Sunday, January 11, 2009

Incest

How does incest start in any family? Maybe sometime in the last 5000 years, a mother dies young, a father grieves with his female children and alcohol is added to the mix and the problem begins. Realistically, unless children result the problem is different than you might think. The real problem becomes: what do people do with these feelings later in life? What does the father do when his daughter marries? What does the daughter do with her feelings for her father in her new marriage?

Like I said these things then go on for generations because once something happens it screws up the moral and psychological compass of all those generations that follow, whether it be one, two, three generations or even thousands of years.

These things can occurr initially, caused by the death of a spouse or child. So, this sort of thing happens around the death of a member of the family that no one, at least psychologically can do without. However, once comfort is sought in this way, it perpetuates itself through multi-generations in very strange ways.

There appear to be two basic reactions to these kinds of things going on. The first reaction is that people in such a family have no sexual boundaries and don't feel safe in any relationship and so are switching sexual partners frequently. The second reaction is to become celibate or asexual which then causes completely different problems.

So then the job of all family members is to bring these individuals back to some sort of balance, some sort of normalcy. Families need somehow to help members be able to feel safe in a good relationship and not to constantly stray and for the opposite reaction help celibate, non sexual or asexual members to realize what they are reacting too within the family long term.

Several generations back in one family, during the 1800s, a mother died and the father was left with three daughters. The oldest daughter was 9 and sought to comfort her father. He was drinking alcohol to soothe the loss of his wife. The oldest daughter left home after finishing school because she couldn't stop what was happening with her younger sisters. However, because of her relationship with her father she was vulnerable to other men. Eventually she met and married a good man who took care of her and had 5 children. When her youngest boy reached puberty he became interested in her youngest daughter. However, because of her relationship with her father letting them have a relationship helped soothe her guilt so she let it go on for several years. The rest of the children knew about this and were horrified and had their various reactions. The youngest daughter though very intelligent became emotionally, mentally ill from this experience even though she eventually married and had two healthy children. However, likely after having her two children she likely molested her son and her nephew at various different ages because of her lack of useful boundaries, also the mother eventually left her husband but came back often and remarried him a total of three times. I could go on but I'm up to the 1940s and I started in the 1880s to 1900. I'm only speaking about this because between one in three and one in four people worldwide are sexually abused as children. I don't have the statistics of how many of them are molested by mother, father, uncle,aunt cousins or siblings . However, I can say between 25% and 33% of all people on earth have been involved in experiences like this train of events. However, to be fair, incest can take many other forms too, with various kinds of effects on multiple ongoing generations as a result. It reminds me of the enabling son or daughter of an alcoholic. Having become enablers for their alcoholic parent they then become various kinds of enablers for their lovers, friends, spouses, and children as well. All these types of problems create various other problems down through the years and affect everyone in various ways ongoing.

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