I was emotionally abandoned by my mother at 6 weeks. She became a wet nurse for a wealthy doctor's family and I was put in a crib on a bottle. We lived very well in a large house with servants but as I grew no one told me that the family was not my family. The man that I called Daddy was not my Daddy, nor were my two sisters and brother my siblings by birth.
     As I look back, I see that I was treated more like a pet than a child. Each morning my mother would get me up and as soon as I could crawl, I bounced down the back stairs on my bum and went to the kitchen to see Cook and George(the driver). They acted like they thought I was as special as I did. Smiles, hugs and special treats were in the kitchen for me every morning. This was my first experience of unconditional love and the last for a very long time.
     My real grandmother came on a Greyhound bus and took me home with her when I was 18 months old, after I had been told that my coughing was keeping the entire family awake and Doctor needed his sleep. So I had to go. We left on a bus. As we walked to the stop I was so scared I had an out of body experience. I saw the entire scene with my mother, grandmother and me from across the street and from behind.
     We went to the back seat of the bus so I could see my mother. I saw her getting smaller and smaller and when the bus turned the corner I could not see anymore. I lay down on the seat facing the back and a part of me died that day. The shock and trauma was so severe to me that I stayed out of body for some time. I was in a world where I knew no one and no one seemed to like me much.
     Their dislike for me grew after my uncle Butler raped me under the house when I was four. Just what do you do when your son rapes your illegitimate grand daughter? You tell no one, put her to bed and dope her up. I was conscious of nothing for a good long time. It was summer when I was raped and the next thing I remember was seeing my self, again from the back, walking up the porch steps in a snow suit.
     This child that was me was wounded so deeply that she did not even begin to recover for 51 years. I grew up a disintegrated personality trying to cope (living was not an option) in a world where no one seemed to want me and everything seemed to be my fault.
I lived with my grand mother until I was seven. During that time my mother came to see me once and I was taken to see her twice. When I was six my grandmother and I made a trip by train to Ohio to see two of her sons, my uncles. We stayed in a big farm house in the middle of acres and acres of flowers.
     My uncles were in the commercial flower growing business. There was a small store across the highway where one of my uncles would take me every few days for ice cream. On this day my grandmother said that she would take me, but when we got to the front of the lawn she decided that she would watch me from there. There was a ten mile an hour speed limit in front of the store. Off I went with my five pennies.
     As I crossed the road I heard my grandmother scream and I turned and was hit by a speeding car. The car skidded 350 feet before coming to a halt and I fell off the bumper and lay face down in the highway. I could see people coming from the house but they were coming so slow, like in a dream. I looked down the road in the opposite direction and there was another car speeding toward me and I knew that my family would never get there in time.The driver saw the accident and stopped.
     When I began to work with my traumas this was one of the worst feelings to deal with: helplessness and abandonment.
     Anyway, I lived, although there was some doubt about that for the first 24 hours. I didn't know that, because I was out like a light with broken pelvis, punctured liver, bleeding spleen, serious abrasions on both feet. I was in a cast from under my arms to my ankles for over two months, July and August. After learning to walk again, I returned to my grandmother's home for a few months. My mother married and I moved to Memphis to live with her and my step father. That is another story.
     Even though I was seven, I had to wait until the next fall to enter public school so I attended an Episcopal school for the rest of that year. What a blessing that was. Although I was poor and not an Episcopalian, I found a place there and hated it when I had to leave. There I was not illegitimate. I was Beverly Jean and I was smart, learned quickly and had a talent for dance. It was a world I could not even have dreamed of.
     That summer my stepfather was bed ridden with a heart problem and each day I had to stay with him for a least two hours (I hated it). He would read me stories and he read well with a lot of drama and kept me interested. One day he started rubbing his fingers on the elastic on my panties. I didn't know what to do, so I just lay there as if nothing was happening. When he started to put his fingers inside my pants, I jumped up and ran across the room. He kept saying "come back, I won't do that anymore" but I would not.
     I never spent any time with him alone after that until my teens and he never said a thing. When I was sixteen, he started exposing himself to me whenever my mother wasn't home. By that time I was smarter and avoided him after the first time.
     I won a scholarship to a college in Missouri but I had to go to the campus to meet with the dean before it was official. Mother told me that we didn't have the money for the trip and then went out and bought a new suit. I didn't feel worthless. I felt non-existent.
     I had four different personalities....my way of coping, I guess. I remember two of them (the other two were minor). I was the church lad: prim, stiff, trying to be perfect. Then I was the harlot, who used sex as a weapon, as an enticement or reward for getting what she wanted.
     When the birth control pill came out, I wondered if I was true to my husband because I wanted to be or because I was afraid not to be. I found out several months later after we had moved to Europe for my husband's job and I had my first affair. Now, I had the power and it felt good.
     It felt good until I started to fall apart emotionally. I had been on medication off and on since my middle twenties. This time nothing helped. I called my Ob-Gyn one afternoon, in a very bad way, thinking it was hormonal. By six olock that evening I was in an institution on suicide watch every ten minutes. If you have never heard the sound of a steel door of a psychiatric hospital close behind you, you do not truly understand the word "hopeless".
     I had been there five weeks when another bomb hit. My blood test showed that I "might" have Chronic Leukemia. I was there another seven weeks while they searched for T cells and B cells and counted lymphs and platelets. Finally I went home.
     My husband and I had separated and I had bought a log cabin in the middle of a national forest. I had two dogs for company but the night I went home to the cabin they were still in a kennel. So I went home alone, threw my suitcase down and went up to the loft to bed. Sometime later I was awakened by a very bright light. It looked rather like a Jacob’s ladder from physics. It was, kind of. It was an electrical fire and my cabin was burning. This was in December in the mountains of Virginia and it was 8 degrees. My portable phones didn't work and I was heavily medicated. I picked up my bag and keys and drove down the lane until I found a house with lights on. No one was home but I went in call the fire department.
