Dear Reader:

I’m  Grace, but inside of me are both victims and survivors of child abuse.  This is where I write about  my life…both past and present, and sometimes I get them confused and live my past in my present.  I am trying to work through all that and that’s what I do in therapy and here, on my blog…and subsequent pages included here, on this website.  

My life is much like a roller coaster with the highest of highs and deafening lows.   If you care to join me I guarentee you  it will be one hell of a ride, but if you don’t think you can handle it,  you should bow out now because much of it is not pretty.  I write the truth.  The truth about me, my feelings, my struggles  both in and out of therapy.   There are parts of me who are childlike and when they write, it might make you sad.  There are parts of me who are angry and sarcastic…they use colorful language and could perhaps anger and offend you.  The humorous parts of me will make you laugh, but the ones in pain may make you cry.   All of Grace will write and you will find a myriad of feelings and thoughts, some of them organized and some of them a mess.  But they are all me. 

Like most survivors of child abuse I suffer from complex PTSD  and all that goes with it!  Including but not limited too, dissociation, flashbacks and body memories, attachment issues, nightmares, insomnia, and depression.  There are times when I feel hopeless and filled with shame and the voices of the past still keep me trapped there, unable to escape.  In order to cope I have enlisted several “friends”: self-harm, suicide ideation, eating disorders and much more!   

 I have a *team* of clinicans who have been enlisted to help me, but much of the time it still feels overbearing  for both them and for me, and I then resort to using the maladaptive coping measures I learned long ago…some say these coping skills are self-destructive but I would challenge that because for many years they have kept me alive.  

HISTORY: As a child, I was cruelly abused by my biological mother and my step-father until the time I was around 14 years old.  I was never introduced to the concepts of love, safety, or trust ~ I am now a grown woman and I have not been able to make the psychological connection of many life affirming ideological constructs.  It’s quite painful to admit. 

I was born a bastard child to a deadbeat drunk; the proof is on my crumpled up birth certificate where her name is scrawled and the space for the father remains blank. I have never met my biological father, but I cannot imagine he had more evil in him than my step-father.  Growing up, all of my mother’s actions toward me were conditioned on the sheer shameful fact, or evidence of my existence, and of course, I was an unwanted outcome to the undignified and regretful coupling with my biological father.  I believe the fact that I was allowed to survive at all was the product of the lawful consequences of allowing a child in your care to die, and not concerned with upbringing. 

Shame and humiliation were so early on directed at and heaped onto me that I seem to have made the leap in logic that that was what life was supposed to for me.  Imagine a life where shame and humiliation are so prevalent and unremitting, that a child, at least on a conscious level, could not conceive of any other condition to apply to herself.  I am still wrestling with those ghosts.  My brain not yet able to come to comforting answers to questions I am barely able to frame.   

Born an unwanted, unloved, child, I was not given the opportunity to engage and integrate normal life-affirming morals and values; I was instead taught that I was born to be used and abused, I was nothing, I did not matter.  I survived the abuse, but I never learned to live.  As an adult I could never admit the enormous amount of atrocities forced upon me as a child, and rather than seek help, I instead found myself entangled in untold numbers of dysfunctional situations that, since I knew of no other choice, were incorporated into my experience database. 

I led a life of denial, deflecting my pain and anger, my humiliation and shame; I was caught in a toxic conundrum of hopelessness, self doubt, loneliness and self hatred.   I spent my 20’s and and early 30’s running from something I could not see, something I could never admit to running from.  That is not to say that I was unaffected by the unconscious knowledge of the truth of my denial and flight ~ it was always dogging my heels.  But I was not able to face, understand or defend myself from my past, better to run and deny because the truth is a journey into madness. 

 I am one person, but I am not a whole person…I am fragmented and shattered into many pieces.  There are parts of me who are still victims, still struggling from the after-effects of the abuse but there are other parts of me who are quite functional and are true survivors.

I write to express my pain.  I hope to heal and integrate all the parts of me by allowing all parts to write and express the pain they experience.  I am writing to free myself from the pain of past abuse…I write to Save Grace……and to help others like me know that you are not alone, really, you never were. 

~ Grace

Love makes the world go round…but, sadly, abuse shatters it into a million sharp little pieces that cut you when you try to put yourself back together again.