Tedder's Blog, page 10

Mirror Mirror ~ An Appetite for Change

What better way to start a week, but with introsepection.

Healing takes a mindset of growth. As a seed becomes a plant, there is visible change. The same was true in my life. The more I healed, the more everything started to look just a little bit different.

Many of my relationships in life took drastic turns: from the men I dated, to the friends I spent time with, and most importantly — the people I chose to see in my family.

The winds of healing blew a different outlook onto my paths.

I suppose the old saying that no one really likes change isn’t true for me – anymore. If I had not embraced change, I would not have healed.

If I didn’t make the choice that I would seek healing at all costs 1) I would still be listening to my family call me a liar, 2) I still would allow men to treat with disrespect, and 3) my friends could continue to betray me. I would have just continued to do what I always did – minimize under the guise of “forgiveness” and then continue on with them.

That’s not me anymore. I’ve got better things to do.

As I’ve gone through my garden of life, I began plucking out the bad weeds that had sprung up unnoticed. They didn’t belong among my flowers anymore. They were taking up space – space that I needed to grow better things.

It took a great deal of courage to muster the strength to change. My reasons were many. I already lived alone so why would I want to remove anyone? They were at a distance, weren’t they? What damage could it be to keep my family close? How could just dating an abusive man but not living with him hurt me?

These reasonings kept me stuck.

The voices of mockery, people who did not believe my story, those folks who mistreated me and constantly betrayed – oh, they mattered. They mattered greatly.

They plucked away at my self-esteem. Their bonds continually undermined any integrity I was trying to build and they secretly laughed at my desire to grow.

They made me feel ugly inside.

Not today! Today, I encourage my growth and welcome change. Not sudden change, but change I get to dictate. A deliberate kind of change. The people who sit at my table are different now. The mockers live outside of my hearing and I pay them no attention.

My eyes steady on my path forward, I trust myself.

I have an appetite now that allows a natural desire to satisfy my need to heal.

In Matthew 13, Jesus spoke, ” 15 For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.”

I give you permission to turn away from any person who hurts you.

Homesickness

Homesickness for a home that burned down. Homesick for a place you visited once… peered at through the foggy glass. The people all gathered around the dinner table, you were there right?

It’s hard to remember. Your body reminds you of what you once had – even if you can’t remember. Even if you have tried hard to forget.

Losing family is hard. Being cast out into a world that is so atomized and lonely. Everyone so desperate for connection but we’re forgetting how to relate. It’s too messy and hard so we stay in our lane.

We don’t want to get burned again.

It’s easier to go on like we never had family. Try to replace that feeling with something grander, bigger.

But it doesn’t work. It never does. Family is the only thing that matters but often it is the first thing to go. All trauma starts here, with this fracture.

There is a way out. Or should I say, a way back, but it will take generations. It will take a folded piece of paper with the secret jotted inside, handed down and down and down until someone can remember.

B

Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Suffering often leads us to ask for a cause. If we know the cause, it somehow makes it more acceptable or easier to embrace the fact that the suffering took place.  I have high cholesterol because I eat too much fatty food. I’m overweight because I don’t exercise enough.
But what about tragedy or suffering inflicted on innocent people who were perfectly healthy that became suddenly sick, or people who were innocent bystanders who encountered extremely evil violence at the hands of individuals not so well understood or known or explained?

As reasons for the tragedies continue to unfold we must look to our Creator more than ourselves for answers. What occurred was evil. But even out of evil God can still and does work—in spite of it.  

May we walk with those in deep pain whenever we have the chance. May we seek to be redemptive with our words as others experience unthinkable pain and loss.

Why does tragedy and suffering happen? There are no easy answers this side of Heaven. Sin, a broken world…but that doesn’t present a package with a nice little bow on top as the complete answer to suffering. We must trust in a God who’s understanding is beyond ours, whose love is vastly greater than ours, and who’s ability to redeem us is far reaching.

That’s what I’ve learned…

B

Mirror Mirror ~ Words of Affirmation

Introspection, what better way to start a week.

When you live in a home of incest, no piece of you lives free. You can’t talk about your feelings, you cannot discuss the abuse and your emotions must be hidden away from sight.

No love in. No love out. No feelings. No discussion. You must live disconnected to yourself. Every part of yourself.

What then remains?

A bullshit life of fake duty.

How do you accomplish this? You start pretending. You create a version of yourself that is so far from reality, you actually fall out of ownership of yourself.

