New Therapist

I’ve got a new therapist and I really think she is competent to handle me, which is saying a lot. I have seen her three times already.  She has shown me that she is competent to handle me, capable, and willing. She is very good at being a witness to my healing therapy while being present, compassionate, and empathetic.  Those are all huge things.

I will say that I was at the point of being able to articulate in excruciating detail exactly what I did and did not want in a therapist and in therapy and in healing. I had a long talk with the person who was going to re-assign me to another therapist. So that has gone a long way in getting me assigned as her client. She is another therapist in the office where I was going.

I’m glad that I don’t have to go out on my own and try to find another therapist entirely on my own and especially glad that I don’t have that project looming in my life right now, even if it were only to find another therapist in the same clinic. I don’t have a lot of energy for projects right now.

I had some real issues with the other therapist, to the point of avoiding going to therapy for six months. I went in one more time, and seriously I was not capable of making it work, and really why should I have to be the one who had to try to make it work? I think the partnership proved to be a bad fit, untherapeutic. She was very good at helping clients manage the everyday manageability of their lives, but that was not my situation and I was clear about that constantly. She made it hard for me to work on my stated  and agreed upon therapy goals and needs of healing from childhood abuse, especially mother daughter sexual abuse.

The clinic will only allow me to get an appointment every other week, so that is very frustrating. It is a county mental health clinic, so it has a lot of clients and they decide those issues, even though I disagree on that.  But I suppose I would need some time to transition into doing therapy once a week.  The nicest part of that is that I don’t have to pay the co-pay, since the county declines to charge me, about $50 or more a month, so that makes it well worth my wanting to stay there, Also I have not found a better therapist on my own. She promised to help me find a weekly therapist, when and if I want to move on.

I have spent most of the sessions going over my family history and abuse history as background, but I am doing a lot of healing work through talking and feeling about all of that. It is very intense. And very healing. I am doing good work.

Good and healing thoughts to you all.

Survivor Quotes 72

About her divorce:

“I could no longer live in a situation where I felt such complete disregard for my feelings. It was maybe the first time in my life I made the choice to take care of myself.”

~ Christine Sandor, Warming the Stone Children (Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse survivor)

Healing Quotes Littles 211

“Well, if they don’t like you, that’s just too bad.”

~ Kirby, You Can’t Take It With You.

Female Parent’s Birth Date Saturday

I’ve been more dissociated lately about the month and the date this past week. Then it dawned on me, yeah no ritual abuse trigger dates coming up, but it is my female parent’s date of birth on Saturday. And that has been a bad yearly date for several years.

When your mother is your sexual offender, mother-daughter sexual abuse, it pretty much makes every day a trigger day when it comes to mother stuff. In addition, some days are much worse than others, like Mother’s Day and her birth date.

I had started looking for a place to move to, but my anxiety and fears had gotten ratcheted up really bad this week. Then I remembered the upcoming date and decided to take a couple of days off to try to cope. Even though the day is still coming up, I felt better right away.

Today I will go for a long bike ride and go to the local buffet restaurant and have a good time, read a book, and sit and have some favorite foods. I have a coupon! Friday I am thinking about going to the movie theater to see something that just came out. I don’t have plans for Saturday, but I will be working on some ideas until then.

Even if my plans are to do nothing, to expect nothing from myself, to comfort myself, to sleep as much as I want, and to be gentle and loving and kind to myself, that is good enough. And it shows how far I have come and how much we have healed.

The Thing About Dumbo

I watched the movie Dumbo again recently. I hadn’t seen it in years. I’ve seen it several times in the past. Each time I react the same way.

I cry at two places in the movie, each time I have seen it. I was thinking about this before I saw the movie again. It is the kind of crying and tears that just comes over me without thought and hits me hard. It is not the kind of tears that I could control or stop. It is more of an unconscious sadness and aloneness that comes over me.

I cry when Dumbo is reunited with his mother, in the middle of the movie and at the end. The first time he just sees her trunk and she is in a trailer and cannot even see him. He reaches for her and she reaches for him. She cradles and rocks him in her trunk while a song is playing. It gets me every time. And then at the end of the movie when he is flying and slides right into her trunk for an embrace.

I don’t see the movie very often; it makes me cry. Seeing it again made me realize that I hadn’t watched it since having flashbacks about mother-daughter sexual abuse, which makes sense why I didn’t put it together why and what I was crying about. I was in the middle of the movie this time and realized it.

I cry because I feel that level of sadness and lonliness that Dumbo feels from being away from his mother’s love and I cry specifically when Dumbo is reunited each time, because that is something I never had and will never have, a mother who loves.

Connectedness to My Energy Part 1 of 3

I’ll try to post Part 2 of this topic some time tomorrow.

I have often wondered why others seemed to clue into me as someone they could try to abuse or use. Part of the answer to that is what I would refer to as a person’s energy. Abusers and users read others like a book, their energy, their emotions, looking for victims.

We all read each other. Just some do it better than others and some are aware of it and their responses to the energy of others and some are oblivious, represed, and/or in denial. This means that many survivors of abuse are clueless about their own energy and accurately reading others.

