by Christina Enevoldsen & Bethany Ruck Bethany: A few months ago, I got word from a family member that my paternal grandmother was found unconscious in the middle of the night and rushed to the hospital. She had suffered a brain hemorrhage and was on a ventilator as her heart rate began to slow. The [...]

by Bethany Ruck I had to cover my eyes during kissing scenes in movies until my teens. I couldn’t ride my bike more than two blocks away. All of my friends had to be approved. My mom would check all of my essays to make sure they were perfect before I even turned in a [...]

by Linda Pittman When I first met my husband, I was keeping a big secret—the story of my childhood sexual abuse. I couldn’t tell him until I felt safe and sure of his love—if that was possible. He is a good man, gentle, kind, intensely loyal and trustworthy. Sometimes it is still hard to believe [...]

by Christina Enevoldsen Just a note: Sometimes I believe things because they are true; other times I believe things because an alternate truth would be painful. One of the indications that I’m invested in a particular belief as a coping method is that I defend that ‘truth’ as though my life is threatened. When I [...]

 by Bethany Ruck  When my last boyfriend and I began dating, we would see each other once a week. The in between times were filled with hour-long telephone calls before bed, a lot of getting to know you time and even more of the sickening, “No, I miss you more” fluff.  One night the conversation [...]

by Bethany Ruck Birthdays usually mean surprises. I remember one particular birthday en route to our destination I was lead into a dark room and without warning, all of my closest friends popped out shouting my praises. I was so taken aback. Immediately my defenses went up. This should have been a happy moment, but [...]

by Patty Hite I took my bulldog Molly to the vet because she was getting skin blisters all over her body. The vet and I have been omitting different things from her in order to see what is causing this. When she has a breakout, she gets a shot and then she’s put on pills [...]

by Jennifer Stuck I have come to believe that secrets are the enemy. They are the parasites that eat away at the human soul. We are meant to be social creatures, to share and express our complex emotions. Yet generation after generation of conditioning has taught us to repress our thoughts and feelings—to monitor every [...]

by Christina Enevoldsen For years, I didn’t realize how fragmented I felt and or how disjointed my life was. When I began to see the truth of my childhood sexual abuse, my world started to crumble. My personal history and the family I thought I had was an illusion; they only existed in my mind. [...]

by Libbe HaLevy My abuse began when I was very young, pre-verbal. I repressed my earliest abuse in total amnesia, not even suspecting anything had happened. But from about age three, I became obsessed with words, language, meaning. Even before I knew how to put letters and words on paper, my imagination took situations around [...]