Our pain isn't about someone else

The pain of our past LOSS,  BETRAYAL and ABUSE has had too much space in our lives...

It is time for it to MOVE OUT
 and stop being a barrier to LOVE 

I have emotionally moved on and MOVED OUT the emotions of pain, abuse and betrayal...I realize that how I feel is about ME, no one else. It is about how I have expected others to treat me; based upon their behavior and promises before they lost the ability to grow and continue to love me as I had loved them...

If we are not careful and diligent, life's joys and pleasures can be taken from us, overpowered by loss, grief and emotional and physical pain. One day we look back and wonder "what happened"...and that is when we need to start on our healing journey of "finding ourselves, healing from abuse and learning to dream again"...it is never ending. Hopefully.

I hope that you have found that YOU LOVE...and that the only barrier that you have to loving others is yourself...it is not about them...it is about YOU. Others cannot make you love them any more than you can make others love you...and the same for "unloving" them...we make the CHOICE to love or not to love. It is an healthy perspective on life to make healthy boundaries and realize that we deserve to BE loved as WE love others. In my experience, very few persons grow out of their pain of loss, abuse and betrayal to see that they have been damaged and unable to love others because they have failed to love themselves.

Don't give such negative, life-sucking emotions place in your life. MOVE THEM OUT and move on with "Singing a new song".
YOU are worth it!!!

If you have loved and lost...

"'Tis better to have loved and lost 
than never to have loved at all." 

- Alfred Lord Tennyson




I have loved. I have continued to love. I will continue to love; no matter how much I have lost. I have taken refuge, comfort and consolation in Tennyson's famous quote: "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." It reminds me that NO MATTER WHAT I have lost; I have not lost "love". I may have lost the subject, the person whom I loved, or may have lost them "for a time" but I have not lost LOVE. I do NOT REGRET LOVING no matter how painful that it had become to LOSE that one whom I loved.

Most of us have parents. Some of us even had good parents. Upright mother and father; maybe a bit quirky and not so perfect, but loving, providential and respectable. They may not have done everything right but we are thankful, like so many others, that they did not do everything wrong. I have enjoyed my parents who are both "gone" now. Today would have been my father's 90th birthday (Mom would have been 91 this coming January 18th). I miss them terribly but I don't regret anything that I did for them out of love. I regret nothing and am thankful for so much. 

I lost a child to stillbirth. That is really a loss that no one can prepare a woman to endure. That lose included the loss of my dreams. The loss of being a mother to a daughter of my own. I was going to name her Mikaela Rose (my family name as her middle name) and she was expected to be beautiful. A mixed and conflicting feeling overcame me as I learned that the child whose heartbeat had stopped just a few hours before, was a boy. A beautiful boy, I later found out after I "gave birth" to this precious child. My dreams of being a mom of another boy or girl of my own evaporated into a fog of sorrow and "loss". 

I have lost a love...one that I thought was "the one". One whom I had loved most of my life. I had lost him to mental illness. He was unable to "find himself, heal from abuse and learn to dream again". Maybe, it was during this time, that I realized the value of "Singing a New Song" for so many people who did not suffer from mental illness. Unlike a person who suffers from mental illness, one who has suffered mind bending, heart wrenching and soul crushing mental illness and was beaten with verbal and emotional abuse has HOPE for healing, health and wholeness. The loss of that love reminds me of an "eternal loss" as I promised that "I would not return to him...again". I loved him deeply and I am so glad that I had some opportunity to share my love for him, with him. It was a love that mental illness stole from both of us. I don't know which is worse: having lost it or having it stolen from you. I still do not regret loving him and never will. 

Never, ever regret loving someone. Even if it is someone who did not deserve your love. You have LOVED and that is the most wonderful, the most valuable power on the face of the earth that dwells within the human heart. 

Love til it doesn't hurt

A loving person that has endured abuse and mistreatment perhaps due to what we thought was "naivete" was really because we "loved til it hurt". You will find yourself BEYOND hurt and into a place of REAL LOVE in your life; no matter who has hurt you or how badly life has treated you...
when WE LOVE, we win. 

Many of us who have suffered abuse in our lives. We have endured the horrible disrespectful speech and behavior of another person have loved until it HURT and we continued to love through the hurt because either we held a religious belief that "we had to love the unloving" or because we might have thought less of ourselves for not forgiving them for their behavior toward us. We suffered in loving them, not as much for them as we need to "love until it hurt and then some" to prove something to ourselves.  Once we realize that love is NOT intended to hurt and that we don't have to be hurt to love or be loved; then we will be just beginning our healing journey of "finding ourselves, healing from abuse and learning to dream again". 

