Claim Your Enso

For domestic violence survivors, there is a little Soho gallery with a big message: No Toxic!

Claim your enso! The zen circle of enlightenment, that is in each of us,  finding  our center and parameter free of toxic sabotage.

This little gallery represents safety and an abundance of creativity and freedom to find your own enso.

In your enso, you get to say who you are. What your abusers and toxic relations tell you about your identity and definition is rejected. You are safe from others’ claim to your identity.

Free yourself of the rigid thinking and expectations of narcissistic controllers.  You don’t belong in their box.

Abuse and fear once controlled us. If we did not follow the thin line of obedience to the person who held the keys to the Rules, we would lose our security. In this life and in the hereafter. That is the extortion that leads to bondage.

Reject the toxic. No more toxic.

You are expansive and creative by your nature: You are made from a creative universe, you have creativity within you.

Create your own circle. Let that circle morph and become fluid and adventurous.  Let that circle be your boundary of exclusion to others who would want to destroy it to gain personal power over you.

Express your enso. In your language, your mannerisms, what you bite your tongue over, what freedoms you allow others. Suspending judgement and ego for the greater freedoms of curiosity and sharing a timeline together.

No! Toxic is a campaign for survivors of domestic violence to find safe ways of rejecting their abusers, controllers, manipulators, and to find the personal liberation in expressing and sharing the Self in meaningful ways.

Domestic violence is the behavior that threatens your security in your own home and private life.  It doesn’t have to be a partner or spouse. It can be a religion, a biased community, a de-humanizing work experience that suffocates your freedom at home.

I know who the toxic individuals and organizations are on my list. Do you know yours?

Do you want support and encouragement and practical skills to free yourself and find your enso?

Comment, and write to me.

This little Soho gallery, and it’s enso showing, is for you.

Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.

traumacoach@gmail.com

How To Beat A Toxic Person (DIY)

 

From my life experience, I can identify five types of Toxic People:

 

1.  The Lalph Roaren Sociopath (presents perfectly to an audience but is twisted and violent in private);

2.  The Ivory Tower Religiost (stokes fires of discontent in the Day Room while preaching repentance to those down below);

3.  The Fee Collector (will do anything if it is a billable hour);

4. The Dufus (No facts, please, ADD Arrogant controller, but hey, just a milk and cookies kind of guy heh heh heh);

5.  The Us versus Them (social programs should be stopped so the marginalized can die early and procreate less into the next generation).

 

While each of these types have their own unique brand of manipulation, all of them use others to feed the malice of Ego.

 

Normal people have empathy. Empathy is the ability to see the perspective of another person’s experience.  In particular, the experience you have created for them. This is the pivotal motivator to change behavior.  In a normal person.

 

Normal people make mistakes. But normal people “get it” that the other person experiences something unusually negative from the action that was committed.

 

Toxic people do not “get it.” They have endless lists of rationalizations, justifications, excuses, scapegoating, and entitlements (“I had no choice, I was the only one who could save the situation for what is was..”  “The ends justify the means,”  “They’ll thank me later…”).

 

Toxic people get a pay-off of inflicting their will, their values, their agenda on others. A power rush, a good looking public persona, an income, status, God’s blessing, hero of the day awards, satiation of control needs.

 

Toxic people can be in our families of origin, our current relationships at home, at work, in the community.  We may at one time have been bamboozled into agreeing with their agenda, or buying into their perspectives, or worse, believing the false front they present with.

 

Toxic people will often use some sort of emotional extortion or fear tactics to gain compliance. They have the ability to create mini-cult cultures in the middle of normal life.

 

Toxic people usually have a scapegoat at hand to get their own behavior off the hook. (The job, the ex, the devil…the such and such group of people in society…Prophesy…the Other political party…being maligned, misunderstood, mistreated, even persecuted..God help us, someone’s got to save our credit rating…superstition, prejudices, “oh no not more of THEM.”)

