The Consumption of Innocence
An emerging image of wholeness beyond the damage of abuse
The bedroom door burst open. Her hand slapped the light switch, evaporating darkness, obliterating privacy. Squinting up at the silhouette, I could see the rage on her face, her bared teeth pinching her tongue as if holding back a murderous force. My mother killed me that night. Again.
She was a perpetual kindergarten teacher. So after tearing off my blankets and glaring at my naked body as it shook in the cold air, she recognized a ‘teaching moment’. The lesson was delivered with a series of stinging blows to the exposed thigh of my right leg. She shrieked as she struck — emitting unintelligible noises like the cries of a wounded animal.
The message got through. Its twisted logic drove directly into the cells of my body and festered into what became my distorted worldview.
my pleasure = my mother’s pain
Decades later, it resurfaced in full intensity when an orthopaedic therapist attempted to manipulate my right leg. At first she was alarmed when I screamed and nearly jumped off the table. But she was quick to understand my reaction and adjusted her treatment. When the session ended, she left me in the darkened room to work through the exposed pain. I swept out the emotional wreckage for over an hour. I admit, it was embarrassing at the time, but it happened and it helped move me forward from what had been a place of ongoing self-doubt and incapacity.
Sexual exploration, for teenagers in my time, was typically a solitary exercise. Without the aid of social media or the internet, we had to settle for real life — shy conversations with crushes, necking in the back of the movie theatre, even Friday night social dancing. If we were lucky, boys like me learned about ‘real’ adult women through adult magazines borrowed from a friend whose older brother had stuffed them under his mattress. Such resources were innocent by today’s standards — missing swimsuits and tan lines around bigger-than-expected nipples being one of the main features.
But it wasn’t just boys like me that found these publications interesting. Once, when visiting my father in his office, I saw him stuffing one into his desk drawer. I assume they had the same effect on him as they did me. But to this day, I have no idea what he, as the man who was married to my mother, did with that energy. I had my bed for moments of fantasy — even though it betrayed me, rattling with the slightest movements of my hand. My father, however, was condemned to share his bed with my mother for his entire adult life. And she had made it abundantly clear in countless ways (mostly unspoken) that she had no tolerance for sexual matters of any kind, by anyone. Being the third and late-arriving child, I sometimes think of my birth as miraculous. Or an outright mistake on my father’s part, triggering a never-ending appetite for revenge on my mother’s part.
My parents’ teenage years were not like mine. They grew up in England during the Second World War. As a boy living on the east coast, my father slept with a machine gun under his bed, in case the Nazis showed up on the beach. He had a story of the time when a bomb landed on the street just a few yards in front of him and then bounced over the houses, exploding on the other side. (That story alone always made me think about the reason for my existence.) My mother’s new high school sat unused and sandbagged for its first year as the students were evacuated to the supposed safety of the countryside to live with strangers. When they were allowed to return home they would spend nights huddled in makeshift air raid shelters — tiny brick structures where they kept the coal.
I can’t imagine how traumatic that would have been for anyone growing up in those circumstances. My mother’s father, a bus driver, had been a tank driver in the First World War. She told me that when war was declared again in 1939, he wept openly. My mother never spoke much about these times and if she was traumatized at all, she never sought therapy for it. Like all good British schoolgirls, she followed the example of her richer contemporary, Queen Elizabeth, and put on her bravest face to get through it. She thought it was working. But I think it also had a hidden cost that she may never have been aware of. And that cost, more often than not, was passed along to others.
My mother, through her outbursts and mood swings, efficiently passed along her unconscious fears to me. Of course I grew up thinking it was actually my fault. As children, parents are the immovable ground we stand on. If something is rattling, it must be us. (To this day my immediate response to earth tremors is not fear but anger.)
The Lasting Effects of Invisible Injuries
Needless to say, I ended up in therapy, working with several practitioners who, curiously enough, all happened to be women. It was in these sessions that the term ‘sexual abuse’ was used to describe my mother’s behaviour. One of the therapists likened it to rape, which surprised me, but it provided a useful frame for understanding the impact it had on me. We could debate the meaning of these terms forever, but that is not my focus here. I want to know more about how abuse can lead to injury in its many forms, and how it can shape our lives and relationships with others. Most of all, I want to define a clear image of an undamaged consciousness that I can use as a reference point to steer my life.
