I M Perfect lady

Tag: blame

  • Baton-Less!

    I thought about innocence yesterday and what it is, how is it experienced and do I truly know it.

    This morning it came to me that I was picking up pieces of innocence as I walked searching for truth, and that perhaps truth is innocence, for without truth can there be innocence?  And is it possible to have experienced so much that isn't innocent and still be innocent or be able to return to the land of innocence?

    I had looked up the meaning of innocence and one definition said, "freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil – blamelessness.  I like this one.

    Being free of guilt…

    I thought perhaps it was impossible to get back a state of innocence, that once you fell out of that pureness, it would be impossible to wipe yourself clean again.

    Innocence dies when you feel blamed.  Innocence dies when you become acquainted with evil… And it returns when the blame lies outside of you.

    If everyone would look upward, toward their parents, victims would dry up…innocence would bloom…like a chain reaction of love flowing backwards through generations; innocence would flourish.

    Seeing the flow of guilt and how it poured downward into small children, you can see the cause…how it forms and why.

    Alice Miller is correct, that the fourth commandment has really messed with our heads and psyches, by bringing blame into our selves out of fear of blaming our parents.

    Innocence is being able to stand up and face the truth of what is…not carrying the blame, shame and guilt that isn't mine to carry.  I didn't start this trickle down affect, but I do carry my responsibility to stop it from flowing down into my children.

    If I blame my children for 'making me mad' or 'losing control', I am passing the baton of guilt to my child.  If she reaches for the baton, she will lose her innocence.  Taking the blame for something you didn't start is to lose your innocence.

    Taking back your innocence is to hand back the blame.

    A relay going backwards, is the only way we can heal ourselves from abuse…

    The weight of carrying the wrong baton is where all the issues lie.  

    I remember in the early days of my mental breakdown, the days of discovering that all I thought I knew, I knew nothing….I recall feeling that this mess was much to big for me AND that I can't fix what I didn't create.  

    It took me out of the lives of my parents and siblings and into my own.  My own was a big enough mess and I carried only that.

    I handed the batons of guilt and responsibility back to my parents.

    I handed the batons of guilt and responsibility back to my siblings.

    And only sat with what I was responsible for.  

    In the past, in the present or in my future.  Holding that damn baton in order to keep my parents guilt free, had done nothing to clean them up, but in fact dirtied me.

    I see sins being forgiven the same way.  "Here hold my guilt for me…carry the burdens of my bad choices!"

    Quitting the relay team of guilt has set me free…I carry only me.

    I take responsibility for what I do, what I say and how I act.

    My children don't have to carry any part of me.

    I am a self contained container…a free me.

    Innocence is being free to be me…baton-less!

    IMG_2364
    Photograph by Hannah Jukuri….

     

  • Children will suffer.

    From Alice Miller’s book “The Body Never Lies,” she writes…

    “My attempts to persuade the Vatican of the importance of early childhood experiences have revealed how impossible it is to arouse feelings of compassion in men and women who right at the beginning of their lives learned to suppress their genuine, natural feelings so mercilessly that there is no trace of them left in their conscious minds. All curiosity about the feelings of others has been stifled. It seems that people who were physically mutilated in early life immure themselves in a fortress deep inside themselves, where they can only pray to God. It is to Him that they delegate all their responsibility, and they carefully obey the precepts of the church so as not to be punished by this “loving” God for any sins of omission they might commit.”

    “Shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein in late 2003, the Vatican was largely instrumental in orchestrating the sudden increase, all over the world, of voices expressing compassion for the unscrupulous tyrant who had been such an object of fear and loathing while he was still at large. But in my view we cannot simply allow ourselves to base our judgment of tyrants on ordinary compassion for the individual, if that means disregarding things they have done.”

