Woman recalls witnessing her abusive father brutally beating her mother – and the shock impact the heinous moment had on her life

Felicity Nicole was only 10 years old when she woke up one summer morning to find her mother crying on the living room floor, with blood running down her face.

Her father, who had beaten his wife with a crystal ashtray, ran through the house to get his bag before being escorted out by her sister’s boyfriend. Felicity’s sister was on the phone to 911.

‘[My dad] didn’t say much to us kids as we watched the chaos… and my mother was sitting on the floor and she was crying, “Why me?” and her head was split wide open and there was just blood running down her face,” said the now 46 years old recalled DailyMail.com from her home in Chicago.

Her parents’ marriage was turbulent, as was Felicity’s childhood with a sister and two brothers.

“My mom and dad… got married when they were 16. They had my sister when they were 16, they moved in with my grandparents, and then they moved out on their own and my grandparents raised my sister really badly, because I think there was a lot of drugs and parties and stuff,” she explained.

“My mother wasn’t one to go along with that. She was more or less the babysitter. But, my God, she loved him. But I don’t remember my dad much when I was little, but when I do remember him, he was high.”

Most 10-year-olds would scream or panic at the terrifying scene Felicity witnessed that summer day, but she remembers reacting very differently.

‘[This is] how I knew I was different… I didn’t know I was a healer at the time, but… there are so many ways a 10-year-old would deal with this. I mean, you would break down and be like, “Oh my God, Mom,” screaming, breaking down, crying,” she explained.

‘I was so together. I went into the bathroom, grabbed a bunch of toilet paper and walked over to her and started blotting the blood away.

“And I said, ‘Mom, it’s going to be OK. It’s going to be OK.’ To me, those were some of the first signs that God was putting me on the path of being a healer and a teacher.”

After this terrible event, she grew up without her father around. He ‘disappeared’ from their lives for 12 years, only occasionally ‘coming in and out’ to visit her. [mother] “Money,” Felicity said.

Meanwhile, Felicity’s mother was “mentally and emotionally shut down,” and her daughter didn’t blame her.

“Given the circumstances, she was not a drug addict. Her vices were coffee and cigarettes, and she worked,” the 46-year-old told DailyMail.com.

‘So as children we did our best to learn to cope with the chaos and the dysfunction.

‘It was bread and no butter… food was scarce, we were poor. Sometimes we had a bathroom that worked, sometimes not, sometimes we had to bathe in the scullery sink.

‘The roof collapsed and there was a big hole in the ceiling of our living room.’

Before Felicity began her “healing work,” she is said to have described her childhood as “fun,” but later she would realize how “toxic” it was.

“We didn’t know how to cope, we had no food. The house was filthy,” she explained.

“She (my mother) just sat there on the couch and smoked. It was just sad when I think about it now because if I had sent my kids to therapy, I would have done it differently.

“But back then, in the ’80s. You didn’t really do that. I mean, I wet the bed when I was 10, 11… there was something going on at a deeper level.”

Felicity recalls in her memoir: Parts of methat her father, Richard, “loved women and drugs more than anything on earth,” and that her mother, Erin, suffered “many bouts” of his anger, infidelity and aggression for more than two decades before he “finally bashed her head open with the crystal ashtray,” nearly killing her.

His drug addiction would eventually lead to his death.

“I remember him smoking weed because I remember asking him, what kind of cigarette is that?” Felicity said.

‘And my sister learned how to roll a joint at age four, from a Kmart receipt.

“He was using cocaine and we know he was sharing needles because he was later diagnosed with hepatitis C.”

Felicity now draws on her childhood experiences to help other women.

After her mother and father died within months of each other in 2013 and her first marriage ended, Felicity resumed her life at the age of 36 as a single mother of a young son.

“I started rebuilding myself in 2013, mentally and emotionally, just doing affirmations, Googling YouTube videos and listening to meditations and stuff like that. It was just to give myself the courage to rebuild myself, to say, ‘Hey, I can do this,'” she said.

Through her company, She is youFelicity helps other women who are struggling to get their lives back on track and find their purpose in life through mentorship and coaching.

When asked what advice she would give to people at a crossroads, she had this to say: ‘I would say listen to your heart. Get out of your head and go into your heart. What does your heart tell you? Because this is our kingdom, this is where God lives, this is our intuition. What does your heart tell you to do?

‘And then we would split it up from there, because you have to think logically. Your heart can tell you to move to France, but if you don’t have any money, then we have to go there.

But what I would say is if someone is stuck like me, [was]. It just comes down to… how hungry are you, just to live? Because I’ll tell you, once you get out there, you have to start from scratch, and that’s hard.

“So you have to be hungry, because you have to work really hard. And you have to prepare yourself for emergencies and have emergency money and prepare yourself for setbacks. And there is no such thing as, ‘I can’t do it.’ It doesn’t exist in my vocabulary. It just doesn’t exist, because I wouldn’t be where I am if it did.”

Felicity’s book Pieces Of Me is out now.