Tedder's Blog, page 23
July 3, 2023
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. This is a clip of an interview with Terry Jo, author of The Abortion Who Refused to Die. Her story is one of unending abuse.
July 1, 2023
Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder
I would love to hear from you! Sharing Saturday with you.
A Jewel: Yesterday was a beautiful day here in the mountains of Montana. The sun glistening God’s beauty, the great lake in the distance, and peace whirling through the trees. I was listening to a podcast from this cool man of God on my iphone. I woke up this morning and saw the positioning of the chairs I was in. They sat facing each other. I remembered I had been sitting with God there yesterday! Oh, best day ever.
A Gem: When Faith Hurts.
93% of sex offenders describe themselves as “religious. Hard core offenders maintaining significant involvement with religious institutions “had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims.”
From the Zero Abuse Project
Why?
Church provides “cheap grace,” gullible religious people, and easy access to children.
Metaphorical Gunpowder: Jesus was not “religious.” Religion is manmade concept with its rules, regulations and traditions. Jesus was and is the first real freedom fighter to walk this planet. If you don’t think so, you don’t know what He came to do. Go live free this beautiful holiday weekend!
Please comment below by leaving your jewel, a gem or something you keep yourself free from with metaphorical gunpowder.
All love!
June 30, 2023
God and Emotional Discovery
The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us.
It will haunt us in our marriages, our jobs, in our relationships with our friends, our children and ourselves.
Experience has taught us time and time again that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against childhood trauma: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood and the willingness to let God help unload and carry that burden.
B
#grief #pain #uncovered #promises #truth #choosetruth #resistdenial #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 sexual crimes, chat through grooming and predator behaviors. This is an interview with an young woman whose life changed when she began babysitting for the neighbors next door at the age of 14.
The Lace of Intimacy
I hate intimacy. It’s just like wearing a lace blouse on a cold day. You feel everything!
Healing has brought me into much more intimate places. This is not a sexual reference, rather a human one.
Intimacy is defined as a close familiarity or friendship. I’ve spent most of my life isolating myself and trying not to check into close relationships.
I had a lot of party buddies but most of them did not help my inner healing. My heart stayed out of these friendships and I liked it that way. I didn’t have to feel more than I was forced to feel.
Coming through such a treacherous past, I had deep pain. So much pain that I couldn’t tolerate any more feeling. Connection creates feeling and it was the last thing I really needed.
Love included in that!
After my first divorce, I stayed single and dated men who were very disconnected and wanted no intimacy. I didn’t say, “No sex,” I said, “No intimacy.”
Healing is a continuous journey. One that never ends, I believe.
I no longer live at the address of 1122 No Intimacy Here. I’ve changed my address and welcome close times with people. I always had moments of it here and there, and I’ve had some good friendships, but the truth was that my inner being just couldn’t take any more connection.
I had to stop all the turmoil and clear out the dust mites in my heart before I could allow more in.
Intimacy can still feel like wearing a lace shirt in dead of winter, but I’m more tolerant of it now.
June 29, 2023
Healing is an Upwards Spiral
In a world full of imperfect people, how unfortunate it is that we don’t embrace the messiness that comes with it??
Healing being one of them. If the trauma we endure is ugly and complex why do we portray healing as graceful and simple?
The internet likes to paint this picture of healing as linear & formulaic with meditation and 1 line mantras guiding us toward salvation.
In all fairness, all of those things CAN be a part of one’s healing process. But it is such a small fraction. Like 1/100 of the process.
For me, healing has been so much messier than what we read in books or see on social media.
Messy, ugly, gut-wrenching.
It is so raw, it hurts. Every touch feels like a lightning strike. Every noise, deafening. Until it’s not.
When I was told what I was experiencing was my heart & soul beginning to heal, I wanted to run for the hills — this was not what I signed up for. The voice in my head, the fearful one, told me I needed to quit while I was ahead, there was no way I was going to survive this.
