GREG CHAPUT
Marilyn Van Derbur Atler remembers being five years old. That was the year her "night child" was born.
Until she was 18 years old, she was a victim of incest, she said.
But only in 1991, 30 years after finally leaving her childhood home, has this 1958 Miss America finally been able to "puncture the concrete wall" that kept her secrets hidden from the world.
Atler shared her story Wednesday night in a packed Griffith Film Theater. Following her speech, Atler asked audience members to stand if they had ever been sexually abused. About 60 people stood.
The evening was sponsored by the Women's Center Sexual Assault Support Services and the Durham Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse.
After she won the Miss America pageant, Atler toured as a public speaker, winning an award as the Outstanding Woman Speaker in America. But this outspoken woman never told the public about her past.
Instead, she said that she flashed "an effervescent smile" to the world, but in private she was tormented physically and psychologically.
In the late 1970s, more than 20 years after the abuse, Atler finally confronted her father. Before she could finish talking to him, he left the room and returned holding a gun, she said. He told her that if she revealed to anyone else what he had done, he would commit suicide.
Atler said that her father violated six other children, including her older sister, during a period of 25 years.
Atler kept her story quiet, however, even after her father died in 1984.
She first revealed her past openly to the public two years ago. She built up her confidence by talking in small support groups, but after the Denver media made her past a front page story, she decided to dedicate herself to educating the public about the her childhood sexual abuse.
"My father had let my child body feel intense feelings--feelings too intense for a child that age to handle," she said.
Atler said that earlier in her life, she had wanted to eliminate everything that was reminiscent of the abuse. "My `night child', my secret guilty hidden self had to die," she said.
But as she grew older, she realized that in order to recover, she would have to cope with her history.
"[This] was to be my most difficult challenge," she said.
The abuse left physical tolls that have plagued her throughout her life, she said. In her mid 40s, Atler suffered from repeated bouts of temporary physical paralyses. Even after she was hospitalized for three months, doctors reasoned that she was just having an especially acute mid-life crisis.
She said she sometimes experienced pain that made her "skin feel like it was screaming," and made her feel as if she were "being beaten, crushed and ripped open," she said.
The abuse also left her with a fear of sleep, for sleep meant that "there was no place to hide and no-one to help you," she said.
Because of this, "I have never fallen asleep, I've never taken a nap without [the help of] medication," she said.
In an attempt to recover from this pain, Atler said that she went through acupuncture therapy, massage therapy and took classes in self-defense.
But Atler attributes more of her recovery to the group therapy and the psychotherapy sessions that victims of sexual abuse most typically undergo.
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