August 18, 2025 • 24 mins
Shirley Enebrad is an accomplished author, grief coach, and retired television producer/writer with multiple awards to her name. Her work in investigative journalism, documentaries, talk shows, and news series earned her critical acclaim throughout her broadcasting career. In addition to writing a widely read blog, she has authored three impactful books:· Over the Rainbow Bridge: My Son's Journey to Heaven and Back· Six-Word Lessons on Coping with Grief· Six-Word Lessons: How to Survive a Devastating Diagnosis. Shirley joins Mark Alyn on this edition of Late Night Health.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Late Night Health continues. I'm marked Allen along with the
insane de l Wayne. Sometime during July, when Shirley and
I were talking about bringing her on the show, it
turns out that we share a birthday a few years apart,
but we do share a birthday. So welcome a birthday, buddy, Shirley,
(00:29):
and a breath.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Thanks for having me. I'm really pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
We're going to talk about growing up in an abusive
family and maybe some ways of getting out of that.
Would that be a good way of describing it?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Sure? Yeah. I don't know how into statistics you are,
but I read an article that said an estimated forty
million adults living now grew up in domestic violence abusive homes.
That's a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
That is a huge amount of people. Yeah, is it? Wow,
that's that's a good chunk of the population.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it was always the best
kept secret. You know, if you come from an abusive
background or a house where you witness domestic violence on
a regular basis, you don't talk about it. You know,
that's the big family no. No, And so I even
have relatives that didn't know that my dad was as
(01:41):
bad as he was. You know, they knew that he
had an alcohol problem. He wasn't. He wasn't like an
all the time alcoholic. He was a binge drinker, but
he was a mean drunk. And I don't know where
his frustrations came from necessarily, but he did take him
out on his wife and kids.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I'm speechless. And you have I think five brothers.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I had five brothers growing up. One of mine has
passed since we became adults, but you know, we all
have our quirks thanks to our dad.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And that leads me to to statistics that if you
grow up in an abusive family, you have a higher
percentage of being abusive in your own.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Family, or being abusive or being a continual victim. You know,
choosing somebody that's like the abuser is just as common
as becoming abusive. So you know, out of my five brothers,
two of them had drug no one had just a
(02:56):
drug problem, the other one had drug and alcohol. And
then my third brother had hasn't still has an alcohol problem.
So then there's three of us that didn't. But like
I said, we have our own quirks. When one of
my brothers is like super controlling how do he to
(03:16):
hate to hear me say this. He's very controlling, and
I think that was how he made he tried to
make sense of the world, was to to try to
make everything the way he thought it should be. And
then my other brother, he's just completely selfish, you know.
And he didn't have an he didn't have a substance problem,
but he has a personality problem.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
I think all siblings do.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, I love him. I love those guys anyway, But
you know, I don't think I would have chosen except
maybe one of them, maybe two as a friend, you
know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So what what do.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
How do you now? I know that you know writing
is cathartic and and so you're writing a book you
just finished. I think over the weekend your book on
this subject. We're doing a little pre promotion promotion on it.
Did you find the writing helpful to get out any angst?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
You know? It's funny because thankfully I'm married to a psychologist,
so that has helped me tremendously. But I have also
been a very resilient person, even from the time I
was a child, and so that helped a lot too,
because I think when I was fifteen, I figured out
that what was happening wasn't my fault, it was him
(04:42):
being broken, and so I was able to sort of
forgive him up to that point. Not that I made
excuses for his behavior because it was a born I mean,
some of the stuff that he did was just off
the charts, but I took the onus off myself. I
realized that it wasn't about me, it was about him
(05:02):
being screwed up. And so that helped tremendously. And I
think that people, especially young people that are going through it,
they need to they need to get that understanding, and
the sooner the better, because you can't blame yourself for
somebody else's bad behavior, you know, and when you're being abused,
you don't think about it because you're when you're young,
(05:23):
you think, oh, what did I do wrong? Why doesn't
he love me? Why does he treat us so poorly?
But when you figure out that that they're broken and
they don't really have control over their emotions for some reason.
