Child Abuse And Painful Memories

"Promise me you'll always remember that you're braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think."
                          ---Christopher Robin to Winnie the Pooh

Yes, that quote comes from a children's book and it is important for each of us to remember. Those of us who have been abused as children often don't see ourselves, our courage and our strength clearly, as others often see us.

INCEST SURVIVORS UNITED VOICES OF AMERICA on Facebook shared the following statistic. "Every 10 seconds a child is abused." Then they ask us to "STOP CHILD ABUSE."

When a child is abused, especially sexually abused, if they are like me, they have many bad childhood memories to work through and let go of as they heal. I recently ran across an article that I want to share with you about reducing the pain of bad memories. The article is written by Valerie Siebert. I am pleased to finally see more and more information and studies being done on the effects of child abuse. Here is the link to the article. I hope it helps you to let go of any bad memories that you may be holding on to.
Patricia

How to reduce the pain of a bad memory @
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10777758/How-to-reduce-the-pain-of-a-bad-memory.html 

Stages Of Loss And Grief For Incest Survivors.

Back in 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote her book called On Death and Dying. In that book she gives us the five stages of grief.
Denial and isolation
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

Grief takes time to get through. Each person takes however long it takes to get through the grief. Some stay in denial longer, others get angry and stay stuck there for awhile before moving through to the other steps. However long it takes is individual to the person. You can go back and forth between the stages until you finally reach acceptance and the grief ends.

Grief isn't just about death. Each loss in your life brings grief also. With incest survivors, many losses happen because of the abuse. The earlier in childhood that the abuse starts, the more losses you have to deal with. If you don't grieve the losses, they pile up and add to the pain and to the length of time that it takes for you to heal.

As a child being abused, stuffing everything inside is the form of denial that is often used. The brain blocking memories is an extreme form of denial used in order to survive the pain of abuse. I know from certain clues that I have that I don't have access to some early memories. I have written about labeling myself an adulteress several times on this blog. 

As an adult, I used denial in order to try to have a "normal" "happy" life when I first left home and then the first years of being married. I told myself if I didn't think about the incest that I could pretend it didn't happen and it wasn't still affecting me if I didn't think about it. I did my best to convince myself of that and I hoped it was working for about 10 years as I grew more and more angry and unhappy. The denial came to a head one day when I heard myself screaming at my husband and telling him that I hated him and my life. A part of me was standing off watching and listening as I screamed those hurtful words at him. Thankfully that part of me stepped in and took control and knew that the person I hated was myself because I couldn't pretend and I couldn't make the pain and anger go away. That was in the 1970's and there were only 3 books on incest at the county library where we lived. They gave me a little bit of relief but not enough. Self-help books were becoming popular so I read everyone of them that the library had and worked hard on improving me as much as I could. I was blessed that my husband forgave me for those hurtful words that I threw at him that long ago day. 

Isolation played its part in keeping me stuck in the pain too. I felt totally alone in my pain. I always felt alone and different, even in a good marriage. I felt like no one would understand if they knew and I was afraid they would judge and blame me if they knew about the incest. I was married for 8 years before I told my husband because I was afraid he wouldn't love me if he knew. If I stayed isolated, then maybe no one would ever know. Of course isolation just added more to my pain also.

The next stage of anger really scared me. I knew that the anger inside of me had grown to rage. That is what happens when you stuff anger deep inside and don't deal with it. It grows. The only anger I saw in my childhood was my dad's rage and my mom's passive-aggressive behavior. When she was mad, she would get quiet and you knew something was wrong but you never knew what. She always denied that she was angry. The passive-aggressive anger was hurtful and crazy feeling because it was never acknowledged. The rage was scary because it might become dangerous and violent. I was afraid that my own rage would become violent too if I let it all out. 

I was angry that the denial didn't work. I was angry that I was abused by those who should have loved me and protected me. I was angry at myself for being a child and not being able to protect myself. I had to do some blaming in order to get though the anger. I don't recommend staying in the blaming stage because then you just stay stuck in the anger and you do need to move past the anger stage in order to heal.

Bargaining is that stage where you just wish it would all go away and you would do anything to make that happen. You have conversations with God and ask Him to take it away and you may even get angry at Him because He won't. Free will isn't free will if God takes away all of our hurts. It is our responsibility to work our way through the feelings, not God's responsibility to take it away. He loved me through it even when I was angry at Him.

Depression is the stage of feeling all of the deep sadness, shutting down the tears and feelings, and pushing them back inside. Louise Hay says depression is anger turned inward. I have grown to believe this for myself. I know from a very young age, I was full of sadness to the exclusion of all other feelings. I know I carried the deep sadness with me at least as young as 5 years old. It may have been there before that and I just don't remember. It seems like for most of my life, I felt that deep sadness. I didn't know where it came from or how to get rid of it. I hated to cry. I was taught as a child that tears just brought on more hurt from my parents. Have you ever had a parent tell you, "I'll give you something to cry about, if you don't stop that right now." Once I reached this stage of grieving, the tears started. I cried for a year at 12-Step meetings because I didn't want my family to see the tears. I didn't know how to explain them to myself, much less to them. At that point, I still felt that tears were a sign of weakness too. Today I know they are a sign of strength. I still don't like crying but I do it when I need to.

You can go back and forth between all of these stages of grieving until you finally reach the last stage of acceptance.  With acceptance comes relief. When you accept the losses then comes change when you let go of all of the pain caused by the losses. With acceptance the losses lose their power to hurt you any more and the abuser loses his power over you too. With acceptance, you take back your personal power and you move forward with your life. With letting go of the losses, you now have room in your life for laughter and peace to enter. 

Each time that an issue comes up, I find more losses to deal with and more grief to feel and go through these stages again. Today, I get though the grief in only a day or two or three, not weeks, months or years. Today I am aware of what it feels like to grieve. Today, I know that if I want to feel the joy, I also have to feel the grief when it comes. 

I am sharing the link that gave me the idea to write this post and to share my ideas on grief. Remember these are just my opinions and experiences with grief. Grief may be different for you. I do know that if you want to heal from incest, you have to allow yourself to grieve.

"The 5 Stages of Loss and Grief" @
http://psychcentral.com/lib/the-5-stages-of-loss-and-grief/000617

Patricia

Inner Child Work And Feeling Safe

It seems that I am doing some inner child work lately. As I talked about in recent articles, my inner child does not feel safe right now. The only reason that I can come up with is writing my book has opened her up to all kinds of fears. Fear of being exposed to the world, on a bigger scale, as an incest survivor; breaking the bonds of silence in a new, bigger way; being vulnerable to so many strangers; being open to recalling new memories. All of it feels overwhelming to her. I can feel her fear and see her shaking.  I wonder if her fear is what is causing my headaches, in an effort to get me to stop writing but I am not going to do that. I can acknowledge her fears but I won't give in to them. If I gave into fear, I would never have left home when I did at 19. I would have never broken the silence of incest. I would never had told my dad that he wasn't safe to be in my life or around my children. I would never have written the first blog article or talked on the first radio program several years ago.

I see how far I have come today and I am proud of the courage that I have. I will keep facing my fears as they come up and I will assure my inner child that she is safe. I will pay attention to what her feelings tell me. And I will continue to write.

I have decided that something that might help is to go back and reread the book Recovery of Your Inner Child: The highly acclaimed method for liberating your inner self written by Lucia Capacchione, Ph. D., Published by Simon & Schuster, New York, NY: 1991.  This book taught me the importance of writing with my non-dominant hand in order to give my inner child a voice. I haven't done any of that kind of writing in many years. Maybe that will give me some answers to what is going on right now rather than me just guessing.

One thing that I learned is that the inner child is the keeper of my creativity. I realized recently that it was her fear that was blocking me from writing. When I faced that fear, the words started to flow again.

Another book that helped me with inner child work is an affirmations book that I have recently shared from, here in my blog. The book is called Affirmations For The Inner Child written by Rokelle Lerner. This book takes you throughout the year with an affirmation to be read for each day of the year.  I wanted to share the affirmation with you from March 3 on Safety.

"It is safe for my inner child to emerge.

The child within runs and hides when someone wants to come close. He lets himself be seen only for a short time, then gets frightened and runs away to hide again. He wants so much to be loved, to play, to experience the goodness of life. But life is too scary. Indeed, life has never been safe for him.

