The most simple question.

(more than one way of being)

Two artists (8 of 10).

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days. I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.  (Today she sent me two images and I had two as well!!)

Two artists (7 of 10), note & a poem.

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days. I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.


Today I have my art therapy group and I am kind of excited about that because I have not been there in a couple of weeks.


I'm really excited about the Cycle of Healing blog.  It is so encouraging to me that more people are joining and contributing to it.  It gives me a lot of hope and strength to know that others are standing up and speaking out about their lives.  If you want to become an author on that blog you can send an email to cycleofhealing@gmail.com and it is open to survivors of any kind of trauma, abuse or pain.  Yesterday someone posted there an incredible poem by Margaret Atwood, this morning Angela Minard posted an amazing poem she wrote titled "Freedom Speaks" and someone posted a drawing there a couple of days ago which I really love.  The title of the drawing I love is "Though my eyes were closed, I saw EVERYTHING" and it is HERE.


I will post later an image of whatever I make at art therapy this afternoon.  I keep trying to decide if I should ride my bike there... probably YES.  ;-)


I am just going to post Angela's poem here too.  It's too wonderful not to share again.

Freedom Speaks

I would literally
squeeze my eyes closed
as tightly as I could
and count to ten
when the memories
would threaten
to creep in.
Sometimes
the flashing images
in the darkness
would buzz
so loudly in my ears,
and I would have
to get away,
seperating from myself
once again.

It is the child
who can will their own escape;
Drifting dreamless,
until the fear
finds a secret place to hide.

The darkest secrets,
living in silence,
will suffocate your soul.
Freedom speaks.
Angela Minard

Forward.

I'm finally back from my two and a half weeks of being with friends in the midwest.  Now that I am back it is time to go forward.

I am going to start writing and drawing every day to prepare for graduate school.  The more work I make before then; the better prepared I will be.

I will be posting images and also writing both here and at the Cycle of Healing.

Yes to getting better.  Yes to love.

p.s.- This big sky photo was taken yesterday in Minnesota.

Two artists (6 of 10).

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days. I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.

It is time.

I just wrote a small post over at the Cycle of Healing.

It is about not acting out every feeling you have.

The title of the post is: "My body used to be the canvas for my pain".

I'll write more soon.

Yes to great friends and art and healing.

Yes to love.

Two artists (5 of 10). Also: tears.

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days. I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.

---------------------------------------------------------------

I have been in the midwest for two and a half weeks.  I'm flying back to DC tomorrow morning and I'm kind of sad today.  I want to go back and do well, feel ok; not slip into old patterns of hurting myself because I am anxious or sad or overwhelmed about starting school in just two months.

I'm really happy for www.cycleofhealing.com and I am going to stay with the truth.

I'm really grateful for all of the love and support.

Yes to Love.

Two artists (4 of 10).

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days.  I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.

Speak out: www.cycleofhealing.com

Two artists (3 of 10).

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days.  I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.

I'm very excited about this: www.cycleofhealing.com

Cycle of Healing; a place for everyone.

Eve Judy, Heather Jerdee and I started the blog "Cycle of Healing" (www.cycleofhealing.com) as a place for survivors of any kind of trauma to write, post art and speak out about their lives. Please contact us to become an author and contribute to the blog.  Everyone is welcome.

*Note: If you want to submit writings or images anonymously please email them to us at: cycleofhealing@gmail.com

"Our experiences and our trauma cannot be the definition of who we are when we are in a like-minded group. Being in the presence of those who share a common bond allows us to become our own people and to realize that the abuse does not define us, it is merely a part of us."

It is possible to speak out and heal from PTSD, the trauma of rape, child sexual abuse, child abuse, incest, physical abuse, emotional abuse, spiritual abuse and neglect.

Two artists (2 of 10).

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days.  I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.

Two artists (1 of 10).

My friend and I are doing a project in which she is emailing me a piece of art each day for ten days.  I am making an image too and posting our two pieces together here.

I will be writing and posting other work as well; I am still in the midwest and a lot is going on.

Trauma changes you; you can be restored to sanity though.

The above photo was taken after the complete facial rebuild of Eve's 35 year old Kermit the Frog.

