Category Archives: God’s healing

Apr29

An Ugly Mind Made Beautiful.

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When the movie, A Beautiful Mind came out I had a hard time watching it because I could relate to some of John Nash’s experiences, in particular the insulin shock therapy he was treated with while he was in the hospital.

The reason I can relate to the insulin shock therapy he endured is because when I was a child and being abused in the cult in the 50’s and 60’s, the cult abusers had to have a way to make their victims forget what they’d done to them, and insulin shock, sometimes called subcoma insulin shock, was the method they used. There were doctors and nurses present who were cult members, and they monitored the victims, who were usually children, to make sure nothing bad happened to them while they were unconscious, and also to administer the insulin in the first place. The correct dosage had to be calculated based on the victim’s height and weight, and doctors and nurses were the only ones who knew how to do that.

Seeing that movie is what triggered that memory, and I haven’t been able to watch it since, which is unusual for me. Usually I love seeing movies many times over.

The movie also reminded me that when I was little I used to crave sugar all the time. Regularly for breakfast I would have cereal with multiple heaping spoonfuls of brown sugar on it, and my mother never stopped me from doing it ~ something that only makes sense if I had a lot of extra insulin in my blood that needed to be metabolized. And now, while I’m not diabetic, thank God, I am insulin resistant. Another way of thinking of that is that because of the insulin shock to which I was subjected, my tissues aren’t as responsive to insulin as they would otherwise be.

It doesn’t usually affect me. Every once in awhile, if I don’t eat anything at all over a long period, I begin to get a little hypoglycemic, but that’s about it. Plus my doctor has prescribed a very good medication that helps to moderate things quite well.

I thank God that Jesus is my Healer, and my Redeemer! I pray that Jesus has healed me of insulin resistence! I forgive everyone who caused it, and I hope I’ll see them in Heaven so I can tell them I forgive them.

It was a form of torture. It makes me feel sad knowing that I was tortured. Even though I’ve described other cult rituals that could be said to be torture, this is the first time that I’ve actually said the words, “I was tortured.” This is the first time I’ve acknowledged it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. Maybe it’s because I’m accepting reality.

It also makes me feel sad knowing that people are cruel to each other so often. It makes no sense to me that people treat each other like that, because it seems like it would be easier to be kind. Being mean and cruel makes things so much more difficult, because then, in the process, a lot of times you break a law and have to go to court, and then to jail. If people would just be kind they could avoid all that, and they might learn about the mysteries of God into the bargain.

It sounds like a good deal to me. Maybe not to other people, but certainly to me.

 

Apr6

Secret’s Delight

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I’ve been wanting to write something, anything, for several days, but the words have eluded me, nasty things. They’ve been just beyond my grasp.

As if words were living things…

Which they’re not, but they feel alive when I can’t find them to get them down on paper. They’re certainly alive in my mind at least.

It’s frustrating when I can’t write, because it feels like the words are trapped inside with no way out. Kind of like me throughout my childhood. In fact, when I was multiple I had an alter whose name was Secret who kept me from writing. It was her job to keep things secret and hidden from me, and I almost always found it extremely difficult to write because of her activity inside. She kept the words hidden behind blank thoughts and clouded minds; in other words, general confusion ~ something I experienced a lot of back then.

Thankfully, since God integrated me in 2003, the confusion is almost completely gone, and lately, I’ve been able to write almost prolifically ~ at least prolifically for me, if the number of entries here is any indication. I haven’t been able to write poetry, which is disappointing, but hopefully that will come with time.

I love writing poetry. It makes me feel free. There’s something about being able to write like that, even though it’s highly structured (I like writing poetry that rhymes), that makes me feel brilliant and uninhibited.

Maybe that sounds a little arrogant because I said that something makes me feel brilliant. Let me explain. Poetry is something that’s fairly new for me. Most of my life I couldn’t make sense of poetry, much less write it. It was a complete mystery to me. Then in September of 1989 I went on a retreat with other abuse victims, and while I was there I met a couple of women who were survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse.

As they were talking about their experiences, what they were saying resonated with me, and I began to wonder if SRA was a part of my background. The thought of it terrified and horrified me. What I’d already remembered was appalling and shocking. To think that the adults in my life, who I was supposed to be able to trust, were guilty of such heinous crimes was beyond my comprehension, much less that they could be guilty of the kinds of crimes that were perpetrated on children by people in satanic cults.

So I came home from that retreat and wrote my first poem. It was called, prosaically enough, My First Pome. It wasn’t very good, but it was a start, and given that I’d never written anything remotely like that before, I think it was incredible. Here it is:

My First Pome

 I want to write poetical,

                             but how do I start?

The words are tangled up

and trapped in my heart.

If I open the door

they’ll come tumbling out,

Jumbled up letters

through an itty-bit spout.

I wrote that on October 1, 1989, and I’ve been able to write poetry ever since. Also, interestingly, I’ve been able to understand others’ poetry as well, something that just thrills me. Back in 2010 I was able to take a writing class at UC Irvine where we had to write a paper on T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. We each had to pick one of the four quartets, and write a paper on the role of time in that quartet. And I was able to complete the assignment! In fact, I discovered things in the poem that the professor hadn’t seen! How cool is that? God is so good! I had so much fun writing that paper!

So that’s my poetry-writing history. I haven’t been able to write any poetry for awhile, but I don’t expect the gift God gave me has gone away for good. I don’t know what’s blocking it, but if it’s like the rest of my writing, I’m hoping it’ll come back once the block has been removed. I’m hoping God will show me what’s blocking it and help me get it back.

