Abstract
This article analyzes the narratives of survivors of father−daughter incest using 20 in-depth interviews with women, each asked to choose a title for her life-story and reflect on its meaning. Three narratives emerged: “Surviving” tells of a struggle for personal achievement in an independent life alongside intensely traumatic experiences and negative feelings, “Fighting Back/Seeking Vengeance” tells of aspiring to strength by acting on their will to fight back and desire for revenge, and “Growing” reflects the wish to fight and win a place in the world through a “rebuilding” process. The conceptualization of incest survivors’ life-narratives is based on the dialectical perspective.
Keywords
Child sexual abuse (CSA) includes a wide range of inappropriate sexual behaviors inflicted on a minor by an adult that are aimed at gratifying sexual needs. Intrafamilial incest is sexual intercourse committed by family members whose marriages are prohibited by normative rules or by the law (Courtois, 2010). Incest abuse can be a one-time event, but is often drawn out over the course of a relationship lasting years. Incest abuse manifests as sexual behaviors ranging from ones that do not involve physical contact to ones including full penetration and may be directed against victims of the same sex or not. Various behaviors associated with sexual abuse include tenderness and camouflage of love, seduction, grooming, intimidation, and even coercion.
The prevalence of intrafamilial CSA presents a complex picture. Russell (1986) found that 16% in a sample of 930 women in San Francisco reported at least one experience of intrafamilial CSA by the age of 16 and Finkelhor (1979) found a prevalence of approximately 10% in his study of 530 female students at six universities in the United States. It should be borne in mind that these samples include abuse by stepfathers, father-figures, and caregivers rather than biological fathers only as in this study. There are scant data for the prevalence of incestuous abuse by biological fathers. In Sariola and Uutela’s (1996) study in Finland using a random sample from 409 comprehensive school classes of approximately 9,000 15-year-olds, 2% of the girls reported sexual experiences with biological fathers and 3.7% reported sexual experiences with a stepfather.
Literature Review
Incest as a Traumatic Life Experience
Intrafamilial CSA constitutes a critical life-shaping experience in women’s lives (Herman, 2000), especially when perpetrated by a father. Incest victims tend to describe feeling as though they have remained under the abuser’s control even after the sexual abuse has stopped (Lorentzen, Nilsen, & Traeen, 2008). Adult women survivors of interfamilial CSA are always on the alert, and they relentlessly struggle to contain the perpetrator and relegate him to the background in order to be able to give meaning to the abuse and to cope (Eisikovits, Tener, & Lev-Wiesel, 2017). Briere and Runtz (1993) refer to the effects of CSA as psychological toxicity. Negative emotions such as pain, disgust, betrayal, and shame dominate intrafamilial CSA survivors’ experiences (Phelan, 1995; Platt & Freyd, 2015). When a father—one of the two most trusted figures in a child’s life, from whom a child expects to receive love and protection—commits incest, he betrays and violates the most profound moral standards in human relationships (Courtois, 2010). Traumatic events and complex trauma have a profound impact that can erode people’s most fundamental beliefs about themselves and their worlds (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). Hence, individuals remain mentally “stuck” in their trauma and experience elevated levels of psychological and social distress (McCann & Pearlman, 1990).
This qualitative study examines the narratives of women who experienced incestual relationships with a biological father. All the study participants described the sexual relationships with the father as traumatic. The study encompassed a number of content domains: the story of the relationships; perception of the impact of the incest on the emotional, interpersonal, familial, and social spheres of life; the experience of the disclosure process; the impact of the disclosure on the family; the perceptions and feelings about the responses of various welfare and legal systems at various stages of intervention and the effects these systems have on the lives of survivors; and the impact of exposure and involvement of social systems on relations with and within the family.
Father–Daughter Intrafamilial CSA
The pervasive and sustained stress of intrafamilial CSA tends to most affect an individual’s self-development, specifically the development of physical and psychological self-integrity and the development of self-regulatory processes, particularly regulation of affect and impulse control (Courtois, 2010; Hanson, 1990; Herman, 2000). Intrafamilial CSA survivors are at a significantly greater risk than the general population for psychological and social problems such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, marital difficulties, suicidal ideation, self-blame and guilt, eating disorders, substance abuse, and conflictual interpersonal relations (Kinzl & Biebl, 1992; Maniglio, 2009; Stroebel et al., 2012). Intrafamilial CSA disrupts both the sense of self and ability to have satisfying relationships in which one feels loved and protected, especially in family and intimate relationships. Intrafamilial CSA abuse can be the cause of poor social adjustment, feelings of anger, isolation, and impaired judgment about the trustworthiness of others (Cole & Putnam, 1992; Courtois, 2010; Daugherty, 1984; Herman, 2000; Stroebel et al., 2012).
Research has contributed significantly to understanding the impacts of intrafamilial CSA on women’s mental health and their coping, but less attention has been given to how intrafamilial CSA survivors integrate their experiences into a life-narrative.
Narrative
According to the narrative perspective, human beings live and interpret “reality” in symbolic language systems: namely, in the form of stories (e.g., Bruner, 1990; Josselson & Hopkins, 2015). The power of narrative is in organizing intentionality of time and finding causative relationships between a series of isolated events that lead to a specific outcome, thus creating meaning beyond the content that is expressed (Goldie, 2014; Polkinghorne, 1988). Ricoeur (1984) wrote that in a narrative, the past, present, and future are intertwined and mutually co-constructed.
