The panel discussion is on Saturday, and I began this morning with a cup of coffee and reflection: Growing up, survivors of chronic childhood incest (covert and/or overt) lack the language to conceptualize or relate what was done to them because survival demands their brains/bodies disconnect from their reality. Brain/body development and connection is damaged and pain is manifested as symptoms of suffering. It would be unrealistic to depict young survivors in YA lit as “obviously feminist” or able to ask for help or have insight. To do so would be dismissive and belittling of the vast complexities of the incest survivor experience—including the familial and societal enabling of it—and I refuse to be an enabler because I am a survivor.
Therefore, it makes sense to me to introduce myself at the panel like this: I’m Sonia Patel, and I’m a practicing child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist. I’m the first person on both sides of my Gujarati-Indian family to be born in the USA, specifically New York. I was raised there, Connecticut, and the tiny island of Molokai, Hawaii, where my debut YA novel RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT is set. Rani’s story is my story, if I’d known what chronic covert and overt incest were while I was going through it—a completely different beast than circumscribed sexual assault in how fundamentally it damages brain development—and something that wasn’t, until RANI, depicted in YA literature in a way that I or many of the teens I treat could’ve related to or found comfort in. My latest YA novel, GITA DESAI IS NOT HERE TO SHUT UP, is my college story and is a realistic depiction of some of the possible long-term fallout of incest, such as the repetition of the sexual object role as a mute language of chronic incest, because the truth is most incest survivors lack the language to conceptualize or explain what was done to them in their youth and often cannot comprehend or verbalize about it until middle age. By giving language to the complexities of incest (the secrets, the gaslighting, the isolation, the denial, the enabling by other family members, and the patterns of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors), I hope to offer young survivors the “aha moments” never offered to me: the possibility of understanding that what they’re enduring is abuse and the acknowledgement and validation of their painful experiences. As a survivor and a psychiatrist who treats survivors, I’m well aware that healing is impossible without the aforementioned.
