A new dawn?
“Whatever it was that he saw in me that made him choose me – I was determined that part of me would NOT survive!”
My journal, July 22, 2018
If ever there was a statement that captured the self-hatred, blaming, and disgust that I felt toward me all through life, this was it.
I assumed it was me. I was wrong, somehow to blame, somehow responsible, contaminated with some trait that he couldn’t resist. I must have brought something to the table that caused this…and thus…it was my fault.
Or, even if I cut me some “slack” because, at least in the beginning, I was an infant, still, I was disgusted with myself. He had chosen me for this hell. So whatever it was that I possessed that drew him to me, I was going to PURGE it as soon as I could identify it.
Looking back, it’s a ridiculous idea…it wasn’t me at all. But given that he abused me right from infancy, it is a logical one. When bad things happen to young children, they assume they caused it and are to blame. They are still at that stage of thinking that everything is about them. So good or bad, it’s their fault. And on some deep and early emotional level within me, I carried that same message.
It was only now, in my late sixties, that a germ of a realization was dawning upon me and creeping into my consciousness…an idea I could finally FEEL, not just tell myself and try to believe it: Was it possible…that I was NEVER to blame? For any of it? That maybe it was about whatever he carried WITHIN HIM all along…
Pre-EMDR Journal notes — BRING IT ON, OLD MAN!
Like the above entry, my various journal notes before that EMDR session were not “positive.” The entries summed up the poison I was carrying:
- Continual pain…in my chest – heaviness
- Depression
- Sooo tired
- Scared…all the time
- On Sunday, depressed and scared Ed will yell at me for sitting around on the couch
- I’m sitting there reading, but feeling like I should be doing something, and I am bad for sitting there; totally anxious
- Scared about the upcoming EMDR
- I think about what it would be like to take a trip somewhere – to someplace new and different and I get scared – what if I have even more intense feelings than I do on Sunday – disoriented, cut off, struggling to do anything or get excited about anything, and I am somewhere in Europe and all I want to do is stay in bed, clutch my pillow, and wish I’d stayed home.
- Why do I feel such an intense need to sit on the couch – like an isle of safety – even as I am afraid to sit here. But I just want to stay on the couch all day, not moving, with my back against the couch back, like it’s my safe place, and never leave it. I don’t know what to do with myself
- I am scared to get off the couch, yet I am scared to stay here.
And aside from all the fear and anxiety that was always with me, I was also choking on rage. I so wanted to just yell at him, confront him now as an equal, take him on, tell him what I think of him, and not let him get away with it!
There were so many very specific memories and emotions from him, overloading my system:
His ethos in life:
- To follow rules makes you a fool, and like everyone else out there – sheep being taken advantage of
- Get around the rules!
- Do what I say, not what I do (You had to follow his commands; only he got to choose how to act)
- I want what I want when I want it
Dad knew he was an abuser…He knew he abused me. He said it on the Nova Scotia trip when the TV news spoke of a woman who had her father arrested for abusing her. His immediate reaction was directed at me: “Would you do that to me? YOU were abused.”
So he knew…
And I thought about that Robert Redford movie: Unfinished Life. I loved Redford’s character because he beat the shit out of the abusive boyfriend who was harassing his widowed daughter-in-law. I know it’s wrong to wish that on anybody, but I have my moments where I wish someone could have beaten the shit out of him for us…
What I would like??? The fantasy — Him, Me, right now, right here. “Bring it on, old man. Let’s see if you’re as tough now that you’re facing a full-grown adult who can fight back. You were so tough when I was a little child, how will you do with me as a fully strong adult? You’re such a big man beating on a little kid, so bring it on and let’s see how you do with a full-grown adult…
I am so tired…discouraged…I thought I was done with “fixing things”…I have done so much therapy work all my life…really made progress. Yet here I am still, in my sixties, and there is still MORE that has to be released, faced, and finished.
Writing this book, and doing the EMDR – it’s like knowing you have to throw up – the quickest way to finally getting better is to get the yuck out, but it’s unpleasant and derails things while you’re going through it.
I know I will be different, changed, and, I trust, more peaceful after I write this book. What it will look like, feel like, I don’t know.
I only know there is no going around, over, or under it…there is only through.
Journal notes – July 20, 22, 23, 2018
After the EMDR
My therapist had explained that I might feel any number of emotions or reactions over the next few days because the brain would continue to process things for some time yet. She instructed me to be gentle with myself, know I could reach out to her if I needed to, and in the meantime, just observe whatever came up. She wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t terrible. But it was clear that I “had been through something,” and it was indeed still going on. Again, from my journal notes over the next several days:
General observations:
8/27/2018 – That evening
I’m drained, hungry, spacey; my head feels weird with a slight pressure in the front forehead…but no question, I feel like I’m in a better place. No more chest heaviness or choking sensation in my throat.
8/28/2018 – The next day
Exhausted, tense, and feeling vulnerable…I feel… “exposed.”
Yet, I also felt the opposite this morning: optimistic, I wanted to do several things I haven’t been getting to: learn chess, do some oil painting, even get some vacuuming done. While I didn’t get to all that, I did get a number of things done in spite of the headaches.
The next 3 days
Constant headache. Not terrible, but an ache that is just staying there.
From Tuesday on – VERY tired…not in a bad way, but in that way after you’ve exercised really hard, or been REALLY tense and then finally could just let your guard down and relax. It’s that whole relief of “I’ve been carrying this energy for so long, and for a change, I can set it down.”
