Sexual Abuse: The Significance of Self-Abuse to Psychic Equilibrium

[…] One can consider the way in which self-inflicted abused turns a passive trauma into an active one for the sexual abuse survivor who is attempting to gain mastery over early trauma and its aftermaths. Through self-destructive behaviours, the survivor regulates the timing, pace and severity of her victimizations, paradoxically experiencing a sense of empowerment. Ostensibly no longer at the mercy of an external perpetrator, the patient assumes control of her abuse. […] (p.130)

Most survivors who engage in violent enactment are aware of wanting to punish themselves. These patients, at their core, are convinced that they are unfit human beings. Filled with shame, they experience themselves as profoundly defective and horribly toxic[…] Frequently told by their abuser that they provoked and wanted the sexual attacks, survivors see themselves as malevolently powerful. As adults, when some internal or external event evokes a sense of having been “bad”, survivors may physically attack themselves or take life threatening risks to punish themselves.

Although being victimized is painful for the survivor of childhood sexual abuse, it is also familiar. Often being a victim is the most secure identity the survivor has. To initiate self-protective behaviour as an adult means to loosen the survivor’s attachment to her internalized objects and to her most familiar organisation of self. In addition, at an often deeply unconscious level, continued victimization in adulthood validates for the survivor the reality of the violations of the past; […] (p.131)

Always juxtaposed alongside the survivor’s identification as a victim, running parallel to it-though less consciously available-is her equally strong identification with the perpetrator of her abuse. The ruthlessness and icy sadism survivors can display toward their own bodies and minds and emotions are shocking to witness. In part, this often represents an identification with the abuser’s blatant lack of regard for his or her child victim. The enacting survivor takes up where the perpetrator left off, turning fury and frustration against herself in appallingly vicious ways.

The patient’s identification with her abuser preserves relational bonds to the internalized and often external victimizer, as well as to other nonabusing but unavailable early figures. […]Even if the survivor is no longer in contact with her victimizer, a strong attachment to the internalized object is tenaciously protected and preserved. […] In addition to preservation of relational bonds, the survivors' identification with the perpetrator protects her from contacting the helplessness and vulnerability of her victimized self.[…] Identifying with her perpetrator, the survivor experiences this illusory empowerment, denying that her self-abuse is hurtful.[…] Like their victimizers, they successfully spit of a sense of themselves as vulnerable, scared and out of control.

To help a survivor recognize that she has incorporated and identified with aspects of her abuser is difficult work.[…] The more the idea that she is in any way like her perpetrator is anathema to her. Interpretation of this element of enactments must be handled sensitively, lest the survivor’s already potent sense of toxicity and malevolence be intensified unbearably. (p. 132) 

If survivors are loath to acknowledge that their enactments betray an identification with their abusers, they are equally reluctant to recognize that their behaviors convey thoughts, feelings or fantasies about current figures in their lives including the therapist.[..] Terrified of the imagined power of envious, rageful, hateful feelings, survivors may deny the interpersonal implications of these affect states, instead turning them against themselves. As children they introjected their abuser’s badness and projected their own goodness onto others to preserve the hope o eventually receiving love and care. Now adult survivors continue this process, they deny the relational failings of others, assuming the mantle of responsibility for making relationships work. When someone the survivor loves or needs disappoints or angers her, these feelings are often turned back on the self. At the core of this process may be a dreadful fear of abandonment […]

Most difficult for survivors to acknowledge is that, once they are in treatment, their violent enactments almost always contain a transferential component, the acting-out element of enactment. Like their parents once were, the therapist becomes a needed figure depended on by survivors to see them through the terrifying and painful working –through of their abuse and its consequences. As survivors loosen their grip on real and internalized objects and are confronted with those losses, the therapist assumes an even greater importance in their lives.

 As they once protected their parents from their mistrust, terror and rage, they also deny negative reactions to the therapist and instead, act them out, often self-destructively. Sometimes, the enactment represents a vicious attack on the therapist’s ability to contain and to heal, a ruthless attempt to disrupt the interpretative and integrative work of treatment. At other times, the enactment speaks for the survivor’s bitter hurt, voiceless rage and desperate envy (p. 133)

Davies, J. & Frawley, M (1994) Treating the Adult Survivor of Sexual Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, United States of America: Basic Books