Performance Art
(c) Melina Magdalena September 2006
My children will probably still be dutifully trotting off to their father’s house for alternate weekends when they’re in their thirties.
Synchronicity is a strange thing. It’s true that once sensitised to something, one suddenly sees it all over the place. For me, synchronicity occurs precisely when it’s needed.
Lately, I’ve had adults spontaneously tell me their stories of growing up in divorced households; people I didn’t know had come from ‘broken homes’, who I would never have guess had experienced the torrid times of feeling they were freaks. Without exception they have each volunteered the following:
“Oh, by the time I was that age, I wanted to do my own thing.
I wasn’t going to my father’s house every other weekend.”
I want my children to grow up and become independent human beings! I want to say to them – you are here to become yourselves, not to pay homage to someone who would make you in his own image!
It’s ironic that I’ve finally found someone who wants to be my partner. Finding time to be alone together could only become more difficult with a détente in the contact arrangements between my children and their father.
The enforced rigidity of contact and the payback games in which their father and I have engaged over the last 13 years have been sources of immense frustration and deep emotional pain. He has instilled in the children a belief that I always intended to keep him from them, and that it was only his wiliness and perseverance, even in the Family Court, that won them the precious right to see their father. I do not want to sever my children’s contact with their father. I do not want them all to myself.
In the interests of nurturing my children’s growing independence, I have noted several things about their communication with their father and me. They avoid informing their father of anything that is not routine. This includes getting in trouble at school, losing calculators, needing to pay for extra activities and receiving invitations to social events. Parties are a problem – particularly when they fall on the weekends when my children are with their father. The children make an assumption that they will therefore not be able to go to them. Why? Don’t ask me, I can’t tell, and as far as I know, they’ve never asked him either! Needing to be able to pay for things is a problem – they do not ask their father, as a rule. Why bother? His attitude has always been to take his right of contact by force if necessary, while refusing his responsibility of contribution to their material well being and neglecting to make sure communication about his activities goes both ways.
Building my children’s confidence, assertion skills and autonomy is a task I consider paramount as part of my mothering. It’s never pleasant when we disagree, but it’s a chance for them to practice these skills. When they need a note for school, or lose something, it’s risky for them to bring these troubles to me. They are willing to take these risks with me not because I am a pushover, but because I treat them with respect and try to keep their best interests uppermost in my mind and behaviour.
I suggested to them that perhaps given their changing interests and busy schedules, it might be appropriate for us to rethink the way their travelling back and forth between their father’s home and ours is conducted. I suggested to them that they are old enough to have some say in how they want to live, and that if they want to make changes or be more flexible, it would be a good idea for the four of us – me, the children and their father - to talk about this and come up with some ideas and plans. I reminded them that each of us has rights, ideas and feelings that are ok and probably different from one another’s.
When they asked me what I wanted, I stressed the fact that I didn’t want to impose my ideas, because I wanted to be able to discuss it all so that everyone was heard. I said that it is quite convenient for me to have blocks of child-free time, but that it is also frustrating when I want to be able to plan to do family things with them, but they fill up their weekends with me with other commitments and are rarely available to change their plans with their father in order to accommodate my wishes. They told me they are teenagers and don’t want to do family things with their parents (meaning me – their father drags them off wherever he wants to go and they never say a word).
My son told his father I wanted to talk to him about changing access. I tried to ring their father, and got his answering machine. It’s no big deal – I’m often not around to answer the phone either. So I left him a message. I don’t remember it word for word, but it went something like this:
Hello X, it’s M.
I think Y told you I wanted to talk to you about arrangements?
I just think it would be a good idea for us all to sit down
and work things out together
so we’re all happy with arrangements.
I’m at work today, so I can’t talk now,
but if you’ve got time tonight when you drop off Y,
we could talk then and you could maybe eat with us?
You can leave me a message and let me know if that’s all right,
or I’ll see you then.
When he pulled up in his car I went out and asked whether he had received my message. He had. I asked whether he had time now. He did. He came inside. I directed my son to offer him a drink.
I finished preparing the meal, and dished up four plates. I directed my daughter to make sure there were four chairs at the table and the children sat down to eat. Their father had already seated himself. There was one place left for me in the corner, squeezed in beside him. I assessed the situation, set my plate at the end of the table and said “Excuse me, if you move over, I’ll just sit at the end here,” extricated the chair from its entrenched, powerless position and seated myself at the head of the table.
Their father began to eat, but within one minute, he began to show signs of distress. He put his elbows on the table; his head in his hands, turned red-faced and began to cry. The children did not know what to do. They didn’t say anything. I just reached for the tissue box and put it on the table. It didn’t take long before he had gathered himself for the verbal onslaught I am still primed to anticipate. First, he yanked a tissue furiously out of the box, smudged it across his nose and threw it on the floor behind him.
“You can’t do this to me, M after all these years!
The last time we sat down together was with a fucking lawyer between us!
This is just totally bizarre.
Why didn’t you give me some notice or something?
I didn’t know you were going to give me dinner.
And I’m not even legally allowed to be here.
You’ve got a fucking restraining order on me.
You just can’t do this!”
He did not look my way. He delivered this verdict violently and loudly, punctuated by sighs, sobs and fists on the table. The children were terribly uncomfortable and scared.
I was also scared. I thought – yes, that restraining order is there for good reason and I don’t want to be in the same room with you ever and I don’t know why I invited you here and I don’t know why I concocted this stupid plan when it’s obvious I’m still as weak as piss when it comes to advocating for my children with you and you won’t listen anyway and you don’t care about what I want and think and need or your children you selfish prick you haven’t changed and you’re just a big fake and I don’t like being scared of you and where can I run to if you explode in the next five seconds and will you hurt the children you always want things your own way and why did I bother you stupid bully and how can you sit there pretending to be in such pain and how can I get you out of my house now instantly immediately like five minutes ago and forget this whole uncomfortable episode?
“Yes, I wanted to talk to you about the restraining order – ”
“Well talk to me then!”
“R and L –”
“I’m not R. I’m not L! I don’t want to hear it!”
I shut up. I continued to eat. He gathered himself up again. I thought Oh God. Let me die right here on this spot I cannot bear another second of this existence. I don’t want to witness my children’s torment any longer.
Imagine what I did next? It’s not hard to guess. It follows the prescribed pattern down to the letter. I had to somehow save the situation, defuse the bomb, stall proceedings.
So, I … apologized!
Yes, that’s right. I apologized for putting him on the spot, explained it had never been my intention to make him feel uncomfortable, that I had only wanted to open up a conversation because I thought it was time after all these years, even though we’ve had a longstanding arrangement that has been working pretty well on the whole. I said the children are old enough now to have some say and I thought it was a good idea to give them a chance to talk about what they want, too.
Fat chance.
After that performance the children were well and truly cowed into submission. When their father pushed his plate away and picked up his calendar, obviously ready to do business, they still hadn’t said a word, but had sat there silently eating their meal, then took their plates into the kitchen one by one and scraped what they could not stomach into the compost bin, returning to the table and refusing to meet my pleading gaze.
After he left, my son treated me to a lecture on my behaviour and expectations and exactly where I had gone wrong in expecting their father to behave like a mature adult. My son even used the word ‘baby’ in reference to his father’s behaviour, and claimed that he would have told his father to stop acting like one, if I had not had the restraining order against him and had not put him on the spot by serving him a meal at my table after all these years of never speaking with him without having a lawyer to mediate.
I reminded my son that the claim about the lawyer is untrue, and that in fact we have been able to negotiate many things over the years both over the phone and face to face. I told him that it is true I have a restraining order against his father and that I wouldn’t have received it from the court if there hadn’t been reasons for it. I also told him that his father has always spoken to me in that way, which is why I so rarely go out of my way to speak with him.
Even so, my son went to pains to justify his own silence and his own position in not wanting to change anything. My heart went out to him, as he told me how angry I was, and how wrong I had been in attempting to bring the four of us to the table to talk about our arrangements. I understood quite well that my son was unable to express his own anger and instead foisted the emotion onto someone whose anger was not so scary and confronting as his father’s.
My daughter was calm and matter of fact. She said little, but her attitude was clear. That had been a pointless exercise. What was there to say?
I gleaned some useful information. I now know when he is going away; three times during the next three months. He probably left quite pleased with himself for managing to get his weekends swapped over to a pattern that suits his fancy-free lifestyle. It just so happens that his trips all coincided with the weekends when he was supposed to have the children. If we hadn’t swapped weekends, it would have meant I had them every weekend for nearly three months. So now he gets to have the children when it suits him, and as usual, he won’t be available to help out if I get busy with my life.
Still, what’s new? Our lives continue to revolve around his needs. He always has been, always will be a performance artist.
My son said to me that this was the worst it will ever get. Next time won’t be so uncomfortable, especially if I lift the restraining order. I’m wondering whether X will have won, if I refuse to initiate a next time. Perhaps I would do better to stay on the sidelines, and encourage my children to speak for themselves, rather than set myself up to be further abused by the man who calls himself their father.
Friday, September 01, 2006
Monday, August 28, 2006
Down the Gurgler
Down the Gurgler
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006
Anyone see Lily Tomlin and Helen Caldicott on Enough Rope last night? I stayed up especially, and am glad I did. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with my sister about the world. As a new mother I know she must be especially sensitive to what’s going on around us.
On Saturday night I had a series of hilarious dreams, one of which is pertinent to this discussion. I dreamed I was watching television. There was a lead-in before the ad break, to the next segment in the program, in which we were going to be introduced to “Australia’s Most Famous S-Bend Family”. In my dream I saw how this family (perhaps something like The Borrowers, by Mary Norton) had set up home in the S-Bend of a toilet!
It seems to me that if we don’t want to end up drinking toilet water via new and improved water filtration technology that no one trusts any more than they trust microwaves, than we really oughtn’t be putting our sewage in the water in the first place.
It seems to me that there is no inevitability about water desalination , nuclear power or recycling sewage into potable water. Besides the fact that recycling water makes perfect sense, as it mirrors the organic water cycle, perhaps people wouldn’t be so up in arms about using filtered grey water from washing dishes and clothes, as they are about using filtered poo and wee water?
If we continue to take no action, we will descend, like Jonah into the whale, and who knows when and in what condition we will eventually emerge into the filthy waters of our own creation? Humans are the dirtiest creatures on this planet.
So here’s an agenda for a political party that wants to win votes and save the world. Please add your ideas to this agenda and present to your likely candidates. (ever the eternal optimist, I presume there are some strong and sensible political candidates somewhere in Australia.)
1) Invest every cent that is needed in building Australia a solar power grid, so that we are completely solar powered and are selling our excess energy overseas by 2015.
2) As a lead in to the above, offer one-off grants to all public housing tenants in Australia to convert their homes to solar power by 2010.
3) Retrain some of the miners at Roxby Downs to manufacture, repair, maintain and install solar panels and the necessary apparatus.
4) Close all uranium mines in Australia.
5) Do not begin to enrich uranium in Australia.
6) Refuse to store nuclear waste anywhere in Australia.
7) Invest every cent that is needed in converting Australia’s sewage system so that toilet waste no longer enters our waters. This means investing in the research that will make it possible even for city-dwellers and office blocks to be able to convert to composting toilets . Every Australian household and office should be converted to using composting toilets by 2020.
8) Retrain miners and other willing workers to be able to manufacture, install, maintain and repair compostable toilets and in the plumbing skills necessary to change our sewage systems so that toilet waste is kept separate from grey water.
9) Make the installation of rainwater harvesting tanks mandatory for every Australian dwelling, and in educating Australians about how to keep this precious resource clean and usable.
Let’s not send ourselves down the proverbial gurgler.
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006
Anyone see Lily Tomlin and Helen Caldicott on Enough Rope last night? I stayed up especially, and am glad I did. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with my sister about the world. As a new mother I know she must be especially sensitive to what’s going on around us.
On Saturday night I had a series of hilarious dreams, one of which is pertinent to this discussion. I dreamed I was watching television. There was a lead-in before the ad break, to the next segment in the program, in which we were going to be introduced to “Australia’s Most Famous S-Bend Family”. In my dream I saw how this family (perhaps something like The Borrowers, by Mary Norton) had set up home in the S-Bend of a toilet!
It seems to me that if we don’t want to end up drinking toilet water via new and improved water filtration technology that no one trusts any more than they trust microwaves, than we really oughtn’t be putting our sewage in the water in the first place.
It seems to me that there is no inevitability about water desalination , nuclear power or recycling sewage into potable water. Besides the fact that recycling water makes perfect sense, as it mirrors the organic water cycle, perhaps people wouldn’t be so up in arms about using filtered grey water from washing dishes and clothes, as they are about using filtered poo and wee water?
If we continue to take no action, we will descend, like Jonah into the whale, and who knows when and in what condition we will eventually emerge into the filthy waters of our own creation? Humans are the dirtiest creatures on this planet.
So here’s an agenda for a political party that wants to win votes and save the world. Please add your ideas to this agenda and present to your likely candidates. (ever the eternal optimist, I presume there are some strong and sensible political candidates somewhere in Australia.)
1) Invest every cent that is needed in building Australia a solar power grid, so that we are completely solar powered and are selling our excess energy overseas by 2015.
2) As a lead in to the above, offer one-off grants to all public housing tenants in Australia to convert their homes to solar power by 2010.
3) Retrain some of the miners at Roxby Downs to manufacture, repair, maintain and install solar panels and the necessary apparatus.
4) Close all uranium mines in Australia.
5) Do not begin to enrich uranium in Australia.
6) Refuse to store nuclear waste anywhere in Australia.
7) Invest every cent that is needed in converting Australia’s sewage system so that toilet waste no longer enters our waters. This means investing in the research that will make it possible even for city-dwellers and office blocks to be able to convert to composting toilets . Every Australian household and office should be converted to using composting toilets by 2020.
8) Retrain miners and other willing workers to be able to manufacture, install, maintain and repair compostable toilets and in the plumbing skills necessary to change our sewage systems so that toilet waste is kept separate from grey water.
9) Make the installation of rainwater harvesting tanks mandatory for every Australian dwelling, and in educating Australians about how to keep this precious resource clean and usable.
Let’s not send ourselves down the proverbial gurgler.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Life in the realms of the possible
Life in the realms of the possible
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006
1. My Landmark Forum
I got two phone calls this week from friends who invited me to a Landmark Special Event. Although I didn’t attend the event, this contact was beneficial, because it got me thinking again about the phenomenon.
I did the Landmark Forum on the Valentine’s Day weekend in 2004, and my seminar series later that year. The friend who introduced me to Landmark went on to assist at other Forums, and to do the other courses, for which she had to travel back and forth from Adelaide to Melbourne for several months. She and her mother were both really excited about Landmark Education.
I was a touch and go candidate for the Landmark Forum. Considering my background of deep depression, and my longstanding refusal to be medicated for this condition, I weighed up the risks of registering and finding it all too much, against the possibility that I was well enough to participate. I was intrigued during the registration process to discover that the Landmark Forum was not a therapy, because no one had been able to quite explain to me exactly what it was. But I had seen the effects it had on people I knew – their enthusiasm, joy and earnestness – and I wanted some of that. My years of counseling had brought me to a point of being able to function and be more or less productive, but I still felt weighed down with sorrows that I couldn’t budge.
DAY ONE
I spent day one feeling bewildered and overwhelmed, and determinedly positive that whatever was going to happen to me would be all right, so long as I wasn’t blamed for what had happened to me. The idea that what had happened, had happened in the past and was no longer happening, was attractive to me. I knew it held a key to transformation. It has taken a couple of years for me to gain perspective on what this means in terms of my ongoing recovery and healing (see below).
DAY TWO
I spent most of day two in tears. I even got up and shared with the whole group, the letter which I had written for homework. This was cathartic. I hadn’t cried in front of my counselors. I hadn’t cried in front of my friends. And my crying in private had always had an unsatisfactory quality to it – I needed to gush forth my river of tears, but they always dried up almost before they had started, while I got busy with all the other things that needed to be done.
DAY THREE
On day three I let go of my fear of other people. Not completely, but so that my fear no longer drives my every action. Unreasonably, so I can raise uncomfortable matters with others and even breach taboos when necessary. The processing time between when something happens to me, and when I begin to react, has become considerably shorter. I’m now able to trace back more often, the triggers to my reactions, and confront those who wrong me. I’ve learned to advocate for my children, and I feel all right about playing some of the social and bureaucratic games that I was previously too proud to engage in. I am aware now, when I am choosing a role and playing those games, and am not being played by others.
It is essentially this that has transformed my outlook. In the Landmark Forum, I made a choice to own my trauma. It means that my trauma no longer owns me.
DAY FOUR
I started getting some memories back, that I had not had access to since childhood. This was remarkable as it brought me into the present.
