If you’re reading this page you maybe wondering if I’m qualified to help you discover your Authentic self… Your true Magical Essence. Perhaps you expect to see a bunch of letters for degrees after my name or maybe 40 years of experience in the field… blah blah blah.

All that stuff doesn’t mean a thing if I’m not putting my true authentic self out there…

Here it is…The About Page. What am I suppose to write… How much do I share if I’m going to talk about being your true self, honoring the authentic you.

The ordinary, safe, boring about page won’t do…No sir.

Boldly stepping into your Magical Essence is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage, commitment and conviction to stay You!

The Journey to M.E., is not about playing life safe…there is nothing ordinary about that! The Journey to M.E. is anything but boring!  It’s more like taking a skydive into your Magical Essence… your true, Inner ME. So… How much do I share?

Let’s start with the Short Story:

I felt like something was missing in my life. I keep search for success and happiness outside of myself. That search left me with the feelings of frustration, stress, anxiety and depression.

Nobody taught me I needed to search within myself. Everything I needed to experience the happiness and success I desired existed in me. I didn’t know that… God gave me a treasure of gifts, abilities and talents to make all my heart’s desires a reality.

I couldn’t see my inner treasure… the Magical Essence that makes me special and unique.  My treasure lay buried under years of negative programming through physiological abuse. I grew up feeling worthless and stupid. I felt doomed to always feeling this way.

All that changed when my youngest daughter came into my life… I didn’t want her growing up feeling worthless. I discovered I didn’t need to feel that either. There was hope to override my negative programming.

I found my inner Treasure and broke the cycle of abuse for my daughter and future generations. Creating a new legacy for my family.For years, I totally dismissed the importance of that accomplishment.  Come on now!  I CREATED A NEW LEGACY FOR MY FAMILY!!!  That should be shouted from the rooftops!  But, when you don’t feel good about yourself, its so easy to dismiss or play down the things you do accomplish.

Perhaps you do you do the same thing? What accomplishments do youplay down as nothing significant?

Now the longer version:

Just The Facts Ma’am

I grew up in Vero Beach, FL the eldest of six children. To this day, I absolutely love the ocean. Let me clarify that…warm oceans with palm trees. Under the guise of visiting my grandparents, my parents moved up north to Ohio and I never got an appropriate chance to say good bye to my best friend, Elizabeth.

My parents originally grew up in Pennsylvania and they often said they missed the seasons. I often say there are seasons I am happy to miss . . . …Fall, Winter and Spring. Give me eternal summer.  (Well maybe not a Las Vegas summer but a Vero Beach summer . . . oh YES! PLEASE!)

I’m persistent, tenacious, determined and very strong willed (aka bitch). I later learned the true meaning of bitch…Being In Total Control of Herself. One of my favorite quotes comes from the movie, Delores Claiborne…"Sometimes you have be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto."

Sorry… Couldn’t resist… had to share.

There is a personality profiling system known as The "DISC". Using their ranking system, I score a very high "D" dominance or driving personality. The first time I took one of those tests, it came out pretty much split between the D & I. The I often represents a social personality. The D was still higher and I would say that means I have fun being a bitch.

Basically, the way I lived my life during that period was, if you got in my way I would run you over. I learned the road to success becomes very bumpy with all the bodies laying in the road.

I now know  there is a time and place for the bitch. It took a lot of healing to reach the point where I no longer leave bodies in the road. The bitch protected me. She spoke for me… She stood up for me… until I could stand up for myself.

The bitch part of me worked overtime for most of my life. She deserves to take it easy and enjoy life now. The bitch hid my awful secrets from the public … I hated myself and really didn’t care if I lived. I believed I was a worthless, no good, rotten, horrible person… so it was better to push people away before they discovered the secret – what I perceived at the time to be the real me.

How does one come into this world with this perception about themselves? They don’t… know one does… not even me… nor did you.

Somebody opens up your little brain and dumps stuff in there… for me, my parents put in garbage.

In the Name of God

Our family looked good, stable and normal on the outside.

People didn’t see us simmering in a dysfunctional stew of the most toxically shaming and soul murdering abuses… religious abuse. Still very little is talked about this type of abuse.

Abuse/dysfunctional behavior is a gift passed through generations. My goal list consisted of many things but not my biggest accomplishment… breaking the cycle of abuse for my youngest daughter. A new legacy… a new path for future generations.

My mother coped with her abuse through religion. She made God her drug of choice.

I grew up with so much chaos and contradiction. Quite normal for a dysfunctional home. My mother’s mission in life was to make sure the devil didn’t lay his hands on us.

