Climbing Out of the Wreck: A Survivor's Tale

“Observing the care with which my son treated his children, I thought to myself, ‘the cycle of craziness is broken.’ The trail of our suffering has come to an end.”

This is the story of a courageous young woman who grew up in a home headed by a sexual predator and an abused mother who lost her mind when Christine was only fourteen, disappearing until she was a mother herself. It recounts the secrets and lies that were designed to protect the darkest family secret of all, which had the effect of making the eight children strangers to each other, and then prisoners of the passions that disordered their lives, and set them against each other.

Christine’s story is filled with intense dramas—the horrifying revenge of the chosen son, the struggle between mother and daughter to the edge of the grave, and finally, the saga of Christine’s climb out of the family wreck: how the birth of her child provided a new compass; how the family traumas failed to derail her quest to free herself and her new family from the chains of the past. The climax of her tale is a showdown with her siblings set off by the dark revelations of the sister at the center of the family secret. This is an inspiring, beautifully told story of individual courage with life lessons for others seeking to break free of similar circumstances.

Christine Stein is the pseudonym of a photographer who achieved national prominence after creating a charity devoted to horse rescue, eventually named the official charity of the Kentucky Derby. She has been married for twenty-five years and has one son and two grandchildren.