Talking about Incest in Public
(both the painful traumatic kind and the hot fictional kind)
As it turns out, lots of the people who read and write taboo fiction have survived some deeply fucked up shit. After talking about incest with other survivors on the Moon, Sun & Stars discord and answering questions, I decided to share more about my experiences and the things that helped me survive and the things that helped me heal, because there are a lot of us, and a lot of us feel very alone, and maybe there are other people who aren’t incest survivors but who might want to know more to better support the survivors in their life.
Incest is not just a sexual act between two family members -- it's a larger system of absence of boundaries within a family, and it's almost always part of multiple incestuous dynamics, even if only one might be the obvious or explicit dynamic.
If you’re an incest survivor, you’re almost certainly not the only one in your family.
“The true characteristics and dimensions of incestuous abuse have been masked by the taboo and silence that have surrounded its occurrence. Recent research demonstrates that incest occurs regularly in our society, perpetrated by individuals who, for the most part, would otherwise be regarded as fairly normal. The taboo on incestuous relations is a deterrent to some would-be perpetrators but not to others. The taboo contradicts the reality of incest prevalence, a fact which led Armstrong (1978) to comment that th taboo has been on the open discussion of incest and not on its perpetration.”
-Christine Courtois, “Healing the Incest Wound: Adult Survivors in Therapy”
To use my family as an example -
My (similarly aged) brother did sexual things to me as a kid, and I had a range of reactions to it including pleasure and enjoyment. And confusion. And fear. I do not think he is bad or even what he did was bad. I think we were both two kids who existed in a family with incestuous dynamics, and we were both shaped by those dynamics and trying our best to survive.
From a young age, I existed as a physical comfort object to my mom (when she was sad she'd get into my bed to hold me until she felt better while I dissociated), and I took on the idea that my role in the family was for my body to be used to make other people feel good. The sexual behavior by my brother felt like an extension of how my mom held me.
My mother was the victim of incest from her uncle, and her parents sided with her uncle over her when she spoke out about it (even after he was facing legal consequences for his behavior with kids outside of the family) (even after he fled the country). She didn't know how to emotionally regulate herself, and I don't think she had (or has) the capacity to understand a child's need for physical autonomy and boundaries because her own were never respected.
There were other incestuous behaviors and dynamics within my family which I'm continuously discovering and unpacking. I think my mom’s uncle abused my grandmother too but I’ll never know for sure. It’s deeply uncomfortable to look back on a happy family story or a childhood nickname and see something sinister underneath and wonder if you’re being paranoid or if it’s actually that bad.
Long term relational therapy (5+ years). EMDR. Adopting a cat. Adopting more cats. Antidepressants. Reading about incest (realistic, terrifying, academic). Reading about incest (fictional, hot, amateur). Being a competitive athlete. Getting a graduate degree. Going on long walks late at night. Telling my family I had Covid so I could skip a family vacation.
These books specifically: Healing the Incest Wound by Christine Courtois, The Myth of Normal, Dissociation Made Simple, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, The Narcissistic Family Unit, Clementine Morrigan’s writing x1000.
The protector parts: Eating disorder. Self harm. Drinking. Perfectionism. Depression. Suicidal ideation. I’m grateful to these imperfect protectors I’ve leaned on over the years.
Things that have not helped:
You will be shocked to hear that people on the internet yelling about how people who find fictional incest hot are disgusting and bad and dangerous did NOT in fact help me unlearn the belief that experiencing incest made me disgusting and bad and dangerous. Luckily, I’m built of spite. But it certainly did not help.
(If I think about my vulnerable pre-teen/teen self reading those things, I become deeply angry. How dare you hurt her in the name of protection.)
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I don’t cater to all these vipers
Dressed in empath’s clothing
God save the most judgmental creeps
Who say they want what’s best for me
Sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never see
-Taylor Swift, But Daddy I Love Him
After I discovered fanfiction in middle school, and then after I realized that there was a world beyond OFC/Draco Malfoy fic, I read a lot of Blackcest. I devoured any I could find, hopping through rec lists on LiveJournal.
Reading Blackcest fics, first Bellatrix/Sirius then Sirius/Regulus mostly, allowed me to see my experiences reflected. Those fics gave me a way to contextualize my family and my role in it. I hate the expectation that kids who experience bad things should go to a safe trusted adult rather than find art that romanticizes their experience. The whole point is that there isn’t a safe trusted adult. The whole point is that I needed the art. I got to hold the romanticized narrative until I got far enough away that I could put it away in a box until I had enough therapy that I could safely open the box and build a new, more honest story.
Obviously plenty of people love incest smut and fic and art. It’s taboo! It’s angsty! It’s a classic! Probably most of those people don’t have direct personal experience with incest in their families. I’m glad they read and write fics too.
