Recently, Jason Pitzl-Waters of The Wild Hunt blog directed my attention to an article by Adrienne Jones, “Lessons My Bullies Taught Me.”  It hit close to home, both because I had more than my share of being bullied and mercilessly teased as the “weird kid” or politely as the girl and later woman who was “diffffffffeerrrreeeeent,” and also because it ignited conversation with several friends.  The crux of our discussion was how adults become part of the bullying problem, removing themselves from being part of the solution by letting victims and children know that they are not worthy or, at the very least,  not heard.  That extends beyond bullying to parenting and teaching in general and how an adult’s own darknesses and fears are transferred to less powerful representatives of themselves.  Yes, often their own children or students.  They’re powerless in their own lives but there is something reassuring about not being the least powerful of the food chain.  That’s what children are for, huh?

I’m in a far more powerful place in my life now, without needing to see others in pain to feel powerful–though a part of me does enjoy the karma of abusers being punished.  I look back at these times now in a more distant way emotionally, but note with certainty that they happened and the feelings I endured.  The way I look back at those times now is not from the perspective of the wounded child but more as her champion, speaking out for her now because she couldn’t then.

The following article  is from the upcoming book, Passion to the Third Degree

(Originally published in 2007)

It’s easy to look at someone else and wonder how they could ever have had self-esteem issues when growing up. I guess there are always ways that the message is sent that a child is worthless. Or, at least, worth less than someone else.

When I was a kid—and later, too—authority figures always said the right words, about how I could be anything I wanted to be and how valuable I was as a person—but I often felt they didn’t believe it. It was one thing to murmur praise and platitudes when life was peaceful, but when it was hard or desperate or dangerous? That’s when those defining moments came out.

I’ve journaled about many of them as my way of understanding them and releasing so much of the pain attached to those events. I can’t remember them all. I don’t care to remember them all. But a few always bubble to the top. And considering how far back some go, that’s a long way to bubble. I guess most of mine have to do with not being listened to or believing that no one would listen.

- When I was a very little girl and the dog attacked me when I was petting him, I was repeatedly asked what I’d done to provoke the dog and warned not to tell anyone that I’d been petting the animal because no one would believe me. I never went near the dog again, but he would hide in the shadows whenever I would go outside, and then he’d run up and bite me on the wrist and run back to hide. This happened many more times before a home was found for him, and I never told anyone about the other dog bites or scars. I’d already been told that I wouldn’t be believed, and besides, the scars on my face were still hidden under surgical tape. The bite healed but the psychological damage has always been there.

- When I was repeatedly sent alone to give an uncle a smooch and hugs at his car even though I kept finding excuses not to go and was shamed for not being grateful for the presents the old man brought me on his visits. Just before Daddy died last December, he found out the extent of the molestation and Daddy held me responsible for not having spoken up and stopped it when I was 12 and so sheltered that I didn’t understand any of it except I didn’t want an old man’s hands down my pants, or anyone’s for that matter.

- When Daddy finally wrote me a letter telling me he was proud of me…not for the awards I’d won or anything I’d accomplished in my career or education or any of the good things I repeatedly told him to win his approval, but because I’d married a banker and had a baby. He especially liked the banker part.

- More recently, when I told my mom that things in my marriage were bad, really bad, and how I was dying inside, and she told me not to do anything to “mess things up” and end up getting divorced.

- A relative who implied that my grandmother’s death was somehow my fault (at age 7) because I was crying and trying to be brave and not admitting that I was crying.

- A relative who refused to listen to my screams, particularly when I had lather from a bar of water-logged white Ivory soap on my hands at the lavatory and he thought it was paint from his job outside that he’d told me to stay away from, and he hauled me into the yard and angrily drenched my hands and arms in gasoline to clean off what he insisted was paint and then I got into more trouble for getting into the paint and him having to fix the situation. No one else believed me either…because he was the grown-up.

- The lack of any response at all from my paternal grandmother when I hugged her and her stating in front of me that as far as she was concerned, I was nothing to her. It was just a few years later that she took a nugget of my news of my first weeks at college and turned it into a horrific tale of how her granddaughter was living in sin in a co-ed dorm and probably, no not probably but most certainly, sharing showers and beds with boys in the dorm. Why worry about nasty rumors when your grandmother creates them from scratch before your very eyes and ears?

I understand why all these people said what they did and how so often it had as much or more to do with their own sense of worth or lack of it. They didn’t really listen because they were lost in their own ego, pain, situation, whatever. I could never depend, really, on what I was told because I wasn’t convinced that the people who loved me believed I was really as special as they said because their actions sometimes said loudly and clearly that they were not hearing me.

I think I’ve always had better luck getting people to listen to my writing than ever to my spoken words.

So how do you get people to hear you?

When you’re in the midst of a heartbreak or trauma, it’s very easy feel stuck in the muck.  I have come to see the turning points of my life in a different light, because that’s exactly what the worst moments of my life have been:  turning points….turning to something better, even if that was impossible to see then.

If I look back on the path my life has taken, every time there was a really rough patch, it forced me to change the course I was on.  Usually, I was not content with the course I was on but I didn’t know how to change it, to craft it into something better for me.  In a way, I suppose I brought that to me, Law of Attraction-style, because I was looking for something that would force a decision. I wasn’t proactive in an action sort of way but rather in a thought sort of way. 

That was true of my back injury when I was so focused on my career that I wasn’t doing much toward fulfilling my dreams or tending my spiritual needs.  It was true of how my marriage ended. It was true of home-business decisions.  It was true of health decisions.

It was true of several relationships I had that were really forks in the road for me.  I was happy with how things were going but wanted more.  If I’d gotten more, I would have been taking a particular fork that would have led to misery.  I couldn’t see that at the time because I needed that aerial perspective to see where the path beneath me was headed….into fire pits, swamps, and far more heartbreak than I got from a break-up.  Those break-ups put me on different path, one that was smoother, wider, gentler, and far less violence to the emotions.  The break-ups were just a few horrendous days wide as I got pushed onto a different course, rather than the miles of sameness before walking through years of hell.

