Searching for the meaning of life's experiences? Your soul purpose? Unlocking the Invisible Child: A Journey from Heartbreak to Bliss reveals the key to self-healing of body and mind, through the grace and gratitude of the heart and soul, via the all-knowing, compassionate invisible child within. In Unlocking the Invisible Child: A Journey from Heartbreak to Bliss, Laura Mayer shares her remarkable journey. It began with the discovery of a crippling and supposedly fatal disease at age fourteen. She chronicles the forty-year course of the disease, along with her multistage self-healing process, and suggests that anyone can take a similar journey to heal their own life. Mayer knows that all the medicine in the world could not have healed her, had she not gone deeper and unlocked the invisible child inside her. Over the past five years, Mayer has witnessed a total transformation in body, mind, and spirit. Aware that if she could mend her heart, her body would heal, she started to trust in the universe and listen to its messages. "There are as many paths toward healing as there are individuals in need of healing. This means there is no formula, no sure-fire, cookie-cutter method that applies to everyone. Unlocking the Invisible Child is the amazing account of Laura Mayer's remarkable journey. She reveals to us a truth-that healing is and has always been the unique journey of the soul. Mayer writes from the heart. Her courageous account will inspire and encourage anyone who wants to be more than they are at present". - Larry Dossey, M.D. author of The Power of Premonitions, Healing Words, and Reinventing Medicine

UNLOCKING THE INVISIBLE CHILD

A Journey from Heartbreak to BlissBy Laura Mayer

BALBOA PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Laura Mayer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-4190-7

Contents

Introduction................................................................................xvCHAPTER 1. My Story.........................................................................1CHAPTER 2. The Medical World Through the Eyes of a Teenager.................................7CHAPTER 3. Courage to Survive...............................................................27CHAPTER 4. My First Marriage: Waking Up the Hard Way........................................47CHAPTER 5. My Hand Surgeon: Truly an Angel..................................................57CHAPTER 6. My Knight in Shining Armor.......................................................79CHAPTER 7. The Great Fall...................................................................99CHAPTER 8. Spiritual Awakening..............................................................109CHAPTER 9. Necessary Action.................................................................119CHAPTER 10. Moving On.......................................................................121CHAPTER 11. The Return of Hope..............................................................129CHAPTER 12. The Appearance of Angels In the Form of Healers.................................139CHAPTER 13. Trusting in the Universe and Its Messages.......................................153CHAPTER 14. Immersion in the Metaphysical World.............................................165CHAPTER 15. Moving Forward and Surrendering.................................................183CHAPTER 16. Living the Miracle in Virginia..................................................191CHAPTER 17. California Dreaming.............................................................207CHAPTER 18. Showing Up......................................................................215CHAPTER 19. Journey into Wholeness..........................................................223CHAPTER 20. Moving Forward Professionally/Making the Invisible Visible......................227CHAPTER 21. Becoming Visible................................................................233Afterword: The Journey Continues............................................................239Exercises...................................................................................243Acknowledgments.............................................................................247About the Author............................................................................249

Chapter One

My Story

I wanted to find the truth even if it killed me—and it almost did.

Joyful at age fifty-five, I witness how my life has completely turned around. Unable to handle the world I lived in as a young child, I had shut down. At the time, I wasn't aware of doing this, but today it is obvious that my cells heard my cry and reacted to the emotional little girl struggling to be noticed and loved. I became the product of an environment in which the message was: Children should be seen and not heard. But I was also not meant to be seen—a belief locking into place a series of traumas that eventually imprisoned me emotionally and physically.

The Lesser Child

She was the child born of hope; I was born of despair. She was my older sister. When I was conceived, my seventeen-year-old mother felt disillusioned in her marriage to my father, whose outlook on life was based on fear and defeat. At the young age of twenty, Buddy was living out a death sentence battling Hodgkin's disease. He had been in the Air Force, stationed at the nuclear testing sight in the Nevada desert, surviving in the only way he knew how: by fighting the world.

It is no wonder my birth was traumatic—two months premature and necessitating my reliance on incubator support for three weeks. I'll never know if Buddy came to hold me or reached his hands through the plastic draping around the incubator to touch me. I longed for his presence throughout my young life.

While he apparently spent most of his time in and out of veteran's hospitals, battling his terminal illness, my mother traveled between Maine, where his family resided, and Manhattan, where her mother lived. My mother, sister, and I soon moved into my grandmother's apartment in Manhattan. Nana, as I called her, was divorced and lived with her teenage son Carl, who now shared his apartment with his older sister and her two young babies. Nana Ruth, who played the role of mother, guided us through this tumultuous period in our lives, while my grandpa lived a short distance away.

My mother divorced Buddy when I was two years old and soon afterward met Saul, a dentist in the Air Force, and married him. Six months later, my mother left my sister and me behind and joined Saul in Newfoundland to set up our home. During this time, we lived with Nana until my mother returned four months later to take us to our new home on the Air Force Base in Stevensville, Newfoundland, far away from Nana and Grandpa.

Buddy died at age twenty-five, shortly after my third birthday. I have no memories of him, although I do have photographs.

