Category: Truth

Heal to Handle Joy

A friend of mine sent this image to me recently. I have no idea who to credit for it, but it is so true.

I spent most of my life hyper-vigilant, not knowing who I could trust, even myself. I often felt like there was an overwound spring, ready to break free inside of me. The anxiety often threatened to pull me under and drown me. It took a toll on my body as I am still learning to relax my overly tense muscles.

Therapy has helped me tremendously. The first few times I went, I did the work to get through the trauma of the moment. Then because of insurance, or time committment, I would end treatment with new skills and strategies for dealing with the stresses of life.

This time though, I have continued beyond the trauma of the moment and gotten to the base of my mental health issues; feeling worthless, not good enough, abandoned, alone, and dealt with them. Now, instead of always waiting for the next bad thing to happen, I believe that I will find joy.

That is a terrifying, new experience for me. I’m not saying that I haven’t been happy before, but I never trusted it, history had shown me that good times don’t last. You get your heart ripped out of your chest, cut to pieces, and left alone to put it back together again.

As I have been learning to live my authentic self, not making myself fit into a certain mold or expectation of me, I have found people who like me, and all the oddities and nerdiness that go along with me. It’s scary to be vulnerable and honest with yourself and others, but in the process, I am learning how to handle joy in my life. I’m not scared that I have to behave a certain way to keep people likeing me, they just like me.

Therapy taught me that I can be me. As a friend learned in one of her therapy appointments, I’m not for everybody and everybody isn’t for me and that’s okay. As I have embraced who I am, I have learned to find joy in acceptance, peace in solitude, and contentment with others. I no longer feel as though I am a spring ready to break free, now if I could just get my shoulders to realize that they are not responsible for keeping everything inside so they can relax…

If you need someone to talk to, I am now an Associate Marriage Family Therapist working at Share Homes Foster and Adoption Agency in Lodi, Ca. If you are in California, I can work with you. Send a message for more information.

A Long Time Coming

I have spent the past few years learning about myself. The journey truly began in the spring of 2016 with a series of Facebook posts that all started with the phrase, “You might be in an abusive or controlling relationship if…” I was writing them to help a friend who I thought was in a controlling relationship, but also to help all people who might be in that kind of relationship and not realize it. In the process, I ended up helping to finally heal myself from the abusive and controlling relationships that I experienced in my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.

Through my healing journey, I realized that I was a people pleaser. I did not even know what I truly liked in some cases, I just liked what others liked. I really like cheesy rom-com movies where you know exactly how the story is going to end. I really don’t like NASCAR, except the white noise of the engines while I take a nap. I like some sci-fi, but not others and I can’t tell you what makes me like some and not others yet, but I’ll keep watching to figure it out.

I learned that I don’t like fighting. If I think someone is mad at me and is about to start or does start a fight, I will do whatever is necessary to appease them and keep them happy. I will retreat into my shell, and ignore my wants and needs to keep the other person happy. This is not a healthy coping strategy. I am working on this.

I have learned how to say what I am feeling, what I need, and what I want without feeling like I’m asking for too much or being too needy. I learned that just because I was made to feel that asking for my needs to be met as a child was asking for too much, it is not. It is normal and necessary for humans to function.

I learned that it’s okay to ask for help; that relying on yourself from a young age because you cannot trust anyone else to help you in your time of need is not a healthy coping strategy. It means that those who should have been there to take care of you when you were younger weren’t.

I have learned a lot over the past seven years and I will continue to learn more on this healing and growth journey I am on. I will never again settle for a person because they pay attention to me, I am looking for a true partner in my future. Someone who loves me as I am. Someone who I am able to be myself with from the very beginning and able to grow and change with as I learn new things.

I am excited to be at this point in my life. I am content with where I’m at. I have great friends, a good job, and a home that I love and am totally comfortable in.

Believe in Yourself

I grew up doubting myself in everything I did. There were excellent reasons for this, I was conditioned to doubt not just my abilities, but even my own emotions. I was terrified that the upper level of the Bay Bridge heading to San Francisco would collapse onto the lower level, crushing the cars below; I never wanted to go over the bridge.

I told my mom about that fear.

Her response: “That’s completely ridiculous. There is no way the Bay Bridge will collapse.”

On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 pm the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 seconds at a magnitude 6.9. Among the billions of dollars in damage that was caused, the upper level of the Bay Bridge collapsed onto the lower level killing one person.

I wasn’t ridiculous, but I had been dismissed. After the earthquake, my mom continued to dismiss my fear, telling me it was a freak accident, caused by the earthquake and anything else she could think of to not take my fear seriously.

There are too many stories like this from my life, I could go on for pages and pages. (I actually did. The book is called Worthless No More, go check it out under the books tab.)

I have spent the past two years in therapy with an incredible therapist. I have also spent a lot of time learning about myself and seeing what beliefs and behaviors I had that needed to be changed.

The biggest change I needed to make was to believe in myself. To trust that my feelings are valid, that my thoughts are valuable, and that my words have worth.

I have spent years teaching these things to my students, hoping that they’d take it to heart and ignoring it in my own life.

Now, I believe in myself. Now, I trust myself. Now, I know my worth.

And you can to.

You are AMAZING!!!!

Christmas Looks Different This Year 2022 Edition

Last year, just before Christmas, one of my very best friends told me that she was sure that I wouldn’t be alone by this Christmas.

Well, guess what…

She was absolutely,

Positively,

In all ways,

Completely,

Without a doubt,

Correct.

While I don’t have a special someone, a significant other if you will, to spend time with this holiday season, I am far from alone. I wasn’t alone last year either.

I have felt alone many times in my life, most of my life actually, even when surrounded by people. I have felt that I had nobody to depend on, nobody to talk to, nobody who understood ME, who I really was.

In an effort to not be alone, I surrounded myself with people that loved me for who they thought I was, so I became that person instead of being me. I hid parts of myself that I knew they wouldn’t approve of. I was ashamed of my flaws. I lost myself in order to feel loved and in the end I was still utterly, completely lonely.

Over the past year, I have realized, that although I felt alone, I was not alone. I did have friends that I could rely on and turn to when I needed them. Those are the same friends that I have in my life this Holiday season that mean I am not alone as I face another “single” Christmas.

I will be visiting with many friends of the holiday break. I will be spending time relaxing at home. I am most definitely not alone this Christmas, she was right.

Anxiety Lies

healthyplace.com

I have anxiety and it lies to me. It knows every one of my insecurities and fears. It whispers them to me in a steady drone in the back of my head, like constant white noise. Sometimes anxiety chooses one or two of them to pick out and amplify; to scream into my mind until I can’t breath, until I can’t think of anything else, until my heart is racing as if I’m facing a life threatening moment, until I want to run away.

(I take medication that helps. Finally, my doctor and I have found a medication that helps AND now, almost a year later, hasn’t left me wanting to do nothing but sleep which is what every other medication I have tried has left me feeling. I also see a therapist, having a person to talk to has helped tremendously.)

The lies anxiety chooses to amplify focus on two topics that have a huge impact on my life: “You can’t do this.” and “They won’t like you.”

Those two lies have kept me from doing so much in my life. They have kept me hidden. They have kept me invisible, locked inside a prison of my own making. There have been people in my life that fed into the lies along with anxiety, who emotionally, physically, and sexually abused me, but it was the lies anxiety told me, and I believed, that kept me in those relationships far longer than I should have been. I couldn’t leave my parents until I was 18, but I kept them in my life much longer. The boyfriend who raped me and my first husband, I waited until they were physically away from me before I broke up with them.

I believed I couldn’t do it.

This past week, I went on a vacation specifically designed to challenge myself. I was willing to go alone, but a coworker ended up joining me, because it was one of her bucket-list travel destinations. It was amazing getting to know her better, I’m so glad she joined me on all the challenges I chose to do. She even had to do one of them herself, because of health reasons, I wasn’t allowed to participate in it.

I hiked up waterfalls, one of them was 1200 steps! There were many stops… for photos… along the way. It was never because I needed to catch my breath. Where are the photos you ask, ummmmm. I’m pretty sure the film didn’t develop on those… (HAHAHAHA.)

Skogafoss Waterfall, Iceland (the black line to the right are the steps I climbed to the top)

I walked through an ice cave, in a glacier that’s melting, on a volcano, that has never gone more than 100 years between eruptions, until now. It’s been 104 years since the last eruption. I walked over bridges made of 2X6 planks of wood, that have been chewed up by the cramp-ons that people wear on their boots to not slip on the ice with melting glacier water rushing beneath them and nothing to hold on to except the occasional rope hooked into the melting glacier wall.

Katla Ice Cave, Iceland

I met tons of new people, that I actually talked to. I didn’t listen to anxiety telling me that they wouldn’t like me. I just went for it. There I may not have learned everyone’s name, but we all did amazing things together and I will never forget them being there with me. I ate food that I NEVER thought I’d eat and it was DELICIOUS. I hope to find some of it here in California, but some of it I know I won’t. I ate fermented shark and I will never eat it again! EVER! But I did it, I got out of my comfort zone and did it! I can do hard things.

My travel buddy, our driver/guide for two days, and me at Silfra, Iceland (where two continents meet)

The next time anxiety tries to lie to me, I need to remember all the hard things I did on this trip and all the people I met. I can do this and people will like me.

Forgiveness

I grew up being told that if in order to be a “good Christian” I needed to forgive those who did wrong to me. If I wanted God to forgive me of my sins against Him, I needed to forgive others of their sins against me. I mean, the Lord’s Prayer, what we are taught is the “perfect prayer” says, “forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

If we forgive others, then God can forgive us and we can have a chance of an amazing future in Heaven.

What I was never taught, what I never learned growing up, was how to forgive myself, so while I was busy forgiving others, so that I could have a future chance in Heaven, I was living in a version of Hell on earth.

I wasn’t taught how to forgive myself for being “stupid” enough to trust my boyfriend to go with him to his friends house.

I didn’t learn how to forgive myself for being so “slutty” that I wore a knee-length denim skirt and a long sleeve button up shirt that day, that I had buttoned all the way up, but somehow, I must have been “asking for it.”

I never knew how to forgive myself for being so embarrassed about what “I” did that day, the day my boyfriend decided that I had been teasing him long enough, that he forced himself inside of me, without even taking my clothes off, that I didn’t tell anybody for months, and I “allowed” it to keep happening for another eight months.

I had forgiven him for what he did, so I could go to Heaven, but I had never forgiven myself. I get upset when people blame victims, but I had been doing that my whole life to myself.

Then a few months ago, my therapist asked me when I was going to forgive myself, as I was leaving. I was so angry with him, for the entire week between sessions. That question was all I could think about.

Forgiving myself? I struggled with it for almost two weeks. I cried, I screamed. I yelled at my therapist. I finally forgave myself.

I had to realize I was a fifteen year old child. I was not in control of that situation in any way. He drove me there, I knew something felt off, but I had no way of leaving and nobody to call, no way to call anyone since there were no cell phones back then. Once he started, he had me pinned down and was about 200 pounds to my 90 pounds, there was no way for me to sop him.

I didn’t have anyone to turn to when it was over. There were no safe adults in my life. The adults at school would have to call the police, my mom would think I was a slut and a sinner. If I told the adults at school my mom would eventually find out, which is exactly what happened months later. She ended up telling me that I had to marry him.

Since I forgave myself, I no longer feel like I’m living in my own personal version of Hell on earth. My thoughts have slowed down (most of the time) and I can sleep at night. I don’t constantly feel like I’m in fight or flight mode.

Forgiving others, is something I recommend if you need to in order to move on from them.

Forgiving yourself, I highly recommend, I don’t think you can live your life to it’s fullest potential if you don’t.

Learning From the Past

From mid-January to mid-March of 2015, I was on the jury of a sexual harassment civil lawsuit. Four women were suing their former boss for sexually harassing them in the workplace and making a hostile work environment because of their gender.

It was two grueling months of testimony that brought up a lot for me. As I sat silently in the jury box, listening to the women tell their stories from the witness stand, listened to what they endured and how they felt, brought up emotions that I thought I had dealt with long before. Then deliberations were intense, we deliberated so long, that another jury was chosen, the trial completed and the verdict read, before we were done.

In the end two of the plaintiffs we ruled he was not guilty of, one we ruled he was guilty of, and one we couldn’t reach a decision.

During the trial, I couldn’t talk about anything I was going through. I know everyone gets that instruction and I’m sure that most people go home and talk to their spouses or friends about the trial, at least a little bit to ease what they’re going through, but I literally couldn’t because our friends knew the defendant. They would hang out with us and talk about their friend’s court case, I’d have to go to the bathroom, then come back and change the subject.

Once the trial was over, I went to dinner with someone I thought I could talk to about how the case made me feel. I had been talking for about twenty minutes, when they looked at me and asked, “Are you ever going to stop talking about this?” I immediately stopped, but it sent me into a spiral into depression and anxiety that I hadn’t experienced since about 1999.

