I M Perfect lady

Tag: disassociation

  • Love Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

    In the children’s book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C. J. Lewis, the youngest child during a game of hide and seek, looks into a wardrobe and discovers a portal to a mysterious world of Narnia.

    This is how I see the land of disassociation disorder.

    Where you have the ability to slip into a portal that takes you out of this world, into a pretend place where life is beautiful all the time.

    Escape, until it is safe to return, failing to record the happenings while we hid in the closet of our minds.

    This gives us a blackout affect or an on and off again visual of reality’s time line. What happed as we slipped through the portal?

    The past 6 years I have been dealing with all the stuff that went on while I was frolicking in my far away land, trying to go back through feelings and emotions.

    This reminds me of what I heard, “Emotions are time travelers.” So I use them as my vehicle to transport me back in time.

    Mostly it is to see what I missed, what spaces I left out, where I built myself without these crucial points.

    It’s like I had sculpted a life based on the land I escaped to.

    A very overbright rendition.

    Now I am bringing into my magical space all the stuff I ran from.

    Adding the dark patches and smashing the sunshine pretend images of love and kindness.

    It’s to find myself standing in the portal between both worlds, the dark and the overbright and re-creating what is real.

    On this pinhead in time, I have to sort everything from both sides holding them up to reality’s discerning eye, leaving behind my ability to turn straw into gold, and weaving the most plausible story.

    I am now without a magical closet where I can leave things on the shelf untouched.

    In the portal, the space or second between the two worlds, I live there now minus all magic.

    A convergence of both into one.

    Combinations of old fantasies and stark bare reality.

    The fantasies allowed me to survive, but in the end they were still fantasies.

    I now see the land, the brightness, and the fluffy white clouds of escape and thank it for welcoming me in as a child, for protecting me when I couldn’t protect myself.

    A space of refuge in a storm, I lived there for 46 years.

    6 years ago to this day, my magic closet stopped working, the darkness flooded my bright world, shattering all the fantasies in its wake.

    Flinging me into reality and slamming the portal shut, locking me out of the closet naked and terrified.

    Alone in the cold truth, everything I ever ran from came home to roost in that one second in time.

    All my fears were realized, all my feelings were validated, my mind’s disassociations clashed into one bang, fantasy met reality, and it was all wrong.

    Horrified I died as me.

    Dead but alive, another wonderful oxymoron!

    In order for me to live, I had to rewire and unravel and re-write the history of me, dissolving fantasy after fantasy, to find the me I had run from.

    I had to begin the long walk back to me.

    Uncovering and unwrapping the entire pretty pretend fantasies and sit with reality.

    Some pieces were harder to unwrap and see.

    Knocking on each door in my fantasy only to hear,

    “Love doesn’t live here anymore.”

  • Rejoin myself as One.

    How did I not know that disassociation was having two separate images that never touched each other?

    That you can literally section off pieces or roles and visit each, just not have a group session.

    I am the most surprised that I can see and feel them separated instead of in one chunk.

    Which is why writing even to my mother had me so unsettled and split.

    How fear and empowerment juggled to be felt, that I could literally feel both.

    What an oxymoron to be afraid and empowered!

    If you don’t bring both side together for a reunion you will always see them in a disassociated way, where their sins live separated from the one who clothed and fed you.

    My mother dressed in high morals was the incapable of turning away from sin, in my mind.

    My father, who worked hard to ensure we were clothed and fed, was incapable of hurting us, in my mind.

    The dance that they shared openly in public didn’t match my experience, and if I spoke and pointed out the fact that nothing matched, the oxymoron would have risen into view.

    Where the extreme opposites join and become one.

    One view, one reality, one person.

    Stripped of the separating eyes, a trick mirror that keeps both lives running smoothly, together but unseen.

    Disassociating two sides of one life.

    Running on separated tracks, two truths never meeting at one station of time.

    Incredible to witness how the affects works inside.
    Where there is almost two of me experiencing the world.

    Where I am split down the middle, one eye on a hurtful reality and one eye on a vanilla one, not willing or able to stay on either side, I flop from side to side.

    Staying disassociated always from one half.

    These past 6 years have been to rejoin myself as one.

  • A pocket of Unreality.

    What I think I have been doing in an odd way is by only looking at the criminal, I spared my ‘dad’.

    By focusing so much on the criminal aspects, I negated joining them with my father. I left the father part pushed far away, in a spot where crimes can’t touch him.

    I didn’t want my criminal to intertwine with my dad.

    I didn’t want the combo, the molesting dad.
    I wanted the criminal called Ray.

    This is a reverse of what I did as a child.

    The time has come to join the two together and make them one, a criminal dad.

    Then I become the daughter that he hurt.

    Not just a random girl, and he not a random man.

    The two parts merge as one; the disassociation now associates with both sides of the same mirror, no more trickery.

    I didn’t know that I had slipped the dad in a special spot, and only focused on the criminal, that I had still kept them separated inside.
    In my heart of hearts, in the fiber of my being I had separated them and never spoke of dad crime, just Ray crime.

    This is incredible to me that I had flipped and exchanged into my mental hiding spot, a dad.

    I hadn’t brought them together inside of me for reconciliation.

    Which is why in order to write a letter they will become one.

    A criminal dad.

    Even resorting to his given name or using the word father, removing the familiar comfortable name while addressing his crimes kept the dad safe inside.

    I would not have known that I was hanging on to a dad inside, that I immediately changed his name when the crime came in, yet there is no way to quickly alter the mind’s beliefs and thoughts attached to him.

    Now the time has come to drop the divider and let them hook up together.

    A little girl sits with a criminal dad; there is no separation or pretend space he can sit in, nor I.

    The restraining letter should have been addressed to my mom accomplice.

    What I failed to realize is I was separating them inside by addressing them by their given names, so that I wasn’t saying my mom did this or my dad did that…I was making my familiar into strangers for the crimes.

    This is unreal to me that I protected the child in me by not joining the two together, reversed from my childhood days, but nonetheless kept them separated.

    Perhaps a letter addressed to Mom and Dad is what is needed, to speak my peace now standing in a spot where there is no veil between the roles of mom and dad and criminal and accomplice.

    I never knew that you could do reverse disassociation, switching the good for bad or the bad for good, that the mechanism worked both ways.

    A pocket of unreality. Where real could hide and not be seen by me.

  • Annihilated in a Balloon!

    I could envision my self as a little girl and how she sits holding out her hands in shame again, for in them should be love and all she sees is fear.

     

    Fear and terror are in her hands.

     

    It feels like it is her responsibility to change that over to love, and no matter what she does or how hard she tries, what she tells her self, all that lay in her hands is fear.

     

    She is not good enough; she is unworthy, something is wrong with her, for she can’t get it right.

     

    Shame on you!

     

    I was totally confused and lost in the thoughts that fear and shame were tightly woven within me. 

     

    I was ashamed and in fear.

     

    When I pictured a young girl sitting there with fear in her hands and so shameful that she couldn’t change the feelings, it occurred to me, that ‘my little girl’ didn’t even have pictures in her head to know where the fear came from.

     

    She had feelings but no road map on how they got there.

     

    As thoughts came and went during the day yesterday, it came to me that my father changed my feelings I did not!

     

    A line in a song, “A little girl was waiting for her daddy one day…” came into my mind. 

     

    I was waiting for a daddy and who came was a man who hurt me. 

     

    He changed from being my daddy and so did my daddy feelings.

     

    In its place are bad man feelings and I can’t change them back.

     

    The tragedy is that I had love, trust and faith in my hands, and they quickly disappeared and terror took its place, a sleight of hand, a bad card trick, and I got left holding the terror card.

     

    I left the scene of the crime while the crime was taking place, but my body recorded the changes with feelings.

     

    Now as a little girl when she sees her ‘daddy’ and feels terror and she doesn’t understand why?