What started as heartbreaks put me on better paths to more confidence, independence, happiness, serenity.  I could have spent the rest of my life–easily–with any one of those men.  I would not have grown in the ways I have, been loved in the ways I have, or learned to love myself.  If I were to map my life, you would see drastic zigzags with markers at each course correction, each with a name or event, but each directing me to higher ground.

When someone I dislike does something to hurt me, especially intentionally, I want to bare my teeth and claws and think nothing of going for the jugular.  If they do something to someone I care about, I’ll shred them without thinking.  When someone I care about does something to hurt me, intentional or not, my natural tendency is to want to withdraw and curl up in a ball until the pain goes away.

Those are my natural inclinations, what goes on inside that most people don’t see.  Showing my injuries is another matter.

In fact, very few people would have any idea at all of how often or deeply I’ve been hurt in my life if it weren’t for my blog and articles, which all started as a form of post-divorce catharsis through what I referred to as my “healing journal”  and ended up being a useful tool for many other women who were starting over in their lives.  That’s because somewhere along the way, I got the idea that you’re just not allowed to show your injuries to others because doing so makes you weak.  Yes, in some cases, it’s like announcing to sharks that you’re wounded and hey-doesn’t-my-blood-smell-good, and the people who did intentional damage will try to move in for the kill…but this is much more than that.

It’s easy to understand that you don’t want your enemies to know you’ve been injured or the extent of those injuries.  That’s just self-protection until you can get back on your feet and fight back.  It’s survival, that.  Showing how strong and invincible you are, even if you feel like a trembling, chilled, drenched puppy inside.

With people you care for, it’s much harder.  Or at least, it is for me.

For me, rather than show my injuries, it’s easiest for me to give off that strong appearance and remain light, open, and involved while I withdraw emotionally and often physically. Often, I will cut people off in an emotional shutdown to keep them from wounding me again.  I certainly responded that way enough throughout a long-term marriage and other relationships.  If I dared to say how I really felt and show my injuries, I knew I’d be accused of being “emotional,” which of course is code–especially among guys–for “weak.”

Yeah?  Well, I’m an emotional girl, I live in my emotions, I enjoy my emotions.  I love feeling wonderful about something or someone or just life, and loving my emotions and what they bring to me does not make me mentally disturbed or weak-minded.  (Thank you so much, Abraham-Hicks, for teaching me that.) I feel everything deeply, and though at times I’ve needed to take the edge off some pain, I don’t want to not feel deeply. My emotions bring a layer of joy and satisfaction to my relationships that nothing physical or intellectual comes close to.  And so I hated being regarded as deficient if I showed my injuries, if I let my spouse know how much lack of support or interest hurt me…or how devastated I was to have a manuscript rejected and dreams dashed…or any number of deep desires that just weren’t coming to fruition for me.

I’ve also been trained not to show my immense joy of being with a particular person because my own emotions were too overwhelming for the other person, even though I thought my emotions were rather subdued.  I once spent a fabulous weekend with a man I was crazy about–we’d been seeing each other for a long time and he’d frequently professed his love–and as he pulled up to drop me at the airport, he crushed my happily quiet mood by saying, “I had a great time, but don’t think this means anything.”   I withdrew into myself, kissed him goodbye at the terminal, and never showed him how badly those words had hurt.  His message was clear that he didn’t want to make a commitment, even though I’d never asked for one and didn’t expect one.  Pushing me away emotionally was a self-protection mechanism for him, but it hurt, and for the rest of the time I saw him, I kept a tight reign on my emotions and never let him see how much he mattered to me, lest insult be added to my injury.  I hated having to tamp down my feelings for fear of how someone else would handle it–which is why I try not to swallow my feelings these days about anything or anyone–but I could no more show my feelings than I could show my injuries.

In my last relationship, I most definitely showed my feelings but none of my injuries.  The reasoning was simple for me:  I didn’t want to add to his stress, didn’t want to try to guilt him into doing something that would have been better for me than for him, and didn’t want to manipulate him by flaunting my injuries.  I’ve noted that some women use their injuries–”I’ll kill myself because you don’t love me enough!”–to get their way, and I never wanted to be confused with one of them.  So my not showing my injuries wasn’t so much about self-protection as protecting him.   Making it easier on him.  Feeling I could not show my own injuries did not make it easier on me.

So where I am now is trying to be completely open and honest whenever I feel hurt.  I try to not withdraw, not close down, not internalize a wound so it can fester and become a physical illness.  I try to be honest.  I try not to manipulate or control a situation by creating a guilt-fest or try to force anyone to deal with emotions that are mine to deal with.  I try to be true to myself.

That’s not easy for other people to see or hear.  It’s easier for others if I pretend I’m not hurt  or that it doesn’t matter or if I do something to take away from the raw intimacy of showing someone else that I’m hurt.  There’s actually power in that, for me,  to show my injuries and know that I’ll be okay, that something happened that hurt and I’ll work through it and figure things out with no expectation of anyone else doing it for me.  That I can be honest in what I show of myself to others without using it as a weapon to get the attention, love, and/or respect that I deserve.

Two women from the Philippines are helping me with a home project. They’re smart, they work hard, and they’re compassionate. Traits I obviously admire. And even though they’ve both been handed their share of tragedy, they still agree, “Life is good.”

One is a single mother of six who just made the newspapers for being the victim of her former employer, a man she—along with quite a few other men and women—trusted and had great compassion for because of tragedy in his own family. She has a good heart, and because of it, she borrowed against everything she owned, including her home, to help someone she considered a friend.

She’s still singed from the fire but at the same time trying not to lose her sense of trust and compassion. That’s such a part of her that it would be a shame to lose not just her life savings but also her sense of innocence.

