Fallout From the Jerry Sandusky Scandal By: Lori j Loesch
Nothing could have prepared me…prepared me with the survival skills I’d need to navigate through the feelings I felt when Jerry Sandusky was exposed. Exposed for molesting young boys that came to his Youth Program for underprivileged kids. The people that are involved in this scandal are the top eshcilon of Penn State University.
If these powerful and educated men, could pay for their horrible, unthinkable deeds, could it be that I didn’t need to fear the powerful, uneducated people that abused me? The ones that put me where I am today, Victim #1. Always a victim. There was no one that tried to help me and I never got the help and guidance I needed to deal with being sexually, mentally, emotionally, and physically abused, everyday.
It seems there is something about me that says “abuse me”. “I won’t tell, your secret is safe.” (I’ll even blame myself for it.) The first Psychologist I sought out, because she was the one my insurance would provide for, lead me astray. Really. She told me, I was well into my late twenties, that she wanted me to go into a bar, by myself, sit down and order a drink and meet people. She also gave me the name of a book I should read. I couldn’t look at it or read it. It was sexual in nature and wrong to give to someone that was as fragile as me. She told me to get the video with Barbara Streisand, called “Nuts”. It was about a your girl that was abused by her father and he would slip money under the bathroom door while she was taking a bath. That was as far as I got. I broke down and cried. I called my mom and she came right over to my gloomy, dark apartment. She really did, and does mean well. She was a victim, even if my husband disagrees with me.
This Psychologist had a favorite saying, she would say, “Oh Lauurrie, she drew out my name as she mispronounced it, you’ve just opened up a brand new can of worms.” If I heard her say it one more time, I may throw up all over her suede suit and fur coat! Really? Who says that? And as soon as that can of worms sprang open…the session was over. If you need me over the weekend, she lied, call me. I did…she never answered her phone.
So you see, I never had help from people who were pledged to help. The Jerry Sandusky scandal came out about two years ago, and I was flooded with emotion. It brought out what had been plaguing me. I had always felt as if something, a chain wrapped around me, was keeping me down. I wrote a poem, when I was twenty something and I feel it tells just how I felt:
Laying at the daggers edge,
Dripping with blood upon my chest,
Too scared to run, to scared to fight,
I hope the courage comes tonight.
Now let me translate for you. I once showed it to a neighbor, and he thought I was sucicidal! Not at all! What I meant was: The dagger was being held by my step, adopted dad. I wanted to run away or fight him, but fear rendered me motionless. I would never kill myself. Never. I know too well what that does to your kids.
The core emotions from the abuse I suffered were rumbling up inside me and couldn’t have been prepared for this. I’m 51 years old, and am just now talking, and sharing the abuse with others. The abuse went further, much deeper than the surface abuse. They lied to me. They told me what I saw wasn’t the way I saw it. I really think they tortured my brain. Confused it.
I go back to the seventies and the movie “Tommy”. I feel like Tommy when his mother and her soon to be new husband sing / yell at him, you didn’t hear it!, you didn’t see it! Bingo, my life. I’m also talking about the illegal activities my step/adopted dad carried out. I remember once, I must have been in third or fourth grade, standing on the stone covered driveway, watching him struggle, huff and puff to get a clothes hanger under the dashboard to turn back the miles in a car he was working on. This was so that the odometer, which read, 125,000 miles, would now read, 25,000 miles.
The truth was never a part of my upbringing. When I said the truth, I got slapped and yelled at. I seemed to blurt out the truth innocently enough, at the wrong place and the wrong time. The terrible words I heard coming from his mouth, directed at me! A little girl in grade school. How crushing. I need to write a book! (Life growing up in a vipers den) or (How to survive, an abused girls journey out of hell and into hell and, maybe out of hell, again).
It has taken me 51 years of struggle to finally admit, tell, what he, they did to me. It’s not my fault. I’m innocent. It’s a difficult road to travel…the after math from the abuse. It is more than just the physical acts that torture children. It’s their everyday lifestyle. The way they go to school and deal with daily issues.
I am talking about sexual abuse so that, hopefully one person will seek out the instruction they will need, long before they turn 51 years of age. Don’t think a doctor will help you simply because he or she is a doctor. Keep going, telling, until you find the social skills you need to get through life as a survivor of abuse.
I was afraid to tell. I was afraid of what people would think of me. This is all from him and them, making it clear that it’s not a good idea to tell, just think what people will say.
I’m here to tell the abused that telling the right people is a freeing experience. The caring people I told, two girls I worked with, they, to my surprise, were on my side! They thought even my mother should be held accountable. My first reaction was no, she’s a victim of him and her mother too, my meddling, manipulative grandmother.
The right people will be supportive. It’s not your fault and there’s no reason to go on in life feeling that it was! We owe it to ourselves and to the ones we love, to put the matter straight. Throw the bum in jail, and all that are involved.
May God be with all that suffer at the hands of the very people that should be nurturing them.
Tags: innocent child, mental abuse, mother, physical abuse, psychologist., sexual abuse, step dad
