Private Incest

Mother-daughter sexual abuse wounds survivors’ hearts and souls. Their mothers were often their only care-givers and the only source of much-needed care.

When this care is mixed with sexual abuse, the effects are devastating. This mixture of nurturance (if there was any) and sexual abuse may have been all the parenting a survivor received.

Often the father was absent or simply did not take an active role in parenting. This mixture of caring and sexual abuse leaves survivors with an unpleasant, and often sickening or repulsive feeling.

On the one hand, the survivor desperately needed to be loved, held, kissed, and nurtured, but when that nurturance comes with such a high price, it is devastating to the child’s psyche. Even nurturance that is offered separate from the sexual abuse becomes hard to trust or to take in freely and openly.

This leaves many survivors feeling a desperate need for love, and at the same time, highly conflicted about that need, and wary of those, particularly women who offer support.

The grief connected to not receiving safe love from a mother or primary caregiver is profound.