The next several days – The intermittent headaches continue, but not badly.
Emotional observations:
- Overall, especially for the first few days, calmer
- Also, somewhat afraid, vulnerable, timid
- Part of me feels exposed and wants to hide out more, yet
- That first day afterward – tense/scared, but of what? I feel like a wide-open wound that needs to scar over because it’s too vulnerable
- Even listening to Ed’s TV show in the background about a space battle caused me strong anxiety. I just wanted to hide somewhere
- Not as quick to anger, a slight softening in that usual readiness to “fight anyone or anything.”
- There is less anger – though it’s still there and needs more work, but lower
- Also, less anxiety – though it’s still there and needs more work, but lower
- I am a bit less inclined to want to fight to prove my point; to try to get people to understand just what I’ve been through…I know what I know, and what I have been through. Maybe that is getting to be enough, and I don’t have to prove anything to anyone? Still needs work though.
Thoughts for what to do next:
- I ABSOLUTELY need to do more of this – my emotional intensity is lower but definitely not enough yet
- I need to get the list of statements and observations I made during the EMDR session from my therapist, so I can use them for my journaling/writing. I can’t remember everything because I was “in that moment.”
Dreams:
- LOTS of messy, weird, disturbing dreams
- A lot of them were related to our house from my early adulthood
- Thinking a lot of my neighbors there, especially the mom, whom I loved to visit
- A LOT of moments about how I didn’t get out of that house….that I continued to do things for my own needs and to get him off my back …and how I hated it and me
- Rounds of dreams where I got out of the house but then failed and had to go back, and kept waiting, wondering when I would find someone, when I would get free
- Can’t remember them all, other than they were related to the emotions of that house, and all of them laced with so much shame, disgust, despair
Insights/Observations: (aside from above)
No matter what, I DID fight to the best of my ability at any given time. I am a kind, caring, ethical person who believed I was protecting my family. I did the best I could at any given moment.
What still needs work, (though on all counts, much more relaxed and less angry):
- Still huge anger toward Dad – even if less than before
- But SO MANY images from all the years of memories flooding out; so angry
- So angry that he wouldn’t get help. He said he loved us. But he wouldn’t get help!
- Angry because at the end of the day, at the end of his life, he got off easy. He never made amends. He never paid for the harm he did.
- And he created a family system that made me look like I was overly sensitive, over-reacting, and too weak to “get over it” — and I am enraged that I have been blamed and have paid for what he caused
- And I am furious with Catholicism and especially priests – they blamed ME in Confession and did nothing to help me.
The follow-up appointment
A week later, I met with my therapist. We reviewed all my reactions and my conclusion that I both wanted and needed to keep doing EMDR.
She liked and agreed with those conclusions and was pleased to hear I was noticing some reduction in anger. Even better, she liked that I was starting to question things more – both my previous beliefs about him, about blaming myself, and about whether I need to be fighting things all the time.
She remarked that this was the very beginning of “separating myself from him and instead, seeing him as just another human being and discerning his true nature.”
As to that nature, she affirmed that “sociopath” was a correct description. He always knew he was “abusing,” not operating out of unconditional love. He just didn’t care.
The tightly packed onion
As for my emotions, there was no question that I was basically that tightly packed onion yet. The layers and layers of hurt, rage, sorrow, loneliness, and fear would need to be slowly and gently peeled away.
Unlike a one-time trauma, the emotions from my decades of abuse could not be released quickly. And at the top of the list, rage was going to be a topic revisited again and again and again in different contexts. I was the one in that family system who carried the rage and outrage for what he had done – he and my mother had handed me the legacy of their own rages and pain. So we would follow what I felt needed to be dealt with next as the emotions emerged, but we would open that door carefully. And as to support systems, I knew I had my husband’s total help. And good friends.
But I also carried the terror about what happened to Ed when he almost died in 2006. I spoke of those fears. Aside from being my soulmate, he had always been my rock. The two of us have always had each other’s backs through life, and whenever dealing with each other’s families. I noted that he is the one person who knows the ENTIRE story, who truly gets it and believes me, and gives me strength as I am learning to stand up for myself. And I was terrified of who would be there if I lost him.
She told me to consider how much I have grown and changed from that event. I have others to offer support now. Good, solid relationships. She explained that when Ed almost died, I was in a panic because for the first time, I realized I was not all-powerful, and we were mortal. And yes, because I wasn’t sure who would be there for me, I grasped desperately to relationships ineffectively. I wouldn’t do that now.
What next?
For the next EMDR work, again, there were so many issues to choose from. But she suggested that we stay focused on my anger toward him…as much as we could plan for anything. But we would start with Dad again, and keep going with wherever things led.
We would come back later to the anxiety and fear on Sundays. Given the history of those intensely abusive Sundays, my therapist felt that what I felt now were the body and dissociation memories I stored back then. In fact, my exhaustion and headaches over this past week were body memories for sure. She added that it was hard to know the extent of what was stored in the tissues of the body.
I had always thought of therapy work as just “cognitive” – understanding what happened and changing the messages. But she impressed on me that research and mental health professionals now agree that it’s both body and mind. You can’t do trauma healing work just based on the cognitive part…you have to address the body memories, the emotional reactions stored in the connective tissues.
With the beginnings of a plan, our next round of EMDR would land in mid-September.
Note:
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and return home for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.
Tags: family, life, love, mental-health, writing
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