When Your Partner is a Survivor of Sexual Abuse or Incest

The number of women who have been sexually abused in childhood is staggering and, I believe, much larger than current estimates suggest. Often the memories and feelings don't surface until there is a safe committed relationship where there is support that can be trusted. That means when your partner is a survivor of sexual abuse or incest, you often suffer right along her side.

It is important for you to have an understanding about what is going on. You are going to need to be compassionate and understanding during your partner's healing process. Them seeking out a therapist and perhaps a group and fully engaging in their healing process will show you they are willing to work out what is coming up for them. This takes the pressure off of you being the only support--an unhealthy and stressful position which can cause irreparable damage in your relationship.

In addition to witnessing the pain and anguish she is going through, you may not be able to be intimate with her in the way you wish. Your sex life often suffers when you are partners with a sex abuse survivor. The following are some ideas and suggestions you can do to take care of yourself and support her at the same time.

First, I would highly recommend that you find a therapist or partners of abuse survivors group. You will need your own support system to help you understand and navigate the things that will come up in your relationship and your feelings about it. Putting a support system in place for you gives the relationship the help it will need and assures that your feelings have a place to be heard and listened to.

One thing to remember: you are not your partner's abuser! Even if you sometimes do things that trigger her, that doesn't make you a bad person. Triggers are going to happen--it is a normal part of recognizing and recovering from abuse. You and your partner need to figure out a way to deal with these triggers, and it is important you do not blame yourself if a trigger happens.

I your partner is just coming to terms and beginning the healing process of childhood sexual abuse your relationship is going to change. She is going to be spending a lot of time and energy on her own healing. She might not have the emotional energy to devote to the things in your life. It is important not to minimize what you're going through because you think her need is greater than yours. Make sure you have friends, family and a good support system around.

A difficult fact, especially for lesbians, is that you can not fix her. You can support her and help her through this hard time, but the healing is her job. She will need the help of a qualified professional therapist to guide her through this process. You can never take away what happened to her. You also cannot deny her what she is going through now. The only way for her to heal is to experience her emotions, deal with them and move on.

Educate yourself about sexual abuse and incest. Understanding the healing process will help you be a better support and also make your partner's behavior make sense to you. Without this understanding you can take on a lot of feelings that are not yours or even about you. The Courage To Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Survivor's Guide to Sex by Staci Haines, Can't Touch My Soul: A Guide for Lesbian Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Donna Rafanello are all excellent resources.

Some say healing from childhood sexual abuse or incest is a life long process. And it is. That being said, things can and will get better. Usually if will take a couple of years of intense inner work the start to heal from the abuse. This can be a tough time for your relationship, but it can also be a rewarding time.

If your partner is not able to be sexual at this time, continue doing the things you both have enjoyed together. Have dates, get exercise, visit with friends. Take time for yourself, too. Work together with your partner about the ways you can be intimate. If your partner does want a break from being sexual, you deserve to know how long she needs and the way to talk about and honor her process in a timely way for both of you.

You too may be a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. How your partner is dealing with her healing may be different from you. Feel free to share with her what has worked for you, but it may not be what she needs. Don't push her down your path. If you are both survivors of abuse, you will need to work extra hard on your boundaries. Focusing on your own healing process is also imperative.

It is definitely challenging to be in a relationship with someone who has been sexually abused as a child. While difficult, it can also be a tremendous teaching and time of growth for you. You can expect to learn many things about yourself from patience and compassion to you feelings and how they operate. If you truly love your partner, hanging in there in a healthy way while she is in the throws of her healing process can strengthen you and the relationship. If you don't deal with it, avoid triggers, take things personally and "play out" the trauma within the relationship both you and your partner will be hurt and the relationship will have little possibility of surviving.

Lesbian Emotional Battering

Last week a friend of mine, Anna, with whom I have only been in occasional contact, called me. In the course of our conversation a story began to emerge that helped me understand her unspoken anxiety. At first we talked about her little girl who is three. Then we talked about work. It took a long time to get around to the difficulties occurring in her relationship.

When it finally came out, she admitted her whole world was crashing and she was crawling out of her skin in fear. She started telling me that her girlfriend faulted her on everything she did. Anna’s self-esteem was very low and her denial level extremely high. She minimized the verbal and emotional battering that was chronically occurring. Her denial came out in how she took the blame for everything as well as the responsibility. Every other sentence she said had an apology in it.

That night Anna was waiting for her partner to come home. She told me her partner had been hanging out with several women who had just come out as lesbians. She had told Anna that the time she was spending with these women was developing a newfound spirituality. She wanted no restrictions from Anna about this, particularly in terms of amount of time she spent with them.

Anna was comparing it to when they first started dating and the partner would not allow her to talk with her ex. Evidently they had many fights about this and finally Anna just gave in and cut off all contact with her ex, who was a good friend and a strong part of her support system.

