Agents of change — Faith and personal strength help women break abuse cycle

At that point, "I realized I had hurt my kids" in much the same way she had been hurt as a child. She got into counseling and went back to church. She acknowledges her mistakes, and knows her children will deal with some of her decisions for a long time. But they've thanked her for trying to make permanent changes, she says.

"God has talked to me. ... The things I've done in my life, whatever they are, I've done them and I've asked forgiveness. I do think they have made me a better person because I chose to use them now in a positive way with the job I have today. God has put me where I am with those experiences so I can hopefully do some good and help other people."

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Linda has also felt God's guidance in using her past to help others in the present. But the trauma she suffered with childhood sexual abuse was so horrific, it took deep exploratory therapy as an adult to uncover the source of her depression as a young mother who seemed to "have it all."

When she was a child, her active Latter-day Saint family, with 10 children, was considered a model within their suburban neighborhood. Her father served as the ward bishop. But the competent facade hid a deeper reality. "There was a real lot of abuse going on in our home — physical, emotional and sexual. My father was the abuser. It was something that happened over a long, long period of years and it happened a lot.

"But it was a secret. ... It was something that we never spoke about in our family or to anyone else. It was a secret — a big secret." So big a secret that her child mind hid that knowledge away behind lock and key, to the point that she repressed the memories of it.

She remembers being vehemently instructed by her father not to tell anyone, that bad things would happen if anyone found out. "I grew up thinking that God must hate me. And in a way I kind of wanted that. Because when people loved me, bad things happened."

Even so, she remembers many happy times and "a kind of love as well," particularly from her mother.

Married at 19 to a man she describes as "extraordinarily kind and understanding," Linda had three children by the age of 25.

But she fought a deep depression, and didn't know why. She sought treatment, and that's when the memories of the childhood abuse began to surface. She sought out two of her sisters to see if they had any memories. They did.

She was relieved on one hand, and devastated on the other. "For me, the sadness and the pain of it that I'd kept outside of myself for all those years was very present. There was sadness, grief, pain and anger."

Confronting their mother, the three daughters expressed their concern for younger siblings still living at home.