Sexual abuse?!

So my previous therapist - REBT but wonderful - gave me the strength to go for what I think I needed. I asked a colleague I like if he'd do Schema Therapy with me and he said yes. I feel safe with him and trust him implicitly and Schema has jut seemed like a good fit from the start.

While I was still seeing her and felt supported I had a terrifying nightmare in which a terrorist was breaking into my office and he was going to shoot us all, me in particular. Towards the end it was my father breaking into my childhood bedroom and a voice over said "This means he sexually abused you".

Around this time I saw a home video HE GAVE ME (probably didn't check what he had there) in which he ZOOMED IN ON MY ASS while I was walking for several minutes. I was perhaps 9? 10? 12?

I've always remembered he mentioned my nice, well-rounded bottom, spanked red by my mother when I was 2, 3 (the whole scene seemed to give him pleasure; I know in my bones I was seriously whipped by him, what my mother did was small potatoes, but this is less relevant here).

I remember being 5 or 6 and scared to wipe my own butt because he insisted on doing that. It took great courage and initiative and going potty in the darkness so he doesn't know to claim my right to do this on my own now.

I remember being as old as 7, 8, 9 and having to bend over naked on the couch so he'd put diaper rash cream on my butt?! My mother was there in the room, I assumed it was just strange and eccentric.

My friends teased me because he bathed me until I was 12 - I don't even know if it was true.

I can't be touched at night, it wakes me up in a panic-attack-like state immediately. I'm also terrified of anyone opening the door and walking in when I'm sleeping or trying to fall asleep.

I don't KNOW anything, but my father is a sexual maniac who owns all the women in his life and narcissists will do anything to anyone, it's not like they have scruples. I'm disgusted by him and can't be touched by him and I KNOW there's a dark secret no one can know or else I'll die.

When this colleague I trusted to be an effective ally against my NF said he'd have some time in September, I had another nightmare. After trying to get to my childhood bedroom - which was dangerous and difficult - I was finally there, but my father was breaking in through the window and the voice over again said "You KNOW this means he sexually abused you".

I haven't slept well since and it's been weeks.

I let myself entertain the possibility of this and it let me cry for days - my thought is "Maybe this is where the love was hiding all along - I was supposed to have loved him at some distant point in the past, and surely just being hit or demeaned is not what did it in, there's also a sleazy abject element to it".

Also, why I'm so uncomfortable with flirting and being sexy and noticing that someone is attracted to me.

Maybe also why I was masturbating compulsively at age 3 or 4 already, including in public. To relieve anxiety, among other things. Not just exploring my body like kids do, maniacally having to orgasm.

So I guess my subconscious let me have a tidbit of this because this new trusted person who could be on my side appeared?

I've been TERRIFIED since, unable to sleep. Like if I allow myself to remember this (I don't, I'm not claiming this happened at all) then I know something I'm not supposed to, something that will get me killed.

New Analogy

I have started to think about my early relationship with my parents in a new way.

I no longer - having, of course, first gone through such a long phase of anger, blaming, and analyzing, which I'm perfectly happy with - need to think about the "relationship" we had. Or them, really, too much.

I see it this way: yes, this early stuff, and love, and parents, all of this is very important. It's like developing language in children. If a child is not communicated with in early childhood, she will have trouble learning language.

Well, I realized recently that, no, my parents never taught me the language of love, but that, yes, I am able to speak it with others now. It's not easy, it's not my mother tongue, I make mistakes or just don't know how to express myself, but I'm slowly getting there. And this is all that currently matters to me. I don't need to think about the fact that my parents failed me in this department so much any more. I just want to focus on the department itself, because that's what matters.

Therapy helped with that. Mostly, my therapist helped me allow myself to not feel anything much for my parents. And be OK with that. Because I feel things for other people, which means I learned language later in life - which is harder to do, but not impossible.

My new version of the recurring dream in which I discover that I actually never graduated from high school and thus my university degree and graduate degrees are invalid? I go back to school, ask around and really, there are a couple of classes that I never finished owing to an error of sorts. I never really graduated. But, also, the administration overlooked this. They gave me a diploma. I officially and validly graduated, even though I missed some things. No one will cause me any trouble or blame me for not completing those courses so long ago, especially given how far I've come since. I can freely go on with my life and, in the dream, I choose to do so.

In my life, I choose to do so as well.

I'm where I am and will be focusing on that now. Working on my doctoral dissertation, embracing new career opportunities assertively, actively making friends with people I find interesting, enjoying my family.

Dreams, Lies, and Video Tapes

So, I'd asked my father to have some old family videos turned into CDs for me.

I hoped it would provide me with additional insights into my childhood.

 He brought them to me a few weeks ago.

