Holidays Past, Present, and Future: From Turbulence to Calm

I am feeling like saying say hello for the Holidays. Hello!!

The Holidays this year are pretty darn Merry in my home. This year feels as if a corner has been turned. I have had moments of deep calm and clarity. Partly I believe due to the fact that I have been exercising regularly for quite some time, and getting enough sleep, sex, and food. I have been getting way too much caffeine, but some things never change! I definitely feel energized for the holidays. I've been listening to The Reindeer Room remixed Christmas songs, it's a great compilation of songs set to groovy trip hop beats. I love it! That is part of my new family tree tradition. I have been concentrating on my new family tree as of late, we are the roots, the seeds even. I even bought an actual tree, a "Glitter tree", from Trader Joe's that will grow to 10 feet. We tore all the old stuff out. It's gone, ashes, ciao. I feel like a pioneer. I was having a conversation with a special person in my life the other day, and we were discussing past lives, whether they exist or not, and I said, for me, I do not feel like I have been here before. She said to me, "Maybe this is your first." That really resonated within me in a concrete way. That is just how it feels to me. I must be very careful too with my legacy, with what I pass to my kids having no blueprint to go by.

It's not that sexual abuse and my father are my only story, it's that that experience is one of many .

It's not about living in the past, but allowing the past to live in you and honoring it and healing from it and knowing when to allow it to go, piece by piece. It's not about spinning in circles but traveling the healing spiral and spiraling up rather than down. It's about being as hypersensitive to our goodness as we are our faults and perceived flaws. It is about realizing that this is your world now, not his/your abusers. It is about realizing you just may have to start over, and that you are a pioneer emotionally, spiritually, and physically. It is about blazing a warpath toward helping speak the truth about your life, which gives others in your life the permission to do the same. It is about learning when you are being treated well, and when it is time to let go of that friend or relationship you do not want to admit is killing you because you need to fix people. (I've tried that, and sure enough, my parents can not be fixed by proxy nor can my childhood.) Especially for the holidays, it is about breaking with old patterns and traditions and being a student of your new life. This means learning how YOU want to celebrate, reading about what others do and brainstorming for nouveauways to live from. 

Paths to New Traditions: Create a collage that envisions your new values and rituals for the Holidays. 

New kinds of music. Research ITunes. Google "Nontraditional" holiday music, or whatever you are interested in. If you never had anything traditional and want that as a new way of celebrating, do that. 

I absolutely love remixed Holiday music, Christmas blues, anything that is groovy, loungey, jazzy,  and unique. Get yourself ornaments that are in alignment with your creative side. Use this opportunity to open up your creative channel. Christmas/Holidays are a goldmine for creativity!

The Holidays for me are exciting not only because it is a collective celebration, and a time when things are magical and full of wonder, but also because it is the beginning of new beginnings. After the Holidays we get to look forward to a brand new year! 

Yes, it is hard, painful, and challenging. It is not as hard or painful or costly as giving up or giving in and going along with the old family energy. That is just not an option for me, and so I go forward. Since beginning this and specifically implementing new Holiday traditions with my family, it gets so much easier as the rituals you create become unique to YOU and YOUR family. It is empowering. I feel completely empowered. Of course, I still tear up at times when thinking of my father and how it is not even safe to love a man who could rape you. This is normal. Yet, I can feel those moments and still feel EMPOWERED by what I have created now. And that is one of these basic human rights we had taken from us, the right to be empowered. I want to remind you, especially if you are struggling right now, it is YOUR life now. YOU have the power to change the trajectory your life travels. Allow the soft, the beautiful, the mundane, the sparkling moments, the peace that is your birthright, allow the light and allow the dark too. I think we live in parallels as survivors, ( I know I do)we step into the now, what is happening today, but we know the pain is till next to us, and that is okay too.

 In Maya's wise words:

When we come to it 

We must confess that we are the possible... 
We are the miraculous, the true wonders of this world 
Free to choose our ends, and our new beginnings 
That is when, and only when... 
We come to it.

Maya Angelou

Merry Happy Everything to ALL! 

Love and Light, Sarah

What Obama Means For the Fatherless

What Barack Obama Means to the Fatherless

By:

Sarah Elise Stauffer (View Profile)

A good survivor friend of mine and I were waxing on this and he asked me to write a little about it, so my dear lovely here you go.

(You are a wonderful man and father! Remember that!)

We took our kids to see Obama at a rally a couple of weeks ago. It was electric, amazing, and very powerful to do with our kids. We believe in teaching them to honor that they have a voice, to use that voice and affect change, to be opinionated, and not to be sheep.“To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.”—Robert Louis Stevenson

Obama is sincere and eloquent, brilliant beyond an Ivy League level—he is emotionally intelligent. He is socially intelligent. And he alleviates my need for cynicism. I was raised by cynics. I threw that veil of shame—and many others—off years ago. I refuse to pass that to my kids. That will not be their legacy. Or mine. But I understand it and empathize with those feeling it. It is easier in some ways to remain cynical. It is safer than putting yourself out there, we think, because then we risk disappointment. Sometimes it means going against your own inherited family rules (It did in my case.), spoken or unspoken. My children have made me believe in life; they kind of pulled the rug out from under my very cynical nature. My hubby is the same—he went against his upbringing to become extremely positive, politically outspoken, and idealistic. Kids, they do the damndest things.

This country could use some hope. It’s as if some people are allergic to it. I understand. One thing he said that resonated deeply with me and especially with my survivor friends was that “Fathers in this country owe more to their kids—they need to stand up and be men and be a real father to their children.” He is using his personal pain as a fatherless child to affect social change. So important. I do not care if you are Republican, Independent, Libertarian, liberal, purple people eater, whattheheckever—this is a common universal need. Touting family values is one thing; valuing family another. Fathers need to be there for their offspring. Period. That your father was absent, abusive, nonexistent, or otherwise emotionally/physically not there must be faced. And felt.