    “As biographers Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie tell us in their 1990 book “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf”, Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937. He grew up in a peasant family living in penury near Tikrit. They had no land of their own. His biological father died before his birth. His stepfather, a shepherd, constantly humiliated the boy, calling him “son of a whore” and “son of a bitch,” beating him mercilessly and tormenting him in the most brutal way imaginable. To exploit young Saddam’s working capacity to the full, he forbade him to go to school until the boy was ten. Instead, he would wake him in the middle of the night and tell him to guard the flocks. In these formative years, children develop and image of the world. Ideas take shape in their minds about the values that are worth upholding in life. At the same time, they begin to cherish desires and dream of their fulfillment. For Saddam, the slave of his stepfather, these desires all centered around one thing; limitless power over others. In his brain the idea presumably took shape that he could regain the human dignity he had been so radically deprived of only by possessing the same power over others that his stepfather had over him. Throughout his childhood, there were no other ideals, no other examples to live up to, only the omnipotent stepfather and himself, the defenseless victim of the terror inflicted on him. It was in line with this pattern that the adult Hussein later organized the structure of the country he ruled over. His body knew nothing but violence.”

    “Every dictator denies the suffering of his childhood and attempts to forget them by indulging his megalomania. But the unconscious mind of an individual has completely registered his biography in the cells of the body, it will at some point urge that individual to confront the truth. After the coalition invasion, despite the immense financial resources at his disposal, Saddam sought refuge precisely in the vicinity of the place where he was born, the place where all help was denied him as a child, a highly precarious spot that could not provide real protection. The fact that he should have chosen this place to “go to ground” reflects the desperate plight of his early years and clearly illustrates the power of compulsive repetition. His return to his childhood was the return to the place where he had no chance to escape.”

    “there is conclusive evidence that the character of a tyrant will not change as long as he lives, that he will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he encounters no resistance. The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator’s efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price.”

    “With his own behavior, Hitler demonstrated to the world the kind of person his father was and the kind of treatment he suffered at his hands when he was a child: destructive, pitiless, ostentatious, merciless, boastful, perverted, self-enamored, shortsighted, and stupid. In his unconscious imitation he was faithful to his father’s example. For the same reason, other dictators like Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Ceausescu, Idi Amin, Saddim Hussein behaved in a very similar way. Saddam’s biography is a striking example of how extreme humiliation in childhood is avenged on thousands and thousands of victims at a later date. The refusal to learn from these facts may be grotesque, but the reason for refusal are not difficult to identify.”

    “ The fact is that an unscrupulous tyrant mobilizes the suppressed fears and anxieties of those who were beaten as children but have never been able to accuse their own fathers of doing so. Their loyalty to these fathers is unswerving, despite the torments suffered at their hands. Every tyrant symbolizes such a father, the figure whom the abused children remain attached to with every fiber of their being, hoping that one day they will be able to transform him into a loving parent by being blind.”

    “This hope may have been what prompted the representation of the Roman Catholic Church to demonstrate their compassion for Hussein. In 2002, I turned to a number of cardinals for support when I presented the Vatican with material on the delayed effects of spanking and asked authorities there to do what they could to enlighten young parents on this subject. As I have said, not one of the cardinals I approached with this request showed the slightest interest in the universally ignored but crucially important issue of physically abused children. Nor did I come across the slightest indication of Christian charity or compassion in connection with this issue. Today, however, those same representatives are eager to show that they are indeed capable of compassion. Significantly, however, this compassion is lavished not on maltreated children or on Saddam’s victims but on Saddam himself, on the unscrupulous father figure that the feared despot symbolizes.”

    “As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties perpetrated by parent figures and a remarkable indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to inhumane treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belong to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil, however convinced they may be of their own humane intentions. From an early age they were forced to suppress and ignore their true feelings. They were forced to put their trust not in those feelings but solely in the regulations imposed on them by their parents, teachers, and the church authorities. Now the task facing them in their adult lives leaves them no time to perceive their own feelings, unless those feelings happen to fit in precisely with the patriarchal value system in which they live and which prescribes compassion for the father, however destructive and dangerous he may be. The more comprehensive a tyrant’s catalogue of crimes is, the more he can count on the tolerance, provided his admires are hermetically closed off from access to the sufferings of their own childhood.” Alice Miller.

    What a brilliant cycle this abuse is, for the circuitous madness not looking creates. How nature creates ways in which our mind can overrun our realities for survival and yet this very technique is what allows it to continue.

    The hurt child ends up hurting children and the hurt children who don’t want to feel their pain ends up seeing the ‘heroic’ adult and not the monster.

    It takes Herculean efforts to go with the body of truths and swing wide of society, church and family to see reality.

