My body indeed kept record of the wrongs done against it. The issue was I couldn’t just heal by simply recalling the trauma my body had received.
It is so much easier for them to talk about what has been done to them — to tell a story of victimization and revenge — than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience.
the body keeps the score, page 47
If I just focused on what my body felt, I’d stay in the victim stage. By internalizing what my body was telling me, by engaging my whole being, I found the true wreckage. A wreckage that included and incorporated all of it: my flesh, my heart and my soul.
My entire being had been captured through the sustained abuse. I left my parents home when I was 18. Their abuse never stopped until I left. That was much deeper than my flesh wounds. Oh, my flesh had been tortured, that’s the truth. However, the deeper damage was what I could not see or easily feel.
I was uncomfortable numb when I left their home.
My body continued on with it’s way of nodding to my past, but I spent my waking hours in full denial of where I had come from. I never wanted to look back.
That kept me a prisoner to my past.
In my early 20’s I began talking about the sexual abuse. I’d recant the tale of losing my virginity to my father. I thought that healed me.
I could not have been more wrong.
Until I found a great counselor and began the work of peeling off layer, after layer, after layer of damage, I could not incorporate my story into my being.
Why is it important to feel the depth of the damage and despair? It is the only way to merge all the blown apart pieces of ourselves cohesively back into one being.
As one cohesive part I now walk on; not leaving my past behind, I carry it with me. It is all part of me now. Not denying it, not honoring it. It is what it is.
I have laid down the idolatry that incest builds around us. Idolatry is the worship of idols. I somehow idolized my father. I have protected him for years. I worshiped the thought of his love and falsely symbolized his role in my life making it different than it was.
Father God, forgive me. I hadn’t seen it for what it is. I remove all denial and pretense. I strike down the false god of my earthly father. No man deserves that place, particularly not a father of incest.
