Soul Mosaic

Writing this first draft of my memoir meant traveling back through many “previous lifetimes” and versions of myself. So much struggle, so much learning, so much assembling of all the tools that would be needed for the most challenging portion of my work — these last eight years.

The work of these last four years has been possible only because of all that earlier work. And these have been the ultimate challenge – opening those last padlocked doors of my psyche to shine light on the places never before confronted…either out of fear, or because I didn’t even know they existed. I only “felt” the pain vibrating out of those shadows. So I had to choose – stay with the pain or break down those last walls. That required a level of courage and strength that was only available because of all the work that came before it.

Now, I am about to begin this last phase of Carl Jung’s spiritual alchemy – the Rubedo, or red, fire part. It is the “me of now,” the me of decisions and answers, but also more questions, especially: “What do I feel and take away from this long journey?”

A friend noted that as she read the last of my recent Citrinitas posts, she heard my current voice returning – the person she knows right now. For so long, the voice was of so many earlier versions of me.

Her comment got me to thinking about “then and now.” What new horizons of me were showing now, compared with the “me of then?”

Then

Journal: July, 2018
Prologue: The Ground Rules

How’s the water?

By this point in my posts — in this “Citrinitas” section of researching and learning — I’ve written a lot about the tools my father used…and how they affected me. But homes are systems, family systems, which means that anyone living in that environment was harmed by it.

Most have heard the metaphor of a frog in a pot of water that is being heated so slowly that by the time the water is hot and the frog is cooked, it never realized what was happening. That was us. We were all living in our “family pool of water” and didn’t even know it.

I say “family water” as a reference to our home environment. And the “water” metaphor comes from a story told by David Kenyon Wallace in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College:

“Two young fish swim along together and pass an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish keep swimming for a little while, and eventually, one of them looks over at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” [1]

You’re in it…affected by it, and you don’t even know that it’s there.

Little bites…

How did Dad manage to gain control over my mother, and then us?

Do I wish my mother could have married someone else?
Do I wish she could have seen through his manipulations and left him?
Do I wish she could have had options, fought back, or protected me?
Do I wish she had been able to take on the fury of my father’s mental torture and survive?

Yes, to all of the above. But I have grown to understand, especially with all the things I have learned as I write, that she couldn’t do that. She was ambushed, abandoned, and battered. She did the best she could.

I can also take comfort that there are strong women who have been able to fight, help, and bring more awareness to this topic.

The strong women

I have a folder of articles about strong women. One is a Washington Post article about a Mom facing jail because she was fighting court-ordered “reunification therapy” with her husband who sexually assaulted their daughters. Other women became fugitives, running from spouses and the law, to keep their children safe from a sexually abusive parent. And even nuns joined the fight.

The yearbook

She was beautiful. Radiant even. I’ve always loved this photo of Mom…such a face of youthful joy beaming out from her high school yearbook page. So much might have been in store for a spirit like that.

And yet, by that photo she had written a single word: “Hopeless.”

My God. What a statement. It just begs for clarification…which is too late to get.

Questions race. When did she write that? And why? Was it a lonely teenage girl wondering what life held for her? Or a self-deprecating joke with friends? Maybe a young adult despairing of her prospects for love?

Or…was it later? The scribing of a scarred and disillusioned wife looking back and regretting her choice?

Years later, I struggle to reconcile the picture with that word. In fact, I literally cringe at the word, pained to think that “Hopeless” is what she felt about herself.

Yet to look back now and know what her life became, was it the word that set her up? A chilling prediction of where the path would lead?

The battle formula to complete his control

Already on our “emotional knees” from his “behavior training, isolation, humiliation, and identity destruction,” we received his knockout punches from these next three “big guns.”

The formula for this part involves:
Intimidation + Alteration of Perceptions + Intermittent Reinforcement

Used simultaneously and alternated masterfully, the result is the abuser having absolute coercive control over the victims, while they form deep “trauma bonds” with their abuser.

I’ve already talked a lot about his intimidation tactics – getting in our faces, yelling, threats of violence, and actual violence. For sure, those were powerful. But their power was magnified exponentially by the other two. So I will focus on those.

Alteration of Our Perceptions

While this sounds like some lofty, academic psychology term, put in plain English, it simply means the abuser tells lies and, through his methods, gets the victims to embrace them as the truth.