INCEST – A FAMILY TRAGEDY
The Holzinger Story
My name is Becky Holzinger. I am trying to survive incest.
We are desperate to believe that we had a happy childhood. We are desperate to believe that our parents loved us – that they would never do anything to harm us.
When that belief is shattered, we crumble. I crumbled over Thanksgiving three years ago.
(Continued here).
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.
~ Incestuous Families ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS - 13
As I came to the most painful part of the incest story, I hesitated. I didn’t think anyone would believe that parents could be this cruel and sick. For decent people, it is almost impossible to believe.
Yesterday, I found the below. This is the most accurate and amazing depiction of my family I have ever seen and never expected to encounter. I am most certainly not alone. And, yes, every one of the items listed is true and occurred in my family. Tomorrow, I will go over them point by point. (The link to the paper is below.)
************
David L. Calof has identified a number of family proscriptions, injunctions, and victims scripts in an incestuous family. They are listed here in a somewhat abbreviated form:
A. Such family systems of denial create certain unconscious rules, family messages, internalizations or scripts of behavior in victims that are virtually universal. Without benefit of recovery, adult survivors tend to function more or less according to these same rules in adulthood...Below are some of the major assumptions which underlie dysfunctional and abusive family process and also operate in the adult survivor:
B. Deny - Certainly the injunction to deny one's actual experience is the crux of the matter...
1. Do not think, see, hear, feel, reflect or question your experience.
2. Do not believe the obvious; accept the impossible.
C. Don't trust self or others.
D. Be loyal.
1. You must protect the family.
2. Keep the secrets.
3. Obey.
4. You must not fight back, disagree or get angry.
E. Don't have needs.
F. Love means being hurt or used.
G. Don't ask for help.
H. Don't show pain.
1. minimization
2. symbolic somatic manifestations and complaints
3. self-injury/mutilation
I. Don't be a child.
1. There is no capacity for innocent, curious developmental exploration.
2. Don't play.
3. Don't make mistakes.
4. Be adult-like but without power or authority.
5. Be responsible for everyone else.
J. It is your fault.
1. There is an underlying systemic assumption that while others do the best they can and can't help themselves, you don't ever do the best you can and you do what you do on purpose.
2. Scapegoating.
K. You are bad, evil, immoral, to blame (`guilty').
L. You are responsible for others' behaviors.
1. They are not responsible for their own behavior.
2. It is not their fault.
3. You must help them.
M. Stay in control of yourself and those around you.
1. Stay on guard.
2. Hyper-vigilance.
3. Anything bad that may happen is your fault and thus your responsibility to prevent.
N. You are incompetent.
O. Don't reflect; question; process.
1. External orientation.
2. No time or safe place (safe harbor) to reflect or process (especially traumatic) experience.
3. Because the rules of logic in such families depends on unquestioning loyalty and the capacity of members to behave in as-if (hypnotic) realities, there is a powerful injunction to keep all transactions on the surface without analysis or critical judgment.
4. Leads to extreme leaps of unquestioning interpersonal faith and resulting frequent retraumatization characteristic of adult survivors.
P. Denial and Dissociation are the fundamental organizing principles of family life. .
"Systems Theory and Incest/Sexual Abuse of Children: Focus on Families and Communities" by Patricia D. McClendon is 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.
~ Arrogant Monsters – 11 ~
“MINE FOR LIFE”
We realize that you cannot discuss Becky’s condition with us out of respect for the therapist-client relationship. However, we feel that it is important that we convey to you our current understanding of some of Becky’s issues, how they are being manifested, and a number of the dire and unsupported allegations that are being disseminated as hearsay.
Frankly, we are also growing increasingly concerned that she is not making progress under your care. We are urging you in the strongest informal manner we can to see that Becky gets the most professional attention possible and, if necessary, any medication that she seems to so desperately need. Thank you.
These are the final two paragraphs of the first letter my brothers and sisters wrote to my therapist in April of 2003. I had seen each of them for less than four days in the preceding five years or longer. They live in Canada (Tom is now in Africa), Vermont, Massachusetts and Minnesota, and we were by no means “close.” .
I was saying that my father molested me. I wasn’t threatening people walking down the street with a gun. The only way they knew I was seeing a therapist is because I told them and they only knew her name because my sister came and talked with her for two hours. Anne “loved” therapy back then – before it took a turn she couldn’t handle.
These sons and daughters of “peace-loving,” active ACLU members not only sent this letter to my therapist’s office, but they also looked up her home address and sent a copy there. My therapist took this letter as a direct threat, and that’s all it can be viewed as.
What type of “formal” action could they have taken? None. What do they mean “not making progress?” The only “progress” they and my parents, who spurred these letters, wanted to see was my retracting my memories. They wanted me to continue to say what a “good family” the Holzinger family is and that my father and mother couldn’t have done this! Medication? Anything to keep me quiet.
How is this possible? How do middle aged adults act like children?
It all goes back to our childhood – which never ended. My parents have never viewed their children as adult or grown up. They couldn’t.
You see, you could never, ever, ever question, challenge or say a bad word about Charles or Millicent Holzinger. You would get your face slapped or be paddled and sent to bed without supper. They were perfect and you were told repeatedly you could never achieve their mental acuity or greatness. They told us this.
I vividly remember my mother telling me on many occasions, “I went to Radcliffe.” The meaning – “You will never be as smart as me.” And it was simply unquestioned that you could never be as smart as the great one who sat in a chair and drank beer.
Yes, my father drank at least a case of 16 oz. Old Reading beers a week and opened a beer by noon on the weekends. There was always, always beer in the house. But he was not an alcoholic. They told us he wasn’t.
He sat in a chair and drank beer and was vicious to his wife and children every day and never said a nice word about anyone. Never. But he wasn’t abusive. They told us he wasn’t.
We were a “good” family. We were “Holzingers!” They were highly educated and intellectuals, we were told, and obviously this couldn’t happen in their home. They told us repeatedly that we were a “good family.”
They argued from morning until night. It was constant. It never ended. It was insults and put-downs and vicious barbs all day long. There was, however, no question who would win. “This is my house,” “I am the head of this household,” “I’m the man of this family,” the great anthropologist would say over and over again always with the threat of violence in his voice and actions. But he wasn’t abusive. We were told he was a “wonderful man.”
And in public, my mother used her intelligence and social skills to protect and cover for this monster with a hair trigger temper who was socially uncomfortable around everyone. “Sociable Millie,” one former friend called her. And she smiled and hid their horrible relationship and talked about peace and told people how they always gave to charity.
