I M Perfect lady

Tag: abuse

  • Backwards to Find Myself.

    In Peter Levine’s book, “Waking the Tiger” he speaks of understanding abuse, as you had to be there, that in order to truly understand the full impact, you had to be there.

     

    We use that in humorous situations, that sometimes the humor is lost in translation, same goes for abuse.

     

    What is so insidious about the abuse is that the abuse mountain of emotions that are too big for a young child to handle is now you.

     

    And the little child of you is lost behind all the swirling rolling twisting contorting emotions, a river of terror, it is like standing behind a waterfall, unable to get out in front of those falling currents of emotions.

     

    It is like swimming in a stream up a waterfall for we are brought back to being a young child feeling what we failed to feel, we are being brought back to the scene of the crime to simply feel.

     

    Simply feel what was so horrendous that we left our self behind.

     

    You had to be there, means we have to walk through our abuse to be there, to own it and live it and know its impact, and then and only then can we be reunited with the child self we left behind.

     

    It is amazing how you can live a life and not be there, not be conscious of not being there, to be missing and not even know it. 

     

    The crime of abuse is that we grow up without a self, we leave behind in a secure place our wonderful beautiful self, and go forth without that.

     

    We don’t want to soil and put garbage on our self, we want to retain our perfection and we believe we can by simply not acknowledging abuse.  Yet we don’t live beautiful and wonderful, we live as abuse.

     

    And somehow we feel that we made ourselves dirty, soiled and feeling like garbage.  Yet it is not our self we feel, we feel the contents of abuse.

     

    To make the separation between what is abuse and what is the child is to see abuse as the painful waterfall that came down on the child. 

     

    The waterfall of abuse is not the child.  It is what happened to the child. 

     

    It is my experience that once you understand that the abuse is not you, but something that happened to you, that you are not responsible for the waterfall of abuse, you can then retrieve the child back.

     

    Seeing the innocent child waiting behind the waterfall allows you to let go of the shame and the blame and the guilt.  It allows you to see clearly the separation between the abuse and the child.

     

    The child didn’t create the waterfall of abuse, but instead intuitively retreated to get out of the pain.

     

    In my case, no adult ever came along to rescue the child.

     

    I walked backwards to find myself.

     

  • Keeper of their Illusions.

    One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.

     

    “I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again.  Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP.  I answer her questions?  How did it slip past the doctors?  Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors?  Were you really sick?

     

    But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust.  And I feel terrible about my own secret.  I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.”  To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.

     

    My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic.  That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve.  The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.

     

    And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up.  The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife.  I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence.  She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought.  She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.

     

    I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad.  A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother.  Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?

     

    Until I turn thirty.  Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below.  There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch.  Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.

     

    And so it is for the people I bring into my life.  My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive.  I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me.  Ah, yes, let me count your cracks.  Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely.  A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for.  When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

     

    So I start over.  When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on.  It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.”  Julie Gregory

     

    As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent.  We are the exact opposites.

     

    She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.

    I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.

     

    We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.

     

    Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.

     

    We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions. 

     

     

     

  • 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.

     

     

     

     

  • The Silent Aunt who disappeared….

    “He couldn’t not know what he knew; he couldn’t not see once he saw.”   Patti Digh

     

    It hit me today in yoga, that what I am witnessing in my great niece is Me.

     

    Me as a newborn baby girl arriving and going with the flow of the family I was born into.

     

    She appears on a stage of an already in motion drama, a play in progress, roles clearly defined, the scenes are set, the dialogue is memorized, and from there her role is carved.

     

    She begins with a supporting role, and will learn that in order to maintain favor, her lines will reflect those of the Main Characters, her parents and grandparents.

     

    It is the expectation of her elders to follow their roles, and someday take over top billing.

     

    I may be her future self and she is my beginning – we are linked with the thread of legacy.

     

    My mother’s sister who was estranged from her family has come into my thoughts yet again.  How nice it would have been to have her view of my mother’s family. 

     

    What made her leave the stage she was born upon?

     

    I feel that I am my Aunt, but a generation behind her.

    I have access to the Internet and have ways to communicate that she wasn’t able to.

     

    My mother is close to her brothers and has always been, while my Aunt chose to stay away, two totally different perspectives of one family.

     

    The last words my mother said to me was, “we have two different perspectives!”  Remarkably wise, she knew we didn’t match.

