I saw a pattern of him choosing for himself. Over me. I saw that to feel powerful, to feel intact, to feel together, he would essentially abandon me, as he needed. Choosing, instead, that I be the weaker one, the broken one, etc. Doing his best to put his pathology into me.
This is why he should pay your money back to you. From the moment in time when your time together was devoted to exploring the parameters of
his pathology. You knew it, Copa. You knew it was dirty and wrong what he was doing. It wasn't that you were too weak to leave. It was that if you left, how would you ever have known whether he was right, and not delving into his own pathology on your time after all?
That is the trap we find ourselves in. That is the deal with the devil we make when entering therapy. It is a time for us to suspend judgment. A time to allow another to interpret our deepest selves, our most tender and unhealed parts that we so desperately wish to understand and cannot.
How could you leave.
And
he knew that, Copa.
At least my therapist was just a doctor of physical things. Truly, he could not have committed the crime of intention that a bona fide, trained and certified and working at providing therapy and only providing therapy, every day and all day person would be doing in hurting his patient as you were hurt, Copa.
For heaven's sake!
He had to know what he was doing Copa and he did it to you anyway because he knew you could not leave without creating a different, weaker kind of self concept than the one you came to him with.
He was a weak and evil man, Copa.
And he knew these things about himself. He had to.
And he took your money anyway.
roar
What stung the most was defending himself, when I stood up for myself, by: "You've got serious problems."
Diamond Cedar strikes so fast the tears sprinkle like diamond rain all over the bed.
Quick as that, she is gone.
He actually said that, huh. How helpless you must have felt, Copa. How he threw you into the thick of it, and how you must have struggled ~ whew.
We don't care.
We are stronger enough. We always were. Copa. You always were stronger enough to survive him.
You only required right witness.
Know what we are doing now, Serenity and you and M and M's mother and I? Well, since I am still out...er, seeing to the therapist in the realm of the Magical Child (Cedar says, smoothing what's left of her hair, every beautiful strand, into place as a defense mechanism ~ an adult one, a perfectly normal adult one, rather than describing her visit to the therapist, as she did the first time she wrote this) M's mother has gathered the diamond tears and holds them up to the light.
Everyone thinks they are very nice.
Like in Lil and Jabber's Frenchman and English King Monty Python clip: "Oh yes, it's very nice."
Oh look. Here I come. Everyone moves over and we all whisper about the therapist and what happened, there in the realm of the Magical Child. M's mother holds the handful of diamond tears.
She is very angry for your sake.
They trust the therapist to find the balance between truth and damaging them. The patient risks being damaged by the therapist telling too much, or telling wrong things, or bad timing, or worst case, by telling false truths, in order to serve themselves.
So, now I am understanding. It is both things. The fear of standing up to the therapist is that they will retaliate in both kinds of ways: For meanness, or vengeance, or weakness: tell you the horrible things you fear are true about yourself.
And also the latter, misuse the power they hold, the trust you have given them, in order to heal...in a way that will hurt you.
And both things happened to us, Cedar.
Yes.
But then, we still have our marrow. And there is a certain therapist out there who doesn't. Little, diamond tears, tiny ones, in the creases of his clothing, and nothing more; nothing more, at all.
:O)
But had we been who we are now, or are becoming...we could have tolerated both things.
Here is the thing, Copa. Predators do move in on the vulnerable. They do. You know this. Copa, had we been who we are now we would not have seen these therapists; we would have believed ourselves because Copa
we knew when we met them, like we always know. But we believe the words, the paperwork, the everything the negative mother within tells us when she whispers we are less than and she is more and so is everyone else. And oh, Copa. We pray a Child's prayer that it is true that they can help us; that it could be true that we won't have to be alone with it, with what we know, anymore.
We have learned to disregard what we know, Copa. We name it Magical Child stuff and walk through the real world on our feet like everyone, like normal people do
and we believe them when they say what they say though we know better. "But," we think. "Why would they tell us they can help if they cannot? We must be wrong, in our abnormality.
So I will trust the therapist. I will require this of myself that I might heal."
We go there expecting to be shamed, Copa, because that is our internal reality. Vengeance. Shame. Terror. Love, moving like a deep river, like a bottomless river, through it all.
Literally, Copa? These therapists knew a pale shadow and believe it to be that river we navigate as a matter of course.
Stop believing him, Copa.
Stop believing him, and stop believing in him.
He was a criminal; he was never an ethical person at all, Copa. You never had to believe anything he said. You took it on faith.
And he knew that, and he took your money anyway.
There just is no telling, Copa, what else he took from you.
It is yours, Copa.
Take it back.
Sometimes I think about very elderly couples, of women especially. Who know their mates or they will die. I mean, soon. Some of these relationships are like yours, nearly life long unions.
Are they afraid every day? Do they say goodbye when they can? Does the stronger mate prepare things so that weaker or more dependent one, is left surrounded by the safety net and protective mechanisms, enacted by the stronger mate? Is it wrong to speak of a stronger one in a relationship, and to assume it is me? Is this one more vestige of my brokenness as a child?
No Copa. I am not afraid. I am filled with gratitude that somehow, I was given D H. I say goodbye with gratitude each time his eyes touch mine. (Unless he is being a jerk that day.)