And she defended him constantly to us. He was an “educator,” a “professor” and the smartest man in Lancaster. When he did something exceptionally outrageous and cruel, she would tell us he had “been in the war.”
No, he didn’t talk about the war, she would say, - neither one of them talked about anything – but in a hushed voice she would tell us he signed up the day after Pearl Harbor and his uniform was in the attic. I am embarrassed to admit this, but up until a few years ago, when I would see a reference to a World War II veteran in the Lancaster Newspapers, I assumed it had to be my father. I didn’t realize most men of his age had “been in the war,” because my mother made it sound like he was the only one.
No, we weren’t like other families, we were told – we were a “good” family. And to keep up this facade, we were told to keep things a “secret,” not to “tell,” never to “embarrass” our parents or “jeopardize” the “good Holzinger” name. We were told this over and over again even into our twenties and thirties and forties.
Nothing mattered but their reputation. And they rarely let us out of the house or had anyone visit in case the truth would emerge from unknowing, innocent lips.
And as adults, we never questioned this need to repeatedly defend the “good Holzinger” name. We never questioned our horrible childhoods. It’s all we knew.
And that’s what we were told and that’s what we believed, even into middle age. But then, I had memories return, and less than a month after the above letter arrived from my brothers and sisters – something happened that would change everything forever.
To be continued…
“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”
Maggie Smith in the movie, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” 1969.
The full letter quoted above is here.
The full “Arrogant Monsters” series is here.
Tomorrow – the farce with the coroner and more - and Alyssarah1 - this is just getting to be good fun!
~ “No one will believe you.” ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS – 10
One of the last memories to return to me was perhaps the most painful of all.
As a teenager, leaving for school in the morning, I told her that I was going to tell people what my father was doing to me. She barely looked up from her coffee and what she was reading. “No one will believe you,” she said.
People will believe me now, Mon. It may have been “his” house, but no, he could not do what ever he wanted.
From “Peace Begins at Home,” LIP – INCEST; A Family Tragedy.
Almost forty years later my mother said the exact same thing in a letter prior to my publishing the special edition of LIP in December of 2003. She wrote, “No one will believe you.”
Well, she’s wrong. These two arrogant monsters thought they could write a letter to Professor Ross Cheit, the Project Director of the Brown University Recovered Memory Project and explain away everything in their family by saying I was “mentally ill”. That’s correct. That is what their letter to Mr. Cheit said slightly over a month ago.
I published an eight page newspaper in December of 2003. This website has published daily for two and a half years. I have printed in detail what I found out about my family; my brothers, my sisters and me.
And these arrogant monsters think they can explain this away by stating I am “mentally ill.” I have wonderful news for them. It didn’t work. Ross Cheit doesn’t believe you and nobody else does either.
Finally, after two and a half years, I am getting people to listen. Yes, we are hearing horrible cases of sexual abuse every day in the news. And these crimes are being committed by perpetrators who were victims of sexual abuse themselves.
But we don’t hear about incest.
Someone has to believe the child – and the pressures are enormous. They are given terrible threats about what will happen if they “tell.” They know that telling will break up their family and where will they live? They know that often times the mother or father will back the other spouse and not them. And most importantly, they are told that “no one will believe them.”
My parents got caught dead-to-rights. Their only current defense is that they are “old” and “elderly” and in their “twilight years.” Well, they aren’t too old to write a letter to Brown University.
And of course there is the argument that they have done so many “fine” things in their lives it overshadows the incest. No, it doesn’t. They raised a pedophile who is a danger to every boy he comes into contact with.
Recently, by chance, a friend was forwarded a letter my father wrote representing the ACLU on their letterhead in 2004. He wondered if Charles Holzinger, the author, was my father. I said yes. He said the letter was “cold-blooded” and “unfeeling.”
And it was incredibly so. And it was more – it was arrogant and ridiculing and he told this man to “accept his lot in life.” The ACLU should review all of the letters my father sent under their name and issue an apology to every one of these people.
People who molest their children are not nice people – and my parents are arrogant, cruel monsters.
"This is not a story about my family. This is a story about incest which involves my family. You mentioned the last LIP as a "significant story." Incest is not significant. Sexual abuse victims fill our jails, staff the porn industry, walk the streets, are a high percentage of those in drug and alcohol rehab and many go on to abuse others. There is a tremendous cost to society and the victims."
"But, yes, it is a dirty little secret. No one wants to talk about it. It makes us uncomfortable. It makes us squirm. That’s the way it’s allowed to continue. Doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, mechanics and accountants do it. And it continues until someone says, I’m not going to keep the secret anymore. This has to stop. This cannot go on to a second and third generation.”
From “Name Change,” LIP – INCEST; A Family Tragedy (click here).
There will be more tomorrow.
The Brown University Recovered Memory Project is here.
~ Arrogant Monsters – 9 ~
LIVING
Children learn what they live.
This simple phrase was posted by a Talkbacker on a thread on Lancaster Online about the sportsman’s club and their live turkey shoot. This is also the name of a very famous poem and I printed a portion of it on the back page of my special edition of LIP – “INCEST; A Family Tragedy.”
I think it helps to explain how my brothers and sisters and I reached middle age without ever taking an honest look at our family or parents. My parents did the exact opposite of everything in this poem. Everything. They didn’t like, respect nor care for their own children. The entire focus was on them - and keeping their real lives hidden.
I am posting the entire poem here. Children learn what they live.
Children Learn What They Live By Dorothy Law Nolte, Ph.D.
If children live with criticism,
they learn to condemn.
If children live with hostility,
they learn to fight.
If children live with fear,
they learn to be apprehensive.
If children live with pity,
they learn to feel sorry for themselves.
If children live with ridicule,
they learn to feel shy.
If children live with jealousy,
they learn to feel envy.
If children live with shame,
they learn to feel guilty.
If children live with encouragement,
they learn confidence.
If children live with tolerance,
they learn patience.
If children live with praise,
they learn appreciation.
If children live with acceptance,
they learn to love.
If children live with approval,
they learn to like themselves.
If children live with recognition,
they learn it is good to have a goal.
If children live with sharing,
they learn generosity.
If children live with honesty,
they learn truthfulness.
If children live with fairness,
they learn justice.
If children live with kindness and consideration,
they learn respect.
If children live with security,
they learn to have faith in themselves and in those about them.
If children live with friendliness,
they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.
~ Charles & Millicent Holzinger ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS – 8
“If my father couldn’t stop it, if he wouldn’t go for help, then my father should have died. I believe that today.”
