If you need to understand why I have been nervous of my family and tried to eascape them here are a small sample of examples

Family eccentricities and black and whites or untrue forceful statements:

·       When I was young I remember my dad telling me that he wouldn’t be alive in 20 years. That is a pretty scary thing to tell a young child, especially as there was no backup or reasoning to this statement.

·       I remember when I was about 10 or 11 , my mum told me that the world would end in 2006. I used to lie awake worrying about this, and I wondered what the point was of growing up and thinking about marriage and children and work if the world was simply going to end. And deep down I went on fearing this until 2007, which, incidentally was when I was adopted into my abuser’s family and my world did end.

·       I remember my mum saying how we would fight in the war at the end of the world in Israel and if we were lucky we would be the ones picking up the bodies on the battlefield – imagine being told that when you are a child! The depression and worry of these statements and others used to keep me awake at night.

·       During the worst and most violent times my dad said that he and my mum would die violently but not there, and that was what God had told him, and they didn’t die there, but he didn’t really die violently in the end, he died in a coma that I believe was preventable.

·       Also my parents used to go on about the mark of the beast and how we would be rejected because we didn’t have this mark, how we wouldn’t be able to go in shops, horrifying when you knew how much shopping my family needed every week! My older sister surprisingly bought into this prophecy and reinforced it, terrifying me, she was my role model and I thought she was always right.

·       These beliefs were plentiful, frequent, and I came into the adult world completely at odds with the real word and unable to live in it, and my parents continued to terrify me and leave me in collapse as I struggled through college with undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome, trauma and learning difficulty, unable to fit in or socialise at all and penalised for it too.

There came a time when I had to decide what was real and right, my parents’ fantasy world or the real world that I was in. It was a wrenching horrible tearing feeling, I felt as if I was being disloyal and doing wrong against God as I distanced myself from my parents, but I was following the example of my older brothers and sisters, which helped, but the beliefs remained firmly entrenched for years and I remained on the fence between the real world and my parents’s world, the remaining family’s world.

·       I remember one day when I drove back to see them, as I was leaving they were leaning on my car, forgetting that I had to go, that I had to get home to work, and they were carrying on a discussion that was to with black and white beliefs about women in work, the thing that got to me was that they kept repeating and repeating what they said, and then my brother was talking about the US presidential elections, this was when Barack Obama was first running for president, and my brother was insisting that Barack Obama would be assassinated, again repeating and repeating it. They have to be right about these crazy ideas, no one is to contradict them.