The Lamplighter Movement
Articles
A Neglected House
Posted by Marjorie McKinnon in Articles on January 28, 2012
A child sexual abuse victim is much like a house that desperately needs repairs. Its foundation, like the soul of a child who has been abused, is cracking and crumbling. It is living on borrowed time. The House has no idea how badly it needs restoration, how it cries out to be REPAIRed. The same is true of someone who has been molested as a child.
The house needs a new roof. A roof protects it from rain and wind and storms, from all of the elements that come in an unexpected manner. In a similar fashion a child who was sexually abused, who has become an adult, cannot trust themselves to meet any emergency, to stay strong when unexpected and bad news enters their life. They do not have the inner fortitude, the confidence, the breadth of foresight and mostly the wisdom to deal with life’s travails and adversities.
The house needs painting. It is peeling and cracked, faded in places. The shutters are falling down and need replacing. It is not appealing to the eye. Likewise a child who is violated grows up thinking they look ugly, that they have no worth, that they are not appealing to the eye.
The windows in the house need replacing as some are broken; some have cracks in their frames. A victim of child sexual abuse looks out at the world and finds a scary place, one where they don’t know what is the right thing to do; one where they are always searching through their window to the world for someone to rescue them. An experience that lies heavily in that attic in their mind, the room they don’t want to open, governs their eyes, their very thoughts.
One would be almost afraid to look inside a house like this. It is disintegrating, little by little with the bricks in the fireplace falling down, each chunk an accusation, the chandeliers hanging like suicide victims, the cupboards falling off their hinges as if they had given up. And what of the insides of one who was abused as a child? Their low self-esteem, their fear and their addictions spiral them into thoughts of taking their own life. Most of all their health is failing. They have left themselves vulnerable to early adult onset health problems like obesity, diabetes, COPD, cardiovascular problems and many more.
If we are a victim of child sexual abuse we have two choices. We can limp through life, carrying a burden too heavy, making unhealthy choices, living with flashbacks and nightmares. We can be suicidal, live in abusive relationships, have addictive disorders, weak boundaries, eating disorders, chronic illness and insomnia. We can be like that house, waiting to fall apart completely until one day it collapses and lays in a heap on the ground, staring at the world with eyes of recrimination and reproach, moaning out loud……………..if only I hadn’t neglected taking care of myself………if only I’d put on that new roof, if only I’d strengthened the foundation, if only I’d replaced the windows………………
For comments, please
mailto: margie@thelamplighters.org
Mothers
Posted by Marjorie McKinnon in Articles on January 21, 2012
When I was a tiny child I remember my mother rocking me and murmuring, “What shall I do when my baby grows up?” It was a memory that lingered for many decades, bringing comfort like the soft stroke of a hand. Despite all of the sexual abuse I suffered at the hands of my father when I was a young teenager, I always knew my mother loved me. When she found out about the abuse she took to her bed, sobbing continuously. My siblings and I wandered through the house in a daze wondering what happened to our “happy Catholic family. In an excerpt from my book, Let Me Hurt You and Don’t Cry Out, I wrote:
“No longer did Mom get out of bed and fix us hot cereal and chocolate in the morning. No more did she avidly question me on how my day went when I returned home. Now, she was asleep when I went off to school. We fixed our own breakfast, stumbling through burnt toast and soggy cold cereal. When I came home, the house was dark, Marine Corps blankets covering the windows and the breakfast dishes sitting on the table in an accusatory manner. There was no dinner happily cooking in the oven and no cheerful sight of Mom listening to her soap operas, shushing me until they finished their fifteen-minute segments. Instead, she lay in bed in an emotional stupor, depressed and withdrawn.
Dad began working a new job, one that took him away from home during the week. He returned on Friday nights to a house heavy with despair, a long line of crimes related by Mom about his children, who waited for punishments to be handed out.
The change in Mom slipped into our lives almost as if programmed. Was this just another stage in mothers? I wondered if she were ill. With little or no communication amongst my siblings and me, we didn’t dare discuss it. As time passed, I realized that Mom had indeed changed for good. My heart was frightened and hollow when I approached our home and saw the Marine Corp blankets covering the windows, signaling that mom was still in bed. I tried to waken her, to get her to eat, oftentimes grooming her as I would a pet. She’d lie in a state of apathy and have me shave her legs, wash her face, or comb her hair. I felt someone had taken my mother from me and left this strange lady in her place. What had I done? Was she angry with me? Didn’t she love me anymore? There was no more affection, no more interest, no more my mother. I grieved deeply. As time went on, my sorrow and bewilderment planted seeds of a neurosis that only grew with the passage of time.