Marilyn Van Derbur
And Franklin and Marshall College, the Lancaster Friends Meeting, the Lancaster Newspapers and the ACLU want to sweep it under the rug and hide it and call it “a personal, family matter.” Well, that isn’t going to work. I will not allow it. It is a crime that destroys families and goes on for generations, but it is so ugly no one wants to think or acknowledge that it happens. It does. It happened to me. And look at what I’ve had to do to get anyone to listen.
From the archived page on this site,“You Can’t Hide, Mr. Fry” and reprinted in its entirety below.
Yes, look at what I’ve had to do to get anyone to listen.
It wasn’t until my Friday post, when I linked to the Franklin & Marshall Anthropology page (click here), that I realized the level of fraud my parents have pulled on the community and their children. It’s all they have done for years.
They are deeply disturbed, sick criminals who spent their entire lives trying to appear “normal” in public. In fact, in the ultimate irony, they acted as if they were intellectually and morally superior to everyone.
They are very good actors – they have been doing it their entire lives. But they can’t escape the facts that are listed in my stories below.
I have also said that I had other memories return. I did. I think that has them more concerned than even the incest revelation. It should.
*************
No wonder my parents were so obsessed with secrecy. Growing up, we were told over and over to keep things a secret. They worried constantly what the neighbors and others would think. They would tell us over and over again not to embarrass them. All of their children agree on this.
Finally, I understood why. They were leading double lives. They had so, so many secrets to hide. It was only two weeks ago that I made the beginnings of a list:
~ My father is an alcoholic.
~ My father is both physically and verbally abusive to my mother and has been for 57 years.
~ My parents have a loveless marriage.
~ My father is not brilliant. He is not a great scholar or intellect.
~ My father never got his Ph.D. because his dissertation was so stunningly bad and lacking in humanity, that the noted scholar in the field responded with an article listing steps to be followed to prevent such a travesty from ever being written again.
~ My father has a violent temper.
~ My father is an arrogant and insecure man who is desperately in need of being in CONTROL at all times.
~ My father is a cruel man.
Of course, they had the monster of all secrets to hide – incest.
From “INCEST: A Family Tragedy – The Holzinger Story” (click here).
They have some other monster secrets they are hiding as well.
*************
A couple of quick non-related notes - it will be back to the news tomorrow with a possible update on this story which I will post on www.incesttragedy.com and link to.
Please do not Instant Message me unless I know who you are. I will not respond. My email address is posted under the “Contact Us” button on the left. Please contact me by email.
I hope to have an update on the “Crow” situation tomorrow. This cyber stalker and criminal needs to be caged.
Another sure bet is that Mr. Smart's column is well-read.
“Mad-dog” Marv Adams in his column this week.
Double or nothing, Marv? What is this thing you have for Smart anyway? Does your wife know?
************
YOU CAN’T HIDE,
MR. FRY
THERE’S A PROBLEM
When Kathy Clark, Anthropology and Sociology Academic Department Coordinator at Franklin & Marshall College, will not tell me the name of the “winner” of the Charles H. Holzinger Anthropology Award, there’s a problem. There’s a big problem and she knows it. You don’t give an award in the name of an incest perpetrator.
I spoke to Kathy yesterday by phone. She was busy at the time but was going to “find” the name of the winner for me and I told her I’d call her back later in the afternoon. Funny, when I called her back she told me she could not release that information. Yet, on our previous phone call she told me that award had already been given out. So, why is it a secret? Is Franklin and Marshall embarrassed? Will the recipient of the award be upset when he or she learns they received an award named after an incest perpetrator?
HIGHEST LEVEL OF INTEGRITY
“I want to begin by reminding you of special responsibilities you have assumed in accepting our invitation to join the Franklin & Marshall community.
“First and foremost, you are expected to exhibit the highest level of integrity in all your personal and academic endeavors. You are not only students here, you are now also representatives of an institution with a 218-year tradition of high standards of thought and behavior.”
Franklin & Marshall College President John A. Fry in his Convocation speech of August 27, 2005 (click here). [Editor’ note – this speech is no longer on the F&M website and the link has been disabled.]
LUDICROUS
Then why don’t you exhibit integrity, Mr. Fry, and do away with the Charles H. Holzinger Anthropology Award. Why don’t you exhibit high standards of thought and behavior? Or are you hoping the Holzingers leave their million dollars to Franklin and Marshall the way you did with my uncle? Does money buy your integrity, Mr. Fry? Why do you have to hide the identity of the winner of the award? Doesn’t that strike you as ludicrous, Mr. Fry?
THEY CAN’T HIDE A PEDOPHILE
Yesterday, a former colleague of my father used the “it’s a personal, family matter” line on me. No, it most certainly is not. It is a crime. As a retired professor, he most certainly should be aware of that, as should Mr. Fry and everyone else at F&M. If they don’t know it, they should update their high standards of behavior to include the fact that incest is a crime. Someone might want to make sure Cathy Clark and the whole Anthropology Department is aware of that fact as well.
My brother, Tom, is a pedophile. He is on self-imposed exile in Africa. He can never be around my friends or family again. Yes, those gray-haired, peace-loving Quakers raised a son who molested his two brothers and who knows how many others. They are excellent actors. They’ve been doing it all of their lives. But they can’t hide a pedophile. Nope. Explain that one.
LET’S KEEP IT A SECRET
And Franklin and Marshall College, the Lancaster Friends Meeting, the Lancaster Newspapers and the ACLU want to sweep it under the rug and hide it and call it “a personal, family matter.” Well, that isn’t going to work. I will not allow it. It is a crime that destroys families and goes on for generations, but it is so ugly no one wants to think or acknowledge that it happens. It does. It happened to me. And look at what I’ve had to do to get anyone to listen.
COMING TOMORROW – WHY DIDN’T THE LANCASTER NEWSPAPERS EVER MENTION ONE WORD ABOUT MY LAWSUIT THAT WENT TO THE SUPREME COURT OF PA? AREN’T THEY IN THE “NEWS” BUSINESS?
ALSO COMING – MY PARENT’S UNBELIEVE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR OF THE INTELL
ALSO COMING – “BE THE FIRST TO FIND MY HALF-SISTER” CONTEST!
~ And An Academic Fraud ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS – 7
Interests: Psychological anthropology
From the Franklin & Marshall College Anthropology site – “Research Associates and Emeriti Faculty” page (click here).
Suddenly, one of my father’s interests is “Psychological anthropology.” His family is the perfect place for this arrogant monster to begin.
