You Get What You Need

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.” Rolling Stones

This song has been playing in my head for a few days now. I’m gonna say it is one the great rock n roll truisms. And what I mean by that is there is a great deal of wisdom in this. But as I was thinking it through, I came to the conclusion that the completed truth of it goes more like this: You can’t always get what you think you want, but if you try you will find you get what you need, which in the end is what you really do want. Because bottom line is, sometimes what we think we want is not what we need. And what we really need, deep down, is what we really want to begin with, we just can’t figure out what it is, or we go looking for it in all the wrong ways or places or people or ideals or things.

What I think is basic to every human soul, what we each really need, is love and truth. And love that is true, not love that is false. And a love that is true is one that sees your value and accepts you without impossible expectations or limitations, but doesn’t stop there. A true love always wants the very best for you and will strive to help you get there. And it may not always be pleasant, this love that wants the best. But in the end it is exactly what we are looking for regardless. A love that sees your value and all that you can be as a whole, thriving person. And this true love starts with ourselves. Loving and accepting ourselves and wanting what is best for ourselves.

As is true with many people, I spent my whole life in the horrible cycle of looking 'out there' for what I thought I wanted. I looked for it in all the wrong people and places and ideals and things, and always ended up terribly wounded, and terribly empty, and then finally in complete despair. And one day, I will never forget that day, I was driving on a country road and this deep anguish came over me, and I was looking for a reason, any reason, to not drive my car at high speed into the nearest tree. The tears were pouring out of me and the sobs were coming from the deepest place, and I couldn’t find a reason to not drive into a tree. And in that moment I had a choice. And even though I couldn’t come up with a reason, I chose to try one more time. And I cried out, “God, I need help. If you are real I need help because I can’t fix what’s wrong anymore and I have tried all the Christian religions and doctrines and advice and all that I know from every other place and it’s not working. None of it is working. But I need you to help me or I am not going to make it.”

It was the choice that opened up the door for me to get what I needed. And what I needed was healing. And I didn’t even know it at the time. I didn’t know what was wrong, I didn’t know anything. But I tried one more time and it opened up the door. The door of some kind of plan, one in which I was totally unaware of, but one where each step was laid out for me one by one. And I just took each step as it appeared before me, some of it didn’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. And some of it still doesn't, not while I'm in the step. But I can be assured that because I made that choice and have embraced the process with intention, it is going to work out in my favor. It actually amazes me, time and time again.

It has been just about 7 years since the day I made that choice, and I am so thankful that I tried one more time. And I can say to anyone who will listen, my path has been a miracle. It has been a miracle, I could not have invented this path, from that moment in my car until this very minute, not in my wildest dreams. And through this path I am being healed with each passing day. And I would never in a million years have expected to have to go through this kind of a process, this kind of a journey, but it has been the most awesome journey toward self-love and self-acceptance, which will in turn open the door to more love and more acceptance, in truth.

Which in the end is going to be what I needed and ultimately what I wanted all along.

If you try sometimes, you just might find...you get what you need.

Respect or Fear? A Foundational Truth

Definitions of Respect:

-noun

1.  esteem for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person, a personal quality or ability, or something considered as a manifestation of a personal quality or ability: I have great respect for her judgment.

2. deference to a right, privilege, privileged position, or someone or something considered to have certain rights or privileges; proper acceptance or courtesy; acknowledgment: respect for a suspect's right to counsel; to show respect for the flag; respect for the elderly.

3.  the condition of being esteemed or honored: to be held in respect.

Definitions of Fear:

–noun

1.  a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.

2.  that which causes a feeling of being afraid; that of which a person is afraid: Cancer is a common fear.

–verb (used with object)

3.  to regard with fear; be afraid of.

My last post,  Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word,  was about not having been respected in my life in relationships, and not having had any self- respect.  I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t have any self-respect, then that would draw disrespect toward me in my relationships.  And in my mind I felt that even though I had given and shown a great deal of respect toward others, it never was reciprocated, because of my lack of self-respect and having chosen the wrong people with whom to be in relationships.

I received a comment on my Face Book page in regard to that post that was a real eye opener for me. The commenter said  “really, if respect is an unknown entity to somebody - how can you expect to get it from them? that includes yourself; so please acquire a good dose of it & spread it around liberally. you're sure to find some deserving targets.”  Angie L.

I had to do a double read on this, because it was so profound for me.  How could I expect respect, give respect or self-respect if I did not even understand what respect was?  Because it hit me at that moment that I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT RESPECT WAS.  My sense of respect, that which I had always given and shown to others was not respect at all, but was fear.  And this was a real moment of truth for me.  And the way in which I feared those I thought I had respect for, varied greatly depending upon the person and the circumstance.

