Imagine for a few moments that you have been having fantasies for years, coming unbidden and at all hours. Once in your mind they won’t leave — like music ear-worms. Let’s say these fantasies are about sex with 8 year olds, or about revenge — about hurting those who have hurt you. [These are fantasies, so whether you were really hurt or not does not enter into the question.] Let’s say you recognize these fantasies as bad; let’s say you don’t want them. Let’s say you try to rid yourself from them and for periods they are quiet, and then they come back, bigger and more insistent. Let’s say you realize you are gazing at a playground, and going mad, and beginning to make plans to act.
What do you do? Ask for help? From whom? The Yellow Pages? Ask your co-workers? Your spouse? They guy you drink beer with?
Is there any public awareness –like there is for alchoholism, depression, STDs– of treatment, of people who have struggled and overcome?
There is nothing. There is no visible doorway out. The man (they are almost all men) is trapped in a cage with monsters who are winning the battle.
It would be different for a certain Congressman, of course. Solid in the upper middle class he should have had knowledge of the hidden byways of professional help. He had the money to shop for counseling. “I have a problem. I need help.” He could have had the best. He didn’t do it. He’s been driving drunk with power-sex-fantasies for many years, hitting on kids, and now he’s been caught. The injury he has done to others is compounded by his complete failure to use the tools he had close at hand to help himself.
What about the Christian truckdriver in Pennslyvania? [His wife was leading prayer services for children at their church when he called her moments before shooting the Amish girls.] Probably not familiar with therapy, psychiatrists, anonymity. Probably without thousands of dollars for a set of sessions. An answer pops up right away. What are churches doing about counseling their parishioners for hidden, frightening fantasies of injury and murder? Is anything ever done except to express loathing for perverts? Wouldn’t this be a good place to start? It is hard enough to get people to talk about sexually transmitted diseases much less about mental hothouses of murder and rape. But wouldn’t it be useful to say outloud, as we do about many other things: if you are having scary thoughts, thoughts about injuring others or yourself, there is help. Reach out! You don’t have to confess to the person you first ask, but ask. Simply say: I need to talk to someone. I need to unload my head.
What about the drifter in Colorado who shot school girls? Where would he turn? If the only conversation in the public sphere is about moral monsters why would he think there was anything to be done about such thoughts, or anyone to ask for help from?
Communities, churches, professionals need to admit to the truth of these hidden wounds / hidden dangers and figure out a way to provide interventions and make them visible, public and available. We have seen the consequences of leaving people alone with their agony.
It is amazing to me that more isn’t said about this terrible blind spot. We’re missing a lot becaues of it and many are hurt because we don’t (wish to) see.
The first public notice I have seen about the problem is in the SF Chronicle this morning.
Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said there is very little being done to prevent pedophilia and other sex-related crimes from happening in the first place.
“When it comes to pedophilia and other sexual disorders, we’re still in the pre-Betty Ford era,” he said. “We feel we can send them to prison and nothing else. We treat the alcoholic, even though he can get into a car and kill a family. But we’ve so demonized the word pedophilia that we don’t recognize these individuals as human or deserving of treatment.”
Pedophilia treatment is available but scarce
Notice, we are not talking about counseling for people after the fact of what they have done to others, but about making available, in thought, word and deed, help prior to the fact. The time to stop wars is before the bombs start falling. The time to stop murder, rape, slaughter is when the fantasies are becoming enormous and real.
Glad to hear from both of you. My own minor epiphany began years ago, begining to understand that depressive hours and days (and weeks) came on unbidden. With lots of labor and help I understood that I could feel it coming on and I had to deal with it, on each occassion, early and decisively. Move out of that room and that chair and that silence when I felt the wafting air of it; get up and go say to someone: Talk to me. Or go find that aspirin of humor Vonnegut likes to talk about. Even then DD (Demon Depression) might hang around for a while but at least the voices coming in through my ears were mostly louder than those generating inside… And I imagine what it is for anyone with real, truckloads of demons! What a terror, and if shut off and away from everyone what else do we expect to happen but that which is happeing today?
Will. Your insight resonates with me. As an unvoluntary alcoholic, I know very well those cunning, baffling and powerful voices in my head with whom I co-exist. Close friends adopted their son at age nine after a horrific early childhood of sexual exploitation. It is no wonder that he has pedophiliac urges, even tho he has had intense therapy since before puberty. There is likely no way to “cure” pedophilia or similar disorders, but I believe that society’s demonizing the people who live with it (and too often act on it) only makes the problem worse. It also leads, as you suggest, to denial, rationalization, minimization and shame rather than disclosure, behavioral strategies, and asking for help. We and he do not let our daughter be alone with our good friend’s son (now in his 20’s), but neither do we write him off. He is, as my Sunday School teacher told me, a Child of God. He did not choose his demon and struggles daily to not act on it. I am glad he is otherwise happy and a useful member of the community (repairing bicycles in a busy shop) and using the best family and mental health support available, rather than rotting in prison or living in fear of discovery or perpetrating. We all need to do a part to help make our communities more accepting and supportive of those who dare to have human flaws or physiological challenges, even while we protect the vulnerable…As Rawls suggested, fate could bring tragedies to any one of us so we should create a society of justice, compassion and responsibility to one another.
well, it’s a good question, and complex in its simplicity …. how does one go about educating the uneducated? how does one go about educating the uneducated about matters mental when the channels of communication are so corrupt we can’t get the truth out about warsk or the people who are dying in them, or the people who have caused them?
there’s another layer here, too: most “mental health issues” are still pre-betty ford …. depression? oh, there are medications for it, but most folks still don’t want to own up to it because it’s perceived as a character flaw ….. and when it comes to matters sexual, then the stigmatization abounds; when “normal” sexuality (whatever that might be) is maligned and misrepresented, than the fringe lies way beyond the fringe …. why, it wasn’t all that long ago that the sacred DSM, the bible of insurance billing and diagnoses, listed homosexuality as a disease …. and pedophilia has been so profoundly discolored with contempt and disgust that it’d take strength unimaginable to own it …. and seek help ……
of course, republicans–knowing as they do no shame–are linking pedophilia with homosexuality, or implying that those abused as children perforce become abusers, or castigating the “culture of tolerance …..”
oh, my goodness; we certainly do suffer from far do much tolerance in this country, don’t we ……