I hope you don’t mind but at this point I’m going to opt out going through the ugly details but rather focus on the effects the emotional, and later physical abuse, left behind. By the time my dad began drinking, I was well into my teen years. The damage from my mother’s mission was already done.

I grew up with messages the world is an ugly place. Your rewards come to you after you die and go to heaven. To get into heaven you must not die with any sin. Suffering and being in a constant the state of grace became the ticket to get in.(does perfectionism ring a bell here)

Rules in the household: Don’t question, don’t doubt, don’t feel, don’t think.

God kept a tally of all your evil doings. I was doomed…hell loomed before me. My mother loved whipping out her 7 deadly sins book from the desk drawer. She would point out which one I just committed.

Believe me, I committed every one of those 7 deadly sins very very early in life.

The last thing my parents wanted was a strong willed, big dreaming child. At least if those big dreams didn’t include the highest honor one could achieve on earth.

Ahh yes… the priesthood. What greater honor existed on earth.

Just one teeny tiny problem…I’m a girl. Of course mom reminded us girls, we should come into this world as boys. Like I can "unborn" myself. So gender inequality existed in our home.

Installed into my young brain were messages of I’m born wrong, I’m vain, I’m selfish, stupid. My mom still likes to tell me what a horrible baby I was.  For good measure, let’s throw in rotten too.

Since my dreams didn’t include the consolation prize of a nunnery, Satan himself reached down and contaminated my brain with other dreams and goals. All my dreams and goals came from the devil.

Now I’m already for adulthood. Armed with no self esteem, feeling worthless and with nightmares of the devil getting his hands on me at any minute.

The Great Escape?

Since I believed I was too stupid to go to college, marriage seemed like the best way out. So I married husband #1 who I dated in high school. He didn’t meet my parents total approval because he wasn’t religious enough.

But he was good at keeping up the psychological abuse and reinforcing my parental message. When our daughter Chantal was born, I decided to pass on the great gift of emotional abuse. Mom & Dad were there with all kinds of "good" parental advise. Religious indoctrination starts very early in life.

Did you know abuse is passed down from generation to generation? Low self esteem is also passed down too.

If I wasn’t a "good" person to start with…how could I ever be a "good" mother. Of course, I was doing everything wrong.

Three years into my marriage we moved to Cleveland, OH. No matter where we lived, I bring myself with me. All the garbage and all the baggage follow. You can’t escape yourself.

I was miserable and depressed. Since I was already on the path to hang out with Satan, I figured suicide was actually a viable option. Husband #1 and daughter were going some place and I decided at the last minute not to go. I assured my husband I was fine and just didn’t feel like going.

After they left, I went down to the garage and with the garage door closed, I turned on my car. Something inside my husband told him to turn around and he did.

Thankfully, no physical damage was done to me because he wasn’t gone long enough and so we swept the incident under the rug and never talked about it again.

Shortly after that though, I decided to separate from him and be on my own for the first time in my life.

I bet this wasn’t quite the About Me page you expected!

Something Begins To Happen

Without the constant verbal assault and getting into a different environment, I began to question so much about myself and how I grew up.

Do you ever find yourself questioning what you believe about yourself? Perhaps like me, you couldn’t question the contradictions or what you were told.

I became an avid reader of personal development books, like Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill etc. One book would change my life and would you believe I can’t remember the name of it today!

I read it shortly before my divorce. The premise of the book is about people who come from abusive backgrounds, find themselves in relationships with other abusers. You don’t know the difference between healthy and unhealthy love.

Subconsciously we migrate to what we know… what we’re comfortable with even if it’s unhealthy.

Our low self esteem and feelings of worthlessness, leads one to believe you don’t deserve a relationship with an emotionally healthy man. In fact, you’ll feel so uncomfortable around someone who treat you the way you DESERVE to be treated. We don’t feel we deserve true unconditional love, so we push the nice guy away.

That is the person we really should form a relationship with.

Without search or looking, I was fortunate to meet my Mr. Wonderful on a blind date. The message from that book came back to me. This is the type of guy I’m suppose to stay with. I had a very hard time feeling comfortable around him.

I kept fearing he would find out my true nature. The mask would come off and he would see the loathsome creature inside. He did see beyond the mask…he saw the "true" me way before I ever did.

There were many times I wanted to run away from Mr. Wonderful (aka Mike). If it wasn’t for that book, I would have dumped my future hubby in a red hot minute!

Can I Switch Places…Please?