If I had what I thought was respect for authority, basically I feared that authority because I had always experienced abuse by those in authority over me.  My fear was based on pain and humiliation and fear of death.

If I had what I thought was respect for friendships or others with whom I was in relationship, basically I feared being rejected or abandoned by them.

In each of these cases, my fear is what drove my behavior in those circumstances, whether it was submissive behavior, or deference to their wishes or opinions, or even whether it was that constant apologizing I was always doing.  It was all based on some form of fear, not due to any form of respect.

So, before I can get down to the business of learning how to respect myself, I have to get down to the business of learning what exactly respect means and how it translates into self-respect.  I looked up the definitions, now I have to really take a good look at them and try to imagine them applied to ME.  Because until I ‘get this’, I won’t get respect from myself or anyone else for that matter.  This is an important foundational truth for me and important for my healing process.  And I’m kinda stoked about it!

Thank you Angie!!!

Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word

About 15 years ago, my father told me he was sorry.  He apologized to me for the way he had severely beaten me throughout my childhood.  And at the time I was so unable to face any of the pain of my childhood, I kind of hurried through the whole thing and didn’t really take it in.  My father was sincere, I know this.  Apologizing doesn’t come easy for him.  It was a big deal, a first in our relationship, and I wasn’t able to absorb it at the time.  But I can tell you that at this moment, I so understand the almost miracle it took for him to realize how harmful his treatment of me had been, and he owned that, he owned it.  And I know that if he could go back in time and change it all, he would.  He would change the way he had abused me and the affect it had on the rest of my life to this point.


I was driving home from work yesterday evening, a long commute, and I am in the habit of using this time for reflection.  The day’s events, the week’s event’s, my life’s events, they all kind of take turns coming up into the front of my mind so I can look at them.  Yesterday evening I was in some turmoil, trying to sort through some patterns that keep taking place in my life.  And what it all boils down to is not being respected, and bottom line, not having self-respect.  I realized that as much as I have learned about abuse and its effects in the life of a survivor, about how our minds get so twisted up into believing that we deserve to be treated poorly, I still have not somehow ‘gotten this’ down in my soul.  Because what I know in my head has not helped me to change the patterns in my life. Not yet.

I still do not have enough self-respect going on in me.  For some reason, even though I understand in my head that I am deserving of good things in my life, that I am deserving of friends and relationships that offer me kindness and respect and really good things, I have not found this to be true deep down in my soul yet.  I am still willing to accept less than what I even minimally deserve as a human being.  And when a person really feels this way about themselves, other people will pick up on it, through our own actions and words, they pick up on the fact that we are willing to be treated poorly, and if they have the inclination, for whatever reason to do this, they will do it.  And it doesn’t matter if we are kind to them, if we are accommodating, if we go out of our way to show them respect and understanding, none of this really matters in the end, because we have also in some way or in many ways conveyed to them that we are willing to be treated in a lesser way than all of these good things that we have given them in the relationship.

I have issues.  I guess you could say a lot of it has to do with attachment anxieties and abandonment fears, and this comes through in a glaring way in relationships, friendships and in work relationships.  And I will go out of my way to make sure that I have not ruffled any feathers, that I have not stepped on toes, that I have not annoyed or offended.  And I spend half of my time in these relationships apologizing for my behavior if I feel I have miss stepped in any way.  And there are times I really do misstep.   And if I have discovered this to be the case, I will apologize and try to make corrections. The problem is that very often I am apologizing for things that are not even my doing or responsibility, but I do this in order to appease, in order to keep the peace.  And I realized today that there has only been one time in my entire life where someone has EVER apologized to ME for their bad behavior TOWARD ME.  EVER.  And that was my father, and that was about 15 years ago.  Never before and never since have I heard the words, "I'm sorry."

I say all this to say:   I have been in abusive relationships all my life, believe me, there have been plenty of times where an apology was minimum of what should have happened and...NOTHING.  And the reason this is so, is because I keep getting myself into the same TYPES of relationships over and over again.  I choose people who will take out their frustrations on me, who will transfer to me their anxiety and fear and anger from the past, who will use me as the scapegoat and try to rewrite their past through me - by exerting control over me in the relationship, by mistreating me, by humiliating me, whether it be physically, sexually or emotionally, we are never living in the present, but always in the past.  And because they are not seeing ME, but seeing someone from their past who they feel DESERVES this kind of treatment, they feel a sense of entitlement to be abusive (often this is at the unconscious level) and they NEVER feel the need to apologize for their behavior, even if at some point they do realize they have done wrong. At this point, they usually end up ignoring it, or shrugging their shoulders, or making excuses.  And I just stick around and take the humiliation of it all, as if I deserve all of this.  And THIS is because I am still stuck in MY past, where this is what I was taught about myself.  It was my role.