By the fall of 2015, I wanted out of my life. I felt like I just made every one’s life worse by being in it, that I was a burden to every one, especially my family. I went to counseling, that helped, slowly, but it did. By the winter of 2016, I wanted to be here again. In all of it, I never made any attempts, just a lot of fantasizing about how much better every one else’s life would be if I was gone.

In March of 2016 I started a Facebook miniseries that I called “You Might be in an Abusive or Controlling Relationship if…”, a memory of it popped up this past week. On March 9, 2016 I wrote “If  your significant other in any way belittles you, demeans you or makes you feel like you don’t deserve better, you are in an abusive relationship.”

There were eleven posts in total, all of them things that I have had people do to me in my life. When I wrote the first one, I was scared. I had told people about my past experience in abusive and controlling relationships, but I had never put it out there for the world to see. I am so glad I did.

I wrote that miniseries for a very specific reason, to help a friend who I couldn’t talk to, but knew she’d see that on Facebook, but it ended up helping me too. It helped me heal. It led me to write my book, it led me to more healing from past trauma and learning to be my authentic self, instead of always being who people want me to be. (This is still a work in progress.)

We all have things in our lives that we can learn from. If we don’t learn from the things we’ve been through, we’re doomed to repeat them, I’m a prime example of that. I did NOT learn from my high school relationship, or my parents. I’ve been having to learn the lessons from those relationships for a long time.

Take time to see the patterns of hurt and pain in your life, even if its not abusive, and learn from them. Learn what you really want and go for it, ask for it, be your true self.

Finding Your Voice, Knowing Your Worth

I’m currently reading a book titled There’s A Hole In My Love Cup by Sven Erlandson. Yesterday I read a section that talked about confronting those who created your negative core beliefs, most likely a parent or parents. Most of us have never confronted them out of fear, not that they will lash out and yell at us for confronting them, but out of fear that they will minimize our feelings, won’t change how they treat us, and therefore confirm our core belief that we are worthless and don’t matter.

He goes on to say that not only do we have the right to get rid of all the crap that they filled our love cup with, but we need to get rid of it and give it back to it’s rightful owner, whether they are going to change or not. Once we do that, get rid of all the crap in our love cup, we have room for love to fill it. The people may not change, but our relationship with them will as we realize our worth and refuse to be treated as less than any longer.

Taking our power back, finding and using our voice, and knowing our worth will also change other relationships in our lives. There are people in our lives who see who we really are somewhere deep beneath the polished surface we work so hard to protect, down to the the hurt, frightened, little kid is hiding, hoping to not be found or hurt again. As we find your voice, realize our worth, and exercise our power, these people will be there, cheering us on and supporting us through the tough times, and there will be tough times because there’s another type of person in our lives.

The other type of people are the ones who hurt us, whether on purpose or because they were hurt and didn’t know how to love us doesn’t matter, they hurt us. When we decide it’s time to let them know how they hurt us, they will most likely respond with something similar to one of these:

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“You’re just overreacting.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“If you had just___________, then I wouldn’t have had to ________”

They will find a way to minimize us and our feelings in order to make themselves feel better. In that moment, we will know that we no longer have to listen to their voice in our heads because they never truly wanted what was best for us. If they did they would have built us up instead of tearing us down. They would have listened to us as we explained how we felt instead of minimizing us to make themselves feel better.

Writing my book was the ultimate way for me to tell my parents how they made me feel worthless as a child and how that affected my life. My mom had died twelve years before I wrote it and my dad had stopped speaking to me four years prior, but whenever I had brought things up to either of them previously, they dismissed me, proving to me that I was worthless to them. Writing my book, gave me my power back and my voice. It changed me and my beliefs about myself.

I know not everybody is going to write a book, but confronting the people who have hurt you changes you. It changes other relationships as well because you realize that you are worth so much more than how some people treat you. I have lost a few relationships since I wrote my book and realized that I have value as a human being and am worthy of love and that I no longer have to chase people to love me; either people will want me, as I am, in their lives or they won’t.

Find your voice, find your power, find your worth.

You deserve it and you are lovable just the way you are!

What If?

I often have my students use their critical thinking skills by answering what if questions.

What if the Britain had won the Revolutionary War?

What if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?

What if the nuclear war hadn’t been used against Japan?

What if you were born into a family with billions of dollars?

What if you were born to a mom in prison?

What if you were a teen parent?

This type of questions get students out of thinking about what did happen and into thinking about other possibilities. It can open their minds to seeing other options so when they are faced with making decisions, they may be able to see multiple ways to handle the situation.

