All God's Children Got Issues: A Woman's Guide to Turn Her Issues Into Assets

By Diane Henderson

ALL GOD'S CHILDREN GOT ISSUES is a transformational book. You have ONE and ONLY ONE life, don’t stay stuck in old patterns of behavior. Learn to live your life to the fullest extent possible!
Discover exactly who you are, how you got here, and ways to transform yourself into who you WANT to be. You will learn:

• Why you resist change
• How the little girl inside of you holds you back and what to do about it
• To be who your soul wants you to be
• How to identify Depression, Forgiveness, Anger, Anxiety, Co-Dependency, Low Self Esteem, Guilt, Shame, Grief, Attention Deficit Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Moral Injury, and other issues that may be impacting you
• How to heal spiritually and how your spirituality can help you heal emotionally
• How to set measurable goals to move you to who your soul wants you to be
• To love and accept yourself despite your life traumas or what you have been programmed to think

You will read stories about how others have overcome their issues and perform exercises that will guide you in your quest to live your life to the fullest extent possible. After reading this book, you will have a clear understanding of how you got where you are and be empowered to move boldly toward who you want (and were meant) to be. You will learn the difference between religion and spirituality. You will also learn how your life will be different when you listen more to your soul and less to others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662901188

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

My Story

"Behind every strong, independent woman

is a broken little girl who has to learn

how to get back up and never

depend on anyone."

Strong Mind

My mother and father did not raise me. My father was in the Air Force and was rarely home. I don’t remember much about him, and what I do remember would not make him a candidate for Father of the Year. I remember two things vividly. He came home on leave one time, my brother was two, and I was four; we were both asleep in the same bed. He burst into our room with a military gas mask on his face, woke us up, and chased us around the room. He thought it was funny. We were terrified. Another memory that is seared in my brain, is a time when we lived with him on a military base. My baby brother had just been born, so I was five. For some reason, my middle brother, who was two-and-a-half years old, would not stop crying. My father picked him up off the floor, sat down on the end of the bed, grasped the edge of the bedspread, and stuffed it in my brother’s mouth. My brother grew up to be a social phobic and was a man of very few words. I have often wondered if there is a connection. My best guess is yes.

My father left us permanently sometime before I was six. I only saw him twice after that, once when I was seventeen and again when I was thirty-seven. He left my mother with three small children, little education, and no job. He was stationed in Georgia at the time and filed for a divorce there. We lived in Virginia. He mailed the divorce papers to my mother, who signed them not understanding that he was claiming all three of the children as dependents, and she would get no child support. My mother was destitute. We lived in a small, four-room house with my grandmother, who worked at the local mill.

I was the oldest, and at the age of six, I went to live with an aunt and uncle who had no children. They were mostly kind and loving, but my uncle was strict and sometimes mentally and physically abusive. That same year at Christmas, he told me for weeks that I needed to be a good girl because Santa would only leave me switches if I were bad. Trust me when I say that I was a good little girl. When Christmas morning finally arrived, the three of us got up and I ran into the living room only to find a stocking full of switches. My uncle had put the toys I had asked for in the dining room where I couldn’t see them. Once he saw my face and tears, he showed me the toys. I treasured those toys immensely long after I was too old to play with them.

One day when I was twelve, I came home from school, and those toys were gone, vanished. When I asked about them, I was told they were given to a needy family who had no money to buy toys for their little girl. I was not consulted or told beforehand. The pain soared through me just like it did that Christmas morning when I was six.

Playing with dry ice in a pot of water was a favorite thing for us to do when other children came to play. My uncle worked at a dairy and would bring it home in chunks. We would put it in the water and watch the smoke curl away into the air with fascination. One day, I went to the dairy with my uncle. He got dry ice for us, wrapped it in brown paper, and we took it to the car. While driving home, we stopped at a stoplight, he unwrapped the package and held the dry ice on my leg long enough to burn. He explained to my aunt when we got home that he did not know that it would hurt me because it didn’t burn him as he held it. I guess he didn’t think about his hand being calloused and leathery from hard physical labor. I could never figure out what the reason he had in his head for holding it on my leg if he did not intend to burn me. There were other more minor incidents as I grew older. It was strange and confusing because I knew that he loved me, and he was good to me in many, many ways.

Both my aunt and uncle tended to be guilt-producing, reminding me often how good they had been to me by taking me in. Three messages that scorched my brain from them during my childhood were: "Never change. Stay just as sweet as you are, Be seen and not heard, and You are beholden to us." As a result, a piece of my brokenness showed itself with me not being able to understand what love was without pain. I was also afraid to speak my mind and express what I thought, or to defend myself. A third piece presented itself as me feeling guilty for everything in the universe, including the starving children in China.