Notice the lack of a B.A. Notice the lack of a Ph.D. Everyone else has one.
Franklin & Marshall College better check to see if my father got some kind of special “dispensation” for his undergraduate degree or they might have to withdraw the credits for all the classes he taught. Yes, he left college to enter World War II – but lots of men and women did that and they didn’t get a two year college “dispensation” upon their return.
This doesn’t mention Franklin & Marshall’s “Charles H. Holzinger Anthropology Award.” This was not established by the college. They did not come to my father and say they wanted to give an award in his name because he was such a wonderful professor.
My father set this up in his own name and provides the funding for the $1,000 annual award. It is simply another “benefit” and scholarship award F&M can offer their students.
But this is a sacrilege and I will write once more to President John A. Fry about this award and post it here. My original letter to him, on August 6 of 2003, is posted on LIPNews (click here). As I state at the bottom of this article:
President Fry, there is a problem with your answer and it is called the Statute of Limitations. The victim gets victimized all over again. However, there is a body of evidence - as presented in this paper, as represented by the circumstances of my family and in my testimony and the testimony of professionals I will be happy to bring to your office. I am asking you to reconsider. Harboring an incest perpetrator is incomprehensible.
It is absolutely incomprehensible. Also, the statute of limitations has changed and there will be more on that shortly.
I also wanted to take you here – to the Lancaster ACLU Chapter page where it says this (click here):
The Lancaster County Chapter recently received a significant bequest from Charles Wilbur Herr, a county native, successful businessman and civic activist. Chapter board member Charles Holzinger had for many years corresponded with Herr. The donor was deeply committed to civil liberties and social justice, demonstrated by his many newspaper letters.
My father wrote this as well and is obviously taking credit for the “significant bequest.” I have contacted the ACLU and requested this be deleted.
My father doesn’t write or talk on the phone to his own children. My father sat in a chair and drank beer and was vicious and cruel to his wife and children on a daily basis. He had no friends or hobbies. A man who molests his children cannot be committed to civil liberties and social justice.
And in this anthropologist’s home, there were no family or cultural traditions of any kind observed. My therapist said early on that if my father could have raised his children in a box he would have. I didn’t grasp her meaning.
I do now. And he did raise us in a box. We got out of the box only to go to school and Lancaster Friend’s Meeting.
There will be more to follow...
HOME
After the coffin was lowered into the hole at Hillcrest, some of the celebrants went back to the Gibbs house at 48 North Oak Avenue, where a buffet awaited them. There was ham, the usual variety of relishes, and a potato salad so superior it moved several of the ladies to compliment their hostess. She seemed abstractedly pleased. The guests made small talk. A few remarked, when they were safely out of hearing, that Les and Florence really were taking this whole thing very well. It was surprising, someone said. Mrs. Gibbs graciousness may be remembered by some as long as they remember their first staggering sight of the open casket. One member of the party can still remember a warm little speech of welcome she made at the undertaker’s an hour or so before the services commenced, “Oh, R______,” said Mrs. Gibbs to the person, “how nice of you to come. I’m so glad. Now,” she added, leading the way with a quick little step, “come and see our Eddie. He’s finally back home.”
The End.
From “A Murder in Paradise,” by Richard Gehman.
Please check back later today.
~ Charles & Millicent Holzinger ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS – 6
Today, I am going to reprint two archived items. If you follow the link to the Sunday News article in the first story and page down you will see me posting as “Chris” under the archived story.
The link in the second story to the Lancaster Friends Meeting minutes no longer works. They have taken down and changed the format of many of their minutes so I have deleted the actual “link.”
Many years ago, I covered a first degree murder case in Lancaster. Many of those involved in the trial told me to read “A Murder in Paradise,” a famous death penalty case in which the penalty was carried out. I asked my parents if they had it. “We don’t have that book,” my father said.
He was a professor at Franklin & Marshall College at the time of the murder. The author, Richard Gehman, was the best friend of my best friend’s father, Intell photographer Richard Reinhold. My parents have thousands of books. All most everyone in Lancaster owned that book at one time or another. My parents did not have the book.
I called Judge Hensel Brown, Edward Gibb’s defense lawyer in the case, during the trial. People told me Brown was never the same after Gibbs was put to death.
OPEN YOUR EYES
I apologize. I am going to switch up again today. You see, the Sunday News has the article (terrible headline, by the way), “These boots were made for talking,’” which is here. This, of course, is about the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit against the war in Iraq sponsored by the Lancaster Quakers at Franklin & Marshall College this weekend. And the article mentions my father as being “instrumental in bringing the exhibition to Lancaster.” So I will have much more on all of this during the upcoming week with my series, “Open Your Eyes.”
But for today, I am going to rerun an article/email which is mentioned in the original lawsuit against my parents, Holzinger v. Holzinger. Paragraph 6 of the complaint reads: “On or about April 14, 2002, REBECCA read an e-mail sent to her and the other immediate members of her family, from her former sister-in-law concerning certain activities by that woman’s former husband, Tom, REBECCA’S brother.” The e-mail is below.
__________________________________________________
AN OPEN LETTER TO TOM HOLZINGER
Hi Tom,
As you may recall, one of the issues that precipitated our divorce was the fact
that you kept bringing guys to have sex in my bed when I wasn’t there, and your insistence that you were going to have sex with your foster brother during his planned stay in our guestroom even though I was at home. It seemed to me that you crossed a certain line at that point.
Now another boundary has been breached. For Easter I went to be with my mother in Pennsylvania for a week, and I naively thought it was very nice of you to offer to feed our cat Cloudy during my absence. As you had once again lost my house key, I had another copy made and I gave you my trust.
I returned on Monday, and we had daily contact as we discussed Misha’s current trip. I had no reason to enter my guestroom until Friday, at which point I saw that the bed had been used. When I asked you about this, you said that indeed you had been there with a friend because “there was physical desire,” but that you saw no problem with that.
Well, there are problems. Firstly, there’s the question of common courtesy. Why wouldn’t one ask permission before using someone else’s place, or at least mention it after the fact? Why do I have to “discover” this stuff? Secondly, there’s the availability of thousands of places for couples to use in Montreal. Why this obsession with having gay sex in MY bed? Have you not yet violated me thoroughly enough? You are a sick man, Tom, and I hope that someday you get the psychiatric help you so desperately need. In the meantime, I need to rethink the influence and even role-model you are for our son, and how much overnighting he should actually be doing at your place. The fact that you hide your actions despite claiming that they are perfectly acceptable indicates a lack of judgment and serious moral confusion.
