Patty’s Keys – My name is Panayiota (Pana for short).

6 September 2015

Some visitors to my blog have started to call me Patty since they have seen that name as my blog name, so I would just like to take this opportunity to explain where the name “Patty” comes from.

When I was a little girl, my divorced mother used to call me Patty which was not my true name at all.  After her divorce from my dear father who had so lovingly named me Panayiota after his beloved deceased mother (my Yiayia), my mother chose to rename me knowing, I am sure out of spite, how much it would hurt my father.

I have always loved and cherished my true name, but all my life I have been called everything and anything but my name.  I have as a result never really felt I had a true identity or belonged anywhere—I have very much felt invisible in this world!  Only my beloved stepmother who was my greatest mentor and strength during my childhood years ever called me by my own name consistently and one other dear friend, Danila.  In a world where I grew up feeling totally invisible in a world where I felt I never belonged, these were the only two people ever to honour me with my own true identity and I will always love them dearly for it.  They have no idea how much this one important blessing to my life held me together over all the years—that having my own name could means so much to me. 

Dear little Patty is “the broken inner child of me”.  The part of me who remembers all the searing pain and anguish of my childhood, the terrifying fears, neglect, abject loneliness, deep longings and horrors of my past.  Somewhere in the torture of her childhood, she became stuck and trapped in a “dungeon” inside of me where her torturers sent her and locked her up before they threw away the key... (soon I will tell you why I chose my Blogs name to be “Patty’s Keys, but for now, let me just tell you about Patty).

Patty stayed locked up for about 50 years before I realised she even existed inside of me.  For 50 years, I never knew that it was her tears I was always crying and her fears I was always feeling.  And because I was not aware of her and how much she was influencing my adult self, I could not understand the chaotic turmoil that was my life; I believed only in the hopelessness of my miserable existence and the weakness of my “self” and had no way to move past this “warped truth” brought with me from my childhood through the script messages painfully inscribed on my heart and mind by my abusers.

Once I learned about Patty’s existence in me and acknowledged this fact, I was only then able to begin my journey of healing by learning how to help her to escape her dark and miserably cold dungeon where she had been locked up for 50 years.  I started to learn about what triggered “her emotions” to surface and interfere with my own in my “adult life” and started to learn at last, how to love myself—and how to love and nurture Patty to help her to heal.  

I came to realise and face the painful truth that I would never be able to go back into my past so that Patty’s longings could be fulfilled by a real mother’s gentle, loving and protective arms, so I had to learn how to love and nurture my “self”.  I had to realise that I needed to take time for her (for the sake of “all of me” as a whole being)... do things that she would enjoy doing to help her to find a way out of her darkness and misery.  So sometimes when I was feeling particularly anxious or sad, I’d take out a colouring book and colour for a while.  Patty wanted her colouring book to be filled with fairies, so that’s what I bought for her.  I could feel what she needed, wanted and enjoyed most and tried to give it to her when I could.  I still do things for Patty occasionally, but as healing has occurred and she has become more and more integrated with my adult self, I find that I don’t need to spend so much time on nurturing her anymore.  That does not mean she has been forgotten... NEVER... she will always be a very important, sweet, sensitive, creative and beautiful part of who I am... it just means that healing has helped her and my adult self to find a place of peace together where we are both gradually learning to live more harmoniously together as a whole.

Patty is still triggered to the surface unexpectedly from time to time... I still cry her tears and still feel her broken feelings and she still disrupts my adult life every now and then, but I know better what to do to help her now and to help my adult self too.  I no longer wait for someone else to rescue me anymore—I know now that I am the only person who can help “me” and I have become aware of my responsibility to this vitally important task, for not only my own sake, but for the sake of my children, grandchildren and others out there in the world who have their own “silent screams” rising up from some dark and lonely painfully lost place deep inside of them also.

Healing work can be very hard, but it is worth every effort to make it happen.  

At the age of 58, turning 59 in November this year, I earn the right to my own name and will not settle for any other anymore.  I would particularly love for my family to know this... most especially the side of my family that my mother aimed to hurt when she deliberately trampled on and threw away my own true name replacing it with another that today represents my inner-brokenness and a dear little girl who had no power to stop the pain and torture way back then.  I no longer care about what the rest of the world chooses to call me, but I do care what name my family knows me by... I care a lot!

I am Panayiota (Pana for short)... and victory over suffering is mine!

BORN TO BE
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How lovely this sweet spirit who lives within, how beautiful is she,
She’s true and wise and full of love as she was born to be.
Her nature truly is divine, for she was created so,
God the Father’s Love for her, He wants her to always know.
So He sent her to this world to live and has given her tests and trials,
And though she’s struggled very hard, He’s blessed her with His Smiles.
No trial could ever destroy her, no one’s cruelty,
Because her spirit who lives within is strong enough, you see.
And all those who’ve never believed in her, will not cause her to give in,
For her spirit who lives upon this earth, never forgets where she has been.
She keeps Heaven in her memory and has carried it throughout her life,
It’s been the strength she’s held onto, through all her toils and strife.
How lovely this sweet spirit who lives within, how beautiful is she,
She’s true and wise and full of love, as she was born to be.

(27 June 2002)

Thank you for reading this and for sharing in my life stories…
gratefully ~ Pana

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