Mistakes, Guilt & Forgiveness: the Tragedy of Error

Content Warnings: infidelity, sexual abuse

I have explored a certain kind of meditation in depth. Some call it Dark Night of the Soul; some call it the Inner Child or Inner Monster meditation. Regardless of the name you know it by, it is that frightening experience in which we face the dark, ugly truth of our own actions and pasts. If we stay the course, it can be a life-altering experience each time it is done.

I am also a follower of the Dark Goddesses: Kali, Skadi, Hela, Erishkigel, Baba Yaga, Sekhmet, Medb, Hecate, Persephone (the Queen), the Morrigan, Coatlicue. I explore the mysteries of life - not the happy verdant plants. I seek the mysteries of the mud in which the primordial soup was mixed, the blood that comes with both life and death, the body wastes that carry away toxins that could kill us and still might if we don't keep them buried or somehow taken away from our homes, the snot that keeps our delicate tissues from breaking down, the tears that cleanse our eyes of physical and emotional hurts. I embrace the stench of death and the crap of life.

So when I came across this situation, it intrigued me. (Names and details have been changed.) This is roughly how the tale was told to me by a friend, Victoria Pendler, a Welsh hedgewitch.

Brent is a big guy, the kind who prides himself on his strength. He is Heathen, antifa, and listens to his wife when she talks about feminism. With three kids, his family is his life.

Lauryn, the wife, had initiated several discussions about them becoming polyamorous, which ended when Brent changed careers drastically and Lauryn suggested their life was already too chaotic to pursue something as serious as the kind of poly relationships they'd been talking about. Brent agreed.

A few years later, Lauryn offered to let a friend of Brent (and acquaintance of hers) to stay at their home when she left her husband over emotional abuse. Within a few weeks, the other woman left, nearly destroying Lauryn and Brent's marriage, and making threats against the couple.

When I came in to help, I first listened to the story as they presented it. Brent was devastated. He'd believed he was pursuing a poly relationship possibility, but had made several mistakes along the way, including engaging in sexual activity before telling his wife that there were even feelings.

Lauryn felt betrayed because she had always talked about needing to discuss relationships beforehand due to being cheated on in the past. She believed Brent simply couldn't love her if he would so easily dismiss her and her needs in the situation, but she also couldn't believe that he was capable of such behavior. She said several times that she'd never once thought he could do this because of his own history with being cheated on. 

I spoke to Brent about the situation in detail, and several things raised flags for me. When I asked him to describe the sexual encounter, he spoke of "freezing up," feeling pressured and desperate. When he explained that he had felt so guilty he'd immediately showered in very hot water, I asked him if the encounter had reminded him of his childhood sexual abuse. 

At that point the floodgates opened. Brent had been molested by a family friend as a child, and the way that the other woman had approached him had been in the exact same, passive-aggressive, emotionally wheedling way that he had experienced decades before. In a nutshell, he had felt raped again.

Once we'd explored that, I pointed out that Brent's past did not excuse his behavior. It only gave us something to work with to restore his wife's trust in him, as well as something to address to prevent a similar situation from ever occurring, which seemed very important to him. He agreed that the realization didn't excuse him, and he vowed to work on his relationship and on his inner child issues.

Several weeks later, I followed up with Lauryn and Brent. They were doing well, communicating thoroughly. Brent had asked Lauryn to outline specific actions he could take for werguild (restitution) to her, and she had given him some assignments that focused on him getting to know her more deeply and taking on more of a controlling role in his own life, which I felt was an insightful move on her part.
However, Brent still spoke of the incident with a great deal of self-loathing and guilt.

I realized that he was stuck, blaming himself for not being strong enough to overcome his childhood trauma and stop the whole thing from happening. Having worked with childhood trauma and inner child situations before, I could see that his approach, while understandable, was sabotaging his ability to grow past his behavior as his wife and family needed him to do. He was trapped in endless loops of understanding but being afraid to take charge and change his behavior in a meaningful way.