“But I’ve got great kids,” she tells me with a smile.

“Life is good,” echoes the other woman.

She’s keeping a positive outlook, which amazes me considering what she’s been through. Her friend tells me that people in the Philippines don’t suffer from depression like Americans do. Maybe it’s the pace of life here or maybe it’s the lack of attunement to Nature, or maybe it’s just not being ourselves. She finds it curious.

Then she adds, “Life is good.”

Before I can wonder how she can say that, she tells me that her husband was murdered in the Philippines in the 90’s but she had four children to raise and she had to go on with life.

“Life is good,” she says again.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Even when things are bad, there’s still enough good to make it all worth the effort.

In every dysfunctional family, there’s at least one do-goodin’ peacemaker who is either a blood relative, an in-law, or a “concerned family friend.”  Ironically, it’s usually not so much about making peace among hostile relatives but about being a hero—even through manipulative tactics designed to force everyone to make nice that really achieves nothing below the surface.  At least, that’s how it has been in my family…over and over and over again. So how do you bring peace into families where there’s never been peace and bring families back together when they’d just as soon each other disappear from the planet?

I grew up in a dysfunctional family.  To the core.  Not only was my immediate family dysfunctional, but my extended family all the way to fifth cousins was dysfunctional in ways that you normally find only in fiction or on Jerry Springer.  My extended family made the Dukes of Hazzard look like the intelligentsia of the South.  Too bad we couldn’t have had reality TV cameras following the various family branches around or we would  have been one of the longest running shows around because there was always DRAMA. DRAMA in all caps. No editing needed for maximum dramatic impact. Not the occasional tiffs that most families have every few years because the wrong sister was the Maid of Honor in a cousin’s wedding or somebody named a baby after Grandpa first, but near-daily DRAMA.

When I was a kid, I seriously never knew when I came home from school each day which relative outside my immediate household was going to be big news—who was going to be in jail, who’d hit somebody with a pipe,  who was avoiding the repo man, who’d tried to run my car off the road, whose window was shot out during the five minutes they weren’t sitting in front of it, who’d unplugged whose freezer on the back porch and spoiled all the food but left their distinctive shoeprints in the dirt, who’d destroyed an expensive piece of machinery in my dad’s barn after taking it without asking,  who’d just reneged on a debt that made half the local stores refuse checks with my surname on them, or who was covering up an affair with a little extra religiosity.  My extended family thrived on conflict—some still do—back before conflict was popularly rephrased as DRAMA.

They say blood is thicker than water, but in my family, so is toothpaste. I love my mom and brothers dearly, but I have plenty of relatives I don’t care to ever see again or expose my children to, and I don’t appreciate outsiders or self-appointed peacemakers telling me what I “need” to do “for the family.”  Usually those people have no idea of the constant turmoil I saw when I was growing up…or the more  recent threats to “beat [me] up” for talking openly about my relationship with a grandparent who never showed any affection to me,  the frequent cyber-stalking and bad-mouthing by cousins I haven’t seen since I was 5 years old, and the busy-body who refuses to speak to me (thank Gods!) for blogging honestly about how I dealt with my father’s death. Outsiders and family peacemakers usually have an ideal in mind that I have personally not known with my family in Georgia, though I do know it with my own children—and that’s why I’m one of those people with no desire whatsoever to bring certain long-lost relatives back into my fold or have a big family reunion with them

My life now is 180-degrees from how I grew up.  I have a wonderful relationship with both my daughters and our home life is peaceful.  At this very moment, there’s excitement over my 17-year-old’s  trip to Harvard to compete in a national forensics competition, the multiple weddings she’s been asked to shoot, and the prestigious summer camp she’s paying for herself out of her photography business—and I’m equally thrilled over my 19-year-old  college senior and the sudden unfolding of opportunities for summer internships either with a well-respected university or a lengthier internship with a counseling clinic or the out-of-state symposium she’ll be presenting at as an undergrad or the potential special research project she’ll spearhead herself that’ll look great on her resume’ for grad school. My family is happy and prosperous and loving and just…amazing.  Why would I ever want to muck that up with people from the past who constantly stir up DRAMA and drop problems on my doorstep?  There is nothing hostile relatives have to offer my happy little family and far too much to endanger the serenity we have.  We are thriving and blessed just as we are, and I refuse to let anyone guilt-trip me with her fantasies about what “family” should be into doing something that goes against my intuition.  My family already is what it should be.

Yet, every so often, someone wants to step in and “set things right.”   Sometimes the person is young and idealistic, with no idea of the past familial patterns.  Usually, it’s a church-inspired ego trip that’s still not going to get anyone into heaven by successful good works, often by women who have not acted ethically in the past.  I have witnessed these over the years where someone new to the extended family decided to ensure discreetly that various hostile parties were in the same room at the same time, thinking proximity would dissolve years of back-biting and they’d be praised for being a hero.  It has not worked and it will never work—and as an added bonus, at least some of the people who felt tricked and manipulated will never trust them again.

That’s not to say that families can’t be reunited or that re-discovering long-lost cousins can’t be wondrous.  I have cousins on my mom’s side of my family whom I knew as children, and in the past few years—with no help from anyone trying to intercede—we’ve found each other as adults.  I happen to think they’re some of the coolest people on the planet.  I don’t know them as adults as well as I’d like to, but I enjoy the conversations we have and look forward to building happy relationships with them in the coming years.  I’ve introduced them to my children because they augment my idea of family rather than merely extending it. It’s peaceful in ways that my other extended family relationships aren’t.

So how do you, if you want to see a family “get back together,” go about the task of bringing peace to a Hatfield/McCoy relationship?

