What Boo the Cat Taught Me About Trauma

                                                
                       

                                                           By Philip Foley

A person can learn a lot about trauma from a feral cat. Boo is our cat. Boo has taught me much about trauma and how patience, love and respect for boundaries can transcend the crippling impact trauma has on someone.

We found Boo under our shed when she was just a very small Kitten. She was abandoned in the forest where we live and left to die. Boo wanted nothing to do with Kathleen and I at first; but she did accept the food and water we left out for her every day. Every time we would approach her she ran back under the shed. We did not force the issue. Eventually, she would allow us to get close to her but touching her was out of the question.

We gave her all the space she needed and after several months she allowed Kathleen to pet her. I would have to wait a while longer.

As Summer arrived we began sitting on our screened porch and Boo would approach the door and look in on us. In the beginning she would not enter. Gradually, Boo would come onto the porch through the door which we left ajar. After hanging out on the porch with us for about a month Boo would allow us both to pet her, but only on her terms. The slightest movement or unfamiliar noise would startle her and she would retreat to a place where she felt safe. Through patience and giving her all the space she needed Boo began to trust us more and more. Finally, Boo moved into the house with us.

Over the next several months Boo would begin to sit on our lap and let us comfort her. Boo, however, is like the legendary Jersey Devil who haunts the forest we live in. Everyone has heard about her, but no one, other than Kathleen and I ever see her. You see, trauma still rules Boo's emotional life. Although she has been living with us for two years now her trauma has not gone away, it is simply managed more effectively. We need to make Boo feel safe or she retreats into the furniture. Boo is a wonderful and affectionate cat. She reveals herself to us because we have created a safe environment and we respect her boundaries.

Trauma needs to be understood and embraced from the victim’s perspective; not from ours. It is a daily exercise. Boo taught me that. When we provide a safe environment, offer perspective, not advice, and recognize the world as seen through a victim's eyes, we will experience the joy of seeing them realize their fullest potential.

Perhaps we should all bring a feral cat into our lives. Thanks Boo! 

PAULA DEEN, LANCE ARMSTRONG & KUMBAYA

PAULA DEEN, LANCE ARMSTRONG & KUMBAYA

 By Kathleen Hoy Foley

 

If you already see the parallels between the three—Paula Deen, Lance Armstrong and Kumbaya—call me because you should be writing this and I could be off somewhere contemplating important stuff like how to keep cat hair under control so I don’t ever have to vacuum again.  If you simply don’t get what Paula, Lance and Kumbaya have in common…well…you’re here, why not hang around for a few minutes?  Not that I’m promising any grand revelations, you understand.  And, oh, if you’re easily offended, leave now because I can’t promise to refrain from snarky.  In fact, I’m can’t promise anything.  No, that’s not exactly correct.  I’m promising eight hundred words, give or take.  And Paula, Lance, Kumbaya, and big fat lies are on my mind… 

Ohhh…Paula Deen…my fantasy of the perfect mama—squeezingly plump, ready with a full-on, enthusiastic bear hug, and hot-from-the-oven cinnamon buns.  Flip on the Food Network and there she was supplying emotional lard to the tired and downtrodden with a lick of sass and lots of butter.  And nobody needs butter and hot-from-the-oven cinnamon buns served up with a thick southern draw more than the tired and downtrodden.  Paula Deen had that southern coo thing down cold.  “Come sit down, darlin’.  Look what I made for y’all.” 

Sure, at any moment Paula Deen’s diabetes could’ve sent in the gangrene and pretty soon a surgeon high on sugar could’ve been sawing off one or two of her feet.  Oh, who cares about all that?  And never mind Ms. Deen’s dream of catering an antebellum wedding reception replete with strapping black men in starched shirts and pressed tuxedoes serving high southern cuisine to white guests.  It’s so romantic reminiscing how her great granddaddy’s slaves were treated just like family, isn’t it?  Except for the manacles…  Oh, don’t let’s think about that.  Pass the fried butter, sweetie pie.  We can’t bother ourselves with the truth…it’s so…so…unappetizing.  Yes, it took me some time to figure out that “best dishes” Paula Deen was just a big fat lie. 

