Inside/Outside: One Woman's Recovery from Abuse and a Religious Cult by Jenny Hayworth

Author:Jenny Hayworth [Hayworth, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

DISCLOSURE

I had reached a point in my therapy where I felt ready to tell my Mum about the rape that had occurred on the tennis court when I was only nine years old.

I was having a more turbulent time in my relationship with Mum than I ever had before, as she was well aware of my questioning the doctrines of the witnesses. We had spent hours discussing it.

She sometimes would be very supportive and sympathetic, and then other times she would start saying what the witnesses taught us to say to doubters. She would repeat the same line about waiting on Jehovah to reveal the answers in due course and that Jehovah uses “imperfect men” and always had. She said I had to show a good heart and wait on God, and maybe this was a test from God for my obedience. I was getting quite frustrated and agitated by these answers, and I felt judged by her at times despite her support in other ways.

I am not sure why it became important for me to share with her my assault at the tennis court. I think it was partly because I wanted her to understand me and why I was so passionate in my objections to the beliefs of the witnesses. I wanted her to understand.

One day she was upstairs giving Thomas a bath. She loved giving him bottles and his bath, and I loved her support and involvement with him. Having a baby in the house despite all the emotional turmoil was one of the happy spots for all of us. He was the glue of happiness that surrounded us, rightly or wrongly, at the time.

My brother had recently remarried and had changed his surname to his wife’s. He had spoken to me in regard to his anger about his childhood sexual abuse and the constant ridicule he had felt from my father growing up, which he never had understood. He had spoken at times about the unresolved conflict from being brought up in a fundamentalist religion such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He had decided to change his surname as he felt he had found what, in his definition, was a real family, and he just wanted to belong and be part of them. My parents were devastated but did not show it openly.

This particular afternoon in the bathroom, the issue of my brother and his changing his surname arose. My mother asked me if I thought he could have been angry with her and Dad because they hadn’t known about the abuse and hadn’t stopped it. At that stage both she and Dad had been told about our sexual abuse by Pop, and they believed us. I told my Mum I didn’t think he blamed them for not knowing about it.

She looked right at me and said, “Why didn’t you tell us? You knew it was going on. Why didn’t you tell?” The way she said the question, seemingly full of hurt, accusation, and anger and looking directly at me, made emotion well up in me.

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