Tedder's Blog, page 21

The Plan…

God is good

He knows what we need.

Even when it is the opposite of what we think that might be.

He is answering our prayers all the time.

I’ve come to recognize that God is never haphazard about who He does or does not place in our lives.

And when you realize, the seed of peace blossoms and flourishes in a way you couldn’t imagine before.

The stress of the future does not concern you, the ache of the past does not haunt you.

It’s in the plan.

B

#recovery #love #traumahealing #cptsd #abuse #mentalhealthmatters #emotionalabuse #narcissist #survivor #mentalillness #stress #narcissisticabuse #psychology #mindfulness #wellness

Teaser Tuesday ~ The Deception in Incest

Thank you for supporting this book! A relatable story that brings validation to the world of childhood abuse.

Grab your copy here:

Finding Yourself

I read once when you’re not meant to be in a certain place, career, relationship, or situation you’ll start receiving nods or messages that it’s time to leave. But if you fight it, God will make you so uncomfortable with yourself that you’ll be forced to part ways.

This was me for many years. Marred by trauma and unhealed childhood wounds, I never felt good in my skin or right in my shoes.I always feet this nagging sensation that something was off. A buzz of anxiety right below the surface. I had dreams, nightmares about certain people or choices I was making. I woke up in sweat. I felt constantly uneasy but I refused to address the thing I knew, just beyond my periphery, that I was ignoring or suppressing because I was too afraid of change.

I kept wanting God to save me. I wanted a grand sign. I never got one but I didn’t get many signs of over the years, every day of my life.

When I began to step into my own spiritual journey – everything in my life began to align.

People who were meant to be in my life stayed. Behaviors that I had tried so hard to control seemed to melt away. The trauma and anxiety and accompanying depression that had plagued me for years just seemed to drop off my shoulders.

And somewhere along this journey is when I discovered my power and my own spiritual gifts. It’s a beautiful thing; to be aligned with your highest self. To live in your purpose, do what you love, and create with passion.

B

#walkawayfromincest traumarecovery #healing #incest #riseabove #jesuslovesyou #prisonerbynocrimeofmyown #evil #noincest #godisgood #cptsdsurvivor #sexabusesurvivor

Watch “Let’s Talk About It | Destigmatizing Childhood Sexual Crimes”

The YouTube Channel dedicated to survivor stories is now live. We delve into the reality of childhood sexual crimes and what the inside of these homes actually look like, the toll it takes to survive and more.

This Thursday I meet with Taylor Fulks to discuss her book, My Prison Without Bars — The Journey of a Damaged Woman to Someplace Normal.

You can read her book here:

Shedding Your Skin

Frederik Nietzsche wrote: “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.”

I think about this a lot.

In fact, it is my driving force in life aside from my family and God – the idea of being a better version of myself and taking risks and pushing hard to grow…even when it is painful.

Shedding each layer of skin and feeling raw for a while requires bravery and courage and real strength and vulnerability.

Of course, shedding our skin doesn’t mean to be without skin. It means that we are opening to a level where there is more transparency and more porousness and more of a natural exchange—a belonging to our world.

So the challenge, for all of us, is that we are very habituated and attached to and identified with our particular familiar skin—our cocoon.

Every one of us.

It is part of our evolution.

We develop our cocoon and we are attached to it, and we have to deal with that. The ego-self is organized around controlling life.

Most of the time, we are trying to get what we want and avoid what we don’t want and trying to hold on to security and comfort and push away fear or pain.

But that is never possible.

So shed that layer & step into the next version of yourself.

B

#healingjourney #toxicrelationships #domesticabuse #narcissism #support #addiction #growth #boundaries #motivation #awareness #life #pain #meditation #therapist #traumasurvivor #borderline #manipulation #loveyourself #suicideprevention #bhfyp #quotes

The Casualties of Having No Comfort

Abuse was the foundation of my suffering. The freeze that kept it steady was the lack of comfort I received.

My parents had to be sociopaths of some kind or they would have seen the pain of their children. They would have noticed the night hours I was up in agony. They would have seen the despondency in all of their children.

They would have tried to comfort the loss each one of their children carried.

I don’t try to figure out who they are any more. What does it matter? To do the atrocious things they did! I’m sure that had plenty to do with their blindness.

I do know how the lack of comfort affected me.

It held me captive to the belief that I was of no value to anyone. Suffering in silence day after day, year after agonizing year, I was left with only one thing to believe. I was worth nothing: Not love, not comfort.

No thing was I worth.

That’s possibly the most devastating lesson I took out of that bleak home. A worthless life was what I brought out and all I had to offer. Believing I was not worthy of love, I didn’t have very high standards. That’s almost a joke to write. Written truthfully I’d have to say, I had no standards at all.

Comfort has always been a bit of an elusive word to me. I imagine the nearest I know to that feeling is being close to my children and grandchildren. Otherwise, I don’t look for comfort much because I don’t know it’s definition.

I had an ingrown fingernail the other day and it was swollen and painful. My husband told me, “my father always told me to soak it in warm salt water to draw out the impurities.” I got a glass and did as he instructed. It seemed to help!

The next day at dinner when I thanked him and told him how grateful I was to hear a story of his father’s comforting words, I couldn’t get through the telling without breaking down in tears. He looked at me a bit puzzled.