Are you willing to keep loving even if it keeps hurting? We all have that choice to make. No one is making us take the abuse from another person for the "sake of love" but ourselves. I see it this way...I loved a mentally ill man...very much, but I chose, over time with the help of his abusive behavior to stop loving him and stop wanting to be with him.

Abuse doesn't deserve our understanding; it deserves our absence.

We are worth it!!! 

Depths of Sorrow, Heights of Joy

When you are joyous, 

look deep into your heart

and you shall find 

it is only that which has given you sorrow 

that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful, 

look again in your heart

and you shall see that in truth 

you are weeping for that 

which has been your delight.

~ Kahlil Gibran ~

Everything begins and ends with the heart. Without it, there is no love. With it, there is pain as well as joy. The heights of its joy can only be exceeded by the depth of its sorrow. The heart is what life is about.I have found Kahlil Gibran's poem to be so very true, painfully true. Through what and whom I have received the greatest heights of joy, I have certainly also felt the deepest sorrow and grief that I could not even have imagined. 

The cost of love. Yet, I cannot see our lives being truly wonderful without the heart. The most fragile and yet strongest "member" of our being. Only when we give our hearts the freedom to feel the pain, the sorrow, the pleasure and the joy will we be "Singing a New Song". The journey of "finding myself, healing from abuse and learning to dream again" required that each and every turn would open another part of my heart; part that had been closed by fear and darkened by pain.

Healing is worth it...and so are you!

Heartache

Doesn't everyone experience heartache at one time or another? Abuse survivors are NOT exempt from heartache; matter of fact, from my experience and the experience of many other abuse survivors, it seems that abuse survivors have lived WITH heartache possibly even more than we have lived without it. It is unfortunate, that such loving hearts are so hurt continually, but that is the nature of abuse...it brings heartache to the hearts that love. 



The song (you can listen here; will open in a new window): Total Eclipse of the Heart: Bonnie Tyler (You tube) reminds me of loving a person who is experiencing abuse. Why do I say that? Because I truly believe that without abuse, heartache like this could not fully exist. I would only hope that no one else would ever experience the mind-bending, soul-crushing and heart-wrenching effects of abuse. 

I have been in an abusive marriage. To this day, he denies that he ever verbally abused me and that was only the tip of the iceberg but I never pushed the issue to "make him see the error of his ways". Matter of fact, he accused me of abusing his daughter whom I loved dearly and was "close to" for the first eight years of our marriage from the time she turned 8 years old. He even tried to charge me with abuse during our divorce proceedings which had NOTHING to do with our divorce so I "let him say what he wanted" without any defense or reply.

Losing my ex step daughter was a "total eclipse of the heart" for me. Learning that her father had done so much to sabotage our relationship; things that I could hardly believe that anyone could ever consider doing to another human being, that I fell into depression. My heart ached so badly that I could hardly bear to feel anything from it. When we have heartache, it means that we "love". I am not sorry for loving nor will I ever be. I will acknowledge that the pain of heartache was an abusive act by an unloving person toward one who had loved them...me. 

Finding ourselves, healing from abuse and learning to dream again, in my experience, does not immunize us from heartache. Matter of fact, it may be that heartache, maybe due to LOVE, is the motivator for healing. I believe this to be true anyways and I am hopeful that someday, my heartache will lessen but I will never forget how I LOVED and I will never regret it.

When is a dream worth dreaming?

But if not for being impossible; 

would it be a dream worth dreaming???

A thought about dreams came to me while I was writing my blog. I was writing about “having dreams” and really digging deeply into what having a dream really means. I couldn't help but ask myself that if it were NOT impossible, then would it be a dream worth dreaming? 

If my “dream” would be possible, would it be a dream at all or maybe it would be a misguided goal or a hope that doesn't even come close to reality. Maybe the nature of a dream implies that it is NOT possible and thus to dream our life away as the Everly Brothers sang in “All I have to do is dream” is an accurate statement. I was dreaming my life away as I pined for my Love. I would think of the love that I shared with him; the “strong bond that we knew” as I wrote in the song “To see you once again”. How could it be so impossible to love him again and forever if we had such a wonderful love in the beginning. HOW could it be so impossible and why would I dream of it rather than plan on seeing him again. I would dream of looking deeply into his eyes; throwing my arms around him and feeling his strong arms about me. In my dreamlike state I would feel the hot, moist eager mouth as his lips and mine pressed together in passionate union and I would think of and feel many other bodily sensations and responses to his touch and presence. How could it be so impossible if it existed at one time; couldn't it exist again and forever?

