I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations from my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances I have changed the names of individuals and places, I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence. I have written under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of my family. Names of people already mentioned in the public domain have remained the same.

Copyright © 2013 Jenny Hayworth

All rights reserved.

ISBN 13: 9781492994701

ISBN: 1492994707

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922107

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

North Charleston, South Carolina

CONTENTS

1923

A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE

EARLY YEARS

POP

INSIDE/OUTSIDE WORLD

THE TENNIS COURT

JANE

GROWING-UP YEARS

GOD

PETER

REALITY

GOSSIP

MARRIAGE

LOUISA

BIRTH

BENJAMIN

PARENTING

BRITTANY

MULTIPLE FEARS

CONFRONTATION

1994

NANA

AUSTRALIA

THOMAS

SUICIDE

A VOICE FROM ABOVE

EMOTIONS

DISSOCIATION

DISCLOSURE

DOUBTS

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

ALIEN

STRESS

THE LIBRARY

AFTERMATH

A PRAYER

FAMILY FOCUS

ASSAULT

SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

RECOVERY

SCOTT

EXTENDED FAMILY

BAD TIMING

LOSS OF HOPE

TRANSITIONING

JAMES

RECONCILIATION

AMY

THERAPY

MANGO

MADELEINE

AN OLIVE BRANCH

INVESTIGATION

LIFELINE

GRANDPARENTS AND GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

STOPPING THE CYCLE

HERE AND NOW

1923

The day my mother died, I went to bed with a knife, and he never bothered me again.

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before.

If it hadn’t been for Agnes, I don’t think I would have thought of it at all.

Four weeks before my mother died, Agnes’s stepfather came to our school and took her. He told my teacher he and her mother needed to catch the early train to go visit her Aunty and family.

I know what happened next only because of what the neighbours told my mother and what we read in the paper in the weeks that followed. I was fourteen years old at the time, and Agnes was only five. She and her mother were boarding with a lady only two streets away from ours, and a group of us all walked to school together.

Her mother had just left her stepfather, and I had overhead many a conversation between my mother and her friends at our kitchen table about the supposed rights and wrongs of it all.

I knew that her stepfather hit her mother, as my mother had talked about how she would turn up at the cotton mill with bruises and black eyes and how she could barely stand some days. I knew there had been a massive argument in the middle of their street only two weeks previously, with him begging her to come back to him. When she wouldn’t, he yelled at her that she would be penniless and broke, and everyone heard her screaming back at him, shaking her hands in his face, saying, “You can take everything off me, everything, but you can’t take these from me.” Everyone knew Agnes’s mother was a hard worker and would always be able to earn her keep. She didn’t need to stay with him to be able to provide for herself and her daughter.

The policeman first knew something was wrong when he stepped into the kitchen. The little girl was sitting on her haunches under the table, slowly rocking backward and forward, and didn’t speak, not even when he called out to her. His eyes registered the large pool of blood, the colour so dark against the wooden floor he first would have thought it might have been water if the smell hadn’t hit him at the same time. The salty, deep taste of it filled his mouth and throat, and he gagged, bringing his arm up to his face, his eyes registering two small, white lumps sitting in the middle of the pool. He realised in horror that they were the tiny, severed hands of the child. She continued to rock slowly on her haunches, her stumps pressed hard against the floor. Bile rose unbidden into his mouth, and he backed out of the room, stumbling over the stone step at the backdoor, and vomited into the narrow alleyway that linked the outhouses and the connecting houses together.

His chest was tight, and he could hardly breathe with the crushing pain, but he managed to call out to a neighbour.

In the end the ambulances took away not just Agnes but also the policeman and a neighbour, who both had had heart turns; the landlady, who had been non fatally stabbed earlier; and Agnes’s stepfather, who was located with his head in the gas oven and a superficial throat wound.

Agnes was in hospital for months afterward and appeared with only her mother at the trial, a small waif all wrapped up in her coat, with her stumps still bandaged where her hands should have been. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, the death penalty only just having been abolished. It was all everyone spoke about in hushed or angry overtones for weeks afterward.

My mother was home from the mill as she was too weak to work again. The doctor told her it was because her heart was weakened by rheumatic fever. My mother told me it was because her heart was broken because my father was a womaniser. The rows my mother had with him over this kept my two younger sisters and me awake at night.

A month after Agnes’s hands were cut off, I woke up and went into our kitchen. There was no fire, it was silent, and my mother was not to be seen. I knew as soon as I walked into her room that she was no more. It was quiet, and the hump of her was still under the bedclothes. I ran and ran to get my father, who was already at work, and he came with the doctor. She was taken away before I got a chance to say good-bye.

My father sat at the kitchen table like a stone most of the day, with all the neighbours and my mother’s work friends coming in, bringing food and offers of help. I knew he would be staying in tonight as he wouldn’t want to face the unspoken accusations from the neighbours, who all had loved my mother and knew well her grievances against him. Instead he would be keeping up appearances.

I knew it would have killed my mother to know what he was doing to me. I knew this because I saw her grief and wasting away with a broken heart from knowing about the other woman he kept no secret about seeing. So I had never dreamed of telling her. I just kept hoping it would stop.

Now that she was gone, my heart was filled with horror instead of comfort when her friends told me her soul would be watching over me from heaven. Now she would see what her husband was doing to me, his own daughter, and she would have her heart broken all over again. She must not know. She must have no more grief. The ability to make sure she stayed at peace was all in my hands.

I had to stop him.

I was waiting for him.

When my door opened, and he stepped into the darkness of my room, he stopped and stared at me sitting up in my bed, silently facing him; then he backed slowly out of the room and shut the door so quietly I didn’t even hear it click. The moonlight was glinting off the large kitchen knife I held in front of me, the handle gripped in both my hands, holding it toward him.

No words were spoken.

He never bothered me again.

A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE

It was 1994 when Nana shared with me the story of her five-year-old friend Agnes Wildman and how Nana had stopped her father’s ongoing abuse on the same day her own mother had died. I was twenty-eight years old at the time, married with three children of my own.

It was not until a further twelve years after this, when Nana had been dead for nearly a year, that I started to write our story in an attempt to make sense of my life and to try to prevent a pattern of intergenerational abuse and loss from continuing with my children.

With the telling of our story came understanding and realisation, and with understanding came forgiveness and healing, and in the healing evolved a life lived without fear.

I was dreaming, but I didn’t know it.

In my dream Nana was talking to me, and I was arguing with her. It was as real to me as if she were alive. She was telling me to write down our story—all that had happened to us—so someone else would be helped and strengthened by it. I was telling her I couldn’t do it. She kept telling me I could and it was important and she needed me to promise her I would do it.

I told her writing would be the easy part, but I had no idea about editing or publishing. In exasperation she said to me, “If I help with the editing and publishing side of it, will you write it?” I just wanted to stop talking about it with her, and I stamped my foot and jokingly said, “Okay, yes. If you find someone who can help me with the editing side of it and publishing, I will start writing.” She leaned back with a satisfied look on her face and looked enormously relieved.

I woke up.

The dream lingered with me for a while.

I was amused by the conversation that had just taken place between Nana and I. It took me a while to register that it had been a dream and not a real conversation. It had felt real. The thought of perhaps starting to write down what Nana had told me when she had visited in 1994 as a base to start from, and to start recording certain events in my life and my children’s lives, mulled over in my mind. I decided I would at some time start to do so. But I had children to look after and things to do, and it was soon forgotten for the day.

That night I went to pick up my daughter, Rose, from her jazz/ballet class that was held in the local high school. I had attempted to make conversation with some of the mother’s before, but most already knew each other and were reluctant to engage in too much talk with a stranger beyond a cordial hello. So I stood back and watched.

A voice next to me suddenly said, “Hello.”

I turned to see whom it belonged to, at the same time smiling and responding to her greeting. Rhonda was really friendly and chatty, and we happily passed the next ten minutes—the class ran overtime—exchanging information with each other.

I found out she was living with a man just across the road from the high school where the practise was held. She had an adopted son the same age as my son, Thomas, and his birthday was on the same day.

She was friendly and forthcoming. I felt like I had known her for a long time and felt at ease with her. She invited me to come for a cup of tea right then and there at her place across the road, before I took the children home, and so I did. Rose and Thomas played happily with her children whilst she put the kettle on, and we settled into easy conversation.

She shared with me that she had been disfellowshipped (the process of being shunned and treated as if dead) from the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion she had belonged to for a while. I was stunned, as I desired friends and suddenly here was one who understood what I was going through as she had been through it herself. I instantly told her about my being recently announced as dissociated from the same religion. We talked for another fifteen minutes about our experiences with being shunned.

The conversation turned to my life. I told her I was studying nursing. I hesitated then before I carried on speaking as I had made the decision to write my story just that morning, but as Rhonda had already shared with me so freely regarding her disfellowshipping, I told her I was thinking of writing a book.

She stopped what she was doing, looked me in the eyes, and said, “I am a writer. I won a Queensland award for my latest book. I have four published books for children and am currently working on another.” She gazed intently at me and said, “You are a writer. You don’t think about writing a book, you do it. Say it as it is, and it will happen.”

Then she calmly went on with making another cup of tea, stating as she did so words that made hairs stand up all over the back of my neck and arms. “If you ever want to know about editing or publishing, just ask me, and I will put you in touch with the ones I use. I had many books rejected as I did not realise I needed to have them professionally edited first, and now that I have successfully gone through the process, I am more than happy to show you how.”

Time stood still.

All the motion in the room slowed down.

The hairs all over my body stood on end. I felt a chill go through me.

My challenge to Nana the night before ran through my head: “If you find me an editor and publisher, I will start writing our story.”

The vision of my nana standing before me so real in my dream the night before was stark once again in my mind’s eye. I could picture her relaxed and self-satisfied smile.

I said out loud, “Okay, Nana, you win.”

I then told Rhonda I hoped she wouldn’t think me strange, but I just had to share my dream from the previous night. After I shared it with her, she came over and hugged me tight.

She looked at me again straight in the eyes and said, “You are a writer. You will write your book. Your Nana appeared to you in a dream to tell you, so you must.”

It felt like Nana reaching from the grave to comfort me. It warmed me inside at a time when I was struggling to feel connection and to feel emotionally valued and loved. It gave me purpose and hope.

So I value and treasure it regardless of whether it was real or a dream.

Thank you, Nana.

This is our story.

EARLY YEARS

My maternal grandmother was dying of ovarian cancer. It was 1965, and my twenty-year-old mother had moved back in with her parents whilst she was pregnant with me to help care for her mother. She gave birth to me on the first of June 1965 in a small town in England. My Dad was overseas training with his regiment in the British Army and didn’t see me until I was nearly three months old.

Mum would pace the floor with me over her shoulder, trying to quiet my crying as I had colic. She didn’t want her Mum to be disturbed as she wasn’t getting much sleep with the pain now intruding from her cancer. Being in a military family was not a new experience for my mother. She knew what to expect as her father had been a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army, and she had been in the British Air Force for a time before she married my father.

Absences were part and parcel of being a military wife. She coped under extremely trying circumstances as her father instructed her and her siblings never to tell her mother about her cancer or discuss it with her. Mum never did. I can hardly imagine the trauma of living day in and day out with your mother and seeing her get increasingly unwell and never talking with her about her illness or impending death.

About three months after my grandmother’s death, after previous enquiries had been made about emigrating, my parents got a phone call to say they had been accepted and could either go to Sydney in Australia immediately or wait a year and go to Perth, also in Australia. They decided to go straightaway and left by plane on the ten-pound scheme in 1967 to start a new life knowing nobody, to go to another country that was on the other side of the world.

My little brother, Mark, was born in Sydney a year later, in 1968, whilst my father was overseas training with the Australian Army to go to Vietnam. After the end of that first year, they moved to Perth. They lived outside the army barracks for six weeks waiting for a married quarters to be ready for them, and then they moved in.

My mother told me later she believed she was suffering from clinical depression brought on, no doubt, by moving to a new country; not knowing anybody; the death of her mother; the absence of her husband; worry regarding his safety; coping with two small, active children; and issues to do with having grown up with an alcoholic father.

When my Dad returned from Vietnam in 1970, he and Mum had been together for five years, but in that time he had been overseas for three years and nine months. If their marriage were to stay together, my Dad realised, he would have to leave the forces as Mum no longer wished for him to be part of it. She wanted his support at home, and she now believed that being in the defence force was morally wrong. So my Dad took a desk job within the army until his time of service was up a year later.

My paternal grandparents and my Dad’s sister and her three children had also migrated during this time and lived in Perth, not too far from us. My memories of my Aunty and her three children are vague and rather sketchy.

When I look back on myself as a child, my memories are mainly sensory. I had a little desk and chair set and a bookcase filled up with books. I had a doll called Bella that used to cry when I tipped her upside down and a little pram and blanket set, a tea set, and lots of other toys. My bedroom had Peter Pan and Wendy curtains, and I used to stare at them and imagine myself going on flights with them to other places. I spent a lot of time within my imagination. I would lie in the bath and slowly sink under the water, holding my breath and keeping my eyes open. I would look up through the water and be aware of the muffled sounds filtering though, and it felt like I belonged in a different world for that short space of time. How good it felt not to be in the real.

Out the back of our house was an empty field with a set of swings in it. My brother and I would lie down in the grass with the heat of the sun beating down on us and the hum of insects droning in our ears, chewing on blades of grass we snapped off. The feel of the ants running across our skin and the flies buzzing around our faces annoyed us along with the wind and bits of sand sticking to our skin. It was quiet, lonely, and often very hot.

One day when we were out in the field on the swings, my little brother accidentally nearly gave me a tonsillectomy. We had both just finished ice blocks and I was still chewing my stick. We were sitting facing each other on a swing rocking back and forth faster and faster. Suddenly he leaned forward; at the same time I fell forward, and the stick went straight to the back of my throat, nearly slicing my tonsils straight off. I can remember my mouth filling up with blood and choking on the volume of it. I ran back into the yard and through the house, out the open front door, looking for my mother with blood bubbling and gushing out of my mouth.

My Mum was standing on the pavement speaking to a friend, and she immediately came running and took me to the doctor. I recovered fine, but I have a nice large, white scar at the back of my throat to remind me of what nearly happened.

We sometimes played tents outside in the yard or made huts from bits and pieces we found along with sheets Mum would let us take to drape over everything so we could sit underneath. I don’t remember getting much pleasure from this. It was more like we had to stay outside for whatever adult reason, and it was the only thing my brother and I could agree on doing together that made it less boring than doing nothing. I am sure he got more pleasure from it than I did. I know he had a plane and a truck my Dad had carved out of wood and painted for him. I was so jealous.

I can remember going for a holiday to Rottnest Island off the coast of Perth and seeing the quokkas and peacocks and going camping with Mum and Dad at various places outside of Perth at different times of the year. They are good memories. I started primary school when I was six years old. My Mum had done a good job of teaching me basic skills, and a love of reading was already established. The work was easy for me, and I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation but found the social aspect of making friends and associating with other children very difficult.

My mother used to recount to me the story of how, after the first few days at school, I announced I had had enough and wasn’t going anymore. I didn’t realise I had no choice and it was to be for another twelve years. She said I screamed and shouted, and the teacher had to come out to get me and take me in. I vaguely remember this and how upset I was. I would refuse to speak in class when spoken to and refused to participate in activities or play with the other kids.

My report cards mentioned my shyness and unwillingness to participate in classroom discussions. My stubbornness at being made to be somewhere I didn’t want to be, away from my mother and with strangers, was strong enough to force me into refusing to speak even at that young age.

I tended to keep to myself and was very shy. I remember my fifth birthday party, for which I had helped wrap the presents for the game of pass the parcel. I burst into tears after the game as I never got any of the presents we had wrapped. All the other kids seemed to play together, and I felt so left out. I remember running and hiding behind the shed and crying. My Mum came and pulled me out telling me not to be so selfish. I was so anxious playing with the other children and felt like a fish out of water, not knowing what to say or how to interact.

It was around that time, sometime in 1970, that my Mum, after having studied the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, got baptised and became one herself. She had told me she had never heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses before they’d come to her door. This was when my parents were living outside of the army barracks in Perth whilst waiting for a married quarters to become available. My Mum had been brought up on army bases, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were never allowed on the bases unless by invitation as they were pacifists. So she had never spoken to them before or even known who they were. When they called on her and asked her if she were concerned about the state of the world, of course she said yes, as my father was in Vietnam, and she also was curious about what they had to say about the Bible.

She told me she had started to wonder if her mother, who had died, could see her and questioned where she had gone when she’d died. Mum said she had joined a Bible study group on the army base but wasn’t getting any real answers from the Bible. She lapped up the fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses came to visit her in her home every week, took her to their meetings, and invited her into their homes for meals and made her so welcome. I believe they provided for her a semblance of the family life she had lost and support at a time when she needed it the most.

My mother described me as being a difficult child up until I started school. I had colic as a baby and was active, defiant, and very strong willed at times during my toddler years, as many toddlers are. For Mum, struggling with depression and an absent husband, it was very hard to cope with me without resorting to physical discipline, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses reinforced this.

She remembers the first few meetings she attended at the Kingdom Hall with me crawling away from her underneath chairs and playing. There were five meetings a week, two of them back to back and each one an hour long. For a young child to sit for that long was nearly impossible, but the Jehovah’s Witnesses accomplished it through strict discipline and a training schedule. My Mum was instructed by others to make me sit in a chair at home for five minutes at a time, and I wasn’t allowed to speak or get off. If I did, the timer was put on again and started from the beginning. In that way I was trained to sit for an hour at a time without talking or moving.

Once I had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an adult, and having trained my own children this way, I was appalled by the amount of physical discipline and threats used to get very young children and toddlers to obey these extreme rules. The age-appropriate levels at which a child would normally be expected to attain certain milestones were not considered. But when you are part of it, and all the other children appear to be sitting quietly and obediently, the power to conform is enormous. It was looked upon within the organisation as a reflection of the inadequacies of yourself as a parent if your child rocked the boat.

In some congregations parents were allowed to let their toddlers have toys or colouring books and pencils, whereas in others, depending on the elders (a few male members within the congregation who were the appointed teachers and leaders) it was considered wrong to allow this as children were instructed to learn alongside their parents. In our congregation nobody would dare to let their children have things to keep them occupied.

My mother has recounted to me how stubborn I was in the face of all this and how, if I didn’t get my own way, I would stay defiant for hours at a time. She recalls once she put me in my room until I apologised to her. I was about six years old. She felt sorry for me after a few hours and brought some spaghetti on a plate to me. She put it down, and as she shut the door she heard a thump. When she opened the door, she found I had thrown the whole plate at the back of the door, and there was spaghetti dripping all down the door and floor! She said she despaired that I would break her will if she didn’t stand up to me and break me first.

We seemed to be on this collision course with each other, a battle of wills, until I suddenly began to conform.

Upon my father’s leaving the army, they made the decision to leave Australia and move to New Zealand. My Dad and Mum felt he needed to get away from all his army buddies if he was to stay out of the forces successfully, plus they said they missed all the little birds and green grass after six years of living in Perth. They decided to move to a small town in the South Island of New Zealand.

One event that happened that seems very small in itself but is seared in my memory was an occasion before we left Perth, Australia, to move to New Zealand. Unbeknown to me at the time, Mum and Dad went down the road to say good-bye to some friends, leaving my brother and me asleep in the house alone. It was very dark, and the lights in our house were on when I woke up. I remember looking in all the rooms and not finding Mum or Dad anywhere.

I opened the front door and walked round the house. They weren’t in the yard. I went back in the house and looked in every room and every cupboard, turning on all the lights. I ran back outside and ran around and around the house; I stood out in front of the house with the door open and the lights on inside with no idea what to do and absolutely terrified of the aloneness that welled up inside of me. I went back in the house, and inside of me I was screaming and screaming. The only word for what I was experiencing was terror.

Mum and Dad came home and were surprised to see me up. I don’t even know if I looked upset. I obviously went back to bed, and they had no idea of the experience I had just gone through. I don’t know why I reacted so extremely to this situation, but I never forgot the feeling of having no idea what to do and of being totally on my own.

I now know what I likely experienced was my first panic attack. I was eight years old.

POP

I remember my Pop as a quiet man, withdrawn even, and the smell of the smoke from his pipe clung to him like a second skin. He would sit with the radio held up against his ear listening to the horse and dog races for hours.

When I think of my Pop, I automatically think of the bathroom in his house in Perth. The linoleum was a pattern of black and white tiles on the floor. When you first stepped into the room, you opened a wooden door, which had a glass, non-see-through window at the top and a key lock in it. Directly in front of the door was a toilet, and to the left of that a freestanding sink. Against the wall on the far left was the bath with a shower curtain and a shower rose connected to the taps of the bath. There was a small window over the bath that you couldn’t see out of.

My brother and I would be at the house to visit our grandparents, but I don’t know where my Nana or mother would be. I am not sure if they went out. Strangely I don’t remember Nana’s being around at all. My brother and I would be taken into that bathroom, and that was where the main abuse occurred. Sometimes we would be put in a few inches of bathwater, and I clearly remember sitting in the water with it going cold and getting goose bumps whilst my brother was being sexually abused. Sometimes I would get out of the bath and inch past my Pop and brother.

I would open the door and run out and hide underneath one of the beds. Sometimes I would stay there for what seemed like ages, and the dust would make me sneeze, and the springs of the bed above would catch strands of my hair and pull them out. My chest would hurt as I breathed, and I would be scared of the sound of my breath as it whooshed out of my nose. It sounded so loud. I would try hard not to breathe so noisily, but it made my chest hurt even more, and I would feel like I was going to explode.

Nana used to make carpet rugs out of cloth, and she had one in a spare room that had different bits of material woven in. She once explained to me where they all originally had come from. There was a purple piece that had come from a nightgown she’d once had. It was a gauzy material. I liked the feel of it on my fingers when I touched it. I used to stare at it from under the bed, and time would cease to exist, and my awareness would vanish.

At other times when we both were taken into the bathroom, my Pop would get the Vaseline jar out and rest it on the sink, and he would get me to touch him and rub him, and then he would touch me. I would be lying on the floor as he touched me, and I would turn my head and be able to see the bits of fluff and dust under the sink and see and smell spots of the talcum powder my nana always wore.

Sometimes I would run and hide in the cupboard in the hallway. It was dark when the door was shut; coats would brush up against my head and cheeks, and my feet would be resting on top of the shoes. I would hunker down, crouched, eyes squeezed shut, holding on to the inside of the lock with my fingers, trying to keep as still and quiet as possible so no one would find me. I would feel terror as I listened to footsteps approaching, and my heart would start beating so fast it felt like it would come out of my chest. The sound of its beating would fill up my head, and when the door was pulled away out of the viselike grip of my fingers and I opened my eyes, it seemed as if the light would blind me.

Nana would come home and beg me to come out of the cupboard if I were in there. I would refuse and pull back inside, and she would keep pulling open the door. I wouldn’t know how much time had gone by while I had been in there, and it would be like coming out of a dream and back into the light. I would sit in the cupboard or under the bed humming silent tunes in my head to drum out all the thoughts of what was happening in the bathroom or elsewhere. I would disappear into my head until I heard Nana’s voice. All of a sudden, I would be aware of my body sitting in the cupboard and feeling cramped and uncomfortable, my fingers sore and numb from holding on to the lock. With awareness returning, fear would flood my body again, and I would be scared to come out even though Nana was there.

Nana would sometimes cry when I wouldn’t come out, and she would pull me out, holding me against her and rocking me on the floor between her legs. I remember her stroking my hair, my face pressed into her bosom, the smell of her talc, and the softness of her upper arms. She would say over and over things like, “You’re a funny little thing” or, “You’re a strange little one” and would then stay quiet and just stroke me until I sat up, and things would be normal again. Nana always felt safe, and I had no idea where she went when Pop was abusing us. I have always wondered.

One of my reactions as a child to the sexual abuse and touching was that I learnt to be super aware of my physical body. I got used to sensations in parts of my body that Pop stimulated, and I would secretly touch them when I was by myself. Nana came across me doing this one day. She asked me, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I am trying to see what Pop is looking at.” Well, the reaction was instantaneous. Nana pulled me by the arms and hit me across the side of the head and yelled at me, “Don’t you ever say things like that, you naughty girl. You need to wash your hands.” She pulled me over to the sink, turned the tap on, and held my arms so my hands were under the water.

Unbeknown to her, she had turned on the hot tap only, and the burning water was scalding my hands. I screamed, and instantly her grip relaxed, and I could pull my hands away. I was shell-shocked, and, I think, so was she. Nana had never raised her voice or got angry with me. She was my source of love and comfort.

I was deeply ashamed and frightened, and I felt desperate to win back her love and terrified she would remove it from me. I felt responsible for upsetting her and making her angry, so I never again mentioned the abuse to her or anyone else until years later. I always loved my Nana and mourned the loss of moving away from her when we went to New Zealand when I was nine years old. She meant the world to me.

I don’t know how many times the abuse by my Pop happened to my brother or me either individually or together. My memories are from a girl under nine years of age who was traumatised and frightened. They were buried mostly in dreams and nightmares, not often thought about, so with the passage of time I can no longer be sure which parts are dream and which parts are accurate.

Was there any physical indication that the abuse occurred? During the time it was happening to us both, my brother started kindergarten. He would refuse to use the toilet there. Nobody worried too much, but at some stage he had a prolapsed bowel. My mother took him to the doctor, who told her my brother’s straining from constipation when he was on the toilet at home, due to his refusing to use the toilet at kindergarten, must have caused the prolapsed bowel.

Nobody realised that someone might have been abusing him, or if the doctor did suspect it he never said. My Mum had to push my brother’s bowel back inside him when it came out. My poor brother was scared to go into toilets that weren’t in his own house as they reminded him of the place of his abuse. I remember feeling protective of my brother and, when Pop was abusing us, a mixture of emotions when I would run away and hide instead of staying with him: relief it wasn’t me, terror, fear and panic it would be me, helplessness at not being able to help my brother, and guilt for leaving him and hiding.

I started to have a dream at that time that would reoccur throughout my life until I began to examine my past. A lion would be chasing me. There were two main scenarios. It had either escaped from a zoo I was visiting, and I would be trying to run and hide from it though no one else would seem to be aware or worried about it; or the lion was walking the streets, and I would run into my house and move from room to room and place to place as I heard it coming, trying to hide from it. Other people were always in the house doing normal things and not scared at all by the lion. In fact they seemed not to see it. I would be one step ahead of it, hiding under beds and on top of cupboards or running from room to room. In the end the lion would sniff me out; I knew it was going to get me, and I would be killed. I would wake up petrified as it was approaching me.

The feeling of being in danger and on edge and always looking for ways out was something I lived with constantly during the time of the abuse. No one else seemed to be aware of the danger, and they all carried on as normal, so I learnt to carry on too. I had a terrifying turmoil boiling inside me under a calm exterior.

So why did we tell no one about the abuse? I don’t remember if Pop threatened to harm us if we told. I don’t recall his doing this although that doesn’t mean he didn’t. Maybe the constant feeling of being on edge and anxious is what impacted on my ability to be a child with other children, just to play normally and feel like I was part of a group. Maybe I never would have felt like I was an alien from another planet when at school or with other children if the abuse had not happened.

All I know is I did feel like this, and these feelings of anxiety along with panic attacks and wishing to belong in the real world were within me from as far back as I can remember.

INSIDE/OUTSIDE WORLD

When our family moved to New Zealand in 1973, we went to live in a small town at the top of the South Island. My Dad got a job with the forestry department and was away for long periods. My Mum was suffering from depression and would lie in bed for hours at a time, and my brother and I would have to be quiet. We all were adjusting to leaving Australia and living in a new country, being at new schools and trying to make new friends. My father had commenced studying the Bible with the Jehovah’s Witnesses once we had relocated, and he got baptised six months later.

We had been in New Zealand for only a few months when my Pop died. Up until that time, I had missed my Nana with a fierceness that pained me. Nana had always made me feel like I was special and wonderful, and I’d never doubted the intensity of her love for me. She had showered me with it and had been very physically affectionate with me, and I had lapped it up like a puppy. She wrote me every week, and she regularly sent my brother and me money. One of the first cards she sent me had a picture of a little girl all in blue. It was so large, it had to be bent in half to be posted. I kept it under my pillow, constantly touching it as it made me feel close to Nana, and I felt so loved when I had it near me.

I don’t remember too much about when we were told my Pop had died. I remember it was raining and cold, and we had been out and came home to a note on the back door from the police. Dad had to go down to the station, and when he came back, he told us my Pop was dead. Dad didn’t cry or seem that upset to my nine-year-old self. I don’t remember feeling much at all, but it was a different matter when my Nana visited a few months after his death. I remember the anxiety building right before she came and the excitement and wanting to be hugged by her.

Seeing her in the flesh again after what seemed like so long was overwhelming for me, and I was scared to look at her. I remember the fear of hearing her talk about Pop and seeing her emotional and crying. I remember feeling guilty like I had caused that pain by wishing Pop dead and hating him so much. I desperately wanted to hold on to her and love her and cry, and at the same time there was the fear I felt inside and the wanting to push her away, and how I hated her touching me. My Mum took me aside at least twice and kept asking me what was wrong and telling me how upset Nana was because I refused to go near her or be hugged.

I felt so much pain and confusion all through me as with my whole heart I didn’t want to cause my Nana pain, but I was so scared to be near her. I didn’t understand it. I was terrified that maybe if I was angry with Nana, I could cause her to die also, and I loved her so much I didn’t want that to happen, so I tried to stay away from her.

I dealt with it by withdrawing even more into the fantasy world I had created in my head. I had started it back in Australia, when I used to lie on my bed and fly off into an imaginary world with the Peter Pan and Wendy characters depicted on my curtains. I used to substitute Peter Pan and Wendy for real people, like my Nana or anyone else I had met who smiled at me or seemed kind. Sometimes they were characters from television that became a substitute family and reality for me.

This doesn’t mean my own Mum and Dad were not good people. They did what they thought was best for my brother and me at the time. I don’t know why they didn’t appear in my internal world, which was a safe alternate reality for me. Perhaps it was because I already had them in real life, and it didn’t stop bad things from happening. I couldn’t find safety in my real world, and they were already in that, and so I had to create somewhere where I could guarantee I could be a hundred percent safe always.

In my make-believe world, I was more connected to the people in it than to what was happening around me. I would substitute people I had read about in books or seen on television or scenarios I had heard and seen and place myself in the middle of them. There were common themes I would work through and experience there. There was nearly always a mother figure who loved me dearly and would never forsake me. Sometimes I would be naughty or have a problem I could have been rejected for. The problem was always resolved in the end, and it was dealt with lovingly. I would always be forgiven and accepted and have a happy ending. Sometimes this happened with an internal father figure as well.

My Dad used to hire a television for us to watch over the wintertime, and I would love watching shows such as The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie. I read The Water Babies and fell in love with Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and with Tom being cuddled and “falling asleep in her arms from pure love.” I dreamt about experiencing that myself. I loved the books The Faraway Tree and The Enchanted Forest written by Enid Blyton. They provided plenty of material for me to make stories up in my head so I could experience alternate worlds where I could escape.

I knew the main fantasy figure in my mind as Inside Mum. She was always there for me day and night. She changed face depending on what book I was reading or what television show I was watching. Sometimes she would stay the same for a period of weeks or months, and then I would change her. She was the perfect Mum, always hugging, loving and protecting me, full of wisdom, advice, and attention. If she got angry with me, it was always resolved, and if I got angry with her, she always forgave and helped me. All the emotions I didn’t feel I could express in my real life, I could express in my fantasy world with Inside Mum.

There were many reasons I didn’t feel I could safely or regularly express anger or sadness in my real family. Partly it was because I had ceased to be able to; I had cut off my feelings and couldn’t identify them. I would feel pressure build up inside of me, but I couldn’t or didn’t feel like I could safely express it in words.

Sometimes something small would trigger an outpouring of emotion from me like a dam springing a leak, and I remember those as very frightening times. It would feel like I was out of control, and I couldn’t stop it once it had started to come out. I would be told I was overreacting, which I usually was, but when you have held it in over a long period it all builds up and comes out in a rush and over the top.

I think this made it even more important for me not to let it happen again, and so the pressure would build and build, and I would keep tight control until something would happen and it would come out again in a huge explosion of emotion.

If I ever did start to raise my voice, I was immediately told to stop, and so the content of what I was saying was halted, and I rarely bothered to finish expressing what I wanted as I couldn’t without having to suppress all the emotion. It just didn’t work. So thoughts and feelings were kept to myself. I had a lot of anger inside me at times. I was brought up with the following messages; they were repeated to me so often, they became lodged in my head.

“If you haven’t got anything nice to say about someone then don’t say anything.”

“Jealousy is rottenness to the bones.”

“Anger is a poison and not acceptable to God.”

“Put away anger.”

“Clothe yourselves with love.”

Anger was portrayed as something unacceptable, dangerous, and to be “put away.” My experience of anger as a child was that it had caused my Pop’s death, so I needed no encouragement to stay away from it.

Putting aside the memories of what Pop had done to me also meant I put away a lot of the emotion connected to the events. I no longer could feel happiness and sadness and anger all the way through my body. These emotions appeared to drift along the surface of my skin like feathers, and at the same time my chest would feel like it was filled with an enormous heaviness. This all happened, I believe, from the period when the abuse started and over the proceeding years as other events and thoughts buried the emotions further.

Inside Mum stayed permanently with me, and my experience of her was as a real person from my earliest memories until I was approximately forty-four years old. Every single day I communed with her within my psyche, and often I would be lost in my own world with her whilst doing other activities. I would resent being pulled into reality by other people’s speaking to me. I would spend hours a day in my world with her, within make-believe scenarios, and every opportunity I had I would retreat and visit with her in my mind, especially if there were activities where I could do work but not have to think too much about what I was doing.

She was an integral and permanent member of my psychological makeup. I could call on her twenty-four hours a day for advice or comfort or just to tell her something. She was more real to me than any real person, and she often surprised me with her wisdom and advice. I would picture her in my mind, and she would start to speak to me or hug me, and what she would come out with would sometimes be something I hadn’t thought of yet myself. I realise now this was part of my mind speaking to me, but Inside Mum felt totally separate from Inside Me, and her advice often made me feel that this was so.

I only recently realised while looking back at Inside Mum that the Inside Me who interacted with and related to her stayed either at about five years of age or in her early teens. It was like part of my mind watched both of us (like watching television), and I observed and took away information from our interactions. The warmth, joy, and comfort I felt inside during these encounters sustained me.

I would take any scenario where I had felt strong emotion (anger or sadness) to Inside Mum and work it out in some scene or other, often totally different from what was going on in my real life, and in that way I would process emotion. Only nobody else ever got to observe or experience it.

In many ways this made me appear very easy to get along with, but it stopped me from emotionally growing up and developing confidence in dealing with real people and situations. I never had to experience feeling the emotions of anger or sadness or jealousy with real people.

All during this time of growing up, my marriage, and most of my adult life up to my midthirties, I functioned in this manner. I was, from the perspective of someone looking at me from the outside, a highly functioning person. I achieved mostly straight A’s at school and loved learning. I volunteered as a Regular Pioneer within the congregation, which meant I went door to door witnessing my faith to others for a minimum of ninety hours per month. I worked at different jobs to support myself during this time.

After I was married, I helped my husband run his business. I worked in an office. I gave birth to four children over a span of eleven years with all the responsibility that entailed and did it mainly on my own as my husband was often busy with business and congregational duties. At this time I mostly was not working in paid employment outside the home.

So from the outside, I was a fairly together and well-functioning person who seemed busy and happy. I was considered spiritually strong within the congregations I associated with as I stuck closely to the spiritual guidelines The Watchtower Society provided to guide us in our lives. The Jehovah’s Witnesses required us to attend five meetings a week, and I went to all of them. I prepared for them all and participated as well as went door to door and studied with my children from the books The Watchtower Society provided. This was my life for many years.

I had close friendships with people within the congregations based on mutual belief that the Jehovah’s Witness organisation was the truth and on shared activities within it, and through the bonds the children formed and had. Looking back I treasured my friendships within the congregations I was with, but I realise now that right up until the last five years before I left, I shared little of myself with people regarding my real thoughts and feelings. Mostly this was because I was unaware of them myself and had buried so much of what had happened along with my emotions.

Even as a mother and adult, I often felt something lacking within me. Emptiness, a longing for something I couldn’t express or find words for, something more, something greater than me. A black hole would open up at times within me, and it would feel like I would fall in. I would have periods of anxiety and depression and not really know why. I couldn’t feel my heart on an emotional level.

Right from when I started school, I loved to write. I got intense enjoyment from it. In my personal life away from school, I started writing down what I was thinking and feeling when I was about twelve. I would write down thoughts I thought were important and keep them for a short while and then throw them away so they could not be found. My writing became a bridge between my internal world and the real outside world, but I didn’t want anyone to enter my internal world via that bridge and contaminate my safe place, so I would destroy my writing before anyone else could read it.

This writing aspect of me was invaluable especially when I was in my late thirties and actively trying to heal myself emotionally and psychologically. Writing words down gave substance and form to the events, therefore they couldn’t be so easily denied. Written words have power. They evoke emotion, and that emotion demands a response. The response challenged my inert state of depression, and I began to feel more solid and real as a person.

But at first confronting real events from my past, and moving from them being only memories in my internal world to facing them emotionally in my adult world, was challenging.

Real has always been scary.

THE TENNIS COURT

There was a tennis court a couple of houses down from the vacant lot that was next to our flat. It had a huge wire fence that ran all around; it was on a hill and sloped down. At the top end nearest our house, you had to walk down some narrow, concrete steps to get to the bottom and then went through a wire door to get into the courts.

One day after school, I took a racket and ball and went down there. It was a fine sunny day although a bit windy. I started throwing the ball against the wall and hitting it back and forth. I was gradually moving into the corner of the court near the road frontage. The concrete went up really high at that end. It was darker and shadowed in the corner, and with having the brightness of the sun in my eyes, I didn’t see the man there. He suddenly appeared from the shadows.

I remember he was not very tall and had afro hair. He had short shorts on. He had a voice that didn’t sound male or female to me, and so along with his hair I was confused as to which sex he was. I can’t remember what he was saying to me, but he went behind me, and I could hear people’s voices far away and balls being hit by a tennis racket probably down the other end of the court. My hands and knees were touching the concrete wall as he pushed me into it with his body; I remember being in the shade, and the wall was cool to touch.

I noticed how black and dirty the nails on his hands were, and then he put his hand down to my waist. I could feel his breath and hair on my neck, and he was talking in a low voice to me. I remember he said to be quiet and he wouldn’t hurt me. He put his right hand up to the top of my inner thigh and pushed my pants to one side and was touching inside me. I remember his hands being rough, and then he pushed a finger inside me and his fingernail scratched me all the way inside. I pushed back against him with my bottom and he tightened his left arm against my waist and pushed me back against the wall. He told me to be still. He had removed his finger from my vagina and felt for my bottom and inserted his finger roughly in there. It hurt a lot, and he kept jerking me against the wall as he moved his finger around.

I remember my ears had a buzzing sound in them, and my heart was racing so fast I could hear and feel it thumping through my whole body. I could feel his breathing fast against my neck. The next thing I knew, he took his hand away then moved back a step and swung me around to face him. My eyes now had the sun shining in them, and I was squinting and moving my head, trying to shield my eyes. He took my hand and pushed it up his shorts.

He said, “Feel inside me now. Do it.” I remember being terrified to move my hand away and terrified to move my hand forward and then feeling with my finger for his bottom and trying to put my finger in. The sense of shame was so huge, it felt like it engulfed me. My head felt like it was going to explode with pressure. My legs felt like lead, and I wanted to run, but they wouldn’t work on their own.

He then walked sideways with me a few steps until we were right in the corner and pushed with his leg into the back of my knees. I went down onto all fours in the corner. I remember thinking how sore my knees were and how dirty the ground was with dust and papers, and I didn’t want my hands in the dirt.

He was fingering me and pulled my shorts to my knees, and next thing I had pain shooting up through me. He was pushing so hard on my lower back I thought it was going to break, and he kept jerking my waist up with his hand and then fingering me with his other hand and pushing against me again, and the pain would start again, and I felt I was going to die from what he was doing.

Suddenly I was above us, watching him over the top of me, wondering about what I was seeing and what was happening. I saw him move and walk away, and I could see someone on the ground and thought, She’s going to get dirty down there. And then there was a roaring noise in my head, and I was back in my body. The noise stopped, and everything hurt. I pulled up my shorts and stood against the wall with my legs shaking so much I could barely stand.

I suddenly heard my mother’s voice calling my name. Her voice got louder and louder, and then it was way above me, where the fence was above the concrete. I stepped back and looked up and saw her face, and she said for me to come on back home as tea was ready. She sounded annoyed because she hadn’t been able to find me, and I had not heard her calling. Then she disappeared.

I remember I had to keep stopping as I was going up the steps, and I was scared about where the man was. I noticed how bright the sun seemed when I came out at the top. I was walking home, and cars were driving past, and I could hear people and normal noises, and it all seemed unreal. I felt like no one else was seeing me. I wondered how everything could be so loud, normal, noisy, and bright, but everything in me was still and stopped.

My legs felt like they didn’t belong to me. I walked in the kitchen door, and my Mum was in the dining room. My brother, who had already eaten his dinner, was in the bath. My Mum was clearing things away and cleaning and banging things, and she had an angry voice. She wanted to know why I had stayed away so long and was telling me to hurry up and eat my dinner and have my bath as she had visitors coming, and I had to be in my room before they came.

I don’t remember eating my dinner. I remember going in the bathroom, closing the door, and hopping on the toilet, and it stung to pee. There was blood on my pants. I stepped in the bath, and I peed in there as I couldn’t hold on, and it didn’t sting as much, but there was red mixed in with the yellow in the water. It still felt like his finger was in my bottom, and I scrubbed at my hands as my finger had been in his bottom.

I got out of the bath and hid my undies in a towel. I snuck in the kitchen and got some newspaper when Mum was not looking. I wrapped my undies in the newspaper and pushed them to the bottom of the rubbish bin so no one would see. I then went to my room.

My Mum came in the room and sat on the edge of the bed, and she was upset and angry. I started crying. She must have thought it because she was hurrying me to have dinner and telling me off for not hearing her calling or telling her where I was going. I started sobbing, and Mum held both my hands in hers and asked me to be quiet. She said, “Please be quiet, and please be good. I need you to be good tonight. If I tell you why, you must promise not to tell your Dad, otherwise he will be angry I’ve told you.”

So I nodded my head, and Mum said Brother Harry and Brother Geoff, who were both elders in the congregation, were coming over soon to talk to her and Dad. She said Uncle James and she had kissed each other, and it was a bad thing as she was married to Dad and not to Uncle James. She had to say sorry to Aunty Di (Uncle Jame’s wife) and the elders and to Jehovah. I wasn’t to tell anyone, and I had to stay in my room and not come out. She was crying, and I was frightened by her fear. I stayed in my room.

I could hear voices murmuring in the background and doors opening and shutting quietly as people came and went. I wondered why my Mum was in so much trouble for just kissing someone. I felt between my legs, which felt sore and different, and I squeezed them together tight and cried under my pillow for my Mum and myself.

How could I tell my Mum I had stuck my finger up a man’s bum when she was in trouble for kissing a man?

I didn’t want my Dad to be madder if he was already mad at my Mum.

I felt so alone and so lonely. I hurt inside and out.

JANE

Jane was “slow.” She was Aunty Di’s and Uncle James’s youngest daughter. Aunty Di had had German measles when she was seven months pregnant with her. Jane was the only person I can remember ever playing with up to that time who didn’t make me feel awkward or anxious. We just enjoyed being with each other.

Maybe it was because she just accepted me for who I was, and so because of her acceptance I could just relax and be. There was no need for worrying about words, and there was no awkwardness or fear. I loved going to her house, and I loved playing with her. Playing with Jane was my first experience of feeling at ease with another child.

Mostly I remember running through the vast grounds of her house with both her younger brother and mine. Running through the leaves, hiding behind trees, and playing hide and seek. Lying down on the ground and holding hands, just looking up at the sky, each of us giggling and laughing or just being still and quiet.

Although I knew that others did not consider Jane stereotypically pretty or beautiful, to me she was perfect. She was always laughing and loving and would greet me with joy and glee. She could have been described as plain and a bit pudgy, but I loved her softness and roundness. The joy I experienced when with her countered any childhood judgment that may have been within me.

She lived in a huge, rambling, old wooden ex-schoolhouse. Her father was the groundsman for all the gardens that surrounded the house and were still used by the new school. He also was the cleaner. The house was full of rooms filled with games, toys, pencils and drawings, and lumpy beds with different covers on them. It was crammed with books, and the smell of the oil radiators that ran along the walls, toasty warm, permeated the house in winter. The smell of her mother’s cooking biscuits and cakes would waft through the house. We always were being called to stop playing and summoned to eat yummy things. I was in love with being there.

The first time I saw Jane after what had happened to me on the tennis court, I tried to do sexual things to her, and I made her cry. We were playing together in a room, and I pulled aside her pants as she lay on the ground. I said I was the doctor, and she had to lie still. I was intensely interested in her genitalia and how she was the same as me. I got her to turn on her stomach and bunch her knees up under her. After she did that I tried to poke my finger in her bottom. She started to squirm away and say no. I got scared and told her to stop crying and I would stop doing it, but if she told anyone I would never be her friend anymore or come and play. She just looked at me and went quiet.

I suddenly heard her Mum’s footsteps coming through the house calling her name, and the fear that went through me made my mouth go sour. I was so scared she would tell, and I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do if she did. I loved Aunty Di so much, and secretly she was my Inside Mum at the time, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her finding me bad and hating me.

We quickly got up and found her and followed her into the kitchen, where we had drinks and something to eat. I don’t remember much after that. I don’t know if I ever went to their house again because we moved shortly after that to another town as my Dad got a new job. I never wrote to Jane; I was too scared to keep in contact in case what I had tried to do to her came to light.

I lost my best friend.

Whenever I thought of her in the years that followed, I was aware of a physical pain and ache inside my chest, and the hurt felt round and solid and hard.

GROWING-UP YEARS

One thing I used to do to relieve internal pressure, built up from feelings I couldn’t feel as anything but pressure in my chest, was to run the sink full of hot water and place my hands in it as long as I could. Why did I do this? The pain of the water burning my hands would wake me up. It caused me to feel pain physically, to feel alive and not numb.

I would hold my hands under until I couldn’t bear it anymore, and all the pressure inside me would explode into smaller and smaller pieces until it didn’t feel so strongly and overwhelmingly. All the pressure disappeared to a degree, and then I concentrated on the pain in my hands, which I could manage. They would be bright red and sore, and it left me feeling calm. It was a way of coping with inner turmoil and pressure.

I also sometimes would get a ballpoint pen or pencil and push the nib into the soft part of the skin of my hand between my thumb and forefinger. I would push and push until either a little round mark stayed indented there from the pen nib or the lead would create a small hole, and blood would come up. It would have the same effect as the hot water but to a lesser degree, and I could do it more often. It would help me cope with internal states that would become overwhelming for me.

Sometimes, when my Dad left to go to work early, I would wake up and go climb into bed with my Mum. She spent long periods in her room in bed as she was suffering severely from depression. I was desperate to feel close to her. I would cuddle right up as close to her as I dared and slow or speed up my breathing to be exactly the same as hers, feeling her skin, breathing in her scent and feeling safe. I would then try to climb on top of her body so I was lying flat on top of her whether she was sleeping on her tummy or her back—it didn’t matter. She would tolerate it for a few seconds and then tell me to get off or shrug me off.

I would feel just an overwhelming urge to try to be close to her, and this was how I tried to do it. It would always end up with me out of the bed, though, and further away from what I was wanting.

I had been scared of my Dad after he’d come back from Vietnam. After we moved to New Zealand, I came to hate him. I had never really known him as my Dad in Australia. I don’t have many strong, clear memories of him up to the age of nine as he had been away so often.

Hate is a strong word, but that was how I experienced it. The reason for this was based on conversations I had with my mother after she had been in trouble for kissing Uncle James. She would speak me about how Uncle James and she could really talk to each other, and he was so kind, and she was lonely and sad. My Dad couldn’t talk to her like that because he had changed since he had come back from Vietnam.

Then she would say she had done the wrong thing and hurt Aunty Di and Dad, and she was the wrong one. But she had confessed, and she had not gone away with Uncle James like he had invited her to. She never saw him again. I often heard my Mum crying, and I knew from our conversations that she was unhappy with my Dad.

This polarised my relationship with my parents. I had protective and angry feelings toward my mother as she always seemed to be depressed, in bed, crying, compulsively cleaning, and never much fun, and I grew to hate my Dad as I blamed him for our situation being that way.

Although Dad organised for us all as a family to go on hiking and camping holidays, which we enjoyed, it wasn’t until I was in my forties that I came to realise how wrong my childhood perceptions of my father had been. As I came to know him more as a person, I realised what a wonderful man he was—damaged in his own way with post-traumatic stress disorder but doing the best he could with a kind heart.

We left where we had been living to relocate to another town in the South Island of New Zealand as my Dad got a job as caretaker of a primary school. He had been looking for a caretaking job for a while. We would have a house on the property where he was going to work; he would not have to travel away anymore, and he would be working outside and be his own boss, which he wanted. We couldn’t take many belongings as my parents couldn’t afford the cost of transporting them.

It was the middle of winter, cold and raining, when we first arrived at the house. It had no floor coverings or curtains as the previous tenants had taken them, and I remember us all sleeping together on the floor in one room. It didn’t feel like deprivation but an adventure. Mum and Dad could afford to buy furniture only a little bit at a time. We all worked hard cleaning the school during the holidays, scrubbing all the walls, desks, and floors and mopping and sweeping, and Dad would use the great big polishing machine.

Dad and Mum planted a big vegetable garden out front, and we kept chickens out on the side of the house. My room was at the front, and in winter there would be ice formed on the inside of the sash windows. It was very cold. The only heating was a small potbelly stove my Dad had installed in the kitchen and dining area. He kept it going nearly permanently in the winter as it heated the water we used, and it was the only part of the house that wasn’t freezing cold in the winter.

Mum bought a treadle sewing machine for me at that time. I was learning to sew at school, and she would take me to buy material and patterns so I could make clothes for myself. I really enjoyed this activity. I loved the whirr and hum of the machine, and I would get lost in the creation of a garment and in my own inner world as I did it. It was a joyous activity for me although, once again, a solitary one.

There were pianos in many of the classrooms, and I started to have lessons. I would go practise on one after school. Alone in the classroom, with the sun shining through the window, the scent of the oil heaters and polish from the wooden floors, and evidence of children all around me, I enjoyed the solitude and comfort of playing.

I was very attracted as a child to tactile things and scents and colours. Flowers in gardens, animals, birds and butterflies, craft activities, or cooking would break through and disrupt my fantasy world, and I would take notice of them.

My Dad got a cane for physical discipline of my brother and me and hung it in the combined kitchen/dining area, which was where we lived 90 percent of the year. I was embarrassed, as people who visited would comment on it, and Dad would take it down and swish it through the air. Everyone would laugh, but I would feel like dying inside. I didn’t understand what the laughing meant as I was so frightened of that cane.

Sometimes Dad would make us go and get it ourselves instead of him when he was going to hit us with it. Dad’s anger was different from my Mum’s; you would know she was angry as she would scream and yell. My Dad never yelled. His was a quiet anger, and we couldn’t tell when it was coming. So that made it more frightening for me.

Anytime I tried to talk to my Dad when I felt sad or was crying, angry, or raising my voice, he would not talk to me until I “settled down,” and consequently, when I settled down, I never talked to him. Showing emotion was not allowed. It had to be held in, hidden away. Talking without emotion was acceptable, and so was not talking, so as a child who often felt much emotion inside I was too scared to talk in case it came out “wrong” and I got into trouble. I think it was the same for my brother.

I didn’t understand until much later that a lot of this reaction from my father came from the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he suffered after returning from Vietnam. He no longer could express emotion or tolerate anyone else who expressed it. But as a child, I did not know or understand this. I just knew my Dad would be irritated by our presence. Often it was safer to stay out of his way and be quiet. I remember sometimes when I would hurt myself physically by accident and would start crying, Dad was unable to tolerate it.

“Be quiet and stop it,” he would say. “It’s nothing, I’ve seen kids with their legs blown off, and they didn’t make a sound. Listen to all that noise you’re making.”

As a child I felt so rejected and hurt by his reacting like this. Now, having read more on Vietnam veterans and their experiences, I can see that these reactions of his were normal. But that didn’t help me at the time when I was a kid growing up with him.

Being a Jehovah’s Witness and having parents who were as well meant no association at all with anyone who wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness. So no “worldly” non-Jehovah’s Witness friends were allowed, no going to other kids’ after school or them coming back to our place; no celebration of birthdays, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or Easter. In our family we were not even allowed to eat lunch at school if we were close enough to walk home so we wouldn’t have worldly influence on us. This contributed to my feeling isolated and different from all the other children.

