Chased by ghosts — Mackenzie Phillips

John Phillips and daughter Mackenzie

Can Incest Be Consensual?

Mackenzie Phillips Highlights the Impact of Incest

When Mackenzie Phillips dropped her bombshell during an episode of Oprah, revealing that she had had an incestuous relationship with her father, John Phillips, for 10 years, controversy swirled. The revelation came on the heels of the publication of Phillips’ memoir “High on Arrival,” in which she accuses “Papa John” of The Mommas and the Papas of molesting her when she was 18.

Though Phillips says she doesn’t remember if the incident at age 18 was the first time her father acted inappropriately with her, she acknowledges the sexual relationship continued for another decade and eventually became consensual.  . . .

Thomas Nagy, Ph.D. . . . says . . . “When the victim encounters that abuser again in adulthood, in that moment, they’ve dissociated into an adolescent mindset again,” he points out. That’s why it’s so important for victims of abuse to seek and stick with therapy for the long haul. “These victims have to grow boundaries and learn how to find a sense of self again.”

“It’s always traumatic in the long run,” Nagy adds, whether the incest begins when a child is six or 17. “It’s child abuse, and there is no such thing as consensual sex with a child.”

http://www.aolhealth.com/condition-center/mental-health/mackenzie-phillips-incest?icid=main

No, incest can never be consensual — even if child is an excited participant.  Incest is the vampire father feeding off the child’s soul by abusing the psychologically normal and healthy “family romance.”

That said, when the child later works through the events, the child, now an adult, must acknowledge the participant aspect.  The situation is not expressed simply by the terms incest victim or survivor, incest participant is the usual reality.  (Incest rape, paradoxically, may be easier for the child to handle psychologically.  The monsterhood of the father would not be hidden in that case.)  The problem is that the child throughout her life is forever caught in the crossfire of love, desire, shame and humiliation — thus many spend their lives chased by psychological ghosts — expressed through drugs, affairs, broken marriages, etc.  Mackenzie Phillips is to be lauded for making her story public.

Failure of the adult incest victim to come to terms with the willing participant aspect will leave her prey to predators.  Sooner or later a sociopathic or other seducer will come along who senses the father’s approach.  The adult child will have no choice but to dance to the music.  In the psychological universe there are few things uglier than an adult incest victim discovering she’s still enslaved by the incest trap, years after thinking she was free.

“Phillips says she doesn’t remember if the incident at age 18 was the first time” – I believe she’s being untruthful.  One shouldn’t expect incest victims to be straightforward in divulging their stories.  Indeed she would sometimes tell relatives, then later claim she was joking.  Also it seems she is still protecting her father — who she still loves and whose love for her she still believes in.

Bijou was only 13 when her older sister told her the shocking story.   . . .   Her confusion was only compounded when “shortly there after Mackenzie told me it didn’t happen.”  http://www.popeater.com/2009/09/25/chynna-and-bijou-phillips-support-their-sister-with-regrets/

or

The Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips, who married John in 1962, claims that Mackenzie revealed the affair in 1997 – but told her stepmom she was joking. “She called me back and said, ‘You know I’m joking,’”  http://www.popeater.com/2009/09/24/michelle-mackenzie-phillips/

An overview can be found here:  http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow-20090826-mackenzie-phillips

Finally I doubt very much that it is that rare for incest to continue into a woman’s adulthood.  Why should it stop?  We need a closer study of this occurrence.

Not frat boy behavior, sociopathic behavior

Our Embassy in Afghanistan Is Guarded by Sexually Confused Frat Boys

. . . security contractors get their kicks peeing on one another, simulating anal sex, doing “butt shots,” and “eating potato chips out of ass cracks.”

. . . According to POGO, employees of ArmorGroup North America—a unit of contracting giant Wackenhut—get their jollies off by “deviant hazing [that] has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired.”

http://gawker.com/5350465/our-embassy-in-afghanistan-is-guarded-by-sexually-confused-frat-boys/gallery/?skyline=true&s=x

Think six to eight year old boys’ sex play.  Then add “peeing on one another,” “butt shots” — sociopaths are simply fascinated by the orifices of sex and waste elimination being identical or in close proximity.  Their level of sexual maturity and development is that low.  See the sex scenes of the wooden puppets in the movie Team America, complete with defecation and urination.

