I debated whether I should post about Michael Jackson's death. After he died, I immediately recalled the scandal in 1993 where he was accused of abuse and his interview with Oprah where he accused his father of abuse. I remembered the difficulty I had during this time.

A few days ago I wrote in my private journal the following:

Despite my dislike of his music except for Mowtown, Jackson is undeniably a giant of the industry. He was also, equally undeniably, very disturbed. That is no excuse for engaging in child abuse, whether he believed it was abuse or not. He frequently had little understanding of his actions with children. He was quoted as saying: "I have slept in a bed with many children... Why should that be worrying? What's the criminal? Who's Jack the Ripper in the room?" For reference see Why I Sleep with Little Boys, by Michael Jackson.

When looking back on his life, we perhaps should take into consideration that his life was radically different from almost every other. He performed professionally since the age of 9. He changed the face of music in the 80s. Like many child stars, he was ill-equipped to manage his life.

Just as I don't doubt any survivors I have met concerning their abuse, I cannot doubt what Jackson has said about his father. But, he is no survivor in my mind. Survivor is one of the few terms I use regularly and with pride. For me, it means that not only have you lived through atrocities, you have ended the cycle of abuse. Michael Jackson, by his own actions and statements, did not end that cycle. We may never know, but this is what ultimately may have ended his life.

I've been blogging now for a couple of months and I must say that I generally find it an excellent experience.

I find it much more manageable than message forums where there will be dozens or hundreds of posts per day (many which are a bit too terse and often off topic). That's a lot to keep up with. I do now follow about three dozen blogs (see my blogroll), but most people don't post every day. What I like about the blogs is that they read more like self-contained articles. I like the therapist blogs because they help me put everything into perspective. I also like the "survivor" blogs (sorry, I can't think of a better word) because they portray the healing journey in many different ways. Many post daily updates which are more like journals. Others make what I call "thinking posts" that give me the opportunity to consider viewpoints I may not have otherwise thought about. Many, like me, post a mix of both.

For me, the community of bloggers I interact with online is like an excellent group therapy experience. But what makes it better than group therapy is that you can do it when you want to and when you are able. Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly disconnected from inside, I'll read some posts or write ahead some draft posts. When I'm feeling upset or triggered, I don't read. Like many other healing activities, this form of "group therapy" needs to be taken seriously. We all need to keep ourselves safe.

I have been particularly appreciative of the quality of comments I see on my blog and on the other blogs I frequent. There is a remarkable sense of respect and support for each other, and mostly none of us really do know each other. And when we disagree, it's done in an equally respectful manner.

So, thank you everyone for my "group therapy". I cherish you all and wish you all peace and healing.

In response to an earlier post, someone commented that there are two stages of therapy. The first is recounting facts like a newspaper reporter and the second is experiencing feelings and emotions. We commonly refer to this as intellectual knowing versus emotional knowing or awareness.

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I don't think that represents the stages of therapy, rather the stages of healing.

If we were to look at the stages of therapy, I would suggest another way of looking at this. The first stage could be therapy as life support and the second stage could be therapy as healing.

When I was first in treatment, looking back many years ago, I can only categorize it as life support. I am sure I made some significant progress, but at the time everything was about life and death. I remember my longtime therapist saying at one point back then that "there's always the elephant in the room." I was so angry with him for saying that, thinking there was no way I could possibly heal with these life-threatening challenges which never seemed to disappear.

But they did abate. Fellow blogger Kate is posting Survivor Aftereffects Lists and I'm struck by how much I identify with each of them. But, I identify in a different way now than in the past. I don't feel so much that I've solved all of them completely, but rather that I've addressed all of them and made changes so that they are not such a big problem now.

Everything years ago was experienced in the extreme. The eating disorders, for example, weren't the mild secret they had been for my whole life. They were life threatening. I had almost no ability to regulate my emotions and I was constantly in a state of suicide and acted out regularly, sometimes quite seriously.

