Steven M. Cysewski of Minneapolis, MNIf anyone desires Steven's contact information, please write us at GPKVictims AT hotmail.com
Steven wrote the following testimonial last month, in October, 2006.
Thank you so much Steven for sharing with us the lifelong impact this abuse has had on you and the offer to assist those who may wish to speak or write to you.
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Steve Cysewski's Testimonial
Well, I don't know how to really write about such a story, it doesn't lend itself to anything but a deep disgust and a saddening set of realizations; I will write it down nonetheless.
My name is Steven Michael Cysewski; I am 47 years old now, born on January 15th, 1959. I was adopted as a toddler into a "nice family" in Ames, Iowa. My father, Dr. Sig Cysewski DVM, was a noted and respected veterinary researcher who worked under the auspices of the USDA at the National Animal Disease Center outside of town. As a scientist, but a cruelly violent alcoholic, I would never become close to Dad, and he remained a fearful enigma to me until his sudden death in November of 1980, (a pickup truck/motorcycle accident).
Mom, Jacque Cysewski, was a typical homemaker and would-be socialite. She fell seriously ill from severe diabetes in her late-20's, and would never be the same. On kidney dialysis her final years, she eventually succumbed to myriad complications of her disease at the age of 60 (1990); she suffered more than most in her lifetime. In short, I was never close to either of my parents and have always felt "on my own.” I've also always felt a burden to others.
My two other natural brothers (Chris and Tommy), adopted along with me in 1963, did not deal with the very personal and humiliating issue of bedwetting that I did (as though having a terroristic brother and my parents extraordinary dysfunction weren't challenge enough for any child...).
However, I was sent to one Father Robert Allan Marcantonio to address this personal adversity of mine; the good priest, with his pertinent degrees in psychology and family counseling would arrest this troubled child's' curse,' which it was assumed was all in my head; I was about 11 or 12 years old.
And it was a curse to me. I recall awakening in the middle of the night and getting out of my wet bed and onto my knees, where I would cry and cry in the middle of the night that someday I would be a "good boy," and Almighty God the Father would see fit to remove this burden. This was the mental state I was in when I put all of my trust in Fr. Marcantonio's guidance...
Initially, Fr. Marcantonio would take me places where we would bond, unreachable adolescent-to-understanding Catholic priest. We went swimming at Beyer Hall on the Iowa State University campus, and swimming out at Hickory Grove Lake near Nevada, Iowa; it came to pass the counseling' sessions' brought us to his small apartment near downtown Ames; it was off of an alleyway, and a the home was a bad shade of green.
It was in that apartment, in the basement of a St. Cecelia's parishioner's home, where the sexual molestation took place. I recall the apartment as being unkempt and messy; he was not a tidy person in any sense of the word. Nevertheless, how clean his space was would be the least of my worries in the end...
One day, Fr. Marcantonio took me to his place and we sat down to talk. He asked me to pull down my pants, ostensibly to 'inspect the equipment for faulty operation.' He began his sucking then: I was neither turned on, nor turned off; he may as well have been licking my elbow. However, the sickening behavior escalated when he took me further back into that dungeon that he called a bedroom...
It is here that I enter my flashback...
Fr. Marcantonio showed me boxes and boxes of hardcore pornography, the filthiest black-and-white stuff. He instructed me to attempt to masturbate while he removed his clothes and greased his nasty self up with Vaseline. I then lay down on his filthy bed while he lay on top of me; he put his penis in the area where my thighs meet my butt cheeks and carried out what in sexual abuse parlance is termed 'dry intercourse’. 'Sometimes he'd give me a dollar or two, then drive me home.
(To this day I have a phantom sense regarding the backside of my entire body; my flashbacks include a faceless, black-cloaked figure engulfing me into darkness.)
Anyway, I don't honestly remember when the abuse stopped, or why; I never said a word about it to anybody. I do know that after I'd run away for the umpteenth time, I was put into a hospital gown at a place called "Shelter House," where Polaroid photos were taken of my body. However, that could have been related to one of the beatings I took from Dad, so I suspect Fr. Marcantonio's abuse may very well have taken a back seat to the charges of Child Endangerment and Child neglect that my parents were answering to; it probably lost its importance in the tumult of the times. I did not have a very happy life after about 4th grade, it would seem.
