Dr. Phil Show on "Forgiving the Unforgivable" (2024)

I watched the Dr. Phil Show on Wednesday, May 11and Thursday, May 12for a show that he called "Forgiving the Unforgivable." I am going to include a link here for the first of the two shows.

Warning: This may be triggering for some survivors. I sat and ate through the whole show on Wednesday. I haven't done that in awhile. The Show triggered feelings that were intense enough for me to numb them with food.

http://youtu.be/xQv3Wf6CTAE

"Forgiving the Unforgivable" is about two grown daughters, Marita and Katrina,who confront their mother about the part that she didn't play as a parent when the mother's boyfriend, later husband, was sexually abusing her daughters for years in their own bedroom. I want to share with you the notes that I wrote down from the show. I think the mother's name was Kathy. That is what I am going to call her here.

Dr. Phil said to Kathy: "What he did is different than what you didn't do."

Kathy said, "These are my daughters."
Dr. Phil to Kathy: "Then act like a mother."

Dr. Phil to Kathy: When you tell the victim that they should have told about the abuse, you are blaming the victim rather than the abuser. Never blame the victim for the abuse.

Dr. Phil to the sisters Marita and Katrina: Sometimes we have to give ourselves what we wanted from our parents. What we didn't get from our parents, we can give toourselves. (Reparenting is what this is called by some.)

Kathy at one point called herself "the wife of a sex offender." She said this would always be her identity.

Kathy asked God's forgiveness in a moment of high drama. What got to me was that she never once asked her daughters for their forgiveness. Kathy kept saying over and over that she didn't know the sexual abuse was going on in her own house. My question is how could she not know when she saw her husband in her daughter's bedroom on top of her daughter one night. She looked in; he looked up at her; she went on into the kitchenpraying toGod for help. She went back to the room; he was gone and her daughters were pretending to be asleep. She told herself and Dr. Phil that she just didn't know what she was seeing.

I don't understand and neither do her daughters why she didn't go into the bedroom and turn on the light and ask her husband what he was doing. She didn't ask because she didn't want to know. She decided that she had imagined that he was in the room laying on top of her daughter, raping her daughter who was just an innocent little girl at the time. She never asked her daughters or your husband about what she saw, about what he was doing almost nightly to her daughters. Kathy kept repeating, yelling, that she didn't know what she saw that night.

Finally one of the girls or both, if it said during the Show then I missed it, told someone about what was happening to them. The husband was arrested and the girls went to live with their father. In court, Kathy sat behind her husband giving him support during the trial. The day of the trial, Kathy went to her daughters anddemanded thattheycall their abuser and apologize to him for putting him in jail. When Marita and Katrina brought this up, Kathy openly denied that she supported a sex offender rather than supporting her hurting daughters.

Kathy cried and yelled at Dr. Phil and her daughters throughout the whole two days taping of this program. She finally admitted that she was at fault but still never really took responsibility for not protecting her daughters. Marita thanked her mother for her honesty during the show. Marita has had counseling or therapy of some kind from the way she talked and handled the whole situation and is probably the older of the two sisters. She wasn't as actively angry with her mother as Katrina was.

I never had this kind of conversation with my mother. When I told my mother about the incest, I asked if she knew about the incest and I asked if she had ever been sexually abused herself as a child. She said no to both of my questions. I believe that confronting the silent parent is in some ways harder than confronting the abuser. At least, it was for me. I still wanted my mother's love. I was still, even as an adult, afraid of what my mother would say or do after I told her.

I think, like Kathy in the Dr. Phil Show, my mother, at least on some level of consciousness, knew that I was being sexually abused. She had to at least have wondered with as many trips as I was forced to go on with my dad. I was never asked if I wanted to go. I was always told by one or both parents that I was going somewhere with my dad at least several times a week from the age of 11 to 17. My mother never questioned all of the time that I spent with my dad. She just knew that he wasn't bothering her. If she had looked at my face, into my sad eyes, she would have seen that something was wrong but she never did. I look at pictures of myself as a child and see the sad eyes.

Eyes tell it all. Take the time today to talk to your children and to look into their eyes. Are they happy or are they sad? Be sure to look beyond what you want to see to what is really there. My mom never did. I always wished that she would have seen my pain and done something to stop it. She didn't.

Thanks, Dr. Phil for doing this show. Thanks to Marita and Katrina for having the courage to do something that I never did in confronting their mother and her lies.
Patricia

Dr. Phil Show on "Forgiving the Unforgivable" (2024)

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