This is of interest to all of us who either had abusive fathers, or nonabusive fathers. Every father needs to be more emotionally in tune and available to their kids. Fathers need to protect and provide, but they need to exhibit empathy and reverence toward and for their children. So many children, girls and boys, are growing up feeling a vague, uneasy sense of disconnectedness. They are acting out (criminal behavior, hurting others, etc.) or acting in (self destructive, my hubby and I both did this for years as teens) because of this: Just because you are a “father” and you bring home the proverbial bacon does not mean you are done. My husband is a fabulous example because he shows the boys it’s good and right to feel, how to conduct oneself as a man, to empathize with another’s struggle, to express their dreams and hopes, to be kind and sensitive to women, children, other men, humans all over, to think about animals, to honor the life force itself. In this rigidly patriarchal society, we have lost the sacrament of the sensitive male. Fathers showing their feelings, imagine that. Golly gee. To their sons, to their daughters. What a novel idea. It touches my life so much that Obama is verbalizing this reality; fathers are not fathers just because they provide. That’s a provider. Fathers are not fathers just because they made a baby; that’s a sperm donor. A child knows when a parent is giving them their energy—it’s an energy, a connection, a soul feeling. They know it. It is a soul nourishment.To all my survivor friends, I know this means something deeply profound to you as well. To anyone who has not directly experienced father issues, I know you can be proud of this as well.

Obama is challenging the status quo by saying this. He is calling out those fathers who are emotionally lazy and do not want to own up to their own feelings about fatherhood. Kids are growing up feeling fundamentally flawed inside because of their parents’ issues, issues that they project all over the child, who then absorbs the crap as their own.To me, that’s what Obama is about. Now, I am a proud Democrat, a very liberal one, although I do believe in the death penalty for child killers and rapists, but I say this as a woman, mother, wife, and daughter of two very inadequate, abandoning, abusive parents. I don’t care that Obama is more moderate than I might like—I don’t think he’ll be legalizing pot or confronting the failed drug war, putting nonviolent drug offenders in rehab instead of prison, for instance. Nor has any candidate gotten up there and said, “I plan to eradicate incest, because 1/3 girls and 1/5 boys are sexually abused in this country.” I’m still waiting on that.

BUT, that he is voicing this call for fathers to step up is why—among a zillion other reasons—Health care: we were personally affected by no health insurance when our first son was born. It was awful and everyone should enjoy a wonderful socialized health care system—it’s working beautifully for Australia, Europe, even Cuba); pro choice rights (it’s a decision that belongs to a woman; it is her body and that is that.); actually addressing sources of unwanted pregnancy and aiming to prevent it (fathers in the home loving their daughters would help this, too); sex education is the only realistic way to do this. Less warmongering, more diplomacy, ANY diplomacy at this point, more gun control (I don’t want kids getting their hands on guns; our country is number one for gun related death), just more control. You NRA folks just chill; for me, we need to screen people and keep guns out of the hands of kids like Dylan Klebold and prevent more Columbines). Shall I go on? I will proudly vote for him. Anyone who cannot find a reason to do the same I ask you to think about this, just this, the subject of fathers. It’s something I think we can all agree on. Namaste.

What Does It Feel Like

What did it feel like
As you walked away
From me
Your daughter?
What does that feel like,
Walking away from your child?
How does the air move around your body?
What shoes does one wear to do this?
Did you tread gingerly,
The dusty ground making crunching sounds?
Did perhaps the ground slip out from under you,
Quaking under your feet with the knowledge

of what you were about to do?
Or did you run,
Fast and hard and away
so as not to feel My heart
Two years from my birth,
Break apart.
Did you tilt your head as you walked?
Did you look back and see me?
Did you then drive to your mother’s for comfort,
Or to forget,
Did you walk hastily through to her backyard,
Falling to your knees,
Praying to the bluebirds you found there?
Did their wings tell of my loss?
Each flap my execution.
In those moments after your exit,
Did my scent remain with you?
At the sight of the stars,

did it smash into you,
Smearing you into the oily Earth,
The realization that,

God help you,
I was probably looking at the same stars,
Alone,
Lips quivering,
Without you?
And later, when you sniffed the piano key white powder deep into your nose,
Did you think your heart,
And therefore mine,
Could forget
Through numbness?
Did you think, at all?
And when it stormed, late into the night,
Did you ever awaken with a start, panicking that I too,
May be somewhere in my tiny girl body,
Wracked with thunderous grief,
With the total annihilation of your leaving?


And when my father took me, at three years old,
For himself in his bed,
Could you feel it?
When you shopped at the market every Saturday,
Bumping into that sweet ole Creole lady,
As you Mumbled, ‘Excuse me, Maa’m…”
and the sun colored oranges caught your darting eye.
Did you wonder, then,
Does Sarah, my daughter,
Like oranges?
Or were oranges oranges and storms storms and mother’s hearts just numb.
And what of your father, your mother,
What did they teach you that you believed I was better off with anyone but the woman who birthed me,
You,
My Mother?

Parenting Advice For Survivors

Parenting is an incredible endeavor regardless of one's background. At best we come from loving homes where healthy mothers and fathers modeled healthy, fulfilling, loving lives. Healthy parents loved, held and nurtured us, and each other. We had parents who were deeply in love and this love was extended between them in an outward fashion. The love shared by our parents and the love they felt and extended to us as children was palpable and poignant. Issues were dealt with in a nonviolent way. Our healthy parents mirrored our innate gifts back to us.

