Things my Mother Taught Me

My first abuser was actually my mother. She never had a good thing to say about me as I was growing up. I didn't stand up straight enough, I couldn't do anything correct enough to suit her, no matter how hard I tried.

At the age of four she sent me away to live with strangers. They weren't very kind to me, but I did survive. The only reason she brought me home was because my dad insisted on it. However, just as soon as she got me home she was planning how she could send me away again. From the age of four through ten on and off I lived with seven different families. It wasn't like going away to camp, it was humiliating and like being entrapped by people who never really wanted me to be there in the first place.

I remember one time when my brother and I were each allowed to get twelve baby chicks because my mother wanted to have laying hens. When she took my brother to get chicks he got his twelve, but when it was my turn to go I was only allowed to get ten. When I protested she told me in a socially acceptable way to shut up. The man who was waiting on us took pity on me and gave me two chicks for free so I got my twelve, no thanks to my mother.

Another experience was when my brother was not only allowed to have a car, but had one bought for him after he graduated from high school. When it became my turn to desire a car I was told, by my mother, that she wouldn't sign for me to have a car. I had to wait until I was 21 and could not only buy my own car, but could sign for it as well. This was just the last of many incidents in which my mother favored my brother over me in a very obvious way.

There was also punishment dealt out to me that never touched my brother. It was done in sneaky ways that didn't always appear to be abusive, but now I understand how dramatically I was affected by my mother's actions. What they served to do was teach me that males, my brother in this case, were better than females and I might as well settle for whatever crumbs were blown my way.

I truly believe she never wanted me to do anything better than she did and she always put me down to steal away any sense of confidence in myself I might have mustered. She wanted me to be dependent on her so she could feel strong, but at the same time she didn't really want me around because she had a secret I didn't know about.

With my first husband I married my mother, for sure. He was verbally abusive just as she had been, only worse. I finally stood up to him after ten years of his humiliating me in front of others and beating me down with his sarcasm, name calling and threats. I thought he was going to kill me on several occasions because that's what he threatened to do if I ever left him. But I was so miserable I had to leave, even if it cost me my life.

Once I got out from under his ruling thumb I had a lot more freedom, and I liked it. I stayed single for several years and just had a good time, not allowing myself to get serious with anyone. Then I met another man I thought would be different.

With my second husband I also married my mother, but it wasn't as obvious. He wanted to take my freedom away from me because he got very paranoid if he didn't know just where I was at all times. He was a practicing alcoholic which was something I didn't understand until much later.

When I was pregnant with my first child I had a dream. I awoke from a sound sleep sobbing and couldn't understand why. It involved my mother, myself and two other people I didn't know. I told an aunt about the dream and she understood perfectly what was happening to me.

Later when I was able to get together with my aunt she told me about how my mother had come to be pregnant with me. Evidently she'd had an affair and I was a product of that secret indiscretion. Then my aunt showed me pictures of the man who was my biological father and his wife, and they were the ones who were in my dream along with me and my mother. This brought huge pieces of the puzzle together for me.

No wonder my mother had treated me so badly when I was growing up. I was a constant reminder of her guilt and my presence was rubbing her nose in it. She must have lived in fear that one day she'd be found out, especially with my aunt knowing about what really happened. Later when I was able to I was successful in getting my mother to confess her indiscretion. I'm sure she never knew I had any prior knowledge of what she divulged to me, and I truly believe that because I didn't make a big issue out of it and punish her for what she had done it took a huge weight off her shoulders.

When my second husband and I were having more difficulties with making our relationship work I started going to Alanon. In the beginning I didn't know I had the right to tell him I didn't want to have sex, after he'd been drinking. Someone at my meeting understood where I was stuck with this and told me I had a choice. Going to those meetings gave me a way to regain some of the independence I had previously enjoyed and helped me to detach from my husbands problem, so I could stop taking it personally.

When I could no longer make my relationship with him work I took my two children and moved to Idaho. Then after he disappeared leaving me without any child support I divorced him and decided to go back to work.

Wanting to do something that would keep me more available for my children I started my own business. Without understanding why, I found myself being led into helping others who had also been affected by abusive relationships. Isn't it funny how we teach the things we need to know the most.

Then I met another man I truly thought was going to be the love of my life. He was very different from the first two, but I decided that I didn't want to get married just yet and we chose to live together.

