IMPERFECT Lady

Caught

One last section from ‘Sickened’…by Julie Gregory.

 

Spring thaws the farmhouse, and in front of the mirrors, my breasts begin to form. They get white, tigerlike stretch marks on their sides from a burst of growth.  My hipbones expand like a time-lapsed flower in bloom.  I grow like a girl in puberty. The pod I was stuffed into has perforated breaks in the skin, and I, ever so painfully, am unlacing myself from the tight shell.  I use my fingertips to tug and pull laces loose, unfurling myself from the cocoon I’ve been kept in, folding and falling, jutting the angles of crooked atrophied limbs out of its hold.

 

I touch my face in the mirror, study it for hours.  I need to see what my face says.  What my expressions look like to others, what my eyes do, whether my face twitches, like hers.

 

Away from the mirror, I do not register that I am pretty.  I cannot comprehend I have an attractive body.  Or that it holds in its untapped wisdom the potential to heal itself.  My instincts are wound tightly into a ball of fishing line, so tangled and knotted that it will take months of daily, delicate picking to see loops in the line and pull them free.

 

I curl my body up in front of the mirror; skin and bones, the ribs of my back casting curved shadows over my thin skin.  I study tiny blue veins, fascinated by the light pulse that pushes blood through on its own; an affirmation that I am living.  I do not have to pump the blood myself; it is my heart that keeps me alive.

 

I look at every part of myself through the mirror, wanting to see what anyone outside my skin would see.  My hands, they look so beautiful, I turn them around and around in the mirror mesmerized.  I look at my face again, soft and childlike, my body lean and lithe.  I step away from the mirror but nothing comes with me. The moment I lose contact with my reflection, I lose touch with what I see there.

 

My mind is imprinted with images of a sickly reverberation of what I felt like inside and believed to be true of myself for all of my twenty-six years: That I am some bizarre, frail creature, destined to die early.  My mind’s eye sees me as a stooped and wasted, with dark greasy hair, a slaughterhouse horse’s long, sunken face, drooping bottom lip, absent eyes.  Since that is what I believe, that is how I feel. Since that is how I feel, that is how I act. And since that is how I act, that is how the world treats me.

 

So I step back to the mirror and there she is again, that girl, that strange girl that everyone else sees.  I reach my fingers out to feel her face.  My eyes cannot get over it.  They peer at her suspiciously. Surely this is not me staring back?  Truth in my mind and truth in the mirror are completely opposites. And I am split down the middle, straddling the chasm between two worlds, flitting back and forth between the world I know and the one that exists in the glass.  It will take me three years of pacing between the two before I can finally bring them together.

                Julie Gregory

 

My mother had a magical mirror and words would allow her world to remain perfect, sins could be erased with the magical phrase, and it would erase all blemishes that may other wise appear, returning him always to be whiter than snow.

 

It is horrifying and shocking to see the damage he was able to do, while she continued to stare dreamily into her cracked mirror of dreams.

 

Behind the wall, lay many broken little girls whose wounds could not be erased so easily.

 

There are no simple phrases that will return your world upright, restore trust and love and give you back faith.

 

When we are taught that words can erase deeds, we are left in twisted place in our minds.

 

In our minds a mirror appears that switches things around, but in reality nothing changes.  Nothing.

 

It feels like the magic mirror was the release hatch my father needed, the escape door…. Her words allowed him to change magically into a kind man, always.

 

Her catch and release program allowed another little girl to be caught.

 

 

Keeper of their Illusions.

One more part that really stayed with me from Sickened by Julie Gregory.

 

“I now feel ready to try and talk to a therapist again.  Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP.  I answer her questions?  How did it slip past the doctors?  Why didn’t anybody notice? Didn’t you have neighbors?  Were you really sick?

