Collateral trauma surrounding childhood sex abuse is like the killer undertow drowning the victim while the ocean appears smooth, pretty, and safe on surface.
The response of a victim’s family, caregivers, authority figures and nurturers to the sex abuse is often more powerful a determinant to recovery than the specific sex abuse act by the pedophile.
Evidence-based data shows us that the more healthy a family’s response to the victim in a sex abuse case, the more that individual will recover from it and the less complicated that recovery will be, including the long-term effects into adulthood.
This same evidence show us that the more a family responds to the sex abuse by blaming and scapegoating the victim, protecting the pedophile, allowing or making the consequences of the sex abuse fall on the shoulders of the victim, or work to remove the consequences from the shoulders of the pedophile, the more likely the victim’s recovery is going to be prolonged and complicated and will extend to disrupt her or his adult life.
In healthy families, the adults will respond by calling out the pedophile, making the pedophile accountable, making it clear to the victim that she or he is innocent and placing the consequences on the shoulders of the pedophile, not the victim, and working in visible ways to obtain justice for the victim, as well as protect potential other victims.
But pedophiles tend not to bloom around healthy families. Pedophiles target the dysfunctional and toxic families where they feel confident their abuses will either go unnoticed, unreported, or that they can take advantage of all the twisted chinks in the family mortar to exploit a way to wiggle out of accountability. And, their way is cleared to target more victims.
In some states it is a crime for victims and families of victims to not report a pedophile because of the reckless disregard for the potential future victims of that pedophile go unprotected. Silence and keeping the sex abuse a secret hurts many others besides the present victim.
One form of family dysfuntion and toxicity is duplicity. Duplicity is both an individual, personal dysfunction as well as a systemic one found in families as well as larger groups such as religions, political organizations, educational institutions, etc.
Duplicity is both a simple and complex undertow. Duplicity means that a person or a group is acting in a hidden, invisible reality deviant from the external, surface advertisement of their stated values, moral compass, and socially acceptable behavior.
The result for the child sex abuse victim is that she or he lives in a state of confusion, knowing the stark truth of her or his molestation while having to cope with daily life of their caregivers acting as if nothing bad happened at all, or worse, the she or he is the “crazy” one, the “liar,” the “bad child” who had so much gaul as to disrupt an otherwise Good family.”
Let me illustrate this more pointedly with my own truths about my own childhood sex abuse and the duplicity that has caused so much more mental health problems for me throughout my life than the actual sex abuse acts themselves.
Some years ago the movie, Fargo” was all the rave, a celebrated movie destined to win big awards. I was not interested, but all the hype and fanfare made me curious. One evening the movie was shown on television, and since I was curious, I watched. And I couldn’t figure out what the popularity was all about. A bland, slow moving film without much action or high drama except for the violence at the end, which was a shock and I would have turned it off then but something kept pulling me to find out the ending.
And after I watched it I thought “this movie is a nothing movie. It’s just so ordinary.”
Wait..Ordinary? Where did that come from? Why would I, a highly sensitive and questioning individual, blow that movie of as an ordinary, bland, nothing movie?
Later on, it hit me. The family in he movie was just like my own. A body out back being put through the wood chipper, blood splattering all over the pristine white snow, while insie in the warm, cozy, clean house, the father is talking to his son that “doncha worry, we’ll get your mom back, doncha know.”
In my family, the pedophile was a short distance away, molesting me and taking child prn photographs while my parents and older siblings, who knew he was a pedophile and knew what he was doing, were in a posture and outward demeanor around a cozy living room or lavish dinner table with “we’re all a happy good Mormon Swedish family and pass the milk and cookies, doncha know.”
That duplicity is still a mind-bender for me 50 years later. Plus, I am still reeling from having married a duplicitous sociopathic man, Aaron Stewart Heusser who committed multiple violent acts — physical and mental and financial — while carrying on to others as “the perfect modern man, the perfect Mormon man.” So much so that his duplicity allowed him to continue his domestic violence against me in the custody of our son, lying, cheating, stealing him and turning him against me such that I have not seen him since he was 13. He is 22 now. And Aaron Stewart Heusser still has everyone convinced he is the perfect father, the perfect modern man, the perfect husband. Dangerous, destructive duplicity.
The insidious undertow under the perfect, lovely veneer of the ocean’s surface.
I am the youngest of six, now 56 years old, the oldest being something around 72 years old.
By the time I was born our uncle Ronald Safsten had already molested my older sister, Melanie Linnea Hansen Willer Silvester, from the time she was a toddler until she hit puberty and the possibility of pregnncy scared him off, Melanie told me later during a Mormon church court in which Ron was excommunicated for her sex abuse, many many years after the abuse. The church would not take my accounting of his abuse on me because he denied it ever happened and my family would not stick up for me, just like when the sex abuse was actually happening.
The Mormon church knew Ron was a pedophile and had sexually abused Melanie, Melanie went to BYU Hawaii and told the counselor, Jayne Garside, about it. Ron was employed at BYU Hawaii and lived net door to Jayne Garside. She never said anything. The Mormon church covered it up and let Ron work at BYU and live in church housing, knowing all this and the risks to his and neighborhood children.
While Melanie was doing that at college, across the island Ron was molesting me and taking me to his little hide-away hut where he had his child porn set up and that is where he took me.
Melanie never said anything. I was three, four years old, she was at college and living at home with us and told the school counselor but never told our parents or the counselor that Ron was molesting me, that he was still an active pedophile ten years after she had been molested by him.
At home life went on as normal, which was a sadistic, psychotic abusive mother who spent her days in bed with the curtains drawn, and a father over-working to pay the bills for 6 kids. I was feral, unsupervised, unnoticed, invisible. I was the good girl, the pleaser, the one to nurture and care for our mother, and to be perfect for our paranoid father who always assumed guilt first and evidence later.