Feb27

Confronting Evil By Talking About It

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When I was a teenager I was forced into having two abortions by the cult in which I was being abused. Well, first they raped me to get me pregnant, and then they aborted the babies that were the product of the two rapes.

The first one happened when I was about thirteen, and the pregnancy was terminated in an abortion at about three months, before the baby was viable outside the womb. It was a boy, whom I named David Adam Christopher.

The second one, when I was about fifteen, was terminated somewhere between four and five months, at a point when they knew the baby would be viable long enough for me to be able to bond with her before she was murdered. And yes, it was a girl. I named her Emily Margaret Rose. For both babies I tried to pick the most beautiful names I could think of, names that were not only beautiful, but were also at least partly biblical with good meanings.

In the abortion that killed David Adam Christopher, I have a very clear picture in my mind of a machine that I’m assuming was an abortion machine. It was a large blue rectangular box with a clear plastic dome on top, and as they were sucking the baby from my body I can see his tiny body parts mixed with blood swirling in the dome as the machine was running.

With Emily Margaret Rose it was even worse. I was the one who had to kill her, though in reality it was murder. I had no choice; they forced me.

After she was born they made me hold her, and they forced me to nurse her. At the time I didn’t understand exactly what they had planned, and I didn’t know why they made me bond with her, but I was glad for it. Then they took her away and put her on a table, which turned out to be an altar. She was naked, and they made me take off my clothes as well, something I always hated doing.

Then they made me go to the altar and they put a dagger in my hand. The dagger had a special kind of double-edged blade that had a thick electrical cable coming out of the handle. The cable was hooked up to a machine that generated electrical current, and as long as the machine was on, current flowed into the knife. As long as current was flowing I couldn’t let go of it because my muscles couldn’t stop contracting. The only way they would allow me to drop the dagger was if I stabbed Emily until she was dead. I had no choice. Not physically, nor emotionally, mentally, or spiritually.

I can see very clearly in my mind’s eye the images of having to do this to my beautiful baby girl. And I can distinctly hear her shrieks of agony as I plunged the dagger into her tiny body.

I take great comfort in Psalm 139:8 when I contemplate this horrific memory, because I believe what it says, that I was not alone in that Hell-on-earth, that God didn’t abandon me even there,

“If I ascend into heaven, You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there.” ~ Psalm 139:8, NKJV.

I also believe I will one day meet both my beautiful babies when I get to Heaven. I hope they can forgive me for what I was forced to do to them. I’ve often felt that I should have been willing to die myself rather than allow them to be aborted and murdered like that, though if I had died I wouldn’t have saved them from anything. They were created by the cult for abuse, and they would have been sacrificed before very long, as appalling and unspeakable as that is.

I feel so many things as I relive this event. I don’t go back to it very often, and  I didn’t expect to do so today, but it came out as I was talking to McT about other things in therapy. And once I start talking about it, it doesn’t take much to take me right back to that scene again.

I don’t know if that means I haven’t truly put it behind me or what. I’ve repented to God over and over again, and asked His forgiveness for every aspect of it, but it’s just such a horrific thing, it feels like I can never repent enough, even though I know that Christ’s work on the Cross was completely sufficient to cover even this awful sin. I know, at least in my mind, that I had no control over what happened, that I was forced into it, but I’m not sure if I know that deep down inside.

I say that because whenever I think of it my feelings get all jumbled up and chaotic inside. They kind of flit and fly all over the place and I have a hard time catching them so I can look at them. It’s like they’re trying to escape detection so I don’t have to deal with the underlying issues.

The problem is, I want to deal with those issues. I need to deal with them.

I do feel a great deal of guilt and shame about what happened, and I also feel a huge amount of sorrow, grief, and distress about it ~ sorrow and grief at what might have been for those two babies had they survived and escaped the cult, and distress at what I put them through in the process of aborting (David), and killing them (Emily).

Of course there’s absolutely no guarantee that they would have been able to escape. Given that they were created by the cult for child sacrifice ~ the reason they raped me in the first place was to get me pregnant so they could use the baby that was the product of each rape in rituals, with the ultimate goal of sacrificing the baby’s life ~ something expressly forbidden by God in the Bible,

They have built high places to Baal on which to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, something I have never commanded or mentioned; I never entertained the thought. ~ Jeremiah 19:5, CSB.

They have built the high places of Baal in Ben Hinnom Valley to sacrifice their sons and daughters in the fire to Molech ​— ​something I had not commanded them. I had never entertained the thought that they do this detestable act causing Judah to sin! ~ Jeremiah 32:35, CSB.

What the Christian Standard Bible (aka CSB) calls a detestable act the King James Version calls an abomination, which the dictionary defines as an atrocity, a horror, an obscenity, an evil, a crime, an outrage, and a monstrosity. In Hebrew this word means a morally disgusting thing, ethically wicked, and an abhorrence.

It’s good to know that God finds what happened to my two babies as morally repugnant as I do. I just wish I hadn’t been forced to participate in it.

I guess what I’m getting at with all of this is that, even though I’ve made a lot of progress, it’s obvious that I still have a whole lot of work to do. Thankfully, God is able and He’s still on the throne of my life. He’s been doing miracles in my life from the beginning on, and I don’t expect He’ll stop now.

I thank God for that!!

Feb5

An Interesting Yet Painful Paradox

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I just realized an interesting paradox, that I’m able to accept the fact that I’m flawed and imperfect, yet while recognizing that fact, I still expect myself to be perfect.

