Soul Mosaic

The unrelenting battles of sleep

Nightmares are a constant in my life, to this day. The only differences in them are the topics or places, whether they seem like a real situation or a metaphor for one, and how I react to the situation.

I have many that are in an unknown place that feels “familiar.” Often, I am on a dangerous road – a highway under construction or repair- up on a mountainside with no guardrails along the cliff edge. And frequently, there is water right next to me or even flooding over me. Raging, swollen rivers right next to my car tires, or towering ocean waves slamming against the ground right near me or over me. Always there is the sense of danger, risky paths, or of being suddenly overwhelmed.

Other times they ranged from mild fury — screaming at a dysfunctional friend then walking away from the relationship – to being raped, then murdered.

Then there are odd ones in which I am, for some reason, walking around unclothed, and no one seems to notice. Or I walk into my home — my secure retreat from the world — only to find my grandparents and Dad, sitting around. I start yelling at them to leave and demand to know how they got in, feeling both violated and frightened that my “inner sanctum” has been breached.

And always, there are snakes…

They’re bringing reinforcements

Despite my explosive previous nightmare where I pummeled a snake to death out of maternal protective rage, they continued to be a frequent image in my dreams. The difference now was that I didn’t freak out quite so easily. I fought back harder, but then they became increasingly vicious. It was almost as if they realized I wasn’t giving up so easily anymore. They also seemed to bring more and more of them to the fight against me, probably for the same reason.

On this night, I was confronted with snakes that came in large numbers, arrayed themselves in front of me, then started to encircle me so I would have no escape.

Those other worlds

Perhaps the best way to move on into the next section of the book, the “Albedo” or brightening dawn of insights, is to note some things from the past that still have a powerful hold on me, and explore why.

As a kid, I was passionately drawn to five things: fossil brachiopods, marine biology, and the books: The Odyssey, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. To this day, I still passionately love them.

The Odyssey was an almost unending series of sea adventures through fantastical lands and the underworld, while battling the angry gods of Mount Olympus, and ending with the “hero” meting out overdue “justice.” I put quotes because the adult me has some very different views about Odysseus himself that I’ll write about later, though now it’s the female characters in The Odyssey that pull at me powerfully.

The Mysterious Island involved a group of castaways who used their collective knowledge and skills to carve a comfortable existence on an uninhabited island, including a secure cave home inside of a rocky ocean-side promontory.

And Robin Hood and his group of merry men always defeated corrupt sheriffs, churchmen, and princes, ate well, and moved with total impunity through the depths of Sherwood Forest, masters of their own fate.

Marine biology was my dream for a distant future, where I would be a female Jacques Cousteau, sail in a research vessel, and spend my days beneath the peaceful waves amidst the beautiful creatures of the depths.

And the brachiopods…they were ancient marine creatures that, while virtually defenseless in a hostile environment, could sequester themselves inside a secure outer shell that they controlled totally, and could open and close only long enough to allow food and water, but no predators, in.

Hmmm…notice any common themes here? Places hidden, secure, and distant where I would control my own safety, food, choices, and destiny? The ability to win out over danger and villains, deliver justice to those who would transgress against their fellow man, and do it all with confidence, self-assurance, and power?

The next phase

It is time now to move from the darkness of the Nigredo phase of my work into the Albedo – the burning white phase of the purification crucible — where the light of insight begins to be seen. That phase was where I started to see patterns and connections, and things began to make more sense.

I began to understand more clearly the costs of the abuse and the harms done. I finally accepted that I could no longer deny those harms, and that some harms, no matter how hard you try to fix them, are permanent. Instead, I needed to embrace my scars if I wanted a good life in the present and future.

Also, this is where I began to research and truly discover what all those years of stress and strain had done to me, not just to my psyche, but to my body and nervous system. And what things I might do now to help ease the medical problems those harms caused.

Questions…

Most of all, I started listing all the questions I realized I wanted answers to. Or at least needed to ask. Things like:

Approaching the Point of No Return

It would be the slow buildup to that 2023 EMDR session. The step by step plodding through therapy, life, and years of things surfacing. My psyche was literally like the roiling magma deep in the earth beneath a volcano, compressing, bulging, subsiding, rising again higher, until finally, it could no longer be held back and it would erupt…

Are you crying?

It was news to me when my therapist said something in passing about my “dissociation.” I had never thought of myself in those terms. She explained that no, it wasn’t the kind where I split into a separate personality, or did things I didn’t remember.