I would imagine that the sex play went further than this.  Ah yes, story below.

Kabul U.S. Embassy Guard: Sexual Deviancy Required for Promotion

Whistleblower Says Bosses Required Sex Acts for Guards Seeking Best shift, Promotion

Private security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were pressured to participate in naked pool parties and perform sex acts to gain promotions or assignment to preferable shifts, according to one of 12 guards who have gone public with their complaints.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=8474937

OK, think boyhood sexplay with orgasms, bullying and dominance thrown in — even more sociopathic.  This sexual bullying by superiors makes this story no longer private, but actionable.  It’s not about what people do in private.

These male sex parties/orgies have also been reported from the Jim Bakker/PTL scandals and the Stanford White scandal.  To quote from my UBS Musings page (http://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/ubs-musings/):

Sociopaths essentially are pansexual.  Since friction orgasms are all they know or can know, the more variety the better.  All cats are gray in the dark.  The sociopathic architect Stanford White (of “Red Velvet Swing” notoriety) had numerous affairs (one led to his murder by a rival), molested his own daughters and hosted male group sex parties at his architectural firm [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/07/08/1996_07_08_049_TNY_CARDS_000376111] (no doubt some of the participants were heterosexual life style males who developed a taste for such behavior by being incested by their own sociopathic fathers).  Imagine such a group sex party network in an investment bank.

Indeed, there were rumors that approached “common knowledge” that such a ring existed at UBS when I worked there.  It may seem difficult to imagine responsible adult males in positions of authority taking part but the photos accompanying the Kabul story, which included supervisors and managers, may make it less difficult.

The only reason sociopaths are considered adults is due to their adult bodies, imo.  Quoting Robert Kegan from an earlier post:

Robert Kegan in “The Child Behind the Mask: Sociopathy as Developmental Delay.” In W. H. Reid, J.W. Bonner III, D. Dorr, and J.I. Walker (Eds.) “Unmasking the Psychopath“. (New York: W.W. Norton), 1986. (1986), p.  68:
The sociopath can sit still, inhibit immediate aims, defer gratification.  Indeed, if he did not have these abilities (which most latency-age children also have), people would not confuse him with an adult even with his adult-looking body (which most latency-age children do not have, and which has more to do with why latency-age children are not confused with adults than people realize).  [Kegan is saying, I believe, that it is the sociopath's adult looking body that gets him into the door of adult life which he is actually unsuited for and absolutely untrustworthy in.]  http://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/how-could-mado…s-for-13-years/

One thing I’ve noticed is that participants are relatively often married family men.  Perhaps they were molested by sociopathic, or otherwise corrupt, fathers and then took a liking to it (a totally normal reaction paradoxically).  Or some I knew to be graduates of aristocratic boarding schools.  I don’t know what sex games take place in these schools but I can imagine.

It seems that there may be a window of plasticity in early puberty.  Thus after male to male sexual activity during pubescence, the taste remains for recreational male to male sex throughout life. While in other cultures and times this is completely normal (the ancient Greeks perhaps), in this culture the participants are exposing themselves to potential blackmail.  And, of course, sociopaths and pseudologues with their immature sexual development are absolutely attracted to these sex game circles.  Further, blackmail is a natural for a sociopath seeking power or security and such a sex circle would allow both outright and implied blackmail.

Sometimes gay communities will be fully accepting of sociopaths due to their alternate sexuality.  However individual gay lovers will of course be as devastated as straight lovers upon being discarded by their emotionless, predatory chameleon lovers as easily as one turns a page of a book, who they had believed they had been close to.  The survivor blogs, the WTF-happened-to-me blogs, the how-come-I-didn’t-know blogs almost always include gay posters.  E.g., Indigo Blue at the Lovefraud blog:  “It reflected True male beauty but on the inside was rot and emptyness and longing, hopelessness,depravity,envy,greed,anger,madness!” http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2008/10/20/revisions-and-enhancements-to-lovefraudcom/#comment-14448.