This is my painting, “Main & 25th,” which is my former home where I abided for a spell, not un-recently.
I know the persons in this painting, and painted them with acrylic and pastel on a linen cloth with tenderness and care. I spent days and nights with these folks, and know a bit about their troubles, frustrations, senses of humor, their loves, their aspirations and private griefs.
This is the homeless row of downtown Vancouver, Washington, around the corner of Main Street and 25th Avenue. Most ironically, this is where sits the lusciously designed and expensively constructed Vancouver Housing Authority building.
Most of the time, in my experience living on this street, the VHA building is unfrequented by the homeless who live there. Much of the building’s space seemed underutilized to me while I was homeless, and came in to use their restroom and printer. It was also curious to me during this time, that although from various news sources that huge sums of monies had been granted to VHA and Council for The Homeless, For transitional housing, I never saw it going to that, could not figure out where that money was going, and absolutely not one of the persons who work for these and other homeless organizations and city-county government, would not respond to my requests to see the accounting of those funds.
My name is Heidi Hansen, and I was one of these invisible persons, part of the collective Throwaway population of Vancouver’s unresolved homeless culture.
Homeless culture is a sad fact of life, many Vancouver residents and politicians say over and over and over but from what I have seen on the ground, the voters, and persons of credibility and power fail to implement solutions that actually make it different.
In family systems — found in counseling psychology as well as on a macro-level in sociology — when a pervasive and unwanted problem exists in a group and is a continual source of source of problem-solving dialogue and vague attempts at solutions, which fail, we must face ourselves honestly and ask the question “Is this problem actually undesirable? Do Vancouver people really want the homelessness problem to be fixed? Is there secondary gain for keeping the homeless right where they are? Is there some scapegoat value that our society does not really want to give up? And what might that be?””
Shocking words eh? Outlandish and nervy question?
But it must be answered.
Sometimes groups act in ways to preserve their “problem child” — their scapegoats — because of an overall and pervasive, unspoken commitment to their base need for the function of that problem staying right where it is.
That’s what I want Vancouver to think about when they look at “Main & 25th.” That is why I am proposing “Know My Name,” — a viable solution to getting more homefullness outcomes, more sustained and maintained homefullness culture, and a visible transformation for individuals from living out homeless culture to transforming themselves in homefull culture.
Homelessness strips away a person’s identity, and then, a person’s self-esteem. Both are required for a person to survive, thrive, remain stable and become fruitful in their lives.
“Know My Name” is a project I propose that recruits a volunteer force of homefull persons who have become sustainable in homefullness culture, and are stable and confident enough to be a mentor, a sponsor, for an up-and-comer homefull person.
A homefullness sponsor does not do social work or donate money or housing itself.
A homefullness sponsor will go through a training with me, (I’ll be the leader and organizer here) and be matched with a sponsee who is willing and determined to not relapse once housing has been achieved.
A homefull sponsee and their sponsor will set out an attainable goal plan to get strong in their identity in their new homefullness culture and get strong in their areas where relapse back into homelessness is a risk or vulnerability.
In other words, a sponsor shows the sponsee the ropes of homefullness culture, walks beside them to guide and support them in building their own new personal identity and by so doing, prevents relapse into homelessness — and instead, finds a meaningful and valued niche, homefull relationships and groups, and becomes useful in homeful culture.
This operates on the premise that we become more like the people we hang out with. If we want certain successful traits and habits, we will get them by spending more time around people who have achieved those success habits and traits
I am inviting interested persons to email me and sign – up to be sponsors, and then I will set up some Zoom meeting trainings to review the expectations, skills, and nuts and bolts of goal setting and communication.
Each week a sponsee will communicate with me to stay on track, while they stay in weekly communication with their sponsee, sharing their experience, strength and hope, motivating and encouraging and celebrating those goals, reinforcing their new positive relationships and activities, and be there for their sponsee when homefullness stress and discouragement hits.
Remember, this is not social work and not monetary. It’s humanity at its own best reservoir for solving a very human set of problems.
Then, I will look for sponsees who want to participate in this project, and match them up with a suitable sponser.
