Tag: forgiveness

• The body truly doesn’t lie

  Within my family, there are two ways in which we have dealt with the sexual abuse of our childhoods.  One side believes and is actively in the camp of forgiving and forgetting, while only two of us are in the camp of discovering our own story and giving free expression…as Alice Miller writes in The Body Never Lies.

  " In each and every case I examined, I was able to establish that when people found the kind of therapeutic care and companionship that enabled them to discover their own story and give free expression to their indignation at their parents behavior, they were able to liberate themselves from the maltreated child's destructive attachment. As adults they were able to take their lives into their own hands and DID NOT NEED TO HATE THEIR PARENTS. And the opposite was the case whose therapist enjoined them to forgive and forget, actually believing that such forgiveness could have a salutary, curative effect. They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency ACTIVELY FOSTERS THE HATRED that though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We ONLY HATE AS LONG AS WE FEEL TOTALLY HELPLESS." Alice Miller.

  This is extremely accurate in my experience.  

  I have do not hate my parents.  I understand them.  I completely get who they are and that the only love they can give me is their backwards hurtful love.  

  While I also totally feel the aggression of my siblings towards me, the innocent in the equation of my parents abuse.

  I can also sense this underneath the 'Forgiving' folks, the rage and anger seething while on the surface the speak kind words.  

  In fact, that is a perfect description of my mother in my childhood.  

  Interesting to know, that Forgiveness and Forgetting, actually fosters hate. And here is what I also know to be right on target…."You only hate as long as you feel totally helpless."  

  Empowerment allows you to feel love…and what I feel most from my siblings is this twisted dichotomy….the surface of 'forgiveness' while underneath rages hatred in their physical bodies.

  The body truly doesn't lie…

  January 13, 2012

  Alice, and, body, forgiveness, lies, Miller, never, reality, The

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• Loving For Me.

  "I wonder, Why you stopping talking at Mom for long time?You need be forgive in your past and let go angry for some reason? You never to know if Mom is gone and you might feel guilty for real. I did forgive what my dad did and time to move on. Please do not waste your time for angry or hate on her. Remember, no one is perfect and you need learn a solve problem. It not hard? Right? Today is new day and do not looking a past.  If you keep emotional, that is not good health. I want to see my family be happy and love anyone!"  Jay Huhta writes on facebook last night.  

  A few entries of my sisters line up beneath…directed at him.

  "you are wise 🙂 Remember Jay, everyone thinks differently and all we can do is respect that….You are sweet Jay, I love you….You are all heart, love you."

  Interesting exchange, it is like there are two conversations.

  And my dialogue would make it three…

  The questions and guilt are always directed at me.  Love and kindness to those who forgive and forget.

  She isn't asked a thing.  

  Nothing is expected from her at all, she is granted all things due to her title, "Mom".  

  Our broken relationship is all my problem; I broke the family pattern, I stepped out of the cycle of abuse, and I am wrong.

  Assumptions are made that I am angry and hateful…that unless I am loving towards abusive people I will feel guilty.

  I used to feel that way, I used to be locked into a frozen stance where no matter what, the only emotion I was allowed to use was love and forgiveness; forgiveness in the abusive sense, of forgetting the abusive actions of changing the past and wiping out the bad things.  Returning that person back to nice.

  My actions are seen as negative, for I will not let go of the past.  I will keep the past as it is, pristine in all its glory, changing nothing.

  I will keep a full image of my father and of his wife and of all they have done to me.  The good, the bad and the very ugly. All of it stays in my book, I will rip no pages out.

  It is written down in the truth of the universe, and you simply can't change what has been done.

  It works beautifully for them to not add the negative things, then you get to keep a kind loving mom and dad.

  My refusing to subtract the hurtful behaviors has my view of my parents totally different that of my siblings.

  The label "Mother and Father" has them capitulating…and I refuse.

  I refuse to go along with allowing abuse.  I know they hate to hear that, I know they want me to believe that they too are taking a tough stand against abuse, that they too will be vigilant. 

  What they want is to have both.

  Standing against abuse and have a happy loving family.  

  Impossible.  

  It literally is not possible when the father is a pedophile and the mother blesses his 'sin's of rapes and fondling away.  

  In a family where abuse lives, you can't stand against it, Unless you stand against the abusers.  It is not my choice that the abusers happen to be my father and mother.  It isn't my choice that those who supported them, happen to be my sisters and brothers.  I stand against abuse, no matter who is wearing it.