1.        First, ask yourself why you’re getting involved. Really, is this any of your business?  Are you trying to look good to your church, to Grandma of the clan, to your sweetie?   Do you dream of what everyone will say when you’re done?  “Oooh, isn’t she wonderful because she brought the family back together single-handedly after a whopping four generations of bad blood?  Aren’t we so lucky to have her!”  Because if it’s in any way about YOU or what YOU get out of it or how people will think of YOU, back away now.  Even if “I just lovvvvvvve helping people” or “I feel good bringing fighting families together” is your motivation, that’s still about YOU.  It’s YOUR emotional reward.  Instead…

2.       Work on yourself. If your motives are honest and you really just want the family to stop fighting so there’ll be more peace in your life, then work on making yourself a more peaceful person.  You cannot change other people.  You cannot make Cousin Emmie Sue turn into Aunt Bessie Mae’s best friend overnight.  You can’t change Cousin Emma Sue’s penchant for kleptomania or Aunt Bessie Mae’s paranoia that everyone, including the Government and aliens, are stealing from her.  But you can change yourself into someone who is accepting of all family members.  Which is why you….

3.       Don’t admonish family members for things you think they’ve done or haven’t done to improve a dysfunctional relationship. Don’t write letters or make phone calls or send emails flaming them for what you haven’t even witnessed for yourself but heard about from another family member with his or her own agenda.  You may not know that Cousin Billy Bob doesn’t speak to Uncle Jimmy Chuck  because Billy Bob spent the entire fifth grade trying to keep Uncle Jimmy Chuck’s hands out of his pants.  And if you did know that about Jimmy Chuck’s pedophilia, you absolutely have no business lecturing  now-grown-up Billy Bob on forgiveness when you did nothing to stop Jimmy Chuck.  That’s because…

4.       People will let go of their animosity and forgive each other when they’re good and ready to, and not before. There is nothing you can do to fix it for them.  When they are ready, they will release what’s kept them apart and begin to mend what was broken or create something new.  Some will probably never be ready—do you think my brother will ever look kindly on the relative who sic’d growling dogs on him when he was showing off his baby daughter for the first time to her great-grandmother and he had to outrun them with a baby in his arms?   But if you really want family peace, there are some things you can do, one in particular….

5.       Be a good friend to all. Keep an open mind, stop gossiping, stop listening to gossip, and befriend every member of the family.  Not just the ones you like or the ones who’ve convinced you they’re right and everyone else is wrong.  Listen with your heart and keep your mouth shut.  Don’t contribute to the bad blood with imaginary scenarios that never happened in the past and aren’t true now.  Don’t speculate on what someone really meant or why they felt a certain way about a family member when you never even saw the interactions between them.  Ask, if you must, but don’t invent answers.   If you can be open-minded and a friend to everyone, you’re more likely to….

6.       Take notice of when a family member is ready to let go of old hatred and make peace—and actually be able to facilitate a feel-good reunion for all. This is NOT when YOU decide that it’s time for them to get back together because “Oh, wouldn’t this be nice if they got along?” or “They’re not getting any younger so they better hurry up so they can be right with God when they die.”  No, this is when Uncle Jimmy Chuck pulls you aside in a tearful confession and tells you what terrible things he did to all the boys in the family twenty years ago and how sorry he is and if he only knew how to ask for forgiveness, he would AND Cousin Billy Bob mentions privately over a beer  on the tailgate that he’s been struggling with forgiveness like his preacher talks about but can’t quite manage it because he feels that Uncle Jimmy Chuck has no idea of the consequences of his actions.  Notice that I said AND, not OR. If Jimmy Chuck wants to make amends for what he’s done, it is not your place to go to Billy Bob and open old wounds and try to force a reconciliation when Billy Bob isn’t ready to talk about the past.  Only when both are ready should you get involved.  “Both” equals “Invitation.”  “One” or “Neither” equals “Mind your own business.”  If Cousin Emmie Sue tells you she is still angry that Aunt Bessie Mae accused her stealing that jade ring that’s been in the family for years and Aunt Bessie Mae is still telling you how terrible Emmie Sue is for stealing it, leave it alone. You’re not going to convince either because they’re not ready.  If Aunt Bessie Mae confesses she found the ring in a drawer two years after it disappeared and is too embarrassed by her false accusations to say anything, then you’ve got an open door to suggest that an apology may set things right—but it’s Bessie Mae’s responsibility to go to Emmie Sue and fix the relationship, not yours.   And that’s why…

7.       You continue to focus instead on being the best person you can be—positive, compassionate, loving, understanding, open-minded, and serene. If you are all those things, then that’s the kind of atmosphere that will be around you and you won’t be dealing with fighting families.   Really…their crap won’t matter to you.  This can take a little while to transition through but it’s very worthwhile when you get there.  If it’s far more fun for you to spend your energy on fixing a family full of dysfunctional people, you’re missing out on fixing your own dysfunctions that stay so well hidden because you camouflage them with other people’s DRAMA.  As for me….

8.       It’s become a game, a splendid revelation of secrets, and it has not been wrong yet.  People who get all up in my business always have something of their own to hide, to divert attention from. The surest way I know that all is not well in their world and with their self-esteem is when they come out of the woodwork with their focus on how to fix ME.

Hold the bashing.  This is not a pro-abortion article or an anti-abortion article.   If you think it is, you’ve missed my point because you’re looking to bolster an opinion you’ve already made.  This is something altogether different that almost no one talks about.

First, a little of my own history:

I have two beautiful, intelligent, compassionate daughters who are everything I could ever wish for. The older daughter was almost miscarried at 10 weeks, and the younger one sent me thrice to  emergency Labor and Delivery  over the three months before she was born.  I’ve gotten pregnant more than once while on birth control pills, which my newest gynecologist believes is because I tend to ovulate unusually early.  I have also miscarried several times–two pregnancies I felt ambivalent about and one I really wanted–but something rather unusual happened with the last two that made me rethink everything I used to believe about abortions, miscarriages, and incarnation.

