12/14/2025
Abuse in many forms can shape who we become. Our minds and bodies are so powerful in the way it tries to protect ourselves from danger...but the muscles remember and the brain is triggered. A smell, a sound, a certain touch...
Trauma can present itself in our bodies that we sometimes won't recognize and we run to our physicians and talk about how to fix the headaches or stomach issues or digestive systems or even heart stuff.
Coming from a complicated childhood and lots of my own baggage and past trauma and hurts, I have seen 1st hand how this has affected my own health.
Be kind to yourself. Be gentle. Speak your truth. Release what you can now and work on the stuff you're not quite ready to. ❤️🩹
I am not saying this because of what I do...but massage could help. Releasing tension in the muscles with a gentle touch and reassuring presence. Letting tears flow in a non judgemental space and place. May healing find you in 2026.
Thank you Sally Field for being brave and sharing your story! 💓
She was only five years old when the ground shifted beneath her feet.
Her mother remarried — and into their fragile little world stepped Jock Mahoney. Not just charming. Not just the stuntman who doubled for great Hollywood legends. He was the kind of man who walked into a room and made people believe the sun had arrived with him ☀️.
A star. A household name. Tarzan.
To strangers, he looked like a dream.
To young Sally Field, he would become a nightmare wrapped in a smile.
Years later she would write, “It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing… but he wasn’t just cruel. He could be magical. The Pied Piper.”
And that duality — the man who sparkled and the man who shattered her childhood — made every wound cut deeper.
The abuse began when she was seven.
Always with a cheerful instruction from her mother, Margaret Field, herself an actress:
“Jocko wants you to walk on his back.”
Then the door would close… and behind that door, a child stepped into a darkness she had no words to describe.
She felt both helpless and, in the most tragic way, responsible.
“I knew,” she later said.
“I felt both a child… and not a child.”
The abuse continued until she was fourteen.
Her mother never intervened. Whether she couldn’t see or didn’t want to see — that question followed Sally like a shadow.
So Sally learned the only survival skill she had: she disappeared.
She studied every room like a weather report — predicting danger, softening her voice, shrinking her edges. She became agreeable. Pleasant. Invisible.
And then, suddenly at eighteen, the world demanded she be seen.
She booked Gidget. Then The Flying Nun.
Hollywood celebrated her as its sweet, sunny girl 🌼.
But those smiles weren’t just performances — they were armor.
Deep inside, she carried the heavy, hidden truth of what had been done to her. It shaped her relationships, her choices, her heartbreaks. She married young, divorced, married again, divorced again. She spent five turbulent years with Burt Reynolds, a relationship she later recognized as a reflection of old wounds repeating themselves.
“I wanted to fix something in me,” she said.
And when Hollywood tried to trap her in the “cute girl” box, she pushed back with everything she had — studying, fighting, demanding roles that required truth rather than charm.
Then came Norma Rae.
In 1979, playing a woman who finally stands up and screams for justice, Sally Field found the voice she had been denied since childhood. She won her first Oscar.
“When she released her rage, I felt freed,” she said.
“If I could play her, I could be me.”
Five years later, she won another.
Steel Magnolias. Mrs. Doubtfire. Forrest Gump. Lincoln.
Two Oscars. Three Emmys. A legacy built not on sweetness — but on soul-deep honesty.
Yet the truth she buried… still lived inside her.
Her stepfather died in 1989. Her mother grew frail.
Still, Sally had never spoken of the closed rooms and the silence she was forced to hold.
Not until 2012.
At sixty-five, while portraying Mary Todd Lincoln, something inside her finally cracked open.
“I could hardly breathe,” she said. “I had to face what was festering.”
So she told her mother.
Fifty years after the first violation, she finally spoke the words she had carried alone.
Then she began to write — not just a memoir, but a reckoning.
Seven years of uncovering, unraveling, rebuilding.
Seven years of searching for the child she lost.
When In Pieces came out in 2018, it was more than a book — it was a whispered confession, a soft, steady reclaiming of her own life. She wrote about the abuse, the abortion at seventeen, the eating disorder, the destructive relationships, the therapy, and the slow rebirth of a self she had been denied.
One line cut deeper than almost anything she shared:
“Because he was with me, I began to feel what I had been afraid to feel alone.”
Now, in her late seventies, after six decades in the spotlight, Sally Field says the bravest thing she ever did wasn’t winning an Oscar — it was telling the truth. It was stepping back into the rooms she survived and naming the darkness. It was gathering every fractured part of herself and whispering:
This is me. All of me. At last. ✨
“I am in pieces,” she wrote.
“And sort of always have been.”
But pieces can be put back together.
And sometimes — just sometimes — the cracks are where the light finally breaks through.
