« Child sex abuse audit lauds NH diocese | Main | Man suspected of child sex abuse is brought back to NN from Calif. »
February 19, 2005
Writing it down and talking is good therapy
You can tell when someone is simply trying to sell a book or they're on a mission. With Sandy Riggin, it was clear right away.
"The book is just a tool," she says.
"The idea is to use it to chip away at the silence that surrounds and the cycle that perpetuates child abuse."
Sandy tells her own childhood horror story in "Forbidden Memories," a self-published account that's graphic in its descriptions and as painful as it is compelling. The excerpts included here are some of the least brutal examples I could find, but ones that get the message across.
Sandy is a slight, slender 5-foot-3. At 41, her straight blond hair hangs past her shoulders. She has a haunted look that disappears briefly when she smiles. One of her eyes is blue, the other green. When she was 6, she says, her younger brother threw a dart into her left eye, causing it to turn green.
These days, she has a private practice as a psychiatric counselor outside Atlanta. But in the '70s, during her middle school years, she lived with her mother and stepfather in Cincinnati and Felicity, where she says she endured all manner of physical, sexual and mental abuse, all described in detail in "Forbidden Memories."
She was in town recently, working her own media campaign, and she came armed with facts.
"Some 3.2 million children in the U.S. suffer some form of abuse every year, according to the National Council on Child Abuse -- and those are just the ones that get reported," she says.
"Mom started cutting my hair. I could feel she was taking off a lot more than she had promised. The reflection in the mirror of my short, ugly hair left me so upset that I begged her to stop. But she wouldn't put the scissors down -- I couldn't hold back the tears anymore and that left Mom seething.
"'Look at yourself,' Mom demanded. I was too embarrassed to look -- so she grabbed my chin and forced me to face the mirror. 'Look at how ugly you are when you cry.' I was devastated by the tear-filled eyes and red swollen face staring back. She was right -- I was truly ugly."
For Sandra, as with so many others who have shared similar experiences, the fallout from a childhood of abuse leads to an adulthood of drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorders and any number of other self-destructive behaviors.
Because of what had happened to her, she hated herself. She was 32 when she says she took 180 Flexeril, a pharmaceutical muscle relaxant. When she came out of her coma five days later, she still wanted to die.
She doesn't know when the abuse started. But this following piece describes an incident that occurred with her stepfather when she was 11 years old. And it offers an insight into why an abuse victim -- and a child, especially -- might blame him or herself.
"When he was done, I felt dirty, like I had just done something wrong. -- I had been desperate for someone to pay attention to me and love me, but this wasn't the way I wanted it to happen.
"The guilt paralyzed me, while my physical self was now awakened. I was bewildered because it felt wrong emotionally and morally, but from a physical standpoint, his touching me excited parts of my body in a way I had never felt before.
"I wondered, 'Is this what it means for someone to love another person? Is this how a dad is supposed to love his daughter? Who can I tell? Who can answer these questions?'"
A month after she tried to end her life, Sandra went into therapy. She began writing about what had happened to her. She would write until she felt she'd written enough, then she would read it out loud. She says she would rewrite each piece until it matched what the little girl inside her remembered. "Forbidden Memories" is the result.
"I didn't write the book to point fingers," she says.
"I wrote it to let others know it's OK to talk about what happened to them. Because if you can talk about it, you can begin to heal."
If you'd like to find out more about Sandra or her book, www.sandrariggin.com is full of information.
Posted by Nealus at February 19, 2005 03:08 PM
