wledge of my mother's and my stepsister's traumatic childhood experiences. Between the ages of five and 14, my mother was sexually abused by her stepfather, while my stepsister was a victim of her stepuncle for many years. Realizing that my mother had abandoned me when I was eight years old because she could not deal with her childhood demons helped me understand my mother and her actions. However, this newfound awareness also ignited my anger towards her offenders and other sexual offenders of incestuous acts.
The objective of this project was to obtain first-hand information from my mother as an incest victim and survivor and analyze it within the context of my growing understanding of incest victims/survivors and sexual offenders. For this project, I integrated my interview findings with my class readings and personal journal entries, thus enabling me to confront my personal emotions about the topic and determine how I can overcome them in order to become an effective therapist. As a future therapist, I know that I will be strongly motivated to help incest victims and survivors address their traumas. At the same time, I do not want to turn my back on the sexual offenders, knowing that they are also in need of assistance. Therefore, this project was a vehicle for me to understand how I can harness my feelings about this topic in a way that would help me contribute to the effort to eradicate incest.
In order to fulfill the objectives of this paper, this discussion consisted of several sections. First, I presented my overall position on the topic of incest and human sexuality. From my viewpoint, incestuous acts not only constitute a transgression against social norms, but also represent a travesty of the act of sexual intimacy based on love. Second, I provided my mother's account of her sexual violation by her stepfather. More specifically, this account focused on my mother's reaction to her experience and its...