I M Perfect lady

Tag: perceptions

  • We abuse our self.

    I am working on putting a Picture Book together with my Story Line quilts…and writing a brief synopsis about each quilt as it represents a portion of my journey.

    I have a visual graph of my inner transformation as I undid abuse and changed my perceptions back to the truth.

    Change is a very slippery word and it often times gets misconstrued, for we are expecting a dramatic life altering physical change, when all that is required is a 360 degree perceptional change.

    It is to change HOW you see things, not the things.

    To remove yourself from one belief and settle your self into another.

    Moving your awareness.  Rearranging your thoughts to match reality instead of using thoughts to cover up what is real.

    What most may fail to recognize, are the changes we fail to make when abuse calls upon us.  Many will focus on the physical act, but few will focus on our perceptions.

    In an abusive home, where abuse isn't addressed…what this means is that, perceptions don't change to now match the new reality.  It isn't that the act isn't dealt with, but rather the perceptions don't change to mirror what just happened.

    It is this that totally screws with the minds of a child.

    Here is the deal.

    My father CHANGED when he acted out sexually to me.  At this point, my viewpoint of him should have changed too.  When I didn't change this inside of my head.  My head no longer matched reality.

    With a head that is askew, I then built my life.

    To undo the abuse, what we are really saying is that we need to straighten out our perceptions.  We have to now make the changes we failed to make way back then.

    It sounds so simple, but I had created a whole life, based on the wrong perceptions.

    I now had to change a father into a pedophile, a mother into his accomplice, and it left me with a new family portrait.

    Change one picture, and the rest start to shift.

    My father changed when he abused me and I didn't act like anything had changed. 

    However, my reality had changed, I just wasn't allowed to let my perceptions of him change.

    Instead of recording the actual event, it recorded things that surrounded it.

    I don't have many memories of my childhood, but I do have wierd ones.

    However, most importantly, my body recorded it accurately.  IT feared my father.

    It didn't want to get close to him.

    No matter what my mind concocted, my body held the correct perceptions.

    I had to change my mind to match what my body felt.

    Undoing abuse means you have to change your mind.

    It doesn't mean forcing your body to feel comfortable or at ease with someone who has hurt you.  It means to follow your body's lead.

    When you change the perceptions in your head to match reality, you will begin to act differently. 

    You will act in kind to reality.

    I no longer felt I had to force myself to be in relationships with family who I no longer trusted or felt safe with…or whose perceptions didn't match reality.

    The greatest tragedy of abuse is that we don't change our perceptions of the person who hurt us.  We want a mother and father so badly, we will think anything to maintain this in our heads.  And as little helpless children, we needed to believe that we were safe.  We wouldn't have survived knowing there was no one there to save us, that we were living in the home of a pedophile and his wife.

    How awful this is to an abused child.  Your wounds go unattended, in order to keep up the perceptions in your home.  If they see your abuse, they will see the monster who lives there too.

    In order to keep the illusion going, you adjust your perceptions.

    Most have no clue what this does to a human being.  It makes you insane.

    Insanity is seeing a reality that doesn't exist.

    Seeing a father where a pedophile stands.

    I became sane, when I saw reality…my perceptions finally matched my body.

    Abused children who are abused by a family member, are usually neglected in order to keep the abusive family member. Rarely is the child treated and the family member removed.

    They would rather keep an abusive father than live without one.

    The child then learns, to overlook abuse and keep the relationship.

    What we fail to appreciate is that we are holding onto abuse and there is no relationship outside of that.  Our new relationships are abuse.

    It is abusive to ourselves to change our truth and perceptions to go against reality.

    We keep a 'loving' father and we abuse our self.

  • Wish For Your Self.

    What a great year of learning, again.  

    Lessons seemed to continually line up to serve to me… more of me; more freedom, more letting go, surrendering and allowing, more ways to be expressive, a deeper understanding, followed by affirmations of what doing the opposite would look like.

    I think I thought, that when I said I was going forth with love, peace and joy, like magic, that was what would follow.  Wrong.  

    Instead I was served up all of my relationships were no love, peace or joy existed, and asked to redo myself there.

    I was given opportunity after opportunity, sometimes many at a time, all clamoring for my attention…insatiable energies of need and control, that had kept me from peace or feelings of love or experiencing joy.

    What I believe lots of folks believe, is that they stay in the same place, but instead of feeling anxious, controlled, resentful, rage, anger, tight restraint…they will just work harder to feel different.

