After Thoughts: The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children -- and Its Aftermath Review

Check out my first impressions here.

First I want to start with a word about something I found after reading this book. When I was searching for video of the writer to add to this article, I ran into a LOT of criticism toward the book. At first I thought well that’s to be expected and I was warned that it was out there, but then I started to read some of it. It really felt like people were bashing this book without having even given it a chance. They heard about it somewhere ran to Amazon.com, read a few reviews listed there, added to the negative reviews, and ran off to troll anywhere else they could find mention of this book. I fully expect that sort of thing to happen here. May I ask that if you must flame this book here, please do not just flame it because you have only read the title and nothing else. I am specific about this because this is a marketing title. It is slightly misleading, and Susan Clancy has stated that she doesn’t care much for the title herself. If you read it flame a way, debate is good, necessary, and healthy. If you haven't read it, try and keep the critiques based on personal experience and fact.

So what is this all about. The Trauma Myth is about bringing awareness to people that in most cases sexual abuse to children isn't always immediately severely damaging to children as it happens. The damage from the abuse tends to manifest itself later in the victims life as they come to understand what was done to them. When most of us think of child abuse we see children being forced into painful sexual acts by terrible horror people we would never allow in our lives. Even with a more progressive awareness of the facts that most abuse starts with people that you know and trust we still do not necessarily believe that those people exist in our lives and spheres of influence, and even if they did you would know and react. Ask yourself a serious question and really think about it, would you turn in your brother, wife, or stepfather if someone came to you and told you what they did to a child? Would you even think to suspect them in the slightest?

In the opening and heavily throughout the book Doctor Clancy makes heavy use of victims' and experts' testimony to paint the mental pictures of what is the truth in the readers mind. Expect to hear a lot of no nonsense accounts of experiences and feelings straight from people who were victimized as children. For some this will be quite an emotional ordeal. I found myself stopping several times to process what I just read from a victim. My own feelings and experiences kept bubbling to the surface as I turned page after page.

Doctor Clancy will use accurate and specifically psychological terminology. This may be a book you might want to keep a dictionary handy, but she does do a good job offsetting the difficulty. After given the actual clinical term for something she will immediately go back and clarify what she just said using simpler clearer language. I did find that this habit of immediately explaining things over again did seem to bog the pace down no matter how vital it was for a general audience's understanding of the material.

As a personal note, a lot of the material Doctor Clancy covered in the book seemed like things that I had always suspected and always thought made the most sense. Children being mostly abused by people they trust makes sense. That there is a political movement behind a lot of the understand people have and the information they are exposed to. Stuff like a lot of the educational programs geared toward children are completely ineffective as far as preventing the abuse.

A child might be able to identify an adult's actions as wrong or weird, but to be able to conceive that these acts will lead to depression, anxiety, mistrust, and/or shame years and years later as an adult is a little much. Furthermore a lot of the situations are contextually complex, since a child lacks the life experiences to help draw out the subtle details of the situation how could we expect a child to make the same decision that an adult would make in that same situation. Children always do the best they can with what they have.

There were quite of few things that I got out of this book that shocked me. First that sometimes a child can feel pleasure from the abuse. This makes sense if you think about it. That it is more common than I expected that children not only allow the abuse to happen but go along with it. I was a child raised with a lot of fight in me for some reason, and I had no trouble standing up to most people (most people pretty much included every adult in my life) that I didn’t fear so I expected other children to have had as much fight as I did.

Something else that stuck me was the way that a lot of relationships between child and abuser seem parallel adult sexual relationships. Acts of abuse tend to happen with a child and a person they trust. Same with normal sexual relations with adults. That the child may want to make the person they care about happy. Most marriages tend to work this way with someone wanting to make the person they love happy. Children who are abused sometimes want the attention that they receive from the abuser. I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that I too tend to crave the attention of the person I am dating. It just bothers me that even those these things can be quite similar (the first being totally wrong and the second being desirable) people treat victims so terribly. (I WANT TO MAKE THIS CLEAR THE CHILD ABUSERS ARE SCUM THE CHILDREN ARE NOT.)

I highly recommend reading this if only to experience the humanity that stems from the stories of the victims. I understand that some people just cannot tolerate the views expressed within but give this a chance anyways.  You will not find bravery like what comes from these victims speaking up like this often. For that I say this is a good enough read, but beyond that this book makes you think and in these we all could be better off with a little more thought in our lives.