~Tara Overzat

Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families Presentation by Tara Overzat

Related Posts

Not All Traumas Are Alike, But They All Still Hurt

Taking Things Out of the Shadows and Into the Light

Go to my Products Page to get your advanced copy and secure your place on my acknowledgments page!

If you haven’t already, check out the excerpt below, or watch me reading the excerpt on YouTube.

Excerpt of “Reverse Psychology” by Tara Overzat

Synopsis

Marla Conroy finds herself an adult, depressed and full of regret. She starts writing a letter to a person from her past and finds that she can’t stop. As she talks about her childhood and her teenage years, a story unfolds that not even she fully comprehends. Marla’s mother is pathologically focused on winning back Marla’s father, a troubled alcoholic with a charming façade, and uses the trust and love of the people around her to this end. Marla, however, wants nothing to do with her father and finds herself caught in the middle of her neglectful mother’s plans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g2d45qf5zM[/youtube

Go to my Products Page to get your advanced copy and secure your place on my acknowledgments page!

If you haven’t already, check out the excerpt below, or watch me reading the excerpt on YouTube.

Excerpt of “Reverse Psychology” by Tara Overzat

Synopsis

Marla Conroy finds herself an adult, depressed and full of regret. She starts writing a letter to a person from her past and finds that she can’t stop. As she talks about her childhood and her teenage years, a story unfolds that not even she fully comprehends. Marla’s mother is pathologically focused on winning back Marla’s father, a troubled alcoholic with a charming façade, and uses the trust and love of the people around her to this end. Marla, however, wants nothing to do with her father and finds herself caught in the middle of her neglectful mother’s plans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*****

Marla Conroy finds herself an adult, depressed and full of regret. She starts writing a letter to a person from her past and finds that she can’t stop. As she talks about her childhood and her teenage years, a story unfolds that not even she fully comprehends. Marla’s mother is pathologically focused on winning back Marla’s father, a troubled alcoholic with a charming façade, and uses the trust and love of the people around her to this end. Marla, however, wants nothing to do with her father and finds herself caught in the middle of her neglectful mother’s plans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I can only hope that appropriate sentencing of child abusers has come along way since the late 90s, but I am not sure that is the case. It is as if there is an unspoken understanding that children are the “property” of their parents, so that we should not judge the methods of those parents lightly. It’s a sad, cruel world when we stop holding people up to the standards of normal, moral decency.

Chelsea, courtesy of oprah.com

Chelsea Rogers, the girl found locked in a cage in a cold, unheated basement in Wisconsin during November 1997, appeared on Oprah today. Her parents received lenient sentences for abusing her and her and her 4 brothers, initially serving only 1 year of jail time at the county level, where both parents were allowed to leave the jail for up to 60 hours a week. That doesn’t sound like jail to me. That sounds like free rent. Apparently, the Judge Steven Weinke had been swayed by testimony that the young Chelsea had a mental health diagnosis – oppositional defiant disorder. Because, yes, the more troubled or sick your children are the more you should be allowed to abuse them, he seems to think. As does Elisa Baker.

Is it that child abuse is so hard to talk about that justices like Weinke may do as they please in handing out sentences? Is child abuse perhaps so pervasive that there are people on the bench who tacitly agree with the tortuous tactics? Is that how these slaps on the wrist occur?

Chelsea is not alone. Jail sentences have been found to be too lenient in the UK as well. Longer jail time can be a deterrent to the horrors of child abuse, and it is about time that it become the norm and not the exception. It is an injustice to have an abusive parent be on probation or receive a sentence as light as a year when the after effects of child abuse can last a lifetime.

Related articles:

Details in dog cage case show parents’ struggles–Couple could not cope with daughter’s mental disorder, experts say

Why wouldn’t she believe she can get out?’

Zahra Baker Update: Stepmom only suspect in disabled N.C. girl’s death, say police

Punishment for Child Abusers

*****

Marla Conroy finds herself an adult, depressed and full of regret. She starts writing a letter to a person from her past and finds that she can’t stop. As she talks about her childhood and her teenage years, a story unfolds that not even she fully comprehends. Marla’s mother is pathologically focused on winning back Marla’s father, a troubled alcoholic with a charming façade, and uses the trust and love of the people around her to this end. Marla, however, wants nothing to do with her father and finds herself caught in the middle of her neglectful mother’s plans.

