As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Wednesday, July 15, 2026 “Unstoppable” – Donna Ashworth
Unstoppable they called her but I saw her stop I saw her stop many many times.
Sometimes I thought she had stopped for good
but no she always found a way to resurrect.
To rise again.
Not the same neverthe same.
Each time a little more determined and a little less vulnerable.
Unstoppable they said but I think it was in the stopping
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Tuesday, July 14, 2026 “The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.”
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Monday, July 13, 2026 “The Four Agreements” – Don Miguel Ruiz
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Sunday, July 12, 2026 “Every next level of your life will demand a different version of you.” Power of Philosophy
As an unexpected gift, our son will be visiting for the week. So I am going to take a break to fully enjoy his company. Our visits are always lovely, but too short and too rare.
It is also a good moment for a short “respite” after the intensity of the post on Triggers and Flashbacks. So before I dive into the deep emotional turbulence of this darker “Nigredo” period, I will let this break recharge my energy.
In the meantime, I will do what I did last Thanksgiving and Christmas – leave inspirational “Gift Posts.”
I will be back here by Saturday, July 18, 2026, with fresh energy, and the next post – Emotions, Part I.
Thank you for your patience, and for walking with me on this journey.
Saturday, July 11, 2026 “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” Carl Jung
There are things left within that remain still totally alive today, buried alive, even though you don’t know it. They lurk…in your psyche. Your nervous system. Your memories. Waiting.
Something happens in the moment – a loud noise, a smell, a touch- and you are suddenly spiraling backwards in time, to a place of total emotional chaos and terror. It doesn’t matter how old you are now, or how long ago that memory was buried.
They are happening again…right now.
Triggers and Flashbacks
There are so many instances that I will be having a pleasant day, absorbed in something fun, and then, when I least expect it, it overwhelms me.
A knob on the kitchen cabinet catches my shirt, and I react with fear and rage at “being pulled.” Someone starts up a loud motorcycle unexpectedly, and I jump out of my skin because the loud noise was like the noise of Dad coming into my room ready to grab me. Body and sensory memories.
Then there are the emotional ones. I have hated weekends most of my life. Except for when I worked in the hospital lab. At least on those weekends, I wasn’t home and was doing something useful. When I was at home, he was at me. Either sexually, or physically if I refused. It took me years to realize that my weekend “dread” was a powerful emotional flashback to “those weekends.”
These days the weekends still haunt me. I will be cleaning the house, then I sit down to rest for a moment and look over my to-do list. Immediately, from out of nowhere, I am filled with intense anxiety and the sense I am “bad.” I feel afraid. I feel like I’d better not be “caught” sitting down. I am in danger…or I am a “bad person” because he has made that clear to me.
Then, there is the “3:00 p.m. sense of dread” every day because “Dad will be home soon,” even though he is long-dead and I am in my seventies.
Or every year in July, on the anniversary of the first moon landing. I hate that day, feel anxious, and full of dread. I just want to sleep. That’s because it was one of the worst days of my life then. I had “avoided him,” and so he was at me all day verbally and emotionally. He didn’t hit me that day – he might have had to explain why to my mother. But he would shoot me “The Look” – that intense glare of pure hatred and rage that kept reminding me I was unloved and in deep trouble. When he wasn’t doing that, he was totally ignoring me. If I talked to him, he looked right past me.
So there is no question but that those memories are totally alive yet within me. I experience them all the time.
“The Look”
We all know those family photo albums full of pictures, especially those candid ones that can range from fun to outright silly because the camera caught the person off-guard in a hilarious position.
And then there are those posed family shots too, the ones everyone gathered for and smiled in unison.
My father’s posed photos sometimes captured a smile. But, especially back then, they usually looked more like his work badge. Sour. Unsmiling. “Tough guy.” Even when we were celebrating.
This was the photo from the celebration of my First Holy Communion when I was seven. In the Catholic Church, it’s a joyous time. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, everyone’s together laughing, smiling, eating. And photos. Lots of photos.
The smiling “posed ones” would always be taken outside by the flowering bush in the backyard. Here is Dad’s posed, “celebratory” face. Could he have been any happier that day??
Whether I call this period of my life the Nigredo phase, the Dark Night of the Soul, or an existential crisis, the name doesn’t matter. It was just bleak.
I had chosen this – unleashing all the emotions that had been waiting a lifetime for me to face them. And looking back, I would still make that same choice. It has been worth it.
But at the same time, I won’t deny that the years from 2018 until about 2023 were truly daunting. My safety net came from my therapist’s skill and her carefully paced processes, my husband’s and friends’ support, and my strength from the previous years of work.
From 2018 to the end of 2019 alone, I had thirteen sessions of EMDR. So much came up all at once, all of it urgent and intense, that we just needed to keep doing them to manage all the “hot” emotions.
2021 would be another intense year with five more EMDR sessions, followed by my mother’s death shortly before that Christmas. And while 2023 only needed three, the fury of a two-hour-long explosive session that March made up in intensity what the rest of the year lacked in numbers. It was a game-changer, and I’ll write more about that soon.