In constructing a narrative, individuals demonstrate their ability to aspire to live actively in “reality” and to select the meaning of their personal experiences (Gabriel, 2000; Murray & Sargeant, 2012; Neimeyer, 2000). Sarbin (1986) claimed that narrative constitutes a productive metaphor in which individuals can construct their existence by choosing to omit or add detail that is consistent with their sense of identity. Selfhood knows the self only indirectly through self-interpretation of the form it takes in the narrative (McAdams, 1996; Schechtman, 2011). In creating a self-narrative, individuals engage in a meaning-making act; put another way, a metastory that lends cohesiveness to a life-story plot (McLean & Morrison-Cohen, 2013).
Self-narrative is conceptualized as a complete story of a special purposeful type that each human being naturally constructs to bring together different life experiences (McAdams, 1996). As such, self-narrative “organizes the ‘micro-narratives’ of everyday life into a ‘macro-narrative’ that consolidates our self-understanding, establishes our characteristic range of emotions and goals, and guides our performance on the stage of the social world” (Neimeyer, 2004, pp. 53-54).
A narrative is born out of the tension existing between different potential versions of one’s self-told life-story. Its aim is bridging across three different selfhoods, which are not always stable: a selfhood that was experienced in the past, a selfhood that feels and acts in the present, and a hypothetical selfhood of the future (Goldie, 2014). Narratives have therapeutic value especially in acute, ongoing or past, traumatic situations that undermine the individual’s worldview and self-perception (Neimeyer & Anderson, 2002; Reissman, 1993; Wigren, 1994). Becker (1999) wrote that when the core life events were traumatic, narratives enable storytellers to create different alternative interpretations of past events and acts, thus shifting the meaning to past choices.
Narratives and Incest
Various studies of intrafamilial CSA survivors focused on how survivors act to integrate the sexual abuse into their life-narratives. These studies did not differentiate between specific types of relationships, but rather indiscriminately included survivors of various familial incest relationship types, including biological fathers, stepfathers, siblings, and uncles. In general, women seem to have to cope with containing CSA and its consequences throughout their entire lives. Thus, we may think of women survivors of incest as active agents who make meaning of their experiences and integrate them into a coherent life-narrative. What we still have not sufficiently identified are the recurring motifs that characterize CSA survivors’ strategies for integrating their experiences into a life-narrative.
Coping with the presence of the abuser, be it a physical presence or a psychological one, has been addressed in Eisikovits et al.’s (2017) qualitative study of 20 survivors of intrafamilial CSA, 10 of whom were abused by their biological fathers. The authors discovered that “. . . most of the women continue to live experientially with the perpetrator throughout their lives, with the experience of his presence varying in a continuum from total invasion to total encapsulation” (p. 222). In integrating the physical or symbolic presence of the abuser, there is a struggle between the forces of intrusiveness of the experience of abuse and of dissociation constructed in order to be able to contain the intrusiveness and hurt, both on the physical and psychological levels.
Coping with negative emotions to integrate them as a lifelong motive was found in the study carried out by Negrao, Bonanno, Noll, Putman, and Tricket (2005). The authors found that CSA survivors, especially those who disclose the fact of the abuse, verbalize shame, humiliation, and anger. The need to manage powerful negative emotions was also indicated in a study by Morrow and Smith (2005), who investigated personal constructs of survival and coping by women who survived CSA. The basic theme in coping was avoiding being overwhelmed by threatening or dangerous emotions that lead to helplessness, powerlessness, and lack of control. This was achieved by different means, including avoiding or reducing the intensity of the feelings.
Another way incest survivors were found to have coped was to resist. Anderson (2006) found that 25- to 38-year-old incest survivors developed mental and behavioral strategies to counter powerlessness, to overcome the subjugation and manipulation, and to refuse being silenced. A key strategy is deciding to survive in spite of having been subjected to incest. It seems that resistance as a way of coping, even when the actual abuse has ended, continues to be meaningful for the ways in which women integrate present and past experiences.
Another task in the integration process is restructuring the self. Grossman, Cook, Kepkep, and Koenen (1999) found that CSA survivors were able to construct a new and hopeful worldview by using their narratives to make sense of their suffering and to integrate their negative and traumatic experiences. One of the themes was shifting blame from self to perpetrator.
To summarize, the CSA survivors’ life-narratives that we studied reveal a constant struggle between the ramifications of the abuse, including the self that was undermined, being intruded on, and fear of being overwhelmed by negative emotions (loss, guilt, shame, anxiety, and anger). At the same time, the narratives also reveal the survivors’ will to construct a life-narrative in which they can assign alternative meanings to their lives, beyond the CSA. Thus, survivors introduce continuity into their life-narratives. The results of extant research are important for the assimilation of CSA in the mental and social world of the survivors. This study adds to the literature on incest survivors’ stories by fine-tuning what we know about the ways CSA survivors construct meaning in their lives. This study also newly focuses specifically on women who experienced sexual relations with a biological father. Most past research of intrafamilial abuse has not isolated this relationship, thus the similarities and differences between the experiences of CSA survivors of biological and nonbiological fathers are unknown. Finally, from a methodological perspective, the use of life-titles as a means for reflexive understanding of survivors’ narratives offers a holistic approach to gain new perspectives on their narratives.
