Transcript: Episode 360
360. April 19
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[Short piano piece is played, lasting about 20 seconds]
The day before we left for ISSTD conference in Seattle, we had therapy. And we were doing eye movements. So everything is a little blurry, but I know it was about our previous Kelly. And one of the things that came up was the look on her face at the gas station where we met for her to give us our notebooks, and how awful that feeling was when we saw that look on her face, which is why we froze. And what that reminded us of from our family. So that was one of those things where in the middle of EMDR our therapist said, “Let's just pause this and put it back on the shelf, and we'll come back to that part later.” And then came back to acknowledging that parts of us felt okay, and parts of us did not feel okay, and holding space for both of those things to be true. That we could feel the intensity of feelings from the past, but also be present in the moment where we knew that we are safe and okay. And we worked on containing that, and then going back to strengthen other good things so that we closed our session in a good place. But that was hard and exhausting, realizing that I have roots in shame from other people's disappointment in me, other people's frustration with me. Rightly so, sometimes. I have not been easy for anyone. And certainly not always right. But as always with EMDR I felt exhausted afterward. And our therapist has said that it's an okay time, even a good time, to take a nap.
So I laid down to take a nap and was awakened by a man in my room. It startled me and scared me, and was maybe one of the top three triggers that could have happened. But it was just the plumber, strangely. I don't know why he came into our bedroom. But we apparently had left the front door open, which I didn't remember doing. But he had called the landlord and said he was coming, but the landlord did not tell us that he was coming. So he thought that we left the door open for him. And he knows that we can't hear well, so he came looking for us to tell us that he was here to fix something on the refrigerator. In the end he did his thing and he left and everything was okay, but I was still shaking. It was so much in one day.
But we do what we do, which is to push on through. And so it was time to get ready for the children to come home. And I have learned that I handle that after school chaos better if it appears that I am structured and busy, so that they will also be structured and busy, rather than if I sit down to relax and then I'm interrupted by them or disrupted by them. Or they also sit down to relax instead of doing their chores. So I have started a habit of working on dinner when they come home from school so that it's then ready when it's actually time to eat instead of rushing to cook things when it's time to eat. And also that way I remember to eat instead of just not doing it because I'm so tired. So it means structuring my days differently if I want a nap after EMDR and dinner early, and planning for that, instead of spending every last moment trying to avoid them passively before they even get home. So I turned on the oven to cook them dinner. And there was a snapping sound like something I've not heard before. And flames began to shoot out of the oven. Not just a random flame or a fire, but an intense fire like lightning. Like a fireworks rocket that you would sit in the driveway and that would burst brightly and fast and intensely. Except this did not run out and this did not turn off. I threw baking soda at it enough to realize it was coming out of the wall from where the element or filament, I don't know the word in English, connects that had broken and so in two places electrical fire was literally shooting out of our oven. And it was terrifying. I got the children outside and I counted their heads over and over again the way I used to count chickens at night in the coop, wanting to make sure they were safe. Needing to know that they were safe.
And then things got blurry. I don't remember what happened next. I can tell you that children are safe and we are safe, though our kitchen blackened. But I went from the sidewalk counting the heads of my children when there was a fire in my home to waking up in the bathroom at the airport with my hair cut. Inches of chunks of my hair on the floor around me and fingernails scissors in my hand. That was my day before the ISSTD conference. So that's what I was dealing with as ISSTD conference began. And I showed up to be as normal as I could. I certainly wasn't there to talk about fire.
We've told you how that week went. And I have not told you how I tried to come home and walk into the mess of cleaning up and repairs, and lost myself again four hours away and woke up back in Kansas City where other people are living in our house there. As if we forgot it was not ours. We are safe now, as I said, but it's been a rough couple of weeks. But it's fine. We are fine. We are always fine. And I guess Part of me that has been in lockdown knows that we have escaped.
It's okay though, because now we can go to therapy in person for the first time in three years. It was a significant day to do so. April 19. That was the bombing in Oklahoma City when I was 17. It was also the day of the painting that destroyed therapy as I knew it. This is what I saw in the morning when I woke up, on my memories, the timeline of how pictures of what we thought were hope, but wasn't. It was on April 19 that we painted this picture for our therapist and found out it was for her friend that was not our friend, and through that also met our friend who changed her mind. And it was April 19 that we knew that we would have to leave therapy because the magic had been shattered, the space had been violated, and things would never be the same. We could not just quit because of the notebooks, and we tried for six months to get them back. The therapist at the time was protective of them. And rightly so. She didn't want them destroyed. She was holding them for us. And we could not figure out which one of us was the one that could consent to getting them back. So we kept going. We kept asking for the notebooks. And we kept talking about her friend.