 

But still, in our sessions, I cry from the guilt of betraying my mother, for not keeping the shroud on her secrets when I held them locked in such trust.  And I feel terrible about my own secret.  I have been writing, writing about what it feels like to be cut open while your mother’s tight, thin smile mouths, “Doctor’s orders, honey.”  To be emptied and filled by your mother, just like the IV bag she’s arranged for you. And to believe you are genuinely ill because that is what everything in your world mirrors back to you.

 

My therapist explains that my mother was cannibalistic.  That she wanted to ingest my living flesh, to tear chunks from my body. That the closest she could come to cannibalizing me was to lift me onto the serving platter for the men of the medical community to carve.  The longer I hold guilt for betraying her, the more I will keep climbing on the platter all by myself.

 

And yet the hand that pushed me down was the hand that helped me up.  The one who beat me was the only one to save me from being beaten. The one who wanted to kill me was the one who would kill her self if I didn’t offer myself under the knife.  I was trained from the womb as an alibi for her innocence.  She would snuff out my life if I went against her, even in thought.  She brushed me this way as casually as you would slide a ling brush down a pair of slacks, to get all the grain running in the same direction.

 

I still told myself that it was okay, it really wasn’t that bad.  A normal sacrifice for any child to make for her mother.  Words programmed into me as my own. Tangled in her web, if a doctor couldn’t decipher what she did, how could I?

 

Until I turn thirty.  Then I see her almost as clearly as if I was standing on a windswept sea cliff and she was looking up from the sand below.  There is only one line that connects us, and it is wrapped around my waist; my hunger is tied to the most intimate, emotionally deep contact you can ever get: a mother’s touch.  Anything less that where she took me feels like not enough.

 

And so it is for the people I bring into my life.  My relationships, like the one I had with my mother, turn immediately intense, sometimes violently invasive.  I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me.  Ah, yes, let me count your cracks.  Let’s see, one hundred, two…yes, you’ll do nicely.  A cracked companion makes me look whole, gives me something outside myself to care for.  When I’m with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks: the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

 

So I start over.  When I ruin something or when someone vines around me, I move on.  It is just another opportunity, another chance to interact with the outside world and not have it take me completely, utterly to the bone.”  Julie Gregory

 

As much as her mother needed her sick, my mother needed me innocent.  We are the exact opposites.

 

She was well and her mother needed her to be unwell.

I was molested and not okay, and my mother needed me to be okay to hold her marriage, her life, and her world together.

 

We both found out that what our mother’s needed had nothing to do with us, but rather we were the vehicles used to get her where she wanted to be.

 

Perhaps we know what our unveiling will do to our mothers, we are wrecking purposefully her illusion, and we are no longer caring enough to sacrifice ourselves for their insanity.

 

We know we are shattering their dreams to a million pieces… yet their dreams go on; someone takes our place to be the keeper of their illusions. 

 

 

 

Sickened

Here is another few lines from “Sickened” by Julie Gregory.

 

“I lived my life in a bubble. First it was her bubble. Then it was of my own making.  And now, freshly stripped of the delusion that had protectively swathed me for years, I was embryonic – too raw to interface directly with the world.  People aren’t just influential to me; a thin layer of them fuses onto me like hot cling wrap.  Their words become my words, their voice inflections merge seamlessly into my own, their opinions form a transparency over the faint etchings of my own developing ones.

 

I look back through stacks of photographs of me after the fire.  In each picture, I hold the facial tics and expressions of whoever I am involved with at the time. My face adopts the characteristics of the other, their fine lines, the exact way the jaw muscles freeze or the flex within their smile. My face morphs to take on their identity.

 

Then I look at a baby picture of myself at six months old, lying on my belly, a natural smile lightening up my face.  My own natural smile, unbroken, intact.  This is the only picture I have of my own face, not someone else’s.  I wonder am I destined to drag around the past like a discarded placenta?  I wonder how far do I boil back in order to reclaim my self?  I was how many pieces did I lose along the way?  Where do I find them? Can I put them back? How many times do you glue a broken vase before you toss it?