You know. I didn't know my dad obviously before the war,
but he I think he had PTSD that was never
(05:44):
treated because they didn't recognize it till no, not till
after the Vietnam War. Did they even start to think
about giving people therapies?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
They don't. They still don't take care of our bets
as as well as they should. Yeah, what about your
grandfather on your father's side, was he abusive?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, you know, I used to when I was young.
I thought, oh, man, his dad must have been a
real jackass to him, for him to be this, for
him to be like this. And then I found out
from several of my aunties that their dad was lovely,
that he was loving and kind, and you know, so
I think my dad was either dropped on his head
one too many times by my grandma, or he was
(06:26):
badly wired when he was born, and then it was
just exacerbated by the PTSD from the war. When he
got drunk, he would go into these ridiculous rants about
the war, you know, and what he saw and what
he did, and and you know, I felt for him,
But then, you know, you get to a point where
you tune it out because I'm wanted. This is probably
(06:50):
why I don't like repetition. I have miss aphonia for
one thing, you know, like so repeated sounds bug the
crap out of me. But just repeating stuff all the
time drove me insane. So I do recognize that he
his problem was probably exacerbated by PTSD. But he had
(07:12):
six other brothers, and during World War Two, he and
three of his brothers and one of his sisters all
went to war. Oh yeah. And then one of his
younger brothers later went to the war in Korea. And
none of them, to my knowledge, beat their wife and kids.
(07:33):
So you know, you can't really and.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
It was it was physical abuse as well as mental abuse.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Oh yeah, emotional physical. My mom was like five foot
and nothing. I mean she was barely five foot, she
weighed maybe eighty five pounds, soaking wet, and you know,
he would bounce her around like a rag doll. And
it was very disturbing as a child to witness or
even hear it. In the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
When when your father wasn't drinking, was he loving at that? Now?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
He was never loving at all that I can recall.
I mean, he was distant, you know, which is typical
of PTSD people. He was just he was very selfish,
and he was not you know, for the longest time,
he was not even a good provider. He would he
(08:27):
would go to Alaska to work on the boats, the
crab boats and stuff, and you know, wouldn't send money
home and my my mom had six kids to feed,
and and then when he came back, you know, he
would go on a big splurge and take himself down
to visit his relatives in California. We lived in Washington
at the time. And then he would do that when
(08:49):
even when he got a stable job as a longshoreman,
he would every once in a while disappear with his
paycheck and go see his relatives. And then what was
really irritating to us as kids was he would treat
all of our cousins. He'd give them money, you know,
buy them ice cream and candy and potato chips and
stuff like that. We never got any of that stuff
(09:10):
because we were so poor, you know. So yeah, he
was very irritating.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
All right, we're going to take a break, and when
we come back, let's talk about the book and maybe
give some ground rules that people who have suffered abusive
parents have grown up in a family where yelling and
beating and all that was prevalent, and give them some
(09:39):
tips so that they can recover themselves. Because that's what
you had said. You encourage people to do.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
I'm Mark Allen.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I'm Mark Allen along with the insane Darryl Wayne, join
us at Late Night Help dot com. Late Night Help
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Speaker 4 (10:12):
You're listening to Late Night Health with Mark Allen.
