Entries Tagged 'Victims & Dangers' ↓

I’ve been missing in action on The Girl Revolution for a while.

I’ve been struggling fiercely, to be quite honest. For months now, I’ve been fighting feelings of failure and despair. Fighting the idea that I should just give up on this losing venture – The Girl Revolution. I realize it’s all a matter of perception – that this venture is a failure. It has cost me a lot of money, even a great deal of relationship capital as I poured my time and energy into a project that doesn’t pay off at the expense of earning an income doing something different.

With the lack of Success of TGR Body, the venture I had hoped would bring the blog into the realm of a profitable venture, it has increased my feelings of failure. I poured money into TGR Body thinking it would pay off. It hasn’t.

My marriage has gone through a recent struggle, my doing, that thankfully has passed. But, the anxiety and trauma of the rough patch lingers for me.

I’ve been diagnosed with peri-menopause and my hormones are trashed out. It is amazing to me that every woman on the planet goes through this phase without killing herself.

I’ve spent more of my time doing paying work and my freelance writing career is definitely alive in Colorado where it was dead in Texas. I’m enjoying the work, but the days are so very long and the work is sporadic. The kids are at home all day, but completely independent. My husband is focused on his to-do list. Most days I count down the hours until I get to slip into an unconscious sleep.

I fear terribly the day I’ve looked forward to for five years – the youngest will be in Kindergarten. If I am lonely now and the days are long now, how alone will I be when the kids are at school all day, the husband is at work all day?

I feel maybe I should get a full-time job, but I’m applying with no offers. Also, I can’t think of anything more terrifying than to get a full-time job in this state of depression and anxiety.

Anxiety and depression have taken over my life – again – and I struggle to find the right doctor, the right talk therapy, the right alternative therapy. I have gone to M.D.s for depression and anxiety medication and they have tried this and that pill. Some made me far worse, leading to the diagnosis of Bi-Polar disorder. I’m on day two of Seroquel XR, which thankfully is bringing me out of a downright painful manic phase. I’ve gone to therapists for EMDR, a rapid eye movement technique designed to take away the sting of past traumatic events that impact my life right now. The therapist had such a terrible demeanor – abrupt and frankly, rude – I felt like I was paying someone to be as mean as I was to myself. I have tried acupuncture and talk therapy, I found a therapist who does both. My favorite treatment has been Neuro-Emotional Technique or NET, in which I have a physical way to rid myself of the negative, heavy energy tied to past traumatic emotional events that are impacting my feelings and perceptions today.

It occurs to me that I began to feel really, really, really bad when I decided to abandon The Girl Revolution. Four-and-a-half years is a long time to devote one’s self to a venture that isn’t turning out the way I had hoped. Is it delusional to think that this blog matters? For a few months it has appeared so. Yet, the more I abandon it, the more I think of it as a failure I’m going to walk away from, the more I think I must have a different purpose – the more depressed and anxious I have become.

PURPOSE. That’s what The Girl Revolution has meant to my life. I started it to pull myself out of deep depression. What do I want to live for? What will give my life purpose and meaning? I had asked myself. If I could make things a little bit better for girls, I could live for that, I told myself.

And it worked. I devoted my time and energy to it as if I could single-handedly change the world for girls. I had unrealistically high expectations. Life Changing words for the people who would read them. A better, more equitable and respectful childhood and future for girls. It’s definitely something worth fighting for. But I also had unrealistic expectations that are egoic in nature – Best Selling Books, Agents, Income.

I’m so worn out from the tremendous anxiety and depression of the last six months that I’m willing to consider the idea that The Girl Revolution is still my purpose and to surrender my expectations of it.

Perhaps, this website never was for other girls. Perhaps God gave it to me because I needed a purpose like I need water and air. Without it I will die. I will just give up all hope and faith and love.

Please, if you’re out there and my words have helped you along the way at some point – PRAY for me to find a way out of the anxiety and depression that has engulfed me.

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Spring Break will be descending on the world over the next few weeks.

It’s made me think of this one time, when I was in college, my friend and I decided to go “car camping” at Yuba Lake. We threw some beer and hot dogs in a cooler, packed our bikinis and threw some blankets and pillows in the back of my Yugo.

