Unhappy families may be unhappy in their own ways, as Tolstoy said it, but they are remarkably alike in the degree of harm they do to children. Children who survive the tempests and abuse of dysfunctional and especially incestuous families share many of the same traits. They experience shame, humiliation, anger, dissociation from their feelings, lack of self esteem, depression, addiction and memory loss. Above all, they seem to share a need to remember things the necessities of their survival compelled them to forget.
Forgetting and remembering are notoriously subjective, and the recent publicity given to adult memories of childhood trauma has generated a wide-ranging controversy about the legitimacy and authenticity of memory. But any adult survivor of childhood trauma will tell you that the capacity to forget or selectively to remember is one key to the ability of children to survive the unsafe homes that are the other side of the American myth of the traditional family.
The difficulty, of course, is that what the child requires to survive in an incestuous family often turns out to be a hindrance to a fully realized adult life. The strategy the child develops crystallizes around defense, avoidance, apparent acquiescence, forgetting and denial and a host of other attitudes, which turn out to be burdens later. So, in addition to surviving the incest, the child must re-experience that abuse as an adult so that the violated child can, as it were, be rescued by the adult who survived. Addiction, dysfunction, bizarre behavior, depression, trouble of all sorts characterize the lives of adult survivors of incest and other childhood trauma. They come as wake-up calls from the traumatic past, rich in alarm but also in the potential for something better than mere survival.