I M Perfect lady

Tag: voices

  • The Questioning Part of You.

    There are, at least to my knowledge, not many blogs about the FALC or more succinctly, abuse and the FALC.  When I began blogging about my experience, my focal point wasn't to look against the church, but rather to share my experience about being abused.  I just happen to be a past member of the First Apostolic Lutheran Church.

    In the past year, two more blogs popped up, Jim Torola's and his wife Judy's.  And there is one called extoots, that is similar, but more looking into the churches similar to the FALC and the members that have left.

    Each of us are writing from our points of view, with intentions hidden or in plain view.  

    My intentions were for the sole purpose of allowing others to see my personal journey, healing from being sexually abused as a little girl.  I wanted there to be a place where others could go to relate…and to break the silence.

    We have this wonderful tool that we can communicate with folks we would never have the experience to physically come in contact with. A way to pass on information and a place to voice and comment.

    It truly wasn't my intention to shine a bad light upon the church, but sadly the truth and reality make it so.  

    What some have mistakenly seen as attack or anger towards the church, is actually a passionate voice wanting you to see that within your hallowed walls lurks a sick disease.

    And yes, I agree that all churches have this disease, for all churches are made up of human beings.  I get that.  But there just seems to be a disproportionate amount within the FALC.  And perhaps that isn't even the bigger issue, but the silence about it.

    No one is talking openly and with a passion to stop the spreading of this awful behavior upon little children.

    And there is a cautionary point I want to make, about the blogs that are out there.  Don't read at face value, don't leave your discernment behind, look and see and pay close attention to what isn't there.

    And please do the same here.  I don't want you to believe that which I write, without you first checking to see if it makes sense to you.  I want you to actively question and please dialogue with me.

    I want you to look around your church and families, to listen closely to stories you hear, to awaken your own inner voice and wonder.

    I feel that my blog is open and free for an exchange of ideas.  I am by my own admission a very passionate advocate for victims of abuse…and secondly against parties that seek to control them.

    What I find a bit discerning about Jim's blog is the lack of a comment section. And now Judy's blog has a log on section that seems odd to me.  I don't know that means.  Why does it matter who reads?  I can see that you as a blog owner have the write to take offending comments off, but to closely monitor who is reading seems a tad off.

    The strict control bothers me about both the blogs.

    What puzzles me is that Her second blog is wide open, but there is no discussion that pertains to the FALC, abuse or for that matter subjects that are deeper than the surface.  I find it odd to monitor the deeper subjects… And just interesting that it isn't a blog habit, for she has two totally different blogs.  One closed and one wide open.

    I feel a natural sense of curiosity in this and a huge lack of trust…and feelings that I am being monitored as I enter her site.  I will not register and enter into her 'controlled' site.  

    I don't have a secret part of me, I stand here in the open all sides revealed, there is no part of me that remains in the shadow, nor do I care to closely monitor who looks upon this site…and me.

    It is my intention and hopes that this site will offer comfort and answers and maybe even a place to see a differing view.  A voice in the silence…speaking up and about abuse and the FALC.

    I want you to see me with your truth and your own discernment, please bring all of you to me.  I want this site to be open and free to browse.  I care not who you are as you read, and I hope that what I have to say will awaken the questioning part of you.

     

     

  • Eyes of a Child

    While mowing the grass last night it came to me that the attacking and jousting for position isn’t about whether there is abuse or not abuse, what was right or wrong, or even the way it is treated or not treated, but rather a more subtle yet ferocious component, it is the fear of no love.

    I have mistaken this for the strength of love, but it is actually velocity of fear.

    Many of the old Masters and wise teachers have all alluded to this; you get to live your life based on fear or on love.

    What we are experiencing is as old as time, the two energies showing their true natures, two sides meeting and clashing, the polar opposites opposing each other.

    Fear is False Events Appearing Real, so what we really have is the battle between the truth and what is not the truth.

    Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “You know, most people around the world believe that there is a great conflict in the Universe, a conflict of good and evil.  Well, that is not true.  It’s true that there is a conflict, but the conflict only exists in the human mind, not in the Universe.  It’s not true for the plants or the animals.  It’s not true for the stars and the trees, or for the rest of nature. It’s only true for humans. And the conflict in the human mind is not between good and evil.  The real conflict in our mind is between the truth and what is not the truth, between the truth and lies.  Good and evil are just the result of that conflict. The result of believing in the truth is goodness, love, happiness. When you live your life in truth, you feel good, and your life is wonderful.  The result in believing lies creates what you call evil; it creates fanaticism. Believing in lies creates all of the injustices, all of the violence and abuse, all of the suffering, not only in society but also in the individual.  The Universe is as simple as it is or it is not, but humans complicate everything.”  Don Miguel Ruiz 

    Life is really this simple, it is or it is not.

    What we are arguing about is what is or what is not.

    Who is or who is not.

    It isn’t complicated or deep and children do this well.

    Don Miguel writes, “"As little children, we are completely authentic.  We never pretend to be what we are not.  Our tendency is to play and explore, to live in the moment, to enjoy life.  Nobody teaches us to be that way; we are born that way.  This is our true nature before we learn to speak."

    This is what I believe Jesus meant by believing like little children; to be in the truth, to walk with the truth, to see the truth, to be authentic.

    Read more from Don Miguel on this subject in Carl’s blog,

    www.messyguru.typepad.com  Titled, "Being Effortless."

    What Don Miguel stated, “The result in believing lies creates what you call evil; it creates fanaticism.”  Fanaticism is the key component that makes up cults or extreme religions; they are not based on extreme love.

    Fanatics are extremists, and from my experience of the FALC they all believe in lies… Lies, which create evil.

    The lies I am speaking most generally about is, that they believe they can wash away reality and that it will no longer exist, and that is one major lie.

    The mother of all lies that follow.

    They have complete faith in something that isn’t real, their faith and trust is placed fear.

    And this act alone creates the fanatical responses, the evil energies we feel attacking us.  We do not feel the energies of love, but the biting words of fear.

    And sometimes after they bite us, they come back with ‘love’ words; they try hiding their fear with kind words, for even their own evil scares them.

    What I hadn’t considered or understood was the level or degree of evil and lies they had faith in, and how frightened or terrified they are to have it disclosed and revealed…

    However, I recall vividly the moment all my true lies collapsed, when all I had faith in evaporated and the terror it left me standing in…and yet in the exact same moment when my world collapsed a grand new one was born, the world of truth.

    And I truly became like a child again.  I didn’t hear what people were saying, but I watched their actions.  Words became meaningless, actions was the true path I followed.

    This world of truth became a spectacular landscape which was very easy to walk in, it was steady and never changing, and there was nothing I had to learn, do or believe in, it was all there in front of me.

    I gave up all past beliefs and thoughts, and simply walked in life with eyes of a child.

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  • We go to the outside.

    On facebook a blog was shared, and I went and had a look.  http://extoots.blogspot.com/  I browsed a few posts and came upon an article that was referred to on a posted dated, April 30th. 

    http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Shedding+light+on+child+abuse+among+the+Laestadians/1135265532861

    While reading that article, it seems it matters not whether you are in Finland or in the USA, if you are asking for abuse to be recognized within the church, you will be bypassed.

    This article has tons of great information and insight, however this is one section that caught my eye.

    Have the leaders put pressure on you?
          “I wouldn’t say that my treatment involved pressure, because putting pressure is something that is active. But I have felt that I have been bypassed.”

    Boy do I get that.  They don’t pressure you or threaten; they simply bypass what you are saying. There is literally NO reaction or action taken when you bring up sexual abuse in the church.

    Anyone that is pondering, how in the hell, sexual abuse and pedophiles has been able to play within the confines of this religion, need to read this article. 