What I believe and why:

Over the decades, I’ve come up with my own beliefs about life, death, autonomy, trauma, and spirituality. That’s the benefit of reaching middle-age–you’ve got enough data to slot and see what shakes out if you care to look.  My conclusions don’t fit cleanly into popular belief systems but then, I’m not a fan of just accepting what I’m told is true.  I have to experiment and experience life for myself and draw my own conclusions.  I fully admit that my brain seems to be wired a little differently and that I see things differently, but then, I’m finding more and more people have similar beliefs but are too afraid to discuss them for fear of being ridiculed or ostracized. I guess I’m used to it.

Most of the anti-abortion debates (or pro-life or whatever-rhetoric-will-best-evoke-the-required-necessary-response) center around when life begins and who has control over that life.  My personal belief, based on many things I’ve experienced and observed, is that yes, life begins at conception.  However, en-souled life begins sometime after that.  I don’t know when.  I think it’s different for each child.  (Why shouldn’t it be?) From my own full-term pregnancies, I definitely felt that both babies were en-souled–the souls integrated with their bodies, in other words–definitely by seven months.  Some people believe that occurs at the point of quickening, which made a lot more sense when we were less technologically advanced and didn’t have the advantages of ultrasound technology to detect a living fetus.  I wasn’t able, in my own experience, to sense the soul fully integrated when I first felt my babies move.  Who knows–maybe souls wait until the body is physically viable before committing.   I can’t say definitively–I had no idea in 1989 and 1992 what to look for.  To be honest, I was not as aware of the non-physical aspects of life, especially what’s on the other side of death or birth, when I was pregnant with Shannon and Aislinn.  That was before I began to meditate or explore shamanic journeys or look beyond the physical world.  I don’t know when exactly that Shannon and Aislinn’s souls integrated into their bodies but I do believe, based on what happened with two miscarriages, that it wasn’t within the first couple of months.  That doesn’t mean that they weren’t…around.  I’ll explain that later.

In working through these issues emotionally, I shall always be boundlessly grateful to shaman Kristin Madden who shared her own metaphysical experiences during pregnancy in her book Pagan Parenting and to shaman S. Kelley Harrell.  I was fortunate enough to have Kelley share her profound insights into what I consider being a portal to allow these souls to enter this world.  I was constantly amazed at how aware Kelley was of all the nuances of pregnancy and childbirth as she experienced them herself, and I wished that I could have been that aware during my full-term pregnancies.  Maybe it’s because she became a mother later in life than I did, but I tend to think it’s because she’s one of those highly sensitive people who understand the spirit realm in ways that most people never know exists.  The unusual things I experienced with my last two miscarriages, after I’d become much more aware myself, seem to be fairly common among other shamans I’ve spoken with, but other than a strange tale my mother always told me, I’ve rarely heard anyone who doesn’t have a specific gift for such things talk about it.

The spooky stuff:

I grew up hearing my mom tell the story of how,  before I was born, she saw me in the processing plant where she was working at the conveyor belt.  She saw the little girl coming toward her and was upset that a child was in such a dangerous place alone.  Except that as the child neared, the little girl disappeared.  She wasn’t in the physical realm.  That child was me, and I do recall being about that age when I visited my grandmother at the processing plant with my mom.

My dis-incarnate children, at least for the last two miscarriages, did not come to me as children.  Not at all.  They came as adults. The first time, I was not as developed spiritually and the effects weren’t as pronounced, but holy crap, this last time was…breath-taking!

I have had this happen to me only twice in my life since I became spiritually aware, and both times, I was newly pregnant and didn’t know yet.   Both times, until I figured it out, it scared the daylights out of me.  This has otherwise not been a normal occurrence for me.  I’ve had a lot of strange things happen in my life–things that qualify as “high woo-woo”–even early in my life when I was a devout Christian.  The miscarriage experiences have an entirely different texture from anything else I’ve experienced or observed.

The first time, it was a man of about 25.  No more.   He was tall, wiry, with brown hair to his shoulders and much like mine.  Other than that, he looked like his father.  I refer to  him as “Dagan” because I felt he should have a name.  The first time I saw him, he was in the periphery of my vision but not there when I turned.  He was close, as though I could reach out and touch him.  Here’s where I feel I’m writing science fiction:  he was somewhat…transparent.  If you’ve seen movies where people fade slowly from reality until you can see through them or if you’ve played with PhotoShop and reduced the color on a background to, say, 20% instead of a nice solid 100%, you have an idea of how he appeared.  For a while, he was right in front of me in this way, solemn and wearing long, dark clothes, like a robe.  His presence made me anxious and he backed away for a while, keeping his distance, but appearing in my dreams and meditations where I felt I had a little more serenity.  He talked to me sometimes in those meditations but mostly, he just watched.  At the time, I hadn’t even completed my cycle or taken a pregnancy test.  Within another few weeks, I was having tell-tale signs, and Dagan continued to hang around, always close by, even when I didn’t see the thin shade of him there.

Zena, which is what I call the woman who appeared the second time this happened, gave me a much more intense experience, but I was also more  able by then to assimilate news of anything that was paranormal in nature. She came out of the blue like a bolt of lightning. I must have been two or three days pregnant at most as I now know I’d had some implantation symptoms just as I’d had with Dagan.  Those were the only two pregnancies where I noted implantation symptoms, but then, maybe I just wasn’t paying attention before.  I called her Zena because she was very tall and somewhat fierce.  She looked much like Aislinn, except taller, very willowy, and with long hair the color of dark chocolate.  She was beautiful and appeared to be about 25.  The first time I encountered her, she was standing directly in front of me, inches away, and was as transparent as a reflection.  I had a weird feeling in my solar plexus chakra that night and had to be held to calm down enough to sleep. I didn’t, for several days, know who the woman was but was starting to suspect I knew.  She was right there in the ether in front of me.  I knew who and what she was, but I didn’t dare voice what I felt.   Her ghostly appearance and the way she was always soooooo close to me was the first of the pregnancy signs.  The others showed up a week or so later.