In order for me to be able to choose healthy relationships, ones in which I am treated in the way I truly deserve to be treated, which is with RESPECT, I need to find it in my own soul, this truth needs to happen in my own soul, that I am a good person, that I am kind and have a heart that loves, and wants to give and receive love, and that at the very least, I deserve respect.  And I need to somehow gain some SELF-RESPECT - because no one is going to respect me if I don’t have self-respect and therefore EXPECT to be respected in the relationship.

 

People will give you what they think you want or think that you will tolerate, they will test the waters and know.  Or I should say that as an adult who really does have power over your own life, abusers are more than willing to use you as a scapegoat if you feel that is your role in your life and theirs and find ways to convey that to them.  And self-respect goes a long way in making the right choices so that you don’t have those types of people in your life to begin with.

Now, how to get that deep down inside my soul where I need it?  I’m working on this.  I’ll let you know.


My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak. I call you–are you there? I have returned. I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again. ~ Carl Jung

Trauma, The Amplifier in My Body

Trauma really does a number on a person.  I’ve read a lot about the effects of trauma on the brain and the nervous system of a trauma survivor.  And it’s almost impossible to really describe it to someone effectively who has never experienced what it’s like to live with PTSD.  The best thing I can come up with is that it’s like having an amplifier buried in your body.  And any kind of sensory input gets fed directly to this amplifier and it gets processed at about a gazillion times of what it actually is.  Whether it’s visual, or sound or often even physical touch.

You know how it feels to your body when you are at a concert, listening to some band that is really jamming, the sound is cranked and you can feel it through your whole body?  And then after you leave the concert and return to the outside world, your body is still experiencing the sensations of all that amplified sound?  That is pretty much what it’s like for a PTSD survivor with sometimes what other people would think the most mundane experiences.  There is an amplifier and it exaggerates every sensory input until the whole body is vibrating with it and it takes a while for the body to rid itself of this overload.

Of course the problem is that it doesn’t take long for a person who suffers in this way to realize that not everyone around them is experiencing things the way they are, are not suffering in this same way.  And so you try to hide this from not only yourself but also from everyone around you. Often people will try to numb themselves through drugs or alcohol, many for years and years, just to get through life. Just to hide from what is going on inside.  But it is really hard to hide from something that affects you so profoundly and so often.  And what starts to happen is that you start to avoid people and places that are going to cause this kind of thing to happen to you.  The ones you know about, anyway.  And then through a survival process that you are often not even aware of, you start to eliminate more and more people and places until you are pretty well isolated from life, period.

Trauma places this amplifier in your body and it is really really hard to get rid of it once it’s there.  Some of us have never really known anything else, we’ve always had trauma and we’ve always had the amplifier.  But after so many years of dealing with it, we run out of coping methods, or we get kicked in the ass by the coping methods that we came to depend upon, and then we are left with trying to find a way to deal with life, without those methods we have always needed just to get through.

It’s a tough spot to be in.  And lucky for us, there is help for us out there now.  There are people working very hard to find ways to help us heal from this part of things.  I haven’t actually started on this leg of the journey yet.  I think it is coming soon though.  I think I’m getting to the place where I will be able to take it on.

Life is waiting for me.  And I want to live it without the amplifier in my body, another freedom I want real real bad.

Uncovering Strength and Courage to Live in Truth

I was just thinking about how much strength it takes to get through the process of healing from child abuse and child sexual abuse.  How much COURAGE it takes.  Things I never saw in myself before now.  I always saw myself as weak and cowardly. Why did I view myself in this way all these years?  I mean, looking back and seeing the things I actually SURVIVED, it is clear to me now that I was NOT weak and cowardly or I wouldn’t have made it to here, regardless of my current healing journey.  It was FEAR that warped my self-image, being hounded by fear all my life that made me FEEL weak and cowardly.  But the fact of the matter is, I had very real reasons to have been carrying all that fear around with me all these years, it was all I knew as a child and I had no way of ridding myself of it until now.  And the fact that I actually kept going IN SPITE of all that fear is a true testament to the strength and courage that was with me the whole time.

 

One of the lies we absorb into our minds and souls as children of abuse is that we are powerless to change our circumstances.  Now, as a child we WERE POWERLESS, we were at the mercy of those who were abusing us, but that feeling of being a powerless child that we carried into our adult lives is the lie. Because as adults we do have the strength, the courage and the power inside us to change our view of our reality, to take that changed view and actually change our circumstances, we often just don’t realize it.  It is there, it is in us the whole time, we just don’t have the understanding of that truth, we are still stuck in our childhood fear and powerless mindset.

