Our book club is reading the book, "leaving the Saints" by Martha Beck…this section was particularly affirming to me when I first read her book about five years ago.
She recounts how her life began to make sense after getting the first waves of memories…
Her memory " I am five years old, my hands are tied, and my father is doing something that feels as though it's ripping me in two. I am stretched on my back, legs spread like a frog on a dissecting table, unable to see or understand what is happening, focusing as hard as I can on the cord around my hands, because it distracts me from what is happening elsewhere….The first horrific flashback was like a nuclear detonation. It felt nearly real as if I were actually experiencing the original event, as though the nerve impulses for perceiving it had frozen into the tissues of my body, never reaching the level of conscious awareness, and were now finally completing their long-delayed journey…"
She also writes about an extremely painful doctors visit that now made sense.
"I am twenty-six, lying in another damned emergency room. The Doctor has just told me that I waited so long to seek treatment for an abscess in the tissues of my perineum (look it up) that he's afraid infection might enter my bloodstream any minute. There is no time to put me under general anesthesia, so he gives me a shot of novocain in a very private place, then hands me a washcloth and tells me to bite down on it. "please don't hate me," he says, and starts operating."
"Numbed by the local, I don't even feel the first incision. But then he sticks a pair of scissors into it, and the pain is just absolutely incredible. I've never felt anything this bad, not in childbirth, not when a dentist accidentally drilled right into a nerve. I am positive that nothing could possibly hurt more than this. Then the Doctor opens up the scissors inside the incision, and I realize I was wrong. And then, oh Lordy. Then he starts to cut."
"Out of all my medical misadventures, this memory stood out most in my mind the day of my first flashback – not just because the injury was related to those badly healed scars, but because the pain during that surgery was the only thing I could compare to the pain my mind and heart felt when the flashbacks started. It wasn't simply the agony and degradation of being raped but, more, the absolute horror of a five year old who has just learned that the universe is ruled by an evil god and that this god seems to have commanded the most beloved and powerful figure in her life to destroy her in a manner much more devastating than death. "We all have our little sorrows," said my Allusion Manager, quoting screenwriter Ronald Harwood even at this awful pass, "and the littler you are, the larger the sorrow." Martha
What I find so remarkable is that the physical pain is of a lesser degree in devastation compared to knowing that your father is capable of doing such awful things.
That knowing is by far worse than any bodily discomfort. The body will heal and the pain goes away….but the knowing who your father is and what he is capable of doing does not go away.
No scar will form over this knowing…it stays an open wound.
What is also comforting in a very horrific way is how she too experienced the time travelers that brought forth the exact feelings from her childhood.
When my niece spoke up stating that my father abused her, my body responded before my mind could comprehend. It shook and was filled with terror in every cell. I knew without a shadow of doubt that she spoke the truth. I too could not stop the mental tumblers from clicking into place and my life began making sense in a horrifying way.
Her husband too was seeing her in a new light, she began to make sense to him…"That is why you space out when I touch you," he said. "That is why you scream in your sleep. That's why you can never really relax."
And while her direct honesty and openness about her abuse may be very disturbing, it is very comforting for an abused child of abuse. It Makes us make sense.
We make sense coming from whence we came…
Tag: repressed
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Coming From Whence We Came…
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Production of Evil
I am thinking Alice Miller may be one of my new favorite authors on Childhood and its affects as well as understanding why parents do what they do.
Here is what she writes on the back of her book, “Banished Knowledge”
“The JUngian doctrine of the shadow, and the notion that evil is the reverse of good, are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer…It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that evil is always engaged in producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is similarly avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil.”
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A safe place for Me.
The sentiments, feelings, expressions, emotions of this blog may appear childlike and perhaps unbecoming of a big lady like me, but what I have just realized, is that the healing I am doing isn’t about a big lady, rather that of a little girl.
The wounds that happened to me, happened as a young child, and what happens then the body grows big, but inside of me I am stunted and remain emotionally immature.
Expressing my feelings now, about events long ago, sound like I am lost in my past, but what is really going on is that I am healing me in my past and allowing my emotional body to catch up with my big lady body.
What is also very incredible is that an event today is orchestrated perfectly to heal a part of me that was hurt a long time ago.
The gifts that I received by my mother leaving a message on my daughter’s phone, is multifaceted.
Empowering, grieving, to seeing things I failed to notice, nothing happens by mistake.
Each event that stirs up emotions is here to teach, to bring a part of me back to me.
Just so you all know the little girl voice is a voice of little girl who had no voice growing up, and I am thrilled beyond words, that I have the opportunity and the vessel for her to heard.Whether another soul reads this or not, I am reading it as I write.
It is an incredible experience to speak as me and to hear me, to feel the sorrow and be the one to comfort, to allow tears to fall that have been repressed for years, to feel after so many years of being afraid to, I am talking to or as the little girl in each post.
What sacred space this is.
A safe place for me.
I M Perfect lady 