Episode 8
I Thought Everyone Heard Voices
From the moment she could remember, she believed the voices in her head—and the abuse—were normal. Sitting on her grandfather’s knee while her grandmother knitted, enduring his hands under her dress, then later in his car, his room, on dirt roads—he normalized violation as routine.
When her older brother began pressuring her at 12, her “no” was ignored until one night, memory itself fractured, leaving only the chilling certainty: It was rape. Trapped in a home of beer cans, violence, and her father’s cruel taunts—calling her “stupid,” “mad like your mum,” a “slut”—she learned to sleep with a knife under her pillow and numb herself with stolen decongestant.
As an adult, she chased love like salvation, cycling through addiction, toxic relationships, and suicidal despair, all while believing she was fundamentally broken. Her daughters witnessed it all—the dizzying highs, the crashes, the hospitalizations—while she carried the crushing lie that everyone else managed their pain, and only she failed. Raw and poetic, her story exposes how incest doesn’t just steal childhood—it rewires reality. And yet, amid the wreckage, one truth remains: She wasn’t stupid. She was silenced.
L-R: Producer: Peter Northcote, Narrator: Jean Kittson, Producer: Tanya Lee
Jean Kittson - Australian Performer / Author / Comedian
Author, public speaker, actor, comedian and scriptwriter for stage, television, theatre, radio. A regular panellist on ABC 702 radio drive program, Thank God It’s Friday and a weekly panellist on Today Extra, Nine Network.
Comedy work has included ABC TV’s, 'The Big Gig', Let the Blood Run Free, Kittson Fahey, Good News Week, the Glasshouse, Flat Chat, The Einstein Factor and comedy debates for the ABC, Channel 9 and Channel ten.
She has been a regular columnist with New Weekly, Sunday Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney Magazine, Inspire Magazine, the Readers Digest Health Smart Magazine and the on-line magazine, The Hoopla.
She is the Patron of Palliative Care Nurses Australia, and an Ambassador for the Macular Disease Foundation, the Australian Gynaecological Foundation, the Raise Foundation and Taldumande Youth Services.