Want to get on the case with Heidi? It’s all at Heidi’s new website, “The Mental Health Detective.”
Backlash 101.
Vile deeds done by vile persons often see a crooked light of day.
Persons who inflict trauma on other persons are usually so manipulative and versed in brainwashing their victims they set up a faux context that protects them from accountability and responsibility, helps them avoid making amends, or facing their consequences instead of creating scapegoats and expendable persons within their system.
Manufacturing a fake, cosmetic front that deflects the public with an almost polar-opposite of their reality such that no one could possibly, even remotely believe the truthteller who exposes their bad acts.
Or, manipulating their audience with the power of money and the power of notoriety such that others want to ride on their tailcoats, keep the gold key to their inner sanctums so earnestly they are also willing to go blind and deaf and dumb and to align against the scapegoats.
The other day in the car on the way to a meeting, the local talk – FM News KXL 101 radio in Portland, Oregon was playing yet another “Us vs. Them Conspiracy Theory/Fear/Paranoia” commercial from my brother Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers in the Portland-Vancouver area.
From my previous excerpts of the book I am publishing on this, remember, Leif Hansen is the bully boy from our family home. Still, a very little boy with a massive chip on his shoulder the size of Montana. Same Leif who got into fist fights with our father that blew out the dining table and chairs. Set his cocaine-runner boat on fire to escape a Coast Guard search in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. Spent much of the early years with his young family in Portland being called back to Hawaii to make Court and Probation dates in Honolulu for drunk driving arrests, his wife Carol confided in me in the early 1990’s.
The same Leif who grew pot in our bathroom and stood laughing and watching with his buddies as his pal David took me into Leif’s twin bed with the orange and brown striped sheets and told me, a young pre-pubescent girl who only wanted to be a pure chaste Mormon girl, and told me that his sex abuse was what married people do, and this was our marriage bed.
So when I first started telling the truth about all the rampant sex abuse against me and others in our good Mormon family, and how the Mormon church covered it up for 2 generations of familial victims, I was certainly punished.
I was told I was “crazy, mentally ill disturbed, unstable, too emotional, is she on drugs?” And a Bad Girl, Unworthy.
Then, told I was evil, and that I was sinning for violating church rules about not respecting the male priesthood, which really means that men are not to be challenged or told on or doubted or held accountable or exposed for their abuses against women and children.
Then my mother took all the sex abuse drama on for herself, as though she was the victim, and made it into a trauma drama of her own about having to deal with a teenager with depression and PTSD which was so very taxing and unfair for her that she need 6 weeks in the hospital to cope with how awful it was for her. Pity her, she manipulated, look how tragic her life is, how she needs so much care and support, how heavily burdened she was because of her daughter’s sex abuse by her brother Ronald Oscar Safsten, born and raised in Bellingham, Washington.
Remember my earlier chapter on ex-husband Aaron Stewart Heusser of the Portland, Oregon area, terrorized me with violence and sadism and paranoid, angry control, isolating me, while being emotionally married to his mother.
When I became the truth teller of our marriage, he came at me with flying moving boxes at my head, yelling, “I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna kill you…”
What made him stop and squeal his truck out of the garage was to reveal that my father was still listening on the cordless phone and heard the whole thing and was calling the police.
And when I got the Restraining Order on him in Washington County, Oregon, his response was to steal all my personal and business finances and block my access to them, all my personal records including birth certificates, taxes, my personal computer, my car keys, my insurance cards, checkbook, my money, everything.
Aaron Stewart Heusser, perfect modern male, perfect gentleman, perfect Mormon man, perfect women’s right’s BFF… And also the same person who left Borders bookstore early one Friday night because he, as he told me in the stacks, a little shaken but also asking permission for it to be okay, — he had become sexually aroused and had gotten an erection from looking through a coffee table art book on the grand masters of Early Europe and their paintings of nude little boys.
After the restraining order, he stalked me to intimidate me. To punish me further, refused to pay child support for 9 months, saying to me, in reply to the court order, “make me.”
Then enter get my bipolar drama queen Borderline Personality and addict sister, who just cannot resist the chance to escalate a drama no matter who gets hurt, who cannot resist meddling no matter how many professionals tell her stay out of it as she was making things worse, — buddied up with Aaron Huesser to carry his domestic violence into an unlawful, illegal, and sociopathic steal of child custody.
