This is a repost of a blog post I wrote the day before Mother’s Day last year. I know many of the women I work with struggle on Mother’s Day as do I.

For me it is a wonderful celebration of being a mother mixed with the sadness and anger of having a mother that could not love me in the ways I deserved to be loved.  I was sad earlier today, overcome by a deep sadness I could not explain until I came back to this post and I realized that the young child in me is still grieving for the loss of her mother.

On this day, I can’t help but think about where she might be, if she is thinking of me and the sadness she perhaps endures every year around this time. Time apart from her softens me and I feel a sadness for her while still holding my boundary and choice to not have her in my life.  Mother’s Day is bittersweet.

This is for all the women who have experienced painful mothering, may you find a way to mother and nurture yourself and that beautiful inner little girl in you.

This post is for the many mothers I know who had toxic, abusive, painful mothering as children.  I know many of you personally and I am one of you. I am also a mother and I celebrate that beautiful fact and am eternally grateful for being graced with this amazing being who came through me.  So tomorrow will be bittersweet as I allow myself to be celebrated and celebrate the mothers around me, and also sit with the pain of not having been mothered.

I see all the tributes on facebook, my fb family putting pics of their moms as their profile pic and the many statuses reading: I love you Mom, or some other wonderful sentiment.  As per my usual modus operandi, I was seeing, but not seeing, reading but grazing over what I may be feeling, going so swiftly through, that I never gave myself the chance to acknowledge what I was feeling.. And so today, I allowed myself to stop and feel. And what came to me is this sadness about my own mother and this feeling of being on the outside looking in.  It is also came to me that not everyone is celebrating their mothers tomorrow or may have some really mixed emotions about celebrating their mothers. Some of you may be feeling exactly like me.

So here is what I am feeling today, the day before Mother’s Day.  For me there is this great sense of loss even though my mother is alive. There is this sadness, that I barely felt the warmth of my mother’s touch. Tears come, right in this moment as I write this, the longing still soft and tender.  Touch, the idea of it, the longing for it, the gaping hole left by the absence of it, and the ambiguity that reams in and out because of my undeniable experience of it as toxic…all just makes me want to cry.

Today on the day before Mother’s Day, I grieve for the little girl who did not have the powerful mirror of MOTHER, staring back at her with love, joy, encouragement and admiration. I grieve for the little girl who encountered cruelty and violence in the eyes of her mother and felt unsafe in her world and feared living another day. I allow myself to see that what I experienced was not mothering, I let myself feel the space that was left by my mother’s inability to nurture me.  It is a big space which longs for her still.  Today I allow the space for this immense sadness, lest it spill sideways.  I breathe, and cry, and breathe, and cry some more and move through, and each time I do, I am healing by filling the space with the love and compassion I so desperately needed then.

I know there will always be a corner of sadness for the mother I had, and the mother she had and the line of dysfunction which kept us all from fully loving.  I am saddened by this generational rage, this wall, this fear that made its way into all of our lives, keeping us from the greatest gift of all…to fully embrace ourselves as mothers and to love and protect our children fully.

And yet there is a joy for me and I hope for you, that we did better, whether it was to choose not to have children, or to love the ones we had in a different way, we have transgressed the wall somehow, haven’t we?

Tomorrow is our day to be celebrated as mothers and to celebrate the mothers around us. We can have our truth and not be overwhelmed by it. We can take care of our beautiful selves, take time to mother ourselves, allow ourselves to be nurtured and loved by others. We can make space for the grief.  We can give ourselves what we needed then and find safe and supportive people who will serve as healthy mirrors. We can do it all because that is what being fully alive, human and woman means. We are capable of standing in all of it with power and grace, even if sometimes it means we crawl under the covers to stand in it.  When we resist, and suppress, we suffer. But when we move through, we move through to the other side, and each time, there is a healing.  Each time we move through, we heal another piece of the broken child and make space for love and joy to come in and wrap its loving arms around her/him, lifting her back up with dignity.

Move through, mothers, daughters, sons, move through.

Holding you in my heart.

Lovingly,
Stephanie

This is just a quickie, to remind you all my next ecourse begins tomorrow, Tuesday May 8th. Yay! Come join us in the sanctuary and go on a journey with some amazing women, exploring how imagery and ritual can play a role in the healing process.  I am super excited to share this course I have developed using my own process and what has worked for me. 

