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TORN From the Inside Out & THE JOURNEY

 MEMOIRS In 1973,  a young woman, barely sixteen years old, and a zealous member of a cultist religious group, married a twenty-three year-o...

Showing posts with label trauma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trauma. Show all posts

Saturday, February 18, 2023

The NARCISSIST You Married Wore a Mask

 

Narcissists are everywhere, because they have always been everywhere, we just did not know them for what they truly were behind the masks-in the shadows lurking.

The secretive self of the typical narcissist is an unbridled ID without a fully developed EGO and an Warped Super-Ego; but most are very intelligent people who know how to hide in plain sight.

You can Marry a Narcissist and live with them for fifteen years before you understand the dark enigma. Fifteen years of wondering if you were 'crazy' because he, or SHE, will make you think that you have lost your mind. The take the truth and make it a lie, and the lie becomes truth. Gaslighting is their second language and they are fluent in it; if you say 'Blue' they swear you said 'Red', and will argue and deflect until you give in and swear you are becoming forgetful and absent minded; after all, there will be no peace unless they are right.

But there are the Good Days when this human in hiding is charming and sweet, loving and 'kind'; but can it really be so, after being cursed and degraded the day before? Or, is is that confounded Love Bombing you just heard about?

You lost yourself years ago, out of a duty to keep the peace and eliminate unnecessary strife, as you found yourself giving up and giving in more and more often. Eventually you wonder where you ended and they began, or even if there is a 'you' left. Everything you do is to please and keep the peace, to absolve, compromise, abstain, suppress and regress. You have stepped yourself all the way backwards as the world passes you by...but The Narcissist has Grown in power over the years  until they are drunk with stolen power-YOURS.

Then it happened-the light shone in and you began to see what was hiding in the dark behind the mask all along. The rollercoaster emotional journey of intense love and hate, happiness and cruelty, lies and deceit, took  its toll on you until one day your woke up to the fact that the Stranger your married was a Narcissist. 

Not just ANY type of Narcissist, but a fully developed Covert Narcissist- a genuine Snake in the Grass. And you thought you had married 'one of the good ones'. The joke was on you.

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Sara Niles age 10


 

The Butterfly Effect


The best art is produced from the driving force of the deepest passion. Pain creates passion, and passion creates art.  The butterfly effect dictates different outcomes for different choices. We all reach cross roads in life, sometimes daily, but always it results in choice. 

I chose to marry an abusive man when I was only sixteen years old. The reasons culminated in choices made by others, but the end result was I suffered greatly for many years, and I became wise in the ways  that only trauma teaches.

I will never be happy that I suffered, but I am thankful that I have suffered and overcome, because it is the reason I am who I am: The pain and the passion created the drive, that I would have never had in a perfect life. No one should ever suffer; but if we must suffer, make it count.

 

It is my mission to work relentlessly to fight against abuse and dysfunction, and the international, deadly pandemic of domestic violence and homicide.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

The Many Faces of Religion: excerpt from The Journey by Sara Niles



The Journey is a narrative memoir of the life of Sara Niles and her children after having fled abuse. Niles includes the context of world events and social issues within the narrative of their lives from 1987-2011; the following is an excerpt that demonstrates the power and influence of religion in individual lives:

Excerpt

Chapter 8

The Many Faces of Religion

Throughout history, every nation and village system in the world, has used religious gatherings to form social circles and networks among neighbors. I grew up in the southern United States, deep in the Bible Belt where country churches were the bulwarks of the communities. It did not matter what the local issue of the day was, church was where the meetings took place and the people gathered.

