I M Perfect lady

Tag: courage

  • Knows you can….

    We believe that courage and fearlessness will arrive before we do something; that it is an actual muscle like thing that comes crawling into our body and boom, we now have courage.

    But courage isn't like that, nor is being fearless. 

    Courage is knowing you are in fear and shaking and trembling and feeling like a small child could push you over, and you keep going.

    Courage and strength doesn't arrive first. It actually settles into you after you faced your biggest fears, said what you thought you could never say, do what you felt was impossible to happen.  It comes After.

    Which seems like that is backwards, but courage comes afterward, for you look back at what you actually did. What you said and how you didn't die….or faint or whatever, You did it. 

    It is the act of doing what you don't feel you have the strength or the courage to do…But you do it anyway….that's when you see this psyche muscle there…courage.

    It isn't like love….it arrives after you need it.  It is like a cheerleader waiting on the other side of the river of turmoil and waiting to embrace you….it doesn't carry you across.

    I am thinking codependency carries….courage waits and cheers, beckoning you to be brave, to walk with shaky legs, to talk through tears and sobs….that is courage.

    Courage doesn't look like we may have it pictured, like it is strong and calm and wise and cool looking, and all put together.

    For me, courage was swear words and jagged sobs, it was putting up hands when my mother came to hug, after being silently away for 5 months after her husband was exposed as being a pedophile.

    Courage was saying no.

    Courage for me was walking into her home, reigning in my rage to the point of ONLY hollering and not pummeling her.  Courage was saying what I had to say to ears that were unable to hear or be empathetic.

    Courage had me walking out, knowing that she couldn't mother me…courage was mothering me myself.

    Courage was sitting on a path not knowing where it led, but going anyway.  Courage was to be without a plan and being okay.

    Courage was accepting what is, when it turned my belly into heaving sobs.

    Courage wasn't pretty or perfect, it wasn't calm and peaceful, but raw ugliness at times…that looking back were beautifully represented in their honesty.

    Courage is doing what you have never done before to get to a place you have no idea that you need to go.

    Courage is blindly living on a pinhead of time, where nothing is familiar and no one is ahead of you…it is you and the time ticking in your life.

    Courage is surrendering the pattern you have followed to strike out on your own, creating as you go; one shakey step at a time.

    Courage beckons and you say yes…in the exact condition you are in. It like God, and only accepts originality.  It only wants you just as you are in this moment of time.  You are perfectly perfect….it waits…go toward it…it is on the other side of what ever you feel is impossible…just head in and know you are not alone. Courage is watching, cheering and knows you can.

     

  • Grace and Courage

    As Alice Miller’s book comes to a close, she encapsulates her thoughts.

    “In this book (The Body Never Lies) I express hope that , as psychological knowledge grows, the power of the Fourth Commandment will wane in favor of the appropriate respect for the vital biological needs of the body, including truth, loyalty to oneself and to one’s perceptions, feelings and insights. If I seek genuine expressions of my feelings in a genuine form of communication, everything that was built on lies and insincerity will fall away from me. Then I will no longer strive for a relationship in which I pretend to have feelings that I do not have, or suppress others that I do have. Love that excludes honesty does not deserve the name of love.

    The following points may serve to sum up these ideas.

    1. The “love” of formerly abused children for their parents is not love. It is an attachment fraught with expectations, illusions, and denials, and it exacts a high price from all those involved in it.

    2. The price of this attachment is paid primarily by the next generation of children, who grow up in a spirit of mendacity because their parents automatically inflict on them the thins they believe “did them good.” Young parents themselves also frequently pay for their denial with serious damage to their health because their “gratitude” stands in contradiction to the knowledge stored in their bodies.

    3. The frequent failure of therapy can be explained by the fact that most therapists are themselves caught up in the snare of traditional morality and attempt to drag their clients into the same kind of captivity because it is all they know. As soon as clients start to feel and become capable of roundly condemning the deeds, say, of an incestuous father, therapists will probably be assailed by fear of punishment at the hands of their own parents if they should dare to look their own truth in the face and express it for what it is. How else can we explain the fact that forgiveness is declared to be an instrument of healing? Therapists frequently propose this to reassure themselves, just as the parents did. But because it sounds very familiar to the messages communicated to them in childhood by their parents, albeit expressed in a more friendly way, some patients may need some time to see through the pedagogic angle of it. And even once they finally have recognized it, they can hardly leave their therapist, especially if a new toxic attachment has already formed, if for them, the therapist has become like a mother who has helped them to a new birth (because in this new relationship they have started to feel). So they may continue to expect salvation from the therapist instead of listening to their body and accepting the aid it signals represent.

