These current entries are taking more time and thought to write. There were so many things going on simultaneously during those years, complicated and all knotted together. In order to share something meaningful and coherent, I have needed to reflect deeply and not rush the process.
In the last two pieces I wrote, I spoke of my husband and me managing many priorities, and just finishing the marriage-skills classes, as well as my finally ending a friendship that was not working.
To continue with the story thread, I will begin with the onion that is “therapy.”
The life of an onion
Onions can last a long time as they are. The layers of outer skin seal them off from the elements, protecting them from invasion by moisture, insects, bacteria, and all. So as they stand, they can remain intact, dormant, and unchanged, for a fair period of time.
Under the skin are multiple inner layers filled with water and nutrients. They surround the innermost layer, and the whole point of the onion, its core. That core is the living bud, the baby plant, that, once released, will become the new onion.
If we harvest the onion, it is those fleshy inner layers that provide us with culinary flavor.
If we instead plant the onion, each one of those inner layers will protect that core, feed it, and then disintegrate. Once all those layers are gone, and if the soil conditions around the onion core are right, it will form the new plant, and the cycle of life continues.
If conditions are not good in the soil, the whole thing rots and dies. So the outcome of an onion depends on the conditions it lives in.
And it was the same for us…
Peeling the onion
As the therapist explained, the whole point of therapy is to examine a problem, find out what is causing it, use tools, and the right nutrients and conditions to heal it. To discover the cause, you have to slowly dig down through the many layers of mess that life has piled on. Layer by layer, you remove debris until you hopefully can get to the center of it all.
He used the example of peeling away the layers of an onion. Quite often, the wound is deeply buried – at the core. Surrounding it are the layers of lifetime’s harms, abuses, and damage. And sealing it all off so you can’t get at the core easily, are layers of thick outer skin. If an onion core is ever to grow a new plant, all those layers around it need to be broken away.
And in a similar manner, if we were to change our lives, we had to break that onion open and start digging.
This made sense to me. If we wanted to heal and have a better life, we needed to excavate a lot of garbage, get to the core of the wound…or in our case, wounds. Then, with the right conditions, we could see what insights and wisdom we could grow.
Good conditions will yield new growth. Poor conditions and the refusal to do the work would let a plant, or our lives, stagnate, then rot.
The marriage classes had been a good beginning. It had eased the tension and polarization between us and gave us a process to “grow a new plant garden” if we were willing to keep going.
The huge onion that was both of our lives
Sometimes therapy doesn’t need a long time. Some onions are smaller than others, and so there are fewer layers to peel. And some onions are huge, because life piled on so much. That was my life, and Ed had his own layers, too.
At each visit to the therapist, I always had one eye on the clock. To say the clock was ticking was an understatement. And then add in the sound of a cash register ringing because we had such a long list of purchases. It is an unfortunate thing that such needed emotional health is often out of reach because insurance is unavailable for therapy, or the costs are just too high. Somehow, we made it work, for which I am so grateful.
We had so many questions, things to fix, lessons to learn. Time was the enemy as we battled to tackle as much as we could in every session. So many issues, so much time needed, so much money…
Our particular excavation
When you have been denied the ability to grow up and experience all the phases of life and emotional development, it leaves you with a lot of holes in your knowledge. I understood this and was determined to learn and catch up to other people my age, as quickly as possible. I wanted to be a good mom, wife, employee, and human being.
It isn’t easy trying to manage present responsibilities, catch up from the past, and prepare for what the future may bring, all at the same time. It’s like having to operate in 1965 at the same time I was doing 1995, while getting ready for 2000 and beyond.
I hated myself inside for what I saw as my “deficiencies,” my brokenness. I always felt “less” than others.
Ed would sometimes hug me and tell me how precious I was to him. I HATED it. I couldn’t hear the word “precious” and take it in as the loving compliment he meant it as. I loathed parts of me. In fact, it’s only now in my older years that he can say that, and I take joy in it. So it was clear that I had a lot of healing to do.
And that was just the surface layers of the healing. I was working full-out to heal what I needed IN THAT MOMENT, to be there for my husband and son. It was all about creating a good “present-day” with them, so the future for all of us could be different and healthier than the past.
As to those deeply-buried chambers of trauma? They were so unreachable in those years. For one, I didn’t even know they were there. Even if I did, there was no time for them yet. Our everyday life had its demands that needed to be dealt with first. And I think my subconscious, which was holding all that pain, knew it wasn’t time. So it would be decades before that core would surface and demand to be heard.