Registration will stay open for a few days after we start. You don’t need to have any experience in art journaling to participate. We have beginner videos in the sanctuary to get you started and the truth is we can all express ourselves artistically.  I’m even providing some digital pieces you can use in your art for those who want to use them. This is a healing course that uses art and journaling as tools.  You will receive an art/coaching video each week in which I share my process with the prompts as well as a pdf with all the information you need to work through the materials. You will also receive support from me on a weekly basis as needed.

For all the basic information about the course you can go to:  http://findingyourvoiceoftruth.com/truth-project-ii/

Healing is so difficult to define and measure. It is often one of the things, that makes my left brain a little nutty. How will I know if what I am doing is helping, working? Part of me searches for a way to measure healing, it is that quick fix part of me, that wants my own transformation to be now, and the transformation of others to be right now as well. 

But the truth is it takes time. The truth is sometimes we need to talk, write, art, about the same issue over and over again until it starts to click, until we are ready to make a change, until the wound has been unlayered for its last time. And I wonder if there will ever be a last time.

I think we all may go to the grave with some wounds not fully healed and that is okay. I don’t think we are meant to heal so completely that we are done..at least that is what my realistic self says. And yet I do believe we can make a dent in it, we can become more fully alive, we can unblock, shift, open, more and more, the more we let ourselves live, the more we explore, remember, reclaim, and come back to ourselves. Every healing path I think is a journey home, home to ourselves and the Sacred within us. 

So for today, I tried to put words to what healing is..this is what I have..not too well formed, a bit clumsy perhaps, but here it is…

Today, healing is:

Remembering, revisiting, naming, owning, claiming

Feeling, truly feeling, what we had to cut off then, moving through, releasing. There may be multiple cycles of this

Healing the layers of a wound. Wounds have many parts/layers/levels to them which connect to other wounds.  Many times we think, I thought I healed that. What we healed was a layer or several layers of it.

Knowing what your core wound is..I am unloveable, I am not enough, I am unworthy, No one will stay and healing with the truth of its opposite, I am loveable, I am enough, I am worthy, they will stay, I WILL STAY.

Coming back to the truth of who you are underneath your story, meaning your true self, who you are at your core.

Healing happens over time, accepting the journey over the quick fix.

Reclaiming the parts of us that were lost, buried, frozen in our childhood

Learning how to feel safe in the world

Living life more fully, by being more fully ourselves, engaging in life, opening our hearts, transforming the story.

Helping others in whatever way that manifests.

Reclaiming your connection to what you hold Sacred.

Being here now, in every moment where everything falls away and all that is left is you and your Sacred Divine Energy.

Here is more on What is Healing?

Have you joined the Healing Truth Sanctuary yet? An online creative community of women healing from childhood wounding.

While I am a very outspoken survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I normally do not speak of details, or go into the story of the various violations that occurred from the age of about 7-15. It’s not for public consumption and can leave my audience triggered and that’s not very healing.

I normally leave that for my therapy sessions and during my healing journey, I did get to pour it all out in my memoir which still sits in a file on my computer, all 364 pages of it. Not sure if I will ever publish it, but it is there, a record of what happened to me. My story, in aching detail…because I needed at the time to pin it down, to claim it, to say this really did happen (I think a part of me thought, did this really happen? with a lot of incredulousness). This post is not about the details of my own abuse, but the anatomy of how those who abuse operate, gain control and leave the child/adult feeling a sense of shame, guilt, confusion, repressed rage and a deep sadness.

Recently I was speaking with one of the men in my group (a group I attend as a participant). He mentioned the word aggression and was imagining what it may feel like to be me, having had experienced aggression by men. I quite simply said, there was no aggression. His eyes widened. I said they were all very nice actually, kind, funny, endearing, friendly and that was how they got to me. It was all very confusing.