It was more the way I had walled off intense emotions all my life. I was aware of what was happening, but my psyche managed to lock away what I was feeling in those moments as a survival mechanism.

She noted, for example, that in all the years we had been working together, she had never once seen me cry in a session. Stopping to think about it, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I cried about anything.

As a kid I cried all the time. And of course, it was standard in our house that if I started to cry, my father’s anger would immediately flare. Then he would deliver that ultimatum that had me gulping down sobs and denying tears:

“Are you crying?!!”
“N-n-no!” This was delivered with a quivering voice that I was rapidly trying to turn to steel.
“You better not be crying!! Because if you’re crying, I’ll GIVE you something to cry about!!!”

And of course it was accompanied by “the look” that instilled terror to your core. So I trained me to stopped crying, FAST.

Now it’s also true that in the 1950s and 1960s, that was a common threat from many parents. It was the times. But I think many did not include that look, or clenched fists, or gritted teeth when saying it.

What was even worse though, was the shame heaped on me afterward when he added that “You’re too sensitive!” That judgment of failure cut even deeper than the threats.

So I had learned long ago not to show emotions. Not to show weakness. And especially not to cry.

December 2019

The buildup to that 2023 marathon EMDR session would come slowly. Anger would come up, but subside or be stuffed down almost as fast. But over time my reactions to things changed. Anger was quicker to surface and its intensity, much hotter.

Journal, 10 31, 2024
The Beauty of the Swamp

Spiritual growth is not found in the happy places.
Most of the time, moments of “enlightenment”
are in the places that suck.

While some can be found standing on the mountain top rejoicing over the view,
more often,
it is in the descent to the valley swamp,
wading through the muck with the bugs and the leeches,
with no exit in sight,
hoping maybe you’ll “get there,”
and yes, you’ll get part of the way there,
but “all the way,” you probably won’t
because to do spiritual growth right
means it never ends until you are dead —
maybe not even then —
…or until you are dead while still breathing.

Spiritual growth is about examining your life,
looking at and facing your past,
the one that still haunts you.
It is dealing with the consequences of your actions,
and there is no shortcut around the uncomfortable places.

Still, you can learn to love a swamp
as much as the hillsides around it.
You can learn to love the steely gray skies and the foggy mists of the heart
as much as the rare sunshine.

You can learn to love that swamp
and even be grateful for it,
because within it you grow strong with the struggle
and learn that you really can endure.

For sure you will revisit it again in life.
I know for me it WILL always return,
that is just life.
But still, there is beauty in the swamp
because now I know I can make it through.

Therapy strategy

Over these years, my therapist and I worked tirelessly, chipping away at the mountain of issues that would present themselves for processing. While we did do some conscious strategizing for which topics to deal with, or in what order, nothing was forced. Life itself would direct what topics and incidents to deal with next.

Still, it helped to have some points clearly distilled. With so many possible choices for “What next?” it helped to have some structure for how to evaluate the next most pressing need in that moment.

Some of my notes from my journals then, listing guidelines and conclusions we reached:

“If you know what your suffering means, and how to use it, it will become a precious source of knowledge about the meaning of your life.”
Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life

What lies “beneath”?

The shift was small. It started with my slowly allowing those intense emotions to come closer to me and be felt, without my rejecting them. I started to recognize those inner messages that sometimes popped up with the rage, like “I want to fight him…make him pay.” And instead of pushing them away, I felt them, and also added, “You have every RIGHT to be furious!”

That may not sound like groundbreaking progress, but it is when you were trained for decades to believe the opposite. And I noticed that the more I accepted the emotion and embraced my right to feel it, the more it actually calmed the rage.

Something about changing how I received my rage made it scream a little less inside me. I think it is like when someone is trying to get your attention, and you refuse to listen, they scream all the louder. When you finally agree to listen and acknowledge their pain, and when they feel heard and accepted, they don’t have to fight for your attention anymore. It was a small change at first, and would take a long time to grow, but still, I could feel the rage occasionally shift.

Slowly, when rage came up, I began to “hold it aside” a bit longer, and examine it, just as I would a specimen in the lab I was about to dissect or a sample under a microscope lens. I started to see deeper, UNDERNEATH the reactions, and tease out the reasons for the behaviors. Because the real answer to healing rage was to find what was underneath it….and there is ALWAYS something more beneath rage.