     

    Certainly something is so very wrong with her. 

    Shame on you!

     

    My whole body felt such utter relief to know that it wasn’t me who changed my feelings about my father, and it isn’t me that can change them back.

     

    It is up to him.

     

    My feelings will be stuck in fear unless and until he presents to me a man who acts like a dad.

     

    I am not responsible I didn’t do nothing wrong. 

     

    I was just a little girl who was waiting for her daddy that is all.  That is all…

     

    A little girl holding Love in her hands…that is all.

     

    There is no shame in that.

     

    I somehow felt I had to hide my fear; I was ashamed of my feelings.

     

    The near miss encounter with my mother, lunged me back into the feelings I had as a little girl, it brought me back to the feelings I had and still have today.  Nothing has changed within my body.  It is incredible that it registers the same.

     

    It is puzzling, how the feelings are similarly intense for her as with him.

     

    Somehow I felt shamed by her for my feelings I had for him.

     

    Disappointing her, her disproval reigned supreme as my number one thing I didn’t want to do. 

     

    Keeping her dream alive, “a longed for family” a father for her kids, I was guilty of not feeling the dream, yet I tried.

     

    Looking back at my life in this awkward review, I feel my life instead of see it; it was like I lived in a balloon that I carried.

     

    Up in the balloon I could pretend to feel what I didn’t feel.

     

    In the balloon, I lived annihilated from my true feelings.

     

    A life of pretend in a balloon, which never touched my body, for the string that held it away from me was called shame and fear.

     

    In order to get back to my body, I had to travel backwards and feel what I could bear to feel.

     

    That day in that dinner, without a balloon to protect me, I felt the electrical charge of fear wrapped around in a colorful ribbon of shame.

     

    With my big girl awareness and reality’s support, along with a friend named Ann, I felt what I needed to feel, the awkwardness of a child in fear sitting in shame.

     

    Shame is exposing your feelings of fear!

     

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    I had this quilt at the Gallery for sale and I took it back. For as I look at it, you can see  how she has to now live.  In the presence of her family she was made to live removed from her feelings….and if you see it from her view, she had to keep her real feelings away from her self, annihilated in a balloon! 

  • Associating with My Truth

    I have been fighting my body for so long, fighting with the feelings I have inside, tormenting myself as I struggle to not do, what it wants to do.

     

    I fought my body to be close to my parents.

    I fought my body to respond better to my parents.

    I fought my body to feel comfortable with my family.

     

    I was frustrated it couldn’t just relax, be normal, chill, and be a normal kid, a loving warm child.

     

    It was like there was an inbred system that didn’t respond correctly to the outside.

     

    It blew cold when it should have blown warm.

    It then blew warm when it should have blown cold.

     

    I felt best when I was far from my family. That is odd to know of yourself.  I could then relax and be myself.

     

    I am a freak of nature, for I don’t have the loving warm comfortable feelings I am supposed to have with family, mine are replaced with a cold standoffish chill. 

     

    So, I had to pretend what wasn’t within me ‘naturally’.

     

    The day that my father was exposed as a pedophile was the day I stopped pretending.  The cold fear within me was not unnatural, it was natural, and I was okay.

     

    I was okay within me. My feelings and my body were acting perfectly.

     

    I am perfectly okay and natural as an abused child can be.

     

    It is perfectly natural to fear those who harm you.

     

    There is annihilation between body/feelings and you when you are abused, and perhaps that is the real meaning of disassociation, we left our feelings behind.

     

    It was either annihilate the feelings or annihilate the parent.

     

    If you annihilate the parent you are out in the cold….

     

    To live in complete annihilation from your feelings and your body, is to live half alive.

     

    There came a fork in the road where I knew the cost that came with my self annihilation, the cost was me and many other little girls to follow. 

     

    When I didn’t speak up in fear of that man, he continued on.

     

    I was the imposter, I was the pretender, I was unnatural, and I went against my feelings to fit in.  I will not do that any more.  I will fit out and be shunned for associating with my truth.