Does anyone know what happened to her brother?
No, I'm not sure. He was younger; he was neglected for the early months of his life, but I'm not sure if he was directly abused like she was.
There was a comment on one of the blogs, from a reader who said, "The update of Beth's story explains that after Beth stayed with Nancy Thomas, she returned home for a visit. Her did not return her to Nancy Thomas but instead placed her with an aunt while waiting for a facility to open that would care for her. She was placed in the facility and the parents eventually chose to legally abandoned her. That's when Nancy Thomas found her again and adopted her. My question is what happened when Beth returned home? Why did the parents not allow her to go back to stay with Nancy Thomas? Why did they finally decide to legally abandon her? In the documentary she seems to have made serious progress by the end. I'm wondering if she regressed once she went back home. The adoptive parents seem very kind and caring and Nancy Thomas praises them highly in the documentary. Also, what happened to Beth's brother? Did he stay in the adoptive home? I wonder if Beth has contact with the adoptive parents now and/or her brother? She is a nurse but also lectures across the country with Nancy Thomas. I wonder if anyone has asked these questions of her, I haven't found any information after extensive Google research."
But that doesn't reveal much more than we already know.
One other observation I just remembered from the video is that when she talked about stabbing her family with the knives, she wanted to do it at night so they could feel it, but not see her. The image she drew of her molestation had her violator behind her where she could not see him.
Good observation.
She also spoke many times of wanting her brother and parents dead, but when asked if the baby birds were dead, she said that when her parents saw them, they said the birds were dead, and therefore they were. She seemed unable to identify on her own judgment if they were dead. Children have trouble understanding death at that stage of life, so I found that interesting.
I noticed that too. She also thought the baby birds could run away and were hard to catch, despite the psychologist's questions. I wasn't sure how to interpret it. Was she confused about death? Was she embarrassed on some level? Was she avoiding guilt? I don't know. She was so matter of fact, it was hard to read anything underneath.
The attachment therapy that they showed did seem strange to me as well. I will have to study it a bit more before having a conclusion. Individuals who have been violated need to have an avenue to express their rage. They need a process to get it out of their system without hurting others. They also need to experience healthy feelings of empowerment. What they do when reenacting the harm on others to regain control is in some ways the right idea, but just misdirected.
When I was in high school, I had a few unsettling experiences about wanting to hurt my father. He was rather a bully, would talk over me literally all the time instead of listening to me, ruined pretty any family holidays, and was easier to just avoid than try to relate to. He was so hard to deal with, it was difficult to have any kind of conversation with him without it esalating quickly into a screaming match or a, "Go outside / hide in your room to get away" debacle. Outside the house, he was respected in a certain circle of his professional peers, and they only saw the good things about him without understanding what it was like to live with an alcoholic narcissist, where he literally trampled everyone's boundaries day in and day out (if he was present at all). This was high school, mind you -- not a young child -- but inside I think I had a potential for a lot of anger because of the situation. One night he was sleeping, drunk, in the living room chair; I was standing in the kitchen and literally felt a physical compulsion to take one of the knives and stab him to death, over and over. it freaked me out, and I left the room in order to get away from the source of temptation.
I don't think I would have had such a strong urge, if I had had a viable outlet for my anger toward him, but I had nothing -- no voice, no way to negotiate, no one who understood or would believe what I had to say. I interpreted it as me defending myself (proactively, while he was vulnerable) and venting all of that bile out of myself. Normally I stuffed all my anger so I wasn't even aware it existed (that was my coping mechanism), until it would come out in the dark and in moments where it made sense.
So I think you have something here. I don't considering myself a psychopath and typically such an act would be unthinkable for me, but the lack of outlet for dealing with him... well, it's like when you don't have anything else, you're reduced to primal "fight or flight" rage. I can't imagine how worse it is when you're a young child, so you don't have the life experience to really frame everything, nor the words to articulate everything, and you're still physically, mentally, and emotionally vulnerable to your abusers.