Mum once tried to organise for me to go horse riding as I had begged her, but she found out that the woman who ran it was a disfellowshipped witness, so it was cancelled. I was not allowed to go. That was the closest I got to doing something with other kids after school.

My Mum didn’t like to socialise as she felt unwell or depressed most of the time. She had severe depression and anaemia that went undiagnosed and untreated for many years. I think that is why I learnt to love books. We were allowed to read books, and I used to lose myself in them for hours at a time and live the lives of the people in them. My reading was closely monitored though.

I remember once when I was aged about fifteen years, my Mum picked up a book I had brought home from the school library, and she was horrified as it had some sexual references in it. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to read it. She marched into school with me the next day and confronted the principal, a lady who looked to be in her fifties. She calmly listened until my Mum ran out of words to say. I sat there wishing the floor would open up and I could disappear. I tried to keep my eyes firmly focused on the floor.

The principal very gently asked my Mum what it was exactly about the sexual references that she objected to. My Mum said that at age fifteen I shouldn’t have been able to pick up a book from a school bookshelf that described people having intercourse. The principal asked my Mum, “Why not?” My Mum answered that it would encourage that sort of behaviour, which she considered immoral as sex was not appropriate until marriage, and I was way too young for that.

The principal replied that teenagers of my age were sexually maturing and felt this sort of thing, and instead of denying that we had sexual sides they encouraged open discussion about it. My Mum refused to listen and objected to my participating in any sexual education classes at school. Consequently, when everyone else went to them, I had to go sit by myself in the library, the same as when Religious Education was on.

The teachers begged my parents to allow me to go on school camps and they refused, as I would be away from the meetings and with people who didn’t believe the same as me. In my final year of school, I won a place because of scholastic excellence to go on a replica sailing ship called The Spirit of New Zealand for two weeks. I was forbidden to go even though I ached to experience the world outside of what I knew. I didn’t dare rebel. I didn’t even have the courage to argue my case with my parents. I even said I didn’t want to go after initially asking so as to make my parents feel better and to be approved by them, but inside of me I wanted to do these things.

I didn’t know how to function with people who weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses or even with those who were. Partly this was the exclusion and isolation of being a Jehovah’s Witness and the isolation within my family with my Dad’s PTSD and my mother’s depression, but also it was my own crippling internal anxiety.

I knew how to function in the highly structured religious world I existed in as well as within my home, where the rules were clearly laid out for me, and within my own fantasy world in my head. But I wished and wanted with all my heart that I could belong and I could go on the sailing trip, but I wouldn’t dare say that out loud with my real voice.

I conformed, but inside I was desperately unhappy.

GOD

I was very frightened of God as a child, and this carried on through my teenage years. We went to five meetings a week. We had a family Bible study once a week using a publication by The Watchtower Society, which is the voice of the governing body of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We read scripture every morning before we went to school, and we had scriptures to memorise and door-to-door witnessing of our faith to other people on the weekends. There was no reading of literature considered worldly or about other faiths or other ideas. All television and films we watched were strictly monitored.

Our view of the world as children was what we heard taught from the Bible at the meetings. It all lay in the control of Satan the Devil, who invisibly “walked around like a roaring lion” seeking to “devour someone.” This could be any of us who chose to show too much interest in the world or its activities.

The only place to stay safe was within Jehovah God’s organisation, and the only way to stay safe was to adhere strictly to its laws. For everyone not within the safety of God’s organisation, and for everyone not yet baptised and therefore not having the protection of God’s spirit, there was the ever-present danger that if Armageddon came when they were still in this state, they would be destroyed for eternity by God, Jesus, and his angels.

We had a book called Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, which had graphic pictures in it of Armageddon, showing the earth opening up by earthquakes and worldly people falling into the cracks in the ground, which would then close up over them. There were illustrations of scriptures that spoke about people’s skin sliding off, lightning and rocks falling from the sky, buildings collapsing, and people falling to their deaths or running terrified with nowhere to hide.

It was a terrifying prospect to be on the wrong side of God, and we were taught that this war of righteousness was going to come in our generation. We had to be ever vigilant that we were not doing anything of which God would not approve. In one of the congregations we associated with, skirt lengths had to be exactly two inches below the knee and no less or they were considered immoral, and men were allowed to wear only suits with ties and white shirts for meeting attendance. Women were not to wear androgynous clothing or wear their hair in any style that would make them look more like a man than a woman. It was very much left up to the local elders to interpret what was and what was not acceptable, so there could be quite large variations of allowed dress and behaviour from congregation to congregation.

So many things could cause us to lose God’s favour according to The Watchtower (a magazine published by The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society). For married couples spending too much time even thinking about sexual things was condemned, and certain sexual practises were deemed immoral even within marriage, such as oral and anal sex. For single people masturbation was deemed a sin linked to weakness and filthiness. The elders gave talks warning people against succumbing to the practice of it and The Watchtower also printed articles against it.

It was stressed by the elders that God could read all thoughts, and thoughts were as bad as doing the act, so we had to work hard to eliminate all wrong thinking from our mind as God would judge us even on this. Any confession of wrongdoing had to be made to the elders, even about things we heard about, so God’s Spirit would not be removed from the family or the whole congregation. Wives and husbands told on each other, and children on their parents, and friends on each other, for fear of losing God’s Spirit.

The elders talked about rape and The Watchtower wrote about it, discussing how, if a woman did not scream she was consenting to the sexual act even if it were forced upon her. After listening to one of these talks in the Kingdom Hall one day, I came to the realisation that I had been raped on the tennis court. There was a name for it. To my horror I realised that because I had not screamed or cried out for help, I was guilty of consent in the eyes of God. In the talk that was given, the Old Testament scriptures were discussed where the woman was led out of the city and stoned to death when she was found guilty. I had nightmares for years about being found out or, at Armageddon, the ground opening up and my falling in, and my family seeing and knowing I had done something obviously really bad to be killed by God.

I’d had an acute awareness of my body since Pop had started to touch me and even more after the rape. I would touch myself when I was alone to comfort myself even though I was still very young. It was almost a form of self-reassurance or self-healing that let me know that I was real and okay. But with all the talks on masturbation, I couldn’t help but feel even more dirty, tainted, evil, and bad. I was horrified that God could see me and know what I was doing as I couldn’t hide anything from him even my thoughts.

I remember getting obsessed about whether my hymen had been broken after hearing a scriptural talk mentioning it at a meeting. We had a reference book called Aid to Bible Understanding, a big, thick, blue book that was an A to Z of Bible questions and explanations. I remember looking up the word virgin in it multiple times as well as looking up back issues of The Watchtower magazines (which went back to the early 1900s) to try to determine if I were technically still a virgin or not. It spoke about the Hebrews having a cloth a bride put under her on her wedding night that was then shown to all the people the next day with blood on it, so everyone would know the bride was a virgin. If she weren’t she could be stoned to death.

I was haunted by worries. When I got married, should I wear white? Would my husband know I was no longer a virgin? How would he know? Had my hymen been torn? Had the blood in the bath been from my bottom or my vagina?

I worried and was anxious so much over these things. I would take a mirror and try to look at my hymen, and I couldn’t tell if it was intact, and I was scared. I thought about my not screaming or fighting back against the man on the tennis court, and I felt fearful I had to make it up to God and show how sorry I was.

I know my Mum’s friends often mentioned to her how they wished their teenagers were as good and spiritual as I was; my mother passed these comments on to me with pride.

All I felt was fear along with a sense of being dirty and bad, and a strong desire and need to strive therefore to be “good.”

PETER

Soon after we had moved to the schoolhouse, a really nice older couple from the local congregation called Peter and Helena Williams visited and befriended us. Peter instantly took a shine to me, and I did to him. He must have been in his early sixties.

Why did I instantly connect with Peter? Because he was the first male in the outside world, and not in my head, who listened to me, looked at me, showed an interest in me, and seemed to like me genuinely. He held my hand, stroked my cheek and hair, and hugged me. I felt like I was in heaven when I was with him. It was like having lived in a state of nonexistence and then coming alive.

“How is my little English rose?” he would say, or, “What a sight for sore eyes. I’ve been waiting all day just to see you.”

Having an adult say such things to me was a new experience at eleven years old—an adult who wanted to be with me; who wanted to talk to me, touch me, and hold me; and who liked me. It was like my heart blossomed and exploded with happiness. It was like my Inside Dad had come alive and was real flesh and blood. I had someone who would hug me, say he loved me, hold my hand, kiss me, play with me, tease me, and treat me like a little princess.

When I was in Peter’s company, I felt alive, and when I wasn’t I felt dead. I can’t remember when it went from normal hand holding and tickling and touching to more intimate kisses, touching, and talk. It all blends in together. I do know and remember that at times we would be sitting talking, and then I would be too embarrassed to open my eyes, and then afterward it would be like nothing had happened.

I remember feeling loved, special, embarrassed, scared, close to him, and nervous all at the same time. He would talk to me of his past and his unhappiness with his wife, and he would often say he wished he were twenty years younger so he could marry me and be with me forever.

I remember how much I loved his compliments on my skin, my teeth, my tongue, my eyelashes, my eyes, my hair, everything. When we were alone together, often hopping in his car to back down the driveway for him to take me home, he would give a big sigh and say, “I have waited for this all day.” He would kiss me full on the lips and caress the inside of my legs and the rest of my body. I would hold my breath with the feelings it would generate in me and stay as still as possible.

I would dream and fantasize of our running off together or of his wife dying so we could marry and be together. I would dream of living as husband and wife in his house and cooking his dinners, and of us sitting in the evenings cuddled up watching television or talking together, and of being intimate. I would think how wonderful it would be to be together and go to bed together and wake up together and never having to leave him.

He used to say how much he hated saying good-bye to me and how much he wished I were with him all the time. I longed every minute I wasn’t with him to see him again and for moments in time we could snatch where he would cuddle, touch, and kiss me.

I never experienced it as wrong or bad.

I never felt abused or victimised by him.

I felt loved by and special around him.

I felt like an equal participant in our love, and I wanted him to do what he did to me, and I wanted more than what was happening although I couldn’t articulate that as I always closed my eyes and went still when it was happening. It wasn’t something I could openly acknowledge with my eyes open and with words.

I can see now I was an eleven-year-old girl, and he was a man in his sixties, and there was no equality in age or experience or anything. I felt back then, though, that it was so unfortunate he had met Helena and fallen out of love before he had met me. But I was willing to wait for him in my eleven-year-old mind.

It went on like this until I was seventeen years old.

I understand I could have had love for him without his sexualising it, but I wonder if I sexualised it first. I closed my eyes when things felt sexual, and then I fantasized so much of what I wanted to happen that a lot of things are blurred and fuzzy, and I don’t know how many times things happened, what actually did happen, and what was fantasy.

It is all confused in my mind.

During the early times when things started to happen with Peter, I went through a brief period of wetting and defecating in my bed. I remember the shock and shame of waking up in that state and getting up and trying to clean the sheets without my Mum and Dad finding out. I don’t know if they woke up and I made up an explanation or if they never did. I don’t remember. Maybe it was my body’s way of saying what was happening was too much for me. I don’t know.

I remember during these years with Peter, I stopped being able to pray. I remember my intense fear of God had settled into an adolescent’s questioning why he hadn’t protected me from being raped, especially as at that time there had been many talks of the persecution of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in Malawi and Mozambique, and accounts of some of them praying to God and their lives being miraculously saved.

Why did God save some and not others?

Why were some raped and killed and not others if all were praying for help?

What sort of God chooses some and not others?

How does he choose?

I’d ask questions of other witnesses, and they would say, “He can read the heart,” and so he would know who was sincere. Then I would feel guilty and abandoned, thinking I must have been bad in my heart and God could see, so he didn’t protect me.

This feeling eventually grew into an anger I don’t consciously remember feeling as anger. What started to happen was that every time I would start to pray or think of the name Jehovah, swear words would fly out of nowhere in my head, from my mind to God. I would try to ignore or apologise, but eventually the swear words outshouted my praying voice inside my head, and I would have to stop. To say this terrified me was an understatement.

I remember looking in The Watchtower and Awake index volumes under swearing to try to see if anyone else had had this problem and what to do about it, but I never found anything remotely like it and so felt even more abnormal and ashamed. I was so sure I would be destroyed at Armageddon.

I would bury my head in my pillow and, with soundless and tearless sobs, beg God to forgive and pardon me and tell him I was sorry. I wondered if I were demonised. If God read my thoughts and heart, and they were filled with all these filthy words, what must he have thought of me?

I had no idea where this voice came from or why. I couldn’t stop it. In fact the harder I tried, the worse it got. I would say over and over to God, “Please just read my heart, please don’t listen to my mind. Please forgive me, and make my heart pure and good.”

At some stage after all this had started happening, a policeman came to our class one afternoon to give a talk on sexual abuse, good touching, and bad touching and what to do if someone did this to us or tried to. He gave out leaflets. I thought about this for a couple of days. The policeman became my Inside Dad in my head. I walked past the police station on my way home from school, and, after spending ages trying to pluck up the courage, I walked in and went up to the front desk. A policeman came out and asked me what I wanted; I handed over the card I had been given at school and asked for the other officer by name. The man told me he was away on holiday, but I could tell him what it was about, and he would try to help me.

I had not anticipated this at all and had no answer or way of knowing how to respond. I had rehearsed inside of my head talking to this policeman I had seen at the school, liked, thought was kind, and bonded with in my head, but I had no sense of what to say to this stranger in front of me. I walked out and never went back.

As my attachment to Peter grew stronger, so did my dependence on him instead of my internal world for protection, I did not see me as a victim, and the whole idea of abuse was lost to my mind. I do not know what I would have told the policeman if he had been there that day. I was still so loyal to Peter and loved him so much.

During that time Peter and his wife had opened up a whole new world to me outside of my family. I was introduced to books on subjects I had never known existed. I was taken to the theatre, to movies, and to the ballet when they came to town. Peter also had a huge garden that incorporated both vegetables and show-quality flowers; he explained things about them to me, and I was intensely interested.

I sometimes still felt full of self-hate and shame in relation to my body, and the only relief I felt came when I was with Peter. At the same time, contributing to the feelings of guilt were the feelings of sexual arousal engendered by being with him. A lot of this, I now know, came from the kissing and touching by Peter. There were signs in my behaviour that things were happening to me, but no one knew about it.

On one weekend I was very exhibitionist toward my brother. I was about fourteen years old, and he was about twelve. It occurred during a weekend that we had a two-day Circuit Assembly (A Circuit Assembly is where a number of congregations come together for one weekend to listen to talks and presentations). I had sewn a new red and white dress to wear to it with a matching bolero jacket. We had a family from the West Coast of New Zealand whose Mum and Dad were staying in their caravan parked next to the fence in the car park of the school. I had to share my brother’s room as one of their adult children had my room.

I remember both mornings being in my brother’s room and stripping off my pyjamas as he lay in bed awake, and I was fully aware he was watching. I put my bra on and off, on and off. I did this both mornings over that weekend. I remember the light from the sun that filtered through the curtains blocking the window in his room. I heard others moving about in the house and talking whilst we were in the room with the door shut, and time seemed to have stilled. My physical and emotional senses were heightened by the knowledge that someone could walk in the room at any moment and catch me out, the slight edge of danger, and the slight sexual arousal of engaging in a voyeuristic activity.

This behaviour of mine was not planned but was a decision made in a split second of time when I had to make the choice to strip off in the room or go out to the bathroom down the hall. I don’t remember any conscious thought process occurring in the split second when I chose to stay. I don’t know why I stood there taking my bra on and off in front of my brother before eventually getting dressed. No words were said between us, and it was not mentioned again.

It was one of those moments in time that occurred over about five minutes but, on reflection, might have been a precipitating factor to a devastating event that followed.

My brother, soon after this occurred, was discovered flashing himself before a girl in the playground of the primary school where my father was caretaker. The mother of the girl went to the headmaster and threatened to go to the police unless action was taken. My father was called in, and the only action the mother would agree upon in order not to go to the police was if my brother was caned in front of the headmaster, the girl, and her mother, and if he would apologise and agree never to do it again.

So that was what happened.

My mother later said my father cried after it, and I think something in my brother died that day. My father had done what he thought was right to stop the woman from going to the police, but nobody thought about what might have happened to make a young boy act like my brother had done.

Instead of his getting help, which might have occurred if they had gone to the police, he was humiliated, punished, and made to feel shame and rejection.

Maybe my brother was also protecting me. I don’t know. I used to try to protect him from Pop as a child, but more often than not I would run away and hide and leave him instead of staying in the same room. I was only a little girl myself. My mind condemns me, but I have to look at a photo of me and see how little I really was at the time and in need of a protector, not having to try to do it all on my own.

How do you live with feeling like a victim and a victimizer at the same time?

REALITY

Toward the end of my schooling, I was the dux of my school. I completed and passed my university-entrance exam. I had decided I wanted to study to be a radiologist. That meant moving to Dunedin and studying for two or three years full time. I was discouraged to do so as the Jehovah’s Witnesses looked upon it as a worldly career, and why work for a system that would be ending soon at Armageddon when I could be working for God? So I put aside my ambition and threw myself into doing what I thought was God’s will.

I obtained a cadetship in a local government organisation for one year full time, so I left school. My parents wanted me to work full time initially so I could earn enough for a car and get some savings before I worked part time and started pioneering. This made logical sense. So I did that. And then I started regular pioneering, which meant ninety hours of door-to-door witnessing a month on top of the five meetings and other Bible studies. This was volunteer, unpaid work. I held two part-time jobs to support myself.

Just before I stopped working full time, things with Peter came to a head and led me into a period of my life that was one of the unhappiest I have ever experienced. My parents and brother had organised to go on a tramp (hike) with other members of the congregation after travelling to and attending a District Convention in Dunedin. A District Convention is a four-day gathering of about twenty congregations that meet in one town to listen to Bible talks.

I had never been able to manage tramping without consistently getting migraines and vomiting, so it was organised that I stay with Peter and Helena whilst my parents and brother were away for the week, as they didn’t want me staying in the house on my own.

Over the years, from about the age of sixteen up to that time, the intensity I had felt toward Peter had diminished a little bit. He was still an integral part of my life, but other adolescent crushes and dreams had started in my heart, and Peter’s possessiveness and my own growing self-awareness had led to the realisation that a future life with him was likely just a dream.

I had developed feelings over a period of a few weeks for a man called James Smith. He was ten years older than I was. He had been out of the Jehovah’s Witnesses for about ten years, had been living overseas for some of that time, and, according to local congregational rumour, had taken drugs and had sex. He showed interest in me as a person. I was intrigued by this difference, and the fact he had rebelled aroused in me, I am sure, some unconscious admiration. I had too great a fear to attempt this myself, but someone who had lived outside the witnesses and then returned—well, there was something about which I was curious! There was a lot of eye contact and flirting, and even though we usually only met and spoke whilst involved in the door-to-door witnessing work, we had snatched enough moments of conversation to notice an electricity between us to which we both were drawn.

James told me I was beautiful and gave me compliments. Whenever I would look around, he was watching me intently from wherever he was. It was that exciting, heart-pounding attraction that is based on feelings, imagination, and dreams rather than reality. But it felt strong, real, and intense.

To feel wanted by someone else and the object of their attention and desire is a powerful thing for anyone let alone a girl with low self-esteem and a desire to be loved and to give love.

One day, after he dropped me at my parents’ house after a morning’s witnessing, he asked to come back and pick me up in his car, to go with him on a Bible study. I said yes, and he dropped me off at home as otherwise I had no way of letting my parents know where I would be, and they were expecting me. My father said no to this as soon as he found out and flatly refused to allow it.

“You are only seventeen years old, and the man is nearly thirty! What is his interest in a young girl like you? He should know better than to ask you to go out with him when you will both be alone in the car together. That is showing no respect for you and your reputation.”

“Dad, I have no way of contacting him before he returns to get me after lunch. He is going to be here in only an hour’s time. We are only going on a Bible study. Why can’t you trust me?”

“It’s not you I don’t trust! There will be no more discussion about it. You are not to go with him.”

“But I can’t contact him to tell him so he doesn’t drive all the way back here to get me. This is not fair. I will be so embarrassed. What am I going to tell him?”

“You go with your mother on her Bible study. She is leaving in half an hour. I will tell him you aren’t going as I forbid it, and I will tell him why.”

I was mortified and terribly disappointed. I shed some tears but hardly had a moment to think before I had to hop in the car and go out with my mother on the Bible study she was conducting. I remember the whole time she was driving, she kept patting my knee, telling me it was for the best, and saying James wasn’t a good man as he should have considered the position in which he was putting me.

All I kept saying was he wasn’t putting me into any position, and he probably just wanted to spend time with me. She then told me what she knew of his past (which I already had heard from gossip by others) and said if someone had shown they couldn’t be trusted once to obey Jehovah then they were unlikely to be trustworthy again. She also told me I was naïve about men and that a man gets sexually aroused much more easily than a woman, and this was why the organisation had the direction for a couple not to be alone together without a chaperone—to prevent sexual sin from occurring.

All I wanted was to spend a few more hours in James’s presence. We hardly would be able to engage in much discussion or sexual sin whilst he was conducting a Bible study, but I sat in silence after my initial objections, in turmoil and distress, wondering what was happening back at the house. When I returned with my mother, my Dad was out in the garden, and James was not mentioned. I was frantic to see him at the next meeting.

I went over to Peter’s house to tell him how upset I was about it all. He told me he already knew what had happened as my Mum and Dad had phoned and told him, and he had taken it upon himself to tell James to stay away from me. He told me James was no good for me as he had been out in the world and done wrong things, and I was a virgin and needed to marry someone who was better than James, so he had told James he should leave me alone. I was horrified.

Within that week James left the congregation, and I never saw him again. I was absolutely devastated. Everyone in the congregation was stunned at James’s moving away as he had relocated as a pioneer to help the congregation, and no one knew why he had up and left so suddenly and never said good-bye to anyone. But I knew why.

It was the first time I remember feeling close to hate for Peter.

I remember saying, “How dare you tell him he is no good for me?”

The anger I felt inside toward Peter and the rage at him for interfering in my life led to my actually crying at night into my pillow for the first time in a long time. If I had known how to get to James or where he was, I would have run away to be with him, but I didn’t have a clue how to do that.

When I had been with Peter in the last few months, if I had pulled away when he’d touched me, he would react by drawing away, removing all affection, and not talking to me. It didn’t take long before I responded again. Gradually over the years, the talking and affection had decreased, and now it seemed more and more like him complaining about his marriage to me and just wanting to touch. I felt less loved and wanted and more used, but I was still too confused in myself to do anything about it.

Also, when I had started doing the cadetship, Peter’s wife had started to meet me nearly every week for lunch at a nearby restaurant. It was the first time we had spent individual time together, and I was growing to be fond of her. I would look forward to her meeting with me, and our spending this time together. After I left the cadetship and was working part time at a solicitor’s, we still continued to meet for lunch regularly. So I was pulling away from Peter emotionally.

I was dreaming also of travelling and so mixed up with my sense of obligation to pioneer, the pressure from the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation, and my own conscience and guilt, there were dreams and hope of seeing more of the world alive in my heart.

So when I stayed for this week with Peter and Helena, things came to a head. Peter was jealous and resentful of the amount of time I spent away from the house. I would go down the road and have cups of tea and talk to an elderly lady who was studying the Bible; she reminded me of Nana in some ways. I was trying to stay away from Peter that week as much as I could, as I was angry with him, especially over what had happened with James.

I went home one day, and he was washing his car in the driveway. He snapped at me for being out, and I remember snapping back about his not being my father and saying I was old enough to be out in the day without having to tell him where I was. He said something back that upset me, and I remember getting my bike and riding all the way back to my house in the suburbs. I sat on the doorstep as I couldn’t get in, and I cried and cried.

I don’t know how long I was there, but Peter turned up. He didn’t say anything except to tell me to get in his car, and he put my bike in his boot and tied it down. I went and sat in the front seat. We sat in his car in the empty teachers’ car park at the school, and I closed my eyes. I said nothing, and he said nothing for what seemed to be a long time. He eventually drove back to his house with me.

The next day in his house, he walked into my bedroom as I was getting dressed and shut the door behind him. He walked up to me and put his arms around me. I could feel that he had an erection pushing against me. Suddenly I had just had enough. I violently pushed him away, and he got such a shock.

He stared at me, and I must have had a look of pure hate on my face because he walked out silently and quietly shut the door behind him.

My parents returned that night, and I went home and never went to Peter and Helena’s house, rang them, or willingly spoke to them again.

GOSSIP

It was very noticeable to both families when I suddenly refused to speak to or visit Peter and Helena.

If they rang I wouldn’t talk. If they came over to visit us at our home, I would disappear. If my parents would visit them, I would opt to stay at home. My mother and father kept asking me what was wrong, and I would say, “Nothing.”

My mother said it was “unchristian and embarrassing,” and she put it down to teenage behaviour and moods and told Peter and Helena that.

Looking back I can see that Peter must have been terrified I would say something. At the same time that my Mum and Dad were trying to maintain a friendship with them, in spite of my behaviour, they started to hear from others in the congregation that Peter and Helena were saying terrible things about them.

My parents applied the scriptural counsel to speak firstly to the one wronging them, and they repeatedly visited Peter and Helena, who would deny the accusations even though many people were telling my parents what they were saying. I don’t know exactly what Peter and Helena were saying to others about my parents, but my parents couldn’t understand why they were and why this was happening.

It was extremely distressing especially to my mother. She started to keep a diary of what was being said and writing everything down in it as she was getting so confused by the whole situation. She did not understand why people she had felt so close to had suddenly turned against her; they had been like parents to her, and she could think of nothing she or my father had done to make things change.

One episode in particular stood out in my parents’ minds. My mother told me about it years later. My father and her had gone to Peter and Helena’s house to try to make peace over hurtful gossip that was being spread by them, and all Peter did was attack them verbally. They both got up and walked out of the house, and, as they were going down the driveway, Peter yelled out to them, “Anyway, you haven’t even taught your daughter anything about sex.”

Because their conversation hadn’t even touched on me, my Mum thought this was very strange, and she wrote it down in her diary. Shortly after this she had a major nervous breakdown. I felt so much responsibility for it. Part of me felt the hate campaign was spearheaded by Peter to discredit my family’s reputation in the congregation in case I tried to say anything about him. I felt I could do nothing to stop it and could see the results in my mother’s breakdown and emotional state, and I felt I was the cause of it.

During that time I still saw Peter at all the meetings we had to attend each week at the Kingdom Hall. He would brush past me accidentally or make sure he got in close proximity—close enough that when I looked up, I could have touched him, and he would be looking at me. It was torture week after week, and I became a master at and super vigilant about trying to avoid him, being aware of him close by, and not meeting his eyes. Emotions would always be running high in me.

The two years from when I stopped seeing Peter until I met my future husband were the worst in my life. I felt bereft over losing Peter and his affection at the same time as I wanted nothing to do with him, and I felt huge anger at the distress he caused my family, especially my mother, whom had done nothing wrong.

Even though I would hate him at times, I also missed the special feeling of being loved and wanted that I had gained from being with him. I felt alone, guilty, and bad. I would think of ways to commit suicide and constantly wished I were dead.

In the week that things came to a head at Peter’s house and I finally walked out, never to return, I was working part time at a solicitor’s job, sharing the work with another witness girl on whose recommendation I had been employed. I rarely saw the other girl as we worked different shifts, but I saw Trudy a lot and liked her. She was responsible for employing and managing us and was approximately in her fifties.

I felt like a fish out of water as I had when I’d worked with other adults during my cadetship. I would take my morning tea on my own so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone else and never accepted invitations anywhere as I was obeying what I had been taught: not to associate socially with worldly people. Eventually they gave up asking me. I would enjoy listening to the other girls talk as all our desks faced in toward each other, but I was happy to put my earplugs in and just do the Dictaphone typing.

During the week after I had walked out of Peter’s, I was extremely stressed over what had happened with him. Trudy asked me to stay late and type letters as the office was inordinately busy. I stayed until nearly 7:00 p.m., and the next day when I went in Judy called me into her office.

Every single letter I had typed was illegible, and there were more than fifty of them. I had no memory of typing the night before at all. Trudy told me one of the partners wanted me fired, but she had talked him out of it as this was the first time this had happened, and she wanted an explanation. I mumbled something about stress at home, and I was sorry. I wanted the ground to open and swallow me up. I couldn’t meet her eyes especially as she was being kind.

She had already retyped all the letters early that morning. A week after that, I resigned as I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of going in each day and everyone knowing the huge mistake I had made.

I was so humiliated, I couldn’t bear the thought of it happening again, and as I couldn’t remember typing or being aware of all the mistakes I had made, I knew it could happen again. I was confused and upset and didn’t know how to handle the failure or the social interaction, so I left.

I got work at a farm where a father and son packaged sugar for one of the airline companies, and I just had to count the packets and weigh them every so often. It was mindless, and the son was sleazy and kept groping me, but it was preferable to having failed so publicly in other people’s eyes.

I also worked part time at a fish-and-chip shop owned by a Chinese man who spoke limited English. He was happy with my work and couldn’t speak much to me, so I didn’t have to interact with him socially. I just went and did what he had shown me by example to do, and sometimes he left me in charge.

Once again I was doing solitary activities, but now it was more by choice as I was acutely aware of my embarrassment, limitations, and anxiety in this area. I desperately wanted to belong but had absolutely no idea how. People would ask me about my weekend; I had been door-to-door witnessing for four hours on Saturday and then read books and gone to bed, and on Sunday I’d had a two-hour meeting and then gone home and helped my mother clean or something. I had nothing to share they could relate to or that would not make me feel different, so I would say, “Nothing much” and shrug my shoulders, and people would cease trying.

The year after I stopped seeing Peter as a friend, father, and lover, I cried often in my pillow. I would cry with all the motions of crying, but no tears would come out. I would be doubled up in pain in my bed, gasping, moaning, and hyperventilating sometimes, but no tears would come, and instead of release of emotion there would be a buildup of pain and pressure. I would burn my hands in hot water from the tap. They would be raw and red and covered in eczema. I would get a sewing needle and scrape my stomach and legs until they bled. It occasionally would bring some physical pain and then literal tears, and I would feel just slightly relieved.

My self-hate reached new heights. I dreamt of running away, and again thought of suicide. I felt totally isolated and unable to communicate to anyone how I really felt. I spent hours in my internal fantasy world. I read often and voraciously.

I had one friend called Ann to whom I related. A friend of my Mum’s had met her whilst going door to door witnessing and commenced studying the Bible with her. Ann was unhappy as she felt isolated because of her weight and had low self-esteem; her Dad had died, her Mum was quite elderly and deaf, and Ann was her carer. Ann was the same age as me. Although I sat and listened to her talk, I wonder, looking back, why I never shared anything real of me with her. My upbeat outside self who knew being a friend meant listening and being fun did not know how to share the emotions of sin, guilt, and fear with anyone.

I loved the times I went to Ann’s house. I was allowed to go because she was studying the Bible and therefore was not seen as a worldly associate. I felt accepted and wanted by her, and so some of the anxiety I felt with others wasn’t there when I was with her. I loved her many cats and the lived-in mess of her house. I think in some ways it recreated the acceptance and comfort I had felt twelve years previously when I had been a friend of Jane’s. I could totally relax and listen to Ann share her pain in regard to her self-esteem issues related to her weight and the problems she experienced with her family. I was a good listener.

She would shout at her Mum at times, and her Mum would shout back, and her brother and her would argue. I had never seen or experienced anything like this before as none of those emotions were shown in my house. It was all very fascinating to me. Ann told me she envied me my family. I didn’t understand what she meant by that; I envied her family. When I asked her why, she told me my mother always cooked lovely meals, we all ate at the table together, my Dad joked with her all the time, and the house always looked clean and tidy unlike her own.

I found these positives hard to fathom as, although my Dad had a dry sense of humour that we all loved, it came out in force only when we had visitors, and that was not often. I certainly couldn’t see any merit in an ultra-clean and tidy house. I looked at Ann’s family and saw how they really shared feelings, emotions, and physical affection, and I envied that aspect. We both therefore gained different things from our friendship with each other. Ann was one of the only good things in my life during that period.

I didn’t go out with anyone except for witnessing. I never got invited out to movies or anything. I suppose I was an oddball even to witness kids. I only knew how to talk about the truth (as Jehovah’s Witnesses refer to their faith) or the Bible. I didn’t know how to hold a conversation on anything else; I could fake it enough to fit in a bit but not to feel comfortable or that I really belonged. I saw others around my age at times after witnessing, but I felt painfully shy and embarrassed, and I would feel much more comfortable talking to their parents than with them.

After I started to date my future husband, I just stopped seeing Ann. I have no idea why I did this when she had meant so much to me. I was so focused on creating a new outside life for myself that might actually have been close to my inside world that I ignored everything else. Being able to compartmentalise my life resulted in my cutting off people and activities at times with an apparent coldness on which it is hard for me to reflect. It was never my intention to be callous, and I never realised how it would affect others at the time. It is only on reflection that I can think about how terrible it must have appeared to those whom had once felt close to me.

My mother returned to the United Kingdom for six weeks to visit her father and family for the first time since she had emigrated. She had invited me along if I paid for myself, and I had been planning on selling my car to do so. However, I had just met Leonard (whom I would later marry), and he had started ringing me nightly, and so I changed my mind about going. I was scared I would come back and he would have lost interest.

For the first time since James and Peter, someone was showing an interest in being with me and liking me, and it was like a drug to me. I couldn’t give up the possibility of what it might lead to. My mother went to the United Kingdom, and six weeks after she got back Leonard and I got engaged. We had known each other for twelve weeks.

MARRIAGE

Leonard was fourteen years older than I was. He was the oldest of seven children and he had been born into a Jehovah’s Witness family. He was a special pioneer. This meant witnessing for 140 hours a month. He had been one for many years, and it was considered only one step away from being a missionary in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Therefore he was considered very spiritual.

Apparently he had visited the congregation I had been part of three years previously. During the congregational meeting he had attended, where I had been sitting in the audience, he never spoke to me but turned to his friend who he was with and said, “I am going to marry that girl.”

His friend had laughed, as I was only sixteen years old and he was nearly thirty at the time, but he told me it was an absolute knowing that went through him, and he had no doubt it would eventually happen. Much later on, when I researched my family history, I found out my grandfather and my father had had the same experience when they had seen the women they eventually married.

When Leonard moved back to the area a few years later as a special pioneer assigned to help a congregation that neighboured ours, he would go to his meeting and then come over to our congregation and go to our meeting so he could see me. He asked for my phone number and started to ring me every night.

Looking back at this time I can see that all our conversations, which lasted for hours, were deep discussions of what I considered at the time to be spiritual truths and Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. We discussed people we had talked to that day while out witnessing or with whom we conducted Bible studies, but there was no sharing of feelings or differing thoughts. It was all conducted on a safe, unemotional level, but in my naivety it felt close and intimate to me.

I was full all of a sudden with dreams of owning my own home—somewhere I could make mine that would be safe and secure. I had dreams of children and cooking, of being cuddled and cared for, and caring for Leonard and my children. It all was a dream in my head that I was going to be able to make happen.

I would be able to make my inside world real in the outside world at last.

Leonard came over once a week and studied a book with me called Making Your Family Life Happy published by The Watchtower Society. It outlined the role of husband and wife according to scripture and what would be helpful to consider in those roles from a scriptural viewpoint for those considering marriage. I thought with all my heart I was laying the groundwork for a strong and happy marriage.

The husband was taught to be the “head” of the wife as Christ was head of the congregation, and although he was counselled to listen to his wife’s requests and needs, he had the ultimate authority. The wife was looked on as a compliment to her husband and a support. Neatly pressed clothes, dinner on the table, and clean and well-disciplined children all were within the wife’s realm. I thought, I can do all that. It will be okay. Anger was looked on as something to be avoided; calm and logical discussions of differences would solve all issues.

Leonard and I talked about pioneering together and moving to an area where we would be wanted and needed more as support for an isolated congregation. Jehovah’s Witnesses were encouraged to socialise only with those within their congregations, and some congregations were made up of only twenty or thirty people and had vast country areas of territory to be covered in the door-to-door witnessing activity. Ideally all the territory assigned to each congregation was covered at least once a month. Some congregations were lucky to cover their territories once a year.

We also talked about both our wishes to have children. Leonard was from a large family and wanted a large family, and I, being from a small family and feeling so isolated with my own emotional issues, loved the idea of having lots of children to love.

Leonard owned his own car, and I had $6,000 saved in a bank account. He had travelled a lot, which I had never done, and had owned his own business. He felt like someone who could look after me and who knew how to move and live in the outside world, in which I felt so scared and foreign. To me he represented a whole new life and a way out of my unhappiness.

I genuinely felt like I was in love with him and him with me. Looking back now I can see we barely knew each other. We had no real emotional intimacy or knowledge of each other outside of our roles in the congregation and our spiritual discussions. We had snuck a few kisses when he was saying good-bye to me after visiting my house, and my whole physical self longed for what I had felt with Peter. I couldn’t wait to be physically close to Leonard.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses reserve sex for marriage; in some congregations dating couples are not even allowed to hold hands. Most have to be chaperoned everywhere they go by another adult, so it is very difficult to have private conversations. I thought I was happy as nothing bad was happening.

Now I realise that a lack of bad does not mean love.

The whole congregation was invited to our wedding. That is how a lot of weddings happened in Jehovah’s Witnesses. The congregation cooked and catered all the food. Mum and I made the cake, and she had a person down the road ice it for us. Invitations went out for the dinner, more than a hundred, and an open invitation to the evening. Local witnesses would provide the entertainment. Singing kingdom songs, square dancing, and little skits usually based on a Bible theme were organised as the entertainment.

We invited Peter and Helena to the wedding. My parents said it would be wrong not to invite them when everyone else was invited. I gave up resisting and focused on my future. After my wedding my Dad told me that Peter had cried all the way through it. They did not come to the evening, but Peter returned by himself, pressed money into Leonard’s hand, and said to him, “Tell Jenny I am sorry for everything, and I wish you both all the best.” This made no sense to Leonard; as many people were giving him money that evening, he just thought it had to do with the gossip Peter had spread about my parents, which I had told him about.

When he told me this later, during our honeymoon, I knew what Peter had meant. He had meant sorry for what had happened sexually between us and sorry for all the trouble he had caused my parents with things he had said.

But it was all too little and too late. I pushed him out of my mind and tried to move forward with my life.

LOUISA

The first I heard of Louisa’s abduction was on the television news one night in 1986. She had gone missing on her way home from school. She was only six years old.

I immediately recognised her as the little girl I used to sit and look after whilst I accompanied a witness friend on a weekly Bible study he conducted with Louisa’s father. I had recently gotten married and moved to a different congregation when the news of the abduction came on the television, but it had been only a few months since I had regularly been in contact with her.

My friend went weekly to study the Bible with Bob, who was originally from Fiji. Bob and his sister used to look after his children, Louisa and her little brother, Michael. I believe Bob and his wife were separated at the time. I used to sit and keep the children amused and quiet so my companion could study with Bob a book used by The Watchtower Society to teach Jehovah’s Witness doctrines. Bob lived in a small house, and he was always welcoming. He would make us drinks and offer us something to eat.

Bob was quiet; my friend did most of the talking, and I would get the feeling that Bob let us in out of politeness and good manners. He was curious about what we were saying but had no intention of changing his religious beliefs. My friend would take an hour or so to go over just two or three paragraphs of the book, helping Bob to read the English as he went along. It was more an English lesson and social visit than anything else, but my friend was convinced he was getting the point across he wanted to make each time and would talk animatedly if he felt Bob was accepting the reasoning he was making.

Later on I heard that on the day Louisa disappeared, there had been a misunderstanding about who was meant to be picking her up from school. I don’t know if this was true. Louisa had started to walk home on her own, and on the way a man had abducted her. The man turned out to be Peter Joseph Holdem. He took little Louisa to the Waimakairiri River, where many people driving over the bridge that day saw him standing with her. It is believed he sexually assaulted her, although that could never be proven, and then drowned her in the river, which was where her body was eventually recovered.

All I could think of as I saw the images of Louisa’s little face on television was how tiny she was, how frail and innocent. I couldn’t understand how a grown man could abduct and intentionally hurt and murder her. Out of all the times she was taken home safely, and the one time her family was late this had to happen. I couldn’t imagine the strain and trauma her father and little brother were going through.

Months later I read that the man who had murdered Louisa had attempted to rape another little girl in 1982 and been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; he had only recently been released when he’d abducted and murdered Louisa. He also reportedly had indecent-dealing offences against other children. I felt incensed. Why did people get more jail time for fraud? Why did sex crimes against women and children count for so little rehabilitation and punishment? Why did it have to be someone I knew and had cared about? After his conviction he was remanded to custody. His parole application was denied in 2011, and he was required to wait a further two years before his parole application could be heard again. This means he will have spent twenty-seven years in custody by the time of his next parole hearing. It is unknown if he will be released at that time.

In 1986, though, more than anything, I thought the promise the Bible held out of a new world where everyone lived in peace and harmony, which God would bring about in my lifetime, was what was needed. All I had to do was concentrate on that, and everything would be all right. Being part of a religion that had an answer for everything helped me feel secure. This world outside of God’s organisation was evil and not to be trusted. The real life would start when God’s kingdom began to rule over the earth. All whom had ever died would be resurrected after Armageddon back to life on earth during the thousand-year reign of Christ, so Louisa would return to life, and in this way the pain of what had happened now, during this time, would be mitigated.

I knew my part in it—what I had to do to be acceptable and what I had to avoid. I thought if I could just do the right thing to the best of my ability, I would have this wonderful future in God’s new world of perfect health, everlasting life, communing with animals, and everyone believing the same. In my mind it looked a lot like the television show Little House on the Prairie, in which I would spend hours in my inside world imagining scenarios. We all would be living close to the land and each other in a close-knit community.

As witnesses we would talk to each other, when we walked down the streets engaged in the door-to-door witnessing work, about which houses we would live in when all the occupants (nonbelieving) were killed by God at Armageddon. Looking back now at these actions, they were macabre and bizarre, but at the time they were very normal within our mindset.

Also, with my abuse history, inside fantasy world, and fear of being bad and unacceptable, and having a desire to fit in and be good, I adhered to the truth, (as we called our faith to each other), like a duck to water. I wanted to believe it all so much, and it was not hard, as others who also believed it and affirmed it to me constantly surrounded me.

In some ways the teaching about life in the new system, which referred to life during the thousand-year reign of Christ, echoed my inside-world fantasies, and living now in Satan’s world, which we were encouraged to participate in as little as possible, echoed my interactions with the outside world.

On the other hand, on some strange, illogical level, I wondered if having been in my presence had caused this to happen to Louisa. Was I jinxed? Did bad things happen to those with whom I came into contact with? Later on I realised my depression and past sexual abuse that I hadn’t then dealt with probably caused these deluded ideas and thoughts, but they troubled me a lot at the time.

I reacted to this sort of thought by becoming scared of getting too close to people and being around people. I withdrew even more into myself and devoted myself more to witnessing and congregational activities, and I kept my private thoughts to myself. I didn’t share my internal fantasy world with anyone.

I felt scared and frightened of the outside real world in which I had to live.

BIRTH

Our son was born just before winter 1988 after a long labour. The Monday night before he was born, it snowed. I got Leonard to get his camera and take a photo of me standing on the porch of our unit, with me heavily pregnant and surrounded by snow, so I could show my son later on what it had been like during the week when he was about to be born.

When we had filled out the paperwork at the hospital and written “Jehovah’s Witnesses” under the heading “religion,” a nurse came into our room, where I was lying on a bed. She said to me, “Does this mean if you bleed out and your life or your baby’s life is at risk, you refuse to accept a blood transfusion?” I said to her I would accept plasma but not blood.

She said a lady had been in the same bed the day before and haemorrhaged, and in fewer than two minutes half her body’s blood had been on the floor. If she had not had a transfusion, she would have died.

“Do you understand what I am saying?” She was so angry and hostile, and I felt totally unable to cope with this onslaught at that moment in time. I also staunchly believed that, as a Jehovah’s Witness, if I had a blood transfusion I was being disobedient to God’s law and would never get into the new system, or if I died I would not be resurrected. We were taught that only Jesus’s blood could save us, and we were forbidden to take blood in any form into our bodies.

I certainly hadn’t expected a hostile reception, and I think this set the tone for my total inability to cope emotionally and physically with childbirth from that point on. Many years later, when reading about sexual abuse in childhood, I understood how birth for many women who have been abused can trigger dissociation and intense feelings for which they are unprepared. It certainly did for me, and being what felt like verbally attacked for my faith just made the situation intolerable for me.

I wanted support and help, but I lacked confidence, and my anxiety increased after this confrontation. I now felt like I had to be the good witness and present a strong and competent front, but I was unable to. By eleven o’clock that night, I had spent an hour or so walking up and down the corridors and leaning on the bed, and I was unable to cope at all. The nurse rang our doctor, who advised her to give me a pethidine injection. She told me this in a professional manner, but coldly and without warmth. I was made to feel that if I were not coping now, there were still hours to come, and so I had better pull myself together and start coping.

After the pethidine injection, I had an allergic reaction, and I started vomiting and could not stop. The pain seemed as horrendous as ever. So now I was still in pain I could not cope with and also vomiting and dehydrated. The nurse hooked up a drip of saline solution in my arm. Whilst all this was happening, I mostly had shut my eyes and was just trying to block out all around me.

The doctor was again called, and a decision was made for me to have an epidural block in my spine for pain relief. This would allow time for me to rest, sleep, and get my strength up and for my fluids to be replaced as I was badly dehydrated. I had a major headache, and all I wanted was for the birth to be over. We were spoken to about the epidural, and it was delivered in a way that implied I was not coping, and if I could not get through this stage at only four centimetres’ dilation without intervention, there was no way I could cope with proper labour.

So I had the epidural. It worked straightaway. I fell asleep just after midnight and was woken from a deep sleep about six in the morning, I was told I was fully dilated, and I needed to be moved to another room to deliver my baby. I felt wonderfully better, refreshed and excited that the time had come. I hoped I could cope now and give birth to our child with no assistance.

I was wheeled into the delivery room, and, because I was totally numb from the waist down, my legs were hooked up in stirrups. I was told to put my chin on my chest and push hard when I was told to. I did. After an hour I was told the baby was posterior presented, which meant his spine was resting against my spine with the widest part of his head presenting first, and therefore he kept slipping back as soon as I stopped pushing.

A decision was made to give me an episiotomy and pull him out with forceps or a ventouse suction cup if I had not made any progress in another half hour. No progress was made despite my best efforts and my having burst blood vessels in both my eyes from pushing.

A doctor came into the room with what seemed like six to eight people with him. He said they were training and did I mind? At that stage I just wanted my baby out and didn’t mind either way. The doctor decided Benjamin was still too high to use forceps, and so a ventouse suction cup was used. The doctor pulled as I pushed, and after a few minutes Benjamin was born. I heard him cry straightaway, and Leonard was given him to hold. Leonard immediately took him to see my parents, who were in the waiting room, as he was so excited and proud. The nurses had to chase after him as Benjamin had not been weighed, washed, or checked over.

After all those things were done, the wound of the episiotomy was stitched up. The experience of the doctor stitching me up, with nearly eight people watching and him joking and laughing about making me tighter than before I had my baby, was a horrible experience. I closed my eyes and made myself disappear into my inside world whilst they were all still in the room.

When they were finished and gone, I was wheeled up to the ward, and finally I could hold my son in my arms. We were in hospital for two days with me learning to walk again without grimacing and Benjamin attempting to feed.

Because of the ventouse extraction, Benjamin’s little head had a ridge that extended from ear to ear and was all swollen. It took days to subside. As I stared at this new little being, I felt overwhelming and instant love for him.

The pain of the last couple days evaporated, and it felt like I was at the beginning of my own story, of being able to create the perfect, loving family I already belonged to in my internal world but so wanted to make a reality in my outside world.

BENJAMIN

Breastfeeding when I had been in the hospital had not been a pleasant experience for Benjamin or me. He just could not seem to get his tongue positioned in the right place and would end up sucking in vain and then screaming in frustration. The nurse would end up getting frustrated, and she would show it in the tone of her voice to him and the seeming roughness of her actions in trying to position him.

Benjamin would scream even more, and I would outwardly, for the most part, appear calm and in control but inwardly I was a total mess and feeling like a failure. We left to go home earlier than recommended. I knew if I could get Benjamin home in our own environment without everybody around us, we would be okay.

He responded to calm, quiet, rocking and endless patience. I learned quickly to become deft at slipping his tongue down just at the right time as my letdown came and latching him on so feeding time became less traumatic. Benjamin had been diagnosed with colic as well as projectile vomiting. The doctor gave me drops to give him to try to thicken my breast milk, to make it harder for him to vomit back up. It worked a little bit, but I would lay out large nappies all around the floor for a radius of about six feet when I fed him as the vomit would fall a long way from us. Although he lost a lot of milk through the vomiting, he put weight on consistently and was well above average in his gains. He often seemed peaceful and contented only when sucking on my breast or lying on me.

Benjamin lived in a front pack for the first few months of his life and in bed with us. It seemed to be the only way we sensed a measure of control with him as all different people, places, and situations just seemed to throw him off balance, and it seemed to be the only way I could ease his continual crying.

The second thing we noticed about Benjamin as a baby, which was distressing for him and us, was his extreme sensitivity to light. I couldn’t stand under bright lights in a room without him getting upset, and going outside even with a hat on him could only be done quickly as he would squeeze his eyes tightly shut and get quite distressed.

Growing up, Benjamin was very serious and intent. Some people, though, used to describe him as sullen. He would be happy observing but also would get frustrated quite quickly with most toys and social occasions. We soon learnt to limit him to a small group of people we could feel comfortable with as we just found it too stressful to socialise or be in crowds, and he was much easier to handle at home in his own environment. Benjamin enjoyed structure, routine, and people he knew well.

When Benjamin was eighteen months of age, we took him to the doctor as he had started to experience constant diarrhoea, had lost weight, and appeared sickly. She sent us to have toxicology tests done at Nelson hospital, and they came back showing that overhead aerial spraying had poisoned him. The doctor said he was now showing an allergic reaction to most foods as a result of this, and his accompanying behavioural difficulties could likely be attributed to it also.

The doctor advised us to put him on an elimination diet to try to manage his severe food allergies. Under her supervision we introduced him to goat’s milk, soya milk, pears, and lamb, and slowly each week introduced another food and watched how he went with it.

We also found out Benjamin was allergic to the casein part of cow’s milk, and we managed to buy a dried milk powder product through a company in New Zealand that removed the casein from the milk. These changes in diet and limitations of food were very stressful for a young child, and Benjamin quickly became quite obsessed with food. Fortunately (or unfortunately for Benjamin) he had such a severe physical reaction when he ate something he shouldn’t have (severe stomach pain and diarrhoea), he soon learnt to self-regulate even without me there to guide him.

I tried to keep all of us on a similar diet to make it easier and it involved hours of time spent locating and preparing foods we could all eat. Although Amy was sleeping through the night, Benjamin still woke numerous times and was irritable and crying a lot of the time. Along with the frustration because of his speech and learning, he did not appear to be a happy child even though he was very loved.

My best memories of him at that age are quiet moments when he lay asleep in bed next to me, looking angelic and quietly breathing, and I would gaze at him and be filled with intense love for him. He was a beautiful-looking child, and I knew he was as frustrated by the situation as we were. I wanted so much to help him reach his full potential and to find out what was wrong.

I was not initially concerned about Benjamin’s speech development as he babbled to us constantly. I first mentioned my concerns to a Plunket nurse in New Zealand when Benjamin was nearly two years old as he was saying only Mum and had said only one other word clearly—light—a few months previously, which he never had repeated, although he would point to it when we would ask him. We had no doubts about his intelligence as he would point out objects if we asked him and obviously comprehended what we said to him.

By the age of four, however, Benjamin did not stop talking, but everybody had tremendous difficulty understanding him. Up until that time, no one was seriously concerned; they all kept saying boys were slower at developing correct speech patterns than girls, and he was a first child. By that stage, though, we had our daughter, Amy, and my husband and I could see how quickly and easily she could grasp and do things Benjamin, even though he had been shown many times, just did not seem able to do, and her language development was starting to overtake his.

Benjamin had so many ideas and talked so much, but it was his own language. All his words would come out back to front, with reversed syllables within the words such as “causebe” for “because” and also within his sentences. He would get so frustrated and angry at not being understood, and his relationship with his sister worried us a lot as he could be so aggressive toward her. In fact he started biting her when she was only two days old.

I took Benjamin at age four to a speech therapist in Blenheim. She recommended a sensory-integration programme for him and further testing at a qualified centre. When we moved to Wellington shortly after that, I contacted a doctor and asked for a referral. She referred us to the Puketiro Centre in Porirua, Wellington.

I was partly opposed to going as I thought, How can a few doctors make an assessment in an hour that could label my child for life? What if they got it wrong? Previously I had taken Benjamin to see naturopaths, homeopaths, and osteopaths and followed to the letter what they had recommended, and all of them in small part had helped Benjamin. But they hadn’t been able to give me what I felt was the full picture.

