Triumph (Second Edition): A Journey of Healing from Incest

Praise for Triumph

You offered something to my understanding that I did not find elsewhere

- Crisis line worker, Calgary Sexual Assault Centre, Calgary, AB.

The quality of the writing and teaching as expressed in Triumph is excellent

- Harvey Armstrong, M.D., Dip. Psych., Child Psychiatry, F.R.C.P. Canada,

Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of Toronto

Triumph...is on the recommended reading list for graduate students

- Toni Ann Laidlaw, Ph.D.

Professor of Education, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS,

Co-author with Cheryl Malmo, Ph.D., Healing Voices.

Your sharing really does enrich all of our healing processes...

- Executive Director,

Aftermath: Self-help for Families of Sexually Abused Children, Toronto.

Thoroughly recommend your book

- Crisis Line worker, Grande Prairie, AB

Written in a style that is easy to read and comprehend...

- Abuse Survivor.

Others’ stories tell of the incest ‘and now I’m happy and well.’ For those in the throes of the pain...your book reads like a comforting hand on the shoulder

- Abuse Survivor

Seldom have I been so emotionally committed to a book as I have to Triumph

- Don Loney,

(former) Publisher, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd.

I am grateful for your book

- Oprah Winfrey.

...a triumph of the soul

- Calgary Herald.

Your book has meant so much to so many

- Shelagh Rogers, CBC Host.

...to be commended

- Quill and Quire.

A story of triumph

- Ottawa Citizen.

...a pilgrim [who adds] a new dimension... No one can come away from this book unaffected

- Toronto Star

"Your book is a triumph

- Peter Gzowski

[Trysh Ashby-Rolls] gave a superb reading, which was warm, intelligent, engaging and powerfully descriptive. She has not only had the courage to write about challenging social issues other writers seldom attempt—but has also developed a voice and style that are literary in the best sense of that word.

- Gary Geddes, author, Distinguished Professor Emeritus,

Department Canadian Literature, University of Washington State.

TRIUMPH: A JOURNEY OF HEALING FROM INCEST

Copyright © 1991/ 2019 by Trysh Ashby-Rolls

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Imo Publications, c/o Trysh Ashby-Rolls, TWUC, 600-460 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 1Y1.

First published in 1991 by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited 300 Water Street Whitby, Ontario, Canada L1N 9B6

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of any copyright material contained in this text. The publishers welcome any information that will enable them to rectify, in subsequent editions, any incorrect or omitted reference or credit.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 D 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Ashby-Rolls, Trysh Triumph: a journey of healing from incest

ISBN 978-0-9939086-0-6

1. Incest. I. Title.

HQ71.A83 1991 306.877 C91-094778-3

Cover Photo: Child in the Meadow. Mary Patricia age eleven, summer 1954, the only photograph in which I felt pretty as a child. By now the sexual abuse has ended.

BOOK DESIGN: CAROLE GIGUERE

DARREN LABEREE

RECENT AUTHOR PHOTOS: GREGORY FRANKLIN

Printed and bound in USA

To honour Mary Patricia the child who endured and survived

This book could not have come into being without the love, support, and encouragement of many friends, acquaintances, colleagues, teachers, and even strangers, to whom I am profoundly grateful. Your contributions have been invaluable.

Appeciation to all who still walk with me on my journey.

CREDITS

Excerpt from Surviving With Serenity is reprinted with the permission of the publishers HEALTH COMMUNICATIONS INC., DEERFIELD BEACH, FLORIDA. Surviving With Serenity by T. Thomas ©1990.

Excerpt from Recollecting Our Lives: Women’s Experience of Childhood Sexual Abuse (Women’s Resource Centre) is reprinted by permission of Press Gang Publishers, Vancouver, Canada, 1989.

Excerpt from Surviving Sexual Violence by Liz Kelly. Copyright ©1988 by Liz Kelly. Reprinted by permission Polity Press, Cambridge, England.

Excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir: A Love Story by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987) reprinted by permission George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited, London, England and by Andre Deutsch Ltd., London, England.

Excerpt from Hope for the Flowers reprinted from Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus. ©1972 by Trina Paulus. Used by permission of Paulist Press.

Excerpt from Incest: Whose Reality, Whose Theory by Sandra Butler from Paper Aegis, Summer/ Autumn 1980. (Aegis was a magazine with a focus on ending violence against women.)

Excerpts from The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. Copyright 1988 by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from Daddy, We Hardly Knew You by Germaine Greer. ©1989 by Germaine Greer. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc., New York.

From My Father’s House by Sylvia Fraser. Used by permission of the Canadian Publishers, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto.