We were having a good time. All sorts of adolescent and young adult adrenaline was pumping around the lake. Girls, ourselves included, were taking bikini-clad strolls up and down the waterline, fishing for a little attention. The collective blood alcohol level was rising. I’m sure there were other drugs – marijuana, methamphetamine – being passed around.

We jumped over huge bonfires at a neighboring camp. It was thrilling and intoxicating really.

As dark descended over the lake though, I started feeling what I can only describe as a “rape vibe.” Now, people often have sex, hook up, make out and generally become more uninhibited than they normally would during spring break. It is practically the whole point, isn’t it?

This time, though, I didn’t get a “maybe I’ll find The One here” vibe. I didn’t get a “throw caution to the wind because this is a safe place,” vibe. I got a “rape vibe.”

My girlfriend and I listened to this vibe. This is the important part of this post. We felt it. We acknowledged it, to ourselves and each other. We got in the car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked and hid under the covers – essentially, we played dead.

A couple of times some guys came and tried to rouse us by banging on the windows. Assuming we were passed out, they soon moved on for easier targets.

The next morning we packed up and left early.

If I recall correctly, the next day the news said there were three rapes at Yuba Lake that night.

Here’s what you need to know, and what you need to tell your daughters, about rapes in crowded, inebriated social situations.

1. None of the girls at that lake caused those rapes. The men who chose to rape those girls caused those rapes. The responsibility lies with those boys only. (If girls and women could control men’s actions I think we’d actually choose the other option: no rape of anyone ever.)

2. Every girl and woman has a built in “rape vibe” detector. Its part of our innate system, as females, because we need it. Tune into it. Believe it. Listen to it. Don’t question its validity or talk yourself out of it. Just, believe it and follow your own survival instinct.

Tell your daughter about her “rape vibe” detector and tell her how to use it. Tell her your own experiences with it, so she will know to trust hers.

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Life Lesson #1 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel.

Life Lesson #10 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Neither does Teacher.

Life Lesson #123 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Neither does Mom.

Life Lesson #563 through #1,010 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Period.

Until you really, really understand this lesson, you’ll keep learning it into eternity. If you’re emotionally bright, you might really get it and get to start learning something else after your second marriage in your late 30s. (Wait, that’s just me.) If your daughter is really, really emotionally bright, she might actually get it in the 3rd grade, which will spare her the painful lessons around boyfriends in her adolescent years. A mom can dream can’t she?

Bullies are there to teach us this Life Lesson:  I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel.

Happily, they are also there to teach us Life Lesson #2: I have the power to control what I do and how I feel.

If you’re alive, then you know how tricky it is to control how you feel in the face of a 3rd grade pack of girls who are screaming and running away from you every time you look in their direction. Still, it’s a prime opportunity to learn these lessons. Without this experience, a person might walk around for 50 more years believing they can control other people’s feelings by changing their own behavior and frankly, that’s the recipe for every abusive relationship ever experienced by any woman.

In other words: while it sucks to watch and you really want to stop it, as a parent, you really, really want to help your kid learn this lesson ASAP with the 3rd grade Mean Girls. Before the lesson becomes a battering boyfriend or a manipulative adolescent pressuring her to have sex. You really, really want her to fully grasp Lesson #27:  I have the Power to control what I do and how I feel.

So that if that guy shows up , she already knows “he’s lying when he says he will love me IF I have sex with him,” because she already has learned, “I can not control how another person behaves or how he feels. So if he doesn’t love me now, he won’t love me then.”

So, rather than telling your kid you’ll figure out a way to stop the bullying, drill this into their heads: Honey, you can’t control how another person acts or how they feel. You just don’t have that power and neither do I. What you can control is how you react to their behavior and how you feel. You could let yourself feel bad about this, or you could decide that you only want loyal and kind friends, and these kids obviously don’t know how to do that yet. You could chase them and try to make them like you, but that will likely make them meaner. You could just ignore them, and that will likely make it less interesting for them. You can only control how you let this effect you. You don’t have to let it make you unhappy.

More tomorrow.

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On Wendsday I tuned in to a Twitter Chat sponsored by @parentella on bullying, girl bullying specifically. Ainsley’s having a rough year. She’s being “shut out” by all the other girls. It’s been going on for a couple of months now.

I’ve asked hundreds of grown women and younger girls about “girl bullying” and while everyone thinks this is a horrible and terrible thing to experience and someone should do something to stop it right now, before more girls get hurt, I have yet to meet a single woman or girl who has said, “that happened to me and here’s how I stopped it.”

