Lavender Magazine
September 5, 2010
Empowering
Lavender Sisters
Breaking the Isolation, Shame & Silence
All you need for recovery
is a Will and a Way
Can’t afford/get to a therapist
Mary is the second daughter of Thomas Blige, a jazz musician, and Cora Blige, a nurse. Her older sister, LaTonya, also is a singer. The family lived in the Bronx until her father abandoned them, then they moved to a public housing project just north of New York City.
“We lived in the ghetto,” Mary says. “I’d hear women screaming and running down the halls from guys beating up on them. People chased us with weapons. I never saw a woman there who wasn’t abused. It was a dangerous place. No one wanted anyone else to get ahead.
When I was 5, sexual stuff was done to me. My mother was a single parent, a working woman. She left us with people she thought could be trusted. They hurt me.
After that happened,
I thought: "It was somehow my fault."
Parade Magazine, published: 01/23/2007
to help
by Karen Duncan
this is what you
have to heal from …
The frequency with which you blamed yourselves for the abuse, carry guilt about exposing the perpetrator, feared family retribution and the ease you recognize the confusion you experienced within the family’s maladaptive belief system.
"that’s it – in a nutshell"
but it will take you
a lifetime to achieve
Have they been treating Me Insane or Sexually Abused?
Yes, I have been labeled with two mental illnesses (major depression and that condition I like to call Chronic Shock Syndrome/PTSD "aka" borderline) but who really is the "crazy one."
I just passed a major milestone in my personal life. I confronted my mother with the knowledge that she allowed and covered up my father’s sexual abuse of me when she was pregnant with my brother 40 years ago.
Funny thing is, no one, from a national mental health organization, two therapists, or my husband was helpful in this last healing step.
The
Real
Secret?
It took 43 years for me to figure out. You’ll never remember the sex if you were too young to put it into context, but you will remember the warped adult rules and their excuses; that will be proof enough.
It was crazy-making behavior, and I was doing it to myself.
There have been many times in my life when I have been totally lost and confused but would not admit it.
I thought my life had to be hard; after all, I was ugly and bad. I struggled through one badrelationship after another.
I struggled to manage my life rather than live it. I believed struggle, hurt, and pain were the natural order.
I knew how to take a punch in life, and I was determined not to be knocked down even when I was on my knees.
I would survive with my extremely negative internal self-dialogue, I would beat myself up for who and what I was and was not, what I had and had not done, what I did and did not own.
Externally, I tried to prove to myself and the world that I was more than I actually believed I could ever be.
In the beginning: abuse is delivered by the those who should have been there to comfort, to protect.
Physical, emotional, sexual abuse are familiar denys of childhood years for all too many children.
And, of course, there’s the cover up — bury the memories deep, hide the pain, live in desperation and unending solitude — a hard place to live, a hard place to leave, a hard place to survive.
Because no one really wants to know the truth. No one wants to look too closely at just how tragic the effects of abuse are.
Survivors of abuse live in a cold, dark world. Traumatic memories come in snatches of emotion, in body memories, in moments of inexplicable terror.
The children of abuse break into fragments. Little pieces rattle around inside trying to connect to the whole: one fragment carries the memories of the abuse, another the fear, another the anger.
Code of Silence:
Beneath the American Dream
chronicles in poetry Jenny’s journey from being sexually abused as a child to embracing life and and love as a woman.
Negative Views of the non-abusing Mother
In childhood sexual cases, the non-abusing parent (usually the mother) is often seen as a colluder, helpless bystander or victim. These negative views may be based on misconceptions about incestuous families and can lead to treatment bias and neglect of the other "victims" of abuse.
Pelletier & Handy (1986) suggests that there are three representative incestuous family types:
Possessive-passive family – the father rules with complete authority, sometimes by force are often described as "manipulative, impulsive, dominating, and unpredictable: and tends to marry immature or insecure women who can be kept emotionally and financially dependent. Such women are often unavailable for their children emotionally or have a physical disability.
Marriage between Dependent Man and a Domineering Woman – these women tire of being the "mother" to their husbands and withdraw from their spouses emotionally and sexually.
Frequently these women are cold and rejecting of their children. They are often absent from their home and therefore unavailable to protect their children.
