Was gonna write a blog post about how to grow an authentic personality as an adult who grew up in abuse or a cult or authoritarianism in some form that prevented healthy personality formation in childhood. Where we grew up with a pseudo personality, a false self, constantly wearing a mask and there not being a "real me" under the mask! Because it could never form.

But it can form at any age, if given the chance. Freedom from abuse, safety, and even just one healthy, supportive relationship are what we need. Souls are resilient and can never be fully suppressed, not forever. We can get traumatised and messed with and all sorts of stuff, but we still have our true potential in us, somewhere, even if it is (temporarily) hidden.

Like a flower out of a dung heap, we can grow. Post traumatic growth is real.

#AurinTheCounselor #ProCounseling #CultRecovery #PseudoPersonality #MentalHealth #trauma #CPTSD #dissociation #DID #mask #FalseSelf #PostTraumaticGrowth

This brief note highlights why the study matters for psychotherapists, social workers, and other mental health professionals: posttraumatic growth—especially increases in personal strength and appreciation of life—relates to better well-being after parental loss in adolescence and young adulthood. It also emphasizes the role of social context and multiple sources of support, including professional help, in fostering growth, underscoring a relational approach to bereavement care.

Article Title: Young people show posttraumatic growth after losing a parent, finding strength, meaning, and appreciation for life

Link to PsyPost Article: ift dot tt/OC7aJzE

Copy and paste broken link above into your browser and replace "dot" with "." for link to work. We have to do it this way to avoid displaying copyrighted images.

#PosttraumaticGrowth #ParentalLoss #BereavementSupport #YouthMentalHealth #MeaningInLife

When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing

Dorothy Small

Clergy-Perpetrated Abuse Survivor Advocate
Choir Member, Saint James Catholic Church, Davis, California, United States

*Dorothy remains available for correspondence with victims of clergy-abuse.*

Correspondence: Dorothy Small (Email:[email protected])

Received: December 1, 2025
Accepted: December 14, 2025
Published: December 15, 2025

Abstract

Dorothy Small’s “When the Poison is Also the Medicine” is a first-person account of how clergy abuse can penetrate an existing, formative wound and yet, through a difficult and nonlinear process, become a catalyst for healing. Small describes the distinctive moral injury of spiritual betrayal: harm delivered through a figure or institution associated with trust, guidance, and protection. Rather than treating recovery as a simple arc from victimization to closure, the narrative emphasizes complexity—shame and silence, memory and embodiment, anger and grief, and the ongoing work of reclaiming agency. Small’s central paradox is not offered as a tidy lesson, but as a lived reality: the same spiritual language and community structures that were implicated in harm can also be re-encountered, reinterpreted, or replaced as resources for repair. The text foregrounds survivor autonomy, the necessity of credible witnessing, and the importance of trauma-informed support that does not demand forgiveness, minimization, or premature reconciliation. By situating personal experience within broader questions of power, accountability, and institutional responsibility, the piece functions both as testimony and as ethical argument: healing is possible, but it does not excuse harm, and it does not absolve systems that enable abuse.

Keywords: Clergy Abuse, Healing and Agency, Institutional Betrayal, Moral Injury, Post-Traumatic Growth, Power and Accountability, Religious Trauma, Shame and Silence, Survivor Testimony, Trauma-Informed Care.

Introduction

Clergy abuse is not only an interpersonal violation; it is also a distortion of moral and spiritual authority. When a trusted religious figure exploits their role, the harm often extends beyond the immediate act to the survivor’s sense of meaning, safety, and identity. For many survivors, the injury is compounded by institutional responses—denial, quiet transfers, pressure to remain silent, or appeals to forgiveness that function as social control rather than moral repair.

In “When the Poison is Also the Medicine,” Dorothy Small offers a personal narrative that refuses the two most common simplifications: that faith inevitably collapses after spiritual betrayal, or that healing requires a return to the institution that enabled harm. Instead, Small describes a more honest terrain, where injury and recovery can coexist, where anger can be clarifying rather than corrosive, and where “healing” is measured less by compliance and more by restored agency.

A central theme is the way clergy abuse can “penetrate” an earlier, deeper wound—intensifying existing vulnerabilities and reshaping the survivor’s inner landscape. Small’s account highlights the body’s memory, the persistence of shame, and the social forces that discourage disclosure. Yet it also traces the emergence of counterforces: naming the harm, seeking credible support, establishing boundaries, and building a life in which the survivor—not the institution—defines what wholeness means.

