I’ve been doing it again. I’ve been trying to go back and rescue myself, which is impossible. No wonder I’ve been feeling hopeless, because it’s a task that I have no hope of being able to accomplish. Unfortunately, when I fall into trying to do this, I trap myself in re-experiencing trauma memory after trauma memory. As Mama Bear said today, it wouldn’t be so bad if my adult was witnessing it and supporting the child part, but I go into the child part and simply re-experience the trauma. Nothing good comes from re-experiencing trauma over and over. It doesn’t facilitate healing; all that it does is stir up trauma symptoms to some degree or other.
In my session today, Mama Bear urged me to not engage with every memory, but to instead practice simply letting them be. I told her that it felt like a betrayal of the child part to leave her to the memory, to which Mama Bear replied, “C., you are thinking as though the child part is a real child inside of you, not a part of you.”
I stopped, stunned, but soon realized that she was correct. I was acting as though I needed to rescue a real child- a child whose needs I needed to put before my own. But as separate as the parts can sometimes feel, we are all a part of the same whole. I was forgetting that the distress that I feel now when I engage with the memories is every bit as important as the distress that I remember. And even worse, by putting myself back in the memory in a futile attempt to help the child that I was, I was instead helping to keep all of me in that distress. I have to remember: I’m not trying to rescue a child; I’m trying to rescue me. All of me. In some ways the now me is the most important, or at least where the ultimate healing needs to be focused, because that is where I should be living and that is where all of the best stuff is. I don’t want to live my childhood over again, but really living now could be a very good thing.
Then Mama Bear dropped the real bombshell on me: “You have already lived through everything that happened to you. You don’t need to experience every detail of it again. What you needed was for the adults in you life to see what was going on then.” That’s exactly what I have been doing. I have been acting as if my being there with the child part during the abuse will somehow change what happened. I desperately want to change what happened. But I can’t change it now. I did the best that I could to deal with it then and I couldn’t change it then. I needed an adult to change what happened. I have never had the ability to change what happened to me; that ability lay outside of me and I had to rely on the adults to do what they should do. It’s not my fault that they didn’t.
I’m not sure whether it is more freeing or heartbreaking to take in that stopping the abuse was out of my control. Mama Bear reminds me that I wasn’t fully helpless, because I got myself through what happened and got myself to where I am now, but in terms of stopping the abuse, I was helpless. Helpless sounds bad, but in this case, because it is the truth, there is a good facet to it. It absolves me of the responsibility for stopping the abuse, for saving myself. It isn’t my fault. It isn’t my shame that it happened. It wasn’t that I let it happen; it was that I had no control over the actions of the adults in my life. Stopping an abusive adult requires the intervention of another adult. I couldn’t make it happen on my own.
I can stop trying to make it up to myself. It wasn’t my fault that I couldn’t save myself. I may need to repeat that to myself a lot before I fully believe it.
I read a therapist blog post recently that said that part of her job is to have clients give up hope. Can’t remember where. But it turned out what she meant was that we need to give up hope that reality isn’t the way it is and that the past wasn’t the way it was. That hope is hard to give up, but it’s necessary.
Your mixed feelings about giving up the hope of saving your child self come through so strongly. Feeling a child’s helplessness has been just one of the toughest feelings for me to face anyway.
This seems a great place to get to before the holidays – thanks for writing it.
BTW, I’m enjoying the quilts on your blog.
I vaguely remember reading something along those lines, as well. I think that it might have been on What A Shrink Thinks. Now that you mention it, I remember it making me uncomfortable at the time.
I’m glad that you are enjoying the quilts! I make landscape quilts myself, but have done far too few quilts in recent years. I’m looking at one right now that I should use if there ever is a theme of stillness or tranquility in a posting. Yeah, right!
CM you have a wise therapist by your side.
I think it is both heartbreaking and freeing to see and accept that you were completely helpless in stopping the abuse and I’m glad you seem clear that you never did anything that would warrant such appalling conduct from your father and grandfather.
I know how easy it is to find yourself in the world of a child. My T often says one of the reasons its important to stay grounded in the present is so our child parts can see we are living a very different life to the one we did in childhood – that you have a loving husband, a safe home, a beautiful and healthy daughter and lots of wonderful things to enjoy. The joy and safety of now does tend to highlight how horrific and unsafe life was as a child and how much we needed that sense of safety and joy in our early years and the absolute hearbreak that it wasn’t there.
Hugs xxx
I think that she is pretty great, too, even if today she pushed me hard. At one point she stopped and asked me, “Does it feel like I’m being brutal? You can be honest.” I told her no, and she assured me that she really did not mean to be. I’m about to go out of town for a couple of weeks and I think that she was concerned about my leaving in the state that I was in. I know that I was concerned.
Mama Bear is constantly reminding me to “bring the child to me, not go to where the child is.” It is terribly easy to be drawn into a child state and requires a deliberate effort to stay in my adult self and bring the distressed child onto my lap, where I can comfort her. At times it feels like a Herculean effort!
Thank goodness I am surrounded by love and safety now. There is no one here who would hurt me.
I think some of the return to the memory is also about the child part needing the adult parts to know and understand what happened, and the adult part needing to be able articulate and communicate that understanding. We need our histories, and those histories are in part inside these experiences we could never talk about or make sense of as children. If that can occur when you re-experience it, then that is productive and useful, and it leaves you with a sense later of being important enough to know what your own experience was and to be heard.
I agree with this. Right now I’m experiencing something interesting though… I’m finding that some parts need to say, X happened as a part of processing. Other parts don’t seem to need to name specific acts, but they do need to be heard as to how horrible the experience was. Saying “I was hurt very, very badly” is sufficient, if the full magnitude of those words is understood.
Learning to listen to what these different layers/ parts/ aspects of myself need is a real part of the challenge, isn’t it? What is right for some of me can be completely wrong for another part of me.
I think for some parts, the horror of the feeling is tied up with the act. Behavior has meaning, and we probably all agree that doing X to a small child is really, really wrong. So, maybe for some parts, naming the act gets at the feeling as well. Anyway, confusing, isn’t it?
Sure is! While I don’t like the idea, at the moment I am struggling with accepting that there are things that I might not be able to understand about what happened. In some areas, my mind may limit me to, “I was hurt really, really badly.” Maybe someday that will resolve into a clearer picture, but there is healing that I can do right here and right now that doesn’t require my knowing more. I owe it to myself to do what I can right now and give myself the best quality of life possible, right now.
Common sense, isn’t it? Concentrate on what you believe that you can accomplish and do that first.
Sometimes I can miss the obvious for a long time!
I wonder if, at the same time, some part of you believes the feelings can’t exist or don’t count if you don’t have proof that they are justified (in the form of specific memories). It’s difficult to understand that children don’t need proof of feelings. One’s parents are supposed to help their children manage their feelings and protect them from situations where negative feelings are too overwhelming. But denial sounds like it was such a strong part of the dynamic growing up, it’s hard to get past it. Maybe it’s just this push/pull thing with denial that’s really going on. One part wants to just accept your feelings. One part says, well, if I have proof of what happened, then what I experienced can’t be denied any longer. It’s hard to live in this in-between state of being continuing to feel that pressure of denial from within whle also wanting to deal directly and honestly with the past. Take care.