Experiencer

Growing up wasn’t all mermaids and magic though. I also got to experience the my dark night of the soul when I was just a teenager. The light and the dark, you really can’t have one without the other

I feel pretty lucky, actually, that I was forced into deep shadow work early on, and learned lessons that would serve me for the rest of my life.

Here’s how it started- as I entered adolescence, I started to starve myself.

It began as a diet when my body started to change, and when I saw how easy it was to control my intake and, in turn, my body, I became addicted to the power it gave me. The feedback was concrete and quick, which made it dangerously satisfying.

I didn’t want to be pretty. I wanted to compete with myself, to drive myself, to push myself. Maybe it was some kind of past life memory, a remnant of being a martyr or a saint. As the pounds fell away, I felt a strange relief in escaping the male gaze. My soft curves gave way to bone.

Being the master of my body was so satisfying, here was one thing I could control.

I certainly couldn’t control my mother, or her depression.

Her migraines kept her in bed most nights. As a single mom, she worked her tail off, and when she came home, she collapsed. She would retreat to her room, turn off the light, and hide from the world.

Her room became a landscape of pain, with hundreds of insulin needles and lancets scattered in the carpet, the air heavy with exhaustion. Our home followed suit, sinking into disorder. She had held it together through our childhood, but by the time we reached adolescence, the weight of the memories she had long buried began to surface.

When my mom took me to the doctor for the weight loss, they immediately admitted me to the hospital and kept me there, on a strict protocol, for nearly three months.

It was like jail, or like a convent. Same same but different. It was a retreat away from real life.

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My mom said I was OCD. I told the doctors that if they saw my house, they would think I was the normal one. They said I was chemically imbalanced, yet no one ever checked my chemicals. They put me on a range of antidepressants, each with its own side effects (this was pre-Prozac.) I got used to the fact that every time I stood up too quickly, I would faint.

Yes, my mind did loop, obsess, and criticize widely. But that didn’t discount the fact that I grew up in chaos.

Eventually, I had a miraculous moment of clarity. I saw that I was the one creating my own suffering. It was perhaps my first download ever, a whole image with a message delivered straight into my consciousness.

I found myself in a dark tunnel, though just enough light seeped through so I could see. I looked down. I saw chains around my wrists, but they were loose. I could slip them off. I put them on, I could take them off again. This vision was so clear, I can still see it now.

Serious Eight of Swords vibes. Apparently, I was getting ready for Buddhism.

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At the time, the dominant theory was that anorexia stemmed from sexual abuse. The doctors interrogated me endlessly about my father, searching for evidence to fit their hypothesis. It was unsettling.

My father never abused me, but through all that psychological digging, my mother unearthed something she had buried deep below consciousness. That memory had been sealed away for a lifetime, buried ten feet under the surface of her mind. She had always told me her father was nearly a saint. I prayed to him at night, unaware that beneath the surface of his seeming goodness lay a darkness my mother had carried silently for decades.

Her memories resurfaced for her through my struggle.

Each new recollection retraumatized her, reverberating through her body. She was exquisitely sensitive, porous to every memory and feeling. What should have been healing instead opened fresh wounds, leaving her raw and torn open.

Here’s the kicker: neither her mother nor her brother believed her. Her mother never protected her from him, and now she could not fully admit what had happened. My mom wrestled with anger at her mother, with the sense of abandonment, with the knowledge that her mother had known and done nothing. But as she began to remember her trauma, her mother was slipping away into dementia and Alzheimer’s. My mom found herself feeling pity instead of rage, watching the woman who had failed her fade into fragility.

Her brother couldn’t see their father in that light. They simultaneously cut each other off. She had been betrayed as a child, and now the betrayal came again as an adult.

She entered therapy, but this was the 1980s. Trauma-informed practices did not exist, and the risk of re-traumatization was unknown. Every session left her more shaken, more fractured, often needing to lie down for days afterward. A deeply porous and sensitive soul, her body was at war with itself, twisting and aching, muscles tight with terror, stomach knotted with grief, every emotion a physical assault. She became unable to care for herself, brittle from diabetes, fragile and trembling under the weight of her own suffering.

At the time, therapy was only beginning to recognize how widespread sexual abuse had been in the previous generation. The Courage to Heal was controversial, accused mostly by men of planting memories where none existed. Critics insisted these memories were false, designed to protect the perpetrators.

The memories that had come knocking at her mind’s door were suddenly denied. She was told she was lying, that what she remembered simply wasn’t real.

The word gaslighting didn’t exist yet, but the experience must have been pure crazymaking, as if the very walls of reality were shifting around her.

They put her on powerful antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications that gradually turned her into a shell of the woman I had known growing up. This was perhaps her first death; this fiery, vibrant woman became vacant.

Therapy drove her deeper into darkness. Reliving and resurfacing memories felt like being assaulted all over again. Her therapist should be held accountable for eight years of retraumatization and the heavy prescription of drugs meant to numb her. It was as if she had become his special project, their relationship far too intimate and dangerously close.

At times, she questioned her own sanity, unsure if she could trust her memories. I wonder what else she remembered but could not say.

I wonder if my anorexia was actually a reflection of her sexual abuse, a manifestation of generational trauma in me.

I also wonder if that evil was what I felt on Oak Drive. The shadows in the hallway, the evil that lurked in the cellar.

That was where she grew up, where she had been sexually abused.

Was her father evil? Was he influenced by the evil in the house? Did the evil in the house work through him?

What if it wasn’t just him?

What if it was an energy, a presence, a ghost, or something not of this world at all?

Maybe what she experienced as her father’s abuse was also an invasion from somewhere else, something that used him the way darkness uses form.

Either way, the harm my mother unearthed through my anorexia would haunt her for decades.

In the next chapter of my life, I was blesses to discover the ancient goddess who helped me embrace my body, and a little later Vipassana helped me befriend my noisy mind.

But, I could never heal my mother, and more than anything in the world, I wanted to. I still do.