Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
My niece just sent me an email. she said 'I think trauma is the birth canal that brings you an opportunity to see reality, and grow spiritually'.
Wow, what an amazing concept.
I am fairly open to what she's saying, regards adult trauma and abuse - because I want there to be SOME good that's come out of it.
However, I'm not amused that it has to be (in the past) so f...cking painful. And....as for the early childhood abuse - NEVER NEVER NEVER is there any 'good' reason for it! nope.
Has anyone else heard the spiritual people saying that we're all on this planet to learn? that's the purpose? and the religious people say suffering is all part of god's plan?
I can't accept either of these beliefs - which indicate some sort of plan or purpose to the childhood abuse.
I can't accept that it's anything other than WRONG AND SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN.
Can anyone relate?
Wow, what an amazing concept.
I am fairly open to what she's saying, regards adult trauma and abuse - because I want there to be SOME good that's come out of it.
However, I'm not amused that it has to be (in the past) so f...cking painful. And....as for the early childhood abuse - NEVER NEVER NEVER is there any 'good' reason for it! nope.
Has anyone else heard the spiritual people saying that we're all on this planet to learn? that's the purpose? and the religious people say suffering is all part of god's plan?
I can't accept either of these beliefs - which indicate some sort of plan or purpose to the childhood abuse.
I can't accept that it's anything other than WRONG AND SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN.
Can anyone relate?
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I did the dumbest thing today. I charged my earbuds, unplugged the block and put the block in my little bag instead of the earbuds. I wasn't happy about that when I got to the gym. What a dummy!
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Ever since I stopped doing therapy because of insurance, I've been feeling that old tense and irritable sense of anxiety and stress. I hate that. I was making so many strides and changes during therapy, my therapist would acknowledge all of my progress and accomplishments, and I miss that reassurance. Today I thought about it, and I made those changes! She would always tell me that I chose to...
Sigh...
I don't KNOW about all the metaphysical consolations, but I do find myself more at peace when I look for the random beauty in the chaos and just let the mystery be.
there are some wrongs that can never, ever be made not wrong. childhood abuse is a perfect example. animal cruelty is another to me.
inexcusable.
the one that gets to me is `god would never put on a person more than they could handle'
well, suicide is my country's number one non-accidental killer of people in my generation, making that statement not only wrong, but hurtful and completely disrespectful.
I just feel like there's GOT to be more to us than this life. This life is an ongoing series of devastation and euphoria, of utter emptiness yet full of grace and glory. It's uglier than the mind can imagine, yet more beautiful than the eye can behold.
Some of us are born into fortune, and others into complete despair.
There's a place where we all become part of one light and one love, and it sure as hell isn't here. This is where we claw and fight our way through each day, and have flashing moments of what that promise will be when it unfolds beyond here. That's the stuff that my faith is made of.
My father was evil. He was undoubtedly a sociopath. He was a genius and a charmer, but the things that happened in the prison that was our home were unthinkable (by many people, but probably not many in here). Worse than the molestation and physical abuse was his calm intimidation and tortuous treatment with his words. He lived to see fear in our eyes, and basked in demeaning us to feel like nothing if we ever showed weakness or emotion. He knew us as individuals with unique vulnerabilities and fears and he preyed upon them with control and reign.
Recently, my mother shared some of the things she knew about my father's childhood. His father was horrific. As boys, my father and his brother watched in horror while their father killed a man over a poker game. Their father would disappear off into the woods with those boys for days, and it was then that my mother strongly suspected that he was violated. And then, my grandfather apparently fled, leaving behind my father and uncle as young men with my grandmother and great grandmother. The damage was done, and as a 19 year old man, my father charmed my mother into marriage where he took fierce control of her. She had 6 children and was helpless to the cycle that continued. She was only a child herself, and in many ways, she still is.
My father is still alive. At the age of 50, when I was only 17 years old, he suffered a stroke. Just like that, his ability to use his words and use his hands were taken away from him. But it was too late for two of my brothers who never had a chance. One overdosed, and the other killed himself.
It's been exactly 30 years this month since my father had his stroke, and for the last 8 years, he lies motionless in a bed at a home. His body is distorting it's shape, and he is plagued with sores and bacterial infections. His lungs are filling with fluid, and he is ever so slowly drowning. He lies there alone in a tiny room with a TV. They bring his meals and clean his ass. Other than that, no one is there.