For years I have maintained discretion with a notion of “protecting” you, but you’ve shown that you have no such scruples. Hence this is an open letter, to which anybody is welcome to respond.
I FIGURED IT OUT
I figured something out. I’ve had a list, a long, long list for over four years now. A list of questions and puzzles about my family and parents. And one question, one that seemed fairly insignificant, sat at the very bottom of my list for years – why did my parents have built in beds, dressers, bookcases and a desk in my and my sister’s “room?”
The house is an old one-room schoolhouse. The second floor was converted into one large room. There were no divisions, no privacy. My two sisters and I shared it. On the one end, where the ceiling sloped down to the eaves, there were two built-in beds on either side with built-in bookcases at both ends of both beds. There were two built-in dressers and across the end of the room, a built-in desk. There was no furniture that was movable, other than a small table.
I don’t recall ever seeing anything quite like it. My son likes to rearrange his room twice a year when the seasons change. It’s always somewhat amused me because it simply does not occur to me to change around my room. I couldn’t growing up. There was nothing to move.
So, way down on my list, was why? Well, it came to me this past week. Like everything else, it comes down to control and money and my parent’s dislike/distrust of their own children.
In an article several months ago, I took you here under “SHIPPED READING” in the January 2005 minutes of the Lancaster Monthly Meeting. My parents were busy, busy, busy shipping 164 pounds of books to the children of Lesotho.
Once, when my brother was visiting my parents several years ago, he found a book he loved as a child. My parent’s house has almost nothing other than books and books and books, because they are great intellectuals. So my brother asked my parents if he could take the book home with him to read to his two boys. My parents told him “No.”
I could hear the amazement and hurt in my brother’s voice when he told the story. We never, ever said anything bad about our parents because they were perfect, you see, and you weren’t allowed to. And none of their children ever, ever asked them for anything. And when you went home to visit you worked, because that was what was expected of you. You mowed their lawn and chopped their wood and picked up sticks. And when my brother asked for one of the thousands of books in their home, a book he had loved as a child, a book he wanted to share with his children, my parents said “No.”
People who molest their children are not nice people.
RUGS IN PLAY
“Becky, what are you doing?”
It was my Aunt Barb asking me in one of the only two times I ever remember being out of my parent’s house for more than one night.
I was carefully walking around their living room rug, avoiding chairs and tables as I tried to go to the kitchen.
“I’m trying not to step on the rug,” I said. “My dad says we kids are ruining his rug.”
I saw her give her husband a worried look. She walked to the middle of the rug and called their dog.
“Becky,” she said, “You can walk on this rug all you want.” She jumped up and down with the dog. “And you can jump on and dance on this rug if you want to.”
“Oh,” I said.
A little later she suggested I go outside. “Do you want me to weed, Aunt Barb?” I asked. “I’m a good weeder.”
“No,” she said. “I want you to play.”
“Oh,” I said.
For the train ride home, my Aunt Barb sent along a bag of cubes of left-over steak from dinner the night before. She liberally sprinkled them with salt and pepper and told me that makes it taste really good.
To this day, I love left-over steak, sprinkled with lots of salt and pepper.
Please check back later today…
~ The Sister Who “Got Away” ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS – 5
I worried last week, when events in the incest story overwhelmed me, and this site (except for one day) stayed with the story exclusively. My readership has actually dramatically increased. Thank you.
This has consumed my life for six years. I think I finally see a light at the end of the tunnel - but first I need to tell the whole story (and telling it here helps me work it through in my own mind) so it will continue here for a few more days and then all of this information will be permanently moved to www.incesttragedy.com.
I have posted this before – but I am reprinting my sister’s response to my email, “Journey” that I posted yesterday. There are so many important points in her email and I will come back to the major ones later this week. What did my mother do when my father screamed at her? Nothing. My mother can’t decide what kind of pie to bake – my father tells her what to make.
Her reference to “Sylvan” is for “Sylvan Retreat,” the name of the old one-room school house we were raised in on Sylvan Retreat Road in Columbia (actually much closer to Mountville). The irony doesn’t get much “better” than that.
Tomorrow – what have this peace-loving Quaker couple been doing these six years?
Re: JOURNEY
(April 26, 2003)
Dear Becky,
I began this in response to your e-mail last Sunday. Even though there’s been plenty of water over the dam since, I would still like to react to some of the issues you raised in that; a number of them resonated with me.
Yes, I remember that Christmas well, and I, too, felt it was joyless and a dreadful expression of a season that should be filled with a sense of wonderment and joy. I remember my hesitation to say anything, for such a statement would only have been used to show my inadequacies of character. I was often made to feel that I had a flawed character - and I still feel that to this day vis-à-vis my parents, I might add.
Dad and I are having strained relations right now over my audacity to suggest that Rick and I might visit Sylvan for a couple of days in April in part to help out on spring work. When he became aware that I was suggesting same to Mother in a phone call and urging her to save some of the outside work for us, he nearly jumped from his chair, took the phone, and proceeded to give me a verbal lashing about my insensitivity to their needs that harked back to my formative childhood. He was beastly. I finally said, “I called to check in, to commiserate over the Iraqi war, and to tell you we would like to visit (staying in a motel) in a few weeks. You have lambasted me. I am hurt, and I don’t want to talk further.” I said I’d be in touch later.
I then wrote him a note, saying that we needed to find a better way of communicating. I eventually got a reply, but one that totally missed the mark. It was arrogant and self-justifying. And it surely did not apologize. While I feel anger and betrayal over this episode, I am also concerned. I worry that he is beginning to lose it, and his diminished inhibitions are an early indication of mental decline. If so, the prospects ahead for Mother and all of us in relating to him are dismal.
You say that I have lived in a “holier-than-thou world.” I’m sorry you have perceived it that way. 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. So, yes, I have stayed away where it is safe and where I’ve thankfully had the support and love of my family-in-law.
I acknowledge emotional abuse. I believe that Dad is an emotionally troubled man. However, he was not sexually abusive to me. He was not criminally abusive.
In regards to the incidents with Tom and our brothers, I am deeply sorry that they happened. However, they happened a long time ago, and all parties/victims have asked that you not bring them up for further discussion and inspection.
I wholeheartedly support your journey in trying to gain understanding and peace. I know the pain I feel over my parental relations. I can only imagine the torment you feel. But I think the journey has to be more about coming to terms with oneself and the cards we were dealt. I don’t think there is anything to gain by hurtling pain, blame and suffering on aged parents and other family members. I would wish that you could find a path to healing. It concerns me very much that your torment continues.
