LIZA'S STORY: "MY LIFE WAS SAVED BY A STRAY CAT..."

“My life was saved by a stray cat my mum and I saved from the streets...

I have survived every aspect of childhood abuse that began at a very early age and continued for many years. It is impossible for a two-year-old to speak, let alone express and interpret adult emotions.

Internalisation results in repression, self harming and feelings of self worthlessness and most commonly eating disorders that affect MEN and Women.

I have been living with Anorexia Nervosa for 20 yrs and although it did take my life in the year of 2000, I miraculously survived and through music am making a difference in peoples lives. It takes time, perseverance and emotional intelligence but it is possible to reverse these effects with a supportive network of friends, health professionals and people like ourselves who can offer support.

I have now maintained a healthy but low BMI for approximately 3-4yrs. It is similar to diabetes in the way we 'manage it day by day'. It is a miracle that I am here typing and if it weren't for the stray cat my mother and I picked up off the street, I would not be here.

Without going into graphic detail, the day I decided to end my life my cat kept running back and forth to my mother who was sitting in the loungeroom. She knew something was wrong and she found me lifeless, no pulse. I had lost all bodily functions, and she and my father dragged me to the loungeroom for the paramedics.

Mum said it was the first time she had seen my father cry. He was a very sad, mixed-up man and I have no anger towards him at all. I'm not making excuses for him but I know he didn't mean to hurt me as a child; he just didn't know how to show emotion, which is very typical in an 'eating disordered' household. It has taken 17 yrs of therapy to get to where I am today and alot of self determination and hard work.

I was on life support for a short time. Mum didn't come to see me as she knew this would be the last time after countless times of attempting to take my life. I remember waking and the Dr's telling me that I had had 3 seizures.

I am still here and although, since the death of my father in 2006, it has been very hard, I have had only two minor relapses but now have heart irregularities so need to be kinder to myself.

It is very hard when the abuse has stolen your every self-esteem. It stunts your growth in adult life. Having an eating disorder is bad enough as it stunts your social/employment life but with the abuse on top of that it is overwhelming to think about.

I have never shared part of my story publicly or the issues of Dissociative Identity Disorder as a result of major abuse. I'm taking every day as it comes right now. There are so many childhood survivors out there all over the world and if this reaches anyone of you, I hope that you are able to find some inspiration.

I too have told her that I forgive her for not protecting me from another family of perpetrators who were very sick individuals and the worst of all. She says she cannot forgive herself and she has her own issues but will never get help so in a way I feel 'responsible' for holding her up emotionally. The worst of my perpetrators has passed away from a drug overdose and the other two have been in and out of gaol. The youngest also turned up to my high school many years ago now. It was awful. He bragged about what he and his brothers had done and I was teased from the other boys in my class alot.

My ED was triggered at the age of 6 as this was the only reaction I got from my mother and I was diagnosed at 15. By not eating was the only way I could grasp my mother's attention. I learnt that this was the only way I was able to communicate with her.

The repressed anger that I experienced, which later commonly develops into some sort of self-harm, began when I was first abused at the age of two (not perpetrated by my father) I was medicated at the age of 3yrs for 'temper tantrums.' Then, at the age of 6 when my father behaved inappropriately towards me, I was put on an anti-depressant for anxiety and bed-wetting, I also had to have a brain scan for my 'changeable moods'...funnily enough, the scan showed up nothing!

All I can do at times is laugh to get through. I don't know if I have a future but am taking each day as it comes. It all seems like too much so I'm writing alot lately, hoping to get all of this negativity out of my brain.

I am also planning my first student Christmas concert for this year that the owner of the restaurant I play at has so kindly let me use as the venue! How lucky am I!!! This, in a way, is giving me a reason to keep going, living knowing I have my students depending on me for guidance.

I was saved only by a stray cat. If my mum and I hadn't saved her, she would not have been there to save me. Mysteriously, she disappeared a few years later. It makes you wonder if we really do have guardian angels...

I want to use my artistic attributes as a way of advocating the long lasting effects childhood abuse has on adult survivors, men and women.

As an artist/performer, I use art as a ‘voice’, an external instrument to express what I cannot in words. I believe we as artists with common interests can help each other and encourage each other through positive influence.

