Tedder's Blog, page 33

Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

I would love to hear from you! Sharing Saturday with you.

A Jewel: I used to walk alone. I don’t anymore. Every step I take is with the King of Kings, Lord of Lords ~ Jesus!

A Gem: Justice is such an ellusive thing. My grief over the lack of justice stays with me sometimes. I grieve that my children received no justice for the crimes committed against them. I grieve that the woman buried under 20 years of rubbish fifty years ago remains there. I grieve for all of the millions of innocent children that go unnoticed and the crimes against them never dealt with. Father, move!

Metaphorical Gunpowder: When I feel like justice doesn’t exist, I always wait just one more day.

Please comment below by leaving your jewel, a gem or something you keep yourself free from with metaphorical gunpowder.

All love!

Audiobook Now Avaiable

I have had so many requests for the audiobook format of A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own. It’s here! The length is 9 hours and 34 minutes.

It will be available on Audible shortly, but it can be purchased and downloaded through my website here:

A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own (Audiobook)

F N’ F (Fear Not Friday)

On the discussion of fear — Do you fear GOD?

Coming through severe and chronic abuse, you bet I had a deep fear of God. Why wouldn’t I? Did God stop my father from raping me for years and years? Nope. Did God stop my mother from joining in the abuse? Nope? Did God stop the woman from being murdered? Nope.

Where was God’s protection over me as a child? It did not exist. Or, did it?

Some time before I left the house on Deleware Lane, I met Jesus. I hadn’t yet turned four. Not an apparition or anything crazy. I just knew Him. He was with me. The abuse didn’t stop for years, but His presence made it survivable.

Was I angry at God for years? Yes I was. It has taken me years to get my faith. It is not easy understanding how God allows such atrocities in life. Why didn’t he just take me out of my parents’ home?

The questions seem endless on the road of redemption, but this I have learned: God did not do it; God did not allow it; God can restore it.

Choice is a delicate balance of understanding. While we all want choice, we don’t want abusers to have choice. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. Choice exists for everyone under God’s laws. It sucks when that choice is used to harm children. And, God is always watching.

A person’s choice often doesn’t align with the choice God would make. It’s really that simple.

Most abusers align themselves with some form of godliness, thus, perpetuating the misguided sense of betrayal from God.

The audiobook of A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own is now available! It is 9 hours and 34 minutes long. Whew! Glad that’s behind me.

It will be available on Amazon, but you can also purchase it here:

A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own (Audiobook)

Healing is not Linear

Healing is not linear, nor is it ever really complete. Living a full life means you continue to revisit your own depths to unearth a new piece of yourself. Each time you bring it to the light, you integrate it a little more.

Own your story. It’s the greatness that makes you the brave and amazing person that you are. Separating from your story is actually more painful than looking at it.

By separating from your story, you fragment your spirit back to the bottom of the barrel. By bringing your pain to the light, you retrieve a piece of your soul bit by bit.

Be patient with yourself and with your body. Escaping pain keeps our lives, our stories and our bodies fragmented.

Don’t be afraid.

Feeling is what life is all about.

B

Spoiled or Neglected

Being “special” is an act of manipulation that abusers use all the time. The special time together, the special bond you share, the special time you get — we can walk on in life and hold onto these special times. Or we can begin to decipher the hidden message of abuse.

My father treated me special. I was his onnointed one (term used loosely). You know why? Pedophiles don’t lead with mistreatment, they lead with “love.” They strategically build their bond with you on the guise of relationship. So many times it is this “love card” that we must explore and expunge completely from our being. Many will not.

If you don’t look at the real issues surrounding your abuse and call it what it was — bad, detrimental, disgusting — you will never lead a life that is blessed with a true bond of love to another human being.

Watering down your sexual abuse will create a pattern of repeating that abuse in your life. I am not talking about abusing a child, I am talking about abusing yourself. If we whitewash the abuse we received, we will always select people who treat us the same way. It might look a little different, but the underlying circumstances will continue to play out in your life. What do I mean? Aggressive sex or no sex at all. Picking people who treat you like a secondclass citizen. Pornography. Masterbation. You get it.