This article presents Small’s testimony as both individual and illustrative. It is a story about one person’s passage through betrayal and recovery, and it is also a lens on the ethical demands that survivor narratives place upon communities, professionals, and institutions that claim moral legitimacy.

Main Text (Article)

Author: Dorothy Small

Dorothy Small, a retired registered nurse, has been a vocal survivor advocate with SNAP. Having endured both childhood and adult clergy abuse, she began speaking out long before the #MeToo movement brought wider attention to such experiences. A cancer survivor and grandmother, she now writes about recovery, resilience, and personal freedom, amplifying survivor voices and pressing for institutional reform.

I am reading in the Bible. What I read caused me to research how a priest who is also  human and a sinner can serve in persona Christi meaning in the person of Christ since  Christ is without sin. Christ is the high priest of the New Testament thus replacing the  role the temple and priests served in the Old Testament. 

Priests, although imperfect humans, are acting on Christ’s behalf during the  administration of the sacraments. Meaning they are instruments which Christ uses  much like the apostles. The power isn’t from the priests but from Christ who works  through them. Therefore, although their spiritual condition is best if it’s clean it’s not  integral when performing the sacraments. Christ’s power works through the instrument  that is the priest ordained. He isn’t a mediator but an instrument. During confession the  priest serves in persona Christi. We can also go directly through Christ on our own who  is the mediator between us and God.  

This makes abuse by clergy even more destructive. Although it’s not their power we  receive but Christ’s working through them, when they abuse and we see them in that  role it can seem like Christ is being used to gain the trust of the prey. It’s the abuse and  exploitation of God. We see priest as instruments of Christ’s light serving to connect us  with God. Clergy abuse is perpetrated by the dark priest not sourced by God’s light but  the other. In my case I was seeking healing through the church which is seen as a  hospital and the priests as human instruments that serve as a vessel through which Christ touches us. 

There is something “special” about them only in their roles. We can all be as Christ to  one another. We all are priests. However, an unordained man cannot administer  sacraments including consecrating the Eucharistic host. Only ordained priests can do  that through the power of the Holy Spirit.  

It’s easy to see how this can override the rational mind and cause us to dismiss red  flags that tell us something is off. Add on top of that the indoctrination most of us  receive as cradle worshippers. It makes it harder to resist their unique position with  God. Especially if the priest brings God into the abuse which many survivors of clergy  abuse have reported. The church is referred to as a field hospital. Christ came for the  broken, lost, suffering and sinners. The church is also considered the temple which  points us to God. It is also referred to the body of Christ. The Vatican is struggling with  what constitutes adult vulnerability. There is no question of the vulnerability of children.  However, in the hospital of sinners, the broken, lost, and suffering which pretty much  describes most of the human condition who are the parishioners coming to Mass to  meet Christ and receive His body through the Eucharist then anyone who comes to the 

church for worship and healing are vulnerable to abuse of spiritual power and authority.  The priest serves as the shepherd of the flock. The shepherd’s role is to guard and  protect those entrusted in his care much like physicians and therapists are expected to  protect those in their care. Priests serve as physicians of the soul and even as therapist.  It is a dual role.  

In my situation during the grooming phase the priest, whose dark penetrating eyes not  matching his grin asked, “Do you think God is in this?” What a crazy thing for a priest to  ask the prey! Of course, God isn’t in abuse of power. The church teaches sex is only in  right order in marriage. Priests can’t marry as they are considered married to the  church. To God. Therefore, any sexual expression by them is equivalent to cheating on  God with the prey. It is the grave sin of fornication they preach about at the pulpit. The  chosen victim of his lower ordered drive feels the shame of being in position to be an instrument of something violating God through His ordained instrument. Instead of  helping us reach heaven they drag us to hell. 

At least I know God was not the source of my abuse or any abuse perpetrated by  clergy. This is not the case for many especially for those abused as children. The  condition of the priest acting outside of his relationship with God is responsible. It is  stemming from the lower primitive instincts. It is from the lower reptilian brain and not  the higher rational brain. In the Bible the devil is referred to as a reptile that tempted  Eve. The actions of a human predator go against what God is. God is the essence and  spirit of light, love, truth, compassion, justice and proper order. Deception, lies,  distortion, manipulation, lust, greed, control, evil and exploitation of the abuser oppose  God.  

Even though an adult I had a child’s mind with father and mother issues related to  childhood serious traumatic events. The church is referred to as mother. The priest is  called father. In reporting the priest, I suffered the same abuse as I did when I was five  and a half and reported my grandfather, who sexually molested me shortly after my  mother’s death and abandonment by my alcoholic father, to my grandmother. She  slapped me forcefully across the face and swore at me. Not having anywhere else to  stay I continued to live with my abuser for about a year until my grandmother decided to  hand me over to an orphanage rather than leave my grandfather. My grandfather was  protected from his victim. It was the same with the church. The priest is seen as  needing protection from the one reporting. The church hates scandal. The one reporting  is seen as the cause of the scandal instead of the one in power who caused the  violation.  

My church abuse deeply pierced my mother wound and father wound deeply  repressed. I was in therapy with a psychologist specializing in treating trauma in  childhood at the time I was heavily groomed by the priest. He knew that. I shared it with  him. Instead of protecting me he used my vulnerability against me. He turned up the  volume of grooming by expert manipulation including gaslighting and creating further self-doubt. Along with a professional therapist I turned to the church to help me heal my

relationship with myself through God in what should have been a safe place. Safety is  crucial in healing trauma. The church was my only safe place left. Until it wasn’t. 

After reporting the priest, I was banned from all ministry in my church by the pastor and  hated by many parishioners who once provided love and community. It’s identical with  what happened after the abuse by my grandfather. I continued to stay under their roof  until it was too hard for my grandmother to live with seeing her husband and his victim  

together. Although brought to an orphanage at the last minute an aunt and uncle opted  to adopt me. It was another abusive environment. I lost an entire family before I even  attended school. I remained in my church community for a couple of years after  reporting the abuse until remaining there was exacerbating the trauma. Once again, I  lost another family. Unresolved early trauma keeps being reenacted until it is  successfully processed.  

Although my priest abuser was sent back to his country the pastor who was also his  friend continued to serve. He could not handle what happened. He had the problem. He  could not tell me to leave that church. It’s public. I wasn’t disruptive. But he certainly  could ban me from all ministry punishing me for creating the scandal by reporting it. It’s  the only power he had over me and in the situation. 

Silence is how the church prevents scandals. Exposure is like holy water to the devil. But the abuse itself was the scandal. God is in the transparency. Reporting it does not  go against God who brings light into darkness. Exposing the sickness of abuse brings justice and healing not only for the abused but the church and the priests who maintains  their vows which includes honoring boundaries.  

Thus, when the priest asked me if I thought God was in this? Yes. He was. Not in what  the priest did but in what I did. I reported it. That exposed not only the priest but me.  Litigation opens you up to intensive scrutiny. You are exposed. After attempting self advocacy through the church for almost a year did not successfully resolve the situation  I sought legal counsel. I learned it took power to address power. Money was the  language the church understood when my words were not heard.  

But guess what? I used it all as an instrument of healing. Abuse in the church was the  domino effect. That domino sent all the others crashing down to the root of my early life  which years of therapy could not penetrate. My defensive wall served as a fortress  making therapy almost impossible and locking in the pain in an interior prison cell from  which there was no escape. There was no way out but through all that rendered me  vulnerable in the first place. The abuse in the church served as a winepress and I was  the grapes in its clutches.  

Carl Jung spoke of personal growth being achieved through confronting and integrating  our own darkness of shadow. “Just as a tree needs roots in the earth to grow, a person  must delve into their pain, fear and unconscious to achieve wholeness and reach their  own potential. A tree can’t grow to heaven until its roots first reach into hell. 

Shadow work is long and arduous work reaching into the hell of what is locked into the  subconscious. It is a long and slow process.  

Sometimes the poison becomes the cure. Today I am actually thankful for the abuse in  the church. Because nothing else could break through the firewall constructed from my  childhood keeping the truth from reaching me in a way that all I knew would have to die  to accept that truth. 

Then the new could grow on a healthier foundation restored on real love and truth  instead of all I knew love to be which was love associated with abuse, lies and  manipulation through grooming which felt like love. Narcissistic abuse has detrimental  effects on the brain, mental health, quality of life and relationships. I had to come to the  absolute end of my life as a new it. It felt like death. Over time through much work,  persistence as well as learning and by providing safety for myself I developed a  healthier loving relationship integrating what lie stuck in my subconscious wreaking  havoc in my life rendering me a perfect target for predators. Individuation is crucial and  possible even at an older age.  

It has been an epic spiritual battle between light and darkness. God won.  

After a five-year hiatus from church I returned almost two years ago to another parish  where I am not banned from ministry. Once again, I am singing in the choir. I didn’t  lose my faith. It just went inside deeper. It is stronger. I am stronger. I learned nothing  and no one has the power to take the gift of faith from me. Nor will I again surrender my  personal power to anyone regardless of their position.  