What is the nature of this kind of injury that can potentially change our view of reality and distort our sense of self? A non-fatal physical injury can heal, given enough time. But a psychological or emotional injury can persist, often invisibly, for a lifetime. It may be written off as quirks of personality or disagreeable tendencies. Of course it could result in much more severe anti-social behaviours. Such injuries are partially fatal because segments of the person may be cut off from experiencing life and growing with ease into maturity.
Physical injuries are directly tied to physical forces that pierce the integrity of the body. Psychological injuries come from a different kind of energetic infliction. The assault inflicted on me by my mother wasn’t physically damaging. I didn’t bleed from it. But the energy of that attack pierced the integrity of my personhood and that injury took a long time, and a lot of effort, to heal. Where was that injury manifest all that time? It wasn’t on my skin, like a cut. It was inside. It altered the energy of my being.
The lesson I took from my mother’s neurotic behaviour was that I was somehow responsible for her happiness. This is a big burden for a child, but I managed to take it on by becoming very sensitive to her moods. Whatever the reason for her outbursts, stress at work, the humid weather, or something I said, I had to be ready for things to explode at any time. This became a generalized skill that I could apply to other relationships — I developed a certain ability to feel the pain of others.
The Power of Some, the Pain of Others
At the end of my second marriage I had become attracted to a younger woman. This is not an uncommon story and, yes, I fell into that pattern. She and I never became more than friends — as much as she seemed to enjoy my company, sometimes for extended periods, she never came within 5 feet of me. I couldn’t understand why until one particular occasion. As we sat on opposite ends of a park bench, I pressed her to explain why she would pull away whenever I was near her. After some time, she eventually spoke, mechanically, with no trace of emotion.
“When I was ten years old I used to share a room with my older sister ...”
My body knew what was coming next. And with a sickening inevitability, her story unfolded.
“… my father would come into our room … and put his hands under her bedsheets … I would hide under my blankets, hoping he would stay away.”
The image of this man doing such violence to a child burned into me. I couldn’t help but weep openly as the weight of grief sank in, first for her, then for her sister, and then deeper, as the realization hit me that so many children are destroyed by such actions, every day, the world over. Faced with this irrefutable evidence of a man using his power as an adult to destroy rather than support his two children, I fell into a profound sadness. It seemed as if I was feeling the pain she was unable to express as she pinned her words, one after another, into the air.
With this nightmare forever weighing on her, she had struggled to grow into a mature adult, smiling more than most, speaking pleasantly, avoiding difficult conversations, giving nothing away, possibly even to herself. I had broken through the facade and somehow taken on an emotional weight, while she sat frozen beside me, too numbed by all of it to show any sign of feelings. Had she dipped into sharing her emotions, I suspect she might have simply fallen apart. She held on tight to save her life. An essential part of her was still trapped in the deep fault line that had ripped into what should have been a smooth, supported childhood. This was the missing piece in the puzzle of our connection and, with that in place, I began to recognize the true nature of the resonance I had with her. It was the jagged harmonic of trauma, locked into each of us, that I had mistaken for romantic possibility. It was a valuable ‘teaching moment’.
My experience of sexual abuse, although damaging, was ‘light’ in comparison to other stories such as this one. But emotional pain has its own internal circuitry that makes it difficult, perhaps pointless, to compare one experience with another. The violence done to a person’s inner being does not have to be caused by extreme physical force. The violation is the breaking of trust patterns. And trust patterns are the basis of how we see reality.
The Insidious Abuse of a ‘Traditional’ Marriage
Chi, my life partner who I met on the dance floor two decades ago, grew up in Manila at the time of the Marcos dictatorship. Despite the martial law, the earthquakes and the annual floodwaters pouring into living rooms, Chi says she was spoiled as a child. For her young Filipina mother and much older Chinese father, Chi was a treasured gift. Their love and respect never ceased, even through her teenage years.
Her love of dance began in front of her bedroom mirror, her door shut tight to keep Motown in and everything else out. The dance skills she built, plus the unfailing support of her parents, gave her an exceptional self-confidence, a strong social life and an ability to deal with any man, regardless of his social status.
And yet her first marriage was to a man who did his best to weaken her. Using his interpretation of ‘traditional values’, he inflicted a subtle, insidious form of power over her. She was not allowed to do any of the planning for her wedding — that was the responsibility of his family. After the wedding, visits to her family were strictly controlled — she was to live in the new ‘family home’. When they joined his aunts in Canada, Chi was allowed to work but not to keep the money she earned. That went into the ‘family account’ which was controlled by the husband. She was given a weekly allowance that was enough to take the subway to get to work. According to her husband, everything he did was for ‘the family’ but it became apparent that the word ‘family’ actually referred to him, and him alone. They never danced and if they were at a social gathering such as a wedding, they would leave when the dancing began.
