The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

Therapy or therapeutic settings can also heal flaws in our judicial system. The judicial system largely does not allow survivors of abuse who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder to actually suffer it in public during trials concerning abuse.  Church leaders and lawyers for churches in clergy abuse lawsuits as well as lawyers for abusive spouses in contested divorces often portray survivors as unstable people making false accusations. But abuse makes one unstable.  Even people not suffering from symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder tend to feel angry when they hear themselves being lied about in court.  Add in a little PTSD and you get an angry and upset witness who does a lousy job by court standards of explaining their experiences. This is the reason I prefer working with therapists.  Judges only see us for short periods of time, and a good attorney can be really skilled at confusing the truth in two or three hours.  Therapists see us o...

I have had to learn a lot after coming to terms with child sex abuse and date rape at age 42.  Actually it tool me another three years before I realized just how much I was harmed by abuse.  I went back to my journal and read what I wrote the day after I was raped.  I had reread many pages in my diary, but not that one, and it was a shocker.  I wrote about how dirty I felt afterwards.  My words were filled with pain and anger at myself, at the two young men who raped me and at all men. I won't share more of my story right now. Healing has been a slow process guided by a therapist and then by learning Compassionate Listening as taught by The Compassionate Listening Project and then by reading about Non-Violent Communication and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. This is going to be an evolving blog, so check back to read more later. These are some of the things I learned along the way. 1.  The first step in healing is coming to terms with what happen...