Is self-medicating really that bad?

I don't have any problem with drinking and don't see it as a sin like I did when I was a baptist. Maybe the way I use it isn't right, but maybe it is. It doesn't make a merry heart or help my stomach but it does help.
Chocolate, sweet tea, wine coolers, vodka smoothies...they all do the same thing for me. I think the vodka smoothies is the healthiest because of all the fruit I use. Fewest amount of calories and sugar to take care of major times of stress.
I drink a very small amount in social situations, but can down 4-8oz of vodka in a smoothie or oj when I am in extreme stress. Is that wrong? why or why not?
The idea of using med's causes some serious stress reactions, but I can get the same effect the meds would have using vodka but without triggering.

Not doing good today

I'm not doing so good. The last counseling session put words to things that I don't like to think about. I'm just on the edge of needing to sit with a bucket. I've barely got out of bed today. I got up to have breakfast with my girls at 11:30. They made biscuits and heated up yesterday's gravy. It was good southern food.

I'm supposed to be making a big batch of pumpkin muffins for tomorrow night. A potential pastor is coming to town with his family to meet with us and another family to see about starting a church. I just want to go somewhere, like deep under the covers, and not come out until they are gone. I am feeling so sick.

I'm so tired from trying to be normal for everyone around me...
I usually pull it off or have a good excuse to explain why I seem a bit off. When I can't take it anymore, then I try counseling. It makes it worse, yet I die by little bits when I just push it down and shove it back into boxes. I can't keep doing what I've been doing, but this counseling is scraping off the top layer as it oozes out of my boxes and looks at it and the looking hurts.
It hurts so much that I don't dare feel anything or think about it as me. If I did then I think I would cry...and not stop. It would be the scary crying, the kind that doesn't even care who sees or hears when I'm crying, but beforehand is so scared of the idea of anyone seeing. I don't know what the word is for that kind of crying. I just know that I melt and can only hold onto one thought.

So this is what working through trauma is like. I learned a new word last Thursday or at least had it directed towards me. I have been edgy, jumpy and nauseated ever since. I also read Christa Brown's book, This Little Light,  http://christabrown.wordpress.com/my-book/  yesterday and I didn't have enough sense to put it down until I finished it. I knew it was triggering for me, but I couldn't stop reading it anyway. No one to blame but myself.

Forgiveness and Dry Heaves

Last Sunday's Sunday school was on Ken Sande's Peacemakers book. Toward the end the focus was on forgiveness. I fought down nausa as long as possible and then fled to the bathroom with, thankfully, dry heaves. All I saw was me standing in the hallway with my teacher telling him I forgave him, again, when I was told how bad I was sinning by refusing to forgive him, again. And then to prove to him that I really forgave him I had to go to the "place where the abuse took place" again. This repeated over and over and over and over and over...

For six weeks I held out and didn't forgive him and go to the "place where the abuse took place" and for six weeks I stood at the wall for the 45 minute recess. He would stand there and tell me that I knew what I had to do to get off the wall.

The things he said to me...

I was such a forgiving child; and now just hearing it taught at church gives me the dry heaves. It has no relation on whether or not I have forgiven him. It doesn't reflect a bitterness on my part. It is a completely undesired, uncontrolable, physical reaction to past trauma. I wish I knew how to shut the videos off without shutting myself off.

http://sapn.nonprofitoffice.com/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={492898A3-4F42-4A60-A5C1-4B75EBCA384A}&DE={4B0CF029-1207-4404-9699-2864F0991A27}
Criminal Statute of Limitations for Child Sexual Abuse
556.037 R.S.Mo. (2007)
556.037. Time limitations for prosecutions for sexual offenses involving a person under eighteen
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 556.036, prosecutions for unlawful sexual offenses involving a reason eighteen years of age or under must be commenced within twenty years after the victim reaches the age of eighteen unless the prosecutions are for forcible rape, attempted forcible rate, forcible sodomy, kidnapping, or attempted forcible sodomy in which case such prosecutions may be commenced at any time.

-----------

Wow!!! What a gift, and I thought the statute of limitations had run out.
It can never run out. Not that I want to back off, but...he can still be brought to trial for all the times he raped me.

