Category: Life Lessons
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How to love a child who doesn’t love you back – a mother’s honest narrative of raising a child with reactive attachment disorder : Institute For Attachment & Child Development
When people dream of adoption, they often picture a child to love who loves back and settles into their family … Continue reading How to love a child who doesn’t love you back – a mother’s honest narrative of raising a child with reactive attachment disorder : Institute For Attachment & Child Development
Rumors
Rumors are the shards of glass that fall from the shattered chandelier of adolescence.
They stick in your feet as you try to walk by them with your head held high and scar your hands when you try to clean them up.
When you get dressed and try to go about your day, they constantly sting and burn.
Everyone notices your hands. They heal quickly though, that’s the good news. People will forget.
But at night, when the world is quiet and the shoes you had to wear come off, the shards are still there, so deep you can’t extract them.
They’re still there in your 20’s when you’re deciding what kind of life you want.
They’re still there in your 30’s when you’re asking “is there anything more?”
They’re still there in your 40’s when you’re teaching someone else how to navigate the world.
Maybe you can find a way at some point in your life to overcome the pain and help someone else through theirs. You can’t get that time back though and sometimes it all comes rushing back.
Something to remember though, that’s helped me down the road, is that nobody starts a rumor about someone who doesn’t matter. Your magnetic qualities, your strengths and your charisma made you a target. You get to keep those things.
You couldn’t have prevented it. That’s how rumors work. Rumors are the things you didn’t do. Someone else is responsible for causing that kind of pain.
Just don’t be that someone else. You’re better than that.
SHARED Trauma and a Facebook Post
Dear William,
I wanted to write a response to you regarding your comments on my post but I needed to do some digging first. Like, the real deep kind. My knee-jerk reaction was just to make a snarky comment and set you in your place. That’s not what I dreamed up when I made that blog post you didn’t bother to read with my picture attached, that you so harshly judged. See, that blog post was about my insecurities about my arms. Then you used it to hurt me. But, I am in a place that you are not yet and in this place, I can be candid. I am in control. I am going to give you some grace.
So as I was driving today I decided to take a good long look inward and decode my emotional response versus my pro social therapeutic response options.
Several times I thought maybe I should just pull the car over and have a good cry. But I didn’t do that. Someone might pull over and try to rescue me. AND I DON’T NEED TO BE RESCUED!
But, maybe YOU do. So allow me. I was also in an abusive relationship. I also got hurt. I responded in life in a variety of damaging ways. I’ve not always been proud of the choices I made when I was trying to get over the whole ordeal.
When I finally got out of ‘said relationship’ and began to try to heal it was NOT EASY.
Healing is a process, the length of which is akin to the length of the process that was used to alienate me from my family and friends. To make me feel worthless and useless. To make me want to please someone at my own expense. To walk around in my own home every day and wonder what I was doing wrong. What was I going to do today that he would berate me for? Why can’t I just get it right? The process that made me believe that I was the terrible wife and mother that he wanted me to believe I was. It took a long time for him to train me.
It took one split second for me to suddenly and violently realize that I was not all of those things he accused me of being and I was going to get out. It took another three years before I actually did.
It didn’t matter that he wasn’t much bigger than me. It didn’t matter that I was skilled with weapons and COULD fight back. He may have very well been able to physically overpower me if he came at me just right, but he didn’t even have to do that. His words cut me deeper than any of the beatings I took. The anxiety that I had just wondering if I was gone too long at the grocery store was enough to send me into a panic attack.
And it took me A LONG TIME TO HEAL FROM THAT! I’m still not done. I will come out of every corner I am ever backed into swinging still to this day. But here is what I have become.
I am strong. I am proud that I am strong. I survived. I am proud of that too. I am proud that I didn’t become another statistic. But I know that there are two sides to every story. Maybe you didn’t want to know mine. Maybe I don’t know yours. Here is what I do know.
Men can be victims of domestic violence too and I would say that many, much too many, frequently are. And they’re never going to tell. As stigmatized as I feel right now admitting it, I can’t imagine what you feel, as a man, because you aren’t supposed to admit that you let her hurt you. Of course that’s garbage talk, but that’s where we still are as a society.
I think you are brave to admit that a woman overpowered you and physically hurt you. Because you are not supposed to admit such things. You are a man afterall. I can’t compare my pain to yours and I won’t.
But brother, let me tell you something, you have got to do the work on yourself now in order to heal from your trauma. Read the book. Take the class. Join the f***ing support group. You need it. Don’t spend years denying that you do. It’s a waste of time and you and everyone you love pay the price.