 

Toxic people are usually so skilled at their manipulations that they get away with it. Over and over and over. They slip by accountability and consequences. They believe so stoutly that they are in the Right that no matter how much fact, evidence, Real Time information or education is presented, it won’t have an effect.  They are “Right.”  Again, zero empathy. Just control.

 

What to do?

 

1. Get away.

2. Create a place that they cannot touch, enter in, control or extort. Live in, and create from, that space.

3. Let natural consequences work their way.  Toxic people will be rejected by those who have high self-esteem. They will be left with only the loser hanger-oners, and those who are likewise toxic and using them for some alternative agenda.  The shallow dead-end of these relationships will eventually  be reached.

4.  Let go of your own ego need to control, justify, and redeem the sociopath.  Find your Higher Self and create a meaningful, expressive, generous life that will illuminate pathways for others without gain in return.  Toxic people can’t meddle in that kind of paradigm. They simply can’t understand that language.

5.  Associate with enlightened people with high self-esteem.

6.  Enjoy and celebrate and procreate the abundance of your garden without the presence of diseased souls.

7. Let them go into the hands of the Universe.

 

Happy karma,

 

Heidi

 

 

Conspiring Magic

In my studio, with hovering Muse, a story of magic is writ...

 

It’s true. A conspiracy is being hatched, right this very minute.  Quick, get out the thesaurus — the paper kind — and put a swig of Monty’s water bowl water into the coffee. It’s time.

 

My Muse, Monty Dog, has been consulted...

Time to write about the great conspiracy to commit magic.  An escape map is being drawn up this very minute. Cerebellum is fully charged, and we are on our way. Hold tight. Heidi D. Hansen c2012

Rescued

Rescue: Self, Trike, Pup.

This article is for those who have needed rescue from a sociopath.

In the painting, there sits a rusty trike at the top of the hill.

You can still see some of the red paint poking through the weeds that have grown up around it.

It was many years ago, that a little girl was abandonned by the side of a highway, her trike thrown out of the car after her, and told she would have to find her own way home, far away across hills and highways and tunnels.

She was firghtened. She was three.

But then, a carrot.  I will take you home, he said, if you promise not to tell anyone about today.

And it was clear what “today” meant. Sexual molestation, child porn, the mutilated puppy.

She took the carrot and never told.  For forty five  years she never told.

During those years she met the perfect mormon man with perfectly combed hair who prayed with her and said all the right things. How could she turn him down? So they married.

A week after the marriage the monster underneath the Ralph Lauren shirts appeared. He beat her, threatened her, and it got worse when the baby came because he was so jeaoulous of him getting my attention.

When she found the trophies of his affair neatly and proudly arranged in his bedside drawer, he threatened to kill her if she told.

They were good mormons, after all, the ideal temple couple. It would ruin his image if she told.

This time she didn’t wait for the carrot. She got herself and the baby out.

Many years later, she finds and cultivates the artist within her and begins to tell all the stories she can tell through paint and paper. Creativity. A  language beyond the grasp of sociopaths.

I am that little girl, that married lady, and I am the artist. And I conquered the lies, manipulations and abuses of the molester uncle and sociopath husband.

I conquered it through paint. Today I paint the trike and the pupply at the top of the hill, and I choose a lovely scottish highland background and a hopeful pink sky to replace the shattered psyche of the days when the sociopaths ruled. Victory.

From what I know, neither the molester uncle or sociopath husband have evolved in their lives. They have not grown past their darkness, they have not honed skills beyond the skills of torture, cheating and stealing and con-jobbing their way through.

They are still stuck in their prisons. The prisons they once tried to make me share.

I rescued myself from their prisons. I have evolved in my soul and creativity, my ability to love and give and inspire. I am expansive, while they still slink about in the dark, grabbing at what they want through trickery.

I conquered the sociopaths. I stayed alive in body and spirit.  I did not die in body nor in soul. I got home, I made a life, I found the artist, and today I am free to paint the trike any way I want.