My sister’s name — the pea in the pod who supplied fabrications for Aaron to use, and committed a few unlawful acts along the way, some of which she still has in play, is Melanie Linnea Hansen Willer Silvester, formerly of Concord, California. Melanie markets herself successfully as the paragon of Mormon virtue, going so far as to throw crying tantrums and plather on judgmental lectures about others needing to get as righteous as she is or she will not be able to see them in heaven and she will be lonely there.
Lying, fabricating, conning, eagerly participating in Aaron’s prolonged domestic violence for her personl sport and addiction to drama? No matter the blatant lying, duplicity?
Melanie’s outer cosmetics represent the false store front of her soul which is filled with con jobs, exploitation of other’s personal lives and estranging/disrupting/stealing relationships to get her drama fix, then go to the temple and lie about being worthy to get inside, while going through 35 years of benzo and opiod addiction, fooling a lot of persons but not myself.
My punishment for truthtelling about all that?
Of course, the grandiose prophetic threat that I will not be able to go to heaven.
And more Borderline Personality games. Sordid, destructive games, that go on without accountability, empathy, remorse because Melanie, like Leif, like the Hawaii State Senator Diana Hansen-Young (sister, public artist), because all they have to do to get away with their criminal behavior is to, 1. See to it that I remain “crazy” while, 2. Manicure and advertise their cosmetic fronts of popularity, social-political ladder climbing, the power of fame, the power of money, the power of the con.
Again, readers who have or are experiencing the trauma of truthtelling, you are not alone.
Continue radical self-care, set and protect your boundaries, your privacy, your Self construct and believing in your Self as worthy and deserving a life free of abusers, confident in your own narrative, always bearing a courageous immovability in who you are and what you can do.
You are not alone. Talk with other truthtellers. You will find a community of remarkable and candid persons filled with the light of honesty, strength, wisdom, and perhaps some creativity and humor in coping and growing.
That is my wish and my work for you. So when I hear the duplicitous, con job radio-tv commercials of Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers, and cringe because I know who he really is, I will draw strength because as long as there are truthtellers, no matter the punishments we endure, criminality in our families stands less of a chance.
Isn’t it nice not to be like them?
——————– by Heidi Hansen, from my new book, The Trauma Project, copyright2019-2020, reproduction prohibited.
Collateral trauma surrounding childhood sex abuse is like the killer undertow drowning the victim while the ocean appears smooth, pretty, and safe on surface.
The response of a victim’s family, caregivers, authority figures and nurturers to the sex abuse is often more powerful a determinant to recovery than the specific sex abuse act by the pedophile.
Evidence-based data shows us that the more healthy a family’s response to the victim in a sex abuse case, the more that individual will recover from it and the less complicated that recovery will be, including the long-term effects into adulthood.
This same evidence show us that the more a family responds to the sex abuse by blaming and scapegoating the victim, protecting the pedophile, allowing or making the consequences of the sex abuse fall on the shoulders of the victim, or work to remove the consequences from the shoulders of the pedophile, the more likely the victim’s recovery is going to be prolonged and complicated and will extend to disrupt her or his adult life.
In healthy families, the adults will respond by calling out the pedophile, making the pedophile accountable, making it clear to the victim that she or he is innocent and placing the consequences on the shoulders of the pedophile, not the victim, and working in visible ways to obtain justice for the victim, as well as protect potential other victims.
But pedophiles tend not to bloom around healthy families. Pedophiles target the dysfunctional and toxic families where they feel confident their abuses will either go unnoticed, unreported, or that they can take advantage of all the twisted chinks in the family mortar to exploit a way to wiggle out of accountability. And, their way is cleared to target more victims.
In some states it is a crime for victims and families of victims to not report a pedophile because of the reckless disregard for the potential future victims of that pedophile go unprotected. Silence and keeping the sex abuse a secret hurts many others besides the present victim.
One form of family dysfuntion and toxicity is duplicity. Duplicity is both an individual, personal dysfunction as well as a systemic one found in families as well as larger groups such as religions, political organizations, educational institutions, etc.
Duplicity is both a simple and complex undertow. Duplicity means that a person or a group is acting in a hidden, invisible reality deviant from the external, surface advertisement of their stated values, moral compass, and socially acceptable behavior.
The result for the child sex abuse victim is that she or he lives in a state of confusion, knowing the stark truth of her or his molestation while having to cope with daily life of their caregivers acting as if nothing bad happened at all, or worse, the she or he is the “crazy” one, the “liar,” the “bad child” who had so much gaul as to disrupt an otherwise Good family.”