I totally understand that the emotional and physical abuse that I received is absolutely nothing compared to what some of you may have endured. The reason I am sharing my experience, and the damage it did to me, is to help you explore your past and connect it to the issues that plague you and keep you from being who and what you want to be and do. It is my belief that the more abuse you received, whether emotional or physical, the more you are broken.

In my first year of school, I absolutely loved my teacher but thought that she didn’t like me. Every day when she called the roll, my name was always last. Of course, it was because my last name was Valenti, but I knew nothing about alphabetical order. In my little mind, I made an assumption. I also remember being teased by the other students throughout my grammar school years because I did not live with my mother and father.

In the eighth grade, I took a Home Economics class where I learned about the different socio-economic levels. When I realized that my family was in the lower, lower class, I was mortified and traumatized. Everyone in our grammar school came from the same neighborhood. We were all poor but did not realize it because we did not know anything different. In high school, I met and became good friends with people who grew up in different circumstances, as well as different socio-economic classes. I was a cheerleader for five years, Secretary of the Student Council, and voted most popular in my senior year, but I always felt that I was less than others and that I did not fit in. In the tenth grade, my guidance counselor asked me what I wanted to be when I finished school. I had heard somewhere that psychiatrists made a lot of money, so I told him, I want to be a psychiatrist. He minced no words when he told me that I was not smart enough to be a psychiatrist. I didn’t know how smart you had to be to accomplish that goal, so I made another assumption, I must be stupid. None of these messages were conducive to becoming a strong, independent, and empowered woman.

We lived in a small house. Next door lived a young couple that I had gotten close to when they first moved in and started their family. Their house happened to be on the same side as my bedroom. By the time I was fifteen, they had five children, and he had started drinking heavily. One night, I was awakened by a woman screaming outside of my window. I peeked through the blinds, and there was my friend climbing from her living room window in her nightgown. She then ran out of sight. One night, I watched her run across the street to a neighbor’s house with him in pursuit. I saw him catch her and drag her back home by her hair. She screamed all the way. These events went on from that first night until I left for college. During those years, I never got a good night’s sleep. There was no pattern as to when it would happen, so I would lie awake waiting and wondering. I worried about where she went to hide, was she in our basement? Was she cold when it happened in the winter? Would he kill her one night? What must those little children think? I wanted to do something to help her, so I asked my aunt if we could call the police.

The answer was, No, because he is your uncle’s boss. After each of their events, we pretended like it never happened. We would talk to her over the fence as we hung out clothes to dry, and not a word was ever mentioned about the abuse that she suffered the night before. When I was seventeen, I was parked in front of our house, getting a last goodnight kiss from my boyfriend, when my neighbor drove up in front of his house, got out of his car, went around it and opened the car door for a woman to get out. They then disappeared into the house. I knew that his wife was staying overnight at the hospital with their son, and the other children were at their grandmother’s house. I was dumbfounded and again traumatized. With the history of my father leaving and treating my mother so poorly, and my uncle being so strict and sometimes mean, this incident was instrumental in me developing fear and mistrust of men—another piece of my brokenness. I could not wait to get married and move away from home (In those days, not many women left home until they were married).

The marriage finally happened when I was twenty-one. I looked every bit of my age on the outside, but I was a little girl on the inside. I went to college for a year and then worked a year while waiting for my husband to finish college. We married, and I worked for two years while he attained his master’s degree. We moved from Virginia to North Carolina, where I knew absolutely no one. My husband worked in sales for IBM and did very well. I was a homemaker and didn’t work outside of our home. I was dependent on him financially and emotionally. He made most of our decisions. I was so insecure that I was afraid to drive out of the city limits by myself. I was dependent on him for my safety. I remember once when he went out of town for business, and I slept on the floor between my children’s beds with a fireplace poker as my bedmate. I had never slept in a house without another adult, and I was terrified. I was utterly dependent on my husband for my self-worth. I believed that I was a good mother, and he backed me up on that. Otherwise, the message I got from him was that I was a brainless bimbo. He drank heavily on weekends and was less than kind to me on those occasions. I won’t go into all of that drama, but you can see that I started the marriage with a broken sense of self, a fractured sense of what love was supposed to look like, an inability to stand up for myself, and I assumed that there was something wrong with me. I had attracted the perfect man to keep the brokenness in place, and to prove that I was less than, and that men are not to be trusted to treat women well. I became extremely depressed.