Apart from freelance photography, I am a classically-trained pianist and teacher. My students age from 5 yrs to 55 yrs; it is never too late to follow a passion. I teach to ‘Motivate, Educate and Encourage’. My students motivate me; they give me a purpose for living life to the full.

I also volunteer at various nursing homes and hostels providing musical entertainment in a therapeutic environment. Apart from performing, I have worked as piano accompanist for various seniors choirs. I have worked in musical theatre and have worked with the Nepean Bell Ensemble, an ensemble of youth and adults with intellectual disabilities.

Having worked as a volunteer in aged care I would also like to advocate the issues surrounding residents such as depression, loneliness and isolation.

Beauty is seeing the smile on the face of a resident at the nursing home who, in a catatonic dementia, clutching a doll they have had since they were 12 years old, momentarily breaks free and begins to sing when I play their favourite song, even if now and then they tell you TO SHUT UP! :)

Beauty is connecting with another person who may not get any visitors because their family and friends have passed on.

I believe you get in life what you give. Grow, follow your dreams and celebrate achievements, big and small. Become involved in your community, volunteer, believe in yourself, have faith and never give up. With our life’s experience we all have so much to offer the world".

‘Breathe to live, not to just exist’.

~ Liza”

Share |

Follow on Buzz

A NEW GIRL GUIDE BADGE FOR SELF-ESTEEM? HAS GUIDING GONE MAD?

Darrin Klimek/Getty Images

As I was reading The Globe and Mail this morning, I came across an article written by the very talented Margaret Wente. Entitled "Not every girl can be a Winner," I was dumbstruck that the Girl Guides now have a self-esteem badge. Say what?

In my youth, I spent years as a member of Brownies and Girl Guides. I traipsed through the woods with the rest of the pack, trying to light fires by rubbing two sticks together in the pouring rain, suffering cuts and scratches and burns from campfires, getting lost in the wood (still can't figure out how a compass works), near-drowning in canoes on choppy lakes, and learning how to do the sheep shank and the round-turn-and-two-half-hitches knots.

Summers were spent at Girl Guide Camp building lean-tos and roughing it in the woods. It was a rough-and-tumble life and I loved every minute of it. Nary was a mention made of my having to study up to earn a self-esteem badge.

I'm sure Lady Baden Powell is rolling over in her grave over this latest development.

Here is Margaret Wente's excellent take on this:

"THE SELF-ESTEEM MOVEMENT"

"Not every girl can be a winner"

"I thought Girl Guides was about doing stuff. I don't remember being encouraged to love myself"

MARGARET WENTE

"What's the best way to build self-esteem among adolescent girls? The Girl Guides think they know. They're adding a new self-esteem badge! Girls will earn it by participating in something called the Love Yourself Challenge, which involves things like group discussions about how much they hate their bodies, and why it's bad to stick your finger down your throat. Girls who meet the challenge will get a crest that depicts a thick body, a thin body and an average body, plus a heart, which is there to remind you to love yourself.

Funny, but I thought Girl Guides was about doing stuff. I thought it was about summer camp and canoeing, swimming across the lake, tying knots, building fires in the rain, pitching tents and learning how to apply a tourniquet in case someone is bleeding to death. I don't remember anything about being encouraged to love myself.

But times have changed, I guess. Today, the low self-esteem of adolescent girls is a veritable industry. To be sure, it's a vile time of life - much harder than it is for boys, and even more awful for girls today than it was when I was that age. By the time a girl is 12, she's been saturated by media images of artificial feminine perfection. She's obsessively self-conscious. Her body and her emotions are completely out of control. She needs and wants to conform socially, to be like her peers, and she's convinced she doesn't measure up. Is she pretty? Is she cool? Is she wearing the right clothes? Suddenly she finds herself in a world of relentless social and sexual comparisons.

Still, it wasn't all that easy way back when. I remember studying myself in a mirror for hours at a time, wondering if anyone could possibly call me pretty. Mostly I concluded no. I was chunky and felt hideously awkward. My girlfriends and I all loathed ourselves, even though many of us were kind, beautiful and brilliant. Today, all of us would be prime candidates for eating disorders. Thankfully, they were not epidemic then. Because they didn't have a name and nobody discussed them, we weren't aware that it was possible to have one. (A few of us did anyway.)

