The Violet Flame

You are the representation of The Violet Flame

When I started this blog it was filled with a lot of angry energy. If you went backwards to the beginning of it, you would notice that over time, as much as I have evolved, so has this blog. It went from confessional, to testimonial, to venting and ranting, to silence and now, to this. 

This would be what my version, perhaps my interpretation of what The Violet Flame is. 

It is the Voice that no one but you can hear, and not with your ears, but with your Soul, and is the part of you that is never accusatory, does nothing to make you hurt. Will not ever abandon you or leave you with no means of Soul survival. 

You are the Violet Flame, are the very Fire in The Belly of The All That Is. It is because of your One Light that is added to all of the rest of the Light in the Universe that there are people who share air with us all and who need us to be that Light, that Voice in the distance, the one lone voice in the wilderness that is Life. 

It is You, You Who has battled the ghosts from the past, the ugliness of right this moment, and the fear of the future, who has bothered to care, not only about others, but about yourself that has made it so that you would be able to shine brightly in the dimness that is confusion, that is all of the pain illuminated within you. While it was that you believed that the illumination of your Soul was the glaring light from shame, it wasn't. 

It was that the fire burned hot enough within to make it known to you that indeed, You Are the Violet Flame. 

When you thought and believed that the madness would never end, there you were, in the mirror, looking back at yourself through the windows of the Soul that are the eyes and through the grief that was brought to you through a "happier means," or at least what was supposed to be, at the very least, happy. Regardless, you went through all of that so that you could be here, right now, to find out that indeed, it was not that someone stamped out your fire, but that it was embers which never went out, and the embers that continued to be the thing that you hoped for, because within the energy that was the heat of the fire in manifest through the embers that could be called your will, your strength and your Truth of Being, you are here, you are now, and you are really and truly the manifestation of what is The Violet Flame.

It was the broken heart that you thought would never heal that brought out of you the energy that is The Violet Flame, and it was the crushed Spirit and weary Soul within you that made you take notice, not of who you were not and never were, but who you know and what you know you have never not been, and you have never not been a shining example of Love, of patience, of the ability to Love, even to the point where it was unreasonable or even safe for you. You stayed, not because of anything other than the fear that was there. The fear was real. The weakness, real. 

Yet, so, too, were the embers which remained to glow within you, was the energy that was the Warrior within, the one who would remain and battle for you and in your place. Her face was the same as yours, but you were not this person who someone else told you that you were. You were, instead, a Strong One in Manifest. You needed to polish your shield and sharpen your weapons, for yours was not the battle that was outside of you only, but also within. It was within where the lies were forced to be the truth that you never believed, and it was the dull ache that you kept alive within and that prodded you on and on, to glow into the Forever that is the Universe, the Universe that has always been your Home. 

You have nothing to fear, and no need to be worried that you are not every bit as wonderfully glowing as you have been told you are. 

You are The Violet Flame....and You wear it well !! 

Aloha ...I Love You All !
ROX

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Chick Wisdom Will Never Fail Us...

For all the things that we each go through, there isn't anything as awesome as the Wisdom which comes from Being a Chick!

Making use of the feminine wiles is not for the faint of heart!

There are a lot of lessons that we learn each day. Some of them are good and make a positive impact. Some of them suck ass but still make a positive impact. All of them are needed. None the less,when it comes to having those conversations with the air, and when we feel like once again we have screwed things SO up that there is nothing that we can think of to make them be better or even different, into the brain comes something which I have termed as being "Chick Wisdom."

Chick Wisdom

You can call it a woman's intuition, or your can call it a Divinely Purposed "thing" that all women seem to possess (and hell, some of us even use it!), but I prefer to call it Chick Wisdom.

Yeah, this post is specifically for the girls and women of the world, namely for those of us who haven't yet been through enough to know how to effectively bounce back from things which may, at the time they are happening, piss us off and break our hearts, but really, all we were doing was learning.

None of us can have any sort of Wisdom without having to go through a few things in life. Things in life aren't always all bad. When we hear about the lessons that we learn most of the time we are prone to believe that what it is that we had to go through was somehow bad. If you learned from what you went through, and you know that you cannot do whatever it was that you did, you learned. If your heart ached but the ache dulled and then you woke up one day refreshed and feeling better than you have in a long while, you learned. If you went through shit, and experienced shit, but you are still in the mindset that all it was was shit, then you didn't learn shit. It is that simple. Really.

You can try to get your point across, but if it is that your words befall deaf ears, and you continue to push and try and do what you think you have to in order to feel better, then you ain't learned a thing.

When we are compelled more to think before we speak or act, think about how a certain thing will affect another person and we are more inclined to impose onto them not only our opinion but also the energy that tells them that no matter what, you are right and they are not, you are not utilizing your own method of the chick in you trying hard to scratch the surface of the issues which are yours and yours alone. While there are other people in your life who might make you miserable, the idea that they are who is responsible for how you feel is preposterous and it is so because you are choosing to let these things happen and choosing to let their shit be your shit, too. And that only makes you feel like a dumbshit, really.

Take it from a professional part-time dumbshit...utilize that Divine Chick Wisdom 

Every single one of us has moments where we lose our clarity and fall victim to our own dumbshit tendencies. I do it a lot. I am sure that I am not the only one who does, but I might be one of the few who will own up to it. Doesn't matter - we cannot go on through life being a dumbshit, and more, we cannot go on through life trying to not be a dumbshit all the time.

What we can do, however, is we can acknowledge that we have been a dumbshit, can bother ourselves with the idea that we are only human and then can use our Inner Chick to guide us through the maze of madness caused by life.

Survivors of domestic violence and emotional abuse sometimes suffer from a largess of dumbshit tendencies, and the truth is that we are only human, and that our own tendencies toward making bad judgment calls and even worse decisions will take over if we are not allowing ourselves to simply just accept that we are not going to always get things right, that we are prone to making choices that might not be the best ones we have made. The beauty of this is that if we know that we are going to screw things up, then we should know, too, that the bigger the dumbshit thing we do, and the more work it takes to come back from that thing, the wiser we will be for the effort and more, for the dumbshit thing that we did.

You are human. You are going to make all kinds of mistakes. Deal with it. Learn from it.

That way the next time you have the opportunity to be all the dumbshit you can be comes to you,  you will have had enough experience to know the difference between doing a dumbshit thing and using that Chick Wisdom you worked so hard to develop.

It isn't that hard to make bad decisions. It is only hard when we cannot accept that we did. You were born for a reason, and that reason was to learn throughout the course of your life, yes, even and especially as at one time the victim of someone else, and then eventually, your very own Survivor!!

...and no one who survives anything terrible can possibly be a dumbshit ALL the time, can they?

Nah...I didn't think so either...

I Love You All!!
ROX

Our violent society is a peek into our lives at home

A violent society is a society which got that way through violence "at home."
We can keep on telling ourselves that "it happens to other people, not us," but the truth is that our violent society is a larger picture of the violence in our private lives and private homes

We can deny it all we want, but there is nothing in the news that tells any one of us that we are not living in some of the most violent times in any of our lifetimes. We have failed ourselves by shunning our gentle human nature and have called our inborn human ability to Love as being weakness, but the weakness is not brought to us through means of over-loving each other. Our weakness is caused by the fractures in our collective thinking that prods us to try to one up one another, to compete against and try to best each other, and when we have finished making yet one more mess that society has to clean up, we want to ask how it came to be this way.

