the messenger
and the unpleasant message
For reasons that are unknowable, one of my roles in life is The Messenger. Over decades, I've shared messages of hope, courage, inspiration, creativity, and positivity, and I will do that for as long as I can. But right now, I'm shouldering grief and adversity, which means that my messages can seem bleak. The truth can be hard to tell and hard to hear, yet we do both to try and do what's right. So, I'm sharing an unpleasant truth because overtime, public education can save millions of lives, even while it couldn't save our sister.
This post is about #MunchausenByProxy (MBP), also called Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another. It's about medical abuse.
Medical abuse by a parent is the most complex and lethal form of abuse there is. In society right now, we think it's rare but, in fact, it is everywhere. I'll compare medical abuse with sexual abuse for a moment, just in terms of numbers and a basic predator profile. Please stay with me.
~2% of children in America are reported as being sexually abused every year. That amounts to ~17.4 million children. The ratio for sexual abusers is split 93% men and 7% women. These men are seeking an outlet for their aggression, as well as a sense of power and control, and the children around them are a means to that end. My heart breaks for those of you who intimately know this.
With medical abuse, the ratio is flipped - the predators are 93% female (mostly mothers) and 7% male, and what experts are finding is that the number of children abused is shockingly and approximately the same: 17 million children a year based on statistical evaluations of medical records. In terms of the psychological profile of medical abusers, it’s similar to male sexual predators but it’s the female version. These mothers seek an outlet for an underlying emotional void, and they scratch that itch by using children to present as saints, martyrs, and heroes.
HERE'S THE DATA POINT THAT WILL PROBABLY SHATTER YOUR WORLDVIEW: Because of the fatality rate of victims like my sister, MEDICAL ABUSE MAKES WOMEN MORE PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLERS THAN MEN.
Our mother, Lorayne Brown-Shaw, is one of those women. She psychologically and medically abused her own daughter, my sister, to death, and she is in the process of repeating history with my sister's daughter.
Over decades, my brother and I watched helplessly as Lorayne induced illness in our sister and our niece - pseudo-seizures, internal bleeding, vegetative states, psychotic breaks. My sister was on life support so many times I lost count. Lorayne adeptly and purposefully simulated illness, falsified illness, exaggerated illness, and coached our sister and niece into gravely harming themselves – and she profited financially from much of it, duping churches, unsuspecting friends and family, and easily-exploitable empaths into ponying up donations. This went on for 40+ years and she got better at it overtime, testing different strategies and looking for areas of weakness in decent human beings.
The last 20 years of my life, all I did was scream into the void. Even people at the epicenter couldn't really see what Lorayne was doing, or name it, or believe it. This kind of perpetration by a maternal figure is FAR outside the bounds of what good people can comprehend. But this type of abuse is real, and it is fatal, and the chances are good that some child you know, at school or in your neighborhood, is already ensnared. Mothers are doing this every day and they’re doing it right in front of you. And because MBP mothers are narcissistic and often sociopathic, parts of them are enjoying it. That is the bone-chilling truth.
In case you're wondering, I escaped because I wasn't the index patient. I was not more intelligent, more courageous, or more resourceful than my sister. I was lucky, period.1 I was the third-born, and Lorayne needed me less since she had my sister and my sister's daughter. Her craving is fed by them. At 8 am the morning after my sister’s violent death, Lorayne Brown-Shaw was on the phone with multiple life insurers working to collect her payments. That’s how vile these wolves in sheep’s clothing are. That’s how maternal they are not.
If you need to watch something to better understand this mental illness, watch Sharp Objects with Amy Adams. Watch The Act with Patricia Arquette. Listen to Andrea Dunlop's podcast Nobody Should Believe Me. Meet the noble people at MunchausenSupport.com. Millions of children are caught in these webs, each on some level trying to be seen, heard, believed, and protected.
To our sister, Christy: Not a day goes by when I don't think of you with a heavy ache in my heart. To our niece, Cassie Brown, your life does not have to end like your mother's, and we will not stop trying to free you. Christy named you Cassie Hope for a reason. I hear her love for you across the veil.
By “lucky” I mean that it was somehow possible for me to rebuild my devastated mental foundation through ten thousand+ cumulative hours of intensive therapy, personal-growth workshops, psychotherapeutic trainings, multi-year collaborations with spiritual teachers, and 15+ years on a meditation cushion. This journey, in itself, was excruciating and arduous but it’s a huge part of how I’m still here.