    Imagine a world full of delusional adults who carry a false picture of their formative years, they will not be able to spot a monster in their presence?

    No matter not how detailed his catalogue of crimes are, what matters most is that his followers, family and friends, haven’t discovered their own box of crimes of childhood…the sightless followers, the ones who love to live in the land of denial will not see his crimes.

    It is incredible to me, it isn’t that they are not seeing what is going on today, but the long ago blindness that makes them unconscious supporters of evil.

    You simply are incapable of seeing in the present if you didn’t see in the past.

    And the sheer volume of people refusing to deal in the past wrecks havoc on today’s reality.

    While I screamed loudly about the present, they clung to the vestiges of their ‘happy childhood’.

    Who knew that holding tight to a ‘happy childhood’ could cause so much pain!

    By not seeing who you really are you are incapable of seeing the truth in others…and this works so well for the monsters among us.

    Who will stop them?

    What will make the blind see, how much destruction has to be spread around the planet, before we can begin to see that children are not born this way, the parents are the cause.

    As long as we don’t see the suffering children, children will suffer.

  • Transference

    About Transference, by Alice Miller
    Tuesday October 14, 2008

    “At the beginning of our lives we were, as very small children, totally dependent on our parents. And we believed, we HAD TO believe, that we were loved by them. Even when we were abused we couldn’t realize this. Then, after 4 years, we grew up and couldn’t avoid suffering from being rejected, hated and treated cruelly. But as dependent children we still could not afford to FEEL this suffering, we were too small to deal with these feelings, thus we had to repress our rage, indignation, and our deep disappointment into our bodies. When we become adult, these repressed feelings stemming from the cruel treatment of our parents may come to the surface, but they are still connected with the small child’s fear of being punished for every sign of rebellion.

    Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us – especially if we have been through therapy – can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we had not yet a name for it. For this reason we need what we call “the transference”, hating for instance another person instead of our mother or father.

    The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. It can also be highly confusing. But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life. If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes, and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing and defensive role of the transference disappears. We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.

    If we don’t want to become like them we must strive to SEE them as exactly as possible. We can use in this way the transference as a means for discovering the feelings of the small child that we once were and to deepen our understanding for him or her. At this moment the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW it’s whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this. Alice Miller

  • Be you alone.

    Yesterday I was asked if I felt lonely and I felt inside of myself and I didn’t, but I understood lonely and have been there often.

    Yet what I failed to understand until I started writing today was that lonely is seeking that part of ourselves that were wounded in childhood. It isn’t so much someone, but a part of us that is missing. We are lonely for ourselves.

    I was writing along and discovered that my meaning or my view of a childhood wound was neglect, sexual abuse, damage, something awful, but do you know what it really is?

    If you look at this from the point of view of what the child lost instead of what happened to them you would discover that the wound is something missing, not something added to who we were.

    It isn’t that we now carry rape and its disgusting features, especially if you were a child and the man your father, but what happens is that in that instant, we felt that our innocence went missing.

    Most focus on the rape and its ugly addition to us, like it now becomes part of who we are, instead of seeing this as something our innocent self endured.

    What I believe is if we are not treated as innocent, we then believe we are not, and then leave childhood minus our feelings of being precious and innocent.

    Living life without knowing you are innocent and precious will open you up to all kinds of situations where you sell your self short, become a people pleaser, have no sense of your own value and self worth.

    The one two punch that my parents delivered left me feeling that I was no longer innocent, my value had changed, I was no longer precious to him and she was unable to see her precious husband change, so instead I had to be the one.

    How confusing this can all be. You think you have to go back and wrestle with the feelings of being abused, but actually it is feeling the loss of innocence.

    A childhood wound is a hole in our innocence.

    And we are the ones to bring it back.

    We are the ones to strengthen our weakened state.

    In the beginning of healing we find ourselves as leaky as a sieve and we slowly over time, we become a solid bowl.

    My container of self, my wholeness is more solid today than ever before, I had plug the holes by speaking up about my innocence.

    In the past few months, I have been able to witness the loss of innocence, the lure and the grooming and the way others treat my daughter after, myself included, to find the intricacies of abuse and what it actually means to be wounded in childhood without the experience of guarding your self worth and value.

    Sadly, the reason there is so much childhood abuse, is these newly arrived souls on the planet haven’t learned to protect themselves they are easy targets.

