Tag: fear

  • Love without Hurt.

    What I didn’t know was that my distrust of kindness and love, was actually fear, that love to me was very wobbly and had lots of sharp edges and was ever changing, it was smooth and calm one minute, but filled with rage or hurtful the next, I didn’t know that love didn’t have a hurtful side.

    To me, Love hurts. If not now, it is coming so prepare it room! There was no time in my life that love didn’t eventually turn to hurt, turn to mistrust, turn to betrayal…so, Love Hurts, eventually.

    In fact the people I loved were people with two sides.

    They had the side of trying to be good, be better, be kinder and then the side that failed.

    We were taught to forgive the failing side and to focus on the trying side.

    I was taught that all folks had this Light and Dark side, and that you overlooked (forgave) their darkness and put them back in the Light.

    It wasn’t focusing on the Light that did the damage, but overlooking the dark side.

    This dark side seemed to be forgivable, because it was uncontrollable, its animalistic ways were beyond human control, it rendered many a man helpless.

    It was a sin, that seemed to come in from the outside, but it wasn’t really them. A happenstance, but not of them, so do not throw a person away due to bad behavior. Forgive and forget, until the next time…

    These sins were just clouds that happened by and you got caught in them, it wasn’t something you had control over and within each human was a weak spot.

    A spot colored in by whatever ‘bad’ behavior they didn’t have control over.

    It is this spot that I have spent 6 years investigating within me, and it isn’t a spot, but my whole pathology of becoming me, a monster whose love was nothing but fear.

    I began to dissect all my relationships and all my actions to see what was what, only to discover, unbeknownst to me, I never met love, not the real love, the love that doesn’t change love, the real genuine thing.

    I was a stranger to real love. I had never felt real love, for within me lay fear. If you are full of fear you can’t feel love, all you feel is fearful.

    Fearful it won’t last, fearful it will betray you, unease and afraid, you sit with fear by love.

    My journey has been to climb out of the hole of fearful love, as a monster of fearful love and then in the Light of day, learn what love is.

    It was scary to show the world that I am fear, that I do fearful things, that I come from fearful places and have wounds of fear and that for 46 years I had no clue what love was, and was loveless inside.

    I had such empathy and love for my monster of fear while I was so inept at what love does, how love feels, where love goes, how it speaks, how it listens, how it lives.

    How grateful am I that I was able to transition from a fear-based life to one that is embracing love.

    That saddest part of being the monster of fear is that you feel you are handing out love, compassion, caring while you are sowing seeds of fear.

    I had to feel the icy water drip into me after I had transformed myself, to really understand this monsters message.

    When my daughter’s abuse presented itself to me, I had post traumatic like behaviors, I vacillated between fear and love, and I felt the calm peace and acceptance of love and the wild terrorizing bitter cold fear, and watch the affects both had on my daughter.

    My brave little daughter was caught in the maelstrom of this fear filled love monster.

    What an incredible transformation and what a roller coaster ride, for all who live with me, myself include, to get to just one side of love.

    Love without hurt.

  • Matter to someone.

    What came to me yesterday was the moment in the diner this summer, when I saw my mother for the first time after a 5-year separation, and how my body responded. How before I could put on my social cloak, I was riveted in fear.

    My body had reacted perfectly and yet I didn’t have all the puzzle pieces, but now I do.

    The reason I feared her isn’t because of what she would do to me, but what she had been unable to do in my past.

    How she was unable to get me/us away from a pedophile, that in fact she did the opposite, she tried to make their union normal, while he abused us.

    How she forgave his sins, and rallied harder to make their marriage work, to keep him so we had a father. She put all her efforts in keeping something that wasn’t true. She focused harder on him, and never once treated our wounds.

    As a child you see how invisible you are, how unhearing she is, how unresponsive to your pain.

    I now feel better about the way I feared her, for at the time it almost felt like I had self empowerment leakage, where even as a 51 year old woman, my 80 year old mother could send me into a fit of terror.

    My body recalls her and responds in its truth.
    I love my body and its meters.

    And how true to form she has remained after all these years.

    What stands out the most of the days, weeks, months after my father being arrested for molesting his granddaughter, is the absence of my mother.