This is frequently not the case, however, and as we become mothers and fathers we are left picking up the fragments of our spirits. If we were abused in any way as a child, there are many things we can do to heal and empower ourselves to parent from a healthier place. This piece will focus on PTSD and Parenting. Almost 70 percent of Americans will be exposed to trauma in their lifetime. Up to 20 percent will go on to develop PTSD. A conservative estimate of 1 out of 10 women will develop PTSD at some time in their lives. PTSD symptoms sometimes develop within the first three months after trauma, but may not appear until months or years have passed. Symptoms can continue for years following the trauma, or, in some cases, symptoms may lie dormant and emerge later in life. This is often the case with victims of childhood abuse. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Post Incest Syndrome are a normal emotional and psychological reaction to a very abnormal traumatic experience. Calling it a "disorder" is a little misleading if you ask me, but semantics are semantics.

Pledging to become a conscious and aware parent and human being is a lifelong commitment, a sort of marriage to life itself. Many ages and stages developmentally speaking can present special challenges for a mother or father who was abused. Often, the normal stages our children go through are trauma-triggers, igniting those long buried feelings in us. Because of the possible congruency with our own abuse at those very same stages at those times, if we are largely unconscious and unskilled at handling our reactions, we can very well break down. Unprocessed trauma wreaks havoc on a parent living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Anxiety issues, Panic Disorder, or any of the other myriad of survivor-related fallout. The greatest suffering befalls one's children. The last thing on earth most of us want for our children is for them to ever have to feel the way we had to. I never want my children to experience the devastation of not having anyone to turn to, or the physical sensation of loss and annihilation that abandonment gives the child left behind.

When we can consciously observe our emotions and our reactions, we can begin to change. Before losing our temper over any of the stresses of parenthood, try picturing oyur child going through what you did. Nine times out of ten that is a serious jolt that pushes us squarely back into the present moment. Empathy is the first tool. What we can't feel in ourselves, we can not fully feel in another. The Buddha said that if our compassion does not include ourselves, it is incomplete. This is a basic truth.

If you are a survivor and you are reading this, I applaud your desire to continue to heal yourself by reading this. Your children and grandchildren will thank you as well. Post traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a psychiatric disorder that can occur following the experience or witnessing of life-threatening events such as military combat, natural disasters, terrorist incidents, serious accidents, or violent personal assaults like rape and incest, including emotional incest.

Taking inventory is essential in my opinion. Sometimes we have to weed out any remaining people and family members who do not have our healing interests at heart. It is important to cast a circle of loving friends and family of choice who will support you and your parenting on your journey. In 2004 I did just that. I had to make the very difficult decision of breaking all ties with the paternal side of my family. Illusions had to go and be released so that new pathways could be laid down. I had to give up the illusion that I had any power to change them, make them understand or make them accountable. It was painful and essential. A survivor has to indivuate and blaze her/his own trail eventually if we are to break loose from the cycle of abuse and prevent infecting our children. The Courage to Heal, by Laura Davis and Ellen Bass was monumental in my growth to the point of being empowered enough to say NO MORE to those who refused to protect me.

Self care is so important. I run and lift weights, and I practice pilates. Exercise regularly, see a therapist that you feel you can trust, practice yoga, and mediation. Moving the body can unlock years of petrified emotion. Make music a daily way to bring about catharsis or just relax you. Survivors with PTSD may be very jumpy, easily startled, paranoid, irritable, rageful, and suffer from a plethora of psychosomatic body symptoms. It is important to remember that all of these "bad" feelings are a language, our minds and bodies are speaking to us in a language, the language of pain. Our job is to listen and compassionately help ourselves to heal. Survivors can be constantly on guard and may find it difficult to concentrate. Sometimes persons with PTSD will have panic attacks. It suffices to say all of this is incredibly challenging when we are trying parent.

When feeling overwhelmed by young children, remember that excessive anger and rage are symptoms of your old pain being made new again by the child in front of you. Excessive distace is common as well, even to the point of allowing youe denial to endanger your own children by not listening to your gut. Like adults who experience trauma, children and adolescents who have been abused cope by using a variety of psychological mechanisms. One of the most effective ways people cope with overwhelming trauma is called "dissociation." Dissociation is a complex mental process during which there is a change in a person's consciousness which disturbs the normally connected functions of identity, memory, thoughts, feelings and experiences. Grounding ourselves is paramount: prayer, massage, warm blankets, a cup of chamomile tea, prayer beads or malas, stones like labradorite or crystals, petting an animal, drawing, reading, stretching, or going outside and connecting with the elements are all ways to come back down to earth.

It is a proven fact that fetal cells can live in a mother's body for up to 27 years. I believe that is true of emotions as well. Read as many books on abuse healing as possible. Take your time but make the effort. No healing happens until we decide. People with PTSD work hard to avoid anything that might remind them of the traumatic experience, as avoidance is a hallmark of the disorder. This includes one's own healing, which will demand that we reenter the feelings, feeling them fully, heed the messages they carry, and then do the enormous work of releasing them. This is very difficult to do as many of our habituated patterns of relating to ourselves, others, and the world once served us and helped us survive.

One of my greatest motivators is my own children, including the little girl that I was. Being proactive is the best way to keep children safe. Acknowledging the dark people and forces in our world who abuse children is only possible to the degree in which we can be accountable for what may have happened to us. Denial ensues partly because when we are vulnerable and being violated, we as children have to suspend the belief that this is actually happening to us. The psyche helps us out that way, otherwise we would go insane with the horror, fear, grief, and terror. People with PTSD frequently feel as if the trauma is happening again, as well as a sense of a nameless terrible dread. Traumatic memory material is not stored in the same fashion in our brains. That's why so many of the trauma memories are so scattered. They are literally fragmented. Flashbacks, often in a very fragmented way, occur as well and are very intrusive, and we relive the experience via this reaction. The person may have intrusive pictures in his/her head about the trauma, have recurrent nightmares or may even experience hallucinations about the trauma. However, some of us experience some pictures or movie reel type images, but some of us have body memories. We feel things in our bodies on a very cellular level. This is perfectly logical given that exposure to such profound trauma, such as incest and rape, alters the wiring of our neural pathways. Our hormones go haywire. The task is to retrain the brain. Retraining the brain and healing the heart are the order of the day.
For me personally, in the past I sometimes felt paranoid and thought I was seeing my abuser under my covers. Out in public every man I saw would look like him. When this happens, and it does still occur around certain triggers, like holidays, I place my hand over my heart and remind myself I am here, existing right now, and that little girl I was needs to be picked up and carried with me into the present.

