Ruby Slippers

Found myself thinking about the movie Wizard of Oz where The Wicked Witch of the West writes"Surrender Dorothy" in the sky with broomstick smoke.  Dorothy and her 3 companions, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion have just had a spa day in the Emerald City when the mean and scary witch shows up and ruins it all.  Or does she? Because of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy is forced to face her fears.

I couldn't help thinking about how this story tells my story. I, too was unhappy with my life and ended up on an unexpected journey.  During my journey I have met my thoughts (brains), heart (feelings), and  fears (courage), especially my fears.  Fear comes in all shapes and sizes.  Our biggest fear is said to be that of death.  I think I am pretty good on that one.  Sometimes, it feels like it would be a relief actually. The fear I have associated with death is that of pain.  I do not want to die a painful death.  There is a point though where pain will make you pass out so there is a threshold to it.  I will not be controlled by the fear of death.  

Survival fears.  These are strong within me and I think probably mostly everyone.  They are biologically programmed into the DNA.  It is difficult to break this encoding.  We are programmed for the flight or flight response.  This is tied into the fear of death.  Survival fears come from all kinds of sources. Not being able to financially support myself is a survival fear.  I may not die but be made to suffer in a life due to lack.  Food and housing are basics we all need.  Fear of the loss of love does not concern me.  I have lost all of the important people whom I have loved.

One of my deepest fears is that of not having a say in my life.  Not being able to manifest my desires.  I was raised in near poverty and I felt stuck as a child.  No matter what I did, I was unable to change my circumstances.  This was my birth choice. I chose this for a reason and it was very real.  I struggled with being able to accept my circumstances but that never stuck, emotionally. I could not free myself from judging myself about not having money, a house, clothes, etc.  I saw that in order to be popular in school, these things mattered and people judged you for your economic status.  I also saw that money brought opportunity and those with money, had it easier.  I judged back.

I don't think I ever dealt with the pain of being poor as a child.  After college, my circumstances did change.  I married and we both had professional jobs and good incomes.  My income continued to increase and I lived a comfortable life.  Fast forward to now, where I have a home in foreclosure.  It is bringing up all of these fears which I thought I put behind me.  It is now my opportunity to face these old buried fears and judgements.  The judgement that my economic circumstance is tied to who I am.  I am god no matter where I live.  Am I gong to believe it that I do not create my reality?  The tricky part is believing that I am creating my reality when it is something I do not want-on the human level.  On the spirit level, there is great wisdom in my choosing but I have to trust that I know what I am doing.  Yes, I do create my reality.  What is in my reality is for a reason and it is showing me something.  I think not being able to change my reality is the belief that I cannot.  I am creating it even though it is what I perceive as a crappy reality.  There is a reason for my crappy reality.  There is a fear here.  The fear is I am not creating.  I accept that i am creating it no matter what.  acceptance of my birth choice plays a part in this too. i accept my birth choice of being poor but it does not mean that I have to remain poor.  I know better now.

Fear of slavery.  Of being controlled by someone else or my circumstance.  I am a sovereign being  and it is time i released the fear of slavery. Of being controlled by someone else just to get your human needs met.  or emotional needs.  that is slavery.  giving someone what they want because you have to - to survive. this is difficult for me to accept.  that we chose slavery for a reason.  I have been a slave in this lifetime.  giving parts of myself away for love when all the love i need is on the inside.

and I see Dorothy in her ruby slippers and being told "You had the power all the time".  The slippers were the keys to her return to home.  she had them with her all along.  And this rang true to me in that I felt I have had the power all along to choose my destiny.  That we all carry that within us-that which we seek is inside of us.  But how to find that which we seek is generally by looking on the outside and thus the journey.  Our lives are mirrors and everything from the inside is reflected to us on the outside in our experiences.  

I truly feel I am ready for this part of my journey to end.  I have explored my thoughts, feelings and fears and quite frankly have seen enough.  It is time to leave Oz 

Fear, the guardian

As I was sitting on my couch, writing in my journal, I was lead down a path where I was able to feel and release some stored shame from childhood.  When we are emotionally wounded and unable to process the pain at the time, we store it in our bodies.  It is walled off until we are able to process it.  Oftentimes it is our fears which are guarding wounds.  The fears are saying "don't go here" it is painful.  For to release a wound, is to go into a wound and re-feel the trauma and pain we were unable to feel at the time.  Wounds which are laid down in childhood are waiting for us to grow into adults so we will be better able to handle the experience of feeling and dealing with the experience.  As adults, we can see things from a bigger and/or wider perspective.  For example, we are able to see our parents as humans who make mistakes and have their own wounds.  As children, we are sponges who just soak up whatever is in our environments.

