Catholicism: Faith lost and my journey back

_{Me as an altar boy at Good Shepherd Parish in Pacifica Ca. My best guess is this is around 1986, a few short years before I became a victim of clergy abuse.}

I grew up Catholic. As a child I went to a Catholic school for first through eighth grade. As a family we went to mass every weekend and because I was at a Catholic school I had religion class for eight years too. I was an altar boy for several years and I was enthralled with the idea of the pageantry of the Church. Faith was my cornerstone, my rock.

I have a strong memory as a kid, I can’t remember how old I was or why I was there but I was at a large mass in San Francisco that was presided over by Archbishop John R Quinn. The “R” was for Rafael which is my middle name too and I was awestruck by him. His presence, the reverence with which he was treated by everyone around him, his flowing, somewhat extravagant gown and the way he carried himself really affected me.

After the mass I snuck away from the group I was with and somehow found him. I asked him for his autograph (weird, but at the time I collected autographs) and he gave it to me. I was walking on a cloud. It was amazing to meet him. Everyone there looked up to him but I met him. He was very nice and kind to me, and it is a memory I still hold in my heart as special. This chance meeting is wrought with irony due to the events that would lead up to Fr Fred coming to St Peter’s and entering my life not long after.

There is a direct comparison albeit stark in hindsight to that interaction and how it made me feel with how I felt when Fr Fred befriended me. He was larger than life, gregarious, affable, warm and friendly. Everyone liked him and he was my friend. It made me feel special and he knew that, he counted on it.

I mention the story of meeting Archbishop Quinn not only because it was a significant moment in my life, but it underscores just how important Catholisism was to me. Probably more importantly, the Church and the people involved, the ceremony and the pomp and circumstance of a big mass. I was enthralled by it all and really enjoyed that part of being Catholic. The part you could see, feel and experience. The part you could interact with, be a part of and get positive reinforcement from.

Looking back, I’m not sure I ever really tried to understand anything past that, or saw a path to understanding the religion, the teachings, the history or the true meaning of being Catholic. I experienced being Catholic on the surface. I really was all about the community of it, I loved the idea of people coming together in a building to see and listen to a leader who represented God. I loved the singing and praying as a group, and I loved the sense of camaraderie and support that I felt being with these same people every week.

The teachings never made it to me. Religion class was like going through the motions. I’m sure I had to memorize many things for tests etc but nothing was ever deeper than dates, people, times, words and places to me. I never learned the why or the purpose behind what I was doing. It has only been recently over pints with my brother where I have realized this and started to feel a pull to better understand the bible and all of the lessons within it.

From the moment I realized what had been done to me by this priest, I lost God. (I had repressed the memories as detailed here https://bit.ly/3ga4YuY) In the initial shock of what happened, the confusion and the overwhelming anger, I gave up on Him and threw Him out of my life along with the priests and Church that I was so devastated by.

It would be years before I started to feel like I needed something in my life guiding my journey through this hell, because I was a rudderless ship. The one real constant in my life that had always guided me whether I knew it or not was gone, my faith. I realized I needed it in my life but I really had no idea how that would be possible with the betrayal and abuse that I had suffered.

It has been a process but once I realized it was time to seek God, even though I didn’t know how, there has been a presence in my life that is just there. It has felt like this constant that I can go to when I need to or remember to but it hasn’t interfered, it has felt like support.

My brother in particular has been an ongoing source of support because of his deep faith in God. I was really very worried about telling him about the abuse initially and not because I was concerned that I wouldn’t have his support. I knew he would stand beside me, my concern was that I would be putting a stress in his life as he had to work through what happened to me while somehow also rectifying it with his faith. What I didn’t realize yet was that it was his faith that would guide him through this while he helped me.

I have had so many deep conversations with him since then centering around religion. Because of him and his guidance I have been able to start testing the waters of Catholicism again. Most importantly, he has shown me that my faith rests in God and that I do not need anything except that one on one relationship with Him to rebuild my faith. That the faith I build is what will guide me through the next phase of my journey which I am hopeful will mean that I can find community in religion again.

I know it’s not going to be easy, so many things involved in a mass or a church still trigger unwanted emotions in me. Sometimes I find myself getting angry with the priest as he speaks, just because he is a priest. At times I especially have a difficult time seeing the priests interact with children after a mass while simultaneously appreciating their role in the community and the importance of those interactions when they are good. I have recently gone to confession several times and while it was hard to do, it felt very freeing once I did. Now the thought of confession makes me anxious. I can’t bring myself to be vulnerable with a priest in private like that. While that is a real and legitimate problem for me, it is unfortunate because he personally is most likely a good man and a good representative of Christ but I still have that block in my mind that I need to work through.

Eddie, my brother, has been very gentle with me through this allowing me to make progress on my own terms. He has never pushed religion or faith on me or even ever brought it up in conversation unless I did first. As a matter of a fact, I can’t think of one time out of all of the talks we’ve had when he initiated the topic of God, faith or religion. It has always been me asking questions, asking for explanations or needing to vent about how I felt in the beginning or even just recently about not being able to go to confession.

I admire his faith tremendously. It isn’t blind faith or allegiance to an organization, his faith rests firmly in God. The entity around God here in the world is human based and so it is imperfect and flawed and he gets that. It is his faith that allows him to trust the Church still and I find that inspiring. His steadfast belief in God and his faith being his foundation have on their own shown me the path and I am so very grateful for that and most importantly for him.

I never would have imagined that my journey would be heading back to the church. I think I knew all along that I was going to find a way back to God and that my faith would, at some point be restored. I looked for it in many places and never found it, now I am hopeful that I can proudly be Catholic again because I do believe that is where my salvation ultimately lies.

My issues with the Church are with one man in particular and the men who allowed him to prey upon young parishioners. They bear the blame. As I said earlier, the church is a worldly entity run by human beings. It is flawed and always will be. I hope that there has been enough exposure of the insidious abuse scandals that the church is actively working to mitigate the risks of this continuing in the future. I’m certainly not naive, I know that it will happen, but my sincere hope is that it’s not on the scale that it was on previously. I hope that significant steps have been taken to address the cancer that crept deep into the administration of the Church.