Aromatherapy is helpful to ease stress and flashbacks. Painting one's feelings is something I highly recommend. Channeling suffering through the medium of art is alchemical and transformative. So many of our feelings seem so difficult to verbalize or express because we can not necessarily see them. But they are not intangible at all, and putting them on canvas, a poem, a journal, or in a collage serves to remind me of that. I can look at my very tangible creation and see that my truth is real. As I continue my path to integration-full acceptance of all dissociated aspects of myself- I feel more whole and less fragmented. When dissociated aspects of one's self become known, accepted and integrated into normal awareness, the fear and terror we had to bury and numb ourselves from during violation is amplified. It becomes more real. Grief and mourning is often the result. Better to deal with things as best you can lest it deal with you in some other unsavory manifestation, like relationship and intimacy issues, addictions to drugs, sex, even Jesus. What the mind may try to forget the body will remember.

My message is this: Feel the fear and do it anyway. Remember the worst is over even when it does not feel like it. When we were little and being hurt, we had to dissociate, pulling our spirits inward as a turtle does when in danger. It is safe to come out of the shell now. But do this with great compassion for the child you once were. The most painful realization I have had concerning my abuser, who was my father, is that he never saw me. He saw an object, a doll, a puppet for his use and abuse. He was never able to SEE me or access his empathy for the little child I was. His narcissism was too impenetrable. I have had to grieve this: I was never even real to my own father. BUT! My children have different childhoods, I do see them, I feel them, they exist for their own purposes. I am just blessed as can be to have them tucked under my mother wings for a time before they are ready to fly. Parenting: the longest process of unfolding and letting go.

Visualize yourself as a small child, go to that child and lift her/him up into your adult arms. I have done this while hugging a big teddy bear or a pet. At one point I could not look at pictures of myself as a child let alone visualize a little me and go to her. I now walk right in to my flashbacks, love guns blazing and walk right up to that child I was (and in some ways still am, and proud of it!)in mid-violation and rescue her. I have started to enter the most intense memory of being raped as a ten year old. If I'm going to be bombarded anyway, I am going to go into that memory in all my Mother Bear glory and take that little girl away. My therapist and I came up with a side-pouch for me to tuck little me into for safe harbor. I truly believe that profound pain can contain profound beauty. There are no easy short cuts, only your individual unique path. Those are some of my personal experiences and ideas, I hope that it helps anyone who needs it.

Resources: http://www.hopeforhealing.org/ptsd.html

Read: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook by Glenn R. Schiraldi
The Courage to Heal, by Laura Davis and Ellen Bass

Kourts for Kids!

http://www.kourtsforkids.org/

Yay!! How many times have I heard about kids and protective mothers being victimized by the system, oh let me count the times! Check out Kourts for Kids. It is a great resource. Save the children!!

Kourts for Kids is a nonprofit organization of volunteers across America, who are working together to find ways to better protect abused children in the family courts. Many people play a role in the protection of abused children -- judges, attorneys, guardians ad litem, social workers, officers of the law, legislators, and advocates. However, sometimes children are not protected due to a lack of knowledge or misinformation, political pressure, or an overload of work. This broken link, which can occur from the time a child discloses abuse to the moment a judge renders a decision, can affect the child for the rest of his or her life. Dedicated to the protection of abused children, Kourts for Kids is going to bat for them by supporting an increase in awareness and education and promoting change within regions where protection can and should be improved.

Warrior Mothering

I am on a healing path. I am a mother, and I will put that first. I brought my three year old to Starbuck’s the other day for our “dates.” We go and have coffee, well, I have coffee and he asks for chocolate milk and the biggest cookie there is. We sit and hang out, we talk about colors, Star Wars, the merits of bigger cookies. When I was three I was afraid to walk through our den because I felt embarrassed that my Dad would have a porno on. My child lives in a world that may as well be in another galaxy. I can’t help thinking this as he mows through his cookie. He walks through our living room, same age, same innocence, same vulnerability, and his worst nightmare is broccoli, two nights in a row. “No Bock-EEE!” The contrast is sharp, I see me walking averting my eyes from my father’s perversions and thus learning I had better just avert myself from my rights as a child, and Dylan walks in on the kingpin of all his misery, the green monster known as broccoli. It’s so stark in comparison it’s just about existential. I giggle at the images. I giggle because he is so gorgeous and free, and because he reminds me of who I was, gorgeous but not free. His intense stare awakens the feeling of the wildest freedom in my chest. It’s like he tells me with his green blue stare, YOU ARE FREE, like me, Mama.
I am free, now. In a café, getting him milk, drinking coffee, wiping his sweet mouth thinking of the amazing things that will come from them, the big words, the knock knock jokes already emerging. I feel pride in taking tender care of this delicate flower that is my child, checking with him to be sure he is comfortable, does he need to potty, does he know he is seen, not only seen, but heard, and that he is visible on a soul level? Doe she know I truly SEE him for the gift he is? I practice folding him into me, like a seedling in the garden of his mother, pressing firmly, covering, softly watering, I think of how I could never leave him. I think of his face frozen to the window, his marrow aching with a savage hot grief. His body wracked with searing pain, a child ripped from his mother, in my case, by the mother herself.
Not this child, and not this mother. I see you, Dylan, I see INTO you, around you, I FEEL you, all over, You are so seen, so loved, so known, so precious. I SEE you, you exist to me, you are beautiful, free, and never, never, never invisible, especially the essence of you. Small innocent hands, vanilla skin, wispy blonde hair, blue oceanic eyes, open heart. Your laugh, your tenacity in expressing yourself, anger, joy, love. Those nights I secretly look forward to when I hear Feet on the Hardwood Floor, patter patter, crossing the house, thump thump, over the carpet, on the clock red numbers equals midnight, "Mama, mama, I want Moop." (Moop is milk)
Never invisible, seen, heard, felt, in every direction, on every level. So is my other child.
And the ones inside me, too.
We are coming out of the dark, into the light.....love to all. SES

