TRIGGER WARNING: I want to talk about the flashback details. Do not read if you are triggered by people's Hot Spot or Death stuff. I dump a lot here. Fair Warning!
I woke to a flashback that played all the way through and then stopped abruptly.
I was asleep in my bed. It was holiday time, and family was staying in the house or others had been visiting our home for Christmas. It was a loud, family time earlier that day, and now I was sleeping. I was sharing the bed with someone else. I don't know who in my flashback was to my left sleeping soundly, but I woke up when my father walked into my room with a rifle or shotgun. I see the gun and him and freak out silently. I feel that he is really going to kill me now, not just rape me and beat me if I fight back.
He sees the family dog asleep near the door, and he stops and decides to take the dog out of the room. Then, I feel safe but quickly panic that maybe he is going to kill the dog. He is gone a long time, while I am worrying about the dog's fate. I hear nothing at all, except my heart pounding,and I'm wrapped up in a quilt and starting to slide headlong off the right side of the mattress toward the floor. I feel stiff as a board and totally unable to move, like I'm frozen. But somehow I'm sliding off the bed, as if willing my paralyzed body to slide to the floor in the hopes of surviving being shot at.
Then, he enters the room, loudly cocking the gun. I hear the loud "Clack" of the gun, and this had the effect of striking terror into me. I feel this terror in my body like a vibration that makes me freeze and also not letting me dissociate. I am totally stunned by this feeling in my body. I cannot move. I can hardly see well in the moonlight coming in the window. I see him and the gun coming toward my bed. I'm wrapped in one of my grandma's quilts and can't move. I'm half hanging off the bed and can't move or anything. I can't see him when he gets closer to the bed as I'm staring straight up toward the ceiling.
I feel the bed shake a bit, and then more and more and more. It seems that he's wiggling the bed, and I worry that means he's getting closer to me. I feel frozen in terror.
The flashback stops.
I processed, and the gun itself, and particularly the sound of the gun being cocked sounded so definitive. It was as if the gun spoke to me that it was going to kill me now. That is how my child mind hear the sound/interpreted it with fear. Fear of him was well familiarized by this time of my life. This bit is the pathogenic kernel of death fear. I hear that sound and it sends me into Freeze unlike others. I was always afraid of him before, but this noise is somehow worse on another level. I don't dissociate either yet to get out of experiencing it. I am used to being attacked and waking to being raped, smothered, and attacked, but not to a gun being brandished. So I don't know how to survive it yet or what I'm going to do. I don't have time to know and decide. I recoil frozen, and I also thought "well, this is it" and even though I was afraid, I think that this (death) is inevitable. I almost accept it is coming somehow and decide to just let it happen? I don't know what that feeling was, of not fighting back, and maybe just wanting it to be over.
After analyzing the parts of this flashback, I now think my dad was raping someone else on the bed next to me and he knew that if he cocked the gun, that would terrify anyone of us awake into not being able to fight him. He used that as his MO. He never used "grooming" just abject fear. He liked to "stun" us first. He was a sadist in all things.
The flashback ended perhaps at the point I dissociated. I know I can totally check out if needed. I was very good at that. I could in an instant check out as soon as I was aware he was in our room. This time, the gun noise messed with that, and this memory of death fear was created and sealed off. I had no memory of this prior to the flashback.
I suspect I checked out when others were being attacked in my presence as well. I assume I figured out someone else was being attacked, so I checked out. This is one of many times that happened and I don't have any recall if I was hurt or just scared to death at that particular time.
In this flashback, nothing ever touches me! I am not actually remembering being attacked, but the fear and horror of the fact my own Dad would cock a gun walking into his kids' room at night. He wanted me to be afraid he was going to kill us at any time. He has always maintained an irrational threat over the whole family. Over the years, nothing needed to be said, the threat just hung in the air over everyone, and nobody ever wanted to challenge it. Everyone just backed down with him.
My sister would, during teen years, try to cajole him into arguments, as if this would prove he cared enough, just to argue.
My mother argued with him and fought with him often, so my sister took that as a side-effect of love. I didn't.
My brother and I just tried to stay out the way mostly. We flew under the radar and blended in. Since my mother scapegoated my middle child sister always, and showed such contempt for her, I assume she had to try to squeeze some attention or something out of our predatory father, and also she has bad Stockholm syndrome qualities. Real bad. She's even dated serial rapists, drug lord, abusive types. Can't figure her out. Just that this is one way the traumas affected her in particular.
I always hated my father, but I tried to hide it, but they all knew. They didn't remember their traumas. We all have suffered amnesia because it was SOOOO bad. He used abject fear states to ensure the memories were totally blocked and not allowed. The rest of the time, he made everyone dependent on him and acted protective as if the fear was of the world, and not himself. He took the fears he built up in all of us, and said it was all around us and we needed him to keep us safe. My mother did the same when I talked to her, she said, others would take us away, others who would treat us worse. If this is how love treated us, imagine the not-loving how they would treat us, she said. :( The result was I had no where to run or nobody to trust or listen to me. I never told a teacher or a family member, and I really told myself I could not remember my traumas, only I knew they were there and that it was something my Dad's fault. I said to myself that he switched into a monster at night. I was confused if he actually changed into someone or something else or NOT? I felt both to be true. It was him and also Not Him. I inserted strangers, faces of strangers over his face to deny it was him and his friend. I couldn't bear it. Not till I was 33. Then I could, then I could remember and cast them all away, once and for all.
