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Post by gemma on Mar 19, 2006 10:10:13 GMT -5
I would like to discuss these sort of dreams but since I didn't find any thread about nightmares, I decided to make one. I constantly have nightmares. I was only 12 years old when I needed to move to my grandmother and live with her. I was studying piano-playing and since our village is so far from every town, there wasn't any bus to carry me into that town where my grandmother was living. So it was better for me to live with my grandmother and so I could visit the music -school and the elementary school. But it was the hell. My grandmother claimed always that I was her favourite grandchild. She was literally suppleing me just like you would supple a dog. My panick-illness developed there.My days by her: 1- I woke up, went into school. My classmates hated me, because I was different from them. Everyday humiliating became a routine for me. 2 - I went into the music - school, where the my humiliating was continued. I was always teased, called a dumbass, etc. 3- I went home to my grandmother. I coulnd't even change my clothes after I ate my lunch because she immediately forced me to learn. I was forced to learn until 7 or 8 p.m. After it I would play the piano, take a shower, had dinner and went into bed There were a lot of friends of mine. I could never go out to play with them. Sometimes she even went to my school and killed my classmates with her kindness. She ws so blind that she couldn't see that all of them laughed about her. So I was teased with her appearance. They asked me if I eat condom at home with my grandmother. (I still don't know why they asked this! I didn't even know what a condom was...) In the town I was looking at a store-window and then came two big boys and one of them punched me so hard that I almost fell into the window. I didn't know why he had done this. Perhaps only for sheer pleasure. I was constantly bedwetting my clothes like a small child. I was 12 years old... And I had nobody to tell these things. Not even my parents. We didn't have money. My mother and I had four, (yes 4) pullovers for the whole winter. My shoes were leaky and I wore my cousin's trousers. Yes, I was really a poor street-kid For six months I was suffering there when suddenly I became ill. In the winter I caught cold and had high fever. Because my parents didn't have phone, I wanted to call one of their neighbours but my grandmother forbade it. I was so tired and ill, I was broken. I cried I told her that I wanted to go home to my parents. She didn't allowed me to call the neighbour. The next day she went into the shop. I was pretending that I was sleeping. As soon as she went away, I called the neighbour and asked her to tell my parents that I am ill and that I wanna go home! When my parents have arrived, my grandmother became very angry. My parents brought me home. I never went back. I changed school and never played the piano again. My grandmother got into the heart-hospital. When we visited her she was roaring at me: - I am here because you left me alone! Since those hellish months I often dream that I am back in her house again and it slowly becames dark and I wanna dial my parents but the rigger of the phone is dancing away from my fingers. I forget the numbers, the doors are locked, there isn't any bus to take me home and I am sad and depressed. I wanna go out of the house but I cannot. And when I am out of there, there is dark outside and danger everywhere and I am without any help...
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Post by Shaelyn on Mar 19, 2006 13:38:27 GMT -5
The nightmares won't go away until you resolve the issue within yourself. You have a panick-illness, I believe until you let go of that fear, you will always be plagued with this nightmare.
Do you feel guilty about what your grandmother said to you? ...can you forgive your grandmother? ...can you forgive yourself?
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Post by gemma on Mar 19, 2006 15:56:56 GMT -5
Neither can I forgive myself, nor can I forgive her. There was no love behind her attitude. This year she was here by us for two months, beause she has broken her ankle. We awanted to help her but in meantime it turned out that she is an arrogant, selfish old woman. The whole family has suffered. Even my parents, and I swear that these two months has taken at least five years from my mother's life away! She made our life hell. And not because she was a little old, dumb woman, no! She had a very strong will and wanted to supple us.
It is hard to forgive her. Arya, I know that your quote is true. I would need to forgive her to make my life better. There are a lot of people whom I have forgiven.
I heart my guiding Voice and the Voice asks me again and again if I can forgive her. I would cry then and say again and again: "No I'm still unable to forgive her." I don't know what to make. I feel that there isn't much time left and I wanna peace among us before she passes away. But I cannot do that, cannot do that... Financially she helped me a lot but money doesn't buy love. And what could I do?
- I am sorry for her - she makes my gorge rise - I feel guilty because she helped me financially and claims that she loves me
First I should know what to feel...
And Shaelyn: no, I've never felt myself guilty! This was not my guiltybut her selfishness. I wasn't her property and never will be.
I was only a small child when she wanted to inform the police against my parents and wanted to take me away from them. She claimed that they weren't good parents...
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Post by muirrin on Mar 19, 2006 19:37:04 GMT -5
*hugs Gemma* In my experience, the only real healer is time. Sometimes you only need a few weeks, sometimes you need years... your case seems to be the latter, but as long as you're not blocking the process by (even subconsciously) nurturing your resentment it will happen eventually However, to some extent I know how you feel. My grandparents are also very selfish. They told my father when he was a teenager that the only thing he could ever be was a farmer, so he left school when he turned fifteen and started working for them on the farm. He's now over 40 with no qualifications but is still desperate to get out, and Mum's dying from suffocation. They pay him minimal wages even though he's now practically running the business, and it's not that the farm doesn't make enough money, it's just that they put a shitload of money into accounts for their sons and daughters who left the farm! All Mum and any other sons- and daughters-in-law are simply breeding machines. We live within 100 metres of them, and they're constantly watching us (think Everybody Loves Raymond)... I wasn't supposed to go to uni; it apparently would have been much better to find a "nice" job in town and keep on living at home. The whole attitude behind this is that they want everybody to stay with them so that they can keep us under their control. I can't say I've ever dreamed about being trapped (to be honest, I still love the place that I grew up in even if the tension becomes too much) but I guess I can't speak for my parents. Even if they don't realise/think of it as important I'm pretty sure that they'd have those sorts of dreams, because it's such a strong, negative force in their lives. Us children as lucky that we can escape eventually... they may not be so lucky.
