Tamara Echols

Surviving Childhood Trauma

As a survivor of extreme sexual, physical and emotional abuse as a child, I allowed what was happening to me to affect me as a teenager and then as an adult. I developed low self-esteem, anger issues and anorexia that almost killed me. I had no one advocate for me after I told my mother what was happening at the hands of her own brother. Her response was I must have been a child abuser in a previous life and I was getting my karma paid back to me for doing that. She did NOTHING to her brother. She actually embraced him. She forced me to endure family get-together's with her brother, I was not allowed to have a voice or an opinion or a childhood. He was sexually abusing my sister and my cousin too but I received the worst from him because I was the fighter. I would kick him and punch him when he touched me. He threatened to kill me several times if I told. He even went so far as to put dead animals in my lunch box to "show me" what he would do to me if I told. He would chase me with running chainsaws like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre character. To this day, hearing a chainsaw gives me anxiety. I finally got away from the sexual abuse when one of the twelve husbands my mother had was transferred out of the country for a government job when I was 13 years old. I had endured torturous abuse from the age of 4 to 13. I could not get over what happened to me and I could not forgive my mother for allowing it to go on as long as it did and doing nothing and not protecting me.