Mackenzie Phillips' Family Shunned Her After Father Incest Shocker
Feb. 8 2017, Updated 6:04 p.m. ET
After Mackenzie Phillips exposed a horrifying family secret — that her famous father had raped her before they began a ten-year incestuous relationship — many friends and fans rallied around the recovering addict.
But the actress turned counselor, 57, claims her family relationships became so "strained," she was uninvited to birthday parties and other gatherings.
One family member "wouldn't forgive me!" she fumes in her new memoir and self-help recovery book, Hopeful Healing. "For abuses perpetrated against me as a child, or for exposing those abuses perhaps."
"I was furious and I was crushed. I wanted desperately to figure out a way to fix everyone's pain. To have them see me as valuable and worthy."
The abandonment combined with critical strangers' judgments of her painful past at times led Phillips to regret her difficult decision to come forward with her story.
"I would lie in my bed at night, thinking, 'What have I done?'" she recalls of the fallout period. "It was a pretty classic response: the victim of the trauma taking responsibility for all of it."
She eventually learned to "surrender" control over others' reactions to her truth.
"I understand that I have no control over how my family individually or collectively feels," she explains. "It's really not about me, and it's not mine to carry."
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Phillips revealed her addict father John's long-term sexual abuse on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009 while promoting her first memoir, High On Arrival. (The Mamas and the Papas singer died of heart failure in 2001 at 65.)
At the time, her half-sister Bijou Phillips publicly stated that she did not believe the allegations. Two of John's ex-wives also slammed her story.
After decades of cocaine and heroin addiction, Phillips is now sober and works as an addiction therapist in the Los Angeles area.
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