Silent No More: (cont.)
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Longing for Nurturing
Behind Kim's fiery spirit and quick wit is a wounded, still grieving young woman. She's overweight, but she has "too many other things to work on" besides dropping pounds. She's single and often lonely, though she has a boyfriend of seven years. Before him, by her own account, she had a string of mostly empty sexual relationships, 40 in all. "I used to confuse sex with love," she says. Now 34, she still finds it hard to believe that a man could want more than sex from her, saying, "I'm afraid people will leave if they see the real me."
Kim can identify exactly when these feelings of worthlessness began. Her stepfather started fondling her during bath time when she was about 7, and by the time she was 11 he had graduated to intercourse. "I went from crying to just giving in to fighting to get him away from me," she says. She felt she had no choice but to remain silent: Her stepfather had warned that if she told her mother, a prominent southern political activist, he'd kill them both. To prove his point, he'd sharpen his knives and clean his gun in front of Kim.
And so she endured routine rapes by the man who was supposed to be taking care of her while Mommy was out saving the world, beatings when she threatened to tell, and a pregnancy and horrifying miscarriage that she suffered through alone at age 16. "I knew my stepfather was the father," she wrote in a journal, "and just like everything else he had done to me, I could not tell anyone about it."
When Kim was 19, her stepfather pressed one time too many for sex. She resisted and he slapped her, and in her anger she found the courage to tell her mother. Kim was stunned when her mother responded by accusing her of seducing her stepfather and ordered her out of the house. Forced to live with friends and family for a while, Kim eventually moved out on her own. Many years later, she would learn that her mother herself had been sexually abused by a relative. Through therapy she would come to understand that her mother had no inkling of how to protect or support her daughter. At the time, though, Kim was devastated.
" Sometimes I think I shouldn't have said anything," Kim says through tears. "I paid a price: I had to change my life. I had no degree, no job, no skills, nobody but me. What I've lived through is incomprehensible. I lost a good part of my life." She tries to describe the physical and psychological impact of her past: "I constantly have indigestion. When I'm afraid, I want to throw up. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to rock my semblance of being normal."
Dorothy Cunningham, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist with a private practice in New York, explains that Kim's situation was made worse by her mother's denial: "When a parent