The answer is easy. The answer is right before our eyes, and the answer is something that we as a whole have decided to call "normal," but I defer to the idea that any time anyone of us hurts through means of another's physically violent act it is because the person who lashed out at someone else came from a place where he or she witnessed a whole lot of violence, all the time, and this is how said person responds to what it was that they were taught. 

We don't think of the larger picture, of the thing that we have created. We want to blame our born rights to bear arms and to protect our homes and our lives from the monsters that lurk in the night. We want to take away rights of good people who would do no harm to anyone ever, not in the context that this is being written in, and we want to blame society for problems which. at their onset, were problems that were hidden from the prying eyes and the judgment of a society where there is no mercy but for that which is doled out in favor of pats on the back rather than a change in the collective thinking.

We want to strip good people of their rights to feel safe while coddling those who would bring our nightmares to full life and in our faces and we want the same society which has shunned those who quietly suffer in many ways to fix a mess that it has survived on, and we want to take away things that are no anywhere near what we, in contrast to it all, need to add to in many ways.

The only way to fix this mess is to teach another lesson

We have come to the place in our lives collectively where it seems that the majority still is the major deciding factor in all that we do as a unit. But what we are not doing is fixing a problem. What we are doing is covering it up with yet one more law which will not govern the lives of the violent in proactive ways. We keep sending them to prisons before we even think to send them to rehab and we keep on enhancing the idea that if someone is beaten up or stabbed or shot that spending time with other violent people is somehow going to make whatever it is that we are trying to accomplish seem like a far away thing for us. The reality is that these people are the product of a lack of Love, because not everyone who grows up in a violent family or who grew up or grows up in a lesser-than-desirable-in-the-eyes-of-society neighborhood is expected to be a violent person. 

Exposure to violence begins early in life, usually at home, and becomes "normal" for a whole entire segment of people who do not know better than to beat the hell outta someone in order to get their point across.  

It is not rocket science that this would be the truth, is not something that someone has to start a rumor about for it to be known and accepted as the quietest reason as to why it is that there are children who grow up without two parents in the home, accepted as why we need more prisons and why it is that we need all the shrinks in our society that we need. 

What we need is not hard to figure out

We, as a whole, badly need to restructure our lives around a mission in our private lives which is based and founded upon Love. We think that we lack economic strength and we want to believe that violence only happens in neighborhoods where the main income for a family is through the local Dept of public Services office, but this is not the truth. The truth is that societally, we have failed ourselves. We have made it a good thing to label harsh corporeal punishment on children as being a parent's religious right to 'discipline" their children, and we have made hazings in both high school and college level athletics a thing which sorts through the pansies in our midsts for the tough guys, but what we rarely think about is that someone at one time in history made it the rule to hurt people, to make them out to be too soft for a world which will chew us all up and spit us out as though that is what we all have to look forward to.

Well it isn't and it never had to be! We are who changes the thinking of the collective whole by being the first one to take action on what it is that we want to see happen in the world around us which leads to things changing on a community level to an entirely different level of change where we can see it and feel it sweeping through our lives like a strong desert wind at sunset.

Violence has become our shameful birthright, but it doesn't have to stay this way. I have said it before that light kills the darkness and that only love can kill the demons within us all.

Only Love can tame the fires of hatred and anger which leads us out of our homes and into a society which does not realize its own frailties and neither accepts that we are who made it the way that it is now. 

Since when was it ever ok to make people hurt rather than to help them grow? Since when was it that we chose to just turn a blind eye and more, when the hell are we going to be the first one to stand up and be bothered by it enough to do something about it?

When will we bother, guys?

I Love You All !! 

ROX 

 
  

Cry

Society sees crying and a show of emotions as a sign of weakness. Yet, in the world of the domestically abused, sometimes, tears are all we have.

The fact that my Sun sign is in Pisces makes it so that when I feel something, some sort of energetic or volatile pull on my emotions, if I am presented enough with all the facets and all the stuff that will take prior to said such emotional happening happens, if it is that the thing at hand is emotionally strong, I will likely end up in tears over it. This is not to say that I am not already an incredibly emotional person who feels every little nuance in a situation, but it is to say that personally I know that when we cry we are not only feeling what we have to feel at that given moment, but we are getting rid of toxicity that was not ours to begin with. This is the very reason that I tell anyone with whom I should have contact in regards to the issue of being physically assaulted for the very first time - that they NEED to cry.

Tears are a gift. Even though we end up with puffy eyes and our sinuses end up being very clogged from all the draining of our emotions, when we cry we very literally release the toxins which were built up within us throughout the time that we were only experiencing the emotional part of being abused. And of course the emotional part is way harder to get over than the physical bruises, but what only an actual formerly beaten person will tell you is that the emotions you feel after that initial attack will leave a person feeling an entirely new set of toxicity, and it is this level of toxicity that will compound the idea that you have already gone through all sorts of emotional stuff and now here is  yet one more thing to have to deal with that you know you never cared to deal with but are now very well in the middle of it.

I know this monster well because this monster is the one that lives in the back of the closet of my mind, taunting and haunting me with the mental images, not only of my bruised,  battered and broken self, but also and more importantly, the illuminated and bigger-than-it-really-is image of that angry face, the gritted teeth, the wild look in his eyes, and that illusory background of anger that he said was caused by me.

Let it be well known right at this moment that the first time you were abused, no matter what way it happened, that at that moment you were changed, forever. At that moment you were stripped of trust in others. At that moment your entire world became enmeshed and laced with a fear that is foreign to you, a fear that now lives in you because someone else placed it there and did so with force.

At that very moment in time, you became someone who you no longer knew, at least not the way that you did prior to that one very intense moment. You became the thing that you told yourself that you would never be - your spouse or partner's victim. The very word "victim" makes people think that you are somehow weak, that you should have had more back bone and above all, the thing that a lot of people will tell you but have no clue is NOT the truth is that they would never let it happen to them.

I am so sorry, folks, but abusers are not the type to tell you when they are going to toss you around physically, and abusers are not going to clue you in to when they have totally lost their mind and are now going to go ape shit on you and physically harm you. There is no abusive person on the planet who is also going to tell you what they are up to and there is no mental health expert who will make me believe that they are the very ones who will unwittingly tell you that they are going to physically harm you. It just won't happen that way. The way that physical abuse begins is at that point where the abuser cannot "break" you or your spirit, and if you are one of the luckier ones then you will know that a broken spirit is never up to those trying to break it and it is very much a case of if you will allow them that leeway - I allowed that leeway, but you don't have to.

You never have to let someone else tell you that they are going to physically harm you even though they will say it a whole lot. You never have to believe that you are not worth someone else's good effort at showing you that you are somehow the effort to be with someone who will not treat you like property. You never have to do a whole lot of things, and at the point where fist meets the eye or the jaw or the ribs, the notion that you do not have to do anything that you do not want to do flies out the window along with your sense of normalcy.
And it is your sense of normalcy that gets shaken and your sense of normalcy that becomes diluted with someone else's version of "normal."

Getting hit is not normal. Being told that you are all what someone else tells you that you are is also not normal and what is further not normal is the fact that in a whole lot of cases, many of us will allow this, out of fear or whatever the hell else it is that you can think of, to become the color of "normal" for an abuse victim because this is the "normal" that their own abusers grew up with. It is never normal for anyone to have to fear what another person  might do, because what they "might" do they ultimately and one day end up doing anyway. To tell an abuser that you are leaving them and that they need to deal with it is just inviting them to conjure ways of hurting you further.

