Frances Pfaff

A Rented Life: Become Your Lover and Someone Else's Frances Pfaff

The biggest challenge in my life was not to find someone to love me. It was to find my love for me. Thirteen years of an early childhood that were a combat zone filled with terror, anxiety, fear, verbal/physical abuse, sleepless nights, screams, helpless to rescue, hopeless to escape, suicidal thoughts, poverty and alcoholism, that left ghosts in the aftermath within me that I carried unaware for most of my life. I still fight them. I was emotionally crippled by a disability that was so insidious that it was only visible in its effects of my movements, poor choices and the resulting consequences that were based on a distorted, warped life filter. I had sub-zero, self-esteem and so I courted and reinforced this image of myself as a loser and so I kept losing. The relationships I had never satisfied that gaping, seeping wound without a name that would not heal or let me go. Why? Because the love that I kept searching for was my own love. More aptly, it supported an ongoing oppression of my value as a person. In essence, this is a journey of loving myself backwards and now forward. I am no longer a restless, dislocated, missing person. I have found myself, alive and well-after all. If your life seems similar to mine I would encourage you to read books about Adult Children of Alcoholics and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. My thanks to all those people and programs involved in alcoholism and domestic abuse. You are helping to save lives!