A New Beginning For This Blog As We Continue Healing Our Childhood Wounds
Hi everyone. I have an announcement to make but first I want to thank all of you who have followed this blog and who have shared your stories and have felt part of this community of hope and healing. It was years ago in January 2010 that I started this blog and many of you have grown and evolved with me as we have shared and healed our childhood wounds together. I want to fill you in on the details and the big changes ahead for this blog. Yes, it is time for some exciting new changes and the biggest one is that I want to reveal my real name and take ownership of this blog that I am so proud of.
I have been upfront since the first day of this blog saying on my About page that I was using a PEN name. Elaine D. Sanders. I chose this special name so that I could write uninhibitedly about my journey in emotional healing and so that I could help others who are struggling to find and express their true voice as well. My pen name served me well and I have no regrets about being known as Elaine and proudly using this name for my life coaching business that came about because of the success of helping others through this blog.
Now I am stepping fully into the light with my real legal name and claiming my story. I feel and hope this will be very empowering for others who are healing from childhood wounds as well. It is with love and compassion and gratefulness in my heart that I share this information with you, my followers and readers, because I know you will understand and support this new venture of empowerment for all of us to step into our truth, and be unafraid to speak up with our true voice about our childhood experiences and our healing journeys. There is no shame in telling your story, nothing to fear when you speak up for yourself about times you felt diminished and unloved as a child. Telling the truth and coming out of hiding is the right thing to do and doing so will support others to do the same.
My middle name really is Elaine. I love the name and when I first decided to start this blog I was proud to find out that the meaning of the name Elaine is “shining light”. My legal first name is Roxanne and I was thrilled to find out the meaning of Roxanne is “dawn”–light of a new day-a new beginning. Right now I am gradually changing all posts and comments from Elaine to Roxanne. It will take a while to complete the change and until then I hope all will be understood. 
Some might ask, with the great success of this blog why not stay Elaine? Well, about a year and a half ago, I wanted my grown children and husband to be able to tell of my new successful career as a life coach and singer/songwriter without having to tell a long story of why I had a pen name. Also, I wanted to start a home community life coaching business and I also wanted to be close to my family (and also to this new support network) through facebook. So I started a home community life coaching website, a new blog with more songs, a personal facebook page and community facebook page in my legal name that I go by on a daily basis with close friends, my husband and kids. Through this experiment I eventually realized I now felt uninhibited to talk about inner child healing and my own healing journey with great confidence– I was able to do both and go back and forth to both blogs and websites with ease for quite a while. I gradually saw how I was dividing myself and my energies. Recently it came clear how I could integrate everything to my legal name and that this would be very empowering for all for me to do this. My energies of late had been mostly with my new creative ventures in my world as myself, Roxanne E. Smith. I am now ready to come out on this blog and say this is who I am, this is what I experienced, and this is how I recovered, and I want to be a role model to help others to come out and express their true voice as well.
Upon beginning to write about my past, I had no idea that this blog would be so helpful to others as it has become. My intention was and is to help and support others by sharing my experience and journey of emotional healing. I have no resentment, anger, or bitterness towards any people from my past. I do not carry any hard feelings towards them and I wish them only peace and love. I believe I may have chosen everything that happened to me because I knew my soul was strong enough to recover so that I could help others. I am now grateful for everything that has ever happened to me for now I am on this path of enlightenment and helping others see their beautiful shining light within that is underneath the layers of pain and self-doubt. I believe helping souls to break through to their true essence is my true purpose in life. I have come to a place where I know that the absence of light experienced as children is because parents and caregivers of children may have had atrocities and abuses from their own childhood that may have caused a complete separation from their own light. We absorbed all that darkness as highly sensitive gifted children but now, after emotional healing, we can now give that light back to ourselves — as for myself, it was only through much inner grief work that I recovered and this is what I now help others through my work–through blogging, life coaching, and through sharing my healing songs and their lyrics.
I shared my honest feelings on this blog because this was my experience and it was this candidness that most helped people relate their own feelings and stories and heal on a deep level. Many of my songs continue to reflect the painful journey to wholeness and joy from a childhood of feeling lost–I feel it was through the gift of music and creative song writing that I was able to heal and express my voice and this self expression continues to heal me as well as others. I have continued to write and record more healing songs recently and this is the project that has kept me busy this past year.
I have a new music website for my newly created and professionally recorded Album–A New Beginning! I am excited to share with you my songs which are my new passion and focus as of right now and my album of 10 professionally recorded songs is now available for download and also on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, and many other sites worldwide.
Other changes on this blog and my websites include the adding of a link to my facebook community page called Higher Ground Haven. So please check it out by finding it on the right side of the page and clicking on the name of it–you don’t have to be on facebook to enjoy it–it is open to the public and will just be another means of support for this community. 