    They are loving trusting and kind individuals that get lured and groomed into letting go of their innocence for the pleasure of an abusive person, confused with the attention and courtship, they fail to see the hook, before they swallow the line.

    What makes this so hard to stop, is that the abusers knows how to lure and groom and make comfortable and when they have complete trust and faith, they then ask or move in a direction we did not see coming, and in that instant we are asked to stand by our innocence or please them.

    Comfort them, love them, allow them, do this favor, lend an ear, bring compassion and empathy…letting go of our own innocence we focus on what they are asking, and our innocence fades away.

    We become part of the dance.

    Even though we didn’t start it, we participated and that alone makes us guilty, yet all we did was let our innocence go to please someone one.

    Letting go of our innocence is our crime.

    What I also found is the steep incline it took to get my innocence back, I had to put the ‘blame’ if you will on the one who treated me poorly, they had to own their own actions and I got to own mine.

    While I balanced my self worth sheets inside, I created two columns, what was my responsibility and what was yours.

    Separating who did what to whom, what age, what experience, what was reality in that time frame in my life, and in doing so, was able to see the trend continuing forward, all the places I lost myself.

    What I have found is the characters from way back then to present didn’t change, but rather I was able to see what was actually going on, and how I felt and how they felt about me by our actions.

    I had no one to blame in my adult years but me.

    It is in owning me as an individual and not a public held entity, that I see it all begins and ends with me.

    My business is being me, being whole, and finding myself in the midst of deep lonely feelings, for you can be certain there is another hole to plug.

    Healing is removing the parts of my self that I have given away to others, pieces of my innocence, chunks of my self worth, bits of value. To see all the times I looked at other to carry me, to make me happy, feel loved, feel worthy, all are signs of my weakness…the places I let my self go.

    Each time I am lonely…it is clue, I lost my self there.

    Each time I feel powerless, well you can bet I gave myself up there.
    Each time I am angry at another’s action, I am expecting them to do something for me, carry me, love me, make me feel secure, and so I know I dropped a part of me there.

    It is amazing how fragmented we are, how may folks carry our sense of self.

    It is lonely, if you need others to be you.

    In a co-dependent society, being alone means being lonely for no one is supporting you.

    How awful to stand alone, separated, unattached…

    Being whole means needing no one to be you.

    You just be you alone.

  • Against my Mind.

    What an odd Christmas I had, it was almost like an out of body experience, certainly out of control, where Christmas joy seemed to mock me outside, yet inside lay a storm of hurt, anger, sorrow, confusion, resentment, more confusion a mess of wires all tangled up with beauty everywhere.

    It is odd to be so riled up inside and the outside appearing picture perfect.

    Looking inside our home last night, you would see a beautiful family and a wonderful Christmas scene; the only dark cloud was fuming around me.

    Today I didn’t know how my day would go, if I would be able to get out from under the cloud, if the fog would leave so I could sit in peace.

    Sit and just breathe in the day.

    My family watched me cautiously, wary and on tippy toes and eggshells, as I did my self.

    Wondering at my own sense of mental balance.

    This mental dysfunction of co-dependency can strike at any time, a hook is caught upon another’s action and blame and resentment ensue.

    If I could know that a snag was coming, I could head it off at the pass, but I am surprised as the ones I am snagged onto, unconsciously a lesson is arriving unbeknownst to me.

    I stay hooked as long as I blame the other, the only way I can work my way free is to see where my responsibility and actions led to the hookup.

    My freedom comes when I can stay aware in the midst of the snag and wise enough to know it isn’t all their fault, that it takes two to tangle.

    And what I usually find, is that they are doing their thing and I hop on wanting, wishing, dreaming that they will drop their life to satisfy mine.

    Oddly enough while it may have been the worst Christmas Eve ever, it also is a template to model the rest by, using it to design free Christmas activities in the future.

    Today, as the dinner preps were needed, I asked.

    I asked for help.
    I asked for specifics.
    I asked and it was met with no resistance, no complaints.

    Now this can’t be a real test, for they were so not wanting a Johnny raincloud on Christmas day or at the dinner table.

    My tone was different, the manic need was gone, there seemed to be a team spirit, a tone of many helping hands.

