The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

When my parents divorced, my father was the rock in my life.  Although I loved my mother for her many good qualities, she was an alcoholic.  My father was the parent I could most easily go to for emotional support and help.  Consequently, when I filed for divorce, although I had physical custody of the children due to my son needing homeschooling for autism, I felt my ex-husband should play a major role in our children’s lives.  I had the children call Dad every night for years.  I also made sure they saw Dad per the parenting schedule.  Despite some small problems between us, Dad and I had a decent co-parenting relationship.  We often attended school events together and shared birthday and holiday celebrations.  The serious problems in our relationship developed after he became involved with the abusive woman who became his second wife.  The point is I felt and still feel that children need lots of quality and quantity time with both paren...

I worked as a biological technician for a couple of science agencies of the US government that President Trump is trying to make much smaller or eliminate. I loved being a biologist. Evolution is the cornerstone of biology. Evolution explains the how and why of the history of life on Earth, like what happened to the dinosaurs. I know that evolution is real and that the Universe is billions of years old.  I loved evolution, and it was the core of what I studied in college. I did not attend church because many Christians did not believe that the evolution of life on earth was true. After I gave birth to my second child, I suffered postpartum depression because I was always up, caring for a baby or a toddler, and was not able to sleep.  My husband had a really good-paying job, but he worked long hours. It took some doing, but he finally took the baby watch a couple of nights a week so I could sleep a couple of nights a week. I still had trouble sleeping because I remain...

 Hackers, I know that all of you are reading my blog. I know a lot of you are slaves forced to try to hack little old ladies like me. I am sorry for your bad situation, but you all have all taught me not to trust anyone. I am a senior citizen with limited financial resources. Do you want to put me on the streets? If you have a chance, Google Howard Storm's Near-Death Experience. He was a selfish man who died and went to hell. Hell isn't exactly the way it is in many Christian churches. It is real. It is awful. You keep reliving the harm you do to others. You and your bosses will know my suffering if you manage to drain me of my resources. You will, in fact, relive them yourselves. This old planet is becoming a hellhole because money should not be free speech. All the peace and love and living simply nonsense is not nonsense. It is what we are supposed to do. Fancy cars will crash and send your bosses and captors driving them to hell. Airplanes will crash and send your captors a...

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...

I was sexually abused around 1963 by two teenaged boys in my neighborhood when I was four years old.  My mother, who was also sexually abused as a child by someone in her neighborhood, struggled with depression and rotated in and out of mental hospitals until Ronald Reagan cut the budget for most of them.  She was too wrapped up in her pain to notice that I was gone.  And it was the days when people were much more relaxed about allowing their children to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. I did not understand what the boys did to me, but I knew it was bad because I had at least been told that these were my private parts.  I knew, whatever it was they did to me, they weren't supposed to do it to me. When I was six I told my mother what the boys did to me. She said, "That's were babies come from," but she didn't do anything. Her nonchalant response gave me the message that what happened to me was not significant. This is a short book list Begin by com...

Please note that I deactivated links for organizations that I do not have specific permission for links, but you can still cut and paste addresses. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Email: mainoffice@ncadv.org Hotlines:1.800.799.SAFE (7233) and 1.800.787.3224 (TTY) Website: http://www.ncadv.org domesticshelters.org https://www.domesticshelters.org   Find  a shelter anywhere in the country and access dozens, hundreds of articles on survivors stories and all aspects of coping with domestic violence. Some local Portland area resources for help for coping with domestic violence (all found on domesticshelters.org): The Gateway Center for Domestic Violence Services -- business phone: 503-988-6400 website: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/gatewaycenter/ Portland Women's Crisis Line -- hotline: 503-235-5333 website: http://pwcl.org VOA Home Free -- hotline: 503-771-5503 website: http://www.voaor.org/children-and-family Bradley Angle House  -- ...