ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Tom Lewis's experience in sexual abuse. As an altar boy, Lewis was abused in church by the senior acolyte who was training him. For survival, he learned to invent provisional selves without knowing these would become confusions of identity, sexuality, and purpose, lifelong sources of anxiety and depression. Memory can be trained but mostly simply occurs, an almost autonomic function of the body-mind, obviously a neurological function in which sensory input is recorded and retained and ordered. His memories of what happened in the basement men's room of St. Suburban's Church in Pittsburgh in 1951 and 1952 are, no doubt, similar to and different from baby-sitter's memories. His spiritual life fell silent and disappeared under the surface of his daily life. He learned a malignant, enduring lesson: emotional survival required the creation of false selves. 'False' is what he called when he first discovered abuser's existence at the age of 60 during psychoanalysis.