Let me illustrate this more pointedly with my own truths about my own childhood sex abuse and the duplicity that has caused so much more mental health problems for me throughout my life than the actual sex abuse acts themselves.
Some years ago the movie, Fargo” was all the rave, a celebrated movie destined to win big awards. I was not interested, but all the hype and fanfare made me curious. One evening the movie was shown on television, and since I was curious, I watched. And I couldn’t figure out what the popularity was all about. A bland, slow moving film without much action or high drama except for the violence at the end, which was a shock and I would have turned it off then but something kept pulling me to find out the ending.
And after I watched it I thought “this movie is a nothing movie. It’s just so ordinary.”
Wait..Ordinary? Where did that come from? Why would I, a highly sensitive and questioning individual, blow that movie of as an ordinary, bland, nothing movie?
Later on, it hit me. The family in he movie was just like my own. A body out back being put through the wood chipper, blood splattering all over the pristine white snow, while insie in the warm, cozy, clean house, the father is talking to his son that “doncha worry, we’ll get your mom back, doncha know.”
In my family, the pedophile was a short distance away, molesting me and taking child prn photographs while my parents and older siblings, who knew he was a pedophile and knew what he was doing, were in a posture and outward demeanor around a cozy living room or lavish dinner table with “we’re all a happy good Mormon Swedish family and pass the milk and cookies, doncha know.”
That duplicity is still a mind-bender for me 50 years later. Plus, I am still reeling from having married a duplicitous sociopathic man, Aaron Stewart Heusser who committed multiple violent acts — physical and mental and financial — while carrying on to others as “the perfect modern man, the perfect Mormon man.” So much so that his duplicity allowed him to continue his domestic violence against me in the custody of our son, lying, cheating, stealing him and turning him against me such that I have not seen him since he was 13. He is 22 now. And Aaron Stewart Heusser still has everyone convinced he is the perfect father, the perfect modern man, the perfect husband. Dangerous, destructive duplicity.
The insidious undertow under the perfect, lovely veneer of the ocean’s surface.
I am the youngest of six, now 56 years old, the oldest being something around 72 years old.
By the time I was born our uncle Ronald Safsten had already molested my older sister, Melanie Linnea Hansen Willer Silvester, from the time she was a toddler until she hit puberty and the possibility of pregnncy scared him off, Melanie told me later during a Mormon church court in which Ron was excommunicated for her sex abuse, many many years after the abuse. The church would not take my accounting of his abuse on me because he denied it ever happened and my family would not stick up for me, just like when the sex abuse was actually happening.
The Mormon church knew Ron was a pedophile and had sexually abused Melanie, Melanie went to BYU Hawaii and told the counselor, Jayne Garside, about it. Ron was employed at BYU Hawaii and lived net door to Jayne Garside. She never said anything. The Mormon church covered it up and let Ron work at BYU and live in church housing, knowing all this and the risks to his and neighborhood children.
While Melanie was doing that at college, across the island Ron was molesting me and taking me to his little hide-away hut where he had his child porn set up and that is where he took me.
Melanie never said anything. I was three, four years old, she was at college and living at home with us and told the school counselor but never told our parents or the counselor that Ron was molesting me, that he was still an active pedophile ten years after she had been molested by him.
At home life went on as normal, which was a sadistic, psychotic abusive mother who spent her days in bed with the curtains drawn, and a father over-working to pay the bills for 6 kids. I was feral, unsupervised, unnoticed, invisible. I was the good girl, the pleaser, the one to nurture and care for our mother, and to be perfect for our paranoid father who always assumed guilt first and evidence later.
My older brother, Leif Hansen, of Leif’s auto collision centers in Tigard, Oregon, watched as his best friend David — who had come to live with us as his parents kicke him out of his home — took me into Leif’s bed and told me I was his girlfriend, and going to get married someday, and This is what married people do” as me molested me in Leif’s bed while Leif and a couple other boys stood watching. Leif laughed.
When I married Aaron Stewart Heusser in 1994, we lived just down the road from Leif Hansen. I was in late pregnancy while one night Aaron Stewart Heusser was beating me around and threatening to kill me, and I called my brother Leif Hansen, right up the road in Beaverton, and asked him to come pick me up and let me sleep on his couch. I told him why, that I was scared Aaron would hurt the baby.
