I’ve had to employ a number of techniques over the last several years to deal with my inner demons and bad memories.  Sometimes these things happened on a subconscious level, without my really thinking about it.  Other times, I was acting more deliberately.  Carl Jung called the latter activity “directed imagination”.  I have had a tendency to combine both subconscious and conscious manipulation of my inner imagery.

Often what happens is that my subconscious will provide me with imagery, and then my conscious mind will run with it.  This is what happened with the metaphorical imagery I used to cage my demons and bad memories.  At some point, I started putting things I either didn’t want to think about or flat out couldn’t handle into mental lockboxes.  Lesser imps and demons were put into boxes that locked with keys, while more formidable mental foes were trapped in magical puzzle boxes of increasing complexity.

These lockboxes were themselves stored in a large wooden cabinet that lives in one of the mental refuges in my inner landscape.  Like The Doctor’s TARDIS, it’s bigger on the inside, so I can put as many boxes into it as I need to.  I didn’t know how many lockboxes I’ve put into this Cabinet of Horrors, but I couldn’t see the back anymore, there were so many in there.

The boxes were my conscious mind’s way of dealing with memories I couldn’t handle or didn’t want to deal with for whatever reason.  It was something I did with will and purpose.  I had bigger demons, though, ones my conscious mind could not handle.  For these demons, my subconscious mind overrode my conscious mind and put those images and memories into a kind of floating closet that had no door, only a pair of black curtains that gently wafted with the breath of the demons that lay within.

This is where anything that happened to me that resulted in blackout dissociation was stored.  I did not know until the last several years that dissociation is even a problem for me, which makes sense when you think about it.  I mean, how can you know you have a problem with dissociating when the purpose of dissociating is to make you forget that something bad happened to you?

The Black Curtained Closet is where I subconsciously dissociated and stored those memories, while the Cabinet of Horrors is where I essentially consciously dissociated and stuffed bad memories into lockboxes even I can’t get into anymore.  I did not label any of the boxes since that would be counterproductive, and I don’t know which keys go to which box.  I’ve effectively hidden those things from myself.

And they will remain hidden from me.  I recently underwent a healing ritual in which the contents of the Closet and the Cabinet were dealt with to the best of the abilities of the healers in attendance.  They assured me I was right to hide those things.  As part of the healing process, it was necessary for me to experience very small doses of the original  memory, but without associated imagery or feeling, as little as possible anyway, so that it could be consciously processed with minimal trauma for the purpose of integration back into my psyche.

Just the tiny, defused snippets of what I experienced upon reintegration were bad enough.  I am not surprised whatsoever that my mind, spirit, and even my soul fractured into pieces when the original events occurred.  Psychiatry and psychology see dissociation as a sign of severe mental disorder, and it is, but I also see it as a precious gift of the subconscious mind, which I believe is always our own best friend, even though it might not always seem that way.  Dissociation is your brain’s way of saying, “You don’t need to see that, keep walking.”

I’ve recently learned another way that the subconscious is one’s best friend.  It doesn’t just hide bad things from us, it also hides good things.  Until I spent 8 solid years in trauma therapy, I didn’t think I actually had any happy memories because every time I went exploring my past, all I came up with was shitty memories.  Recent breakthroughs combined with going through a lot of photos have shown me I do actually have happy memories, they’re just buried underneath the shit.

I wondered for a long time why the mind would hide one’s happy memories from oneself, but then I learned about how the mind works.  It is at heart nothing more than a survival engine, and if happiness is not conducive to survival, it will make you forget it and even avoid it.  However, I also learned a lot about neurology and memory, and together with my own experience, I have learned that we never truly forget anything so long as it is recorded in the first place.  And even dissociated memories were recorded: they were just highly compartmentalized.

I finally got through enough of my traumatic baggage that happy memories began to slowly bubble to the surface.  It was like all of my happy memories were laying at the bottom of the ocean beneath a layer of decaying sludge, and it was only after scraping away that layer of sludge that I was able to free the happier memories.

However, scraping away that layer revealed yet another source of unhappy thoughts, feelings, and memories that I call the Well of Sorrows.  Consider it the Mariana Trench of the proverbial ocean of my psyche: a more than 7-mile plunge straight to the coldest and darkest Hadean depths of my subconscious.  This is where all of my unresolved grief and other feelings related to the various losses in my life have been thrown.  I didn’t have the time or energy to deal with them at the time the losses occurred, so they’ve sat there at the bottom of this Well, decaying and fermenting and sending up the memory equivalent of bubbles of toxic gas.

