Uncorked...

“The change of life is the time when you meet yourself at the crossroads and you decide whether you want to be honest or not before you die.” ~Katharine Butler Hathaway



I had been totally alienated from my feelings. That's how I protected myself all those years. It took me forever to feel a feeling, much less express it. People would say, “How do you feel?” and I'd say, “Just fine...” It was like learning a different language. It was a process of getting things intellectually, then at a feeling level, and finally being able to act from that position. I began to compartmentalize my life. The parts I kept to myself, the parts my family was allowed to see, and the other parts no one was allowed to see, and the happy face when I went to work. I was trapped in my own body.

I am learning to honor all my feeling, especially the anger and the outrage. One day, a friend of mine said, “You know that you created this because you are the creator of your universe and your soul set this energy into motion. So take responsibility for it and quit mewing about it. Just forgive and move on.”

I became so pissed! I was choked with anger and lashed out like a cornered animal. To this day, we have not totally mended our relationship. Through my sessions, I've learned when you're feeling anger, you need to honor that. If you try to get to the forgiveness before you get to the anger, you're going to fuck the whole thing up. This is exactly what I had done. You have to work from where you are in your gut, not from where you think you should be in your head.

I went through revenge periods. I imagined all kinds of horrible wicked things that resulted in torture, a shotgun aimed at their balls, or a Molotov cocktail thrown at their vehicles. Two wrongs cannot make something right, were the words echoing from within my mind. If I didn't feel love for the child in me who had been raped, I would not have had this internal outrage. Sometimes I sat and felt so much compassion for one of my abusers, I wept. I am letting it all come right on through, and the more I allow all of it to come up, the more I find myself moving to loving myself. The more I tried to block the rage, the more I stay stuck. I reconcile all of this by saying I trust the process. I trust the validity of my outrage. The outrage is because I honor and value and love life.

Circumstances in life change. In retrospect, I owe my daughter my life. From the time my daughter was born, my instincts kicked in, and I was able to nurture her and protect her. Somehow, my love and my desire that this child would not be hurt were strong enough to overcome the obstacles that stopped me from doing other things to harm myself. I literally can say I owe my daughter my life because she awakened that ability in me to mother. Time and time again, when for myself I would have chose to die, I chose to live for her. I knew that somehow it had to stop with me and that I would not pass it on to her. Yet, I didn't seem to know what the “it” was. Everything would have been better if I'd known all of this forty years ago. The one thing I couldn't give my daughter was my happiness, my love of myself. I was able to give her a love for herself, a feeling for her strength, but there was a lot of joy we were never able to share. I weep for that.