I remember often wondering what the point of it all was back then. Why would so many people try to help me? I thought I was a definite lost cause. I couldn't begin to imagine having any reasonable life. But, the "life support" I was receiving actually allowed me to get to a place of healing.

The progress I made back then led to hope. As Kate posted, to have hope requires us to make progress and then based on that progress we can see for ourselves a better future. Not everyone has hope. I am lucky to have found it.

Even though I don't often deal with the life and death issues of long ago, my therapy is in many ways much harder now. I feel there's so much to keep track of and be aware of. I have to recognize triggers and figure out ways to deal with them. I have to learn to regulate difficult emotions. I have to soothe parts of me (but first I need to acknowledge and respect them). This seems hugely complicated to me. But this is what healing is all about. This is the hard work. This is what makes us courageous.

I tend not to use that word when talking about myself. But as I look back and look forward, I cannot imagine a better one.

Have you ever wanted to just take your head off and hurl it over the edge of a rooftop? Well, artist Nina Levy thought of doing just that.

One of my favorite "quirky" places to visit is the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. Levy's sculpture, called "Headlong" is quite imposing at 7 feet tall. Levy challenges us to ask whether "certain additions or subtractions to the human body might make metaphorical, or even practical, sense."

I love this sculpture because sometimes I just need to laugh at what I go through. If I could, I would have this piece sitting on my front lawn.

I was once told by my former therapist, in response to my telling him about my achieving a state of consciousness or enlightenment, that he wasn't surprised because my "whole life is about experiencing extremes."

As I gain more awareness and communication and collaboration on the inside, I find these extremes to be more difficult to handle.

The one area which is most difficult is sleep.

I'm struck by how disordered and variable sleep is for me. I can go days of sleeping all the time on one extreme and days forced staying up on the other. And I can also be somewhere in the middle, which is perhaps a more normal way of sleeping.

When there is forced staying awake, it's usually because there's a sense of internal panic that I need to protect against. Becoming slightly manic avoids the inevitable. When I do get to bed on those nights, it usually ends up being a twisted form of hell. There's almost a direct window into the terror felt by parts of me. I know that to be the case, but I cannot really write about it now because I don't have the experience of it. It's more like I'm reporting on what happens. I've talked before about intellectual knowing versus emotional knowing. On these nights, the activity level of my system is very high.

Then there's the opposite extreme. I can sleep for days on end. I think mostly my system activity is very low and I don't generally have any sense of what's going on inside. I'm usually in some form of depression and disconnected.

I don't live in these extremes all the time. I often do get to experience a middle ground. I find that practicing good sleep hygiene helps. Now that baseball season is here, my children are about to end school for the summer, and it gets dark later, I find myself up late and find it difficult to practice good sleep routines. But for me, I find it best to attempt to de-stimulate at night. I often try to go to bed with the kids at 9. Kids have elaborate bedtime routines. When I become involved in theirs, it helps me.

Medication has mixed results. I tend to not take medication at all if I can help it. But on the nights which become hell, I eventually load up on benzodiazepines very late to stop the crisis. This often leaves me snowed the next morning.

I self assess at night. If I go to bed with the kids, read, listen to music, draw a little, write a little, and still can tell that the system is too activated to sleep or there's a growing panic inside, I'll take some medication. What I take changes depending on the circumstances. I had a real difficult time withdrawing from benzodiazepines last summer, so I don't take them regularly. But I do find they work most quickly and effectively. I have trazodone, chloral hydrate, lunesta, risperdal, and klonopin. They all work to various degrees, but it's hard to tell exactly how because the ground rules are always changing. Even still, medication is not a perfect, or even a good, solution.

I just started a sleep log. Not only am I keeping track of how many hours I sleep, but I'm also writing down where I'm at before sleep, what I've done from my hygiene routine, and what I take for medication and why.

I posted this to start a discussion about what works for you with respect to sleep.