In fact, it is evidenced that once a woman reports the abuse to authorities or when she chooses to leave him the abuse victim is neatly placed in a more dangerous position than she already was. Hence, the reason that I am all for provisions made to the abused through nonprofit agencies and government providers. When it comes to abuse and the leaving of our abusive partners it is the paper trail which matters and not only how the abuses made you feel. The reality is that the abuse is not done once you leave and the propensity and possibility of it still happening and more harshly once you are gone is real. More abused women are killed after they have left their abusers and not while they are stuck in the middle of the madness they have been forced to call their lives.

This, folks, is the reality that becomes that of an abused person, and the statistics you read and hear about are real. The textbook descriptions of what we go through are not real because these explanations do not give credence to the idea that bruises and bones take time to heal, that spirits crushed need time to become revitalized, and further, there is no textbook that adequately explains what it is that all abused people go through. And what we go through is quite a lot.

Hence, the reason that it is good to cry, the reason that when it all first starts it is good and needed to feel and explore those emotions and deal with them as best we can at the beginning of things without the benefit of therapy. In fact, to allow the tears to flow is therapy. It helps rid us of our sadness and our grief, helps to ease the bewilderment, and most of all, allows us to feel whatever emotions that we are feeling at the time it all comes to the head that, in most cases, ends up happening and it does not matter how long it took for your attacker to start in on you with the verbal and emotional abuse because at the onset of those things happening it is but a matter of time before the physical abuse begins.

So please, by all means, do yourself a favor and cry.

Sadly, you earned it...

I Love You All
...Roxanne...

You cannot make other people "get it"

Too often, the abused turn to people who cannot understand the depth of the issues

I won't bother to "out" the person who chose to run his mouth today about an issue that is really not a huge thing. I also will not go on to tell anyone who it was whose fracture of peace that was hard worked for almost wrecked, just because that person felt a little bit disgusted by the remnants of what someone else did. While I get it...really, I do...it - the 'it' that caused this havoc today, and surprisingly no, the "problem" has not seeped into my marriage to this person, was such a minor thing that it really is making me wonder if who in the lives of the abuse survivor and survivors-in-training are really listening to the people who are going through the mess called domestic abuse?

If you don't listen, you won't have a clue


This is not meant to insult anyone reading this, but if you are a loved one of someone who is being emotionally abused and you are not listening to what it is that they are telling you and if you are willing to compare your own childhood with your own abusive father to what it is that your loved one's children go through, please stop. Though the technical similarities are there, I know, for a fact, that no two situations are alike, so please stop behaving as though you know how to fix your loved one's problem because, no, you do not know.

You want to be there, and that is fine, and you want to help, and that, too, is fine. What is not fine is the idea that you think that what you yourself have been through in any way at all somehow validates that you know better than the victim does. Again - no, you don't, and there is no more bigger an insult that someone who goes through the abuse can receive. You cannot begin to know what is happening, are not qualified to give advice, can never fix things for them because the bottom line is that you do not know what to do and your attempts a trying to get your loved one through their time of heartache, though appreciated, may only serve them with more grief.

Believe me, I know this one personally. If I didn't, I would not have anything to write about today.

You cannot make things better by making your abused loved one feel like he or she is not doing enough to get out of the very volatile situation by making a phone call to the nearest shelter or even to the police.


From experience I can say that yes, calling the proper authorities when your loved one is being physically harmed is the best thing that you can do for them. Yet, when there is only an exchange of words, and this is not to tell anyone that verbal abuse is less damaging than physical abuse (because it is lots worse on the victim, and yes, I know this one, too), there really is nothing that calling any authority, any shrink, any person will do to help. And please, spare me the "they don't want help. If they really wanted out, they would get out." To those who would think and believe this, let me give you the biggest "go fuck yourself" that you have ever had.

You do not know what it is that abused people go through, even after their abuser is not in their lives. You do not know how to make it go away, and you can suggest all you want what you THINK you would do, but you are not in the situation and you cannot try to make an abused person get into your head when most assuredly it is YOU who needs to get into theirs.

To suggest that any abuse victim or survivor LIKES being told who they are, what they do, blah blah blah, is just adding huge insult to permanent emotional injury that the abused person has to heal from all on their own, and your adding your two fucking cents to a matter that you know nothing about, that you have not researched and that you are basically clueless about only pisses your loved on off. You are not helping the problem. You are adding to it, and you are quietly being placed on that list of people who abused them as well. Watch your mouth and your ass, because you do NOT get it and if you say horrible things to them about their life situation, you are just as creepy and clueless as is their attacker. You know nothing when it comes to what other people go through, and you will remain to know nothing as long as you continue to flap your fucking jaw muscles about an issue that you have some very real feelings about but not an ounce of real knowledge. Knowledge is key in these kinds of things, and without a scrap of even knowing at least your own part in their pain, again - you are no longer a part of the solution but have, without realizing it, become a part of the problem instead.

Way to go, hero!
Duh

...and arguing with an abused survivor or with someone in the middle of their crap over what YOU think they should do is like a sin against God and mankind


The term STFU completely applies here, because getting up in the proverbial ass of someone whose life is in utter turmoil is just like telling them what to do. Telling them what you would do if you were in their situation is a bad thing. You do not know what the hell we go through, so shut your sorry ass up and no, you WOULD NOT do all those things that you are telling your loved one to do. Stop turning them into your newest science project in societal bullshit. You do not know what you would do. You are telling your loved one this because you are not in the middle of the same pot of shit soup that they are in and you keep making it seem that they are somehow indebted to you for being the foremost expert on something that is foreign to you.

If you have not been hit by someone who outweighs you at least by 100 pounds, shut up. If you have not been bullied by someone who outweighs you by at least 100 pounds, shut up. If you have not been afraid of someone who outweighs you by at least 100 pounds because you have a memory of what happened to you and you cannot go through that shit again, please, shut the hell up, really. You cannot glean from television or the internet enough knowledge to get your ass out the door in terms of and in regards to having been abused in some way, shape or form.

Again, please, shut up. You do not know what the fuck you are talking about. Unbeknownst to you, and I am just telling you this as a favor to you - you, not so coincidentally, do not know it all, and no, your fucking big fat graduate degree does not make it so that you know more than a survivor or victim of domestic abuse and family violence. While you may know a lot more about whatever it is that you studied, unless you studied psychology and at least have a passing interest in the thinking of the abused...shut...the...fuck...up...today.

One more time...


You want to know how to help your loved one? That's easy - shut the fuck up and listen to them, because that is what all abuse victims and abuse survivors really do need, just someone to listen, to not judge them, to not put their own two cents in about how they feel about the abuser - talking about the abuser to the abused only places the attention and your attention on something that you do not need to further etch in the abused person's head.

Shut your foolish ass up and fucking listen. Listening will give you the opportunity to really know what it is, even in a very tiny way, what it is that they have gone through, what we have all gone through, and what a lot of us always go through, even after the abuser is no longer in our lives.

The very best thing that you can do for your loved one if you really want to help them is to simply just be there and to listen, because anything else you tell them will fall on deaf ears, as their entire lives are lived on the idea that they must always look over their shoulder, must always sleep with one eye open, must always have that sixth sense that tells us that we have to be careful...