So, I was put into foster care, the world kept turning, and my Dad was killed in a vehicle accident down in College Station, Texas; it took him 11 days to die in that miserable
November; I was 21. He ran into a pick-up truck while driving his motorcycle one evening. The truck, driven by an employee of a seismic exploration company from Delaware (looking for oil during the early 80' s boom), failed to yield the right-of-way and Dad slammed into it broadside.
A Wrongful Death settlement (Negligent Vehicular Manslaughter) put over $1.5M into the Cysewski family coffers (along with a hefty double indemnity life insurance payment) and our family, such as it was, imploded on itself.
Already having sweetly signed the waiver for Mom, she and certain of my brothers tore through the money while I was sent to a psychiatric hospital due to my bottomless depression and anger. It was there, at Greenleaf Psychiatric Hospital in Bryan, Texas, that I first recovered the repressed memory of the sexual abuse by Marcantonio. During a small group discussion led by my physician, Dr. Glenn A. Hirsch, I blurted out about the abuse; Dr. Hirsch exclaimed, "Now we're getting somewhere!" Little did I know what was in store for me once I opened up.
Weeks into my voluntary hospitalization, we patients of Dr. Hirsch were all at a roundtable discussion meeting at the home of another patient's parents: my mother was at the meeting, as well. (She was a patient of Dr. Hirsch herself, and the one paying.) In the meeting, I broached the subject of the sexual abuse by Marcantonio in an attempt to somehow reconcile my estranged relationship with my mother. A hush came over the room, and the subject matter was skirted as the discomfort of all present settled in; it got really quiet, man.
The meeting broke up when the hour was through, and my mother came up to me and said, and these are the first words of a mother just finding out about her son's molestation, "Steven, you have to understand that priest's are human, too." I became cold and numb as the friends of my mother surrounded her to comfort her in her troubles with her angry son. Not a single person came up to me, not one...
Pathetically, I continued to make awkward attempts to get Mom to "like me," but I was something that was just too much to deal with. I walked up to her one day during those months at Greenleaf, and there in front of her friends, with my silent brother, Chris, on her arm (the new 'man' of the family and also victimized by Marcantonio), I spat out at her, "You're a shitty mother!" She screamed back, "I'm sorry Steven, we may have made mistakes, but we tried!"
Thus ended my relationship with my mother; I was discharged from Greenleaf Hospital to a halfway house (Mary Lake) where my roommate thought he was a @#$%^& dog... There was no aftercare whatsoever, and I can see in hindsight where I was psychically opened up, then left on the table as those in whose hands I'd blindly entrusted my mental health walked away uncomfortable with an such inconsolably frightened boy.
Months later, I would hear from my brother, Chris, that "Mom felt she'd spent enough on me already." Nervously, he added, "You gotta admit, Steve, she's kinda right." Thus ended my relationship with Chris: she'd paid over $19,000 to Dr. Hirsch, I would learn later. Meanwhile, all of my brothers, the ones that played ball, that is, were given large sums of money from the lawsuit while I was told to go away. I believe they call this dynamic "Loss of Consortium," in legalese. (I found two years after my discharge from Greenleaf Psychiatric Hospital, from a psychology intern I'd befriended, that Dr. Glenn A. Hirsch was an active cocaine addict while treating, and taking advantage of, both my mother and 1. Sadly, he continues to practice today in Austin, Texas.)
So, the years passed, I drank and smoked dope, wandered from city-to city, and pretended life would magically work out someday. My capacity for denial was enormous, and the years of wildly caring for nothing took me into homelessness, destitution, and a complete loss of self-respect. Nonetheless, I always felt deep down that I wasn't "that bad," and I learned to live on hope itself. I truly believed in God in my core, but I was in an unreachable state of mental vigilance and a droning sense of injustice that always prevented me from seeing more than a couple hours ahead in life, and I always expected the worst. I never made anything of myself, and in 1992, feeling left out of and completely disheartened by the Cysewski family (my own family) I went to live with a biological brother in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
It was there, when Chris was visiting one week during Christmas of '92, that I again broke my silence about the priest. Chris had been invited to give a deposition to an attorney in Des Moines regarding the fact-finding investigation of a claim by another St. Cecelia's altar boy, from the same time all those years ago. Chris asked me to accompany him to Des Moines and I ended up giving my story to the attorney, as well. Before I left with Chris to go back to Cedar Falls, I told the attorney I would like to pursue a case of my own; I smelled money, and I could have cared less anymore, honestly.
