276: What if you left your kids held hostage?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I was walking through a dream. I could not take in what was happening. At that point, I was thinking, I have to save my daughter. But also at that point, I was like, I do not want to die tonight. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 276. What if you left your kids held hostage?

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My father was born in rural North Carolina and they really didn't have any type of money. And it had been said that our family were hard drinking Irishmen. He was born to an abusive father.

So my father grew up with seeing my grandfather abuse my grandmother physically. And it said that my grandmother would stay out late in the night gardening just to try and stay out of the house and stay away from him. My father was a sensitive soul as a child.

Knowing that he was raised in poverty, it affected his self-esteem as well. And his only options as a young man, as he felt, was to join the Army. So he joined the Army at 20. He always longed for more than North Carolina, the Army. He always longed for an education.

My mother, once my grandfather died, she was about 11 or 12 years old. And my grandmother became a boarder to make extra income. And she would let men stay in the same room, bed, with my mother and my mother's very close sister.

So my grandmother offered up my mother and my aunt as people to sleep with. So that caused my mom, you know, a lot of inner trauma, caring wounds of being, you know, a young child and sexually abused by my grandmother's approval.

So my parents getting together, they didn't handle any of their hurts or wounds back then. Again, you just try and sweep it under the rug, act like it doesn't happen. So that trauma was not taken care of. You get these two people together with hurts and wounds. They start having these children and they had seven kids.

They had the first three and then the last four. And I'm the youngest. I come out completely hyperactive. Nobody knew what to do with me. So being this hyperactive person, this is way back like 1965. And Ritalin was just coming as a popular medication for kids that were hyperactive.

So I always felt like I was a guinea pig. Mom taking me to the doctor, analyzing me, then putting me on the Ritalin drugs. So that early on put in my mind that there was something deeply wrong with me.

It wasn't like, oh, baby sister, we love her. It's like, oh, baby sister, you're a pain in the ass. Because I was just constantly talking and daydreaming. And they looked at me like I was just an annoyance, which put me in a position as I was not okay as a person unless I was altered. Right.

So that's kind of the dynamic of the family. Also, when I was young, I was gangly and skinny and total tomboy. This is the time in life where your mom just opened the door at summertime and said, hey, come back when you think it's about five for dinner. So I did a lot of riding my bike, wandering alone.

This had led me to wander on this new road from my neighborhood, you know, to this strip mall. I was alone riding along. This person on a bike passes me and I look at them and, you know, I thought they were doing the same thing as I was doing. So, you know, I go to the strip mall. I'm coming back. There were these sunflowers growing. I looked at them and I'm like,

Gosh, I would really like to bring some of those sunflowers home to my mom. Well, unbeknownst to me, this person had circled around and was following me. And I didn't realize that. I started picking these sunflowers. And next thing I know, I'm grabbed. And this person holds a knife to my throat. He had on a ski mask. And they said, scream and you will die.

There's nobody around anyway if I were to scream. He pulls me into the culvert, take off your clothes, and began to assault me. It's so crazy because all these years, I still can smell that moment. I can taste that moment. I can feel the gravel on my back. When he was finished, he took my bike. They found it later on.

I did leave my clothes, but they were hidden as well. So I made it up to the road and then walked that area back to my neighborhood naked and bleeding.

And I will never forget this. This card stopped and this woman just jumped out. The man took off his coat and she just wrapped me in it, you know, and held me close and took me home.

My mother, she was just so distraught. They did take me to the hospital and the police came and they got a description and my mother's in the hospital with me and she's like, squeeze my hand if you need to. Well, she squeezed mine so hard my fingers became numb. And then knowing later what she had gone through, this was devastating.

So here we have, you're not okay unless you're altered. Now you are dirty. Kids are cruel. So that got out into the neighborhood. People are going, you know, kids my age. Oh yeah. Well, you had sex. I mean, it wasn't sex. It was rape. And it's just, just too much.

I was nine years old when the assault happened and that forever changed me. There was no way I could ever go back from that. I became two people. I completely disassociated what was happening and just became completely numb to get through it. I was out of my body and out of my mind completely.