I am asking you, reader, and asking those in social services to help spread the word on this project, and send referrals my way so I can start to organize matches.
This is brand new for me, and brand new for sponsors and sponsees, so this is the time to float your ideas and suggestions and be a part of the building up of this project, if you desire.
I do believe that homelessness relapse can be prevented, and that newly homefull persons can contribute so solidly to their new culture — once they know what that is after living in a marginalized culture — and that this “Know My Name” project can be a viable, life-affirming action with observable, measureable series of viable results.
Interested in helping out?
Please email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, or call me at 360-835-8591, room 111 in Washougal to discuss your thoughts, questions and suggestions.
Thank you for your interest and your help.
You can get to know me better by exploring my websites at:
http://www.theartistschronicles.wordpress.com
http://www.thetraumaproject.health.blog
http://www.thementalhealthdetective.wordpress.com
http://www.doghotelbooks.wordpress.com
http://www.themuseacademy.wordpress.com
http://www.nativicabook.wordpress.com
Thanks, and take great care of yourself — you are definitely a great person, and I love it that you read this!
Heidi Hansen
When you walk through a city street and see homeless people, when you ride a city bus and see large immigrant families wearing raggedy clothing and carrying bags from the local food bank, when you see 600 – lb. individuals trying to ride a grocery store cart filled with cakes and chips, what are the first thoughts that come into your mind?
I would like you to consider marginalized persons– including those in and out of incarceration, drug and alcohol treatment, mental health hospitals, those whose highest paycheck is he amount on their disability check, those whose home pantry will not exceed what they can get from their EBT SNAP card, those who look healthy, young and fit but live on social security disability checks and in public housing, those who can’t get their kids into the good schools because they don’t fit the income bracket of the neighborhood — I would like you to go back in time to when these persons were young children.
There is a lot of very robust social science research going on right now on Adverse Childhood Events and adults outcomes of homelessness, addictions, incarceration, learning dysfunctions, mental illness, poverty and unemployment.
Social scientists have used this research to arrive at computation tables that itemizes and scores each adverse child event and show the higher the ACE, the higher the marginalization and disability and poorer health and economy of that person as an adult.
Adverse Childhood Events are basically traumas of early childhood — traumas that are sudden, acute, and intense, like abuse or death of a parent, and those that are more subtle, pervasive, and lingering like food scarcity and addictions.
As my readers know, I am using my own family system to show a number of the effects of trauma and traumatic family dynamics that alter not only the personalities and behaviors of the family members, but the culture of toxicity of the family as a whole.
As you all know, this is the basis for a book I am writing.
So now consider the “Throwaway People.”
I am in that class, and have been for much of my life since childhood, when my older siblings and parents decided to keep the sex abuse from the pedophile uncle Ronald Safsten a secret.
At that time, my family determined that I was expendable. My personhood and health and safety came second, or not at all, in lieu of protecting the sex offender who ate at our table, worked on my sister Diana Hansen’s Hawaii Senatorial campaigns, and was often putin charge of babysitting me.
Long before I was born, my older sister Melanie was sexually molested by Ronald Safsten for years when she was a young child. The family and the Mormon church knew something was going on, but chose to keep that a secret.
When I was two years old, and my older sisters were in their late teens, our family moved to Hawaii for a job offer for my father.
Guess who followed us, but the pedophile Ron Safsten, who was targeting the fresh meat in the cute little toe- head girl Heidi.
If Melanie had told someone in authority that Ron Safsten had molested her for years, and had that adult told the law, I would not have endured his sexual abuse of me.
Had the Mormon church leaders who knew of Ron’s molestations of Melanie told the law, I would have been spared.
And anyone who knows the loud, vocal, bulldozer of a personality of my older sister Hawaii State Representative Diana Hansen, who built her campaign on ”fighting for the little guy, the underdog,” and on holding the “fat cats” in power accountable can not possibly believe that she did not know about Melanie’s sex abuse — they were only about one year apart in age and together all the time. It is not realistic to believe that State Representative Diana Hansen was unaware of her campaign marketing artist Ronald Safsten grooming and abusing me, or that she was unaware that Melanie was being molested by him for ten years right under her nose.
Somewhere in all that time, spanning about 17 years, from being a close-knit, enmeshed mormon family in Bellingham, Washington, to Honolulu Hawaii, this “good mormon politically good” family decided that I was expendable. That I would be the Throwaway.
Later of course, it was Diana who wanted to get her screenplay read by a famous Hollywood producer that she was willing to trade me in to him for some sex time in trade to get her screenplay read by that producer.
By a hair, I escaped the molestation because I already knew what that train looked like on that track and I dodged it.
But when I heard the chillin word’s of Representative Diana Hansen tall me in the hotel elevator, “just don’t tell mom or dad I brought you here, okay?” I knew I was expendable. A throwaway.
So then as a pregnant woman asking my older brother Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto collission center for protection from my abusive husband Aaron Steweart Heusser one night because he was hurting me and I was worried about the baby inside me, and Leif’s answer was, ” a man’s house is his castle, and a wife belongs in his castle, I can’t take a man’s wife out of his castle.” I knew I was expendable. I was a throwaway.
But I already knew that about Leif, as it was his friend David who took me into Leif’s bed as “man and wife,” while Leif watched with his friends and they all laughed, I knew I was expendable. I was a throwaway.
The only way I got mentally well was to get out of my family as soon as I could as a teenager, cut off all communication with them, and live my life as though they did not exist. I have to do the same thing now, today, at age 56, and the older siblings — the sex abuse enablers — are into old age — cutting myself off from them is again yielding me health, safety, peace, growth, freedom and independence from the grasp of these sociopaths.
If you talk to anyone of these older siblings, they will be all shocked and plather on about how much I was loved, spoiled, doted on as the precious youngest daughter.
But control over a family member is not love.
It is not love to create and maintain a throwaway person.
It is not love to make them mentally ill so that if she ever told about the reality of sex abuse rampant in the family, or domestic violence in her marriage, she would not be credible.
It is certainly not the legal way, the Mormon way — but these are the people who made the laws and saw to their Mormon flock’s needs, and became big business charitable contributers in the community.
Yet they abandoned me to a wife-beater, they abandoned me to a first-class manipulator in court without an attorney, they abandoned me to homelessness on the streets of Vancouver, Washington. Just like they abandoned me to a known pedophile.
They aided and abetted child estrangement by lying for and with Aaron Heusser in his use of child estrangement in an illegal custody play — which is illegal and unlawful at this present time and could mean prison time for them, as well as civil litigation to recoup the damages of parental attachment loss.
These people pretend to be so righteous and the paragon of virtue and success, but in reality, created an expendable person who became society’s throwaway person and represents a reality they go crazy trying to separate themselves from.
But they cannot escape the truths of what they have done and arranged to utilize to protect themselves from being caught. Just create an expendable person to carry that weight for you.
Control is not love. Abuse wrapped up in “This is for your own good,” and “you’ll thank me for this later” while throwing a vulnerable family member under the bus is not love. It is not strength. It is not sane.
Creating a throwaway person and sanctioning more trauma for that expendable person to endure — so they don’t have to face the music of their own behavior — is not love. Not family. Not church. Not safe, not admirable.
It’s immoral, sociopathic, and criminal.
And I’m calling them out.
——————————————–
My last few posts on this site will provide the context and background for the shaping, and eventual passing of a new domestic violence-child custody law which for now, is named “Heidi’s Law.”
We are now a group comprised of two volunteer attorneys — one a trial lawyer the other a family law attorney — three family therapists one court child custody mediator, and four domestic violence counselors and case managers.
What we have so far is a working draft of a law — a hybrid of family law and domestic violence law — that punishes a parent for manipulating child custody as an extension of his domestic violence during the marriage/divorce process, resulting in child estrangement from the victim parent.
Just as importantly, allows domestic violence restraining orders and punishments to be dispensed to any extended family member of either divorcing party, or co-worker, friend, associate, church leader, family member or significant other who meddles in or provides aid, support, alibi or cover stories for that domestic violence perpetrator in provoking, establishing, or escalating child estrangement from the victim parent.
