A Father's Protection and Love

My heart has hurt a lot over the last year. I mean physically hurt like it was being squeezed. Sometimes it has felt like a dagger going through the front of my body, coming out the back.

Four months after my fall on the stairwell, I’m still having a lot of trouble and pain with my back. I landed straight across my heart center. Shortly after that I remembered my nightmare with my heart bleeding at the age of 4. I know it has to do with my heart charka and my original emotional trauma. It’s trapped in the tissue of my body’s memory and I’ve been trying to release it on my own. I’ve had cranial-sacral work done by my sister (she has minimal training) and it has helped but we seem to have hit a stand still. Last weekend I tried to lift something and aggravated it further. It hurts like hell. I decided to go see my cranial-sacral therapist I’ve used for years. She uses several different additional modalities in her practice.

As I was lying on the table, I knew I had to tell her what was happening in my life. It poured out of me. I thought it would be hard for me but it wasn’t. I was hoping my body would experience a big release but it didn’t. She didn’t have to tell me, I could feel how heavy the blockage is. She told me that I needed to come back, that above and below my heart, straight across my body (front and back) felt like a piece of wood. Heavy and thick. She told me that during the session the point of which my body responded the most was when I spoke of my nightmare memory about my heart bleeding. She said my body was acknowledging that this is the emotional cause of the injury holding on. I told her that I really felt like I was open to releasing it and that I don’t understand why it won’t let go. We scheduled another appt.

The following day I was contemplating our session. I asked myself why. What am I not getting? Why is this so painful? My mind went back to 8 years ago when I was lying on her table. I had hurt my shoulder ripping up concrete in the backyard of an historic home I had bought. I was doing serious restoration to it as a single mom, so I did as much as I could myself and did things I shouldn’t have, like digging up enormous pieces of concrete. I had torn a muscle in my back and couldn’t use my arm which was in a sling.

I started to tell her about this strange thing that had happened a couple of months earlier when I was home visiting my family. I went down in to the cellar at my sister’s house to do a load of laundry. I was struck by the dank, musty smell of it. It felt sinister and dark. I threw my wash in, wanting to get out of there quickly. A chill went up my spine. I felt a lump in my throat and I felt afraid. I ran up the stairs. The thing that was so strange about it was that I have been in cellars thousands of times and never felt that way – ever. While the therapist worked on me, suddenly my mind was flooded with the memory of being 1 ½ yrs. old. I was in a little dress standing at the bottom of a cellar stairwell. My face was stained with tears sliding down my cheeks. I knew someone had hurt me in a sexual way. My body hurt and I was terrified. I was looking up at someone. It was a man and he was angry that I was crying. I didn’t see his face in my memory although I felt I knew who it was. I saw the man’s hand reach for me and in anger yank me hard (like a snap) by my wrist. I felt something pull in my shoulder as pain again, radiated through my body. I was stunned at the memory. I sobbed for a long time. How could someone do that to a toddler? It took months for all the pieces to come to me, like putting together a puzzle. I put off identifying the person for a long time because I wanted to feel absolutely certain. I felt I knew but that’s a pretty big thing to claim about someone so I wouldn’t allow myself to utter it to my therapist until I knew 100%. It was my uncle, my father’s brother. I eventually remembered that he had done things to me before I could walk, but it ended when I was around 1 ½.

The last memory I had was the day it ended. I was in my crib with him standing over me. My dad came in and saw what he was doing and flew into a rage. He started screaming at him and saying, “How could you do something like this? She’s a baby?” My uncle denied it but my father railed on at him. “In my own home! You came in here and hurt my child! My child! There’s something wrong with you! You’re sick in the head”. He told him to leave and never come back. He came in and put my diaper back on me. He was sobbing. I could hear him even when he left my room. My father rescued me from his own brother. He must not have ever told, because my mom would have told us. We would have known about it. I have a vague memory of my mother saying that my dad and uncle were estranged for a time but she never knew what the fall out was.

