(Remember that my answers to these questions are only examples. What matters are your own answers.)

Who is the safest person for you to express anger around?

The first thing these abusers did was essentially steal my parents. They made it very clear that if anyone ever found out, that person or those people would be killed. They made certain I believed this. These monstrous men not only sought to embed their anger in me, but also their fear of discovery. As a child I was essentially a sponge, an easy container for the monstrous men to try to unload their burden of anger energy in. I was successful in hiding the abuse from my parents partially because they could have never guessed that things like that could even happen. Knowledge about cult abuse was not widespread in 1966. They completely trusted the person that secretly took me to the monstrous men. They no doubt noticed a change in me, but simply could not explain it and just did the best they could. I aimed the anger and frustration of having to keep this secret at my mother, because she was the safest person to aim it at. She would not respond in kind and she would still love me. Unfortunately, she probably thought it was something about her that made me express anger towards her.

My mother died several years ago. It occurred to me to tell the being who had been my mother that if she was now aware of the abuse I experienced, it was not her fault. She was in no way to blame for not having been able to protect me. And this released me to see how I had gone out of my way to protect her from the knowledge of the abuse, when at the same time I was so fierce about not wanting her to protect me from other things like dogs and lightning. Now, I can see that we do the best we can with what we have at any given time. And I’m free to forgive myself for the ways I treated my mother when I was a child doing the best I could, while she was doing the best she could.