SAY “NO” TO F&M

     Franklin & Marshall College, a liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pa., annually gives an award named after an incest perpetrator and academic fraud - my father.  The president of the college, John A. Fry, doesn’t care about sexual abuse.  He doesn’t care if your daughter or son is sexually abused.

     Do not send your children to this over-priced college that condones the sexual abuse of children. They will not be safe.  

    This site is devoted to the story of my family’s incest tragedy and the legal paperwork..  I own two other websites: www.lipnews1.com is published every day; www.lipnews.com is an archive of older stories.  All of the incest stories from both sites will be moved to this one.  If you have a story to tell, please contact me.  We learn and heal from each other.   Thank you.

Becky Holzinger, Editor

email:  BeckyH209@aol.com

Phone:  (215) 350-5849   

~ And Mindless Robots ~

ARROGANT MONSTERS – 14

 

 

     Our purpose in writing you is not to deny any of the allegations in the newspaper, instead, we want to convey to you the depth of our shock and concern with what the paper’s publication indicates about Becky’s mental state.  The nature of the paper’s presentation depicts her extreme anger, poor judgement, and impaired mental functioning.

A letter, written by my father, and signed by my brothers and sisters and addressed to my therapist’s boss, a Doctor of Psychology,  in Philadelphia.

     I read this to a friend over the phone and she said, “It’s time to write a book.”  She’s right.

    I published a paper in which I said my one brother had criminally molested his other brother, and his foster brother, and I was concerned he may have molested my own son.  And these mindless robots sent this letter to a Doctor of Psychology, a man who sees the horrible effects of sexual abuse every single day, and they said I had impaired mental functioning.

    This goes to “D” and “O” in yesterday’s list involving incestuous families and may go down in the history books as one of the most extreme examples ever.

    Not one of my siblings would say my father is a nice man.  Not one would say he is a kind man.  My sister sat with my therapist and told her how terribly he treated my mother and we kids. 

    But none of that matters.  Our parents told us from the time we were born to protect the “good Holzinger name” and we were never, ever allowed to question or challenge them.  Nothing else matters.  Not even criminal molestation.  Nothing

    She has already been contacting former Franklin & Marshall professors and deans, asking questions about our father and spreading rumors and allegations.

From my brothers and sisters first letter to my therapist.

     This was unheard of.  This was heresy.  I honestly believe they thought I could be institutionalized for “daring” to go speak to colleagues of my father.  This was not allowed.  We were told from the time we were born to never embarrass our parents.  Besides, we are insignificant and unimportant people who have no “right” to ever question our parents.

    In addition, I am faxing you a copy of a condolence letter she sent to our cousin Phillip Holzinger after the death of his sister.  The “enclosed” she refers to in her letter is a copy of the letter she sent to Dr. Fry.  Needless to say, Phil was extremely upset about the two letters.

From the second letter my brothers and sisters sent to my therapist’s boss.

    She faxed the head of a counseling service that has thousands of clients and is used by all the major health insurers in Philadelphia.

    You were never supposed to get anyone upset.  Never.  If you did, it was your fault and you had done something wrong.  My letter to Phil was actually very nice.  His sister, June, was going through something similar to me and committed suicide.  I was devastated.

    In my parent’s email that told us of her death, the second paragraph was devoted to the boy they had hired that summer to help mow the grass and how nice their property looked.  They never liked June.  I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth telling again.  On a visit from Minnesota shortly before her death, my sister would not let June drive her up the driveway to my parent’s house because she, at over 50 years-old, didn’t want them to know she had been with her own first cousin.  My father had physically threatened June’s husband years prior and June had witnessed it.

    I believe I have kept the family at arm’s length out of a need to protect and insulate myself from feelings like the ones I’ve had the last month.  I did not want to be crippled emotionally by feelings of hurt and inadequacy that Dad (and Mother, too, I must say) invariably gave me, and the only way I knew how to avoid that cesspool was to withdraw to some extent.  Once, in a tentative effort to get some emotional support a few years back when Rick, Ethan, and I were going through some terrible times, I was totally rebuffed. 

My sister Emily’s email to me in response to my email “Journey.”

    Emily was smart.  She withdrew.  And even with the understanding she shows above, this third grade teacher signed all of the letters.  In fact, when I sent an email to my mother saying she should stop participating in peace vigils, she faxed it to my therapist’s boss as if questioning my mother was reason to have me institutionalized immediately.   But we were told from the time we were born that you could never, ever question or challenge our parents.

    Emotional support?  My parents have no emotions except anger.  They don’t talk about anything – except “anthropology.”  If she was having trouble it was her fault and who cared, anyway?  She’s not important.  Only Charles and Millicent Holzinger are important.

