The Courage to Heal

Judy Gold is forty-five years old. She is a musician and lives with her husband, Howard, in an upper-middle-class, predominantly Jewish suburb of New York. Howard is a businessman and works for his father-in-law in the garment industry. Judy and Howard have been married for twenty-five years and have four children, the eldest of whom is nineteen.

Of her childhood, Judy says: “My father’s sister died in an insane asylum and I was named for her. I was always told I was going to end up just like her—bad and crazy. We were upper middle class. My mother was addicted to prescription drugs. She was always hazy. Before she married my father, she had been a published author. It’s too bad because she could have had a successful life and it ended up being a real zero. She’s dead now.

“My father was a very violent man. He was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He was loving toward us whenever our family was portrayed to the outside world. He used to march us out every Sunday night to a fancy restaurant for dinner. It was like Make Way for Ducklings. But what went on before we got into the car was a horror show.

“The world loved him. He set up scholarships; he helped build the local temple. He’s given buildings to universities and hospitals. So no one would ever suspect what went on in that house.

“The only time I can remember him being loving was when he was in my bed. He would batter me at night and after he'd beat me up, he’d make me take his shoes off and kiss him good night. And then in the morning he’d climb in my bed and molest me. There was never any intercourse, but there was everything else.

“My first memories of being abused are tied in to my sister’s birth, when I was six. The beatings continued till I went away to college, but the incest stopped when I was about twelve, when my baby sister turned six. That’s always made me wonder if he moved on to her.

“Even though the actual abuse stopped when I reached puberty, the sexual innuendos never stopped. He’s just sleazy, horrible. You wouldn’t want to meet him. Yet, as I say, the whole world loves him.”

Come On, Ask Me

When I stopped smoking, I gained thirty pounds in four months. Somebody gave me the name of this therapist who did hypnosis for overeating. I really believe that there are no accidents. I think I ate myself up to those thirty pounds for the purpose of seeking therapy. It was right there on the surface, waiting to come out.

I was almost provocative in the kinds of things I said to my therapist, like “Oh, you should know my family.” In other words, “Ask me. Come on. I’ll tell you if you ask me.” What was going to be five sessions has now become over four years. A couple of months into the therapy, he asked me to tell him about my father. I said he used to beat me up. And he said, “What else did he do to you?” And I said, “Nothing.” And he said, again, “What else did he do to you?” And I said, “Oh, well, he crawled into my bed.” And he said, “What else?” And I kept insisting there was nothing. And then he just asked me point-blank, “Did he ever touch you?” That started the whole thing. I finally admitted, “Yes, he touched me.”

When we started using hypnosis, I got to the first memory. Then I started to remember incidents without the hypnosis. I got to the point where I could remember my father’s precise smell. It took me two years to clearly remember what had happened.

The one thing that brought it all into focus—and it was the hardest thing—was a memory that I had always wet my pants. I used to hide all these sticky underpants in my closet as a little girl. And now I know I didn’t pee in my pants at all. My father had ejaculated on me when I had them on, and I had saved all those underpants on the floor of my closet. My grandmother found piles of them in the closet and she showed them to my mother, who accused me of wetting my pants. I told her I hadn’t done it, but she wouldn’t believe me. She punished me for denying it, and he beat me for lying later the same night. As I pieced this together in therapy, I realized she had to have known the difference between urine and semen. It was the worst memory I had. But it made it all very real.

My mother’s death freed me up to remember all of this. I remember when my mother was dying, I talked about the beatings. I said, “Why didn’t you stop him? How could you allow him to do those things to us?” And her answer was “What could I do?”

I had always adored my mother because she was so talented. And I felt such pity for her. But when I realized that she had known what was going on, I hated her. I even went to her grave and stomped on it. I was screaming at her. They could have locked me up then if they had seen me.

After I got through all the anger, I realized that she really was helpless. I’m sure that she had been a victim herself. And she sacrificed me so that she could live.

When the doctor told my mother I was pregnant, she asked me who the father was, and I told her. She confronted my stepfather and he claimed that he knew nothing about it. Within a week we left him and went down South.

When I first realized I was pregnant, I attempted suicide. It was a hard time for me. I knew I needed therapy. I wish somebody else had realized it at the time!

My mother told me I didn’t have to keep the child, that I could put it up for adoption or that she would raise it as her own. I chose to keep that child because it was the first thing that was ever mine.

I created a cover story about who the father was. I said he was some boy I’d been going with. I had to deal with a lot of put-downs from people, you know, ‘cause I was fifteen and having this baby.

Because of all the things that happened to me, there was this question that used to haunt me, you know, “Why me?” Those were the years I call my trauma years. And I went out of the trauma years into being a battered wife.

I got married at seventeen. I was already pregnant with my daughter. My husband and I were the same age. I told my husband about my stepfather and that he was my son’s father. If only I knew then what I know now! I would have never told him. Because he got jealous. Every time we argued, he’d bring that up. I was different kinds of whores and sluts and this and that.

We were into it before we ever got married. We used to argue once a week when we were going together, but not real physical kind of stuff. But after we were married, he had the license. You know, they pronounce you man and wife, not man and woman. To my way of thinking it gives men a free ticket to do whatever they want. So the battering started and increased till I couldn’t take it anymore.

I left him after he’d taken a branch off a tree and beat me with it, but then I came back and went through what I call my three months of hell. I was making $1.79 an hour. I was paying all the bills; I paid the rent. I was buying all the food, all the clothes, even renting him a television. I got off work at 4:30. I was expected to catch the bus at 4:35, hit downtown at 5:00, change buses, and walk in the door at 5:20. If I walked in the door at 5:30, I got my ass kicked.

So in essence, he held my children hostage. He did lots of sadistic things to me during that time. I was on a large dose of Librium. My nerves were so bad, I was going through bouts of temporary blindness.

I was twenty then, and I tried to kill myself. I had gotten my prescription filled. I came home and I took about half the bottle. He found the bottle and he woke me up ‘cause I was going off to la-la land. And he got me up and went and got my son, who was about four then. He sprayed Raid in his hair, then he took a lighter and held it over his head and said, “If you don’t wake up, I’m gonna light his hair.” I mean I was going through it. We didn’t have a phone or anything. There’s that isolation thing.

I decided to kill him.

It was a question of survival. I knew we couldn’t live together without one of us killing the other. So I was going to kill him. We had this argument on a Monday and I had planned that Friday that when I got paid, I’d pay the rent, the water bill, buy a gun, go home, walk in the door, scream, and kill him. Even now, I can say with conviction I was going to kill him.

And this woman who was like my second mother said, “You don’t want that on your conscience the rest of your life.” So I turned him over to the military because he’d gone AWOL. They took him to jail. I took my children to safety and moved out of the house in four days. I started divorce proceedings immediately.

When I got rid of my husband, all that weird stuff went away. I didn't have to take Librium any more. The blindness went away. The shaking went away. All of that went away.

So by the time I was twenty-one, I had been married, divorced, and had two children. When I moved to California, I had seven suitcases, two kids, and one hundred dollars. And Lord, I’ve come a long way from there.