    To stay with same relationships, BUT feel differently about them.

    Feel more loving…will bring up love.  And to become peaceful where rebellious feelings explode…to dial down or to a different frequency.

    That isn't what real love, peace and joy is.

    That is denying what is there and forcing feelings.  Which is to have false feelings of love, peace and joy.

    Many believe you can simply just 'think' differently about an individual etc and like magic, feelings will change.   That your feelings are the problem within the relationship…not that the relationship itself is where the troubles lie.

    Seeing life differently is where the key lies.

    I am reading, "The Body Never Lies" by Alice Miller.  This is one of the first authors who addresses the child, instead of the parent…she sees abuse from the child's perspective and how the body feels and then how the child is made to 'feel different' in order to honor and love thy parents.

    She writes, "The parenting approach know as "Poisonous Pedogogy" breeds overly well adjusted individuals who can only trust the mask they have been Forced to wear because as children they lived in constant fear of punishment. "I am bringing you up in the way that is best for you" is the supreme principle behind this approach. "If I beat you or use words to torment and humiliate you, it is for all for your own good."

    "In this famous novel Fateless, the Hungarian writer and Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz describes his arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp.  He was fifteen years old at the time, and he tells us in great detail how he attempted to interpet the many grotesque and appalling things he encountered on his arrival there as something positive and favorable for him.  Otherwise he would not have survived his own mortal fear."

    "Probably every child who has suffered abuse must assume an attitude like this in order to survive. These children reinterpret their perceptions in a desperate attempt to see as good and beneficial things that outside observers would immediately classify as crimes. Children have no choice.  They must repress their true feelings if they have no "helping witness" to turn to and are helplessly exposed to their persecutors. Later as adults lucky enough to encounter "enlightened witnesses," they do have a choice. Then they can admit the truth, their truth; they can stop pitying and "understanding" their persecutors, stop trying to feel their unsustainable, disassociated emotions, and roundly denounce the things that have been done to them.  This step bring immense relief for the body.  It no longer has to forcibly remind the adult self of the tragic history it went through as a child. Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected."

    "I call the violent kind of "upbringing" abuse, not only because children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting establishes a kind of totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humilations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subjected to, let alone defend themselves against them. These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built around them."

    "The sphere of politics is an excellent example of the way in which the hunger for power and recognition is never stilled.  It is insatiable, it can never be entirely satisfied. The more power these people have, the more they are spurred on to actions of compulsory repetition, restore the initial feelings of impotence they were trying to escape; Hitler is his bunker, Stalin in his paranoid fears, Mao in the final rejection by his people, Napoleon in exile, Milosevic in prison, Saddam Hussein in his mortifying fall from power. What impelled these men to abuse the power they had achieved to such a pitch that it ultimately plunged them into impotence and powerlessness?  I believe it was their bodies.  Their bodies sustained the knowledge of the impotence they felt in childhood; they stored such knowledge in their cells, and they set out to force their "owners" to face up to that knowledge. But the reality of their childhood instilled such fear in the hearts of these dictators that they preferred to wipe out whole peoples, to exterminate millions of human beings, rather than confront the truth – their truth."  Alice Miller

    I am reading this book for the second time, and it once again has a much broader meaning to me, than the first time around.  I am now able to see more potently the actual ways a child has to disregard its own body in order to survive, to look for 'positive' so not to drown in its own mortal fears…and how quickly an outsider can spot the crimes, while those within are unable to see.

    I have experienced the view of being an outsider and the quick slamming of the door behind me as I stood on the sidewalk, for the 'family unit' couldn't withstand the truth…mine and theirs.

    Their impotency against truth is what causes such insane behavior. Their lack of self power and worth has them snubbing outside…like that is where their truth lives…within us.

    You can berate me and kick me out of your life, but your truth, just as in the Dictators of the past did…but you are kicking us so as to NOT feel and own your own truth.

    I know that I have been kicked aside.  And it has nothing to do with me, but it has much more to do with the individual's fear of their own truths.  By keeping me out of their worlds, they like the 15 year old Hungarian Boy, keep their concentration camp a place of positive living…of love, peace and joy.

    I am so grateful that I was able to have the courage to see my own truth…

    What I didn't know, is that the most violent among us are those who are in mortal fear of seeing their childhoods in Reality's Light.

    That their violent behavior is to keep themselves from feeling the truth about their parents.

