Tedder's Blog, page 26
June 14, 2023
Words of Wisdom | Convicting the Guilty
Convict as a verb means to find or prove to be guilty. Usually this is in a court of law before a judge and jury. What if your case never makes if before a judge and jury? The lack of conviction is devastating in the life of victims. Most victims of childhood crimes rarely seek justice. When they do seek help from the court systems, many find no real answers, justice, or help.
“I also noticed that under the sun there is evil in the courtroom. Yes, even the courts of law are corrupt! I said to myself, “In due season God will judge everyone, both good and bad, for all their deeds.”
Ecclesiastes 3:16
Since biblical times our courtrooms have been currupt. It’s just the truth.
We can still convict the guilty by using our words, telling our truth, and living in our stories. Being a Christian should not change our dedication to such matters.
Whoever says to the guilty, “You are innocent” —
Provers 24:24
peoples will curse him and nations denounce him.
But it will go well with those who convict the guilty,
and rich blessing will come upon them.”
Forgiveness and convicting are two separate things. Both should coexist. Convict the guilty. You could be saving the next child from their abuse.
June 13, 2023
Parenting with childhood Trauma
Parenting with childhood trauma is the hardest yet most rewarding work of my life. Showing up each day with all the old wiring that I must unplug, reroute, and patch up. It can be exhausting.
I have to soothe the woman who never learned to love herself…all while tending to the needs of my children.
Nothing else matters if I can’t get this right. When I feel overwhelmed and I’m in the parenting trenches, I’m pulled into the sounds and feelings of my own childhood… it’s as if I’m in two places at once and battling the challenges simultaneously …but with the terrified brain of an abused child. Most days, I rise to the challenge; some days, fewer and farther between, I fail – I yell, I cry, I run into my room and bite my fist as hard as I can to calm myself down.
I let me family know often – the particular ways in which I struggle. My husband gets details, my children don’t. But they all know it’s not their fault on the days I just can’t get it together. I don’t pronounce these things to evoke anything other than pride – hopefully- that I was able to overcome my past enough to carry my babies to shore.
They will be free, my children. I cling to this fact – they will be free.
B
Teaser Tuesday
Join us for an exclusive book club community starting July 11, 2023, for six months.
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June 12, 2023
Do you have community?
Do You Have Community?
Research shows that connection to community has been identified as a protective factor in the experience of trauma and helps to ameliorate symptoms of (C)PTSD. We hear a lot about tools and therapy and all kinds of healing modalities but we seem to repeatedly underestimate the power of connection. Deep healing and connection can be found outside of the therapy room – this seems almost controversial to say…but it’s true!
I know that community and connection was instrumental in my healing. Knowing there were other people out the who had gone through similar experiences made me feel shockingly less alone. Less crazy. Less confused. Less afraid. After plenty of one on one time with my therapist, I was ready to be myself fully and to embrace my story of recovery with other women.
We know our health generally improves when we feel like part of a community and declines when we feel isolated – so we do we try to go it alone?
The thing is, trauma heals in relationships—healthy relationships. Relationships where you are seen, heard, validated, and respected. Ones where boundaries are upheld.
Your community is out there and they are waiting to love you, see you, accept you, and hear you. You owe it to yourself to take the first step. You deserve it. Please don’t ever give up.
B
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I hear far too often that there are not enough resources and support available for victims of childhood crimes. Let’s change that!
There are two options for joining: 1) Select the link above for the monthly membership option at $7.50 a month or choose the one-time purchase of $45.00.
The Gathering | Exclusive Book Club Community | Begins 7/11/2023
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Mirror Mirror ~ Sexuality & Trauma
Introspection — what better way to start a week.
Question – Do you see how childhood sexual trauma effects our sexualilty in life?
Sexuality is the capacity for sexual feelings. As children when sexual feelings are thrust into our life much too early, far too aggressive, and we have no choosing in the matter – what happens?
I can look back on my life and see my many choices were being driven by a wind that I did not control. The power of the early childhood abuse was still dictating my steps, but I did not see it that clearly then.