Leif Hansen’s reply was, “No, I can’t do that. A man’s house is his castle and I can’t go over there and remove his wife from his castle. A wife belongs to her husband. You have to stay there. That’s tough love.”
A month later, his wife Carol went into labor with their son and Carol called me and Aaron, and my parents to take her to the hospital because Leif was so drunk she couldn’t rouse him from a drunken stupor, much less drive her. We did that, and their son was born and introduced the first time to his father, drunk and having just abandoned his mother at his birth.
Now you can see and hear Leif’s television and radio ads all over the place — he’s famous for his commercials — as his commercials call out corrupt, duplicitous insurance companies and promises that he will save you from compromise on your injured automobile repairs and restore your car to “pre-loss” condition using the legalities the insurance companies “don’t want you to know about.”
Wait… Duplicity. Acting on the outside as the hero rescuer and the best advocate for your injured automobile, but he stood watching and laughing as I was consumated to his friend David as a child bride in Leif’s own bed? Left me alone with Aaron Stewart Heusser’s active violence while 8 months pregnant?
A mind-bender. Dangerous, destructive duplicity.
My other older sister, Diana Hansen-Young was a state senator in Hawaii for a long time. Then she became a prominent artist and is now a globally famous artist and playwright.
But when I was twelve, she was anxious to get her new screenplay produced and a big Hollywood producer was in Waikiki at the luxury resort hotel, the Kuilani. She had gotten an appointment with him to see her screen play. She took me along. I was told this was a powerful and famous man and to dress up so I wore the blue gingham Easter dress with a fluffy white apron my mother had made me, reserved for church, to this meeting.
I didn’t know why I was asked to come along, I figured either she was babysitting me again because our parents were not available, or that she needed some company. She told me maybe he would like to publish my stories that I had made into little illustrated books.
When we got there, we went up to a very large hotel room which was really fancy and in one corner in a huge wicker chair was this Hollywood producer with curly gray hair, and at the other side of the room stood two men who said nothing but to greet us and let us in.
When he had said hello and my sister introduced her script, but the Hollywood producer said he wanted to talk with me about my storybooks about mice and squirrels that I had made and illustrated and could Diana leave the room for a few minutes so I could tell him about my books in private.
So when Diana left the room he called me over to sit on his lap. He flattered my stories and drawings. He squeezed me close to his chest with both arms and talked right into my ear. I was too big for his lap. I got a very weird feeling, and was afraid I would be in trouble for being rude, but wiggled off his lap and said I had to go and left the room.
When I got out to the hall, Diana took me right down the elevator and told me not to tell mom and dad she brought me here. I don’t remember what was said after that, just that we drove away in her litle green MGB with the top down and I never told.
I became clinically depressed by the fourth grade, was a subject of concern for my teachers regarding depression by the 6th grade, and made my first suicide attempt in the ninth grade. A wise teacher by-passed my parents and took me to a doctor who admitted me to a hospital.
Guess who was the first one to visit me?
A very anxious and ingratiating Ronald Safsten, and next a drunkened Leif Hansen who took his shift on my suicide watch while pouring himself drinks in the hospital room shower stall. The clinking of glass, the pouring of liquor, the smell, the bloody glazed eyes and the slumping over asleep in the designated suicide watch chair.
I’ve battled clinical depression, anxiety and panic, dissociation for 50 years. Now at 56, my parents are dead. Aaron Stewart Heusser, Diana Hansen Young, Melanie Silvester, Leif Hansen, and all my other family and extended family and Mormon church friends have shunned me and abandoned me even while I have leukemia, spine fractures and am homeless and broke.
Their duplicity reigns. Everyone in their circles and beyond adores them, worships them, idolizes them.
But the truths they are hiding about their own behavior and total lack of conscience about it, twists in the undertow of my life.
So I continue to call out truth, even though I know their conscience is unavailable to them and as they grow older that will not change, they will never take accountability for what they put me through as a child and the aftermath of it all that I still stumble over.
I cannot control how others take accountability, and I cannot make them take any consequences which is their due, These are master manipulators that will get their branding a win at the cost of other innocents like me.
But I don’t let them have control over my soul, my moral compass, because I am not duplicitous, I do not manipulate or con, I do not hide the perpetrators and put consequences on the victims.
I feel deeply the empathy of victims and shout out accountability for their perpetrators, and s an advocate i see duplicity ruling the lives of victims left and right.
