Encountering Pain of the Past : Incest: The peer counselors at Some People’s Children understand that ‘people who were abused, abuse.’

The artwork that decorates the warren of small rooms where these incest survivors meet depicts the pain and hope the victims have felt.

“A lot of hurt people are very talented,” said Monica Weil, co-director of the counseling group Some People’s Children, as she gazed at a collage that juxtaposes magazine images of flowers and candles with a picture of a screaming child.

“They go into the pain to create. It’s a great release, and these people need it.”

Weil, who developed multiple personalities as a result of her own childhood abuse, and her husband, Michael Buffington, started Some People’s Children more than a decade ago out of Weil’s needs.

Sexually abused by her father almost daily for the first 17 years of her life, Weil said she created seven different personalities to help her cope. After years of therapy, she felt she was doing well at “integrating” her personalities until pressures of her marketing career sent her “splitting” again. Her therapist recommended peer counseling geared specifically to incest victims, but Weil said she couldn’t find anything. And as she looked, she found other people who needed help.

Weil began inviting other incest victims to meet informally at her Van Nuys home, and in 1986 Some People’s Children was incorporated as a nonprofit agency.

“Every month, our groups were doubling in size,” said Buffington. In June, 1989, they rented office space in Encino.

With a $500,000 annual budget supplied by donations and sliding fees, the 20-member staff includes four licensed full-time counselors, nine peer counselors and other physicians and therapists who work on an as-needed basis. The agency counsels about 150 clients a week, mostly in peer-group settings.

Buffington and Weil are not therapists. In fact, neither completed an undergraduate degree, although both attended Cal State Northridge. They are careful to have all work supervised by licensed professionals “because the side effects of incest are great--including schizophrenia, suicide, severe depression,” Weil said. Peer counselors are closely monitored, she said. “People who were abused, abuse. They could unknowingly become abusers” by, for example, overstepping boundaries, such as touching, or making the client feel ashamed about his or her feelings.

“We have strict guidelines,” she continued. “No touching is allowed. Besides dealing with the molestation, we try to teach people how to protect themselves, how to establish boundaries and not to allow themselves to be touched if they don’t want to.”

Buffington worked as a counselor in chemical-dependency programs. He said he and Weil know their limits, as well as their strengths. “I can get them sober,” he said, “but if they need psychotherapy, that’s when I say, ‘Doc, come on down.’ ”

What sets Some People’s Children apart from other such services, they believe, is the combination of peer counseling with professional supervision, as well as the therapy’s scope, covering co-dependency, substance abuse and post-traumatic stress issues.

“We counsel not only the survivors, but the ‘significant other’ in the relationship,” Buffington said. “That’s hard, because often these people don’t think they have a problem. But if you’re living with someone who acts crazy or abuses drugs or alcohol or is severely depressed all the time, you do have a problem, especially if you don’t think it’s a problem.”

Psychiatrist Robert Gerner has been referring incest survivors to Some People’s Children for about four years, usually recommending that they use this counseling in conjunction with individual therapy.

The agency, he said, “facilitates being able to deal with the past without fracturing the patient’s defense system.”

Gerner, co-director of the West Los Angeles Center for Mood Disorders and an associate research professor at UCLA, said that Some People’s Children is “still a young group, still evolving and finding out what works and what doesn’t.”

Twelve years ago, C.J. admitted she was an alcoholic, had been since she was 15. If she could only get sober, she thought, her life would be better. But being sober brought her no relief. She was constantly depressed, couldn’t sustain a relationship, had no childhood memories and was afraid to be touched, yet she craved physical contact. She gained weight to hide her body.

“I always knew something happened to me, but I didn’t know what,” she explained. During a meeting of Adult Children of Alcoholics, she heard testimony of early-childhood molestation. “After listening

to other incest victims, her own memories began to surface--memories of being molested when she was 8 by her cousin’s 20-year-old husband, and again by her best friend’s stepfather.

She recalled clandestine “dates” with her divorced father when she was 12. “He took me to fancy dinners, gave me champagne, took me to the racetrack, to the Bahamas, always telling me not to tell my mother or stepmother. I felt like the ‘other woman.’ ” C.J. came to Some People’s Children four years ago as a client and is now a peer counselor.

