The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

by Virginia Pickles I find metaphors for healing all around me.  Walking in nature slows me down and gives me time to contemplate and meditate.  The beauty of the place and the moment soothe me and uplift me.  One of the most inspiring places I love to walk near Portland, Oregon, is Smith and Bybee Lakes. More than two hundred years ago when Lewis and Clark and the Corp of Discovery paddled canoes by here on the Columbia River, there were no levies, no roads, no warehouses, no electrical lines -- just acres and acres of wetland.  The Columbia River flooded the seasonal lakes in winter.  By September, sun and summer drought left behind swaths of cracked mud along their edges.  Fish and Tree Frogs and the Western Painted Pond Turtles thrived in the virgin landscape.  Native grasses grew around the shores.  Rushes and sedges grew in the shallows.  Mule Deer and Pronghorn Antelope came to browse the grasses and brush and to sip water a...

I am a survivor of sex abuse as a child and date rape as a young adult.  My whole life has been occupied with coming to terms with these wounds and learning healthy coping skills to heal them.  One of the symptoms of abuse that I struggle with is outbursts of anger.  One coping skill I am learning to rely on to heal myself is gardening.  Gardening lifts me up from seas of sadness and calms me through storms of anger. Anger is one of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Survivors of child abuse, sexual assault, and domestic violence often suffer from PTSD just as combat veterans do.  Anger is a normal part of the healing process, but if we inflict our anger on others, we can also ruin our relationships with friends and family and cause problems for ourselves at work and school.  While anger over abuse inspires us to fight for justice, we need to channel and control our anger so we don't harm ourselves or others. People who express ...

Theresa's Fund and its offspring, domesticshelters.org , are what happens when marketing executives decide to spend their spare time combatting abuse. Google  domesticshelters.org and you will find it has not only a website , but a Twitter account , a Facebook account , a Pinterest account, and an Instagram account .  Peruse the website, and you will find that they also have a You Tube account.  The domesticshelters.org , the Facebook page , and the Twitter are all updated regularly with thoughtful articles about abuse.  The website also includes a data base of domestic violence shelters and related services around the country and information domestic violence victims need to know to keep themselves safe. This media outreach to survivors, advocates, and the community at large, is the brain child of two content marketing executives -- Preston V. McMurry Jr. and his son, Chris McMurry. According to the website of the Content Marketing Institu...

By Preston V. McMurry Jr. as told to Virginia Jones Donna Theresa, Preston McMurry, Jr.’s wife, was horribly abused as a child in Agnone, Italy, the  a mountaintop village where she was born.  During their marriage the physical and emotional scars of her childhood torture played havoc with their life beneath matrimonial blankets. More of the story is told in the preceding two blogs:  Pres and Donna Theresa: The Love Story That Inspired A Nonprofit Combatting Domestic Violence  and  Pres and Donna Theresa Part Two: Pres Works on Healing From the Loss of Donna Theresa Periodically, Donna Theresa left home.  At first, for a few weeks.  Each time she left it was for a longer period of time. She was never able to explain why, but always announced her intended departure with the same words, “I love you. But, I am leaving.” She heard the line in a movie the couple attended three nights before her first disappearance.  Donna Theresa and ...

By Preston McMurry as told to Virginia Pickles Jones In part one,  Pres and Donna Theresa:  The Love Story That Inspired A Nonprofit Combatting Domestic Violence,   we watched as Preston V. McMurry, Jr. and his beloved wife, Donna Theresa, who was born in Italy, struggled through 16 years of marriage.  Their marriage was burdened by the emotional and physical scars Donna carried as the of result of the horrific abuse she suffered prior to her adoption at age five by a fine American family.  In pursuit of a fully compatible marriage, the deeply in love couple committed to psychological counseling. After ten years of therapy and an ongoing struggle with intimacy, they followed their therapist’s advice to travel to Italy to find Donna Theresa’s roots in Agnone,  the mountaintop village where she was born in 1947.  They hoped to fill in her lost memories about her childhood with insights that might  improve their amorous relationship....