domestic violence is a global issue and it's lifelong and we're going to find out an awful lot more about that with helen newhouse nothing ever goes on here first before we get into your history we have to talk about what you're doing now you are a healer ye for the last twenty five years i've been integrating acupuncture both sound healing energy medicine and intuitive coaching and it's just been an incredible journey so what is a healer i'm thinking of and yes i didn't know what to call myself when i first began i had no degrees i had no licenses and i struggled with that word healer because it implies that i do the healing and what i have come to learn is that no i doubt so there isn't really a great word for what i do but healer is different than technician so there's a great difference between what we bring as a healer rather than as a technician vehicle through which healing comes through but let's talk about the journey as to how you got there no boy out of the book nothing ever goes on here and that as we record this show the book is  kitchen my mother was coward and i guess a red velvet red wall with a lump rising under her left eye my father loomed over her all six three three hundred sixty five pounds of him he held frozen arms just cans in both fists dead stop i both charismatic if you want to into the room right now you both love him you would just adore him he was extremely lovable and at the same time he was extremely rude to his own mother on her deathbed said to him i have never loved you and i still don't and then she died and so he had never healed talking about being a healer he had never healed so he did what most people do they've done a lot of work on themselves and he recreated the same abuse that had been given to him and it made it extremely difficult because you never knew when he would shift it went from being completely about it i think part of it was that i was the one person who really stood up to him i think he appreciated my enthusiasm for life my gifts my intelligence and at the same time he was extremely competitive nothing that a father should they he was jealous as i've been told by my mother and jealous of you yes he was there was a there's a story later in the book where  he takes me skating in the skating dress that he has brought me home from switzerland and he he meets a man and i see him talking to this man who i had seen skating in the rank and i said to dad who is that and he has to do with the boston skating group which was where they took young girls and they got them prepared for the olympics and he had invited my father to bring me and i said oh when  swearing at me telling me you know who do you think you are shut the heat off and i was frozen and i i just didn't know what to do and so i was sitting there thinking well what what has this and later in life i found out from my mother the culch she read everything from romance novels to biographies to history books she devoured books and out all the way my father devoured she cycled in and out of depression instead of therapy she received a shock treatment and heavy medications i'm a direct like  she told me several times she hated how the drugs made her feel less and she feel better she'd secretly go off her medication cold turkey but i could always tell she was too happy and she barely slept so ok so you've got your father on this and who's both up and down diagnosed with depression she had been diagnosed with anxiety basically she was a very wounded person as well she suffered from depression from the beginning of her childhood her she had lost her father when she was a and so her cycles when she was going in a downward cycle at the very bottom before she completely bottomed out she would drink excessively  and as crazy i know this is going to sound she would also smoke cigars i mean it just got completely completely crazy so she but she was different than my father he was more direct and her issues with me were more much more insidious and so actually the more difficult to deal with it so yeah i found my father actually easier to deal with  you know and everybody out there is asking this question let me just leave i mean it i mean i got an eleven year old daughter right now i mean if this were to be her circumstance would she leave probably not yeah because where do you go but did you ever think about oh god yes of course and i had many opportunities where i had very good friends and their parents i think that they would have been you know been willing to take me in but i felt responsible i felt responsible for not only my parents but also for my other siblings because i am the second to oldest and the eldest daughter and particularly you protect your brother robert i think he was smaller yes so he was my oldest brother but he had a very different mentality the ninth did i think i have a fighter's mentality and i think he realized or i know i think about this a lot why didn't he fight back and perhaps he just didn't have it in him or perhaps he realized he was fighting a losing battle so what you're searching there as we again from the book i spent hours thinking about religions and god i just  didn't just go to temple but i also went to church hopping every few weeks with my friends my favorite was dixie's roman catholic church so you're growing up in new york jewish woman and your favorite place was the roman catholic church well actually i grew up in brookline massachusetts off of finance and i moved to new york so i'm at that point i'm living in brookline and it is the first time that i'm living and almost i would say eighty percent of jewish community and but we had moved from an all irish catholic neighborhood in west roxbury and dixie and i met and she continues to be one of my best friends today and i felt so at home  talking about ten eleven