Then there was that other voice. The courageous one, that said, “Remember who you are…” the person who never relents, who is survived this much and can survive even more. A person who yes, is absurd, strange, imperfect, ridiculous but also brave and lovable and capable.
Most people may never know that you have healed something so deep inside of you it feels like you’ve been born anew. Do it anyway. You get to rewrite your story, one full of love and gratitude.
Remember: healing is an upwards spiral: “We cannot stand in the same river twice.”
B
#emotionalabuse #narcissist #survivor #mentalillness #stress #narcissisticabuse #psychology #mindfulness #wellness #gaslighting #childhoodtrauma #domesticviolence #traumainformed
Thirsty
I was thirsty for knowledge and it was easy to find.
I was thirsting for wisdom and that proved a more difficult search.
Grasping for things I needed, I found myself thirty for a God who cared.
Grappling with a limited strength I found in myself, I moved closer to a Father in Heaven who had unlimited strength.
Thirsty. I was just so thirsty.
Until I drank from the living water that took that thirst away.
June 28, 2023
Grief: A Signal Flair In the Dark
The grief that accompanies the losses of sexual abuse are intangible. Inexplicable. The healing process: destructive and painful. Unlike other forms of mending, survivors are ostracized, confused about loyalties, self-blaming, and unsupported. Families are torn apart and anchors obliterated. The healing process from sexual trauma HURTS. It’s not something we talk about enough.
Beginning with society that has decreed that silence around this topic is a must, and must remain taboo which then leads to collective silence and continued feeling of aloneness and abandonment first by the victim and then by extended others.
But grief can guide us. Grief can be a signal flare in the dark. It can show us how to mend and who to trust. But we must listen and we must be touched the flames of its pain before we can move forward in the process of becoming whole again. Grief is the great bridge to happiness and wholeness and beyond. But it is also the road on top of and through happiness…it carves right through it. Sometimes, you’re stuck on the grief train and you can only look at the beautiful landscape passing by but I promise you, the will be many stops along the way and you get to choose when it is time to get off. And even when you want to get back on again. Grief is part of the ride. Learn to master it and you’ve got life half-licked!
B
#prisonerbynocrimeofmyown #evil #noincest #godisgood #cptsdsurvivor #sexabusesurvivor #childhoodemotionalneglect #ptsdrecovery #cptsdsurvivor #aces #suicideawarness #jesusislord #ptsd #cptsdwarriorstance #traumabond #ptsdawareness #familysecrets
Watch “Let’s Talk About It | Destigmatizing Childhood Sexual Crimes”
The YouTube Channel dedicated to survivor stories is now live. The first interview is with Joeann Hall Crafton, author of Taking a Different Path, Finding Joy in the Journey.
June 27, 2023
Why full disclosure?
Some people wonder why full disclosure? Why include the details in the accounts of our sexual abuse?
For one, to sanitize our stories, we enable abusers to fly under the radar of denial. When important aspects of the abuse are edited out to increase the digestibility of our stories .. we rob survivors of the power and stark truth of what they went through. We increase their shame. We help hide these crimes behind a thick wall of clouded obscurity.
Imagine if I man, who came home from war, could not talk about his ordeal at length. If he could not purge the details from his soul, let them out, be shared, be witnessed?
When we can process the traumatic details of our pasts with other person, we are able to feel less alone in the fear and terror of those recollections.
When we are allowed to utter the deepest and darkest events aloud – their power is diminished.
Abuse is not pretty. But the terms to describe it have been so stripped down of all meaning is becoming easier and easier to avoid having to really think about what childhood sexual abuse actually is – for it is only in acknowledging the true horror of it that we can honor, understand and grapple with how to help rid our world of this disgusting and soul-robbing crime.
Sexual abuse can mean so many things. Everything from touching or speaking to a child inappropriately to raping and trafficking. If we can keep the accounts of these horrible tragedies mentally at arms length then we can also avoid having to be disturbed by them. And being disturbed by something is what motivates a person to demand change. To enact action and to move to create waves in a community that is obsessed with smoothing over the waters in order to conceal the true turbulence below.
B