Tapping into this new truth is not easy.  It requires that we look at ourselves, look at our history and find out where the lies were embedded.  This is the really painful part of the healing process.  Most of us have buried all of that hard stuff, we had to bury it just to keep living.  Going back and facing the abuse in all its ugliness and pain is part of that process of finding out where this fear and this lie took root in us.  We have to find it, we have to dig it out, we have to destroy it.  The lie needs to be destroyed and replaced with the truth that we are not destined to be at the mercy of abusers.  IT IS NOT OUR DESTINY TO BE ABUSED.  This is so key.  This is the lie that needs to be replaced with the truth that we are actually destined to LIVE OUR LIVES IN FREEDOM.  But it is up to us to grab that truth, to claim it, to make it our own.  And the road to this takes strength and courage, and we ALL have this inside us.  The healing journey is not what gives us these things, it is what uncovers them.

Old Time Religion

My head has been swimming in the waters of religion over the past week, it seems to go on and on, I can’t get out of this arena.  Everywhere I turn, it’s coming up, and when that happens, I know it’s time for me to dig in and deal with it.  Something I have learned on this journey to date.  Religion is a topic that is a sore spot for me, which means that I need healing in this area.  The healing is happening; it’s just taking a long time, long time.

I was born into the world of the fundamentalist variety of Evangelical Christianity.  There are so many denominations and independent churches out there that have the fundamentalist mindset, and it seems as though I have been to every single one of them in my lifetime.  And that’s not a good thing.  The narrow views, many times hateful views that are taught, (or maybe I should say, that are drilled into your mind) are so damaging.  And combined with a childhood filled with other abuses, it leaves a person in a bad spot.  Things get so twisted up inside.  Very few adults are able to see and think clearly in these environments; their sense of reasoning becomes disabled, so a child has absolutely no chance of being able to sort out what is being put into that little, innocent, naïve mind.  Everything becomes a soupy mess.

Fear is the main ingredient in the soup recipe.  If you have ever heard a fiery sermon preached on a Sunday morning in a fundamentalist church, you will know what I mean.  Fear of God, fear of the world, fear of sin, fear of everything.  And judgment is what drives that fear deep inside you.  God is a god of judgment, and sin is going to land you in the hands of that angry God.  But all have sinned.  Such a dilemma we have going on here.  Seems to be no escape.  I mean, sure, they do preach there is an ‘out’ in all of this, as in Jesus saves.  But yet, the ‘feeling’ is that we are all just one sin away from wrath.  And if you happen to be in a fundamentalist church that doesn’t believe you can ‘lose’ that salvation, you still have to appear as though you have no sin, because it is that ‘righteous’ living that is the proof you have been saved, and it is the occasional ‘unrighteous living’ that will end you up with God’s chastisement.  These churches are filled to the brim with people either in denial of their own humanity or who are in constant anxiety about it.  Lots of hiding going on.  Lots of vulnerability.  Lots of fear of being ‘seen’ as less than righteous.

When a child is taught about an angry God whose wrath is all consuming, who is waiting to hand out punishment because he always chastises those whom he loves, and then that child is subjected to the most cruel abuses, no escape from the abuses, well, things get all mixed together.  That soupy mess. The abuse becomes both the child’s own sin AND her punishment, no way out.  She is being shown how sinful she is and also being punished at the same time.  It is always her own fault.  And God is always involved in what is taking place, because he is all knowing and all powerful and filled with wrath.

I had to develop ways in my mind to deal with all of this, as it was way too terrifying and way too overwhelming for me and there was no escape. So I started splitting.  My only way of surviving it all.  It is amazing to me now, now that I understand myself after all of these years, that I was able to come up with a system in my mind that allowed me to deal with all this pressure.  I was just a child.  Innocent, soft hearted, sweet.  But I was made to believe I was a whore who was going to spend eternity in hell, eternity separated from God and from everyone I knew.  Talk about abandonment issues.  Talk about pain.  Talk about terror.  What I was made to endure physically was just the tip of the iceberg compared to what I had to endure in my soul.  AS A CHILD.

Religion is a sore spot for me.  This means that there is a wound that goes incredibly deep and I need healing.  The healing is happening, but it takes a long, long time.  And I think that God understands if I would just rather take a long break from having to think about him for a while.  I need to breathe.

Carpe Diem!