Since we know that we have to be careful, perhaps, too, you might also want to be careful as well.

Wouldn't want to be the cause of yet another fight, or worse, another bruise caused to your loved one because you had shit to say, now, would you?

I Love You All...(yes, even you idiots with no idea of what you are advising to your loved ones)

Rox<3


(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. If you want to exact change and cause a Stir, you can contact Roxanne by clickinghere. Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

Gratitude (Or "What Christmas is really all about")

Gratitude is hard when you think you have nothing to be grateful for

When it seems that you have had everything that matters to you stripped from your life, and when you believe that there is nothing left for yourself, Be Grateful.

Be Grateful, even for everything that someone else has put you through


As difficult as it may be for some of us to be grateful to the creeps who made us fear everything and everyone, namely them, it is good practice for healing to be able to forgive and to build an attitude of gratitude toward our oppressors, and it is because without them we know not the things that we are and have always been capable of. When I say be grateful, I really mean it, and I say it because it brings to you a feeling of peace, a feeling that you can get through everything and anything that comes your way.

Be grateful for the things that have been presented as challenges in your life, because without the challenges, we cannot ever know just how deep the well of strength is within us, how strong the person who we really are and who we really have been all along really is. Without oppressors in our lives we do not know what needs to be seen to and repaired, and we can never begin to heal without it. We can never begin to understand who we really are without something or someone there to tell us what they think we are, and what they think we are is so far removed from the reality of who we really are that once it is that we have been goaded, or hounded, or belittled, or even beaten, into knowing who we are, we never know and we can never return to it unless we are paying attention.

This is not my telling you that I am fine with the abuses that many have suffered, but it is to say that whatever happens to us is meant as a lesson, if not in trusting people we shouldn't, then in trusting ourselves to know that we can rise above everything that we have been witness to, everything that we have been told we are but are not, everything that we see as mean and horrible and things that cripple the soul. Without the tears we cannot know the depth or the joy that laughter brings and can never really experience it because there is nothing to measure it against. Without the pain we can never know what feels right, and without the daggers sent straight to the middle of the soul of our hearts we can never find out that every heart, no matter how broken, has the propensity to heal.

Without the ugly things that visit our lives we cannot know the depth and the worth of the beauty which resides within us all.

Take the good, the bad, and the ugly, and you come up with something beautiful


If there is one that I am very familiar with it is the depth of the soul of a person who lives their lives outwardly, lives their lives as though the only thing that counts, that has ever counted, was what they could accomplish in the material world, but there is nothing in the material world that has roots in the material and no matter what anyone thinks, it never will and it is because all of those material goodies came from a thought - a good thought, or perhaps even a very bad one, but none the less, the soul is where everything starts, because the soul is where our most precious treasures really are.

No matter what ugliness is part of your life right now, as Polly Anna as it might seem, you can turn it into something beautiful, something that somewhere along the Path that you are on right now will culminate into being something gorgeous and real and permanent and yours - you just have to believe that it is, and most of all, you must first have gratitude for it, even as it is still in your mind and in manifest and lives only as an intention.

And speaking of intention, never forget that it is the intention of a thought, of a desire that matters most, and not the thing itself. It is often said and widely believed that it is not the reward as much as the journey to the reward that we all pine for, and in the case of being grateful it is the one thing that matters the most. The journey to wholeness is not one for the weak of heart, the meek of soul, but it is the journey that all abuse survivors eventually must take, for without the drive to want to further your life, and without the desire to see things in a different light, there is nothing else that will lift a person out of the pit of hell called their life at present moment than knowing that one truth. No journey has ever been taken without also taking the very first step. In this case, the first step is simply believing, which, in an abuse survivor's world, is something that must be relearned as it, too, is stripped of us.

Yet, once we have it back ( I refer to it as my "Girl Mojo"), there is nothing and no one who can stop us. Nothing. Not one person. It is this way because we have used the Spiritual muscles built up by hurtful words and action taken against us, and it is this that carries us through to our highest learning. It is the experience as an abused person that prompts us to become survivors, and once we are survivors, we then become fighters, and in our case, the fighter never does not reign victorious. We go from being just a survivor to being a reigning and victorious Soul with a heart and mind to match, and by my count, that is a lot to be grateful for. We find that we can handle almost anything that comes our way, and if we cannot handle it at that very moment, we know that our moment will come. It is not a matter of if, anymore, not in the case of the survivor of domestic abuse and violence, but rather and only, when.

It is Beautiful to be Grateful...

A person living in the Light of Love and with Gratitude in their heart is a person who has begun the Journey to healing. If we can manage to rise above the anger, above the shame and above the remnants of what we thought our lives should have been, we can manage to see to it that everything in our lives brought us to this point, to this place where we can stand atop the proverbial mountain, look out onto the world that is our lives, and see that we have much to be grateful for, see that we are not so without that we cannot manage to also see to it that we are a better beacon of Light than we are a purveyor of the darkness. Abuse survivors live their lives shrouded in darkness that is not their own but becomes theirs once it is that someone whose darkness is not bigger, but whose darkness is backed by all the power that they have within them.

People who have survived such things have not used every bit of what they were granted at birth, and in so knowing this cannot use it if they do not realize that they have it. We all have it, and once we can take hold of and harness it, there is nothing that we cannot do - not one damned thing, and this is the most beautiful and most important thing about Gratitude.

Gratitude is a Light unto its own. It sheds light on the things that are of importance to us, and breaks us free of the belief that we want more than we deserve, and we do not realize that wanting is different than desiring. Want leaves us feeling empty, but desire fills us with hope and banishes the fear which has permeated the Light within us for too long. When we can be filled with Gratitude our lives begin to change.

So, be in the Light that is Gratitude - YOUR Light that is Gratitude, and find within the one Christmas gift that has been yours all along...

I Love You All...
...Rox...


(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com) 

Learning to Trust again, to Love again takes a lot of Soul Work

"It's like the wind...I can't see it, but I can feel it..." (Victoria Kristine White)

It is a rare occasion when I will quote another person's words, but it was this young woman named Victoria,a woman with whom I am only familiar in a Facebook kind of way. Yet, her post this evening sent my being stuck for words a bit of a kick in the ass, and I know what it is that I wanted to tell you all, and yes, it relates to all that we have, as survivors, been through.

Regaining our sense of trust in others begins with our own ability in our sense of Trust, not only in ourselves, but also with the Soul, with the Spirit which guides us and with the idea that everything in the world, other than what you see materially, begins with a thought, and this does include those things which can be counted as 'intangible.' It would be cliche' for me to write something about Christmas, but in trying to keep with the whole  holiday spirit, I guess this would be an attempt at my reminding people that we cannot know how to give anything to anyone until we can first give ourselves a chance to grow. If we do not allow ourselves to grow, we will not be able to heal, and if we cannot heal, we cannot trust, and if we cannot trust, we can never really truly know how to Love again, no, not even ourselves. While this is a very ugly thought, it is the truth of the matter.

It took a lot for me to trust, as well it should have, because trust is the thing that is the hardest for people to rebuild within themselves. Mistrust is where doubt is created, and the first person we doubt is never someone else, but only ourselves, and we project it out onto other people, this feeling that we cannot let go of, at least not right away. It is too hard to let go sometimes, because we know that the risk is too great. Risk is what got us into the messes that we found ourselves in and it will be the trust that we will rebuild within that will help us to climb out of the despair that has enclosed us in a shell that might look like us, might act like us, might technically be us, but it is so not who we really are.

