A Survivor of Sexual Abuse Speaks Out

In this New York Times article, Katharine Seelye reports on a one-man performance by Michael Mack, 56, entitled Conversations With My Molester: A Journey of Faith. When Mack was growing up Catholic in North Carolina in the 1960s, he wanted to be a priest, but then, when he was 11, a priest molested him. Mack didn’t tell anyone and prayed that he would forget the experience, but “the memory,” he says, “tingled like a phantom limb.” Spurred by the Boston Globe’s revelations in 2002 of widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic church, Mack located the priest who had abused him and arrived on his doorstep. Drawing on their conversations, Mack wrote and began performing his 90-minute dramatic narration. “By telling my story, I am making this my truth,” he says. “I’m claiming it and getting it back.”

One issue that Mack wrestles with as he remembers the abuse is painful ambivalence: his simultaneous feelings of attraction and revulsion, feeling half giddy and special and half terrified, finding himself “powerfully attracted, and powerfully repelled, finding self-loathing its own dismal ecstasy.” He imagined that not being able to get the crime out of his mind for so long proved that he was responsible, that he had “wanted it to happen, invited it to happen, made it happen, deserved it.” All this provides insight into why sexual abuse causes such deep and long-term damage.

“Private Pain, Played Out on Public Stage” by Katharine Seelye in The New York Times, Jan. 14, 2013 (p. A10), http://nyti.ms/WBaSkj 

From the Marshall Memo #469