Exit.

Exeunt. To quietly exult.

Dr Rani Raote sums it up with, ‘The honest attempt should be to work towards self-worth, and this is applicable for everyone, irrespective of whether they have been traumatized or not. In the final analysis self-worth is what a person should possess; and self-worth is that which takes the longest to achieve. Women who have been sexually abused in childhood have a lot of trouble with self-worth. Until there is an active working towards self-worth, adults—and those who have been sexually abused in childhood are no exception—will try and lock themselves into labels; they will give themselves labels which, though unflattering, will sound familiar to them. They will feel familiar with these spaces, and this familiarity will make them feel that they are comfortable.’

This can have alarming consequences. Like the mother who, while sorting out the laundry to put into the washing machine, saw blood on her son’s underwear. She did nothing, said nothing, she was paralyzed in a familiar space, she was in complete denial. Her children grew, her teenaged son one day had a roaring fight with his father, his younger sister overheard. And discovered that their father had been sexually abusing both of them. To his son the father would say, ‘You want to make me do it to her instead?’ To his daughter the father would say, ‘Let me do it to you otherwise I will do it to your brother.’ The sister went in for therapy as an adult, she benefited from it; the brother went in for therapy, he abandoned it thereafter.

There is absolutely no age for beginning to heal; Dr Rani Raote has a woman who came in to heal at fifty-seven years of age. She came with depression, a sense of futility and alienation, a relationship problem with her dysfunctional husband. Sessions revealed that she had been sexually abused by their family’s trusted male servant when she was seven years old, he kept abusing her till he left, when she was twelve years of age. Her most vivid memory of this, an apparently unconnected one. Eyes. She recalled the driver’s eyes, as she was being driven to school by him: sitting in the backseat, she would find his eyes on him, he would be adjusting the rear-view mirror so that he could see her, look at her, mock-undress her with his eyes.

Those eyes; their violation.

This fifty-seven-year-old lady is better now, and better equipped to manage her dysfunctional husband without being sucked into it.

‘Blockers’ is what this lady is called by the psychiatrists and therapists—shrinks as these specialists are also affectionately nicknamed since they are supposed to scale down the magnitude of the problem.

Blockers are those trapped in their survival cycles but having completely blocked out the reason why. They come in for help later in their lives, in the late-thirties, mid-forties, fifties and sixties; they come because they do not like themselves the way they are, they cannot understand why they are like that but sub-consciously they know something is not right; in fact, it is terribly wrong. Typically speaking, blockers go with the following symptoms to see their shrinks. These have been identified in three sub-groups by Helen Sheldon in 1988 for the British Journal of Psychiatry as: