Sisters Surviving (S1E6)

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People believe their eyes.

That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this, is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something.

I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

If you just can't get enough of me in your ears, first of all, thank you.

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I'm Elizabeth Hant.

I go by Liz.

And I'm Erica Hant.

We will be sharing about our own personal experiences.

Our adopted mother has not been formally investigated or charged for the medical abuse to our knowledge, though we have reported our suspicions to protect identity.

We will refer to our adopted mother as Ursula and our biological mother's name is Julianne.

Liz and Erica Hann are twin sisters who discovered in their 20s that they had been victims of Munchausen by proxy abuse.

They were placed with their foster mother at age five after suffering abuse and neglect at the hands of their biological mother who was suffering from substance abuse issues.

Liz and Erica reached out to me on Instagram after hearing an interview that I did with Dr.

Mark Feldman on a podcast.

When I heard from Liz and Erica, I was really anxious to talk to them because I just wonder what life looks like after for survivors.

How do you live through something like this?

How do you get your sense of self back intact?

How do you build a healthy life after going through a childhood like this?

Tell us a little bit about your first impressions of Ursula that you can remember.

She seemed like a normal person, right?

Like someone you would see on the street.

You'd walk by her, seems like a pleasant person.

It was that way for quite some time.

She did have some

really, I'll say unique ways of disciplining us.

You know, she used like a point system, you know, because she actually ran a daycare at the time.

we would earn points for do like having good behavior and then get points taken away if we acted out and then at the end of the week we would be able to like cash in our points for like a pack of gum or you know would get to pick the movie night for the weekend or whatever it was a busy household right off the get-go and so i think her way of maintaining control was through different ways of discipline that didn't feel like like, you know, like a family necessarily.

We always kind of felt almost like an outsider, like we're almost,

we were always treated like daycare children or foster care children.

We didn't really start experiencing abuse or at least like in your face physical abuse until we were probably around the age of seven.

And then later on in our 20s, we started to review our medical records and kind of piece together that she was also being medically abusive.

What was the story of your health as you understood it?

We actually remember undergoing pretty extensive neuropsych testing at the University of Minnesota here.

And that was when we were probably six or seven.

I remember when we were leaving to go get that testing done, She was saying, you're going to go get tested for fetal alcohol syndrome or FAS for short.

She said that we have FAS.

So that was what we were told.

And she actually ultimately used that as a weapon against us to emotionally abuse us as well.

Can you explain what some of the symptoms of FAS are typically and sort of how that would present?

So FAS, the symptoms would be learning disabilities.

physical deformities, I think usually in the face, but also there are physical deformities with like your heart or lungs.

You might have issues throughout your life.

It also includes just other general cognitive and social delays.

It can also have behavioral issues.

I didn't feel like we displayed any of that when we were kids.

Listening to Erica and Liz list out the symptoms of this disorder that they supposedly had was incredibly jarring because I'd talked to them a couple of times now on Zoom.

They are healthy looking, beautiful, smart, prototypical girls next door.

We found medical records that showed that we were there for two weeks in the care of or at her house.

And at that two-week mark, she brought us in for medication for anxiety.

And so that's ultimately how that started.

She wanted to put us on medication for anxiety.

The doctors didn't want to start us on anything because they said that we had just gone through a very traumatic event and it's completely normal to have anxiety.

And they offered alternatives.

It started there.

We progressed to having neuropsych testing done.

We progressed to seeing multiple therapists and we would bounce around therapists in our childhood to the point where anything that we said, we felt like it would go back to Ursula.

She would threaten their practice.

She would remove us from the care of that therapist.

She would find a new therapist.

What were your conversations between the two of you like around that time?

When it initially started when we were seven, we talked about it, but we didn't really like say, oh, this is wrong or, oh, this is why we were put into foster care in the first place.

I remember Erica and I were hiding in one of our closets out in the guesthouse with one of our older sisters.

I can't remember which one of us had the Windex, but...

you know, we were talking about how we would use the Windex to spray her in the face if she came after us again.

We had those those kinds of conversations where we talked about like, how do we protect ourselves?

But I don't know that we actually like had true conversations about that was physical abuse until we were like 16 or 17.

And she did still attack us, like even at that age.

And cops would be called and we're just difficult children.

She accused me of being on drugs.

They would usually just chalk it up to like a family dispute or she would use our mental illness as her go-to of like these are really difficult children they were adopted they have fetal alcohol syndrome and so whenever police were contacted that was the story they were being given they ultimately took her side because she was so involved in the community she was a member of the church super respected she was a part of the foster care system trusted by social workers, guardian and lightum.

So she really positioned herself to be trusted.

And so that anytime that there was any suspicions raised or police contacted, she would be able to play it up that we had a mental illness and things like that.

The tactics that Ursula used on Liz and Erica may sound really different from the tactics that Hope used, but this is really the same form of abuse.

Again, back to this being a crime of opportunity, Ursula used the tools at her disposal just as Hope used the tools at her disposal.

So for Hope, it was physical things, it was feeding issues, it was her youngest being born really premature that sort of kicked off that pattern of behavior.

And for Ursula, it was having the setup of having two little girls come into her from a biological mother who she knew struggled with drugs, who could conceivably have fetal alcohol syndrome or other developmental delays.

This is diabolical.

She used the five-year-old twins past, knowing that their mother was a drug addict against them.

She had this set up when they joined her household.

We suspect that she went with these mental or emotional diagnosis because it's not really black and white in the sense that like there's not any one particular test to say, yes, you are positive for anxiety.

Like it's really subjective in nature.

And the other reason is she had a narrative.

She was able to look at our background and where we came from.

And our biological mother, Julianne, was an alcoholic and she was also abusing heroin.

You know, she had this history of substance abuse, and Ursula was able to cling on to that narrative.

Because you refer to him as your dad, so that makes me think you had a closer relationship with him than with Ursula.

So can you tell me a bit about him?

He felt like a normal dad growing up.

You know, we would play basketball and we would go take care of the farm animals together.

And so, I would say we were really close.

It felt like he was kind of a buffer.

It felt like that was our only grasp of normalcy.

When our parents did go through a divorce, it was incredibly messy.

We were brought up on the stand to testify about why we wanted to live with our mother.

We were 14 or 15 at the time.

Ultimately, our father lost physical custody and we weren't able to have a relationship with him again until we were 18.

We did try to off and on throughout ages 15 through 18 to have a relationship with him through trying to be placed in his care.

We worked at the local dairy queen and our dad would just come visit us at work on lunch breaks because he just wanted to see us.

And as soon as Ursula caught wind of that, it led to more abuse, more restrictions.

So she was fighting any chance of us to be able to have any relationship with him.

And he was painted as a bad person.

She would manipulate us to kind of believe that he wasn't a good father.

What was going on with Jenna and with the other kids in the house?

Was this behavior and this abuse sort of spread equally?

Or do you feel like the two of you were a particular focus and then it shifted to Jenna?

Like, what did those dynamics look like?

No, I actually think that it got worse as she had more kids.

Liz and I were the first foster children to be adopted, along with our younger sister, Jenna.

But it's almost as if the youngest kids who were adopted later have actually had it worse.

So did you see some of those behaviors with your younger adopted siblings that was manifesting in some of those more sort of classical physical ways?

Feeding tubes.

apnea issues, failure to thrive, that kind of thing?

Or was it all sort of in the psychological realm?

Kind of the common thing that you see with Munchausen by proxy, you know, with the failure to thrive and that narrative that they're not eating properly or unable to eat properly, it's almost as if she escalated as the children were added to our family.

It was all in the psychological realm for every kid in the house.

It was a different spread depending on the kid and kind of like the background that they came from and their narrative.

I mean, these diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar, it's like if you look at the medical history, like their parents may have been diagnosed with that.

Again, she was able to cling on to a narrative that may or may not be true, but, you know, she was shopping around for these diagnoses very early on when the kids were young.

I'm glad you pointed that out, that there may be some of these things that were true, because I think sometimes people look at these cases and they make the assumption that you have to disprove any diagnoses that have been made about that child in order to prove that there's evidence of medical child abuse happening.

And of course, that's not the case.

