Hi everyone, I haven't posted in almost a year. But I am happy to say that I have continued in my healing process. My thesis is complete. I have come out of hiding and shared my experience with so many people. It helped me so much to feel like I am no longer hiding. I have worked through a lot with my mother and father. I have started doing reiki (an energy healing technique) and it has helped me so much, along with an amazing therapist who is also a survivor. I have finally found love for myself!!!  At this point I am trying to really love my body the way it is. I want so badly to be ready for a relationship and my therapist is nudging me to go for it. But I think I am still scared to let someone love me. I am not sure exactly why. I was dating a man this summer and when he started to show signs of love toward me I began to have flashbacks in his arms where he became my abuser. This had never happened to me before. Because I never let anyone get that close before. I think maybe I haven't dealt with the feelings of love that I felt toward my abuser and that he probably felt toward me, however twisted it was.

I have joined an online dating site but every time I start to talk to someone and they want to meet I become terrified. I loose all interest in men and just want to be alone. I am still not attracted to nice men. I guess this is what I need to be digging at. It has been so nice not having the abuse in my face the last month or so. Maybe I needed a break. But I am so much stronger now. I know I can deal with this, I'm just not sure how to go about it. I can't afford to see my therapist for a while. I have pushed so many men away over the years. Now I'm hiding behind being extremely picky and still not liking nice men. I've come so far, I feel like being in a meaningful relationship is the last step for me. It is just taking longer than I had hoped. I know I can love someone, but the idea of them loving me terrifies me.

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

Hello All,
It has been a while since my last post, I discovered this site last year and was using it a lot more frequently in the beginning. I found a lot of peace just reading most of the posts. There is a great deal of comfort in the identification process. I could relate to every entry that was shared. I am ready to move on to the steps and will be purchasing the material in the next few weeks. I will be picking up my 14 year chip in AA in February and I am feeling strong enough in my recovery to continue peeling back the onion. I appreciate all the people who have had the courage to share here and I just want you to know how much it has helped. God Bless you all and have a safe and happy holiday ~ FM

taste_buds
Holidays provide a built-in excuse for indulgent entertaining. This all-purpose foodie community covers everything from homemade hangover cures to dinner party menus. Need quick advice? Get five-minute snack suggestions, low-fat ingredient substitutes, and even measurement conversions. Delicious recipes garnished with humorous advice. Yum.

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naturesbeauty
Always on the lookout for compelling images, we were delighted to discover this flourishing community of artists who share a love of nature. Honoring the subject with photographs, paintings, sketches, prose, poetry, and other creative works, you'll be simultaneously riveted to your monitor and inspired to run helter skelter towards the nearest wooded dale.

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hi SIA,

i'm new to posting so please let me know if i am doing anything wrong. thank you. :)

i am grateful for this group. i used to go to meetings in oakland but now that i have moved into san francisco it is less feasible for me to cross the bay every week because of my schedule.

i am trying to work the steps but it has been difficult without guidance of someone that has been through it. i am about to embark on the 4th step and am lost about how to go about it. i am going through the SIA booklet of the 12 steps that have questions to answer at the end of each step. it is a good booklet but i need more help than it gives.

i was hoping that i can get a sponsor that can work with me through LJ or email to help me out.

thank you for allowing me to join this community.
i will talk to all of you soon.

It is time for me to stop letting fear dictate my life. There are a handful of things I need to do that I keep putting off out of fear. I keep telling myself, "feel the fear and do it anyway."

I realized today that I may not be where I want to be, but I am not where I used to be. Thank God!!!!! It is Christmas season, and I am enjoying it. I enjoy the real meaning of Christmas, the Christmas story. I am not Scrooge anymore and it feels good. At the same time, I feel for everyone who is where I used to be. Christmas time is a hard season for so many. I know because I used to be one of them.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I announced on Facebook: I am thankful to have one more year to celebrate life and praise God. I meant it from the bottom of my heart. There was a time about 14 or 15 years ago when I was mad that I was alive. I felt I was only alive to feel pain. The years I have spent since then working my program have been hard. Yet I am seeing the fruits of my labor.

I still have my struggles. I still have flashbacks. There is one particular part of the abuse my uncle inflicted on me that haunts me. I think it is time for me to write another letter to my uncle, and then burn it. I admit I dread putting down on words what is haunting me. However, I am going to do it before this month is up!!!!!

Current Mood: contemplative

I was posting this as a comment on another share, but I realized that I was going to do my usual pattern of starting to comment and writing pages and pages and pages... so I might as well share here instead!

I'm kind of fascinated by my feelings about therapy and my experience with it, compared to 12-step work. I guess this is in part because I had one particular therapist who I thought was just mediocre at the time, who in retrospect was AWFUL. Mediocre therapy is awful, tho, because it costs time and money that could be going to actually changing things for the better. And therapists are in a position of power and authority - or at least that was how I always saw them - so I always assumed that even if it seemed like they were wrong or clueless that they must be going somewhere with it!

I've had good therapists too, but my experience has also been that none of the therapy, self-help books, etc. could really help me very much until I was working the steps. I've heard that from a lot of other people in various programs. I don't really know what exactly it is about the steps that clears away everything that blocked me from taking self-help actions before, or really integrating what I learned in therapy, or progressing very quickly.

I know that working this program lifted my trust issues, which were really blocking me in therapy before; I didn't trust anyone enough to share what I was feeling, or a lot of times what I was thinking, and that makes it REALLY hard to get anywhere! I didn't even trust myself enough to let myself know what I was thinking or feeling a lot of the time.

