I Often Hate My Name

I know, you're not supposed to feel this way.  I realize my name is my vibrational marker in this world, but oh - what I wouldn't give to change it.  In fact, I almost did change my name but got cold feet.

You see, I was afraid of what my family and my friends would think if I changed my name.  It is probably the one thing that held me back from doing this.

Growing up, my Dad used my full name starting with my first name of Donald as a way to indicate he was pretty angry at me.  If I heard it, I cringed.

I knew what was coming and there was no escaping it.  The more you tried, the worse the punishment.  It didn't matter if you had really done nothing wrong.  It only mattered that he needed someone to blame for whatever it was he was upset about in that moment.

On top of it, my dad loved nicknames.  I was a small baby at birth and so they nicknamed me pee wee.  I can't actually believe I am even writing about any of this.  It feels shameful and humiliating to me.   Even though I had to endure this at home, I tried my hardest to not get names attached to me in school.

One day in Kindergarten I took a new plastic truck to school for show and tell.  My dad thought I needed to put my name on it even though there is no way I would have let that toy truck out of my sight.  We didn't have many toys in the first place.  The name he wrote on the bottom of it in big black letters - PEE WEE.  Talk about making your stomach turn flip-flops all day.

I also remember hearing my dad pound his fist on the table and scream,

"we're family and we will be proud of our last name. We will love one another no matter what or I will make sure we do."  

He preached the last name as if it was something great.  I cringed in these multi-hour tirades he would have where you had to sit at attention and listen to him intently or he would keep going longer. 

He was so proud of the last name and it sucked to me.  To me, it stood for sexual and physical abuse.  It stood for mental manipulation, mind control, thought control and no freedom.  It stood for anything but love and respect like he demanded that it did.  He is more than welcome to be proud of it if he wants, but it has a devastating effect on me.

There are many more things that have happened where I just hate my name.  My full first name, Donald, was used as a weapon.  It was not one of respect or love or compassion.  When I heard it used, my fear went "oh oh... what did I do wrong now?"  This was immediately followed by dread and fear and anxiety which happened almost every day it seemed.

Now at this point in my life, I made sure I had no kids.  My siblings had daughters so there is no chance they will pass our family name on.  I had no kids, so effectively it stops with me.  I cannot think of a better way to win over what my dad did to me than deprive him of passing on the name he was so proud of when I was a kid.

I don't know if I will ever get to the point I love my full legal name, but if you meet me, there's a good chance, you'll hear the first name I go by now and you would have to ask me what my last name is.  I don't readily give it out.  I don't readily use it.  I want nothing to do with the last name.  If you call me Donald, you're probably going to get ignored or get an angry response.

It is difficult to deal with this part of my life.  I know the vibration of our name means a lot, but it is a source of pain that I have to live with for the rest of my life.  I may still change it yet, but now that I've got music and books out, that may get more tricky.  I know it will follow me until the day that I die and I wish it wasn't so.  Even if I changed it, the name is still attached to me and that sucks!

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2017 by Don Shetterly

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Major Moment Of Embarrassment And Shame

The other day I went to a healer in South Florida by the name of Kathi Angeli.  I have been to her several times before and each time, it really helps me move forward in life, while letting go of long held energy blockages and finding forgiveness for experiences of my past that I encountered.  This session was no different and at first, I thought it was not going anywhere.  Lo and behold to my surprise, things got intense real quick and I was shocked at the event that came up.

Way back many years ago around the time I was 14 years old, there was an incident that happened with me and my younger brother.  I don't think I had hid this experience from my consciousness, but I never fully realized just what impact it had on my life.  In reality, I just chalked it up to another one of those experiences from my traumatic past that I had to heal and work through.  In fact, I thought I had worked through it, but then healing trauma is a process, not necessarily an end point like so many often believe.

In this experience, my mother (God rest her soul) who hardly ever whipped us, got upset with something my younger brother and I were doing.  I cannot even remember what it was to this day that sparked the whipping. I really doubt it was much of any significance.  In our house, the slightest breath could get you whipped.  I recognize she was having issues with my father and more than likely took that out on us, rather than dealing with it in her own life.

Child Forced To Bathe Is Abuse

I read an article today that made my hair stand on end and my skin crawl.  Some days I wonder if adults really understand what it is to be human or are they just aliens in a human body.  This story was about a third grader at a Texas school that was forced to bathe.  Evidently according to teachers and school officials, the kid smelled and they took it upon themselves to violently scrub him down.  I'm sure Sandusky would have been jealous.

Of course I don't know all the facts in the situation nor do I accept the media's story as the gospel truth.  After all, the media does tend to distort the facts in a frequent manner.  Regardless, if this story is true, it leaves me speechless. How on earth anyone who calls themselves an educator could do what they did to this child, is beyond me.  Plain and simple, it was child abuse.  They should all be locked up.  When did we become a society that so disrespected our children and treated them as something we could do anything we want to with the kids?

This story of course strikes a chord with me because I was only allowed to take one shower a week as a kid.  This shower of course was done on Saturday night so we would be presentable for church on Sunday.  After all, you didn't want the people at church thinking we were bad people.  We had to keep up the image of everything being fine in our family.