“What in the ever loving hell kept me from blowing my brains out?”

This was the question that Judith Witherow asked when she was reviewing the personal essays that make up her memoir Strong Enough to Bend. And her answer was "love." She understood that no one could love her partner Sue or her sons with the kind of passion she carries in her body. After reading her book, I would conclude that she also carries that unique passion to her readers. She wants us to heal with her. She wants us to understand. To that end, she shares stories of great suffering and great fortitude.

Witherow defines herself as a “poor, mixed-blood Native American Indian raised in the Northern Appalachians.” She is also a lesbian living with multiple sclerosis and lupus.  She is careful to forge the links between the oppressions in her life: The illnesses that come from drinking the polluted water that flowed downstream from mountains strip-mined for coal, her prospects in life  limited by an educational system that tracked poorer children into lower level classes in spite of their high grades.

Over and over, Witherow adjusts the lens of the reader to bring the reality of poverty into focus. Patiently, she explains why her beloved mother could never meet the middle-class criteria for a “mother of the year” award. She details the multiple jobs that she and her siblings worked from as early as she can remember, giving the lie to the belief that poor people are lazy.  The reality of our health care system is brought home in the terrible story of her sister’s death, being denied care in the hospitals that could have saved her life because she lacked insurance.

"The last night of my marriage still seems like some other woman lived through it. Him sitting on the bed slapping a buck knife against his leg. Me pinned down by the blankets and the fear in my gut. 'I don’t want to kill you but I have to.'”

Her story of escape to the arms of the woman who would become her life-partner is riveting. And in this second section of the book, about her lesbianism, Witherow’s earlier themes return like a leitmotif: how class differences must be negotiated with her partner, and how her Native American background interfaced with an emerging butch identity. 

"Bottom line, whatever is affecting you needs a label."

The third section of the book is about the author’s health… and again, she makes sure the reader understands the ways in which misogyny, racism, and poverty inform the narrative. There are misdiagnoses, medical malpractice, and the mysterious experimental treatments she underwent as a child… because they were free. Witherow, warrior woman, does her own research and her own networking about her illnesses. She notes, in an essay about a group therapy session, “The knowledge I crave can only come from the other ‘chosen ones.’”  And she also notes, “Whenever ‘it strikes women more often’ is heard, the battle for funding automatically begins.” This is a tough section to read, but as Witherow notes the real shame she feels is toward a country that spends more on war than on research for saving lives.

Strong Enough to Bend ends with feminism. Witherow makes connections between her past activism and the issues confronting women today. One of the most poignant essays tells of an Equal Rights Amendment protest that coincided with a march of Native American activists walking from California to Washington. The Native American activists began to chant “Bitches with Riches Getting More Rights for Whites,” and Witherow was called upon to mediate with “her people.”

There is so much between the covers of this book, and I understand it’s still only a tiny percentage of the intersecting oppressions and overlapping experiences in Witherow’s life. One of the many take-aways from this powerful memoir is a stanza from one of her poems titled “Losin’ Our Origin:”

"'If you would just think
more positively your
life would be better.
Smile more. Expect less.
Life is crap because
your outlook created it.'

Reservations rack and reel with this gem."

Dear Local Theatre Company (and I know you know who you are),

If your audience demographic is anything like the national one, then women comprise 69 percent of your ticket buyers and 63 percent of your audience members. Hold that thought.

I see from your latest bulletin that your upcoming season has a lineup of all-male playwrights, with the exception of one play by a female novelist who has never written a play before in her life. (I daresay she has never formally studied playwriting or worked professionally in the theatre… but does that matter, really, since all women playwrights appear to be amateurs and novices anyway?)

So here’s a suggestion for you: Since you have never yet in your long history pulled together a season that even remotely reflects the gender demographics of your audience, why not tailor your audience to your season?  That would mean 86% of next season’s audience would be males. And the 14% who are women would be folks who have never attended the theatre before in their lives… because surely the fact that they have chosen never to see a play can have no possible correlation to their ability to appreciate the experience.

