Dear Readers, It has been such a long time since I was able to write here. Six months of therapy and help in a residential home… it’s a long time. I don’t even know where to begin as I talk about it. I learned so much. I’ve grown so much.
I’m done now. I’m not going back. It’s a long story… lots of drama and misunderstandings and hurt and fear. I don’t want to talk about all that just yet.
But I do want to talk about fear. One of the things that came out, especially in the last couple months of treatment, was my deep fear. I had learned to deal with and manage it in the years past, but it came out in new ways, triggered by new things this time. Now it’s stronger than it has been in a long time, and it is ruling me much more powerfully than it has in a long time.
It comes out in my dreams. I have horror movie level dreams and nightmares sometimes… sometimes more than sometimes. People I love get hurt in horrible ways. People I am meant to protect are tortured before my eyes. People I love so deeply become monsters, controlled by something dark and evil. People who love me forget me and treat me with indifference, severe disgust, or even intense hatred. I have dreams of finding bodies of children I was trying to protect, mangled and frozen with the most awful expressions on their faces. I have dreams of walking around a corner and finding a dear friend or trusted protector dangling from the ceiling. I have sickening dreams of finding that people who I thought I could depend on were all along using me, and twisting me, and selling me to others.
It’s horrible. And then I wake up and realize that the level of fear I feel in those dreams is the same as what I feel through every conscious day.
It doesn’t make sense. None of the things that happen in my dreams has ever happened in my waking life. None at all. And there’s really VERY little chance that any of those things actually would happen.
I can try to explain these fears by saying I’m afraid of hurting people I love. I’m afraid of letting people who depend on me down. I’m afraid of failing to protect people from any and all pain. I’m afraid of losing people I love to the darkness of bitterness and relentless anger and depression. I’m afraid of being dropped, forgotten, rejected, let down. I’m afraid of being abandoned and unwanted and unloved and inhuman.
But all of that seems so normal. Everyone struggles with those things, at least to some degree. Why should it affect me so much when other people are more able to dismiss it?
These things terrify me to a level that is unrealistic. I don’t try things because I’m afraid of what might happen. Someone snaps at me and I spend the next week too scared to even look at them. I’m so afraid something worse will happen. I won’t approach someone or contact them in any way because I’m so afraid of bothering them. If I bother them, they might drop me and abandon me and hate me. Maybe their love isn’t strong enough to withstand something like that. I don’t talk to people. I don’t go places with people. I try to always know what’s going on with everybody, and where they are, so I don’t lose them, and I still feel at least a little like I’m taking care of them, and not failing them or letting them down in that. I’m very controlling.
One friend used to call me a turtle. I’m so slow to come out of my shell, and the smallest of things can send me back inside to hide again for hours… or days… or weeks… or years…
I want to come out of my shell and fly and be free again. It was so much fun, so wonderfully life-giving, when I was there before. I want my courage back.
windwhisperings 