It is time to make life safe for my inner child and I have the power to create a safe haven. Safety brings freedom not only to accept and love myself but also to love others.

As I concentrate on making a safe haven for my inner child, I will be aware of my friends, old and new. I will choose friends who are emotionally healthy or moving on the journey toward wholeness. It is within the loving bonds of friendship that my inner child can come out and learn to feel safe."

Another friend of mine who is working with inner child issues is Mary Graziano. I want to share the link to one of her blog posts called "Memories Still Do Hurt."
 
http://nippercats.blogspot.com/2014/03/inner-child-is-hurting.html

I hope that all of you are having a good week. Keep telling yourself that Spring is just around the corner. I think most of us are tired of old man Winter.
Patricia

 

Boundaries, Detachment And Self-Worth

"I can be emotionally separate and still be caring.

I will not take on the anger, fear or moodiness of those around me today.

In my dysfunctional family, no one encouraged me to be a separate individual. When my parents were angry or depressed, I was made to feel it was my fault. I was expected to rescue them emotionally. Well, taking on the rescuer role didn't work in childhood and it hasn't worked in my adult life either. Because the source of others' unhappiness is inside them, nothing I can do will lift it from them. My detachment doesn't mean I don't care about their pain; it means that I know I cannot save them from their own moods.

I will honor my individuality today by refusing to take on the negative emotions of those around me."

From the book Affirmations For The Inner Child, written by Rokelle Lerner, Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, Florida: 1990, 2010, From the page February 28 - Boundaries.


I wanted to share this with you because it describes my childhood so well and one of my roles in my dysfunctional family. I was the protector of my mother's feelings from the age of three when I remember assigning myself that role.

Family caretaker for everyone was another of my roles. Some good things came out of my caretaker role. I am a responsible adult who cares about people in my family, friends and about society in general. One of the not so good things that came out of that role was that I became a people pleaser and lost myself in the deal. I was so busy taking care of everyone else that I often felt overly tired, overwhelmed and angry. I wasn't allowed to have a childhood. I was too busy taking care of my family and their needs.

I became bossy as the oldest child with two younger siblings who were my responsibility. If they got into trouble, it was my fault. I should have kept them out of trouble.When I learned about detachment, I was able to let go of what wasn't my responsibility. I didn't have all of the answers for my siblings.

I knew how to fix everything and everybody. That was the illusion I tried to convince myself and everyone else was true because I had to earn your love. If I did enough you would love me. And I had to do everything perfectly so that no one could criticize me like both of my parents did when I was struggling to be a child with too much responsibility.

I am a terrible housekeeper today, partly because my inner child is in open rebellion about all the housework that I did as a child with nobody teaching me how to do any of it. The only thing I can tell you my mother taught me how to do in all those childhood years was when I was 11 years old, she taught me how to make biscuits. From then on making biscuits became my job in the evenings during the week and two times a day on weekends and in the Summer months until I left home at age 19. Everything else I learned how to do by experimenting with trial and error. I was told to do a chore without anyone taking the time to show me how except what I learned to do in Home Economics in school in the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades.

I also realized again this week, that I still feel some shame in this area when it comes to inviting people into my home. I just don't know how to change this. I know it shouldn't matter what other people think and still in this area I am afraid of being criticized. My housework was never good enough for my dad when I was a child. I would get called stupid and be told I was as slow as grandma or as slow as Christmas and generally made to not feel good enough. This may seem small to some people but it is still a big issue for me.

Along with shame over being a bad housekeeper, I feel fearful of having others in my home right now. I recently told my husband that may be because of the writing that I am doing right now - going deeper into more layers with my issues. I just don't want anyone here but me and Daniel. I guess with this writing, I feel exposed which doesn't make a lot of sense because I have been writing for this blog for over six years now. I need my space to be safe. With Daniel and I, I do feel safe.

I feel bad because an online friend is visiting my town this weekend. He is a guest speaker at one of the area churches. I haven't extended an invitation for him to stay with Daniel and I. I am going to see him at the church on Sunday. This will be the first time that we will meet face to face. He is someone that I have enjoyed knowing for almost the entire time I have been a blogger. I am not afraid of him. The fear is from deep inside of me. The shame is still there inside my inner child. I am not sure how to convince her to let go of it, if she can let go of it at this stage in my life. I am not giving up. Knowing me, I will probably give him a copy of this post to read since it explains my feelings pretty good. This is my issue, not his. I am not done working though it yet. I don't know if I ever will finish with this one. I won't give up on my inner child or on me. Thanks for reading and having patience with me.
Patricia

Biography Of Patricia Caldwell Singleton, Incest Survivor

I am an incest survivor and an adult child of an alcoholic. My dad and my grandfather were mean drunks who influenced me to not drink because I was afraid of becoming like them.  I am also a survivor of domestic violence from my dad's rages when he was at home. Even when he wasn't raging, he was verbally abusive with name-calling and intimidation. He was a dictator with his controlling of the entire family. My mother rarely made an decisions and I wasn't taught how either.  My family was dysfunctional in the extreme.

I have memories of incest happening from age 11-17. The first memories were of being raped by an uncle on a fishing trip and a long weekend alone with him at my grandmother's. He lied to me and my mother when he said my grandmother was home. She came home on Monday afternoon.

A few weeks later, my dad decided I was old enough to take my mother's place working twice a day on weekends helping my dad out at the dairy milking cows. On my first night of helping at the dairy, we went to the hay loft to throw down hay bails. While there, my dad took his shirt off and spread it out on a bail of hay and told me to pull down my pants and to lay down across the hay bail. No explanation was given for his actions. I remember feeling disgusted and thinking to myself, "Not daddy too." That is how the incest started and went on for 6 years. Every time my dad left the house, I was sent with him and I would be raped before we came back home. Sometimes later on he would also wake me up early mornings before the rest of the family woke up and he would abuse me in another room of our house. Most of the abuse took place in the front seat of his truck. My mother sent me on many of those trips. She missed many signs that I was being abused because she didn't want to see them.

At 17, I knew I was strong enough to say no to the sex and not let my dad manipulate me into changing my mind. The sex stopped but the emotional and verbal abuse continued until I ran away when I was 19 on the day after I took my last test of my second year at a junior college. I packed a small shopping bag that I normally carried books in with a few changes of clothes. I gave my sister a note to give to my mother when I didn't come home that night and had my mother drop me off at the college on her way to work that morning. An angel of a friend who was older than my own parents picked me up and took me home and gave me a place to live and helped me get my very first job for the Summer.  After 3 days of my mother lying, she told my dad where I was. He came after me. I went home for the weekend and then went back to my friend's house on Sunday evening. I had broken away from my dad's control. That took more courage than I knew I had. If I had stayed, I would have had a nervous breakdown and would have lost myself completely. I knew that so I was strong enough to not give in to pleas and threats that my dad used to get me to stay.

I went away to college at the end of that Summer and as a Junior at 20 years old, I met and 8 months later married my husband. Before we were married, he knew he was not my first sexual experience but I could not tell him that most of my experience came from my dad. I was too afraid he would leave me. We were married for 8 years (1980) when I told him and my sister both about the incest. Even after telling them both the truth, I continued to pretend that the incest was not affecting my life. In my marriage, I became a controller thinking that would make me feel safe. It didn't. People tried telling me what I was doing but I wasn't ready to hear it until one day my husband came in from work. I got angry about something, I don't even remember what it was about. I do remember hearing myself screaming at my husband that I hated him and I hated everything about my life. A part of me was watching and listening and was in shock that I blamed my husband for the hatred and the anger when it wasn't his fault. I knew in my gut that it was me that I hated, not him. I hated myself for the incest. I thought I was bad because of it. Almost immediately, I apologized to him and started working on changing me. Our county library only had 3 books about incest and none of them offered much help. I started reading books on self-improvement and started working on letting go of some of my controlling behaviors. Small changes happened but still no work on the incest issues. I didn't even know I still had incest issues. I wanted to pretend that I didn't. Today I know that is called denial and it is very unhealthy. Denial keeps you in the hurt.

My real healing started in January 1989 with my first 12-Step meeting. Since my dad and grandfather were both alcoholics, I was considered an adult child. I choose to not drink because of the fear that I would lose control and be a mean drunk too. Thanks to a book called Adult Children of Alcoholics written by Janet G. Woititz, I looked in my newspaper and found an adult child recovery group. In my mind the alcoholism and incest were intertwined. I couldn't separate the issues even though my dad didn't drink all of the time that he abused me.

