Tiny Buddha

Tag: survivor

  • Why You’re Not Happy (Even If Life Looks Fine)

    Why You’re Not Happy (Even If Life Looks Fine)

    Do you sometimes see people running around enjoying life and wonder what you’re missing? Sometimes I used to think I must be a horrible person. I had so many things going for me, and I still couldn’t be happy. I would ask myself, is there something wrong with me? Am I a narcissist?

    Then sometimes I would decide I was just going to be happy. I would fake it until I made it and just accept that’s who I was. But it wouldn’t take long for me to feel overwhelmingly depressed.

    I had a little dark hole that would constantly pull at me, and I didn’t have the energy to keep ignoring it. My attempts to do so just made it scream louder, and then I really was in a mess. This, of course, made me feel worse because it would remind me that I must be crazy.

    As I worked through my healing journey, I discovered there are three key reasons why we can’t just muscle up and be happy. We need to work through these three obstacles to move from just surviving and having moments of happiness to thriving and living a life full of joy and inspiration. To living a life where we love who we are and what we are doing and have hope for the future.

    Life is never perfect, but it sure is a lot more enjoyable and fun when we love, enjoy, and fully experience the present moments we are in.

    So what are these obstacles? And what strategies can you use to work through them?

    1. Validate Past Experiences

    When you don’t fully validate and process painful past experiences, the energy of those experiences gets trapped and contained within your body.

    It takes consistent and continual emotional energy to keep the walls around those experiences high and the energy within contained. The energy and emotion inside are deep and strong, and to keep these feelings away from our consciousness. we can’t allow ourselves to experience any deep or strong feelings, even the good ones.

    Allowing yourself to pull down these walls and grieve all the deep and strong feelings inside will free your emotional energy to feel deep and strong happy feelings too.

    For me, this meant feeling and processing the sexual abuse I endured as a child.

    For years I convinced myself that I was fine and that it happens to almost everyone. I tried to minimize my experience and leave it in the past. The walls I had built to keep all the grief and pain of those experiences out of my conscious daily awareness drained me and prevented me from feeling life in real time. I was guarded, with very shallow access to my feelings.

    No one wants to go back and work through the pain of the past, but I discovered that doing grief work with my therapist allowed me to truly let go of the pain and thrive in the present.

    2. Let Go of the Need for Control

    When you’ve been hurt in the past, it is normal to want to curate a life where you can’t get hurt again. We create a sense of safety by ensuring our life is as predictable as possible. Any time someone in our circle acts in a way that is outside our control, we ensure they “get back in line” so we feel safe.

    For example, if your partner doesn’t immediately return your text, you might get upset and lash out about how disrespectful he is being. If your kids don’t seem to be as concerned about their grades as you think they should be, you might panic and shame them, saying they will be stuck working in fast food restaurants for the rest of their lives. We want everyone to act as we think they “should,” so our world feels nice and safe and predictable.

    Zoom out and look at this scenario… Could it be any more boring? No wonder it’s impossible to feel true joy and happiness. Joy and happiness come from the ability to be spontaneous, light, free, and unpredictable.

    I think a lot of people mistake feeling safe for feeling happy. Being in a constant search for safety keeps us in survival mode. Knowing you are safe with yourself no matter what allows you to move out of survival and into a higher consciousness that brings joy, pleasure… and happiness.

    It is true that many of us have very real pain from the past, and it is perfectly normal to want to protect ourselves from feeling that pain again by attempting to curate a life we can fully control. This is an unconscious decision we make out of self-protection.

    Choose to make the conscious decision to let go of control. Trust that you now have all the resources within yourself to feel safe, no matter what happens. Releasing the need to control will bring you the ability to feel joy, pleasure, and fun again.

    This one was difficult for me and took a long time to integrate. Because of my abusive childhood experiences, I overcompensated for my feelings of worthlessness and lack of safety with a drive for success and perfectionism to try to control how others perceived me.

    If my co-worker wasn’t pulling her weight, I would stay late and work weekends to ensure the work was done, and done well. If my husband wouldn’t spend time with me or plan dates, I would plan dates and put all the reservations in his name so it looked like he was investing in me and our relationship. If my kids were not interested in wearing outfits that I thought would make our family look perfect, I would bribe them with candy so we could look good and put together as a family.

    I thought that making myself and my family look like we had it together meant that we did, and we would therefore be happy. Man, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and it actually drove not just myself but everyone in the family system in the opposite direction.

    No one likes to be manipulated, and even if we can’t exactly identify that’s what is happening, we feel it. Honestly, I had a bit of an identity crisis as I let go of how I wanted life to look and embraced living and feeling life in real time. What I can say is that since I’ve let go of control, life has been full of more peace and joy than I knew possible.

    3. Look for Happiness

    What we look for, we will find. There is a reason we constantly hear people talk about gratitude. When we look for things we’re grateful for, things we enjoy or love, we create more of those things in our lives. We begin to see how much joy and happiness we already have.

    We so often completely overlook the goodness that’s all around us because we are preconditioned to see and experience all the things that are going wrong.

    This third step is caused by not working through the first two. When we haven’t validated our past painful experiences, we look for validation in all our current painful experiences.

    It’s like those experiences keep haunting us until we take the time to turn around and look at them. They cloud our ability to see the happiness we already have all around us. We can’t experience the innocence and joy in our children. Nor can we accept the love and connection our friends want to offer us or appreciate all the amazing things we are doing well at work.

    When we are stuck in the need for control, we look for all future outcomes that will help us to stay safe instead of looking for all the joy and pleasure that is already in our life. We don’t have enough bandwidth to do both, at least not all at once; so, for example, if we spend all our time subconsciously looking for ways someone else might hurt or abandon us, then we don’t have the energy left to look for joy and pleasure in our relationships.

    One day I had to make a choice. I decided I had had enough of being tired, frustrated, and miserable. I knew it would take a while for my circumstances to change, but that didn’t mean I had to stay stuck and feel isolated, frustrated, and lonely.

    I made the hard choice to look for happiness. At first, I would journal things I found happiness in, and over time it became more subconscious than conscious. It also helped to talk about it with a good friend, as we both challenged each other in looking for happiness.

    Sometimes I still struggle. If I haven’t been taking care of myself, this one is the first to slip. I start to slide back into an old pattern of looking for how life is screwing me over. I know that I’m better able to keep my mindset in happiness when I engage in self-care as often as possible.

    If enough is enough and you are ready to move on from feeling like you are just surviving life, implement the following three strategies to overcome the obstacles to joy.

    First, start journaling or processing your feelings about past experiences. It could be a good idea to do this step with a professional, depending on what you have been through.

    Next, start identifying how much control you have over your life and the people around you and see where you can loosen up the reins a little.

    I can almost hear you saying back to me, “But everything will fall apart if I let go!” Let it fall apart. You don’t want a partner and kids who live only to make you satisfied and “happy.” Let life get a little messy. They (and you) will be so much happier if they just get to be themselves, make mistakes, and develop connections out of genuine love and respect… not out of fear of failure or mistakes.

    This last one is pretty simple: start looking for joy. Get curious when you find it hard or upsetting to look for joy. Often, turning things around is simply a choice. Change your subconscious conditioning from looking for what is going wrong to looking for what is going right.

    These three steps will help you attract the people and experiences that will bring you everything you are looking for.

    Before you know it, your past pain will be a distant memory that doesn’t impact your day-to-day life. Instead, you will feel a sense of freedom and joy because you’ll be able to live life in the moment rather than in your head trying to predict outcomes, and because you’ll have reset your pre-conditioning to look for the good in life everywhere you go.

    This is what it takes to be one of “those people” who just seem happy and full of life. Which strategy will you try first?

  • Too Busy Trying to Survive

    Too Busy Trying to Survive

  • I Don’t Know Who I Am: How I’m Finding Myself Again After the Abuse

    I Don’t Know Who I Am: How I’m Finding Myself Again After the Abuse

    “When you turn the corner / And you run into yourself / Then you know that you have turned / All the corners that are left.” ~Langston Hughes

    Nearly two years ago I left a long-term controlling and abusive relationship.

    I didn’t know that I was in one. I just knew that I was desperate.

    Abusers take everything away from you. I don’t just mean your money or your home or your children, although they take those as well. I mean everything, including your sense of self.

    Toward the end of the relationship, I wrote in my journal: “I have nothing. Nothing. No future. No family. No home. Nothing. I don’t know what to do any more. There seems to be no hope.”

    When I first left I had nowhere to go. I stayed in a hotel for a while and then moved to a pay-by-the week residence. I genuinely could not see any future for myself at that time.

    When you read about leaving an abusive relationship, there is a lot of information about how hard it is to leave. It takes someone, on average, seven attempts.

    It also can be dangerous to leave. Abusers escalate their behavior when they fear that they are losing their control over you. These are important things to be aware of.

    What nobody seems to talk about, and perhaps there are good reasons why, is how hard it is to recover once all the dust has settled.

    I have spoken to the police and been to court and had some excellent support from a domestic abuse charity. I have been to support groups. I feel like I’ve processed a lot of the abuse and that I am now able to move on from that trauma.

    I have a truly amazing therapist, who recognized the situation I was in even when I was trying to hide it from myself. He helped me escape. I credit him with saving my life.

    I have my own flat now that feels safe. I live in a nice area. I’ve made new friends and I am starting to feel part of the local community.

    But two years on from this relationship, I still don’t know who I am.

    Someone recently asked me what I like to watch on TV. I have no idea. I surrendered all TV-watching decision-making to my ex-partner because he had a tantrum if I put something on that he didn’t like.

    I don’t know what I want to do for a job. Up until recently, I worked in my ex-partner’s field, even though it is a field I know little and care less about, because that’s what he wanted me to do. I don’t know what I care about.

    Why am I telling you this? Because I am certain that I am not alone, but sometimes I feel very alone. And if you out there reading this also feel this terrible confusion about who you are and what you want to do, and you also feel alone, I want to tell you something…

    You are not alone.

    This is normal. This is okay. Not okay in the sense that it’s enjoyable or good, but okay in the sense that it is an understandable consequence of your journey.

    You don’t have to feel like there is something especially wrong with you that you aren’t now skipping through the fields gleefully enjoying your freedom. Hooray! I can do whatever I want!

    This is, I think, what people expect a domestic abuse survivor to do once they’ve gotten away from their partner. It’s what I wanted to do. The idea of finally having the freedom to do what I wanted was so exciting.

    It fell down pretty quickly when I realized I didn’t know what I wanted.

    Other than pancakes. I love making and eating pancakes. Hot pancakes with fresh lemon juice and sugar.

    And therein lies an anchor that you can use to start rebuilding yourself and your life.

    Start with something small.

    When you are rebuilding yourself, it feels like this should be profound. You should find out what your values are. What your aspirations and dreams are.

    This is like running a marathon without having done any training. You can’t start with the massive things. Start with the small things.

    What do you like to eat for breakfast?

    Even that is a big question for me because my ex-partner controlled my eating. I wasn’t always allowed to have breakfast. He didn’t do mornings, and if I woke him up making breakfast, he’d start screaming and threatening suicide.

    One day I discovered by pure chance that I like pancakes. And I am sure of this. This is something small but something solid and real.

    I can use this with other things in my life, to find out whether I like them or not. Do I feel about this the way I feel about pancakes? It sounds ridiculous but it works for me.

    It’s okay to change your mind.

    This is a big one. When your life has been unstable because you’ve been constantly gaslit, and subject to the shifting and changing rules that a controlling person indulges in, you want stability.

    You want things to stay the same. And you think that who you are and what you want should stay the same.

    Pro tip: It doesn’t. Not even for “normal” people. And your mind has been infected with the thoughts and ideas of another person.

    When you ask yourself what you want, sometimes it’s not your voice that replies. You may not recognize this at first. Later, you think, wait, that doesn’t feel right anymore.

    You can change your mind. It’s okay. It’s normal.

    I desperately wanted a cat for months. I bored everyone to tears telling them how much I wanted a cat. I looked up pictures of cats and mooned over cats and planned out names for my cats.

    Now I don’t want a cat. Not that I don’t like cats, I just don’t feel ready to take on the commitment of a pet. And that’s okay.

    Try stuff out.

    Do you really like chocolate, or is it that your ex-partner liked chocolate? How do you know?

    Try it out.

    Do you like to sing? Try that out.

    Maybe you find that you love to sing and you hate chocolate. Great. You’ve learned something about yourself.

    I like pancakes, chocolate, and singing. I do not like marmalade.

    Give yourself time.

    I am eternally thankful that a lady in one of my support groups said, “It took me about six years to start feeling like myself again.” At that point I was about nine months out of the relationship and convinced I was a failure because I still felt completely unstable.

    At this two-year point I catch myself feeling frustrated with myself for not having made more progress. Come on, Lily. Why don’t you know what you want to do with your life yet?