DAY FIVE
I was spectacularly unsuccessful in inducing other people to embark on Landmark journeys of their own. I did invite several people to the final evening, and several people came – one signed up, but then pulled out, because she simply couldn’t find the money to pay for it. The others were polite, expressed their happiness for me, but declined the offer to do the Landmark Forum themselves. Even (and especially) my children have adopted a cynical attitude towards it, perhaps because I prioritized my participation in the seminar series and made them stay home alone one evening each week for ten weeks.
The only person I have directly influenced to do the Landmark Forum was only convinced months later after another friend of hers had done it.
2. The Money Stuff
While I’m very happy to talk about the Landmark Education Program and to share the benefits that I gained from my participation in it, I continue to question its elitism.
I thoroughly endorse Landmark Education’s claims that it offers a transformational experience, which could benefit every person on the planet and lead to world changes in attitude and behaviour, could solve all kinds of global problems and be the driving force to a better world. The problem is that Landmark Education is simply not made available to the marginalized sectors of western communities.
Take my most recently thoroughly happy friend, for example. She gets by on the Disability Pension, but she’s very happy to be spending every cent at the moment, to get her Landmark training completed. From week to week, she has almost nothing left to live on, because of the cost of travelling back and forth to Melbourne. She has also borrowed money in order to participate in Landmark.
Because of the intensity of her studies, she has little energy to look for work that might assist her to manage a little more comfortably. I respect her choice. I’m really very happy for her. I can see the direct benefits she has reaped, from taking part in Landmark Education. This intense level of participation won’t last forever. When she’s had enough, she will move on to other things, taking with her what she’s learned. She can do this precisely because she is not responsible for anyone else on the planet.
What I would like people to consider, is the disproportionate cost of my friend’s participation. It’s not a matter of limiting treats, meals out, movie dates or that annual holiday, and budgeting in order to prioritise the Landmark Education process. No – she’s jumped right into the bathwater and taken the baby with her.
Landmark offers no concessions whatsoever. When I did the Landmark Forum, I was rudely shocked to discover that nothing but water and a chair to sit on was offered to us for the hundreds of dollars we had paid to be there. The expectation that on top of the registration and travel costs, we would be in a position to buy restaurant meals each night was something I hadn’t realized, and certainly hadn’t budgeted for.
Landmark Education keeps its overheads low by doing things like telling participants they needn’t worry about accommodation when they have to travel interstate, because local participants will offer them a place to sleep when they get there.(This is probably true. The nature of the work encourages close and deep bonds to be forged between participants.)
The method of handling disgruntlement is to shove it all back on participants, who are coached into believing that we are choosing to blame Landmark Education instead of choosing to rise above our own circumstances.
I feel it is a great shame that the benefits of Landmark Education remain unattainable by people in marginalized sectors of our community, because they do not have enough money at their disposal to even contemplate participating in the programs on offer. These are people in the welfare social underclass, people with children who depend on them for food and shelter, the elderly, the sick and the poor.
One argument is that if one counts the number of hours spent participating in the Landmark Forum and divides the registration costs by the number of hours the cost per hour is relatively low – certainly comparable with the sliding scale of counselling services. It might be further argued that doing the intensive five days of Landmark Forum would reduce the number of subsequent hours of counselling required by newly energised, newly transformed Forum graduates. Even if this is the case, most people pay for their counselling session by session, and do not have the $500 required upfront.
Another argument is that the welfare mentality will necessarily reduce the impact of the Landmark Forum on participants. This is the idea that something offered free, or at a reduced cost, will not be appreciated or embraced to the same extent as something purchased for the full price. My proposal is that the proportionate cost of registration must be considered within the context of a participant’s disposable income. Something that is unaffordable simply isn’t a possibility.
3. Landmark Trauma
I checked out the web before and after doing the Landmark Forum. I’ve always been frightened that I’ll get brainwashed into a cult, and wanted to make sure that was not the outcome of Landmark Education.
One of the saddest accounts I found was by a woman who had been coached to take responsibility for the fact that she was sexually abused as a child, and later raped as an adult. This woman’s story touched me deeply. As a survivor of rape myself, it left me in a quandary wondering why I had responded so positively to the Landmark Forum.
Just Google landmark education and you'll find links to similar accounts.
I’ve tried writing about this several times in the last three years and got nowhere. During this time, I’ve used Landmark concepts and technologies off and on both consciously and unconsciously, and benefited greatly from this. My outlook has remained much more positive, on the whole, and I’ve coped with some heavy losses and disappointments during that time.
My life has changed dramatically since I embarked on my Landmark Education. I’ve found a partner, something I couldn’t even invent as a possibility for myself until nearly a year after I’d done the Forum. I’ve completed my Graduate Diploma in Education and can even contemplate a future of enjoying a teaching career, again something I never thought was possible for me. I compiled, edited and published a book. I’m writing regularly and creating artworks. I’m living as full a life as I can manage, at the moment, and am even able to look ahead and create my future. My family life is the happiest it’s ever been.
I am still extremely resistant to the concept of forgiveness, and am touchy to the extreme, about being labelled a victim. I have no desire to let go of these two aspects of the identity I’ve created for myself. As a participant in the Landmark Forum, I was wary of being asked to take responsibility for being raped and abused.
The idea of self-blame is the clincher here. Like every human being I have regrets and broken promises. There are things I wish I’d done, and other things I’d rather forget I did. Before I did the Landmark Forum, I blamed myself for everything except for being raped. My self-hatred was the underlying issue behind everything that happened to me, everything I did. It took some time, (much longer than five days), but I made a choice to let that go.
When the topic of leaving the past in the past was raised, under the guise of taking responsibility for our futures, in the interests of our freeing ourselves in order to be open to the possibilities it might present, my hackles rose and I fought hard against this. It sounded like I was being asked to accept that I had created and desired everything that had ever happened to me (and everything anyone had ever done to me). I think this was on Day Three. I didn’t talk to anyone about the way I was feeling.
There has never been any doubt in my mind about who is responsible for raping me. This is not so easy for every person who has been raped. Many people are raped in circumstances society holds up as though they really had asked to be abused. This is the effect of living in a society which habitually blames victims.
I was able to resolve the issue of taking responsibility for being raped, by objectifying the experience to some extent. I also separated the act of rape from its impact on me. The idea that it happened in the past and was no longer happening was the key. The fact that I continue to experience the impact of being raped is distinct from the experience of being raped. That is the ongoing trauma, with which I continue to deal every day.
In choosing to own my trauma, I let go of being that self-hating, self-blaming, anger-dependent, fear-addicted victim. Whereas previously I wallowed in the mire of being unable to control my emotional and life-stopping reactions to the constant reminders and triggers to being victimised, I now allow myself to feel what I feel, express what I experience, and to make conscious choices about how I live my life.
I was not a person who repressed or concealed the fact that I had experienced trauma. Perhaps too, the nature of my trauma was not as deeply entrenched as it is for some. I was ready to open myself to the possibility of owning my trauma.
This has been possible for me because I had already reached a healing plateau in my journey. I have to take a longer perspective and acknowledge the other factors that have been part of my life and healing process. The counselling I did was undoubtedly life saving, and the studies I’ve undertaken have also contributed to my developing confidence and points of view.
My experience of Landmark Education has been positive. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. There are no quick, instant, universal fixes, but I wanted to add my story to those that recommend Landmark Education for people who can afford it.
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006
1. My Landmark Forum
I got two phone calls this week from friends who invited me to a Landmark Special Event. Although I didn’t attend the event, this contact was beneficial, because it got me thinking again about the phenomenon.
I did the Landmark Forum on the Valentine’s Day weekend in 2004, and my seminar series later that year. The friend who introduced me to Landmark went on to assist at other Forums, and to do the other courses, for which she had to travel back and forth from Adelaide to Melbourne for several months. She and her mother were both really excited about Landmark Education.
I was a touch and go candidate for the Landmark Forum. Considering my background of deep depression, and my longstanding refusal to be medicated for this condition, I weighed up the risks of registering and finding it all too much, against the possibility that I was well enough to participate. I was intrigued during the registration process to discover that the Landmark Forum was not a therapy, because no one had been able to quite explain to me exactly what it was. But I had seen the effects it had on people I knew – their enthusiasm, joy and earnestness – and I wanted some of that. My years of counseling had brought me to a point of being able to function and be more or less productive, but I still felt weighed down with sorrows that I couldn’t budge.
DAY ONE
I spent day one feeling bewildered and overwhelmed, and determinedly positive that whatever was going to happen to me would be all right, so long as I wasn’t blamed for what had happened to me. The idea that what had happened, had happened in the past and was no longer happening, was attractive to me. I knew it held a key to transformation. It has taken a couple of years for me to gain perspective on what this means in terms of my ongoing recovery and healing (see below).
DAY TWO
I spent most of day two in tears. I even got up and shared with the whole group, the letter which I had written for homework. This was cathartic. I hadn’t cried in front of my counselors. I hadn’t cried in front of my friends. And my crying in private had always had an unsatisfactory quality to it – I needed to gush forth my river of tears, but they always dried up almost before they had started, while I got busy with all the other things that needed to be done.
DAY THREE
On day three I let go of my fear of other people. Not completely, but so that my fear no longer drives my every action. Unreasonably, so I can raise uncomfortable matters with others and even breach taboos when necessary. The processing time between when something happens to me, and when I begin to react, has become considerably shorter. I’m now able to trace back more often, the triggers to my reactions, and confront those who wrong me. I’ve learned to advocate for my children, and I feel all right about playing some of the social and bureaucratic games that I was previously too proud to engage in. I am aware now, when I am choosing a role and playing those games, and am not being played by others.
It is essentially this that has transformed my outlook. In the Landmark Forum, I made a choice to own my trauma. It means that my trauma no longer owns me.
DAY FOUR
I started getting some memories back, that I had not had access to since childhood. This was remarkable as it brought me into the present.
DAY FIVE
I was spectacularly unsuccessful in inducing other people to embark on Landmark journeys of their own. I did invite several people to the final evening, and several people came – one signed up, but then pulled out, because she simply couldn’t find the money to pay for it. The others were polite, expressed their happiness for me, but declined the offer to do the Landmark Forum themselves. Even (and especially) my children have adopted a cynical attitude towards it, perhaps because I prioritized my participation in the seminar series and made them stay home alone one evening each week for ten weeks.
The only person I have directly influenced to do the Landmark Forum was only convinced months later after another friend of hers had done it.
2. The Money Stuff
While I’m very happy to talk about the Landmark Education Program and to share the benefits that I gained from my participation in it, I continue to question its elitism.
I thoroughly endorse Landmark Education’s claims that it offers a transformational experience, which could benefit every person on the planet and lead to world changes in attitude and behaviour, could solve all kinds of global problems and be the driving force to a better world. The problem is that Landmark Education is simply not made available to the marginalized sectors of western communities.
Take my most recently thoroughly happy friend, for example. She gets by on the Disability Pension, but she’s very happy to be spending every cent at the moment, to get her Landmark training completed. From week to week, she has almost nothing left to live on, because of the cost of travelling back and forth to Melbourne. She has also borrowed money in order to participate in Landmark.
Because of the intensity of her studies, she has little energy to look for work that might assist her to manage a little more comfortably. I respect her choice. I’m really very happy for her. I can see the direct benefits she has reaped, from taking part in Landmark Education. This intense level of participation won’t last forever. When she’s had enough, she will move on to other things, taking with her what she’s learned. She can do this precisely because she is not responsible for anyone else on the planet.
What I would like people to consider, is the disproportionate cost of my friend’s participation. It’s not a matter of limiting treats, meals out, movie dates or that annual holiday, and budgeting in order to prioritise the Landmark Education process. No – she’s jumped right into the bathwater and taken the baby with her.
Landmark offers no concessions whatsoever. When I did the Landmark Forum, I was rudely shocked to discover that nothing but water and a chair to sit on was offered to us for the hundreds of dollars we had paid to be there. The expectation that on top of the registration and travel costs, we would be in a position to buy restaurant meals each night was something I hadn’t realized, and certainly hadn’t budgeted for.
Landmark Education keeps its overheads low by doing things like telling participants they needn’t worry about accommodation when they have to travel interstate, because local participants will offer them a place to sleep when they get there.(This is probably true. The nature of the work encourages close and deep bonds to be forged between participants.)
The method of handling disgruntlement is to shove it all back on participants, who are coached into believing that we are choosing to blame Landmark Education instead of choosing to rise above our own circumstances.
I feel it is a great shame that the benefits of Landmark Education remain unattainable by people in marginalized sectors of our community, because they do not have enough money at their disposal to even contemplate participating in the programs on offer. These are people in the welfare social underclass, people with children who depend on them for food and shelter, the elderly, the sick and the poor.
One argument is that if one counts the number of hours spent participating in the Landmark Forum and divides the registration costs by the number of hours the cost per hour is relatively low – certainly comparable with the sliding scale of counselling services. It might be further argued that doing the intensive five days of Landmark Forum would reduce the number of subsequent hours of counselling required by newly energised, newly transformed Forum graduates. Even if this is the case, most people pay for their counselling session by session, and do not have the $500 required upfront.
Another argument is that the welfare mentality will necessarily reduce the impact of the Landmark Forum on participants. This is the idea that something offered free, or at a reduced cost, will not be appreciated or embraced to the same extent as something purchased for the full price. My proposal is that the proportionate cost of registration must be considered within the context of a participant’s disposable income. Something that is unaffordable simply isn’t a possibility.
3. Landmark Trauma
I checked out the web before and after doing the Landmark Forum. I’ve always been frightened that I’ll get brainwashed into a cult, and wanted to make sure that was not the outcome of Landmark Education.
One of the saddest accounts I found was by a woman who had been coached to take responsibility for the fact that she was sexually abused as a child, and later raped as an adult. This woman’s story touched me deeply. As a survivor of rape myself, it left me in a quandary wondering why I had responded so positively to the Landmark Forum.
Just Google landmark education and you'll find links to similar accounts.
I’ve tried writing about this several times in the last three years and got nowhere. During this time, I’ve used Landmark concepts and technologies off and on both consciously and unconsciously, and benefited greatly from this. My outlook has remained much more positive, on the whole, and I’ve coped with some heavy losses and disappointments during that time.
My life has changed dramatically since I embarked on my Landmark Education. I’ve found a partner, something I couldn’t even invent as a possibility for myself until nearly a year after I’d done the Forum. I’ve completed my Graduate Diploma in Education and can even contemplate a future of enjoying a teaching career, again something I never thought was possible for me. I compiled, edited and published a book. I’m writing regularly and creating artworks. I’m living as full a life as I can manage, at the moment, and am even able to look ahead and create my future. My family life is the happiest it’s ever been.
I am still extremely resistant to the concept of forgiveness, and am touchy to the extreme, about being labelled a victim. I have no desire to let go of these two aspects of the identity I’ve created for myself. As a participant in the Landmark Forum, I was wary of being asked to take responsibility for being raped and abused.
The idea of self-blame is the clincher here. Like every human being I have regrets and broken promises. There are things I wish I’d done, and other things I’d rather forget I did. Before I did the Landmark Forum, I blamed myself for everything except for being raped. My self-hatred was the underlying issue behind everything that happened to me, everything I did. It took some time, (much longer than five days), but I made a choice to let that go.
When the topic of leaving the past in the past was raised, under the guise of taking responsibility for our futures, in the interests of our freeing ourselves in order to be open to the possibilities it might present, my hackles rose and I fought hard against this. It sounded like I was being asked to accept that I had created and desired everything that had ever happened to me (and everything anyone had ever done to me). I think this was on Day Three. I didn’t talk to anyone about the way I was feeling.
There has never been any doubt in my mind about who is responsible for raping me. This is not so easy for every person who has been raped. Many people are raped in circumstances society holds up as though they really had asked to be abused. This is the effect of living in a society which habitually blames victims.
I was able to resolve the issue of taking responsibility for being raped, by objectifying the experience to some extent. I also separated the act of rape from its impact on me. The idea that it happened in the past and was no longer happening was the key. The fact that I continue to experience the impact of being raped is distinct from the experience of being raped. That is the ongoing trauma, with which I continue to deal every day.
In choosing to own my trauma, I let go of being that self-hating, self-blaming, anger-dependent, fear-addicted victim. Whereas previously I wallowed in the mire of being unable to control my emotional and life-stopping reactions to the constant reminders and triggers to being victimised, I now allow myself to feel what I feel, express what I experience, and to make conscious choices about how I live my life.
I was not a person who repressed or concealed the fact that I had experienced trauma. Perhaps too, the nature of my trauma was not as deeply entrenched as it is for some. I was ready to open myself to the possibility of owning my trauma.
This has been possible for me because I had already reached a healing plateau in my journey. I have to take a longer perspective and acknowledge the other factors that have been part of my life and healing process. The counselling I did was undoubtedly life saving, and the studies I’ve undertaken have also contributed to my developing confidence and points of view.