Titles as Keys to Meaning
The title of a literary work, though set apart from the body of the text, is integral to its meaning and thus should not be ignored by the reader. The title constitutes the reader’s initial connection to the work and is the key to understanding it (Lerner, 1983). Authors’ choice of titles expresses their stance toward their work and directs the reader to its central topics and ideas. Titles may be viewed as the author’s way to convey an interpretation or message and to prompt the reader to ask questions about the content and meaning. Readers develop expectations about a work and reflect on its meaning with the title in mind (Frederick & Farrell, 1983; Lerner, 1983).
People are often taken by surprise when they are asked to choose a title for their lives. The need to make such a choice compels them to adopt a reflective stance regarding their lives. They must grow aware of the assumptions and premises underlying their life-narrative. Giving a name to one’s life-story brings to light its storyline—the structure of the life-story and the meaning that the narrator gives his or her life. The act of giving the life-story a title forces individuals to sift through the events and experiences in their life. The choice of title defines the self-narrative in a way that unifies shared core meanings, which are the essential foci for understanding selfhood. The title that people give their lives points to the meaning that they will assign to future life events as well. As in a work of literature, the title is not only a token of form but also the life-narrative’s super-code (Kacen, 2002). A title has the power to create borders for the life-narrative and to constitute an idea that both unifies one’s life and makes it unique.
Method
The narrative approach selected for this study derives from the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition, which views the human world as composed of a multiplicity of subjective realities. The aim of the researcher is to expose interpretations of a phenomenon. By exposing those interpretations, the researcher facilitates a detailed and holistic understanding of subjective processes and meanings of participants, without attempting to support or refute hypotheses (McLeod, 2001; Murray & Sargeant, 2012; van Manen, 2001).
Participants
Twenty Jewish women whose ages ranged from 20-50 years, with a mean of 33 years, participated in the study. Ten of the women were married and had among them a total of 20 children. Eight of the women were single, one was divorced with four children, and one was a single mother who had one child. Thirteen participants were recruited for the study through the social services, four through the Internet, and three from treatment centers. Six of the participants grew up in religious homes, three of whom still defined themselves as religious at the time of the interview. All except two participants reported financial difficulties in their families of origin. All but one of the participants described experiencing violence in addition to sexual abuse: 16 described physical violence on the part of the father: three described a regime of terror inflicted by the father but without physical violence. All the participants reported that the intrafamilial CSA began when they were children, ranging in age from 3-11 years; most reported they were aged 3 when the abuse began. All the participants reported sexual abuse up to and during adolescence. Three of the women had disclosed the abuse to a friend, four to a family member, three to a school counselor, and all the rest to a social worker from the department of social welfare. Seventeen of the participants reported the abuse themselves, giving the following reasons: Eight wanted to protect their sisters; nine had felt unable to continue being complicit with the secrecy. For the remaining three women, someone who was close to them had discovered the abuse and reported it on their behalf. As a result of the disclosure, three of the fathers were detained, but the criminal case was closed; seven were incarcerated; in all the other cases, the father was not arrested. Following the disclosure, 10 participants were removed from their homes, and 12 reported that they had run away to live on the streets.
Data Collection
Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews (Roulston, 2010), which allowed the interviewees freedom, space, and flexibility to elaborate on the subjective meanings that they attributed to the phenomenon under study (Josselson, 2013; Kvale & Brinkman, 2009). The interviews were conducted by the second author, a female social worker with 20 years of experience in child welfare both in the capacity of a therapist and supervisor.
The interview consisted of a short sociodemographic questionnaire and an in-depth semi-structured interview with questions about the following aspects of the participants’ intrafamilial CSA experiences: the abuse and its disclosure; the family’s and others’ reactions to the disclosure; their experiences with the official legal and criminal agencies such as the police, the courts, and the welfare services, and their significance to them; their evaluation of the range of interventions and their impact on the victims’ lives; and the impact and meaning of the abuse in the study participants’ lives. Each interview lasted approximately 2 hr, was audio recorded, and transcribed verbatim.
The concluding question of each interview was, “If you were asked to choose a title for your life-story, as for a book, what would the title be?” In addition, each interviewee was asked to elaborate on how her title reflected the meaning of the intrafamilial CSA for her and her life. All of our analyses in the following section are based on the women’s answers to both questions.
Data Analysis
Asking the interviewees to choose a name for their life-narratives encouraged them to engage in a holistic reflection on their experiences. We therefore performed a holistic content analysis (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998) of the interviewees’ titles, which was informed by the central question used in this approach: What is the core pattern in the life-story (Wells, 2011)? In adherence with Crossley’s (2000) and Kacen’s (2002) insight that titles help identify the central topic or life theme with which people frame their lives, we analyzed the story titles and the interviewees’ explanations of them as stand-alone texts in every sense. Our aim was to understand how the plot structure chosen by the narrators created a meaningful and coherent statement about their personal identity.
We performed the analysis of the title and the dialogue that centered on it in three stages. First, we read and reread the interviewees’ life-narrative titles and their explanations for choosing them until achieving a sense of in-depth holistic empathic immersion in the participants’ experiences (van Manen, 2001). At this stage there was an attempt to enter the personal experience each interviewee was attempting to deliver regarding her own life-story. This was achieved by the researchers’ relating and reflecting on the emotional atmosphere that was conjured by each title given by the interviewees. For example, anger versus hope, observing the past versus looking forward to the future. Such were the major issues the researchers were most attuned to.