Negotiating the Miscarriage:

I’ve recently been introduced to several shamans (not the ones already mentioned) who talk about the deep trauma of women who chose to terminate their pregnancies for various reasons and live with deep guilt.  They help these women find peace with their decisions, but they’ve also discovered what I call the “energetic abortion” or the “negotiated miscarriage.”  They urge women who are facing untimely or unwanted pregnancies–not always the same thing–to go into a meditation and talk to the soul who wants to come through as a new baby.  By becoming pregnant, they’ve opened a doorway into our world and those souls are standing at the door and waiting for the vehicle we call our physical bodies to be ready to carry them into life.  Rather than go through the trauma of a unilateral decision and an abortion clinic, the woman talks to the unborn soul and they work out what’s best for both. The report I got back was that in most of these cases where the woman is able to communicate with the waiting soul, they experience a miscarriage, which is also known as a “spontaneous abortion,”–not to be confused with a medical or surgical abortion.  This method of soul-level negotiation, according to one source, allows women to find peace more easily with a untimely pregnancy that ended without outside interference.  I know my background in contract negotiation is showing through when I say this, but it was something agreed-to by both parties.

That’s not exactly what happened to me.

Sometimes it’s the unborn soul who re-negotiates.  And that’s when it’s terribly hard on a woman who miscarries with no insight into why, especially if she can think of a billion reasons to blame herself.  It’s hard enough when you do have insight.  I have no idea why I miscarried earlier in my life, except that Shannon wouldn’t be here now, at least not in her current form, if that baby had come to term.   It might have been Shannon’s soul in another body but it wouldn’t have been the same because I was pregnant again only four months later, to my surprise.  My circumstances had changed somewhat over those four months, and the timing and marriage were suddenly much better.

With Dagan, he showed up at a time when everything in my life was falling apart.  My husband and I were fighting all the time and I was contemplating leaving.  In fact, I never even told him I thought I was pregnant. I started to, but before I could get the words out, it was assumed to be another argument and I got cut off.  I felt too wounded then to say anything and just kept it to myself.  Then one night a month later,  tensions were high and I was so miserable.  I fell asleep and Dagan came to me in a dream.  He told me he was going to leave, that the time wasn’t right.  I agreed that the time wasn’t right but I didn’t want him to go.

“If I stay,” he told me, “you will never leave him.  You will stay here, where you’re unhappy, for me.”

I woke up bleeding.

He did, however, tell me that there would be other opportunities for me to mother him and that he might come through then.  I know I did feel his presence a few times after I got into a new relationship that failed, but eventually I let Dagan go.  I knew that soul was ready to come through and had waited for the opportunity, but without a relationship in place, the opportunity never solidified.  I do think that by now, he is in the world with some other woman as his mother, but it’s not me and never will be.  It was his choice, and we re-negotiated that sacred contract between us.

With Zena, it was different.  I was worried about how a pregnancy would affect my health at the time, but she was very much wanted and I would have welcomed her into the world, even if that meant raising her alone.  I went into a meditation to try to meet with her.  She already had a strong physical effect on me, especially in my third chakra.  I was under a lot of stress at that point, and my normally low blood pressure shot way up.  I told her in that journey to meet her, soul to soul, that I would welcome her regardless of the physical hardship but I was willing to let her go if it was for the best, if something in particular happened that would have a disturbing outcome for her.  We were both waiting to see if that would happen.  For much of the time, she was not very communicative.  She was watchful.  The last time I saw her in a meditation, the decision had been made. She was not coming through for me–her sacred contract was with her father.  It was more important for her to come through as his child for him than to come through for me.  If the pregnancy continued, she would be with me but not with him. This was about what she needed, about what he needed.  And I had to give that some room.

After the meditation, she was no longer standing in front of me.  She was no longer anywhere around me.  The next morning several of my pregnancy symptoms had abated. More the next day.  By then, I found out what we’d feared had happened, and she was gone for good.  For me, at least.  Not for him.

If I knew now….

If I were doing this all over again, say having a baby with some exciting new man in my life, I think I would definitely be more aware than ever before.  I’d also meet that waiting soul in meditation and welcome him or her and make sure there were no surprises.  I’ve made peace now with my children who never were my children.  These last two were negotiated miscarriages where we both had a say, or at least some input, into the decision to go.

I sat in the conference room and sobbed hard enough that my shoulders shook.  Of the 75 people in the room with me, most of them backed away, not knowing what to make of my very public breakdown.  We were all there for a 2-hour training session on the new Justification and Approval Guide from Part 7 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and yet I was on my knees with my face in my hands.  Nothing had ever gotten to me at work quite like what had happened a few mornings before, and nothing has shaken me like that since.  At least not at work.

Luna sat down next to me and shooed away the only people curious enough to come near.  “Lorna,” she said, “what is WRONG with you?  I’ve never seen you cry at work.  Well, except for that one time.”

The one time she referred to was when my dying mentor had spoken to me for the last time, describing in detail the kind of casket he was to be buried in.  I had sat at my desk with tears in my eyes, wiped them away, and then had marched off to negotiate a $40M deal with as much professionalism as I could muster.  A woman may occasionally rage in my kind of career, but crying is generally taken as an overt sign of weakness.  But on this day in the conference room?  I didn’t care.

I told Luna what had brought me to my knees.

“Lorna,” she said, “that was a week ago.  Why haven’t you been able to shake it off by now?”

I didn’t know.  I’d been through a fair number of tragedies in my life and kept right on moving without a glitch in my stride.  I’d worked with a broken back and I’d worked while in labor.  I’d finished several business deals while waiting for my daughters to come home from final exams so we could drive out of state to my dad’s funeral.   I’ve written work documents from an ICU waiting room so that we could get Lot 14 of the AMRAAM missile awarded on schedule.  My personal life has rarely brought a halt to my professional life.  But something about the situation from the week before struck at the core of my sense of fairness and justice.

