Messages By: willowtree07

Aww, shucks! Your gonna give me a huge ego in a minute here, lol. 

I try to be understanding and respectful of everyone's right to have their own opinions, though goodness knows its hard sometimes. I also try not to let myself ever get too big headed, because I am first and foremost a flawed human being.  I have compassion,empathy, kindness, and a great sense of humor but I'm also faulty in many of my personal choices. I know all too well the depths of addiction and though I am more freely acknowledging I have some addictions I'm still struggling with recieving help.

Perhaps that makes it easier now for me to be understanding and patient with others who are at my same stage. I sadly didn't always use to be this way. I was very pig-headed and unwilling to see things through their eyes. I would say "why don't they just stop" ect. sigh, its so easy when we point fingers at others. Not so easy when we get the magnifiying glass out and truely look at our own lives. 

That understanding about my own past is helping me to be kinder when I look at others who are still at the fingerpointing stage. Life is just a many forked path that has multiple different ways of arriving at the same place. Some of the paths are twisted, shaded , and double back on themselves many times before straightening out and heading in the final direction. Some are short and straight from point a to b. It doesn't matter what path we are on or what fork in the road we chose, at some point (given a full lifetime) we all get there. Some finally reach that true understanding level at the very last moments others are more fortunete and get it much sooner. I think I'm still struggling, maybe my path is still a little overgrown and bit hard to see but at least there is a beacon at the end that continues to shine for me.

Ohhh, sometimes I get all deep and stuff, lol! I think I'll copy this to my online diary.  :)

I don't believe I've written to you yet, though I've seen many of your messages. I just wanted to say that the user who wrote to you seemed to be trying to understand why you write in all caps letters (in effect chat-style shouting).  I don't think that they were trying to be mean to you, though since I don't know them personally that could be the case.

I've noticed in many of your messages you are very angry and vocal about the abuse your husband has caused to you. I know that it must be a very difficult thing to have to live with now. Through no fault of yours, you are now stuck having a life long std. This was a horrible thing that your husband did, and not only hurt your physically but also emotionally. The anger you have towards the prostitute and your husband is very understandable. However, the user who wrote to you is not your husband or the hooker. Being angry at the entire world doesn't change the fact of what your husband did to you. 

Sometimes being angry all the time can cause you more emotional damage instead of healing. Its true that for now there is no cure for herpes, but I am more concerned with how you feel inside. The pain that you carry everyday in your heart is obviously very deep and overwhelming at times. Is there a counselor or a trusted friend whom you can talk out your feelings with? Though talking can't change the past, it can help with inner healing. It can help you figure out a course of action to ease your devistating pain. Revenge and thinking about revenge just brings up all the pain over and over, becoming an obsession. Just living everyday with that pain must be very hard for you and I can't possibly begin to tell you how very sorry I am that you were victimized in such a horribly devistating way.

You have a right to be upset, angry, depressed, overwhelmed, and/or worried. You do not have the right to make everyone else feel that way, or you would be passing on that abuse to others. You are a stronger and better person then that. I believe that with a great deal of time and very good friends that you trust to speak about this with, you can be healed of your inner pain. You can learn to love and trust again. I am not a professional, I am not a deep personal friend, I am just a normal person who is reaching out with the spirit of kindness and compassion to let you know that you are worth the time and effort, you are worth it!!  Invest the time in yourself that you are currently investing in obsessing over the others and you will find a much richer reward.

Know that my intentions were not to offend, but rather to be helpful if  at all possible because I see in you a person in deep pain that needs validation and acknowledgement rather then arguements or chat-fights.

Sincerly yours,

Willowtree07

Thank you.

I know sometimes it can be so difficult to not be judgemental or arguementative when we see someone we know is going down a wrong path. I struggle with it alot, having a friend who is in a similar situation as that other user.

 I know that my yelling at her to leave him, isn't going to get her to do what I want. All I can do is be there when she calls or comes over in tears, give her as much empathy as possible and bite my tongue alot.  I have on more then one occasion offered to allow her to move in with me as I have spare rooms in my home, I've told her I would help with childcare, I have done everything I can think of to give her an escape route. But until (and if)  she is ever ready to make that choice, all I can do is be available and  to be as good a friend as I would want to have if I was in her place.

