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fayerody said:
good friends are few and far between...family is everywhere.

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Fay, you are right, good friends take the time to look at who you are, and accept what they see. It is truly voluntary.

Jen, I appreciate everything you say, no need to comment.

There is another secondary point that I think is worth noting. I think this may happen more with males, but I don't know.

When youngsters are going through chaos at home, they often go into the world with a great big 'chip' on the shoulder, and trouble follows them around like a bad smell. As a kid, I used to get into a lot of fights, I would always fight with men much bigger than me, at one time I was 16 and the other guy was 21-22. I liked to go back and show the blood to my father; I wanted him to see what was happening to me. He just got more angry. When I had some teeth knocked out he just said "Tomorrow you'll cry like a baby". I took great pride in showing him that I didn't cry, I took it.

At some level I thought that he might realise that the trouble was about him, and not other people, but he never realised it. He never stopped the tormenting, almost to the day he died.

My point is that, when we have this stuff at home, it is very difficult to make friendships outside the home. I would say that I had no close friends between the ages of 14 and 25, just people that I hung out with. I kept the secrets and denied everything, and I must have looked like a bag of nerves pretty much all the time.

The only emotion I felt about my home life was shame, for me and for my mother, that we allowed this misery to happen to us. I mean, you just don't talk about this kind of stuff in school.

I reacted so badly, very arrogant and bragging about all kinds of stuff, all a great big cover up. I was good at it and I just made lots of enemies through it, no one seemed to see through the smokescreen. After the age of 30, and with the geographical distance from my father, life slowly improved.

So what I'm saying is that friendships don't come easy to survivors, especially when the trouble is still going on. It takes a lucky break, maybe a youth leader or a teacher, to see it and break through. Usually, families like ours are isolated, as this suits the abuser, so outside contact is minimal, as it was in our case.

So, for young people in the situation here and now, friendships of the quality needed to start the changes are unlikely, and this is tragic. I think that the good friendships come with the healing process, and that is further down the line.

In the meantime there are many dangers lurking for young people in current abuse situations, as we all know. The deck is stacked against them.

Cheers, M