My experience of Landmark Education has been positive. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. There are no quick, instant, universal fixes, but I wanted to add my story to those that recommend Landmark Education for people who can afford it.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
First Aid
First Aid
(c) Melina Magdalena 2006
On Friday I got my Certificate in First Aid for Centres and Schools, all part of the process towards teacher’s registration in South Australia. The full-day course was held across town, and I arrived much earlier than I’d anticipated. Only one other participant was in the room when I looked in, a young woman who smiled at me from her seat. I took a seat beside her, careful to leave a seat between us in order to observe the social norms.
The course was made up almost entirely of women – new teachers and child care workers, and experienced teachers who had allowed their first aid certificates to lapse. No one sat between the young woman and me, but the last student to arrive, a young African man, sat to my right, and was my companion for the rest of the day.
The woman on my left was an ordinary white Australian woman in her early twenties, blonde, cheerful, somewhat plump and sure of herself. The one who came a few minutes later and sat on her left was the timid brunette type; thin, round-shouldered and still in braces.
They knew each other; whether from Uni they weren’t sure, or maybe it was from their church circles. I listened as they went through the verbal ping-pong, which established the shared contacts and experiences that would enable them to share their time and their table for the rest of the day.
One came from the country, the other from the hills. One attended a church where she was the only person her age in a congregation of over 70s. The other lives quite a distance from the church she goes to, but it has about 90 people of her age group in it. It transpired that she was already married, so I suppose she attends the young couples services.
I tuned out at this point, feeling there was much less possibility of common ground between us than there had been, and turned my attention to my copy of the first aid manual to see what the latest recommended treatment is, for snakebite in Australia. Then they began to discuss something that sounded more interesting.
The people in their churches are considering a split, a division of the old order and the new. They talked in vague terms – their mutual understanding meant it was not necessary to go into detail with each other, but I broke into the conversation at that point asking, “What are the issues?”
It was the bolder one who answered of course; the other one for all I know could herself be a latent lesbian. “The Church has decided to allow gays and lesbians to preach, and they’ve made this decision without consulting the people. We’re all against this of course. Not that we’re against gay people, we just don’t want them teaching us. And the thing is, practicing gays and lesbians are now going to be allowed to be ministers in our church.”
I looked her in the eye for a long moment, wondering what to say in the face of her blunt certainty. The ugly division she enunciated was raised in the air like a fiery cross. I could no longer see her words as a scaffold that could be used to attempt to bridge the distance between us. I allowed silence to fall. The moment ended, and I turned back to the first aid manual.
What irony that I, a feminist lesbian Jew, felt I had any reason to defend my Christian friends whose lives are impacted by the ordinary brutality of such reasonable people? Had I not that day already gone out of my way to breach the zone which excluded me, in order to seek training from the Red Cross, a supposedly neutral humanitarian organization which has existed for over 70 years but only last month voted to include Israel and a non-Christian, non-Muslim symbol to be displayed on its flags? *
On another day I would have felt vulnerable, excluded and resentful to be forced to keep such company. I guess my skin has thickened in the face of repeated similar incidents in which the assumptions of wider society that I am Christian and heterosexual impinge upon certain aspects of my identity that are often better left concealed.
It is unfortunate though, that having gained my first aid certificate, I still have no balm at my disposal to administer first aid to the torn hearts and minds of those around me who have no hope of belonging, simply because they can’t conform to the heterosexual norm.
I wanted to ask these two young women
1) What exactly are you afraid that gay and lesbian ministers will teach, given that their role is to represent the church you all belong to?
2) What do you mean ‘practicing gays and lesbians’? How is their teaching and preaching going to be any different whether they are sexually active or celibate?
3) How can it be, that you claim your church has excluded the opinions of every person who belongs to it, when in fact the church has worked for years through its own organization in order to reach this decision?
It seems to me that a human being who has chosen to enter the preaching profession is likely to be fairly convinced of his or her faith, and to feel inspired and moved in order to want to work as a minister under the shelter of the church that harbours this faith. Sexuality and religious conviction do not compete with one another, and nor are they mutually exclusive. They are two separate, sometimes overlapping aspects of identity.
Surely gay and lesbian people are not beating down the doors of churches in droves to demand they be admitted and accepted? As usual, ignorance and fear is disproportionate to education and experience.
I have heard Christians argue that the purpose of the devil is to lure human beings from the path of righteous heterosexuality into the ways of evil homosexuality. People who believe this will argue that advocates of the gay and lesbian ministry exist for the sole purpose of leading more Christians astray, to embrace an evil non-heterosexual lifestyle. They might add furthermore to their arguments that gays and lesbians who are convinced of their sincerity and faith, have been blinded by the devil in order to fulfil the devil’s aims, and that they are therefore not sincere, not faithful and not true Christians, but followers of evil.
I do not know how to converse with such people, and I don’t wish to associate with them. There is no room for dialogue, when I wish either to persuade them of my point of view, or to exclude them from my world, in exactly the same way they hold out only these options to me. The difference between us is that I have no ambitions to destroy them for their beliefs.
It is not something of a red herring, a distraction and an excuse, to focus upon ministers of religion who happen also to be not heterosexual, as harbingers of evil? To my way of thinking, there is no lack of evil in this world. Whom does it serve, to spend copious amounts of our time in casting suspicions upon our friends and neighbours, and to sit in judgment of their love?
·http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5104680.stm BBC News, 22 June, 2006 “Red Cross votes to admit Israel”, accessed online, 29/7/2006
·http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19640099-28737,00.html The Australian, July 1, 2006 “Schism looms over gay clergy”, accessed online, 29/7/2006.
·http://members.ozemail.com.au/~unitingnetwork/history1.html Chronology of the UCA Sexuality Debate accessed online, 29/7/2006.
(c) Melina Magdalena 2006
On Friday I got my Certificate in First Aid for Centres and Schools, all part of the process towards teacher’s registration in South Australia. The full-day course was held across town, and I arrived much earlier than I’d anticipated. Only one other participant was in the room when I looked in, a young woman who smiled at me from her seat. I took a seat beside her, careful to leave a seat between us in order to observe the social norms.
The course was made up almost entirely of women – new teachers and child care workers, and experienced teachers who had allowed their first aid certificates to lapse. No one sat between the young woman and me, but the last student to arrive, a young African man, sat to my right, and was my companion for the rest of the day.
The woman on my left was an ordinary white Australian woman in her early twenties, blonde, cheerful, somewhat plump and sure of herself. The one who came a few minutes later and sat on her left was the timid brunette type; thin, round-shouldered and still in braces.
They knew each other; whether from Uni they weren’t sure, or maybe it was from their church circles. I listened as they went through the verbal ping-pong, which established the shared contacts and experiences that would enable them to share their time and their table for the rest of the day.
One came from the country, the other from the hills. One attended a church where she was the only person her age in a congregation of over 70s. The other lives quite a distance from the church she goes to, but it has about 90 people of her age group in it. It transpired that she was already married, so I suppose she attends the young couples services.
I tuned out at this point, feeling there was much less possibility of common ground between us than there had been, and turned my attention to my copy of the first aid manual to see what the latest recommended treatment is, for snakebite in Australia. Then they began to discuss something that sounded more interesting.
The people in their churches are considering a split, a division of the old order and the new. They talked in vague terms – their mutual understanding meant it was not necessary to go into detail with each other, but I broke into the conversation at that point asking, “What are the issues?”
It was the bolder one who answered of course; the other one for all I know could herself be a latent lesbian. “The Church has decided to allow gays and lesbians to preach, and they’ve made this decision without consulting the people. We’re all against this of course. Not that we’re against gay people, we just don’t want them teaching us. And the thing is, practicing gays and lesbians are now going to be allowed to be ministers in our church.”
I looked her in the eye for a long moment, wondering what to say in the face of her blunt certainty. The ugly division she enunciated was raised in the air like a fiery cross. I could no longer see her words as a scaffold that could be used to attempt to bridge the distance between us. I allowed silence to fall. The moment ended, and I turned back to the first aid manual.
What irony that I, a feminist lesbian Jew, felt I had any reason to defend my Christian friends whose lives are impacted by the ordinary brutality of such reasonable people? Had I not that day already gone out of my way to breach the zone which excluded me, in order to seek training from the Red Cross, a supposedly neutral humanitarian organization which has existed for over 70 years but only last month voted to include Israel and a non-Christian, non-Muslim symbol to be displayed on its flags? *
On another day I would have felt vulnerable, excluded and resentful to be forced to keep such company. I guess my skin has thickened in the face of repeated similar incidents in which the assumptions of wider society that I am Christian and heterosexual impinge upon certain aspects of my identity that are often better left concealed.
It is unfortunate though, that having gained my first aid certificate, I still have no balm at my disposal to administer first aid to the torn hearts and minds of those around me who have no hope of belonging, simply because they can’t conform to the heterosexual norm.
I wanted to ask these two young women
1) What exactly are you afraid that gay and lesbian ministers will teach, given that their role is to represent the church you all belong to?
2) What do you mean ‘practicing gays and lesbians’? How is their teaching and preaching going to be any different whether they are sexually active or celibate?
3) How can it be, that you claim your church has excluded the opinions of every person who belongs to it, when in fact the church has worked for years through its own organization in order to reach this decision?
It seems to me that a human being who has chosen to enter the preaching profession is likely to be fairly convinced of his or her faith, and to feel inspired and moved in order to want to work as a minister under the shelter of the church that harbours this faith. Sexuality and religious conviction do not compete with one another, and nor are they mutually exclusive. They are two separate, sometimes overlapping aspects of identity.
Surely gay and lesbian people are not beating down the doors of churches in droves to demand they be admitted and accepted? As usual, ignorance and fear is disproportionate to education and experience.
I have heard Christians argue that the purpose of the devil is to lure human beings from the path of righteous heterosexuality into the ways of evil homosexuality. People who believe this will argue that advocates of the gay and lesbian ministry exist for the sole purpose of leading more Christians astray, to embrace an evil non-heterosexual lifestyle. They might add furthermore to their arguments that gays and lesbians who are convinced of their sincerity and faith, have been blinded by the devil in order to fulfil the devil’s aims, and that they are therefore not sincere, not faithful and not true Christians, but followers of evil.
I do not know how to converse with such people, and I don’t wish to associate with them. There is no room for dialogue, when I wish either to persuade them of my point of view, or to exclude them from my world, in exactly the same way they hold out only these options to me. The difference between us is that I have no ambitions to destroy them for their beliefs.
It is not something of a red herring, a distraction and an excuse, to focus upon ministers of religion who happen also to be not heterosexual, as harbingers of evil? To my way of thinking, there is no lack of evil in this world. Whom does it serve, to spend copious amounts of our time in casting suspicions upon our friends and neighbours, and to sit in judgment of their love?
·http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5104680.stm BBC News, 22 June, 2006 “Red Cross votes to admit Israel”, accessed online, 29/7/2006
·http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19640099-28737,00.html The Australian, July 1, 2006 “Schism looms over gay clergy”, accessed online, 29/7/2006.
·http://members.ozemail.com.au/~unitingnetwork/history1.html Chronology of the UCA Sexuality Debate accessed online, 29/7/2006.
Monday, July 17, 2006
making comments
1) click on 'comments' at the bottom of the post
2) type your comment into the window
3) choose an identity - e.g. 'anonymous' (means you don't have to provide your own email address or anything, even if you do choose to sign your comment with your name)
4) type in the word verification
5) click preview
6) check your comment
7) if you're happy, click publish
note moderation simply means I get to see your comment on my blog before anyone else can see it, and I can choose whether to display your comment.
2) type your comment into the window
3) choose an identity - e.g. 'anonymous' (means you don't have to provide your own email address or anything, even if you do choose to sign your comment with your name)
4) type in the word verification
5) click preview
6) check your comment
7) if you're happy, click publish
note moderation simply means I get to see your comment on my blog before anyone else can see it, and I can choose whether to display your comment.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Stage Managed Offensive (part two)
Part Two: let’s play war
© Melina Magdalena
I understand things at a simple level. I’ve never been good at arguing for argument’s sake. I see no point in talk-fests that prove nothing and achieve even less.
Why not listen to both sides and come up with a set of solutions that overcome the perceived problems and make it possible to work together for the future?
In the world of stage-managed warfare, why not send our youngsters out to be trained up, achieve qualifications and kill civilians?
If they join up, they get money, training and job security which more than fee-paying universities and technical colleges can offer them. Our youngsters are in less danger as soldiers, than the citizens of the nation-states Australia sends them to protect.
Engaging in war is the drama queen’s technique for grabbing attention. Whether she slaps her rival across the face or steals her understudy’s costume, there is no justification for bombing the shit out of a city or country in order to prove one’s political point.
Such behaviour does nothing but create enmity, hatred, bitterness and grief which can lead only to more destruction and terror.
And the world sits back and watches in smug horror. At least it’s them and not us.
And our leaders say nothing, if not to outright condone the terrors perpetrated by nation-states against one another.
“We have a right,” they say, “to defend ourselves in the war on terror. We have a right to pre-empt the terrors that others are intending to perpetrate on us. If we don’t defend ourselves, no one will. Staging an offensive against our terrorist enemies is the responsible thing to do.”
There is no end to the cycle of terror, when we live in a culture that worships fear as a means of control and manipulation.
Ask yourself – what are you afraid of, and why?
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Imagine that someone decided to bomb the highways, runways and railway lines that connect Adelaide to the other cities of Australia. We can hear them talking …
“What about the power stations – we’d better cut off their power and telecommunications, too. And just for good measure, let’s poison their water supply.”
Why would anyone do that? What would it prove? What could it achieve? I put the same question to you.
Taking a cue from Israel; isn’t that what Australia should do to the good old US of A? Aren’t they are holding one of our citizens hostage in Guantanamo Bay?
How dare they? We’re not in a war situation, are we? Oh that’s right – we’re all in this together, this war on terror. But technically, we’re allies. And besides, the USA has nuclear capability. It’s probably not such a wise move to start taking out their power stations and highways, so let’s just ignore the USA’s terror tactics.
I suppose we wouldn’t all die. Some of us have been hoarding food stocks and fresh water supplies for years, in case of tribulation. Some of us don’t live right in the vicinity of mobile phone towers. Backyard rainwater tanks and vegetable patches would probably save a few. But it wouldn’t be long before families were forced to defend their patches against marauding hungry have-nots who were hapless enough to depend on the stock market to preserve their wealth, and bought big, ugly, cold houses in paved low maintenance garden-free zones.
It wouldn’t be easy to learn to murder those in order to defend our own, but we’d get there, or die in the attempt. It’s all about survival of the fittest, after all.
Imagine that we got ourselves back on our feet, buried our dead (mostly women and children) and began to repair the infrastructure that enabled our communities to thrive. Australians are resourceful. We have plenty of resources for export, so why not re-route some of them to Adelaide, to get us back on track?
Then, just as we’re beginning to breathe freely again, when hospital staff can take stock of their situations and begin to plan how to treat the thousands of less-severe casualties who have missed out on treatment in the meantime, it happens again.
The planes and helicopters fly over while we’re busy minding our own businesses. Submarines just rise up one day in the Port River. Who do they belong to? The dolphins are all dead – we didn’t listen to them anyway. Missiles appear out of nowhere. We see our wives and uncles blown to pieces in the street. A bomb falls on the university – did it miss its target? No actually, the university WAS the target. Our enemy has heard that the professors are teaching our children to rise up against them. We’ve reached a critical point in our learning when we’re able to say – that bomb didn’t just ‘drop’ – it was thrown at us deliberately.
We’re a little smarter this time. We made it look as though we were repairing the same highways we had before, but we were also building a tunnel to Olympic Dam. They’ll never bomb that – they need our uranium. The riff raff of Adelaide are fleeing underground. What’s left of us is getting out as fast as our legs can carry us - by trailer, on foot, by bicycle – desperation is the mother of all invention, and we’ve got no petrol left.
We’ve set up a refugee camp at Roxby Downs. It doesn’t matter that food supplies have to be flown in from elsewhere. We’re used now, to going hungry and thirsty. The kids have learned that it’s no use complaining. Someone will look after us and make sure we don’t get massacred in the millions. What would be the point in killing us anyway? We’ve got nothing left, that anybody else would want. Surely someone in the world cares?
God must have saved us for some reason.
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So let’s dig up the past. Let’s uncover that shallow grave. Let’s look a little deeper than the topsoil. Let’s get real. Let’s seek the heart of the matter and discover the naked truth.
War achieves power only for the greedy and destroys the lives of the innocent millions. War continues a cycle that humanity ought to have outgrown by now. The trauma of those who survive far outweighs the grief for those who die. In some ways, it’s harder to survive. Humans are not actually dependent for our survival, on warfare to lubricate the machinery of capitalism.
Have you lost your connection to what is real in this world?
Here’s a reminder:
• Every human being comes helpless into this world and depends on the kindness of others to raise it to adulthood.
