The Trauma Prism

This guest blog is an edited excerpt from a story posted on Medium: Essays from, and for, Mothers On the Aftermath of Sibling Sexual Abuse. The authors introduce themselves: We met through 5WAVES’ support group, Parents Coping with Sibling Sexual Trauma and Abuse. We connected through our similarities of being the biological mother of both children–for both of us, a daughter who was sexually abused by an older brother, in her pre-pubescent years. Both of us are in committed, long-term relationships. We are both health professionals with over 70 years combined clinical experience.

We write under the alias “WhatWas” to maintain anonymity. This signifies how, in an instant, What Was our life evaporated. We look back, longingly now, and with inescapable sorrow, for what we thought was our family. A family where we believed everyone was generally safe, and felt loved and cared for, even though it was not, and never could be, a perfect family. In telling our own stories of what was then, and what is now, we will not share any information that could reveal the identities of our families. Throughout these essays, details of our stories will be altered to protect the identities of the people we love most in this world from accidental disclosure.

We both learned about the SSA when our daughters were on the verge of young adulthood. Disclosure of SSA is always fraught with hazards ahead, but disclosure at this age brings a unique set of them. Our daughters had just been launched out into the world, where, as parents, we were legally no longer a required part of their lives and it was developmentally appropriate to be “letting them go”.

We had both engaged in years of struggle in our relationships with our first and only daughters as they moved through adolescence. In these struggles, it was difficult to know how much of the relationship tension was due to what might be considered ‘normal’; expected tendencies for adolescent girls to pull away from their mothers.

There was nothing fundamentally different in what we were experiencing, relative to other mothers we talked to and other relationships directly observed. One of us saw a therapist during her daughter’s adolescence to obtain support and guidance around building her mother-daughter relationship, recognising the strain on both herself and her daughter at times when relating was particularly difficult. The other consumed many resources and sought the advice of others on a continual basis in search of how to navigate the relationship with her daughter.

Years of Relationship Struggle with Our CWWH

Given our professional backgrounds, we understood how reacting to the distress we were seeing through the Western medical model had the potential to pathologize them. This could include labeling them in ways that their medical records would never allow them to shed for the rest of their lives. Because of this, we monitored our daughters for signs of concern, encouraged and supported them in their school, social and family activities, worked toward understanding them, and were always seeking ways to improve our mother-daughter relationships.

Like many teens, our girls were desperate for autonomy, so we held space for them to tell us if and when they needed help, ready to usher them into the health system if needed. Both of our daughters had sought therapy for different reasons by the time they told someone about the SSA: one continued with her therapist through disclosure, the other’s mother worked feverishly to find a trauma-based therapist, which happened very promptly.

Despite the parenting and relationship challenges in the years during and since the SSA, both young women are managing to grow and develop their unique qualities and potential — an absolute testament to their strength. They both have a circle of long-term friends, have worked and traveled, completed schooling and have entered university studies. Many of the people they subsequently disclosed to, with our support and encouragement, were family friends — some of many years standing. Both of us as mothers cultivated and cherished these long-term friendships, knowing that parents can never fulfill all the needs of a child, teen or young adult.

What we did not realize is that the wounds of SSA had damaged our relationships with our daughters long ago — without us knowing anything about it.

In hindsight, this explained so much of the years of struggle with them, and what came after disclosure…

Relationships with the CWWH: The Trauma Prism

What this meant for us was that we both had daughters who were deeply harmed early in life. In part or in whole, they could only see us through what we will refer to as the trauma prism, or the ability to view us only through the neural, automated responses developed given the trauma they had endured. These responses are, and remain, protective for them. They are, simultaneously, destructive to building or maintaining supportive relationships.

As a “medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”, the prism our daughters viewed us through for most of their developmental years was one of not providing the safety or love for them as they expected us to, as the abuse was happening.

We are unaware of what our daughters were told during the abuse by their siblings. It is not uncommon for children who are carrying out harmful sexual behavior to tell their sibling anything necessary to keep the abusive behavior hidden from parents. It is not unimaginable, then, that our sons may have suggested something along the lines of “mom knows and says it is ok” or “don’t tell mom because she will be really angry at us both.”

What, then, were our daughters conditioned to believe about us, as mothers?

We will likely never really know.

How unloved and confused our daughters must have felt at that time, as they may have been told things that were untrue to keep the abuse shrouded in secrecy. The longer term, extensive damage such messaging caused in our relationships with them is something we think about every day. The role of the trauma prism is something we have intensified our efforts to understand, in our current attempts to build a relationship with our daughters after disclosure.

Given our rocky relationships with our daughters, and the timing of them bringing the SSA to the surface to disclose and begin processing, made launching them into adulthood a complex and painful proposition.

We knew how much they would need their mothers going out into the world, after having suffered for years from the SSA. Yet we were at times out of reach from our daughters relationally, bringing us both to feelings of deep despair.

A young adult is just starting to more clearly see their parents as human beings, with all of the usual flaws and qualities. Our daughters also have to discern the differences between their thoughts, fears, and trauma-based expectations about us, and how we have, in fact, responded and acted in ways to support them, and how we can in the future…

As we process through the heaviness of the complexities of being mothers of children who were harmed by and harmed their siblings, we plan to share what might be helpful to others going through their own versions of the hell on earth that is SSA…

For now, if you’re a mother trying to survive in the aftermath of SSA, know that your story matters, and that you are not alone.