Sara Niles's Blog: Sara Nile's Blog - Posts Tagged "mental-illness"

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Sometimes the reason for writing compels the author until the work is finished:

I was born naturally gifted with a talent for writing that was polished by traumatic life experiences which fueled the passion behind my writing.

Torn From the Inside Out was my first book; the writing of which began in 1995, eight years after being forced to flee for my life with five young children in 1987 when I was only twenty nine years old.

I wrote Torn From the Inside Out using the pseudonym Sara Niles, pouring out my deep-seated pain and anguish of having been a victim of domestic violence for almost fifteen years, along with my repressed fears and untold secrets; thus releasing the shame and guilt that comes with such an oppressed life and shedding it forever.

Much of my education was accrued l ‘hard way’ as my Uncle Robert used to say, for example, my own personal knowledge merged with empirical statistics reveals that domestic violence and family discord tend to follow victims throughout family generations, as Learned Behavior and negative images from childhood, are hard to shake free. It is because of my knowledge of such factors gained after having completed the writing of Torn From the Inside Out and subsequently obtaining education and training in the field of psychology and human behavior, that I realized the story had only begun. In order to properly address the complications of embodied in family dysfunction, two more books were needed in order to tell the ‘rest of the story’ as Paul Harvey (1918-2009) famously said.
The Torn Trilogy was completed in 2011, after almost sixteen years of struggle and strain toward the literary ‘finish line’, the crowning touch of my life’s work.

The Torn Trilogy is a twelve-hundred page mammoth work that includes Torn From the Inside Out, The Journey and Out of the Maelstrom. The Journey is the story of the children of ‘Torn’, as they fought to find their way in the world and Out of the Maelstrom is told from outside my own personal experience as I came in contact with ‘others’, such as the woman who was set aflame and wore the scars to prove it, the children whose animal-like behavior marked them as cases of ‘Reactive Attachment Disorder’ (RAD), as they exhibited the extreme symptoms of having lived in savage conditions with savage people. The third book of the Torn Trilogy broadens the perspective of the massive problem that arises when ‘man against man’ is the common theme within family bonds, as the selected individual accounts defy both morality and humanity. With the final book of the trilogy, speaking as the first hand narrator (Sara Niles), I emerged out of the maelstrom only to find a world of people still trapped within it, thus Out of the Maelstrom stands as a testament to not only the suffering inflicted upon man, but more importantly, the power of the human spirit to survive against all odds.

Sara Niles

I am Sara Niles. I spent ten years as a domestic violence counselor and Trainer, after my escape in 1987, and having obtained a post-secondary education. My work inside the front lines of domestic violence allowed me to come face to face with thousands of victims and victimizers. It was through this personal exposure that I realized how ingrained the stain of human dysfunction can become and how difficult it is to escape it. The generational impact of domestic abuse, dysfunction and violence not only affects individuals by warping the schema of children when their perceptions are most impressionable, but it spills into society via drug and substance addiction and deviant behavior that often ends in imprisonment.

I have always loved the art of great literature, and developed an affinity for the classics at a young age that has matured over the years like taste in fine wine. If had lived an ideal life, I would have written about ideal lives, but because I lived and survived an unconventional life filled with an undue amount of trauma and loss, my writings are filled with the passion and pain of traumatic experiences.

My drive to write about such a serious subject as domestic violence and family dysfunction is integral to my qualifications as a writer: A former victim of extreme domestic violence as a young woman; spent twelve years obtaining an academic education along with professional work experience. My extensive training in psychology, sociology, the behavioral sciences, as well as over a decade working in the fields of domestic violence, mental health and drug addiction counseling, enabled me to include the subtle dynamics of human motivation within my writings, embedded unobtrusively like a shadow and to write the final book of the Torn Trilogy from a humanistic, global perspective.


The Torn Trilogy

Love is one of the greatest human emotions and a powerful force in its own right, but even love cannot prevent some things from happening”

“Sometimes when you become so accustomed to loss, a new loss is only part of your usual ‘normal’”

“Our flight to freedom and safety was filled with a calm suppressed terror in the children and I, the type terror you have when you are used to living with danger”

“Emotional breaking'The Journeys are delicate to repair and even harder to decipher. I was not smart enough, nor did I have the wisdom needed for such a job at that time”

“Ariel was the perfect emotional adapter when things went wrong, but she was not amenable to life when things went right. It seemed her coping mechanism was geared towards trouble”

By Sara Niles (Pen Name)

Using narrative, case studies, and psychological summaries, The Face of Dysfunction examines the patterns and behaviors created by dysfunction.

I write to make a difference, therefore my writing is mission oriented and imbued with a deeper purpose because of my traumatic life experiences. I write primarily nonfiction that exemplifies mans inhumanity to man, focusing on the triumphant human spirit within us all.

The Effects of Dysfunction and Domestic Violence are both primary, and secondary in nature, and for many, last a lifetime.
The internal pain caused by childhood abuse, becomes externalized through the triple threats of mental illness, trauma issues, and damaging addictions. I call this triple effect the 'Three Headed Monster'.

Patterns and Dysfunction

I spent thousands of hours examining people's lives under the microscope of counseling and I continue to see repetitions of the same underlying themes in almost every family. Healthy families beget healthy families and sick families beget families with many of the same sick dysfunctions that they experienced as children. Young boys and girls whose family role models were womanizers or man-users usually womanize or abuse and dispose of men, those whose models drank, usually have a substance abuse problem and those who grew up with hurt, pain and abuse usually inflict it upon their families in the same measure, over fifty percent of the time, or they may invariably find a partner who inflicts pain upon them. There are a rare few who escape this repetitive cycle, even though they were raised in it, but they are the exception. Many will marry the negative image of their parent or their opposite in an attempt to recreate what 'love' felt like and looked like to them as a child.
No matter how the child interprets it, when the family model is corrupted then the copy is corrupted. A very wise man that I greatly admired and who was a teacher and trainer once said there was a grandmother who baked a turkey with the edges cut off and both her daughters and granddaughters also baked their turkeys with the edges cut off. When someone asked the granddaughter why she baked her turkey with the edges cut off, she replied because her mother did it that way. When the mother was asked, she replied 'because my mother did it that way' and when the grandmother was asked, she said that she always had a pan that was too small for the turkey so she started trimming the edges so it would fit into the pan.

Dysfunction only needs to operate the first time, the rest will follow. We need to stop dysfunction where it starts in the first family, with the first children. If dysfunction by chance escapes detection, then stop it where you find it.

The collateral damage created by surviving family dysfunction is usually more dysfunction. Many of the dysfunctional patterns and behaviors become a part of a new family dynamic. The enormous amount of guilt suffered by survivors often result in repressed shame and a sense of permanent powerlessness, that lends itself to emotional triggers that release hidden hurt and anger. The unexplained outbursts that well up inside and find release as ‘road rage’ or as a screaming fit, or passive aggressive periods of cold shouldering toward loved ones, create new hurt feelings and a sense of inadequacy in dysfunctional adults.

Many of the stories explore elements of the dysfunctional dynamic through the behavior of abuse victims, and abusers, in the context of the role of the advocates involved in their lives.Filled with stories that are sometimes tragic and occasionally humorous, the Face of Dysfunction is set against the backdrop of daily life at a domestic violence agency in a small town.