There is a version of a successful life that can be built entirely around a secret. A competitive sales career. A packed social calendar. Children who are protected within an inch of their lives. A life shaped by a drive towards perfectionism so thorough that nothing gets dropped, nothing goes wrong, and nothing gets in. For decades, Darlene Lekowski lived that version. She was, by almost any external measure, thriving. What she did not know until she was 58 years old is that everything she had built was a survival mechanism. Every habit, every defense, every drive to win. And it was killing her.
Lekowski is the author of Shattering: A Story of Survival, Justice and the Power of Telling the Truth, a memoir about the sibling sexual abuse she experienced from ages 7 to 12 at the hands of two of her brothers, and the 50 years of silence that followed. Her story is not just about childhood trauma. It is about what happens to a person when they spend half a century holding a box shut. And what becomes possible when it finally blows open.
This episode is for anyone who has carried something too heavy for too long, or who has ever wondered whether the way they move through the world might be a response to something they have never fully faced. It explores a question that Lekowski lived inside for most of her life: what does keeping a secret cost you, and is the price ever worth it?
The Secret That Shaped Everything
Lekowski grew up the youngest of five children in a conservative Midwestern family. Her parents were pillars of their community. Her mother was a Hope College graduate who owned a Christian bookstore. Her father was a senior vice president at a major local manufacturer. From the outside, it was a country club family with a good reputation and a lot to protect.
From inside, it looked different.
“At seven years old, the world betrayed me,” Lekowski said. “Brothers who I was supposed to trust and protect me instead sexually assaulted me.”
The abuse continued through age 12. And then, in the way that children do when they have no other options, Lekowski made a decision. She would tell no one.
“If I told, I was going to destroy the family,” she said. “So I chose to keep the 90% good that I had.”
It is the kind of arithmetic that makes a brutal kind of sense when you are eight or nine years old and the adults around you hold all the power. Her brothers reinforced it explicitly, telling her that disclosure would crush her mother and ruin the family. The threat did not need to be violent to be effective. In a conservative household where reputation meant everything, Lekowski understood exactly what silence would cost her, and what speaking would cost everyone else. She chose everyone else.
What she could not have known then is how long that choice would follow her.
“Everything I Did to Survive Was Killing Me as an Adult”
<div class=”subhead-note”><em>The hidden cost of childhood coping mechanisms</em></div>
Children who experience trauma do not simply survive it and move on. They build systems. Lekowski’s were elaborate and, for a long time, remarkably effective.
At the age when most kids are figuring out what they like for lunch, she was engineering her own safety. Being alone meant being vulnerable, so she made sure she was never alone. She joined every sport available to her. At one point, she was playing seven different sports simultaneously. She became, as she put it, “uber popular,” surrounding herself with friends so that home was never her only option. She was always at a party, always among people, always safe.
“I learned at a very young age, if I was ever alone, I was going to get assaulted,” she said.
These strategies worked. And then she grew up, and they kept working long past the point when they were serving her.
The competitive drive that made her an outstanding salesperson also made every argument with her husband feel like a matter of survival. The hypervigilance that kept her safe as a child made her an overbearing parent. The need to control every outcome, to never lose, never give an inch, never leave anything to chance, made genuine closeness nearly impossible.
“If I gave up, if I lost, then I was going to get sexually assaulted,” she said. “My husband became my opponent. My children became my opponents.”
She had PTSD her entire adult life. She just did not know it. She had been in therapy since 2005, had sought help briefly in college, had confided in close friends when her reactions became impossible to explain. But she did not receive a formal diagnosis until she was 58 years old. Until then, she assumed the perfectionism, the hypervigilance, the white-knuckle need for control. She assumed all of it was just who she was.
“I thought my behavior was normal,” she said. “I think a lot of women who are over-perfectionists and controlling, I think we feel like our behavior is normal.”
When the Box Blows Open
Lekowski had made a vow that her parents would never know. Her mother was the last barrier, and when her mother died in February of 2021, that barrier was gone. Three months later, still in the fog of grief, Lekowski finally reached her breaking point with one of her abusers.
She sent a text. She called him a rapist. She told him she could destroy his life if she wanted to. He told her to go ahead.
What followed was a civil lawsuit filed not by Lekowski, but against her by her brother. Her private, buried, 50-year-old trauma became evidence in a courtroom in front of twelve jurors. She took the stand. Six of her closest friends testified. Her therapist testified. Everything she had spent decades keeping in a box was now, in the most literal sense possible, public record.
“I was willing to forgive,” she said. “I was planning on taking this to my grave. The box was blown wide open.”
The trial preparation lasted two years. The nightmares came back. The fears came back. A PTSD episode during that period became one of the most clarifying and devastating moments of her life. During it, she struck her daughter, momentarily mistaking her for her abuser.
“She said, mom, you need more help or I can’t be in your life anymore,” Lekowski said. “And that was a huge turning point for me.”
Amy Stone asked the question that cuts to the heart of why secrets like this one survive for so long: “What do you feel about secrets now?”
“We all have secrets,” Lekowski said. “We all have some sort of trauma. Whatever we’re keeping inside, in that box, let it go. Because your life will change dramatically when you open up and trust people that they’ve got you.”
Healing Is Not the Verdict
Lekowski won both cases. She expected that to be the end of it.
“I won. All right, great. Hallelujah. I won both cases. I’m healed,” she said. “Well, that’s not how healing works.”
What followed the verdict was grief. It was the specific, heavy grief of a person who had finally been believed, finally been vindicated, and who now had to figure out what to do with all the anger, the bitterness, and the decades of resentment that winning had not dissolved.
