Sara Niles's Blog: Sara Nile's Blog - Posts Tagged "suicide"
Mission Based Writing
http://impactbooksandart.com/
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
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
Grief, Loss and Honor: The loss of ‘Ariel’
My daughter Ariel, my child of 33 years, died this year on February 17, 2013. Gone. No more. Yes, I know the one word statement is not a sentence, by any standard other than my own-yet the single, simple word ‘gone’ is the strongest statement I can think of to describe the overwhelming awareness of how our lives have changed since her death. Gone, yet not just for a minute as if she stepped out or misplaced her phone, but she is gone in the most permanent sense that I know: gone to never return as we knew her. I don’t care to be comforted with the ever after and how one day I will ‘see’ her again- I simply want to absorb the idea that my little girl, my ‘picayune Amazon’ is out of my life and the lives of her siblings for as long as we each live on this great earth. The world as we knew it before February 17th has changed forevermore.
The stages of grief have been my companion in a most intimate and personal way this past five weeks, with each stage coming to visit in a different way each week until the visits of these unwelcome strangers gradually fades from that of a screaming nightmarish intruder to that of a quiet comforter. Anger was the most prominent of the stages and the most expected of the grief stages presented by the renowned Swiss-American psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Yes, Elisabeth, you were right on each one, that I know for sure, because I learned each one well in the past thirty-five days. I was angry for many reasons, mainly because I had a life stolen from me, I was ‘wronged’ and there was nothing in the world I could do to change that. My daughter did not have to die, she was not ill with some unbeatable illness such as cancer, nor was she killed against her will by some random stranger. My daughter was responsible for her own death.
I bargained with myself, alternately blaming myself because I failed her in some way. Maybe if I had said “l love you” one more time or was more understanding and supportive, then she would be alive. Maybe if I had had more money and more resources, I could have prevented this awful thing from happening to her. All of the second guessing, negotiating and bargaining, has changed nothing, not even my own honest opinion: that nothing I could have done would have stopped her from orchestrating her own death. I knew this because I have spent eighteen years of her life and mine, trying to stop my daughter from continuing on a path of self- destruction and self-annihilation.
Suicidal ideation became my daughter’s drug of choice when she was fifteen years old and persisted in her psyche till the day she died. The internal conflicts and mental illness that troubled my daughter’s mind were difficult to displace, even for short intervals during her life. The extreme polar opposites of my child’s mood swings only matched her extremely disparate behavior; she was like two people living in one mind. My daughter, ‘Ariel’, was one of the most complicated and fascinating human beings you would likely ever meet because she was a gifted with unusual intelligence and a brilliant mind. Ariel possessed the duals abilities that enabled her to comfort, inspire and charm in one moment and to become a caustic hurricane of wrath in the next. Ariel was a dichotomy of positive and negative human emotions and a repository of unprocessed childhood angst and fantasies.
Ariel loved to dream dreams of great accomplishments, of becoming an attorney, a writer, a world traveler and activist; yet the world of today and now, was one she could never conquer. The act of living in the moment, and of finding joy among the most common and mundane of daily living experiences, such as the beauty of sunrises and sunsets and the simple joy of just ‘being’, was something that she never mastered. Ariel never learned to love herself, as she was and in the moment; instead, she would only entertain the idea of Ariel the Conqueror, The Attorney, The Writer, titles she projected into her ever distant future and never fully achieved. The fact is, these future goals were achievable if only Ariel could have found peace within herself. Ariel was a great writer and a great communicator, for she could bring you to your knees with her words or lift you to transcendent heights of elation.
I feel a deep loss for myself and for my family, and I also feel a deep loss for what Ariel could have been and would have been. I have accepted this loss as part of my new normal and I will incorporate it into my life as something positive in the spirit of ‘Ariel’ (Shenoa). Ariel wanted to complete her book ‘On the Wings of Moonlight’…….I will complete it for her to honor her and as a testament to her spirit.
Sara Niles (pen name for Josephine Thompson), Ariel is the name chosen by Shenoa for herself in the memoir: The Journey by Sara Niles
Suicide in America:
On February 17th, 2013- the same day of my daughter’s death-Mindy McCready committed suicide at age 37.
Rodney King survived police brutality, only to succumb to the consequences of careless choices made as a result of his addictions (June 17, 2012).
In the year 2010, the statistics on suicide rates reflected a steady rise in the suicide rate to
over 100 suicides per day.
The Balanced Mind Foundation (2013). Daniel Steel’s Testimony before Senate Appropriations Committee; Retrieved from the web Mar. 2013: http://www.thebalancedmind.org/learn/...
