
Artist: Sandhi Schimmel- http://www.schimmelart.com/collection.htm
I feel as though I am balanced on a tightrope right now. Everything is so precarious that I can’t think about anything other than focusing on staying balanced. But that balance is artificial and I know that I am going to have to step off that tight rope from time to time.
That tightrope has me over two different states: one where I don’t believe that anything very bad at all happened with my dad. The other state believes that everything that I think might have happened, did happen. Sitting here, writing, I can connect with a third state: the me who can see that the truth most likely lies somewhere between the two extremes.
I have been here before. I hate being in this place. I hate this tug of war inside of me. So why do I come back here over and over?
I’ve finally realized that when I was a child, the only way that I had any “normal” was to not believe that anything bad had happened. If I could mostly live in a state where nothing bad had happened, then I could go to school and learn, have friends, do things with my mother, even be happy some of the time. I had some “normal” and that “normal” helped me to be in far better shape than I would have been without it. I had been looking at these current episodes of denial as being problem behaviors of mine or at the best ways that my mind is using to titrate taking in the reality of what happened, but now I can see that they are habits formed as a child, when they actually served an important and positive purpose. It’s no wonder that I am repeatedly drawn back to the denial over and over! Especially when I am overwhelmed and stressed. Fortunately, things have changed, and grounding in the here and now is a better way for me to find my “normal” these days, rather than denying my experience.
But the denial also helps to balance the pull to believe every single memory type thing that has come up. You see, I hesitate to believe that it all happened. Something inside of me resists believing that he actually did all of those things. But also I know that I am beyond furious at him and if there was a simple way to do it that didn’t hurt my mother, I would simply walk away from him right now. I know that parts of me hold extreme fear where he is concerned. I know that so much of me just hates him and wishes that he was dead. I know that when I talk or think about him, so much of the time I want to throw up. Those reactions are way too strong to be based on nothing, so there has to be some reason for me to have such strong feelings. The terror is stronger where my grandfather is concerned, but all of the other emotions are stronger with my father.
For several months I kept on trying to dig and dig, to see if I could figure out just what happened with him. That didn’t work. I got more and more hyperstimulated and more and more easily triggered into flashback states that may or may not have been accurate. Rather than clarifying what happened, I just got more and more confused. I want to be clear that the entire time, Mama Bear was trying to get me to not dig, but it was as if there was a divide and part of me understood and accepted that and another side of me was determined to just keep on digging.
Unfortunately, all of this means that I am left with all of these things in my mind that really might not have happened. What do I do with that? Especially because some things might have happened, so it isn’t as though I can just dismiss them all as products of an over stimulated, traumatized brain.
I feel as though I can’t figure out where to sit right now. Every place that I try has something spiky that pokes me when I try to settle there and I have to jump up and try another place, but that isn’t going to be comfortable either. It isn’t that nothing happened and it isn’t that everything happened. OK, so something happened, but what sort of something? Was it “just” bad in my mind because of what happened with my grandfather, or was it something that anyone would recognize as being bad? I wish that it didn’t matter so much to me, but it does. There is a particular room and a particular activity that keeps on coming to mind, but does it haunt me because I have thought about it too much, or do I think about it so much because it haunts me?
I have no idea when I will come to a place where I can settle sufficiently for me to be comfortable. Even if he did sexually abuse me, so much of me sees it as being impossible that it could have been a part of my life, I don’t know that I will ever be able to believe myself. I knew that my grandfather was outright cruel and enjoyed hurting people- that was openly acknowledged in the family. My dad was supposed to be the “good guy” of the family. The one who turned out all right and who all of the cousins could look up to.
I don’t know. All I know is that I am confused and angry and hurting. I know that I hate dealing with all of this. And I know that I have to find a way through this mess, even if it feels impossible at the moment, because I refuse to carry it with me for the rest of my life.