Right now, we are working on getting him to the point where he can forgive himself. Since he is such a big fellow, he is seen as masculine, manly, and the like. He has internalized this perception, and feels that he should not be able to be victimized in any way. He seemed a bit shocked when I pointed out that his actions during and after the sexual encounter stemmed from him being almost desperate to not be seen as a victim, and that it had lead to the majority of the lies that Lauryn had been hurt by.

Brent's inability to forgive himself for being weak, traumatized, and only human is actually impeding his ability to NOT be weak and traumatized. While I had been concerned he might use his childhood as a get-out-of-jail-free card, instead he considered his trauma to be a sign of his failure as a man.

Brent has a long way to go, and Lauryn is still struggling with her own feelings about things, but they both need to forgive themselves for being effected by their pasts in order to move on in a healthy way.

I hope this story helps others going through similar situations. We cannot use our pasts as an excuse, but we also can't act like we are capable of dismissing any effects our pasts might have on us, how we react to situations, or how we feel about things. The emotional situation is ALWAYS valid. How we deal with it determines how healthy it is.

Hidden Trauma: Dealing with Crap You Didn't Even Know Bothered You

It started with a post about someone having to sit next to a wriggly, rambunctious child at the movies. Before I knew it, I was on the attack and when it was over, I started crying... for an hour.

WTF?!?

I ended up talking with my husband, and I realized that I was especially sensitive about the idea that parents shouldn't take their kids out in public unless XYZ (usually to do with the behavior of said kids).

Now, to be clear, I get as annoyed as anyone when some little jerk-monster is being a pain. But I also remember feeling completely abandoned by all friends and most family for almost FOUR YEARS.

When I got pregnant, I stopped going to the bars with friends. Seems obvious, right? Well, none of them ever came to visit me or call to check up. I'd already established myself as someone who really doesn't like to "bug people", so I'm very unlikely to call someone just cuz I'm lonely.

Then I moved to eliminate the hour-long commute to work. On several occasions after my son was born, it hit me that if I was somehow incapacitated by
illness or injury, not a single person would notice for days at a time, except my coworkers, and I'd just get fired as a no-show.

My son is ASD (autism spectrum), and he was a fussy, fussy baby. I couldn't go out in the evenings, because he cried for around 2 hours every single night. No reason. Just cried. I couldn't do any of the evening activities that might have gotten me out of the house and around other people.

He also cried in the checkout lane. He'd be perfectly happy shopping, but no matter the time or how long we'd been at the store, he'd cry in the checkout lane. Three times I was told to abandon my month's worth of groceries if I couldn't keep my infant from fussing. As a single working mom, that wasn't even an option, but it didn't keep people from telling me I didn't belong in a public place with a baby.

When my parents came to town, they often took me out to eat. As a single parent breastfeeding, I spent my evenings eating take-out (usually cold after taking care of baby1), so I happily passed my son over to my mother and ate decent hot food that I didn't have to try to cook with an infant. Twice, my own mother asked why I didn't just leave my food and leave the restaurant when my son got a bit (trust me, that was only a bit, people) fussy. I may have gotten a look on my face similar to a starving predator facing down something that wanted the gazelle for itself.

At that point, I didn't have internet, except at work. So I spent my days working and my nights feeding the baby while I watched cable TV. Alone. For months at a time.

When I moved to my current small town, I went out ONE time with coworkers. We went to the bar for my birthday. It was my 30th birthday. One of my coworkers called my mother because she thought I was getting "too drunk".

I can't even explain how being collected by my mother at 30 years old because people don't TRUST me to be able to take care of myself... how that completely shut down any further attempts I might have made to have any kind of social life. After all, it was a small town. Everyone knew my mother.

So after 4 years of no social interactions outside of work and a few minor events, I started a business, met my now-husband, and got pregnant again. For several reasons, which have since been resolved, I started my daughter's life as a single mother still. My mom took us to see Juno. I got to watch 30 minutes before baby2 started to fuss.

I had no car - I was there with my mom who was still watching the movie with my son. So I spent the entire movie pacing the hall with a fussy baby. For some reason, I wasn't really eager to try that again any time soon.