Being abused causes survivors to have damaged energy. Being abused causes you to judge and devalue yourself. We misinterpret things. We misunderstand. We blame ourselves for everything. We are vulnerable and naive and don’t know how to change that. Our emotions and energy become hyper-active and negative.

Slowly, with healing, we start to be more protective of ourselves, establishing boundaries, rules, and limitations in our life and when interacting with others. But even after years of healing it is very hard to heal or change our energy.

For the purposes of this discussion I will share my definition of personal energy. By energy I do not mean the soul. I do not mean the aura. I do not mean the body. I do not mean the mind.

Energy is the sum total of a person encapsulated. Energy is all that has happened to a person, all the good and all the bad, all that you have done and all you have not done, but should have. All the good qualities you have nurtured and developed and all the challenging ones that fester inside you. All the sorrow and all the tears, all the fears and all the pain. All the joys and innocence you have been able to retain. All that you have healed from and all that you haven’t.

A person’s energy is the story of their life and their present. A survivor’s energy is living too much in the past and in the future, and not in the present. It’s about living the aftermath of child sexual abuse. It’s living in the grip of fear and turmoil, hating yourself and having trouble finding the love and care from others that you deserve. A person’s energy is their everything.

Connectedness to the Mother

Being a mother-daughter sexual abuse survivor means, for me, that I have been disconnected from my mother all of my life. She was not a safe person to be connected to. She never loved me and I always knew it. She was violent and sexually abusive. I don’t want to ever be connected to her.

But I am working on being connected to the mother.

One of my sister-in-law’s was a great mother. Unfortunately her kids had my brother as their father. He was loud and verbally abusive. She was a great mother, but she could not make my brother be a great father. Still it is a model to me of what good a woman can do for her child daily by being a good person and a good mother.

Some time ago I became aware of a connection to the earth as my mother. I am still very uncomfortable and afraid about this connection. I tend to avoid it. I know that is not very healthy; letting my fears overwhelm my desire to continue working on the connection. But it is the truth. Unfortunately my fears sometimes ovewhelm me. I will try to do better and focus on the connection to help me with life and healing.

I have always felt a strong connectedness to my ancestors. So I suppose through them I am able to connect to mothering through my male and female ancestors who having mothering qualities.

For most of my life I have been a Christian. I think that I have always been disconnected from the concept of mother in religion. Though there is one connection that has been strong since my early twenties.

There was a time in my life that I went to church a lot. I read the Bible a lot and studied and knew many others who went to church. One Bible quote that I remember reading and continue to remember and think about is the one where Jesus says that God loves us like a mother loves her chicks, hovering over them, loving and protecting them. This is the God that I am connected to.

It has only been recently that I have thought much about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Since music is one of the items on my bliss list it would be natural for me to explore this through music. These two songs are helping me to feel some connection to her and from her to mother:

Ave Maria sung by Christinia England Hale

Mary sung by Patti Griffin

Healing Vids 7

Epic Stargaze

by Alex Cherney

Songs for Healing 35

Don’t Be Shy

Cat Stevens

I loved Cat Stevens and his voice. As a teenager I used to sit in my room and listen to the albums over and over. I loved hearing him on the radio.

I remember when I first started hearing this song, when I was a teenager. I was painfully shy. I remember that I used to sing this song and the next song for healing over and over and try to be less shy, to try to live my life more. The song doesn’t have the best of advice, it’s kind of vague, but it was encouraging and that made me feel better. I suppose everyone has songs like that from their teenage years.

Don’t be shy just let your feelings roll on by
Don’t wear fear or nobody will know you’re there
Just lift your head, and let your feelings out instead
And don’t be shy, just let your feeling roll on by
On by

You know love is better than a song
Love is where all of us belong
So don’t be shy just let your feelings roll on by
Don’t wear fear or nobody will know you’re there
You’re there

Don’t be shy just let your feelings roll on by
Don’t wear fear or nobody will know you’re there
Just lift your head, and let your feelings out instead
And don’t be shy, just let your feeling roll on by
On by, on by, etc.

Lyrics

Connectedness to Artist

There are two quotes that stick in my mind about this topic.

One is of a teacher who said that when she is teaching art to a classroom full of five year olds and she asks them to raise their hands if they are an artist and all of the five year olds will raise their hands. But in a classroom full of ten years old and she asks the same question to only half of the students raising their hands.

Probably the opposite is true. Probably artistic ability has increased rather than decreased and yet they doubt themselves.

The second is a story from the movie Six Degrees of Separation. The person is telling a story about going to his child’s school and seeing so many beautiful paintings on the walls done by the children. He asked the teacher why they were all so good. She said the genius is not in the work, but in knowing when to stop and that is when I take the painting away and say they are done.

So, like most things, having a someone to take the roles of teacher, mentor, and supporter means so much to believing in yourself and doing. I never had that before; before finding my survivor friends. But more and more I am getting support and that has helped me to be bold and to believe in myself.

I am an artist.