Especially me.  I am a human emotional sponge.  I am an empath which is having the experience of feeling everyone else's emotions.  It has been a lifelong journey to be able to separate out myself from other people.  I feel emotions intensely and emotions on the lower end of the scale such as anger frighten me.  Combine that with a fear of rejection and you have someone easily emotionally manipulated.

Back to my story.  I was writing about how as  an adolescent and young adulthood, I had no concept of the government, really and how it personally affected my life.  I was attributing that ignorance due to being poor.  First of all, there were no learning opportunities in my environment about our government. Second, I never had things to lose.  We did not own property.  My mother quit her low paying job when I was in the 7th grade.  She never really talked about why.  Somehow we were existing.

During this time frame, we went on food stamps which is a government program.  I had a memory of walking to the grocery store about 1/2 to a mile away and buying groceries.  When it was time to check out, I was absolutely humiliated. I remembered that sometimes my mother would send my sister and  myself to the grocery store with food stamps in hand.  If we wanted to eat, we would have to go through the humiliation of paying with food stamps.  Sat here on my leather, yellow couch, I released a wound tonight form long ago.  Ashamed of myself for having human needs.  The basic human need of food, I was ashamed for needing to eat.  This must be how a homeless person feels when they are seen hunting in a garbage can.  Ashamed for needing to eat.  In fact, I usually fall to pieces when I see a homeless person looking for food.  It is the same thing.  I am no different than the starving homeless person.  They are just a reflection of myself.  Seeing the shame in the homeless person is a reflection of the shame within myself.

Where did I get this shame, I asked myself?  How did I know to be ashamed of using food stamps?  I absorbed it from my mother.  She passed her shame onto me.  It was she that was ashamed which is why she oftentimes sent her children to buy the groceries, so she would not have to experience it herself. She dumped her emotions onto me and I absorbed them.  Not everyone who is on food stamps is ashamed of themselves.  If there would have been discussion about it in our house, that it was presented as not something to be embarrassed and ashamed about, then it would not have been as traumatizing.

Back to fear.   What fears did I have that were protecting this wound?  You know, the fears that say "do not go there, it will be painful."  I believe it is tied into survival needs.  Food and housing which are basic human needs and when my ability to survive is threatened, it is translated into being afraid.  So, for example, the loss of my home in foreclosure was creating all of this fear.  The fear was guarding this wound of being ashamed of myself for needing a house or food.  I have been identifying my being, my beautiful being, with the kind of house I live in. And if the house and food are gone, then there I am again, back to being an ashamed child.

I am working with owning everything I see on the outside as a reflection of myself.  Everything, EVERYTHING that is in my experience, I am creating from the inside.  If we embrace our fears, then the gift on the other side is the release of what it has been guarding.  After the release of a fear, then we will no longer need to create it on the outside in order to see it.  That's the plan, anyway......

The MUSTARD SEED

There is this intangible feeling that I am trying to wrap my arms around and pull out from inside of my being.  The mustard seed.  The seed that is buried deep, deep (did I mention deep) down.

This morning, I had a dream and it was about being robbed on the street.  There was no help around and my screams were met with complete silence.  The feeling was that of powerlessness, of not being able to do anything at all to help myself.  There was no one around to help me.  I had to surrender to the experience.  After being robbed (in my dream) there was this feeling that is difficult to describe.  Of having had something traumatic happen but no marks-no bruises, nothing on the outside for the world to see as evidence.

As I marinated in this feeling today, trying to make sense of it, I followed that feeling of powerlessness.  Where else in my life have I felt like this?  Of being a "victim" where something was stolen from me and then afterwards, it was as if nothing had happened.

My first sexual experience-I was 15 and he was 17 -my first love.  We had been making out in cars mostly and he was pushing to have sex.  I was not ready for intercourse.  I believe it was New Years Eve and there was drinking involved ( I had little experience with alcohol) and he coaxed me into this room full of other couples making out.  We were on a bed, my pants had been taken off and all of a sudden he was on top of me, with his penis inside of me.  It was very quick (and unfulfilling I might add) and he pulled out before he came inside of me.  And then it was over.  There was this feeling of trust I had for him as he always quit when I said no and he knew I had not changed my mind about being ready for sex.  He said he loved me.  And, yet, there I lie half naked on the bed, filled with desire only to be raped.  All that was left to do was to get dressed and walk out with the Queen song "Tie Your Mother Down" playing in the background.  Afterwards, there was no hand holding or loving embraces or expressions of love.  Nothing.  Silence.  We went on as if nothing had happened.  I was betrayed.

