I noticed I'm getting hits.  This has kind of been "in the drawer" for a while, but I've been planning some new layers for "The Broken Vessels:  Excavating Shards of Memory in the Blogosphere."  Thanks for reading.  Stay tuned.

Enter here.

The Mortal Fear of Physical Peril,
or,
Fear in My Cells

I've thought of taking a break from therapy to go for a series of massages to release chronic holding up and down my spine.  This one muscle spasms, my right shoulder goes down and my hip goes up.  I'm crooked and graceless.  I wanted a break, too, to clear up my doubts about L.  It was a good sign when Little J. (my eight year-old self) started to get sad about the prospect of not seeing her.

Explaining to L. why I wanted the break helped clarify some things.  Before these new memories, I had several categories for Donna that had taken me a lifetime to sort out:  the endearing, pitiful, strangely wise crazy woman I had always known; the fantasy of the perfect mother that was my forgetting; the violent abuser of the first set of repressed memories from my early twenties; the angry needy multiple I revealed later in my research as a historian; Baby Donna, the symbol of her pure untainted soul I had come to on the path through all of that to the heart of compassion.  A Donna for every layer of memory.  This incest jumbled them all up.  Now I can't seem to get a fix on anyone but the baby.  Now she's just not there.  I can't put this new Donna in with the rest yet, the sadist, my mistress, my dom, my top.

Little J.: "When I do feel this, I won't die."
L.:  "No you won't die.  Back then it wasn't safe to feel.  But you won't die now."
Little J.:  "But it's ok to die, if I do die.  I mean dying is something that happens."
Me:  "I think what she's trying to say is that she understands now that feeling won't kill her.  It's not that she wants to die.  But the fear is in my cells.  Saying, it's ok to die, reassures the cells.  Just accept.  Don't fight against it.  If it's my time to die then that's as it should be.  Facing and accepting death enables the release."
L.:  "Yes, death is part of the process."

Right after our session, I got a huge hit of transference.  "L. doesn't like me anymore.  I'm covered in filth."  I'm not identified with it.  Just noticed it.  I also figured out that the fear in the cells is simply the imprint of mortal fear in response to real physical peril, my life under threat every night.  For months I lived with the fear:  tonight she's really going to kill me.

And I understand now that I don't have to let L. go because she doesn't give me everything I need.  When I need to look into her near-black eyes, eyes the color of fertile soil, and feel her strong presence with me, I can.

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