But as I grew older, I could be a shape shifter in whatever scenario I was in or who I was with or what we were doing. And it was a matter of trying to fit into any situation that I was in. That, again, resonated with you're not okay unless you're altered.

You can shift where you are. You can keep things quiet or silent. Like this particular situation with the attacker, it was shame. I felt that I deserved to carry that and I shoved it way down.

I started to draw. I started to bend metal, make jewelry. Just the thought of being an artist. I did a lot of really cool embroidery at that time. Just focusing on the beauty of things. And after my assault, I had this amazing teacher. She was trying to tap into something that would make me beyond shame.

This teacher would come and pick me up on Saturdays. She'd take me to art museums, art shows, you know, really try to let me know that the assault and the shame and all of that that I had been through as a child was not everything I am. So in my mind, I was going to be an artist. So then we move into North Carolina from California when I was 11 years old.

I was like, "Okay, great. Nobody knows this." I can establish myself apart from all of that. I had three older siblings that were out of the house by now. I'm thinking, you know, I can form this relationship with my mom. And then shortly after we got there, my mom started having problems.

We went to the hospital and they had said she had ovarian cancer. She went to church shortly thereafter and got saved. And she was convinced she was going to be healed. And for me, I thought she was going to live. I'm like, done deal. Jesus Christ is involved. All good. They got her in Duke and started giving her some chemotherapy. They went to a doctor's appointment yesterday.

The doctor was in the room and he asked me to leave. And when I came back, my mother was weeping. And she goes, your mother's going to die. I'm just devastated. I'm like, well, you were supposed to be healed. She goes, I'm not. I'm not going to make it.

So I'm starting to see her become more of a shell of who she was. Seeing her stay in the hospital, wasting away. And when it got close to her passing, it was everything I could do to go in and hold her hand. The morning that she died, my dad comes home and he's just broken. You know, he let us know that she passed away and he said she was in peace and

He said the moment she actually passed, she raised her arms and said she was ready to meet Jesus. Then she passed away. My dad was devastated. I would hear him just weeping at night, and it just broke my heart. My dad is working two jobs trying to keep us afloat. He doesn't know what to do with us. And it's like my family blew apart.

I felt like she was going to be the glue in our life. And now I have no one. And I'm 13. I lost my footing. I really did. And what do I do now? Therapy wasn't really something that happened. So you put on this brave face. I wanted to be the bright one.

And there was that other person that I shoved down, shoved it as far as I can. And you can only push it down so far in life. That's when I really started going full throttle into the drug life and steering away from education. And it is in this environment that I met my first husband, who I got involved with at 14 years.

He was the long-haired drummer dude. He had that swagger, and girls wanted him. He was the bad boy, and he chose me. We would drop ass and not go home at night and stay on the beach and share these amazing things about art, listen to the same music, and I was mesmerized.

All of the girls were like, oh my gosh, he's so handsome, but he's dangerous. What really started to bond us is it was after my mom died and my dad really, he wasn't connected with us. He was working through his grief and there was a Black Sabbath concert coming up. Even to this day, I'm a hardcore rocker, but anyway, I had to go.

We loaded in this van. We took off to the concert, you know, just partying all the way. And so that really started to bond us together. At the time, my very best friend was this guy that lived down the street. And he was also my ex's friend.

He saw that we started getting closer and he said, do not go out with him. You know, be his friend, but don't. Don't do this. He's violent. You know, I confronted my ex and I go, hey, what's up with that? And he said, well, you know, I would never do anything like that to you.

I was like, okay, you know, and I felt special. I felt like, you know, he's choosing me and, you know, he's, you know, this edgy guy, you know, he's a drummer, he's cool, right?

I went to his house once and his mom, there was holes in the wall. And I'm like, what the heck is that, man? And he's like, yeah, well, my mom is a bitch. She nags me. She doesn't understand me. And instead of hitting her, you know, I just thought I'd, you know, just put the holes in the wall, you know, just imagining it was her face.