I used those 12-Step meetings to talk about the incest. Those caring people believed me and didn't judge me or tell me that I was bad. They told me to get a sponsor and to work the Steps. My sponsor should have been a woman but I didn't trust women. The women in my childhood were all judgmental. One of them even told me when I was 5 years old that I was going to Hell for wearing shorts. I picked a man as my sponsor who I felt safe with. Shortly afterwards, he had me start working the 12 Steps and, after finishing with the first three Steps, writing out a very long 4th Step which had over 100 questions for me to answer about my childhood. I don't remember how long it took me to write out all of those answers but I was healing thru writing for the first time. Writing has always been an important tool to my healing. In writing, I don't censor my thoughts. I just write the words and feelings come out with the memories. I still do this today even. Those 12-Step meetings and the work I did with my sponsor saved my life and my marriage. I learned about codependency and dysfunctional families and so much about myself. I also went to 12-Step meetings for families and friends of alcoholics and found out where so many of my characteristics came from. I have written about those 12-Step meetings and the healing that I did in my blog Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker.                                                       (  http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com  )

I do not remember who directed me to read The Courage to Heal written by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis but I am so grateful that they did. Not long after I finished reading The Courage to Heal, the workbook which was written by Laura Davis came out and I wrote my way thru all of the exercises in the Workbook. Those two books helped me to dig deep into the pain to start to do some major healing. I used those and other books and my 12-Step groups to talk, write and to heal my way thru the worst of my incest issues over the next 10 years. I was also in two different incest survivor counseling groups for a total of about 5 years. Because of the 12-Step concept of a Higher Power, I was also able to heal my relationship with God and myself. This was also the beginning of my spiritual journey.

In 2007, I got my first computer and thru meeting a new friend online who offered me much encouragement to write and share my story and also instructed me on how to set up a blog, my blog Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker came into being June 1, 2007. Its growth has been slow and steady as other survivors have found and supported my articles. Regretfully over the past two years, I haven't written as many articles because of health problems and more time away from the computer. I do appreciate all of the support of my readers. It is thru my blog over the past six years that I have come to know a community of survivors and have in the past three years thru my blog, the use of Facebook and Twitter, I have become an advocate for myself and for other survivors of incest, rape, bullying, sibling abuse and domestic violence. I have spoken on a number of radio programs over the past three years to reach out to other survivors and to tell my story so that others know they can also tell their stories and they will be believed. I am an advocate for children, women and men. I am so grateful that men survivors are now breaking their own silence of abuse. Now the picture will come closer to being accurate. Too many of us have suffered in silence. I want survivors to know that they are not alone. I and others are here to hear you and support you back to health and healing.

Effects Of Incest - When Your Abuser Is Your Dad

Yesterday, I read an article about the Stockholm Syndrome written by CW Seymore Shards of Glass. Today, I was leaving a comment on her link on Facebook when I decided to make it an article for here. Here is the link to CW's article "The 'Stockholm Syndrome' and the Abused!":

http://shardsofglasscwseymore.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-stockholm-syndrome-and-abused.html

Here is what I wanted to share with you.

When the abuser is your dad, you have a love/hate relationship. You love the dad that says he loves you and makes you laugh and feel good but you hate the dad who abuses you, calls you names, and makes you feel worthless just because you were born a female.

I hated the man that used me for his own sexual pleasures before I was old enough to understand what he was doing. I hated that he took that first time that was supposed to be special away from my husband and me.

Instead of excitement and shyness, I was filled with dread and guilt. I felt shame because that wasn't my first time. I loved my husband but I had so many mixed up, messed up feelings about sex before of the incest.

When my dad forced me to have sex with him, I would close my eyes and go deep inside until it was over. I thank God that my dad was never interested in me enjoying the act. Because of that lack of caring on my dad's part and that of my other abusers, I can separate the sex that was had with them from the love making that occurs between my husband and me in our marriage bed.

Through the love and patience of my husband, I have been able to stay present and experience pleasure in the act of love making. I wasn't the best of partners in the bedroom because of the incest. I had to realize that my husband was not like my dad. My husband taught me how to enjoy my body and his. I have been very blessed and it took time for that to happen.

Spouses of incest survivors don't have an easy road either. They deal with lots of stuff that they don't understand because the incest survivor can't explain what she/he often doesn't understand either. Some of us tell our spouses about the abuse. Others don't. I can tell you that I was married for eight years before I told my husband because I was afraid he would leave if he knew the shame that I carried around inside of me. I wasn't afraid of how he would feel about my dad. I was afraid of what he might think/feel about me. He didn't turn away in disgust. He continued to love me and gave me the needed time and space to work through my major issues.

My dad wasn't my first abuser in my memories that I have but his attitude toward me, women, marriage and toward sex were what took away from my first time with my husband in case you are thinking, well, she told us that her dad wasn't my first. I don't know who my first sexual abuser was. The first one in my memories at age 11 was an uncle. The one who caused the most hurt and emotional damage was my dad who became my sexual abusers within a month of being abused by my uncle. My dad was the one who influenced the way I saw myself and my life.

Who was my first sexual abuser that caused me to think of myself as an adulteress at the age of three? I don't know. I don't have access to those memories, just the clue that I believed myself to be an adulteress at age three. That is a very strong memory that I do have and one of the clues that I was being sexually abused by someone at a much younger age than 11 when my memories of abuse do start.

Here is blog post written by another friend of mine, also on the topic of Stockholm Syndrome.

http://vigaland.blogspot.com/2012/07/now-i-get-it-i-have-ss-stockholm.html

I am going to end this post with something that I left in a comment after reading the above article:

I do understand the loving your father, hating the lover. When someone tells me that love and hate can't live in the same heart. I tell them they are not incest survivors.
Patricia

Time Does Not Heal All The Wounds Of Incest

"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.'
I do not agree.
The wounds remain. In time, the mind,
protecting its sanity,
covers them with scar tissue
and the pain lessens.
But it is never gone."
    - Rose Kennedy -

I borrowed this quote, with permission, from http://facebook.com/groups/rapesurvivorsunite . The page is called Rape Survivors Unite.

I don't get angry when I hear someone say, "time heals all wounds." but in my mind I add the words, "unless you are a child abuse or incest victim/survivor." I don't get angry at these people because I know they are well-intensioned and probably feel helpless in the face of the horrors of child abuse and incest. Just imagine how those of us who have lived through child abuse or incest must feel. We don't need platitudes from well-meaning people. We need authentic love and support and we need to be believed when we tell our stories.

I have never questioned whether my memories are true, but some survivors do. I have too many memories of being told I was going somewhere with my dad in his truck. I lived with the knowledge and stress of knowing that before we came home my dad would find some quiet dirt road or an empty pasture to pull into to rape me before returning home to pretend that nothing had happened and to pretend that everything was normal.

For a long time, I didn't call the sexual abuse by its name of rape. I always thought of rape as being physically violent. Someone then told me that rape happened anytime you are threatened or coerced into having sex that you didn't want and that you didn't give permission for. Incest with a child by an adult counts as rape because a child can't give his or her permission to be sexually violated. My emotional scars are much deeper than any physical scars might be. Physical scars affect your body and eventually fade and disappear. Emotional scars are much harder to heal and may never completely go away. As Rose Kennedy says the pain lessens but the scars are still there.

I would love to believe that "time heals all wounds." Incest and rape affect your mind, emotions, and your body on so many levels. Some levels heal quickly. Others don't. At almost 61 years old, I am still waiting to see if time heals all. I have been doing this healing work since 1989. If I lived to be 1000 years old, I might could say "time heals all wounds." So far time has not healed all of my wounds.

When I was 38 years old in 1989, I finally had the courage to open the door to incest and to look it in the face. I didn't know, that at almost 61, I would still be working to clean out that room of issues. The cleaning out is still taking place but isn't as intense or of long duration now but it is still going on. Because of my own healing journey, I know that your life can get better. Mine is so much better now than it has ever been. The support and love of my husband is the greatest blessing that has enabled me to work on my own healing. I love you, Daniel.
Patricia

Denial: Pretending Everything Is Okay Doesn't Mean Everything Is Okay

Most of the time denial is not helpful. Sometimes it is. Denial can actually save a life or at least a person's sanity, for awhile, when that person is living with abuse on a daily basis like many children do.