First, you must remember

The first thing that you must remember is that you learned how to mistrust people and that just as you learned how to do that, like much else, you will have to relearn trust. It is a sad truth that abuse survivors end up going through more than we bargained for when all is said and done, but the beautiful part in all of this is that you get to pick how you want to come back, and you get to practice talking to people, practice not talking about you so much that you give away more than you even have for yourself. It took me these last three  years to come back to me, to know and to reinvent me, and it has been a bitch of a time doing so, but it has also been a great time that offered me the opportunity to grow into this outrageous, fiery, passionate person who is full of Spirit and is deeper than the very recesses of the Soul within. This is who I am. This is who I have always been, and I Love Me, just as you should also be so inclined to Love You.

"...don't you even worry pretty darlin', 'cause you'll find Love again, I Know..." (Tesla, "Love Song")
The thing that I am asked all the time by other survivors of domestic violence is if I am scared to Love another person, and to that question I simply explain that I never lost Love for people and that Love is the thing that will carry you through everything and anything and will always be the thing that you will find will heal you faster and better than everything else.

When a person is abused by another person who has promised to Love them and that person chooses to fracture the trust that an abuse survivor has built up, it is hard to imagine that there is any Love there at all, but there is, and the Love that remains is the Love which has always been within ourselves. If we continue to believe that the Love we deserve is outside of us, we will always be chasing it, and we all know what happens when we chase something or someone - they run. They run like fire burns old newspaper - fast. The reason that we chase is because there within us is the person we were the last time we thought we had to go out into the world to find what already lived within us. We were made from Love, which means that we do not have to chase it because it exists within us and never will die.

Love does not die, even the shattered remnants of what it was that we were told and shown was Love from someone who themselves could not fathom Love because to them Love equals ownership. Love and trust are not borne out of a need for someone else to control who we are - yes, I said need. We seek the approval from someone outside ourselves to validate us, and all we get is the version of ourselves that someone else wanted or wants and is never really the person who we know we are, and the person who we know we are is the best person we can hope to even think to be because it is ourselves in our truest essence. There is nothing quite more beautiful than a person - a woman - who knows who she is and who is confident in herself, who Loves all of herself, even her quirks and the little things makes us who we each are.

It is not only the Romantic sort of Love that I am telling you about


Love is the highest form of respect that anyone can show another person. It was a long time before I could even think to tell anyone that I Loved them, but these days, after a whole lot of work on myself, it is a daily thing for me to tell someone that they are cared for, that even if it seems that they are unlovable, that I Love them, and when I say it, I mean it.

Yet, being able to tell another person you Love them takes a lot of trust. You must trust that you can give that piece of your Self away and you must trust your Self not to get hurt when they do not say it back - not everyone is comfortable or feels safe saying that they Love someone, anyone, and even if they don't say it, you know it because like Ms. White posted, Love is very much like the wind- you cannot see it, but you can surely feel it, and that is what matters the very most. It is important that we realize this about us, that we are able to Love, and that we are able to Love from the moment that we are brought into this life. Because someone else takes away the Love that we have for them, chips it away by being horrible to us, it does not mean that the Love within us dies. Love does not die. It is like Light - you can have all the darkness in the world and it can engulf you, but once the tiniest sliver of Light is shone, there is no more darkness. This is what Love does.

Illumination

Love illuminates our Selves, and with that illumination we are able to Light the world with the flame within which is our true selves. Once we have illuminated who we are and once it is that we have seen, through that illumination, our own flaws and imperfections is when we can know within that we have reached a point where we never thought we would ever be again. While there will still be much work to do, and while it will be that no one but us can reclaim that piece, it is a freedom like no other to no longer fear that we are not able to Love or to be Loved.

Being someone else's victim hurts in many ways, but being able to come back to who we are is like water for a thirsty person. Love drenches us in its healing nature and brings to the surface the ugliness that we have allowed to rule us and it sets the standard for who we want to be and who we want to grow into. Being abused makes us shrink into ourselves, makes us believe that this is all we will ever be - defeated, bruised, Spiritually maimed and scarred in the soul. Yet knowing that scars mean that healing has taken place is the salve that brings us back to Life, back to who we are, and makes us know that everything is going to be alright.

If we can believe that we can trust ourselves to do anything, then we should also believe that we will be able to Love again, in every way imaginable, and that what we asked for in the past has come and gone and now we can Love the person we have grown to become. We can take the ugliness, the hurt, the anger and the pain and turn it into the beautiful thing that we have become. We can turn someone else's trash and the rubble of what was and what became of us in to a beautiful piece of art, original and raw and primal and screaming from the inside, out.

We can choose to be who we are and we can choose to Love who we have become, and we can do all this all on our own. Yes, it will take time, and yes, you will cry like a woman in mourning, and yes, you will feel cleansed and brand new. One day you will wake up and just know....

One day, you will just know...it is like the wind...you know it is there, and you know it because you can see the evidence in the birds which fight it in flight, and even though you cannot see the wind, you can feel it.

So, too, is the nature of Love. You know it is there. You cannot see it.

You can feel it.

I Love You All ...
...Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

Time Heals

Setting our sights only on the hurt we have suffered impedes our healing

Pisces people are fabulous martyrs. I know. I am one. On the other side of that martyrdom is someone who is strong and vibrant and full of both Spirit and Life and someone who is literally aching to experience the healing needed to survive all the things that they have been through, and I promise you that what they have been through is a whole lot.

If we are left only to ponder the reasons that anyone would want to hurt us we end up trying to find the corner in a circular room. There is no reason good enough to hurt anyone intentionally. No matter what kind of abuse it is - regardless if it is physical or emotional -  there is not a good enough reason to put hands on another person. The abuse begins subtly, can be a passing glance of disapproval or distaste, can be a remark made in regards to what a victim looks like (I always heard that I was a whore because I wore make up, did my hair, liked having my nails done, got waxed...you know...being a girl...I enjoyed it then as much as I do now), can be about their level of intellect, can be anything at all so long as it pertains to what must be done, according to the attacker, by the victim to make them more acceptable and lovable by the person who tries to change you.

There is no level that will be acceptable and there never will be. Once you stop doing all the things that you are told bothers your attacker, and once it is that you have changed everything outwardly they begin the cycle again and this time the damage is not something that can be see (yet) but can be felt and will be known by those who have known you longer than your attacker has. They begin to chip away at the self-existence that is built up, and they start an all out war on who you are, and this is where the real damage begins because the only and the very next thing that happens are the physical beatings. It all happens over time. First you are coerced into not being lovely to look at, then you are manipulated into a pattern of thinking that causes you to react to their words as though they were the words of God himself. Once you are changed both inside and outside, there is nothing left other than the physical beatings which are always the victims fault, at least and according to the person doling out the physical terror on their victim.