  What they call love is to capitulate for abuse; to surrender the facts, the truths and keep a happy loving family.  

  And if you don't forgive and forget you will feel guilty.

  I won't.  

  The only guilt I have felt is for all the years I went along with the abusive family, for supporting her and forgiving him. My guilt is for the first 46 years, and my actions to keep silent about abuse.  I have no guilt about my last 7 years.

  No regrets, none. 

  All my behaviors were perfect for me.  Perfect for someone learning to walk away from abuse. In my confused backwards state; all the actions I took were exactly as they should be.  

  My journey away from abuse began in a state that the abuse had put me in.  Mental, upside down and backwards, with defintions of love completely wrong, disassociated from feelings and emotions and a sense of self.

  I did my best in the state I found myself in.

  I am proud of my last 7 years…it is a huge accomplishment of healing from abuse.  While I see this as a positive, my family still back within the 'loving' confines of family see it negatively.

  And they should.

  We haven't seen eye to eye on this for 7 years.

  Our eyes are focusing on two different things.

  Seeing abuse from two drastically different vantage points.  

  One is to see what my parents need, and the other what the abused child needs.

  My vision cleared and I was able to see the child's needs.

  Mine.  Where in the past, I too could only see what was best for my mother, my father and to keep a family together.  And in doing so, I failed to speak up about abuse and abuse ran through our family into the second generation…for 40 years.

  For 40 years I didn't see me.

  Now I do. 

  And I feel no anger or hatetred nor do I feel guilt in seeing me.

  When I see the abuse in me, I can see the abuse in others.

  When I love myself.  I love myself enough to walk away from abuse…even if it is wearing the label dad/mom.

  Love of self and being in that family were impossible to do.

  I feel very blessed and full of grace that I was able to finally see me.

  I found me in a battered and broken state, but have walked myself into a place that is totally loving for me.  

   

   

  January 12, 2012

  choices, estrangement, families, forgiveness, guilt, life

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• We either hide your sins or own our lives.

  The main belief or what keeps the faith going is this one paragraph that Jim Torola wrote about in his Post, “Why no Movement.”

  “Or the FALC trump card, "it was forgiven in Jesus' Name and Precious Blood, thrown into the bottom of the sea of grace, forgiven and forgotten, and if anyone brings up this again, they will take on that sin."  Jim Torola    http://jimtorola.typepad.com/blog/

  Anyone who has not been raised on this concept may find this strange, but if you have been taught since you were a young girl, that this is true; you will not go diving into the sin lake to retrieve anything.

  Diving into the sin lake, sins will attach to you like suckers in a stagnant pond…and you are ‘bad’ for just wading into the waters, for ‘thinking’ about past sins…let alone going back in and dragging them to surface.

  I am not sure I can impress upon those who are walking the narrow road what it is you all are actually doing.

  You are teaching children that when you tell, nothing will be done for them, but great magical acts will be done for the bad man.  And all matter of shame will be brought upon you for ever speaking of this matter again.

  As Pete Torola so succinctly put it, “What is your motive for telling?”

  Why little girl are you going back to the sea of Grace and dragging out Ray’s sins? 

  “Oh yea of little faith, don’t you believe it has been blessed away?”  To what end do you want to drag this dirty filthy deed to surface???  Don’t you know its bad to do this?

  What is so utterly mind blowing is that the adults never doubted the girls recounting, but instead did insane things with this information.

  If you only knew what that does for a child who has been abused, to be heard, but then no action to arrest, stop or curtail these activities.

  We tell the adults and the adults do nothing.

  Oh wait, they do do something, they take our pain, suffering, fear and anguish and toss it away, paying no attention to how we feel.  It is more important to bless the bad man and put his ‘acts’ away, and then threaten us if we bring it up…again.

  For they want to get to Heaven…and the way to heaven is to bless, bless, bless, repeatedly, forever, and NEVER speak of it again. 

  The way to Heaven is to make the bad men whiter than snow…and the way is littered with the souls of little children.

  I can’t know what you all feel as you sit your bottoms down on the benches, but I am here to tell you what your techniques of dealing with sins do for an abused child.

  It gives the abuse child nowhere to go, no one to hear, and no one to see them.  They become invisible and discarded, useless, worthless…trash, the litter along your path to heaven.

  I recall writing and actually giving a narrative of what it felt like…even without memories, I had a distinct recollection of not being able to get out of the hellhole.

