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Hi! This is my new site to tell you all about my healing journey. I am a survivor-thriver. If you are too, come along...

Fantastic Weekend!!: What a Fantastic Weekend!!!

Well well well.... what a spectacular weekend it has been! Truly a good end to the hot summer. We've been busy little bees fluttering around and having tons of fun and good eats!

Friday evening we tried a new restaurant which was pretty good. I think we will go back again. The Blue Moon was ice cold and the hot wings and tator skins were pretty good. After filling our bellies we decided to hit the bookstore. One of my favorite things to do. I was a happy camper looking at all the magazines with a focus on Halloween! Yep it's right around the corner! Anyway we stayed for a while relaxing. I was hoping live jazz music would be playing but no luck. Still a very enjoyable evening.

Saturday we got up early and grabbed our backpack gear and headed out. After a several hours drive where we enjoyed the scenic route through towns we were not familiar with but plan to go back and visit, we ended up at our destination. The beautiful Hocking Hills. Magic land!

We had packed a lunch and loaded up our packs with food to eat on the trails but because it was already mid afternoon we decided to have our picnic lunch first before we headed on the trails. It was yummy! We checked out the visitor center and grabbed a couple trail maps and started hoofing it.

I started taking pictures right away as this place is surrounded by really great photo opportunities. Because it is such a popular destination and it was the last true weekend of summer before the kids all go back to school, the place was really packed. I think I would have preferred to go when it was less crowded but still all in all it was perfect weather. It got up to the mid 80's but in the forest with all the shade it made it fairly pleasant.

Actually we decided we are going to go back again in the Fall when there is less people and congestion and maybe stay in a cabin around there. Hocking Hills is a very interesting place. It is home to Cedar Falls, Old Man's Cave, Cantwell Cliffs, Ash Cave, Rock House Conkle's Hollow and Lake Logan. We did not get to visit every section of these and in order to explore and enjoy the scenery we tend to hike a bit slower.

Our main focus was Old Man's Cave which actually is not a real cave. It is a gorge with a deep recess in the side of the sandstone rocks that is fairly deep and wide. Surrounding this are several nearby small waterfalls and creek beds. Locals named the structure "Old Man's Cave." as a result of Richard Rowe's occupancy, who lived and died there.

Richard was a hermit who lived in the large recess cave of the gorge. His family moved to the Ohio River Valley around 1796 from the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee to establish a trading post. He and his two dogs traveled through Ohio along the Scioto River in search of game. On one side trip up Salt Creek, he found the Hocking Region. Rowe lived out his life in the area and is believed to be buried beneath the ledge of the main recess cave. Earlier residents of the cave were two brothers, Nathaniel and Pat Rayon, who came to the area in 1795. They built a permanent cabin 30 feet north of the cave entrance. Both brothers are buried in or near the cave. The cabin has since been relocated elsewhere.
Evidence exists that various groups occupied Old Man's Cave well before Rowe arrived. Archaeologists have documented that Indians visited the region perhaps as long as seven thousand years ago. The Shawnee, the Wyandot, and the Delaware Indians all occupied the area at various times in the 1600s and 1700s. I can see why the Native Indians would love this area so much because it is beautiful and full of wildlife and would make a good shelter with an abundant source of water and plant life.

Here are some photos from our day.

This is one of the huge rock walls that are so massive. Lovie looks small standing by these doesn't she?

This was the sign leading to Old Man's Cave. I don't know if you can see them or not but those little specks of blue and white in the picture are actually people!

This is the cave or recess in the wall where the hermit lived. They have built stairs to get up there now. When I went years ago there was just the dirt path that you had to trek up to get to the cave area. Can you see how many people are there? That shows you just how massive this place is.

Lovie up ahead walking on the trail while I am lagging behind snapping shots as usual.

This area was The Lower Falls. There was a small trickle of water coming over the rocks but plenty of kids and people enjoying the refreshing cool water. I could definitely imagine the natives using this area to get water and taking a nice cool dip.

This is where we started getting a bit more rugged on the trail. At one point I had to climb over a tree. I loved every minute of it!