     

    My mother never spoke of the sister that ran away, never.  She had another one who also was estranged from the family but lived near the family; she, I was told was cold and bitter. My mother had very limited exchanges with this sister. 

     

    She also had a brother who committed suicide.

     

    My Uncle (my mother’s brother) molested my brother and sister, and another Uncle molested my mother when she was a young girl, yet she remains close to her family and holds them in high regard, visiting them regularly.

     

    There are two distinctly different reactions on the stage of abuse; we either keep the normal dialogue going or we get off the stage!

     

    If you stay on the stage, you continue with the same play and drama and accept new characters as they are born upon this stage.

     

    When you get off, you get off alone and you are segregated and an outcast, but the abuse stops.

     

    It stops only along your family branch, but the rest of the tree continues to flourish as long as the other branches go along with the original dialogue of abuse. 

     

    Roles continue unchecked, words flow the same, abuse lays in the wings waiting, forever near, cycles spiral again and again, repeating itself like a broken record.

     

    On my new stage I have to learn or maybe unlearn the first 40 years.

     

    I am no longer a newborn without a voice or a choice.

     

    I now am able to discern what I feel and what I know, what is healthy and what isn’t healthy and I have the right to act freely and use dialogue that goes against the original family play.

     

    It is with the greatest compassion that I look back upon my old stage and see my family still stuck in the roles they were born into.

     

    If I can be a voice that hollers from off the stage, a disgruntled watcher of their play, if my jeers can put a seed of doubt, a drop of fear, a whisper of truth, if I can lure but one player away, I feel my life’s journey will not be for naught.

     

    I will not be the silent Aunt who disappeared….

     

     

  • Alive but unaware!

    What an incredible ride, what an awe-inspiring journey, I feel an immense amount of gratitude to be given the opportunity to live beyond the bubble, to find a life outside of denial.

     

    Unless and until you have been totally snowed under by a false belief, where you and reality are an ocean apart, you will not understand the enormity of dissolving denial.

     

    First of all you are the one standing neck deep in denial, and it is from there that you have to dig yourself out, not knowing what is real; your denial or reality. 

     

    When I began this journey, when my bubble burst, I thought my reality changed, when in actuality it was my denial that had sprung a leak or collapsed, leaving me without protection.

     

    My husband said that I was like a scared rabbit, and I was.  I had no place to hide, to run to or escape, all I saw was the harsh reality in front of me.

     

    Actions that I had previously denied stood enormously obvious!  I had no choice now but to see and to feel what each action felt like.

     

    Living with all your nerves exposed, with no shield to protect you, a turtle without its shell.

     

    What I believe is while you are in denial; you deny your emotions a life.  You can’t feel them.  They don’t exist in the bubble, for that is why we built the bubble to escape feelings; they were far to terrifying to feel.

     

    Emotionally immature is how we get left. 

     

    We left our emotions behind and our bodies grew. 

     

    Emotionally stunted we live awkwardly in this world.

     

    The picture I now have, the overview and the application of denial, the land that we build and live in, leaves me in utter disbelief.

     

    Abuse while hurtful to the physical body, is nothing compared to being sentenced into the land of denial.

     

    What I am now seeing is that some get a life sentence and some 40 plus years. 

     

    I do not know what makes the denial bubble burst, how some have a stronger bubble than others, but denial is built from the inside out and I am thinking that it is the only way out.

     

    The one who built it is the one who takes it down.

     

    I sit in awe, I sit in gratitude, I sit in reality bubble-less.

     

    The definition of denial, refusal to acknowledge existence of something: a refusal to believe in something or admit that something exists.

     

    What we have to admit to is the bubble we live in and not the reality that has always been there.

     

    What we ultimately deny is our self.

     

    Alive but unaware, that is denial!

     

  • A broken Heart.

    Remnants of a long conversation linger in my head, dragging out more ideas and different slants on fear, truth and death.

     

    I wonder what some would fear most, facing their truths or facing their deaths.

     

    If you truths were real vanilla and uneventful, of course death would loom large and scary, but what if your past was scarier?

     

    What if you were being asked to look upon a past filled with trauma, then how would your death look?

     

    Death seems like an escape hatch a welcome slide into oblivion, compared to having to feel, deal and heal a wound of abnormal proportions.

     

    Today I was exploring the depths of psychosomatic symptoms in the body and this is what I read.

