Soul Compost: Transforming Adversity into Spiritual Growth

By Licia Berry

A little girl with a photographic memory has mysterious experiences of God, angels and helping spirits as she endures sexual, physical, emotional and mental violence in her home. Raising poignant questions about the keen awareness of children, this book details the remarkable journey of an intelligent and intuitively gifted girl who stays alive and connected to her spiritual self, but loses that connection in her despair to live in a broken world. As she grows into a woman, she finds the strength to fight her way back to the light. Detailing her experiences without judgment or blame but with a keen eye of observation and understanding, the author shares an inspiring story of finding her way home to herself and to a joyous life. With practical suggestions as well as jaw dropping insights, Soul Compost is a heartfelt, moving and courageous book. First in the "Woman, Awake Series" by Licia Berry, a series that details five stages of her healing adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781624887628

Book preview

Licia

CHAPTER 1: A Glimpse of the End at the Beginning

I am spoiling the end for you now.

I am a healthy, productive, and exultant woman who is intelligent, creative, awake, loved, adored, and free. I have run my own business for many years, raised two astoundingly beautiful teenaged sons (both inside and out), and will celebrate my twenty-sixth anniversary this year with my beloved husband. Yes, I am imperfect like all human beings. I eat too much sometimes, I can be lazy, I have a prejudice against ignorance, and I do not like beets. There have to be some chinks in the armor, right? Otherwise, I wouldn't be real.

But the good stuff far outweighs the bad, at least now it does. It was not true before, when I was a kid. I had the basics: food, shelter, water, clothes-on-my-back, but the stuff that makes you want to live was missing from my life. There were good things, to be sure. My parents taught me many useful things. I learned to love the creative and expressive arts from my mother, something that has surely eased my way in the world. She has not been supportive of my writing, as one might understand; I thank her for her attempts to silence me because they have made me ever more determined to speak my truth. From my father, I learned how to work for what I want, even though he did not choose to do the work to have a relationship with me. But the greatest thing I can thank them for is showing me how not to parent. It has taken a lot of work to heal my life so that I could not only be a happy, productive person in the world, but also raise children who do not carry the burdens I carried. I tell the happy ending now, because some of the stuff you read in this book may be hard to take in, but I want you to know that I made it. And, if you are a survivor of abuse, you can, too.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a common term that is frequently used in association with returning veterans of war and survivors of violent crime. I learned that PTSD could also result from childhood abuse. To my surprise, PTSD was actually my official diagnosis as of 1989, when I began my recovery. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR), the criterion for a qualifying diagnosis of PTSD centers on a Stressor, or that a person has been exposed to a traumatic event in which the person has experienced, witnessed, or been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others and the person's response involved intense fear, helplessness, or horror. (Note: in children, it may be expressed instead by disorganized or agitated behavior.)

Symptoms of PTSD (from Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) :

Criterion B: intrusive recollection

The traumatic event is persistently re-experienced in at least one of the following ways:

1. Recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event, including images, thoughts, or perceptions. Note: in young children, repetitive play may occur in which themes or aspects of the trauma are expressed.

2. Recurrent distressing dreams of the event. Note: in children, there may be frightening dreams without recognizable content

3. Acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring (includes a sense of reliving the experience, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashback episodes, including those that occur upon awakening or when intoxicated). Note: in children, trauma-specific reenactment may occur.

4. Intense psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event.

5. Physiologic reactivity upon exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic event

Criterion C: avoidant/numbing

Persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of general responsiveness (not present before the trauma), as indicated by at least three of the following:

1. Efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma

2. Efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma

3. Inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma

4. Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities

5. Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others

6. Restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings)

7. Sense of foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or a normal life span)

Criterion D: hyper-arousal

Persistent symptoms of increasing arousal (not present before the trauma), indicated by at least two of the following:

1. Difficulty falling or staying asleep

2. Irritability or outbursts of anger

3. Difficulty concentrating

4. Hyper-vigilance

5. Exaggerated startle response

Criterion E: duration

Duration of the disturbance (symptoms in B, C, and D) is more than one month.