Incest, Weil and Buffington claim, is often at the root of addictive behavior such as drug and alcohol abuse, promiscuity and eating disorders.

Almost all of their clients are recovering from some form of addiction, Buffington said. Most have been in various 12-step programs, among them Alcoholics and Overeaters Anonymous.

While these programs are helpful for many, they may present problems for incest victims. A staple of the “anonymous” organizations, Weil said, is making the alcoholic or drug abuser take responsibility for his or her actions. “But when you are a victim of incest, it isn’t your fault. Also, there is often a lot hugging and touching, which many molestation victims find hard to accept. We don’t touch anyone. We do recommend 12-step programs, but suggest incest victims stay away from touchy-feely ones.”

Jan Claypool, intake counselor for the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center in Van Nuys, said it is difficult to find good referrals for incest victims. Some People’s Children, she said, is one of the few that treats a wide age range and offers co-ed groups that allow victims “to learn to interact with the opposite sex. They are specific in the kind of counseling they do and realize that post-traumatic and substance-abuse therapy go together.”

Groups are divided according to age, “because victims relate differently at particular life stages,” Weil said. For example, it is difficult for a teen-ager or a young, unmarried person “still working on dating” to relate to people who are struggling with child-raising issues. And for younger patients, she said, the pain and abuse are often fresher.

Clients usually come to them in one of three stages of trauma--chronic, delayed and acute. Victims in the chronic stage have been suffering anxiety disorders for years, Weil explained, and are not getting better.

A delayed depression has been triggered by something. Maybe it’s a traffic accident or someone tries to get fresh on a date.

In the acute stage, she said, “the abuse is happening now. These people cannot go into a group with someone whose abuse happened in the past.”

Often, clients are still in denial when they arrive, Weil said, especially men. “They say things like, ‘Yeah, I was abused, but it wasn’t so bad’ or ‘My dad kissed me on the mouth, but it wasn’t intercourse, so it wasn’t so bad.’ ”

Not all incest involves touching, she added. “There also can be insidious incest, which is anything that is a negative secret or makes you feel ashamed, such as a mother who consistently parades around the house in seductive clothing.”

“It’s the secret and the shame,” agreed Kimberly, a willowy blonde who left home at 15 and became involved with drugs and alcohol. She spoke softly and haltingly, sitting with her feet curled up under her chiffon skirt, tying and untying her hair. “I felt for a long time that if anyone was attracted to me it was my fault because of the way my body was and I owed it to them to do anything they wanted.”

Anyone in a parental role, including “teacher, therapist, clergy or anyone close to the victim who exploits them, who steps over a boundary with a child,” is an abuser, Buffington said. “There also is something wrong at home if a teacher sexually abuses a child and no one at home notices it.”

Because incest, like other child abuse, tends to be transmitted from generation to generation, the center’s slogan, “Stop it in this generation!” has become not only a watchword, but a call to arms.

Sherry, another peer counselor, noted that in her family, child-abuse victims go back at least to her grandfather. “Victims become perpetrators.”

The peer counselors gathered for the weekly Wednesday night staff meeting are a diverse lot, ranging in age from early 20s to mid-40s. Mostly women, they show varying degrees of comfort in talking, from bluntly forthright to almost painfully shy. Weil hovers protectively.

“This counseling can wear you down because it’s so long-term,” said Buffington, running a hand tiredly across his eyes.

“Do I work hard?” he asked. “Yes. Would I give it up? Never.”

“The most important thing is to let everyone know this is a safe place, non-judgmental and non-confrontative,” C.J. said.

Kimberly said this was the first place she felt protected.

“Boundaries were set,” she said. “It was very clear that if I was drinking I couldn’t come to group. And I wanted to, because here I felt I was accepted and not judged.”

Diane (not her real name) was molested by a baby-sitter when she was 8. This went on for more than a year. When she was 12, she began smoking marijuana “to block out the bad feelings.” She saw two psychiatrists, but “my life was staying the same,” she said. “It wasn’t until I got here, to a safe place, that I could acknowledge the core issue. I felt a healing.”

Recently engaged to a man who is aware of her childhood abuse, Diane feels her life is finally starting to come together. She is working and finishing her college education, while volunteering at the center.

Healing, said Sherry, is “like a Rubik’s Cube--it takes a lot of twists and turns to get it right, to make it better. But it’s worth it.”