Category Archives: self-actualization

This is the bottom.

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Right now I feel so desperate that I feel like if I back away from any part of recovery work, any part of speaking my story that I will hit bottom.  The only place I see to go from here is to beat the shit out of my kids so I can prove that I am a monster.  Until this crisis passes I need to not be alone with my children.  As humiliating and pathetic as I feel.  That is what I need.  I need help.

I have friends coming to spend time with my kids while I hide in the garage.  I should contact a few more people.  This is very hard.  But I have support and I will figure this out.  But it’s really hard.

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Last night I went to my support group.  It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space.  I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses.  But I don’t have that kind of story.  It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.

This is more of that “what to say” thing.  When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal.  I don’t do that.  As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit!  I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well.  And I need to.  Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me.  It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence.  Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself.  Silencing me means that I am invisible.  Silencing me means I deserve it.

When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean.  Like I am still worth seeing.  That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story.  I leave details out every time.  Often on accident.  But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out.  I figure out a lot more of what scares me.  But people have a limited capacity for that.  I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times.  But I have to tell them.  I can’t be quiet and nice about it.  I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.

The family members who are upset with me?  The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages?  Yeah.  They don’t get me and they can’t.  My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born.  My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”

I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes.  It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable.  I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff.  How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother.  Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.

I just did a nasty thing.  I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have.  I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad.  This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children.  As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them.  Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake.  I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person.  You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.

And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her.  Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out.  And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens.  Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.

I am frantic, scared, and angry.  And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me.  I feel very unsafe.  I feel very attacked.  Even here, within my family in my home.  In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me.  Want to know why I feel that way?

Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child.  But I have small children.  And they have needs.  And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become.  I can’t be the grown up right now.  Thank god I don’t have to.

As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and…  I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe.  My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery.  She’s too close.  And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her.  Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too.  I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though.  I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself.  I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken.  She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me.  With everyone else, fine.  Not with me.

Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids.  I need to have chats with my friends.  As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation.  I need to not have sex stuff around my kids.  I need that to not be part of their existence in any way.  And people think Shanna isn’t listening.  It’s not ok.  I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance.  I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house.  Because that is how you break cycles.  My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range.  That will not be part of their world.  And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate.  I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.

My children cannot support me.  It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not.  And my children should not have to support me in any way.  That is not the role of a child.  I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try.  I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid.  I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes.  But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago.  I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.”  Then we run off and play.  But I can’t do that today.

Today I am too small.

I choose life

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As of Saturday morning things were not so hot with my dear friend.  However, on Saturday evening I got a phone call from that friend.  He called me to tell me was sorry for the ways in which he was derailing the conversation.  The stuff I was talking about made him think about very uncomfortable things from his own life and he couldn’t handle it and he wanted me to stop talking.  He admitted the whole thing top to bottom.  I laughed and I cried.  I thanked him for trusting me enough to be honest with me completely and totally for the first time in our friendship.  Then I bossed him around (see how that works) and I told him to come back over.

Noah, my friend and I sat around and talked about broken dynamics.  We talked about where we are reacting to old baggage and where we have created new stuff together.  We talked about the parts of our dynamic that are good and healthy for us and we talked about the parts that are not healthy for us.  Then we tried to figure out how we can get more of the good and less of the bad because we are ready to grow up.  We are ready to stop hurting the people we love so much.

And I can’t get very detailed because an awful lot of what we talked about isn’t my story.

And Sunday we had brunch with another very long time friend.  I like to call him the California Mindfucker because he is very interested in getting into peoples brains and playing with the goo.  Not to mention that he was one of my first lovers/play partners in the bdsm scene and he has done a fair bit of fucking with my brain.  But the ways he does it are so screamingly over the top weird California new-agey feeling.  I love it.  Of course we did more spelunking into brains but this time, for the first time ever, I paid attention to his story.  That feels horrible to admit.  I feel like I should not be the one who “takes” in a given interaction.  But I often am, and that feels bad.

But oh man.  Since I have started consciously trying to ask for and accept more help I have seen a dramatic increase in the intensity of my friendships in a really wonderful way.  I am allowing people to do things for me I’ve never allowed them to do before.  I didn’t realize how lonely I have been my entire life.  No wonder I pursue sex with such vigor.  It’s the only time I let myself have a close, mutual relationship.  I don’t let anyone I am not currently fucking do anything for me and I make those people go through hell before I let them do stuff for me.  Instead I set myself up as the victim/martyr with all the need.

