This is a great blog on dealing with mental illness and strategies to overcome. Catherine not only discusses her struggles but profiles others in the battle, bringing light to a taboo subject. She is an incredibly strong woman whom I’m proud to call Friend.
Spiritual Spring Cleaning: “Purge items and photos that remind you of destructive people or forces, which perpetuate negative life-story patterns. Spring is a great season to begin a new chapter, but you’ll need a blank page to get started.” — Bajay Pitter
Strategies for Deliverance
I love seeing formerly battered and abused women go from victims to Victory. Being a survivor of domestic & sexual violence I can relate to the pain and sufferings of women trying to escape abusive relationships. Even after being delivered from my abuser physically it still took a long time to be delivered mentally and emotionally. I’m still on the road to complete deliverance but at least I’m further down the road than 6 years ago.
The pain is there. It’s real. I’ve learned I must speak my pain but not to dwell within the pain. I must not make a home inside the pain. One of the ways to move past that pain is to destroy any reminders from that time period. I kind of had a waiting to exhale moment. No, I didn’t burn up his clothing but whatever he left inside my house went into the garbage that included clothing, computer junk, his old business cards, anything related to his pigeon hobby, and any photographs of him.
I especially found destroying the pictures to be a type of Cleansing Ritual. It was therapeutic because I was symbolically as well as physically removing my abuser from my life. It was the first step towards healing. I can remember during the time I was with my abuser I went to a Women’s Retreat with my church. One of the things our Pastor’s Wife had us do was to write our fears or challenges down on little strips of paper and throw them into a fireplace. Fire represents a form of purging and casting photos of the abuser along with the bitter memories into the flames is cathartic. Think of it as conducting our own personal “Burning Man” ritual. Of course depending on where you live and if you live in a house or an apartment it may not be practical to build a bonfire in the backyard or sacrifice our kitchen stoves at the risk of violating our city’s ordinances or creating pyrotechnics worthy of Mrs. O’Leary’s bovine arsonist.
A safer and less risky ceremony would be to take every picture of your abuser and run them through the shredder. This would accomplish the same fulfillment which is to banish this person as much as possible from your life. Now for me it was easier because we only had a common-in-law marriage and did not have children together. For those ladies who have property and children in common with the abuser this might become more difficult but still doable. If there are children involved I’d save two or three photos for the children to have once they become adults but I’d place those pictures in a safe deposit box or a strong box located in the basement, attic or a close family member or friend’s home to give the kids an opportunity to decide what they feel and make their own personal decisions upon reaching adulthood.
The objective is to begin the process of purification. Wash away the slime, filth and dirt off our bodies and out of our lives. To arise from the ashes like the Phoenix reborn, renewed, and ready to rebuild our lives. Today take up the shattered pieces of your life and build something brand new. A new beginning. A new identity created and defined by you not your abuser or outside detractors and naysayers.
Phoenix Arising from the Ashes
Graduate from the School of Hard Knocks don’t take up residence there. Resistance is not futile. Do not be assimilated into the Hive. Our identities and self-worth do not reside within another person but within us. The power to become free resides within us.
There is a Reset button to life. Not to move us back to before our relationship with the abuser but now knowing the signs, how not to be so needy to return to those destructive relationships. How can I Love myself and build up myself so I can attract healthy romantic relationships. Of course none of this freedom is won overnight.
There will still be days of doubt, fear, and frustration but those are the days when we reach out to our support group, our inner circles for help and reassurance that in time everything will work out.
Today I release myself from the Island of Lost Souls back into the solace of self and community.
The Memory much like a Salvador Dali Painting is filed with surrealist things using ever day objects, that slip and slide out of the doorways in our mind. Windows roll up and down on their own, doors open and close arbitrarily. You’ve entered a dimension where the normal scientific rules are bent on an everyday basis. Youth can be restored if we can just get to the crick of life and heads like dogs lap up the youth sustaining water. Memory is a Bizzaro land in which we create dreams. Memory is the vast wasteland where we recreate our past and try to control and shape the future.
Donations and Freewill offerings can be made directly to my PayPal account deborah.palmer280@gmail.com
AthenaMemories of days gone byMemory
Description
Memory: on stone but never in stone.She Gazes into the Past while Contemplating the Future.Goddess of Memory gazes at her past.
Shall we regard our girl children as Jephthah’s Daughters? How long will we continue to perpetuate the adage, “Women love their sons, but raise the daughters.” Every child deserves the opportunity to succeed in life but success comes through accepting responsibility and learning to be accountable. Any child male or female who constantly lashes out at authority figures in a bid to always be “right” is a child bound for prison or the graveyard. Stop making girls the sacrificial lambs!!
Ladies, let’s love our girl children and stop putting them on the altar in order to save a son who does not wanted to be saved and does not think he needs help or worse some no account man who should not even be a part of our households to begin with. Let us not return to ancient times when girls and women were thought of as little more than chattel or commodities to be bought and sold. (See below for more details on ancient economies)
“One of the unusual things about the Bible is that it preserves some bits of this larger context. … It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingdoms, by the time of the prophets, was already beginning to develop the same kind of debt crises that had long been common in Mesopotamia: especially in years of bad harvests, the poor became indebted to rich neighbors or to wealthy moneylenders in the towns, they would begin to lose title to their fields and to become tenants on what had been their own land, and their sons and daughters would be removed to serve as servants in their creditors’ households, or even sold abroad as slaves.