My question is this. Do I have to prove what he did to me? There were no "witnesses" that stood by and watched.

Denial? or protection

Who am I kidding? My 93 year old grandma doesn't even have a computer!!!

My kids? I don't know. How do you tell your kids something like this?

Everyone else? Shame?

I'm trying to breathe, hands sweating etc.


Yesterday I called a lawyer(I knew him when we were in grade school and college)
I also called the Independence Police Department and
and the Kansas City Police Department
--somehow my police report is missing but the record that it exists remains
--puzzling
I talked to 2 new friends that hadn't known any of this before, they know now.
I talked to the Metropolitan Organization to Counteract Sexual Assault(MOCSA)
I "chatted" with an old friend on facebook, she now knows

I think I'm doing pretty good, for a chicken.

I bought chocolate and hot tea. The chocolate is gone already:(

I think that for now I am as public in as many places as I can be and still hold together.

Using My Real Name!!?

Well, I finally took the plunge, overcame my fear, or maybe I only overcame my sense of self-preservation because I finally joined the rest of my generation and got a facebook account using my real name. My abuser also has a facebook account. I blocked him; hope it works.
He appears to have left the South and moved west according to his facebook info.

On my facebook wall I wrote that I was looking for other victims of a teacher I had had. I went to a medium to large size Christian school and then on to Bible college with some of the same people and I am now feeling like a bug under a magnifying glass. I have now just put out a huge advertisement and flashing neon lights about the fact that I was abused in some serious way and I sincerely hope that it pays off and he is brought to justice because this really sucks.

Here on my personal blog I will maintain anonymity except to an extremely small number who know me in real life.(about 4) I'm not sure if it's more to protect myself, or my family. I lean towards thinking it's for my family(grandma and my kids). I don't want my kids to know everything or really much of anything. My mom and I get along now, mostly because I threatened her that if she didn't treat me like a human being that her grandkids would never even know she existed, and she lives over a 1000 miles away. We talk on the phone and I enjoy it now. She acts like the past never happened. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Second Grade

I read Robin Hood so much that by the time I was eight years old I could act out all my favorite parts. For some reason I had difficulty getting any friends to play the part of Little John or of Robin Hood to act out their first meeting and battle of staves. The creek was there and so was a nice log laying across it. No one wanted to end up in the creek or to be hit with a stick, even if we choreographed it(Ididn't know the word for it but that's what I was doing) The coolest thing was that the neighborhood we lived in was called Sherwood Forest. My mom was the sheriff of Nottingham, but she didn't know it. My dad was King Richard, but he didn't know that either.



In school my teacher thought my dad had been stationed overseas in England because of the way I talked. Nope, I'd just read too much of Howard Pyle's Robin Hood and also George McDonald's Back of the North Wind. Accents and speech patterns stick to me from books I read and really get into.



This was the same house(actually duplex) where I lived out the part in A Little Girl's Story where my mom said she was leaving me. We only lived there a few months. I learned how to look up things in the encyclopedia. For some reason my mom decided that I should look up 3 -6 words/topics in the encyclopedia or dictionary every day. I kicked and fussed over it but I actually liked it. As long as I was looking things up I wasn't getting yelled at. I still like to read encyclopedias and dictionaries. It's one of the good things I remember about my mom during my growing up years.

Being Findable Online and Fear of Rejection

I've been going to a Bible study for the last couple of years. I sorta stopped going much this past year. We were going through a book that I can't remember the name of and the next week we were going to be reading and then talking about a chapter that covered rape. I couldn't go that week or the next, and I've been sporadic in my attendance ever since.

Well the lady who hosts the study is the sister in law of a guy I slightly knew in high school and we ended up going to the same college and hung out a lot our freshman year. He is now a lawyer and he was always a real decent guy. I want to be a person easier to find online so that former students/victims of slimeball can get in touch with me and we can stop him. So I was thinking of a good email address and searchable info I could use but then I thought I should check it with a lawyer to make sure I wasn't shooting myself in the foot for later prosecution of him. AHA I thought, I know a lawyer, sorta. So I called my friend that hosts the Bible study and stumbled around to ask her to ask her husband to ask his brother my question. The joys of giving background info...not. Anyway I can now add another person on my list of people who know. I didn't tell her specifics, but enough so that it's easy to fill in the blanks. I did tell her I had an odd question. I'm getting better at this, maybe I can talk to Dr C halfway intelligently and not have to look at my talking point notes when/if he calls me back.