years old yes well from the very beginning i can remember being even much younger than that him praying to god i had journals that i kept and i would write to god in my journals begging for his h you also had secrets again coming out of the book the book is nothing ever goes on here fires where one secret there were others the violence in our house my mother's crazy drinking my father's arrest handcuffed and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon in the middle of  cigarettes my crazy thoughts how much i loved writing having the lights on and the phone shut off finding boxes filled with porn tapes in the attic my father's interrogation by the f b i how afraid i was of people finding a gun in our closet our family being threatened by and there's our i started fires they began in my father's green ashtray and you know i think about of the lot and i think that it was the one place where there was fire has great power and when you feel powerless i think the sense of lighting a fire is it brings a sense of it need she where you cannot go yourself i believe and the fires grew and they grew and they grew until the last fire was behind our house and it could have taken the whole house aide know and now that i'm thinking about it i think as i say that i think you know i was very underneath it all i had to be very angry and i think a fire is an expression of that kind of energy so perhaps it was a creative way to explore that that energy without getting into trouble with my father but you did you had trouble with your father over the fact they did eventually i got caught but until i got caught i think it was a way that i could really express that or that that was your secret your your dad had so many secrets you know lots of secrets and one of them included arms deal yes yes i mean i've never met an arms dealing daughter before yeah neither  didn't i didn't find out until after he was dead and about this but i certainly knew when the f b i arrived at our house that there were many secrets that i didn't know about and one of the saddest secrets was about a man it was very difficult living with a man with so many cigarettes and having him as a father is very sure to be talking to me more on camera you know people have known about this they're like alan but i'm sure the mafia has more things to do than to find a new house so another part of the book in addition to what we've already read there's a little headache of adding to the chaos my parents are never regular jobs mom had a teaching degree from boston university and love to teach but dad always managed to get her fired and show up demanding that she be paid more than threaten a school all it took was one of his visits and she'd get fired then we talked about your being an arms dealer in the f b i and then ultimately one day your dad left and they returned months later but my question is it seems that your dad cared for your mom even though he was abusive his is my right there or is this something normal that you found in your own practice or you do i think that's a great function no absolutely not and i absolutely one hundred percent believe that he loved me on that being abused i had no choice but to go to my room and wait for  needed i blacked out from this point forward i can't remember anything except a vivid memory that comes up in therapy and some of my nightmares my father's brown leather shoes was kicking me again and again in the rib cage as i lay on my back on the bedroom floor you're nothing but a worthless one and i'm going to the rest of it i couldn't catch my breath the air didn't feel like it was getting to my lungs stop i cried the only kick me harder the next thing i remember i was i was lying on my bed rolled up in a fetal position years later my mother told me that he was petrified he was going to be feted that his rage was beyond her control but he was too she was too scared to call the police or anyone else he loves kick the crap out of you he six three three hundred sixty five yeah yeah yeah yeah if and you know people ask me this all the time and many therapists who i've worked with out of the hearings i could see on their faces they took their navs that wow this love is dysfunctional and but i have to say that this is one of the most talked about issues within domestic violence because there i wondering now so what i would say to you and what i say to most everybody is that when you have a very very deep when you have been jacked it yourself self there's almost only one conclusion which is i do exactly what's been done to me i hurt others and is it right absolutely not condoning it no but i bring great compassion to anybody who has been wounded like that and i think that if you really want to know is what got me through it is that i understood understood this was a man who was so wounded himself it was like he didn't have another choice except to strike out against somebody else and i unfortunately was that somebody else you know wasn't just your was your mom right and there are brothers and sisters yes mostly my eldest brother did you feel loved by your dad yeah absolutely i don't understand i know i know enough love that you feel that keeps you there now in my case i wasn't a grown up so there was more of a reason to stay but but actually i'm the person that went after him when he left which shocked way and it still shocks me today but this is not that unusual because there's a great love between there's also a fear factor too oh absolutely but i have to say there was by your father yes i have to go back to the book nothing ever goes on here and this is i had it this up myself inexplicable years later my mom told me why it was conceived her mother had recently died and she was feeling depressed my father took her to see the doctor the doctor's advice  to my father was