Child Abuse and the Strengths that Come from It

Some people can be damaged severely from being abused as a child. Whereas, I've told friends and even some family members the things that I went through as a child they can't believe it. They say that I don't seem to be the type of person that they picture as being as badly abused as a child.

When I was two, my mother died from a massive heart attack after major surgery. My father being a man of his time was incapable of raising children on his own. Me and my brother, who was six at the time, were shipped off to live with an Aunt until my father could get it together and maybe provide another home for us.

After about two years of searching he found a woman who became the wicked step-mother from hell. She had a son of her own that was just a year younger than my brother. Shortly after they were married, my father and her had two other children between them. We became the "His', Her's and Our's family". As you can imagine I was a child who had lost her mother and so there was situations that would occur.

My step-mother didn't seem to be equipped with the patients it took to deal with the emotional upsets that would happen with the kind of loss that my brother and I had been dealing with. These things would upset my step-mother and she would seem to loose control. I don't even want to go into detail about some of the things that she would do for punishment. Sometimes the behavior needed to be handled with understanding and not discipline. She didn't seem to have the sense to determine the difference.

I had been tossed around to different family members almost every two years. Guess it was like a cooling down period for my step-mother. By the time I was fourteen I had convinced my father that she was treating me unjustly. I showed him the welts on my arm over a simple misunderstanding before leaving for a family holiday dinner to Grandma's house. She had denied me rights to go with the family and my dad then refused to go also. Children services became involved and I was then removed from the home.