And again, I'm like, oh, my God. He's like, oh, but I would never do that to you. You know, you don't nag me like that. You know, we're cool. You're cool.

We moved in together. I was 17. I dropped out of school. My teachers are like, no. My dad's like, no. My employer was like, no. And I go, well, you don't understand. I'm in love. And they're going, oh, for God's sake, don't do it. Especially with him. He resented his mother completely.

His mother was from old money. His dad had an executive position. She would tell me that her parents would fight throughout the night and her dad would slap her mom.

She had told me at one time that if a man doesn't slap you, he really doesn't love you. I mean, hitting you is showing that he is just passionately in love with her. And she had told me that my father-in-law had broke her nose at one time.

She started to really pull me in early. She would say, I know your mother died. I'd like to step in and be that mother person for you. I felt that if she sculpted me, then I could sculpt him. I was really excited. I became a part-time nanny. He became a person working in the tile industry. And we're just building our lives. Well, he decided that...

He didn't like working and he connected with people that were drug dealers. He decided that what we needed to do is move way out into the country. I mean, a shack down a dirt road country. He would start to deal drugs and I'm like, you know, I really don't want a part of that.

But he was so good at playing my heartstrings. I'll get a job. Things will get better. So he moved me down into the shack in Zebulon. They started to cut me off from my father. Your father doesn't do anything for you. We're the ones that are always here supporting you.

My father's like, be careful, be careful. And once they found out that that was happening, my ex said, if he shows his face here again, I will kill him. So it was a complete separation. I basically had to fend for myself. He would leave days at a time. So I was able to get a job. It was a sewing factory called Devil Dog Dungarees. It was like an hour to walk there.

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Of course, I was drinking and doing drugs. And that's all I knew. That's the friends that we had. That's what was accepted. And then he started disappearing. And then he started to hit me when I would question where he was. He would abuse and have the honeymoon period. And I would believe because I wanted this person to marry me.

In my mind, I didn't have options due to a build of shame, due to you're not okay unless you're altered. So here we are, 21 years old. I was 21 years old. And he's this cocaine pot dealing person. Six o'clock in the morning, there's a knock on the door.

police officers just push their way in and they say to me sit down they go into the bedroom where he was they grab him out of the bed drag him in and cuff him and then search our house

They arrested us both. They locked me up into the Lewisburg jail. And even though it was his drugs and they could prove that I was working, I learned guilty by association is guilty. His mother is beside herself. She hires one of the most powerful lawyers out of Raleigh, North Carolina.

The judge and the bailiff, they emptied the courtroom. And they took his parents and the judge and the attorney into another room. And they came out and they said, okay, three months probation and you can't have any guns. I mean, anybody else, they would have got five years minimum for the amount we had had. I came out of it a felon. Here's some more shame.

He continued to deal drugs and I am freaked out. The abuse starts to ramp up because he's gone more. He's coming home with pictures of other women. So we get into this big brawl one night and he had a friend with him. I grabbed my keys and I was able to make it out the door.

I got into my car. I just threw it in reverse, went down to the end of the road, and then I turned around and drove back, and he runs toward me. He gets the passenger door open. I throw it in reverse and turn the wheel and break his femur. I looked down at him and I go, well, give me a good reason why I shouldn't run over your head.

And he goes, please take me to the hospital. So me and his friend load him up, take him to the hospital. He had to get into traction for several weeks. He went home to his mom for a couple of months. Then he comes home and he's, I'm a changed man. I want to start a family.

I'm like, I'm going to move out for a little while. And he kept pressuring me and his mom starts calling me. He calls me, they're crying. We need to take care of you. So I go, we're right about 22. And that's when I got pregnant with my first daughter. We did get married when I was nine months pregnant with my first daughter.

She was born in 1985. Again, a honeymoon period. He needed help. I'm a caregiver. And then once he is 100% well, he goes back into dealing drugs, being abusive. And it's at this time that I started the first iteration of my company.

I would make dolls at night and then get a few hours sleep, be with my daughter. I had so much fun being pregnant and giving birth. I think I'm going to do it again. So I got pregnant. I drove myself in the hospital to have her because he was on another bender somewhere. He comes and I go, where the heck have you been? This is the birth of your child. And he goes, oh my gosh, Queensryche was playing. I had to go see them.