to get her pregnant i laughed when my mother told me this but here's the thing your mother alternately was taken by your father to a mental hospital yes and she returned h and said that she needed to talk with you and when she did she said i have to get it off my chest i don't mean i had innate intelligence to start with so i think that was very helpful and i have been i have done a great deal of personal work i have done twenty two years of therapy but you were like twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen these were like to your peers for anybody right right well i will say grace if you really want to know i mean i would just have to say grace because i do wonder you know i could have become homeless i could have become a prostitute i could have become a drawdown to that would have made sense but perhaps it's that my relationship with god kept easy because you know i spent a lot of those shares cry i can understand that in the book when you reveal that your mom told you that she didn't love you you know that's the end of that you don't talk about it i know today that she loves me i think she had i think she was very jealous of me in this made it very very difficult i didn't understand my mother and she didn't understand me when i was four years old i remember i put my fingers on the table and i said please paint them and that to me seems like a very normal four year old thing to do and she looked at me and king said oh thank you you are nothing like me i'm not sure where you came from and now thing in adults i think what a thing to say to a four year old you know i don't i can't say that i felt loved by my mother growing up i now have a very good relationship with my mom and yet it's not the same love i feel my dad had incredible want my mom not so much and yet i know that she does love me but it's just a different kind of relationship it came time where you got out of high school and it was time to go to and these adults you're both your parents are calling you up and saying you know we're going to split up we're going to center in the hospital it's going to be this is going to be that basically they are continuing their abusive behavior against each other and valving you on the phone yes i mean i read that part and i thought oh my gosh they're like children looking for attention yes absolutely and that doing it in a very destructive way yes and it was very very difficult to get a college that way so by thanksgiving of the first year i decided that i was going to come home and when i went home and announce this my father said remember you have two choices the college or the door so i stayed in college luckily we don't have very much time left the book itself again nothing ever goes on here there's so much more like to talk about but i have to ask you this you are now a healer as we talked about the very beginning is this your catharsis is are you healing yourself through healing others oh absolutely absolutely it is and it's such a great joy to help other people where i have struggled so hard and for so many years if i can make anybody's easier oh my gosh it brings me not only joy but great peace well it's kind of like in the book though that that this becoming a healer was almost not something of your choice you know healer no thank you but once i took it on and accepted that this was to be my journey i you know i committed to it and but now it's been twenty five years later and my personality self has calmed down a little bit and i've grown up a little bit more and yes i would agree with you that the healing that i have done with others ultimately heals me and it kills me to be a part of rage yes you feel that you were your dad absolutely and that ultimately was why i decided to end my marriage you know i was married to actually a very nice man and you know he has his own issues as we all do but i watched myself being extremely destructive and i didn't like who i was becoming at the beginning of the show i introduced to this as domest issue and it's also a life long yes and part of the book again nothing ever goes on here once my father's evil alp burst began they took on a life of their own but there was a good  but then my raging fits with my first husband it was as if i was my dad and so the reason i read this part out of the book is that is this still a lifelong journey the the abuse that you felt and lived in as a child absolutely i will be healing for the rest of my life that i'm certain of do i still have fits of rage now through body work and therapy i have come to a place that is much one peaceful i'm in a beautiful joyous happy relationship with a wonderful man and and we have very similar parents actually and so we heal each other it's amazing his father is my mother and my father's his mother so we understand each other very very well in our family continued its dysfunctionality however even at the funeral of your father who died relatively young i think it was in his late fifty's fifty six now and even at the funeral there were your brother your brothers were making demands upon you and then as your mom got got ill as well again your family was making they're all doing the very very best that they can and i think they are incredible human beings given what they've gone through given what they've gone through you know what is that me well given i mean you're read and read and you're read the book and it was it was a book that i couldn't put down but i couldn't read it either does that make sense yes yes it's a you know i actually have somebody who wanted to read the book to see if love you you know it's difficult and i said keep reading it gets better and you know and and it ultimately ends in healing so forcefully worth the time to read and so i got one final question what do you want the readers to get out of this