Life After Pain (A Walk Everyday May Blog)

  Hi Dragonflies, When I last spoke with my father he said "It's not healthy to have no contact with family." A phrase designed to undermine my actions that support my worth contrary to his intentions to control me. It's important to remember that once a child becomes an adult they can choose their own family, sometimes that is to continue biological relationships (ie with parents and grandparents) other times it can be to develop strong supportive friendships that become chosen biological family and then there's a marriage that can make someone legally a family member and also the individual's ability to create children if they choose. Keeping contact cut with our biological parents and extended biological family is not always unhealthy and is especially not so if those biological family members are abusive. Every now and then I realise more of the ridiculous things biological family members say to me and how they may have convinced themselves that they are r...

  Hi Dragonfly’s  My toxic dad’s girlfriend had a very unusual sense of humour that made me very uncomfortable. She thought people with poo fetishes were funny and she found Gordon Ramsay’s antics hilarious. I remember feeling scared and threatened the way she laughed at how violent Gordon Ramsay was and how often he would swear. It was an angry swearing. I suppose it also comes as no surprise that my dad’s girlfriend is also violent. She would fly off the handle at me unprovoked for seemingly no reason. I felt more tense being around her than my own father but when my dad and his girlfriend were together I felt very very tense. They would often gang up on me if I had an issue. Anyways sometimes my dad’s girlfriends humour was just cringe and other times it was scary. I suppose subconsciously I knew it was sociopathic to laugh at someone being abusive and causing someone pain. Now I know Gordon Ramsay is like a health inspector in business but I just feel like he could have mo...

Hi Dragonflies, When I was in my sensory motor stage or preoperational stage (between the ages 0-6) I was wrongfully diagnosed with ADD. I also didn't get to start school at 5 like all the other children. I started kindergarten at 6 instead because I was apparently too emotionally immature. I was living in a stressful environment even in the times I barely remembered. My father was in his second abusive relationship before I turned 1. My grades were often not very good as well. Extreme stress in a child's life such as neglect, inconsistent parenting and a families financial situation can negatively impact on a child's brain and body. The development can be slow and the child's ability to learn can be impacted on their slow thought process due to this kind of stress. Family violence can also impact on a child's learning by way of regression. It can affect a child's ability to focus and listen. This is what I think led to my wrongful diagnosis of ADD as a child be...

  Hi Dragonflies, So recently I went on a holiday to Adelaide. I kept having nightmares of being stuck in my childhood home with my dad. In the dream I had lost my ticket home and my husband was in Sydney and I couldn't even reach him by phone. So retracing my steps in Adelaide with my husband made healing easier but it also made me realise a lot more about the family I grew up with and my abusive father. I soon realised that not only did I have holiday trauma due to my grandmother being abusive and bribing me to do whatever she wanted on holidays but, I realised that my father was never a good father and that all the good things I thought about my father was just an act. It turned out that my father encouraged me to have a relationship with an older man when I was barely an adult and he also kept friends who were inappropriate with me. This was another #metoo moment for me and I let go of a lot of guilt that wasn't my own. My father was happy to have friends who talked about s...