child abuse « Heidi's Art Life

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!