    Again, I know that they were coming, that we were coming off of a bad experience, where my manic mood stole Christmas joy, so I can’t be sure the atmosphere changed permanently, but a change was from deep dark fear to neutral.

    I will not say I was filled with joy or filled with gratitude or love or peace, but I was out of the depths of hell.

    Even in neutral the rest could feel their own joy, I wasn’t stealing their peace.

    How awful to witness the affects one dark rain cloud can have on a party, and to be it.

    It’s like the party planner; the event coordinator creates this wonderful display, great food, and then sits and stews in the midst like a bad stench spreading it everywhere.

    Like Dr. Jill Bolte says, “you are responsible for the energy you bring into the room.”

    Yet I felt so out of control.

    What I can do next time is just state how out of control, how angry, hurt, confused, resentful I am and it is best that I be excused.

    Taking my dark insides with me.

    Christmas for me was seeing the damage that darkness of co-dependency can do, how it changes the feelings of the others in the room, how it takes out joy.

    It is scary that I still have episodes of this.

    Yet I feel that each time I learn more about myself and hopefully be wiser next time.

    It left us all happy with neutral, no over joyful or dreaded darkness, just an idle.

    My mental dysfunctional co-dependency bouts start with a small item and pick up speed and volume if left unchecked, its almost like I got drunk on negative energy.

    Today I felt hung over and depleted from being strung so tight my head and jaw in a vice, muscles taunt, breath shallow, vision clouded.

    Braced to fight my misconstrued expectations to the death, while wanting desperately to be free and relaxed and calm and accepting, bending to the change in plans.

    Instead I put support beams of thoughts around the expectations built upon nothing.

    Like fluff on a cloud.

    Nothing supporting nothing.

    Mental thoughts being planned by a mental mind.

    The left side of my head is bruised, my jaw in pain, my left neck and shoulder ache, all a stiff from my struggle with reality.

    What I want most is to relax, to breathe, and to process this episode to my DNA.

    What I caught a few hour glimpse of is my old life, a spirit of Christmas pasts.

    My life review brought to life in reality.
    I had just been thinking a few weeks ago, that our home hasn’t had me go ‘crazy’ in a long while, and there I was in full living color, out of reality, crazy.

    Tonight I am grateful that I visit this state now, but don’t live there full time.

    How incredibly hard that life is.
    How separated, how desolate, how fearful, how lonely…

    What I think now is that this mental dysfunctional co-dependency, is something to manage, never cured.

    That it can sneak in and steal my peace at any time, that the more I set the stage, by voicing my concerns, needs, desires, the less opportunity it has to grab on and hijack my life.

    My antidote is flexibility and freedom.
    Theirs and mine, against my mind.

  • I feel Solo

    As I look at my self in my life today, I am so much freer than I would have ever dreamed possible.

    While I live in the same house, married to the same man, and still have four children with me, I am no longer chained by their behavior…well okay, I still get stuck for a half hour or so, but I can usually set myself free.

    Dr. Berman spoke of the triangle affect, where relationships get stuck when couples move from one corner to the next exchanging roles and manipulating feelings.

    I lived on that triangle for years and years, and I was the master at being a hero and dabbled in the victim villain roles pretty often as well.

    On the triangle you are never in control of your feelings, somebody owns yours and you own anothers, we forever go around making other people feel and feeling how other people make us…never free to feel by yourself.

    If your not moving feelings around, there is the spot of hero, where you literally take over the responsibility of another’s life, where you come in and save the day, allowing them to miss a lesson to grow and learn by experience.

    This triangle is dysfunction and it leaves you separated from your feelings, where you are forever at the mercy of another.

    My past six years have been unlearning the triangle reflexes of blaming the other, and instead look inside to see where I gave up power.

    Looking for the power leak, where I lost control of my own power.

    Any time I say, “you disappoint me” or “ you make me feel sad” I am back on the triangle as a victim.

    Instead if I say, “I am sad or I am hurt” I am in control of my feelings and I get to explore why.

    What actions did I do to wind up feeling this way?

    What can I do now to make me feel better?

    It leaves the other person out of my feelings; it frees them up to be in charge of their own.

    The co-dependency triangle leaves you so tangled up and out of control, where you never can be assured that your peace, love and joy will stick around, that soon something or somebody will come along and steal it away.