My family life reminded me of a camp of mutilated and injured soldiers from some obsolete war, indescribable in its agony. All the figures were shadowy and disoriented, as if only half alive and that half living in a well of misery. We moved in and out of our days appearing to wait for some catastrophic happening, all of us knowing that once it did, we were ill prepared to handle it.”
Even in times of anguish, the wounded family seems unable to bond together and fight the battle from within. Lost and desolate, we carry our pain, a load that grows with each passing day, until it becomes more burdensome than our lives can handle.
Through the years I drew strength from the memory of what my mother had whispered as she rocked me. It was not until we moved from Nebraska to the Los Angeles area that I found evidence contrary to my belief that my mother loved me. I had just turned eighteen, anorexic and insecure, a prisoner of my parent’s continual restrictions and strong arm control: no makeup, no college, no friends, no phone calls, no driver’s license, they chose my job and I was to turn the money over to them. One day I protested vehemently and in response my father beat me with a belt so severely that it almost killed me. I can still hear my mother’s voice screaming over and over, “Hit her again, hit her again!” before I passed out. A few days later I ran away from home.
I learned to attach myself to older women who became substitute mothers. But it was never the same. I wanted my real mother. A hidden part of me, armed with that poignant memory, was certain that she had never ceased to love me. It wasn’t until I was at the end of my recovery and visiting with a neighbor who lived across the street from our house in that small farming community where my sexual abuse began, that I found out the truth.
My friend was talking about my mother. I was only half listening. Hoping to emerge stronger, hoping to have arrived at the end of my recovery, I had just gone into that bedroom for the first time since we had lived there. The memories had spilled out, leaving me badly shaken. My friend was talking about my mother, saying, “Your mother always tried to make everyone in town think that you had a happy Catholic family. But I never believed it. Something always seemed dark about that house. She used to tell me you were no good and unclean, that you lied and were lazy or anything negative she could say about you. I couldn’t understand why someone would feel that way about their own daughter. And I knew you were none of those things. You were just the opposite.”
Now I knew for certain. My mother hadn’t loved me; she had hated me. The shock reverberated all the way to my soul. I burst out with the truth of what had happened in that Red House with a willow in the front yard that swayed like a ballerina and the magical flower garden. My friend was shocked and told me she wished I’d have come to her for help. We spent a long time talking before I took my leave but not without hugging her and thanking her for having been a substitute mother, caring for me as if I were her own.
She was the first of a long line of those surrogate mothers who befriended me through the years. They will never know how much I loved and appreciated them. Perhaps you too have a mother who didn’t love you, one who hated you. Perhaps you have a story similar to mine. We always craved a loving mother and as time went on realized that we had to be our own mother. Friends who nurtured and supported us became our mothers. If you are one of the fortunate ones who had a loving and devoted mother I am so happy for you. As I said in the early part of my book REPAIR Your Life, my four children have been the greatest joy I have ever known. It is difficult for me to imagine a mother who didn’t love her children.
We were not meant to be orphans, not even semi-orphans. The loss of a parent, either emotionally or physically, cripples us as it follows all of our lives, its sorrow lingering in an abandoned closet in our mind, one we want never to open
Please email your comments to margie@thelamplighters.org.
Victim
Posted by Marjorie McKinnon in Articles on January 15, 2012
“Victims get what they request,
When they entice their fate,
And lessons learned are harsh and swift,
And wisdom comes too late”
The above lines are from a poem I penned before I began recovery. At that time I lacked the insight to see that I was creating my own problems and that being a perpetual victim was a role I’d become comfortable with. I’d have bludgeoned anyone who even dared suggest it. Still unable to comprehend that I was, as William Earnest Henley so brilliantly put it, “the master of my fate, the captain of my soul”, I made unhealthy choices, most of them digging my hole deeper and deeper. But what I did that was mostly responsible for me digging that hole was to surround myself with negative energy. On a regular basis I was sure, when asked, how are you doing, to launch into a long tirade about problems I was having with my husband (or boyfriend at the time). I’d go into dramatic detail about his drinking, how he was unfaithful, how I didn’t know how to handle him and so on. I now make a public apology to anyone who had to listen to this garbage. I didn’t do this every day and all of the time since large parts of my life were enjoyable. I loved my children, loved being with them, I had a number of friends who were like family to me, my weight was exactly where I wanted it, I had large amounts of energy and managed to keep up with all the demands of a single mother of four who worked sometimes three jobs to hold the family together. With no child support coming I needed to. Even there, I managed to find something to wail about.