    I don’t know because someone emptied out my mind and filled it with their ideas. And made the consequences for thinking differently from them completely catastrophic. I am still scared to hold the “wrong” opinion, even though these days nobody is going to throw heavy objects if I do.

    My brain was rewired over a long period of time and it’s going to take time for me to fix that. This is okay. It’s not fun. It’s hard work. But it’s okay.

    In the meantime, I am going to sing, make pancakes, and eat chocolate.

  • “But He Never Hit Me!” – How I Ignored My Abuse for 30 Years

    “But He Never Hit Me!” – How I Ignored My Abuse for 30 Years

    “People only see what they are prepared to see.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Abuse is a funny thing. I don’t mean humorous, of course.

    I mean the other definition of funny: difficult to explain or understand.

    Abuse shouldn’t be difficult to understand. If someone is mistreated, we should be able to clearly point a finger and proclaim, “That is wrong.”

    But not all abuse is obvious or clear-cut.

    I was abused for most of my adult life and didn’t know it.

    Crazy, right?

    Let me state it again: I was abused and didn’t know it.

    I only saw what I was prepared to see.

    Is That Really Abuse?

    I’ve read enough biographies and seen enough movies based on true events to know what physical abuse looks like. But broken bones and bruises are only one kind of abuse.

    Through deep discovery with a therapist who cradled me protectively, I can now say with certainty that I have suffered abuse in several forms:

    • Emotional
    • Financial
    • Sexual
    • Spiritual

    Yes, abuse comes in many forms.

    It is often invisible.

    My abuser was my husband—the very person who was supposed to love me more than anyone.

    A man I started dating when I was seventeen years old and married when I was twenty-two years old. We were married for thirty-one years.

    He never was physically violent. He never screamed at me or called me names. That abuse would have been more obvious.

    His abuse was subtle and manipulative.

    Invisible.

    What People See

    Imagine you stand outside to watch the day end with a beautiful sunset.

    A friend stands next to you and remarks, “What a beautiful green sun.”

    “Green?” You scoff, “The sun is orange and yellow like a big ball of fire. It isn’t green. Maybe you should get your eyes checked.”

    A neighbor overhears your conversation and joins in. “It certainly does look magnificent tonight. That is my favorite color. Emerald green with shades of lime.”

    You wonder why two people suddenly think the sunset is green. Could they be playing a joke?

    You squint your eyes, looking at the sun critically. You see an orange ball surrounded by yellow haze shooting out until it blends into the ocean-blue sky.

    No green.

    You overhear more conversations around you. Everyone is talking about the green sun.

    A kid cruises by on his bike. “Look how green the sun is today!” He shouts and points up in the sky. Everyone murmurs their appreciation of the view.

    You slowly begin to think maybe you are the one that is confused. Maybe you aren’t seeing things right.

    You keep hearing that the sun is green, but you don’t see it. Maybe there is something wrong with your eyes.

    And just like that, your perception has changed. The next time you look at a sunset, you look at it differently. You’re going to be looking for green instead of the oranges or yellows.

    You only see what you are prepared to see.

    Abuse is a lot like that.

    The more you are told something, the more you believe it.

    I was told I was worthless, and I believed it. I didn’t argue against it. I didn’t see it as abuse because it didn’t fit in with my idea of abuse.

    My Abuse

    The abuse I suffered was so manipulative and deceitful that I didn’t see it coming. I was belittled and bullied. I slowly lost who I was while I fed my husband’s constant need for validation.

    These are the words I often heard:

    • You’re too emotional.
    • That’s not what I said. You never remember things right.
    • Are you cheating on me?
    • You’re too sensitive.
    • The husband’s role is harder than the wife’s.
    • It’s a good thing you have me–who else would love you?
    • I never said that. Why do you always twist my words?
    • Your body doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to me.
    • Why do you always make me feel bad about myself?
    • Remember when you messed up that one time? Let’s talk about that again.
    • Most women are better… and I got stuck with you.
    • Women just aren’t as smart as men.

    Thirty years of these statements left me feeling inadequate. Worthless. Hopeless.

    I wondered why I couldn’t be a good enough wife.

    If you read through those sentences above, you may see the obvious gaslighting that was going on.

    Classic gaslighting.

    My husband made me think I was ‘wrong’ about everything in life. I was too emotional and sensitive. I had a good body but didn’t want to have sex 24/7. (He called that false advertising.)

    I was not allowed to ask him questions about things like our finances and savings … or I was questioning his manhood.

    If I asked an innocent question, such as if he was going to have to work on Christmas Eve, he would chastise me for making him feel bad.

    My husband used my faith to control me. He would cherry-pick bible verses and common ideologies to support his authority over me.

    And then he made me feel like I was overreacting and ridiculous.

    What’s worse, I began gaslighting myself!

    I would chastise myself for not being his ‘ideal’ woman.

    I blamed myself for not being a perfect wife who could take care of everything in the home, raise three children, hold down a job, and take care of his mother who lived with us… all while fighting lupus—a progressive autoimmune disease.

    I felt like a failure.

    And then something happened…

    The House of Lies Falls

    Thirty years is a long time to live in ignorance. When I finally realized what was happening, my whole world collapsed around me like a brick building in an earthquake.

    The blindfold was finally taken off my eyes.

    In the span of four months, I discovered every heartbreaking lie my husband told me. And there were mountains of lies.

    First, he hadn’t had a job in over fifteen years.

    Every day he would tell me goodbye and go to a “job” he didn’t really have. He had lied about his job so convincingly that he had made up fictitious friends and co-workers, and even told stories about them.

    We didn’t have health insurance. He hadn’t filed taxes. He hadn’t filled out financial aid for our college-aged children. We didn’t even have car insurance.

    We had no savings. No retirement. We had been living on my meager income. We made ends meet because we were living with his mother.

    He missed many events because of his “job”: soccer games for the kids, concerts, school programs, church events. I lived like a single mother because his non-existent “job” demanded so much of his time.

    He has never given me an answer as to why he did this. But honestly, could there be an answer that would be forgivable?

    He confessed he had a porn addiction. He was watching porn every day. This skewed his sense of reality.

    This is why I was never good enough for him. He expected a porn star for a wife.

    Then came the infidelity…

    The Final Straw

    It’s not going to be a surprise to hear he was cheating on me.

    When I first learned of all the lies, my husband tried to maintain that he had been faithful to me. Well, when everything about him was revealed to be a lie, I couldn’t blindly believe him anymore.

    He finally broke down and confessed that he had been cheating on me since we began dating over thirty years ago.

    He thought he should win some brownie points because he never had a girlfriend, so he hadn’t cheated emotionally. I wasn’t too impressed.

    He had sex with over fifty people. Fifty!

    I can’t count how many times over the years he accused me of cheating on him. Now I understand why; it’s called projecting. He was projecting his own guilt on me. All the things he did, he assumed I must have been doing as well.

    And the cherry on top? He said he cheated because I didn’t fulfill him.

    In a nutshell, he cheated, accused me of cheating, and then blamed me for his cheating.

    There is no coming back from that.

    A Shift in My Thinking

    My ex-husband has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). He is a pathological liar and a sex addict.

    He can’t think beyond taking care of his immediate needs and desires.

    But here is where I had to change my thinking: He didn’t act maliciously. Atrociously and carelessly, yes. But not with malice.

    There is something wrong in his brain, a disconnect. His emotional intellect is a cross of a horny teenager and a petulant child.

    I know I’ll never get a sincere apology from him. (How can you really be sorry about lying for thirty years?) I will never fully understand the way he thinks because his brain doesn’t work the way most people’s do.

    And that’s okay.

    I don’t have to understand him to heal, move on, and live a peaceful life.

    My perception has changed. I do not accept the blame for his issues and shortfalls. It is not my fault.

    This shift in my perception did not come overnight. It has taken a lot of time, and I was helped by an awesome therapist.

    In fact, during one session, my therapist had me write in big letters on a piece of paper: I didn’t do this. That visual reminder helps me view the situation through a new lens. Now:

    I no longer accept abuse.

    I no longer ignore abuse.

    I will never again be abused.

    No one can convince me that the sunset is green today. I see the golden oranges and yellows as they really are. I am prepared to see clearly.

    But He Never Hit Me

    Remember the second definition of funny: Difficult to explain or understand.

    This whole situation is funny; it is impossible to explain or understand.

    It’s abusive.

    The only good thing to come of this is the shift in my perspective. I am now important in my life. I am the top priority.

    I remember telling my story to a friend. He listened kindly, and then asked THE question in hushed tones. “Did he ever hit you?”

    Dumbfounded, I shook my head no.

    “Well, thank God he didn’t cross that line. Then you’d have so much more to heal from.”

    This friend wasn’t being flippant. He just spoke out loud what many people think: Abuse is visible.

    But I now see abuse as it really is—hurt, harm, and mistreatment that can be visible but is often invisible.

    Scars of Abuse

    I wish I could show the marks his abuse has left on me.

    I’d love to reveal how my self-worth has been chipped down to sawdust. Or how my self-confidence has been beaten down by fear and panic.

    The wounds on my heart are deep and scored like an ancient oak tree; no amount of repair work can erase the damage that has been done.

    The bones of my joy have been broken and re-broken too many times to properly set anymore.

    Scars sheathe the joints of my freedom from the bondage of “til death do us part.”

    And the gentlest, softest part of my soul is shaded dark by bruises.

    No, he never hit me. But great damage has been done all the same.

    I am an abused woman.

    I am a victim.

    But I am a survivor.

    And my story is just beginning. I walked away from my abuser and am embracing a new life, a life where I am in charge.

    I call the shots.

    My scars may not be visible to the eyes of people who don’t know what to look for. But they have forged a new woman who is strong, courageous, and much, much happier.

  • How I Changed My Perspective When I Was Too Angry to Be Grateful

    How I Changed My Perspective When I Was Too Angry to Be Grateful

    This is not your usual piece about gratitude.

    I am sure you’re familiar with all the benefits of having a regular gratitude practice.

    Chances are you, as a reader of this blog, have a gratitude routine of yours. I was one of you. I have been regularly gratitude journaling for over a year now. I have experienced all the promised benefits of it myself.

    Gratitude journaling has helped me reduce my stress, get better sleep, and feel more energized. It improved my mental well-being so much that I even started a social media page to encourage others to practice gratitude.

    However, one day, things changed. Expressing appreciation for what I had started making me feel bad, selfish, and guilty.

    What happened? On the sixth of February, my home country was hit by two immense earthquakes. A region where millions reside was completely destroyed. Thousands of buildings collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of people were trapped under the remains. Cities were wiped out. In the entire country, life just stopped.

    Shortly after, my social media feeds were flooded with despair. People who could not get in touch with their families… People who tweeted their locations under the remains of their collapsed houses, begging for rescue… People who lost their homes, families, and friends.

    I was heartbroken. I felt helpless and useless in the face of this tragedy.

    A few days later, like any other day, I sat down to write in my gratitude journal. I couldn’t do it. You would think that after seeing all the unfortunate people who lost everything they had, I would have had even more to be thankful for. After all, I was so lucky just to be alive. But no, I couldn’t do it. Instead, I got stuck with guilt.

    Today I feel grateful guilty for being in my safe home.
    Today I feel grateful guilty for having a warm meal.
    Today I feel grateful guilty for hugging my loved ones.

    It has been almost two months since the earthquake. I couldn’t get myself back into gratitude journaling. Then it hit me. Underneath my grief, there was another emotion: anger.

    Because you know what? This disaster wasn’t just a completely unexpected incident. The scientists had been warning the authorities about this earthquake for years. The geologist said it was inevitable. The civil engineers said the strength of the buildings was too low. The city planners said the right infrastructures in case of such a disaster were not in place.

    Over so many years, we all heard them repeatedly warning the authorities, but nothing was fixed. I was very angry with the broken system that did not care.

    I couldn’t let go of my guilt because I was afraid that if I did, I would let go of my anger with it. I don’t want to let go of my anger. I want to hold onto it so that I keep fighting for a change, a better system that cares about its people.

    I know it’s not just me or this one earthquake disaster. Many people all around the world suffer from the actions of governments. People who live under war, oppressive regimes, or corrupt states would very well understand the anger I feel.

    Rage toward an authority, a government, or a broken system is not the same as being angry with another individual. The rage gets bigger in scale to the number of lives affected. And maybe the worst part is that this type of rage is harder to let go of because history shows that such rage fuels the actions for change in broken systems.

    So I wonder: Is it possible to transform the rage that is harming me inside into something else without losing the desire to fight for change?

    And again, I find my answer in the path I know the best—gratitude. But this time, instead of being thankful for the things I have, I’m thankful for the things I can provide.