She tried EFT tapping, a therapeutic modality that combines physical percussion on specific points of the body with self-directed statements to shift emotional focus. She described it as transformative. It did not erase what had happened, but it redirected her attention away from her abuser and back toward herself.
“The EFT tapping helped me take away the focus on him,” she said, “and turn the focus instead on me. What I need to be fulfilled. What I need to be whole.”
What ultimately moved her forward, she said, was a decision that had nothing to do with her brother and everything to do with herself.
“I had to use my own agency in order to move my life forward,” she said. “I had to shed the shame. Forgive yourself. And even if he won’t apologize, I had to move forward.”
Her daughter put it most clearly. When Lekowski first told her children what had happened, her daughter’s immediate response was not sympathy. It was a challenge. “Mom, I hear you, and I’m so sorry what happened to you, but I think I’m hearing the fact that you need to forgive yourself first. You need to give yourself grace.”
That, Lekowski says, is what she has had to do. Not forgive her brothers so that they could be released, but forgive herself so that she could be. She hired a ghostwriter, spent a year telling her story, and is now telling it publicly on podcasts, in courtrooms, and in a book, because she does not want anyone to have to carry this alone for as long as she did.
“Right now, one in every 20 children in a classroom is currently being sexually abused by an older brother or sister,” she said. “Nobody’s talking about it.”
That, she says, has to change.
What Letting Go Actually Looks Like
The week Lekowski recorded this episode, her son was graduating from the Army. Her first husband, historically not an organizer, had not made dinner reservations a month in advance. The old Darlene, she said, would have gone off.
“Now that I’ve been able to just release all of the trauma, all of the pain,” she said, “I’m kind of like, who cares if I have a dinner reservation a month ahead of time?”
Her children have noticed. Her relationships have changed. The hypervigilance that made her both a formidable professional and an exhausting presence in her own home has loosened its grip. She knows what love is now, not as a concept but as an experience. She says she did not really learn it until her late 50s.
There is something both devastating and genuinely encouraging about that timeline. It is devastating because of what it cost. It is encouraging because it means there is no expiration date on this kind of transformation. You do not have to figure it out at 25 or 35 or even 50. You just have to be willing, eventually, to open the box.
Lekowski opened hers because a civil lawsuit forced her hand. She would not wish that path on anyone. But she wants the outcome to be available to anyone who carries what she carried. The healing, the forgiveness, the lighter life on the other side.
“I hope that I help at least one other person not go through what I’ve gone through,” she said. “I hope that men and women who were sexually abused as children are not afraid to talk and know that they’re not alone.”
For Darlene that is the whole purpose of her book.
This article was inspired by an interview with Darlene Lekowski and Amy Stone on The Art of Imperfect Adulting podcast. https://imperfect-adulting.captivate.fm/listen https://www.youtube.com/@imperfectadulting To hear more compelling conversations like this one and receive special offers from our guests directly to your inbox, join our email community today.
Sibling Sexual Abuse: Interview Transcript Darlene Lekowski with Amy Stone | The Art of Imperfect Adulting | March 2026
Amy Stone [00:00:05]:
Welcome to the art of imperfect adulting. Darlene Lekowski, are you ready for a fun chat today?
Darlene Lekowski [00:00:10]:
I am ready than ever.
Amy Stone [00:00:13]:
Yay. I’m happy you’re here. All right, I have the same two warmup questions on every single conversation. I ask everybody what part of the world they call home. So where are you?
Darlene Lekowski [00:00:21]:
I’m in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area right now.
Amy Stone [00:00:24]:
Fantastic. And share with us something that you love or enjoy or like about Charlotte.
Darlene Lekowski [00:00:34]:
The thing about Charlotte is that you’re fairly close to everything. You’re three hours to the mountains, three hours to the ocean, and it’s just a great place to live. And I grew up in Michigan and lived in Chicago, so I’m really glad to be gone from the snow. But this weekend, we got 8 inches of snow, so I really didn’t leave it very much.
Amy Stone [00:00:54]:
Goodness, that is a lot of snow. So many people were recording, recording this for the audience so that they know we’re recording this. The very beginning of February, and so much of the country is getting, you know, severe weather. I’m in the almost tropics. And so we are in the land of falling lizards, frozen lizards. So. And it has been kind of hilarious because they’re all over the place, and it’s a little colder here than it usually is, but, you know, can’t really complain about the cold.
Darlene Lekowski [00:01:24]:
No.
Amy Stone [00:01:24]:
Down where I am. All right, so, Darlene, what we’re going to talk about today is we’re going to talk about you making the decision to release some control in your life, and we’re also going to talk about keeping secrets. Does that sound like a fun conversation today?
Darlene Lekowski [00:01:39]:
It absolutely does.
Amy Stone [00:01:41]:
All right.
Darlene Lekowski [00:01:42]:
Very interesting. Once you hear my story. I think.
Amy Stone [00:01:45]:
I think so, because I don’t actually know. I don’t know what the secrets are or what the story is. I’m going to be learning this along with the audience. All right, so you shared the information. I do have. You shared that in midlife, which is a super general term. So you were forced to confront the way you were living. And I was curious about how long ago we’re talking to put a timeframe in. When did this come up in your life?
Darlene Lekowski [00:02:10]:
So I just turned 60 this month, and I had to confront everything in front of me at 58 years old.
Amy Stone [00:02:17]:
Okay, so just a couple years ago is when. This is when I confronted.
Darlene Lekowski [00:02:21]:
Yep. When I confronted the secret. But the trauma happened when I was 7. But I buried it.
Amy Stone [00:02:27]:
Okay. All right. So very good. So that’s a piece of the puzzle. I got it. We’re going to come back to that. So is there something specific that, you know, made this something that you had to deal with two years ago, or was it like a general sort of awakening?
