For years I’ve pretty much been doing the same thing over and over again with my parents and expecting different results.  !BLAM!ming them was doing something different.

By not ever dealing honestly, openly, and calmly with the past and being straight up with them I swept everything under the carpet.  The result was I continued to get walked on and held responsible for their guilt and pain.   This allowed them, but honestly mostly my mother to continue with a lot of her/their hurtful ways.   The most recent examples: the card and phone call to the hospital mentioned in the prior posts.

She’s been bullying me my whole life in similar and much, much harsher ways.  She’s made me responsible (and her husband and son) for her wrongs and guilt.  I finally came to a point where I felt no guilt for what she had done in her life, or to me, or what she ever would do.  I decided that I was giving the guilt and pain back.  I had been bullied long enough…So the !BLAM!

Once I did this I set myself free.
Since I’ve been experiencing freedom, more self-confidence, much more clarity.
Some of the clarity has come in the form of being able to see myself clearer.  Remember my posts on “Peering Down the Rabbit Hole” and I talked about feeling worthless most of my life?  And how now that I see it I can 1) heal it and 2) must to be on the look out for slipping that mask back on?  Well after the hospital phone call I discovered that when it comes to my mother I tend to put that mask on right away.

She hung up on me and I felt worthless.  Unvalidated.  Wrong. Wrong for telling her she hurt me.  That it was wrong what she/they had done to me…  Typically in the past I would have gotten angry and spewed it out.  This time however, when I felt these feelings rise up I stopped.  I began to observe…calmly.  And that’s when I got in touch with “something different…”  I saw the little girl inside me.  She had backed into a corner, drew her knees up to her chest, put her face between her legs, and hid. 

I continued to watch.  She didn’t know how to come out.
I’m 45 for heaven’s sake and I’m reacting as if I’m a child.  Good God who knew?
…Later, the little girl was still in charge and was nervous on the phone with the man in her life that’s showing her love, kindness, and acceptance and hasn’t a problem in the world with her, yet she felt he did and she began to say things that questioned this.  But this time I/the adult saw what I/the little girl was doing.  I/the little girl was creating a situation where he would get upset with her/me, thereby proving to her/myself that I was indeed worthless.  Worthy of the worthless mask.

Once I saw it I countered it by being honest and admitting exactly what was going on, that I was going to do all I could to overcome this illusion, and I needed help.  And I received it    I received love.

Since I have wobbled around coming out of the corner.  But I’ve been observing. Learning things about myself.  Healing and growing and creating new realities.  Happily I haven’t created a mess with him, my children, or my ex as I would have in the past and wondered how it happened.  Instead I have dealt lovingly with myself and strove to not let the past effect my present.  I’m an adult, my mother can’t hurt me this way anymore.  I have value.  I have worth…

Night, love ya,
Theresa Jane
-whose finally leaving the past behind and beginning to really live in the present    because I did something different… I !BLAM!med…

Thoughts since the !BLAM!…

A great metaphor for the forgotten child.

!BLAM!ming my parents was one of the best things I’ve ever done.  I feel so different inside.  I’m experiencing transformation daily.  I let my parents know that I was a forgotten child in all their violence, drama, and destruction.  And I did it calmly.  No screaming, no yelling, no my parents yelling back…  I let them know in a controlled, clear adult manner that what they did effected me.  That I’ve never stood up and said.  I had always basically summarized: “You and dad were terrible.  You were out of control…”  This time I let them know what they did hurt.  How I felt.  How I was effected.  That I remember what they did to each other and me.  It was REAL.  It happened.  It destroyed me.  I’m tired of it not being acknowledge and them expecting me to just go on as if, to quote my mother, “We were just a family who had problems”.   Good God, it was more than that.

I grew up in that mess.  I was a child.  I had to find a way to survive.  Through my private sessions with my couch/therapist… I discovered that I never came out of survivor mode.  Possibly the best way to describe it would be to say, I functioned like a vet who suffers with post war trama: flashbacks/jumpy/edgy/suspicious/on alert/ready to protect and defend…

Not me. Just a great pic for here

I have lived on “survive mode” since I was a child.  It has only been until the last 7-8 months that I can say I am finally, really, really coming out of that state.  Out of the “training” I went through at home, when I grew up and my brain was forming.  The way I processed life, my psychological state of being, formed and letting that go and even seeing some of it was a very difficult thing to do.  A very tough row to hoe.  Those ways of being were what allowed me to survive what I lived through.

