The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

I have been using Jaime Romo’s book Healing the Sexually Abused Heart: A Workbook for Survivors , Thrivers and Supporters for my support group.  Since some people have trouble motivating themselves to do the exercises in a serious form -- writing down their responses and sitting with them and writing them down again, I decided to blog my way through the book to try to help others to do the same thing. I already completed the first exercise in the book and so it is now time for the second exercise -- Action 1.02 -- on flexibility. Jaime begins by asking, "How can I be more flexible when dealing with unfamiliar or uncomfortable ideas?" I would add "and situations" to the question. The last question in the exercise is, "What do I commit to now in order to be more flexible." This exercise instantly put me in a state of anxiety, because I have an abusive person in my life right now. This person is constantly making demands on me. Some are reasonable...

These days are sad ones for our country, with the shooting of Democratic Representative, Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona as well as the shooting of the little girl Christina Greem, who was born on 9/11. These shootings were an act of a man, Jared Lee Loughner, who appears to have suffered from emotional trauma meted out by a verbally abusive father. Jared may be schizophrenic too. Maybe his stimuli were all internal, and he was not influenced by angry rhetoric from Republican or Democratic politicians and pundits....or maybe he was influenced. My opinion is that probably an emotional violent father coupled with possible biochemical disturbances in Loughner's brain made him more vulnerable to influence from violent rhetoric and more likely to commit the insane act of violence when most of the rest of us know the rhetoric is intended to incite political action and not actual violence. That said, now what do we do to help our country heal? President Obama gave a moving speech th...