    I cut the meeting short.  I was stunned.  As I was about to leave, I asked, “Is it okay if I tell my sister what you told me?”

    I watched her brain digesting this question.  I almost thought I could see it ticking.

    “Becky,” she said, “After you leave here you can tell anybody you want what I said to you tonight.”

     “Oh,” was all I said.        

From LIP – INCEST, A Family Tragedy.  This is after my therapist read an email from my ex-sister-in-law and told me it was obvious my brother had been sexually abused as a child.

    We were never allowed to “tell.”  I was almost fifty and had to “ask permission.”

 

There will be more tomorrow.

~ All of the letters referenced above can be found by following the links here.

~ “Closed” ~

INCESTUOUS FAMILIES

 

 

    Two recent visitors to the incesttragedy.com website have come from the Fresno Pacific University and the Portland State University.   This has me extremely gratified and I hope to turn the site into an educational resource.  I learn something new almost every single day.  Today was unbelievable.

*******

     Tom began the conversation with, “Emily, Anne and I have discussed this and we do not believe it is possible that our father abused Becky.  We are very concerned about her.  We just want her to get better and go back to the happy person she used to be.” 

     He was quick to add, “Nothing happened to me.  I remember my entire childhood and no one abused me.”

    Martha nodded.  “Tell me about your parent’s relationship?” she asked.  “Does your family except new members, i.e. spouses, readily?” She asked.  “Tell me about your father.”

      Tom was more than happy to fill her in.  I didn’t disagree with any of his answers to the questions.

    “No,” he said.  “Our parents never showed affection for each other.  They didn’t ever kiss or hug or hold hands.  They argued a lot.”

     “No, when they met the woman Quyen was going to marry, they grilled her for forty-five minutes.  My mother grilled her.  Quyen and I were squirming in our seats.”

    “No, my father was not involved with his children.  He didn’t have any time for us.  He didn’t play with us.  He didn’t want us around him or under-foot.”

    “He was a tyrant,” he said of my father.  “An absolute tyrant.  He was the absolute ruler of the household.”

 

*************

    This is from the incest story linked to above and describes a three-way phone call between my therapist, my brother and me.  I asked her afterwards why she asked the question about accepting new family members readily.  She said she was trying to determine if ours was an “open” or “closed” family. 

    It’s a topic we never explored in great detail.  The answer is now obvious, but today I found this from a 1991 clinical social work paper on the internet and had a deeper insight into the effect and reasons for “closed” families:

    “Unhealthy family systems have (almost) closed boundaries with fixed and rigid connections or no connections whatsoever. Almost everything is fixed and rigid: goals, roles and relationships, and rules and norms. Unhealthy family systems don't have equal power, the higher level subsystem (father) usually rules and the lower level subsystems (mother/children) are subservient. The father can rule his family and limit their behavior. He can effectively block healthy adaptations by limiting the behaviors/roles of family members and by isolating the family system from the community. The family, like all systems, relate through a process called feedback. It is the feedback loops that maintain the system functioning...In closed systems families the feedback loops are negative and work to keep the system frozen and unchanging.”

 

Tomorrow – from the same paper, there is a list of family traits in incestuous families, and it almost knocked me off my chair.  It describes my family exactly.  Exactly.

~ Talk About It ~

COURAGE

 

    I will say to every rapist who will violate a child this very night with acts so unspeakable her mind will be forced to leave her body, your child my be mute today, but someday your child will speak your name.

    The children will speak every single name.  And as we take away the children’s secrets, we will take away the rapist’s power. 

 Marilyn Van Derbur, “A Story of Hope”

    I printed this is the special edition of LIP:  INCEST – A Family Tragedy; The Holzinger Story.  I don’t think I have given Van Derbur enough credit.  She was Miss America in 1958 and has written two books and lectured extensively on the incest she survived by her father from age 5 to 18. 

    In the tape, quoted above, Van Derbur says she was physically paralyzed and hospitalized, and when her physicians could find nothing physically wrong with her she found the psychological cause – incest.  Believe me, I understand.

    And I haven’t given her enough credit for speaking out.  Earlier this week I took you to the Survivors of Incest Anonymous website and there are two things that struck me:  first, the pervasiveness of incest and secondly, the incredible emphasis on staying anonymous.   And it seems to me, the one enables the other. 

    I am in contact with the organization and will have much more on all of this later.  But what simply is incomprehensible to me and absolutely inexcusable, is Franklin & Marshall College continuing to annually award the Charles H. Holzinger Anthropology Award.  And to be honest – I’m fed up and angry and if they want to ignore me and hope I’ll go away – well, they’re in for a surprise.  A liberal arts college should be the first to recognize the horror and criminality of this and remove the award my father established and funds in his own name to feed his arrogant ego.