I have al kinds of problems, but I have a place of peace that money and fame can’t buy, which is a clear and strong conscience, a deeply feeling moral compass, a congruent set of behaviors and acumen which i use every day to help others in their trauma.
The peace of congruency wins for me.
I hope it will for you, too.
Feel free to email me and tell me how I can help you find your way, according to your own choices, through and beyond your trauma.
Thanks for listening,
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
You may not even see the family annihilator, he or she may be invisible, but you will certainly be feeling and reeling from their destruction.
There are two kinds of Family Annihilator: The Silent Stealer, and the Invader – Infector.
This holiday will be especially difficult for those families who have lost children in divorce and custody battles. These are areas of vulnerability that a Family Annihilator just cannot resist. They may have already done their deeds of damage and all you can do is try to breathe.
Family Annihilators are compulsive, driven by insatiable needs for control, drama, possession, violence, sadism, with unending narcissistic appetites. They need to divide and conquer other people’s family relationships, or own and possess other people’s children in order to feel valid, real, alive, potent, just to feel their own skin.
They are cunning and often passive-aggressive, although many are overtly violent and will have domestic violence, rape, molestation, or emotional abuse in their background. They have often lost their own children or partners due to these personality disorders, and were unwilling or unable to get effective treatment and so they resort to a rudimentary satisfaction which is to act-out those patterns on other people’s families and their primary relationships with their children.
“Well, don’t they care about the children?” You might ask. “It’s one thing to act-out against another adult, but to harm a child to accomplish a perverted control compulsion is hard to fathom.”
It is hard to fathom. That is why many people don’t believe it’s possible for Family Annihilators to exist — they just can’t wrap their heads around the part about hurting the children. That’s how Family Annihilators get away with it. Especially in divorce and custody. It can also be an extension of domestic violence.
Konrad Lorenz was a sociobiologist in the 1950’s and is considered to be the father of that field, which is the study of how animals act in groups. In his famous book, “King Solomon’s Ring,” Lorenz tells of his observations of many animal species who act in altruistic ways. He tried to find their motivation for the altruistic acts, and likened that to humans.
Lorenz also observed acts of destruction, sabotage, and violence against an animal’s or species’ own close kin. He asked why, and tried to liken it to humans. His book is very revealing about human behavior more so than animal behavior and I strongly encourage it to be on every home’s bookshelf.
Why do parents love their children more than themselves? Why will they give up, sacrifice their own lives, needs, selves, to give all and more to their children?
And why do some people destroy families?
I myself have witnessed the two types of family annihilators, and this holiday my heart and thoughts will be with those who are also suffering the empty chairs at the holiday table with the spirits of the annihilators pervading the room.
The Silent Stealer needs to control other people so much that he must own the child of the custody dispute, must posess them, to the exclusion of all others and cannot find rest or peace until he has accomplished this and severed any possibility that the other party will be able to share in the child’s affections or relationship.
He must be King. The other parent is a threat to his dominion and rule. Children are objects, things, items and artifacts he accumulates as emblems of his power and rank.
Yet, the silent stealer lives under a rock. He does these things passive-aggressively, looks like the perfect gentleman on the outside, says and does all the right things, dresses and grooms very well, is super smart and does generally what others expect of and want from him. But. But. It’s what you cannot see that is his real life, his duplicity is a cover for the back-story power grab. This is the person who will charm you into a position of relaxation and trust while committing his social violence in ways you will not see until it is too late.
This is the man who must steal his children in a custody battle, and wins. He will not feel the need to justify or rationalize his antisocial behaviors — he will feel entitled to them, and expect others to allow him his due.
Once this person has custody or seized emotional control of the child, he will con and lie and use other people to manipulate things so as to make the other parent not be able to participate in that child’ life. He will construct a new reality for the child, a dual universe, which the child will understand not to dispute or contradict, lying to the child, telling horror stories about the other parent, making that child afraid or ashamed of the other parent, while rewarding the child for loyalty with material possessions and social status.
The Silent Stealer is actually quite impotent and often controlled by more mature, GrandMaster Manipulator-nurturers such as his own mother or mistress, sometimes both being one and the same.
The silent stealer is actually quite dull and devoid of personality and in life when it comes to actual, legitimate power and status. He must con his way through. He has nothing that he hasn’t cheated or lied or conned to get. He has very little social skill in the realm of authentic, deeply engaging and spontaneous relationships. And so the silent stealer is too scared to act alone. He often manipulates cohorts to assist him in stealing the child and sealing the deal sureptiteously.
