First hand story of childhood sexual abuse; very common today. Maggie and her alters wrote the book in their own words. Maggie was diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder and began to recover old memories as the alters or inside people told their stories. Maggie shares her insights gained in counseling, her thoughts and reactions to dealing with difficult material and how she found a way to live normally as if it didn't happen.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A courageous memoir....,
By
This review is from: AS IF IT DIDN'T HAPPEN: A memoir of abuse, multiple personalities, and hope (Paperback)
Childhood sexual abuse--the ultimate betrayal of a child's innocent, fragile soul--encapsulates the child in a powerful vise of denial, terror, and secrecy, while simultaneously stealing the gifts of laughter and happiness, safety and security, and an environment that gives healthy intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth. Telling the secret of abuse is the singular pathway to healing, health, and the hope that it will help others become more aware. Yet telling the secret is the hardest thing to do.
The first-born and only daughter in a family of seven children, a beautiful, blue-eyed, curly-blond-haired child, Maggie quickly becomes her mother's small helper, learning to change diapers and give 3 am feedings. She soon hears her mother tell neighbors what a good help Maggie has become and then works harder to do better because it feels so good to be noticed. For, on the inside, Maggie feels deeply sad and empty. In her first chapter, titled "One Big Happy Family," we might expect to meet the author's parents and siblings. Instead, Maggie introduces us to some members of the family of personalities who reside within her as a child. She allows us to enter her world of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), where two or more personalities exist within a person and, in some situations, take control of their behavior and activities. Most studies show the primary cause of DID is traumatic childhood abuse and that these children have often been the prey of sexual abusers during their early life. This is Maggie's story. As more sons are born, Maggie's mother appreciates time alone when her children can visit Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken's nearby house. Yet it is there that Maggie's horrific sexual abuse starts at about age three and continues with unremitting frequency until she is 16 years-old. A trio of sexual predators--Uncle Ken (a seemingly jovial toy salesman), his son Kenny, and neighbors who pay Uncle Ken so they can sedate and use Maggie for sex and pornography--steal her tiny psyche. Maggie is able to cope and survive by using dissociation and she is absolutely unaware of her several alter personalities until she seeks therapy many years later as a depressed adult. By the time she begins school Maggie shows some problematic signs, but these pass unrecognized by teachers and other adults in her life; her splintered interior life remains invisible to all who might help her. Uniquely, in this writing, Maggie's alters tell their own stories using their individual voices and sketches that speak as powerfully and poignantly as their words. We meet the small twins, Cathy and Catherine, who endured agonizing abuse that Maggie could not possibly bear and the little four-year-old boy named "4," who tries to protect Cathy and Catherine with his bravado and sword, realizing he's unable to and goes on to master the art of running away. Small, helpless Isabel arrives. Three of her heartbreaking words echo from the pages over and over and long after I finished reading, poignantly capturing the ultimate outrage of childhood sexual abuse. At the same time Isabel is cruelly abused by Uncle Ken, she wants to please him. "I be good, I be good, I be good," Isabel softly sobs to Uncle Ken when he harshly tells her she's being bad. Subsequent personalities are born as new traumas arrive. Maggie herself is fully present one day in third grade where students are called daily to the board to solve arithmetic problems. Those who answer correctly, as Maggie always does because she is very bright, are told to return to their seats while those who have made a mistake stay at the board to receive kind attention on how to solve the problem correctly. This day Maggie completes her arithmetic and leaves the room for lunch. Then she realizes that if she makes a mistake she can stay at the board and receive some of that kind attention she longs for. She races back to the empty classroom and changes her correct answer to an incorrect one. But another student sees what she's done and tells the teacher, who calls Maggie to the front of the room and scolds her for cheating. This humiliation is more than Maggie's fragile psyche can bear. In the brief moments when the teacher tells her to turn around and before she spanks her and will humiliate her before her classmates, the self-labeled "mad girl," gutsy Vicki is born and