I grieve for the little girl in me who was damaged. I grieve the loss of my brothers and the broken soul of my mother.
Who grieves for the little boy that my father once was, and whose childhood was stolen from him too?
I do. More often than not, we are victims to victims. I don't make this damaged life about me. I make it about a long chain of very unfortunate events that cry for grace and mercy.
That's what I try and feel every day. Grace and mercy. I try real hard. I visit my father and I tell him I love him, because somewhere in there, the little boy still suffers. That little boy will be free someday by God's will, as will the little girl in me.
Maybe life is about really really feeling the difference between the evils that roam among us humans, and the grace of God that awaits us and shows us mercy.
I'm sure this is not at all in agreement with what others may feel, and I completely understand that. This is my own perspective.
My favorite professor in seminary told me that when his child died he told his wife it was God's will and she threw him out of the house until he got a better concept of God. Ha! He did. Sounds like you and his wife (and, eventually, him, too) agree on that God's plan thing. Me, too. Thanks for saying so.
I fantasize about a bar in heaven where earthlings and aliens all drink together in something like the bar scene from Star Wars. And we find out that the cruelty on earth was an exception, that it wasn't so on other planets. That this isn't God's will, that all of this pain on this planet was by mistake only.
Hey, Jon--good to see you, by the way.
I don't know if there was a reason, and it WAS wrong what was done to me... It has taken me so very long to understand that concept...
Despite those responses, I try so very hard to open my mind and have some kind of perspective regarding my abuse...
I truly wish you well on your journey... It is not always easy, can be quite painful, but I find, with journaling, I am able to see there are good days along the path of this thing called life...
Even if that's true, we are here for now, and I do look for meaning in my suffering. It matters hugely to me.
The history of humanity is a history of brutality and suffering. I don't know why we went off the rails in the course of our evolution, but we did. And most of the sufferers of the past were either hardened to their own and others' suffering, or they were destroyed by it. We are among the first to learn to heal and to stand up to the evil in our pasts. I want it to be about lifting humanity above it's gruesome ways. I'm not sure if or how that's true, but that's what my heart yearns towards.
Thank you Muji for giving me this hilarious scene in my head, of all of us - including the aliens, sitting around the bar, at the Star Wars cantina. One of my favorite movies. Now I can't get that music out of my head. : )
This one more than other's ticks me off. Mostly because that is not what was in the bible, just deformed version to fit a need to say some thing believed to be profound.
As a widow..that has been laid on me now along with the living with my past abuses.
It is taken out of context as Paul was warning the followers, of what befell Moses' followers, that chose to participate in vile behavior. A warning not to test God, they had made idols to worship and to sacrifice to as well as other sordid behavior in the name of Idolizing god.
We would be tested/tempted but that ways would be available to us to see a way out ...if we chose.
1Corinthians 10:9-10:14
9 We should not test Christ,[b] as some of them didand were killed by snakes. 10 And do not grumble, as some of them didand were killed by the destroying angel.
11 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come. 12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you dont fall! 13 No temptation[c] has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted[d] beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted,[e] he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
Idol Feasts and the Lords Supper
14 Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry.
He won't tempt, but others might. we choose.
As for your father, it is what I was talking about that we or many of us are only the next cycle generation of our parents own distorted reactions they learned. What we "learn" from that is how to stop that cycle. Not easy until you can feel compassion for the abuser. I have reconciled my father's. Because I now know his life. It felt like part of the weight was lifted. My father was a "Savage" that was put into catholic schools to beat the indian out of him and beat the Catholic into him. When it was his choice he studied all parts or all translations, Spotting mis-translations, and time line discrepancies. Sundays Service was followed by the priest coming to our home for these discussions, which we as children were tested on...beaten/punished for mistakes.