  What is a hellhole many may ask? 

  You know what the hellhole looks like; it is the bottom of the Sea of Grace.

  Pedophiles swim down there and drag little girls there repeatedly…while you all ‘believe’ that they disappeared.

  A hellhole is a place where you have no power, no choice, no way out. You are left alone in your mind without adult supervision while your father does the unspeakable, you can speak, but you can’t be heard.  They can see, but turn away…you are too little and they are sooo big. You are living in an alternate universe from the adults around you. They speak of loving kindness, you feel utter helplessness and fear.

  I was lost in the sea of Grace and no one cared…

  In order to survive the sea of Grace you have to kill your spirit, drug your feelings, check out and live in the pretend place the adults live.  Where a pedophile is a dad…

  I know why kids do drugs, kill themselves; they can’t take the sea of Grace no more.

  While you all are blessing him, you are making us Live in the Sea of Grace…or what it really is The Lake of Sins.

  I lived and swam and finally got used to living in the Lake of Sins.  Its twisted mess became my normal.  Silently you swim around, not speaking of what you see, how you feel…you are disconnected like debris…unattached drifting amidst the other despicable things.  You fit in there, you feel as one with all the disgusting things, you are unworthy and useless, for the caring adults didn’t care.

  It is incredible to me, that when you don’t see our wounds we become them…you don’t have to bless us, we naturally are attracted to the sins you tossed away…

  When you don’t see us as innocent, we no longer feel it.

  Funny, in a tragic way…you always seen and made sure that Ray stayed innocent…

  He stays clean and I get dirtier…I have to keep this a secret so the adults stay clean. 

  I have broken the silence, the gig is up, it is over.  I came to shore, I left the Lake of Sin, and I am talking about it, writing about it, and hoping against hope, there is one little girl out there in her own hell hole who will hear me calling her name.

  I see you.

  I hear you.

  I know you are there.

  I am here to tell you, you are not alone.

  The only way out is to stop holding the secret.

  The threat of sins is simply that a threat.

  There is no sea of Grace, but a lake of sin.

  You live there and you can walk free.

  Get out.  Speak out. Stop holding on to sins of others.  We all carry our own…the sea or lake lives within us.  We either hide your sins or own our lives.

   
  What we feel like before we were abused…

   
  and how we feel after… This is the Sea of Grace in the FALC where

  the abused children are made to live, for the 'dad' is clean and we are not.

  September 24, 2011

  abuse, childhood, FALC, forgiveness, secrets, sins

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• 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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• 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…

  

  June 2, 2011

  abuse, Alice Miller, attachment, body, childhood, commandment, courage, forgiveness, fourth, legacy, lies, love, never, Religion, sexual, The, therapy

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• Elders of the Church

  There are no coincidences in life and the fact that I am learning about more and more sexual abuse in my old church while I am reading Alice Miller is profound.

  She is literally writing about the hows and the whys that seemingly intelligent functioning adults are unable to stop this behavior…or it seems “Knows” and does nothing.

  What I am getting a view of is my family but displayed in a much bigger group, widespread from state to state.

  That there is an underlying very pervasive evil preying upon the children, while half the adults sleep and the other are the perpetrators, and all presenting a mask to society of high morals and values, where TV, Music, drinking and drugs, etc are forbidden, where truth and honesty is the way of life….

  The grand scale and its history from generation to generation of criminal sexual behavior under the auspices of a religion of high morals and value is mind blowing.

  My mother was not an anomaly she was a typical church mother.

  And what is so extremely shocking to me is that I didn’t know of it when I was in it. Yet, here is the deal on that…I didn’t leave the church until I had seen the truth of who my father was. So, I guess, their families were like my family we all matched…so we were not outstanding in the fact that the children in the family were abused.

  Knowing that my father abused the neighbors and the neighbor’s parents were in the church and did nothing shows to me, that they too didn’t find this shocking or something that should be presented to the law of the land.

  Again, I felt I lived in this little nest of incest with neighbors that I later found out had their own nests, but that we were the ‘odd’ ones in the church. But 6 years later, I am finding out that we are far from odd, but perhaps just normal parishioners.

  In Alice’s book she speaks of forgiveness in how I seen it work in the church and how it actually is the juice that keeps the evil in the pulpits and on the church boards, literally running the church while raping the children.