    Today, I am grateful for having a safe home because I can accommodate someone who lost theirs.
    Today, I am grateful for having a job because I can afford to donate meals to people in need.
    Today, I am grateful for having my arms because I can hug someone who lost their loved ones.
    Today, I am grateful for accepting all my feelings and having the wisdom to transform them.

  • After the Assault: What I Now Know About Repressed Trauma

    After the Assault: What I Now Know About Repressed Trauma

    TRIGGER WARNING: This article details an account of sexual assault and may be triggering to some people.

    The small park down the street from my childhood home: friends and I spent many evenings there as teenagers. We’d watch movies on each other’s MP3 players and eat from a bag of microwave popcorn while owls hooted from the trees above.

    Twigs lightly poked against our backs. Fallen leaves graced skin. Crickets hummed in the darkness. The stars shone bright through the branches of the redwoods.

    Eight years later at a park in Montevideo, Uruguay, darkness again surrounded me. Leaves and twigs once more made contact with my skin. This time, though, I couldn’t hear the crickets or notice the stars. Details of nature were dimmed out, replaced by the internal clamor of a rapidly beating heart and shock flooding through me.

    By day, Parque Rodo bustled with life. Later that year I would ride paddle boats there with my girlfriend of the time. I would feed crumbles of tortas fritas to the ducks alongside my Uruguayan housemate, while he shared with me his dream to become a dancer in New York City. I would do yoga on the grass with fellow English teacher friends. It would become a place of positive memories.

    That night, though, it was anything but.

    ~~~

    One week earlier, I’d moved to Montevideo to teach English and become fluent in Spanish.

    My first week passed by in a whir of exploratory activity. I traversed cobblestone streets past colorful houses resembling Turkish delights; past pick-up soccer games in the middle of some roads; past teenagers walking large groups of varied species of dogs.

    I learned Spanish tongue-twisters from native Uruguayans while drinking mate on the shores of the Rio de la Plata. I sand-boarded for the first time and became accustomed to answering the question “De donde sos?” (“Where are you from?”) in nearly every taxi I took and confiteria (pastry shop) I set foot in.

    Now that it was the weekend, I wanted to experience the LGBTQ+ night life (which I’d heard positive things about). Located on the periphery of the expansive Parque Rodo, Il Tempo was one of Montevideo’s three gay clubs, catering mostly to lesbians.

    I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, so my plan before heading in was to grab a chivito sandwich (one of Uruguay’s staple foods). Chiviterias abounded across Montevideo, present on nearly every corner, so I imagined I wouldn’t have to walk far to find one.

    After taxi-ing from my hostel, I asked the bouncer if he could direct me to the closest chiviteria. Pointing down the street, he told me to walk for half a block. I’d then make a right and continue down 21de septiembre until reaching Bulevar General Artigas.

    ” Y alli encontrarás una” (“And there you will find one”), he said.

    A few blocks didn’t sound like a lot, so off I went.

    I walked for what felt like a while, without crossing paths with any other pedestrians.

    Isn’t this supposed to be a major street? I wondered. Also, shouldn’t there be some streetlamps?

    It was then that another pedestrian—a young man wearing a backward baseball cap—came into view.

    He was walking briskly toward me from the opposite direction. Pretty much the minute I saw him, I knew my evening wouldn’t be playing out as I’d envisioned. A chivito was no longer on the table. I wouldn’t be dancing with a cute Spanish-speaking lesbian at Il Tempo.

    “Adonde vas?” (“Where are you going?”) the man asked me as he got closer. Tension immediately took hold of my body, which I did my best to hide while quickly responding that I was on my way to a chivito spot.

    Yo sé donde comprar un chivito” (“I know where to get a chivito”), he said, gesturing toward the park. “Te muestro” (“I’ll show you”).

    My heart hammered, but I again tried to obscure any signs of fear. Maybe if I exuded only niceness and naivety, it would buy me more time—because the grim truth (that there was nowhere within eyesight to run to) was quickly becoming apparent. The foggy pull of disassociation came for me, wrapping its wispy arms around my heart and mind.

    Similar to how Laurie Halse Anderson wrote in Shout: “The exits were blocked, so you wisely fled your skin when you smelled his intent.”

    I chose not to run—because who knew how long it would be before I found a more populated road, or even a passing car? And how far could I flee before the man caught up? He’d likely become angry and violent if and when he did. Also, flip-flops make for pretty dismal running shoes…

    Maybe if I kept walking with him, we’d cross paths with another person, went my reasoning at the time. No one else was present on that dimly lit street, but maybe in the park someone would be—a couple taking a late-night stroll, or a cluster of teenagers cutting through on their way to the next bar; or someone, anyone who could step in and become a buffer. Parque Rodo’s website had, after all, mentioned that many young people hang out there at night.

    ~~~

    I don’t remember what the man and I talked about as we walked. I do remember a half-eaten chivito lying atop a trash can off to the side of the path; the sound of my flip-flops crunching against the gravel; that we continued to be the only pedestrians on our path; and that after a minute or two, the man announced, “We’ve almost made it to the chivito place.” I nodded in response, my appetite now completely nonexistent.

    Part of me still hoped I could buy time. That I could pretend I didn’t know what was about to happen, for long enough so that someone, or something, could intervene—so that maybe it wouldn’t.

    Nothing and no one did though. When the man finally grabbed me and pushed me against a tree, my feigned composure broke. Noticing the shift, he used both his hands to cover my mouth while whispering that he would kill me if I raised my voice (“Te mataré,” he repeated three times in a low hiss).

    Over those next few minutes, I kept trying to hold eye contact in attempt to get through to his humanity. I desperately and naively hoped that at any moment he would awaken to what he was doing and feel ashamed enough to stop.

    He didn’t though.

    When he tried to take my shorts off, a disorienting sequence of imagined future scenarios swiped through my mind like sinister serpants.

    They showed me dealing with an STD.

    Taking a pregnancy test.

    Getting an abortion.

    Doing all of these things on my own in a country 6,000 miles from home and from everyone who knew me.

    My fear of those imagined outcomes pushed me to speak up.

    ”You don’t want to go down there,” I warned, feigning concern for his well-being.

    He reached for my shorts anyways.

    And so I tried again, this time while looking him in the eye. Though I wouldn’t know the Spanish word for STD until years later when taking a medical interpreter certification course, I did have others at my disposal. Enough to explain that I’d once had “a bad experience” that left me with algo contagioso (something contagious).

    If this man cared at all about his health, he’d stop what he was doing, I explained.

    Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I saw the slightest bit of uncertainty begin to share space with the vacancy in his eyes.

    Whether or not he believed me, he stopped reaching down and settled on a non-penetrative compromise.

    Afterwards he snatched up my shorts and emptied their pockets of the crumpled pesos inside them (the equivalent of about fifty U.S. dollars). Then after tossing them into a nearby bush, he ran off into the night.

    ~~~~

    As I stood up a dizziness overtook me, my soul quavering and disoriented in its return from the air above to back inside my skin.

    Still shaking, I found my way to the closest lighted path, walking quickly until I reached Il Tempo—the club I’d started at.

    I asked the bouncer if I could use the bathroom.

    Once inside I washed my mouth with soap—one time, two times, five then six. No number of times felt like enough.

    After returning to my hostel, I fell asleep, telling not a single soul. I wouldn’t for another six months.

    ~~~

    Part of it was that I didn’t want to bother anyone. What had happened was heavy, but it was over now. I was fine—and what was there to say about it? Telling people, this soon into the start of my year abroad, would just be needlessly burdening them. Not to mention disrupting the momentum of what I’d wanted to be a chapter of growth and new beginnings.

    Another aspect of it was that I feared the questions people might ask, even if just in their own heads:

    Why were you walking on your own at night? Why didn’t you take a taxi? Why were you wearing shorts? Why didn’t you run? Scream? Why did you follow him into the park? Why weren’t you carrying mace? Why didn’t you…?

    I too had asked myself these questions. And I had answers to them.

    I was walking on my own because I’d just moved here and didn’t know anyone; I didn’t take a taxi because I thought the walk would be quick, and taking one every time you need to walk even just a block or two gets expensive; I wore shorts because it was a hot summer night; I followed him into the park for the reasons outlined in my thought process above, and perhaps because fear was clouding and constricting my rational thinking.

    Still, I couldn’t shake free from the shame.

    The people I confessed to months later turned out to be wonderfully supportive. Looking back, I can see that though I’d worried about them judging me, I was the one judging myself—then projecting that self-judgment onto them.

    Still, even though my support group didn’t, I was also aware that society does lean toward placing accountability on victims—even more so in the years before the Me Too movement. Often, even now, the knee-jerk reaction is to question victims.

    After determining that the best way forward was to put the incident behind me, I then locked it away into a mental casket and began the burial process. I covered over it with mate and dulce-de-leche; with invigorating swims through the Rio de la Plata; with meeting lively souls in the months that followed.

    Though unaddressed, at least safely buried the memory couldn’t harm me. Or so went my thinking at the time.

    ~~~

    Following the assault, I began my teaching job at the English academy. I assimilated to Uruguayan culture as best as I could, all while providing positive updates to friends and family back home.

    The pushed-down trauma manifested in other ways though—in stress, depression, and near constant irritation. As Tara Brach put it, “The pain and fear don’t go away. Rather, they lurk in the background and from time to time suddenly take over.”

    I drank unhealthy amounts of alcohol (not just in groups, but also when alone). Many things overwhelmed me. Countless triggers seemed to set me off.

    The Uruguayan girl I’d been dating even said to me once, “Te enojas por todo” (“You get irritated by everything”). I ended up getting banned from that lesbian club I’d gone to the night of the assault, after arguing with the bouncer one night.

    Nightmares plagued me. I’d learned in my college psych class that one of the functions of sleep is to escape from predators. I wondered why, then, I came face to face with my predator every night in my dreams.

    ~~~

    I’d had other traumatic experiences prior to this one—many of which I’d stuffed away.

    The pain pile-up will level off, if only you just stop looking at it, I often tried to tell myself.

    It didn’t level off though. I’d flown down to Uruguay with the pile still smoldering, my conscious mind numbed to the fumes (having been trained to forget they were there). Following the assault, the pile grew—and continued to grow well into my return to the U.S.

    When we avoid processing, the traumas form a backlog in our hearts and minds, queuing up to be felt eventually. Numerous studies have found avoidance to be “the most significant factor that creates, prolongs, and intensifies trauma-reaction or PTSD symptoms.”

    It was only when I began inching closer toward my pain that I began to slowly heal the parts I’d stuffed down for so long.

    Healing took place when I began opening up to people. It took place in therapy and through getting a handle on my drinking. It took place when restructuring my network, prioritizing the friendships that were better for my soul, while trimming the ones that had served more of a distracting and numbing purpose.

    It took place in redirecting care to my relationship with myself—spending more gentle one-on-one time with her, out in nature or in a quiet room.

    Every time I run barefoot on a beach, my heart heals a little.

    Every time I leave a meaningful interaction (with either a human or the planet), my soul inches closer toward realignment.

    I practiced turning toward my truer self in all these ways—until eventually, as phrased beautifully by Carmen Maria Machado, “Time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, [had] stepped between the two of [the traumatic incident and me], and [were] keeping [me] safe as they were once unable to.”

    Though I want this for everyone who’s survived an assault, or any other serious trauma, it’s only within judgment-free space that true healing is possible. This means letting go of self-judgment, and surrounding yourself with people who can validate you.

    May the idea be wiped from our collective consciousness: that the choice to wear a particular item of clothing, or to consume a few drinks, or to seek out a snack late at night—basic things men can do without fearing for their safety—are responsible for what happened to survivors.

    May the prevailing understanding become that what is responsible—100%—is a person’s decision to assault. Full stop.

    May all of these things become true—because no survivor should have to experience shame alongside the pain that’s already so difficult to bear on its own. Because every survivor deserves a space to heal and reclaim what was taken from them: the ineffable sense of emotional safety that should be our birthright. We deserve a viscerally felt “you are okay” coursing through our veins. We deserve to feel completely at home inside our skin.

    May we arrive there some day.

  • How To Keep Moving Forward When You Feel Like Shutting Down

    How To Keep Moving Forward When You Feel Like Shutting Down

    “I can’t believe what I’m managing to get through.” ~Frank Bruni

    My worst fear was inflicted upon me three months ago: a cancer diagnosis—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Out of nowhere!

    Truth be told though, lots of awful things that happen to us come suddenly out of nowhere—a car accident, suicide, heart attack, and yes, a diagnostic finding. We’re stopped in our tracks, seemingly paralyzed as we go into shock and dissociative mode.

    My world as I knew it stopped. It became enclosed in the universe of illness—tiny and limited. I became one-dimensional—a sick patient.

    And I went into shock. To the point where I didn’t feel. As a person who values mental health and understands the importance of emotions, I seemingly stayed away from the feeling part. It wasn’t intentional; it’s how I coped.

