One of the hardest things for kids to overcome is being taught that their feelings and perceptions of the world were wrong or bad. They can't tell what is right after that, because they have had to question themselves and everything that they think.

I don't know if anyone would really consider me to have been abused. Nothing was really big, anyway. But I was not allowed to do things for myself. I didn't know what to do with my anger, because there was no place for it to go, and I couldn't talk to anyone. When I started trying to talk to people outside of the family, my sister always seemed to be there to inform them that I was just wrong and selfish and bad for saying that there was anything wrong. But that is probably a distortion too.