    However, by her speaking out and others like her we can air out this issue, bring light and awareness, open the closet and see what is hanging there.

    This inspires me and makes me feel that my treatment wasn’t personal, it is simply the way it has been dealt for over a 100 years. But due to the fact that she has written an article in their newspaper, perhaps we too can do the same.

    When bypassed inside the religion, we go to the outside.

     

     

     

  • Until she can find her own.

    The hardest part of being a mom is when your child takes an exit that you didn’t see coming and they seem to disappear from the usual landscape and it leaves you separated.

    And I am not even sure what exit she took, where she is or what her intentions are, just that she has left the lane of what was and is now heading down a road that neither of us are familiar with.

    As I continue to travel down my regular road, off to the side is this other lane of unfamiliar nagging at me, this road from my view is full of potholes and hairpin curves with disappearing drop-offs and my daughter seems blind to all its hazards.

    I am not certain if she is at a wayside unsure or if she is going forward with a full head of steam.

    I am not even sure what is making me uneasier, her being on that road or not knowing if she is sitting down in wonder or going further into its complicated bends.

    Our voices have been silenced. But all that seems to be happening now is a silent movie, where the drama continues, but I can’t hear the words.

    The not knowing is far worse, I believe than knowing.

    In the knowing, I know and can deal.

    It is like her life has slipped from my view.

    This almost seems like the far end of a spectrum, one being you are doing too much in a child’s life, overtaking it and this is the complete opposite, where you are completely taken out.

    In the middle of the spectrum are two people who allow the other their lives, we share and explore and understand their individual journeys.

    I am wondering how to hook our roads back up, how to join them together in a way that honors and gives space, in a way that respects our differences, but allows us to trust each other.

    Is there a way two people can be together on two different roads?

    As women we have lots in common and I am sure it is harder when I have more experience and I have been her superior as her mother for all these years, but is there a bridge that we can stand upon and share our views?

    I will have to let go of my fears and my ‘know it all’ attitude and let her show me the landscape of her new world, I will have to be a visitor to a foreign land.

    It truly feels like two distinct worlds.

    Yet I believe and feel that I have traveled the world she is going into, so it isn’t that foreign to me, perhaps it is only new and exciting to her, she is the foreigner not I.

    What is so perplexing is that you never leave reality, this is an inward journey, you are traveling away from your essential self.

    Away from your morals, your values, your worth, your self esteem, your dreams, your passions, your soul. Into a world of secrets, lies and deceit…heading towards a self that is unfamiliar, foreign.

    It is the road to no you.

    You are being lured down this road by a friendly face that is the façade of negative energies, manipulating you with false promises and pretty lies.

    If she were to travel this road alone, He would be her only guide.

    What I want is to walk with the two of them and give the real story, like Paul Harvey’s ‘the rest of the story’.

    Yet he knows and perhaps she knows too, that I will be the story wrecker, I will unveil the pretty lies and unravel the promises and make them as they are empty.

    So what scares me the most is that my familiar voice will be drowned out by his, that she will tune me out and turn a deaf ear to my words and cling to his.

    Her life in its innocence doesn’t have a voice of her own.

    I am sure she feels the pull between him and I, both of us wanting her. And what I want the most is for her to have a separate voice from both of us, but I don’t feel she has one for her self as yet. I see her as a girl who confused and twisted and wants to have love and attention but it comes with such a price tag, her self worth.

    I can almost understand the twist between what he says and how she feels.

    His promise land is a secret place and it can’t reach the light of day.

    In order for her to travel down his road, she lies to me.

    What I want most is for the lies to stop.

    Lies to herself and lies to me, both are taking a toll on her.

    It is so telling to see what lies can do to your spirit, you can literally see her growing darker.

    The truth will set your Spirit free!

    The two roads I see in my minds eye is the road of lies and the road of truth. One road darkens and leads you away from self and the other will support and Lighten who you are.

