Stop Child Abuse Now (SCAN) - 1903

Tonight's special guest is Debra Hunt from Glendale, Arizona, a new NAASCA family member and volunteer. She began life in Fontana, California, in a childhood home marked by mental and emotional trauma, and outward displays of hatefulness. Yes, she was given opportunities participate in normal childhood activities like choir, dance, and cheer-leading .. to look like a shining star. But meanwhile Debra experienced a home-life filled with ridicule, hatefulness, belittling, and silence .. deafening silence. There was extreme physical and mental abuse. Invisible but enduring scars of childhood trauma laid the path for adolescence. Feeling alone, scared and unloved, she embarked upon her teen years in true rebellious style. She began sneaking off. Debra began seeking attention and validation through drug and alcohol use, and risky sexual encounters. She was molested and raped as a teen, and later, in young adulthood, she endured Domestic Violence and more victimization. After graduation she got married and had a child. When her husband left her homeless with a baby, Debra picked up her life and moved on. In 1994 she met the second man she would wed. After the first seven years she noticed an abusive pattern in her life. She'd brought childhood feelings of emptiness and worthlessness into adulthood. Debra had learned that to 'feel safe' she had to shut up and take it. However bad things seemed, she believed the alternatives, real or imagined, would be worse. Debra realized these thoughts, this seeming truths, were the result of trauma from an abusive childhood. But things are improving now. Currently, after a 23 year marriage, Debra's surviving a divorce. She's begun her survivor journey, determined to heal, and is documenting it in the new book she's writing, “I Am Hunt.”