The most disconcerting thing about violation is nightmares.
I went to bed last night fairly content with my lot in life.
I was happy: happy with my husband and the life I am leading; happy about the
future and my son’s imminent return from his winter visit out of state; happy
about how blessed the Goddess and God have made my life.
Here I am four in the early morning when not even the
commuters have crawled out of bed to face Monday morning traffic. My nightmare last night was so vivid, I woke
to find myself curled in a jumbled pile tucked up as close to my husband as
possible. I was sweating in sheets and my unfortunate bid for the reassuring
contact of my husband had left my back feeling like I had performed some type
of unholy tantric acts in my sleep. My newly fixed nose was pretty beaten up
having been stuffed into the soft blanket I often sleep with and the stress had
caused a dsyautonomic flare. All my muscles ache and it feels like I have been
hit by a bus that came barreling through my bedroom on silent wheels in a
hushed violence. The only evidence of the strike was how difficult it was for
me to untangle and stagger into the bathroom for pain medication.
The problem with my nightmares is that it takes whatever
problem I have let sit in my subconscious and manifest those problems in my
dream with a barbwire twisted sense of reality. Currently I am suffering
maternal anxiety with my son so far away. We talked everyday about everything
and nothing and him being gone for so long is a gnawing barb to my
subconscious. Yesterday, two good friend’s had really bad days. I made one of
them extremely upset and there was no resolution by choice. Sometimes bad days
need to come and go before perspective can be reached and because of my deep and
abiding love for my friends I chose not to confront the issue during that hot,
instant of confusion that comes when stress overwhelms those we love and makes
them a little difficult to accept that love we have.
These things for most of you would be minor bumps upon the
road and certainly not nightmare worthy…for a survivor of incest and consistent
childhood abuse it turns into this story.
We are in THE house. My family lived in multiple houses
growing up and there was one house on the end of a cul-de-sac where the
majority of the confusion and abuse I survived took place. It was from this
house we suddenly upped and moved from the city to Nowhereville under
mysterious circumstances to build a new house in the mountains of North
Georgia. It was in this house where I meet my childhood best friend who would
eventually find me as an adult and confront me about my father raping her. It
was in this house where my bedroom was separated by an entire floor from my
mother that I watched my father rape my sister on multiple occasions. The
bad, ugly house that seems so innocuous on the exterior and was a place of
mental, physical, emotional and spiritual anguish on the inside.
In this house, my biological mother is searching for my
brother. Even in my dream, where I have been trained to lucid dream, I
understood that it wasn’t my biological mother looking for my brother it was me
looking for my son. Of course, we couldn’t find either. I was content to let
the dream continue because even as my subconscious played out in Technicolor
the feeling of loss I had been experiencing in my son’s absence, I understood
that it was just that: a reflection; a mirage; a healthy way for my
subconscious to better deal with my missing child. Besides, my waking,
conscious, participating self knew that in less than twenty-four hours I would
be at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport picking up my child, so he isn’t
really lost, misplaced or even really gone.
Then my biological father enters the dream. At first he is
what he has always been in my life, a threat. My father being a stone sober
explosive abusive meant living weeks and months with a man that seemed as
harmless as a fly, as upstanding as his Masonic brother’s believed. Then
something would happen and our entire world would crumble, dishes would break,
threats would be made and carried out, safety and security would morph into
hatred and distrust. I would be ripped away from feeling loved and thrust into
a world where nothing pleased my biological parents and I was left scrambling
to figure out how to restore a more even keel to my own existence.
The threat his presence always represents is twofold: the
eminent creation of violence and the establishment that I am not loved. Having
been trained to participate and direct my dreams, at first I am able to keep
his presence in my dream a threat only. I am able to handle the thoughts that I
know are fabricated and not really a part of my current life. My biological
father isn’t going to beat my biological brother or my son because he is
missing. Neither is missing anyway. One has divorced himself from me and sided
with my biological father and the other is safe in a bed in Massachusetts being
loved and carried for and spoiled by others who love him. For awhile I am able
to contain the dream centering it around looking for my biological brother with
occasional appearances by my harried biological mother who is worried about
waking my biological father.
“This is just a reflection of my anxiety regarding my
missing son,” is the mantra my brain tries to chant without being overwhelmed
by the tidal wave of emotions the dream is creating.
Then my biological father awakes demanding to know what is
going on.
Once again I step in to try to manipulate the dream.
