This would have been written about 1982.
“In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I
thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so
sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different
ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and
family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of
being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of
psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States,
occurring about once in every million women.8 Given that there were then only
about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how
forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the
basement of the hospital.
Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of
father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology.” My
patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent
psychopathology”—they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often
engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with
razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that
“such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and
allows for a better adjustment to the external world.”9 In fact, as it turned out,
incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being.
In many ways these patients were not so different from the veterans I had
just left behind at the VA. They also had nightmares and flashbacks. They also
alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being
emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with
other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships.” The Body Keeps the Score
I underlined the passage which struck me as shocking. Long before 1982 I could have told them there were more incidents of incest perpetrated on my one body. But incest was only slowly becoming public knowledge. I did not say the words until 1988 after which came years of on-again, off-again therapy as the anguish was devastating and breaks were unavoidable.
The silence was deafening back then, as well as self-defeating.
The Road Forward 