What is really sad about many similiar situations, is that alot of people don't feel they have anyone to turn to or that they have no place to go. They may feel that people will judge them or talk down to them as if they were foolish people who were just asking to be in an abusive situation, instead of being kind and considerate and understanding. We ALL make mistakes, we all do foolish things, we all have issues that keep us in situations that other wouldn't understand, we will all do something that others with perfect 20/20 hindsight will say was reckless,stupid or just plain wrong ect. Its up to each and every person to make the choice to put themselves in the other persons place, to think "how would I feel if I was living this life?" 

Goodness sakes, compassion doesn't mean we have to give everyone a free license to behave however they want and to continue making the same mistakes while moaning about the way everyone is out to make their lives miserable.

However, it certainly helps make the world a slightly better place if we all stop yelling and start listening with our hearts and minds. Listen to the root cause, the source of their pain, not look at the end result with unforgiving hardened hearts. Its a very weary,long and windy path to having inner peace, its hard to put aside our life long prejudices and judgements and to think beyond ourselves. I have moments when I'm the nicest most mature person you ever met, willing and able to be understanding  about even the worst people/situations, and then there are days when I am so blinded by my own pain and anger that I lash out at anyone I think is attacking me...even when they aren't. Sigh! Give me another 20 years and I might be better but all any of us can do is try, try, sigh and then try again.  :)

Thanks again so much for your kind comment, hope I didn't ramble on too much. 

Willowtree07

I too haven't seen the show, though I might have caught one or two of the series earlier on. Its hard to remeber all the different shows.  Anyway, just wanting to also express my hope for a new beginning and that Alex is able to be emotionally better cared for when she returns home.

Its so vital that our young people recieve love and firm parenting at this stage in their development. They are getting ready to break their old patterns of childhood and establish who they will be as adults. Its already a horribly confusing and frustrating time, caught between child and adult. Hormones flare up, emotions are up one moment and crashing hard the next, with all that to contend with even as a "normal" teen, having the toxic home enviroment makes it that much harder for her to express herself as she matures and grows into a young adult.

I know what its like to turn to older men for comfort, when I was 14 I too used them as an escape from a saddening home situation. I wish now that I could go back to that age and knock myself up side the head, or at least have had someone who cared enough to stop me from self destructing like that. The worse part, was that no one knew that I was doing this, they never spent enough time talking with me to find out why I was always so depressed, and running away. I could have ended up with a VD or pregnant or dead. I was so emotionally destroyed thinking that I wasn't worth the time for one of my parents to invest in getting to the truth, for them to sit down and talk with me, find out what was wrong in my life. They just shoved me out the door off to a therapist who prescribed anti-depressants, when I would have much rather had my mom care and talk to me like a human being rather then a problem.

 It has been a long long time and alot of introspective thinking to get over that time in my life. Its scarred me, changed me, and stunted my emotional growth for awhile. But I will not let that time period (or any of the other bad ones) define who I am as an adult.

It would be incredibly easy for me to blame my mother, however, as adults we talked about her childhood and upbringing and it has helped me to be more understanding. Fifteen years later now, I know that she wasn't nurtured and her family never spoke about emotional issues. Her mother never hugged her or ever told her that she loved her. And the emotional distancing goes back further, my grandmother's mom died in childbirth and her father remarried very quickly to a very emotionally distant woman. My grandmother was only five when she lost her mother, so she grew up in a home with no love from her step mother (who considered her a burden) and a father who was just happy to have another woman feed and cloth his children. At some point, the chain of emotional neglect has to be stopped or if I ever have children this will be the legacy I pass on to them.

Ok, I've gone off on a tangent here. However, I just once more want to express my hope and prayers for the well being of Alex and all of her family.

Thank you so much for this kind message back to me. I have been attempting to find some free time to weigh in on some of the new shows and topics these last few days, however, my cable (internet and tv!) was out and I missed out on at least one really good one.

And I agree, the only way that we can truely mature and grow as part of the human race is to look at all sides of the arguements. Dismissing someone's deepest personal beliefs and tromping all over them verbally has never gotten me anywhere in life. Sure if felt good for a second to really lay into someone(feel all high and mighty), but then I had to realise rewarding abuse with more verbal abuse only leads to two(or more) people hurting.  No one wins in that kind of situation.