This is actually one of my favorite sections of the trails because it has a magical quality to it like a maze of sorts. Yes I climbed up those 100 trillion steps! It took me a while but I made it and was proud of myself. (Note to self: Next time we go, we start here and take the stairs DOWN to get the other areas!)

OPPS!!! If you want to see the photos go to my TOP PAGE and click on my homepage blog called The Inner Sanctum. (It's under my profile information) For some reason they wouldn't post here. Sorry about that! ;)

We were going to hike on another few miles to Cedar Falls and did go another mile or so, but the terrain was getting a bit rough and my body is not in spectacular shape with my knee and all. There were some tricky parts to the trail that were close to ledges and plus the fact that we were getting pretty deep in the woods where not a lot of people were. I got a bit spooked when a lone man was trailing behind and I notice we were the only three in the area. He was acting a bit weird and you never know what is going on with people sometimes. Being women we have to be a bit more cautious of situations like that going into deserted woods. When another couple approached us going to the way we had already came from, we took the opportunity to turn back and stay close to them until we felt safer again.

I did great on the trails and I bet I walked up and down at least 300 steps or more. Most times I have to take them one at a time because of the knee but I did really good and wasn't hurting much afterwards either. All in all it was a fantastic day. We got home about 9:00pm and just crashed.

Yesterday I got up and we decided to relax and cook out and enjoy the rest of our time off. I made a lemon ice box pie which was divine, some homemade macaroni salad and we grilled chicken in Italian dressing. Yummo! We built a fire last night and sat under the stars while drinking Honey-Moons. (It is made by Blue Moon and it is a seasonal beer flavored with honey and orange.) So good and refreshing. I can only drink one or two at the most because beer tends to give me a headache because of the hops.

This morning I got up and made some sour cream red potato salad which is my favorite recipe for potato salad and we grilled pork strips with a spicy pork rub. Talk about melt in your mouth good! Honey I know how to cook and Lovie is in heaven when I bring out my culinary skills. I really should have been a chef because it is a natural ability I seem to have inherited from my grandmother. I love blending that good down home country cooking with the newer updated inspirational foods and delights. I think it is why I adore Paula Deen so much. She does the same.

Anyway...here it is, Monday evening and it has been such a great weekend that we have truly enjoyed. I hope you guys all had just an enjoyable holiday weekend as I did!

This week will be a short week at work and before you know it, it will be Friday again! Can you really believe it is already September? My my!

Have a wonderful week darlins and as always,

Bear Hugs!

PolarB ;)

Monday September 1, 2008 - 08:27pm (EDT) Permanent Link | 1 Comment
Feeding My Spirit: Hello my friends!

It is a beautiful day filled with sunny skies and The Great Spirit is GOOD and we are blessed to be here living life each and every day.

Love fills my heart and reaches out to you. I have been feeding my spirit and connecting even more so with my native roots over the past few weeks or so. It settles in my bones with a certainty that it is right where I am supposed to be.

Tonight's music selections has a wonderful spoken message first and then I hope you will stick around to enjoy the calming native flutes and drums.

Life is Good!

Saturday August 23, 2008 - 11:29pm (EDT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Listen to Sophia's Message: Sophia has the right idea... don't you think? Have a great day and Bear Hugs! PolarB ;)

Monday June 16, 2008 - 07:09am (EDT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments
Truth and Deceptions: I've had something on my mind for a while now and thought it would be helpful to write about it so I can have final closure on it. About three years ago when I first started my blogging addiction....LOL, I met a friend online who seemed to have a lot of the same goals as myself in regards to helping other people who have been in past abusive relationships. Our stories were different yet much of the healing and work to recover from such abuse was similar. Over time we became pretty good friends and we started talking on the phone in addition to online through our blogs and through IM. I felt pretty close to her and felt we had a common bond of healing and we seemed to have a lot of the same value systems from what I could tell.

