40. Powerless

Don’t know what’s going on deep in our subconscious these days but lots of dreams about someone in control of everyone’s lives and deaths. A few nights ago it was a man who could give everyone cancer. We were really angry about it and determined he would not have that much control. We were going to fight him. Last night was similar. A man choosing amongst many people the one person who would be allowed to live. Everyone else was going to die. It was scary.

We often have dreams about very powerful aliens having control of our lives. Their ships are enormous and extremely powerful as they fly overhead or hover in the sky. Why are we having these dreams?

Last year we had these strange episodes at night. Night terrors. Not quite dreams but a definite image and feeling of all the lights in the world going out suddenly. We wake up with a gasp. It was very frightening. It happened over and over for many months. We do have a fear of the power going out especially when we go to Galiano. It does happen often there in the winter when it’s windy or when it snows heavily. Trees come down and cut power lines. It sucks too. The house has electric heating so when the power is out then there’s no heat except from the wood stove. Which means then we have to sit near it until the power comes back on.

Last year the power was off for 2 days. We left before it came back on. Neither Lance or us got a good sleep that first night. Did a lot of reading and talking which was alright. But we do like tv a lot. It’s comforting and the power outage takes that comfort away from us. We can’t use our computer for very long either.

Abuse is all about power. About the perpetrator who has most of it and the victims who have very little if any. Gray (7) came to the realization though one day while he was drawing that our abusers did not have the power to read our thoughts. That was a real revelation for him. At least some part of us was not accessible and that pleased him.

Life does seem to render us powerless in so many ways but we can still go back to Viktor Frankl and the idea that our attitude can have a huge effect on our life and help us feel some control over things. When we have a more positive attitude we are more resilient and can deal with stress more easily. We can rise above things to a certain degree. And when we take ownership of our own feelings, rather than blame someone else for them, we can feel a certain amount of control over things. We cannot change someone else, cannot change their thoughts, their feelings or their behaviour but we can do something about ourself. And that can affect the other person.

We used to try to remember that when we were raising Graham. When he was under 10 we would try to remember that his behaviour was often a response to ours. When we focused on changing our behaviour when we had a problem with him we found that it had an effect on him and his behaviour would change too. We tried to own our own emotions and behaviour with him as much as we could. There were times we really lost it with him and would yell at him. But we would eventually catch ourself and apologize to him. We would make sure he knew that he wasn’t bad and it wasn’t his fault that we were screaming. It was the only thing we could do sometimes because we would react so quickly to something and fly off the handle. Apologizing afterwards was all we could do then and to make sure he hadn’t done anything wrong. We think it helped. In his later years he has been willing to accept responsibility for his emotions and behaviour. It is not difficult for either of us to say we are sorry. Thank goodness. It’s so painful when we cannot do that with each other, when we can only blame and lash out. So much wounding.

Oh the picture. We bought that card because it reminded us of Katy Ann (2) when she was younger. She owns the doll Emmy Bean. Found her at a yard sale and fell in love with her immediately. Emmy sleeps with us all the time. In the dream last night we clung to Suzy, our other really important doll, and wondered what would happen to her if we were not chosen to live. It was a very unpleasant dream.

But there’s “power”, which we see as when someone has power over another person. And then there’s “empowerment” when everyone has power. It is shared. We like that concept a lot.