My pursuit of perfection has led to thousands of incidents of self-abuse over the years, yet if I acknowledge that I’m imperfect ~ as is every single member of the whole human race ~ then such a quest is a fruitless endeavor, and will always be one.

Then why do I continue to pursue it?

I don’t know.

Maybe I can figure it out, with a little Spirit-led assistance.

For one thing, it may be rooted in the cult and its rituals, which seemed to be never-ending. For instance, there was the one that they started doing to me when I was as young as two years old, where they had me in a room with a high ceiling, and a huge bonfire in the middle of it.

There was a metal table suspended from the ceiling by pulleys and a big timeclock on the wall, and there was a naked man tied down to the table. They would ask me questions, questions which had no answer, but they would expect me to come up with the right answer, and when I couldn’t the pulleys would lower the table closer to the bonfire. And the timeclock gave me a certain amount of time before it dinged. Once it dinged it was too late for me to answer that unanswerable question, and the pulleys were triggered to lower the table.

Because the table was metal it was like a frying pan, so as it got closer and closer to the fire the man’s skin began to burn, and the man started screaming in agony. He begged me to make the table stop moving towards the flames, and pleaded with me to answer the questions correctly. But given that the questions were unanswerable, and that I was only two or three years old, that was an impossibility. So all his screaming and pleas did was confuse me and make me panic-stricken and frantic.

That was the kind of perfection that was expected, even demanded, of me throughout my childhood. Nothing I did was ever good enough, no matter what I tried, and if I made a mistake, my mother made like I’d done it on purpose if I didn’t act remorseful enough. I remember spilling a glass of milk at dinner a few times when I was a kid, and if I didn’t act abjectly apologetic, she accused me of doing it on purpose.

Like, who knocks over a glass of milk on purpose, especially if doing so is going to result in a beating and/or getting raped, considering that Harry used rape as punishment for anything and everything.

I’ve wondered if having to feel that kind of abject remorse for a simple mistake is the seed that was the genesis for the self-abuse. It makes sense to me that it was, but even knowing that doesn’t seem to make any difference in being able to stop doing it, and that is extremely frustrating to me. Sometimes I feel desperate in my desire to not do it anymore. Lately I’ve taken to asking God to take me Home ~ that’s Home to Heaven ~ just so I don’t have to go through it anymore.

It’s just so painful, and I hate doing it!! It can’t be pleasing to God! It just can’t!!

The first incident of self-abuse I remember was while I was a student at Ripon College, and it was during my junior year. I was taking pipe-organ lessons (Ripon had a small, two-manual pipe organ), and one day during a practice session that wasn’t going at all well, I got so frustrated that I completely lost it, and I scratched my forehead so badly that I drew blood. I ended up having to find a Kleenex to staunch the blood-flow so it wouldn’t ooze down my face and make a mess. I also ended up ripping the pages of the music, so I had to figure out how to mend them so they were still readable.

The other early incident of self-abuse that I remember was when I was visiting Priscilla and Malcolm in Colorado, and they asked me to macramé a plant hanger for Bernice (Malcolm’s mother). They paid for all the supplies, and everything, but I only had a week to complete it, and somewhere in the middle of it I figured out I’d done a whole series of knots wrong and had to rip out a huge section of work and do it over, so I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to finish by the deadline Priscilla had given me. As a result I scratched my forehead and my arms, making an enormous bloody mess of myself.

They didn’t ask me how I got the scratches on my face, but I’m sure they knew, and I was too embarrassed to mention them.

I was able to get it finished on time, even a few hours early, though I ended up having to stay up all night to do so. I was so sure Bernice wouldn’t like it that I couldn’t be in the same room with her when they gave it to her. I had to hide in the other room. That’s how afraid of her criticism I was.

Fortunately, all my fears were for naught, because she loved it, and it remained hanging in her house until the day she died, several years ago. In fact, from what Katharine says, it’s still there.

So that’s my story, my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, perfectionistic, and painful story. I feel a desperate craving to be free of it. If I could open up my skull, and find the part of my brain that contains the self-abusive perfectionism, I would rip it out so I wouldn’t have to struggle with it anymore.

But I can’t, so I won’t. I guess I’ll have to trust God to do that part.

Rats!

Nov27

A Hope Deferred, and a Decision Made.

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A long time ago, many, many years, in fact, I wanted to be a doctor. That’s all I ever wanted to do from the time I was ten years old. And my grandmother encouraged me in that desire because she bought me these marvelous books of medical illustrations by this guy named Frank Netter, who was a physician, but he was also an artist who specialized in doing beautiful and highly technical medical illustrations.

Frank Netter is dead right now. He died in 1991. But they’re still using his books of medical illustrations.

Unfortunately, the realities of my life, kept me from fulfilling that dream, (the abuse I suffered as a child made it so I’m not able to handle much in the way of stress, and medical school is very stressful), and I never even got accepted to medical school. I took the MCAT ~ and did poorly ~ and I applied to one school, but I wasn’t accepted, I’m sure because my MCAT scores were too low. My GPA from UCI was good, 3.46, but it probably wasn’t good enough.

It was a crushing blow, because, as I said, that’s the only thing I’d ever wanted to do with my life.

That was over thirty years ago, back in the mid-’80’s, and to this day, I still don’t know what God wants me to be when I grow up. Once I lost that dream I was never able to find another. I tried music for about a year, but couldn’t stomach the idea of having to practice for hours at a time. I thought about being a therapist, but at my age, graduate school ~ plus the years and years of collecting hours for licensure ~ feels impossible.

