I M Perfect lady

Tag: sexual abuse

  • A mind game at its worst.

    In the extoots blog I follow and comment on ( http://extoots.blogspot.com ) a response from Finland caught my attention…or a few sentences, where the church is once removed from the congregation in times of trouble.

    "The sexual abuse scandal was badly managed by the SRK leaders, it looked like they got everything wrong in communicating it to the media, right from the start. However, for those who want to go the truth behind the headlines, it is also quite obvious that there never was any institutionalised abuse (such as in e.g. the Catholic church) but the incidents occurred inside families. In those circumstances, it is difficult to hold the congregation responsible especially when the official teaching has always been that crimes do not go away by the forgiveness of sins. (Unfortunately there were exceptions to this rule, and in a few cases, the congregation lay preachers were involved in hiding such crimes and criminals from the police, and also preventing the victims from getting help. This is not acceptable and I am very sorry for this ever happening in my religion.) 

    What makes the FALC or other like minded religions different from the abuse within the Catholic Church, is that the abuse is happening within the families. It isn't the "leader" of the church so to speak. So, the church can't be held accountable.  It isn't the institution that is doing the abusing, but rather the members of their organization, not the organization.

    Like "the church" somehow gets to escape, that "the religion" isn't where the crimes are occurring, but outside of it.  Like church and religion are actual entities….one stepped removed from family.  Yet it is infiltrating each family with its teachings.

    To me, it is like preserving the integrity of "Family" while abuse is happening by my father…as if he isn't part of family.

    I can't see how they can separate one from the other.

    Where in the church is there actual accountability to the law of the land, to the safety of the children, to the integrity of its message of high morals and values when it wants to keep its distance between It and the People?

    It rules the people, but doesn't want to be affected by the actions of people.

    It controls the people, but will not take control for the people's actions.

    I am not sure if others can see this slight but wide gap between their responsibility and the lack of owning it.

    While telling folks what to do, they fail to see what they are doing…and then totally disappear when $%#@ hits the fan.

    The powerful energies that preach these rules become silent and apathetic in the face of tragedies…'not responsible'…when those they control go out of control.

    Hard to hold the church responsible as much as it is hard not to.

    How interesting that the church boards are free of all negligence, while dictating how so many live their lives.  

    While I wanted to blame the church, I also had to see    how much of my life I had given over to the church.  I just didn't know it would NOT take responsiblity for the aftermath of what it preached. It is like it is only responsible for the out flow, not the backlash.

    I had to own my lack of self care and my own rights I had reliquished to the church…AND, I had to see what they did with me. They didn't care for me, they didn't protect me, they didn't even seem to notice they were holding all of me. 

    Again, not sure I can articulate the disappearing church we gave our self to.

    Giving up our lives, our choices, our freedoms to this thing. And this thing disappearing right before our eyes and us with it.

    How the church doesn't want to be seen in the families its controlled…when the church was such a large seen force that molded many families….how can it then disappear?

    And what happens when it does?

    A mind game at its worst.

  • Trajectory of my life.

    Going to sleep last night with tears drying on my cheeks, after feeling the feelings of being a child with no one at your back, to feel the absence of protection of safety, and feeling the feeling of free falling with screams and no landing, I awoke to wondering who has my back now.

    I understood that most of my over dramatic ways is due to the fact that I have been unhealed, and that I have been healing as I walk with my daughter in what I call abuse, and how as I watch others respond, I am again plunged back 45 years and get to see and feel the dynamics of my own childhood.

    The present day actions are bringing forth my unexpressed feelings and giving me the chance to voice them now, letting my little girl say what she needed to say, feel what she needed to feel.

    Yet, my thought as I went to sleep last night, was who has my back now?

    Who is supporting me, who is standing with me and walking my walk?

    Am I living with people who are for me or against me?

    Frightened I felt alone again, almost childlike yet with adult options.

    I can flee; I can go where no one can hurt me.

    Confused about leaving or staying, I fell asleep.

    This morning I began writing and became more confused, so I went to my room with the heater running for yoga, and was hit directly that here, this is the warm caring I need, and then quickly felt that, I am the one I am waiting for.

    I am the one who cares for me, who will bring me to places that I need to be, allow me to speak when I need to speak…

    I am my own mother, I love and care for me.

    I have my back.

    While inside I felt the desperate need of wanting to be cared for, it would actually be relying on others for my needs, wanting them to take care of me, to be a child again.

