Babs' advice = "LISTEN, BELIEVE and encourage them to STAY STRONG."

00:03 All right. Hello, I'm Cheryle Gail founder of Brave Voices. We speak up to protect children from childhood sexual abuse. And today I am interviewing Barbara Walters, who is in Florida, and I am recording this from Portola Valley. I am 59 years young. And. Tell me about yourself, Barbara.

00:32 Well, I prefer actually being called babs, babs, because I spent a lot of time in my life being teased about being Barbara Walters. As you could imagine, I am 78 years old, and I do live in Florida for the past six years.

00:48 And it's Lake Worth, Florida.

00:50 Exactly, which is southeast Florida. Florida. Right.

00:54 Great. And so we are committed to speaking up, normalizing the conversation of childhood sexual abuse and its prevention in order to contribute to future generations having a safer childhood than we did. So we are both here voluntarily and sharing the details of what happened so that we can understand the process. How does childhood sexual abuse occur? What are the long term ramifications of having been harmed? How do we move from surviving as children to thriving adults? So that's what we're going to go through today. So thank you, Barbara, for being a brave voice and speaking up and sharing with us your life.

01:51 Well, I could say thank you to you, Cheryle for creating a safe space for people to be able to speak up.

01:58 Thank you. And what I love most about this is it goes into the Library of Congress so that we, so many of us never made a police report. So when we hear the numbers, one out of three, one out of five, we know they're not the right. We know it's a much larger problem than that. And so this is, this is proof of what an epidemic childhood sexual abuse is. All right. Well, let's start at the beginning, wherever you want. As far as sharing the who, what, where, when, why, how does this happen? How did it happen to you?

02:37 Well, I think that in order to know how it happened to me, you need to know about my parents.

02:43 Okay.

02:45 My parents told us that they met in reform school. I was threatened throughout my childhood that if I did anything wrong, they were going to send me to reform school. But it wasn't until I was an adult and I was in therapy that one of my therapists looked up the school that they supposedly went to, and it was a private school funded by jewish federation, and it was for what was called juvenile delinquents. So kids who had gotten themselves into trouble and whose parents couldn't manage them for whatever reason. Now, my father gave us the reasons why they were sent there, but I don't know this for a fact. It's just hearsay but he was truant from school and he decided that he didn't need to go to school because he was smarter than every teacher in that building. And he had built a bomb in chem lab and he almost blew up the high school. So that convinced him that he was smarter than everybody. And my mother was found making out under the stairwell in her apartment building with a puerto rican boy, which went against her jewish mother's, I guess, sensibilities. Now, both of my grandmothers were divorced women, which was almost unheard of that generation in the twenties and thirties for jewish families. So they were stuck with these two kids who were acting out and sent them away. They met each other and somehow they became pregnant with me.

04:21 Okay?

04:22 So I use that not to excuse them for what they've done, but just to set the groundwork that they were clearly unprepared to be parents. And not everybody who becomes a parent has a maternal or paternal instinct. It's a biology that creates babies, not necessarily emotions. So in order to get married, they had to run away to another state because their parents wouldn't grant them permission. So they went to Baltimore. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I was born before the wedding ceremony.

05:03 And how old were your parents at this time?

05:05 17.

05:06 Okay.

05:07 Yeah. But my father instantly got drafted. It was World War Two. We're talking about 1945, and my mother was alone in this city without any family or friends. And kind of, I would have to guess, saying resentful to find herself caring for a baby by herself, or even resentful being married to somebody who wasn't present anymore. That's just guesswork. I can't give you more than that.

05:38 And probably scared. My gosh. Yeah, yeah.

