It's Never Too Late

I have been doing deep emotional work for a long time, which has been hastened by writing my book series. I have currently completed and published the first book in the series “The Blood Moon Sealed My Fate” and the second book in the series “Escape Under a Waning Crescent Moon,” and I am working on the third book that is yet to be given a title. Since these fictionalized books are inspired by a compilation of true stories that originate in Appalachian Mountain clans, facing those stories again is giving me hindsight that is leading to epiphanies. One thing my Mom used to say is that hindsight is 20/20 vision, and she was so correct. When we look back honestly at our mistakes, we can see so much more clearly than we saw when we were making those mistakes.

Some of my current writing made me remember a time when someone close to me abused a child. Since the person made excuses and tried to scapegoat the child instead of looking honestly at their own behavior and changing it, I ended the relationship with that person. It is amazing to me that I was able to do that, because I did it while I was still a 100% doormat. Something about that situation cut so deeply that something unfamiliar rose up in me (and that unfamiliar something was probably always part of me and may be the character trait I had that allowed me to eventually heal myself).

The person I ended the relationship with didn’t want to let me go, so they pursued me to the point of stalking. I remember one night when I got home from a date, and this person was waiting on my stoop for me. I reminded him I had ended the relationship because he had abused a child in a way I could not condone, told him my decision wasn’t going to change unless he did, and asked him to please leave my property before I called the police. His answer was a justification and that let me know he hadn’t changed at all. He said he’d been drunk when he did it and didn’t know what he was doing (and that apparently hadn’t taught him anything since he was swigging on a forty ouncer during the entire episode). When I headed to the house to call the police, he got scared and left. As I put the key in the door to get into the house I was renting a small apartment in, my date said the drunken state excused the abuser from any accountability for what he had done. What????? I am sad to admit that even though I felt disgust all the way to my core, the 100% doormat part of me continued to date that man since I didn’t immediately need to protect a child from him. Even though his words were egregious, saying them wasn’t bad enough to make that unfamiliar part of me rise up like had happened when a child’s immediate safety was at stake.

As I reflected on that situation and the things I had done both right and wrong, I realized that my date had defended a drunk man’s misbehavior, because my date was often drunk, too. As I said, I was still a 100% doormat at that point in time, and my surroundings were cluttered with addicts and people who were on the take for a variety of reasons. A person who is not healing themselves isn’t going to see the same misbehaviors they are guilty of as wrong when they see them in someone else. If they did, they would have to admit they were wrong and in need of making some changes.

As I thought about that, I realized that, until recently, I still had situations with the same pattern in my life. I have shared several times in this blog how my old boss, Rosemary, told me healing happened like peeling away the layers of an onion. I had peeled away enough layers that the degree of danger and damage was much less than it had been with the drunk men who felt a person had no accountability for what they did when they were drunk, but the pattern was still there. I realized the pattern was still there, when I remembered a warning my friend had given me that ended up being true.

My friend witnessed me sharing in a group designed to help vulnerable people heal, because that group met in a public place. I shared how upset I was that someone who should have been helping me through significant caregiving trials that led to significant life trials would not help me no matter how much I begged. In reality, I was maddest at that person since they had the closest proximity to me, but no one had helped me at all through the trials of caregiving (something I learned is common for caregivers in a caregiver support group). Therefore, I had every reason and right to be angry.

To give you a nutshell idea of the trials I was facing at the time the conversation that concerned my friend happened, I had just finished almost twenty years of caregiving, ignoring my own health limitations and physical handicaps to do it. I was already exhausted by the time I started being a caregiver for my father, and that exhaustion was tripled by the difficult situations I had to face such as the abuse story that is shared in the article I chose as a picture for this post – and sadly that was only one of several similar abuse episodes. Things became so difficult for a variety of reasons that I couldn’t take care of my own home. After my father passed away, I had to put every ounce of energy and financial resources into repairing my home from years of neglect, and I was tackling this even though my exhaustion had been tripled due to the unique and abusive situations I repeatedly encountered while caring for my Dad. Part of those repairs was replacing a long and high retaining wall that by the time all expenses were counted in cost about $25,000. That’s a year’s salary for many people and is particularly impactful when you are overwhelmed with medical bills and trying to regain your financial footing after decades of caregiving. Then, the contractor left without filling in the dirt behind the retaining wall, so I ended up doing that myself since finances wouldn’t allow me to hire anyone else to do it. I was so exhausted, I had to crawl while doing much of that work. Then, the retaining wall fell and had to be redone at another expense. At the same time, I was working alongside a contractor who was helping me rebuild a stone garage that was attached to that retaining wall. I was helping him, because he gave me a break on the price if I picked up supplies for him (which meant running back and forth all day and getting them in a small car), so he could use the money he made on that job to get his truck fixed and restart a business after some hard times he had faced himself. We were helping each other to recover from some difficult times in our lives. These two major repairs and the work I did on them myself were enough to keep any person inundated for a year, but I was also continuing to do everything else by myself just like I had done everything by myself when I cared for my father and everyone before him I had been a caregiver for. While doing the work I did on those two major repairs, I had to catch up the yard work that had been ignored for a long time, clean the house, unpack the things that had been left to us by people we had cared for who had passed away, do other minor repairs – and it was all on me alone again just like all of the caregiving responsibilities had been on me alone.

In addition, a neighborhood improvement organization got upset that I was trying to repair my house since at least one of their members had a desire to flip it, and that member knocked on my door and threatened me in the midst of all that I was already going through. Before my bones had warmed again from that spine-chilling threat coming from a very large man, our insurance company knocks on our door for an inspection based on a report made by that man. We were given a list of repairs and a very difficult timetable to do it in. If we didn’t succeed, our insurance would be revoked. Since our home loan required insurance, our loan would have been called in the moment it was revoked. I was looking at becoming homeless.