Excerpt of “Reverse Psychology” by Tara Overzat

A year or two after I turned eighteen, I gave serious thought to changing my last name from Overzat to my mother’s maiden name. I didn’t want anything I did to be associated with someone I had not wanted in my life for years. The name for me was tainted.

I changed my mind after realizing that a lot of people knew me by my original name. These people didn’t necessarily know anyone else with that name. Even as a young adult, I had somehow made the name my own. I wasn’t an Overzat, I was Tara Overzat.

I’m glad I changed my mind. By leading the best life that I know how, by trying the best I can and staying on course, maybe I can fix the name a bit. Perhaps add a positive connotation to it, at least for myself when I look down at my driver’s license. A name change would’ve been running away from the problem, not fixing it.

Related Articles:

Someone Will Listen

We Are Not Interdependent

How to Live With Child Abuse

Children shouldn’t have to be parenting themselves – worried about danger, taking precautions, and trying to tell their parents what has to be done.

When I was living abroad, a friend told me a mole that I had ignored for years looked awfully suspicious. He made me promise to have it looked at ASAP. Once I found a reputable doctor at a Western-style facility (boy, could I tell you stories about some of the “doctors” abroad), she looked at me and though she remained calm, she told me quickly and directly, “Yes, we will definitely need to excise that.”

Luckily this awful-looking mole was benign. A couple of years ago, I had yet another spot looked at and was told it had to be biopsied. It too, thank the Lord, was benign.

Yeah, I grew up in Florida and was outside a lot… but this hits me hard for another reason.

For awhile when I was a kid, we were forced to go to the beach. I say forced because it wasn’t the usual few hours at the beach. It was an all day ordeal, spent trying to entertain ourselves whilst our caregiver sat in the broiling sun passive aggressively killing himself with white, red, and blue cans of Budweiser. While we were allowed to put on sunscreen in the morning, we were verboten to reapply it. Whenever I asked, I was angrily denied. As a result we often got very sunburnt by the end of the day.

My skin would itch and peel underneath my shirt at school all week. I would go home and sleep slathered in aloe vera gel.

“Tara, tell him you don’t want to go to the beach,” my other caretaker told me. She never picked up the phone or confronted him in any way – after all, it wasn’t her hurting.

Thing is, it wasn’t up for discussion. If he wanted to go to the beach, we went – and that was final. Besides, if I made too much of a stink, I wouldn’t be able to collect the rent check, as I was often told. So, we suffered silently. And now every new little mark, every mole that looks a little different now than it did a few months ago, is a reminder of that suffering and a fear of something worse.

Related Articles:

Visits to My Father

Rich of Poor & Nothing in Between

Parentified Child

Imagine yourself on the phone with someone you haven’t spoken with in a long time. You’ve missed this person, and she gives every indication of having missed you, too. Before you know it, past transgressions have melted away and you enthusiastically tell this person everything that has been going in your life – school, work, relationships. She seems happy to hear all of this. She seems different. Changed. A person trying to better her life.

You get off the phone and shout to the rooftops about the positive change in this woman’s life and how proud you are of her. You are on top of the world. You even plan to call her tomorrow to see how you can help.

You wake up the next day to a missed phone call at the wee hours of the morning. A long voicemail awaits.

You click “play” on your phone and the voice, while familiar, is not the one you heard last night. It is cold, full of disgust. She asks for a “favor,” one that would do you harm. You are numb. As you re-animate, it feels as though there are a thousand glass shards inside your body.

You shower and go to work anyway. Smile anyway. Chat anyway. But the pain just doesn’t go away. Every so often, tears jump into your eyes, but you blink them away. Maybe it’s just the dry air in the office.

How can someone manipulate a child’s love without any remorse?

Related Articles:

Overcoming Feeling Unworthy of Love

Not All Traumas Are Alike, But They All Still Hurt