We siblings agonized for months over the letter we sent you and your therapist. Our most fervent desire is for you to find a measure of contentment and peace.
Love,
Emmy
ARROGANT MONSTERS - 4
A JOURNEY OF PAIN
My sister, Anne, shows every sign of having been sexually abused. She has terrible, terrible insomnia and has since she was a teenager. Several years ago she told me she still takes a derivative of valium to get to sleep.
She had a terrible high school experience, as did I.
She gained a tremendous amount of weight in high school, as did I, but she can’t remember exactly when she gained or when she lost the weight. She has been extremely thin ever since.
She had gynecological troubles and had a partial hysterectomy many, many years ago.
She had a terrible problem with sexual intimacy.
She has never married and rarely dated in her lifetime.
She went into therapy years ago because she said she just wasn’t happy in her twenties and because our parents had such a bad relationship.
She moved to Minnesota to get away from my parents.
She ran, beginning in high school, and for many years after until foot and ankle problems made her stop.
She is scared to death of my father.
The list goes on.
When she found out that my brother Tom had criminally molested our 13 year-old brother twice, she immediately emailed me that this was terrible and meant that Tom’s own sons were at risk. Yes, they were.
And yet, several months later, she emailed me that twice, “was not a ‘pattern’ of abuse” and somehow that sick phrase, which likely came from my father, made it okay and we were back to being a “good family.”
She refuses to address the fact that our family is not “normal” and sent letters to my therapist saying that I was literally crazy for even suggesting that my father molested me. Why? How did my parents pull this off? Control. Absolute control and belittlement - ensuring their children would never “amount to anything” so they could never be challenged. Parents who molest their children are not “nice” people. And my parents are two nasty, vicious people.
As partial explanation for all of this, I go back to my opening paragraph from the Incest Story,
“We are desperate to believe that we had a happy childhood. We are desperate to believe that our parents loved us – that they would never do anything to harm us.
“When that belief is shattered, we crumble. I crumbled over Thanksgiving three years ago.”
My sister doesn’t want to crumble. She doesn’t want to have to throw out everything she was told and has believed. She doesn’t want to believe her own father and mother could do this. She doesn’t want to believe her own parents are frauds and liars and criminals. She doesn’t want her life and belief system thrown into chaos. She doesn't want to have to start over.
I somewhat understand.
I am reprinting my email “Journey” that I sent to my brothers and sisters on April 20, 2003 and also published on the front page of my special edition of LIP; INCEST - A FAMILY TRAGEDY; The Holzinger Story:
_________________________________________________________________________________
JOURNEY
As all of you know, I have been on a journey. A journey I did not choose to take - but one that began with a few memories of a long ago boyfriend - and the journey has taken me to places and people I never would have dreamed possible. It has not been pleasant, and there’s a long way yet to go - but I will follow this road because the truth does set us free.
I thought at one point I would send a long e-mail before things begin to happen in Lancaster, trying to convince my siblings. Sadly, there is so much evidence, no one but my own siblings need to be convinced.
Emily, if one of your students came to you and said they had sex with their foster brother, you would be required by law to report it. If one of your students came to you and said he had sex, one a criminal molestation, with both of his brothers, you would be required by law to report it and the children would immediately be removed from the home.
It is a sign of how incredibly dysfunctional this family is that criminal, horrendous behavior that changes and destroys people’s lives, has been reduced to "improper behavior." You say Tom is sexually conflicted. Where did that come from? The well water at Sylvan? Why don’t you run that by your school psychologist?
Anne, you knew years ago that something was dreadfully wrong. I am sorry that none of us listened back then. I guess we were busy with our own lives and never understood your need for therapy. I understand it now. I don’t think you went far enough.
I have told Anne this story, but I will tell the rest of you, because, unfortunately, it is one of the many defining moments I have had over the past two years. I asked my therapist what could cause a girl in high school to have such terrible, terrible insomnia that it continues to this day. Her answer, "Terror."
I have so many memories in my head. But there is one that is so strong and so traumatic, that one of my siblings simply doesn’t remember it - the Christmas without presents. All of the money went to charity, so we were told. Of course, that Christmas fell on a Sunday - why do such a thing unless everyone at Meeting is aware of such a selfless, amazing, giving act on the part of our parents? I think Tom got into trouble that Christmas - I think he disobeyed Dad. That was cause for punishment - severe punishment.
I left the table between dinner and desert. As a child, I knew something was desperately wrong with a Christmas with no joy, with nothing special planned - just act like it was any other day so our parents could teach us the wonders of charity. I went to my bed and cried. And I believe that Tom disobeyed Dad and came and comforted me.
In this professor’s house, a house that should have been full of ideas and questions and challenges, no one disobeyed Dad.
Well, at 49 years old, I’m going to disobey. I’m going to do what I have to do. Actually, I’m glad I get to throw out all of their criticisms and their "values" and their horrible relationship. Something in my gut told me there was something dreadfully wrong there. My gut was right.
I hope to see some of you down the road.
~ And Academic Frauds ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS - 3
“Your father’s an anthropologist?” he asked? I nodded. The air was filled with irony. It was strictly a rhetorical question.
It came at the end of my sitting with a former dean of Franklin & Marshall College, a psychologist, for three and a half hours. He quizzed me on every aspect of my family’s life and I had shown him numerous letters and emails.
Everyone picks up on the irony and the tragedy of this situation except my parents. My father is such an academic fraud that he continues to write letters in his “defense” stating he was an anthropology professor for 37 years. He evidently thinks this one fact alone will "vindicate" him. He is also so arrogant he thinks people will immediately say, “Well, he couldn’t have molested his children. Maybe if he had been a truck driver or a garbage collector we could believe it, but not an anthropology professor.”
It’s gone beyond ironic to absurd. Anthropology is the study of cultures and families and his personal family is a criminal train wreck and a tragedy that has no explanation except incest. And people realize it right away.
I’m reprinting “Whatever Happened to the Ph.D?” below. This is a true story – none of his children ever knew what happened to it after spending three summers on the Cherokee Reservation while he worked on his Ph.D. My therapist asked my brother in our phone conference call if he knew. My brother said he was sent to his room one night while my parents had a huge argument and he said he never heard the topic mentioned again.
A former colleague of my fathers I contacted by email remembered it very well over 50 years later. He suggested I get a copy of his initial dissertation and read it.
I did. After three summers with the Cherokee Indians, he wrote an unbelievably negative and inhumane portrait that shocked the academic world when it was published.