05:43 So here we go. We go a little deeper into the story. And my parents don't get along. A lot of domestic violence. My father has some kind of anger issues. He uses his fists. He's a little bit obsessed with his guns, which he has hanging all over the place in open gun racks. He boasts about the fact that during the war he learned to be a sniper because he could kill a man with one shot at great distance. And he ever the big storyteller, tells us that General Eisenhower was the person he was hired to protect. And we subsequently found out that that wasn't quite true. But, you know, so we have a lot of fighting going on and a lot of moving from place to place. I remember thinking that by the time I got married, I had lived in twelve different homes and with lots of different people, but basically my sister and I were terrified of my father beating my mother up. We tried to sink into the floorboards and disappear because there was nothing we could do. She would be bleeding and crying and he would pummel her down to the grounds and get her in some corner.

07:16 Wow. Wow.

07:18 So a little while after this, we noticed that when my father would come home from work, my mother would meet him at the door and start complaining about my sister and I and how bad we were. And she would rile him up until he stopped hitting her and he started to hit us.

07:38 Oh.

07:41 Now, probably a lot of survivors know that when you grow up in a war zone, like my house was, you become very observant, very keen watching nuance, knowing when the moods are going to shift, knowing when danger is coming.

07:55 Yeah.

07:56 I became very observant about the fact that my mother's complaints kept her safe but harmed us. Yeah. And pretty soon she got even more into the goading him by. She would go in and get his belt and the beatings got worse eventually. One day I get a period and my mother leaves the house. My mother always leaves the house after the beatings of because she leaves us with him. And he calls me into his bedroom. Now, normally I'm not permitted into his bedroom because my mother made a rule that we're only allowed in there if she's there. But he invites me in. I don't want to go. He taps the bed, he asks me to sit down next to him and he tells me, congratulations, you're eleven years old and you became a woman today. This is where it gets a little harder to talk about Cheryle

09:09 Yeah.

09:10 Because as much healing as I've done, and to your point, as much thriving as we do, it was a very formative time in my life. And I sit down on the bed next to him and he puts his arm around me and he tells me that he's going to do me a big favor. He doesn't want me to grow up like my mother, that he doesn't want me to be frigid. And now that I'm a woman, he's going to teach me what to do. So as his arm is around me, his hand starts coming down and squeezing my breasts. So I turn my head away because that's the only thing I can do. And on the night table there is his gun.

10:02 Oh.

10:10 That was the first time. All he did was really just tell me what was going to happen and touch me. But after that, he started doing what I call his nighttime visits. He would come into my bedroom. Didn't matter if my mother was home or wasn't home. And he started doing various things to me. So, like, the first time, I pretended that I was asleep, hoping that he would go away. And he put something in my hands. Something. The only way I could describe it, I was eleven years old. Squishy.

10:46 Yeah.

10:46 Squishy, yeah. And he wanted me to move my hands up and down, and I wouldn't. So he squeezed his hands around my hands and he. Now that I know what he did, he masturbated in my hand. After. I could hear his breathing get very heavy and intense. And then something got all over me. And he tapped to me lightly and he said, I'll be right back. Like I was waiting for him to come back. And he came back with a washcloth and he washed my hand, but some of the stuff was still on my leg. And in the morning when I woke up, there was this cake done stuff. And from there, he squeezed my legs apart. And I don't think it's necessary to go through anything more than that. But I developed something that I didn't learn until many years later was a way to disassociate myself from what was happening. So I would physically separate myself from my body and picture myself in a jungle, running away from a beast with fiery eyes and fangs. And I would just keep myself focused on escaping from that beast until it was over. And this continued on for seven years. Now I understand that I was in survival mode and that one of the hardest part in healing. And if I had to offer advice for someone, I would tell them that there's a lot of shame involved. Even though you're a child and your adults are supposed to be the ones who are taking care of you and protecting you. And not only did my mother, I believe, sacrifice us, but my father couldn't control himself. So the hard part is healing from all of his shame. So there is a part of me that wishes I had the strength to run away from home and even be a street person and be homeless and not put up with it anymore. But at that point, I understand from all of the damage that was done early, with the beatings and the threatening and the lack of protection, that I did the best that I could. I just survived.