I just wanted the full picture.

The Puketiro Centre was marvellous. They assured us of what we already knew inside ourselves: Benjamin was a very sensitive but highly intelligent little boy who showed extreme frustration and specific difficulties with language and speech development, learning disabilities, and poor motor coordination that was no fault of his or ours. It was such a relief to have some positive steps being taken at last. They felt sure they could help Benjamin reach a hundred percent of his full potential, and they contributed in a huge way to that.

A speech therapist, an occupational therapist, a paediatrician, and a learning-disabilities teacher initially assessed Benjamin. The occupational therapist developed a sensory-integration programme that Benjamin attended regularly for months, and the speech therapist also worked intensely with him. The speech therapist was the first person who handed me a copy of the Little Treasures magazine from New Zealand that had an article on dyspraxia written by Judy Davies; the therapist had read it and immediately thought of Benjamin.

It was like turning on a light in a dark room. I photocopied it twice and underlined every point I felt applied to Benjamin, especially the parts about the social and emotional characteristics of a child with dyspraxia. Although the occupational therapy and speech therapy improved things greatly, we still found day-to-day life in the home and handling Benjamin’s reactions to things a struggle.

A few months after the diagnosis by the Puketiro Centre, I rang the person who had written the article on dyspraxia and arranged to meet her. She was in the process of writing a book and asked if I could write down some of my experiences as Benjamin’s mother and how we came to the diagnosis. I was more than happy to provide a contribution.

Put simply, dyspraxia is an umbrella term used to encompass a range of symptoms children who are diagnosed with this condition may experience. It includes such things as difficulty in motor coordination and, often, difficulties in speech and language especially in regard to sequencing.

Finding the support of this wonderful lady and other parents whose children experienced similar struggles was a life raft for me at that time. It was also a small inroad into associating with non-Jehovah’s Witnesses who provided a positive experience of “worldly” people for me.

Having dyspraxia meant Benjamin was unique in his descriptions of life and living, and we enjoyed that aspect of his personality. We had so many situations where we nearly died trying to control our laughing as he was not open to subtleties at all and would see things very black-and-white. Humour was something Benjamin had to learn to appreciate, and he would look at us sometimes and say, “Is that a joke?” so he knew whether to get angry or laugh. He listened avidly to all advertisements on the television, and taking him shopping was like having a walking computer alongside us reeling off all the advantages of the different products and why we should buy them. Everybody else around us would think it hilarious.

I remember one humorous occasion in a shopping centre. This older lady came up and stroked his hair (Benjamin hated to be touched by people he didn’t know) and said what a gorgeous-looking child he was. Benjamin drew back from her whilst frowning intently at her smiling face and said to me, “Mum, I don’t not like that lady.”

The lady looked puzzled and said to me, “What did he say?”

I said, “He said he don’t not like you” and walked hurriedly away whilst she stood there looking puzzled. I know he meant he didn’t like her, but it was the unique way he said it that made it funny.

By the time his second sister, Rose, was born in 1993, Benjamin had totally lost his love of school as he was struggling so much with learning. He was still having help from the specialists at the Puketiro Centre. He was on a limited diet due to his allergies. He would say he felt dumb and would start to cry when he had to go to school.

It was suggested to me that the Specific Learning Difficulties Association (SPELD) might be able to help him. I was put in a touch with a teacher who lived near us in a rural area outside Wellington. Benjamin had regular lessons for two years with her, and she helped him enormously to be able to understand language and to find enjoyment in reading. The help was all government funded, otherwise I would not have been able to access it.

During the previous six months of getting help with SPELD, I had removed Benjamin from the primary school where he had been and had homeschooled him. It was a restorative and healing time for us both. At the end of the six months, I had found a little school that had approximately twenty students from grade one to seven and was located about twenty minutes from our house but only five minutes from Benjamin’s SPELD teacher. Amy and Benjamin were enrolled and spent the next two years there.

It was wonderful, and Benjamin flourished with more one-on-one attention, less noise and distraction, and smaller numbers of children. All his teachers loved him as he tried so hard and was always willing to do his best.

This quality he had of never giving up was going to be invaluable in the next few years.

PARENTING

Parenting was a steep learning curve for me once Benjamin was born. I had lived such a controlled life, never allowing emotions to show, and suddenly to have this child who appeared to do nothing but show seemingly out-of-control emotions led to me using physical discipline with him for a period of time that I now consider to have been abusive. I think having a child I felt like I could not control made me feel deeply inadequate as a parent, mother, and person.

Up to that time, I had managed to be the outwardly perfect student, wife, pioneer, and Jehovah’s Witness, and now others were negatively commenting me on as a mother in the congregation for the first time in my life. I felt as if something in me was lacking as my parenting seemed inadequate, and my child acted as if he were out of control.

Benjamin would cry endlessly when he awoke at meetings, and it continued on as he grew old enough to crawl and walk. I used to take him out the back and try to nurse him not because he was hungry but just so he wouldn’t struggle and cry. He was only about four to six months old, arching his back and screaming, and all the mothers around me would be tutting and saying, “Temper, temper” and, “You will have to smack that out of him.” As he got older, his crying and screaming got louder and appeared to get worse, and once he was running around it was even harder to get him to stay still.

We had five meetings a week to attend; Leonard was an elder; and others with large families including babies all seemed to cope, and I didn’t understand why my young child didn’t just sit or be still and respond to me when I tried to soothe him.

Physical discipline had been a part of my growing up. Mum used to yell when she couldn’t cope, and she used to slap us across the legs or arms if she got really upset. Dad had procured a bamboo cane once I turned eleven and used it on my brother and me for discipline from that time up until our midteens the occasional time he deemed it necessary for us.

Later on I wondered if I had engendered such feelings of inadequacy in my own mother as Benjamin engendered in me. She said to me as an adult that she had despaired that if she didn’t win the battle of wills with me when I was a child, I would not turn out well. Also she said she would never have dared as a child to disobey her parents, so she didn’t want to bring me up as a disrespectful child. These conversations, along with my past experiences and combined with the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teachings, served to make physical discipline appear acceptable to me as something to use with Benjamin.

I vividly remember the first time I smacked him. It was after we had moved to the new congregation to help out, and I was about three months pregnant with Amy. There are eighteen months between them, so Benjamin must have been about nine months old. He had started to wake earlier and cry, and as I was still breastfeeding him, I would bring him into bed with us, and he would feed. Instead of going back to sleep after his feed, he was wriggling to get up, and I was getting quite exhausted.

I had spoken to my mother and my sisters in the congregation, and I remember being told by some of them that I had to go in and change his nappy, give him some toys in his cot, and leave him. If I kept picking him up and bringing him into our bed I was making a rod for my own back. If he screamed and carried on, I was to smack him.

The first morning I awoke after determining to try to change his behaviour, my stomach felt clenched up and in knots. He started laughing and holding up his arms when I walked in the room. I changed his nappy. I felt detached, like I no longer had any emotion toward him. I think I made myself feel this way as everything in me did not want to smack him.

After I finished he rolled over and immediately stood up to come with me. I gave him some toys and said, “No, you must stay in your bed” and left the room. He immediately, of course, started screaming, but that time more forcefully than originally and sounding quite distressed. I went back to bed, but after a minute I could not stand it, and I went back in and smacked the top of his little bare leg about four times. He looked stunned and sat down then burst into tears. I walked out.

That was repeated a couple times, and then I couldn’t bear it and ended up picking him up and taking him to my bed to feed him, feeling angry and frustrated and upset with both him and me. He couldn’t breastfeed with a blocked nose from his crying, and so he kept pulling off the breast and gazing up at me sobbing. I felt dreadful, but I had been brought up hearing the words “spare the rod and spoil the child” and truly believed if I loved my child I had to discipline him physically if necessary so I had control and he learnt to be obedient.

Although I felt dreadful inside, I allowed my rational mind, which had been brainwashed, to override my emotional self, which was feeling so bad. This path carried on until Benjamin was about five years old, and then something in me broke and I just thought, No more. I am not going to hit my child again. I must find another way. It was the act of another person hurting my child that made me wake up and stop my hurting him.

I look back and see the physical discipline I meted out to Benjamin was excessive. It never worked. He just cried harder or got angrier, and in the end we would both be in tears; if we were at a meeting, I would have to remove him and wait outside until it had finished.

I vividly remember at one meeting I attended, one of the elders came out back where I was standing with Benjamin, who was about four years old at the time, and he was crying in my arms as he wanted to get down and run around. The elder pulled Benjamin out of my arms and stormed off with him down the back of the car park.

I am sure the elder smacked him and verbally berated him. I remember standing there feeling completely helpless, wanting to go get my child but also hoping maybe the elder would come back and would have accomplished what I had not been able to. I remember the unshed tears of grief and despair and feelings of fear and failure that congealed into a lump in my chest and throat, unable to come out. The heaviness in my body weighted me to the ground like an immobile stone.

The elder brought him back, and Benjamin came into my arms and was shaking all over and just sobbing. I held on to him and stood there outside in the sun, rocking him slowly, breathing the warm scent of his hair on his head, which was buried in my shoulder as he cried. I didn’t go back into that meeting until it ended.

People might say I couldn’t have loved him.

But I did with my whole soul.

I had been taught by the Jehovah’s Witnesses my whole life that children are born inherently sinful, and I had heard scriptures quoted from the platform saying if you “beat your child with a rod, he will not die from it.” It was taught to us that the parent needs to break the will of the child to make him or her obedient, and just as men were to have their wives in subjection, they also were to have their children in subjection. Physical discipline was advocated for wilful disobedience, and parents were admonished not to feel sorry for their children if they cried but to remember that their everlasting future was at stake if their wilfulness was not broken.

I didn’t seek out information from any worldly source as up to that time I had sourced information only from the organisation if I had a question or a problem. It was actively discouraged to seek information outside the organisation. All around me parents used physical discipline. If children didn’t respond and become submissive and obedient, they were considered to have hard or bad hearts and needed firmer discipline to keep them on the narrow path of righteousness.

The episode I most regret was when Benjamin was only about four months old, at our first Circuit Assembly since his birth. He woke up, and I took him out to the mothers’ room to feed. He fed, and then he started crying, and no matter whether I walked up and down or rocked him or put him in his pram, he cried.

I felt anxiety overwhelming in me in that room, with all eyes upon me. I now know I experienced a panic attack. It felt like I was going to suffocate if I didn’t get out and away from all those eyes looking at myself, and Benjamin, who screamed so loudly. I didn’t choose to walk out of the room and go outside as to get to the door that led outside, I would have had to walk through the assembly hall with two thousand people all seated quietly and listening. There was another door. I thought it was a way out. I placed Benjamin in his pram and wheeled him in there without really looking and shut the door behind me before realising I was in a small cupboard-like room.

I tried rocking the pram, and I shut my eyes as the panic attack overtook me. My heart was pounding so hard, I could hear it in my ears, and could feel it in my chest. I felt like I could not catch my breath. The noise from his crying felt deafening in the small room. I felt totally trapped and unable to think of what to do. I placed my hand over Benjamin’s mouth and pressed down hard. He struggled and then stopped. I suddenly thought he wasn’t breathing, and I was shocked into taking my hand away and flooded with adrenaline over what I had possibly done. He took a deep breath and screamed louder than he ever had screamed before.

I hurriedly backed out of that room. I exited the mothers’ room, walked through the assembly hall with what felt like all eyes upon me, and walked the pram outside and down into the car park area. I sat on a grass verge in the hot sun; I completely covered him and my breast and shoulder with a baby blanket to try to stop the sunlight from affecting him, and I offered my breast to him. He eventually calmed down enough to suckle. I was lost in regard to how to parent him and did not know what to do.

I struggled to find Leonard among all the people after the session ended for the morning. Benjamin had exhaustedly fallen into a restless sleep. I asked Leonard to take me home, saying Benjamin didn’t appear well, and I did not attend the next day.

I won’t ever forget the overwhelming feeling of panic and not knowing what to do to quiet my child or comfort him, or how it felt to have him not respond to me and the anger I felt toward both him and all those who just sat and watched me, none offering me any assistance. I had felt judgement emanating from them.

It wasn’t until years after that, after I had spent time telling my story to a therapist and confronting what had occurred to me, as well as processing and dealing with the emotions I had repressed relating to it, that I was able to look at my own parenting and be able truly to comprehend the damage I had caused.

When Benjamin was five years old, I took the first step: I was willing to look outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses and ask for help. I went to my family doctor, and she provided support and information that enabled me to realise how unrealistic my expectations had been regarding Benjamin’s behaviour from such a young age.

This child-development information was in direct opposition to the accepted practice at Jehovah’s Witness meetings, where visitors would often comment favourably on the rows of quiet and obedient youngsters who would sit for more than two hours at a time. They didn’t realise it was often only accomplished by brutal physical discipline, and this was not something to be in awe of but to be horrified by The years since that time have been a long and slow process to forgive myself at a time when I was also dealing with other issues. Knowing you have acted in an abusive way toward your own child whom you say you love is something that feels nearly impossible to live with. I can rationalise why I did it. I can understand the circumstances.

Out of my four children, only Benjamin has suffered from depression and anxiety. I have asked him as my adult son for forgiveness, and he has readily given it. But I do not for one moment think that, even though he states he has no conscious memories of my smacking him, the long-term psychological affects have bypassed him. His history shows they have not.

I can only be there for him fully now in a more whole and conscious state myself. I hope by being brutally honest about how I behaved, I can help other parents who are bringing up their children within fundamentalist religions that advocate physical discipline see that this is both damaging and wrong, and the expectations for the child sitting quietly for hours are not in line with recognised child-development understanding for age-appropriate skills.

Just because the Bible is quoted at you, it does not mean the practice is right. Your child doesn’t have a bad heart if he or she doesn’t respond to a smack to make him or her sit quietly. Smacking might work in the short term for many children, but for others who won’t conform, beatings can go on for hours or continually, and the emotional damage is lasting.

Children need a parent who does not look upon them as having something inherently wrong in them that needs to be beaten out of them for them to be approved of by a supreme being. How ever did it get to be the case that some religions advocate this, and thousands blindly believe it?

BRITTANY

After I had married and had Benjamin, my husband and I moved to a small congregation located on the South Island in New Zealand. We moved there to help out as pioneers and for Leonard to serve as an elder in the congregation.

Auxiliary Pioneer is a term used by Jehovah’s Witnesses to describe those who devote sixty or more hours voluntarily to door-to-door work each month. A Regular Pioneer at that time devoted ninety hours per month in field service. We had been in this area only a few months when I became pregnant with our daughter, Amy. She was born when Benjamin was eighteen months old. We lived there for approximately five years.

When Benjamin was five years old, he started to cry every time I went to leave him at the childcare centre he was attending three mornings a week. He had always enjoyed going. When I asked him why he now didn’t want to go, he said, “I don’t want to leave you” and, more disturbingly, “Someone is touching me.” When I tried to press him further, he would get very distressed.

I brought it up with the childcare centre, and they said there were no older children he played with, only younger children, and there were no opportunities they could see where anything could be happening. It made me very distressed that he was so upset and that he had disclosed something of this nature and there didn’t seem to be any substance to it. I couldn’t understand why he would say such a thing, and I couldn’t get him to talk any more about it.

Then Amy, who was three and a half years old, started to scream every time I put on her night nappy and when I took it off in the morning. She would sometimes vomit she got so distressed. When I would try to ask her why she was crying, all she would say that I could understand in between great big sobs was “sore,” and she would point to her vulvar area and say a word that sounded like “pin” to me. She looked a bit red sometimes, but I could find no reason for her distress. Twice I took her to the doctor because of this, and she was found to have urinary tract infections. This seemed a mystery to me as she never was left with anyone and was always with me.

About six months prior to this, a young mother had moved into the congregation with five children. The father had left the mother and run off with someone else and had consequently been disfellowshipped. The mother had then discovered she had breast cancer. I had been told some of her older children had behavioural problems. The mother approached the local elders and asked for assistance; she was worried her children would end up in foster care as she was not coping with her situation.

We offered to have one of her elder daughters come stay with us. Her name was Brittany. She was only fifteen years old at the time. One of my best friends in the congregation had a daughter similar in age, and her daughter and Brittany got on very well together. As my friend popped in a lot, and we were close friends, it seemed to be working out well having Brittany stay with us. It was unofficial foster care.

One morning my friend phoned and asked if she could drop off her daughter, Julia, after school the next day as she had been asked to waitress until late in the evening. I said no problem and would look forward to having her, as I was sure Brittany would also. When I got off the phone, I said to Amy, who was in the kitchen with me having breakfast, that Julia would be coming to our house after school and staying the night.

She said to me, “Julia? Not Brittany?” The previous night Brittany had been left alone with both the kids, who were in bed asleep, whilst my husband and I had gone out to a later supper with another witness couple down the road. She had already left for school this morning.

I said to Amy, “That is not very nice. Why don’t you want Brittany to stay with you? Were you naughty the other night when she looked after you?”

She said, “No, but Brittany said she would cut off Ben’s penis with a knife.”

My whole body went cold and numb inside, and everything went still inside of me.

My whole body knew she was telling the truth, but my mind couldn’t accept what she was saying.

“What do you mean Brittany said she would cut Benjamin’s penis off with a knife?”

“She wouldn’t let me in the room. She shut the door, and she had a knife, and said she was going to cut off Benjamin’s penis, and I was screaming, ‘Mum, Mum,’ and you weren’t there.” Then she burst into tears.

I cuddled her, and I couldn’t say a thing. I felt sick to my stomach, and I thought, How can she have made this up? Why would Brittany go in the kids’ bedroom with a knife? Why would she say she would cut off Ben’s penis? What had happened? All these questions were racing through my mind.

I went out to the clothesline and finished hanging the clothes. Amy went back to playing in the house. Everything felt surreal, and I felt very detached from everything around me. All day I kept to myself at home and went about my normal activities in a daze. It was on my mind the whole time in the background while I carried on my normal activities as if nothing were wrong—but everything was. I had no idea what to do. I felt helpless, numb, detached, and like a failure.

I hadn’t protected my children.

I went over the choice of confronting Brittany and her denying it to me, and then what would I do? I kept thinking Amy must have mistaken what Brittany had said or her intent. Then I would go over the words Amy had used and try to think of reasons why Brittany would have a knife in Benjamin’s room and try to normalise it. I wondered why Benjamin had said nothing. I finally decided to tell him at the end of the day what Amy had said and see what he said or did. He just said no and frowned and refused to say anything else.

His refusal to speak about it, and his avoidance and seeming anger at me for bringing it up, made me feel even more confused. Why was he angry? Why did he say nothing had happened? Why would he be angry if nothing had happened?

I finally brought it up tentatively with my husband when we were in bed that night. Saying the words out loud made it real and defiled the normality and air around us. I had hesitated so long as I was so scared to make it more real than it was already.

I wanted it all to go away and not to have to deal with it.

Leonard’s reaction, especially given Benjamin’s denying it, was to leave it alone and forget about it unless Amy said anything else, and then just to reassure her everything was okay. Initially I felt relieved, and I decided that was the best thing to do. I rolled over and went to sleep fitfully. In the morning I woke up and tried to pretend everything was okay like Leonard had suggested.

But underneath I was an absolute mess.

Amy still screamed whenever I changed her night nappy. Benjamin’s fear of my leaving him at day care and his tears and words—“someone is touching me”—kept going round and round in my head. I picked up the phone and rang the family doctor. She was one person outside of the Jehovah’s Witnesses I trusted. I went to the appointment with my stomach tied up in knots.

I sat in the chair, and when she asked me why I was there, it felt like it took forever to force the words out of my throat. It felt dry and closed up. I could hardly speak. She gently asked me a few questions. Afterward she told me she had to ring the police and let them know. I completely fell apart.

I sobbed. I told her my husband did not know I was there speaking to her. Everything had to be handled within the congregation as I wasn’t supposed to go to the police or worldly people, and I would be bringing shame to the congregation. I did not know what I had expected her to do, but it wasn’t this.

She assured me the police could ring me during the day when my husband was not home. They would likely come to the house in a plain car and plain clothes so nobody would know who they were. If, after speaking to me, they felt there was reason to question the children, they would arrange for me to bring them to the central police station. If they felt there was substance to the allegations, then and only then would they approach Brittany and question her.

This reassured me. I was so worried that if there were another explanation for what had happened, then Brittany would be traumatised even more than she was. She already had a stressful family situation, and I cared deeply for her and didn’t want that to happen. I decided not to tell Leonard until after the police had spoken to me. I was hoping they would discover there was no need to speak to the children, and then it would just all go away.

The police rang and came to the house. I could tell them only the small amount of information I had as I had refrained from speaking to the children about it anymore; the doctor had advised me not to. The police decided there was enough information to interview the children at the police station.

At that stage we had moved house from the South Island to Wellington on the North Island. The police arranged for the children to come down to the central police station and be formally interviewed. I let Leonard know we were going there, and he was furious. He thought the congregation should handle it and didn’t think there was anything to handle anyway. I told him if the police, after interviewing the children, felt nothing had occurred, then nothing would happen so not to worry. I convinced myself they would find no evidence.

I took the children to the station and was invited to sit in a room with a two-way mirror and watch. The police would interview them separately in a room set up with lifelike-looking dolls and other play equipment. I declined and read my book in another room. I have always regretted this, and looking back I don’t understand why I didn’t watch. I can only say that at that immediate point in time, I was so convinced they would find nothing, I wished to remain in that state of denial. I felt I would be unable to handle it if something did come up and had no idea how I would.

After what seemed like a long time, a female police officer came into the room and said, “Unfortunately both children’s stories match, and there is significant evidence from their stories that sexual abuse has occurred.”

They had videotaped evidence from both children, and they were going to follow up and interview Brittany. They gave me the phone number of a child counsellor and strongly recommended I ring her up and take the children. There would be no cost as government rebates would cover it.

They told me the children had said Brittany had been coming into their room at night (the two of them shared a room since Brittany had been staying over). She had been lying on their beds and masturbating both children with her fingers and mouth and inserting a pen into Amy. She had threatened them that if they told anyone, she would harm them and me.

Both children told the police that on the night in question, when Amy said Benjamin had been threatened with a knife, Brittany had been touching Benjamin, and he told her to stop or he would tell his Mum. Brittany had then gone out of the room, gotten the knife, and Amy followed her, then Brittany locked her out when she went back into Benjamin’s room. Amy thought Brittany was going to kill Benjamin and was screaming and crying for me. Brittany had held the knife to Benjamin and threatened to cut his penis off with it if he told me, and she threatened to harm me if he told about what had happened.

The police said Benjamin was very fearful of something bad happening to him or me because of his telling. This was why they strongly encouraged me to get counselling for the children.

I had a mixture of feelings. I felt overwhelming sadness for the children for what they had gone through. I felt shame as a mother for not having protected them and for doubting them. I was full of anger toward Brittany. I felt anger and fear over having to tell Leonard and how he and the congregation would react. At least with having moved towns, the children did not have to see her at the meetings each week.

I felt determined to take the kids to counselling. I knew deep down that my inability to express or truly feel emotion was connected to my sexual abuse, and I didn’t want the children to have the same issues I had experienced as they grew up. I somehow knew that support and being able to talk about what had happened was their key to getting through this terrible experience. Everything in me was now focused on accomplishing this.

I went home and told Leonard, and all he seemed to be focused on was that taking the kids to a counsellor would make it worse. He thought we needed to stop talking about it so they could forget it and move on with their lives. I knew you never forget it; you just push it aside, and I didn’t want that for the kids. I wanted them to have reassurance and support, and I knew on some deep level I was not capable of giving them all the emotional support they needed.

Leonard also was very concerned that I was breaking the rules regarding going to “the world” for legal matters and justice, and he said I should obey scripture and let the elders handle the situation. I could not see how the elders, who had no knowledge of how sexual abuse affected children or, for that matter, experience in counselling children or how best to handle children, would be better than trained counsellors. I wanted the best for my children.

The police interviewed Brittany and her mother. They interviewed the elders in the congregation plus other families who had had contact with Brittany and her brothers and sisters. Over the next few weeks, many in the congregation shunned me because I had gone to the police.

I was furious to learn Brittany had much earlier told her mother that her father had sexually abused her, and her mother had not believed her and accused her of making it up for attention. It also came out that Brittany had told one of the elders’ wives that her father had abused her sexually. The elder’s wife had told her husband this. He had approached the mother, who had said Brittany said these things only for attention, and there was no truth in it. Then it was left.

Nobody had thought to tell my husband and me these things when they had been asking for families to take in the children to help give the mother a break. Nothing had been mentioned. I was furious at this, and it made me trust even less that the elders were qualified to help support my children.

I rang the counsellor the day after the police had interviewed the children in Wellington and arranged an appointment with her. I saw her within a few days, and I really liked her. Her room was filled with toys and felt and looked colourful, warm, and friendly. She spoke with both the children on her own, and she assured me she had no doubts they had been sexually abused.

She saw the children individually and sometimes together for nearly eighteen months. She used play therapy to help them. She would sometimes ask to speak with me, and in those times she told me how frightened Benjamin was that the threats Brittany had made would come true.

I learnt how damaging it was to their trust and self-esteem to wake up with someone touching their body in their bed, in a place where they were meant to be safe, and then being threatened not to tell about it. I also learnt about the confusion and fear created in them by having their sexual organs touched, rubbed, and sucked at such a young age. The sense that something was happening that they were not allowed to talk about and had to keep a secret reinforced the idea that what they felt and what had happened was bad.

Combining sexual feelings with badness and shame while receiving threats of harm or death was so damaging to them. Being able to express those fears and feelings through play therapy, and being helped to be able to name the emotions connected to the behaviours, would all help to minimise or mitigate the damage that had occurred because of it. In the meantime I was struggling to cope.

I never relented or stopped taking the children to counselling, but for the first time in my life I was questioning, doubting, and actually acting in opposition to the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which I had believed one hundred percent was the truth and that I would lose my life if I left. I was full of contradictory feelings and fears; I was in conflict with myself. I felt alone and isolated within my marriage and within the congregation.

No longer was I seeing the elders as my Inside Dads. Instead I was relying more on my Inside Mum to cope as people in my outside world had let me down.

Little did I realise Benjamin was beginning to experience his own internal thoughts and fears becoming realities for him and the ongoing impact this would have on him and us as a family in the following years.

MULTIPLE FEARS

Afear, if supported by seemingly supported facts, takes on a life of it’s own and is a force to be reckoned with. It can be an unconscious force motivating a person’s behaviour that is so powerful, and so beyond being able to be dealt with by rationality, that it can appear untreatable. I learnt the truth of this in connection with our son, Benjamin, during the time after we had relocated to Wellington to live.

Benjamin commenced his first year at a primary school in Wellington. We lived in a house that was two minutes’ walk from his school.

Benjamin begged me to walk on his own. One day I eventually agreed, but I felt nervous. I felt so protective of him and Amy since what had happened with Brittany and didn’t like them out of my sight. Anyway, I decided I needed to do what was best for him and not me and let him walk so he could feel some independence. I let him go for about two minutes before I hopped in the car and backed out of the drive as I had to go to the shops.

As I rounded the corner, I was horrified to see a man holding Benjamin by the arm, animatedly talking to him and pulling him across the road where, between two houses, there was a vacant lot that sloped down a hill to the street below.

I swung the car right in front of the man, blocking him. I jumped out and yelled, and as soon as the man heard the brakes and saw the car pull in, he let Benjamin go and ran off. I rushed out of the car, went over to Benjamin, and said, “Who was that? What was he doing?”

Benjamin said to me, “I didn’t tell him my real name, Mum. I told him I was…and I told him I live at…”—both of which were false. He said the man had asked him to go and see his dog. Benjamin had been so busy giving a false name and address, he had not realised the man had already started to pull him across the road.

I am not sure if the man had a car down on the other street or where he was hoping to take Benjamin, but I was so shaken up I felt terrified. I went into the office at the school and let them know what had happened. Then I went home instead of to the shops, and I just sat in horror.

I kept thinking, What if I hadn’t gone around the corner straight-away? Where would Benjamin be? What might have happened to him? Why is this happening to us? Haven’t we had enough to deal with? What am I doing wrong? Why don’t other people I know have this happen?

Benjamin talked about it for weeks after, and Leonard and I praised him for his bravery and his quick thinking, as did his teachers. He appeared relatively unscathed by the incident. However, unseen to us, inside of him a belief was growing that would be damaging to his psyche. It was going to be increased by another incident that happened shortly after this one.

It was a fine sunny and windless day in Wellington, and so we decided to take our family for a day trip to Picton on the ferry. It was a beautiful trip through the Marlborough Sounds. Benjamin was especially excited, as he loved being on the water.

He had just watched the old black-and-white Titanic movie on television and kept asking us on the morning we were leaving if there were any possibility of the boat sinking. Of course we said no and reassured him it was a large catamaran and quite stable. It was designed to hold both cars and people, and there had been only one major ferry disaster in New Zealand—the Wahini, which was wrecked with a high loss of life on a very stormy night. This day was beautiful, and the conditions were perfect, so there was no need for alarm.

The day was calm, and we were all sitting at an outside table facing the way we were travelling. We were about two hours into our journey, and the boat was navigating its way through the Marlborough Sounds. We had had morning tea and were sipping our coffees and talking to an older couple whom also were seated at the table.

Suddenly the older man said, “I hope we are going to turn soon” as we were heading straight for one of the islands in the sound. We didn’t slow down, and we didn’t turn. I stiffened up and grabbed on to Benjamin. Amy was already sitting on Leonard’s knee.

Suddenly the alarms on the boat started sounding—whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop—and a panicked voice came over the intercom loudly saying, “Brace, brace, brace.” The stern of the boat ran up the gravel beach with a tremendous crunching noise, and the nose of the catamaran stopped a couple metres from the cliff face of the island. Half the boat was sitting high out of the water. There was a huge shudder as the boat beached, and lots of things fell onto the floor. Benjamin and Amy were frightened and crying as were many of the passengers. We all peered in shock over the edge of the boat, down to the gravel beach that appeared metres below us (too far to jump safely), wondering what had just occurred for this to happen.

We were stranded for hours on the boat whilst divers checked that there was no damage to the hull. Apparently all three backup systems had failed, and the ferry had beached itself because of some technical difficulty it had experienced. Six hours later the ferry backed off with assistance from tugs on the high tide, and we limped slowly into Picton.

We immediately had to catch the freight ferry back to Wellington as it was late and dark. We had not brought provisions to stay the night in Picton and did not have the money to do so even if we wanted to. The freight ferry wasn’t designed for passengers. It was old, smelly, and dirty. We didn’t get back home until the early hours of the next morning.

The whole day ended up being a real endurance test for the whole family. In Benjamin’s mind the belief that Brittany’s threat that harm would come to him and our family if he told was coming true.

A further event in the same year, which directly threatened his life, solidified this belief for him.

My sister-in-law invited the children and I to go with her to Upper Hutt to do some shopping. I had never been there before. We gladly went and had a great time.

On the way back to her car, her girls suddenly took off and ran to the car, which was parked about ten metres away from us on the same side of the road. Benjamin started running as well, following them, and was about two metres behind them.

A car came out of an underground car park, and as the driver was looking to her right checking that no cars were coming, she did not see Benjamin. The bull bars on the front of the four-wheel drive hit him, and he went down and disappeared under her car. She stopped her vehicle immediately and got out.

I don’t remember screaming, dropping my bags, or running. I remember bending down under the four-wheel drive and seeing Benjamin lying still and unconscious. His head was about two inches from a back wheel, and his feet were about a foot from the other back wheel. I didn’t know if any of the tyres had run over him. My heart was thumping inside my eardrums so loudly it was hard for me to hear or think of anything else. My vision was narrowed to what I could make out underneath the vehicle—the sight of Benjamin’s little body— and everything else was blocked out. Checking his pulse, checking for any obvious signs of trauma or bleeding, I could not find any. He lay as if quietly asleep except that lying on concrete underneath a vehicle screamed out that things were far from normal.

My sister-in-law was hysterical. She was crying and screaming, as were her two girls, who also had seen it happen. The lady who had run over Benjamin in her car slowly edged it forward so we could examine him more closely. He didn’t appear to have a mark on him, but he still was not moving and was unconscious. Within minutes an ambulance arrived. A paramedic put Benjamin, unconscious, in the back of the ambulance. The officer was alone, and he went to put my sister-in-law in the back of the ambulance. He turned to me and told me to follow in my car.

I said, “But I am his Mum.” He hadn’t realised I was because I was so calm whereas Kathy was distraught. Kathy followed in her car with all the kids. The ambulance pulled over twice to check Benjamin as one of his pupils was dilated, and he was still unconscious. He had blood trickling out of one ear. By the time we got to the hospital, he was moaning and regaining consciousness. The doctors kept him in hospital for a few hours whilst they did some tests. They found his eardrum had ruptured on the side where the bull bars had hit his head. Miraculously he was uninjured save for a nasty concussion and temporary deafness in one ear, and his stay in hospital did not last long.

About an hour after we had arrived at the hospital and the doctors had told me his injuries were unlikely to be permanent, my body unexpectedly gave out on me. First of all my legs started shaking, and then, in a few minutes, my whole body was shaking so violently I could not stand up or even talk without my teeth chattering. The nurses came and wrapped blankets around me; they said I was in shock, and it was a delayed reaction. Within a couple hours, I had settled into a state of exhaustion. Benjamin also was exhausted from the shock and the physical trauma.

I had learnt an important lesson.

Physical injury, which is so easily seen, brings out the best in people. Benjamin was flooded with toys, get-well gifts, and genuine concern for his welfare.

When his sexual abuse had been disclosed, it had been a different reaction. Nobody had talked about it openly, like they did when the car hit him. After the car hit him, Benjamin was able to tell his story over and over, and in the telling he found healing, comfort, support, and understanding.

When he had been abused, there had been only silence.

And in silence and avoidance came an innate sense that he had done something shameful, too bad to talk about, that had to be kept in the dark, not to be brought up in the light of day in “normal” conversation.

It remained hidden and secret, with only his thoughts; his meanings (often skewed) and his childlike interpretation of events. Except for the counsellor, who was invaluable, it was a taboo subject with other people, as implied by their silence.

Another event that appeared to directly threaten my life led to Benjamin’s retreating into denial and silence with even his counsellor, as he no longer believed Brittany’s threats were invalid.

I heard a knock on my door, and when I opened it I welcomed into my home a friend who had come to visit. It was the weekend; Benjamin was home from school, and Amy was home from kindergarten.

As I put the kettle on for cups of tea, I felt suddenly like I was peeing myself. I excused myself, laughing, and rushed to the toilet. It was blood. There was a lot of it.

I already knew I was eleven weeks pregnant.

I went out and told my friend, who helped me lie down on the couch. She went and got me towels, which I placed between my legs to soak up the blood. I phoned the midwives I had started to see at the beginning of this, my third pregnancy, and with whom I had recently signed a contract to deliver my child. They came over and told me if I was going to miscarry, there was nothing that could prevent it. But for my own peace of mind, I could try to lay still.

After bleeding heavily for two days, I went into hospital for an ultrasound. The baby’s heart was still beating, but right behind where the placenta was attached there looked like a huge, dark blob. The placenta had detached from the wall of the uterus right behind where the umbilical cord was attached. The doctors felt there was little chance of saving the baby and a high chance of oxygen deprivation and brain damage.

They recommended I have a D&C (dilatation and curettage) to remove the foetus and try again so there was no risk of a brain-damaged child. I couldn’t do this because of my beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness but also because everything intuitively inside me was saying, “Let it take its natural course. If this baby is meant to survive, it will. If it does not, that is what is meant to be.”

I wanted this baby so much on so many levels. Nobody understood why, and most in the congregation felt I was totally mad getting pregnant when we were dealing with Benjamin’s health issues, my husband’s taking over part of his family’s business, and the police case with Brittany.

But something in me wanted a child who was untouched by all that had happened. It was irrational, but I wasn’t acting rationally. I was acting mainly from an emotional motivation I couldn’t articulate at the time even if I had wanted to.

I felt very isolated from my husband, my faith, the congregation, and my friends. I felt consumed with worry regarding the children, and this was something that was an urge I just didn’t resist. I wanted another child, and it was all to do with a new beginning and something to focus on that was joyful and not full of pain. It made no rational sense at the time, but I had no regrets.

Rose survived her rocky start in utero and was born healthy and vibrant. She brought me untold joy and a reason to live at a time when often I wanted to disappear to escape the emotional pain. Rightly or wrongly she was part of my survival at that time. Fortunately she was such a happy and contented baby, full of character and joy. It could have been very different for all of us if she had not been. However, she rarely stopped laughing or smiling, and she helped us all focus on something joyful. She was a distraction from dealing with the traumas that were overwhelming for all of us.

From what Benjamin was telling the counsellor, though, he saw my threatened miscarriage with Rose as Brittany’s threat coming true. He saw the attempted abduction, the ferry beaching, and the car running him over as evidence that bad things were happening directly to him and to his Mum.

It was enough to shut him down.

He went into intense denial of everything he had said and told the counsellor he didn’t want to come anymore, that nothing had happened. Amy had been lying, and he didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

As he had already told the counsellor that he saw these things as direct results of Brittany’s threats, she interpreted his sudden denial and about-turn as real fear and an attempt to stop the bad things from happening anymore. He became full of rage and anger and lashed out at everyone and everything. It was a terribly challenging time.

Leonard and I were also in real fear as Brittany’s father had somehow gotten our phone number in Wellington (which probably wasn’t that hard to do as Leonard’s business was in the Yellow Pages under his surname). He had phoned twice, threatening us if we didn’t call a halt to the police investigation. It was a very frightening time. I was paranoid and jumpy. I didn’t know what he looked like. I kept the door locked at all times. I was scared to answer the phone. I let the police know what had happened. I don’t know if they spoke to him, but the phone calls stopped.

I kept taking Benjamin and Amy to counselling, and eventually Benjamin’s anger settled. Part of the problem also was that at that time in the congregation, at one of the meetings, we were studying a book entitled Making Your Family Life Happy. It was studied on a Tuesday night at a one-hour meeting we called The Book Study.

This was the same book Leonard and I had studied together when we were courting seven years earlier. This, and other books produced by The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society would be studied every few years in a cyclic way.

At the meetings the book would be read paragraph by paragraph. After each paragraph the question at the bottom of the page relating to that paragraph would be read out. Someone would put up their hand and provide, from the book, the answer to the question.

The meetings were small and held within someone’s home with five to eight family groups attending each one. There might have been ten or more book-study groups held on the same night separately in different homes among the one congregation. The children usually all sat on the floor. They were each encouraged to answer at least once during the meeting. Often the parents would write out an answer for their child in simple language and cue him or her when it was time to put up his or her hand.

During that year one of the chapters we were studying was on how to teach your children about sex gradually and age appropriately. It gave specific examples in the book about speaking simply and using correct body terminology. It said, “The boy puts his penis inside the girl’s vagina,” and that was how two people had sex. Benjamin was really misbehaving during that meeting. After it ended we left immediately as he was angry, and I wanted to get away from having an audience as quickly as possible. As we were going out the door, I asked him, “What is wrong with you?”

He said to me, “It is all lies. It is all just lies.”

I asked, “What is?”

He shouted at the top of his lungs, “The boy doesn’t put his penis in the girl’s vagina, the boy puts his penis in her mouth.” We exited the house with everyone inside hearing through the open window exactly what Benjamin had just said.

I told the counsellor all this, and she advised us to reassure Benjamin that what Brittany had done to him was one way adults got sexual pleasure, but it was not the way sexual intercourse took place to make a baby. All this was a direct result of the abuse. It was terribly confusing for Benjamin and difficult for us as parents to manage.

Many in the congregation saw Benjamin misbehaving and angry and criticised us as parents. No allowance was made for what had happened. Some blamed my taking him to counselling as the reason for his misbehaviour. Many doubted the abuse had even occurred. It was very isolating.

Amy had seemed to recover from the experience relatively unscathed compared to the intense emotions Benjamin was showing. She loved going to see the counsellor. She settled down with her sleeping quite quickly once Brittany had stopped coming to the house and stopped screaming when I changed her night nappy. She stopped wetting the bed at night, and there had been no more urinary tract infections from the day Brittany stopped residing with us.

However, Amy would get very distressed when she had to be separated from me, and this was happening a lot as she had started kindergarten a few months previously. She would scream at the top of her lungs and sob uncontrollably when I had to leave her. I would ring the school about twenty minutes after I had left, and they always said she had settled, but I still found it terribly traumatic. I wondered if it was related to the abuse and her fear of being with strangers away from me, but I don’t suppose I will ever know for sure. Once she settled in after a few weeks, she adjusted and was okay.

Looking back I can see that my gut was telling me something was seriously wrong when both children were initially unhappy. I am so grateful I had a caring and kind doctor who took what the children said seriously and supported me but still acted in the best interests of the children even though she could see I was paralysed by fear and distress.

Even though my own experiences often led me to disengage emotionally from the children and not act in ways maybe others would have, I did in the end act and do what was right for them. Although there was opposition from my husband, the congregation, and friends and from within myself with my own conflicts and emotional turmoil, I still acted.

I also am so thankful for both my brave children—Amy for initially disclosing the abuse and Benjamin for speaking out even when experiencing extreme fear in the face of what seemed like overwhelming evidence (to him) that he and his mother were being harmed because he had spoken out. The strength of their resilience amazes me.

The end result was not really satisfying, but considering it was the words of four-year-old and six-year-old children against a fifteen-year-old girl, it was realistic. The police told me Brittany denied the charges. I was told she denied to the police that her father had abused her. She said she had made it up. Her mother and father, I believe, got back together not too long after that.

Years later I got a phone call from the elder’s wife who Brittany had initially told that her father had abused her. She told me Brittany’s father had committed suicide, and he had left a note admitting the sexual abuse of Brittany. I felt incredibly sad for Brittany and her ordeal and incredibly sad for my children. I also felt thankful I had gone to the authorities and gotten support and help for my children despite the denials at the time.

The police had arranged a conference with Brittany and some support people, to sort out a solution besides court that could work for all concerned and myself. I decided not to attend, and I had to tell the police what I wished to be the outcome of the conference. I told them all I wanted from the conference was for Brittany to have mandated counselling. I do not know if she ever did.

I was incredibly angry with the legal system that allowed Brittany to have as many members of her family or support people as she liked with her during the conference, yet I was allowed to choose only one support person. I do not remember anything else about the outcome of the meeting besides the fact that she maintained her denial of the charges.

The police advised it was highly unlikely that a court would listen to the children’s evidence and convict Brittany, who was also a minor at the time of the alleged offending. This was because Benjamin was now denying what had taken place even though his original evidence was a hundred percent supportive of what Amy had said, and because Amy had been only four years old at the time of her disclosure.

So that was the outcome.

There was no win for either side.

The only positive was that by allowing them to disclose and be believed, and then be supported in counselling, I hoped I had given my children voices, thereby helping to reduce the shame and fear they felt. I knew helping them name and give expression to the feelings they were having, confusing and often overwhelming though they were, would reduce their chances of suppressing all emotions inside them and prevent them from living in a state of numbness and emptiness for years after, as I was then still living.

But it was a tumultuous period of years. Benjamin was often full of rage, and his behaviour was extremely challenging to deal with. I had no longer been physically disciplining him and was supported by the counsellor in other parenting methods, but I often felt inadequate and that nothing was working. Eventually, over time, things slowly started to improve.

Benjamin became less fearful and was able to let go of the belief that Brittany’s threats were coming true. But it took a lot of intensive work and support to challenge that belief, especially given all the events that had transpired to create that reality in his mind.

Unfortunately, dealing with the children’s emotions left me confronted me by my own abuse history, and the scab started to lift off my tumultuous inner world.

I was ill equipped to deal with what lay beneath.

CONFRONTATION

As the sexual abuse of my brother and me by our Pop had stopped when we’d left Australia to move to New Zealand, I’d never spoke of it with my brother in nearly thirty years.

I rarely had intrusive thoughts or dreams about the abuse, and I would not consciously think about it. The few times it came unbidden into my mind, it seemed like a bad nightmare I had had the night before, all the details of which I couldn’t remember the next day.

My brother, despite being baptised at age sixteen, had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses when he was eighteen years old and had moved overseas to pursue his own career path. He would contact me by phone, sometimes weekly or sometimes a month or so would go by. He would often change his phone number, and then I had no way of contacting him.

During the time when Amy disclosed the sexual abuse by Brittany and we moved to Wellington, my brother rang and we talked. I did not discuss with him what had happened to the kids in great detail, although I mentioned it. This might seem strange to people, but in our family we rarely discussed what were the most important things, and this was normal for us.

Toward the end of our conversation, he said something to me about my being naive as I was still a Jehovah’s Witness. I can’t remember why he said that or what we were talking about, but I just exploded in anger. This was very rare for me, and I don’t recall it ever having happened between my brother and me before.

I ended up shouting through the phone at him that terrible things had happened to my children in Jehovah’s Witnesses, and things also had happened to me when I was younger, and he didn’t have a clue what I had to deal with or how I dealt with it, and how dare he accuse me of being naive! I hung up on him. I didn’t hear from him for months.

Then I got another phone call from him two or three months later. He asked me if I had gotten a letter he had sent me. I said I had not gotten any letter as we had moved house a month earlier but kept the same phone number. He suddenly blurted out that he had written the letter because of what I had said in our last phone call, and he asked, “Do you remember anything about Pop having abused us?”

I said, “Yes, I remember the abuse by our Pop.”

I so wished I had gotten his letter as we had never discussed what Pop had done to both of us, and he had never written a letter to me before. I felt in despair as to why it had not reached me; I had a postal redirection in place. But we talked for a while on the phone, and although we didn’t speak in detail of the abuse by Pop, I did answer my brother’s question about if I remembered what had happened to us. That phone call and dealing with my own children’s abuse added fuel to the fire of intrusive memories. I started to have dreams of Pop and Nana’s house, where the abuse had occurred, and started to have more episodes of depression and anxiety.

Before we had moved to Wellington, and before I had found out about Amy and Benjamin’s sexual abuse, we had an Awake magazine (published by The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society) published on the topic of childhood sexual abuse. At that time both Leonard and I had been having financial problems, Benjamin had been having behavioural problems with his allergies and jealousy of his sister, and I was struggling with sleeplessness and tiredness. I had become very low spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically.

I had confided to one of the elders’ wives (Trish) what had occurred with Peter because I had felt close to her and thought I could trust her. She had a granddaughter who had been sexually abused by her paternal grandfather and the granddaughter had recently been disfellow-shipped. She still maintained secret contact with her granddaughter as she felt the actions she had been disfellowshipped for were not because of a bad heart but because of her trauma as a child.

I became close to Trish and loved her as a mother figure. After I confided some detail to her, she encouraged me to seek counselling. This was definitely not the norm at the time for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I agreed, and she made an appointment with someone in a town nearby. I remember the sense of camaraderie and air of secrecy I felt as we drove to the appointment that day. Although I wanted help, I also was terrified of speaking to someone. I felt like I would be betraying the organisation, and I felt so guilty and full of shame. I remember walking in the door and sitting down.

The lady smiled at me and said, “What would you like to talk to me about?”

I said, “My friend thought I should come and see someone.”

She said to me, “Do you always do what your friend tells you to do?”

I felt like dropping through the floor and nearly died of embarrassment on the spot. I got up and said, “I am sorry. I made a mistake,” and I walked out. I was not ready to talk. I had too much shame. I still was too loyal to the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation, and I felt responsible for a lot of what had happened with Peter even though I had been a teenager and he had been in his sixties.

I started to believe that God had removed his holy spirit from Leonard and I because of my concealing the sin I had committed with Peter years earlier. This was because of information I had read in the recent Awake article. I started to agonise over it. In the end I decided I needed to tell my husband and maybe talk to some elders to confess regarding what had happened with Peter. The last thing in the world I wanted was for my children and family to suffer endlessly because of me.

I was nearly suicidal in despair over dealing with all the internal conflict.

First, I wrote a letter to Leonard and briefly outlined that Peter had been intimate with me. My memories from that time with Peter were very haphazard and erratic. I could not be definite regarding the exact timing of what happened or even exactly what had actually occurred and what I had only imagined. I was so full of guilt and confusion.

I felt too ashamed to speak to Leonard directly, so I put it in writing, which was hard but easier than speaking about it. Leonard was not sure if it was serious enough to lead to Jehovah’s removing his holy spirit from us, so he suggested we speak to the other elders in the congregation about it.

I couldn’t bear having the elders in our local congregation know all the details and having to see them at meetings every week knowing that they knew all these things about me. I asked Leonard if we could speak to some elders in a neighbouring congregation. He rang them and asked if they would come speak to me about something that had happened a long time ago that I felt guilty about and was worried was causing a loss of God’s approval now. Two elders came to our house to see my husband and I.

I told them all I could remember about what had occurred with Peter. They asked me questions: Did you ever wear provocative or see-through clothes around him? How often were you alone together? Did he ever go into your bedroom when you stayed at his house? Were you sexually aroused when he touched you? Where did he touch you? Did you touch him? Did you kiss him? Did he force you? Did you willingly engage in this conduct? Did you fantasise about having sex with him?

The elders then read me the scripture in the Bible that said, “He who even looks at a woman with desire to have relations with her is committing adultery.” I was admonished in regard to the sexual fantasies I’d had when with Peter as a teenager. Then I was read scriptures and told I needed to refrain from spreading gossip and slander in the congregation as it was only my word against Peter’s, and I would need to keep to myself what had occurred as there were not two witnesses to the events of which I had accused him.

The elders said they needed to write to the elders in the congregation Peter was a member of and advise them of the accusations made against him. They said it was a “judicial matter” and serious allegations, and Peter had a right to hear them. A judicial matter meant he could be disfellowshipped for the accused wrongdoing, and a group of three elders would need to hear the evidence against him, listen to his reply, and reach a verdict. They would be the judges.

I told the elders I didn’t want Peter spoken to as that was not why I had raised the matter after all those years. I had felt guilty and worried regarding maybe having lost God’s holy spirit.

These matters were entirely overlooked, and in fact no one addressed them. It felt like circumstances had been set in motion that I had not intended and I had no control over.

In my mind I was trying to confess and ask forgiveness, and they saw me as making an accusation.

As the elders were leaving, they advised me they would be writing to the congregation at once. As my father was an elder in the congregation Peter was in, I was in a state of extreme stress; my father had no knowledge of these events, and I felt I had to let him know from my own mouth before he got the letter from the elders. I had no desire for him to know any of this about me, and I felt a level of shame I cannot put into words.

I felt like I was walking in a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake. Everything felt surreal, and I felt disconnected from my whole life and suicidally depressed although I had no plan actually to carry it out. I thought my children would be better off without me, and I was the reason for their distress and what had happened to them. I felt like everything I had done as a parent was a failure and they deserved a better parent than me. I thought often about wanting to die and being free of emotional pain.

I spoke to my father by phone and touched as briefly as I could on the subject of what had happened with Peter; I said I had told some elders and now they wished for someone to speak to Peter. He asked me no questions. I told him that he would be getting a letter from the elders regarding the matter. Shortly after that my mother and father came up to see me.

The elder’s wife I had become close to had rung them and asked them to come as she was concerned and fearful regarding my state of mind as I had expressed suicidal wishes. I remember my father coming up behind me in the kitchen and saying, “Are you all right?”

I said yes as the last thing I wanted to do or felt I could do was talk about the matter. And that was that. I remember my mother asking me if I was sure about what had happened as “they are very serious allegations,” and I said yes but felt my throat clamp up with emotion and was unable to speak further to her.

When Peter had been spoken to, I was phoned up by the elders and told he had vehemently denied all that was alleged in the letter; he had said I must have been mentally ill. I was totally shocked. I had in my own mind decided he would blame me for throwing myself at him, but I had never envisaged his denying it totally. I then said I wished to confront him. My husband and I drove to his town, and I stayed with my parents.

Peter refused to meet me at the Kingdom Hall, as would usually happen, and kept refusing all requests from the elders for a meeting. In the end he agreed to meet but only on the condition it was in his house. On the afternoon he finally agreed to meet, one of the elders pulled out of the meeting because of business problems. That meant only one elder could come with me.

We met at the house. The minute I pulled up, my heart felt like it was pounding out of my body. I walked up the drive. I felt so indignant at Peter’s denial of me that I just had to go through with the meeting. The fact he had put it off for so long had given me some confidence that he was more nervous than I was and didn’t wish to meet with me as he felt guilty.

I was driven internally by some force to see him. I think his denying what I felt we’d had and what had meant so much to me for years, and his being the only real male person I had ever felt special to, alive with, and real to, were such a shock I just couldn’t accept that he had actually said that.

When I walked in the lounge where he and his wife were sitting, Peter immediately took charge and started speaking to the elder about how sad it was in regard to the rate of mental illness in the congregations these days. After five minutes of his totally dominating the conversation and not even looking at me, I couldn’t hold back any longer.

I interrupted the conversation, and my anger and emotion were palpable in my voice.

“How dare you not even look at me or speak to me? How dare you treat me as if I don’t exist and aren’t even sitting here? How dare you accuse me of mental illness?”

I don’t know whether the elders from near where I lived had told him I had been severely depressed, but I strongly suspected it, and that was why he had taken this tack. I also had discovered that one of the elders I had spoken to was a friend of his.

The meeting was a disaster. He tried to tell the elder he had a medical condition, of which he had documentation, that meant he was unable to have an erection easily; he hadn’t had intercourse with his wife for years, and she would attest to that. I just looked at him and said that whatever the paperwork said, I stood by what I knew had happened, and having an erection with a girl forty years younger than himself to whom he was attracted and who was in love with him was a totally different situation from being with a wife with whom he’d repeatedly said he had problems.

Helena then said to me that if anything had occurred, she couldn’t understand why I hadn’t said anything at the time, as she thought we’d had a good relationship and were friends, and I had been such a confident young lady. I tried to explain unsuccessfully to her that I hadn’t thought anyone would believe me, I had shame for my role in it, and I was sorry. It all had felt too big and hard to handle, and the best thing at the time had been just to stop seeing them and stop coming around, which I had done.

I stumbled over my words as I had so much emotion inside me and did not feel I was getting them out in the way I wanted. I also was sitting in their lounge, where some of our intimacy had occurred, and so this was throwing me emotionally off balance.

The elder at the meeting ended up saying we were not getting anywhere, and we just had to agree to disagree. He asked me to read out loud scriptures about slander and gossip that he looked up in the Bible. He told me it had to be left up to God to know the truth about what had happened. He told me there had to be two witnesses to allegations of child sexual abuse if the accused denied its occurring, and as there were no such witnesses, I had to be quiet and leave it up to God to reveal if he so wished.

The only way a person within the congregation could be found guilty of child abuse was by confession, conviction in a court of law, or the mouth of two witnesses to the same event. If I spoke about it to others, I could be disfellowshipped.

I left feeling angry, disillusioned, manipulated by Peter, empty, flat, stripped of all dignity, and full of shame and guilt. If it were possible to feel worse than when I had first rung the elders, I certainly did a hundredfold. I drove home in a wretched state.

I was disillusioned with the elders and no longer felt their way of handling cases of child abuse was correct, but I excused that as their being imperfect people, and I wasn’t going to let that stop me from having faith in God. My inability to pray started up again because swear words would appear in my head whenever I tried to pray or think of God, just as when I had been a teenager, and once again I felt scared and very alone.

I coped by concentrating on the seemingly mundane and ordinary things of life and trying to help my children.

Benjamin was struggling with learning at school and still had behavioural issues, so that took my energy, plus dealing with a young daughter and a new baby. I threw myself into preaching, doing more and more door-to-door work. I think I was trying so hard to make myself “good” as the burden of shame I felt was so enormous.

But the cracks in my belief in the Jehovah’s Witnesses had started to appear.

1994

I woke up just as the light was starting to penetrate the darkness of the room. Someone had been shaking my shoulder and calling my name. I sat up quickly as consciousness came to me, and I looked around for my husband or one of the children. No one was standing there. My husband was sleeping soundly in the bed next to me.

I looked at the foot of the bed, and three people stared back at me. I rubbed my eyes, as I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I wasn’t scared; I was too busy trying to figure out what was going on. I didn’t feel threatened as I saw straightaway that I could see through the people to the wall opposite. My mind was trying desperately to figure this out in the microseconds since I had awoken.

One of them appeared to be dressed like an old-fashioned policeman, in a double-breasted top with brass buttons and a hat with a point on top. The other person I immediately perceived as being a monk as he had a brown cloak on and a hood up over his head; he was looking down, with his hands clasped in front of him but partially hidden inside the cloak. The third person was dressed like a nun, wearing white headgear that appeared very strange to me. Later on, when I looked up headgear common to nuns, I immediately identified it was a cornette she had been wearing. The flyaway-looking headgear with strange angles was very unfamiliar to me.

I didn’t feel threatened by any of them, and by the time I shifted in bed and sat fully up, rubbing my eyes to peer more closely at them, they had gradually faded away until eventually I couldn’t see them. I lay back down with my heart pounding, trying to figure out who they were, what they wanted, and why they had appeared to me.

I didn’t wake up my husband. I knew what he would say. According to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, there are no such things as the spirits of dead people, only demons, and if you see them you must have done something to attract them into your life, and you must pray fervently for protection by calling out the name of Jehovah or Jesus to make them go away.

We were encouraged, during talks by the elders about demon attacks, to go to the elders for advice if we felt we were subject to demon attack. This was so that we could try and determine what we might have done that had acted as a means to bring them into our home, and to pray to God immediately for guidance. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to purchase anything second hand for fear of attack by demons if the property’s prior owners had been involved in satanic things (we were told this could even include watching unapproved movies). I never saw these figures again, but over the following month other things occurred that were disturbing to me.

Amy was waking up numerous times in the night, and when I would go to her, the light would be on in her room. She would be crying, saying someone was turning the light on and off. Benjamin started waking up and saying he was having nightmares. One night in particular he woke up and came into bed with us, very distressed and trying to explain to me what had happened. He said he had had a dream about a demon sitting on top of him, crushing his chest and then leaving and smashing his window on the way out. He was then thrown out of his window by the demon. He was in state of panic as he said that when he had woken up, he had felt like the dream carried on and didn’t stop, and this frightened him. He never wanted to sleep in that room again.

One time I was preparing vegetables for tea in the kitchen and heard the front door slam downstairs, and distinct thumping of footsteps running up the carpeted steps and then stopping. I called out, thinking it was my husband coming home, and went looking for him, but no one else was in the house at the time except Rose, who was asleep in her cot.

The fact that this occurred at the same time I was dealing with the children’s sexual abuse, Benjamin’s fear of bad things happening because he had told on Brittany, and my continued fears in regard to God’s spirit having been removed from our family because of what had happened with Peter all led to our making the decision to move house.

Mum and Dad were caring enough to let us borrow a few thousand dollars for a deposit, and we were able to purchase our own property. Within a matter of weeks, we had found our property and relocated.

At the time this experience was frightening, intriguing, and anxiety producing. I believed it probably was my sinfulness with Peter that had caused God to remove his spirit from my family, and demon exposure was a consequence of that. I did, however, have room for doubt that maybe there was an as-yet-unknown alternate spiritual or scientific explanation for it all. I allowed the doubts to linger in the background, and I forced myself to concentrate on present issues for which I did have explanation.

NANA

When Rose was only six weeks old, my Nana visited us in New Zealand, all the way from Australia. It was so lovely to have her with us—three generations in the same house. I treasure the photos I have of that time. My Nana seemed so old and frail and much smaller and fragile than I remembered. I felt surges of protectiveness toward her. She gravitated toward Amy, who was the age I had been when I had last lived close to Nana in Perth, and she often called Amy my name by mistake. I would catch her stroking Amy’s hair, kissing and cuddling her, and playing games with her.

In the mornings I would find Nana had climbed into Amy’s small single bed and was sleeping with her curled up in her arms, with Amy’s head resting next to Nana’s breasts. It brought back such tender and lovely memories of how I had perceived Nana as a child: as a protector and carer, soft, supportive, and loving.

As Nana had been told within the first couple of days what had happened to Benjamin and Amy and why I was taking them to counselling, I wondered how much of her outpouring of tenderness was because of grief or because of memories of me as a child.

One morning, whilst we were sharing a cup of tea together, I started to ask her about her memories of her mother. She told me her mother had died when she was fourteen years old. They were living in the midlands area of England at the time. She said her mother had told her when she was ill that she would die of a broken heart, so that was what Nana thought it was. I asked her what she thought her mother meant by that. She told me how when her father had been gassed in the war, he had been sent to Netley hospital to recuperate, and after that he had come home with another woman. He set that woman up to work for the owners of the mill where he and her mother worked.

She said her mother was sick for a while before she died; she had had rheumatic fever earlier in life, and it had weakened her. She would stay home from working at the cotton mill, and the inspectors would come around to check if she really were sick. Nana said that just one year prior to her mother’s dying, her Mum was standing on a table putting up Christmas decorations, and the inspectors came around and saw her, and she had her pension taken off and had to go back to work.

Nana said the strongest memories of her mother were of her laughing; being a Sunday-school teacher; having long, black hair down to her ankles; and being unhappy with her Dad. When I asked about her Dad, she said he was a womaniser, and she went very quiet. She took a sip of her tea, put it down, and then said, “After my mother died, I took a knife to bed with me, and he never bothered me again.”

My heart felt like it stopped inside my chest, and time seemed to slow down and then stand still for a second. I knew the effort it had taken for my Nana to disclose this and that she was close to choking up. We both concentrated on our cups of tea for a while.

Nana put her hand over mine and said I was doing the right thing taking the children to counselling, and what I had told her about stopping the cycle of abuse was the right thing to try to do. She told me not to stop regardless of what Leonard or others were saying, and she was proud of me. It was a moment in time of closeness and many unspoken words that crossed all barriers that previously had been raised between us.

All the blame I ever had directed at her for knowing what Pop was doing and her not stopping it, for running my hands under hot water, for telling me not to say such things, all dropped away from me, and I just felt love and sympathy for the young woman who had lost her mother and then had to stop the sexual assaults by her father.

After this it seemed like the figurative floodgates opened for Nana. I was determined to ask her as many questions as I could about her memories and her family, and she responded. I learnt more about my Nana as a person in those few days than I ever had known before, and we renewed the closeness I had experienced as a child.

She told me her youngest sister had had a baby out of wedlock at a young age, and Nana had given that child away to someone she knew as she believed her sister was not equipped to bring up the child. It was an unofficial adoption.

Also her oldest daughter, my Aunty Shirley, had had a child out of wedlock when she was unmarried and still young. Nana had given that child, a daughter, away to someone she had found out wanted a child, through people for whom she had been cleaning house. It was not an official adoption either. I was shocked but didn’t doubt the validity of what Nana was saying.

It was like Nana wanted to tell everything about all the children in her family she had believed had needed rescuing or to be found more suitable families. Maybe seeing what a stepfather had done to her five-year-old friend had created a belief in her own mind about the risk to a child with a single female parent. I can only guess about her motivations in giving away these children.

She told me of an incident that still disturbed her in relation to my cousin, Bruce, whom she lived with since my Aunty and her had relocated to Sydney from Darwin. At that stage of his life, Bruce was a pastor in a local church and lived in a house that was owned by the church, where he looked after three siblings who had been severely abused both physically and sexually. Apparently the children were a handful, especially the boys. Nana said she felt Bruce was way too hard on the children. The girl was nearly mute and about fifteen years old.

Nana said that on one particular day she opened the door of the bathroom, and the girl was lying in the water in the bathtub naked, with Bruce rubbing between her legs with a flannel. Nana said the girl was lying stiff, staring straight up at the roof, and her arms were rigid down at her sides. Nana demonstrated the stiff arms while telling me. She said the girl could use her arms and was old enough to wash herself, so why was Bruce doing this?

The question wasn’t demanding an answer; Nana was just talking to herself out loud. She was obviously disturbed and confused when detailing her memories. She said she stood in the bathroom doorway, and Bruce and she just stared at each other and didn’t say a word between them. She said she shut the door and went into her room and did not come out. She went to bed. Later on, when it was dark, Bruce opened her bedroom door and stood in the doorway. She said he stood there for ages and didn’t say a word, and Nana said she didn’t speak either but pretended to be asleep and lay very still. After what seemed an age but was probably only a minute, he shut the door and left.

The implication, which was obviously very disturbing for Nana, was that Bruce was abusing the girl. But to me the throwback image was so strong—of her father coming into her room at night to abuse her as she lay in the dark, silent and aware, watching and waiting, and the implied threat Nana felt from this occasion even though it may not have been intended.

I never spoke to Bruce about that episode, although I later revealed the births of the two other children. I felt there could have been an alternate explanation and that although it was obvious Nana had fears and concerns, she had not addressed them with him at the time, and it was now too far past the event, with no direct evidence to accuse him.

I also thought how dreadful it was to be falsely accused if you were only doing your job, looking after three highly disturbed children. Maybe he had to attend to the girl’s cleanliness needs if she refused to move or do so herself. If this were the case, it was less than ideal for a sexually abused girl at age fifteen to be washed intimately by a grown man, but it might have been all she had in the circumstances.

Nana disclosed that after her mother had died, her father had remarried quite quickly and had more children. She felt her stepmother favoured her own birth children over Nana and her two sisters and was quite cruel to her, and Nana had hated her. When she had left home, she had taken her two younger sisters with her and never had contact with the rest of them ever again.

She reported that she felt she had lost her childhood after her mother had died. She did nothing but work at the mill and then work at home and be a mother to her younger two sisters, and so she didn’t want to experience that again.

When she was married and nine months pregnant with her oldest child, she walked home from the bakery my Pop owned, where she worked in with him, as she had been experiencing stomach cramps. She said her son was born halfway up the stairs, and he would have fallen all the way down if her husband hadn’t been following her and caught him. She said she had no idea how he was coming out or what she had just experienced.

After her second child was conceived, she understood what had caused her pregnancy and so resolved to have no more children. My father was born twelve years after his sister, and my Nana stated she had never wanted him. He had grown up experiencing this feeling of never being wanted, and in fact my Nana spoke of a time when she had left him in his pram outside the bakery all day as she forgot he was there, and a customer brought him back inside!

Hearing this part of Nana’s story helped me understand who she was as a person. I came to the conclusion that a pattern of learned silence and keeping secrets, accompanied by both loss and unresolved grief, can introduce a pattern of relating that can be inadvertently passed on to future generations, which can then increase their vulnerability to becoming victims.

Nana had kept quiet about what had happened to her for nearly eighty years; she had not disclosed it. Who knows if her father went on to sexually abuse her younger two sisters or not? Did she know or suspect this? Had she felt the terrible burden I had felt of not protecting a younger sibling?

Had she also lived her life unable to feel the full range and depth of emotion as I had done so far? Were her actions in giving away two female children born to her unwed sister and her own daughter a result of what she had seen occur to Agnes in a stepfamily situation? What motivations drove her as a result of her own abuse experiences? In her attempts to protect these children from future harm, had she inadvertently created more harm by removing them from their birth parents who no doubt loved them? What had become of these children?

I grieved inside for my own father growing up having never felt wanted. Hearing him express no memories of any events in his life until the age of fifteen, I wondered about his own possible abuse history and the trauma of having a mother who resented his very presence and expressed how much she did not want him, and his never understanding why.

I loved both these people intensely but could see how their histories had shaped them both in the ways they related or did not relate to their children. It made me more determined than ever to try and be more open with my own children.

AUSTRALIA

When Rose was five years old, we migrated to Australia. We moved to Brisbane as Leonard had a sister and other family already working and living there. We bought a house. It was a beautiful home and had a totally self-contained granny flat downstairs that Mum and Dad moved into after moving back to Australia within six months of Leonard’s and my migrating. We lived upstairs in the three-bedroom house. It had a swimming pool and spa and a great garden in which the kids could play.

However, I was desperately unhappy.

I had started having doubts about the Jehovah’s Witnesses six years earlier, after the disclosure of Benjamin’s and Amy’s sexual abuse. Doubts had been raised in me regarding the validity of the doctrines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the validity of the elders’ authority.

My doubts in regard to the Jehovah’s Witnesses coincided with cracks beginning to occur in my marriage and my drawing away from my husband as he had opposed my taking the children to the police and counselling and had been totally unsupportive. This created an ongoing wedge between us. I wanted to but could not talk to him about what was happening with the children, what the counsellor was talking to me about, or my own abuse memories. He shut down or walked away.

Another issue that had always been a source of conflict in our marriage was pornography. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that it is wrong and totally unacceptable for a Christian to look at or read such material. As Leonard had always been an elder in the congregation and had to counsel other people on such things, I thought it hypocritical that he secretly had stashes of such magazines as well as videos I would periodically find when I was cleaning. I used to find them at the back of his filing cabinets or pushed behind files and in other places. I didn’t understand his attraction to it, and it eroded my trust in him to see that he hid it. It was an ongoing issue, and it became worse once we moved to Australia.

My husband had always made money and lost money as an entrepreneur, and I had been happy to let him handle the business and financial side of things in our marriage. However, I started to take notice of bank statements and saw that multiple times every week there were varying amounts of money consistently being withdrawn from the same automatic teller machine (ATM) at the same place, and this had occurred since just after we’d moved to Australia.

I showed my Dad the statements, and he looked up in the phone book the name of the place that appeared next to the withdrawals on the bank statement. It appeared to be either a club or something near the place Leonard was working. The amounts totalled twenty, fifty, or a hundred dollars on each occasion, but it was happening multiple times a week, so this added up to a substantial amount of money going out. I spoke to Leonard about it. He got angry and said it was lunch money. Then, when I showed him the statements and queried his spending hundreds on lunch every week, he said it was pocket money for the children. As we never gave the children pocket money, this shocked me, and I knew he was lying.

I ended up accusing him of perhaps spending money on prostitutes because of the constant pornography I was finding, and he did not instantly deny it; the look on his face made me feel cold and still inside. I couldn’t believe he would do such a thing—not with his being an elder in the congregation and the fact that he was condemning me for not attending the meetings regularly or going door to door anymore. His refusal to give an adequate answer made me angry that there might have been more hidden that I didn’t know and that he might have been lying about. The conversations always ended without my receiving any proper answer and him just clamming up and walking away.

I broke down and, in desperation, went to my Dad, who, at that time, was still an active member of the congregation. I was distressed, and I told him what had occurred and said I just wanted answers. I felt it concerned him and my Mum also as they were co-owners of the house, so they had a vested interest in where the money was going. Dad sat down with Leonard and me, and we repeated the same procedure over again. Leonard just said it was lunch or pocket money but couldn’t explain the amounts or why they were so much.

When he was asked directly if it were pornography or prostitutes or something else, he did not deny it but just said he could not remember what it was for and about. He also could not remember where he was withdrawing the money from even though it was the same place on the bank statements multiple times a week. None of this made sense to either of us. Leonard sat there mutely, and the discussion ended with me feeling more confused and dissatisfied than ever.

Just after that I decided I could not live like I was in my marriage anymore. This was a huge step as divorce and separation without adultery are not recognised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a witness cannot remarry otherwise. A divorce, even though legal in the law of the land, is not considered legal in God’s eyes unless one party has been unfaithful. So the very idea of separation was horrifying and inconceivable to most Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I just knew I was severely depressed as I had doubt about my beliefs and my whole sense of who I was. My questioning who I would be if I no longer was a Jehovah’s Witness made me feel unstable, empty, and terrified.

My whole identity and world beliefs and how I operated in the world were totally interwoven with my beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness, and I did not know how to function without them. But at that point in time, the stress of my marriage issues was the straw that broke the camel’s back, figuratively speaking. I knew if Leonard were not there, I might be able to sort out all the other confusion and keep my head far enough above water emotionally to deal later on with my marriage issues.

I asked him to leave. He was devastated and totally had not expected me to ask this of him. He sat looking bereft on the edge of our bed in our room, where I had called him in to talk to him. He asked where he should go. I said to his Mum and Dad or his adult married sisters. I told him he had to decide. He was in shock, and he didn’t seem able to make any decisions. He said good-bye to the kids and told them he was going to stay at Nana’s for a bit, and then he would be back. He left.

Suffice it to say it would take a book to explain all the conversations that were then had between my parents and the local elders, all of them asking me why I was separating and saying it was against God’s will. I raised the issue of the missing money, the pornography, and the fact that I had lost trust in the Jehovah’s Witnesses over their doctrines in regard to such things as rape and child abuse and how things had been handled with my children and me.

During that time of separation, Leonard wrote me a letter. He told me that at age twelve, in a town where he grew up in New Zealand, in a toilet block in a local park, a stranger had sexually assaulted him. My shock while reading this was huge. He said he had never told anyone about it, not even his parents. He said the guy had performed oral sex on him, and it had been his first sexual experience. I rang him, and we made a time to meet.

I was so pleased he had confided in me. He told me that when he had found out about Amy and Benjamin’s being abused, he’d thought the best thing would be not to talk about it with them. He said he had not talked about it, and he’d thought it was the best way as the shame connected to what happened was still huge in him.

We talked about the pornography. He said it was not the women he was looking at but the men. They aroused him. He felt so much shame. I told him I wished he had told me years earlier so we could have bonded closer rather than drawing apart. I could totally understand why he’d had the reaction he’d had with our children now that he had disclosed this. He had wanted to spare the children what he’d thought was shame over its coming out into the open. I spoke with him in regard to the shame still being there even if the incidents were not spoken about, and was he not a prime example of this?

He also spoke about an incident that had occurred when I was pregnant with Benjamin. At the time my parents had a cleaning contract that involved them both working just two evenings a week and once on the weekend, and they were paid nearly a full-time wage for this. They were at the stage of wanting to give it up, and they also wished to help us out. We took it over. There was a big factory to clean as well as numerous office buildings. I would vacuum, dust, and clean the office block, and Leonard would clean the men’s toilets and shower block.

One evening, after we had finished cleaning and were on our way home, he suddenly said we had lost the contract. He said the boss had spoken to him; a complaint had been made, and we no longer could work there. I was horrified. I wanted to know what the complaint was and why we were not given a chance or any notice. Leonard said he thought the boss was giving the contract to a friend of his, and that was the real reason behind the dismissal.

I was immediately up in arms and said it was illegal, and firstly we had to have sufficient notice and then be given a chance to improve. I asked if the complaint were about my work, and Leonard said no. Then, when I kept pressing him, he suddenly said an employee of the firm had accused him of threatening to kill him, and that was the real reason we had been dismissed.

I was stunned and totally shocked.

I asked, “Why would someone accuse you of that?”

Leonard said, “I don’t know why.”

I said, “Well, why did the boss believe him and not you? And what did the boss say he had been told happened?”

Leonard said the employee had told the boss that whilst Leonard was cleaning the shower block, the employee had been in the shower, and Leonard had threatened to kill him.

I kept on and on, asking questions, and Leonard’s answers kept changing and were not satisfying me. Finally I said I wanted to go talk to the boss myself. Leonard shouted at me to leave it alone and said he had not threatened to kill anyone, but the boss had said if we left quietly he would not call the police, and that would be that. I was confused, horrified, and upset.

I told my parents the whole story, and they agreed it did not make sense, but in the end they thought it was up to us to deal with. They said they would also have wanted to talk to the employee and the boss themselves to try to sort it out, but if we wanted to leave it that was our choice.

My whole gut was telling me Leonard must have done or said something to this man and something happened. I knew my Dad had always liked the boss, and I couldn’t understand why I had not been called into the room or why it had been said the police would have been called if we had not left.

At the time, I think, deep down I knew something more had happened, but I so wanted to keep the fantasy of creating an inside life for myself that I didn’t want to do anything whilst I was pregnant with our first child to rock that fantasy. I pushed it out of my mind, and we got on with our lives.

Maybe I was doing the same thing that Nana had done when she had heard me insinuate that Pop was touching me, her granddaughter. If something feels too hard to deal with, potentially too distressing when you feel you have had enough distress, and you just want a quiet life, is it easier maybe to pretend you must be wrong and not pursue it?

Now when I asked Leonard about it, he agreed there had been an “encounter” with the man in the shower room, and the man had not been willing. He had told Leonard he was going to tell the boss, and Leonard had threatened to kill him to try to stop him from doing so as he had panicked.

He would not elaborate further and was distressed, so once again I did not push him. Leonard then said there had been other times he’d had sexual contact with males.

He said just before we were married, he had swept a man’s chimney and noticed there was pornography lying open on the couch. He said he then asked to use the man’s shower, and he was directed to use the en suite shower. He said when he came out into the bedroom, the man was lying naked on the bed, and Leonard’s towel fell from around his waist, and the man then gave him oral sex.

He said he stood there until he ejaculated, and then the man asked him to do the same thing to him. He said he told the man he was not gay and would not do that, and the man got angry and told him to go away. He said he had to pay the man bribe money to stop him from disclosing it.

Leonard was adamant there had not been anyone since we had married. My gut feeling was not to believe him about this, but I did not push him. This was the first time we’d had what I felt was some honesty between us.

He then said the money that had been withdrawn consistently from near his work was because he was being bribed; he had done something wrong, and if his boss were told about it, he would lose his job, so he had to keep paying the money.

He would not say what he had done wrong.

At that stage he was working for a company as a financial consultant. He said his life was in danger. He would not elaborate further or give any more answers. Once again I thought this story was closer to the truth; it still was not the whole story, but it was the closest I was ever likely to get to it.

I talked to him in regard to his sexual orientation and how, since I had started to see the psychologist and read books that were written by others, not just The Watchtower Society, I did not think homosexuality was a sin or that adult pornography was necessarily so bad.

But what did disturb me were the lying, living a double life, and secrecy that had created some of the damage in our marriage. He said he was not homosexual as he loved me and wanted to live with me. I said he could still love me and be homosexual. He said he just had to pray and try harder, and it would be okay. He begged and begged me to give him another chance. We got back together, and he moved back in.

He did go, at my insistence, to see a psychologist; I was getting so much assistance from it, I thought it might help him. He saw someone and came home and told me he didn’t need to go again—he had been told he was “fine” and “normal.” The way he said this to me made me feel so angry as he knew I was regularly going, and I felt the insinuation was that he was saying he was normal and I was not. I asked him if he had told the psychologist about the sexual assault on him as a child, the pornography, the lying, the homosexual encounters, and the current bribery he was experiencing. He said no to all the above. I just looked at him. He refused to go back.

I did not connect in my mind my first experience of seeing a counsellor and how I had walked out as I had not been ready then. I just saw someone who had completely wasted an opportunity and was now, I felt, using as a weapon against me the fact that a psychologist had told him he was “normal” (whatever that meant) and did not have to attend, whereas I had been going regularly for months.

By that time I had disclosed to Leonard all my history, and I felt doubly betrayed as I thought he was not dealing with all the issues he had that had led to the breakdown of our marriage, whereas I was seeing someone to continue to try to address my problems. Although open communication about our pasts had started to bring us closer, rather than bring more shame, as Leonard had originally feared it would, his refusal to be open and not secretive about all the things happening in his life that were creating mistrust continued to erode our relationship.

No longer was it defined by our roles as Jehovah’s Witnesses, as it had been up to then; we were struggling to base it now on who we really were as people.

This time it was the real us working at our marriage, not the stereotypical characters of husband and wife we had been trying to live up to being, as outlined in a book written by Jehovah’s Witnesses, thinking this would create the perfect marriage.

The real us at that time, though, did not come from what dreams were made of.

THOMAS

During that turbulent time in our marriage, our son, Thomas, was conceived. Our marriage was going through a very rocky time, but we were talking at least. I still felt we had a chance. I could not envisage a future on my own, and I felt I had an ally in Leonard and an emotional support.

From the time we got back together, he listened to me when I spoke about my doubts regarding the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and he listened to me when I spoke about how I felt the abuse had affected me emotionally. I also felt like we had become closer after he’d started confiding in me, and I was listening to and supporting him also.

One particular night, after making love, Leonard suddenly said the condom was missing and started searching the bed for it. We couldn’t find it at all. I suddenly felt myself go cold all over, and I went into the toilet, and sure enough the condom fell out of my body. I hopped in the shower and was soaping myself down in a total panic. Leonard came in the room to see what I was doing. I told him the condom had been inside me, and I knew I was going to be pregnant. I just kept saying over and over again that I couldn’t be pregnant as I couldn’t cope with it; we had too many problems, and I wasn’t strong enough anymore.

Leonard convinced me to get out of the shower and come back to bed and that nothing had happened. I lay in the bed with him holding me and could not sleep for ages. I had an absolute certainty throughout myself that I was pregnant. It was intense fear about how I would cope and an absolute internal knowing.

I clearly will never forget lying there in the dark with Leonard gradually going to sleep next to me, holding my stomach and staring at the ceiling in the darkness with dread and certainty and deep fear of how I would cope. I had no doubt I had conceived. This was a very different feeling and reaction from when I had conceived Rose.

I rang the doctor the next day and went to see her the same day. I spoke to her regarding my marriage problems and how I had three children and was using only condoms for protection. She asked me when my last period had been, and it had ended only the day previously. She then gave me the Depo-Provera injection in the leg. This contraceptive lasts for three months at a time.

I felt relieved that I no longer needed to worry. I dismissed my concerns and did not mention to her the missing condom from the previous night. I pushed it from my mind. Although I was facing realities in my past, I continued to live my life in denial of current issues on many occasions. The pattern was still very strong. If I didn’t think about it then it might not have really happened, and I could forget about it.

A few weeks later, I started to get morning sickness. I bought a home pregnancy test from the chemist, and it was positive. I made an appointment with my doctor, and she did a urine test, and this also was positive. She was horrified and appeared worried. She looked up problems with pregnancy after being given Depo-Provera, and it did not look good.

Once again I found myself in the position of saying I could not have an abortion as it was against my religious and personal beliefs at that time. I just felt in myself I could not do it. I felt shame envelope me when I was sitting in front of the doctor for what I had not said previously, for putting her in this situation, and yet I could not bring myself to verbalise any of it.

I comforted myself, recalling how I had been in this situation before whilst eleven weeks pregnant with Rose, when my placenta had separated and I’d had a bleed. Rose was born healthy and vibrant six months later. So a portion of me still hoped things would work out this time.

I did not bond with my baby during my pregnancy as I had with the others. Once he moved I felt some relief, and once I had my ultrasound scan and nothing untoward was shown, I also felt some relief. But there was always an underlying sense of anxiety that stayed with me. I wondered what the long-term consequences might be. Right throughout my pregnancy, I had a fear that something would be dreadfully wrong with the baby, and that remained with me right to his birth. I felt so much guilt for not disclosing the lost condom to the doctor at the initial visit and burying my head in the sand, not wanting to face the possible consequences, and now I was facing the worst possible outcome.

During that time I was suffering quite severely from depression. I had made friends with an elder and his wife in the congregation, whom I regularly saw and met with for lunch. Lisa and Matthew listened to me and were noncondemning and nonjudgmental. I did not tell them everything, but I did tell them a lot of what I was in conflict about.

Lisa started to study the Bible with me even though I had been a witness for a longer period of time than she, to try to help me find answers to my doubts. I still was not satisfied as she did not find any answers I had not been able to find already, but I was desperate for someone to prove my doubts wrong so I could go back to feeling safe and secure again in my faith, and not feel this tumultuous confusion the doubting of my faith had brought.

As a Jehovah’s Witness, I knew my place in the world. I understood that my place was to be a public witness to Jehovah. I had to warn people of the coming Armageddon. I had to obey what the Bible said about morals and how to live my life, and in that way I would remain in God’s favour and be saved. I was to associate only with other Jehovah’s Witnesses and try to help non-Jehovah’s Witnesses to see we had the truth. Part of obeying God was to work in harmony with his organisation here on earth, which I believed was The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. Although we were taught the organisation was made up of imperfect men, and so sometimes mistakes were made, we also were taught God had always used imperfect men to be his spokesmen.

We were encouraged to believe that if we wished to be pleasing to Jehovah, we were to have individual Bible studies with each of our children, conduct hour-long weekly Bible studies with people we met door to door who were interested, and go door to door - everyone aimed for a minimum of ten hours a month. All magazines and books that were given out were recorded, as were return visits that were conducted on those who previously had bought literature or who were not home. These reports were calculated, and our names were put on them to be put in a box and tallied each month. In this way the local elders monitored everyone in the congregation’s field service.

Considering most of us had husbands who worked full time, it was an arduous and difficult task completing all these above-mentioned things. They occupied most of our time. We were encouraged not to watch anything above a G-rated movie, not to listen to worldly music or associate with non-Jehovah’s Witness people unless we were trying to preach to them or convert them. In this way our lives were kept very busy.

But when I had fully believed, I’d felt I had a purpose and that my preaching was in obedience to what God had asked of me. I also had been taught I was living in the generation that would see Armageddon, and I would then live forever, in perfect health, under the thousand-year reign of Christ. During that time all the dead would be resurrected, and we would preach to them. All the animals during that time would not be wild or unsafe to humans. The lion would literally lie down with the lamb as the scripture in the book of Isaiah predicted. No animals would eat each other but would be vegetarian.

At the end of the thousand-year reign of Christ, all those who were not obedient to Christ would be destroyed, and we would live forever in harmony under the rule of Jehovah. God’s spirit was taught as being an active force we could pray for in our lives. It did not have a personality. It was more like power God could infuse us with to help us survive these trying times and encourage us. We could have more or less of it depending on our conduct and obedience. If we lost it and were removed from God’s protection then we were open to attack by Satan and his hordes of demons, which were just waiting invisibly in the wings to terrorise us.

Anyone who left the Jehovah’s Witnesses was considered to have a bad heart and was either disfellowshipped or disassociated. Unfortunately it wasn’t until I experienced my own doubts that I realised there was no dignified way to leave Jehovah’s Witnesses once you had been baptised. It didn’t matter if you had been baptised as a child or teenager.

You could only leave by being disfellowshipped or by disassociating. The difference was that dissociation was when someone told the elders they no longer wished to be a Jehovah’s Witness whereas disfellowshipping was something done by elders to rid the congregation of a former member who had chosen to do something wrong and was unrepentant about it.

Disfellowshipping was meant to be the final act to bring someone to repentance and back to the fold. Once someone was announced from the platform as either of these, we had to treat him or her as if he or she were literally dead. No one talked to him or her, ate with him or her, or acknowledged him or her in any way.

The only people who could talk to a disfellowshipped person were the elders, who could tell them what they had to do to show repentance so they could be “reinstated” within the congregation. This usually involved the person who chose this path coming to meetings for many months and sitting at the back of the hall, not talking to anyone or being talked to, and having meetings with the elders to repent and tell them what he or she was going to do differently and why he or she had been wrong. I observed many people being disfellowshipped, disassociated, and reinstated over the years, so I thought I understood it well.

Any question I ever could have asked was answered by some article or book written by The Watchtower Society, and scriptures were quoted to back up the answer. In this sure world, there was no doubt or unanswered questions. Living with a myriad of rules for what women could do, what men could do, how children should behave, what we should watch and listen to, how we should act with non-Jehovah’s Witnesses, and how to treat nonbelieving family as well as rules in regard to education, work, and anything else one could ever think of asking left no room for doubt over what to do in any situation.

Once I had begun to question the way the organisation had of handling child abuse cases, doubts arose over all their doctrines and interpretations of scripture, and my belief system started to unravel. When I agreed to study the Bible with Lisa, whom I genuinely connected to and liked as a friend, I saw it as an opportunity for me to be proved wrong and regain some equilibrium.

Instead the opposite happened.

SUICIDE

Just before I started to have morning sickness with my pregnancy with Thomas, I found some more pornography at home, and more money was showing as missing on our bank statements. Leonard then revealed he was still paying bribe money and gabbled incoherently about being in fear of his life. He also said he was gambling some of the money and losing quite a bit in an endeavour to get some of it back.

I asked him to quit working for this boss or tell his boss what had happened, and we would find some way to manage. I didn’t care if we had to sell the house. Anything was better than the pressure he was under. He would not agree to any of it. I asked him once again if he were seeing a man or paying a man for sex, and he would not answer. He walked away. I did not know if he was angry with me for not trusting him or if he was being dishonest about something else. All I felt was confusion.

I was going over and over in my mind that if I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I would be cut off by all that I had ever known including my mother and father. I considered myself to be very close to my mother even though I had not shared any details of the sexual abuse by my Pop with her, but we had talked about everything that had occurred to my children as well as, to a small extent, the situation with Peter. We had a shared understanding and bonding, and I loved her dearly, as she did me. I did not know how I could cope if my mother and father rejected me outright and refused to talk to me. I did not feel I could face it.

I had seen the doctor by that time about feeling depressed, and she had commenced me on antidepressants. I had been taking them for only two weeks and had quite a few along with some Valium to help me sleep.

One particular day I just felt like it was all too much, and if I could just go to sleep everything would be all right. I felt I was going to explode with grief and emotion; it was all just a huge heaviness in my chest and head. I drank half a bottle of beer that Leonard had left in the fridge, took three Valium and three antidepressants, and lay down on the bed. I had no intentional thoughts of suicide, and I certainly had not taken enough to cause that to happen, but I just wanted everything to stop.

Leonard apparently came into the room, saw me lying there asleep and the opened bottles of tablets, and tried to wake me. By that time I was deeply asleep, and he naturally panicked. He rang Matthew as he didn’t know what to do. Matthew came over and realised I was semi-conscious; he apparently shook me and was able to get me to open my eyes, but I wouldn’t talk. There were also tablets left in the packet and bottle, so he didn’t think I had taken enough to do any harm. He put me in the back of his car, and, after ringing the hospital; he and Leonard drove me to the local hospital emergency department in Brisbane.

I have little memory of the trip or being in emergency, but the nurses put a tube down my nose and into my stomach and pumped charcoal down, as they didn’t know how many tablets I had taken. I woke up in the early hours of the morning with severe stomach cramps. I was in a ward; I realised it was a hospital and tried to find a toilet. A nurse directed me to one, and it was as if my guts completely fell out. I barely moved from that toilet for a couple of hours. Everything emptied out of me. I got back to bed and was woken up at 6:00 a.m. by noises in the ward. A lady was talking to a nurse stationed at a desk at the end of the room. I got up to see where I was and what I needed to do to ring my husband.

When I reached the desk and asked the lady standing there my questions, she looked up at me, stopping the writing that she had been doing on a clipboard, and introduced herself as Dr. Debbie Wyatt, a psychiatrist who had been asked to speak to me in regard to what had happened the night before. She shook my hand, and when she spoke she had a strong American accent. She was petite with short, dark hair and looked very slimly built.

She had a kind voice, and there appeared to be no judgment; she even appeared quite happy to see me as I was first on her list for the day. She asked if I would like to come and speak to her in another room, which was more private, or wait awhile. I said I was happy to go speak with her. Much later on she told me this was her first day on the wards as a psychiatric intern, and I was the first patient she had been asked to see.

She had a list with many questions on it. She asked me if I had meant to kill myself, and I said no. She asked me if I felt suicidal or had a plan to kill myself if I was to leave the hospital, and again I said no. She wrote down all my responses. Somehow, with all the questions she was asking, I found myself opening up about what I was dealing with: my marriage trouble; my doubts in regard to my faith; my history of sexual abuse, of which I was having intrusive dreams and memories; my children’s abuse; and my fears over what was going to happen if I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

She listened and offered to see me weekly to talk and try to find some solutions, and to help me work things out. It sounded like a wonderful opportunity for me, and it was all going to be paid for by the health system. I again thought I was blessed, as this was why I had not been to see anyone. I had certainly previously enquired. She said she was signing me out, and I was free to leave as soon as I could arrange for someone to pick me up. She organised an appointment for me to see her in two days’ time, and I left feeling a glimmer of hope.

Over the next few months, I saw Debbie weekly. There was no set program, and she did not take the lead. She made it clear from the outset that I set the agenda for what was going to be talked about, and she would follow my lead. She would ask me questions sometimes in relation to what I was telling her, offer a gentle comment on an alternate view, or name an emotion or a different way of looking at something.

Sometimes we went into a room where our sessions were taped. She explained to me that she was in training, and it was important for her to be able to get feedback on her professional involvement with me. I had no issue with agreeing as I felt for the first time in my life that I was truly telling my story and having someone actively listen to me.

During the time I was seeing her I discovered I was pregnant with Thomas. I was nine weeks pregnant when I eventually told her. She expressed delight at a new life beginning, and over the coming months she was always positive about the pregnancy, me as a mother, and my progress.

Unbeknownst to her I had internalised her as my Inside Mum. I communed with her about everything, as I always had done with Inside Mum, but this time it was her face and voice I heard in the fantasy world I created. Most of the time, I was aged between five and fifteen years old when I talked to her in my head; I acted out scenes of me as a child with her, and these times were very real to me.

Sometimes I forgot and thought I had told her something, and she would be asking me questions while looking puzzled. I then would realise I had had these conversations in my inside world and had not actually told her in session. Over time my Inside Me would get excited about the outside real me going to see her. It would sometimes be hard to contain the childlike joy and feeling of real relationship my Inside Me would feel toward her from showing on the outside.

Because of the hours I spent talking to her as my Inside Mum in many different scenarios, I became intensely connected to her emotionally and felt very bonded to her even though ninety percent of the relationship was a fantasy. Because I was in a therapeutic relationship with her, seeing her weekly and feeling heard and listened to, I connected more closely to her than to anyone else in my life up to that point in time.

This connection would lead to the start of the loosening of my dependence on my internal fantasy world to process emotions and commence the start of my being able to express emotions as a real person, feel them in my physical body, and show them for the first time to the outside world.

Unfortunately I had not yet developed the skills to moderate how I expressed my emotions in the real world and thus commenced a tumultuous period in my life when others perceived me as acutely mentally ill at times.

A VOICE FROM ABOVE

I invited my friend Lisa to accompany me at the time of Thomas’s birth. I valued another woman’s support. I had a friend present at Rose’s birth, and my mother had been present for Amy’s birth and been a support. So I organised for Lisa to be there for me.

Once the contractions started, I rang her, and she came to the house. I was over my due date and did not want to be induced, so I had purchased the essential oil clary sage and rubbed it on my belly, then put hot towels over it to try to induce contractions. Within two hours of commencing this, contractions had started. We all took bets, including Mum, Dad, and the kids, as to what time Thomas would be born. It had been organised that my parents would be phoned when the birth was imminent, and they would wake the kids and bring them up to the hospital to see Thomas.

When I got to the hospital the midwives told me I was only two centimetres dilated and had hours to go. They gave me two paracetamol and told me to turn off the light and get some sleep. Lisa and Leonard went into a shared lounge to watch a movie. About ten minutes after they left the room, I needed to go to the bathroom. I went and sat on the toilet.

I must have fallen asleep, as nearly an hour later I woke up with an almighty contraction and felt like I had to push. I was in too much pain to walk back to the bed. I pushed the emergency buzzer, and nurses came rushing into the bathroom and turned on the light. They didn’t believe me, but when they checked they said I was fully dilated and needed to go to the delivery room. I was helped into a wheelchair; Leonard and Lisa were fetched, and I was wheeled to the delivery room. By that stage I was not coping well with the pain. The midwives asked me if I wished to have a bath, and they ran a lovely deep, warm bath. Just as I was stepping into it, my waters broke. The nurse immediately said I couldn’t use the bath and had to come up onto the bed to deliver.

She sat the bed up like a chair and put lots of pillows at the head so I could lean on my knees over the head of the bed. Within two minutes I was pushing. I had oxygen to breathe through a mask for pain relief. At the time my waters broke, my parents had been phoned. They arrived with the other three children about five minutes after Thomas had been born. All of them got to hold him, cuddle him, and watch him have his first bath. This helped all three children bond with him. They have all been wonderfully caring and supportive to him throughout his life to this day. I had been so scared I would lose him during the pregnancy that I had been afraid to bond with him in case this occurred. I fell in love with Thomas after his birth with as much intensity as I had all my other children.

Shortly after Thomas was born, I had an experience that was as baffling as it was comforting. I was lying in my bed and had my arm over the top of him; his head was resting in the crook of my left arm. I woke up just as dawn was breaking, and light was beginning to penetrate the darkness of the bedroom, so I could just dimly make out the shapes of things. I was aware of Thomas’s steady breathing and the weight of his body as he breathed with his head against my arm.

Suddenly my conscious mind was up in the top right-hand corner of my room. I was gazing at a figure asleep in a bed in the dim light, and suddenly I recognised myself with Thomas lying next to me. I could still feel his head lying across my arm. I felt totally confused as to how I could see me and at the same time feel his head when I was so far away.

In the microsecond I was aware of this, a great white light shone in a cylindrical shape through the roof and illuminated our bodies on the bed. A loud, authoritative male voice that I heard only in my head stated firmly, “Don’t worry. I’ll always be with him.” I instantly felt an absolute knowing go through me that the voice was not my own but belonged to God.

I was so shocked, I sat bolt upright in the bed. I felt a rushing sensation as my conscious awareness came back in through the top of my head, and my ears filled up with what I can only describe as white noise. I sat up so quickly that Thomas woke with a start and started crying. My heart was pounding really hard in my chest.

For weeks afterward I thought of this experience nearly every day. I worried endlessly over what the words meant.

Did it mean Thomas was going to die, or something bad was going to happen, and he would therefore always be with God? Or were the words meant as a comfort, meaning God would always watch over him? Why hadn’t the voice said that if that was what were meant? Was the voice really from God? Or was this proof that I really was demonised? Why would demons say good things to me? Were demons real?

Did I still believe in them? Were they saying good things to try to trick me to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses? Had I lost my mind? Or was it some form of alternate dream state?

I had increased anxiety for a long time and worried about the experience, as I did not how to interpret it. Eventually I just accepted it and took it as a sign that I should stop worrying about anything being wrong with Thomas. In some strange way, after a period, it also comforted me as Jehovah’s Witnesses had always taught us that if someone left them, God considered the person on the same level as a dog returning to eat its own vomit and would no longer listen to the prayers of one who had turned his back on him.

I reasoned if I had God talking to me, I couldn’t be totally bad.

EMOTIONS

After Thomas’s birth, and coming up on my first Christmas after I had commenced seeing the psychiatrist, I started to experience feeling real emotions, not just in my internal fantasy world. At first I started to feel sadness going through my body. Real tears started to come into my eyes and run down my cheeks with this physical feeling of emotion, without my having to hurt myself to generate them or try to relieve the pressure of any heaviness.

The feeling of safety engendered in therapy by regularly talking about all that had occurred in my life in a safe place, and being truly heard, started to allow me to relax and permit emotion to break through the barrier I had created. The main emotion I experienced at that time can only be described as intense grief.

At first, when I started to experience this, I would be able to express it only by going into my room or making sure I was alone and away from others. I found the experience intensely frightening. I had experienced crying in my imagination with Inside Mum but not in my real outside body in the present day. Once it had started, sometimes I would experience crying but wasn’t sure why. I was not sure what had triggered it. At that time in my therapy, the grief just seemed to come at will, and I felt like I had no control over it.

For someone who had led such a controlled life, this was intensely frightening. It started to happen when I was in sessions with Debbie, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Everything in me would try to shut it down. I would end up shutting my eyes and feel like I was drowning inside trying to hold it in.

Debbie would sit for ages with me trying to figure out what was going on, and I just could not talk about it. When I did manage to say anything, if the emotion was still very large all I could say to her was, “ I am scared my Inside Me is going to come out.” That was exactly what it felt like.

I had never allowed another person to know about the Inside Me and Inside Mum. The fear of allowing any part of Inside Me to show in the outside world was so fear provoking, I did not know how to handle it.

Of course Debbie had no idea what I was talking about.

It felt like in real life I was going to act and be like Inside Me was with Inside Mum when I told her things. The physical feeling of the emotion was like something moving slowly through my stomach and up through my chest, and the heaviness would move up to my throat and eyes and nose. I would shut my eyes and put my hands over them and my mouth and just sit very still, trying to will it to go away.

Why was I so scared? I do not know. I just know it felt like if I let even a little bit out, I would totally lose it and maybe never get put back together. The power behind my sadness felt bigger than my ability to control it, and it terrified me. However, it got to stage where I couldn’t hold it back, and one day at home I started to cry and could not stop. I eventually felt like I would have to cut myself to stop this intense experience rather than, as I had in the past, making small cuts to relieve the pressure and make me cry. Now I was considering making cuts to stop my crying and get rid of all the inside pain.

I had already told Debbie about the self-harming and what I would do and had done. I knew she wanted me to find more healthy ways to manage the emotional pain, and the Inside Me was desperate for her approval. I thought if I cut myself I would have to tell her, so it would be better to go into hospital until the crying could stop. I could get help, and then I would be able to deal with the pain in a more healthy way than cutting. It was just before Christmas. I rang the hospital and I was admitted. I cried nonstop for nearly three days.

Debbie came to see me during her normal rounds of new admissions. She told me she could not see me for our scheduled appointment the next day as I was in hospital, and it was policy not to see people when they were in an acute phase of symptoms. I was shocked and just reacted with complete anger and distress. I yelled at her—the first time I’d had such an extreme reaction and remained totally conscious and in control of it.

As she walked away, it was like the melting away of all the hopes of Inside Me, who had been expecting to spend time talking to Debbie and regrouping. I felt abandoned in my time of need and that I was being punished for doing the right thing. I yelled this at her and just dissolved into sobbing again. I was absolutely bereft. There was a colliding of my internal and outside worlds in a way that had never occurred before.

I felt intensely alone and completely at the mercy of my overwhelming sadness and tears. Later that evening another patient approached me and thrust a small commercially produced bookmark in my hand. It had a message on to the effect that I was loved and not alone, and others understood my pain.

She said to me that someone had given it to her once, and it had brought her comfort, but I needed it more than she did. I held on to that bookmark all night. It was symbolic of my Inside Mum in the outside world caring for me still. It linked me to another real human. It comforted me. A small act of kindness, once again by a stranger, helped ease my emotional pain in a small way.

I later learnt that talk therapy is not the best way for some people who have experienced trauma to recover. In fact for some people, reliving intense emotional experiences can make the situation worse. There are other very effective therapies that can help people who have experienced trauma. However, at the time I had cut off all emotional feelings from my memories and lived in an intense internal fantasy world, and this was what had been offered to me, so it was what I engaged in.

During the time I spent in hospital, my parents and Leonard looked after the children. I do not know what they told the children, but I am grateful they were there for them. When Leonard picked me up and took me home, we had cups of tea, and the kids asked me how I was. I said okay, and that was it. Life went on as if nothing had happened.

In the end the fear that I would eventually be completely cut off by my mother prevented me from sharing my emotions at these vulnerable times with her. It was a way my adult self protected me until I was strong enough to deal with the reality of it.

DISSOCIATION

I no longer considered myself a witness for Jehovah. Since I had completely stopped going to the meetings, and it had been over a year since I had gone door to door, I was no longer bearing witness to the truth of God’s word as outlined by The Watchtower Bible & Tract Society and so could not, for all intents and purposes, call myself a witness.

I considered that I was in trouble with my faith, but I had no desire to end my association. I was still hoping someone would prove me wrong, and I could return to full involvement as untroubled as I had been for the previous thirty years of my life. Over the previous few months, the elders had been around my home a number of times to speak to me, and they had, unbeknownst to me, spoken to Leonard about me whilst he was on his own.

They had questioned him and ascertained the content of our private conversations wherein I had shared all the reasons why I had doubts about various doctrines. At the time Leonard had supported me and shown understanding as to my reasons for doubting, and he had not been able to find answers for me. However, he had told me not to bring any of my worldly friends home to the house. These were mainly a few people I had met through the children’s school.

He said he felt I had changed—when he had met me, I had been an active Jehovah’s Witness, and now I no longer knew if I wanted to be. He stated to me that he could understand I was going through a dilemma, and he wished to remain with me, but if we remained together he did not wish me to bring non-Jehovah’s Witnesses into the house or allow the children to play with non-Jehovah’s Witnesses. Effectively I was isolated. Secretly I kept seeing these friends and allowing them over when he was out, and allowing the kids to see non-Jehovah’s Witnesses. But I could no longer share this with Leonard, as he was very uncomfortable about it.

The elders asked to speak to both of us together one day. Once you are a baptised member of a congregation, you are subject to the elders, who are seen as appointed by God to lead the congregation, take the lead in preaching, and keep the congregation clean from worldly influences. They came to the house dressed in suits, very official looking, and placed their briefcases on the floor and their Bibles on the table. Leonard and I sat opposite them both. My parents were watching the children as we had told them the elders had requested to meet with us.

One of them asked me if I considered myself “subject” to my husband. The correct answer would have been yes. Within Jehovah’s Witnesses the wife is required to show subjection to her head—that is her husband—and then all are subject to the elders; and the elders are subject to Jesus, and Jesus is subject to God. It is a nice line of subjection.

However, as I knew Leonard was still gambling, looking at pornography, and paying out bribe money for doing something wrong he still would not tell me about, I said no. I honestly told them all of the above as we had discussed it openly with them before, and I told them if I didn’t respect Leonard I certainly did not see him as my “head.” I believed I stood alone before God, and he would judge me on my actions not the actions of my husband, so I didn’t see why the elders should judge me for not considering myself subject to my husband. They obviously did not see it this way.

I sat there whilst scriptures were read out to me. One of them mentioned Eve, who was described as an “agitator” in the scripture that was read to me.

The elder had prefaced his reading by asking me, “Are you an agitator like Eve?”

I had answered, “No.”

He then read me the scripture and said anyone who did not follow the scriptural advice to show subjection to her husband—for me as a wife, that would mean going to all the meetings if my husband told me to or going out witnessing—was an agitator like Eve.

For someone who was struggling under great strain like I was, all I felt was enormous anger. I could barely contain it, and I know it showed. No longer could I keep a calm outward appearance. My emotions broke through.

During the interrogation the elders revealed knowledge of the doubts I had expressed solely to my husband, which made it clear they had talked to him in regard to our private conversations. I told them they had been private conversations with my husband, and I refused to discuss the content with them or have the content used against me. I felt like I was being figuratively beaten over the head with a hammer. I felt so condemned.

