My sister and I were emotionally abused by our mother and stepfather. My mother was hopelessly in love with him that she had no use for us, and of course, he hated us so we kept out of the way as much as possible. It was basically like being put in a foster home.

The funny thing about our early life is that from the outside, our family looked perfect--mother and stepfather had a business, he was a bigwig in the community and in everything, etc., etc. I did have a friend of theirs who had come to the house when I was a young teen tell me how her husband refused to go back after seeing how poorly we were treated. That really helped as life was the Twilight Zone as SF pretended he didn't know what he was doing.

I'm just starting to realize how many of my issues go back to all of that.