Of course, in describing the Cherokee, he is actually describing himself. And the piece accurately reflects his cruel and abusive attitude and treatment of anyone involved in his life.
What Happened to the Ph.D.?
(The dissertation and two comments pull up under a Google search of Charles H. Holzinger. They are available from the Smithsonian.)
“SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE PERSISTENCE OF ABORIGINAL CHEROKEE PERSONALITY TRAITS”
Following three summers spent on the Cherokee Reservation in Big Cove, North Carolina, doing research for his Ph.D., my father published the above titled dissertation. Following are three brief excerpts:
“If we ask what type of early childhood experiences would lead to a personality marked by the inhibition of affectual expression, particularly hostility; by a characteristic wariness and even suspiciousness of others; by an inability to deny even implicit requests, and a resentment of authority, we would be led to anticipate childhood experiences very similar to those which have been described.”
“The same neurotic tendencies observable in Cherokee personality today were implicitly present aboriginally, but they were held in check by a value system which precisely buttressed the points of greatest latent weakness, and there were roles and a belief system in which these values could find satisfying expression. There was a high valuation placed upon independence and autonomy precisely because there were deep unconscious dependency longings. Generosity was highly valued because the basic character structure would lead individuals to be grasping and selfish. There were strong values relating to bravery and courage because the inner urges were to withdraw in the face of any threatening situation. And finally, there was strong valuation placed upon self-restraint because there were strong aggressive impulses.”
“The Cherokee of Big Cove today typically show traits of passivity, apathy, suspiciousness, and dependency that would in the event of the removal of all outside sources of support seem to make even their biological survival questionable. These traits can be seen as the neurotic warping of the underlying character structure.”
Experts in the new field of anthropology reacted with shock and dismay at this negative depiction of an entire culture. Two experts on the Cherokee published extremely negative comments and one, John Gulick, listed specific steps that should be taken in research in the future to prevent such a travesty from ever being written again.
My father’s Ph.D. was gone. His career was then limited to F & M where tenure prevented his being fired. His nickname became “Cherokee Charlie.”
None of his children ever knew “what happened to the Ph.D.” Like everything else in my family, it was kept a secret. We were told all of our lives that my father was brilliant; an intellectual, an educator and a wonderful professor. We were told this over and over and over again as if being a professor were akin to being God. And, we believed it. And like everything else in our childhoods, it was a lie.
~ Charles & Millicent Holzinger ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS - 2
I am reposting “Smoke and Mirrors” below. Almost every one of these items is verifiable fact. I learned in therapy that the first item is called “elective mutism” and is highly unusual in teenagers. It usually occurs in young children when they first go to school and do not speak in school. I stopped speaking at home. I would not speak. It so embarrassed my parents when they had “company” for dinner one night that they took me to see a psychologist – a psychologist employed by Franklin & Marshall College. My therapist indicated that even all those years ago, this should have been a huge, red flag for a psychologist.
What is truly outrageous is that my father, an anthropologist, thinks he can explain the train wreck that is his family by simply saying that I am telling “outrageous lies.” But then, incest perpetrators almost never admit to their crime – no matter how much evidence there is. They are the liars. And it is such a heinous crime that society doesn’t want to believe it happens. It does. Take a look at my family.
“SMOKE AND MIRRORS”
(By Lorrie McKinley, attorney for the Defendants, who is married to my first cousin on my father’s side, Philip Holzinger. The quotes are from my parent’s response to the appeal to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in the case of Holzinger v. Holzinger.)
“Petitioner Rebecca Holzinger (hereafter “Petitioner”) uses nothing but semantic smoke and mirrors to couch her decades-old claim for tort damages against her elderly parents for alleged abuse during her childhood as an important policy issue for this Court.
“…she claims that she never experienced any distress as a result of the abuse she alleges until 2002, when she was fifty years old.”
~ I stopped speaking in high school.
~ I had a dreadful high school experience.
~ I began to drink heavily in high school.
~ I gained a tremendous amount of weight in high school.
~ I moved into Holly House, a tiny “guest house” on the property in high
school.
~ I moved into an apartment in the 12th grade and had to change schools and graduate from a different high school than I had attended all of my life. I also had to work two jobs to pay the McCaskey tuition.
~ I have always had a fear of men.
~ I have never married and rarely dated.
~ I told a boyfriend when I was 18
~ And the list goes on and on and on.
“Incest was the molding experience of my entire life. Everything I have thought, said, done or felt has been influenced dramatically by that”
Marilyn Van Derbur
WE TRIED TO RAISE OUR KIDS “RIGHT”
Please check back later today…
~ Charles & Millicent Holzinger ~
ARROGANT MONSTERS
I recently found Brown University‘s “The Recovered Memory Project” (click here). I plan to contact them after they return from their Christmas break. The important thing with this study is that the memories have to be “corroborated.” That applies in my case. In that respect, I am “lucky.”
I would urge anyone else with “corroborated” memories to also contact them.
Very early in January of this year, I posted a story about “repressed” memories (it is reprinted in full below). It included the above brief mention of a Brown University study.
The University was on Christmas break until January 21, 2007. I tried the number listed once at the end of January, got voice mail and didn’t leave a message. It was not high on my priority list.
Yesterday, I picked up the phone again. This time I was connected directly to Professor Ross E. Cheit, the Project Director. I briefly explained my situation and mentioned that my father is a retired Franklin & Marshall College professor.
“I got a letter from your parents,” he said to me.
“Excuse me?” I absolutely could not believe it. “I received a letter from them about a month ago,” he said. “I hadn’t heard from you but I kept the letter. It’s around here someplace,” he said. “They mentioned your website.”
And, of course, they said none of it is true. If you have not read the “INCEST STORY,” please click here and do so. There is nothing sexually explicit. It relates my true story of having memories return and what I discovered about my family. I re-read it yesterday and I cried. I always do.
Franklin & Marshall College continues to annually “award” a student with the “Charles H. Holzinger Anthropology Award.” This is not acceptable. He is an arrogant fraud and an incest perpetrator. He does not have one single redeeming quality. He is a vicious, nasty man with a hair trigger temper who sat in a chair and drank beer. He never got his doctorate. He never got his undergraduate degree. He never wrote or published one thing. As with every aspect of his life, he is a fraud – a complete academic and personal fraud. My mother is the same.
There will be much more coming about a childhood devoid of love and affection, of constant, daily criticism and verbal and physical abuse and letting their children know they would never amount to anything. They had to keep the incest a secret after all.
