"A look at the journals from my youth and adulthood reveals another 'Cinderella slipper.' My handwriting would change dramatically, as if the writer were different people. Sometimes on only a two page spread, there were three or four totally different styles. On one page, my cursive letters would be very large and full of big loops, and only a few sentences later it would turn instantly into tiny printing. . .
    "What I didn't realize for quite some time was that I was a person who had distinctly different parts of my personality. These parts were so different from each other, in fact, that they had different mannerisms, different ways of talking, and different handwriting. Several of these parts would take over at different times while I was growing up. Some simply waited quietly in some mental 'closet' for a later time when I was ready to heal. In the healing process, personality parts would act as 'guideposts' to help me map my way back to wholeness and healing.
    "From my childhood to my adulthood, I did not consciously know all the horrible things that had happened to me. . . Later, in my 30's, I experienced triggers, body memories, panic attacks, unexplained bruises and the realization of broken bones, as previously described. Conscious recognition of the reality and enormity of what had happened to me came to the surface one piece at a time, paced in a way that would allow me to 'survive the healing.'
    "Having multiple personality parts was ideal for a paced healing process. Each part retained only a small portion of an experience, thus the process of gaining a conscious awareness of my childhood abuse meant I had to wait until each part of me felt safe enough to share with my whole. If I had taken years' worth of horrors and processed them all at once, I would not have survived." (My Tears Fall Inside, pages 49-50)

    Sometimes God gives us unusual gifts and we don't even recognize them as gifts until many years later, or not at all. The fact that God gave me the ability to develop multiple personalities as a very young child, also gave me the ability to totally block out all of the horrible memories. In this way, I was able to lead a normal life and the memories did not come back to me until I was "capable" of dealing with them. Look carefully. What gifts has God given you?

    "Dreams and flashbacks were also 'Cinderella slippers' in my life. I have been plagued by horrible dreams and terror at night. This writing describes one such dream:

IN MY DREAMS
(1992)

The night drags on
and in my restless sleep
I break out in a cold sweat.
I tremble and shake violently.

My dreams are vivid
and the eight year old I become
can't speak
for she is overcome with terror. . .

In my dreams
I feel physical pain.
The covers are too tight
and I can't move.

My panic intensifies
and I awake still feeling pain.
I continue to tremble,
awake and adult. . .

     "Other 'Cinderella slippers' included unexplained reactions or 'triggers' that would arise in my everyday life. One time I took my little boy to a dinosaur museum where one of the exhibits was housed in a structure built like a tunnel. The sides were made of grey rock and as we began walking through this tunnel and turning a couple of corners, I saw some bars that looked like a jail. Suddenly my heart started pounding and I began shaking all over. I was terrified! I turned around and got out of there as fast as I could. I could not imagine why I had that reaction.
    "About a year or so later, a childhood memory emerged. In this memory, the satanists had taken me into a cave that had tunnels. They put me into a room with bars, like a jail, and had left me there alone in the dark. After the memory came back, I recalled my reaction at the museum. Suddenly it made sense and I understood why I had such a terrified reaction in the museum." (My Tears Fall Inside, selections from pages 41-44)

    Sometimes healing can be a very long and painful process, but over time, it can and will get better. My life now is so much better than it was and I am happy most of the time. Life means that sometimes we have issues to deal with, but as we deal with those issues, we can move on and our lives will continue to improve over time. Progress truly is in the process.

    "Sometimes there are no visible bruises, scars, or broken bones. The body acts as a very reliable record even in those instances. A short excerpt from one of my writings, 'Flashback,' (1994) describes some of the physical reactions I was experiencing.

The Trauma has turned to inside anger,
but since it doesn't come out of me,
it attacks the insides and turns to self-hate,
self destruction.
My stomach spasms with pain.
I feel heavy, heavy, heavy!
AAAAH!

    "I did not always feel stomach pains. Sometimes I would feel horrible chest pains or some other extreme physical reaction. For instance, I would wake up gasping and crying or my entire body would jolt with terror.
    "Another journal entry:
        "For nearly 2 solid weeks before Halloween, I was waking up every single night gasping or crying out and feeling terrified. . .
    "All of these 'body memories' were significant to me. They were often harbingers of memories about to emerge into consciousness. It was as if they were the tips of memory 'icebergs' coming to the surface from somewhere deep beneath the ocean." (My Tears Fall Inside, pages 40-41)

    When we don't express our emotions in healthy ways, they affect our physical body. Negative emotions such as anger, can cause physical pain and illness. Many times we misunderstand emotions. Though some emotions are more negative, emotions themselves aren't "good" or "bad." Emotions just ARE. What makes them good or bad is what we do with them in relationship to others.