Union of Dependent man and Dependent Woman – neither is able to fill the other’s overwhelming needs. Inadequate as parents and spouses, they look to their children for parenting.
A significant number of mothers of CSA victims have themselves suffered abuse as children.
Excerpts from Janet D. Felgenbaurm’s, Negative views of the mother after childhood sexual abuse. Published in Women’s Mental Health.
Thrivers tell us what works for them?
It’s call the Lavender Sisterhood and they send me all the latest trends, their accomplishments, and articles that advanced their understanding so that you can enjoy eBites of what is exciting a new.
Sisterhood
It’s call the Lavender Sisterhood and they tell me about their books, their speakership, and eBites about their experiences with new drugs, laws, understanding what it means to the first in the "Wild West" of new approaches.
Latch on to
what works for you
Have you ever had someone look at you as if your story is beyond comprehension? Our Sisterhood already knows how that feels.
Do you feel as if they don’t have any idea what if feel like to be in your shoes? Our Sisterhood already knows how that feels.
So don’t hestitate to come join us for a chat about anything in this eMag or that is on your mind ….
the healing
tools of nature
Finding therapy among Earth’s mightiest friends.
As such, we owe it to ourselves and to God to respect and honor the bounty of the earth. The Creator has placed at our disposal a wealth of natural energies that are willing and useful healing tools. We need only ask, and the help is there for us.
Trees
These mighty friends are elemental symbols of wisdom. They are tangible signs of transformation and growth. Trees are receptive and energizing.
They stand as symbols, representing and demonstrating our endless source of supply. Imagine that every tree you pass on the streets or roads is a demonstration of the things you can be or have in your life.
There is no shortage of possibilities in life, and every possibility is within your reach. We can also talk to trees, particularly elms and oaks. Weeping willows are eager receptors for our sorrows—they take our tears and transform them into beauty!
Trees are a solid support system.
An excellent clearing ritual can be performed at the foot of a tree. Dig a small hole in front of the tree or near the roots. Lie flat on the earth and talk directly into the hole.
Talk as though you were speaking to a person. If you are expressing pain, sorrow, fear, and so on, tell the tree exactly what the cause is and how you feel about it. If you are making a request, be specific.
therapy >
Understanding
Your Mother’s
Limitations
Mothers of this generation of women did not have the information we have today; they did not readily have the opportunity to seek help or talk to someone about what was happening to them as children.
Their trauma occured before they were effective laws to prosecute abuse, shelters for victims, therapy programs in their community, and media exposure on the topic of abuse.
reviewing your
family legacy
healing technique
Our mothers were, in some ways still are, one of the most silent generations about this trauma.
She has learned from her father-to keep the abuse a secret- was taught to her as a means of protecting him, not her or her child.
She learned as a child to maintain the silence of the perpetrator and the family belief system of denial. She was not taught how to keep herself safe or that she deserved to be protected.
She lacked confidence in her own beliefs, perceptions, and convictions about sexual abuse and thus continued what the family believed was appropriate.
On the front cover is me coming out of the tunnel of darness into the light. One of the goals of the book is to go back and help other victims and survivors to make it out into the the light too.
I hope as more victims and survivors speak out about their own personal stories, there will never be another person who has to feel alone in the process.
My father started training me early on to be his personal play thing/ sexual slave. I had been sexually molested as an infant. My mother sent my two brothers and myself to my grandparents to safety. I did not live with my father he would come to get me. He came after me when I was 15 and told me he waited til I was old enough.
At the hands of my father, I was physically, emotionally, sexually, spitually and financially abused.
Meditation Tapes
ONLY USE FEMALE VOICES
with affirmation tapes and meditation because you are trying to substitute your inner voice with theirs through repetiton.
A male voice sounds
like an abuser telling
you to calm down
and minimize
the situation.
Runaway Love
Mary J Blige
Enough Cryin’
Mary J Blige
No More Drama
Mary J Blige
Good Woman Down
Mary J Blige
Take Me As I Am
Mary J Blige
Click on her to see video
What’s Love Got to Do With it
Tina Turner
Rain on Me
Ashanti
I Will Survive
Gloria Gaynor
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