Truly the poisonous experience of clergy abuse became the medicine. Chemotherapy is  the poison that played a part in saving my life from double ovarian and fallopian  tube cancers thirty years ago which most likely was also related to so much trauma  lowering my immune system. It is through God’s power within me that gave me the  strength to override the neglected and abused inner child in me who was the target to  predators and narcissists fearful of further loss clinging to the illusion of love through  grooming.  

I finally was able to mature. It is never too late. It is well worth the effort. The amount of  work I had to do is how I realized my value and learned what love is outside of abuse. I  won’t need love and validation beyond myself which makes one vulnerable to predators. 

Discussion

Small’s narrative underscores a crucial point that is often missed in public debate: clergy abuse is not merely a scandal; it is a human rights issue bound up with power, coercion, and psychological injury. The damage is intensified by the symbolism of spiritual authority, which can convert an assault into a crisis of meaning. In this sense, the harm is both personal and structural—an interpersonal violation reinforced by institutional dynamics that may discourage accountability.

The essay’s most challenging contribution is its insistence on complexity. “Poison” and “medicine” are not presented as equivalents, and the metaphor does not romanticize suffering. Rather, it describes a paradox survivors frequently report: that the very arena where harm occurred can become the site where truth is confronted, autonomy is rebuilt, and new forms of strength are forged—sometimes through reclaiming spiritual language, sometimes through leaving it behind, and often through redefining it on the survivor’s own terms.

Small’s account also clarifies what healing does and does not require. It does not require silence. It does not require forgiveness as a condition of social acceptance. It does not require reconciliation with an abuser or an enabling institution. The piece implicitly supports a trauma-informed framework in which credibility, consent, and boundaries are non-negotiable. It also points toward institutional obligations: transparent reporting mechanisms, independent investigations, survivor-centered policies, and a culture that treats disclosure as a call to action rather than a threat to reputation.

Ultimately, Small’s testimony functions as an ethical mirror. It asks readers to distinguish between performative remorse and genuine accountability, between spiritual rhetoric and moral repair. The clearest lesson is not abstract: survivors heal when they are believed, supported, and empowered to define their own recovery—while institutions are required to confront the conditions that allowed abuse to occur in the first place.

Methods

This article is a first-person narrative authored by the contributor and underwent light editorial review for clarity, grammar, and house style.

Data Availability

No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current article. The article text is the intellectual property of the author.

References

(No external academic sources were cited for this interview.)

Journal & Article Details

• Publisher: In-Sight Publishing
• Publisher Founding: March 1, 2014
• Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
• Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada
• Journal: In-Sight: Interviews
• Journal Founding: August 2, 2012
• Frequency: Four Times Per Year
• Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed
• Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access
• Fees: None (Free)
• Volume Numbering: 13
• Issue Numbering: 4
• Section: B
• Theme Type: Discipline
• Theme Premise: Theology
• Theme Part: None
• Formal Sub-Theme: None.
• Individual Publication Date: December 15, 2025
• Issue Publication Date: January 1, 2026
• Author(s): Dorothy Small
• Word Count: 2,107
• Image Credits: Dorothy Small
• ISSN (International Standard Serial Number): 2369-6885

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges her spiritual director, Joan Stockbridge, Father Curtis, and Dr. Hermina Nedelescu.

Author Contributions

Dorothy Small produced and wrote this article as sole contributor with minor editorial notes by Scott Douglas Jacobsen and a reading by Father Curtis. 

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

License & Copyright

In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012–Present.

Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.

Supplementary Information

Below are various citation formats for When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing (Dorothy Small, December 15, 2025).

American Medical Association (AMA 11th Edition)
Small D. When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing. December 15, 2025;13(4). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine

American Psychological Association (APA 7th Edition)
Small, D. (2025, December 15). When the poison is also the medicine: How my experience with clergy abuse penetrated my deepest wound and became the catalyst for healing. In-Sight: Interviews, 13(4). In-Sight Publishing. http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine

Brazilian National Standards (ABNT)
SMALL, D. When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing. In-Sight: Interviews, Fort Langley, v. 13, n. 4, 15 dez. 2025. Disponível em: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine

Chicago/Turabian, Author-Date (17th Edition)
Small, Dorothy. 2025. “When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing.” In-Sight: Interviews 13 (4). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine.

