still going on

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Its also a place for those members to reconnect and share their experiences.

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Fleur
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Joined: Wed Jul 20, 2011 9:23 am

Re: still going on

Post by Fleur »

Hello VAC


Thank you for sharing. I'm happy it feels cathartic to write here. Also thank you for the reassurance that you are choosing to live the best you can

I know memories can be bittersweet, or just plain awful but it also seems you have some nicer childhood memories too?

May you find peace within


Much caring
Onward to a safe community for all people in which to thrive ~ gentle hugs [if okay] ~ Fleur
there
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Joined: Mon Aug 15, 2011 12:41 am

Re: still going on

Post by there »

Hi, VAC,
Good to read your recent posts.
Sending gentle support your way.
All women are beautiful. Period.
I deserve better than survival.
VAC
Member
Posts: 724
Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:16 am

Re: still going on

Post by VAC »

Hello,

Very short....I know the Holidays are hard for many with regrets and memories attached with times that most others seemed to be having a joyful time.

Start over again. Make your own memories. Years ago, in the 70's, there was a song with a line in it ".....never let yesterday steal your todays". This is sort of a mantra.

When I get tired my mind wanders to things I am better off not going to. My regrets to all who are alone or who can't abide any celebration because of the events imprinted during this time in your past.

I also have wondered whether sharing the dream, about my primary abuser, would help others. It is the only sexually based dream I have ever had about him, and it explained so much to me. I still have to ponder this. I have remembered more. It stinks but it is good to know.

Later,

V.
Fleur
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Joined: Wed Jul 20, 2011 9:23 am

Re: still going on

Post by Fleur »

Waving to you VAC


May the festive season bring you peace, loving family and friends
Onward to a safe community for all people in which to thrive ~ gentle hugs [if okay] ~ Fleur
Jonesy
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Re: still going on

Post by Jonesy »

Lovely, as always, to read from you VAC.
Agreeing that the festive image of 'family & togetherness' can be difficult to stomach when you're on the outside of it.
Hoping that you and yours get the opportunity to make some new memories soon.
You are important

Email: jonesy@isurvive.org
Harmony
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Joined: Tue Nov 29, 2011 8:10 pm

Re: still going on

Post by Harmony »

Dear VAC,

It alway warms my heart to see you post. You are truly a survivor thriver. Wishing you only the best. Enjoy each moment. You are a cherished long to isurvivor.


with care,
Harmony
VAC
Member
Posts: 724
Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:16 am

Re: still going on

Post by VAC »

Hello,

I have been away for a while, feel like a space traveler sometimes. So much has taken place lately: dear friends moving away others battling cancer, and new levels of work for me to reach....

This dream has so opened up my memories, although the dream is symbolic...

In the dream I was in a huge bed....my dad was on the other side of the bed, covered with wounds and bandages. I sat with my back to a wall and my feet across the bed on my dad. I had hired a huge man, a brown man who was blind to come and lay down with his head at my right hand, his back across my lap, and his feet at my left hand.

I would put my hands some where on the hired man's body and kick my dad...I would sneer at him, "look at what I am doing". My dad would moan and cry and beg me to make him watch me. I would laugh and do something else to the blind man across my lap, not even for pleasure, but to make my dad watch.

My dad would try to look away, but I would make him look. The blind man was almost like a Golem. It was very odd, since I never paid for sex when I was wild and wooly. I believe I brought him there simply for the purpose of punishing my dad. I honestly believe that man and the scenario represented the root and the motive of all the insane things I did.

My dad was always scared of me. I knew it, but did not know why. I was damaged goods and he was the damager. This dream is quiet symbolic and literal of the way things were.

I went sort of bonkers when I was fourteen and escaped internment in a mental facility. That was about the time that men in our community noticed me It was very blatant. I could be with my dad or mom, walking down the street and have men step out of businesses and whistle at me. They would get in my face in front of my dad and ask me to go hunting or fishing with them.....he knew exactly what they wanted.

