Hounds of Hell Rewind

I sometimes have dreams of murderers. Once, I dreamed that I am at a picknick, just sitting under a tree enjoying the day, when a dark man** steps in front of me and shoots me in the face with a shot gun. Another time I dreamed that I am in a basement or concrete room below ground. The wall in front of me is painted bright turquoise blue, and blood is seeping though it from alot of murdered and dismembered people who a murderer has killed and hidden behind the wall. Now the murderer is after me because he wants to add me to the people behind the wall. Suddenly a figure who looks like Gene Hackman comes in and chases the murderer away.

These murderer figures are the malevolent caretaker figure of my psyche. The Gene Hackman figure would be the benevolent aspect of the caretaker.***

**these "dark man" figures are never African American. In my dreams, African Americans are always figures of joy and laughter.
***the first time I ever saw Gene Hackman was in a film called Bite the Bullet. In that film, he rescues a horse that is being beaten by a bully and gives the bully a good thrashing in punishment for beating the horse.

Living well is the best revenge *evil grin*

And the dog dream was probably a picture of my psyche shortly after my father made me bleed. It is helping very much to be able to understand these images and what they mean. And for me, it is helping very much to be able to put this process out into a public-but-sheltered space. Trauma lives in the shadows. It may happen in public, but the damage goes on in the privacy of the psyche. Bringing what happened out into public in a safe way throws light into the dark corners. This process is rather like lancing a boil. The lancing process creates its own wound, but then the healing can begin. What I am doing now, in this blog, is lancing the boil. I am not "dwelling on" or "wallowing in" anything. If a person puts just puts a bandaid on a boil, the boil will continue to deepen and fester because the bacteria that cause boils create a fibrous capsule around themselves. The lancing process brings the infection to the surface, allowing the body's own healing processes to begin. It is the same with child sexual abuse. A walled-off memory, kept in secret, is a memory that cannot be healed...there must be a witness; not to the event that caused the trauma, but to what the event did to the psyche. I am lancing my walled-off memories. It may look like "dwelling on" to some, but others know that it is not.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you }:)

Over the last few days, I've been getting a sense of my body's posture when my face was beaten when I was 13 or 14 months old. My mother says it happened in a fall, but the sense of it I am getting, which is still only a very faint echo, is that I was sitting upright and sitting still. There is no sense of falling, or having fallen. I am beginning to think I was beaten as I sat in my highchair.

So the feeling of being unable to get away would have been two-fold...at 13 or 14 months old, I was just learning to walk (according to my mother, I was a late walker), AND, if my sense of it is correct (and I am almost certain that it is) I was trapped in my highchair.

I have alway had this sense of stillness connected to a "feeling memory" (for lack of a better term) of profound dissociation, but I was unable to understand the meaning of it. I believe I am beginning to understand the meaning.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you }:)

I think I know what my dog dream was about! Donald Kalsched says that during trauma, ego defenses are overwhelmed and so archetypal defenses come into play to protect the personal spirit from any situation that the archetypal defenses see as resembling the original trauma. When I was beaten at the age of 13 or 14 months, I was just beginning to "move out" into the world, so-to-speak...beginning to talk and walk. Then, at the age of 4 1/2, I was severely molested, just at the age of another "moving out into the world" moment...starting school!!!. I have always been unable to find my place in the world. I am intellegent and academically inclined, and although I get very good grades, have always been unable to graduate from college or find where I belong in the world. I am beginning to thing that every time I do anything my archetypal defenses see as "moving out into the world" they start that inner malevolent-but-protective function/action that they do so well in order to keep me from being re-traumatized. I now believe that the dog dream was my archetypal defenses trying to protect me from what they saw as a danger point...my starting to move out into the world again. I do not remember any archetypal dreams that I may have had before the dog dream, but that doesnt mean that I had none. Donald Kalsched says that trauma is always worse when it happens at developmentally important points in a person's life. I would say that learning to talk and walk and starting school are two very important developmental milestones in a person's life. No wonder my archetypal defenses see "moving out into the world" as a souce of the utmost danger to me, and strive to prevent me from doing so. The purpose of archetypal defenses, is , after all to keep the person safe at all costs.

Just to clarify, archetypal defenses ARE NOT THE SAME as ego defenses. Archetypal defenses operate at the level of the Self, NOT the level of the ego. Archetypal defenses come into play when the ego's defenses are overwhelmed. They would also come into play immediately if the person is an infant who doesnt have a fully-formed ego.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you }:)