I first touched the Well many years ago when I attempted to write an essay for a magazine that took reader submissions on monthly topics.  I forget what the monthly topic was, but as I wrote, I became incredibly sad in a way that I wasn’t anticipating.  I found myself just sobbing at my keyboard, as though I had taken my finger out of a dam I didn’t know was there.  I avoided exploring my memories for a long time after that.

Then came the Zombie Years followed by my Awakening, at which time I got into therapy,  mostly because everything I was reading about awakenings of any kind was that it was of prime importance to get oneself a guide or guru of some sort.  After about half a dozen of these Universal messages, I was like, “Ok, ok, I’ll get a guru.”  I had no idea how to find one, though, so I just opened my mind and asked the Universe for guidance.  Instantly, an image of my therapist flashed in my mind from when I had seen him 5 years previous, accompanied by a loud voice saying “THAT GUY.”

I wasted no time in seeing if he was even in practice.  Luckily for me, he was, and I began the arduous process of shedding my conditioning and processing my incredible load of traumatic baggage.  I always managed to steer clear of the Well of Sorrows, though, the place where the deepest hurts had been thrown to fester.  The other layers had to be taken care of first, like an archaeology dig.

I actually did most of that work on my own outside of session, because I am still so closed off from other people on a one-to-one basis that I cannot speak or cry about my worst memories in the presence of another person.  Not until recently, anyway.  At my last session, I spoke openly about a rather nasty incident from my teen years that has always bothered me.  He asked why now, and I realized it was because my trusty subconscious had decided it was time, based on the previous trauma work I had done.  It decided I was ready to talk about that clearly without going to pieces, a decision marked during the aforementioned healing ritual by the retrieval of the soul fragment that went with that memory.

And I was ready.  My voice was wobbly and I laughed nervously throughout the telling of my gnarly tale, but I told it.  And now it doesn’t haunt me anymore.  I am having to deal with the emotions from that time, though, the ones I couldn’t deal with at the time because I was a sophomore in high school and just had to keep going on with my daily life.  Since I was 14 at the time, I’m currently feeling that age: sullen, depressed, irritable, and isolated.  I’m also feeling the emotions related to the traumatic event: shock, disgust, numbness, fear, anger, and resignation, all rolled up into a big, spiky ball.

Somehow, though, I still feel better than I did before the retrieval of the broken soul fragment and the telling of my story.  My therapist told me to take care of the inner 14-year-old that was retrieved and give her what she needs.  I’ve been trying to think of what that is.  14 was a horrid year in my life, just one fucking thing after another.  That kid needs a lot of things, starting with friends and fun, two things I had none of at that age.  I saw a lot of movies by myself that summer.  The sorrow of the social life I never had as a kid is another thing sitting at the bottom of the Well.  My virginity lost to questionable circumstances that year is yet another, and that’s all in addition to the gnarly story I shared in therapy.

I don’t go fishing in the Well for things to pull up and consider.  My subconscious does that and hands things to me when it feels I’m ready, and I rely heavily on my intuition to guide that readiness.  Getting me to remember the power of my own intuition may be the most valuable tool therapy has given me, because once upon a time, I knew.  Time and trauma conspired to make me forget, though.

The Black Curtains are now pulled to either side, and the dark closet behind them is now shining with light.  There is nothing inside to make the curtains flutter.  The Cabinet of Horrors has a back again, and all that is inside are a few boxes that were locked so tightly even the healers couldn’t get inside them.  I feel lighter inside, as though I am no longer carrying heavy burdens I have been lugging around for decades in some instances.

I’m still healing, though.  Just the plain, defused knowledge of what was behind the Curtain and inside the Cabinet is enough to induce numb shock.  I’m surprised I’m still alive.  Goddess knows the odds do not favor my continued life to or past this age, but I hear Han Solo in my head: “Never tell me the odds.”

I did not used to appreciate my existence, didn’t see what was so great about surviving.  Now that I know what I’ve survived?  You’re goddamned right I appreciate my existence now that I can see the demonic body count I’ve left in my wake.  My spiritual skeleton is an alloy made of adamantium and unobtainium, my muscles are fusion reactors, and my skin is made of dragonglass.  I don’t need any weapons, because I am The Weapon.  Bring it on, motherfuckers.

and the things that they fear
are a weapon to be used against them

Rush – The Weapon