The Self

A little more, I can't tell you how profound an impact this model has had and has on my life, my relationship to mySELF, my relationships with others, my ability to parent, etc.
All the esoteric branches of the world’s religions teach that there is an untarnished essence within each of us, a Self from which wisdom, healing, and spiritual energy flow. We rarely experience this Self directly because it is obscured by self-protective psychological mechanisms or lost in the fear, pain, and shame of past trauma.

http://www.soulselfhelp.on.ca/internal.html

Internal Family Systems Therapy

I wanted to post information regarding IFS, I think it is profound and very helpful in finding your light and working with the inner child/children/parts. I did this for four years with my therapist and the compassion I learned from her with this as a tool is something I am indelibly grateful for. I also recommend reiki, cranio-sacral and massage therapy for connecting with the light within.

An excerpt:

Managers, Firefighters and Exiles

Are there common roles for parts across people? After working with a large number of clients, some patterns began to appear. Most clients had parts that tried to keep them functional and safe -- tried to maintain control of their inner and outer environments by, for example, keeping them from getting too close, or dependent on others, criticizing their appearance or performance to make them look or act better, and focusing on taking care of others' rather than on their own needs. These parts seemed to be in protective, managerial roles and therefore are called the "managers."

Where a person has been hurt, humiliated, frightened or shamed in their past, they will have parts that carry the emotions, memories and sensations from those experiences. Managers often want to keep those feelings out of consciousness and, consequently, try to keep these vulnerable and needy parts locked in inner closets. Those incarcerated parts are known as the "exiles." The third and final group of parts clicks into action whenever one of the exiles is upset to the point that it may flood the person with its extreme feelings or makes the person vulnerable to being hurt again. When that is the case, this third group tries to put out the inner flames of feeling as quickly as possible, which earns them the name "firefighters." They tend to be highly impulsive and drive to find stimulation that will override or dissociate from the exile's feelings. Bingeing on drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or work, are common firefighter activities.

The Self

There is one other key aspect of the IFS Model that also differentiates it from other models. This is the belief that, in addition to these parts, everyone is at their core a Self that contains many crucial leadership qualities like perspective, confidence, compassion and acceptance. Working with hundreds of clients for more than a decade, some of whom were severely abused and show severe symptoms, has convinced me that everyone has this healthy and healing Self despite the fact that many people have very little access to it initially. When working with an individual, the goal of IFS is to differentiate this Self from the parts, thereby releasing its resources, and then in the state of Self, to help parts out of their extreme roles.

I had no clue about the Self until I began this journey almost twenty years ago. Like many other young people in the sixties, I had experimented with meditation for respite from my inner cacophony. From these experiences, I sensed other dimensions of myself, but had no framework to understand them. I was also an athlete and, on the football field and basketball court, had occasionally entered that delicious flow state in which my mind was still and my body could do no wrong. Like most people, however, mostly I was consumed with finding ways to counter the undercurrent of worthlessness that ran through my psyche. I believed the inner voices telling me I was basically lazy, stupid, and selfish. That's who I thought I really was.

I was led to knowledge about the Self less through direct experience than, later as a therapist, through witnessing what happened to my clients as I helped them explore their inner worlds. I had several clients in the early 1980's who began talking about different parts of them as if these "parts" were autonomous voices or subpersonalities. As a family therapist, these inner battles were intriguing to me, and I began asking clients to try to alter them in the same ways I'd been trying to change their family's communication. It seemed that many of them could actually converse with these thoughts and feelings as if they were real personalities. For example, I had a client, Diane, ask her pessimist voice why it always told her she was hopeless. To my amazement, Diane said it answered her. It said that it told her she was hopeless so that she wouldn't take any risks and get hurt. It was trying to protect her.

This seemed like a promising interaction. If this pessimist really had benign intent, then Diane might be able to negotiate a different role for it. Yet Diane was not interested. She was angry at this voice and was telling it to just leave her alone. I asked her why she was so rude to the pessimist, and she went on a long diatribe, describing how that voice had made every step she took in life a major hurdle. It then occurred to me that I was not talking to Diane, but to another part of her that constantly fought with the pessimist. In an earlier conversation, Diane had told me about an ongoing war inside her between one voice that pushed her to achieve and the pessimist who told her it was hopeless. It seemed that the pushing part had jumped in while she was talking to the pessimist.........continued on website.

http://www.selfleadership.org/ifsmodel.asp

More explanations:

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a new form of therapy that is compassionate, inclusive, spiritual, powerfully healing, and deeply respectful of our inner life. For more information, see www.selfleadership.org. This article is a brief introduction to IFS.

IFS recognizes that our psyches are made up of different parts, sometimes called subpersonalities. You can think of them as little people inside us. Each has its own perspective, feelings, memories, goals, and motivations. For example, one part of you might be trying to lose weight and another part might want to eat whatever you want. We all have parts like the inner critic, the abandoned child, the pleaser, the angry part, and the loving caretaker.