The elders ended the session and left. My husband showed them downstairs and talked to them for a while. I was fuming. Leonard, I think, had not expected the verbal attack either and certainly had not been expecting them to use what they had managed to get out of him about our private conversations against me. I know he felt gutted as much as I did.

They basically also had used scriptures against him, counselling him about elders needing to have their wives in subjection if they were to be looked up to by the congregation. Obviously they were implying he was failing in his headship. After all my years of loyalty to the organisation, I felt so hurt and betrayed underneath the anger.

There is a 24-hour suicide prevention phone line manned by volunteers that operates in Australia. It is called Lifeline. I had already completed the Lifeline telephone counselling course up to the point of going on the phones before I had realised I was still too unwell to make the commitment to work on the phones. However, no one was angry with me for not going through with it. All I received was encouragement and commendation. I learnt so much in that 120-hour course. There were people from all professions and backgrounds, and most of them were working full time. Although it was organised by the Uniting Church, they made it clear at the outset that you didn’t have to belong to their church to be able to do the course or volunteer on the phones for them.

I learnt so much about how many good and giving worldly people there were. After having being taught my whole life that everyone who didn’t listen and respond to the Jehovah’s Witnesses had bad hearts and were not acceptable to God, finding and experiencing the giving and caring of all these people made a tremendous impact on me psychologically.

I was blown away by their kindness and the fact that people would volunteer their time to help others with no recognition; only the people in their immediate families would know what they were doing. Partly I also participated as I had rung Lifeline on many occasions over the preceding two years when I was feeling scared, alone, or completely overwhelmed by depression and anxiety. Just having someone listen to me had lifted my burden enough to enable me to survive another day when I had felt my emotional pain was too great for me to carry on.

When I had rung Lifeline, I never had been put down, and I always had come off the phone ready to go to sleep or face a new day with new-found peace of mind due to someone having listened to me. I’d always wanted to give back for all I had taken. I just wasn’t well enough or quite ready at this time.

During another elders’ visit, they asked if I had done the Lifeline Telephone Counselling course. When I confirmed I had (which they already knew from talking to Leonard), they told me I was committing apostasy because it was run by a religious organisation. I explained to them you could belong to any religion and do the course, and it was about helping people who were depressed not to commit suicide by extending them a lifeline in effect.

One of the elders looked at me and, with great derision in his voice, said to me, “And you think you can help these people?”

I looked him straight back in the eye and said, “Yes.”

He smirked and gave a laugh as he got up to leave. I was told not to go anymore or else I would be guilty of apostasy.

I already had graduated and gotten my certificate, and I had talked to the presenters in regard to not being ready to go on the phones at that stage. They were supportive and happy with my participation up to that point, and gave me great encouragement to return when it was the right time for me. However, that elder’s unkind words stuck in my head and devastated me. I could not believe the put-down or the ridicule.

Inside of me I still was expecting the elders to deal with me like my Inside Dad, showing care and love and comforting me in my spiritual distress. But they never did so during their official visits. Only my friend and her husband showed any human care, humanity, and love in their dealings with me. Otherwise I felt like I had been figuratively skinned alive after my encounters with the elders.

These encounters all added to my ongoing distress and mental torment.

DISCLOSURE

I had reached a point in my therapy where I felt ready to tell my Mum about the rape that had occurred on the tennis court when I was only nine years old.

I was having a more turbulent time in my relationship with Mum than I ever had before, as she was well aware of my questioning the doctrines of the witnesses. We had spent hours discussing it.

She sometimes would be very supportive and sympathetic, and then other times she would start saying what the witnesses taught us to say to doubters. She would repeat the same line about waiting on Jehovah to reveal the answers in due course and that Jehovah uses “imperfect men” and always had. She said I had to show a good heart and wait on God, and maybe this was a test from God for my obedience. I was getting quite frustrated and agitated by these answers, and I felt judged by her at times despite her support in other ways.

I am not sure why it became important for me to share with her my assault at the tennis court. I think it was partly because I wanted her to understand me and why I was so passionate in my objections to the beliefs of the witnesses. I wanted her to understand.

One day she was upstairs giving Thomas a bath. She loved giving him bottles and his bath, and I loved her support and involvement with him. Having a baby in the house despite all the emotional turmoil was one of the happy spots for all of us. He was the glue of happiness that surrounded us, rightly or wrongly, at the time.

My brother had recently remarried and had changed his surname to his wife’s. He had spoken to me in regard to his anger about his childhood sexual abuse and the constant ridicule he had felt from my father growing up, which he never had understood. He had spoken at times about the unresolved conflict from being brought up in a fundamentalist religion such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had decided to change his surname as he felt he had found what, in his definition, was a real family, and he just wanted to belong and be part of them. My parents were devastated but did not show it openly.

This particular afternoon in the bathroom, the issue of my brother and his changing his surname arose. My mother asked me if I thought he could have been angry with her and Dad because they hadn’t known about the abuse and hadn’t stopped it. At that stage both she and Dad had been told about our sexual abuse by Pop, and they believed us. I told my Mum I didn’t think he blamed them for not knowing about it.

She looked right at me and said, “Why didn’t you tell us? You knew it was going on. Why didn’t you tell?” The way she said the question, seemingly full of hurt, accusation, and anger and looking directly at me, made emotion well up in me. I was new at feeling emotions physically in my body, and I had not developed a lot of skills to handle the intensity I would feel. On this occasion, however, I did not lose control.

I felt deeply hurt by what I perceived as the accusatory way she had asked the question. I said to her, “Well, I was only eight years old myself. I felt frightened, ashamed, and to blame also.”

She said to me, “Well, maybe if you had told us then none of this would be happening.”

I looked at her and said, “I told you about Peter when I was an adult, and you and Dad did nothing. You kept associating with him as if I had not said anything.”

She shouted back at me that as my father was an elder in the congregation, he had to keep speaking to Peter and dealing with him in a professional way. They had both talked about it, but it was my word against his, and as there were not two witnesses to the events I had accused him of, they had to put their feelings aside and do the right thing for the congregation and as taught by Jehovah.

I said, “But I told you as an adult and you didn’t do anything to my abuser. You didn’t confront him or tell him what you thought of him for his abusing me, and you kept on as if nothing had happened for years. Why would you have done anything different if I had told you as a child about Pop?”

My Inside Me feelings were that if my father, who was a Vietnam veteran, would not stand up to the abuser of his child, I was not worth standing up for—I was worthless. That feeling was so hard to cope with even as an adult; there was no way on earth I would have coped with that as a child.

My mother was really upset by what I had said about their not cutting Peter off after I had told them about the abuse. She ran down the stairs. I dried off Thomas and waited until he was settled in bed, and I was calmer. About an hour had passed, and no one else was around. I walked downstairs and went into the bedroom. I hated fighting with Mum, and I knew she struggled with depression at the best of times. I apologised to her. I knew she had believed me after we had told her about Pop a few years earlier. She had been so upset after finding out about Pop’s abuse that she had ripped up all the photographs they had of him.

She looked at me when I came in her room and said, “I never would have thought to talk to my mother like that. I have done nothing to deserve to be spoken to like that.”

I didn’t answer. I just apologised quietly. Then I told her I had something I wanted to tell her, something I had not told her before. I wanted to tell her now so she might understand why I was so upset about the witnesses’ teaching in regard to a victim’s not screaming being a sign of consent.

I told her that when I was about eight years old, I had gone to the tennis courts one day, and a man had sexually assaulted me. I stopped to take a breath, as I was shaking, but she interrupted me and said, “But you did tell me.”

I said, “No, I have never told you this.”

She said, “You told me the day after it happened. Dad and I were in the backyard gardening, and you came downstairs and stood there quietly and you said that a man had hurt you in the tennis court the day before.”

Everything in me went still and quiet.

I had no memory of what she was telling me, but I had no reason to doubt her. She went on to say Dad had talked her out of going to the police, as I seemed so calm. She had gone along with the decision despite feeling it was the wrong one. She said my Dad had even gone down to the tennis court the next day to look, but of course it was the day after it had happened, so he did not find anything. They decided the man was long gone, and there would be no use in going to the police, especially as I did not seem hurt.

I was stunned and in shock.

I had no memory of telling my parents of the rape the day after it happened. None whatsoever. Even whilst she was telling me, I could picture our backyard and my standing there whilst they were gardening, but it was as if I were making up the picture in my mind when she was talking. Not like a memory of something that had actually occurred.

I went back upstairs as my mother said she was tired and didn’t want to discuss it anymore. I never really got to explain or say what I wanted to say. My emotions were all jumbled up inside me, and my throat felt all clammed up. I was numb. All I could think was, But I was hurt.

I must have blocked out my memory of this, as the knowledge that no one helped me was worse than what had happened. Maybe I would never have re-enacted some of what happened in the tennis court, with Jane, if my parents had only just talked to me or taken me to a doctor, to be physically checked and to see a counsellor.

I felt so confused.

I discussed it all in detail at my next therapy session. Mum and I never yelled at each other. This was one of the first times it had ever happened. I also had discovered that I had told and nothing had happened. Maybe that was why I hadn’t told them about Peter at the time it had started to happen.

I thought of my pregnant twenty-one-year-old mother being told by her father not to tell her mother she had terminal cancer when she was living in the house, nursing her, and watching her grow weaker. I thought of her father’s having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the war. I thought of his being a Regimental Sergeant Major and an alcoholic who reportedly had ruled with an iron fist at home and her previously disclosed fear, as the oldest, of being held responsible for her brothers’ and sisters’ behaviour and failings.

I thought about my Dad’s stating he had no memories under the age of fifteen and his own father having sexually abused my brother and me. I thought about his silence in regard to his experiences in Vietnam, his PTSD and sleeplessness and nightmares.

I started to piece together all the secrets kept in my family for years—the not talking about issues, and my parents trying to make a better life for my brother and me, and the shock of discovering bad things and then deciding that if everything looks okay, all must be okay.

I remembered the occasion where my brother had nearly given me a tonsillectomy by accident, and my mother had immediately sought medical assistance for me.

Did I need to bleed copiously so the wounds could be seen?

How can you delve into another’s, even your own child’s possible emotional pain if you have a tight lid on your own? I resolved to let go of my resentment toward my mother and father for all that had been left unsaid and not done. I resolved in my own heart that I would do everything in my power to enable my children not to repeat the patterns my grandparents, parents, and I seemed to have been vulnerable to repeating.

DOUBTS

Imagine that someone you love dies. You no longer can see them, speak to them, or touch them or have any literal experience with them except within your mind and heart. This is what being disfellowshipped or disassociated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses means to those who are cut off. They are treated as if they are dead to those remaining in it.

When I was an active member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and believed a hundred percent in it, I had always believed what had been taught to us from the platform by the elders and in The Watchtower magazine (published twice a month by The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society).

I believed that when baptised Jehovah’s Witnesses decided (because they had bad hearts) that they no longer wished to be Jehovah’s Witnesses, they would say to the elders that they no longer wished to be known as Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a totally voluntary process, I was taught, and it occurred because these people wanted to do things that were condemned by Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Bible and so no longer wanted to continue being known as one. It was a voluntary separation on their part from the organisation even though they would realise it would cause enormous pain for their families.

Since these people knew that by choosing a lifestyle contrary to one Jehovah God wanted them to lead (as set forth by The Watchtower Society), they knew their families would have to cut them off in obedience to the scriptural direction given by the Apostle James on how to treat those who left the fold. This was to treat them as if they were “dog[s] returning to [their] vomit” as the scriptures put it.

The families would not be allowed to speak to them, eat with them, or greet them. In fact they were instructed to treat them as if they were no longer living. If their families did associate with them and didn’t repent for it after being given the opportunity to do so by loving elders who would try to turn their hearts back to obedience to God’s way, they also would be disfellowshipped.

The elders saw disassociation as a choice made by a baptised person even though both—disassociation and disfellowshipping—were treated in exactly the same way. Disfellowshipped ones might have just made a mistake and need to be punished for the behaviour in which they had engaged. So they were often seen as not having bad hearts but as having been led astray or needing to be shocked into realising the seriousness of their actions. People could, however, commit any disfellowshipping sins, and if they were expressing enough remorse or contrition they might not be disfellowshipped.

Talks were constantly being given from the platform about all the things one could be disfellowshipped for including fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and any sexual conduct considered “Unclean” or classified as “pornea.” Also idolatry and celebrating worldly holidays (birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Halloween) were considered disfellowshipping offences, as they were all pagan in origin.

However, when I asked the elders why witnesses like myself could wear white wedding dresses and wedding rings, both of which were pagan in origin, and asked who picked which historical customs were allowed to be practised and which weren’t, they could not give me an adequate answer.

We just had to be obedient to the direction of The Watchtower, and if they changed their understanding because of a “light” from God in the future, we would be told. But in the meantime, we had to be patient, be obedient, and wait.

My major doubts had surfaced while being reprimanded in New Zealand about going to worldly counsellors for my children when they disclosed their sexual abuse. I had not received counselling from anyone, and this had not helped me. I knew deep inside myself that I had to get help for my children other than just what the elders would provide. I didn’t want my beautiful children to experience the extreme guilt and fear I had experienced because of the abuse by Pop and all that flowed from it.

I could not see how elders who were not trained as counsellors in any way, shape, or form and had no formal education on sexual abuse victims and how to counsel or treat them could have been better than trained professionals. Also I could not see how, if someone broke the law of the land by sexually abusing a child, only the elders and not the judicial system should have dealt with him or her. I had scriptures quoted at me at the time saying God appoints elders, so they are his representatives on earth and not some worldly judging system that does not understand the ways of God’s people.

Again I could not see how, if police were not involved, the guilty person’s just saying sorry to the elders would stop it from happening again or to someone else. Who was accountable? If a member of the congregation murdered someone, he or she had to go to the police and to court. Why not those who committed sexual abuse and rape? Why were these lesser crimes? Why did they not warrant criminal inquires?

When in Wellington, New Zealand, and taking the children to see the counsellor, I had been disturbed by what I had seen happening in our own congregation, where Leonard was involved as one of the elders. A young girl disclosed past sexual abuse that had happened to her, committed by a witness male friend who had worked for her father. She had stated he had come into her room and raped her a few years previously, when she had been about thirteen years old. Now that she was sixteen years old, she had disclosed it.

The accused had previously been married and had two daughters. The daughters had disclosed sexual abuse, but they were still young, only five or six years old. The ex-wife had gone to the police and was taking the children to see the same sexual-abuse counsellor I was taking my children to.

She didn’t know me, but I knew her as the two children had been at the meetings with their abuser on access visits up until the disclosures had been made. His ex-wife had been disfellowshipped, and he had remarried, and his new wife was only seventeen years old and pregnant with their first child. He had apparently written a letter of confession to the elders. The police had requested to interview the head elder, known as the Presiding Overseer of the congregation the accused attended. The Presiding Overseer had come to our house to have an urgent meeting with Leonard, who was then the Secretary of the congregation, and the Treasurer. These were the three main elders in each congregation who dealt with these matters.

As the Presiding Overseer was leaving the house, he said the letter had to be destroyed at all costs, as he had spoken to a solicitor and it was up to the prosecution to prove guilt—he did not have to supply evidence that would incriminate the accused. He also spoke about how he believed that the confidentiality of a confession to elders should be considered the same as the Catholic Church did it, and no elder should therefore have been forced to tell a policeman or court what had been disclosed by a member of the flock to him.

He was saying if the letter was found, the brother would most certainly be found guilty (he had pled not guilty in court) and would spend a long time in prison. As he was very repentant and had promised not to do it again, and had responded to the counselling of the elders, they needed to protect their flock.

It sickened me to listen to them talk. I instinctively thought, but what about protecting his children and his unborn child? What about the children from the congregation who went to his house? The young girl had been counselled by the elders not to say anything to anyone. She came in distress to see me one day after arguing with her witness mother, with whom she had a volatile relationship, and said he had been made to apologise to her, so it was all meant to be okay now.

I knew from my own experience as an elder’s wife and from visiting other elders and their wives that rarely was anything kept as confidential as the congregation was repeatedly told it was. I knew that within a few days, every one of the elders and their wives would know what had been said and discussed, and all who were close to them as friends would be told. There was no confidentiality, in my experience. I didn’t want what had happened to my children and any disclosures I made to be dinner talk around people’s tables. I couldn’t bear for that to happen. So I just knew I had to go outside the congregation.

The most important reason, though, stemmed back to my childhood fear and memories. Hearing the talk given from the platform when I was a child about the scriptures in the Old Testament that said if a woman was raped in the field and didn’t cry out, she was guilty of adultery and was to be stoned to death, frightened me enormously. I had frozen when Pop abused me. I had been unable to move due to fear at times when I was in the bath, in the cupboard, or under the bed. During what had happened on the tennis court, the leadenness in my legs prevented me from moving, and the fear up tight in my throat and chest meant I was unable to scream or make a sound; I had a total inability to fight back as I was immobilised by fear.

I had spoken to Amy and Ben’s counsellor, and she had been quite forthcoming in explaining that children can fight, flight, or freeze. And abusers often picked those they felt would not fight back but would freeze or comply for many varying reasons, but it certainly did not mean the children wished it to happen.

At the time of Benjamin and Amy’s being abused, there was a case getting media coverage involving a woman in the United States, where a man had been found not guilty of rape due to the fact she had made him use a condom in the middle of raping her. Some of the local elders said this showed willingness and compliance. The woman had awoken to find a man on top of her, who she did not know, with a knife held to her throat. She had condoms in her drawer. When she realised he was going to rape her, she begged him to put on a condom as she was so frightened of getting HIV or another venereal disease. He put it on. Then he left afterward. She went to the police, and it had gone all the way through to trial. He was found not guilty because of the condom use. I was outraged.

I thought, here was a woman having enough wits about her to protect herself in any small way she could, even in the process of being violated by a stranger with a knife, and because she didn’t fight him, as she wished to survive, and he complied and wore a condom, it was taken as consensual? I was horrified. Many Jehovah’s Witnesses I associated with agreed with the court finding as it concurred with the biblical teaching we’d had drummed into us.

Another case was also in the media of a woman who did not scream or resist as the man had broken in and had a knife, but she had a young daughter asleep in the bed next to her. So she lay quietly and did what he said, as she was terrified if her daughter woke up she also would be assaulted or otherwise hurt. The man left, and because the woman had not screamed, the issue of consent arose. I argued vehemently with the elders that surviving was the most important thing, and no one in their right mind could think she gave consent when it was a stranger with a knife held to her. They kept parroting the scripture, though, as if they were unable to think outside the box.

Even when discussing this same issue with my friends, Lisa and Matthew, I would get frustrated. Matthew said if someone broke into his house, and his wife didn’t scream, he would wonder why. Lisa replied instantly that of course she would scream. I put to her that if she were so terrified she couldn’t run or make any noise, would that mean she consented? She couldn’t give an answer except to say she would scream, and it wouldn’t happen that she wouldn’t. And then they said God wouldn’t have put that in the Bible if it were not reasonable.

I was upset and angry, to say the least. I could not believe that, as scientific evidence clearly showed, a person has no control over his or her physical reaction to fear. So why would God punish people for that? I repeatedly said to the elders that I didn’t believe in a God that treated people like that, and that The Watchtower’s interpretation of those scriptures must have been wrong.

One day an elder came to the house and lent me a few books and magazines he had in regard to biblical questions I had raised. I read them, but they gave me no new answers that satisfied me—nothing besides what I had already found out through studying the society’s literature myself. I had them for a while and then one day put them in Leonard’s briefcase for him to give to the elder at the next meeting. I rang the elder to let him know Leonard would be giving them back, as I was not attending many meetings at that stage. I felt like I would be a hypocrite if I continued to go door to door, trying to convert people to a faith with some doctrines I no longer accepted. I also was spending my time trying to cope with my marriage issues and my own emotional state.

The elder asked me if I had found the magazines useful, and when I thanked him for giving them to me but stated they had not answered my queries, he enquired if he would see me at the field service group that Saturday. I said no and said that as I no longer went witnessing, I no longer considered myself to be a witness. He went quiet and asked me to repeat that statement. As we were repeatedly told from the platform, if we did not go door to door then we were not witnesses for Jehovah. I again stated to the elder that as it had been months since I had been in field service, I did not consider myself a witness anymore.

The conversation ended pleasantly enough, and I thought no more of it. At the time I didn’t realise this innocent phone conversation, which had taken only two minutes, would alter the course of my whole life.

If I had known, I might have paid more attention.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

A couple nights later, Leonard came home from a meeting distraught. He said an elder had pulled him aside and warned him that at the next Thursday night meeting, it would be announced that I had disassociated myself from Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was shocked and confused.

I said I had not written a letter or spoken to any elders about wishing to leave the organisation. I was still actively seeking answers to my doubts. He then told me I had apparently had a phone conversation with an elder and stated I no longer wished to be known as a Jehovah’s Witness. I was immediately shocked and angry. I told him it had been taken completely out of context, and the elder knew that. It was in relation to my not being able to call myself a witness as I no longer went witnessing and hadn’t been for months.

I wrote a letter stating that I did not wish to be disassociated from the organisation and explaining the content of the phone call. Leonard delivered it the next day to the Presiding Overseer of the congregation. I never heard anything back. Leonard never heard anything back. Mum, Dad, and Leonard came back stunned from the next meeting where I had been announced as having disassociated myself from the congregation, and therefore all were not to have any contact with me.

My Dad, who was an active Jehovah’s Witness but had refused to take up a position as an elder when he and Mum had moved from New Zealand to Australia to live with us, was furious. He knew all my doubts and why I had been having them and sympathised and agreed with many of them.

Also he could see the harsh way I had been dealt with by the elders and knew all I had given in service to the organisation over the previous twenty-five years. He was horrified because he knew I had written no letter to the elders requesting to be announced as disassociated. He said that having doubts was not a disfellowshipping offence. He also knew I had written the letter stating quite clearly that I wished to remain a witness and still wished to try to resolve my doubts. He spoke to elders during the week, and no one seemed to know what was happening. It seemed to have been spearheaded by one elder and not a joint or unanimous decision that should have been prayed over, and then I should have been given an opportunity to repent and redeem myself.

One elder told my Dad the elders were worried that I was so Popular in the congregation, I would start influencing others to have doubts, and they couldn’t have that. They again brought up the apostasy accusation because of my having completed the Lifeline telephone-counselling course a few months previous. Dad told the elder that was ridiculous, as it had clearly been explained that doing the course didn’t involve prayer or worship of any kind. Also, if I were to be gotten rid of from the congregation for these reasons, I should have been spoken to about it again and clearly been told. This had not happened.

Dad stopped associating with the congregation on that day and in fact never went back. He wrote a letter to the head office of The Watchtower Society in Sydney describing what had occurred, asking for an investigation, and registering a complaint. He didn’t hear back for months and months, until eventually he rang and someone told him the letter had just been sent back to the congregation to be dealt with. He told them the letter was about the body of elders in the congregation, so how could they investigate themselves? No one was willing to talk to him or give an answer to him. He was disgusted.

I was still living in my marital home with Leonard, and my parents were downstairs in the flat. My mother reduced her contact with me because I had been disassociated, though she still talked to me and helped with the children.

Sometimes I would go out at night and lie on top of the kids’ trampoline in the backyard when it was still, dark, and quiet. I would look up at the stars and feel the coolness of the night air on my skin. I would pray over and over to whoever was out there to please give me an answer about my marriage and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and to please be with me and help me. Then I would go inside after a while.

Sometimes I would feel better, like I had passed my plea on to something bigger and greater than I was, but mostly just the act of unburdening and lying quietly, surrounded by the grandeur of the night sky, would still my turbulent emotions.

My marriage with Leonard was on the rocks. Money was still disappearing from our accounts, and I was struggling emotionally. One morning, not long after it had been announced that I had disassociated, I awoke and decided to shower and drive to the shop to get the Sunday paper. Driving home on my own, I suddenly had to pull over and just started sobbing and sobbing as I was thinking of my marriage. There are no words to describe my sense of grief but also my knowing it was over.

I knew that no matter what I did, I could not keep on living in isolation at home and living with my husband in the same house but feeling totally estranged. No longer could we talk, as I knew that my words could be told to the elders. My husband had also made it clear he would remain one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was upset and angry with me for having “changed.”

I knew I had changed. But there was nothing I could do about that. I no longer believed the same about the teachings as when I had first met my husband. I felt nothing but anger toward the organisation.

I asked Leonard to leave. He refused.

Leonard was angry, and his family fuelled his anger. He refused to leave our home and said since I was the one, who had changed, and he was the one working and paying the mortgage, I would have to move out if I wished to leave him. I asked him, “What about the children?” He made it clear he was working full time so he could not look after the children.

I took the children and our car, and I spent a fortnight sleeping on friends’ couches, arranging for the children to spend nights here and there with school friends and friends I had made through the school. I was left sleeping in the car some nights.

I had occasionally been seeing a mental-health nurse through a local mental-health service that Debbie had organised for when she went away. I rang them and explained my homelessness and dilemma. One of the caseworkers organised all the paperwork for me to sign to apply for a Housing Commission home and put in a recommendation confirming I had four children and was homeless. Within two weeks I had received government housing.

I will forever be indebted to her for all the extra work and time she put in to secure this for me. It was not the first time that worldly people had come to my rescue and went above and beyond the call of duty or their professional responsibility to help me. I was still suffering from severe depression, having panic attacks regularly, and suffering crises of faith, identity, and future direction.

There then ensued a constant battle over child support. Leonard made it quite clear that, as I had left him, it was my job to support the children financially and not his. I asked if he would look after the children in a share-care arrangement—they could live one week with him and the next week with me. I lived close enough to make this workable. He turned it down flat, stating he was working full time, and it would never work.

I had to think long and hard about how to support myself and provide a good example to my children. I realised I had to get a qualification in some area that would guarantee me work, but it could not take too long to achieve. I decided on nursing, due to the mentoring and help the mental-health nurse had been giving to me.

Once I had moved out the family home and gotten the Housing Commission home, my Mum made the decision to cut herself off from me completely. She refused to hug or kiss me anymore when I dropped off the children to visit with her and their Dad. She said it was too hard for her emotionally; she believed I would die if I didn’t come back to the Jehovah’s Witnesses before Armageddon happened, so she had to cut me off now so she could cope.

It was the single most difficult thing I ever experienced. It led to about a five-year period of intense grief and emotional collapse that broke me at times, and I did not feel I would ever recover.

ALIEN

I felt like an alien from another planet trying to integrate into nonwit-ness society. Having obeyed all of my life what I had been taught was the biblical injunction not to form strong social connections outside the witnesses, I now had to try to adapt to life as a nonwitness.

I kept seeking the “rule book” in all I did. How did one know how to behave at a birthday party? How did you know if a present or money was appropriate, and if you didn’t know the family what was the protocol? Did you stay if your child was invited to play somewhere else, or did you leave? How did you know whether to stay or go?

I had missed out on listening to the music of my era. I had no idea how to dance or move. I felt uncomfortable with making small talk. Once again I was thrust into the same feelings I had experienced as a child, when I’d felt like I was an outsider looking in and was always looking over my shoulder for the lion no one else seemed aware of.

At the same time, I would sometimes wake in a cold sweat and panic, thinking, What if the Jehovah’s Witnesses are true? What if Armageddon is coming and I am going to die? It would take ages for my heart to stop pounding and for the panic to subside.

Sometimes I felt like there was no place I belonged. I spent a number of years going to other churches and searching other religious beliefs before I stopped looking for a religious solution. I longed for the time past when I had felt secure in my place and knew my role and purpose. I felt like I was adrift on the sea without a paddle, and nobody knew I was shipwrecked. In my own mind, I thought they all just thought I was strange.

I was grieving the loss of friends, my support system, my religious community, my family, my previous spiritual life, and my identity in the community, and experiencing the reality of a social death.

The lived reality of knowing that people whom I previously had been good friends with, considered me too bad to associate with or speak to, and there was nothing I could do to get them to speak to me again. It felt like too much at times. Going to the shops became an exercise in torture, as bumping into all my past Jehovah’s Witness friends who would walk past and not speak was an everyday occurrence. It never got easier. I never tried to speak to them as I knew they wouldn’t speak back. I knew many of them felt badly; I had been in the exact same position before and always felt extremely uncomfortable about having to avoid people so I wouldn’t be ostracised myself. It never came naturally to me, and I know it wouldn’t have for many I formerly knew.

I learnt from searching the Internet that many who had been disfellowshipped or disassociated from Jehovah’s Witnesses could not adapt and survive the total exclusion from their families, groups, and communities, which led to high rates of suicide and mental illness among members who left. Although many did go on to create new and meaningful lives for themselves away from the witnesses, many went through periods of intense grief, and some never recovered.

Although I had been pushed away from the Jehovah’s Witnesses before I had chosen to leave it, was inevitable that I would have left eventually. I think losing the control over when it happened brought back old feelings of having things happen to me, when I had lost my power and self-choice.

I focused on the anger and fear this generated in me for a time before I could identify the blessings in the action.

STRESS

Up until the year 2000, when I became a disassociated witness, I had indoctrinated Benjamin and Amy as Jehovah’s Witnesses. They had been taught all the same things I had been taught at home and at meetings, and this was all they knew. Now suddenly their father’s large family was telling them I was going to die because I had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they had better not go with me or they might die too. For Benjamin, after all he had been through, this was the last straw emotionally and psychologically.

He started to have problems with back and neck pain and headaches. He was referred to a neurologist at a hospital for a computed tomography (CT) scan and an electroencephalography (EEG) scan to try to discover the cause of his constant headaches. The scans were normal, and he was prescribed tablets for three months, which helped reduce the intensity and frequency of his headaches.

In the same year, we had Benjamin assessed for Asperger’s syndrome by a specialist in Brisbane. The specialist said Benjamin had strong traits but not enough to make a diagnosis. After Leonard had listened to the specialist and read his book, he said he felt he fit all the symptoms himself, and it explained a lot of things to him as to why he felt so socially awkward and seemed to upset people without knowing why. I could see this also, and it helped me be more understanding of his difficulties in showing and expressing empathy in situations; he just didn’t know how to express his feelings, although I knew he definitely felt them.

At that time Benjamin started experiencing symptoms because of extreme stress. At first he kept them to himself, but eventually he revealed them to me. He had been taught all his life that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were the only true religion, and if you left it then God’s spirit left you, and you were open to demon attack. He had his aunts, uncles, friends in Jehovah’s Witnesses, and grandparents on his father’s side all telling him he would die if he followed me instead of going to live with his father. He was told I would die at Armageddon.

He was struggling still with learning difficulties and had an increase in rigidity in some traits he had always had, in areas such as cleanliness and routines, and he was also trying to deal with his parents’ marriage breakup.

Coming into puberty plus the threats of death no doubt caused some resurfacing of the conscious and unconscious memories of the previous sexual abuse by Brittany. But mostly it was the spiritual crises and angst brought on by my leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses that tipped things over the edge for Benjamin. He had reached a saturation point of stress, and his brain could no longer contain it.

He didn’t tell me or anyone else straightaway, but he started to hear a condemning voice. At first it occurred only when he was in his room at home, and then eventually it happened even when he was at school. He was frightened by the voice, and in his twelve-year-old mind he thought it was a demon. He believed that as he had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses and stayed with me, he must have been open to demon attacks.

So the solution for Benjamin was to listen to the demon voice, do what it said, and try to be close to the devil, as he knew the devil was the second most powerful being next to God. The voice was telling Benjamin he was going to die, that he was stupid, and other putdowns commenting on whatever Benjamin was doing at the time.

The night Benjamin first told me about it, I felt so distraught. Part of my brain wondered if it were a demon and if I had brought this to my child because of my actions. Another part of my brain rejected this reasoning and decided it was a medical, psychiatric reaction to the stress he was experiencing mentally and emotionally and had previously experienced, and I needed to get him psychological help.

Benjamin said the voice would make him jump when he was walking along the footpaths between classes by shouting out at him, and sometimes he would shout back for it to go away or look for where he thought the voice was coming from to try to discover the source. He never could see anyone, so this reinforced his idea that it was an invisible demon.

Benjamin said the voice was located outside of his head, usually coming at him from up in the top corner of his room or from the side. It was never nice in what it said to him, and this added to his distress. Benjamin also experienced distressing physical symptoms at the same time he heard the voice.

In September 2000 a doctor requested Benjamin see the neurologist again for another CT scan and EEG, as his symptoms had worsened and he was now hearing the voice many times a day. There were no significant findings from the neurologist’s tests that would explain Benjamin’s symptoms. The school had called an ambulance twice for severe stomach pain that suddenly affected him and caused him to be unable to walk or move. He had been given injections to relax the bowel, as the doctor he saw said he was experiencing bowel spasms. This was attributed to stress.

The doctor eventually admitted Benjamin to the children’s ward of a hospital in Brisbane. He was an inpatient for a few weeks. The doctor commenced him on Risperidone (an antipsychotic medication) and an antidepressant medication. They made Benjamin really sleepy. Gradually the voice lessened and then disappeared. During the time Benjamin was in hospital, a family meeting was requested with all immediate members of Benjamin’s family by the social worker. This was part of the therapy to try to get to the bottom of why Benjamin was having these symptoms and for the psychiatric team to observe us all together.

The other children, Leonard, my parents, and I went to the family meeting. Each of us was asked in front of Benjamin to say why we thought he was having this experience and what could be done to make things better for him. I said I knew my deep clinical depression was not helping me be as fully emotionally available to Benjamin as I wished I could be, as I was undergoing treatment with antipsychotics and antidepressants myself and was in therapy.

I had already explained to the doctors about the previous sexual abuse by Brittany, the diagnoses of dyspraxia and dyslexia, the effect of leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the fear of death this had created in Benjamin because of believing he and me and his other siblings would die because of leaving.

My mother said she thought my leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses was a large part of Benjamin’s problems and my own mental illness. None of the children up to that point in time had been told I had been suicidal, and my mother said in the meeting that I had tried to kill myself. She thought my mental health was negatively affecting Benjamin.

I then said my mental health was so bad as I was struggling with the effects of being disassociated; the loss of all my family, my marriage, and my faith; the effects of my own sexual abuse; and trying to cope on my own with four children with little if any support from family.

Leonard did not offer much but affirmed he loved Benjamin and wanted to do what was best for him. He said he thought my leaving the marriage had not helped, and I said I’d had no choice as I had been isolated and could not survive like that, and there were other reasons for the marriage break up that I did not wish to raise in the group. I left feeling that at least the staff could see all the issues, and we were not a functional lot by a long shot. Benjamin continued to attend school at the hospital in the mornings and then engaged in therapy in the afternoons. After he was discharged as an inpatient, he spent a whole term travelling by train to the hospital to continue to attend school there.

One of the unexpected and sad results of my mother’s telling the doctors in front of the children that I had tried to kill myself was that Rose, who had suffered from viral-induced asthma from the age of eighteen months, took it to heart. She was only six years old at the time. I had previously told her I had been in hospital as I was very sad, and the doctors were trying to make me better.

My mother’s saying I had tried to kill myself created anxiety in her. She would fake being sick if she thought I was depressed so she could stay home and keep an eye on me. She never told me this until years later, and it was a burden I never would have wished on her. This poor little girl was worrying about her mother killing herself when she should have been focusing only on growing up and her own peer-group-related worries. I can’t undo it, and I can’t undo how depressed I was at times.

Benjamin, after the second term as an outpatient at the children’s hospital school, was reintroduced into his former class at the state school he had previously attended. He had a strong group of friends. However, the hitting and shouting at his sisters, especially Amy, continued at home; he also did the same to me.

He seemed like a Jekyll and Hyde personality. The situation still felt desperate. My senses of guilt and self-blame were overpowering.

THE LIBRARY

The breathing is what I remember noticing first. Heavy, rapid, and sharp intakes of breath increasing in volume as whoever it was came closer. It struck me as odd in the library setting I was in, sitting at a computer. I looked up from processing my Internet banking and hesitated.

Then I heard a female voice speaking rapidly and heard fear and panic intermingled in her words. “Someone tried to abduct her. He had her by the arm and on the ground.” The voice rose in volume. I stood up as the breathing became louder and laced with sobs, and a stab of pain went through my chest and caught there within a block of fear as I recognised the sobs were coming from my eleven-year-old daughter, Rose. She suddenly materialised, walking out from an aisle to the right of me, with a lady alongside her, holding on to her.

Everything then erupted.

Rose, the instant she saw me, became hysterical, screaming out, “Mum, Mum.” She took great gulps of breath, and the only clear words I could hear as she forced them out of her lungs, which were constricted by a lack of oxygen and panic as she hyperventilated and collapsed on the ground in front of me, were, “Man….He was touching me, Mum….I couldn’t get away.” I was holding on to one side of her, with the lady I didn’t know on the other side, trying to pull her up.

“Mum, my legs don’t work,” Rose said. She was heavy in my arms. A chair appeared in front of us by the information desk, and we half dragged and half carried Rose the last few feet to sit on it. I stood up and kept my hand on her shoulder.

People were moving around, appearing in front of me and disappearing. I could hear voices around me, but wasn’t aware of their meaning. It must have been only a couple seconds, but it felt like minutes until a lady tapped me on my shoulder. She had two policemen by her side. Suddenly all the sounds and voices became louder and clearer to me, and I was conscious of all the people looking at us. I felt like we had to get away.

“Please, can we move somewhere more private?” I asked, and this time all the held-back emotion came through me and sounded in my voice. I nodded to the doorway I thought led to the sorting room.

“Yes,” said the lady.

I remembered my handbag with everything in it next to the computer about ten feet away. I said, “I just have to get my bag,” and I ran back and grabbed it.

I was conscious of about four other people at each side of me and behind me, staring at their screens and typing. As much as I was grateful that they didn’t meet my eyes or speak to me, as I wanted to rush as quickly as I could, I was also silently asking myself, What are they thinking? Why aren’t they talking to me? Do they blame me? And the huge question, What happened? I could feel my face burning and my heart pounding as I turned and ran back to Rose.

We walked through the door into the back room, and I felt the relief of not being on public view. I could feel that Rose was starting to shake all over. I wanted to pull her onto my knee and hold her and ask her what had happened, but I didn’t.

We sat down at someone’s desk, and papers and items were moved from in front of us. I put my bag on the floor, under the legs of the chair, and suddenly a librarian appeared and said, “Sorry, but we need to ask you these questions quickly so we can try to catch him. What was he wearing? What did he look like?”

Rose said, “His hands were dirty and felt rough on my legs.” She started crying. “He was kissing me all over and on my neck, and I kept telling him to stop, and he wouldn’t.”

The minute she said his hands were rough, I went cold all through me. When I had been assaulted as a child, one of the main things I remembered at the time was how sharp his fingernails had felt and how dirty his hands had been.

It was all swirling around in my head, emotions from past and present. My own emotions and awareness of them and my awareness of my daughter’s emotions and how I needed to keep mine in check for her. The heaviness and weight in my chest tightened, and my head felt light and dizzy.

Someone called out that a librarian had chased him, and they had the registration number of his car. I immediately felt so relieved and grateful for whoever had done this, as I knew it could make a big difference in catching him. Two other women came over with the police and sat down next to us. One of them was about seventeen years old and was crying. They introduced themselves as Julia and Candice, and the older lady said, “Candice saw what happened. She called out to me, and when I came around the corner the man started pulling on Rose’s arm and trying to drag her with him. Then he dropped her and ran out the door.”

Then one of the police said, “We need to speak to Rose on her own and take a statement.” The librarian showed them the kitchen next to us, and they went in there with Rose. It didn’t feel right letting her go in with them on her own, but when she hesitated and looked nervous, one said to her, “It’s all right. Your Mum is right next door, and you can go back to her as soon as we have finished speaking with you.” I gave Rose a quick kiss and hug, and she went with them through the door.

When the door shut, and I was left with Candice and Julia, I asked them, “What did you see happen?”

Candice said, “I came around the corner and looked up, and I saw Rose crouching on the floor with her arms over her head. The man was leaning over her, and she was saying, ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone.’ I first of all thought he was her Dad, the way he had hold of her, but something didn’t feel right or look right about it. He said to me, ‘What are you looking at?’ and I looked away, but Rose was crying. I just called out, ‘Mum’ as she was in the next aisle. Mum came around the corner, and I started to cry and point. The man was dragging Rose by the arm toward the door. He looked up and saw my Mum, and both of us called out, ‘Hey,’ and he dropped Rose’s arm and started to run out the door. A librarian heard us both call out and saw the man run and Rose on the ground, and she chased him out the door.”

I thanked Candice and her Mum repeatedly for what they had done and for helping Rose. I said to Candice that if she hadn’t come around the corner when she did and taken notice of her gut feeling that something wasn’t right, who knew what might have happened.

When Rose at last came out of the staff kitchen after having given her statement to the police, I was so relieved to see her again. She seemed calmer. She sat next to me and smiled, and laid her head on my shoulder.

Candice said, “Are you all right, love?”

Rose said yes and smiled at them and me.

She told me he kept kissing her neck and face, and his hands were all over her breasts and legs and up her skirt. He kept saying something under his breath like, “So beautiful, so beautiful….” Then she started crying again. I felt like crying, but nothing would happen.

I just held on to her. I felt sick and upset and angry and in shock. I couldn’t believe this had happened to my girl, and even more, going through my head was the question, “Why Rose?” Why, out of all the people in the library, did he have to pick on Rose?

She was the only one out of my three eldest children who had not been sexually abused, and now she had. It seemed unbelievable, especially as it was ten o’clock in the morning, and we were in a public place. We had to keep waiting in the library until police took all the statements from everybody concerned. Rose had to walk the police through the library and show them exactly where everything had happened. They took her books, which the man had held on to, for fingerprinting reasons, and that upset Rose again as she had been looking forward to reading the ones she had chosen. The police surveyed the closed-circuit television camera footage and identified the man walking directly behind Rose and me as we had entered the library, and following her as she went to the young-adult section.

We both were hungry, and the police let us walk over to the shopping centre, which was five minutes away, to buy something to eat and come straight back. Once we were in the mall, I noticed Rose’s head moving around, looking everywhere, and she clung to my hand tightly.

“What happens if we see him, Mum?” she whispered to me with tears running down her face.

I held her hand tightly and said, “He can’t hurt you anymore. I am here, and he would run a mile if he saw you now, as he would know he is in trouble.”

When we were standing in line, people were walking past behind her and bumping into her. She kept grabbing me; she was terrified. I was so upset and angry that this man, a stranger, had in one instant taken away her sense of safety in the world. Her ability to stand in a public place and feel safe and not worry about whether someone would grab her or touch her inappropriately had disappeared.

After we walked back to the library, we had to go down to the police beat for Rose to describe the man to a sketch artist, who would do a “wanted” poster from it. After we had done that, we were allowed to go home. By that time it was nearly three in the afternoon. We had been at the library since ten that morning. Both of us were exhausted. I had rung Rose’s Dad and arranged for him to go pick Thomas from school, and to let him know what had happened. It was a boiling-hot day. We had parked just down the road from the library, and as we got back into the car to start it, I couldn’t help but think how much had changed from when we had parked it there that morning.

Then the car wouldn’t start.

I turned the key in the ignition for half an hour. Both of us sat in the car with sweat pouring down our faces and backs as the sun poured in the windows and I tried to start it. I felt like bursting into tears. I wanted a cold drink, and I knew Rose did too, but I had no money left to buy one. I desperately wanted friends and family around for support.

Eventually the car started, and we drove home.

AFTERMATH

One of the main questions that arose in the following weeks as Rose visited her cousins, grandparents, and friends, was, “Why didn’t you scream?”

I saw afterward, when she returned home, the devastating effect it had on Rose emotionally to be put in the position of feeling like she had done something wrong by omission, and I became angry with the people who were asking this question.

Six sessions with a counsellor organised by the library staff did a lot to alleviate this ongoing damage. He explained to Rose that people used to think there were only two ways to deal with trauma. One was flight, where a person ran away from the danger, and the other was fight, where you fought back against whoever was trying to hurt you. He explained that scientists and doctors now knew there was a third way humans dealt with trauma and life-threatening situations, and that was to freeze. Your brain shuts down the blood supply to everything but the vital organs, and that is why you can’t move your legs and arms and they feel numb and heavy. Also your mind blacks out what is happening, and sometimes you don’t remember anything much during or after the event, and you can be unable to scream or make any sound with your voice. This is what happened to Rose.

He said to her that people who haven’t been in that situation have no idea how they would react. It would be one of the three ways, and it is an involuntary thing. You don’t have any control over it. Only people like soldiers who have been trained to act a certain way in dangerous situations can sometimes overcome their bodies’ and minds’ natural tendencies to react in these ways, but even then not in all cases.

The counsellor praised Rose for holding on to the shelf, as this undoubtedly stopped the man from being successful in picking her up and moving her out of the library and into his car, which was parked nearby. It was so helpful for Rose to hear this and not feel guilty for her involuntary reaction to the event.

She said, “I kept telling everyone that my Mum told me if this ever happened, ‘kick him in the balls,’ but when it happened I couldn’t speak or do anything.” Then she said, “Nobody understands that. They keep saying what they would have done, but they don’t know because it didn’t happen to them.”

I noticed a few days after the event, before the counselling began, that Rose had started to add into her story that she had started screaming once Candice came around the corner, and she had started hitting the man. When I spoke to her gently about it, I felt so sad inside that she felt she had to make up an “acceptable” version of events for other people who she felt might judge her. It was another aspect of the incident that was unexpected and that made it harder for her to recover from.

I think the sense of helplessness, and her feeling like she had no control over what was happening to her when she froze, was difficult psychologically for her to come to terms with. She struggled with feelings of blame and that she let him do things to her when in reality she had said no and crouched down to protect her body from his hands. In the end the only person who was at fault for the assault on Rose was the man who had chosen to assault her.

In the first few weeks after it occurred, Rose hardly slept at all. She moved her bed away from under the windows and constantly checked that they were locked at night before she went to sleep. She continually relived the experience in her mind and went over and over different aspects of it. In talking with her, it came out she had lied to the police and told them he had touched her only on top of her pants; he really had touched under them, but she had been too embarrassed to say this at the time.

She also found the sensory memories of experiencing his hands over her legs and his mouth on her neck very difficult. It made her body feel unsafe and scary, and the emotions connected to it felt overwhelming for her at times.

Sometime soon after it happened, Rose walked to the corner store, which was just around the corner from us. She went with her older sister; they were going to buy some sweets. On the way back, a car passed them both with young lads inside who hooted the horn and wolf whistled to them both from the car. When Rose got home, she was very quiet and mentioned some guys had wolf whistled at them from a car and how stupid she thought they were. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when I went into her room, that she burst into tears and told me she had felt scared that they were going to stop and hurt her and Amy. She got very distressed.

It was hard for Rose to be outside the house at all for a while without having fear overwhelm her and intrusive thoughts that maybe the man who had assaulted her was watching her somewhere, or that she would accidentally bump into him wherever she might be. She needed the curtains to be closed at night without a gap anywhere at all, as she had fears the man would find out where she lived and hurt her for going to the police. She was scared he might be outside looking into her room.

She seemed to withdraw into herself, and she quietly cried herself to sleep. At school she was leaving classes at times and just crying in the guidance officers’ rooms. On one hand I was pleased she wasn’t holding the emotion inside, but on the other I was worried it was going to impact her schooling and cause her to get behind. I had homeschooled her in the six months prior to this occurring as she had been so severe with her asthma, with constant hospitalisations, that I had been trying to help her catch up by doing the work at home with her for a period.

We had registered with the Australian Christian Distance Education School, and she was following their curriculum. She went back to her own school after six months as she had improved significantly in her health.

The police arrested the man on the day it occurred. They tracked down his address through the licence-plate number of his car that the librarian had noted. He was charged with assault, deprivation of liberty, and indecent dealing with a child under the age of twelve. He had to appear in court one month from the date he was charged. There were three adjournments. Thankfully Rose did not have to appear, as her original statement had been taped.

Another court date was set a few months later for a plea to be heard. A plea of guilty was entered that day to the one charge of indecent dealing with a child under the age of twelve; the other two charges had been dropped by the prosecution in a bargain for his guilty plea to the greater charge.

A few months later, nearly a year after the assault, he was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment but spent only one month in prison and then two months at a minimum-security jail farm. He apparently had no prior convictions for this offence and had been undergoing counselling. He has to notify the police of his address for a number of years and has to be registered with ANCOR, the Australian National Child Offender Register.

For Rose, knowing he had been arrested so quickly after the assault was a huge relief. However, knowing he had been let out on bail undid the relief nearly straightaway and created immense fear for her. When he was in jail, she felt a measure of justice and relief from fear, yet at the same time she said she felt sorry for him and hoped he wouldn’t do it again. She felt confused at times by having these conflicting emotions.

My main concern was that if he would sexually assault Rose, a young girl who was a stranger, and take the risk in a public place, what was he doing to other young girls among his family, friends, or neighbourhood, where he had supposedly easier access?

One event that impacted our spirits positively at that time occurred when we attended a service at a Baptist Church in Brisbane, which I had occasionally started to attend. During the kids’ club, which took place whilst the adults were at the main service, the youth worker, a young woman, asked the kids to pray with her for the young girl who had been sexually assaulted in the library that week. She said that wherever that young girl was, they wanted to pray to God so she knew she was loved, thought about, and supported. All the kids who were Rose’s age agreed and prayed. When Rose spoke up and said, “It was me,” they all hugged and supported her.

It was a real boost for her, and it seemed to signal an improvement in Rose’s demeanour and confidence. It reaffirmed to me the power of community and how knowing that other people care can make such a difference in an individual’s life.

A PRAYER

The sight that greeted me could have come straight out of a horror movie. There must have been hundreds of cockroaches that had come out in the dark, and when the light had been turned on they had run in a million directions. The whole wall and floor were covered with them. Amy had gotten up to go to toilet, and had put on the light. Her screams as she had run into my room and jumped onto my bed had woken me. We spent a restless night with little sleep with all five of us in my bed.

We had moved into the government housing only the day before. It was a lowset three-bedroom brick home. The backdoor opened straight into a lounge and dining area combined, and all the other rooms radiated off them. There were bare wooden floorboards and bare windows. But it had been freshly painted inside and out, had a new stove, was affordable, and was ours for us long as we needed it. So I was grateful.

Unfortunately the next few nights, after the exterminators had been, were worse as the cockroaches that were still living were now half dead, and when the light went on they were staggering and dropping as they tried to run. This meant they were dropping from wherever they were onto our beds, couches, floor, or benches. Thankfully, within a few days, most of them were gone. We could laugh about it later, but it was disheartening at the time.

I had kept the car as I had commenced studying at the local Technical and Further Education College (TAFE) for my enrolled nurse diploma. I needed to drive to my practical sessions at varying hospitals to start my shifts, and so my pension was being used to keep my car on the road, to pay for petrol, and for buying books for my studies. I had been relying on food vouchers from various organisations to feed us as food was the last thing on my list to pay for—after our bills.

It was humiliating having to go ask for food vouchers to feed my family. Most people I obtained them off enabled me to keep my dignity intact, but some people’s approaches made me want to shrink and disappear into the floorboards.

One particular week I was really struggling with exhaustion from studying, trying to manage the children on my own, and my depression. I woke up one night close to Christmastime. It was to be our first Christmas in this home. I was determined to celebrate it with my children.

I no longer knew what I believed in a religious sense or if I even believed at all in a supreme being, but I was still praying at times and looking for evidence that, if there were a God, I was maybe still acceptable to him. I had recently obtained a book entitled What’s So Amazing about Grace? that had provided some semblance of comfort to me and a totally different interpretation and description of who the author described God as being, as well as some doctrinal thoughts. It was therefore not so much the religious aspect of Christmas I wished to celebrate but rather the principles of giving and family time that I felt the story of Jesus personified.

However, I was struggling to feed us basic food and had nothing financially left over for extras. Sometimes I could get only a packet of porridge, sugar, and eggs to make scrambled eggs and porridge all week, or else I relied on potatoes I baked in the oven in their jackets and then grated cheese over. This was cheap and filling but boring and monotonous after a while, and I worried in regard to whether the children were getting enough vitamins and proper nutrition from their limited diet.

I was so lonely for my family and old friends who were all in Jehovah’s Witnesses, it felt like a physical pain continually through my body. The physical pain of never being hugged or touched for months by another adult in any way was also taking its toll on me, and this was totally unexpected. I ached for human contact. The longing just to be held or have some sort of physical contact was indescribable.

This particular night I woke up in the middle of the night feeling full of fear, anxiety, and despair. Everything felt too hard.

After quite a long time spent crying, I was exhausted. It was dark and silent in the night.

I was still struggling with questions such as did God exist? If he did, was I condemned for my doubts? Did he understand why I doubted? Did he consider me an agitator like Eve? Or was I considered disobedient for not being in submission to my husband? How did he feel about my separation and pending divorce? Did I have a bad heart for leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses?

If there were no God and no plan, what then? Where did I fit in? What was I going to do? How was I going to make new friends after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses when I found it such an anxiety-producing exercise? I was so lonely at times, it made me feel physically ill.