When I had to move to his house at fifteen, Gertie came out to deal with my father. I drew Jesus' face on the wall facing the door with eyes that followed you. The other long wall had Michelanglo's God hand reaching, image drawn on an 12"x8' wall. it stopped my dad at the door, he always knocked after that, but never came in.
http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7hXy89BSGm4ALuFXNyoA;_ylc=X1MDMjc2NjY3OQRfcgMyBGJjawMwczQwdDIxOG9rZnVwJTI2YiUzRDQlMjZkJTNEMS5kSlBoQnJZSDFxTEloVEhnNFB2VTNUOWZCNFIxeWRka2dzSE5PQVgxQTMyQS0tJTI2cyUzRDRhBGZyA2ZwdGIteWZmMjAtcwRtdGVzdGlkA1JBTVAlM0RSTVAwMyUyNlNXSU0lM0RTV0lNQzAEbl9yc2x0AzEwBG5fc3VnZwMxMARvcmlnaW4Dc2VhcmNoLnlhaG9vLmNvbQRwb3MDMwRwcXN0cgNtaWNoZWxhbmdlbG8sIGhhbmQEcHFzdHJsAzE4BHFzdHJsAzI0BHF1ZXJ5A21pY2hlbGFuZ2VsbyBoYW5kIG9mIGdvZAR0X3N0bXADMTM4OTQyNTY3MjgwOQR2dGVzdGlkA1NXSU1DMA--?gprid=y6wrtn1jS3ePngW2IcUaOA&pvid=2WbkVzcyLjMOEB0QUYo_2QuQNzYuMlLQ8_L__aFI&p=michelangelo+hand+of+god&fr2=sa-gp&fr=fptb-yff20-s
So yes we learn.
Tolerance, we'll charter our very own DS space ship for a heavenly preview--what do you say?
I personally dare to believe that somehow suffering must be even beyond God's power to mete out or else what kind of God would dole out pain so badly. I see instead God being with us in our suffering, not just in Western religions, but Eastern ones, too.
That means even the most powerful tool for dealing with suffering is solidarity, even for God. Not those pat answers we all hate. Those came out of the mouths of the bad comforters in the Book of Job in the Bible. So people who quote the Bible to give us pat answers should read the whole book.
Sometimes the answer is not even saying anything. Just being there for each other. Like we do here.
I totally don't buy the omniscient all-powerful God. I certainly don't buy that we get one shot and then it's heaven or hell. I'm always grasping for meaning and understanding and not convinced of anything.
But I think that the universe is made of consciousness, and we are all part of that universal consciousness. We are all god ourselves, a small offshoot of god, like the jets of water that fly up when an ocean wave hits the shore. I think the evil in the world is of our own making - us meaning humanity. I think we are an outcome of the universe's boundless creativity and "god" is discovering and learning through us as the story goes on and we evolve. I more or less believe in reincarnation and I feel like our suffering and learning to heal from it, learning to reject all the negative meanings about ourselves that we derived from it, and discovering our true, beautiful, loving natures is maybe a culmination of eons of suffering and causing suffering as human beings. That's not saying we deserve it for past sins - it's about learning that we don't deserve it. None of us.
In the natural world, there is suffering. It is part of being alive, for every member of every species alive on this earth right now and for all those in the past. Even "nature" has a choice: tsunami, earthquake, volcano, etc....the result of the imperfection of the creation as it exists BECAUSE of its 'free will". These are difficult concepts, I know that. But I have spent a lifetime studying this and I can tell you that your suffering, no matter how great and no matter how unjust and undeserved, will ultimately NOT MATTER because this life ends, and the "next" begins.
I know, it's a ticklish subject. I went and sent you a friend request to discuss it some more, if you're interested as I am, too. Good stuff.
muji
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we simply cannot read most of these responces do to the fact of the fundamantal nature of our torture and abuse. it was completely religious based. specificaly "christian" based. from almost the moment of birth She was marked demonic and had to be "Cleansed."
you can fill in the blanks.
we know this day that Divinity in no way sought to have the inoccent treated such. it is an abonination. many times we have discussed with Divinity why? the aswer is always "Free Will. True Power Must Honor the Divine Rights of Choice and Free Will. Otherwise you cannot truly have cause and effect (aka karma/justice)."
in this we learned that they made and continue to make their choices so they will reap what they sow judged by their own proffessions of faith. While we now hold our own right to choose for Ourselves and we will be held accountable by our proffesions of faith, but it will be OUR choices NOT anyone elses.
We choose to comune with a Divine who is love and peace and protection and acceptance. as well as reflect that to the rest of the world in our own way even if they don't get it *snork*
they marked her cause She listened to that Divine voice. they didn't like it when It told her that "They are mad at God for abandoning them. They're mad and themselves for abandoning Him and having to live with the concequesnses."