Carpe Diem! Seize the day!  We have all heard this saying. The longer version goes like this: "Seize the day, putting as little trust as possible in the future...", this taken from a Latin poem by Horace. The thought is, none of us knows the future, we should spend less time living our life in the future and spend more time living our life in the NOW.

Sounds so exhilarating, so freeing, sounds like the way we all should be living our lives, doesn’t it? Well, I have problems in this area.  You see, I have a part of me who is very fun loving and very spontaneous, who has no problems seizing the moment or the day, EVER.  And then I have a part of me who is very practical, who thinks and rethinks every freaking thing that’s in front of me.  And my problem is that my spontaneous part has gotten me into a lot of trouble through the years, because she doesn’t have any memory of the trouble she gets me into.  She was actually designed that way inside my head.  Live life, don’t remember the bad stuff. 

Ironically, my practical side didn’t used to remember the bad stuff either, but she was designed, inside my head, to be practical, to weigh everything out, to stay ahead of the trouble, to see it coming.  But to live like this is paralyzing.  Because let’s face it, you can talk yourself out of everything if you ONLY see all the possible problems that could take place. I started thinking about how out of balance I am in all of this.  I don’t really have a part of me who is balanced, a part of me who can assess things as to their risks, but still end up taking at least SOME of those risks for the sake of just living life without being afraid of every freaking thing in front of me.

I've been going round and round in my thoughts for a few days over all of this because of a religious tract a friend of mine found in a rest stop. The tract was from one of those cultish groups who claim that Jesus is coming back on 5/21/11, just a few weeks away.  I used to believe in that stuff, although I knew better than to believe anyone who actually predicted the day!  But I grew up being preached this stuff every Sunday and there was always this fear in me that there was really no time for me to actually get out there and live my life.  So I never took any kind of risks, because Jesus was coming.  That would be the part of me that is practical, by the way.  My other part never remembered this little bit of information from one week to the next, so she didn’t ever hold back.  But really, she was totally a moment to moment kind of part, so the risks were of those kinds, never risks that actually led to much of anything but a party.

If I thought that I only had about 6 weeks left on this planet, how would I choose to live my life for the next 6 weeks?  The old me, the old practical and religiously fearful part would have found a nice safe place to hunker down wearing sackcloth and ashes and prayed for 6 weeks, hoping not to be left behind. But that part of me doesn’t really believe that stuff anymore.  Every other part of me would be out there trying to make the most of the time I had left.  And that would mainly be about making sure that the people I love know that I love them and spending every waking minute I had living and loving.  And at this stage, even my practical part would be on board with this.  Life is short, 6 weeks to be exact, I’m going to forget about anything practical and seize the day and live life and love.

So, why can’t I somehow cross the great divide and live my life AS IF life is short, there are no guarantees about tomorrow, seize the day?  Why can’t I get myself to this place where I am willing to take risks and live my life?  It’s what I want to do.  It really is what I want to do.  I have lived in chains for 48 years, I want to be free to live my life.  What is stopping me?  Fear.  But fear of what?  What is this fear that is so deep in me and so powerful that I can’t seem to shake it and where did it come from?  And how do I get free of it?  I WANT TO BE FREE OF IT AND TAKE RISKS, WHERE LIFE IS LIVED.

Maybe I should just do it?  Push past the fear and seize the day, where my life is waiting for me in the NOW. 

Ashley Judd and the Celebrity Spotlight on Child Abuse and Neglect

I have been reading articles the last couple of days about Ashley Judd’s newly released memoir in which she supposedly doesn't hold back her truth about being abused and neglected as a child, much to the fury of her mom and sister (according to ‘insiders’, family friends, anyway).   I have to say, Ashley Judd has more chutzpah than I do right now.  And I am proud of her, as if I know her somehow.  Strange thing about child abuse survivors, we have this invisible connection, and when one of us has a victory like Ashley, no matter whom they are or where they are, we all feel that victory, almost like we are part of a team.  There is this courage that gets released from one to the other, through the atmosphere or something.  I felt encouraged by her boldness in speaking her truth no matter what kind of public scandal it would cause because of her family’s outrage.