The months passed while I stayed with Jim (my natural brother in Cedar Falls). I drank, obsessed about Marcantonio, and came to see my hopes for money as a way to buy back the good graces of my family in the end; they would see that it was all just a big misunderstanding, and that I was actually a "good person!" So, that was my mindset in those depressing days, and when I drove up to Minneapolis to have my head examined by the attorney's psychologist (Dr. John Gonsiorek), I was ready to let it all go.
Dr. Gonsiorek stated that "most men would have been broken, having been through what you have." He added, "You’re not 'broken,' but you're alcoholic, and if you don't stay sober, any therapy you attempt will just get all gummed up." Naturally, I left his office on top of the world because I wasn't 'broken!' I was so happy that I still had a verifiable chance! Quitting drinking wasn't something I thought about at all, come to think of it. He also stated in his psychological work-up that "it is noteworthy that Mr. Cysewski has not deteriorated psychologically more than he has; this may indicate the presence of inner resources." In other words, I believed in God...
If you knew the suicidal state that I'd walked around in all of those years, you would see the twisted, perverted sense of value I held; I was still standing despite all of it... far out...
I recall walking nightly across the blue suspension bridge across the Ohio River in Cincinnati back in the late-80's. I would feel a psychic 'tug' to jump over the side into the river where God's angels would rescue me and save me from destruction; I would be 'cleansed' in the 'baptismal' waters of the icy river. The self-destructive sensation was at its worst at night, and I shudder to think about how close I came to taking that plunge...
Well, in the first week of October of 1993, my attorney sent a 'Demand Letter' to representatives of the churches insurers threatening publicity. The letter asked for the ludicrous sum of $400,000,000! Nonetheless, it got their attention and they called for a meeting in Chicago. The following week I flew with my attorney (and another victim who I recognized instantly from childhood; we were forbidden to speak for legal reasons) to the Chicago O'Hare Hilton Hotel where we met on the 2nd floor in a suite of conference rooms.
In the room that day were representatives of the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, the Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, Lloyd's of London, and Aetna. In the closing minutes of the day's meetings they all got up, apologized individually for the circumstances surrounding the 'unhappy' occasion, and promised me $100,000 for my trouble. After flying back to Des Moines, I drove all the way home to Cedar Falls, barged in the side door to tell my brother the news, and he was passed out drunk in bed with his clothes on. I went back downstairs, popped a Budweiser, and then wept about it all for the first time. I didn't really grasp just how lonely a trip survivorship is.
In the second week of November of that year, I received the first check for $50,000 and went to the bank with it. Before even leaving the premises of the credit union I spent over $35,000 on family members; I was' apologizing' to them for how shitty of a person I was in the past, disregarding just how shitty they'd all treated me. Nevertheless, the money did not cure the affliction I live with each day, and I was soon back to being broke and drinking like never before.
In 2001, I was with my brother Tommy down in Texas, when we saw the second jetliner crash into the World Trade Center live on CNN. I was further jolted into reality that day, and I knew I was a man with my head up my ass. There I was sitting down in Texas, in a town I hated and working a job just to get money to buy beer and pot daily. Despite it all, my regrets and anger had gotten the better of me at last, and I knew it. With little to explain to him why' his brother seemed hopelessly depressed, I left my brother down in Texas and set out on a Greyhound bus to Minneapolis, Minnesota. (I chose Minneapolis for no other reason than it was a city big enough to provide the necessary infrastructure for me to access social services, etc.
Additionally, I was from the Midwest, and I liked the Vikings. After the past decades, it made little difference where I went to face the hard reality of a destroyed life, so I "left the comfort zone," as they say in some recovery circles.)
