Tag: cover

• Reasons to Spin

  While dialoguing in the comment section on the Post, “Where Your Best Interest Lies” a few posts back, I am feeling like I am a reporter trying to get my story out and they are working like crazy Spin Doctors or the Public Relations Department of the FALC to prevent that from happening. 

  They are trying so hard to convince me it wasn’t their ‘faith’ or the church or its members or any of that religious stuff, and that my abuse stands alone, like a rogue virus.

  I feel people are working so hard to spin my story off into this lonely little section called abuse where religion never touched it, blessed it or had ANY thing to do with my abuse. 

  There is abuse, AND there is religion and never shall the two touch each other.

  It is sounding like a political debate where they want there to be two sides. 

  And I am here to tell you in my experience, Religion had a huge part in keeping abuse in my family home.  It did not stay there on its own and without the knowledge of the church.

  There is no way I can speak of my abuse without including the church. 

  In fact, if I had good faith in the forgiveness of sins, I could have had a normal dad.

  If I had good faith in the power of the forgiveness of sins, the sins would be washed away never to be heard from again…

  Maybe you all want to blame my weak faith on the fact that my father kept abusing little girls.  For damn it IF only I could have believed more deeply he could be washed whiter than snow and not hurt one more little girl.

  Do any of you know what it is like to call your childhood friends, now 40 years later and say, “I wish you would not have been my friend, for honey it cost you way too much.”

  Have you?

  Do you know that I recall one bright memory of me being on a huge white pole swing in our yard on a bright sunny summer day, and my dad came to me crying asking ME for a blessing.  Why?  What did he do to this young young little girl whose feet couldn’t even touch the ground.  What???  I don't know if I did it properly…I was way too little. 

  Did I not bless him properly?  Did I not believe it, IS that why he continued on molesting, raping and fondling little girls?  Was my faith to weak in strength to erase it correctly?

  Am I going to hell for being a bad blesser???

  When you question my story, you are saying to me, that I am wrong. Tell me where I am wrong?  Tell me, please and USE your name.

  I believed in a father.

  I believed in a mother.

  I believed in the power of the forgiveness of sins.

  I believed in order to be good, I had to bless bad people.

  I believed wrong…

  And did my ‘faith’ in the forgiveness of HIS sins spare one little girl?  Did it?  Can you put the blame on me?  Did I bless him wrong???

  Oh yeah my faith is weak now, it is actually nonexistent in the power of forgiving and blessing away the sins of the fathers.

  Yes it is.  I believe 100% that it does not work. 

  I am living breathing proof. 

  Where do you all believe these piles of sins are?  Look behind you they walk with you everywhere.  It is only in your mind, that you think they are gone.

  Each and every action you have made is written down in the book of reality seen by God…nothing gets erased ever.

  The only thing you can do is do better when you know better. 

  In the past, I was a good Christian and spoke of it not, not my feelings of terror towards my father, nor my deep down resentment towards my mother, I sucked in and asked to be blessed for being such a bad child to feel unloving toward her parents. 

  I kept trying to be a better child, never even stopping to see if I had parents I should be loving toward. 

  When my father’s name was spoken as being the one to molest my niece, I became a very bad child.  I stood with the little girl and somehow I knew I was standing with me. 

  I stood in reality and refused to bless it away, like I even could.

  This little girl isn’t going to be ‘unabused’ if I utter the magic phrase.

  I am bad, a bad ass, and a bitter, cold, vengeful woman some say.  I will be alone and lonely for saying what I say.  I will be ridiculed and not believed…all the same things I felt as a child.

  As a child I believed them, now as woman who is speaking her truth I do not.

  I have faith in God and me.

  I have faith in truth.

  I have faith is using my real name.

  I have faith in others who can reveal themselves to me.

  The rest, I have no faith in.

  For if you can’t say your name, you are not standing with me, you hiding like my father behind the front of being normal.  Good people don't hide.

  Only those in truth will say their name.  This is my belief and this is my blog.  If you feel differently you can blog yourself and have a great conversation and sharing anonymously.

  Oh and one more thing.

  Someone mentioned I lost the faith in God.

  No honey, God has been with me all along.

  He was the one who erased my memory of the event.

  He kept me being a little girl with out such a horrific thing to remember.  And did however keep my truth in my body, to keep me from going near the man who did such awful things to such a sweet innocent BELIEVING girl.