The arm that was in the sling was the same arm that my uncle had yanked me up by. I remembered that I had held my arm close to my body for a time after that. It was hard to use it. My sister would have just been born. In my memory my mom noticed there was something wrong but was too overwhelmed caring for all these kids to do anything about it. It slowly healed. One day after the memory had come back in it’s fullness I was standing in the bathroom after my shower and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked at my collar bones. Now I understood why the collar bone on that side of my body was always a little lower and more recessed into my chest than the other side. I also noticed that they were far more even than they had ever been in the past. The more the therapist worked with me the more equal the two sides became.

As my mind went back through the entire memory, I asked myself if the wound of my father’s infidelities was greater because he had protected me from sexual abuse? It’s strange how we can know things beyond what one would expect at a certain age. I’ve been reflecting on my own behavior as a child. I don’t remember sexual abuse being talked about when I was really young and yet my earliest memories are of me not trusting men. I was worried about someone harming me in a sexual way. I never wondered at the time how I even knew what it was. My father is the only man I felt safe with that way. I kept a close eye on where men and boys were in proximity to my body and never remained in a room if others left and there was a male left with me, except my dad.

The totality of our body, mind and spirit is indeed a miraculous and mysterious thing. As I reflected, I began to cry and realized that I trusted my dad on a sexual level. It was all on an unconscious level. He had protected me and I knew he would never hurt me that way. Then he hurt my mother and I felt betrayed by what he did. More of the puzzle – no wonder I was so aware and emotionally attached to my parents sexual relationship and attached good feelings about my dad to it and no wonder I was so crushed to learn that he was less than perfect in this way. I finally understand why it hurt me so deeply and was all encompassing. There really was very little to feel good about in terms of him when I was a child with the constant drinking and beatings of my mother. How odd that sexuality is the place I found my trust in him. The workings of a small child’s mind and how they try to make sense of things is so intricate. My father had been brokenhearted when I was born, another girl (the fourth). I know from my mom that he had trouble feeling connected to me. My sense is that the day my dad stopped my uncle and protected me, is the day he bonded with me as his child. He found his love for me. Our bond was born from sexual trauma. It ended up a secret because I had no words to tell and my dad never told anyone.

Even as I process and explain this I am aware of how bizarre it must sound. I know that our memories and deep emotional patterns are stored in the body, in our limbic system. Our neural system carries with it our emotional sense memories from childhood. We also carry with us the cognitive sense we made of what happened at the time. That’s why when we touch upon these memories through today’s events we can feel as helpless as a child. We can find ourselves reliving the original pain.

After I had the memory I understood why my dad acted almost like a freak about protecting us girls from sexual harm. He always had a big thing about “my property”, “my home”. Saying things like “Get off my property and don’t come back if you think your going to say things about my girls”, “This is my home and I’ll protect my kids”. Years later, as adults we learned that my dad gave guys that he knew (his age or just “too” old for us) warnings about keeping away from his girls. He only ever went for women in his age range and thought people were screwed up that chased women half their age. This is still true of him today.

I also understood myself with my own daughter. I didn’t like leaving her with people before she could speak. My former husband used to get so annoyed with me about it. He thought that I was irrational to think that she had to be able to speak before she stayed with other people. For me it made perfect sense. If someone harmed her sexually she wouldn’t have the words to tell me. She wouldn’t have the words to ask for help. She wouldn’t have the words to say someone was hurting her.

Dealing with the sexual issues of others and how it has affected me has been a lifelong process. I somehow came away from my earliest experience with the belief that sex was a really important thing. It was special enough for me to feel that my father loved me for the first time. My uncle hurt me, he caused me physical pain so I saw people did bad things with sex but I also saw that it must be a good thing because my dad felt so strongly about protecting me that he connected to his love for me because of it. I’ve really made an effort to be as healthy as I could about my own sexuality. I think sex is one of the greatest gifts we have and one of the deepest ways to connect to our partners.

It was 2 or 3 months after discovering my husband had been looking at porn throughout our entire relationship, that I remembered when I found about my dad’s infidelities. It was also then that I recalled having been so hurt by it that I made an absolute decision to turn my back on my father. I decided to not believe in him or look to him for anything.

I locked my pain away, hiding it even from myself until now. I didn’t think my father loved me until I was 18. It was my first conscious feeling of his love. Now, I can feel the love he had for me when I was a small child. I have been able to re-connect with it. As imperfect as he was, he did love me but I blocked it out.