Like Annie Charlie
Session with Lyn and so many tears. I feel so frightened and I am shaking and trembling. Although Lyn is not working on Friday she is willing to see me again because I’m having a tough time. I feel so grateful and full of relief when she says that she will see me. Sometimes I feel so comforted in her arms, it’s such a sweet release from so much pain. When we get home I cry more tears. Lyn thinks I’m beginning to feel Tir (1) and Julia (1). Maybe so. I don’t know.
I am on the edge of some horror but I must not back away from it this time. I must go into the dark place now and accept the others no matter how frightened I am. There’s no turning back for any of us now. We have to open the closet door and all come out. I must get ready for this. My role is to sit and wait for the others. I need to listen to them and allow the things that must happen. I must be like The Observers (1), open, trusting. I check with the others to see how they feel about me being the “host”. Ariel (1), with much emotion, says she now feels that this is her mind and body too and that she has the right to express herself through it. She used to think that I, Shell (1, 2), had too much power and control and thus prevented her from things. But now she sees that is not true and that it is up to her and the others to speak up and act.
Graham is not home and we breathe a sigh of relief. Some of the others can come out now. We can talk. Some do really enjoy Graham’s company and enjoy being his mother. But others hold back because someone else is around. And it is very difficult for me to tell my friends about the others. I feel ashamed, scared they will accuse me of lying. Afraid they will not believe me. Of course, I don’t really believe it all either. I cannot fully accept that my identity is so fragmented much less the cause of this fragmentation.
So I collapse, fall apart, cave in. Crying so much then Annie Charlie (1) and CF (1) start crying. Then we go lie on the couch curled up like Isa (1) in her crib, crying, and her mouth open and Rage (1) trying to yell and Tir yelling at hospital staff to leave us alone even though we are not in hospital. I don’t want to know anything. I can feel them bringing me the truth like food on a tray saying you’ve got to Shell, sometime you’ve got to. But the things on the tray are these horrible creepy crawly bugs, and slimy, not like food at all and I can’t do it. I can’t swallow this. I tell them I’m scared. And I tell them I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I left the scene of the crime. I feel so terrible I’m almost sick on the couch and crying and drooling and everything just seems to be coming out of me and I’m sure someone’s going to drag me away cause I know I’m crazy Lyn you say I’m not but I know this ain’t sane.
I carry my illusive past around with me like a shield, to protect me from who I am now and what I will become. It gives me something to hang onto. If I let go I will die. I am terrified of dying and I am terrified of letting go. I would rather hold onto my illusion of the past than sail into the sea of unknown. I have a dream about my ex, David, that he is helping me to die. Gently and with love. In the dream I want to die, but not because I am in pain, not because I have given up, but because I want to let go, finally, of all my trappings.
I can feel people holding me down but I don’t understand why and who they are. I know they want to hurt my body, use it for their own power and pleasure.
I am beginning to wonder whether anything in the way of abuse happened with my stepfather. It’s possible that Julia or Ariel or even Tir have the answer. My cousin who lived with us when we were both 10 years old says the only person he ever cared for was my mother. She doesn’t think he really cared about me. Hmmm... I read an article on the long term effects of incest. The person “may have feelings of disgust and revulsion about their own and partner’s body”. Also that “the woman only experiences sexual pleasure at the beginning of a relationship, when the partner is new. The ability to experience sexual excitement diminishes rapidly as the relationship continues.” Being involved sexually “recapitulates the incest and becomes overwhelmingly conflict-ridden resulting in sexual avoidance”. After a year or two or three David, Graham’s dad, began to feel like a brother to me and sex felt like incest. It was dirty and bad. I was dirty and bad.
The article continues that many women who were violently abused but repressed the memory of incestuous events end up feeling “guilt, shame, embarrassment and bewilderment that they need sadomasochistic fantasies to bring them to orgasm”. My body is something for me to use sexually either to have power over a man and “lure” him in or to be used sexually by others and render me powerless. Women abused by incest report periods of sexual promiscuity in their life. Many women oscillate “between periods of compulsive sexual activity and periods of abstinence” and “suffers from a confusion about sex and affection, generally being unable to differentiate the two”. A survey showed that many of these women choose men who are emotionally unavailable or a “father figure”. These women tend to marry men much older than themselves. My grandmother married a man 20 years older than herself, my mother a man 30 years older. We had a “romantic affair” with a psychiatrist in 1990. He was 20 years older than us and he had the same birthday as our stepfather. He even looked a little like him.
This is like trying to jump off the highest diving board. We go higher and higher each time as we learn more and more about us. Each new level brings even more dread, the feeling that the worst is yet to come. The fall will be even more frightening.
Creating another personality, another self is cold, sterile, calculating. It’s about severing something, not just distancing yourself. Cutting clean. Like cutting with a knife.
A dream. A group of people are going to rape me. They don’t like me at all. They feel disgust and contempt for me. One woman shoves the top of a bottle into my knee. I wake up feeling very disliked, unloved and depressed. My dreams are not very pleasant these days and often seem to be about me being in a hopeless situation. And powerless.
A picture of a little dark haired girl in a magazine. Her arms reaching out, asking for love. I look at this photograph and feel the strangest sensation. A “coming out of” I don’t understand. This is you Shell, not born, but created. It is not that the others are a part of me but that all of us Inside are a part of Tir. Tir is the one born, the essential self within. I have been told this before yet I was not able to believe but when I see this picture now I know it is true. I am not the one born, the one who began, and I am terrified by this. Yet I have already begun to change, to evolve into a future self. This is a dying, an “old self” leaving. This is dis-illusionment, the end of an illusion.
We need Lyn to work with Tir, to help her become all of who she wants to be. And we, the rest of the Web, need to support and carry her, to protect and nurture her.
Tir is making me dizzy. She shakes her head back and forth, tormented by demons. And she hates needles.
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