A sheister lawyer, for example, or his mother to whom he has never fully disengaged, a mother who controls him and wants him all to himself, who refuses to see his flaws and will not let anyone hold the Golden Boy accountable. She owns him. Now she wants the grandchild to own. Together they are partners in crime.
Neither can change, learn or grow from experience. Nor can they feel remorse, or feel for the damage and sorrow that will follow that child all through the child’s lifespan because they have lied and conned and manipulated the other parent completely out of the child’s life. The insatiable compulsion to own the child occludes any sliver of humanity or mature, long-term thinking.
Empathy was never a functioning factor in the first place. Where empathy is, where a conscience is, for most people, the Silent Stealer has a void in his personality.
In my life I have also seen The Invade – Infector Family Annihilator. This type is usually a Borderline Personality who has an insatiable appetite for high-intensity drama, and like a heroin addict, needs a higher and higher intensity of drama each time to get the same high.
This person has long line of relationship carcasses in her wake. This type of family annihilator is a sociopath in that they do not have a conscience about their violation of other people’s rights. As for causing pain and suffering, well that’s more gravy for their own sense of tragedy. It gives them an excuse to indulge in dark feelings and melodrama. They cannot see what they are doing to others — even the child — all they can see is getting the drama jacked up higher and higher, stirring the conflict, instigating crisis where there was none and none needed to be.
This person is a terrific social engager — she can play roles like a chameleon, read the people in the room in a few seconds and adapt her personality to fit in and get the gossip. What wrong with that? You ask. What’s wrong is what comes next. She will get under people’s skin to control them very nimbly and without the other person being aware of it. While the silent stealer controls others from the outside, the invader- infector gets inside another person and controls from the inside of their personality.
It’s like they do not have a Self, and must parasitically inhabit another person’s internal structure to feel real, valid, a borrowed personality.
From this position she can easily con and cheat and lie to get control of the child in a custody drama. Somebody else’s child, somebody else’s life.
Why? What’s the motivation?
To feel real, to feel viable, to be in control, to be Right, to temporarily have a personality and a position of importance.
Why choose custody battles? Why target children?
Because they are easy targets. Like the Silent Stealer, the Invader-Infector is a coward. She and He cannot face the world of adults head-on. They are too weak and know they will not be acceptable if adults saw them for who they really are. Children are easy marks, however, and in the fog of custody war, they can hide their nasties.
The Invader – Infector will meddle in other’s families to the point of destroying the bonds and attachments between parent and child. She must own other people’s children and comes alive in the high chaos of destruction. Then she alone can save the child from the crisis she manufactured. She is the social-emotional version of Munchausen by Proxy disease.
She will have no conscience, just a set of supra and grandiose justifications, usually dramatic narratives in which she is somehow a victim in the tragedy she manufactured. She will control her narrative with false and inflammatory gossip that splits people apart, fabrications on top of fabrications, tall tales with privy information, she will be the One In The Know.
She feels entitled, even religiously called to intervene in other people’s families, which is her cover and excuse for causing the chaos, crisis, confusion and conflict that rob one parent of their child and gives the undue advantage to the other parent. Is there no greater power to have in life than to decide the home of someone else’s child?
The Borderline Personality must always create stark sides to feel safe, so there is no middle ground in her crisis-mongering. Once she has manipulated herself in the driver’s seat, the choices to her are simple. No consequences.
Just like their is no child. To her, the child is a tool to accomplish getting herself a mirror so she can see her Self and other people can too. The child is invisible. To these types of sociopaths, the concept of ‘other’ is non-existent. The concept, reality and validity of Child is non-existent.
This person has such little sense of Self she is ultimately easily manipulated by stronger antisocial manipulators such as the Silent Stealer, who needs a front man. She needs the drama, he needs the delivery person. Two peas in a pod. A symbiotic relationship made in mental illness heaven. The costs to the child don’t matter. There is nothing beyond the high of the intensity and urgency of the moment for the Invader – Infector.
She will have tall tales to tell the child and the general community to accomplish this. Terrible tragic and horrible fabrications that the child will believe, and the silent-stelaer will support and exploit to work his ends. Truth and facts are not her friends. Facts are too boring and accomplish nothing in her drama addiction. She may be ultra- righteous, a pillar of the moral community on the outside, but that’s just a cover so people won’t question the verocity of her pathology. No one wants to be on the receiving end of her manipulations and chaos, so no one holds her accountable.