Even though this is only the nutshell version of the hardest parts of what was going on and doesn’t cover the hundreds of little things I was tackling at the same time, I did meet everyone’s demands and got it all done in time to save our home, even though it impacted my health and exhaustion level greatly. My success proves I’m a capable person.

I expressed in that support group that met in a public place how hard it had been and how angry I was at the people who could have helped me for being lazy when I needed them most. Instead of receiving empathy, kindness, direction, or any positive form of support you would expect to receive in a support group, the most powerful member of that group minimized my situation by stating his loved ones would call him lazy, too, and then ushered us on to the next topic without any regard for my pain or need.

At the time this happened, a friend who had witnessed it pulled me aside and warned me that the person who said that was someone who should be healing themselves and becoming what their loved ones needed them to be instead of hiding their own need to heal behind “healing” others. She said anyone who could be that cold to someone who had experienced the kind of devastation I had experienced was not to be trusted. She warned me that if anyone ever got hurt in a group with that dynamic the hurt would be compounded instead of minimized. As we talked, a stranger sitting at the next table interjected that what she witnessed on her frequent visits to this establishment validated what my friend said. She said she had overheard enough just by being in the same public place at the time we met each week to know that we were trying to heal from organizations that had put the needs of the organization above the needs of its members, yet instead of healing from that this group was doing the same thing under a different name. She said if the needs of the members were of the most importance the meetings wouldn’t have started until the organization had developed enough to have a place to meet that protected the members privacy and comfort. She said she had often felt embarrassed by the things she had overheard, because she knew they should have been kept private. Instead, they had put a rush to get the organization moving above the privacy and comfort of the members; therefore, it was no surprise to her that my friend had noticed one of them justifying how someone was mistreating me by their laziness when I was literally being worked to death, because he was mistreating his loved ones with the same or a similar laziness.

I was so busy with all of the life responsibilities I listed five paragraphs before this one that I hadn’t had time to contemplate what I needed to do before someone else from the group very inappropriately blamed all of the hardships I was facing on me, and not because I had made bad decisions that led me there but because I hadn’t turned all of those problems over to her magical ability to make them all go away. Anyone with common sense knows problems like that have to be worked through and that waving a magic wand over them won’t make them go away without working through them. My friends prediction was right. I was harmed, and it was handled in a way that compounded that harm. Fortunately, my friend who was a counselor witnessed this episode too since it happened in a public place, and she took me under her wing and helped me heal from it.

A few years have passed since these things transpired, and I have risen above all of those hardships due to my ability to make the right decisions even when I’m overwhelmed, so harsh and angry judgment was never appropriate. My friend, who was a licensed counselor, gave me a year’s worth of free counseling to help me recover from all of the incidents she had witnessed, and I peeled away a huge layer of the onion of recovery and self-improvement due to her help. I now realize that many things I allowed to happen in the first couple of years after my father passed away happened due to the way caregiving has impacted my health, caused severe exhaustion, and the repeated grief of losing those I had cared for had weakened my boundaries and made me vulnerable again. This has happened in a church I started attending right after my father died, in this group, and with a woman who acted like she was trying to help me with my new book publication only to leave me walking on eggshells, and with an old friend I had long ago separated myself from due to her harmful patterns only to learn the hard way that those patterns hadn't changed. Since I am still dealing with family health issues such as my father-in-law being in the process right now of moving into assisted living after a long illness, I am being extra cautious about letting people in quickly before I truly understand their motive. The year of free counseling my friend gave me helped me understand why I needed to do that when in a state of vulnerability.

It is ironic sometimes how well God seems to understand our needs. My friend who is a counselor that helped me through this not only witnessed enough of some of the public incidents to help me, but she had also worked with the main problem personality at the church I started attending during this time of vulnerability and was able to give me a lot of perspective due to that. Since much of our counseling focused on that subject and the last episode she had witnessed in the public meeting due to how long that episode had lasted and how many aspects of that long episode we needed to cover, I didn’t revisit her words and the words of the kind lady at the next table until my current writing caused me to remember the drunken man who had defended another drunken man abusing a child. I realized that I had peeled away enough layers of the onion that I encountered it on a much less harmful end of the spectrum, but it was still the same pattern. A person condoning bad behavior because they were guilty of that same bad behavior. A person victimizing the victim instead of expecting the person who did the harm to own their actions, just like had happened to me and the child when we had taken a stand so many years before. When I realized the similarities, I cried for hours. I prayed to Papa (the name I now use when I talk to God). Papa helped me gather my composure, and I realized being on a less harmful end of the same spectrum shows how much I’ve healed. I realized that recognizing that gives me the opportunity to heal even more. And, I realized the way I see the situation and those involved shows that I’ve healed a great deal even since these incidents happened.

My old boss, Rosemary, was right. We do heal and/or self-improve in a manner similar to peeling away the layers of an onion. But, if we look back on where we were a year or ten years ago, we realize how far we’ve come. Even if we face very difficult situations like the ones I described nine paragraphs above this that make us vulnerable and more prone to repeat our old patterns, it is unlikely we will lose all of the progress we made in healing before those trials weakened us. It is more likely that the hard work we did to heal will make us more determined to return to previous levels of healing we had achieved. Even if we’re repeating the same pattern, we are probably repeating it with much less dangerous and much less harmful people. And, the good news is, even if we recognize that we are still repeating patterns, recognizing that is the first step in changing them. I have already done a lot of work in changing them due to the free counseling my counselor friend gave me. I will use this new revelation to peel away another layer of the onion and heal even more. It is never too late to improve ourselves.