In the second stage, we performed a thematic analysis (Holloway & Freshwater, 2007) of each participant’s life-title, the meanings attributed to it, and the interrelationships between these meanings and the title; throughout, we regarded the title as a whole rather than its separate parts (Murray & Sargeant, 2012), while keeping in sight the parts that created the whole. At this stage, the researchers related the title given by the interviewee and the concrete content presented in the interview. For example, the title chosen by Deborah for her life-story was “Mask,” as will be described further on, and we as researchers examined the existential ways and values that masking served Deborah in her life.
In the third stage, we attempted to cluster the life-narrative titles that we previously collected, applying both our rational and imaginative capacities, to construct an abstract typology. Special attention was given to internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity between the narratives (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). We found three distinct narrative typologies that corresponded to the life-stories and meanings that our participants constructed for themselves. At this stage the researchers attempted to find a coherent common theme among all the narrative titles presented by the interviewees, by examining the components and existential meanings reflected and facilitated by the title. For example, the titles: “The girl who beat the dragon,” and “Bird on a wire,” as will be analyzed further on, reflected, based on the second stage, similar components of growing, in that the narrative endeavored to accomplish change in the women’s life aimed to fight for their place in the world, coupled with a sense of victory and awareness of a rebuilding process.
Rigor
Qualitative researchers aim to ensure trustworthiness by developing a broader reflexive and deeper coherent understanding of the study participants’ meanings that extends to in-depth interviews, direct experience, continued involvement, and delving into interviewees’ perceptions (Wells, 2011). They lend credibility to their interpretations by grounding them in precise quotations, thereby creating a dialogue between the interviewees’ and researchers’ voices (Lieblich et al., 1998). Quotations also bridge between the interviewees’ subjective experiences and the general, abstract theme of the life-narrative category; they are supplied to highlight the various levels of meanings attached to a life-narrative theme.
To ensure intercoder reliability, the two authors performed an independent thematic content analysis and then compared between them. As noted above, the titles given by the interviewees served as the basis for analyzing. Those titles, one would say, “spoke for themselves.” Yet, each of the researchers brought with her or him to the meeting a conceptual analysis of the typology of titles and their components. We resolved disagreement about and discrepancies in coding and the evolving units of meaning that we were formulating through discussion and jointly reviewing the original statements and reflecting on them. We continued coding the units of meaning until the process reached saturation (Charmaz, 2006). The constellations that emerged were of survival motifs, fighting back, and growing, that built the interviewees’ narratives.
Two major motifs that emerged and called for a conceptual bridging were the motif of survival versus the motif of growth. Whereas the first author believed the two themes may be integrated, the second author, who was the one who conducted the interviews and experienced the interviewees firsthand, stressed the differences among the two themes. From this dialogue, common issues were identified that represent the differences between the group of women interviewees focusing on survival, who keep experiencing intensive negative emotions, compared to the group of women who stressed the growth component and experienced a positive emotion of victory.
Ethics
The study was approved by the University of Haifa Committee for Research with Human Participants. All the women in the study participated of their own will and signed informed consent forms after having received an explanation of the study’s aims and the researchers’ obligation to protect their privacy. The aim of narrative research is to empower participants and convey that they are the creators of the meaning of their lives, carefully avoiding their objectification. The researcher does not assert for them what the truth is, but instead allows the participants the freedom to tell their stories, attempting to gain a profound understanding of their interpretations (Josselson, 2007). Thus, the researcher conducting the interviews in this study endeavored to empower the participants, and she showed respect and empathy for their feelings. All of these measures were necessary because of the participants’ intense pain and shame when speaking about their victimization and its personal, familial, and social impacts on their lives. Finally, to protect the identity of the respondents, all names used in this article are pseudonyms. At the beginning of each interview, the interviewee was informed that the interview may raise emotional pains and distress. They were given the personal phone number of the interviewer who was a professional social worker specializing in trauma and child welfare. Furthermore, at the end of the interview, a debriefing was carried out to verify their emotional reaction to the interview and they were informed that if any emotional distress may arise they are welcome to contact the interviewer who would help with referral to relevant support and can provide emergency processing of the emotional distress.
Findings
The motifs that we found in the first of the three core narratives that emerged, “Surviving,” included a change and a break in the abusive cycle, a struggle for survival, the wish not to be defeated by the past, and the desire for personal achievement in an independent life. On the other hand, the narrative was fraught with intensely traumatic experiences, negative repercussions and feelings of shame, guilt, fear, confusion, and loneliness. In the second narrative, “Fighting back and Seeking Vengeance,” the interviewees’ identity centers on a deep aspiration for strength and the perception of action as an expression of the desire to fight back and for revenge. The experience of the participants who chose this title was of ongoing war, which became a goal unto itself; however, this narrative was chosen by only a minority of the participants. In the third narrative, “Growing,” the storyteller endeavored to accomplish change in her life in the desire to fight for her place in the world. A sense of victory and awareness of a rebuilding process were present alongside the difficult emotions. For heuristic purposes, we illustrate two life-stories for each type of narrative. Although there may be an overlap between the different types of stories, we emphasize the variation among them.
Narrative of Surviving
Limor’s story: “This is my life.”
Limor grew up in a religious home with two sisters and two brothers. Her father, who was violent toward them and his wife, began sexually abusing Limor when she turned seven. At age 16, after suspecting that he was also abusing her sisters and confronting her father about it, he beat her severely, leaving bruises. As a result, Limor disclosed the fact of the abuse, and Limor’s father was arrested and sentenced to several years in prison. Limor was removed from the home, initially to a foster family and later to a residential facility. In adolescence, Limor left the religious way of life. At the age of 18, Limor married for the first time, had two children, but divorced her husband because he was violent toward her, which resulted in her children being sent to foster homes. At the time of the interview, Limor was married for the second time and had had two more children. She had resumed a religious lifestyle. Limor’s narrative title was “This Is My Life.”