Once I was in a supermarket and rolling my cart down an aisle when I ran into a friend from my son’s Pop Warner football team. I asked how she was doing and within minutes was sorry I had asked. She droned on and on about this problem and that problem and any of my attempts to cut her off and be on my way were met with still one more difficulty in her life. For weeks afterward, every time I went grocery shopping I ran into the same woman. I began hating grocery shopping. One day it dawned on me. Go to a different store. Once I began that my problem disappeared. Unfortunately so did my insight. The word is there are three of us: the way others see us, the way we see ourselves and the way we really are. I was not able to see the way I really was. Most people can’t.
Despite being basically an optimist, I was suicidal at times (it’s possible to be both), I chain smoked when angry or worried. I drank too much when at parties. I cried a lot. I had this little kid that lived inside of me that was weeping a lot harder than I was. She was weeping because I wouldn’t address the problem she carried in front of her on a minute to minute basis. Get into recovery, she almost screamed. Whenever I began to hear her I made sure I was a moving target.
As I began recovery, albeit it took a long time, I started to see those things I’d been so blind to. I was that lady in the supermarket. Oh how much I hated to admit that I was a bundle of negative energy. Even on days when I thought I was doing good and feeling cheerful, that blasted little kid was screaming for help. I didn’t find out till mid-recovery that not everyone has a screaming child inside of them.
Today I’m the happiest person I know. I deal on a daily basis with people who have serious and multiple problems. I receive emails and phone calls from people who are where I was and want out. I receive a daily newsletter on child abuse. Today’s headlines are: “Sex chats with teenage girls blamed on immaturity”, “Ex-Irvin High School teacher gets 50 years for child porn”, “Catholic monk faced child abuse investigation”, “3 trends in child abuse scandals”. Even Fergie was in the news today: “Fergie Faces 22 yrs in Turkish Prison for Filming Abused and Abandoned Children Documentary.” How are we going to resolve these problems? One day at a time; one problem at a time.
I’m able to be objective about all I hear and see. I place distance between myself and what I’m hearing and reading. Otherwise, doing what I do would be too difficult.
Do I have down days? You bet. Have I cried? Oh yes. When my grandson was killed in a motorcycle accident I thought I’d never stop crying. Do I smoke? Nope! Do I drink? Almost never. When I confront an obstacle I make sure I’m not in a victim stance. Once you’re a survivor you find you are your own best friend. Despite occasional hardships, I’m able to be my own therapist. I learned a lot in recovery and it’s all stayed with me. Sometimes I take a walk and talk to myself as I figure out the best way to handle my problem. Crying is a rare occasion and most of the time it is a family problem or one I handled incorrectly. I’m still learning. I hope I never stop.
Please email your comments to margie@thelamplighters.org.
Maintaining Balance in Today’s World
Posted by Marjorie McKinnon in Articles on January 7, 2012
According to a recent Gallup poll the most important problems in the world were: the economy, primarily unemployment, followed by dissatisfaction with government, healthcare, family decline, illegal aliens, education, fear of war, poverty, Social Security, welfare, terrorism and a host of others. That’s a lot to worry about. Each of us has our own personal worries to add to the overall mess the world is in. I have friends faced with cancer, with family members in Afghanistan, divorce, financial stress, recent death of a loved one and care of the aging, to mention a few. I have a much loved daughter who is recovering from shingles of the eye. If you think you have problems……………the morale of that story is, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”
When you think about the biggest percent of the world’s population, even here in the United States, still struggling with childhood traumas of one kind or another (we have 60 million survivors of child sexual abuse alone) one wonders how we are surviving. Just one of the previously mentioned personal problems would make a person weak kneed. When faced with more than one it is difficult to function and handle even the most minor of responsibilities. Tipping the scales is the sleep deprivation problem in this country which by itself is enormous.
Now, you have some of the bad news. How about some solutions? How can we maintain balance in the midst of all these problems? One of the first steps is to make healthy choices. Every morning I have a little exercise I do. I repeat to myself what I need to do to make healthy choices in what I call the Six Dimensions: Mental, Emotional, Physical, Spiritual, Social and Financial. It may sound like a difficult task but it’s relatively easy if you stick to some discipline. For example: in the mental dimension I tell myself I will remain centered, stable, purposeful, I will use my head before I use my words, I will develop rock solid confidence, I will remember that life is too short to be little and I will utilize all the properties of awareness (sensibility, prudence, knowledge, visualization and foresight). It doesn’t mean that I’ll hit 100% success each day. I have days when I’m petty, discouraged, and angry. The great part about being human is I get to forgive myself when I’m less than perfect. Not only that, I can start all over tomorrow.