     

    “Yet even when a patient accepts their symptom is being caused by an emotion—an exceptionally difficult barrier to surmount—the trauma that caused the symptom in the first place is often shown to be so ugly that both patient and doctor can readily understand why the patient’s mind converted it into a physical symptom in the first place:  even the mind itself believed the emotional trauma to be easier to handle that way. 

    Physical symptoms often get better with a pill.  Emotional traumas often take years to heal—if even then.  The technology we have to heal the scars caused by some traumas—as advanced and helpful as psychology can be—still lags behind the technology we have to treat ailments with purely physical causes.

    But we shouldn’t be discouraged.  We may all experience psychosomatic symptoms to some degree, but when our symptoms are shown to be so and we accept it, that acceptance becomes the most important step toward resolving them.  After all, how can we find a contact lens we lost by looking near a lamppost when we lost it in the shadows?  The real work begins, of course, once we start looking in the right place.  Dealing with somatization only requires us to bring to the table one quality:  courage.” (Alex Lickerman)

     

    Isn’t it amazing that the mind can convert trauma into a physical symptom?

    How interesting to read and understand more how emotional trauma affects the body.

    And I love how courage is what we need to bring to the table. 

    Courage. 

    Courage to face our truths, our past and our hurts, and especially if the truth hurts the images we held of our family.

    Courage, wow, I think they forgot a broken heart.

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  • Freedom in Healing.

    Yesterday I felt the sorrow of not going back, of being forever outside, being stuck in a new life upon which there is no return.

     

    That my inner truths and feelings will not change, and I don’t have the magic to make it happen, they sit there rock solid unmoving, unshakeable.

     

    I felt like I was riding shotgun to these feelings, like I am riding along behind them and have to act accordingly.

     

    Even if my inner wishes and desires are to go against them, I am weak where they are strong.

     

    These truths are not of my making, I didn’t dream them up to make my life difficult, to stay away from weddings, and forgo all family activities.

     

    The makings of these truths came in ways not many care to know or acknowledge; they forget that I am not the maker of these truths, but the carrier of them.

     

    It is like I am carrying a disease that I didn’t invent, but yet seen as the magician and the creator. 

     

    That I am the one who started this whole thing and now that I have had my ‘fun’ with it, just get rid of it and be ‘normal’ again.

     

    It still catches me unaware that they still think it is me that is the real trouble, that if only I would just stop sprouting this garbage than a normal family I would have.

     

    Then once again I could rejoin them in celebrations instead of wanting to be in exile.

     

    That I am the one who wants to stay away, NOT that there is actually something to stay away from.

     

    That I am enjoying this new role, this new life, the knower of my unchangeable truths, that I prefer to live estranged, that I decided this is a new me choice for me.

     

    If only that were true, that one day I simply decided that my old life didn’t work anymore and I set out to find a new me.

     

    What they fail to appreciate is the fact that I was unaware and blind to the abuse in our home, that I built a life upon a false foundation. 

     

    When the foundation crumbled, so did I, I had a break down of me.

     

    In the million pieces of me that lay shattered, I had to find a way to make a new me.

     

    The last five years isn’t an experiment or fad, it isn’t a temper tantrum or something I can set aside for a wedding, it is the way I healed.

     

    I healed inside by setting up boundaries.

    I healed by acknowledging my abuse, my abuser, and those who support abuse by not standing against it.

     

    I healed myself putting myself in exile.

     

    And exiled from this family I will stay, it is the choice of being healed or abused.

     

    I felt the sadness of this exile, the aloneness, the being seen as different and difficult, and it is.

     

    Yet I no more can go back into abuse than I can let go of the freedom in healing.

     

    "I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be."
      ~ Einstein

     

  • The Girl She Was Meant To Be.

    I found myself seeing myself but with my old perception and then with my new perception could see my old self.

     

    It is like looking in a two-way mirror seeing your self on both sides. 

     

    Amazing to see such contrasts between the two.

     

    It dawned on me that I am a crazy, daring, bold lady, a woman of courage who tossed aside 46 years of rules and regulations to follow her own truth. 

     

    I am in awe of the distance between these two women, and they both are Me.

     

    The lady I used to be didn’t break rules, she followed along obediently even if she didn’t want to, people pleasing was her full time job, and choice making wasn’t her strong suit, her sense of self was gotten from the multitude of labels she covered her self with.

     

    My new lady tossed out all the rulebooks, and set out on her own, using her own body as her guide, for the first time ever.