IFS has discovered that every part has a positive intent for you, no matter how problematic it might be. For example, Sally has a part that says, “You couldn’t be successful at your ambitious goals. Who do you think you are?” This is hurtful to her and prevents her from taking action in her life, but when she got to know this part in her IFS work, she discovered that it was actually afraid she would be punished if she stuck her neck out, and it was trying to stop her to protect her from that pain.

Bill has a part that is judgmental and competitive with other people in a way that is not consistent with his true values. However, when he really got to know that part, he discovered that it was just trying to help him feel OK about himself in the only way it knew—by feeling superior to others.

When you understand that a part has a positive intent, it doesn’t mean that you give the part power. Sally doesn’t want her part to prevent her from taking action, and Bill doesn’t want his part to act out being judgmental and competitive. However, using the IFS approach, Sally and Bill can relate to their parts with understanding and appreciation while taking the steps to heal them.

This is fundamentally different from the way we ordinarily relate to our parts. Usually when we become aware of a part, the first thing we do is evaluate it. Is it good or bad for us? If we decide it is good, we embrace it and give it power. We act from it. If we decide it is bad, we try to suppress it or get rid of it. We tell it to go away. However, this doesn’t work. You can’t get rid of a part. You can only push it into your unconscious, where it will continue to affect you, but without your awareness.

In IFS, we do something altogether different and radical. We welcome all our parts with curiosity and compassion. We seek to understand them and appreciate their efforts to help us. But we don’t lose sight of the ways they may be causing us problems. We develop a relationship of caring and trust with each part, and then take the steps to release it from its burdens so it can function in a healthy way.

In the IFS system, there are three kinds of parts—managers, firefighters, and exiles. The managers are the parts you usually encounter first in exploring yourself. Their job is to handle the world and protect against the pain of the exiles. Exiles are young child parts that hold pain from the past. (We won’t get into firefighters in this short article.)

For example, John has one manager that tries to know everything about any organization he might work with and tries to do everything perfectly. This is an incredible burden for him and prevents him from being light and flexible in his work life. When he started to get to know this manager part, he learned that it was trying to protect him from being betrayed by people or projects he might put his heart and soul into. He also realized he had another manager part that was very suspicious of people. This part checks out people carefully to see how they might betray him. Both managers are trying to protect John from feeling the pain of an exile part that felt hurt and betrayed, first by his mother and then by an organization he was part of.

In the above example Sally had a manager that said, “Who do you think you are?” Although this message has prevented Sally from taking action as she would like, it is trying to protect Sally from the pain of an exile part who felt crushed and frightened of punishment. It turned out that Sally (and other children) had been punished by the nuns in her Catholic school whenever they became too visible, so from then on in her life, she had a terrified exile and a manager who tried to keep Sally invisible.

Parts take on extreme roles because of what has happened to them in the past. Exiles take on pain and burdens from what they experienced as children (or occasionally at other times). Managers take on extreme roles in order to protect you from the pain of the exiles. IFS has a method of understanding and working with these parts to release the burdens and heal the system, so you can function in healthy ways.

Breaking Through Mother Issues

Conversation goes like this:
"I just can't believe she is that way. How could she leave her little daughter? I mean, he rapes her, does all this abusive stuff, and she leaves me with him. And actually had to idiocy to say to me that she thinks she could have been conscious enough to pick up on abusive energy around men. Oh really? Please! I was 2 and a half! I really think she tells herself these stories in her head, the way it was, like she was not making a clear choice to be selfish. She threw me away. Somehow she always justifies herself to herself. But there is no justification for abandoning your child. And no justification for continuously making your selfishness someone else's fault. My want for a "mother" has been an infection in my wound.
You know, maybe I am asking for too much from the wounded, BUT I want her to be stable, not perfect, but stable, in all respects, financially grown up, emotionally grown up. Be someone I can look up to! Be mature and expressive, be eccentric too, but be appropriate, be healthy, have your shit together, create a life that allows you to be available, put others first, reach out, let the walls down, be positive instead of so dark, so complaining, so negative, so immature, so focused on yourself."

ETC.

I say, "I just want her to walk in to my home like a thousand mothers do, bags in hand, maybe Old Navy bags, maybe Lord and Taylor, either way, well put together, healthy and fit, stable inwardly and out which you can't fake, interested in us and the boys, nurturing, all of this and maybe holding a Starbuck's even!! I just have this image of this woman who is not who she actually is. I mean, if that were actually her, she would be a whole different person. I want this person.....who is she if not my mother? How many therapists and friends have said to me,"She has never been a mother to you." So sad, and so true. Never. So who is this person I have seen in my mind?
Husband:
"That's You."
He then begins pumping his fists victoriously, so hilarious. He hit that one on the head!
Perfect example of how healing yourself of mother and father wounds is not what we so often think it is-we think it means changing them. It's not. That's not the definition.
My response to him having this insanely amazing insight:
"WHHHHHHHOA. That's Me. "
And my soul began to see, the person I am envisioning is actually me.
Can I get a hell yeah?!
Parenting Victory!!
(How about the Spongebob Victory Screech!!)

