Soul Mosaic

“…survival…is not synonymous with wholeness. We don’t survive whole.”
Daria Burke, Of My Own Making

The Superfund site

“Something in me…screams…This is not all I am. I had something more in mind to do….We are reclaiming what another human being…decided to ruin, to take for themselves…Many of us don’t die. But our trajectories are forever altered.”
Jen Cross, Writing Ourselves Whole

And Cross goes on to so eloquently point out that they didn’t just TAKE from us; they left us with a MESS to clean up, comparing us to an “oil spill,” a Superfund site in need of cleanup that will never be quite the same. :

“We spend the bulb and blossom of our lives cleaning up a toxic waste site. Meanwhile, we watch our friends come into full flower: making connections, reaching out, writing books, making marriages and families, developing their crafts, their skills, themselves. We watch them build careers, and wonder what is wrong with us that we can’t do what they’re doing. But we are still salvaging the superfund site inside of us. We painstakingly wipe off every blade of grass and feather of every bird that is a necessary part of our inside selves. The oil is never completely eradicated. Some of the areas impacted never recover…never become what they ought to have been…And then we simply have to mourn their loss, grieve what might have been….Meanwhile, those who polluted us are allowed to continue…”

I agree with every word…and deeply feel the effects of both what was taken…and what was left…and what goes forward…

“The past is not the past…We all bring every second of our lives to who we are today.”
Andre Dubus III, with Melanie Brooks, in Writing Hard Stories – Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma

About costs

Let me first be clear… I have managed to reclaim a lot in life. And Cross notes the same in her book when she indicated that we can become a hybrid of what we were meant to be; that we can go on, go forward, and still thrive.

But too often society “glosses over” that whole in-between section, the blatant, cold, hard reality that exists in between “the abuse and the thriving.” So for once, I want to be very specific about just what this life of mine has cost me…about the fact that no matter how good we make it – there were…and ARE…costs we incurred.

And by “we” I mean not just myself, or other abuse survivors, but society in general.

But first, let me talk about my personal costs in this.

The vein of my life force?

When I first started working with this trauma therapist almost twenty years ago, all I could feel was anxiety and terror. I wasn’t even aware of the rage, just terror. Beyond that, my emotions, as well as any emotional power, were a flat line. I was not a fully open, fully expressive human being

It took ten years of regular work for me to even reach the place where anger might be a possible emotion in me. It took a literal lifetime for me to mine deep enough into my psyche to finally hit that vein of rage.

No question, once opened, there was no turning back. But then…maybe that was the point? Could it be that maybe my very life force…the one I’d been denied since infancy, was also there? The life force that is the “light side” of rage, and that could finally allow me to accept and embrace all of me, all of my life and being, fully…with love?

I only knew that once I started through that swamp of emotions, I had to keep going…because the rage had something to teach me.

THIS TIME, I’ll win…

I talked about proxy battles — re-enacting past moments of abuse or conflict by “fighting back” in some current-day situation — my way to win some kind of perceived battle in the present day. They could be some small angry interaction with someone in the grocery store, or whatever. But if I perceived insult or disrespect, especially by a man, I would “stand up for me!”

Even as I know I don’t want to get hooked by whatever it is, and on some level I know it’s ridiculous, there are times I just feel compelled to do it anyway. And even more weirdly, I experience a tremendous sense of relief if I “win.” And it’s not just relief that I “won”, but…that I FOUGHT BACK.

Then I came across these passages in the book Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman, MD:

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!

Before I relate the session experience, I need to take a moment to consider the question – Why rage?

Why did I carry white-hot rage toward my father?
And why did that need to be the first thing we tackled?

I will let the images do most of the talking here.

Who was he?

Probably best answered by the stories he shared with me on our weekend car rides, all of them disgusting or upsetting. Such as the one about abusing cats when he was a kid.

Unglued

In 1984, I was walking every night, trying not to kill myself. I had to start life all over again.
In 2008, I was afraid to get off the couch, and having an emotional breakdown. And again, I was having to start life over.

Both times, I was at the end of my rope, hanging by a thread, not wanting to be dead, but wondering what else there was in life, and if I had any value.

I was consumed by a level of anxiety I’d never experienced before. It was so bad, I was afraid to get out of bed in the morning — dreaded starting another day of pain. But I was too afraid to stay in bed. Yet I couldn’t wait for the day to be over so I could get back in bed, and when I did, I only felt safe on my stomach, propped up on elbows, watching the same video over and over again on a small portable player while Ed watched TV.

Almost every night for months, it was the Pixar movie, “A Bug’s Life.” It was safe, all the ants worked together, and there was nothing scary or provocative. And the best part, the part I wanted to be in, was the big sleeping chamber where all the ants rested, sleeping safely and comfortably in their little hammocks. It was snuggly, all of them there together, safe from any threats. Just the security of being there together with all of their friends. I so wished I could live with them.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Flannery O’Connor, story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

He woulda been a good man if…

It was that same book I was given by one of my elementary school nuns from her college English course. The one that opened my mind to the wide new world of literature. The one I drank up like it was water, and I was dying of thirst.

There was that one story in the book, though, by Flannery O’Connor, called “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I was both repelled by it because of its violence and unwillingly, but powerfully drawn to it. I could never let it go. All my life, it gnawed at me, but I never knew why.