She told me it was after 10 pm on the east coast and that her partner had the baby, whose bedtime was 7 pm. This was after she expressed that the partner had wanted to talk when she got home. Anna’s fear was that the partner was going to break up with her.

One form of lesbian battering is the emotionally destructive relationship. Emotional abuse is the form of battering which is psychological and verbal. It humiliates and degrades the victim and makes the victim feel inferior. It may involve such behavior as blaming the victim for problems, threatening to withdrawal from the relationship, manipulating with lies and emotional insulting, criticizing, harassing the victim with attacks of jealousy, and denying that the victim is being abused. The main difference of characteristics between chronically abusive relationships and emotionally destructive ones is that the weapon is words rather than fists.

Hart (1986) defined lesbian battering as: http://www.loribgirshick.com/bibliography.htmlhas
…that pattern of violent and coercive behaviors whereby a lesbian seeks to control the thoughts, beliefs or conduct of her intimate partner or to punish the intimate for resisting the perpetrator’s control over her….If the assaulted partner becomes fearful of the violator, if she modifies her behavior in response to the assault or to avoid future abuse, or if the victim intentionally maintains a particular consciousness or behavioral repertoire to avoid violence, despite her preference not to do so, she is battered….The violence may include personal assaults, sexual abuse, property destruction, violence directed at friends, family or pets or threats thereof. It many involve weapons and is invariably coupled with nonphysical abuse, including homophobic attacks on the victim, economic exploitation and psychological abuse.

Lesbian battering has been denied by the community in which it occurs and ignored by society as well. Many of the themes are the same as in dealing with heterosexual abusive relationships; however, there are some specific dynamics to being a lesbian in a homophobic society and the nature of lesbian dyads that adds dimensions that complicate the issues.

Although it is believed that lesbian battering has been with us for quite a while it was not until the Task Force of the National Coalition Against Domestic violence http://www.dcadv.org/10task_force/gay_lesbian.html held a meeting in 1983 it was first addressed publicly. The lesbian community had been hesitant in dealing with it until a few courageous women began to speak out about the abuse they had received at the hands of their women lovers.

Finally, in 1986, the first book appeared on the topic: Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering by http://www.antiqbook.nl/boox/vin/28254.shtml K. Lobel. This book offered an excellent first step in educating lesbians and the public in general regarding the extent and forms the violence may take. In addition, it addressed the community’s response to the problem in terms of developing support groups for the victims and trying to educate staff to lesbian problems within the battered women’s shelter movement.

Robin Norwood, in her bestselling book Women Who Love Too Much http://www.amazon.com/Women-Who-Love-Too-Much/dp/0671733419 suggests that the relationships we are attracted to replicate what we lived with growing up. She gives the following characteristics as typical for women who find themselves as victims in abusive relationships.

1. Typically, you come from a dysfunctional home in which your emotional needs were not met.
2. Having received little real nurturing yourself, you try to fill this unmet need vicariously by becoming a caregiver, especially to a partner who appears, in some way, needy.
3. Because you were never able to change your parent(s) into the warm, loving caretaker(s) you longed for, you respond deeply to the familiar type of emotionally unavailable partner whom you can again try to change, through your love.
4. Terrified of abandonment, you will do anything to keep a relationship from dissolving.
5. Almost nothing is too much trouble, takes too much time, or is too expensive if it will “help” the partner you are involved with.
6. Accustomed to lack of love in personal relationships, you are willing to wait, hope, and try harder to please.
7. You are willing to take far more than 50 percent of the responsibility, guilt, and blame in any relationship.
8. Your self-esteem is critically low, and deep inside you do not believe you deserve to be happy. Rather, you believe you must earn the right to enjoy life.
9. You have a desperate need to control your partner and your relationships; having experienced little security in childhood you mask your efforts to control people and situations as “being helpful.”
10. In a relationship, you are much more in touch with your dream of how it could be than with the reality of your situation.
11. You are addicted to women and to emotional pain.
12. You may be predisposed emotionally and often biochemically to becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol, and/or certain foods, particularly sugary ones.
13. By being drawn to people with problems that need fixing, or by being enmeshed in situations that are chaotic, uncertain, and emotionally painful, you avoid focusing on your responsibility to yourself.
14. You may have a tendency toward episodes of depression, which you try to forestall through the excitement provided by an unstable relationship.
15. You are not attracted to women who are kind, stable, reliable, and interested in you. You find such “nice” women boring.

It is a long and difficult journey, when in the midst of an emotionally abusive relationship, to have the self-esteem and courage to get out of the situation. Usually by the point Anna has reached, emotions and thinking are confused and it feels too overwhelming to take any action to leave the abusive situation. Developing strong support systems, women’s abuse groups or Alanon http://www.al-anon.alateen.org/ , and therapy are extremely important to built confidence, become educated about what is happening, and stop the denial that is so debilitating.

I hope Anna will be able to seek out these resources and begin to find her way back to herself. The positive thing that I can see is that she called me and talked about it. That is at least a start on the path to healthy freedom.