I did ask her to not advertise it. I'm not sure how she can ask my question without her husband knowing who she is talking about. I got her cell # from him tonight, and then she is going to go home and ask him this question. Oh well. It is what it is. -----I just called her and told her that I had called H and got her cell # from him and that he's not stupid, he can put 2 and 2 together and it's all right, so don't stress over me saying don't advertise it. She assured me that it won't go any further than them.

I think they had already been talking from what all she said to me, but I'm not sure.

Last July(2008) I had been told in some kind of confrontation thing, by people I thought were my friends, that I was all kinds of awful and they were quite specific. One of the things that I was accused of, was hiding behind past abuse as an excuse for not trusting and being open with these very new friends. They put us out of their lives and said that after I had gotten help and changed and fulfilled a list of requirements that the men would get back together and see if I was qualified to be allowed back in their lives.

You know, for someone who is terrified of rejection this was very severe. I didn't know it was possible to stay awake and cry the whole night long until the sun rises. I cried beyond tears. It hurt so bad that I never even wrote about it after the verdict was given.
I had tried so hard to trust and I had opened up to a certain point and where I was most vunerable is where they plunged in the dagger of rejection and unworthiness.

We have made some new friends since then. I have been quite aloof and kept most recent pains and intense past pain to myself. I don't think I come across as aloof, at least it is an acceptable level if they do think so. I am so afraid of losing our new friends that I am always amazed when I see acceptance and tolerance of differences and forgiveness, but yet I still haven't risked them knowing my personal past pain or ours as a family in what we went through with one of our children.

Trying to start up counseling again

I haven't written anything since April...anywhere, or at least I don't remember doing so. I had a good time in Florida, I think. Underneath all the smiles and laughter were other things. I'm not sure which is real. Can both be real at the same time?

I'm supposed to be blogging through Bold Love. I haven't touched it in months. It was too much for me. I guess a self help sort of book that I'm going to be brutally honest with myself as I read it is going to require someone outside of myself to get me to actually do it. Evidently I don't have much self-government when it comes to hard things, I keep running.

Off and on since April I have thought about counseling and some of the stuff I talked about with Dr. A. I stopped seeing her because of that stupid letter she wanted me to write. I couldn't filter out what was pyscho bull and what was valid. I just shoved everything back in boxes until my child was ok and we had basically recovered from the last major rejection of us as a family and me as a person by our then newest friends back in July 2008. That still hurts but it's scabbed over nicely. We have had two major rejections of us since we moved here. I don't handle rejection well. It brings up all kinds of gut reactions and I hate it.

The last few months I keep thinking about going to see Dr C. He's Christian, even if he is baptist. Hopefully he can help, he reminds me of a former counselor I really liked. As long as there is a project or problem to solve then I stay busy and I don't think about things. Right now we are trying to get accepted by a denomination and then get a pastor sent to us. It's really stirring up fear of rejection and I don't like it. And that's on top of things starting to ooze out of my boxes again.

I called tonight and left a voice message for Dr C. I called after hours on purpose. I couldn't talk for real today, but this was a good in between step. If he calls me back then I'll see if he will see me or not. He is not with the counseling group he was with. I can't find him listed anywhere but as a pastor at a SBC church. He may not do any counseling outside his church. I talked to him once already about a year or so ago. He probably won't remember me, but I still can't do the "let's find a counselor" thing. Starting from scratch and having to say things is torture. I can disconnect and be fairly dispassionate about it, yet at some point and at some level I know I'm talking about things I'd rather die than go through again. Shame kicks in and bout drowns me in it's suffocating weight. It's just a matter of when. It could be when I make eye contact, or when I walk out the door, or when I get into my car to leave or sometimes it really gets bad when I come back the next time and have to look at their face before I have the chance to settle in and not look at them; it doesn't really matter because it always comes and I have to remember to breathe and force myself to not care and yet still be able to talk. It's really hard.