Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 2143

Tonight's special guest is Edward (Ward) Schline from Cambridge, Maryland, who was raped at age 12 by an older step-relative. "Things started to spin wildly from that," he says. A preemie at birth, Ward is hearing-impaired. The hearing aids he wore made him “different,” so he was bullied from second grade to senior high school – when he stopped wearing his hearing aids. Unable to hear well resulted in Ward losing his tuition assistance so he became a carpenter for 35 years. Ward relates that, if his bosses “asked me to do something I would do so, but if they told me in the wrong tone, I fired them and walked off the job.” Self-medicating with alcohol and on narcotics from a knee injury, he was diagnosed with “depression with psychosis” and, later, PTSD. He attempted suicide in 1995 and is currently in therapy. Recently divorced from an abusive person after 21 years of marriage and domestic violence, Ward tends to talk to people who are in the midst of crisis, because he's comfortable there in that zone. He says he knows crisis better than anyone else, it seems. He's chatted with a lot of people and, most of the time, he just listens and is supportive, sharing articles to read and connecting them with other advocates. "At this point in my life I am humble yet with gratitude, over the hump and past most of the effects of PTSD." He goes on, "In between the stimulus and the response there is a time where we chose what reaction to have, and that's where I regain control. [Now] I choose a non-traumatizing response."