13:35 And the disassociating is amazing, right? Our little brains, how what we couldn't get out. There's a gun on the table, there's violence. Our brains, it just always amazes me how well our brains attempt to protect us. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that you were raised in violence and fear and your mother chose to sacrifice you and. Yeah, just what a horrible way to always as a child, not know when violence was going to happen and violence and sexual violence. And I can't imagine how, how you live through seven years of that. And I'm wondering if you had conscious memories during those seven years or did this disassociation protect you from knowing what was happening? Or were you always living in fear that it was going to happen again?

15:06 Well, at some level I knew that it could continue to happen, but I totally lived my life as though it were not happening.

15:14 Okay.

15:16 As a matter of fact, I was an avid reader and my sister and I, because we came from financially impoverished home, were entitled to free lunch at school. But I chose to walk home at lunch with the other girls that were going home for lunch and I would sit and read for my hour. And that was the only time that I was basically happy because there was nobody there to hurt me. Till this day, I love being by myself. I enjoy my own company. But it was in reading that I learned what was actually happening to me. But I think it's important for anybody who hears this interview to understand that today in school, children are taught about their bodies. They're taught about not letting anybody touch them. They're taught to speak up. But when I went to school in hygiene, which was the only class that we had that was in any way connected, we watched a black and white movie of the birds and the bees pollinating flowers. And that at eleven years old, that gave me no concept what was happening to me. Plus, being the first of anybody I knew to menstruate, I didn't have like an older sibling or something. And then my mother, I have to give my mother credit for the reading because one day she brought home a big stack of library books for me. And I fell in love with losing myself in these stories. So somehow, somewhere inside me, I always knew that I was going to be the heroine of my story, that I was going to come out of the other side just like Helen Keller, who was blind, or just like the little women who this, whose father died. I knew that no matter what happened to me, I would survive. But my mother had started to buy this volume a month encyclopedia from the supermarket and we had gotten up to letter n. So every day when I would come home for lunch, I started with the a's and I read through just about every posting that had anything to do with me. And let me tell you, when I got to I, and I got to incest I was in shock, Cheryle because the definition in that book had nothing to do with what was happening to me. And it said I was. That was the first time I ever heard the word incest. It wasn't a, like something that people talked about.

17:51 No.

17:52 And it said sexual relations between people too closely related to be married. It didn't say anything about violation. It didn't say anything about violence. It didn't say anything about the person supposedly protecting you. It didn't give me any clue, except that I knew that I couldn't marry my father and I certainly didn't want to.

18:20 Yeah.

18:22 So I lived my life like, yes, I know that's happening, but I'm not even going to think about it.

18:32 Yeah. Yeah. And you were looking for answers. One thing that I want to go back to is you're saying that today children are being taught about their bodies. They're being taught, but unless we adults speak openly about sexuality and our physical bodies and the epidemic that childhood sexual abuse is, they will not know that we are safe people that they can come to and talk about this. So we're definitely. I think of it as an evolution. It's wonderful.

19:13 Right.

19:13 I taught my daughter with all the books to speak up, but they have to hear us talking about this. So I just wanted to interject that, that we're making progress. But until we adults take the responsibility and get comfortable talking out loud in front of the children, that they're not going to know that it's a safe subject for them to talk about. So you found incest and you found other helpful information in these. They were. They were digests.

19:49 That was encyclopedias. You bought one volume a month. So we had only gotten up to n. That's as far and I think as. We must have moved or something.

19:57 Oh, okay.

19:59 I didn't find it all that helpful. Finding the incest definition.

20:06 No. Right. That doesn't help a lot. And so you. You were living life as if it wasn't happening. But you've got all of this knowing and this fear that unless you were at, at home at lunchtime, you weren't safe any other time, and. And your mom ignored it. She probably knew this was happening. I'm guessing if.

