In Hiding in Plain Sight, a U.S. Air Force veteran comes home to a family very different and unrecognizable than the one he left behind more than twenty years ago. He quickly learns that the long-duration battle he's about to fight on the home front will take every ounce of his strength...a battle as formidable and horrifying as one could ever conceive imaginable.
Sean Torean McFadden was a happy boy in childhood and a happy man through much of his adulthood. His departure from home at the age of seventeen led to a rewarding military career that was his greatest success, but upon his return home in his early forties, he would find a different type of enemy than those he worked so hard to suppress in uniform for more than two decades.
This enemy was close, personal, and wore a mask; hidden yet unhidden, known yet unknown, present yet distant. His quest for survival would take him on a long, treacherous and heartbreaking journey in emotional and psychological warfare-where the fight for survival of his mind, his spirit, and the love of one person put him on a divergent, unscrupulous battlefield-one bred in the depths of hell.
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All families are imperfect, yet within the expected range of imperfection you may believe that your family is particularly afflicted with a profound dysfunction and that this dysfunction is so severe as to inhibit the happiness and success that every person within that family unit deserves.
Sibling abuse is one of the more controversial areas of domestic violence. Society places great emphasis upon sibling relationships exemplified by the use of terms such as "brotherly and sisterly love" to reflect strong attachments of love and caring, but not all sibling relationships are healthy and well-adjusted. Several studies indicate that sibling abuse occurs in more than sixty percent of families, crossing all racial and socioeconomic lines, making it a common form of domestic violence and an area in need of greater research. For many years, very little research was conducted into the dynamics of sibling abuse, and what researchers do know comes from clinical studies. Parents often ignore it, researchers do not study it in great detail, and many therapists find it a normal element of growing up. However, there is an increasing focus on the fact that, in less than a majority of cases, sibling wars develop into a form of repeated and inescapable abuse.
One study determined that, as siblings grow older, their abuse decreases. The author can personally and unequivocally state that this is not always the case. It is his greatest hope that, should any aspects of his life within these pages sound familiar to you from your own experiences, you will learn from his experiences, be nourished and strengthened by them, and become strong enough to prevail in healing with truth and a greater sense of self.
The word "evil" has been used in this book more than one hundred times. It is not a word Sean takes lightly, nor should you. He struggled immensely with its use and required in-depth soul-searching before determining whether to use it or not. One normally associates evil with demons, possession, dark cults, and the like, and most notably with the devil itself. This book is not about that. It is about premeditated and unbridled betrayal, cruelty, emotional and psychological harm, half-truths, outright lies, and other forms of deception that leave no outward scars. While these, Sean has concluded, are all weapons in the devil's massive arsenal, because of that there is no question in his mind that with the existence of human evil, the devil plays an active role. With that thought in mind, he determined his use of the term in this book was proper.