Chicago/Turabian, Notes & Bibliography (17th Edition)
Small, Dorothy. “When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing.” In-Sight: Interviews 13, no. 4 (December 15, 2025). http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine.

Harvard
Small, D. (2025) ‘When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing’, In-Sight: Interviews, 13(4), 15 December. Available at: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine.

Harvard (Australian)
Small, D 2025, ‘When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing’, In-Sight: Interviews, vol. 13, no. 4, 15 December, viewed 15 December 2025, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine.

Modern Language Association (MLA, 9th Edition)
Small, Dorothy. “When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing.” In-Sight: Interviews, vol. 13, no. 4, 2025, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine.

Vancouver/ICMJE
Small D. When the Poison is Also the Medicine: How My Experience with Clergy Abuse Penetrated My Deepest Wound and Became the Catalyst for Healing [Internet]. 2025 Dec 15;13(4). Available from: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com/when-the-poison-is-also-the-medicine

Note on Formatting

This document follows an adapted Nature research-article format tailored for an interview. Traditional sections such as Methods, Results, and Discussion are replaced with clearly defined parts: Abstract, Keywords, Introduction, Main Text (Article), and a concluding Discussion, along with supplementary sections detailing Data Availability, References, and Author Contributions. This structure maintains scholarly rigor while effectively accommodating narrative content.

#ClergyAbuse #HealingAndAgency #InstitutionalBetrayal #MeToo #MoralInjury #PostTraumaticGrowth #PowerAndAccountability #ReligiousTrauma #ShameAndSilence #SurvivorTestimony #TraumaInformedCare

At the end of last year, while reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell," many of us encountered the idea of "post-traumatic growth"—a sort of inverse PTSD, where individuals experience increased resilience, strengthened relationships, and personal empowerment as a result of a traumatic event. Excited by this phenomenon (and our own brush with it), a member of our reading group has worked with a friend in clinical psychology to facilitate a presentation and deeper conversation about the power of community in uncertain times.

Please join us on Tuesday at 6:30pm for an in-person discussion and workshop that draws on academic research and our own experiences as disaster survivors to explore the idea of post-traumatic growth!

More information can be found at https://firestorm.coop/events/3381-together-we-rise.html

#PostTraumaticGrowth #PTSD #HurricaneHelene #MutualAid #MutualAidDisasterRelief #WeKeepUsSafe #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)

Tales From The Blanket Lump

Hey, everyone. Lazarus here. Sorry for going fucking dark for the last little while.

Lumine visited this past week, during which time I was so goddamned stressed my body came inches from basically falling apart. It wasn’t his fault at all, and he was in fact a most excellent baby. If anyone is to blame, it’s Zelda for dropping the ball when it came to logistics and stressing Emerson and myself out so goddamn badly it started to take a physical toll on both of us. I ended up getting everything set up for Lumine’s arrival and picking him up from the train station pretty much single-handedly because if I hadn’t, he would have been marooned there for a couple hours at the very least, which would not have been Emerson’s fault, he had to work and could not escape early.

Emerson and Lumine bonded quite well, and Lumine actually bonded so well with Zelda’s legendarily shy and skittish cat and made me happy stim so hard in the process that he got an invitation to move up here once more shit shakes out on all of our ends, so that’s absolutely and legitimately lovely.

That leaves ongoing drama with Zelda, which sent me into a chronic pain flare across three body systems from which I am still recovering and now I have a chest cold to boot. I appear to have gotten so damn stressed that I started my menstrual cycle a week early, which most likely knocked out my immune system, allowing for this shit to happen. Oh, and Lumine is fucking sick, as well. I’m fucking sick of the interpersonal stress, and I’m sick and tired of it making me sick and tired.

So, I’ve essentially dropped my weight where a lot of shit is concerned and have stuck myself in a lump of blankets to sleep off this chest cold most of the time. Sleep has always been my favorite alibi when I don’t want to get involved in interpersonal nonsense, as most of my close people know that my sleep is sacrosanct and I do not get much of it.

When I haven’t been asleep, I have been watching Netflix, eating delicious food that Emerson made, or calling and hanging out with people that don’t stress me the fuck out. In other words, I am pretty intentionally being fucking useless to people who are causing a great deal of chronic stress because I quite simply do not have the energy to deal with this shit anymore. Like… I am so drained by this shit that my body will just make me pass the fuck out rather than deal with it. I quite literally physically can’t, and I’m going with my body’s cues here.

Hell yeah for becoming ungovernable and unusable.