I was somewhat surprised. I'd forgotten my mother and, looking at her, I felt more distant from her than ever. She seems weird, cold, too eager to sound loudly interesting and funny, or just vanishes into the background, despondently.

She's the one who'll taunt me and criticize me for her amusement in those videos. My father actually sometimes defends me. It's nothing big, for sure. Annoying pecks more than stabs.

But, I just don't like her.

I guess that's surprising. She died, then I discovered my father was a narcissist, then I remembered he was always the dominant one, and I somewhat idealized her posthumously. And I felt guilty for being duped or forced into choosing him over her when I was a child. Now I'm not so sure it was the worst thing I could have done. I just don't like her.

I've been telling people about this interesting discovery lately, most recently last night over some beers with friends.

So, this morning I had one of those vivid nightmares, the recurring one I've been having for years with some variations: I find out again all my work towards my doctorate is futile, as I never actually graduated from college. I have to go back to my final year. Nothing is a big deal, except for one course that I'd apparently just forgotten to take and thought of as boring and useless.

I now realize I can choose another course instead, and this time, being older and different, I choose, strangely for me, a course taught by a lovely, helpful, kind woman, involving baking colorful cookies shaped like snowmen and stick figures and cartoon characters. It was childlike and fun and you couldn't fail. I was happy to learn something that might help me make nice gifts for my family. I felt like a loved child being allowed to take this course. I hugged the teacher for being so helpful and she hugged me back.

She looked and acted nothing like my mother. This time, passing the missing exams meant finding a kind, loving, mother surrogate.

The dream continued by me going to my therapist and discovering someone else there, a colleague of his. He insisted I talked to him, so I started telling him about my mother and my dream, and he interrupted me:

- Stop blaming your mother! Stop blaming your parents for your problems and behaviors!

So I started railing and ranting and howling at him:

- I'm NOT blaming her for my behaviors! I'm only blaming them for not loving me, and for how bad that makes me feel, but me screaming at you right now is all ME, and my anger is all ME! And if you think I can't blame them for making me feel that way, don't you dare blame me for how you're feeling right now, being screamed at!!!

That felt good.

(I still haven't terminated therapy, as things are sort of still happening in every session.)

motherless daughters

She lost it again. She was in her daughter’s face, having a toddler-like temper tantrum. Except that she was thirty and a mother and should be able to control herself. And should be able to control her daughter’s behavior, at least a little bit. This was all she had left after about three hours of reasoning, begging, and sternly, but unpersuasively saying “Calm down. Now.” Three hours of threatening, pleading, and even hitting her. Twice.

The little girl was angry. Or scared. Or both.

“You’re not my mother. You stole me from my real parents. Admit the truth!”

Poor little Rapunzel. Seeing mother Gothel for who she is. At last.

***

Later, at night, her dead mother pays her a visit.

“You know,” she says, “You thought your father was sterile and we used a sperm donor to make you.”

“We did have a donor. We used donor eggs. I’m not your real mother.”

She’s smirking cruelly as she says that.

***

I don’t remember that cruel smirk from when she was alive.

I do realize this now makes three generations of motherless daughters. The sins of the mothers.

The third little girl

A knife blood everywhere I wash and scrub and hide the washcloth.

No one must find out.

Two little girls are still here. The older one is five, the younger two. They don't know a thing. They don't know what happened to the third little girl, the one in the middle, who's about three or four years old.

A detective comes. Horror as she finds traces of blood on the floor, on the bed, on the camera. Guilt and shame, I'm ready to confess to all my crimes, but then I remember – I only have two little girls. I never had a third girl.

"We've done a test," the detective says.

"The blood we found belongs to you." 






(My interpretation: This is when I was emotionally broken and basically killed. I was around 3 or 4. Because I think the way I am is my fault, I try to hide it. If I'm the third little girl, if the blood is mine, then it's not my fault. No more so than it would be my daughters' fault for anything that happened to them now. There's no need to hide anything. I'm the detective, I'm myself, and I'm the dead little girl, all at once. According to the dream, at least, I didn't do anything horrible, although I constantly feel like it. I never took that knife to my daughters. The worst that happened to them was they might have seen some of my blood and got scared. And I'm sorry about that too.)

Weird mom dreams

Again, amid clear signals for "you're in the land of the subconscious" (I descend a filthy stairscase stained with blood and excrement, and a gignatic half-serpent, half-lizard scurries across it), I enter a hospital and my mother is there. We're both sick and dying and I realize she's actually alive and we both stay alive and get better.

"Why haven't I seen you all these years? Where have you been?" I suddenly remember to ask her. It's been almost ten years since I thought she died.

"I don't know. Your father must have lied to you about me dying so he could get together with his girlfriend without you objecting."

