For You Mental Health Champions

Announcing “Coffee With Heidi” on Zoom for Anyone and Everyone To Take On Their Day With Recovery Goal Planning and Positive Support

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

The Trauma of The Vacuus

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

The 5 Acumens of Trauma Recovery — Join Heidi for A New Trauma Project Workshop September 28

There are five masteries — high life-affirming skills — to learn in our recovery and resiliency of traumatic experience:

  1. Creating meaning;
  2. Finding restorative justice;
  3. Body reconciliation;
  4. Creating and strengthening your sense of Self;
  5. High engagement with life-affirming activities.

I am hosting another Trauma Project workshop to provide safe, private and renewing education on these 5 acumens — and I really hope you’ll join us for this. It’s on Saturday, September 28, 2019, at 9 a.m. in Vancouver, Washington.

It’s free, and I’m bringing the coffee — the good kind!

Journals and sketchbooks will be provided at no charge, and good pens.

Email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com to RSVP and confirm location details.

Remember, trauma changes us, but we get to say how.

So until then, rest, restore, and renew.

— Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.

…I’d love to see you there on the 28th!

cash.app/$doghotel2018 is the link to donate a tad of cash to help fund The Trauma Project. Heidi is an experienced clinician and understands the necessity of providing truly excellent mental health care to those who can least afford it, and everything about the Trauma Project is free to all. So, donations here at this link go directly and exclusively to fund the overhead and upkeep of The Trauma Project, and I will write and sign a receipt for your tax purposes and also express exactly where your donation went — was it printing costs, or stamps for mail-outs, was it to pay for the meeting space, the sketchbooks/journals we use in our workshops, was it for refreshment in the workshops — I’ll let you know. That’s Heidi’s promise, your money goes exactly where I say it goes. Thank You!

Sailin’ On The River of Grace

I made this dog-story art-song video to represent that living creatures, including people, can only thrive when they have environments to live in that are permanent, safe, secure, predictable and nourishing as well as in their control. This is also a segway to a mural I am starting that represents some insights around the experience of homelessness that the typical stereotypes don’t capture. I’ll be posting the progress of that mural, with photos, and there will be a charitable auction for ownership of it when it is completed. Thank you for your time, your energy, and motivation to upgrade our city neighbors who do not have secure, safe, predictable homes in which to grow and thrive as persons. And their dogs.