Criterion F: functional significance

The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

I exhibited these symptoms for the vast majority of my life, and still occasionally do. However, I have evolved and healed to the point that my diagnosis now is Post Traumatic Growth (PTG), defined as positive psychological change as a result of one's struggle with a highly challenging, stressful, and traumatic event. We all know the old saying, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger; as it turns out, there is a scientific term for this phenomenon that is measureable. This growth is measured by the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996), a 21-item instrument for assessing positive outcomes in people who have experienced traumatic events. Five domains or factors are contained within the larger construct of PTG and are measured on subscales within the PTGI. The five factors include Relating to Others (greater intimacy and compassion for others), New Possibilities (new roles and new people), Personal Strength (feeling personally stronger), Spiritual Change (being more connected spiritually), and a deeper Appreciation of Life (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).

There is a suggestion that the disruption caused by the trauma is significant enough to create psychiatric symptoms and shattering enough to the person's assumptive world view (Janoff-Bulman, 1992) to generate growth. But this doesn't happen for everyone. There is some thought that rumination, or thinking that revolves around resolving discrepancies and making sense of one's previous goals and self and one's current reality (Calhoun & Tedeschi, 2006), is what separates those who fall into a repetitive pattern of a more involuntary, brooding style of rumination and a later, more deliberate, reflective rumination that is associated with posttraumatic growth.

Yes, I was sexually abused as a child by men in my family, including my father. I was also physically and emotionally abused by my mother. I'm going to tell you a bit about it in this book, as well as take you on a journey through some of my most powerful healing moments and insights. It is my advocacy to tell the truth, and that means telling the truth to myself as well as to my readers. I have to tell you the bad stuff in the same breath as the good stuff. Anything less is dishonest. I am not going to give you all of the gory details because I don't want you to throw the book across the room and retreat to huddle in a corner. I am going to tell you enough to help you understand that I'm one resilient woman, and that is what I want you to focus on. That is what I want you to leave with when you've finished this story. I believe that my resilience is your resilience. I believe that I'm no different than you. All women have the capacity to survive the worst that the world throws our way. We are remarkable.

I've had an amazing few years. Recently, I sent my oldest to college, saw my youngest perform a lead role in Les Miserables (he was the leader of the revolution, a perfect role for him), watched my husband grow in his chosen work, and enjoyed some success in mine. There is a level of success in my family that speaks to a strong foundation, a sense of support, and a feeling that there is something beyond what we can see, a greater connection with a big picture of our lives, perhaps a spiritual connection.

So, why would I write this book? Why would I revisit my past, open up creaking doors with dusty hinges and reveal all for the world to see? Why would I want to do that to myself? Because the story won't let me go until I tell it. And now that it has been written down, I feel I can move on and actually accept the blessings that I have worked so hard for in my life.

Licia and her family, 2011 (photo by Dina Ivory)

I think that we all come in with a greater connection, but that we can get it beaten out of us if we are not stubborn and cling to it like a life raft. When I look at my children, I do not see an interruption in their sense of Self and belonging in the world. It seems that their awareness of their rightness of their being here sustains them.

I did not have that. I did have an early awareness of the non-physical world, and direct experience of the love of The Creator. It is this spiritual connection that saw me through the dark times of my childhood, and thank goodness I had it. What I did not have was the sense of wellbeing that comes from knowing you are in the right place at the right time. My home life was enough to make me look up at the sky and ask if I could please come home. The first time I remember doing that I was two years old.

Over the years, my direct connection faded, and I almost lost it. At 19, I may as well have never had it. I was as lost as a human being gets. Covered up by my pain and the insanity of a culture that does not support everyday sacredness, I felt like an animal in a zoo, like everyone else stuck here on this planet. Zeroing in on my direct connection with spirit was a wild and wooly ride until I found it again, and find it I did.

The quest of my life has been to recover that connection, and once I did, to expand it into my every day consciousness and into my service in the world. Not an easy feat when being visible (shoot, being in a body) brought me such pain. But there is no other choice for me; my life has been evidence of the struggle to reclaim what I once knew so clearly.

Personal Reflection

Journal Entry, 2004

In 2004, while on our family vision quest, we visited Padre Island National Seashore. During that time, I wrote this journal entry as part of my healing process.