“Where is the love in this scene?”

This is a question familiar to many acting students. Novice performers who tear into a scene filled with dramatic conflict are brought up short by the criticism that all their effort is coming across as just so much sound and fury signifying nothing… because the audience is unable to discover the love between the combatants. “But it’s not there! They’re enemies!” I remember arguing. To which the response is, “Then you must find a way to put it there.”

Yesterday, I found out that my mentor in theatre had died. I had not seen him in thirty years, and I was surprised by the emotions that arose for me.

My relationship with Jack had been intense and transformative. For four undergraduate and graduate years I had tried to win his attention and his approval, and I had consistently failed. He had been the professor to please. The other professors were academics, but Jack had worked on Broadway for fifteen years. He had been choreographed by Balanchine, danced with Judy Garland and Ethel Merman. Jack had studied with Uta Hagen and taken classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio. He was carrying the DNA of Stanislavsky, the Group Theatre… and he had learned from the masters themselves the secrets of “the Method.” We all were competing to inherit the legacy.

Jack cast me in a lead role of a play that went on to win regional and state competitions, touring eventually to the Kennedy Center for the prestigious annual American College Theatre Festival. I remember the rehearsal we had the night before we flew out. Jack was giving little touch-up notes to the cast. When he got to me, he stopped, and then he said, “And as for you, I don't know what to say.” It was a devastating note. He had done it in front of everyone. I was, apparently, beyond help. My performance was hopeless. I was going to doom all of us to failure. I was the Jonah on board, but it was too late to throw me overboard.

Today, as a director, I know that, if an actor is truly that hopeless, giving a note like that can only assure an even more abysmal performance. When I think of that moment, I realize that Jack’s animosity toward me and his need to humiliate me were so great, he was willing to compromise his professionalism to indulge them.

In spite of the fact he had cast me in the leading female role, Jack gave the final curtain call to the supporting actress. This insult was emblematic of our dynamic for four years. He could not ignore my ability, but he could and did take every occasion to withhold acknowledgement of it.

Jack was my adviser for my directing thesis project, but I could not get him to come see the play until right before it opened. When he finally did attend, he gave me a list of changes that were too sweeping to implement at such a late date, but that left me with the understanding that the production was terrible.

I was on the verge of coming out as a lesbian and  I was twenty years younger than Jack. I had come of age in the era of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Jack had fled the oppressive Midwest with its suffocating 1950’s homophobia. His liberation had been the Broadway world of musical theatre, a world dominated by gay men. His heyday had been the era of post-war misogyny… the work of Miller, Williams, Albee. He either could not understand my restlessness as a woman wanting to be front and center, or maybe he understood it all too well for what it was: an assault on his refuge .

Jack and I finally came to a breaking point. It was close to the time of my graduation. I cannot remember the issue… it may have been one of my final attempts to get him to view my thesis work. What I remember was being in his office and breaking down in tears of rage and frustration. I remember Jack was appalled. It was if I had vomited on him. He didn’t know what to do, and I was beyond caring. I just sat there and cried.

Directly after this, I remember I went to a playwriting class. I was still crying, still sobbing. This is an odd memory, because I was normally a very reserved person. Whatever was happening to me that day was so momentous, I had become oblivious to my surroundings.

Jack personified the world of commercial theatre, and even though he had left it in the early 1960’s, and even though it was now the 1980’s, little had changed for women. In fact, today, thirty years later, there has still been little change for women. My experience with Jack, bitter as it was, turned out to be a blessing. It spared me years, maybe decades, of searching for a toehold in a male dominated industry that had a particular aversion to ambitious feminists. When I remember that afternoon with the out-of-control crying--which was a mystery to me at the time--I believe it signified my letting go of all my dreams of a career in theatre. I believe that I was understanding that there was no strategy that was ever going to gain me membership in this boys’ club of boys’ clubs, and that what I was experiencing with all those tears was grief, but also relief.