I still might consider it, however.

I’ve thought of art, but not as a career.

I just can’t seem to find anything that suits me enough that I’m willing to put forth the time and effort necessary to make a career out of it.

I guess, more than anything, that makes me feel like an extraordinarily lazy person.

Harrumph!!

I do like to write, and I think I’m fairly good at it, but I don’t know if I’m good enough to be able to make a living at it. I’ve been told that my poetry is publishable. I’ve also been told that I should write and publish my story, because God has worked miracles in my life, and He’s set me free from a lot of my abusive childhood, and He’s continuing to heal me from the rest of it. I thank God for that. I’m just not sure if I’d be able to do a proper job of putting it in written form so people would want to read it.

Publishing my poetry doesn’t feel too intimidating because it’s already written, so all that would be needed is to find someone to publish it. Writing my story is another matter. That feels completely daunting to me, because, not only would I have to write it, but I’d have find someone to publish it, and I don’t really know how to do either one.

Maybe I should just do it and let God worry about the rest. If I’m doing what He wants me to do, then how it gets done is really His problem, isn’t it?

Yup, it is!

Maybe I should take a creative writing class with an emphasis in writing a memoir. That might help get me started.

Now I just have to figure out where such a class might be located…

Jun19

Working Hard at Doing Absolutely Nothing, or Maybe I’m NOT Such a Lazy Bum.

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I’ve been wanting to write about the fact that I don’t have a job, which makes me feel like a I’m not much more than a big, lazy bum.

I’ve tried a number of times to get a job, to no avail. Everytime I apply for a job some place, something always happens that makes it not work out. Either I’m under-qualified, or I’m over-qualified, or I’m too old (I’m 65), or I’m too highly educated, or I’m too religious (I’m an evangelical Christian), or I’m too opinionated, or I’m not opinionated enough, or…, or…, or ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the few times I’ve had a job, that didn’t work out either, with one exception: my job working for ADS (Airport Delivery Service). I really like that job, and I was good at it.

My job with ADS was the best job I ever had. It was a job where I returned people’s lost luggage out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, and I got to drive to interesting hotels and ritzy houses all over southern California, plus I got to meet a lot of fascinating people. In addition, I could listen to my favorite stations on the radio, without regard to anyone else’s listening preferences. It felt a little selfish, but I was the only one riding in my car, so it didn’t really make any difference.

But if I were to think about it logically ~ hard to do, but I can manage it ~ as well as listen to what my friends tell me, I would realize that I probably do more than I’m aware of. I have three friends, all of whom depend on me for moral support. Both Karens are taking care of their significant others. Karen C. is the primary caregiver for her mom, who is in end-stage Alzheimer’s Disease, and has been for awhile. Karen G-N. is the primary caregiver for her husband, David, and her newborn baby. David is on dialysis three times a week because he needs a kidney transplant, and Karen has been doing the dialysis at home ~ imagine that ~ kidney dialysis at home; what will they think of next. Pretty soon they’ll be doing heart transplants at home without benefit of doctors or nurses.

So David has been in the hospital for three or four months, and he hasn’t even met his baby son for the first time yet. Jonathan (the baby) has been on this earth since May 21, and David has yet to meet him. That’s just wrong! And Karen has needed friends to transport her and the baby to the hospital so she could visit David. I’ve provided the transportation, and then watched Jonathan out in the waiting room while Karen and David visited, and then drove Karen and Jonathan home again.

And then there’s the other Karen, Karen C. She doesn’t need me to drive her anywhere, but she needs lots of encouragement because she has to take care of her mom all by herself, so she’s always sleep-deprived. She has a professional caregiver (some kind of nurse) come in from the outside for six hours on Thursdays, and someone comes in to give her mom a bed-bath once a week, and someone comes in to clear her catheter and change her bladder bag once a week. So anytime something happens with her mom that worries her, Karen calls me and asks me to pray for her.

Amazingly, God always answers those prayers. I say amazingly because there hasn’t been a prayer that I’ve prayed for Karen’s mom that God hasn’t answered ~ with healing, with wisdom for whatever problem with her mom Karen’s been having that she hasn’t been able to figure out. God has always answered every prayer I’ve prayed for Karen’s mom, usually within the hour. There may have been one time where I prayed that her mom wouldn’t have to go to the ER, and she ended up having to go anyway, but that time they discovered that the problem was much deeper and more complicated than either Karen or I were aware of, so it was actually a good thing she went to the hospital.

And then there’s my friend, Helen, who lives in Australia. She had a stroke on May 29th, and while I can’t do anything to encourage her in person, I can support, inspire, and motivate her via email. Rachel and Kim are certainly doing that, and I can do the same. I can send her scripture verses, and cheerful letters, and prayers as well. It turns out you can do all kinds of things in an email letter! And her son is keeping Rachel, Kim, and me up to date on her condition and progress with daily letters.

So the upshot of all of this is that maybe I’m not quite as lazy as I think I am. Even though I don’t do much more than sit around in my apartment all day, while I’m sitting, I do a lot of encouraging and supporting and motivating of my friends. And when I go out, it’s to do the same thing ~ encourage, inspire, and motivate the friend I’m going to visit.

I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

Cool.

Jun10

The Continuing Saga of My Struggles With Mom’s Death, or Why Can’t I Cry?

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Well, it’s now May 8th, seven weeks to the day since Mom died.

I’m still struggling, though the issues are somewhat different. Now it’s more about realizing how much I miss what I had with her while she was here. And the frustrating thing is, while she was here, I didn’t know I had it.