So when she was born, she was blue. And he goes, I told you that wasn't my baby. This is a black man's baby. The nurse looked at him. The doctor looked at him. And they ushered him out of the hospital. So then I have my second daughter. And of course, it continues. And it starts to ratchet up.

I was going to church at this time, this Methodist church, and the pastor connected me to a battered women's shelter. They started to help me track the cycle of abuse, when to know that I'm not safe and I need to get out. He always carried a briefcase with him.

One day I opened his briefcase and there was a 45 Magnum in there and a pretty large bag of cocaine. I called the battered women's shelter and they're like, you have to get out. And I'm like, well, he won't shoot me.

I called his parents. I go, "Look, this is a cycle. I can't live in this." One of us has got to go, whether it's him or whether it's me. And they said, "Well, okay, we will set our son up somewhere. You stay in the house." One night, I am laying on the couch sleeping and I wake up to a click.

And I open my eyes and he has this gun between my eyes. And he says, if I can't be in this family, there will be no family. And I'm going to start with you. He pushes me into the kitchen and he tells me, get down on your knees. He puts the gun to the back of my head. And I absolutely believed I was going to die in that moment.

Because when I looked at him, he looked absolutely crazed. He was so angry because I broke the control. When I finally had the understanding that this person didn't love me, he turned so ugly. And it wasn't hate that I had. It was a complete indifference toward him.

He could live, die. I didn't care. It was indifference. And he saw the change in me and he knew that I would never go back. I just can't even describe the sheer terror. When I was on my knees, the bully, when is it going to come? What is it going to feel like? The moment that I'm going to lose my life. Been a miracle.

My oldest daughter runs in and says, Daddy. And it was just enough distraction that I bolted out of the house. It was so instinctual to save my life. It wasn't to get in front of my daughter. It was to run. Was I a coward? How could I do that to save my own life and the conflict within my heart?

The thought of seeing my children's bloody body. My youngest was nine months in her crib. Ever since the first time he saw her, he would say that she wasn't his, although she was a spitting image. So the fear that I had is he was going to kill her first.

And the overwhelming want to run back, yet the overwhelming fear that I would die, you know, and the conflict of my self-preservation. Why was I more important to myself than my children? Children that I love. I kept running. I ran across this field. It seemed like forever. I'm barefoot. The whole time I'm running, I'm just imagining myself getting shot in the back.

I ran over to my neighbor's. It was probably a quarter mile and I'm beating on their door and I'm just screaming, he's threatened to kill me. The kids are in the house. I left my kids and they pull me inside. But then once I'm inside, I started to have that realization. Once it all sunk in about the fact that I had left, I was hysterical.

I was ready to sprint back. If it hadn't have been for them to hold me back, I would have. They called the police for me. I was anguished. It seemed like the police, it took them too long to get there. It was just sheer terror. You know, I was terrified that the police would have to shoot him. My daughter was in the line of sight.

So the police come and it was almost like the SWAT team. They positioned themselves around the house and they looked through a window and they saw that my oldest was sitting on his lap. They're like, okay, your daughter's still alive. They go, we see her. It doesn't look like he's pacing around. So we don't think he's gone in and killed your younger daughter. And they said, okay, so this is the plan. We're going to call him.

We're going to tell him that's all a mistake, that we've got you with us. We've talked to you. You knew you were wrong. And it's all just a miscommunication. And he agrees. To this day, I'm still shocked that he answered the phone. I walk in with the police and they have me in front, but they're on each side of me.

They're like, if he starts to make moves or he looks like he's going to shoot you, we are going to push you away. We're going to need to get your daughter away from him and be prepared. We may kill him. They were reassuring me coming into the house that it was going to be okay, that I wasn't going to be killed. I did not completely believe them at that point.