    I dealt by mindlessly and mindfully (yes, that seems like an oxymoron) putting one foot in front of the other and doing what needed to be done, like a good soldier, plowing through the open minefields.  Actions and intentional mindset were my strategies.

    My biggest fear was: Will I make it through the treatments? What if I don’t?

    So I started reigning myself in to not let myself think too far ahead, down into the rabbit hole of fear and anxiety. Being a small person with no extra weight, I was scared of the chemo crushing me. Terror would rear its head when I allowed these thoughts to enter my thin body. What if I shrivel up and die? What if I can’t do it?

    And so my mind work began. I became very intentional about putting up that stop sign in my head so as not to get ahead of myself and project into the unknown, scary future. I began taking everything one step at a time.

    I stop now and digress. I had been in the depths of despair and darkness when, many years ago, my middle daughter, Nava, was diagnosed with lifelong neurological disabilities.

    I had a noose of bitterness and anger pulled so tightly around my neck that I couldn’t even go to the park with her. My envy of the other babies who could sit up and start to climb out of their strollers was too much for me to bear; to the point where I stopped going to the playground.

    My therapy at the time was a life-saver and helped me move from the unanswerable “why me/why her?” questions to the “how” and “what”: how to carry on with a major disappointment and blow, toward creating new expectations and goals, and what to do with this to still build a good life.

    Changing the questions helped me cope and move forward. This has served me well in other challenges throughout the years, such as my divorce and Nava’s critical medical issues years later, for which she was hospitalized for a year.

    So with the cancer diagnosis, I went to the “how” and “what.” How can I deal with this in as best a way as possible? What can I do to optimize my coping skills? How can I minimize my anxiety and fear?

    Having studied positive psychology, resiliency-building, and mindfulness, I’ve gleaned some tools over the years that are serving me now through my personal medical crisis.

    Let’s look at a few.

    Anxiety and Staying Present

    We know anxiety is caused by worry of the future. So staying present is key. Working on our mind to be in the moment and not spiral outward is crucial. I know my PET scan is coming up, and I’m naturally anxious about the results. I tell myself to take today and make it as good as possible and not think about the end of the week. There’s a lot of intentional work that goes into controlling the mind.

    And when we spiral, as we humans naturally do, we allow for that too. “Permission to be human,” as positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar states. The important thing is bringing ourselves back. It’s not that we don’t go to dark places; it’s that we notice it and don’t linger and get sucked down into it. We recognize it and can pull ourselves out of it.

    Expansion

    Once the shock and horror of illness begins to settle and we see some pattern or predictability, we can look to expand our identity and role beyond a sick person, or in my case, a cancer/chemo patient. I begin to step outside myself, my illness, toward others and other things that are important to me.

    Connecting with who you are beyond your sickness opens you up and reminds you of the bigger You. We are more than our difficult circumstance.

    I always remember Morrie Schwartz in the book Tuesdays With Morrie—how he cried each morning (as he was dying from ALS) and was then available and present for all his visitors, to be of help and service to them.

    So I reach out to a couple of clients to offer sessions during my seemingly better weeks (in between treatments). I create some (generic) social media posts. I haven’t gone personal with this online, so this blog post is a big (public) deal.

    Meaning in Your Life

    Doing things that are meaningful, however small, and that make you feel good is a sure way to stay engaged and moving. It’s the ordinary things that keep us going. Since I love colors, I wake up and match up colorful clothing and makeup (unless I’m too weak), as that makes me feel good.

    Nature and beauty are my greatest sources of soothing and healing. When I feel okay, I go to a park, sit by the water/ocean, and visit gardens, just get outside and look at the expansive sky.

    I deal with my indoor and outdoor plants. I cut off the dead heads, water them, take some pictures, and check on the veges. This represents growth and beauty.

    I get inspiration and uplift from words, and love non-fiction books of people transcending their adversities. I read, underline, and reach out to authors.

    And I learn. I started a creativity class with someone I actually found on this site. I figure it’s a good time to incorporate creativity and natural healing.

    What infuses your life with meaning? What is important to you? What expands you? Who are you beyond your difficult situation?

    Response and Choice

    Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, logotherapist (therapy of meaning and purpose), and author of the renowned book Man’s Search For Meaning, is instrumental in the foundational concept that it’s not our circumstances that define us but rather our response to our situations that determine who we are and who we become.

    “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

    And another one: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

    These ideas have been life-changing for me and propel me to avoid an all-too-easy passive and victim-like mentality.

  • How I Stopped Feeling Sorry for Myself and Shifted from Victim to Survivor

    How I Stopped Feeling Sorry for Myself and Shifted from Victim to Survivor

    “When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write a brave new ending.” ~Brené Brown

    There was a time when I felt really sorry for myself. I had good reason to be. My life had been grim. There had been so much tragedy in my life from a young age. I had lost all my grandparents young, lived in a home with alcoholism and domestic abuse, and to top it all off, my dad killed himself.

    I could write you a long list of how life did me wrong. I threw myself a pity party daily in my thirties, with a load of food and wine. The story I was telling myself was that all this bad stuff had happened and I was unlucky in life and love. I told myself my life was doomed.

    I believed if there was a God, he must have hated me because everybody around me had a perfect-looking life compared to me.

    I felt like I was the only person who felt like this and couldn’t see any goodness in my life. I kept telling myself I was destined to be lonely and unfulfilled in my work life because I was just not good enough.

    I took care of others in my family to give myself purpose, but inside I loathed it. It made me bitter and resentful. I didn’t do these things because I wanted to. I did them because I felt like I had to.

    I thought this was who I was meant to be—the side act in everyone else’s story.

    My peers were moving on with their lives, getting married, having babies, and buying houses. I was stuck in my pity party, in the sadness of the past, unable to move on. I felt like I did as a child—powerless, out of control of my life, and sad.

    For as long as I could remember I felt anxiety and sadness. I would distract myself from these uncomfortable feelings with other people, TV, busyness, food, and later in life, alcohol.

    I was a victim in childhood and then I continued to live as a victim into my thirties, blaming everyone else and God for my poor start in life. I blamed myself as well. If only I was enough, then my life would better.

    There came a time when I couldn’t carry on the way I had been and had to take responsibility for my own life. My own story. It was time to get out of my own way. I was hitting rock bottom, and the time had come to either fight for my own happiness or follow the road my dad had taken.

    My life felt pointless, but I finally listened to a voice within me that told me there was a way forward and got out of my own way.

    This was the start of my spiritual and healing journey.

    It all started with a simple internet search on how to feel better—mind, body, and soul.

    Amongst the tips I found was the suggestion to practice daily gratitude. I started by writing down everything I had in that moment.

    For a long time, I focused on all I didn’t have rather than what I did. But I had so much—great friendships, travel, love, a well-paid job, a nice home, and so much more. I ignored all the good stuff and it robbed me of what I did have. The present moment. But now my eyes were opening to all the light in my life.

    I began to see and appreciate sunsets and sunrises. I looked for the good everywhere. Even in the darkness. I was searching for the light in every day. The more I looked the more I found.

    I practiced gratitude when I found new information and practices. Podcasts, books, teachers, healers, therapy, and so much more. The more I said thank you, the more good things I found.

    The story I was telling myself was changing.

    Then I added meditation and mindfulness to my daily routine and began hearing my intuition more.

    Before all I could hear was my fear, but this inner whisper was getting louder. Ideas would pop into my head like “I just don’t love myself,” and then I would see a quote from Louise Hay that resonated on social media. One led me to her book You Can Heal Your Life. I implemented the strategies in her book and then more tiny steps occurred to me in the quiet.

    I said thank you every single time. I felt more supported by myself and the universe and less like a victim in my story.

    The better I felt on the inside, the more opportunities I noticed.  I saw a job I liked advertised and rather than letting fear stop me, I listened to my intuition, which guided me “to just try.”

    In the past I would have ignored it and thought “I wish.” This time I just went for it. Just like that I left a toxic work environment for a job more aligned with my values, offering more money.

    I attracted better relationships and in time found love. After searching for more ways to feel good on the inside and change the way I saw my life and my world, I incorporated daily affirmations and walks in nature.

    My reality kept changing as I changed within.  

    Have you ever noticed how your body feels when you say, “My life is crap”? Your body contracts and you can almost feel the fear rising. But when you tell yourself, “There’s a lot of good in my life,” your body almost expands, and you can breathe.

    Our words have a profound impact on us. Changing that narrative we tell ourselves changes everything.

    The new information that I discovered through my personal quest helped me to understand my past. I found people like Gabor Maté who explained concepts such as intergenerational trauma and addiction. This information helped me change the story I told myself around my childhood. It helped me understand my trauma.

    I remember knowing from my intuition that my relationship with my dad needed my attention. Then I saw an advertisement for a new book, Father Therapy, by Doreen Virtue, which led me to inner child work. This helped me heal my younger self.

    As I continued my quest to heal and feel better, I found new healing modalities like breathwork, EFT (emotional freedom tapping technique), and eye movement techniques.

    I said thank you again and again and again.

    All those years I spent as a victim to my story kept me stuck and unable to move forward. But now I was ready to change and expressing gratitude for the process. More was always finding its way to me. I now had so many tools that I never knew existed in the depths of my pity party.

    It was not easy. I cried. Fear took over some days and I couldn’t access my intuition. But I would just start my quest again the next day, journaling to connect with myself and see what had happened the day before. What my feelings were and what I needed.

    I showed myself love and compassion for my bad days and celebrated the good ones. No longer was I a victim of childhood abuse but a powerful survivor.

    Yes, bad things happened to me. But they are not who I am; they are just part of my story. That story is what led me here, to this place where I’m now writing to you. I hope to inspire you and show you that it is possible to change your story, whatever it is; that there is so much guidance and support available to you when you are ready to find it. You really will see it everywhere when you start paying attention.

    You too will see you also have an inner voice guiding you and access to everything you need to heal. When you start recognizing all the tools available to you, you’ll feel less alone and supported on your journey.

    I no longer feel bitter about my experiences in my childhood, but proud. They made me who I am and have allowed me to help many others on their journey to heal from their past.

    I have found forgiveness, love, and compassion for the people that hurt me, like my dad, which helps me feel happier. I didn’t have to forgive him. He did awful things, but I understand now they came from his trauma. This has given me great inner peace.

    It takes courage and time to transform on the inside and become a trauma cycle breaker in your family. This means that your children will have a different experience. How amazing is that? What a great gift to give them.

    The information, tips, guidance, and light are waiting for you to discover them. You just need to take the first step and decide to become the hero of your story and find your own heart’s happiness.

  • How to Thrive in Life after Surviving Cancer

    How to Thrive in Life after Surviving Cancer

    “Have a little faith in your ability to handle whatever’s coming down the road. Believe that you have the strength and resourcefulness required to tackle whatever challenges come your way. And know that you always have the capacity to make the best of anything. Even if you didn’t want it or ask for it, even if it seems scary or hard or unfair, you can make something good of any loss or hardship. You can learn from it, grow from it, help others through it, and maybe even thrive because of it. The future is unknown, but you can know this for sure: Whatever’s coming, you got this.” ~Lori Deschene

    Isn’t it amazing how some days are etched in your mind forever and other days are just lost in the wind? One day that is etched in my mind forever is December 27, 2006. This is the day I was told I had breast cancer. While breast cancer is common, being twenty-six years old with breast cancer isn’t that common.

    So here I was, twenty-six years old with breast cancer saying to myself, “Well f*ck, that sure throws off the plans I had for basically anything.” I quickly fell into fear, worry, and “why me?”. I will spare you the details of treatment; it wasn’t any fun. I lost my hair and my dignity and fell into depression when life returned to “normal.”

    Whatever normal is, I was living it. However, nothing was normal. I didn’t know how to live without a doctor’s appointment to go to. I mean, all I wanted was an end to the endless appointments and here I was without them, and I couldn’t figure out what to do.

    So, I took lots of naps because I was exhausted, or so I thought. Well, it turns out I wasn’t exhausted; I was depressed. I was alone with thoughts of wondering when my cancer would come back. I was sucked into a pit of despair that I had never seen before. Who was I becoming? The person who sat in their pajamas all day while I worked from home—yep, that was me.

    I wanted to scream, “I survived cancer, now what?” Where was the manual on how to live after cancer? Who helps me get back to living? I just go back to what I was doing, as if nothing happened? I was tired of saying to myself, “But I’m supposed to feel better, right?”

    As the stream of appointments, scans, lab draws, and phone calls from friends and family continued to slow, I tried hard to be well and remain optimistic. Continue doing my job, walking the dogs, and dragging myself to the gym. Life just didn’t seem real, and depression overwhelmed me for days or weeks at a time. A quick nap turned into a four-hour slumber; my physical body was healing, and my mental body was spiraling downward.

