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LynnS
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Ellie's Journal
Ellie's Journal is a place to find comfort in those moments when the wind is howling too fiercely or the night is dark and you feel lost.
A veteran poster, Ellie's words have lifted flagging spirits and soothed troubled minds since she first gained her freedom from her abuser in May 2003 and found her way into our forums a few weeks later. Within these pages you will find a comfortable place to rest, a peaceful oasis on your journey and inspiring thoughts to ease your footsteps out of the past into the future of your choosing.
Ellie's stories reflect her gentle spirit and her heartfelt belief that our healing begins with the acceptance of the truth of who an abuser truly is. When we can say without doubt, "He is the lie." or "She is the lie." healing begins. In our acceptance of the truth of who they are and what they did, we turn our backs on their lies and deceit as we turn into ourselves to find where we lost our truth while falling into their abuse.
In these pages, Ellie invites you to walk away from abuse and claim all that you are meant to be so that you can learn to live in freedom from the past. You will be encouraged to tackle life's challenges as you face your feelings about yourself, your relationship with others and the hurdles life throws your way. Each weekly article will be filled with insight to inspire you to take another step, ideas on how to reclaim yourself and your life, and comforting thoughts to carry you through your day.
Sit back, sip your coffee and enjoy. Ellie's words are perfect for dipping into, for savouring syllable by syllable, word by word, or for simply soaking up as you breathe a sigh of relief that you have come home to find yourself surrounded by friends.
DO NOT COPY THIS PAGE
COPYRIGHT BY ELLIE
Last edited by femfree, Mar/5/2009, 10:49 pm
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 10:49 am
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LynnS
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Re: Ellie's Journal
Ellie's Journey
Imagine. My life without him.
When I was with him I couldn’t imagine my life without him.
In the beginning, his love made me feel alive. My senses awoke and I became hypersensitive to the air, to sounds, to sights. I looked at the world with the eyes of a new born child. I fell in love, minute by minute, day by day, with me as he saw me, with the world as he saw it, with life as he painted it. He completed me. Coloured in the grays of my world with the multi-hued wonder of his painter’s palette filled with the sparkling colours of the rainbow. He became the dot above my ‘I’, the exclamation mark after each breath.
His words soaked into my parched mind, filling the crevices of pain etched into the soil of my memory where I had become lost in my search for my one true love, fearful that I would never find him. And there he was. My soul mate. My Prince. The only one who saw me. Heard me. Knew me. Upon his first tender kiss my heart beat in time with his and nestled into the inviting warmth of finding its home within him. Without hesitation my heart burst open and he settled in to claim it as his own. I offered him all that I was and he kept taking me deeper and deeper.
In those first heady days of our affair, I seeped my body in his touch, laid bare my heart, and peeled back my skin to reveal my bones stripped clean of all defences. He touched me. Inside and out. And I lay still beneath his hands in breathless wonder of finding myself where I belonged beneath his touch as he memorized my skin, my face, every curve and arc and angle of my body.
I mapped his face upon my fingertips; the bone above his eyes, the furrow between his brows, the mole upon his cheek, the fleshy skin of his earlobes. I rubbed the scent of him, the touch, the textures into my flesh. I embedded the feel of him into my fingertips, the look of him into my mind. In those moments when he was gone, I would touch my fingertips to my lips and smell him, feel him, hear him murmuring his soft, gentle words of love that filled my heart with the song of our love everlasting.
Without him, I ached. Without him, I yearned for his return to fill my empty arms. I waited in moist and tender expectation of his touch reverently moving over me, caressing my body, my soul, my heart. My lips would kiss his palm and I would feel him growing inside me, moving me closer to that place where the world grew eerily silent and I lost myself in the ecstasy of knowing I was nothing without his love guiding me back to life.
I was love. In love. Completely loved. Immersed in his love I could not imagine my life without him.
He promised me I would never have to know the emptiness of my life before him. I would never have to be without him, ever again. He told me he was mine and I was his forever and a day. Through time eternal, happily ever after.
He told me everything I wanted to hear and drowned me in the ever lasting promise of his love. He would never let me go he whispered.
I believed him.
Besotted, immersed in the hypnotic waves of pleasure rippling through my body as he spun a magic thrall within my mind, I could not see the terror lurking behind the empty promises of his undying love. I could not see the fire burning. I could not feel the heat rising. I blinded myself to the truth and basked in the afterglow of love bursting upon my dream come true. My hungry heart feasted on his promises of endless sunrises and golden moments forever-after.
I looked away from his anger. I looked away from his abuse and turned my back on the pain of loving him because I could not walk away from him. I could not see my life without him.
In my refusal to see the truth, he continued to spin his lies and I became deaf and blind to the truth revealed in his rage simmering at the edges of my dream.
He was lying with every word. Deceiving me with every action.
He hit me with the truth as I lay exposed upon the soiled sheets of our promises to love one another in sickness and in health, until death do us part. He shred my love with his ice cold hands. He ripped away the gossamer curtain of my belief in happily ever after. With one deft thrust, he pierced my hopes with the knife-edge of his disdain and I fell apart beneath the ruthless blows of his anger pummeling me into submission. My heart was broken.
Look at you, he screamed at my huddled body curled in upon itself, desperately trying to shelter my heart within the cavity of my chest from the truth of his scornful glare. You are not worthy of my love.
I believed him.
My skin stretched taut across my battered and bruised body. My mind freefalling through time pouring bitter tears through my veins in a futile attempt to fill the shattered vessel of my heart. I could not stop the bleeding. Frightened I would die, terrified he would leave me behind to drown in the brackish waters of my fears, I lay bare my pride and pleaded with him to take me back. One more time. To bring me home again to that place where I belonged within his heart.
And he relented.
Again and again and again. Relentlessly, he took me back. He brought me home to that place where I would sigh with relief to find my heartache stilled beneath the tenderness of his touch, for just one moment, again and again and again. Until the next time when he would rage and I would plead for him to take me back so that I could show him with my love that I would never leave him.
How could I leave a love so true as the one that had blossomed within my mind when first he had planted the seed of his deceit in the springtime of our affair?
It was the lie of that love I nurtured as he continued with each relentless thrust and parry of his uncompromising belief that I was his to have and to hold. My mind reeled back in horror at his words and clung in desperation to my hope that love would blossom again if only I could hold onto the promises I believed in. Holding on, losing ground, I became diminished in my capacity to hold out against the truth hardening my heart against his furious insistence, it was all my fault. In my shame and self-denigrating blame, I lost hold of who I was and held onto the nothing he told me I would be without him.
In time, my voice grew fainter as I sank beneath the weight of my fear. Pinned by invisible bonds of terror, his words held me in silent captivity in the pain of loving him. While outside the narrow corridor of my life with him, a cacophony of angry voices demanded that I find my life without him.
I couldn't find it. He was always there. Haunting me. Calling me. Coercing me to move deeper into his web. Eventually, even the voices grew silent. They couldn't understand why I wouldn’t leave. I couldn't tell them the truth. I knew they wouldn't believe me.
I could not imagine my world without him. Couldn't they see? Leaving him would be the death of me. He held my heart in the vice grip of his lies and I had lost the key to set it free. I had lost my way in the darkness for I was his to have and to hold in the fear that I could not find my life without him.
Why did I stay?
He told me he would never let me go.
He told me if I left, I would fall.
He told me I was nothing without him.
He told me leaving him would kill me.
I believed him.
Until I turned my back upon is lies and walked away from the lure of his untrue love reeling me into the despair of living in the depths of his darkness.
Away from him, his lies were revealed in the light of each new day. Away from him, I no longer searched for my truth within him and found it rising with my spirit within me. Away from him, I found my belief in me. In my life without him.
Without him, as the sun bursts across the horizon and I awaken to another day in freedom, I breathe a sigh of relief that I have come home to where I belong and am free to imagine the beauty of my life without him.
October, 2005
Copyright MLG
Last edited by LynnS, Oct/25/2008, 11:04 am
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 10:58 am
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LynnS
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Re: Ellie's Journal
When Goodbye is Never Spoken
For such a little word, good-bye carries a mighty wallop.
Good-bye can mean, see you in a while, or see you in a year. It can carry us into the night on the hope of tomorrow or it can sweep all hope away as we look back and see there will never be a next time, another day, or a new tomorrow.
For those who have journeyed into the valley of the N or P, good-bye is a word fraught with the fear that once spoken it can never be returned. In its silence we fear the door is always open as we stand upon the precipice of tomorrow without him. In our sorrow, it lays frozen upon our tongues, our minds numb in the fear it might slide out on a breath of air and change our lives forever. Terrified we might slip, we pack our hopes and dreams into that one little word and stuff our pride and dignity into the cracks of our pain seeping in beneath the door held fast against our fear. And all the while, we search for the perfect last words that will either make it all right or make him hear us, just this once, before he slithers off into the dark from whence he came. And as we flounder in the depths of empty words and promises, we pray that there will never be a time to say good-bye but rather welcome back, I've missed you. Spiraling into the darkness of the painfully long good-bye they began when they said, hello, we silently hold onto the word that will set us free and stumble through the words of begging them to please not say it.
But destiny waits for no man, and the door we thought we held so firmly closed is always open, until, eventually we must face the reality that we will never have the chance to say our fond farewells. They have already left. Gone in search of new tomorrows. Of some other happily ever after, without us.
In their passing, we are left holding the shreds of our battered hearts in the basket of our dreams, frozen in time. Alone, forlorn, we whisper, good-bye, into the empty space that lays before us, hoping they will hear the soft promise of our hopes they will find 'out there', that which they could never find in us. We peer into the darkness of the lengthening shadows, our tears puddling around our feet, falling into the river of our sorrow. We flail about in desperation searching for solid ground as our fear of drowning rises with our tears as we cry out for one last chance to say good-bye. It’s such a little word but it keeps us stuck on the dream of wanting them back so that we can say, Good-bye. In the end, there are no words to answer our despair, just the good-bye we whisper to ourselves as we pick at the scab of our wounds that never seem to heal.
To begin again, we must accept that we will never find the key to unlock the secret door of their understanding. It resides somewhere in the dark, beyond the edges of the light. But, beneath the scabby, jagged-edge scar of our disbelief, new skin is forming. If we leave it alone long enough to heal from the inside out, we will understand that it was our shadow we feared, for in their darkness our light was blocked.
In time, one day not yet here, we will lift our heads and see, the sun is shining. Into it's beckoning warmth we will step into the light of finally knowing, the only way to say good- bye to what never was, is to accept it never will be.
October, 2005
Copyright MLG
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:06 am
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LynnS
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Re: Ellie's Journal
The Heart Rock--Part 1
This morning, the pooch and I went for a walk in the rolling hills of our favourite park. The sky was laden with billowy clouds, variations on a theme of grey. Gold and yellow and auburn prairie grasses rustled in the chilly October breeze that swept down from the north. I imagined the wind whispering its stories into the barren branches of the trees that lined the trail as the pooch bounded ahead of me, her nose pressed to the ground, on the scent of prey. It was a windblown, shape-shifting morning. Leaves swirled in the air, a hint of frost nipped at my cheeks. It was a morning made for sweeping thoughts and soaring spirits.
My mind swept back to a time when the P roamed freely the streets and avenues of this city at the foot of the Rockies. To a time when I believed he lay dying, with only the mechanical assistance of a life support system keeping his body away from crossing over into the land beyond this realm where life had blossomed in perfection upon his tender kisses. At that time, I would wander these hills and cry and plead with the angels above to set him free; the burden of his ailing heart weighed heavily on my mind, the thought of his body wasting away on life support took my breath away. I felt numb. Confused. Frightened.
What a difference time makes to broken hearts and wounded spirits.
He’s been missing now for 4 months. Disappeared. Headed west the police say. On the lam. In violation of his parole. Racing westwards as we had done when he was on the run just 2 and a half years ago and he had taken me along with the promise of letting me go once he had fled the country.