I was walking through a dream. I could not take in what was happening. I almost felt like I was being moved through this fog. I mean, I had no choice but to follow what they were wanting me to do. And I didn't even think for a second I had a choice. At that point, I was thinking,

I have to save my daughter. But also at that point, I was like, I do not want to die tonight. I don't want to be shot. I was seeing that I would be shot in my heart. What would that feel like? How traumatic would that be for my daughter? The thing I was most fearful of is if they had to shoot him, my daughter would get in the crossfire.

She would lose her life. Was it me calling the police? Is that why she would lose her life? It was this big mix of emotion coupled in with fear with the police officers just pushing me through like, you have to be calm. You have to be convincing. You don't yell to your daughter. You don't have fear in your voice. You call her gently.

It was just so delicate because the police are like, if you flinch or the look on your face looks like we're going to do something, you cannot give away our hand. And at that time, I was just a big ball of fear and terror. Because my thought was he wasn't going to go down easy, that he would kill us all.

Then feeling that big responsibility that everything hinges on me. As we walk in, I'm just shaking. They're saying, we're coming in. It's okay. She's with us. We're all just going to sit down and talk. They're like, set the gun down. Get it away from you. Which he did, which I'm still so surprised.

They had coached me just to reach my arms out, to bend down and reach my arms out and call her. He let her go. And as soon as she left his arms and got just almost to my arms, two police officers tackled him. They threw him on the floor just like the movies, face down, cuffed him, yanked him up. And I had my daughter and I just left for the other room.

Once they got him in the police car and drove away, that's when the two officers came back and started to talk to me. They go, we're going to charge him with attempted kidnapping. We're going to charge him with endangering a child. We're going to make sure he doesn't get out. They said he had about 250 rounds of ammo. He actually had another gun with him. And that if I had not gotten away,

This was not going to end well. You probably saved some lives. It helped to alleviate, but looking in my little girl's face, I'm like, how could I have done that? But I did. And I think that my oldest daughter climbing in his lap kept him from shooting me in the back. So I don't know. My youngest was nine months old and she slept through the whole thing.

But my oldest daughter says that she remembers it. And it was terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. When I look back at it, I am so lucky to be alive. I can't tell you why he made that choice with the anger and the amount of rage he had and being under the influence. And I felt if there's ever angels around,

They had their wings around me and they had their wings around my daughters. It wasn't that far after that I called his parents and then they came. They're like, okay, we're going to take you. We're going to move you into an apartment in Chattanooga. We're going to get you a car. You can get into college, you know, and start your education. We'll help you with the kids. We'll help get a childcare for them.

So I go. He goes through his court date and he'd get sent to jail. I left and went to Chattanooga, Tennessee and his parents were paying all my bills. I was going to college. I got my GED. I was thinking about going into nursing. I always felt that I was like functionally illiterate. You know, he would call me stupid.

But education was something no one can take away. It was mine and it was mine alone. In the meanwhile, I had no idea this whole other abuse was actually going on. The economics that his parents were offering came with a price I didn't understand.

They convinced me to get him out. You know, we're going to keep you safe. And I did it. You know, I did it. Then what they would do is they would bring their son up, unbeknownst to me, and meet at their house with the girls. And they would tell my daughters, don't say a word. This is a secret, which they didn't, didn't say.

There was always fear that he would show up. Just because of what I had gone through, I did not underestimate that he could get into a drunken rage and come after me with a gun. I always had that in my mind. We had this one situation where I'm talking on the phone in the kitchen and

The girls are running around and he pulls up in the car and he looks at me like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I'm like, holy shit. You know, I threw down the phone and I ran to the door and he got in before I could get to the door.

My oldest daughter's like, Daddy! And he's like, I just want to talk to you. We need to get back together. You know, I need to see the kids. And I dropped the phone so the person I was talking to could hear me. So they called 911 and then the police were able to get there. And I said, look, I have custody. This can't happen.

And he had said things to me, threats. You think you're going to get married to some nice guy one day? Just know I'm going to be in the bushes and I'm going to kill you as you come out of the church. That trauma stayed. That's the trauma that kept me screaming at night. At that time, I went to church as well. And there was a pastor there. And he said to me, we have a counselor here.

