Safe Haven

Trying to find and create a place to feel nurtured and safe from storms, where I might belong, even if only for a time, where I can feel at home, able to welcome others and share knowledge, feelings, stories and experiences.

I'd so like to share the many stories of what happened to shape me into the person I am today, some I can share, but the most recent stuff, the really scary stuff is caught up in past work related experiences that have to remain secret. This makes understanding the way I percieve the world around me a bit difficult to explain to those who have not had that background.

The last few years have been a turmoil of anxiety issues piled on top of one another, time and time again. It's hard to trust when the ones who should have protected you are the ones who were the most consistent in their abuse of you.

From childhood, mother decided I was out to harm her in some way and took up against me even before I started school, belittling and shaming me as often and as openly as she could. Eventually the siblings took part in that as well, and do so to this day. Except that I no longer hear about it having severed all connections with them to save myself.

Along the way, a kidnapping and sexual assault occurred for which I was blamed by priest and parent alike. Luckily the doctor the school principal eventually forced my mother to take me to gave me what I now understand to have been the morning after pill, and despite it being too long after the event, it worked. Something I didn't realise the truth about until some years later, having been a sheltered and naive child at the time. Clever doctor tricked ma into leaving the room and talking to me on my own.

Fast forward to marriage, children, births and deaths, and domestic violence, and move after move after move for work prospects. An eventual diagnosis of PTSD after being wrongly treated for epilepsy for a year. Then other diagnoses of depression and anxiety and other health factors throughout the years.

The repeated betrayal of a once loved church system, priests, and loved ones has left me emotionally scarred, some of those wounds will never heal, this I know to be true for many of us who have been treated without respect or honour.

Anniversay reactions are problem times, especially when those times occur around the times when others want to celebrate. Religion and divinity references, platitudes and throw away phrases that dismiss the reality of experience have no place in my world.

I just want a place of respite, of recovery, of kindness and consideration, where all who interact are respected and honoured while being respectful and honourable; even if it's only for a time.

After all, to everything there is a season ...