As I walked I looked down at the stones scattered across the trail and spied a deep red rock. I knelt down to inspect it. It was heart shaped. Smooth. Glossy. I picked it up. Felt its coolness in my palm. I wrapped my fingers around it. I rubbed my thumb against its smooth surface, into the ‘v’ pulling the edges into its heart.
I used to collect heart rocks. I’d send them to the P when he was lying on his death bed. I’d ask his minions to ensure that one was placed in his hand everyday. “Even a heart of stone can be warmed in loving hands,” I’d told the P when first we met and he had told me of his ailing heart. I would place my hand upon his chest and will my strength into his body in the hopes that his heart would heal beneath my touch and he would never leave me. He told me my touch was magic. I wanted to believe him.
Then one day I walked into his office and found him sitting behind his desk. Only hours before I had held my cellphone to my ear and heard the sibilant hiss of his life support system breathing for him. I had been walking in the park that day too. I had held a heart rock in my hand as I whispered words of encouragement into the silence of his dying heart and when the call ended, I had cried.
Yet, there he was, breathing freely, sitting behind his desk. I wanted to find my heart rocks. I wanted to take back that which I had given in love. I pounded on his chest, struggled with him to see if the heart rocks I had lovingly held in my hands and warmed for him were somewhere in his desk.
“Ellie”, he said as he grabbed my wrists and tried to keep me from opening the carved wooden keepsake box on his desk. “They’re not here. I have them in a safe place.”
“Where?” I demanded as I tried to get around him to check the drawers in his desk.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said guiding me back to the chair on the other side of his desk.
The OW was there too. She sat in her chair and watched this part of the drama unfold. I couldn’t look at her, even though we’d come here together. I still didn’t want to accept her existence. I didn’t understand how she could be sitting there if our love had been so true.
Her mother had called me earlier that day. “Hi.” The stranger’s voice on the phone said. “You don’t know me. I’m a friend of S. He suggested I give you a call. I’d like to have coffee with you to talk about something.”
I wasn’t really listening to the words. S was a former boyfriend. Since meeting the P I had terminated all contact with him as the P didn’t like the idea of our friendship. I had seen him once in the intervening months and he had asked about the P. He’s dying, I told him. He promised to pray for him.
“What would you like to talk about,” I asked, thinking she wanted to talk to me about a consulting job as S tended to refer clients to me still.
“I’d prefer to talk about it when we meet,” she said.
That wasn’t unusual so I agreed to meet with her that afternoon.
“Can’t you meet this morning?” she asked.
A thought flickered through my mind, she’s pushy. “No,” I replied. “I have a meeting and need to get ready for it.”
That afternoon should never have come I would later think. I should have said no. I should have walked away as guilt and shame and the Ps lies cascaded into me. But I did go. And I fell.
“S tells me the man you love is dying. On life support, “the woman said. “My daughter is also in love with a man who’s dying. She talks to him on a cell phone. He’s on life support in a hospital in California. I’ve told her it’s all a lie. I’ve told her he’s using her. I’ve told her he’s the same man you told S about. She won’t believe me. She’s been crying for days. She won’t eat. She’s desperate. Please. Help me. Tell her the truth.”
The truth? I heard her words and tried to wrap my mind around their meaning. But they hung in the air before me. An impenetrable wall blocking all sound. Incomprehensible. Flat. Unemotional. Empty words. What was the truth? She must be lying.
“No.” I said. “That can’t be true.”
I had to prove her wrong. The P had warned me ‘others’ would try to fill my mind with lies. I had to find the truth. I agreed to meet her daughter.
Driving behind her, on my way to that fateful meeting, I wanted to call one of the Ps minions and tell him what I was doing. Ask him to tell me it wasn’t true. But she had warned me not to call. “He’ll tell you it’s all lies.” I didn’t believe her but was too afraid to test the truth. I had to find out for myself.
I walked into the front door of the woman’s house and her daughter stood in the hallway waiting. She was very pretty. Younger then me. Dark hair like mine. Big smile. Slim. Her blue eyes were puffy with tears. I opened my wallet and pulled out a photo of the P.
“Is this him?” I asked.
She took the photo. Held it tightly. Her hands shook. She passed it back to me without a word. She didn’t have to say anything. Her eyes told the truth. Wide. Frightened. Tears welling up over the lids and spilling down her cheeks.
I didn’t know what to say. I moved into the living room. Sat down on the couch and put the photo back in my wallet. She left the room. I sat silently while her mother paced the room, cursing and swearing.
“I knew the rotten bastard was too good to be true. I knew it. How could he do this? How could he hurt her like this?”
I didn’t have any answers. I could feel my heart turning to stone within me. My chest hurt. I couldn't think. I couldn't grasp what was happening. The young woman came back. In her hands she held a stack of cards and letters. She handed them to me. I recognized many of them. They were the same cards he had sent to me.
“Maybe he got a discount on volume sales.” I quipped as I read the words of love he wrote to her that were the same one’s he’d written to me.
Smile for me my love and my heart smiles back.
Last night, I made a wish on my wishing star, but I know it didn’t come true…cause if it did, you’d be holding me right now instead of this card!!
Honesty…beauty…trust…respect…understanding… all the wonders of the world are mine because of you.
“He’s alive,” the OW said. “He’s here.”
“No.” I whispered. “That can’t be. I just spoke to him.”
“On life support. Right?” she asked pointedly.
I nodded my head. (cont.)
October, 2005
Copyright MLG
Last edited by femfree, Mar/5/2009, 10:44 pm
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:09 am
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LynnS
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Re: Ellie's Journal
The Heart Rock-Part 2
The mother stopped her pacing, spun around and grabbed the letters and cards from my hands.
“Lies. Lies. All lies.” She said. “I saw him drive by me. He was in his white Range Rover. He’s here.” And she threw the cards onto the coffee table. Some of them slipped off onto the floor. No one picked them up.
