Svava and Ophelia in Seattle

This is my friend Svava. She's one of the many amazing superstar advocates who have made it their mission to advocate for survivors of abuse worldwide. Originally from Iceland, Svava is spreading her wings in the United States. I truly believe that only by joining forces and working together will we make the biggest impact. Together, we are making a difference. To learn more about Svava and her organization, visit her website: Click here

MALESURVIVOR'S 21ST WEEKEND OF RECOVERY

SPACES AND SCHOLARSHIPS STILL AVAILABLE!

ATLANTA WEEKEND OF RECOVERY-LEVEL I
Male Survivor has a great scenic facility to host us (The Center for New Beginnings in Dahlonega, GA, one hour north of Atlanta), and NOW they need more participants to take advantage of this great opportunity for healing! If you are a male survivor of sexual abuse, provide services to male survivors, or are a partner or ally of male survivors, please help us spread the word now about this retreat. Registration will remain open until May 14th, so there is still time to register.

Scholarship help is also available!

This is the last Level I Weekend of Recovery until October, so if you're ready to take this step in your recovery, please join in!

For more information, please go online by clicking this link: http://www.malesurvivor.org/weekends/2008/dahlonega.html

Thanks for helping us spread the word!

Holiday Musings from the Psyche of 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

Ask the question.

Something that we hear a lot from loved ones of survivors is that there is a large variety of resources for survivors to reference, but fewer that help loved ones to get a handle on what has happened and what they can do to help.

There are a number of ways in which family and friends can support an adult survivor of rape, sexual assault and gender violence:

* Listen in a way that supports and validates the survivors’ feelings.
* Let them know that you believe what they are telling you.
* Make yourself available for the survivor.
* Encourage survivors to seek help.
* Let survivors disclose details of the abuse at their own pace.
* Ask survivors what they need from you to feel safe and supported.
* Take care of yourself and get help if needed.
* Educate yourself on recovery issues. See suggested reading for a list of literature to assist you.

Admittedly, there are a lot of questions that arise when someone in your life is trying to work through their trauma. Sometimes, the things you say or do, though well intentioned, may not be appropriate or helpful to the survivor.

I have read a number of books as a survivor and as an advocate in the field. Some of which we recommend on our site.

For more information, please visit our resource page: http://www.womenspeakoutnow.com/resources.html

If you have additional resources, not yet listed please let us know. We will do our best to review them and if appropriate, add them to the list.

Emotional Heirlooms

Howdy, ya'll. Holiday time is upon us, and I want to remind everyone to look for positive triggers, perhaps even consciously create new traditions that are totally yours and yours alone.

My husband and I are doing the tree farm thing with our kids this year. He was raised in a religion that did not observe any holidays, no birthdays, no Christmas, etc. (LAME)

My mother left me when I was 26 moths old. She wanted to pursue her own interests which at the time were a rock band. I was raised by a father who never held a job down, mooched off his parents, who enabled him in every way. He began molesting me as a baby, about one and a half. He eventually kidnapped and raped me in a motel room in New Orleans.

My mother was supposed to come to meet us there, she never came. His family chose denial and I chose emancipation, so I waved bye bye to that freak show for good in 2004. I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. We likes to get down in Nola. Naturally, I have always loved holidays. Just inherently love celebratory energy. Any opportunity to shake what I got, I shall! Like right now, James Brown is playing, he's singing about his soulful Christmas tree and grooving at Christmas time, and I can barely sit here to type because my ass just wants to shake itself....but I digress.

Troy, my hubs, and the kids and moi were driving the other day, discussing ornaments, the passing of legacies to our children, what if any legacy we have yet to obliterate from our respective childhoods. Most were in need of total annihilation! As we were talking, I said,
"you know, what about emotional heirlooms?" He said, "Oh my god, write about it!"
That's what it's like...we pass down the ornaments, silver, the plates, even the the dysfunction because it seems easier than actually changing things, we pass down habits, idiosyncrasies.

But, I think of what we are leaving our children as more than a legacy. Legacies are a little intangible. What emotional heirlooms will we pass to them? Literally, for each moment in life, what are we passing? What crystallized moments, whether joyous or painful, will we give them to hold? Will we remember that those very heirlooms are going directly to our grandchildren as well? My parents and grandparents on both sides never thought past themselves. Ever.
This has to be done very deliberately. This year, our positive triggers are the tree farm, side-of-the-road apple cider, and lots of groovy Christmas music. Now, the tree farm thing is essential, as I have much trauma surrounding the holidays.

I am creating future triggers, or memories, that will eventually pass into being emotional heirlooms for us and our babies, and their babies too..Screw Santa's list, I have made a list from my childhood, what was good, what was not. When I was little, Christmas was pretty good considering the context, at my dad's folks. I always missed my mother terribly and felt lonesome for that maternal love. I always feared my father's mercurial moods at Christmas. I feared his father for the same reason. Even at my grandparents, it was often like walking on glass. It was up to me to push for the tree, the lights, the merriment. If I had not been so determined to celebrate, I am quite sure no one would have done it. Many of the traditions once held dear in my family unraveled with the years of escalating abuse. It was not very safe to feel merry, for I always knew any merriment was a precursor to violence. Still, I stayed up all night decorating that tree, giving my soul room to be expressed.Yet in the midst of it all I stayed up all night decorating the tree. I loved doing it, me awake with all the animals.

