I M Perfect lady

Category: Current Affairs

  • Inconvenient Truth

    Just finished reading “Sickened” by Julie Gregory, her story of living with a mother who needed her sick, Munchausen By Proxy.

     

    It is amazing that her mother could convince her she was sick, and to ‘act’ sick, and how her mother’s state depended upon her behavior.  And how she never knew this wasn’t her real self, that this was a self that her mother needed.

     

    She writes, “Truth is whatever your mind believes.  And beliefs are erected by those who raise us.  If someone shapes your mind into a distortion, you have to find something that can give you a straight answer.”

     

    She tried to tell her dad about the abuse, but he didn’t fully grasp the immense totality of it all…she goes on to say.

     

    “After that day with Dad, I knew that nobody could give me straight answers but me.  I used mirrors to step back and forth between trips out into the real world, trips back into the swirling black hole of my family, trips to new adventures outside the bubble, seeing how long I could walk away from the mirror before the old thoughts submerged the fresh ones.  Sometimes I’d only get to the kitchen or down a few steps of the porch.  Sometimes, I could make it a half-day before I’d have to rush back to see myself…

     

    With my freshly wired instincts, I inch farther and farther out of my incubator.  I stay longer in the real world and run back with less frenzy when waves begin crashing.  When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch to capture the barrage; bar napkins, toilet paper, airline barf bags, my bare leg.  I scribble my thoughts; tweak them with words from my new vocabulary.  It talk myself out of paranoia and coax myself from ledges. I fill volumes of journal books with these moments; packed with crowed text, both sides scribbled and stuffed with snippets of paper smeary inked paper towels, feverishly written.

     

    My life now in triplicate: One life in the mirror, one in the world, and one balancing the two as oceans which must wax and wane in tandem until one replaces the other.” Julie Gregory

     

    She is right that your life is lived in triplicate until you can finally live fully in your truth.

     

    How you find yourself in a very awkward stance, knowing your past is incorrect, but not fully knowing what is, and then being the one to resurrect a you that you have never known.  How you have to go against all who stood with you in the secret.

     

    She writes about her younger brother.  “His memory, as mine once did, as opted for the starrier picture.  It was just last year, when Danny was twenty-four, that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a tape of Mom’s singing, one of the few good things strained from our life with her.

     

    He still needs a mom and dad.  His psyche has draped sharp edges of detail in a thick drop cloth as he keeps his past at bay with workaholism and asthma attacks that coincide with Mom’s random phone calls to him…”

     

    It is like a curtain that shields the truth, a blind area where the parents are concerned, something that stops the truth from penetrating their worlds and upending their apple cart of loving parents, or at least ones that ‘tried their best’.

     

    To me it is facing the inconvenient truth.

     

     

     

     

  • Happiness Prescription

    In Deepak Chopra’s book, “The Ultimate Happiness Prescription, he writes;

     

    ”The roots of unhappiness are often invisible. This is especially true of the conditioning that creates toxicity in a person’s life.  The most powerful conditioning exists at a subtle level of the mind.  It begins in the first year of a child’s life, as the infant brain learns how to think, feel and behave from influences in the home.  Conditioning becomes he dominant feature in all of us by the time we are toddlers.

     

    This is when we set lifelong patterns into our brains. Even today you are replaying scenarios you learned when you were two or three.  Consider a small child out with his mother.  He sees a giant lollipop and wants one.  What does he do?  The most common pattern is the following: First he is nice, asking in a cajoling voice if Mommy will buy him a lollipop.  If this tactic doesn’t work, he tries the opposite, acting nasty.  He whines and cries and makes a scene. If this doesn’t work, the next step is to become stubborn and indifferent.  He refuses to pay attention to his mother, who wants him to stop being unhappy and difficult. This is a subtler approach than nice or nasty.  If stubbornness fails, the last scenario is to play the victim- poor me, no one loves me enough to buy me a lollipop.  When the mother finally gives in, her child becomes conditioned, thinking he’s discovered something that ‘works’.

