healing

As the new year gets closer I have found myself becoming nervous about what next year is going to be like for me. In a way, I am excited because I know that next year there is not going to be abuse waiting for me around every corner, because finally, he is gone. But I don't want to allow myself to be too hopeful for next year, not after this one. This year has been painfully long and hard, and I have made a lot of changes in my life, many for the good. But yet, here I am with a brand new year just a couple of days away, and I cant even let myself look forward to it.

I keep being told that each day after the abuse is supposed to get easier, but each day I wake up feeling as though maybe I should be hurt that day because I woke up late, or because I spilt coffee, just small, stupid things that I do, I don't know how to deal with those. I am not getting hurt or yelled at anymore for those, so why do I feel like I almost need that? Everyday is so confusing. Conversations with other people are just a blur where I go around and around in circles about the same things, the same issues, talking about everything we have discussed a thousand times because I don't know what else to talk about without bursting into tears. I know the new year wont take that away, I know it is also silly to wish for such a thing, but I really really do.

Those of you who know me know that I am a survivor of long term sexual abuse. But for those that do not, I was abused from childhood until just recently by a good friend of my family. For years I was numb about it all, and not willing to deal with it at all. I finally did get myself together enough to get into counselling not too long ago, and was able to work up the courage to go to the police and report this man.

Now that it is over, and I have been through that, it has not all left my mind like I had hoped it would. Stupidly, I was hoping that I would wake up the next day and feel that huge weight lift off of my heart and no longer have to deal with the images that have been in my mind since the first time he hurt me. I was wrong. In fact, since it all stopped I feel like the images have been much clearer and I have been having flash backs much more frequently. And, to be honest I am just not dealing with that well, particularly not at night time, when I have anxiety attacks and can’t sleep at all because I feel like he is watching me again.

Well, over the course of my self perscribed vacation I did a fair bit of reading.

I found a free online book about energy healing.

Written by Silvia Hartmann, it provides insight and a look at the 'energy body'.

The book's philosophy is that emotions are our energy bodies crying out with pain/joy.

In my opinion that's fairly logical. And energy must flow, something we should all know by now. When it doesn't we get blocks which are harmful.

There are a few quotes from the book I'd like to speak about and take a look at now. For reference:

This is part of a three-year online priestess' course, as well as something I would like to do. I'm very interested in becoming a healer, not only for people but for animals, and especially for animals. This book was found via the wonders of google. I selected inspiring quotes to write about here, some of which reminded me of this project:

One thing I've personally come to terms with, the older I've gotten, is that for myself, and for a lot of women I've talked to in my life and work, the wounds which come from other women can often cut more deeply than those from men do.

As women, betrayals from our mothers often seem to hit us harder than betrayals from our fathers. A female friend who hurts us often seems to have the capacity to hurt us more deeply than our male friends can/could. For those of us who are bisexual, queer or lesbian, we might experience that the first time a girl or woman breaks our hearts the depth of that hurt is unexpectedly more painful than we have experienced with men.

We could theorize until the end of time as to why that is (and plenty of women have, inside and out of feminist contexts), but WHEN it is, it can be really tough to deal with.

I admit I'm a history buff. But my oh-so-nerdy tendency has taken me back to the Women's Liberation movement, so really, you can call it nerdy if I can call it radical.

Reading about the women who worked that movement and gave us all a new lease on femininity brought me to odd moments where vocabulary and anatomy stopped working against us. Do you remember when 'vagina' was an embarassing word? We all went through that phase and struggled to come out of it; I'd bet it was our feminism that saved us. Vagina. That or Eve Ensler.

But we were reexperiencing one of the cardinal achievements, in my opinion, of the women's libbers. Vagina, cervix, uterus, vulva--they opened the words up to the public and took them out of the mouths of medicine to the street. And they did them one better. In a world and a time when female sexuality was nonexistent simply because it was ignored, activist women--our foremothers, to be blunt--reclaimed "down there" with a trend that could stand some popularity today.

It’s been hard for me to write these blogs, after reading everyone else’s. My first blog was to the child inside me, which was repressed and hidden. I experienced things that n child, or person should ever experience. I grew up too early and never had a true childhood. My mother was never really able to be a part of my family due to the murder of her body and soul.

She experienced incest continuously as a child/ teenager by her fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins; she began self-mutilation with sex, drugs and alcohol at a very early age. The last time I saw her was on my sixth birthday, so I grew up with very jaded knowledge of how women were supposed to be. Before she left, she taught me to be beautiful, to show my legs because that’s what men liked, and that I couldn’t live with out everyone’s attention.