Dreams are something that can play with the mind. They are surreal and who knows how crazy they seem to others but to us; they are as real as waking up in the morning. They motivate us to get out of bed and slide into some decent clothes and go to work. They prompt us to evaluate every relationship that we have only to find that none of them come close to the one that we dream about. We are not looking at it with “rose colored glasses” and forgetting the rough spots that we ran into ourselves along the way and the pain of the separation that only time can heal. We see our lives in the light and scrutiny of the dreams that we hold in our hearts. The dreams become the magnifying glass of our intentions and the filter by which the words that we use on a daily basis are chosen to reflect the plastic life that we have chosen over our dreams. Our dreams can appear more than real to us while living in a state of denial or constant insistence that the life that we are living is the only one that is available to us. Why would we tempt ourselves to believe that life could be better? Why not just accept the fact that life is what it is and it will always be what we have made it to this day and that we should put away those “childish” dreams and work with what we have. 

Reality is not what it is so cracked up to be. I mean, really, does anyone expect us to live lives that are so miserable just because they are the ones who are afraid to dream? Maybe they think that we are as afraid of dreaming as they are; afraid of dreaming a dream that is so impossible that to consider it would peel back and uncover their layers of discontent with their lives. To dream is to not be afraid of the truth of our lives. I think that I can say and believe that if we are afraid of dreaming, we are denying the truth of the miserable existent that we have created. We have sacrificed our right to dream at the altar of a mediocre life. We have bludgeoned our imaginations in hopes that we will not have to face the defeat of our free wills to live as we would really like to live.

“To live a life worth living” is a cliché of clichés that has come to mean even less than the cliché had originally intended. Does anyone “live a life worth living?” If everyone “lived a life worth living” then tell me why there are so many dreamers; so many discontent and discouraged people in mid-life crisis who look at their lives and say “this isn't my life”?

I have stood and faced myself in the mirror many times; shaking my head in unbelief as to the life that I have acquiesced into living. I asked myself “how did I get HERE?”. “How do I get out of this mess and live a “life worth living?” “Isn't it too late to start over?” I would feel my spirit weakened and collapse under the inquisition and sadly admit: “Who am I trying to fool, I don't have a hope to live a life that I could only dream of”. The saddest part of this statement is that I was the one fooling myself that I could life a life worth living while living in misery and want. Oh, I don't mean that I was so miserable and wanted so much that I would never be happy while being in that place; no, it was more like I was miserable and wanted so much APART from what my life consisted of that I was dreaming of being so far away, like somewhere “over the rainbow”. Even Dorothy caught a glimpse of some wonderful land “beyond where the blue birds fly” while she was living in the black and white Dust bowl infected land of Kansas on the dismal farm with the ordinary characters found in an ordinary life.

As I evaluated the realness of my life; 

I fell into despair knowing what I was living in 

and I felt an unquenchable hunger for what I had been living without. 

I had nothing to lose. 

In my mind, it could "get no worse" 

and if I attempted to follow my dream and did not get it; 

I would be no WORSE off than living without it.

Dreaming goes beyond what we can imagine. Dreaming is daring to want something that you can't even see and needing something that you can no longer live without. If but not for it being impossible, it would not be a dream worth dreaming.

We CAN "let go" and still hold onto ourselves

Photo: Scott Wright Photography

"We must be willing to let go 

of the life we planned 

so as to have the life 

that is waiting for us"

~ Joseph Campbell ~

Have you ever "clung onto" pain, hurt, regret, sorrow, grief and a myriad of other confusing and frustrating emotional states longer than you really needed in order to "heal and move on?" I think we all have done this. We tend to hold onto the familiar because the dreams that we have held deep within our hearts seem too far away. We are afraid of change. We are needing to "find ourselves, heal from abuse and learn to dream again". We are not alone.

I was well into my late 20s before I realized that I had been abused; emotionally and physically by my father. I had always yearned to have a "daddy" like my school girlfriends but knew that I did not have one. I had a father. One who went about his life; even neglecting his own children. Being a middle child, I naturally withdrew into my own world and being an introvert on top of it, I retreated into my own imagination and thoughts. I became a singer, writer, song writer and "philosopher" of sorts; all because I had to let go of the dreams of wanting a "normal and healthy" family life and sought to find my own instead.