    Some of the things I have done to diffuse anger and other negative emotions are:

1. Write in my journal.
2. Write a letter to someone expressing all of the anger and hurt I feel, but don't send it. Writing down my feelings helps me to figure out where those feelings are coming from and helps clarify what they relate to. Also, the very act of writing them down sometimes helps to diffuse them.
3. Build a campfire in an appropriate place and imagine my anger burning up with the fire.
4. Buy helium balloons and write on them. Then let them go. As I watch them float up to the sky, I imagine that I am giving this problem to God.

    What are some healthy ways you have learned to express your negative emotions?

    "July 1, 1993 journal entry:

        "I had a memory come back during therapy quite some time ago of the satanists putting my right hand in a vice. They were crushing it and it had to do with brainwashing. In the memory the child part said, 'They were breaking my hand.' I assumed it hadn't literally been broken, but was only a child's interpretation of the experience, 'It hurts, therefore it's broken.'"

    "Later, in a letter I wrote to a church leader:

        "I mentioned in the last letter about the bump on my right hand and I want to tell you what just happened the last few days. I bumped my right hand really hard and hurt it right next to the already existing bump. It swelled a little and hurt quite a lot at first, and when it was still swollen the next day, I decided to go to the doctor to have it x-rayed just to make sure I hadn't broken it.
        "I saw a doctor I have never seen before. When he saw my hand he immediately asked me if I had broken my hand before. I just told him I had injured it as a child. After my hand was x-rayed, the nurse told me that the doctor would be a while because he saw something he needed to talk to the radiologist about. When he came back, he told me that he had seen a definite line in the x-ray that showed a fracture, but that he wasn't sure if it was an old break or a new one. He said the radiologist told him it was definitely an old break.
        "My hand is already doing much better, but it was interesting to have actual proof that my hand was indeed broken once before--especially since I had had no conscious memory of ever having broken it, and the child part remembered it before I had any verification that it might even be true." (My Tears Fall Inside, pages 38-39)

    The child part remembered what had happened, even though I had no conscious memory of ever breaking my hand, and the truth of that memory was evidenced by the medical x-ray. The mind has amazing and incredible capacities. If we truly understood all that it can do, we would stand in awe.

    "Cinderella came home from a fabulous ball. It was so vastly different from her routine lifestyle that the whole evening might have been a dream, except for one tiny detail: she still had one of the glass slippers. She knew she hadn't 'made up' that glass slipper because she could see it and touch it. It was tangible proof that something unusual really had happened.
    "I had not been to a wonderful royal ball--quite the contrary, but I had suffered total amnesia about the sexual and satanic ritual abuse that had happened to me when I was a child. Nevertheless, there were always 'glass slippers' in my 'closet'--those tangible things that told me something important had happened to me.
    "These conscious evidences were important not because they, of themselves, 'proved' that the abuse was real, but because they helped validate what I was experiencing and gradually beginning to remember. When I looked at my 'Cinderella slippers' in combination with my emerging memories, the medical evidence, corroborating statements, and the terror that was a part of my life, a real picture began to take shape. . .
    "The body never forgets; it contains a literal record of everything that happens to you in life. Various problems with my body were 'Cinderella slippers' for me. Unexplained scars and broken bones can be powerful objective evidences of abuse that has been 'lost' from the conscious mind. In addition to scars and broken bones, unusual 'body memories,' though less convincing to skeptics, can be very validating 'Cinderella slippers.' It seems the body has its own ability to remember even when the mind cannot. In my case, there were both kinds of evidences." (My Tears Fall Inside, pages 37-38.)

    The total amnesia I experienced throughout the first few decades of my life was a gift. God allowed me to forget the terrible things that happened to me and didn't let me remember until I was an adult. When the memories did come back, I was shocked that the pieces of my puzzle began to fit together. Knowing how much of my life that I had forgotten, helps me to look at other people with more kindness. Who knows what went on in their lives--perhaps even things they don't remember--which affects the choices they are currently making.