It's a pattern of fabricating or exaggerating or inducing conditions.

And so there may be something that starts it off or there may be some underlying condition that feeds into that narrative.

So I'm really glad that you brought that up.

And I think that what's really interesting about your story actually is that

it's not some of the things that we are more used to seeing in medical child abuse cases, physical issues, feeding issues, surge or unnecessary surgeries, that kind of thing.

But of course, the psychiatric stuff can be just as damaging.

You know, it's creating a false story of your own self and your own health and your own capabilities and really breaking that bond of possible trust between you and medical professionals.

And talk about some of this baggage that that's left you guys with and sort of how

that part of the abuse, how that affected you guys.

It led me to have a general distrust of therapists, I think, because a lot of what we would report in therapy would get reported back to Ursula and then would be weaponized against us.

Just the long-lasting effects of being told that you have this, you know, mental illness, not only does it build a stigma from your perception, you look at a mental illness as like this terrible thing that the way that it was presented to you your entire life, it's debilitating.

Like I had a really hard time figuring out who I was and like trusting what I was capable of because time and time again growing up, we kept on being told, you won't be able to do X, Y, Z.

You won't have a normal life because of your mental condition.

That's a lasting effect all through your life.

I've worked really hard with a therapist that I trust to get to the point where I'm at right now, but it was an uphill battle, I'd say.

Like she keeps on trying to put us in this box and we're not going to stay in that box.

Being told from a young age that there's something wrong with you, you constantly are wondering what it is and it makes you feel unlovable.

It affects your relationships with significant others.

It affects your relationships with your friends, your family.

And so, like Liz said, it takes a long time to go through therapy and find somebody that you trust to really kind of start to repair those wounds, but I don't know that you can ever fully repair them.

It creates a lot of self-doubt.

So even though Liz and Erica didn't have a name for what was happening to them, by the time they were teenagers, they became aware that they were the victims of abuse and felt like they needed to get out.

They even tried to formally emancipate themselves from their mother at the age of 16.

At that time, we were working full-time.

We were attending college full-time.

We were also participating in sports.

And so we felt like we were, you know, living a life that an adult could put together at the age of 16.

And it's really sad to look back at those documents that we presented to the court because we're so clearly manipulated and so clearly emotionally abused in the documents pleading with the court and pleading with the judge to get us out of the situation that we don't have fetal alcohol syndrome, but the court system is the same system that placed us in the care of Ursula.

So ultimately, we were not granted emancipation.

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Eric and Liz did finally make it out of Ursula's house.

Two years after their attempt at emancipation, they graduated from high school and they moved out the day after.

What was the light bulb moment in terms of identifying the elements of munchausen by proxy that you suffered?

The light bulb moment was when we were going through our adoption paperwork and we saw the record that said that she was seeking the anxiety medication.

For two five-year-olds who had just experienced a traumatic situation, putting them on medication right away just was an immediate red flag to us.

And then from there, we just started piecing everything together.

I actually recently requested the records from the University of Minnesota to see if we did get diagnosed with FAS because we never questioned it.

So it'll be interesting to see like what those results come back as.

Some of the reasons why we feel like we were victims of Munchausen syndrome by proxy is the socialization part of it and like her seeking the attention

and the status that she would get by taking care of these difficult children.

She really seemed to thrive off of being seen as like this saint.

She would get complimented when we were at restaurants by how well-behaved we were, but it's like, if you peel back the layers of that,

were they well-behaved because they are well-behaved or because they were scared?

This is Dr.

Mary Sanders.

She is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Stanford and she is the head of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children's Munchausen by Proxy Committee.

Mary works with both perpetrators and survivors.

So when children grow up believing that they're ill, that's their self-story.

And that means that they may be missing school, they may be missing social opportunities, developmental opportunities.

I've had kids, even after the abuse has come to light, they don't know.

They still believe that they're ill.

You know, they grew up with this self-story, it's very hard for them to move from it.

And so, yes, the self-story of illness can be very difficult to debrief the kids from.

That's the, you know, the main issue of the whole

life around being ill.

And then suddenly everything's changed and they're being told, you know, they're not ill anymore or all these things maybe didn't exist.

