Finding Peace

Deep thoughts

by Crystal Lucas

The time line of my life is marked in joys and sorrows just like everyone else’s, but I find myself going back over all these moments with a finer tooth comb than i ever did before.

I am struggling with questions I will never know the answers to. Did I ever really know the man I married and lived with?

When did the cheating really start? How many lies did he tell? How many lies did I believe?

One thing I know for certain I loved him with my whole heart. I respected him and was supportive of every job change, every move. I was supportive of his choices and he made many without even considering me. I forgave and forgave because that’s what the creator calls us to do. I honored him and loved him and chose him over and over again.

I didn’t even always choose me and my health, he came first then my kids. Never me.

Why is it that we women think that’s the right order of things? Our partner should be our equal not one above or below. Even the creator gave us instruction on the roles for husband and wife, but says he took the rib to create woman so that we were equal and that women should be protected, and cherished. He didn’t do either of these things in our marriage. More often than not he left everything on my shoulders, o hey I’m taking this new job so we have to pack and move by this date. It fell on my shoulders to prepare our children, pack a household and take care of moving all utilities or canceling subscriptions.

It’s no different now that he’s chosen an affair and new woman. He walked out left me saddled with an insurmountable task of home repairs, didn’t lift a finger to help after hurricane Florence came barreling through and decimated our town. He hasn’t seen his kids in almost 9 months. Realizing that he is not a man of integrity is shattering, and telling about his character.

I no longer am willing to put forth so much effort to make his life easier or better. He walked away. He chose his life. I’m now choosing mine.

Happiness is just around the corner for me. I can feel it building. I can feel the joy bubbling just under the surface. I am finding more moments of peace. I have tried everything to reconcile and he refuses to even talk so it’s time to move forward and teach my children that you don’t need a man to make you happy. Neither do you need a looser who cheats on you and destroys your self esteem.

If your partner isn’t bringing out the best in you and isn’t treating you as an equal please get help. Don’t wait. Don’t keep hoping for the best. If you value your partner communicate. If your partner doesn’t communicate that’s a good indicator of where they place their values. Believe their actions, not their lip service.

The more work I do on me the more I’m seeing that the amount of love I gave him was all the love I should have been giving myself. I need to love me that well and not give it away to anyone else. Nobody can complete us, they will eventually leave and if we are not whole the void they leave will be insurmountable. When we stop looking for love outside of ourselves, but rather find the light of the creator deep within we can heal old wounds, and love ourselves as the beautiful creation we are. Find your worth alone before you try to find your worth to anyone else.

Healing trauma’s

by Crystal Lucas

People everywhere face traumatic events that shape us in ways we never imagined. We each struggle with life and how to go forward. How to move on. Well meaning individuals will try to encourage you when your going through a trauma with platitudes, or positive thinking.

How often do you hear someone say things like ” you will get over it” or “you are strong,you will survive this too” or even worse to me is “God never gives you more than you can bear”?

This can often leave someone feeling as if their emotions surrounding a situation are invalid. It takes away the power of healing the trauma by feeling the emotions you feel. Each emotion is important. How we learn to cope with our trauma changes who we are meant to be as a whole person. It’s hard to sit with big emotions, be vulnerable and open.

Childhood trauma’s are something that shapes us in ways that we often don’t see until well after the fact.

For me personally I am learning how my childhood trauma’s caused me to shut down, retreat from those I loved when I felt they didn’t want me. I closed my heart and pulled away physically as well. But I am also a nurturer by nature and so I would do other things thinking that it would relay my message of love and convince them how deeply I loved them. Caring for them, cooking for them, doing things to make their lives easier. I often ignored my own pain or didn’t recognize my own hurts. I didn’t realize how my limiting beliefs were playing such a huge role in my life, or even that I had so many limiting beliefs.

When we ignore our pain thinking we have gotten over it or moved on we have not really healed, but we have mastered coping skills. Until those coping skills don’t work anymore. One day you discover how broken you feel.

Something we don’t fully understand is that all trauma changes our brain, not just our psychology but also our physiological brain and how we process even normal events in our lives. Childhood trauma causes cortisol to be released into the brain, this response causes the brain development to be delayed. When trauma happens as a child we don’t know how to heal the past hurts, or the beliefs we form from those responses. It is through our current life experience that we can come to understand that our past has effected us. A trauma response is often a shutting down in varios ways and it’s normal. We may never be the people we once were again but that doesn’t mean we can’t grow and learn from it.

That’s the good news!

We can grow from our traumatic events and reshape our lives. Acknowledge that your response to the trauma was normal. It’s trauma. Even years later it’s normal! You can go back and revisit trauma and heal it now. Or you can stay stuck in repeating patterns that have destroyed your life. The choice is yours.

If you are ready to step into healing and move past trauma responses let me know. I am happy to meet you where you are on this journey and offer my services to coach you.

I married a what?

by Crystal Lucas

Discovering that you are married to a narcissist is rather Earth shattering. Especially when you didn’t notice it for a long time.

That’s been my life…

The discovery still keeps rocking my world and I find myself bound in moments of grief so raw. Grief over what I thought we had vs the reality. Grief over the real love I felt and the dreams of the family we built.

Women are often the memory keepers. We build photo albums and capture the moments to be preserved. We tend to hold the memories in our hearts. But when you discover that your married to a narcissist you start to question all of these memories.

