She awoke one night to find her paternal grandfather kneeling beside the bed, his hand stroking her private parts. He warned her to be quiet or risk “getting her ass whipped.” That touching quickly escalated to oral sex and other intimacies.
Tammy Gagnon was just nine year old when this molestation filled her young mind with guilt and rage. Like so many other victims of this horrendous crime, she felt the blame was hers, not the abuser’s. Under the strict rule that “what happens in our house stays in our house” and could not be discussed even with other family members, Tammy could not fill her desperate need to share her distress.
Despite the dysfunctionality of her home life—the physical abuse of family members by her alcoholic father and the austerity of her rigid mother who cloaked very controversy with silence—Tammy’s early childhood was relatively comfortable. She was well-behaved at home and an “A” student in school.
At age 14, as her body began to mature and her emotional needs changed, the consequences of the trauma bottled-up within her became evident. Tammy ran away from home with a carnival roust-about. The drinking she had begun a year earlier increased and her addiction to drugs began... http://www.Tammygagnon.com
Copyright 2011 Tammy Gagnon.