I tend to think of my  husband's fate as a Karmic debt being forcibly repaid by him through his losing his life at his very own hands. Only a moron would basically turn their back on their family, decide early on that since they feel that the system owes them something for all the time they put into it that they are now entitled to whatever it is that they feel they are owed, would choose, after having had a major heart attack and then having had open heart surgery, to continue to smoke, to eat like a pig, to be angry all the time, to live their lives with the bitterness that is them to be in charge of their lives.. This is the mantra of the abuser, that they are owed, that they live their lives at a deficit and that everyone within their own circle of social contact somehow is indebted to them for something. In my case it is because he simply did his job and, by his own demanding it, I stayed home with the children and raised them, doing what I had always done - I wrote - books, ghostwriting, marketing and ad materials, basically anything that I was tasked with and contracted for - and I danced, performed, choreographed, taught (and now use as a healing tool with other women with "beauty" issues that cannot be fixed with the help of make up or cosmetic surgeon) hula, and yes, he tried like hell to make me see hula as yet one more island girl's way of ensnaring another white man into her den of iniquity.

But he did not succeed at it. I would not let him. I still will not let him. He cannot take this from me again.
And now he is not long for this world , just as he said he would not be, and just as I have always known and believed.

Time Heals

Time heals. As time passes and memories fade we find that we are no longer the people we were so many years ago when there were blackened eyes and hairline fractures, when there were excuses made for behavior not befitting of a pig as it wallows in its own filth, when there were days filled with terror and nights filled with tears. Gone are the days where I would spend the entirety of a day trying to find a way to make this person see me the way that I knew I was - fine and capable of being my own person, no matter what he thought.

Here we are, the memories of a grimace before the blow, of 17 years long gone, and the voice which was silenced by a choice not made by me but forced upon me through being stalked, being belittled, being all the things in his eyes that I knew I was not. He'd never bothered one time to see me as I really am, and he still thinks that I am a little too weird for "acceptable" society, but if I bothered to let his words and his idiocy be what still ruled me, I might still be that timid little twit who was willing to please him to make him happy which eventually was a requirement needed to please him to keep myself safe. These days, it is the altruist in me, the Piscean nature, that damned Certificate of Ordination and the degrees in health sciences alongside the certificates in wellness that cause me to allow him his last days to be spent with his children. I am hurt, but I am not horrible. I am no longer as angry as I was,but it is all still there, the memories, as though I can watch them on my television screen. It is all like a long and drawn out miniseries that took too long to come to an end.

I have grown since that time and know well now that I have always been safe, always been nurtured by the Light of Love and the Infinite Universe, have always known that God has always had me. He must. If He didn't I might not be here. I might be a statistic that is a far grimmer shade of gray. I might be in traction permanently. I might be an addict. I might be ...anything that I am not truly.

But I am not. I am not any of those things that this man whose last name I share, with whom I share three marvelously Spiritual children, with whom I have shared history, an address, a car....with now whom I share only history, but not much else. I find now that after all these years, it was never me who was damaged and I was not damaged until after he damaged me.

Now I am scarred, but scarred means that to some degree, I am also healed, because the scar is the evidence that the wound that once was there has healed.

Scarred....scarred is good..

I Love You All!

Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

There is nothing scarier - enlarging our territory the Jabez way

To survive you must enlarge your territory, so to speak

If there is anything that someone who has been through the travesty of both domestic abuse and domestic violence knows about it is being afraid of everything and everyone. This is the tragedy that is borne of the scourge of domestic violence. There are a million and one survivors out there in the great big world, who, because of someone else and what that someone else did to them, have limited their social circle.

We live life fearful until one day we realize that what happened in the past is done and over with and that the only thing we can do now is to learn from our fears and to learn to work with what has been done to us. I could sit here everyday and think and believe that I am everything that my own attacker told me I am, or I can bother to think about what all the other people in my life think of me and lemme tell you what - their version of me and his version of me are markedly different. Yet, not even their opinions matter in the grander scheme of things. Only mine does.

Only your own opinion of your Self matters, no matter what

My abusive spouse would, if he could, sit here and monitor everything that I write, but this does not mean that I would not come back and write what I really have to say, and what I really have to say is a whole lot. Yet that would solve nothing, not for him and not for me. He should not waste his time with trying to correct everything about me that he feels is wrong with me, because he would not bother to sit and listen to me as I go down the list of all the things that I think he could work on, not for me but for him. I say this because I know and have known for a really long time that what I have to say is really not a big deal to him because frankly he thinks that I am not as big of a deal as I know I am and yes, I happen to think all of us are a really big deal. If we were not and if we had nothing to do in this lifetime not one of us would be here.

There would be none of us to tell our story and there would be no one who would know that only our own opinion of us matter and that what other people think is irrelevant in the bigger picture because opinions, as it is known, are like assholes - everyone has one, and in my case, I have two.

We, even I, have to accept this truth about us. No one has the right nor the strength to occupy our thoughts about us - no one. If we could wrap our heads around this we would all be fine. It is the reason that for a lot of us it might seem that we need no one in our lives, that we do not need to be a blessed part of the lives of everyone else who occupy the planet, and that we need not be a blessing unto our own. This is what robs us, the idea that we must please everyone. That is impossible. We cannot please everyone. We need to please us first, even though your minister might have made it seem that you have to give up yet more of you for someone else. You don't.

I Promise.

The Jabez Way

Man, there was a time when referencing the Bible would give me the dry heaves, but anymore now I look to it so as to make sense of the things that for many years were used "against" me in that book. Yet, just like in life, period, we find our solace in places we never thought we might. In my case, it is the Bible. Maybe it is because of my upbringing and the fact that I practically had the Bible force-fed to me, or maybe it is because I feel like more than not, in it there are too many references to women being lesser than men.

There is much Wisdom to be gleaned from the Bible, and this morning, after I had been told that I don't need anyone else, (yes, by IdiotBoy) I began to see, both with my mind's eyes as well as all around me (nothing is coincidence, mind you) the word "Jabez" and "territory" and things that point to my enlarging my own readership.

We cannot be whole people if we are not willing to let people into our lives. I am a very private person in real life and choose to have but a select few friends, and yes, it does have a lot to do with the fact that after all I have been through I have become very selective with who it is I choose to spend my very valuable time with. Unlike money and tangible things time can never be replaced, and this is something that is lost on someone who is abusive, who is greedy, who worships their money and allows their things to speak for them. Once all the money is spent and once the things are no longer a part of their life they become helpless because now they have to learn to be right and upstanding with others. Now they have to be who they are in order to enlarge their territory and truth be known, it is not the person they abuse who they need to help change, but it is their very selves.

The same does not hold true for abuse survivors. We are a force and a power unto our own. We know well what it is like to have the power to enlarge our reach taken from us and we know the uncomfortable feeling that comes with not being able to reach out to others. This is a challenge for us, because what we knew to do in order to do such a thing has been called wrong, stupid, a waste of time, and everything that we know that is truth and true according to us has been washed away forcibly, and we feel like there is nothing that can or will bring that back for us.

Thing is, you have to bring it back. You have to enlarge your territory, and you have to be willing to see what is not there, and yes, I am talking about the mighty hand of God (or the Goddess...or whatever else it is that you choose to call your Higher Power). It comes at a time when you feel the most alone, at a time when you find yourself willing to let go of the assumption that your attacker knows better what is best for you, and it comes when we least expect it to, the need and the desire to call out to God like a child having a nightmare screams for his mother. Socially, abuse survivors are left without any tools to use that they have not tried, and we don't fancy using the ones that we did in the past because subconsciously that is how we believe we drew the person who abused us to our lives (this is not truth - you drew them to you because you thought that you were not good enough to have anyone who'd appreciate everything about you -yes, I said it, now deal with it. I have been there and I know that this is what happens...acceptance is key here, folks). We forget about what we knew back then because we feel like it only works to draw bad people to us.