Excerpt from The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women by Diana E. H. Russell. ©1986 by Diana E. H. Russell. Published by Basic Books Inc., Publishers, New York.

Excerpt from Womanspirit: A Guide to Woman’s Wisdom by Hallie Iglehart. ©1983 by Hallie Iglehart. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Excerpt from Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By You? © by Jordan Paul, Ph.D. and Margaret Paul, Ph.D. CompCare Publishers, Minneapolis, MN. Copyrighted material used with permission.

Excerpt from The Inner Dance by Diane Mariechild. ©1987 by Diane Mariechild. Published by the Crossing Press, Freedom, California. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpt from The Book of Runes by Ralph Blum. ©1982 Ralph Blum. Published by Eddison Sadd Editions Limited, London, England. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpt from Changes of State by Gary Geddes. ©1986. Published by Coteau Books, Thunder Creek Publishing Cooperative Limited. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpt from In Celebration of Friendship by Rusty Berkus. ©1990 by Rusty Berkus. Published by Red Rose Press, Santa Monica, California. Reprinted with permission.

Excerpt from Seeking the Heart of Wisdom by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield, ©1987. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., 300 Massachusetts Ave., Boston, MA 02115 USA.

Excerpt from Fully Alive by Ralph Laurens. ©1985 by Ralph Laurens. Published by Saybrook Publishers, Dallas, Texas. Used with permission.

Excerpt from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle © 1997 by Eckhart Tolle. Published by Namaste Publishing Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Reprinted with permission.

Possible Indicators of Child Sexual Abuse (revised 1990) reprinted with permission of the Metropolitan Toronto Special Committee on Child Abuse.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: VICTIM

CHAPTER ONE A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

PART TWO: SURVIVOR

CHAPTER TWO CATALYST

CHAPTER THREE A PROMISE IN THE SNOW

CHAPTER FOUR FLASHBACKS AND MEMORIES

CHAPTER FIVE CHOOSING TO HEAL

CHAPTER SIX CRISIS AND CHAOS

CHAPTER SEVEN CHILD IN THE MEADOW

CHAPTER EIGHT NO MORE SECRETS

CHAPTER NINE BLACK HOLES

CHAPTER TEN DISCOVERING ME

CHAPTER ELEVEN DEAR MUMMY

CHAPTER TWELVE DEAR DADDY

CHAPTER THIRTEEN GOD?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN LETTING GO

PART THREE: WARRIOR

CHAPTER FIFTEEN BIRTHDAYS

CHAPTER SIXTEEN BODY BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN LEARNING LOVE

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN BOUND FOR GLORY

CHAPTER NINETEEN FINDING MY FEET

CHAPTER TWENTY DANCING IN MY BONES

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE INTO THE LIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO AFTER

APPENDIX A

POSSIBLE INDICATORS OF CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

APPENDIX B

COPING SKILLS

OTHER TITLES BY

TRYSH ASHBY-ROLLS

FOREWORD

Trysh Ashby-Rolls was still recovering appalling memories of incest when I met her, but her story wasn’t the first one I had heard. My friend of some twenty years, the gifted novelist Sylvia Fraser, had just published My Father’s House, an account of her gradual awareness that her father had subjected her to incest from infancy until she was in her teens. Over many dinners in candlelit restaurants I listened as Sylvia struggled to piece together what had happened to her, one fragment of horror at a time, and I knew how painful it had been for her to decide that she had a responsibility to write about it.

Soon after Sylvia’s book was published in three countries, a letter came to me at the Globe & Mail where I was writing a column. The person, Trysh Ashby-Rolls, said she was dealing with incest memories and she was finding it both an exhilarating and awful experience. She had invented ways to cope and she thought some of them might be helpful to others. Was I interested in writing about her?

I certainly was. Her letter, for one thing, was uncommonly sprightly and intelligent. She sounded like a woman I would enjoy meeting in any context. The subject of incest, however, was one that had become a media phenomenon and I was intrigued on that count alone. Almost overnight, it seemed, sexual abuse was revealed to be almost as fixed an experience in childhood as bandaged knees. Experts were saying that some form of sexual abuse happens to one in three girls and one in six boys. Reports documented the crippling consequences. Close to ninety percent of women in Kingston’s appalling Prison for Women had been sexually abused in childhood; it was said that more than eighty per cent of prostitutes, men and women, were sexually dysfunctional because of incest.

I first learned the extent of childhood sexual abuse in October 1984, when I moderated a panel at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry that was advertised to be about Violence in the Family. I expected it would concentrate on wife-battering and I prepared for that topic. To my surprise the panellists were more preoccupied with incest. Lorna Grant, who coordinated the Metropolitan Toronto Special Committee on Child Abuse, devoted her presentation to exploding myths about sexual abuse of children.

