From Victim to Victory
I began this journey toward success in the least likely place. After all, most people who find success and teach others how to achieve it have, at the most, a small sad story to tell. Yet in a world where being a homeless single mother is still subject to chronic prejudice, victim is a word used for just about any incident that causes discomfort, and struggle is learning how to walk to the grocery store when your car is broken down, it’s hard to grasp how one person can manage to deal with a lifetime of struggle and still gain a place in the ranks of successful people.
I began my journey more like a child who is the victim of famine in a third world country. At eighteen months of age I was discovered lying in my crib. My bones protruded and my belly was swollen from starvation. My diaper had rotted for days and the bottle left for me was curdled. I had so little attention that I did not know how to walk, crawl or speak.
Six years in foster care brought thirty-two moves and the loss of my siblings, my only consistent source of love and connectedness, as well as physical, emotional and sexual abuse in foster homes. To make matters worse, my adoptive parents were not properly screened and my adoptive mother would fall victim to a cycle of psychological illness that would plunge my childhood into a life of fear, chaos and abuse.
My teen years were spent in a facility for teenagers after abuse forced me out of my home and I was placed in protective custody. There I struggled to maintain hope for life and was sheltered from a normal childhood where my peers were learning how to become independent. By the time I graduated high school I lacked the self-esteem to believe that I could graduate from college and had no ability to visualize my future past the age of 21.
I had a glimmering hope in my life so don’t feel sorry quite yet. This childhood could easily have sent me in a serious cycle of mental health and social issues that plague most young people who struggle with self-esteem problems. In fact, I nearly did when I attempted suicide at 18, just two months after graduating high school. I had been offered a place to stay with some friends but they were in a poverty situation themselves and, so, within two months I was on the street and struggling to figure out what alien world I had been thrust into.
That night, I sat in a hotel room and wondered what could possibly lie ahead of my. I took an entire bottle of medication for my asthma and waited. That night there were no angels, apparitions of God, or bright lights. There was just a sudden realization that I couldn’t let all the voices from the past win. I’d been told my entire life that I was worthless, useless and unwanted. My adoptive mother had told me that I was no more loveable than a dirty a**h**** every morning just to keep me in my place. Would I let that win?
What if I was meant to do more? After all, even though I was terrible at math I had scored extremely high in my SAT/ACT scores. Didn’t that count for something? What if I could do something more remarkable? What if I could become somebody, anybody, and be part of the world in spite of whether it wants me or not?
I called for help and survived my brush with death, though I would spend days in ICU and years would pass before I understood the magnitude of my decision that night. From that day on, I never went without what I needed again. Food, shelter, money… all of it found it’s way to me in one way or another. I was even handed $500 in a train station one night.
Life didn’t become magical by any means. I struggled. I had to learn how to get a job. Sounds ridiculous to an average person but I had always been told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. This institutionalization and control meant that I had a few years of learning that my peers had access to in their teenage years. I learned to ask questions, in spite of the responses I got from others and learned the art of living in a capitalistic society throughout my early twenties.
While I mastered surviving, I developed enough self respect to stay away from the drug, alcohol and sex culture that plagues young adults in their early years of independence. I just didn’t have time for it and couldn’t risk loosing any moment of learning to the damaging effects of these problematic issues. I shied away from men, kept my nose to the ground and taught myself what I could.
One struggle I maintained was that of relationships. It would be my greatest challenge. While I had faith in my ability to earn money thorough creativity, I didn’t have any healthy references to guide me, and I failed to understand how my past could have affected how I saw the world.
I gave up feeling sorry for myself somewhere between my nineteenth birthday and my twenty-first birthday. First, it didn’t make any difference in my situation. Feeling sorry for me didn’t earn friends, return my family to me, or make me successful. The fact was that I didn’t have the motivation to move forward when I was busy looking at the past and blaming others for my situation. No matter what happened, it was my choice to get out of the cycle I was in and no one could stop me. After all, I was now an adult and if the world wanted me to be a contributing member to society then I would need all my resources focused on making that happen.