Suicide is the murder of self. There is no simpler way to put it. Self -murder or suicide kills more people in America than homicide; currently over one hundred people per day die by their own hand in this country and over one million people per year make suicide attempts. The victims of this tragic behavior include hundreds of thousands of family members and friends who are left behind.
When I was young, I could not imagine why anyone would ever want to kill themselves. The word ‘suicide’ was not only a puzzling phenomenon; it was a concept that was far removed from my world at that time. I never suspected that one day I would spend almost 18 years of my life in imminent fear of suicide robbing me of my child, my daughter.The Journey
The stages of grief have been my companion in a most intimate and personal way this past five weeks, with each stage coming to visit in a different way each week until the visits of these unwelcome strangers gradually fades from that of a screaming nightmarish intruder to that of a quiet comforter. Anger was the most prominent of the stages and the most expected of the grief stages presented by the renowned Swiss-American psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Yes, Elisabeth, you were right on each one, that I know for sure, because I learned each one well in the past thirty-five days. I was angry for many reasons, mainly because I had a life stolen from me, I was ‘wronged’ and there was nothing in the world I could do to change that. My daughter did not have to die, she was not ill with some unbeatable illness such as cancer, nor was she killed against her will by some random stranger. My daughter was responsible for her own death.
I bargained with myself, alternately blaming myself because I failed her in some way. Maybe if I had said “l love you” one more time or was more understanding and supportive, then she would be alive. Maybe if I had had more money and more resources, I could have prevented this awful thing from happening to her. All of the second guessing, negotiating and bargaining, has changed nothing, not even my own honest opinion: that nothing I could have done would have stopped her from orchestrating her own death. I knew this because I have spent eighteen years of her life and mine, trying to stop my daughter from continuing on a path of self- destruction and self-annihilation.
Suicidal ideation became my daughter’s drug of choice when she was fifteen years old and persisted in her psyche till the day she died. The internal conflicts and mental illness that troubled my daughter’s mind were difficult to displace, even for short intervals during her life. The extreme polar opposites of my child’s mood swings only matched her extremely disparate behavior; she was like two people living in one mind. My daughter, ‘Ariel’, was one of the most complicated and fascinating human beings you would likely ever meet because she was a gifted with unusual intelligence and a brilliant mind. Ariel possessed the duals abilities that enabled her to comfort, inspire and charm in one moment and to become a caustic hurricane of wrath in the next. Ariel was a dichotomy of positive and negative human emotions and a repository of unprocessed childhood angst and fantasies.
Ariel loved to dream dreams of great accomplishments, of becoming an attorney, a writer, a world traveler and activist; yet the world of today and now, was one she could never conquer. The act of living in the moment, and of finding joy among the most common and mundane of daily living experiences, such as the beauty of sunrises and sunsets and the simple joy of just ‘being’, was something that she never mastered. Ariel never learned to love herself, as she was and in the moment; instead, she would only entertain the idea of Ariel the Conqueror, The Attorney, The Writer, titles she projected into her ever distant future and never fully achieved. The fact is, these future goals were achievable if only Ariel could have found peace within herself. Ariel was a great writer and a great communicator, for she could bring you to your knees with her words or lift you to transcendent heights of elation.
I feel a deep loss for myself and for my family, and I also feel a deep loss for what Ariel could have been and would have been. I have accepted this loss as part of my new normal and I will incorporate it into my life as something positive in the spirit of ‘Ariel’ (Shenoa). Ariel wanted to complete her book ‘On the Wings of Moonlight’…….I will complete it for her to honor her and as a testament to her spirit.
Sara Niles (pen name for Josephine Thompson), Ariel is the name chosen by Shenoa for herself in the memoir: The Journey by Sara Niles
Suicide in America:
On February 17th, 2013- the same day of my daughter’s death-Mindy McCready committed suicide at age 37.
Rodney King survived police brutality, only to succumb to the consequences of careless choices made as a result of his addictions (June 17, 2012).
In the year 2010, the statistics on suicide rates reflected a steady rise in the suicide rate to
over 100 suicides per day.
The Balanced Mind Foundation (2013). Daniel Steel’s Testimony before Senate Appropriations Committee; Retrieved from the web Mar. 2013: http://www.thebalancedmind.org/learn/...
Suicide is the murder of self. There is no simpler way to put it. Self -murder or suicide kills more people in America than homicide; currently over one hundred people per day die by their own hand in this country and over one million people per year make suicide attempts. The victims of this tragic behavior include hundreds of thousands of family members and friends who are left behind.
When I was young, I could not imagine why anyone would ever want to kill themselves. The word ‘suicide’ was not only a puzzling phenomenon; it was a concept that was far removed from my world at that time. I never suspected that one day I would spend almost 18 years of my life in imminent fear of suicide robbing me of my child, my daughter.The Journey
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