Ultimately I hope that when there are victims who come forward the Church has developed a way to support them and their families so that those victims don’t have to lose their faith in order to hopefully find it again one day. If I had my faith in tact throughout this ordeal it would have been significantly easier to navigate through. Perhaps my journey from the Church and now back can serve as an inspiration. An ispiration to be sure there are programs in place to not only monetarily compensate victims. Victims should be supported in ways that I wish had been available to me as a member of the Church as I look back on it now.

I say this all the time but it bears repeating. I refuse to believe that this happened to me for no reason. I am convinced that I am meant to help others through my experience. Thank you for reading, I appreciate each one of you. One Love.

Red Flags: Learning to Trust Yourself

Photo by Jan van der Wolf on Pexels.com

One of the most frustrating yet most redeeming parts of rebuilding your mental strength after victimization is when you start to understand the significance of red flags. Frustrating because as you start to see all of the red flags that were presented to you by your abuser it is upsetting that you were unable to identify or address the behavior at the time. Redeeming because it’s empowering to understand the significance of red flags while developing the tools that you need to respond to them appropriatley.

I am still in the phase of trying to understand why I would not act on the red flags. It isn’t like I didn’t know the behavior of the priest was wrong or abusive, I chose not to address it. Granted I was young, but why did I choose not to address it? Was it because it was uncomfortable to bring up? Because I needed to avoid conflict? Or because I didn’t know the significance of the red flags, how deeply they would affect me if they went unchecked and didn’t have the tools to deal with them even if I wanted to?

This is where I struggle today. I believe that I want to avoid conflict with people close to me no matter what. I have always felt like if I addressed something with someone that I would be easily manipulated into seeing it from their perspective and my feelings would not matter. Believing that has kept me from bringing up issues while instead just moving on, hoping they would go away.

As I’m sure you can imagine, the vast majority of my therapy has been dealing with this. Teaching me to believe what I feel, to not set bad behavior aside and most importantly giving me the tools I need for a healthy response to these warning signs.

Abusers and narcissists are manipulative by nature. Whether they are playing the long game; maneuvering you into the position they want you in for their own benefit, or just smaller, daily manipulations also to put you in a place where they can take advantage of you emotionally, physically, sexually. Again, all to satisfy their own needs, desires or to feed their ego. They manipulate other humans into suffering for their own gain.

They’re so good at it that you don’t always see the warning signs, especially at first. You know them as someone who is fun or friendly, generous and dynamic. People are drawn to them, they treat you well, they’re good in groups and people want to be around them. It makes you feel good to be their friend and the red flags haven’t started to accumulate.

That’s part of their plan though. You may not think that they are this calculated or devious, that they somehow can’t control their actions, but they are. They are always positioning themselves to be able to take advantage. Their way sucks you in and you know what you see in this person is good and it is supported by the effusive praise you hear about them from others.

When you finally start to feel like something isn’t right it’s usually too late. They’ve got you in a position where you feel like if you bring up a behavior, your concerns will be met with deflection. Statements like “you know me, do you really think I’m capable of that?” or “you know what I’ve told you about that person, they can’t be trusted.” They shoot you down with charm and/or aggression and you give up and ignore what you were concerned about.

The significance of you either trying to confront them and being shot down or just realizing what will happen if you do, is huge. It sets you up to never address things that come up and to stop trusting your gut feelings. You bottle up what they do and just sort of go into survival mode. If you give them what they want there won’t be conflict, they won’t manipulate your feelings or they won’t bully you into not bringing something up again. You stop being an individual and you are in essence their puppet. This emboldens the person acting inappropriately to continue to do so and to increase the abuse. To double down on the manipulation and control who you are, where you go, what you do, what you believe and who you are friends with.

What their end game is determines what happens next. Maybe they just need a punching bag. Someone who will do what they say, never question them, always be there and remain in their control. For some abusers this is what they need. To control another human being in order to satisfy their shortcomings. Maybe they are insecure, don’t know how to just be themselves, can’t maintain a healthy relationship and are affraid of being alone. Sometimes they want to steal another person’s life, to take what they don’t have from someone else and in essence become that person. They ruin other people’s lives to make themselves feel better. It’s all very sick and twisted.

For me, my first abuser’s end game was sexual gratification. Every single bit of what he did, every word he said to me, every trip to the store we took together, everything was geared toward gaining my trust, manipulating my mind and eventually taking advantage of me, a 14 year old boy, sexually.

The damage that these people leave in their wake is far worse than the in the moment act. You become antisocial. You don’t trust people, you can’t let people in and until you do the work to fix it, you don’t even realize what is happening. You don’t realize how damaged you are and how far from a safe and peaceful life you truly are. You hurt other people when in reality that is the last thing you want.

The best gift you can give yourself is awareness. Awareness of how others act and why. Awareness of how you respond to how others act and why and awareness of how you should respond and when. Being able to identify red flags is fantastic. It takes a lot of hard work and anyone who puts in the time can get there. The tools needed to appropriately respond to those warning signs come from the work you do too.

It feels very daunting. It feels nearly impossible. It seems so much easier to hide and never address the problems you face. I know, I’ve experienced it all. I never truly believed I could get where I am today. I’m not at the end of this journey by any means but I am in a significantly healthier place mentally than I’ve ever been and I strive to get a little bit better every day. We only get this one life, each day that passes is a day gone but the best part is that there is always another day on the horizon to start to take back your life. One Love

Coping Mechanisms

From booze to the gym. Coping mechanisms vary from very unhealthy to healthy but even the healthy ones are not ever really addressing the root problem.

Coping mechanisms can be good and bad, healthy and very unhealthy but we all have them and I am going to describe in this post the ones that I have used and abused in an attempt to show that there is no one perfect way to deal with the anguish of mental health challenges.