Why did you choose the title “this is my life?”
That’s how I lived. That’s what I knew, that’s how it was, and that’s that; you accept what it is. You don’t know anything else; you think it’s like that for everyone. And that’s how you live with it. I didn’t think I could live any other way, that I could resist or that not all my friends were being beaten, punished, abused. So you learn to accept that it is your reality.
Does the story have a happy ending?
I wish.
What do you think?
I still haven’t reached a happy ending because I’m still struggling with the demons. Why do you think I’m so thin? I have a big empty space inside. When my son says, “Mommy, I love you,” I can’t just accept that calmly. I start to cry.
You cry?
Yes, because I’m not used to it. When I was a little girl, they didn’t love me the way a child should be loved, and I didn’t love my parents.
Limor’s narrative title and her reasons for selecting it show how the intrafamilial CSA defines her life, its negative repercussions, and being a victim of it. She describes her life as an ongoing war, fighting the self within the self. Her existential experience is of oscillating between poles: between the threat and wave of helplessness and the fight against helplessness. Even when she actively tries to change her situation, the sense of helplessness remains with her. This struggle is described metaphorically as “fighting the demons” and reflects the nature and intensity of the forces within her. She swings back and forth between resisting and fighting for her life and despairing and feeling weakness. Limor has a “big empty space inside” of her which reflects danger but is simultaneously an invitation to be filled that motivates her to survive and fight against the threatening abuser. Nonetheless, any improvement she makes is subject to threat, especially by her deep sense of being a helpless victim.
Deborah’s story: “Mask.”
At the time of the interview, Deborah was 42, a single mother with four children who worked with senior citizens. Deborah grew up the eldest of two brothers and two sisters in a poor home where both parents were violent toward Deborah and all her siblings. Deborah’s sexual abuse began when she was 11. At age 14, after witnessing her father rape one of her younger sisters, Deborah beat her father up and was thrown out of the house as a result. Deborah reported her father’s abuse to the welfare authorities but the sister who Deborah saw being raped, accused her of lying and being vindictive; the father was never arrested. Deborah gave her story the title “Mask.” Her explanation why follows.
I was always wearing a mask, even today, in fact. I always had to get up and put on a mask as if everything was just as usual, everything was alright, and to be like everyone else. But it’s like that even today, which is what’s so sad. Sad that even today, in fact, I don’t let myself be sad. A mask. I put on a mask.
Why don’t you let yourself?
So that people won’t feel sorry for me because I don’t need anyone anymore and don’t believe anymore and, in fact, I’ve learned not to let anyone see what I’m going through anymore. And always to appear strong, fighting.
Because what will happen if people will see?
Then . . . then, they will know that, inside, I am small, vulnerable.
And then?
And then they can take advantage of it to hurt me. I can get hurt.
The mask is a necessity that provides protective strength. Deborah experiences a duality of identity: on one hand, she is a “strong” fighter who does not surrender to life or to sadness and who struggles for an internal and external connection. On the other hand, she experiences the self as helpless and vulnerable. Deborah does not give up her helpless-victim identity even as she is aware of her strengths and successes. She is wary of exposure and disclosure and remains guarded and on the alert. This results in a sense of a polar existence, survival between preserving what exists but out of a sense of gross limitation of her ability to bring about change, rehabilitation, or healing.
Fighting Back and Seeking Vengeance Narrative
Sigal’s story: “A punch in the face.”
Sigal was 29 years old and single and worked as a waitress. Sigal’s father began sexually abusing her when she turned five, accompanying it with more violence, threats, and acts of humiliation. At age 14, Sigal ran away from home and found a 30-year-old Arab partner, who helped her file a complaint against her father. She was then transferred to Zofia, a correction center for adolescent girls. She spent several months there before she was moved to a hostel, from which she escaped. At the time of the interview, she was living alone and had no contact with her family. Sigal calls her life-story “A Punch in the Face.”
Because in the end, that’s what I gave them! But on second thought, it’s both this and that: It’s what I got from age five and it’s what I gave back to them ten years later.
Tell me a bit more about it.
When I was little and my dad started to abuse me, there were always threats or blows and it was like a punch in the face; something terribly painful that you don’t expect to happen. And what I went through later at the welfare services was also like being punched, but in the stomach, because I really expected that someone there would understand me and support me and wouldn’t lock me up in Zofia, and that’s not to say that I didn’t get a few punches there too. But then I learned to hit back! At Zofia, you have no choice, you understand that if you’re not strong and if you don’t hit back, you’ll suffer even more. And the fact that I testified against my dad and that he’s now in prison is the punch that I gave back. To all of them—my mom, who never believed me, my sister, my grandma, and yes, I’m glad that he’s in prison; I expect he gets punched there, too.
You’re glad?
Yes, a fed-up kind of gladness because who’s happy when things go badly for her family?! And who’s happy that I’m now, actually, alone. But I’m happy that they know that you don’t mess with me and they always chose to believe him and to say nasty things about me. But in the end, they lost in the courtroom.
I hear your anger and that connects with what you said about a person who doesn’t hit back will suffer more.