takes the devastating spanking. Monnie bears Maggie's depression, hopelessness, and despair, and often contemplates suicide. Monica, Monnie's twin, on the other hand, is strong, competent, and moves quickly through her "To Do" lists. As Maggie meets each of her alter personalities in therapy over the months and years, and each tells a story heretofore unknown to Maggie, what happens to them then? Do they leave? Stay? Change? For those complex and moving answers, I now step aside to let you read this extraordinary story of a healing journey in which the author's honesty and courage is so evident on every single page. Maggie Claire is, above all, a woman to be deeply honored and her book a celebration for one woman's breakthrough of both the paralyzing secrecy and perceived shame of sexual abuse. Maggie Claire has written one of the most courageous memoirs I've ever read. Reviewer's Note: It is unfortunate that several small, yet needed editorial fixes exist throughout the book which may be a distraction from the excellent content of this memoir. Hopefully, these will be resolved with the next printing. ________________________________________
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Getting Help from "inside people",
This review is from: AS IF IT DIDN'T HAPPEN: A memoir of abuse, multiple personalities, and hope (Paperback)
Can you imagine the terror a child must feel when locked into a box for an entire day without food or drink? Can you imagine the pain a child must feel when beat with the buckle end of a belt? This was punishment for this author as a child, for not behaving like a "good girl" for her Uncle Ken when he and his friends wanted to use her body to have sex and make pornographic films. They sedated her with drugs so her child's body would relax through the pain of penetration. They also threatened to kill her brothers if she told or if she made them mad by not cooperating.
A SCN woman, under the pseudonym of Maggie Claire, has written about how she survived these horrendously evil crimes by developing Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This excerpt describes how "inside people" helped her endure the hundreds of incidents that began at age three and lasted until age twelve: "After a while, I learn to drift away even before things happen. Karen is always watching from the ceiling. When I am up with her, I separate myself from my body and from what is happening, and I don't feel anything. I can see Cathy or Catherine there on the table instead of me, and the sex things are happening to them. I can see other abuses from the ceiling where I float with Karen." There were many more "inside people" and each one had a specific role to play when traumatized as a child and again years later, when remembering and in therapy. A chapter is devoted to each one, describing what that character did to help the child survive the physical and psychological pain by "disappearing" up to the ceiling or elsewhere. The author describes coping mechanisms such as cutting oneself so badly that it erased the memory and feelings that were coming up. These stories were told under the tutelage of compassionate therapists. Diary entries and e-mails to them are intermingled with the author's child-like drawings and descriptions of how she communicated with her "inside people" as a child. I think As If It Didn't Happen is a must-read, to help us understand the disorder, to heighten our awareness of the crime of childhood sexual abuse, and to assure that we do our part toward preventing it and punishing the perpetrators. This book, in the end, is a moving account of how a strong, courageous and heroic person can recover and go on to lead a life that sets an example and helps others. The author worked for eleven years at a psychiatric hospital as a registered nurse, helping patients deal with their traumatic experiences. Now that she has retired from nursing, her goals include speaking and educating groups of people about surviving child abuse and saving homeless and abused animals. She is a loving mother to six adult children and four grandchildren. She also makes soft, cuddly blankets for newborns, sewing into each one her love and good wishes for the child's protection from harm. by Donna Van Straten Remmert for Story Circle Book Reviews reviewing books by, for, and about women
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Better than SYBIL.,
By Maggie Claire "Maggie Claire" (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
This review is from: AS IF IT DIDN'T HAPPEN: A memoir of abuse, multiple personalities, and hope (Paperback)
I was impressed with this book. It taught me a lot about multiple personalities and childhood sexual abuse. It was hard to read but I thought we should know about this terrible thing happening to children today. The book flowed nicely and provided many pictures that were interesting and telling. All in all, this book should be a movie and it would be better than the SYBIL movie.
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