A few days ago, I played a dangerous game of “what if?” I asked myself the question, “What if my parents had taught me that it’s okay to say no.”

I learned from a very young age, that the answer to a request from my parents was always, “YES!” If we answered with a “no” there were consequences from being forced to do whatever it was through coercion or being yelled at and belittled. The consequences always involved feeling unloved.

As I grew up, I believed that if I loved someone, and they loved me, I wasn’t allowed to say no to them under any circumstance, no matter how uncomfortable I was with the situation.

What if my parents had taught me that it’s okay to say no?

Would I have been sexually abused and raped at fifteen years old by an eighteen year old student leader at church?

Would I have left someone who loved me and offered me a safe place because my mom refused to let me date him?

Would I have married someone who used me to cover up the fact that he liked boys and treated me more like a roommate than a wife?

I eventually had to stop the what if game, because it was leading me down a very deep, dark, rabbit hole, that left me curled in the fetal position in tears. I have a great life with two amazing kids, my own house, a decent job, but sometimes, the what if game gets the best of me.

Now I know that it IS okay to say no to people. It’s all about setting boundaries. If they love you, they will still love you, even if you have to say no every once in awhile.

Ideal Culture Conflict

In sociology I teach my students about ideal culture and real culture. Ideal culture is the values and norms that a society claims to have while real culture are the values and norms that a society actually lives in their day-to-day lives. I also teach my students that we have society as a whole, like all people on earth, but that is also broken down into many different sub-groups, like people living in a country or region; people who identify as a specific gender or no gender, people of a certain ethnic group, friend groups, religious groups, political groups, families, what job you have, etc.

Basically, society can be broken up into many different types of groups and within each group there is an ideal culture and then there is what the people of that group actually live out every day. The ideal culture is usually unattainable, but most people do their best to get there. What’s that old saying? Aim for the moon, if you miss, you may hit a star.

I have grappled with this idea my whole life, but only recently, with my therapist, have I realized it. We are taught by media and society that families are supposed to be safe places to learn and grow. That we are supposed to be able to trust our parents to be there and take care of us when we need support. For many people, that’s their truth and I’m so thankful for them, but for me and many people like me, that’s not the case. Our families were a place of constant heartache and deep wounds that followed us from childhood into adulthood that we are still working on healing from so they will stop affecting our relationships and our lives.

this is just a picture I found online, I have no idea who they are.

When I was twenty years old I married the guy I had been dating since my senior year of high school, who was a youth pastor. I had this idea that marriage was going to be a partnership and that we’d be happy. Not long after we were married, he told me that he didn’t think he’d ever be happy being married to me. As a Christian woman, I had been taught that it was up to me to keep my husband happy, so for the next five years I did whatever I could to make him happy. I did whatever he told me to do and basically lost myself in the process of becoming the woman that he could be happy being married to. This nice Christian man that I had married was actually a controlling abuser, who ended up getting arrested for abusing boys. I divorced him.

The biggest conflict for me has come from the evangelical church and many people who call themselves Christians. I was raised in a Pentecostal church and switched to a Baptist church when I was twenty-six years old. They both claim to live by what the Bible teaches.

To me that is when Jesus says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. (From Matthew 22:37-40)

Yet it seems to me, that many Christians have all kinds of rules about who they have to love and who gets into heaven and who gets to be considered Christian. A few of the churches I attended, actually taught that there were denominations within Christianity that were not “real” Christians and would not go to heaven when they died.

They didn’t show me love when I was sexually assaulted by a leader in their children’s ministry or when my ex-husband was arrested. Both the churches that I was attending at those times asked me to no longer attend. When my ex-husband was arrested, that pastor disparaged me so badly from the pulpit, that my friend wouldn’t even tell me what was said.

I know that ideal culture and real culture are not the same. I know that ideal culture is unattainable, but the people that have been in my life, from these small, little sub-groups of the larger society, seem to have not even been trying.

I know that nobody is perfect. I know that I’m not perfect and I never will be, but I hope that strive every day to live up to the best in the ideal society. I know I won’t attain it, I am after all a flawed human being. I also need to remember that everyone else is a flawed human being, none of us are perfect. None of us will attain that ideal culture, but I can surround myself with people who strive for that, who actually hope for that type of world, who don’t just pay it lip service and then behave in a completely opposite way.

Here’s to the hope of getting close to our ideal culture!