 

I had been taken to the bone.  My mother had fingered into me like the hollow of a melon and scooped me out.  And now, years later, you could press belly to backbone.

 

Books are my friends, where it’s okay to be silent….

 

All my time is spent slipped silently between their pages, finding some truth to go with the mirrors. They are self-help gurus who parent me positively and show me how to believe in myself.  They suggest underlying spiritual philosophies:  That each soul chooses its parents and all its experiences in order to learn the lessons it needs to develop fully.  That if the soul’s human form knew what it was supposed to learn beforehand, the ego would short-circuit the process of discovery.  They tell me that, because of this double blind experiment, where you find yourself in this painful process is exactly where you need to be.

 

That if you lived in a dark cave you’d need time to adjust to the light when the rock was rolled away.

 

That Hawaii had to be a volcanic eruption of toxic goo and ash before it became so lush and beautiful.

 

That if you watched the clothes in a washer, it would look like they’re getting dirtier as they slosh through filthy water.  But it’s only after this agitation cycle that you can pull out fresh, clean clothes.

 

I bolster myself with platitudes: “We are who we are not despite adversity, but because of it” and “They say the truth hurts, but the only thing truth hurts, are illusions.” I sink the studs into soft dirt, and bank my new foundation.

 

My books talk to me like the child I am and coax me into developing autonomously.  They metaphorically hang all the colored pictures I make on the fridge when I race home with them.  They never tell me: Lighten up, you think too much.  If anything, they say, Hey, you, with the frontal lobe, turn off the TV, stop the noise, and consider this deeply.  They never dismiss me with Get over it.  Or if I turn to my father: What are you talking about? My brother: I don’t remember anything. Or my mother when I squeak out that I was too young to be taking the gun out of her mouth: “Jesus Julie, where is a mother supposed to turn to for support if not to her own daughter?  You think the sun rises and sets on you, like you don’t have any problems?  I can think of a hundred times you…”

 

I pile my books around me before I sleep and they are the psychic guardrails that keep me from falling out of bed at night.”   Julie Gregory

 

 

Inconvenient Truth

Just finished reading “Sickened” by Julie Gregory, her story of living with a mother who needed her sick, Munchausen By Proxy.

 

It is amazing that her mother could convince her she was sick, and to ‘act’ sick, and how her mother’s state depended upon her behavior.  And how she never knew this wasn’t her real self, that this was a self that her mother needed.

 

She writes, “Truth is whatever your mind believes.  And beliefs are erected by those who raise us.  If someone shapes your mind into a distortion, you have to find something that can give you a straight answer.”

 

She tried to tell her dad about the abuse, but he didn’t fully grasp the immense totality of it all…she goes on to say.

 

“After that day with Dad, I knew that nobody could give me straight answers but me.  I used mirrors to step back and forth between trips out into the real world, trips back into the swirling black hole of my family, trips to new adventures outside the bubble, seeing how long I could walk away from the mirror before the old thoughts submerged the fresh ones.  Sometimes I’d only get to the kitchen or down a few steps of the porch.  Sometimes, I could make it a half-day before I’d have to rush back to see myself…

 

With my freshly wired instincts, I inch farther and farther out of my incubator.  I stay longer in the real world and run back with less frenzy when waves begin crashing.  When I do slip under, I whip out a pen and write myself back to the surface, using whatever material I can snatch to capture the barrage; bar napkins, toilet paper, airline barf bags, my bare leg.  I scribble my thoughts; tweak them with words from my new vocabulary.  It talk myself out of paranoia and coax myself from ledges. I fill volumes of journal books with these moments; packed with crowed text, both sides scribbled and stuffed with snippets of paper smeary inked paper towels, feverishly written.

 

My life now in triplicate: One life in the mirror, one in the world, and one balancing the two as oceans which must wax and wane in tandem until one replaces the other.” Julie Gregory

 

She is right that your life is lived in triplicate until you can finally live fully in your truth.

