A complementary triangulation

Camila, the second child of Carlos and Carolina, was subjected to sexual abuse by her father, without interruption, between the ages of six and sixteen. This is the most serious form of sexual abuse, as much because of how early it began and how long it lasted as because of its intensity, since it involved full genital relations. The psychological damage was therefore very great, arising from a complementary triangulation in which Camila was deceptively promoted to the status of “pseudo-spouse.”

The psychological maltreatment was thus triangulating, and it involved a series of components that distorted Camila’s life over a long and decisive period. From the outset, she experienced with a strange ambivalence the flattery and seduction with which her father treated her, since the privileged relationship this implied, in certain respects, did not make up for the heavy threat that came with it (“you must never tell anyone about this, or there will be very serious consequences for you and for the whole family”), nor for the loss of easy access to her mother, Carolina, who, without consciously knowing what was going on, sensed in Camila more of a rival than a daughter. Moreover, the relationship with her brothers and sisters was also negatively affected, since they did not understand the rarefied atmosphere that surrounded Camila and interpreted it as manipulation on the girl’s part.

This is why, when Camila broke off the game at sixteen and announced that she was leaving home, her mother and her siblings made common cause with her father, accusing her of being capricious and irresponsible. Years later, Carolina would say that, although her daughter had revealed to her what was going on before leaving, she had thought “that it was only a matter of some minor touching.”

This is an extremely serious circumstance, one that often arises when girls put an end to the abuse, usually in adolescence, and it places them in a situation of high risk. Having become fully aware of the relational swindle to which they have been subjected, they sink into self-devaluation and feel abandoned by everyone. It is not unusual for them, caught in a chaotic whirlwind, to engage in highly self-destructive behavior.

The fall and the poisoned help

Camila was no exception. She drifted among drug dealers and other delinquents, with one of whom she formed a couple as hastily as it was precarious. From this relationship she had three children in succession, a girl, Rosa, and two boys, Alberto and Martín, with whom she sank into a process of social degradation and deterioration. But, between the alcohol, the drugs and the ill-treatment she received from her partner, Camila had the idea of turning to the only people from whom she sensed she could get help: her parents. And she got it. It was help that was poisoned for her, but effective for her children, who found in their grandparents good parental figures, caring and protective.

But, paradoxically, this brought about a further deterioration in Camila’s family image, as she appeared in everyone’s eyes as a shameless, irresponsible woman, capable of dragging her children into her self-destructive whims, from which the grandparents rescued them thanks to their loving self-sacrifice. Carlos and Carolina sighed and raised their eyebrows in resignation, conveying to everyone the feeling that with Camila there was nothing to be done, even though, alas, they were ready for any sacrifice to save the children.

Carlos ran a family business in which all his children would come to work, except, naturally, Camila. Thus her brothers and sisters, Felipe, Rodrigo, Magdalena, Ignacio and Roberto, unwittingly took part in the network of complicities that confirmed the disqualification and discredit of Camila, “that spoiled madwoman who couldn’t be trusted.” In time, her children would also receive offers of future integration into the network that excluded and marginalized their mother. Everyone had an interest in making the story of Camila’s irresponsibility plausible. The parents, in order to fight off the feelings of guilt that memories of the abuse evoked, and even to erase the very evidence of it; the siblings, in order to justify their privilege in the face of the marginalization of the excluded one. Even for Rosa, Alberto and Martín, it was reassuring to believe in their mother’s unjustifiable unreliability, which allowed them to enjoy, with their grandparents, material advantages she could not give them.

