"Behind Closed Doors"

I was sexually abused by both my mother and my stepfather.

When talking about abuse, it is mostly men that are mentioned as the perpetrators. Women, and especially mothers, are refused to be seen as people who could harm and assault children, especially their own.

In fairytales it is the ugly old witch who hides out deep in the forest who eats children. She is alone and has a black cat, worts on her nose and stringy, grey hair. Apparently as a woman you have to be old, physically undesirable, childless, unmarried and exiled from society to be seen as even remotely capable of hurting a child.

People refuse to see seemingly “normal” women as a threat, and especially someone who puts up the front of the perfect mother, wife, neighbour, employee and friend.

Mothers are put on a weird pedestal that both elevates them above women without children, as well as puts them down for being caregivers. They are seen as "irrevocably friendly" and "unquestionably nurturing", yet "unthreatening" and "vulnerable". Prey, not predator. Mothers who abuse their children use this to their benefit, and use their position in society and their children's natural dependence on them to groom and manipulate them.

To abusive women, becoming a mother is perfect. You can mould your child exactly how you want, make it believe anything that you want them to believe and condition them exactly to your liking. It is a very particular type of cruelty - and as someone who has lived through it, a very particular type of hell.

My mother didn’t look like a monster, but she certainly was one. She had a job, responsibilities, a home. I went to school, participated in sports, had friends.

It all looked normal, but it was far from.

Three years ago was the last time I saw my mother. I confronted her with the abuse that she and my stepfather inflicted upon me. She made me cry and screamed at me that she would “see me in court”. I removed her from my home.

That was the last time I ever saw her.

I am sharing my story because what I have to say matters and is important. I want to be able to help other people who are going through this. I believe that everything that thrives in the darkness loses its power by shining a light on it.

I don't deserve to wither away in shame for what my mother and stepfather, and by extension my family as a whole, did to me, and my story deserves to be told and heard.

I am not taking this depravation to my grave.

All of my life I have been made to believe as if it was my responsibility to protect the people who hurt me from the consequences of their own doing. That if I "really loved them", I would stay quiet. It makes me gag just thinking about it.

Living in a dysfunctional family system that desperately tries to look normal to the outside world feels like being part of a fucked up secret society. The secrecy influenced every waking moment of my life, and corrupted every good thing that was ever in it.

I have struggled with depression since I was a teenager. I always had to put on a smile, because any display of negative emotion would "spoil the mood" and upset my mother, which would then turn into an outburst of extreme violence, and that violence would then be blamed on me.

I could be crying in the corner of the room, or having fled upstairs, terrified, while my mother would be covered in her own blood with eyes black, like a shark, and she would still find a way to turn it around on me and make it sound like what she did to me was my own fault. This happened to me when I was a child. And the terrifying part is that everyone believed her and agreed with her.

Somehow my mother convinced everyone in my family that her abuse was not of her own doing and free will, but that it happened because I "triggered it" in her, and that because of that, I deserved it. She once called me "the child of the devil" - which was the closest thing to self-awareness that I had ever observed in her, put me and my brother out in the rain to punish us - for what I can't remember, and would claim after yet another violent outburst that "she couldn't help it".

My family seemed to sympathise with her, something that I never understood, which caused a massive rift between me and them, and initially started my journey of healing, breaking away from my family, self-discovery and independence.

My mother was never diagnosed with a mental illness, but I always knew that something was wrong with her. I thought that I was losing my mind, because I seemed to be the only one who believed that her behaviour was deeply disturbing. Nobody ever intervened, nor did anyone ever contact the authorities. My stepfather would disappear when a situation got too intense, and leave us behind. He would come back after a while. Where he would go to, I have no idea.

To cope with the abuse and the traumatising emotions that accompanied the abuse I suppressed my feelings until I didn't feel anything at all. I drank. I slept with people that I don't remember the names of. I have felt unable to deeply connect with people because I was so scared of them finding out the truth about me and my family, and I have never felt free to do what I really wanted to do with my life.

Relationships always involved some shape or form of coercion, abuse, mind games, violence, oppression or co-dependence. No matter who I met, no matter where I was, the reality of where I came from and the system that I was brought up in stared me in the face like laser beams through the mist. It took me years of therapy and healing to get to the point that I am not questioning my own experiences anymore, and that the shame that I carried with me for years is being replaced with peace and pride of having survived everything that I have experienced.

It is a miracle that I am still alive. I did’t have anyone to protect me, and I had to figure everything in life out by myself. That is a giant feat.

Don’t ever assume that what you think is happening behind closed doors, or what someone’s Instagram feed looks like, is the actual truth of what is going on.

Abusers are very good at hiding the truth, and will use a myriad of tactics to keep their victims silent.

Not anymore.