Reconciliation and Healing Across the Veil
Margaret presents her unusual experience with trying to reconcile the newly surfaced memories of her father's sexual abuse when she was a child with her own belief that her now deceased dad was one of the kindest people she had known. She finds herself trying to decide whether to embrace her inner child who was coming up for healing or to lose herself to spare her family from this painful truth. She finally prayed that God somehow let here know the truth no matter whether this truth meant she was crazy as her family thought or whether she was accurate in pursuing this truth for healing. She became committed to following the truth wherever it led her, trusting that God had a plan to resolve this family crisis for the good of every family member. The last thing she expected was that her deceased dad would start explaining to her what really happened and open up a dialogue which led to her healing "across the veil".
Margaret knew as a young child that she wanted to be a missionary to show people how God loves them. She dreamed of going to foreign countries to do this, but her dad convinced her that social work would be a more appropriate pursuit for her. She worked as a socail worker in hospitals, family and children's services, child abuse and foster care, school social work, a substance abuse residential treatment center, a jail and two maximum security prison settings. She stayed at home to raise her two children for several years and studied new thought spirituality after growing up in a Methodist Church. She used her private time to pursue spiritual growth. She continues to work full time in a maximum security prison setting as a mental health coordinator and provider of mental health services.
About the Author
I was born a twin. We were dressed alike and enjoyed a lot of attention about this. People would point to us and say, "Look at the twins!" with delight. I was embarrassed by this attention but my twin loved it. She was the outgoing one. She was the dominant one of us.
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She is awesome actually. But this is about me. I never felt I belonged in my family and never understood why until I started having some memories of childhood incest when I was in my 50's. Luckily, I had acquired a lot of knowledge about child abuse and family systems when I started having these memories, I loved my work, loved helping people grow and learn about themselves, their strengths mainly. I so admired how my clients were able to manage their lives even when everything seemed to be going against them.
I went to college and majored in English and Social Studies Secondary Education. My first job was teaching 8th and 9th grade History and English in a middle school. This job alerted me to how much I really wanted to help the underserved families because I was teaching in an area in a metropolitan area in an impoverished area. The students were so engaging, honest , inquisitive, and opened up about their challenges at home. Since I had always wanted to be a social worker, I decided to get a job for the state working with the disadvanta ged. From there I went on to graduate school and got my Master's degree in Social Work.
I worked with children and families in various areas of social work, at first in medical settings, then in protective services for children, then obtained my licensure for doing mental health treatment. I did outpatient assessments and counseling for adults, families and children, then got experience with working with substance abuse patients in a residential setting. During that time, I got an opportunity to work at Angola Prison in Louisiana in a mental health unit . After leaving that position in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, I returned a year or so later and worked at Angola another 15 months before moving to another state where I worked in a county jail with inmates with mental health problems. This led to a full time position as a mental health provider at a maximum security section of a medium security prison. I worked there for several years before coming to my present counseling position at a wonderful outpatient community mental health non-profit facility.
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I wrote my book after unexpectedly having a wonderful experience connecting with my deceased family and my abusive father when I was praying to get some answers to the disturbing memor'ies I was having. I felt guided by Spirit and my family across the veil to write about my experience to add to the information out there urging humanity to stop child abuse in all of its forms. I had to face some uncomfortable truths about my abuse but also received healing from Spirit, and the love of my deceased family members who encouraged me to see that this abuse was generational and needed to be stopped.