I am headed into a battle; a battle to win the war of gaining my intended life. I am working to find my purpose. I was simply not created to mop up the need of my abusers. God has a much better plan for my life, for all of our lives.
For the last 3 to 4 months I have felt a nagging in my heart to no longer work around my core feelings by focusing on symptoms. Not that I am finished with symptoms, but I really believe if I do not get to the center, the symptoms will stick. I could stop right here and still be able to live an okay life, working around the damage of the abuse and maybe moving further past it. However, I do not want an okay life. I want the life I am meant to live, the one God created me for. I need to feel whole and fully experience life.
Compartmentalization of the abuse is a defense mechanism. There are compartments holding memories, emotions, and self-protection. While I have cried and experienced feelings about the abuse I had to stifle, there was always a part I did not touch, avoiding the core driving my life and decision making.
About a month ago, after great personal physical harm was experienced, my counselor and I decided it was really time to excavate, to dig into the core. He asked where I wanted to start and, much to his surprise, I chose to start with the most destructive emotions. There were a few reasons for this. First, I had pretty good control over the anger, sadness, and over protection. Second, I was starting to spiral down from the destructive thinking and there was a very real threat to my physical body as well as emotional stability. Lastly, if I could survive getting to the core of harmful emotions, it would put the others in a different perspective and possibly be less painful to work through.
The lies we believe are hurtful and deceitful. Any cutting, toenail removal, or other painful physical action I took was driven by the lies. For the longest time I was able to keep them under control and not really expose myself to origin. I hid from them out of fear of experiencing the incredible pain.
I created this monster of lies within. My abuser (nickname Junior) told me the sexual abuse was my fault. If I was not cute, sweet, or pretty, he would not do those things to me. Junior was excellent at convincing me he just could not help himself because I was so desirable that I was the instigating factor. I made him a bad person because I was purposely tempting him and therefore responsible for all of it. I was 3-½. Even now I can hear Junior feeding me these lines. I shoved all those “responsibility” feelings and lies into a compartment. Without being conscious of it, I was punishing myself for causing the abuse, for creating a monster forced to sexually assault me based on my actions.
My therapist’s intern, who has participated in my sessions, made a casual remark that struck a nerve. She wondered if I also acted out of un-forgiveness? Was the inability to forgive myself lowering my resistance, inspiring the physical harm because I felt I really did deserve it? It was ultimately decided to explore this in the next 2-hour session he had available. There was concern a 55-minute session would not be enough time to “regroup” afterwards and the goal was to avoid cutting or worse. With the longer session there was time to recover if it got really bad. For the record, there was not any pressure to actually do this in the 2-hour session. It was completely up to me how it went. If I deferred, it was not a big deal and the time would be used for other issues.
In the few weeks leading up to the longer session I started to write down the possible negative emotions behind the self-destruction. Once I had the list, I put it aside and waited. I was nervous about getting too involved without proper protection in place.
The self-hatred was composed of my abuser’s lies about my being to blame and all the other negative emotions I have about myself whether abuse related. The list of hurtful emotions consists of un-forgiveness, self-hatred, vulnerability, intimacy, brokenness, and unworthiness.
My therapist gently took me through the basics of the emotions. He showed me how they are all lies. It was not my fault, so there is nothing to forgive. I did not create the situation or encourage it, therefore I should not hate myself. Vulnerability and intimacy are good things that were twisted and made to feel bad. It is going to take time and I have been taking steps to become vulnerable in safer situations and I am making connections with people I never had before. The abuse is not the only thing making me feel broken and flawed. There is nothing in my DNA making me less of a person, making it okay to abuse and/or hurt me. Something in the abuser broke and he sexually abused me, not the other way around. I am not less valuable because of the abuse. The feelings of unworthiness not only stem from the abuse, they also reach into my relationship with my father. After my parents divorced I did not see or hear from him for a long time. He essentially disappeared into his military career and new wife. My therapist helped me see his actions came from his own hurt and had nothing to do with me. Every child believes divorce or absent parents have something to do with them. If I was somehow a better daughter, he would not have left me behind. By the time the divorce took place I had been abused, adding to my feeling I was not good enough for my dad to stick around.
The session was the most emotional I have endured to date. It was raw, honest, and excruciating. I have cried in therapy several times but this time the pain and tears came from my core. I felt everything. I was sifting through devastating emotions and could not hide. Once I started the option of cutting the process off was out of my control. I was fully present, could not dissociate from it, and crushed by the power of the pain. After 1-½ hours my therapist and the intern stopped me and we talked about how to take care of myself when I left. Everyone in the room was drained by the end. I was safe and put back together at the end of the 2 hours, exhausted but no longer defeated.
Did recognition of all this fix everything? No, but some of the power is gone. The feelings were dragged into the light. Now I can see them and can sort through and reorganize, reshape, and put it them perspective. This will take time and a lot of work, more work than I really think I want to do. I am taking 30-plus years of damage and repairing it. Just as one does not gain or lose weight overnight, I did not wake up the next day all better. A lot of effort on my part needs to take place and I will need help to keep it all in proper perspective. I can do this and have been doing it a little at a time all along. I will slip along the way and have dig my way out, but I honestly think the cutting and other physical harm is over with.
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