Speaker 5 (10:14):
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Speaker 3 (13:49):
Of the solution.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Late Night Health continues. I'm Mark Allen, along with the
insane Daryl Wayne. Our guest is surely interbred. And you've
written a number of books. Actually, I have, on a
variety of topics.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Well, they're all nonfiction. My first book was called Over
the Rainbow Bridge, My Son's Journey from Here to Heaven,
and then my inventory burned in the Mallie wildfire, so
I had to rewrite it, and yeah, I had to
retype the whole thing, but I updated it and I
(14:28):
added more pictures, and I changed the subtitle to to
My Son's Journey to Heaven and Back because he did
come back. That's that's a whole other story. And then
I wrote two six word lesson books, one about coping
with grief and went about what to do when you
get a devastating diagnosis, and then this one is called
(14:50):
The Longshoreman's Daughter, and the subtitle of that is From
Chaos and Abuse to Survival a childhood memo are And
it's about my family situation, which you know, it's not
unique a lot of people. Obviously, if there's forty million
people that grew up with some type of domestic violence
(15:12):
or abuse, how experienced it. But it's how you deal
with it and come out the other end. I think
that makes the.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Difference in your writing. Was it cathartic? Did it help
you rationalize what your dad did?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Well, that's really an interesting question because I was just
thinking about that the other day writing it was I
wrote it really fast because we were waiting for results
for my daughter's cancer testing, and.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Which I'm we should point out we're negative, right, yes, yes, yes,
there was a.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yes or leukemia cells had been eradicated by the immunotherapy,
so that was ce celebration time. But in the time
that I was kind of stressed out waiting for the results,
I wrote this book and about my father and the
effects it had on my family, And you know, it's
basically a self help book memoir type, and I had
(16:19):
a lot of time to think about him, and it
did help me sort of get to a better place
of forgiveness, because I had forgiven him when I was fifteen,
when I figured out that it was his problem and
not mine. But you know, he continued to be the
way he was into adulthood for me, and I just
(16:41):
kind of tried to have as little contact as possible
with him, and he was okay sometimes. You know, that
was the hard part was because you never knew when
he was going to turn. He was like a jackal
and hide if you know, young people probably don't know
who that is. But he was like he was like
(17:01):
doctor Duckle and mister Hyde, and he could his mood
would change in a heartbeat and he would get cuckoo
out of nowhere. So living like that as you're growing
up or even you know, as a teenager, he liven
an adult when you don't know if somebody's going to
stay stable and neutral. Neutral was safe, but you just
(17:23):
never knew when you were going to be safe or not.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Did you love your dad and not like him?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I think so I just when I was a kid,
I thought, well, you're supposed to love your parents, you know.
And I thought he was a great dad until I
was about eight, because I used to sleep like the dead,
and so when he was pulling his crazy antics, I
wouldn't wake up. And I didn't know that he was
being that way, and I couldn't figure out why my
(17:54):
older brothers didn't like him. You know, here's a good story.
When I was five, we lived at my grandpa's house
in Silliness, and I was out in the in the backyard,
which was like a big, huge vegetable patch, playing and
my older brother came out and out of the bluie said.
He said, if mom and Dad got divorce, which I
didn't even know what divorce meant, who would you want
(18:17):
to live with? And I said dad? And he smacked
me across the face. So here goes abuse, another generation
of abuse, right, And I was holding my face, going,
what the heck's happening here? And so he asked me again,
and I said daddy, and he hit me again. And
then the third time I thought, Okay, the light bulb
has to go on here, Shirley, and I said, I
(18:38):
guess mom. So he stopped hitting me at that point
and walked away, and I was going, now, I'm not
even safe with my siblings, you know, So it did.
It was kind of creepy, but.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
I mean, when when your brother hit you, was it
a tap or a real smack.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
It was a smack, you know. And he was like
eleven and I was five, and he just hauled up
and smacked me good twice and until I figured out
that that was the wrong answer.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
But yeah, it's.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
It was hard to even know if I loved him
after I figured out, you know, what kind of a
monster he was, you know, it was just I wanted to,
but I don't. I'm not sure that I did.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And he's no longer with us.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
No, No, he died quite a while ago.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
God.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
So yeah. Then my mom died three months after him.
That was really hard because she had spent her whole
life taking care of this maniac, and we all had
plans for we all wanted to take her someplace special
after he She wasn't tied down, you know, taking care
of him, and then she she was so worn out
(19:50):
from taking care of him, she got bronchitis. It turned
into pneumonia and then she died, so yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I'm sorry. Yeah, what would you say is the number
one thing that somebody growing up in a family like
this where somebody is abusive, whether it's a brother or
a father, mother, where they physically beat you, what can
(20:20):
a can an adult do to mitigate this?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Well, I think as an adult, when you have a choice,
you can either have limited contact, no contact, you know,
or get therapy. Is the number one thing.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
I would say.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Really call your husband, Yeah, you get somebody that is qualified.