Shadows of things to come
About the only hint that deeper wounds were present was all the nightmares I had. Some were of pit vipers attacking me. Others were more blatant — dreams of being abused again and again and again, reeking of the shame I felt and the confusion over the fact that even as I didn’t want the abuse, when he did things to me, my body betrayed me and enjoyed it. The nightmares were the abuse being replayed in my subconscious over and over. Sleep was not a refuge. I will come back later to the topic of nightmares and how they have changed as I heal. For now, all I can say is that we didn’t deal with them. That was work for a later day.
Regarding the things I was experiencing then, they were part of the trauma and severe PTSD I have. But at that point, the therapist didn’t refer to it as trauma, and PTSD wasn’t spoken of. Those were topics of research just being discovered at that point.
The things we know now about trauma and PTSD, about the way all that pain is stuck and stored in our body tissues as unprocessed memories, and about the new methods of treatment, were unknown then. They wouldn’t come to our attention for a number of years.
We worked with the tools we had and did our best to peel back every layer of the onion that presented itself to us.
Revelations
Even as reaching those core issues was years away, there was still a lot of ground to cover. We continued learning about how to resolve our marriage issues. There were things to learn about how to help our son with his educational issues. And there were more things to share and understand about what my father had done to me, and what to do about him in the present moment.
I shared more details with Ed and the therapist about what had transpired all those years at home. Things I hadn’t even though to say before.
Hearing about moments like the family shower session, Dad molesting me in the car at three years of age, or other equally damaging incidents, the therapist emphasized to Ed and me, “You were never safe. Not ever.”
Those are chilling words to hear. The implication was clear — “not ever” meant right from that helpless infancy. Even as I had no “photographs of those moments,” on some deep level in my gut, I knew he was right.
The therapist also confirmed for us that, given my father’s lack of any credible therapy, he was a risk to our kids. His whole history pointed to him being a sociopath, with no remorse, and only concerned with his own wants and needs. And that he was incredibly successful at being emotionally manipulative.
Dad could be both loving and cruel. Manipulative and generous. It was such a mind-f-ck to determine if he was good or bad? Helpful but misguided? Truly Machiavellian?
It was so hard to wrap my brain around stark, harsh realities. I always knew that part of him was malicious. That was the part that abused me. But I also thought that there were parts of him that were good. Redeeming qualities. Like a good person who just can’t control one area of their nature. As ridiculous as it sounds, it was like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars sensing “the good in his father, Darth Vader.”
So it was such a struggle to face him as pure evil. WAS I reading him correctly? Was I being unreasonable in always standing guard and confronting him? Or was I really seeing the tip of an evil iceberg, and as such, had to stand against him for the kids?
As the therapist put it to us, “If he were all bad, it would be easy to walk away. But when abusers are a mix of loving and abusive, that is the hardest situation to deal with.”
And there was the fact that he was then in his sixties. With the arrogance only a younger person can have, you assume, “Maybe he is safe now. Changed. After all, he’s old now and probably isn’t interested in sexual things.” Being older now myself, I know that is a ridiculous assumption.
As to the quandary of what to do with him, I read a quote one day that nailed it:
“Adult children don’t just wake up one day and say, ‘I’m done with my parent, I don’t ever want to speak to them again.’ Making that decision usually takes years and many failed attempts to heal the relationship. Cutting off a parent comes with immense grief and lots of shaming.” – Genesis Games, LMHC – The MindJournal
I will speak very shortly about “family systems,” and just how true this statement is. For now, I will simply say I tried earlier to just cut off my family. That didn’t work. It isn’t that easy for a variety of reasons, as the therapist noted above. Yet, being around and just “going along to keep the peace” wasn’t the answer either. Connection was on a case-by-case basis. So, so hard. Thus, we had a lot to contend with in terms of my father. Soon.
Given all of this, it is no small wonder we were doing a lot of therapy…and needed to.
Another “onion” area
If all of that wasn’t enough, there was one other area of my life that presented problems – the offshoot of Dad’s programming in me to despise the “power of the feminine” in life — my broken relationships with women.
How to “do friendship?” COULD I trust a friend? SHOULD I even bother? While I had ended one friendship that just wasn’t right, I had other friends and was struggling with those relationships. Within me was a battle that both longed to have other women in my life and my terror to never let another woman close.
So that came under the microscope, too…
Soul Mosaic 