Sundays did not help my depression. My husband never wanted to go to church, so my sons did not want to go either. The three of them fought me every step of the way from the breakfast table to the church door. One Sunday, after struggling to get them dressed and into the car, I looked at each one of them and hated them all. I was mortified at my thoughts, and it occurred to me at that moment that God did not want me to hate my family. If making them go to church was making that happen, I would just give up and go by myself. I felt like a failure, and that did not help my depression.

When we traveled back to Virginia to visit our folks, I was okay and enjoyed the trip there, but coming home was a different story. I would get sick on the stomach and be miserable. My husband made fun of me and thought I was weird. What he did not know, and I could not tell him, or anyone else, was that I felt trapped. I knew that I would go crazy if I went back to live with my aunt and uncle, and I knew that going back home and living with him was slowly killing me.

There were days when I got the children off to school that I went back to bed until it was time for them to come home. I remember once going to the grocery store and being so depressed that it took me ten minutes staring at the peanut butter before I could choose one to put in my cart. I remember the day I was lying in bed and realized that I had to get help, that something had to change. It was all I could do to lift the phone receiver. It felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. I dialed the mental health center helpline to see if they thought I indeed needed help. I didn’t even believe in myself enough to trust that my thoughts about getting help were valid. The wonderful lady on the other end of the line agreed with me and encouraged me to get into therapy.

I was even afraid to go to therapy because I knew that my husband would not approve, but the words of the person on the Help Line encouraged me to start thinking about what I could do to help myself. Our church also sponsored a Help Line. It was not for giving advice but was just for someone to care enough to listen. I knew I could listen, so I signed up and took the classes to be a good listener. After most of the calls I heard, I felt better about my situation because I would not trade my problems for theirs. For the first time in many years, I felt that I mattered. I then began to take personal growth courses, which gave me the courage to try out for parts in plays at our community theater. I had acted in high school and had loved it. I landed several roles in musicals. My voice wasn’t beautiful, but it was strong, and I got character parts. I could lose myself in the characters that I played. I could be sweet, bossy, sad, happy, or slutty and be applauded. I sooo needed that applause!

Of course, I developed feelings for one of the leading men in one of the shows because he paid positive attention to me and thought that I was delightful. Being away from home so much at night at the theater and watching my friendship grow with the leading man opened my husband’s eyes enough that he agreed when I insisted that we go to couple’s counseling. They told us that we were two broken people and that we needed to be in two separate therapy groups so that we could fix ourselves first and then work on the marriage. That made sense at the time. The problem was that only one of us changed, and that was me. One day, he compared me to a toaster. He explained that it was as if he had gone out and bought a very nice toaster. It was a two-slice toaster and the bread popped up from the top, and he loved it. Then one day, he came home, and his beloved toaster was replaced by a shiny four-slice model that toasted from the bottom and did not pop out of the top. It was nice, but not the one he picked out. His drinking increased.

It took a divorce for me to become completely aware of how impaired I was. Before the divorce took place, we spent two years of painful times trying to figure out what would and would not work for us and then to figure out how to manage the separation process. I was the instigator in wanting the marriage to end, but there was no way I was going to leave without my children, which is what he was proposing. I had gotten into the habit (co-dependent as I was) of staying awake most of the night when he came to bed drunk because he often would get nauseated in the middle of the night. I felt that I needed to stay awake, so I could arouse him and make sure that he would not throw up in his sleep and choke to death. I cannot tell you how many nights I had to wake him up.

Then one night, when I was lying awake worried about him, I heard a voice in my head that said, Let the fucker die. Please excuse my language, but that is exactly what the voice said. It tells you how much anger I had inside of me that I was not dealing with on a conscious level. I got out of bed and had a peaceful night’s sleep on the living room couch. Unbeknownst to me at the time, he did throw up that night. He woke up, but not in time to make it to the bathroom. I did not clean up after him and left his mess on the bed and the bedside rug. He finally cleaned it up before he went to bed that night. I never slept in bed with him again. He decided that he deserved better than to be abandoned by his wife from the marital bed and moved out within two months.

The children and I stayed in our home for a year after the separation. I knew that I had to finish growing up and act like an adult. I never once went to bed with a fireplace poker after he moved out. It felt strange, but I had no fear of staying alone. I began taking college classes to finish my undergraduate degree. I knew that I would have to support myself and had no education or skills to do so. I found a townhouse, procured a mortgage, and arranged the move. The rest of the money from the divorce settlement, plus $600 a month child support, got me through undergraduate school. For maybe the first time ever, I felt good about myself.

I graduated Magna Cum Laude from NC State University. I DID HAVE A