    She actually was sequestered and not taking our calls. She went on vacation to Australia and Hawaii, she stayed in the warm climate for months, and only arrived here around the time my father was driven home in chains.

    I do not recall one action that would bring comfort to a child who was abused by that man, not one. She was so busy caring for her needs and his, that she overlooked the dozens of girls, by this time, who stood around with their underwear down, bottoms exposed, abuse clearly showing, and did what she needed to do.

    When I sat in her home, four months after the fact, I saw her shed tears about what was going to happen to her, I saw her strength arise in defense of him and her religion, I saw her blank and defensive when I confronted her on her actions as a mother.

    Not a tear fell as I told her about my experience with her husband, it was like the doors were all closed, I was talking to nothing.

    Isn’t it incredible yet again, that we can fear actions of nothing.

    Nothing. To do nothing is extremely painful to endure.

    My mother sent cards and made personal visits to all the girls she knew who had been molested by her husband, neighbor girls, but she did not give me her daughter the same courtesy. She apologized in a letter saying how sorry she was, that she didn’t believe this young neighbor girl and was sad that it took years to do so.

    The detective handed me that letter, and I crumpled it up and threw it on the floor, like a child enraged, and I was.

    My own mother at the time was sequestered and not taking my calls, was unable to hear of my childhood abuse, and she was penning letters to other hurt little girls.

    How telling, how cruel, how insane…how dare she dismiss me that easily.

    Again what I feared from her was nothing.

    Nothing again.

    I am worth nothing again.

    Nothing.

    What she gives me is nothing, a void. Space, silence, a void.

    I just looked at the two words together. A Void.

    I didn’t know that avoiding was nothing.

    A void.

    When you avoid someone you give them nothing and doing nothing creates a void

    A void isn’t love, it is space, silent, open, and alone.

    Imagine feeling this energy from a mother while you have wounds from your father?

    Instead of being able to find comfort and shelter, we encounter a void, space, emptiness, where no one is coming, nothing will happen…

    A void is who my mother is to me.

    Running from my father I fell into a void.

    It is no wonder my mind couldn’t comprehend or compute, there was no safety anywhere.

    Who is there to catch you when you fall?

    My last line in my letter to Mr. Detective man was, “Every little girl should matter to someone.”

  • Fearfully love.

    “He who cares the least has the most power.” Is a quote that I heard, but have no idea who is the author, but I agree with it.

    Did you know that it is possible to care so much you are frozen to act, to speak, to do, that it will literally freeze you?

    Who would think that inside of ‘caring’ you would find fear?

    But here is the deal, if you care or love a person so much, what you are afraid of is losing something for you. It no longer becomes about them, it becomes about you.

    Who knew there was selfish caring, self absorbed caring?

    You and your feelings of the fear of losing overwhelm the situation and you freeze in fear and fear is all they feel.

    Instead of feeling caring they feel fear, isn’t that incredible?

    They think you FEAR them, not care for them.

    Sitting as a mother who has been gripped in fear of ‘losing’ her daughter, I was also cognizant of the fact that it was more about her.

    Pushing back fear and my loss, I have to keep the focus on how my daughter can regain her sense of self. Sure I slipped and fear fell out and hollering ensued, but awkwardly and in starts and stops, we are dealing together.

    I didn’t know how palatable this feeling of fear was or how it freezes you until I have witnessed so many who know and love my daughter do nothing.

    I couldn’t figure out what the deal was, why are they not actively coming in with words of encouragement, cheers and goodwill, why most are pressed back and motionless and silent, absent, vacant, not here.

    Again, “it isn’t the words of our enemies we remember, but the silence of our friends.”

    What I get now, is that the fear of losing, keeps them out of the game, and in doing that action alone, they lose.

    They lose what they love out of fear of losing what they love.

    It leaves me breathless!

    Love to me is being afraid and going in anyway.
    Being willing to lose what you don’t want to lose, being willing to let go for their sake.

    Isn’t being fearless, being in fear and acting anyway?

    What I know to the depth of my being is that a child who has been abused, feels fear coming at him, not caring. For the parent fears that they lost something precious to Them.