Over the course of the last couple years we met in person several times and she came to visit and stay overnight in my state and Lovie and I ended up going to visit her and staying at her house for a couple days as well. The last time we met in September we went camping together. Lovie and I adored her and her husband and they seemed to feel the same way about us too. We got along with ease and comfort and I viewed it as a great relationship for all of us. I considered her a very close friend like a best friend would be and for the most part we talked on the phone everyday. I typically was the one who called her because of my work schedule and we emailed each other fairly often. We sent Christmas and birthday presents to one another. I had never had a close friend like this growing up because of my abuse. I was moved around a lot which made it difficult to form bonds and relationships with people and my trust level was not all that great because I was just trying to survive and remain unnoticed as I was growing up.

As Jill and I got to know one another I felt very comfortable sharing a lot of my history of childhood abuse with her because she was an abuse survivor herself. It gave me a sense of comfort and I felt she understood a lot of the issues and feelings of how the abuse affected me. Sometimes we would talk for hours about not only about abuse issues but about everything like blogging and what was going on in our daily lives. I was very supportive of her when issues came up with her children or with a couple of women she was having difficulties with. She in turn was supportive of me when ever I was having difficulties from my past abuse issues or when I was stressed from work. Although she went through her abuse as an adult from a significant other, I suspected her childhood was not totally tea and roses either because she had mentioned an alcoholic father whom she often butted heads with growing up. I shared things with her that I did not feel comfortable sharing with anyone else.

Because I had hit a speed bump in my healing process, I started going to a therapist to get over some of the roughest patches of my own healing. I shared a lot of my process with Jill and it was nice to have someone who I thought would understand to listen to my feelings and thoughts. I was in the middle of working on my ritual abuse memories which was very difficult. Ritual abuse is very ugly to deal with and working through some of my worst memories was a hard emotional process for me. It was draining and exhausting mentally and physically. Although I did not share a lot of the actual details of my abuse with Jill, I did share with her how it affected me. I had to learn to embrace and love the abused hurt parts of myself. My angry teenager self who held so much rage for the repeated rapes and abuse from my father and the terrified hurt five year old child self part of me that experienced the devastating ritual abuse. I discussed a lot of this in depth with Jill and while it was very hard to go out on a limb and tell another person of your deepest hurts, I felt Jill was supportive of my healing process and that gave me a comfort level of sharing with openness that I had never had with another friend.

I introduced Jill to my surrogate mother because they had a lot in common. Both were volunteer child advocates and I thought this would be a good connection for them to share wisdom and resources with each other. They seemed to click and that was great! As time went on, my surrogate mother and I had a few issues going on between us. She was going through some of her own healing issues as she was a survivor too and there were days she was in tears and to the point of complete emotional breakdown. I supported her as I had over the last 15 years, however there were times when we both were in the middle of our own healing process and her issues began to have an effect on my healing process.

During the summer last year, my surrogate mother became suicidal and ending up in a three day lock down in the hospital. When I went to see her, her words and actions had a very negative impact on me. She outwardly expressed blame for everyone else and how their actions were affecting her, yet it did not seem she wanted to take responsibility for her own emotional well-being or acknowledge how she ended up in the hospital on lock down. I was upset and shared a lot of my feelings with my friend Jill who in turn took it upon herself to jump on my surrogate mother calling her manipulative and basically berating her for putting her children and family through hell by having the suicidal thoughts and putting the option of suicide in the minds of her grandchildren and kids.

When Jill did this, I felt it was very unsympathetic and harsh, especially when it was dealing with somebody who was in a fragile emotional state of being anyway. Over the time previously when my S-Mom would call Jill in an emotional state, Jill would tell me that she could not believe a woman who was in her sixties and a grandmother had not been able to get over her abuse issues by now and just live her life. Maybe it was because Jill had not experienced the same type of abuse in childhood and she didn't realize the impact it can have on a child growing up living with abuse day in and day out. Not that any abuse is more or less than any other, however, maybe because Jill's abuse was experienced as an adult and in a shorter period of time, it was not comprehensible to her how much of an impact childhood abuse could and did have on a person who has been abused during most of their childhood developmental years growing up. Speaking from experience, it affects your whole sense of being of worth and is very impactive for the child who then becomes an adult who carries a lot of pain. Unless the affects are actively worked through and processed and healed, the effects can be lasting throughout your whole life.