20:32 Well, I kept a diary. That was one of the. Reading and writing and dancing have always been important to me, and they still are today. I think I mentioned to you that I got a contract to publish my memoir. So I'm finally speaking out in a bigger way as well. But I kept a diary. And in the diary I wrote about my father's night visit. I also wrote about smoking cigarettes. I also wrote about cutting class. And very interestingly, my mother would confront me on the smoking and the cutting school, but never said a word about my father. And, of course, when we confronted her, she said, who would ever think that anything like that was possible, you know? So she excused herself.

21:25 But denial.

21:27 Yeah, well, that's what my. You know, I'm back in therapy again because writing this memoir has really, like, triggered a bunch of stuff, but. And it's good to have somebody to talk to that you can get the response that you need.

21:41 Yes.

21:41 So one of the things that she told me is that the reason people deny these things is because it's very messy and they don't want to deal with it. So, you know, because, I mean, there were people that I've told throughout my life, and I didn't get the satisfaction that I needed.

21:59 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just can't cope. Can't take responsibility for her part. And others just don't want to hear it. It's too. Yeah.

22:13 Messy.

22:14 Yes. Yep.

22:15 Too. It's not easy.

22:17 Nope. Yep. So we're asking a lot of humanity to address this issue, in my opinion. It's the last social issue that has not been dealt with adequately, in my opinion. But. And that's it. People who haven't had the experience, I can't tell you how many people that I'll ask for support know that's not what. That didn't happen to my family, but I'm not. Not. It's not something that I care about. I care about Parkinson's because my mom had Parkinson's or something like that. I said, yeah, but my gosh, you know, your children luckily didn't. Weren't harmed by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who was right in your community? It's so hard. It's so hard to get people who. Who were not involved, even people who were involved. So, yeah, that is the big question for me, is how do we get all humanity to care about this epidemic?

23:25 I conducted a ten week healing journal writing workshop at a residence for women on drug and alcohol abuse. And what surprised me, I mean, I went in there working with addicts who, some of them were mandated to go through the program, and some of them, their families had put them in, and some of them had voluntarily gone in. But I was amazed that at least 30% of them had been sexually abused as children. Not necessarily by a parent, some by a grandparent, some by a. A clergy, a coach. But the point is that this is just like, I didn't go in there knowing that that was the audience that I was going to see. But in doing the work, that's what came out. And I wonder how many other people talk about disassociation. I mean, I'm not an expert in statistics or in psychology, but how many other people have suppressed it or disassociated it and refused to bring it to the surface and they're okay? I don't criticize people.

24:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, it's our brains doing the best they can to protect us, which I, you know, it's just amazing to me how that happens. So can you talk a little bit about, and I don't know the answer to this, so maybe there aren't any, but any physical challenges that you've had throughout your life that you would attribute to having been harmed sexually as a child?

25:06 Well, obviously, the first one is looking for love in all the wrong places. So I've been married three times. I believe in marriage. I think it's a. It's a good union. And fortunately for me, I got it right this time. Like my husband says, he's not the third husband, he's the last husband. But I so equated my success with my body that I didn't know any other way to find love. So I screwed up a lot. Not only did I have two marriages that didn't quite work because. Not because of the people I married, because my decision making was flawed in some ways. They were very similar to my parents in neglect and abuse, not necessarily physical violence, but a lot of emotional abuse. And the other thing is that I've suffered from anxiety my entire life. It's like I'm still putting my foot down and is there a mine there? Am I going to hit a landmine?

26:28 Yeah. And have you come up with any coping mechanisms for the anxiety?

26:36 I'm constantly working on it, Cheryle I mean.

26:43 Even now, with this lovely human being that you're married to, do you have as much anxiety?

26:50 No, but I still get triggered very easily, and I'm a big believer in healing myself, so I try not to take medication or use any artificial means. So it's becoming more and more difficult as I'm aging.

27:09 Can you, for those who don't understand triggering, can you give an example of how you're triggered? What is that for you?

