The consequences of sexual abuse, however, are not restricted to problems in one’s sexual life; they impair the development of the self and of an autonomous personality. There are several reasons why this is so:
1. To have one’s helplessness and total dependency taken advantage of by the person one loves, by one’s mother or father, at a very early age soon produces an interlinking of love and hate.
2. Because anger toward the loved person cannot be expressed for fear of losing that person and therefore cannot be lived out, ambivalence, the interlinking of love and hate, remains an important characteristic of later object relationships. Many people, for instance, cannot even imagine that love is possible at all without suffering and sacrifice, without fear of being abused, without being hurt and humiliated.
