A path back to Light, through Filth
A lifetime of adversity has grown within me an orchard of varied fruits and groves of plentiful abundance from which to approach any aspect of life. It is difficult for some to appreciate pain and suffering from a point of view of gratitude, but you get there, eventually, when there’s enough of it. It becomes like a weed, but one which you’re happy to see, because its resilience and constancy promises you’ll sup forever without want.
I started in a family of extreme poverty and occasional homelessness. I didn’t notice this, however, except that sometimes I was hungry and always the adults were stressed out. I didn’t know it, but the ever-present insecurity – the not knowing where we’d be, whether we’d be ok, or whether we’d have food – had already set me up for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
When my dentist chose me as his victim for torture, it sealed the deal.
Looking back and having talked with many others from our small town who were also chosen as his victims, I see his pattern easily. He chose single mothers or mothers like mine: not single but essentially the same as my father had long lost to alcohol and drugs and couldn’t be relied upon in any significant way. So, this dentist chose the youngest, usually a female, of a family like mine. He chose the shy and unlikely to speak up. He chose those unlikely to be believed by the older siblings and the parents.
For one, how could my mother believe me when this was the only option for dentistry we had access to, since he allowed payment over time and we did not have money? And, at the same time, he did not torture my brother or sister, so why would he torture me? Logically, that couldn’t be true, right? It was a perfect trap.
When I complained and cried, at the beginning, about how much it hurt and how I didn’t like him, everyone assumed it was the normal resistance to going to the dentist, the normal amount of pain, the normal discomfort. I eventually learned not to cry or complain, because I would be called a “cry baby” and told over and over again, to growing frustration and exasperation, that no one liked the dentist and I just had to learn to deal with it. Though this stunned me because I just couldn’t understand this amount of pain, I was conditioned to eventually shut off my voice.
As times grew worse and my father would come home screaming drunk and blind with past traumas of his own, I transferred this skill to being able to cry silently, as well. The life force within me shrunk further, the leaves and stems withered and withdrew. There was no water, no Sun to nurture life, it was not possible to grow, in this place.
The dentist then became a lesson in dissociation. I was instructed harshly by him to raise my pointer finger when I felt pain. This is a horrible trick of narcissists and psychopaths: to make you feel that their torture of you is your fault. I hadn’t expressed my discomfort enough, he taught me, so the finger would indicate my pain and it was my responsibility to make him see my finger raised. I thought this was the key, he simply must not have known how much he had been hurting me, in the past, and if I could only lift my finger fast enough and strongly enough, he would stop.
He didn’t, though. It was apparently just a way for him to get off on my pain, even more, watching the finger rise and stay up for the whole visit. Next, he taught me through his anger not to move, no matter how much screaming, searing pain passed through my head, mind, and body, or he’d hurt me more. So I learned to go away, to see it from afar, to not experience it directly.
Eventually, this curse becomes the gift of being able to withstand great amounts of pain, but more importantly to become objective about my bodily incarnation and use my much more powerful mental and emotional bodies to move around, to receive information and healing, and more. This becomes my superpower. But it feels neither super nor powerful, to a five year old.
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