Tag Archives: forgiveness

base

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My oldest nephew has reminded me about “base”.  Nothing can get you at “base”.  Base is perhaps the most important thing.  And I’m really glad that in play, kids have something to run to where all of the scariness stops and they are control.  When they are on base, they stop the world and process the chase, the overstimulation of the craziness and then when its time to go again they re-enter the game.

The sufferer of ptsd (I’m trying not to capitalize it, I think that’s great advice.  Thanks, A!) frequently feels chased.  I’ve got a thing or twelve on my emotional plate right now.  I have about 4 family relationships I am working on right now.  We still don’t have our stuff from the pirates and that is winding down, I hope we may have our stuff by Christmas.  My new job is great and not easy.

E and I continually work to connect to be “base”.  It is so good.  It’s really hard right now.  The pirates have our bed.  This weekend in a hotel was the first time we’ve slept together in a bed since 9/25.  And we are working so hard to keep our emotional connection sweet.  I’m really lucky, because the air mattresses and other sleeping arrangements have led us both to a lot of back pain through this ordeal and it’s not getting us down.  We’re just taking care of each other.

After a really hard week, A texts me….  She simply says, “I bet you look beautiful and your hair smells like strawberries”.   I laugh because she was close, 3000 miles away and my hair smelled like pumpkins.  My best friend is the master of sweet understatement, she can say better in 9 words what I was trying to tell you in 1,200.  And she smells like caramel, but she doesn’t have to put stuff in her hair to create a scent like I do.  A is “base”.  A is bass to my melody.

I am “base”.  I keep the motion and the flow in my life.  I swim the channel of shadows toward the light.  I love and forgive and connect and sting when I harm people and get pissed off when I have to do the right things and it’s hard.  I try to stop when I can’t and I try to go when I should.  And I learn from my little wild guru nephew about base and safe and stop.

Here’s a new feeling

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Rage.

I have to say that I’ve done a lot of work to peel off the whys of abuse.  I’ve walked many paths.  I’ve marveled at so many people’s rage.  I didn’t get it.  Now I do.  In the last month, starting in the middle of the road trip, I do.

Rage.

So many friends have had rage because they couldn’t protect me.  I said it was fine.  But from a different vantage, from this different angle, I see different pathways and how history that I thought I knew – form different pictures.  I want to throw up.

Now I know more and can see patterns and history and a much larger picture is coming together.  And this picture is not redeeming: I am learning how some families struggle with certain demons for generations.

The more I speak out, the more I can see back and am aware of what created the environment that makes a family susceptible to a cult.  A family is taught shame and secrets.  A family is taught that they are so flawed that there is no hope for them.  I want to know where this dark mythology started in my blood.

I have deep compassion.  But I have rage.  Because these lies have scarred just about everybody I love.  And now that I see the patterns, now that I am 3,000 miles away – I can see clearly.

Rage.  It took a lot of therapy to find mine.  And it was hard to name, but I drew a straight line to it in a cliche shower epiphany this morning.  Now that I know it, I can’t unknow it.  I’m straight up pissed off.

It’s not just why me and why my family.  It’s why anyone.  I want to start with me and mine.  Only love and compassion will fight this.  This is beyond morality and judgement, they doesn’t exist in this level.  There is only love, non-judgement and compassion.

I have to dig deeper, ask questions, publicly gut myself and write about it.  I have to be someone who sheds light and helps it stop.

No means No

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Facebook is funny.  A while ago, I saw a picture of my ex-wife.  We don’t talk or get along right now and I don’t know if I should have hope that we will.  Time will tell.

This picture was amazing.  She was beaming ear to ear and she looked so happy.  I smiled.  When you are breaking each other’s hearts and breaking up, you don’t see a lot of smiles and I hadn’t seen her smile in what seems forever.  It doesn’t happen around me and I have to accept that.  But it’s beautiful.

She was standing in front of a VW Bus.  Apparently, she bought it after we broke up.  I had told her that if she bought a VW Bus that I would leave her.  I’ve had nothing but miserable experiences associated with them: from car accidents to getting my head puked on.  They are stuffed with horse hair and they smell like horses.  I hate them.   She sucked it up and went without.

