A New Blog

As you can see I have not been very active on this blog for some time.  The days that I face issues from the abuse have been few and far between for many years.

For the past few years I have felt a strong pulling to share my story, and to offer hope to those who are trying to wade through the aftermath of abuse.  This blog was my attempt to do so, and I am happy to know that it offered a few people comfort.  However this never quite came out the way I desired, so I have moved the blog to a new location and a new name.  I will still be discussing many of the same topics, along with finding purpose in our lives.

I’m very excited about the new site and I hope in time it will come to be a real resource of healing.

I would love it if you would come visit me, leave a note or a message there and let me know what your most pressing needs are so I know what topics I can address and help you with right away.

http://www.adivinewalk.com

Although the new site is focused on healing from child abuse with God’s help, I think you will find the site helpful even if you are not a survivor, or if you are a survivor but not a Christian.  You don’t have to be Christian to benefit from much of the material on the site, and that will probably become more true as I delve into more abuse related issues in the near future.  Come let me know what you need!

 

Wow!

I just learned about this broadcast by 20/20.

http://abc.go.com/watch/2020/SH559026/VD55121488/2020-48-victims-forced-confession

It is about the denomination of church that I grew up in (until I was 11 anyways).  While the stories are quite different from my own, it feels like perhaps a tiny bit of confirmation of my memories.  I am wondering if anyone can tell me if there have been reports from Simcoe Ontario Canada about abuse in the local churches there, particularly in the 70′s and 80′s but really anytime?

  Apparently the IFB church has had a number of massive scandals regarding abuses.  Most churches seem to have such allegations if you search, but apparently this church has many more than you would expect.   What I wouldn’t give for some real coroboration of my story.  I know it happened, but sometimes it just doesn’t all seem possible.

My Sexual Abuse Survivor Bracelet of Healing!

My bracelet to commemorate my healing finally arrived today!!!  Here is the information:

http://divergentramblings.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/my-bracelet-arrived/

This has turned out to be a truly healing experience, I’m so glad I did it!

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The Last Wall – My Initial Plan for Healing

Here is my plan for tearing down the last wall.  The steps are independent of one another, so I will be working at all consecutively.  This is sure to change over time, particularly if this wall proves to be as hard to tear down as experience has lead me to believe it will be.  So here are the first steps, in no particular order:

• Recognize the people who I have always felt loved, supported, and truly accepted by.  Remember how that felt, incorporate those feelings into who I am and into my view of myself.
• Tied in with the previous; Work to incorporate those things that make me feel loved, supported, and accepted into my relationships with others, especially my son. 
• Recognize the things I do that already make people feel accepted, loved, trusted, and celebrate these skills within myself.  Keep encouraging myself to grow in these areas.
• Feel the hurt of the rejection, hurtful words, and hurtful actions that have been done to me.  Grieve, cry, scream if necessary, tell my story, and clear out those feelings, then let them go, and make the choice to forgive.  Rip that wall down.
• Determine what I like about me, grow those areas, take risks to show people those sides of me.
• Determine what it is that I don’t like about me… why I don’t like it (is it really an issue, or is it an oozing childhood wound based on a misconceived notion of who I am)…
• Heal the wounds, work towards bettering myself and eliminating or minimizing the flaws… this will be a life long process
• Realize that all people are human, even me, and that people will accept me, flaws and all.
• Figure out why I am afraid to show people me… what am I afraid they will see ?

Getting Angry In Order To Forgive?

Another repost:

As I was out working on my garden, and pondering life, I was thinking about anger and forgiving.  My experience has taught me that the only way to heal and move on from something is to forgive.  But how do you get to a place of forgiveness?  I’ve written several articles on the steps of forgiveness, and how to forgive things that seem unforgivable, and I still stand behind the things I’ve said there.  But I want to explore the concept that you need to get angry, grieve, feel the hurt that you received before you can forgive.  In essence, getting angry allows you to forgive.

Yeah, you heard me right.  We do this so often in our everyday lives that we don’t even recognize that we do it, but we can’t forgive if we don’t feel we’ve been injured.  Yet when the bigger things come up, and we need to forgive, we try to deny our anger and hurt and instead to miraculously “forgive” without completely acknowledging to ourselves that we were hurt.  This just doesn’t work.  If a friend hit you with a baseball bat accidentally, you wouldn’t try to convince yourself it didn’t hurt now, would you?  Emotions are the same way.  It does no good to refuse to acknowledge that you’ve been hurt.  You have, you may wish you hadn’t been, but it doesn’t mean that you were not.  Instead, we need to recognize that we’ve been hurt, get angry, grieve if necessary, and then we can choose to forgive.  Sometimes this process may last 2 minutes, but in some situations, it may take years.  However if you don’t let yourself feel the pain, I promise you, you won’t be able to forgive, and if you can’t forgive, the wound will never fully heal.

Although it helps to understand why someone did something that hurt us, sometimes that information is not available or is not helpful.  In the end, it is our own pain, sadness, that we must face in order to make the choice to move on.

The Stickiness of Childhood

This is a re-post of a blog post I wrote on my other blog.   

