The Kitchen table

 Hello All, Trying to pick up the pace of blogging. I'll tell you, this last year has been a whirl wind and my mind has been in seventeen different directions for most of it.   I feel like I'm finally honing in on an idea.  This blog is part of it.  Losing weight is part of it. Sharing and getting response is part of it.   Mostly I feel like I'm at a tipping point personally. Like I'm on the verge of understanding myself in a real way and that is going to unlock so many doors. This last year of reflection is great for me because, by nature, I am an introvert. I am an introvert with little time to be introverted.  I have had little time for introspection.  All the life lessons I've been learning have been left fallow.  I didn't have time to observe them, turn them over, dissect them.  I didn't have the mental energy to remove the emotion from the experience and create a paradigm where I weighed what I thought I knew with this new information.  New information

 Hey all! Hope things are good with you.   One of the first epiphanies was that how I allowed others to treat me was a direct reflection of how I viewed myself.  How I viewed myself was a direct reflection of how I was treated growing up.  I felt like a burden.  When I didn't feel like a burden I felt invisible...and the only time really bad things happened was when I wasn't invisible anymore.  Then I was punished.   I had no power over what was done to me and that created a feeling of powerlessness over almost every aspect of my life. That is called learned helplessness. While you have no power in childhood, You do in adulthood. When you are stuck in trauma it doesn't feel that way.   I had a very immediate experience with this idea in  high school.   In 9th grade, I was still in a bit of a haze.  My mom had been divorced from my stepfather for about three years and no doubt, I was still traumatized.  I had no plans.  I had no forward momentum.  I drew, road my bike and ke