Darlene Lekowski [00:02:42]:
It was very specific.
Amy Stone [00:02:45]:
So.
Darlene Lekowski [00:02:47]:
I don’t know how to back into it because it’s kind of an incredible story. So my mom passed away in 2021. I had a very deep, dark secret that I’d kept for 50 years, and I vowed my parents were never to know.
Amy Stone [00:03:02]:
When your mom passed away, you no longer had to keep the secret.
Darlene Lekowski [00:03:06]:
Exactly. Mom passes away, dad has dementia.
Amy Stone [00:03:10]:
Oh, so he doesn’t know.
Darlene Lekowski [00:03:12]:
Yeah. I get in an argument with the person that caused the trauma. A year later, I get sued over it. And my trauma is now front and center in a court of law in front of 12 jury members. Wow.
Amy Stone [00:03:29]:
Oh, my goodness. That’s like a real trial, not like family judge. Okay. Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:03:33]:
Civil trial. Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:03:35]:
Okay, so let’s back up a teeny tiny bit. You mentioned some of this already, but I was thinking when I was writing out the questions that it sounded to me like to really understand what we were talking about, that it might be helpful to understand, like, who was in your family and stuff like that. So without getting too personal, share with us what you will as little or as much as you want to about your family. So you mentioned that your parents, your mother’s deceased, your father has dementia. What else? Siblings. You have at least one sibling. Pets, kids, jobs. Tell us what we need to know. Sure.
Darlene Lekowski [00:04:08]:
So in current day, I am married to my second husband. I have three adult children, all in their 20s. I am the youngest of five children. I’m a 60s child. And I guess to talk about my trauma is, unfortunately, at seven years old, the world betrayed me. And from the ages of 7 to 12, brothers who I was supposed to trust and protect me, instead sexually assaulted me from ages. From those ages. So I took that trauma, put it in a box, thought I was rid of it, became a very successful career woman, successful mom. But, you know, I had control issues. I had hypervigilance issues. I had perfectionist issues. I had to win at all costs. And it took me until 58 years old to learn everything I did to survive was killing me as an adult.
Amy Stone [00:05:18]:
Okay. All right. And then 58 is when you. So you’ve been married twice, you have adult kids, and so this is the secret that you kept. And I was. I. Like, I did not know what it was before we started, but. So we call this. This is then considered sibling sexual assault, right? Ssa.
Darlene Lekowski [00:05:40]:
Ssa. Or another acronym is ssta. Sibling Sexual Trauma and Abuse.
Amy Stone [00:05:47]:
Trauma and Abuse. I have. You’re actually, believe it or not, not the first conversation I’ve had about this. I interviewed Jane Epstein, who also wrote a book about her story. And it is something that is from speaking to Jane, I have had a voyage view, you know, like through just our contact. It’s not something that people like to particularly talk about or have spoken around them. It’s not. It’s maybe not, you know, it’s not what people are looking for. Conversation over. Bingo. And so it takes a lot of, A lot of strength to, to bring that up. And that’s, that’s what I wanted to mention that. All right, so we’re going to wind back this the calendar and talk about you not as a kid when this was happening, but how holding the secret and the coping mechanisms that you developed, how they impacted your life as an adult. You told me on the pitchforum that you really thought you were being a good adult or doing a good job at adulting because you were managing everything and trying not to drop any balls. So tell me more about what it meant in your life. Like what were the things that you were. That you were keeping under control and taking, taking care of that. What were you managing at the time?
Darlene Lekowski [00:07:11]:
Well, I just, I wanted to be successful. I wanted to win at all costs. And I just knew I become a salesperson, okay. And so if you always have to win, it’s really good to be in sales. But what was happening is, you know, I’d get into an argument with my husband and I just wouldn’t give an inch, you know, and my husband would say, you’re being impossible. You just don’t give. Well, to me, if I gave up, if I lost, then I was going to get sexually assaulted, you know, so that’s how it was impacting me because if you always have to win, my husband became my opponent, my children became my opponents. And I was so uptight and so hypervigilant keeping this secret. I had two lives. I had the little Darlene who was abused and hurt and betrayed, and I had the over perfectionist adult Darlene that could do no wrong and overachieved and just did everything that I could to be very detailed so that I wouldn’t get hurt as an adult.
Amy Stone [00:08:28]:
And were you. So then when you. Were you always like that? Like were you like that from the time you were an adolescent and able to like, you know, be aware of the performance metrics? Like, were you very competitive in High school and college and beyond.
Darlene Lekowski [00:08:42]:
Yeah. It’s interesting you asked that, because as a child, I learned at a very young age if I was ever alone, then I was going to get assaulted. And so I did everything in my power never to be alone. So I became uber athletic. I joined every single sport a little girl could could. I think at one point, I was playing seven different sports. I decided to become uber popular. Because if I was popular, if I had lots of friends and girlfriends, then I would never be home. I would be at parties, I would be among people. I would be safe.
Amy Stone [00:09:24]:
Okay. Yeah. One of the things that I’ve learned, or one of the things I’ve picked up, I probably shouldn’t say learned because I’m the host, not the expert. One of the things I’ve picked up in many of these conversations is that these coping mechanisms that we design when we’re children, they do very much seem to me like they start in strategies to create that feeling of safety. So what I’m hearing you say is that home wasn’t safe. Being alone wasn’t safe. And so from a very early, early age, you were doing whatever you could to not be home and specifically not be home or not be alone, to be surrounded by people and to be out of the house. And so then how did that work out when it became you making your own home? And so instead of it being your parents house, living with your siblings, you were forming your own family. How did it shift?