Most people, when they learnt I had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were happy for me and asked me why I had stayed in it so long. Sometimes I experienced understanding from people, and with others I felt on edge, judged, and found wanting. I then asked myself, “Why did I stay so long?”

The answers I gave myself, I could not tell other people who had no understanding and whom I felt would not get it. There were the feelings of being special, unique, chosen and supported by God, and part of an intense band of supporters isolated from the rest of the world. There was the ever-present dream of a better life if only you obeyed the instructions given by the organisation for this life in Satan’s world at this time. There was the absolute surety of having an answer provided to every question and of never having to live with doubt. There was living each week with a full program of activities that gave purpose and meaning to your existence and helped you feel like part of something larger than just yourself.

The overwhelming emotion I was feeling that night, though, was aloneness. With all this going through my head, and in a state of exhaustion, I ended up putting my hands together in desperation on the bed and praying over and over in my head and then out loud, “If there is anyone out there who can hear me, please show me I am not alone, I am not as condemned as I have been told I am, and you care. Please show me you have heard, and I am not alone.” After saying the words out loud and ending my prayer, I sunk in exhaustion and slept solidly until the morning.

The next day I felt so tired while getting the kids ready for school that I decided I had to give TAFE a miss and come home to catch up on some sleep after dropping them at school. I felt exhausted through to my bones. Whilst we were still all getting ready, there was a knock at the door.

I didn’t recognise the young man standing there asking me if I were the person whose name was written on the piece of paper in his hand. I recognised the van in the drive, though. It was the van that came on Wednesday nights and delivered bags full of leftover bread and pastries to my house along with others to whom they delivered. I had started receiving the drop offs after the bakery told me someone had given them my name. I never found out who had, but it was an enormous help.

He said he had a gift for me, and he came in with a white laundry basket full of food and goodies. He placed it on the table. I was ecstatic, stunned, and really grateful. The young man looked embarrassed but happy, and with barely a word he left as quickly as he had come.

The children were all jumping around and pulling things out, looking at what was in the basket. They were thrilled as not only were there packets of Weetabix and practical food, but there were boxes of chocolates and biscuits and other junk food in there also. They were dropped off at school with happy hearts and in high spirits, and I drove home feeling a bit lighter and looking forward to a long sleep.

I had only just gotten in the door when there was a phone call. It was someone from St. Vincent de Paul. He said someone had nominated my family to be sponsored for Christmas a number of months ago, and could I please confirm my name and the names of my children? I did. He then went on to say that unfortunately they had trouble with one of their vans, which meant they would be unable to deliver the items, and would I be able to come pick them up later that afternoon? He gave me their address, and I said I would be there.

After I had picked up the kids from school later that afternoon, we continued on into the city to collect the items. When I got to the building, we were ushered into a warehouse area that was filled with white baskets all done up with colourful cellophane wrappers and ribbons, and full of food and presents. There were too many to count. The man found which belonged to me and helped carry it out to the car. It appeared full of food and goodies. I went to shut the boot and he said, “Oh no, there is lots more!”

There was one whole basket for each of the four children and one for myself, all full of wrapped gifts. There were two baskets full of food and a Christmas ham too large to fit into a basket that came out of a fridge. I barely could fit all the items in the car! I was stunned, grateful, and humbled, and the children were beside themselves with excitement. We drove home with the children balancing baskets on their knees and continually turning around and trying to guess what the presents might be in all the baskets.

We unloaded the car of all seven baskets and placed them on our small dining-room table. Because there were too many to fit, we put the rest onto chairs. We all sat and looked at them, and the children started dancing around the table in glee. We unwrapped some of the food and had a feast for tea that night. Our fridge could fit only all the perishable hams and bottles of soft drink in it.

When it was dark, there was a knock on the door. A man was standing there with his wife, and they both had white laundry baskets full of food in their hands. I didn’t know who they were. They introduced themselves and said they were from the local Anglican church, and they had sponsored us this Christmas.

I didn’t have any idea who might have put our name forward, as I had never been to this little local church and didn’t think I knew anyone who had. I told them I had unexpectedly been sponsored by another group, and would they therefore like to give the food to someone else? The lady said that a lot of the nonperishable items could be saved for later, and they would really like to leave them with me. I thanked them profusely and took the baskets off them and into the house. They didn’t stay; they disappeared as quickly into the night as they had appeared.

I now had eleven baskets full of food and gifts on my table, chairs, and bare floorboards. I was filled with a sense of the surreal, and my heart was full of disbelief and gratefulness for all these strangers who had blessed my life. I could not have been further from the state of distress I had been in the previous night when I had cried out to God to please show me a sign that I was cared for.

I looked a bit more closely at the two latest baskets to check if there were any more perishable items. Under the cellophane cover, I could see an envelope.

I pulled it out, and on the back of the flap someone had written “To Someone Special.” I opened it up and inside was a letter. This is what it said in block writing:

I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD, AND YOU ARE MY CHILD. I LOVE YOU, AND I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS.

BE NOT AFRAID OF YOUR ENEMIES; ALWAYS BE COURAGEOUS, AND THIS WILL PROVE TO THEM THAT THEY WILL LOSE AND YOU WILL WIN, BECAUSE IT IS ME, YOUR GOD, THAT GIVES YOU VICTORY.

I, THE LORD, WILL FIGHT FOR YOU, AND THERE IS NO NEED FOR YOU TO DO ANYTHING, FOR I HAVE NOT GIVEN YOU THE SPIRIT OF FEAR BUT OF POWER AND LOVE AND A SOUND MIND.

REMEMBER ME, JESUS, IN EVERYTHING YOU DO, AND I WILL SHOW YOU THE RIGHT WAY. I TELL YOU, WHEN YOU PRAY AND ASK FOR SOMETHING, BELIEVE YOU HAVE RECEIVED IT, AND YOU SHALL BE GIVEN IT. I WILL GIVE YOU WHATEVER YOU ASK IN THE NAME OF JESUS

I WILL INSTRUCT YOU AND TEACH YOU IN THE WAY YOU SHOULD GO. I WILL GUIDE YOU WITH MY EYES UPON YOU.

DON’T BE AFRAID! STAND YOUR GROUND, AND YOU WILL SEE WHAT I, THE LORD, WILL DO TO SAVE YOU TODAY.

YOUR HOLY SAVIOUR,

JESUS.

FAMILY FOCUS

While the school was reporting no problems, I had nothing but behavioural problems at home with Benjamin, who threatened to hit or did hit Amy and me on a daily basis. I spoke to the mental-health nurse about it, and she suggested a program called Family Focus, which had been set up to assist families with children at risk of going into care because of issues in the home.

I had two wonderful ladies come and see me from this program. Over a period of about six weeks, they came two or three times a week, and they talked to each of us individually and tried to come up with a behavioural system that might work. They even set up a video camera for a few days in our lounge to record what was happening so they could best help us.

However, at the end of the time, they said everything I was doing was not working as Benjamin was full of rage, and although he would agree to all the contracts they spoke about, he chose to give in to his anger and resort to hitting and verbal violence. They were well aware of the physical punishments I had subjected Benjamin to during the first five years of his life, the issue of my depression since leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the shunning by our previous friends and family.

Part of the problem I had in dealing with Benjamin’s rage (and it could only be called that) was that he would follow me from room to room and not leave me alone even after I gave him time and listened and reasoned with him. It would go on for hours, his ranting and smashing, and on one occasion he pulled a knife in the kitchen and held it to me, threatening me not to leave the kitchen and telling me to stay.

It was relentless and unbearable, and I could find no way to alleviate it or cope with it. I worried about my rights and the rights of my girls and their growing up in a home where they should have be free of violence and not afraid all the time for their safety. At the end of the six weeks, it was discussed with me if Leonard would agree to take Benjamin for a period as all other methods had been tried. If he tried to hurt his sister again, he would have to go and live with his father for a month.

There was to be no compromise, as he would need to be removed so we could all live in safety and to protect him from his own actions, which he appeared unable to control. The support workers and I sat down with Benjamin, and this was clearly explained to him. He understood and said he didn’t want to go live with his father, but he understood why he would have to if he remained violent. Up to that time the children regularly would go and stay the night with Leonard.

Only two days later, we were all exiting the house to go somewhere. There had been no prior altercations, and everything and everyone was calm. Amy opened the passenger front door to hop in the car, and Benjamin suddenly yanked the door out of her hands, grabbed her by the upper arm, and swung her out from the seat. He sat in the seat himself and then attempted to shut the door on Amy, who was trying to get back in. Consequently the door slammed on Amy’s arm, and I thought it was broken. I spent hours sitting in emergency at the hospital to have an X-ray taken, only to discover it was fortunately just severely bruised. But this was a breach of the contract.

I told Benjamin when we got home to pack a bag, and I would be taking him to his father’s. I would bring the rest of his stuff in the morning. He was to stay for four weeks, and then it would be renegotiated if he were to come home. He would have to agree to another nonviolence contract if this were to occur after four weeks.

Benjamin suddenly completely fell to pieces.

There was no anger, just extreme sobbing and grief.

I had to harden myself and tell him to get in the car, and ignore all his attempts to engage me. My emotions were in my throat, and I didn’t trust myself not to break down.

As I was driving over there with Benjamin in the front seat, he continued to sob, this time begging me over and over, “Please, Mummy, please let me stay home. I won’t hurt Amy anymore. Please Mummy, I beg you.”

He was whimpering and crying, begging and pleading over and over and over. I told him he had been given so many chances, and I had clearly explained to him the consequences if he hurt his sister again, and I was going through with it. We could renegotiate in four weeks. I felt physically sick inside myself as I drove the ten minutes to his father’s house, listening to him begging. It was the single lowest point in my life.

Leonard was quiet when I dropped Benjamin off and didn’t say much. Although he had agreed to have him if push came to shove, I do not think he thought it would actually occur. As I left I could see Ben standing alone in the driveway watching me drive away.

I pulled over the car on the way home and just cried and cried. I felt like a traitor. All the mistakes I had made in my parenting felt like they culminated in this moment, and I had abandoned my son totally. Considering the terrible emotional pain I was suffering from my mother’s cutting me off, I felt I was doing the same on an emotional level with my son, even though rationally I knew this was tough love and quite different circumstances.

I felt we had lost something between us.

As I sat in the car crying, with visions of my son standing in the driveway before my eyes, I remembered the beautiful little boy I had held in my arms at birth and all the hopes and dreams that had been encapsulated in that moment. I had envisaged creating an outside life as wonderful as that portrayed in Little House on the Prairie.

The reality could not be more different. My mother was treating me as if I were dead. I felt like I had just abandoned my son. Our family was fractured, and our lives felt shattered.

The guilt for my own physical abuse of Benjamin prior to his turning five years old overwhelmed me. I thought about what might have been if Ben had not been physically disciplined so harshly as a young child and if this were why he was acting out so physically violently now at his family. It felt like this was true.

After Ben went to his father’s, he never came back to live full time with us again. He lived for a few weeks at a time with me, but it was his choice to stay with his Dad as when the time came to review the situation, he said he would rather stay with him. He was more subdued when he came over for weekends to stay and see the kids and me, and obviously he saw the kids in between when they went to their Dad’s. But I felt a distancing from him, a drawing away from me and a lack of connection. Even within all the anger, I had felt a connection and bond, and now those seemed to have disappeared.

However, there didn’t appear to be anything I could do about it, and everything appeared to have improved. He seemed less angry and less hostile. I made the most of the moments I did spend with him and endeavoured to show him the love I felt for him in ways that I could.

I continued communing with my Inside Mum in my internal world and gained comfort from the reality of her always loving me even though I appeared unable to emulate the same loving relationship with my son in the real world.

ASSAULT

It was late at night and pouring rain.

The way rain comes down in the rainy season in Queensland in bucketful’s at a time, it is hard to hear someone right next to you speak. I woke up; Ben had rung me from his mobile as he was walking down the road to his friend’s place. He said his Dad had knocked him unconscious, and when he had woken up he had left the house. He said he was worried about Amy as she had seen it all and had locked herself in the bathroom, as she was frightened of Dad.

He had his television and Xbox and was carrying them to his friend’s house. I asked him how far away from his friend’s house he was, considering it was raining so hard, and he said he was just going up the driveway. He had already phoned to see if it was okay to stay, and they had said yes.

I rang Leonard’s house, where Amy and Rose still were. Amy answered. She could hardly get her breath as she sobbed to me. She said all of them had been watching a program on television when Dad had come in and just turned the television channel to something else. Benjamin had hopped up and turned the show back to what they were watching.

She said Dad had grabbed Benjamin by the throat and pushed him against the wall and kept punching Benjamin in the side of the head. She kept saying over and over again that Benjamin just hung there and didn’t hit back or anything. He just hung there.

She then said Rose and she had been screaming at Dad to stop, and he had stopped and let Ben drop. He fell in a heap on the floor and didn’t move. Amy said she rushed to the toilet and locked herself in, and had been vomiting and crying, thinking her Dad had killed Benjamin. She was scared. She said Rose had gotten the phone and knocked on the door, and they both had gone into the bathroom and locked the door.

At this point she told me Benjamin had been telling her for ages Dad was hitting him, but she had never believed him or had thought it was just a smack, and Benjamin would have deserved it. She said Benjamin had just gotten off the phone wit her, and she now knew he was okay and safe at his friend’s place.

Unbeknownst to me Leonard had been hitting Benjamin with a closed fist and abusing him physically since we had separated. None of the other children, though, had ever seen it happen before, and Benjamin had confided in Amy and Rose that his Dad hit him, but considering they had lived through their brother’s hitting them and seeing his rages on a frequent basis, they both thought to themselves and told him that he must have deserved it.

I asked if Dad were there, and she said he had gone into his bedroom and shut the door. I asked if they wanted me to come down and pick them up, as I would, and she said it would be okay to come in the morning. For some unfathomable reason, I listened to that and didn’t go straightaway. Looking back I think I might have had a few glasses of wine to drink and didn’t know how to get over there to get the girls at that time of night. I had relocated and now lived forty minutes away across town.

Amy told me Dad had never hit her or Rose. I then rang back Benjamin to make sure he was in his friend’s house and able to spend the night. He said they had gone back to bed, and he was going to bed too. I said I would see him in the morning when I went to get the girls.

The next day he didn’t want to come back to my place but said his friend’s parents had said he could stay another night and go to school from there. He still wanted to stay with his Dad and refused to come with me. He told me the abuse had happened right from when we had separated, and Dad would just be normal again next time he saw him.

I felt heartbroken for him. Suddenly I could understand partly where some of the extreme rage and violence shown toward Amy and me had come from. Leonard had always shown favouritism toward Amy, and it was evident to all the children that she was his favourite.

Leonard had always told me his father had been very extreme in his physical discipline with him and all his brothers, especially Leonard’s brother Henry, who had experienced mental health issues. He had also stated his father would beat him until he could not move at times with whatever was on hand. Leonard had never shown physical violence toward me in our marriage or toward the girls, but I remembered an incident that had happened just before we separated. Thomas was about seven months old and pulling himself up on furniture, and had been standing at a coffee table in front of the couch where we were sitting. Leonard had wanted to see something on television and had kicked up his foot and kicked Thomas over out of the way.

I had shouted, “You kicked him,” and he immediately said he didn’t mean it, that he had only meant to get his nappy bottom and scoot him down so he could see. But Thomas had started crying, and I was really angry and upset with Leonard. He would not admit that he had hurt or done the wrong thing to Thomas; he just kept saying, “I didn’t kick him” and, “I haven’t hurt him.” I walked out of the room in disgust. This was about a week before we separated.

Now all of this was going through my memory. On Sunday I picked the girls up and brought them home, and I sat them down and asked them to retell me what had happened. Amy kept crying and said Dad had told her not to talk about it with me. She was worried about doing so. I told her she wouldn’t get into trouble, and she was still allowed to see her Dad. She was most worried about not being allowed to see her Dad anymore.

On Monday I rang the school Benjamin attended and asked to speak to the guidance officer. She came on the phone and said two of Benjamin’s friends’ parents had been into the school and had laid complaints against Leonard, and jointly the school and the parents were going to lay complaints with Child Safety. She said one of the parents said Leonard often went away for the weekend and left Benjamin on his own with no food in the house. Benjamin would steal money from his Dad’s business drawer so he could buy food; if there were no money there, he would go hungry. Ben had told his friend this.

Benjamin had lost a lot of weight, but I had put it down to a growth spurt, and he had recently ceased the Risperidone medication, which had made him quite puffed up for a while. The other parents said they had noticed extensive and significant bruising on Benjamin’s back on more than one occasion. Benjamin had denied to them that his Dad hit him, but he had told their son this was what happened with his Dad.

When I got off the phone, I rang Child Safety and told them what had happened on the weekend, from when I had received the phone call from Benjamin to when the girls arrived home. I told them Benjamin refused to come home with me, as he still wanted to live with his Dad. I explained with his being so adamant about it and only a few months out of hospital, I did not want to push him too hard to do something he did not want to do, in case I made the situation worse for him.

Child Safety interviewed Leonard. He denied hitting Benjamin with a closed fist and denied hitting Benjamin previously. He agreed to Benjamin’s continuing to live with him and agreed to Child Safety’s interviewing Benjamin at regular intervals from that point on. As Benjamin was nearly fourteen years old, they decided he was too old just to remove and that monitoring and trying to support the existing arrangement was preferable to foster care for a child who had so recently been so disturbed.

The police charged Leonard with aggravated assault. He pled guilty, was fined, and was put on a good-behaviour bond for a year. Before he went to court, he tried to influence Amy to lie in her statement to the police and to tell them she had not seen him hit Benjamin. Amy and Rose had often told me since Benjamin had gone to live with Leonard, there were holes in the walls, and Leonard had blamed Benjamin for making them. Benjamin had denied this, and he had never put holes in the walls, not even at his most aggressive, when with me. Ben told Amy his father’s slamming his head into the walls had made these holes. Benjamin refused to discuss any of it with me. I took it as a continuation of the anger he still experienced toward me from what he saw as rejection.

Just before Leonard went to court, he rang up one day and said he wanted Benjamin out. He didn’t want him there anymore. Benjamin was upset and crying in the background. Leonard said Benjamin had stolen money from him and did not respect him, and he could not have him living there and refusing to attend meetings or anything anymore. He had told all his family that Benjamin had told lies to the police, and so all Benjamin’s extended paternal family were angry with him. None of this was helping him emotionally.

I was angry with Leonard as a father for letting his thirteen-year-old son take the blame for his behaviour. Even though he had blamed the breakup of our marriage on my leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses and being mentally unstable with depression but not disclosing the real reasons, I had not expected him to blame his own child in this situation. But he did, and I lost all respect for him as a man and a human being, and my emotions tipped over into feelings of hate and bitterness.

I had a phone call immediately afterward from a friend I had made before I’d left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Her husband worked full time as a distance education teacher. Kerry and Frank had been great friends and a great support during my leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and we’d had many a pleasant afternoon with the children swimming in their pool or doing craftwork with Kerry.

I asked her if she and Frank would be willing to have Benjamin stay for a few months, until I could sort out where he was going to live. He was desperate to stay at his old school and with his friends, and I lived forty minutes away, He didn’t want to move away from the one constant that had stayed in his life since we had moved to Australia.

She readily agreed as she had a run of people coming and going at their house. Benjamin moved into their home. They were like second parents to him. They loved and nurtured him, and Kerry even took him to get his learning difficulties reassessed, as it had been six years since he had first been assessed in New Zealand. They went above and beyond the call of duty in the help they offered and gave Benjamin and me, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

Leonard made no contact with Ben, even though he lived only five minutes away, for nearly four months. Ben also made no contact. Kerry and Frank were both horrified by what had occurred with Leonard and his lack of contact with Benjamin when Benjamin was desperate to hear from him. Then one day Benjamin told Kerry he had rung his Dad and asked if he could go back and live with him, and Leonard had said yes. As Benjamin was now fourteen years old, we could not stop him. He moved back, but Leonard had said he no longer was welcome upstairs; he had to have his bedroom downstairs. Benjamin agreed to this.

During that time Benjamin struggled at school but tried hard to apply himself. He got A’s in some subjects and C’s in most others, with D’s some semesters. He excelled in art, music, and drama. He loved ancient history, but his marks never reflected his love of the subject. He played the lead role in the school musical that year. He had so many lines to learn by heart, which he did effortlessly, and he sang four solos as well as many other songs with the group. He got a thunderous standing ovation.

In year twelve he and his friends wrote and starred in their own production, which was a play. It was a poignant comedy about four friends who go out and get drunk and wake up the next morning on a park bench, and then try to find out what actually had the night before. There were many subtle messages in regard to binge drinking contained in well-written humour. It was a roaring success, due in no small part to the role Benjamin played in it. He loved acting. At one point I had enrolled him in an Acting Academy, and he had done one semester before he went into hospital.

Before Leonard and I had separated, both Amy and Benjamin had auditioned for and won coveted positions in the Australian Youth Choir. It involved a financial commitment for the children to travel for twelve months all around Australia, participating in the choir. Once Leonard and I were separated, with much less money to live on, I had to withdraw the acceptance. I ached for this lost opportunity for them. Both of them have amazing voices, and I have often wondered where professional training would have led them both.

Benjamin and Amy also both won places in regional art competitions for their age groups, and I had enrolled them, before I’d separated, in a local extracurricular art class for a year for a couple hours a week. The teacher taught technique. They both loved this, and it was a wonderful outlet of expression for both of them. Rose was sportier and had joined the Girl Guides after I’d left the Jehovah’s Witnesses; she also was on the swimming team. She was a natural at most sports.

Children will forgive and tolerate the most extraordinary abuse from parents because of the desire for unconditional love and acceptance. If the parents do not give it or make it conditional upon things, the child will still often bend over backward to try to keep in contact with the parent, even if at the same time they have feelings of hate toward the parent for how they are being treated. This duality of emotion can be hard to juggle for an adult, let alone a child.

The desire for acceptance and belonging is so strong. If you don’t create another internal world to live in, you have to make the best of what you have got in this one. I suppose this was all Ben was trying to do.

He just wanted his father to show love to him and his mother to be there emotionally for him.

SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

After leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had embarked on a spiritual journey that still continues. At first I started to visit Internet sites of ex-witnesses and read their research as to why they believed certain doctrines of the witnesses were wrong. I read about alternate ways of reading and interpreting scripture and discovered that the Jehovah’s Witnesses had constantly changed their mind over the years on different doctrines.

To give just one example, the doctrine on whether to celebrate Christmas or not changed repeatedly in the history of the witnesses. This meant that because of the change of doctrine and disfellowshipping of those who did not go along with the latest interpretation, marriages and families were broken up, with subsequent heartache for many people.

I read story after story of people with similar experiences to mine. This really was a comfort to me. We had always been warned not to read or go to ex-witness sites as they were said to be blasphemous, and their motivation was said to be malicious. All I found were stories of many individuals who had chosen or been pushed to leave, and their lives had been torn apart by the disfellowshipping or disassociation process.

There is no honourable way to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses once you are a baptised member. You cannot just say you don’t believe it anymore and don’t want to attend. You are seen as subversive and having a bad heart if you don’t conform, and you are gotten rid of. Many people who don’t have a full understanding of the effect of disfellowshipping on individuals say, “Well, it is a voluntary organisation. If you no longer believe their core beliefs, you shouldn’t be allowed to stay a member.” And this is fair enough.

What they don’t understand is the total cutting off from friends and families that occurs, and the devastating effect this has on individuals. Or, like my mother repeatedly said to me, “How can you have chosen to cause me all this pain? You know when you left I would not be allowed to talk to you anymore, and you still left. So you chose to cause me this pain.”

This, of course, is totally contrary to how I viewed my leaving. I did not choose to cause my mother pain or to not be able to associate with me. I stopped associating with the witnesses as I no longer believed the doctrines and did not want to live a hypocritical life. My mother then had a choice either to remain as a witness, believe their doctrines, and cut me off; or to investigate and leave also.

She, however, as the witnesses had repeatedly taught her, thought of the witness doctrines as the same as God’s direct commands. So if the witnesses told her I should be disfellowshipped for certain beliefs or actions and then cut off, she saw that as God telling her she should not associate with me.

One of the doctrines I still believed after I had been disassociated was in relation to their stance against blood transfusions. After I left I researched how the doctrine had been formulated and found holes in the reasoning I had been taught. This felt like an enormous burden off my shoulders. Deprogramming my mind from the brainwashing by means of this research led to a gradual lessening of the fear that had plagued me for years. I slowly addressed the myriad of ideas that had firmly been lodged in my cognitive structure as truth that needed challenging.

Getting books from bookshops and the library was an enormous help. I am an avid and a fast reader; I would devour four or five books a week. I was insatiable in my quest for understanding and knowledge to try to understand if there was another organised way of belief to which I could belong. I contacted the Bahia faith after they had advertised meetings in the local paper. I went to quite a few of their meetings. What attracted me was they said you could belong to any religion and also be a Bahia.

I also read a small book entitled The Universal Christ by Bede Griffiths that espoused similar ideology. I liked this idea of finding unity and similarities in worship, as it was so diametrically opposed to what I had been taught as a witness. I had started to believe that exclusiveness and isolating people of one belief from another was not a way to support a strong belief system but was actually the opposite.

More than one of the Bahia members invited the children and me back to their homes, and these new associations were a source of comfort and growth for me. One knocked on my door and handed me an envelope with $200 in it one day, as she knew I was struggling financially. These people were acquaintances, and so many times they reached out and showed kindness and love to me that helped me keep surviving and believing in people.

The love and kindness of strangers and the spirit of giving to another, if it is in your power to do so if that person crosses your path, with no questions asked, no judgment, and no expectation of repayment or accolade from anyone else, had a powerful effect on me.

How wonderful my life path was being filled with people reaching out to me at times of most need. I was wonderfully blessed. Another couple rang me up and gave me the address of the holiday house they were renting and invited the children and me up for a couple nights. It was absolutely wonderful for us.

I read books on evolution and on alternate understandings of what brings meaning to people’s lives besides religion. I avidly read books written by people who had been challenged by many different adversities in life, and I drew comfort and strength from reading them.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses had always quoted the scriptural saying that “one bad apple in a barrel contaminates all the rest” to support their belief of shunning disfellowshipped members. However, people are not apples. And if they are convinced about a certain way of thinking that is backed up by adequate evidence, they will not be easily swayed by another’s point of view.

I have discovered this time and time again since I have left the witnesses and formulated my own strong opinions and beliefs on things. I am more than open to seek out alternate ways of thinking, but I will keep returning to my basic belief. I will modify it, but I will not change it totally if I am not convinced. Why do the witnesses not have the faith in their own teachings to allow their members to do this?

They sometimes say sending out witnesses door to door exposes them to all different beliefs. But it doesn’t really. Witnesses are counselled that they are there to preach to the householder and not the other way around. And that the purpose when they call, especially if someone objects, is always to keep talking and providing “evidence” of the truth we have been taught. We were never, at any time, taught to listen actively to the reasoning the householder was presenting, but only how to refute any reasoning that could be brought up on any given subject against our way of thinking. This was the whole purpose of one of the five meetings we attended each week, called “The Theocratic Ministry School”—to learn how to refute common objections to our teachings.

In fact the truthfulness of any belief should be strong enough to stand up to challenge, and if it is not then so be it. People should be free to make up their own minds and not be told to not read literature opposing their viewpoint or counselled for reading about alternate ways. This is bullying and brainwashing, and evidence of a cult that is exerting mind control over them.

Having experienced true love and undeserved kindness from people of all different beliefs and nonbelief since I had been disassociated, this had a more powerful effect on me than any words I read.

I started to realise that living an honourable life did not necessarily mean having to follow a particular rulebook. Rather than everything being separated into “good” or “bad,” there were only opportunities for learning. What might make someone else happy and make her feel like she is living a fulfilled life might be totally different for me. No longer was I seeing everything as “right” or “wrong.” I was starting to critically analyse situations and choices and determine that everything in life did not have to be experienced as dualities. Rather it was more complicated and multi-factored.

As my judgments of others and their life choices lessened of others, my judgments of myself became less severe, and my self-acceptance and self-esteem started to grow.

RECOVERY

One book that helped me overcome my fears was entitled Leaving the Fold by Marlene Winnell. She had left a fundamentalist religion and wrote the book as a way to provide help to others who were struggling to find new independence and self-worth.

I found untold comfort in the fact that others who had left fundamentalist religions sometimes went through the same angst, questions of life, and identity crises I was going through, and I found comfort in reading about how some resolved similar questions and conflicts they faced.

There was a chapter called “Why Did I Stay So Long?” I particularly liked her discussion of the many positive things I had grieved about losing after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses that others also had missed, such as having an answer to everything and an absolute surety of my place in the world; the feeling that I was chosen by God and special to him, and feeling a sense of strong belonging to an in group or community that the rest of the world was hostile to and that created intense ties and loyalties.

My father likened the sense of belonging when he was an active Jehovah’s Witness to the ties he had experienced only in active duty in the defence forces. Having your life and your role in it mapped out for you provided a measure of security that disappeared when you left, especially when you no longer had five meetings a week, study preparation, Bible study, and field witnessing to occupy your time.

I was invited by a friend to perform in a play for Child Protection Week. I am not sure if this was for her university teaching degree that she was doing or for the drama groups in which she loved to participate. She had applied for and obtained funding, and we enacted a play. It was only a short play with four or five small scenes, but it helped my self-confidence enormously.

We also performed the play in the library for counsellors and dignitaries, and some of them were moved to tears. It showed very dramatically, through simple poems, songs, and enactments, the damage done by verbal, physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. I had first met this friend when I had answered an advertisement in the back of a primary-school newsletter advertising a drama workshop for girls to increase their self-esteem. It was only a one-day workshop, but I rang and took Amy, and the friend and I met that way.

We stayed in touch for many years, but I still didn’t know fully how to be a friend, and I think the gradual pulling away occurred as it often never occurred to me to acknowledge, with gifts or invites, special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and Christmas.

I felt like I was in a world where I didn’t know the unwritten rules, and I am sure I came across as ignorant, uncaring, and thoughtless many a time because of not acknowledging these things. I also at that time was deep in my therapy and was discovering me. I am sure this made me much like a teenager whose focus was on forging her own identity. All my energy was inwardly directed, and even though I sought out friends, it was to sustain me. There was not a lot of giving back to my newly formed friendships at that time, and I don’t think I could have been perceived as a very good friend, but it was not intentional.

When I commenced university in 2004 and started studying psychology, one of the many courses on theories of child development looked at the progression humans go through naturally from birth to adulthood in regard to their cognitive awareness. Such things as magical thinking, concrete thinking, abstract thinking, and critical thinking were discussed as all being parts of natural human development.

I read some interesting research that resonated at the time, examining religious belief or moral development progressing along the same lines as cognitive development. It was an explanation of why we might have all different forms of religious thought today, encompassing such things as magical thinking within religious belief, concrete thinking (belief in an authoritarian god with “rules” to obey), and critical thinking (the ability to put aside a rule for the greater good of the person or society) and why some people might be attracted to some forms of religion more than others because of their experiences in their families of origin when growing up.

I saw links between psychological and spiritual development that seemed natural and logical to me. I came to see religion as more of an accident of birth and part of a cultural heritage than a choice for most people. This was all fascinating to learn and a different way of looking at why the world was the way it was and why religion might exist.

My measure of how spiritual someone was when I had been a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had been very much influenced and based on belonging to the organisation and obedience to all its rules.

After I left it was a gradual process over years of my letting go of old beliefs and starting to realise that someone could be spiritual in so many more ways. Even the definition of what spiritual meant changed for me, encompassing such things as kindness to others, not gossiping or judging, bringing joy by giving in ways others couldn’t measure or didn’t know about, engaging in voluntary work, being kind and supportive, nurturing relationships with family and friends, working in the garden, supporting the environment, being active in animal protection, supporting those less fortunate in society, or simply just being the best person I could be as an individual in society.

Also I came to believe that people did not have to believe in a personalised god to be spiritual. They could be atheist or agnostic but still be kind and altruistic, and by anyone’s standards that made them spiritual or living by the spirit—spirit meaning the spirit of love and kindness.

My definitions changed and broadened, and in the process not only did my heart grow wider and my horizons enlarge but it felt like a weight dropped off my shoulders. My narrow way of focusing on the world that I had felt for years, that I thought had been my protection and had made me acceptable to God, dropped away, and I felt lighter with the internal and external judgment gone from me.

SCOTT

My divorce came through about two and a half years after I had separated from Leonard. He agreed to pick me up on the day, and we drove to the courthouse together. I do not remember having to do much except say yes at one point to the magistrate. Our divorce was granted. On the way back home, Leonard was chatting about his work and other things. I suddenly felt an incredible sadness start to well up in me.

Even though I had been the one to instigate the end of our marriage, and I still felt a hundred percent that I had done the right thing by doing so, it was a grief for all the hopes and dreams and for the intact family I had dreamed of having. For my children having to grow up now with their father not living in the same house, and for my estrangement through disfellowshipping from my parents and all Leonard’s family, with whom I had regularly associated.

The disfellowshipping had not only affected me but all my children also, as the isolation from family included them in many ways. In some ways the grief was also coming from the Inside Me for the loss of the dream of a whole, happy family in my real world, just like the Little House on the Prairie scenario I had envisaged in my head.

That night I went to bed early and woke up about one in the morning with a crushing pain in my chest that made it difficult to breathe. I sat there for half an hour with my breathing becoming shallower as the pain in my chest grew worse. In the end I rang an ambulance. I was told I had tachycardia, and I was given a tablet to place under my tongue.

Once I had been admitted to the emergency ward and all tests had been conducted, it was decided I was suffering from a panic attack induced by personal stress. They told me it often presented with symptoms similar to a heart attack, and I was sent home. I felt embarrassed, but my physical pain and symptoms were real, and it was a very frightening experience. Even though it was horrible, at least now I was feeling emotional pain and expressing it rather than just having the experience of heaviness that I had had for years.

Not long after my divorce, I decided to explore the world of dating. This was something, of course, I had never done before as Leonard and I had talked on the phone or in person, and if we were together in person we always had a chaperone with us. I had a great fear of dating but also excitement. My fear was over how to behave, what would be expected of me, and how to conduct myself. I spent some time in my therapy sessions talking about this.

I was still looking for rules of living all the time since leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I kept finding it hard to grasp that everyone made up their own rules or standards, and you chose whether to belong to other religions or groups based on similarities of thought. I was always looking for the norm so I could fit in and not be seen as different, and so I could be accepted.

One wet Saturday when I was at home, I investigated an online dating site. I spent a pleasant afternoon surfing it. My children were all with their father for the weekend, and the time passed quickly. I ended up joining, as one man in particular caught my eye, and I wanted to send him a private message.

Scott caught my attention as he was a single Dad with a son in his late teens. His son had just joined the armed forces. Scott said he worked full time, and he enjoyed cooking, curries, and reading. As I enjoyed all those things, and he was from the same part of England as my Dad and grandmother, I thought I would send him a message. He replied straightaway, and we ended up talking on the phone for a few weeks.

I found Scott’s accent familiar as it was the same as my Dad’s and Nana’s. His dry English sense of humour was engaging and instantly put me at ease. I had not laughed so much in a long time. In fact that was and is the singular strongest thing that attracted me to Scott and what I grew to love about him. He made me laugh all the time, and this was such a refreshing relief for me. We ended up meeting and going to a movie.

I blush to say I initiated holding hands with him straightaway. I held hands because I wanted the experience of dating, and this was what I thought people did, and also I wanted to. Of course he thought that was wonderful, but looking back I cringe at my naivety for my age. Scott and I rapidly started to see a lot of each other. He was suffering from depression, and his friends, family, and son had stated they had been concerned in regard to his level of drinking before he’d met me, but they were relieved as that seemed to reduce vastly. As he drank quite a bit but did not seem to be affected by it, I thought he did not have a problem.

I did not realise that when someone has been a long-term heavy drinker, he builds up a tolerance to it, and although he could be legally drunk and have high alcohol levels in his blood, he does not necessarily appear in his behaviour to be drunk. Scott was always the life of the party and would have everyone laughing when he was present.

But what no one knew was that when we went home, he would be in depressions that would last for days. I begged him to go see a doctor, and after countless arguments he agreed. He was put on antidepressants but told that if he drank more than two alcoholic drinks, the effectiveness would be reduced, and if he kept up drinking, the medication would be useless. Unfortunately Scott kept on drinking.

I found out his mother and father had separated when Scott was young. He had an older brother and sister. He said his father lived with another woman, and that was why his parents had separated. His mother had been a nurse. I had been studying nursing at TAFE when Scott met me, so that must have resonated with him. I had gotten work in a dual-diagnosis unit for brain injury and mental health and had been working there part-time when I’d met Scott. He told me his mother turned to alcohol when his father left, and it was a very bitter separation.

Over the course of two years during his childhood, his mother had drunk herself to death. Scott said she died in bed one day, and the ambulance did not come to collect her body for hours. He found her. She had bled out. He was only in his early teens. His brother refused to touch alcohol after that, but unfortunately Scott turned to it during his life. He said his mother would have psychotic episodes when she had been binging on drink and at varying times had tried to kill him and his brother.

He said one day she chased him and his brother with a knife, and they had escaped into a bedroom and shut the door. She was stabbing the other side of the door with the knife! He said they needed trucks to take away all the bottles piled up in the back courtyard after she died. Scott had never wanted children because he was worried about what sort of father he would be because of his background, but when his son was born to his first wife, he loved him unconditionally.

Scott had panic attacks, which were quite severe when we were first together, over our relationship, with a part of him panicking that he was with me and another part that felt he would die if I left him. It was like this battle in him. I do not know why. It lasted for months, and for someone like me, who had been cut off by my own mother and all my friends after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it was really hard to handle. I understood he had no control over it and was in turmoil.

Other people in his life did not see this conflict, extreme anxiety, and depression. They wouldn’t have believed it. Looking back, I can see Scott used alcohol wherever he went to prop himself up, and underneath he was insecure and anxious, but he came across as the life of the party, and that was what people loved about him. He made everyone laugh, but inside he was crying a lot of the time, and even he didn’t know why.

He confided in me that when he was about twelve years old, a barber he used to be sent to for getting his hair cut would molest him. He said the man would put his hand down his pants and fondle him, and he would just sit there not knowing what to do. He said one day his mother heard that the barber was molesting young boys, and she went down to the shop and shouted at him. This seemed like a positive memory of his mother’s standing up for him and a very vivid one for him. Once again someone I was involved with had been affected by abuse both sexually and with addiction.

Sometimes he would not talk for days. Other times we would go out together, but he would refuse to hold hands and did not want to be touched. Then, if I left him alone and just got on with my life, he would get angry and accuse me of not caring and being heartless. If I kept trying and kept getting rejected, I would feel worse. He would come out of these episodes in his own time.

I ended up ringing the Al-Anon organisation, which helps family members of alcoholics. I explained the cycles of remorse and crying. Scott would beg me not to leave and shower me with presents and cards, and then there would be a gradual buildup of not talking and no intimacy. Whether I tried to engage or not engage with him, I was blamed for how he was feeling. The children and I would live on eggshells when he came home, not knowing what mood he was going to be in. It got to a point where I felt he hated me all the time, yet when I suggested breaking up he would panic, say it was all his fault, and promise to stop drinking or cut down but wouldn’t be able to, and within a few days it was all back the same again. This went on for two years.

The counsellor at Al-Anon advised that the only way to stay with an alcoholic, if that was what I wanted, was for me to get on with my own life whilst living with him. She said I had to explain to him how I felt about his drinking and then leave it up to him. Scott would at that time come home and say, “Do you mind if I go for a quick drink?” If I said yes, and he came home drunk, then I had no right to complain as I had said yes. And if I said no, he wouldn’t speak to me all night and would sulk, or would sneak off anyway and be angry. I was in a no-win situation. The counsellor said to me that I was just to refuse to engage in that conversation and tell him he knew how I felt about it and it was up to him. I was not going to say yes or no anymore.

Also, if he wouldn’t talk to me for ages, rather than my hovering around him and trying to placate him or ask him what was wrong, I just had to get on with my life. Ring my friends, go out, make dinner, and just get on with things. So I did. This seemed to infuriate Scott, and he would accuse me of not caring. I told him that nothing I did helped, so I could focus only on living my life, and he could join me if he wished or not—it was up to him.

During that time he became paranoid that I was having an affair and would question where I had been and with whom I had been. Once, after I got home from university, which was forty minutes away, he asked me where I had been parked. I told him. He exploded into a rage, said I was lying, and asked whom I was seeing. I had gone to lunch with four or five of my university friends at a house about five minutes from the school and so had moved the car for an hour. He had driven in specifically to spy on me, and when he hadn’t found my car in the car park, he thought I was having an affair. This was frightening behaviour for me to experience from him.

No matter how much I tried to explain to him that I was too busy and too tired to think of having an affair—with three kids at home, studying full time at university, and working part time at the hospital—and that I just wanted to be with him, he wouldn’t believe it. All I wanted was for him to stop drinking so he could deal with his depression.

He had been cheated on in relationships too many times, and I think his self-esteem and anxiety were such that he was always dreading and waiting for me to leave. I explained to him over and over that if I left, it wouldn’t be because he was depressed but because he didn’t do anything about it. He had been given help and offered help, and he was doing the one thing stopping him from recovering: being dependent on alcohol.

There were so many positives at that time to being with Scott, but the alcoholism was not one of them. I also recognised and identified with the hurt-child part of him and was trying to be like an Inside Mum to him; I thought if I loved him enough, that would be enough, and things would come right. It took me a while to understand that you can’t love someone out of an addiction—it has to come from within that person, not from outside, if he is to change.

Persistence was something I was familiar with, though, so I kept trying to make it better.

EXTENDED FAMILY

After I had been disassociated, I decided to write a letter to my Aunty Shirley and my cousin Bruce, who were still in Australia. There had been no contact between my extended family and me since our family had left Australia when I was nine years old.

My brother had already made contact and formed bonds with them a few years previously, and so it seemed a good place to start. They responded, and I eventually went to visit them. I also went down a couple times to visit Nana before she died. After she had visited New Zealand in 1973, I had not seen her again in person but had communicated by letter and phone.

The first time I visited, I stayed with Aunty Shirley as my Nana was sick and was not expected to live. When we got to the nursing home and walked in her room, her bed was stripped and empty, and Nana was nowhere to be seen. I could see the panic in Aunty Shirley’s eyes, and when we went into the corridor, the nurse allayed our fears and told us since Nana had been told I was coming, she had rallied. After days of being in a semicoma and not eating, she was sitting up in a chair, had eaten breakfast and lunch, and was waiting for us! Aunty Shirley could not believe it.

I hugged Nana, and we held each other tightly. The nurses put her back in her bed, and I sat next to her. She held my hand and stroked it.

Nana had always had huge breasts, and as a child I couldn’t help staring at them. As a teenager I had dreaded developing like her and would secretly pray, “Please don’t let me get breasts like Nana.”

Because she had shrivelled and shrunken with old age and looked like skin and bones, there appeared to be hardly anything left of her now. She leaned over and whispered to me, “Jenny, can you do me a favour?” The nurse had tucked her top into the top of her skirt and in the process had tucked the two long flaps that were now Nana’s breasts into her underpants and the top of her skirt! I gently extracted them for her, and we both giggled until we cried.

When we left the room, the nurse told us it was normal for many people before they died to go into long sleeps where they couldn’t be roused, often for days at a time. This was what Nana had been doing. She also told us Nana wouldn’t let them move or place objects on an armchair in the corner of her room, as a few days earlier she had said her mother had started to visit her and sat in that chair. She said over the next few days her mother visited regularly and sat in that chair and talked to her. She felt a peace that she was soon to be with her mother.

I felt so relieved and pleased that Nana had no fear and was comforted in this way. I also was so happy that after she had been told I was coming to see her, she had awoken and been conscious, happy, and talkative. Aunty Shirley said she had not been like that for weeks. It was so wonderful. We had two long visits over two days and shared a lot together.

When we got back to my Aunt’s house after the first visit, we talked for hours. I felt very close to my Aunty. I found a straight-down-the-line, warm-hearted, accepting, and surprisingly open woman who showed me hospitality and love when she didn’t even know me, just because I was her brother’s daughter.

She broke down and cried when she told me she had always felt rejected and unaccepted by her mother even though she had been the sole carer of her for years. She said all Nana ever talked about was her beloved two sons—including my father even though he had left home at seventeen and rarely wrote or rang. It had been only in the last couple of years, because Aunty Shirley had pushed the issue, that her mother had said “I love you” to her. Prior to that she had refused to say it. Aunty Shirley said she couldn’t remember ever being hugged growing up or any affection being shown by Nana at all. It devastated her and made her angry and bitter. Nana had moved in with my Aunt after Pop’s death and had lived with her ever since, until eventually she became too frail and needed full-time nursing-home care.

I explained to Aunty Shirley how I had the opposite memories of Nana from when I was growing up. I shared with her some of the stories of Nana’s childhood and family memories Nana had shared with me. When I got to the part about Nana’s saying she had given up a child my Aunt had given birth to, she laughed and dismissed it, saying she didn’t know why Nana would have said that, but she must have confused her with Nana’s younger sister, who had a child out of wedlock at a young age.

I didn’t contradict her and left it at that, but just told her Nana was not judging when she was telling me all her memories; rather it was in relation to what had happened to Amy and Benjamin and her visiting at that time.

My visit with Aunty Shirley felt like a bonding and healing time, and we hugged and felt close. It was my first experience of extended family. I also had a wonderful visit with my cousin, Bruce, and his wife and family.

Aunty Shirley had three children when she had immigrated to Australia. She had a fourth son, Cameron, who was born in Australia. She had become very involved in the Salvation Army after moving there and had become a lay preacher.

Aunty Shirley had always cautioned Cameron against binge drinking, as Cameron’s father had been a heavy drinker to the point where he experienced blackouts. By his late teens, Cameron had moved in with another family member living in the same town.

One particular Saturday Cameron had been out the night before with his friends and come home late, and was sleeping it off. There was a knock at the door, and it was the police. They wanted to talk to Cameron. He was woken up, and they asked him a lot of questions about whom he had been with and where he had been the night before. He couldn’t answer most of the questions as he had drunk so much he could not remember. They said a young woman had made a complaint of rape at the police station, and they were questioning him and his friends. They took the clothes he had been wearing the night before and told him not to leave town, as he would be questioned again.

About lunchtime he said he was going for a drive and went out. When he had not returned by 6:00 p.m., everyone was really worried. His brother and others drove around looking for him. They found his car parked at a popular tourist spot, and Cameron was dead inside. He had gassed himself.

To say my Aunt and his siblings were devastated would be an understatement. Only a couple days after his suicide, the police came around to tell the family that Cameron had not been involved in the group that had assaulted the woman. The police had since identified the people involved.

When my Aunty went to organise her son’s funeral with the Salvation Army, they refused to conduct the service in their church or bury him on the church grounds, as suicide was considered a sin. In one day, after years of being committed to the faith, my Aunt left it, never to return. She lost her support network and her faith at the time she needed them the most.

Aunty Shirley couldn’t bear staying in the town for even one day more, so my cousin, Bruce, paid for Nana, his Mum, and his brother’s body to be flown to where he lived, and the funeral was held there. Nana and Aunty Shirley never returned to their prior home.

Some time later Nana went to live with Bruce for a short time. He was then dating the woman he was later to marry. He was heavily involved in a church as a pastor and youth counsellor, having gone to theology college previously. He was living in a home paid for by the church, looking after three children from the same family who had been placed in care because of prior physical and sexual abuse.

From my Aunt’s perspective, my Nana was a very opinionated and hard lady, and my Aunty felt she could never measure up. Along with the fact that Nana constantly elevated my father and his brother and didn’t thank or show affection to my aunt, this had led to quite strong feelings of bitterness toward all of us—understandably.

Learning some of Nana’s history helped Aunty Shirley to understand why her Mum had perhaps been like she had. My Aunt felt to me like the outward representation of my Inside Mum, and I felt supremely happy to have found her.

Unfortunately, learning the lesson that real people with real emotions do not behave like my inside-Mum figure was very soon to become a stark lesson in how much I still had to learn in my developing attachments with real outside people.

BAD TIMING

I wrote and told my aunt about the sexual abuse my brother and I had experienced with Pop (her Dad). I did not discuss this first in therapy, and I never thought of the effect it would have on my Aunty. I was feeling so accepted and loved, and so wanted to be close to my family, that I did not stop and think.

I did not go into any detail; I just said it was such an integral part of my memories of my childhood with Nana and Pop and had such long-term, devastating effects on my brother and me, and I just wanted to let her know. I didn’t want to discuss it unless she wanted to ask me more, but I just felt I wanted to let her know, seeing as we were starting to be close.

I got a reply from her stating she believed I was genuine in my belief this had happened, but she had no memories of her father in that way. In fact she had only positive memories of him compared to what Nana had been like, and if I wanted to remain friends with her I was never to mention it again. I was devastated.

I do not know what I had been expecting. I think I had been naively expecting my aunt to behave like she was Inside Mum and embrace me, and we would become even closer. I had not expected this and did not know how to handle it. We continued to write to each other without mentioning the subject.

A few months after that, I was once again invited to visit my cousin, Bruce. He picked me up from the airport, and I went to his home. On the second day, after his wife had gone out, Bruce and I were about to leave to go and have coffee at a local art café. After I had hopped in his car, he asked me if I still stuck by what I had said to his mother about what Pop had done to me. I said yes.

He said to me, “I know you believe this, but I need you to know that I remain close friends only with people who are honest and tell the truth, and I need you to think seriously about this.”

I asked him what he meant, and he said he had already talked to my brother about the sexual abuse I had said occurred with Pop, and although he had initially confirmed it, my brother had since denied it. I was shocked and horrified. My brother had said nothing to me about this conversation with Bruce. Throughout the rest of the morning, all I wanted to do was get away.

Tumultuous would be the correct way to describe how I felt.

I had to remain calm on the outside as I was stuck at Bruce’s house with no way to get the few hours to the airport, and I had two days remaining on my trip. The bond I had formed with my extended family had replaced some of the pain of the loss of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and my mother.

I didn’t feel I could cope emotionally with losing the relationships with my extended family.

I felt if I did not recant what I had said, I was going to lose everyone in my life again. I spent a sleepless night in emotional turmoil. I knew I was not lying. I felt betrayed and confused by my brother and wanted to wait to hear what he had to say before I passed judgment on him. I felt so alone. I had people all around me who I felt were now looking at me like I was a liar.

During the course of that day, Bruce’s wife had spoken to me about Pop and had asked me, “Do you still believe what you said happened with your Pop?” I said yes. I felt confused by the question. Why wouldn’t I believe it? You don’t change your mind about something as big as that. But if my brother had since denied it, they must have thought I was lying. His wife had said to me that Pop had been the only positive male role model in his life growing up, and my revelation about the abuse had shattered this. He had no experience of Pop being as I had stated.

Anyway, after all night in emotional turmoil, and in a situation where I was feeling judged, condemned, and about to lose the family I had only recently gained, I made the decision to recant. I thought if sticking to my guns meant losing these people who were my only family in my life, and whom I had bonded with and felt close to, then damn him—it wasn’t worth it. I knew the truth, and that was all that mattered.

So I asked to speak to Bruce on the front deck privately. I told him I had lied, and it had not happened. He thanked me for my honesty and said he forgave me and accepted my apology. I just felt empty. I felt strangely lighter and accepted, but I lost something inside of myself again. I felt disconnected from all my emotions once again and felt like I was watching myself from afar, like a character in a movie.

Bruce drove me to the airport the next day, but I do not remember much about it. I know I had written a letter to him and his wife the night before, but I don’t remember what I said. I was desperate for acceptance, frightened by what had happened, confused, and even more upset in regard to my not being able to be authentic. He dropped me off at the airport and, I am sure, must have been glad to see the back of me.

I was absolutely exhausted when I got home. I rang my brother nearly immediately and told him what had happened. I told him Bruce had told me if I did not recant, he would not be able to remain close to me. And that Bruce had told me he had already spoken to him, and he had told Bruce it was a lie. I asked my brother if he no longer believed that Pop had abused us.

He said of course our Pop had abused us, but he wasn’t going to let someone who was dead and already had caused enough damage in our lives to cause us to lose the only family we now had who felt close. I said that in my own way, I had come to the same conclusion and had also told Bruce the next day that I had lied, as I had been scared to lose them as family. My brother said it didn’t matter what had happened in our past; we needed to stop letting Pop destroy our lives and move on.

I hung up feeling disturbed and in a quandary. I agreed we shouldn’t remain victims and shouldn’t let Pop destroy our lives, but what had we both just done? We had both lied and compromised our integrity by saying something had not occurred that did really happen. Both our motives were to stay close to family, but at what cost?

Also, my cousin and aunt had lost a brother and son, respectively, to suicide after a girl made accusations of rape that later turned out not to be true. How must they have felt about my brother and I, thinking we had both deliberately lied about Pop?

Keeping the people who were alive happy was more important than standing by the truth of what happened to us, and it ended up leaving me feeling alone and lonely. I had made that decision thinking I was going to preserve the closeness I had felt with my family, but it left me feeling suicidal and even more isolated than before.