Was he always a narcissist, or did it happen gradually? When did you give over the control? When did you allow yourself to be so manipulated?

Some of these question’s wont ever be answered, and others don’t need to be. Finding peace in your heart to accept what is and move forward with healthy boundaries is a must. I still have some days where the tears fall randomly or out of the blue. I still question and I still wonder why. I am allowing myself the time and space to grieve but I am also moving forward.

As a caregiver my natural reaction is to take care of everyone else around me. I spent an entire marriage taking care of his needs above my own. I spent my days doing for everyone else and forgot that I should come first in my world and everyone else secondary. I can’t possibly take care of anyone else properly if I am not taking care of me. Getting divorced has shown me all the ways I failed to take care of me, and all the ways I allowed him to belittle me. All the little ways I wasn’t important in his world are huge red flag warnings for narcissistic behavior.

I chose to believe him and doubt my inner voice. I chose to believe every time he told me that the people he worked with didn’t like how he was affectionate with the women he worked with. How he was a hugger and he wouldn’t ever cheat on me. I chose to believe each time he came home and belittled me for not feeling well and then would go to his room and stay there for hours without having any interaction with his kids or I. I chose to believe that he just was having a hard day, or that it was stressful being a cop and he deserved time to decompress.

What I didn’t do was take stock of the facts and evaluate how these actions were all bad for me. How my health was declining because I wasn’t being supported, loved and cherished. How my stressful day at home with 4 kids several animals and the mounting weight of taking care of all household finances, running my own business, homeschooling 4 kids, planning field trips and trying to do it all on a miniscule budget was effecting every aspect of my life.  I will forever be grateful for the fact that I was able to raise my children. That they are the people they are because of all I did to raise them mostly alone because he never participated. I am now learning to balance my needs with theirs as we all go through this process. My kids have been an amazing support and I for them.

Together we are forging onward to new dreams.

The Journey Begins

by Crystal Lucas

My name is Crystal and I hope that you will join me in the telling of a tale full of woe and joy, as many good stories are. This story is my own Journey through what I thought was an average marriage, and now an average divorce.

I will share my laughter and my tears. As well as perhaps a few funny stories along the way.

In the beginning everything was as it should be, young couple deeply in love get married and start a family… Somewhere along the way we lost sight of who we were individually. I don’t even rightly know where his mask fell away and I started making excuses for his poor treatment of me. His lack of involvement with the kids, or his complete lack of communication on matters that are important in a marriage.

I went along raising my kids and doing the best I could trying to make a failing marriage work.  I ignored many of the red flags of a classic narcissist and attempted to keep life normal for my kids. We went on field trips alone and created co-op’s. The adventures we had alone, my 4 kids and I were amazing! Then I would come home and listen to verbal abuse or worse the silent treatment at night when I would come to bed.  I would internalize that it must be something I did, or worse wasn’t doing.  I see myself as a strong woman who has overcome a lot of adversity in my lifetime, I never saw myself as an abused wife. I didn’t see the mental abuse as abuse. I didn’t notice the gaslighting, or the million little ways he controlled my thinking. We always walked on egg shells trying to make sure to not set off the barrage of negative that would stream from him. The few good days in between all the bad made me believe that we were getting through and surely everyone must have hard times in a marriage.

In public and to friends and coworkers he always talked about how much he loved me, how great I was, how fantastic he thought it was that I stayed home with the kids and homeschooled them. He always talked about me to everyone else, just never to me. He didn’t want me he wanted a paper cut out puppet who did what made him look good.

I remember the first time I discovered his infidelity and I thought I must not be meeting his needs, that’s what we women are taught. If we don’t do enough for the man he will stray. It’s never about him and his insecurities or his lack of integrity, only about us and what we must not be doing for them. The truth is I went above and beyond in every aspect. I ignored my own health, the red flags and the constant decline of different areas of my body until it got to be so bad that I sought advice form my chiropractor. 8 years ago she told me I have every classic symptom of Fibromyalgia.  Fibro is a beast and there are so many different ways people suffer with this disease. I began reading. I tried to understand because at least that would give me an idea of what to expect. It made it worse. I felt bad physically and was emotionally so exhausted that I never had a moment’s peace. He did nothing to help, if I needed a massage he grudgingly would rub for a few minutes and then he would either want sex or roll over and say he was tired and was going to bed. He never attempted to lighten my load of “mom” work, or ease the daily struggle of homeschooling through the pain.

There are days I find myself angry at all I allowed in my life. I am working towards healing, towards forgiving. It’s a journey full of tears as well as new hopes and dreams, one I look forward to sharing with anyone who wants to read it.

I am learning to let go of my fears and embrace my new life. This summer I met my brother and we camped together. I was just starting on a journey that would make me feel like my old self, before fibro set in. I have had a life long fear of heights and I avoided doing things because of it. My brother helped convince me I could climb down this mountain to see this beautiful waterfall, Soco Falls. There were ropes to give you something to hold onto but the ground was slick. I was terrified but did it! I kept going. Each foot in front of the other, slowly until I was at the bottom. Standing there looking around I was in awe. I managed to climb down this mountain to see this beauty. During our camping trip we ventured to two other falls, each beautiful in their own way but none as monumental as this one.  This is my inspiration now, and the first picture on my blog is of this climb. I now know I can do anything, one step at a time and I hope to encourage you to do the same.

 

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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