It takes a wise person to be able to judge situations from all sides,  and to see them multi-dimensionally, and to be able to do this perpetually: in fact perhaps it takes special genius to do so. At that time in our lives, I did not possess the genius necessary to judge where the boundaries that limited my children’s freedoms should be. I lacked the balance needed to use religion wisely.  Religion was a vital and powerful force, which can be as useful as it can be dangerous, if not used in a balanced way. Karl Marx once said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature… It is the opium of the people”, and though this famous saying has angered many a religious soul, it is a true statement nevertheless. Too much religion can indeed be like a drug of escape, for those who are trying to avoid the realities of a ‘dangerous’ world. Just as I found my way into religion as I perceived it at the time, I would find my way again. My children were simply my followers until they developed stronger wills of their own, and would then be free to chart their own paths in life.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

The Torn Trilogy By Sara Niles

Quote from Torn From the Inside Out

“For the next half decade, I lived on the ‘flower bed of Eden’, as Cousin Andrew called it.  The days were never long enough; perhaps that is why I hated to sleep.  Seasons came and went in a panorama of delight.  The record ice storm of the early 1960’s was a great memory to me as a small child, as I watched the storm through steam fogged windows, warm and snug, as the loud popping of snapping pine trees screamed with the howling winds. Nothing caused me to fear those years, because I felt perfectly safe, as I expected I always would”

From: The Journey
“When the dark night ended, a new day dawned for us when my children were still small, and the new day was a long as the long night had been, and in some ways, just as frightening”



“Love is one of the greatest human emotions and a powerful force in its own right, but even love cannot prevent some things from happening”


“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”


“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger

Quotes and Excerpts
From: Out of the Maelstrom

“He was dead, alright. The sight of death is an ugly and fearsome thing, I thought, as I absorbed the tragic sight in front of me. It was a man, ‘The man’ , was lying in the road with blackish- red blood pooled around his head, and as he lay face down with his feet in his own yard, while his head and shoulders were planted in the street, he gave the appearance of  a killed animal felled in its tracks by a hunter. 

Saturday, December 14, 2013

"Love is one of the greatest human emotions and a powerful force in its own right, but even love cannot prevent some things from happening”

“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”

“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger”

“Emotional breakings are delicate to repair and even harder to decipher. I was not smart enough, nor did I have the wisdom needed for such a job at that time”


“Ariel was the perfect emotional adapter when things went wrong, but she was not amenable to life when things went right. It seemed her coping mechanism was geared towards trouble”

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Interview with Sara Niles, Memoir Author

Question:
Sara Niles primarily writes nonfiction memoirs-Why is that?

I am on a mission to make a difference through The Torn Trilogy memoirs, which addresses family dysfunction, domestic violence, child abuse, mental illness and drug addiction issues, and the destructive effect it has upon human lives.

Most people read books for two reasons: to be entertained and to be informed.

 Many readers have been conditioned to view nonfiction writing as a medium that is purely informational and fiction writing as purely entertaining. The fact is, nonfiction can be both entertaining and it can pack a powerful informational message as well; as an example, the movie Titanic was filled with information about a historical event, but it was also highly entertaining; a fact that also holds true to literature, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was hailed as a masterpiece in nonfiction literature simply because Capote wrote a true story as though it was fiction.

I have lived an extraordinary life in which the odds were heavily stacked against both me and my children, placing our mere survival at risk countless times. The element of rising suspense that captivates audiences was an actual part of our lives, and the unusual twists and turns that keep you on the edge of your seat, was a normal part of our survival.  When the saying ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ was coined, it aptly applied to our lives and the multitudes of people who have lived similar lives.

 Torn From the Inside Out, The Journey and Out of the Maelstrom, each tells a story that is filled with both entertainment value and informational content. Each of the memoirs can provide whatever a reader is seeking: a good read, insight and information, and entertainment. Regardless of the reason for reading The Torn Trilogy, the reader will come away entertained and enlightened and in the process, the dark veil of family dysfunction will have been lifted a little higher with each reading.

What is the greatest joy of writing for you?

The empowerment of writing life-changing memoirs that offer enlightenment and insight is the greatest joy and is most rewarding for me.

Knowledge and insight is like a light in a dark tunnel, especially if that 'tunnel' is years of denial. I delight in providing insight through my writings that empowers and enables people to change their lives for the better. Most people do not realize that knowledge can help a person forty or fifty years after a traumatic event but shedding light on hidden secrets and enabling people to reexamine the way they saw themselves.
A large percentage of drug addicts and a disproportionate number of the mentally ill are troubled by a past that involved domestic violence or some form of abuse during their childhoods. Light needs to be shed of those faulty perceptions and attitudes.

My writing enables me to become a light bearer in a dark place.