Murderous Hugs

Delphine was 4 years old when her hell began. "We always promised each other, my Mom and I, that we would not talk about it anymore, that it was over. Except that after this promise, which I never broke, I had many bad times to go through. I was always trying to find out why I felt so bad about myself, why the fear of dying came over me again, as in childhood. I gradually became aware that this feeling of uneasiness probably came from the drifting in and out of hospitals that I had experienced from a very young age, from the way my mother manipulated me, from all this sadness, and these fears, all these emotions had been so well repressed for years. My mind doesn't want to remember but my body hasn't forgotten anything and was letting me know." Munchhausen syndrome by proxy is a severe form of child abuse in which the adult caregiver deliberately causes serious and repeated health problems in the child before taking the child to a doctor. Afterword by Dr. Stéphanie Dauver, child psychiatrist, who wrote her thesis on Munchhausen syndrome by proxy.