    What I love love love, is that you are the only one who can give that away. It isn’t stolen, you literally hand it over in a victim like drama way with great words and feelings.

    When I learned that my love, my joy and my peace were mine and I had right and obligation to protect them, life was much easier, I walked away from the triangle.

    Standing authentic with your feelings isn’t always easy, but always empowering.

    I no longer disappoint my feelings or cover them up or speak down to them or pretend them to be different than what they are.

    I stand up with them no matter what.

    My feelings empower me.

    The Spirit of me is alive in feelings.

    I am as I feel or I feel as I am.

    I blame no one for how I feel.

    I feel solo.

  • Gateway Into Self

    A blog called, Brave Girls Club, has a wonderful story about wearing signs, or the lack there of at;

    http://www.bravegirlsclub.com

    As I pondered which signs I am hiding or what I am not revealing it occurred to me that a sign was hung upon my neck, when my father’s truth hit the daily news.

    His past hung heavy around my neck.

    A sign I did not want to wear.

    His sign and my sign were puzzle pieces, they went together, he was a pedophile and I was his victim.

    Yet the sign wasn’t hung upon me until a niece spoke up and her words matched my feelings, and now I had a sign as proof.

    What an awkward, clumsy, shameful, disgusting sign, I had to wear.

    It was this sign that all turned away from, old friends became strangers, acquaintances dodged me, my sign didn’t fit into many relationships.

    The sign entered into the room before me, it over shadowed any cute outfit I wore, there was no way to hide or dress it up, It was exposed.

    Sadly some signs are not given the same considerations as most.

    In the first blushes of wearing this sign, I stood alone.

    Me and my new sign not knowing how to stand, to walk and carry myself with this new found history, I soon seen how I was someone to steer clear of.

    It is so interesting that some signs gain many friends and tons of support, while other signs are shunned and feared, their darkness too dark to approach.

    Standing up in those early days, with the weight of the devastation upon me, the sign nearly collapsed my spirit.

    Surprisingly that by having had to walk alone, I have more strength, not less.

    I still wear my sign, it will not go away, it and I are one, my past is me, and I am it.

    Some signs are the gateway into self.

  • 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.

     

     

     

  • Feminine Self

    My 40th yoga session followed right behind a two-hour Oprah interview with 4 sexual predators and a book I was reading called “The Flying Boy” by John Lee.

     

    As I began yoga and on the Standing Head to Knee pose, as I went to pick up my left leg, which is weak and unbendable the thought came to me, “my feminine side was crippled or broken” and tears began to flow.

     

    It was like my body felt relieved that I could acknowledge this.  I felt such compassion for the wounded feminine parts of me as I lovingly stood there on one leg holding my left/feminine side.

     

    This alone would be a huge gift on day 40, but on we go. 

     

    I get to the Balancing Stick pose and as I raise my hands above my head and I begin to breathe, another profound thought comes in, “I am only responsible for love and trust,” and again tears come and a huge lightness to my shoulders.  As I was breathing in I was feeling only being responsible for bringing trust and love to my relationship with my abuser, my father.

     

    I am innocent of being responsible or guilty for the abuse.

     

    I then proceed to hold the pose of Balancing Stick for all but the last one, for on that one, again I was eager to tell you about this, and lost the connection.

     

    Those are two gifts this yoga gave me today, the realization that my feminine side is damaged, but with good reason, and that I am free of carrying the weight of guilt and shame or blame.  My shoulders literally felt lighter yet again.

     

    As I went into the floor Separate Head to Knee, where my left hip usually screams, I told it, “it is okay I understand your hurt,” and I was able to do this without pain, not perfect, not farther, but with ease and more tears. 

     

    It is like I am recognizing the physical manifestations this body has held.

     

    An overwhelming sadness came in knowing that I have lived so long without this side, this softness, this trusting openness, how hard and stiff it has left me, struggling to be stronger, tougher, when what I needed was to be more relaxed and soft. 

     

    Bikram is right, “you have no idea what yoga can do for you, Yoga makes you you.”

     

    As one predator stated, “I killed the person she could have been.”  And he is right.  But they only win if we don’t bring her back!  I intend to return to my full healthy loving trusting feminine self!