 

How you find yourself in a very awkward stance, knowing your past is incorrect, but not fully knowing what is, and then being the one to resurrect a you that you have never known.  How you have to go against all who stood with you in the secret.

 

She writes about her younger brother.  “His memory, as mine once did, as opted for the starrier picture.  It was just last year, when Danny was twenty-four, that the only thing he wanted for Christmas was a tape of Mom’s singing, one of the few good things strained from our life with her.

 

He still needs a mom and dad.  His psyche has draped sharp edges of detail in a thick drop cloth as he keeps his past at bay with workaholism and asthma attacks that coincide with Mom’s random phone calls to him…”

 

It is like a curtain that shields the truth, a blind area where the parents are concerned, something that stops the truth from penetrating their worlds and upending their apple cart of loving parents, or at least ones that ‘tried their best’.

 

To me it is facing the inconvenient truth.

 

 

 

 

Perfections of Me.

I think trying to define love is like trying to define our unique personalities; we all have a love definition, which we formed through our experiences in life.

 

Love for me is on the inside and is more about me, where before it was an outside need and all about you.

 

There has been a total switch in my definition of love.

 

Before I felt love by what others brought me, I was empty of love unless and until another showed me some love. 

 

I was empty and I would do almost anything to get some love.  I was a people pleaser to fill my container called love. 

 

Now I feel love from the inside out.

I am full of love inside.

 

Love of me and all the different layers, stages and ages that make up me.

 

I sit with great compassion and empathy of my journey to love me.

 

It has taken many years to look at me, all the nooks and crannies, the dark side and the light, to see all the facets of myself and to become friendly with them or at least meet them with understanding, little by little trusting and loving me.

 

I am sure there are still parts of myself I haven’t explored, even sections of my past that lay buried, yet with each new lesson returns another aspect of my self that was long ago sacrificed.

 

Sacrificed for another’s love, another’s happiness, another’s dream.

 

Each sacrifice took away a part of me.

Until there was nothing left for me to love.

 

I will no longer sacrifice my feelings for you, my happiness for yours, or my truths for yours.

 

Love without sacrifice means loving myself enough to move away…

 

To steer clear of things that hurt me then and now, to speak my truths, to be honest with my feelings, to protect my happiness and my dreams.

 

Love is the freedom to be myself.

Love loves my imperfections until they become my perfections of me.

 

Steps towards mine.

My online conversations with family are so enlightening and disturbing, confusing and clear, and they show me who they are, and how they see me.

 

What continues to surprise me is that they hold me up to an unattainable standard and then have no standards for themselves or the rest of the folks they spend time with.

 

Their willingness to hang on to my father and let me go leaves me forever puzzled.

 

My latest infraction is that I knew my mother wasn’t with my father, but I said it for my benefit, for my stories benefit.

 

I lie for the benefit of my story?

 

My story is torrid enough without needing one drop of falseness.  They don’t make Hollywood movies that are as tainted and twisted and long-suffering as mine.

 

I willingly admitted that I assumed wrong, and that wasn’t believed. 

 

My mother was in my father’s new town, but refused to see him, she would get dropped off before his house and wait while they delivered ‘stuff’ to him.

 

She was near, but not with him, sorta like when she is up here.  She is near me, but not with me. 

 

So what does that mean?

 

We have not had a reunion any more than they have had a divorce, it seems she lives in between.

 

Between the ending and a new beginning, a no place.

 

It seems to me it would be easier to end it once and for all, to complete the relationship to finalize it, like ending a contract, for until then you are nowhere, not married, but not divorced.

 

Separated with space, living in a hammock between both lands.

 

Her not being near him hasn’t brought her closer to me, I wonder why? 

 

Where is she really?

 

No steps taken to sever or to reunite.

 

What kind of life is it to live in between, to live in the space that isn’t either side, to be free of making a choice either way?

 

Isn’t that standing still?

