Did the Therapy Thursday thing today.

And we got talking about what has been on my mind lately. I told him I had been thinking about the massive psychological wound that lies at the center of my psyche and how it seems like this ocean of suffering inside me and that make it hard to imagine there being an end to it.

But I know that there is. I know that it’s finite. I can feel its weight in my mind and thus I can tell that it has dwindled over the years as I blog away.

It might be draining slowly, but it does so steadily. And I can feel the edges clearly and can actively encourage them to join up so the damned wound can close.

No cigar for guessing where the pain came from : being raped by a stranger when I was but four years old.

Nobody knew it had happened – the bastard got away with it – so obviously nobody did anything about it., I got no therapy. I had no help. I suffered alone.

So what else is new?

Even if it had happened in this current more enlightened era, I am not sure I would have been able to tell anyone. Talking about things makes them real, after all, and my mind had sealed away the memories of the event so well that I completely forgot it had happened to me until much later in life.

And yet, when I remembered, it was like the memory had been sitting there the whole time and I just stopped noticing it.

Which is weird.

I kind of wish I had been able to tell Doctor Klein, the therapist I saw in high school, and seen what he could do with it.

He saved my life,. I was suicidal a lot as a teen.

God, I’ve been so sick for so long. One of the walking wounded, as my therapist said.

Anyhow, give how unable I was to even recall the incident myself, it is not a surprise at all that this means the wound it caused went completely untreated for decades.

And untreated wounds fester. Mine has had 40+ years in which to do it. It hangs there in the center of my mind, visible to none but controlling everything from the shadows.

I still can’t imagine what it looks like. All I can see in my mind’s eye is a spherical control room deep in the center of my mind and nothing but impenetrable darkness within.

But if I had to guess, it is probably a fox. Or some other kind of critter. Something small and delicate and timid and nursing a truly horrifying injury.

A fox with no tail, perhaps.

That’s so depressing. WTF is wrong with me? Why do I think of these things?

Because they express what is really going on inside me, I guess. Like H.R. Giger, I am driven to draw my nightmares, in my case with words.

And I would honestly probably be better off if I drew more of them so I could set them free and not carry them around any more.

More after the break.

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Express the wound

Warning, the following is very gross in a medical way.

Today, I shared a disgusting but apt metaphor with my therapist, Doc Costin.

I compared my attempts at self-therapy to when you are pressing on wound or an abscess or whatever to squeeze the nasty infected fluid out of it so that the wound itself can heal and the body can be free of that toxic foulness.

That is how I feel about my process of digging for pockets of pain and fear and other frozen emotions so that I can expose them to the light of day and have them evaporate and be gone forever.

Thus, I empty out my sea of pain a bucketful at a time.

But I want more. I want to find bigger pockets of badness so I can release more of my pain into the sky and recover faster.

My ambition and my impatience grow (grows?)

I am perfectly willing to face pain and suffering too long deferred. I am not happy about but I am determined to rid myself of this dyspeptic morass of frozen feelings by whateve means is most expedient.

Nero Wolf has been a bad influence on me.

One important thing that came up during today’s session is that in order to let things out, you also have to let things IN.

Once the door is open, it’s open both ways. If I want to drive out my demons, I am going to have to bring in my angels.

I have to let the sun shine in.

Or is it “let the sunshine in”?

Turns out the hippies might have known a thing or two that I don’t.

I am remind of that time last year when I had that incredibly intensely trippy and wonderful dream with rainbow kaleidoscopes and twisting turning pinwheels and an entire song I wrote in my dream. Lyrics, music, everything.

Which I sadly forgot upon waking, along with most of the rest ot the dream.

But my takeaway from that experience was that maybe it is okay to leave mundane reality behind and go on a “trip” in search for your very own rainbow of happiness.

Or even just to use substances and sensations to overwhelm the frantic chattering of your neurosis ridden conscious mind so the rest of you can freaking relax for a bit.

Maybe the New Age type people have a freaking point.

Like, take these lovely young people :

There is something I need in their music. Something that called to me the first time I heard them and that led me to download a bunch of their songs.

It appeals to that powerful and mysterious something that has lurked in my consciousness for my whole life. Something that is larger and stronger than my puny rational mind but that has never done more than pop up at random times and made me feel weird and profound for a while because it didn’t “make sense” and so my overly rationalistic mind had no choice but to treat it as noise.

The idea that I could follow that feeling to something incredible that would expand my mind and liberate my true self never occurred to me. It was more important to me that I keep control and not “go crazy”.

But maybe the mystics know things I do not. Things of incredible value to my soul and my happiness that I have turned away at the door for not fitting into the existing framework of my understanding of reality.

And tell me, how is one to ever transcend with a mindset like that?

How about letting things in and THEN figuring out where they fit into the grand scheme of things? That’s how you expand your mind and give depth to your soul.

And where do you think all your wondrous talk of humanism is leading?

To the place where all things meet, of course.

And that place isn’t rational AT ALL.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.