    The difficulty of shifting back to life was not what I expected, and thank goodness for friends. My dear friend Rebecca asked if I wanted to run a half-marathon, but my visceral reaction was no. Then I learned the race took place one year to the date after I finished chemo, so I thought, “Heck yea, take that cancer!” It was perfect timing. One foot in front of the other, I trained for my first half-marathon.

    I kept myself going by trying to run when I could. Running was my go-to mental health fix pre-cancer, and it was starting to work post-cancer too. I remember there were days when I would drag myself to run and come back home in minutes. Then there were days I felt like I had superpowers and it felt so good.

    Rebecca and I crossed that finish line, hand in hand, and celebrated with margaritas and Mexican food, my other go-to mental health fixes.

    So why do I feel inclined to share my story? It’s not just about cancer, depression, running, and margaritas. It’s about making something good come from something bad. 

    Cancer taught me a lot of things. The biggest lesson was to control what I could. That looked like taking a long way home instead of sitting in traffic, not getting worked up about long lines in the grocery store, taking risks like rock climbing in Utah, trying new things like fly fishing in the mountains of North Carolina, singing in my car on the way to work to pump myself up for the day, going on camping trips with my girlfriends, and leaving behind a soul-sucking career.

    I can’t say I am exactly happy I had cancer, but I can’t imagine life without it. It’s a love/hate relationship. Looking back, it was an opportunity for growth and learning that I can do hard things. It was a reminder to focus on being truly alive.

    There is not a guidebook for cancer survivors, no way to time travel to the person you were before your diagnosis, no way to return your body unscathed, or quick way to restore your trust in your body again.  It’s a journey that you must figure out for yourself, one minute, hour, and day at a time.

    You must accept what has happened and discover a new self.

    I learned more in the year after cancer than I had in the previous twenty-six years. You don’t need a cancer journey to do this.

    Life is short; learn to live life to the fullest. However, if cancer is part of your journey back to living, you are not alone in your quest to learn to live again. You can do this. One tiny step at a time, you will learn to truly live again. You will stumble back and take huge leaps forward.

    You can have a life full of purpose, happiness, gratitude, and adventure. Don’t merely survive cancer, thrive after cancer! What are you waiting for? Let’s do this.

  • The Beauty in Her Baldness: Why My Mother Was Still Radiant with Cancer

    The Beauty in Her Baldness: Why My Mother Was Still Radiant with Cancer

    “Beauty doesn’t come from physical perfection. It comes from the light in our eyes, the spark in our hearts, and the radiance we exude when we’re comfortable enough in our skin to focus less on how we look and more on how we love.” ~Lori Deschene

    For as long as I can remember, my mom had long shiny silky black hair down to her knees. It was magical in the way that it attracted people and inspired curiosity and connection.

    Everywhere we went, strangers approached her, usually timidly at first with a brief compliment, and then, after receiving her signature friendly head nod and open smile, they relaxed and the questions and comments would pour in as if an unspoken invitation to connect was made and accepted.

    “How long did it take you to grow your hair?”

    “How long does it take to wash it?”

    “It must take forever to dry.”

    “Can I touch it?”

    “Wow, it feels like silk! Annie, come feel her hair!”

    “Does it ever get caught in anything?”

    “You must spend a lot of money on shampoo.”

    Regardless of the comments or the duration of the conversation, everyone always walked away smiling, their step a little livelier, as if the world had suddenly become a better place.

    My mom has a warm, open aura about her. When we’re out in public, she has a way of making people feel instantly valued and appreciated. My sisters and I call it “mom’s juju,” some kind of mystical power that brings out the good in everyone and everything.

    She makes eye contact with strangers and if someone doesn’t avert their eyes away quickly, she nods her head slightly, as if bowing down to them in respect, and offers them a big, generous smile that immediately warms them, causing them to smile back.

    She has a radiant inner happy glow that’s contagious, and over my fifty years of knowing her, I’ve witnessed people shift from closed off and rigid to open and free in a swift, instantaneous moment. It’s almost as if they’ve suddenly been released by a heavy clamp that was holding them down and they stand up taller, happier, lighter… even if only for a moment.

    Mom’s juju makes people come alive.

    It’s ironic that she’s an introvert like me, and I often think about this when I’m out in public.

    I confess that I go into “robot mode” where I forget I’m human and that everyone around me are humans too. I usually do this when I’m short on time and have a specific, focused goal, like grocery shopping.

    I avoid eye contact and deliberately close off my energy, especially when I don’t want to be approached, bothered with small talk, or exchange energy with others. I just want to shop; I don’t want to connect, chat, or stay any longer than it takes me to get my food and leave.

    But my mom, she’s different. She reminds me that I love people and enjoy connecting with them too. She reminds me that it’s more important to connect soul to soul, human to human, than to check off that next thing on my to-do list. She reminds me of the true meaning of the word, “Namaste,” and is the living, breathing embodiment of it.

    The divine in me sees the divine in you.

    When she nods her head upon greeting someone, she’s bowing to the divine in the other person.

    Most people think she’s bowing because it’s an Asian tradition, but to my mom, it’s more than a rote action imposed by a tradition, it’s a gesture of genuine love and respect because she truly does recognize the divine in everyone. And in her recognition of them, they too recognize it in themselves, even if only for a moment, even if they can’t explain it or understand it. They feel different after having the exchange with her.

    My mom’s hair was often the icebreaker for this exchange. It provided an opening for people to approach her.

    Like the sirens in Greek mythology whose singing lured unwary sailors on to the rocks, her hair lured people into a glimpse of their own divinity. They thought they were drawn to her hair, but they were drawn to their own beauty and divinity inside them. The hair was just the seductive song.

    No one knew this, of course, not even my mom.

    To my mom, her hair became something that defined her and her beauty. In a world that has the capacity to tear down anyone’s value, my mom’s hair made her feel unique, exotic, special.

    She enjoyed the attention that people lavished on her hair, and eventually, her self-worth became wrapped up in it, in the same way she would wrap her hair around her neck several times when she was cold.

    In late 2011, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.

    Beyond the fear of dying, my mom said that the idea of losing her hair was more difficult than having cancer, and she visualized not only surviving cancer, but surviving it with all her hair intact, despite what the doctors and nurses said.

    If anything could break the rules of science and chemotherapy induced hair loss, we thought, mom’s juju could.

    But after several weeks of chemo, her beautiful long hair started falling out in clumps. It left bald spots that made her look even more sickly and frail, and we realized there are some things mom’s positive juju couldn’t affect.

    Cancer has a way of ravaging you and it doesn’t care who you are or how you feel about it

    On one ceremonious and tearful morning, my mom surrendered to cancer’s command and asked my oldest sister to shave her head.

    It was an emotional, traumatic, and beautiful moment of loss, acceptance, and renewal, all swirled into one, as she watched her hair fall from her head onto the floor, piece by piece, like pieces of her identity falling away from her, and in its place, something different.

    Something clean and pure and unhidden.

    She looked in the mirror and saw herself for the first time—the person she was without the thing that she’d thought made her, well, HER. There was a bald woman staring back at her and she looked even more special, unique, and beautiful.

    I don’t know what my mom was expecting to see after losing her hair. Perhaps there was a part of her that didn’t expect to see anything, as if once she lost her hair, she’d somehow cease to exist. Her identity had been so entwined with her hair that she thought she might be gone too, once the hair was gone.

    But she wasn’t. She was still there. She survived.

    This realization freed my mom. She no longer wrapped her identity (and uniqueness and beauty) around her hair. Cancer made sure of that, it had given her no choice. Any illusion of an old, outworn identity had been swept away with the dead hair on the floor and tossed in the trash.

    She found her new identity—an identity that was based off her inner beauty, not her outer beauty. She discovered she was unique and beautiful without it, and she radiated an inner knowing of this so much so that people started complimenting her on her baldness.

    And she responded with the same signature head nod and grin, but this time, as a free woman, no longer bound by physical illusions of beauty.

    She had become truly free.

    This was the gift of mom’s cancer.

    Cancer has a way of ravaging your false identities and reminding you of what’s real and true.

    Now, eleven years later and cancer free, my mom’s hair has grown back. It’s not the same as it once was, thick and shiny black silk. It’s now thin and gray.

    But a renewed person has emerged, with an even more powerful and radiant juju, and the beauty inside her shines brighter than ever.

  • Why I Don’t Define Myself as a Victim and What I Do Instead

    Why I Don’t Define Myself as a Victim and What I Do Instead

    “The struggle of my life created empathy—I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.” ~Oprah Winfrey

    See yourself as a victim and you become one. Identify as a victim and you give your tormentor power over you, the very power to define who you are.

    Statements like this have become commonly accepted wisdom today because they are undoubtedly true. If you see yourself as a victim, you will be one. You will be someone who has been defeated, someone who is at the mercy of another, and that is no way to live.

    And yet, the truth is that many people have been victims. Actually, it’s probably fair to say that everyone has been a victim of something or someone at some point in their lives. So, how can we reject being a victim without denying reality? On the other hand, if we accept being a victim, aren’t we then giving up our own power and independence?

    The answer I think lies in part in a subtlety of language, a small distinction with a big difference. Rather than defining ourselves as victims, why not just say that we have been victimized?

    One thing this immediately does is to describe the act, not the person. It means someone was taken advantage of, mistreated, bullied, tricked, or whatever the offense was. It does not disempower that person thereafter by defining him or her going forward after the event.

    In fact, “victimize” is a verb, and just using it seems to bring a sharper focus on the subject rather than on the object. When I hear the word “victimize,” my first thought is “Who did that?” not “Who was the victim?”

    While that may sound like splitting hairs, the word “victimize” describes a moment in time, not a person. It accurately portrays a reality without turning that reality into a perpetuity by defining someone as a victim. It rightfully places emphasis more on the person who shouldn’t have done that rather than the person who shouldn’t have let it happen, as if he or she had any choice in the matter.

    However, there is a much more important point here than those semantics, which is this: While we don’t want to define ourselves as victims, we also don’t want to erase an important part of our story, a part that may have played more of a role in our personal growth and development than anything else.

    As unpleasant as it may be to experience, pain deepens people. To hurt and to be sick is to commune with all of those people who are sick and hurting and who have ever been sick or hurt or ever will be sick or hurt.

    In suffering, one is given the chance to suffer along with everyone else who is suffering, to be connected with a vast array of people facing innumerable different circumstances. To suffer is to be human, part of a much greater whole.

    When coming out the other side, we have a choice. We can forget our suffering and learn nothing, remaining unchanged. Or, we can define ourselves as a sufferer and collect another sad story to cling to. The telling of that story is what creates our ego, and indeed, for many people, that ego is a victim story.

    While on its face a victim identity is not a happy thing, the victim story does have its allure. It certainly can be a way to avoid responsibility and curry sympathy from others. More than anything, it provides the stability of an invented identity, which is exactly what the ego is.

    That stability staves off the ultimate fear—that of life’s ever-changing uncertainty. But, at the same time, clinging to this stability causes us to fight with life, and hence leads to suffering. It is a rejection of life.

    However, there is a third way, which is to accept what happened to us and learn from our suffering to become a wiser, kinder, and more empathetic person. It is to embrace our victimization without becoming a victim.

    Suffering is the great teacher and the great uniter. There is an ancient spiritual teaching from India which asserts that there are three ways to acquire spiritual knowledge: through experience, through reading books, and through a teacher, or someone who knows about it.

    Unfortunately, if you’ve ever met or read about people who have undergone a major spiritual awakening, or if you have experienced one yourself, it is usually the result of the former, and that “experience” is usually pain and suffering.

    So, when we’ve been victimized, we gain some insight and some power. We can recognize those people who are or have also been victimized, or even who are just hurting, and more readily empathize with their experiences. We are more able to be that helping hand, that listening ear, that open heart.

    This is a lesson I have learned though painful experience.

    A few years back, I was in a cancer caregiver support group when my mom was going through her cancer journey starting just a few weeks after my father passed away. I moved back home from very far away and had served in part as caretaker to both of them—a very difficult experience.

    I stayed in the group until my mom was miraculously recovered and it was time for me to get on with my life, maybe after a period of sixteen months. When someone left the group, different members would go around in the circle a say a sort of little tribute to the person leaving.

    One woman in the group came from a very different set of circumstances than I did. I’m a white guy from the suburbs who grew up in stable family and attended a prestigious university. She was a mixed-race African American and Hispanic woman who grew up in a single mother household in the Bronx and went back to get her degree as an adult.

    She had a confession to make. She said when I first came to the group, I just seemed like a privileged white guy from the suburb where I was born. However, as she got to know me and heard me in the group, she knew there was “something” about me—that I could listen to people and hear their pain and somehow relate to them. I could hold space and give good advice at the same time, and she knew it was from the heart. It was not something she expected of “someone like [me].”