Darlene Lekowski [00:10:19]:
Well, I just became overprotective of my children. You know, now that the truth has come out, even one of my sons was like, why didn’t you tell us sooner, mom? Why didn’t you let the secret out of the box? Because now that we know, now that we’ve told us, we get you. We understand why you, you know, we’re in our business all the time while you’re so overprotective of us. And so that’s a lot of what I also had to let go of. I had to let go of controlling every single thing, every single second around me. And by doing so, I’ve had such a better relationship with my children. They’re like, mom, you’re a totally different person. Like, this is awesome. I mean, we hate that this happened to you. And, you know, they were very supportive, but they were also very sad to think that I had to keep this secret. And I think that’s something for your listeners. Like, we all have secrets. We all have some sort of trauma. We just have to figure out, like, whatever we’re Keeping inside, in that secret, in that box, Let it go. Because your life will change dramatically when you open up and trust people that they’ve got you.
Amy Stone [00:11:38]:
Yeah. So I want to ask you about keeping this secret because you. You said today, right after all of this is unraveled, that you. You know, that what you were afraid of was being reassaulted. But I’m curious whether or not you were aware of that exact thing, or was it just a general underlying fear, like from the time when you were, like, 12 years old, were you directly afraid of something very specific happening to you, or was it just a very heightened sense of overwhelming fear?
Darlene Lekowski [00:12:10]:
I was deathly afraid of getting assaulted and murdered. I mean, I literally was afraid of the dark. I could not go outside. I could not be alone in my house with the curtains wide open because I felt like there were stalkers outside my house.
Amy Stone [00:12:29]:
Okay. Yeah. So very directly, you had a very concrete thing that you were afraid of, and you tied it directly to. You had to manage everything and win every contest.
Darlene Lekowski [00:12:40]:
Yes, and protect myself. Not only protect myself, now I’m a mother now. I have children. I’ve got to now protect them from anything. And that became. I don’t want to use the word helicopter mom, because that’s not what I was. It was just more of an overprotective, overbearing mom, constantly on edge.
Amy Stone [00:13:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. And so you said you have talked a little bit about this. So this impacted your relationship with your husband and impacted your. Affected your relationship with your sons. Who else did it? You said. What you actually said in the application was you said, you know, you were holding everything so tightly that you drove the people away. That you drove people away from you. So your husband, your sons, did it roll over into, like, you know, friends, co workers? Was there, or was it. Was it really specific to just the people you were sharing your home with?
Darlene Lekowski [00:13:36]:
Well, for me, when you hold a secret in that dark, that deep, for me, it was shameful. You know, your brothers did this to me. I can’t talk about it. I think I’m the only one. And it just became. I’m sorry. I forgot the question, Amy.
Amy Stone [00:13:58]:
So you were talking about the keeping the secret and the way you were very controlling and also very competitive. It impacted some of the relationships in your life. And you mentioned that you. You would not let go of the arguments with your husband, and you mentioned that this shifted with your sons when you began to release control. But I wondered if it rolled over into some of the other relationships in your life, like girlfriends, co Workers, you know, people on the pta, like, did it. Was it. Was it every single relationship touched everything, or was it really isolated to the people who are your family?
Darlene Lekowski [00:14:34]:
Thank you for the reminder. So when you have a box of trauma that big, you think you’ve got it under control, you think you’ve got it buried. But the problem, when you’ve got a giant secret, the box leaks. And so it did. I had PTSD all my life, but I actually wasn’t diagnosed with it until I was 58 years old. I thought my behaviors were normal. Yeah, I thought everybody was super in control. I thought everybody was a perfectionist, you know, and so I gotta tell you, I did have incidents with my girlfriends, but it was my girlfriends who saved me because I couldn’t tell my secret to my parents. I couldn’t talk to people at church because then, you know, my parents would find out I had PTSD incidents with my girlfriends. And those times I told them and I confided in them and I said, you know, I. This is why I behaved the way that I did, you know, like, I was at a bar one time and some guy touched me in the wrong place. I flipped out, and they thought that the guy had put drugs in my drink. That’s how bad it was. And so, yes, it bubbled up and bubbled up, and it did affect some relationships with my girlfriends. And I in college ended up drinking too much and experimenting with drugs and all of that. And thank God I didn’t become a drug addict or an alcoholic or a prostitute. I could have, but I didn’t. I chose a different path. I chose the perfectionist path.
Amy Stone [00:16:19]:
So those outsize reactions, those are actually a symptom of unresolved trauma. Not always. Sometimes people can just be dramatic. So it’s not a. It’s not a one to one ratio, but that is something that. That does show up when we’ve got something that’s not fully processed. And the most. The most. The most famous one that is completely socially acceptable. Right. That we know is that when. When you have a family member pass away and you’re overwhelmed with grief and that first six months to a year when you’re really overwhelmed, somebody will cut you off in the grocery store and you’ll just explode. Just explode. For me, I had to talk to somebody at the bank, and I just completely. They had made a mistake, but I was completely impatient with this person. And I distinctly remember apologizing as I was doing it.
Darlene Lekowski [00:17:15]:
I know.
Amy Stone [00:17:16]:
It was like, I know I’m hysterical. I’m very sorry. Also, you need to fix this.
Darlene Lekowski [00:17:22]:
Right.
Amy Stone [00:17:23]:
Right.
Darlene Lekowski [00:17:23]:
It’s so funny you say that, because, I mean, even this week, like the old Darlene. My son is graduating from army this week. My first husband, he is not an organizer. I plan the dinners like I do the reservations ahead of time. A month ahead of time. Normally I would flip out. What? You can’t make a reservation? You can’t make plans a month ahead of time? How dare you. Why not? Why can’t you do this? Well, now that I’ve been able to just release all of the trauma, all of the pain, I’m kind of like, who cares if I have a dinner reservation a month ahead of time? And he was texting me today, and I’m like, fine, you’ll take Friday night, I’ll take Thursday night. That’s how it different for people when you let go of your secrets.
