It’s been a while since we’ve posted. We’ve continued with the brain spotting therapy with some interesting results. Apparently the one who blogs also does the sketches. After one of our brain spotting sessions we went away and a depressed adolescent part came forward. All we would do is sit on the couch and doze. Literally, we’d go to work and then come home and sit on the couch and watch tv with the sound off. Also, in a bizarre twist – we stopped brushing our teeth. No matter what we did, we couldn’t get in there and brush our teeth. After a month or so of this the depressed adolescent went away and lj came forward.
Lj is a witch and DnD gamer. As a result we’ve returned to our spiritual pursuits – Saturday evenings are set aside for meditation and spiritual growth work. We’ve renewed our studies in Ifa and have refreshed our DnD game by building an online gaming platform for our next game. Lj is also better motivated, we keep up the house better. We still struggle to brush our teeth and now we bathe only once a week. Not sure what’s up with that.
The portrait work has ground to a stop. We miss it. We study mouths, ears and hands when we people watch. When I plan to set down and do some sketching it never happens.
In addition to the brain spotting therapy, we also worked with another therapist. This last visit we talked a little about the youngest part, she’s somewhere between a year and half to two years old. We left the therapy appointment still triggered. Over a period of time some things have surfaced. The youngest part is all emotion – confusion, fear, pain. She doesn’t understand what happened only that she was held down and touched. She lingers in this state. There’s just no words to say what she’s feeling. She just wails in our head.
The second youngest part (about three years old) keeps asking why. Why did these men touch us this way? The three year old hasn’t heard an answer that makes sense to her. The parts talk amongst themselves on this and the older ones have some solid thoughts as to the why. The most obvious reason is that the men were broken in some way, just as we are broken as a result of their actions.
Now the older parts want to know is who does this sort of thing? Who thinks to themselves ‘touching a child like this makes me feel good’ ? I know an adult whose step-father was the one who regularly had sex with her beginning around the age of six. The step-father told my friend that ‘sex with children is a natural act that has been happening for hundreds of years. She just needs to get over herself.’ This makes me so angry.
But, just because that statement makes me angry doesn’t make it any less true. Historically the sexual use of children does go way back. I don’t agree that sexual use of children is a natural act. But, there are a lot of children who are violated this way and to this date I don’t hear a lot about the people who are supposed to be protecting them. I know more people who are adult survivors of child violation than those who are adults who never experienced child abuse. Granted, anecdotal conversation is not a very scientific method of tallying data.
But still, why do adults do this to children? I understand children violating children – it isn’t right but understandable. Someone violated them as children and they are expressing love/appreciation/gratification in the twisted way they have learned to express. Adults know better and they do it anyway. It seems to me it is like someone who can’t resist chocolate eating all the chocolate within reach. Except using children sexually is truly bizarre and unnatural. Who looks at a child and thinks of sexual gratification? When I see a child my first thought is ‘this is someone I have to protect’.
I think of the world we live in and truly believe that sexual child abuse is rampant. It seems to me that there are more survivors of childhood abuse than there are people with non-abusive childhoods. This is truly sad. How do we fix this? How do we live in a society that experiences childhood without trauma? Child sexual abuse is so pervasive that children are abusing children. How do we protect kids from kids?
A lot of questions spawned by a young child’s question – why? And no answers. If I had an answer to the question of why that made sense to a child it would make healing so much easier.
Lark In The Dark - Discussing Dissociative Disorder 