    What she couldn’t tell was that the picture-perfect suburban upbringing I had masked an uglier truth.  Unfortunately, my childhood story was one of frequent abuse—physical, emotional, and even on a couple of occasions sexual.

    I grew up in a family of four children, the scapegoat of the family. It was a relationship dynamic that my parents taught to all of my siblings. Thinking back on my childhood, nearly all of my happy memories took place outside of the home—at school, at friends’ houses, by myself, anywhere but home. I was alone in a house full of people.

    While I’d love to say that ingrained a tenderness in me, an intrinsic empathy for the downtrodden, it didn’t. It hardened me and made me uncharitable. I could tough it out. I could push past it all. Why couldn’t other people? That was my attitude.

    Then, well into my adulthood, I had a crisis—a complete emotional breakdown. After years of illness, a difficult career, tragedies among my friends and family, it all become too much. I collapsed but was reborn. It was at that time, when all my defenses crumbled, that I experienced a total change of heart. Among other things, I found my empathy. It was a bottomless well of goodness that I never even knew was there.

    More than anything, I found myself drawn to the outsider. Deep down my harder self had seen the outsider with contempt, probably because I could recall how painful it was to be the outsider growing up. Now, I was able to empathize with that outsider as I fully accepted and integrated the whole of my experience, including my childhood of victimization.

    And yet, having grown up the way I did and even after the big “shift” caused by my breakdown, I still didn’t really think of myself as a “nice” person. I suppose my outer reserve remained intact because I didn’t think people thought of me that way either.

    What that lady in the cancer group said to me that day was better, more meaningful, and more rewarding than any trophy, award, accolade, or recognition I have ever received. But it was a compliment dearly bought, for without my childhood victimization and the suffering I’d experienced in my adult life, I never would have earned it.

    A victim I am not. For that to be true, I’d still need to be sad or resentful. I’d need to be living in some maladapted way, surviving through coping mechanisms and pain management. Is it upsetting when I think about that innocent, happy, carefree childhood I never had? It sure is. But my past brought me to my happy present and taught me heart lessons that I never would have otherwise received.

    When I look back, would I want to live through it all again? Definitely not, but I’m glad it happened that way and thankful for those experiences.

    But, while being nobody’s victim, I do not reject—indeed I embrace—my victimization. It’s part of my story, maybe the most critical part.

  • 39 Supportive Things to Say to a Male Survivor of Sexual Assault

    39 Supportive Things to Say to a Male Survivor of Sexual Assault

    “One in six men will be sexually assaulted at some point in their life. It doesn’t make us weak or less masculine—nor should it. Rather, we, as men, should encourage other men to speak up, to be courageous, share this burden with others, and to attend therapy and take medication. There is such a thing as healthy masculinity, and we can find that in our fellow men, in comforting those who are having a rough time. Seeking help in a healthy way, wanting to be better, practicing empathy and compassion and caring for each other are ways of practicing healthy masculinity.” ~Anonymous

    Why is it that men are less likely to be supported than female survivors of sexual assault? No matter a person’s gender or sexual orientation, all survivors deserve love and support.

    In 2013, I became an activist for survivors of sexual assault. I was living in New York City, and my method for getting the message out was through chalk art. To reclaim my voice after the NYPD threw out my sexual assault case, I went all over Brooklyn and Manhattan scribbling chalk art messages about consent.

    Since then, I have done thousands of chalk art drawings all over the world, from Europe to South Africa. Using art as a tool of activism has been an extremely powerful way of reaching millions with an important message: It’s time to replace the current rape culture that we live in with a culture of consent.

    It’s a common notion that it’s impossible for a male to be raped. Male survivors who speak up are often met with the response, “How can a boy get raped?” The answer is, if he does not give his consent, it’s rape.

    It doesn’t matter if the rapist was male, female, or any other gender identity. If he denies consent, it’s rape. Any person of any gender can be raped.

    Imagine how hard it is for a woman to speak up and report a rape. That difficulty is doubled for men because the patriarchal concept that “men cannot be raped” ruins any hope for male survivors to get the support they deserve. This concept totally dismisses the real-life experiences of millions of men who actually have been sexually assaulted.

    For fear of not being believed, it’s fair to assume that millions of men hide in silence. Very few heal or recover due to the stigma of male rape.

    Men’s stories matter. Men’s healing is just as important as healing for others. When men heal, the whole world heals, because the world is still run by men.

    Suicide rates are often higher in males because so many of them fail to express their emotions due to the patriarchal concept that crying is a sign of weakness, particularly in men.

    When a man is seen crying, he is often told to “man up.” Due to fear of being called weak, men hold in all their tears instead of releasing them.

    Shaming men and boys out of crying is mental torture for those who truly wish to express themselves. Men who have been raped should be uplifted in their healing, however they see fit. If their healing includes shedding a tear for all the pain they endured, it is their right to do so.

    Here are thirty-nine uplifting messages for male rape survivors.

    1. Your pain is valid.

    2. The person who did this to you is the only person to blame, not yourself.

    3. You are not less of a man for being sexually assaulted.

    4. Being a survivor does not define who you are as a man.

    5. A survivor is anything but weak.

    6. Don’t be afraid to talk about it.

    7. Never blame yourself.

    8. Things will get better.

    9. You are so incredibly strong.

    10. I’m proud of you!

    11. You are not alone.

    12. What you are going through is temporary.

    13. You are loved.

    14. You’ll see the light one day and be happy again, I promise!

    15. You have many people who believe and support you.

    16. You are worthy of love and respect.

    17. You don’t need to feel ashamed.

    18. Talking about it to someone you trust will help.

    19. You are heard.

    20. You are valid.

    21. You don’t have to be strong all the time.

    22. It’s okay to cry.

    23. You’re safe to express your emotions.

    24. Some days may be better than others, but you will get there.

    25. You will grow and survive this current pain.

    26. We support you.

    27. Even if you had an erection, you still weren’t “asking for it.”

    28. Even if you had an orgasm, if you didn’t want it, it was rape.

    29. We applaud you and your courage.

    30. Feel the pain instead of numbing it.

    31. You gotta feel it to heal it.

    32. You’re still manly and I adore you.

    33. Tears are a sign of strength.

    34. The sickness of another is not your burden to bear.

    35. Being a victim is difficult, but in time you will heal.

    36. There are people out there that love you and are willing to listen to you (including me).

    37. Keep staying alive. There is so much to live for.

    38. You are brave for admitting what happened.

    39. We are in this together.

    The idea that men cannot get raped is perpetuated by the false belief that all men want is sex, every hour of the day. While I was doing #StopRapeEducate chalk art in New York City in Union Square one day, a young, Afro-Latino couple stopped to read the message I was writing: “Rape knows no gender.”

    The girl looked puzzled and asked me what it meant. I told her that it means anyone can get raped, whether they are a male or a female.

    She burst into laughter and said, “A guy…. hahaha…get raped?! Ha! How is that even possible? Shit, I’m sure they would love that. That’s every guy’s dream.”

    I gave her the straight-face-emoji-look and said, “Actually, that’s not true. Men who get raped are traumatized just as much as female victims. I’ve met tons of guys who have been raped. It’s a serious problem.” She straightened up quickly.

    Men have freewill to decide if they want to have sex or not. If you are someone who dates men, it’s important to accept that the men in your life may not always be in the mood to do it, and that’s okay.

    Before I understood this, in my younger years, I recall pressuring myself to be readily available for sex with guys. I would even go as far as to pounce on them, thinking that that’s what they wanted. I had seen it a million times in movies as a way of women initiating sex: no questions asked, just pounce.

    One of my friends that I used to hook up with told me once that he was tired of my sexual advances. I felt so ashamed and disgusted with myself because I was caught up in stereotypes about male sexuality that I gave myself to someone that didn’t have interest in me.

    This is why sexual education is so important. It’s unacceptable for us to learn about sex from movies, television, and porn.

    The reality is, men and boys are not sex machines. Nobody is. It’s always okay to say no to sex, and it’s never acceptable to assume that someone wants to do it.

    To create a safer, more loving world for all of us, let us respect and support male survivors of sexual assault rather than reinforcing toxic masculinity rooted in rape culture.

  • 44 Things to Never Say to a Rape Survivor

    44 Things to Never Say to a Rape Survivor

    “It was not your fault, even if you were drunk, even if you were wearing a low-cut mini-dress, even if you were out walking alone at night, even if you were on a date with the rapist and kind of liked him but didn’t want to have sex with him.” ~Joanna Connors

    Child sexual abuse victims who speak up are incredibly brave and vulnerable. If a child comes to you for support, be mindful of your energy and reactions. If you need to ask them questions to get a better understanding, be mindful of your tone, body language, and intonation.

    When I experienced sexual assault at the age of thirteen, I didn’t tell anyone because I was afraid that I would be punished.

    I grew up in a home where I was trained to not show too much skin and to always avoid the male gaze. The day I was raped, I was wearing a skirt. I knew that, somehow, I would be blamed and punished, so I stayed quiet.

    As an adult, I learned through spirituality that I needed to change how I viewed rape survivors and myself. None of us “asked for it.”

    When addressing a rape survivor, it’s important to use consent-oriented etiquette and language. There are a variety of words and phrases you should never say.

    Be gentle with sexual assault survivors. Rape is a delicate and triggering topic. If someone comes to you for help, ask them what they need and if there is anything you can do for them.

    Listen. Check in on them.

    Look past your judgments of the situation and just be there to support them as best you can. Be sure to take care of yourself and your energy while helping others.

    Typically, I would only ask questions if you need to. Some people do not wish to share details of a traumatic experience. This is understandable.

    If you are required to ask some of the following questions for an investigation, be sensitive to your tone. Avoid judgment and any phrases that sound judgmental.

    It can even be helpful to say, “Rape is never the victim’s fault. I just need to ask you a few questions to get a better picture of what happened. Is that okay with you?”

    Only say what needs to be said. Only ask what needs to be asked. You may want to dig deeper, but you might end up saying the wrong thing and retraumatizing them further.

    Rape survivors need to be heard.

    How would you want to be treated if you went to someone for help? Give them the most compassion and unconditional love you can channel from your innermost being.  That’s the best way to support them.

    To shift from our current rape culture and into a culture of consent, we must change the mindless, go-to reactions that we have toward victims of sexual abuse.

    Why is it common to ask, “Was she drunk?” Why do people inquire about what someone was wearing at the time of a sexual assault?

    It’s common because society has taught us to judge instead of love. In a culture of consent, the mindset is different.

    In a culture of consent, we know that it doesn’t matter if someone was drinking. No one deserves rape.

    In a culture of consent, there is less blame and more compassion. Compassion is key when it comes to creating a culture of consent.

    Compassion in a culture of consent means extending unconditional love to sexual assault survivors. We can no longer live as we are as a society. The time for change is now.

    To implement this cultural shift, we can only start with ourselves, our thoughts, and our reactions toward rape survivors.

    I created the following list to help you take one major step in that direction.

    44 Things to NEVER Say to a Rape Survivor

    1. What were you wearing?

    2. Were you drunk?

    3. How did it happen? (Ask them if they are comfortable with sharing what happened. Listen mindfully and don’t oversteer their story. Respect how they share their story. Refrain from interrupting so they know they have the freedom to express themselves. This question is only necessary for law enforcement officials and healthcare professionals who are required to know the details in order to help the survivor.)

    4. Did you scream?

    5. Why didn’t you scream?

    6. You really need to get a gun.

    7. I know a self-defense class that you should go to.

    8. Your outfit was very sexy.

    9. How could that happen to you, again?

    10. Did you say “no”?

    11. Did you fight back?

    12. You’ve already had sex, so, what’s the difference?

    13. You’re a guy, you’re supposed to like it.

    14. Rape is every guy’s dream. (A girl said this to me while I was making consent-based chalk art in NYC in 2015.)

    15. How can a girl rape a boy?

    16. Rape can’t happen during marriage.

    17. There’s no use in crying about it.

    18. You need to let go of your anger.

    19. Are you sure it was rape?

    20. Weren’t you dating?

    21. Why didn’t you get a rape kit?

    22. Have you had sex since?

    23. You should have yelled “fire.”

    24. Why haven’t you reported it?

    25. I thought you liked him/her/them.

    26. It’s your fault.

    27. You shouldn’t have gone with them.

    28. You were asking for it.

    29. You attracted that.

    30. You led them on.

    31. That’s not rape.

    32. That was sex. You could have avoided it.

    33. You should have protected yourself.

    34. You shouldn’t have been out late.

    35. You shouldn’t have been drinking.

    36. You shouldn’t have gone to that party.

    37. That would never happen to me.

    38. You’re smarter than that.

    39. Stop putting yourself in situations like that.

    40. It could be worse.

    41. Get over it.

    42. It’s not that big of a deal.

    43.  I hope you learned your lesson.

    44. There are some things you could have done differently.

    Instead of blaming or shaming someone who has been traumatized, hold back those thoughts. Focus only on how you can be a friend to them in their time of need. If they came to you for help, it means that they trusted you.