This 'before' photo was taken after Eve's dog chewed off the majority of Kermit's face.

I used a plastic container lid to rebuild the upper and lower jaw, restuffed his face with pillow filling and sewed part of a t-shirt over his face to complete the reconstruction.

Here is a link to an album on Facebook with some great photos from my trip thus far.

Holiday, bicycles.

This blue bicycle is fantastic.

Disordered eating. (Displacement; Part 2.)

My first memory of the incest is of being orally raped.  Each day I struggle with food and with nurturing my body and mind.

The incest stopped when I was 25 years old and moved more than a thousand miles away from my parents.  When I was young I would turn to sugar and sweets to comfort myself.  When the raping finally stopped I started using overeating as a way to cover my pain.  I binge ate and tortured myself severely with food for 8 years.

It has taken me nearly 8 years of therapy to be able to fully understand that I have been using food to torture myself; as a way to describe the fact that I was both physically and emotionally tortured.

I distracted myself from my real pain by over eating and making myself sick.  It used to be easier to pretend the problem was about a stomach ache and a lack of self control than to know that my body and mind were abused by my family for years.

I wrote this post from the kitchen table of my dear friend Eve Judy.

Not slipping into denial about the incest.

I've been struggling the past several weeks with the reality that the rape actually went on until I was 25 years old.  Since understanding that last very large section of very hazy years of my life there has been a lot of clarity and a mountain of sadness in my head.  It is awful.  I wake up every morning and feel like I do not want to be alive.  I'm two months away from starting school; I have to keep reminding myself I am safe and healthy and ok and solider on.  Tonight I want to cry.

I have been putting things together in a way I was never able to before.  In the past it was just a cycle in my mind of back and forth between knowing and not knowing.  Now it is like I always know that I was raped until I was 25 but sometimes I wish so much it still was not true and I want to hide or stop something; a feeling or thought- but there is no way to dissociate from the truth and reality like I used to be able to do.

So then I am just there.  With the knowing.  I am just here; with the knowing.  And I hate it.  I hate what happened to me, I hate what was done to me, I hate how much the rape of my body even more raped me of my mind and my life.  I hate how much I tortured myself in order to hide from myself the torture I had survived, I hate how much I want to howl in pain, I hate seeing the images of being raped as they turn from stills in my head to reeling images.

A couple of weeks ago, after I put my real name on this blog, I received a few threatening emails.  I set the comments here so I moderate each one now.  I think the threats have made me feel afraid to blog; but I really feel like I need this blog.  I need to write here and be heard.  That 25 years of torture and all that silence; it was too much.  Too much pain, too much not talking and too much suffering in circles inside of my own head.  I think the threatening comments made me not want to write here, but then I think that is just another excuse, another step towards denial and all my wishing that this torture had not happened to me.

Almost every day I think of Elisabeth Fritzl.  She is the Austrian woman who was held for 24 years in a cellar and raped by her dad.

My skin feels like it is burning; it always does.  I hate this.  I hate what happened to me.  I am going to keep going but tonight I am so sad I want to rip myself away from my own life; I will hold on though.  I was ripped away from too much.  I want to hide from the truth but I can not so I will keep telling the truth and talk now and make my art.  I am going to keep talking.

I will not be silenced again.

Drawing, detail.

Drawing, holiday.

I've been drawing & taking photos. Some images are on my Tumblr: http://jsawle.tumblr.com/

Displacement. (Part 1)

There were so many thoughts and feelings I tried to block or 'erase' from my own mind and life.  But it is not possible to really block or erase any of our real experiences; the thoughts and feelings come up all of the time and all over the place.  Part of the dissociative mechanism which helped me to survive was DISPLACEMENT.

Wikipedia defines displacement this way: In Freudian psychology, displacement is an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind redirects affects from an object felt to be dangerous or unacceptable to an object felt to be safe or acceptable. 

I displaced a million things in order to not know about the abuse I survived.

The panicked feelings I have about my mouth- from my mouth having been raped so much- it became about food in the present day for me.  The crisis was no longer about a mouth which had been raped but instead a problem of putting food into that same mouth today.