The best part of writing on message boards, is that we can reread what we have just written. If we think about how others will view it and we find that changing a few words or sentences will even it out....just a few backspaces and the delete button makes it all better. Sadly, in a give and take face to face we aren't able to do that. Anything and everything we say is now out there forever, wether it hurts the other person or just yourself. That is one of the hardest parts of my daily struggle to improve, learning to keep my mouth from saying what I know I would never write down. Its becoming a way to benchmark myself a little. I think a moment and say, would I want this written down for all eternity? Was my intention to help or hurt by saying that?

Would I be able to read this again in 2 weeks and still think it was the right thing to do and say?

And just incase I haven't said it before I want to thank you too, you always have an interesting and unique view. I look forward to reading your messages in the future on this board and others.

I agree.

I was molested by two different family members when I was a small child. I was lied to after I left the family and was adopted by new parents. My former family told my new family a few years later that the molesters had passed away(one did). They were both rather old, so this was easy to believe but denied me my right to confront them about their abuse as well as attempt prosecution.  A few years later I received a christmas letter from my former mother, and she was talking about how she had divorced and moved in with her family in wyoming. She had a young daughter and she was living with this man again! I could not believe that, first of all, he was still alive and second...that knowing he had molested me for years and confessed to it, she would bring another girl into his life that was the same age!

Now many more years later as an adult, if I had recieved this information now instead of back then I would hire a private detective to track down the new address (since she didn't include it in the christmas letter) and I would have pressed charges or done something  to get that girl away from a mother who obviously was endangering her by moving in with a pedaphile. Family or no family, NO ONE has the right to molest children. NO ONE who has ever molested a child should ever ever ever be allowed back around children and most especially a molester should never be allowed around their young victims again. 

The fact that the grandmother (from  the show) knew about the abuse and didn't report it, means that you can not trust this person to have the best intrests of the child. How can anyone even think of bringing either of these people back into their family and life?

I am going to watch the show today. I have always tried to keep from pre-judging people and I always attempt to see things from both sides with compassion and understanding. However, from what was written about this show...it seems rather straightforward. A family wants to allow a molester to come back into their lives. From what I understand, a child was abused, the abuser was arrested convicted and is now a registered sex offender. What possible reason could you have for wanting to have that person in your life? Compassion for this poor child is very easy, understanding the parents is going to be harder.

I think that molestation and abuse has been an epidemic since mankind first walked this earth and had standards/morals. I think the difference in the last twenty years or so has been that, now the victim isn't being punished (as much) for coming forward. People are now being made to be accountable for their crimes against children. 

There is still a huge way to go, sadly.

I honestly feel that repeat offenders should be castrated/hands cut off, and/or imprisoned for life!!!!!! The reason I say repeat offenders is because there is small chance that some offenders were wrongfully convicted, but the vast majority of real abusers are in prison or now free are guilty. That a year or even 10 years in prison could possibly be equal to pain/shame/hurt that a child will have to live with for the rest of their lives is just unimaginable. If you steal a child's normal life, you should not get a normal life either.

I thought I could watch this show that the 20+years that have gone since I was abused would have helped me cope better. I was instead filled with the rage, helplessness, anger, and shame just as if I was still 8 years old. It was like reliving the nightmare and to hear that "grandfather" attempt to justify it by saying the devil made me do it ect...just sickened me. People like that who claim to have found god make a bad name for all christians. This "man" is not now nor was he ever a man of god! He can not claim outside influence, he let his sick twisted fantasy out and hurt his granddaughter for all time. I am so very sorry that yet another little girl has to struggle with this for her entire life. 

On a completely vindicitve and heartfelt side note here...if I ever ever find this sicko near me or my nieces or any children, I will defend them without hesitation. This freak had better hope that he is NEVER identified. When society allows this abuse to happen and gives him a slap on the wrist,  we are all consenting that this abuse is "not that bad".  Whichever state you live in, write to your congressman, your presidential candidates, ect... let us make child sexual abuse a federal offense! It is a crime against this child, against what we all stand for as a nation, this is a crime that can not be allowed to be swept under the rug. ALL child molesters should be REQUIRED to where a t-shirt that identifies them at all times! This is not cruel or unusual punishment, this is to protect us all from perverts. To protect our children and our future. Do not let this crime  against a minor, be a minor  offense. It is a major problem, we need to speak up and out about this now!!!!!!!!!!