Lance Armstrong…geez, if I hadn’t actually seen the words, I cheated, fall directly out of his mouth, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Even when I heard him confess, I still couldn’t believe it.  After all, I believed in Lance Armstrong.  He was a tenacious bulldog who not only bit cancer in the ass, but converted it into raw, honed muscle, hammered it into a titanium chariot, and harnessed its energy to conquer the Pyrenees, dehydration, cramps, and exhaustion to win the Tour de France over and over.  And while he was at it, damn, didn’t he spit in the eye of every naysayer who dared question his integrity?  What an inspiration!  Drag out the rusty Schwinn, peddle mile after miserable mile through headwinds and sweltering heat lugging an extra sixty five pounds of middle-age girth, and call me Blanche. 

But there he was, revealing himself as just another gazillionaire coward.  Lance Armstrong, the super star athlete, was no more than a fraud, a con artist.  He drugged, blood doped, cheated, threatened every living soul around him into silence, ruined the reputations of anyone who dared question him, and sued those who dared speak, while tallying up his mega fortunes.  Lance Armstrong was no hero.  He was an arrogant menace in spandex.  And he never gently cradled childhood cancer victims in his strong, brave arms after dismounting his bike, like I thought either.  Lance Armstrong: one big fat lie. 

So is Kumbaya—you probably already know this.  But I actually believed that we could all hold hands and sing the world into a better place.  Kumbaya is a big fat lie, I know that now.  But back in the days of folk music masses, Marriage Encounter, and the Charismatic Movement—raucous praising, speaking-in-tongues, and holy roller Catholics—holding hands, swaying and singing hymns was touted by ‘spiritual authorities’ as the path to all that was good.  And I bought it.  No!  I devoured it.  Kumbaya: Joy! Happiness! Peace!  Sing more.  Praise more.  Smile more.  Do more.  I hugged strangers.  I drank communion wine from chalices slobbered on by hundreds.  (Give me a moment while I cringe…eww…)  And, oh, that darkness that haunted me?  Easy as Praise Jesus it away.  Kumbaya didn’t fail.  I did.  Only that was just another big fat lie.    

Call me gullible, but I believed the big fat lies of Paula Deen, Lance Armstrong and Kumbaya.  I needed to be coddled in the embrace of fairytales: endless butter, endless energy, and endless soothing hymns to pamper the dream.  The luring offer of a straight, easy path to ‘feel-good’ was like an addictive drug.  I could skim along the surface of happy if I ignored disease, covert racism, and hid the dark agony of sexual abuse under pretty hymns and pure baloney.  It half worked for a long time.   

But truth has this way of speaking—in my case, exploding.  It’s an intense force of nature that pushes through concrete, past closed eyes, into aching hearts, and eats away at carefully constructed, big fat lies—and an added plus for me, it chiseled away that extra sixty-five pounds.  Of course, truth doesn’t concern itself with time or gracious manners.  That was news to me.  I bet it was news to Paula Deen and Lance Armstrong too, who probably figured they could out run it, or at least, forever ignore it.  Which it turns out, is the biggest, fattest lie ever.  

As for Kumbaya?  It’s a nice song and all, but you won’t find me humming it while I’m praying away the cat hair.  Just hand me the damn vacuum cleaner.

Violence Against Women - World Health Organization Report

Violence against women has reached ‘epidemic proportions,’ WHO reports says

Women violated by their partners are twice as likely to face depression as women who have not experienced violence.      National Monitor, Fritzi R. Bodenheimer | June 21, 2013

A new report released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) says violence against women has reached “epidemic proportions.”  More than one-third of women around the world will experience violence resulting in physical and mental harm.

The violence against women is most likely to come from an intimate partner.  It may include physical violence like hitting, kicking or beating; sexual coercion; emotional abuse like insults, humiliation, or threats of harm; or controlling behaviors like restricting access to a woman’s family, job, or medical care.

“The report findings show that violence greatly increases women’s vulnerability to range of short-and long-term health problems; it highlights the need for the health sector to take violence against women more seriously,” said Dr. Claudia Garcia-Moreno, one of the authors of the report.