    4. Once clients, accompanied by an enlightened witness, have lived through and understood their fear of their parents (or parental figures), they can gradually start to break off destructive attachments. The positive reaction of the body will not be long in coming: its communications will become more and more and more comprehensible; it will cease to express itself in mysterious symptoms. Then clients will realize that their therapists have deceived them (frequently involuntarily) because forgiveness actually prevents the formation of scar tissue over the old wound, not to speak of complete recovery. And it can never dispel the compulsion to repeat the same pattern over and over again. This is something we can all find out from our own experience.

    “In The Body Never Lies, I have tried to show that some widely held views have long since exploded by scientific research. Among them are the convictions that forgiveness has a salutary effect, that a commandment can produce genuine love, and that feigning feelings that we do not have is compatible with the demand for honesty. But my criticism of such misleading ideas is by not means to be equated with a refusal to recognize any moral standards or with a wholesale rejection of morality.”

    “On the contrary, Precisely because I staunchly uphold certain values – such as integrity, awareness, responsibility, or loyalty to oneself – I have difficulty with the denial of truths that I consider self-evident and have in fact been empirically substantiated.”

    “Inability to face up to the sufferings undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.” Alice Miller

    What I find so affirming is are the major factors that Alice believes will help a person heal from abuse is what I discovered as well…

    Honoring thy Mother and thy Father…is no longer valid when they don’t honor you. This is a two way road and that love without honesty isn’t love.

    Secondly, the forgiveness to keep them ‘sin’ free…will not put scar tissue on our wound; it will not help heal us at all. In fact, we eventually will hurt our children, for we are still unhealed and hurt.

    From what I am hearing in my old church based upon the premise of forgiveness, this is self evident. If forgiveness worked, it would have stopped a long time ago. But when you hear that the grandparent was a perpetrator, the parent was perpetrator and now a child is, Forgiveness doesn’t stop abuse!

    And I love how she uses the body as a gauge for our barometer to our honesty. Your body simply does not know how to lie, it just responds in kind to the climate in which it is forced to live.

    How easily our world troubles could be solved if we all were brave enough to speak our truth and walk behind it with grace and courage…

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  • The Shame Lives when we hide it…bravery is born when we don’t!

    We can’t know the obstacle courses another person is navigating in their lives, what sorts of soul wrenching choices they are making, what tricky waters they are navigating by how they present themselves daily, for most often we are taught to ‘put our best face forward’ and not share the nitty and the gritty, the sad and devastating and we have all become masks of covering up.

    How did it become more natural to pretend than to walk in authenticity, like we get points for being the most put together and champions of keeping our ‘messes’ well hidden?

    So that now it seems that a person who speaks their truth and walks it is a phenomena instead of the norm.

    What is it about human nature that we want sunshine and blue skies, peace, love and joy and push back and away from feelings and emotions of great tragedy, yet live it anyway?

    The behind the scenes drama would be better served in front and out loud. To simply present to the world your selves dressed in your dirty laundry and wear it with flare.

    To be as disheveled on the outside as the raging confusion and overwhelming emotions of pain on the inside and for it all to match, instead of primping and struggling to remain perfectly coiffed while totally unraveling.

    It seems we want perfect looking lives whether we live them or not and we will struggle to pull it off, and feel victorious if we can walk around in public hiding our broken insides.

    Imagine the world and how much more relaxed it would be if our insides would appear as accessories, if we were allowed to wear our confusion outside, what great advice would pour our way and how comforting it would be to see that you were not alone.

    And, the greatest news is that the secrets would die for it would be unfashionable to not have colorful deeply intriguing soulful items displayed on your chest.

    Imagine the white blankness of indifference compared to the wildly attractive colors of wrestling with overcoming abuse?

    How nice it would be to get rid of the social presentation and just be our selves…

    What happens with these social masks and if they are good actors, is that you never get to know the real person, just the nice set of clothes that walk around.

    In walking and talking about my ‘dirty’ laundry or my truth, I have had the greatest privilege to hear others real life…they relax and be them selves where the social outside disappears and underneath is this wildly exciting alive soul living life, going through huge lessons of growth and inner knowing.

    Life is lived underneath the perfect faces and put together clothing and if you dare wear your dirty laundry in public you will find others who are eager to do so too.