Interesting.  Enh, sorta.  Ok that’s hyperbole too.  But that’s my story about myself sometimes.  Anyhow, at this point I am trying to change up how I relate to people I love the most.  It’s an interesting process because almost all of the people I love the most have some fairly major issues.  That’s the whole “prickly and difficult” thing.  In order for us to get to a place where we know how to be more respectful of one another I have to start to look at my friends more.  I have to actually see them in a way I have never looked at them before.  I need to figure out where my defensive mechanisms are and actively try to change them.

I’m not really going to be able to go where I originally thought I was going with this post.  I got derailed by a wonderful, awesome person.  I got to go talk to an old friend and tell her about the highs and lows of our relationship and she gave me feedback on her perspective of them so I could figure out where I end and she begins.  And she tolerated a lot of babbling.  It was nice.  She has been my friend for so very long.

I’m starting to realize that anyone who is in my life at this point is fucking serious about loving me or they wouldn’t be in my life.  It takes intense effort and tolerance to be my friend.  And lots of people do it.  No really, lots of people.  I am putting out feelers for my birthday party and fixing my house and people are showing up.  Not hundreds, but lots.  Lots and lots.  More than I imagined.  I am really lucky.  I am really blessed.  I want to figure out where I end and they begin.  I want to see them more clearly.  I want to stop seeing ghosts.

I choose life.

And the next phase begins.

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This weekend didn’t quite go as expected. I didn’t know I was standing on the edge of a precipice about to fall in as fast as possible. I’m ready for my life to be different. I’m ready to go find some new dreams. I realized a while ago that I was feeling frustrated by the limited scope of my life, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. We are stuck, right? We have these little kids and we made agreements about how we wanted them raised so now I am stuck with those decisions (and this situation) forever. Or at least till the kids are older.

But isn’t life dynamic? This situation is untenable. Something–or, rather, a whole lot of things need to change. So we got to talking. We got to talking about what our lives could look like if we were luckier, or richer, or more determined. We talked about the extremes of what we would each like to have. We tried to figure out how our separate passions and interests can work together. The odd part has always been that we have tremendously different focii in life, yet we manage to be obsessed with one another and we get along far better than I’ve ever gotten along with anyone. Ok, if we are going to be very different people on very different paths, we need to find a way to hold hands at least from our separate paths. I can do it! I can reach out and hold on to the most important man I’ve ever had in my life.

Noah’s dreams are his to share, so I’ll let that rest for the time being. But as for myself, I need a change. I need to be more than a lactating, cleaning, cooking machine. No thanks. I want to have things that I do that are interesting to me. I want to *complete* projects. I want to grow and develop ambitions of my own. Some of the ways I want to grow do actually involve working–but not necessarily for someone else and not necessarily for money. I have to learn how to value me and my time appropriately. I’ve had good reason to think about that lately.

So I’ve been trying to determine what my dreams/goals can be. In what areas of my life do I want to stretch my wings and fly? The first and most important thing to me is realizing that it’s ok to be weird. That must sound odd to anyone who knows me. I experience a lot of anxiety around being odd. Especially in some particular ways. I’m totally ok with making financial choices and living with the results of those decisions. Unless the results make me look like my vision of poor white trash. There, I said it. I have class issues. I grew up being driven around in ugly, old trucks–often that had been “modified” with a blow torch (like my uncle’s truck that had been an RV and he used a blow torch somehow to take most of the RV shell off and leave a weird almost pick up truck from the RV shell). No thanks. I have to discover the difference between having shit because you can’t afford any better and having shit because you want to fly to Europe instead. Not that any part of my house actually qualifies as “shit” and I sold Noah’s ugly truck already.

I live in a small, not especially nice home. There isn’t much I can do about that other than change my attitude and possibly my decor so that I actually like my house. There are always going to be limitations to living here–it really is a small home and the layout is not the best–but I can work on changing things about this house so that I like it here. I am in this house at least 16/24 hours 7 days a week. Lately, much much more time than that. Why shouldn’t my house be someplace that makes me happy? So I am going to change things. I’m nervous about where I will find the money. I think that house projects need to become my big ‘entertainment’ budget and I should stop buying my children clothing to fund it. I’m kidding. Mostly. It is lucky that we are set for clothes for pretty much the rest of the year.

Right this exact minute we are nearly in a financial place that gives me hives. We are running out our buffer. We are doing so for quite a few good reasons and the money will be replaced this year–but I’m scared. I can feel the terror of being poor. It’s hard to convince my lizard brain that we are not on the verge of poverty. This would be because of vehicle maintenance and property taxes. Ugh. But it is temporary because the checks to fix it are on their way. I’m just over-sensitive. You see, I have panic attacks if we drop below three months of salary in savings. And Noah makes a lot of money. But! It’ll be ok. It’s probably a good thing for me to be cautious with money. Noah does want us to get rich.