Women violated by their partners are twice as likely to face depression as women who have not experienced violence.

They are also more likely to contract HIV and sexual transmitted diseases and to experience unwanted pregnancies.

The study found that among women who are murdered, 38 percent were murdered by their intimate partner.  Forty-two percent of women who have been sexually or physically violated sustain injuries.

While violence is a global problem, women in southeast Asia, eastern Mediterranean countries and Africa had the highest incidences.  Still, the report shows 32 percent of violence against women occurs in high-income countries.  In the United States, about 5 million women are victims of domestic violence, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“This new data shows that violence against women is extremely common.  We urgently need to invest in prevention to address the underlying causes of this global women’s health problem,” said Professor Charlotte Watts from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  The school was a partner to WHO in the research, along with the South African Medical Research Council.  The researchers looked at data from 81 countries.

Among the minimum standards WHO recommends to health care centers is training for providers in how to ask their patients about violence, a guarantee of confidentiality and a private setting for consultation, and the resources to treat the physical and mental health of the patient.

In an interview with Voice of America, Garcia-Moreno of WHO, said we need to prevent violence from happening in the first place.  “We know that children who are abused or who are exposed to their parents abusing each other are more likely to end up in an abusive relationship either as perpetrator or as victim,” she said.                               

If you need help, call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).

Please use your voice to speak out against this outrage.

WOMEN WHO ANSWERED THE CALL TO SPEAK

WOMEN WHO ANSWERED THE CALL TO SPEAK

Compiled by

 

Kathleen Hoy Foley

 

Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression.  Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power.  And a woman with power is feared.

~~Gloria Anzaldua

 

 

We begin to find our voices.  We begin to see, hear…”I am talking about 5 thousand years of slavery—my slavery, my mother’s, her mother’s—all the women in the world for generations and generations.”  Nobody knows what to do, and yet we are doing it.  Millions of obscure women begin to dare to speak.  Our pens are dangerous weapons. 

~~Kady Vandeurs

 

 

In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation, and to recognize her role as vital.

~~Audre Lorde

 

 
It is not simply that the voices of working-class people and people of color have been stifled; they also have been unheard and rendered unhearable, aurally erased.  And the dominant group, too, has been damaged in the process, deprived of access to crucial experience and ways of seeing…

~~Toni Morrison

 

 
In addition to taboos against speaking and publishing what is regarded as unspeakable, the writer faces her audience’s resistance to hearing…  (the) work calls into question our ways of keeping at arm’s length what makes us uncomfortable.  At its most powerful, (the) work often impels us to in-corporate the pain of violation, to take it into our own bodies where it can force us to respond.  It implicates us…in the struggle to give voice to the horror and the determination to end it.

~~Deirdre Lashgari 

 

Whatever might exist that is completely outside of human language, that is completely other, can paradoxically be approached or approximated only through language.

~~Jane Hoogestraat

 

Why are so many more women silenced than men?

~~Tillie Olsen 

 

But woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self-development, is her first duty in life; And this (is) not primarily for the sake of others, but that she may become fully herself.

~~Matilda Joslyn Gage

 

Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

~~ Dr. Judith Herman 

 

I had an abortion.

~~Gloria Steinman

 

What if I tell you, you are not different

it’s the family albums that lie

~~Andrienne Rich 

 

Only women die one by one, attempting until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them…  Only women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman.  Only women die one by one, polished to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately ashamed to cry out.  Only women die one by one, still believing that if only they had been perfect…they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it so strangely difficult and empty, themselves so hopelessly confused and despairing.   

~~Andrea Dworkin 

 

Most harm that can befall victims through violence can come to them also through deceit.  But deceit controls more subtly, for it works on belief as well as action.