Things seemed to go fairly well with us, until my daughter started going through puberty. That's when I noticed a dramatic change in Clay's behavior toward her. He began saying mean things to her that sent up red flags for me. When I confronted him with his behavior by sharing a case history from Susan Forward's book Toxic Parents, of course he denied the implication that it was a sexual reaction on his part because he didn't want me to know that he already knew that. He worked on directing my attention away from that possibility, which gave me little to go on because I had no proof of my suspicion.

Then when my daughter came to me with the fact that Clay had done something inappropriate with her I again confronted him. Of course he denied everything she had said, saying that she was just trying to make trouble between the two of us.

I finally shared my situation with a friend who suggested that when we got together that afternoon I could bring it up in Clay's presence during our conversation, and confront him. So that's what I did, and much to my amazement he admitted that my daughter was telling the truth. Shortly after that was when CPS became involved and threatened to take my children away from me. This really made me feel angry, because I had tried to do everything right and they were punishing me for it.

I must say though, that I did have my day in court. I got to tell the judge just what the assistant district attorney and the matron from the police department had done with the confidence they assured my daughter she would have. The judge heard my account and then my daughter's account, which was almost identical, and then he did what she asked of him. Needless to say the district attorney was shocked, however I don't know if he learned anything from his experience. My daughter did though, she learned that her voice had power.

One of the conditions for Clay to stay out of jail was to go to counseling for sexual problems, which he had been doing for about a year. Of course I had been paying for these sessions right along. It was at one of them, that I had been invited to attend, that I realized he was never going to get well because he didn't really want to. That's when I began to slowly withdraw from any emotional involvement with him until he decided he'd had enough of my indifference and broke it off with me. Of course that's exactly what I had hoped for, because I knew I was enough of a crutch for him to hold onto that if it hadn't been his idea he'd have fought to keep me in his life.

After Clay was finally out of my life I studied hypnosis and got my certification so I could help people even more. However, it afforded me a self help tool to do a great deal of deep healing for myself as well. I was left with a lot of anger toward Clay because I hated what he had done to my daughter, and then been able to easily walk away from it. Again I found myself teaching the things I needed to know the most, in this case how to successfully express my anger in a way that didn't hurt me or anyone else.

All along the way I had been doing my own healing, but it really got down to some of the deeper issues I needed to deal with during the end of that relationship. This was also about the time I discovered that I had bonded with my mother as the father figure in my life, something that helped me put many things straight in my healing process. Many of my clients, I later discovered, had also bonded with parents in very different ways as well. Once I understood what I was dealing with I could help them to understand what was affecting them so profoundly as well.

After the breakup of my relationship with Clay I found myself mourning the loss of him in my life. When I discovered this I wondered what possible reason could cause this reaction. What finally came to me was that I wasn't mourning the loss of Clay at all. I was mourning the loss of the romance I had in the beginning of the relationship and the loss of what might have been with him, and that's all. Once I understood this all the feelings of needing to mourn magically went away.

With the help of many people, some who wrote books about what they had learned, I was able to finally put everything together and connect all the dots to finish doing my healing work. People like Susan Forward who wrote about the misogynist she was married to, in her book Men Who Hate Women And The Women Who Love Them and the sick relationships parents and children often have, in her book Toxic Parents.

There were others like Margaret and Jordan Paul who wrote about healing their relationship and his own personal healing in their book, Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You. (And the Workbook that goes with it) There were always things to learn from everything I came into contact with.

There were several other books that helped me heal parts of myself, but it took me years and years to do what I did. And I was still seeing myself as a victim, but I had graduated to calling my abusers the ##%@*!! in order to get my deep seated anger out.

I don't know about you, but I like instant gratification and I found little in my healing until I discovered one very important underlying principle no one ever taught me when I was growing up. It was that I, personally, was creating my own reality. I had a hard time with that principle at first, but it was pointed out to me that in the bible Jesus said "As you believeth so is it done unto you." It took me a long time to truly understand what that meant. When it finally sank in I realized I was receiving my own reality through all the beliefs and opinions (both true and false), all the fears and the prejudices that I had developed, accepted and inherited along the way.

I know many people may be groaning right now, but this is my truth. If you cannot accept it that's okay. Go your own way and be of good cheer, but understand one thing. This not only worked for me, it set me free.