    My dirtiest of the dirt is that I have a pedophile for a father and once I openly displayed this, owned it, spoke it, I have been free to display other shades of dysfunction as well, and little by little my whole self is allowed to come forth.

    I have become comfortable in my own skin and wear my abuse as a badge of courage not of shame; it’s one of the last diseases that need to be socially acceptable.

    Human nature when its abused creates this, it isn’t a bug, it is spread from family member to family member and I truly believe that the more we talk about this and the more we openly display our abuse, the less power it will have and its insidious spreading will recede.

    Incest is hidden behind nice looking clothes and demeanors, and family’s monsters are protected and made normal so as not to stand out and look odd…and we need to undress this normalcy and own it.

    When we own it we begin treating the root cause…we find the line and the path of destruction and can one by one bring them in the open and see how their abuse affected them.

    Are they still being victims or have they taken over and become what abused them? And we have to recognize that they are acting out perfectly for being abused.

    “Hurt people hurt people.” They are not natural monsters; they became this way coming from whence they came.

    While we can see the wolf in sheep’s clothing, we never treat the wolf we just pet the lamb.

    Petting the monster will not stop the abuse; it is only facing the monster within that we can begin to affect the root cause.

    Undressing and exposing the monster is a step in the right direction.

    Isn’t it funny, but we all know we are petting a lamb with the volatile wolf underneath…yet we are too afraid to know it and speak it and do something about it. It is much easier to pretend it is a lamb the whole way through, even though the wolf fangs are showing and we have bites to prove it…

    I know the cost of not disrobing the wolf…of pretending that he is only a lamb.

    Our children need to know from us adults in the room, that a monster is sitting in their presence and if we treat him like a lamb, so will they.

    It is time we call a spade a spade, a monster a monster and a molested child a molested child. It is time for us to wear our wounds on the outside with courage.

    The shame lives when we hide it…bravery is born when we don’t!

  • Mother for them.

    I want to say “Happy Mother’s Day” to all the mothers out there who stood up and did what was hard to do.

    Who had a voice that spoke out when their hearts were breaking, who walked away from their home and family to end abuse.

    Who were willing to leave all they have ever known to change the course of abuse in their children’s lives.

    Mothers who walk with shaky legs and confusion, but walk anyway, the ones who can see the hurt child…and then nothing in life matters more, they walk against many who demand their silence.

    The mothers who will give up her dreams for the safety of her children deserve all the accolades of this day.

    The mother who is in fear, but walks anyway, who leaps into the unknown to save her child, I cheer you on.

    These are mothers of true courage and strength and willingly walk face to face with life’s greatest fears to save a child, theirs and others. They do not sit silently and watch and not get involved, they leap when others sulk back.

    They are the heroes who this day belongs to.

    Mothers, who mother in love, walk fearlessly against evil, and are a strong secure place to be held. Who you can trust and who will lead you to your highest good.

    My Happy Mother’s Day wishes and good energy go to you.

    May you stand tall when the world is falling, when your voice is the lone one in the sea of silence, may you find your courage within you, and know that the Universe walks with you always.

    Feel inside and you will feel the strength of all the mothers who sat in fear, they are cheering for you to show them the way.

    Even mothers need heros, you are a mother for them.

  • Meant to be.

    Motherhood begins in childhood, and womanhood starts there as well. The essence of who we are as a woman will directly relate to what kind of mother we are.

    There is no separation between woman and mother; the two are one.

    We don’t leave behind who we are as we take on the responsibility of a child, we simply add this to our ongoing relationships that are already in place.

    A child joins your relationships and will emulate them as he begins to create his own, he watches how you treat yourself and how you allow others to treat you, and it is from there that he learns self-care.

    My motherhood path began with me being a valiant co-dependent, a people pleaser and a whore for love and peace, there was very little of my life that was solely for me, most of it I lived for the benefit of others.

    All my decisions and choices were linked to someone’s happiness or love, I made choices based on whether I would lose their approval or not.

    When I stopped seeking approval and instead began living inside out doing what I loved, I began seeing a Me emerge, a separated unique individual, a self.

    As I grew into being more me, I no longer needed others to support me, and it set them all free to be them selves.

    My children were set free when I set myself free.

    My children’s lives returned to them and they too are now free to be what they want to be from the inside out.

    I am there to guide them to show they the lay of the land, but at the end of the day, they get to decide their fate depending upon the choices they make.

    It isn’t my life it is theirs.

