Meet Bob McCabe
Founder, Recovery Speaking Initiative
Bob McCabe is a recovered alcoholic and a survivor of clergy sexual abuse. He lost his job, marriage, family, financial resources, friends, self-respect, and his dignity. His journey back, and the life he has built since, is why RSI exists.
Bob founded RSI because when he needed help, there was nowhere to turn. He has been in recovery for more than a decade. Bob leads RSI because he has walked the path himself, and RSI wants to make sure that no one has to walk it alone.
Helping is Healing
Listen to Bob’s March 2020 momondays talk about how helping others on their journey is part of his own recovery. Want the longer conversation? Watch Sexual Abuse: My Story, Bob’s talk with Patrick and James of Soaring Prophets about surviving sexual abuse, addiction, and the stigma that keeps many men from getting help.
A letter from Bob
In the summer of 1963, I was sexually abused by Fr. Alphonse Robert in a Cornwall motel while travelling from Scarborough, Ontario to Montreal, Quebec. I was 11 years old.
That experience has had a profound impact on my life and the actions I have taken. It led to three divorces, a period of estrangement from my three children, broken hearts of brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and parents, angry and disappointed employers, friends and associates. I drank alcoholically from the age of 25 until 58, and ultimately lost everything of value, including all relationships, all values and moral standards, as well as severe impact on my medical condition.
For me, this journey of recovery started in the early morning hours of December 4, 2010, at the corner of Wellington and Bristol roads in Guelph, Ontario. It was at that time that something came between me and alcohol. A moment of clarity, if you will. I entered a 12-step recovery after a weekend of detoxing at my apartment, and for the next three years I got sober and began intense work with other alcoholics and addicts. During that time there were no severe conscious thoughts of the abuse or its impacts.
On Christmas morning 2013, I was at home and had just completed my morning prayer and meditation discipline when I re-lived the sexual abuse by Fr. Robert. This experience took me through all of the grooming over the year before the Montreal trip, the visits and deception he perpetrated on my mother, the travel and his rambling conversation on matters sexual, the overnight stop in Cornwall, the abuse during the night, the next morning at the basilica, and the long ride home.
Upon arriving home, there is a clear and vivid memory I have of running up the driveway of our home on Birchmount Road in Scarborough, desperately trying to put distance between me and that predator priest and the confines of his car. And yet saying to myself that I could not tell Mom or Dad or any of my brothers and sisters of this dreadful and paralyzing experience of abuse, because no one would believe me. He was a priest. Next to God. Who is going to believe me over God?
That was the exact wording of that thought some 58 years earlier. I felt the anguish and desperation and fear as I write the words today, as a man of 69 years, to the same intensity I did as an 11-year-old boy in 1963.
The difference today is not that emotions and feelings do not return. They do. They just do not own me. I am not the victim now. I have tools, physical, mental and spiritual, which allow me to recognize the emotion and not automatically default to the victim persona of my past.
The reality remains that the abuse took place, and that, coupled with my alcoholism, were the worst two facts of my life. And now those two facts are the biggest assets of my life.
My hope is that RSI can offer that same journey to others who have suffered trauma.
Thank you for visiting, and for your ongoing support.
With deep respect,
Bob McCabe
Founder, Recovery Speaking Initiative