Rythea Lee's book, "Trauma into Truth - Gutsy Healing and Why It's Worth It."
She has words and her Art...she answers questions that she was asked most often...it is an artful book.
Here is one section that popped out to me, having just experienced an encounter with my mother. Rythea knows my view.
The question: "Was it Lonely?"
"Lonely like a solitary walk down a long wooded pathway. Lonely like the sting of cold air when your warm hand lets go of mine. Lonely as if I am entering a park full of busy unrecognizable people. I have felt this sweet kind of lonely."
"Then there was the lonely of sitting across the dinner table looking at my mother and sensing something was wrong. A wall, an electric fence, a city of buildings, an entire continent between us. She had hurt me early on but now she was smiling at me. Her arms had not held me when I was tiny and crying but now she smiled at me as if we were close. I told myself lies in order to feel one with her. I said she would never hurt me, she didn't mean to, it never happened, I'm crazy, and clearly we are close, look at how her eyes water when she smiles at me. I created vats of fantasies setting off warm fuzzies within me, living inside them completely."
" All the fantasies in the world could not eradicate my terror. That kind of loneliness was deadly. The loneliness of sitting across from someone who supposedly adores you and feeling sheer terror. That kind of loneliness would undo me. So I went away and learned to live with a lonely that had congruence. I was alone, I was without the woman who had given birth to me. I was leaping into a void of unknown solitude but I could live with that loneliness. It was a lonely that made sense." Rythea
I get what Rythea means. I love that she can separate the two lonely places...and how one makes sense and the other is sheer terror.
Underneath the question, "Is healing a selfish Act?" she writes.
"There have been countless days when I wanted my life to be different. I wanted my parents to be different parents, my siblings to be different siblings, my path to be a different path. I went so far as to pretend the abuse I suffered did not exist. I was willing to blot out any inkling of unrest just to have a family, to be part of the only home I had ever known."
"Was it selfish to choose the truth above all else, even security? Was it selfish to dive into years of grief and longing to give birth to the only self available to me, me?"
"Selfish would have been passing the abuse on to my children, my loved ones, my partner. Selfish would have been carrying the denial into the next generation. Selfish would have been becoming angry, scared, small, withheld person who never healed, who did not find her clear unique voice."
"If I did not choose to remember the violence, the sexual abuse, the loss, the crazy-making epicenter of my childhood, I would not know who I am. I would not have have harbored the tools of self-responsibility that enabled me to be in service to other survivors. I would not have grasped, down to the bone, the kind of atrocities people live through and been able to offer my understanding."
"The time it has taken to recover my essence has been a long, indescribably challenging road. I wanted to skip the journey and go into hiding. I craved addictions and self destructive acts that would turn off the stark reality of what people do to children. But then, in the quiet place of faith, I sensed that love was growing. Every day it grew in the compost of my terror. Amidst the wreckage of what people call "The American Family" stood a figure unafraid. I had something to give and it had not died." Rythea.
I so know the feelings of being thought of as being selfish, as I don't wave, as I drive past, as I keep my eyes, mind and soul focused on healing. How my behavior today and my actions are cited as being worse than my fathers abuse, I know.
I know what it means to dive into years of grief and longing. Only those who have sought healing know the pain and echoing feelings of craving family...when you head out to save the only one you can....you.
I also know that it would have been very selfish and self absorbing to not at least try and change the pattern...to protect the generations below you, to stop the legacy from continuing to your children's children. It wasn't for me, that I began this journey, my sights originally were upon my children. For me...it seemed it was too late. Yet, in being self less, I found me.
In finding me, I am setting up a new pattern...one where when I look into my children's eyes, they will not shudder in fear...nor will I sit in guilt for not doing something.
Rythea is another huge affirmation on my journey...
I love too, how she felt the love begin to grow. Feeling that love, and experiencing joy, is truly what keeps us going. Through the days and weeks and years of grieving about the wreckage we called family.
Thanks again Rythea for understanding me. Now I know, for you are me.