“I was at his office this morning,” the OW said. “I sat on the hill across from the parking lot and watched. His Range Rover is there.”
I didn’t want it to be true. It couldn’t be true. I had come expecting to meet the OW. I’d always held a fear that I was not worthy of his love deep within me. And now it was true. He loved another. He hadn’t had the courage to tell me he didn’t love me. I had come expecting to have my hopes of love everlasting shattered, but I had not come expecting to find his imminent death a lie.
“No.” I said. “He wouldn’t do this to me. He couldn’t.”
The OW laughed. A note of hysteria in her voice. “Of course he would. He is doing it. He’s playing us for fools. He’s laughing at us right now. Him and his minions.”
“No.” I whispered. “He wouldn’t.” I was wrong. He would. He did.
We walked into his office a short while later. The OW and me. Two women scorned. Fooled. Betrayed.
He sat at his desk. His minions around him. He looked at us in surprise and then a flicker of something else swept through his eyes. A glint of pleasure. A look of satisfaction. I shook my head. It couldn’t be. I remember Steve, the one with whom I had most contact look sheepishly at me as he slunk from the room with the others to leave the three of us alone.
The P got up, moved from the far side of his desk and closed the door. He walked back, stopped beside me and touched my hair.
“You look good,” he whispered, his eyes looking deeply into mine. I stared into the depths of his, trying to see the man who was dying in this living, breathing apparition.
The OW made a noise. He broke eye contact with me. He looked at her and said, “You look wonderful too.”
I sat and shook my head. My mind screaming inside me No! No! No! But my words were frozen on my tongue. My heart was cold. I could not speak.
The P sat down behind his desk. Leaned back. Looked at both of us. “Well. This changes things.”
But it didn’t really. Change things. Until the end. But that was to be three years later. At the time, I tried to shut the door. He kept forcing it open. Again and again and again as I took to hiding in darkened closets to avoid the truth of the terror he surrounded me with and the fear erupting in my stone, cold heart.
“Your daughters lives are in danger”, he said. “You went to the police. They are pulling apart my life. The evil men are angry.”
“Please tell me why”, I kept asking.
“I did it for you.” He said. “I had to keep you and your daughters safe.”
I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand. I wanted him to help me. I wanted him to tell me why. But he never did. Never could.
“Not yet.” He said. “All will be revealed but I must tread carefully. I cannot let them use what you did to destroy me and you.”
Lies.
“It’s too risky. The less you know the safer you will be.”
Lies.
“Trust me, Ellie. You must trust me. I will not let harm come to you and your daughters. But you must do as I say. The evil men are lurking. Watching. We cannot be too careful.”
Why I asked again.
It was the why that almost killed me. I wanted to know why. And there was no why that could explain away his betrayal. His lies. His deceit. The why is what I needed to leave behind in order to get beyond his control. But I couldn’t do it. I could not let go of the why. I wanted to believe there was a reason for all the pain and fear and terror.
I wanted to believe he didn’t do it just because. But he did. He did it simply because he could. Because he had to in order to keep alive the image of who he wanted me to believe he could be so that I would not see who he really was. The lie.
I stayed focussed on why and ignored the lies. It took me three and a half more years to find the answer.
He lied.
And I believed him when he said, his love would set me free. I believed him when he said I was worthy of his love. I believed him when he told me, he would never hurt me.
He lied and I wanted to know why.
This morning I held the heart rock in my hand, looked up into the sky and laughed out loud. The pooch, startled by my sudden laughter came prancing back to me. I spun about, my arms flung wide, the heart rock secure in my hand.
I wanted to heal his ailing heart. I poured my love into his stone cold heart and for a moment, he felt its warmth. But he could not hold onto it forever. Why? Because his heart was not true.
Like the heart rock laying warm upon my palm, his heart could only feel my warmth as long as I was touching him.
A heart rock is just a stone.
A stone cold heart feels warmth when held in loving hands but it feels the chill as soon as it is left alone. I wanted to love freely. And he wanted to hold my love captive within him. He wanted to make believe his love was real and I wanted to believe his love was true.
Today, my heart breathes warmly within me, no matter where I am, no matter who I'm with. My heart protects me. It keeps me strong. It guides me lovingly through my day without fear a heart rock will be anything other than a piece of stone.
I dropped the heart rock into my pocket and carried on with my walk, my heart filled with joy. In front of me, leading the way, the pooch continued to prance in anticipation of the wonders she would find upon the trail ahead.
Copyright MLG 2005
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:10 am
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LynnS
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Re: Ellie's Journal
Awakening From the Deep Sleep
When I was with him, I waited. Every day. Day in. Day out. I waited. Breathless. Expectant. Frightened. I waited.
For something. Someone. Somebody to stop the craziness. Something. Someone. Somebody to make it all ‘go away’. To awaken me from the nightmare of his abuse disguised as love and make the pain stop. Make the terror end.
But everyday. Day in. Day out. It was there. Waiting.
The terror. The horror. The pain. And so, I pushed down my fears and my anxiety and sleepwalked through my day in hopeful anticipation of awakening to a better day, tomorrow.
With him.
It never came. In its absence I fell into the big sleep of the abused. That time and place where each breath evaporated into thin air and I walked in numbing silence through my never ending story of searching for meaning in someone else’s bad behaviour, someone else’s arms.
When first I met him, I thought he was my shortcut to happiness. I thought he was my dream of true love everlasting come true. In his unholy embrace, I got lost on the road to hell and told myself I had no choice but to believe him when he said he was the one who held all the answers. He was the one who would make it all better. To make it happen, I let go of the power I had lived my life in fear of claiming and bought into the myth of his make-believe. He was all that I would ever need to live, happily ever after.
But, happily ever after never came. I wasn’t happy with him and in the end, I didn’t want to live.
Happily, I was given a chance to end it.
And I did. After he was gone.
While in it, though, I never saw that I could end it. I never accepted I could – confront his lies. Leave him when the abuse overwhelmed me. Make it stop. Because, even before I met him, I never accepted I had the power – to make my dreams come true. To create my own happiness. To fill my hungry heart from within, without losing myself to another.