Jeff says I was never, not from the very beginning of my life, able to establish a real bond with my mother, so it’s understandable that I wouldn’t feel much in the way of grief when she died. I can see where he’s right about that, but it still feels wrong that I’m not all broken up that she’s gone.

I still haven’t had a memorial service for her. I’m fairly certain there are people who would come to one, but I can’t seem to rev up any interest in planning it. I just want to forget about the whole thing and go on with my life, but I don’t know if it’s okay to feel like that, and even more, if it’s okay to do that ~ mostly because it feels like if I did that I’d be pretending my mother never existed.

I feel like my mother left a desert in my heart. I know that’s not true, because God has done a tremendous amount of healing in me, but somehow, that’s how it feels, and that’s the picture I get when I think about my mother’s influence in my life over the years. I guess I shouldn’t worry whether my feelings are right or wrong, and just accept them as my current reality. If I do that then I can ask God to heal what’s there and change my current reality to a new one that’s better and more God-honoring, as well as mother-forgiving, with no desert. Isaiah 35:4-6 says,

4Say to those with fearful hearts, “Be strong, and do not fear, for your God is coming to destroy your enemies. He is coming to save you.” 5And when he comes, he will open the eyes of the blind and unplug the ears of the deaf. 6The lame will leap like a deer, and those who cannot speak will sing for joy! Springs will gush forth in the wilderness, and streams will water the wasteland. ~ NLT.

That’s what I want my life to be like: where flowers are always blooming, and hearts are always joyful, and God is easy to find. In other words, Heaven!

Apr17

Mom Died and I’m Struggling…

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Mom died. It happened almost three weeks ago, on March 27, 2017 at 2:55 a.m. I’ve been dealing with various aspects ~ like getting her buried (actually encrypted) next to Dad at Forest Lawn, getting her death certificate, and notifying various insurance companies and pension plans of her demise for starters. Then, once I get the forms from the aforementioned insurance companies and pension plans, I get to fill them out using the copies of the death certificate that I got from Forest Lawn ~ and I HATE filling out forms.

But it’s got to be done. Harrumph.

I’ve been flooded with a myriad of feelings since she died, and I haven’t really had any place to take them. I know I can talk about them with Karen, or Helen~Kim~Rachel~Jesse~Jacob~Rob~Isaac via email, or God via prayer. Of course, I’m talking to God about them ~ I talk to God about everything ~ but sometimes it FEELS better if I can talk to a person I can see with my eyes. And that precludes all of the above-mentioned people except for Karen, but it’s hard to think of talking to Karen, because there’s never a time when she’s not sleep-deprived and therefore struggling to stay awake as you’re talking to her.

So that leaves here. As in talking about all these roiling feelings here, regardless of the fact that here isn’t a person I can talk to face to face. Here feels like it would be the same as talking to God, because He knows my every thought even before I think it, but writing it down here feels somehow different. Maybe it feels different because I feel like I can say whatever I want and/or need to without regard to what anyone might think of me. I’m pretty certain I can do that with Karen, and with my email friends, but because of the issues already mentioned, it’s much more difficult to talk to them. Another complicating factor with my email friends is that they live all over the world ~ literally. Helen lives in Sydney (that’s Sydney in Australia). Rachel lives in Northern Ireland. And that’s just for starters.

With that said, let’s get on with it.

As I said, I’ve been flooded with a myriad of roiling emotions since Mom died. Actually, they started beforehand, once I knew she wasn’t going to survive this illness, but I didn’t really let them come to the fore until after she was gone. So I’ve decided to use this blog to process all of it. It may take several posts or it may take a few. For all I know it’ll only take one, but it may take many. I just don’t know. I only know that I have to get it out from inside of me, because if I don’t it’s going to fester. I can already feel myself getting seriously depressed, only for the first time in my life the depression has a temporal focus and isn’t free-floating, like it’s always been in the past. This time it’s actually related to something in the world that happened to me that I can pinpoint on the calendar. Which means that, hopefully, it will end at some point. Hopefully.

So…

One of the biggest things I’ve been feeling is that I hastened Mom’s death because I didn’t visit her often enough. And my fear isn’t without justification. By not often enough I don’t mean I visited her once a week when I could have gone to see her three times a week or everyday, even though there were times that I did see her once a week. I mean that, while I did see her once a week at times, most of the time, I came up with reasons and excuses to not see her at all, every reason in the book, in fact. I did pay her bills as needed, though I wasn’t very good at that either, and whenever there was a care-planning meeting for her at Monrovia Gardens I always showed up and asked questions and signed whatever papers they needed me to sign. Whenever she ended up in the hospital I would visit her everyday while she was there. I just couldn’t seem to make myself go and visit her at Monrovia Gardens on any kind of regular basis.

Mom never did advance beyond mid-stage Alzheimer’s Disease. She just kind of gave up. I know what advanced and end-stage Alzheimer’s looks like. Karen’s mother is in end-stage Alzheimer’s (I think). If she’s not in end-stage, then it’s very far advanced. Mom never got that far. She was still able to talk and feed herself when she felt like eating. She was no longer ambulatory, but she wasn’t yet bedridden, and she could still socialize and interact with other people when she so desired. Karen’s mom hasn’t been able to do any of that for a very long time. Karen says she can understand what her mother is trying to communicate, even though she’s completely nonverbal.