But for me – have you ever experienced something you believe so strongly you will never be able to say aloud? That any time you see your secret referenced it’s in shock and disgust and revulsion? You can pretend – you’re very good at pretending – but you know it’s real, and you know it’s your secret you’ll hold onto for the rest of your life while the world reminds you how disgusting you are?
Then you find that people are writing about what you experienced in a thousand variations that all contain some nugget of your truth.
I cannot express in words how important it was that I found those stories at that time.
I never commented on a single fic. I never made a single account on any of the sites I read fanfiction on. I clicked the “yes I’m 18” box without hesitation every time. I wish I could go back in time and have my adult self articulate the enormity of my gratitude for each and every author who helped save me whose work exists on sites I can only revisit with the Wayback Machine.
I understand why people might feel horrified at the idea of a 11-12 year old reading smutty incest Harry Potter fanfic. People aren’t wrong for feeling that way.
That said, I truly don’t care what people who aren’t incest survivors think.
I’m so proud of that child for finding a way to survive. She might have hated herself, might have fantasized about death, but she survived and kept the truth of her experience wrapped up in a fictional world where it could be safe to explore and kept it there until years and years of therapy made it possible to engage with it in reality.
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I’m a real tough kid
I can handle my shit
They said, babe, you got to fake it till you make it
And I did
-Taylor Swift, I Can Do It With a Broken Heart
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No one is writing about incest the way Clementine Morrigan is right now. I’m so grateful for her. I’m not sure this little tumblr post would exist without her essay series.
"Incest functions as a spell of unreality. A structure of nothingness. A completely normal and unremarkable family life in which something unnameable is ominously and terrifyingly wrong. You know in the summer when you can see the heat making the air go squiggly? Imagine those squiggles as an indication that in the seeming nothingness, there is something there. Incest is like that. Subtle, pervasive, unthinkable, unnameable. But present, felt.
As a teenager I came up with this metaphor: Imagine you are in a house full of bugs. There are bugs crawling all over all the walls and all the furniture and in your food and even on the fork you are lifting to your mouth. And you feel disgusted, you feel like something is really wrong. But your whole family is acting completely normal, laughing and eating and talking as bugs crawl over their faces and into their mouths. When you tell them you think there are bugs in your food your family says it’s just pepper and not to worry about it.
There is no way to talk about incest without feeling that you are lying. This is because incest lives in the realm of unreality and everything in the realm of unreality cannot be thought or said or named. When you speak of things that happen in the realm of unreality it will always feel like a lie and be treated like a lie. You are breaking the fundamental rule. You are not allowed to talk about what goes on in the realm of unreality because it isn’t real."
Read more and pay for her writing if you can on her substack.
Without a doubt, the not-explicitly-sexual incest from my mom fucked me up more than the explicitly sexual incest from my brother, but I only feel confident claiming the incest survivor label because sexual stuff was done to me by a family member, and I still feel like I’m lying sometimes because it wasn't bad enough to count.
I’m a literal mental health clinician who can map out various incestuous dynamics within my family and who has clear memories of a family member doing sexual stuff to my child body, and I still feel like I’m lying.
I believe you if you feel like a liar because I bet you do. I believe you if the incest never included anything directly physical. I believe you if you enjoyed it. I believe you if you don’t remember but feel like it’s true.
If we’re monsters, I love our courageous monstrosity.
If we’re liars, I love the way we make up stories to survive when reality is impossible.
If we’re an uncomfortable truth, good.
It still impacts me. I’m not over it.
It’s very difficult for me to imagine love that does not include violation. To be loved and to be allowed to maintain a self.
But I’m open to learning otherwise, and that openness is new.
I was so, so good at living in unreality. I could make myself perfect, such a flawless object until I couldn’t think of anything except killing myself, but even then I still maintained the image of perfection my family expected.
It’s cool I never actually killed myself.
I find it hard to be around my family now. There are advantages of living in unreality. I drink a lot more when I’m around my family than I ever did before, but I don’t think about killing myself nearly as much. Reality is worth it. Being able to exist as a person is worth it.
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I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
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I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. (I insist.)
It didn’t kill me then. It’s not going to kill me now. (I remind myself.)
My life is worth living, and there are fights worth fighting, and it is undeniably true the world is full of horror, but it is good to write and create and be alive, and it is good to try. I’m a little afraid to post this, but the fear and shame isn’t mine to hold, and I never should have been the one holding it.
Consider this a thank you note sent out to the universe in the hopes the sentiment echoes towards those authors who saved me then and to all the writers who are saving people now. Your art matters. No matter how weird or niche or dismissed or hated it is. It matters.