Suddenly my dream self is dressed in a business suit and my father is naked but
covered in his own bed. He used to sleep during the day and some of the most
disastrous incidences often came from waking him accidently. We were trained to
be quiet as mice or get snapped shut in the mouse trap that was my father’s
violence and uncontrollable rage.
I confront him and the dream shifts to contract
negotiations. I begin to tell my biological father that I have been in heated
contract negotiations with a woman about property and that the woman thought
she had figured out how to get out of our contract. However, she didn’t know
the law very well and I had already gotten the signatures I needed so she was
stuck!
I am swamped suddenly with a sense of foreboding and begin
to struggle with feelings of love and acceptance. My heart is suddenly worried
about whether or not I am being loved or I will continue to be loved. IN the
dream I am trying to win my father’s affection with my prowess as a business
woman and simultaneously worrying about the woman I am in contract with,
whether or not she will continue to love me.
Remember my friend who was having a bad day? One of the
crazier after effects of continued abuse is a belief that we are unworthy of
love. Not the platitudes we spout breezily on Facebook or Twitter. LOVE –
unconditional, constant and regardless love that is given without merit or
regard to anything other than one person has decided to love another.
My friend is a survivor of her own hells and this type of
love for her is different. She hasn’t had a lot of love that is based on a
voluntary contract that has stuck and been unassailable even in disagreement or
strife. In my dream, I am telling myself I have taken a contract to love her,
even when she wants to get out of that contract; my love for her is binding. In
the face of her fears about people continuing to love her without judgment, I
am going to love her. In the face of my past and her past, I am going to love
her. My dream self is telling the
manifestation of inconsistent love that I have figured out how to consistently
love someone else despite the blueprints for loving I was given by my past.
Then my biological father says, “How do you know she will
uphold the contract?”
BOOM! CRASH! BANG!A dream that I had been able to steadily navigate overwhelms me as past feelings of regret and unloving come swarming in to assail my subconscious mind. I am surrounded by the white noise that has form and words and tells me all the things I fear the most:
“She won’t love you like you love her.”
“She will break this contract.”“There are things you can do to make others not love you anymore. There will always be things you can do to lose the love of those around you.”
My subconscious mind provides me a ViewFinder of still
photos showing me all those who have professed undying love for me and then
found me lacking and unlovable. Many of these photos are persons from my past
and some are even in my present. People I know or suspect for whatever reason
do not love me anymore. It ends with a still photo of my beloved friend her
face contorted in rage, all traces of love gone from her.
At this point the dream world shatters and I wake in that
sweaty, aching heap trying desperately to reassure myself that my husband, my
stone, my constant still loves me. If he were awake I would ask him and he
would tell me. I ask him all the time, “Do you love me?” and he patiently
answers, “Yes!”
“Of course!”
“You’re alright honey. I love you and will.”
But his warming assurances are locked in his own slumber and
I know he has to get up soon and go to work, so I crawl out of bed and take
pain medications and sit down to purge myself from the nightmare so I can face
my own day unencumbered by the remnants of my own nightmare.
I know you are surprised that this dream isn’t violent. My
most violent dreams come in that time just before sleep when I feel the most
vulnerable. That is when I daily relieve the horrors of sexual and physical
assault. My deep slumber is when I dream of the most damaging things done to me,
the emotional and mental vestiges years of physical trauma inflicted upon my
psyche. In the end, all survivors of childhood abuse ultimately worry about the
love contracts in their lives.
We have love contracts with all the people we are in contact
with from our most distant Facebook acquaintances to those very closest to us.
These contracts are often unintentional and are developed over time. It is the
unintentional nature of most love contracts that leave survivors of childhood
abuse floating on a sea of uncertainty. My first marriage was a victim of a
completely unintentional and ever evolving love contract. My current marriage
is rock solid because of an intentionally built love contract.
One of the things I have come to understand, due largely
because of my sisters of choice, Sarah and Crystal, is that love contracts do
NOT have to be unintentional and they do not require anyone’s signature but my
own. My friend who is freaked out and screaming and upset is actually worried
about the expiration date of our love contract. What she hasn’t yet realized
and accepted is that the contract for our friendship and love doesn’t have any
stipulations in it. For adult survivors of abuse, contracts without
stipulations are an unknown and unbelievable thing. Without Sarah or Crystal or my late mother,
Coco, I am unsure I would even understand that myself.