     This was a blazing homecoming from the nut house. I lived in an apartment for a year while my cabin was rebuilt. I really learned nothing about myself in the hospital so I went to a psychiatrist and then to a LPSW with whom I worked for nearly three years. In the meantime, I did 21 rebirthing hours and got involved in a psychic development group led by David McKnight. David became my spiritual teacher for some years to come.
     At the time I read Marianne Williamson's book based on A Course In Miracles and joined a group studying The Course. That began to change my life by turning my former belief system 180 degrees from where it had been. After that, Paul Ferrini made a stop in Charlottesville VA on his way to New Mexico and I had the opportunity to meet him and spend an evening in his energy and listen to him speak. I have never forgotten that night. I have held the desire in my heart to be able to have that kind of energy for myself. I am still working on it.
     I read everything Paul had written and it was like angel wings against my soul. I made more progress with my new counselor and began to have a little more confidence in my own ability to live closer to the present than the past. We decided it would be a good idea for me to attend an Incest Survivor’s weekend because of my step father. The things I heard that weekend made my blood run cold. Satanic ritual abuse starting very young and lasting for years, parents prostituting young girls, fathers having intercourse with their daughters with the mothers watching, mothers sexually abusing their daughters, you name it. This retreat was for females so we didn't hear of the boys' abuse. Still, the only thing that seemed to hit me was when a girl talked about blood on her underwear. I felt that somewhere down inside.
     Three weeks later I was skiing with a friend in West Virginia. It was a Thursday. I had skied about an hour and suddenly there I was at the top of a diamond and could not do anything right. I basically couldn't ski. My friend thought I had gone nuts and so did I. My body would do nothing I gave it the command to do. I am a good skier but not that day. It took me forty-five minutes to get down a slope I did in fifteen with ease. At the bottom of the slope, I told my friend that I was going in the lounge for awhile and would pick him up in a few minutes. As I turned to go in the lounge, I thought I saw a little girl lying in the snow on her left side. Said to myself "you are nuts". When I went out to meet my friend, there she was again-- only this time she was facing me. The question came, "Is that me?" I put the whole thing out of my mind and skied rather badly the rest of the day. The next morning the rape memory returned in a blaze of pictures and words. I got a legal pad and started writing down the words and describing the pictures. I wrote for hours, thinking the entire time, "this is not true, I am making this up." The words and pictures kept coming and I kept writing until I was exhausted. I called some of my aunts who had lived in the house I was describing as adults. Every detail checked out, and they finished out some things that happened after the rape that I didn't know.
     I cried and cried and cried and even rented a sad movie so I would not stop crying. I kept at it until I felt empty. Then I got mad. Rage at my raper, who had been my favorite uncle. If he hadn't already been dead, I would have killed him, and gladly gone to jail. I still had a baby doll that was named after the two of us. I called her Beverly-Butts, and I loved her. I loved her until then. In my anger I took that doll and smashed her head against the brick fireplace and pieces flew everywhere. I picked up the pieces and smashed them again with the poker. The body was cloth so I stabbed and ripped that into pieces. I started a fire in the wood stove and put the pieces in it and burned them. I had heard that ashes were good for fruit trees. So after the stove cooled, I took the ashes and spread them around a peach tree in the back yard. The next spring the tree died.
What call I tell you? Rage is a mighty thing. It kills. It had been killing me for years. The memories continued to come up for several years but as I began to heal and connect with myself and that little girl they didn't hurt anymore. I finally forgave my uncle after walking in his shoes for awhile and having a better understanding of his pain. The forgiving was for me, not him. Hopefully, God had already done that.
     My healing continues today. I spent years living close to nature, regulating my days by the sun and my activities by the seasons. A Course In Miracles opened up the spiritual path to me. I have had many teachers along the Path. Joseph Campbell, the myths of the Austrialian Aborigines, the psychic skills of the Nomads of the Sahara, the Metaphors of the Bible, Gary Zukav, James Redfield, Kenneth Wapnick, Thomas Moore, Carlos Castenada, Ram Dass, the healing practice of Reiki (I am second degree currently), Joseph Goldsmith, the words of the Master Teacher and way-shower, Jesus, Emerson, Butterworth. And on and on, until finally Paul Ferrini came back in my life by way of an e-mail.
     I attended my first retreat in December of 2005. It seems impossible that it has only been such a short time, for so much has changed in my life since I entered Paul's Spiritual Mastery Program. Attending my first retreat was a little scary for me, but I knew that I needed to go. Being there was an experience like no other. There I found the family I had never had and I experienced unconditional love from Paul and from the other Mastery students. I recognized it from my childhood and it was and is wonderful.
     A lot of my journey on the path has been taken alone. Not so anymore! Now I am surrounded by a loving community of sisters and brothers. Each one is a light and an inspiration in my life.
Since I have joined the Mastery program, I have been sharing my journey of healing from childhood sexual abuse with other women who have similar experiences. As Paul says in his books, the wound and the gift are intricately related. As I heal my wound, I can help others heal. That is the gift that      I can give to others, even as others have given me the same gift when I needed help.
Paul has asked me to facilitate an Affinity Group for survivors of sexual abuse at the Awakening the Feminine Spirit conference in July in Connecticut. I am happy to do so. And I hope that those of you who feel connected to my story will come to the conference and join our group. I could have saved myself many years of torture if I had found this community earlier on in my healing process. If you are where I have been, don't wait to ask for help. You don't have to heal alone. Please come and join us in healing together.
     I feel blessed to have returned back to Paul's heart centered work. Now I am more ready than ever before to heal, to step into my power, and to serve.