A new family, and a report

That was where things stood when Camila, having hit bottom, began a slow climb back in her life. She met Fernando, a good man who, very much in love, offered her the chance to create a stable family, to which Camila brought the only thing that, for her, led to stability: more children. Javier and Fernandito were born and, together with Tamaris, born of a previous marriage of Fernando’s, completed a picture as unprecedented as it was demanding. On the one hand, there was no doubt that, for the first time, Camila glimpsed the possibility of being recognized as a capable and responsible woman, at the head of a respected family. So much so that she dared to report her father to a child protection center, alleging that there was a danger he would do to her children what he had done to her. This was enough for the three eldest to come back to their mother, though grudgingly and without understanding why they had to give up the comfort they enjoyed at their grandparents’. On the other hand, the scale of the task laid bare her limits: she simply did not feel strong enough to keep such a complex family going. Fernando worked endless days as a security guard, while she had to struggle with the overload the little ones represented and with the constant disqualification inflicted on her by the older ones: “You, who abandoned us to live the high life, now have the nerve to take us away from our grandparents claiming they’re a danger. You’re the dangerous liar!” And Camila sank into depression.

First stage: consolidating the family she had created

It was then that a family therapy began which, in a first stage, set out to consolidate Camila’s new role as wife and mother in the family she had created. Fernando collaborated fully, and Rosa, Alberto and Martín calmed down enough to begin to be able to listen to their mother. They still did not understand the extent of the damage she had suffered in her childhood, being themselves children wrecked by a tormented history, but, at least, they gave her the benefit of the doubt: yes, she loved them and, in her own way, she wanted the best for them. They understood that they could not go back to their grandparents, but they refused to live in conditions that were clearly inadequate. They willingly agreed to go to a residential home proposed by social services and, during the weekends they spent with Camila, she began to experience, for the first time in her life, the feeling of having a united family for which it was worth making an effort. Rosa, seventeen, and Martín, twelve, above all, proved calm and affectionate with their brothers and sisters, and reasonably respectful toward Fernando. But with Alberto there were more problems, because the adolescent turbulence of his fourteen years was reinforced by the fact that he was the one most spoiled by the grandparents, who had nurtured in him fantasies of soon joining the family business. Camila’s depression had disappeared, but the instability of the situation called for new perspectives.

This is why the therapist proposed to Camila that she open another chapter: “You are a remarkable woman, who has drawn strength from her weakness to the point of achieving what no one would have imagined a few years ago: creating a beautiful family and organizing the present well. The problem is that the past is so atrocious that it seeps in through the cracks, threatening at any moment to ruin what has been built. What I propose is that we now put the past at the center and focus on your family of origin, mainly your parents and your brothers and sisters, so that you can obtain the reparation you deserve and need. It is also a necessary condition for your relationship with your children, and especially with Alberto, to become clear and stable once and for all. But, for that, you have to bring me your parents.”

Summoning the parents

And she brought them. It did not cost her much, because Carlos feared scandal and even possible legal consequences, and Carolina followed her husband unconditionally. So Camila came to the session with both of them, as well as with Rosa, whom she had chosen in her capacity as eldest daughter to accompany her and to be a witness to everything that would be said. And the father gave a memorable performance, in the course of which he acknowledged all his faults: “Not only did I subject her to appalling abuse, but, what is worse, I then allowed her to be the one who appeared guilty of the failures of her life. I cannot ask for forgiveness, because I don’t deserve it.” The mother claimed she had noticed nothing, and her husband, like a gentleman, confirmed her innocence: “I am the only guilty one.” Carolina nevertheless kept up a critical tone toward her daughter: “I knew nothing, and the fact that you suffered from what your father did to you doesn’t justify your not telling me anything, me of all people. You didn’t behave well, neither with me nor with your children.”

But, at this stage, neither Camila nor the therapist was going to allow new mystifications to be perpetrated. The accusations were therefore categorically rejected, and the need was established for a family meeting that would definitively clarify things and restore Camila’s standing. It was she who had to choose the people who would attend, and that is what she did: her brothers and sisters with their spouses, two maternal aunts as representatives of the extended family, and Rosa, representing her children.

The family meeting

The session was held in the presence of fifteen people, and the father reiterated his self-accusation. In a firm voice and with a dignified bearing, he stated explicitly that he had committed the worst sexual abuse on his daughter and that he had then allowed her to be accused of irresponsibility, never specifying until that day that she had weighty reasons for being lost in life. The mother, who insisted that she knew nothing (“… well, at most I imagined there might have been some minor touching…”), showed contrition, weeping without restraint and reproaching her husband for having been able to do such a thing to his daughter. The sisters-in-law were very hard on Carlos, insisting that Camila was now a different person in their eyes. But those who played a decisive role, and whose importance would keep growing from that moment on, were the siblings.