For thirty years I would struggle with the limited resources, the obscurity, and the internalized oppression of working in lesbian communities, but I was spared the dance of femininity and appeasement that engaged and exhausted the best energies of so many of my peers. I would never lend my talents to a “ladies’ auxiliary” in theatre. I would luxuriate in the freedom to write without compromise or censorship, and for a population of lesbians, feminists, girls, and especially survivors of sexual abuse whose stories are routinely appropriated, distorted, or erased in so-called “universal” drama of mainstream theatre.

So, Jack… I missed your memorial service.  I would have liked to have gone. And if there had been an occasion to speak, I would have made “Where is the love?” my text. I know where the love was for you. It was theatre, and good acting . It was the honesty of a scene, the integrity of the action. And I know from your obituaries that the love was also in the volunteer work of your post-retirement years. You worked as a counselor on a substance abuse hotline, an ombudsperson for eldercare, and as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for neglected and abused children.

And where was the love for me, in my experience as your student? Well, I will just  have to put it there.

Dylan Farrow has come forward with details about her sexual abuse at the hands of her father Woody Allen. Her brother Ronan, has supported her. And now her brother Moses Farrow has come forward to defend Woody, accusing his mother Mia of “poisoning” the family against her former partner. Her motive, of course, is revenge against Woody--for seducing and marrying one of Mia’s daughters.

High drama, but also predictable. In cases of incest, it is very common for one or more siblings to refute the victim’s accusations and come to the defense of the perpetrator. This happened in the Sandusky case. One of his sons accused his father of abuse, but the other sons stood by their father.  The same thing happened with Roseanne Barr. Her sister contradicted Roseanne’s version of the abuse in the family.

And it happened in my own family. My brother’s position was that I had “falsely accused an innocent old man.” How is that siblings can have such wildly different experiences within the same family?  There could be several possible reasons:

Often the victim occupies a scapegoat role in the family, and discrediting and trashing him or her is part of the prevailing family dynamic. The abuser could be so powerful or terrifying that other siblings, for their own reasons, may have chosen to side with him or her… and sometimes that “choice” is made for them on a subconscious level, with the subconscious mind editing out of memories.  And then, there are the perks and incentives. Inheritance is always a big one, but there can be other benefits in protecting a perpetrator. Often accusing a family member will result in losing one’s welcome with the perpetrator’s side of the family, or even with the entire family. No more invitations to Thanksgiving, graduations, holiday dinners. If one is still being supported by family, it might mean no more free rent, no more free tuition, and so on. When the perpetrator is a famous celebrity, the benefits can be substantial.

But there can be something else going on when siblings deny abuse. It’s called dissociation. In psychiatry, this is defined as “the separation of normally related mental processes, resulting in one group [of processes] functioning independently from the rest, leading in extreme cases to disorders such as multiple personality.”

Let’s look at this.

Often a perpetrator will only perpetrate when they are in an altered state from drug or alcohol use. Under the influence, they can be described as “changing personalities,” “acting like a different person.” And sometimes, with sexual abuse, this can happen without substances. Sexual compulsions and addictions operate apart from the will. They seem to have a mind of their own. Ask any addict. This is what Step One of the Twelve Steps is all about: “Admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.” Folks in recovery will be quick to add that being “powerless over alcohol” does not mean they are helpless or non-accountable. The addict can reach out, get a sponsor, attend 12-step meetings. Addicts, even ones far-gone in addiction, can and do become clean and sober and stay that way. They can make amends.  But first they have to identify the disease as a dissociated state that can take over their thinking. Recovery strategizes around the dissociated process of addiction, which is why it works. It does not rely on will power.

Dissociation can be very confusing, and especially for children. Often the distance between “drunk daddy” and “sober daddy,” or between “perpetrating mommy” and “non-perpetrating mommy” can be so great that it is impossible for a child to hold the concepts of both simultaneously in the mind. They have to choose. The internal split of the perpetrator becomes an external fault line in the family. The child does what the perpetrator does: He or she edits out the inconsistencies, splitting off the affect and the narratives that are taboo. Sometimes the victims themselves can experience this before retrieval of memories. Incest survivor Marilyn Van Derbur writes about the “daytime daddy” and the “nighttime daddy,” and how there was no connection between them in her mind. As a child, she split off all her memories of “nighttime daddy,” and she did not recover these until she was an adult.