It was not true, she said, that most sexual abuse of children is caused by villainous strangers who lurk around schoolyards to waylay youngsters. Instead, almost all sexual abuse—ninety per-cent—occurs in the child’s own home and the perpetrator, a word new to me to describe offenders, is someone known and trusted by the child. Also, she said, the degree of abuse is not an indicator of the lifelong damage the child will suffer. Fondling can be as traumatic as penetration, depending on the child and the situation. Neither is it true that an affectionate perpetrator does little lasting harm; the truth is that a child fondly seduced with gifts and attention is profoundly confused because misery and shame have come packaged as love.

And so it went during that evening’s discussion of family violence. The participants spoke in sensible, brisk tones as they described the emerging social problem, but something very different happened when they finished. People in the audience went to microphones, their faces streaming tears, and told a hushed auditorium about the incest in their lives. We all went home shaken.

That same year the Fifth International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect in Montreal was stunned as paper after paper, speaker after speaker, all described the havoc and extent of childhood sexual abuse. That winter the topic of incest simply exploded out of the closet and took over the national agenda.

Incest survivors, as they bravely called themselves, began to meet and share their stories. The similarities astonished and heartened them, but to proceed with their healing they had to teach therapists how to help them. Few therapists had the insight or training to meet their needs. Counsellors were running to one another saying, What is this? Women survivors of incest who consulted male psychiatrists for help sometimes were told that they were imagining things. Men survivors went to incest workshops and were turned away by women who wanted to comfort one another, but not them.

I met a psychologist in a small community in the Maritimes who told me she was burned out. She was the only person in town working with incest survivors and she had a waiting list.

Like many journalists writing about social issues, I tried to report on what was happening. Whenever I did, dozens of men and women contacted me to tell their personal stories of abuse. What they had in common was the intense emotional pain they were suffering and, in every case, a history of disrupted relationships that was blighting their hopes of adult happiness.

They also shared a compulsion to be heard – and always for the same reason. They wanted others with similar backgrounds to know they weren’t alone, that they weren’t crazy, and that there was hope.

The letter from Trysh Ashby-Rolls in January 1989 sounded what had become a familiar theme but it had a distinct quality, a thread of elation. She was healing, she told me joyously, and she wanted to talk about it. We arranged to meet in her small, exquisitely furnished downtown house. She served me tea elegantly and told me, often with a brilliant smile I found disconcerting and incongruous, about her horrible childhood.

It was a relief when she began to speak of the ways she was managing her anger and her grief. Her ingenuity was simply splendid. She had begun by trashing her bedroom, she told me sunnily, but then she discovered something that left no mess and was just as gratifying. I whack the bed with a tennis racket, as hard as I can. She was full of such strategies, some as basic as warm milk for sleeplessness and others, like a symbolic burial in her backyard of the abused child within her, deeply complex and powerful.

Mindful of the thousands of adults in the same pain, I said, Of course, you’ll do a book.

When I wrote about Trysh Ashby-Rolls the next week in the Globe & Mail I devoted most of the space to her techniques for healing herself.

She is parenting herself, I wrote, and she is the good, loving parent she didn’t have. She buys herself roses. She bakes herself cookies. During a particularly bleak period, she went to bed and drank warm milk out of a baby bottle and nipple. She has a teddy bear, a piano, plants in a sunny window, and beside her bed is a silver teapot and white china cup… That day telephone calls poured into the Globe, overwhelming the staff. People were hungry to know more about the phenomenal woman who was fighting back with such wit and bone-wisdom. Trysh called. I was apprehensive that inadvertently I had written something to embarrass her or add to her anguish but, to my relief, she was jubilant. She was besieged with calls from radio and television people across the country, she said. They wanted her to talk about her strategies for dealing with incest memories and she was delighted to accept.

A few days later, with media attention still building, she told me that she was giving serious consideration to my suggestion about writing a book. Maybe she owed it to others, she thought; maybe she owed it to herself.

Do it, I insisted.

We didn’t see one another again for almost two years but we kept in touch. She wrote me that she was moving to the West Coast to find the space and privacy to finish her own growth and start on the book. Every few months she wrote that both projects were going well. Then I happened to be in Vancouver one evening late in 1990 and someone gave me a note. It was from Trysh, saying that she would see me after the speeches.

When we met I almost didn’t recognize her. The woman I saw in Toronto in January, 1989, had a quality of muffled tension and anxiety that made me fear that she might break. The Trysh Ashby-Rolls who hugged me in Vancouver was bubbling with the joy of living. She was out-going, beautiful, and at peace with herself.