    The freedom you give comes with self responsibility and that is what I believe the goal of each parent is, to make them ownership of their lives.

    To raise them to see the consequences from the choices they make, and to allow them to sit in the consequence is the learning of life.

    How we deal with all facets of life is how they learn to deal.

    How authentic we are, how loyal to self we are, where our integrity lies, all will be reflected back to us in our children’s lives.

    Mostly what we fail to notice is that our children’s lives will be lived as we live today, not our potential or what we plan to do, but as we do today.

    To raise independent children, be independent.
    To raise children who love themselves, love yourself.
    Who you are today is the pattern your child will follow, our footsteps are leading them into a life we have.

    We can’t do nothing and hope our children learn from our mistakes, we have to undo our mistakes.

    There are a few, a slight few, changelings of this rule, they are the exceptions not the rule, that will strike out on their own and redefine themselves leaving behind a family, I know this happens for I was one.

    I changed the family legacy by leaving instead of staying in the cycle of abuse/dysfunction and co-dependency; I had to walk out to save my self.
    Time will tell as my young adult children leave our home and set out on their own making choices, was there enough time spent with me to learn a new way of being or were their formative years to tightly ingrained.

    I sit here today aware that the woman who I was and the woman who I became, mothered the same children.

    How this will affect them remains to be seen, what pattern will they follow, how deeply were they affected by their formative years and how much of an impact has my freedom made?

    What I know for sure is that the more I remain honest with myself, the more I love myself, the brighter the second pattern is seen.

    To be the best mother ever is to be the best you can be with your self.

    Loving yourself enough to say no when you mean it.
    Loving you enough to put up boundaries to keep hurt out.
    Loving you to speak your truth always.
    Loving your self as you find your self in this moment, knowing you are a work in progress and be willing to do what it takes in each moment to stand with your self.

    You will then mother a child of strong courage to be who they were meant to be.

  • Where I stopped caring for me.

    As I read back a few days in my blog, I saw where the trimmings had a hold of me and almost ruined Christmas, and then the actions and expectations did the job the trimmings had started.

    It is like negative energy travels from item to person to thing, to any place in my world to latch on, and if I am not aware where my power is, it slips in and takes over.

    What I believe happens as well, as the busier you are the more unaware you become, so busy doing you forget to be.

    My Christmases of past were very busy doings, they wore me out to the last drop of energy, it was what I thought was needed to make a great Christmas to do over and beyond what you normally do.

    To put your self into trimming the house, oodles of gifts, baking, card sending, wrapping your self up into a dozen places until there is no you left.

    Exhausted and depleted.

    A manic Christmas cheer.

    Taking the season of giving into a manic state of doing and overdoing and then doing yet more.

    This holiday season is a playground for those of us who have ‘responsibility addictions’ who feel we carry the power to make others happy. It is like a drugstore of places for us to get our hits.

    There should be a warning label on Christmas.

    “Be careful not to give your self away.”

    I had a very odd dream on Christmas Eve, well actually very early Christmas morning, as I awoke from it, it left me knowing its content was a metaphor for how I lived my life.

    It isn’t a nice dream, but I will state it here anyway.

    I became aware I was in the back of a station wagon, face down, naked from the waist down, I was a young girl and I was watching a man approaching the side of the car, the windows are open and I hear him say my maiden name. In the middle seats are young kids, and the feeling I have is that I will offer my body to him to spare them. He climbs on my back and does his thing. I don’t feel anything, except that I am making him happy.

    When I awoke from this dream it seemed like a complete metaphor for my life.

    How I will be a whore for another and I will do so to spare another pain, I will abuse my body for the sake of others.

    It stayed with me this ugly dream on Christmas day.

    Its contents a visual of how I navigated life in co-dependency, how I will use my body in two ways for the pleasure of others and to spare pain for the innocent, to protect them I will abuse to my body.

    How others use my body was clearly displayed with my approval and willingness.

    Perhaps I needed that shocking dream to wake me up to how I get lost in another’s life.

    And what was so telling was the age of this young girl, as I caught sight of her in the rearview mirror, very blonde hair and young body, her flat chest, being strong beyond her years, willing to suffer for another.

    Courageously selflessly boldly the sacrificial lamb.

    Perhaps I don’t have images of my child abuse, but this is as close as it gets.

    And what I feel was that I truly didn’t focus on his deed and my pain, but his happiness and who I spared.

    What began at the moment of abuse was the fragmentation of living life for self.