While with him, in a last ditched effort to lighten the load lest I sink beneath the weight of my despair, I jettisoned components of my life. I couldn’t work. I quit my job. I couldn’t support my daughters. They went to live with their father. I couldn’t see my life free of him. I threw away rational thought and buried my pain beneath my belief that he would save me.
With the desperation of a balloonist casting overboard those items that threatened to crash his fragile craft upon the rocks below, I manically let go of responsibility for taking an active role in my own life as I attempted to float above my pain. I did anything to stay aloft. To fly above the angst. The terror. To keep myself from feeling the enormous cost of giving up on me and giving into him. I focused on the futility of doing anything by immersing myself in doing nothing. I held his disorderly conduct close to my heart so that I could remain exempt from taking action to end the pain ripping my heart apart.
And through it all, I waited. For someone. Something to save me.
I prayed to the angels. To God. To anyone who would listen to please stop it. To make it stop. To help me. I prayed and relinquished responsibility to take a step to help myself. I told myself I was helpless. Lost. Frozen. I convinced myself I had no power and I believed me.
Two years, five months after gaining my freedom, I still wait in anticipation of my life beginning.
I wait for that moment to appear that says, this is it. Here’s my life. Isn’t it beautiful?
Underlying my anticipatory mode is a deeply buried truth that reveals itself in my passive voice. In my waiting for life to happen. In my not taking steps in the right direction to reach my goals. To attain the summit of my dreams. To step into the void and fly.
And with every moment of inaction, my goals drift further from fulfillment as I waver between taking that leap that will save me from living a life mired in inertia as I cling to the fear of never being all that I am meant to be.
Keeping me from stepping forward today are the same truths that dragged me so deeply into the quagmire of his abuse long ago. It is these truths that kept me looking for myself throughout my life in someone else’s needy arms, in someone else’s dreams, in someone else’s voice. These truths kept me believing someone else held the key to my happiness. To my fulfillment.
The truth is, I feel helpless.
Helpless in my life. Helpless in my power. Helpless to be all of me.
This morning, as I journalled, I asked myself, where does this sense of helplessness come from?
The answer enlightened me, and, as long as I have the courage to step into it and move through my fear of what I found, the truth will free me.
My truth is founded on voices from the past. Voices from a childhood spent yearning to be heard, to be noticed, to be acknowledged. They are my mother’s voice. My father’s silence. Voices long forgotten. They are founded in my belief that I could never be enough of what anyone else wanted. Even though, what they wanted was more than I could fathom. My helplessness is founded in my belief that I needed to live according to someone else’s standards, someone else’s dream.
My truth is found in my belief that I was helpless. And, because I feared claiming the power that would dispel the myth of my powerlessness, I did nothing. I skimmed the surface of my life, going through the motions without truly believing this was my life to live. Fearlessly. Impassioned. Passionate about life. Passionate about me.
It’s time to grow up.
My father has passed on. My mother remains locked within her mind, spinning tales of make believe that reassure her that nothing changes. Especially life today. For the past is comforting in her mind for in the past, she can live without fear of ever having to take responsibility for her pain today.
There’s no pleasing them now.
It’s time to please me.
The voices of the past are irrelevant. Guardians of the threshold of my future, they taunt me to dare to take this step into the unknown, to let go of my fears and leap. They challenge me to ‘do it’ as I tentatively step into the challenge of claiming my life for me.
The voices of the past remain silent when I move forward, but I am clinging to my helplessness in fear of letting go.
The truth hurts. It catches my breath in my chest. It pushes my mind into the corners of the room, somewhere up there, high above my pain.
But the truth will set me free. The truth will unchain me from the past, if I am fearless enough to face it without judging myself for having waited so long for someone else, anyone else, to come and set me free.
This morning, as I looked at the words written upon the page I realized, my waiting time is over.
It’s time.
Time to pick up the mantle of my power. To step into my hero shoes that have waited in anticipation of my realization that there will never be a better fit than right now. A better time to step into my truth and fly.
It’s time to put my fears to rest. Time to claim my place within my life without fear that I shall fall into the void left behind by voices that have finally found their place in time where they belong. The past.
I have waited my life for this moment. Waited for that time when the stars aligned, when Jupiter met Mars, or Pluto collided with Venus.
It’s time to quit waiting and to take action.
There is no better time than now. No better time to quit making excuses for not making my dreams come true. My time is now and there’s no time like now to turn off the faucet of my neediness to let the past control my today and keep me from being all that I am meant to be.
It’s time.
Copyright 2005
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:19 am
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LynnS
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Re: Ellie's Journal
The Mother of My Dreams--Part 1
When I was young my mother often told me, her voice querulous and foreboding, “One day you’ll have a daughter just like you and you’ll understand how much you’ve hurt me.”
It was a mystery to me. That suggestion of my hurting my mother. I didn’t want to hurt her. I wanted to love her and to know she loved me.
Her words haunted me throughout my growing years. With every one of my perceived transgressions her commentaries on my disappointing behaviour were carved into my mind as permanently as a brand scorched onto a calf’s flank. With each passing year, I repeated her words with the fervour of a penitent crawling her way up the stairs to Fatima and praying for absolution from on high.
“You have to do it your way.”
“You never listen to me.”
“You don’t love me.”
“You don’t talk to me.”
“Why can’t you be like your sisters?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
I imagined her words etched in gothic script like an epitaph on a tombstone. Even though, she often reminded me, she would never rest in peace because she was damned to eternal unrest. All because, even in death, she would worry about me, the daughter who didn’t love her and who refused to make her dreams come true by being the person she wanted me to be.
In moments of sadness or confusion over my latest inexplicable wrong-doing that had caused her pain, I would slip into her words and remind myself that there was no sense in trying; any relationship with my mother was doomed. I accepted my fate. My destiny was cast upon her unassailable truth. I was the imperfect daughter she had never wanted me to be.
