I Got Out, But Not Until Great Damage Was Done...

I was groomed from birth forward to be completely obedient.

Far beyond the stereotypical and societal expectations for girls and women of my generation. I was a docile, quiet, intelligent child. Loving and eager to please, as children tend to be.

My mother was a predator and she preyed upon my siblings and me relentlessly. She was a sadist and exhibited no conscience, and never the slightest remorse. She had privilege and luxury, and she told us on a daily basis that we were her literal slaves. Her mantra was delivered to us at least hourly and it was, "Run, animal run".

She couldn't say often enough that she was going to kill us in cold blood, that she hated our guts, that she would kill our siblings if we were to tell our father, or anyone, and that she had given birth to us so that we would serve her. She forced us to get on our knees and pray to her, and I can still remember the words. I refused, with great violent, vicious and highly destructive consequences to my tender child-self.

She had not been an abused child according to all eyewitnesses, all friends and family members. She had been loved and cherished, valued and protected. Appreciated.

Her thirst for stalking us, for threatening and ridiculing, rejecting and frightening us was unquenchable. The gratuitous nature of her violence was evidenced in her filthy, vile, highly sexualized remarks, gestures and actions.

There was no safe place and there was no downtime. We were punished for straight A's in school. The specifics of her abuse are triggering and activating for me to retell. They were all encompassing, deeply destructive and highly controlling. To say that we were intimidated would be like saying that there are just a few people who live on this planet. I could never overstate her aggression or her lust or her gratification at indulging her pedophilic appetites upon us.

In the middle of my teens I escaped by virtue of a marriage and commenced to have multiple children and ultimately marriages. At about 30 years old I had a spiritual awakening that helped me to understand how to begin to recover and I learned about therapy and even began college. As a single parent of nearly half a dozen children and without much child support, without any other form of support, I foolishly was lured into renting a home from her. Her daily harassment was rekindled and I was without recourse.

(This later resulted in a long separation from her, in terms of contact.) I have pursued every form of self-help and professional help available.

During the time of my early twenties, when I already had a couple of children, I was extremely vulnerable and was looking for extra income that would also enable me to be home and accessible to my children. I saw an advertisement in the local newspaper stating that a large and well-established company needed people 3 to 5 hours per week, for a full-time salary. In all of my naivete and inexperience, I jumped at the chance. They did not disclose the name of the employer, but it turned out to be the world's largest direct sales Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) company.

I allowed this organization to pressure me, to stalk and harass me, to call me multiple times per day- and sometimes per hour, to groom me and to brainwash me until they took over every aspect of my life. They must have seen me coming a mile away. So eager to please. So eager to achieve. So eager to obey. So eager to make a difference. My role in the family of origin had been  decoy, to keep my predator mother off of my younger siblings. I was a first-born child and a natural leader, despite having been beaten and utterly terrified everyday into submission.

Multi-level marketing destroyed my life. It destroyed my health. I allowed them to manipulate my brain with constant guilt.

They kept moving the carrot and dangling different carrots of reward that were intended to enhance the life of my family, and enable us to survive and even thrive financially. It was all  smoke and mirrors. One only needs to examine the structure and the payment schedule, which they carefully concealed from young and eager -to- please me, to understand that only the higher ups of the pyramid could make any money at all.

It took me about 2 years to extricate myself. One day I woke up in a hospital so dehydrated and so exhausted from overwork and lack of sleep that the attending physician actually told me that I had something he called "rock star syndrome", and told me that if I ever allowed myself to become so exhausted again, to never bother coming back to the hospital to save my life..

I had in fact been working about 90 hours per week and none of this resulted in any form of payment. These were recruiting sessions that I was highly pressured to invite everybody I knew to and which resulted in almost all of my acquaintances and friends and contacts becoming alienated from me due to the pressure.

I was in such a state of collapse that when the doctor told me that I must leave the company I was involved with and completely change my life, I took it literally, as the very young person that I was, and I bailed on everything else that I had, including my young and innocent husband.

In my state of complete exhaustion, I unconsciously rebelled, at last, against my mother, as well, and began to individuate. I went through late but brief period of teenage rebellion, even though I was already in my early twenties. I had been highly responsible and overly productive throughout my young life, but had suffered night terrors and flashbacks almost constantly. This was my escape…or so I thought.

I had never been in a bar before, and on my first exposure, where a young friend had taken me, I met a very high risk individual, and in a very short time married him. I brought the party home, but after a little bit of rest, I woke to the shock and horror of what I had done. Over four decades ago, before there was available communication technology other than telephones and television, I was at a complete loss, and so I even turned to my parents. They would not lend me the small amount of money, even briefly, to hire a divorce attorney.

For 5 years I worked hard to escape a man who would break windows to get back into the house.

I called the police department so many times that they stopped coming. My children were conceived mostly by rape and on birth control. This resulted in three more young children in 3 years. I had given birth without notice outside of a hospital, nearly died, and was in terrible health. When I hit bottom and called a crisis line I learned about therapy, I had a paradigm shift which enabled me to divorce him.

I want to flashback now to my early teen years and show how my childhood had set the stage for further vulnerability and exploitation. The traumas that occurred to me from birth until this time are too numerous and too gruesome to explain here. But in my early teens I found a way to sneak out of the house and go with a school friend to a local Pentecostal church. I spent all of my free time for the next few years on my knees listening to them teach what a sinner I was and crying and begging God for mercy for sins I never committed.

We were told that the only persons who would not go to the wrath of hell were a very few and narrow types of Christians. And only Christians, and mostly only this type of Christian. There was no healthy emotional advice or any form of support. There was no mental health advice or help, or emotional well-being practice. This was an affluent church with well-heeled adults, in a beautiful town. At no point, seeing me and some of my other abused peers there, was there any attempt to address our obvious emotional distress. We were needy, lost, willing and eager to please children, in anguish and agony...and in great need of support. We were, instead, groomed to proselytize.

The church and that MLM consumed much of my young adulthood and reinforced the impossible expectations that I placed on myself, which I had learned in my family of origin in great fear and daily terror. I was ripe for the picking. I was low-hanging fruit and extremely easy prey. The amount of guilt introducing rhetoric, constant harassment, intense mind programming all reinforced my feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy to the point of completely draining all physical, emotional, and mental resources that I had worked so hard to survive with.

The church and the MLM company cost me everything. A child with a different personality who was not so obedient and compliant and not so eager to please may have fought back sooner and may have left sooner. I have many very specific, credible details which are verifiable, that I can share regarding my extremely dangerous family of origin, that church and others like it that I attended, and multi-level marketing.

Those who have already suffered, those who are so willing to do their very best and to help others, those who would like to succeed by lifting up others and not at their expense, those who are inexperienced, ignorant, idealistic, and hardworking are the very prey that these predators canvas for.

I am alive, thanks to a 12-step program and an unstructured recovery. I am alive, but I suffer. And I can never get my young life back. Not ever.

~Anonymous