As I said, Mom just seemed to give up. She stopped eating and drinking, and then she ended up in the hospital because she got dehydrated and came down with pneumonia. At first her doctor told me he thought she’d recover from that illness, but that she’d fairly quickly become ill again, and that she wouldn’t recover from the second illness. As it turned out, she didn’t recover from the first illness. She died two days after coming home from the hospital.

I had started praying that God would take her Home right around the same time she stopped eating and drinking. I just felt like her quality of life was such that she wasn’t happy, and wasn’t at peace, and I couldn’t really ask her about it because she wasn’t able to communicate on that level anymore, and hadn’t been able to for a long time. And the point of it all was that she wasn’t going to get any better, but rather would only get worse over time. So the overall picture was fairly bleak.

On that note I’m going to end this post and continue with this in my next one…

Oct10

Am I Afraid of Anger, or Do I Get Angry at the Fear?

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I originally wrote this post back in April of 2013 for a blog that I kept on another blogging site. That blog was shut down by the website without my consent, and I was never able to get it back, so from time to time I’m going to repost some of the posts I wrote from that blog as they seem appropriate to what I’m dealing with now.

This post contains a letter that I wrote to my biological father to deal with some of the unexpressed anger and rage that I feel about what he did to me. My therapist suggested that I write it but not send it, so that’s what I’ve done. Here’s the post:

April 10, 2013 ~ I’ve come to realize that most of the anger I feel and/or express is misplaced and misdirected, either at myself, or at the people in whatever TV program I’m watching at the time, especially if it’s something having to do with someone being raped or abused, or being treated unjustly or unfairly in anyway. I also get angry at certain news stories having to do with violence against children or women, or about registered sex offenders.

I’ve also found it interesting and a bit puzzling that I’ve never once felt, much less voiced, any anger towards my father for all the awful, horrible things he did to me. I have forgiven him, and I’ve never ever had any desire for revenge, but by the same token, I’ve also never felt any anger towards him. I don’t know if it’s because I’m terrified that he’ll come after me or because I’m afraid I’ll go ballistic if I start letting it out, or just what.

So maybe it’s time for me to do something about it. It’s not good to hold anger inside, especially for long periods of time, and while I’m getting better at not holding my anger inside, when I do let it out it’s almost always directed at the wrong person. So I’m thinking I should do something to express some of it towards my father, instead of towards me and all the other people who aren’t supposed to get it. My therapist says I should write him a letter, but I wouldn’t have to mail it to him. So that’s what I’ll do.

May 15, 2013 ~ I think it’s curious and probably significant that, after I start thinking about writing a letter to my father to tell him how angry I am at him, even if I know he’ll never see it, all of a sudden I avoid this blog like the plague. I wrote the first part of this post at the beginning of April and now it’s the middle of May.

Up until now I’ve always avoided dealing with any real feelings about Harry, and I think the reason is because I’ve been afraid, terrified, actually. Terrified that I wouldn’t be able to control my anger, petrified I’ll go ballistic and do something I’ll regret later ~ all because I’m panic-stricken at the idea of no longer hiding my true feelings about him. As I was sitting here thinking about what to write, I beat a retreat in the middle of this paragraph to play solitaire. Sometimes it helps me to think. Actually I think it’s an excuse for not having to think or write about what I’m supposed to be working on. Anyway, I started playing Solitaire and it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to (I was losing game after game) so I got more and more frustrated, and I ended up hitting myself a whole lot. Which is the point of all this in the first place: I get angry at myself instead of getting angry at the person ~ Harry ~ who’s the one I should be getting angry at.

So I’m going to step out in faith, and instead of being afraid of the anger, I’m going to get angry at the fear, and I’m going to start writing that letter. So here goes.

Harry:

First, I have to say that there are certain things about my childhood for which I’ve always been grateful: the piano lessons, and the love for classical music that you and Mom instilled in me, plus the keen intelligence, analytical mind, and desire for knowledge that have made me a voracious reader, and given me a life-long love of learning.

I thank you for those things. As I said, I’ve always been grateful for them, and I consider them a gift. However, there were many things I got from you for which I cannot be grateful. That will be the subject of the remainder of this letter.

I have a lot of things to say to you. A LOT. You’re supposed to be my father, at least that’s the title they gave you on my birth certificate. I have to tell you, however, that I don’t buy it. You’ve never been a father to me. I’ve had a lot of memories of things you did to me when I was a child that no father should ever do to ANY child, much less his own daughter ~ that no human being should ever do to any other human being. Even animals shouldn’t be treated the way you treated me. So I have a hard time calling you my father.

You abused me. You abused me physically, verbally, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. You made me hate you, and you made me hate myself. Everytime you abused me you told me you had to do this to me because God hated me. Everytime you abused me you told me I was as ugly as if someone had thrown acid in my face. I don’t know why you felt the need to say those awful, hateful things to me. It took me many, many years of healing before I could believe that God didn’t hate me, and many more years after that before I could believe that anyone, much less God, could love me. I’m still working on whether or not I’m ugly. I think I can finally say that I’m not ugly, but I’m not sure I can take it any farther than that yet.

I’ve finally decided that maybe you told me those things because you were projecting onto me how you felt about yourself. However, that’s no excuse for that kind of cruelty! Do you have any idea the kind of pain just those two statements spoken over and over into my life have caused me? Agony! Do you hear me? Agony! You caused me years and years of anguish and agony, plus nine suicide attempts just from those two statements, not to mention the torment from all the other horrific and terrible things you did to me.

You abused me within an inch of my life. The only reason I survived infancy is because God gave me the ability to become multiple.