I have learned that I had to stop my life and stand still to see the winds of destruction that were blowing all around me. Then, I had to begin dissecting my abuse to find the patterns that had been created in me.
Ask yourself this question: Is your sexuality a choice you made or a choice that was made for you?
June 10, 2023
Begin.
I was 17 when I taught myself to shoot up in my mother’s bathroom while on the phone with my 24 year old boyfriend. Up until that point, he had refused to teach me how…but now I was threatening him now: “tell me how or I’ll botch the job jabbing myself endlessly.” I don’t remember what happened…how I eventually got the nerve. All I know is that I figured it out. I figured out how to kill myself even faster.
I shouldn’t be alive. The way I used and the things I did to get it … I was living the riskiest kind of life a person can live.
I spent the better part of 10 years chasing that first high, but also chasing away loneliness, chasing away pain, chasing away any thoughts or feeling at all. I was living in the state of total obliteration and numbness. I hadn’t breathed my last breath, but I was dead as a person can be without dying.
So sobriety brings you to life, right?
Well, not at first. First, it tears you open. And leaves you open. There is no escape hatch, nowhere to run and hide. You take all the stabilizers off your life. There is nothing to hold onto because this is deeply internal work, and you have to show up every day.
Everything suppressed rises to the surface.
Everything you’ve ever pushed down, ignored, batted away, held off facing, comes to to face you like some demon in a trilogy movie the franchise will not stop making.
It’s now your job to scrutinize everything as it presents itself. You are being given a chance to exorcise them for good.
When the dust starts to settle, what remains in the wake is an entirely new understanding of the world.
It’s like a yearlong gut-punch, but somehow, doubled over, you learn to smile. And then, to laugh. Then, suddenly, it’s like the world is in technicolor with the volume turned all the way up. It’s overwhelming at first and you have to keep adjusting your eyes… but eventually he wake up to the beauty of it, and you cannot get enough.
The way I experience life now is
enormously profound. I get to live it in total awe and appreciation… people pay good money for this. People learn to meditate and go to therapy and read every book under the sun to try to be more present in their lives. All I had to do was destroy my life to get it. But I wouldn’t take it back. Not for anything.
B
June 9, 2023
Thankful
June 8, 2023
The Incest Taboo
The first time I was sexually abused by my father, I was around 3 years old. His abuse continued for many years ending around 16 when my ability to consent or even know what that meant had become so obliterated that choice was not in my vocabulary.
Because of this, for a long time after, I thought my only choices were murder or suicide. I thought the darkness of those memories were mine alone. I found that the erasure of the abuse can be worse than the abuse. Though I tried to die, as many do, I survived. Instead, I spoke. The more I was believed, allowed to say what happened to me, the less shame and guilt I experienced.
As written in “The Incest Diary”, an anonymous book about incest, the author write: “In the fairy tales about father- “The Girl Without Hands,” ‘Thousand Furs,’ the original ‘Cinderalla,’ patron saint of incest survivors – the daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their father’s sexual advances. They do everything in their power to escape. But I didn’t. A child can’t escape. And later, when I could, it was too late.”
Without intervention, incest can escalate to the point where some children live in states of sexual captivity that persist well into adulthood.
A study published in 2012 of ten Australian women reporting prolonged incest by their father into adulthood found the mean duration of incestuous abuse was 31 years. The estimated average number of sexual abuse episodes was more than 3,300 in the lifetime of each woman.
As my minutes often states, incest is truly the perfect crime. Perpetrators are usually obsessed with power and control and strictly regulate family life to minimise the likelihood of detection.
Some incest offenders retain strong community and business ties that effectively inoculate them from suspicion. A family that is not showing overt signs of dysfunction is unlikely to attract the attention of child protection authorities. Under these conditions, the family becomes the perfect staging ground for sexual exploitation.
Until the invisibility of incest is tackled this inescapable reality will never change for so many helpless and innocent children.
B
