My mother and my older brother were my abusers. I've always had this underlying feeling of letdown, that no one else in the family stepped in to intercede. It was clearly out in the open, within the family. Being older now and able to understand a lot of what I saw going on around me, I have to think that my mother was lucky someone in the family did not kill her. Aside from my own abuse, I look back and see how the whole family was at her mercy. She had gotten friends of her's to beat my Uncle; her brother; senseless, conspired with an attorney to steal my Uncles business from him, controlled my Uncles relationships and that is only the beginning. With my grandfather, she showed no compassion for him after my grandmother died, often telling him that he should be dead instead. My grandfather had opened his home to us to live in and she did nothing but penalize him for that and sneak other drunks in the window, jeapordizing all of our safety. With her husbands, she was terribly physically and verbally abusive. Each and every holiday would ultimately be ruined by one of her lunatic like, tyrades. Extended family no longer came around, because she was just too much to stomach and I suppose at some point they wrote us all of figuring that we were all one and the same for allowing it. When my brother became older, he joined in and they were a team of destructive forces that literally destroyed our family. How could these two be allowed so much power over all our lives. I was the only one to say NO, and fight back and eventually confront them and leave them to rot in their own sickness. What used to be a large and happy family was reduced to fragments and it sickens me to hear the remaining couple people left, talk about these two as if they were saints.