Letting go took two things: A committed couch who wouldn’t give me any way out and my unwavering commitment… leaving appointments with swollen red eyes or swearing a sailors stream of cus when it came to the session I just left, “what did that son of a bitch know about anything…”

Since leaving home I have searched for my healing.  Tried many things.  So I could live normally.  Feel normally.  Like other people.  It wasn’t until 6 years ago this January 2nd that I really found the source of my healing.  That’s when I found my life couch and he had a system (birthed from the book he had been writing: Red Book and Cotton) and through it I found the way out.  However it’s taken a lot of work and it wasn’t until the last 7-8 months that I can I say I have had the earth shattering break throughs that could allow me to say, “Now I’m really starting to live my own life.  I feel it.  I see it.  The lingering effects are falling off in chunks… finally.”

That’s not to say that through the years I haven’t seen major changes in my life, emotions, reactions, how I deal with life around me.  It’s just to say that all that work finally added up to the “Wow” I see and feel in me today.  And the !BLAM! rocketed me.

I know I’m not done.  I have more work to do.  And I will, “Sell all I have in search of the pearl of great value”…that being my wholeness.  I have to be whole.  I have to feel like a confident adult who has value and worth.  I have to be happy from the inside and not from what happens on the outside to “make” me happy…  So I’m not stopping…

Love ya,
Theresa Jane
-if you are clueless about what I’m talking about when it comes to what I did when I !BLAM!med…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3dcbzTwu7Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

My neighbors decorations. It's sweet. Had to share.

This path I’m on…discovering me.  Going from a housewife to a film maker has taken the most interesting twists and turns since it began.  It really proceeded my first blog post… I would say by 5-6 years.  A year or two before my divorce.  That’s when I began to have an uncontrollable drive to discover me.  To break out of the only role I had ever performed: Housewife.

I want to pause right here and state that I in no way want anyone to consider that I’m demoralizing the role of housewife.  The reason for the use of the word is that that was what I had done for 23 years.  Had I been a sales clerk, I would have named my blog From Sales Clerk to Housewife.  The title exists in order to express a passing away of the old and the birthing of the new.  The title also demonstrates how dramatic the transition has been.

But I will hasten to add that there is an unspoken component to this word, “housewife”.   And that is that it was all I knew.  It’s what I had been surrounded with growing up.  I knew only a handful of woman that worked before I reached my teens and then in my teens none of the woman held anything very, shall we say snappy.  Hairdressers, Realtors, clerks, check out people, a nurse or two, and definitely teachers.  So my examples/role models were scanty.  My mom was a housewife, my grandmothers, my aunts, friends of my mothers, women that lived around me…  Therefore both unspoken and spoken the training was: become a housewife.  Although I yearned for greater I found myself duplicating that image.  And in retrospect I can honestly state that I never sat down and made that decision.  To become a housewife.  I truly have come to see that I made it based on a brain pattern.  And once I came to grips with that I was left wondering, who and what I was?  What makes me tick?

While I was still married I toyed around with this. (too much to tell now)   But nothing like the day I signed those divorce papers.  Whoose.  I was thrust onto the canvas of life with the question, “So what ya gonna do now woman?”  Damned if I knew.  It was completely foreign.  I may as well have gone to the Russian Tundra without the aid of a translator or guide.

But in spite of that when I was alone with my thoughts I declared that there was no way I was going to spend the rest of my life pitteling around with little, ordinary jobs.  Good God NO.  I’m not cracked up for that.  I’ve got too much creativity and drive to not do my own thing and be trapped by a 9 to 5.  And in spite of my worthlessness that I dealt with, (but hadn’t identified it at the time) I was too strong willed and driven to ever want to bend my knee to someone drawing up a schedule for my week and dictated to me what I had to do with my hours for the rest of my working career.  Are you kidding?  Spit that right out of my mouth.

Course I needed money so I did try the “job” thing.   Hated it.  That’s when I went into my own business caring for other people’s children.  I love kids.  I think their great… So I love what I do and it pays the bills.  I can call my own hours, chose the families, and set my salary.  Perfect.  For the moment…

So anyway… I knew I was untrained in anything business, but I really didn’t care.  I knew I could learn anything I set my mind to.  Proved that to myself time and again.  So I’d make it one way or the other.  I dug into the concept and belief that I would one day have my own business.  Then I got busy and have forged that direction every since.  I’ve taken a lot of turns getting here but every bit of it was training and preparing me for the company John1 and I formed: Free the Mind Productions, Inc for the purpose of creating videos.

This is a good place to stop.  When I sat down here tonight I had no idea what to write.  I kept putting it off and messing around with others little things.  Finally I came here and started typing and am surprised where I’m going.  I have more.  But holding that for tomorrow.  I know where I’m going.  The hint is: it ties with the last few posts.

Night, love ya,
Theresa Jane
-whose doing it again…another mini series, sheesh what is it with me?  LOL.