Sometimes, though, my brain is tired and my body isn’t. That’s when I just shut my eyes for a bit and chill and let my brain rest and wander for a minute away from my phone or whatever the hell I’ve been doing that’s been making me so tired. It helps, and whenever I regain the capacity to get back to the task at hand, I get back to it.

During one of those brain naps, I got the idea for what could turn into my sixteenth album once my executive dysfunction releases its hold on me. I haven’t been able to play my instruments or record anything for awhile due to being so damn tired and stressed, but I hope I’ll eventually get back to it by prioritizing energizing people and things. I always do. Sometimes I just need a brain nap. Or an actual nap.

I’ve also discovered that watching Netflix helps get my brain in order when I want or need to spend long periods of time alone by acting as a sort of other presence or presences in the room so that it’s easier to both keep track of time (something I don’t have a concrete sense of without an anchor, like music or TV) and a semblance of human company without the pressure to engage back.

It’s easier to eat, stay hydrated, and generally take care of myself with shows I enjoy as an external anchor point. And considering that most of my stress is interpersonal, sometimes it’s nice to just…be able to listen, watch, and get invested in shit without having to do something about it, you know?

I also haven’t let myself really get invested in fiction in a long ass time (around a decade or longer) since I tend to get extremely deeply invested in anything I enjoy beyond my own fiction, so it feels wonderful to be a fucking fan of shit again. Emerson got me hooked on a show called The Magicians on a hunch that I would like it, and it’s honestly like what would happen if The Chronicles of Narnia and Doctor Who had a more dark, more fucked up baby than the both of them, and I am unfortunately quite invested in this bloodbath fuckshow. It reminds me a fair bit of my audio drama The Third Prophecy, and so a lot of the dark shit in it doesn’t really bother me, surprisingly. It’s the sort of thing I would write, and I am of the firm belief that real people are far scarier and more fucked up.

If you can handle the extremely dark tomfuckery, I highly recommend it.

Well, dearly beloved hooligans, I am getting tired again, so I must go rest my mind once more. Whee. I love y’all. Stay tuned for more magic ✨

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#agoraphobia #beingFuckingUselessForOnce #brainThings #chronicFatigue #chronicIllness #cptsd #creativity #deconditioning #deconstruction #drama #Emerson #healing #Lumine #polyamory #postTraumaticGrowth #recovery #rest #sliceOfLife #socializingAsADisabledPerson #vitaminB100Experiment #whereTheFuckIsMyInternalScreamingTag #Zelda

A benefit of hardship #posttraumaticgrowth #posttraumaticthriving #burnoutrecovery #autisticburnout

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZkYRKw9d4

#ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Neurospicy #Neurodivergent #ND

Lost In Time And Space

Hey, everyone. This is Lazarus, once again. As I write this, I’m sitting on my apartment’s balcony space so that I can get a bit of fresh air. At Emerson’s suggestion, I took today largely away from the Internet to clear my head, but it seems to have made me sadder, albeit less anxious. I’ve spent a great portion of today deep in my head strategizing and things, but I feel disconnected from the world in a not so pleasant way, sort of like I’m lost in space and time. So if I am going to go all in on disconnecting, I think I need to make a better plan so that it doesn’t make me feel worse and adrift. So now I’m drafting a blog post in my notes app that I will post when I come back online again. 

I shuffled through a deck of prompts that Emerson has, and found one that is going to be a doozy to contemplate and write about, but I think ought to be addressed head on anyway. It goes a bit like this: “Wonderland: You always have your imagination. What is something that you want to achieve, but probably never will?” I know I’m probably not quoting the prompt verbatim, as usual, but it gets the point across, I think. I’m also probably going to cry as I write this, in all honesty. 

I would love to be abled, or at least accommodated to such an extent that I could function enough that I could do a great deal more. I know that’s probably the remainder of my hyper independence talking, but I grieve what I used to be able to do every day. I hold my need for rest and greater peace and my fervent wishes for greater independence, to contribute more, to push past what is holding me back, and to build bigger and greater things simultaneously and I try every day to let the peace and rest win because I know that ultimately that is the only way I will be able to contribute more. 

I can’t do anything meaningful if I’m running on fumes and pushing myself to the point where I’m very nearly dead. It’s a strange paradox that I tend to ignore when I’m anxious, angry, and/or craving movement and release. I can only really see the nuance and appreciate the paradoxical nature of healing and the true way forward when I’m calm and able to recharge myself. But still, I grieve. I miss what I was able to do before illnesses, trauma, and injuries took all of my independence away from me, however unhealthy and against true human nature it actually was. 

