Terrified and terrorised : reflections on dealing with intolerable pain.

What is it to leave a child carrying the terror of unbearable harm, to not recognise the innate sensitivity and feeling of a small child, a being who is truly innocent and has committed no sin at all, in contradiction to what the Catholic Church teaches us? Its something I have been contemplating today and after therapy where I shared the pain of a follower with my therapist. I was crying at the time for the small boy who was so badly hurt and had painful feelings all projected upon him and dumped into him, THROUGH NO FAULT OF HIS OWN. I thought of the despair of finding yourself all alone in that situation with not one single trustworthy, tender, loving adult to hold you, it truly would be intolerable for a child.

As I cried I thought of how most what trauma sufferers need is also someone who is willing to mirror and suffer with them the intolerable pain that overwhelms them. For myself I was trapped in a car for over an hour with metallic pieces of engine all through my legs. When they finally got me out they could not operate at that time because my lung had been pierced and collapsed and I needed help to breathe, but never the less when they gave that to me I was fighting it off as it felt like being smothered to have an oxygen mask put over my face. The paramedic came in from behind me and when I had the repetition of this accident in 2005, following a cranio sacral session in which I relived it, I woke out of a black out to find a strange man hovering over me, and this was 13 years into sobriety so I was not them waking out of one of the many alcoholic blackouts I had during my years of active addiction.

I am no stranger to pain and maybe that is why I can empathise so deeply with the terror and pain of others. I do think it is a gift to be able to feel in this way but it can be a difficult burden at times. I struggled after session digesting my lunch a few hours ago, because this week I relived a lot of things with Kat. In addiction to this we were exploring the wound of emotional abandonment I inherited from my mother and how her own mother always wanted to off load my mother when she could, in fact she had my Mum put into domestic service at the tender age of 13 and Mum rebelled and got her self a job and an apprenticeship after a few months of being sent to live with the well to do family. Mum often shared that Nana never once said “I love you”, she put Mum’s head through a wall at some point and terrorised Mum into keeping everything clean, they were both alone with no father or husband in the late depression years.

I feel very sad sometimes now that I was as angry with my Mum as I was, considering what she lived through she did well and she tried her best to love us, especially me but I did get sent away too, after Dad died and left alone a lot as a child. Those wilderness years of active addiction overseas (in the years following my father’s death in 1985) did leave big scars, I ended up running off on my husband when all my trauma came to head too, back in 2002 and I felt some guilt for that but today Kat asked me “do you really think you could have done it differently?” The answer is “No!” at the time I was desperate to get back into therapy overseas and my marriage did not survive much longer.

I think the movie ‘Wild’ I shared about a few posts back resonated for this reason, especially when ‘Cheryl’ (played by Reece Witherspoon) asks herself. “What if I forgive myself?” I cried today reading that out in therapy.

Today though there is a lot of light around me. I had a very good outing with my sister yesterday, I picked her up from the hospital and we went to a few cafes which were closed, got her some make remover pads she needed from the grocers and then went to a local place for afternoon tea. There is true affection and understanding growing in my heart for my sister and I ask her a lot of questions these days, sadly she doesn’t remember a lot of her childhood either, she told me yesterday the one memory she has of my brother (8 years older than her, 17 years older than me) is of brushing the dandruff off his shoulders before he left for work at the restaurant he and my mother ran in the late 1960s.

My sister seemed to have her own needs erased in service to the family at many points of her own life, she told me yesterday ‘my memory is fucked’ this is due to the shock treatment she was given back in 2012 and all the drugs she has been given over the years in which she has not had any active psychotherapy. But we can talk about things now, I share what hurts me, I am still not included in outings with her and Mum’s best friend who we used to see to go to the movies on a Saturday in the years before Mum died, this is the friend who tells me I am ‘difficult’ and ‘too emotional’ (sigh!!) my sister said to try and not take it on board so I can laugh it off now and see its not about me.

Kat brought up today how hard I have had to fight in my family not to have my true self totally obliterated. She always reminds me that if I have a reaction it is for a genuine reason, (not just that I am being ‘difficult’). I think I carried my Mum’s own rejection by her mother, Nana also preferred my older brother, Gary, over my sister Judith who ended up so tragically sick in later life. Mum often told me too, that Nana preferred my father to her. I think my Mum too had to struggle hard for her identity and I don’t think Dad always took her seriously at times, but she was volatile and he had to cope with this and must have absorbed a lot of the stress which he internalised and became stomach cancer which he died of in 1985.

We spoke today in therapy too of the pain of parents that gets projected on children, especially those who get scapegoated. Its so difficult when the parental relationship is toxic and the murderous rage a parent feels towards a partner (or parent) gets dumped into a child ‘scapegoat’, that child will labour all of its life with the intolerable feelings dumped into them, veering between a seething almost inexpressible rage, so often buried, dissociated from or somatised and a sense of a ‘bad’ or not good enough self. Help is needed with this rage and some of us may find it from transpersonal or ‘imaginal’ figures, beings or creatures. These may try to orchestrate the death or complete separation of the trauma survivor from ‘help’ as pointed out by Donald Kalsched in his work with highly traumatised clients.

Demons show us where the pain lies and angels may be needed or goodly, fairy godly figures who can help us to contain the pain. Ideally we would find that kind of healing the loving arms of another who truly understands the depths of the person’s psychic suffering, but often it is our own inner parent who must hold us through the process.

Today I felt what it must be to struggle so much with all of this and not have a therapist’s help. My heart goes out to those in that situation. God knows I have had many aborted therapy attempts myself and I count myself so lucky to have Kat to talk to and understand. To live with such intolerable burden is heavy and the scars never leave a person in that situation, self soothing becomes difficult but we must keep searching for ways, developing tools and resources to help us sit with the distress, work with the memories, imprints and feelings and dig deep beyond the defences as best we can without destroying ourselves or each other.