And then fate stepped in and turned the pages of memory to reveal an unwritten story awaiting the imprint of someone who would change my life. In the innocence of my daughters’ birth the waters coursed over the dam holding time in place and broke the back of my belief that all I needed to feel complete was the mother of my dreams.
Becoming a mother had never been high on my list of ‘5,342 things I want to do before I die’. In fact, not becoming a parent had been one of the few things my former husband and I had managed to agree on. Our divorce was the second thing. But that was several years after our daughters’ birth and an expected outcome of our discord and my dissatisfaction of our life as it was versus the different life I wanted it to be and the unchanging life he hoped to cling to.
“Children change your life,” he said when once I’d asked if he ever wanted to have any little bundles of joy running around the house. “And I like our life the way it is.”
I suppose I agreed. Though it’s more likely I simply took his words as an expression of our life and how it should be and never questioned my own ambiguous feelings around parenting.
I thought it was a moot point anyway. Having children wasn’t supposed to be something my body was capable of conceiving. At least according to my doctor who, upon my second ectopic pregnancy, had told me that the likelihood of my becoming pregnant was about as great as my chances of becoming a saint. I didn’t tell him about my mother’s expectations of sainthood based upon her assertions that the burden of having me in her life was worthy of the Vatican’s blessing of her canonization. He might have lowered the odds of pregnancy had I done so.
In the end, his odds and biological dictates were irrelevant. In my mid-thirties, I gave birth to two healthy daughters, eighteen months apart, and ended any future child-bearing repercussions by undergoing a tubal ligation. Secure in the safety of my womb cut off from future impregnations, I leaped into motherhood. I embraced the state of life’s new born possibilities with the zealousness of a convert to Christianity throwing themselves into the baptismal waters of their rebirth.
My husband was not as ardent in his acceptance of the parenting state. He loved our daughters, but, felt constrained by demands of the after-birth of their often messy lives. Torn between his desire to not change and my insistence change was necessary to parenting, he kept losing ground in his mission to garnish his post-child life with the same unencumbered freedom of his life b.c. (before children). (cont.)
October, 2005
Copyright MLG
Last edited by femfree, Mar/5/2009, 10:46 pm
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:22 am
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LynnS
Head Administrator
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Registered: 10-2008
Posts: 1498
Karma: 81 (+81/-0)
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Re: Ellie's Journal
The Mother of My Dreams--Part 2
The rift between us grew as I expounded on the virtues of the two blessed infants filling my arms with love, and he retreated into sullen silence at my absence from his arms. Late night feedings and midnight trips to the Emergency Room took a toll on our marital bed leaving us stranded in separate worlds and sometimes separate bedrooms. Five years after their appearance onto the landscape of our conjugality, we broke the ties that bound us and took up the mantle of singledom and co-parenting.
Toppled from my coveted role as wife, flying solo in the parenting hot seat, my mother’s voice began its rancorous reverberations through my psyche.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked after yet another complaint that I was selfish and inconsiderate to have left my husband. Did I have no consideration for them? (she liked to include my father in these discussions to ensure I understood the magnitude of my transgressions). For their feelings? They would have to spend their retirement worrying about me, she insisted. They would have to worry about how I was going to make it on my own. Without the man she considered to be a perfect husband, how was I going to support my daughters? – Then again, to my mother, any man was perfect, just as long as he took the time to marry me.
"Why do you have to do it your way?" The age-old question bounced off the flood of memory I was fiercely trying to hold back from engulfing me. "Why couldn’t you at least have consulted us before taking such selfish action and destroying our family name?"
I remember the day the parcel arrived filled with articles and books on the negative impacts of divorce and its affects upon ‘the children’. My father, a Roman Catholic like my mother, and a man whose anger I had feared most in childhood, even went so far as to include a copy of The Watchtower that explained why divorce was a sin and caused children to commit suicide. I cried when I opened the parcel and wondered, why didn’t they understand?
It was an open-ended question. A question founded on my disbelief. How could people who said they love you be so inconsiderate and lacking in empathy that they felt obligated to beat into you their feelings about how your choices hurt them? It was a question that reflected my belief that I was responsible for the unhappiness in our family, for all that had gone wrong, for all that would ever go wrong.
It was a question riddled with voices from the past that had mocked me and chastised me for having feelings that contravened the family code of never speaking the truth. Unless of course, you raised it in anger and hurled it at your opponent with enough force to ensure they cowered in dismay and lost their voice beneath the shouting. It was a question reflected in my brother’s reminder of my place in our family the night before our father’s funeral. I had suggested our mother would be better off getting sleep than sitting on the patio drinking Irish Whiskey at 2 o’clock in the morning, “You always destroy everything good in this family Ellie. What’s wrong with you?”
It could be considered trite to say that becoming a mother was the best thing I ever did in my life. But it would be true. Nothing I have ever done has taught me more about myself and caused me to look at why I do the things I do, why I believe what I do about me and my limitations. Becoming a mother has taught me that there is something wrong with me when I hold myself back from taking chances with my life for fear someone will ridicule me for dreaming. And loving my daughters has taught me the futility of clinging to voices from the past that would have me believe I am wrong to want to love and be loved without fear of retribution.
From the moment I first held my daughters' bodies in my arms, to watching my eldest daughter leave for college this fall, her hopes and dreams and expectations of life to come buzzing around her like flags flapping in a Santa Claus Parade, there has not been one moment when I did not appreciate the gift of my daughters’ presence in my life.
They have taught me to experience the joy of growing up.
They have encouraged me to become the loving adult we all need me to be.
They have taught me how to love without fear. Without trepidation. Without expectation.
They have taught me how to free myself from yearning for the mother of my dreams and to accept the one I have.
I met her the night my eldest daughter climbed into bed with me at 1 a.m. after coming home from a date with her boyfriend. She cried and confided her feelings, her fears, her sorrow that no matter how nice he was, he was not the boy for her, and she would have to end it. I listened and soothed her furrowed brow. I held her as she cried. Two hours later, she kissed me good-night and climbed out of bed.