I keep having to remind myself through all of this that my rest and the creative work I’m doing is still an action, that even though it looks like I am doing nothing, it’s still an action, it’s still a choice. I’m still doing something. 

Even when I’m doing research, writing, or art from bed or sitting down, I’m still doing something. I’m never doing nothing. Reframing my perspective around rest, art, and leisure from doing nothing to doing something has helped improve my quality of life and mental health a great deal. 

And when I keep that perspective in mind, it has helped me relax a great deal more and make rest and leisure a much easier and less anxiety inducing choice to make, as I often have to fight my anxiety, which paralyzes me when it comes time to rest because I feel as though I have done nothing all day even when that simply isn’t true. I’m resting, an action. I’m making art, an action. I’m watching TV, an action. I’m talking to my partners and friends, an action. I am cuddling my cats, an action. I’m blogging, an action. I’m doing medical research, an action. When I think about my behavior that way, it becomes far less paralyzing to do…anything because in my mind, all actions start to carry equal weight, no matter what they are, because they all carry an element of conscious choice and autonomy, and none of them are nothing. 

They may have different impacts and implications on the people and situations around me, and I can change my behavior accordingly based on what I observe, but none of it is meaningless. It also does wonders for my perfectionism when I keep that in mind, which is also rooted in anxiety. I just need to work on keeping that in mind… 

Speaking of research, I may have made a breakthrough last night. I have been experiencing a great deal of numbness in my right hand and on the sides of my face particularly the right side, as well as fatigue, which drinking saltwater or eating salty food almost immediately resolves. I’ve also had shitty circulation for most of my life. So I started wondering due to a longtime suspicion that I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome or POTS, that my blood pressure might be low running low regardless of how my body is positioned due to severe and prolonged stress and heart damage. 

So I did a bit of research last night that tentatively confirms that theory. It also gave me a new theory that my blood pressure dipping especially low in the mid to late afternoons into the nighttime is causing severe fatigue that’s gotten worse as the temperature has started falling as winter approaches. Time for new experiments! 

That being said, the vitamin B is still massively improving my mental health at a baseline, and likely keeping my blood pressure at a lower level than it would be normally since it is normalizing my mental health and keeping me more stable than I would be without it. So I wonder if I need to start making feta cheese a staple of my diet like I did when I was younger. Feta is about the saltiest thing known to man, second only to a rock of salt itself or possibly brine. I love feta cheese. So let this be a public service announcement to any suitors or partners looking to win my heart or make our relationship even better – load me up with that good shit. It’s my favorite, and it may literally improve my health in the process 💛 

Yay for doing health shit myself! I think that’s enough pondering the mysteries of the universe or at least the human body for the day. Stay tuned for more magic, y’all. I’ll be around. 

Your (not salty enough) sorcerer, Lazarus 

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Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”

I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.

I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.

I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.

However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.

My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”

However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.

For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.

I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.

I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.

I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.

Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.

I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:

“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.

Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.

Your strangely wired sorcerer,

Lazarus

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*the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.

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Hey, everyone. This is your trusty guide and sorcerer, Lazarus, once again. Today was very slow moving, as I woke up tired and I didn’t really recover much energy all day. I don’t think the weather helped much, nor did my anxiety about the upcoming presidential elections, but my pain wasn’t too bad, and I got most of the things done that I had wanted to do. This post is the last major thing that I wanted to do today, so even if I crash after writing it, I will have done plenty today. Both Zelda and Emerson are over here tonight on the off chance that things go to hell locally with the aforementioned elections. I find it ironic that the elections are being held on November 5, which is Guy Fawkes’ Day in the UK, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’ve been meditating of late about how a lot of modern culture, especially in the United States, doesn’t prioritize rest and leisure in the slightest. We’re often conditioned from birth to be human doings rather than human beings, and it creates this enormous culture wide shame around things like rest and on a deeper level, disabilities and chronic ailments. Everyone is in a hurry, and many people are left behind if they can’t keep up for any reason and it kills them slowly.

Practically from birth, I was one of those people who was constantly at risk of being left behind, even by my own family. Both of my parents were entrepreneurs, and my father, Xavier, had built his business into a smash success. My mother, Hera, would often say that she didn’t know what she wanted to do when she grew up, but she ran a photography business for most of my youth while simultaneously homeschooling my brother, Blue, and I.