I look at my babes today, and they have a brand new world, a mother who would rather die a slow painful death than abandon them, a father who is healthy, kind, sensitive, a love like no love I ever knew on Christmas and every other day. I am giving myself all things new as well. New heirlooms. New feelings, letting the joy in, relishing it, allowing my heart to be porous so that I may soak it all in. The joy that my children feel becomes my own. . When I see my children happy, free, and safe, I celebrate that with a deep smile, taking the moment home into my heart, and thanking the universe for this life. As we do this in our new family, we heal the children we once were as well, so everyone benefits. Instead of being angry or bitter because we were cheated, we choose to celebrate, and the taste is ever sweeter because of our respective histories.

Here's to new and healthy emotional heirlooms. We may not be able to hang those from a tree, or place them upon a mantle to look at, but they will live forever in the hearts of our children.

Welcome Sarah!

WSO welcomes Sarah Elise to our growing list of contributors for the (Wo)Men Speak Out Blog.

Sarah and I met on the Angela Shelton survivor forum on the days before Angela even knew who I was! Over 5 years later, we are still working our butts off sharing our stories, through out own organizations now, with all who will listen. Some of you may know Sarah as our featured Artist of the Month in the Oct 07 Minizine.

Sarah is truly a bright light. It is with great admiration that we welcome Sarah to our circle of survivor-advocates and look forward to her future posts.

Namaste Sarah and thank you for being here.

Reinventing Family

Today has been one filled with much mixed emotion. There are quite a few friends out there who are going through an extremely difficult time right now and with the holidays just around the corner, I was called to make this video to vent some of my thoughts. I hope it serves you well and gives some light in the darkness. Be well.

-Ophelia

A Mother's Choice

Often, we hear of men who molest young girls and women and receive too little jail time or often, no penalty at all for their crimes. Tonight, on television was a story of a mother who was the co-abuser to her daughter of 7 years old. The reason for her decision, she wanted to "prove her love" to her husband. The ultimate sacrifice, in her mind would surely win over his commitment and perhaps allow some sense of normalcy to their lives. Normalcy stemmed from incest, an interesting and obviously distorted reasoning, an excuse to commitment the ultimate betrayal.

These stories are not new to me, having read hundreds of thousands of emails over the years depicting torturous and unbelievable acts of abuse. However, it always takes a moment longer for me to come to terms with mothers who turn on their own children, in order to gain the "love" of a man in their life. They themselves, abuse victims in the hell that is intimate partner violence. Part of me feels torn by the understanding that they face their own fear and pain and yet, I cannot condone the line that is crossed from victim to abuser.

There were so many levels to this particular case, but what I was struck by was an issue that screams true for so many women; needing a man in order to feel validated, worthy, loved. Often, women (and men) who are survivors of abuse will do find themselves doing things and allowing things to be done without questioning the impact of their decision. There is a laundry list of reason why such things happen, but one very important factor is conditioning.

If you are told that you are useless and unworthy each and every day of your life, parts of you, if not all of you will begin to believe it. There is truth behind the saying "thoughts are things" in that what you believe you become. If you are a vulnerable child your choice and sense of reality outside of your caregivers is drastically reduced and the name and expectations placed upon you will be your burden until you are old enough or fortunate enough to learn otherwise. For all of us, I believe this means being our own teachers.

A few years ago, I found myself in a relationship with a man who was quite older than me. I didn't realize at that time, that a large part of my connection to him was based on my relationship with my father. An odd and somewhat disconcerting realization, however one that looking back and being a survivor of incest, makes a lot of sense to me now. To make a long story short, I allowed myself to stay in this relationship and undergo behavior that I now see as abusive on many levels.

I fell in love with a man, and allowed him to control me in order to gain his affection and approval, much like I did with my father. The difference here is that I am no longer the abused child of 4 years old, but instead a grown woman making adult choices. The catch? On many levels, in the decisions that I made in that relationship (and others like it), my inner child, the one who learned what love was from her father, was still seeking love in the same way from men who could not give her what she needed. Self-worth, validation, self-respect, a true sense of self are all things that we must find in ourselves and that cannot be resolved by others.

I see myself as fortunate to have gotten out of that relationship before marriage or children. I can only imagine how much more complicated life would have been had my life changed even slightly to the left or where it is today. I see my mother and sister in my own experience, yet they were not as fortunate. My sister, passed and my mother having spent 30 years with an abusive husband. I see that choices that she made. I try not to judge her and yet, sometimes I do, still. I wish that all women and men will see their worth and never make the choices that will endanger themselves or their children. We must break the cycle now before it is too late.

Reflection in an instant

I have a friend who lives her life in goodness. Like many of us, she is a caregiver. She spends her days helping others. She also lives her life in fear, each day looking over her shoulder and doing the best she can to stay safe. Her life, one of unbelievable turmoil and incredible strength. She fights for the rights of so many but like many of us, forgets or is sometimes unable to see how worthy she is of love, how much she is already loved or simply that she is not alone.

This road is long and tiresome sometimes. Many of us have lived experiences that are unspeakable, or at least unbelievable to utter. We compare our wounds and work incredibly hard to lift ourselves up to a place where we can recognize our strength. We are not defined by our past but it can be unclear just how much of it has contributed to our struggle to simply, "get through" the day.

So, I write this short blog in response to the pain I shared in a moment of disclosure. A moment where the world came crashing down and the realization that what was normal, can no longer be that again, but that we must redefine what normal is and rebuild foundations. I speak to all of those that have experienced pain, confusion and fear.

To those who have been granted second, third and forth chances, that we should know that even in the darkest of hours; there is light. That there is love and friendship.

That there is hope. We all need hope.

Ophelia