When I was a little girl, my parents and my Sunday School teachers told me that Good always prevails over Evil, that Right always beats out Wrong, and my sense of justice was strong.  Justice was balance to me.  Not that bad things didn’t happen, but when they did, the scales would be balanced.  Justice would win.  Everything turned upside down would be righted.

My belief in justice changed into an overwhelming need for it beginning on a mid-May morning when I was 11 years old.  That was the year the Alday Family was murdered in Donalsonville, Georgia.   The year I stopped believing that Good always wins and that justice will be done.

I lived in the small town of 4,000 in rural South Georgia where everybody knew everybody, including the hard-working farm family.  The news rocked the town in a way much like 9/11 and watching those planes fly into the Twin Towers rocked New York City—six members of the community, including the pretty 25-year-old  wife who was raped, tortured, shot, and left to die in an ant hill in the woods, had been murdered by escapees from a Maryland prison camp.    In a town of that size, most people personally know the sheriff, the coroner, the locals who scour woods for a rescue.  I was 11 and  heard details from these men talking about the size of bullet holes and the condition of Mary’s body and all of the horror replaying in my head—as impossible to escape from as it was later for me to keep my own children in September 2001 from seeing repeated plane crashes on TV, on newspapers, or overhearing it at school or in the grocery store.  It permeated my little world, and every time, I got a great understanding of what Evil can do to Good and how helpless Good can be sometimes.

Most people remember where they were when the planes hit the Twin Towers…or when the Challenger blew up…or when JFK was shot.  For the people in Donalsonville, they remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news about the Alday murders.

Though the ring leader of the 4 murderers boasted publicly of what he’d done, he became the  longest-serving inmate on Death Row.  I watched a series of trials that financially damaged my hometown and led to the same results each time.  I watched major newspapers in Georgia and around the country invade my hometown and frequently rally around the murderers, outsiders to a hick community like ours. Even though the ring leader was finally executed 30 years after the crime, I as a young teen saw only the series of legal wrangling and nothing of justice.  My hometown meanwhile lived in fear that he would either escape or be paroled because he’d said in an interview series:

“I’d like to get out and kill more of them. They represent the type of society I don’t like. I didn’t know them, had never seen them before May 14, but I didn’t like them. Working people don’t do a damn thing for me.”

That was the shadow I grew up in, one of injustice and fear of retaliation.  For a child and a young teen—if not for most adults—there’s an extreme sense of helplessness that comes with that.

It was that same sense of injustice and helplessness that hit me that morning in the conference room, and I couldn’t shake it.

“Lorna,” Luna said, “you’ve got to get over this. You can’t work like this, and we need you.”

“It’s not that easy,” I tried to tell her.  “What happened brought up a lot of issues for me, and I can’t just get over it instantaneously.  I need to work through.  I need…closure.”

She leaned into my ear and whispered, as she tugged me into a chair, “Then get closure–now, damn it!”

Over the years, I’ve often read where the supporters of murderers wonder why the family and friends of the victims can’t just get over it, move on, forgive, find closure.  Occasionally, I hear of family and friends who reach a place of forgiveness and even step in to become strong advocates for the very person who took away their most precious loved ones.  I applaud people who are able to do that because they’ve reached a place of closure, of balance.  They’ve found their justice in some sort of way and can release the all-consuming hold that such pain of loss can have on a person.  However, it’s not for me to demand that of anyone and I very much dislike when supporters of criminals insist the victim or victim’s family and friends just get over it.  It’s not their particular pain, it’s not their particular journey, and it’s not their place to expect it of anyone else.

I have no idea if the Alday family–what was left of them–found closure 30 years after they lost their loved ones.  I wish sometimes that a sociologist would come in and look at the long-reaching effects the mass murder had on people in the community.  I know that for myself, I did feel some very small sense of justice when the ring leader himself was finally executed, even though he’d been on Death Row longer than two of his victims had been on this planet. Just memories of those days of my childhood still stir me deeply, and I’ve spent those 30 years and more searching for some way to balance all the bad things that happen in the world, looking furtively for evidence of justice out there.

Finding closure is very much like working through grief.  It cannot be done according to a one-size-fits-all calendar.  It can’t be demanded or insisted upon or forced.  It has to come in its own time.

It doesn’t have to be a murder, a rape, or even anything remotely resembling a crime in order to open a tremendous wound that will need to be closed.  In fact, I don’t think that kind of wound can even be closed–it has to close on its own, and that takes however long it takes.

In my case, what had happened at work the week before had been devastating even though no one knew exactly why, including me.  But the need for closure isn’t reserved just for major crimes.  I’ve seen small betrayals between friends, husbands cheating on wives, women who recall being molested by relatives, colleagues passed over for promotions–you name it.  All very personal, very deep wounds, and sometimes not so much for that particular wound as for the re-opening of a very old one that was never worked through.  Those who don’t live with those particular wounds, however similar a wound might be to their own, will often demand the wounded party face the facts that what’s done is done, deal with it, and move on–tomorrow, if possible.

It’s too bad we never know with a wound if we’ll find closure that week or six months later or decades later.  We can pray over it, we can do ho’oponopono releasing rituals, we can go to therapy, but closure will come when closure’s good and ready.  For me on that day in the conference room, I pulled myself together and made my way through the rest of the week’s meetings on auto-pilot.  I didn’t break down publicly again, but the turbulent emotions and the repeated attempts to achieve closure were going on underneath my mostly calm exterior.  For months.  And months. And months.  And months.

One day something happened.  I was tired of carrying that open wound and guarding it so it wouldn’t be picked at, and bumping it or nicking it without meaning to.  I didn’t like that open wound but I didn’t know how to make it go away.  But I set my intention to find closure. I was ready to release it in a different way than I’d been ready before–or thought I’d been ready.  Within two weeks, I found a way to bring my life back into balance in that area.  Within another two weeks, I found some justice.  What had been upside down turned right side up, and it happened very, very quickly.  Literally overnight.  I admit, I am astonished that closure, when it came, arrived so quickly and completely. That’s not a timeline to be enforced for anyone, by the way, including myself.  That’s simply a statement of how closure finally came.