My older brother, Leif Hansen, of Leif’s auto collision centers in Tigard, Oregon, watched as his best friend David — who had come to live with us as his parents kicke him out of his home — took me into Leif’s bed and told me I was his girlfriend, and going to get married someday, and This is what married people do” as me molested me in Leif’s bed while Leif and a couple other boys stood watching. Leif laughed.
When I married Aaron Stewart Heusser in 1994, we lived just down the road from Leif Hansen. I was in late pregnancy while one night Aaron Stewart Heusser was beating me around and threatening to kill me, and I called my brother Leif Hansen, right up the road in Beaverton, and asked him to come pick me up and let me sleep on his couch. I told him why, that I was scared Aaron would hurt the baby.
Leif Hansen’s reply was, “No, I can’t do that. A man’s house is his castle and I can’t go over there and remove his wife from his castle. A wife belongs to her husband. You have to stay there. That’s tough love.”
A month later, his wife Carol went into labor with their son and Carol called me and Aaron, and my parents to take her to the hospital because Leif was so drunk she couldn’t rouse him from a drunken stupor, much less drive her. We did that, and their son was born and introduced the first time to his father, drunk and having just abandoned his mother at his birth.
Now you can see and hear Leif’s television and radio ads all over the place — he’s famous for his commercials — as his commercials call out corrupt, duplicitous insurance companies and promises that he will save you from compromise on your injured automobile repairs and restore your car to “pre-loss” condition using the legalities the insurance companies “don’t want you to know about.”
Wait… Duplicity. Acting on the outside as the hero rescuer and the best advocate for your injured automobile, but he stood watching and laughing as I was consumated to his friend David as a child bride in Leif’s own bed? Left me alone with Aaron Stewart Heusser’s active violence while 8 months pregnant?
A mind-bender. Dangerous, destructive duplicity.
My other older sister, Diana Hansen-Young was a state senator in Hawaii for a long time. Then she became a prominent artist and is now a globally famous artist and playwright.
But when I was twelve, she was anxious to get her new screenplay produced and a big Hollywood producer was in Waikiki at the luxury resort hotel, the Kuilani. She had gotten an appointment with him to see her screen play. She took me along. I was told this was a powerful and famous man and to dress up so I wore the blue gingham Easter dress with a fluffy white apron my mother had made me, reserved for church, to this meeting.
I didn’t know why I was asked to come along, I figured either she was babysitting me again because our parents were not available, or that she needed some company. She told me maybe he would like to publish my stories that I had made into little illustrated books.
When we got there, we went up to a very large hotel room which was really fancy and in one corner in a huge wicker chair was this Hollywood producer with curly gray hair, and at the other side of the room stood two men who said nothing but to greet us and let us in.
When he had said hello and my sister introduced her script, but the Hollywood producer said he wanted to talk with me about my storybooks about mice and squirrels that I had made and illustrated and could Diana leave the room for a few minutes so I could tell him about my books in private.
So when Diana left the room he called me over to sit on his lap. He flattered my stories and drawings. He squeezed me close to his chest with both arms and talked right into my ear. I was too big for his lap. I got a very weird feeling, and was afraid I would be in trouble for being rude, but wiggled off his lap and said I had to go and left the room.
When I got out to the hall, Diana took me right down the elevator and told me not to tell mom and dad she brought me here. I don’t remember what was said after that, just that we drove away in her litle green MGB with the top down and I never told.
I became clinically depressed by the fourth grade, was a subject of concern for my teachers regarding depression by the 6th grade, and made my first suicide attempt in the ninth grade. A wise teacher by-passed my parents and took me to a doctor who admitted me to a hospital.
Guess who was the first one to visit me?
A very anxious and ingratiating Ronald Safsten, and next a drunkened Leif Hansen who took his shift on my suicide watch while pouring himself drinks in the hospital room shower stall. The clinking of glass, the pouring of liquor, the smell, the bloody glazed eyes and the slumping over asleep in the designated suicide watch chair.
I’ve battled clinical depression, anxiety and panic, dissociation for 50 years. Now at 56, my parents are dead. Aaron Stewart Heusser, Diana Hansen Young, Melanie Silvester, Leif Hansen, and all my other family and extended family and Mormon church friends have shunned me and abandoned me even while I have leukemia, spine fractures and am homeless and broke.
Their duplicity reigns. Everyone in their circles and beyond adores them, worships them, idolizes them.
But the truths they are hiding about their own behavior and total lack of conscience about it, twists in the undertow of my life.
So I continue to call out truth, even though I know their conscience is unavailable to them and as they grow older that will not change, they will never take accountability for what they put me through as a child and the aftermath of it all that I still stumble over.
I cannot control how others take accountability, and I cannot make them take any consequences which is their due, These are master manipulators that will get their branding a win at the cost of other innocents like me.
But I don’t let them have control over my soul, my moral compass, because I am not duplicitous, I do not manipulate or con, I do not hide the perpetrators and put consequences on the victims.
I feel deeply the empathy of victims and shout out accountability for their perpetrators, and s an advocate i see duplicity ruling the lives of victims left and right.
I have al kinds of problems, but I have a place of peace that money and fame can’t buy, which is a clear and strong conscience, a deeply feeling moral compass, a congruent set of behaviors and acumen which i use every day to help others in their trauma.
The peace of congruency wins for me.
I hope it will for you, too.
Feel free to email me and tell me how I can help you find your way, according to your own choices, through and beyond your trauma.
Thanks for listening,
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
the trauma project 