Undecided?

Unknowing?

 

I see her as unchanged, for even if she has left my father’s side, she hasn’t made steps towards mine.

 

 

 

Looking at her...

I went online and did some reading on the statistics and reseach on pedophiles, for some reason I hadn’t done this before.

 

Pedophile.

The word comes from the Greek: παιδοφιλία (paidophilia): παῖς (pais), "child" and φιλία (philia), "friendship".

 

Child friendship, wow, I would have thought the root of the word would be monster, predator, but not child friendship!

 

Imagine!

 

Child friendship, which is exactly what I have been trying to warn my sister from allowing to happen, a friendship being formed with her little granddaughter and my father. 

 

Below are a few paragraphs from another article I found interesting. That being a pedophile is similar to performing magic tricks…

In 1992 while living in Los Angeles, actor and magician Steve Valentine invited me to be his guest at the world famous Hollywood Magic Castle.  The Castle is a private club dedicated to the promotion of magic as an art form and hobby.  Club members perform their illusions up-close, chair-side, right under your nose.  Afterward, our group ended up at my apartment where Steve was gracious enough to show us more magic.  Amazed at how easy it was to fool us, I asked him point blank, “Why can’t we figure it out?”

His answer has stuck in my mind for almost 20 years. “Magicians can get away with it,” he said, “because we know how you think.”  Having a degree in communication and psychology, I was riveted by the idea that the majority of humans (myself included) process the world through a homogenous lens that others can easily manipulate to fool us into seeing exactly what they want us to.  And what’s truly discouraging, as anyone who has ever been privy to the workings of a magic trick can attest, is how mindlessly simple the bending of reality needs to be to completely fool everyone.  I had always believed the wonder of magic rested within the skill of the magician.  Come to find out, it’s more accurately rooted in the conformed ignorance of the audience.

The answer is simple; like a magician, predators get away with it because they know how children think, and as a result they’re able to convince adult eyes to see exactly what they want us to see; an ILLUSION that nothing is wrong.

The mind control – the trick – the reason victims are not reporting the crime, is simply this: Fear.  Predators use the most powerful human motivator—Fear—to trick our children into silence.

 

It is not the skilled mastery of the Predator that allows them to molest and rape our children and get away with it; rather it is the conformed ignorance of our children.  We must therefore make every effort to arm our children with pragmatic information to help them to fight back and destroy the monsters who would hurt them.

 

You can read the full articles at www.ezfame.com

 

Amazing to read that pedophiles are magicians who befriend our children and then put the seal of fear around the whole incident and call it ‘our secret- our BAD secret’ bringing the child in on the act, owning the shame and blame and fearing exposure to the loss of their innocence.

 

 

Here are some statistics I read.

 

1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 14

 

1 in 6 boys is sexually abused before the age of 16

 

Like rape, child molestation is one of the most under-reported crimes: only 1-10% are ever disclosed.

 

More than 90% of all sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator. Almost 50% of the offenders are household members and 38% are already acquaintances of the victims.

 

The average serial child molester has between 360-380 victims in his lifetime.

 

This magic trick and the magicians who perform them on our innocent children will continue to play out as long as we continue to see them as normal fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers.

 

The Illusion is the perfect environment for my father to perform his tricks.

 

He is being supervised while he begins his next act, and being hand delivered his next partner to perform with him.

 

For without a partner his magic dies.

 

The magic of taking a child’s friendship and tainting it with sexual abuse, of taking our love and trust and using it to entrust us with his secret.

 

He needs the ignorance of the adults in the room and he needs a child’s friendship, its these two main ingredients that will make the whole act.

 

The magicians rely upon you looking at one thing while something else is really going on.

 

As my sister is looking for a pedophile, while a pedophile is looking at her.

 

 

My Mother's eyes.

Misperception of our environment is the key that turns your body into dis-ease. 

 

A misperception of the world is the cause and the spread dis-ease.