I was looking at some photos on the net of the Judds through the years, and whenever Ashley is in the group pictures with her mom and sister, there is a sadness in her eyes that I know; a sense of not belonging. And even in many of her solo pictures, she has that same look, like she is just so lost.  I know that look, I see it in my own family pictures and in me.  Always feeling like the outsider, almost as if we are somehow in the picture by mistake. And that’s what it comes down to for a child abuse survivor.  We have always felt as if WE were a mistake.  And that being a mistake was reason enough for being made to endure whatever abuse or neglect that came our way.  No child should ever be made to feel as though they are a mistake.  And it’s easy to do, to make a child feel this way.  Easy for a parent or other family member who decides they have a right to take their frustrations, fears or deviances out on you just for being there; or by ignoring you and putting you in harm’s way.  Neglect is just as devastating, if not more so, than outright abuse.  Because neglect says that you don’t matter at all.  You just don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

And for Ashley, the neglect continues, doesn’t it?  Because what she has to say about how she was raised and about what it did to her, well, it doesn’t seem to matter to her family except that somehow THEY are the victims now.  You see, what matters most to them is how people view them, not the truth of what was done to Ashley and how it affected her life.  She is still not important enough to them to hear her.  She has something to say and they still don’t want to hear her.  Because nothing has changed, it’s still all about them and she is still on the outside, still that mistake.  One that if they could erase, maybe even by shaming her for speaking her truth, they would, just to make life easier on them or make them feel better about themselves in some way.

The truth doesn’t matter in the family of abuse.  Keeping up appearances does. It’s all about protecting the reputation of the family, of the abusers or those who neglect their children, even if the lie is killing one of their members, the slow painful death in the wounded soul of an abused child. 

Ashley Judd has used her celebrity spotlight to show us that being abused happens everywhere and its effects are the same for all of us who share this common connection.  And speaking your truth is bold no matter who you are.   I am proud of her for speaking her truth.  I hope that I will one day be able to speak my own, even if it makes my voice shake.

Survivors and the Challenge of Relationships

“To me the better friend is the one who will honestly address our weaknesses as well as our strengths. For they are the ones who really help us to grow. Not the back patters.” 

Being a survivor of abuse presents many challenges in life, one of which is to be in relationships with others; and then to be in HEALTHY relationships is a tremendous challenge.  We have no healthy role models from our childhood; we have no healthy skills from which to draw.  We were not given any clue as children what relationships really were.  We existed, we survived, and these were the only skills we knew.

The greater part of my life has been one of being an appeaser and a fixer.  As an appeaser, I spent my life basically flying under the radar.  Avoiding anything that looked threatening, and that includes ANY kind of conflict.  It’s really hard to be in a healthy relationship and be completely avoidant of conflict.  There aren’t any two human beings in this world who are going to agree completely on everything that comes up in life.  And in order to steer clear of trouble, many abuse survivors will always defer to the other person; it’s what we learned as a skill for our own survival.  If it didn’t completely keep us safe, it made things much less severe for us.

 

As a fixer, I learned early on to develop problem solving skills.  Any way in which I could come up with a solution to any foreseen conflict, I would set myself to it. Stay ahead of the storm, find a solution, avoid a disaster, avoid impending doom.  Because we all know shit flows downhill.  And I was at the bottom of that hill.  It was in my best interest to at least try to make sure the shit didn’t happen to begin with.

I took those unhealthy relationship skills learned in childhood into my adult life.  And although these skills made me a great friend to have around, it also set me up for repetitive patterns of being abused.  I spent an enormous amount of emotional energy trying to be compliant and trying to solve everyone’s problems.  I was a collector of strays, troubled people, some of them harmless, some of them not so harmless.  I never saw the difference until it was too late.  And regardless of whether they were the harmless type or not, they still sapped me of all energy and left me with nothing inside.  They were happy with the relationship, I became deeply depressed.  And once the depression set in, my pattern then was to withdraw and leave the relationship, get the hell out of Dodge.  This was a pattern I repeated over and over again.  And the real kicker in all this is that I sought this stuff out, because it was what I knew, it was where I was ultimately comfortable.

I am now for the first time in my life, at the age of 48, trying to learn healthy relationship skills.  TRYING being the operative word.  I have not even touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to having a clue what I am doing, or better said, I don’t know how to put into operation the things I know in my head.  All I know is that I am trying really hard and not always doing what I know.  The difference this time in the way this feels is that I have hope for once that eventually I am going to find my way.  I am going to learn how to do this. I'm not going in blind anymore. I have the understanding of boundaries now, although I'm still not very good at staying within them.  But I’m getting better, and that is a huge improvement over not knowing anything about them to even try.  I can move forward as long as I know I am moving in the right direction.

I have a friend in my life right now who is very important to me, someone for whom I care deeply, and at the same time, the friendship is a huge challenge, I think for both of us really.  We are both survivors, both having lived our lives with the same unhealthy patterns, the same appeaser/fixer patterns that leave us depleted and eventually withdrawn, and though the way they manifest for each of us is a little different, the patterns are the same.  We are finding ourselves in a kind of dance in this relationship, a dance in which neither of us is all too familiar with the steps and we have definitely been bruising each other up pretty good.  But there is a different feeling to this.  Because for the first time I am aware of all these things, these deficits that I need to overcome; these unhealthy patterns that I fall back into.  And I am trying to find my way through it, trying to find a healthy balance in being a supportive friend, and yet maintain those unfamiliar but necessary boundaries.