Trauma is trauma because it involves something that the mind cannot accept, and yet something that the mind must accept. Incest is traumatic. It cannot have happened, and yet it did. One cannot bear to think about it, and yet one must find a way to think about it. The family cannot assimilate it, and yet they must. Fissures open up. Lines are drawn. Alliances form. Something or someone is ejected. Someone is a liar, someone has ulterior motives. The survivor recants or she is cast out, discredited, trashed. Or else the perpetrator is rejected, demonized, banished, all traces exorcized.

My perpetrator had dissociative disorders. He could be in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight with my mother, with screaming and hitting… but if the doorbell rang, he would cross to the door, open it—cool as a cucumber—and make a little joke about his torn shirt and the missus. He could turn like that on a dime. As his mental illness progressed, he began to lose his boundaries among his colleagues. One attorney told me how she was in the middle of negotiating a divorce settlement. She was representing one partner, and my father was representing the other. Suddenly, in the middle of the negotiating, he stood up and began to preach how it was the will of God for the couple to reconcile. He delivered a sermon as if it was from the mouth of God. This from the man who abused his daughter!

Sometimes, when a powerful figure, like a father, dissociates, those around can also spontaneously dissociate on cue. That enables them to split off and possibly forget entire episodes of incongruent behavior. This kind of dissociation is a self-protective strategy, especially when the family is still a survival unit, as it is for a child.

How did the perpetrator learn to dissociate? Often perpetrators were victims themselves. They failed to reconcile the fission in their early psyches, which enabled a dissociated reality to grow in themselves. My father was sexually abused by his mother, who slept with him until he was twelve. He was sexually compulsive by the time he was a teenager… and yet, he tried to gain admission to seminary school. He wanted to be a minister!  How did he reconcile his out-of-control sexuality with a call to the ministry?

What I noticed was that my father could do something that the whole family witnessed, like cutting through the cord of an electric hedge-trimmer, and then insist that he had not done it. I mean, really insist. I thought, “Well, he’s either the world’s best actor or else he has the world’s worst memory.” I came to believe that the truth was neither. He was dissociating. He held himself to such high standards of godlike perfectionism, that when he messed up, he simply edited reality. He could “make it so” whenever he wanted. Possibly it was these impossibly high standards that played a part in the creation of a criminal and non-accountable dissociated state.

My father eventually became a criminal attorney, which was an ideal profession for a man with an aptitude for altering his reality. He could argue with remarkable persuasion the innocence of the most blatant offender, because in his mind, he had “made it so.”

I do not believe that my father assimilated his perpetrations. I believe that he stored those memories in the same file with the bisected hedge-trimmer cord: “Things That I Know I Could Not Possibly Have Done.”

Getting back to the question of siblings…

When these conflicting sibling narratives occur, they do not necessarily mean that the perpetration never happened. In fact, they can bear powerful witness to a dissociated truth about the family. Is someone lying? “Lying” is a poor choice of words for what happens in dissociation. Truth is being compartmentalized, split off, banished… but that is different from intentional lying.  These pieces of truth, held by different family members, become polarized, as do the holders of them. Demon-monster or long-suffering, wrongfully accused innocent?  Ungrateful, vengeful child or courageous truth-teller? Loyal sibling defending an innocent parent or cowardly betrayer hoping to inherit?

One of the touchstones of late stage recovery is the ability to move away from black-and-white thinking, to be able to hold in mind contradictory truths. What would this look like in the case of incest?

One might remember the times when a perpetrator was caring and generous, and at the same time hold the memories of their horrific perpetration and betrayal. One might acknowledge the skill or artistry in the perpetrator’s professional life, and still retain the anger for their sexual predation.  Holding contradictory truths, one must still make choices around behaviors. And those behaviors will reflect values and have moral consequences.

