Child Abuse Story of Healing and Recovery From Tom

by Tom
(Wisconsin, USA)

In between my childhood and my career as a social worker, I had a first career as a U. S. Marine. I was forced to retire after 8 years of service due to disabilities from Vietnam. I went to McGill University in Montreal, Quebec and after graduation was when I began working with girls who had been sexually abused. After several years of doing this, the Montreal Gazette did a story on me, and that is when I first recognized the links between being an abused child, an aggressively delinquent teenager, all that one expects a Marine to be, an angry adult after losing my "legitimate" outlet for my aggression, therapy, and finally a social worker with abused teens and teen abusers. I learned a long time ago that the healthiest thing for me to do was to own all of these chapters, as I truly believe we are all products of our past. I have, from time to time, shared this with my clients. All too often they see us as who we are today and are not aware that we may have faced our own struggles along the way.

When I was 2 1/2 years old (my brother was 9 months, one sister was younger and the other older than me) our mother attempted to kill us. We grew up with this knowledge and were taught to hate her by my father's side of the family. At age 19 I was heading to Vietnam and passed through St. Paul. I used this as an opportunity to meet this woman. What I saw verified all the negative messages we had been given.

Several years later, after she passed away, I learned she had been married to another man and they had six children. I have met most of these brothers and sisters and from them, and her first husband, learned that at one time she was a wonderful mother and wife. Circumstances related to WWII led to her working in a factory where she met my father, who was on the rebound from his divorce from an equally wonderful mother and wife (I also met her and the three children they had together). My mother's relationship with my father cost her her children and first marriage, and this lead to severe alcoholism which eventually killed her.

It is hard to describe how, learning what her first marriage was like, erased all the anger and hurt I felt toward her. This was, and remains a powerful message that no matter what they have done, most people have some redeeming quality which prohibits judging them.

I tell my clients that while I have a wonderful wife, two terrific daughters, a nice home, drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee and have a job I love, none of this would have happened had I not looked in the mirror and realized I was my own worst enemy.

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