Heidi D. Hansen is an artist and writer in Vancouver, Wa. To inquire about the art for sale you see on this blog, write traumacoach@gmail.com .

WELCOME TO MY STUDIO, My Summer Collection. Victory!

 

"Conspiracy"

Spring Fury

Break Free

Otter

 

Comfort the Children

 

Memories of Scotland

 

Plant A Garden

 

Getting Home For Supper

 

Lunch Break

 

This is my Summer 2012 collection, all originals, all available by writing Heidi D. Hansen at traumacoach@gmail.com. copyright2012, all rights reserved, reproduction not permissable.

Welcome To My Studio

My Summer Collection

The purpose of art is to create intimacy.

Intimacy without linear purpose. It is about edification and expansiveness from the experience itself. Nothing can be something.

Welcome to my studio. A place of color, of meditation, of yoga and travels through the imagination. Travels without destiny, but a great escape and conspiracy to break free.

You have to make it up as you go along.

This puts a burden on the viewer, they have a call to form a relationship with the art fearlessly and without bias in order to come away changed by that relationship.

This is the intimacy of change.

It could be the colors, the lines, the form and light and shadow. It could be the negative space. But when the friend of the art gets comfortable with art, and allows a relationship to form, there will be an effect.

I give the credit to my muse, Monty Dog.

And of course there must be a muse in the space. A fairy, a Tinkerbell, a sprite who dusts the room, canvas, paintbrush and mind of the artist with vision, and most of all, the ability to sit with the canvas when the time comes to slog through the mush.

Much of art is mush. But a good artist will share the mush, incorporate it into the work, consult the muse, and even when there is no linear goal or even payment at the end of the line, she pulls out all the stops.

Art is intimacy. Just like rubbing the ears of one’s muse. On the lap. As the brush strokes do their thing.

Heidi

To inquire about my summer 2012 collection, email at traumacoach@gmail.com .

My Entry to the Whole Planet Foundation’s India Conts.

Over the last few months I have blogged numerous articles about my art journey painting for the Women of Kerala.  Sift through the articles and find the ones that have the 8 paintings I did especialy for this fundraiser.

I have a sisterhood with the women of WPF, and share a common bond. I want to win this contest so I can take a big box of art supplies to India and paint for the woman who owns the tea shop there. I have adopted her and would love to paint for advertising and inventory so her business can have another way to bloom.

To sum up this painting collection, I will post them in a string here, although they can be found at the WPF FB page as well as the blog posts in this thread.

The giant wall tile mural being sold at Whole Foods, Mill Plain, tile by tile, to raise WPF microloans. "Song of the Field" was used for this! It is almost complete!

 

"Song of the Field"

 

"Bringing In the Harvest"

 

"A set of greeting cards for WPF"

 

"Tutu On The Beach"

 

 

"Kerala Boy"

 

"Mother and Son"

 

Since these paintings and the tile mural are still being sold at the store, I do not know how much money these paintings brought in for microloans.

 

It was a spiritual journey and an artistic feast to be able to do this for WPF, and my sisters across the sea. I hope to paint for them soon in person!

 

Heidi D. Hansen

traumacoach@gmail.com

FB: Heidishelpers

 

Soul Hike

"Break Free," available for sale

Her Great Escape has begun. She is breaking free.  Free of the grief, free of the loss, the guilt and regret, free of the self-destructive cycles. Free of self-disgust, and the prisons of anger and isolation.

 

It begins with a book by a woman who hikes the Pacific Coast Trail on her own journey to escape her grief, self-abuse, and loneliness.  She tests herself and makes it through the crucible and finds out just what she can do, what she can endure, and what she can walk out of.

Then, what she can become.

That is a true book. And an inspiration to follow, a path, a beacon in the dead of night.

CW knows she too, must break out on a journey that will test her limits and push to become more than what her circumstances tell her about herself.

