I M Perfect lady

The good news about having such a short time to 'prepare' for the filming, is that there is no time to prepare….so you don't have to.  

The normal response is how do I look and how does my home look and then….the realness sets in, when I know that is not what people will tune in to experience, but rather the content of how it feels to be labeled and treated like you are mental…and to learn more about mental illness and disorders.

Who in their right mind would volunteer for such a documentary to disclose and expose your inner darkness?

Me.

However, I believe my story is backwards or society is and I guess the viewer will be left to answer that on their own.

As I thought about this "interview" I recalled the interview with the detective who came to take the statement from me to help create a case against my father.

These encounters are not your typical conversations, for they want to know what you usually keep silent about.

They are here to go into the darkness and bring you there too.

When the Detective came into my home, it was just a few weeks out of my denial…and today I am 10 years out.

The me who sat in the chair 10 years ago, bravely trying to wrap my brain around me being abused, is so not who I am today.

I have had 10 years of writing and doing art…of endless talking with my brother, to reading books about abuse.  I have done yoga to express the emotions trapped in my body.  Read books from authors who are brilliant in recounting their stories and share what is helpful.  I have been out and about in our local town, doing social services on the topic of being sexually abuse.

This interview will be different…but so am I.

I am not in the throes of trauma…shell shocked from living for 46 years in denial to be smacked into reality, digging into a darkness that was so wide and deep and terrifying…and me so small.  Not in size, but in inner self, of knowing who I was.

I am ten years strong today.

This interview will host a woman who is wise in the ways of being a victim and what is needed to move beyond.

The detective's interview was of a new victim, 40 years after the crime.

She had a mind who failed to record the sexual abuse, so she lived in denial.

And what came to me yesterday, is that when the mind fails to record, "it didn't happen" and that is how I lived…denying its existence.

Denial.

Most would not think that denial is a mental illness.

And, I think it is one of the most common, and widely accepted as being 'normal', and not an illness at all.

It wasn't the actual act of being sexually molested, (raped by my father), but the fact that it wasn't recorded.

For I then lived my life like it didn't happen…that my father wasn't a pedophile.

To live with a pedophile like he was just a normal dad, is what was mental.

Not the 10 years that I have now lived in reality…this I call being of sound mind.

My left brain as Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor says "Took the least amount of information and weaved the most plausible story…" creating a normal family…it denied all references to abuse.

Denial is manufactured in the left brain.

How incredible to learn that the left brain doesn't need facts or reality checks.

And, yet how devastating to learn that the life you lived for 46 years has very few anchors in reality.

Giving up denial is quite shocking to the system…to all at once know you have been duped by your own mind.

I would not have been able to live so long in denial, unless the rest of my family lived there too.  If there had been anyone in reality at the time of my abuse, I would not have entered into denial. 

But denial is the land my mother resides in….and she brought us all there.

And once you are aware, you lose your ability to deny.

To me, the greatest tragedy of abuse in a childhood home isn't the abuse, but the lack of bringing it into reality to be dealt with. What we are taught by our need for silence, to deny.

Deny and not speak of it. This very small and quite large application that is required to remain at peace and have love of family, it is what sends us to live one step out of reality.

Abuse doesn't mess with your mind.  The aftermath does.  

How does your mother respond?

Do the adults see the children in danger?

Who is there that you can speak to and be heard.

A few days after my flop into reality, I said…all it would have taken for us to be rescued is one eye that saw us or one ear that heard us…one hand reaching in to save the child.

The filming today is for me to try and articulate the act of denial that followed my sexual abuse and how it was more damaging than the sexual act itself.  The body heals, but the mind goes untreated.

What my untreated mind needed the most was reality.  Even if reality was terrifying and disgraceful to know.  Knowing what I had denied was the key to recovery. Recovering the truth of me.

"Call Me Mental"…I hope, will help dispell the shroud of what creates mental illnesses…and how we all participate in the dance.  

My father didn't act alone.  He acted, and many many of us denied it. When you deny realty once, it becomes a way of life, going on "forgiving and forgetting".

This morning, I will once again, act against the family legacy; breaking the silence of denial.