I am not afraid of men who are bigger and stronger than me. No person’s physical appearance is threatening to me. I don’t find strong men unattractive because they’re strong. I don’t think they look like monsters. I don’t find less muscular men unattractive because they might be weak. My trauma didn’t manifest the way yours did. I know that no matter what a person looks like on the outside, they are who they are at their heart. There really sometimes is no clue to who they are until you give them a chance to show you.
Don’t carry your trauma around for the rest of your life making assumptions about what people are capable of or what kind of pain they may inflict on you because of the way they look. You are gonna miss out on a whole lot of awesome. Do the work on yourself and keep your mouth shut about the way other people look.
And for the record, I wanted to be strong, not so I could fight back against some man if they ever tried to hurt me again. Not so I could show off my muscles and take selfies. I’m 44 and I just want to still feel good when I’m 66 and beyond. I want to be able to make the damn bed without giving up and asking for help. I want to be able to do the fun things I like to do without the amount of pain that I was in before I started lifting weights. And it is working. And I’m happy about it. AND I want to inspire other women to take their health into their own hands. Eating right and exercising takes a lot of dedication, but it’s worth it. It’s another step I have taken on the road to being my best self. I will never be ashamed of that, regardless of who finds me attractive.
Healing….. means wading through the trauma you experienced and ending up standing on top of that mountain of bullshit that life threw at you and screaming “I F***ING WON”!
Cliques vs Friend Groups
Ladies, hear my words and rethink your attitude toward other women!
Cliques still kill me. I’ve never understood the need to stand shoulder to shoulder with other women and make other people feel unwelcome. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be accepted or that I’m somehow immune to the sting of rejection.
When you’re a teenager you can travel purposely in groups of peers if you happen to be lucky enough or skilled enough to be accepted by a clique. (Still not sure what it takes) But as an adult you find yourself trying to do things your kids enjoy, break new ground and “get out there” or you find yourself in some obligatory situation where you have to go somewhere for a function and you try to find some joy in it yourself.
Anxiety grips many of my friends and keeps them from going out and enjoying life.
I’ve never been a clique type of girl and honestly when I was a teenager I wanted nothing more than to be accepted by certain groups. To be invited to the movies with a group or to go skiing or to the pool together. It may not look like it now but high school was the worst for me and I just knew there was a better world somewhere out there where I would find my people.
I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons since then and one of them is that this mentality doesn’t go away with age. I’m pretty sure this is where social anxiety springs from and it’s completely unnecessary. You might look at me and come to your own conclusions and say “she fits in everywhere” and you know what, I do. You know why? Because I don’t believe the lies that other people tell about me.
I am a seeker of the outcast at parties. I am the girl you can walk up to and say without words, “I have no one to stand with and people watch” and I will hear your call and stand with you. If not for the rejection I felt as a teenager I might not be this person today.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, I was never able to teach my children how to fit in to cliques either. But I really like the adults they’re turning into so I’m going to go with “fortunately”. They have all had a hard time with other girls at school. They are all fiercely independent and passionate people who defend others who can’t defend themselves. All have a heart for the outcast.
My oldest daughter got kicked off the bus one time for a day because she stood up to a bully who took a a special needs child’s book bag. She pushed her down and took it back. The bus driver called me and said he was sorry he had to suspend her for the day because of the rules but she was his hero. ♥️
So to all of you who have a super strong bond with your female clique and refuse to accept new people into it, I am sorry for you that you will never meet and know all the awesome women I have met who still today don’t travel everywhere in cliques.
“Adult women still do this? Yes. Very much yes. Just go try and find a chair at the pool.”
I’m not shaming anyone for having friend groups. I have those. There’s a difference. And when you’re grown and you purposely shut other women out who are clearly seeking someone, anyone to cling to in an awkward social engagement, then you’re in a clique not a friend group. You are the kind of people who would let someone figuratively drown in a social situation and watch them leave and laugh about it.
You know if you are someone who doesn’t reach out and offer those women to sit beside you, even if they might say “no”. You know if you are one of those women who purposely shut other women out because you are jealous of them or worry someone might judge you for spending time with them. And good news ladies, it’s not too late to change.
Am I saying you have to be friends with them? No. I’m saying you can be kind to them, offer them a seat. If you decide that they’re bad news well then I’m all about some boundaries. But don’t let Mean Girls be your theme for life and pretend like it isn’t.
Love yourself enough to love other women and the world will be a better place, I promise.
