I am a survivor of child molestation at age 7, date rape at 14, and an intimate partner relationship enduring years of control and emotional abuse that escalated over time, and culminated 20.in 2 clear incidents of physical abuse that brought the relationship to an end…finally. 

This retrospective description of the most painful and harmful events in my life brings tears to my eyes, but it was not how it looked to me in the moment.  I did not understand what happened to me or even begin to unpack it to try to reclaim the essence of who I was before those things happened, until many decades later.  At the time, to the limited degree that I was conscious and aware of the events, I was convinced I had somehow brought these things on myself through some fault or deficit.  Like most survivors, I was enculturated to believe that if I had been a good person, only good things would happen to me.  So if bad things happened, I must have failed or deviated from goodness in some way.  This framework of unworthiness kept me trapped in shame, guilt, and self-destructive behavior.  So much self-destructive behavior…

Now, after pursuing my social work graduate degree and training, supervision and practicing in mental health, I can more clearly see the emotional wounds, and the patterns of behavior they caused, in myself and in others.  My life journey paired with my professional training leads me to understand that by unpacking the relationship between emotional and physical wounds and patterns of responsive, trauma-induced, survival behavior, we can identify approaches to trauma-informed interventions that address root causes, and result in sustained healing and sustained behavior change for better outcomes.[1]

Even though I feel like I have personally climbed the Mt. Everest-equivalent of breaking myself open to reclaim who I was, I continue to “peel the onion” in phases, setting down what feels like large boulders over time which make up the heavy weight that multiple traumas caused.  Until very recently, I lived a life of perceived safety achieved by hiding my true, damaged, unworthy self, locking my heart away from painful and all emotions, flattening my capacity for joy, happiness and prosperity, judging everyone around me very harshly, just as I judged myself – with condemnation, regret and scorn, forever letting perfect be the enemy of good in the striving for unachievable “perfection.”  These events convinced me that I was unworthy of abundance.  The many, many poor decisions I made afterwards reinforced and underscored that what I believed about my unworthiness was true.  The assaults on my body and soul taught me to despise my physical body and to abuse, resent and punish it for the disappointing, disgusting thing I sadly believed it was.

Here’s a bizarre thing about all of this negative impact and I believe this is true of millions of other deeply traumatized women.  Even though I was weighed down by all this trauma, like most trauma survivors, I still managed to accomplish some pretty remarkable things. [2] Throughout these events, broken, self-medicating, feeling like I had failed and disappointed my parents and myself, lost and unclear about where my path or next steps would lead, I also drove my car from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast with everything I owned and started over, from scratch.  I bought a house, fell in love with a nurturing, loving man,[3] I finished my college degree in Psychology, and a graduate degree in Social Work.  I spent 5 years working a dream job in a foundation, making social change with significant resources.  I have helped to start 3 successful small businesses for myself and my husband.  I founded a nonprofit to do my heart-centered work and fulfill my purpose on this planet. And now I am writing a book to make the world safer for women and girls who experience the things I have dealt with in my 55 years on this planet.  Those are some pretty outstanding accomplishments. What may not be apparent from the outside, but I know many women know, is that it is a daily struggle to remember to give myself credit for what I have accomplished.  But the more piercing insight that lives in my heart is this:  how much MORE could I have accomplished, if I had not been weighed down by the damage caused by multiple traumas starting at the age of 7?  What risks would I have taken or dreams would I have pursued if I had not spent two decades trying to unf*ck my life and my heart from self-destructive behavior, self-medicating to numb the shame and guilt of falling short of expectations, driven by events that were not even my fault?  This represents the gap in unrealized potential caused by the silence of our society in discussing the damage we are doing to women and girls by pretending our society is safer than it really is.

I carried my secrets for over 40 years, because I was afraid to speak up.  I was afraid that I would be seen, first of all, and that I would be seen as broken, evil, undeserving of happiness, irreparably damaged.  Why else would these terrible things happen to me?  Bad things happen to bad people, right?[4] And so I did the best I could to redeem myself, trying to do good things and be helpful to others while I carried a stone the weight of the world in my soul, and I contorted internally and externally to be sure to hide who I really was, in shame, guilt and fear.  Through the conditioning of the events of my young life, the manipulative, emotional abuse by a narcissistic partner, and society’s (view that I was unworthy, but I want to say something else here) I had been conditioned to believe I was a terrible, tainted, undeserving person who was never as good as everyone around me, and my only path to redemption was to sacrifice myself in service to others to the exclusion of my self, my dreams, my joys.  Only then might I find that ever elusive feeling of being okay in my own skin.  I had to work my ass off for it.  And so began my alternatively unfulfilling journey of hustling for my worthiness, and never, ever getting to that “I’m okay.” Feeling.