What we know is our truth, and if you can bother to see to it that this is only a truth specific to you, you can then begin to enlarge your territory.

The Prayer of Jabez

The Jabez Prayer is known worldwide, even though not everyone in the world was raised up in the church (I am SO not the churchy reverend...not at all...). Basically what the prayer says is that Jabez wanted to "enlarge his territory" (his circle of people) so that he could go out into the world and bless people with what he was gifted with at his conception.

When I happened upon this prayer and this verse this morning it came at a time when really, I feel like there is nothing left for me to do other than enlarge my own readership. Had this been a mere six months ago I would likely raise an eyebrow, say that it was a good idea and forego the idea that there is an entire population, of women, mainly, who need to know that really, even with all of the offers of safety and all of the well meant offers of a new life, there is someone on the planet who understands and can relate to them, and really that is the first step in getting out into the world and remembering who we are. Who we are are not these wilted versions of our former selves. I took the opportunity to reinvent who I am to fit the mold of my life at present, and I am choosing to see it for what it really is - a transition that I was meant for, that no one else can get through like I can or in the manner which Spirit needs it done. It is only me, myself, who can do this.

I have been tasked with screaming at the top of the proverbial mountain that there is hope, that it is ok to want to be all the beautiful that you can be, that it is fine to want to be who you are and that it is ok to be afraid of what you do not know can or will happen at the hands of another. I am also tasked with screaming at the top of said same mountain that it is not ok to stay that way, that it is not ok to let anyone tell you who you are or control you or to just be downright shitty to you. Those things are not ok, but those are the things that we each have to get through. My purpose in this lifetime is to tell others that they can be who they are, that it took them some time to unlearn their Selves and that it will take them some time to relearn who they are.

This is my Jabez prayer, this blog...and these are my words and my gift to you all - to tell you that I am here, that I will always be, and that if no one else gets it, I do.

I "get it."

I Love You All!!
...Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

"Physician, Heal Thyself..." (Luke 4:23)

When it comes to our healing from the things which we have gone through, we have to remember that how we feel is all our own.

It used to be common for me to blame everything on my abusive spouse. As years passed and I started becoming more and more clear in what it was that I have been through one thing that resonated with me a whole lot was that even though we get hurt by others, it is our responsibility to not hurt anymore. The thing that makes us hurt is the thing that sets off into motion the things that we can call our monsters, and the monsters and how we feel about what has been done to us is what makes us angry. It is not always and only the action taken against us, but the way that we feel about what has been done that matters more.

Placing blame on the person or the people for how we feel after the fact - immediately after the fact- is one thing, but to continue to allow them that much control over how we feel about anything is something that a lot of abuse survivors choose to do. I know this because I chose it, and now I have unchosen it, because it is not and never has been conducive to my healing. How can I expect to fully recover from the heartache if I am only willing to go back and revisit the past so that I can hand control over how I feel about myself to the person who made me feel crappy about me in the first place?

Physician, Heal Thyself

Rarely will I defer to biblical reference when it comes to something that is nowhere near being anything that any one belief system can "heal." Yes, it is very important that we have support systems in place, but to become and allow ourselves to become completely dependent upon others to make us feel better about what has happened to us is a habit that we need to learn to break. It is like depending on a cigarette to make us calm down when we are angry - we know that puffing away will help us ease the tension from having gotten angry, but in reality it is not the smoking but the act of smoking that makes us feel better. I mean, come on - we all know that smoking cigarettes is very bad for us, so let's not give credit to an inanimate object.

Instead, what we need to do, and what it is that I have made an art form, is the conscious act of learning how to heal one's own self. In order to do this, though, we have to be willing to live through the hurts and the anguish that we felt when we were going through what we went through. We have to revisit the pain to see it and where it lives and what caused it. We have to know and see for ourselves those places within where we hurt the most so that we can go within and see to it that we are able to heal from it all. Sometimes, the scar that stays still will bring back to us the pain that we went through, but forever it will remain a scar and not the wound that caused it.

We must be willing to see to it that our past pain is not as big as our desire now to no longer hurt, to no longer have the propensity to place blame on an old hurt and to be able to get past it all takes a lot of forgiveness, and a lot of patience. Yet, the bottom line is that in order to heal ourselves, we have to be willing to accept that we have to not look back, not place blame, and to no longer live in that hurt. It is Divine no longer allowing our abuser to have the control of how we feel.

If you want to heal, you have to take the first step in that healing. You have to be willing to let it go with them and keep it all for you...what, you ask?

Everything. That's what. Every damned thing. It is the only way that we heal, the only way that we get past it all. We can never heal from the past if we continue to live there. We cannot go forward if we hang on the anchor's weight of the past. It just will not happen for us. We have to let go of the need to keep our abuser at the end of our leash because them being there only enslaves us further to them, and again, that gives them all the control. We can stay mad, but if we stay mad forever then we will end up sick and dead at their hands, or at least, because of their influence. We already gave them pieces of ourselves that will forever remain theirs. That is the part that they took. The rest belongs to you, ok?

Physician, heal thyself...no one else can...

I Love You All !!
Rox

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)

Nobody Hears

It is nearly impossible to get people to understand

People mean well. Those who share our lives with us want us to be happy and want us to have a good life, and this is the reason that at the same time and while they mean very well, they do not understand that every abuse victim and even abuse survivors do not need a cheering section - they need the people in their lives to at least listen to them even if they cannot fathom the reason why most abuse victims, even though they want to leave are afraid to. I know this monster very well, as this is the monster that, yes, even as the man can barely breathe without wheezing, I still am very afraid of him and it is two-fold these days, because of his health and because truly, someone who has limited time left in this lifetime really hasn't a care in the world and truly has nothing to lose. The idea that if we run away we will be safe is only partially true. No one thinks about the idea that not everyone's situation is the same even though everyone's situation may have similarities.

This is not to imply that there is no and will be no escape - I have always maintained that everything in this life is temporary. There is always an end to everything, even and namely the experiences which hurt us and break our hearts, even the things that make us look at ourselves through shame colored lenses. Even if whatever happens, happens - nothing is forever except for Love. We Love our Selves and that is the  main reason why anyone who has been the victim of someone else's abusive hand or words or both seeks relief through escape, through (yikes) the arms of another person who will give them what they never really had, through whatever means it takes, and sometimes - no, not sometimes ...all the time - we end up, 9 times out of 10, emerging victorious when all is said and done.

But there are still those in between times, those times where you are in the mindset that you need to plan your escape and you need to plan to do things differently because most assuredly there is nothing that is not in constant flux when living the life that I and many other abuse survivors have been through. You do what you must in order to get away from all that is your reality. You change what is your own so that instead of it being both of yours together there is something in your life that belongs to you and only to you, and usually it is an intangible thing that you seek out because the intangibles are the things that no one can touch but are also those things that mean so much to anyone who can now call themselves a survivor. I am a survivor. I have been told already by a Kahuna that I am part of what I am calling the "Great Mahele of the 21st Century".