In my own experience, I was less empowered when I was demonizing the perpetrator. I continue to confront and I still hold him accountable, but today I have a deeper understanding of him as person made up of many parts, with his own history of victimization, and suffering from a devastating form of mental illness. This perspective expands my opportunities for advocacy and activism, and it also enables me to take a more careful inventory of the ways in which I have been affected by the perpetration.

Today, I can read the articles by Dylan and by Moses Farrow, and I can see how they both tell the same story, a story of incest.

I remember the bad old days when sexual harassment was teasing and date rape was just a bad date. I remember when rape was considered something that strangers did to careless women walking too close to dark alleys.

What changed? Many things. Women were allowed to vote, to own our children, to gain an education, to work in the professions, to inherit and own property, to serve on juries, to control reproduction. Women were able to become doctors and lawyers and elected officials and judges. We came out of isolation in patriarchal homes and roles. We started talking to each other, comparing our experiences.

But here’s the thing about children. There will never be a critical mass of empowered individual children. Children will never organize themselves into PACs. They will never control research about themselves. They will never elect their own officials to frame laws on their behalf. They will never serve on juries or be judges, or even become attorneys. They will never be the doctors examining other children. They will never be the psychologists questioning other children. Because they are children, they will always be dependent. Their rights will always be defined by and granted to them by adults. And rescinded. They will be treated as property of their parents, unless there is some kind of horrendous abuse that is brought to the attention of authorities.

Here’s another thing about children: They will always think like children. Their brains are still developing. They will have survival strategies that are functions of their helplessness and their stages of development. They can be trained so easily to believe atrocity is normal, that perpetrators are their protectors, because they do not have the prior points of reference of adult victims. Their silence can be coerced. They can believe that they are the cause of every abuse perpetrated on them, and that their perpetrators are their victims.

When a charge of sexual abuse is brought forward officially, it will always need to be an adult bringing it forward. There will always need to be adults eliciting, transcribing the story. And, as these adults attempt to bridge the language and perception barriers, they become vulnerable to charges of manipulating the child, implanting suggestions…  recruiting the child in an act of spite or revenge.

And then, of course, there is the narrative that a child constructs. The details may change. The chronology may double back on itself. The memory may be somatic, or emotional only. The more traumatic the incident, the more fragmented the narrative. Deprived of agency, the child does the only thing she can to alleviate the agony of powerlessness: She changes her thinking. There may be dissociation, amnesia, aphasia, confusion, contradiction, fusion with the perpetrator, overwhelm. And every one of these syndromes, modes of thinking, and disjointed styles of narration becomes justification for discrediting the child.

This is the situation with incest. This is why children are targeted. They won’t tell, and if they do, they won’t be believed, and if they are, it still can’t be proven. And nearly always there is more social capital in siding with the perpetrator who is, after all, an adult. Children have few resources, few networking connections of any use to adults. And their anger cannot result in slander, evictions, firing, scapegoating, and social shunning. Siding with the perpetrator nearly always carries fewer negative consequences for the bystander.

And, then, of course, there is the media circus around an incest accusation. The ordeal that the child will have to survive.  Many parents and sometimes prosecuting attorneys make the decision not to press charges. This is especially true when the perpetrator is a celebrity or public figure. And when charges are dropped, the world takes that as proof that it was all made up in the first place.

If the perpetrator is careful not to leave any physical evidence, he or she can pretty much count on indemnity.

If there were or could be such a thing as a court of children, there might be different standards. The shattered narratives might be read differently by a true jury of peers. The amnesia or chronological inconsistencies themselves might be assessed as an index of the severity of trauma, instead of evidence of "false memory."  A jury of child peers might react very differently to a celebrity defendent, unswayed by the celebrity's social position or reputation. They might have a visceral response to the creep factor. (And, yes, adult juries are influenced by emotional factors all the time.)

But this kind of justice is not possible for children. We adults must always interpret, intercede, mediate, judge, indict, sentence.  And we are doing a terrible job.