Arriving in Minneapolis on the afternoon of October 1st, 2001, I immediately checked into the Comfort Inn across the street from the bus depot, where I chucked my belongings and went searching for something to drink. I knew it was the end of the road for me, but in the mental state of those weeks I could care less whether I lived or died. After buying a 12-pack of beer, I began to drink, and then I began to cry... I couldn't stop it once it started. I went into the shower, and I cried in there, too. Things would never be the same for me regarding the family I'd lost, and I knew it was true I could never look at them the same, either; so important to an adopted child to have a family to call his own...
I screamed out in that room, to the unseen ears of my silent brother, Chris, "You gave every indication years ago that you were leading this family; never mind, I'll take responsibility for all of it!" I knew I'd been hung out to dry all along, and that any developing credibility I'd had throughout my adult years was always destroyed by some idiotic behavior while drunk or stoned.
Nonetheless, my family had been merciless in their scapegoating; I was at the point I had to let them go and accept an emotional orphanage I would not wish on any human being.
I achieved sobriety that first week of October, and I began to address what was eating at me. I lived at the Minneapolis Veterans Home for over 3 years (an overwhelmingly negative experience), and then moved to a truly caring and nurturing environment here at Cabrini House. Ironically enough, it was here that I began to understand the challenge I am up against regarding undoing a psychological 'imprint' that is not my fault. Having the support of certain SNAP members has been instrumental in my feelings of true self-value these days, and I am grateful to Steve Theisen, Bob Schwiderski, David Clohessey, and the anonymous donors who sprang for me to attend the National Conference out in Jersey City, New Jersey this past July.
When I was at that conference in Jersey City, it was kinda surreal. I'd slept on the sidewalk of the 'Bowery' back when I was in my early-20's, and had also spent a fitful afternoon blocking out reality in the subway station of the World Trade Center during that same period. So, while I was in New Jersey this past July, I went to "Ground Zero" and just meditated about it all.
There I was in NYC on a Sunday morning, drinking a New York cup of coffee and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle while sitting outdoors with a few bucks in my pocket, attending a conference surrounded by sensitive people that cared about me. I'd survived somehow, and I know full well it was the grace of a loving god that brought me back from certain destruction; I was there, and it's not like I didn't drag my heels every step of the way.
(I know now that I am valued by (more so than 'offensive to') the same force of creativity that stirred to invent the trees. Amen, and thanks a lot, Sir...)
"Now let's talk about something nice!"
Steve Cysewski
October, 2006
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(This support for Steve has been extracted from a larger E received)
Hi,
I was moved by the testimonial of Steven Cysewski. Sharing information as to another's process of healing is invaluable.
As in Steven's case a lot of times children are scapegoated in families and to divorce your family is a great hardship. I know this from experience and I still have not fully dealt with it.
K
In the same E-mail, "K" brings up another consideration, articulating a point so well:
Abuse that happens to children in their home by family members is a whole other area requiring research and information not available to me. My feeling is that getting the word out is only the tip fo the iceberg to such a deep and wide spread abuse to
children and young adults in our world.
I think what is surfacing on the internet with pedofiles soliciting children has been opening eyes as to the extent and the types of people with this sickness (teachers, doctors, etc.)
My main concern is what happens after a courageous child comes forth. There does not seem to be enough social workers, etc., who can adequately support, protect and
provide for these abused children. I would like to know there is a healthy environment or place for these children to turn and sustain them.
"K" your point is a very valid one that must be addressed. Look at the statistics. Knowing 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 7 boys are sexually abused and requiring assistance, that extrapolates to tens of millions needing social help.
This IS a pandemic with that stigma of guilt and shame hovering below the fabric of our nations in outrageous proportions.
It must stop being swept under the rug. Victims must be identified and helped.
It is vital that care and funding be stepped up to meet the needs of so many.
There is one answer to head towards: hopefully great numbers can be amassed with testimonials, numbers mean votes, votes equal powerful lobbying, successful lobbying means social dollars to aid the Survivors.
Next, in my mind there is another possibility: garnishee. There should be laws passed and enforced garnisheeing pedophiles and perverts for life, employers forwarding those monies into a National Social Fund to care for the abused.
Not my area of expertise, but boy, if I was an elected official you'd see me voting for a bill like that!
Hey K! Let's put that idea out to everybody! Voila! Done: Poll #6 has been added.
