Major Change

 I think there are going to be a few changes around here and that I will be getting back to the original purpose of this blog the sharing of my knitting and dyeing adventures but also sharing the journey of recovering from childhood abuse and I have come to realise that many of my readers were victims of other forms of abuse and may still found solace here.

I have had to stop showing my dogs. This has been what has kept me from being able to knit and dye like I used to which I missed terribly.

The decision to quit showing dogs has been a very painful and difficult decision to come to but an absolutely necessary one. Before my last doctor left which if you didn't read it on Facebook left me feeling bereft and emotionally a mess.  I was not expecting it and I later learned that the whole practice had been told that they were not to tell me and that she would tell me herself at our very last appointment because she knew how I would react. At first I pretended she hadn't said it and I carried on talking about how I was. She had arranged a future meeting between me and her and my new Dr and my husband because he is also going to be her patient. By that time I had worked through enough to see the situation in an adult way and that I was not being abandoned and that my doctor was a human being who had advised to live and decisions to make for which he did not need my permission. I also found out because I asked if she had received the letter I wrote her telling her how much of a different she had made to my life that she too found it very difficult to leave me.

So give me a little bit of time and this blog will return more to its original purpose but bear in mind I have changed as a person, I have grown, and I fully intend sharing that which I find will be helpful to others and not just myself. There will be staff I will not share because despite my openness I do not share everything  because I have other people to think about. 

I really do apologise to those survivors who came regularly to my blog only to be disappointed that yet again I had not written anything. I would not change what I did because I have grown a great deal in the last few years and I have learned much more which I can share.

And for the fibre- artist people  among you you will definitely be seeing more of that. 

 I believe I have made the right decision now to stop showing my dogs. I fulfilled the dream that that 12 year old boy had  in that I owned a top winning dog and I also bred a top winning dog and the dogs I have around me at home are all top-quality dogs.

I am not making any promises because I don't know where I am headed healthwise nor life wise. 

BEING LIKED OR PREPARE TO DIE

We all like to be liked. However, with abuse survivors this desire to be liked can be dangerous and almost pathological. I certainly know that when I was younger I would do whatever I could do to please anybody just so that they would like me. It never occurred to me that I may not like them.

For me not being liked represented danger. If you didn't like me you are likely to harm me and so of course I did what I could to make you like me. This led me to be a chronic people pleaser and led me to very humiliating situations.

Mostly this situation has changed as I have and I no longer fear not being liked though this is not always the case. As with any recurrent illness I very occasionally become scared of people when it is apparent to me that they do not like me especially when I have had no dealings with them and when I have gone out of my way to have dealings with them it has not gone well at all. Not only as fine a completely humiliated myself but have never once felt goodwill toward me from them. This has nothing to do with friendship. It was purely to do with fear. In my mind they didn't like me and they were therefore a danger to me. One of them had already shown on more than one occasion that the fear was realistic at least from her I have thought of little else but I do realise that all of this with regard to another couple has been in my head I think. I do not think that they have goodwill toward me but I also do not think that they wish me any harm either and that is the part of the child Colin that still feels that not being liked means danger. Now that child Colin wasn't paranoid. He had every reason to believe that if he wasn't liked he was going to get hurt and that is exactly what happened every single time. Hence I have spent a lot of my adult life being afraid and being especially afraid of people. I have some very good friends now, most of them women. It is obvious that my relationships would mainly be with women as it was men who harmed me (or boys at school who bullied me and where I humiliated myself the most as I would do anything to prevent being spat on, kicked and punched, called shit  as my nickname and often in class where the teachers did nothing to stop it.  I was completely friendless at school and fully expected that that would be my life. So it is now no mystery to you why I am so surprised with my life and so clearly shows you where the fear comes from.)

 And this has not been a problem for many years now especially for the last 10 accept it has reared its ugly head again this last while. Adult Colin accepts that for whatever reason I am not liked and that is perfectly okay and does not mean that I am in danger. Child Colin of course believes that it is danger. I have just realised something I've never realised before. This is the situation where the adult Colin can parent the child Colin and explained to him that not being liked by these people does not mean they are going to kill me in my extreme fear or just do me some damage in my  less extreme symptom.

I have never written about this before because once again it is something that I am terribly ashamed of. In the recent situation I humiliated myself deeply.  Who would want to admit to such a stupid and illogical well I would because I'm keeping to my promise of being authentic.