At any rate, I felt Jill was very judgmental and unsympathetic towards somebody who needed understanding and compassion. I continued to be supportive of my S-Mom even though I felt deep down in my gut that the suicide attempt was a cry for attention and a way of getting everyone to give her love and fulfilling her need of the feeling wanted and needed and loved which had always been one of her key issues over the years. Jill told me, "Well you have to be nice to her, you have more of an investment in the relationship than I do. I don't have an emotional stake in this, so it really doesn't matter to me if she is angry at me or not."

My S-Mom was very hurt and upset by Jill's words and they did not speak for several months afterwards. Jill told me that she just ignored or deleted any emails she got from my S-Mom and basically gave her the cold shoulder treatment. My own relationship with my S-Mom became distant more and more each day as I pulled away in order to focus fully on my own healing. My S-Mom and I had a really rough previous year and as I said we were both working on our own healing issues. Because of where I was in my own journey and because my S-Mom was having a negative impact on me more and more, I decided to take a break from the relationship and have some down time to focus all of my efforts on dealing with the last bit of my ritual abuse once and for all. I could feel that I was at a pivotal point in my recovery and I needed to direct all of my energy and focus on my healing process. I felt I was so close to finally being free of the intense emotional roller coaster that this journey had been in my life.

When I made the break from my S-Mom, Jill unexpectantly became very vocal and was very adamant that I was making a huge mistake and that I was being selfish. She called me gutless and basically berated my decision for choosing what was best for my own healing. She sent me several scathing emails with her opinion of how wrong I was and what a mistake I was making. It felt like being sucker punched from out of nowhere and I couldn't understand why she was not okay with me making the best decisions for my own life and my own healing journey. What made it more difficult to understand was the fact that she herself told me that my S-Mom was impacting my healing because maybe she didn't want me to get better just so she could continue to feel needed and wanted.

Another fact that was so odd was I could not understand Jill's reaction because Jill herself had made a decision to distance herself from her own family member. Her daughter was in a relationship and going to marry a man who Jill viewed as very abusive. She told me she could not be a part of or be supportive of this union that went so against her grain of everything she had done in her own healing process from an abusive relationship with a man. Because of her own abusive experience she said she could feel it and see it in this man and she could not be supportive when she felt her daughter was making a huge mistake. She refused to speak to her daughter over several months and she even refused to attend her own daughter's wedding. I felt this was a decision she might regret later yet I was supportive of Jill's decision to do what was best for her because she was my friend. After all she was an adult and could make decisions for her own life because she was the one who was going to live with the implications of her own decision.

We interacted back and forth through email and I felt like I was constantly having to defend myself when it didn't meet with her approval. I brought up the fact that I couldn't understand her attitude towards me because she had basically did the very same thing with her own daughter. I told her I didn't agree with that decision but I was always supportive of her even when I did not agree with her. I did not understand why she could not be supportive or respectful in return for my decisions. I should know what is best for me, just as she made her own decisions on what was best for her. Jill said that our situations were nothing alike and she did not agree with me. She said my daughter will always be my daughter no matter what. I thought yes but that doesn't make your actions less hurtful to your daughter no more than it did to me. She would not admit any similarities in each of our decisions and so I let the subject go. When a wall goes up, the other person is not able to hear anything you are saying to them anymore.

She told me she didn't want a friend who was going to not be truthful to her and only tell her things she wanted to hear. I told her I was supportive of her because she was my friend and she was an adult who could make her own decisions and I respected her right to do that. I said it isn't my place to tell you what to do or not to do. You can make your own decisions and I will always support you because you are my friend. I asked her if she would have changed her mind even if I had expressed my opinion. She said no, probably not.

I told her had always been truthful to her and I gave her a bit of honest feedback. I told her that her response to me and her response to others including my S-Mom and her interactions with other people when there was conflict, tended to come off as being a bit rude. I told Jill that she called it being real and honest however saying whatever she wanted to say regardless of how hurtful it is to the other person comes off as being rude sometimes. I told her she should think about the words she wanted to say and think about what impact it is going to have on the other person before she says it. I told her there are more productive ways to get your point across without being hurtful to the other person. Needless to say, Jill may have asked for honesty and truthfulness however she did not want to hear it when I gave her what she asked for. In my opinion, Jill just wanted to be the only one who was heard and she wanted her words to be final.

