The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

I wrote this blog about a decade and a half ago, or maybe a little longer.       I was thrown out of my Catholic Church in 2004 for handing out articles that showed that the Provincial Minister of the Franciscan Order had known about our former Franciscan priest pastor’s abuse of minors and a few adult women. Instead of protecting vulnerable children and adults, he covered up the priest’s abuses. The priest had been wonderful with my autistic son, so kind and friendly. My son loved him, but eventually I realized it was really good for my family that the priest was removed, or my son might have become one of his victims. While I came to terms with why the priest had to be removed, I felt the provincial minister who had decades earlier covered up the priest’s abuses should have also suffered consequences. So I handed out articles on the priest and the provincial minister before and after Mass at my church. During Mass one Sunday, the female pastoral associate came up b...

  Both my ex-husband and I suffered trauma in our childhood. Mine is discussed elsewhere in this blog. Look for it. My ex-husband’s parents never married and were unprepared to be parents when he was born. Growing up, he was shuffled between different family members’ homes. Some family members were loving and supportive. Some were stressed by their lives. They tried to give him a good life but also failed to give him all the love and support he needed. Perhaps due to his insecure childhood, my ex-husband was the most jealous man I had ever dated. In addition, I was eight years older than him and had worked about four years as an observer on foreign fishing vessels in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. The job came with lots of male friends and significant growth in my self-confidence.  Before we married, my husband and I went to couples’ counseling to work on our struggles. The therapist told my soon-to-be husband to be less jealous and gave us a book by Harville Hendr...

Social Scientists noticed that people feel good when they hear their religious and political views praised and distressed or even angry when they hear facts that disprove their beliefs. We humans are like this because when our ancestors walked the earth as hunter/gatherers, they needed the protection of a tribe for survival on a wild planet populated with mountain lions and wolves and African lions and hyenas or elephants and tigers. Unfortunately, in the modern world, tribal thinking causes racial discrimination, wars, ethnic tensions, and conflict in divorced families. My children’s father and I co-parented well when we first divorced. Then he married a very controlling woman who divided our family into tribes. In my tribe, we called my daughter’s father every night because when my parents divorced, I lived with my mother, but my relationship with my father was important to me. In my tribe, I wrote letters to the teachers to make sure they gave all school information to my dau...