There have been times when I wish that I could go back to the days of ignorance about my poor mental health. I feel like back then I was care free and that life was better. I wasn’t analyzing every little thing that happened every day and attributing it to betrayal or immaturity or trust issues and I wasn’t struggling to cope with the overwhelming stress in my head.

The truth though is that I was. I was doing all of these things and I was doing it in the most unhealthy of ways. I drank hard and often. I think back to polishing off bottles of whiskey every night because “I liked it” but in reality I was coping with the torture in my mind by drowning it in bourbon while also killing my liver. On a certain level I knew what I was doing but without guidance, without tools or boundaries and by living with an enabler who liked keeping me in that place, in his control, I really didn’t stand a chance. I was on a path to being a horrible alcoholic and very angry and abusive when I drank.

The majority of what I am going to write about here has happened in the last ten years. These ten years have been a long, scary journey full of ups and downs, some extremely dark downs and also some really great highs. These ten years are when I began to take a hard look at myself and chose to fight the fight regardless of how hard it would become.

I still didn’t think I had a problem with alcohol ten years ago. My entire adult life I had spent drinking to silence the demons in my head without realizing it. This part of my life finally showed me that and gave me another coping mechanism that I have bought in to wholeheartedly and it has almost been more therapeutic than anything else I have done.

I had never joined a gym or consistently worked out before 2012. Late that year I was lamenting the fact that I was out of shape and wanted to make a change, I didn’t really know what to do though. I went to a Vitamin Shoppe to ask questions about supplements and realized they really couldn’t help me. That is when I lucked out and met a guy named Matt Cooper at a MaxMuscle store in San Rafael.

I went there after the Vitamin Shoppe and asked the same questions. Matt answered them all easily and then guided me toward a plan based on nutrition, some supplements and exercise. Sure I was buying things from him but this was more than a sales pitch for Matt, he cared and he wanted to help. He became a good friend and mentor for me and I am proud to know him to this day. He runs a successful business in Southern California called Rewire Health and Performance now, check him out if you’re interested. https://linktr.ee/rewirehp

Matt recommended that I join a gym in Novato that had just been opened by a friend of his called Anytime Fitness. I went down and met with the owner Grant Witham and made another new and influential friend that day. I joined his gym and started working out, not really knowing why or where it was headed. I just felt like it was something I should be doing.

Looking back on it today I probably had the sole motivation of wanting to look good by joining the gym. I can’t imagine that I had the forethought at the time to realize that I had started the thing that would eventually teach me how to push past barriers and that I was capable of things I never would have imagined.

This change did not happen overnight, as a matter of a fact it is still happening today. It has evolved slowly over ten years and I expect that it will still evolve more over the next ten and beyond. Once I started to feel comfortable in the gym and educated myself enough that I was being safe and seeing results I became obsessed with my time in the gym.

There is nothing in my life that I have done that puts me in a zone the way the gym does. There is something about the progression of training, the “you against yourself” that pushes me and that I punish myself with as well. Losing myself in a crowded gym as if there was no one else there became my happy place, where I could really get in touch with myself, my abilities, my strengths and weaknesses. It is where I learned how to challenge myself and where I learned that I can physically overcome mental blocks. I learned that my mind was powerful.

The gym is where I realized that no matter how hard I worked there, my mind was in need of the same attention I was giving to my body so I found a good therapist to attack that challenge too. For a long time things were going well and I felt that I had turned a page. I had but it wasn’t all successes and happiness the way it seemed. I had refused to address my drinking still and I really didn’t want to.

The anger would reemerge when I drank. It was fear driven anger. Fear of facing something that needed to be addressed and that was going to be the hardest thing I had ever done. So as much as I loved the power I felt in my life whilst at the gym, I was still hiding from things with whiskey, every night.

The last few years have seen the biggest change in this area for me and it is no coincidence that this same time frame saw the end of my friendship with the person who was controlling and enabling my drinking for his own benefit when I clearly had a problem and would pay for it dearly if I didn’t do something about it.

I didn’t always drink to numb my mental pain, many times I would “have” to drink to address the physical pain in my leg. Long days on my feet or if I did something to cause more pain than usual would be so mentally taxing that all I wanted to do was get to the bottle so I could breath and then numb the pain. I won’t take pain killers because I hate the way they make me feel and I am terrified of becoming addicted to them. I would, however, drink til I couldn’t feel anything night after night. The pain in my body from my bone disease is always going to be there so I knew that I needed to do something about the situation.

The gym helps to ease my mind and gives me focus, it is my time for me every day. The booze was helping me not address things and to just go numb but I needed something to change. About this time, medical marijuana started to become more mainstream and accessible to people like me but I was very skeptical. As a retired cop I had been brainwashed with the idea that it is a gateway drug and since I was deathly afraid of becoming addicted to stronger drugs than marijuana, I knew it was not for me.

Marijuana is not a gateway drug. Sure there are many people who have used marijuana as their first drug and then gone on to use many other more dangerous drugs but to say that is only because they used marijuana first is unfounded and unfair. If there was no marijuana most of those those people would still have found and used the other drugs. I bet there are many people who might have used stronger drugs but found what they needed in marijuana and never got to the more dangerous ones. Marijuana and its derivatives, when used properly can make a huge positive difference the life of someone like me.

Eventually I got a medical marijuana card and started to poke around the possibilities of whether it could work for me. Many years later as the cannabis industry has exploded and the availability of all different strains and varying strengths and derivatives has blossomed I have found a safe and effective tool to use when I have too much pain and when my brain is overwhelmed and jumbled.

Marijuana itself was fun to experiment with and I do still enjoy the high that it gives occasionally. What has really made all the difference in the world for me has been CBD.

CBD calms my mind, allows me to focus on the important things when I feel overwhelmed and chaotic and because it clears my mind, it gives my body and my mind the ability to process pain without having to drink myself to near unconsciousness in order to find the same peace. CBD addresses the issues I have without the impairment of being “high”.

