Child Abuse Story of Healing and Recovery From Adopted Guy

by Adopted Guy
(Christchurch, New Zealand)

Adopted and beaten by adoptive mother, only child of 5 to be deliberately left behind when she finally left my dad:I was lucky enough to only have 1 crazy parent, my adopted dad was a man of integrity and character. although i think i knew id been beaten(thank goodness i have no memory of it), i never connected with the emotion until my dad was dying of bowel cancer. watching him die was the saddest thing for sure, but nothing like the exhaustion of waking up to child abuse. my sister saw me getting beaten once and as an adult she'd still cry about what she saw. id always tell her that we just needed to forgive - i literally had no emotion about it. when i started talking to my siblings about it, 25 years later, what i thought happened once turned out to have happened many times, as different family members recalled it happening on different occasions, but had never spoken of it. like others, i believe in a God who is loving and merciful, but nothing colours your perception of God like a violent and powerful adult out of control. i have had counselling and in many ways have come a long way in the last two years. i am 32 and it all happened under the age of 6, when she left.

in the last two years my dad has died, my wife of seven years has given birth to our first daughter, in the town that i was abused in(we no longer live there, but our daughter was born there, which for me, was like claiming that town, and making a new start with a new life, almost redeeming it in a way).

so now there is a new start, a reason to look ahead and not back. i know that because i have faced the abuse, i am not looking ahead in denial of the past. i still have some days where my head goes round and round and its hard to stay positive, but i'd like to think those days become fewer and further apart. as for the loving and merciful God, that is certainly who He is. time to set aside my fears and wrong associations and dare to believe that someone so all-powerful would choose not to use the power they have to hurt, but to care for and to defend the helpless, to stand up for injustice, and to accept the rejected as if they were His own, and as if they had always belonged to Him...

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