There were things I wanted, that she said no to.  I sucked it up and went without.

Seeing that picture of her was amazing, because she was standing in front of a big, bright shiny YES.  And her smile said, YES.  And I cried because I stared at that picture of her in her shiny moment of yes and thought about 12 years of NO.  When she and I had denied each other various things, moments and events because of our fear.

I was packing for the move last night and I had an item that I bought a long time ago that used to represent hope.  But it had been denied so many times, that I threw it away because I realized that now it represented rejection to me.  A symbol is a symbol, the hope is in me.  I don’t need to carry an albatross.  It was not an actual albatross.

We’re both engaged now.  I am so much happier.  I am practicing YES all of the time: to me, my new partner, my path, my potential, my healing, my art.  E and I say a lot of yes and we have a good plan, but that plan generally leaves room for whatever then next most awesome thing is.

I hope she’s also getting YES and giving herself yes.  I hope that smile isn’t just for the camera and is there a lot, because it’s beautiful.  I’m glad she got that bus.  And I’m glad that I’ve finally learned that it’s just a thing.  Just a thing and it’s far more important to make your partner feel heard and loved.  It was so much easier for us to react on our fear and shut the other one down.

That isn’t and can’t be my life anymore.  I am cultivating an expansive YES.  And that is really scary sometimes.

ever since June 3rd

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I’ve had an email in my inbox that I’m terrified to read.  Turns out I’m not the only one who writes about the pain of the church.  One of the other people wrote their story and emailed it to me.  And I’m totally gonna read it.  But I’m scared.

I guess, I feel that their pain will be more real if I read it.  Maybe, it’s easier to think that it’s easier to contain if I’m the only one talking.  Maybe it’s cause I’m a Leo.

A double click will keep my commitment.  I feel like such a hypocrite, publishing tomes of my memories and not being able to read theirs.  But when I was showering, I thought about something else.  It’s bigger than me.  I think that reading their story will make mine times two. And open an exponential door into a monstrous house of pain.

If I hurt this much and they hurt this much – and there were 40 families.  That’s just too much.  It’s too big.  I feel like it’s opening the front cover of a really big book.

I also feel like this whole thing is a mystery.  I hear so many stories about how the church ended, how it crumbled.  But I don’t know 100% because I’m the one who walked away.  I got disowned by my family and excommunicated, yes I engineered it.  And yes that played a big part in exposing a lot of the BS going on.  But I’ve learned there were so many other factors at play.

So, after walking away from rubble it’s scary to walk back in and excavate and see what really went down and what the damage was.

But, dang I feel like a hypocrite for not being able to read that email.

outside talking to the outside looking inside

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Recently, I had a phone conversation with somebody who is the best friend of one of the people from the church.  (You found my blog online.  Now you are in it… Hope you don’t mind…)

But she’s been friends with the woman from the church since before the church.  And she knew all of these things that had happened.  She knew people, names, had socialized with some of us.  She knew my mom.  I heard what it was like for her to be the best friend of someone in a cult.

How scary, it must have been for her.  She walked a delicate balance because she didn’t want to drive her friend away.  She was a delicate anchor.

It made me think of the person I met before I left the church who told me that what I was experiencing might be abuse.  She was very gentle.  She knew that if she came at me passionately that I was freak out and shut down and run away.  I am forever grateful for her intuition that helped me find a way out of the church.

It was amazing to hear her talk about it.  Validating in a lot of ways, because what happened was so weird.  And sometimes it feels like a bizarre dream that took up the first half of my life and haunts the second half.  She talked about the cult de sac where so many people from the church lived and how some realtor listed it as hot property because it always sold so fast.  They didn’t know all of the demand was driven  by a cult trying to buy into the same area, and that once the church was gone the demand dried up as the families dispersed.

She talked about one of the women in the church, who has a very special place in my heart.  But she saw a completely opposite side of her.  And of course she would.  Because she doesn’t know that that woman was my very first dance teacher when I was five years old and she’s the one that gave me the keys to my soul’s freedom.  She was also my brother’s first art teacher and although the Army crushed my brother’s arm, he’s still an amazing artist.

There was anger in her voice and that made sense too.  The same anger that is in the voice of a lot of my friends.  The anger of “WHY DID THIS HAPPEN TO SOMEONE I LOVE”.

