I M Perfect lady

Tag: abused

  • Covering Up my Truth.

    I listened to Jane Fonda speaking about her life, and I wasn't able to write it down word for word, but what she had to say struck me.

    How our survival self stands in the way of us growing up and becoming whole.

    I know this is true.  

    She said, "I stepped out of myself to live next door to me, in a shell of perfection."

    This shell is pretending to not be hurt and abused, but to be 'okay' and 'normal'. We have to act like this, in order to maintain the family's image and good front.  It soon becomes who we are, it grows thicker and thicker, the longer we live this way.

    She also said that the tool we use to survive, becomes the tool that is the obstacle for becoming whole.

    I see it as the shell has to be taken down in order to get back to your own self, and this shell is the facade we lived as to be normal and okay.  Removing this wall brings us to our truth.

    Our truth is scary on many levels.  For one it is not accepted by our parents and others who want to remain in their shells.  And it was terrifying knowing that I lived as a shell, but not me. That my truth wasn't who I had lived as.

    I knew my shell much better than I knew who I was and my history.  As a shell I constructed things to look better than they appeared. Friendlier, kinder and more loving.  Outside of the shell it was like all my friends became enemies.

    Yet, without ever leaving the shell of pretend, I would not have grown up…I would have remained stunted and as immature as a child inside; a wounded child.

    It is funny, in a peculiar way, that we believe we can add things to cover up our abuse, and that we can grow around it.  But, in the end, we end up with a pretty, perfect shell, and a yucky inside.

    Our outer appearance can't change how we feel inside.

    This is the mad dance and marathon…forever adding something on the outside to help boost our self esteem.  I couldn't be good enough, smart enough or cute enough to erase the abuse.

    Once I sat down with my wounded child, I was able to begin growing as me.

    No more shells.  

    No more pretending.  

    Instead I began falling in love with me…broken, abused, but real.  

    I loved my real self and had to say good bye to the shell.  

    The shell that helped me survive my childhood had followed me into adulthood.  

    Jane is right, the shell that kept me surviving my childhood, also kept me from being whole and me.

    So in order to become me, I had to leave my shell behind.

    My shell was the shield that kept my real feelings from showing.

    Kept me from pleasing myself, but always pleased others.

    It shielded me from becoming too emotional and loving, from being open and vulnerable.  My soft spot remained behind this thick wall.

    I remember my husband commenting, in the very early days of my father's exposure, that I was like a scared rabbit.  And I was.  I was walking around fully exposed without my shell.

    God, those early days were brutal.  Living life without a shell had me feeling extremely naked…and bloody.  The image of a wound.

    I was walking around as a wound…without a shell. No longer able to pretend that I wasn't abused.

    Until you can heal the wound you are very sensitive…with your nerves exposed.

    Now, I feel my wound is healed.

    Shell long discarded…and I am growing up. 

    My insides are matching my body.

    I no longer am a grown woman, wearing a shell, to cover up my wounded child.

    I am now grown woman who was wounded as a child…who grew up as I mothered my own wound, by no longer covering up my truth.



  • Self Love

    If you held a woman’s vagina sacred, if you held a woman sacred, you couldn’t murder her or rape her or mutilate her or hurt her. Eve Ensler

    I just listened to the Vagina Monologues.

    What an incredible and insightful look at the one body part that has been used and abused to take our spirits and how sad most often it occurs in young childhood, before we even know it intimately ourselves.

    The heart of a woman, the place where we can experience and express the wild nature of women, is captured and raped before we even connect, stolen before we find our own worth.

    Eve Ensler opens the dialogue in how detached and unowning we are to our own body parts after they are misused.

    We walk away from the wound too.

    We treat ourselves as others treated us, without care or feeling, we turn ourselves off.

    In one part she mentions a group of young girls who just returned from Rape Camp and how they lined up with their mothers to have a picture taken, and not one of the girls looked at the camera, all heads down in shame.

    Looking down in shame for being raped.

    It is how they see themselves now, through the eyes of their abused vagina.

    Their sense of being a woman has completely changed by the treatment their vaginas received.

    The treatment they received is now the ruler of self worth.

    What a journey into regaining your power back, to hold yourself worthy, to find the specialness, to feel again after the most sensitive and sensual part has been brutally treated.