And it's very hard to sift through for them.

And sense of betrayal.

And post-traumatic stress sometimes, if they did know, you know, some of the kids were aware that they were being abused and felt that they couldn't fight back.

So that lack of control too.

Because it seems to me that this form of abuse so deeply affects your sense of self, do you think that maybe having your sister to look at and being so similar and sort of being able to say, I don't think these things are true about my sister, so maybe they're not true about me?

I think that a lot of our resiliency actually comes from being able to lean on each other and having that shared experience because I knew that I could always trust at least one person.

I always knew when we were young that I wanted to do more with my life.

I had a couple of different examples to reference.

Our biological parents, that was a no-go for me.

I didn't want that life for myself.

Our adopted parents, also another hard no for me, didn't want that life.

A commonality that I noticed between both of my experiences was that neither our biological parents nor our adopted parents pursued college at all.

And so for me,

because I love to learn and because I was good at school, I was like, logical next step, go to college.

I think I've worked very hard to get where I am today, just putting my head down and getting the work done.

I've talked to a number of survivors at this point, and this idea that the revelation of abuse comes a little bit later in life in one's 20s, even in your 30s or 40s or beyond, is really a common theme.

Survivors have told me that they felt like their mind and their heart had to wait until they felt stable and healthy enough to be able to even process those memories.

This was true for Liz, who waited until she was about 23 to start seeking therapy for the abuse that she'd suffered.

Erica tried to cope by keeping her focus on her education and her considerable accomplishments, but she found that the blast zone of the abuse permeated all of her intimate relationships.

I want to say that I more so did a lot of things with trial and error.

So I would find myself in my first boyfriend, it was a very abusive relationship.

You know, I would find myself in situations where I was kind of repeating the trauma and trying to relive that trauma and get a different outcome.

I also found a therapist and it was really helpful for me that my therapist specialized in trauma.

She was able to kind of explain to me the effects that trauma have on the brain development.

And so that was really helpful for me to kind of understand why I kind of was repeating that process over and over with different relationships.

Have you confronted Ursula directly?

Have you confronted her?

Yeah, on several different occasions, we confronted her directly.

She denies ever weaponizing FAS against us, but that was literally our entire life growing up.

She doesn't ever apologize.

She doesn't ever admit wrong.

You know, each time we've reached out to her, she accuses us of starting starting drama, all sorts of stuff.

So we've confronted her and it's always the same story.

So

here again is Dr.

Mary Sanders.

You know, way back, there wasn't much out there in the public about this.

There weren't names for this type of abuse.

And so these victims really didn't feel like they had a place to go.

And now they do.

Victims have come forward in their adulthood and been able to talk about their stories, recognize what had happened to them.

And some have been able to get their medical records and be able to kind of sift through and look at the story of illness that was falsified over time.

But I don't think any of them have had a parent that I'm aware of anyway that had a parent that was able to acknowledge.

We need for the perpetrators to be able to get to a place where they can acknowledge that they've engaged in this form of child abuse and fully take responsibility, being able to recognize the need to put their child's needs first above their own.

When individuals

tend to have what's called an external locus of control, they tend to blame others, not take responsibility, get their needs met indirectly using deception, it's very difficult for them to admit and acknowledge that they've engaged in these behaviors, not only to others, but to themselves.

We just want to be clear.

Our message is not, you know, we need to hate her or we don't forgive her or we perseverate on, you know, these negative feelings.

Our message is that we we want other people who experience similar abuse to be able to feel empowered to make a different light for themselves.

And we just want to be motivating and inspiring to other people who have had the same experience.

We have a voice.

And when we were kids, no one ever listened to us.

And so now that we have found our voice, we want to continue to use it.

What do you want people to know about Munch Housing Housing by Proxy?

I mean, what are some of the things that maybe you guys have seen in terms of how it's represented that you feel are inaccurate or some of the things that you just like to share from the perspective of being survivors?

I think that people tend to see abusers as, you know, like the obvious villain.

And I think that it's really important to demonstrate that there is this kind of gray area, that you know that something's wrong when you're going through it.

