Associating.

For the past few months I've been working a lot to unravel the knots of the Stockholm Syndrome pieces of the abuse.  This is about that work.

Before my therapy session on Monday I told myself I was really going to push myself as much as I could.  I understand that the more I can tolerate sinking into my own mind instead of constantly trying to be in a state of running from it- the sooner I will hurt less.  So I went for it.  I said as much as I could- just let myself talk and the hardest part was hearing what I had to say.  It was so painful.  Then yesterday I was sort of torn between pulling up the conversation I'd had with my therapist and running from it- so again- I decided to just really let myself go over what I'd said.  Then I cried.  A huge huge cry that involved sobbing and snot streaming from my nose.

In order to dissociate from a lot of the worst things that happened I had to take a new event and paste it over the old one.  So yesterday I was obsessively thinking about a present day relationship but aware that I was obsessively thinking about this person and that this wasn't in fact what I was really even meaning to be thinking about.  So I managed to ask myself:  WHAT IS THIS REALLY ABOUT??  And I immediately had my answer.  Then I immediately started to cry with the streaming snot part soon to follow.

These are difficult answers.  Thoughts and feelings I could not tolerate at the time they actually happened so I stuffed them away- but they were always still there and then they came out in other weird places where the feelings didn't really belong but I just needed them to be somewhere to explain them and the reality and truth felt too painful.  

So here... let me get to my point.  When I was 19 I left 'home' to go to college and in my memory I was SO HAPPY.  I remember being in the car with my boyfriend and him driving and I remember the cd we were listening to and I remember being SO HAPPY.  I was happy to be getting out of the house and away from my mom and dad- I WAS SO HAPPY.  Except I wasn't- or not completely anyway.  A part of me didn't want to leave at all.  But I couldn't really know about that part of me then or until approximately yesterday.  I didn't fully want to leave my dad.  I was 19 and a way of being me had been thinking of him as my 'boyfriend' for about 10 years by then.  And I felt like I was leaving the man I really loved and I didn't really want to be doing that.  But I couldn't know about it because I wasn't able to know about the fact that I'd been being raped/having a sexual relationship with him all my life.  So I was in terrible pain in a certain part of my thinking but I couldn't know about it at all.  Until now.

I've always felt so ashamed of everything about pretending my father was my boyfriend- every little piece of the Stockholm Syndrome.  I've felt so bad that I've felt disgusted with myself for even eating and keeping my own body alive.  But the more I become clear about the whole picture- about how he had manipulated me since I was a baby and then all my growing up life and then I'd felt in love with him both because I really was and because it was how I survived- now that I can see it all more clearly I am feeling not mad at myself but instead; deeply sad.  

In the past when I would think about the Stockholm Syndrome parts of all of this I would only be able to think that I HAD to feel that I loved him, that I HAD to imagine he was my boyfriend.  But I really did believe it, I really did feel it.  I really loved my father, I really wished in some way that he would leave my mother and be with me instead.  And even though I came to all of that through his abusing me for all of my life... I really felt it.  It was real.  And so the pain of leaving him when I went to college at 19 was a very real pain too.  So much so that I went back home to be with him during the whole time I was in college.  And when I was finally able to remember that I did that- went back to him- DROVE AN HOUR AND HALF to be with my own dad sexually- I HATED MYSELF.  Because it all hurt.  And it was much easier to be disgusted with myself than it was to think:  HOW COULD HE HAVE HURT ME SO MUCH???  HOW COULD HE HAVE CARED ABOUT ME SO LITTLE??

It was the same when I left permanently when I was 25 years old.  It was excruciatingly painful.  In some parts of my mind I knew I had to get away from him and my mother- but in other ways of my thinking I did not want to leave.

And when I started therapy just a few months later and began to talk for the first time about my father sexually abusing me- in order to heal my life and my mind I had to not only give up my whole family- but also the man whom I had come to feel like I was very much in love with.

It's a lot.  It's taken me a lot of work to get to this place.  Unknotting the knots of the Stockholm Syndrome has been the most difficult part of my work to recover.

But it's working.  I am getting better all of the time.  When I first started going to Survivors of Incest Anonymous there was a saying from the program that they had which I thought at first was rather silly and now I realize is in fact rather brilliant:  "It works if you work it, so work it because you're worth it."

The work to recover and heal from sexual abuse is long and hard- but possible.

The opening for the first year MFA thesis exhibit is tomorrow night.  Here is another detail from my piece.