    By looking at abuse from the body part which abuse occurred is to see the difference between a sacred and loved vagina to one who has been ravaged by abuse.

    Again, the saddest part to me is that very young girls are being abused before they even know what it is, how it works, that it is sacred, that it is an expression of love, a tool for pleasure not pain, and they are driven away from the most intimate part of themselves.

    This disconnect creates frozen or careless owners, where they are ‘ice maidens’ or floozies. The swing from one pole to the next shows how out of control of their bodies they are.

    Learning to love and hold sacred our own bodies is a huge part of the healing process, to reclaim them from the abusers, redefining them once again, returning them back to their innocence.

    Because it is such an intimate part of ourselves, when abused, we lose our sense of intimacy, a personal loving relationship with self.

    This loss of self intimacy is our greatest loss…we lose reverence and sacredness of self, we lose our own self love.

  • Associating with My Truth

    I have been fighting my body for so long, fighting with the feelings I have inside, tormenting myself as I struggle to not do, what it wants to do.

     

    I fought my body to be close to my parents.

    I fought my body to respond better to my parents.

    I fought my body to feel comfortable with my family.

     

    I was frustrated it couldn’t just relax, be normal, chill, and be a normal kid, a loving warm child.

     

    It was like there was an inbred system that didn’t respond correctly to the outside.

     

    It blew cold when it should have blown warm.

    It then blew warm when it should have blown cold.

     

    I felt best when I was far from my family. That is odd to know of yourself.  I could then relax and be myself.

     

    I am a freak of nature, for I don’t have the loving warm comfortable feelings I am supposed to have with family, mine are replaced with a cold standoffish chill. 

     

    So, I had to pretend what wasn’t within me ‘naturally’.

     

    The day that my father was exposed as a pedophile was the day I stopped pretending.  The cold fear within me was not unnatural, it was natural, and I was okay.

     

    I was okay within me. My feelings and my body were acting perfectly.

     

    I am perfectly okay and natural as an abused child can be.

     

    It is perfectly natural to fear those who harm you.

     

    There is annihilation between body/feelings and you when you are abused, and perhaps that is the real meaning of disassociation, we left our feelings behind.

     

    It was either annihilate the feelings or annihilate the parent.

     

    If you annihilate the parent you are out in the cold….

     

    To live in complete annihilation from your feelings and your body, is to live half alive.

     

    There came a fork in the road where I knew the cost that came with my self annihilation, the cost was me and many other little girls to follow. 

     

    When I didn’t speak up in fear of that man, he continued on.

     

    I was the imposter, I was the pretender, I was unnatural, and I went against my feelings to fit in.  I will not do that any more.  I will fit out and be shunned for associating with my truth.

     

     

     

  • Being imperfect has set me free….

     

    “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”   

               Martin Luther King

     

    ‘…the silence of our friends’… it’s the silence that keeps gnawing at me.  I will get secret messages from family, but not in public, silence, why?

     

    It just dawned on me; it isn’t the silence that’s the problem it’s ME!

     

    It is Me?

     

    I am shocked and amazed that it is Me that keeps them silent, that I am the problem.

     

    I am the one that silences their voices, they don’t want to join theirs with Me.

     

    Me, it’s me…wow.

     

    In a past blog about silence from family, I discovered then that it was easier to be with my father, most actions and words were in support of him, and it is still the same today.

     

    Although I have a few secret members whispering to me, and I did ask them to join me publicly, and all declined.

     

    Declined in fear or in shame of being with me, being seen like me, being grouped with me???

     

    It did feel like I was being denied a friendship…a space remains between us and silence is the wedge that keeps us apart.

     

    At this point I want to acknowledge those of you who bravely stand with me, who are willing and able to raise your voices with mine, to link your names with mine, to publicly be with me as I speak of sexual abuse.

     

    Me a daughter of a pedophile, a victim of abuse, a confused at times, adult woman of incest; that is me!

     

    That is who I am. 

    I can’t change it.

    I am just being myself.

    I am publicly writing about how it is to be an openly abused woman.

     

    I understand your silence now and I honor it.

     

    I M perfect, and it’s impossible not to be.

     

    Being imperfect has set me free…

     

     

     

     

     

  • Uncontested.

    My brother and I have been writing about our feelings or the lack thereof with our father, there is still something I am missing in our dialogue.

