Essays from The Shadows
Volume Three
I was floundering and finding it difficult to know what to do. In therapy-speak I sat in my kingdom and anyone who had abused me was standing outside the walls of my kingdom and I was safe.
As I explored that kingdom and learnt about the landscape I inhabited, for the first time in my life I had a clearer view. I was starting to see what had actually happened to me, the impact it had and the damage it had left behind.
Seeing it was not the same as knowing what to do with it. I did what I had always done from the start of this process. I talked to others. I listened to conversations. I read up about it. I tried to process how the things I learnt applied to me.
I went back to basics. What I needed was the person who understood this stuff. The person who could walk alongside me and teach me what I needed to know and help me process what we discovered.
So I asked if it would be possible to book and pay for some long online sessions where we focused on some of this stuff. He suggested the best way would be to repeat what we knew worked. Return to Holland and take some time to do some intense work. Together in the same room and work hard and see how it goes. So we did.
I flew over and checked into the same hotel. Took the same train to him, walked alongside the same river. Sat outside the same building on the same bench and played the same piece of music I had listened to on the last day when I left there just over a year ago.
Smoked a cigarette. Stepped back into the room.
Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.
I was not the same person I was when I left.
I gave him a summary of how I felt and what I thought we were there to work on.
I explained that in my kingdom I had found a woodpile. If I lifted up a log I found dark corners, bugs and damp, rotten wood. There were things I could see and things I couldn’t quite make out. I needed help taking it apart and examining it.
There were things from my childhood, how I had been treated, how it had damaged me, that I needed help understanding.
The most important thing was how violence and chronic emotional neglect had impacted me and whether we could start by making sense of that.
So we started compiling a list. The effects and the reality of living with these things. It was not easy to think about. Or for me to see clearly.
I always have the issue that I was so young when it started and everything feels blank. There is a residue of panic and fear. There is a vague notion that violence has always been with me. As we progressed, we did a few exercises and talked around subjects. He asked questions and we explored feelings, and our list expanded and became more detailed.
As we meandered around the subject, I felt myself engaging with it more deeply than I had ever done before. I started to remember details. There were conversations about how he hurt me. What method. How he did it. What he said. How it made me feel.
It felt harrowing to be stepping into that kind of detail, but it also kept me moving deeper into the centre of everything. It had a sense of purpose, and I knew I was in safe hands. I had followed him into these kinds of places before and he had always protected me. This time was easier because there was a lot of trust and a belief that he would never just leave me there.
I had agreed before we started that I would not do disordered eating. I would eat lunch. I made a plan that I would eat three small to moderate meals every day I was there. That way I would always be eating something. My particular thing is that hunger doesn’t switch on in me and I just ignore the need for food. Then, after a whole day with nothing but coffee and water, I will have a headache or feel a bit sick and eventually it occurs to me that I might need to eat.
All of which doesn’t help with energy and concentration levels. He had built in a lunch break. Eating together at a place just down the road. A working lunch. We carried on talking about where we had got to and he would explain what we would be doing in the afternoon. We did it all with a plate of tasty food in front of us and I managed to stick to my plan every day of the trip.
Eating three meals a day might seem a basic requirement to you and I accept that it is an odd thing to struggle with. I do not avoid food to be difficult or because I choose to do it.
A combination of chronic emotional neglect and the damage it left behind leaves me with a way of behaving that is hidden from my view and seems perfectly normal to me. It is more the absence of things than something I do. It is what I don’t do because it was either never taught or because my body and brain decided on a different way to cope.
So lesson one seemed to be … eat.
City Monk ~ Breaking Bread
Published