First Reflections

I spent the majority of my adult life feeling like I was not enough. This negative belief was buried deep in a psyche born from compounding and severe childhood abuse, and although I had a mother who did not neglect my basic needs, feeling like I was too much or incapable was prevalent throughout my youth.

Spirit was likely with me as a young girl, manifested through the pages upon pages of 2D drawings I would replicate on the dining room floor. Laying there on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, and chewing the end of a pencil, I practiced duplicating coloring book pages and handing them to my mother, one by one. “Great job!” she would say for the umpteenth time, and she always had a smile on her face. Regardless, I would soon decide I had been completely abandoned, especially by Spirit.

Unbeknownst to my mother, and prior to our peaceful, rural, country life, I had spent many afternoons hidden away in closets entertaining my uncle and his teenage friends with my three-year-old naked body. My mother’s praise was needed if I had any chance of finding value in myself outside my outward appearance and the message I had imprinted on my toddler brain: that the only thing I was good for was providing voyeuristic pleasure to boys.

Having come from sexual abuse herself, my mother was hard on me. Determined not to allow her daughters to repeat toxic patterns, she attempted to control our behavior. Naturally, I felt misunderstood, sitting on a secret I wouldn’t divulge to her until some rainy afternoon twenty-seven years later. Somewhere in the middle at age twelve, I was raped. My uncle had been brought out to live with us to “straighten out” according to what I overheard my Grandmother say through the phone receiver and into my mother’s ear as she busied herself with supper. One, hot, summer evening, a few months later, he had penetrated my body as I lay safely sleeping in bed, naively feeling as if that part of my life was behind me. Upon waking, I felt an intense pleasure, then immediate fear, guilt, dizziness and shock. Once he finished I had an overwhelming pressure that required I get up to use the bathroom.

Silence. He lay there frozen as if the act he had just completed hadn’t really happened. It occurred to me, no one was going to answer the racing questions bouncing around in my frazzled brain. A few minutes after walking half awake to the bathroom, I stood staring into the toilet bowl, a white substance covering the void I had just deposited. Why had I felt pleasure during this enactment? Some part of me knew what had just happened, and I internalized the guilt that arose from feeling this way around something so wrong; it wasn’t until a few years later, when I realized what the substance was swirling around the surface of the murky water that the full brunt of what happened hit me like an F6 tornado, and I was sucked up into the void of victimhood and martyrism. He never acknowledged the event, and continued on the abuse and denial.

What resulted for me thereafter was confusion, anger, depression, disappointment, pain, sadness, fear, and betrayal. I kept it with me. I turned fourteen, and threw myself into the arms of other boys to feel something other than the hurt and the frustration. My mother punished my bad behavior. I rebelled in every way a teenage girl with self-esteem issues looks for worth. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand. She wouldn’t understand. That’s what I told myself.

My healing journey truly began when I decided to finally out my story. When I, with full borne anger, burst through with tears and resentment, and muddled something along the lines of, “Please don’t judge me as a mother, you have no place to talk. . . not even knowing your own daughter was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused for most of her young life at the hands of your own family!” Shock. Tears. Comparison. Self-Pity. Resentment. Anger. Cutoffs. Emotional Manipulation. Forgiveness. Healing. Regression. Renewal. This was the trajectory of our relationship post-confession, and in no particular order, with some happening more than once.

There is so much more to tell. My journey is not linear. I have found my way back to a loving and respectful relationship with my mother and myself, but not without its challenges. Just as I ask clients to look at the conflict and aim to shift their perception of the problem from their partner or family to a new outlook, I was required to see my mother and myself in our whole narrative. When I realized the inadvertent nature of the controlling behavior, and the skewed intentions of trying to save others from a life of torment and toxicity, things shifted to a process of letting go.

This process is what I wish to share with you here, and I fear that the only way to truly explain the path to an enlightened and forgiving state, is to start at the beginning and trudge through all the mud and the muck. As Brené Brown says, “Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.”

So, if you dare, come along with me as I navigate the treacherous waters of a lost girl fighting to survive; a mother struggling to understand; a conflicted and fractured family full of chronic anxiety, cutoffs, emotional manipulation, control, self-esteem issues, and victimhood; and a mother and daughter who began a generational shift toward healing despite the odds against them. My hope is that my story of finding connection, empathy, forgiveness, and a way into the spiritual light within us all, will bring you hope, inspiration, and insights into shifts you can make in your own life in order to forge a path toward peace, love, and acceptance.

Always Shining.

XO Ashley