It was a good talk.  It was a hard talk.  I was proud of myself because when it got too triggery, I set a boundery and we moved on.  That for me is progress.   But, it really opened my eyes to the damage of the church.  The friends and family that were cut off from loved ones because of this cult.  Because of the spiritual abuse and the forced isolation.

I still have so much trouble reaching out to my blood family, because I see them as a them and not a me.  I am trying so hard to change that in me.  That and something called ambivalent attachment disorder, which is something you get when the people who are supposed to keep you safe do so only some of the time so it’s not reliable.

OMG TMI

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“Really, Suzi?  Wow.”

I’ve heard it a million times.

TMI!!!

I thought of this when I was blogging yesterday about what do you tell a client about PTSD.  What do you have to tell a client or a boss about a trauma, a disorder or a mental illness?  I don’t know.  Mine makes me kinda flippy outty and tactless and times.  There’s the crying.  People kind of notice.  There’s the good days where I’m not triggered.  Or the OK days where I can bottle it down into a nice little coal in my gullet.

But gullet coals aside…  Why the oversharing?  Why the saying too much?  It’s been hard on relationships because I’ll be out to dinner and the start a relationship with…”so the other day in bed…”  Keeping it classy.

So, I was thinking about it, and talking (too much jk) about it.  And then I went to therapy and danced and screamed about it, and it hit me.  Not literally.   But the cult maintained control over us by brainwashing us into over-confessing everything.  We were trained to tell every thought and every feeling, or we would feel awful-nauseous.  If we ever saw someone from the church and had a bad thought about them and didn’t tell them, it was a sin and we had to tell them before the next communion or it was like the sin was locked in forever.

By making us a self policing congregation it really cut down on enforcement.  Which is actually good business automation practice if you think about it-but back to the cult…

So, I am in pain if I allow myself privacy.  I feel like I am lying to you if I know something that I haven’t told you.  It’s misery.  And if you confess before something gets found out the punishment is somewhat lessened.  There is a constant paranoia scan in my head that is looking for wrongs committed…

So, this over-confessing still makes sense.  I’ve adapted it a little.  In the past few years, Ive been more jokey about it so that I can still make sure that I’ve said everything but in a jokey way so that I don’t get looked at like I’m a martian all the time.

I’m practicing privacy now.  Which is one of the reasons I’ve been so silent on the blog.  I’ve been evaluating again: what do I want to say?  Why do I want to say it?  What do I want to get out of this?

And so I don’t know that I know what I want.  But I know I have more to say.  And this is my forum.

a gift of a dream last night

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I’ve been self employed for over 10 years and last night I had a dream of my last employer.  I was the sole tech for the small business and also a project coordinator.  To quote the great AEJ, “when he canned me”… “he said I was inadequate”.

And I see how that has poisoned me in so many ways.  This CEO and I didn’t get along.  There were cultural differences, there were socio-economic differences, there were “hey she’s working with tools on a server and has boobs at the same time” issues.

This job was my leap from being a corporate rising star and ladder climber to small business.  It was my jump from being a cog in a vast IT wheel to being The Wheel.  I had a big learning curve.  But my dream last night also let me in on how many ways it was a completely sabotaging environment.

The saddest thing is how I had never been fired before.  I knit that word “inadequate” into my scar tissue and wore it.  I owned it.  The thing I realized this morning is how many personal and professional boundaries I have crossed to be the one who would “go there” who would “do it”.  Who would be rock star enough at the cost of my own personal sanity and health.

Because after 10 years, I didn’t even remember who I was proving wrong anymore.  I just knew that I was on a mission to kick some ass, no matter how bruised my foot was.

I feel like last night’s dream was such a gift.  I feel like I can work on letting that go.  I can do what I can do.  I can trust in the brilliance and the experience that I have and I don’t have to get all crazy about it.  I don’t have to compromise my happiness, balance, loved ones, plans, whatever so that some scary monster from a decade ago who hopefully doesn’t remember me any more won’t be right.

Of course, being the highly enlightened being that I am.  I changed all the server passwords to “inadequate”.