~~Sissela Bok 

 

“She feels alone, burdened by a weight she could never shake off.  Even today, she feels a knot in her stomach as she writes, finding it hard to put words together, preferring to forget and not be consumed anymore by memories.  She feels that by speaking of her father, and above all by speaking of the half-open door he never let her shut, she has in turn opened up a dangerous gap in her tale…” 

~~Sylvia Molloy 

 

When incest is covert (in cases of intrusive voyeurism, sexually colored ridicule of a child, and sexually motivated exposure), it does not involve physical contact.  However, the dynamic is always sexual misuse, both of the authoritative power and of the legitimate need for closeness over a child who is unable to resist.

~~Eileen Starzecpyzel 

 

my poems

strung like bloody beads across my throat,

my disembowelment, my seppuku—

scarlet entrails

twisting from the open wound

~~Janice Mirikitani

 

 

Rage is not a "stage."  It is not something to be gotten over.  It is transformative, focusing Force.  It is her broom, her Fire-breathing, winged mare.  It is her spiraling staircase leading her where she can find her own Kind, unbind her mind.

~~Mary Daly

 

 

How do you break out of a restrictive cultural milieu?  How to know you are in a bubble, and life—the real life you are meant to live—is taking place elsewhere?

 

~~Dr. Gayle Wurtz

 

 

But she had made art!

Somehow, sick or well, every day…

It’s me

who is having trouble

making art of this.

~~Bernice Rendrick

 

 

To anybody who asks me who I think I am to tell political bigwigs, captains of industry, and religious honchos where to get off, I answer: Who do I have to be?  I am the Domestic Goddess, you impertinent creature, you!

~~Roseanne Barr

 

 

I imagined the hostile response I’d get…  “Who does she think she is?”  …it turned out not to be like that…  The world…turned out to be much, much bigger...  …full of…sisters and brothers although we had never met, who were there to welcome me coming out of the shadows, and who wanted to throw off the shadows that obscured their own lives, too.  My small voice was answered by a rich chorus of voices: my voice, which had once had been mute!  Of all the places where my story might start…it started itself at a point in my life when I could not speak at all…

~~Nuala O’Faolain

 

 

All silence has meaning.

~~Andrienne Rich

THE PERMITTED ABUSE OF ELDERLY WOMEN

 

Elder Abuse Awareness Day, June 15

 

By Kathleen Hoy Foley

 

Elder abuse is what happens in shabby nursing homes at the hands of evil caregivers, or at the other end of a phone line when a lowlife bleeds an oldster’s bank account dry.  Once exposed, elder abuse gives rise to public fury and incites cries for political action and criminal prosecution.  There is something ugly to see when an elder’s arm is black and blue or when retirement savings have been siphoned away by a no-name loser and his computer.    

But what about elder abuse that is invisible to the eye?  What about elder abuse that is permitted?  Not only permitted, but encouraged and celebrated?  It is particularly sinister when abuse disguises itself as a noble cause and delivers its wounds from the shadows, especially to those unequipped to protect themselves.  Abuse, no matter what name it goes by or how it is concealed, always injures a body and damages a life. 

An elderly person subjected to abuse forgoes all hope for emotional recovery.  The impact is too great; the time to rebuild what has been destroyed too limited.  Abuse perpetuated against an elderly woman defines the rest of her life.  It is her final chapter.  For many of us, it was also our first chapter.

I am an old woman among thousands of old women across this country who, as juveniles, were brutally impregnated in a time when we did not own our own bodies, when sexual assault lacked description, and termination rights did not exist.  Rape was our offense.  And pregnancy was our punishment.  We hid out in maternity homes.  But the finger of public accusation found us anyway and pointed straight at our disgraced, swollen bellies.  Eventually we were rescued by the confidential adoption process that freed us from all connections to the assailant and returned us to our lives.  But we were permanently, catastrophically injured, and forever shamed.  We are shame—embodied and visceral.  Trauma is our permanent, screeching companion.    

Once again we stand accused.  We are elderly women hunted because of those secret, shameful pregnancies.  We are ghosts fabricated from delusions.  We are worn bodies hunted by younger aggressors manic with obsession, spewing anger the equivalent of road rage.  We are relics hunted for our names; our lineage; for the blood circulating in our veins.  We are fossils hunted for the bones and flesh that structure our images.  We are sideshow freaks hunted for our deformities and DNA.  We are little girls in wrinkled skin hunted to provide humiliating, ancient sexual details.  We were forced breeders, broodmares hunted now as mothers. 

