..dear reader..

I'm glad that Burke's book exists and others like it but all the survivor stories I have read so far have left me feeling like there is so much more to be said, so much more that needs to be learned and the writers did not put as much of themselves into writing as they could of. I do not want to take anything away from the extremely important work done by Burke's and others just that I feel I need to explore the issues such books raise in me and how little I feel they are addressed. As I said in the title this is a personal response, the abuse I experienced occurred over a longer period and involved many more people so it is not surprising that I should finish the book thinking 'is that all?'. The first thing that bothered me about it was the beginning where she describes her life first in terms of her relationship with her father then her husbands. As a feminist this is frustrating for me, surely there were other important relationships in her life as she grew...

It got a bit weird for a while last night, for a little bit. I had been reading 'Wholeness', the abuser father of the narrator was an anesthesiologist who injected her and gave her pills before she was molested by friends of her dad. I started to feel a tingling all over which reminded me of the times I have been put under to have teeth removed and for the laparoscopy. It wasn't particularly intense and it felt unnerving rather than scary. Unlike the woman in the book I have mostly been conscious of the fact that the 'normal' family facade was just that. During my teens the 'me who had never been raped' was a pretty thin veil, not enough of a personality to even call an alter. I don't know how many times I swore to my self 'I will never, never forget this', I would often loose the details through the hypnotism or whatever happened afterwards but I rarely lost the feeling that awful things were happening and that I had to fight. When I tri...