Using denial to leave the abuse behind at home helped me to feel safe each day when I went to school. I always loved going to school. I hated summers and holidays that I couldn't go to school.

I had teachers who cared about me and helped me to feel proud that I could excel at something and make good grades. I didn't get that praise and acknowledgment at home.

On the other hand, those same teachers didn't recognise that I was being abused at home. I had no physical signs of abuse on my body but even if I had, I don't know that the teachers could have or would have done anything about the incest in the 1950's and 1960's in America. A man had more freedom then to do as he pleased with his wife and children and often the law would not intervene. The awareness of abuse just wasn't there or if it was, it was rarely acted upon.

Pretending that everything is okay when it isn't, as an adult, is not helpful most of the time. The very same denial, that protected me as a child, worked against me as an adult. Denial comes at a high cost to the human body and mind.

Holding back emotions, hiding from memories, refusing to see the abuse that is going on or went on in the past - all of these can cause stress that wears out the body and harms the mind of the victim. I didn't know how much energy it took to hold on to my denial until I let go of it.

Holding in emotions rather than feeling them takes tremendous mental control. Your body carries all of that stress whether you want to accept it or not. The stress of shutting down emotionally can do harm in the physical realm of the body by causing symptoms like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and many other conditions.

If you are in denial, stop. Give your mind and body a break. You deserve to have a full life. That doesn't happen when you are in denial. For you to heal, and you are definitely worth taking the time and effort to heal, the denial must go. Yes, letting go of the denial, initially, hurts more. That stage doesn't last. You can get past the hurt. You can survive feeling the hurt. Then as you let go of the hurt, through feeling it, you will heal.

As you heal, joy and peace become a possibility that you can open yourself up to. Ask any survivor/thriver, if letting go of the denial and feeling the pain was worth what they have today. They will tell you that it was. Please do this for yourself. You are worth it.
Patricia

Related Articles:

Resources For An Incest Survivor And Adult Children Of Dysfunctional Families @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2012/04/resources-for-incest-survivor-and-adult.html

Childhood Memories @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/10/childhood-memories.html

Dialogues With Dignity And 22 Ways To Love Yourself @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2012/01/dialogues-with-dignity-and-22-ways-to.html

Memories, Disbelief And Self-Doubt

So many survivors have to deal with the disbelief of others when they recover new memories of abuse. I have plenty of memories of being sexually abused from the age of 11-17. I never lost those memories. I have always remembered.

When I recovered the memory of calling myself an adulteress at age 3, I wondered why I don't have the memories to support that one clue? Then I realized that a 3 year old may have trouble holding on to memories that they don't have the tools to deal with and still survive the horror of the abuse.

Survivors often share the doubts of others as to whether their memories are true. That self-doubt doesn't mean the abuse didn't happen. It just means that the abuse is sometimes easier to forget than to deal with the horror of remembering.  Our brain allows us to remember when it is safe to look at those memories.

This post is from an edited comment that I left on the post of an online friend on his blog article "The Wounded Warrior: Witness To My Shame." Here is the link for that blog post if you would like to read it:

http://whatislove-2010.blogspot.com/2012/01/witness-to-my-shame.html

Thank you Jan for sharing your story so that other survivors can read your story and be inspired to do their own healing.
Patricia

Happy New Year From Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker

I am hoping that you all had a wonderful Christmas this year. In saying that, I know that for many survivors, Christmas and other holidays are not always happy. Too many memories seem to come up of past childhood holidays that were very unhappy. In my own childhood, holidays meant my dad was off work, which meant more opportunies for drinking, also more opportunities for his little trips to town which meant more sexual abuse events for me to endure.  When my dad got drunk, he was like his dad and got mean.  Not physically mean, usually, but verbally, emotionally mean which can have longer lasting effects upon others than physical abuse where the bruises eventually go away. I don't mean to sound like I am downplaying physical abuse.  I would never do that.  I know that some have died and many have nearly died from physical abuse.  Emotional abuse leaves long lasting scars that may never go away.

This Christmas, I didn't experience any of those memories or thoughts about my childhood. I did share one good memory from when I was about 8 years old with my son-in-law while we were talking about the existence of Santa Claus.  We were at my paternal grandparents' house, spending the night on Christmas Eve.  My dad came from a family of 13 kids.  He was the 3rd from the oldest so I grew up with the younger ones. Around 8:00 p.m. all of the kids were made to go to bed.  I remember being so excited about Santa coming the next morning. I don't think that my dad was the only one of the older siblings who was visiting their parents' house that night. The house was full of kids and adults.  I remember the adults seemed as excited as the kids all were. I rarely slept when we were at my grandparents' house even when it wasn't Christmas because I always got stuck sleeping in the middle of two other kids. I would get too hot to sleep. With the excitement of Christmas, I laid there most of the night listening to the excited talking of the adults in the rest of the house. They got to bed sometime in the early hours of the morning.  The kids started waking up at daylight.  We couldn't open any presents until the grown-ups were awake. I don't remember what I got as a gift from Santa.  I just remember the wonderment of Santa and Christmas.  That is one of the good memories of childhood that I cherish.

This Christmas was full of good memories too.  Around my birthday on December 11, we exchanged Christmas gifts with our son and his wife.  On December 18, Daniel and I got on a bus to go to Boise, Idaho where our daughter and her family live.  Daniel decided that he wanted to spend Christmas with our grandchildren this year.  We have not spent a Christmas with our daughter since her oldest daughter was eight months old.  We have four grandchildren that we wanted to celebrate Christmas with. We had a wonderful week of visiting with them - Christmas shopping after we got to Idaho, going out to eat at a nearby Mall where Daniel loves a chicken dish at a cajun restaurant in their Food Court, a baptism for our middle two grandchildren into the Mormom church, visiting with all of our son-in-law's family that came for the baptism, Christmas Eve dinner with our daughter and her family at our son-in-law's cousins' house.  Best of all was watching our grandchildren open all of their presents Christmas morning.  We drove to the nearby Sawtooth Mountains the day after Christmas to experience the beauty of the mountains and snow.  We saw cross-country skiers, antelope, snow mobilers, and beautiful snow covered mountains. 

Daniel loved the time at our daughter's but hated the two bus trips.  The last one was the worst.  We watched our last bus driver break up a fight and threaten to kick two people off the bus.  We had one young man who was probably on drugs of some kind.  He talked loudly almost non-stop until about 3:00 a.m. when he finally shut up and went to sleep.  No one woke him up at our Ft. Smith, Arkansas stop because we were all tired of his talking and cursing.  He was just loud enough that the bus driver could ignore him.  We left Oklahoma City 45 minutes late and so when we got to Little Rock at 6:40 a.m. on December 30, we had missed our connection to Hot Springs by about 30 minutes.  I called our son and daughter-in-law to let them know that the next bus to Hot Springs was at 7:00 p.m.  Our son was already at work.  Our daughter-in-law came to N. Little Rock to pick us up after I was able to give her the address for the bus station.  An employee of the bus station told us that the bus from Oklahoma City was always late and that we should call for a taxi to take us home.  I told him I would only do that if the bus station was willing to pay the bill.  He said no they wouldn't do that. 

On Monday, I plan to call the bus company and complain.  At two of our transfer points, we were the last ones on the bus and filled it to capacity.  One of those stops there weren't any more passengers waiting to get on the bus.  At the second stop, about 8-10 people were in line behind us and had to wait for the next bus to come along.  All of this may have been because we were traveling for the holidays but I was not impressed by customer service at all or by most of the bus drivers.  Daniel says we won't travel by bus again.  I kept a good mood until we missed our bus in N. Little Rock.  I remained nice to the bus personel but I will make an official complaint.  We had to put gas in our son's car after our daughter-in-law came and got us.  We stopped in Benton, Arkansas at Waffle House on the way home for breakfast.  Instead of getting home around 7:00 a.m., we got home around 9:30 or 10:00 a.m.  Our journey was a great experience overall with only minor frustrations along the way. 

I am glad that I had my husband Daniel to experience the adventure with me.  The highlight of the trip was the day after Christmas when our oldest granddaughter posted a comment on her Facebook page saying that our visit was the best Christmas present that she had ever received.  That made our day.