Nice people do not molest their children and these people are arrogant monsters. For six years, the only thing these people have done is send threatening letters to my therapist and friends and now they have the unmitigated gall to contact Brown University trying to keep their “reputation” intact. It won’t work. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary. It can’t be denied. And Franklin & Marshall College better come to their senses and do away with the award – there will be more on that tomorrow.
“Repressed” Memories and “Culture Study” are reprinted below.
~ “Repressed” ~
MEMORIES
“Repressed memories.” If you asked me six years ago what I thought of the “concept,” I wouldn’t have had an answer. I never thought about it much. I still don’t – except I know my case and the answer is they can be absolutely legitimate. I repressed my memories so I could survive.
There are numerous women and men who have had this occur. In fact, in Lancaster there is a well known woman who had memories of abuse by her father return years later. She chooses not to tell her story and I understand and respect that. It is the most painful and difficult thing I ever could have imagined.
Someone molested my brother, Tom. If we have learned anything from the Catholic Priest scandal, it is that pedophiles were themselves molested. They become fixated on children the same age as they were when molested. Tom says it never happened to him. Yes, it did.
People who meet him know right away there is something “different” about him. There is a boyish quality and a constant and total preoccupation with sex, including sex with strangers and very young men, which he makes no effort to hide. Rather, he prides himself on it.
I also want to discuss my therapy. I sat in a room with a therapist who was licensed by the state and certified by my HMO for one hour each week. We sat in chairs and talked for the hour. I was never hypnotized and no other form of “recovered memory therapy” was ever used.
I was offered a prescription for anti-depressants after I was examined by their staff psychiatrist. I never filled it. Depression does not mean crazy. It means exactly what it says. People become depressed over the death of a loved one, the break-up of a marriage, being the victim of a crime and on and on and on. And as my therapist told me – most people don’t seek therapy until the pain becomes unbearable and it affects every aspect of their life. That was me.
Basically, I took a list each week of things I thought about that happened in my childhood or about my parents and their relationship and we would discuss it. After twenty years working for Philadelphia’s Children and Youth Services and her education, she knew and had seen first hand far more about abuse and dysfunctional families than I could ever imagine. She was my sounding board for whether things were “normal” and to discuss items I could not discuss with anyone else.
There are many, many things that occur in an incest family that you can’t discuss with friends or neighbors or co-workers. My family is so dysfunctional, that as I have noted before, my brother, Tom. sent a CD of photos to every member of my family at Christmas time several years ago. Included in the photos was one of him showing full frontal nudity that my son opened. That’s correct. It showed him in full frontal nudity. I had to double check with my therapist that this was not “normal” family/brotherly activity. And of course, many, many people do not want to go public with the fact that they are a victim of incest. Believe me, I understand.
My father and mother would have you believe that this is not possible because they are “highly educated” and my father is a professor. Right! Have you checked the news lately?
In my Special Edition of LIP, I state that on my first night with my therapist I was almost embarrassed to tell her my father was a professor. “Becky, professors are known for this,” I quote her as saying.
Yes, they are. And I would learn the reason they are “known” for this is their choice of occupation. Most of us work with peers, in other words, other adults. We are “equals” with our co-workers.
Teachers/professors do not. They work everyday with young children and very young adults who are under their control and they wield a tremendous amount of “prestige” and power over them. The teaching profession often attracts those who are too immature to work with fellow adults and those who want to molest the children/young adults they have the prestige and control over.
I recently found Brown University‘s “The Recovered Memory Project” (click here). I plan to contact them after they return from their Christmas break. The important thing with this study is that the memories have to be “corroborated.” That applies in my case. In that respect, I am “lucky.”
I would urge anyone else with “corroborated” memories to also contact them. I don’t have time to research repressed memory. I don’t have time to dwell on it. I know what happened to me and I know what I discovered about my family.
My focus is incest and the tragic repercussions of sexual abuse and how they negatively impact this society every single day.
~ Anthropology ~
(And Legal Options!)
CULTURE STUDY
“For instance, Plaintiff’s father, who is an anthropologist, was occasionally out of the country during her childhood. It is important for him to know when the alleged events took place so that he can ascertain his own whereabouts at the time Plaintiff contends he was at home in Lancaster engaging in child abuse.”
(From the Brief of Appellees filed with the Superior Court on January 6, 2005.)
My father wrote the letter below. My brothers and sisters don’t know a diagnostic psychological assessment from a flu shot but they sure as hell could use one. Notice he wants it done by a “doctoral level” psychologist. Only the best for his daughter! Of course, my father never got his own doctorate. He never even got his undergraduate degree.
“Impaired mental functioning.” You’d think an anthropologist might have a few problems with what occurred in his family, don’t you? That’s what anthropologists do. Study cultures and families.
My therapist handed me this straight out of the envelope. It was almost as if she were so startled and sickened by it that she didn’t want to touch it. I took the original letter and the emails where I “threaten” my brothers and sisters that if they go directly to my son one more time I would go directly to their children, and I put them in an envelope to my sister Anne and told her to “Put it up your ass.”
How did my parents get four grown children, three past fifty, to make complete fools of themselves? Doesn’t an “anthropologist” realize it’s not wise to have a pedophile write a doctoral level psychologist?
There will be much more coming. Tomorrow – back to the news.
_______________________________
March 4, 2004
Dr. Andrew Vogelson
Evergreen Counseling Associates
7600 Stenton Avenue, Suite 1-F
Philadelphia, PA 19118
RE: REBECCA HOLZINGER
Dear Dr. Vogelson,
My siblings and I have been in touch with you several times in the last ten months about our sister, Rebecca Holzinger, who is a client at Evergreen.
I am sending you a copy of the 8-page newspaper Becky published in December. Please look at it and put it in Becky’s file. As we told you in our September 29, 2003 letter, she threatened to publish this newspaper in a flyer she distributed in Lancaster in September. We are well aware of the legal implications with the paper’s publication, but we are not persuing our legal options at this time.
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 judgment, and impaired mental functioning.
We siblings have received disturbing e-mails from Becky since she distributed the newspaper, and I am including copies of them with this letter. You will see that some of them contain threats toward us as a group or as individuals.
We request you encourage Becky’s therapist to think about a diagnostic psychological assessment from a doctoral level psychologist. Our concern for her mental health has only increased in the last few months.
Yours sincerely,
Anne Holzinger
also on behalf of
Tom Holzinger
Emily Holzinger Hausman
Steve Holzinger
NOTE: There is unbelievable breaking news in the incest story. Please check back tomorrow. Unbelievable.
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