     

    Simple as this emotional cycle might sound, millions of adults continue to act it out, using the same belief that their tactics “work” to get them what they want. The problem with this conditioning is that my manipulating others, you never really get what you want, which is greater love, peace and joy. Because conditioning trains the brain into a false sense of happiness, you are actually manipulating yourself.  You become the kind of person who doesn’t know how to be anything other than nice, nasty, stubborn or a victim.

     

    Conditioning is the subtlest form of toxicity.  You cannot reach true happiness without escaping your mental conditioning.  In our society there’s a wave of interest in leading a life that’s more natural, free of toxic substances.  Purification of every type can be beneficial.  But the secret to detoxifying your body lies more in the mind than anywhere else.  There are seven steps to ridding yourself of toxin at the subtle level.

    1.    Take responsibility for your present response.

    2.    Witness what you are feeling.

    3.    Label your feelings.

    4.    Express what you feel.

    5.    Share what you feel.

    6.    Release the toxic feeling through a ritual

    7.    Celebrate the release and move on.

     

    These seven steps apply whether you are trying to change a toxic emotion, habit, craving, or relationship, because your past conditioning lies at the heart of all of them.

               Deepak

     

     

     

  • All Eyes On The Child’s Wound

    "It is a relationship with the self that is flawed. Parts of the self get literally walled off from them. They can't love them," he says. "They can't even access them." Dr. Drew says speaking of Sex Addictions.

     

    Sex addiction isn't as simple as promiscuity. Dr. Drew defines the disease as an intimacy disorder. People who are addicted to sex may be afraid or unfamiliar with intimacy, so they substitute sex for real human closeness.

    "Sexuality is something that should make you feel good about yourself," Dr. Drew says. "[When you're a sex addict], you've lost control of your sexuality."

    Many sex addicts do have one thing in common. Dr. Drew says 80 to 90 percent suffered trauma as children. "If you have a history of trauma, particularly sexual trauma, in childhood, you want to look very carefully at this behavior," he says.

    In fact, Dr. Drew says these terrorizing experiences can influence who you're drawn to as an adult. "The people and places that cause terror in childhood cause attraction in adulthood," he says. "We end up being repetitively attracted to the same kind of person that obliges us by acting out the same behavior over again."

    This was on the Oprah show yesterday, and I missed seeing it, but read about it on her website, www.oprah.com

     

    And just a few days ago, my junior high math teacher was arrested for child porn. http://www.jsonline.com/news/crime/70303702.html

     

     

    Unless we start to treat the children who are molested correctly, healing the wound in childhood, they will become the addicts of the future.

     

    It is so incredible to me.  We have to stop the cycle at the child, or not be surprised with the outcome of adult children of abuse.

     

    The first question most ask me about my parents, “were they abused?”

     

    Most realize that this is a cycle, that it began in childhood, but we fail to see the child today who is the victim, and that the child needs huge amounts of treatment to undo the abuse.

     

    Sure we must put away the abuser, the one whose life has run amuck since his abuse, but we must stop the problem with the injured child today.

     

    We spend lots of money on the abuser, and nothing on the child.

     

    It seemed backwards then, how the defense team comes in and rescues my father from jail, how the focus is on him.  Yet no one came into rescue the wounded girls.

     

    Most were too old and seen ‘useless’ for the trial, yet we were the most wounded, for we have added to that wound unknowingly.

     

    We are left with a wrecked view of self, unable to access the part of us that lived prior to the abuse.

     

    The outrage we feel towards the molester, may be society’s guilt at not dealing with the child years ago.

     

    Our guilt and shame at ourselves for not facing and healing this wounded one.

     

    As I sit here I know what wasn’t done for me.

     

    How we are left alone flipped upside down and backwards, while most want to pretend we are normal.

     

    There is no normal after that.

     

    It is insanity to think so.

     

    Yet we are fooled and surprised when an adult child of abuse abuses, for that is the only love/attention they have ever known.

     

    Each time we neglect an abused child another abuser is born.

     

    Hurt people, hurt people.

     

    An abused person either lives as a victim or a perp.

    Those are the only two choices.

     

    The third choice must come in, a new way of dealing, healing and owning what is really going on.

     

    It is time we focus all eyes on the child’s wound.