Today is the last day of 2011.  It has been a year of struggle and triumph, tears and joy, awe and wonder. Some experiences I would not want to repeat.  Those hopefully were lessons that I learned so they don't have to be repeated.  They were mostly relationship lessons which can sometimes be the hardest when people get hurt and friendships end. My best friend had a heart attack and I didn't know about it for several weeks because we weren't speaking at the time. That was a first for us. We have never had any major disagreements like this before. I am very glad that she survived and so has our friendship.  It scared us both.  The year ended with our trip to Idaho and back home.  We had a great time.

I want to end this year of 2011 on a good note as I wish all of my readers and friends a very Happy New Year for 2012.
Patricia

Merry Christmas For 2011

I want to wish all of my subscribers Merry Christmas for 2011. I appreciate you reading my blog and also leaving you comments and letting me know what you think and feel after reading my posts.

Christmas can bring on a confusing mixture of thoughts, memories and feelings for survivors. Some Christmases, like this one, are full of joy, excitement and peace with myself and with the world.

Other Christmases can bring memories of the past, from my childhood of incest and emotional abuse.  Christmas, as a child, meant that my dad would be off for a few extra days which meant more drinking in excess.  I can't tell you what year my dad went from being an occasional heavy drinker to being an alcoholic. In my memory, my grandfather was always an alcoholic who was a binge drinker who drank on weekends until he would pass out usually on Saturday night. My dad was very attached to his father so we spent almost every weekend with my grandparents at their house. For me the weekends with my paternal grandparents started around the age of seven. Before that a lot of my time was spent with my maternal grandmother and the uncle that lived with her. For those of you who are new to my blog, these extended visits started when I was two years old and got whooping cough.  I couldn't stay at home because if my baby brother got the disease, he could have died from it. My point in revisiting this is to let you know that the family disease of alcoholism has always been a part of my life and played a big part in my painful memories around Christmas.

My father and grandfather were both mean drunks.  Because of this, many of my Christmases were not filled with happy memories. Some Christmases, those memories come up and are in my face. Those Christmases are sad. I used to try to stuff my way through those days with food.  When that didn't work, I tried to just ignore the feelings.  Neither of those methods of coping worked for me for very long. The feelings were still there. I have learned that I just have to feel what I feel. There is no way around feelings. Letting myself be sad or letting myself be happy is not just ok but is very necessary if I want to be healthy physically and emotionally.

This year, I am happy and excited. My husband and I are going on an adventure. I have never done this before. My husband has, but for shorter distances. As a Saggittarian, I am supposed to be adventurous. As a child that was kept hidden in me as was many other things along with the secret of incest.

We are going to visit our daughter, son-in-law and four grandchildren. We are not driving. We are going by bus which will take two days.  When we get to Boise, our daughter is going to pick us up and take us out for breakfast.  Then we will probably go back to her house and crash from lack of sleep.  I doubt either of us will get much sleep on a moving bus.

We are going from Hot Springs to Little Rock, Arkansas to Kansas City, Missouri to Denver, Colorado to Laramie, Wyoming to Salt Lake City, Utah to Boise, Idaho. We will have many short stops along the way to pick up and let off more passengers. Our longest layover is five hours in Kansas City.

We come back a different way. The route stays the same from Boise to Denver. Rather than going through Kansas and Missouri, we come back through Amarillo, Texas to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma to Ft. Smith, Arkansas to Little Rock and then on to Hot Springs in time for an early breakfast and then to crash in our own bed at home. Our longest layover on the return trip is five minutes short of three hours in Salt Lake City.

We get to see our two middle grandchildren being baptised into the Mormon church a day or so before Christmas. Our daughter and son-in-law are excited about that. I am excited for them to be raising their children in the religion of their choice. I didn't have that as a child. Neither of my parents went to church. My son-in-law was raised Mormon, my daughter was raised in the Church of Christ as was my husband. I am happy that they have a church family that they are happy with and that loves them.

This will be the first Christmas that we have spent with our daughter since her oldest daughter was a baby of eight months. Shortly after that Christmas, they moved to Idaho.  Our youngest grandson who just turned six less than a month ago keeps asking his mom if today is the day that grandma and grandpa are coming.  Our oldest grandson will turn ten on the day that we leave Hot Springs.  He will have to wait for us to tell him Happy Birthday when he sees us two days later in person. He was born seven days after my birthday.  Both of our grandsons are Saggittarians like their grandma.

I have my next post already written and scheduled to come out on December 26. Please feel free to post comments but I may be a little slow in getting them published along with my reply.  I will probably have limited access to a computer once I get to my daughter's.  I will have the two days there and two days back on the bus that I won't have access to a computer at all. Thank you all for your patience. With my daughter and grandchildren around, I won't be spending much time on the computer.

Sending love and Christmas blessings to you all. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Below I am sharing some of my blog posts from Christmases past for those of you who weren't here to read them the first time.
Patricia

Related Articles:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year To All @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/12/merry-christmas-and-happy-new-year-to.html

The Spirit Of Christmas @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2009/12/spirit-of-christmas.html

Christmas Is Over For 2008 @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/12/christmas-is-over-for-2008.html

Cry When You Need To @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/12/cry-when-you-need-to.html

Shutting Down To Get Through The Holidays @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2009/12/shutting-down-to-get-through-holidays.html

How To Write A Book - Automatic Author Tutorial - Slade Roberson

A highlight of my day on Thursday, October 20 was an email that I received from my friend Slade Roberson.  Slade emailed me to let me know that I had been picked to receive a free copy of his Automatic Author program along with 2-Author Consultations.  If you are like me have an idea to write your own story for future generations to read, then you can find Slade's Automatic Author Tutorial at the following link:

http://sladeroberson.com/automatic-author

I have used one of Slade's tutorials in the past that took me step by step through the process of setting up this blog.  Without that tutorial, this blog would not exist.  I am still very limited in the technical skills that I have for using my computer.  That is one of the reasons that you won't find pictures at the head of each of my posts.  One of these days, I will have my daughter-in-law sit down with me and write out step by step how to download pictures on to my blog.  My daughter is the one who posted the picture of my husband and me for my profile picture.

Slade knows that I have recently made the committment to my family and friends telling them that I am going to write a memoir of my experiences with childhood incest and the healing journey that I have been going through for the past 20+ years.  I have already decided that my memory of being what I called a "3-year-old adulteress" is going to be the beginning of my story since it is one of my earliest memories.  I am not sure where my story will go after that.  My earliest memories of the incest happening didn't happen until I was 11 years old.  I still need to decide exactly what I want the focus of my book to be.  Do I just want to write one book like my friend Colleen Spiro has done in her book The Third Floor Window or divide my life up into more than one book as my friend Dan L. Hays has done.  Dan's first book is called Freedom's Just Another Word.  He is currently working on book number two which is due out sometime in 2012.  Reading both of those memoirs has given me much encouragement to write my own.

I have lots of encouragement from you, my readers, my friends and my family to write this book. With Slade's Automatic Author Tutorial, I have no reason to put off writing this book any longer. Now I am going to sit down and start reading the tutorial.

Before I do that, I need to apologize to my readers for not writing much on Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker recently.  I am going through some minor health problems which I hope will be resolved soon.  As minor as they are, my energy levels have been low lately.  I feel just bad enough to not get much done throughout the day. 

With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up, that needs to change.  Family is coming to our house for Thanksgiving and I have major house cleaning and rearranging to do so that everyone will fit and have room to move around.  I love it when my family and Daniel's come to visit.  It takes a lot of preparation to get ready for them.  We will have about 11 or 12 people in the house for about 3-4 days.  My house is noisy and full of love, disagreements, and compromise as families do when they get together for any period of time. I am blessed with the wonderful mother-in-law and sister-in-law that I dearly love. It is the 3 brothers, of which my husband is the baby of the family, that usually provides the noise.  They are all in their 60's now and losing their hearing so they talk loud because none of them wants to spend the money to get a hearing aid. The youngest of the clan who will be gathering here are two sisters - twin 4-year-old who have me wishing that I had just a little of their energy.  They are sweethearts, who being four like a lot of attention.  They are easy to give it to.  Being around children can keep you young at heart. Being around them also gives me reason to miss my grandchildren who live in Idaho.  They are all growing up so fast. I hope that you are all having a glorious October and enjoying the Fall weather and colors.  Autumn is my favorite time of the year.
Patricia

Related Articles:

The Most Influencial Person---#4---Birth Of A Dream
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/07/most-influencial-person-4-birth-of.html

Out Of My Comfort Zone---The Third Floor Window
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2009/09/out-of-my-comfort-zone-third-floor.html

"Freedom's Just Another Word" Book Review
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/04/freedoms-just-another-word-book-review.html

Let's Talk About Spirit Guides Teleconference With Andrea Hess And Slade Roberson
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/11/lets-talk-about-spirit-guides.html

Name It, Claim It, Make It So---Intention To Hear Your Spirit Guides
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/09/name-it-claim-it-make-it-so-intention.html

Guest Blogger Jane Rowan and The River of Forgetting

Hope that all of my American friends had a great 4th of July.  Today I have a special treat for my readers.  I have my first ever Guest Blogger, Jane Rowan author of the book The River of Forgetting here to answer some interview questions about herself and her book.