Amy Stone [00:18:17]:
Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:18:17]:
And you open up that box.
Amy Stone [00:18:19]:
Yeah. And the reason I highlighted that is because I do think. I think it’s very hard to see sometimes the way things are showing up for ourselves, whether it’s we have spinach in our own teeth and we’re not looking in the mirror or whether we’re reacting in a way that is a clue, you know, and that is a clue. So you had some very supportive relationships then, is what this is. And they. They stuck with you when. When it bubbled up and when it was scary. And so is something. So. But there are close connections were challenging because you were keeping the secret and you weren’t able to have that. Would you say that close connection was and is something that it’s actually very important to you, or were you like kind of almost avoiding close connection on some level because you knew you had.
Darlene Lekowski [00:19:13]:
Oh, man. It’s kind of like a two edged sword. Close connections were critically important to me. My girlfriends meant everything to me. But because I was traumatized at such a young age, I honestly don’t think I learned what love really is or was until my late 50s. Again, I was. I think you described it really well, Amy. Like I was so naive of who I was and who I’d become. It was almost like I had this wall or the shell. And it really took the lawsuit and being on the stand and that much confrontation for me to look at myself and go, wait a minute. And I actually had a PTSD moment with my daughter. And that was a game changer. Like, I ended up hitting her in the head because I thought she was my rapist brother. She was my daughter.
Amy Stone [00:20:13]:
Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:20:13]:
And she even said to me, mom, you need more help or I can’t be in your life anymore. And that was a huge turning point for me.
Amy Stone [00:20:21]:
And was that during the trial or. It was before.
Darlene Lekowski [00:20:23]:
It was. Well, so the trial went on for two years. You know, I get sued in 2022, we don’t go on the stand until January 29, 2024. So this PTSD incident happened in 2023, because I’m reliving, I’m having nightmares all over again. And so when I realized, oh, my God, I did this to my own child, I’ve got to change.
Amy Stone [00:20:56]:
That must have been a very hard moment.
Darlene Lekowski [00:20:58]:
It was. I’m still, I don’t want to tear up, but I’m still.
Amy Stone [00:21:02]:
Yeah, yeah. Especially if you, you know. Yeah, I, I, I won’t, I won’t pick at that scab very much because that must have been very, very hard. But so let’s. So your mom, your mom passes away, your father has dementia. You, at this point, how often were you thinking about this, like, top of mind, what had happened to you as a child? Like, right when your mom passes away, like, were you still thinking about a lot and aggressively keeping the secret, or had you settled into sort of a, you know, a state of suppression? Like my normal is that this is I’m keeping this secret and something. And then you decided to face it.
Darlene Lekowski [00:21:46]:
Well, how did you go from that.
Amy Stone [00:21:49]:
To the law is really right?
Darlene Lekowski [00:21:50]:
Right. Yeah. So it was all suppressed.
Amy Stone [00:21:53]:
Okay.
Darlene Lekowski [00:21:53]:
It was all, little Darlene’s in a box, she’ll be fine. She bubbles up every now and then, but as long as I keep that secret buried, I don’t have to deal with it.
Amy Stone [00:22:02]:
Right.
Darlene Lekowski [00:22:03]:
And then I had adult Darlene over here. But I think, Amy, subconsciously, I don’t think it’s a coincidence my mom passes away. February, I get in a huge fight with one of the brothers who abused me three months later.
Amy Stone [00:22:19]:
Okay.
Darlene Lekowski [00:22:20]:
And I say, look, you need to stop treating me the way that you do, or I could destroy your life if you want me to. I’d been trying to get him to pick up the phone. He wouldn’t pick up the phone. And I called him a rapist. In the text, I had had enough. Little seven year old Darlene came out and he told me to go for it. And so.
Amy Stone [00:22:40]:
Oh, and that’s how it happened. Okay.
Darlene Lekowski [00:22:43]:
So then we got in a text shouting incident, which isn’t pretty. It’s in the book. It’s not pretty at all. But then I actually afterwards wrote an adult Darlene email saying this is what happened. Here are the facts, here are the details. I will forgive you, Don, if you just say you’re sorry.
Amy Stone [00:23:05]:
Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:23:06]:
And instead of getting apology, I got handed a lawsuit.
Amy Stone [00:23:10]:
And I’m going to guess that the lawsuit was, keep your mouth shut. This never happened. Stop saying fake things about me. Okay, so. And all right, so at what point, at this point when you. It begins to resurface because you kept it submerged and do you. Do you go on. Do you begin to get. Does somebody tell you, like, you go to a doctor and somebody says, hey, by the way, you have ptsd? Like, is that, like, is that how this happens? Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:23:36]:
I mean, I’ve been in therapy for 20 years already.
Amy Stone [00:23:39]:
Now. Did you tell the therapy therapist about this or did you keep them out of the loop?
Darlene Lekowski [00:23:44]:
No, I. I told girlfriends and I told therapists.
Amy Stone [00:23:47]:
Okay.
Darlene Lekowski [00:23:47]:
I’ve been going to treatment for this since 2005. I tried when I was in college at Michigan State, but in the 80s, it was all old men, doctors who just wanted to push drugs on me and that. I already had enough drugs in college. I didn’t need more medication. So I had been going to therapy, and it wasn’t enough therapy. And so when the trial started, everything came pouring back as if I was seven years old again. The nightmares, the fears, the drama, the control. I mean, I am so shocked I didn’t lose my family during those two years of getting ready for the trial. I’m very fortunate. Then I did start doing some alternative. You know, I did eft tapping.