Four years after our blind date, Mike and I got married. And a few years after that, our daughter, Allyce came into our lives.I made God a promise that I would be a better mother if he gave me another chance and give me a daughter.

My parents never accepted me for me. I vowed not to do the same to Allyce.

Growing up feeling wrong and worthless is not fun. I actually became my own worse abuser. Constantly playing the same tapes from my childhood over and over. Doing my best to be perfect.

I bet you do the same thing too… keep playing those false statement tapes in your brain.

I didn’t think it could be different for me. I would have to live with these awful feelings for the rest of my life. That was not a sentence I wanted Allyce to have pronounced on her.

I decided to become the mother I wish that I had had. I wanted Allyce to grow up feeling good about herself. I wanted her dreams to be encouraged and her feelings to be validated. I wanted her to experience love simply because she existed – not based on anything she did or did NOT do!

The more I did to build my daughter’s self esteem and reaffirm her self worth, the worse and worse I began to feel about myself.

I wanted to switch places with Allyce…I wanted all that love…that acceptance. Even Chantal wanted to switch places too.

I got more and more depressed over the years. I found it harder and harder to keep myself together. I was so horribly, obsessively frightened that I night start to abuse Allyce.

I was getting tired of my crazy thinking and chaotic behavior. Perfection is exhausting and my life wasn’t getting any better…no matter what I did.

I’m Not Crazy…I’m Not Alone

I never set out to break this cycle of abuse. I just got fed up with me sabotaging my goals. I read enough books to recognize this behavior. I sought help to find out why I couldn’t make progress.

Lost childhood memories started flooding in and became so overwhelming I finally broke down one day. Totally lost it… left planet earth and returned to find myself at the Glenbeigh Treatment Center.

Diagnosed with severe depression, post traumatic stress disorder along with some other stuff… I was a wreck.

My psychiatrist told me that my inner child so desperately needed and wanted to hear the words and feel the same love that Allyce was experiencing. The breakdown was my inner child’s cry for help. The psychiatrist assured me that I could feel good about myself too.

Sitting in the counselor’s office one day, I was asked what I thought God looked like… and I jokingly replied… me! After all, I was taught we we’re created in God’s image. So God must look like me.

I waited for thunderbolts to hit me… another checkmark in God’s tally book.

To my amazement, my counselor assured me, I was absolutely correct. Instead of being thrilled with that response, I immediately went into a panic mode, trying to reassure the doctor I wasn’t serious.

He than asked me where I thought God existed/lived. Like I didn’t learn my lesson from the image question… My mouth blurted out… in me while pointing to my heart.

Once again no thunderbolts and the counselor assured me I was correct, again! Oh no…you don’t understand, I’m a bad, ugly person. God can’t be in me or am I created in his image. Maybe "normal" people not me.

During our group session I was about to discover how normal I really was. Everyone of us stared at each other in disbelief when we told our stories. The reaction was the same…It felt like everyone in that room had lived in my house, hiding and observing. Every one of us felt that way. We were not alone with our experiences. We were validated as real human beings.  We were not crazy in how we felt.

For the first time in my life, I actually felt safe.

I could begin the journey of finding my real self. The self created in God’s image. I would take years of therapy to discard my parents’ version of God. I would need to unlearn so much. My behaviors and habits supported the crazy chaotic reactions to life. I would need to learn new one.

As much as my parents were into God and religion, they decided being created in God’s image wasn’t good enough… they tried to recreate me in their image.

 

The Wonderful Thrilling Journey to M.E.

This journey never ends. You keep evolving closer and closer to your best and authentic self.

I got healthy enough to finally fulfill a dream of starting my own business. It grew quickly and was profitable in a short time. My daughter Allyce was pursuing her dreams of Olympic gold as a figure skater.

Sitting in the rink, I decide to write a personal mission statement for my life. Some parts are lifelong… other parts already happened and some are still yet to come.

One part I would need to grow into… it would take another decade before I felt ready to act on this part of mission statement.I recently closed my business to begin this new chapter of my life…

I encourage others to believe in themselves and that they are worthy of their dreams and goals. Where I am I will create an atmosphere of safety and unconditional acceptance, where people are comfortable to be themselves and feel better about themselves.

There is a Magical Essence in all of us… Something inside us insists we plan for victory not defeat, for happiness not misery, for peace of mind not for a life of worry, anxiety and fear.

There’s something special inside all of us. Even you… although at this point you may not believe it. Never underestimate what it is inside you that makes you special.

PS
Mr. Wonderful and I will celebrate 28 yrs of marriage as of this writing (2012)… I really did marry a wonderful guy!