Sometimes we are disappointed by life's circumstances as they are thrust upon us so cruelly. Abuse, neglect and betrayal are just a few that we face, have to deal with and heal from in order to hear the song of hope and courage within our hearts; to "sing a new song". We all face these things but we may not deal with them in the most healthy ways. I have sought to FACE my life, my hurts, my pains as well as my joys and successes. Being empathetic and compassionate to others, I can see the hurt in other's hearts and minds. It is in these times, that I realize that I had to "let go" of what I thought life "should be like" for myself and others and just learn to ACCEPT LIFE as it is. This has made my life much more interesting, healthy and happy even.

I believe in healing wounds, second chances and dreams coming true. It hurts neither myself or others to believe this and only aids me in helping others find the healing path that I have found. It is a healing journey of self-awareness, self-acceptance and truth. It is not the life that I had sought to find because I had not been aware of it. 

I didn't understand

that I didn't understand

until I understood.

~ DER, Singing a New Song~

Another thing that I "did not understand" was mental illness; some are now calling it "behavioral illness" and it certainly is a dis-ease of a person's behavior and those who experience thus behavior can easily detect the "disconnect" between their loved ones hearts and minds as well as between each person involved. Mental illness is something that we MUST accept as a reality. It exists. It is insidious. It can ruin lives and loves. 

May I encourage you today to "study yourself"...what kind of person are you? What are your dreams? What is deep within your heart that you have never told another soul and what would you truly LOVE to share with someone, anyone who you could trust? Has mental illness of a loved one or even yourself, "held you back" from venturing into the "wonderful world of you"?  I know that mental illness does NOT make anyone "bad" or "less worthy" of love, respect, joy and LIFE. But if you know of someone who suffers from it and may even be the "one" who suffers with them, you are NOT alone. LET GO of the "life that you had planned", radically accept (check out radical acceptance ) the "life" that you may be living and a loved one may have been suffering through and "find yourself, heal from abuse and learn to dream again". Though you may have seen "your dream" fail for whatever reason, that does not mean that you can't find a new one. If you are reading this, you are already seeking MORE from life; you KNOW that you have a dream deep within you that is just waiting to be brought out "into the light" (Love (poem) by Roy Croft ) and LIVED out. 

Just believe that "YOU ARE WORTH IT", because you are and you can start on your healing journey.

It is okay to yearn to be loved

As abuse survivors, we are most often SO hard on OURSELVES. We accept the weaknesses of others, allowing them to say hateful words and showing themselves to be unloving toward us. We are confused and TRY to make arguments that we are blamed for; make sense. We TRY to not do or say those things that seem to set off our loved one. They do not like for us to see them as being emotionally destructive or damaged but in all likelihood, a person who is unloving and SAYS that they love, is at least, self-deceived. We try to figure out "what we did wrong" when actually we are just loving them in our way. We are loving THEM at their worst. We may have learned or hoped that IF we love, we will be loved in return. This is not true with an emotionally damaged person who is abusive to us. They may deny that they have any problem in dealing (or loving) us. They may say that WE are crazy and need to be evaluated. They run from intimacy and fear abandonment but say that we are the ones who starts ALL the fights and we are ALWAYS wrong. These are behaviors that become known as ABUSE.

Finding parts of our "lost" selves; regaining the truth

Abuse can produce selective memory and we may even forget who we are and what we deserve. We cling to dreams of "what we want" so much that we do not realize that we deserve to have SO MUCH more than what we are left settling for. We really deserve to have ourselves after the abuse is gone.

Part of "finding myself" was really discovering WHO I WAS and WHAT I DESERVED. When I was separated from my first husband, I heard a voice from Heaven say "don't tell him what you WANT, tell him what you see". I did just that. If I had told him "what I had wanted", he might have felt obligated to "be a good guy" or to "prove that I was wrong in how I saw him and his treatment of me" as well as "denying his addictive behavior". I did not tell him what I wanted; what I wanted did not matter at that moment. I needed to see the truth and KNOW the kind of man and relationship that I had committed myself. I deserved to know the truth; even though the truth hurts. I also believe that the truth heals.

A Valentine for Hurting Hearts

For all the precious, lonely and hurting hearts on

Valentine's Day:

Valentine's Day may be a very special day for lovers but it seems to totally disregard the single, lonely hurting heart. Too many years I dreaded the upcoming "Lover's Holiday".  I would mournfully walk throughout the mall and see all the beautiful festive red and white displays declaring the "love the of the ages" and all the wares for sale to give to that "special someone". 

