Guilt isn’t the child of logic or reason. It’s not easily dislodged with information. This invasive adversary grew like a vine during my childhood sexual abuse and had a second spurt of growth in my active healing years.
I’ve always resisted the metaphor of seasons representing different ages. And yet, standing in my yard yesterday, doing my version of a few yoga stretches, I looked at the rich color of leaves all around me and saw a connection.
There are times in our journey when the tender spring-time shoots of our personal growth give way to change. What was once so firmly attached and held close as we nurtured our potential becomes something we want to share. We become the autumn tree. Stunning in the hues we have acquired, we find ourselves ready to let the leaves of our experience fall into the community around us.
Above all else, grade school was a place of order. Bells, lines, and desks in a row, it seems regulation was considered the path to knowledge. Repetition was the guiding force.
It began with the first warning bell. As we left the playground to begin the day, our wiggles and giggles were gobbled up by the wide halls where teachers stood at class room doors and rows of lockers called for our coats. Enthusiasm gave way as we slipped into our desks and faced the front of the room where the green blackboard wore a hat of a perfectly executed alphabet.
Some things are so woven into the fabric of our days, it seems the pattern has always been there and will never change. Writing in Jane Austen’s era is often an adventure in pulling threads out of everyday life to see how they affect my characters. When it came to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, my aristocratic friends were on the leading edge of change.
As three meals a day became popular, breakfast was becoming a full meal. It wasn’t served until 9:00 or 10:00, but it required full dress. The upper ten-thousand wouldn’t have considered coming to the family dining parlour without impeccable grooming. For those who couldn’t face these rigors, there was still the option of a light breakfast served in bed. Luncheon was a light midday meal followed by dinner before one began responding to the invitations that would elevate and establish them in society.
Anger was a challenging, elusive, frightening emotion for me during healing. Growing up, I had witnessed it blowing up without apparent reason. I had seen it used to terrify, abuse, and cower. It had soaked into the fabric of my family until it dampened even the sunniest moments.
Every opportunity can be seen as a bubble of energy with its own color, currents, and cadence. From our usual place of activity and comfort, these appear on the horizon of our journey like roadside stops. They might offer excitement, growth, more of what we love, new vistas, or another direction.
Knowing these bubbles of energy possibilities will change my days, maybe my destination, and surely the route to my intentions, I have been inclined to respond instinctively. But, lately, I have noticed a change.
Students learned best by drilling and repetition. Diving under our desks and covering our heads with our arms would protect us from a nuclear attack. In the 1950's the fear of Russia’s power was as real and accepted as the sun rising in the east.
Children of the Lone Ranger and Popeye years grew up under a cloud of other beliefs that shaped our lives. We were eating the best apples ever produced with the help of DDT and arsenic. We couldn’t drink coffee because everyone knew it would stunt our growth, while smoking cigarettes was chic and cool, one of those things adulthood held as a carrot to a rabbit. Most of us lived in second-hand smoke without a single thought for our health, but we didn’t swim for an hour after eating.
In 1661, M.P. wrote this about coffee: ‘Tis extolled for drying up the Crudities of the Stomack and for expelling Fumes out of the Head.’ The medicinal qualities of this berry drew me to coffee too. I learned it was high in antioxidants and started drinking a cup a day. In Jane Austen’s England, coffee was simply the kissing cousin of tea and chocolate drinks.
Coffee houses came before tea shops. By 1675, the landscape of England was dotted with 3000 ancestors of Starbucks. In 1717, Thomas Twining turned his coffee house into a tea shop and began a new fad. By the early 1800’s tea had become more affordable and a common drink in the middle class as well as those with more income, but Jane Austen’s era and come and gone before the Duchess of Bedford started the English tradition of late afternoon tea time. Even then, coffee was invited.
Healing from childhood sexual abuse felt like a cavalcade of challenges, obstacles, rewards, insights, emotions, and the incomprehensible. Though every survivor can recognize this landscape, each of us has our own experience. For me, this journey of courage asks that I also share what I learned about healing from dissociated trauma memories.
Money, like everything else, is energy. We pull it out of our pocket or purse knowing others will recognize its power to buy things, but at the quantum level, it is nothing more than vibrating molecules. And each of us determines how it fits into our life by our beliefs about money.
If I pulled out one-dollar bills and offered them to people standing in line at a movie, every single person would have their own feeling about its worth. One person might push it in his pocket feeling it would have no effect on his day. Another might be delighted about using it to buy popcorn. The wonder of any amount of money is determined by the value we place on it.
There are times in our journey when the tender spring-time shoots of our personal growth give way to change. What was once so firmly attached and held close as we nurtured our potential becomes something we want to share. We become the autumn tree. Stunning in the hues we have acquired, we find ourselves ready to let the leaves of our experience fall into the community around us.
It began with the first warning bell. As we left the playground to begin the day, our wiggles and giggles were gobbled up by the wide halls where teachers stood at class room doors and rows of lockers called for our coats. Enthusiasm gave way as we slipped into our desks and faced the front of the room where the green blackboard wore a hat of a perfectly executed alphabet.
As three meals a day became popular, breakfast was becoming a full meal. It wasn’t served until 9:00 or 10:00, but it required full dress. The upper ten-thousand wouldn’t have considered coming to the family dining parlour without impeccable grooming. For those who couldn’t face these rigors, there was still the option of a light breakfast served in bed. Luncheon was a light midday meal followed by dinner before one began responding to the invitations that would elevate and establish them in society.
Knowing these bubbles of energy possibilities will change my days, maybe my destination, and surely the route to my intentions, I have been inclined to respond instinctively. But, lately, I have noticed a change.
Children of the Lone Ranger and Popeye years grew up under a cloud of other beliefs that shaped our lives. We were eating the best apples ever produced with the help of DDT and arsenic. We couldn’t drink coffee because everyone knew it would stunt our growth, while smoking cigarettes was chic and cool, one of those things adulthood held as a carrot to a rabbit. Most of us lived in second-hand smoke without a single thought for our health, but we didn’t swim for an hour after eating.
Coffee houses came before tea shops. By 1675, the landscape of England was dotted with 3000 ancestors of Starbucks. In 1717, Thomas Twining turned his coffee house into a tea shop and began a new fad. By the early 1800’s tea had become more affordable and a common drink in the middle class as well as those with more income, but Jane Austen’s era and come and gone before the Duchess of Bedford started the English tradition of late afternoon tea time. Even then, coffee was invited.
Healing from childhood sexual abuse felt like a cavalcade of challenges, obstacles, rewards, insights, emotions, and the incomprehensible. Though every survivor can recognize this landscape, each of us has our own experience. For me, this journey of courage asks that I also share what I learned about healing from dissociated trauma memories.
If I pulled out one-dollar bills and offered them to people standing in line at a movie, every single person would have their own feeling about its worth. One person might push it in his pocket feeling it would have no effect on his day. Another might be delighted about using it to buy popcorn. The wonder of any amount of money is determined by the value we place on it.