I've talked before about dreams and nightmares (see "Dreams" category), including in the last post. I wanted to bring up a connection I made just tonight.

First, I repost from the comments of the prior post the broad brush of my dream tonight:

As I've said before, I don't spend much time interpreting every detail of my dream, searching for hidden meanings. It's much easier now to get the take home message from them because they all seem to clear.

I mostly don't remember much at all about my dreams or nightmares when I wake. I could have easily turned over and went back to sleep and this morning I would probably have had only a sense that I dreamed but would not have known much more than that. But I find that when I sit up for a while and breathe a little, the memory of the dreams surface. It's not exactly effort. I cannot really think myself into remembering. It's more of an internal acceptance and listening that allows it to happen.

I suddenly realized that the manner in which I remember my dreams upon waking is almost identical to how I remember therapy upon leaving. This was shocking to me. This tells me that in therapy, I clearly am often in some other state of consciousness.

But it also tells me that I have the ability to communicate inside. This is comforting.

In tomorrow's post, I'll write about disordered sleep and sleep hygiene.

I get disturbed by most dreams and nightmares. But I seem to always learn something from them. Recently I had a nightmare, that I'll share with you all.

For the most part, the nightmare was about protecting my two children. But I largely think they are metaphors for me as a whole. Just like the other dream was a metaphor for me (the first with the data is protecting the integrity of what I hold and am learning about my brain; the second was protecting the little princess which I think was my sanity which was later revealed to be about protecting many more than just her which represented all inside and, maybe, outside).

This dream had McLean Hospital in it, the place I go to for help. If you've ever seen the movie "Girl Interrupted", you will know that the hospital is connected by a series of underground tunnels. Sometimes these tunnels can be a little bit freakish. This nightmare largely took place in the tunnels. I don't think in the beginning of the dream the kids were with me, but towards the end, it became about protecting my girls (or at least that was what I understood). These dreams are all in the Stephen King class now. Does this mean I'm getting to be sick?

There were many parts of the dream and one part had my wife and I scuba diving; but it wasn't really safe. Then my oldest daughter came to join us another time. There were things like that; doing things connected to the McLean grounds (I don't know where you would scuba at McLean), but about both sharing experiences and protecting.

Then there was a large and old lobby and I took the kids out of that building into the tunnels. The goal was to remove them before the monsters came. The monsters were horrible. As we left the building, we saw a few of my daughters' friends sitting separately and wrapped in blankets. One of them, she's a little arrogant, like a certain part of me, made some snide comment to me, and I reprimanded her and told her I was going to tell her mother. She recoiled.

Once in the tunnels, it was just like being in a horror movie. And now that I write this, I remember having another dream like this several months ago where there was a pool at my work and then priests.

But then it got many orders of magnitude more scary than anything before. Suddenly I was planning some kind of party near a pool (again a water theme). It was like a field day for kids. I was planning fun activities, but I was apparently oblivious to (or really knew but didn't say anything) the fact that these horrific monsters were going to show up.

I think this is a metaphor for there being a parts way of dealing with life. How could I possibly plan a summer party for kids, knowing they would be all killed by the monsters? Was this what my life was like as a kid? Would I plan to go to church "knowing" I would be attacked? Then maybe it really wasn't a surprise like I always said it was. Well, to me it was a surprise because I didn't have to experience anything really, and there was not much that I needed to be aware of. So, like the body pain I often experience, the experiences got handled by parts, which were and are largely all kids.

It was as if some parallel reality was going on. Because while one part of me was oblivious, some other part of me was preparing in a major and frenetic way to protect the kids at the party. The steps to the pool were barricaded and I remember saying we need larger planks of wood to shield the steps. There were also large boulders used as barriers.

Sure enough right on schedule (and there was this sense that I had to hurry up), the huge and disgusting monsters came and slashed everyone in the pool and at the ice skating race. Nobody lived. There was blood everywhere. Then I woke up.

Do others have nightmares like this that seem to tell you exactly what's going on inside? If so, what do you make of them?

