“You Should Be Over It by Now”

These seven words can extend the experience of grief, guilt and shame of many survivors of sexual assault and other types of trauma.  Unfortunately, these words are often said by someone that the survivor looks to for support such as a family member or mental health professional.  Childhood sexual assault survivors have told me of instances when they were expected to engage in family activities that include the perpetrator of their abuse because the family feels “it is all in the past and you should forgive and forget.”

This refusal to accept the ongoing impact of the abuse in a person’s life can increase the shame, guilt, and sense of loneliness and isolation that a survivor feels. 

According to researchers Koss and Harvey (1991), “victims of sexual assault show very high distress levels within the first week that peak in severity by approximately 3 weeks postassault.  The distress then continues at a high level for the next month but begins to improve by 2 to 3 months.  After 3 months, rape victims do not differ from nonvictims on most symptom{s}” (p. 57).  However, even though these levels of distress will gradually diminish there are long term effects that can impact the life of the victim.  Women who have been sexually assaulted are more likely than others to experience a lifetime prevalence of clinical depression, addiction to drugs or alcohol, anxiety disorders, and post traumatic stress disorder.  (Koss & Harvey 1991 as quoted by End Violence Against Women International).

Trauma survivors may be also be experiencing long term effects of grief.  A trauma survivor is no longer the same person that he/she was before the assault took place.  The world no longer feels safe and the impact of the assault changes the persons physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  Experiencing grief at the loss of the pre-trauma person is a normal response to the horrific event.

Many victims have fewer episodes of reliving the assault as time goes by.  However, there comes a point in the recovery process where they realize they are not able to simply “get over” the trauma as easily as they originally thought.  This may be due to a crisis that floods the person with memories or (as noted above) contact with the perpetrator or someone who looks like the perpetrator. 

Many of the women that I have worked with find that their recovery from the trauma is impacted by the validation or lack of validation by important people in their life.  If a family member denies that sexual assault occurred against a young child or teen, that victim often feels as if the family has colluded with the perpetrator and/or blames the victim for any disruption to the family.  The victim then learns to suppress their emotions often leading to drug or alcohol abuse, depression, and anxiety.

When a trauma survivor asks me how long it will take to “get over” what has happened, I respond by letting them know it will take as long as it takes.  Some days will be better than others and eventually the good days will number more than the bad days.  However, the event or series of events will always be with them.  I encourage survivors to find ways to be in contact with other survivors so they know they are not alone, but I still want them to feel validated in their uniqueness.  No one likes to be told (as one woman recently related to me) that the rest of the world has problems, too.  Yes, the rest of the world has problems, too, but this woman just wanted her family member to acknowledge her pain. 

Being able to move on does not mean getting over.  The impact of the abuse will always be there.  Eventually the person does become stronger at the broken places and can transform the pain.  However, no one can predict how or when that happens.

Citations are from Victim Impact: How Do Sexual Assault Victims Respond? And How Can Law Enforcement and Other Community Professional Respond Successfully? By  Kimberly A. Lonsway, PhD and Sergeant Joanne Archambault (Ret.), May 2007, www.evawintl.org

Abraham Lincoln – A Case Study in Depression, Trauma and Resiliency

 I have recently been interested in reading about Abraham Lincoln and the depression that significantly affected his life to the point of being a defining characteristic of who he was. 

I started by reading (yes, I will admit this) Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.  I doubt it was Mr. Grahame-Smith’s intent, but in knowing that Lincoln suffered from depression I found the novel to be an allegorical representation of Lincoln’s struggle against the demons of depression (and slavery).  This fight strengthened him and led to the heroic acts that defined his presidency. 

The book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatest by Joshua Wolf Shenk is definitely a more serious and enlightening depiction of the life of Abraham Lincoln.  I invite you to read the first chapter and listen to the podcast at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4976127

Mr. Shenk does an excellent job in outlining the struggles that the president experienced in his life and is able to do research that delineates the genetic heritage of depression in the Lincoln family.  Although he makes a great amount of mention to the struggles in Lincoln’s earlier life, Mr. Shenk does not seem to make the connect between these early traumatic experiences and the depth of Lincoln’s depression.

According to historians (including Mr. Shenk and James Swanson in Manhunt: The 12 Day Search for Lincoln’s Killer) Lincoln experienced the following traumatic experiences in early life:

· the death of his mother when he was nine
· frequent moves due to poor business decisions on the part of Thomas Lincoln, his father
· the death of his older sister who had been his primary caretaker after the death of his mother until his father remarried.
· raised by a distant and abusive father who had witnessed his own father being killed in an Indian raid
· Living in neglect and poverty
· The death of two children before his assassination.
· Marriage to a woman with her own trauma and mental health issues.

If we used today’s ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) score see http://opendoorsnh.blogspot.com/2010/07/adverse-childhood-experiences.html , Lincoln would probably score 5 or above, well within the range that leads to risky and negative consequences in life.

Lincoln also experienced two strong characteristics of many trauma survivors. After the death of a woman with whom he may or may not have had a serious relationship in his twenties, Lincoln’s friends organized themselves into a suicide watch. Lincoln himself reported that he was fearful of carrying a knife for fear of following through on his desire to end his life.

In a letter to John T. Stuart, his first law partner, Lincoln wrote:

“I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”

Secondly, Lincoln had what is known as a ‘foreshortened sense of future,’ which in hind sight was definitely prophetic. He often commented having a sense or dreams of his impending assassination. Given the politics of the time and his position, it is understandable that he may be fearful but this started much earlier than his rise to the national political stage.

Abraham Lincoln had tremendous resiliency. He was able to take each negative experience and eventually turn it to his advantage. Even his backwoods poverty served him well in connecting to the constituency that eventually elected him to office. Lincoln also was able to attract people into his life that enhanced his abilities and balanced his deficits.

In understanding Lincoln’s history and theories of attachment, it can be seen that four people nurtured Lincoln’s innate resilient nature: his mother, Nancy; his sister, Sarah; his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston; and his friend, Joshua Speed. I encourage you to read more about these relationships, but I wish to particularly note that it was his stepmother who encouraged his love of learning even in opposition to a father who believed that reading anything other than the Bible was frivolous and lazy. It is my opinion that this relationship was the most stabilizing influence of his life and greatly offset the mercurial relationship he had with his abusive and distant father.

It is very apparent that Lincoln was a great politician with high ideals. His desire to be of service and to make meaning of his life was a component of his strength and resiliency. Abraham Lincoln was a man of conscience who was determined to leave this world better for his being in it and he succeeded, not in spite of his depression, but because he was able to use his struggles to his advantage. Unfortunately, a person with the same history of mental illness would probably be unable to rise to the status that Abraham Lincoln did due to stigma. However, I think that those of us who struggle with depression and the effects of childhood and adult trauma can find Lincoln’s story enlightening and inspiring.