And you know what, It's funny because a lot of
people try therapy and then they go, oh, I didn't
like it. I didn't like it. It's because they didn't find
the right person. You know, there is a good therapist
out there for you, as long as you look for
a qualified person and and look for somebody that fits
(21:03):
with your vibe, you know. And then it's there's no
harm in saying, oh, well, if this didn't work out,
I'm going to go try somebody else be instead of
just giving up, which a lot of people do. And
I don't know about here in California, but in Washington State,
you can hang out a shingle and call yourself a
counselor with no background.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
No education.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah, yeah, it used to be. I only know if
it's still true. All you needed was a four hour
AIDS class. Can you believe that?
Speaker 1 (21:34):
No?
Speaker 2 (21:34):
I mean you have to have more certifications to cut
somebody's hair. So yeah, there's so you got to be careful.
I did a whole news story on it once when
I was still in the state of Washington about how
you got You've got to be careful because they could
screw up. I mean, there was that whole thing for
a while about repress memories and cults, you know, people
(21:58):
that were in Satanic cults and all that. That was
all memory manipulation, you know, by people that were qualified.
So yeah, you got to be careful.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
The and I also find that well, religious counselors, whether
they're clergy of any kind, often don't have the training.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, council.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
You know, patients, clients, practitioners, and not practitioners members of
the church. Yeah, I find that a little suspect to me, but.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
It's a lot of suspect. Really.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
When will the book be out along daughter?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Oh, probably within the next month. Yep. I'm just finishing
up which pictures to include and and getting ready to
call my publisher got it.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
That is really uh, that's something. And it'll be available.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
On Amazon, Amazon, Kindle.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, all those, all those, all those places. Surely, thank
you very much. I appreciated Happy birthday again too, and
thank you all right. And and Daryl was just a
week or so before.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Us, so oh, happy birthday, Daryl.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Thank you, Darryl.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Thank you very much for everything you do for me.
I appreciate it my pleasure. And I thank you in
the audience at home or in your car for tuning in.
We appreciate you as well. Have a good week, have
a great week, and most importantly, have a healthy week.
(23:46):
See you next time.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Bye bye for now.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Sh
Late Night Health continues. I'm marked Allen along with the
insane de l Wayne. Sometime during July, when Shirley and
I were talking about bringing her on the show, it
turns out that we share a birthday a few years apart,
but we do share a birthday. So welcome a birthday, buddy, Shirley,
(00:29):
and a breath.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Thanks for having me. I'm really pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
We're going to talk about growing up in an abusive
family and maybe some ways of getting out of that.
Would that be a good way of describing it?
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Sure? Yeah. I don't know how into statistics you are,
but I read an article that said an estimated forty
million adults living now grew up in domestic violence abusive homes.
That's a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
That is a huge amount of people. Yeah, is it? Wow,
that's that's a good chunk of the population.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it was always the best
kept secret. You know, if you come from an abusive
background or a house where you witness domestic violence on
a regular basis, you don't talk about it. You know,
that's the big family no. No, And so I even
have relatives that didn't know that my dad was as
(01:41):
bad as he was. You know, they knew that he
had an alcohol problem. He wasn't. He wasn't like an
all the time alcoholic. He was a binge drinker, but
he was a mean drunk. And I don't know where
his frustrations came from necessarily, but he did take him
out on his wife and kids.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I'm speechless. And you have I think five brothers.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I had five brothers growing up. One of mine has
passed since we became adults, but you know, we all
have our quirks thanks to our dad.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And that leads me to to statistics that if you
grow up in an abusive family, you have a higher
percentage of being abusive in your own.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Family, or being abusive or being a continual victim. You know,
choosing somebody that's like the abuser is just as common
as becoming abusive. So you know, out of my five brothers,
two of them had drug no one had just a
(02:56):
drug problem, the other one had drug and alcohol. And
then my third brother had hasn't still has an alcohol problem.