CBD can be taken in many different ways but I smoke it. Honestly, I wish I didn’t have to smoke it because the smoking part feels counterproductive but none of the other methods have ever given me the results that smoking it does. I’ll keep trying other methods but for now I am fine with the trade off, it has worked miracles for me.

I’m not claiming that it directly affects the physical pain that I am in, marijuana does that. I compare the feeling in my leg on marijuana to the painful parts being wrapped in bubble wrap. I can feel it directly attacking the pain.

CBD is different, at least for me. The way it helps is that it gives my mind the space and the freedom to process the pain and handle it the way that the brain is meant to. Usually my mind is so overwhelmed and cluttered that it can’t even begin to address the pain so it just sits there, pounding and pulsating pain with no relief in sight. The CBD gives my mind the ability to handle the pain, it saves me that way.

I still drink beer but I haven’t had anything stronger than that consistently in a long time and I doubt I ever will again. I loved the taste of whisky back in the day but now I want nothing to do with it, I don’t even like the smell anymore. On the rare occasion when I have had shots with friends or a mixed drink I am reminded quickly why I stay clear of that stuff now. I don’t feel hungover anymore when I drink like that, I feel poisoned and it lasts for days, no fun. When I drink beer it isn’t to escape, it ‘s to enjoy the beer itself or enhance a social gathering having pints with friends. I don’t miss those nights and especially mornings but I’m not perfect so I’m sure there will be more of them in my future. I’m confident however, that they will be few and far between and they will never again be to escape my reality or be when I am alone.

I’ve clearly taken on writing as a coping mechanism as well and it helps immensely. I think that just about anything can be a coping mechanism, anything that you love to do or that brings you peace can be channelled in to the positivity of working through your journey. The easy ways out, drugs, alcohol are just that, easy. The fact that they are easy is the red flag you need in order to know that they are not the way. Even something I love to do like writing or going to the gym aren’t easy. They are hard, at times they are very hard but I love to do them so that difficulty is worth it.

At the end of the day accomplishing something hard is a feather in your cap. Knowing you are capable of doing good, hard things that improve your life can become addictive in itself in a good way. It feels good to succeed especially when most of life is failure. Find your own little ways to succeed every day. Be proud of your accomplishments regardless how small they may be or how inconsequential they may seem at the time. Build on all of them, let those successes become your foundation so that when the failures hit they don’t destroy you. With a good foundation built on healthy actions and belief in yourself you are setting yourself up for more significant victories in the future.

As I finish this post, just a reminder that all of this is hard. I know that what works for me today may not work for me tomorrow or next year. The point is that as we evolve as people, our goals and passions evolve too. Always be looking for that next good thing that will make you happy. Always seek that next healthy habit that feeds your mind and your body and soul. Don’t get discouraged when you stumble. Failures are always an opportunity to learn and improve. Remember that if you need to talk I am always here. Thank you for reading. One Love.

Regression is normal

I’m taking a little detour from the posts you’re used to seeing from me today to talk about regression in your mental health journey.

I was reading through a few of my posts last night when I couldn’t sleep, intent on finding any elusive grammatical errors to fix. As I was reading them I realized just how much they lean toward the positive side of the journey I’m on.

I thought about it for a bit and realized that while there is nothing wrong with that, positivity is a very important part of healing, it didn’t completely reflect the way I am feeling right now. I felt it might be helpful to address that for myself and my mind but also for anyone who reads these posts and might feel like the positivity is a bit much or is forced or not completely realistic.

One of the main reasons I write is to get the feelings and thoughts out of my head and on to something tangible. It helps clear my mind of clutter and gives me a reference to look back on when things seem hopeless or hard. Writing, in fact, gives me power. I feel very strong in my life when I write and in turn the posts you’ve seen lean towards positivity because writing makes me feel that way.

These last couple of weeks have been really hard on me and writing has helped me through that. I feel like I’m battling an oncoming wave of depression, fighting to stay out of the hole of sadness and isolation that I have become so familiar with. Writing has been keeping it at bay but it’s creeping in.

Today I realized that instead of fighting it I should write about it. Write about how weak I still am despite the victories I have won recently. Still so weak that just the start of a new day can sometimes be so daunting that I just don’t want to get out of bed.

I have had so much success from being bluntly honest about my feelings so I should do the same now.

My life clearly isn’t ideal but I’m making the most of where it is right now. I’m working through things given the current situation with the belief that it is temporary and with the work I’m doing will improve at some point. I stopped giving myself deadlines and chose just to live in it, day by day and do something positive every day to work toward my ultimate goal of my life, living a lot closer to my daughter again.

This has not been an easy thing to accept. Being 6000 miles away from the love of my life, my favorite human and the little girl who is growing into such a beautiful young lady was a gut wrenching choice to make. Ultimately I made it in order to protect my mental health, to provide myself with stability and routine so I could really dive in to working on the challenges that have created my unhealthy mental place.

It took time to accept but I finally did and even though I know it was the right decision and has already paid dividends, it sucks. It’s one thing to text everyday, to talk from time to time and to FaceTime when we can. I love every single interaction like that, each one buoys me but they don’t take the place of being in the same space together. Feeling the energy of the day from each other without even speaking keeps you from having to ask how they are and gives you a sense of their current mood just by being near one another. I miss that.

I miss her energy and her hugs and I cannot wait to get back and see her often again. When I decided to do this, to move to Spain for an extended period of time, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t waste the time. It was more like I couldn’t waste the time. The only way I would be able to justify upending our routine together would be if when I came back to California that I had made significant strides. That I would come back a better man, human and most importantly dad than I was when I left. That I would come back stronger.

I certainly don’t mean that I wasn’t good at those things before coming to Spain. I was ok but I clearly needed a lot of work to be more stable and to be the rock she deserves from her father. I realized that the first step toward that was actually a step back. I needed to step back and assess my situation honestly and live in that reality deeply until I could start to crawl out of it and make strides toward my goals.

