Dancing With Daddy: A Childhood Lost and a Life Regained by Betsy Petersen

Dancing With Daddy: A Childhood Lost and a Life Regained

by 

Betsy Petersen

Timmy Cham's review

Sep 19, 2020  ·  edit

really liked it

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."--William Faulkner

How much of our present behavior is just an aftershock
of a traumatic earthquake which occurred in childhood?
Betsy Petersen's memoir of recovery from incest provides
an admirably detailed and poignant portrait:

I did not know what I was doing. I only knew I was angry
with [my children] and they didn't deserve it. Until I
had gotten back the missing parts of my past, I couldn't make
the connections between my anger at my children in the
present and the numb compliance of my childhood.
(page 93)

Through a memoir which reads like a novel, Petersen recounts
her struggles to reclaim the memories of what was done to her
--and how her childhood trauma later impacted her attitudes
and feelings about sexuality (49-51), motherhood (81-96),
money (109-119), menstruation (115), people-pleasing (117)
and food (120-124).

An insightful book--for survivors and their loved ones.

Reclaiming Our Lives: Hope for Adult Survivors of Incest by Carol Poston and Karen Lison

 Reclaiming Our Lives: Hope for Adult Survivors of Incest

by 

Carol Poston,

 

Karen Lison

Timmy Cham's review

Aug 22, 2020  ·  edit

it was amazing

What does it mean to lose one's childhood? Is there a way to reclaim lost childhood? These
are the pivotal questions at the heart of Poston and Lison's insightful and sensitive account of incest and its survivors.

The first six chapters painfully recount case-studies of incest-survivors, describing their experiences. In essence, an incestuous childhood is a *lost* childhood (Chapter 3). The predictable consequences of this lost childhood include trust-issues (Chapter 4), a lack of self-esteem, and a feeling of unsafe powerlessness (Chapter 5). The adult consequences of this poisonous triad of losses is obvious: lacking a sense of safety, lacking an ability to trust, lacking self-esteem, the adult survivor of incest is handicapped in her ability to live up to her God-given potential--to become the Best Person they can be.

We can put this in terms of Maslow's famous "Hierarchy of Needs." Without Safety, a person lacks the second level of Personal Needs. Without trust, a person is handicapped in their ability to build fulfilling Relationships--i.e., the third level of Maslow's Pyramid. And without a sense of durable self-esteem, the adult survivor of incest is left without a sense of Purpose (which is the fourth level of Personal Needs). Since the fifth, highest level of personal needs--Self-Actualization--depends upon the fulfillment of the previous levels of Personal Needs, it's unsurprising that the survivor of incest encounters serious Problems of Living in adulthood.

The book's remaining two chapters turn to how the damages of an incestuous childhood might be healed. Chapter 7 lists "Steps of Growth" for the survivor to assimilate and aim for--with the help of a counselor and/or a support group. And Chapter 8 lists a set of 26 A-through-Z practices (pp. 218-257) which comprise a Life in Recovery.

This book is insightful--not just for survivors of incest, but for anyone whose childhood scars have left them with trust-issues and fragile self-esteem. I'd gladly read this book again.

Review of The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison

The Kiss
by

Kathryn Harrison

 

 

"I somehow miss what I don't want to see--that my father himself is selfish, a narcissist, dangerous" (page 80)

Biologically, it was incest. Psychologically, it was devastating. Emotionally, it was toxic.

It begins when 20-year-old Kathryn Harrison's father, after 10 years' estrangement, travels to meet her--and forces an assaultive kiss on her. "I know it is wrong," Harrison recounts, "and its wrongness is what lets me know, too, that it is a secret" (page 69). The experience leaves the daughter isolated: She abandons school; she flees from her friends; she walls off her boyfriend ("Everything," she says, "takes more energy than I have" (page 75)). The experience makes her physically sick: shingles, narcoleptic sleep patterns, pneumonia, bulimia (pages 118, 166, 170). She begins cutting herself: "It's...a desire...for manageable pain, bleeding that can be stanched (page 153). The experience leaves her alienated from herself: "I can see past and through [the kiss] to the life I used to have, but, mysteriously, the kiss separates me from that life" (page 71).

What made the daughter so vulnerable that her father could so cruelly exploit her? Harrison spent her girlhood and teenage years trying to make herself invisible (even to the point of employing anorexia to "make [her]self smaller and smaller until [she] disappear[s]" (page 39)). And yet, her abusive father's eyes "somehow...see me into being" (page 63). The daughter has also been taught to remain silent: "I begin to learn the wisdom of keeping my feelings to myself" (page 36). In a world of pain, starved of love from her mother, the daughter begins stealing suicide-intended Seconals at age 14, and is anorexic a year later.

The very thought of such a suffering young woman being targeted by her long-estranged father--who cruelly exploits her hunger to be loved and appreciated and seen--makes for devastating reading. It will be a rare reader who can read this memoir without tears.

The daughter finally frees herself from her narcissistic father's vortex--thank heaven for small favors--and manages to craft a married family life of her own. That Kathryn Harrison could manage this, after all she's suffered, testifies to the authors astonishing inner resilience.

A unique book--a singular portrait of the racking torture a father's exploitation can cause a child.