Right. Only the strong survive. I am a survivor, like a cat, fighting back and landing on my feet. At home too, if I hadn’t fought back, I would have continued to suffer.
Sigal perceives herself as a “survivor,” the image embodies trauma and strength, hostility, falling repeatedly, and continually bouncing back. Violence and hostility toward her, from both the family and the welfare services, are fundamental components of her life. In this violent world, her ability to survive depends on her ability to “punch” back; hence, warring and self-defense are what give her meaning. Her life-story centers on fighting back, refusing to surrender. Sigal’s attitude toward her fighting back seeking is twofold: on one hand, she denies being “happy” about the harm she has caused her family, but, on the other hand, characterizes the revenge as an accomplishment. The tone of Sigal’s comments about her family was violent and angry: They’re so mean. If only they would die in a road accident, but they should [first] suffer; they should be in pain just like I was in pain. And I’ll know about it but won’t do anything . . . just like they did to me. An eye for an eye.
When asked if she was angry with her parents, Sigal denied feeling that way: “They aren’t worth my anger or my feeling anything.” In a world in which she felt compelled to focus on survival, she also felt the need to repress her pain and emotions so as not to risk revealing a weakness that could make her vulnerable to harm or render her helpless at the cost of losing the ever-waging war that she could not afford to lose. Her identity as a survivor depended on fighting back.
Irit’s story: “The golem that rose to crush its creator.”
Irit was a married 24-year-old who had two children and worked with children for a living. She was the fourth of six siblings in her family of origin. Her father began sexually abusing her when she was six and continued until Irit, at the age of 15, was pressured by a friend to disclose the abuse. Later, Irit’s older sister told her that their father had abused her also but that she had never told anyone. At age 15, Irit ran away, was frequently truant from school, and exhibited other behavior problems, as a result of which she was removed to a correctional institution for adolescent girls. Irit described the removal as a change in her life, which gave her the courage to report her father’s actions. Her father stood trial and was serving a prison sentence at the time of the interview. At first, Irit choose “The Golem that Rose to Crush Its Creator” as a title for her life-story:
I don’t think my story has a title. They haven’t made one up yet. You see, they always looked at me as though I was a retarded child. I didn’t talk, I was absorbed in my own world, I didn’t study; I didn’t communicate with the world at all. It was only at age 15, when I left home, that I started to thaw out and noticed that there is a world out there. So maybe the book about me needs to be called “The Golem That Rose to Crush Its Creator.”
What do you mean by that?
I was a monster, a doll; that is what he made of me. But I slipped through his fingers and showed him what was what. He thought that I would always be his puppet and that I would keep quiet all my life, and then I rose up against him and opened my mouth to the whole world, and today, he is other people’s puppet, in prison.
So the change was possible once you were distanced from him?
It’s not the change. See—it’s the reversal. I was nothing. Dumb. With no aspirations, but now, I am a person who works and studies. I got married. And yes, the distance from him, from home. The fact that he wasn’t with me all the time and I saw other things—that not everyone lives like me and that you don’t have to. And that it can be different, and that it’s possible to have a life.
Irit describes the change in her life as a “reversal,” a theme that describes the change her self-perception underwent: from a “retarded” person with no desires, who had nothing, to a working and learning human being; from a “doll” without the breath of life to a person with aspirations and full of life. However, the title of her narrative, “The Golem that Rose to Crush Its Creator,” is marked by duality: fighting back and revenge. Irit attributes the freedom she was able to gain to leaving home, which was an act that allowed her to “thaw out.” This is in the sense that she had turned into an autonomous person with an identity, no longer subject to being an object for her father’s use and control. The interviewee’s pain and the trauma of betrayal dominate her narrative and they portray a negative self-image, shame, and a lack of strength and psychological self-control. By contrast, Irit views fighting back and vengeance in her life as instrumental in extracting herself from her helpless state and achieving emotional survival. Nonetheless, Irit struggles against being swallowed up in the identity of the vengeful victim. In her narrative, she alternates between constructing her life and her selfhood in terms of vengeance and independence. In her perception, life is
like a kind of puzzle [and someone] needs to gather all the parts and rebuild gradually. Not so infrequently, it breaks up again and I reconstruct, and I understand that it is like that, that it will always be like that; it will fall apart and I will build it up again.
It is evident in this excerpt that Irit is fatalistic about life and she perceives it as changeable. She is aware of the inevitable disintegration of her constructions but is also secure in the knowledge that after life “breaks up,” she will have the strength to rebuild it.
Narrative of Growing
Jasmine’s story: “Bird on a wire.”
Jasmine was a married 30-year-old who had a baby boy and worked as a cashier. She grew up with both parents and six siblings. The father was violent toward the entire family. He began sexually abusing Jasmine when she was six. Her mother was perceived as weak and submissive. When Jasmine was 13, her parents divorced, but the sexual abuse continued. When she was 15, Jasmine discovered that her father was also abusing her younger sister and reported him to the school counselor. Her father was arrested but not incarcerated, apparently because her sister did not cooperate with the investigation. Jasmine called her story “Bird on a Wire.”
I am actually a bird. I flew away from there, far away.
What do you mean by a “wire”? A wire fence?
It’s like I came out of the ghetto. I was shut inside an inferno. I was behind this kind of fence, with thorns, where you couldn’t escape. That’s what I was like, but I always knew that I would fly away from there, that I wouldn’t live my whole life inside that ghetto.
How did you know?
I don’t know. It was as if something inside me had the knowledge that, one day, my life would change. I didn’t know how, but I knew it would happen.
