hsphaven

Following on from my last post about my sleep paralysis and other trippy night time experiences, I found this article about “spiritual emergencies” which was a great read. It talks about the intersection between psychoses and spiritual experiences. It reminds me of one of my favourite quotes which is that shamans swim in the same ocean that people with schizophrenia drown in.

Since writing that post, I got my period. No wonder my sleep has been so messed up, I thought. I was in bad pain so took some strong painkillers and went to bed with a hot water bottle. I took one pill at first but it wasn’t enough so I had to take another one, which finally gave me relief. I eventually fell asleep, but then I had another crazy dream. This time I was with my family, the people I love despite the hurt they’ve caused me, but in the dream I was biologically about 4 years old. I was being molested, but this might sound really weird but I actually kind of liked it. It felt good physically. As a child I was very sexual and being touched felt good, which is why I sought it out all the time with friends. Somehow over the years I have shut all that down and I could easily live my life without sex now.

These people- younger selves, younger family members- were lost. Frozen at this time. They didn’t know that there was another reality. They didn’t know it was 2024. And while I was 4, I was also an adult and carried the awareness that I have now. I was a time traveler from the future, like Doctor Who (though I never really got into that series). I was trying to tell my mum and everyone that it was actually 2024, but they looked at me like I was crazy. All I know is that the nature of time is not linear, that it is all blurry, that the past still exists on some level, that the present exists, and the future exists, and sometimes it’s hard to separate them all.

I was trying to free these people. But they were frozen like glass horses in this tiny fragment of time.

I then finally woke up. I listened to meditation music and cried.

I don’t know how much truth there was to this dream. I cannot believe the people I dreamt about would ever do something like this to me. I have no conscious memory of these things happening. But from a young age there were some signs that something was not right. I was obsessed with sex. I would write about it in my stories all the time, and draw pictures of it. I still have my old notebooks from early primary school. In one story, I named a character “sex”. I drew a picture of this character, a young ecstatic girl. In another entry, I wrote “Dear [inset prep teacher’s name]. I like you. Would you like a smack on the bottom?” A number of parents didn’t want their kids playing with me because they believed I was a bad influence on them. Their kids would then start talking about and doing sexual things as well. Then one friend accused me of sexually assaulting her, and that was the start of a very drawn out smear campaign. I can’t remember what happened with that friend. But it saddens me that I was demonised by parents and teachers when all this time something bad may have been happening to me and no one knew and I received no help.

I feel a lot of guilt about some of the things I did when I was a kid. I remember touching my younger sister one time when we were alone down the side of the house. I’m not sure how she felt about it. My sister is trans, and was biologically male at the time. She is now estranged from the family (except for my dad) and I have no relationship with her anymore. She doesn’t want to see me on her birthday. I have wondered whether it was because of this incident and asked her if I ever did anything to make her uncomfortable, but she said no. My dad, who I live with, tells me that my sister wants to come over at midday on Saturday to play table tennis with her new “friend”. My dad told her that I usually sleep at that hour. She then got all jealous and accused my dad of loving me more than her. I couldn’t believe it. This is MY house too. Doesn’t she care to check with me too? She acts like I don’t exist. 

The following is an extract from a government website:

Girls with harmful sexual behaviours

Much of the research about harmful sexual behaviours focuses on harmful sexual behaviours by boys. This is because boys account for the majority of harmful sexual behaviours. Statistically for girls:

• At the age of four or five, girls are just as likely as boys to engage in harmful sexual behaviours.
• Broadly, girls account for a very small proportion of known sexual abuse of children.

Girls with harmful sexual behaviours are an extremely vulnerable group of children. They are likely to have experienced serious, persistent and multiple types of childhood victimisation including:

• higher rates of sexual abuse and higher rates of victimisation at a younger age
• higher rates of multiple and concurrent types of abuse (physical and emotional abuse, neglect and domestic violence)
• higher levels of family dysfunction.