    "My sensitive nature was evident in the first grade when I became concerned about stepping on ants. I was very careful walking on the sidewalks because I didn't want anything to die. Specifically, I didn't want to be the one who killed any living thing and this concern extended to flies also. When my mother would ask me to grab a fly swatter and kill some flies in the kitchen, to her chagrin I would say, 'I don't want to kill flies. I don't want to kill anything!'"
    "'Oh don't be silly,' she'd say with frustration in her voice. 'The commandment not to kill doesn't apply to flies.'"
    "As a thirteen year old, I was accustomed to walking to school every day with a group of friends including my friend, Kathy. One day we were walking home and Kathy was not with us. The other girls told me they wanted to be my friend, but that if I wanted to be in their group I would need to drop Kathy as my friend.
    "I stewed over that decision because these were popular girls, but Kathy had been a good friend and I didn't want to hurt her. I hoped the other girls would just forget about the 'Kathy thing,' but they didn't.
    "They told me, 'Since you didn't drop Kathy, we don't want to be your friend anymore. You can't walk home with us or hang around us anymore.'"
    "I had to hold the tears inside until I got home to my bedroom. I felt like my heart was breaking inside. How could anyone be so cruel? I hurt so badly inside; how could they hurt me on purpose like that? Looking back on this event, it was the height of irony that a part of me was so surprised and perplexed that teenaged girls could be so cruel.
    "The reality was that even while dealing with this juvenile 'cruelty,' parts of me had hidden away memories of much, much greater cruelty. In fact, these parts had had first-hand experience with some of the most depraved acts humans can inflict on each other." (My Tears Fall Inside, pages 31-32)

    The calculated evil of my childhood abuse was so vast that I created many 'pretend friends' to hold those memories. In my mind the terrible things happened to 'them' and not to me. As a result, I had no memories of the evil inflicted upon me, but the fear of evil was so deeply ingrained in what was left of me, that I couldn't bear the thought of any cruelty or evil even existing in the world. SO, I created a world I could handle, a world where no one was ever unkind and where there was no such thing as evil. When events happened to rock that belief system, I was devastated, but would quickly return to the belief system of the world I had created. Unfortunately, this make-believe perfect world was eventually shattered.

    "Looking back on my life as a child, it is no surprise that I often developed friendships with women my mother's age. I would try to attach myself to a camp leader or a school teacher, only to have my mother disapprovingly say, 'Oh, don't bother her!'"
    "Despite this craving to attach myself to other 'mothers,' the early 'training' from 'the mom,' combined with very deliberate brainwashing by other adults (which will be discussed later), produced an extreme reluctance on my part to open up to people. I was obsessed with thoughts of:
    "'I'm too much trouble.'
    "'I'm in the way.'
    "'I'm bothering them.'
    "'They wish I wasn't here.'
    "'The whole world would be better off if I didn't exist.'"
    "I was a sensitive child and at least one part of me was overly concerned with perfection. I wanted so badly to be good, to be a perfect child, because I believed that if I could somehow be good enough and perfect enough maybe someone could love me. Maybe even God could love me.
    "As a kindergartener, I was given an assignment to draw lines connecting pictures arranged in two columns. Each picture in column A somehow related to a picture in column B and I was to draw lines connecting the associated pictures. I just knew that I would do the task perfectly, and I naively said to myself:
    "'If I try really hard, I'm sure I can do it perfect. In fact, if I try really, really hard, I can do all my assignments perfect forever. I bet I will be the first person to ever go through twelve whole years of school without making a single mistake on my papers!'"
    "But this was not to be. The teacher saw that I had simply drawn horizontal lines from one column of pictures to the next, not paying attention to whether the pictures matched or not. She told me that I had done it incorrectly, that I had misunderstood the directions. I tried not to cry, but the tears just wouldn't stay inside. I was so sad and dejected. Why? Because I was desperate to be a perfect shild in order to be loved." (My Tears Fall Inside, selections from pages 29-31.)

    Do you know anyone who struggles with perfectionism? Is this a challenge for you? Is the underlying reason for this thinking because of the deduction that perfection is necessary in order to be lovable--even by God? It took me many years to realize that God loves me (and YOU) the way I am right now--even with my imperfections. (Do you cease to love your children because they make mistakes?) He sees our life as a process and is just happy with however we are learning and growing along the way.