  “Can forgiveness for the crimes done to the child be not just ineffective but actively harmful? It certainly can because the body does not understand more precepts. It fights to make our conscious minds admit the truth and transcend our denial of genuine feelings. This is something children cannot afford to do. They have to deceive themselves and turn a blind eye to their parent’s crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to repress their feelings. But if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or make others foot the bill.”

  “A therapist who has forgiven his parents for the cruelty they showed him may feel the urge to suggest this same remedy to his clients. In so doing, he is exploiting their dependence and their trust. If he is not in touch with his own feelings at all, he may indeed be unaware that he is doing to others what was once done to him. In suggesting forgiveness as a solution, the therapist is abusing and confusing others, while rejecting any kind of responsibility for his actions. He is convinced that he is acting for their own good. Are not all religions unanimously in their conviction that forgiveness is the path to Heaven? Was not Job ultimately reward for the fact that he forgave God?”

  “Unlike children, adult patients have a choice. They can leave a therapist once they have seen through his deception and self-deception….”

  “To break through this vicious cycle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.” Alice Miller

  What is so vastly incredible is that the one thing a child needs to heal is not offered to him in that church, instead the only thing that is offered is the forgiveness of sins and the fourth commandment…”to love and Honor thy parents”.

  It is no wonder to me, as a person who has lived in the system, who was abused and left untreated there, and has witnessed the responses of my siblings, that this vein of power is still in play, whether you leave the church or not, it will take Herculean power to stop the mind set of forgiving sexual crimes and not passively accept love hurts.

  As long as forgiveness is preached, children will suffer abuse from the elders of the church.

  May 31, 2011

  abuse, Alice, body, children, church, FALC, forgiveness, lies, members, Miller, never, of, sexual, sins, The

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• What my mind can hold.

  Glancing through the book “Truth vs Falsehood” by David Hawkins, I read this headline, “Cultism”…so here it is.

  “Cults ensnare the unwary by their specialness and false promises. Members have ‘insider’ status and a special ‘lingo’. The group leader is charismatic, seductive, and courts the intimate, who is flattered by the attention. The leader is very ‘special’ and treated with adulation, which is quickly turned into control of members, including especially their money and sex lives, as well as lifestyles, diets, clothing, etc. Members must take allegiance and break off relationships with family or even spouses and often associations or groups.”

  “The group often forms a geographic, restrictive enclave and develops a group paranoia as well as a characteristic “cult glaze” (cal. 120) as though in a hypnotic state (the effect of isolation and brainwashing). Once detected, that glaze is easily recognized (the “programmed cult look,” as one observer described it. There is a flatness and automation style to rationalization where content is like a “party line” that is parroted from having been programmed. Cults especially target celebrities and exploit them as showpieces.”

  “The influence of the cult leaders is so strong that large groups of people will willingly kill not only others but also themselves (e.g. Heavens Gate, Jim Jones, Islamic terrorists, suicide bombers, Aum Shinrikyo subway gassers, Bolsheviks, Nazi party, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, White Supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, liberationists etc.”

  “Another characteristic of cultism is proselytizing and insistence of following the party line of a pseudo-religious group belief system by which individuality is scorned or even threatened. Leaders are very power-oriented, and control plus paranoid egoism are dominant themes.”

  “Sometimes a spiritual leader will calibrate as integrous early in their career but then will fall victim to the seduction of prestige, money, sex, or the adulation of followers. Then the original spiritual group degenerates into a cult, or a spiritual technique becomes actually trademarked and then commercialized and marketed by hired publicists. In that case, the technique calibrates above 200 but the organization itself falls below 200 and becomes primarily a marketing organization that trades on the original concept or exclusive technique. The technique is thus only taught for a price and ‘trainees’ are forbidden to reveal the secret teachings (which are usually merely a few simple phrases or sentences with a general application to ‘improve health’, “attract abundance”, “increase love life,” “be more popular”, fulfill your potential success”, “attract a mate”, etc) Some of the promoted techniques can be found in any fortune cookie, e.g. “One smile can change your life forever” (cal. 350), or “Success goes to one who is kind.” (cal. 360)

  “The true value of such workshops is not the magic of the central concept or technique, but the disciplined practice of actually applying it with regularity in the daily life instead of merely quickly dismissing it as “I already know that.” The value of training workshops then lies in the learning of the value of steady application and actually putting a valuable tool into practice and steady focus, e.g., the “faithfulness” of A Course in Miracles workbook.”