Amy Stone [00:24:33]:
Okay.
Darlene Lekowski [00:24:33]:
It was a doctor who said, you know what, you have ptsd. You might not have known it, but you do.
Amy Stone [00:24:40]:
And was it the first time somebody had said it to you?
Darlene Lekowski [00:24:43]:
I was 58 when I was told by a doctor, you’ve got PTSD. And I’m like, I don’t even know what that is. What do you mean? You know, because I thought my behavior was normal. I think a lot of women who are over perfectionists and controlling, I think we feel like our, our behavior is normal.
Amy Stone [00:25:01]:
Well, I think that normal for me is like a moving target. Right? So, like, when you know, whatever you’re, Whatever you’re. You’re used to, whatever you’re acclimated to, there’s obviously a limit to this where there’s things that people are like, no, this is clearly not normal. But, you know, like, you know, in some houses, you know, you’ll take your shoes off before you go. In other houses, you don’t. And, you know, we’ve all had that experience. Where you walk into somebody’s house and you’re like, how in the world do you live this way? Like, or the opposite, which is like, oh, wow, how do we live this way? Like, it’s so different, but you don’t notice it until you see the comparison. And so it doesn’t surprise me. Like, everybody thinks they’re a good driver until somebody tells them, hey, by the way, you’re not.
Darlene Lekowski [00:25:47]:
Yes. Yeah, that’s true. Yeah. You’re to define what normal is, Amy.
Amy Stone [00:25:53]:
Right. And so, you know, but, you know, and so, but the perfectionist, you know, I can really see, you know, it makes sense that you would be like, of course I’m doing it wrong. You know, of course I should have known earlier. What are you talking about? I should have figured it out on my own. But you didn’t know. And, um, and so you did some EFT tapping. And, and, and did it help?
Darlene Lekowski [00:26:14]:
It did. It did. It really helped me understand that the behaviors that I was doing didn’t matter anymore. And the EFT tapping helped me take away the focus on him, my abuser, and turn the focus instead on me. What I need to be fulfilled, what I need to be whole. And I was able to reject anything that didn’t serve me anymore.
Amy Stone [00:26:42]:
Very cool. All right, and so I’ll describe EFT and you can tell me if I get it right or wrong. So EFT is a modality which combines physical percussion on your own body and some. What are they called? Meridian points? Is that what they call them? Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:26:57]:
Forehead. Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:26:58]:
Combined with a sequence of self directed statements that acknowledges how you feel and you walk through changing it for what you want. So there’s a very famous sequence which is that even though X, Y, Z is happening, I still love and completely accept myself or I want to feel better or whatever it is that you do. So that’s what EFT is. So people can then Google it. There are a variety of people. One of the things that’s really neat about EFT is it’s once somebody teaches it to you, you can kind of run with it on your own. You don’t necessarily. You can find people to help you with it or you can do it yourself, like in the closet at night with, you know, just on your own. So yeah, I think that. So that’s wonderful that that works. And you mentioned that this trial. So you. Doesn’t. It doesn’t sound like a super stable, super loving family relationship that you go through a full, like litigious two year trial prep with a jury that’s like a major. What was Thanksgiving like for you guys? Like, did not with your siblings, I’m guessing.
Darlene Lekowski [00:27:59]:
That’s right. I mean, I don’t have any relationship with my two older brothers who abused me anymore. Those ties severed that May of 2021 with the explosion text. I did call one of them, though, the next morning, and I just said, david, did you really do this to me? Like, come on, I’m not going crazy. Don’s out there telling everybody I’ve had a nervous breakdown, that I’m a pathological liar. Come on. You know, did this really happen? And he said, yes, I’m sorry. He gave me the acknowledgment that I needed the other brother, I just think he is in such denial and just. I think once he told his wife and showed his wife the text messages, he had to keep lying, and he kept lying. I’m actually shocked he didn’t try and settle this out of the. Because I had. So I had six girlfriends who testified for me and the therapist.
Amy Stone [00:28:57]:
Wow. Oh, my goodness. And so there’s five of you. There’s three. Do you have a relationship with the other two siblings?
Darlene Lekowski [00:29:03]:
So my sister passed away, sadly, of cancer in 2008. So I. My one brother, who’s two and a half years older than me, who didn’t hurt me, he and I have a relationship still. And then Don and Dave, the two that hurt me, are off doing their own thing.
Amy Stone [00:29:18]:
So that is a really disruptive event in your family. I’m very sorry that it’s a hard. All of this is unpleasant, and I wish I had better words. But the ones I have are just acknowledging, you know, how hard it is and that you went through it. But on the flip side of that, you know, I’m impressed at a couple of things. The strength to go all the way through with it and not back down and hide from it when somebody brought it public. And to do all those things. And also the strength to. Like, you said that you don’t think you felt like you knew what love was until your mid to late 50s. And I think that that’s actually for a lot of people who in a variety of situations, that’s actually a very encouraging thing to hear people discover that late in life. Right. Because you have this story of early childhood trauma, which impacted it another time. That people, like, feel that way is when they’re going through the end of a very long relationship. Like, could I. Can I ever rediscover love or affection? I think that you are a more inspirational person. Than perhaps like you know, using Bridgerton as a guide of possibility. So, all right, so. So that’s the secret. This is what this is. We do so that you know like. So like you’ve told us a secret. What do you feel about secrets now? Like you kept this quiet and let’s talk about why you figured out to do that at a young age and why you stuck with it for such a long time. Like I grew up in a family that also part of it had some secrets. Some of them, I totally understand why we kept them secret to these day. Others at 52 years old, I’m like, I don’t get it. I don’t get it why that was a secret. I don’t know why I was told. But why did you, did your brothers tell you not to tell anybody? Like was there aggressive message like don’t tell anybody? Or was it something that you decided you were like, no, I know I can’t tell anybody about this.
