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#MeToo #TimesUp #WTF (1.9.18)

Well, I’m exhausted. I just finished getting my daughters to bed at 11:45 pm. I still read them bedtime stories, lead a prayer together, and typically get them to hit the hay at 10:00 pm. Not tonight. Nope. We watched our taped Golden Globes – part 1 last night, part 2 tonight, and plan to watch part 3 tomorrow night. We finished tonight’s segment with Oprah Winfrey’s acceptance speech. Thank God Oprah is intelligent, strong, and an excellent communicator. As a result of Oprah’s powerful speech, my daughters and I had a lengthy discussion about consensual sex; how alcohol lowers people’s inhibitions to make poor decisions; how some guys respect “no” and others don’t; how we, as females need to be smart, tough, clear, and assertive; I shared real life examples of sticky situations that I got into that could have been much worse; I shared real life examples of two males taking advantage of me, because I was weak from being sexually assaulted by my father for 12 years and not knowing how to assert myself with them more effectively; etc.

I’ve always considered Oprah today’s Jesus. Oprah is a Master Healer. She has been through hell, risen up like a phoenix, and get’s her purpose in life – to help others. I remember Oprah back in the old days hoofin’ up and down the aisle’s on her television show, holding up the microphone, giving people a chance to be heard. She asked questions. She was tough, considerate, inquisitive, and sensitive. She also had great courage. I remember her leading a show through the topic of racism and if I remember correctly, the show was held in the South. Jesus.

Tonight with her wisdom and life experience, Oprah has set the bar for society to live to a higher ideal. #TimesUp. It’s doable. Christ set the bar high back in his lifetime and his teachings made great progress for centuries. It’s not that difficult to treat other people like you want to be treated. But for many people who feel powerless and victimized, it’s difficult. When people are hurting, they lash out and hurt other people. For people who feel powerless, it’s important for them to control people, to overpower people, to instill fear in people in order to control them. Then throw in the never-ending cycles of abuse, alcoholism, drugs, addictions, etc. and this dysfunction increases exponentially.

Sexual assault is wrong. Physical abuse is wrong. Emotional abuse is wrong. Psychological abuse is wrong. It is not okay to hurt someone else, to overpower someone else, to harm someone else. It’s not nice and it’s not okay. Why the fuck do people do it? It’s easy to call out someone and say, “This person is bad. This person is fucked up. This person hurt me very badly.” Yes, we need to stop the abuse. We need to call out the people that are in the wrong and say, “Stop yourself. Stop this behavior. Your behavior is unacceptable.” Once all of the dust settles from these volcanic eruptions of women standing up and  speaking out about sexual harassment and sexual assault, what’s next?

My father sexually abused me. How do we teach our children to protect themselves when primary caregivers are the ones perpetrating the sexual assault? It’s difficult. It’s challenging. I have been blessed with not 1 but 3 daughters to figure this lesson out. I try my best every day, but honestly, I’m going to fuck up and have fucked up many times. My husband was traumatized in different ways in his family system. We love our daughters. We want to raise healthy, strong, independent girls to be strong, independent, loving women and it is challenging. Consequently, we overprotect our daughters. I told my husband one year, “We are similar to Holocaust survivors. We both survived traumas from our childhoods and now our children are being raised in the shadows or the residual effects of our traumas.” We are trying the best that we can, but sometimes it’s just ugly. But if you think about it, every generation is living out the traumas from the previous one or two+ generations. It’s part of the human life cycles.

Life is a crap shoot. You survive stuff. You escape stuff. You get beat up emotionally, physically, spiritually, etc. Sometimes the goal is to survive, sometimes it’s to adapt, sometimes it’s to grow, and ultimately it’s to feel some level of satisfaction about all of the work that you have done here on the earth plane.

So where do we go from the #MeToo movement? What’s the goal? How are we going to change things?

#1.) We need to educate people, including children, about sex, sexuality, and relationships. This educational program or system needs to begin with age appropriate information at age 3.

#2.) We need to create and support movies about healthy relationships – have you noticed how many movies show characters having sex after drinking lots and lots of alcohol? Is that the message we want to spread to the masses? Drink heavily, have sex with total strangers, and then do it all over again the next night?

#3.) People need to learn how to be assertive. There is a big difference in being assertive versus being aggressive.

#4.) People need to learn and believe in self-worth. #selfcare = #imatter.

#5.) Children need outside sources of information from their family systems educating them about appropriate and inappropriate physical contact and/or touching. I used to want to scream when I was in my 20’s and heard people say, “Children should be taught that the only people that should ever touch their private parts are their parents or their doctor.” What if the parent or the “doctor” is a sexual predator? I remember a girl in high school telling me that her dentist used to touch her [large] breasts and French kiss her when she was sitting in the dentist’s chair. I knew it was wrong. I felt awful for this girl. She was crying out for help, yet I couldn’t help her. I was being abused by my own father at that age, yet I couldn’t help this girl, because I didn’t know what to do, what to say, or how to help her. I felt stuck and frozen with fear (and consistently overpowered by my father).

#6.) I was able to say, “#MeToo,” during college after watching a television show called “Something About Amelia” starring Ted Danson. This made for TV movie helped break the ice about childhood sexual abuse giving me a voice to ask for help among my friends. I didn’t even know I was asking for help. All of my girlfriends were talking about the show after Christmas break, and everyone was shocked and appalled at the storyline and I said, “That’s what happened to me.” My story was different from the movie, but the theme was the same. I was being sexually abused by my father and my mother had no idea about the abuse. Television and the internet have the power to help people. Movies and videos need to be made to break the ice and then offer trusted resources to assist the people once they say, “#MeToo.”

Oprah has spoken. A new day is dawning. We’ve pulled back the curtain in the workplace, but the more significant place that needs help and work is the sacred family system. How are we going to change our family systems to fully respect and create #HERSTORY within the context of HISTORY?