Born in 1937 in an era when sexual abuse was never spoken of again, Gloria couldn't understand why her sexuality made her stand out to predators like red berries against snow. It was not until mid-life, when she experienced a full-scale flashback to repeated childhood abuse, that she began to understand the power and depth of her woundedness and of the unremembered forces that drove her choices and behaviors and that exposed her and her children to additional harms both from others and herself.
With the flashback, she began to see that she was living a life that largely was out of her control, one event following another like dominoes falling—a chain reaction set in motion by the initial push of early abuse. With that awareness, she recognized that if she was ever to guide her own life, internal and external, to take control, she had to report some of her abusers to their respective professional and religious organizations and that she needed to tell her story.
And so, Gloria Kingsley (a nom de plume to protect the privacy of her children and other innocents) has chronicled her double exposure life, the whole crazy mess of it—failures and triumphs, faith forgotten and remembered, proximate justice and partial healing—in the hopes that her story will help other abuse survivors, especially those of her generation, to heal and their families to better understand.