You forced me/us to lie about what you were doing to us so you could keep on beating, raping, and otherwise assaulting the life out of us. You told us that if we ever told anyone what you were doing to us you would kill us, and then you played Russian Roulette with your revolver between our legs to make sure we believed you. There was no way we could have known back then that the gun was loaded with blanks. We were children, tiny children, so we had no choice but to believe you, and we had to become liars that no one could trust as a result. You stole our integrity,  our innocence, our childhood, and our hope when you did that, because you left us with no recourse and no ability to seek rescue.

Do you remember our habit of picking our cuticles? We started doing that at a very early age, as young as two years old. Do you know why we did that? Because you told us we couldn’t tell anyone what you were doing to us, so we had to come up with a way to tell people without using words that we were in peril. So we picked holes in our cuticles, sometimes to the point of getting them infected. Tragically for us, our efforts were all for naught, because no one ever caught on or reached out to help.

You used rape as punishment for wrongdoing, and you kept changing the rules so we never knew what they were. It didn’t matter what we did or how we did it, it was never good enough, so no matter what, we were wrong and had to be punished, which meant you had yet another excuse to rape and/or hit us. I don’t know what we did to become the brunt of your rage; I doubt we did anything. We think you just needed a scapegoat, and we were small and weak enough that we couldn’t fight back.

And then there was the time when we were three when you decided that just raping us yourself wasn’t enough; you needed to spice it up by getting your friends involved. So you orchestrated a little gang-rape with four of your cronies. I don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish that day, but it certainly couldn’t have been anything good.

Do you have any idea of how traumatic that event was for us? That one incident was so devastating, so damaging to us that you caused the creation of 12, that’s right, twelve, new alters. It was so horrific that Catherine Belinda, the core personality, decided she’d had enough of your lies and betrayals. She determined that she couldn’t stand your abuse any longer, so despite the risk and menace inherent in your threats, she resolved to tell someone, anyone, what you were doing to us.

But God and the rest of us knew that you meant business when you said you’d kill us if we told. So we all hid Catherine Belinda away and put her to sleep, and kept her that way for the next fifty years. In her place someone else was created to run things. The new alter’s name was Sarah Abigail Kuriakos, but she answered to Catherine Belinda’s name so no one would notice or suspect anything was different.

You know, all we wanted was to be accepted and loved. That’s all any child wants. Was that too much to ask? We don’t think it was, but you couldn’t even give us that. A child is a gift from God, yet you treated us like trash. A child is a reward from the Lord, but you acted like we were your personal property to kick around and beat up as you pleased. We were a small, innocent child! You were nothing more than a cowardly bully, picking on your own daughter, someone who was too small and defenseless to stand up for ourselves. If you’re going to pick on someone, pick on someone your own size!

I think the thing that hurts me more than anything else about all the horrors you visited on me/us throughout the years of my childhood is that you made it nigh unto impossible for me to have a relationship with a man, or with God. I’m terrified of men and I’m terrified of sex. As a consequence I’ve never been able to consider even going out on a date, much less anything more serious, because I might have to let him touch me, and ultimately I might have to marry and have sex with him.

Fortunately, as far as a relationship with God is concerned, God had other plans, and it’s only by His grace and mercy that I’m alive to tell this story, or that I know anything about Him at all. I owe my life to God and to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and it’s only because of His healing power that I’m able to trust Him or believe in Him. I will never be able to express enough gratitude to God for all He has done for me in setting me free from all that you did to me. One thing you should know however, is that the same God of Love who healed me won’t allow me to hate you anymore.

That’s right. Jesus loves you just as much as He loves me or anyone else, without reservation or condemnation, and because He’s healed me, He’s helped me to forgive you for everything you did to me. And yes, I have forgiven you. I don’t want revenge, I don’t desire any kind of evil to come to you, and I wish only good for you. This teeny weeny paragraph stating my forgiveness may sound a little trite, like nothing more than a bunch of platitudes after my great long letter expressing a lot of pent up rage and apparent vitriol.

In truth I was only expressing my heart and my truth as I saw it, plus this is the first time I’ve ever expressed my anger towards you all in one place and directly towards you. But my forgiveness is real and heartfelt, and the ball is now in your court. It’s your choice as to whether you will accept or reject it or not, because with my forgiveness, I’m also offering reconciliation with you and the possibility of a relationship. I don’t know if that’s something you desire, but my offer is there if you choose to accept it.

That’s all for now. I wish peace with God and health for your body and soul. I know that you now suffer from emphysema and are on 24-hour oxygen, and I wish healing for you from that as well.

Blessings and Peace,

Sarah

Well, thankfully it’s finished. As an addendum, I want to add a little bit of history to bring the story of the multiplicity aspect up to date.

As I said in the middle of the letter, at age 27, in October of 1980, I changed my name from Catherine Belinda Pfaff to Sarah Abigail Kuriakos. At the time I was only just beginning to have memories of being abused and I had no idea I was multiple. I thought I was changing my name to cut myself off from a heritage of abuse, and I thought I was choosing a new name. So I chose three names that were Bible names with really good meanings, and that meant things I had never meant to anyone before: Sarah means, “Princess,” and Sarah, of course was Abraham’s wife and the mother of Isaac. Abigail means, “a father’s joy, or a joy to the Father,” and Abigail was one of David’s wives, and a virtuous woman in the Bible. And Kuriakos means, “belonging to God” and is used twice in the New Testament.