    The child feels fear and so they stop talking about what happened, for it puts ‘fear’ into the parent.

    They don’t want to make their parents afraid.

    I now see where love lost to fear, how it flips so unnaturally and how parents become lost in their own fears and not see the child fall away.

    They go away and go silent as well, for they don’t feel caring they feel fear. And since they are the ones who ‘changed’ due to abuse, they feel that their abuse is something others fear.

    Isn’t it incredible that the fear the parent has of losing a child is the key component to losing a child.

    Their fear is what sends the child away.

    And guess where this child feels most at home, among others who are not afraid of them, other abused people who people fear.

    It saddens me that the abused child gets pushed away because of fear and then owns and becomes that response as who they are. This becomes a new definition of self after abuse.

    And are left knowing, If I speak my truth, if I own my abuse, people will fear me, become silent and shun me.

    This is their experience when they first told.

    We either get to be not who we are with those who love us, or we can become ourselves with those who abused us.

    This new abused wound still fits with those who abuse, they do not fear us, they want us, they need us, they ‘care’ about us.

    Isn’t this a twisted circle?

    The ones who can ‘save’ us are frozen in fear and this leaves us going back to the ones who abuse us.

    I am amazed in knowing the success of abuse is fear in ‘good’ people and how the abusers must be clapping and singing halleluiah each time the abused child returns for more attention and acceptance.

    All we wanted was to feel accepted and loved.
    And it seemed that those who abused us did a better job.

    I recall telling my Aunt, my dad’s sister, that I always felt accepted by him, not judged like I did with my mother, that he loved me unconditionally.

    Imagine a pedophile loved me without conditions. He loved me innocent and he loved me abused, even if the abuse was by his hands.

    We can love or we can fear, but we can’t fearfully love.

  • We Play!

    “When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” ~Howard Ikemoto

    Imagine a world where we didn’t forget to be a child, to have the childlike wonder of the world, a sense of knowing we know how to do anything without fear and lack of self-confidence?

    Where we didn’t have to take classes to learn how ‘draw correctly’ or write perfectly, but instead do what feels right for you.

    It seems at times we are taught so much, we are taught how not to be ourselves.

    We learn until we lose our way back to our self.

    Perhaps the class we need the most is an open class without rules or expectations, a class where we go to unlearn all the fears and lacks that have been preached to us, a safe zone where we shed the years and layers of all the things that are not us.

    A shedding room, a fleecing space where we can get back to the childlike place, where we are the center of the Universe, where we can do anything and we admire ourselves and all that we accomplish, where we affix stars to all that we do each day, where there is an unlimited amount of energy and things we want to see and do, where the world is wide open and we are free.

    How do we take off the heavy cloaks of doubt, fear, and lack that we drag around each day? How do we quiet the voices that have trained us to be motionless in fear?

    We wiggle free by doing things no adult in their ‘right’ mind would do… we play!

  • Fly

    I listened to Byron Katie today, speak about the mind is always the cause and then we act out the affect of what we think.

    We think and then we move…it isn’t an action first.

    All our actions are supported by a thought. And here is the second part, the thought doesn’t have to be true and we will follow it.

    We will follow thoughts, marry for thoughts, die for thoughts, kill for thoughts, and suffer greatly all due to our thoughts, whether they are true or not, we never stop to challenge our thinking mind with our thinking mind.

    Many of us will die with the same thoughts our parents had, and will see ourselves as they originally saw us, we will not advance beyond the original thoughts.

    The family legacy of same thinking is handed down generation to generation.

    What most fail to consider is the original thinker and what his life experiences were and what he passed on.

    What I want most for my children is for them to have a clear mind, a free mind, a mind that seeks and lives with reality.

    I have come from a long line of brainwashed conformists.

    I see them locked into a diseased mind.

    Dysfunctional families can only continue with minds that are not free.

    Cults depend upon malleable minds.

    There are woman who fall victim to ‘love’ and all it is a mind game, a control, a man owing your body and life.

    The old saying, “if you love something set it free, if it comes back to you its yours if it doesn’t it never was.”

    Most will not ‘try’ or test the waters of their love, challenging to see the depth and breath of it, to see how free you are inside of a relationship.

