Hidden trauma

MONTROSE — As a public face for the private hell endured by many, Marilyn Van Derbur Atler captivated the audience Thursday, when she spoke of incest and sexual abuse.

Even so, that audience upstaged the former Miss America when, at her invitation, local sex abuse survivors stood.

There were more than 20.

“Now you (Montrose) know why we do what we do,” said Donna Rose, administrative assistant for Montrose’s Dolphin House Child Advocacy after the event.

The center serves abused children in the Seventh Judicial District and hosted Van Derbur as part of National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

“Hopefully, this talk will bring more attention to the problem,” Warren Waterman, board member, said earlier. Waterman is a former Montrose County sheriff.

And child sexual abuse is a problem — one Van Derbur knows too well.

“I was 53 before I was able to say the ugliest six-letter word in the English language. Incest,” she said.

Van Derbur was 5 when her father began abusing her, but repressed that knowledge by “splitting” into what she called the “day child” and the “night child.”

“The more degraded the night child became, the more the day child needed to excel. ... I truly believed I was the happiest child on earth.”

Only her youth minister sensed something was wrong. It would take years of his gentle probing before Van Derbur recalled what happened to her. She was 24 — and devastated — but also managed to disclose the abuse to the man she would marry, Larry Atler.

“Two men saved my life,” Van Derbur said. It would be years more before she recognized the full impact of what was done to her — years that included bouts of inexplicable paralysis and which still include an inability to sleep naturally.

“Sleep,” she said, “was when my father could do anything he wanted.”

So deeply had she repressed the memories that her day child knew nothing of her night child. When those memories came out, she said she experienced them in “real time,” and could physically feel her father’s touch.

“This is an area of child abuse that we don’t talk about,” Dolphin House Director Kay Alexander said of incest and other sexual abuse. “It’s something we need to talk about. It’s a very well kept secret.”

She said children are conditioned to think of adults as authority figures. An abusive adult is able to use threats to keep the child silent; non-abusive adults can actually increase the trauma when they dismiss a child’s concerns or, worse, call them liars.

Van Derbur said it is critical for parents to create an environment that is conducive to trust and honesty.

Her home environment, for all its wealth and privilege, did not offer that.

When she was 48, and her father was dead, Van Derbur told her mother about the abuse. She still remembers what her mother said: “I don’t believe you. It’s in your fantasy.”

Bootsie Van Derbur was forced to admit it when her other daughter stood with Marilyn — and also disclosed abuse.

“My mother hurt me far more than my father did and she never laid a hand on me,” Van Derbur said of the lifelong effects of not being believed.

She said it was little wonder children rarely tell, when, as an accomplished adult whose abuser was dead, she could not convince her own mother.

“If people are not going to believe me, then who, dear God, is going to believe a child?”

Abusers also employ manipulation to get what they want. Even on the day she confronted her father about what he’d done, Van Derbur was manipulated.

She said she went to the family home and when she sat down, he left the room for a moment.

“I knew he had a gun (when he came back),” she said. “If that sounds incomprehensible to you, you have never lived in an incest family. Terror reigns. Not fear. Terror.”

Her father’s words were: “If I knew what it would do to you, I never would have done it.”

Van Derbur had clung to that one hope, but it was later dashed when a stranger wrote her. Van Derbur’s father, the woman said, had sexually assaulted her when he was 74.

“My father knew exactly what he was doing and he continued to do it until he died,” she said.

And what did he do with the gun, the day Van Derbur confronted him? As she left, he took it out and told her, had she come to him in any other way, he would have killed himself.

Van Derbur said public awareness should not only include the devastating effects of child sex abuse, but prevention strategies — and the hope of healing.

Despite what she endured, there were things she didn’t know about sexual abuse before she became a full-time advocate. Of these, she said the most stunning was learning that 14-year-olds comprise the largest number of sex offenders of any age group.

“We don’t know how to stop a man, but we do know how to stem the tide of teenage boys victimizing younger kids. Teens don’t realize the trauma they can cause,” Van Derbur said.

“We are not sitting down with our children and talking to them.”

But, she said, we should be. Conversations can be honesty, and promote honesty, without being graphic or scary, she said.

“We have to ask, because children don’t tell.”