What other choice did I have?

I wasn’t going to be killed. I knew I was going to have to be raped, but at least during the off times of abuse they might leave me alone if I just damn complied with their every fucking notion of what it took to be a good girl in their farce of a home.

On the thought of being a good girl, I don’t remember once being told I was a good girl. They never thanked me for not displaying outrageous behavior but sucking it all up. After all, I was doing it for them – shouldn’t they tell me I was doing a good job?

All of my fortitude to stay alive in that house. All of my denial to not betray them. Did I ever get a thank you, you’re such a good girl. NOPE! Never. Never will.

I believe that when I get back to my eternal home, I will hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Matthew 25:21.

Just that knowledge makes it ok.

The Reluctant Cycle-Breaker

I used to have a big family. I remember the feeling of being surrounded by people and food and the kids in the corner and the coats stacked on the bed. I don’t know if anyone loved me but they knew me.

Today, I don’t have any family. They are gone. To me at least. That’s the hard part though – they’re all still out there. But I know what it feels like – to have family.

I was somebody’s cousin once.

Somebody’s Grand-daughter.

Someones’s niece.

Sometimes I fantasize about having it back again. Turning in the cycle breaker chip and putting my head in the sand. It seems to work for so many. But I know the pain and toxicity and lack of safety would not be worth the minimal amount of comfort I might glean from their presence.

Who makes me feel loved, connected, and unconditionally accepted? It’s probably not my family or origin. But I have it in my nuclear family, in my husband’s family, and in God.

To my fellow cycle breakers –
Keep on going. We see you.

B

Fear Not Friday | On Rejection

On the discussion of fear, do you fear rejection?

Loneliness envelops the person that has been rejected. Light shines dimly from the eyes. The soul mocks the inability to breathe. Oh, rejection, I have known you well. What is abuse if not the severest form of rejection? Jesus knew rejection. It's pain leaves you disabled on the side of the road. Grief is the duty of the rejected. Fear not because God has overcome rejection, too.

When Holidays are Hard

Exposing secrets can tear families apart.

But hear me out, it can also bring them closer together.

I’ve lost a lot of family members – pretty much all of them aside from my sister and mother. It’s been a long and lonely and painful road but there are so many upsides.

It’s freed me up to build a healthy family of my own making. It’s allowed me space to heal without the toxic and ongoing damaging effects of spending time and maintaining relationships with sick people.

It’s allowed me to heal and strengthen the bonds I have with my mom and sister.

I remember showing up to a funeral (some distant relative with whom I was never close) and encountering my grandfather. I was 14 at the time and completely aware of what he had done to my mother. Up until this point, we didn’t have much contact with any of my grandparents. But almost as soon as my mother made eye contact with her dad, she was bringing him pie, laughing at his jokes and seemed to be on some eerie autopilot that nobody could turn off.

I was flabbergasted. I was angry. I was triggered. I knew why, I was educated enough at that point to understand trauma bonds and incest dynamics but I couldn’t watch it and ended up storming out of the reception and sitting in my mom’s car, crying uncontrollably.

After about 5 minutes, the car door opened. My grandfather lowered himself into the driver’s seat, pulled out a pack cigarettes and lit one calmly. He said nothing to me nor looked my way, he just sat in silence, blowing smoke straight ahead.

I jumped out of the car as though a snake had slithered in and ran back toward to building where my mother was.

My grandfather didn’t say anything to me that day but he conveyed everything he wanted to without uttering a single word. That’s how power and intimidation works in families. Sometimes it is loud and abusive and sometimes it is as insidious as a snake.

Today, I get to show up to holidays and family gatherings and actually enjoy every person surrounding me. No pretending. No ignoring, no surprises. Everyone is safe, trustworthy. I don’t have to be in the same room with people who I know have raped, tortured, and abused children and taken the lives of innocent women.

B

Words of Widsom ~ Don’t Hide the Junk

We truly are as sick as our secrets.

All I learned through my childhood abuse was, don’t tell, don’t talk — try not to remember. You think that works? Nope!

“We played as children do. My brother and I were close – albeit with sexual overtones. We pretended and explored a lot together. This was the early ‘70s so there wasn’t much going on inside the house in the way of electronics, so you had to create your own fun. One time we scratched out a detailed menu for my parents with an imaginary restaurant running in our home kitchen. Mom and Dad were our first customers. It was fun! Our parents graciously played the roles we gave them, and it was good. If we lived in the house with the attitude of “things are fine and your pain isn’t showing,” we seemed to get along just fine.