So then there's three of us that didn't. But like
I said, we have our own quirks. When one of
my brothers is like super controlling how do he to
(03:16):
hate to hear me say this. He's very controlling, and
I think that was how he made he tried to
make sense of the world, was to to try to
make everything the way he thought it should be. And
then my other brother, he's just completely selfish, you know.
And he didn't have an he didn't have a substance problem,
but he has a personality problem.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
I think all siblings do.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, I love him. I love those guys anyway, But
you know, I don't think I would have chosen except
maybe one of them, maybe two as a friend, you
know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (03:51):
So what what do.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
How do you now? I know that you know writing
is cathartic and and so you're writing a book you
just finished. I think over the weekend your book on
this subject. We're doing a little pre promotion promotion on it.
Did you find the writing helpful to get out any angst?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
You know? It's funny because thankfully I'm married to a psychologist,
so that has helped me tremendously. But I have also
been a very resilient person, even from the time I
was a child, and so that helped a lot too,
because I think when I was fifteen, I figured out
that what was happening wasn't my fault, it was him
(04:42):
being broken, and so I was able to sort of
forgive him up to that point. Not that I made
excuses for his behavior because it was a born I mean,
some of the stuff that he did was just off
the charts, but I took the onus off myself. I
realized that it wasn't about me, it was about him
(05:02):
being screwed up. And so that helped tremendously. And I
think that people, especially young people that are going through it,
they need to they need to get that understanding, and
the sooner the better, because you can't blame yourself for
somebody else's bad behavior, you know, and when you're being abused,
you don't think about it because you're when you're young,
(05:23):
you think, oh, what did I do wrong? Why doesn't
he love me? Why does he treat us so poorly?
But when you figure out that that they're broken and
they don't really have control over their emotions for some reason.
You know. I didn't know my dad obviously before the war,
but he I think he had PTSD that was never
(05:44):
treated because they didn't recognize it till no, not till
after the Vietnam War. Did they even start to think
about giving people therapies?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
They don't. They still don't take care of our bets
as as well as they should. Yeah, what about your
grandfather on your father's side, was he abusive?
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Well, you know, I used to when I was young.
I thought, oh, man, his dad must have been a
real jackass to him, for him to be this, for
him to be like this. And then I found out
from several of my aunties that their dad was lovely,
that he was loving and kind, and you know, so
I think my dad was either dropped on his head
one too many times by my grandma, or he was
(06:26):
badly wired when he was born, and then it was
just exacerbated by the PTSD from the war. When he
got drunk, he would go into these ridiculous rants about
the war, you know, and what he saw and what
he did, and and you know, I felt for him,
But then, you know, you get to a point where
you tune it out because I'm wanted. This is probably
(06:50):
why I don't like repetition. I have miss aphonia for
one thing, you know, like so repeated sounds bug the
crap out of me. But just repeating stuff all the
time drove me insane. So I do recognize that he
his problem was probably exacerbated by PTSD. But he had
(07:12):
six other brothers, and during World War Two, he and
three of his brothers and one of his sisters all
went to war. Oh yeah. And then one of his
younger brothers later went to the war in Korea. And
none of them, to my knowledge, beat their wife and kids.
(07:33):
So you know, you can't really and.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
It was it was physical abuse as well as mental abuse.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Oh yeah, emotional physical. My mom was like five foot
and nothing. I mean she was barely five foot, she
weighed maybe eighty five pounds, soaking wet, and you know,
he would bounce her around like a rag doll. And
it was very disturbing as a child to witness or
even hear it. In the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
When when your father wasn't drinking, was he loving at that? Now?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
He was never loving at all that I can recall.
