Gestalt Goodbye to My Abuser

Published February 25, 2016 by Nan Mykel

(Gestalt Goodbyes include appreciatons,  resentments, and regrets.)

Things that I appreciated  about you, Daddy:  your encouraging me to write creatively; your encouraging me to draw; your teaching me and coaching me to play tennis; your intelligence and lively mind; your sense of humor , and the day I left my homework at home and you chased the city bus downtown to give it to me.

Things I resented  about you: your lack of work ethic; your lying in bed all the time you were home; your sense of entitlement –it seemed you thought the world owed you a lot that you really didn’t deserve; the way you treated Mother; your molesting me; your scrambling my mind with conflicting messages about sex and life; your lack of insight into your problems; your being willing to subject the family to your alcoholic lifestyle; your insising I return home when I had the chance at a much better life with my maternal grandparents; you frightening me when you straggered through the house.

Things I regret: that you remained a weak victim of your father’s molestation; that you suffered and did not become a father I could respect;  that you gave up on yourself and tried to live your life through me. I’m afraid that covers it all. Goodbye to you and all that.

Reprinted from FALLOUT: A Survivor Talks to Incest Offenders.

DREAM ON !

Published February 22, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Henri BergsonPart One

According to Henri Bergson, “Stored memories aspire to the light, but do not even try to rise to it…they know that I, as a living and acting being, have something else to do…but suppose that I am asleep. Then these memories…have raised the trap door which has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise, they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great danse macabre. They rush together to the door which has been left ajar.”

                                              ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

Opinion: Inconceivable Secrets

Published February 21, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Congratulations, and welcome to us “outs.”

Jeffrey's avatarQuas Production

America has a sickness. Not just America. All over the world there are children keeping secrets. Secrets too horrible to confess to anyone. Secrets that influence a lifetime. Secrets for which too many children and adults believe they are responsible. That secret festers like a virus slowly suffocating hope, killing our ability to love or trust and blinding us to our dreams. It cripples us at the deepest, most sacred part of our being.

The people we love the most hurt us the deepest. The people charged with protecting us from harm injure us the worst. The people who should be shaping our future steal it from us. Instead of pulling us up to be our best they tear us down to believe the worst. Abuse, whether emotional or physical is an incomprehensible betrayal devoid of conscience.

Some people will pay a psychologist to chip away the years of suppression…

View original post 404 more words

IF the SNAKE ….

Published February 21, 2016 by Nan Mykel

 

                              IF THE SNAKE SHOULD FALL ON YOU:  TRAUMA

Out of the Blue


        Out of the Blue

I had to write a note on trauma when I saw this photo. When I did research on my book on incest, I learned about trauma and realized that I had once been traumatized.  There are degrees of trauma–sometimes the birth of a stillborn baby, rape, incest, an automobile accident, combat, violence. Those severely traumatized are labeled PTSD.  I was not significntly traumatized by my own damaging experience of incest; I came close to being traumatized during a mad late-night ride with my drunken father, but in reviewing the various  definitions,  I  realized that I was traumatized when I gave birth to my dear Downs Syndrome daughter 44 years ago.  One of my main symptoms was  feeling vulnerable to bad things happening, out of the blue.  I no longer felt safe. I felt like fortune had turned against me and anything could happen.

Janoff-Bulman and Frieze (1983) described trauma  as “the abrupt disintegration of one’s own inner world…the shattering of very basic assumptions that victims have held about themselves and their world.  “

Maddock and Larson (1995) referred to trauma as “an emotionally intense experience that occurs without a suitable framework of meaning within which it can be placed for understanding and mastery.”

According to Van der Kolk (1987), “The essence of psychological trauma is the loss of faith that there is order and continuity in life…the belief that one’s actions have no bearing on the outcomes of one’s life.”  And I have to feel great compassion for the thousands of new mothers of microcephalic infants, due to the recent mosquito (Zika) infection.  I wanted to write a poem to express my feelings about them , but there seemed to be no words for the tragedy.

Well, I had to get that off my chest since the photo was such a metaphor for impending trauma.

A Body of Evidence

Published February 21, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Michelle at The Green Study's avatarThe Green Study

canstockphoto8980615I finally forced myself to go for a physical, stirrups included. Yee-haw. It was embarrassing when the receptionist announced I’d have to fill out new patient paperwork, since it’d been nearly 6 years since I’d last shown up. After a flu last month kicked off a party of hot flashes and inexplicable pains, I forced myself through the door of the clinic.