This is perhaps the first post that is sort of like a journal entry. It's kind of a gamble for me because it's a bit more revealing than I'm used to. Here goes.

Lately, I've been in I guess what you would call a "depressive rut". I have been almost completely non-functional most days, getting out of bed in the late morning and not really accomplishing much of anything during the day. I have done the bare minimum during the few hours I've been awake. Yet I've been to all of the kids' functions, I eventually mowed my lawn, and I did clean the house the other day (though I'm not sure my wife really noticed, but that's another story).

Even though I've been unable to get myself motivated most days, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I have been able to make the one hour commute into my office, getting there before 5AM and having "no trouble" being functional. I started realizing that these were huge swings in how functional I was and I didn't much like it. Ah, there is that new awareness again!

I began to wonder why I just didn't go into my office every day, thinking that I could be functional all the time. But, I don't think it works like that anymore. It probably used to at some point. Those days are long gone.

Backing up a bit, a little over a year ago, I decided to focus my efforts on healing and this didn't work out well with the old Monday through Friday get up at 6AM and be home by 7PM routine. This change in focus, which perhaps one could call a lifestyle change upon reaching 40, has been met with great success and I've healed in ways I could never have imagined. I've been able to get my work done through a combination of working from home and going into my office for meetings.

Well, this past Tuesday I didn't make it into my office. And I realized on Tuesday that the "work part" of me either isn't as committed to the work or isn't able to work like before. I guess this is one of the unintended consequences of healing and being more blended inside.

This brings me to last night. Last night was chaos. The chatter would not stop. This led to some screaming. I tossed and turned in bed until finally I asked the "work part" for help. Was up at 2AM. Had breakfast at International House of Pancakes at 3AM, and was at work at 4AM.

So I need to figure out how to handle this. I think if I can only motivate myself to start exercising and doing my yardwork during the days I'm home, I will be okay. But I don't know that I can do that. Why can't I take a little bit from this "work part" and have him keep me from being non-functional? This was the whole point of healing, right? So that I could be more blended inside and communicate and collaborate inside. I did learn to do that. But why isn't that happening now? Instead, things are becoming more separate. I'm becoming less aware. I'm writing in my private journal less because I don't have anything to write about.

My whole mission in healing has been to find ways to make my life more continuous and safe. The two are intertwined. I spend time in a library before my therapy appointments, I keep a very active private journal, and I pay attention as best I can. As I become more aware and heal, I am beginning to notice issues that just aren't right and I try to work at finding ways to address them.

One specific issue that's come up very recently is what happens after therapy. Up until a year or so ago, I would go to therapy and then often go back to work. That didn't work out so well all the time. Sometimes it became a safety issue.

Eventually I decided to go home after therapy and that helped quite a bit.

Lately I've realized that on my way home, almost every time, I disconnect from everything we've talked about in therapy and it becomes completely lost to me.

So, I addressed it by spending time after therapy to reflect and write.

I think, "Gee, this really sucks all this work I have to put in." But this is my life. I really have no choice.

Sure enough, as I spend the time and make the effort, I slowly begin to make connections and I start to know.

This is from my private journal:

I kind of understand that this "know" and "not know" phenomena is pretty much been with me forever and manifests itself in many areas of my life. But I'm more uncomfortable with it now. And now I want to address it head on.

Does this resonate with you? If so, how do you deal with it?

It's not that common, for me at least, to recognize a scene in nature which is a metaphor for my life. But this one was one such scene. This is a wall, over 200 years old, in historic Lincoln, Massachusetts, the town in which Paul Revere was captured by British soldiers in 1775.

I made this image in early May 2008, during a time in which I was making immense progress in understanding myself. The moss on the wall burns off when the warmer weather comes and the entire wall gets covered by overgrown weeds. But in early Spring, especially during wet weather, the wall comes alive.