We are invisible.  Young aggressors mock our trauma as fictional.  Yet we are in your family, among your friends.  We eat at your Thanksgiving table.  We are mute, unseen old women singed by the legacy of sexual violence.  Violence that never found justice or voice.  We could not seek justice because justice was not available to us.  We had no name for rape or sexual abuse.  No words for the unspeakable.  No reference for sexual violence committed by familiar faces.  Sexual assault was part of our lives.  It occurred in our homes.  In our schools.  In our churches.  At family gatherings.  We were invisible girls assaulted in plain sight.  It was what we endured and what we were blamed for.  It was a time when girls lived at the mercy of male aggressors—sexual predators who frolicked on wide-open playgrounds.  We were their free amusement. 

Now we are elderly women terrified of exposure.  We have protected our loved ones from our sordid pasts even as we live trembling in dark, secret hiding from its pursuit.  We know that our families cannot protect us.  Caregivers won’t protect us.  Nursing homes, like the archaic maternity homes where once we cowered, can’t protect us.  No cop with a gun strapped to his hip can protect us from abuse that is permitted. 

As the clamor to unseal confidential adoption records grows steadily louder and increasingly hostile and the public imagines fairytale “reunions,” elderly women are silently absorbing the blows and sucker punches landed by aggressors advancing toward them in revenge.  Lawmakers are swayed by ignoble rhetoric from aggressors disguising themselves as champions for adoption reform and retroactive justice.  The public is influenced by delusions of sentimental, made-for-television, “mommy” moments, as the mental health community remains stonewall silent on the living damage of past sexual trauma in the elderly.  All the while, traumatized old women remain targets of strangers hunting them—aggressors enjoying public and legal support as they claim entitlement to elderly women’s lives, their beloved families, and their cherished homes during their final, fleeting chapters.

June 15 is Elder Abuse Awareness Day.  Abusing an elderly woman by invading her life, destroying her privacy, and exposing her past sexual wounds is indefensible.  Perverting that abuse into a righteous cause and celebrating it as a victory is not only contemptible, it is a call for political action and criminal prosecution.

 We are the mute old women sitting at your dinner table.  We are elderly women terrified of the aggressors chasing us because of a catastrophic, confidential pregnancy. 

 

We need your help. 

 

Elder Abuse Awareness Day, June 15

Planned Parenthood Poster Child

Planned Parenthood Poster Child

 

…oops…

 

Planned Parenthood Poster Old Lady

 

By Kathleen Hoy Foley

 

 

Planned Parenthood needs to thank me for single-handedly increasing their business significantly in the last two months.  I understand there’s been a rush for services since my story and book, Woman In Hiding, has gotten some press.  Evidently, no girl impregnated against her will wants to be me.  I guess there are better things to look forward to then contending with giant, irate fifty-year-old babies looking for revenge.  Sticking needles in your eyes comes to mind.   

 

So I am officially offering Planned Parenthood my old lady mug to use in all future campaigns hawking services.  I don’t come cheap.  This is not only because of my star power, but owing to my powerful power in general, which evidently is quite powerful.  I wasn’t aware of this until the hate mail.  I did not know I possessed the power to make people fat.  It’s good to be informed.  Knowing of my powerful power gives me the upper hand in salary negations.  Thank you, haters. 

 As the official Planned Parenthood Poster Old Lady, I expect Planned Parenthood to fork over additional incentives for all the weaving and ducking I’ll have to do while promoting their services.  It’s a pain to constantly dodge giant babies chucking turds.  That’s tough, nasty work, right there.  Sure it comes with the job but, come on now, I have needs and entitlements besides cash.  Dry cleaning, for instance.  Plus massages; manicures; hair and makeup.  Botox to keep my smile frozen in place.

 Recently, Planned Parenthood has fallen into lethargy.  I’m disappointed about this.  I can’t be the only one doing their bidding.  They need a reality show.  Something like,

Un-Planned Parenthood, Damn It.  Drag out all the old ladies from the pre Roe v Wade days—the crones with live, buried bodies in their pasts—and pit them against giant adult babies wearing extra large diapers looking for mama.  Picture Grandma Moses battling Sumo wrestlers sporting huge Onesies. 