Felipe, the eldest, was a special case, because he had a long history of drug use and was an extremely reserved man, who did not utter a word during the whole session. But Rodrigo, the third child, led an admirable reparative process. When he took the floor, he began by acknowledging his share of responsibility in the marginalization to which they had all subjected Camila: “We should have realized, but we didn’t want to see. We sensed something, but we closed our eyes out of convenience, because life was better in ignorance. It was easier to accuse a sister of irresponsibility, while she was struggling in the storm of her life and bringing children home for us to look after, than to accept that what was rotten was the foundations of the family, that the one guilty of everything was our father and that the crime had gone on for years under the eyes of our mother and… of all of us. Nothing will be the same from today on. We owe Camila something very great, very important…”

Magdalena wept a great deal, but, unlike the mother’s tears, hers expressed sincere emotion and clear repentance, since she was the one who, among the siblings, had criticized Camila the most. Ignacio and Roberto, twenty-two and twenty, were much younger than their elders and did not even remember the moment when Camila had left home. For them, their sister had always been a distant and unpredictable stranger, who had even invented a risk of sexual abuse on their part toward Rosa as an urgent reason for getting her children back. They were moved, but needed more time to work through the new situation.

In the end, the clarification session was a real success, and the therapist underlined this, insisting that the process of reparation was only beginning. He pointed out that everyone’s reaction was an indicator of the human quality of the family. “You, Carlos, did Camila an enormous amount of harm, but she is today a strong, beautiful and capable woman, who is definitively taking control of her life. In this strength of hers, in this capacity to resist and to get back up, there is surely also something good that comes from you. In any case, I would like to be able to count on all of you to continue and conclude this therapy, so that it leads to a situation that is fair and reparative for Camila and for her children.”

The therapist’s intention was to continue working with the parents, with the idea of bringing about a process of reconciliation… only insofar as Camila wished it. This choice rests on the evidence that a person abused or mistreated by her parents remains their daughter, so that, to some extent, she will always carry within her those who mistreated her. Everything that can be gained in the direction of understanding and, if possible, of forgiveness and reconciliation, will help her to lighten her burden. In other words, it is more bearable to feel oneself the daughter of parents who mistreated you because of their own, ultimately human, problems than of incomprehensibly satanic monsters.

The parents’ history

The therapy therefore continued and, in the sessions that followed, it was possible to work with parents who showed light and shade, and whose collaboration made it possible to reconstruct their histories. Carlos had lost his father when he was a child, and his mother had remarried a man who never made her happy. Both went their separate ways; Carlos remembered having caught his mother in bed with a lover, while his stepfather’s infidelities were just as notorious. In a context of abandonment, he forged a very independent and combative personality, leaving school early to work relentlessly. For her part, Carolina had lost both her father and her mother, and her childhood was spent in a boarding school, watched over from a distance by her two elder sisters, on whom she depended down to the smallest details. When, at seventeen, Carlos and Carolina met, they literally fell into each other’s arms, forming from then on an indissoluble couple of extreme complementarity. He held the helm, and she put flowers in the vases.

At eighteen, they were married and had a first child, when they had scarcely had the time or the opportunity to play like children or to romp like adolescents. And at nineteen, they had Camila. In this context of relational prematurity, with Carlos playing the superman ever more forcefully and Carolina consigned to the role of fragile, dependent little doll, the loss of roles occurred. Felipe was physically mistreated, because he was a whining brat who did not respect his father’s need for rest, and Camila was sexually abused because her father, all-powerful, deserved “the warrior’s rest,” and Carolina was too exhausted after her second delivery.