• Everybody lives and dies.
• No human being is of more worth than another.
• We all need food and water and shelter and education and healthcare and love.
• We all come from families and communities whose aim is to nurture and grow.
• All the food we eat was grown somewhere, by someone in the world.
• If storms and warfare destroy the crops, there will be nothing for us to buy in the shops.
• All the water we drink is part of the Earth’s great reservoir that is cycled again and again and again, enabling life to continue.
• Even wealthy westerners are susceptible to starvation and disease.
• Bombs and landmines kill.
• Like war, nuclear power is dangerous for children, animals, plants and people and all living things.
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.
© Melina Magdalena
I understand things at a simple level. I’ve never been good at arguing for argument’s sake. I see no point in talk-fests that prove nothing and achieve even less.
Why not listen to both sides and come up with a set of solutions that overcome the perceived problems and make it possible to work together for the future?
In the world of stage-managed warfare, why not send our youngsters out to be trained up, achieve qualifications and kill civilians?
If they join up, they get money, training and job security which more than fee-paying universities and technical colleges can offer them. Our youngsters are in less danger as soldiers, than the citizens of the nation-states Australia sends them to protect.
Engaging in war is the drama queen’s technique for grabbing attention. Whether she slaps her rival across the face or steals her understudy’s costume, there is no justification for bombing the shit out of a city or country in order to prove one’s political point.
Such behaviour does nothing but create enmity, hatred, bitterness and grief which can lead only to more destruction and terror.
And the world sits back and watches in smug horror. At least it’s them and not us.
And our leaders say nothing, if not to outright condone the terrors perpetrated by nation-states against one another.
“We have a right,” they say, “to defend ourselves in the war on terror. We have a right to pre-empt the terrors that others are intending to perpetrate on us. If we don’t defend ourselves, no one will. Staging an offensive against our terrorist enemies is the responsible thing to do.”
There is no end to the cycle of terror, when we live in a culture that worships fear as a means of control and manipulation.
Ask yourself – what are you afraid of, and why?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Imagine that someone decided to bomb the highways, runways and railway lines that connect Adelaide to the other cities of Australia. We can hear them talking …
“What about the power stations – we’d better cut off their power and telecommunications, too. And just for good measure, let’s poison their water supply.”
Why would anyone do that? What would it prove? What could it achieve? I put the same question to you.
Taking a cue from Israel; isn’t that what Australia should do to the good old US of A? Aren’t they are holding one of our citizens hostage in Guantanamo Bay?
How dare they? We’re not in a war situation, are we? Oh that’s right – we’re all in this together, this war on terror. But technically, we’re allies. And besides, the USA has nuclear capability. It’s probably not such a wise move to start taking out their power stations and highways, so let’s just ignore the USA’s terror tactics.
I suppose we wouldn’t all die. Some of us have been hoarding food stocks and fresh water supplies for years, in case of tribulation. Some of us don’t live right in the vicinity of mobile phone towers. Backyard rainwater tanks and vegetable patches would probably save a few. But it wouldn’t be long before families were forced to defend their patches against marauding hungry have-nots who were hapless enough to depend on the stock market to preserve their wealth, and bought big, ugly, cold houses in paved low maintenance garden-free zones.
It wouldn’t be easy to learn to murder those in order to defend our own, but we’d get there, or die in the attempt. It’s all about survival of the fittest, after all.
Imagine that we got ourselves back on our feet, buried our dead (mostly women and children) and began to repair the infrastructure that enabled our communities to thrive. Australians are resourceful. We have plenty of resources for export, so why not re-route some of them to Adelaide, to get us back on track?
Then, just as we’re beginning to breathe freely again, when hospital staff can take stock of their situations and begin to plan how to treat the thousands of less-severe casualties who have missed out on treatment in the meantime, it happens again.
The planes and helicopters fly over while we’re busy minding our own businesses. Submarines just rise up one day in the Port River. Who do they belong to? The dolphins are all dead – we didn’t listen to them anyway. Missiles appear out of nowhere. We see our wives and uncles blown to pieces in the street. A bomb falls on the university – did it miss its target? No actually, the university WAS the target. Our enemy has heard that the professors are teaching our children to rise up against them. We’ve reached a critical point in our learning when we’re able to say – that bomb didn’t just ‘drop’ – it was thrown at us deliberately.
We’re a little smarter this time. We made it look as though we were repairing the same highways we had before, but we were also building a tunnel to Olympic Dam. They’ll never bomb that – they need our uranium. The riff raff of Adelaide are fleeing underground. What’s left of us is getting out as fast as our legs can carry us - by trailer, on foot, by bicycle – desperation is the mother of all invention, and we’ve got no petrol left.
We’ve set up a refugee camp at Roxby Downs. It doesn’t matter that food supplies have to be flown in from elsewhere. We’re used now, to going hungry and thirsty. The kids have learned that it’s no use complaining. Someone will look after us and make sure we don’t get massacred in the millions. What would be the point in killing us anyway? We’ve got nothing left, that anybody else would want. Surely someone in the world cares?
God must have saved us for some reason.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
So let’s dig up the past. Let’s uncover that shallow grave. Let’s look a little deeper than the topsoil. Let’s get real. Let’s seek the heart of the matter and discover the naked truth.
War achieves power only for the greedy and destroys the lives of the innocent millions. War continues a cycle that humanity ought to have outgrown by now. The trauma of those who survive far outweighs the grief for those who die. In some ways, it’s harder to survive. Humans are not actually dependent for our survival, on warfare to lubricate the machinery of capitalism.
Have you lost your connection to what is real in this world?
Here’s a reminder:
• Every human being comes helpless into this world and depends on the kindness of others to raise it to adulthood.
• Everybody lives and dies.
• No human being is of more worth than another.
• We all need food and water and shelter and education and healthcare and love.
• We all come from families and communities whose aim is to nurture and grow.
• All the food we eat was grown somewhere, by someone in the world.
• If storms and warfare destroy the crops, there will be nothing for us to buy in the shops.
• All the water we drink is part of the Earth’s great reservoir that is cycled again and again and again, enabling life to continue.
• Even wealthy westerners are susceptible to starvation and disease.
• Bombs and landmines kill.
• Like war, nuclear power is dangerous for children, animals, plants and people and all living things.
WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER.
Stage Managed Offensive (part one)
Part One: leadership squabble
© Melina Magdalena
Big news this week in Australia: John Howard and Peter Costello’s battle for supremacy. Did anyone else notice how little passion either of these men expressed for his position, his party, his nation; his people?
I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who was describing the kind of blank-faced beige bureaucrats who govern us. They have not a smidgeon of character, and are shape-changing creatures who magically alter their facial expressions, stance and opinions to suit whatever occasion presents itself.
However, let’s not ignore their undeniable skills at the art of distraction and media manipulation.
The polls are not favouring dear John just now, and why should they be?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Hey Peter – “Let’s play dirty and grab some media attention by acting out in front of the millions of Australians whose lives have been negatively affected by our policies.”
“What a good idea, John! The joke will definitely be on them, if we twist it a little. We’ve got to somehow convince them that politicians don’t lie.”
“The best way to do that is if you accuse me of lying. Then I’ll prove I didn’t.”
Do you believe him?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My teenagers are good at the same thing. I suppose they learned it from me, in the earliest years of their lives. I honed my skills at the art of distraction during the hours spent waiting for and riding on buses around Adelaide.
I’ve seen my kids band together and create a scene over the most petty and trivial of issues (for example which placemat they get to use at the table, when all the placemats came from the same identical set).
The effectiveness of this technique lies in the fact that I am momentarily distracted from whatever was preoccupying me at the time. My kids do it to jolt me out of distress. They pick up on my distress, become distressed in turn, and act out, in order to put me back on track.
Oh – and Australia needs a nuclear power industry like I need a hole in the head.
GET REAL, FOLKS!
© Melina Magdalena
Big news this week in Australia: John Howard and Peter Costello’s battle for supremacy. Did anyone else notice how little passion either of these men expressed for his position, his party, his nation; his people?
I had a conversation with a friend yesterday who was describing the kind of blank-faced beige bureaucrats who govern us. They have not a smidgeon of character, and are shape-changing creatures who magically alter their facial expressions, stance and opinions to suit whatever occasion presents itself.
However, let’s not ignore their undeniable skills at the art of distraction and media manipulation.
The polls are not favouring dear John just now, and why should they be?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“Hey Peter – “Let’s play dirty and grab some media attention by acting out in front of the millions of Australians whose lives have been negatively affected by our policies.”
“What a good idea, John! The joke will definitely be on them, if we twist it a little. We’ve got to somehow convince them that politicians don’t lie.”
“The best way to do that is if you accuse me of lying. Then I’ll prove I didn’t.”
Do you believe him?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My teenagers are good at the same thing. I suppose they learned it from me, in the earliest years of their lives. I honed my skills at the art of distraction during the hours spent waiting for and riding on buses around Adelaide.
I’ve seen my kids band together and create a scene over the most petty and trivial of issues (for example which placemat they get to use at the table, when all the placemats came from the same identical set).
The effectiveness of this technique lies in the fact that I am momentarily distracted from whatever was preoccupying me at the time. My kids do it to jolt me out of distress. They pick up on my distress, become distressed in turn, and act out, in order to put me back on track.
Oh – and Australia needs a nuclear power industry like I need a hole in the head.
GET REAL, FOLKS!
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Another Side of Normal (2)
Living with PTSD - Bleeding
© Melina Magdalena 2006
Once upon a time, it was unthinkable for someone to survive rape. Of course, women survived, but it was kept a shameful, silent secret. A woman who was known to have been raped, was automatically labelled “victim” and treated as a worthless used up slag who would have been better off dead.
Rape is considered to be one of the worst things that can be done to a person. In our legal systems, to be charged with the offence of rape is supposed to be equivalent to being charged with murder. Like murder, the crime of rape has suffered from linguistic filtering and legal permutations so that circumstances can be twisted to diminish the legal seriousness of whatever act is alleged to have taken place between a perpetrator and a victim.
One of the things that really got to me when the man who raped me was being fed through the legal machine, was the way in which my experience was assumed by the Court to be known and understood. In my Victim Impact Statement, I wrote at length about the many ways in which being raped had affected my life and impacted on my ability to function as a woman and a mother.
By this time, I myself had already been fed once through the legal machinery when I applied for Victim’s Compensation a year or two before. The police had no idea who had broken into my home and raped me, and as there seemed to be little possibility the man would ever be brought to any kind of justice, I applied for compensation and was eventually awarded a small sum of money which improved my opportunities and quality of life. It enabled me, for example, to purchase a second-hand computer and printer, to get my driver’s license and a car. These are things I may never have attained as a single mother on a pension. They enabled me to pursue my studies and my writing, and gradually, to become less home-bound.
As part of my application for Victims of Crime compensation, I experienced a baffling interview with a legally-appointed psychologist. Baffling, because she judged that the impact on me of having a strange man break into my home in the middle of the night and threaten to kill me and my children unless I allowed him to rape me was minimal, since this occurred just a few months after I had fled my marriage, while I was still also having to cope with the legal ramifications of custody battles and the Family Court, not to mention the Magistrate’s Court, which I had to attend when my ex-husband opposed the imposition of a Summary Protection Order against him, nor the stresses of bringing up two very small children alone, with no income support save the pension.
I am so glad that this is all behind me now, thirteen years later.
However, I remain bemused by my memories of this interview, years of counselling sessions, and the construction of my Victim Impact Statement. In particular, the physical aftermath of being raped is something I still feel is ignored and is widely misunderstood.
This is not the first time that I’ve tried to write about this, and I think I understand where part of the difficulty lies for me. While following media reports of the inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble aboard a cruise ship in 2002, I’ve talked to a number of survivors abut why the men who filmed each other raping her as she died of a drug overdose of the date rape drug ‘fantasy’ were never charged with rape. Their cabins were cleared of all evidence before the police could board the ship and commence their investigations. The video footage and violated body of Dianne Brimble are all that remain as evidence of what happened to her. This doesn’t seem to have provided sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Today when I logged into my email, I saw articles on the web about the reduction in the sentences that some gang-rapists in Sydney had received. I looked at the article and my eye was caught by one particular line “In sentencing the men in 2004, Justice Michael Finnane said the victim had the worst injuries he had seen in his 35-year legal career - requiring surgery to her genitalia after the attack.”
There was a section in the Victim Impact Statement form which asked me to describe the pain and physical injuries that I had suffered as a result of the crime. I distinctly recall feeling inhibited about what “physical injury” meant in my case. I was still in the process then, of getting angry about the many times I had felt coerced during my marriage, into having sexual intercourse when I really didn’t want to. With my limited and traumatic range of sexual experience, my confusion is understandable.
Like many people, I suppose I had felt as though rape perhaps wasn’t as bad if it only involved penile penetration of the vagina, as it has whenever I had been raped. Since that is the same as sexual intercourse, had I any right to claim that I had been physically injured through this act? And what of pain? Had it hurt at the time? I made myself numb, believing I was about to be killed. There are areas on my breasts that are still ice cold, parts of my body that I cannot bear to have touched, where that rapist touched them.
I found out later that some of the women who were also raped by the man who raped me, had suffered greater physical insult to their genitalia and other parts of their bodies. My understanding however, of the effect of sexual assault, is that the emotional effects and trauma that is induced can be of as great severity whether the actual assault consists of physical penetrations, mutilations, verbal harassment and anything in between.
The only kind of thing I felt justified in writing in my Victim Impact Statement was the bruising I had suffered on various parts of my body that was photographed as evidence of the attack on me, and my fear that I had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the man who raped me.
Thirteen years after being raped, I can tell you with confidence that the physical trauma continues and has not improved. Furthermore, the trauma is not recognized as such by the medical establishment, and there is no treatment for it. Whenever I raise my physical problems with doctors, I am told that my experiences lie within the range of normal. There is nothing for me to be concerned about. Perhaps I am unlucky, but it’s just something I have to live with unless I want to have a hysterectomy. (Not bloody likely.)
I once presented my doctor with a list of physical symptoms which I wanted to address with her. She asked me whether I thought I might be depressed. (She wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last to take refuge in the panacea of the antidepressant.) I go to see a different doctor now, but she has not been able to help, either. I allow her to invade my body every two-and-a-half years and give me the required pap smear, and I get her to monitor my iron and thyroxin levels.
I have been tested for fibroids on numerous occasions. I have the levels of various hormones and minerals in my blood checked over and over again. I took myself to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital one evening, a few years ago, fearing that this time I might really die of blood loss. They sent me home again and told me to buy super-sized sanitary pads. In all these years, it has only my iron levels that have shown consistent stress and depletion. I’ve been blessed with good health, and cursed by the ignorance and apathy of doctors.
The idea of a link between body, mind and spirit is something I’m familiar with. Perhaps the system between these aspects of self is too complex to manage in any useful manner? The body is an amazingly complex network of interdependent systems. It’s obvious to me, that as a result of being raped, something in the systems of my body has been knocked permanently off balance. It doesn’t help to tell myself that I am causing my own symptoms, or that if I chose to think in a different way, the symptoms would necessarily resolve themselves. It doesn’t help to think that if I chose not to label my symptoms as dis-ease, I would therefore no longer suffer them as distressing.
Every three or four weeks, my body launches an all-out assault upon me. I feel as though my insides are fighting to become my outsides. Several days before my period actually begins, I fall into a deep and suicidal depression for a day. This black day affects me no matter what else is going on in my life at the time. It’s only dangerous when life is not going reasonably well. From experience, I know to keep my thoughts to myself. I reassure myself that it will pass, as it always has, so far.
On these days, I try not to react to situations that arise with family members, friends or workmates that will later need to be resolved.
My body begins to bloat. The irritation begins, and intensifies over the next forty-eight hours, as I feel I am surrounded by a swarm of angry wasps. I emanate “DON’T TOUCH ME” vibes, and become clumsy, awkward, impatient and reactive. Nothing is simple, nothing works the way it is supposed to and it’s all my fault.
Then like magic, I wake up one morning and I feel fine. I feel like I’ve lost a kilo or two overnight, and my clothes begin to sit right again. During breakfast it dawns on me that this sensation is what heralds the beginning of the bleed. I leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to check my supplies. If I’m lucky, I will have bought ahead, but all too often, my period (curiously) takes me by surprise. The irregularity is one factor, but perhaps at some subconscious level I still cling to the hope that if I don’t want to have it, it won’t come!
I often experience cramping for a day before the blood appears. It’s the machinery of my body getting into gear. I go to the toilet often, just to see whether the bleeding has begun. Once it has, it is unmistakable. Floods and fury. I can feel my uterus as it contracts and expands like the instinctive muscle it is, sucks blood from outside its walls and pumps it out again. For two or three days this goes on, though mercifully, the cramping usually ends twenty-four hours after the bleeding begins. I go through six to ten super-sized sanitary napkins each day, and two or three pairs of underpants. I wake up twice each night to find the pad, my thighs and my sheets saturated with blood, stagger to the bathroom, change the pad and crawl back into bed for a couple more hours.