 

Again going back to the two different perceptions of our world between my mother and I, between my family members and I, shows how the disease of my father continues to contaminate generation upon generation.

 

The dance of misperception blows my mind.

 

He is able to continue spreading his disease because of her misperception of him and his children’s misperception of him. 

 

Misperceptions lead to wrong action and as Byron Katie says, “confused minds do confusing things”, and Jesus says, ‘forgive them they know not what they do’.

 

I am expecting the confused mind to see clearly, or I am writing and speaking to confusion hoping for clarity, it has occurred to me lately I am speaking to the wrong crowd.

 

My intentions and deepest desire is to make them see, and to wake them up.

 

And what seems to be happening more and more is I am working on me. 

 

I am learning more and more and seeing more and more and becoming more aware of how this all works.

 

My long held misperceptions are unraveling bit by bit.

 

I am the one who has benefited the most by writing, by taking my thoughts and bringing them to paper I get to see what I didn’t see before.

 

What an incredible journey out of the misperceptions I lived behind.

 

I had wrote to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the book, “My Stroke Of Insight” and told her that I had a stroke in my reality, a stroke of truth. 

 

Truth flooded my brain, bursting apart my misperceptions.

 

The journey in the past five years is the re-wiring, re-labeling, and learning to see reality as it is and living without the lens of my mother’s eyes.

 

 

 

 

Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton

Here is a part of what he writes.

Sometimes, the body’s natural harmony breaks down, and we experience dis-ease, which is a reflection of the body’s inability to maintain normal control of its function-providing systems. Because behavior is created through the interaction of proteins with their complementary signals, there are really only two sources of dis-ease: either the proteins are defective or the signals are distorted.

About 5 percent of the world’s population is born with birth defects, which means they have mutated genes that code for dysfunctional proteins. Structurally deformed or defective proteins can “jam the machine,” disturb normal pathway functions, and impair the character and quality of lives. However, 95 percent of the human population arrives on this planet with a perfectly functional set of gene blueprints.

Because the majority of us have a perfectly healthy genome and produce functional proteins, illness in this group can likely be attributed to the nature of the signal. There are three primary situations in which signals contribute to dysfunction and dis-ease.

The first is trauma. If you twist or misalign your spine and physically impede the transmission of the nervous system’s signals, it may result in a distortion of the information being exchanged between the brain and the body’s cells, tissues, and organs.

The second is toxicity. Toxins and poisons in our system represent inappropriate chemistry that can distort the signal’s information on its path between the nervous system and the targeted cells and tissues. Altered signals, derived from either of these causes, can inhibit or modify normal behaviors and lead to the expression of dis-ease.

The third and most important influence of signals on the dis-ease process is thought, the action of the mind. Mind-related illnesses do not require that there be anything physically wrong with the body at the outset of the dis-ease. Health is predicated upon the nervous system’s ability to accurately perceive environmental information and selectively engage appropriate, life-sustaining behaviors. If a mind misinterprets environmental signals and generates an inappropriate response, survival is threatened because the body’s behaviors become out of synch with the environment. We may not think that a thought could be enough to undermine an entire system, but, in fact, misperceptions can be lethal.

Consider the situation of a person with anorexia. While relatives and friends clearly perceive that this skin-and-bones individual is near death, the anorexic looks in a mirror and sees a fat person. Using this distorted view, that resembles an image in a funhouse mirror, the anorexic’s brain attempts to control a misperceived runaway weight gain, by-oops!-inhibiting the system’s metabolic functions.

The brain, like any governing entity, seeks harmony. Neural harmony is expressed as a measure of congruency between the mind’s perceptions and the life we experience.

An interesting insight into how the mind creates harmony between its perceptions and the real world is frequently illustrated in stage hypnosis shows. A volunteer from the audience is invited onstage, hypnotized, and asked to pick up a glass of water, which the volunteer is told weighs one thousand pounds. With that misinformation, the volunteer struggles unsuccessfully with straining muscles, bulging veins, and perspiration. How can that be? Obviously the glass doesn’t weigh one thousand pounds even though the mind of the subject firmly believes that it does.

