claws of his psuedo-affection and pretend-world to justify what he put me through.
My mother attempted a smear campaign after I was married, in 2014. It was the first time I’d distanced myself from speaking with her on her terms. Instead, I needed some time to myself and new partner at the time. Family members on Facebook were recruited, etc. It was embarrassing, and no real resolution was had. Except that I knew from previous experiences that if I put up a good girl charade and gave my mother copious amounts of credit for my own achievements, she would be happy and less controlling. For a while.
Always time-limited, and seldom internally-driven, my mother’s kindness and support was based on a fear. The fear was similar to and slightly connected to my father’s, by association, and her lack of protective action. She was afraid that her most important job would prove to be a failure. She needed credit for having made so much effort and so many sacrifices for raising me. When I’d reassure her she was fine, I just wanted to get to know her more, or simply be together, it was confusing and again, we ran the risk of her personalizing my requests as inferring she was somehow lacking. It was about performance, not quality of relationship, to my mother. As such, our bond was pretty hollow, except when I relented and let her into a small window of my world so she could fulfil a pretend-role of savior, wise-woman, guide, etc. I had to act happy a lot to avoid being considered ungrateful or difficult as a youth. It was a big price to pay for room, board and some of the best Spice-Girls-era platform running shoes (Baby Spice) you’d ever seen.
The issue was that my mother simply overestimated her parenting abilities and upon discovering she was out of her depth, turned into a toddler and would throw a tantrum at me for being such a hard daughter to parent. Because I had needs and emotions that wouldn’t stay as simple as an 8-year-old’s.
That’s when I remember my mom was fairly reliable and protective, up until around 8. Then, she couldn’t keep up. Instead of asking for help from someone other than my father, she just got mean. She was paranoid about me being sexually abused by boys I liked and hung out with after school. She didn’t know how to resolve her own trauma so she contributed to more of mine. Eight is also when my father’s sexual misconduct began, and when my mom decided to throw herself into her social work degree so she could save other kids better than she could save me. She clothed and fed me, and was interested in me and my child-life. And, by contrast, observing other families’ purgatory as a social worker convinced her our own wasn’t that bad. The role validated her authority as a safe person and mother, while at home, since no one was reporting what was happening, I was just another kid that wouldn’t screen in for a home visit.
What a rough go, eh? But, there were good times, as there often are, in families where such darkness lives. And that’s the stuff I smile fondly about now I’ve finally cleared the clutter that refused to be buried as soon as I began parenting a child. I can truly value and laugh at those habits and quirks we inherit from our parents in neutrality, without any meaning. The amount of butter I enjoy on my toast, my penchant to wash and reuse plastic bags, the rush of wearing shoes in the house, etc. Those were held away from me for years, my brain priming me to avoid the neutral or good memories lest I be tricked to concede my time, dignity and individuation again by being tempted to reconnect. Reconnection, while nice-feeling, most often, led to great emotional pain afterward, as it was assumed the past would be overwritten when I reached out.
My father was such a good gaslighter, a fantastic covert narcissist who invalidated the complaints of the child he treated like an objectifiable woman by manipulating the insecurities of an actual woman who simply wanted to please him and be pleased, in ways only they could understand. He weaponized her love for him to forgive all kinds of sins a la the cycle of family violence, to even discredit and demean her only child. Then, she could be in the right, and a good mother. As long as I was painted to be the unreasonable pain I have no doubt my mother deeply felt I was. So ungrateful, was the main zinger.
My parents had a bookshelf replica of Le Baiser (The Kiss), the marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, that was always prominently displayed. When my father finally left, he took no photos, no art, no momentos of family life. In many ways, my normal expression of emotional pain and her needed actions of getting my father to leave, destroyed the illusion of loving permanency between her and her partner. Motherhood can an agonizing experience, and unless emotionally mature in your own right, it is fairly easy to grow to resent your child. By their very nature, the younger generations of a family are prone to reveal unaddressed shit mothers and grandparents never thought (or always hoped) they’d never have to deal with. What a costly arrangement, this life-giving.
