COMING CLEAN

Shania heals from her past

Like the title of her new album, Now, Shania Twain wants to live in the moment. And no wonder, since her past is so painful.

The country superstar grew up with abusive parents. “Many nights I went to bed thinking, ‘Don’t go to sleep, don’t go to sleep, wait till they are sleeping,’” she recalls of her youth. “I was worried about my father killing my mother, but my mum was quite violent too. I would wake up to make sure everyone was still breathing.”

Shania (52) has spoken about her traumatic childhood with her stepdad Jerry Twain, but following her bitter break-up of her marriage to music producer Robert “Mutt” Lange in 2008, she says, “I started peeling back the layers of pain I was in, and all the other griefs and disappointments came back to the surface.”

Now she’s revealed her stepfather abused her not only physically and psychologically, but sexually as well. “I learned to block it out,” she says.

But a friend of Shania’s tells the Weekly, “She didn’t want to live as a victim any more” and wanted to speak out.

“She was determined to break the cycle and forgive herself and those in her life, living or dead. It’s about freeing herself up for the rest of her life.”

First, Shania needed to accept the choice she’d made as a child to not turn in her parents for abuse. “I thought, if I go to Children’s Aid, we’ll all get separated,” she recalls. “I just couldn’t bear that.”

Instead, she stayed and found refuge in music. “A lot of kids play with dolls, and I played with words and sounds.”

Her parents’ death in a car crash in 1987 is another painful memory. “I was out of myself with grief,” Shania says and she put her career on hold to care for her siblings until 1993, when she met and married Mutt (69).

Their collaboration made her a star, but when he had an affair with her best friend, the betrayal devastated Shania. Still, she thought, “This was not nearly as bad as my parents dying. It’s time to put it all in perspective.”

She worked hard on healing and in 2011 she got remarried, to Nestle executive Frederic Thiebaud (48). Speaking out now about the abuse is her way of “coming clean”, says her friend.

“She wanted to be rid of it once and for all.”

With therapy, music and most of all, her son Eja (16), Shania’s looking ahead – and, of course, coming to New Zealand for three shows at the end of this year.

“Being a good, doting mum put her past into perspective,” her friend says. And now Shania has a new outlook. “There’s always light at the end of the tunnel,” she says. “That’s the way I look at life.”