Yesterday "Big Brother" had his attorney contact me, to what end is yet to be determined. But the reason why and the strategy of such an action is pure "Big Brother." He's had a singular focus on me for longer than I can remember. Unfortunately I was unable to decode his offensive objective until a recent interaction. And also unfortunately I had held the conceit until that moment of realization that I had actually outrun his reach. Of course we don't talk about the longevity of childhood abuse and how it holds onto the body, literally and figuratively. No, we expect that at some point the impact is renounced and cured, or at worst wears off.
Well, I bought into the conventional thinking only to discover that like a seed buried during a drought, when moisture returns, the seed does indeed spring to life. That's what has happened and is happening to me. Fragments of my childhood have found new momentum and life--even "metastasizing" to "organs" I thought I had grown in adulthood and therefore were immune. As a result, I am entering the most spiritually and emotionally dynamic process of my life. And I'm doing it to save my life.
I start with this bit about "Big Brother" because he has been instrumental in forming in my mind and spirit ideas and reactions that have sabotaged my progress in life, my relationships, my ability to heal myself, and certainly the full realization of my personal freedom. He along with my mother and my father, perpetuated a constant level of abuse so fully realized as to remain a constant, experienced even after my parents' deaths and any kind of separation I could effect to protect myself.
And that is part of the problem. We often define recovery--the pursuit and return to a normal state of health, mind, spirit, and strength--in terms of and with strategies that should work but don't get near the reality of what it takes each of us to recover. The reason recovery is so complicated for us lies in the nature of the wounds as well as the lack of normal in our childhood experiences. First we learn that childhood wounds endure. Second we discover that we were only briefly allowed any normal states of being. Therefore each wound is difficult to identify, isolate and heal because many of us knew a "normal" that was only those moments of being wounded.
With my mother, I only knew her confused and vicious cycles of paranoid schizophrenia with brief moments of hyper-happiness. With my father, I experienced invisibility so frequently that I knew I didn't matter and would only matter if I was useful, which I couldn't prove to be. And with my brother--wow!--I learned that my only value was as a whore whom he was tasked to teach to be a "good" whore. So now I search for what normal there is for me to find and regain. You'd think that what I became as an adult would give me that. But, no, when trouble surfaces, my childhood "normal" appears and consumes me--until my adult can regain my attention. That in-the-moment recovery depends on the catalyst--and that's always a person--and my ability to find my "normal."
My intention with this blog is to offer up the challenge of recovering from wounds created in a child--I often think of what happened to me as having my ego cleaved--and healed from my adult perspective, one who can let the past be present but not overwhelm my desire to be whole and normal.
I will turn 65 this December and have had some amazing moments in my life, some monumental accomplishments, and accrued a community of friends so profoundly beautiful, generous, and loving as to find within each of them the essence of a God I can't always see without looking into their eyes, hearing their voices. But the counterpoints to the good and great in my life still shake my world like the storm Sandy now reshaping the North East. And so I think this blog is for others like me, this late in our lives.