27:16 Well, my husband grew up with two brothers, so these three boys love to tease each other, and to him, teasing is a sign of love. But to me, teasing is a sign of criticism. So I become defensive when he's just trying to have fun, but it's not fun for me. It's kind of like when you get tickled. You know, you laugh a lot when you're tickled, but that doesn't mean you're enjoying it, you know?

27:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that reminds you of growing up, and then you have a. Maybe an overreaction.

27:59 Yeah, well, like my daughter will say, mom, you're too sensitive. Well, the truth is, is that people that grow up with our experience are sensitive. And maybe we were sensitive before that, too. And the fact that we could still be sensitive is amazing. So I'm not going to take that one as a criticism, but it used to sting me when people said, oh, you're too sensitive.

28:21 Yeah, yeah, I heard that all my life from my mother as well. And feeling. How have you done with being able to mourn and grieve and move through the feelings that you've disassociated from?

28:45 Was that a question? I'm sorry.

28:47 I know it was convoluted. I was just wondering how, because through the disassociation in the moment, we're not feeling the fear necessarily because we're disassociated and we're not mourning the loss of parents who protected us. And I'm wondering how. How that has been for you as an adult. Have you been able to mourn and move through all the different emotions that you had as a child?

29:15 Well, one of the blessings in my life is that I am the mother to three children. And I have to say that of all of the peak experiences in my life, and I've had a decent life parenting those three. Absolutely. Take the top of the pyramid. Part of me got to be a child again. I spent a lot of time with my children, playing with them, teaching them, talking to them. It was healing for me. But it also gave me an opportunity to break that chain and to see what a miracle a baby and a child is and to see how amazing it is to watch them grow into adulthood. I mean, if you would have told me I have a 56 year old son, I'd say to you, how's that possible? I'm only 45. You know, that's what I feel like.

30:16 Yeah.

30:17 So I think that working through their lives allowed me to recapture some of my own. And then on top of that, I've been a self help junkie. So along with reading everything that I could to give me hope for my future and to keep me focused on possibility, you know, if these people could fight a war and survive, then so could I. But I've always been. I've always allowed myself to be vulnerable and speak my truth. This is the first time in my life that I'm speaking that truth out loud. But I've always spoke about the difficulty in relationships and my difficulty. And like my parents, neither one of them graduated from high school, so they felt that a high school education was enough for a girl, and that was the end of it. Well, I got two jobs, and each one had tuition reimbursement, and my first one paid for my bachelor's degree, and my second one paid for my master's degree. Fantastic. I mean, I've been involved with things like the s training. I don't know if you know where. An airport?

31:38 Yeah. Yeah.

31:40 Ira progoff's journal writing workshops or the woman within workshops. So I'm still open to getting more of my life together and understanding life in general. But I use it not only for me, I give it away. Cheryle like you're doing. So, I mean, I think I may have told you this. I'm a certified jazzercise instructor, and I just became one six years ago in my seventies. It wasn't like it was all my life, but I always loved dancing and writing and movement and reading. So I think that a lot of those things have kept me healthy and have kept me centered in a way that allowed me to heal, starting from having my children. So even though my husband's may not have worked out, I'm grateful to the one who gave me those three.

32:38 Oh, yeah. And I'm curious, did you raise them talking openly about their anatomy and instinctual sexual experiences and about prevention of childhood sexual abuse?

32:57 Well, I'm a little bit weird as a parent, so I had to teach both my sons how to use the toilet and because their father was absent. So, I mean, I would straddle the toilet with them to teach them to stand so they didn't end up sitting. They saw me. I saw them. That's about as far as I went with my boysenhe, although I have to say, my oldest son, I found him one day when my daughter was crawling, masturbating on her back. So in my fear, I said something stupid to him. I said to him, what you're doing is fine, but that's something you do in private, in your own room, not with your sister. I said, it's like picking your nose, you know, you don't want people to see you doing that. And I realized years later, my son probably said, wow, my mother's dumb. She thinks this feels like picking your nose. But I did the best that I could with what I knew. But the one thing that I am sorry about is I traumatized my daughter. In an attempt to keep her safe, I told her a story that I made up, that I was working with a woman who had to go away and left her children with the grandparents, and that the grandfather came into the little girl's room and touched her in a private way. And I wanted to know from my daughter what she would do if something like that happened to her. Now, I thought I was protecting her against my father. Years later, she let me know that I terrified her. Terrified her of being touched. So, you know, even though my intentions about being open and being honest, I was limited in the things that I said and did. And I do regret if I hurt my children in any way.