Darlene Lekowski [00:31:21]:
It was kind of a combination of both. I mean after every assault and luckily there weren’t that many. It was about once a year. So I never knew it when it was coming. I think that’s part of my hypervigilance. Always on guard because I was always felt stalked. But really every, my brothers would say, if you tell, you know you’re going to destroy the family. If you tell, you know, mom was going to be crushed. My parents were very conservative. My mom went to Hope College in Michigan, which is a conservative Christian college. She owned a Christian bookstore. My dad was senior vice president of the biggest, you know, factory in town, the country club family. And here I am, seven, eight, nine years old, thinking I’m the only one, like what’s going to happen to me if I tell? I’m going to be forever known as that little girl who happened to. And I just knew I was going to destroy my family. So I chose to keep the 90% good that I had.
Amy Stone [00:32:29]:
So. And you kept this secret all the way through to when you were protecting your parents reputation. Do you, do you wish that you had come out earlier with it now that it’s all said and done and you’re on the other side?
Darlene Lekowski [00:32:44]:
You know, I don’t know if going back to the 70s and the culture that it was, I don’t know if I would have been brave enough too. Cause I still think I would have been the only one. But that’s part of the reason of my purpose now, Amy, is because I don’t want little boys and girls to know that they can’t tell. I want parents, I want your listeners to go have a conversation with their children tomorrow to say we have to think about the dangers in your own home. You know, let’s run, yell and tell. That’s what I’m hoping for. And if I, maybe if I lived in today’s era, I wouldn’t be an afraid little girl anymore because SSTA or SSA is common vernacular. You know, right now nobody’s talking about it. And here’s a crazy statistic about SSTA. Did you know that they believe that 1 in every 20 children in a classroom is currently getting sexually abused by their older brother or sister?
Amy Stone [00:33:49]:
I did not have that data point, but I think that it’s not overly surprising. I think that one of the, one of the things. And you lived this. So I, and I have not. So I’m not presenting it, but I think that the deal you made, which was to value your parents relationship ahead of your life experience is a bad deal, right? It is. It’s a bad deal. And the power dynamics in the family. So like, I mean, you know, I think everybody, you know, it’s a tough situation because, you know, the adults have the upper hand in power in any family. Like what they say has a lot of, has a lot of power. And it should, like when we tell our kids, don’t stick your hand in the fire. Right. We, we want them to listen because it’s safe. But when that gets twisted, it’s, it’s tough. It’s very, very tough. So it doesn’t surprise me because I do think that people mostly don’t bring this stuff public. And so, and I think that most people even, you know, because going very realistically, and we’ll talk about this because you, and it wasn’t necessarily your choice to go super public with this story, but once it was public, you know, everybody knows it’s out there.
Darlene Lekowski [00:35:11]:
Yeah, Yeah. I wasn’t backing down. And that very day of the argument, my brother called every family member except for my one brother. So then it did become public. And then I had to tell my children. I mean, I had to be faced with the shame of telling my children. I mean, what mother has to be faced with telling their children about what happened to them like that? That was so traumatic for me, but they were so incredible and so supportive that everything I feared ended up being the exact opposite.
Amy Stone [00:35:47]:
Well, and I think that that does not always happen, first of all, but it does happen more often than we might think. And I think that that’s a very important part of people having the courage to come out. Not everybody needs to go on a podcast and write their private stories or, you know, not. I have a pretty public profile, and I like my. There’s all kinds of stuff about me and my family that I definitely talk about, but I have also a lot of respect for, you know, knowing the things that you don’t want to share, and just. That’s totally fine. So that’s not what I’m saying. But, you know, how did this. Like, being able to define a secret and separate it from privacy, I think is a really, really strong skill that families are good if they can talk about. Right. Like, it’s. I think it’s very, very helpful, because when you keep the secret and you keep it isolated and you’re a walking example of this, you cut yourself off from the support of the people who are closest to you.
Darlene Lekowski [00:36:40]:
Yeah. Yep. And after winning the trial, I mean, it was like, I won. All right, great. This is awesome. You know, Hallelujah. I won both cases. I’m healed. Well, that’s not how heals. If anybody’s.
Amy Stone [00:36:56]:
If anybody’s looking, you can see my face. Goes to, like, should probably. I’m like, really? It was like, snap your fingers. You’re healed. Like, with the. Is that really how you felt? So after it was done, it’s not. You’re not totally healed. You lose, you win the trial, you’re. You get through that, which is, I’m sure, an enormous thing. But then you end up. You have to go through and do some more emotional healing for yourself.
Darlene Lekowski [00:37:20]:
Yeah. It’s kind of like going through a death with somebody. There’s phases of the emotion. It was like grief. And I just finally figured out that I had to just let go of all the black tar that I had in my soul. Cause I was so angry. How dare he put me on the stand? How dare he make me live, Relive my entire trauma? This is exposed to the world. I was willing to forgive. And I was also planning on taking this to my grave. I know that doesn’t sound the greatest, but that was what I wanted, you know, I wanted to bury the box. Well, the box was blown wide open. And then I just had to say, I can’t be angry anymore. I have to get rid of the bitterness. I have to get rid of the resentment. And as soon as I said to my soul, get rid of it all. You’ve got to shed the shame. Forgive yourself. And even if he won’t apologize, I had to use my own agency in order to Move my life forward. And that’s what I’ve done. And that’s when I decided, I’ve got to write a book. I’ve got to help other people. And I got to tell you, Amy, I mean, a year ago, if I were on your podcast, I’d be bawling. You know, I couldn’t get through it. But every time I talk about it, I heal just a little bit more.