This wall has been remarkably healing for me and it's an image I come back to time and time again. The wall has so many parts, some small, some large, but they each contribute to keeping the wall together and strong. This is how I've approached my own internal structure. This is when I realized that the goal is not to become one. The goal is not to be many either. The goal is to be both. This is when I realized what the saying "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" really means.

I'll be posting more photographs here and probably will be adding a gallery page. If you want access to my other images, drop me an email.

My answer: Of course it does. But, we are already special. Everyone is special. We are no more special than anyone else. And there are plenty of other things which make us special.

One of the worries I have when I think about and talk to others about recovery from a dissociative disorder and trauma is the special factor. I understand that there's always that natural tendency to want to be part of a group. To be special. Different. And I admit that I sometimes do get caught up in that myself. But when I take a step back, I know that the path of "I'm special because of my trauma and dissociation" is a dead end. It does not help us heal.

Intimately tied to the issue of being special is the language we often use. All of us sometimes get caught up in saying "we" and "co-consciousness" and "switch" and "integration" and "alter" and on and on. When absolutely necessary, I may use one of these terms. But I tend to avoid them. There's a simple reason for that. The language of dissociative disorders and their definitions present narrow views. These views tend to tie us into a particular way of thinking (and sometimes being) and ultimately hold us back.

All of us, I hope, embrace as our main goal to heal. For those of us who dissociate, it's undeniable that this ability was a main reason we survived. But we all end up eventually discovering that dissociation is severely limiting. The only way we heal is by broadening our awareness, often quite radically, from where it used to be.

It's rather easy to say "Personality A did this" or "Personality B was out" and people, particularly treaters, will know exactly what you mean. But that's usually said because of lack of awareness, or strict adherence to the dissociative language and paradigms. As we develop awareness–as we heal–we necessarily find ourselves at odds with these paradigms and with the goal of dissociation.

That's when we've reached a middle ground.

It's a bit harder to try to explain the middle ground. It takes a bit more effort to explain what is perhaps a less clear reality. While this is not always the case, I have come to believe that the dissociative barriers which demark personalities may be only consistently extreme at the beginning of our healing. I've known many survivors who have confirmed this view. Is there really a firm line that marks precisely where one personality ends and another begins? Is there really a distinction between co-communication and co-consciousness? At this point, we've outgrown the language, which is why I don't like it in the first place.

We heal when we begin to view ourselves as whole beings who are constantly changing. We heal when we take ownership and responsibility for our actions, even if we used to blame them on a personality. We heal when we view ourselves as a little less special and a little more like everyone else.

No question I've been under the weather lately. Depression? Perhaps. Mental exhaustion? Perhaps. Pure laziness? I thought of that too. I've slept most of the past four days, but seem to be able to rally when I absolutely have to. I guess that's a good sign.

An interesting thing happened last night. I had to take my daughters to the annual school picnic. Somehow I was able to get in the mood. I am a photography nut and take pictures for our local newspaper. This picnic is pretty much a required photographic event and those of you who are into photography, and I mean really into photography, know you cannot let an event like that go by undocumented! Well, I actually planned on not taking my cameras, but in the end the photographer in me came through. As usual, I probably looked like a complete dork with two cameras around my neck, one with a big telephoto lens and the other with a wide to normal lens.

Photographing people, especially children, is hard to do when you are dissociated. I guess you can do it, but the pictures will come out looking like you are dissociated. Making a photograph at an event with people requires a fair bit of thinking and internal connection. You have to first get the right expression from your subject, then make sure you've framed the image correctly, and finally get the right exposure. The first two are the hardest if you are not connected inside and outside, but often are the most overlooked.

Getting the right expression means there usually needs to be some interaction with people. Kids are a fair bit easier than older people. Kids love being in the newspaper. Older people, well, not so much sometimes. It's the photographer's job to make the people feel comfortable about having their picture taken, and sometimes, you need to direct them a little bit, especially if you are going for a cover image. If you are a news photographer, you are always looking for that perfect cover image. For kids, this requires getting down to their level and, at the same time, getting permission of their parents. Getting down to the kid's level is something most of us are good at, so this helps a great deal. And, yes, this is a rare quality because I look at most of the parents around me and see that almost nobody gets down to even their own kids' level.

