Yesterday was a difficult day for me. I spent the whole day only about 50-60% here and the other 40-50% was a frightened, upset child state that I kept on trying to block. It seemed that whenever I stopped resisting, I would start to slide into another way of thinking and being.
Mama Bear had to go out of town for a few days, however she was clear that I should call her if I needed to talk. Knowing when to call before I hit a major crisis has always been problematic, however she keeps on telling me to contact her when I have tried to ground and present center repeatedly and I just can’t get it to work on my own. So, for once I contacted her at a point when I wasn’t completely wigged out and all we could do was to try to scrape me off the ceiling.
I told her most of what was going on, and she started to talk me through present centering for the 5,000th time (I can do it on my own now until I hit a certain point when I need the presence of another to help make it work). As I became more present centered, I also became more aware of what the part that I was struggling with was feeling and I told her, “Now I just need to convince this part that there is nothing now to be so frightened of.”
Her response was interesting: “Do you really need to try to convince that part? I’m not sure that it’s possible to convince it right now. Do you think that you could just allow the fear to be there, while you focus on being as present centered and aware that there is nothing in the moment to be afraid of? Maybe you could at least not be afraid of the fear.”
I thought about it and said, “That’s a lot easier to say than to do!”
She laughed, “You put that a lot more nicely than some of my clients do!”
However, it got me thinking. I know from experience that fighting against what I don’t want to experience doesn’t go well. It may eventually fade away but, in the mean time, I spend a considerable amount of time distressed. More likely, I resist until it breaks through and comes through as a flashback. Was there a different way of handling it?
Later that evening, I had some time and space to myself. My daughter was out of the house for a couple of hours, so I didn’t have to hold things together for her. I decided to stop fighting the feelings and instead just focus on being aware of exactly where I was, sitting on my bed, with my cozy quilts surrounding me and my favorite fleece blanket wrapped around me, as an adult, in 2014, with a family of my own.
What came out first was a lot of grief and pain and confusion. I could feel how very much I needed to believe as a child that my dad loved me. How much I needed to believe that he didn’t want to hurt me. It just happened. I desperately wanted to not even need to ask, “Does he love me? Does he want to hurt me?” And don’t know what the answers were then and I’m still confused about it in the here and now. And now I am confused about things like, “What would being loved by him even feel like or look like? I want to be loved by a father, but do I even want to be loved by my father now? I don’t mean, “Do I want to try to create a loving relationship with him?”, I mean, “Would I even want to know from a distance that he has some love for me?”
I’ve realized that while some of me needed to believe that he loved me, some of me also needed to believe that he didn’t love me. How could anyone do those things to a child that they actually loved? If he did somehow love me and still did them, that’s even worse than him not loving me. It’s far more frightening for someone who loves you to hurt you than to be hurt by someone who is supposed to, but doesn’t love you. It makes the whole world a much more frightening place, if you can’t actually be safe with the people who do love you.
I know that my dad would say that he loves me and he believes that he does, but I keep on going back to the question, “How could you hurt someone that badly, over and over, if you really love them?” Raping your daughter isn’t like just striking out in anger, something being done on a flash impulse and done in an instant. You don’t just find yourself in her bedroom in the middle of the night, unless you decide to go there. You don’t end up in her bed by accident.
What does love mean, if you can rape someone when you love her? Even if it isn’t violent? But still, it makes her cry.
Such an intensely painful process.
It is.
It means her feelings don’t matter to you. Not that much.
He had feelings for you, but they weren’t the kind that make you care enough not to hurt someone to meet your own needs met.
No, it didn’t just happen. He found a way to excuse or justify what he did, to deny it, or to deny how you really felt.
He chose not to see how he was hurting you.
There just is so much here that hurts and I so intensely feel that child confusion.
It’s okay. It is confusing. The confusion is part of what happened.
So much hurt and pain. I’m glad you were able to call mama bear before you were completely wigged out, and that you have her.
Thank you, Alice. I am very glad, as well. Every time I get myself to trust her and it goes well, it just builds the trust up a bit more. And I very much need someone I trust deeply to be by my side through this process.
Love can be confusing. But someone raping a small child, that’s not love! I’m so sorry he did that to you hurt you in that awful brutal way. XX
Fortunately I wasn’t that small I was either almost 11 or 11 when it started and I was tall for my age, however it still was way too young. I’m still not at the point where I can take in what it was like for me, though.