Thirdly, “Heidi’s Law” will include monetary sanctions for the guilty party using death insurance actuarial tables and algorythyms to determine the monetary value of the abused parent’s lost time and relationship with their child as a result of the above stated manipulations and law violations. This is a new, more focused and more stringent set of punishments for child estrangement and any party who has helped the offending parent can also be arrested and criminally prosecuted and punished using those same insurance tables as restorative justice for the parent who has suffered from the manipulated child estrangement.
Fourth, any persons or divorcing parties who knowingly and willingly provoke, establish or escalate child estrangement within the framework of a divorce or child custody arrangement shall be charged with child abuse, and criminally prosecuted, retroactive to 1994.
Soon we will be gathering the initial round of necessary signatures, and asking for community involvement, advertising and endorsements.
Do you have a story to tell? Would you benefit from “Heidi’s Law?”
Heidi’s Law will grandfather in past cases going back to 1994, and includes cases where the children of the child estrangement manipulation can also sue for damages from the offending parent if they are now adults.
Much much more to come on this, and I’ll be posting here as well as direct-mailing updated newsletters to any and all — individual or advocacy groups — who want to have a voice in this very timely, and long-overdue, family law.
Contact Heidi Hansen to participate, tell us your story, or donate supplies or monies for this cause at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, call 360-335-4939, and thank you.
This is the copy of my letter to the Editor today (The Oregonian, The Columbian, assorted other media):
Dear Editor,
As Mary Trump’s book is closer to release, the public will increasingly hear the word “Sociopath” more and more, and I am relieved the elephant in the room is finally acknowleged.
Not just as a means of making sense of and surviving Trump’s presidency. This is permission and obligation for victims to tell our stories and get help for the trauma from the domestic violence that these white collar sociopaths have caused and gotten away with it.
These are the sociopaths among us who can wreck family relationships for sport and hobby, getting a drama fix, getting a control fix, getting a sadistic rush from seeing the helpless fear and pain in the victim’s eyes and voice, and the supreme power of walking away from it without any emotion or conscience.
This is the season for the victims to get their say. This is the time for the victim to get validation and really make visible and demand restorative justice for the sociopath’s damages.
The white-collar sociopath is so perfect in outward markers of success, nobody believes the ex-spouse or children who suffer from their passive-aggressive manipulations and clever avoidance of accountability or their inability to experience remorse or empathy and thereby, get out of the main task of human development, which is to introspect and reflect on one’s behaviors and choices, experience the pain they caused to others, and make personal, authentic change and amends.
The white-collar sociopath does not have it in themselves to reflect, introspect, and become moved by the pain they cause others to make personal, life-affirming changes in their personalities and behaviors. They just see the situation as needing a better manipulative strategy.
Self-pity and low self-esteem tantrums are not an expression of remorse, regret or seeking forgiveness and making true amends.
A sociopath’s response to getting caught, or called-out, or brought to accountability for their destructive and duplicitous behavior is to be insulted that anyone would dare to challenge the veneer of perfection they have so carefully cultivated. They would rather throw the victim under the bus, again and again, than try to feel any authentic remorse for their unattractive choices.
In my professional experience and personal life, I can attest to the danger in extremus that these perfectly presented individuals present. Danger in their behavior, which is often carefully crafted to avoid accountability or visibility, but also danger in that they can efficiently and effectively manipulate the room so that their victims will not be believed.
These sociopaths will pick up strays along the way. Family members and associates who are so sick that they will join him in his abusive conquests, and become visible as sociopaths themselves. Peas in a pod, similar ships finding each other in the night.
Sociopaths will often seek out organizations such as extreme religions, political parties, and community groups to 1. hide their sociopathy; 2. They need that external moral structure to guide themselves through society. They have no inner, genuine, organic moral structure. Without an extreme church or political party to spell out the proper set of black-or-white normal social behaviors, they would be spending much of their lives in prison.