“Thank you for listening mum,” she whispered as I wiped one last tear and gently kissed the damp spot on her cheek. “I’m sorry for keeping you up so late,”
“Don’t be,” I replied. “All my life I have yearned to have a relationship like this with my mother. And now, I don’t have to. I’ve got it. With you.”
She kissed me one last time and left my room. I lay back upon my pillows, the quiet of the house a warm blanket enfolding me in its loving security. I thought about my mother’s wish long ago. About her belief that having a daughter would prove her right in her belief that I wanted to hurt her.
She was wrong. I never wanted to hurt my mother. I only wanted to love her. I will probably never understand why my mother couldn’t accept me and my love, just the way we were. I know her refusal hurt me. But, in finding myself as a mother, I have learned to let go of expecting my mother to fulfill my dreams. Making my dreams come true is my responsibility.
I can’t make my mother into anyone other than who she is. But I can have the mother daughter/relationship I have always yearned for simply by being the mother of my dreams.
Copyright MLG 2005
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:24 am
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LynnS
Head Administrator
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Registered: 10-2008
Posts: 1498
Karma: 81 (+81/-0)
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Re: Ellie's Journal
Why Did I Stay?
I have wrestled with this question for a long time. While with him, I sometimes wondered, ‘what on earth am I doing here’? I refused to believe my life was such a mess, that he was lying -- and in my refusal to accept reality, I trapped myself in my disbelief. Since gaining my freedom, I have looked back on those 4 years 9 months and wondered, ‘what on earth was wrong with me that I stayed so long’? In my acceptance of reality, I let go of my disbelief and accept I was a victim, long before I met him.
I know there are the physiological/psychological factors that compounded my convoluted thinking causing me to accept my belief that I was incapable of leaving him and would be lost without him. I know these factors contributed to my inertia and the resultant trauma bonding that held me pinioned in his unholy embrace. But none of these factors explain why an intelligent, well-educated, articulate woman did what I did – before the trauma bonding, the Stockholm Syndrome, the depression, the pain.
Why did I stay?
I stayed because in the process of burying my truth beneath his lies, I turned off my inner voice of reason. I quit listening to myself telling me that regardless of what he was saying, what he was doing wasn't adding up. I gave into despair, helplessness and confusion and gave up on me. I wanted the rosy sunrise of his promises, the gilded cage of his castle in the air and gave into the magical thinking so that he could make my dreams come true.
I stayed because I didn’t want to take responsibility for what was happening in my life, my daughters’ lives and to me.
I stayed because it was easier to stay than to leave. It was easier to take the coward’s way out by staying locked into his machinations than to take the leap into the unknown by leaving him and his lies behind.
I stayed even though I knew he was lying. I knew he was deceiving me. I knew he was manipulating me. I knew all of this but I refused to look at the truth because to look at the truth meant having to look at me – and I was too frightened to do that.
I stayed because I was a victim and I didn’t want to admit it.
As I write this I think about those who might say – but you can’t blame yourself. You didn’t know who he was when you first met him. You went into that relationship with your arms wide open in love and expected to have your love reciprocated in equal measure.
And all of that is true.
None of it matters though when I look at the reason’s for why I stayed.
I could walk into a hundred relationships with my arms wide open and still find them empty – because my arms wide-open were filled with my own empty promises that I would treat myself with love and respect, truth and honesty. My lack of clarity in my beliefs, my values, my principles trapped me in his lies because I didn’t know what I stood for.
I stayed, not because of him, but because of me. My weaknesses brought me to my knees. My weaknesses kept me locked inside the web he wove around me.
Two and a half years after gaining my freedom, I am willing to stand in the naked light and state, unequivocally, I stayed because of me.
He abused me. He lied. He deceived. He used terrifying stories to hold me silent. He manipulated my mind and smothered me with his untruths.
But I am the one who chose to believe him. To let go of reason so that I could accept his unreasonable words and actions. Accept his unacceptable behaviour and compromise on myself – not because of who he was, but because of who I was and who I refused to be – independent, strong, uncompromising in my belief in me and what I deserved from love and life.
I stayed because I did not have the courage and strength of character to stand up for me without fear.
In my world, post P, I am 100% accountable for me. Post P I cannot hold him accountable for what happens to me today –Just as he is accountable for what he did, I am accountable for what I did, and what I do today.
Today, I let him go, in peace, without shame, blame or pain. Holding onto resentment, bitterness, anger keep me from living the beautiful life I deserve. I let him go because I have the courage to take charge of my life today, to be 100% accountable for me today and to make choices that love and support me every step of the way.
I leave him behind because I know that the past is gone, today is alive and tomorrow is just a dream away. A dream that will come true as long as I walk my path with dignity, grace and ease, 100% accountable for me.
Copyright MLG 2005
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:25 am
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LynnS
Head Administrator
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Registered: 10-2008
Posts: 1498
Karma: 81 (+81/-0)
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Re: Ellie's Journal
Fear Lives In My Belly
Excerpted from:
The Dandelion Spirit
By: M.L. Gallagher
http://www.dandelionspirit.com
Fear is a tiny seed nurturing the germ of anxiety pitted in my belly, rumbling up through my mind, pounding away at my senses to let it have voice. It aches when I attempt to move away. It stretches and expands to encompass the space I just left. It erodes my peace of mind, disrupts my dreams and ruffles the calm waters of life upon which I sail when I flow within me. Fear breathes fear, self-igniting, perpetuating itself, feeding upon itself as I struggle to breathe through it to be free of it. Fear exists within me and keeps me from knowing freedom without fear. I have to write of fear for fear jumped up and scared me this weekend. I met it, head on, crashing into myself, crying, thrashing, pounding my mental fists upon my mind as I held myself accountable for feeling fearful.
I feel fear. I know fear. I live it. For weeks I have struggled to move out from beneath the weight of my fear that he will come looking for me. For weeks I have known peace of mind as I took the steps necessary to create a safety perimeter around my daughters and myself, to hold us in loving arms of security, in spite of the winds blowing around us. And then he blew into my fences and toppled my peace of mind.