  Your church doesn’t own God; he is not applauding your spinning my story to make it kind.  He was there and he knew I would not have survived life living in that house with a visual memory, sadly I would have went insane.  Only a child who didn’t know could support that family. 

  I didn’t know… and I put my faith in the folks who were spinning my life to be normal.

  Now I am no longer fooled by the spins, I only see what is behind. 

  Only anonymous have reasons to spin.

   

   

  September 5, 2011

  abuse, childhood, cover, FALC, forgiveness, lies, of, sexual, sins, spinning, The, truth, up

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• The soul that lies beneath.

  Julia Cameron writes in The Artist’s Way…

   

  ”Conditioned as we are to accept other people’s definition of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like a self-will run riot.  It is not. The snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. Each of us is a unique, creative individual. But we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-TV, undersleep – many and varied forms of junk food for the soul…”

   

  I have never thought of overeating or any of the above as being junk food for the soul. That most of the things that are bad for the body is also bad for our souls.

   

  They blur our uniqueness, keep us living in with a fuzzy image of who we are, what we want, what we feel and where we heading, and above all, make it hard for the soul to shine through.

   

  In fact all the bad habits keep the soul from shining through and yet we believe we need these habits, we literally crave them, and what they are is a black out curtain for the soul.

   

  It is odd to me that we crave what keeps us from being our whole soulful self, and that we want the stuff that darkens who we are.

   

  Perhaps we want to darken our reality.

   

  We want to shut the shades on what is in order to survive…instead of taking actions to remove ourselves from situations in real life, we drape a curtain so we don’t have to see.

   

  It is amazing to me that we become so accustomed to living a life with a darkened drape, that we have no idea how to live a life without them.

   

  Julia Cameron is gently telling us what stands in the way from being you. What items we do to not be alive, aware and unique.

   

  By removing the junk food from our lives we can see what they were covering up.  The more we crave and hold on to things that are not good for our souls, the more chances there is big stuff we are not wanting to see, feel or respond to.

   

  For me, my big mess was revealed first.  I saw a whole life that I had no clue was going on underneath my dark curtain of denial, of self-numbing or fuzzy blurring of reality, and I then had to start eliminating things that contributed to the blanket of dysfunction.

   

  This blanket of dysfunction lived my life for 46 years, a thick layer of stuff that my soul was unable to shine forth through.

   

  It is surprising the difference between living as the dark curtain or the soul that lies beneath. 

   
  This is one of my first quilts after the revealation of my big mess….and you can see the sliver of gold, which is the soul trying to emerge.  I called this the Soul Lost.  I now have a better understanding of this quilt 6 years or more later!

  July 13, 2011

  abuse, Artist’s, Cameron, cover, creative, denial, habits, Julia, junkfood, life, self, sexual, The, up, way

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• My feelings are me.

  In reading, “A Course in Weight Loss” by Marianne Williamson, it came to me how we are so untruthful with our feelings, so neglectful, so mean, how we run away ducking and hiding, how the planet at large doesn’t like to see sad feelings.

  Feelings of grief or despair, feelings that lower the energies within, a dark foreboding feeling, the feelings that maybe we are not one with reality.

  It seems that at least in my house, we were to skip over reality and that alone was the cause of most dark feelings.

  I am thinking, and I may be wrong, but that when you walk hand in hand with reality, you will be less sad, if you are not wanting things to be different.

  It is the wanting to change what can’t be changed that brings sadness.

  To not be who you are.

  When there is a separation between what is and what you want, that the most suffering happens.

  When you surrender in agreement and sit with what is, although you feel sad to let your dream go, eventually you will see the peace of being in sync with the Universe.

  My greatest sadness was that I didn’t have a dad.
  It wasn’t that I had a pedophile.
  Once I got over the fact that I couldn’t have a dad, when I accepted I was a girl without a man who could be a dad dad, I was much more content and at peace, I was no longer fighting reality.

  To me, when you feel deep sadness I wonder if you are in a place of wishful thinking, mad dreaming, reality changing, if you are struggling hard with acceptance.

  Sadness has a message.
  What is it saying?

  To me I have lots of sorrow escaping in yoga, past sorrows, past dreams and expectations that never came to bear. Even new sadness comes in along with a future dream, which can be no more.

  Some of my sadness that escapes in yoga is the little girl finally telling me where I hadn’t been with her.