Though I will always, as a result of seeing the injustice of the Alday murders as a child, feel an overwhelming need for justice and a balance of forces, I know that all is well in the particular area of my life that was devastated at work that week.  Justice has been done.  Balance has been achieved.  The scar is still there, but the wound has closed, healed. I feel light, happy, gloriously alive and full of passion and mended and…so very content.

Who knows?  Maybe in time, even the scar will fade.

Healing old wounds of childhood trauma and self-esteem doesn’t come easily, but when it does come, it’s unexpected.

Thinking back on my childhood, I might just as easily have been a child suicide. I remember thinking about it when I was nine years old, right after being humiliated in front of several hundred kids at school–by a faculty member–for following my religious convictions, which were then devout Christian. Even in the third grade, I had strong beliefs and a different way of thinking from what everyone around me in my small Southern town had. How I saw life made me different, and in many circles, an outcast.

Healing old wounds means understanding the universality of childhood traumas and how they affect us for the rest of our lives. As I’ve discovered through counseling numerous people, even the most outwardly confident of us has or have had those horrible buried issues of low self-esteem where our parents instilled into us their worst darknesses, for which we in turn instill our own fears and inadequacies into our own children. For me, it went far deeper than that–I spent most of my childhood and half my adulthood feeling that my spaceship had crashed on this strange planet where I never had and never would belong.

How do you go about healing old wounds when the traumas were commonplace for many years? I remember far too many times when I was publicly ridiculed for the way my mind worked. I was called weird, bizarre, and later, more euphemistically, different. And when I say “publicly ridiculed,” I don’t mean simply by bratty kids my age but also by teachers and adults with the kids applauding. I grew up in the “I’m-OK-You’re-OK” 70’s…but the message was always that I wasn’t OK because I had different ideas about life.

Those ideas didn’t go away. My way of thinking and seeing the world didn’t go away either, even though I learned not to share my views unless I was willing to catch grief for them. As an adult, I knew that if I didn’t follow the crowd’s way of thinking that I’d be ridiculed, and the conservative non-creative people around me didn’t disappoint! That included most brutally my ex-husband and his friends. The differences in viewpoints were vast, and I was so outnumbered. My view of the world then was more closely aligned with how today’s twenty-somethings see it, so to them, I don’t seem as different as to my own peers.

Here and there, over the years, I found other people who thought much as I did, but they didn’t hang around for long. They tended to move to larger cities where there were more like-minded people. That didn’t do much for healing old wounds because, if anything, their disappearances tended to reinforce childhood trauma and that sense of my alien race wandering toward extinction.

When, thanks to the Internet Gods, I found that there were many of us out there who were different, it seemed we were a whole secret society. We were Wiccans, we were writers, we were polyamorists, we were free-thinkers, we were visionaries, we were rebels. Whatever we were, we didn’t fit in.

It’s funny that for all the things over which I have been ridiculed as being different, they are the exact things I’ve earned a living at. I spent an entire decade being the revolutionary in my career field who was willing to take risks and “think outside the box”–even though my supervisors thought thinking outside the box should apply only to my work project and not to how I saw other things in life.

I didn’t really get to the point of joyously relishing being different until sometime after my divorce, when I began re-crafting my life to be the way I wanted it to be and with lots of other people around me who were as eclectic in their thinking as I was. It’s meant being in relationships that were deeply rewarding but cannot be defined in any socially acceptable terms, even to the silliness of saying “in a relationship” because we’re all in a relationship of some kind and heaven knows, being in a marriage is not synonymous with security. It’s meant finding people who understand the power of the mind over what we’ve always seen as reality and designing our own lives and definitions of success that most people from our pasts will probably never understand. Healing old wounds doesn’t necessarily mean that people from your past will ever, ever understand you.

But the final chapter in healing old wounds has come to me via the Internet, particularly through Facebook, MySpace, and a couple of other social networks. Within a few months’ time, I heard from dozens of people from my childhood, teen years, and early adulthood–all times in my life when I felt so alone.

The unifying theme of what I hear from these reunions is that I was “the most unique person” they’ve known to date. It’s not said this time (and these people didn’t say it then) in a way that’s meant to hurt, diminish, or wound. It’s said in a gentle, loving way. I have discovered childhood friends who were devastated that I changed schools and never saw them again. I’ve discovered boys I was crazy about in high school and college whom I thought didn’t think I existed yet they thought of me often. I’ve discovered girls and young women who were appreciative of little things I did for them that I thought had been unnoticed and unwanted because I never heard anything to the contrary.

It makes me want to gather them all up in my arms and hug them now, and help them with healing old wounds of their own.

I confessed to Obiwan, my coach who listens objectively when I need a sounding board, that as far as healing old wounds from my childhood and beyond, these reunions have been such a tremendous blessing to me. And she, in that unique way she has of pointing out just the right thing at just the right time, told me, “You’re being shown that the love was always there for you even though it was never really expressed until recently.”

I’m finally healing old wounds–some of the oldest. And I’m claiming this planet for my own.

Amen to that, and so mote it be.

Book cover for Working through Grief: Tips for Coping with the Pain of Loss

Traumatic experiences, grief, and loss can take a heavy toll. Death, dying, divorce, sexual abuse, and suicide aren’t things you just “get over.” You have to heal them from the inside out.

Forget everything you’ve heard about “getting over it” and coming out of mourning on a specific time table. Time does not heal all wounds—it merely gives you perspective. What does heal the wounds of traumatic experiences is being able to look hard at what happened, slowly reaching a point of being able to honor your experiences or what you lost, and release the weight of your mourning. Not that the scars left behind won’t be sensitive to the touch, but you can get back on your feet and walk again and, yes, eventually dance again.