And you don't necessarily need to disprove anything like you were saying Andrea.

I think that's the common misconception is that you have to disprove a diagnosis and it's not as black and white as people think and as the media portrays it.

You know, in our story, Ursula is not a very obvious villain.

I mean to us she was, but it was very hard for us to overcome some of that and to have people listen to us because of the social status that she carried.

And these people really do position themselves in a status that's going to benefit them.

And their level of manipulation is almost cult-like.

They can get anyone to follow them and anyone to believe them.

I think it's really helpful that your story is this even subtler version of this abuse.

And I mean subtle in its presentation, not subtle in its effects of using the sort of psychiatric medical system, because that's even more taking it to a degree of something that's not going to show up on a blood test, that's not going to show up on an x-ray.

That doesn't really, to be honest, take that much work to fake.

It just means someone coming up with a compelling narrative and sitting there and making that report to a doctor or a therapist.

And I think it's really helpful for people to understand this as a pattern of behavior because, and as a pattern of abuse.

I also think it's really important to keep the focus on the victims and the focus on survivors and on identifying these behavior patterns because it doesn't matter at the end of the day so much why the person's doing it.

It's about understanding that pattern of behavior and then being able to identify it and protect kids from it.

What would you guys like to see happen?

I just want there to be recognition that this occurred.

I want there to be some level of accountability.

I don't know what that looks like, but I mean, these people are never going to admit their wrongdoing, but I think what I want out of it would be just some validation from her.

I don't think that I want any justice through the courts at this point, just because the worst case scenario versus the best case scenario and having to weigh out the pros and cons.

And unfortunately, I think that the children in the home now are in better positions in her care compared to potentially the unknowns of being in the care of other foster parents.

So yeah, I think it puts us in a tough situation.

I don't know what justice really does look like in that scenario.

I'm kind of opposite of you.

I'd like to see her without contact with kids.

Like she clearly is a repeat offender.

She's done it for 20 years, you know, 20 plus years at this point.

So I have a hard time believing that she could actually change.

Justice looks like

her

being held accountable for what she did, her being held accountable and not being able to have children in her care.

You know, I do recognize that there is a wild card that comes into play when you're placing the child in the foster care system.

You know, it gives me anxiety and scares me a little bit to think about where could these kids end up.

But at the same time, I want her to be held accountable.

Today, Liz and Erica are 28 years old and they're thriving.

Liz recently got married and Erica walked her down the aisle.

Liz is working as a product manager for a digital experience platform and Erica is actually working as a pediatric trauma physician assistant at a children's hospital in Minnesota.

They are currently at work on a memoir about their experiences and are passionate about raising awareness about Munchosen by proxy.

To learn more about Liz and Erica and what they're up to, please go to the show notes and see a link to their blog and both of their Instagram accounts.

I want to give you an update on where I was with getting an interview with Hope.

Needless to say, I'm not a professional investigative journalist, but fortunately, my producer Tina is a longtime news gal.

And what she recognized in my communications back and forth with Hope was that even though she was saying no, she had kept the conversation going.

And so we both were able to discern that there must be some part of Hope that did want to sit down and have this conversation with me.

And I felt like it could be a good thing for both of us.

People who are involved in this kind of crime don't get treated with very much empathy, and I felt like I was uniquely positioned to have some empathy for hope.

I was determined to do whatever I could possibly to have this conversation.

Next time on Nobody Should Believe Me, we will dig into the psychopathology of Munchausen by proxy perpetrators and attempt to answer the crucial question, can they be saved?

If you've been listening to this podcast and some of the details sound very familiar to you from your own life or someone that you know, please visit us at munchhausensupport.com.

We have resources there from some of the top experts in the country and we can connect you with professionals who can help.

Nobody Should Believe Me is a production of Large Media.

Our lead producer is Tina Knoll.

The show was edited by Lisa Gray with help from Wendy Nardy.

Jeff Gall is our sound engineer.

Additional scoring and music by Johnny Nicholson and Joel Schupak.

Also, special thanks to Maria Palaiologus, Joelle Knoll, and Katie Klein for project coordination.

I'm your host and executive producer, Andrea Dunlop.