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.