Edino van Dorsten, one of the nine children of Ruinerwold, published his book last week My name is Edino. He describes what happened to him as a child in a family that was terrorized by a religiously insane father who saw himself as the Messiah.
The book was in bookstores on Tuesday and the first reactions were positive. “The first reactions were that people had read it in one day,” says Van Dorsten in the RTV Drenthe radio program Cassata. “It’s exciting to publish a book, it’s exciting to tell your story. And you also realize how intense some things were.”
In the book, Edino Van Dorsten describes, among other things, that he encountered his father when he had already been rejected and exiled by him. Edino saw him cycling in the distance and was happy to see him. “I had missed him, because I had not seen him for a while and I still completely believed in my father at that moment. And during that period there was nothing worse than being completely left alone, being forgotten, as if I did not exist. When I saw him and saw that he was happy to see me, it meant a lot to me. And he also spoke my name, Edino, for the first time in a long time. That touched me very much.”
Edino immediately felt the urge to follow his father’s mission again. “He started with a good cause, to make the world a better place, he wanted the right thing.” But according to Edino he had ‘forgotten’ that if you want to change something you first have to start with yourself. “He didn’t look at himself, he only looked at how he could change other people so that they fit his idea. When that didn’t work, he shut those people out, which made him go back further and further. And so the closed system started and no one could call him out on wrong behavior, because he was untouchable. But he himself could talk to everyone.”
Edino van Dorsten was also mistreated and sexually abused. “What happened, happened, we can’t change that anymore.” he says about that. “We have to learn something from it, we have to see what we can learn from a situation. We can only look at how it came about and what we can learn from it and how can we use it so that it does not happen again. And that is why you have to write it down as it happened. You should not make the story more beautiful than it was, that is of no use to anyone.”
According to Van Dorsten, it is not just about the abuse, but also about everything behind it. “The mental oppression, the psychological oppression and how that plays on a child’s brain over the years. And what the effect is on life afterwards.”
Van Dorsten does not hate his father. “I hate what he did and I abhor and condemn what he did. I also felt anger, but the only thing that creates anger is a kind of powerlessness within yourself that you cannot do anything with.”
“I describe everything openly, it has been a scar and a heavy burden. I noticed that by talking about it and writing it down, that burden became less and I was able to give it a better place. I hope that other people who read the book can gain strength from it to do the same.”