still going on

[Jitterbug]

Really good to read your posts, Vac.

You sound to be well on your way to that place of peace and understanding, deftly travelling the storms.

There is such wisdom in your words. I too send much caring to you.

Warmly,

Jitterbug

[wolfspirit]

VAC,
The closing of your last post really stuck with me:
"I am much more interested in how I end this Journey than how it started."

That perspective is so poignant for me. I haven't even thought about my journey of healing ending. Will it end? Will it end in a positive way or will it end tragically?

Or were you talking about the Journey of Life? That's even more powerful since I am facing so much loss, lately.

As usual, your posts are very helpful for me, and I enjoy reading what is going on in your "inner landscape" as well as the events of your day-to-day life.

Thank you for the peace and healing wishes.
Sending you clarity and contentment,

ws

[VAC]

Wolfspirit,

I believe the journey of healing and the journey of life are supposed to run parallel and intersected to and by one another. I believe the downfall for the wounded soul is to add every hard place and sorrowful thing in life present into the cause of the wound, life past.

Yesterday, I attended the funeral of one of my father's mistresses. She was the classiest of the women he fed upon. Her children are my friends. She suffered greatly because of him....liars and predators can be charming.

When I was a teenager, I threatened her....one of two people in my life I threatened and meant it.

My heart changed when it dawned on my a few years later that she was just another one of his victims. I also tended another one of his mistresses in a nursing home on a daily basis.

There has to be a place and a time in life when we choose to rise above hatred and anger.....the lady whose funeral I attended had several children, none of them my siblings. She was a young widow. My father was generous.

I read the letters of gratitude her children wrote to my dad: he was never one for discretion and honestly I don't think he gave much of a damn. One of her sons came to me in tears and said they had to go see the "old place" and remembered the kindness and generosity of my dad.

I held his hand and smiled.

That generosity came at a time when I learned he was worth more alive than dead, and that my mother could not have made it due to the debt he had pulled her into, which a husband could do at that time. He did not treat my mother well, and honestly made it his religion to oppose me and belittle me in any way possible. He often pulled mother to the edge of financial disaster, was not honest, etc.

So he lived.

I sent flowers to her funeral.

I sat in a packed church in which the majority of the people knew who I was and who my father was.

Professionally I work closely with her daughter and son-in-law.

My point, time will either be an evil bitch or a balm of healing.

My dad dumped her for a much younger woman after decades of devotion....I had to remove my son from my dad's company, when at age four he did not know who to call grandmother.

My mistake was not moving away.

If I have a choice of smelling rot or some beautiful fragrance, I choose fragrance. I have been as kind to this woman's children as I know how....my dad was a great actor. He needed to have people who thought well of him. Mother was his strength and backbone I believe.

Mother was no longer taken with his charm as she had to hold everything together while he fancied himself the country gentry. She paid for everything he had.

There is even a road named after him.....I got rid of everything he legally tried to bind me to from the grave.

Funny story, a few months after he died, he received a summons to appear in court (how he loved to entangle himself with low life in every way possible!) I called the officer in charge, a lady, and told her my dad would not be able to honor that summons. She puffed up and said, "Why not!"

I said, "He's dead, but he is dressed nice, and if she would issue an order for exhumation, there were a few things I would like to say to him."

Then I hung up.

Very strange.

My garbage can is totally masked by a hedge of rosemary, and inserted into a canopy of blooming jasmine and honeysuckle, both red and yellow. A friend just came over and did some gardening for me, and planted two climbing rose bushes behind that with another kind of jasmine.

Every time I walk through the gate, I brush the rosemary and the combined herbal and floral fragrance is a relief to my senses and alerts me that I have come home to a place of peace and rest.

In fact I took some pics today to send to a friend....they will never know a garbage can is there.

My heart is a garden...it is up to me what grows there when it is all said and done.

If I choose to hold my head up, it has a direct connection to my heart.

I choose what comes out of my mouth....a time was presented for people in the congregation to speak publicly about what the woman who died meant to them. I know there were some that expected me to "have a moment"...

All of "my moments" have been lived and lived through.

I can afford to have some dignity and class: if you only knew the life I lived in terrible vengeance upon my dear old dad, who I did love and do my best to care for.

It does not serve me well to hate: I can feel it like an eel crawling in my gut if I give that overpowering emotion its way...it will never rule me (journey of healing/journey of life)

Mine will not end tragically.