Keeping the incest a secret and the crisis of living in the insanity of that silence and the weight and pain of that- it became about my own real body and its real weight.  The weight of a body crushing me and raping me became about my own weight.  The not talking and keeping the secret of the incest turned into a million kinds of other silence- not making my drawings or not finishing them, not talking or at least not saying what was really scaring me.

A menstrual period was something which I could complain about to no end- the cramps, the bleeding, the mess, the mess, the mess- the mess of a menstrual period.  But it was not about a period it has always been about this memory: I am three or four and looking down into my underwear and there is a bright red spot of blood and some part of the lower part of my body hurts and why?  But I could never really have that memory.  It would have raised a million questions- it would have caused a lot of problems- but that spot of blood was there and I saw it thirty years ago and so for thirty years though I did not want it to be about a spot of blood in my underwear which was attached to a feeling of pain in my pelvic region which was attached to the memory of a hand and then the hand of a man... So I changed everything around the memory that I could and I could not change that original spot but I could move around everything around it- cut my mind off from my body, in my mind's eye cut the hand off from that man and on and on.

But always there has been that original spot of blood and that early memory of standing in the bathroom staring into my underwear and feeling pain.  I tried all my life to run from that spot of blood and a million other terrible things after that- then I eventually understood I was not really living.  I was not really living; I was only running.  I was running from the past, I was trying to displace, cut off and separate every little detail.  Chop everything up into pieces so tiny and then disperse them everywhere.  But it does not work to try to hide from reality; unless you keep going and eventually you still run out of room to run and realize one day you are standing in a corner and so you have to turn around and when you do you see a billion little pieces of the chopped up pain and memories and though you have to start to reconnect them in order to get your real mind back together and working properly and know the truth so that you can really live and in a real way- those billion little pieces of pain are like the light from stars very far away.  The pieces of pain are NOT the way they were once when the crisis of the original pain was happening; they are memories.  And the memories at first seem unbearable; then you remember that they are memories- and they are in fact tolerable.  The pain of the memory passes.  You have a different feeling.  Then you get to go on; living.

There is no power in hurting a child.

I am on vacation in the midwest for one more week.  I am staying with some of my closest friends, meeting some incredible new people and having a great time.

The first few nights of my trip were filled with a sort of restless sleep and a lot of nightmares.  I started to talk more about some painful thoughts from the past which were tugging at me emotionally and then I began to sleep more restfully.  The nightmares changed from a very chaotic feeling to that of a complicated and painful but much more tolerable dream.  This morning I awoke from what seemed at first to be a nightmare; but then I realized it was just frightening.

Last night I dreamed that I confronted my father.  I was with friends and I was yelling things at him.  At the end of the dream I was running after him with a knife; chasing him out of the room and screaming at him still as I ran after him. And when I woke up I felt kind of sick and frightened and then I talked about the dream.  And the thing that was awful was that in my dream my dad was just a man; not a monster.  And it made me realize; he was always just a man and never a monster.  He felt like a monster to me when he would physically torture me- but then as I was saying this morning- there is no power in hurting a child.  The reason he felt like such a big monster to me when I was little... was because I was little.  And because he was big and holding me down.  It makes me sick- but also, I think it is good that I am getting more clear about these things.

I think it was good that I dreamed that I was confronting him and chasing him out of the room.  He took up far too much room in my life.  He took far too much of everything.

I always felt like my parents had robbed me of so much- I was unsure how I would be able to live- how I would ever have "enough" emotionally.  I felt raped of so much and so many things.  As someone said to me recently though; the good thing about being handed a pile of shit is that shit can be used for fertilizer and amazing things can grow from that.  And they are.

It is possible to heal from child sexual abuse.

Today I am drawing, eating delicious food and going on a bicycle ride!!

Jessieh leaving today.

This is an image of a drawing I have been working on and one Jessieh made in her sketchbook.  We'll draw today until she leaves and right now Eve is baking.

Live Tweeting of the Love Tour to Kansas.

You can follow the Love Van here: http://twitter.com/jennysawle
Yes to LOVE!!

Kansas.

Eve, Jessieh and I are going to Kansas today.