     

    I remember stating, “It was like I was going to find myself, I didn’t know who I was or even that I was missing.”

     

    And it was the truth.

     

    I left my old me and I walked away, for the old me was a combination of other peoples ideas of me, their needs of me, their wishes of me, I was a me of their dreams, but not of my own.

     

    The old me was built up for reasons that had little or nothing to do with me.  Even if I didn’t know who I was, I knew for sure who I wasn’t.

     

    A child molester once said, “I changed who she would have been,” and he is right.

     

    A little girl who has been molested loses her way, her passions, and her spirit. 

     

    Her life is only about surviving.

     

    In this two-way mirror on my journey I see how the same courage she had to survive, she used to set herself free. 

     

    From the wide view I see a fearlessly bold lady who has taken her life back.  Who will no longer just survive, but she will live.

     

    She will live her own dreams, have her own ideas, make her own wishes and suit her own needs.

     

    Self lovingly at last, she is free to be the girl she was meant to be.

     

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  • I Did Not Run Away!

    “I did it,” I said as I completed the last pose, I did it and I felt this accomplishment deep within, I did it.

     

    The overwhelming emotional feeling of victory settled all around me as I was bathed in the feelings of success.  A success between my relationship with my body and I; I had kept my word!

     

    I am learning how to be present,  be aware and to be honest with my body, what I put in my body and how best to treat it.

     

    For so long my relationship has been distant, aloof, uncaring and neglectful and my body displayed that marvelously.

     

    The body is such an incredible living mirror; it can only reflect how you treat it, nothing more or nothing less.  It simply responds.

     

    I am with a body that lived for years and years without a connection with me, for I didn’t want to feel its pain.

     

    Geneen Roth explains in her book Woman, Food and God, “…I tell my students that the greatest blessing of their lives is their relationship with food.  They look at me rather quizzically, but the sentiment sounds so lovely that they are willing to hear me out.  Then I say that we are not going to fix their relationship with food; we are actually going to walk through the door of their eating problem and see what’s behind it.  Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.”  Geneen

     

    I found out that I loved sweets for their ability to numb my body and make me tired, I am learning that by doing yoga it can wake me up and give me energy.

     

    It makes sense to me that I distanced myself from my body that I tried to shut it down.  It was hurt and abused. As a small child I had to shut it down to survive and I escaped with food that numbed the body so I didn’t have to feel.

     

    As you awaken this body back up, you do have to feel what you couldn’t feel way back when, but you feel more alive than you ever have felt, more powerful and confident knowing you can feel deeply and still breathe!

     

    When you numb out the bad feelings you also take the good ones too.  I didn’t know this. 

     

    I felt the rush of victory and accomplishment I did it! 

     

    I stayed with my body for 120 days I did not run away! 

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Back to Peace.

    “I am responsible, but not in control!” 

     

    Isn’t that an oxymoron?  How can you be responsible for something you don’t control?

     

    That is what happens when you feel responsible for another’s behavior or action or inaction even.  You feel responsible, yet unable to control them!

     

    As a little girl in my childhood home, this is exactly how I felt, that I was responsible yet not in control. 

     

    It is like being responsible to stop a waterfall half way down, knowing those who will get hurt below as the water falls from above, yet unable to stop it.

     

    The parents at the top keep dumping stuff over the falls, and it rains upon us all.  Instead of being down on the bottom, I stood mid way, trying to stop the rain!

     

    As a child and then an adult child I carried this hopeless responsibility and made it my life’s work.

     

    This job was so time consuming, it kept me from my own life, but firmly into yours racing between your behavior and the affects.

     

    Since it never really stopped the abuse and neglect, this midway kinda sorta life I lived was all for naught.

     

    The only way you can stop abuse from raining down is to stop the man at the top of the falls, or get the children out of the way.

     

    Neither happened in our family.

     

    Somehow the children in the falls believe it is their responsibility to stop the top, to work harder, be better, do better so this bad behavior wouldn’t fall down upon them.

     

    Little do they know they are not the cause, just the ones who get rained upon, the residual collateral damage.

     

    This collateral damage then sets forth in life trying to control things that are impossible to control and giving responsibility for their happiness to others.

     

    A life set in motion without control, just like a flimsy doll in the rush of Niagara Falls.

     

    It is only when you can separate this all out and put control and responsibility where it belongs do the falls turn into a millpond.

     

    A millpond, which emotions pass through, ripples arise now and again, and settle back to peace.

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