I am starting to get it. In the last few days, maybe even over the whole time we have been in Padre, I am starting to understand at a habitual, cellular level: I am not separate from my consciousness or from my physical body or from my Spirit. There is no separation except the one that is created by my mind. It is all One.

It started to occur to me a long time ago as I asked the question WHY? All the time. I wanted to know the reason for things; I wanted to get down to the root cause of something. An annoyance to most every adult and child around me, I persisted in my search for answers, feeling, knowing that underneath the surface, there was more information, a deeper cause.

When I was eleven years old I experimented with mind/body connection; I was successful in influencing something that was happening within my body by how I focused my mind. All of these years later, I have used myself as a science lab to test new awarenesses and tools I am given to assist in healing and transformation.

Of late, I have noticed that when I feel a physical manifestation of something coming up, I am going automatically (most of the time) to what's the message? When I get the message, then I feel free to say, This will go no further. And the physical manifestation then turns around or dissipates as it is no longer needed to get my attention.

This came to a deeper level of awareness in the last couple of days along with the full moon. I was working with my struggle with HEAVY HEAVY issues that have plagued me for a LONG LONG time. Victimization by my parents, wanting to be alive, wanting to heal, to be free but feeling trapped, weighed down as if by an anchor. I felt the heaviness in my thought process, the slowness of the vibration in this thought.

Lightbulb!

I remembered a moment years before in therapy when I changed my father (in my mind) from an all powerful monster who would kill me into something quite insignificant: a tiny piece of chicken shit. I watched this transformation occur as I shifted my thought, and suddenly I saw this tiny piece of chicken shit on my shoulder, where I then flicked it off. Eureka!

I was just ready in that moment to move from victim to victor, to take my power back from the person I was giving so much power to, and I learned a valuable lesson.

Chicken shit has become my code word for the true smallness of those stories we tell ourselves about who we are, the identities we wrap ourselves with in the name of our importance. Yes, those things happened to us, and they were awful, horrible things to live through. And if you're reading this, then live through them you did.

Perhaps Creator wanted to experience these things through us. If that's true, then we are some butt-kicking, immense spirits. It is important to acknowledge the experiences and the feelings that arise as a result. It is important to heal from the things that hurt us. But it is also important to remember that we are SOOOO much bigger than our pain. There is the magical moment when pain is transformed into understanding, and we can integrate the wisdom, let go and move on. The alchemy that happens in this precious moment of healing is what I live for.

I had a dream in my early twenties, before I began my long descent into my healing process, of journeying and going to see a wise man, you know, the guru that folks crawl up to the tallest mountain to ask the big questions. Well, I had a big question.

In this dream I approach this wise man and I ask, What is the meaning of life? Why do we have to go through all of this? Good one, right?

He gave me the answer to my question. It was so simple that I laughed. I laughed so hard I woke myself up, still laughing. I was so surprised to wake up laughing that the answer that I'd sought (and was directly given) flew right out of my head, and my mind forgot it. I can't recall what the wise man said to me to this day. But the feeling of the simplicity of his answer is very familiar. I ask myself, why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we go through so much drama, and we do we buy in, and why do we hang on to the pain, and why do we forget? And then I laugh.

I do know this answer deep inside me. I recounted my sense many times of having stood in the front of a line on the edge of incarnating with a menu in my hand, and taking my pencil and checking off every single item on the menu. I'll try one of everything! It looked so fun from up there, where there were hundreds of thousands lined up behind me waiting for the chance to do the same thing, to come to earth to learn, to feel, to experience. I happened to be greedy and wanted to experience EVERYTHING. My life has been so full of experience and lessons, so full as to have been called a life lived encompassing many lifetimes.

In the moments when I believe I have touched enlightenment, I've understood that it is a privilege to be here, pain and all. The experience of being alive is a joy, even if the experiences are hard and painful. All the tough stuff that I have lived through and used to propel me in my growth process has prepared me to assist others who are living through adversity. It is all a beautifully orchestrated dance, each of us with their unique part to play, all part of the One.

I officially started therapy when I was 23. There I learned all of the cognitive information about what happened to me as a kid (you will read about that later, in Chapter 4: My Herstory). I had many years of growth as a result of intellectually understanding the concepts of dysfunction and abuse, and I am grateful. But eventually I thirsted for more.

Creating an intellectual understanding