I am working on putting a Picture Book together with my Story Line quilts...and writing a brief synopsis about each quilt as it represents a portion of my journey.
I have a visual graph of my inner transformation as I undid abuse and changed my perceptions back to the truth.
Change is a very slippery word and it often times gets misconstrued, for we are expecting a dramatic life altering physical change, when all that is required is a 360 degree perceptional change.
It is to change HOW you see things, not the things.
To remove yourself from one belief and settle your self into another.
Moving your awareness. Rearranging your thoughts to match reality instead of using thoughts to cover up what is real.
What most may fail to recognize, are the changes we fail to make when abuse calls upon us. Many will focus on the physical act, but few will focus on our perceptions.
In an abusive home, where abuse isn't addressed...what this means is that, perceptions don't change to now match the new reality. It isn't that the act isn't dealt with, but rather the perceptions don't change to mirror what just happened.
It is this that totally screws with the minds of a child.
Here is the deal.
My father CHANGED when he acted out sexually to me. At this point, my viewpoint of him should have changed too. When I didn't change this inside of my head. My head no longer matched reality.
With a head that is askew, I then built my life.
To undo the abuse, what we are really saying is that we need to straighten out our perceptions. We have to now make the changes we failed to make way back then.
It sounds so simple, but I had created a whole life, based on the wrong perceptions.
I now had to change a father into a pedophile, a mother into his accomplice, and it left me with a new family portrait.
Change one picture, and the rest start to shift.
My father changed when he abused me and I didn't act like anything had changed.
However, my reality had changed, I just wasn't allowed to let my perceptions of him change.
Instead of recording the actual event, it recorded things that surrounded it.
I don't have many memories of my childhood, but I do have wierd ones.
However, most importantly, my body recorded it accurately. IT feared my father.
It didn't want to get close to him.
No matter what my mind concocted, my body held the correct perceptions.
I had to change my mind to match what my body felt.
Undoing abuse means you have to change your mind.
It doesn't mean forcing your body to feel comfortable or at ease with someone who has hurt you. It means to follow your body's lead.
When you change the perceptions in your head to match reality, you will begin to act differently.
You will act in kind to reality.
I no longer felt I had to force myself to be in relationships with family who I no longer trusted or felt safe with...or whose perceptions didn't match reality.
The greatest tragedy of abuse is that we don't change our perceptions of the person who hurt us. We want a mother and father so badly, we will think anything to maintain this in our heads. And as little helpless children, we needed to believe that we were safe. We wouldn't have survived knowing there was no one there to save us, that we were living in the home of a pedophile and his wife.
How awful this is to an abused child. Your wounds go unattended, in order to keep up the perceptions in your home. If they see your abuse, they will see the monster who lives there too.
In order to keep the illusion going, you adjust your perceptions.
Most have no clue what this does to a human being. It makes you insane.
Insanity is seeing a reality that doesn't exist.
Seeing a father where a pedophile stands.
I became sane, when I saw reality...my perceptions finally matched my body.
Abused children who are abused by a family member, are usually neglected in order to keep the abusive family member. Rarely is the child treated and the family member removed.
They would rather keep an abusive father than live without one.
The child then learns, to overlook abuse and keep the relationship.
What we fail to appreciate is that we are holding onto abuse and there is no relationship outside of that. Our new relationships are abuse.
It is abusive to ourselves to change our truth and perceptions to go against reality.
We keep a 'loving' father and we abuse our self.