I mean, he was distant, you know, which is typical
of PTSD people. He was just he was very selfish,
and he was not you know, for the longest time,
he was not even a good provider. He would he
(08:27):
would go to Alaska to work on the boats, the
crab boats and stuff, and you know, wouldn't send money
home and my my mom had six kids to feed,
and and then when he came back, you know, he
would go on a big splurge and take himself down
to visit his relatives in California. We lived in Washington
at the time. And then he would do that when
(08:49):
even when he got a stable job as a longshoreman,
he would every once in a while disappear with his
paycheck and go see his relatives. And then what was
really irritating to us as kids was he would treat
all of our cousins. He'd give them money, you know,
buy them ice cream and candy and potato chips and
stuff like that. We never got any of that stuff
(09:10):
because we were so poor, you know. So yeah, he
was very irritating.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
All right, we're going to take a break, and when
we come back, let's talk about the book and maybe
give some ground rules that people who have suffered abusive
parents have grown up in a family where yelling and
beating and all that was prevalent, and give them some
(09:39):
tips so that they can recover themselves. Because that's what
you had said. You encourage people to do.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
I'm Mark Allen.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
I'm Mark Allen along with the insane Darryl Wayne, join
us at Late Night Help dot com. Late Night Help
is proud of our partnership with the EBC, the Evolutionary
Business Council. Check them out at Ebcouncil dot com.
Speaker 4 (10:12):
You're listening to Late Night Health with Mark Allen.
Speaker 5 (10:14):
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Speaker 3 (13:49):
Of the solution.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
Late Night Health continues. I'm Mark Allen, along with the
insane Daryl Wayne. Our guest is surely interbred. And you've
written a number of books. Actually, I have, on a
variety of topics.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
Well, they're all nonfiction. My first book was called Over
the Rainbow Bridge, My Son's Journey from Here to Heaven,
and then my inventory burned in the Mallie wildfire, so
I had to rewrite it, and yeah, I had to
retype the whole thing, but I updated it and I
(14:28):
added more pictures, and I changed the subtitle to to
My Son's Journey to Heaven and Back because he did
come back. That's that's a whole other story. And then
I wrote two six word lesson books, one about coping
with grief and went about what to do when you
get a devastating diagnosis, and then this one is called
(14:50):
The Longshoreman's Daughter, and the subtitle of that is From
Chaos and Abuse to Survival a childhood memo are And
it's about my family situation, which you know, it's not
unique a lot of people. Obviously, if there's forty million
people that grew up with some type of domestic violence
(15:12):
or abuse, how experienced it. But it's how you deal
with it and come out the other end. I think
that makes the.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Difference in your writing. Was it cathartic? Did it help
you rationalize what your dad did?
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Well, that's really an interesting question because I was just
thinking about that the other day writing it was I
wrote it really fast because we were waiting for results
for my daughter's cancer testing, and.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
Which I'm we should point out we're negative, right, yes, yes, yes,
there was a.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
Yes or leukemia cells had been eradicated by the immunotherapy,
so that was ce celebration time. But in the time
that I was kind of stressed out waiting for the results,
I wrote this book and about my father and the
effects it had on my family, And you know, it's
basically a self help book memoir type, and I had
(16:19):
a lot of time to think about him, and it
did help me sort of get to a better place
of forgiveness, because I had forgiven him when I was fifteen,
when I figured out that it was his problem and
not mine. But you know, he continued to be the
way he was into adulthood for me, and I just
(16:41):
kind of tried to have as little contact as possible
with him, and he was okay sometimes. You know, that
was the hard part was because you never knew when
he was going to turn. He was like a jackal
and hide if you know, young people probably don't know
who that is. But he was like he was like
(17:01):
doctor Duckle and mister Hyde, and he could his mood
would change in a heartbeat and he would get cuckoo
out of nowhere. So living like that as you're growing
up or even you know, as a teenager, he liven
an adult when you don't know if somebody's going to
stay stable and neutral. Neutral was safe, but you just
(17:23):
never knew when you were going to be safe or not.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Did you love your dad and not like him?
Speaker 2 (17:32):
I think so I just when I was a kid,
I thought, well, you're supposed to love your parents, you know.
And I thought he was a great dad until I
was about eight, because I used to sleep like the dead,
and so when he was pulling his crazy antics, I
wouldn't wake up. And I didn't know that he was
being that way, and I couldn't figure out why my
(17:54):
older brothers didn't like him. You know, here's a good story.
When I was five, we lived at my grandpa's house
in Silliness, and I was out in the in the backyard,
which was like a big, huge vegetable patch, playing and
my older brother came out and out of the bluie said.