I’ve been able to that and I feel strong and positive today and I feel like I can withstand these regressions in my outlook. It’s important that I remember that life is all about ups and downs and so certainly there will be those times in this struggle toward some sort of normalcy in my life.

The vital part is to not let these times crush me like they have in the past. In the past they’ve seemed like the end of hope and would cause me to want to give up trying. It would send me to drinking to forget or to numb the emotional pain. That’s so destructive but until you have healthy ways to deal with these things, the tendency is to revert to what seems like the easy path out of it.

Writing this is going to help me through this rough patch and will give me a reference to look back on the next time I’m feeling down and missing her so much.

I’m not working toward perfection in my life, I’m working toward balance. Balance is where my strength comes from. Strength is where my hope comes from and hope is where I build the rest of my life from.

If you’re struggling and feel hopeless or if you’ve regressed and feel like you want to stop fighting, talk to me. Reach out, I’m always here to help whether I know you or not. We all have challenges and struggles and no one persons struggles are less important than my own. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, I refuse to believe that my suffering has been for no reason. Each day it is more apparent to me that I have suffered in order to help guide others through their hard times. I am here for you. One Love.

Manifestations of Narcissistic Manipulative Abuse: Inability to Trust

I don’t think that I realized until recently that I really don’t trust people. Not that I think that all people are inherently bad or untrustworthy, I am realizing that except for a rare situation I just never let anyone completely in. To be clear, this was not a decision I was making or that I made for each person in my life. This was another defense mechanism that stemmed from trusting a man who meticulously and insidiously gained my trust by slowly grooming me over time. Something he was so good at, as all narcissists are, that I wouldn’t even understand what he had done for decades and that I am still learning new aspects of the damage from today.

At a time in my life when I was very vulnerable I had the unfortunate experience of meeting and becoming friends with a narcissistic predator priest. While I think we all can agree that the physical and sexual abuse that I eventually suffered at his hands was and is just awful, I’m here to tell you that yes, it was awful but it was nothing compared to the lasting mental and emotional damage suffered.

This post will focus on the damage done to my ability to trust others due to his deep seated betrayal. I’ll explore how it has affected my friendships and relationships, how it still manifests itself today and how after all this time I fell victim to another narcissist as an adult because of the subconscious familiarity I felt through his manipulations and fake affection.

Just like in my last post about abandonment, my mind has acted to protect me by going to the extreme again. Since I didn’t have the maturity level to identify red flags or the tools I needed to set and adhere to healthy boundaries my mind acted to not allow me to trust anyone fully.

This tactic works well to protect you from people who aren’t in it for good reasons. It protects you from narcissists, predators, leeches and just anyone who is not good for you. A healthy mind identifies the red flags that those people present. A healthy mind also knows how to respond to those red flags and has good boundaries. An unhealthy mind can’t do that so the wall gets built and you don’t realize it, but you never trust anyone.

Not trusting deprives you of some of the greatest things in life; true love, companionship, camaraderie etc but you don’t realize it. You don’t realize that wall is there so you think that you are trusting the people you fully let in. You think that they know everything about you, that you have allowed yourself to be vulnerable to them and have given yourself up. The fact is, you have not. 

It’s subconscious and is proof that while you think you have opened up fully to someone and that they know everything about you the fact is that you don’t even know everything about yourself. That part of you that you don’t know, is working against what you are working toward. It creates a struggle within because it is holding you back but you don’t understand why. You don’t understand what the feeling is or why you have conflict in you over a relationship or friendship that you feel like you are giving yourself to 100%, with someone that you believe you trust fully and have bared your soul to.

That conflict is the wall. It is the protective barrier that you don’t realize is there until you start to do some deep, introspective work. That is when you reflect on people, situations, relationships and understand where and why you failed at no real fault of your own, only because you weren’t capable of being true to yourself yet.

When you start to do the work it can be very overwhelming when you first start to see the enormity of the scale in which your life was affected by this abuse. That is when you realize that the physical and sexual part of the abuse isn’t close to as bad as the manipulation, what I call, the long game. The long term manipulation of your mind to protect themselves and get what they want. That part is insidious and is the most damaging part of it all.

Learning about this through therapy and introspective meditation starts to let you feel that barrier in your daily life and gives you the tools needed to start to move it aside and explore the damaged part of you so you can start to heal it. It makes you take stock of the people in your life and gives you the tools you need to decide who stays and who goes instead of the broad strokes of the wall where no one gets in. 

For me that process has not been easy. I resisted really committing to therapy for years most likely because I couldn’t fully trust the doctors at no fault of their own. I bounced from doctor to doctor for a while until I found one that I could really open up to. Once that happened I started to see my world a little bit differently each time that I left a session.

The people in my life started showing their true colors for good or bad and I got to decide who was good for me and who wasn’t. Cutting out the ones who weren’t was relatively easy once I had the ability to see their red flags and usually I could look back on our friendship and realize that it was never really healthy or beneficial. The real work came when someone I fully trusted, someone who I had years earlier let the wall down for started showing red flags. That was confusing and ultimately led to me regressing terribly in my therapy and in my life.

When you start to apply the tools that you have and see the positive results in your life from it, it’s empowering. At first you feel like you have to be on guard all the time to be able to read and react to situations that people create but eventually you start to relax in it a bit because you start to really trust the instincts you have been working on.

When those instincts trigger warnings about someone that you have let in close to you it gets very confusing and makes you question your abilities again. In my case I kept ignoring the red flags with this friend as I suppose I always had and put them away. Looking back on that time in my life now I can see where I thought I was ignoring them but I was really working behind the scenes to eventually be able to remove someone as toxic as that from my life. It took a moment of uncontrolled weakness on their part but that was all I needed to really trust myself and make the change in my life.

