![]() So I thought as a way to get attention and it was never sexual in the beginning, it was more just for attention. ![]() And first it started because I was athletic. That was just not going to happen because I watched my mother drink.īut I definitely turned to men and trying to get relationships. So I just decided that I would never use, and I would never drink. I thought he was sleepy, but found out later it was heroin. So I just went into full blown pre-teen rebellion, running away, being with boys who were drug dealers, getting in stolen cars, doing everything that you should not do and still never using, because I knew my father used and watching him nod out and all that. I don’t know what happened, but she never showed up. My mother was to pick me up from somewhere. I wanted to keep everyone around me happy because I was in so much chaos as a child. My mother was a heavy drinker and I became her bartender. I was taught to bottle early, up whatever you feel. And then when I go home, the same thing, what happened here, stays there. So from there, it put in me a feeling of what happens here, stays here, there. Just things that no child should ever hear. ![]() Conversations about people being murdered by adults around you. Child labor, like picking greens, cleaning floors, rubbing feet, mopping walls. And a lot of molestation, a lot of verbal abuse, burning with cigarettes. I was the longest running child in that place. And I was there from the time I was six weeks until seven years old. I was in a daycare that they now named the hell house and it was horrific. She was gone, which gave me one, freedom to do things I shouldn’t be doing and two, expose me to things that probably shouldn’t have been exposed to at 3, 4, 5, 6. So a lot of her depression was in my story because she wasn’t available spiritually, mentally, emotionally. That was her 14 year old boyfriend who she happened to marry by home and who passed. So my mom was a single mother who was very depressed. My father was an addict who passed when I was about eight years old. I have three biological children and two bonus children. For someone who’s been through what Renee’s been through, that’s no trite cliche, that’s hard won wisdom. □ Those are her words you’ll hear them later in this podcast. It’s what enables her to look at her life and see every single thing as a lesson or a blessing. You are beautiful, and God does love you.įor Renee, God’s love became a solid foundation from which she could be boldly honest about her past trauma and present struggles, while still honoring the good that was there as well. And she told me, I would say, everything in life that happens to you is not your fault. I asked her what she would say to her childhood self, to the little Renee who was growing up amid so much evil and abuse. Drugs and alcohol seem to offer a way out, but only ensnare us further. For some of us like Renee, those false verdicts then trapped us in tunnels of shame and fear. And often we concluded that trauma like divorce or abuse or neglect or death was our fault. We picked up on a lot, maybe more than our parents thought, but we didn’t know what to make of it. I’m Vic King, chaplain at Helping Up and your host on this podcast.Īs children, many of us were great observers, but terrible interpreters. Vic: From Helping Up Mission, this is A Shot of Hope. Please help us make a better podcast by taking our listener survey Listen as Renee shares her story of healing and recovery from childhood abuse, codependency, and recovery from addiction to alcohol.
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