Your Toolbox

YOUR TOOLBOX is for people of any age, junior to senior, who want to write a letter to a parent that starts with 'I hate you' and ends with 'XO, hugs and kisses.' It is normal to want to love a parent, but parental abuse, neglect or trauma can alter a child's development and future connections and bonds. Although a young person on the receiving end has done nothing to prompt their parent's wrongdoings, they may move into adulthood never fully understanding or resolving the root of their lifelong challenges and struggles. The hope is that YOUR TOOLBOX will begin the unwinding process for anyone who finds themselves in this situation regardless of age or stage of life.

YOUR TOOLBOX is for people of any age, junior to senior, who want to write a letter to a parent that starts with 'I hate you' and ends with 'XO, hugs, and kisses.' It is normal to want to love a parent, but after a mother or father leaves hurtful and damaging marks, physical or emotional, it can turn a child upside down. Unfortunately, many sons and daughters are forced to live with feelings of mistrust and deprivation from the very people they were born to trust and love and have no alternative than to fend for themselves as they grow into adolescence and adulthood. Every story of childhood trauma may have a different beginning, but a common factor is that it can lead to destructive behavior to oneself, loved ones and society. Parental harm can rear it's ugly head when a child is an infant, toddler, preschooler, tween, teen or young adult. Regardless of the age when one lands on the receiving end of dangerous parental actions, that individual may never fully understand or resolve the root of their lifelong challenges and struggles. Paraphrasing a friend of mine who is a practicing therapist, bad experiences stick to our brain like velcro whereas the good ones slide out of our memory like Teflon. If we put our minds to it, we have the power to tip the scales by recalling the positive and shedding past negative occurrences and encounters. The tools referred to in YOUR TOOLBOX that can help us move forward are accessible to all, within ourselves. YOUR TOOLBOX is a guide that acknowledges internal battles but also recognizes our desire and ability to change. It transfers the power and control back to where it should have been at the start.

From the time that Margie was a child, she was keenly aware of what parental abuse, neglect, and trauma will do to a person. She experienced it second-hand as an observer, of her father's relationship with his parents and siblings, as a bystander watching innocent situations that prompted her dad's anger, and as a witness to his plea to his sister to make things right in his later years. However, it was not until Margie adopted a nine-year-old who had lived in 11 foster care homes that the light bulb illuminated at lightning speed. Puzzle pieces that sat for years finally fit together. What had been a pet-peeve - watching people dismiss or not consider the effects that childhood abuse, neglect or trauma had on another, became a calling. Gradually this led to the writing of YOUR TOOLBOX.