No one holds the Silent Stealer accountable, either. He looks to good to be “like that.” He’s no “Joe Six-pack.” He’s the perfect gentleman.
So if your holiday table is empty of the child who has been manipulated out of your life in divorce and custody by the Silent Stealer and/or the Invader – Infector, you are not alone. And you are not crazy. They are the crazy ones, it’s just that they don’t look it.
So don’t you look it either. Don’t give them their win. Don’t let your child lose. Use the time away from your child to mend your wounds in your own private way, get stronger and wiser and make a strategy where your child gets a winner of a parent out of you, even if it takes time for that child to see it. You’re still the parent, and your child
still needs you.
And kick out the silent stealers and invader-infectors from your table, your home, your mind, your personality. No matter what they have done to you, the lies they have told about you, the lies and cons they have gotten away with, and been rewarded for, just know that it wasn’t you who did all that. You are not like them. Thank God you are not like them.
Your child needs you so much to NOT be like them.
—- Heidi Hansen
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The Invisible People. Crimes against humanity called homelessness, mental illness, poverty. These three rob people of the secure landing spaces needed to by all humans to learn, develop their Selves, and thrive and contribute to humanity.
This trifecta is the robbery, the theft of humanity that undercuts and compromises the credibility of what society gains and progresses in.
When you help someone get into and stay in secure homefulness, medical treatment, and a boost into the middle class, you are actively growing the seeds of humanity and a society that transcends the material.
The big question we face now may not be so much, ”how do we house and treat and generously employ people,” but rather,
“What is missing, what is getting left out of the talent pool, the gifts, discoveries, big questions and small plodding work efforts that create real possibility for society?
“What have we lost, and cannot see is lost, out of the possible, that remains dormant, the seeds of what could have been, from our homeless, ill, and impoverished neighbors?”
——————————– Heidi D. Hansen is producer of The Trauma Project and puts on workshops about trauma recovery in the Vancouver-Portland area and online at this site. Email Heidi at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com for discussion or information. Thanks, and be well!
The Trauma Project workbook is here — with 3 free posters of our choice, artwork by me — for $29.99 paid online through Cash App at this link:
Email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com to arrange for your shipping and poster selection.
Thanks, and be well —
Heidi
Heidi D. Hansen, M.A. is a retired trauma therapist and now heads The Trauma Project. DID, or dissociation, is a spectrum of experience and reaction to trauma that affects the personality in a unique way.
Contact Heidi at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com to arrange a trauma consultation or sign up for one of her Trauma Project workshops. Her fees are guided from a sliding fee scale, and she accepts payments using credit or debit on Cash App online. Thank you!
November 7, 2019, by Heidi d. Hansen, m.a.
‘the dandelions bloom at midnight’
this was the secret password my son and i used when he was young, used in cases when we were not able to communicate directly but a change of plans needed to be made, for example, if someone else was to pick him up after school at the last minute. the password was used to let him know the situation had my permisssion, my knowledge, and was safe.
but the phrase is more than a secret code — it is true that some flowers and plants bloom in the night hours.
this is also a metapor, that some persons bloom in adversity. in times of our greatest despair, we can choose to act out our troubles, or do something extraordinary with them.
we are all children of creation – creativity is innate within ourselves. we are capable of innovating solutions, finding new ways, summoning up coping skills we have not thought of before.
trauma changes us, but we get to say how.
if you find yourself in a spot in life when everything has crashed around you, the things you normally hang onto for sanity have abandoned you, you feel frightened and alone and shaking in your boots — but yet you are still standing — shout out loud in celebration, ‘i’m still standing.’
the one hidden blesing of trauma is that it clears the decks. when everything is lost or damaged, everything becomes a new blank canvas upon which to paint something new and different — perhaps this is the opportunity for you to become a version 2.0 of yourself — a self you always imagined you might want to become someday – and since all is lost and theree’s nothing left to do but re-create yourself, perhaps you can strategically create that self you had previously only imagined, but now you can make it real.
trauma is mesy, it is unpredictable, it will sneak up and bite you from behind when you least expect it. but truma is not an illness. it’s an event that has caused great pain and fear. the side order that comes in tow with that is shame, guilt, rage — even though you have nothing to feel shame or guilt about, we do anyway.
that’s where restorative justice comes in. ‘putting the monkey back on the back of to whom it belongs.’ within lawful limits, a person must make some justice happen in order to be whole again.