As they reviewed my information, I stood there stiffly, until I blurted “I’m having an anxiety attack.” My heart was pounding so hard I could barely focus on what the woman behind the desk was asking. Age? 48. When the nurse took my blood pressure, it was through the roof. She chuckled knowingly about “white coat syndrome”. All that damned meditative breathing did nothing.

The doctor was a woman about my age. I do what I usually do under stress, which is to start cracking jokes. I did…

View original post 774 more words

Stone the Sky and Huff

Published February 20, 2016 by Nan Mykel

whimsygizmo's avatarWhimsygizmo's Blog

…..

We’ve only got a few magic beans left, remember, Love?
We sold the rest for a stray cow and a song. If the tin
-tinnabulation of her dwindling bell tells
you nothing else, let’s recall that
here there be giants, and we are Lilliputian small.

Huff out that angry fear all you want, Love. The
sky’s still stoned with our madness and our tears.
Come, play connect-the-dots with me, in stars;
perhaps Orion’s got some answers on this belt.

Let’s claim a midnight cloud for our own,
wait around and watch the moon melt
from period to comma. Maybe our story’s still written
here somewhere, in inky haze and days of un
-held breath. Maybe we’ve actually won. May
……………..-be our once
upon a time has just begun.


Prompted by Quickly in September, day 24.

Linking up to dVerse Open Link Night, February 2016.

View original post

The incubators birthday

Published February 19, 2016 by Nan Mykel

So sad that she infused you with all this anger that is eating you up. Someone said that the best retribution is to live a good life, but it’s always difficult to come from a minus to a plus. I’m not really religious, but there was a time that I prayed daily to be relieved of my hate for someone, because of what it was doing to my insides. Hate doesn’t hurt her….Keep on writing!

dissociatedsurvivor's avatarmothersdollfatherstoydotcom

So today is my incubators birthday. It will be turning 58. There are no cards or well wishes sent and certainly no visits from one of her children given the fact she tortured her from the moment she was born. All I hope for is pain loneliness & misery. I hope that she is ridiculed with some painful disease which leads to a long miserable life ending in a painful slow death. If I had my way she would have her womb ripped out without any anaesetic. Still what goes around comes around and no suffering will be enough for her.

This poem was written on Mother’s Day. It’s just as applicable for her birthday.

Happy Mothers Day
to the woman who gave birth
who ensured my coming years
would be nothing but hell on earth
Happy Mothers Day
to the woman who I had to trust
to meet my…

View original post 346 more words

WHY MY ROYALTIES ARE MINISCULE

Published February 19, 2016 by Nan Mykel

I spoke recently at a Writers Fair in my home town. One of many presentations, it was videotaped.  Recently I reviewed the tape and to my surprise discovered that I make horible, gibbering faces when I address an audience. For example:

awfulface3

Really now, would you trust anything this shifty-eyed creature wrote?

Hehheh

Or this one?

Screen Shot 2016-02-12 at 12.13.03 PM

I’m glad I’m blogging now instead of publishing books. This way, no one has to eyeball the real me.

 

Beginning of the end

Published February 18, 2016 by Nan Mykel

Empathic, loving expression

AB's avatarPerspectives on Life, the Universe and Everything

Those rhymes I sung
When I was little
Front bells I rung
Before running away
Shouting top of my lungs
Old anthems of brave
Bees who stung
Anywhere I could touch
On those trees we hung
As days passed away
Bit by bit I am losing you all
Memories where art thou
Where else dear old fellow
Just on the tip of your tongue

20140124-042531 pm.jpg

View original post

Scottie's Playtime

Come see what I share

Chronicles of an Anglo Swiss

Welcome to the Anglo Swiss World

ChatterLei

EXPRESSIONS

Anthony’s Crazy Love and Life Lessons in Empathy

Loves, lamentation, and life through prose, stories, passions, and essays.

The Life-long Education Blog

Let's Explore The Great Mystery Together!

Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News

Second Look Behind the Headlines - News you can use...

Evolution of Medical profession-Extinction of good doctors

choosing medical career; problem faced by doctors; drawbacks of medical profession;patient tutorials

Petchary's Blog

Cries from Jamaica

Memoirs of Madness

A place where I post unscripted, unedited, soulless rants of a insomniac madman

Life Matters

CHOOSE LOVE

Mybookworld24

My Life And Everything Within It

Mitch Reynolds

Just Here Secretly Figuring Out My Gender

Frank J. Peter

A Watering Hole for Freelance Human Beings Who Still Give a Damn

Passionate about making a difference

"The only thing that stands between you and your dream is the will to try and the belief that it is actually possible." - Joel Brown

Yip Abides

we're all cyborgs now

annieasksyou...

Seeking Dialogue to Inform, Enlighten, and/or Amuse You and Me