 

Every Valentine's Day, my heart was made sick to think that I had "loved and lost" before and was afraid that I might NEVER know that again. 

I was reminded of other dear hearted women who had been hurt and abused and face each Valentine's Day in the same way. 

I felt that this holiday was a very wicked reminder of the cruelty of abuse...again and again each year. 

I am so sorry for your pain. 

And most of all,  I'm sorry to myself  

for treating me worse than I would anyone else.

Hot potato!

I just couldn't help myself...LOL. When I saw this picture of a silhouette of a person who appears to be "holding the son" my memories went back to my childhood and the game "Hot Potato". Ok, if you remember that also, we both know HOW OLD we are! Like the game, this picture reminds me of "what we get our hands on" and we "get burnt"
at times while playing the game. This is just an illusion; of course we cannot hold the sun in our hands but we present the illusion of holding it without the real consequences. What are YOU holding onto?

Light

 Light. Truth. Love. Power. All words are synonymous
in ways and perhaps the reason why that Light is a common symbol of many holidays. Lights and candles are used year round in many homes but none are consumed as much as when they symbolize truth and intimacy; intimate romantic dinners where the proposal of marriage may take place, the lighting of one candle in a marriage ceremony, the light of candles or battery -powered lights carried by carollers or the flame of one candle as it is passed to another in either a Christmas or New Year's Eve celebration.

Futility of worry

My mom quoted this saying, thought to have originated from the Appalachian hills of West Virginia where her maternal German immigrant grandparents settled to farm. Maybe hearing this saying all my life has helped me to put worry in its place. It has always been an useless but eager consumer of my energy that provided NO benefit at all. I would even say that "worry" is really no more than "our desire to control the uncontrollable" and when put that way; it sounds as absurd as I have seen it all these years.

Out of the abundance of the heart...

Surviving abuse is not just a matter of heart but of mind as well. The mind bending manipulations and twisted realities of a personality disordered spouse or family member result in wounds of both the heart as well as the mind. We can only truly "speak" out of our own experience and beliefs. What we can only speak of is what come from and is within our hearts. 

Above all else, guard your heart, 

for everything you do flows from it. 

Proverbs 4:23(NIV)

We may have been careful "what we put IN our hearts" but little do we realize what had gotten into our hearts and COMES BACK OUT as the result of abuse and woundedness. After having been wounded so deeply by abuse, we may "shut off" or "close down" our hearts or "build up walls" to protect ourselves from further pain. 

 The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - 
they must be felt with the heart. 

Helen Keller

I am thoroughly a "heart" person, I LIVE from my heart. For me, to live any other way is false and NOT living at all. I am warm, funny, sensitive, loving, insightful, creative, hopeful and forgiving; but one thing I am not is hard and walled up; any more that is. Abuse causes us to be cautious and protective of our hearts; we withdraw and "hide" our true selves until one day, we realize that we are losing sight of who we are. We are "losing ourselves" in the sea of abuse and neglect, pain and misery.

Here is my secret. 
It is very simple. 

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; 

What is essential is invisible to the eye. 

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

This above saying comes from the book and movie titled "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. It is funny how WISE a children's story can be and how much an adult can learn about ones own heart by reading a story about how we should "never give up hope" and that we CAN learn if we are only willing to "be like a child" again.

The heart is the most wonderful place in the world. In it and out of it comes LIFE. Without it, I would have to ask the purpose of life; in my opinion, there would be none.

What's love got to do with it? An abuser's view of marriage. A TRUE story.

 
Imagine this scene:  A "christian" couple have been separated due to domestic abuse; the wife/mother has left the household eight months prior with their child living separately; totally supporting both she and their son with HER income alone (also paying for the husband's medical insurance as in the past 12 years out of her income). There have been NO sincere attempts by the husband at reconciliation or resolve of "issues" in the marriage; the wife has documented the hurtful words and behavior that he clearly exhibited for many years to only be disregarded and discounted. This meeting was really set up to confirm what the wife feels she has "yet to do".

She invites the husband and her Pastor and his wife (also a Pastor) to her apartment for a home cooked meal. Conversation is light and leads them into the living room for some more discussion. While the Pastor is talking about his marriage to his wife; the topic turns to his "role" as being a Christian man and the inappropriateness of "demanding" of  submission by a husband.  The husband pulls out his Bible and says to him "I don't want to hear anything that does not come out of this; I will not take any of YOUR counsel".