Tending the Wound

For anyone experiencing Holiday Fallout, I wanted to encourage you (and myself )to tend the wound left by the sword if it hurts. My wound was infected for a long time, self abuse through drugs, smoking 2 packs a day, acting out, you name it. When it hurt then I ran to one of those standby behaviors. I just did not know what else to do and my early environment laid that track down for me. Everyone around me acted out sexually, used drugs, had awful self esteem, and the plague of denial which is still in effect to this day. So now, when the wound hurts, even though I am on the healing path, I have to accept that it will hurt from time to time. Which it does. Even my PHYSICAL cesarean scars still twinge and hurt if I push on them a certain way, like doing the rocking horse in yoga, BUT.....
I think mine feels better today because I refuse to pour salt in it by not resting, by yelling at myself in my head about my family of origin (Why can't they change, Why do I not inspire in them the change I want, Why this, why that..), or by being generally critical toward myself. Today I woke up and took the bambinos for a walk. I do not feel like running today. I am going to allow myself to not run. My intention today was for them to get some fresh air and let them get their ya-yas out, and for me to inhale some of mother nature. Mama Earth is my elixir for all things. I just feel naturally pulled outside when upset, unbalanced, sick, whatever the case may be. I feel so much better after going out with my little ones in the woods. I had dreams about my horses, riding them and one was very upset(symbolic), and my Uncle and Aunt made an appearance as well. This is my father's brother and his wife and children. I loved and adored those babies when I was a teenager-the oldest was born when I was 15. In cutting ties, I lost those girls. And my horses. In my dreams I am fighting with Aunt Denial and Uncle Minimizer. I see the oldest girl under some kind of saran wrap. I think I was trying to remove her. My dreams are always taking place on that damn farm. Parts of me feel like they are still there. In the form of my equine counterparts. I woke up feeling like the dream was actually happening, on some level it is, but anyhow, I had to really rein myself in this morning. (That shit is like a vortex sometimes.) Deep breaths, easy on the coffee, good veggies, long walk with beautiful children, lay down and read while the boys play a new game, and allow the feelings to float around while I rearrange my head and plant myself firmly in NOW. When I was a little girl I took such comfort in the woods and in animals. No matter where you live, try to have animals and nature in your life.
Today I am saying more affirmations than usual, drinking Yogi Detox tea with the intention of cleansing my emotional field(my emotional field is full of lavender blossoming, by the way) and when I get that heady feeling or anxiety feeling, I stop what I am doing, lie down, and breathe. Right now my kids are getting ready for their lavender oil sea salt bath. So to decompress from the holidays, do your affirmations, detox with tea and salt baths, set your intention to "heal", and get a healthy dose of nature! This is tending the wound.


Love, SES

Making Memories

The above is my new way of holding myself as a baby, me holding me.

Making memories is the order of the season! Each new positive thing we do at this time and all year round is what I call a positive trigger. Do new and joyful things and remember as you do them, I will remember this next year/later and be filled with positivity, warmth, and love. Make memories you will savor. Create experiences that make you and your inner child smile. If you are a parent, make a list of what you would have loved during the holidays as a child. My list includes love, safety from sexual torture, and a mom who did not leave me. I did not get those things, but as a mother, I can give them to my children. I already have! Pat yourselves on the back if you have too, parents. Holidays are a wonderful opportunity to solidify charming and love-filled memories, especially if you are a parent. When things feel triggery, picture yourself as a child and then hug and hold that child. Look at your children for cues on how to be, how to simply be here in the now for brand new experiences. Each year is another year further away from the abuse and further into our own lives. What freedom! Take lots of baths, with sea salts and essential oils, take your vitamins, get some good exercise, stretch or do some yoga, meditate or pray, watch movies, hug your pet, get a massage, get a new haircut, dance, put on some John Coltrane, watch the squirrels, listen to some groovy jazz or hip hop, take pictures of your new life, have your feelings and accept them, keep going, I will see you all after the holidays!
Love and Light, SES

Holiday Musings from Sarah Elise

JOY is alive and well in the here and now. The above shot is moi and my husband the delicious human being that he is.




First picture is of me with my youngest son. The second is of me with my first born son, who opened me up in so many ways. Fritz pictured above. My horse. I am unaware of how he is doing these days as I do not speak to the incest family. In the here and now, joy is doing a dance.