There will be a new name for this blog–it is being changed from Hope and Healing with Elaine to Hope and Healing Haven. I hope you like it and will remember it easily. I think it is a great fit! The domain name is going back to hopehealing.wordpress.com. Elainedsanders.com will no longer be. I won’t be taking new clients for an indefinite period of time because my singing/songwriting career is taking center stage in my life right now and I will be sharing my song lyrics which are self-help poetry put to music as I embark on this new career.
I hope that you will enjoy embarking with me on this NEW BEGINNING journey. My song A NEW BEGINNING has new meaning now as it has been rerecorded professionally and is the perfect tribute to this new phase of this Hope and Healing Blog that I hope will continue to be a Haven for all souls seeking healing from their childhood wounds and empowerment to find their true voice and true self.
Please enjoy listening to a sample of A New Beginning below: press > play to hear
Another song I’d like to share is called “I’m All Right”–you can listen to a sample of it below:
My new music website is finished and it is ready to share with you, you may visit it here: RoxanneSmithMusic.com. 10 professionally recorded healing songs from my new album are now finalized and available for purchase with free samples of each song for you to listen to first! You can buy downloads of the songs there on the website–all proceeds will go to continuing my work to help others heal from childhood emotional pain. It’s a great cause! I highly recommend playing the songs especially in the morning each day as you get ready–it will change your mood for the day and has a healing effect. Think of it as part of your extreme-self-care healing routine each day which is so important for highly sensitive survivors. We need to do extra kind things for ourselves each day! Please try it and let me know how it works for you–I welcome the testimonials!
Thank you for reading today. I am excited to re-connect with all of you survivors who are searching for emotional guidance and a safe place to feel connected and to heal from the past. This is a wonderful community to be a part of and I feel truly blessed and grateful. Welcome To Hope and Healing Haven!
With love, blessings, and warmest caring wishes,
Roxanne
(Read the following comments from the bottom up)
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Here is an edited version of the original “About Me” when I was using a pen name, written in December 2009 and used through February 2014 (the original was changed a few times over the years ):
Hello and Welcome! Elaine is a name that has special significance to me and I have chosen this Pen name because it will make it easier to be completely honest and uninhibited in all my writing. My wonderful supportive husband and I have both had many childhood wounds to heal and overcome and we have made a new wonderful life and have raised two amazing children.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Child and Family Services with emphasis in humanistic counseling psychology, sociology, family dynamics, and child development. There was nothing more important to me than raising children with high self-esteem and to be emotionally healthy, and breaking the cycle of emotional repression that has been passed down for generations through our extended families. Our children are in college and beyond now, adjusting well to all of life’s demands, and my husband and I couldn’t be prouder of them, not just because of their accomplishments and achievements but because of the relationships we have with them and the caring, loving people they have become. We are supportive and encouraging of whatever they choose to do with their lives and we are there for them to listen to their feelings and they in turn are supportive and encouraging to us and grateful and loving human beings.
I have discovered many things along the way to building a healthy family and finding my true purpose in life. I have discovered I am an INFJ, an empath, a highly sensitive person, an avid journaler, writer of self-help poetry, and a singer/songwriter writing many songs–including my songs of hope and healing. These songs were written mostly to help myself through the pain from my many childhood wounds and the ups and downs of life. Most of all, I have discovered the depth of my skills as an Empathic Life Coach. With this, I have discovered my true purpose in life-all my skills of writing and singing and songwriting have been catalysts in helping me express and find my true voice–to realize that my true purpose is empowering other highly sensitive souls to heal from their wounds from childhood and become the person they are meant to be.
I feel it as a privilege for me to provide comfort and support to any soul who is in emotional pain and to let them know there is hope and someone out there who understands. With the help of this website, it is my hope to validate, inspire, and give hope to people through my writing, my music, and my availability to you as an Empathic Life Coach. So often a person just needs a companion to listen–someone to validate the complex and confusing painful feelings that come up when childhood wounds are triggered and then keep us from moving forward to become our true selves. Our blog community strives to be an “enlightened witness” for any person who needs to be heard about childhood wounds or if you have no family members or friends who understand you. Please check out the comment sections of each post which contain lots of guidance and sharing of experiences. We understand and we care. Welcome to our community!
With love,
Roxanne
Forgiveness Is For Your “Self”
Hi everyone. I have been wanting to share my song “Help Me to Forgive” for a while, but I wanted to explain what I mean by forgiveness because it can be such a confusing and guilt-inducing concept. For myself, forgiving was something I kept trying to do because I thought it was the right thing to do.