These high levels of childhood victimisation mean that girls with harmful sexual behaviours are more likely than the general population to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health concerns such as depression, suicidality and eating disorders. Girls with harmful sexual behaviours are more likely than boys to have been at risk of significant harm at the time of their harmful sexual behaviours . For many girls, these experiences of risk continue into their adult lives. They often have limited positive social support and are more likely to be victims of interpersonal abuse in the future.

I was an anxious kid who got nightmares all the time, would wet the bed a lot longer than most kids, and was clingy. Mum and dad slept in separate rooms and I slept in my mum’s bedroom with my sister.

I continue to have symptoms of sexual abuse. I have a host of physical and mental health issues. I have vaginismus where I cannot fit anything up my vagina. I experience age regression. In their article, Woman at the Margins: A Critique of the Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, Clare Shaw and Gillian Proctor assert that at least 70% of people diagnosed with BPD have been sexually abused as children. Some doctors have thought that I was sexually abused as child, but have never been able to figure out who may have done it. They see how much my family cares about me and think surely they wouldn’t have done something like this to me. That is something I’m confused about as well.

I still really miss Betty, the nurse I wrote about here. She hurt me greatly, but I feel like her assessment of me was the most accurate of all people I’ve met. She thought I might have DID and asked if my dad or anyone had ever done anything to me sexually. The second time I went to this hospital, the hospital referred me to my last psychologist to get assessed for DID. But this psychologist said that while she had wondered whether I might have DID, she just didn’t have any evidence.

I’ve been having a lot of dreams that don’t make any sense at the time, but then when I get some new information, I understand them. I had another dream recently about a jumper my mum leant me. In the dream I was approached by a girl who was insisting it was her’s. I was arguing with her saying no it’s not. Then when I saw my mum recently I told her about the dream and she said the jumper actually belonged to my nana who has passed away. I now believe it was my nana in the dream. It IS her jumper. I can’t believe I’m talking to dead people in my dreams now.

I don’t know if I’m losing my mind, or if I am having some kind of acute psychic opening. I can relate a lot to this article which talks about how people who are psychic take in more stimuli on a daily basis. I’ve got to the point where I can no longer sit in most restaurants, struggle to go to the supermarket and cannot go anywhere without industrial grade earmuffs as I’m so sensitive to noise.

I was also searching the internet for other people who actually enjoyed being molested. Yeah I know that sounds totally messed up. I had only ever heard of descriptions of sexual abuse as something terrifying and unwanted. This article got closer to what I experienced in my dream.

Honestly, I’m over all this. I’m exhausted, depressed and emotional all day from not sleeping well. When the nights roll in I put off going to bed because I never know what I’m in for. I’m also distressed lying in bed awake because ever since my overdose my pulse pounds. I hear it in my ear like a ticking clock. I sleep better during the day, but am often woken by the neighbour then, even though I sleep in an insulated box my dad kindly built me to block the noise. The box and house is a mess and foster spiders. I turned on the light at 4am the other night and found a big black spider on my arm! Just what I needed during all these nightmares and episodes of sleep paralysis, and no it wasn’t a hallucination this time. I flicked it off and managed to put a glass over it and move it outside. My life feels like a horror movie right now. Like I’m Alice stuck in wonderland. I wish I could clean up but I have nothing left in me. I can’t deal with anything. I knocked over a glass of water in my box last night, and it took everything I had in me to dry the area. I knew if I left it wet, as I’ve done before, the carpet would start to rot and stink. I then noticed cobwebs under the table by the bed and in the cracks of the box. My house is in a disgusting state, but I’m too depressed and sick to do anything about it. I’m still tormented by that buzzing sensation on my head from the antidepressant I was given years ago and it doesn’t get any better. I feel so hopeless I don’t even know if suicide will put an end to my suffering. I will probably just get stuck in another miserable place. I’ve thought about going to hospital, but most private hospitals don’t let me sleep past 10:30am and people need to be well enough to attend group. There are less expectations in public hospitals, but because of their discrimination against people with BPD, they will only let me stay 48 hours. Private hospitals don’t want me because I am too unwell, but public hospitals don’t want me either as I am not crazy enough. Whether public or private, they are all loveless, soulless and often overstimulating places.