We didn't know yet about fawning, but we knew therapy was over. And we found a fawning way to say goodbye, with Emma's top 10. That was meant to be our goodbye and we thought we would not go back to her office after that. But we couldn't leave the notebooks, as if it was somehow leave pieces of us behind. And so we wrestled with through the summer, and we scrambled to get better at making friends, and we did all we knew to be good, to try hard enough, to be accepted. Fawning, fawning, fawning. We were scared and said so. We doubted and we said so. But on the school yard playground, the cool girls were climbing up to the monkey bars and we would die if we were left behind. And so we just kept climbing up, up, up. And then in October, at the Women's Retreat, was Sleeping Jesus in the boat. We started across the monkey bars not knowing where it was going, but trying to have faith enough that our therapists would be there on the other side. That our friends would be there on the other side.
We could, we thought, even create someone new as if my mind were made of playdough, to meet the requirement of facing the fire in which I was to throw in all my shame and fears as an act of faith. And if there is anything we know how to do to survive, it is fawning. Even before the fire. But also that broke me. That was the end of me. The end of Emma as we knew her. It shattered us. It was too much and we were still alone. Because we did not belong. And what school yard girls had promised would be friendship was not to be for us. And so we finally said goodbye, notebooks aside, pretending that's what we threw in the fire. So that it would finally be okay to leave and not come back.
We didn't know then that her office was closing. She hadn't told us. And we didn't know then that the pandemic was coming. No one could have guessed it. And so we were guilty for killing Emma, for pushing her into the fire. And for that we deserve to be punished, to die, because hope itself had died. And so we went to the Middle East with intent and plan, and sent the letter that said we were not coming back. Except that our bodyguards were good and knew what they were doing, were wise and strong and sent us home again to California. The deployment of fire itself. And we had to scramble to live as someone new, to live at all. Because we had fallen from the monkey bars and not reached the other side, and there were no friends there to catch us, and it knocked the wind out of us. No air in our sails to cross the stormy sea to get to the other side. And before we could get back up on our feet, COVID came. And we thought we were waiting for friends and a therapist on the other side, but we had fallen down the well. And it would take us two years to realize that no one was coming, to find the words to say that this abandonment had left us in attachment cry. Two years in the country with the children. One year alone, on my own, when even the husband had to leave us. I think that we could have died there on the ground with no air left to breathe if it were not for the faces of our children, and the waddle of little chickens, and the kisses from fish who didn't mind drowning and taught us to breathe underwater on the swing by the pond on our mountain where we stayed alive by crying rivers of tears.
Dark years for the podcast. Darker still for us living it. But we did live. And now it's been three years since the painting that changed everything. The painting I wish we had never done. Conversations I wish never had happened. Knowledge I wish I never had. It was a small slip. It was my mistake in asking a question when I know better than to speak. And it was a small crossing on her part, unintentionally, that cost me everything.
These are footprints, like we told you in that story in that episode where what we thought was being given to us was not. And the care we thought we were receiving was an illusion. Some confusion. Wishful thinking. A little girl still locked in a cedar chest dreaming a freedom, of nurture, of care, of being chosen and released like butterflies to the sky instead of being buried in a box and left alone. These three years were not lost on me and changed everything. Namely in that I don't know if therapy will work again. I don't know how to believe in it again.
I posted in the Community a picture of the painting. And I said April 19, 2019. That's when it happened. On accident. A stupid painting that changed everything. Through a series of circumstances, it was this painting that caused things to fall apart in therapy. That's why we think it was our fault. Because we did the painting. I thought it was of God, and sharing was an act of faith, and that connections were being made, and I was promised that they would keep me safe. That was the beginning of my unraveling.
And today, in 2022, I cried. And I was even angry because what they said friendship would be, it wasn't. Not for me. It feels like they tricked me. And I was ashamed because I couldn't be what they wanted. Because when even fawning fails, all you have left is attachment cry. And that was hell. Two years of hell. It was the most suffering I have ever endured, which is saying a lot because I've been through a lot. But all those other things were done to me, and this I did to myself. But also today in Now Time, April 19, 2022, I did not drown today.