    So, as you go forth on this New Year's day, be careful what you seek for your self in 2012.

    If you seek, like I did, a life filled with love, peace and joy; you will first have to find all the places you have it wrong.  It has been 7 years of learning what isn't…in order for me to then set forth again.

    My wish for you is your own wish for your self.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Nothing Can Sway Them…

    Today as I rode along in the mail jeep, I listened to "Sway" The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior…by Ori Brafman.

    A very interesting look at what is behind the irrational behavior. 

    In the beginning of the book, he speaks of two very compelling reasons why people don't change their minds or the direction of their lives.  

    One is the "Aversion to Loss"…where they will hold on to a sinking ship, rather than lose it.  It isn't even about what they are holding on to, it is that they just are simply repulsed by the thought of Loss. They live life from the NOT losing perspective and fail to see life from a view point of gaining something new. They literally are not even able to see a new way, for their sole focus is on NOT LOSING what they have.  This one factor will lead to all kinds of irrational behavior.

    Now couple it with an added vice, "commitment"…and you have the makings of insane behavior. 

    They made a commitment and that commitment overshadows any facts that fly in the face of that.  Their commitment binds the NOT Losing sentiment into a circle that they can't escape from.  No rational directives can penetrate the tightly woven Beliefs they hold.

    I highly recommend reading this book, if you have irrational folks in your world and you simply can't figure them out.  The experiments alone are very interesting to see how the human rationality works.

    What this has helped me see is that if your mind set is on NOT LOSING, you will not be able to see a new way.  For you are holding tight to the thought that you can't lose what you have…it isn't what you have, but losing.

    This of course brings me to my siblings and how they don't want to lose the family and even how they are committed to the roles of brother/sister/son/daughter, they acted irrationally from my point of view, because they couldn't lose.

    Loss becomes the larger meaning…than what you holding on to.

    This is why I couldn't understand why they were so dead set against letting go…they didn't want to lose…and their commitment to that family stood higher than the family they were committed to.

    I don't know if I can adequately explain this, but if you read the book, you will see how we give up being rational in irrational ways due to holding on to a secondary meaning.

    Oh, and there is one about "Value"…where if your first impression is that person or thing is valuable, you will not change your mind easily…and in fact, you will disregard information that tries to lessen the value.

    The first impression of valuable stands against all facts to the contrary.

    These three different examples dove tail in nicely to abuse and it explains how folks refuse to budge in a new direction.

    Lots of the abuse is happening in families whose 'reputations' proceed them, and it is extremely difficult to change the minds from the first impression of valuable…our minds can't be swayed.

    It works in the opposite direction too.  If you are labeled as less or worthless, you can't get people to believe otherwise. And it even works if people label you worthless, you begin to believe them EVEN if you have facts that dispute it.

    We simply can't be swayed by facts, for in front of the facts, stands our first impressions…or fears of loss…or our ironclad promise of commitment.

    Losing family….failing to honor your commitment to the family and changing your Values of them stand in the way of navigating rationally in the face of abuse.

    In my experience, this explains the behaviors of my family…they are a strong bunch; nothing can sway them.

     

  • The Majority Vote.

    Martha Beck writes in "Leaving the Saints"….. After a family therapy session where Martha  remained the one lone family member willing to see abuse.." I could see that my siblings' truth, as well as that of all other Latter-Day Saints, would always be based on group consensus.  I read psychology tests about the effects of socialization on perception, pondered the famous experiments by Solomon Asch that demonstrated how subjects who didn't know they were being tested changed their perceptions in order to agree with other people. Shown two lines, one long, one short, in the company of people who all claimed that the lines were of equal length, the naive subjects almost always agreed with the majority, rather than the evidence of their own senses.  They not only said that the lines were equal; they often came to actually SEE them as being equal."
    What is alarming and comforting at the same time, is that my family isn't any different from the test folks, who automatically side with the majority. That very few will use the evidence of their senses and stand alone.
    She also wrote about losing her family, " It would have been less painful to lose my family to war or natural disaster; less shame, less confusion, less personalized energy.   I did lose them you see.  I've never really been back. Though there isn't an official "no contact" rule between us, my siblings and I stopped most communication after that bloody battle.  I hear from other relatives that I am the black sheep now, the traitor to our family's code, the enemy of every thing we once stood for together…."
    And the last few lines that caught my attention…"Sometimes I think there is not enough room in the Universe for the sorrow of that exile."
    Being exiled from your family for going against the majority vote.