I was at the park, walking 'the Pooch'. The week before I had seen him driving in too close proximity to my home. I reported the sighting as per my agreement with the parole liaison office and left it at that.
Do you think he was looking for you the parole liaison asked me? I don't know, I replied.
I don't think so, but I don't know.
And then the following Friday night I saw him, driving along the street that parallels my favourite park where I walk the pooch. There is no reason to be on that street other than for residents or park visitors. It is out of the way. Not a logical through street.
I knew he was looking for me.
I left the park and stopped by friends.
“I'm so glad you dropped by”, my friend said. "We were trying to call you."
And then she told me something that made my stomach curl into itself like acid corroding the vessel containing it.
“We've had two flat tires in the past week,” she said. “Do you think it's him?"
“I don't know,” I replied. But they would be a natural target for him to get at me. And two flat tires in a week is not a coincidence. He loved letting air out of tires. The analogy to what he does to people did not escape me this time. I felt deflated.
I called the parole liaison.
I believe he's looking for me, I said.
Yes, he agreed. It would look like it. But without facts, we cannot do anything because his lawyer would laugh his way out of the courtroom. Sighting him is simply that -- a sighting. He has not attempted contact.
I agreed. I shall stay alert. And the parole officer had his name added to the list of High Risk Repeat Offenders to increase my safety and their response time should I call.
But the fear crackled in my veins as it ripped through the vestiges of my peace of mind.
The trouble with fear is that sometimes it masquerades itself as other emotions.
On Friday I took part in a management retreat. Our focus was on communications. Our CEO, under stress, tends to become bombastic. And, to some degree verbally abusive. I had spent the past two weeks walking out of meetings with him as I clearly defined the boundaries around behaviours I will not tolerate.
Our management team is inexperienced. It is in turmoil. Revenues are down. A major project is behind schedule. And the CEO just had major surgery on his neck. So, along with having a pain in the neck he had become one as well.
As the senior manager of the organization, I also managed the CEO, deflecting, correcting any potential issues from becoming a reason for him to leap into crisis mode and disrupt the entire organization. These past few weeks I had found it more and more difficult to deal with the CEOs outburst and was on the point of leaving. It appeared an impossible environment to work in, and not one that was healthy for my well-being. Without the retreat to deal with these issues, I did not believe I could stay and had told the CEO my feelings. We agreed to address the situation Friday in a 'safe' environment with the very well-trained and respected facilitator we had contracted to conduct the retreat.
Friday, at the retreat, the CEO challenged me on my behaviour over the past few weeks. He's a psychiatrist so does possess a fairly good intellect on human nature! You are scape-goating me for things that are going on in your personal life.
Was I? I had not revealed what was happening and believed that the stress that was lining my face like rivulets of raindrops streaking a window pane was related to work -- not Peter. I denied scape-goating him. Told him that when someone continuously yells I shut down, walk out.
“Walking out when I am acting out is a good strategy,” he replied. “But you have lost your focus."
I started to cry.
The facilitator called a break and I went outside for a breath of air.
When we returned we did a session where we had to individually write out productive and non-productive behaviours of our team members and then tell them in one-on-one sessions what we ‘saw’. While I appreciated the positive feedback, the non-productive one was the same right across the board -- You are extremely emotional.
I was stunned. I am not known for being an emotional manager. My strength has always been my ability to remain calm and focussed in spite of turmoil.
I went for a walk in the woods and thought about the CEOs comment and my co-workers feedback.
And that's when I saw it.
I was 100 miles from this city, in a mountain resort, surrounded by tall pines and towering peaks.
The world around me was quiet and serene. Not even a breeze stirred the trees lining the path upon which I walked.
But fear accompanied me. Fear rippled through my mind, crippled my footsteps, rustled beneath every leaf suspended upon the branches beside me.
Fear existed.
I was in fear of the P.
And he wasn't there. Didn't know where I was. Technically couldn't be there because it is beyond the radius of the conditions of his parole.
And yet I feared his appearance.
I took a breath. Felt the tightness around my heart, the bands constricting my mind snap shut. I took a deeper breath. Slowly. The tightness eased, my mind opened as blood flowed throughout my body.
My fear of him had blocked me from seeing that my emotions were dammed up against the back wall of my mind, a log jam keeping me from seeing, speaking, living my truth -- I am free as long as I acknowledge all of me -- including my fear.
In trying to ignore my fear, in not acknowledging that I am disturbed by his presence, I was denying a part of my truth. I have reason to fear him. And even greater reason to stay free by creating a safety perimeter that would keep me strong.
On the drive back to the city I stopped by a lake and walked its shores as rain and mist wrapped me in their cool embrace. I watched the droplets of rain hit the water and bounce up before hitting again and spreading out in rivulets upon the steel grey surface.
Fear's like that. It hits you. Bounces up and then hits again in the hopes that this time you will let it in to seep in ever-expanding circles invading your peace of mind.
As I sat and watched the mists swirl around the mountains I realized that I could not deal with this fear on my own. I needed help. I decided to go back to my therapist for hypnotherapy. My fear is real. But it does not need to immobilize me. Nor keep me from moving with grace and dignity throughout my life. I need emotional tools to help me cope with my fear. To face it. See it for what it is. And know that it does not control me.
Fear lives in my belly. But courage fills my heart and hope expands my mind so that I can rise above the fear and ease away the acidic residual of too much time spent looking behind me. When I listen to myself and embrace all of me, when I fill myself with the knowledge that I create my freedom in everything I do and say, then I am free to be all of me without fear of the unknown.
I do not know what the P will do. I do know what he is capable of and thus took the precautions I did to create my safety perimeter.
More importantly -- I know what I am capable of. And I am capable of far greater than someone who lies and cheats and deceives in order to get what he wants.
October, 2005
Copyright MLG
Last edited by femfree, Mar/5/2009, 10:47 pm
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"The best way out is always through."--Robert Frost
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Oct/25/2008, 11:28 am
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