If your mother didn’t know about the abuse then it might be a shock to her. Her first response would be to defend her husband and your father. Give her time too. You will all need to heal and hers will also be at a different speed than you and your sister. She will be looking at it from a wife’s point of view, while you and your sister were children.

Rarely are even evil people pure evil. We all have out great moments too. I see most parents, myself included, mirroring the voice of my own parents, short tempered at times with sharp answers to silence an annoying kid! What I have observed is that we don’t know just what went on when they were children. If your father was abusive, I can almost bet he wasn’t nearly as abusive as his father was to him. It seems mostly that parents try to do a better job but it is so hard to follow a different path when raised in an abusive environment as a child.

I was married to an abusive spouse but when he was dying he asked to see me and I started taking care of him on Saturdays so his son and family could go to wrestling matches. That meant a long drive from Seattle to Portland for me. He had been the greatest love of my life but I had to leave him to live. By the time we reunited, he was confined to a wheel chair and had his right arm amputated due to various cancers. Not much to fear from him anymore. I still loved him deeply and it crushed my heart to see him waste away. Taking care of him willingly helped heal my heart in the long run. I was able to tell him how much I loved him and how sorry I was that it didn’t work out.

I do hope my website helps other people figure out the trauma they expereinced as kids so that they don’t go through half their life wasting it by substance abuse. September 10th will be my 19th year sober and that is a miracle in itself.

Thank you for sharing.

Sue

Cults stay far underground and thus off the publics radar. To me, the memories aren’t repressed as much as they are denied by the adult perpetrators until the child is forced to suppress the truth in order to fall into line with their parents beliefs. A child doesn’t stand a chance at sorting out the truth if the people they trusted as innocent, vulnerable children continue to lie/deny to them. But the deep, disturbing memories will not let the child rest.

I feel so strongly that our socieity must throw off the secrecy surrounding child sexual abuse, brutality and torture. A child should never feel shame at what happened to them as little kids. Unfortunately we protect the perpetrators instead of the child.