Excerpt #5: The Ravages of Childhood Abuse

    Just because child abuse often stops when the victim leaves home doesn't mean it all ends there, or that "he'll get over it once he grows up." The onset of adulthood is the worst part of child abuse, as the young adult must now put on a different face and try to keep up with those who fared better in their childhood. The seeds planted so many years before will continue to bear their bitter fruit at the most inopportune times. Adulthood, for most, is a long-awaited entry into the real world of opportunity, productivity and accomplishment...a time to harvest the sweet fruit of their labor, not the bitter fruit born out of the labor of abusive parents. Young adults who've been abused must go out into the world of false hopes, lost dreams, terrible insults, and horrendous nightmares to face our reality: a daily grind of embarrassing struggles and crippling failures. For us there is no recourse, there's no going back to undo those terrible days of childhood trauma. Our only option is to pick up the pieces, day after day, with the hopes that our suffering will somehow end. Eventually we must sit on the sidelines and finally come to grips with the fact that the past is never the past, it's the here and now.