As I neared the end of my twenties I had two small children, a nice apartment and a husband. I earned money through my art and writing and spent most of my days caring for my children. Both my children were born with disabilities related to their sensory system so I was busy handling the challenges of parenting when my husband became violent. My littlest son was two months old when we found ourselves in a women’s shelter and being sent to another state to find safety and shelter.
It was at that moment in my life, in the train station, that I realized that I had to change the cycle of relationships in my life. I needed to have respect for myself. After all, if I could master living as part of society then I could prevent further relationship issues in my life as well. I sought out counseling and studied practitioners who dealt with the Law of Attraction, NLP, Hypnosis and Psychology. I researched the human psyche and what I had learned from the Neurologists who dealt with my children. I closely studied a case study of a girl who had half her brain removed and learned, in as much detail as I was allowed, how she re-learned how to function again.
With this knowledge I was able to teach my son, who was born with Auditory Neuropathy and Cortical Visual Impairment, how to train his brain to create new and healthy pathways. He can now see and hear in a healthy range. I also learned how to map my own thought processes and re-structured much of my memories I had from my childhood.
No, it wasn’t a Vulcan mind-erasing trick. It was a long process of counteracting negative responses I had toward my environment, re-training my brain to think and automatically refer to healthy thought patterns about myself, others and the world; re-orienting my reactions to the trauma that had occurred and allowing myself to release negative emotional responses while retaining all the healthy lessons I’d learned.
Meditation and hypnotic commands allowed me to focus on the benefits the world had to offer and what I had to offer the world rather than thoughts of fear, doubt, anger and lack. As I did this I saw what could be said to be a magical transformation of my life. My attitude, demeanor, thought process and effort worked together to create a literary and business legacy that left me empowered and taught me how to empower others.
Today I am in my early thirties and have created three successful businesses, own a home of my own and am raising my children with the same principles I learned from my own journey to health and abundance. The cycle of abuse that had existed in my families long before my birth has been broken with the learning and education I have been able to provide for my children. I am thankful for them, for my world, and for all the prosperity in it because I know that no matter what you have been through, you can change the path of your future with a shift of thought and a change in attitude.
Many critics of the Law of Attraction mistake this process as some sort of magical theory that says if you think about a pile of money, it will land on your table. Perhaps this could be true for prophets and magicians of some other realm or who are enlightened enough to make it so, but most of us are just average people trying to make sense of the world we perceive.
Some critics say that it devalues what victims have been through and places the blame with them. This is true and not true. First, you attitude and response to trouble and crisis is your choice. What you choose to do with the events that create impacts in your life can either stop you in your tracks and take you down a terrible road of hardship or it can propel you forward with momentum. The founder of MADD didn’t let her pain stop her from making a positive difference in the world, The Dali Lama didn’t let the occupation of his country stop him from spreading the message of peace and love throughout the world, and being confined to a wheelchair didn’t stop Stephen Hawkins from becoming one of the most celebrated men in our world today.
Each victim, impoverished person, or guy down on his luck has a choice to make. Either you get up in the morning and change the thoughts that are running your life, create a plan of action and follow your healing with diligence, and start becoming part of the healthy society we could be living in or you participate in the fear, anger, accusations and destruction that has created the problems for you in the first place.
I don’t believe that I created the situation I was born in from my physical body in this lifetime but I haven’t visited the realms of timelessness and spirit with my brain, body or little window into time and space. I can’t say for sure what goes on in Spirit. I can only believe and have faith that there is a Universal Order out there and a God (or Source) that loves me. I know this because we are all born with an instinctive understanding of love and we all seek unity, happiness, hope and joy. Those are the attributes given to God and I celebrate that.