I think everything they tried to teach me is true, for them, if not for me. And I am trying in my own way, at my own pace to find my own friends. And I'm okay with that. And all of you in the Community and groups are still there a year later, which baffles me but for which I am grateful. And we have used what we learned to build our own community. So even if they were not for me, or I was not for them, those footprints still did good in the world somewhere. That's the only thing I have to give them now. Offering the same thing for others abandoned and rejected like myself an opportunity for a tribe that is safe and here. Maybe that's the best way to honor them, anyway. Maybe it's the best way to honor myself. Grace and space for that, as they would say.
So today, I felt all the feelings but also let them go. And grief today, but also peace. Disappointment but also growth. And I managed to do all of that without even contacting our previous Kelly like we wanted to. Because she, the person, is not someone I know. And she, the therapist, is not mine. [Deep sigh]
But for seven months, I have been back in therapy with a good therapist. It's been three months since we began eye movements for what happened, so that I could re engage in therapy for Memory Time things instead of only grief for her. It has been two months since we got moved to twice a week sessions. One month since we met in person. Two weeks since we started going to her office, in person. And one week since we finally started journaling again.
And now everything is back online. There are parts all over the place, feelings all over the place. There's the hard work of untangling feelings, of tracing them like threads on a tapestry, and trying to regulate them instead of just being inside a Ping Pong machine getting whacked around. Trying to discern them instead of avoiding them. Trying to hold space for them instead of reacting or acting them out. Trying to exist without causing messes. Trying to heal me without causing harm to others. Trying to pace things so not causing harm to me. Trying to see clearly, and know what I know and feel what I feel, without turning it off or drowning. Trying to stay in the boat where sleeping Jesus is invisible now.
The biggest piece of this in Now Time is seeing our therapist in person. Driving to another brown building, this one with a red stripe. Finding a parking spot across all the windows that are staring at me like it's a trap. But this time when I saw the wall of windows, instead of imagining all the horrors in the offices there until I was too panicked to be able to get out of my car, I turned those windows into zoom boxes and imagined your faces there cheering me on, laughing, playing with your filters, taking turns telling stories, until I have the courage to go inside to where like always there was a lobby with an elevator to go up. And the elevator opened to a sitting area just like it had before. As if I formed the building out of my own consciousness, out of my own memory, as if the universe knew that I was looking for the last door on the left. I passed the bathrooms on the right halfway down and then kept going down the hall to that last door on the left. Somehow reaching it 10 minutes late even though I had parked an hour early. So it seems we've made no progress in three years of getting ourselves inside the door. But our therapist was there waiting for us in a mask because a mask is Now Time. The end of COVID, the middle of COVID, COVID being a thing now. But I had forgotten my mask because Now Time and Memory Time and the last door on the left is all blurry. And I felt ashamed because I of all people have been so careful for so long. But she whisked me through her hallways to her door in a maze I've already forgotten, and opened her door to what is always there. Some armchairs and a couch with pillows, and a blanket we will never ask to come off the shelf.
I felt the air sucked out of my lungs. A consequence of forgetting my mask. And a flashback of this is the panic of therapy in person. I had forgotten what it was like not to have a button to turn off my screen. I had forgotten what it was like to sit down without anything to veil me. I had forgotten what it was like to sit down across from someone who could see into me when I cannot even look at them.
My saving grace was her window, which is big like my bedroom window. And outside of it is a tree. A large tree, with arms open wide with free abandon as if to tell me, “you can be here some day, like this some day, full of air in your branches, and green with new growth and reaching toward the sky with hope.” And the whole session, the tree stood there, arms open wide like a hug. Arms lifted high like Moses over the battle keeping guard as if I might still have a chance at winning.
And across from the window on the wall was a piece of art. The kind I could sell in the market to get enough money for groceries. And again, as if a sign from the universe reminding me that it's trying to be gentle, the picture was of a storm on the sea, with a small figure of a person on the shore in the sand. And I'm sure for some people it feels like they're walking toward the storm with something to face, and that's why they're coming to therapy. But for me, I'm walking out of the storm. And it was then that I realized I have landed here, finally, on the other side.
And after my session I went to my art. I pulled out my paints and I made my own version for myself. A storm on the sea that included fire and smoke and the small figure of me walking away from it, letting it go. And in the foreground, some grass and flowers, as a spring is here, in me, not just outside the window.
[Break]
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