I can only imagine that this was the same feeling I had when my  biological mother left me at the age of one.  My step father's grandmother somehow cajoled my 19 year old mother into leaving me and my 6 week old sister to be raised by her.  From silenced relatives who didn't speak out until years later, there seems to have been subterfuge involved.  I was raised as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.   Betrayal by my biological mother who was supposed to protect me and by my step grandmother who would emotionally abuse me.  Who, by the way, always told me how much she loved me while dispensing emotional abuse.

Yes, there is a pattern of betrayal throughout my life.  It has come in all kinds of packages.  All of them telling me they loved me while they betrayed me behind my back.  These two instances are probably the most significant as they occurred early to set the imprint.  The last betrayal was with my second husband.  We were married for only two years.  He ended up being one of those psychopaths.  The kind of person who totally deceives everyone around him.  He is one of those people who will probably end up on the news someday.  As psychopaths are want to do, I was destroyed financially not to mention my health.

The betrayal with a happy face came from my best friend who also happens to be my boss at work.  She was undermining me with people who reported into to me and others in the organization.  She took credit for my work with the higher ups and painted a picture of more than her fair share of importance.  All the while, telling me how much she loved and appreciated me and denying any wrongdoing when confronted.  Until she was caught, red handed and yet, still had the audacity to try and "spin" it.  Again, that feeling of you've just been punked - but we go on as if nothing has happened.

My husband of 20 years who is the father of my children abandoned me emotionally.  After the divorce and remarrying a year later, he decided he wasn't going to pay for our children's college and medical expenses.  This resulted in me having to sue him to honor the divorce agreement.  Needless to say, this was totally unexpected that he would abandon the kids financially.  He lost, of course, and we go on as if nothing happened.

Now this is a story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down


Before this dream, a few weeks ago, I had discovered that there is something called betrayal trauma.  Here is the definition:  Betrayal Trauma: The phrase "betrayal trauma" can be used to refer to a kind of trauma independent of the reaction to the trauma. From Freyd (2008): Betrayal trauma occurs when the people or institutions on which a person depends for survival signifi cantly violate that person ’ s trust or well - being: Childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse perpetrated by a caregiver are examples of betrayal trauma.

Betrayal Trauma Theory: From Sivers, Schooler, & Freyd (2002): A theory that predicts that the degree to which a negative event represents a betrayal by a trusted needed other will influence the way in which that events is processed and remembered

This is what you call a core trauma.  It is the set up that occurs early in childhood and then is repeated over and over again until the person can see and heal it.  It finally becomes so ridiculous that you cannot NOT see it.  Since the initial trauma occurred at one year old, without conscious memory, it was a nasty little booger I could not get hold of.  It was like a mustard seed that was hidden deep inside of my being which until it bloomed, blended in with all the other bits and pieces of life.  

 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and put in his own garden. It grew, and became a large tree, and the birds of the sky lodged in its branches.”

 I believe this dream to be the releasing of my core trauma.  In order to heal, the feelings that are stored inside of the body, have to be felt.  The pain that was too difficult to feel at the time of the wounding will be felt as it is leaving.  Still, hard to describe this feeling of being hurt and then - I think it is like that of going numb or in shock.  Yes, a feeling of shock.  The shock absorbs the pain.  But yet, there is something intangible about the shock.  Maybe it is invalidation-that everything goes on and the pain is never validated or expressed.  If no one else recognizes the pain, then does it exist? Is it real if no one else admits to it?  Can I have my own feelings regardless of someone else's validation?  Can I feel?  Am I permitted to have my own feelings?  

This is where the fear lies for there are consequences to standing up for oneself.  Am I strong enough to weather the storm of owning my own feelings, of standing up to the possible anger and rejection?  Will you leave me if I express my feelings?  Best guess is yes, for the type of person I have been attracting to myself is not the type of person who is usually willing to own their own actions.  Here is the mirror:  I am not taking responsibility for my feelings and am attracting the same.  

What is the gift from all of this bull crap :) ?  Maybe it is to know, that what I am feeling and seeing is valid.  To not look on the outside for approval, validation, and acceptance.  To own my experience and to speak up about it.  If I am not honest about my feelings then  I am going to attract dishonest people.  To not let the fear of anger and rejection stop me from expressing myself.


This has been quite the journey.  As each betrayal presented itself, I learned from it.  It was like a spiral where it just goes around and around with each new betrayal experience being more difficult.  Until now, I have it by the throat-the roots and I am pulling this mutha out.

Betrayal trauma NO MORE!  Next........