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Terror: Snapshots of Narcissistic Abuse
I first experienced terror in a nightmare at the age of 5. I sat on my bedspread, suspended hundreds of feet above the neighborhood below. A string dangled from one corner of the bright green and yellow coverlet, just out of the reach of a horrifying King Kong trying to pull me down from my unsteady perch. I couldn’t move for several heart-stopping moments. When I finally found my scream, I bolted to my parent’s bedroom. Terror feels a bit different as an adult. It is even difficult to write this. My innate dissociative tendencies keep interrupting my chain of thoughts. But it must be noted that victims of domestic…
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Body Memory: Relearning Safe and Happy
That our body can retain memory is probably no surprise to most women. We look at our grown children and remember the sweet weight of their infant bodies in our arms and how soft their little cheeks were to kiss. Thanksgiving is upon us and our mouths water remembering familiar holiday dishes or when the fragrance of pumpkin pie fills the house. The highway between smell and memory is a short one. But the tendency to store memories in our body can work against us, causing anxiety or dread to pop up in unexpected and inconvenient places. For me, to be in the presence of anger caused my body to…
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What Your Metaphors Reveal About You
One of my favorite metaphors is in Alice Walker’s essay, Beauty, When the Other Dancer is the Self. In it, she writes about her blind eye resulting from a BB gun injury from one of her brothers. She charts her relationship with her blind, scarred eye, from painful adolescence to the moment when her little girl first notices it. “You have a world in your eye,“ says her daughter, carefully observing what is left of the scar tissue. All at once, her eye becomes a metaphor for the internal worlds inside Walker that have grown because of the injury. I have posted a link at the end so you can…
Healing Through Art & Words
