When Lynne Finney was going through therapy, she wanted to help herself heal. But she couldn't find any self-help books for incest victims.
So she wrote one.Finney, who lives in Park City, has a book coming out in February called "Reach for the Rainbow" about sexual abuse and the disassociative disorders it can cause. "One-third of the book is a section on self-help," she says. "I talk about affirmations, self-hypnosis, controlling your emotions, how to nurture yourself."
Finney went back to school recently to get her master's degree in social work so she could counsel incest victims. She wants to tell them they didn't deserve to be abused.
From the time we are tiny, she says, we are taught that God loves good little children. Abused children translate that to mean that, since they are having horrible experiences, they must be bad.
"A lot of abused children grow up believing that God doesn't love them," she says. "I hope I help them reach a different conclusion."
Finney knows what it means to need help and search for help and not be able to find any.
Twelve years ago she was a successful lawyer in Washington, D.C. She was appointed to presidential boards, was the director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board for several years. Later she was a diplomat with the State Department.
Finney was asuccessful woman with an interesting life. She was never, not for one day, happy.
Finney lived with sorrow and anger. Her pain, she believed, was somehow linked to the fact that she could not remember anything of the first 11 years of her life.
But all the well-respected and expensive therapists that she sought told her she was not to worry about those early years.
When she married and moved to Utah, she went to yet another doctor, this time for menstrual pain. Unable to find a physical cause, the gynocologist sent her to a hypnotherapist. On her second visit Finney remembered that her father had raped her.
Finney does not have multiple personality disorder (MPD) in the classic sense - which she defines as having at least one other personality that takes over for your regular personality and causes you to have amnesia.
Finney wasn't really "splitting" her personality, she says. What she was doing as an adult, she explains, was exaggerating portions of her personality in what she calls "ego states."
For example, she says she had one ego state called "Hatred," which carried all her anger at her father. This ego state did her no good in her adult life. Every time she had a reason to be angry at someone, she would find herself also hating that person - intensely and forever.
For the first six months of her therapy, she fought the dreams and memories she was having. "To believe incest could have occurred in my own family was too horrible," Finney says.
Finally she accepted that what she remembered about her childhood actually happened. She kept on with therapy and learned self-hypnosis.
She says, "For two years I worked on getting memories back, for an hour a day, seven days a week. During that time the pain I had felt all my life began to diminish. I hadn't known what it felt like to live without being fearful, tense and angry."
At one point she asked her psychologist if she could stop. She had remembered many horrible things, and it was making her unbearably sad. He said she would reach a point where she could say, "So what," when she had another memory.
Finney said she not only got to the so-what point but also began to learn from her past. "I would realize what kind of a decision I'd made as a result of what happened. The decisions are so important," she says.
For example? "I had decided never to trust anybody again. That was the most potent and tragic realization." She understood her decision when she remembered lying in bed being exhausted, but fighting sleep. She was listening for her father to go to bed, she realized. Once he was asleep the little girl could end her vigilance and go to sleep herself.
Finney has learned two important truths. First, you can be happy while you are healing. "I tell my clients to allow yourselves to be sad about this for only an hour a day."
And second, "I've learned how absolutely fantastic I was as a little girl. I was a super achiever. I was subjected to intolerable stress, but I didn't die or go insane.
"Disassociation and multiple personality disorders are fascinating. The mind is wonderful to allow you to block out this intolerable stress and let it come back in bits and pieces when you are safe and able to handle it.
"What people with MPD are demonstrating to us is that we all have amazing creative abilities. If you look at it without fear there is no stigma."
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(ADDITIONAL INFORMATION)
From "Reach for the Rainbow," by Lynne Finney:
"When women discover their abuse under hypnosis their memories and experiences are sometimes discounted by outdated therapists who say the hypnosis is unreliable because the hypnotists can put ideas in the subject's mind. That allegation is non-sense. . . . My research has not revealed one single case where a survivor has been proven to have made up incest while in therapy. There is simply no motive for a person who seeks help to lie or to have someone prepare them to fabricate a tale of abuse.
"For those of you who have been subjected to the cruelty of these stubborn Freudians, I can only urge you to try another therapist. . . . Trust your own instincts; do not ever take someone else's word as gospel just because she or he has a degree. And find another therapist if yours doesn't believe you."