By the second day of bleeding, I can barely crawl out of bed, though I do. Despite feeling so wretchedly ill and drained, I mother, I housewife, I go to work and I do whatever needs to be done. The thing I dislike most about this bleeding is the clots. They vary in size, and they fall out of me like I imagine dead fetuses would fall out of me if I were miscarrying. Every month I feel as though my body is telling me I’ve wasted its capacity yet again, to nourish and bear a child. I feel like my body is punishing me.
The scientific link that has been established between certain hormones and fertility is not something that has been helpful in my situation. I spent a year on the birth control pill to see whether this might help. All it did was give me an insight into when the bleeding would begin again, every twenty-eight days without fail. I didn’t require birth control, so I went off the pill after a year. I spent a different year on another medication whose function was to prevent my uterus from sucking up the blood outside itself. This did help a little, but I still clotted and flooded and wept. When the pills ran out, there seemed little point in getting the prescription renewed.
Since being raped, the disruption and malfunction of my menstrual cycle has had a severe impact on my quality of life. This impacts on me far more than any sexual ‘dysfunction’ I might otherwise care to report. The fact that I’m not interested in having sex with men does have some link with being raped, but it’s tied in with many other factors than the purely physical, such as my distinct aversion to spending time in the company of men, let alone inviting a man to have access to my private parts.
I’ve never heard another survivor talk about her menstrual cycle as having been affected or impacted as a result of sexual trauma, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many of us are affected in a similar way. All of us have probably been told that many women suffer from premenstrual syndrome; that it’s unfortunate if we have pain while menstruating, but it’s nothing that anyone can do anything about.
I would like to be able to include this information retrospectively on my Victim Impact Statement. I would like to see the suffering that I continue to endure every few weeks be considered in the sentencing of the man who was convicted of raping me, and who will be released on parole next year. I sometimes joke with people that men suffer from menstrual envy, but deep in my heart I know I’m just projecting my own terror and anguish onto the men I sometimes encounter, who find reasons to give me a hard time. No man in his right mind could envy my menstrual cycle.
REFERENCES:
“Gang rapists have their sentence reduced”, Friday March 24 12:30 AEDT ©AAP 2006, viewed online URL http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=87738 [24/3/2006].
© Melina Magdalena 2006
Once upon a time, it was unthinkable for someone to survive rape. Of course, women survived, but it was kept a shameful, silent secret. A woman who was known to have been raped, was automatically labelled “victim” and treated as a worthless used up slag who would have been better off dead.
Rape is considered to be one of the worst things that can be done to a person. In our legal systems, to be charged with the offence of rape is supposed to be equivalent to being charged with murder. Like murder, the crime of rape has suffered from linguistic filtering and legal permutations so that circumstances can be twisted to diminish the legal seriousness of whatever act is alleged to have taken place between a perpetrator and a victim.
One of the things that really got to me when the man who raped me was being fed through the legal machine, was the way in which my experience was assumed by the Court to be known and understood. In my Victim Impact Statement, I wrote at length about the many ways in which being raped had affected my life and impacted on my ability to function as a woman and a mother.
By this time, I myself had already been fed once through the legal machinery when I applied for Victim’s Compensation a year or two before. The police had no idea who had broken into my home and raped me, and as there seemed to be little possibility the man would ever be brought to any kind of justice, I applied for compensation and was eventually awarded a small sum of money which improved my opportunities and quality of life. It enabled me, for example, to purchase a second-hand computer and printer, to get my driver’s license and a car. These are things I may never have attained as a single mother on a pension. They enabled me to pursue my studies and my writing, and gradually, to become less home-bound.
As part of my application for Victims of Crime compensation, I experienced a baffling interview with a legally-appointed psychologist. Baffling, because she judged that the impact on me of having a strange man break into my home in the middle of the night and threaten to kill me and my children unless I allowed him to rape me was minimal, since this occurred just a few months after I had fled my marriage, while I was still also having to cope with the legal ramifications of custody battles and the Family Court, not to mention the Magistrate’s Court, which I had to attend when my ex-husband opposed the imposition of a Summary Protection Order against him, nor the stresses of bringing up two very small children alone, with no income support save the pension.
I am so glad that this is all behind me now, thirteen years later.
However, I remain bemused by my memories of this interview, years of counselling sessions, and the construction of my Victim Impact Statement. In particular, the physical aftermath of being raped is something I still feel is ignored and is widely misunderstood.
This is not the first time that I’ve tried to write about this, and I think I understand where part of the difficulty lies for me. While following media reports of the inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble aboard a cruise ship in 2002, I’ve talked to a number of survivors abut why the men who filmed each other raping her as she died of a drug overdose of the date rape drug ‘fantasy’ were never charged with rape. Their cabins were cleared of all evidence before the police could board the ship and commence their investigations. The video footage and violated body of Dianne Brimble are all that remain as evidence of what happened to her. This doesn’t seem to have provided sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Today when I logged into my email, I saw articles on the web about the reduction in the sentences that some gang-rapists in Sydney had received. I looked at the article and my eye was caught by one particular line “In sentencing the men in 2004, Justice Michael Finnane said the victim had the worst injuries he had seen in his 35-year legal career - requiring surgery to her genitalia after the attack.”
There was a section in the Victim Impact Statement form which asked me to describe the pain and physical injuries that I had suffered as a result of the crime. I distinctly recall feeling inhibited about what “physical injury” meant in my case. I was still in the process then, of getting angry about the many times I had felt coerced during my marriage, into having sexual intercourse when I really didn’t want to. With my limited and traumatic range of sexual experience, my confusion is understandable.
Like many people, I suppose I had felt as though rape perhaps wasn’t as bad if it only involved penile penetration of the vagina, as it has whenever I had been raped. Since that is the same as sexual intercourse, had I any right to claim that I had been physically injured through this act? And what of pain? Had it hurt at the time? I made myself numb, believing I was about to be killed. There are areas on my breasts that are still ice cold, parts of my body that I cannot bear to have touched, where that rapist touched them.
I found out later that some of the women who were also raped by the man who raped me, had suffered greater physical insult to their genitalia and other parts of their bodies. My understanding however, of the effect of sexual assault, is that the emotional effects and trauma that is induced can be of as great severity whether the actual assault consists of physical penetrations, mutilations, verbal harassment and anything in between.
The only kind of thing I felt justified in writing in my Victim Impact Statement was the bruising I had suffered on various parts of my body that was photographed as evidence of the attack on me, and my fear that I had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the man who raped me.
Thirteen years after being raped, I can tell you with confidence that the physical trauma continues and has not improved. Furthermore, the trauma is not recognized as such by the medical establishment, and there is no treatment for it. Whenever I raise my physical problems with doctors, I am told that my experiences lie within the range of normal. There is nothing for me to be concerned about. Perhaps I am unlucky, but it’s just something I have to live with unless I want to have a hysterectomy. (Not bloody likely.)
I once presented my doctor with a list of physical symptoms which I wanted to address with her. She asked me whether I thought I might be depressed. (She wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last to take refuge in the panacea of the antidepressant.) I go to see a different doctor now, but she has not been able to help, either. I allow her to invade my body every two-and-a-half years and give me the required pap smear, and I get her to monitor my iron and thyroxin levels.
I have been tested for fibroids on numerous occasions. I have the levels of various hormones and minerals in my blood checked over and over again. I took myself to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital one evening, a few years ago, fearing that this time I might really die of blood loss. They sent me home again and told me to buy super-sized sanitary pads. In all these years, it has only my iron levels that have shown consistent stress and depletion. I’ve been blessed with good health, and cursed by the ignorance and apathy of doctors.
The idea of a link between body, mind and spirit is something I’m familiar with. Perhaps the system between these aspects of self is too complex to manage in any useful manner? The body is an amazingly complex network of interdependent systems. It’s obvious to me, that as a result of being raped, something in the systems of my body has been knocked permanently off balance. It doesn’t help to tell myself that I am causing my own symptoms, or that if I chose to think in a different way, the symptoms would necessarily resolve themselves. It doesn’t help to think that if I chose not to label my symptoms as dis-ease, I would therefore no longer suffer them as distressing.
Every three or four weeks, my body launches an all-out assault upon me. I feel as though my insides are fighting to become my outsides. Several days before my period actually begins, I fall into a deep and suicidal depression for a day. This black day affects me no matter what else is going on in my life at the time. It’s only dangerous when life is not going reasonably well. From experience, I know to keep my thoughts to myself. I reassure myself that it will pass, as it always has, so far.
On these days, I try not to react to situations that arise with family members, friends or workmates that will later need to be resolved.
My body begins to bloat. The irritation begins, and intensifies over the next forty-eight hours, as I feel I am surrounded by a swarm of angry wasps. I emanate “DON’T TOUCH ME” vibes, and become clumsy, awkward, impatient and reactive. Nothing is simple, nothing works the way it is supposed to and it’s all my fault.
Then like magic, I wake up one morning and I feel fine. I feel like I’ve lost a kilo or two overnight, and my clothes begin to sit right again. During breakfast it dawns on me that this sensation is what heralds the beginning of the bleed. I leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to check my supplies. If I’m lucky, I will have bought ahead, but all too often, my period (curiously) takes me by surprise. The irregularity is one factor, but perhaps at some subconscious level I still cling to the hope that if I don’t want to have it, it won’t come!
I often experience cramping for a day before the blood appears. It’s the machinery of my body getting into gear. I go to the toilet often, just to see whether the bleeding has begun. Once it has, it is unmistakable. Floods and fury. I can feel my uterus as it contracts and expands like the instinctive muscle it is, sucks blood from outside its walls and pumps it out again. For two or three days this goes on, though mercifully, the cramping usually ends twenty-four hours after the bleeding begins. I go through six to ten super-sized sanitary napkins each day, and two or three pairs of underpants. I wake up twice each night to find the pad, my thighs and my sheets saturated with blood, stagger to the bathroom, change the pad and crawl back into bed for a couple more hours.
By the second day of bleeding, I can barely crawl out of bed, though I do. Despite feeling so wretchedly ill and drained, I mother, I housewife, I go to work and I do whatever needs to be done. The thing I dislike most about this bleeding is the clots. They vary in size, and they fall out of me like I imagine dead fetuses would fall out of me if I were miscarrying. Every month I feel as though my body is telling me I’ve wasted its capacity yet again, to nourish and bear a child. I feel like my body is punishing me.
The scientific link that has been established between certain hormones and fertility is not something that has been helpful in my situation. I spent a year on the birth control pill to see whether this might help. All it did was give me an insight into when the bleeding would begin again, every twenty-eight days without fail. I didn’t require birth control, so I went off the pill after a year. I spent a different year on another medication whose function was to prevent my uterus from sucking up the blood outside itself. This did help a little, but I still clotted and flooded and wept. When the pills ran out, there seemed little point in getting the prescription renewed.
Since being raped, the disruption and malfunction of my menstrual cycle has had a severe impact on my quality of life. This impacts on me far more than any sexual ‘dysfunction’ I might otherwise care to report. The fact that I’m not interested in having sex with men does have some link with being raped, but it’s tied in with many other factors than the purely physical, such as my distinct aversion to spending time in the company of men, let alone inviting a man to have access to my private parts.
I’ve never heard another survivor talk about her menstrual cycle as having been affected or impacted as a result of sexual trauma, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many of us are affected in a similar way. All of us have probably been told that many women suffer from premenstrual syndrome; that it’s unfortunate if we have pain while menstruating, but it’s nothing that anyone can do anything about.
I would like to be able to include this information retrospectively on my Victim Impact Statement. I would like to see the suffering that I continue to endure every few weeks be considered in the sentencing of the man who was convicted of raping me, and who will be released on parole next year. I sometimes joke with people that men suffer from menstrual envy, but deep in my heart I know I’m just projecting my own terror and anguish onto the men I sometimes encounter, who find reasons to give me a hard time. No man in his right mind could envy my menstrual cycle.
REFERENCES:
“Gang rapists have their sentence reduced”, Friday March 24 12:30 AEDT ©AAP 2006, viewed online URL http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=87738 [24/3/2006].
Another Side of Normal
Part One - hearing
Living with PTSD
© Melina Magdalena (24/3/06)
The amazing thing about people who live with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is how well we appear to function in everyday society. Notwithstanding those of us who are so unfortunate as to have been misdiagnosed and so merely exist, drugged to the eyeballs to keep us quiet, most of us remain anonymous, faceless members of the community . We have learned that it’s safer to remain silent about those aspects of our lives that no one seems to be able to do anything about. The traumas that induced our conditions have already happened, after all, and that damage cannot be undone, only lived with. Living with PTSD is a continuous journey towards health.
Having studied Beverley Searle’s analysis of the kind of people upon whom Freud based his theories and diagnoses, I wonder whether a similar analysis could be made of the supposedly wide range of ‘normality’ in terms of the kinds of physical symptoms that survivors of sexual trauma are told are nothing out of the ordinary .
As Searle describes, a large proportion of Freud’s sample of young neurotic women had been sexually abused and traumatized by their fathers, uncles, brothers or family friends. The effect of this on Freud’s scientific output was not to spark outrage and put an end to the damage wreaked by these men on the girls and women they assaulted and violated, rather it was twisted upon the survivors themselves, who were labeled and diagnosed by Freud as being sick, deviant and deficient. These survivors struggled with the selfsame mental, spiritual, emotional and physical symptoms of having been abused, that survivors struggle with today. Today, the scale of normality in terms of mental and physical health which has been imposed upon us through the work of Freud and others, who failed to address the cause of the damage, and only assessed the results, means that we do not really know what normal is or could be, for us.
We have no idea what normal is, for a person who has not suffered trauma. In a way, this is a perfect reflection of the way in which conventional Western medicine functions. It is largely reactive, addressing symptoms as they arise, rather than seeking to prevent their occurrence or heal their underlying cause. The ability of human beings to survive despite all kinds of diseases and disabilities is amazing. It is not just survivors of trauma who exhibit this capacity. In itself, the ability to live and function, to produce, contribute and create within one’s circumstances is proof of the strength and determination of survivors to rise above conditions of ill-health, disability or chronic illness.
Some people might argue that it is precisely the fact that human beings survive and thrive within such a diverse range of possibilities that makes us truly human.
I don’t believe that surviving trauma makes me a better person than someone who has led a charmed and peaceful existence. I do believe it is incumbent upon me to put my life to good use, no matter what has happened to me in my past. That is what makes me truly human.
At the same time as writing this, I am conscious of the empowering belief that I am the expert on my own situation. I know myself better than anyone else possibly could. This is an attitude which I have been encouraged to develop, in order to give me some semblance of control over my life. It is a useful paradigm to work from, but today I choose to focus my attention elsewhere.
This week I went to an audiologist for a hearing assessment. My reasons for having the assessment include a strong family history of hearing loss, the government subsidy that enabled me to have the assessment without incurring a cost, and my auditory experiences which range from the bizarre to the annoying.
Like many people who live with PTSD, my extreme sensitivity to noises is trigger-happy and exhausting. This is something I live with every day and every night, for which I have developed a range of coping strategies which render it almost invisible to anyone else.
Gone are the days when I literally threw myself to the ground and rolled out of danger when a fighter jet roared over the skies of Adelaide as part of a thrilling entertainment spectacle. The spectacle of me having left my body so that I could watch myself shaking with terror on the ground below was enough to convince me that I had to do something to disguise my reactions in future.
I have trained my body not to physically jump in instinctive response to loud and startling noises. Whilst driving, I am able now, to remain outwardly calm, and hold my hands steady on the steering wheel, even when my heart is pounding and my legs have turned to jelly in response to the gunning and screeching of motorcycle engines and tyres behind, in front or beside me.
I work in the city, which means that I am exposed to a great deal of industrial and traffic noise. Walking along streets and waiting for public transport can induce harrowing auditory experiences. So I have learned to attend to a different range of sounds, and to block out those that most distress me.
Of course, this has meant I have to maintain other aspects of hypervigilance, in order to keep myself out of danger. Interestingly, I have developed an exaggerated startle reflex to visual stimuli. When I am dealing with emotional stress, or at times when I am concentrating intently on a single task, I frequently jump and scream when someone comes into my line of vision and startles me. These people are usually around six feet tall, and when their presence registers unexpectedly on my consciousness, I panic.
Unfortunately, along with several of my work colleagues, my sixteen year old son falls in this category. Last weekend I was extremely stressed and preoccupied. Over the course of one day, I jumped and screamed in fright about fifteen times at his sudden appearance, though I knew all along he was with us in the house. His feelings were understandably hurt and he was rightly offended that I was so afraid. My distress had nothing to do with him. This reminds me of the experiences of Shosha and her children, as described in “Soft of Hearing”, broadcast on Radio National in 2002.
