UNLOCKING THE INVISIBLE CHILD

BALBOA PRESS

Contents

Introduction................................................................................xvCHAPTER 1. My Story.........................................................................1CHAPTER 2. The Medical World Through the Eyes of a Teenager.................................7CHAPTER 3. Courage to Survive...............................................................27CHAPTER 4. My First Marriage: Waking Up the Hard Way........................................47CHAPTER 5. My Hand Surgeon: Truly an Angel..................................................57CHAPTER 6. My Knight in Shining Armor.......................................................79CHAPTER 7. The Great Fall...................................................................99CHAPTER 8. Spiritual Awakening..............................................................109CHAPTER 9. Necessary Action.................................................................119CHAPTER 10. Moving On.......................................................................121CHAPTER 11. The Return of Hope..............................................................129CHAPTER 12. The Appearance of Angels In the Form of Healers.................................139CHAPTER 13. Trusting in the Universe and Its Messages.......................................153CHAPTER 14. Immersion in the Metaphysical World.............................................165CHAPTER 15. Moving Forward and Surrendering.................................................183CHAPTER 16. Living the Miracle in Virginia..................................................191CHAPTER 17. California Dreaming.............................................................207CHAPTER 18. Showing Up......................................................................215CHAPTER 19. Journey into Wholeness..........................................................223CHAPTER 20. Moving Forward Professionally/Making the Invisible Visible......................227CHAPTER 21. Becoming Visible................................................................233Afterword: The Journey Continues............................................................239Exercises...................................................................................243Acknowledgments.............................................................................247About the Author............................................................................249

Chapter One

I wanted to find the truth even if it killed me—and it almost did.

Joyful at age fifty-five, I witness how my life has completely turned around. Unable to handle the world I lived in as a young child, I had shut down. At the time, I wasn't aware of doing this, but today it is obvious that my cells heard my cry and reacted to the emotional little girl struggling to be noticed and loved. I became the product of an environment in which the message was: Children should be seen and not heard. But I was also not meant to be seen—a belief locking into place a series of traumas that eventually imprisoned me emotionally and physically.

The Lesser Child

She was the child born of hope; I was born of despair. She was my older sister. When I was conceived, my seventeen-year-old mother felt disillusioned in her marriage to my father, whose outlook on life was based on fear and defeat. At the young age of twenty, Buddy was living out a death sentence battling Hodgkin's disease. He had been in the Air Force, stationed at the nuclear testing sight in the Nevada desert, surviving in the only way he knew how: by fighting the world.

It is no wonder my birth was traumatic—two months premature and necessitating my reliance on incubator support for three weeks. I'll never know if Buddy came to hold me or reached his hands through the plastic draping around the incubator to touch me. I longed for his presence throughout my young life.

While he apparently spent most of his time in and out of veteran's hospitals, battling his terminal illness, my mother traveled between Maine, where his family resided, and Manhattan, where her mother lived. My mother, sister, and I soon moved into my grandmother's apartment in Manhattan. Nana, as I called her, was divorced and lived with her teenage son Carl, who now shared his apartment with his older sister and her two young babies. Nana Ruth, who played the role of mother, guided us through this tumultuous period in our lives, while my grandpa lived a short distance away.

My mother divorced Buddy when I was two years old and soon afterward met Saul, a dentist in the Air Force, and married him. Six months later, my mother left my sister and me behind and joined Saul in Newfoundland to set up our home. During this time, we lived with Nana until my mother returned four months later to take us to our new home on the Air Force Base in Stevensville, Newfoundland, far away from Nana and Grandpa.

Buddy died at age twenty-five, shortly after my third birthday. I have no memories of him, although I do have photographs.

My inner story was all about suffering. It came from feeling disconnected from my parents and older sister—from not being loved—a sense of isolation that later manifested itself in the form of a physical dis-ease. In addition, I suffered from the loss of my biological father, and used my bereavement to keep my sadness and emptiness alive.

The Suffering Child

Throughout my childhood and early teen years, emotional traumas took up residence in my cellular makeup, and my personality responded. At age three, for example, I announced one evening during dinner that I wanted to be a dog, and I started barking as I moved away from the table and onto the floor. My new father, finding my antics neither funny nor cute, proceeded to walk me out to our front porch. "You'll have to stay here because this is where dogs belong," he said. Years later I wondered why my mother or sister didn't come to my rescue, and why I lacked the courage to go inside, scream, or fight. Why did I just stand outside the door watching my family carry on as usual at the dinner table?

When I did start to cry, because I had to go to the bathroom, my new father said, "Dogs go to the bathroom outside." Intense fear coursed through me as I refused to suffer further embarrassment by peeing in my pants. When I was later let back into the house, my father said, "I guess you'll never want to be a dog again."

That day I lost a piece of myself to a world of grief, shame and despair. The resulting sense of separation, alienation and annihilation soon became part of my personality. Over time this primordial scene of humiliating abandonment crystallized into a feeling of being a perpetual outsider looking in. My mother, still a child herself, together with my sister and my new father, were unable to stir a sense of self-awareness within me. As such, the truth of who I was beneath the facade of my story was not revealed.

It took forty years of battling the effects of a crippling disease before I decided not to suffer anymore. "Either I heal or I'm out of here," I stated emphatically to the universe, fully believing that healing was a physical event. Very soon I realized that real healing was soul deep, cellular in nature, and that...