Finding the Center

(caution: struggles with self-injury and mention of suicidal feelings)

What follows are some pieces I have written about my recent journey. The links are to pictures I made on those dates.

Something like a year-and-a-half ago, I told my mother I was getting new memories. I told her it involved my grandmother abusing me, and as an example, I said that my grandmother told me that my mother didn't love me.

My mother's first response was that she didn't believe me, but we went back and forth on it over several months and she came to accept it in essence. I said I didn't know whether to tell her more, and she said she wanted to know when I was ready to tell. By then it was fall and we agreed not to deal with it until after my parents had moved.

A long period followed when my mother didn't bring it up, and I didn't either because I was getting bad memories about my mother and telling seemed more problematic. Then, early this fall, my mother said that if I wanted to tell, she wanted to listen. I tried to work on setting it up to talk with a therapist near where she lives, but in the end my mother was uncomfortable with the idea of doing this with someone neither of us knew or trusted.

She kept suggesting we do it with my therapist, but neither he nor I wanted to do that. I decided there was validity in her not wanting to do it near where she lives, and my therapist and I talked about it and I decided to ask the priest of my church here if he would provide a safe setting for such a discussion when my parents came to visit for Thanksgiving. He and I had a good conversation about it and worked out what we expected.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I got back from a stressful trip to Washington and messages not to tell hit me much worse that I expected. I wasn't quite on my feet to go get a knife to hurt myself, but I was close.

When I talked to my therapist about it, I came to understand the goal of telling is just to break the spell, to finally violate those "don't tell" messages. I decided that I didn't want to tell about my memories of abuse by my mother and that I didn't want to get into being angry at her.

Thanksgiving went okay, but as we got near to the appointed time Friday afternoon, I couldn't understand why I had ever thought of wanting to do such a thing or what it could do but cause my family to reject me completely. My therapist was out of town, but he had actually expressed that he thought I should do this (rare for him), and that sustained me.

The meeting itself went as well as I could possibly have expected. I started by saying that what I needed was just to tell, and as I spoke it became clear to me that what I needed to tell was not a lot of details, but rather the feelings that I was so dirty and that if my family ever knew they would send me away.

My mother's first response was that she didn't see when there was an opportunity for these things to happen. The priest spoke to that, in general, and I spoke to it a little in particular and my mother settled down to accepting what I was saying and responding more on the lines of what had she done wrong. The priest and I both tried to reassure her on that.

Later on, my mother said something about how my grandmother liked to give me a bath and put me to bed. I actually talked about a particularly gruesome and bizarre memory because that expressed my feelings so clearly, but I said it was one I had trouble believing myself and she could take it symbolically.

My mother seemed to assume that the bad stuff happened when I was very small, which surprised me (I would have thought that was the harder part to believe). The priest asked me about telling my mother as a child and I said I didn't want to deal with that too much. But I did say that I remembered telling her that I didn't want to visit my grandmother because she hurt me in the bath. And my mother said that the possibility of sexual abuse was so inconceivable to her back then that she could see she wouldn't have understood what I was telling and she probably wouldn't have understood even if I said my grandmother hurt my private parts.

That is a sampling of what seems most important right now. My mother said that she could only take a lot of the details symbolically, but she really seemed to believe the essense--that her mother had sexually abused me. I had hoped she would respond that way, but all the people I talked to about it warned me that she probably wouldn't believe me. I guess I got everything I realistically hoped for. I knew I wouldn't get the kind of emotional support I long for--she didn't cry and didn't reach out to me until we stood up at the end. What I (child) long for is for her to keep reaching out to me even when I push her away. I raised the question of whether we could go further with this process, and my mother said that she is 68 years old and it is too late to examine her life. However, she seemed to be willing to do the same kind of meeting again if I had a need.

It went so well and yet after my parents left (after visiting a couple more days without any particular problems) I felt so bad. Somehow, it proved that my mother never would give me the overwhelming love that the child felt was the only possible rescue. I spent several days really quite overwhelmed with pain and grief, and it still hurts to write about it. I also felt very disoriented; I can't make sense of the change in my inner landscape resulting from having told.

Meanwhile, the last month or so in my work with my therapist, I have been moving into teenage feelings. I had a hard time accepting the projections that go with that--feelings of love/sexual attraction towards him. But then they got balanced with some teenage feminist rebelliousness--it would be funny if it wasn't so embarrassing.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I wrote a lot about how my image of what it means to be a woman is that I cannot protect my boundaries. Being female means being invaded and means loosing myself to please others. I remembered reading a radical feminist book in college (Ti-Grace Atkinson) that argued that sexual intercourse inevitably carried a symbolic meaning of rape. The odd thing is that I went back to the book and I can't find her saying that.

It is beginning to go deeper now to issues of trusting my therapist and of the fears of the teenage feelings that showing the deep vulnerability (the child need for love and acceptance I carried as a teenager) will lead to further abuse. I don't know what will come out when I do trust.

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