Letting the pain go

She was there inside of me, the little voice of my inner child.  Most of the time I was running from her, or avoiding her.  I was afraid of her, as I have blogged about previously.  I was afraid of myself being her.  I was afraid of what she had to tell me.  I was afraid of the judgments people had put upon her.  I was afraid the judgments were true.  I was afraid there was no way to defend against the judgements.  She felt trapped in a world where her truth could not be told, could not be understood, could not be healed.  And I kept her there, because I could not see a better option for her either.

Then I started to hear her whisper, her silent voice asking me to look at her, to listen to her, to learn from her.  I did some initial simple inner child work, and learned little things about her in pieces.

Then we went to a movie.  This movie triggered my inner child so thoroughly that she was thrown back into the realities of repeated violent rapes.  There was no way out of these violent seven year old memories.  All I could do was look at them and process them.  I wrote about the memories to capture them and give them a place to go.  If I could have found a way out of those memories, could have avoided those memories, could have ran screaming from those memories I would have.  But wrapped up in the images of violence and rape was a fragile little seven year old girl.

There really is no formula or procedure for dealing with such things.  All you can do is work through it.  It rocked me to my core.  It tore me apart emotionally in ways I have never faced, it healed me in ways I never expected.  Like relieving a pussed over splinter, it hurt and it felt good.

The strange thing was how familiar these memories were, like I had always knew them, like they always sat there dormant under the surface, always present.  These were not strange memories to me, these were vividly familiar memories to me.

The emotional impact of these memories was a month and a half, a month and a half of resolving the complicated layering meanings that were all tangled up in these memories.

It is not a battle I would have ever chosen to fight.  I would have chosen to have left those memories locked away, rather then remember them.  But it was not a battle I could avoid.

At the end of the fighting, and battling, and processing I found more freedom, as is always the case.  At the end I let that little girl inside of me out, out of that old dusty room she was curled up in in fear.

We still have not decided what we are going to do with each other.  She tells me things from time to time.  One day she stomped her foot and told me that all my clothes, even my newly acquired ones, were all old woman clothes, she did not want to wear them, she wanted to wear bright colors.  Another day she told me my long hair made her feel claustrophobic, and she wanted it chopped short in a fun freer cut.  Other times she decided the best thing to do for the day was pack the kids up, give them all Slurpee's and go to the mountains.  She is more spontaneous then me, and lighthearted and fun.  I have been missing this carefree happy nature in my life, she has been way too long trapped inside that dusty room.