Using hand knitted shawls as masks to protect their identities, the old ladies will try to fend off the advancing giant adult babies with nothing but aluminum walkers and the occasional slice of homemade apple pie tossed into the bloodthirsty mob as a diversion.  Naturally, this will not deter the giant adult babies, but it will drum up business for Planned Parenthood.  Once a few sound bites hit You Tube, we’re talking going viral.  Do I have to think of everything?

Being the Planned Parenthood Poster Old Lady is a dream I never aspired to.  That proves my personal failing of shortsightedness.  All along I could have been exploiting the spectacle of my reproductive nightmare, conniving and scheming my way to the pinnacle of tawdry enterprise, for which I would have been very well paid.  Seedy is wasted on trailer parks and rent-by-the-week rooms in motels that believe sheets ruin the appearance of stained mattresses.  Tabloid TV would’ve made me rich white trash.  The sleaze is endless… 

I’m not just talking giant adult babies here.  I’m talking bashful teenage girls and run-of-the-mill housewives taken out by corrupt adoption agencies, diabolical social workers, and malicious, ob-gyn nurses.  I’m talking light-bulb-over-head style interrogations; smarmy detectives; stalking; and surveillance of invalids in nursing homes.  Throw in the questionable politicians and the jackbooted nuns...(sigh)…I could’ve been somebody.  Alas, it’s too late for regrets.      

    
But life does have its rewards.  I’ve proven that I have the power and the talent to drive new business right through the double doors of Planned Parenthood offices.  It is only fair then that Planned Parenthood upgrades my unofficial status and formally endorses me as THE Planned Parenthood Poster Old Lady.  I demand recognition and appropriate compensation, plus future employment as a reality TV icon. 

Call me, Planned Parenthood.  

Convicted Sexual Offenders Have a Lobby

 

By Philip Foley

Convicted sexual offenders have a lobby: Reform Sex Offender Laws (RSOL). Groups are working to change the way penalties are imposed on sexual offenders. While they argue that the criminal justice system per se may not be at fault, they claim it is the 'time served' after the actual time is served that presents the problem. In essence, public punishment continues well after a convicted sex offender is released from prison.

No such lobby exists for aging and elderly women who as juneviles were victims of sexual assault that resulted in catastrophic, confidential pregnancies. These women are in hiding from a society and culture that punishes them for the violence perpetrated against them all those years ago, while holding them accountable to the second generation aggressors hunting them via breached sealed adoption and other confidential records.

The trauma and guilt victims suffer from sexual assault imposes a "LIFE" sentence. Profound trauma makes it impossible for victims to speak for themselves. The criminal and civil legal system forces them to appear in person to fight for the right to protect themselves from unwanted intrusion into their personal and family lives. Many elderly women are not equipped to understand the violence they were subjected to as junviles and the protections the law could provide, if it was accessible to them, when that violence re-asserts itself in their elder years.

We have federally required ramps and doorways for physically disabled persons to gain access to the legal system.

We need to create access for elderly women disabled by past sexual trauma who are trying to cope alone with its resurgence into their lives.

Elderly women enduring stalking and abuse as a result of a confidential, catastrophic pregnancy must be permitted to have "champions." Persons who can appear for them; persons who can adequately represent them through the civil and criminal justice system. Emotional and psychological safety is paramount to a trauma victim. Elders require prospective on the trauma they endured and they need to be informed about what protections the legal system can offer them and their families.

Most trauma victims are unable to articulate their needs to an attorney; most are unable to describe their ordeal to anyone they do not completely trust. Trauma victims survive by adapting to whatever the situation requires them to be or to say.

Convicted sexual offenders enjoy a lobby. Unless society permits them equal access via champions, elderly women re-victimized by past sexual assault will never be so fortunate.

Contact your legislators and insist that elder women re-traumatized by sexual violence through information gained from confidential sources be granted this basic civil right.