    Spirituality helped me see my power and the importance of my voice. It taught me to have compassion for myself and fellow survivors. Sexual assault recovery can be catapulted when the rape survivor has a loving, supportive team of people who they can go to in times of need.

    How can you create this type of safe space for the sexual assault survivors in your life? How can you create this safe space for yourself?

  • I Am a Survivor, Not a Victim, and I’m Grateful for My Pain

    I Am a Survivor, Not a Victim, and I’m Grateful for My Pain

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post deals with an account of sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people.

    “Emotional pain cannot kill you but running from it can. Allow. Embrace. Let yourself feel. Let your yourself heal.” ~Vironika Tugaleva

    I was nine years old, sitting on the couch with my dad, watching a Very Brady Christmas (on my sister’s birthday, December 20th) when he first molested me. Terror, confusion, disbelief, and shame comingled to create a cocktail that would poison me for many years to come.

    We grew up in a family that, from the outside, seemed ideal.

    We would attend church with my mom’s side of the family every Sunday, going to breakfast at a restaurant after. My brothers, sister, and I spent weekends partaking in fun activities that would range from spending the whole day building towns made out of clay to rollerskating while my mom baked homemade bread. To anyone that knew us, we seemed like the perfect family.

    And then one day we weren’t anymore.

    After that horrible night, my dad promising me it would never happen again, I was lost and confused. Was there something inherently wrong with me to provoke him to do that to me? Had I in some way invited him to touch me inappropriately? I felt disgusting, soiled, and used, convinced that it was all my fault.

    These feelings followed through me the next three years of being molested, then spread and grew through the aftermath of me finally telling my mom what had happened. Even after the abuse stopped and with my dad safely behind bars, I carried guilt and shame with me daily. A badge of honor to remind me of what I had been through and survived.

    Survival became my top priority, and it didn’t matter what I had to do to attain self-preservation.

    As I grew older, I found survival through drugs and alcohol. For a small moment each day when that liquor touched my lips, when that pain pill was ingested and absorbed, I was free. The incessant dark and ugly thoughts that plagued my mind were blissfully silenced and I was able to breathe a little easier.

    Once this method of forgetting no longer worked, I graduated to an abusive relationship, playing out the codependency and toxicity that I had grown up with. I ran from anything that was healthy or good for me because, on some level, I believed I didn’t deserve it. How could someone who had had been molested be worthy of true love and happiness?

    I sentenced myself to a lifetime of misery and defeat because I truly believed that I was not deserving of anything but pain.

    Living this way was exhausting. I was tired of this so-called life that I was sleepwalking my way through, and I knew that the path I was on would eventually lead to death or an existence filled with depression day in and day out.  

    So I started making changes to my lifestyle. I went cold turkey cutting out the pain pills and the alcohol. This is not something I would recommend doing, as it’s always best to follow a physician’s orders, but I knew in my heart that I had to stop immediately because if I didn’t stop at that moment, I never would.

    Losing the security blanket that the pills provided was one of the scariest things I have ever had to experience. I felt like I had lost a deep, integral part of me, my best friend. I had to walk through life with my eyes open; I was exposed and raw and didn’t know if I could make it through without the assistance of those little pills. Many times I had to reevaluate why I was doing this and what this new journey would look like.

    I also started therapy. I knew that I could give up my vices, but if I didn’t start delving into the deep and complex emotions I carried over from childhood, I would not grow as I needed to. For someone who had learned from an early age to sweep everything under the carpet and pretend like nothing was wrong, therapy was difficult, to say the least.

    I had been forced to see a therapist on and off as a child and my teens after the molestation, but I never went willingly. Now, as an adult who was doing her best to start making real changes, I tried to approach therapy with an open heart, willing myself not to quit when it got too rough. It’s one of the best gifts I could have given myself.

    I started attending therapy diligently, week after week, slicing myself wide open, plunging my hands deep within my heart, pulling out those long-buried emotions, and holding them to the light where they were addressed head-on, albeit somewhat reluctantly.

    I began to sift through the complicated feelings that I had held onto for so long. I sat with the emotions and felt them. I cried, I screamed, and I laughed, broken wide open. I was naked and vulnerable and even though it was terrifying, it was also exhilarating. By finally allowing myself to feel what I had repressed for so long, I was able to move through the feelings as I should have all those years ago, to feel truly alive.

    Once the feelings were addressed, I begin to journal in earnest. To write about what I could not speak of for decades, to put down on paper what mattered to me, even if it was inconsequential to anyone else.

    I began to understand that I matter, that what I felt was important and necessary.

    Through journaling, I began to understand that I could look at what happened to me as something horrible, I could continue to feel sorry for myself and wish it had never happened, or I could choose to find reasons to be thankful. Yes, thankful.

    Though I wouldn’t choose to be molested, the experience made me stronger than I ever thought possible. I became resilient and self-sufficient, learning that I could turn my pain into something bigger than myself.

    One of the main things that helped me shift my thinking  from victim mode to empowered, was starting a gratitude journal. I listed ten things I was grateful for daily, and the more I journaled, the more I found myself seeing the beauty in the hardships I was dealt.

    There are going to be things that are out of our control, things we wish hadn’t happened. But if we can look at these experiences with appreciation for what they taught us, for how we have grown because of them, we’ll find it much easier to heal—and handle anything life throws at us.

    If you find yourself in a situation where you see yourself as a victim and can’t seem to get past the pain, I urge you to look at the situation as a growing opportunity. See everything you’ve learned and how you might even use those lessons to help other people.

    Gratitude is a powerful tool that we can come back to again and again throughout our lives. Not only does it help us reframe our past, it makes us more compassionate—toward ourselves and everyone we encounter.

    We begin to see that others struggle just as we do, and we are able to be a little kinder when we understand that we all share a common ground through our pain.

    Through gratitude, I learned to start having compassion for myself and I realized I could make a difference in this world. By sharing my pain, I found my voice. I am no longer a victim. I am someone who was dealt an unfair blow, but who has emerged stronger and more resilient, appreciative of the good things in life for having gone through the bad.

    By speaking out about what happened to me, by sharing my story with others, I have given that nine-year-old the words she never had. It is for her that I expose myself, that I bare my deepest, darkest secrets.

    It is my biggest hope that another person reads my story and knows that they are not alone. If you can relate to anything I wrote, know that you too can turn your pain into something useful to others. You are not broken. You matter, you are loved, and you are worthy.

  • I Know I’m Strong Enough o Handle Whatever Comes at Me Because…

    I Know I’m Strong Enough o Handle Whatever Comes at Me Because…

    From Tiny Buddha’s Worry Journal

  • 6 Empowering Lessons Death Taught Me About Life

    6 Empowering Lessons Death Taught Me About Life

    “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss in life is what dies inside us while we live” ~Norman Cousins

    I am not dead and I am not dying, so you may wonder why I write that death has taught me what I need to know about life.

    I lost my mother when I was fifteen. Being a teenager, thoughts of anyone close to me dying had not entered my head. My mother had a brief illness and passed away unexpectedly at age forty-seven.

    I remember that my schoolmates came to see me, and I kept thinking that they had their moms. More than being sad that I had lost my mom, I was angry that I had been placed in that position. I missed my mom a lot and just wanted her to come back and be with me.

    I started developing a fear that my father would die soon too. When I was in my early thirties, my fears came true when my dad passed away suddenly after a heart attack. He was a skilled physician, a kind man, and more importantly, a wonderful father to me.

    As if my dad’s passing away was not enough, my older sister died unexpectedly a year later. I always considered her a strong person, and I could not fathom how she could have died.

    To add insult to injury, another sister of mine passed away soon after that.

    By then, I had decided that the Universe was conspiring against me. I did not think anyone cared, and I put on an act, pretending to be happy. The truth was that I was buried under the rubble of my fearful thoughts, and constantly worried that something would go wrong.

    The next couple of years passed by with various family mishaps till one day, I lost the prestigious job I had.

    You may wonder why I classify a job loss in the same category as death, as a job is not irreplaceable. To me, at that point in my life, the job loss had the same feeling of injustice that the death of my parents and siblings so early in my life had for me.

    One of my friends suggested that I read books about having positive thoughts. I googled “positive” and started to devour self-help books. I subscribed to Tiny Buddha and spent time meditating.

    I reflected on what I read while drinking coffee in the quiet stillness of the early morning hours.

    I meditated while on the treadmill, and I realized that the answers to my questions had always been within me. I had just let the unannounced and uninvited negative thoughts I had to overshadow the shackled positive thoughts within me, yearning for a release.

    I realized that I was not singled out for anything bad, as I also had a lot of blessings to be thankful for. I had just chosen to not focus on the good in my life. I knew then that I am a survivor. I would like to share my lessons, which I hope will help you face loss of any kind that devastates you.

    1. There is a survivor in each one of us.

    If you have survived even one moment after a tragedy, you are a survivor.

    Yes, there is a sense of utter hopelessness and despair at first, soon after a loss; but every passing moment shows that you can and you will live this life you have been given.

    It proves that you are strong; it proves that you are not a quitter; and above all else, it proves that even if you never forget who or what you have lost, you will not run away from living life.

    After all, life is not about living in defeat.

    2. There is always something that is going right in a person’s life.

    Even in the midst of a tornado of unforeseen circumstances, and all the despair it brings in its wake, there is always something to appreciate in life.

    Even though I lost my parents and sisters, I still had wonderful friends in my life.

    We need to focus on the good in our life and try to be happy. Being sad and focusing on what we do not have does not change the circumstances.

    You can either make a list of what you have, or you can make a list of what you do not have. The first list will bring you peace and happiness, while the second list will bring you only sadness.

    You may have a lot of things that make you unhappy, but if you have even one thing going well, you have to focus on that. I have found that the more I consider the good in my life, the more things seem to come together for me.

    3. Do not take the people you love for granted.

    If you are lucky enough to have loved ones in your life, call them often. Visit them often. Share your life with the people who love you.

    What can be more important than the people you care about, who care about you?

    No one is guaranteed to live a hundred years, and even a hundred years can pass all too fast.

    4. Let go of expectations that events in life need to happen in a certain manner that you favor.

    Life happens, and it may or may not turn out as you hoped it would. You just have to work with what you have. A lot of times, you may be surprised to find that you end up liking what you get.

    Even if you are disappointed that you did not get what you expected, and even if you are upset that you do not have what you want, it is still possible to lead a good life if you can let go of your expectations and find reasons to be happy with what you have.

    Life becomes a lot better when you learn to accept it.

    5. It is not your fault that bad things beyond your control happen.

    Blaming yourself will take you down a long and lonely road with no end in sight. Guilt is a hard taskmaster with no mercy.

    Even the most meticulously thought out life will have unforeseen hardships disrupting the plans.

    You could not have changed the circumstances surrounding the loss. You could not have prevented it in any way.

    Sadly, death happens and life still goes on. When my mother died, it was the day before the Festival of Lights, and all my neighbors were enjoying firecrackers outside in their garden. Life went on. When my father died, life went on. When my sisters died, life carried on.

    I used to wonder where God was till I realized that God is the strength and energy that pulled me through all of these circumstances.

    6. Be open to miracles.

    As long as you are living, something wonderful could happen at any moment. Life may have lows that you never expected and that you did not foresee, but it also will have highs that you never dreamed of that will bring you joy beyond your wildest imagination.

    The Universe does not owe you anything, so be grateful for any blessings that you have. Do not let anything slip away.

    No matter what happens, try to enjoy the life you have. No one else can enjoy it for you.

  • 5 Lessons on Living Life Fully from a Breast Cancer Survivor

    5 Lessons on Living Life Fully from a Breast Cancer Survivor

    I Survived

    “We all have two lives. The second one begins when we realize we only have one.” ~Confucius

    When I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer in September 2014 I tried to spin this life curveball on its ugly head and find some lessons from this journey.

    That’s how I dealt with the blow.

    The truth is, I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me. I never wanted to be a victim.

    I wanted to be a survivor from day dot.

    Throughout this process I learned five powerful lessons that I’d like to share with you so that you can live life more fully—without a cancer diagnosis.

    The reality: Cancer changed my appearance.

    The treatment for cancer took away my hair, my eyebrows and eyelashes, and my breasts. All the lovely feminine assets I had were tampered with or lost temporarily.

    The lesson: Love goes beyond looks.

    The people who matter love me no matter how I look. One day when I was heading toward the end of my chemotherapy, my five-year-old boy found a picture of me with all my hair and eyebrows and said, “We love you however you look, Mummy.” That makes me feel blessed beyond belief.