I’ve been pondering a lot of issues lately, and find myself once again amazed at how much childhood and the impressions we get during childhood affect the rest of our lives.  I hate this.  I know these things can be worked through, and we can learn to view things and react different to things than our childhood would present, but it is such a hard thing to do.   I get discouraged sometimes looking at how far I still have to go, it’s so easy to get locked into the frustrations of the healing that has yet to be done, and forget about how far we’ve come.  In fact that has a lot to do with why I got the bracelet for myself.  I knew I was in trouble when I suddenly REALLY NEEDED something to remind me of how far I’ve come, and now I know why.  It’s time to face new issues, issues I’ve been toying with the past few weeks that I’ve now come to full realization are going to have to be dealt with.   I’m so full of questions right now.

• Can I do it?  I’ve done it before, but can I really do this? 
• Can I deal with my issues and be a good mother and wife while doing it? 
• How has not having dealt with these issues been affecting my family?  Too much I can tell you that, not that they know that, but I am not sure I’ve really been giving all of myself to them in the way I want to, in fact I’m pretty sure I’ve been building walls again.  Are these impacts irreversible, or can I pull it together and change?
• Will I be contending with issues like this cropping up every few years for the rest of my life???  Do all people deal with junk like this? 
• Do I have the support I need to grow the way I need to right now?  If now, how on earth am I going to get that support?  I have support…. but is it really enough… probably not.
• This is so much more minor than things I have dealt with in the past… why does it scare me so much?

Current issues at a quick glance:
1.  Trusting others…. this is the crux of it all, everything in the end comes back to this. 
2.  Opening to completely and totally love without reservation or fear.   Being completely and totally me, loving people deeply, and yet realizing that people are inherently flawed and that we all make mistakes, so it’s okay if I get hurt, it doesn’t mean the person didn’t / doesn’t care.  In the end I guess this means being vulnerable.
3.  Moving past the anger…. thought I’d done it, but some of it is cropping up again.  I need to figure out how to express anger in a healthy manner, because by nature I stuff until I explode at someone “safe” that I am not even upset with.

What I need… yep I’m just gonna put it out there  (in no particular order):

• Love… especially unconditional
• Hugs
• Shoulders to cry on, and the realization that it’s okay to cry on someone’s shoulder, and people who will realize that even though I am crying on their shoulder, it doesn’t make it their fault, and I don’t need them to fix it.
• Non-judgemental  listening ears.  People who will listen and not judge my craziness, because I tend to have moments of absolute craziness when I am trying to make big leaps forward
• People I can trust who won’t let me down too often, and who won’t just up and disappear on me someday (people have a tendency to vanish from my life unexpectedly, which has really compounded the whole trust thing)

I have some wonderful friends, but very few of my relationships have reached this point…  I need to know how to get my support system from where it is now… which is primarily just being able to discuss parenting… to where it needs to be.  How do I do that?  Will God help me form the relationships I need right now…  what do I need to do so that he can do that?   If I deal with all of this, will I finally feel like me?

The Last Wall – A Few Notes

I have come to realize that I still have yet another wall up.  I’ve written several posts about it on my main blog.  Some of the issues surrounding this wall though, are ones that I can not write about on a site  that my family will have access to.  To the best of my knowledge they do not know about this site, as I have not given the address to any.  These stories are stories I need to share, but I do not wish to hurt anyone with them.  Many of the issues have been far compounded by the abuse, and for a child with a normal childhood would have been sad, but probably not as catastrophic as they felt for me.  As an abuse survivor though, they have compounded the messages of worthlessness and rejection that I felt.

I boldly call this the last wall…. is it?  I hope so, I believe so, but of course only time will tell.

Labels

Victim of Child Abuse

Child Abuse Survivor

Conqueror….

Since I posted the bit about my bracelet, I’ve been doing some more contemplating over the term “survivor” as applied to those who have been abused.  I hate the word.  I liked it once upon a time, it felt blame free, and I still like it for that reason, after all someone who “survives” something is not at fault.  But now, I feel like so much more than a “survivor”, I feel like there is a huge amount of passivity in the word “survivor”, it fails to express all of the fighting, screaming, crying, and just plain work that has gone in to recovering from being abused, into the job of achieving peace…. I need a step after survivor, something that defines one who has moved past surviving, and has moved on with life.  I rather like child abuse conqueror myself   Although I’d love to hear some more suggestions.

On the same note, I was reading  this blog post about labeling, and it ties in very well with my thoughts.  I think that the label of survivor can be very limiting, and can often come to define us, especially in the early stages of recovery, where we feel like we are literally just surviving.  It is very important to always remember that we should not post our entire identity on having been an abused child… nor should we try to ignore or even deny the fact (within ourselves), instead it is best to realize that for better and worse our experiences as a child are an integral part of who we are.

The Search for A Name

I am searching for the perfect name for my bracelet… and coming up short.  I want the name to signify what the bracelet means to me, I have a list of words, but seem to be just short of what I am really looking for.  So far the best I’ve come up with is my bracelet of healing and fortitude… which might work, but I don’t know….  Anyone have suggestions?  Here’s a list of the words I associate with it:

Commemoriation
Remembrance
Memories
Healing
Triumph
Courage
Wisdom
Fortitude
Recovery
Celebrating the Past and Having Courage for the Future