  • Don’t Put Time First.

    We cannot waste time. We can only waste ourselves. ~George M. Adams

    I love this phrase. How we think we are only wasting time, when what we are doing is wasting ourselves.

    As you look upon the day, we are asked to make choices by what life offers up to us, we can vote yes or no and that will decide how we used up time.

    I now know it is not a waste to sit by the river, to just be with singing birds, to experience the vast array of nature, but for me, it is a waste to be barraged by negative energies.

    I don’t mind messes and a good crisis, but I do mind people unwilling to change or look at things in a new light, and who are just giving commentary from a mud puddle.

    It isn’t a waste of myself to lend a hand while someone is changing direction, but it is to just watch him or her sit.

    I focus less and less on time and more and more on what I am doing, where I am and how I feel.

    I used to race time on my mail route, for we get paid salary, and it seemed like I was beating the system to go fast, yet I missed the ride, while focusing on time.

    Now I experience the route, the people, the animals, the changing landscape, the weather, I am on the route. I am there in each moment and time passes unnoticed and at the same pace.

    It is amazing how your life will change when you don’t put time first.

  • Valley of Evil

    Reporting – is to tell about what happened: to give information about something that has happened, an account or statement describing in detail an event, situation, or the like, usually as the result of observation, inquiry, etc

    How well do you report your life? What is your observation deck, is it the mind or can you step back and witness the whole scene and see your part in the mix of the whole?
    Can you report from your inner view and share all the details, or do you gloss over the rough spots and expand on the lighter moments.

    Are you an in depth reporter and can you speak your own truths, do you even know your own details? Do you dare become an investigating reporter in your own life?

    It seems we are more comfortable in the valley between both truths, yours and mine.
    A place where life is lived on the thin surface, where feelings are not shown and reported, where no hard questions are asked or expected, where details are of weather, dress and food…the space where life isn’t happening.

    What I find so interesting is that the truths from both sides fly over this valley are heard but not believed, are seen but overlooked, are felt but quickly numbed, it is the place where truths are not held and they quickly are ignored.

    No one expects you to hold on to reality in the valley, it will ruin many a pretend relationship if you do so.

    The perceptions from here are very distorted and absent of truthful facts, a report that leaves out the most pertinent information for the goal of the valley is to be kind and loving…at all costs, even if means leaving reality behind.

    At times it seems that I am living in a dual world, where people speak a totally different language than I and that I can see and hear what others blatantly overlook, it is like I am a reporter of reality and they are reporters from the valley’s floor where they don’t hold on to facts as being real.

    My mother had said we have two perceptions and she was totally right, in her world truths were known but not held, they were looked at quickly but not dwelled upon, so life could return as quickly as possible back to ‘normal’.

    My perception is much different, I report differently, I see things and hear things that I do not disregard.

    The meaning of the word Perception.

    Perceptions -perceiving: the process of using the senses to acquire information about the surrounding environment or situation result of perceiving: the result of the process of perception impression: an attitude or understanding based on what is observed or thought.

    Interesting to know that perception comes from the process of using the senses.

    Using your senses…but what happens if you are detached and disconnected from your feelings, then what? What will you then use to guide your peceptions or how right on can they be?

    It is interesting to know that we all percieve the world based upon our connection to our own inner sense of self.

    The further from your self you are, the further off base is your perception. And to me, the more you disregard your truths, the further from self you go and the more off base are your perceptions and more you out of line with reality you go and deeper into the valley of pretend.

    I was a residence of this valley for 46 years while living in reality, I had no clue that my perceptions at that time were distorted, that they did not match reality, but instead fit perfectly with the image in my head.

    When the image in my head exploded it left me standing in the valley of pretend but aware…aware of how off my perceptions had been.

    I was aware of all the distortions, all the false images, it was like waking up in a nightmare, where all the good became evil and the evil good…where truths became my friends instead of my enemies.

    All the things that were kept hidden were revealed, to see the old sins resurface unharmed, truth flooded into the valley in my mind, there was no place to hide.
    I was flooded with awareness of how unaware I was.

    The view of the valley of looks very different standing on mountains of truth, it looked like the valley of evil.

  • Will not change the Art.

    Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt

    How interesting to look at Art museums from the point of view of the works of Art and how it is to stand around listening to various remarks…

    Immediately I felt that we are all moving works of Art and the planet is the museum, and we all have our own commentary and perceptions of each other’s Art.