It has been one of the most growth inspiring relationships I have ever had outside of therapy.  I have actually been catapulted into growth, I’ve learned more about myself through this friendship in such a short period of time than by any other means so far in my journey outside of the therapy room.  I've been forced to see the way in which I behave, that's not always pretty.  I've been forced to acknowledge that I am clingy and needy and can be smothering.  I have been forced to acknowledge that I don’t always communicate well within a relationship, I can be avoidant still of difficult conversations.  I've been forced to examine my motivations for things I do and say.  These are hard things to face in oneself.  But the only way to grow is to do just that and to work on bettering myself.  I need to grow through it.  This friendship has given me this wonderful opportunity for doing this.  Sometimes in life, you really do get what you need.   Relationships are  tools set to sharpening each other, if we have a mind to let them. 

Unearthing Buried Emotions

I was having a conversation the other day with a gentleman with whom I have a great deal of respect. We were talking about child sexual abuse, rape to be more specific.  And we got on the subject of male child rape and he said to me that for a male, the most horrible thing that can happen to him is to be raped.  And something odd happened inside me.  I became enraged.  It was immediate and it was alarming. It was alarming because I wasn’t feeling rage about the fact that this occurs, I know it does. I was feeling rage that what he was implying was that this is how it is for males, not for females.  Or is that what he was implying?  You see, my perception was that this is what he was implying.  It wasn’t in fact, what he was saying at all.  It was how it was hitting me.  Triggering me.

I am a survivor of child sexual abuse.  I am a survivor of rape.  I was raped as a small child, starting while I was still in diapers.  I was raped at various times throughout my childhood, adolescence, and into my adult years.  And I’m not going to get into the specifics of this, but I just want to convey my own experience with this subject and show you how a person becomes affected by rape.

It took me several days to unravel what happened in that one conversation, what was being triggered in me. The first reaction was internal and it was immediate and it was an emotion of rage.  And the rage was directed toward the gentleman with whom I was having this conversation, although he didn’t know it at the time.  My rage was directed toward him because I misunderstood his meaning, but the key here for me is that the rage was real and it is valid. 

I later sent him an email, telling him that what he said felt like a slap in my face.  As if I had in some way been invalidated, he knows my own history of rape.  I sent quite a lengthy note telling him of what exactly it is that a woman goes through when raped.  Telling him all the things that I was feeling at that moment about rape.  About how it messes with your identity, you are no longer a little girl, or a lady, you are now a whore. About how society labels victims and shames us into silence, once again - disgusting, dirty, somehow infectious like a disease that people may catch just by being in their presence.  About how rape changes the way she views her body, views her place in the world, views her worth as a person, or non-person to be exact.  I went on and on, because in my mind at that moment, I was setting him straight as to whether women were AS affected as men when raped.

Today, well, things look a little different to me.  I realize that I had been triggered.  And it had nothing really to do with whether males or females are affected equally by rape, because of course they are.  It had nothing to do with this at all.  What it triggered in me was an emotion that I didn’t know I had about my own experiences with being raped.  I had never faced any real emotion at all over this.  I had acknowledged in my head the horror of the experiences.  I had faced the memories and faced the understanding of what my life had been like and what it had done to me, how it changed the course of my life.  But until that moment in our conversation about male rape, I was unable to touch any kind of emotion attached to my own experiences.  They have been buried so deep in me and I have not wanted to feel them.  But things have a way of finding their way out.  And I have some very real rage going on inside of me that has yet to really see the light of day.  I have a lot of very real emotions of all kinds going on inside of me that I have not been able to face, not been able to allow out.  But they are making their way out; they are finding their way to the surface.  And I now know that they are coming out in ways that are not immediately apparent.

Triggers are like that.  They unearth buried emotions at the most unexpected times, in the most unexpected ways.  And sometimes it takes a lot of work and a lot of patience to figure it all out.