    Wanting to feel like a child being taken care of is going backwards, reverting to childhood…

    It is my job to heal me, to feel and separate the emotions from childhood and those from today, to not mix my anger towards my mother with my husband, to keep the plays in their own era.

    The degree of separation is huge.

    Knowing that I can set the stage, make my life comfortable, that I am strong enough to watch my own back, and have the courage to speak my words, always, is huge. That I can withstand deep sadness, grief and sorrow, that I can still find my inner balance and core, that I can muddle through until clarity can be found, that I am healing and dealing and being who I am coming from whence I came.

    A woman whose childhood left scars she now has to deal with along with the raising her children, even when they dovetail, and I am asked to flow between child and mother, the wounded and the healer, the caretaker and the needy, I make it, I deal, I survive the ride down the rapids of emotions and character changes.

    What a dance, to be playing all parts, and feeling their psychological damage and or healing, repairing as I go…while growing new emotional strength leaves me exhausted and exhilarated.

    My inner body feels like it has been churned up and shot through with huge holes, bruised and achy in the feelings that run through me.

    I feel inside like I ran back-to-back marathons and carried my daughters and generations with me, that I was solving the puzzles and correcting movements, re-writing my life’s script.

    And in doing so, will change the trajectory of my life.

  • Save yourself.

    While thinking back upon my journey out of sexual abuse/incest, I wondered what was the one thing that made a difference, what one major item was my cure?

    Cancer has drug treatments and therapies and it seems the body has lots of help to eradicate the diseased cells and again, I wondered about how abuse is similar but completely different.

    It is like we the abused child are the cancerous cells, and we have to leave the tumor.

    There is no treatment for us; it is up to us to save ourselves.

    What other diseases are healed by the sick cell?

    It seem preposterous to know that we are the ones we are counting on and in order to be healed of incest, you must leave the family where it originated, your family of origin.

    So, in order to heal you must go against and away from your family and most often friends.

    We leave the ones who others use to help in times of sickness, they are no available to use, for it is from them that our healing lies.

    I just found this very odd that we the dysfunctional, the broken down and confused are the ones to lead the charge, the ones put in control of our wellness.

    And we have to go against family and friends to achieve this task, the ones who have used and abused us are now there to holler and insult as we make our way away.

    Heading into an unknown land hoping for a new start a new self, a place where we can undo the dysfunction and make us function.

    We need to function to handle our dysfunction.

    Incredible…this self healing healing stuff!

    Which is why the rate of success is so very small. I wish I had the numbers, but I don’t. In my family of 16, including me, two of us so far have managed to stay away from the tumor.

    Two of us are seen as outcasts…and we are, we had to cast ourselves out of the disease, no one but your self can save your self. It is as if you are on fire and you are the fireman.

    This just boggles my mind and I am in complete awe that one as upside down and twisted was able to get myself free.

    I do recall in the beginning how the pull was to go back, to make the tumor benign to make the family whole so that I could be with them….but it soon shown me I was all I could save, each cell is on its own.

    No one is coming to save you, you have to save yourself.

  • A Lady with Borders

    I listened to Dr. Laura Berman speak about “Borderline Personality Disorder”. It sounded so similar to where I came from, where the lines between what is your life and what is my life are blended, and how you can flip between like and hate in relationships, blaming the other for your actions. She was speaking to a woman whose husband had this and the husband blamed the wife for his cheating.

    Dr. Laura’s advice to the woman was that even if you are the only one that is sane and all are calling you insane, you are still sane. That for her to grab a hold of reality and not let go for it seems we can get sucked into their twisted reality and get very confused. And usually these types of individuals are married to or in a relationship with co-dependents who live to make you happy.

    I was glad to hear of this Borderline Personality Disorder, and I feel that it mirrors own life in how I used to blame my poor behavior as a mother on misbehaving children and how I also have lived on the other side of the coin, being a good daughter to make a good mother.

    This was an interesting view of my family and how they still are using each other to behave.

    I will get a good sister IF I be a good sister.
    I will get a good mother if I be a good daughter.

    This conjoined way of living is very weird to me now, and the insanity that ensues mind blowing, for they literally believe that they can control another’s behavior by their behavior.

    I am stunned to know that finding reality and separating bodies is what is needed, to stop bleeding into others lives or having their lives bleed into yours, that we need to find a way to stay completely in your own power.

    I also listened to Mark Nepo who wrote “The Book of Awakening,” and he spoke of a time when he lost his job and found out he had cancer, and at the moment when his life seemed to all fall apart at once, he found his soul, a part of him that remained untouched by the chaos.

