In The Beginning....

 

So to begin with my experiences with Melanie Tonia Evans - my most recent abuse experience, from the beginning...

I first began reading her blog in around maybe 2010? I was reading lots of blogs at the time, trying to make sense of what what happening with me and Steve, and how to put it right. IIRC, at the time, Natalie Lue's Baggage Reclaim blog was my favourite, and is still one of the best relationship sites on the internet.

Whereas Melanie's blog becomes more prominent in my memory in 2012, during a horrible year of court visists to prosecute Steve and hospitals, as Dad became more and more ill and then died. By 2013 I was very on board with her approach, but could not afford her Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Program (NARP). However, I would do craniosacral therapy on myself and follow her guidance.

In 2014 I had got the money together and bought the program. The healing modules in those days were all at least 2 hours long, and frankly I didn't have that much time available for myself, so I used them about once a week. Of course, I didn't read the instructions, and began with module 9.

It worked great! I would feel so much better each time I used the modules, and NARP became part of the way 2014 was the year of my real recovery and true freedom.

I found that although I came to the program to heal from Steve, I spent far more time shifting my childhood trauma. It had often been suggested to me that my childhood contained the reason for my ongoing depression and anxiety, and also made me vulnerable to predators, but I'd always discounted it - my childhood was completely normal!

It turns out I didn't recall most of it. I loved Christmas and holidays, and those are the parts of my childhood I mostly remember. But there were other memories I would mentally skip over. I don't even want to write about them now. Suffice it to say that my sisters remember even more, and have confirmed that my memories did happen.

I also remember sitting in a safeguarding training about how to recognise possible child abuse. I had to try very hard not to cry, because our childhood qualified as both neglectful and abusive. Or to be more precise - my mother did.

I know why she was the way she was. She had a horrible and traumatic childhood: her mother died when she was very young; she grew up during World War 2, in an area that was frequently bombed; and her father left them with his parents and moved in with another woman, going on to have a whole new family and rarely seeing her and her sister.

And she kept that part of it a secret until I discovered it in the 1990s, because that 'whole other family' only lived 10 minutes away from us.

So it was mostly about my mother that I spoke on the NARP Community Forum, which is the support forum for NARP.

When you read reviews of Melanie's work, you'll see lots of bollocks written about the Forum. It's actually a really great way for people to get support without being mired in victimhood, because it focusses on how to get out of the victim story, and into your body, where the trauma is. There's actually a public blog post about ECHO - the Empowered Code for Healthy Outreach that is used on the Forum, which fully describes why it works so well.

But every so often there would be a member who just wasn't interested in healing, and was only there to vent. Actually, this was common in the early days of people's membership, and the Forum moderators always took that into account. But if it was an ongoing pattern, then yes, a moderator would intervene, unapprove a post, and message the member.

They really were (and are) lenient - for example, until I became a moderator in 2015 or 16, I'd never read the Code of Conduct or ECHO. But I was never unapproved. Even if you were unapproved, all you had to do was edit the post in line with ECHO (and the mods would help as needed), and then your post would be reinstated.

So the people who were removed from the Forum really were hardcore objectionable. People who refused to abide by the CofC or ECHO, people who couldn't take constructive criticism, people too enmired in their pain to recognise help unless it came in a compliant and validating package.

The Forum really was (and is) great guidance and it achieved a huge number of successes. Melanie was striking by her absence though - the whole thing was down to her moderators, and it felt like a massive honour to be asked to be a part of the moderator team.

I gladly accepted, and this was my first step into the whole MTE vortex.