Thanks for staying in my absence. My daughter is well now and gone back to school full time! So I am back to writing. Back to the blog and back to my (new) book. Things have taken a slightly different turn and so will my writing. You have seen my total adoration of my deceased husband in my poems and my writing. I had a tumultuous and monumental awakening recently and this is the topic of my ammended book. I have just finished it and need to find a publisher. But I’m going to give some of the highlights here to accompany my posts.

I started attending for music therapy. Which if you don’t know is therapy with a highly skilled counsellor but you improvise with musical instruments for a short part of the session to open your subconscious. I’d been going for 3 weeks and I started to become troubled by some abuse memories from when I was 5. I had experienced them fully as flashbacks when I was 25. But I talked to my friend about it and then buried it. I couldn’t understand why they were coming up again and started to channel them into poetry as well as talking to the music therapist.

Then truly from my subconscious, a poem came from nowhere about my husband (next blog post). The phrase “It’s hard to say no to someone that you know” stuck with me from another poem (which should have actually said “it’s hard to say no when you’re 5 f**king years old!”). But anyway, this phrase stuck and the realisations started to come and break down my relationship with my husband, my extraordinary love, my soul mate. Who severely emotionally, sometimes physically abused me and subjected me to prolific sexual coercion and violence.

Many people idolise the one they lost after death. I seem to have taken it to the extreme. I have been advised that he displayed behaviour characteristic of someone with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It seems that when he died I remained under his control. As brainwashed as I had been by him for 11 years, I did not let it go. In addition to this I had to step up for my young child, alone with little support and then 5 years after that and the grief process, she became severely ill. It’s only now I’ve had space in my head to be open to process anything but it seems my brain thought it was time.

When you are with a Narcissist, they gaslight you and make you think everything is your fault and that you are going mad. Easier for him to do with someone who has a mental illness. There’s a source of blame right there. As I reflected on my experience with him, I reflected on my life and relationships and experiences within it and found other significant situations that had set me up as vulnerable to his abuse and an awareness of situations that I took responsibility for and absolutely should not have done!

Obviously my experiences as a very young child with abuse did not provide a good start. But I started writing about my Mum. My Mum was physically and emotionally abusive but she also blamed me. I ended up thinking my experience with her was a normal part of growing up. It’s only now I can see what a catastrophic effect this has had on most of my relationships. I went on to blame myself for a sexual assault when I was 14 and a drug rape when I was 25 where I was kept in someones flat for 2 days in and out of consciousness. I didn’t share any of these things. I genuinely accepted them as my fault.

So it was easy for a Narcissist to step in and continue the damage. But I am healing. Well I am broken actually, almost but not quite. I have been gifted with resilience and I shall use this to heal. So my blog will taken a different turn and I will be exploring some of these things. I am now Alice not Bloss since my husband used to call me Bloss. I have chosen Alice as my Dad wanted to call me Alice but my Mum didn’t like it.

I hope you will stay for my new journey and I look forward to receiving new followers with love.

Be well,

Alice.