One could see the pain on this woman's face as she tells her story and I could hear the guilt in her trembling voice from not having acted on her suspicion about her young daughter being molested. Eventually, alcoholism overtook her life and she had to check in to an alcohol detoxification program. Although she puts up a front in public, she cares about her children and knows she has to get past this addiction to parent them properly and recognizes that she could not do it on her own. Beth also discloses that she has just recovered from a complete "emotional breakdown a few years ago" and was now "on the right track again".

Another participant gave details why she cannot do some activities with her children, "I've ahhh…gone through a bad depression…so I just…But I'm starting to - I'm starting to slowly come around." She later adds, "Like it took me a long while to uh - took me awhile to just trust people." She was being followed by a specialist in psychiatry from out of province and had been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder for which she was seen for weekly therapy. She attributes the cause of her present problems to her traumatic childhood where she suffered from physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Although she never named her condition as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, her descriptions parallel those of the women who experienced violence in Horsman's (1999) study and it is possible that this was the cause of her struggling. She describes the situation in her childhood, "Yeah like my mother she left my father because he was very abusive and alcoholic and - and she left him and um - met somebody else." Her large family of twelve children was split in pairs and sent to various foster homes when she was seven years of age.

This participant spent her formative years after the family separation with another sibling in a foster home; she saw her mother on occasional visits each year and had no idea where her other siblings were living. Eventually, the children were brought back to her mother, who had remarried and began a new life. She was one of the last ones to return to her natural mother because her foster parents had fought to try to adopt her and her sister. She continued, "I never had much of a background. I never had much of ahhh…upbringing there. It was a struggle…So I'm just starting…I'm just learning now. I find it's like at times there it can be very hectic and overwhelming…especially if I'm going out."