“I saw a quote that said: ‘Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it. For many of us, our generational curse is avoidance. We come from people who just act like it didn’t happen. But pain demands to be felt. And somewhere along the line, a child will be born whose charge is to feel it all. These are your shamans, your priests and priestesses, your healers. You call them mental health patients and label their power as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and the like. But these are the ones who are born with the gift of feeling. And as we all know, you can’t heal the pain that you refuse to feel…’ And I felt that.”
Deep Minds Anonymous
At the top of the world
Throughout most of this Citrinitas section of posts, I have been sharing the information I dug up from my research. I needed to spend some time looking for facts, because those would help me in my quest for answers to the questions I’ve carried for life, including:
What happened in that house that made it possible for Dad to so manipulate, fool, and control us?
Why couldn’t my mother fight back?
Why didn’t I leave sooner?
How did I finally get out?
How did all of that affect my decisions and the events of my life going forward?
Who, if anyone, was to blame?
What about truth, hope, forgiveness, agency, love? Did they exist or have any meaning to me?
Most of my life, all of these were stuffed into a back closet of my mind while I dealt with the needs of a present moment issue. But to leave it all there meant never having a clear, complete picture of what happened. Just a pile of broken pieces with no idea of how they connected to each other.
Sometimes you need the 20,000-foot view…that place where you can see the entire landscape at once – where the hills meet the river, where the cliffs are, how the lake in the valley is fed by a source high up in the mountains. And where that is.
In that moment, standing at the top of the world, you finally see the whole vista and how it all relates to each other. That is the moment when all of the individual pieces fit together, and things make sense. And in the end, making sense of it all was the crucial point.
By going through all of this, for the first time in seventy years, I feel whole.
Is the assembled picture pretty? No way. But it rings true. And seeing it all there in its entirety has its own…comfort. An affirmation that I wasn’t crazy, but that house environment was.
This may all sound strange. But there is something about unmasking the dark horrors in the daylight that takes away their power to keep haunting you.
Turning on the lights
It’s like one of those dark, frightening “fun-houses” at the amusement park from childhood. When you rode through it, every corner was another terror. At any moment, some monster would lunge at you. And screams filled the air even though you could see no one. But the fear was contagious and kept growing.
Now, go back into that same place years later, and walk through it during the day with the lights on. The entire room comes clear, and you can see the whole layout. You can see exactly where the car tracks run through it. Where each hidden trapdoor is. How ridiculous and silly the monsters look now that the room is bright and no one is screaming. None of it is pretty and never will be. But neither does it level you in terror. Because you can see it now for what it is.
So this section has been about fact-finding, analysis, and understanding.
But now, I will close out Citrinitas with a couple of posts that return to my work over the last few years, and especially how that progress showed up in my nightmares.
The original versions
All my adult life, I’d had constant nightmares about the abuse itself, as well as related themes. They were saturated with passivity, shame, and the despair of the victim. Always, I was under attack and trapped, and they would just repeat, like reruns of old movies:
- MANY snake attacks of varying nature, but always tiny first, then swelling, then overwhelming me, often with hundreds and thousands of them, all ready to strike
- Scenes of Dad abusing me, sometimes right in front of Mom, or pushing her or my husband out of the way
- Traveling on lonely highways that ran right along cliff edges, or next to, or almost swamped by, walls of raging water
- Being in a cottage at the edge of the ocean, with storms blasting and waves pounding the walls of the house until it seemed like the house would give way
- Stuck in traffic jams and trying to race around people
- The woods around the country home I used to live in
- Trying, but failing, to connect with my neighbor who I loved and missed
- Work nightmares – showing up late, unprepared, starting the morning work in the late afternoon, or forgetting something until it is too late
- Always, desperately seeking a bathroom, and I either couldn’t find one, or it was broken, a total mess, sealed off, or fake; or having no privacy and everyone is walking by
- And the worst one: getting out of the house, but then money problems forced me back home, and I was stuck there, unable to ever leave again
Always, so much struggle, seeking, failing…and shame.
The shifting versions
But after 2024, and much EMDR work, they began to change. They were now more intense in the struggles. More fighting back even when I failed. Despair was shifting to tenacity, and a yearning to break free.
In one, I was trapped on the third-floor porch of my childhood home, but it was starting to come apart. A friend was there with me, and I was afraid she’d fall. I tried to save her but knew I couldn’t. The only hope of saving either of us was to abandon her and try to get all the way downstairs to a set of keys. With great difficulty, I struggled my way down through convoluted passageways in the house. Finally in sight of my goal, I realized I left something upstairs…which meant I had to go all the way back up there and start over. Despite despair, I just turned around and trudged my way back up through the house because it was the only way to save things.
Another dream touched back on those horrible versions where I had to move back home and never again get to leave. But now, they had another part to them. Instead of giving up, I kept trying to find a way out. Find a way to earn extra money. And at the same time, move forward to find love and someone to be with, even as I was still stuck at home. An old boyfriend figured prominently in these as I kept trying to reach out to him, hoping he would come back and save me. In these new versions, even as I accepted that for the moment I wouldn’t get out anytime soon, I kept trying to claim a life for myself and find a way out. I was even begging God in my dreams to send help.
