Experiencer

Through the question, “What is your intuition story?” a flood of fragmented memories was released. It began like a slow drip, flashes of frightening moments surfacing one by one, until a whole catalog of weird experiences emerged. I had seen things as a child that terrified me so deeply that I swore I would no longer witness the supernatural. I believed in it, but I refused to see it.

At first, my mind went to Oak Drive, my childhood treasure trove of haunted house terror. Then, like stepping into a dark attic with a flashlight, I began to uncover other moments where I had felt unsafe, both practically and metaphysically.

Thank goodness for quarantine forcing us to stay home. Without that vast stretch of time and space, I do not know if I would have had the courage to do this shadow work.

A friend told me about an amazing therapist who used Accelerated Resolution Therapy, a creative cousin of EMDR. In it, you recall a traumatic memory and alter it in any way you like, rewriting the story for yourself. We were allowed to use imagination and magic. We could do anything.

I began earnestly searching for the monsters I had hidden away in my closets, under my bed, and in the darker corners of memory itself, following the trail of every moment I had ever felt terror. Each memory shone like a lone star in the dark, tethered to a thread of mystery.

I imagined myself in the director’s chair, watching what had happened on Oak Drive and changing the scene so I could rewrite the story for my own healing. Oak Drive came first. It had to. The first haunting. The first lesson in fear.

I stepped into the moment as a guardian and wrapped the little girl, my past self, in a protective bubble of light made from my love and grounded presence. With this act of imagination, I felt the healing ripple, the sense of protection and safety touching me in the present. It was safe to look for monsters, and I knew I could protect myself.

Stephen King says terror is the purest form of fear. It is the quiet, unrelenting dread that comes before anything appears, when your mind fills in every shadow and sound with a story of its own. Looking back, I see that those moments on Oak Drive taught me the texture of the unseen. Terror wasn’t about danger. It was about presence, the shiver that wakes you to something larger than yourself.

The very first thing I did was go back and protect the girl who had met the unknown alone. I let her know she was not alone anymore. That the monsters could be faced. That the shadows could be held with love.

Working through these memories felt like traveling through time, backward and forward at once. Time and space became my tools for healing the me that had always been me.

I stepped into those moments as the adult who could hold, see, and protect the little girl I once was. In that crossing, my present self softened, and my past self finally moved forward with care. It might sound strange, but it was deeply healing.

When I finally learned the word “experiencer,” the scattered memories of terror and awe began to form a pattern. What had once felt like isolated, bizarre events now appeared as parts of a single story, a pattern stitched together by the protector I had become for my own inner child.