I was just too sensitive, after all. They needed to toughen me up for the big bad world. What a happy surprise for me to discover that the world (when healthy and functional in its basic social codes) doesn’t yell and destroy you for simple mistakes nor demand loyalty in the face of violence. The world, when “typical,” lets you leave those situations, and actually tries to help you avoid violence in the future.
What Helped me Get Here?
Limit contact with anyone who prefers the pretend world of “family violence and sexual abuse doesn’t happen in families.” Elect to spend time with yourself instead of these idiots. Do not cave to their desperate cries for education, forgiveness or affiliation. Chances are, sexual misconduct hit them too in some shade, and their families and friends were successful in gaslighting and convincing them to trade their basic human rights in for familiarity and inclusion in a corrupt family system. You don’t have to cave for their comfort.
If they can’t handle the reality of your life with kindness and respect, it’s their loss and not your responsibility to cajole into decency. Let them sit with your chosen absence from their lives. Personally, I made it clear with one friend by saying, when she continued to put herself in my shoes with absolutely no idea what she was talking about: “look, if you feel uncomfortable talking about this without sticking yourself into my position without having experienced incest yourself, just tell me you’re uncomfortable with it. Because that’s fine, I have other people I can talk to about this, but what you’re saying is invalidating and gaslighting to my experience. I need friends who can be real with me in letting me know if they can handle these conversations with me. I prefer real to ‘nice’ at this point.”
My friend couldn’t apologize, she was stuck in her own past, her own survival mode. Something about my experiences hit too close to her own friends or family who survived incest and who maybe didn’t take it on with as much eventual fury or reconnaissance. She’d told me several times before that they’d buried their experiences, and turned to the community who turned a blind eye to their suffering, in order to prioritize the social health and/or wealth of the whole, to protect the other less despicable members of the family. From what? I’d ask. From the scandal and resulting loss of contacts, she’d say.
Ah, to protect them from having to take action in being good people, I thought silently. It is the cheap out. To me, and to any other good person, good mother, good leader, it is unacceptable. To betray your own kin for good contacts, for business, poverty or food reasons. I’ve been there, I’ve done that.
I could never do that again to myself, or to anyone else. The answer is clear after having lived and loved and helped others through the wreckage for over a decade: I’d rather die than betray people like that. Money is useless without the dignity and the personal freedom to enjoy it.
Building an Emotionally Mature Community & Living in It
My individuation from what she knew may’ve repulsed her. Dare I even say it: was such a voice to fight and take back fiduciary power as penalty for the damage inflicted on me considered, by her, a noted and self-described collectivist, selfish?
I didn’t care, and was happy to give up the friendship. Turns out she was stuck in her own bullshit, and I didn’t have any more time for it. As survivors, our narrative can change from how could you (when someone enables or perpetrates a sex crime) to how dare you! And fight back.
For every one or two unsupportive friends, 3–4 supportive, self-disclosing and encouraging friends emerged. And for these emblems of humanity’s excellence and beauty, I’m eternally grateful.
Wherever people are on their unique journeys of not being a dick and understanding how to support folx recover from incest (whether overt or covert), sexual harassment or abuse, this was how I healed, and I want to extend the knowledge and give others who have actually lived it, as much permission as humanly possible to do the same by making this information known and freely accessible.
I believed and followed these few points of logic to:
- ALWAYS CHOOSE MY TRUTH FIRST OVER ANOTHER’S COMFORT WITH IT. (Not doing this led me into years of CPTSD and self-abuse, which is a common response to trusting shitty people with your personal problems they are not equipped to help you resolve!)
- ANY PERSON WHO DEFENDS, ACTS CONFUSED OR ENABLES THE ACTIONS AND REPUTATION OF SOMONE WHO HAS SEXUALLY ABUSED YOU, IS NO BETTER and NO MORE TRUSTWORTHY than the ABUSER.
