Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Child Abuse

A light in the darkness for severely troubled children, former special education teacher Torey Hayden faced three of her most extraordinary challenges after she left the classroom. Nine-year-old Cassandra, kidnapped by her father and found starving, dirty, and picking through garbage cans - a child prone to long silences and erratic, violent behavior, whose hard-won recollections of the nightmare she endured could not be fully trusted.

One cold November night, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, fifteen-year-old Richard Jahnke Jr., ROTC leader and former Boy Scout, waited for his parents to return from celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the night they met. When his father got out of the car, the boy blasted him through the heart with a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. Richard's seventeen-year-old sister, Deborah, was sitting on the living room couch with a high-powered rifle - just in case her brother missed.

Eight-year-old Joon has no time to grieve her parents’ sudden death. Ripped from the security of a loving family, she endures horrific abuse in a system intended to protect her. After four years of torture and her foster brother’s attempt to steal her innocence, she runs away to Philadelphia’s poverty-stricken streets. Coming of age while homeless, Joon must fight just to stay alive. Despite the danger and desperation that surrounds her, she clings to her dream of offering the world something positive. But kind acts don’t put food in her belly as she searches for love and a place to call home.

Acute trauma and addictive disorders are often a result of psychological injuries experienced as a child, while typically producing long-term and harmful generational consequences on loved ones and other family members. Claudia Black presents a portrait of a broken family system, exploring how addiction and trauma develop in families, their damaging repetition, and offers a roadmap for healing.

They are five kids with five different fathers and an alcoholic mother who leaves them to fend for themselves for weeks at a time. Yet through it all, they have each other. Rosie, the youngest, is fawned over and shielded by her older sister, Regina. Their mother, Cookie, blows in and out of their lives "like a hurricane, blind and uncaring to everything in her path". But when Regina emancipates herself as a minor and escapes, her siblings are separated.

For forty years David Meagher harboured a secret. Then in mid 2018 a text message from an old school friend forced him to confront his past and finally deal with it. Secrets and Lies is a story about child sexual abuse. The culture that enabled it. How the perpetrator groomed his victims. How it finally came to an end. And how four decades after the crimes were committed his victims embarked on a successful two-year journey to bring the offender to justice. David Meagher delivers an intimate account of the lasting impact of child sexual abuse on survivors.

Unfortunately, abuse happens everywhere and can come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, it can happen right in front of us, and we still won't see it, or maybe, we just choose to ignore it hoping that one day it will go away on its own. This is my true story about living with a monster - a monster whom only those in my household would have ever had the unfortunate chance to meet. The monster I called my daddy!

In this volume, you’ll hear some stories that take place as recently as a few years ago, while others date back as far as the 1930s. There’s the story of a young Russian immigrant who came to the United States seeking the exciting lifestyle he’d seen on television, only to be stabbed, set on fire, and left to die in the desert by his own friends. There’s also the story of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. There’s one of a brawny railway worker who couldn’t control his steroid-fueled rage. And more.

Tommy Belanger had been born into a dysfunctional family - fed by alcohol abuse, abject poverty, and the trials and tribulations associated with living in isolation. His was a life filled with child abuse, incest, bestiality, and zoophilia. Tommy hated how those things affected him and his siblings. And he detested his father.

Thrust into state care at six months of age because of an alcoholic father and mentally ill mother, Teresa Cooper spent an unsettled childhood in a variety of children's homes. At age 13, she was sent to Kendall House in Gravesend, Kent, a home which soon became her prison and worst nightmare. Teresa found herself a victim of a terrible regime: she was injected with dangerously high doses of drugs and sexually abused.

Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working on the retrial defence of death-row convicted murderer and child molester Ricky Langley, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment Ricky's face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes, the moment she hears him speak of his crimes, she is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by her reaction, she digs deeper and deeper into the case.

Suzanne suffered five heart attacks and made it through open heart surgery. But even that pales in comparison to the horrors she faced as a young girl. Her childhood became the ‘stuff of nightmares’ after her father passed away and her mother, unable to get a job in Ireland, had to seek work in London. So ‘Mammy’ was forced into the heart-breaking decision to put Suzanne and her five siblings into church-run orphanages in Dublin while she worked away. It was just meant to be temporary.

From the outside, Vanya’s childhood of riding horses with her father in the solitude of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and attending flamboyant operas with her mother in the city looked idyllic. But life for Vanya was more about learning to gauge and survive her parents’ unpredictable actions - from being left to lie in her own blood-soaked diaper while her Christian Scientist mother prayed, refusing to get medical help, to watching her father writhe on his bed in the detox ward, his hands and feet tethered with leather straps.

People across the globe fall victim to challenging relationships, but that doesn't mean you have to stay a victim. You are more powerful than you realize—you just need to know where to direct your energy.

To the outside world, she was a bright, popular, all-American adolescent. But at home, behind closed doors, lived another Katherine - shamed, isolated, afraid - locked in a forbidden embrace from which there was no escape. It was a secret too terrible to silence. It had to surface, shattering her life, changing it radically - but with its release, bringing at last a new hope, not just to Katherine and her family, but to all the Katherine Bradys everywhere who will recognize themselves as they hear her story.

After a life in care, with both good and bad experiences of the system, Hope knows all too well what the risks are for children in care as they approach adolescence. Lacking any sense of self-worth or belonging, children in care are often dismissed by the authorities as impossible to manage and, worse, perceived as children who have invited sexual abuse by placing themselves in 'dangerous' situations. Hope lifts the lid on this untold chapter of her story and the devastating effects she experienced when she reconnected with her past.

Do you feel you lost your childhood because your parents weren't ready to emotionally take care of a child? Have you ever feel like you always have been the adult in your child-parent relationship? All you ever wanted was parents who listen to your stories, welcome you with open arms, and tell you how much they love you, no matter what you do. Instead, you walked around on eggshells making sure none of your actions would upset or irritate your parents. Now, it is the right time to start healing yourself instead of taking care of others.

The moving true story of a little girl with Asperger syndrome, controlled and abused by the one person she called her friend. Taylor had always struggled to make friends - she felt 'different'. Taylor never knew her father, and her mother wasn't around much. She just didn't understand people and was alone and scared most of the time. That was until, aged just 11, an older married man called Tom befriended her. She loved having someone who would talk to her, listen to her - a protector. But when he moved away a few months later, she was easy prey.

Kate, born to abusive, drug addicted parents, identifies an inner God voice when she is very young. This voice, and the support of her grandmother, helps her overcome her circumstances instead of falling victim to them. However, as she grows up she finds that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and she discovers that she is an addict herself. Deciding not to go down the path her parents went, she rises above her circumstances again and chooses the path of recovery.

Drawing on the mind-body techniques of somatic therapy, The Healing Sexual Trauma Guided Journal offers insightful writing prompts to help you explore your emotions, overcome internalized shame, and heal your traumatized nervous system.