Carlos had his most honest moment when, speaking of all these matters, he showed, between tears, sincere repentance: “I was never again able to trust myself. I always kept a distance from my other daughter, Magdalena, and, of course, from my granddaughter Rosa, for fear of losing control again with them. But, deep down, I always knew nothing would happen, because what happened to me with Camila was a kind of illness, a morbid obsession very hard to repeat. I know now that I ruined her life and also that of my whole family…” As for Carolina, she insisted that she had not even imagined anything of the sort could happen, and she was very angry with her husband. For a few days, she left him, going to live in a house they owned by the sea, two hundred kilometers from the family home, and she had several contacts with Camila, which were well received by the latter and seemed to mark a new relationship.

However, this spectacular change in the parents did not last long. Soon Carlos began to send out messages to the effect that life and the family business had to go on, which provoked a reaction of intense rejection in the children. His authoritarian character did not allow him to keep the humble profile he had shown during the confession. He entrenched himself once again in the role of the great man, a sinner but repentant, at whose side his wife hurried to position herself, too dependent to dare face a life without him.

The siblings’ revolution

The therapy sessions with the siblings, Camila included with full honors, and Ignacio and Roberto now integrated, created a climate of enthusiastic support for her and of intense criticism of the parents. Rodrigo made himself the leader of a veritable family revolution: “How can it be that this gentleman still claims to act as if nothing had happened? Does he think that, because he acknowledged what he did, and only when he had no other choice, everything is already resolved? And Mom? How are we to understand that, after leaving, she went back to live with him, saying that she doesn’t forgive him but that she can’t leave him alone? We have to do something so that Camila is left with not the slightest doubt that her sufferings belong to the past.”

And they did do something! Meeting in council, the siblings decided to strip the parents of all responsibility in the family business, granting them a dignified life annuity that would allow them to live far away, in the house by the sea. And they all sided with Camila, offering her a place in the business and showing their solidarity in various ways. Felipe changed spectacularly, speaking freely of the ill-treatment he himself had suffered and taking his place, alongside Camila, in the group of victims. Rodrigo, in his capacity as new leader, skillfully organized the business, helping each one to find a place in it. Magdalena offered to help Camila by taking charge, for a while, of those of her children who might need it. Ignacio joined his elders with the enthusiasm of the convert, and Roberto was the only one who decided to keep up relations with the parents, while also drawing closer to his siblings, and especially to Camila. Concretely, and although he was a very young man, he organized several meals at his home to which he invited all his brothers and sisters, as well as Camila and her family. He was also able to resolve with her the misunderstanding over the accusations of abuse toward Rosa which, though unfounded, had served to let Camila get her children back. Roberto understood her and forgave her, even though the matter caused him some legal unpleasantness.

Finally, Camila completed taking control of her life: she took vocational training courses and became a family support worker, alternating this occupation with some collaborations in the family business. At the end of the therapy, Rosa, then nineteen, went to live independently, first with friends, then with a boyfriend. She was a young woman who, amid the din of the battles that had surrounded her since she was very small, had matured early, and who now appeared fairly stable. She had understood her mother and had also contributed to the stabilization of the family. Martín presented no problems and lived with his mother, well adjusted. As for Alberto, he was the one who most resisted accepting the new situation, combining his identification with the grandfather with a defiant attitude proper to his condition as an adolescent. However, his aunt Magdalena took care of him for a period, until his conflictuality diminished and he could adapt to his mother and his new family.

The logic of the ecosystem

Camila’s case illustrates well how a history of maltreatment can seep into the relational fabric of a family over several generations. The parents had already suffered the consequences of inadequate modes of upbringing, which had forced them to face life in unfavorable circumstances. This makes it easier to understand their failure with their children, and especially with Felipe and Camila, whom they continued to subject to manifestly dysfunctional situations. The chain of maltreatment, through Felipe’s addictive pathology and Camila’s maladjusted behavior and depression, threatened to be passed on to their children, entangling them in perverse games with the two other generations. Fortunately, the chain of maltreatment could be interrupted by a therapeutic intervention, which was also preventive of later ills and rehabilitative of the aftereffects of the past. And the therapy freed up resources which, with relative autonomy from the therapist’s initial intentions, led the process along unsuspected paths. The group of siblings took the leading role, making up, through its reparative capacity, for the limits of the parents. Such is the logic of the ecosystem.