     

    When I wrote the second time, I was addressing the fact that my brother was disappointed with the kind of father he had.

     

    We also talked about my usage of the words dad and father when speaking about this man and it opened up another point. 

     

    What is the meaning of dad and father?

     

    Dad – an informal word for father.

     

    Father – A male person whose sperm unites with an egg, resulting in the conception of a child. b. A man who adopts a child. c. A man who raises a child.

     

    While reading them, the last part is where he failed; he didn’t raise us, he lowered us. 

     

    My brother would like me to write the word dad (dad) to emphasize the lack of being one. Or perhaps use biological dad.

     

    For the past 4 ½ years when I would speak of my father I would call him by his name, I could no longer referenced him with dad.

     

    It would be nice if there was a new term for this, for a man who lowers his kids, who makes them less than who they are.

     

    The word dad was like a swear word to me, like a mouth full of disappointment, and my tongue couldn’t form the word to slip it past my lips, it had broken my heart.

     

    His formal name came easy, it ripped the title from his back.

     

    It seems like a betrayal to yourself as a child, to use that name for someone who hasn’t acted like a dad, but rather used the dad term for priveledges of a sick disease.

     

    In fact I had read somewhere that pedopiles who abuse their own children are seen as lazy, for they don’t even have the energy to leave their homes. 

     

    You see some pedophiles don’t have home grown little girls, they have to construct elaborate ways to have the opportunity to be with little girls.

     

    I guess that makes sense and it makes us seem like we were grown for a set purpose and then became residual garbage.  No wonder my brother feels so useless, he wasn’t even ‘special’ for a short period of time.

     

    I felt this odd jealousy or a oneupmanship between my brother and I.

     

    Is it better to feel used, abused and damaged or to never be seen at all?

     

    About six years ago I read a book, “The Hidden Messages in Water,” by Masaru Emoto and here is a portion of what he says.

     

    I have the impression that the act of looking at water crystals is an act of creating life.  This is because when you look at the crystals, the water changes its appearance moment by moment.  Your gaze has a special energy of its own, and while a gaze of good intentions will give courage an evil gaze will actually take it away.

     

    A family that subscribed to our magazine conducted an interesting experiment.  They put rice in two glass jars and every day for a month said “Thank you” to one jar and “You Fool” to the other, and then they tracked how the rice changed over the period.  Even the children, when they got home from school, would speak these words to the jars of rice.

     

    After a month, the rice that was told “Thank you” started to ferment, with a mellow smell like that of malt, while the rice that was exposed to “You Fool” rotted and turned black.

     

    I wrote about this experiement in the book that I published, and as a result hundreds of families throughout Japan conducted this same experiement for themselves.  Everyone reported the same results.  One family tried a variation of the experiement: like the others they said “Thank you” to the first bottle of rice and “You fool” to the second bottle, and then they prepared a third bottle of rice that they simply ignored.

     

    What do you think happened?  The rice that was ignored actually rotted before the rice that was exposed to ‘You fool.’  When others tried this same experiement, the results were again the same.  It seems that being ridiculed is actually not as damaging as being ignored.

     

    To give your positive or negative attention to something is a way of giving energy.  The most damaging form of behavior is withholding your attention.

     

    I think this experiement has the potential to teach us a very important lesson.  We must take care to give our children our attention, and to talk to them.  Speaking words of kindness and love should begin from the time of conception…..Masaru Emoto.

     

    This book came to mind immediately and I recalled this experiment, but what I didn’t recall was the one jar of rice that was ignored.

     

    So in the oneupmanship, my brother wins.  He rotted first.  I never knew that they hurt worse.  Wow.

     

    Being abused you get attention, which is better than none at all.  I know this has to be why we feel guilty, for we wanted the attention so bad. 

     

    Imagine what we do to just get attention, to just be seen, just so we are not ignored.

     

    Neither one of us can call him dad, we both feel the title doesn’t fit, I just wish there were a title that did.

     

    What do you call a man like our father?

    What term can possibly fit that?

    Estranged father?

    Ex-Father?

     

    I looked up divorce from father, and while glancing at the different sentences, one word caught my eye.  Uncontested.

     

    What I feel most is that he didn’t contest his worthiness as father, he didn’t protest at all, how sad to find not one place where we could call you dad.

     

    The scales tipped uncontested.

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