How awesome ((Blue)) - Congratulations on 20 years!

I remember knowing for sure that if I talked with anyone, I would be beaten and belittled. Adults would, with the best of intentions, try to help my situation and talk non-threateningly to my mother. She would be fine talking with them and they would think they had helped. But when we got alone, the monster came out. She took my "telling" as betrayal and I paid the price being beaten and belittled.

I tried telling my father and he tried talking with her. I tried this a few times and each time, the result was the same; beaten and belittled.

My mother accused me of loving my father more than loving her. When I was 12 I woke in the wee hours of the morning while we were visiting my grandparents. I heard mom talking with my grandmother (who had treated my mother at least as abusively as my mother treated me) telling her that I treated my father like my boyfriend and was always pitting them against each other. I fell back to sleep and had a nightmare. There were stormclouds on the horizon and a field of golden wheat. Joan of Arc was leaning against a cross, getting ready to drive a stake through her heart with a rock. She looked deep into my eyes. As she hit the stake with the rock, we switched places. I woke in a cold sweat.

I did cling to my dad. I couldn't tell him what was happening or I'd be beaten: when he came home from work, her abuse would stop because she didn't want him to know what she was doing to me. So I would cling to him; he was the only safe place I had. And when he would leave to go to work the next morning, she would yell at me for clinging to him. She would start talking of me like she was telling someone else about me, calling me "it." Dehumanizing me.

So for me, there was no safe place.

I am glad to know children now have a place to go and more services available - and it pains me to know children are being abused as bad or worse than I was.

That's awesome

Congratulations on 20 years! That is awesome

Congrats Blue Moon, more not drinking than drinking, that is a truly awesome accomplishment (and that is in the proper sense of the word awesome)

Wow. I couldn't have written this any better myself. I'm saving this as well. Thank you.

Oh thank you so much! I absolutely LOVED this. It's so appropriate for me right now.

I am excited for you twenty years sober ;0) that is an awsome accomplishment in my book. Thinking gets me into trouble also just an FYI lol but glad to here you are celebrating it this year.

good luck with your journey...I am still trying to keep up my good work as well

Jealous!

Wow!

Great words of encouragement inspiration and remembering why we choose to be sober and continue on this path.

Eddie

Meeting are as important as our drug of choice was {alcohol
or drugs} I never skipped a day for over 38 years { except for 3 days in jail for public intox}

I use to love to go to the bars every now and then I would
go to a new one. The same thing with going to meetings find a new one but always have a home group and share the meeting, make coffee and make the new comer feel welcome.

Recovery to me is a thinking game
how I can spread the feeling of freedom.

Free from the addictions that held me down
for over 38 years

I was in the same sort of abusive relationship as you and believe me I should of got out 20 years ago,he made me insane and turn to drink but thank god he has gone and I am now a year sober.....