We are going to visit our friend Angela.  Her blog is here: Here and Now 4 Angel

Eve wrote a good post today and her blog is here: Let the Freedom Continue

Jessieh's blog is here (a lot of great stuff in the archives): Jessieh Speaks

And the other night I met Heather Jerdee.  She is amazing.  Her blog and art are here at: Heather Jerdee Fine Art

I will try to post some images from the road and I'll write more when I get back.
We're off to Kansas!!

Very early.

Eve wrote about and posted images from the party we had last night; Let the Freedom Continue.

The Holiday is pretty much like this: Love.

Holiday.

Christopher and I are in Minnesota with my great friend Eve, her husband Adam and the amazing Jessieh just arrived at the airport.  I'm literally surrounded by many of the people I love the most.  It is wonderful.  We are off to pick up Jessieh.  I will be here for two weeks and I will be blogging- Eve just wrote on her blog and I am going to just post a link to that for now- I will write more soon.  Eve's blog is here: Let the Freedom Continue

Different ways of being.

(You always seemed like different people to me; so then I was that way too., June 8, 2011)

Righteous anger and the healing power of love.

I've struggled with anger all of my life.  Mostly I have been afraid of it; my father was an extremely angry person and I've always felt that a lot of the pain I suffered was because of his rage.

In the past few weeks as I have been signing up for more social media sites and putting my real name onto them and this blog; I have been acting out in a rage of my own righteous anger.

I have been furious for so long; since I was a child.  But I was scared of every kind of angry feeling because all I could associate with anger was being hurt.  And so for a very long time almost all of my rage was directed back at myself.  I did not know how to be angry without someone getting hurt.  I was angry and so I hurt myself.  I cut myself, had unhealthy sexual relationships and literally tortured myself with binge eating.  I was hurting and all I could see to do was what I had always seen done; take it out on my body and mind.  And so I did.

I have said for a long time that I believe my parents hurt me because they were hurt themselves.  I believe they acted out in rage because of pain they had which they did not know how to heal from.  It has been for a long time much easier for me to view my parents only as "abusers" or "torturers".  And while it is true that at different times they were definitely both; they are and were also human.  They are people; not "monsters".  They are people who made terrible choices and hurt other people because of the pain that they were in themselves.  It has been an enormous amount of work for me to be able to really see them in this way.  They were not always hurting me, they were not always torturing me; my parents were not always awful.  And in many ways that has been the most difficult piece of truth to accept.

It has been difficult to accept because it was so hard to grasp at first all of the terrible things which they had done.  In order to survive their abuse I had to pretend it was not happening; that they were not doing those things and then later- that they had not done them.  After a long time in therapy going over gruesome details of the ways in which they hurt me and after a huge amount of working to heal; I am now able to sit with a bigger and thus more clear and real image of the reality of the family which I grew up in.

I believe my parents were hurt but not able to heal from their pain and in their pain they lashed out and hurt others.  The damage was more than that though.  The truth is- when you are in a rage of pain- you can not be close to other people.  It is impossible to really love or accept love when you are hurting and constantly lashing out because of that hurt.

I knew I did not want to take my pain out on other people; so for a long time I took it out on myself.  I finally healed enough to stop hurting myself; but I was still hurt.  I was still hurting and so I lashed out.  I wrote my real name onto this blog, Facebook and a few other places.  And then, after that, after my very public display of my righteous anger- I still hurt.  Because the truth about righteous anger is that it is still a form of anger.  And responding to anger with more anger is never going to result in any kind of healing.

So I still hurt sometimes and I am still scared to fully trust people.  I still struggle with the pain my parents put me through and how to live with my own body which was physically abused so much.  I am well enough now to decide that I am going to use my art as the place where I direct the rest of my hurt and pain.  And I fully believe love will heal the rest of what still hurts inside of me.  I am going to love people with all my heart and let myself be fully loved.

Almost a month ago, when I was still flailing around in a lot of pain, my great friend Eve suggested to me that I focus more on the love in my life.  In the last month I have been working to shift my focus from the pain of the past which I kept staring at- to the love in the present which I could not fully see.  I have been able to open my heart and heal pieces of my broken mind more than I ever have before.  Eve wrote about love on her blog today too.  Her blog is here:  Let the Freedom Continue

I usually try not to use this blog as a place to communicate with my sister, but today I am going to make an exception.  I want to say here on my blog with my real name on it a message to her:  I love you.

