There must be so much processing going on inside right now. I have been sleeping so much and I know that I process in my sleep. I rarely have dreams that I remember, but I’m well aware that my brain will get busy enough shifting things around and I will have no choice but to succumb to an irresistible surge to fall asleep. Yesterday that meant a 1 hour nap in the morning, a 2 1/2 hour nap in the afternoon, and then 9 hours of sleep overnight.
Today I have been experiencing some of the results from all of that processing.
The first thing that I noticed was that memories of abuse by my father were coming up pretty quickly, in short, precise snippets. For once, it was like I was able to help the part that holds the memory watch the memory go by without becoming very emotionally involved. Instead the responses were more like, “Wow, I can see why that would be confusing, scary, and icky feeling,” or “Yes, I can see how I would have changed from being curious to being scared and dreading what might happen next under those circumstances.”
I don’t know how many times Mama Bear has talked with me about “letting the memories just pass by, neither rejecting them, nor engaging with them.” Until now, my reaction has always been, “Yeah, right, you try remembering your dad doing X to you and neither getting caught up in it or trying to push it away as fast and hard as you can!” To be fair, she also has become clear that she understands that it may simply not be possible for me to do that, but then asks me to keep on practicing the mindfulness meditation to help me get to the point where I might be able to do it. The last time she asked, it was like a child part was involved in the conversation, and it was that child part who answered, “I can try.” Today, it felt like all of me was working together to try to manage the memories differently. I wasn’t fight with myself, with part of me trying to get the memory out and paid attention to, while another part was fighting desperately to “make it not be.”
A second thing I noticed after dealing with a round of memories this morning. It was like a part of me went, “Wait a minute. All of those bad things happened, but I’m sitting here, functional. I survived. I’m OK. Really actually OK, not just having to look and act OK. I then had such a clear sense of being little and hurting, physically hurting, but also needing to live, to go out and play and be happy. That need to live and do living things was more powerful than the pain, at least some of the time. But there were so many reasons for me to not look like or feel like I was hurt for so much of my childhood, whether it was just to allow me to go on for my own sake, or to keep things secret, or to make things easy for my mom, or to be in agreement with my parents over what our family is like, or whatever. There was so much pressure to fool myself and the rest of the world. But I think that left me with confusion: “How do I really know that I am ok? How do I really know that I am safe? What is real and what is not real? What is true and not true?”
In our last session, I told Mama Bear that I had realized that this whole confusion over what was real and what wasn’t real and the pressure to see the world the way that my parents wanted to see it must have been a trauma in it’s own right for me. Her response was, “I’m sure that it was.” She went on to point out to me that so much of the therapy that we have been doing for awhile has been working on this very issue. “What is my story? How can I believe myself? Am I real? Can I trust my feelings, intuitions, memories? How do I reconcile my love for my mother with this whole mess?” And so on. I then told her that on the way to the session, I could feel that a young part wanted to take her hands and go, “Is this real? Am I really safe?!? Or is it just a dream or my imagination? How do I know if I’m really safe?” Mama Bear had me wrap my arms around that scared child part to hold her close and soothe her and answer her questions. It helped with that issue and it helped the session go to a deeper level. It seems that I’ve been working inside on those questions ever since, though.
The third thing that came up was that I realized how much I had lived with the sense that what my father was doing to me was unsurvivable. It’s been harder for me to see that with him than with my grandfather because I had been very afraid was that what my grandfather really wanted was to kill me. (From my current perspective, I don’t think that he did. I think that what he wanted was to have free rein to do whatever he wanted to me and keep on hurting and terrifying me as much as possible. If he had killed me, he would have lost that.). When I finally dealt with my terror that my grandfather would kill or otherwise obliterate me, I felt such joy and relief at being alive. Parts of me that had been afraid that I was really dead and just some sort of a zombie (or something- it never made sense) were giddy to come out into the world and feel the air, smell the trees, see the sunlight filtering through the leaves. It finally felt safe for them to feel that I was alive.
Today something similar happened in regards to my dad. I noticed all sorts of little things that have always been there, but I haven’t been able to see. Smells were more intense. People seemed more present to me. Everything just seemed more alive. Or I suppose that I felt more alive. I was confused about why I was feeling this way right now. I don’t remember ever thinking that my dad wanted to kill or destroy me, so why was I feeling such relief and even surprise at being alive? I eventually realized that while I didn’t feel that my dad had any intent to destroy me, it very much felt as though I might not be able to survive his actions.
I have a remembered sense of being small, not understanding what was going on, and being afraid of what was going to happen to my body. Being afraid that my body might be hurt too badly. I don’t know if that comes directly from what happened with my dad or if it comes from knowing the types of things that could happen from what my grandfather did. I also very much remember, “This is too much. I can’t take this. I can’t handle this. I would rather be dead. It is going to tear me apart. This is impossible to live with,” at the emotional level.
I think that I lived with an on going sense that the abuse wasn’t survivable. I also think that sense is why I have had such a strong belief that the abuse can’t be real. It seems so bad that I wouldn’t have been able to make it this far, if it had really happened. That wasn’t a case of my now mind grasping for some reason to doubt my memories, it was a reflection of just how awful the experiences had been for me.
But today, somehow, it feels safer than before to look at how awful it was and say, “Yes, that was me when I was little with my father. I was scared that my body and mind would be torn apart, but I’m sitting right here, in one piece. I’m not bleeding. My mind has done some funky things in order to survive, but it adapted to protect itself, it didn’t get torn apart. I’m now in my 40s. Nothing can change the fact that I survived my childhood. I don’t have to be afraid of what happened anymore, because it ended a long time ago. Whatever the worst thing was that happened with my dad, I survived it then and it will never be repeated. The past really is over. The present is real. It’s safe to have a life that feels good to me.”
I wish that I could say that I believed that this meant that I would never feel terror again while dealing with a memory, but I’m not so sure of that. I do hope that it will happen less often, though. I also hope that I can keep in touch with the fact that I have the safety net of a safe now always under me. No matter how bad a memory is, eventually I will come out of it. And my now has a lot of love in it.
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Living While Healing 