Framing the image means that you have to pay attention to everything in the frame of the camera. For news photography, clean images are an absolute priority. This means you cannot have ugly or cluttered backgrounds. Good photographers can take a boring subject and make it quite exciting by positioning themselves and their camera in exactly the right spot and using the best lens for the job. There are a million ways to frame any given image. You have to be connected internally in order to pay attention to that detail.

So, I'm walking around last night at this event with hundreds of kids and most of their parents and I knew I wasn't fully connected. I knew my photography wasn't at its best. One of the reasons I knew that was that I didn't take that many images during the two plus hours I was there. I took a bit under 200, when I would normally take two to three times that amount. But, even still, I did a decent job. I got home, processed the images, uploaded them for the paper, and went to bed. And I got up at 4AM to go to my office this morning. So, I haven't been able to get up for four straight days and then this morning I get up and out at the crack of dawn. I wondered if it had something to do with photography. It probably was an internal boost that I was able to rally yesterday and make some good images.

For me, photography has been a healing force. To be sure, there are times when I absolutely cannot do it and I will cancel a photo shoot. But, by and large, photography has been an activity I find to be intensely grounding. While I do interact with people a great deal, there's a certain safety to be found behind the lens. The trick, though, with people photography is that you have to learn to alternate between the safety of being behind the lens and the risk of interacting with your subjects to make your images pop.

I recommend photography to others in the hopes it can be grounding for you too.

Note that I am not posting links to my photography websites, but if you email me and I know you, I will send them to you.

I've shared a somewhat similar drawings emphasizing a sense of internal harmony and safety. I wrote about the role of drawing in healing and the need for finding balance. I certainly don't always have a sense of an internal protected core, but I am finding that I am learning how to achieve it and how to maintain it. Communication and collaboration are the keys.

Related Posts:

• Radiating Parts (May 2009)
• Safety (April 2009)

I don't know a huge amount about Colin Ross. But I do know he's on the front lines of dissociative and dissociative identity disorder (DID) "research". I have read much of the research out there as I am sure many of you do too, including by Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart. I read the ISST&D Journal.

A friend of mine forwarded this to me and, well, I was kind of shocked. This video shows Dr. Colin Ross claiming he's invented a device which captures his eyebeams.

I don't think he's really "working" on this, as such. I hope this is just a fascination of his. He's obviously not thought much of the ramifications. He is a doctor and, as such, lives in a scientific world and a special community. If I did something like this, I would probably lose my career, or be severely ridiculed, which he is. I know Ross has done many good things, but this action signifies that he doesn't think things through because all this is is simply fodder for those who are against him. If he were my patient, I would say he was being reckless.

For me I take this personally, because I do believe in all forms of dissociation and DID and I do believe in RA/SRA. But many others do not. And since he is a leading voice for DID and RA/SRA, then he is hurting the cause greatly. He has a certain responsibility, and he's not holding up his end. He should let vision/neuroscience people worry about how vision works. Vision does not work the way he says it does. It simply doesn't.

Until now, I have focused this blog on aspects of healing. I have not talked at all about my personal history or made any political statements.

Recent news has compelled me to stray a bit from that approach.

On May 20, 2009, Ireland's Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse released a long awaited 2600 page report on the abuse of thousands of children at the hands of priests and nuns of the Catholic Church. Not at all unlike the scandal in the United States, which began in Boston, it was made known that church leaders knew what was going on. These church leaders' main goal was to protect their institution, and they were enabled by the Irish government who looked the other way amid a "culture of self-servicing secrecy." In Ireland, the government bears major responsibility because these children were generally outcasts, placed in a network of 250 Irish Catholic care institutions from the 1930s to the 1990s.