She starts to develop a conspiracy with her dog, how they will make their big break. She makes a mental map, as most of her soul hike will be mental, because in reality, CW can’t leave her house.

So she must break free in her mind. She paints the picture on impulse, dedicated to doing it without fear of doing it wrong, making a goof, producing a terrible thing.  She paints it from a menagerie of memories of places she has been and ponds, nights, trails and stars she has experienced in person. Back in the day before the Big Panic.

CW doesn’t know what to call this painting. She has borrowed Vincent Van Gogh’s stars. They don’t belong to her. But she and Vincent have a shared experience of mental illness, and in a way she believes his paintings to be an effort to break free of it. And so they are kin and those stars make them siblings, for a brief few brush strokes.

She calls the painting “Break Free.” And then gets to work defining the next destination, her dog and she, on the map of her great conspiracy.

 

copyright2012heididhansen. To inquire about the art on this blog, write traumacoach@gmail.com.

Her Great Escape

Escape Kit

 

This is her big break. The great escape. A monumental conspiracy to break free of the prison of sadness and fear.  She gathers some items to make an escape kit — a map of where she will go, a computer to write on, a phone to locate resources, and a glass of Merlot and bowl of sloppy chili to get her going.

 

Stay tuned…At 48 her abusive ex husband won’t have any more control, her lost son will find a way, and she will be able to feel sand between her toes and smell air that has come across centuries and continents.

 

Just watch and see…Mrs. Kitchitt now breaks free.

installment 1 copyright 2012heididhansen

Rebel Beauty

Spring Fury, now for sale

 

I am a student of my dreams. But I have to live in the day.

 

My dreams can be of survival, a grim testing of my wits and tenacity against foes seen and unseen.  The invisible ones are the worst, they will eventually take form, and the dread of how and why is a prolonged sweaty fear.

 

So in the day I take care of my dream life, out where I can legitimately handle the plot line and prepare for contingencies.

 

A riot of color on the paper, a fresh purple field of iris, with shadows of red lily, a hint of daffodil.  I combat the shadows with thalo blue and thalo green hues and the shadows are conquered.  With my brush I am the storyteller.  I subdue and call forth at will.  In the daylight while I am vertical and have a voice I can hear. Where there is no need to scream.

 

This is what art can do.  I can alter a dream, yet learn from its insecurity and vulnerability.  This is Spring Fury.  Beauty with a bite. Flowerful rebellion against the dying of the light.

 

Heidi

To purchase or inquire, call (360) 771-3160 or email traumacoach@gmail.com.

Spring Fury

Just beginning field of iris

 

I have a lingering winter chill in my brain and on my spirit.  But with the sun coming up at 6:10 in the morning I cannot stay that way. My soul will die.

 

So, I have a recipe for attitude adjustment:  Paint a huge painting of spring fury — a field of new iris. Lots of purple, lots of motion. Lots of claiming the space.

 

Then I make a homemade tomato soup, because the wind is whipping around outside and then we get doused with barrels of hail.

 

1/2 gallon spring water, to boil.

Melt in 1 cube of cream cheese, 1 cube Monterey jack cheese, 2 tablespoons butter and 1/2 pint of half-and-half cream.

When it is melted and smooth, bring the heat to medium. Add pepper and garlic and basil.

Stir in 2 cans of 8 oz. organic tomato paste.

Add 8 sliced mushrooms, and three sprigs green onion, sliced.

 

Let sit for a couple hours on no heat.

 

Add salt if desired, but I don’t so I can taste the fresh vegetables.

 

Toast some sourdough bread when you are ready to eat.

 

While I do all this I listen to Sibelius, “Finlandia.”

 

I do a five-minute sequence of yoga stretches/breathing, and resume the field of iris. I tromp through it, kicking off the new rain which has appeared.  My feet are muddy, but there is purple on the horizon and my fury has broken free. I am at peace.