My inner story was all about suffering. It came from feeling disconnected from my parents and older sister—from not being loved—a sense of isolation that later manifested itself in the form of a physical dis-ease. In addition, I suffered from the loss of my biological father, and used my bereavement to keep my sadness and emptiness alive.

The Suffering Child

Throughout my childhood and early teen years, emotional traumas took up residence in my cellular makeup, and my personality responded. At age three, for example, I announced one evening during dinner that I wanted to be a dog, and I started barking as I moved away from the table and onto the floor. My new father, finding my antics neither funny nor cute, proceeded to walk me out to our front porch. "You'll have to stay here because this is where dogs belong," he said. Years later I wondered why my mother or sister didn't come to my rescue, and why I lacked the courage to go inside, scream, or fight. Why did I just stand outside the door watching my family carry on as usual at the dinner table?

When I did start to cry, because I had to go to the bathroom, my new father said, "Dogs go to the bathroom outside." Intense fear coursed through me as I refused to suffer further embarrassment by peeing in my pants. When I was later let back into the house, my father said, "I guess you'll never want to be a dog again."

That day I lost a piece of myself to a world of grief, shame and despair. The resulting sense of separation, alienation and annihilation soon became part of my personality. Over time this primordial scene of humiliating abandonment crystallized into a feeling of being a perpetual outsider looking in. My mother, still a child herself, together with my sister and my new father, were unable to stir a sense of self-awareness within me. As such, the truth of who I was beneath the facade of my story was not revealed.

It took forty years of battling the effects of a crippling disease before I decided not to suffer anymore. "Either I heal or I'm out of here," I stated emphatically to the universe, fully believing that healing was a physical event. Very soon I realized that real healing was soul deep, cellular in nature, and that healing the wounds of my heart would eventually heal every other piece of my being and reveal my true nature.

To Tell the Truth

I have always honored truth. But I was taught when I was very young that truth wasn't always necessary. That set up a conflict in my core beliefs. For example, soon after my stepfather legally adopted both my sister and me, I told a friend that my biological father had died when I was three. My mother scolded me for revealing the truth, and told me not to tell anyone again, stating, "Sometimes it's best not to tell the truth." I left it alone. We never discussed it again. But even though I heard my mother's words, I knew this sentiment could never apply to the girl who came into this world seeking truth. This scenario repeated itself throughout my life.

"Love Me Do"

Invisible to my real self at age nine, I hid away from life, without any clue that I was the perpetrator of my own disembodiment. I felt so lost that I came to believe the only way I could be loved was to be in the hospital. I had learned from watching television that everyone in the hospital gets attended to. So it came as no surprise that one night while trying to fall asleep, I cried out to God, "Maybe if I were in the hospital, the Beatles would come and visit me and then I would be loved by someone." Four years later I ended up in the hospital, but the Beatles never came.

Of course, the Beatles were just the first plea, the outcry of my anguished heart. I reached out to anyone who had the potential to take this inner pain away. Some relief arrived with the birth of a baby brother when I was just shy of my tenth birthday. Andrew, a sweet addition to the family, was the only member who was touchable and who desired my hugs and kisses. Otherwise, feeling unloved myself, I remained wedded to my sense of victimhood, and put out a powerful message that I would accept anything as long as it brought me some attention.

As time passed, I made an effort to gain visibility by becoming a cheerleader, part of the pack of popular girls who were noticed and seen. Cheerleading became the focal point of my social life, making me feel powerful and important. It gave me the confirmation I needed to believe I had a right to belong. But I did not yet realize the necessity of being fully visible to myself before becoming visible to anyone else.

Then at thirteen, I met Michael, who came as a blessing into my emotionally starved life. Michael was by far the best thing that had ever happened to me, giving me what my parents could not—attention, affection, and the freedom to be myself. But so entrenched was I in my suffering, I couldn't fathom that someone could really love me. I often feared that Michael would leave me—and that I wouldn't survive without him. How easy it was for the fear of abandonment to rear its ugly head. And because of my insecurity, I became very needy, an unappealing trait even to a fifteen-year-old boy.

Michael was my first experience in truly giving and receiving the gentleness of love. My psychiatrist explained many years later that Michael wasn't just a first boyfriend, but in fact the first person in my life who was loving. Most people experience the first union of love with their mother, but this was never available to me, because my mother was struggling with her own sense of self and couldn't be emotionally present for me. But Michael could be, and therefore became my prototype for all relationships that followed. I compared everyone to this gold standard in lovability.

Michael carried his own brand of wound, especially a lot of grief and sadness over losses in his own life. But I set aside these observations and focused on the Michael whom I loved and felt safe with. Unfortunately, the tendency to be present to another when it undermined me caused me great anguish in every relationship that followed, until I had the courage to love myself enough.

Despite cheerleading and my attachment to Michael, by age thirteen the hole in my soul was so deep no one could fill it. My fear of reliving my relationship with my parents had given birth to another motif— that something—even crumbs of affection—was better than nothing.