Was there something, someone, who helped you to feel like a bird?
I don’t think so. Maybe when you experience hell, something inside you is not willing to accept that that is all there is to life, because if things are like that, then you despair; and there were times when I wanted to give in to that despair—to depression—but I always kept it up, stopping myself. I would look up at the sky and wish I could fly away.
Jasmine’s life theme emerges from her description of how she substituted her identity of an imprisoned victim for that of a bird. She attests that she always knew how to fly or transform herself but that she had been in the “ghetto” standing on a fence until she finally chose to fly away to reach the longed-for change. The image of the Holocaust concentration camp intensifies the depiction of her trauma and the experiences of freedom and power. With her self-image as a bird, she constructs a life motif of hope that runs parallel to the reality of her trauma. She describes being able to look upward and finding strength and hope for the future. Her strengths manifest in her description of being able to fly and in her daring and belief in being able to accomplish something that appears impossible. She describes it as follows: I know how to cope, I have strength. I know that I have strength because my whole life has toughened me. . . . I learned to take everything differently, not to let the past control my current life. What happened to me happened and I can’t turn the clock back and change it. I can’t escape from it, either. It happened and I have to cope, not lug it along with me or run away. Because when you cope with things in life, you can get through them. And when you don’t cope with things in life, they come back bigger. It can even take years until it can suddenly come back to flood you and drown you in it, but I am coping.
Jasmine emphasizes her power to avoid defending or denying the past and forces herself to accept and look squarely at her abuse, thus succeeding in neutralizing its negative impact. She does not succumb to being “flooded” by the past and even sees it as something that has “toughened” her. Her life experience shows her that coping in a forthright manner is the right way to prevent greater trauma and to lay the foundation for building a feeling of normalcy.
Liat’s story: “The girl who beat the dragon.”
Liat was 26 years old, single, lived alone, and was studying a therapeutic profession. Liat was the eldest of three siblings and both her parents were academics and financially well-off. The sexual abuse began when Liat was five, continuing until a year after her parents had divorced and she was 16, when during a visit at her father’s, his female partner noticed some sexual interaction between them. Frightened by the partner’s instant and strong reaction to the incident, Liat first denied it, but after the partner informed Liat’s mother, she felt strong enough to stop hiding the secret and disclose the intrafamilial CSA. When questioned by the police, her father denied the abuse; Liat did not confront him and refused to testify against her father who was not arrested. Liat chose the title “The Girl Who Beat the Dragon.”
I really will write a book. Yes, I have a topic and a title: “The Girl Who Beat the Dragon” [laughs]. Dramatic, eh?! I defeated the dragon and the dragon is not my father, but the fear, the anxiety, the despair.
Yours?
Yes, I actually beat myself. Or maybe there were two of me, the miserable, submissive girl, abused by her father and whose life is finished and she is scared and anxious; and the girl who is not prepared to give up today and fights for things to be different. Because I thought about this; I’m actually from a good family. I have uncles who are lawyers and teachers and I have a grandfather and a grandmother, and no one ever physically prevented me from escaping or telling. What actually stopped me? It was I, my abused self, who saw the world as black, and it was only when I managed to break through my own fear that I truly began to make a change in my life. So I’m the one who beat myself, and that’s the real dragon.
That is a terribly harsh thing to say and maybe accusatory?
Yes, of course. People are responsible for themselves, for what they do and don’t do, and no one could actually do for me what I did for myself.
Liat presents her story as a daring victory over fear and divides her life into two: one part that belongs to the victimized past when she was submissive, miserable, anxious, and trapped with no way out; the second is in the present and is associated with the identity of the fighter who frees herself from the fiendish monster. The title of her life-story has a mythical quality, telling a story of true transformation, presenting her victimized existence as a fight against a dragon. Her way of gaining control of the “dragon” was by focusing on her own responsibility. Liat says of herself that she is a “building” which is her unifying image for the actions she has taken in her life: “I build the foundations because if the foundations of the building are unstable, everything above will collapse. So I understood, first of all, that I need to strengthen myself, the foundations, and that is what I did.” Just as the foundations must be laid before building can begin, so Liat performs her actions in the correct order within an overall meaning for her life’s struggle.
Discussion
Analyzing the interviews, we were struck by the inherent dialectic nature that was embedded in each narrative. The fundamental life motif of the interviewees is negotiating the dialectic relationship between two dichotomous poles. At one pole is the self that lives with the intrafamilial CSA and perceives it as a threat from within capable of interrupting life. As Herman (2000) found and wrote, “The memory of incest persisted, shaping their relations with others and their image of themselves” (p. 96). At the other pole is the self that seeks the freedom to choose, to rebuild, and not to be a victim of intrafamilial CSA. The dialectical stance that the women’s selves are bound up in is one of “and/both.” The two poles coexist and define themselves interdependently despite being mutually oppositional, negating, and contradictory (Almagor, 2011; Baxter, 2004; Ford, Ray, & Ellis, 1999). On one hand, the self is experienced as being in conflict with antagonistic forces. The interviewees feel that the past sabotages their ability to construct their lives. On the other hand, their ongoing experiences continually challenge them to create a life-narrative that can prevail over the intrafamilial CSA trauma. Even episodes of failure in overcoming the past are experienced as part of the meaning given to their coping. In this sense, the essential dialectics in this study are personal control versus chaos; wholeness versus disintegration; agency versus helplessness; hope versus despair; being entrapped in the past versus seeking meaning for one’s future.