  “Another expression of cultism is the cultification of splinter groups from traditional religions, e.g., the far-right “fundamentalism” most prominent and visible in Islam, Christianity and ethnic variations of worldwide religions.”
  David Hawkins

  While I know when you are in the midst of a cult, you can’t see the forest for the trees, but when you step out and find your own freedom to be an individual to feel the open space where the programmed mind used to be, it is mind blowing.

  Most feel and think that a cult is this small hidden special group, but if you look around within many religions, you will see what they are doing to the individual, they are controlling it.

  Any organization that tells you what to wear and what not to wear, what is acceptable and what is not, what you can and cannot do with your own body is a cult. Albeit a milder level for perhaps your religion hasn’t asked you to kill, yet.

  In my childhood religion, there was a phrase that could erase all sins and we literally believed in its power. “Your sins are forgiven in Jesus name and blood…” By believing in this phrase, ‘there was no sin to great to forgive’. All transgressions against others was deleted.

  With this phrase, many criminal behaviors are washed away without ever needing the police, the law or the court of the land.

  It is insanity at its best and what happens to the victims of these crimes? Who is there to protect them, when it is know and approved to have pedophiles preying upon the children, and the only consequences are they have to ‘confess’ and be ‘forgiven’?

  Where are all these sins? Do they really believe that Jesus is carrying the weight of all the tortured children? Is he indeed that forgiving to allow the children to suffer while the adults get a new cloak that is whiter than snow? Come on people wake up the sins are living in your midst, they are the abused, the confused and the broken.

  There are no magic words that will take away the physical act of abuse on a child’s body nor erase the terror and the shattered trust and innocence….

  The most evil words that I can now hear are “Your sins are all forgiven…” For what it means to me, is that the monster has been blessed to abuse again.

  When will the people in the cult wake up and see the bleeding children? When will they understand that the words spoken are destroying the spirits/souls of the children among them?

  As they sit in the pews singing “Bless be the tie that binds us…” I want them to know, they are the chorus in a ring of child abuse!

  I wanted to believe that my family was an oddity that we were not the popular way within the church, yet I fear that I was the tip of the iceberg and what lies beneath is beyond what my mind can hold.

  May 19, 2011

  abuse, children, churches, cults, david, elders, FALC, falsehood, forgiveness, Hawkins, of, sexual, sins, truth, vs

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• The Mastery of Love, by Don Miguel Ruiz

  “Truth”

  When we look at our wounds with the eyes of truth, we can finally heal these wounds. YOu begin by practicing the truth with your self. When you are truthful with yourself, you start to see everything as it is, not the way you want to see it.

  Don’t believe all the lies you tell yourself – all those lies that you never chose to believe, but have been programmed to believe.

  Don’t believe yourself when you say you are not good enough, you are not strong enough, you are not intelligent enough. Don’t believe you are not beautiful. Don’t believe whatever makes you suffer.

  You can chose how you want to live your life. And if you are honest with yourself, you will know you are always free to make new choices.

  “Forgiveness”

  There is no other way but forgiveness to clean emotional wounds. Forgive those who hurt you, even if whatever they did was unforgivable in your mind. You will forgive them not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because you don’t want to suffer every time you remember what they did to you. When you can touch a wound and it doesn’t hurt, then you know you have truly forgiven. Forgive others, and you will see miracles start to happen in your life.

  Forgive yourself also – for everything you have done in your whole life. When you forgive yourself, self-acceptance begins and self-love grows. That is the supreme forgiveness – when you can finally forgive yourself.

  “Self-Love”

  Love is the medicine that accelerates the process of healing. There is no other medicine but unconditional love. There are millions of ways to express your happiness, but there is only one way to really be happy, and that is to love.

  April 5, 2011

  don miguel ruiz, forgiveness, healing, love, self-acceptance, self-love, wounds

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• Where we lead…

  In the past two and a half months, my yoga practice has been very spotty, it has boiled down to two times a week, and I am now understanding the sentiment of caring for your self or more importantly what it feels like again, to not care.

  Without care or interest, to be indifferent to the bodies needs. To feel myself almost going to sleep or in a daze and be too tired to begin.

  What we fail to notice is that when we are too tired to do something, we are actually playing to indifference; we are feeding the lack of care.

  It finally came to me what I have been doing, I have been leaving myself alone.

  Leaving the care of my body, walking away from what it needs and just sitting down.

  I could feel the waves of indifference, what I used to call being lazy, with no umph is actually the expression of indifference.