So I’m going lay it out a bit here. How it kind of went, for some if not all. How I experienced most of the men who molested me as a child. I’m going to talk about the seduction and the anatomy of the seduction because I think it is important to understand and important to the work of healing shame (a topic we are working on in the sanctuary). As someone who was abused by 9 men, I experienced the full gamut of the following:

Anatomy of Seduction in Child Sexual Abuse

• They are quite often people we know. Like, love and trust. They may even be our protectors or trusted by our protectors.
• They may pay attention to us in positive ways and in negative ways. Using rewards and punishments.
• They may be nice, funny, giving (my grandfather used to buy me cupcakes after school), they may take a special interest in us, they may even find out what we like and give us special treats.
• They may intimidate us with threats, stares,or  actual violence. Some abusers go this route, which is less about seduction and more about intimidation, taking us over, humiliating us, using our powerlessness to take what they want without apologies.
• They use shame as a weapon..you were bad, no one will believe you, look at what you made me do or some variation of this. What we end up believing is: “I am bad”
• Their size and body are used as weapons as well. They show us they can overtake us at anytime and we learn we cannot do anything about it. This leads to learned helplessness. Even when we can supposedly “get away” we don’t. This also leads to shame as adults that we didn’t fight back, say no, cry out, tell. As adults we begin to feel the power we have and we wonder why we didn’t use it..not remembering how truly small and helpless we were. This distorted thinking can be a block to the healing process and has many layers.
• They seem very powerful to us, as we are small and cannot fend for ourselves and have not been taught we can say no to adults, that we have a right to our bodies, that we can tell and someone will believe us. “There is no safe place to go. I am not safe.”
• They may use pity as manipulation, as a way to get you the child to feel sorry for them. They may apologize or look guilty which often makes the child wonder if they did something wrong. As we get older we may think we have some kind of sexual power that provokes men to look at us, take advantage of us. More shame as we shut down our sexual energy or overuse it to compensate for these feelings.
• For some of us it may feel good physically which adds to the shame and confusion.  This arousal is normal and is not something the child can shut down. Based on human anatomy there are parts of our body that will be aroused when touched, no matter the situation is. It has to do with anatomy not “wanting it”, “asking for it” etc.
• We may hint at something being wrong to one of our parents, or even tell and get a reaction that tells us we are not safe to speak our truth which further intensifies their power. “Oh so I am powerless”
• If it is repeated abuse, chronic stress sets it, our brain become rewired and our nervous system goes through cycles of being revved up, then crashing.  This leaves us feeling hypervigilant, waiting for the next shoe to drop, anxious, feeling dread, fear quite often.
• As children we are unable to say, “oh he is doing that because he has a problem, he is sick, or something is wrong with him/her” Instead we think, “something is wrong with me”. It is part of our development to believe that we are the center of the universe and anything that happens in it has something to do with us. It is called egocentrism. And although we outgrow it at some point, those younger parts still exist in us and believe what they believed then.

The healing comes in facing our shame in adult settings with healthy mirrors who can tell us, it was not our fault. It comes from us accepting that it was not our fault (this comes in time) and putting the shame where it belongs, no longer in us, eating away at us. It comes in telling our younger selves that it was not their fault, that they did nothing wrong..saying it over and over and having compassion for when the little girl/boy in us comes up and feels shame about anything.

That is the perfect time, when we are triggered and feeling shame to take the opportunity to have an inner dialogue with your inner child and let it know it’s okay, you are okay. Even if as adults when we find ourselves doing something we quite naturally would feel badly about, we can own a healthy amount of guilt, make amends if we need to and do it differently next time. We can work on it. This, what happened to us, was not something we could work on, there was nothing we could do. We were in fact innocent, helpless and powerless.  We were not wrong or bad, which is what shame is, a belief and feeling that we are wrong. Separating shame from guilt (we did something wrong) can be helpful.  Even some of our guilt is not ours, but that is for another day.

I hope this gives those of you who have experienced sexual abuse and those who know someone dear to them who experienced it, a greater understanding of the shame associated with sexual abuse and what it does to a person’s mind and sense of self. The healing is in reclaiming the truth for ourselves, and the parts we lost in those attacks against our very souls.

Have you joined the sanctuary yet? Join us here: http://www.healingtruthsanctuary.com

My next ecourse begins May 8th. Truth Project II: Healing with Imagery and Ritual Details here: http://findingyourvoiceoftruth.com/truth-project-ii/