It was not easy, like I said it caused me to immediately regress in my therapy and created a headspace where for the first time in this entire journey of mine I felt on the cusp of losing all hope. The despair that I spiraled into as a result was devastating. I could not believe that after all this time and all this work I had done, I had again been victimized by a manipulative narcissist. Not physically or sexually this time, but as I have noted before it was the worst part of it all, the emotional and mental abuse that this type of manipulation causes. I lost all trust in the abilities that I felt I was doing so well with and felt out of control and beyond overwhelmed.

This made me look to family and in particular my siblings where I knew without a doubt who I could trust. I was desperate to open up to someone and I needed someone to trust but I had just been betrayed by the person I had trusted implicitly and so I went to family and they came through. Without them taking me in, listening to me, supporting me and showing me the love that I needed, my rebound from the trauma of that betrayal would never have come so quickly.

In the end I am grateful for knowing the truth. It was a lesson learned albeit a heartbreaking and devastating truth but in the end it strengthened my trust in myself. Being able to take a retrospective look at an event like this and realize that I was identifying the red flags all along was healing in itself. Studying narcissism and manipulation has shown me where I really didn’t stand a chance to act on my instincts because I had been groomed to not trust myself specifically for this “friendship” by this person. 

Trust in damaged people is so very hard to come by and it is even harder to find once it has been broken. Therapy, work and time help move you into a chapter of your life that you will be able to control more as you continue to work, seek help and as time continues to pass. As hard as it is and as unpredictable as it can and will be, your life is worth all of the pain and struggle that it will take to get you there. Take the step, be brave and help yourself, once you do you will find the right people who will help you too.

I know that this topic is a big one and hits deep with people. I am in no way healed and I have accepted that I never will be. I have also accepted that I will never give up on the work it takes to keep getting better. I’m committed to it because I deserve it and life can be great still. If you’ve read this and it resonates, I am always available to talk, please reach out. I’m certainly not an expert but I have lived it and continue to live it and I am actively working on it, I am always here to help. Thank you for reading, One Love.

Manifestations of Childhood Trauma: Abandonment

For as long as I can remember I have had pain in my leg. The first time I broke my femur was the day after my 5th birthday. I was having my leg slowly stretched when I was nine! To me all of this was just normal. I mean I knew it wasn’t what my friends and peers were dealing with but I never thought I was different. It was just what it was. I had no idea, nor could I have, that the fact that it was so different and I was treating it as if it wasn’t was simply burying traumas that would come back to haunt me in the future. I don’t think I did anything wrong, but looking back I know I would have done things a little different.

Knowing what I know now, I probably should have been in therapy way back then just to help me process things. To help me deal with being in the hospital for extended periods of time at such a young age. To help me deal with the fact that as I was missing school, all of my friends were experiencing childhood together, building bonds that I was missing out on, experiencing little things that I wasn’t experiencing that help to mold you as you grow up.

I want to be clear, my friends at the time could not have been better. They never treated me different except when they would stand up for me when someone called me peg leg or some other stupid hurtful thing. They always stood by me, helped me when I was on crutches, let me play kick ball on crutches (I used the crutches to swing my body and I crushed that ball!) and visited me in the hospital. I’m lucky to have had them and to this day they are still some of my closest friends. If any of you are reading this, you know who you are and I’m eternally grateful for you. Thank you, I love you.

The truth is that if you are not there, you are missing out on something. So while home schooling as I recovered from surgeries kept my curriculum up, my growth into adolescence and my maturity arc were severely stunted. This has been clear as I have grown up, it subjected me to a predator and has led to the failure of all of my relationships to date.

You feel alone a lot when you have to stay in the hospital. Your friends and family can visit and stay as long as possible but they all have lives that must be lived and the truth is that most if not all nights are spent alone with only the occasional check in from the on duty nurses. You get used to it to a certain point but that is out of necessity more than anything else. When you are five years old or nine years old or even fourteen years old you deal with it, but deep down it is damaging.

Even though you understand the situation and you understand that people have to leave, it manifests as abandonment. It creates a fear deep in your mind that even the people closest to you will leave and you will be alone. It subconsciously builds a wall against abandonment by keeping people at bay as you grow up. It makes you not willing to fully open up and let people in because of the fear that they will leave.

This is not something that you realize is happening. You don’t purposely decide to keep people away, you don’t choose loneliness over companionship or friendship or even love. What is happening is a subconscious trigger to protect yourself and until you understand that’s what’s happening, you can never tear that wall down.

The wall is necessary and it took me years of therapy to understand that. The wall is your mind taking the extreme route to do in general what you never learned to do selectively. Your subconscious knows that you don’t have the emotional tools that you need so it does it for you, only it does not delineate the good from the bad. It just blocks out any possibility of true intimacy because you can’t apply proper boundaries. This protects you from abandonment but at the cost of all of the great and powerful and fulfilling human interactions that most people enjoy.

This just isolates you more and continues to stunt your growth as a person even as you grow into an adult. We are all always learning how to live regardless of our age and unless you learn how to set boundaries and use the tools available to you, you will continue to live a life with a maturity level far below your actually age and a normal level of understanding of how to trust the right people and protect yourself from the wrong ones.

Even as I write this I am learning from it. This is a journey that will probably never end but I’m ok with that. For the first time in my life I am in control. I own what I do, who I see, where I go and who I let in. At first it’s hard because it’s new but it is becoming just a part of me, and that is exciting. That is hope after so many years wondering if hope actually exists. Boundaries are the key, learning how to set them and then stand by them is more empowering than anything I have ever done.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this. I want to reiterate that if any of what I talk about resonates in you and you want to talk about it, reach out to me. This is not only my journey but it is my path. I believe wholeheartedly that I am meant to help others through my struggles and pain. I’m here for you. One Love.

Why I Struggle Part 2: Ollier’s Disease

This is me at 9 years old at Kaiser in San Francisco. It shows the dual devices attached to my leg that were used to lengthen my leg slowly over six weeks.