There are some noises that I just cannot bear to be around. If I hear loud noises and fighting in our street, I run around the house and turn off every noisy appliance, just so I can hear exactly what might be going on out there. I cannot do anything else until it goes away.
The sounds of sibling rivalry used to be constant triggers, until my children began to explore the world of hip hop. How I hated that music when they first began to listen to it! I had to scream at them to turn it off, or I had to leave the room and leave the house. It was not just the level of profanity and discord, nor just the obscene and degrading lyrics, especially where they pertain to male attitudes to women. It was the various layers of noise that were woven together and somehow came to represent many of the kinds of sounds I find it hard to live with. I still object to the sexism, hatred and violence expressed by much of the hip hop that I have heard over the years, but I have trained myself to be able to listen to the sounds and separate the strands into their layers, thus confining them to limits that are tolerable for me. My children get along better than they used to, but I am now able to tune out their senseless bickering.
I live in an area of a housing boom. When I try to work at home amidst the cacophony of trucks, jackhammers and other building equipment, I know it is going to be more useful to stop what I am trying to write or paint and turn my attention instead, to something repetitive or mundane. The wear and tear on my emotions, from having to keep my reactions at bay whilst attempting to sustain my creative output is deleterious to my energy levels. Amidst such ongoing cacophony, forcing myself to relax and take a nap to recover my strength is also an impossibility.
It is in terms of quality of life, that such sensitivity to noise impacts on how well I am able to function as part of ‘normal’ society. Everyone who has learned to adapt to debilitating or limiting physical conditions, whether short-term, recurring, permanent or chronic, knows the cost of such adaptation can be measured by how much energy one has at one’s disposal, for other things.
Mental and emotional fatigue shows up in my life as a chronic physical symptom of PTSD. It is not my imagination or habit that causes my eyelids to droop around eight-thirty at night, and makes me yawn incessantly from then on. I am simply at the end of my tether. The level of auditory distress with which I have had to cope during the day directly determines my level of exhaustion when it comes to dealing with the noises of the night. Sleep is another matter altogether.
My hearing assessment showed that my hearing in both ears lies comfortably within the normal range. No surprises there. When my home is quiet, I can turn my television down to ‘3’ and still understand every word of dialogue. When I lie awake at night, I can hear the pulse in my wrists. The sound of the sheets as they rustle, when I turn over, trying to get comfortable and cosy enough to fall asleep, overwhelms every other sound around me.
Several years ago, I used to wake at night, believing I had heard gun shots next door. The second time I rang the police about this, the kind woman on the other end of the phone reminded me of the road works that were happening at night as tunnels were being blasted through the foothills of Adelaide, twenty kilometers away. I began to pay attention to the gunshots that I heard. Sure enough, they always occurred on the nights when there was blasting going on up there. I stopped bothering the police with my calls of auditory distress.
It’s funny how well I’ve taught myself to tune out false alarms. The trouble is, that in doing so, I also tend to fade out the noises of social discourse that do not represent potential danger or distress. In order to function socially, I have to consciously switch on my hearing and attend to the sounds that people are making around me. Overstimulation is the most frequent result. In attending to conversation, my hearing goes hyperactive. I overhear so many fascinating and intriguing tidbits, that it’s not easy to tune into the one particular strand of conversation in which I have been invited to be involved. This can be quite fun for a while, but it too, leads to exhaustion.
When I need to concentrate, I’ve learned that multitasking is sometimes the only way to do it. I often have two or three things going on in my head at once. If I am anxious while driving, I will sing a song, as well as counting, or reciting a different set of lyrics in my head. This drives my children up the wall. I’ll also add up the numbers on the numberplates of the cars around me, and make up silly acronyms with the letters.
I can carry on conversation fairly well at the same time as counting and singing in my head, though my retention levels are not high. This is probably what leads me to worry about my memory. It has meant that there are gaps in my sense of time. During the conversations, I appear to be attending and even to be a good listener. It’s later that I obsess about what I did or didn’t hear, and whether I was really there at all.
Creating noise is one of the most effective coping strategies I have developed. When the babble of my extravagant emotion becomes too hard for me to bear, I will take to hammering, throwing things around, and rummaging fruitlessly in my pots and pans cupboard just to drown out my own destructive thoughts. These are the times when I tend to break crockery by mistake, because I bang the plates down on the counter with gleeful rage, and throw them into the sink to be washed. It doesn’t make me crazy. It relieves the pressure without hurting anyone else. I also enjoy slamming doors.
But the best thing of all, I have found, is to put on the kind of music that I like to listen to, and to turn it up loud loud loud!. I love to sing my heart out when I’m feeling bad, because it makes me feel so much better. I don’t care about whether the neighbours can hear me through our paper thin walls. I couldn’t care less about the lameness of the lyrics. All that matters when I’m singing is the glory of the sound itself, and the fact that I am choosing to make it, to the exclusion of all other sound around me.
Living with PTSD is challenging. It’s good to reflect on aspects of what this actually entails. I quite like to admit that I have an extravagant emotional life. I can laugh about my exaggerated startle reflex. These are largely private matters, invisible to the naked eye, so to speak. When asked about my levels of health, I am happy to report that I am relentlessly well. I rarely mention the fatigue that now feels normal to me. This doesn’t mean I am not challenged by living with PTSD, but it reflects my strength and pride in the fact that I step up to that challenge and function very well in spite of it.
REFERENCES:
1. Bambridge, K (2005), “Reclaiming a Life”, pp. 128-131 and Searle, B (2005) “My Experiences of having Dissociative Identity Disorder in South Australia “ pp.178-182, The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds M. Magdalena (Ed.) Seaview Press: Adelaide.
2. Searle, B (2005) ), “The Legacy of Freud“ pp.21-28 , ibid.
3. Aviva Sheb’a (2002) “Soft of Hearing”, adapted for radio by Mike Ladd, broadcast in two parts on Radio National 729 FM, (2002).
Living with PTSD
© Melina Magdalena (24/3/06)
The amazing thing about people who live with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is how well we appear to function in everyday society. Notwithstanding those of us who are so unfortunate as to have been misdiagnosed and so merely exist, drugged to the eyeballs to keep us quiet, most of us remain anonymous, faceless members of the community . We have learned that it’s safer to remain silent about those aspects of our lives that no one seems to be able to do anything about. The traumas that induced our conditions have already happened, after all, and that damage cannot be undone, only lived with. Living with PTSD is a continuous journey towards health.
Having studied Beverley Searle’s analysis of the kind of people upon whom Freud based his theories and diagnoses, I wonder whether a similar analysis could be made of the supposedly wide range of ‘normality’ in terms of the kinds of physical symptoms that survivors of sexual trauma are told are nothing out of the ordinary .
As Searle describes, a large proportion of Freud’s sample of young neurotic women had been sexually abused and traumatized by their fathers, uncles, brothers or family friends. The effect of this on Freud’s scientific output was not to spark outrage and put an end to the damage wreaked by these men on the girls and women they assaulted and violated, rather it was twisted upon the survivors themselves, who were labeled and diagnosed by Freud as being sick, deviant and deficient. These survivors struggled with the selfsame mental, spiritual, emotional and physical symptoms of having been abused, that survivors struggle with today. Today, the scale of normality in terms of mental and physical health which has been imposed upon us through the work of Freud and others, who failed to address the cause of the damage, and only assessed the results, means that we do not really know what normal is or could be, for us.
We have no idea what normal is, for a person who has not suffered trauma. In a way, this is a perfect reflection of the way in which conventional Western medicine functions. It is largely reactive, addressing symptoms as they arise, rather than seeking to prevent their occurrence or heal their underlying cause. The ability of human beings to survive despite all kinds of diseases and disabilities is amazing. It is not just survivors of trauma who exhibit this capacity. In itself, the ability to live and function, to produce, contribute and create within one’s circumstances is proof of the strength and determination of survivors to rise above conditions of ill-health, disability or chronic illness.
Some people might argue that it is precisely the fact that human beings survive and thrive within such a diverse range of possibilities that makes us truly human.
I don’t believe that surviving trauma makes me a better person than someone who has led a charmed and peaceful existence. I do believe it is incumbent upon me to put my life to good use, no matter what has happened to me in my past. That is what makes me truly human.
At the same time as writing this, I am conscious of the empowering belief that I am the expert on my own situation. I know myself better than anyone else possibly could. This is an attitude which I have been encouraged to develop, in order to give me some semblance of control over my life. It is a useful paradigm to work from, but today I choose to focus my attention elsewhere.
This week I went to an audiologist for a hearing assessment. My reasons for having the assessment include a strong family history of hearing loss, the government subsidy that enabled me to have the assessment without incurring a cost, and my auditory experiences which range from the bizarre to the annoying.
Like many people who live with PTSD, my extreme sensitivity to noises is trigger-happy and exhausting. This is something I live with every day and every night, for which I have developed a range of coping strategies which render it almost invisible to anyone else.
Gone are the days when I literally threw myself to the ground and rolled out of danger when a fighter jet roared over the skies of Adelaide as part of a thrilling entertainment spectacle. The spectacle of me having left my body so that I could watch myself shaking with terror on the ground below was enough to convince me that I had to do something to disguise my reactions in future.
I have trained my body not to physically jump in instinctive response to loud and startling noises. Whilst driving, I am able now, to remain outwardly calm, and hold my hands steady on the steering wheel, even when my heart is pounding and my legs have turned to jelly in response to the gunning and screeching of motorcycle engines and tyres behind, in front or beside me.
I work in the city, which means that I am exposed to a great deal of industrial and traffic noise. Walking along streets and waiting for public transport can induce harrowing auditory experiences. So I have learned to attend to a different range of sounds, and to block out those that most distress me.
Of course, this has meant I have to maintain other aspects of hypervigilance, in order to keep myself out of danger. Interestingly, I have developed an exaggerated startle reflex to visual stimuli. When I am dealing with emotional stress, or at times when I am concentrating intently on a single task, I frequently jump and scream when someone comes into my line of vision and startles me. These people are usually around six feet tall, and when their presence registers unexpectedly on my consciousness, I panic.
Unfortunately, along with several of my work colleagues, my sixteen year old son falls in this category. Last weekend I was extremely stressed and preoccupied. Over the course of one day, I jumped and screamed in fright about fifteen times at his sudden appearance, though I knew all along he was with us in the house. His feelings were understandably hurt and he was rightly offended that I was so afraid. My distress had nothing to do with him. This reminds me of the experiences of Shosha and her children, as described in “Soft of Hearing”, broadcast on Radio National in 2002.
There are some noises that I just cannot bear to be around. If I hear loud noises and fighting in our street, I run around the house and turn off every noisy appliance, just so I can hear exactly what might be going on out there. I cannot do anything else until it goes away.
The sounds of sibling rivalry used to be constant triggers, until my children began to explore the world of hip hop. How I hated that music when they first began to listen to it! I had to scream at them to turn it off, or I had to leave the room and leave the house. It was not just the level of profanity and discord, nor just the obscene and degrading lyrics, especially where they pertain to male attitudes to women. It was the various layers of noise that were woven together and somehow came to represent many of the kinds of sounds I find it hard to live with. I still object to the sexism, hatred and violence expressed by much of the hip hop that I have heard over the years, but I have trained myself to be able to listen to the sounds and separate the strands into their layers, thus confining them to limits that are tolerable for me. My children get along better than they used to, but I am now able to tune out their senseless bickering.
I live in an area of a housing boom. When I try to work at home amidst the cacophony of trucks, jackhammers and other building equipment, I know it is going to be more useful to stop what I am trying to write or paint and turn my attention instead, to something repetitive or mundane. The wear and tear on my emotions, from having to keep my reactions at bay whilst attempting to sustain my creative output is deleterious to my energy levels. Amidst such ongoing cacophony, forcing myself to relax and take a nap to recover my strength is also an impossibility.
It is in terms of quality of life, that such sensitivity to noise impacts on how well I am able to function as part of ‘normal’ society. Everyone who has learned to adapt to debilitating or limiting physical conditions, whether short-term, recurring, permanent or chronic, knows the cost of such adaptation can be measured by how much energy one has at one’s disposal, for other things.
Mental and emotional fatigue shows up in my life as a chronic physical symptom of PTSD. It is not my imagination or habit that causes my eyelids to droop around eight-thirty at night, and makes me yawn incessantly from then on. I am simply at the end of my tether. The level of auditory distress with which I have had to cope during the day directly determines my level of exhaustion when it comes to dealing with the noises of the night. Sleep is another matter altogether.
My hearing assessment showed that my hearing in both ears lies comfortably within the normal range. No surprises there. When my home is quiet, I can turn my television down to ‘3’ and still understand every word of dialogue. When I lie awake at night, I can hear the pulse in my wrists. The sound of the sheets as they rustle, when I turn over, trying to get comfortable and cosy enough to fall asleep, overwhelms every other sound around me.
Several years ago, I used to wake at night, believing I had heard gun shots next door. The second time I rang the police about this, the kind woman on the other end of the phone reminded me of the road works that were happening at night as tunnels were being blasted through the foothills of Adelaide, twenty kilometers away. I began to pay attention to the gunshots that I heard. Sure enough, they always occurred on the nights when there was blasting going on up there. I stopped bothering the police with my calls of auditory distress.
It’s funny how well I’ve taught myself to tune out false alarms. The trouble is, that in doing so, I also tend to fade out the noises of social discourse that do not represent potential danger or distress. In order to function socially, I have to consciously switch on my hearing and attend to the sounds that people are making around me. Overstimulation is the most frequent result. In attending to conversation, my hearing goes hyperactive. I overhear so many fascinating and intriguing tidbits, that it’s not easy to tune into the one particular strand of conversation in which I have been invited to be involved. This can be quite fun for a while, but it too, leads to exhaustion.
When I need to concentrate, I’ve learned that multitasking is sometimes the only way to do it. I often have two or three things going on in my head at once. If I am anxious while driving, I will sing a song, as well as counting, or reciting a different set of lyrics in my head. This drives my children up the wall. I’ll also add up the numbers on the numberplates of the cars around me, and make up silly acronyms with the letters.
I can carry on conversation fairly well at the same time as counting and singing in my head, though my retention levels are not high. This is probably what leads me to worry about my memory. It has meant that there are gaps in my sense of time. During the conversations, I appear to be attending and even to be a good listener. It’s later that I obsess about what I did or didn’t hear, and whether I was really there at all.
Creating noise is one of the most effective coping strategies I have developed. When the babble of my extravagant emotion becomes too hard for me to bear, I will take to hammering, throwing things around, and rummaging fruitlessly in my pots and pans cupboard just to drown out my own destructive thoughts. These are the times when I tend to break crockery by mistake, because I bang the plates down on the counter with gleeful rage, and throw them into the sink to be washed. It doesn’t make me crazy. It relieves the pressure without hurting anyone else. I also enjoy slamming doors.
But the best thing of all, I have found, is to put on the kind of music that I like to listen to, and to turn it up loud loud loud!. I love to sing my heart out when I’m feeling bad, because it makes me feel so much better. I don’t care about whether the neighbours can hear me through our paper thin walls. I couldn’t care less about the lameness of the lyrics. All that matters when I’m singing is the glory of the sound itself, and the fact that I am choosing to make it, to the exclusion of all other sound around me.
Living with PTSD is challenging. It’s good to reflect on aspects of what this actually entails. I quite like to admit that I have an extravagant emotional life. I can laugh about my exaggerated startle reflex. These are largely private matters, invisible to the naked eye, so to speak. When asked about my levels of health, I am happy to report that I am relentlessly well. I rarely mention the fatigue that now feels normal to me. This doesn’t mean I am not challenged by living with PTSD, but it reflects my strength and pride in the fact that I step up to that challenge and function very well in spite of it.
REFERENCES:
1. Bambridge, K (2005), “Reclaiming a Life”, pp. 128-131 and Searle, B (2005) “My Experiences of having Dissociative Identity Disorder in South Australia “ pp.178-182, The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds M. Magdalena (Ed.) Seaview Press: Adelaide.
2. Searle, B (2005) ), “The Legacy of Freud“ pp.21-28 , ibid.
3. Aviva Sheb’a (2002) “Soft of Hearing”, adapted for radio by Mike Ladd, broadcast in two parts on Radio National 729 FM, (2002).
notoriety
Is it notoriety, when I check google for 'Mersigns' and the entry comes up reading: Mersigns Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does ... ?
Has someone looked at my blog? I wouldn't know - I have received no comments! And that's OK, because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to be able to publish online, whoever looks at the thing.
It teases me though - "objectionable content'? What is objectionable on my blog and what kind of person would have called it objectionable?
In looking through what has so far been published, I notice my earliest posts have disappeared. They were the ones that graphically detailed my experience of PTSD. These were the entries I trembled to write, let alone publish. They are possibly too long and in need of editing, but still, I've never read anything like them by anyone else.