So, that's all ancient history, and it sucked but it was what it was and now I'm okay. Except, apparently, I'm not okay.

Even now, just thinking about all of this (not something I usually do), I am fighting back tears. It was hard to think that after all the people telling me I'm a good mom, and I did so well when solo, etc., etc... I was traumatized.

Even now, the thought of being a single parent again is so painful that I just want to curl up into a ball. I am literally gun-shy of it. It closes my emotions off except for this bitter, clogging pain. It shuts my mind down except for these memories going through my head over and over.

And I never even knew that it had affected me so deeply. Despite the fact that I do Shadow Work ALL THE TIME, I never knew. I dig for things like this, regularly, but I had no idea it was there.

So the lesson here is this: Shadow Work is never done. There is always more to work on. And just because trauma is hidden, doesn't mean you are not traumatized. And just because you are traumatized, doesn't make you broken... just a little chipped.

A Tale of Two C-Sections

My first child, my son, was an emergency c-section. A combination of "problems" conspired with a lack of knowledgeable labor support to send me racing to the OR. I put "problems" in quotes because while macrosomia ("big baby") and failure to progress SOUND medically fear-inducing, they are seldom the emergency that cut-happy OBs make them out to be... they are more of a "problem" when something RARELY goes wrong and results in a malpractice suit.

The result was an emotionally devastating three HOURS of recovery time in which I was not ALLOWED to see my first child. Laying in bed alone, struggling to wriggle my toes in the hopes that such an action would get me back to my room faster...

I still think there was a lingering negative impact on my parenting. It seemed to me that from the start, I wasn't supposed to have had my baby. Nature itself tried to tell me by not letting me birth him.

Unsurprisingly, this thought came back with every parental doubt that entered my mind. I cried silently more times then I care to admit, wondering if I had done something that went against the laws of nature by conceiving and raising (but not birthing) this child. Or maybe the stress-filled rush of the c-section permanently turned my child from a trusting baby into the fussy, colicky creature that protested life's sudden changes at every turn. After all, I couldn't save him from the cutting, ripping entry he made into the world; how could I protect him from anything?

Years later, I had gotten past this little emotional issue... or so I had thought.

With the impending birth of my second child, I discovered to my horror that I wasn't ALLOWED to birth my second child either. In fact, I wasn't even ALLOWED to go into labor this time. This was made all the worse my a time-table set by the doctor's estimation of my due date, which I know for a fact was either a week late (unlikely) or THREE WEEKS TOO SOON. That's right, he not only wanted to rip my second child out of my body, he wanted to do it before she was ready... and no amount of protests on my part could convince him his precious ultrasound was wrong. Never mind that I knew when I had sex and when I didn't.

As I struggled with the stress of late pregnancy and raising a (still fussy/needy) pre-schooler, I tried to find a way out of this mess. However, it turns out that in my state (bass-ackwards Nebraska), my choices were to schedule a c-section, labor (alone) at home, or show up at the hospital in labor and hope they didn't FORCE me into surgery (they can and have done that). Enter more weeping...

In the end, I didn't have the strength to fight them and scheduled the c-section. As with the first, there were no complications during the surgery or during recovery. However, there is still the emotional problems that no one seems to care about as long as you don't murder your children.

Like the nagging suspicion that these aren't my kids... I mean, really, how would I know? And, with the second one, the more nagging suspicion that she is almost a preemie, taken weeks before she was ready. The doubts and worries that plague me with every cough and sniffle - c-section babies are more likely to have respiratory problems, even into adulthood. The sudden bouts of paranoia - increased chances of SIDS. Sometimes I go about parenting with a disconnect that frightens me - a disconnect that I feel comes from not feeling or even seeing my babies leave my body.

All of this is made worse by the so-called comforting words of well-intentioned people who just don't get it. "At least you're all healthy/alive." "She's so pretty, because she got taken out via c-section." "Congratulations!"

Yeah, "congratulations". Like I did anything more then not kill them in utero and then lay there like an incompetent log while someone else did the work of bringing them into the world. I didn't even get to see or touch them unless someone else allowed it and facilitated it.

And so the pain and doubt continues.