Thank you Jane for consenting to do this written interview with me so that my readers can learn more about you and your book.  I just finished reading your book a few days ago.  Your book is an amazing tale of recovery from incest through the use of Inner Child work.  Your story shows your courage and stamina in dealing with fragmented memories and frightened inner children. I knew a little bit about your story because of our initial contact on Twitter and on your webpage.  I was curious to understand how a person with only fragmented memories, at best, could go about healing from the wounds of incest.  I have six years of memories of my own incest abuse.

Why I was interested in reading Ms Rowan's book? Because I also have clues that my incest abuse started before the age of three.  I have a very definite clue in that at three years old, I labeled myself an adulteress.  I have no memories to go with that clue showing that I might have been sexually abused early in my childhood.  I was interested to see if Jane ever got her full memories back or had to work on just the clues.  I will soon be starting my own inner child work to see what I can recover.  I know that the memories are there being held somewhere in my child's mind and in my body-memories.  Like for Jane, my memories of this early incest are held by my younger inner children.  Inner child work is often the key to healing from abuse.

Welcome to my written interview with Jane Rowan, author of The River of Forgetting.  Ms Rowan's words are shown in italics.



1.  Can you tell my readers a little about your life before the memories started to surface?

As a science professor, I was busy and successful. I loved teaching.  The politics with some of my colleagues really got to me at times, and I found myself in conflicts fairly often.  Being a strong woman in a male field isn't easy, but my need for control was perhaps a bit excessive. I was divorced, with one grown son, and my father had died just a year before the memories began coming.  I didn't feel defective but my friendships were a bit unsatisfying and I was probably uptight.

2.  What triggered your memories?

Several things, I think.  My father's death was one factor. My son was out of the house, so I had more energy to tend to my own needs. I had been in therapy for a few years, and was thinking of terminating, when my therapist asked, "So what about relationships?"

For some reason, that question about relationships really struck deep, and I admitted I didn't have enough closeness in my life. Then one day when my therapist asked about how my Inner Child was feeling, I found myself in a profound fog, really far out there and lost.  It was dissociation, of course.  Then just a few days later, I literally woke up, first thing in the morning, to the first memory.  It was a very complete sensory memory of sitting on the toilet when I was only three years old, and it hurt to pee; I could see the bathroom and where the door was, and the bathtub and the window.  I didn't know what had happened to make me hurt.  I just knew that my mother's explanation of it was wrong.  That's what started me on the "detective story of the soul" that is my life and my book.

3.  What made you decide to write a memoir?

I'd been keeping a journal for years and years already.  When these memories began to overwhelm me with waves of feelings - doubt, nausea, grief, fear, rage - I needed to write more and more just to stay sane.  After six years of therapy about the abuse, when I saw light and joy coming into my life, I experienced such a wave of gratitude that I wanted to celebrate my work in therapy, the amazing process that it can be, and my therapist's skill and care.

It seemed natural, even mandatory, to write it out and share it.  Of course, as I wrote I experienced the feelings over again and understood more and more, so the book has layers of meaning for me and , hopefully, for the reader.  Readers tell me it takes them inside the therapy process as no other book does, and helps them see from the inside what the transformation can be like.  Although survivors' experiences differ, many of the emotions and reactions are the same.

4.  Give us a brief preview of your book.

My memoir begins at that moment when I woke up one morning with the memory I described to you above.  For the first year, I wrestled with daily doubts that anything could have happened within my loving, eccentric family.  Fortunately, I already was seeing a terrific, empathic therapist who was my lifeline through all of this.  As I delved into my past, I remembered snapshots of childhood memories of boat trips and daily life and endearing oddities, but also my father's affairs and strange things he said about sex. Then a specific body-memory came to me and whirled me into nausea and confusion.  It had no visual components but it was vivid and compelling. I could not have made up a flashback like this.  It was awful.

I found myself incredibly angry at my mother for her passivity that enabled my father to abuse me.  Then as she aged and was dying, I had to decide whether to confront her. Incidents at work brought out my latent anger and I learned to apprciate its positive power.  There was a creepy year in which a stranger sent obscene harassing letters to my workplace, in an intense reminder of the abuse.  Through all these life-events I continued to make sense of my early trauma and to befriend and care for the young self, my inner child, who had lived through and repressed the incest.  Gradually I came to feel love, joy and creativity in ways that were really new in my life.  And writing the book itself brought me to a new level of creative expression, catapulting me into retirement.

Thank you Jane for giving us insights into yourself, your journey through healing the pain of yourself and your inner children and your book.  I appreciate the the fact that you speak out about incest and the issues that go hand in hand with incest.  Gladly I will recommend this book to my friends.  As more of us speak out about our own abuse issues and how we healed ourselves, we give others the courage to start their own healing journeys.

If you are interested in knowing more about Jane Rowan and her book The River of Forgetting, you can go to the links that I will provide below.  The first link that I am sharing was from a radio interview that Jane did sometime last week. I hope that you will take the time to listen to this informative interview.


A BOOK AND A CHAT WITH STORYHEART
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/across-the-pond/2011/06/28/a-book-and-a-chat-with-jane-rowan

The River of Forgetting: A Memoir of Healing from Sexual Abuse
http://riverofforgetting.com/

Website
http://janerowan.com/

Blog
http://janechild.blogspot.com/

Again, thank you Jane for approaching me about this Guest Blogger article.  I appreciate the struggle that you went through to share your story and your book with other survivors of childhood sexual abuse. In sharing our experiences with incest and our healing journey out of incest, we help other survivors to know they are not alone and that they too can heal.
Patricia

A Story Of Incest And Healing - Guest Post At Bongo Is Me Blog

My second guest blog article of the week appeared today at the blog of Bongo Is Me.  Bonnie has put a Trigger Warning on the post.  Apparently it needs one from the comments that I got this morning.  Here is what Bonnie says about my post and me.

"This is the Eleventh in a series of guest posts .....it's about real struggle..real life...real pain...and getting through to the other side....thank you to all my guests for helping me find my voice....
This woman Patricia Singleton writes an amazing blog about her journey through incest and how she survives today..she shares her courageous story here..
I am honored to have her here..Please show Patricia the love and encouragement you have to me..."

Bonnie, thank you so much for asking me to do a guest blog article for you.  I appreciate the opportunity.

The name of my blog article is A Story Of Incest And Healing.  The link to this article is

http://bongoisme.blogspot.com/2011/06/trigger-warningincestreal-life-series.html#axzz1TVeXl09Z

This is one of the most difficult posts that I have ever written.  According to the first comments on the Bongo Is Me Blog, reading my guest post caused three people to cry.  I cried reading their comments.  The last two blog posts have both been guest blog articles and have been the hardest for me to write.  Both pulled the feelings out of me that I felt on Father's Day.  I felt vulnerable and raw.  Both of those articles are the first time that I have ever recorded in writing the details of my first two remembered experiences  of incest.  Approach both of them with caution if you are an incest survivor. They are not easy reading.
Patricia

Related Posts:

Guest Post At S.A.S.S.U Sexual Assault Survivors Standing
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2011/06/guest-post-at-sassu-sexual-assault.html

Today Is Father's Day
@ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2011/06/today-is-fathers-day.html

Guest Post At S.A.S.S.U Sexual Assault Survivors Standing

Several weeks ago, Jacquese whose blog is S.A.S.S.U Assault Survivors Standing asked me to do a guest blog article for her.  We only met recently on Twitter.  I liked quite a few of the comments that Jacquese left on Twitter and so I commented back.  I read her blog and left a comment or two.  Here is what Jacquese says about her blog.