You see, it took people coming along and given me that
unconditional, unstipulated contract of love to help me understand several
things that are vital in loving. First, love is a choice based on nothing but
the decision to love.
Why does my husband love me? Why does Sarah or Crystal love
me? Why did Coco love me?
No reason whatsoever.
They decided to love me. They decided somewhere along the line to love
me without stipulation. They decided to teach me how loving is suppose to look.
Coco showed me the love contract all mothers should have for their children. It
is the contract I have for my own son based upon the blueprint she gave me.
Sarah showed me the contract of unconditional, unstipulated,
unassailable love. We have hurt each other deeply and those wounds have healed
giving way to a deeper, more abiding love and affection. With each year that
passes that love becomes something more than a contract and is almost like
breathing. This love is the oxygen in my emotional system and reflects most
accurately how my husband loves me.
Only his love adds to it all the affection, cuddling and awe
that lovers give to one another. He sees me through the lens of his love contract
and I am always beautiful. I am as beautiful to his loving eyes today as I was
when I married him ten years ago or hand fasted him eleven years ago.
Crystal’s love is the responsible love. She is the tough
love that says there are expectations and when you fall short, I will love you
anyway because I know you. You would never intentionally harm anyone because I
know you have been intentionally harmed and that thought you would do the same
mortifies you. However, sometimes you act without thought, your impulse and
pride get you and you need someone who loves you enough to tell you these
things. It is a truer love in some sense than the lover’s contract Tony has and
it is a harder love to believe in because I am left feeling that I will do
something to be unloved and eventually my sister by choice will choose to love
me no more. It is this fear that my dream echoes for my other friend. She is worried about our love contract. She is scared that her own past and her own anxieties is going to run me off of loving her. In my dream I triumphantly tell my biological father that my contract with her is unbreakable and I owe Crystal for the knowledge of why.
The why is: I choose to love her and what she does or
believes or chooses is irrelevant because my contract isn’t really with her, it
is with myself. In fact, I do not believe you can actual have a contract of
love with someone else really. Love is a decision you make in your heart to
give something that has to be believed on with faith by the other party. You
can’t wrap it up and gift it at Yule. You can’t quantify it. You can’t define
it. It is outside the realms of this materialistic realm.
Once I understood this, I could choose who to love and what
they did, the choices they make, the things they choose to do have no bareing
on my contract to love them. I have contracted with myself to love them. I have
said, “She I am going to love.”He, I am going to love.
For me this means that I am going to try and see the person
through the eyes love. When they rant and rail against the horrors of their
past or present, I am going to love and try and understand the things they say
and do are all tied back to a fear of losing love. When they assail me with
hurtful words or actions, they are asking what the limits of my love are. Can
they do something to make me not love them anymore? What is that thing? Where
is that line? They are in essence saying, “I know there is something that will
make you not love me anymore and I am going to find it before you do.”
Make no mistake there is a difference between love and
healthy boundaries. I love people who are no longer in my life because they
couldn’t maintain healthy boundaries and had to consistently push and push to
figure what it was that would force me to not love them. I love them still and
I have separated myself from their behavior. Truly a person can only accept
love if they love themselves and most of us do not love ourselves enough to
recognize when we are being loved.
I haven’t always had this outlook. There was at time when my
judgment of others cost me dearly and I lost the respect and admiration that
love is tied to of people I dearly wish I could still claim I have. There are
some hurts, however, that never heal and some wrongs that do not deserve to be
forgiven. Because of this knowledge I have of myself and how in the past I have
broken my own contract to love others, I woke in a cold sweat, my insecurity
rolling down my mind like the sweat down my back.
What if my friend
doesn’t know about this intentional contract to love? What if they are unaware
they are worried that they will do something to be unworthy of love? What if
they have conditions on the contract to love me and I fall out of favor of
their love?
Even as I wake I try to remind myself that isn’t how loving
works really. Love is about my choice.
She, I choose to love.
Even if she has stipulations, even if there is something I
does that make her love me no more.
She, I choose to love.
My love for her is based solely on my decision to love and
in the face of the most painful emotional turmoil; I can remain true to my
decision. I can let my own worries of love and acceptances go, because I cannot
control the behavior of others. I can however control my own.
She, I choose to love.
I can make these choices because others have chosen to love
me.
I love you without knowing how,
or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly,
without complexities or pride; I love you because I know no other way
Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVIII love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
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