Flee, Part 1

~ KJ

I sat in the waiting room of my therapist’s office this afternoon, fighting the urge to get up and leave. I looked at the door, then looked at the clock, debating if I could dash out without running into her. I can’t leave. She’ll worry. I have to leave. I can’t do this today. I spent so much time debating with myself, that before I knew it, my therapist came out of her office and my option to flee was gone.

I was scared. I wanted to run away because I was scared of what was going to happen. I knew my therapist would know something was wrong. It doesn’t matter how many times I say “I’m okay.” My face always tells the truth, and today my face was telling the world that something was wrong.

Sure enough, my therapist knew I was not okay. She asked when it all started. I told her. I told her how I couldn’t stop crying. I told her I couldn’t sleep. I told her about the memories that were (are) not stopping. I told her I didn’t want to remember anymore. I couldn’t take anymore heartbreak.

My therapist talked about memories and what memory loops mean, and all the things I already knew. Therapy was a safe place to talk about it. I knew that. But I was still scared. I tried to process it anyway. I knew that hiding it and avoiding it was not working; that was obvious to me given how I’ve been the last few days.

He knew. He was there. I started crying. Uncontrollably. I felt the pain in my heart come back. My head was hurting in a weird sort of way, like a pressure was building up inside with no way to release it. And I just kept crying. I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted that little bit of hope I had been holding on to that my father was just the tiniest bit of a decent person. But that is shattered now. That hope is lost.

It was too much for me to accept. I started doubting everything. Maybe these memories aren’t real. Maybe I’ve just made this all up in my head. I knew in part that these memories were real, but I didn’t want to accept them. I wanted my hope back. I wanted my innocence back. I wanted my father back.

I’ve had memories before where he is there, but not really there. This was different. It was clear what was going on. There is no doubt in my mind. He knew. And he didn’t protect me. He didn’t help me. He helped her.

Why? I don’t understand. My therapist says not to focus on the why, not to stress myself out trying to understand people who cannot be understood. But I can’t help it. I don’t like it when I don’t understand something. I don’t understand my life. I don’t understand the people who raised me, although I’m not sure saying “raised” is really accurate at all.

I struggled to stay connected to the present. The difficulty of working through flashbacks and memories is realizing that you are in the here and now, and not back when the trauma happened. Sometimes I am afraid of reliving it, so I push it down and try to forget about it. For the record, that never works.

My therapist has to constantly remind me that I am safe there, that no one is going to hurt me. So why is it so hard for me still? I want to feel safe. I just want to feel safe for once in my life.

17 thoughts on “Flee, Part 1”

  3. You will never understand them because you are a good and kind person and they are an abomination that didnt deserve to be parents and you deserved to be protected,to feel safe and loved. I know the feeling of just wanting to run away, i know the feeling of being overwhelmed with memories and they are so hard to deal with.my hear goes out to you.

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  5. I struggles for so long to understand why the people who created me treated me the way they did. Abusing a child is not possible to understand by people who would never do such a thing. I had to finally stop trying to understand and just accept that they did it. It took a long time to get there. It was a hard leg of my healing journey.

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    1. I feel like I keep getting stuck on that part. I’ve been struggling to understand for awhile, but don’t want to concede.

      I hope acceptance comes for me as it did for you. But thank you for letting me feel not so alone.

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  6. I can relate to your post and your pain. Only in my case it is my mother who didn’t protect me. This distancing from your attachment with your father, is a tough step. It’s normal to go back and forth between feeling the attachment and distancing yourself because of what he did/did not do. Go slowly. Be ever so gentle with yourself. Sending you so much support. A.

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  8. I, too, have spent a LOT of time trying to understand why. What was he thinking? How did it seem all right to him to do this? Etcetera, ad nauseum. I try to leave it along, and then I come back to it again and again.

    Parents are supposed to love us, guide us, cherish us, protect us. Some people are so damaged, selfish, broken, and/or cruel that they are unwilling or unable to do that. Your parents are a very extreme example of that, a horrific example. There probably are some reasons in their own histories that might help explain how they developed so badly, but that would never let them off the hook. There is nothing that happened to them that would excuse what they did.

    You are so brave and strong. I hope you are ever more able to feel safe in your new life.

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