Find the courage to face the truth. It is there that you will find the freedom you’re looking for. It doesn’t help you at all to deny it. There is no good thing about childhood sexual abuse – period!

Lyon, et al. Study showed:

Most adult survey respondents reporting sexual abuse never disclosed as a child60-80% percent of CSA victims delay disclosure until adulthood

Do We Really Have To Visit Old Wounds

You recognize that familiar, dull feeling in your gut — as though something is wrong, though you can’t quite pinpoint what. Something is off- you’re not connected to yourself, to the world…

You go through life stymied by this ache. It crescendos and crashes. You get distracted by the news or your job or Twitter, or something that temporarily scares you a little bit more.

It goes on, until one day, you realize you’re being levied, haunted, by a pain you can’t quite decipher. Slowly, it wears you down. It’s harder to get up. It’s harder to go out. It’s easier to drink and then drink some more. Or maybe eat, or drink or shop. Everyone has a different vice.

The thing about life is that our emotional experiences, if we don’t finish them, stay with us. They stay with us like old clothes we never get around to packing up and putting out at the curb.

Haunting us, numbing us, making us reach for wine or shopping or whatever vice and we can’t figure out exactly why…

Those subtle feelings are incomplete emotions, unresolved problems. They are signals, yes, but signals to the spaces in which you are not yet free.

When you’re ready to heal, you will need to revisit these old wounds. Have them show you their origins. You will see moments you forgot about, feelings you forgot you ever felt. You will see the past come up in blinks and vignettes.

Slowly, over time, you will awaken to what is really wrong, which is the piece of you that had to break off to build a wall because behind it was a wound you did not yet know how to heal.

In the healing process, you don’t just learn how to go back and fix what you didn’t finish. You also learn how to press forward, how to live more intently and presently, how to process your experiences in real-time.

The more you do this, the more you will awaken and begin to show up for life. You start speaking again, you start feeling again, you start being again. You can dance when the music plays, cry when you’re sad, take a risk though it’s scary.

When you feel strong enough to look at what’s wrong, you begin to unearth your soul. It was always there, you were never lost. It was just buried under years and layers of identities and styles and beliefs and ideas that had adhered themselves to you like a shield.

You were never lost. You were only hidden. And all the time you spent feeling so uncomfortable was just your deepest self trying to speak to you, trying to remind you of its presence.

It was only the core of you saying: Keep going, there is more to life than this.

B

Intentional Sin

It is difficult to believe that someone sets their heart on hurting a child, but it’s true. Many do! When you think of crimes against children, don’t forget all the calculations that have to be built around those acts. That is intentionality. Premeditated crimes.

Thought out beforehand, these people spend a great deal of time on this. They have to or they wouldn’t be sucessful. Then, they lie, manipulate, deny, cheat and steal.

The worse crime of all is that seldom do any of these pedophiles pay for what they do. They create damage in a child’s life that takes a lifetime to repair and they usually go unpunished. They rely on the fact that people don’t want to talk about such things. They depend on people pushing this under the carpet.

Even though it’s uncomfortable to confront your abuser, it is mandatory. For you, not them. If you are being hurt – tell someone and get to safety. The person hurting you means to hurt you. Don’t deny that fact.

Father, today, I pray that you watch over your people. Get them to safety. Teach them your ways, the ways that are much higher than our ways. Let them know that punishment is coming to the person that hurt them. You do not let these crimes go. You know each act that has happened and you are fighting to defend us. Of that I am certain. Protect the innocent. Hold the guilty accountable.

In Jesus’ mighty name, Amen.

We Are All Connected

In the quiet of my new life, I have begun to understand a few things.

At a certain point in my healing journey, I realized – I am never alone.

This silence is alive with the unfolding of other lives and with the turning and movement of the Earth and the presence of God who oversees all things.

As I got better, I began to sense my connection to the world’s pain and my part in healing it.

I realized that my transformation of pain into love was an act of service for humankind.