"S.A.S.S.U is devoted to providing healing, empowerment, education and resources to males and females who are survivors of Sexual Assault/Abuse and  molestation or family members and friends who support survivors.  You DO NOT have to be a survivor to support this movement."

I like what this says about Jacquese and her blog.  Like me, she is dedicated to helping survivors.  From what I have seen of Jacquese, she is a wise and caring woman, so when she asked me to write a guest blog article I said yes.

The title of the article is a collaberation between Jacquese and me.  I hope you will join me in going to Jacquese's blog S.A.S.S.U Sexual Assault Survivors Standing to read my blog article which we decided to call

Incest:  Protect Your Children which you will find at the following link:

http://sassuempowerment.blogspot.com/2011/06/incestprotect-your-children.html

Jacquese, thank you for this opportunity for me to reach a new audience of survivors.  I appreciate the work that you are doing to help other survivors and their families and friends. 

Readers, please leave a comment on S.A.S.S.U for Jacquese and me but also come back here and let me know what you think about the article as well. Have a glorious weekend.
Patricia

EFT And Tapping On Memories From Childhood

Reclaiming Our Days, Meditation for incest survivors, Helena See, A Fireside/Parkside Meditation Book, Simon & Schuster, New York, New York, 1993, page for April 1:

" 'There are many ways of crying.'
'Yes.'  My tears were hidden behind my grinning mask face.
'Yes, there are.' "
    - VERA RANDAL

"We have all spent a lifetime hiding our tears, our fears, our rage, and our pain.  We cover up our feelings from everyone around us and from ourselves.  It feels safe this way.  Safer to hide and be alone with the feelings deep inside.  So many years of fear and abuse taught us it was safer to die alone inside than risk showing ourselves to anyone else.

To heal we must start taking that risk.  It hurts, its terrifying, it requires concentration and effort to show our emotions rather than hide them.  It is a new way of life.  We can start off slowly, making absolutely sure that the person we choose to share our insides with will gently hold them in his or her heart.  Even with a safe person it won't feel safe or easy.  It is a risk, a risk we must take.

We will be surprised to find that a trusted friend is honored to see our pain, to be the recipient of our gift of honesty and openness.  We will find that a new world opens up for both of us, a world of being real, a world of intimacy.  We will find that this is a freer world, a world full of hope.  And we will find that we belong in it.

When I share my inner self I show my friends how much I value them."


In working with my Grief class and my EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) counselor in the past few weeks, I have come to realize that I still am not aware of everything that I feel.  I am not aware of the anger in me except when the volcano in me is erupting and lava is flowing over me and whoever lit the fuse that started the explosion.  Most of the time that person with the match is my husband.  Why?  Because he is a safe person for me to get angry at.  I doubt very much that he appreciates the fact that he is a safe person in my world.  He is the one that gets to see all the many facets of my emotions.

I had my second EFT session on Thursday of this week.  We talked about me having a love/hate relationship with attention from other people.  What came to mind was a memory from the twelfth grade.


My dad controlled all of the money in our family.  He didn't let any of us, including my mother, work.  I never got to work after school or on weekends like so many kids do.  I never learned to handle money as a kid because the only way that I got money if I wanted to buy something was to skip eating lunch at school.  I bought birthday cards for my parents and brother and sister this way.  If I wanted to eat in town, off of the school campus, I would get to eat one day and go without the rest of the week.  This was the 1960's and school lunches were 25 cents a day. 

I didn't wear makeup like the other girls in school because my parents wouldn't buy it for me.  This was another way for my dad to keep me from growing up.  In the twelfth grade, I saved my lunch money for several weeks to buy some eye makeup.  One morning when I got to school, I went into the girl's bathroom and put on my eye makeup.  Nobody said anything about it all day long until I got to my Senior English class.  After the class, my teacher called my name and told me that I looked pretty with my eye makeup on.  I was so pleased with myself and her complement.  I told her thank you and left.  As soon as I got home that day, I washed the makeup off before either of my parents could see me.  I never wore makeup to high school again.

You might ask why when my teacher thought it was so pretty on me?  I loved the attention from the teacher.  I was terrified by the teacher's attention.  One minute I was happy about the attention from my teacher and the next minute I was terrified.  Why?  Because in my life, most of the attention that I got was sexual.  Except for this one day, I did my best to fade into the woodwork.  The only thing that I excelled in was school work.  I made mostly A's and B's with a few C's.  I loved school because it and books were how I escaped my world of abuse.

We discussed this memory and tapped on it on Thursday during my EFT session.  My counselor asked where I felt the terror from that day.  I told him my throat felt like it was closing up with the terror.  We tapped on that fear and releasing it.  Usually it takes more than one round of tapping to remove the memories from my body.  I start out each session feeling the fear in a body part, usually my solar plexus for anger or fear.  This time the fear was in my throat.  We tapped on "All attention is sexual attention."  Then we tapped on "All attention doesn't have to be sexual." 

Next we talked about the volcano of anger and rage that comes up and out all over my husband and me.  We tapped on the volcano inside of me and changed it from being destructive to being constructive.  We tapped on "The volcano inside of me is just energy."  "The energy of the volcano can be turned into a passion for life, for living."  When we finished, I didn't feel dark and heavy any more.  I feel joyful.  I told my counselor that I like the way that I feel after a session.  I left the session smiling and full of joy.

I don't know how much writing I will get done on my blog for the next three weeks.  My daughter, son-in-law and four grandchildren are right now driving through Kansas on their way here.  They left Idaho when my son-in-law got off work yesterday afternoon and drove all night.  They will be here in Hot Springs, Arkansas sometime early tomorrow morning (Sunday).  Our son-in-law is flying back home on Monday.  He couldn't get off for more than a few days.  Our daughter and grandchildren will be here visiting for three weeks.  My husband and I are excited to have them visiting.  We only get to see them usually once a year.  Usually we go out to Idaho.  This time they are visiting us so all of the family will get to see them.  Everyone is excited.
Patricia

Dear Seven-Year-Old Patricia - Inner Child Letters Series

Happy 4th of July all my fellow Americans.  Hope you had a glorious weekend of picnics, swimming, fishing, and fireworks.  Here are two past posts that I wrote about my thoughts about independence:

True Independence Comes From In-dependence @ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/07/true-independence-comes-from-in.html

Independence, Not Just For A Day @ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2008/07/independence-not-just-for-day.html
Even though I wrote them two years ago, they still hold true for me today.

Next, I want you to go to the blog Emerging From Broken and read Darlene's post from July 3.  You will find it at the following link @ http://emergingfrombroken.com/low-self-esteem-shame-depression-and-the-first-step/
Be sure to read all of the comments too.  Some of them made me cry.  Thank you Darlene for expressing what it feels like to be a child who has been abused and what it feels like to be an adult who has survived that abuse.  It is often a hard road but we can become more than survivors and move into thriving.  The key is learning to love ourselves and letting go of and refusing to believe the lies that we were told as children.


Here is my next installment on the Inner Child Letters Series.  This is the letter to my inner seven year old:

Dear Seven-Year-Old Patricia,
I started to call you Patty but that didn't feel right.  You are maybe the first that was called yourself Patricia.  Like with three-year-old Patty, I don't know what happened to you.  I don't have any memories of abuse.  I have always known that something big happened to you, to us, that year.  I need to say "us" because I need to stop distancing myself from you and from whatever it is that I don't remember.  I am the child that these things happened to and I am the adult looking back trying to remember and, in failing to remember, still knowing that I have amends to make to you and apologies to make for not listening to you and not taking care of you all of these years of our life.  I do love you.  I will take care of you and protect you from all possible hurt as much as I have the ability to. 

I don't know what you are protecting my mind from knowing but I thank you for it.  I know that you did the best that you could as a seven-year-old child to protect yourself from whatever happened.  It hasn't been blocked completely because I have always been aware that something happened, I just don't know what it was.  I know that it was major or the memories wouldn't be blocked.  I can guess that it was possibly more sexual abuse, but it is only a guess.

What I do know from that year is that my maternal grandmother's house burned to the ground.  What I just got was that we were left with my uncle while my parents went to make sure that my grandmother was okay.  This is the uncle that raped me when I was eleven years old.  This was the uncle that took my brother, sister and I to work with him on his garbage route and got my brother and sister so drunk that they both got terribly sick and he thought it was funny.  I didn't drink because I have never liked the taste of beer.  This was sometime around the same time period within a year or so.  Part of me wanted to quit breathing as I typed this.  Another possibly clue but still no memories?