  You become indifferent to what it needs for its optimum health.

  What I find so intriguing is that when my daughter’s abuse came in and I experienced posttraumatic symptoms, I left my self-care.

  It is strange that when our body needs us the most we are the farthest away.
  It wasn’t that I was disconnected from the stress and wasn’t dealing with life, but what I failed to do was treat my body, to care for its needs.

  As I did yoga yesterday I was surprised that my body still remembered the poses, that it did it’s best with stiff and sore muscles, and that it tried to keep up to what I was asking of it, and I felt its struggle for it wasn’t used to this routine.

  The body’s forgiveness is pure nature; it simply follows where we lead.

  (What I know for sure today, is that by not doing yoga I am feeding indifference. So when I sit and feel unable to get up and do my yoga, I know to whom I am dancing with, what music I am hearing, I am hearing the beating of the drum being led away from me.)

  April 4, 2011

  Bikram, body, caring, exercise, forgiveness, healthy, indifference, lazy, letting go, routine, uncaring, whole, Yoga

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• Standing Strong.

  “If you recognize the UNreal with any sincerity in your heart, you need not look for the real.” (Mooji)

  What a simple idea to recognize the unreal…and yet I was born onto parents who were unreal, so my real was unreal and there was no place to find real.

  My parents lived their lives hiding their real and so we lived hiding our real, in fact our religion had the perfect tool we could use to hide real, it was called forgiviness of sins.

  These sins then are no longer part of us, they became unreal and our real is minus all sins.

  The real you has no sins…you have repented and handed them over to Jesus, so you can remain whiter than snow and your sins have been washed away.

  Anything that was dark or off color could be washed away.

  I lived in this washed out world of unreality.

  It was washed so many times, you lost sight of what was real and what was unreal. In fact the real you had to keep forgiving to make it unreal.

  I am not sure you can follow along, but the main theme of my childhood religion was to keep forgiving all that wasn’t right, and in doing so made it right once again.

  In this fluid ever changing landscape nothing real ever stayed real long enough, I lived thoroughly in a moveable reel.

  Incredible the way this works for the deviant.

  In fact I was raised to believe so much in the magical power of forgivenss of sins that no reality was ever too great to forgive, to make right again.

  Most will concentrate on the feelings of forgiveness but not in the actual application of it.

  To apply forgiveness is to wash away an action you have done, it leaves you standing as if it never happened.

  Where does this sin go?
  How does it magically not be part of you anymore?
  Can you literally delete that part of yourself?

  My childhood religion concentrated highly on forgiveness and did have sins as well, but it was the application of applying forgiveness upon the unsightly deeds that created havoc in my world.

  For it allowed all kinds of behaviors that were harmful for a child.

  My incredulousness of this leaves me with no words.

  For I lived 46 years in unreality that they taught me to create.

  My mother’s strengths come from this religion and my father needed this magical wand to return him to being whiter than snow after raping little girls.

  It isn’t the reality of what I endured, but the unreality.

  How insane the ideology of this religion is…how it works incredibly well for the rapist and is extremely unaffective for those of us who have been raped.

  What did it do for me?

  Did it undo my rape or did it make me have to make whiter than snow a rapist, make a pedophile a father?

  There are two sides of all things, and when you see the application of a sin being erased from the sinner, it doesn’t show you how it feels as one who was sinned upon.

  As my father was heaven bound and cleaner than the white driven snow, I was left in hell, dirty and untreated.

  I was left with a father who hurts and who is forgiven by a multitude of Knowing adults.

  Knowing adults who can change a rapist back into a father with a few words, “Your sins are all forgiven in Jesus name and precious blood.”

  And he is once again set upon Heavens path.

  And where am I?

  What magical words can you say to me, to heal me, to make me whiter than snow? Where are your words for me?

  I am speaking for all the ones who have been sinned upon.
  Who are left with the affects of the sin, who go untreated.

  Untreated is to go without the truth being lived out.

  Untreated is to not make real that which is real.

  We are forced to live in unreality when you bless away that which is real.

  Imagine taking away that which is real from a child…

  Making them live in the make belief world.

  My whole childhood was based upon make belief things, creating a wonderful fantasy land.

  It has taken me six years so far to recognize the unreal and it falls away and all that I get left with is the real.

  What I know for sure is that real cannot be blessed away, it remains standings strong.

  March 28, 2011

  forgiveness, incest, rape, reality, Religion, sins, unreality

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