Brave Enough To Be Bliss

learning about it because it implied to me that I would have intentionally passed along pain to my child. And as I hope has come across loud and clear in this book, I would have literally died for my child in any way. Bring on whatever torture and death chamber you wish, and I would have willingly walked in, even run in, if it meant I could spare her one single second of pain. In fact, I had to get up to get a tissue after writing that sentence. To be clear, what brought tears to my eyes is the last part about sparing her one single second of pain. If anyone wants to shut me down, just say anything that even remotely implies I would intend to hurt my child, even today when she is 27 years old. It is the very last thing I would ever want to do. And honestly that applies to anyone, not only my child. My heart and my soul led me to do only good and loving things, and that is why knowing the brain has its own operating system, its own way of working that I am not always aware enough of to control, allows me to look at myself and my behaviors with some bit of compassion. And when I am not hating myself for it, I can more easily offer an apology and learn from the experience to better manage in the future through continued healing work, education, etc. So, the first part of love always protects to me is similar to a Bible verse I wrote in the journal back when I started college. It is 1 Peter 4:8 (NIV), “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers a multitude of sins.” Even with my brain operating my nervous system the way it did, I had intentionally made the decision, as I mentioned back in the motherhood chapter in the first section, to do everything I could to ensure that Kylee always felt loved. I showed her that I loved her unconditionally by consistently and intentionally choosing actions and words that backed that up. Without this consistent and intentional decision and effort on a daily basis, the damage my nervous system unintentionally was doing could have been much greater. I had no knowledge of the nervous system involvement back then, but intentionally focusing on love helped protect her from the unintentional pain of my nervous system and other pains she endured as well. Certainly, if I had known then what I know now, I would have begun the healing journey BEFORE I had a child, not waited until she was so sad she wanted to die to finally figure myself out only in an effort to keep her alive. But instead of wanting her to have the healthiest mom, I wanted to try to be a perfect mom. As someone who was trying to be perfect, I could not self-reflect enough to even know how to be a better one. If I had instead wanted her to have the healthiest mom , even though I didn’t remember the rape, that was only one of the things I needed to heal from. I remembered the others; I was just too scared to face them because they were imperfect parts of me. If I had begun that healing work alone, I may have remembered the other earlier and given her the best chance for her parents to be happily married, providing her with a stable home. I would have exposed her to healthy extended family relationships even if that meant some of them couldn’t be present in her life if they were unwilling to become healthy. I would have been a better role model of a professional working mom. I would have felt confident enough to introduce her to spirituality which could have provided a firmer foundation for her to get through this hard life, and the list could go on and on. Certainly, I provided all of these things to some degree, but in my desire to be a nearly perfect parent focused on giving her everything and trying to protect her from any pain in life, I allowed fear to win and was only a fraction of what I could have been. And while I ’ m very glad she now has had six years with a healthier mom than she might have ever had if I hadn’t gotten brave enough to face the pain, she and I both deserved much more than that. “To my children, I’m sorry for the unhealed parts of me that in turn hurt you. It was never a lack of love for you. Only a lack of love for myself.” Teresa Shanti

“When a parent can’t apologize to their adult child, it’s not because they’re always right. It’s because they can’t admit when they were wrong.” Whitney Goodman

This is not coming from a place of self-hatred, in fact it’s the opposite. If reading that makes you uncomfortable, that’s an opportunity for you to self-reflect on why that is. I was the best mom I could be at the time with what I

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