Maybe one is not supposed to speak of such things?
Maybe that is what makes them objectionable?
Well, having worked on four different computers during the past six months, I shall go back in my files, find these writings and republish them.
If there are readers out there, please do feel free to comment.
m.m.m.
Has someone looked at my blog? I wouldn't know - I have received no comments! And that's OK, because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to be able to publish online, whoever looks at the thing.
It teases me though - "objectionable content'? What is objectionable on my blog and what kind of person would have called it objectionable?
In looking through what has so far been published, I notice my earliest posts have disappeared. They were the ones that graphically detailed my experience of PTSD. These were the entries I trembled to write, let alone publish. They are possibly too long and in need of editing, but still, I've never read anything like them by anyone else.
Maybe one is not supposed to speak of such things?
Maybe that is what makes them objectionable?
Well, having worked on four different computers during the past six months, I shall go back in my files, find these writings and republish them.
If there are readers out there, please do feel free to comment.
m.m.m.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
A Radical Notion
A Radical Notion
© Melina Magdalena (2006)
Sex in the Brave New World
Remember Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" (originally published in 1932), where the State controlled and managed human fertility and human sexuality? With the implementation of a strict routine of medication, people were encouraged and incited to have casual sex regularly, albeit in a sterile, factory-like manner without the accompanying neuroses of human relationship. Children were created in bottles and raised by the State, a system which is echoed today in the drive to have babies and toddlers cared for in institutions while their mothers go out to work.
As reviewer James Schellenberg writes in ‘Challenging Destiny: Science Fiction and Fantasy Reviews http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/bravenew.htm (viewed on-line, 1/7/2006) “Huxley is worried about a state of mind … that puts happiness into a materialistic paradigm and then uses it as a method of control, justified as what the people want.”
In his review, Schellenberg reflects on the character of Lenina, who befriends the Savage, a man who was brought up outside of the System, and how “… Lenina and her sexuality often stand for everything that is wrong and corrupt and vacuous about this system …” Could it be that Lenina appears so grotesque in contrast with real live human women, for many of whom the relational aspects of sex are just as, if not more important than the physical?
As far as female sexuality is concerned, it’s important to realize that Huxley wrote the book before The Pill technology emerged and western climates changed from one of sexual restraint and limitation, to promiscuity and permissiveness. After The Pill came on the scene, males were to rejoice that there was now nothing to hold back the tide of female sexual energy. Females were to fully embrace their new freedoms and give their bodies over to sex wherever, whenever and with whomever.
It’s this technology that mirrors Huxley’s vision of fulfilling people’s materialistic desires and calling this happiness. By eliminating the fear that sexual activity will lead to the making of babies, marriages and families; by buying and ingesting The Pill, women can avoid the need to bind their male sexual partners into long-term financial contracts which are designed to ensure that their offspring are adequately provided for.
I first read the book as a sixteen year old, and recall sensing how isolating and lonely an existence would be, in those individual cells, each inhabited by a single person, where one’s interactions with others were segregated, measured and regulated so that no two people could ever know each other. I thought it was cruel.
What’s the point in living at all?
Something that Huxley managed to express very well in his book was the development of a societal aversion towards children, which has also become a strong element in contemporary western society. Just as the relationships between castes and sexes were managed and regulated, in Brave New World, so were the relationships between generations. So much so, that old people delivered themselves to be killed, because nothing but their physical remains were of any further use to society.
The question of ‘what’s the point in living at all?’ is central to Huxley’s vision. It’s a common question, first encountered by most disenchanted adolescents, and revisited from time to time as we are pummelled against life’s challenges. Why do humans continue to reproduce so mindlessly? Who says that the proper way to live is to go to school, get a job, marry and raise a family, play with your grannies and die? Why bother? Where does it get you? What does it get you? You can’t take it with you when you die.
Is it just a matter of grabbing at pleasures where they arise, and damn the consequences? Should we all just make a pact to look after ourselves and let future generations do the same? Should we humans commit mass suicide, and leave the planet to the innocent and more deserving?
Bestowing of Meaning
John Wyndham’s "Consider her Ways" (1959) is another book of speculative fiction in which society is sharply divided into castes, and the role of women is explored. In his vision, children are borne only by particular women, whose elevated role as Mother begins with conception and ends with birth (a vision recently echoed in the cloning film ‘the Island’, although for Wyndham, the cycle repeats and doesn’t end with the killing of the woman immediately after she gives birth).
I find the preoccupation of these two male writers with the role of women and childbirth quite fascinating. Wyndham’s book goes so far as to posit a manless society. Heinlein is another whose writing to me displays a great deal of misogyny, in which women are generally relegated to the undignified role of the sexually objectified.
The feminist speculative utopias I have read, including "Herland" (originally published in 1915), "The Demeter Flower" (Rochelle Singer, 1980), "Woman on the Edge of Time" (1976) and "Door into Ocean" (Joan Slonczewski, 1986) posit societies in which the begetting and raising of children are natural, conscious, valued and central aspects of the communities they describe.
In these feminist novels, the problem of men and the nature of man is a central theme. Is this simply a foil for the preoccupation of male novelists, for the nature and role of women? Why is motherhood so central to the women novelists and for the men, a medical problem at best, and a neurosis at worst?
Is it significant, that in researching this article, I came across a web-page by the fundamentalist Christian Right, which denounced all feminist speculative fiction? (Clear Goal for Utopia, by John and Clara Godwin, see ‘Feminist Utopias’ http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Publications/Utopia/utopia1wa1.htm viewed on-line, 2/7/2006).
Funnily enough, it is the spiritual haves who tend to reproduce with far more fervour than the spiritual have-nots. Leaving aside the obvious religious reasons for this (the meek shall inherit the earth; raise up your armies to conquer the infidel; bear sons so that you shall be rewarded in heaven) I wonder whether the confidence to reproduce also stems from a conviction that it is in relating, that human endeavour acquires a significance that elevates it from the mundane, physical and mechanical, to something more magical and sacred? Humans who relate to something bigger than themselves – whether that be Gaia, God, a Higher Self, Christ, Wilderness or a set of Deities – are automatically in a relationship with the rest of the world that non-believers lack.
It is true that we ourselves are the bestowers of meaning on every aspect of our lives, and that without bestowing such meaning, there is little point in anything, except to do our little but in maintaining the status quo and holding up the power structure.
The Baby Bonus
Indeed in Howard’s Australia, the cost of children is high on the government’s agenda. Women are now being paid thousands of dollars to bear children. Only future generations can justify the actions of past generations. Unless we have children to be born in hospitals and then go to child care and then school and then university and eat and play and consume and do their bit to maintain the economic cycle of production and consumption, we might as well all lie down and die. There’s no point at all.
Howard’s disdain for cultural and artistic expression as a basis for meaningful human endeavour is easy to explain away because in these domains, the causal relationships between production, consumption and profit are not so easily characterized. Contrast this with his so-called passion for sport, where sport is not just a game of winning and losing, but entails much value-adding in terms of media interests, advertising, and a myriad of sport-related product-lines and it is obvious that his enthusiasm is purely capitalist. I’ve seen no evidence of any vision beyond the level of spiritual manager and bureaucrat. Howard’s policies inspire nothing, but the oft-thwarted pursuit of material happiness.
Would Australian women keep having babies if they weren’t being paid to do so? It’s clear to me that Huxley’s ‘soma’ is money. Money is where the power lies; not in human relationship, not in cultural expression, not in community and certainly not in family. Apparently, people will do anything they are told to do, as long as they are paid for it. Money is a scarce commodity. More money is in the hands of a few powerful people, than the rest of the money that is sprinkled like poppy seeds amongst the general population.
How racist is Howard’s agenda? Is it just to balance the rampant reproduction of the newly arrived to our shores, that he wants the more well-established women of Australia to have babies? His welfare policies further enlighten those who look for the hidden agenda. Surely it’s not a general call to reproduce, (though the Baby Bonus beckons at the quick-fix needy poor).
Wouldn’t Howard prefer to populate the country just with the offspring of certain individuals – well-educated, heterosexual professionals with property? Wouldn’t this be fair enough? These are surely the parts of society most able to raise healthy, clever, contributing children for the next generation. But think a little deeper – what will these children do when they are grown up? Our society is not egalitarian, even though the Baby Bonus goes to all sectors of society. What about the children of the poor, the working-class, the refugees and migrants? The children of the middle class will grow up to be the managers and teachers of the milling millions whose parents were less able.
Ultimately, what is wrong with this? Isn’t this the way the world has always worked? It’s hardly radical; hardly a departure from the norm. We all know society is divided into the haves and the have-nots. We all know how desperate the have-nots become, how they struggle and strive to change their status. Perhaps they will be seduced into thinking the Baby Bonus will enable them to achieve that step up the ladder to financial security?
I see Howard’s vision as manipulative, grandiose, narrow and disappointingly shallow. It attracts the support of the many precisely because of its conservatism. How often do we stop to ask the question ‘what’s the point in living at all?’ In our secular world, we do everything we can to avoid such questions. It is when we are brought face to face with them, if we lose our partner, lose a child, lose our job, that we finally admit that these questions have been in hot pursuit like the Greek Harpies, and have hounded us for years to pay attention to them.
Motherhood minus the father
In my world, I have come to question the role of fathers as anything but sperm donors. That is an extreme and radical statement, and I don’t wish to detract from the families in which mothers and fathers both play important and contributing roles in the raising of children. However, I know of so many families with absent fathers.
In these families, The Pill has not saved anyone from reproduction. It has not liberated the women from their pre-ordained role as mother. It has not rescued the children from lives of unstinting poverty. And the people in these families are obliged to fulfil Howard’s expectations for how single mothers ought to live.
These women, these mothers have not borne their children in order to get the Baby Bonus or the Pension (a.k.a. Parenting Payment Single). In the majority of cases, their children were conceived within heterosexual relationships that went wrong. These mothers, girlfriends and wives never anticipated the depths to which their sexual relations with men would take them.
Their children have been deserted by the men who fathered them. The wrongdoings of these men have resulted in long-term disadvantage for their children, which could be redressed either by enforcing some kind of contractual arrangement between the parents which made the father liable to support the children until they were financially independent, or by the government recognizing the value of motherhood and supporting the mother to raise the children in dignity until they were financially independent.
Though it purports to, Australia does neither of these very well. Instead, mothers and children are left in the lurch, perched upon a fragile twig of welfare offerings, struggling to maintain work and family balance, fighting to fulfil their side of the mutual obligation equation, when single-parent families are never recognized within the government schemata of how Australians ought to live, and the Government makes them beg for every cent they get. The double standards are never acknowledged, which is why it is so frustrating to take these issues into a community which meets them with the blank face of hostility and misunderstanding.
So I say to those women who want to have children and do not have male partners who will support them in raising those children – you won’t gain anything by not having them, so you may as well find some sperm and inseminate yourselves without agonizing over the lack of a father in your future child’s life. Eliminate him from the equation. Do not expect anything from him, whether financial, emotional or sexual. Give him no claim on the child. He’ll only want that if he feels it is to his economic advantage to use his biological bond in order to evade fiscal responsibility.
That is my radical notion. In my feminist utopia, children are conceived and brought into a world of love. Their mothers are valued and the work they do in raising them is recognized and rewarded so that families live comfortably and productively.
Children are cherished and educated by the community. No man or woman abducts, rapes and murders an eight-year-old in a public toilet. No priest molests choirgirls and altar boys. No brothers, uncles, cousins, step- or grandfathers or foster parents abuse the children under their protection and care.
In my feminist utopia, women are not ‘just’ mothers. They are expected and encouraged to contribute to their community in every way they can. Everything they do demonstrates what important, valued contributors they are, to the society of which they are part.
© Melina Magdalena (2006)
Sex in the Brave New World
Remember Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" (originally published in 1932), where the State controlled and managed human fertility and human sexuality? With the implementation of a strict routine of medication, people were encouraged and incited to have casual sex regularly, albeit in a sterile, factory-like manner without the accompanying neuroses of human relationship. Children were created in bottles and raised by the State, a system which is echoed today in the drive to have babies and toddlers cared for in institutions while their mothers go out to work.
As reviewer James Schellenberg writes in ‘Challenging Destiny: Science Fiction and Fantasy Reviews http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/bravenew.htm (viewed on-line, 1/7/2006) “Huxley is worried about a state of mind … that puts happiness into a materialistic paradigm and then uses it as a method of control, justified as what the people want.”
In his review, Schellenberg reflects on the character of Lenina, who befriends the Savage, a man who was brought up outside of the System, and how “… Lenina and her sexuality often stand for everything that is wrong and corrupt and vacuous about this system …” Could it be that Lenina appears so grotesque in contrast with real live human women, for many of whom the relational aspects of sex are just as, if not more important than the physical?
As far as female sexuality is concerned, it’s important to realize that Huxley wrote the book before The Pill technology emerged and western climates changed from one of sexual restraint and limitation, to promiscuity and permissiveness. After The Pill came on the scene, males were to rejoice that there was now nothing to hold back the tide of female sexual energy. Females were to fully embrace their new freedoms and give their bodies over to sex wherever, whenever and with whomever.
It’s this technology that mirrors Huxley’s vision of fulfilling people’s materialistic desires and calling this happiness. By eliminating the fear that sexual activity will lead to the making of babies, marriages and families; by buying and ingesting The Pill, women can avoid the need to bind their male sexual partners into long-term financial contracts which are designed to ensure that their offspring are adequately provided for.
I first read the book as a sixteen year old, and recall sensing how isolating and lonely an existence would be, in those individual cells, each inhabited by a single person, where one’s interactions with others were segregated, measured and regulated so that no two people could ever know each other. I thought it was cruel.
What’s the point in living at all?
Something that Huxley managed to express very well in his book was the development of a societal aversion towards children, which has also become a strong element in contemporary western society. Just as the relationships between castes and sexes were managed and regulated, in Brave New World, so were the relationships between generations. So much so, that old people delivered themselves to be killed, because nothing but their physical remains were of any further use to society.
The question of ‘what’s the point in living at all?’ is central to Huxley’s vision. It’s a common question, first encountered by most disenchanted adolescents, and revisited from time to time as we are pummelled against life’s challenges. Why do humans continue to reproduce so mindlessly? Who says that the proper way to live is to go to school, get a job, marry and raise a family, play with your grannies and die? Why bother? Where does it get you? What does it get you? You can’t take it with you when you die.
Is it just a matter of grabbing at pleasures where they arise, and damn the consequences? Should we all just make a pact to look after ourselves and let future generations do the same? Should we humans commit mass suicide, and leave the planet to the innocent and more deserving?
Bestowing of Meaning
John Wyndham’s "Consider her Ways" (1959) is another book of speculative fiction in which society is sharply divided into castes, and the role of women is explored. In his vision, children are borne only by particular women, whose elevated role as Mother begins with conception and ends with birth (a vision recently echoed in the cloning film ‘the Island’, although for Wyndham, the cycle repeats and doesn’t end with the killing of the woman immediately after she gives birth).
I find the preoccupation of these two male writers with the role of women and childbirth quite fascinating. Wyndham’s book goes so far as to posit a manless society. Heinlein is another whose writing to me displays a great deal of misogyny, in which women are generally relegated to the undignified role of the sexually objectified.
The feminist speculative utopias I have read, including "Herland" (originally published in 1915), "The Demeter Flower" (Rochelle Singer, 1980), "Woman on the Edge of Time" (1976) and "Door into Ocean" (Joan Slonczewski, 1986) posit societies in which the begetting and raising of children are natural, conscious, valued and central aspects of the communities they describe.
In these feminist novels, the problem of men and the nature of man is a central theme. Is this simply a foil for the preoccupation of male novelists, for the nature and role of women? Why is motherhood so central to the women novelists and for the men, a medical problem at best, and a neurosis at worst?
Is it significant, that in researching this article, I came across a web-page by the fundamentalist Christian Right, which denounced all feminist speculative fiction? (Clear Goal for Utopia, by John and Clara Godwin, see ‘Feminist Utopias’ http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Publications/Utopia/utopia1wa1.htm viewed on-line, 2/7/2006).
Funnily enough, it is the spiritual haves who tend to reproduce with far more fervour than the spiritual have-nots. Leaving aside the obvious religious reasons for this (the meek shall inherit the earth; raise up your armies to conquer the infidel; bear sons so that you shall be rewarded in heaven) I wonder whether the confidence to reproduce also stems from a conviction that it is in relating, that human endeavour acquires a significance that elevates it from the mundane, physical and mechanical, to something more magical and sacred? Humans who relate to something bigger than themselves – whether that be Gaia, God, a Higher Self, Christ, Wilderness or a set of Deities – are automatically in a relationship with the rest of the world that non-believers lack.