I told him that it must have been so great to have received the comfort of a parent. I hadn’t known that.

It’s these small moments that I notice in a grand way. The hope of a stronger tomorrow. A belief that I will learn these lessons of comfort and pass them on to my own children and grandchildren.

“Everyone says that forgiveness is a wonderful idea, until he has something to forgive.”

C.S. LEWIS

Taking the Risk To Live!

When I was on drugs, sometimes it would occur to me, that I was using them, in part, so that I didn’t have to face taking true risks and failing. I could always blame drugs on the fact that I wasn’t fulfilling my potential. I knew it deep in my heart and it would shock me awake for just a second … long enough to feel a sense of dread and panic.

The thing is: you don’t need to drugs to avoid taking risks and fulfilling your true potential. You can use almost any excuse in the book – work, past traumas, kids, financial problems, etc etc.

The inescapable truth for everyone is that you will not fulfill your purpose in life without stepping outside your comfort zone.

You’ll never know what you are capable of if you give in to fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

This is hard for survivors of sexual abuse, because we never got that fundamental foundation that allows most other people the freedom of initial safety & the courage to take risks. For a long time, I waited for someone to give me a sense of what I was missing from my childhood. But it never happened. It never will. Nearly everything I’ve built within, has ultimately come from within.

I have a couple mottos in life – one of them relate to this idea- ‘Embrace what you don’t know’. I try to push myself so hard that the person I was last year is almost unrecognizable to me. Not in a fundamental sense, just in the way that I’ve taken new risks, made mistakes, felt growing pain, pushed myself beyond what I thought I was capable of.

And each year, I look back, astounded. It is such a cool way to live.

If you want more out of life you have to push your boundaries.

No this doesn’t mean you have to jump off cliffs or go skydiving, oftentimes it’s little changes or action steps that can make a big change.

Wake up earlier and follow a morning routine.

Spend more time outside.

Count your steps and move your body more.

If there is something that you feel hesitant to do at all, that is probably your sign to push through and do it.

Your comfort zone feels easy. So if life seems too easy lately, challenge that.

B

#recovery #love #traumahealing #cptsd #abuse #mentalhealthmatters #emotionalabuse #narcissist #survivor #mentalillness #stress #narcissisticabuse #psychology #mindfulness #wellness #gaslighting #childhoodtrauma #domesticviolence #traumainformed

When Grief Strikes

If we understand grief, then we understand that it works just like pain does. When you break an arm, the pain indicates there is a real problem. Grief indicates pain unrealized, loss unnoticed, and the consequences of abuse.

Grief unidentified leaves us brokenhearted and living in dull depressive states. When you befriend grief and ask what it’s mission in your life is you begin to heal. Bitterness begins to evaporate and time is more meaningfully spent.

Grief should not be blocked. Western society has a way of telling us that healing should take us no longer than a year or so.

Wait, what?

Western society believes that to be living your best life you get healed right away. What a bunch of horse shit that is. So, you live in years of abuse, but you believe that abuse is healed with a couple of counseling sessions and a visit to the sheriff’s office?

I think we are all smarter than that.

Grief is unwelcomed for sure. Which one of us likes it? But, it is so necessary when healing from childhood wounds. It is the first ingredient to healing. It moves in a way that we believe in. We can feel it — which is something that many of us have lost.

Don’t deny grief. Make it your friend.

We got home, I put the kids to bed, and rushed to take a hot bath. Tears swollen with grief of years past steadily flowed. Tantalized with my new life with my children, these memories threatened to bring that to an end. It was the onslaught of the pending tidal wave. I had little power over the process or when the memories stopped. I turned the water off and the phone rang.   My middle sister, Chrissy, asked, “Are you okay?” I asked why she called because it was late at night. She said, “I just felt like something was wrong with you.” And, indeed, there was something wrong with me.

Chapter 7 – Phantom pain, a prisoner by no crime of my own

Read along on Kindle, grab a paperback or listen to the audiobook (narrated by me):

Break the habit of being yourself.

Can you break the habit of being yourself?

Can you change your personality?

Can you shift from mostly negative thinking to positive?

I’ve done it!

I used to be chronically negative, cynical and completely defeated about my life. I lived in the past and my body was trapped there too. So much of this was automatic by the time I reached adulthood. My brain was hardwired to expect bad things.

I had never felt safe in my body as a child and, as an adult, it had become a protective shell, shutting down during moments both innocuous and intimate.

During the healing process, you can actually rewire and retrain your brain to reverse the effects of trauma. You can reinforce your prefrontal cortex and get back rationality and control. You can strengthen your hippocampus and help your memory work how it’s supposed to.

You can stop letting your past dictate your future.

Reinhabiting your body is scary when it has never felt like a safe place, and the process has been slow and excruciating for me. But the progress I’ve made is astounding and I never want to stop improving my relationship with my body, my soul, with God or with my loved ones.

B

Teaser Tuesday ~ The Art of Dissociation

Thank you for supporting this book! A relatable story that brings validation to the world of childhood abuse.

Carol Boyce, author of First, Please Believe Me, and I discuss dissociation here in this clip of her interview:

Watch the interview interview here: