Eleanor Cowan

By Eleanor Cowan During our coffee break at our desks, my co-volunteer at a local community center, a fundamentalist religious whom I'll call "Barb," asked, in a warm manner, if this was the week I’d finally accept her invitation to attend her evening sacred text group. On four previous occasions, I’d declined her invite. This time Barb pressed me for a “viable reason.” I quoted Timothy 2:12, “A woman must learn in quietness and full submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; she is to remain quiet.” Barb, an anxious older woman, replied that every such word, phrase or sentiment can be interpreted with the help of a knowledgeable theologian. Sh …

Our need to belong can lead to exploitationRead More

By Eleanor Cowan My throat, arms, and legs felt swollen. Not for the first time, the thought occurred: “Death would be an instant relief.” I could hardly walk. Heavy with grief, a searing acidic ache in my stomach, I arrived at the weekend retreat held by a support group for those affected by the addictions of a loved one. Assigned to a tiny room the size of a storage cupboard in the small community college, I dropped the worn backpack I’d hastily stuffed with an old nightie, soap, and toothbrush. I chose a seminar among those offered on the agenda lying on the desk and stumbled to it. What was going on for me? I’d met someone. It had been five years since I’d left my sex-addict pedophi …

Healing old pain through a new disordered relationshipRead More

By Eleanor Cowan One early evening at the end of the second year in my support group for Parents of Sexually Abused Children, we were invited to participate in a new activity together. Our lead Social Worker, Aidan, also an artist and storyteller, suggested that we complete two unfinished sentences, each in our own words. The first was, “Detaching from the abuser(s) in my life feels like _____. The second was, “Once I let go, I found myself _____. I’d like to share the responses I heard that evening with Lovefraud readers. Aidan, also a former victim of physical predation both in her childhood and in her adult life, began: “Finally detaching from my abuser dissolved tiny sha …

Fill in the blank: ‘Detaching from the abuser in my life feels like _____’Read More

By Eleanor Cowan On Tuesday, a young friend from Montreal called with good news. A single mother of four children, proud of her escape from an abusive ex-husband, Kaila is back at school, works part-time to cover the groceries, and, each week it seems, successfully faces yet another challenge to advance her world. On Monday, a problem with the toilet required a plumber. Kaila called the “cheapest in town” ad circled in red ballpoint in an old phone book. In his early 50’s, the uniformed plumber waited for Kaila to return from taking her children to school that morning. As he inspected the toilet in her apartment, he began to talk about the high cost of living. Raising his eyebrows, he w …

After the sociopath, taking back power and standing up to bad behaviorRead More

By Eleanor Cowan One winter’s day, busy preparing to drive to a free art lesson for my children and their young friends, my disagreement with my husband took an unwanted turn. I’d contested Stan’s view of God’s endless compassionate mercy and boundless clemency. “If that’s so true,” I asked, “What’s hell for?” My husband was a covert pedophile, although I didn't know it at the time. Molesting our young daughter and ridiculing our son at every opportunity, while I was at safely at work, Stan never took responsibility for an addiction he knew was morally wrong. Even though he’d molested his own siblings as a teenager, he still felt entitled to become a seminarian as a young man. Aft …

Sociopath exerts control by holding important people and events hostageRead More

By Eleanor Cowan “She broke her neck on her way down,” said a police officer at the scene. Thick yellow spray paint outlined an ovary-shaped form on the grass from which my mother’s body had been removed, wrapped in a zippered tarpaulin. Two screaming witnesses, bathers who’d been enjoying a pleasant afternoon by the building’s outdoor pool on that sunny August day, had happened to glance up to witness my mother’s horrid plummet from her seventh-floor balcony. “She didn’t feel the final impact,” the investigator added. I noticed a tinged bloodstain on the grass. “The skull sustained a crack,” said the kindly officer, following my gaze. This week, more than four decades since my mo …

Our cultural conspiracy of silence about predators and pain finally begins to crackRead More

By Eleanor Cowan I picked up my sweet, chubby grandson and cuddled him in my arms. He’d reached up to me and, thrilled to respond, I held him close. But ah, a colorful object on the floor beckoned, and instantly, he wanted down. Wriggling only once and issuing a single sound, he found himself back on the wool carpet crawling towards a plastic lamb-shaped cookie cutter. It claimed his full attention. With no hesitation, he’d signaled his wish and I honored it. Simple as that. Not so in my childhood. Responses to me were, “What do you want now?," "Go away," "Get lost," or, "What a pain in the behind.” So today, to say no when I mean no, or yes when I mean yes, without compromising m …

Once I was groomed to be compliant; now I’m reclaiming my own lifeRead More

By Eleanor Cowan January 1973 - Quebec At the college where I worked as a secretary, I smiled up at the chubby cherubs fixed along the ancient oak hallway, their alabaster gazes uplifted in hope. I knocked on the chaplain’s door. We’d arranged to meet during my lunch hour. Anxious to hear about the results of his appointment with my fiancé’s mother, I took the same wooden chair Edna sat in only hours before. That morning, my future mother-in-law begged Father Price, the priest booked to officiate our wedding, to dissuade me from marrying her son, Stan. Edna explained that while she liked me, I was emotionally unreliable. I’d been raped and molested. Sometimes I binge drank and my mot …

My husband’s entire family knew what he was, but nobody talked about itRead More

By Eleanor Cowan I awaken this first day of 2018 to a winter world of snow. Outside my window, sunshine brightens a yellow bus full of passengers lumbering over a mile-long overpass. Even though layers of heavy slush still cover its roof, it’s plowing along. The bridge, dripping with glistening icicles, allows the access to town that otherwise would require a long overland trip. Thanks to hard-working night time crews, the road is clear. It’s been twenty-eight years since I awakened from a freezing burrow of long-term disassociation and managed, with wonderful help, to escape the pedophile I married — a confused, disturbed exploiter who hid behind the respected academic letters stuck …

Healing after the sociopath — a long bridge over painful memoriesRead More

During my fourteen years of marriage, even though I could see and hear, I was blind and deaf to the messages coming in all the time, information that slowly, over time, eroded my hope that marriage and children would solve the unresolved grief in my life. One morning in July 1976, I was nursing Teddy while watching the Montreal Olympics on the TV our landlord had kindly loaned to us. In an instant, the pillows that supported my back against the attic wall felt like stone as I listened to a flash news report. Our newborn was asleep when I whispered to Stan, “A child has been sexually abused by her own grandfather in Guelph. What a horrible, unspeakable thing.” All conscious memory of my …

My sociopathic husband and isolation in my marriageRead More