There are many, many explanations for the low self-esteem of adolescent girls, which range from the toxic media culture to the subtle "silencing" of residual sexism. Personally, I think a lot of it is hormones. Girls go nuts, just as boys do, only in different ways, until their hormones settle down.

One thing I know for sure, though. The self-esteem movement is a crock.

Much of the modern self-esteem enterprise - which basically consists of telling every kid how fabulous she or he is - is completely hollow. We go to absurd lengths to turn every kid into a winner. One 10-year-old I know is thrilled because she won a High Silver at a dance competition last week. That sounded great - until I learned that above High Silver comes Gold, and then High Gold, and then a brand-new category called Platinum. Like grades, prizes have undergone rampant inflation. The idea is to make everyone feel special, whether they are or not.

Does this work? Well, no, not really. For a long time, people thought that kids who felt good about themselves would get higher grades. They don't. They only feel entitled to them. Nor do they commit fewer crimes, smoke less, do less drugs, or have less of what we might call inappropriate sex. In fact, it tends to work the other way around. Getting better grades improves your self-esteem. We also think that bullies have low self-esteem, but it isn't so. Their self-esteem tends to be very high.

Even though girls now outperform boys in school, efforts to improve the self-esteem of girls have been especially strenuous. These efforts tend to feature inauthentic praise, easy tasks, solely positive feedback, and other "schools without failure" gambits. All of that can backfire badly. One day those girls will be exposed to reality. That can be a nasty shock - especially if they have never been allowed to fail, or asked to do something really hard. They won't have the emotional persistence or fortitude to deal with it.

Boys, at least, get some lessons in resilience and persistence on the playing field. They learn to suck it up and be a man. Girls could use some more of that. (Just as boys could use more sensitivity to other people.) Instead, we give them structured, easy tasks and go out of our way to make them feel good. All this reinforces their adolescent tendency to act helpless, instead of competent. And then we wonder why they don't feel more empowered.

Among the biggest critics of the self-esteem movement is cognitive psychologist Martin Seligman. "We now think we should inject self-esteem directly into our young people, as opposed to producing warranted self-esteem, which I believe comes from doing well with the people you love, doing well in sports, doing well in school," he said. In his view, self-esteem exercises are a menace to society.

In some cultures, especially Asian ones, high self-regard is thought to be a flaw, not a virtue. Our culture used to believe that too. We used to call such people "conceited" or "full of themselves." One problem is that they have trouble seeing the world around them as it really is. They imagine that other people share their high opinion of themselves, even when other people think they're jerks. "People who have elevated or inflated views of themselves tend to alienate others," wrote social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who used to believe in the importance of instilling self-esteem, until he reviewed all the research.

The irony is that the Girl Guides themselves invented the best way to empower girls. Challenge them, build their competencies and give them the experience of authentic accomplishment. Take them away from the boys, so that they don't have to be obsessed with how they look, or whether some boy likes them.

"They need to learn the dedication you need to struggle through something," says Jessie Barrie, a remarkable young Canadian who is the director of experiential education at a top school in the United States. She has seen adolescent girls transformed by three-week wilderness trips. "It's essential with girls that you put them in a situation that truly does challenge," she says. "On the first day, they completely believe they can't do it. But slowly you give them the tools and building blocks, and they do." They get cold and wet and sore. They survive for 21 days without a shower and no makeup or clean clothes.

"The social playing field is levelled, because all of them are dirty and they all have greasy hair, and they all have to depend on the group to get through. It doesn't matter if the cool girl and the dorky girl are in the same group," she says. "They know for certain they've accomplished all this by themselves. And the next time they face adversity, they'll remember when something seemed impossible, and they succeeded."

I know that feeling. I was 12, at Girl Scout camp, on my first overnight canoe trip. We found a campsite and pitched our tents, and then the rain came down. It was torrential. We were soaked to the skin. But there was no wimping out. We built a giant fire in the rain and cooked a giant pizza over it, all by ourselves. Age 12 was the worst year of my life. But that night, I was completely happy."


Bravo, Margaret.


Link:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090502.COWENT02ART2013/TPStory/TPComment/?query=

Share |

Follow on Buzz