Her book is about a very long journey through hell. In places the pain she experienced is almost unbearable to read, but it is almost about a miracle—the triumph of an unquenchable spirit.

Susan Swan, a brilliant novelist, once wrote that healing, re-birth and the evolution of self are the central goals of experience. Here’s to Trysh, healed and reborn; whole. She’s good news.

—JUNE CALLWOOD

My parents adored their

‘love child’.

Age fourteen months

September 1943.

Studio portrait.

Age three

1946

INTRODUCTION

Telling the truth is dangerous. Very few people want to hear it. Statistics do not agree on exactly how many women and men are the survivors of childhood sexual abuse in North America. Whatever those figures are, they are shockingly high and, ultimately, meaningless. For they don’t touch hearts; they say nothing about the pain endured by the casualties. Individual stories do.

My story, my healing journey, is not unique. I have written it not for retaliation or revenge but to reach out to other survivors, to those who support us — our partners, friends, counsellors, teachers, families, colleagues — and to those who want to gain greater insight into healing the devastation of incest and child sexual abuse.

Not everyone can listen. Those whose pain is very great and are protecting themselves will deny, trivialize, and try to invalidate my experience. Some will turn their backs — some already have. Others may work to silence me, for those who must keep secrets, even from themselves, attempt to stifle those who would speak their truth. Nonetheless, I have endeavoured to show the state of things, but it is my view only. Truth has many sides.

I want to share what has happened to me to inspire you, the survivors, on your own journeys of healing; to offer encouragement when your instinct tells you to give up; to let you know you are not alone. It helps me, too, to know there are many of us travelling in the same direction. It is possible to heal, to live a life of dignity and serenity. My way is not the only way; we each find our own path. The more of us who walk it, the more likely we will save our own lives and break the broader pattern that has destroyed so many.

Talking things over with Bear

None to pleased about my sister’s arrival.

Summer 1945

Tea in the garden with Uncle Jim touching my back and Aunt Ada at the right

PART ONE

VICTIM

Recovery from sexual abuse is a continuing process. The first stage of that process is recognizing that we were victimized.

T. Thomas, Surviving with Serenity: Daily Meditations for Incest Survivors

Remembering our vulnerability as children makes it possible to understand the effects of the violation and exploitation that is child sexual abuse. We can see how the abuser’s invasion of childhood and his manipulation of a child’s vulnerability wreaks havoc that takes years to undo.

Women’s Research Centre, Recollecting Our Lives: Women’s Experience of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Moments before this picture was taken, at my paternal grandmother’s house in the summer of 1952, I was crying. Clutching my handkerchief in my hand, I put on a characteristic brave smile. I am nine years old.

Summer, 1952

CHAPTER ONE

A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

We treat ourselves for the rest of our lives the way we were treated as children.

Alice Miller, For Your Own Good

Spring came early to southern England in 1943. Almond trees bloomed on February 2, pale petals against a cloudless sky. From that same sky, the night before, German bombers had dropped their arsenal on the capital city. As dawn approached and the all-clear sounded, I slid into the world, to my mother’s consternation and the midwife’s surprise. She remarked, If the child can survive this, she can survive anything. This inspired me often in later life.

My mother wanted to call me Mary (a name I grew to hate); later, Heather. The compromise was Mary Patricia. Had I been a boy I would have been called Spenser, my great-grandmother’s family name. It is easy to see how my parents attracted each other. Both came from shame-bound, dysfunctional familes with overwhelming needs for love. They clung to each other like orphans. It was a marriage doomed to fail.

My father was related to the Rolls family of Rolls-Royce. He was born in Wales in 1913 into a life of privilege: wealth, elitist private schools, Cambridge–all the fine things of life and the traditional cruel discipline that accompanied them. His father was a violent-tempered, dictatorial British army colonel; his mother a socialite more interested in being an international bridge champion than a mother.

Clearly exasperated and frustrated in the latter role, she dumped my father, age three, on her mother’s doorstep, which he never forgot. His grandmother packed him home immediately.

My father had physical problems—spasms caused his head to nod and his eyes darted back and forth. His mother’s infidelity with his father’s regimental chief, and the inevitable scandal of divorce that followed, led him to retreat into his intellect and imagination, both of which were considerable. My father’s brilliance walked a fine line between genius and madness.

At university he developed a love of acting and announced that he wanted a career in the theatre. Shocked, his mother ordered him to take up a more suitable profession. As always, he obeyed and became a chartered accountant.

My mother, a year younger than my father, was born out of wedlock to a domestic housekeeper in 1914. She was abandoned by her father into the hands of the well-meaning relatives—among them his sister, Ada—who bailed him out of his little scrapes.