Travel back into Donald D'Haene's world where his immigrant parents arrive in rural Canada to live in isolated poverty, constantly moving from one rented house to another. Where the religion of the father curdles into a cult at home. A cult of unfettered temper, wife subjugation & the The Game he plays with his children.
Donald's father rules his little fiefdom with a fist of fear & sexual abuse until the youngest child refuses to play The Game. When Donald's mother takes her family before their religious elders, instead of the abuse being stopped, she is chastised for not reporting it earlier & the family, while being allowed to continue to attend services, is shunned, & life at home returns to "normal."
It isn't until Donald, now in his teens, reads a letter in the advice column of a newspaper, that he realizes what his father is doing is illegal. It takes a while for that information to make sense in his life, & when it does, he begins the rescue of his mother & siblings.
Donald D'Haene is the first author I've read who recounts his transformation with sessions of mental therapy. If you glean nothing else from FATHER'S TOUCH, you will see how useful the services of a community mental health organization can be.
FATHER'S TOUCH is an ebullient, enchanting, hopeful memoir about a man's childhood, dominated by a predator parent, & the author's rocky road to health, maturity & happiness.
As the tale unfolds you can see how the perpetrator isolates, then brainwashes his victims while increasing their physical and psychological dependency on him. And how black-white, this-that, right-wrong beliefs merely reinforce his own absolutist opinions and literalistic excuses for seduction and violence. The self-justifications, the lies, the false faces and twisted thinking were familiar to me through my counseling work with perpetrators, whose primary agenda is the complete control of family members.
What the author also details for us is the adulthood fallout of abuse, and the lifelong struggle for clarity. Sticking closely to his experiences, he shows us what it is to try assembling a self without having had a sense of self--and burdened at the same time with the hyper-rigid shoulds, oughts, and other forms of shame and self-hatred deposited into his psyche by the abuser. (I believe it was Elie Wiesel who said that it's always the victims who feel shame, not the executioners.)
A particularly sad moment: sitting in the courtroom hearing attorneys warp a sexual abuse case into a religious battle, the author thinks: why did I put myself through this ordeal? Such legalistic wranglings only serve the perpetrator, of course, mirroring as they do his own attempts to control other people through misrepresentation, procedural weaknesses, and word games.
In spite of this, the author moves ahead with his own healing, demonstrating that the benefits of asserting oneself don't necessarily depend on happy outcomes, legal or otherwise. To find that the world isn't so bad a place to inhabit in spite of all the suffering, and to become comfortable with one's differentness, are only two of the treasures he uncovers on his pilgrimage. A third is learning to get more comfortable--despite abuse, rejection by "Christian" elders, and a homophobic society--with being gay, a thing hard to come by even without having been incested or raised in a fragmented family. (Remarkably, the abuser has written about the sinfulness of his son's homosexuality. Apparently it's OK to terrorize an entire family, use spirituality for subjugation, and even rape one's children--but not OK for a man to show love to another man. The family values of perpetrators and those who support them are truly unique.)
Finally, the book is also a topical reminder that sexual abuse is not confined to (or mismanaged by) the Catholic Church, and that many "Christian" organizations are more interested in protecting their clergy than its victims. In this they resemble the gentlemen whom Jesus criticized for shutting the door on those who follow. Not every church, temple, or parish provides a safe haven for perpetrators, of course--but an emphasis on politics, male control of women, missionary persuasion, ideological domination, and uncritical obedience make large religious organizations attractive to victimizers looking for protection and self-authorization. The more political an organization, the greater its usefulness to predators adept at making rigid rules work in their favor.
I recommend this book to abuse survivors actively engaged in the struggle for selfhood.
In this story D'Haene tells the story of his upbringing. His father was controlling of his mother, and sexually and physically abusive to he and his brothers and sister. He tells of his personal dissent into a hell: high school is bad enough for most of us without the additional bitterness and pain caused by a tumultuous home life and the fact that your father has raped you. Nevertheless, D'Haene's story is not solely a tale of angst and suffering: instead, it is a story that shows how one individual finds redemption.
As an honest reviewer, D'Haene does not write with typical artifice and convention; his story is an honest and personal account. As it is honestly the story of one man's life, and not the idea of one man's life, it reads as such. Were it intended to be literary, there are ways that it may have been possible to package it in a form that would be a little more tortured, and perhaps more dramatic. Parts of it could be cut; others could be edited. However, as it is what it is, it is a wonderful book as it stands, and really should be read.
However you got to this point, I would recommend that you need to read this book. It is enlightening, interesting, and, in an odd way, a book that could strengthen one's faith. I commend Mr. D'Haene for having the strength to live through his early life strong enough to tell his tale; I hope, for all of us, that many people read this book.