    Van Derbur also exposes another horror decent people refuse to realize.  Her mother knew.  My mother knew.  Most spouses of abusers know – they live in the same house for heaven’s sake. 

    This is a quote from Chapter 2 of her book, “Miss America By Day,”:

    Click. She was on the first step. Then, slowly, very slowly, click, down to the second step. Then even more slowly we heard the third click as she stepped down the third step. My door was less than six feet away. Finally! My mother was coming. Finally it would be over. At the sound of the first click, my father had frozen. I had frozen. We remained motionless at the second click and the third. It was a dramatic moment in time when each of us knew what the other was thinking. It seemed like minutes, but I'm sure it was only seconds. Then we heard another click, but she wasn't coming to save me, she was going back up the steps. She knew.

    Once again, this is a quote from the Survivors of Incest Anonymous website:

    There is, on the average, a visitor to this site every 7 minutes…24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  There are a lot of survivors in the world
    Yes, there most certainly are, and it’s time, as Van Derbur states, that we all talk about it and name names and stop this horror.

There will be much more to follow.

 

The Survivors of Incest Anonymous website is here.

“Miss America by Day” is here.

 

~ "Causing Pain" ~

ARROGANT MONSTERS -12

 

 

    My younger brother, Steve, was adopted from Vietnam as a baby when I was a teenager.  I had not kept him informed.  Before Tom’s phone call with my therapist and me, I had established a cell phone call with Steve for the day after.

    I briefly filled him in.  At 3:00 p.m. on a phone in my office at work, I listened as Steve said very calmly, “Well, let me tell you what happened to me.  Tom molested me when I was thirteen.”

    All hell broke loose.  The e-mail I sent to my brothers and sisters entitled “Brotherly Love” is printed in this paper [and below].  I sent my son to Canada to spend a week with Tom one summer when he was eight.  I had trepidations.  Something in my gut told me better.

    But Tom was insistent and I thought my sister’s boys would be there as well.  I put my son on a plane alone to visit his uncle – a pedophile. 

    I was in a panic. I was in a rage.  I got physical symptoms - rashes, backaches and the insomnia got worse.

From LIP, Special Edition, INCEST – A Family Tragedy, December 2003.

    I got other major symptoms as well.  Some are too embarrassing to mention here. 

    What have my parents been doing for the six years my life has been turned upside down and in turmoil?  They called me “delusional.”  They stand in peace vigils.  They helped to organize the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit at Franklin & Marshall College against the war.  My father was named in the Lancaster Newspapers.  It was also reported in the monthly minutes of the Lancaster Friends Meeting (Quakers) that my parents wrote a booklet for the event titled, “How to Begin the Peace Making Process.” 

    They have not done one thing to begin the peace making process in their own family.  It is so ludicrous and hypocritical it makes me sick to my stomach and very, very angry.

     Later, in other minutes and after I had begun my website, it was noted that my mother found a small loom while house cleaning and was offering it to anyone who wanted it.

    That was mine and she knew it.  I still have some of the headbands I wove on it as a teenager.  I’m also sure I paid for it.  They never bought their children anything.  My parents knew I was reading the minutes and they did this strictly to hurt me as much as they could.

    They sent me letters saying no one would believe me.  They were also busy writing letters to the editor of the Intell about peace.  My father wrote one in March last year decrying this country’s role in torture. He tortured his family his entire life.  What absolute frauds these people are.

    They had their children, who were told all of their lives you could never, ever say anything bad about the wonderful Charles and Millie Holzinger, call my friends to tell them I was crazy.  They had their children write my therapist repeated, threatening letters and in one said they were “all in agreement that I was mentally ill.”   

    They sent emails behind my back to my son telling him I was crazy and offering their phone numbers in case he “needed to talk.”  It was my son, who after their first letter to my therapist devastated me, said “Mom, your one brother molested your other brother.”

     They had my sister send me emails saying I was “destroying” the family.  She told me I was causing the family “pain.”  No, I was only causing my parents “pain” because they were being exposed as the despicable incest perpetrators they are. 

     Not one person in my family ever asked if I was okay.  Not one. Not ever in six years of unbelievable pain.   Holzinger children don’t care about each other and we aren’t important. We were taught the great anthropologist and his Radcliffe educated wife and maintaining the “good Holzinger name” were the only things that were important. 

    This totally dysfunctional family was already destroyed by incest.  Anne, who sent me the emails, hasn’t talked to her own sister, Emily, in forty years.  And Steve was molested by his brother and there’s obviously no love lost there.  What was there to “destroy?”

    Meanwhile, my parents were busy trying to explain all of this away by telling people I was “filled with anger” and “spewing hatred.”  And I read about my father in the Lancaster Papers who was quoted as saying he was going to “stand as a witness for peace.” 