I lived in a fog most of the time, and started self-medicating about that time. I began to keep company with notorious people in our small city.

Part of the memory that has been restored to me since this dream, is that I did everything in my power to oppose my dad, to shame him. I was a nightmare in the neighborhood, really dangerous for the other children. I put one in the hospital for three weeks with a fractured skull, and other things. People moved to get away from me.

They could not find domestics to keep house and care for me because they were scared of me.

This dream shocked me and I believe it is very accurate of why I did the insane, self-destructive things in my dad's face. He had to remove me from his place of employment because a man came in and we were checking each other out. He had to face the men and women he knew in this small town.

He lived in fear of me.

The positive aspect of having this vivid dream is that I am more open and willing to forgive my folks. It really cemented in the part of my past in which I was so utilitarian with the men I was involved with. The vast majority of them were men that could never have been conceived to be gay. One part of me tried to hide my lifestyle from my folks to protect them. The other part of it was that I did things in the face of this city to humiliate my dad.

The negative aspect since I had this dream is remembering so many things I had not seen before, and as in keeping with past revelations, this has depressed me, and I have to fight the insane desire to run. Have been very detached from my wife and have been spacey. I have remembered many things that could have been I was protected from, for which I am thankful. It is very odd, but since the initial dream, I have had the impression in my dream life that he is alive and dependent and a part of my life I ignore, but he is needy and I should "be a good son".

I also have looked back and been eaten with regret and reliving the damage I have done. That is another revelation I had when I interpreted this dream. I can hate what my dad and others did to me. I am starting to think there were possibly more. That is not what this dream showed me though. It showed me that I am the one who did the most damage to my own being, using the pain and the unknown parallel of repressed memories, as an excuse to enter into a masochistic, self-hating, nihilistic hedonism.

My folks got called by the health department when I was still a teenager to let them know their son had been declared a public health menace by the CDC.

Again the drive to take myself down comes when I remember things, but fortunately I am beyond that now. Just looking back makes me ashamed, but I have to fight myself not to drift into a fantasy fugue and live it all over again in my mind. When I do this, I feel weak, exhausted, ashamed, and sometimes nauseous.

I cheat myself by going back in time and taking my being into the catacombs.

I am in my 60's now, and my life is not over. I have a good doctor who works with me and knows me. I have gone on a generic anti-depressant for the time until I get through this. I deeply appreciate the ability to come here and be transparent. I know that I have been drifting since I had the dream, but that dimension will close soon....

.....that driftingnessless was my old hiding place and when I feel it come, I put it away. I can't space out.

I also have to fight that in other ways, like obsessing on things that consume my time so I won't have to face what I need to do....I have so many doors open. I have responsibilities. I can't run from life, from my life.

Thanks for listening--I hope my sharing this dream helps someone else and hurts no one.

VAC

VAC
VAC
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Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:16 am

Re: still going on

Post by VAC »

Hello,

It is strange how this comes....been a very busy day.

Getting ready to wind down, and for absolutely no reason, a flood of memories that dominated an hour of my time.

It is like a collage of many things all connected.

The bottom line of this is two things...one is pervasive shame, whose bait I have learned to despise; the other is identification. I have to decide who I am...I did many years ago, forty in fact.

Why after all this time my mind should go back to the very things that destroyed me in every way? There is more to all this, really. I am considering a counseling sabbatical, a retreat in which I could have a number of qualified T's to talk to....it is selfish of me.

My wife could use it too.

I do have the luxury of a former boss who is a friend for life and one of the best T''s I have ever met. He knows all and we talk on a regular basis.

I feel so very awkward, so unable to connect sometimes, although no one would ever know it. I overcompensate and have social graces and acumen that is a very good acting job. I can be insulted, etc, and it disappears into the chasm within I hide things.