In reality, I was already Sarah Abigail Kuriakos, but I wasn’t consciously aware of it. Everyone inside decided that the name of the body, which had been Catherine Belinda up until then, should be changed to match my name so there would be more congruence between inside and outside. It made sense. Catherine Belinda was hidden away and asleep, and had been for a long time, and would remain that way indefinitely, so it didn’t make any sense to keep using her name. It made much more sense to use my name because I was running things, so we found a lawyer amongst the people at my church, and we went to court and changed it to my name. And strangely enough, the change wasn’t at all hard to adapt to. It was like that should have been my name all along. I’d had this weird feeling for awhile that Catherine Belinda was a name that belonged to someone else ~ which turned out to be true in a strange sort of way. Plus all my friends said that Sarah Abigail fit me much better than Catherine Belinda did. Funny thing! Maybe that was because Sarah Abigail was actually my name and Catherine Belinda wasn’t.

And, being Sarah Abigail Kuriakos has made a huge difference in my life, and brought me closer to Him. Everytime I hear the names I hear their meanings, and God has used that to heal me a tiny bit everyday. Plus I’m no longer multiple. In October of 2001 I decided I wanted to seek integration, so I went to the pastor of the church I was going to at the time, and asked him if they could help me with that. I knew that the process of integration takes many years, often in excess of ten, if it’s done in therapy, and I wanted God to do the healing, not some shrink. So my pastor and some people in the church who knew of my background set up a team of prayer warriors, and they prayed for me once a month over a period of 18 months, and by the end of that time I was fully integrated. It was a wonderful thing. Instead of being many I was one ~ for the first time in my entire life! There was no longer any chaos or confusion inside. Blessed peace! Wow!! Praise God!! And the really cool thing was that the process was complete right around my fiftieth birthday. And just before the final integration was done, God woke up Catherine Belinda and brought her out of hiding so that she could be integrated into the whole along with everyone else. Amazingly, God had been watching over her the whole time, and had been causing her to grow while she was asleep, so when she came back it wasn’t a huge shock to her system, or mine. I was seeing a really good Christian therapist at the time, and she was fully supportive of the prayer group’s work.

And then there was the whole situation with Klepto, who was a little four-year-old girl who stole things because that was the only way she could get what she wanted. Of course, stealing is, and always has been, absolutely antithetical to everything I am, so when she came out and started stealing stuff from work (I was working at an arts and crafts store then), I got very upset. The first thing we did was talk to her and told her she couldn’t do this. She had to take everything back, and put it back where she got it without getting caught, because I didn’t want to lose my job. Then, on the advice of my therapist, we changed her name to Elizabeth, because Klepto as a name was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. She came out one more time in a toy store where she tried to shoplift a game. Fortunately I came out and stopped her before she could leave the store with it, but it was rather embarrassing. And then she was integrated into the whole, and was no longer a problem, thank God!

So, God gave me the most amazing and wonderful birthday gift for my fiftieth birthday, and I’ve been eternally grateful ever since. I can’t thank Him enough. Certainly I’ve had my struggles since then. There was the whole seven-year period where I was angry at God because I couldn’t understand how He could allow me to be abused. It turned out that what I really didn’t understand was about God’s sovereignty, and that I didn’t have the right to challenge it, which was what I had been doing.

And then I realized that all I really wanted to know was where God was when I was being abused. And ultimately God showed me. He showed me that He had been right there with me, protecting me by making me multiple, saving my life by creating new alters as they were needed. Each time there was an abuse incident that was severe enough to require a new alter, God put His finger on my personality in the exact spot where He wanted the split to occur. It was God who created Sarah Abigail Kuriakos, and chose her name ~ which gives the meaning of the names even more significance when I think of it in that light.

Well, I guess I’d better finish this and post it. It’s turned out to be VERY long, a lot longer than I expected, though all of it was important and needed to be said.

Until next time then…

Sep19

A Game That’s Not a Game

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I’ve been playing this online game called TrainStation on Facebook for a long time, probably a year or more. I spend too much time playing it, and I’ve had a feeling for awhile now that the Lord doesn’t want me to play it anymore. I’ve tried a number of times to stop playing it to no avail.

One time I managed to stop for a little over a week because I unfriended all the Facebook friends that were playing it with me, but I felt so uncomfortable that I ended up going back to it. I shouldn’t have allowed the physical feeling to rule over me like that, but I did.

I’ve begun to realize that I’m addicted to it, which may have been why I felt uncomfortable when I stopped playing for that week. Not a good thing!

The reason I like playing it is because it’s fun and relaxing. There’s no violence and I don’t spend any money on it. It’s just quiet fun that’s relaxing. I’ll admit there are a few times where I get frustrated because the screen moves unnecessarily in full-screen mode as my finger brushes against the trackpad when it’s not supposed to~something I can’t help. But that’s the only problem I have with it and it’s more of a technical issue with the trackpad and my straying fingers than a problem with the game.

I’m going to post what I’ve written thus far because something happened with Mom yesterday that I need to write about. Once I’m done with that I’ll come back and work more on this.

Life can be SOOO interesting at times!

July 24, 2019

This update is almost four years later. For the most part, I’m no longer playing TrainStation, but I am playing four other computer games. However, I don’t spend as much time playing them as I did while I was playing TrainStation. Additionally, the frustration I used to experience as I played any game is no longer a problem, thank God. The self-abuse is gone, hallelujah!

The fact that the self-abuse is gone is probably the biggest change, and the most welcome. Self-abuse has haunted me for many, many years, and I have longed to be free of it. I’m so grateful to God for setting me free from this besetting sin!!