In the Nexium Cult special expose documentary films and podcasts, those survivors of the cult accessed several psychotherapists and psychologists who defined the psychological torment they experienced as “psychological rape.” They understood that being isolated, demeaned and rewarded through exclusive social connection, rank and status coerced the sexual abuse they sustained and as a result could be defined as psychological rape. Essentially, when your community enables and betrays you to protect people who give the illusion of leadership, this is the secondary trauma that can either make you want to implode, or want to save the world.
Healing is when you are finally able to prioritize saving yourself and the sane and loving people around you, full stop.
DARVO (Jennifer Freyd) and this kind of him-pathy (Kate Mann) through protecting the abuser when friends encourage their survivor friends to muzzle themselves because of what the community or general population will think, is psychological abuse. It normalizes abuse and encourages open secret-keeping to protect the guilty. Then, the guilty can unscrupulously go back to those enablers to utilize them in skirting future accountability.
Which brings me to my next point:
3) LEAVE THEM.
Your own company is worth 10x what going to the occasional brunch with these numbskulls used to add up to.
Last points:
4) DIVEST and you will heal better and faster than before. To that I can ATTEST.
It can be heartbreaking to discover there may be many people who can’t come with you on your full path to recovery from trauma you didn’t ask for. After leaving and divesting your energies from them,
5) MOURN THEM
Grief can be defined as a strong emotional response to loss: weeping, anger, bargaining, attending rituals honouring the loss, etc. But mourning? That’s a process we have to nurse as an ongoing response to the grief. I allowed myself to mourn the loss of the safety I was denied, the end of the hopefulness of any reconciliation that I’d held onto, and the bittersweet enlivening I experienced when I finally accepted my entire story, finally the tragic parts, told matter-of-factly without omitting any detail, in all of their gloominess. I had waited so long for this lightness because I simply couldn’t accept what I would have to do in order to get free. And that’s lost time that deserved to be mourned.
What can Mourning Look Like?
Sighing deeply, looking back and saying, yes, that’s what happened, left alone with it, prone to this related tragedy and that extended exploitation, how terrible it was — they all were — to happen. And then, after honouring this deeply unique and personal process, moving along to another joy and renewed access to old happy or nostalgic or nuanced memories I hadn’t had access to in years, knowing that I honoured that young one who should’ve had a legal advocate at a much younger age. Sometimes the mourning is peppered in with joy for quite some time. Mourning requires immense emotional awareness, intelligence, and maturity. If you feel alone in it, look elsewhere for others doing similar work. Find them where you can and connect in simple yet meaningful ways to you.
When I was around 10, I wanted to be a lawyer. When asked why, I said confidently, “because lawyers help people.” I remember some people laughing at me, saying “if you only knew….”
But I did know. Those prophetic young words of an innocent girl… people should listen more to innocent girls. And believe them.
Thank you for bearing witness to the awkward yet necessary emancipation and reclaiming of myself over the past 3 years. It’s been a trip. And yes, I feel better now.
Final Thoughts & Dedications
Here’s to all the survivors who never get the opportunity to sue their predators and obtain the kind of figurehead justice representative to the horror they endured. Raise a glass to all the badass people who live their whole lives never telling a soul (except us counsellors) and wait it out until their perpetrators (especially the ones they were married to, or children of) die, before they feel they can properly heal, get angry, grieve and love what’s left of their lives, in peace and in FREEDOM.
I see you, and we have met with one another in the silent witness hostel of my counsellor’s office, in my DM’s or emails. I’ll always respect and care about you. Most of all, I know why you’d do that. And it will never negate the veracity of your experiences.
I move on cleanly and bluntly, publicly, so that others know it’s possible and to NOT ACCEPT PURGATORY FOR HEAVEN.
SEXUAL MISCONDUCT IS A CRIME OF POWER and ITS CONTINUANCE is a SOCIAL DISEASE. Where we can, as a whole, (yes, as a collective), we must DISINCENTIVIZE it as much as possible. AS PUBLICLY AS POSSIBLE. For those who can afford it, to support those who still cannot, from afar.
This chapter finally closed, and I have never been happier.
Best regards,
Amora Sun
