The Squatters And Their True Rights

A Story Of Unwanted Guests And A Touch of Bling

As you can see by my new bling, I’ve had an eventful few weeks (one could say, even a couple years) that has culminated in an ever-morphing lesson that I thought I would share with my readers with the hope that something I offer here will help you as well.

The bling you are looking at apart from my beloved gold cross, is a Holter monitor and it’s in place because I had a cardiac event that completely altered my life’s course. It had an especially strong effect because the worst of it happened next to a school bus stop full of children that I feared I might hurt had I not been able to pull safely to a stop.

You see, I’ve been goaded more often lately into listening to the voices of my past that my friend Marina has aptly dubbed “the squatters”.

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The squatters are nasty little buggers that I’ll introduce today along with the story of my bling.

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I have been gone from my work and my passion for a while and my reasons behind that are far too numerous to fully articulate here (Did you notice the name change for this newsletter though? More about that in another post) but what’s important in my story is the cumulative effect of it all and what I’m choosing to do as a result.

Today’s post is partly about the squatters but it’s about so much more. For anyone with a trauma history, you’ll already be familiar with good friends of my own squatters because you’ll recognize their signature in your own lives. For a practical explanation, the squatters are simply the voices of my past that seem to have a mission to further perpetuate the damage done to me throughout my life at the hands of evil. They’re the voices of abusers and even the voices of inner parts of myself that have taken on a parrot-like nature and found a way to mimic the damaging voices that have followed me my whole life. It’s ingenious the way it all works because while many of my abusers are long gone, my little inner parrots unwittingly do their jobs that were long ago abandoned and over the course of the last couple of years, and especially in the last couple of months, they have become torturous little buggers bent on expediting my demise.

Parrots trained to perpetuate the voices of evil

I am never one to speak unkindly about actual inner child parts however what I have little room for are the programmers of those parts who took a child, divided her into pieces through abuse, and gave some of those pieces the job of torturing the whole. For them I have contempt but for my inner children, I have a great compassion for what they endured that turned them into the parroters of evil.

Today’s message is less about walking my readers through the healing of my “parrot children” and more about the calling out of the squatters and naming them and leaving them laid bare in the light of truth. It seems wholly appropriate to execute this job since they found it appropriate to torture me into the acquisition of new bling after leaving me terrified on the side of the road.

What happened to bring me to this point began with a migraine and a subsequent 3-day headache. On the third day, I was driving to pick up my son and suddenly there was a flash of pain over my left eye and within seconds my heart began to pound in such a way that I was left breathless and confused as I fought to steady my breath and hopefully my heart’s beat. It didn’t work and as I drove ever nearer to that ill-fated child filled bus stop, I became terrified of losing control of my car and taking out real children simply waiting to go to school on an ordinary day. As I pulled safely to a stop I was flooded with a perceptual black water that came up as if from below me and enveloped my visual field and wrapped me in a watery blanket of blackness.

Blinded and with my heart beating out of my chest, all I could think was I needed to get to my son so he could call 911. I didn’t think to dial it myself as my original motherly mission was to take my son to work so in my erratic, cardiac, blackwater confusion, my thoughts were simply to do my job, get to him and then have him call.

Now, I am admittedly experienced with anxiety and with anxiety’s older sister, the panic attack. I’ve stood frozen in place, heart pounding with only a sense to run or die right there on the spot on countless occasions so I know what a panic attack looks like. What was taking place for me that day was no panic attack and at this point I’ve met with several medical professionals who can’t be pinned down to unequivocally saying that’s what happened to me. Not a one is comfortable with slapping a label on me of “garden variety panic” and so I’ve earned myself my bling for a time to see if it can capture any other heart anomalies.

What I am comfortable saying this entire “heart event” might be is the cumulative effect of the stress I have been under as I have spent months listening to the voices of my past tell me:

• “You aren’t real family.”

• “You brought this on yourself.”

• “You’re not worthy of love.”

• “We don’t love you or value you in any meaningful way.”

• “You are a failure.”

• “We love watching you fall.”

• “There’s nothing you can do to control what’s happening.”

• “You’re worthless.”

• “You’re not worthy to walk this earth.”

• “If you don’t do what we want, then you will pay.”

Those, my reader, are the squatters.

Well, some of them anyway.

I told you they are nasty little buggers and I wasn’t kidding and it’s those nasty little buggers that spoke long enough and at a steady, menacing drone throughout the last couple of years to finally convince me that I was powerless and worthless. Then, after a re-emergence of a chronic family illness that happened just weeks before the acquisition of my bling and that finally pushed me over the edge, my heart metaphorically collapsed under the weight of my past and its seemingly dying breaths took place as I approached a bus stop full of children acting, in my opinion, as

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a clarion call to once and for all finally pay attention to myself and not the voices of my past.

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I say this in this way because I believe God brought me to the point at which I nearly crashed into a bunch of children to wake me up to the idea that I have stopped paying attention to the healing of my own inner children in favor of listening to the squatters. The real children at the bus stop were never in real danger as I saw fit to care most about them while continuing to neglect the reality taking place as the black water enveloped me in a blackout on the roadside.

This is not to say that what I felt in my heart and body wasn’t real, rather what I felt was the cumulative effect of the neglect of my self and my healing. It was real and it was a warning shot and it’s one I have taken heed of. It took a visit to the emergency room and a 72 hour Holter monitor I affectionately refer to as my bling to finally decide, once and for all, that it’s time to leave the squatters in the past and move forward.

My body can’t take it and certainly

my mind can’t take it

anymore.

So, “squatters rights” have been pulled and I am starting a new journey that will unfold and my posts and videos will reveal the steps I take to continue my healing process.

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