Then, there was the furious outburst at Dad. In that nightmare, I had managed to send him to jail for abusing me. Yet the judge let him out early, which deeply upset me. And Dad, instead of being reformed, sorry, or just relieved he got off easy, came at me with angry accusations about my jailing him. He wanted ME to apologize to HIM. In this dream, I not only refused to back down, but instead I exploded with barely contained rage:
“AMENDS?!!!!! You want AMENDS??! Look what you did to ME! When are you ever going to apologize to me? What about being sorry and showing some REMORSE for what YOU did?!”
It was clear that the more I worked in therapy, and the more my emotions changed, so did my nightmares.
I was no longer a passive victim, but a determined fighter. Sometimes in the nightmares I actually went at him, yelling, provoking fights, screaming what I truly thought about him. And even as I still failed to get free in them, the important thing was that I was always fighting now.
From pain to beauty
In 2024, I spent a lot of time in EMDR sessions, working on a very core issue for me — personhood…or rather, the lack of it. I did not feel like a whole person, or even my own person at all. And I desperately needed external validation and approval to feel okay.
So my daytime therapy sessions confronted my fears of being alone, abandoned, and needing my husband’s approval to validate my own feelings as right. We chipped away at my sense of insecurity and feeling invisible — not valued, seen, or heard.
And in my daytime conversations with my husband afterward, we discussed my need to still engage in proxy battles everywhere. What emerged was the realization that I was fighting for my very right to exist. I didn’t even believe it myself that I had a right to that. But deep down, I raged against that, and so I kept fighting everyone else to prove, from outside of me, that I deserved respect.
It became clear that it was long past time for me to set down my warrior armor. I had needed to battle my father all my life, yes, especially for our children. But fighting the world was not my future. It was time for a change…to let a softer, self-loving side come out. And again, those changes came out in my dreams.
In one, I was living in an apartment with an extra bed. At some point, a couple of us found a homeless teen girl. I wanted to help her. While in the past I would have walked past her, in this one I couldn’t ignore her pain. I WANTED to help her. Needed to. So I went back for her and brought her to my home. Now, I still had to battle, because the room needed to be freed of a swarm of roaches. And when we opened a kit that was supposed to get rid of them, huge roaches came flooding out of the kit and swarmed all over me. I screamed for help. So progress in some parts, but still battles in other parts.
Sometimes I couldn’t even explain the dream. About this same time, I had a “Crucifixion” nightmare. At times it was me on the cross, but mostly it was the crucified Jesus figure. For some reason, we needed to keep moving him to new places, which was excruciating, because He was in pain and a bloody, broken mess. I have no idea what this dream was about…except pain. It was just pure pain.
But then, in the middle of all of these nightmares, one night, for the first time in my life, I had one of the loveliest, most uncharacteristically peaceful dreams ever:
Journal notes: 11/2/2024
We were dining at a nice lower level/underground restaurant. Wonderful dinner. Relaxed. And then later, I discovered there was an entire subterranean town in a large tunnel. All around were long, winding paths, like an underground mall, and lined on both sides were lovely restaurants and shops. It was a most beautiful place. A bit of heaven.
The series, and the approaching corner
After one particularly intense EMDR session, I had a series of dreams three nights in a row that revealed how much I was changing:
Journal notes 1/20/2026
Right in my way was a huge cobra. Usually, I would fight to go by it, but this time, I realized — what if I go a new way? In that moment I decided I could fly ABOVE it, out of range of its fangs. So I launched upward, flying higher and higher until I was right over it. The idiot snake tried desperately, and absolutely frantically, to get me. It stretched upright to its full height but couldn’t reach me to bite, so it shot venom at me as hard as it could. It looked absolutely ridiculous – driven mindlessly in such a frantic and determined attempt to get me. But I was able to fly above it. However, I also realized it was still a close call, as I could see just how far up the venom reached, as it barely missed me. To me, this indicated just how strong of a hold that “snake’s power” had on me most of my life.
Journal notes 1/21/2026 – “The Asshole man” dream
He was shoving carts across a parking lot, hitting cars. Inside the store, he was loud and acting stupidly, harassing everyone unrelentingly. I complained to him. Useless. I got angrier and fought harder, and was acting more at his level. He kept acting up more, and I kept fighting back. But no matter how much I fought him, I ended up looking and acting worse and worse to try and fight back. The angrier I got, the stupider the things I did. He and his friends just laughed at me all the more. As it was happening, I began to realize that this was such a waste of time. I wasn’t succeeding, and I knew I looked stupid. There had to be a better way.
Journal notes 1/22/2026
I can’t remember anything about the dream. Instead, I suddenly had sharp vaginal pain that woke me right out of a sound sleep. It took a little while for them to subside, and I was fine in the morning, but for sure, lots of sharp pains during the night.
So many of my journal entries from 2024 through 2026 documented nightmares like this – shifting energy. Embracing a new power. Fighting back. Rescuing others. And new insights about the uselessness of fighting the world in proxy battles.
What mattered most, though, were the entries that noted a new sense of self. Of coming into a wholeness, with power and a belief that “I deserve.”
And it would be the next nightmare, that seemed to indicate that years of nocturnal battles might have finally turned a corner.
Up Next
The parking garage …
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