And then, the other wierd mom dream alternative comes up - yes, she's dead. But I realize she didn't die of breast cancer. My father killed her. He wanted to be free of her and he killed her so he could be with his girlfriend.

I guess this is only normal. I'm pretty sure that's why Hamlet was seeing the Ghost - his mother remarried so soon after his father's death. The idea of foul play just somehow symbolically creeps up.

It's haunting. It's not just the first few minutes after I woke up that I was trying to remember what actually took place and what the true reality of the matter is. It still haunts me, days afterwards.

I know. I just know.

I had a dream a few nights ago where I was descending steep and dangerous steps to get to the edge of a deep and dangerous river where I could meet a fisherman who'd sell me a fish. Halfway down the steps, wondering whether I'd break my neck or drown, I realized I already had a fish in my hands. And it was a stinky, disgusting fish I didn't know what to do with. Nothing I'd like to prepare for my family or eat. I just looked at it.

The moment I woke up, I understood that this meant I already know my father is not my biological father. I don't need to do a DNA test - risking him discovering I know this and paying money for it - in order to find out. I already know. And I don't really know what to do with it.

My aunt recently remembered another tidbit from a long time ago (she digs stuff up from her memory, just like all of us do, in no particular order, as it all comes back to her): my mother told her, before I was conceived, about their fertility issues.

Apparently, instead of doing it the normal way - males go first, because it's much less invasive - my mother first underwent extensive fertility testing which revealed there was nothing wrong with her before my father agreed to be tested and, whaddya know - the test revealed "half his sperm was dead, and the rest of it was lazy," my mother told my aunt in the strictest confidence.

My mother told me as much when I was 18.

Short of a divine miracle, the only way in which my mother could have conceived in 1981 was via donor sperm.

I look nothing like my father or his sister or parents, and neither do my kids. Not a single little insignificant trait. A short glance at my kids next to their parents or anyone in my husband's family quickly and easily reveals those little familial similarities.

What difference does it make? Not much, really. But there are implications of this on my mind that I'll just have to share.

The Tiger Inside the House

I had a very vivid dream this morning which I knew had a connection with Kiki's brilliant grizzly bear post even while I was having it.

In the dream, there was a killer, man-eating tiger already in my home. As long as we fed him what he wanted and let him play with us the way he wanted, the worst we'd end up with were a few scratches and tiny bites. And we lived in constant fear that we'd piss him off and he would just rip us to shreds. I wanted him out of my home but there didn't seem to be a way to do that without seriously jeopardizing our very lives. There was just nothing I could do except humor the gigantic, frightening tiger. There was no rational way out.

I didn't tell anyone about my dream.

Today we all went to the store and I told my daughter she could choose one small toy. She picked a tiger. A tiny, puny, fragile-looking toy tiger made in China.

The moral of the story? I don't have a clue. It's just one of those coincidences you can't make up.

Persecuted

I just now realized that other dreams in which I was persecuted by a dark murderer may have been about my father too.

In one of them, a man with a gun is chasing me through a labyrinth. At one point, I get sick and tired of running away. So I confront him and tell him "Just go ahead and kill me." He presses the gun against my chest. He hesitates. So, looking him straight in the eyes, I pull the trigger myself. The bullet goes through my heart, which has gone all numb. I don't feel a thing. The ground just gets softly closer and then there's only darkness.

I've thought about it and I do feel my father as a truly dangerous man, with the potential to actually hurt me. I'm not sure to which extent this sentiment is irrational, but it's there and that's a fact.

A frightening dream

I'm at the computer and a man attacks my father, stabbing him in the thighs (very aware here of the symbolism of wounds to the thigh in mythology etc. - a sexual wound meaning sterility, among other things. My father may not be my real father, and some other man may have given him that particular sexual/narcissistic injury of not being fertile and not being my real father.) My father complains to me of being indifferent to his injuries, and I say in a cold voice "Oh horrible. Oh no." and start chasing the perp down the street.

Next thing I know, a horrible murderer is chasing me down the street, trying to kill me. I know all the time it's really my father. I'm in the witness protection program because I know something I shouldn't and the murderer wants me dead (many things I'm aware of now, including his infertility, that he wouldn't like publicized).

I enter a house where my chosen family is with another family I really like - a young married couple with two kids that I'm friends with. This is their home and they're hiding me. (I see them as good parents. I talk to them openly about my father and NPD. They get it.) At some point, however, the wife lets the murderer in and starts talking to him. I'm not sure if she does so in order to kill him or to betray me. But he's no longer dangerous after this.

Thoughts? One I have is: there's a lot of fear in there.

Back in school

Last night I was back in school again. I hadn't passed geography, history, and math, and now all my subsequent education is invalidated.