  Where she was left alone while I dreamed on.

  Where she was in reality and I escaped.
  Tears flow of rejoining, connecting and being one.

  I stay with my feelings now and find them very enlightening no matter how dark and confusing and restricting, for underneath the tangled mess is a part of me that has been lost and unfelt and needs to be tended to.

  All feelings are signals, which steer you to live authentically as you.

  They are not about the other person, the feelings are specifically made for you, they are your prized possessions, they are what makes you you.

  When you stand with your feelings, you are standing up for you.

  When you cover them up, you are pretending to be someone else.

  My feelings are me.

  January 14, 2011

  A course in weight loss, being, cover, feelings, hiding, Marianne Wiliamson, pretending, them, you

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• All or None Religion.

  My mothering skills have huge pockets of All or Nothing options, accented with control and responsibility that is overly dramatic and leaves me with little options to manuver through issues that I find are out of my control. 

   

  While talking to my brother I was trying to figure out how this ‘all-or-none” works within dysfunction, like what how is it applied and why?

   

  How was I taught this and why do I still use that as my “go to tool” in conflict resolutions.

   

  Charles Whitfield in his book, “Healing the Child Within”, writes.

   

  “This is the ego defense that therapists call splitting. When we think or act this way, we do so at either one extreme or the other. For example, either we love something or we hate them.  There is no middle ground. We see the people around us either good or bad, and not the composite they really are.  We judge ourselves equally as harshly.  The more we use the all-or-nothing thinking, the more it opens us up to behaving in an all or nothing fashion.  Both of the actions tend to get us into trouble and to cause us to suffer unnecessarily.

   

  We may be attracted to others who think and behave in an all-or-none fashion.  But being around this kind of person tends to result in more trouble and suffering for us.

   

  Table 3 lists types of parental conditions associated with dynamics of AcoA’s, and adult children from other dysfunctional families.  While all-or-none thinking can occur in any of these parental conditions, it occurs especially often among fundamentalist religious parents. They are often rigid, punitive, judgmental, and perfectionists.  They are often in a shame-based system, which attempts to cover over and even destroy the True Self.

   

  All-or-nothing thinking is similar to active alcoholism, other chemical dependency, co-dependency or other active addictions and attachments, in that it sharply and unrealistically limits our possibilities and choices.  To be so limited makes us feel constricted and we are unable to be creative and to grow in our day-to-day lives. 

   

  In recovery, we begin to learn that most things in our life, including our recovery, are not all-or-none, not either-or.  Rather, they are both-and.  They have shades of gray, they are somewhere in the middle of a 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 and not either a 0 or a 10.” 

  Charles Whitfield.

   

  I am beginning to see how it is applied and why.

   

  It limits the possibilities and choices and covers up our true self. 

   

  That feels right. 

   

  Yet it feels dreadful that is what I am doing to my children, when I offer the all-or-none attitude.

   

  While all-or-none seems to be easy and cut and dried, it actually reduces the choices so small, it leaves little room for both-and.

   

  I than fail to see my child as good and bad, or energetic and lazy, that they swing and sway to both sides, depending upon what needs to be done.

   

  I write them off quickly, too quickly when my reality becomes overwhelming to me, when my fears rush in that I am being abused again by their lack of caring for my home, their dishes etc.

   

  This ideology is the corner stone of my being a huge foundation that I leaned upon and lived from.

   

  It is so much easier to manipulate others from there.  Manipulating others is a scary premise to raise children.  Manipulating them for my benefit…Instead of finding solutions with multiple choices. 

   

  I lived by the hard and fast rule, do it my way or leave.

   

  Or its cousin, do it my way or I leave.

   

  Each and every time I feel overwhelmed or out of control, I want to bring this dogma back into my world, to wield the cumbersome sword and dictate to clear my world of riff raff and true selves begging to be heard.

   

  It is so hard to wrestle yourself free from the ties that bind this to my way of thinking, to be open to others ideas and solutions, to bring them in and see if this is just my problem or a family problem.

   

  I will ride the mower with this thought, “attempts to cover up or even destroy the true self.”  And sadly we both suffer, no true self remains standing in the all-or-none religion.

   

   

  August 9, 2010

  Charles Whitfield, control, cover, dysfunctional families, Healing the child within, manipulations, religious fundalmentalists, true self, up

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