To manifest the perceived reality of a thousand pound glass of water, something that cannot be lifted, the hypnotized subject’s mind fires a signal to the muscles used to lift the glass at the same time it fires contradictory signals to the muscles used to set the glass down! This results in an isometric exercise wherein two groups of muscles work to oppose each other, which results in no net movement-but a lot of strain and sweat.

Cells, tissues, and organs do not question information sent by the nervous system. Rather, they respond with equal fervor to accurate life-affirming perceptions and to self-destructive misperceptions. Consequently, the nature of our perceptions greatly influences the fate of our lives.

While most of us are aware of the healing influences of the placebo effect, few are aware of its evil twin, the nocebo effect. Just as surely as positive thoughts can heal, negative ones-including the belief we are susceptible to an illness or have been exposed to a toxic condition-can actually manifest the undesired realities of those thoughts.

Japanese children allergic to a poison ivy-like plant took part in an experiment where a leaf of the poisonous plant was rubbed onto one forearm. As a control, a nonpoisonous leaf resembling the toxic plant was rubbed on the other forearm. As expected almost all of the children broke out in a rash on the arm rubbed with the toxic leaf and had no response to the imposter leaf.

What the children did not know was that the leaves were purposefully mislabeled. The negative thought of being touched by the poisonous plant led to the rash produced by the nontoxic leaf! In the majority of cases, no rash resulted from contact with the toxic leaf that was thought to be the harmless control. The conclusion is simple: positive perceptions enhance health, and negative perceptions precipitate dis-ease. This mind-bending example of the power of belief was one of the founding experiments that led to the science of psychoneuroimmunology.

Considering that a minimum of one third of all medical healings are attributed to the placebo effect, what percentage of illness and disease might be the result of negative thought in the nocebo effect? Perhaps more than we think, especially since psychologists estimate that 70 percent of our thoughts are negative and redundant.

Perceptions have a tremendous influence in shaping the character and experiences of our lives. They’re the reason why those faith-filled folks can swig poison, joyously play with deadly snakes and lift a car to free a loved one. Perceptions shape the placebo and nocebo effects. They are more influential than positive thinking because they are more than mere thoughts in your mind. Perceptions are beliefs that permeate every cell. Simply, the expression of the body is a complement to the mind’s perceptions, or, in simpler terms, believing is seeing!

Being imperfect has set me free....

 

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”   

           Martin Luther King

 

‘…the silence of our friends’… it’s the silence that keeps gnawing at me.  I will get secret messages from family, but not in public, silence, why?

 

It just dawned on me; it isn’t the silence that’s the problem it’s ME!

 

It is Me?

 

I am shocked and amazed that it is Me that keeps them silent, that I am the problem.

 

I am the one that silences their voices, they don’t want to join theirs with Me.

 

Me, it’s me…wow.

 

In a past blog about silence from family, I discovered then that it was easier to be with my father, most actions and words were in support of him, and it is still the same today.

 

Although I have a few secret members whispering to me, and I did ask them to join me publicly, and all declined.

 

Declined in fear or in shame of being with me, being seen like me, being grouped with me???

 

It did feel like I was being denied a friendship…a space remains between us and silence is the wedge that keeps us apart.

 

At this point I want to acknowledge those of you who bravely stand with me, who are willing and able to raise your voices with mine, to link your names with mine, to publicly be with me as I speak of sexual abuse.

 

Me a daughter of a pedophile, a victim of abuse, a confused at times, adult woman of incest; that is me!

 

That is who I am. 

I can’t change it.

I am just being myself.

I am publicly writing about how it is to be an openly abused woman.

 

I understand your silence now and I honor it.

 

I M perfect, and it’s impossible not to be.

 

Being imperfect has set me free…