    You’re likely blessed in the same way, and that’s something worth acknowledging and celebrating.

    The reality: Chemotherapy is horrible.

    It saves our lives but the process is yuck. I experienced all sorts of symptoms that were pretty uncomfortable. I almost got used to them as time passed by, yet I had to keep going back for more. For five months.

    The lesson: Don’t take health and energy for granted.

    To get up in the morning and feel healthy, comfortable, and full of energy is a beautiful thing. To feel normal is extraordinary. I will never take my health for granted again. I will never again consider normal days, when nothing exciting happens, mundane or time to kill a chore.

    Each morning when you wake up, even if that day seems ordinary, take a moment to appreciate the extraordinary gifts of your health and vitality.

    The reality: Life is short.

    When I was diagnosed with cancer there was a short amount of time while waiting for the test results when there was a possibility my life would come to an end a lot quicker than I thought. My mortality smacked me in the face.

    The lesson: Life is precious.

    Somehow it’s taboo, and I was a little in denial that my life is short and a tremendous gift. Awareness of my mortality gave me a big kick up the bum to live my life fully.

    Every day is a gift.

    The reality: I experienced fear and anxiety like never before.

    As I went through the cancer journey, my mind could easily have been consumed with worry about what the future holds and thoughts about the past—Why me? What did I do to deserve this? I could potentially be filled with a lot of fear and anxiety.

    The lesson: Love always conquers fear.

    I had never experienced such a feeling of presence. I felt so utterly aware of what matters and how much I have to be grateful for.

    When something like this happens all the petty stuff that fills our lives and relationships falls away, and all that is left is love.

    I have never felt fear in the same way that I have in the past few weeks, but the love I have received from friends and family has stepped up to meet me, and my fear has dissolved instantly.

    Whenever fear comes to meet you in life, try to flip it around and find love. Consider all that you love and everyone who loves you. Like me, you may find fear dissipates immediately.

    The reality: I had to create a lot of change in my life.

    As a mother of two small kids, I am so used to putting myself last and forgetting to look after my needs.

    After my diagnosis, I took myself on a journey of healing, immersed myself in creative projects, meditation, kinesiology, sound healing, distant healings, chakra cleansing, Ayurvedic lifestyle changes and supplements, journaling, and getting back to basics with my relationship with food. 

    The lesson: Everything starts with you.

    I really made myself a priority—because I had to. I had to give myself love. I had to nurture myself. In doing so, I realized how important it is. For me and for everyone around me. The ripple effect it has had on my kids, my family, and friends has been profound.

    Everything starts with your relationship with yourself. Accept, love, and be kind to yourself always.

    In some bizarre ways I feel almost grateful to have been through this experience. Somehow it has shown me to step past fear and be invincible. So I hope I can share this with you, in some way, and give you an element of this perspective.

    Your life is a miracle.

    Every birthday is a blessing and every moment is fleeting.

    I survived image via Shutterstock

  • How to Redefine Yourself by Letting Go of the Past

    How to Redefine Yourself by Letting Go of the Past

    Freedom

    “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” ~Maya Angelou

    When I was eight years old, my mom had her first mental breakdown. The illusion of a typical suburban family shattered as the household descended into chaos. When the counselors and child protective services stepped in, I knew: I was undeniably different.

    When you’re a child, family life is the classroom through which you learn how the world works. Once my mom was hospitalized, I realized how very different my lessons were.

    Mortified, I retreated into a world of my own, one in which I wouldn’t have to try to formulate responses to questions I couldn’t possibly know the answers to.

    As the years passed, family life grew more chaotic. Addiction and mental illness sunk their teeth deep into the flesh of my family, wrenching apart the bonds that held us together.

    By the time I graduated high school, I felt like my family life had completely imploded and my sense of self imploded with it.

    I moved out of my parents’ home as soon as I was able to and quickly set to work creating a “normal” life. I bought a car, then a house, and earned my degree. I spent more than six years in an unhealthy relationship for the sake of stability.

    I can’t pinpoint the moment I realized that I was acting out a story that did not belong to me.

    I had buttressed myself with stability and material comforts not because they were the things I truly wanted, but because they were the things that I could hold as evidence that I had survived my tumultuous past and developed into a responsible adult.

    I didn’t know it at the time, but I was driven by shame. I was ashamed of my family and I was ashamed of myself. In a culture where addiction and mental illness are stigmatized, I couldn’t bear the fact that those two illnesses, in some ways, shaped the framework through which I viewed the world.

    So I hid myself behind the story I had created of who I was. The narrative I shaped began with a girl who was victimized, then broken. Eventually, I began to identify as a survivor, but for many years, I didn’t realize that I was much more than that.

    Shame is insidious. It disguises itself as a desire to be a better person, a commitment to moving on. Meanwhile, it burrows deep into your soul and makes a home there until the day that you break open and expose it to the light.

    It was heart-wrenching to uncover the truth. I had labeled myself a survivor because I was unwilling to acknowledge the pain that I carried within me. I defined myself by my experiences, and so created a life where every action was driven by my past.

    I had to let go of the lies I told myself in order to become my most authentic self.

    All of my past experiences have certainly contributed to my perception of life, but I know now that those experiences do not have to shape my present.

    I can acknowledge the pain of past experiences while still choosing to experience the present from a place of joy. That choice was made simple by taking just one step: I let go of the labels I had given myself.

    I could choose to live life as any number of things: a victim of abuse, an adult child of an addict, a survivor; or I could choose to live my life free of labels: a person who has lived a wide variety of experiences and is open to all of the new experiences that life has to offer.

    I found so much freedom in becoming myself.

    I no longer make decisions out of fear. Rather than analyze every situation through a framework created by years of dysfunctional relationships, I trust my instincts. I take care to notice the stories I tell myself and I consciously choose whether or not to believe them.

    Take a moment to listen to your own narrative. How do you define yourself? Write down a short description of who you are and where you come from. Then, take an honest look at your narrative and decide if that is the person you want to be.

    We are all poised to create the lives we want, but we must first uncover and discard the beliefs that no longer serve us. Let go of your labels and greet each day open to the possibilities of who you might be. Your potential is limitless.

    Photo by Jesus Solana

  • A Message for Anyone Who’s Been Abused and Has Kept It Inside

    A Message for Anyone Who’s Been Abused and Has Kept It Inside

    Stand Strong

    TRIGGER WARNING: This content deals with an account of sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people.

    “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” ~Maria Robinson

    My uncle molested me from the time I was about four until I was in my early twenties. He held me too long and hugged me too tight. He would growl in my ear like an animal in heat, his warm, wet, often alcoholic smelling breath overwhelming me.

    This is how he greeted me at every occasion. When I was really small, I almost looked forward to seeing him because I liked the attention and believed he loved me, although deep down inside, I always felt as if I were doing something wrong, something naughty.

    As I grew, he began to grope my ass through my clothing while he whispered in my ear. He would tell me that I was sexy as he growled and hugged me tighter, pressing me up against his body. Much to my horror, I was aroused.

    I was aroused by my uncle. “MY UNCLE!” I would think to myself. “What on Earth was wrong with me? Surely something was gravely wrong with me to be aroused by my own uncle.”

    I wasn’t even sure of what arousal was at that point and only in retrospect could identify what I was feeling. I didn’t have a name for sex at that age, but I could feel it and knew it was wrong deep down in my belly. I felt wrong. 

    He was an adult. He was my uncle. He loved me.

    I felt the problem was surely mine and would chastise myself as disgusting and dirty. I kept my secret close. I assumed the other members of my family knew of his behavior and that he was normal. He didn’t try to hide it, or so it seemed to me.

    He acted out all the time. He was loud, erratic, and verbally abusive. His behavior was blamed on his drinking and the fact that he was an eccentric artist who simply couldn’t control himself.

    This was the way it was. This was the way it was to be.

    When I was a teenager dancing at a wedding, he told me seductively that he wanted to “make love to me.” I laughed, deflecting his advance as he pulled me in tighter. He had told me that he wanted to have sex with me.

    I knew it was true. I wondered if I would have the strength and courage to say no. I felt the planes and curves of his entire body pressed into mine on that dance floor as I drifted up above, looking down from a cloud, wondering how I might ever escape myself.

    It was only in my late teens that I began questioning if my sickness wasn’t possibly in part his sickness, because in every book that I read and every movie that I saw, I searched but could not find a relationship like the one I had with my uncle. 

    I would wait for the scene in a movie between two related people to become romantic. When it never did, I began to wonder if that bad, ugly feeling in my belly had been trying to tell me something about him.

    I cried to my boyfriend night after night, because the more emotionally intimate we became, the harder it became for me to be physically intimate with him, and he wanted to know why I was in such pain.

    After a Thanksgiving dinner accompanied by my uncle’s raucous behavior and inappropriate advances, my boyfriend insisted on confronting my father. To my shock, my father claimed that he had no idea of my special relationship with my uncle. He never would have guessed.

    No one knew but me.

    I simply never imagined that I would be in the position of having to defend myself. My uncle had been so free in his behavior with me. It never occurred to me that he would deny it.

    He denied it, as did his wife and the entire side of the family that accompanied him. Not only did they deny it, they threw accusations at me.

    “Crazy. Depressed. Liar. She’s unable to interpret harmless behavior.” They defended his honor as husband, father, and grandfather with vigor as if he were a hero—someone to be lauded, not disparaged and blamed with this filth.

    My father had confronted him and relayed the information to me. I did not have the courage to confront him myself.

    Just as I never dreamed I would need a defense, I never dreamed of how many would accuse me. Even my own brother sided with them, and my father would soften my uncle’s blame with statements like “he didn’t mean to hurt you.”

    I wanted to scream so loud the heavens would respond. Cry so long my eyes would bleed into pools of blood around my feet on the floor. Vomit up every one of my organs in sheer disgust.

    But what they didn’t understand is that the blaming, name-calling, and crafting of an airtight defense against me were all unnecessary. I wanted nothing from any of them. I did not want an admission. I did not want an apology. 

    I did not want revenge.

    I did not want him grabbing my ass at my wedding. I did not want to have to explain to my someday husband my “special” relationship with my uncle. I did not want him to have access to the children I would someday have.

    I wanted him to reconsider his behavior before his son’s newborn baby girl, the first girl born into the family since my birth, turned four. I did not want to ever see his disgusting face again. I did not want to feel anymore that sick, dark pain deep in my belly as he touched me.

    I did not want him to touch me again, ever. I wanted my future to be different from my past.  That is all I wanted.

    And I got it. I never saw him again. I turned and walked away from all the disbelievers and my uncle the molester.

    I found people who did empathize and help me heal. I faced the truth of what had been done to me and got the help I needed to go on to live a healthy, normal existence. In doing so, I learned that it is common for families to turn on abuse victims and believe the abuser rather than the abused.

    Were you abused? Did you speak your truth, and no one believed you? Did you speak your truth and experience the pain of even one person doubting you?

    If you were abused and someone, anyone, didn’t believe you, know that I do. I believe you. I stand with you, and for you, in the small way I can. 

    Speaking the truth after being abused takes incredible courage and strength. I am proud of you.  My story can be your story.

    We can be victorious together as survivors. I am a survivor. You are a survivor.

    We are stronger for having survived. We stand together triumphantly and move forward, bravely living abuse free lives.

    If you have been abused or are currently a victim of abuse and have not yet spoken out, I urge you to reach toward a safe person and speak your truth. You too are strong and courageous and deserve to live an abuse free life. Stand with me, no longer a victim but a survivor.

    Start today and make a new ending.

    Photo by Cornelia Kopp

  • We Are Never Alone in the Storm

    We Are Never Alone in the Storm

    Hugging Under Umbrella

    “We all have problems. The way we solve them is what makes us different.” ~Unknown

    Like so many others living in Florida, my family was deeply affected by hurricane Charlie in August of 2004.  We have completely recovered financially some years later, but the gravity of the situation leaves feelings close to the surface.

    Our particular community was heavily hit by what were called spin-off tornadoes. Most people in Orlando did not believe the storm was coming our way.  We had little notice that the storm path had changed from the forecaster’s prediction.

    A friend from Jacksonville called and said, “They’re saying here it will hit Orlando tonight as a category four.”  We hadn’t heard that yet and there was no time to board the windows or evacuate. The sky turned a very eerie dark gray and the reality was quite clear.

    We listened to the battery powered radio as our power went out quite early in the storm. At one point we heard that serious tornadoes were spotted on radar near the airport. This was minutes from our house.

    As we were devising a plan, we heard “If you can hear this and live in Conway, seek shelter in a bathroom or interior room now.”

    My husband and I huddled in the bathroom sheltering our then-three-year-old with a mattress. I was pregnant with our second and we both knew this was serious. We began to hear heavy winds and then glass breaking. A tornado does very much sound like a train passing over your head. (more…)