The consensus appears to be that there really isn’t an effective way to stop it. Not as a whole. Not as a broad social problem. I, certainly, have never experienced an effective way to stop it. I’ve never met a teacher, principal, parent or girl who has had a simple formula to stop this distinctly feminine social hell.

Ainsley’s school does everything one might think would work, there are workshops about bullying, classroom discussions, “no tolerance” pledges taken by students, a “girls lunch” where the teacher keeps the girls in the classroom to have an open discussion about what kinds of bullying or annoying and hurtful behaviors are going on. On paper this works. In reality, it appears to have little effect. Or maybe it does – maybe things would be 100 times worse without these efforts.

I often hear women say, “then you meet these girls’ mothers and you realize where they got it.” While this appears logical, I have to question the theory because I have yet to meet the woman who has said, “oh, I never experienced anything like girl bullying in my life.” They ALL say, “yeah that happened to me in 3rd grade or in my senior year or at my first job.” Which means that it is so profoundly widespread that one would have to assume that all mothers across all cultures, tribes, ethnicities and religious belief systems essentially suck or have a tendancy toward meanness and actively teach this to their children.

No, I’m positive that the parents of many bullies are nice people, or have learned to become nicer people at least.

Which leads me to another questioning of bully assumptions: that bullying is learned behavior.

I question this because if you hang out with a room full of two-year-olds they are all selfish, bullying little monsters. Every last one of them is a terrible friend. They bite, they steal toys, they punch, they jocky for position at games, insist that they are always right, thrive on praise for being the best at even the littlest thing, can’t take the slightest competition or criticism at all, demand that everyone bow to their whims and if they don’t they will use manipulative methods like tantrums and screaming fits to get their way.

It’s the people around them who teach them how to be good friends, get along with others, share and cooperate. The adults around them are motivated by not wanting their two-year-old to be a social outcast for such deplorable behavior. They are also motivated by not wanting the other parents to shun them for raising such an A-hole.

Based on this, I believe it is friendship that is the learned behavior. Kindness toward the weird, different, better, worse, annoying human is the learned behavior.

My theory, and please test this and let me know if you come to a different conclusion, is that girls have no idea what they are doing socially and they are kind of bad at it, until they get better at it. The girls who stay bad at it account for the frequent comment, “God, adult women are even worse,” which is something I hear many adult women say about their coworkers and sisters-in-law.

Sometimes it takes a parent, teacher, principal or counselor saying, “You’re being awful and no one is going to want to hang out with you if you keep acting like this.” On both ends. Maybe, the pack of girls is annoyed by a particular trait – bragging, bossiness, whining, crying, secret violating – that is making it feel really, really good to be mean to her. This trait, right or wrong, will likely always lead to social danger unless the entire scope of culture changes, which isn’t likely to happen quickly, at least not while she’s still in the 3rd grade. Maybe it’s motivated by pure unadulterated jealousy – a natural human emotion that takes conscious effort to overcome. You know, like the time I recieved a press release about a book being published by a college senior, who had already scored better writing credits than I have in 15 years of diligence and brilliance and the subject of her book was how F#$% hard it is to be so F#$%& PERFECT. I steamed in pure jealousy for days and never did that book review, even though it might have been applicable to The Girl Revolution.

My conclusion is that we all have a little bit of Mean Girl in us, and we all have the capacity and the responsibility to overcome it.

Later, I’ll give you ways to help you daughter develop a core self that can withstand her turn in the Mean Girl Firing Range. Ways to instill a deep sense of self that won’t crumble in the face of girl bullying. As a parent, you don’t have the power to stop girl bullying in all its forms. But, you do have the power to help your daughter navigate it, stand up to it and insulate herself from it.

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This post, On Silence and Taboo, was originally posted by Melissa Wardy at PigTail Pals. I’ve cross-posted it with her permission. Be sure to become her Facebook Fan, follow her on Twitter, buy an empowering t-shirt from her for a special girl in your life.

Taboo: (n) A strong social prohibition or ban relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and forbidden based on moral judgment.

Pedophile: (n) A person, 16 years or older, with a primary or exclusive sexual interest in prepubescent children (usually 13 years or younger).

