Today started out sunny, at eight thirty the sun was a pool of molten gold spilling out low between a thicket of black trees. Little spills of sun light lay splashed on the trampled snow in the woods, illuminating the tracks of deer and squirrels. There was a pale blue sky and rose and gold clouds lying along the western horizon.
Unfortunately, in the time it took me to drink my morning cup of coffee, those clouds had grown until they had shut everything in. They do that around here a lot, it's very disappointing. I guess I'm used to Colorado, where the sky is so huge that you can see clouds so far away you know they're paying taxes in another state.
But here! Turn your back for one minute and the decorative little pink clouds will have mutated into a dense, depressing cloud cover not thirty feet above your roof top.
Anyway, on to other things. So the last time I was at my therapist's office we merely chit chatted. I mean, it was enjoyable; I like talking about myself. Especially to someone who's paid to be interested, you know? There is just no audience so attuned to one as one's therapist. One's mother, if one is lucky. (Which I am- hi mom! Love you.)
Actually, I'm not quite sure why I still need to go. She asked me on a scale of one to ten, how much did the abuse bother me now and I figure it's about a three. How did that happen?
I think it was in part because one night, when things were pretty intense in the therapy, I gave myself permission to let go of any other repressed memories I might be holding on to. I thanked myself for repressing them, for protecting myself by holding them back, but I gave myself permission to let go now.
It was really terrifying to do that. Before, I just handled what memories were coming up for me in the EMDS therapy, or what had been triggered in the course of daily life. Under no circumstances, before now, would I have actually been ok with just allowing memories to surface on their own, as it were.
Memories did come up when I gave myself permission to release them. But just because I remember them doesn't mean I have to live it all over again, it's finished. Now I don't have anything inside of myself to be scared of. Giving myself permission to let go was incredibly healing, I was telling myself that I am ok, that I can handle what happened to me. I'm no longer the victim, I'm the victor. Bring it on.
That was one part. Another part was releasing myself from guilt associated with being abused. Being abused impacts every part of a person. It impacts thought patterns. A lot of abused people suffer from what it called automatic responses.
These can be physical responses, they can be emotional responses and they can also be unwanted or intrusive thoughts, usually of sexual behavior or actions that the abused person would never want to see or experience but which get played out in their head. They can't control these thoughts, they are subjected to them.
Now, you have to understand that I was raised in a church where it was commanded to control one's thoughts. It wasn't enough to control one's actions, one could sin merely by thinking. That church was my whole world.
Can you imagine how it must be, to be a young, innocent girl who has been raped and abused by her elder uncle, subjected now to thoughts outside of her control, thoughts she can't place because the abuse has been repressed, and being told by her society that she must control those thoughts, or else she's not being pure, the holy grail of spiritual perfection?
I was already subjected to guilt. I had already assumed the guilt for being abused in the first place. I already thought of myself as a dirty, nasty person without really know why, I just knew it, deep down inside me.
Sometimes I wonder how on earth I managed to survive with my self intact.
"Have you ever stopped to think about how much ego strength you have?" my therapist asked me this week. She talks like that; she talks about things like "my ego state." I like it, it makes me feel erudite.
Anyway, yes I have stopped sometimes to wonder about that and where on earth it comes from. I don't know where it comes from; I have to assume that God created me this way for His own glory. Also, we're each born with strengths and weaknesses, if we invest over the years in our strengths, that strength is then going to grow and grow. I just kept on making the choice to live, to live as fully as I could at each stage of my life.
So, I was reading "The Sexual Healing Journey," and that's where I read about intrusive thoughts. It. was. astounding. In reading that section, I understood, in concrete terms, for the first time that:
a. I wasn't alone in struggling with them, and
b. they did not belong to me.
I can't describe the amount of freedom that swept over my soul in understanding that. I brought the book into therapy that week and read that section.
"I have those thoughts!" I cried out loud, jabbing the page with my finger. "I've struggled with that all my life! And it's because I was abused! It's not about me; they don't belong to me, they have nothing to do with who I am as a person."
My therapist was thrilled. She further described that thoughts are like birds in the sky, you can't control them. The point is to make sure that they don't make a nest on your head, by obsessing about them. The thing to do, is what my father always said, to have neutrality and altitude. To notice and pass by without judgement.
That was a very exciting therapy session, I gotta tell you. I was on the edge of the couch the entire time, bursting with new ideas, arms waving, eyes flashing. I had thoughts, thoughts, thoughts.
"I don't have to feel guilty!" I declared, joyously. "I'm not guilty! I'm free of guilt!...well," I paused, looking up at my therapist with amusement. "I don't know...I've never been completely free of guilt..."
"Who knows what might happen if you don't carry around all that guilt, huh?" asked my therapist, teasingly. "It's scary!"
"I know! The freedom! All that freedom cannot be good for a person!"
The great thing is that we both got the joke. To a person like myself who has hedged themselves in by guilt all their life, who used the guilt to control and to motivate-giving it up completely is both exhilerating and frightening. But I do think that that is what Paul meant when he wrote, "There is now no more condemnation for those in Christ."
Anyway, since that session everything has been better than before. My therapist assures me that because I have reparented myself so well, I'm going to be an even better parent to my actual children; I'll be more self aware, deliberate, compassionate and patient.
I love to think about that; that all this work I've done benefits not just myself and my marriage, but my future children as well. My children won't carry my genes on down through the generations, but instead their heritage will be freedom and integrity of person, a work that was begun and carried down to me by my own parents. What a great legacy that is.
