But what is here today is important. How do I know this? Because, as I was trying to engage in an inner dialogue, as I was trying to puzzle this out a large hard blister formed in the front of my throat, just where I could reach it with my finger. It made swallowing immensely painful. So, for a few minutes, I stopped thinking, and the blister vanished. Scary multiple personality stuff, you know?
Ok - so let me try and begin from the beginning. Well, not the beginning beginning, but from the beginning of todays delightful experiment in head shrinking.
The Doc puts me in a trance state, first to begin working on the viscious dream and wine induced migraine I was sporting. After working on sensations for a while, he instructs me to tell myself that I love myself. Here is where I cease cooperating, but I tried. I couldnt do it. I just couldnt. So, he has me continue breathing, and tells me to keep working while he leaves the room.
The first thoughts that float into my mind is the words to the order of confession that we christians perform before holy communion... "I confess that I have sinned against you in thought word and deed. I have not loved you with my whole heart. I have not loved my neighbor as myself...."
After a few rounds of that, "She" began to appear for me. The little girl. The inner juvinille delinquent. The inner character who should be living permanantly in a psychiartic ward. She is wild, out of control. She doesnt accept comfort, nor affection, she lets no one touch us. When strangers reach for us, she not only reacts.... she is prone to hit them. She has no words, just need and desire and fear. She is dirty, and her eyes are ringed in black, and her hair is all over the place.
So, I try and comfort her. I try and love her. I tell her it will be all right, that I am there for her, that it isnt her fault, that she did not - ever - deserve what happened. I imagined cradling her in my arms. I touched her face, and pushed the hair out of her eyes. I repeated over and over and over - you didnt deserve this.
The Doc comes back into the room, and asks me to share. I tell him I dont want to, because he, being a psychiatrist, will just assume I am crazy. He assured me that he has already come to this conclusion. I tell him what I can, and we begin to speak of parts integration.
I told him I had tried to work with this part on several occasions, but her reaction to integration was that of terror... of being further rejected, and she just shuts down. He said maybe I am asking her the wrong questions, going to quickly... and that may be so.... and my hour and money was up.
While walking home towards the bus, I started exploring this encounter with this other. Now, most of these broken parts have been integrated. But, her - well... no. She is there, right underneath, near the surface, and in quite a bit of control of my life. Elaine posited that perhaps I am holding out on growing up, but... as I began thinking of this ungrown part, it occured to me that this goes a bit deeper than that.
I hate this bitch. I have done to her what every single person she has ever encountered has done. What every person she has depended upon has done. I have rejected her, betrayed her, blamed her, and scapegoated her. She lives in my soul in this state of isolation and need... and I have locked up all my fear, anger, pain, suffering, and everything everyone ever said was "wrong" with me into her.
You see... I went out and I constructed an alternate personality. I created this person the world sees - competent, intelligent, wise, caring, together, attractive, funny, socially acceptable. People generally like me, I am relatively successful. I am sleek, and groomed, and seductive... (not perfectly, but competently) - and this other person, well... she threatens the thin membrane of acceptability I have managed to fashion.
She is the girl who got left. She is the one who Daddy raped. She is the one who never had enough food, failed to thrive, couldnt play sports - the one who other children hated and who other girls picked on. She is the one who mom hated.
She is the one who believed her brothers, when from her ealiest memory, the would taunt her with
"Poor Shaun, nobody loves her, think she'll go in the garden and each some worms"
Yeah, they were teasing. But I beleived them. I took it to heart. Nobody loves me.
So I became someone else, and I left her behind in the dirt.
What is it about victims that makes us all hate them? She was never responsible for this... she got fucked. And when she turned to people for safety, they fucked her too. When others saw how fucked she was, they reviled her, shamed her, used her as a repository for all thier stuff, like the little sacrifical goat that the jews put thier sins upon and ran off the cliffs.
And I have done the same to the most innocent, helpless, and purest peice of myself. I don't WANT to be that girl... the girl nobody wanted. I don't want the girl that everyone betrayed in my life. She's got atrociously bad luck, if nothing else.
So, here we have the last piece... the biggest part of the puzzle. And I am like one of the other girls, picking on the weakest member of the tribe, in order not to be cast down myself. Doing to myself something I would never in a million years do to another person.
This is new information for me, and I dont know what to make of it... but "she" has the power to drive me to bad decisions, to prevent me from recieving things that we need to survive, and apparently the strength to raise blisters in my throat. So, WE had better find some solution to this... because this simply isnt fair, to either of us.
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