And, the lessons learned from being a solo tech in a small company is the inspiration for us to start that small company that we started.  So, thanks scary monster.  And thanks dream.

problems with authority 1

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You may not have noticed, but sometimes I have trouble with authority.  Most recently this played out with my personal trainer where she said, come in twice before our next appointment-do these things or “you’ll be punished”.  She couldn’t have been more playful when she said it.

I even wanted to come in.  But I swear that phrase triggered me and my “fuck you shoes” were glued to the floor and I couldn’t go.  I said about a thousand times, I need to go to the gym.  I wanted to go.  But I couldn’t get there.  Why couldn’t I just get off my ass?

I felt weak and dumb.  I didn’t feel like I was “rebelling”.  I just felt like there was a force field between me and there.  Like I couldn’t get there.  I realized that between doing something or taking a punishment, I will take my autonomy and their punishment every time just because I can.  To prove my freedom now.

But seriously, I’m 35.  They aren’t going to get me anymore.  Half of my brain knows that, if I hold my head to the side and smack it, will my lizard brain get it?   It gets exhausting trying to prove myself to them, especially since they aren’t there anymore.  And since what I was rebelling against was healthy for me and something I wanted.

This is one of the consequences of emotional and physical abuse.  Now that the SCARY is internalized the problems with authority and internalized and I have to be at the gym in 42 minutes explaining how we’re going to have to come up with different language so that I can get my ass to the gym while I work on the cobwebs in this new dark corner that’s been lit up for me.  And not feel like a jerk or a delicate flower or make her feel like a jerk.

all you need is love 2

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Now it’s easy for me to feel that since I breached trust that I am horrible, icky, nasty.  I remember a time when I was 16 and I had my hair cut off as a punishment that if anyone asked why I cut my hair that I had to say that it was because I was a sinner and (something else I don’t remember…)  But that became a part of my identity, my scarlet A.

So, I feel like when I’ve “sinned”, or hurt somebody I love that I need to wear a banner of shame or an albatross.  It seems it’s more productive to learn from it and integrate it into your life and move on after forgiving yourself as a stronger more mindful person in the world.  Crazy.

So, E and I have been nesting and I feel really loved and supported.  I feel like I can make “mistakes” and he can make “mistakes” or we can “act from our shadows” or enact behaviors from our past that were once necessary.  Although in our initial communication, there may be misunderstanding there is light and space to step back and speak in a loving way about how we communicate and what the root is.

This and the giant rocks falling off of me, gave me a lot of courage.

all you need is love 1

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I’ve been very silent and internal.  Having posted a blog would have been like reaching into a tornado and pulling out one piece of debris and saying this is my focus.  But I’ve had no focus.

I mean, I’ve been focusing on my physical.  Which brings me right back to my emotional.  E’s and my living space that was quaint and intimate when we moved in has become neither and we need to go when our lease is up.  It’s an important part of our “stay in love plan”.

He and I went through a hard time recently.  There’s this sneaky person in me.  She used to sneak eat when she was growing up.  She used to get  tricked and then punished by authority figures.  She never could believe the reality presented to her was really what was going on.  So, this person (um…me) ended crafting her own reality in a lot of ways.  Becoming a kind of social manager, control freak, because if I know every thing that’s going on then there are no surprises.  I create the reality.  I am the knowing one.  I choose who to let in.  And while there aren’t a lot of surprises, there are surprises when you are with someone who actually wants to be with you creating your path equally.

It’s been so hard to let down the levels of walls and controls that I didn’t even know where there.  Manipulation that I didn’t realize I was spinning, so ingrained in me, until it was coming out of my mouth.  It’s been so hard to just be at peace and listen and be in a conversation without having to figure out what my move is three moves ahead.

So, to my credit I have a lot of successes in this.  A couple weeks ago, I didn’t have a success and this crack in the trust in our relationship is what led me to realize how deep this fear is of just being is.  Of believing that if I am totally honest and can have an open conversation about my wants and needs that it will most likely work out.  But if I am sneaky about it, it just won’t.

This has been a gift in our relationship, a lot of growing and healing has happened really fast.  I went and had some body work done and she hit an area where I had some stored trauma apparently and I cried for about 12 hours.   Then about 2 days later, I felt like 200 pounds of stone that I had been encased in fell off of me.