Genie In A Bottle

If you are of a certain age, you will remember the TV show 'I Dream of Jeannie'.  I grew up watching the reruns after school, many years of watching those reruns. It had a tremendous impact on me as a young girl.  Jeannie seemed like something to aspire toward; she was beautiful, she was good hearted, she was fun, she lived comfortably and she could do magic, she could alter her world by the blink of her eyes. These are the positive things about her and her life I was drawn to.  But there were negative things as well, only I was too young to pick up on them, CONSCIOUSLY.  She was a slave.  A slave to her Master.  Of course, in the TV show, her Master turned out to be a pretty decent guy, so she was lucky. He really wasn’t all too keen on being her Master, and of course the whole premise of the show was how hard she tried to convince him that she was a good slave and that he was lucky to have her.  And there was plenty of lighthearted comedy going on that kept us all from seeing the dark side of this setup.

I chose the metaphor of a Genie In a Bottle as the way I view my SELF in life for many reasons.  I actually did pattern my life after Jeannie in an extreme and unconscious way. I had already been altering my life, inside my head, for many years. But Jeannie showed me a better way of imagining this kind of thing, this kind of alteration.  She was the nicer version of what was already going on in my life on the outside, and in my head, the inside.  Her life as a slave to her Master was a cleaned up version of what was going on in my young life, and it was a comfort to me in some way.  See?  This isn’t so bad.  I can be Jeannie and it won’t be so bad. Even her bottle, that place where she was sent, her prison, it looked so pretty, didn’t it?  Nice and comfy, silk pillows, softness everywhere, all pink and purple and girly and stuff.  If I can just imagine that my prison is as pretty and comfy as Jeannie’s, then things really won’t be so bad.  If I can imagine that my Master is this handsome, good hearted, benevolent Major Tony Nelson, then my life isn’t so bad.  If I can imagine that Major Nelson would never do anything to hurt me, then my life isn’t so bad.  If I can imagine that Major Nelson’s friends are harmless, even when they find out about me, then my life isn’t so bad.  I can just pretend and everything in my world will take on a rosier hue.

The problem here is that real life is very very very rarely like it is on TV, especially back in those days, when we were only shown the softer side of things.  And even if some element of ‘bad’ was introduced, there was always a resolution by the show’s end, the ‘good’ always won in the end.  Nice and tidy, things always ended in a nice and tidy way, where everyone was safe and happy.  But that was not what my real life was about, that was not how things were going for me.  I was trapped, just like Jeannie, but my Master was not the handsome Major Nelson, the good natured man who would never really hurt me. In my world, Masters knew only how to lay the trap and make you pay a heavy price for being as innocent and naïve as Jeannie.  And once you were in the trap, once you were in that bottle, there was no way out and life never had that rosy hue.  It was a dark, rank and painful prison that I never did find my way out of, not until I opened my eyes and realized that I was going to die in this place, and that there had to be someone out there who was going to be able to help me out of here.  Someone was going to take the cap off that bottle for me, I just needed to ask for help.

Sometimes the End is the Beginning

A little over three years ago, at the age of 45, I somehow found the courage to seek help.  I was a mess. I had been a mess all my life and internally this was always something I was keenly aware of, but now it was apparent to those on the outside as well.  I didn't have any understanding of why, I never had any understanding of why I was a mess, it just always WAS. 


To those around me I always appeared to be fairly stable, productive, independent, level headed.  Inside I was in constant turmoil, weighed down by dense emotional pain, hounded by constant fear, feeling paralyzed and unable to move forward in any kind of positive way. I was existing, surviving life, but felt very very dead inside.


In the year of 2001, I was working a job I enjoyed, I owned my own home, I was in a relationship with a man I loved very much.  But I was gripped with fear and I couldn't shake it.  Not just fear, actually the worst kind of dread, impending doom. And in the middle of what seemed like a good year, I came unraveled.  I blew my job, I walked away from my relationship unexpectedly and I had a meltdown.  But being a survivor of life, I kept it all internal.  I withdrew and kept it all to myself.  It was what I had always done.  I withdrew and kept everything to myself.


I lost my job, I lost the love of my life, and I lost my home.  And then I became a child.  I moved in with my parents and stayed numb for almost 5 years.  Five years of my life was - poof - gone, lost with everything else.  No more hiding that something was very very wrong.  I had reached that bottom that everyone talks about.  But fact of the matter is, I had reached that bottom many times on the inside, this was the first time, however, that what was going on internally had finally made its way out.  And I knew that if I was going to be that ultimate survivor, I was going to need some help in finding out what was going on with me.  I was going to need to find someone who could help me find my way back up from the bottom.  I had exhausted my internal resources and I needed to find a way to trust someone.  It would be the first time in my life I would try to trust someone.  It was the best decision I ever made. It was the decision that saved my life.


And so, the day I walked into my therapist's office was the beginning of my life.  Because what I had been experiencing up to that day was not life.  It was a slow death.  And I had almost given up the ghost.  I was at the end.  And then came my beginning.