I am very aware that there are people in this world with bigger problems in their lives than what I have. People who struggle mightily with the aftermath of unspeakable abuses and devastating diseases. As an empath I feel deeply for them and I truly hope that using my love for writing and detailing the intimacies of my life will allow me to help others who aren’t as fortunate as I am to have an outlet for their pain and suffering.

So far I have talked a lot about the aftermath of the sexual abuse I suffered as a teenager at the hands of a Catholic priest. While that is, I believe, the main driver of my life going off the rails, there has been another constant struggle in my life from day one.

If you know me, you know about the bone disease that I have, enchondromatosis (Ollier’s Disease). If you are close to me you know how hard it is to deal with every single day. How much brain power goes in to dealing with the constant physical pain and the mental anguish that comes from my body failing me as I get older.

In this series of posts I am going to lay it all out there. What the disease is, how deeply it affects me every day in my professional and personal life and how the hopelessness that comes with it makes it so much more difficult to handle the deep issues from the clergy abuse.

First, I feel it is important to describe the disease and how it has and still does affect my life. In subsequent posts I’ll dive deeper into the long term, less obvious ways the disease has affected my life past just the physical challenges.

The technical definition of Enchondromatosis is:

“A rare disorder that causes benign (not cancer) growths of cartilage in the bones. These growths usually occur in the bones of the hands and feet, but they may also occur in the skull, ribs, and spine. They may cause bones to break, to be deformed, or to be shorter than normal. People with enchondromatosis have an increased risk of developing certain types of cancer, including chondrosarcoma (cancer that forms in bone cartilage) and cancers of the ovary or liver. Enchondromatosis is most common in children and young adults. Also called Ollier disease.”

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/enchondromatosis

Here is a brief run down of the milestones I have faced from this disease in my life. When I was five years old I broke my left femur by simply running around in my backyard. There was no trauma, nothing out of the ordinary happened, my femur just broke…from running. By the time I was 9 my left leg was 4 1/2 inches shorter than my right leg and I underwent a leg lengthening procedure. Both long bones in my left leg were broken surgically and two external devices were attached to the bones through 4 screws in each. Over the course of the following six weeks the knobs on the end of the external devices were turned twice a day to slowly stretch the gap between the breaks in the bones.

That entire procedure took about 5 years of surgeries to slowly remove all the screws and plates that were attached to the bone in order to strengthen it while it healed from the lengthening. As a part of this procedure growth plates were removed from the knee in my right leg in an attempt to slow the growth of that leg to let the two end up as close as possible in length once I stopped growing.

This picture shows the bowing deformation of the bone. It was fixed in surgery by by breaking the bone and re-setting it straight and using bone from my hip to fill in the gap.

Shortly after I was done with all of the surgeries from the lengthening, I broke my femur again. This time I was attacked by a dog as I was riding my bike delivering papers. I spent another six weeks in the hospital in traction.

Everything seemed to be going well after that break. There was always pain and a smaller discrepancy in leg lengths but I was able to overcome all of it and became a police officer. In early 2000 I was feeling worse pain in my left hip area than usual and so I saw a doctor for it. I was diagnosed with a large tumor and told I would need to have my hip replaced and that I was facing the reality that I may have bone cancer.

The tumor was removed without needing to replace my hip and while it was a low grade cancer, I did not require treatment past the surgery to remove it. Over the course of the next 15 years I had countless surgeries to remove similar tumors that have grown from micro-fractures in the bone just above my left ankle. To this day in that area of my leg, I have a large metal plate and seven screws holding the bone together.

I have had to really take a big step back in my physical life because of this as too much walking and or standing causes these painful micro-fractures from which the tumors grow. That area of my leg is in constant pain. If I do too much one day it is virtually impossible to walk on it for days after from the pain and I have begun using a cane when I am doing any extended walking or standing.

I have had to leave the last several jobs that I had due to my inability to meet the job descriptions requiring walking, standing, climbing, etc and I have had an impossible time finding a job that I can physically do that will pay the bills in the SF bay area.

I think I never realized how much these physical issues would and have manifested into mental problems. I think I always assumed I would get past it all and the disease would be a part of my story, not my future. I never realized how it would get worse as I got older, never even considered it.

In the coming posts about this part of my life I’ll detail how the disease stunted my maturing process and caused significant self worth problems. How the disease made me vulnerable to narcissistic predators even as an adult and how it is currently shaping my life and my relationships today.

Thanks for reading! One Love.

Why I Struggle Part 2: Enchondromatosis

This is me at 9 years old at Kaiser in San Francisco. It shows the dual devices attached to my leg that were used to lengthen my leg slowly over six weeks.

I am very aware that there are people in this world with bigger problems in their lives than what I have. People who struggle mightily with the aftermath of unspeakable abuses and devastating diseases. As an empath I feel deeply for them and I truly hope that using my love for writing and detailing the intimacies of my life will allow me to help others who aren’t as fortunate as I am to have an outlet for their pain and suffering.

So far I have talked a lot about the aftermath of the sexual abuse I suffered as a teenager at the hands of a Catholic priest. While that is, I believe, the main driver of my life going off the rails, there has been another constant struggle in my life from day one.

If you know me, you know about the bone disease that I have, enchondromatosis (Ollier’s Disease). If you are close to me you know how hard it is to deal with every single day. How much brain power goes in to dealing with the constant physical pain and the mental anguish that comes from my body failing me as I get older.

In this series of posts I am going to lay it all out there. What the disease is, how deeply it affects me every day in my professional and personal life and how the hopelessness that comes with it makes it so much more difficult to handle the deep issues from the clergy abuse.

First, I feel it is important to describe the disease and how it has and still does affect my life. In subsequent posts I’ll dive deeper into the long term, less obvious ways the disease has affected my life past just the physical challenges.