When I made the decision to break off the ties of my relationship with my S-Mom, Jill's interaction with me changed. Because I no longer had a cell phone ( because I had given it back to my S-Mom because of being on her calling plan) I could not call Jill everyday anymore. I continued to email and IM and interact with her in our blogs. I noticed that Jill never made an attempt to contact me or call me even though she still had a cell phone, even though previously to this I had called her nearly everyday. Jill knew that our land line phone did not have a long distance service so I was unable to make long distance calls except from work which I was not really permitted to do. I found her lack of contact a bit odd and it made me start to question her feelings toward our friendship.

We spoke occasionally through IM when I could catch her on and in our last interactions on IM she cried and told me she felt she was to blame for my relationship breaking up with my S-Mom. She said she felt so guilty that she played a part in my decision. I assured her my decision had nothing to do with her that it was something I needed to do for myself and my own healing journey. I told her my S-Mom and I had been having some issues long before she ever came into the picture. She said that she was sorry and that she should not have spoken so freely in a way that was derogatory towards my S-Mom. I assured her that I held nothing against her and the breakup of my relationship was not her fault in any way. I felt maybe Jill had been distant with me because she had feelings of guilt and that was the problem.

After that conversation I noticed that Jill avoided me even more and never made an attempt to contact me. Distant and cool was the description of Jill's attitude toward me and I didn't understand it. It had been several months of very little contact so I wanted to find out where we stood. Did we still even have a friendship? I decided to just outright ask her. I sent her an email asking her if she still wanted to have a friendship with me and I wondered why she had not been in touch over the last few months. Was it something I did that offended her? I felt I needed to know where we stood. Obviously the close relationship that I thought we had perhaps wasn't really the case after all. It had been fine when I was the one who called her everyday but since I didn't have a cell phone I notice that Jill had not tried to contact me at all. So I questioned it. It was beginning to feel very one sided.

The response I got was abrupt and it felt like she had turned my email into an analysis of me, which she had done on more than one occasion. Many times in previous emails, Jill acted like she was a therapist who had to figure things out. Why I thought the way I did or why I asked the questions I did. She turned the questions I ask her around on me and asked if I even knew what friendship was. I responded to her questions in a positive way and was sincere in my answers. I made the wrong assumption that she actually wanted to know the answers to the questions she asked.

I asked her the same question -what does a friend mean to you? The email I got back was very negative and filled with a lot of demeaning disregard for my feelings. She tried to say she had called but I never answered the phone when she did call, which was not truthful because it would have been recorded on my caller ID. Any call I had from her previously always showed up in our caller ID listing so I knew she was being dishonest with me. Jill got very angry when I confronted her about that and told me I don't care what your caller ID says. Jill told me if I wanted to know what a friend was to go to a Hallmark store and read the cards about friendship. She said --I don't have time for you or your issues, and stated that my past abuse issues was the perfect excuse to not have to take any responsibility for my actions. I could always blame it on my abuse! Jill's email was like being smacked in the face and it was very hurtful to me.

It had not been the first time she had thrown my abuse back in my face. I had overlooked her abruptness with me on more than one occasion and I did not deserve to be treated like that. It was not okay with me that she thought it was perfectly okay to spew her judgmental words to me yet I didn't ever have a right to respond to anything she said. She wanted her words to be the last and final word. In my opinion and from my own past experience with abusive situations, life is too short to let somebody intentionally be disrespectful of you and your feelings especially if it is happening over and over again. I made a decision that this was going to be the last time I would let anyone treat me in this way. I did not deserve to be treated with such disdain and inconsideration.

I responded back to her with a couple of short sentences. I said- "Don't bother contacting me again. You've have thrown my abuse in my face for the last time and my email to you had absolutely nothing to do with my past abuse. Take your superiority and narcissistic attitude and use it on somebody else." I had never said anything like this to anyone before in my life, yet I wanted to be direct in ending the relationship.