Fester: (v) To putrify, rot, or decay over a period of time.

Silence: (n) Relative or total lack of audible sound.

As by now you have heard, a firestorm erupted on Twitter yesterday when two bloggers sent a tweet about a book for sale at the major retailing website of Amazon.com. I clicked the link and there it was: a manual for pedophiles on how to groom, molest, and rape children. It was not a memoir or psychologist’s explanation, it was a how-to manual, an instruction booklet on how to rape children. Rape. Children. Sex with children is always illegal, it is always rape. This, for sale on one of the largest, most accessible retail websites in the world. Mainstream. I tasted bile. I taste bile as I type now.

I was an intern at the District Attorney’s office and later in several law enforcement and investigative offices during my collegiate years. Right after college I worked as an investigator at a PI firm, and spent most of my time hanging out at the Sheriff’s department trying my hand at cold cases, mostly homicides. With that background, I have been exposed to the nasty, damaging world of pedophilia. I’ve seen a lot of stuff I wish I could unsee. Unlearn.

Yesterday morning I wasn’t shocked that a manual existed, as I’ve known for years that pedophiles consider their predilections to be a hobby of sorts, and love to share secrets and tricks with each other on how to evade law enforcement, groom victims, perform certain sex acts with little physical evidence left behind, how to get away with certain things to fall into a lighter sentencing catergory should one get caught, etc. It is a lifestyle built on lies, manipulations, deception. I’ve seen documents like this before. In order to survive pedophiles fly under the radar and keep their conduct to closed, derelict communities of acceptance.

Yesterday morning I was shocked that the manual would be so mainstream. We ALL should have been shocked it was so mainstream. The book’s right to be there was being defended. It wasn’t a legal issue of free speech or child pornography, it was an issue of business standards. Amazon is a privately owned entity and under no obligation to carry, sell, or protect this writing. But Amazon let the book stand. Amazon made the statement that the instructional manual of child rape was not found to be so heinous that it warranted immediate removal and a public apology. The presence of the book said that the taboo is sliding, that the concept of child rape has a place in our society.

Amazon should have standards that state that any materials propagating or supporting the molestation and rape of young children is prohibited and has no place on their site or in our society.

Pedophilia must remain taboo, and considered unacceptable in every form, in every circumstance. There is never a time when it is permissible for an adult to have any type of sexual relation with a child.

Parents and others spoke out, loudly, some in rage, some in shock, over this book being available on a site they used and trusted for their families. I spoke out loudly. I spoke about it all day long. I called authorities and media to alert them to the book and the story. I informed my parent community and that of others to rally parents, to collectively say “NO WAY we will let this stand.” My community, my parents around Pigtail Pals made phone calls, placed emails and follow up emails, they contacted and were interviewed by media, they posted the information and alerted their friends. They took action on a day when silence would not stand.

The book is now gone. But the problem is not.

The problem cannot be met with silence. For those who criticize, saying our voices attracted attention and increased sales, it did. Hopefully it also increased awareness, increased a feeling in people to take up action. People had the right to speak out against something so vile, so abhorrent that most of us became physically ill when we thought about it for too long. And hopefully those curious people, most of whom I’m willing to bet are not pedophiles, who downloaded the book into their Kindles and read as many pages as they could stomach, now have a new frame of reference to just how disgusting pedophilia is, and how unfair and damaging it is to its small victims. Amazon was concerned on protecting its customer’s purchasing rights, while most of America, and the world, was concerned over the rights of our children not to be molested or raped.

Yesterday gave marketers and retailers the message that our society will not stand for the peddling of pedophilia and profiting from the harm to the bodies of the small children we cherish.

Whether you took part in the uproar yesterday or not, the problem is not gone. Today, tomorrow, and the next day, consider an action you can take to give voice to the sexual abuse of children. Contact law makers for stricter sentencing, donate items or time to shelters, mentor youth so that there is a caring adult in their life advocating for their health and wellbeing, volunteer at a Take Back The Night, and set a standard in your own family – sexual violence toward any person at any age is unacceptable. Talk to your children about their bodies and sex, and who may and may not touch them. Give you children the voice that should they ever be approached or be touched, they be unsilent.

Today, tomorrow, and always, be unsilent.

Pedophilia festers in the silence, the taboo slides when we stay silent. BE UNSILENT.

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