    I get that.

    I felt that at the time my whole world fell apart that inside of me my soul awoke or I awoke to my soul. It was the only thing dysfunction hadn’t touched.

    I can’t be certain what my overall mental status was for 46 years or what conditions all in my family have, but this Borderline Personality Disorder seems to explain the sense of guilt I had when I wasn’t able to make them better, or the shame I felt for my father’s deeds, like we were all one big ameba.

    I woke up as a woman without borders!

    The past six years have been constructing fences, separating my flesh from theirs, my emotions and feelings being shanghaied by their lives, and learning how to be a lady with borders.

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  • That Kind are not Family.

    I heard the Oprah show on the radio about the twin girls that were abused for years by their brothers and father, whose mother knew but did nothing.

    At the end of the show Oprah gives them a few words of wisdom, one about forgiveness and the other about not letting their spirits be killed by what their brothers and father did to them.

    She said her definition of forgiveness is,

    “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past would have been any different.”

    She told them to let go of the hope for a different kind of father.
    Let go of the hope for different kind of brothers.
    Let go of the hope for a different kind of mother.

    Letting go of the hope a Different Kind…you have to then accept the kind you have.

    In my case, I had to accept a raping kind of father and a mother who also knew, but did nothing.

    We did not get the loving kind or the supportive protective kind, we got the abusive kind.

    Secondly, Oprah said, “I want you to not let the spirit be killed by what your brother and father did, to not let the spirit die.

    The toughest part is really feeling that the hope is gone for a different kind of father/mother/siblings, but at that point when you lost all, you are then left with a part of yourself that is beyond all that, your spirit.

    It seemed to me, in the darkest moment of seeing the kind of family I had, I was then able to see a small seed that wasn’t going to be defined by what they did to me, it was a part of me that separated from them.

    I then set to work on redefining me and reworking the parts of me that were confused and mixed up due to abuse.

    I had to learn how to love, to trust and to find faith within myself.

    I had to reestablish what I felt were my boundaries since I was raised in a home without boundaries, in an unsafe place, where a father can rape a child and the mother remains married to him, forgiving his ‘sins’, Sins that hurt me.

    If these twins can find the strength to fully accept that the kind of parents and siblings they have, they can then begin to make choices that will not include abuse.

    If you don’t see the monsters you will continue to have ‘father/brother’ like relationships with a men who rape you.

    The greatest work that needs to happen is that you have to pick only one. A father OR a Monster, you can’t have both.

    And at that time you will also pick which one you will be.
    A daughter who allows this behavior or one who will save her spirit and walk away free.

    Also at the end of the show, Oprah said that 99% of abuse is from family members or someone we know, and we have to be willing to put fathers, brothers, uncles and friends in jail. And this is huge. This is key, this is very had for most to do, which is why mothers don’t see and sisters don’t tell etc, no one wants to put family in jail, families that rape and abuse children! Families of that kind are not family!

  • Balloon of Dreams!

    “Walking against the dream…” came to me in yoga, that why it has been such a struggle, I am walking the opposite of my dreams.

     

    The dream was born with abuse, and what we cling to with our lives is the dream.

     

    A dream that is opposite of reality, a dream of denial, a dream of illusion, a dream, a figment of our imagination.

     

    My dream began as a very young girl, I lived in that dream, that dream was more than my reality.  It was warm and cozy, loving and caring, a blanket that kept out the ugly truths.

     

    What I failed to realize is that walking in reality wasn’t as hard as destroying the dream.

     

    The dream was more precious to me than reality.

     

    The dream was where I was loved, where I was good enough, where I mattered, ‘to them’.

     

    I worked hard to keep that dream alive and now in the past five years I was working hard to destroy my lovingly safe place.

     

    It is shocking to know this, and incredible to realize that denial is the dream.

     

    The word denial being a dream land didn’t penetrate into me, that the application of this is to be living in and breathing in, a space that is loving cozy and warm while interacting in real life with the opposite.

     

    Denial is a balloon, a bubble that floats above reality.  I was a bubble girl!

     

    What I realized in yoga as I thought of the quilt I made with the little girl and her balloon, is that on the quilt there are beads running up into the balloon, and now I know those beads are tears.

     

    When you shed enough tears, the balloon breaks like a water balloon bursts.

     

    It leaves you naked, no blanky to cover with, nothing to hide under, you are left with a broken balloon of dreams.