I wrote to my brother the next day. I said I had been through too much in my life with keeping secrets, having to hide the truth, and living in fear, and I was breaking free of all that. I could not remain in the lie. I had to tell Bruce I had lied about saying Pop had done nothing to us. My brother said it was up to me; he just wanted to get on with his life, but he could understand my feeling the way I did. So I e-mailed Bruce and told him. I remember the ongoing silence around the subject.

Looking back, I can see how confusing this all must have appeared to Bruce and my Aunt. First I said we had been sexually abused. Then he rang my brother, who denied it. Then he confronted me again, and I said yes, it really had happened, and then the next day, no it didn’t happen, and I was sorry for lying. Then the next week, I was writing and saying no, it did really happen!

Also at that time, because of being shunned, dealing with my own abuse memories, the kids’ abuse, Benjamin’s emotional breakdown, and my own hospital self-admissions when I felt suicidal, I was not in a good place mentally or emotionally.

Unbeknownst to me Bruce had phoned Mum, who told him I was mentally ill. Mum was telling people I had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses because I was suffering from mental illness. Of course this just would have confirmed to Bruce that I was unstable and not to be trusted. He didn’t know me, and therefore he could go only on the information he had. Without knowing my whole story and circumstances, he had no idea of the reality.

To me it felt like the final strings of my life were unravelling and could not be tied back together.

LOSS OF HOPE

My mother had coped with my decision to pull away from and then not return to the Jehovah’s Witnesses by seeing it as a result of my being mentally ill and not as a result of an informed, conscious choice.

I understand, looking back with some distance from the events now, that the opposite was to believe that if I had left by conscious choice, either I had a bad heart and was wicked, or I had found it was not the truth (The Truth is how Jehovah’s Witnesses refer to their faith) . Both these alternatives were not acceptable to her at that time.

Dr. Debbie Wyatt had diagnosed me with severe depression, anxiety, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. I had disclosed this to my mother. She then used that as confirmation of why I had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses rather than seeing my illness as a result of my past experiences and exaggerated by what I had experienced once I was disassociated.

She believed I had been treated badly by the elders. She could see I had suffered emotional upheaval with my husband and due to what had happened with the children, but she believed I would come to my senses later and return. She kept repeating that it had been my choice to leave. I had chosen to leave my marriage and the witnesses. I had known if I left the witnesses, she would have to cut me off in obedience to God. So I had chosen this pain for her and for me.

I could not convince her that I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut and pretend to still believe the doctrines as I couldn’t live in falsehood or keep secrets any longer. I had done that with Pop, with the rape, and with Peter, and I no longer could do so.

When I returned home to Scott after having visited Bruce, I was an emotional wreck. I still had panic attacks over some of the doctrines in which I retained belief. I had fear over whether I would die at Armageddon either because I hadn’t yet found the correct way to worship God or because perhaps I had left the one true religion and was condemned.

I was still trying to form my identity separate from the witnesses. It was a slow process as all my beliefs about the world had been structured around them. I was experiencing deep depression brought on by memories of my abuse, guilt over my memories of what had occurred with Jane and my brother, and feelings of inadequacy in coping in the world. I just could not cope. I was overwhelmed. I could not see a way forward. It had reached a tipping point.

After a night where I had drunk more than I normally would, I ended up crying myself to sleep. I woke up about six in the morning. The children were with Leonard that weekend. I stood alone in the kitchen, in the quiet and with the early morning light filtering through the blind. I reached into the cupboard to get a glass out for some water so I could take some painkillers for my headache. My other medication was next to the painkillers. In a snap decision, without giving myself any time to think about it, I opened the bottles and swallowed all my antidepressants and Valium. There must have been about ninety pills. All I wanted was to go to sleep and not wake up. I went and lay down on the couch in the lounge.

Scott got up to use the toilet about seven-thirty and went looking for me. He found me passed out in the lounge, surrounded by vomit on the floor in front of me. He could not rouse me. He rang for an ambulance and then rang his stepsister. She and her husband and children lived only five minutes away. She came around and sat with Scott, and they followed the ambulance to the hospital.

I was sent to intensive care, where I remained for three days. On the night of the second day, I woke up and looked around, asking the male nurse where I was. He told me I had overdosed and was in the hospital. I asked to use the toilet, and he said I had a catheter in, and it would go into a bag. Unbeknownst to me I had not passed urine for all that time, and they thought my kidneys had failed because of the overdose. I kept asking him for a bedpan, as I did not want to wet the bed. In the end he went and got one and helped put it under me, as I was too weak to move properly on my own. I was so relieved to be able to empty my bladder. They decided the catheter must have been inserted wrong, and I was okay after all.

The next day when I awoke, I was told I was being shifted to a normal medical ward. I asked if I would be able to have a shower, and a nurse pointed to where the bathroom was. The instant I sat up, everything was swimming before my eyes. I felt like I was going to faint. I said this to the nurse at the desk, and she told me just to sit for a while, and then I would be okay. She and two other nurses were sitting at the desk. I wondered why none of them was coming to help me. I stood up and started to wobble, then sat down on the floor. I tried again, and the same thing happened. I felt like crying. They all were watching me when I looked up.

I told them I was unable to walk without falling and asked if someone could come and stand with me whilst I walked, as I was scared. The same nurse told me not to be silly and held back one of the younger nurses who had stood up to come to me. She told me again not to be silly and just to walk to the shower. She said I had wasted all their time and resources by trying to take my life when there were really sick people who needed to be looked after.

I hadn’t expected an attack. I wasn’t after sympathy. I just was worried about walking to the shower. I hadn’t thought about what had occurred prior to the overdose as I had been awake and conscious for only an hour or so that morning. I felt my eyes fill with unbidden tears.

I stood and started to walk toward the shower. My legs gave way from under me, shaking uncontrollably, and everything started swimming and going black before my eyes. I lowered myself toward the ground before I fell and heard the older nurses tell one of the others to go and get a chair. A younger nurse came and helped me sit in a shower chair, and wheeled me into the shower room.

I was conscious at that time of patients in other beds with curtains pulled around them, and family members sitting next to them, and I felt like I wanted the floor to open up and for me to disappear. I once again felt rejected, unaccepted, unwanted, a burden, an embarrassment, and ashamed, and the full force of my emotional pain hit me once again.

I took off my gown and sat there whilst the young nurse stood about six feet away from me, holding a shower rose and extension and hosing me down. The water was lukewarm, and I was shivering uncontrollably, mostly with emotion. I was trying to hold back my tears so I didn’t start sobbing in front of her. She caught my eye and, to break the silence, said, “Why did you do it?”

In the silence of the few seconds that followed, the full weight of what I wanted to tell her hung over me.

How did I encapsulate all that had occurred over a lifetime and how I felt about it in one or two sentences to give her an answer?

I couldn’t.

Scott arrived after I had been settled into a medical ward. We went and had a coffee at the café. When we got there, he recognised a couple that were there and started talking to them. They asked me why I was in hospital. I told them I had had kidney failure and was going home the next day. They wished me the best. I had not lied, but I had not told the whole truth.

How do you tell complete strangers that you overdosed?

When they left I told Scott I would not blame him if he wanted to separate. In fact it might have been for the best as I obviously still had a lot to sort out emotionally that I thought I had already done but must not have. He said no; he had thought about it fleetingly but then decided he loved me, and he wanted to stay with me. We would sort it out together. I felt comforted, loved, and grateful.

Whilst I was still in hospital, a nurse came to me one day and said I had a phone call. There was no phone in my room, so I walked down to the nurse’s station to take the call. To my shock it was my mother. We had not spoken since my disassociation.

She said, “Leonard told your Dad and me you are in hospital, and you have been in intensive care. Are you all right now?”

I said, “Yes.”

She then rushed out a whole lot of words all at once, stating, “I am allowed to talk to you and help you, as we wouldn’t leave someone sick and in need, even though they are disfellowshipped, if they need help. That is my Christian obligation. I would like to come and help you. I can clean the house and look after the kids, and help cook meals for you at home until you are better. I know Scott probably still has to go to work. Would you like me to do this for you?”

I had so many emotions going through me as I stood in my hospital gown, with the phone against my ear, listening to my mother’s voice. I was trying to process all she was saying, but along with happiness at hearing from her, anxiety was snaking its way through my body.

“What about when I get better? Will you continue to talk to me then?” I asked.

“No, I can’t. I am only allowed to help you when you are sick and in need. I really want to help you, Jenny. I miss you so much. I love you. Do you not understand how much pain you have caused me with what you have done, forcing me to cut you off? Please let me help you.” She sounded breathless and full of hope, but I could feel the tension rising, connecting us through the telephone line.

My legs were starting to shake with emotion and weakness as I stood there with the phone against my ear. I felt the familiar heaviness solidify in my chest like a lump of concrete, and unshed tears felt like rocks in my throat.

“I would love to see you and have your help, Mum. I miss you so much. But why would I want to get better if you are just going to cut me off once I no longer need you physically?”

Her voice travelled down the phone to me, and the difference between us suddenly seemed unmanageable. “Don’t be stubborn, Jenny. I am offering to help you.”

I felt my eyes fill with hot, salty tears. Here was my mother talking to me after all that time. She was offering to come and look after me. My Inside Me was full of longing for a Mum who would nurture and care for me at this moment in time. However, I could also hear the recrimination in her voice and felt like a little girl being told off for putting her in this situation.

I snapped.

“I nearly died because of you. I am nearly dead because of you. My kidneys stopped working because I tried to kill myself. Your cutting me off doesn’t make me want to come back to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It makes me hate you for loving them more than you love me. Why would I want you back in my life, loving and caring, just to have you cut me off again as soon as I am better? Why would I get better? Why not stay mentally sick forever so I can have you forever in my life? What sense does this make? I have to get better, for my sake and for the kids. But I can’t do it if you are playing games with me. Talking to me when you give yourself permission to. Cutting me off again when you feel you no longer can justify the contact. That screws my head up. It completely fucks me up. I will see you only if you will not cut me off again. So what is it going to be?”

I had been shouting down the phone, and the nurse sitting at the station in front of me had stood up and come over to stand next to me. She had her hand on my back. My voice was shaking with emotion, and my legs were shaking, and I felt sick in my stomach.

My mother sounded like she was a million miles away. All I could hear was condemnation. “Well, you chose this. You chose this way. You knew I would have to cut you off if you left the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I am in pain too. You don’t know how many tears I have shed over your decision and the pain it has caused me. You are responsible for your own actions….”

She kept on talking, but her voice had muted into a drone, a record player of religious rhetoric I had heard repeated from the platform over many years. As she continued to talk, I handed the phone to the nurse. I could no longer hold back the tears. I walked back to my bed and pulled the curtain.

I cried for the Inside Mum I wanted and needed my Mum to be. I cried for the unconditional love I wanted and needed. I cried for the pain she was experiencing. I cried for my aloneness. I cried because I wondered why I wasn’t lovable enough for her to put me ahead of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I cried because my feelings of aloneness, shame, and isolation as a result of my suicide attempt had increased rather than diminished. I was in the moment. I folded. I cried and cried until I fell into an exhausted sleep.

After I was discharged and Scott had brought me home, I e-mailed my parents as my cousin, Madeleine, and her family were emigrating from England and were due to arrive that week. My cousin and her family had arranged to stay with me for four to six weeks whilst waiting for their furniture to arrive from England, but there was no way I felt up to it. It all felt too hard.

Madeleine was the daughter of my Dad’s brother and his wife, whom I had never met. They had become Jehovah’s Witnesses separate from my parents’ joining. Madeleine had left the Jehovah’s Witnesses in her late teens and been disfellowshipped. Her parents had refused to go to her wedding, and she had suffered from the shunning, so we had this in common even though we had never met as yet and only spoken by phone.

My parents agreed to have Madeleine and her family reside with them as they knew I was still recovering. My mother could have my cousin stay, even though she was disfellowshipped, because my father, whom she saw as her scriptural head, had stated she must.

A few months after that, Scott and I separated. I decided it was too hard for me to recover emotionally whilst living with an alcoholic who was presenting two different faces, one to the world and one at home, and who was not prepared to give up the alcohol. We had bought a house together that had rapidly risen in value in the short time we’d had it. He had a valuation done and paid me what he said was half the increased value since we purchased it. He kept the deposit, as I had not contributed to that. I found out later that the valuation was significantly higher than he had told me, and he had therefore underpaid me for my share of the increased value of the house. I let it go, as I decided I needed to focus on my emotional recovery.

Why did strangers show love to me, yet people who were meant to love me keep mistreating me?

TRANSITIONING

The all-engulfing enormity of disconnection, aloneness, and abandonment that swallowed me whole after my disassociation is hard to describe. After being actively involved with my family, my extended family, and my Jehovah’s Witness family, with whom I had intense bonds, there was just nothingness in the space left once I had been disassociated.

Because I had not formed any social relationships outside of the Jehovah’s Witnesses the whole time I was with them, I had nothing to fall back on when they were no longer there. When you have belonged to a group where the ideology says you are a special people, the only group accepted by God and doing his divine will on earth here today, and that all the rest of the world, backed by Satan and his demons, is opposed to you, you form intense mental, emotional, and spiritual bonds with each other. You literally feel tossed to the wolves when you are not with each other, and you feel that you can rely on and trust only one another. The feeling is that no one else in the outside world can be trusted—only fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Although I had ceased attending most of the five meetings a week months before my disassociation, I still had weekly Bible studies with my friends, Lisa and Matthew. I saw my mother each day as she lived on the same property, and I had friends within the congregation whom I saw weekly. Although I had not shared all my doubts with them, we still met and had coffee or lunch, and I felt close to them. Some of them had children the same age as mine, and they would come over each week and bring their children to swim in our pool along with both my sister-in-laws and their children. We would have meals together also.

All this stopped after it was announced I was disassociated. I had known it would, but the experience of it was an emotional feeling of an aching, huge chasm within my whole being and of total aloneness in the world. I would go shopping for food, or drop the children at school, and be surrounded by people but realise not one of them knew me, or me them.

Suddenly the relationship I had started to build with my therapist assumed another level of meaning and intensity. Dr. Wyatt had returned to her home country unexpectedly with her husband, and she referred me to a psychiatrist with whom I could continue therapy. I commenced seeing her weekly. In a short period, I felt she was the only person who knew me, and I started to lean on her more heavily. Combined with the engulfing aloneness were questions such as, “What if the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right? What if I am going to die now that I have left them? What if God won’t even listen to my prayers now that I have left? Am I really totally abandoned by God as the Jehovah’s Witnesses have taught me all my life? Is there even a God? If there is not, how do I find my place in this world?”

The anxiety created by these thoughts was crippling. I would physically feel pain and be incapacitated. I would curl up in bed, feeling like I was dying and unable to function. I would go on automatic pilot to get the kids off to school, and then I would be unable to move or function for the rest of the day. I was diagnosed with major clinical depression and anxiety, and my medication was increased.

I cannot effectively describe the physical pain of being cut off by everyone. The disassociation and my asking my husband to leave were within weeks of each other. Even though our marriage had been on the rocks, we maintained a sexual relationship up until the end. No longer having the sexual contact, and having no contact physically with friends, hugging or nurturing each other emotionally, started to build into an aching chasm.

I ached to be held.

I physically felt ill with longing for both sexual and nonsexual touch. Whenever I had enough money, I would go see a massage therapist. Sometimes this meant I had no money for food for that week and had to go get food vouchers from the neighbourhood support centre to feed my children. I felt guilty for doing this, but it was survival.

Sometimes it was the difference between not enacting a suicidal action and committing one.

When the children went to their father’s or to my parents’ for a weekend, I would sometimes end up in the emergency room of the local hospital. Rocking and folded up within myself, just waiting to talk to the mental-health nurse and for someone to hear my emotional pain. If this were not able to occur, I would ring Lifeline or another helpline. The suicidal urges and feelings were so strong, and these were all survival techniques. I careered through each day and week. During this time I commenced my enrolled nursing diploma at TAFE. I was seeing my therapist weekly, and I had the support of a mental-health nurse at the local hospital if I needed help in the days between seeing my therapist.

When I had first spoken to Dr. Wyatt while in hospital, I had told her about my inability to feel and how all my feelings seemed only skin deep, or else I would feel heaviness in my chest. I always felt like I was acting a part.

She had assured me that talking about the past and exploring it all would be the way to break open the lid I had placed over being able to feel. That had certainly started to occur after a few months of talking in therapy, to the point where I felt I had no control at times over my feelings, the strength of them, or being able to contain them. This was frightening to me although it was progress to the doctors. It brought its own set of challenges and problems.

Four or five times, I ended up as a voluntary inpatient within the local public mental-health system, staying between one and three nights in hospital. Each of these times I didn’t see a doctor, but I curled up within a bed and just sobbed. Other patients were invaluable support for me, and I found myself supporting other broken souls.

On the whole my experience within the public mental-health system was that it was a holding cell, a containment area, so suicidal actions could not be carried out. No talk therapy or healing occurred. It was a place that could prevent you from acting out suicidally, when you felt you needed the extra support, by virtue of the four walls surrounding you and not having to think about meals or responsibilities or the like. For a short while, I attended a consumer support group connected to the hospital and met some supportive people within that, but still I didn’t feel that I really could connect or relate closely to most of them.

My crisis was mainly spiritual, one of faith and abandonment created by being disassociated from the Jehovah’s Witnesses along with an emotional crisis of dealing emotionally in the present with past sexual-abuse trauma I had not been able to deal with previously. Also the ending of my marriage and the health crises of my oldest son were impacting me, along with severe clinical depression.

Sometimes within my therapy, I would spend the whole hour talking and filled with a desire to reach out and just touch the therapist’s hand. I would be filled with tension and conflict knowing it was a non-contact relationship, with my outside self trying to contain the Inside Me from reaching out in real life to touch her hand. Sometimes I did. She never shook me off, but she didn’t respond either.

I remember on one occasion I had become so distressed and upset, as I was driving myself into the hospital, the lampposts along the road were changing into people before my eyes. It was the weirdest sensation and experience. My depression at times was labelled psychotic depression because of these experiences, and I was then given antipsychotic medication as well.

Another time I was sitting within a cubicle in the hospital emergency area. A nurse had interviewed me and had gone out to get a doctor. I suddenly heard my therapist’s voice outside the cubicle, seeming to come from direction of the roof. I thought she must have been in another room, and her voice was carrying and coming through the roof air vents. Unfortunately for me, she was exasperated and talking disparagingly about me. I started to sob, and I felt desperate to see her and try to explain myself so she wouldn’t think badly of me.

When the nurse returned with the doctor, he was quite concerned about my obvious distress. I was asking him to please speak to my therapist and gave him her name. He told me she was not on duty that day. I did not believe him, and told him I had heard her talking about me to someone. I presumed it was him, and said to him that I really needed to talk to her. He kindly and gently explained that she was not available, and I took that to mean she was not available to see me. I spent some time talking to the psychiatric registrar who was on duty. After talking to him, I settled down enough that the doctor allowed me to go home and did not admit me.

At my next therapy appointment, I brought up what had happened at the hospital. The therapist insisted to me that she had not been there that weekend. I found this very difficult to believe as I had heard her voice, her accent, and she had been talking about me to someone else. It was very hard to hear and to understand that my brain, because of emotional stress, had been making up these things. It made an already difficult and harrowing experience even harder and more difficult to bear.

Not being able to trust your own brain, and feeling like you don’t know what is real and what is not real in what you observing by sight or hearing, is indescribably frightening.

I stayed on the antipsychotic medication for just over a year and then gradually, under medical supervision, weaned myself off it. I stayed on the antidepressants for more than eight years. Twice during that time, I tried to come off them, but my symptoms of depression increased so much I had to go back on them again. My main symptom was tiredness and wishing to sleep all the time. I often wanted just to lie in bed and shut out everyone and everything. The desire to do this was overwhelming.

Anytime I did not have the children or they were otherwise occupied, I would climb into bed and hide under the covers. It took all my energy to go to TAFE, where I was studying nursing, doing placements, and doing assignments; at home I was taking the children to sports, school, and extracurricular activities. The times in between, my energy would completely disappear, and I would cry or sleep for hours.

From the commencement of my therapy, I experienced dreams that would repeat over and over with slight variations each time. I still occasionally experienced the dream I’d had since I was a child of being chased by a lion, but I now experienced multitudes of dreams mainly involving defecation and toilets.

In my dreams I would be talking with people whilst I was sitting on a toilet. Or I would be going to use a toilet in an outdoor setting and would be sitting there whilst the dream happened around me. Sometimes the toilets were disgusting and foul, and other times they were in beautiful settings. Toward the end of my therapy, these toilet dreams stopped and have not returned since.

All I can surmise is the figurative process of my purging by discussing and remembering the past expressed itself in my dreams in the settings it did. The experience of feeling contaminated, tainted, dirty, and full of shit, as well as the fear of appearing disgusting to others, and the process of discarding detrimental opinions and beliefs about myself, all came out in my dreams.

Throughout all these experiences, I had the ongoing association with my Inside Mum along with my Inside Me who interacted with her. I would say the main achievement of my attending psychodynamic therapy besides learning to feel again and then to moderate my emotions; was learning to form emotional bonds and connections with real people in the real world that eventually replaced Inside Mum and Inside Me who lived in my fantasy world.

This was not a conscious happening. I did not know it was going to occur, and the realisation when it finally occurred—that Inside Mum had disappeared, and I couldn’t conjure her up in the same way any-more—was a huge loss and a distressing time for me. However, at the same time, I realised I must no longer have needed her, and she had gone for that reason.

It is hard to describe how the experience changed from feeling like I had no control over what Inside Mum said to me to my talking to my therapist, a real person, about what was bothering me instead, and transferring to her all the emotional reactions I was having. I also was gradually building and forming meaningful and emotionally safe interactions with other people.

The formation of these friendships, and the experience of showing and feeling emotion when dealing with other people, meant I started to interact less and less within my fantasy world. Gradually the experience of living within me with an Inside Mum subsided to the point where it ceased.

For a while afterward, I underwent a period of grieving and loss for my Inside Mum. She had been an integral and necessary part of my psyche for so long, and I missed her terribly.

I would try to imagine her, but the experience had changed, and I knew I was just imagining a figure, and it wasn’t the same as it had felt previously. She no longer was real in the same way to me, and she no longer talked to me spontaneously, where I never knew what she was going to tell me.

It all had stopped. I cannot even pinpoint the exact moment it happened. It was only after a period of time that I realised she had disappeared.

This process took place from when I first started to see a therapist to a few months before I stopped seeing one. This was over a period of eight years and involved two therapists. The last couple of years, I was seeing my therapist only once a month or every two months, but it was still a long process from start to finish.

I focused on reading real-life stories of people who had overcome or learnt to live with traumatic events in their past because of physical conditions or other traumas, and I drew strength from these stories.

I looked up online support groups for ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. At times I found them very supportive, but after a time I found they sometimes had the opposite effect, and I would feel more depressed. I tried to take what I found to be positive from all these different avenues.

I realised and came to believe I could choose what thoughts I focused on and what I allowed myself to dwell on. I could stop my thoughts, and I could redirect them. Affirmations, mindfulness, meditation, positive thinking, and visualisations all became daily practices for me. I eventually read a book written by Carolyn Myss entitled Why Some People Heal and Others Do Not. It was very much a turning point for me when I read this book. It was about not remaining a victim and not forever identifying yourself by what had occurred to you in the past, but using the past to draw strength from and to move forward.

This resonated with me. I had been given support at many different times by strangers and telephone counsellors and many different doctors and nurses.

It was time now that I started to give back, refocus on my strengths, and move forward.

JAMES

I was sitting down with a cup of coffee, reading the local newspaper. There was an article written by a lady who was appealing for donations to try to help an African refugee who had been turned down for permanent residency in Australia, and who needed financial help to pay for legal services to help prove his case. She felt his case was worthy, and a brief outline was given in the paper. She had also been giving talks in local churches to try to raise money for his cause.

I was still recovering emotionally from my suicide attempt and was still very low. I thought using some of the money from the settlement Scott had given me to help improve the life of someone else might be a way for me to give something back after all that had been done to help me. So I rang the lady and made a time for her to come around and speak to me.

She told me James had been living in a part of Africa where the Lord’s Liberation Army (LLA) infiltrated and conducted raids on villages regularly. A raid had been conducted on his village, and during the raid his father, who was the local doctor, and his mother and sister were murdered. He was captured, taken hostage, and forced to fight for the LLA. They used to force young men and boys to conduct horrible crimes against other people with the threat of the same being done to them or their friends if they did not.

So James was held captive by them and moved about the region with this army for a few years. He saw and was privy to a lot of meetings between the leaders of the army and leaders of other countries, and so when he escaped, his life was in danger. The LLA put advertisements in local papers offering a reward if people would turn him in. He had to leave the area and trek on foot across the continent to Kenya, where he stayed with a distant family member.

He still was not safe even there, as he said there were people out to kill him. His family member got in touch with a distant relative in Australia, who offered to pay James’s fare out, and then James could apply for refugee status. This was what James did. When he heard that his immigration application for permanent residency had been turned down, he asked why. Immigration lawyers told him they had put his story forward, but as there was no collaborating evidence provided by James, and his story could not be verified, he had been turned down.

Of course, before leaving Africa, James had not thought about applying for the death certificates of his family, getting copies of the “wanted” ads, or getting sworn statements from people in his village in regard to his situation. He had been too busy surviving.

James lived in a tent in Australia and worked part time at different jobs, determined to try to get a better lawyer who would be able to get the evidence for him. He went to see someone who agreed to apply for residency again for him and get the evidence needed. James gave him everything he had from the last application. They lawyer asked for a large sum of money.

James was living on subsistence food and sleeping rough to pay all his money to the lawyer. Another year went by before he heard back from the lawyer that his application had been turned down for a second time. James was desperate, as he had no money left and was still paying off the debt.

Ann heard about him through a friend who worked with refugees. She had been phoned up one day and asked if she could help. She invited James to come and live with her to get him off the street. After she was unsuccessful in trying to contact the second lawyer, she enquired at the Department of Immigration as to why the second application had been turned down. To her horror she found out that the second lawyer had done nothing but resubmit the first lot of paperwork James had given him and nothing else! He had not even endeavoured to get the evidence. He had extorted a large sum of money from him and, more importantly, had cost him his chance for refugee status. James was not legally entitled to apply again but could now apply only directly to the minister for immigration to overturn the decision.

Ann went to see an immigration lawyer who was recommended, and she put James’s story to him. He was shocked, but he agreed the story was all too common. Many refugees were ripped off by unscrupulous lawyers just out to make a quick buck with no regard for the humanity and vulnerability of those they were dealing with—many of whom had lost all that was dear to them.

He agreed to waive most of the fees but still needed the costs covered, which were going to be substantial. He had to find the local papers and reports of the raid on James’s village where his family had been killed. He needed to get the death certificates of his family and prove they had been murdered by the LLA. He had to get his hands on the “wanted” posters put up by the LLA that James said meant his life was at risk if he returned to his country. He had to get all this within the short time frame allowed by the Australian government, as James had already exhausted his two main avenues of application and so had limited time left to get his case together to be heard. The lawyer also had to gain this evidence within a country where bribes had to be paid to every person involved in the transaction, which also cost money.

It seemed daunting and unachievable, but Ann’s heart had been touched by James’s story. Her Australian spirit was outraged that he had been treated so badly by Australian people he had turned to for help, and to whom he had paid good money. She could see he was not a bludger; he appeared genuine, and if the proof required was found, he should then be able to stay.

The lawyer warned her that a successful appeal directly to the minister was rare. In fact he gave James only a very small chance of the appeal being granted, which would then give James more time to get his evidence before being deported. Fortunately the appeal was granted, and James was given time. This was unprecedented and spurred Ann on. She and her husband did not have much money, although they put in all the money they could.

She was giving talks in the community and at local churches to try to ask for donations, and in this, way week by week, when she was not at work, she would get some more money together to pay the next bill that came in for James. She always seemed to be running behind, but, she said, the churches or groups that were in poorer areas gave more money every time than the wealthier ones she spoke to. She had learnt that people who had the least gave the most to others they thought were worse off than they were.

I decided then and there to donate a portion of the few thousand dollars I had from my separation to James’s cause. It was an absolute knowing that this man had to be saved, and it was only right that I should help to do so. I had been helped so much, and I knew I would not have been alive at that point in time without the love and care shown to me by strangers. It just felt like time to pay some of that back.

Ann stressed there was no guarantee that James would be allowed to stay even if we got the evidence in time. And all the money given would be in vain then. But at least we would have tried. I decided giving would give me hope and purpose at a time when I had little in my life. So I gave.

Over the next few weeks, I would ring Ann and ask how she and James were getting on with his case. At last one day, the phone call came. All the evidence had been obtained, and the solicitor had put it all together and tendered the case to the minister to be heard. Now all we had to do was to wait. All the evidence backed up James’s story.

Soon another phone call came. James’s appeal had been heard, and he was granted permanent residency as a genuine refugee in Australia! Ann and I were so thrilled. Ann held a party at her house, and everyone who had helped on James’s case were invited and all brought food. What a celebration. James was there along with some fellow African refugees, and they put on African music and burst into an impromptu African dance.

I felt myself well up with emotion to see these beautiful young men on their own, all refugees and all having experienced unspeakable horrors and loss. Their gratefulness showed in the tears streaming down their faces in happiness for James whilst still waiting for their own cases to be heard. The joy in their dancing and singing was contagious.

What a lesson! After all they been through, to be able to sing and dance with abandon and joy, revelling in the moment. I learnt the lesson that night to have joy in the moment when joy comes, as life brings enough trauma and pain. That is the beauty of being human and sharing with others. It was so wonderful. I know James will never get over the pain of what happened to him and what he was forced to do as a young man, but I hope he has learnt to live with it and finds more happiness than sadness to fill his days.

Somehow the sight of his dancing to the African drum beat in Ann’s living room with his head thrown back, his eyes shut, and his body moving in sheer joy to the rhythm gives me hope that he has been able to do so.

RECONCILIATION

Not long after Scott and I had initially separated, I had woken crippled with arthritis in all my joints and barely able to move with the pain. The doctor put me on a high dose of steroids and anti-inflammatory medication, but after reading the side effects of using them long term, I decided to use some of my money and go to a health spa for two weeks to try to get myself on track.

I thought that without my health, I was not going to be able to do anything, so I had to sort it out. It was also part of my learning in therapy to love myself and show kindness, forgiveness, and care for me, which sadly I had neglected to do many times previously. Whilst at the retreat, I lived on fruit and vegetable juices and organic fare. I had water enemas to clear out my bowel and swam in a salt-water swimming pool, and sat in a sauna to detoxify my body.

I did gentle exercise and walked every day. I slept. I felt like a million dollars, and 80 percent of the pain was gone by the time I left. I kept up the exercise and increased my walking in the early morning and evening. Weight dropped off me, and I got healthy and fit. I felt amazing and looked amazing.

I continued dating during this time, going out with different people including an Italian man for about three months. I had met him at a Reiki workshop. Engaging in intimate relationships without being married was new to me, and because most of my guilt had diminished and I was discovering who I was and what I liked sexually, it was a liberating and healing experience for me. My time with Mario was exhilarating and exciting, and I grew so much in my confidence and ability to enjoy all aspects of myself including my sexuality.

After Scott and I had been separated for about a year, I heard he wanted to speak to me again. I rang him, and we agreed to meet up. I was brimming with confidence and feeling good about myself! The minute he saw me, his eyes filled with tears; he kept calling me “love,” and I laughed the whole time. He told me he had changed—he was still drinking but only one or two at a time, and he desperately missed me.

I so wanted to believe it was true, and I said yes again way too quickly. All I can say is I did love Scott and wanted so badly for things with him to work out. I knew he sincerely wanted this too; I never had doubted that. But looking back I can see I should have allowed more time to go by to check if his drinking really were under control. Within two weeks of moving back with Scott, I knew I had made a mistake. All the same issues were there, and I had returned lock, stock, and barrel—moved towns, given up my house, moved my kids to new schools—and was in the same situation.

I felt ashamed and embarrassed. I thought if I loved him enough and worked hard enough in the relationship, I could make it work. I was living in a beautiful old Queenslander historic house in a rural setting. It was the house of my childhood inside-world fantasy.

We had a dog that we had inherited from someone who had moved to England for three months and never returned. Charlie was in poor condition after having lived abandoned outside in a yard with three other dogs, and he was flea ridden and had no hair on his whole back or tail, as he had scratched it all off. He had epilepsy from neglect and severe malnutrition. I massaged his coat with pawpaw ointment and bathed him and fed him good food. With love Charlie blossomed. His hair all grew back. He followed me everywhere. He sat outside the toilet when I went in there, and every time I got up to leave a room he would follow and sit at my feet.

Charlie was estimated to be about nine years old when I got him, and he lived to fifteen years old. He was a huge factor in my healing, and I loved that little dog.

I put my passion into my garden, developing a wonderful flower and vegetable garden along with fruit trees. I got different varieties of chicken. I had Charlie.

I made the best of the situation and concentrated on my children and animals and studies, and all the good things around me.

Time moved on.

AMY

Amy had a best friend called Rebecca. They were inseparable, and it became a routine that Amy got up early in the morning to go over to Rebecca’s house, and then they would walk to school together. Rebecca saw Amy through my divorce, my depression, my commencing work outside the home, and all the other changes that happened during these years.

At that same time, Amy had a teacher in grade seven who had a positive influence on her. He knew she was keen to do the bike-education course through the primary school, but one of the prerequisites was to have a bike, which she did not have, and I could not afford to get her one. He made a bike up for her out of older parts, painted it, and then presented it to her one day after school with a big bow wrapped around it.

She was ecstatic, and I was blown away and grateful for a teacher who cared. His actions showed Amy that you don’t have to know someone well to do something kind to help them if it is in your power to do so. She was valued and important, and there were people in the world who showed they cared about her.

Rebecca had a brother who was only two or three years older than she was, and he lived with his Dad. Amy loved spending time visiting with Rebecca when she went to see her father and going to see Rebecca’s grandmother as well. One weekend she was invited once again to go camping with them all. She was so excited.

The first I knew something was wrong was when I received a message on my mobile from Amy about eight o’clock one morning. The message said something bad had happened, and could I please ring her. When I did, in between tears she explained to me that she had woken up in the middle of the night to find that Rebecca’s brother had his fingers inside her vagina and was penetrating her with them. She said she took a moment to realise what was happening and whom it was, and at first she was scared to move or show she was awake.

She then tried to push his hands away. But he kept at it. She said she then whispered to him, “No” and, “Stop it” and pushed him away again as he had resumed touching her. She had lain there too scared to go back to sleep, as she was terrified he would try something again. She became more upset and distressed as the hours went by. The three kids had been sleeping on top of their sleeping bags, as it was hot, all in the same tent. The adults were only a few feet away in another tent.

The next morning when they were all up, about seven o’clock, and Rebecca’s Dad was in the middle of cooking breakfast for them all, Rebecca’s grandmother noticed Amy was very quiet and asked her if she was okay and if anything was wrong.

Amy broke down and told her everything that had happened. Amy said she was horrified and shocked but immediately believed Amy, hugged her close, told her she had done nothing wrong, and said she would deal with it. Rebecca’s grandmother went and told her son what had happened. Amy said Rebecca’s Dad was really concerned for her, and she told him what had occurred. He was so angry.

He went and woke up Rebecca’s brother, who admitted straight-away what he had done and confirmed Amy’s story. Amy said Rebecca’s Dad got so angry, he had Rebecca’s brother by the throat up against the four-wheel drive car and was yelling and hitting him. I think this was as distressing to her as much as all that had occurred, although she understood how angry and upset Rebecca’s Dad was.

Rebecca’s Dad spoke to her and asked her what she wanted to do. Amy said she wanted to talk to me more than anything, and Rebecca’s Dad gave her his mobile phone to do that. He asked her if she would consider allowing him to deal with Rebecca’s brother, that he would take him to see a counsellor rather than going to the police. He told her if she wanted to go to the police, she was more than entitled to do that, and he would support her in that way, but he was asking her if she would also consider letting him deal with the situation.

At that stage Amy had rung me. I listened to her so bravely and strongly describing what had occurred to her and how it had made her feel. I am sure with the abuse from Brittany eight years previously, which also had occurred in the night with adults sleeping not too far away, this had brought up old feelings and emotions related to that as well.

I decided that rather than rush in and do what I wanted to do immediately, which was drive and pick her up and go to the police, I needed to let Amy feel empowered to make the decisions over how she proceeded from this point. Amy said she felt safe now. She said Rebecca’s grandmother and Dad both supported her and protected her.

Rebecca’s Dad was making the brother leave the camp. She decided she did not want to make a complaint that day and would agree to wait and let Rebecca’s Dad punish him, and take him to see a counsellor. The fourteen-year-old boy had been made to apologise to her, and Amy, up until that time, had always been a friend with him too.

Rebecca’s Dad came on the phone and spoke to me. He apologised over and over for his son’s actions, and I could tell he was horrified, disgusted, very angry, and very distressed over what had occurred. He then asked me if I would be willing to wait and let him punish the boy, and take him to see a counsellor as a first option.

I told him I was leaving that decision up to Amy at that point in time; I felt it was important she have control over the process of events as she had had things occur that were out of her control and frightening to her. He said he understood. I then spoke to Amy again. She pleaded with me to let her stay. Rebecca’s grandmother came on the phone and said she would have Amy and Rebecca sleeping with her, and the boy would be leaving that day, so he would no longer be there.

I felt reassured that Amy was capable of making that decision to stay. She said she would see me in two days’ time when they returned from camping. I agreed. I spent the next two days repeatedly going over in my mind what Amy had said had occurred.

I was incredulous that once again, sexual assault had happened to one of my precious children, this time once again from an unexpected source.

When Amy returned I had conversations with her about my fear that maybe he would do this again to someone else, or had done this to others and needed to be stopped. She said he had sworn it had never happened before, and he had apologised, and he was going to go see a counsellor regularly. She wanted to leave it at that.

However, I struggled with whether she was old enough to make this choice and whether I should take over and make the choice for her. I felt it was important to let her take the lead and have some control over what occurred, as it had been her body that had been violated.

More than ten years later, when discussing this incident again, Amy brought up how she had been upset that Rebecca’s Mum had never been told about the matter. I was not aware of this at the time and had assumed she had been. Amy said Rebecca’s Dad and grandmother had decided it was best not to tell her, as they didn’t know how she would react. Amy therefore felt she had to keep a secret whenever she saw her, and this had in some way made her feel as if she had done something wrong.

Keeping secrets to protect others was exactly the sort of situation I had been determined to break the cycle of with my own children, and in this situation I realised I hadn’t been able to fully. Amy was finally able to discuss with Rebecca how the event ten years prior had affected her and how not telling Rebecca’s Mum had made her feel.

She had continued to have contact with Rebecca’s Mum over the years, and at times the memory of what happened would arise, and she would be in the situation of feeling dreadful and not being able to share why. The intent was good, but the outcome was not. The pattern of keeping quiet to protect other people’s emotions had been set in place. It was reflected in Amy’s life in the following years, and it took some analysis later on her part to realise it stemmed back to this event.

Amy inadvertently had been taught that adults needed to be protected from hearing some things as they might be too much for the adult to bear. The underlying subtle message was that if telling about the assault was too much for an adult, did that mean the assault had made Amy “too much”? In this way the assault was given more power because of the fear surrounding it.

The energy required to keep secrets and protect others is draining and takes away from energy that might be invested in joy and full acceptance of self. Learning when to speak up about an issue and when to be quiet is a lesson many struggle their whole lives to try to balance right.

For myself, I was not wrong to speak up about what Pop had done to my brother and me, but my timing and manner and way of delivery meant some relationships never recovered with family members to whom I had wished to remain close. For Amy, she chose to remain quiet and not tell Rebecca’s mother after being asked to do so by Rebecca’s family, but this created a cost to her in setting up a pattern, which was reflected in a future intimate relationship, of keeping secrets from someone’s family to keep them happy but at the expense of her personal happiness.

After she clearly recognised this link, she was able to address the emotions that had arisen in her over the years. This was healing for her.

I found out much later that Rebecca’s brother had been struggling with a drug issue at the time he had assaulted Amy, and after he had overcome this, he had gone on to complete an apprenticeship and now was about to be married.

Was the assault on Amy a cry for help by a damaged boy? Was it a one off? Did he ever repeat it? Did I do the right thing in not reporting the matter to the police, as Amy was a minor? Should I have allowed Amy to be the one to make the decision about whether to go to the police or not? Would the brother have been supported by the police and given help as a minor if I had reported it? Should I have allowed the police to make that decision instead of trusting the family to follow up when they were so emotionally connected and conflicted?

In retrospect, when looking back and reflecting on that time, I believe I should have gone to the police and allowed them to provide the assistance and investigate, as the boy was only a minor himself. However, at the time I did what I thought was right. I had not wished to cause more harm.

I suddenly connected to my father’s choosing to cane my brother rather than involving the police after my brother was caught exposing himself; perhaps in his eyes, Dad was trying to prevent possibly more-serious consequences for his son.

I related to my father’s deciding not to go to the police when I initially disclosed the assault when I was nine years old because, as I appeared okay, he didn’t wish to make things potentially worse for me as his daughter.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

THERAPY

I was still very mentally unwell during this time despite the progress in working through things.

A psychiatric-support nurse had explained to me that after suppressing all my emotion for years, the new allowance of expression that suddenly had begun meant I had not had time to learn how to moderate my emotions, how to express them suitably, or how to self-soothe. That was why I would become overwhelmed with sadness or anger. I needed to give myself time to learn healthier ways of handling the depth of emotion I was experiencing.

I know now, looking back, that emotion I had previously not felt over injustices and abuse done to me in the past flooded me to the point that I would be grief stricken to the point of not being able to feel I could contain it within myself physically.

After not experiencing emotion my whole life, I now would often feel out of control and ruled by it. I felt myself drowning in emotion, mainly grief, and my memories of the past. I intellectually understood that to move forward, I needed to let go of the past.

But before I could let go of it, I needed to acknowledge it. Not just intellectually by verbalising it but also emotionally by feeling it. Only then could I truly let it go. But the lived experience of going through this nearly destroyed me. All I can say is my survival instinct was so strong and so powerful, even when I was being destructive toward myself in an endeavour to deal with the emotional pain; I sought out help, trying to stay alive.

When I cried I felt the emotional pain of sadness as a physical pain that went all the way through my body. I felt it in my heart area as pain and hurt, and within my body I could feel sadness moving as a literal sensation. I could feel my heart beating faster, my breathing went faster, and I took rapid, big gulps of air as I cried. The tears felt like they came from the depths of my soul, right up from my feet and moving all the way like a snake through my body and up out of my mouth as noise, as snot through my nose, and out my eyes as tears with no holding back.

This was a total sensory experience and so different from what I had felt as sadness previously. This experience involved my whole body, mind, and heart feeling sad, and it was frightening. The feeling of adrenaline as it moved through my body and the physical sensations made me feel out of control and vulnerable.

At periods over this time, I deliberately cut my legs and arms (always where other people could not see). This was never bad enough that I needed to be hospitalised, but I did need to go seek medical attention to get stitches for some of the cuts. I would turn up at the emergency department of the hospital in crisis, wanting to talk to someone as I knew this eased the pain, and I could then carry on.

The need to want a real person to hear me led me to compulsively try to seek out people to talk to through the hospital emergency department and mental-health department. I saw this as the job they were paid to do. I now know this was skewed perception and not real, but at the time, with being so self-absorbed, it was how I perceived it to be. I mostly experienced kindness and shoulders to cry on, but sometimes I would leave after being admonished for wasting people’s time when they should have been dealing with people who were “really sick.”

I often sought help by ringing Lifeline’s twenty-four-hour crisis line, the Parents telephone helpline, or the Salvation Army helpline. Talking to someone on the other end of the phone would bring the emotional pain down to a level that I could bear enough to get through another day.

At that time also, with discussing in therapy what had happened with my brother, my friend Jane, and my relationship with Peter, I became concerned and overwrought with guilt and the desire to make amends. I used the Internet to look up the White Pages online for the state in Australia where I knew Jane’s family had moved to from New Zealand. I found an address and phone number for her.

I decided to write a letter. I wrote to my Aunty Di and her husband, and I told her about the rape, about what I had tried to do with Jane, and why I had not kept in contact. I told her I had worried how Jane had been affected over the years by what had happened and wished to tell her so she could bring it up with her and see if she was okay. I apologised for my actions as a nine-year-old. A few weeks went by.

One day I was busy in my kitchen and, the phone rang. I answered it, and I recognised Aunty Di’s voice straightaway. My heart started thumping really loudly, and I went quiet as after our initial greetings, I knew this must have been hard for her. She started off by saying she had received my letter but had kept it from her husband, as she had been worried about his reaction. She then said she was so sorry for what had happened to me and thanked me for telling her what had happened with Jane.

She said she had raised with Jane the subject of me as a friend and asked what memories she had of me. She told me Jane had appeared happy and settled in describing her memories to her. She said she had not noticed any concerns over the years looking back at anything that might have been connected to my acting out sexually with Jane. She encouraged me to forgive myself and let it go. We ended the conversation.

I felt my Inside Me welling up. My Inside Me longed to go see Jane and renew our friendship and renew Aunty Di as Inside Mum in a real way, with seeing her and getting to know their family again. But I knew this was not possible as they were they still active Jehovah’s Witnesses. However, I had the relief of closure and knowing I had tried to do the right thing and make amends. I felt some degree of absolution in regard to trying to put right something that had weighed heavily on me for years.

At that same time, I had heard through the grapevine that Peter, in New Zealand, had been battling cancer for a few years and did not have long to live. I decided to write him a letter. It was from the part of me that had loved him and that had not gone to the elders to get him into trouble or accuse him but just to try to regain God’s spirit in my life. I wrote all this in the letter.

I wrote from my heart how important he had been in my life and how he had made my life worth living over those teenage years. I wrote about the joy he had brought me by introducing me to or encouraging my love of books, live shows, gardening, and other subjects he had talked about that had opened up a larger world for me.

I then wrote about my shame and confusion sexually because of his fondling me and because of the conversations he’d had with me about his wishing to leave his wife and be with me. I told him how I had never been sure about what actually had happened and what had been imagined.

I told him how devastated I had been when he had denied anything had happened between us as it had felt like a denial of something that had been so important to me during that time. I also said in the letter that I forgave him for the pain he had caused, and I thanked him for the positive things he had added to my life. And, although I knew he was dying, I wished him peace.

I never received a reply to my letter. Part of me had expected this and was not surprised, but the Inside Me had hoped and was disappointed. A few months later, I received a phone call from Trish, the elder’s wife in New Zealand who had been a good friend to me. She told me her husband had been with Peter in his final days and was with him when he died. She wanted to let me know he had confessed to her husband the truth about what he had done to me.

I am glad I wrote the letter to him before he died as it had been written with the intent to release me from the pain I had been holding within myself for years. It accomplished that. Thanking him for the good and forgiving him for the bad released me.

Even though the phone call did nothing to restore my faith in the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation, I was grateful Trish had known how important it was for me to know about this and had taken it upon herself to phone. Through resolution of these two past events, another small part of me found healing and self-forgiveness, and another step had been taken toward my feeling whole and solid again as a real person.

MANGO

One morning not long after my Nana had died, I woke early. I felt really sad thinking about how much I missed her, and I was reminiscing. I sat on the back steps with my coffee and was talking in my mind to her, not knowing if she could hear me and wishing I did not feel so sad about my life.

When I finished my coffee, I went down to feed my chickens. As I was walking back up toward the house, I heard this pathetic sound of mewling coming from one of the large Bowen mango trees we had on the property. About six feet up in the fork of the tree was a little ginger kitten. It had blue eyes and was tiny and skinny. Its little mouth was open in a pink wail; it was crying out to me and trying to get down but was too scared to jump. It was clinging to the vertical trunk above the fork with its claws. I managed to coax him down far enough to grab him, and he snuggled immediately into me, burying his head deep in the crook of my arm. He was shaking all over. I could feel the fragility of his rib bones as I held him. He breathed rapidly, and I felt the strong beat of his heart as I held his skinny body against my chest.

I knew he was not one of the wild cats we had around the place—they ran away as soon as they saw anyone. We were quite isolated and surrounded by sugar-cane fields and farmland, and people sometimes dumped pets they did not want out of their cars. I thought he must have been dumped as he was so friendly and obviously was frightened and very hungry. There were no near houses from which he could have come.

I brought him back up to the house and fed him some water and scraps of food. I then held him against me as I sat on the back step. He snuggled in and began purring, and after a time of being held close, his shivering and shaking stopped. He was such a comfort, and I was filled up with an inner knowing and feeling that Nana had directed him to me to comfort me. I carried him into the house.

When Scott saw him, he was not happy. He disliked cats and insisted we were not going to keep him. He made me agree to take it to the vet to see if they could find a home for it. I desperately wanted to keep him as I had linked the cat and Nana serendipitously together. Scott eventually agreed that if in three days the vet had not found a home for it, we could keep it so it would not put to sleep. I sadly took the cat down to the vet that morning and drove home with the empty basket next to me, feeling like I was going against everything in my gut.

As I sat in my house thinking about how sad I had felt earlier that morning, and how warm and blessed I had felt when holding the ginger kitten, I knew immediately I had to go back and get him.

I didn’t say anything to Scott. I just went and got the kitten and drove home. I thought if he was going to leave me over the cat then so be it, as things weren’t good anyway, and it would be an excuse for me to be on my own again. I picked up the kids from school, and they were delighted with the kitten. We all talked about names, and one of the kids said, “Mango”—and so Mango he was named.

Scott was not happy, but I just said to him, “I am keeping the kitten. You do not have to have anything to do with it, but I am keeping it.” He ended up loving that cat nearly as much as I did. Mango was lovable. He was a cat that talked to people when he came in. He sought people out to say hello when he came in the house and rubbed himself against our legs and purred and made all different sounds in response to human conversation.

Thomas took Mango to bed with him that first night. Every night since then, he has gone with Thomas to bed like a teddy bear next to him with their heads sharing a pillow. Mango then sneaks away once Thomas is asleep. He has been a godsend as both an emotional support and a source of comfort and healing for both Thomas and me.

We know he is a cat.

We know he does not have special powers.

But my Inside Me secretly likes to believe that Nana directed him to me, and I fill up with love and warmth whenever I pick him up. Animals have been a source of healing for me, and Mango has been a large part of that for both the children and me, and especially for Thomas. Mango was a bridge for me in helping to transfer attachment away from my Inside Mum and onto a living entity in the outside world.

He was a small part of the process whereby I started to have real connections with animals and people in the real world.

MADELEINE

Unfortunately my obtaining Mango created an irreparable rift with my cousin. A couple of weeks previously, my cousin, Madeleine, who lived only fifteen minutes away from me, had told me she and her husband were returning to England. Her husband was terribly homesick and could not settle in Australia. She was quite distraught at the decision as she loved Australia and felt at home here. She needed to find homes for her two cats, and whilst we had been at dinner at her house a fortnight ago, I had been cuddling one of them. I had said to her I would see if I could talk Scott into taking one of them, but Scott, who was there, said, “Definitely not,” and I had put the cat back down. Nothing more had been said.

I had invited Madeleine and her family over to dinner a few nights after I had found Mango. I knew it was her birthday soon and thought it was that weekend, but I was a few days out. I tended to do this still as I was not used to remembering or celebrating exactly on the day or recognising how important that was for people who were brought up celebrating birthdays.

I thought Madeleine seemed unusually quiet even though we had all had a good night, but Scott assured me he thought all was fine, and she probably was just still upset in regard to having to go back to England. I thought of Madeleine as a sister, and although I had not shared everything that had happened in my past, I had shared much with her, and I felt very close to her. She was one of my main friendships at the time and the only family I had contact with besides my father.

The next day I received an e-mail from Madeleine saying she had set up her account so she couldn’t receive e-mails from me, and I was not to ring her. She was cutting me completely out of her life.

I was not to contact her.

She said I had promised to try to have her cat that she loved, and now I had another cat and not hers, and she was devastated by my actions. She said she did not feel she could forgive me.

I completely fell to pieces.

I cried so hard and for so long, I literally felt something Pop inside my head. It felt like something had actually broken.

I had been cut off by all my previous witness friends, all Leonard’s family I had been really close to, my mother, my aunt, my cousin Bruce, and now Madeleine.

I just thought that something had to be wrong with me.

How could this be happening? And how could she not even be giving me a chance to set it right?

I ended up driving around to see my Dad. He was home, and this was the first time, I think, he ever had seen me cry, as I had previously kept all emotion hidden away from him. He was wonderfully supportive; he made me a hot drink and assured me that he thought she would eventually come around.

He kept saying it was a ridiculous situation, and in a way it was a silver lining on a dark cloud as it brought Dad and me to a different level in our relationship. I went home slightly saner and feeling more able to cope but still devastated.

The long and short of it was that Scott spoke to her husband and to her on my behalf, and, he told me, she just needed time and would come around. She advertised her cats, and one of her friends she had met through her children’s primary school came to adopt them.