In Boston, the beginnings of the scandal began in 1992 when Fr. James Porter was prosecuted for abusing some 100 boys. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Less than a year later, the Archdiocese of Boston began to enact new policies to address the growing revelations of abuse.

At the time, I had been in the midst of my own personal crisis, healing from abuse by a priest which extended over a period of many years. I came forward during this time. For me, though, I had as much invested in keeping the abuse a secret as the church did. Despite the new policies, the main goal of the church was to prevent a scandal. This culture of secrecy, in my experience, permeated every aspect of the church and for the entire history of the church and society at the time. In my case, the church secretary knew, other priests knew (because I told them in an effort to get help), and eventually even my parents knew (which ultimately ended the abuse). But I was ashamed by what happened, afraid of retaliation, and felt I bore some responsibility. So, I couldn't imagine coming forward in the press or coming forward to the police. In my 1995 settlement with the church, I had to sign a document saying that I understood the church was admitting no wrongdoing. Looking back, that was a personal mistake.

I was able to eventually put my life back into some order. But, when the scandal erupted in Boston again in January 2002, the harsh reality of my past clashed with the present. I quickly fell apart, like I had a decade earlier, and embarked on a healing journey of proportions I had not previously envisioned. The task before me was immense and mine is but one of untold thousands of lives forever altered by abuse within the Catholic Church.

As a result of the scandal, the Archdiocese of Boston set up the Office of Pastoral Support and Outreach which is focused on supporting survivors. They have paid for my therapy for the past several years. In a March 11, 2009 press release on the steps the Archdiocese of Boston is taking to protect children, Cardinal O'Malley reaffirmed his commitment to supporting survivors. He revealed Pope Benedict's direction to Bishops: "It is your God-given responsibility as pastors to bind up the wounds caused by every breach of trust, to foster healing to promote reconciliation and to reach out with loving concern to those so seriously wronged." Cardinal O'Malley then wrote that this "directive could not have been clearer."

I believe in personal and institutional responsibility and appreciate I am in a somewhat unique position as a survivor. I know most survivors of family abuse and other forms of abuse (which in terms of numbers, dwarf those of the church abuse survivors) do not have the opportunity for this support. I don't take this lightly and feel I have a responsibility to heal.

It was only a couple of months ago that I asked for and received all the documents pertaining to my case; 180+ pages made public by the church in the course of government investigation. The records showed that my abuser denied almost everything I had come forward about, except sleeping with me and kissing me on the lips, which he said was normal affection.

I was struck by the fact that the church paid monthly stipends, medical care, and a group home for my abuser for nearly 10 years after the settlement, until he was defrocked by Rome in 2005. The Cardinal (which at the time was Bernard Law) wrote several supportive letters to him. In contrast, I spent a couple years embroiled in legal wrangling with church lawyers who disbelieved me and was given a legal disclaimer to sign prohibiting me from ever speaking publicly, along with a check for my troubles. I saw that check as a personal victory, despite having signed the document. I had won something, even though it was a settlement outside of court. I had gained some justice, however small.

This was not my goal, however. My goal, which I laid out very clearly to the lawyers when I originally came forward, was to stop my abuser from hurting anyone else ever again. I wanted to prosecute him and put him behind bars. But my case turned out to not be one where many victims came together. While I know there were other victims, which were confirmed by the records, I was the only one to come forward. I was advised that I didn't have a strong enough case to prosecute. This was not because my personal history was not sound enough, for it was, but because we didn't have the strength in numbers needed to secure a victory.

So, I have considered my victory incomplete. I take solace from the fact that it is my doing that my abuser is no longer a priest in the Catholic Church. But I regret that he was not criminally prosecuted and does not have a criminal background. He does not have to register as a sex offender. I have to live with the fact that I could not, in the end, completely protect other children.

I have since redefined what victory means to me. Victory now means healing. I know I cannot save the world, especially if I cannot save myself. The past year has been a period of remarkable growth and healing. I am well on my way to victory.