I do think that chasm needs to be emptied and closed. I can't really verbalize how much I love my wife....she is the wife of my relative youth. She was a virgin when she came to me and I was a diseased whore. She has led a selfless life and lives to help me and work with me. Music brought us together and I stand in wonder of her when she sings and plays....in fact we sing together, which I marvel in and at. I love our children and would die for them.

I am thankful....but that hidden part of me wants to run, but I never will. It is like a sudden impulse which puts a veil over my eyes that causes me to see everything through old eyes. When I was young, I could pack a car and relocate so fast it would make your head spin.

I have never deserved my wife and children.

Infrequently, I am pulled to pornography. The sad thing is it disgusts me and depresses me, and I find no pleasure in it. It is the gauge that pulls me into a storm of memories, a life of madness lived in a whirlwind. There was nothing good about any of it, no matter how one might try to romanticize it. I have to remember that I was fed up with the whole scene, and had walked away more than once from everything other people say they want. It is a masochistic foray that I cut short mercifully. It makes me feel so dirty. I have no desire for any of it.

I am only thankful I am forgiven and lived to get out....I often said things out loud about those years,

"No one gets out of here alive." So many died. Found dead. Murdered, tortured, mutilated. Went insane, suicide, compulsive sex that destroyed body and mind. Always wondering when someone would kill me or take me to pieces. I saw men get shot, knived. Men raped and thrown out on the side of a road in the middle of nowhere.

I road horses with one of my friends almost every day...he was gentle and kind. His body was found in a river with a tire over his head and his hands tied behind his back with wire. He had been tortured. No one was ever charged.

I was in police raids on a regular basis....a lot I could say. My best friend would never have hurt anyone. He was prone to drink and drive....the police tried to beat him to death. He woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed, his face kicked in (boot prints on his face where he was stomped), his ribs kicked in.

The men I loved the most I never had sex with....weird. All ancient history.

I saw too much really to say on here....living in the dark with daylight only as an accessory for enablement to make the dark shine more brightly, one sees and becomes a part of things most people would never understand.

I want to say this, that I do not want to look back. I do not want to look at the images of the things I once did. It makes me weep and tortures me. However, there is something deeper coming up from the depths of me. I will soon lay all this aside. It is a deep thing, secret to me that must be expelled from my inner man. I want it to come soon.

It is crazy the things I remember. My older brother had died. My mom and I picked out a new car...it was so nice, a 57 Mercury. I was little, like 3. We drove to my grandparent's place, where I should have been raised. On that two week reprieve from my Dad, we spent time with those wonderful old people. My grandparents were occupied with my Mom who was in mourning.

Death was stalking me. I tried to hide. I hid in a closet and jammed myself into a closet and pulled things around me. I stayed there for hours. I remember just going away, and I was there motionless. After some time I heard them searching for me. They were hysterical. Finally the closet was opened once or twice, and I was pulled out. They did not punish me. I think I remember not being verbal after that for a while.

On the same trip (in the Summer) I ran from them and crawled into the backseat of our car, and went into the same fugue. It was very hot. All the windows where rolled up. I remember after some time I could hear their voices...I was not to myself, drenched in sweat and boiling hot. I was weak. I tried to open the door and could not. I tried several times and finally got it open.

Fresh air struck my boiling body....my grandmother ran up and screamed, called everyone. I could not walk. She stripped all my clothes off and bathed me with the garden hose in the front yard for a long time and held me and talked to me. I remember them talking.

On the same trip I was chasing my grandmother's flock of geese on that idyllic farm. I followed them to the pond. There was a snake sunning itself on a flat rock. I went after it. It jumped in the pond. I jumped in after it, headfirst. The water was over my head and the bottom and sides were slick clay. I could not get traction to get up and kept sinking. I was in the pond for a long time. There were long reeds that drooped over the edge of the pond over the water. I began to grab for them and after several tries was able to crawl out of the slick pond bank.