As highly sensitive people (HSPs), we want so badly to be compassionate, fair, and kind. I kept forgiving and forgetting the past. I pretended like everything was going to be okay if I just forgave and moved on but I continued to let myself be walked on. I ignored my feelings and kept telling myself I was forgiving and that was the right thing to do. For me, it was the wrong thing to do and the pattern continued until I felt so hurt one day by blatant disrespect for my feelings–when I made a simple assertion that was not to this person’s liking and then they said they were going to do it anyway whether I liked it or not.
I could not deny my feelings any longer. My rage shocked me–I knew it was from childhood and way out of proportion to the event at hand. But I listened to my feelings and it felt good to feel this truth–it was how I had always been treated me and I kept giving out the benefit of the doubt. The anger awakened something in me that needed to come alive–my assertiveness about my needs and feelings and about the boundary that kept being crossing and I kept letting it happen all because I felt it important to forgive and forget.
Now this anger fueled me in a healthy way for a while. It felt good to feel instead of being numb and self-doubting for so long. I wrote a lot about it and found myself in my journaling to have a lot of wise insights and a lot of reasons to be completely fed up with the insidious and mean things that were said to me with a smile.
But I was still so angry, it scared me how angry I was because it was so intense I felt hatred. And this makes sense really when, as highly sensitive children, our trust in ourselves and our spirits feel consistently stomped on until we give up and repress and hide our true selves and feelings away so completely–this is a trauma!– not feeling safe to express our intense anger we hide our true selves away. Now for the first time, I was so angry but I felt alive, I knew it was the truth I was feeling. I was somehow grateful for everything that had happened to me to give me the self-awareness to finally know the truth! Writing my feelings out helped me make sense of it all. I was able to see actions from my childhood which were the cause of much pain and self-doubt. It was very clear! I will never forget this moment in my whole life when I realized there was absolutely nothing wrong with me and that I had just been the victim of a person that I wrongly trusted with my heart and soul. So I made myself a promise not to trust this person with my private feelings (a healthy detachment) and set some boundaries for time and space to heal and it has been a very important decision in my life.
All these emotions coming up helped me connect to this wonderful aliveness–a connection to my true spirit and a connection to God and that he was there with me all along. I know it sounds strange–how could all that pain be so awakening in a positive way but it was. In the midst of the pain, I felt bliss and freedom and truth and so I knew it was right to stop trusting this person. And after a long period of intense anger, pain, grief, and then acceptance, I finally understood what all the talk and importance of forgiveness was all about–I needed to forgive God/The Universe and stopped blaming Him/It for “giving me” such a painful childhood. And I needed to forgive myself because I knew I did the best I could at figuring out a very confusing situation and for blaming myself as a child out of survival. I needed to forgive the whole situation and all the pain it caused me because I had ME again. I do not have to forgive a person who is not sorry to their face and never will be–but I do forgive what they did. I had been holding onto a lot of resentment which I didn’t realize was hurting me and taking a lot of energy.
And that is when I sat down and wrote the song “Help Me To Forgive”. I’ll never forget writing it. It was a very spiritual and pivotal moment in my life. It helped me to start the process of trying to forgive God, The Universe, and me, and the whole situation, and my pain. That is what forgiveness really means for me. Then, a few weeks later, I wrote the song “This Too Shall Pass” with a newfound ability to comfort myself through the worst feelings of rejection and betrayal.
Yes that was quite a month–September 2007. And I am glad I have these two songs to commemorate that special time when I reclaimed my true self and found inner peace and acceptance. And I also discovered a way to let God’s love in my life and really feel it and believe it. As the saying goes, ” The truth will set you free,” but you must feel your feelings to get there.
But in all my writing just now about forgiveness, I don’t want to forget my reasons for writing this post. It is to support you, the highly sensitive child with childhood wounds, from not feeling guilty that you cannot forgive yet. And that trying to forgive even God and yourself before you have gotten through all of the anger and all the repressed emotions from your childhood can leave you feeling guilty and beating yourself up. Please do not feel guilty if you are not ready to forgive anything yet. Please be kind to yourself and love and comfort the wounded child inside for all the feelings you were denied being allowed to express. That is the first step and it takes a long time to tell your whole story–to let out the entire truth. The song “Help Me To Forgive” is meant to comfort you on those times you are filled with anger and resentment about the past–and you are realizing how strong you are because of the pain you’ve been through and you are ready to stop holding on to blame. I share the lyrics with you with the utmost compassion and love in my heart.
With love,
Roxanne
Hope and Healing Haven 
Thank you so much, Judy! That’s wonderful that you will be joining me! You are an important part of this community and I appreciate your support and participation as we journey ahead! With love and light, Roxanne
Congratulations. I’m looking forward to step onto this new path with you.
Hi Alec! Thank you so much for your kind words and encouragement! Yes, I’ve got new wings to fly higher!–I hope it is “uplifting” for all! Stay tuned for my next post in 2 days–it’s about my “amazing” past year.
This a great step! Well done! You are flying on an amazing trajectory!