Average Pedophile Molests 117 Children Before They Are Caught

"The average pedophile molests 117 children before they are jailed for child offences."

The above quote comes from the following website: Helping Hands Against Abuse which is located in the United Kingdom. Here is the link for this organization:

http://www.hhaa.co.uk

I hope if you are a survivor of any kind of abuse as a child or an adult that you will check them out. HHAA is a group that I support on Facebook and on Twitter both because of the work that they do to help survivors of abuse heal and find support.

Here is my response to the above quote which I posted on my Facebook page and which has already been shared by several of my Facebook friends on their pages as well.

"This is a sad number that we can change by coming together and making the world aware of child abuse. From awareness must come action. Be aware and if you suspect a child is being abused, tell someone. If that someone does nothing, tell someone else until something happens to protect that child. If you are wrong, apologize. If you are right, you have changed the life of a child."
Patricia 

Happy Father's Day - Not For All Abuse Survivors

I want to wish any fathers who are reading this post a Happy Father's Day. Be good to your children so that they will grow up and want to honor you on this special day. The same goes for any mothers reading this post. Your children want to love you. Give them reasons to love you. Protect your children from the abusers in the world. Teach your children to love you and to love themselves.

Father's Day is supposed to be a day to honor our fathers but some of us grew up being abused by our fathers. Abuse can take the form of physical, emotional, mental or sexual abuse. For those of us who were abused by their fathers, this day can be a day of bad memories rather than good ones. Memories of abuse can also make us wish that we could recreate the father of our dreams which can in turn make us feel sadness and grief for that father that we always wanted and never had.  Father's Day can be a day of ambivalence for survivors. You can love your father because he is your father and sometimes he was nice to you. You can also hate your father because of the lies that he told you and because of the abuse that was done by him to you.

For those of you who had great, loving fathers, I am glad for you. I didn't walk in your shoes. You also didn't walk in my shoes so you may not understand why survivors sometimes struggle so much with this day. You may not understand our need to break the silence of child abuse. That is okay. You don't have to understand but don't judge us either. For those who are struggling, I do understand. My dad died back in January 2000 so I no longer struggle with this day. Take care of yourself today. This day will be over with in less than 24 hours. Then it will be another day. Do what you need to to get through this day. Love yourself. Give yourself a break. Breathe.
Patricia

I Am A Survivor/Thriver Of Incest

An online friend recently asked me, "Do you ever -not- feel like a thriver . . . like an off day or something?"

Here is my answer:

Yes, sometimes. It is part of being a survivor that I have gotten used to. Some days the sadness and the tears do come back to visit. It isn't all the time like it used to be.

There are cloudy days. I still have issues that come up but not as often or with the intensity of the early years of healing.

There are still times when a TV program or a Video on YouTube or someone else's story will hit me in a vulnerable place. When they do, I remind myself to breathe and I let the tears fall.

Tears used to be a sign of weakness to me. Today they are a sign of healing and courage.

Anger used to mean rage and violence - not today. Anger is okay to feel and can often be resolved just by saying the words, "I am angry."

I don't have crying jags any more and I don't rage any more because I don't stuff feelings until they build and are uncontrollable.

 To me, being a thriver doesn't mean just sunny skies. Being a thriver is being able to feel it all in a healthy manner and then letting it just flow through me.


A day or two later, someone else asked, "Does anyone see themselves as a thriver?"

Here is my answer:

Yes, I do. Being a thriver doesn't mean I don't still have issues that I occasionally have to work on. It doesn't mean that I am all smiles and joy, even though they are more frequent in my life than ever before. It just means that my life can have joy and peace and calm rather than the chaos that I often created for myself out of my anger, rage, and hurt.

The sadness is not a constant with me any more.  For most of my childhood, I felt like I was the sadness. I knew if you looked in my eyes that you would see the sadness. I rarely smiled. I didn't know how to be a child after the incest started. I felt like there was a hole in me where my heart should have been. That hole was emptied of joy and happiness and filled with sadness.

As a thriver today, I find that I actually enjoy myself and my life rather than just existing. My life has laughter and joy. My heart has melted from its frozen desolation and is now filled with love for myself and my family.

Are you a thriver? What does being a thriver mean to you?
Patricia

Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker's Fifth Year Anniversary

Today Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker is five years old. I thank each of you that has been a part of this journey of growth and transformation.

My Blogger Overview Page for June 1, 2012 says that I have 3900 published comments. At least half of those are my comments back to you. It is important to me to be able to let you know how much I appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment. I don't like visiting and leaving a comment on someone else's blog and not getting a response back. Sometimes the comments at the end add so much more to whatever I say in the content of the blog post. Your opinion is important to me. I want you to always feel free to voice your opinion about my topics. The few times that I did not publish a person's comment was because they were abusive in the way that they expressed themselves. I don't expect everyone to believe what I believe. I do expect everyone to be respectful in expressing your opinions. That is just healthy boundary setting.

Even though I haven't posted a blog post since my last one on May 7, my readers have been loyal. Today's Pageviews from Blogger were 134. That may seem small to some but my numbers have been steadily growing here since the first post on June 1, 2007. I appreciate everyone of you. On my Feedburner.Google.com page, my daily page views show 440 subscribers for today. My blog page itself shows 220 followers. I don't have a clue as to why there is such a difference in numbers but there is. Either way, I appreciate everyone of you.