It is true that we ourselves are the bestowers of meaning on every aspect of our lives, and that without bestowing such meaning, there is little point in anything, except to do our little but in maintaining the status quo and holding up the power structure.
The Baby Bonus
Indeed in Howard’s Australia, the cost of children is high on the government’s agenda. Women are now being paid thousands of dollars to bear children. Only future generations can justify the actions of past generations. Unless we have children to be born in hospitals and then go to child care and then school and then university and eat and play and consume and do their bit to maintain the economic cycle of production and consumption, we might as well all lie down and die. There’s no point at all.
Howard’s disdain for cultural and artistic expression as a basis for meaningful human endeavour is easy to explain away because in these domains, the causal relationships between production, consumption and profit are not so easily characterized. Contrast this with his so-called passion for sport, where sport is not just a game of winning and losing, but entails much value-adding in terms of media interests, advertising, and a myriad of sport-related product-lines and it is obvious that his enthusiasm is purely capitalist. I’ve seen no evidence of any vision beyond the level of spiritual manager and bureaucrat. Howard’s policies inspire nothing, but the oft-thwarted pursuit of material happiness.
Would Australian women keep having babies if they weren’t being paid to do so? It’s clear to me that Huxley’s ‘soma’ is money. Money is where the power lies; not in human relationship, not in cultural expression, not in community and certainly not in family. Apparently, people will do anything they are told to do, as long as they are paid for it. Money is a scarce commodity. More money is in the hands of a few powerful people, than the rest of the money that is sprinkled like poppy seeds amongst the general population.
How racist is Howard’s agenda? Is it just to balance the rampant reproduction of the newly arrived to our shores, that he wants the more well-established women of Australia to have babies? His welfare policies further enlighten those who look for the hidden agenda. Surely it’s not a general call to reproduce, (though the Baby Bonus beckons at the quick-fix needy poor).
Wouldn’t Howard prefer to populate the country just with the offspring of certain individuals – well-educated, heterosexual professionals with property? Wouldn’t this be fair enough? These are surely the parts of society most able to raise healthy, clever, contributing children for the next generation. But think a little deeper – what will these children do when they are grown up? Our society is not egalitarian, even though the Baby Bonus goes to all sectors of society. What about the children of the poor, the working-class, the refugees and migrants? The children of the middle class will grow up to be the managers and teachers of the milling millions whose parents were less able.
Ultimately, what is wrong with this? Isn’t this the way the world has always worked? It’s hardly radical; hardly a departure from the norm. We all know society is divided into the haves and the have-nots. We all know how desperate the have-nots become, how they struggle and strive to change their status. Perhaps they will be seduced into thinking the Baby Bonus will enable them to achieve that step up the ladder to financial security?
I see Howard’s vision as manipulative, grandiose, narrow and disappointingly shallow. It attracts the support of the many precisely because of its conservatism. How often do we stop to ask the question ‘what’s the point in living at all?’ In our secular world, we do everything we can to avoid such questions. It is when we are brought face to face with them, if we lose our partner, lose a child, lose our job, that we finally admit that these questions have been in hot pursuit like the Greek Harpies, and have hounded us for years to pay attention to them.
Motherhood minus the father
In my world, I have come to question the role of fathers as anything but sperm donors. That is an extreme and radical statement, and I don’t wish to detract from the families in which mothers and fathers both play important and contributing roles in the raising of children. However, I know of so many families with absent fathers.
In these families, The Pill has not saved anyone from reproduction. It has not liberated the women from their pre-ordained role as mother. It has not rescued the children from lives of unstinting poverty. And the people in these families are obliged to fulfil Howard’s expectations for how single mothers ought to live.
These women, these mothers have not borne their children in order to get the Baby Bonus or the Pension (a.k.a. Parenting Payment Single). In the majority of cases, their children were conceived within heterosexual relationships that went wrong. These mothers, girlfriends and wives never anticipated the depths to which their sexual relations with men would take them.
Their children have been deserted by the men who fathered them. The wrongdoings of these men have resulted in long-term disadvantage for their children, which could be redressed either by enforcing some kind of contractual arrangement between the parents which made the father liable to support the children until they were financially independent, or by the government recognizing the value of motherhood and supporting the mother to raise the children in dignity until they were financially independent.
Though it purports to, Australia does neither of these very well. Instead, mothers and children are left in the lurch, perched upon a fragile twig of welfare offerings, struggling to maintain work and family balance, fighting to fulfil their side of the mutual obligation equation, when single-parent families are never recognized within the government schemata of how Australians ought to live, and the Government makes them beg for every cent they get. The double standards are never acknowledged, which is why it is so frustrating to take these issues into a community which meets them with the blank face of hostility and misunderstanding.
So I say to those women who want to have children and do not have male partners who will support them in raising those children – you won’t gain anything by not having them, so you may as well find some sperm and inseminate yourselves without agonizing over the lack of a father in your future child’s life. Eliminate him from the equation. Do not expect anything from him, whether financial, emotional or sexual. Give him no claim on the child. He’ll only want that if he feels it is to his economic advantage to use his biological bond in order to evade fiscal responsibility.
That is my radical notion. In my feminist utopia, children are conceived and brought into a world of love. Their mothers are valued and the work they do in raising them is recognized and rewarded so that families live comfortably and productively.
Children are cherished and educated by the community. No man or woman abducts, rapes and murders an eight-year-old in a public toilet. No priest molests choirgirls and altar boys. No brothers, uncles, cousins, step- or grandfathers or foster parents abuse the children under their protection and care.
In my feminist utopia, women are not ‘just’ mothers. They are expected and encouraged to contribute to their community in every way they can. Everything they do demonstrates what important, valued contributors they are, to the society of which they are part.
Friday, June 23, 2006
New Australian Fascism
© Melina Magdalena
(14/6/2006)
I’ve been listening to Minister Joe Hockey speaking on Radio National’s “Religion Report” (14/6/2006). To see the transcript of this program, go to this link: "Churches say no to federal plans for the unemployed" (and ignore the typos) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1665033.htm
Minister Hockey's words confirm my suspicion that the Federal Government is moving closer and closer to fascism. Prime Minister Howard's cosy mania for the wholesome christian nuclear family is the obvious driving force behind the many moves by the Federal Government to impose someone else's world view upon our reality. Sitting here, with the twentieth century behind me, this is scary stuff.
Minister Hockey says that now that the Federal Government’s Welfare to Work legislation is becoming a reality for all Australians, non-government organisations including church agencies are obliged to comply with government directives and cooperate in administering the breaching system. Minister Hockey refuses to acknowledge the distinction between government and non-government agencies. He resorts to petty emotional blackmail, when he asserts that church agencies and non-government organisations which do not take up the government’s offer to take on the work of administering the government’s system, are letting down the most vulnerable people in Australian society – those very people the Government is aiming to breach, punish and abuse through its Welfare to Work legislation.
The only people I know who refuse to work are those non-custodial fathers who do not want to pay child support. Welfare to Work is designed to make the custodial mothers forsake their parental responsibilities and try and find paid work in addition to their parenting responsibilities. This policy sets up their children to be neglected. It leaves the next generations vulnerable to higher levels of parental abuse, because those who do not receive the good parenting that is only possible by parents who are present and actively engaged in positive parenting, do not learn how to parent their own children well.
The people targeted by the Federal Government’s Welfare to Work legislation are not people who refuse to work. People who do not have a paid job are people who have other concerns in their lives. They are people with disabilities, mental heath issues and family-life circumstances that make it difficult for them to take on regular work. Economic rationalism makes it difficult for businesses to adjust their practices in a way that would enable such vulnerable people to be employed.
NGOs and church agencies will continue to assist the most vulnerable people in Australian society, without cooperating with the Federal Government’s fascist schemes. Those most vulnerable people will be obliged in ever greater numbers to seek the assistance of these groups, because the Federal Government’s fascist legislation, with its eight-week breaching system is designed to starve them into submission.
(14/6/2006)
I’ve been listening to Minister Joe Hockey speaking on Radio National’s “Religion Report” (14/6/2006). To see the transcript of this program, go to this link: "Churches say no to federal plans for the unemployed" (and ignore the typos) http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2006/1665033.htm
Minister Hockey's words confirm my suspicion that the Federal Government is moving closer and closer to fascism. Prime Minister Howard's cosy mania for the wholesome christian nuclear family is the obvious driving force behind the many moves by the Federal Government to impose someone else's world view upon our reality. Sitting here, with the twentieth century behind me, this is scary stuff.
Minister Hockey says that now that the Federal Government’s Welfare to Work legislation is becoming a reality for all Australians, non-government organisations including church agencies are obliged to comply with government directives and cooperate in administering the breaching system. Minister Hockey refuses to acknowledge the distinction between government and non-government agencies. He resorts to petty emotional blackmail, when he asserts that church agencies and non-government organisations which do not take up the government’s offer to take on the work of administering the government’s system, are letting down the most vulnerable people in Australian society – those very people the Government is aiming to breach, punish and abuse through its Welfare to Work legislation.
The only people I know who refuse to work are those non-custodial fathers who do not want to pay child support. Welfare to Work is designed to make the custodial mothers forsake their parental responsibilities and try and find paid work in addition to their parenting responsibilities. This policy sets up their children to be neglected. It leaves the next generations vulnerable to higher levels of parental abuse, because those who do not receive the good parenting that is only possible by parents who are present and actively engaged in positive parenting, do not learn how to parent their own children well.
The people targeted by the Federal Government’s Welfare to Work legislation are not people who refuse to work. People who do not have a paid job are people who have other concerns in their lives. They are people with disabilities, mental heath issues and family-life circumstances that make it difficult for them to take on regular work. Economic rationalism makes it difficult for businesses to adjust their practices in a way that would enable such vulnerable people to be employed.
NGOs and church agencies will continue to assist the most vulnerable people in Australian society, without cooperating with the Federal Government’s fascist schemes. Those most vulnerable people will be obliged in ever greater numbers to seek the assistance of these groups, because the Federal Government’s fascist legislation, with its eight-week breaching system is designed to starve them into submission.
Monday, June 12, 2006
retrospective use of rapist's DNA
STATEMENT – retrospective use of rapist’s DNA
© Melina Magdalena (12/6/2006)
(written in preparation for tv interview with Channel 10 (Adelaide) news reporter Gerda Jezuchowski)
First of all, this person who was raped is not a victim of rape. She’s a survivor. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge her courage, in reporting the crime to the police. That is not an easy thing to do, and I wish her strength in the journey ahead.
Secondly, it’s bad enough to be raped by someone who is known to you. If it’s not someone you live with, you’re always going to be on tenterhooks, afraid to run into him somewhere unexpectedly, and you wonder who in your social circle knows about him and hasn’t said anything. That’s pretty creepy.
But when you’re raped by a stranger, one of the first questions you ask is – why me? To have such a personal violation, this atrocity committed against you, and then you say – it can’t have been a random attack. It’s so pointless. And after that, you realise that every man is suspect. It could have been the policeman who is interviewing you. It could be the man in front of you at the supermarket checkout. It could be your nephew, your uncle’s best friend, your neighbour, your grandson’s teacher, your mechanic.
So you walk around with this burden of knowing that you are a damaged, violated, broken person. And you know it can happen again, at any moment. Who was it? No one knows. But that rapist knows you now. And he might come back. You might encounter him anywhere and he’ll be laughing about it, because you’re so terrified. There’s no way to prevent it from happening again. There is no such thing as personal safety. You are vulnerable to attack at every minute of every day. You wind yourself up as tight as a spring and you’re ready to be raped again.
After a long time, you get used to being on edge all the time. You live with the fatigue of spending all your energy keeping guard and you modify the way you do things, to try and feel a little bit safer. You worry about the people you love, and hope they never go through what you’ve gone through and you live with the constant regret that those who are closest have seen you at your worst, and you wonder how it’s affected them. And you get on with your life, because what else can you do? It’s either that, or give up and die. But you never forget that you are under siege.
I was raped thirteen years ago when a stranger broke into my home while I was asleep. Even now, after all this time, I do not go to sleep ever, without running through scenarios in my mind. If it happens again tonight, what will I do? Is the phone beside my bed? Do I have a clear escape route? Is there anything nearby that he could hit me or cut me or strangle me with? Have I checked the doors and windows? What will happen to the children if I am murdered tonight? Have I done absolutely everything I can to make sure they will be all right even if I am not?
Thirdly, this business of DNA testing is being twisted to a criminal’s advantage, by conveniently forgetting the purpose for which his DNA was taken and tested in the first place. Police DNA records should be no more sacrosanct than fingerprints. The whole point of a DNA Bank is to assist police to solve crimes, prosecute offenders, and stop further offences from being committed.
If your fingerprints are on file, it is a good deterrent not to commit a crime that might be linked back to the reason your fingerprints were taken in the first place. The same follows for DNA testing. No one is advocating that every person in Australia have their DNA arbitrarily put into the DNA Bank just in case they commit a crime down the track.
If the police have this rapist’s DNA on file, we may presume they took it for some other offence-related purpose. When a person is not convicted for a crime because of lack of evidence, it doesn’t mean that person didn’t commit the crime. But saying that his DNA cannot subsequently be used to identify a crime that he did commit because he didn’t commit the other one, is a bit like saying “OK, you got off, that time so feel free to go out and re-offend.” Wouldn’t it be more sensible to say “You were lucky that time, you bastard, and we’ll be watching you, so keep your nose clean! If you hurt anyone else, we will be on to you in a flash, because that kind of behaviour is unacceptable and we will not tolerate it.”
© Melina Magdalena (12/6/2006)
(written in preparation for tv interview with Channel 10 (Adelaide) news reporter Gerda Jezuchowski)
First of all, this person who was raped is not a victim of rape. She’s a survivor. Moreover, I would like to acknowledge her courage, in reporting the crime to the police. That is not an easy thing to do, and I wish her strength in the journey ahead.
Secondly, it’s bad enough to be raped by someone who is known to you. If it’s not someone you live with, you’re always going to be on tenterhooks, afraid to run into him somewhere unexpectedly, and you wonder who in your social circle knows about him and hasn’t said anything. That’s pretty creepy.
But when you’re raped by a stranger, one of the first questions you ask is – why me? To have such a personal violation, this atrocity committed against you, and then you say – it can’t have been a random attack. It’s so pointless. And after that, you realise that every man is suspect. It could have been the policeman who is interviewing you. It could be the man in front of you at the supermarket checkout. It could be your nephew, your uncle’s best friend, your neighbour, your grandson’s teacher, your mechanic.
So you walk around with this burden of knowing that you are a damaged, violated, broken person. And you know it can happen again, at any moment. Who was it? No one knows. But that rapist knows you now. And he might come back. You might encounter him anywhere and he’ll be laughing about it, because you’re so terrified. There’s no way to prevent it from happening again. There is no such thing as personal safety. You are vulnerable to attack at every minute of every day. You wind yourself up as tight as a spring and you’re ready to be raped again.
After a long time, you get used to being on edge all the time. You live with the fatigue of spending all your energy keeping guard and you modify the way you do things, to try and feel a little bit safer. You worry about the people you love, and hope they never go through what you’ve gone through and you live with the constant regret that those who are closest have seen you at your worst, and you wonder how it’s affected them. And you get on with your life, because what else can you do? It’s either that, or give up and die. But you never forget that you are under siege.
I was raped thirteen years ago when a stranger broke into my home while I was asleep. Even now, after all this time, I do not go to sleep ever, without running through scenarios in my mind. If it happens again tonight, what will I do? Is the phone beside my bed? Do I have a clear escape route? Is there anything nearby that he could hit me or cut me or strangle me with? Have I checked the doors and windows? What will happen to the children if I am murdered tonight? Have I done absolutely everything I can to make sure they will be all right even if I am not?
Thirdly, this business of DNA testing is being twisted to a criminal’s advantage, by conveniently forgetting the purpose for which his DNA was taken and tested in the first place. Police DNA records should be no more sacrosanct than fingerprints. The whole point of a DNA Bank is to assist police to solve crimes, prosecute offenders, and stop further offences from being committed.
If your fingerprints are on file, it is a good deterrent not to commit a crime that might be linked back to the reason your fingerprints were taken in the first place. The same follows for DNA testing. No one is advocating that every person in Australia have their DNA arbitrarily put into the DNA Bank just in case they commit a crime down the track.
If the police have this rapist’s DNA on file, we may presume they took it for some other offence-related purpose. When a person is not convicted for a crime because of lack of evidence, it doesn’t mean that person didn’t commit the crime. But saying that his DNA cannot subsequently be used to identify a crime that he did commit because he didn’t commit the other one, is a bit like saying “OK, you got off, that time so feel free to go out and re-offend.” Wouldn’t it be more sensible to say “You were lucky that time, you bastard, and we’ll be watching you, so keep your nose clean! If you hurt anyone else, we will be on to you in a flash, because that kind of behaviour is unacceptable and we will not tolerate it.”
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