For now, I will simply say that there were many times I felt like I was walking through the fog-shrouded swamp. To look anywhere held the same view — bleak, gray, and limited, as if the swamp had always been my reality and had no beginning or end.
Each step only guaranteed it would be deep, squishy, and uncomfortable. I felt like at any moment I could be sucked under the muck or struck by the sharp fangs of a hidden viper. And I was blind to what lay ahead, or behind me.
But at that point, I learned the best thing was to just keep stepping. There was no point in turning back because that was swamp too. No matter where I turned, it was just more swamp. So I might as well just keep going forward, trust the process, and believe there was an end to it somewhere.
First…The Process…
What was the process of marching through the swamp of this dark time? And what was in that swamp?
We used to watch a show called “This Old House” on PBS. They’d start with a structure that had been functioning well for decades and looked like it was in decent enough shape. They figured they would just need to do some alterations here and there, and the house would have that fresh, updated look they wanted.
Yet, most of the time, they pull one part of the wall or cabinet apart and discover more damage than expected. Sometimes there would be so much it threatened the integrity of the structure itself. So their choice was to either rip everything out and start over from the rafters and frame…or condemn the structure. There was no way to “remodel” without “ripping it all open.”
The period of 2018-2019 was that decisive moment for me. I’d done a lot of emotion work over the decades of my life. And even the last year I had done a tremendous number of EMDR sessions. So while it wasn’t perfect, it was decent. If you didn’t dig too deep. So I could have stopped there.
Yet, underneath the surface, I sensed a bigger problem. The question was, do I “open the wall” or just slap on a coat of paint and call it done?
It was that moment in life where I had to look at it all and ask, “Is it good enough? Have I gotten what I wanted out of my work?…essentially, “Am I done?”
Dreams are a weird mix of things from the past and present, wrapped up as metaphors that are weapons against ugliness and that give truth…then…healing…if you can endure them.
The nocturnal performances
One thing I have learned is that many of my dreams are about my psyche trying to process something I either can’t remember or can’t handle consciously. I have learned that very early abuse experiences are often not remembered as a “movie narrative” but as uncomfortable body feelings and flashes of an image or metaphor.
I think there are those dreams that are not coincidental. I’ve had a lifetime of those. Instead, they put on a nocturnal drama that’s a riff on something from my life. The plots and characters are formed around unresolved issues, trapped emotions, and terrors from things done but not consciously remembered. And some of those “performances” have been stuck on replay for literally years, either trying to tell me something, release something…or process it.
There are many familiar ones that have been regular occurrences going back decades — to at least to my twenties. Maybe earlier. I can’t remember when they started, but do I remember what’s in them? Oh, my, yes. My journals are filled with their details. And many circle the same disturbing themes.
Most of the time when I’m having nightmares, I don’t think I wake my husband. But he has told me that there are nights he hears me tossing and turning, or muttering in my sleep. And occasionally I have yelled out. So, it is a fair thing to say that, for me, sleep is often not a respite from my traumas. Just a different theater for their performances.
As I return to writing about the deep work I was going through as I struggled to understand my past, it’s easy to question if anything is getting any better. If I had any doubt of progress, though, a recent incident in a doctor’s office showed that I am growing in self-caring and empowerment.
That most “inappropriate” appointment
The medications I take can have an adverse effect on my metabolism. That can work against me for healthy blood sugar levels and weight management. I have been following a diet and exercise regimen that is helping, but I wanted to see a specialist in this area to see if he felt my progress was on track.
At the office, we waited a long time, but eventually, we were called in and taken to a small examination room, where the nurse took my vitals and the usual other things they do before the doctor arrives. She was pleasant, finished up her work, and said that the doctor would be with us shortly. We waited a fair bit longer, but finally, there was a knock on the door, and the doctor strode in. He was followed by a young woman.
Right from the start, the energy seemed off. He quickly introduced himself and started to brush past me. Trying to observe the usual “niceties” when meeting a new caregiver, I reached out my hand to shake his, and introduced myself. He seemed distracted, almost put off by this. I handed him the clipboard of forms his nurse asked me to fill out, but he tossed it on the counter without even so much as a glance.
He started to begin the appointment, then caught himself. Waving his hand at the woman with him, he rattled off her name and said she was an “observer,” but gave no explanation as to why she was there. He just asked if it was okay with me.
I found it odd. In seventy years of doctor appointments, and over thirty-five of those as a medical professional, I’d never had a doctor behave like he was.
For one thing, I knew it was customary for him to provide some amount of explanation for the person, such as she’s a medical student, or a college student, or whatever. But he gave nothing. I didn’t care, but was put off by his attitude, which seemed to imply my consent would of course be given, and he was doing me a favor asking.
He stared at me, then at my husband who was with me, and with a surly attitude, asked, “Who’s this guy? And is it okay for him to be here?” It was not a polite or professional request, but almost an irritated one.
I was irritated at how he referred to my husband, and was a bit confounded by his attitude. But tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. I introduced my husband and noted that, of course, it was fine and I wanted him there. At this point, I felt somewhat on the defensive, but assumed I was reading it all wrong.
Soul Mosaic 