C/TW: childhood sexual abuse (no details)

I’m sitting on my back porch as I write this, a light westerly breeze blowing in the 80F weather.  I feel as decadently privileged as someone doing the same thing on a marbled balcony overlooking the French Riviera, though something tells me I’m having a better time.  It’s taken a while to get to a place of relatively constant gratitude about most things in my life.  I don’t judge myself for having not been that way before, I had very valid reasons for not feeling particularly compelled to express or feel gratitude.  Now that I’m further along my Path, though, I’ve come to a place where I no longer want to drag around gratitude’s opposites, such as resentment.  No, the people who were responsible for that resentment haven’t been let off the hook (although they’re all dead, so what difference does it make?), but at least I’m not dragging it behind me anymore.

I still don’t know why I was doing that.  I don’t know what purpose there was to clinging to my anger and resentment.  I know enough about the psychology of the subconscious that there was indeed a reason and purpose to carrying that around with me for so long, I just don’t know what it was.  However, I do know that if I want to continue progressing from Old Me to New Me, I have to let all that shit go, because it belongs to Old Me, and she’s been resting peacefully beneath a Tree in my mind for quite some time now.

Now I’m in a place on my therapeutic Path that is good, but doesn’t feel good.  I’ve dug in the mental dirt long enough and deeply enough that I’ve gotten to a layer of very old, unacknowledged feelings largely having to do with truly acknowledging the gravity of some of the crimes committed against me over the course of my life.  With that acknowledgement comes a flood of anger, rage, pain, resentment, and most of all, grief.  It sucks, but somehow in the process of grieving comes the ability to let things pass.  One must grieve in order to let things pass, and in order to grieve, one must know one has lost something, and I have either lost or had taken from me a great many things in my life.

This is a very strange place on the Path for me, because I can tell I’ve improved greatly since beginning therapy five years ago, and yet when one comes to this place where one can really see and acknowledge all of the different ways in which one was broken, you suddenly feel shattered again on some level, especially if, like me, you find your mind revealing things to you which you had always feared and suspected but never had evidence for.

In my case, I had always wondered if the abuse I suffered at the hands of my creepy stepfather had ever extended beyond the molestation I consciously remembered.  After my Awakening five years ago, I would occasionally visualize poking around in the dark corners of my mind with a torch, looking for anything I was missing, finding nothing, but always feeling like there was something I wasn’t able to see.  Over the next couple of years, the sense that I had forgotten something became stronger, and impressions of what I had forgotten began to repeat with increasing frequency.

One day I was out driving and listening to music, as I’m wont to do, and Tori Amos’ “Cornflake Girl” came on.  I still can’t tell you what it was about the song (perhaps knowing Tori is an SA survivor), but as I drove down I-35 past downtown Austin, I was suddenly filled with the certainty, if not the explicit memory, of having been sexually assaulted when I was six years old or thereabouts.  The effect of this realization was like the “moment of clarity” alcoholics refer to: suddenly everything in my life up to that point in time made sense, as though I had dropped a missing lens into a handheld telescope, suddenly bringing a fuzzy picture into focus.

I do not doubt this subconscious realization, regardless of what Western psychiatry says about the phenomenon of repressed memories (they say it’s bogus).  One reason is because of the blank spots I have in my memories, which is odd for me since I actually have a rather impressive, near-eidetic memory.  I may not remember what I was eating for breakfast on the second Tuesday of March 1984 like some people can, but I remember way more than most, so for me to have a huge blank spot in my memory is telling.

I wish I could say that the incident when I was six constitutes the only blank spot in my memory, but it doesn’t.  I have others at the ages of 11 and 16.  I don’t need to go poking around with the mental torch to know why they’re there or what’s behind them.  On the one hand, it’s saddening and enraging to know these things, but on the other, it’s a relief to know what’s been “wrong” with me all these years.  Technically speaking, I have dissociative identity disorder in addition to my other issues, something very few people understand and typically only as “multiple personality disorder”, a terribly stigmatic misnomer.  Really all it is is one of the brain’s ultimate self-defense mechanisms, one I consider a great gift, put into place to prevent the mind from completely shattering.  It takes the traumatic memories, thoughts, and feelings and tucks it into a separate compartment where it stays, unknown to the person, until it’s triggered into manifesting by similar circumstances.  Fortunately for me, this only happens when I’m utterly terrified, which only happens in extreme and unlikely circumstances.

This is why I say that I feel more broken than ever despite having made such progress on my Path: one has to make a certain amount of progress before one is able to even handle the reality of how broken you were if you don’t want to shatter into pieces again.  It’s like looking at a hideous car crash and realizing you were in the car.

Now I’m doing the mental equivalent of checking my pulse: am I alive? am I breathing? do I have all my parts? what the fuck happened?  I feel like I’m in a bit of a state of shock on occasion as I survey the horror of my early life.  I used to tell myself that my home life couldn’t be that bad because I wasn’t being beaten with a belt, which I wasn’t, but in hindsight, the people who raised me had the same mindset as the belt users: they just used different weapons.

Knowing what I do about multigenerational trauma, I’ve had to spend a great deal of time contemplating how to feel about the people I grew up with.  My mother I have sympathy for because I know she grew up under similarly abusive circumstances, and it’s remarkable for me to be able to say that because I truly hated that woman for a very long time.  I don’t anymore because I’ve achieved a certain level of understanding and compassion when it comes to her.  I cannot say the same about my stepfather.  It may be that he was born innocent and turned into a terrible person over time, but whatever the case, I find myself unable to extend the same compassion to him, and I don’t think I should feel bad about that.  I walk a spiritual Path that connects me to my ancestors, to whom I am at least partially responsible for their healing, and they tell me that he is not my ancestor, and therefore I bear zero responsibility for healing his sick soul.

It has been this deep contemplation that has allowed me to release the resentment and allow the grieving process to proceed.  I find myself wondering what takes grief’s place when it’s over, but I know from internet memes of all things that grief never goes away, it just changes size and shape.

But yes, there is much grieving in my soul these days.

The 3-year-old missing her Daddy.

The 6-year-old missing her innocence.

The 11-year-old missing her safety.

The 14-year-old missing her youth.

The 16-year-old missing her autonomy.

The 17-year-old missing her home.

The 24-year-old missing her purpose.

The 30-year-old missing her dignity.

The 40-year-old missing her hope.

The 47-year-old missing her sanity.

While I am definitely not enjoying myself right now, I recognize this as a necessary process, one that will hopefully allow me to stop living in the past and let me live in the present without worrying about the future (too much).  Right now I feel like I’m still in something of a limbo state, stretched between what was and what is.  It makes it very difficult to truly live and enjoy what I’m doing in any given moment.  I have a number of hobbies and activities that I enjoy a great deal, when I’m not depressed or anxious about the past or the future, and I find myself spending far too much time dwelling in the Land of What Was rather than in the Land of What Is.  I’m not judging myself for it because I think  rumination has its purpose, but I’d like to get to real living now, not just existing.  I have books to read, articles to write, a garden to tend to, and paintings to create, and after the life I’ve had I feel like I’m entitled to spend my time that way.  Sure, I still have to pay the bills, do the dishes, and clean the cat boxes, but that’s all part of the beautiful life package.  

Maybe that’s the most important thing I’m learning right now.