The technical definition of Enchondromatosis is: “A rare disorder that causes benign (not cancer) growths of cartilage in the bones. These growths usually occur in the bones of the hands and feet, but they may also occur in the skull, ribs, and spine. They may cause bones to break, to be deformed, or to be shorter than normal. People with enchondromatosis have an increased risk of developing certain types of cancer, including chondrosarcoma (cancer that forms in bone cartilage) and cancers of the ovary or liver. Enchondromatosis is most common in children and young adults. Also called Ollier disease.”

https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/enchondromatosis

Here is a brief run down of the milestones I have faced from this disease in my life. When I was five years old I broke my left femur by simply running around in my backyard. There was no trauma, nothing out of the ordinary happened, my femur just broke…from running. By the time I was 9 my left leg was 4 1/2 inches shorter than my right leg and I underwent a leg lengthening procedure. Both long bones in my left leg were broken surgically and two external devices were attached to the bones through 4 screws in each. Over the course of the following six weeks the knobs on the end of the external devices were turned twice a day to slowly stretch the gap between the breaks in the bones.

That entire procedure took about 5 years of surgeries to slowly remove all the screws and plates that were attached to the bone in order to strengthen it while it healed from the lengthening. As a part of this procedure growth plates were removed from the knee in my right leg in an attempt to slow the growth of that leg to let the two end up as close as possible in length once I stopped growing.

This picture shows the bowing deformation of the bone. It was fixed in surgery by by breaking the bone and re-setting it straight and using bone from my hip to fill in the gap.

Shortly after I was done with all of the surgeries from the lengthening, I broke my femur again. This time I was attacked by a dog as I was riding my bike delivering papers. I spent another six weeks in the hospital in traction.

Everything seemed to be going well after that break. There was always pain and a smaller discrepancy in leg lengths but I was able to overcome all of it and became a police officer. In early 2000 I was feeling worse pain in my left hip area than usual and so I saw a doctor for it. I was diagnosed with a large tumor and told I would need to have my hip replaced and that I was facing the reality that I may have bone cancer.

The tumor was removed without needing to replace my hip and while it was a low grade cancer, I did not require treatment past the surgery to remove it. Over the course of the next 15 years I had countless surgeries to remove similar tumors that have grown from micro-fractures in the bone just above my left ankle. To this day in that area of my leg, I have a large metal plate and seven screws holding the bone together.

I have had to really take a big step back in my physical life because of this as too much walking and or standing causes these painful micro-fractures from which the tumors grow. That area of my leg is in constant pain. If I do too much one day it is virtually impossible to walk on it for days after from the pain and I have begun using a cane when I am doing any extended walking or standing.

I have had to leave the last several jobs that I had due to my inability to meet the job descriptions requiring walking, standing, climbing, etc and I have had an impossible time finding a job that I can physically do that will pay the bills in the SF bay area.

I think I never realized how much these physical issues would and have manifested into mental problems. I think I always assumed I would get past it all and the disease would be a part of my story, not my future. I never realized how it would get worse as I got older, never even considered it.

In the coming posts about this part of my life I’ll detail how the disease stunted my maturing process and caused significant self worth problems. How the disease made me vulnerable to narcissistic predators even as an adult and how it is currently shaping my life and my relationships today.

Thanks for reading! One Love.

Manifestations of Abuse: Instant Gratification, Foreshortened Future

This post will explore an issue that has been inherently problematic for me, instant gratification or foreshortened future. For the longest time I did not know that this was a result of PTSD, I thought it tied to the immaturity that I struggle with but foreshortened future is common in PTSD and people with mental health challenges.

This is such a strange part of my struggles. For as long as I can remember I have wondered why I have never held a job longer than five years or had a relationship last more than five years (my marriage did, technically, but I had already failed in it long before we broke up). I used to reflect on these facts and try to understand why it was. Try to figure out why some people could hold a job for decades but right around year three I was always feeling the need to move on.

That need to move on was not out of boredom or a need to challenge myself. I always started to feel like my time was running out. I felt like I was a fraud and sooner or later my employer would realize it and I wouldn’t be able to live up to the expectations so I preempted it and moved on.

I distinctly remember thinking that at a new job the expectations were very low at first. I would have to train for months before I was expected to take on the role by myself and even then there would be a long learning curve. It would be at least a couple of years before the statistics year over year would reflect my actual effectiveness. It was always around year three when I felt like the expectations had sunk in and there was no way I would be able to meet them. I felt like I was faking it and that feeling would become overwhelming.

In relationships and friendships it was similar. In the beginning everything is new and exciting and happy but could I sustain that long term? I would fail them, there was no doubt in my mind. I would self sabotage or crawl into a hole and hide from the responsibilities, ruining what I had. To me this was so much worse than the issues with jobs, this was another person and I was going to hurt them, it always felt inevitable.

The relationship part is sad to me. I enjoy people and I love to experience life with people. I just haven’t trusted myself to be good to people long term. It’s like today I know I can but tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? The longer the time frame, the more overwhelmed I would become and I would withdraw.

I know this has hurt people and I am in the process of coming to terms with that. I care deeply about people and never want to hurt anyone and so it has been a hard pill for me to swallow but a necessary one. I can’t make real changes in my behavior unless I am willing to accept the darkest parts of myself. That is the only way to learn how to change them.

Knowing all of this today is great, I feel like there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Knowing where to focus therapy and self work is very important but even as I sit here writing this I can’t think long term, it is still overwhelming. I’m focusing on making good decisions daily that will lead to longer term commitments and eventually open up the future for me.

It all sounds very immature and in a simplistic view it is. But once I found out that foreshortened future is a thing, it really started to bring my struggles in this area into focus. It is a lack of trust that people will stick around. A lack of belief in my ability to sustain who I truly am as if I have to work to be myself. A belief that the world holds no future for me or anyone else. A lack of ability to see that there is happiness out there, that there is good out there.

There are many other aspects of foreshortened future that I have experienced. Distrust, unpredictability, lack of motivation, altered perception of the passage of time to name a few. I intend to dive in to them more deeply in future posts instead of inundating you with them all in this one post.

For now, I thank you for reading as always and encourage you to reach out to me if you can relate to any of these topics that I write about. I am here for any and all of you. One Love.