Both parents were basically allergic to what they considered to be “laziness”. I was disabled because I had survived heart failure and then a stroke in quick succession when I was a baby, and was very atypical in other ways as a child, both mentally and physically, so I had to push myself from an early age to keep up with the rest of my family. I had to undergo numerous operations as a result of the heart failure/stroke combination, which left me in severe pain the majority of the time, so it was a battle to keep up with my very athletic parents in any real way, and they gave me shit for not being very physically strong. I grew up thinking that everyone around me was in severe pain that they just…hid, and that being pain free was just more BS that companies said to try to sell you something. I didn’t learn that that was false until I was 24 or so.

Mentally, I was different from nearly everyone I knew, as well. I could read by the time I was 18 months old, and was both blessed and cursed with an extremely accurate autobiographical memory, so I could remember nearly everything that had ever happened to me in excruciatingly accurate detail. I also had a heightened intuition and next to no sense of linear time, which only got stronger as I got older.

Not only that, but because of the age when all of the things happened with the stroke and things, I didn’t attach in any meaningful way to most of my family members or..anyone, really. I sort of always knew that they were garbage. Pair that with the massive vocabulary that I got from being able to read so young and an almost complete lack of shame or regard for them, and I wasn’t shy about letting them know how I felt about the lot of them and their bullshit. This caused a lot of problems. I was very angry and lonely from an early age. I didn’t fit in anywhere, and I didn’t particularly want to. I felt like a stranger in my own family. By the time I was perhaps five or six, I wanted to be an adult so I leave and not come back.

Nobody really knew how to handle me. Xavier did his best, but my mother, Hera, sort of gave up on getting to know me as I was and settled for trying to make me normal as she defined it. There was only one problem. I had survived so many things that should have objectively killed me that there was no fucking way I was going to walk away from any of that shit normal, even if I had been properly nurtured and met where I was. It didn’t really work and got very, very ugly.

I came out of my childhood cripplingly anxious, perfectionistic, plural, and dripping with self hatred to such an extent that I was ashamed of my very being and pretty actively suicidal. Her definition of normalcy was nowhere close to normal, and certainly was nowhere close to how I functioned best.

I was still in agonizing pain, both mentally and physically. I didn’t care about myself at all, and that translated to my relationships. I loved people, but had no idea how to show it. Because of how I was raised and my trauma history, I unconsciously thought at the time that the highest form of love was begrudgingly tolerating someone’s presence, and that I would be lucky to find a partner at all, much less one that actually valued me for who I was and treated me well. So my first partners were less than stellar.

Over time, I started working through my trauma in greater depth and came to find out that much of my upbringing and therefore Hera’s definition of normal was very, very much not normal. Not even close. I think a better word to describe it would be unhinged. A major part of that examination has been looking at my anxiety around rest and productivity. That’s taken a lot.

I have no internal sense of when I need to quit until I am so tired I can’t stand up or my hypermobile joints are dislocating, and that’s taken a great deal of work to unfuck in any real way. I don’t like doing nothing. I deeply enjoy being productive and keeping my mind and hands busy, especially since I have had to spend much of the last three years in bed and have this gnawing sense that I need to make up for lost time, so to speak. I’m almost constantly bored if I’m not actively engaged in something deeply, and I have a very hard time slowing down and relaxing.

I know all of this is trauma talking, and I need to give myself more breaks and leisure time. But how? I’m still trying to figure that out. In a way, writing here is a nice balance, as it gives me a nice focal point for all of the chaos in my brain with no external algorithm to appease. I write here when I want to and am able and only really then. Granted, I still put a great deal of pressure on myself to write regularly, but I do that so that writing doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of the maelstrom that is my life. I actively want to write and deeply enjoy it when I do. I’ve always enjoyed writing.

Additionally, I’ve been using writing on to give myself a mental pause button and time to sit and reflect on what I’ve been thinking about of late relatively free of distractions. It’s a challenge, but I love challenges. I love trying to articulate my meditations as clearly as I’m able, as that gives me a handy thing to refer back to, even if no one ever happens upon this blog later. I always feel lighter after I write, so this is in its own way a form of rest, I suppose.

I’ve found myself completely out of energy at around three o clock in the afternoon consistently, as well, and I have done my best to stop fighting the fatigue and let myself drift gently into a nap. Apparently this isn’t my body being weird, nor is it a chronic fatigue thing, it’s just a human one. This was reassuring to learn, and may help me fight the fatigue even less. This is a fucking process for sure…

Ah, well, I think that’s enough for today, y’all, as my brain is starting to get tired. Stay tuned for more magic, glorious entities near and far. I’ll be around.

Your very sleepy bored cat of a sorcerer,

Lazarus

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