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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scent of Cedar *" data-source="post: 659220" data-attributes="member: 17461">Maybe you can see it now as something separate from yourself.  When it was happening to you, there was no separation.  In a way then, you are witnessing for yourself now.  As painful as it is to relive those feelings, to feel that sense of what your reality is according to the abuser, imagine what it must have been to have been steeped in that kind of contempt as a little girl.Just a beautiful little girl, wide eyed and innocent as all children are.There is a thought that every character, every item, everything in our dreams represents an aspect of self.  In my process, I learned that the most frightening aspects would turn out to be the part of me that was strong enough to carry everything ~ all the feelings, all the things that were too hard to know.  Each of us does our healing uniquely.  Each of us was hurt in a complex and special way having to do with our mother's psyches.  But in my recurring nightmarish dreams, there is generally a house.  For the longest time, it was my grandmother's house.  In the dream, I was in the sun-filled dining room looking out onto the fields, the apple orchard, the stream.  I would go upstairs, the tightening around me making it so hard to breathe.  In the upper right corner of the hallway at the top of the stairs was an old-fashioned fuse box.  The kind that had glass fuses.  In the window on the landing, a spider.  I pass the window to finish climbing the stairs to where the fuse box is.  I don't know where I am going.  The spider behind the glass, the glittering fuse box ~ these things are just there.Always, the dream is the same.Always, from that dream:  And the wires connect and the music...plays of its own accord.I have written some of the most incredible stories about that dream.Another dream has to do with a Victorian mansion.  At first, it is a frightening house, a haunted house on a street near my own.  Then, it becomes a house I own.  There is a top floor, a place where the air tightens and the space closes down and it is difficult to breathe.  I am very afraid to know that room, that series of rooms, is there.  Then, I begin to go there.  I go as far as I can, each time.  I never decide not to go there.  I always go there, go further.  It never stops making me feel I cannot breathe, cannot escape, cannot move.So, a year or so ago, I dreamed of the house again and that is when I realized I had always dreamed of that house.I don't know what either dream means, yet I do.  The language of dreams is not so easily translated, pinned down, into words.So anyway, that is what I know about dreams.Maybe SWOT, you are questioning the part of you that held the poison your mother believed about herself and poured into you.  Maybe you are strong enough, and healed enough, to explore that part of yourself, now.In the poetry I have shared here, the glass-eyed witch is me.  All the parts are me.  I did not know that when I wrote the poetry.  Except that somehow, I did.  I was telling myself how it was with me.Remember the dream of hair, and my mother in the dream, and the connection to the real-life visit to WalMart and whatever else was involved with the imagery surrounding that dream.  Had I faced these things before I was strong enough, before I was healed enough, to consider and recognize and refute them, I would only have been able to teach myself what my mother taught me about myself in the first place. Because of these experiences, I think it is true, when they tell us we will never give ourselves more than we can handle.  We are meant to be whole.Everything, even the nightmares about your mom, could be your psyche's insistence on healing.Cedar</blockquote>

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