34:50 Yeah.

34:51 But I also know that I didn't have sex with them.

34:54 Yeah.

34:54 And I didn't beat them.

34:56 Yeah.

34:56 I didn't emotionally abuse them.

34:58 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we did the best we could to talk about it. And again, it's that evolution. And now, thankfully, we can take courses with someone like feather Birkwow. And really, and on the brave Voices website, there are role plays about, how do we talk to our children about this?

35:17 Oh, okay. That's good to know.

35:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's quite a few. So we're down to about four minutes. And so I want to know if there's anything that you absolutely want documented in the library of Congress, anything that we didn't talk about that you want to share.

35:32 I think there is something. I'm glad you asked that question. When I got married the first time, it never occurred to me that my father would start having sex with my younger sister. I don't know why. Maybe from my disassociation, maybe from the fact that when I left that house, I thought all my problems were over. Honestly, I never thought anything would bother me again. When I found out about my sister, I tried to adopt her. So my husband and I went to the rabbi that had married us, and we asked him for help. And not only did he refuse to believe me, he refused to believe that a jewish father would ever do anything like that.

36:15 Wow.

36:16 So I went to jewish community services after that, and I got a female counselor, and basically, she said the same thing to me, that jewish fathers don't do those things. So if there's anything, and I'm not criticizing jewish fathers, because I'm sure it doesn't even have to be your father as we know it could be your teacher, your coach, your babysitter, your brother. The bottom line is that religion doesn't play into this. If we see what's happening with clergy reports.

36:48 It'S every socioeconomic, every. All over the world. I just did four months all over Europe, and it's epidemic there as well. We'd like to think. It's not. It's all denial. It is a problem everywhere.

37:03 Right?

37:04 Yeah. And I'm so proud of you that even though you were discouraged by these people of power, you continued.

37:14 Right. Well, my sister ended up getting married at 17 and running away and being pregnant, just like my mother. So I didn't have to protect her for long. But I really tried. I just. I just want people to know how painful it is when you cannot even hear what somebody is saying. Anybody that I told who wasn't ready to hear it and didn't want to hear it made it seem like I was the problem. It's not happening anymore. Move on with your life. But you know this from interviewing people and from your own experience, it's never over.

38:05 Yeah. Yeah.

38:06 We heal. We get to where we thrive. It makes us stronger in some ways. It's a. I made myself a promise when I saw that definition in the encyclopedia, that someday everything that happened to me would have a purpose. And the purpose would be the meaning that I gave it. To be able to hear somebody else believe them and inspire them to stay strong. So that would be my message, Cheryle

38:44 Hear them, believe them, and help them.

38:49 Inspire them to stay strong.

38:51 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a perfect, perfect way to end our interview. Thank you so much for sharing and passing on. We ask everyone that. That we. I interview to either interview two others or to send two people to me that will like to share their lived experience so that we continue more and more brave voices. So please share.

39:23 I only know three people, and one of them is my sister, who refuses to be part of the conversation, so I will ask the other two.

39:32 Yeah.

39:33 And I am more than willing to interview. But if you get too busy because you have too many people, I'll be glad to interview some of your people as well.

39:44 Good. All right.

39:45 And I already have two speaking engagements set up for this year that hopefully I'll be meeting more people. And I have my memoir, so once that's out, I'll let you know about that, too. And maybe we'll get some more people through that as well.

40:03 Yeah.