    You wonder what makes some travel into the darkness and what makes others travel towards the Light. What decides this and can they make a U-Turn?

    I will do as any good mother or women who see another descending into the darkness will do. I will give her my voice until she can find her own.

  • I Can

    As I look backwards on this year I am happy with the way that I stayed the course in yoga, by not succumbing to the voice that wanted me to give it up.

    Between the voice and the lazy feelings that would sometimes overwhelm me, I stayed the course for the greater balance of the year, and I am proud of that.

    What I intended when I began was to take better care of myself, to do something that would begin a change and to do it for 60 days.

    The sixty days turned into 120, than 180 and then 240, it was then I faltered a bit and began missing a few days.

    Yet even in the last month, I have done more yoga than not.

    Tomorrow is the last day of the year, and the tally stands at 331 days of yoga done, (after I do today’s, which I best get going on soon) and 33 days no yoga.

    I am feeling it was a successful yoga year.

    A year of not listening to the voice and feelings that would have me believe, I can’t.

    Learning to overcome the voice by doing, and changing the tone to I can.

  • Boldly slips away unscathed.

    What struck me last night is that the definitions of good and evil in my childhood home were competing for the upper hand, that my father’s heaven was my mother’s hell, and visa versa.

    It truly is that one man’s heaven is another man’s hell.

    My father’s heaven depended upon my silence, and my mother’s actually too…she needed the image of his being just a loving dad, and he did too, both sides terrified of hell, if truth be told.

    I can see how easily it was to manipulate a child in our home, for the values contradicted each other, the front divided, two roads leading to hell if truth be spoken out loud and unforgiving.

    Life was much easier on my father and his pedophile ways, to have silence…it was much easier on my mother, for she didn’t have to know.

    She may have heard us tell our stories, but she didn’t have to believe. If you don’t believe the words spoken, you don’t have to act. If you don’t have to act, your life doesn’t change.

    It is by far harder to change, than it is to remain committed to the cause.

    The cause of us remaining all together.

    My father’s hell was the truth.
    And actually my mother’s hell is the truth as well.
    They lived in heaven in silence.

    But for me, the truth has set me free.
    Hell is being quiet…Heaven is speaking out loud and often.

    I can see how many a child faces the same thing, that the adults in the room lose big time, if the child speaks, that the ones holding our survival need us to play along, pretend and hold up the façade.

    As my friend said, “what will people think” if they knew what was really going on.

    We are to act like it is heaven, while dancing in hell, going with the flow, following the lead of those taking “care” of us.

    Preachers preach of the evil on the outside, while we are imbedded in the camp of evil on the inside.

    What is up and what is down, who is right and who is wrong, or is our camp of evil far reaching?

    The compound has its own boundaries that reach far and wide.

    I know that when I first discovered the evil in my childhood, I quickly seen the churche’s evil, and then even the law of the land.

    Claiming to be the fighters of evil, while many are incapable to actually combat it when they see it face to face.

    When evil knocks at their door, some bless it.
    Some reduce the charges and set it free.
    Some open up their homes allowing access to more little girls.
    Some love evil as a way to heaven.

    The list is long and powerful.

    We are dancing with the devil each time evil knocks and we treat it with goodness, kindness, fairness, compassion, etc.

    Evil dances in our faces, showing us all that it is, an unruly force, taunting our weak defenses, it boldly slips away unscathed.

  • The Voices are Silent

    I finished the Quiet Room by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett. What an inspiring story of girl with a broken mind; a schizophrenia mind.

    She had voices in her head that were finally silenced with the proper medication, treatment and her tenacity to continue working on herself.