The titles reflect the interviewees’ struggle for authorship of a life-narrative, managing helplessness and powerlessness that was dictated to them by experiences in the past, which robbed them of their personal life (Neimeyer, 2006). It can be argued that the interviewees who described a growing narrative exhibited a high level of integration of selfhood and a pronounced ability to make meaning of the incest. These interviewees had a high level of authorship and their narratives can be characterized as progressive (Gergen & Gergen, 1997, 1986) The surviving and fighting back/vengeance-seeking narratives combine the qualities of progressive and regressive life-narratives and are marked by their authors’ intense oscillation between the two types. The sense of regression is present especially in the surviving life-narratives, indicating that the mental schemata of the interviewees who authored them are less adapted for coping with the trauma to selfhood.
Our findings are in line with stories of intrafamilial CSA survivors who describe the dialectics between the sexual abuse, including its emotional ramifications, and the process of coping (Anderson, 2006; Eisikovits et al., 2017; Grossman et al., 1999; Morrow & Smith, 2005; Negrao et al., 2005). This study contributes to the holistic understanding of a survivor’s life orientation, which can be used to understand how she constructed her progressive versus regressive life-narratives.
The interviewees with a growing life-narrative accept the loss of possibilities that were once open to them and try to develop realms of control and choice. In contrast, interviewees with a vengeance-seeking narrative express a sense of loss of control, which they attempt to overcome by controlling circumstances, and they perceive revenge as a means to restore balance. Notwithstanding, rage can protect a woman against fully experiencing the powerlessness and terror of childhood sexual abuse and also protects her from potentially more painful experiences of loss (Cole & Putnam, 1992).
Theoretical Implications
Assigning a name to their life-stories is an act of self-validation and self-definition in that it enables survivors to view in perspective the complex meaning of the sexual abuse in their life-story. The narrative is thus an attempt to make sense of the abuse and to integrate the seemingly meaningless pain into their life. One of the cognitive benefits to survivors who have created life-narratives is the loosening of the grip of shame, guilt, and other trauma-based emotions that the survivors associated with the abuse. The narrative makes it possible to understand the emotional consequences and to situate them within a life-story that is greater than the abuse and is inclusive of the significant others who acted and act in their lives, including the offender and family of origin.
The narrative enables women to deal with CSA’s inherently offensive and pathological taken-for-grantedness by creating a space in which they can give meaning to their suffering, while constricting a personal and social identity. The narrative interlaces the survivors’ dominant story, with its traumatic details and events, and alternative stories of suffering or guilt. For example, intrafamilial CSA does not define them, but they are active in constructing their relationship with the world and the future. In this way, it enables the professionals helping them achieve a twofold listening, both to the traumatic story and to the story of the response that centers on making meaning of the former. By recognizing and understanding how the two stories in each woman’s narrative weave in and out of each other, it is possible to distinguish between a survivor’s individual symptoms and the ways she has developed to cope with them.
Implications for Practice
This study adds another layer to the benefits that narrative therapy can offer trauma survivors by showing therapists how they can practice a twofold listening: one to the traumatic story and the other to the life-narrative, which is the existential response to trauma and can be understood as resistance to the negative impacts of sexual abuse. The findings of this study dovetail and confirm the findings of various extant studies that found that survivors of CSA exist in an ongoing struggle to maintain a basic position of meaning making. The contribution of this study is to suggest a way to understand how survivors perceive their lives, where each title given by them is part of a category and equally reflects the unique integration of each survivor.
By inviting an intrafamilial CSA survivor to give her life-narrative a title, the therapist conveys respect for the woman’s ability to construct meaning, to resist, and to become empowered, which all form the basis for her recovery process. The degree to which people can see beyond their trauma and envision a different future might protect and help them cope with the traumatic event (see Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).
Giving a name to their life-narratives enables women to cope with the sense of threat, lack of control, and helplessness caused by the intrafamilial CSA and hence enables them to regain a measure of control over their lives and to impose some order therein. Thanks to the use of narrative, the women can frame their trauma and decide for themselves which experiences and issues they can tolerate coping with and how, so as not to experience a breakdown of their defenses. As not all survivors will heal in the same way and to the same extent, life-narrative construction can help professionals tailor their interventions to the women’s survival needs.
Limitations
Despite the heuristic value of this qualitative and exploratory study to understanding the deeper subjective themes of intrafamilial CSA survivors, a number of limitations must be acknowledged. First, the purpose of qualitative research is not to offer generalizable results, but rather to suggest theoretical implications and practical ones. In this spirit, the titles given should be understood as heuristic, idiosyncratic, and localized constructions. While the themes were derived from the titles the interviewees gave to their life-stories, it should be taken into account that those titles were given following an exhaustive interview regarding their sexual abuse experiences. Thus, the interview framed and defined the context in which those titles were constructed. Indeed, every title is given in a context and within a frame of reference, and every question and interview supply such a frame. Second, the sample size is too small to yield any generalizations. Third, the interviewees were all known to the social services and motivated to participate in this study. Thus, our findings do not necessarily apply to other survivor groups. We do not suggest that the titles can be used alone to interpret the narratives or that the narratives are all that there is to the understanding of the lives of intrafamilial CSA survivors. Rather, we propose that by paying close attention to the titles and the narratives, and the relation between the two, we can glean deeper understanding of the intrafamilial CSA survivors’ experiences and coping styles.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.