    Some think the tighter you are bound the more you are loved, when in fact the opposite is true. The loser the ties, the more love grows.

    A free mind is a loving mind.

    A bound mind lives in fear.

    Hold a flower clutched in your fist and see how much it grows…

    The impulse of a parent is to squish their children tight to keep them safe, and yet the most loving thing we can do is release them and let them go.

    We can only hope that we taught them to fly.

    “What is bound on earth is bound in Heaven…”

    “Thy will be done…”

  • My own load I can manage.

    What I experienced was the karmic wheel that was much larger than what I seen of my boss’s one day.

    This was an energy that had been repressed and bundled in fear.

    Each moment in my life where I felt the superior was neglectful; I became insubordinate and tried to correct my mother’s behavior by correcting them.

    The Universe has delivered to me various opportunities to attend to myself, but in each of the situations I instead became rebellious to the boss, not wanting to once again endure the treatment of childhood.

    More than once, I have been told I walked a fine line of being insubordinate.

    I looked up the meaning, it means to refuse to obey orders or submit to authority.

    Of course my insubordinate nature was always to protect the unprotected children, no matter if the ‘children’ were my fellow employees.

    I was stuck in the fear of being responsible for things that I wasn’t suppose to be responsible for and for making the supervisor/mother aware of their behaviors while wanting to please them by allowing them to leave for rest, yet resenting the mess they left me in.

    If you look at this without the fear of being unattended, or the fact that I will not be held responsible for things that could/would and may happen, I am just a woman whose only responsibility is to care for my one rural route.

    I can do that.

    I did do that.

    I literally kept bringing the focus back to my mail, my job and tried to ‘not care’ about what was going on in her world.

    The separation is key.

    The knowing what is my business and what is hers.
    What is my responsibility and what is hers.
    Thankfully she didn’t leave behind babies who were in need of much care, babies that I just couldn’t neglect and leave unattended.

    What I see and feel most now is that I have a much broader view and less fear of the lines between what is my responsibility and what is others.
    Picking up others responsibility has weakened my shoulders and weighed heavy in my life.

    I feel the correction and the absence of fear that I am not being a good responsible girl in their absence with a load so much larger than my capabilities.

    My own load I can manage.

  • Attend to me.

    In the past few days I have been tangled and untangled, in the present and in the past, with my mother and with my boss, young and then old, a child then an adult, feelings from the past trickling into the present, until I feel frozen in unknowing how to be, how to respond etc.

    The overall feelings I have is being neglected and under the rule if you will or under the care of a self absorbed person.

    My brother had me looking into The Presence Process book for a section he was curious about, and ironically or not, it was the words I needed to explain my past few days.

    I was perfectly set up to revisit the environment and the nature of my relationship with my mother, how she acted and how I then felt.

    It was so perfect, that even the home/office was falling apart and when my boss left the office she was replaced with a man who was irresponsible and a risk to be with.

    The choreography of the Universe leaves me shaking my head in awe.

    There is a line in the previous post that I took from the book, “An Unbalanced adult is an unattended child.”

    Looking back at my childhood, if I were to put one word on how I felt, it would be ‘unattended’, and I was given a tour back there via my experiences at work in the past few weeks.

    It’s re-creation was remarkable and my the feelings that surfaced were perfect little time travelers from the past.

    The resemblances between the two women brought to me the exact emotions I needed to feel.

    What kept me silent at work was that I was confused as to what now? I did question my boss about her choice making, and was met with defense, and even the defense was perfectly my mother.

    Each time there would be one more item from the past that completed a perfect picture of the dynamics that create the atmosphere where a child is left to its own devices.

    I could clearly see the shoes my boss stood in and why she made the choices she made, her inner constitution couldn’t take one more day in our office.
    It mattered less to her the kind of individual she left in charge or who was under his care, what mattered most was her rest and her sanity, she fled.

    And like my mother who ran away repeatedly in my childhood and in my teenage years she came back feeling better, not wanting to explain or hear my side.

    Feelings of resentment of her being able to escape and me being left to deal were perfectly felt.