One thousand eight hundred and ninety-five days after the murder, our fake family made headlines. My father murdered on June 8, 1968, and we adopted this little boy and appeared in the local paper on August 26, 1973. The riddle of my family couldn’t have been scripted. No person could have unraveled the demonic turmoil they hid.

From the book A Prisoner by No Crime fo My Own

Want more?

The Way Out

My story is one with a beginning, but no end. It is a story that continues to evolve and change. With each season that passes, a new me rises from the ashes of my past.

As I heal from trauma and unlearn the patterns that were handed down from generation to generation, another facet of who I was always meant to be emerges. Instead of stuffing my problems and hiding them through substance use, I confront them and adjust my behavior. I walk in forgiveness toward myself and those who harmed me, knowing that many people got here the same way I did – because someone showed us a way to live that was contrary to a life of wellness lived to its fullest.

I didn’t grow up with big dreams. I grew up wondering, “How can I get through this day in tact … mentally and physically.

In addition to the trauma I grew up with, I also learned something else from my parents. I learned that the only way to deal with life was to stuff it deep down and keep moving. The way you did this was simple – drugs and alcohol.

It was this hopelessness and the constant nightmares of my past that led me deeper into my addictions.

But I found a way out … through hope and prayer and therapy and employing the use of dozens of healing modalities.

I go out into my new world afraid and unfamiliar with the surroundings, but I push through the fear and forge ahead. I face my trauma and refuse to be victimized by it any longer.

I have been able to overcome and find healing. I want to keep going and take others with me.

I plan to take what I have learned and show others the way out.

B

Let Jesus Shut the Door to Your Pain

“My bathroom had now become the bathroom in the old motel room in ’68.  My mind’s eye flew open. The window of the memory had started with that body memory. I didn’t realize what my hand was telling me until I was instantly back in the motel room. Plain as day, I was there, again. I could see all of us there. Dad, Craig, me, but the woman had already been murdered and was missing. The room was full of chaos, and they were moving about quickly, but not orderly. Dad handed me his knife. It was heavy – that was the heaviness that was in my hand. The odd thing about working through tragic memories is the way they come back makes sense when you educate yourself. The body keeps score and the heaviness in my hand led me back.

With the knife in my hand (which makes no difference anymore, except to explain the weight in my hand), Dad told me to follow him into the bathroom. I didn’t want to go because they had placed that lady in there. I opened my eyes or were they shut? I wanted to pull myself out of that bathroom and to stop watching in my mind’s theater. But now, I was urged back, so I continued. Craig was in the bathroom and the lady was in the bathtub.

The water was running over her neck, and they had her head laid back, sort of cocked in a weird position. It was laid back so far it was like a fish head that had not been cut off all the way and flopped back. Her head just should not in that position.

“It shouldn’t look like that,” I literally said out loud.

My mind raced as I was watching it again. I started crying rather loudly and intently. The scene played out with the water running over and over her neck. It ran until the blood seemed to be washed away.

. . .

I woke up a few hours later to a tremendous headache. My body ached everywhere, and my soul hurt. I went through the day and wasn’t sure how I was going to put this away so that it didn’t tear up my life for weeks or even days. I watched movies to try to escape into someone else’s story. I went for a nice walk and bought Thai food. I came home and as the night hours would be coming on soon, I needed a plan.

What would my night look like? Would I see them washing out her neck over and over as I tried to go to sleep? Would I go to sleep and wake up with another nightmare of something else that I hadn’t remembered and be terrified all over again? I couldn’t know for sure what was going to happen, but I was getting better at trying.

. . .

A few hours before I got into bed, I got a severe bout of diarrhea. This carried on for about the first hour I was in bed. My body was tremendously trepidatious going into the dark hours of night. As I lay there crying out to God, He answered me. I watched as Jesus walked into that motel room and picked me up. He put me in his arms and held me tight. He walked over to the bathroom door, and He closed it. I heard Him tell me that I didn’t have to go in there anymore. I didn’t have to continue to watch. He’d stopped it for me. Now, I was equipped with an answer. Every time my mind wanted to go back and replay that scene (which would be a vicious cycle), I’d only go back to the door and see it closed and my mind could stop.”

From A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own. Incest. Rape. Murder. Then, I turned Four. The journey of healing.

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