This self-imposed limitation and the belief on which it is based – a perceived unworthiness because of how I interpreted what was done to me by others – has thus far been the single most difficult barrier to overcome to claim the life of my desires.  I battle with it daily, winning some and losing some, to hold in my mind and heart that I deserve the life of my dreams equivalent to the measure of energy exchange I am willing to offer to the universe and there is no act or decision I have taken at any point in time that declares otherwise.  Replacing the voices in my head that convince me to play small, stay safe, not take risks that could fail, and challenging the feelings in my heart that I somehow failed and fell short of what I am supposed to be, and so failing and falling short is my inevitable outcome if I take risks, is a moment-to-moment job.

 Adjacent to this awareness have come a few other insights about this phenomenon and its impact on people in the world.

1. I am one of millions of women and girls who have been assaulted, molested and abused, who are carrying their burden in silence, at the expense of their joy, and this is depriving the world of their potential contributions.
2. Having worked to ensure that service delivery systems do a better job of providing resources to disadvantaged people, I have learned that NO amount of resources can help someone become successful if they don’t believe they deserve it.[5]
3. Eliminating violence and abuse of women and girls is a huge undertaking of a complex system of factors, but if we look at the root causes, and the root causes of those root causes, we can begin to untangle concrete ways to improve safety while in an abusive situation, promote thriving after leaving an abusive situation, and to give grace, permission, power and courage for survivors to speak up at kitchen and coffee tables everywhere, so they can begin their journey of healing and reclaiming who they are underneath the impact of trauma.[6]
4. Beyond the economic costs of violence and abuse against women, [7] eliminating violence and abuse of women and girls, such that they can achieve the fullness of their potential could result in a huge economic and cultural explosion of untapped potential. In fact, it is men’s fear of this happening that has resulted in the oppression and abuse of women throughout the ages.[8]
5. IMHO, Forgiveness is solely for the victim/survivor on their timeline. It is the process of taking one’s power back and deciding how one chooses to feel about what happened.  It is transforming one’s belief from “things happen to me” to “things happen by me” which restores agency and moves the victim to survivor. [9]

This book is designed to begin to address these issues, create safety for disclosure, raise awareness of the pervasiveness of this issue, equip practitioners with the tools and information they need to be part of the solution, to approach this population which requires a counter-intuitive, non-medical, non-linear, non-one-right-answer mode of intervention, to bring grace, permission, power and courage to change the behaviors that are hurting and damaging each other, and dimming our shine.

If I can reach one million women and girls who are suffering in silence, and help them open their own door to healing, evolving, and stepping fully into their powerful essence without fear, think how that much unrestricted joy, creativity and power will lift the world!   It will also interrupt the cycle of intergenerational control, violence and abuse.  Doesn’t that sound amazing?  I’m so glad to have you on this journey with me!  Let’s get started!

Telling this story after 40 years of silence – no one knew – cracked the shell for me.  I’ve been expanding like a flower unfolding in the sun ever since!  Helping survivors find the courage to navigate this very treacherous and scary terrain of disclosure of childhood trauma to open the door to a new way of living is part of the amazing and transformational work that I want to help inspire, lead and expand!

Helping someone overcome their self-limiting beliefs instilled by trauma, and see themselves through the eyes of unconditional acceptance, suspended judgment, and compassion is one of the most rewarding ways to spend time on this planet!  We can strengthen others’ capacity to see themselves this way, by practicing seeing ourselves this way!  This is where practicing Self-Love becomes the key…

My first publication, a compilation with dozens of skilled, amazing women authors is “365 Days of Self-Love: Daily Rituals from Experts Around the World.”  I hope you will buy it for yourself, and deepen your daily practice of self-love, so we can form an inescapable tsunami of unconditional self-love rippling out into the ocean of our world, and expand the healing, the joy, the indescribable bliss of a world where all trauma is transcended, and we are free to be fully, truly, deeply who we are and love every iota of ourselves!

Will you join me?????

[1] citation

[2] The role of risk and protective factors in trauma outcomes.

[3] Who bore the brunt of my fear-driven, anxiety and trauma-induced controlling behaviors for over one and a half decades.

[4] Just World Fallacy

[5] The psychology of poverty

[6] I do not say reclaim who they were before the trauma, because there is no going back.  Trauma is like adding a chemical to a solution.  Once it’s in there, it changes the composition of the solution and there is no way to extract or remove the added chemical without some significant transformational intervention like heat or distillation.  What is more likely or achievable is to neutralize the impact of the chemical in the solution by balancing the solution with another addition, like trauma-informed. 

[7] Cite to the statistics of the costs.

[8] Feminism, reproductive control, chattel, the patriarchal roots of DV, etc.

[9] Michael Beckwith’s stages of spirituality.