trauma can make us feel as though we’ve gone dead inside. that is why it is so important to fill up our lives with life-affirming actions. things that are creative — you are a child of creation, remember — so fill your days with creative things — anything of your choosing, it does not mean artsy or crafty things although those are great too – it can be anything — making up a new song or joke, walking through the library and picking books at random off shelves you haven’t been to before, and reading one paragraph out of the page the book opens to. it can be creating your own coffee specialty item at your local coffee shop — you might want to tip them for this. making a friend froma different culture and listeinging to their family stories. throw yourself into anything and everything that is life-affirming and validates your sense of self, safety, and sanity.
the self, our personality — is a trememdous gift. trauma will try to rob you of that. but remember there is only one person who owns your self, only one person who can make the decisisons for the development and healing and thriving of that self — you.
you’ll need someone to talk to about the pain, the awfulness, the horrors, the ‘world has caved in on me’ experience. one who can use life-affirming strategies to help you re-connect with your sense of self and esteem in a manner of your own choosing, finding a center of joy that you can trust.
find a trauma-skilled therapist. not everyone has the training and expertise to this field. i happen to be a therapist who is, and my trauma project workshops will provide you with a knowlege structure around three types of trauma — the trauma of abuse and violence, the trauma of abandonment and neglect, and the trauma of dehumanization. i’ll also teach you five specific masteries that will help you grow through and even thrive after trauma and throughout your life development.
so call or email me and let’s talk and set up a trauma workshop for you, or individual therapy sessions to addres more personal needs. i want you to be well, mentally and physically, and i’m here to help you do that. thanks for listenting, and let’s talk soon — bye for now..
Are you a health care professional? Work in social or human services? Legal services or law enforcement? Sales? Are you in a management or executive position where you train, supervise, organize and motivate employees or departments of the business? Teacher or educator or in childcare? Do you work in non-profit or philanthropic organizations including churches or are you thinking of starting one?
everybody has a story. there are many types of traumas, and they show in up in the workplace, classroom, sales calls, and in patient/client/congregational care. the more you understand how trauma affects a person’s way of relating to their environment, the people and stressors around their environment, the more effective you will be in helping them, and your organization, achieve their goals..
let’s start with the basics. empathy and perspective.
sense of security, personality structure, and esteem are damaged by trauma in invisible ways.
except they are not invisible to the person of trauma. a person of trauma goes to great lengths to hide their dysfunctions so as to appear as normal as can be, because for all intents and purposes, they are normal. they want to work, play and love just as much as everybody else and most persons of trauma are just regular, average people who are skilled, educated/trained, available for relationships and hobbies and life adventures. normal.
except that we know now that the more trauma children and adolescents are exposed to, the more problems they will have in later life with rocky relationships, trouble with the law, with homelessness, domestic violence, unemployment, substance abuse, and mental illness.
we now know that in adulthood as well as childhood, trauma alters the structure of nuerons in the brain that are not reversable. these nuerons are responsible for the chemicals that produce anxiety, depression, impulsivity, low frustration tolerance, poor decision-making.
as a professional, you may have more contact with these individuals struggling with these risk factors than what you see on the outside.
trauma survivors live in a world invisible to most. it is a lonely, isolated world of fears and needs and a sense of being so very different from everyone else sometimes that alone-ness itself is a barrier.
the cure is to be able to connect deeply in life – affirming ways with other people, meaningful work, making the world better for others, but the symptoms of traumatic stress handicap people right at that point — it can be a sensation of living in a tupperware box, almost able to reach out and touch what they see others doing – not being afraid, not over-reacting, not withdrawing or being aggressively controlling but able to really honestly enjoy being with each other, engaged in the moment and find find joy in the day without self-punishment. but they can’t get past the fuzzy tupperware wall. how to live like that is just too foreign a concept for trauma sufferers.
you can begin to assist your people move past those barriers by deepening your empathy for what is happening inside a person of trauma — in a world you are not experiencing. a world which is invisible to you. the following chart will show two columns that may help you see and hear the invisible reality of the person your chosen profession has given you stewardship.
to set up a workshop for professionals, or a private consultation on how being more trauma-informed can help you be more effective in your work, email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, or call me at 360-635-3733. thanks, and be well — heidi
please take advantage of this coupon to upgrade your acumen on trauma and how that can help you and your work be more successful. I accept payments made to ally online bank, via western union money transfer services, or by money order.
the trauma project 