He said, if mom and Dad got divorce, which I
didn't even know what divorce meant, who would you want
(18:17):
to live with? And I said dad? And he smacked
me across the face. So here goes abuse, another generation
of abuse, right, And I was holding my face, going,
what the heck's happening here? And so he asked me again,
and I said daddy, and he hit me again. And
then the third time I thought, Okay, the light bulb
has to go on here, Shirley, and I said, I
(18:38):
guess mom. So he stopped hitting me at that point
and walked away, and I was going, now, I'm not
even safe with my siblings, you know, So it did.
It was kind of creepy, but.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
I mean, when when your brother hit you, was it
a tap or a real smack.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
It was a smack, you know. And he was like
eleven and I was five, and he just hauled up
and smacked me good twice and until I figured out
that that was the wrong answer.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
But yeah, it's.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
It was hard to even know if I loved him
after I figured out, you know, what kind of a
monster he was, you know, it was just I wanted to,
but I don't. I'm not sure that I did.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
And he's no longer with us.
Speaker 2 (19:26):
No, No, he died quite a while ago.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
God.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
So yeah. Then my mom died three months after him.
That was really hard because she had spent her whole
life taking care of this maniac, and we all had
plans for we all wanted to take her someplace special
after he She wasn't tied down, you know, taking care
of him, and then she she was so worn out
(19:50):
from taking care of him, she got bronchitis. It turned
into pneumonia and then she died, so yeah.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
I'm sorry. Yeah, what would you say is the number
one thing that somebody growing up in a family like
this where somebody is abusive, whether it's a brother or
a father, mother, where they physically beat you, what can
(20:20):
a can an adult do to mitigate this?
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Well, I think as an adult, when you have a choice,
you can either have limited contact, no contact, you know,
or get therapy. Is the number one thing.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
I would say.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Really call your husband, Yeah, you get somebody that is qualified.
And you know what, It's funny because a lot of
people try therapy and then they go, oh, I didn't
like it. I didn't like it. It's because they didn't find
the right person. You know, there is a good therapist
out there for you, as long as you look for
a qualified person and and look for somebody that fits
(21:03):
with your vibe, you know. And then it's there's no
harm in saying, oh, well, if this didn't work out,
I'm going to go try somebody else be instead of
just giving up, which a lot of people do. And
I don't know about here in California, but in Washington State,
you can hang out a shingle and call yourself a
counselor with no background.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
No education.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah, yeah, it used to be. I only know if
it's still true. All you needed was a four hour
AIDS class. Can you believe that?
Speaker 1 (21:34):
No?
Speaker 2 (21:34):
I mean you have to have more certifications to cut
somebody's hair. So yeah, there's so you got to be careful.
I did a whole news story on it once when
I was still in the state of Washington about how
you got You've got to be careful because they could
screw up. I mean, there was that whole thing for
a while about repress memories and cults, you know, people
(21:58):
that were in Satanic cults and all that. That was
all memory manipulation, you know, by people that were qualified.
So yeah, you got to be careful.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
The and I also find that well, religious counselors, whether
they're clergy of any kind, often don't have the training.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Yeah, council.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
You know, patients, clients, practitioners, and not practitioners members of
the church. Yeah, I find that a little suspect to me, but.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
It's a lot of suspect. Really.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
When will the book be out along daughter?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Oh, probably within the next month. Yep. I'm just finishing
up which pictures to include and and getting ready to
call my publisher got it.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
That is really uh, that's something. And it'll be available.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
On Amazon, Amazon, Kindle.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, all those, all those, all those places. Surely, thank
you very much. I appreciated Happy birthday again too, and
thank you all right. And and Daryl was just a
week or so before.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Us, so oh, happy birthday, Daryl.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
Thank you, Darryl.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Thank you very much for everything you do for me.
I appreciate it my pleasure. And I thank you in
the audience at home or in your car for tuning in.
We appreciate you as well. Have a good week, have
a great week, and most importantly, have a healthy week.
(23:46):
See you next time.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Bye bye for now.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Sh
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