Look for the white-collar sociopath in divorce and child-custody cases, where their domestic violence in the marriage extends into the child custody manipulations. How they can manipulate judges and extended family members and their own children is astounding and painful. But they are not moved by pain. They do not have the cog-wheel inside to be moved by empathy or personal accountability and stop their abuses. That’s what makes them so dangerous.
When caught and called-out, these sociopaths will attempt to ”be sorry,” — but pay close attention to their behavior — it is really self-pity and narcissistic wounds, the insult of having been exposed, that they are displaying.
As a retired child therapist and survivor of an ex-husband who is a white-collar sociopath, his mother, and my own family members who gravitated towards him — ”two peas in a pod” sort of arrangement — I have been saying for years, and still call – out, that if you or somebody you know is saying “nobody believes me because he’s so perfect. He doesn’t look like ‘Joe Six-Pack,’ or “this is what she is really doing, please listen to me, why can’t anybody see what she is really up to” — listen. Look beneath the presentation of the sociopath, exercise your brain to look beyond stereotypes, and listen to the victim.
It’s the undertow you have to worry about when swimming in the ocean.
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
Heidi’s Take – Heed and Avoid The Sociopath List:
Aaron Stewart Heusser
Valerie Heusser Bates
Some Clergy in the LDS church
Paul DeBast
Ronald Safsten
Leif Hansen
Melanie Silvester
Rafael Campos
———————————- Who’se on your list? Need to talk about it? I’m available for Peer Mentoring, support, and resources.
What to do next?
Need help? Want to help? Email Heidi at: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com. Phone: 360-335-4939.
Join me at my new site, The Mental Health Detective — click on Zoom Room Enter in the main menu! Participants at “Coffee With Heidi” get a free, hand-painted coffee mug heat wrap from me — take good care, Heidi
I wanted to give something to my world family as an artist. A gift for those suffering from the Caronavirus and the effects of this pandemic, a song, “The Night The World Wept As One…”
Here is an art version of The Night The World Wept As One,” using Heidi Hansen’s own art. Lyrics are provided at the end of this post.
I wanted to give something to my world family as an artist. A gift for those suffering from the Caronavirus and the effects of this pandemic, a song, “The Night The World Wept As One…”
Here is an art version of The Night The World Wept As One,” using Heidi Hansen’s own art. Lyrics are provided at the end of this post.
Lyrics to “The Night The World Wept As One:”
Is it a dream, is it a poem, is it a prayer?
If I close my eyes, I know I’ve always been there…
Dear Darlin,’
When stars fall, and you can’t find North any longer,
find a river, and let it ride, a river is mother to the world.
It will ride with you, it will ride you,
A river will ride you back to me.
Dear Darlin’,
When promises fail, and you can’t find a friend any longer,
find the ocean, find the sea —
the sea is mother to the galaxy.
Let it fly you there, let it fly you there,
it will fly you home to me.
Dear Darlin’,
When stars fall,
and the world weeps as one and longer —
find the butterfly flyin’ on the mountain,
watch it send new breezes to the shore.
Can the love over here
Become the hope over there?
When I shout into the canyon,
and it echoes back with grace,
“what kings cannot control,
the artists already know” —
the world is one for you and me.
copyright2020heididhansen.
Please feel free to sing and share this song with others. Commercial or for-profit use is prohibited without artist permission. Copyright2020Heididhansen. Contact Heidi Hansen of Vancouver, Washington at email: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com.
Thank you!
Take care of yourselves, use this time at home to find your creative talents, make a world family of art — instead of sickness and fear — for future generations to identify who we are as one world, right now. — Heidi
A lot of people think that it is the physical and emotional abuse acts that define the trauma experienced by domestic violence. Remember, from my previous posts, that trauma comes with subtle, even invisible, undertows that are perhaps the most damaging and destructive over the long-term.
One of those undertows comes from how the people around the victim react and respond to the abuse, and how the perpetrator responds nd reacts to his violence.
There is such a thing as “normal.” A big player in a person’s mental health is the personality cog – wheel of empathy, ability to be authentically remorseful for causing pain and destruction, the depth and spontaneous degree to which the perpetrator experiences the pain of his victim, and being genuinely motivated by that pain to make amends, go through a deep and insightful reflection that leads to personality change such that he does not commit violent acts again.