(Love, January 14, 2011)

Drawing from today.

Drawings from today.

Silence about child sexual abuse does not protect children; it protects abusers.

This week I have been anonymously harassed via the comments on my blog.  The threats have been triggering because they remind me of when I was originally threatened into silence by my abusers.

I can not change the past or what happened to me as a child.  I can control my actions and reactions to violence and hate now though.  I will not publish the threats here.  I will keep writing about my life as I continue to heal from the abuse I survived.

I will not be threatened into silence again and I can not protect the people who abused me by keeping silent.

Please speak out and help to stop the silence about the epidemic of child sexual abuse.

Art and love.

I am writing this from the library of my new school.  (The above image was a photo I took during a tour of the sculpture studio today.)  I'm completely happy.  I've registered for my classes, gotten my ID, met with other students and now I am in the library with my first stack of books.

I feel so happy today- at the university and with this stack of drawing books and I know; I am ok.  I made it.

For the past several weeks during many tumultuous events I started thinking that the two things I really needed to survive are:  art and love.  And I have both.  And I am doing more than surviving.  I am getting to really live my life now and it feels fantastic.  Even when there are difficult feelings or sadness- at least it is all real- at least it is all honest.

This morning I was driving here and I called Christopher and I felt excited like a child and I said, "I'm wearing a pink t-shirt and jeans!"  And he said, "Sounds good!"  That makes me laugh now to type that... I spoke to Eve right before I walked onto the campus and I told her about my outfit too.  Today wasn't the first day of classes but registering and having my ID makes me a student and marks an end to what has been a very long and often rather difficult journey.  But I did make it.  And now I have three months of summer to enjoy before starting my classes and becoming a teaching assistant.  And I have access to all these books... and best of all... I finally have access to my own mind and my own heart.  And that- that marks the beginning of me able to be real in my own real life.

Christopher told me this morning that there is a Lite Brite App and I said, "When did you find out about this??  How long have you been holding out on me about this?"  And he was laughing and so was I and my God, it felt wonderful to hear him laugh and to be laughing.

This blog has been for a long time the account of my struggle to heal from the incest and abuse.  It is going to be a lot more about my life now; today.  I am so grateful.  I used to wish my dad would just kill me as a way to end my suffering.  Then a thousand times I thought about ending my own life because I was in so much "fucking pain".  I am so glad I didn't.  I am so glad I held on.  I am so glad I looked right at my doctor and was able to reach out enough and to trust him enough to believe him when he said, "The painful feelings will pass."  He was right.  All of our feelings pass- they are feelings and not "who we are".  It took me so long to understand that...

Yesterday I was anxious and became agitated and it was one of the first times in my life I was able to really clearly think, "This feeling will pass.  I need to let this feeling settle and pass."  And it did.  And I was able to calm down and carry on.  I took care of myself, talked to the people I love last night and made art.

Which brings me back to this library where I write this now.  I am so happy to be able to FEEL and to be IN THE PRESENT MOMENT!!!  I have the two things I need most in this life:  Love and art.  And I am ok.  I am so much better than that... I am great.  :-) 

Don't fight it.

The crisis of having my own body.

I took the photo on the left this morning and the one on the right this afternoon.

I've struggled with taking care of my body for all of my life.  I have written on this blog more than once about my father raping me and saying, "Why are you making me do this to you?"  I always believed the rape was my fault.  I had to; because he said it was.  I have always struggled with the way I look and part of it has been the dissociative identity disorder but a lot of it has been fear.  I have not wanted to take care of my body; I have not even wanted to own a body.  I surely have not wanted to own one that was tortured.  All of my life I have been scared of wearing shorts and showing my legs and have suffered through the worst of summers wishing for winter so I could pile on a million layers.  Anyway- I am finally starting to wear shorts and not feel panic.  Finally.  And today I got a haircut, put in my contacts and removed a lot of extra facial hair.  So... YES to not being afraid of how you really look.  YES to knowing if you were raped: IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT.

Here is a part of the drawing I made at art therapy this morning.