It also helps to watch HALT which stands for hungry, angry, lonely and tired. If you are feeling depressed, discouraged, out of sorts or even suicidal, check those four. If even one needs attention, take care of it. If all four are a problem, no wonder you’re not feeling at your optimum level. Hungry? Fix yourself a great meal, one you’ll enjoy. See how you feel after that. Still out of sorts? Let’s check Angry. What an ugly face anger wears. It causes wrinkles, makes you look sour and if you indulge yourself in it you’re not going to be a popular person and you may wind up regretting it. Go for a long walk, hit a punching bag, write in a journal about why you are angry. If someone has treated you unfairly it is a statement about them, not about you. Now let’s check Lonely. Call a friend, write someone a letter, visit a neighbor. Connect with loved ones in some way. If you don’t have many loved ones maybe it’s time you started to find some. It’s easy. Be gracious to someone who is in the same space you are whether you’re at work or on a committee. Take an interest in them. Ask them how their life is going. It is so easy to have a friend; just be a friend. The last one is the easiest to remedy, Tired. Take a nap, get a good night’s sleep.
So much of life is attitude. That’s something totally in your control. But there are a lot of things that aren’t. If you’re not happy about the political landscape, get involved; work to change the rules; work to get someone you want in a political position. There are solutions for world poverty but for the most part they require money. You can’t eradicate terrorism. You’ll never have any control over the type of movies that are released unless you choose to not see them. If, eventually no one comes to a certain kind of movie they won’t produce them anymore. Detach yourself from worries about anything that are beyond your control. PRAYER helps a lot. If you don’t believe in God, call him something else. You weren’t brought into existence out of nothing. And I sincerely doubt if you or any of your relatives created the mountains, the oceans, the trees or the smile on a child’s face when they look at the candle on their second birthday cake.
That’s my grandson, Jake and he has NO worries. I call this photo “Enchanted”. Judging by the several dozen others I have of him he’s pretty much like this the majority of the time.
And you can be as well. If something in your life is broken, REPAIR it. I’m problem resolution oriented and love to figure out how to make something better. But I stick to things in my realm. I’m fortunate enough to know how to do Transcendental Meditation. Once a day, for 20 or 30 minutes I close the door to the world and slip into a peaceful place. I come out of it revitalized. I eat healthy (don’t count Christmas). If you spent one week eating junk food and another week eating healthy you’d see the difference it makes in your outlook on life. I have downtime just like everyone else. I move through it. I get over it. If someone appears to be angry at me or not LIKE me (Good Lord how we hate to have someone not LIKE us) I take a few minutes to decide if I have done something to deserve it. Then I apologize and make peace. If I can’t think of what it could be I do something to get my mind off it, call a friend, read a good book, watch a movie or play with my Golden Retriever. See below. She’s the big one on the bottom.
Life is meant to be enjoyed. If you haven’t reached that goal yet, get to work. REPAIR yourself.
(If you want a great suggestion on how to make healthy choices order a copy of It’s Your Choice! How To Make Healthy Choices.)
The Joys of Recovery
Posted by Marjorie McKinnon in Articles on January 1, 2012
Awhile back my younger sister was killed in an auto accident. She was also my close friend and my daughter. I raised her. Mom was tired of raising kids after having had four in four years so she gave Jeanne to me and said, “You raise her, I’m tired”. I was nine years old. Jeanne thought I was her mom when she was growing up. My initial grief at finding she was gone was so acute that the doctors at the hospital where she died had to give me a shot of morphine. It carried me through the preparation of the funeral and the trip back home. Days and weeks and months of intense grief followed. It has now been thirty four years since I lost her and not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. But time has put a cushion between the reality of her death and my grief. I can live with it. I am happy. I live a good life. But I still miss Jeanne. Sometimes, you need to let go of your grief. That’s how recovery works too.