But the undertows get in the way of all that.
Violent and sociopathic people do not have those capacities. Where we would expect to see that remorse and accountability process, instead, when we look closely, we see self-pity. We see how the perpetrator quickly and powerfully turns himself into the victim, needing justice for himself, requiring comfort and care and tending and succor to raise his self-esteem and make him feel valid, loved, even appreciated and respected.
Because these blog posts are chapters of the book I am writing on trauma, I draw from not only my clinical acumen and professional experience and observations and training, but from my personal perspective and experience as a victim.
When my son’s father, Aaron Stewart Heusser physically assaulted me at a mother’s day brunch at Cannon Beach, Oregon, I found him naked and curled up in a fetal position in the bathtub, trying to cry but without tears. He moaned and whined about being unworthy of love.
And, despite my years of training as a trauma psychotherapist, I found myself kneeling over him in the tub, patting his back, rubbing his shoulders with an outpouring of tender loving care, using a soothing, comforting tone as I reassured him and buoyed up his self-esteem, trying to heal his wounds.
Then I caught myself. The undertow was sweeping me out to sea and I knew better and was allowing it. I was comforting the offender. Wait.. Isn’t the offender supposed to be comforting me? Healing me? SAying he is sorry?
So I got up, changed my posture and told him I was insisting he go to a therapist first thing in the morning.
That psychologist diagnosed him with Anti-Sical Personality Disorder, Major Depression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
The first thing Aaron Stewart Heusser did was call his mother. After that, he was enraged as was she, that someone had the gall, the audacity to say that her “golden boy” had a flaw.
Then Aaron Stewart Heusser’s violence and other forms of abuses towards me really took off, and no, there was no more therapy for him. I was stuck in the undertow, vulnerable and frightened, being pregnant with our son.
The undertow of perpetrator manipulating the victim into providing him succor and self-esteem boosters continued ad nauseum.
Later in the process of child custody mediation, the mediator asked Aaron Stewart Heusser what he felt was the main problem in our marriage, and Aaron Stweart Heusser replied, “she doesn’t respect me.”
The mediator told me it was a lost cause, Aaron Stwart Heusser’s anti-social personality was not capable of insight or remorse or change.
During our divorce, I represented myself, Pro se. I subpeoned and deposed Aaron Stweart Heusser’s supervisors nd adminsitrators and financial officers of Timberline Software of Beaverton, Oregon, where Aaron Stewart Heusser worked.
I was aware there was a financial undertow occurring, but needed to provide hard evidence to the judge. And Timblerline would not comit perjury, and so revealed to me that Aaron Stwart Heusser had indeed solicited administrative decisions to hide his salary increases, bonuses, stock options, other forensic accounting matters revealing other hiding of assets from his son, by financially abusing me in the divorce.
When I revealed this in Multnomah County Court, and Timberline administration testified to all that, the Judge threw is pen down and struck his fist three times on his desk, yelling to Aaron on the witness stand, Do you know what a lousy thing that is to do to your wife?” Over and over, 3 times.
Aaron Steweart Huesser began to cry in the witness chair. The judge rolled his eyes, stared at Aaron and yelled, “those are crocodile tears. You are not sorry for what you have done to your wife, you are sorry you got caught. Do you need to take a moment to cry for yourself outside?”
Right there, the Judge stopped the undertow with a strong whiff of reality and sane perspective.
The Judge called out what normal should look like, and called out Aaron Stwart Heusser using the oldest trick in the book for domestic violence perpetrators, which is to make himself the poor pitiful victim who needs other’s pity and cossiting, manipulating his victim to buoy him up and ignore the bruises, broken parts, and carry the burden of the consequences of his actions that truly do belong to him.
Just like with my older brother Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers, Portland, Oregon. On more than one occasion, Some friend of Leif’s would call our father to come immediately because Leif was actively suicidal, had a gun and a knife laid out and was going to comit suicide.
Being the designated caregiver in our family, I was dragged along and told to talk Leif down from suicide. I was in late elementary school-middle school at the time.
