“He would come into my room at night, late if my mother was home, earlier if she was working. I’d wake up and he would be there, standing over my bed, whispering my name.” Sylvia, a schoolteacher who is in her third marriage, trembles as she recounts events that occurred almost forty years ago. “I wasn’t scared the first time,” she says. “I didn’t know what was happening, and even when I did, I didn’t understand it. I remember thinking it was just a bad dream. But it kept happening. There was nothing I could do to stop it. It wasn’t a bad dream. I know that now. But it was a nightmare that I still live with every day.”

At least once a month and sometimes as often as once a week, Sylvia’s father, a dock worker whom she describes as “a giant, a huge, powerfully built man,” sexually molested her. The incest, which involved fondling of her genitals and oral sex, began when she was six and lasted until her twelfth birthday. She never knew why it started or why it stopped. She always knew when it was about to happen, however. “I could tell by how he looked at me when I came downstairs to say good night,” she explains. “I’d go back upstairs, get into bed, and lie there, waiting, so scared, my heart pounding so loudly that you could have heard it in the next room.” Fear was only one of the painful emotions that washed over Sylvia during her father’s unwelcome visits.

“I’d go back and forth like a yo-yo,” she continues. “Sometimes it felt good. But then I would feel disgusted. I wanted to vomit, to scream, to scratch his eyes out. But I never did. It was out pf control and I was completely powerless to stop it. I was terrorized.” Eventually, young Sylvia discovered that she could “turn off my brain just totally block out my feelings and remove myself from the situation.”

That is precisely what she did each time her father molested her and what she continued to do forever afterward. In fact, Sylvia, who was forty-five when she came to us for sex therapy, completely blocked the incest from her mind, having absolutely no conscious memory of it. Then, after four months of therapy, the memories started coming back. After years of psychotherapy and participation in an incest survivors’ support group that helped her face and work through many of her emotional conflicts, Sylvia has recently begun to experience sexual desire.

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