Do you want to talk to him? And he started talking to me about economic abuse. I started seeing things in a much different light. So then I, you know, I do seek my financial independence and talking to the counselor. I'm like, you know, I want to see my dad.

Well, my dad's eight hours away and I've got these kids and at that time I'm all kind of freaked out. Oh, can I do this on my own? Drive eight hours away? So about four hours into the trip, I stop and stay in a hotel. It's got a pool. And so I stop and enjoy the pool with the girls. We have a meal. I come back to the room. Phone rings. It's his mother. She said, if you don't turn around right now,

I'm going to report that car stolen. I will take your children and I will bury you. I hang up the phone and I call my dad. I go, what do I do? He said, you get Harris what you do. You got to leave. I escaped into Washington in 1990 and I was 29. When I got into Washington state, I called my attorney and he had said, you're never going to believe what's on my desk.

to gain custody of your girls. And he told me, I just want you to know you have balls of steel. When I got to Washington State, I had talked to the Battered Women's Shelter and they had arranged with the Secretary of State an alias for me. So they completely covered me over. And then so if mail came to me, you know, it would go to them first and then they would send it out to me.

So I was getting cards that had like $2,000 checks in it saying, come back. They hired a private investigator. They never did find me.

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Get 80% off your impression kit when you use code WONDERY at Byte.com. That's B-Y-T-E dot com. Start your confidence journey today with Byte. It's about this time that I meet my husband that I have now. We've been married for 30 years. I met my husband in 1992. So I had a couple of years of what I thought was healing.

It was so exciting for me. I'd come through all of this. People celebrated me. They want to know my story. So I felt like, wow, I've really done something great. And I've met this wonderful man. We're going to get married. Everything's going to be all good. That's when my daughter started to become difficult. She was 10 years old.

I was working full time and I was putting myself through school for my bachelor's degree and I was still stuffing hurts and wounds. I could feel the pain still in my heart and I still needed to stuff it because it was so ugly and so hard. How could anyone understand and help me? My dad died in 2005 and

And my best friend in the world died in 2010. I held the weight of the world. I was Atlas. Yet there was something inside me that was going to break. I felt like just below my skin, I was cracking. This really started to intensify about 2013, where I couldn't breathe. I went to the hospital twice thinking I had a heart attack.

It was coming out. There was no way to stop it. Between 2013 and 16, I started to physically have to suck things down. I couldn't find words and it was becoming really hard to even get through work. I started to cry. I started to

isolate myself from family. And then in 2016, it all came crashing down. And I can't tell you why, but this one afternoon I'm in the garden and I just stop what I'm doing. And I walk into the house and I tell my husband, take me to the hospital. I'm going to kill myself. He goes, no, you're not. I go, I have a plan.

I am going to kill myself. And it's no joke. He takes me into the hospital. And I mean, his eyes are as big as saucers. When a lot of people commit suicide, the people around them go, I had no idea because we just can't even speak what's happening. Some people say suicide is selfish. It's not.

It's this hurt and this loneliness that's so deep. You just want to make it stop. What that started was that started me getting well, me going into outpatient and realizing I'm not alone. And that's a big thing. When you're in that place, you feel like...

You're absolutely, utterly alone, even though you have family and friends and people that love you and admire you. It's just you can't hear that.

I would wake up screaming. I would have these dreams where I was like Rambo and I had a gun and all these bullets on me and I was saving children or another one. I was stuck in the mud and I couldn't get out. I had dreams that my ex-husband would be in them and that he was holding me hostage. These are terrifying dreams.

In 2016, I started working with my therapist and I'm still working with her now. But when I first started working with her, I would nonstop cry. And she told me, one day you will stop crying. She went through EMDR and she was able to start to walk me through my darkness. She was able to help me find my voice.

Help me find my value. Help me piece it together. Everything was just all these little spots throughout my life. It was never woven together in one life. It was a bubble of shame. It was a bubble of not being accepted. It was a bubble of being assaulted. But it was always too painful to put it together.

And what she and EMDR allowed me to do is to go back and reframe it all. Something that she shared with me, and I would like to share it with everybody. When you are going through these situations, never move your starting line.