    It is there my responsibility gene was developed and pruned, where I became the pleaser and the saver.

    Where I stopped caring for me.

  • Stand Up!

    Yesterday Oprah had the second part with the 200 men who stood up against abuse, I have only seen small segments on her website, but the few I seen offered this, “Standing UP against abuse”.

    Standing up and speaking up with courage, releases the shame, the blame and the rage that live in silence.

    Standing up is not a victim stance.

    Standing up takes courage.

    Standing in the truth of your life and your life experiences, standing and speaking of the deeds of evil you survived as a child, the mixed messages, the bad definitions, the path it set you upon, all stop when you stand up.

    You then pick your own path.

    A path free of abuse.

    I believe to the depth of my soul, you either are sitting down with abusers and letting the legacy continue, OR you are standing up and speaking out and walking away from the abuse.

    It takes courage to stand up, but standing up is the only thing that will stop abuse.

    Sitting and remaining in relationships where the abuse lives is sitting down in abuse.

    I Stand UP!

    I applaud these strong men and the courage it takes to stand up and I am standing with you!

    It will change your whole life, from being a victim to becoming a survivor.

    Standing up and speaking is the only way to end this.

    It is never too late to stand up!

  • Letting go of Perfection

    Courage lies within us in a very deep place, buried behind the walls of fear of imperfection, coated in false ideals and fantasies that are impossible to attain, courage waits for us to uncover it.

    Peeling back the layers and layers of deceit we have of ourselves, piles of unrealistic desires and impossibilities, a mound of what I am not.

    Courage comes when we are able to stand alone in being who we are right now without improvements, without the completion of dreams, minus the goal, but instead standing right here right now, completed up to this point.

    With no excuses, no reasons, just as I am.

    The courage it takes to drop all the idealized versions of your self and just be okay with the raw deal, the real complete version of you, up to this point.

    For some reason we continue to not look at what we are, but instead of what we are trying to become.

    While we focus on where we are going we miss this step in the creative process, this step called today.

    I have no idea of what my final creation of me will be, but I do know who I am today.
    I know where I walked, how I walked and sometimes even why, I don’t know where I will step, but I know that each step will be me.

    It takes courage to be truthfully half done, authentically complete, and yet fully perfect as you are right now.

    Am I whole?
    Am I normal?
    Am I perfect?
    Am I sick, mental, imperfect?

    Whose measuring stick am I using?

    My intention is to be with myself as I walk forward in my life, not a fraction more perfect than I am right now, and not a snippet less.

    It takes courage to accept yourself as you are today, to toss aside the blueprints and be complete now, without a new version in mind, but to be a success thus far.

    Courage is letting go of perfection.

  • The Wise Listened

    I only spent one hour in her presence and wanted to follow her home, and in fact we may have been behind her motor home as she left our town, I had the chance but turned off as our road appeared, allowing her to leave me wanting more.

    It wasn’t so much her story but rather the affirmations I felt as I listened to her.  I wanted more.

    Her story and mine shared some similar roads, and I could see how her courage was grown, how she shined in her individuality how comfortable she is in her skin, although I know it wasn’t always so.

    She spoke of her childhood in a tone of ‘this is what it was’ marveling with us and showing us how those steps were gifts that she used to become who she is today. 

    Dr. Maya Angelou.

    From an abused mute child to one who had us all sitting in rapt attention to each word, insight and profound wisdom she uttered.

    Maybe we can’t listen to another until they have something worthwhile to share.

    She has enough wisdom inside, and I feel I just got one little tiny peek.

    A peek of who I will be!

    She makes life seem only worthwhile if it is colorful; with characters and scenes that put fiction to shame.

    It’s like the more you suffer, the better the storyteller you will become and how much more interesting the story will be to tell.

    She didn’t hide the ‘shameful’ parts, rather she allowed them their truths to stand equal to the kinder parts, the happier times and she weaved them all together into one strand of self.

    The audience followed her as she led us on her journey as we sampled a few moments of significance that made her who she is today.

    A colorful woman telling us this isn’t a rehearsal, so get on and live life.

    Thanks Dr. Maya Angelou for taking the journey to come and speak to us today.

    We are just another spot on her journey, and she a spot in ours.

    A connection and energy exchanged.

    I left feeling she was giving us a hand up, as she reminded us of all who came before us, what their cost was, and how we don’t have the right to waste our time being less than who we can be.

     A wise woman sat on that stage and the wise listened.

     

  • 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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