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As I begin the writing of my response to Question #2 that my daughter has asked me toward the completion of our book, and as I contemplate the 17 more questions that follow, I realize how desperately I have always needed someone to ask me these questions — and to LISTEN to my response.

I realize how desperately I needed this to happen all the way along through the first 18 years of my unbelievably abusive infant-childhood.  There was no hope during those years, but what a change in the course of my entire adult life it would have made if anyone had cared enough to ask and truly listen from the time I left home at 18.

If there is one single action that ‘the public’ can take on behalf of severely abused children and of we adult survivors it would be to listen wholeheartedly to our stories.  What happens instead is that NOBODY listens.  That means that NOBODY cares enough to believe us.  Always (and we can watch it on their faces) ‘the public’ is running their own inner dialogue that is saying, “Who do you think  you are to believe you had an early life any worse than the rest of us had?  Let me me prove my point by telling you about mine.”

End of story.  Always happens.  End of our story as we remain locked within our self as we have always been because of the horrors we experienced – most often from the time we were born – and that we survived in a world that ‘the public’ cannot begin to imagine.

Would people behave this same way were they to encounter Nazi concentration camp survivors’ stories?

I will no longer let ‘the public’ off the proverbial hook by saying, “That’s OK.”  There’s NOTHING OK ABOUT IT!

If you EVER encounter a person who tells you, “I had a severely abusive childhood,” or “My childhood was hell,” or any version thereof – please believe them and put your self aside with one single intent:  To care enough to LISTEN to what such a person has to say.

In this way you will become a part of the solution to child abuse rather than a part of the problem.

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+CALL FOR GUEST WRITERS HERE!! PLEASE CONSIDER….

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