A little bit of History

I've been thinking about where I am, and where I have come from.

But I don't know how to share it, other than to use metaphors, so I hope that's okay.

It start's, as it must, with the abuse I suffered when I was a child.

But I've talked about that, so lets move on to what happened next.

The abuse had created a lot of anger, anger that scared me, and I labeled it The Monster and tried to lock it away.

But it wasn't the only part of me I tried to deny.

There was also a feminine nature to me, a part I simply called The Girl.

And I was as afraid of her as I was the Monster, so into the darkness she went.

My ability to deny these two parts was far from perfect, and they both came to the surface at times, but I kept fighting them.

Meanwhile on the surface, I had created a number of characters. These were not true alternate selves, but they did sort of take on lives of their own, taking turns in being the self I presented to the world.

Then I made a mistake. I watched the movie version of Pink Floyd's "The Wall". and thought I should take my walls down.

The result of that cause most of my characters to merge, and it weakened the barriers keeping The Girl and The Monster down.

I soon developed a pattern of relative stability followed by a collapse, then a rebuilding of stability again.

This pattern remained for decades.

It took me loosing my home and my wife, and harming my relationship with my family for me to realize I had to break that pattern.

And I went for help, first to deal with the abuse, so I could face the Monster.

I honestly had not planned finding the Girl first.

And somehow, she wasn’t as scary anymore.

After a period of . . . "adjustment" I started to reach an understanding with the Girl, and she merged into the rest of me.

Which led me to discover that she had in fact sacrificed herself to save the rest of me from the worst of the abuse, and had done what she could to keep the Monster at bay.

But I still left the Monster to deal with.

I've made a lot of progress on that front, even though there are still times when the anger the Monster has scares me, but bit by bit I'm slowly accepting that the Monster was and is a part of me, and therefore I can choose how the anger is expressed.

Its a work in progress, but I think I have done enough to consider this . . .

A Fresh Start