    "When I was a child, my family lived in a rundown farmhouse. . . You might say we were 'land rich but cash poor.' . . .
    "My father was rarely an emotional presence in my early life, and he even had trouble being a physical presence because of the massive amount of work involved in running a farm. . .
    "When I was only three years old, my grandfather, my father's father, died, leaving the entire burden of the farm to my father. He inherited the 360 acre dairy farm and was responsible for 50 dairy cows that required milking early every morning and evening. My father's burden included growing a potato crop and hay for the cattle each year. . .
    "My life as a farm girl lasted only until I was ten. . . Financial pressures finally caused my father to explore other possibilities. He chose to leave the farming life and go back to school.
    "Throughout my life, my Swiss-German mother made sure her children had the physical necessities of life. We were clothed and fed, but that's about all she was capable of providing. By the time I came along, my mother had given birth to three children in three years.
    "My older sister died after only 24 hours of life. By the time I was five years old my mother was raising five children under the age of seven. She was under extreme stress and was continually too exhausted by her efforts to meet our physical needs to be sensitive enough to our emotional needs, including providing comfort and nurturing.
    "In reality, I was unable to find safe love anywhere in my childhood. . . My extended family included a paternal grandfather who died when I was only three years old. My maternal grandmother also died that year, and my paternal grandmother had already passed away before I was born. The only possible relationship I could have enjoyed with a grandparent was with my mother's father. My grandfather lived nearby for the first two years of my life, but then moved back to his native Switzerland, rarely returning to visit us.
    . . . "Only in looking back on this experience do I appreciate the irony that the only person in my life who was truly capable of providing effective warmth and nurturing lived thousands of miles away and hadn't been a part of my childhood. Ironically, everyone (including me) thought my life was happy and perfect. Because they were busy raising nine children, my parents were unaware that I was hurting and needed an outpouring of love and support." (My Tears Fall Inside, excerpts from pages 25-27.)

    Sometimes parents are innocently unaware of the internal pain their children are suffering. As we observe the children and adults around us, is there someone we can reach out to, and help them feel loved and important?

    "Holding up two small photographs, my friend shook his head in amazement."
    "'These can't be the same person,' he said incredulously."
    "He was right. Even though both photographs were childhood pictures of me, the     'me's' in each image were as different as two completely different people could be. Sifting through the many photos in my album depicting the person known to the world as 'Shawna,' my friend seemed confused."
    "'There's no common thread,' he complained. 'As I see you growing up in these pictures, I honestly can't tell that there are similarities from one picture to the next.'"
    "I picked up a black-and-white photograph of a 'me' that was three years old. This particular version of me stood next to my smiling mother. In the picture, I was looking directly into the camera with eyes framed by 'dirty blond' hair, my left arm raised to my mouth, and I was chewing the back of my hand.
    "As I lifted this picture from the table, I suddenly realized that as an adult, whenever this three-year-old child would come forward from inside of me to express her pain, she would always bite the back of her left hand. . .
    "My friend continued to look through the photo album. There were faded photographs of me at various stages of maturation. In one, I was five years old; in another I was ten. In others I was pre-adolescent and in others, a teenager. Several of the photgraphs were family pictures, but in each picture my friend was unable to identify which of the children was me. . .
    "It was obvious, when looking over these photographs, that I was capable of becoming completely different people at different times. The result of my ability to 'split off' into other 'people' or 'personalities' were obvious, even to someone who sees only my frozen image without being able to observe the different ways I behaved, and/or hear the altered voices coming from my mouth. While the differences were obvious, the causes were not. What caused little Shawna to split into multiple parts that would look so physically different when captured on a still photograph? I later realized my ability to 'split off' was God's way of allowing me to live my life normally until I became old enough to deal with the horrors of my past." (My Tears Fall Inside, selections from pages 21-24) 

    Normal young children are very creative and many have a pretend friend. My childhood abuse was so extreme that I created many "pretend friends" to help me. In my mind, those terrible things happened to the "pretend friends" and not to me. In that way, I was able to separate my conscious self from the bad things I lived through. With the memories forgotten, I was able to live my life normally. These wonderful "pretend friends" or "parts" kept all the terrible memories hidden from my consciousness until my mind determined that I was strong enough to process those hidden memories.

    Often when we suffer abuse or go through other painful events in our life, we wonder where God is and why He allows these horrible things to happen. We look at life and wonder what He is thinking. Although we don't know the reasons why God does or does not do what He does, one of my child parts wrote an email to a friend which shares an interesting perspective.

                Wen I was in the woods and laying on the leaves on my back and looking up at             the trees, well I was wondering. See, if God sees all this stuff from WAY up in the             sky, that means He sees the tree branches BEFORE He sees the fat trunk. Does             THAT mean the trees look upside down to HIM? And wut if HE sees it all right and             really WE are the ones that sees the trees UPSIDE DOWN? If you are as smart                 as me, then YOU just figured out that life is just like those trees. Maybe we just                 look at it all upside down! I wonder wut life looks like if it is right side up--like how             GOD sees it? (The Silent Cries, p. 265)

    We see life from a very limited perspective, whereas God sees everything from an eternal perspective. He is the only One who knows how every facet of our life and experience will affect us. He sees how we and others will grow from the challenges that we face. He allows us to make choices on how we will act or react to those problems and whether we will or won't choose to triumph over our pain and use these experiences to try and make a better world than the one we lived in.
    I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Please share.