I got the answer to my questions of how she viewed our friendship. There wasn't a true friendship of caring or understanding. Jill wanted to help people with abusive pasts yet she was unable to handle hearing of abuse that was different than what she experienced. She did not understand the healing process or the impact of long term abuse. Perhaps in her case, her recovery process was quick and efficient or perhaps she isn't really done yet at all.

My thoughts on this is if you aren't able to deal with working with all types of abuse, which none of it is ever pretty and delicately wrapped up in a neat little bow, then you have no business putting yourself in a position of thinking you can. If it's over your head and frightens you then at least be willing to admit that and say I can't handle this and be up front about it. Otherwise you are potentially doing more harm than good no matter what your intentions may be.

It takes a strong deeply compassionate person to be willing and emotionally able to listen to accounts and effects of any type of abuse and to be able to support the healing process with understanding and compassion, treating any and all survivors with dignity and respect. All survivors of abuse no matter what type they experience deserves at least that.

Upon the disintegration of our friendship Jill started making comments in other people's presence that were directed towards me saying I had treated my mother very unkindly and been very hateful to her. This was not the truth as I had been very respectful and chosen my words very carefully in my interactions with my S-Mom. In fact when I wrote my S-Mom a long email before we actually severed ties, I let Jill read it and she told me that it was very well written and got my points across in a respectful way that she thought would be received very well. She told me I was a very effective communicator and that my words were gentle and still carried the message I was trying to convey.

Now Jill accused me of treating my S-Mom with nastiness. I confronted Jill's public comments and got an email that was filled with disrespectful untruths. Again she turned everything around because her wall was up and she refused to hear anything I said. She had her opinion and it was the final word. I chose to not respond to her and just let it go. What would be the point of another interaction when Jill wasn't willing to listen to anything I had to say but her own judgmental opinions?

Soon after Jill devoted a whole post to talking about the ending of our relationship. She said I was very sick and needed help. She made me out to be this fragile mental case and inferred that I needed to be under constant psychiatric care or put away in a mental facility somewhere. She did not use my name, but she made it a point to be sure to include enough information so that everyone would know exactly who she was referring to. She included nearly word for word my profile information and things that a lot of our mutual friends already knew about me. She made sure in her comments to give obvious clues as to who she was talking about. Which they did.

I had several people come to me directly and ask me about it. Those who didn't buzzed among themselves which didn't concern me. There are always going to be gossip and goings on behind the scenes and I don't play into it or participate. The words she wrote was filled with deception. She wrote of things that never even happened. She wrote that I could barely make it through each day because I struggled so much and heard voices in my head and that I had directed so much rage and hate towards her. She said I would have whole conversations with her and not remember anything I had said. She said that I didn't know what love was and had to ask her several times to describe it to me. She said I pulled her into the middle of two fights and when she jumped in there was no fight. None of those things were the truth and I sat back in shock at who this person was that I thought was my friend could turn out to be so different than who I thought she was.

It was true that I had discussed with her in depth my abuse and how it affected me. It was true that I had a hurt inner child who was trying to recover from the devastating effects that ritual abuse and the abuse from my father had caused. Throughout my intense therapy I had discussed with her what it was like to feel the rage of what was done to me as a child. I told her of the body work and releasing activities I did to get that rage and anger out. Anybody who has ever experienced the violation of being raped and repeated abuse is going to get in touch with the anger at some point in their lives. Never at any time in our relationship did I ever express any anger towards Jill or anyone else for that matter. Most times, if anything, I have directed anger at myself which I've learn not to do anymore. Years ago I used very unhealthy coping skills, yet I've healed those hurt parts of my life and have not used those skills for quiet a many years now. That's what healing and recovery does for you. I discussed a lot of my journey with Jill yet many of these things were things that happened decades ago.

If Jill was referring to my S-Mom's suicidal incident as being the fight she got pulled into, Jill did that with her own two feet by her own free will and choice. I never at any time asked for her help in defense nor did I need it. There were tiny smidgens of truth blended in carefully with outright deception and untruths. Jill hinted in her words that my abuse may not have even happened because I could have been so delusional that I could have made it all up. If only that were the truth, then I wouldn't have had to spend so many years of hard therapy work to process the effects from my abusive past. Her words and descriptions couldn't have been further from the truth. Somebody asked me if I was going to respond to her. I said why would I respond to something that isn't even the truth?

