Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 660047" data-attributes="member: 17461">This is what I think I know.  Though we would be different kinds of people today, had we been parented in an even minimally appropriate way (like not confronting our own mortality every time our cowardly abusers took out the flickering memories of their abuses on their own freaking little kids) we all did go on, somehow, to create our lives.And we learned, as you did too Copa when you adopted your son, that loving someone else can heal us.Remember that old Beatles song:  The love you take is equal to the love you make.This is true.We can love, and give, and stand for someone else, or for our pets, and we can heal our present day selves through those ways we name ourselves good and valid people.  When we elect to go back in time to the frozen trauma places in our psyches, the only benefit to us is in relearning the names we were hurt and threatened and tortured into believing when we were little kids and had nothing, not even safety.I am sorry you have been so alone in your life, Copa.  It seems so horribly unfair that these things happened to us at all and then, that they weakened and took away our abilities to believe in ourselves as adults.We were so vulnerable.And there are predators in the world.And we fell and fell, and we never knew why.That is in the past, Copa.  We cannot change what happened to us.  What we can do is decide whether what we were taught about ourselves was moral, or correct, or appropriate, or beneficial in any smallest way.  We can learn now, whether there was any truth at all in our childhoods, or whether our abusers were and continue to be, liars.  For some of us, poverty or prejudice or any of a thousand other things may have turned otherwise decent people into abusive parents.  For others of us, for those whose good fortune it was to be born here in this country and to have had enough food and clothing and an opportunity to read and learn and experience the possibility of healing...our abusers were evil people.They could have sought help.  They hurt their children, created victim mindsets in their own beautiful children, instead.These things that happened to us cannot be changed, Copa.But we can change whether we believe them.  We can label and name our abusers ~ whether they are parents or teachers or sisters or therapists ~ we can define them and the value of the things they told us were true.We can do that.And though it is too late for us to claim the lives we may have created for ourselves had we been made healthy and strong in our childhoods, we each has the life we did create.We have created lives replete with beauty and with the warmth of the love we made, Copa and SWOT.  This is the miracle, here.  We loved ourselves to this point through loving and helping and standing for and believing in, others.We did that; we do that.Our abusers could not touch or change or damage that core that was us, that was who we were and that is who we are now, from the beginning.All we are doing here is reclaiming ourselves from the greedy, grasping lying fat little dirty fingers of our abusers, reaching all over and touching our psyches.We invited them in.We can throw the dirty little bums out.I wish I could get my money back, though.  Not for the first times, but for the times when that first therapist was betraying a sacred trust and still took my money.What a cheap, sad little tramp he must have been, in his heart.I mean, we all make mistakes.  I make a million mistakes every day.  but our therapists did what they did knowing what they knew about what they were doing.And, just like the abusers who hurt us in the first place, they did it anyway.And they kept doing it, COPA and SWOT.That's as evil as can be, to do something like that.CedarSWOT, I was thinking about your mom ridiculing you like she did over what boy you liked when you were such a beautiful young girl just coming into her womanhood.What a jerky thing that was for your mom to do.</blockquote>

Verification