What I do know is that the lessons I learned as a small child created a mentality that kept me on the paths that caused more like things to continue in my life. I know that I faced a world that didn’t want me and saw those images return time and time again. Because that was all I knew, it was a process to learn about the other side of the world. Looking back on my own life, I realize that I probably missed out on all the people that would have cheered me on happily!
Victims choose to live in their trauma. Survivors choose to identify with their trauma and continue the cycle through their angry attitudes, often causing more trauma for themselves and others rather than releasing themselves or others from it. I know this because I was a graduate of a successful shelter in Denver, Colorado where I learned the cycle of abuse and that I didn’t have to let it control me. I learned to look for a way out instead of focusing on the cycle. The red flags were clear indicators I would use later in life to prevent a repeat of abuse in my own life.
However, I went through a transitional program I would end up leaving early because their focus was angry, resentful and aggressive. While they gave me shelter, they failed to see that I needed clear instructions and empowerment. The version of empowerment they taught was that I needed to figure it all out on my own without help. The problem with that? While I was being fed information about my victimization I was unable to understand what the next clear step was. They didn’t have it.
I ended up relying on my own search for answers and did the unthinkable for their program. I decided to forgive my abuser, understand my part in allowing the abuse in the first place, and took responsibility for my abusive situation 100%. No blame for him. Just compassion for the cycle he was stuck in. I turned to myself and changed what I had done to attract and create the situation and found my way out of it with the assistance of others who believed the way I did.
As a result, I released the cycle of anger I had been trapped in, allowed myself to trust men (a key component to my success) and removed abuse and fear from my life. This change created a healthy speaking relationship with my former spouse and my children have the advantage of experiencing healthy and happy interactions with both of us. I can only imagine, as I talk with other single moms who spent their time being angry and focusing on their abuse, what their lives would have become. I certainly wouldn’t have had the energy, self-esteem, motivation or time to create the amazing life I have now!
There are many opponents to the Law of Attraction. In fact, they have seemingly great arguments. However, most of them state their conclusions of how they believe you should achieve success and use the same principles taught by the men and women who teach the Law of Attraction today. It always comes down to you. Are you willing to create a goal? It’s your responsibility to create a plan. You must choose follow the plan or not. You must decide how much you can achieve and decide if you are going to have the conviction to achieve what you set out to do. The doors open because you are using the single most powerful law you can use.
I have experienced profound levels of change in all areas of my life. Even my children have created seeming miracles. One day they got together and decided they really wanted a certain toy. A week later the toys arrived in the mail. I opened the box and called out, “Who manifested these toys?”
Both boys bounded out of their bedroom with grins on their faces and said they did. They explained that they had decided which ones they wanted and tried out mom’s “Law thingy” with their Genie. Oddly, when I called the person who had sent the toys, the sender said they’d been sitting on the computer when they suddenly felt inspired to do it though they couldn’t really answer why. Since the boys never receive packages in the mail unless it’s their birthday, or Christmas, it was a clear actualization of their joyful use of belief.
Does it work for them all the time? No. There have been other strange and wonderful occurrences in life but, as my son says, “asking for things can be greedy. I needed a toy we both liked so I knew my Genie would give it to us. That made both of us happy and I really wanted to play those with him. The genie knows when you need it and when you don’t cause your heart knows already and it won’t send the message right unless you really, really mean it.”
So, expect miracles at times, plan and believe in yourself, and always trust that what you think, do and create is well within your power. You are a master of your own world and you can become anything, yes anything, you choose to be. Attraction and determination are friends… use them.
Tori Clark
July 10, 2008
Founder and Author of My Genie Loves Me!
Tori now lives in Seattle, WA with her two children and runs the My Genie Loves Me! Website. She is a public speaker, writer and artist. She home schools her children and advocates empowerment for victims of violence, children with disabilities and children of the foster care system. Her seminars and classes are available on her website www.mygenielovesme.org.
Tags: genie, language, magic, quantum, speech, survive, victim, victims