Amy Stone [00:38:46]:
Which makes you a much easier person to tell the story, because you’re through it. You’ve really had some time to think about the feelings you had and do that, and there’s definitely. There’s so much power in that, and I appreciate you taking all the work to do it when you had the idea, I need to write the book. All right, so this has become very public with your family. So for a long time, it was a private secret. Then it was blasted into the public through a fight and through a court trial, and now everybody in the family knows. But when you decided to write a book about the story and when you tell your husband, hey, now I’m gonna write a book, what was the feedback from the rest of the people? They were like when you said, really? Not only did we live through this, but now I’m gonna write a book, how was that received by your. By your crew?
Darlene Lekowski [00:39:40]:
It’s interesting. I’m not gonna tell you who, but I did have one person say to me, are you sure you want to be known as the woman this happened to? And that really hurt. That kind of was like, it’s okay. Yeah, I do. I need to. And that’s how I’m going to heal. My husband was really supportive. My children were like, mom, we love you. You do what you need to do. And even my daughter, when the first time I told her, she’s like, mom, I hear you, and I’m so sorry what happened to you, but I think I’m hearing the fact that you need to forgive yourself first. You need to give yourself grace. And that is what I’ve had to do. And that’s why I wrote the book. I mean, I hired a ghostwriter to do it because I knew I couldn’t do it on my own.
Amy Stone [00:40:28]:
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:40:30]:
And telling my story, she ended up being almost like a fourth therapist, you know, pulling out all of the data and the stories, so.
Amy Stone [00:40:37]:
Wow. So it took a year with the ghost writer to get this ready for publish, but this episode is going to come out at the end of March. Your book is actually coming out at the beginning of April, we’re going to wrap this up in just a few seconds with the Rapid Fire question, but tell everybody, well, I’ll read the title. And then. So the title of the book is Shattering A Story of Survival, justice and the Power of Telling the Truth. So what do you hope will come from the book?
Darlene Lekowski [00:41:08]:
I hope that I help at least one other person not go through what I’ve gone through. I hope that men and women who were sexually abused as children are not afraid to talk and know that they’re not alone.
Amy Stone [00:41:24]:
Yes. Yes. And do you. So that I think that’s very good. Okay, so when you’re listening to this episode, if you’re listening right when it comes out, there is a pre release deal where you can get a discounted copy of the book on Amazon on April 2nd. And so there will be a link for that discounted copy for 99 cents in the show Notes, wherever it is that you’re watching or listening to the show, the easiest way to get the links is always to be subscribed to the Imperfect Adulting email list because then at the right timeframe, I will zap it right into your email box and you’ll have it. If you’re listening to it some other time, the book will be available for purchase in all the regular places. So we’ll give you all of that. Thank you very much for that very generous offer for the book. Are you ready to wrap this up, Darlene, with the final three questions?
Darlene Lekowski [00:42:10]:
I am.
Amy Stone [00:42:11]:
All right, so as somebody who’s a perfectionist or a recovering perfectionist, do you have a set morning routine and if so, what is it?
Darlene Lekowski [00:42:23]:
I get up at the crack of dawn. I mean like literally at the crack of dawn before everybody else is awake. 4:35, 30am and I just chill out. I get my cup of coffee, I sit on my back porch and I just spend time for me before the world starts.
Amy Stone [00:42:40]:
So do you sit on your back porch with 8 inches of snow? Is it a four season or is it an indoor house?
Darlene Lekowski [00:42:46]:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
Amy Stone [00:42:48]:
Yeah.
Darlene Lekowski [00:42:48]:
Sometimes it’s my back porch, sometimes it’s my living room sofa in front of a fireplace. How’s that?
Amy Stone [00:42:54]:
No, I was just clarifying. You could have an all season porch. I don’t know. Very good. All right, so you wrote a book. Do you also read books? And if so, what’s a good book that you’ve read that you think that people in the audience might also enjoy and you can include listen to? Because for me, reading and listening to books is all the same.
Darlene Lekowski [00:43:13]:
Yeah. I mean, I read so many books, but my brain doesn’t allow me to remember things. There is a book about the women in Vietnam who were soldiers, and I can’t remember.
Amy Stone [00:43:29]:
The nurses.
Darlene Lekowski [00:43:30]:
Yes.
Amy Stone [00:43:31]:
I think it’s called the Women.
Darlene Lekowski [00:43:33]:
The Women. Yes. It was so good. That’s one of my favorite.
Amy Stone [00:43:37]:
That is a really good book. I enjoyed that one, too. I really, really did. Were you old? So now you’re a little bit older than me. Do you remember Vietnam? Okay, for me, E. For me, it was all like my. It was all just learning through literature. All right. Very good. Okay. So you grew up in the Midwest. You live in North Carolina. When you take vacations these days, are you a person who likes to go a long way from home, choose an exotic location, or are you a person who is like, nope, I picked my town. I’m going to stay nearby.
Darlene Lekowski [00:44:07]:
I’m the type of person that wants to go someplace new every single time.
Amy Stone [00:44:12]:
Okay.
Darlene Lekowski [00:44:12]:
There are only two places I’ve ever gone back to, and that’s Italy and Hawaii. Other than that, I’m going someplace brand new.
Amy Stone [00:44:20]:
Fantastic. That’s it. Darlene Lakowski, thank you so much for being a wonderful guest today on the show.
Darlene Lekowski [00:44:26]:
Thank you. I really appreciate your time, Amy.