I know that I haven't posted much lately. In May, I experienced a severe allergy attack that lasted for several weeks after spending the day out with a friend with our car windows down for the entire trip. I don't know why but my allergies have been much worse this Spring than they have ever been. Some say allergies are worse for everyone this year because we didn't have a cold Winter in Arkansas. Only in the past week have I begun to feel better.

This post will be the 353rd article that I have written over the past five years on Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker.  Earlier I went through my Blogger pages and looked to see which of my articles were your favorites. Thank you for your diversity. I was surprised at some of your favorites. Here they are:

1. What Other People Think About You Is None Of Your Business posted on 8/29/07 with 5546 views. This one is by far the favorite. None of the others are even close to the views of this one.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-other-people-think-about-you-is.html

2. There's A Hole In My Sidewalk posted on 8/11/07 with 3881 views was written about a poem that I was introduced to when I first started going to 12-Step meetings back in 1989. Someone had printed and framed the poem and put it on the wall of the meeting room. For its simplicity in words, the poem is powerful in its message.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/08/theres-hole-in-my-sidewalk.html

3.  Family Secrets---Incest May Be A Part Of My Life Series---Part 5 posted on 9/2/07 with 1795 views since then. I think there were 8 blog articles in this series of posts. This post is one of two from this series that made the top 10 list of favorites. Most of these posts came with a Trigger Warning on them.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/09/family-secrets-incest-may-be-part-of-my.html

4.  Forgiveness Is For You, Not The Other Person was posted on 9/16/07 with 1651 views. If you are considering forgiveness as a part of your healing, this is just one of the articles that I have written on the topic of forgiveness over the years.  Forgiveness is a topic that I feel strongly about. I never thought that I would forgive my abusers. I didn't plan to. I was further abused by well-meaning people who wanted me to forgive too soon. For me, forgiveness was the end result of healing and happened in its own time when I was ready.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/09/forgiveness-is-for-you-not-other-person.html

5.  Dealing With People Who Push Your Buttons was posted on 7/5/08 with 1494 views. This post was written because I got angry at someone who was being mean to my husband. My husband is a sweetheart and this person was just jealous of him. I realized that this person was pushing a lot of my buttons and so I looked at why.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/07/dealing-with-people-who-push-your.html

6.  The Secret---Affirmations Change Your Life was posted on 8/8/07 with 1393 views. This is one of my favorites. I wrote it when The Secret was so popular. In this post I share how I was taught to work with affirmations in order to change the negative messages we tell ourselves.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/08/secret-affirmations-change-your-life.html

7.  Spirit Animal Totems was posted on 11/11/07 with 1311 views. This post is not a typical subject for me, being more on the spiritual side rather than the survivor side of things. Sometimes we just need to forget that we are adults being so serious and let the inner child out to play. This was one of those times.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/11/spirit-animal-totems.html

8.  Three Of My Past Lives was my very first blog article back on June 1, 2007. Only in the past 2 years has this post grown in popularity. The views for this post are 1176. As I say in the blog post itself, you don't have to believe in reincarnation. I do. Reincarnation just seems to explain a lot of happenings in my life.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/06/three-of-my-past-life-experiences.html

9.  Inspiration, Denial And Incest was posted on 1/20/10 with 1144 views. This post is rather long and a bit of a rant on my part. The article also comes with a Trigger Warning. This rant was brought about by a comment that a very young lady left on my blog. The young lady didn't think my story was inspiring and was too sad for her tastes.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/01/inspiration-denial-and-incest.html

10.  A Little Girl's Story---Incest May Be A Part Of My Life Series---Part 8 was posted on 5/10/09 with 976 views. This post was the last of the Series. The original story was written by me back in 1989.
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2009/05/little-girls-story-incest-may-be-part.html

11.  "The Patricia Singleton Story" Update was posted on 5/3/10 and viewed 908 times since then. This is the last one that I will share. I know that many of you have listened to this radio interview that I did with Cyrus Webb. When I first started this blog back in June 2007, I never imagined that it would lead to be a guest speaker telling my story on a radio program. If you haven't heard this talk yet, I hope you will take the time to listen and let me know what you think.
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/05/patricia-singleton-story-update.html

When I started this blog, I was inexperienced with the internet. I still have things to learn, like how to put photos on my blog. I have made so many new friends over the past five years because of my blog. I have learned to use Twitter and Facebook to further the reach of my blog to other survivors. I have grown and become a voice for incest survivors around the world. Most recently, I have learned how to use Triberr.com and Klout to extend my reach to new people. The survivor community is quite large and growing larger every day as we join together to protect children and to educate adults about child abuse.

I am grateful to everyone of you who read my blog and leave comments.   Thank you for being willing to enter my world. I know that my stories aren't easy to read. I appreciate the time that you spend here. Please join in helping me to break the silence of child abuse. A child should be loved, not abused. Every day as I go out into the world of the internet, I meet new people with their own stories of survival and pain. Some are seasoned warriors like me and others are just beginning to tell their stories and move from being victims to becoming survivors. Please join me in honoring their path to healing.
Patricia