I was covered with mud and walked the distance back to the farmhouse. My grandmother saw me first,
"Oh, my God, this child has been in the pond!"

I know I kept asking my mom when we were going back...I kept telling her I wanted to stay, to not go back. I kept telling her I did not like my dad, to please not go back.

She told me she knew, but we had to...she had a good job. After that I began to throw and break things in the house. I attacked some children that were brought to play with me.

The day we left I tried to run away. I cried and screamed and held to my grandmother. Grandma and Grandpa were crying, my mom was crying: my brother had died. I was trying to tell them not to send me back...I said several times, Daddy is bad; Daddy hurts me...no one listened. It was over my head and I was three.

I cried and sobbed for a long time. My mom did her very best to make the trip back slow and we stopped and ate and slept at nice places and looked at many tourist attractions. She did not want to go back either. I have fantasized that Grandma heard me and asked me what I was saying, and that they took me to a doctor, and that we never went back, and they raised me, and I grew up working on the farm with my Pop. We would have been so much better off.

Then after that it all went internal. That was when I stopped eating, and began to self abuse. That is for a different time. But oh yes, I do remember more.

Thanks for your time....here I have freedom to get it out.

A few years ago I had to have a medical procedure done which required me being put to sleep. The doctor came out and told my wife that my colon was badly scarred with deep fissures....she was able to tell him that I was a survivor of CSA and she knew about it. I love this lovely, loving woman.

Peace to you all...





I suppose one of the earmarks of the past
Fleur
Member
Posts: 13378
Joined: Wed Jul 20, 2011 9:23 am

Re: still going on

Post by Fleur »

Hello VAC


Thank you for sharing. I've been having flashbacks more vivid than for a long time. I get that it feels strange. I too would have preferred to have lived with maternal grandparents. 3 is such a young age for memories of this type. We were both vulnerable to unwanted attention

Really happy for you to have a family of a loving wife and caring children


Sent with peace for your closure
Onward to a safe community for all people in which to thrive ~ gentle hugs [if okay] ~ Fleur
VAC
Member
Posts: 724
Joined: Wed Jul 27, 2011 1:16 am

Re: still going on

Post by VAC »

Fleur,

Thanks for your kindness to me. In Jewish time 2018 is "The Year Of The Open Door". I do hope and pray this for you and me, and all who come here.

I had always been so flippantly nonchalant about things I faced in the past before I had recall....evidently my internal capacity for "putting things away" has been a chasm and in operation for a very long time. One of my mantra's from my youth was "I don't care"; another was "I don't care".

A T asked me once if I lost time...that was when this journey first began in 2005. That was about two years after recall and only when I was confidant enough about the recall memories to know they were factual. I dug through every memory I had and found the dots connected, much to my sorrow. I was content believing I was the mad, dysfunctional child of wonderful people who were saddled with me...it worked.

Now I am convinced I did....sadly with regret, there were many things I should have and could have done for my own good that I caved at key opposition I realize now triggered me to "go away". I became convinced of this when I had a reaction to a sleep medication in which I shopped on tv and online and had no memory of it until the stuff was delivered.

Anyway, it is a process I realize more and more....the first moment of recall was when I was driving in 2003, while my dad was dying. I knew, after the shock of it wore off a little, it was a good thing to remember and I would be ok. The disturbing part of this present thing is that I know there is something there I have to soon remember that I don't want to.

I can tell when this is on me because I start to feel a little claustrophobic. I am going to learn something soon.

From my 23rd year to my 49th year, I had the same sequential dream on a regular basis. It was so vivid and disturbing, I was fearful that I had done something awful as a child, to the point I investigated events in our town during my childhood. The dreams stopped two months before I had recall. I realized after some time that I was the child in my dream I had buried.

Fleur, I do pray your life is filled with grace and peace, and that peace and wholeness is not a desire but a reality in your life.

The power of blessing is a known phenomena, but has been studied.

VAC
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