    My mother, last year, wrote a letter to the editor of the Intell to make sure the public knew these wonderful people were supposedly sending their second donation to the people of Pakistan after a landslide.  And as I noted on this website, they were busy, busy sending 160 pounds of books to the children in Africa.

    And during that same time, they sent me a pack of GPC cigarettes with eight in it.

    It came in a small, flat box two summers ago.  The Post Office sent me a note rather than delivering it.  I was scared when I picked it up and drove to where my son was working to have him open it.  My son could not believe it.  A post-it note said they found them while cleaning and assumed they were mine.  The cigarettes had to be at least five or six years old if not many years more than that.  They spent $.60 to mail them.  They don’t spend $.60 on anything.  And, of course, they had always wanted me to quit.  It was an absolutely clear message that they would rather have me dead than have their reputations questioned.  If you find that hard to believe – it is the absolute truth.  I immediately mailed them back. 

    Their most recent “recommendation,” sent via my brother, was that I change my last name.   Yes, that will take care of not “ruining” the good Holzinger name!

    For decent people, it is almost impossible to fathom the evil of these people, just as initially, people could not accept/believe that my father molested me or his son.  It goes against everything decent people want to believe.  And we almost never read about incest.

    I recently heard the expression about parents only being as happy as their saddest child.  I laughed.  My parents have never cared about the happiness or wellbeing of their children.  Only they matter.  All they have ever done is belittle and criticize us and tell us not to embarrass them. 

   And when the total realization of all of this fully sunk in, the pain was overwhelming and it was literally paralyzing. 

    And while this process was going on for six years, I read in the papers about these two people who molested me and my brother at a minimum, who adopted a baby from Vietnam who was molested by my brother, who sponsored a teenage Vietnamese refugee who was also molested by the same brother, talking about peace and civil liberties and social justice.  Yes, it infuriates me. 

    Several years ago, when I met with my lawyer for the first lawsuit, he asked me what this had done to my life.  It’s the only time during our meeting I cried, and I couldn’t really respond.  I sent him a fax the next morning.  I have it somewhere in my 10 boxes of emails, correspondence and clippings but I will paraphrase a portion of it:

    I used to plant flowers around my house and enjoy them.  I don’t plant flowers anymore.  I used to buy nice clothes and worry about my appearance.  I don’t care anymore.  I used to clean my house and take pride in it.  I don’t do that anymore.  I used to enjoy having friends over and cooking dinner.  I don’t do that anymore.  I used to go grocery shopping.  I don’t do that anymore.  I used to enjoy going out with friends.  I don’t do that anymore.  I used to like my job and feel I was good at it.  I can’t concentrate anymore.  I used to have a life.  I don’t have a life anymore. 

    Just two months ago, these arrogant monsters sent a letter to Brown University thinking they could explain all of this away by saying I was “mentally ill.”  I have to worry my brother, and/or my father - on one of the very few times my son spent the night at my parent’s home alone when young - may have molested my son.  Can you imagine living with that?  Can you imagine this in your own family?  This is why I’m telling the incest story.  This is an absolute horror and tragedy – and I haven’t even begun to tell how this affected my entire life before my actual memories returned or how this sickness may go on to future generations.

   If anyone has a copy of my parent’s brochure, “How to Begin the Peace Making Process,” please mail it to me.  These people are incredibly arrogant, extremely evil, monsters.   They did, after all, molest their own children.  And they could care less.  They believe it was their house and their children and they could do whatever they wanted.

       

BROTHERLY LOVE

(I sent this email to my brothers and sisters on May 2, 2002 following the phone conversation that begins this article and it was also printed in the special edition of LIP:  “INCEST – A Family Tragedy; The Holzinger Story.”)

 

Hello Emily:

 

    I understand that our family has been keeping yet another secret.  Tom molested his own brother Steve and you knew.  I think it would have been nice if someone had told me before I sent my son to Canada for a week by himself.  Very nice.

   I come from a normal, nice home, but I have a brother who molested his younger brother (by the way that’s a CRIME) and his “foster” brother.  But let’s keep that a secret so everyone thinks we’re the nice, normal family that’s better than everyone else because our father is a PROFESSOR.

    And you are surprised that my therapist immediately saw sexual abuse – and you say it couldn’t have been our father.  I wonder what other secrets are out there.

    Why didn’t you ever suggest to your twin that he gets help – before he lands in jail?  Shit, the Catholic Church has nothing on the Holzinger family. 

+++++++++++++++++++

The full "ARROGANT MONSTERS" series is here.  

LIP News will be on Spring break beginning tomorrow and will return to daily publishing on Monday, April 9th.