The Exquisite Agony of Remembering

***Trigger warning: This article contains content about assault. You know your needs best, please take care of yourself and seek counseling for support!***

Hello my loves! It has been such a long while since I have been able to sit down and share. Some of this is attributed to being in Grad school and working. A big portion though has been that the immediate physical and emotional journey I am on has been difficult to say the least. Let's do a recap since it has been so long since I last wrote to you all.

I have started on the arduous path with my therapist of addressing the molestation I experienced as a child. We are a few weeks into the healing sexual trauma workbook by Erika Shershun. Beyond skipping ahead a few pages to cover the grounding exercises, we are only 8 pages in. Prior to this, my over achieving self would have gone bonkers over that-I am quite familiar with the 'I want to heal it all now' mentality. But, this is so big and so hard, that way of being is now rendered unsustainable. Sometimes I can spend 15 minutes on just one sentence. I am glad that at the beginning of this I had no idea how hard it would be because I don't know if I would have stepped off that edge had I known.

At some point I think I will share with you physiologically what I have been experiencing, the painful ways my body is speaking with me. But, right now because that is so acute and ongoing, it does not feel good to think about digging into that. To write it I must be in my body scanning to then share it out, and the big barrier there is that I would need to be in my body. Right now I can only manage short visits. Even now writing this, I feel myself becoming activated and my brain wanting to shut down, shut this out. These days this is a daily experience. I am working on telling myself I am safe. An amazing lesson I am learning right now is that I can stop the task I am doing and take care of what my body's needs rather than forcing myself through it to complete the task. Either way I will complete the task, one is so much less abusive to myself though and gosh does that feel different! I am still learning Ahimsa (non-violence) when it comes to myself. This very tender new way of not forcing myself is so important because my whole life I have been trained both inside my household and out, that 'you complete the task' 'you power through' 'people have expectations of you'. No one's expectations are more important than me also caring for myself.

I think today what we will chew over together is the experience of denial I am negotiating with. Some of you may resonate with this inner dialogue. I have memories returning to me from my childhood, at this time they are not yet scary ones, but if they are able to resurface it is only a matter of time before the hard ones are exhumed and ask to be dealt with. There are whole sections of my childhood that I can't remember, they are blocked in behind the thick black obsidian wall of my subconscious to protect me. You don't get an option of when memories come, they just happen-locked away for so long and desperate of oxygen-they break in with no warning. In preparation for the advent of this event my therapist and I chatted about putting a safety plan in place so that I can follow a prepped plan for when I am in crisis. All this makes sense and feels reasonable. One of the steps she and I agreed on is that I would work with Andy to come up with a code word I could text so he knows it has happened and I don't have to be explaining in moment. As he and I were having this conversation I felt SO ridiculous. The internal dialogue cropped up telling me that I was being dramatic, this must be some sadistic search for attention, I AM FINE and I don't need to be doing this. I shared this in real time with him and I was able to asses that it was easier to gaslight myself than accept something so dreadful happened to me that remembering it could spark a response I couldn't fully control.

Let me tell you, I think the idea that I would be so effected that I would not be able to force my affect to be socially acceptable is tough to digest. I hid away my PTSD symptoms after my brother's murder so successfully people meeting me had no idea what I was masking, all while carrying a 4.0GPA and working. After going through the trauma symptoms in the workbook, I have been masking them to be high functioning since I was a very small child. You can see how I would think I was being over dramatic about my memories given all that I have already navigated through. But, then you see I think about the little girl I am going back for, the one who was told all that messaging about packing it away-I won't continue to do that to her. That sweet little face deserves to be validated. She deserves to have me remember and fully live inside my body. I think about how this may be SO INCREDIBLY scary, but I have already lived it-it isn't going to happen again, and currently she is trapped by that mental wall just as much as I am in the present moment.

I won't pretend like I have any idea of what is going to come next, but I will keep reminding myself that I am brave enough to keep going. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center states that 81% of women nationwide will experience some form of sexual assault or harassment in their lifetime, I am not alone in this healing work and if you are on your own healing path, you are not alone either. The event that fragmented us from our bodies was painful and the task of returning is not easy either. We are resetting a bone that didn't heal correctly-rebreaking it so that it can be set right is beastly but, once it's done-my oh my the relief must be glorious. This is one of the greatest deaths I will experience but I know a life where I don't live daily in hypervigilance is attainable. So, my loves I cast myself to Lilith's hell fires to be recast whole, finally.

Please be tender with yourselves, as I will try too as well. I have such hope that these pieces of myself that I share with you will help you out. I share my whole hearted love with you and know there is such strength in this vulnerability. We will build a more loving world because of who we choose to be. Until next time my loves.

~Lily