Category Archives: Suffering

Aug7

God’s Definition of Good

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What is God’s definition of good?

Someone asked that question on the radio recently, and it really made me think, mostly because I’m just about positive God’s definition is different than man’s.

The Bible says,

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,” declares the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” ~ Isaiah 55:8-9, ESV.

What that tells me is that God sees things differently than we do. In addition, God is completely good, and we are the antithesis of good. The Bible says our righteousness is as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). All of which makes sense, because we’re separated from God as a result of our sin ~ and as a result of Adam and Eve’s original sin ~ thus necessitating the need for a savior. Which is why Jesus Christ came and died on the cross ~ to atone once for all for our rebellion, and pay the ransom to remove the wall of separation between us and God.

Humans may have good parts; we may do good deeds. But bottom line, we are an evil lot, and without Jesus Christ’s saving work on the cross we would have no hope of anything other than eternity in Hell.

So God, and of course Christ, are wholly other than humanity, completely separate.

With all of that said, good from God’s point of view might be seen as that which is morally pure, just, and right, and also truthful ~ in the way that Jesus is the Truth (John 14:6, Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” ~ NKJV). I capitalized Truth because it’s not the kind of truth you see in today’s culture, with moral relativism and relative truth. It’s the absolute Truth that’s found in God’s Word, and that’s embodied in Jesus Christ.

I think the concept of good is also seen in everything that’s beautiful. The Bible says,

Oh, worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness! Tremble before Him, all the earth. ~ Psalm 96:8, NKJV.

Give unto the LORD the glory due to His name; Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness. ~ Psalm 29:2, NKJV.

Not only are God and His holiness beautiful, but His creation is beautiful as well, and the world He created is chock-full of examples. In fact, His Word says that evidence of His existence can be clearly seen in His creation. It says in the book of Romans,

For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made they can clearly see His invisible qualities ~ His eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. ~ Romans 1:20, NLT.

I also think God sees suffering as good, even beautiful, as paradoxical as that may sound. Jesus’ work of salvation on the cross was the best possible good that any person could have done for humanity throughout all of eternity, and yet the agony He suffered ~ physically, emotionally, and spiritually ~ was probably as much suffering as any person has ever had to go through.

He bore the sin of the whole world in His body, and worst of all, He had to endure God’s abandonment, because God cannot look on sin, so while Jesus hung on the cross God had to turn His back on Jesus. That must have been the most agonizingly painful suffering of all for Him, and He showed it with His words,

And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means,” My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” ~ Mark 15:34, ESV.

When Jesus uttered that anguished cry He was actually quoting Psalm 22:1,

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? ~ Psalm 22:1, NIV.

Another detail of Christi’s suffering that I remembered as I was writing this post is that He actually benefitted from it as well, as everyone else did, something that I’ve never understood very well. It says in Hebrews,

While Jesus was here on earth, He offered prayers and pleadings, with a loud cry and tears, to the One who could rescue Him from death. And God heard His prayers because of His deep reverence for God. Even though Jesus was God’s Son, He learned obedience from the things He suffered. ~ Hebrews 5:7-8, NLT.

That idea has always puzzled me. Why would Jesus Christ, the Son of God, have to learn to be obedient before He could go to the cross? Maybe it was because He was human as well as divine, and the human part had to learn obedience. That makes sense to me. That I can understand.

Curiouser and more wonderful too!

His humanity taught His divinity what it meant to suffer, and how hard it was for humans to be obedient in the process.

Maybe that’s why He makes such a good High Priest!

I like to think so…

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!

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…

Oct6

O God, Let My Blood Cry Out On My Behalf!

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O earth, do not conceal my blood. Let it cry out on my behalf.” ~ Job 16:18, NLT.

Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” ~ Genesis 4:9-10, ESV.

The Lord showed me something recently. I was doing my Bible reading, which at the moment is in the book of Job. I was reading Chapter 16, and I got to verse 18, and I was reminded of Genesis 4:9-10, both passages quoted above.

God showed me from Job 16:18 that Job was praying that the earth would not conceal the blood from his wounds because he was afraid God would forget about him if it did. That reminded me of Genesis 4:9-10, where God called out Cain for murdering Abel. God told Cain that his brother’s blood was crying out from the earth, and therefore he couldn’t hide what he’d done, and especially he couldn’t hide his crime from God.

Then God showed me using Job 16:18 that the reason I had already started picking holes in my cuticles as early as age two was because I was trying to get someone, anyone, to notice that something was wrong, terribly wrong with me. Harry had already begun abusing me, even at age two, and he had already threatened to kill me if I told anyone what he was doing to me, so I couldn’t say with words that he was hurting me. I had to devise a way to communicate that I was in peril without using words. What I came up with was to pick holes in my cuticles, at times to the point of causing infections.

Unfortunately, as hard as I picked, my efforts came to naught, because no one ever caught on. And while I know people didn’t think about things like child abuse and childhood sexual abuse back in the 50’s and 60’s, much less do anything about them, the fact that no one, not one single person, paid any attention to my attempts to make known my distress makes me very sad for the child that was me back then.