The turning point came when she was invited to a work-related weekend retreat. She was excited by the chance to interact with her colleagues on a more casual basis. He was outraged that a married woman should even consider going to such an event. She went anyway. She enjoyed the activities of the first day, returning to her room at 2 AM. The receptionist had left a message to tell her someone had been calling her for hours. The phone rang. She picked it up and her husband’s rant poured into the room like a burst pipe. He stressed the fact that the men at the retreat were all married, implied she was a whore and declared his sister would never, ever do a thing like this.
Chi was late to arrive at the morning work session. She was unable to hide her tears and her colleagues expressed serious concern. This unexpected support was important to her. That evening she chose to again attend the social and returned to her room after midnight to the phone ringing. Hearing the same accusations, stronger and more threatening, she realized that her marriage was at a critical point. She had to make a decision.
Like so many women, she had stayed in an unfulfilling relationship because of her sense of responsibility to her children. But they were teenagers and Chi was growing concerned that further exposure to their father’s reign could be damaging to them. For the next three years, there was a tense power struggle where little was said between Chi and her husband except his insisting she quit her job and her responding consistently:
“My job is all I have. I will never give that up.”
Eventually, Chi found an apartment. When she had packed the last of her things and headed for the door, her husband told her:
“If you leave, you can never come back.”
She turned to him and said “I will never come back.”
And she didn’t.
Fortunately, Chi eventually found a way to take action and to emerge as a vibrant human being. She recognizes that the support she received as a child had given her an inner strength to not only endure a dysfunctional marriage but also the wherewithal to escape from it.
I met her many years later, and yet for the first several years of our relationship, the aftershocks of her marriage still rippled through our shared emotional landscape. It again raises the question of where the damage from the abusive treatment actually resides over all those years. And what happens when we are able to find healing? What changed?
Wholeness: The Interfusion of Core and Radiant Patterns
Here is the point that is obvious for some and contentious for others:
We are not born in sin, we are born in a state of innocence.
Innocence is a state of balance between inner and outer worlds. It is a transparency that connects the two realities. There are no twists or distortions to bend impressions or inhibit expressions. Innocence is nature’s way of introducing us to the world, providing a base consciousness that promotes growth, learning and the development of the power required to live a full life in a complex world. All a child requires to achieve this is a supportive environment.
But, until it matures into its fullest awareness and power, the innocence of a child is fragile and thus easily lost.
When innocence is lost, it is because of damage to the wholeness of a person’s being. What was once whole is now partially missing, and that is inherently disempowering. The framing of this in terms of wholeness or missing pieces invites visualization of fullness of being as some sort of pattern. This is where we can explore fertile new ground.
What kind of pattern can account for these different kinds of damage and also for a state of wholeness? I see it in terms of degrees of concentration of power versus its broader diffusion into the environment. These are opposite states but not incompatible. I call them Core and Radiance respectively, and I see the pattern of wholeness as an interfusion of the two.
In my own story of abuse, I can see the damage as the loss of something at my core level. The result for me was depression and a sense of futility that affected me for many years in my personal relationships and my early professional life as an artist.
My young friend, and her sister, were confronted with a monstrous act by their father who evidently had a destructive need to consume the innocence of his children. I saw a crippling of her ability to express her own feelings, at least to me. Perhaps that was a factor in how long it took me to get a clear idea about who she was and how we were actually connected. I believe there was a resonance between the silence she needed as she hid under the sheets and her apparent reluctance to talk about what really mattered to her. I’m not sure if I ever met the ‘real’ person or just a protective mask. Her particular kind of cheery radiance may well have been that outer mask rather than deeply connected to her inner truth.
Chi’s story shows a determined path to regain happiness in life. She has a remarkable balance of Core strength and Radiant presence. I believe that contributes to her strong intuitive sense about how people interact. It also played a big part in deciding what to do with her failing marriage.
We are all in relationships of some kind. As children, it can be difficult to understand relationships sometimes, especially when family members present some form of threat. As adults, perhaps we can do better — given the right tools to help us understand the dynamic structure of relationships. I have found the concept of Core-Radiance to be such a tool. Years ago, as an art student, I first encountered a startling image of a complete Core-Radiant living being — and I have been fascinated by its implications ever since. This is what I want to explore in my writing here.
In my next article I will share the story of that art student’s epiphany.