By embracing my existence, I could bring courage to others to face their own pain and to acknowledge what it had to teach them.

We are connected, to each other and to the world. An unhealed life is a statement of our need to work together to heal the whole. It is an opportunity to refrain from turning away, separating our reality from the reality of others.

B

Teaser Tuesday

The book A Prisoner by No Crime of My Own is published. This week all formats will be available (eBook, paperback, hardback and audiobook). This week I share about how memory returns.

Chapter 11 – Finding a Guru/Finding a Murder

“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

 – Dylan Thomas 

. . . continued . . .

The issue of the motel room I remembered going to with my dad and his friend, Craig, as a child was always with me, particularly after the strange encounter I’d had twenty years earlier when my ex-husband took me to the motel on our night out, or any time I had stayed in a motel room. I’d pace the floors while my children slept, not knowing what the fuck was wrong with me. It was a strong invisible force and I needed to penetrate it to be whole.

In time, I told Sara about it. She, of course, wanted me to spend time exploring what was in that room, but I did not want to. That seems like a misstatement – I did not want to, but the truth of the matter was that I spent time staying away from it. Sara told me once that I made it harder on myself by not stopping and diving into that room. We spent many sessions trying to find a way to open the door in my mind to reveal the full detail of the motel room. I fought it. I fought this one hard. Then, one day, I felt as if I were going to lose my sanity. The harder I tried to keep the ugliness of that room hidden, the more it would mock me.

My children were home this Saturday afternoon. The sun was out and the last thing I wanted was to recall a memory. Seriously? Would you want to waste a beautiful Saturday on that? Neither did I but a strange phenomenon was happening. It felt like my mind was splitting and I couldn’t hold it together. I was so frightened that I had to call Sara.

She answered and I told her that she needed to send in some men in white jackets to collect me at my house. My understanding of reality was in upheaval, and I was scared.

Sara and I continued our work over the phone. We had to if I was going to make it through that day. I can still feel the panic that I was losing my sanity.

Sara asked if there was any place I could go in the house to be alone. She assured me that I wasn’t losing my mind but needed to get to a quiet place.

I went to my bedroom, closed the door, and lay down on the bed. My heart was pumping with anxiety. She told me I’d be fine and explained that my adamant denial of the memory was making the situation worse. This time I was willing to listen. Next, she asked me to walk through an exercise with her. She told me to find something in the room that I could focus on. Directly above me on the ceiling was a fan — I would place my focus there. She told me to make no judgments about what I was seeing, but just to describe to her what it was.

I started with, “I see fan blades. It is white. There are screws.”

Right beside the ceiling fan, my mind’s eye saw the inside of that motel room almost instantly. There was my father, Craig, and some blonde woman. My father slit the woman’s throat and ended her life. I explained this to Sara as I was seeing it. My soul began to empty some of the fear and violence I experienced that day some thirty years earlier.

I froze as the memory of witnessing that murder spewed out of me.

. . .

The Circle of Trust

Do you ever know you’re being nudged to do something but you ignore that deep inner feeling? Trauma, more than any one thing, can break us off from our connection with ourselves and also with God.

When you argue with God, you rob yourself of the opportunity to heal and grow. Often we resist growing and listening to God when we are still stuck in the past, encapsulated in fear and pain.

We quickly learn that the stories we tell ourselves will keep us stuck unless we question them. Often, we are our own worst enemy.

We all seek to protect ourselves, especially emotionally. Tough defenses often fail to keep us as safe as we hope, because they keep us from healing. The wear and tear of hiding from the pain can take an enormous physical toll on the body…let yourself feel the pain and let the pain change you and grow you into something new and different.

Your trauma doesn’t make God uncomfortable. Nobody is too damaged for Him to relate to.

Let yourself be changed. The scar left by trauma is supposed to change you. It’s the natural response to an unnatural experience like trauma. Perhaps it’s stating the obvious, but to be unchanged by an unnatural experience just isn’t natural.

Learning to Trust God and trust ourselves we can see more clearly the light that can shine through our own broken places and ultimately heal us: body, mind, and soul.

B