I had a tendency to look at a year ago or 2016, but really my starting line started when I was a child. And it's a matter of looking at all of this time that you have survived. You can only stuff so long and it just has to come out. I always carried shame.

Even though it wasn't my fault when I was a child, I carried that shame. I never got over the fact that I felt dirty or I didn't fit because I had a secret. It was something I didn't talk about. It was something I didn't tell. With my felony, again, something was wrong with me. I was holding that secret.

And I held the entire time. I was not okay unless I was altered. I did have a spell there where I did drink too much. That was self-medicating prior to getting help. And again, I was good at hiding that. I feel like with my daughter taking the turns that she did were just unbelievable that I had to save her.

I am busy trying to keep this kid alive, running her to therapy, her suicide attempts. What I would also do is I would project what I went through on them. Like if they were having a little bit of trouble, it would trigger me.

I would say, "Oh God, they must be feeling that. That's awful. I need to rush in and save them." They would come in late and I'm like, "You don't understand what late means to me. When you're late, I see you dead in a ditch." Like I could feel it all the way up into my throat. I was always like, "You know what? I effed up my kids."

If I hadn't gotten that relationship, if I hadn't married that person first, if I, if I, if I, I carried that shame. I carried that hurt. I thought everything was going to be just wonderful as soon as I got out of North Carolina and escaped.

my ex's family and my ex. I'm going to have a normal life. You know, I'm going to be married. We're going to raise these kids. We're going to have this house. Those things about myself never left. You don't look at yourself. Plus, I was such a good liar. Oh, my God. My husband and my family and my friends were like, what? You're suicidal? What? What?

And then I was in a safe place with my therapist and it all started coming out. I started to feel strong. I started to feel like I lived two lives. Doing EMDR when I talked earlier about breaking into two people, when we went back to that moment of the assault that I never, it was always there.

But I never wanted to go there. And she prompted me to. I referred to that situation as we, you know, we, broken. She helped me put that back together. I need for you to go back and tell that little girl it's okay. Give her a hug. Tell her there's no shame. And I did. Some people are just shit.

And it is not your fault. Just like the person that assaulted me at nine, the abuse that I endured was their gratification, their sickness. It wasn't mine.

The biggest thing to work through was the intense shame. The shame of, I brought my kids through this. The shame that I left them in a hostage situation. The shame that was my fault of what happened to me. Intense shame was the hardest thing. But once you start to speak out,

There's more people than you. I guess my main message is you're not alone. You are not alone out there no matter what you are facing. Reach out. Find your tribe. You're going to find safe people. Listen to your gut. If something is telling you you are not safe, especially if the words ever come out of your mouth, they would never do that to me, you're in trouble. Listen to that voice.

And look at me, the timeline. It took that long. And that amount of suffering, that amount of shame, that amount of hurt, all of the past, everything that I was told and knew, told me that I could not do better. But yeah, then I make it through. Yeah.

I got my degree. I'm telling you, they got pictures of me. My smile is so huge. Now I have an artist studio. I make jewelry. If I could have envisioned my life 35 years ago, I couldn't even imagine where I'm at now. I mean, even the thought of being a homeowner, you know, getting an education, you know, working at, you know, a really great,

great paying job in a profession that I like, I would have never, ever imagined it. And my husband, for over 30 years, he has been the string to my kite. You know, he has stuck with me through all of the process of healing, which has not been an easy journey. So I couldn't imagine. And, you know, the sun will come out and you will stop crying.

It may take a while, but the sun will come out.

Today's episode featured Kathy Robertson. You can find out more about her on Instagram at kathyrobertson.homefire. You can also reach out to her over email at homefireartistry at yahoo.com. Kathy also wanted to remind everyone out there, especially if you're currently struggling, that you can text or call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. at the number 988.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like stuttering super bad. I'm like, stop f***ing around. She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms, and spreading fast. It's like doubling and tripling and it's all these girls. With a diagnosis, the state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

No, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since The Witches of Salem? Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here. Something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.