“[This is what the biblical book of Nehemiah is referring to in the passage,] ‘Some of our daughters are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them.’ One can only imagine what those words meant, emotionally, to a father in a patriarchal society in which a man’s ability to protect the honor of his family was everything. Yet this is what money meant to the majority of people for most of human history: the terrifying prospect of one’s sons and daughters being carried off to the homes of repulsive strangers to clean their pots and provide the occasional sexual services, to be subject to every conceivable form of violence and abuse, possibly for years, conceivably forever, as their parents waited, helpless, avoiding eye contact with their neighbors, who knew exactly what was happening to those they were supposed to have been able to protect. … http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2009
Donations to this Ministry for the Housing Fund can be made in U.S. Funds via money order or bank checks made payable to Rochdale Village Inc. 169-65 137th Avenue, Jamaica, NY 11434, Account No. 083-11G-16924 or directly to deborah.palmer280@gmail.com via Paypal. Thank you and God Bless.
“Oh, why have your people forced on me the name of Pauline Johnson? Was not my Indian name good enough? Do you think you help us by bidding us forget our blood? By teaching us to cast off all memory of our high ideals and our glorious past? I am an Indian. My pen and my life I devote to the memory of my own people. Forget that I was Pauline Johnson, but remember always that I was Tekahionwake, the Mohawk that humbly aspired to be the saga singer of her people, the bard of the noblest folk the world has ever seen, the sad historian of her own heroic race.”
Nobody knows my name or the real me except Jesus and him alone. Some ancestors unwillingly pulled from the breast of Mother Africa the others walked the “Trail of Tears”. Both had forced upon them the indoctrination of Euro-centric Christianity to the detriment of each noble culture.
A few months ago I traced my maternal ancestry back to Mozambique. When I made that discovery something in my spirit clicked and I knew that one day I had to return to the birthplace of my Great, great, great, great, great Grandmother, her birth name lost to time and eternity. Other ancestors born in this great land have yet to be revealed. Many times I wonder, “What was my African and/or Native American name.” The names of Finney, Halstead, Gordon, Palmer were all given by some distant slave-owner. Who were they and who were they 500 years ago?
Like Tekahionwake I live my dichotomy every day even in my spiritual life wondering about the respective faiths of my African and Native American ancestors. Thinking about how their own unique worship was torn asunder only to be replaced by a Euro-centric “Christian” god who relegated them to a lesser status, below that of their European captors.
Children of an accursed Ham? (Genesis 9:20–27) I think not for the descendents of the great Realm of Ethiopia have risen again to the rightful place in the Diaspora.
Matthew 12:42
New King James Version (NKJV)
42 The queen of the South will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and indeed a greater than Solomon is here.
The cries of my people would not be extinguished. The voices of my Native American ancestors called to me for redemption. Through an experiment called Carlisle Indian Industrial School History, really internment in re-culturalization concentration camps Richard Henry Pratt sought to erase the cultural identity of Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other tribes through forcing children into complete immersion in Eurocentric culture and identity, effectively erasing their own. Take away a person’s language and belief systems, telling them that how God created them was wrong and had to be fixed only serves to create indwelling images of self-hatred within those lost children. If eradicating my indigenous and African American culture, traditions, ethnicity and exchanging them for dominant white culture will I be closer to God? Will Jesus accept me in this new form?
As I gaze in the mirror as many Native Americans did 150 years ago neither my face nor my features as God made them can be erased. The efforts on the part of European conquerors failed. Nor were the colonizers able to erase the connection to the Great Spirit as he was known long before the white man touched our shores.
White man you tell me that only your version of Jesus can save my soul and deliver me from sin. And just what is my sin? Being born with a brown face, high cheek bones, full lips, long flowing Jet Black hair or locs that rise to kiss the sun. Does my sin lie in the dances my people perform to honor my ancestors and Mother Earth who gives us all sustenance? Am I or my ways at fault because we revere Nature as opposed to destroying the land, fouling the waters, polluting the environment in a never ending obsession to conquer, convert and control? Now who is the savage? Who is the so-called heathen?
Oh European who comes bearing the sign of the cross who is this God of yours that lifts up your customs and traditions but disparages mine? He is not the Jesus depicted in your Old Master paintings from Italy, Spain, France or the Flemish Masters. No, more than likely he was a swarthy man with kinky dark woolly hair, skin darkened by constant exposure to the sun. Jesus was someone whose looks paralleled the populations most of the indigenous tribes of Africa, North and South America.
Revelation 1:14-15
New King James Version (NKJV)
14 His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes like a flame of fire; 15 His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters;
We Sisters and Brothers from what you named the “Third World” now know that Jesus came for us just as we are. God accepts us in all the richness with which he created us. We Black and Brown followers have redefined and returned Christianity to its original intent and meaning.
No longer do we walk the “Trail of Tears” or the Via Dolorosa. Now we stand together arm in arm marching onward to Zion that beautiful city of God taking our place among those who have been redeemed.