    She explains, “I still hear the Voices from time to time. I try to take my own advice. I distract myself, lecture myself, and focus on the outside world. I have taught myself to use a little mantra when they reappear: “These Voices are not real. Don’t be frightened. Don’t get upset. They are not real. Don’t let them overcome you. Try and think of what happened just before you heard them. Is there some emotion you can isolate that will help explain why they are here now? They are not real. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

    “When I hear the Voices, I shake myself back to reality by using all my senses. If I am riding the train to Manhattan for example, I concentrate on the taste of Diet Coke and the smell of the perfume I am wearing. I look out the window at the changing view, and listen carefully to the sound of the conductor collecting tickets. I feel my own ticket flipping back and forth between my fingers.”
    Lori Schiller

    Even though I am not schizophrenic, I can relate to using reality to keep me on the path to wellness, how my voices were alive and walking in reality, voices of the dysfunctional family I left behind.

    Medication was able to reduce the voices mostly and when they returned, she formulated ways to not believe them.

    My experiences of walking out a dysfunctional family had the Voices on the outside in reality that were beckoning me backwards, and there wasn’t medication that would silence them, instead I had to be silent.

    My Voices were sisters, brothers and mother, my father’s voice never appeared.

    Voices and laughter, seemingly vanilla requests urging me to stop being so mental, so frightened, so weird, so odd, so standoffish, so separated, so cold, so heartless, so mean, so unkind…just like her voices in Lori’s head, mine too rose against me.

    The only medication I have to silence their voices is my truth; it seems to keep them far away.

    It is odd that my Voices are real and in living color and they too can threaten my newfound wellness, and perhaps tear little holes in my confidences, eroding newfound peace, as they bounce around like hysterical laughter, wanting me to join in the false hilarity.

    There is a small part of me that longs for the old group, yet a much larger part of me overcomes that, knowing what I would be joining.

    It is almost like I was raised in a Mental Hospital, and that I escaped into normal, and the old patients are beckoning me back.

    And the patients in the Mental Hospital were told that they were living normal, and see me as going into a land of total insanity.

    There are even times that I like Lori, have to concentrate on the smells, sights and sounds around me to keep me with reality, to know that I am okay, I am not the one with mental issues or dysfunctional patterns controlling my life, that I have done the due diligence to get me here.

    Here the voices are silent.

  • Follow an Impulse Fearlessly.

    “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognizes them as our own, as the tender shoots, which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.  Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.  We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things.  We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.” 

     ~Henry Miller, Sexus

     

    Slaughtering our finest impulses…is what leads us to not doing what we feel inside.

     

    What stops us? 

     

    I am learning to follow the impulse, to listen to the voice inside, whether it be to steer away from things or to be drawn towards them.

     

    Our lives are lived from the tiny impulses that happen as we move along each day.

     

    Impulses to take a new path, to speak to a new friend, to call an old one, to send a card, to make a call, to say words we fear, to try a new idea, a new hobby; all are sparked by an impulse within.

     

    It isn’t so much that we don’t have impulses, but fear quickly comes between the impulse and us halting it from happening.

     

    To follow the lead of the impulse fearlessly, knowing you are in fear, but to feel the excitement of doing something new, daring to express or share a part of you that needs to be voiced, to be a playmate with the impulse. 

     

    Be a willing playmate, stop sitting on the sidelines of your life…get up and follow an impulse fearlessly. 

     

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  • Where I want to go…

    “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it.  I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” 

       ~Charles F. Kettering

     

    Today was my 132nd day of doing yoga and my whole body and mind seem to be screaming to let it go, let it be, just relax you have come far enough.  Yet another voice of knowing, the silent motivator who has seen great improvements countered these excuses.

     

    I am thinking it was a fantasy to believe that one voice would grow silent, and a fallacy to think you will silence forever one voice.

     

    One voice this morning had lots of great reasons to stay in bed, the rain, a cool room, a warm bed, a long week of work, a tired body, while the other voice spoke of strong muscles, yoga gives energy, feeling good, etc.

     

    I feel better knowing that I have two voices and two choices and I can follow either, there isn’t one right voice, just two voices leading to two different places.

     

    Each day it is up to me to decide where I want to go!