    My mother left my father in charge, who wasn’t really a take charge kinda man, so I had to step up long before my age had this kind of responsibility tools.

    So, not only were we left alone with a pedophile, we are left with me, a unattended child taking care of unattended children.

    In a home that was falling apart or held together on a string, whose cupboards were lacking, mountains of clothes, piles of kids, endless disasters looming.

    As I sit here today, I am still silent and feeling.

    I know that the messenger/boss was delivering my past, that I am to feel my feelings releasing this fear of being unattended, and attend to me.

    What I love the most is that at the end of the day it is now my honor to attend to me.

    I am not stuck in the office, I am no longer a child, there are not children who are in vital need of care, I am not little girl who is unable to defend herself, it is not my worry if the furnace breaks or the water pipes freeze etc.

    I am able to witness and now see the scene before me and not feel that I am responsible and unattended.

    I am grateful for the set up for my boss playing the messenger, and for me being released from the fear of being left unattended.

    Unattended.

    Oh the ways I want to care for the unattended little girl in me…

    I will attend to me.

  • My Soul Cheers

    Shutting the valves or entry points where I have allowed toxic behavior and or negative energy to seep in, feels soooo liberating, so empowering, so self loving, I feel so lightened by this, if only I knew that I wouldn’t feel alone, but empowered, I wouldn’t have waited so long.

    The first time I left my family, I did so in fear, anger and anxiety, in moments of pure panic due to the way they were all acting, I segregated myself in solitary confinement in fear. Fear of who they were and how weak I literally was, I scurried to be far far away from them.

    I was out of control in a lonely spot with raging fear, alone and empty inside, twisted up with confused and conflicting images, tangling love and fear, I had to run to survive, not knowing that I would survive…I left.

    It wasn’t an act of courage or empowerment but an act of sheer terror.

    The difference between fleeing in terror or fleeing with knowingly and great awareness are oceans apart.

    One leaves you vulnerable and alone.
    The other empowered and alive with great gusts of newfound peace, like breathing or not breathing.

    Breathing with the right to orchestrate your world, using your free will to close the source of pain that flows into your world.

    What a great thing to know, how empowerment is grown, it is birthed by making a choice, using your awareness and seeing the cause, doing what you can to eliminate it in your world.

    This isn’t at all about them, but about you.

    You have the right to open and close relationships.

    I love that I found the energy to use the switch, to flip the button to off.

    It doesn’t change who they are, but it greatly changes their impact in my world. Little did I know, even though I left the window open, that I was the one I was waiting for…

    Inside, as my tank overflows with empowerment, my soul cheers!

    (I think I scored one for me!)

  • 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.

  • One Verse

    Life seems to unfold flatly in front of us and some will half close their eyes to bring in a fuzzy sorta kinda picture, so not to see its pure untouched nakedness.

    Raw life.

    Life without words, just life arriving unshackled, free and unbound.

    Reality.

    Worldwide realty show where there is no re-shooting or voice over, just life coming to us live!

    Life coming to us live and in living color!

    Yet how often do we see/hear and get what is playing out in front of us, the untouched version?

    How often do we excuse, dismiss, and let be behaviors due to some long held relationship we feel unable to dissolve?

    How often do we respond authentically to what is actually happening, or do we look the other way?

    When we turn, does the reality show make a sharp left with us?

    Do reality and its history not get recorded due to us blinking instead of responding in kind?

    Sometimes living in raw life I find myself brushing up against people who seem unaware that life is a live living breathing moving event.

    These are not actors, but actual people living life, it is not a rehearsal or a bad game show.

    This is your life.

    This is your moment in time, the here and the now, and each little tiny raw life moment is comprising your life, they all get tagged and stored into your history.

    What you do today is a day in the life of you.

    What you see today and respond to today is a recorded response in the life of you.

    How you respond to raw life builds the character called you.

    We can either work harder on keeping reality back or succumb to the rawness of life.

    Welcoming life exactly as the Universe created it, accepting the darkness as dark, the light as light, love as love, fear as fear…allowing each its own perfection.

    Love as love, not fear.
    Fear as fear, not love.
    Seeing the darkness as dark.

    Seeing the dance of Life as One….The Universe. One Verse.