I found Leif Hansen in these times in a drunken state, with visible lines of cocaine on the dresser or bedside table, half dressed and filthy, reeking of booze in visible clouds of pot smoke, with weapons out beside him for suicide.
I did what I was told, used my innate counseling skills and talked Leif down. I was patted on the head by my father and mother and older sister Diana Hansen-Young for being such a good counselor and such a good girl.
But I had this nagging undertow making me seasick inside… I knew why Leif Hansen was suicidal — He had participated and supported the sex abuse his BFF committed against me in The marriage bed.” And Leif kept it all silent.
And I was comforting him, making him feel safe, loved, appreciated, valued.
There’s the real trauma for persons of domestic violence and child abuse — how victims are manipulated to caretaking and protecting their perpetrators.
See, if the statute of limitations was still in place right now, Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers would be on the state Sex Offenders Registry.
There will never be true justice for many many victims of domestic violence.. there really cannot be true justice, even if the legal and our family systems supported the notion that it is the offenders who carry the consewuneces, not their victims.
But calling out these patterns to offer experience, hope and strength — and validity and setting the healthy and sane perspective straight, is well within our power.
Don’t swim in the undertow, post a sign to keep others out of the water.
————————-By Heidi D. Hansen, M.A. copyright2020, reproduction prohibited
. Contact Heidi: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com.
Do you have, or have had, a Vacuus in your life?
Are you a Vacuus in someone else’s life?
As most of my readers know, I am writing and publishing a tell-all trauma book about my own personal story living in a family filled to the brim with sex abuse, emotional and physical abuse, crimes, sex and drug addiction, deceit, exploitation, and manipulative games that destroyed my bond with my son.
If what happened to me as a child was happening now, several family members and siblings, some of whom are high profile public figures, would be in jail.
In my childhood era, my family got away with keeping the secrets and living in duplicity. One world, sordid, dirty, twisted, sociopathic. These same persons also created a simultaneous world for people outside the family to see — solid mormons, close-knit, service oriented, caring and compassionate, prominent politicians, big-name business owners, published and famous artists and writers — while actively participating in the abuses, and making decisions that kept my sex abuse experiences a secret that led to severe post traumatic stress and clinical depression in childhood on into adulthood.
My new book will feature the sly, hidden destructive dynamics of my siblings Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers in Portland, Oregon, Diana Hansen-Young of Hawaii State Legislature and painter-writer fame, Melanie Silvester, professional genealogist in the Mormon church, evangelist for the Mormons, and others.
How these individuals became Vacuus is unknown to me, as they are all about 14 years older than me, but I will be speaking directly to the choices they made that knowingly allowed sex abuse to run rampant in my young life, and the sadistic manipulations they used to cover it up, and assist in helping my ex-husband, Aaron Stewart Heusser, to get away with domestic violence in the marriage, and extend his domestic violence into child custody and get away with turning our son against me with dark lies about me that has caused my son not to want to talk to me or see me in nine years. He is 22 now.
The Vacuus.
Vacuus is a term I have given the vile, viscous villains in an imaginative tale I wrote called “The Muse Academy.” (www.themuseacademy.wordpress.com).
But Vacuus are not entirely fictional, in fact, they exist and thrive in hiding in plain sight in realtionships, settings, tasks and contexts of all variety.
Vacuus are persons who steal your narrative, or manipulate it to suit their own sadistic needs, the lust for drama gossip, the pornography of fabricating crisis, conflict and chaos, the evil of splitting close bonds apart, splitting people apart and sowing contention just for the sport of getting a drama fix — that would be sibling Melanie Silvester and Diana Hansen-Young.
Hard to believe, given Melanie’s presentation of the supra-righteous poster woman for the Mormon church and its holy values, that she would destructively align herself with my ex-husband, Aaron Stewart Heusser to fabricate high drama and crisis for her own drama fix, while partnering with him in such a way that he could lie in court testimony to underhandedly and illegally seize custody of our son.