Working all the steps where I have to take my own inventory really gave me a deep understanding of what effects the abuse had had, too, and what patterns I have had in my own life that hurt me, and helped me get to know my own self and where my boundaries are and where I never knew how to set those boundaries before... and that growing clarity makes it a lot easier to progress in any kind of self-help way. That's what lets me grow as a person, and grow in my relationships and goals and stuff too.

The other thing is that a lot of therapists I've had don't get how wide-ranging the effects of abuse are. Like, their approach to abuse tends to be dealing with the memories and with my feelings about having BEEN abused, and then it's like if that stuff is no longer "bothering me", the problem is solved. Or maybe they'll look at how that affects my patterns in my other relationships with people. But it's only been in SIA and other 12-step programs that I've seen that my perception of my body has always been anorexic, or that my overachieving perfectionist relationship to work of any kind has always been workaholic, for example, and that those are direct effects of the abuse.

Like: my anorexic thinking about my body has been self-punishment, always struggling not to act out the belief that I don't really deserve food, deep down wanting to make myself safe by shrinking away to nothing so I will just disappear. I took on the shame that belonged to my abusers, and thought if I disappeared, nobody would be able to abuse me! Or: like the fact that I will always compulsively just do "one more thing", whether it's reading one more page or chapter of a book, or helping one more customer, is a way that I try to dissociate and control things. I always wanted to do more, do better, because my parents pushed me and emotionally abused me around school. I thought that if I could just be perfect, I could stop their abuse. I thought that if I just kept doing more, I would eventually get to the elusive point where they'd be happy with me. I could escape what I was experiencing inside by keeping on "doing" instead of "being". I had a pattern of choosing abusive workplaces, and then trying to control that abuse (and, somehow, all the abuse I had ever experienced!) by pushing and pushing myself. As if I had ever deserved anyone's abusive behavior toward me - including my own!

I want to bear witness to all these things because I think that we as abuse survivors lose out. Alcoholics Anonymous started before anybody had ANYthing that worked for dealing with alcoholism; alcoholics were "hopeless cases". So AA was the first thing that worked, and it obviously worked very well, and as people started developing ways for the medical and mental health fields to do something with alcoholism, they based it all on what they learned from AA.

Survivors of Incest Anonymous, though, and related programs, started after people thought they had ideas of what would work. There was already a bunch of different approaches to therapy, most or all of which had ways of dealing with the most obvious effects of abuse, like suicide, depression, rage, and flashbacks. So rather than informing and changing the whole field, we end up being informed by it. For example, our newsletter for a long time asked for submissions of art and poetry, like every other survivor newsletter, rather than writing about the steps or traditions or people's experiences with SIA, like every other twelve-step program's newsletter. I think we have had a history, as a program, of drifting away from how it works and why, and toward things that already existed that just help with a part of the problem. Even though as individual groups and meetings and intergroups people in SIA are working their programs like crazy and growing like wildflowers!

I had great therapy once I had been working my program for a while and learned to choose therapists who actually had healthy boundaries and had worked through abuse themselves. My work in therapy helped make the work I was doing in program go somewhat farther and faster. I think it can probably help people in a lot of ways. But it's the steps that really go to the core of the abuse that I experienced, and scrape it off of my life, layer by layer, like scraping barnacles off of a ship's hull.

I guess what I want to share here is that there are a lot of awesome tools out there that have nothing to do with twelve-step programs, and which can really enhance the work we do in SIA. Therapy, bodywork, healthy detoxing, EFT, and so on. Different ones work for different people. But most of all: really deep, amazing recovery from abuse is not only possible, but in my own experience and what I've seen from people around me, it's inevitable if we keep working the steps.

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Want to embrace your wanderlust on the cheap? If you're tall on adventurous spirit, but short on funds, this community can help you plan a trip to anywhere. Offering plentiful tips on how to travel light, you can post about bargain hotels and hostels if you're into urban exploration or discuss camping gear and mosquito netting for the great outdoors. Hitch your backpack, pitch your tent, and carpe diem!

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a 12 steps group in my erea of CODA, codependents anonymus. i went there a few days ago and even though i am not sure thati am codependent, maybe i am, it feels realy good because it is a group that is working on recovery and mainaining functional relationships... which is a rare type of reality for me.

i am still feeling like a mess with my relationship with my botfriend. i realized that even though he got a divorce he is still emotionaly controled by his ex-wife, and given that they have kids together it is very painful for me because he does things for her, and tries to please her.

i am trying to set the boundries according to my own wellfare, and this is maybe the issue in codependency. instead of trying to fix him up, to try and fix myself up.

i feel an extrem pain and difficulty in doing that.

i am hurt and angry at him for bringing me into this mess.
i don't know if i can stand it, along with my own issues.
but maybe if i will be a little patient it will be worth it. he is asking me for a chance to fix his problem, but i know it goes very deep.

uhhhhhhhhh....
i hate it and am tired of it.
setting boundries is a tough job.

but what i really experienced at CODA was the thankfulness.
the next day i wrote many thanks to god and founf out i have so much to be thankful for.

i want to share it:
thank you god for all the beautiful things i was able to do today, thank you for my helpful collegues, for holding on just for today and not running away from my relationship, for his love for me, for having my therapist's support, for my mom reaching out to me today and helping me get new boots for winter, for my creative ability, for my beloved cat that comforts me, for having you and your guidance in my life...