Oh boy, here come the holidays...In years past the PTSD would be stirred up like a sandstorm. It gets easier as the years go by, thankfully mainly due to the healing effect of my family, my kids and husband. We have a clean slate with which to begin our nouveau familial style. I love my boys and husband so much. I feel that they inspire me and bless me...not just in the usual ways, but when I feel lost in the past, they bring me to center and keep me going just by being themselves. This is one of the ways motherhood and partnership heals me.
When one of them has a need, or a want, as they do a zillion times a day, I am snapped back into here and now. The here and now, this has been my focus. I tend to criticize myself and tend toward perfectionism in myself that I would never expect of anyone else. Perfectionism is a synonym for masochism, and self sadism. I feel so grateful for my family, and for surviving the trauma of my mother abandoning me, and my father raping me all those years, not just sexually but emotionally and spiritually. When I met my husband, I was in an unhealthy place, still tied to the blood family on my father's side. I was self destructive. The sight of him was like a reflection, and the image was of safety, goodness, love, and family. As the horses once did, Troy reflected my innate goodness back to me and I him. Wow. What a gift.
It was a momentous milestone for me to break away, ignoring the drone of bad advice and misguided emotional "support", telling me to come home and live there and be close. Be close. The incest web. I said no thanks to that and stayed with the man I would marry and become a mother with. It was very hard as the family, as most dysfunctional families do, knew how to manipulate me. I really left home in 99, I just kept going forward, years passing, rising like a phoenix. Very daring for me. The one thing they really had to wield were the horses. I began riding when I was 3. My horses gave me a sanctuary, they loved me unconditionally. They were magical. As I grew my grandmother, my father's mother, was "grooming" (interesting choice of words, huh?)me as she put it, to take over the family business. I elected a very different path and the shit hit the fan. Both my grandmother and grandfather tried making me feel so guilty if I ever desired anything outside of the horses. This was sacrelige! Of course I did desire other things, especially my own interests as most teenagers do, but their guilt worked.
I miss those horses. In 2004 I had to walk away from them, and one special one in particular. I chose my baby, my husband, their lives and mine over the horses. Over the family, over the pull of the incest web. In 2004 I even cut ties with my grandparents for good, filed a rape report against my father, received flowers from Eve Ensler, and began examining my relationship with my mother. The year of emancipation. My breaking away from them and thus the genesis of my breaking the cycles really began years earlier, in my mind. I was digging out of prison, misguided at first, in that I tried escaping through drugs and unhealthy relationships. I guided myself into the realm of true escape after I grew tired of hurting myself for things someone else did to me. I put myself first. My own mother never put me first, she left me with my father. My heart felt like it was being mutilated when I thought of my child ever feeling that. Over the years I have stayed in touch with that pain, and the pain of my father's abuse. It has kept me more empathic. Somehow she, my mother, lacked that fierce maternal bond. I was attached to both of my parents deeply, as children are. I am also incredibly bonded to my kids. My husband thinks I am more bonded to them and in touch intuitively with them than anyone else on earth. I love that he thinks that and am proud that I am!! Not apologizing for my goodness folks. Not gonna play it down either, I am a pretty great mama!
I give them what I never had. I feel the enormous ache and grief over my own losses as a child, I vow every second of every day that not only will I NOT repeat things, I think of what I WILL do. What can I add? Asset based thinking here, what can I give, not just what can I avoid doing. I can make a conscious effort to show my love and manage my anger and model healthy things for them. I add cafe dates, volunteering at my son's school, I teach them to be aware of mother earth and all her creatures, I honor their innocence and vow to protect it no matter what, I watch them grow and learn and try to appreciate the challenges they present me, like being more patient. Watching them safely develop and explore their bodies and express their emotions so freely is amazing and challenging. I was never allowed to feel my anger or even my joy fully. Especially not anger. Oh hell no, no anger for Sarah. And joy stifled by the always present threat of things falling apart as they so often did with my dad. He could never deliver a promise, hold down a job, keep a stable home for me. I remember when toys had to be brought back because he could not afford them. I still struggle with letting my hubs go out and shop for me at the holidays. I freeze up and feel like I am 7 again, walking through K&B, trailing my dad as he walked up to return gifts. John Lennon played in the background, singing about so this is Christmas, and what have you done? He promised a house and a dog, a job that he would keep, a mom for me, he promised to not touch me there anymore. All broken, all broken. I chose my husband because I knew that he would never do such things, although the sick little girl inside of me wanted a jerk to replay trauma with. As for the past, the holidays I think of them. All of them, horses, people, red velvets ribbons. Are they ghosts? I don't know. William Faulkner said "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past. " Interpret as you will, but it's all about tending the wounds and simultaneously living in the here and now. We used to decorate their stalls with stockings and wreaths and we had parties for all the clients. People came and brought gifts and food, we even had a costume contest for the HORSES!! I miss so much their soft faces, their whinnies, their cantering up to me, the smell of the barn, like cedar and shavings... and I miss being so good at something. (I won all kinds of awards all of my life, equestrian success was a huge part of my having any self worth.) I love Angela's metaphor, though it is more literal than metaphorical for those of us who have experinced abuse, of the sword of trauma piercing us. I remember thinking to myself about five years ago, this is like an iron maiden. I feel like I am in one of those iron maidens, knives coming from every direction. Horrifyingly accurate. It is like a sword, all of it, not just being raped. Not being protected, no armor. The armor should have been my mother, my grandparents. My uncle and aunt who chose denial. The sword is out and now we tend the wound. I am tending the wound. Part of tending the wound so it does not get infected is acceptance of what was and cultivation of hope for what NOW can be. NOW, the reality is that as a parent I must accept that I AM good. I must accept that goodness. It is so hard to accept our own goodness at times. I can not explain why my mother and father, grandparents and uncle did not see my goodness and honor it as I do my children. Blinded by their own unhealed wounds, enormous gaping wounds infected with drug addiction, emotional numbness, denial, inability to protect the vulnerable ones, and fear. Infected and blinded.
It was what it was. I am who I am today and though a part of me still needs to cry, rage, and ask questions, thats part of what helps me walk solidly on my healing path.
In the meantime, in the now, I am creating, with my husband and family, joyous, grateful, creative and impassioned energy for our new family tree. I know the reverberations will be felt into the next generations, and the little girl I was will feel the ripples too. I invite her to be here now, now and always.
Let's all invite our parts, our little ones inside, to come and be here with us now. They are waiting for our love and safety so they can leave the dark rooms, where they have been alone and crying, and come into the light where they belong. We can parent them now. If you are not a parent, you actually are a parent, because we all have inner children who need love, they are all the children we once were at certain times. The traumatized ones need us. And we will rise up like the phoenixes, and be here for them now. Namaste and Love to All~S

Parenting

Greetings to all the lovely folks, my name is Sarah Elise Stauffer and I will be contributing here regarding parenting, motherhood, fatherhood, and breaking the cycle. The picture above is of my youngest son. Yes, you were this precious too! Unbelievable that I was this age when my mother left and my father began sexually abusing me. His reality, as is the reality of my 6 year old, is so opposite, two different galaxies apart. I can not even imagine my husband or myself hurting him like we have been hurt.
One thing that I'll mention, if you are a parent, and you are having difficulty empathizing with yourself or doing inner child work-which is ESSENTIAL in healing yourself and for building a healthy foundation for parenting-a simple exercise is to think of your issue...then put your child in that scenario. It reframes the entire thing and helps you perceive yourself the way you were and are-a precious child who was innocent and deserved so much better! Start looking at yourself the way you see your child/children. You were no less, you were and are deserving of all the love and safety that your own children are worth. Children are really teachers and healers. They come here and trigger us and challenge us and, no, I don't mean to say it's all butterflies and cupcakes. But the healing that parenting can spark is pretty profound.


For now I wanted to introduce myself and say hello to everyone here. I'm grateful to have the oppurtunity to talk about parenting and what we can do to heal and break cycles.

Lots of love to all-Sarah Elise