The Pastor quickly senses that this man is not one to "take anyone's word for it" and obliges him by taking his Bible which was pushed toward him and opens it to 1 Corinthians 13. The Love chapter. The Pastor persuasively reads the entire chapter aloud while remaining to stand and then hands the Bible back to the husband. With total disgust in his voice and obvious air of superiority at having been "read the Word", he so eloquently states (in question form but obviously rhetorical)  

"WHAT does THAT have to do with ME and MY MARRIAGE???"

That makes me think of Tina Turner's song "What's love go to do with it?" and according to this abusive husband LOVE has NOTHING to do with HIM or HIS MARRIAGE. His own words stand to testify of "his faith" and lack of love for his wife. Of course, to end our story, the Pastor proceeded to state his intention that he would  "not cast pearl before swine" by continuing the conversation and that it was "over" and thanked me for the dinner and headed toward the door.

Another choice response by the husband was,  

"Are you calling me a PIG?"

 On a more positive note:  LOVE does have EVERYTHING to do with a good and healthy marriage; whether you are married to "a person who claims to be of a certain faith who obviously does NOT practice what he preaches" or married to a wonderful person who has come to learn that there is NO excuse for abuse. Don't be fooled by a PIG in sheep's clothing. 

****For the record; I hope that you found this amusing. It truly happened JUST as it is recorded. The irony and humor was somewhat diminished at the time by the true shock that ANYONE would even make such comments. Looking back at this as "a pig in sheep's clothing" gives me a chuckle. Abuse is not funny but the stupidity of the abusive behaviour can truly be comical. To add to it; I have eaten "Kosher" for over 18 years. This IS a true story.

With GOD ALL things are possible!

I call myself "newsong" because ever since I became a believer in Christ Jesus; June 28,1985, I have been "singing a new song".

I have made a FULL CIRCLE of my life in the past 30 years. I started college and fell in love with G; my love of over 4 years and we broke up and both married two others before reuniting this past February. We saw each other for the first time in almost 26 years on Feb. 15th; the day after Valentine's Day when he sent a dozen red roses to my workplace. My Love. We have made it a "full circle" to come back together. Something that neither of us ever thought would be possible. But I had been praying for years that he and I would both be "single" and able to "get back together" during the "Dark Ages" while the years between us passed. We realize that we were both single and available from Oct. 1996- Jan. 1999. A short span but both of us were legally single yet we did not look for one another then. We had resigned to the fact that "life was suppose to suck" and after one failed marriage each; while still pining for each other, we "fell into" abusive relationships that really made us "long for each other" even more.

When I said that I was "praying for the day" that both G and I would be single; I wasn't kidding. I looked online in Jan. 2011 and found that he was NOT married. His mother had passed and it appeared to be a recent passing (it was actually 2007; a month after I delivered my still birth son at 5 months gestation) so I had it confirmed that HE was single since no wife's name was next to his on her obituary notice. I JUMPED for JOY; not at his "being single and alone" but more for his "being single again and available". I had ONLY wanted him to be happy and if not with me, with another very lucky woman. He had two and neither of them were what and WHO he really wanted. They were both jealous of me just as my two husbands knew of and were jealous of G's place in my heart and life.

I was separated from my second husband at this time and realized months before that it was time to contact a lawyer for divorce proceeding. We had a terrible tragedy happen that an employee that I worked with had died suddenly near this time and it spurned me to contact G even more; through my hot tears I swore to myself that death would NOT separate us and that I would contact him and see him again...soon.

A new day...realizing that abuse is a thing of the past

I am going to try to log and review my journey through various abuses;
being a mature believer in Christ Jesus (Messiah Yeshua) and biblically grounded and not strongly doctrinally swayed AND being an AVID musical person; who sings, plays a few instruments, reads music a little, improvs alot and praises God with this awesome gift...this is the perspective from which my journey will take place.

Abuse is abuse; it is hard to define when one doesn't truly know what it is. I have a saying "I didn't understand that I didn't understand, until I understood" and that is the same way that our perspective is while we are being abused...it is as if our spirits will not permit us to acknowledge such hideous behavior toward us; unthinkable control for someone else's benefit, mind bending agony to admit that maybe; the other person, whom we deeply love, and says that they love us; is and has been abusive to us in many ways.

This is where I will start...praying that all who read, who need hope in an abusive situation or healing from known past abuses and who want to BE FREE and BE ME again will find hope in my journey. I have seen miracles by the Hand of God Himself...I hope to share with you and encourage you to seek Him and be healed and live in freedom!!!!

Sending you love...