According to those in the know, the Great Mahele  was meant as a means to ensure that the indigenous Hawaiians - the natives...my ancestral bloodline...would be recognized as the original landowners and made it so that they would not lose their rights to the ancestral lands. In that same line of thought I think of the current Universal climate in terms of things Spiritual as being the Great Mahele and epitomizes the idea that indeed, the meek are currently inheriting the earth and we are doing so in great numbers. While this is all fine and good, there is still the idea of the Now and the Now dictates all that is at this moment and at this moment there are a lot of people being victimized by the ones who they are emotionally dependent on and dependent not by choice but because after so long of being victimized they have come to the point where they have been worn down by the emotional batterings they have endured. This is not their giving up but is rather their letting go.

Letting Go

Never assume that by my saying that abuse survivors are letting go of their shit as meaning they are letting go of what they have been through - I promise you that is not what they are doing because you can never let go of something that teaches you as much as being the target of someone else's demons. You never forget the first time that it happens, and you never forget the bewilderment of being both angry and intensely afraid, and you do not ever forget leaving and being found and returning to your attacker, not only to save your own life but also to keep your loved ones safe. After you have been threatened just one time and after you have been told who you are and after you have been hit just one time, in many cases, and even though a lot of victims do escape, even the ones who do escape will tell you that no matter what happens and no matter where you go to hide they find you. They find you and they promise you all kinds of stuff and then after they have lulled you into a false sense of security they begin to wear you down all over again because when you left you took away the control they had and now they are angrier and more ready to get their revenge on you no matter what. It is the eternal mind fuck.

You are never really free, either, because the memory is still there. You will live for the rest of your days with the memories of what you went through and it is up to you to do what you will with that experience. I chose to tell my story, to tell other survivors and current victims that yes, someone in the great big Universe gets it. I get it. I understand you. I know your fears and more, I know your frustrations, and many of your frustrations come from well meaning people who just cannot and do not understand why it is that you cannot leave as quickly as they would prefer that you would. I mean, this is not to say that it is never done, because it is done - I know. I have done it. And when he found me you can bet your okole that I was afraid, possibly more than I was the last time before that time that he'd found me. Every time I left, he found me. Sometimes, there is just no escape, and lots of times the cops do not care - you are not a priority until you have been beaten badly enough for you to warrant a visit to the ER.

No one wants to know or to accept that someone in their lives who they love immensely is being abused by someone else. No one wants to hear that you are, on a daily basis, trying very hard just to make it through the day without crying, without being so sad and down on yourself. No one wants to know that you are a statistic and no one wants to deal with the pain of knowing that you are going through what you are going through. They don't want to know because they cannot rescue you the way that both you and they know you want them to, which is simply to just take you from the situation you are in. Yes, I have been taken away from my situation in the past, and everytime I left the motherfucker found me. He never didn't find me. Eventually I got to the point where I looked him dead in the eye and told him that I would be his Grim Reaper, that I would be who would hold his hand and walk him to his grave and he has, over the last three years, made that the truth. 

No one wants to hear that you have to go through this all, but those who do not know what you go through also need to be told what you go through and they need to be educated about your reasons for being so scared. Never think that I write these things in defense of an attacker because the opposite is true. I write this shit because no one has bothered to listen to the person they care about. Yes, we know that you are scared for us and our safety, and believe it when I say that we are, too, but the reason that we stay is because before we leave, we need to have an escape plan. EVERY person who has been abused knows this and you become very adept at planning when it is that you have nothing else on your mind than becoming free of the oppressive nature that someone else brings to our lives. We do not ask for this to happen, and it bothers me that there are still a lot of people on this planet who feel that if you do not run away you somehow deserve what you are being given. To those dickheads I would like to extend a cyber-bitchslap ...you haven't the slightest clue of what you are talking about and were it you who HAD to go through what abuse victims and survivors go through, you might not be tsk-tsking your loved one. You might be asking them how you can help.

Idiot.

Nobody Hears  what is being said because what is being said is not what is wanted to be heard. Human beings are compassionate creatures and we want to know that those who we care about are not hurting, are not in a situation that they can rightly or quickly get themselves out of and surely what situation they are in is NOT their fault - no one asks to get their ass kicked or to be talked to like they are a piece of crap by a person who demands that their victim is enamored of them and them only. No one wants to hear that this person who they love so much is being hurt on a daily basis by someone who is essentially a stranger and no one wants to accept the reality that what their loved one is going through makes their loved one not but a statistic.

Nobody hears that what we go through must be bad enough for law enforcement to really do much about. There must be bruises and their must be blood - again, I know this because I lived it and I have the pictures to prove it. There is a song that perfectly describes what it is that a person going through what it is that we go through. Suicidal Tendencies is a band that spoke for the masses back in the 80's, and in the 90's they maestro'd a song titled "Nobody Hears." And it is true - we talk through our eyes, the words, pouring down, and still, nobody hears. 

Nobody hears what is really happening - they only know what they wish they could do, and God bless them for wanting to do something. What really needs to happen first is that they need to hear what we are saying. They need to hear our fears and our frustrations and they need to not try to put themselves in our place because no one would want to go through what I have been through, and what I have been through is nothing near what a lot of survivors have been through and what a lot of victims go through. 

It is enough that we have to figure out how to get out of a mess that we alone did not create. It makes it harder when no one hears what we are trying to get across to them. It takes a while for an abuse victim to become a victim, and it takes longer for a victim to be able to call themselves a survivor. Nobody hears what we are saying but we want you to. We want you to be there, and we are thankful when you are willing just to hear what we are saying to you, and we are more grateful when you do not try to come up with a solution that just will not work. I have been to shelters, and I have run away more than a dozen times. I have hidden in places where I never thought he would look, and though I did not give up on trying, I gave up on doing what it is that was suggested to me that I tried, over and over again, and which did not work. 

As a survivor of physical abuse, I can tell you right now that we never stop trying, ever. We are constantly thinking, coming up with new ways to relieve ourselves from our lives momentarily. We become sharper and more quick witted, but we also know that the way we end up that way was harsh, is harsh, and we never wish this upon anyone. 

When you want to help your loved one, sometimes all you really need to do is listen, because truly, nobody hears what it is that we are saying to them. There is no one size fits all, even though the "symptoms" of abuse are the same for the victims, and even though the M.O. of the abusers are almost alike. No two stories are alike. Not everything you read or see or hear about will fit every person's situation. I know this. I live it. There is no legal document that will stop someone who is on a mission. Yes, leaving is important and yes, needed, but leaving in haste only makes a bad thing worse.

When it comes to helping an abuse victim, it is important to hear what they are telling you because very truly, their lives are much endangered every single time they leave. Listen to what they are telling you, and get involved where you need to, but do not discount a single thing they are telling you because what they are saying is very important and absolutely is a matter of life...or death...

"When the last tear falls down, nothing gets washed away. Another plea put to rest, as nobody hears, nobody hears...so what did I do to you, that makes you run from me? Now I'm sittin' here screaming inside myself. Don't understand why nobody hears..." 

(1992, (c) Suicidal Tendencies, Nobody Hears, 'The Art of Rebellion.")

I Love You All...

...Rox...

(Rev. Roxanne Cottell is a Freelance Writer, Speaker and Spiritual Counselor residing in Southern California. For inquires regarding the Ka Wahine 'Ui dance program for survivors of domestic abuse,or any other inquiries. send an email by clicking this link . Her latest book, "Goddesses, Priestesses and Queens" can be purchased at lulu.com and amazon.com)