This may not be the greatest post ever. I am back down in Port A for the weekend. This time with ALL my kiddos and my mom, who is often like another child, god bless her. But I haven’t written in a couple of days and wanted to get down some important stuff.
I had a great session with my therapist on Wednesday. We did EMDR on the Great Trauma. I wasn’t sure whether or not I still had anything buried about it but oh boy did I! It was kinda crazy though because I quickly went from the Great Trauma to my own trauma. I feel crazy even thinking this but I am starting to suspect that something happened to me – some kind of sexual abuse – that I can’t quite remember. It might have been when I was really little – the age 3 keeps popping up – or maybe even in a past life. Or it might just be the heaping gobs of shame that I had dumped on me about my own sexuality when I was a kid.
I was raised Southern Baptist and so I was taught that every sexual thought or innocent act was a mortal sin and I was going to burn in hell. I was also taught that all men were out to get me. Once, when I was around 3 – I think, we were at a bowling alley and my mom told me that if I didn’t keep my legs crossed that the man across the aisle would be able to see up my skirt and he would come over and do bad things to me. Crazy, right? Like I said, god bless her. That got me to thinking about her own childhood. What the hell made her like that?
Back to therapy though – by the end of the session, I realized that core of my issue is SHAME. I saw this big, ugly raw, infected sore in my soul that was festering with shame. Shame about my sexuality, shame about my body, shame about my drinking, my eating, my parenting. SHAME. It’s killing me. It’s eating me alive. How do I break out of this yuck?
The next day, we were waiting to hear back from a mortgage lender on whether or not we were pre-qualified for a loan. We have already been pre-qualified by another lender, but this one would have much better terms. We were anxiously waiting all day when FINALLY the phone rang. But instead of an approval, they had questions for me. You see, I filed for bankruptcy 8 years ago with my previous husband. And the lender was showing some late pays since then and they needed an explanation before they could move forward. I had none. I don’t even remember the late pays and I don’t think they are accurate and my own investigation of my credit report seems to support that but, nevertheless, I was sucking on a big old stinking beer stein of SHAME. The bankruptcy and being poor is a HUGE shame nugget for me. Immediately, I went from happy and optimistic, to darkness and tears. I have been struggling to get out ever since. I got drunk that night. The shame seeping out of pores, running through my veins was more than I could stand. I had to make it go away.