I had studied metaphysics all my life, as well as the bible and other spiritual beliefs. However, it wasn't until I listened to Lazarus and gained some understanding of the work he was doing that I was able to put together all the things I already knew, but hadn't been able to connect the dots with. Somehow I was able to find the way to step beyond that point where I had been stuck for so many years and bridge all I knew and all I had learned with all I had experienced in my life.

A friend of mine was investing in the Lazarus tapes regularly and making me copies of everything she bought. It was interesting and exciting at the same time. However, after about a year I found he no longer held my interest like he did in the beginning, but I listened anyway. Then one day something he said created a shift in me. I really don't know specifically what it was that helped me leap forward, all I know is I did.

Suddenly I could see the connection in everything that had happened to me. I could see the role my mother had played as being positive instead of just negative. In that quantum step I had taken I stopped being a victim and saw the people in my life as teachers instead of punishers. I stopped being a target for others to use for practice and set myself free from that yoke of responsibility.

When I began to understand that I had allowed others to do all the things that had happened to me and saw myself as just having had experiences I stopped being a victim. Then experiences I had forgotten about began coming up from my sub-conscious for me to look at. Once I had expressed my emotions about them I was able to release the memory, to what I had accepted in my heart as God.

The hardest thing I found in doing this process was that I never seemed to have enough time for myself because my clients took up so many hours of my days. However, I knew I still had more to learn and I continued to develop tools for myself to use, in the process of working with my clients. This helped me to proceed with a much lighter heart and an ever expanding consciousness, which in turn I shared with my clients. Believe me it was worth it to be able to have the peace of mind I had as I let go of the past and embraced the new things entering my life, at that time.

I began seeing some of my old relationships from the past and recognized the victim role I had played and how I had used it to perpetuate the dance we all do in this experience we call life. I remembered going somewhere with my mother, at age four, and her encountering someone she knew that I had never seen before. I actually remembered thinking, as I looked at a middle aged woman who complained about every facet of her life, that's probably what I'm going to look like when I grow up.

I had never met this woman before that day and yet I was prepared to allow her to have great power over who and what I would one day become. When I realized what I had done, as that four year old child, I immediately went back to that time, in my mind, and changed everything. It must have worked too because I have very few aches and pains and I'm a great deal older now than that woman was at that time.

I remember going back to other moments, in my minds eye, and did a lot of ripping, burning and flushing of ashes down my imaginary toilet. I had worked out a very nice technique to heal the past for myself and then I passed it on to my clients.

It was to see the past in my minds eye (in my head), review what had happened, tear down what I didn't like as if it were an obsolete poster, rip it up like paper, burn it on the imaginary fire I had created, flush the ashes down my imaginary toilet and then put up a blank poster upon which I could create all the things I desired to put into that part of my former life. Sometimes I created something right away and sometimes I waited and did it a little at a time, but I was always careful to replace what I had torn down with something positive.

This mental exercise worked for me every time IF I took the time to put as many of the five physical senses into it as I could. I heard, saw and felt the past. Then as I tore it down I felt and heard myself ripping it up. Then I smelled the smoke and heard the flames snapping around the pieces of the past I was surrendering to God. Then I felt the shovel in my hands and heard the sound it made as I scooped up the ashes and dropped them into the toilet. When I flushed the toilet I felt the coldness of the handle, heard the sound I had heard for years and saw those ashes swirling around as the water drew them down into that little hole through which everything disappeared. Then they were gone and I was free. Free of whatever it was that had kept me bound and imprisoned for so long whether it was a person, an experience or a habit.

Shame on parents for projecting their insecurities, prejudices, shame, anger, fear and past experiences onto their children in the name of love. However, shame on the children for holding it against them for the rest of their lives. The parents grew up believing themselves to be victims as well and really didn't know any better, because no one taught them anything different.

It's not too late for any of us. We just have to embrace an understanding that may be very different from anything we've ever heard of. But what about Galileo who was almost tried for Heresy because he embraced a new way of thinking? What about the disciples who followed Jesus into a whole new way of thinking and seeing their world? They came to an understanding, and they had to step out into a new direction, no matter what the consequences might be. They had to stop being victims long enough for their spirit to soar, so they could reach for loftier things than others who had come before them.