:O)
I do, Copa. And the wonder of it? Is that so does D H. And yes, D H will protect me if he is the one to go first. He will protect me not only financially, but with the way I think, Copa. I have posted before about D H comments regarding my FOO and even, our children. It is right that this should be so, Copa. Well mothered men respond to the Hero motif, to the Hero archetype, with their whole hearts.
I love that part of D H. I love the way he honors the mother in his heart, whatever his mother in the world is doing and how he does not flinch from what is or try to cover or excuse or understand it. That is internal locus of control. That is what those of us with internal, rather than external, locus of control are able to do: See with clarity what is.
And claim the Hero within by right.
That is where we are going, you and me and Sserenity. (Alright. So here is a funny thing. Since I have been in Snake Cedar mode? I keep typing Sserenity with two esses. For heaven's sake.)
Anyway.
That is where we are going. Internal locus of control. And for me, that means I need to go back to the realm of the Magical Child, because that is where I created defenses and believed in them even though they didn't work and punished myself for thinking like that in secret about my abuser
and that is the shame of the thing, Copa. That is the thing that sickens and weakens and shames us. Because that is not normal thinking and we know it.
That is what that therapist knew Copa, and you did not.
Now you do.
The Magical Child protected us then to the degree she was able.
A Hero, Copa and Serenity.
We have been ashamed of our own courage, of our own Hero, and afraid to claim her as our own.
Claim her, now.
And in that hellish arena where everything and...nothing
occurred
Where mirrored music was broken and mirrored vision
obscured
A Wizard and a befuddled magician
conferred
In Confucianesque discussion
of just what it most certainly might have been
That each may or may not have believed
himself or the other to have heard
So did the game end
that neither player would play
The magician storm off ~
the innocent...
Wielding that promise
spoke on a razor's nicked and crazied edge
the bloodied innocent waken
Choose, her Name ~ by the Wind
by the wolves, and by the Fire
in her eyes
Claim
the witch and the Child
godforsaken
Hold them, safe
that which, glass eyed, call the Time
that which...lies
Claim their truths as her own
there, in that hellish dawning....
Taught that which, required to kneel require
vengeance
Learn vengeance require it become
that which...lies
Step forward ~
pain, blue on blue, in those eyes
Choose, and walk that path less traveled
where briars and black-thorned brambles
writhe and moan, against the noon
Where howling ricochets roar and rock
the Child
Where witches howl for vengeance
bald, and glass eyed 'neath the moon....
So did the game end that neither player
would play
The magician storm off ~
the innocent...slip away
And in that dark and that thundered awakening
where the black and the white ricochet
Where witches fly and the Wind taste of vengeance
where cripples and beggared innocents pray
Crimsoned ribbands reflect....
Innocence ~ bloodied innocence, hold the Wind
hold, the witch; hold the hunter
at bay
***
The white Child be flown
ere the magician's return
Call
her Name
Call...
the Time
Call the sweet, bloodied burn
of the phoenix
(Perhaps, Grandmother...
the phoenix cries, as it burns.)
White
against the carmine pits of Hell
White
against the bloodied ashes of its birth
In baptismal Fire and in Water, reborn
a white and a six petaled promise reflect
Moon shadowed
in pools catacombing the Earth
Cedar
So, here is the thing, Copa and Serenity. Had these therapists of ours never pretended to represent for us the safe harbor we believed them to (and for which they took our freaking money), it is possible that we never would have required ourselves to find and face and claim ourselves ~ our true selves, strange, Magical Child thinking and all.
So.
We are fine.
They can be safely discounted.
On we go.
Copa, the poetry is given so you can see it, so you can see what it felt like through my imagery. Pay special attention Copa, to the promise, to the moon-shadowed promise, spreading through the pools catacombing the Earth.
That is the awakening Self.
The phoenix, self immolating and awakening
by her own choice.
Okay. Out of Magical Child realm and back to Normal Realm. That is the difference here, Copa. We can travel between them. We know where we are, when we are in the realm of the Magical Child.
We are sane.
That was always the secret fear I had to write into poetry and you had to rationalize into words. It was our way of making sense of what, in the realm of the Magical Child we created to survive what was happening to us, seemed so real.
We had to believe it then, Copa.
We saved our own child selves, there and...we lived. Now, we need to claim the courage in us, and never be ashamed that we lived, again. We did what was required, like we always do. Good, good work.
Copa, one more thing. The money discrepancy with M. That doesn't matter. There is and always has been, a money discrepancy between D H and I. You know this to be true, Copa: Once there is enough money for what is required to create a life, money ceases to mean status. It becomes the tool it is. What passes between one mate and the other is something sacred, something we don't understand. Everything that happens in that relationship is what needed to happen for the correct questions to be uncovered and addressed and resolved. We posted about trust, once. That is where the trust is developed, I think. In that place where both therapists did what they did, M and my D H have not done that
. Though, knowing our deep and unhealed vulnerabilities, they might have.
An ethical man.
That is the description of an ethical man.
The duration of the relationship doesn't matter, I don't think. Once the healing possible has been accomplished, perhaps that is when relationships end.
I don't know.