    How interesting that the Art can be defined by the viewer and how it changes as new viewers arrive.

    I also believe that we change as quickly each time we bump into new people and a new perspective.

    I love that I now have this metaphor and I will see myself as a work of Art moving around the planet. But what I love even more is the understanding of how different we see Art and what some find brilliantly incredible, others will pass right by.

    How cool that Art changes by the viewer… yet not at all.

    The Art stands unchanged yet changed depending upon the perception.

    I love that I am like Art, that some will understand and appreciate my contrasts and design, while others will make a cursory glance and walk on by.

    But what I love the most, my integrity lies within and remains unchanged by those who view me.

    Remarks, even stupid ones will not change the Art.

    (Is Art imitating life or life imitating Art?)

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  • Resolve who I am.

    It is New Year’s Eve, the day we all sit down and look at the balance sheets of life, pour over our faults and choose one or two that we feel must go, and then declare to everyone we will no longer do those things.

    How many of us take the time to really sit with the affect, the trouble spot and see where it came from, why it was formed?

    What we call bad habits are usually coverings over some pain.

    They are the lids that keep us from feeling the feelings too severe to feel.

    Usually what happens is we just exchange habits, we seldom delve deeply into what lays beneath, to dive below and feel the pain.

    As I approach this New Year, instead of making resolutions to get rid of bad habits, I want to explore beneath the habits.

    The definition of resolution is the process of resolving something.

    The act of answering, solving…

    Perhaps if we looked at the coming year as the year of the answers, we will look at each day differently; we look to be enlightened about our behaviors, instead of running from them.

    Vowing that we will sit down in the middle of our habit and sort through it looking for answers.

    It is my belief that beneath the habit lays our true self.

    My resolution is to resolve who I am.

  • Confines of a Well

    There seems to be two perceptions.

    The Perceptions with choices and the perception of no choices or the perceptions of freedom or the perceptions of limited and no choice.

    And depending upon which land you occupy you will have a life that reflects that.

    I lived in both places. The first being the dark narrow hole of perception that I was frozen in, where I had to do what others wanted of me, where my life was led by the wishes of others, I had no free will of my own.

    We can call it a victim hole, and its perception is very one way, or co-dependent, where the quality of my life depended upon another.

    The perception in that land was very limited and the quality of life was at the mercy of another’s good will.

    It was from that darkness I fell out of onto the land of wide open expanse and freedom, where my strings to others were untied, where I was able to walk freely and express myself freely, where the victim chains that held me in place fell free.

    It was equal to walking out of Plato’s cave or the story in Sogyal Rinpoche’s book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, about the frog who climbed out of the well to see the ocean.

    It is like your constraints and perceptions shatter into a million fragments, where you now have access to an unlimited choice.

    There is no common ground between the two worlds.

    I feel that I lived in a place where my boxes of choices were not available to me.
    It seems incredible to me now that I didn’t have access to my own box of choices that I waited for someone to tell me what to do.

    Imagine the difference of perceptions to having access to your own choices or not.
    Living, as a prisoner in your own life is pure hell, its living in a dark well and not knowing what freedom exists outside.

    So while I agree perceptions are a choice, it is way hard to phantom that inside the well.

    If you disagree that perceptions are a choice perhaps you best look around where you are living and see who holds your box of choices.

    You will either find the freedom of the ocean or the confines of a well.

  • Morale within a Cult.

    What I am finding so intriguing or mind bending as I contemplate Evil, is that Evil is literally defined in the eye of the beholder, there seems to be a personal preference accommodation, not an official Evil standard we all go by.

    I was going to say that we all believe killing is wrong, but in war we say it is okay. Well, okay for us to kill, but not be killed. We swing and spin in our definitions…

    Evil seems hard to pin down so that all looking at it will agree, there seems to be a viewpoint that changes evil into good and good into evil.

    This has to be what divides us that we can’t even agree on what defines evil in humanity.

    What also makes it hard is that you can be raised in evil and not know it, and be told anything outside of your home and church is wrong, and you believe it. Fearing what you don’t know.

    You believe it until you don’t believe it and then you find it hard that you ever could have believed what you believed.

    Life after cult is an incredible ride, it has such fluid openness and freedom, a sense of being an individual unattached and unfettered, a free spirit.

    Free spirits are bad for morale within a cult.