This anxiety dream has been recurring for years. I recently realized it meant I was missing an important step in my emotional and social development, and this invalidated my whole seemingly normal adult life with my family of choice.

But it means something else too. I hadn't faced problems and issues I was supposed to deal with in the past. I just ran away from them. I left my father and married my husband, but I hadn't dealt with him in my mind. I just sort of tried to forget him and the fact that I ever had a family of origin.

Last night, one thing was different. Instead of panicking and becoming depressed because I was supposed to study for high school exams with kids and a job and a thesis, I started dealing with it. I realized I had new, adult tools at my disposal. I knew where to get information. I didn't have to rely on the teachers. I could employ a tutor to help me.

Growing up means I am now an independent adult who doesn't have to be afraid any more. I can handle it easily now because I've really grown strong.

Another dream that only now makes sense

A couple of years ago, I had a dream that was so vivid and disturbing and felt so meaningful, but I couldn't understand its message then.

In it, I realize, to my dismay, that what I inherited from my father isn't a small apartment, but instead a huge house full of intimidating old furniture and all sorts of dusty old junk. We'd just been living in one tiny room, because that was all we could afford to redecorate, my husband and I, but then I discover the rest. Room after room after room of dark old junk. We'd never have the money or the energy to redo all that. And I didn't want to sell the entire house and just move. No, the house was somehow part of me and I knew I'd have to get to it in time. But, right now, all I could do was live in the small functional part of the house that my husband and I remodeled and seal the rest off.

I get it now. The house was me, and much in it was what I inherited from my narcissistic father. All the baggage I wasn't ready to deal with then. My marriage was the functioning haven in my life, and my husband was the support I'd have in the future in order to deal with all that, in time, when I could emotionally afford to and had the energy for it.

Well, here's to redecorating the whole house, opening it up and airing it! Here's to blogging! 

It's frustrating to find out you somehow knew all this much earlier, but couldn't tell it to yourself. Can't these dreams just send an e-mail or an sms?

A recurring dream recurring no more

Here is Nina's great post on the frustrating fact that we are left to finish the job of raising ourselves, socially and emotionally, because our narcissistic parents were unable to.

It reminded me of the message of a dream that I've been having for almost a decade.

In it, I'm dismayed to find out that there's a high school course I forgot to attend and I actually never graduated. So, my college degree, my M. Phil., my work on my doctorate, it's all useless, all for nothing, all invalidated, because I never graduated from high school.

I used to wonder what I might have missed academically. But the message wasn't about that. It was couched in academic terms because, apparently, that's all I understood.

So, recently, I had the same dream, only now my mother somehow appeared in it. I approached her and we talked and agreed to go out together, shopping, to the movies, for a walk, things we never did. My father was looking and he was angry and wanted to stop us, inventing silly reasons why we shouldn't go, but we just laughed at him and went away.

It was then that I learned that it was all going to be fine with that course. I'd have to do some work, take a class, do some tests, but it was going to all work out. And I woke up, finally understanding what the dream had been trying to tell me for years! 

In my mother tongue, the word used for graduating from high school has at its root "mature". I'd never matured. I became independent, I got married and had kids, but I hadn't matured into a real adult. I needed to do more work to raise myself, socially and emotionally, otherwise nothing in my life was really going to work out. But it's going to be fine. I can do it and I will. At least that's what the dream said.

The Interpretation of Dreams

I had one of those meaningful dreams last night. I was sitting with some friends on top of a hill overlooking a lake at night. The lake was calm and deep and clear and you could see the bottom, although it was dark outside. My friends were chatting and one of them quoted some advice I'd given her. I said "What do I know?" and stood up. I started descending the hill, a baby in my arms, because I wanted to show the lake to the baby.

Someone said "There's filth at the bottom of the lake" and I said "No, those are plants. The lake is very clean and clear and you can see the plants on the bottom."

When I got almost to the foot of the hill, there were some stairs there leading to the lake. They were slippery and suddenly I was afraid for the baby. I sat down and closed my eyes and started slowly sliding down them, when, all of a sudden, something dark, wild, and stinky jumped at me, grabbed me by the hair and started screeching! I still didn't open my eyes. Then I woke up.

So far, this is what I've come up with: I want to go deep and discover my true self and see it through the eyes of my inner child. So I go on, further and further down into my memories and childhood and real feelings, but there's something scary there I'm still not ready to confront, and, until I do, I won't get it right. What could it be?

What grabbed me was an irritating, comparatively tiny monster. I wasn't really scared. I knew I'd get rid of it. But it was still preventing me from getting to the lake. And I wouldn't LOOK at it. I was just about to ask it: "Who are you and what do you want?" when I woke up.  

Dear fellow armchair psychologists, feel free to interpret!