     

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  • Just me.

    When Oprah did the interviews with the Sexual Predators, her main intentions was to sit in a nonjudgmental space where they could tell their side. 

     

    In doing so, she was able to hear why and how, and then for those of us who were abused in the audience, we could see we were targeted, groomed, lured and sought after, and it set us free.

     

    She also spoke of the child who had to take care of her self, and how if she looked in the window of her childhood home, she would see herself alone. This is what the predators see, NO one is there watching the child.

     

    What is so sad about this is the child is seeking someone to take care of them, and in pops this sexual predator and gives them the attention they crave. 

     

    We want someone to take care of us, make us feel special and they do, but with the ultimate goal of abuse.

     

    It occurred to me today in yoga, is that the little girl who was so not seen, is still seeking to be seen.  Just see me.

     

    See me.

     

    See me hurt, see me lost, see me confused, see me broken, see me and help me, or see me helping me, fixing me, doing good for me, just see me, and acknowledge me.

     

    I turned into this seeking device.

     

    Forever seeking attention, seeking help, seeking love, seeking safety, seeking comfort, seeking peace, seeking, seeking, seeking, I am so tired of seeking.

     

    To feel the uselessness of waiting this long, to once again have to be strong enough to take care of myself, leaves you breathless and weak, yet strong.

     

    As tears flowed once again, it felt like I was once again left alone to heal, that no one on the outside could help, even if they wanted to.

     

    It was up to me.

     

    I had to be with me. 

    To be with me for me alone, not for someone else’s approval.

    Just do me for me.

     

    It was up to me once again to be with myself to not wait for the other to make me feel good, or to be proud, to heal my wounds, or myself and that I am the one I was waiting for.

     

    I was waiting for me to be with me, to not make excuses, be too busy, to this or to that.

     

    By doing this yoga challenge for 60 days, it is making me pay attention to me each day; I am giving me what I needed the most, me.

     

    A me that is good enough, I am good enough alone, just me.

     

     

     

  • I run, because you can’t.

    “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way and not starting.”

                 Buddha

     

    I felt the loneliness today of my Aunt who ran away.  A woman I never met, yet I feel we are one.

     

    I felt her sadness of being misunderstood and unknown, how her choice to save herself, sentenced her to a life alone outside of her family.

     

    Ostracized for escaping, for saving ourselves, for walking free of abuse, we are not cheered, no clapping, instead we are jeered with sarcasm.

     

    I never ever thought my harshest critics would be from my own family, they are forever punching the already weakened psyche.

     

    The Little girl within feels so sad, empty of words to make them see. 

     

    Today I wondered about my Aunt and her life, how she survived without contact from her family, yet like me the family she missed is the same one that brings her pain.

     

    The intellectual part of me understands that the energy they bring me isn’t healthy, but my heart yearns for acceptance, for understanding and even empathy.

     

    Like missing the stick that is poking you in the eye.

     

    I have more empathy for folks who are set aside because of who they are, parts of themselves they cannot change.

     

    Maybe because my Aunt disappeared and no one spoke her name that I want there to be words about me.

     

    Perhaps this blog is a way that I too will not just simply disappear without a trace.

     

    In the first few days of my father being accused of criminal sexual conduct, I wrote.

     

    I wrote in disbelief, I wrote the words to anchor myself somewhere, to hold me in the sea of grief.

     

    Writing is evidence of my journey.

     

    I have kept all written communications from my family as evidence. I know that is an odd word to use. 

     

    It was the evidence I needed to sort out which one of us was in reality and which one wasn’t.

     

    My mental mind fought a long hard battle up against reality and in reality there are written words from a family who is not cheering me.

     

    In as much as I want them to be cheering, what I needed more were their words of mental ness to shine the way out.

     

    Maybe in the end their shouts of sarcasm are cheering me forward.

     

    They are showing me there is nothing for me back there.

    They were showing me how not to be.

    Showing me how far I have come.

     

    I feel the energy of my runaway aunt; she joins me in spirit as I run along, lending me her courage and strength.  I feel the spirit of many little girls whose time ran out, who were too empty to begin, I run for you. 

     

    I run towards wholeness with truth at my side.

    I feel you with me as I run.

     

    The refrain “you are the wind beneath my wings” came to mind.

     

    I am so grateful I was able to run away.

    I am so not alone.

    All little girls everywhere who suffered like I, I run for you.

    I run, because you can’t.

     

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