 I can feel that I am very close to being able to close the door on this without anybody else needing to do anything. Now that the adult Colin understands that the child Colin has had the upper hand in this situation for quite some time.  And now that I am aware of this I can do what is needed for the child Colin and the problem will resolve itself. 

 Often we dislike a person just because they remind us of somebody in the past who made them feel  uncomfortable or frightened them  and all of that can be totally unconscious.  as an example there was a man at the dog shows who still is at the dog shows whom I did not like at all. I wouldn't show under him  and I avoided him. One day I happened to look up as I was knitting in my wheelchair and I saw him walking towards me and I felt tremendous fear and I suddenly realised that this poor man that I had judged as being a bad man had only reminded me of the man who had hurt me seriously when a child. Once I realise this I always responded to his hello and have shown under him. 

I hope for my own sake that the other situation is resolved very quickly in my mind t

AUTHENTICITY

It is time for a new post.

I have not been at all with it recently in fact for the last few months I have not been as well as I have been. This has caused a little consternation amongst my Facebook friends and others. Whilst I find this comforting and really surprising that people are that interested in me, I also find that it puts pressure upon me to lie and not tell the truth. And this blog is not about that. It is about telling the truth but it seems that when I do tell the truth a lot of people disappear and no longer read what I write. I would be a liar if I said that this did not upset me because it does. I sometimes think I am a marionette on a string and  they pull me this way and that way. I end up staying away from the computer. There are those too  who have told me that they do not read my "negative posts" and this is a long time dear friend who obviously can't take me as I am.  I guess that comment hurt.

 When I started to write this blog it was away from me to express my hurting,  my pain,  and to my surprise it did indeed begin to make me feel better. I wrote only about the subject of child abuse and its effects. However, it soon became apparent that I had readers and they would write to me and tell me their stories often in the comments section. One day it occurred to me that that remaining anonymous as I was as Knitman,  was not  fair when writing how there is no shame in being abused and here I was hiding who I am. I  I stopped hiding who I was. For some reason this brought in even more mail  from other survivors.

 Slowly, I began to lose myself in all this writing back to people. "But I am learning so much… These people have somewhere they can share their secrets which they have kept fears… I cannot abandon them…) So I stayed with it slowly losing myself along the road.

Then 10 years ago I was diagnosed with four serious diseases in one go: culinary heart disease, fibromyalgia, a neurological disease which the neurologist know about but not enough research has been done into it yet to be able to give a definitive diagnosis which to me means a name I don't want a disease that doesn't have a name: Spondylosis (  
which has a name in front of it but I can never remember what it is)but it is causing my spine to crumble, to fall apart. I can recall an argument I had with the nurse who was doing my annual MOT  and I insisted to her that I was 5'10" tall and had been all of my life once I have matured. I insisted that she measured my height again and she got the same answer. I said then you need to height gauge recalibrated. She was very understanding in that I didn't want to recognise the obvious although it really had not occurred to me that the reason I was losing height was because of what was happening to my spine.

Of course I said about this too and I received some very kind letters and some not so kind letters and some bombastic letters which told me that they knew a sure way of curing me and others who found yet another way of blaming me for my abuse; I was like this because I had not done the mental and spiritual work on myself because if I had I would be fit and healthy.  I do not feel well disposed towards such people and find it amusing that so many  New Age people are as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists they detest!

It became more and more difficult for me to share how I felt every day as I started all of my posts because I felt I was letting people down. I wish I could say it was my imagination but some people on Facebook  has been quite blunt  in saying how they miss the old Colin who was always  "up beat and always had something wise and wonderful to say".

 I am a mixture of all of these things. Through the latter half of 2011 and well into 2012 I suffered a bipolar disorder episode which I kept entirely to myself. I hid it at home from John and even from my doctor and I did this by using large amounts of tranquillisers.  Why did I do this? Because How could I possibly  be having an episode after 15 years of not having one and how could I possibly tell anybody my doctor and John to different reasons but the people on my blog and on Facebook?  So eventually in late 2012 or possibly early 2013 I came out and spoke about my illness and that I had just come out of a relatively bad patch.  I don't think it was received very well. It didn't fit in with the Colin they came to read  and who had lied to them by not telling the truth from the beginning but then if they understood bipolar disorder they would know that for the first six months I had no idea there was anything wrong with me it was only when I came down and was feeling depressed that I began to see what I had been through.

I'm going to go back to writing how I actually am each day and not fake it to make it.  This doesn't represent a change really it just means going back to being the authentic Colin. c