[fireman02169]

Im looking for a good doc for a friend of mine who lives on the north shore area of Boston. She has decided to tell me about her childhood and I believe she needs professional help. She has never shared this information with anyone else including her husband and she has received very little counseling.

She suffers from night terrors, severe anxiety attacks, and is self medicating with Benzodiazapines.... basically whichever ones she can get her hands on. She is currently trying to ween down what she is taking and is having a difficult time. She has also been a cocaine abuser (which I have managed to get her to stop) and abuses flexiril and soma for "back problems" and marijuanna. She denies using any opiates. Currently she is abusing Xanax, Ativan, and Vallium and she is trying to ween off of the xanax and Ativan.

She hasnt even told me the full story, but she was left in the care of neighbors when she was a small child who raped her, and tortured her physically and mentally from ages 4-7. She tried to tell her mother about it at one point and the mother slapped her and made her apologize to her abusers.

She told me she has an extreme fear of the dark and cellars / basements because thats where they would take her and bind her with wire to the furnace and rape her. She has had multiple surgeries on her vagina and ****/colon as a result. Im still not sure if they penetrated her with any foreign objects, but she has led me to suspect this.
When she has sex now she says it feels like being stabbed with an ice-pick due to the scar tissue...

Thats all she had told me until the other day when she hinted that the sexual abuse wasnt even the worst of her ordeal. They used to threaten to cook and eat her. They described that her skin would blister and they would peel it off and eat her. They would stuff her in an oven and turn it on holding the door closed until she was nearly unconscious from pain and asphyxiation. The oven racks would leave burn marks on her skin which her torturers would scuff out with brillo pads until they bled to hide the marks, and tell the mother that she had fallen..

The mother had sufferd through rape as well in her own past and according to my friend, "wasn't able to handle it properly". The father was away overseas for long periods of time for his work. She said as a child, when she said her prayers at night she prayed to die in her sleep everyday. She was extremely suicidal and if she wasn't so young and unknowledgable as to HOW to end your own life, she would have done it without hesitation.

The abuse stopped finally when she and her family moved away from her attackers... She has since had a very hard time with social disorders and drug abuse.

She is a very intelligent 33 year old woman. She speaks 2 languages, and currently works as an LPN in a home for the Psychotic "because it makes her feel more normal"... She is an amazingly sweet and caring, loveable and highly functioning person who cares for 5 other people who live with her in a sort of impromptu group home of sorts with her husband. I have convinced her to seek out professional help to detoxify and get the proper medication and guidance that she deserves. She does have health care through her work.

Thank you for any help that anyone can offer. Please, I am not looking to get solicited... I am looking to help and extremely complicated, very nice young woman with a past that I think will make the strongest of constitutions cringe...

I think this woman is at a crucial point where she has decided to finally face her past and deal with it appropriately and i fear that if it doesn't work out, she may not recover.