Hard to wrap my head around, how Leif Hansen and Diana Hansen-Young can deceive the public, their voters and constituents and customers and advertisers and vendors — with such sly duplicity, and keep all their dark, twisted behaviors a secret from all of them.
This is the passive-aggressive, sneaky, depceptive and duplicitous way in which the Vacuus work their wiles.
You wake up one morning and your life is turned upside down and you don’t know how that happened, but then you spot the stink of Vacuus footprints all over the home and you know, Melanie and Aaron and Lei and Diana have been at it again.
For what purpose? So Melanie could get her drama high, and Aaron could control her to the point of making her lie to the judge because he didn’t want to share our son, he wanted to own our son. Our son was a possession for Aaron, and a game pawn for Melanie.
Like any addict, the drama fix, the gossip fix, the crisis fix, the power fix, the control fix, the ownership fix, must get bigger each time to get the same addicted satisfaction.
Its how Vacuus get their jollies.
I cannot get back what was lost, and likely to remain lost, with my son from the sociopathic duo of Melanie and Aaron, but there is a legal option for me to sue them both for child estrangement. I am actively researching that as a point of my recovery from their trauma, which is restorative justice.
So, there is The Dramatist Vacuus, the Gossip, the Empty, the Void, the Sadist, the Destroyer, the Stomper, the Bully, the Thief.
The Bully and Stomper would be Leif Hansen.
You’ll have to buy the book to find out how.
Do you have any of these Vacuus in your life? Are you secretly hiding and denying the fact that you might be one of these to other people?
Ammends must be made, accountability taken, consequences allowed to take their natural course and the burdens and pain put back on the shoulders of the perpetrators, not any longer on their victim’s backs.
Persons of trauma learn to suspend their judgement, to mistrust or second-guess their inner voice, their gut instincts, so they tend to go along with the Vacuus instead of claiming and displaying their own truths, the facts that Vacuus want to deny.
My encouragement is to trust your Self, your perceptions, your initial judgement-calls, so the Vacuus don’t have a void to fill. You’ve claimed your space and are outwardly making it known that the Vacuus no longer have a seat at your table.
Know that speaking your truths, or simply acting with choices based on your truths, will bring some blow-back. The Vacuus do not like paradigm shifts. Not only do they not want to give up their power and control, they are deathly afraid of being exposed. Shining a flashlight under the bed poofs away the boogey-man. Shining light on dark secrets will bring you peace, ultimately, because you are no longer allowing Vacuus to rent rooms in your head and heart and soul without paying rent while destroying your property.
Self-care is a necessity, not a luxury. Self-care includes setting boundaries, maintaining your privacy, disengaging from persons who do not respect these. Distancing your Self from destructive person’s manipulations, stop being the focus of their possessiveness, get out from under their ownership, dodge their compulsions to write your narrative for you.
Build yourself a place of peace in your home, and inside your Self that you can carry with you everywhere you go, and quietly dwell in there, and communicate with others from that space, everywhere and anywhere.
This place of peace is still, it is reasonable and from that posture life becomes reasonable.
It is both a refuge and a shield from Vacuus storms.
Your mind, you heart and personality are yours and only yours. You are a child of creation, creativity is innate within you — so go on and create your Self the way you want that artwork to be.
Thanks for reading,
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
email: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com
Puppies?? Puppies at Dog Hotel? A new Dog Hotel Courtesy Taxi roaming around town doing courtesies for homeless persons? What ‘s this that the Countessa said?
Yes.
It’s all here with an unexpected outcome in the new animated song -story Dog Hotel short story.
It’s the only holiday movie you’ll need this year. It will pull your heart up and off the couch and get you up celebrating life, because, as the Countessa said, “…Life is beautiful, and we must celebrate it every day.”
Coming soon to this and the official Dog Hotel website by Heidi Hansen at http://www.doghotelbooks.wordpress.com.
oh — and what is Dog Hotel doing on a trauma recovery website?
Because practicing joy, practicing comfort, is necessary, not a luxury. These are vital to good mental health. Life-affirming activity with high engagement is central to trauma recovery.
See you soon at Dog Hotel — take care, — and carpe woofum!
Heidi
the trauma project 