Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 3080

Tonight's special guest is Maureen Seel from Brooklyn, New York, a child abuse survivor,  an artist and an author. She grew up in Missoula, Montana, was raised Evangelical Christian and her mother, who struggled both with borderline personality disorder and poly-substance abuse, held very strong fundamentalist beliefs. "Due to her own past trauma, my mother had taught me to fear Hell and to fear her," Maureen says. "Our home life was frequently unstable due to her unpredictable mood shifts. Due to this, I have lived my entire life with this feeling of innate 'badness' or 'brokenness'." Maureen moved away for college and met her husband. "I constantly feared friends would leave, my boss would fire me and my husband would divorce me," she explains. "I believed I was inherently broken. I believed that if people left me, I would deserve it." After her mother's death, things got exponentially worse. "I turned to disordered eating to gain some semblance of control and was sent to inpatient treatment 2016. That was a wake up call, but I wouldn't finally get on the road to genuine and lasting recovery until this last year." The couple moved to New York City and for the first time since college, she found herself without work and unsure of her path in life. "I decided to write my memoir, 'I'm Not Bad'. The lessons I learned along the way are applicable to many who are trying to work on self-compassion. I plan to use my writing to speak up for those who can't." She concludes, "Healing isn't linear, and I know I will get turned around at times. Only now I feel better equipped to overcome these challenges, since I've decided to claim my story and take charge of that narrative."