On Being Grateful for A Community of Bloggers, Integrating, and A New Direction

Dear Readers,
I know I promised you a post on integrating personality parts, and I actually wrote such a post.  It did not make it to this blog, though, because as sometimes happens, I clicked somewhere I should not have clicked.  And I was being so careful!  The result of the errant click was that I lost the entire post, and I have no clue as to where it went!  However, I offer you the following thank you, the beginning of my post, the part that did not disappear into the black hole: 
 
A Heartfelt Thank You!  
 
My thanks to Cat’s Meow and her blog (http://livingwhilehealing.wordpress.com/) and also to Sidran.org (http://www.sidran.org/sub.cfm?contentID=73&sectionid=4 ) for inspiring me to write a post on integration of personality parts.  I’m so thankful to be part of the community of bloggers addressing the topics of PTSD, C-PTSD, and DID.  I’m also grateful to the people who blog about domestic violence and child abuse, and I truly appreciate those who blog about the causes of these social problems, especially positivagirl whose blog is called “Dating a Sociopath.”  The more information we share, the more we learn, and the more we learn, the more effectively we can help victims become survivors. 
 
Having expressed my gratitude, I will say that since I have relocated to this small town, I have felt so much better than I did when living in the big city.  By this, I mean I have more energy and feel less stressed.  I feel more "together" than I have felt for a long time, and that may be in part because since I have been here, I am experiencing the integration of my personality parts at a more rapid rate than in the past year or so.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I have even experienced the return of my female sexuality, a part of myself that I did not believe would return.  I figured I'd go to the grave without welcoming that part of myself home, in fact.  Not so!

I remember when I was a little girl, about the age of eight or nine, I more or less booted my sexuality out of my psyche.  After all, why would I want to be a little girl when my being female had led to so much pain?  When I was about four, my parents had forced me to pose nude for their guests, and the neighbor woman had fondled me and had sexually assaulted me.  A few years after that, boys chased me into the bushes on the way home from school and shoved sticks up me.  All that pain because I was a girl!  Get rid of the "girl" in me, and nobody would hurt me, I reasoned. 

                                                                 

 

I was about the same age, eight or nine, when I decided that I was on one side and everyone else in the world was on the other side.  In my mind, I became a tough little asexual being determined to survive even if my survival meant struggling alone against everyone else in the world, a tiny blade of grass determined to break through the concrete all by myself--as Malvina Reynolds sang in the 1960s:

God bless the grass that grows through cement.
        It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent.
        But after a while it lifts up its head,
        For the grass is living and the stone is dead,
        And God bless the grass. 

 (Stanza Three of "God Bless the Grass."  Malvina Reynolds wrote this song in 1964 after the assassination of JFK.)


Here I am, then, age 75, and I'm finally "getting it together."   The old cliche "Better late than never!" works for me! 

So with the above in mind and feeling energetic, I attended Mass this morning.  For some reason, simply being in a church, no matter what variety of church it is, helps me contact the right side of my brain and allows me to have insights or ideas I might not otherwise have.  Today's church experience was no exception.  I entered the church empty-headed and exited the church with an idea:  I've decided to take my long essay which I titled "Fallout" and modify it so that it becomes a monologue script. Once I have done that and have refined the monologue so it feels comfortable when I perform it, then I plan to contact churches and appropriate organizations and offer to do performances in exchange for donations to the local agency that helps survivors of domestic violence.
 
I have all the ingredients for success in this venture:  the already-written personal narrative, the personal experience of abuse, the experience of standing or sitting in front of an audience, and the sense that God has blessed this idea.  And rather than ask myself why on earth I would want to do such a thing, I have asked myself why on earth I would NOT want to do such a thing.  No reason comes to mind.  Over the years, and with God's help, I've learned the technique of turning a half-empty glass into a half-full glass--a very important skill!

So now I see a new task in my future, that of raising funds for the local Human Response Network.  To that end, after the pressure of participating in the big fundraiser coming up in mid-March, I will begin serious revisions of "Fallout."  If you would like to read that essay, simply find the search engine in my Google blog, healingabusecausedcomplexptsd.blogspot.com, and type in "Fallout."  I divided the essay into four installments originally to make them easier to read on the blog, so if you find the essay, be sure to get all four parts. 

It's Sunday afternoon now, and I'm going to kick back and relax and wait for tonight's installment of "Downton Abbey"--one of my pleasures in life!  Got to relax and recharge before the next busy week begins!  Namaste . . .