I am not a phony. Often my wife has seen me in situations, publicly, in front of hundreds of people, in which I was pinned down with the agenda of making a scene.

When all eyes are on you, smile broadly, take a deep breath, chin up, shoulders back, and play the script that is handed you, much to the chagrin of the players who wanted my head on a silver platter. She has gotten angry with me because I was so convincing, she thought I had prior knowledge of what was set upon me.

When she knew the truth, she asks, "How do you do that?"

I laugh, ".....a lifetime of being groomed by the masters of manipulation and humiliation"

For many years I never stepped out of the house without being picture perfect, because I knew I would be stared at wherever I went....my daughter caught on to this when she was younger. "Dad, why is everyone staring?"

Enough happy talk, but you, Wolfspirit, will not end in tragedy. You will end in strength and triumph.

This I know.

VAC

[VAC]

Jitterbug,

This is overdue! Realized I forgot to respond: good to see and hear from you.
Thanks.

VAC

[VAC]

Hello,

Safekeeping and peace over everyone here over this weekend, over you and all you love.

VAC

[Jitterbug]

And for you, Vac, too.

Jitterbug.

[Fleur]

Hello VAC


May you have peace, stay safe and remain in the comfort of knowing you are loving and lovable, beloved, just as you are

[Harmony]

Dear VAC,
I believe living well is the only revenge there is in life. Fixing the smell of refuse garbage cans by planting fragrant rosemary is the perfect analogy to life. We can't fix our (garbage) abusers but we can chose to smell fragrance in life than the smell of old garbage. Brilliant.

Harmony

[wolfspirit]

VAC,
I appreciate your encouragement, and I learn a lot from what you share of your journey. Thank you.
Your mindset on the pain of the past and it's "smell" is simple yet powerful.
It is similar to what I hear from my therapist, the spiritual mentors I listen to, and the survivors who have pushed through in their healing and are in a state of stability.
We can control our perspective. We can control our thoughts. We can control our feelings. We can control our reactions and our dreams.
I know that is true because I see people living in that space.
I just wish that I weren't so vulnerable to the flashbacks I have. They are uncontrollable, in my mind. They are there, like air or the sky. I can not ignore them or control them. I must face them and process them. They are real and they cloud that mindset of choosing love over hate. Choosing positive instead of negative. Choosing the present despite the past.
I fall down and I can't climb back up. Not for a while at least.

Maybe someday I will know what inner peace feels like. It isn't a choice I've ever had. Not until the trauma stops interrupting my hope and trust that I can permanently heal.

I admire your kindness toward the people that your dad hurt so badly.

hugs,

ws

[VAC]

Good to see you all....

Wolf Spirit,

I do not know about your geography, or the proximity of where you live now in relation to the place in which you were abused.

I do not know if your dad is living.

If it was a perfect world, you and I would go to the building in which you were abused, and I would sit there with you. I don't recommend people going alone to places in which the "crime was committed". I would sit there with you until whatever happened happened, and then I would gather you up and go somewhere beautiful and peaceful and listen to you.

The house in which took place the bulk of the abuse in my young life still stands/also the abuse of my child by my dad as well: I will one day be able to afford to buy it and have plans for it (my own issues, not to be recommended to others, but run Forrest, run)

Recently, I have been waking between 4 and 5, and going back to sleep for a bit. I have been having some flashback dreams during that time which have been disturbing to me, but not the norm.....

......at the same time something strange happened the other day, another first. I was in a public place and felt I was being watched. Not with my "natural" eyes, but in my mind's eye, as I turned, I saw the young me watching me intently. It was the me that was a destroyed destroyer, a wild beast of a man.

I literally used to believe I was not fully human, and told others so, and many believed it well enough.

It was shocking to remember the me I was in such vivid detail and the imagery attached.

The good thing is that I realized that was no longer me.

I can't speak for you, or for anyone else, but it has seemed with me that very few flashbacks are an isolated memory or image, but if I dwell on it, it is attached to something else....and oh how I can drift away into a cascading stream of vignettes like an old slide show.

Lately, twice, I have awakened from a startling dream in that second phase of sleep, and said out loud,

"This is not me anymore"

I say the same thing outloud when I remember something and it tries to run the whole gamut of history past.

"This is not me anymore"

I also have this mulling around inside me,

"My history is not my destiny"

I want to encourage you, Wolf Spirit. I hope what I have written is not a sorrow to you. You are coming out of the pit in every way.

I believe this.