Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 1176

Tonight's special guest is Laura Landgraf from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, an author, activist, speaker, and life coach. Her mission is empowering women and men who survived childhood abuse. In the process, she believes we protect our children. She encourages her audiences to question, reach, journey to self-discovery, believe in themselves and soar Laura is a survivor of child sexual abuse and trauma, is soon to come out with book on the subject. "The Fifth Sister: A Memoir" recounts how she grew up in a wildly dysfunctional family, surviving complex trauma. It is a hard, gritty, multilayered story with hope that it's possible for women to stop the madness. For eight years Laura and her four sisters struggled to survive the nightmare of sexual and emotional abuse. She lived it; the isolation, the fear, the losses, the manipulation and control, the tentative and fragile bonds with one another, finding humor, and a burgeoning sense of self. As an adult, she buried memories of her family’s dysfunction and strove to build a life as close to perfect as she could imagine. Then, on a rare visit to her parents’ home, Laura walked into a room and saw her father playing “Tiger” with her own children. Memories flooded back: the game of “Tiger” was always the prelude to molestation. Stunned to discover that her father was still an incestuous abuser, she faced her past to protect her children, for their children’s sake. Going undercover, Laura was able to prove a twenty-year history of molestation, which her mother aided and abetted—at first passively and later actively. Be sure to check out her BLOG