I printed it out a copy of it and gave it to my therapist along with some of Jill's other emails. I was trying to understand how I could have been so wrong in believing she was a true friend and somebody who actually cared about me. I told her I was deeply hurt by Jill's words and I was trying to make sense of why she would choose to blatantly lie and be so hurtful. She read them and told me Jill's words were intentional and she meant for it to hurt me. She said- You know who you are as a person and this is no resemblance of you, so why is it so hurtful? I told her it was because I put my trust out there to somebody and opened my heart and emotions up to someone who I thought I could really trust and just like the abuse made me feel, the betrayal and her disregard of my feelings hurt me very deeply. I said it is like finding the courage from within to finally put your trust in somebody once again after so many years of hurt and pain only to get knocked to the ground and stomped and then they turn around and laugh in your face.

Beth my therapist ask me what I was going to do about it. I said I am going to get back up, brush myself off and hold my head high, and move forward. I know I made the right decisions for my life and my healing. I know who I am and somebody else's opinion of me has no bearing on who I actually am. I am a strong woman who is loving, peaceful, kind and compassionate and that is who I will continue to be, even when people don't give me the same consideration and regard.

Beth told me that sometimes people who have experienced abuse have not done enough of their own work and when you have two survivors of abuse interacting it may not always be a healthy relationship because of various reasons regarding triggers and trying to get each of your own needs met in an unhealthy unproductive way. Such was the case with my S-Mom. I truly wish her the best and send love and healing light to her in hopes that she will be able to continue to work through her own issues and finally heal the hurts of her past so she can be happy and free. Beth was very proud of me for taking care of my own needs and healing. She told me she did not want to influence me in any way but rather let me come to my own conclusions about my relationship with my S-Mom, which is what I did. I knew it in my heart a long time ago that it was the right decision, however it took me a while to actually put action behind it.

Jill has resumed a relationship with my S-Mom and has filled my S-Mom's ears with information that is simply not the truth regarding things I supposedly said or did, so much to the point that my S-Mom had to tell her to stop saying things to her because it was just too hurtful to her. I have no idea what the motivation is behind this, nor do I want to be involved in it. I have tried to make sense of why somebody would go to such lengths to not only try to alter or damage personal relationships with people in my life, but to drag my name through the mud as well with deception. Is it because of anger? Jealousy? To feel superior? I may never know and really at this point it really doesn't matter to me anymore. I have turned it over to God and have found peace about it now.

God knows and can see inside of her heart and he will be the one to deal with it because he is the ultimate judge and jury. Eventually the light will always shine on the truth and I am letting God handle the rest.

All I can do and have been doing for months now is praying for Jill. I have her and my S-Mom on several prayer lists. I send her love and light and compassion. I've already forgiven her yet I have no desire to rekindle a relationship with her. There are lessons learned in every situation and this was no different.

There is one really good thing that came out of all of this. It has made me much stronger in my convictions of the person I am and how I choose to live my life with positive light and purpose. I know I have made a difference in the lives of others for the better. God has blessed me greatly and each day I get confirmation of that. I will continue to let my light shine even when people try to snuff it out. My faith is stronger than it has ever been in my life and I am secure in the knowledge that God is on my side and that's all I ever really need.

Peace & Light,

PolarB ;)

Tags: lessons, truth, deception

Friday June 6, 2008 - 02:52pm (EDT) Permanent Link | 3 Comments
Life is Good but BUSY!!: Hello Peeps- Just a quick shout out here. I have not forgotten about this blog or all you wonderful cyber friends out there.... Life has been very busy and I've been working my tail off in the gardens and playing out in the beautiful sunshine. I will catch up very soon with all of you.

Life IS GOOD!

Bear Hugs!

PolarB ;)

Friday May 30, 2008 - 07:57am (EDT) Permanent Link | 3 Comments

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