She rang one day after a few weeks and organised for me to meet her at one of the restaurants in town for a good-bye lunch. They had sold their house and were returning to England in only a few weeks. I met her for lunch, and we talked about everything except for what had occurred, but from my perspective the bond was broken and lost. I let her take the lead, and she never brought up what had happened with me.

Maybe her inviting me to meet her for lunch was a practical way for her of saying sorry and moving forward. But I didn’t feel I could be close again to someone who would cut me off for something they were upset about but never talk about it with me. I realised I had put a wall up in me as I never wanted to allow myself to be hurt like that again.

So had I truly practised forgiveness if I couldn’t move forward and renew my relationship with her?

No.

I recognised at the time that the emotional fallout inside of me was still too raw, and I was still too insecure in my own self not to be profoundly hurt by another’s rejection of me, even temporarily. I had work to do in my own growth before I could reach the emotional maturity needed to forgive truly and let go and be able to rebuild.

I couldn’t see at the time that maybe her rejection from her own parents, and relocating countries, meant her relationship with her animals also took on extra meaning and importance for her, perhaps creating more extreme sensitivities about the expectations she had placed on me in regard to protecting what was important to her.

But at that point in time, it was all just too hard when I was still trying to heal myself. So I said good-bye to her and moved forward without family in my life.

AN OLIVE BRANCH

A few years after the breakdown in my relationship with Madeleine, Amy was accepted into the Navy. She completed her training, and I was sent an invitation to attend her passing out, which was being held at a base near where my Aunty Shirley lived.

I decided this might be a time for healing our relationship. I rang Aunty Shirley and let her know I would be coming down to see Amy graduate and would love to catch up with her. She offered to let me stay with her, and I accepted. She said Bruce and his family would be coming to stay with her at the same time as Bruce was being presented with a church award.

Amy’s graduation day went without a hitch, and the visit went all too fast. I stayed only three nights. Although there was no unpleasantness, things felt strained between us all. But I felt it had gone as well as could be expected given our history. When I got back home and phoned my Dad to let him know how the graduation had gone, my Mum answered the phone. As she rarely did so, I was taken by surprise, and I told her I had just returned from Amy’s graduation, and I had stayed with my Aunty.

She said to me, “Oh, I am surprised they agreed to have anything to do with you after the abusive e-mail you sent Bruce after you last stayed with him.”

I could not believe this.

I said, “What abusive e-mail?”

Mum said, “Oh, Shirley or Bruce forwarded it to me. It was full of terrible language and terrible things, and you sent it.”

I was so confused. I knew I had not sent any abusive e-mail to either my Aunt or Bruce, and they had never mentioned anything to me.

I rang Scott and found out he had sent an e-mail (we shared the same e-mail address when we were together) after my overdose as he was so angry with them and hurt for me. He said he couldn’t remember everything he had said, but he had been drinking prior to sending it, so it probably had not been good.

I rang my Aunty immediately to ask her about what my mother had said to me. She said she did not want to dig up the past, and I said to her, “Well, I am mentioning it because obviously you all talked about it after Bruce sent it to you. You sent it to my Mum, and you all assumed it was from me. I need you to know that when Scott and I were together, we shared an e-mail address, and he has admitted sending the e-mail to Bruce.”

She said, “Scott seemed like a lovely man when I met him, and I can’t see him doing anything like that.”

I asked her if she could let Bruce know I had never sent him the abusive e-mail, and she didn’t say anything.

I hung up the phone feeling absolutely deflated.

I had been branded a liar, partly because of my own recanting and then saying it was true.

Then I had an e-mail sent supposedly from me to them, but no one at the time confronted me about it. Because I had just attempted suicide, they probably didn’t want to talk to me about it in case I was still unstable.

No wonder the atmosphere had felt strained when I had gone down there.

But I knew the truth. I knew I had not done that. After my overdose Scott was angry at their rejection of me, and he blamed them for what I had done. The fact that either he pretended to be me or they assumed it was from me and no one told me—there was nothing I could do about that.

My way of tackling things was trying to open up situations with words and dialogue, but too much had happened, and my reputation was shot with my family. Scott had inadvertently put the nail in the coffin for reconciliation with my extended family; although that had not been his intention, it was the outcome.

I do not regret the time I spent with Scott. There was a lot of laughter but a lot of pain also. I learnt more about me in those three years than I would have in another ten years on my own. I knew being with Scott had taught me you can’t love someone out of addiction if they do not love themselves. I learnt I could love someone and understand why he or she had an addiction but not be willing to live with or put up with emotional and psychological abuse. Also I learnt I was not willing to be with someone who had an addiction and who was not willing to do something about it.

I had worked so hard in therapy and in my life to get myself together, and I was not willing to settle for someone who at least was not willing to put in the same amount of effort. I learnt that loving Scott was painful for me, and real love should not have to be painful all the time. I learnt that just because Scott had done kind and wonderful things for me, I did not owe him or have to pay back equal time in my life waiting for him to decide if he were going to do something to sort himself out.

I finally told Scott, after months of no talking, no intimacy, and his openly admitting it was the alcohol addiction that was preventing his depression from being effectively treated, that I could not take it anymore.

He once again begged and cried, and this time he went to my father, who, to his credit, tried to be impartial. He said Scott agreed his drinking was the basis for our problems and he needed to stop, but he had already promised countless times and broken these promises. He agreed in front of my father not to drink, and if he had a drink then I could leave. He understood this was his final chance.

He agreed, and the next day he left for work. He worked in another town, and so he didn’t come home for a few days until his shifts were finished. Two days later I got a phone call from him and knew he had been drinking. He was around at a good friend’s down in Brisbane, and he admitted he’d had a few drinks because he was “pressured to do so”—he was saying it had not been his idea. I hung up the phone. I could not bear to hear the excuses. I had heard them all. Scott drank when he was happy, sad, jealous, tired, joyful, grief stricken, celebratory, all the reasons for having a drink under the sun. I was not going to waste time anymore.

I got in my car and drove to a real estate agency. I recognised the agent, as I had recently nursed his father in hospital; he had died of cancer. He recognised me. I explained that unfortunately my partner and I were breaking up, and I needed to find somewhere affordable to stay. He pulled out a place from his book and said it had just come on the market for rental that day, and it was mine if I wanted it. I took the key and went to look at the house. It was perfect.

I arranged with my Dad to help me move my belongings over the next few days. Scott left dozens of messages on my phone as did Scott’s friend, at whose house he had been drinking. I didn’t answer any of them, as I had nothing else to say. A couple weeks later, when I returned to the house we had shared to collect my final few items, I checked the computer we previously had shared for any e-mails that might have come in for me.

I noted Scott had deleted most of them, but one had come in obviously after he had left to go to work that morning. It was from his brother in England, and I could read the prior one from Scott to which he had replied. Scott was telling his brother the separation was obviously all planned, as I couldn’t have gotten a place so quickly otherwise, and there must have been another bloke. His brother was agreeing it all had to be a setup and was telling him to make sure I didn’t get anything. I was so angry. I cared for Scott’s brother and his son, and I hated that he was lying to them about me.

I rang him and blasted him. “How can you lie when you know the truth? How can you lie when you know they will cut me off in loyalty to you?” He said he was sorry, but he was hurt, and any normal person would have done the same thing. Scott knew that the devastation in my life, caused by being shunned by people closest to me; and now his lies to friends and family, meant I was now going to be shunned by them.

One of the main reasons I had waited so long to leave the second time I was with Scott was my children. I wanted them to have a stable home in the country with the animals, a father figure, and stability. Once I had told them we would have to move out of the house as I was leaving Scott, they were supportive and said they didn’t care where we lived as long as we stayed together.

I had not realised the depths of their unhappiness living with an alcoholic. I had not realised how unpredictable Scott was in his dealings with them. They didn’t tell me when we were together as they didn’t want to cause problems or make me upset. On one occasion a few weeks prior, Scott had been going out somewhere in the car and had wanted Thomas to go with him. Thomas had said he didn’t want to go—he wanted to stay with me. Scott took exception to this even though I said it was fine, and he got really angry. We stood on the back steps saying good-bye to him, and he advanced up the steps and grabbed Thomas by the upper arm and attempted to pull him down, saying, “Come on, Thomas, you are coming with me.” Thomas was sobbing and saying over and over in a quiet voice, looking straight at me, “Please Mummy, no. Please can I stay with you?”

His eyes pierced right through mine, and in a microsecond the appeal went straight to my heart. I was filled with a cold dread, and I refused to allow him to go. Scott yelled at me, “Thanks for your loyalty” and sped off, revving the engine and squealing the tyres down the driveway. I had no idea what was behind it, and Thomas refused to say, but I am glad I listened to my gut and didn’t allow him to go. Something in me tugged at his reaction.

I felt guilty but relieved when I heard the children’s relief at the news we were moving. They all said that as long as we were together and had our dog and cat, we would be okay.

And we were.

INVESTIGATION

One day just after Scott and I had separated permanently, Thomas, Amy, and Rose were all playing. Suddenly I heard Rose scream and then start shouting at Thomas. She was really upset, crying and angry, and when I walked in the room she was holding his arm, saying, “Look at me, look at me. Why did you do that? That is wrong. Why did you do that?”

Thomas was crying and obviously distressed. He broke away from Rose and ran and hopped up on his bed; he lay face down on the bed, and cried.

I asked Rose what had happened. She said they had been rolling around on the floor and tickling each other when Thomas put his hand up her pants and shoved his finger up her bottom. She was really upset and was tearful. Thomas was only about seven years old, and I knew straightaway this was not in the normal range of behaviour for a child his age to do out of the blue and to a much older sibling. I told Rose I would talk to him, and she said she was concerned, as if he had done it to her what had he done to his friends or would do if he hadn’t already?

I went in to talk to Thomas. He was lying on the bed silently, and when I rolled his shoulder over so I could see his face, he had floods of tears pouring silently down his face. I asked him if he had ever done this before, and he said no. I asked him why he had done it, and he just shrugged his shoulders. I pulled him up onto my lap and hugged him and said I was not mad at him, just worried. Rose was scared and upset, as we are not allowed to touch other people’s bodies in that way unless they give us permission and we are adults.

I asked him if anyone had ever done that to him, and he said no. Then I asked him if he had ever seen that done to someone else, and he said no. Just the way he was avoiding me and answering me with great hesitation made me doubt it, and, along with my past experience of sexual abuse, my gut was telling me there was something more, but my head was telling me I did not want this to be happening.

I decided to leave it until the next day. I told Thomas to say sorry to Rose and said I wanted to talk to him more about it but would wait until the next day. At that time I did pull him aside in his room to talk to him. I prefaced the conversation by saying how important it was to tell me the truth and to let him know that whatever he said to me, he was not going to get into trouble. I also said to him that sometimes, if children had been touched by an adult or watched other people touching, they were told not to tell their mother or they would get hurt, and this made it scary to talk about. But if this had happened to him, that was a lie he had been told, and nothing bad would happen to him if he told.

Slowly the story emerged. Thomas said he couldn’t remember it all properly, but last time he was with his Dad they had driven up to stay with his Dad’s friend. This had been nearly three months ago, and Leonard had driven to see his friend Dale, who lived in a unit complex on the Gold Coast. Leonard verified this for me later.

Anyway, Thomas said he had fallen asleep in his Dad’s car, and next thing he knew he woke up and was in Dale’s flat, and no one was there. He didn’t know where anyone was. So he walked outside to try to find them. He hesitated and said eventually his Dad came back and said he had been washing the car with Dale downstairs, and that was where they were.

I said to Thomas, “Did something happen when you went outside to look for your Dad?”

He said yes. I asked him to tell me.

He said there was a man who said to him, “Do you want to see my puppy?” He had his door open, and so Thomas went in. He stopped then and would not tell me anything further. I was horrified. Thomas was terribly upset, and I just held him tightly. I thanked him for telling me and said he could go and play, and told him not to worry. I told him I was so sorry that had happened to him.

I immediately rang Leonard and told him what had happened between Thomas and Rose. I told him what Thomas had said. I asked him if he had gone outside to help Dale wash his car after he had arrived, and he said, “Yes. Thomas was asleep, so I carried him up and put him on the couch and then went back downstairs to talk to Dale whilst he washed his car.” He kept saying Thomas had not said anything to him, and I told him there could be a myriad of reasons for that.

I told Leonard I was going to go to the police to talk to them. I rang the Child Protection Investigation Unit. They told me to bring Thomas in, and they would see if he would repeat any of the story to them. I drove Thomas down, and we walked in. I had talked to him about not being frightened, and it was important to tell the police exactly what he had told me.

A policeman came up and introduced himself. He asked Thomas if he would like to come to see his car. Thomas said yes and brightened up, and they disappeared. Quite a long time seemed to go by. I was getting anxious. I even started to worry about the policeman abusing Thomas and my wisdom in letting him go off with one policeman on his own. What were they doing? What was happening? Was Thomas okay?

After about forty minutes, they appeared again. Thomas seemed quite happy. The officer took me aside whilst Thomas played in the play area and told me he had tried everything he could think of, but Thomas was totally clammed up. The policeman couldn’t get him to say a word. He told me it didn’t mean it hadn’t happened, but they could only go so far with their investigation without Thomas’s statement.

I was bitterly frustrated and disappointed but at the same time concerned for Thomas. I worried why he was not talking after revealing all this to me previously. The next day at home, in the morning, Thomas called out to me as I walked past his room. He was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling and then looked at me with tears welled up in his eyes. He looked me solemnly straight in the face and said, “Please forgive me, Mum, but I told a lie. It didn’t happen. Please forgive me, Mum.”

I just hugged him to me tightly as silent sobs shook his little body and said, “Of course I forgive you if you are lying, Thomas. I love you so much. But part of me thinks you are just scared, and that is why you are saying it did not happen.”

He just cried all the more and again looked me seriously straight in the eyes. He reached out with his hand to my chin and held it for a moment, looking deeply into my eyes. He said, “It didn’t happen.”

I let it go. I rang Leonard back to see if he had heard anything, and he said he had talked to Dale, and Dale did not remember anything. A few weeks went by, and a policeman from Child Protection Investigation Unit rang me back. He said they had officers talk to Leonard and Dale and had identified someone who had been living in one of the units as having a prior history, but that person had vacated the unit and was unable to be located at that point in time.

I told the officer what Thomas had said to me, and he said that often happened. The police still felt it was credible, and his feeling from the information received was that something had happened that day, and the person in that unit block who had prior history had suddenly moved, so that looked suspicious.

I wondered if Dale had talked to other residents and spooked the person into suddenly leaving. Thomas would not talk. I stopped asking him and left him alone. I thought about ringing up to organise a counsellor but decided that as Thomas was not a talker at the best of times, getting him involved in an activity that would boost his confidence and self-esteem would be more helpful. I enrolled him in Scouts. Thomas absolutely thrived in Scouts and loved it. I became secretary for a year, and he went on all the camps and had a great time. I think it helped to settle him down.

He had some trouble in year three at school with being bullied. I went to see his teacher only to be told she needed to tell me Thomas had been bullying another boy since late the year before. As this was now April, this was a shock to me. I asked her why no one had said anything to me so I could address it. She said they thought they had nipped it in the bud with talking to Thomas and the other boy at school and setting things in place to prevent it from happening again. But apparently the other boy had said just that week that it had started up again, and the verbal abuse was so bad his parents were thinking of actually moving house.

I was absolutely horrified that no one had talked to me about Thomas’s being a bully. I also felt upset that this was overshadowing what I had originally approached the teacher about, which was that Thomas was alleging he was being bullied himself. I talked to the teacher about my recent breakup with Scott. Also I told her about Thomas’s recent allegation of sexual abuse and the investigation by the police. The main question I kept asking was, “Why wasn’t I called in earlier?” It was not like I did not walk into the school at the end of each day to pick him up, and nobody had the chance to talk to me?

Once I knew which boy it was, I knew his mother sat and waited each day at the school. It was a small school of approximately 150 pupils, and I easily could have talked to her and tried to sort it out. I felt everyone else who knew each other and had lived in the area for years were all looking at me and knew about it. I felt on the outside and excluded. I was defensive of Thomas but also wanted him to have help.

A couple years later, when I went to get Thomas enrolled in tutoring as he was struggling with reading and writing, he got really upset and begged me not to make him go. It came out that his teacher aides at this school had belittled him and told him he was stupid and dumb, would never learn, and could never amount to anything. Suddenly everything fit together. The teacher aides, who were school Mums, must have been friends with the family of the boy Thomas bullied and took it out on him by ridiculing him and pulling him down. I was absolutely furious and devastated. He said he hated teacher helpers as they hated him and told him he was dumb, and he begged me therefore not to go to tutoring.

I was so angry. How dare they take it out on a seven-year-old boy instead of approaching me, his mother, and handling it sensitively for both children? All that experience taught Thomas was that some adults could bully him, and there was nothing he could do about it. It certainly would have contributed to his carrying on picking on this other boy. Thomas stopped name calling this other little boy once I was aware of the situation. I met with the teacher and both children once a week for about a month, and there were no further instances. Thomas was told to tell the teacher if the boy who was bullying him picked on him, and that situation was handled sensitively in the end.

However, once again someone in my family had been the victim and the victimiser, and it had happened without my realising it.

LIFELINE

In 2004 I had commenced studying for my Bachelor of Nursing degree at university. I completed nine units over a twelve-month period and then decided it was not for me. When considering other careers, I decided to transfer to social work as I was allowed to do eight subjects of another discipline as part of the degree, so I wouldn’t have wasted a year of study. However, the university had closed the midyear intake, and I did not wish to wait until March the following year to commence studying. I looked at psychology and transferred my nine subjects over to that degree and commenced straightaway. I was living in a small town and working part time at the local hospital as well as studying.

I read an advertisement in the local paper asking for volunteers. I had not forgotten in the past years how many times the Lifeline counsellors had been there for me in my darkest hours, and I was determined to give back for all I had taken. It was an inner force driving me. I had always known, from the first time I had been encouraged by the mental-health support nurse to enrol and do the course, that I would return one day and work on the phones. Now, looking at the advertisement in the paper, I decided it was time.

I applied to do the telephone-counselling course and was accepted. During the following three months, I completed 120 hours of role play education and learnt the art of reflective listening. My journey of personal growth at that time was extraordinary. Once again I felt in awe of this agency, set up to help normal, everyday people help other everyday people in distress. I loved the fact that it didn’t matter what faith or belief you had; as long as you agreed with the foundation principles, you could be trained to be a telephone counsellor.

I completed the course and loved every minute of it. I found much of it challenging, as we had to learn to listen actively and reflectively and support people who were suicidal, self-harming, or in dire need of a listening ear for all different reasons. People who had been victims of domestic violence or sexual assault, or who suffered from mental illnesses, came and spoke to us, which personally challenged any preconceptions and biases we might have held. I learnt so much from the role playing and having a group reflect back to me about how I performed. The feedback from others, on such things as tone of voice and my effectiveness in how I used each of the skills we needed to learn, was invaluable.

I learnt how I had to put aside my own experiences, background, and preconceptions even if I had experienced some of the issues that clients raised on the phone. I had to truly listen and be there with people, by their sides, as they poured out their personal pain. I learnt so much about myself and more importantly, about how to truly be with someone else who was going through personal crises or was in emotional pain.

I passed the course and was approved to move on to practical experience on the telephones. There were plenty of support people on hand to sit with me for as long as I required. I found that knowing what had helped me the most when I had been the one calling helped me now to a certain degree, but the most important thing was to be fully available emotionally to the person on the other end. The Egan method of counselling, which is the basis of Lifeline training, is a person-centred therapy. The tools they taught us in regard to how to listen and guide another actively through the maze of often-conflicting options and emotions were invaluable.

I encountered every situation you could think of in these few months. Most who were suicidal had attempted suicide before and been in hospital, or they felt suicidal and were in extreme emotional pain that they didn’t feel they could share with their families or friends. Some had actual suicidal plans, and yet something had made them ring instead of carrying through with them at that particular time.

Many were just plain lonely to the bone and had no one to listen to them or to talk with. I was surprised that just a hearing ear was what most people wished for. Nearly all who phoned had no trouble talking, and they let me know when they had talked enough, felt better and more able to cope, and could carry on.

Many people said they had told secrets they had kept for years—things they had done they were ashamed of and didn’t feel they could live with if anyone found out, conflicted emotions about partners and children and parents. They spoke about things they were scared to voice out loud to those around them but needed to be heard and to say. They needed to have a chance, in a safe place with a safe person they couldn’t see, to say the words and work out their own path in the telling.

Everyone had a story.

One particular night I went on my shift as usual. From the time the phone rang and I picked up the call, I knew I had a young woman on the line that was serious about taking her life.

“Hello, Lifeline. How can I help you?” I answered.

At first there was only silence. I sat quietly listening as I had been taught, and I could hear music in the background, and the soft sounds of someone breathing.

“It’s okay, take your time. I am right here when you want to start talking.”

I heard the sound of a deep intake of breath. Gulping, ragged sobs filled the earpiece of my phone, and the sound of someone trying to suck back in all the pain echoed in my ear. I could identify it was a female crying although no words had been spoken by her yet.

I allowed about fifteen more seconds to go by whilst I listened to her crying.

“You don’t have to start at the beginning. Sometimes it’s too hard to know where to start. It’s okay not to know,” I said. Sounds of more crying filled my ear, louder now and less controlled. It was the sort of crying that occurs when someone is absolutely bereft, exhausted, and in despair. The wailing was coming from the depths of someone’s soul, the sound of someone who had lost everything and had nothing remaining.

I allowed a few more seconds to go by until I heard a lull in the crying as the person struggled to get their breath. “I am right here with you. You are not alone,” I said. The wailing was less intense, and I could tell she was listening to me. “I can hear you are in enormous emotional pain. It is okay to cry. You’re not alone anymore.” I stayed quiet for a few seconds. “What is your name?”

“Karen.” Sobs started slowly building up intensity again.

“Karen, can you tell me what is happening for you right now? What made you pick up the phone and ring me tonight?”

“I just want to die. I just want to die.” The female voice wailed loud and high, frantic and nearly shouting. “I can’t do it anymore. It’s just too hard. I just want to die. I can’t take anymore. It’s too much. It’s all too much.”

I identified exhaustion, slurring, lack of hope, and the clink of what sounded like a glass. I pushed the “alert” button and, at the same time, dialled the number for my supervisor on the mobile phone I had next to me. I left the phone on the bench and kept talking.

“Where are you right now? Are you at home?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Where is home, Karen?”

“It doesn’t matter. I want to die. I just want to die.” Her voice rose again to a crescendo.

“Karen, have you been drinking?”

“Vodka. It is my favourite drink. I’ve nearly finished the bottle.” Her voice was slurring, and my concern elevated another notch as her ability to self-moderate and respond to reasoning would be compromised. Suddenly her voice slipped into the hushed sing-song tones of a little girl. It was so soft, and her words so slurred, I was finding it hard to pick up the meaning of what she was saying.

“I’m touching me. I’m touching me. Oh, there’s blood all over everywhere. I can taste it.”

Soft moaning filled the air. The strains of music in the background muffled her voice. “Daddy, Daddy. Oh, I am so turned on. Why are you doing this to me? Why?” Her moans changed to a high-pitched sob, and her gulp for breath filled my ear.

“Karen, are you cutting yourself?”

“Yes. There is blood everywhere. I am going to die. I want to die.”

“Karen, can you please put the knife or razor down whilst you are talking to me? Karen, have you put down what you are cutting yourself with? I need you to put it down whilst you talk to me.”

“Yes.”

“Karen, I hear that you want to die. I believe you. But part of you picked up the phone and rang me tonight. Part of you must want to live, as you rang me tonight. I need to talk to that part of you that wants to live.”

“No, I want to die.” Her voice suddenly changed back to that of an adult. “All of me wants to die. I can’t take it anymore. My daughters will be better off with me dead. I’m no good to them. They should stay with their father all the time. They would be better off. I am useless to them.”

“I hear you say you believe your daughters will be better off with you dead. I hear you say you want to die.” I allowed a few seconds’ silence. Her breathing was noisy and raspy. “Why did you ring me tonight, Karen? Why did you ring me on the night you want to die?”

Her voice, interlaced with sobs, shouted down the phone at me. “Because I’m scared. I don’t want to be alone when I die. I want someone with me.” I waited a few seconds until her loud, frantic sobs started to die down.

“I hear you’re scared, Karen. Karen, if I could wave a magic wand and take all your emotional pain away, would you still want to die? If all the emotional pain was gone, would you still want to die?”

“No, but you can’t. No one can. I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything, and nothing works. This is going to work. It is all going to end tonight.”

“Tell me about your emotional pain, Karen. Tell me why it feels so bad.”

Everything else in the room and in my life ceased to exist except for her voice, her words, her story, and the phone against my ear. I tried to stay with her as she went to some dark places and took me with her.

She was currently separated and had two young daughters. They lived with her full time, but this weekend they were staying with their father. She said he was a good father, and her daughters enjoyed going. She sometimes spoke in a normal-sounding voice and then would switch to a voice that sounded like a little girl’s as she regressed in time and was living a reality back from when she was a child. She was drinking vodka as we spoke and sometimes masturbating. She kept on picking up the razor and cutting herself. She was in her bedroom with loud music playing whilst she was cutting the top of her leg deep down to her femoral artery.

She wanted to die.

She had made up her mind that it would happen this weekend, and her ex-husband would find her on the Monday morning after he had dropped their daughters at school and come around to drop off their gear. She was a victim of long and sustained childhood sexual abuse by her father. She kept drifting in and out of consciousness toward the end of the call. She was in an altered reality because of emotional pain, intoxication, and sedatives and was cutting and masturbating to try to alleviate some of her tension while stating she wanted to die. Her memories of childhood and adult emotional pain intermingled.

My supervisor had come in and had called the police in the caller’s area twice already. Unfortunately, as police had taken her suicidal to hospital some months previously, they were in no hurry to get to her. They were prioritising other calls, not realising the seriousness of the situation. This was not an unusual situation for us on the phones. Many police were escorts for the mentally ill and suicidal, taking them to hospital, and most had regulars in their areas that they got to know well. This sometimes made them act with less urgency.

However, my supervisor kept ringing and conveying to them that I was an experienced counsellor, and she trusted my instinct that this girl was actively attempting to suicide and would bleed to death if no one reached her soon. All my gut instinct was screaming out to me that this was so. I channelled all my energy and every fibre of my being down that phone to her; I was a hundred percent focused on trying to say the right words to convey to her to live and not to die, and that I was there for her.

I appealed to her as a fellow human being, through her daughters, through the young self she kept slipping into, that there was hope, there was a reason to live, there was a way out of this pain, there was a way to have the emotional pain stop and end without her having to die. She wanted the emotional pain to end, but that didn’t mean her life had to end. Her daughters would not be better off with her dead. When she didn’t have the emotional pain to deal with, she could be there for them. She could be the mother she wanted to be. She could build a new life once the pain was gone. She could trust people again.

I asked her what had happened this particular weekend that was the final straw that had made her decide to kill herself. She had received a bill in the mail that she said she could not pay. It was added to the other bills, and it was the breaking point for her.

It was all too much. She had no one to share her pain with or to support her through her marriage breakup, being a mother, or her own abuse memories that were flooding her now that she was on her own. She did not feel she could cope as an adult in this world any longer. She did not feel she could be an adequate parent and role model for her daughters when she could barely get out of bed each day. She didn’t want them to see her like this. She didn’t want to frighten them. She was starting to behave in ways she did not like. She felt they would be better off without her.

I tried to ask her what had helped her get through these times in the past, when she had previously been this distressed and suicidal. But it was nearly impossible to reason as an adult with her when her rationality was not in charge, and her younger, seemingly emotional self was in charge.

I therefore said that Karen the adult needed to look after Karen the child. Her child self didn’t need to be cut and hurt. Her child self didn’t need sexual stimulation when she was drunk and scared. Her child self needed the adult Karen who had rung Lifeline to put down the razor, put down the alcohol, and just let her sleep, let her lie down and rest, as she had been through enough.

She stopped talking, and I no longer knew if she was conscious. I just kept talking and talking, hoping she could hear me and hoping something I was saying in a calm, soothing, nonjudgmental voice was getting through to her.

The police arrived at the house; I could hear through the phone that they were breaking down the door. One of the police picked up the phone and started talking to me. He said she had cut down to the artery, and it looked like she had nicked it. There was blood everywhere. She was unconscious, but the paramedics had arrived, and they were taking her to the hospital.

I was so relieved.

He hung up the phone, and suddenly there was just silence where there had been intense energy and focus. All the energy just drained out of me, and I felt myself start to shake. She was alive. She was going to make it—for that night anyway. I prayed and hoped someone at the hospital would relate to her and help her. That she would find a doctor or therapist who could help her find a way out of the maze and trap she had found herself in with no hope.

On the way home, in the dark and quiet, I suddenly had to pull my car over. I thanked the whole universe for letting me be the one to sit with Karen during her pain, for the police and paramedics who had gone to her assistance, and for the doctors and nurses who would be attending to her. I had intensely related to her. I understood her switching between her child self and adult self. I understood her use of masturbation and alcohol to try to alleviate the intense aloneness and emotional pain. I understood the cutting and thumping music for the same reasons.

Then I just sat in the dark, in the stillness and the silence, and with my whole heart wished and prayed she would find a way in the coming weeks and months through her emotional pain so she could find a reason to live again and be wholly there for her daughters as she grew older. As people had been there for me when I was at my lowest.

I felt something click together in my head and heart. It was a physical sensation and a feeling of completeness that washed over me. Something closed up in me that I had not realised until then had still been open. A feeling of fullness and wholeness filled me.

I prayed to the universe to watch over the young woman, and in my mind’s eye I handed over the responsibility for her healing and destiny to the universe. I trusted that her journey and mine had collided for a reason, but that reason was completed now. I let go of her figurative hand. I felt the anxiety connected to what might have been happening with her leave me.

I started the car again and drove home. I felt deep within my bones that I had fulfilled a karmic debt, and the circle was complete.

I was released.

GRANDPARENTS AND

GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

I started writing to my maternal Grandfather in England just after Rose was born. I was already questioning the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teachings at the time. Reading Grandad’s letters and hearing his story and learning of the amazing accomplishments in his military career, as well as his experiences of loss and grief as a child, helped me develop some pride in his resilience and courage, and thus pride in myself as one of his descendants.

I also had the other picture of him in my head that my mother had conveyed to me: the picture of a man who, although brilliant in his role as a soldier, was also a chronic alcoholic and, in her eyes as the eldest daughter, somewhat distant as a father, someone to be feared, and a difficult husband for her mother.

People play different roles in their lives, and I could relate to the fact that in some aspects of his life he was succeeding more than others might ever achieve. But in the areas of his life that involved emotional availability and vulnerability, he appeared not to have forged the bonds and links he so craved or expressed he felt toward his children and wife in his letters to me.

I could relate to this in my own experience with how I had felt as a child with my own parents—feeling disconnected, not valued, and like I was lacking in some way. I knew as an adult, though, that they had done the best they could—especially in the case of my father, who was also a brilliant soldier and outstanding in his military career, but, because of post-traumatic stress syndrome and his family of origin’s experiences while he was growing up, he was not emotionally available to my mother or us as his children.

When my mother described my Grandfather to me, it was always in regard to him as a Regimental Sergeant Major in the British Army whose life was the Army, and his family came second. She appeared scared of him, in awe of him, and often angry and perhaps baffled by him. She described how, as the oldest child, she was held to account if the others played up on her watch, so to speak, and she would then get into trouble for not keeping order.

My Mum has always appeared to be obsessed with rules and obeying them and everyone doing the right thing. Maybe it stemmed from growing up in this way as the oldest child of a man who she described as “running his family the same way he ran his men under him in the Army.” She also described her mother as a feisty lady who would stand up to him. Mum described how one day he had come home hours late from work, and her Mum had his dinner keeping warm in the oven and put it in front of him. He started to complain about how it was dried up, and she grabbed his head and shoved it in his plate.

My mother described her father as a heavy drinker who would explode into a temper at the slightest provocation. She said she hardly ever brought a friend home from school for this reason, but one day whilst she was in high school, she did bring a friend home. Her friend looked out the window and said it was raining, and when they went to look closer it was her father peeing out of an upstairs window, and it was raining down in front of them. She said she was absolutely mortified.

My Mum could tell me very little about her own mother but spoke very affectionately and highly of her. After I started to research the family history, my Aunt (Mum’s sister) sent me some memories of her mother, which filled out my family story some more and helped shed light on my own mother and why she might have behaved the way she did.

It turned out that my dear Grandmother, whom I never met as she died when my mother was only twenty years old, had lost her mother when she was only nine, and then her father committed suicide the next day. This huge loss was not tempered by love and nurturing but exacerbated by being split up from her siblings and cast into a home with an Aunt she felt no love from, and from whom she continually ran away.

I have cherished photos of my Grandmother holding me as a newborn. For years my mother kept a shawl that my Grandmother, Maud, had crocheted for me when she was sick with cancer.

She had worked all her life, either paid work or voluntary; she had stood up for the poor, she had given back, and she had stood up for herself. I am so proud of her.

Over the period of eighteen months when I wrote to my maternal Grandfather, he replied openly and candidly. Before my disfellowshipping, in discussions with my mother, she had stated her father had been born in approximately 1915, but the month and day were not known. His father had been killed during the First World War, and his mother, who was pregnant with him as an illegitimate child, had to adopt him out unofficially as no one knew she was pregnant, and since his father had been killed they could not get married. My Grandfather had been given his birth father’s surname to take as his middle name and was told it was from an illustrious family in Britain.

The story from my mother was that when my Grandfather was about eleven years old, his foster family arranged a meeting with his birth mother as he had been having some emotional and behavioural difficulties, and they thought maybe meeting her would settle him. Apparently they met in a coffee shop. His mother told him she had since married and had two children. Her new husband did not know about him, her firstborn child, and could never know or find out, as she could not risk his divorcing her and taking her other two children away. She told him never to contact her again. Suffice to say this did not help at all.

My Grandfather joined the Army. Apparently he never tried to contact his birth mother again and always spoke of his foster family as his real family from that time forward. In the nine long letters he wrote to me, he described some of the outstanding achievements and memories of his life. It was like a little window into his soul and helped me feel proud of his many accomplishments.

Not long after the last letter from my Grandad, only a few months before his death, my brother visited our extended family in England. After he had visited Grandad and our Uncle, he also had gone onto visit one of our cousins, who was working as a nurse at the time. He met her for dinner at a pub near her house, and they had a great time, he said, catching up and eating and laughing. He said as the evening drew on, she became distressed and started crying, and confided in him a story of estrangement from her family.

She said that her father (my Uncle) had started touching her sexually as a child, and she didn’t tell anyone. Then, when she was about eleven years old, he actually raped her one night. She said she was crying, and he sat on the end of her bed with his head held in his hands crying also and saying sorry. He told her he’d had worse done to him by his own father. She was shocked but so upset and distressed that she told her mother. She immediately confronted my Uncle, and he apparently admitted the rape to her and what had led up to it. Consequently they separated.

My cousin stated that after a period, her mother wished to get back with her father, but this did not occur. She was asked not to go to the police or tell anyone about it as her father would lose his employment and career, perhaps go to jail, and would lose his military pension that he had worked for all his life. She therefore had remained quiet. Most in the family had just been told that another woman was involved.

My brother was shocked and horrified. He, like I did, had longed to meet up with family and to reunite, as we had grown up isolated from all our family in England. At no stage did my brother disbelieve our cousin. He said she was so distressed and obviously suffering that he did not feel she had any reason to lie.

When I disclosed to my mother what my brother had been told by our cousin, she could not believe it. She rang her sister, and my Aunt confirmed the story to her. My Aunt said she had confronted their brother, and he had admitted it to her, and they had forgiven him even though they were horrified by what he had done. Here was another cousin who was estranged from her family because of abuse.

I wondered about the relationship my Uncle had as an adult with my Grandfather. Did he have mixed emotions in regard to his own father? Grandad’s military career was distinguished and involved many achievements, including involvement in major battles such as the Siege of Tobruk, the D-Day landing at Normandy, the frontlines in Germany, and the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. My Uncle never attained the same rank as his father in the forces although he had a distinguished military career himself.

My Grandfather had been based with the British army in Kenya to help quell the Mau Mau uprising. I later read about the atrocities committed by the British there and I wondered if my Grandfather had taken any part in it. He had reportedly raped his son, so did that mean he had committed other atrocities I did not know about?

In his letters to me, my Grandad was proud that I wanted to know him, and he was keen to tell me what was important to him and to answer questions. I will be forever grateful I asked the questions.

After I had learnt about my unknown Great-Grandmother, I wondered about how she had felt alone in London during World War I, finding out her lover was dead and discovering she was pregnant. I imagined the shame, the disgrace, and the heart-wrenching decision no doubt forced on her; she probably felt she had no choice but to give up her child. Then, years later, having to meet that child and the agony of telling him she could not see him again as the fear of going through losing her new family was too great in her own mind.

How was the rest of her life? Did she always mourn the son she gave away? Did she manage to stay in touch with his foster parents and find out what he had done with his life? Did she know of my birth in 1965? She would have been aged in her seventies, so maybe she would have.

I think about my Grandmother at age nine losing her mother. Had her mother been suffering a long illness? Was it an accident? Was it sudden? Why did her father commit suicide? Did he feel to blame? Why did he feel he couldn’t go on? What loss and experiences had he had in his life that led him to that point?

After being separated from all her siblings and sent to live with an Aunt she never felt love from and who had no softness in her at all, as she later told my Aunty, how did she survive and become so resilient? What did she do emotionally and mentally to find happiness in her life and to keep going? What memories did she have of her mother that she took to her grave? Did she love and miss her mother and father when they were gone? What was life like for her before they died?

So then my mother had been born, the first child to two parents who had both lost their natural parents through tragedy. What impact had that had on their parenting of my mother?

Mum was anxious, always worried about obeying the rules and not breaking them. My Aunty, when she visited Australia and met me as an adult for the first time (after I was disassociated), said my mother even as a child would tell on them to their parents for doing the wrong thing. She could not relax.

On a more positive note, I recognised the similarity between my Grandad ’s seeing my Grandmother for the first time and thinking to himself immediately, I am going to marry that woman and my father’s seeing my mother and saying the same thing, and lastly my husband, Leonard, seeing me and saying the same thing to his friend sitting next to him!

I connected to the instant knowing inside that we can have with those to whom we feel connected and with whom we know we have a future orientation even without speaking to them. Having experienced a number of occasions in my life where I have been filled with an absolute knowing about something before I had the confirmation, I can relate to my extended family in this way.

I loved hearing the stories and seeing the photos from before my mother and father’s marriage, when my mother appeared fully involved in life. She has definitely suffered severe depression and anxiety throughout her life, although she was a high achiever in school. Hearing these stories and seeing the photos of my mother before her marriage gave me a picture of someone who became lost and now appeared only able to function within a highly structured organisation.

Mum states that losing her mother and moving to Australia were the catalysts for her seeking out Bible study with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the beginning of her journey of total involvement in that religion. She appears to believe in this faith one hundred percent, to the point where she puts it before everyone and everything. It has replaced family and all the normal things from which people gain fulfilment and happiness.

I feel I must mention the story of her birth at this point. She was born during World War II in London, during a bombing raid. Her mother was pregnant with her and heard a bomb being dropped, and from the noise thought it was going to land in her street. Her mother leapt under a table, and the bomb crashed close by and rained down dust and debris all over the place. Her mother was in such shock and got such a knock from diving under the table that she went into early labour, and my mother was born under that table.

She was eleven weeks premature and weighed only two pounds, five ounces. She was told that her skin was red and transparent, and she looked like a skinned rat. Her mother wrapped her in cotton wool and placed her in a drawer to keep warm, as she had nowhere else to put her. Her mother fed her with an eyedropper and rubbed her with olive oil constantly before rewrapping her in cotton wool to keep her warm. She survived all predictions that she would not make it because of the dedication and care of my grandmother Maud.

Apparently my Grandfather refused to accept or believe Mum was his child, as she looked so appalling. This story demonstrates to me the power of the mother-child bond, and in some ways it comforts me to know this existed in my family.

I learnt from conversations with my Nana before she died, that my Pop, who had abused my brother and me, had been born a twin; his twin had died at birth and his mother only a week later. He was placed in homes until the age of five, when his father remarried and he was brought back home. His father and new stepmother had other children.

I wondered what effect, if any, the early loss of his mother had on his development. Had he been abused? At what stage did he become an abuser?

What trauma, if any, had my father experienced that resulted in his having no memories before the age of fifteen?

Researching my family history and learning more about my parents, Grandparents, and more-distant ancestors revealed a history involving losses of mothers, post-traumatic stress, suicide, and tragedy. I learnt about different family members’ involvement in key points of history and personal histories that involved great accomplishments.

Among it all I found a feeling of interconnectedness and belonging. Learning things about my ancestors both near and distant helped me understand, know, and forgive myself, and helped me find strength in the knowing.

STOPPING THE CYCLE

Through my therapy I became determined to stop the secrecy and the cycle of sexual abuse, mental illness (PTSD caused by war and depression), and the loss of mothering I had discovered generations of my family had experienced so at least my children could grow up with awareness. Hopefully this would break the cycle from continuing with my grandchildren.

I had originally started the family tree on my Nana’s side to discover for her exactly what her mother had died of, and then it became a bit of a quest to find things I could be proud of in my family and to help me know myself. It certainly did that and was a wonderful and rewarding experience.

My cousin Bruce died a few years after I first had gotten to meet and know him. I heard through my father in the months before he died that he wanted to speak to me. I contacted him via e-mail, and he said he had heard I had done a family history and asked if I would send him what I had researched. I was more than happy to do so and sent it down to him in hard copy form, for which he thanked me. But he never responded to me after that, and I decided to just let it go.

He died a few months later.

My brother remarried after the breakdown of his first marriage, and he and his wife and son live in Australia. He has a responsible job. He travelled overseas for years and had many experiences before he eventually settled down. We remain in close contact.

I have not resumed contact with my cousin, Madeleine, and I have not resumed any contact with my Aunt. I believe that family can be people you choose rather than just those who are blood related, and for me it is still too raw and too complicated to try to sort it all out. I made mistakes and misjudgements in my dealings with them, as they did with me. But no door need remain permanently closed.

My second cousin contacted me via e-mail after seeing Nana’s name and recognising it on my public-domain family tree. He was the son of Nana’s niece, whom Nana had unofficially given away for adoption when she was young. Nana had told me about this, but I had no way of finding out the identity of the child or whom the child had been given away to.

I learnt from Luke that his mother had been given away when she was five years old, and although she had renewed a relationship with her mother (my Nana’s sister) in later years, it was always fractured because of the emotional pain she felt over blaming her mother for having given her away. I had not realised his mother had been five years old when she was given away.

He said his Grandmother had always sent him sets of books for his birthdays, and he had fond memories of her despite his mother’s having a fractured relationship with her. He said his Grandmother had been married at least three times and led an unconventional life. She had remained in Yorkshire up until her recent death, and he had eventually moved to Ireland and married, and was happily settled there with his own family. It was wonderful to meet up with him via e-mail and see how well our generation was doing despite the obvious trauma experienced by our Grandparents’ generation.

I found out from Madeleine that she had met my Aunt Shirley’s daughter who had unofficially been adopted out at birth. She stated that after our cousin had committed suicide, our Aunt had taken an overseas trip and gone back to England. She had reconnected with her daughter who had been given away. Madeleine said our Aunt took her to meet her long-lost daughter. She believed that our Aunt had fallen out again with her daughter some time after this, and they had stopped speaking to each other.

So everything Nana had spoken about to me that week when she’d come to visit had turned out to be true.

She really had been purging herself of all these long-held secrets of children being given away and long buried abuse secrets. I heard a long time later that my Aunt’s daughter renewed contact with my Aunt, and she flew over to Australia and met her remaining half-brothers and sister. My brother sent me a photo of all of them having a meal at Bruce’s place, taken a few months before he died.

Although Nana had made me feel special because of the way she treated me, I could see how her estrangement from her own children had occurred, especially with her daughter. It made me realise even more how abuse and trauma creates an emotional disconnection from self and from feeling, and can lead to people acting in ways that make them appear as if they have no empathy or heart. Learning these things about my Nana and the rest of my family helped me understand myself and accept, to a certain extent, why I had acted in sometimes unfeeling and un-protective ways toward my children.

I feel that Nana must have felt things inside herself, but whether she packaged them away like I did in an internal fantasy world or whether she lived in an emotional void, I will never know. At least just before she died she was emotionally connected again with my Aunt and was able to tell my Aunt she loved her and voluntarily give hugs—even though she was ninety-six years old before this occurred. Revealing to my Aunt her own mother’s abuse history also paved the way for some understanding of and forgiveness for the behaviour my Nana had exhibited toward her over the years and lessened a little bit the bitterness my Aunt felt toward her.

I have hope for the thousands of other people who experience emotional disconnection and who would be able to experience more-fulfilling relationships with others if they could learn to feel again. Trauma can be overcome. Resilience can be learnt, and new lives can be forged full of meaning, purpose, and experiences of real joy. Connections with others can be made that are emotionally satisfying.

This is my hope. This is the work of which I now am a part.

HERE AND NOW

I finished my three-year psychology degree with honours but chose not to complete my fourth year.

Instead I gained full-time employment with a government agency that works with prisoners to try to enable them not to reoffend and to help them reintegrate into society. My role is to case manage those convicted of serious violent offences as well as sexual offenders.

Many people say to me, “How can you work with those people? How can you help criminals?”

My answer is that if one person can be helped not to reoffend, and another victim is not created, then the work is justified. How can I not do it? Under our legal system in Queensland, Australia - once someone has served his or her term of imprisonment, he or she is free to live in the community without supervision unless he or she is deemed under the Dangerous Prisoners and Sexual Offenders Act to be under indefinite detention.

The majority of perpetrators of violence or sexual offences, though, are released into the community after having served three-quarters of their sentences. If they are supervised and helped to address the issues that contributed to their offending, some of them can be rehabilitated. For those who are subject to a term of supervision before the end of their sentences, fewer reoffend than those who are released after having completed all their time.

I could count on one hand the people I have case managed who have not disclosed horrific pasts involving abuse, neglect, or abandonment. It just proves to me that violence, whether physical or sexual, is not a behaviour people are born with; they become violent for different reasons.

I find great satisfaction in my work among the most marginalised in society. Although I work hard to try to help prevent future victims as part of a multi-agency team, the reality is no matter how much help is offered, a large percentage of those I work with will go on to reoffend. I focus on the people who we do manage to help and remind myself of each future victim who is saved because of our work.

I usually disclose little of my personal story to my colleagues or the friends I associate with now unless I have built up trust over a long time.

Fearing judgment for not having protected your children, not having trained your children to be able to recognise, avoid, or fight off their attackers, and finally not having taken steps to murder your children’s abuser all become feared judgments from others, creating a culture of silence for parents of child victims. I sought out books, on the computer or at the library, written by mothers, whose children had been abused, just to read about others who had experienced similar things, so I could try to find something I could relate to.

I joined a depression support group in Australia called GROW, where I was able to talk about some of the circumstances that had led to my serious depressive illness. I found the collective support of others who had experienced life-altering depression to be invaluable. After a few months, I left the group as I found I no longer needed the regular weekly sessions, but I maintained contact with one beautiful soul who maintains her presence as a maternal figure in my life to this day.

I have come to accept that my mother may never choose to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even though it has been fourteen years she may never choose to renew full contact with me. However, I always keep the door open and live in hope that one day she may return and fully embrace me as her daughter again.

I have learnt and accepted that because of her own past, even if she does return in my life, she may never be able to be the sort of mother I’d longed to have for years. I would have to accept who she was as a real person and look to myself and other relationships instead to keep nurturing the part of myself that longs for unconditional love.

I have managed to form relationships over the years with people who fill roles in my life I do not experience in my own family. There still remains an ache and longing Inside Me for blood family to be with me, like I used to fantasise about when I watched The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie as a child. Sometimes I will see other families and will assume they have this sort of relationship, and I will be filled with sadness and pain and feel a void for a while for the loss of what I do not have.

However, I have come to realise that no family is perfect. Beneath the shiny exterior, many experience fractured and difficult relationships they struggle to maintain, and many long for less conflict even within close relationships. However, within the imperfection, the perfection comes by continuing to try to connect and in trying to understand each other within all the differences. That is what I believe is the true beauty of families who stay together and stay close. Not lack of arguments or lack of differences.

For many others I have observed that family relationships are different from close friendships we may have with friends who share similar interests. Years of associating with only Jehovah’s Witnesses led to intense connections and relationships within that sect that resulted in my having unrealistic expectations for how relationships were conducted and experienced in the real world. This has been a revelation to me that family don’t have to be close friends, and this doesn’t mean that the family is not supportive of each other.

So my life is not perfect, but it is perfectly real.

I have joy and I feel pain.

I have laughed until I have cried, and my jaw has ached afterward. I have cried until I can hardly catch my breath, and my tears have drenched my tissues, and I can’t breathe because of my blocked nose. But this life has more breadth and depth than when feelings skipped across my skin like butterflies dancing, and I was just an observer of others participating in life.

I find real in simple, alive, and tangible things now.

Things like gardening, soil, animals, insects, art and music; the smell of freshly cut grass; the smell of rain in the air after a period of drought; the touch of the paws of my cat as he purrs and kneads against me all remind me of life in its rawness and I find it all somehow comforting.

Then there are the feelings on my skin of the sun midmorning, as it warms me up after a cold night. The taste of homemade hot cocoa sipped over a good book, and the smoky haze of a fire in a half-lit room on a dark winter’s night while consuming a home-cooked meal. Pleasure comes from the myriad of small things that make up each day and that I never took note of before, when my life was filled with higher imagined ideals and rules I was so focused on trying to follow to be accepted by both God and man.

Unfortunately, even though the federal government in Australia has announced a royal commission to investigate child abuse in religious and other organisations, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in 2013, still have not changed their policy on child abuse. Unlike medical professionals and other government organisations that are mandated to report suspected child abuse, the Jehovah’s Witnesses organisation has a policy that elders are not legally obligated to report suspected child abusers to police if victims disclose abuse to them—unless there is a law in place in the state that forces them to report it. They say it is up to the victim to go to the police if they choose to do so.

They still have the policy that there must be two witnesses to the abuse disclosed, or two separate victims, for the report to be believed by the elders if the accused denies it. The victims continue to be counselled to be silent and not gossip about what occurred, or they will face a disfellowshipping committee. In this way reports of child abuse are treated the same way in the congregations as reports of infidelity or stealing. It is still not treated as a criminal matter but rather something elders use the organisation’s policies to guide them on.

Of course if one of your main teachings is that you believe that all people, including police and the courts, are not part of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, belong to Satan and are open to his influence, and will all be destroyed at Armageddon, then why would you trust in that system and report members to it?

Protecting repentant members and protecting Jehovah’s name so as to not bring it or the local congregation into disrepute in the community still is at the forefront of elders’ minds and the organisation, rather than protecting victims and preventing future victims.

Elders still continue to take on the roles of counsellors, judge, jury and confessors, even though they have no professional qualifications to do so. I hope that all victims of child abuse within Jehovah’s Witnesses in Australia are empowered to tell their stories to the commission.

I remarried a few years ago to a man who writes for a living; he is also a musician and a passionate soul about key issues that matter to him. We share many common goals and are focused on helping each other reach them. I have two stepsons who live with us full time and have their own hopes and goals we are focusing on helping them achieve. My oldest three children are all employed; one is going through university, and all are in long-term relationships. Two of them live a few hours away in different towns. My youngest son is still in high school and loves his sport, which has been a wonderful outlet for him. Their roads have been rocky at times, but they have shown resilience and courage, and we have drawn together and they with their peers, and they have managed to maintain their positiveness and hope for the future.

Keeping secrets always promotes victimisation to continue, as in figurative darkness. No one can find his or her way, and it often can generate fear. It also takes tremendous energy to keep big secrets, which is enormously tiring and detracts from life. I truly believe that to escape forever carrying the burden and pain of the past, one must turn back to face the darkness. Hold someone else’s hand if support is needed, turn on a torch to shine and illuminate every corner and crevice, accept it, forgive yourself and others if possible for your own sake, and then let it go, before you can turn and face your future.

The past is never forgotten, but it can be lived with. Until the pain of it is acknowledged and heard, even if one chooses to do so only within oneself, the positives and lessons cannot be acknowledged and focused on. Resilience from tragedy can then become strength that empowers rather than a burden that slows joy and participation in life. But it is a journey. The length of time to move through this is individual. Self-awareness can bring perception and make one less likely to become a victim again, and make one more aware of preventing victimisation in those we are charged to protect.

By writing my story, which is also the story of my family, I hope that through the power of language and words, people who read the stories might not feel so alone or in pain and might be able to start to see some hope that life truly can become amazing and worth living.

One step at a time, one minute at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time, and one year at a time—a life grows and evolves and takes shape.

I hope this is the case for you.

This was my story.

www.jennyhayworth.com

jenny@jennyhayworth.com