Before I was seven years old, my parents would let me spend a lot of time with my maternal grandmother.  I had a very strong connection to my Grandmother Howe because when I was two years old and got whooping cough, I was taken to stay with her and my Uncle Albert who lived with her at the time.  Until I started to school at age five, I would spend weeks or months at a time with them. After I started to school, I would spend a month or more with them during the summer months.  Then when I was seven, Dad refused to let me stay with them anymore.  That summer was the last time that I got to spend large amounts of time with them.  After that I got to visit with them only when my family went to visit on holidays.  I missed those happy times with them.  I never knew what changed and why I couldn't go to visit them anymore.

Around age seven is when I remember having headaches for the first time.  I remember spending large amounts of time outside by myself.  I remember a very religious aunt telling me that I was going to Hell because I was wearing shorts.  I remember not liking her or her daughter after that summer.

This is just bits and pieces of memories and nothing concrete to say that I was abused, just possibilities. 

Dear Seven-Year-Old Patricia, I hope that you will learn to trust me and will reveal your secrets to me one day.  I know that I can protect you and I will continue to love you no matter what secrets you hide.  Know that I am strong enough to take whatever you want to tell me now and in the future.  I will not allow anyone to ever hurt you again.  I will always listen to whatever you want to say to me.  I will always be here for you.
I love you,
Fifty-Eight-Year-Old Patricia

Inner Child Letters Series - Processing

I am still processing the first letter in this series of posts.  The grieving has lifted some.  The headaches have gotten less frequent but the nausea of this past week is still hanging on.  Last night I was talking with a friend about the headaches and the nausea and what their significance might mean to me.  I know the headaches are from the stress and my own inner resistance to doing this work.  I know that I had headaches as early as seven years old.  I know that my first year in 12-Step meetings, I left every single meeting with a headache when I didn't have one at the beginning of the meeting.  Some part of me was resisting what I was hearing in those meetings.

This afternoon I have been thinking about the nausea and remembering.  I remembered that every time there was a sexual encounter when I was a child that I would immediately get an upset stomach.  I remember many times telling my dad or my mom that I felt like I was going to throw up and them ignoring me.  What I learned was that how I felt physically and emotionally didn't matter to either of them.  I remember for the first ten years of my marriage that every time my husband and I made love I would then, afterwords, experience nausea and I would ignore it as my parents had taught me to do as a child.  As an adult, I continued to discount my feelings, physically and emotionally for many years.  I didn't know any other way to be.  It took several years of going to 12-Step meetings before I began to feel anything.

What I realized today is that the nausea that I have been ignoring this week may very well be a body memory since I am now opening up to the inner children who felt this as a way of trying to stop the sexual abuse.  The nausea may not be related to the sexual abuse at all but with these thoughts coming up, I have to wonder.  I know that all of this is pure speculation on my part.  I know to some people this may sound totally crazy.  I do know that there is a connection between feelings, abuse and physical symptoms of the body.

Louise L. Hay in her book Heal Your Body, The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them on page 52 says "Nausea      Fear. Rejecting an idea or experience.       I am safe. I trust the process of life to bring only good to me." 

Those words could be very true in my past situation with the incest and my current situation of going back and visiting my inner children and the abuse that they suffered and continue to carry for me.  A part of me is still rejecting the idea that incest occurred in my childhood and is still affecting me today.  The part of me that still doesn't want to deal with this could be causing the nausea as a way of making me not face the truths that I am facing with writing this Inner Child Letters Series.  It could be that because I am going back and revisiting this past trauma that the nausea is coming out as a body memory of what I felt back then.  This could be the body's way of finally releasing its feelings of unease from back there.  In many ways this whole thing is a new territory for me so I am feeling my way around.  Does any of this make sense to you, my readers or am I totally losing it here and trying to make up something to explain away the feelings again?  It would be nice if when I finally finish processing all of this that the headaches and nausea would completely go away.

This isn't the post that I thought I was sitting down to write.  Oh well, what is is.  This is my post for today.  Before closing, I want to share these websites and blogs that really helped me to stay positive while dealing with this stuff  in the past few weeks.

Kendra Kett blogs wonderful little tidbits of wisdom at  http://www.pinwheelgirls.com .

Ellen Brown has a blog called Stepping Stones that offers help for going through many of life's transitions at   http://ellen-brown.com/blog/2009/10/02/attitude-of-gratitude-helps-when-dealing-with-job-loss-or-other-life-transitions/

Thanks to Kendra and Ellen for the posts that you have written that haved eased some of my pain of last week.  There are others and I will post them in my next articles.  I have company coming over so have to get off the computer for now.
Love to you all,
Patricia

Inner Child Letters Series - Grieving

A friend earlier today emailed and asked me if I was okay?  The following is a slightly edited version of what I emailed her back.  It also explains why I haven't posted an article here in over a week.

No, I am not okay.  Thank you for asking.  When I started this Inner Child Letter Series, I expected to do some grieving but I never expected this intensity and it has knocked me on my butt.  I am not handling it well at all.  I have eaten most of 3 bags of chocolate this week and had my husband buy me a box of chocolate ice cream last night.

I haven't been able to write about the feelings because I don't know where to start or what to say.  I did reach out early this morning and left a message on the Facebook page Reaching Survivors of Sexual Abuse and left a small comment.  I haven't called my 12-Step sponsor about it.  I don't know what to say to her.  I did talk some Thursday night during my class on Grief.  That helped some but only temporarily.

It doesn't help that my husband and I have both been sick this past week too.  He has a really bad bladder infection that kept him home from work for almost a week. 

With all of the energy shifts that have been going on, I have been having dizzy spells and the occasional nausea from that.  On top of that I have been having headaches almost daily since I wrote my last post.  I know the headaches are from stress and that part of me that resists all of the changes and the feelings.  I can stay with the feelings for awhile and then I get scared and eat.  I don't overeat during the day.  I do it from supper on until I go to bed at night.  Nighttime is a trigger for me.  I am also not sleeping much.  I go to bed sometime between 1:30-3:30 a.m. and get up sometime between 7:30-10:30 a.m.  On the days that my headache builds, I finally take my prescription strength pain pills and then I am wiped out for the next 2 or 3 days from the headache and the pain pills which I hate to take for just that reason.  With the headache, I am in too much pain to think clearly and with the pain pills I am drugged out and can't think.  I have slept through several days this week because of either the headache or the pain pills.

The grief feels so big and deep.  I did not expect this.  It has been years since I have done grief work like this.  I have forgotten how it feels.  For years, I felt this way all of the time.  That was years ago.  It makes me afraid to continue this series of posts and I know that is exactly what I need to do.

Thank you (You know who you are.  I am not mentioning your name as my friend because I didn't ask your permission.) for reaching out to me.  I didn't know that I needed to say all of this.  It is like your asking gave me permission to let go.
Patricia

My friend suggested that I might have the beginning of a blog post in the above email so now you have it.  Before this, I have had lots of thoughts going through my mind and a whole lot of feelings that I haven't wanted to feel and know that is exactly what needs to happen.  As another friend Stash Serafin recently said, "Feeling is healing."  Maybe it was the 3-year-old me that shut down those feelings, I don't know.  Some voice in me just said, "Yes, you do know."  Another part of me is still resisting this whole process and doesn't want to know.  That is where my headaches are coming from.

As I mentioned above, I talked some about this in my Grief class on Thursday night.  The leader of the class believes that the 11-year-old inner child is the one who is holding all of the knowledge of the abuse and all of the pain and the memories for the 3-year-old.  This work is harder than I thought it would be.  I am trying to be gentle with myself and stay with the feelings as much as I can and not beat myself up when I can't.

With everything that has been going on this week, it slipped my mind that June 1 was the 3rd Anniversary of when I posted my first article on Spiritual Journey Of A Lightworker.  That first article had nothing to do with incest.  It is about my beliefs about past lives.  It is called "Three Of My Past Life Experiences".  You can find it at the following link:

http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2007/06/three-of-my-past-life-experiences.html

This is enough sharing and vulnerability for today.
Patricia

Related Articles:
Inner Child Letter Series @ http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/05/inner-child-letters-series.html

Three Year Old Adultress Revisited - Inner Child Letters Series - 1 @
http://patriciasingleton.blogspot.com/2010/05/three-year-old-adultress-revisited.html