Also, I needed to separate myself from his evil, and so I pretended "my father" was not capable of evil. I made the evil the monster and said it was just nightmares. I explained it away from myself so that I could go on being a good girl. I split him, and myself, to do that.
As I write this, my arms grow numb and I feel dissociated as if time is messed up and I'm numbing out. The pain of the truth is so painful to me that my body no longer feels my own, because I don't want it if it holds these painful experiences and memories. I now see that I was sending away the pain, and therefore, large parts of myself. Now, I want myself to be whole, even with the pain, suffering, betrayal and fear that I felt so often as a child.
My relationships that I have now are healing to me, as I see who I am mirrored in people's eyes who would never harm me, I trust. In that trust, I can handle these parts of myself that I couldn't handle before. I was never going to be murdered, although I spent a long time feeling that it was going to happen at any moment. I was trapped in that feeling so, so long. Then, inexplicably, the abuse stopped and I felt relatively safe. I was unhappy trapped with asshole parents, but it was better than before.
Then, they took us to a foreign country, and immediately, I felt triggered that the safety was illusory, and here, they could really dispose of us. We were in actual danger at several points living abroad. I actually had a gun pointed at me, and was chased all downtown by a gang of drunken rapists. I was actually ringing the doorbell of a human trafficker man's home at age 15, and was saved by his neighbor when she pulled me into her house so he wouldn't see me when he drove home that night. This is only what I can recall right now. There's more, but I can't do it all now.
So I felt very unsafe for several years (age 11-16) during foreign travels, not just because of my shit parents who neglected us, but also the actual danger of being foreign and desirable as a victim for standing out, being female, being young. etc.
Now, I am back home, and feel yet unsafe about accidentally running into parents at shopping areas (again, happened twice now in 4 years). I handled it well, but I don't like the feeling it could happen and they know where I live.
So before above flashback, I was having intrusive worrying thoughts of my father showing up to my front door armed to the hilt. I know from years back he would carry a handgun in one or more of four places, three on his body, and one in his truck.
Then, I had this flashback. So I know that the fear of him showing up to my front door with gun is based on that actually happening in the past and him cocking the gun as if to say "I am going to shoot you!" with the actual gun. And then he was doing something to someone in my bed while I was frozen, and I dissociated completely.
So I guess I am not crazy, but my husband says he won't come here as he's a Coward. I am also frightened because if he did show up, I know that I would feel like I had to kill him or be killed. I'm afraid I might kill him based on how fearful I feel toward him. I feel put in a corner and unsure how I would handle it. Thinking about this puts me in a very fearful mind frame.
I do think it would be best if I moved far away, but I am sure that I won't feel totally better on this until he is actually dead, and even then how will I be sure he is dead if I don't see the body? Often, after having really bad flashbacks, I feel like I need for him to dead as soon as possible to resolve this issue. As long as he is alive, I feel unsafe, basically. It is irrational fear, because he is not the only thing dangerous in the world. Other triggers exist, but I usually zoom in on him as the danger, mostly because he was for so long the creator of altogether new levels of fear and torture for years. He is a jailor, a tormentor, a monster to me. It doesn't even make sense how he manages to live a normal looking life to others and do what he does. People who have not experienced an organized predator of domestic violence like this do not understand this issue. This can lead to anger and rage issues, as it is so frustrating for victims living with constant fear, and anger is secondary, growing out of that constant.
But I now realize how fear was constructed and it was mostly illusory. He used pain producing but not physically damaging nerve touches and used threats, which were likely not loaded, empty threats. I feel anger about this, too. How premeditated and how he used his high intelligence to hurt and permanently scar us. The only visible wound is my broken nose. That's all the evidence I have to tell me I'm not making it all up and I'm not nuts.
I must remember the time I was able to sit upright and this scared him away from my sister. I was able to startle him back, once, and save her from molestation that night, once. That is something I must also remember. I used his own game against him, at least one time, successfully, even as a kid.
And right before the flashback I had a deep spiritual moment. Why is that? What is the connection between my soul and this trauma? That is still a muddle.
I also feel I must be sort of brave, even to write this all out. After going through being their daughter for 33 years, how did it end up that I could get this off my chest? Sometimes I surprise myself that I am not just afraid anymore and the fear doesn't have as tight a grip on my mind as it once did. But it's certainly there. I feel it in my body, and hear it humming in my ears. I feel I will forever be haunted by this fear. I wonder if I could live without fear, what that would be like, even for a moment. Even when I was happy or laughing, I felt some fear always in the background, I am sure of it. Even if I cleared out every one of the trauma memories, would that baseline fear background feeling go away?
