Dang, I hate making grammatical errors and posting before I catch them.

Puts me in the spin cycle and the voices start berating me for making a mistake.

And it's all downhill from there...

Remembering the abuse is hard once we have blocked it out. I had thoughts of "did that really happen?". Then recalling the exact day,what I was wearing and even the song on the radio pretty much confirmed I was a nut job.

It sucks, but the flash backs and memories have to surface so we can heal. Take it a day at a time.

I didn't even catch your error! :)

I find it astonishing so many of us start remembering in our 40's.

I achieved adulthood with no childhood memories, whatsoever. I was around 20 when an army therapist spotted it. My family is so glaringly dysfunctional that there was no doubt to the general nature of the memories. The therapist was unable to convince me there was any valid purpose in remembering. Memories bad.

In my early 30s I was still applying sealers on the memory blocks and routinely raging at my young children and disappearing into the desert for days at a time to protect those young children from their combat trained mama. I began to see the point of remembering. That was in the mid 80s.

In the decades since I have quit fighting the memories, I have come to think of those memory blocks as a dam to a reservoir. When the dam breaks, it gushes. All you can do in the face of the gushing force is stay afloat and wait for the crest to pass.

Any hate sucks. Literally. It will suck the life out of the most lively of us.