The soul cannot forgive until it
is restored to wholeness and health.
In the absence of love - how can one forgive?

With an abundance of love, starting with one's self,
forgiveness becomes a viable opportunity.
-Nancy Richards

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Loving Voices

Long into my family estrangement, the negative comments from my past continued to visit on the present. Sometimes, they played like a repetitive loop. Other times, a certain event triggered the voices of anger, blame, and rejection. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head: You are bad. You are sick. You are crazy. You single handedly destroyed our family.

I could feel myself shrinking and feeling small.

It is easy to get stuck. Even though we no longer had a relationship, I continued to yearn for my mother’s love and approval. I wanted her to replace the ugly voices in my head with new loving voices. I wanted her to accept responsibility for what she had done.

It’s easy to become seduced by our longing to receive support from the one place that it isn’t available. I knew I had to take responsibility for my own healing and to find support where it was available.

Over a period of many years, I developed a loving community of encouragement. With the aid of loving people in my life, I worked on healing myself by replacing the old unhealthy internal messages, feelings and responses, with new healthy internal messages, feelings and responses.

Slowly over time, I began tipping the scale from the negative to the positive.

As survivors, we need help changing the majority voice we hear in our heads - from that of our abusers – to that of love, so that we can heal, mourn, and move on with our lives.

5 comments:

Richard Webb said...

Hi Nancy,
I remember going back to my mother, knowing that the same abuse would be forthcoming, and yet hoping against hope that she'd changed.

When I found out that I was the one who needed to change, I was so very hurt. After all, I hadn't done anything wrong.

After a great deal of work on loving myself, I was free to choose to love, and with that choice comes peace.

Carol Webb...
(I know it says Richard, but he's the one with a blogspot blog, and I'd have to comment as anonymous otherwise).

AbuseAndForgiveness said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
AbuseAndForgiveness said...

Dear Carol,

Thank you for sharing!

I also experienced a great deal of hurt and disappointment when I realized that I was the only one I could change. And that I had to in order to heal!

Warmly, Nancy

Marj aka Thriver said...

Thanks so much for submitting this for the blog carnival. I'm glad you participated again.

AbuseAndForgiveness said...

Thank you! You have created a wonderful community of support!