Becoming My Story

Everything changed during my freshman year of high school. I was in the kitchen mixing ingredients with an electric eggbeater and accidentally got my left pinky caught in the rotating blades. It was no big deal; it didn't even hurt. I would have forgotten about the incident, except that months later I noticed I couldn't straighten that finger. My mother thought the problem might be connected with the eggbeater incident. My father speculated that a doctor might have to make a small incision on the left side of my hand to repair the damage. He spoke those words while tracing a line down the outside of my hand just below the pinky finger.

Within a few months, I began to feel some numbness and tingling in the area. My parents and I started to wonder. Little did we know that my hands were about to become the physical manifestation of my tormented heart.

Chapter Two

The Medical World Through the Eyes of a Teenager

I was diagnosed with a disease that was supposed to get worse as I got older, but against all odds, I got better.

To unravel the mystery of my contracted pinky finger with as little trouble as possible, my father suggested we make an appointment with his longtime friend Shelley, a radiologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. Whatever is wrong, he said, would show up in an X-ray. So we traveled the forty minutes to see someone he trusted. From that day forward, nothing would ever be the same.

Batteries of Tests

I liked Shelley. His office felt friendly, and I felt a sense of importance being there because Shelley let me go inside the viewing room to see the results of the films, a privilege most patients did not have. Shelley explained to us that the X-rays indicated no damage to the finger; the source of the problem lay higher up in my arm. He recommended that we seek a second opinion, and referred us to a radiologist who ran his own series of X-rays. The radiologist agreed with Shelley, and referred us to a neurologist. By this time, similar symptoms were manifesting in the fingers of my right hand. Clearly, my symptoms were not related to the eggbeater incident. We continued making our way from one doctor's office to the next, unaware that the contraction in my little finger was just the tip of the iceberg.

In the months following my first set of X-rays, my father and I made many trips to the Mount Sinai Medical Center, meeting with New York City's finest physicians, all of whom diligently tried to find the source of my problem. I soon noticed that the fingers in my right hand were starting to contract, accompanied by numbness and tingling sensations. As months passed, there was clear evidence that I was losing muscle bulk in my fingers and in the palm of my hand. My fingers were starting to claw and hyperextend at the joints, and I couldn't open them fully.

By my freshman year in high school, the disease was already deeply embedded in my cellular makeup. The progression was slow but dramatic. My entire life had altered in the course of several years, and I was constantly plagued with anxiety and stress, never knowing or trusting whether I would be able to perform certain tasks. Always in the back of my mind lurked the biggest fear of all: that someone would notice I was not normal.

My disease soon affected both sides of my body. On December 24, 1969, my dad and I drove into New York City for an appointment with Dr. Seymour Gendelman, a neurologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Although it was Christmas Eve, he was working late and had agreed to see me in his private office on 88th Street, just blocks from the medical center. I instantly took a liking to this kind and gentle man whose desk contained pictures of his three young boys and his wife. A colleague of Shelley's, he did a routine neurological workup and then sent us home.

When we left Dr. Gendelman's office, my dad and I noticed an old-fashioned ice cream parlor on the corner of 88th Street. On the spur of the moment, he suggested that we go inside and have an ice cream. What a treat! My dad rarely made spontaneous offerings, so I seized the occasion to connect with him. Sharing an ice cream gave him the opportunity to express his concern and to show that he understood what I was going through. This extra dose of attention became a ritual I looked forward to whenever we went to see Dr. Gendelman. As much as I enjoyed my visits with him, however, they brought me much anxiety and fear, because I never knew whether the news would be good or bad.

Shortly after our initial visit to Dr. Gendelman, we were referred to Dr. K, the director of rehabilitation medicine at Mount Sinai. When we arrived at our initial visit with her, Dr. K, a pleasant woman in her mid- fifties, came out to greet us and usher us into her office. As she prepared to administer a test called an electromylograph (EMG), a diagnostic tool to measure the electrical activity of muscles at rest and during contraction, she explained the procedure. In conjunction with this test, she also administered a nerve conduction velocity test (NCV) used to measure how well and how fast the nerves send electrical impulses, which make the muscles react in specific ways. Together, the diagnostic tests help evaluate the health of the muscle and the nerves that supply them. Dr. K stuck needles into my muscles, first in my hands, then my arms, shoulders, neck, and chest. This procedure was extremely painful, because after inserting each needle she would wiggle it until some measurable sign registered on the machine. I sat as still as I could while she performed this procedure, one needle at a time. From time to time over the years, Dr. K would have me lie down on the examining table and check my lower extremities as well. Occasionally, she would place needles down my spine.

Disillusionment

One time my mother accompanied me on a follow-up outpatient visit with Dr. K, which was a rarity for her. I was sitting across from Dr. K, with the machine to my left; and my mother was seated behind me, watching. As usual, Dr. K inserted the needles into my hands, arms, chest, and neck, after which she placed them in my spine. It was so painful I wanted to cry, but I fought back my tears. My mother, instead of supporting me in my discomfort, got up and left the room. I was stunned. I remember thinking, "Where is she going? Is she sick?" I never forgot how alone I felt following her departure.

(Continues...)

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