Once upon a time I lived a life filled with nightmares, poor choices, failed suicide attempts, time spent in a psychiatric ward and mountains of shame. But I went through recovery. And I did it right. Today I am happy. I live a good life. Do I still think about what happened to me when I was thirteen years old and my father entered my bedroom in the middle of the night? You bet I do. But it doesn’t traumatize me. There too, time has put a cushion between the reality of what happened and my grief. Any pictures that flow into my mind about my past anguish have objectivity between them and me. It is almost as if it all happened to someone else.
There is no truth to the often said comment that you can never recover from child sexual abuse. I used to be suicidal. Now I can hardly remember what it feels like to be that way. I often tell God with a certain dark humor to “please disregard previous instructions”. I used to like to party, too much; too many men, too much booze, too many poor choices. Today I know how to say “no”. It wasn’t easy learning that. During recovery I stood in front of my mirror and practiced saying “no”. I bought a sweatshirt that said, “What part of no don’t you understand.” Today I make healthy choices.
I remember a time when I had no idea what was going on in the world. I barely knew who the president was. I was so buried in my own pain that I didn’t know there was a world out there. But once I started recovery everything changed. It didn’t happen overnight. At the time I was married to my third abuser and his abuse was so sadistic and so severe that at times I lost my mind. But slowly I began the journey that would take me across the bridge of recovery. Sometimes I stumbled, lost my way, made the wrong choice for a group to join or a book to read that promised me a healthy life and wound up costing me a lot of money and no help. By some miracle or by God’s guidance and a Guardian Angel I kept putting one foot in front of the other.
I started writing the story of my life, tracking the mistakes I was making in my recovery and the directions I went that turned out to be good choices. I knew there was no hope for a happy ending but I kept writing, exploring my childhood, delineating my parents and their parents. I joined a Twelve Step program called Incest Survivors Anonymous. I also joined a group called Alternatives to Domestic Violence. I read every one of John Bradshaw’s books avidly and went through three copies of his tape, Healing the Shame that Binds You. I visited my Dad’s grave and spent four hours screaming at him until my voice was raw and I was exhausted. I told him I would forgive him if he would help me get a movement started to stop child sexual abuse, if he would help me get my writing published. I worked a rigorous and honest Twelve Step program. I made myself a Magic Mirror and read it daily, sometimes hourly (read REPAIR Your Life if you want to know what a Magic Mirror is). Still embroiled in my painful addiction to a sadistic monster one day as I began to cross a busy street I saw a large van approaching. This time no one could stop me. I stepped on to the curb and as the van approached I hurled my body forward. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me back. I felt the wind of the van as it rushed by; my feet wobbled on the curb. I was furious and turned around to give a tongue lashing to whoever had interfered. There was no one there. Stunned, I began thinking maybe I wasn’t meant to die. Maybe God had a plan for me.
Little by little, I felt myself walking across that bridge. Some days I looked down and saw dark and troubled waters that terrified me. But I knew I either had to succeed or I would die, either by my own hand or my husband’s. One day I felt an unusual feeling, hope. I began saying “no” to my husband’s brutal rapes. I spent time in a women’s shelter. I hid out in Arizona for three weeks, a poorly organized and complex plan roaming around in my brain to either end my life or find myself. I returned home to my husband but somehow had found bits and pieces of myself in my travels.
I could see all the good stuff on the other side of the bridge waiting for me, joy, confidence, stability and most of all, mental equilibrium. My Twelfth Step was soon approaching. I was almost finished with the story of my life. I went back to the town where my abuse first happened and went into the bedroom where my father had raped me. It was tough facing the avalanche of memories. I didn’t think I could do it. But I came out stronger. I went back home, got rid of my abuser, filed for divorce, then had my “spiritual experience” my Twelfth Step and I was DONE! I was finally on the other side of that bridge. Everything I had been working so hard doing for almost five years had paid off.
Today I am one happy lady. I have a great husband (he does the illustrating for my books and is also the funniest man I know so I have my own entertainment committee), I have many friends in many states, a great relationship with my four kids and I live in a beautiful home near Sedona, AZ, a longtime dream of mine that I thought would never happen. I sleep deeply and richly every night with no more nightmares. I sing, I laugh. I take long hikes with my Golden Retriever, Gwinevere, I read, I write books. Today I’m the published author of five (soon to be six) books. Today I’m the Founder of an international movement for recovery from child sexual abuse called The Lamplighter Movement. We have 83 chapters in 13 countries. I’ve achieved so many goals and dreams that I never thought to do. I did recovery right!! So can you!!!!!! Have you been REPAIRed??? Choose a happy life!!!
Please email your comments to margie@thelamplighters.org
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