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Post by Shaelyn on Mar 19, 2006 21:23:02 GMT -5
I see. I'm glad you don't feel guilty over it.
I agree that your grandmother is selfish. And I'm sorry you've been through all that.
But...at the same time, you can't do anything to change her. The only thing you CAN change, is you. ...Her selfishness will continue to hurt you, to burden you, until you forgive her and let it go.
You deserve better than to still be hurting from that situation so long ago. I'm not looking at this, and saying you should forgive your grandmother for her sake, I'm looking at this and saying you should forgive your grandmother for your own sake. When you forgive her, your own healing can begin.
...also...to forgive doesn't mean you just forget about it and act like it never happened, or trust her judgement, whatever. it just means that it doesn't hurt you anymore, that you don't look back on that event with anger/hate/frustration/pain/ whatever-else-you-may-be-feeling.
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Post by gemma on Mar 20, 2006 10:32:36 GMT -5
Muirrin: and have you go to uni? I hope so!
All the other things you told to me and what Shaelyn told me will be answered later but I now need to time to think.
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Post by Shaelyn on Mar 20, 2006 18:31:01 GMT -5
Take your time. I send you love.
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Post by muirrin on Mar 20, 2006 21:22:08 GMT -5
And hugs. And chocolate ^-^
And yes, I've been at uni since the end of February. No one tells me what to do once I've made up my mind! ;D
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Post by gemma on Mar 21, 2006 5:29:02 GMT -5
I am proud too! ;D Shaelyn: thank you
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Post by muirrin on Mar 21, 2006 8:59:24 GMT -5
*pfft* If I can do it, then anyone else can... I'm hardly the strongest of people, it's just that there was never any doubt in my mind that told me I wouldn't go to university and go on to a career from there If anything, I'm proud of you, Gemma, for surviving this! It makes my own experiences seem tiny in comparison but at the same time I thought I might mention it as it's related and if you ever need to talk, I'm here...
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Post by pearldancer on Mar 21, 2006 13:56:01 GMT -5
Gemma,
I have had things in my life that have taken me decades to work through. .. .so I can understand where you are. I can feel the pain in you though and the strength of your desire to stop hurting. I will offer you this one thought and you will use it or not depending on if it resonates:
Possibly the only way to manage forgiveness now is to recognize the blindness of your grandmother in her actions. She is sleeping. . acting through her own pain and fear and years and years of reactions and mechanisms. She is flailing . .. thrashing about in this life to the very end. Can you feel the sadness of an entire long life lived that way? Can you feel past all the rest to the deep sorrow? Can you cry for what she denies herself in all the selfishness and blindness she has cultivated?
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Post by shepherdess on Mar 21, 2006 14:23:39 GMT -5
Gemma, I read through your post and couldn't feel anything but sorry for you. It sounds indeed as though you had a rough time. I wanted to offer you some insights that may be able to help you move through your pain.
I too suffered through abuse(sexual) and an oppressed youth, I held on to it all very close and felt very sorry for myself for having been treated in such a way and carried my anger and hurt for the people who inflicted it on me very near. My inability to forgive, I realized later, was killing me. It was my reaction to the situations and not the situations themselves that were affecting my life. I realized that infact no one is "evil" and that noone was "out to get me and cause me harm", thier selfish actions may have caused such results but it was not thier intent to ruin my life. It was that reaization that allowed me to forgive all of those that had helped to create pain in my life. When I finnally forgave them all I saw it like a silver ball arise from my abdomen and at last I was free.
Another thing to think about is that it sounds to me that your Grandmother really wanted you to be with her, that she loved you soo much that she was scared that you might leave and therefore leave her alone. Her actions were wrong and caused you to feel the opposite of love and infact made you feel as though she didn't care for you and wanted to punish you. But I think she was just scared, you have to remember that in these older generations people didn't always have the ability to heal and figure out that they were responsible for thier own life. Many people in our parents and grandparents generation still suffer with an unconsious pattern of tieing fear to love and acting on that fear. It may make it easier for you to forgive your grandmother and move on if you realize how ill equipped she was at dealing with her emotions and learn to feel sorry for her, as her own short comings emotionally no doubt caused her to live a very unsatisfying life. I imagine that her reluctance to call your parents when you were so ill was just a reaction to her fear that they might come and take you away from her. She loved you Gemma, the poor thing just had no tools to figure out what love really meant.
I hope that helps a little, Kate
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Post by Shaelyn on Mar 21, 2006 14:50:14 GMT -5
Gemma, I have had things in my life that have taken me decades to work through. .. .so I can understand where you are. I can feel the pain in you though and the strength of your desire to stop hurting. I will offer you this one thought and you will use it or not depending on if it resonates: Possibly the only way to manage forgiveness now is to recognize the blindness of your grandmother in her actions. She is sleeping. . acting through her own pain and fear and years and years of reactions and mechanisms. She is flailing . .. thrashing about in this life to the very end. Can you feel the sadness of an entire long life lived that way? Can you feel past all the rest to the deep sorrow? Can you cry for what she denies herself in all the selfishness and blindness she has cultivated? indeed. ...and I wonder how she came to be that selfish. the selfish people I know were spoiled as kids, or had poor role models. not to say that that's how your grandmother came about being selfish...I'm just giving another angle to look at it... that selfishness may be all she knows, how can she act differently, when she doesn't know any differently? I can give a prime example: my boyfriend's dad. at a glance, he's an not a very nice person (and one that he believes everyone else should wipe for him, I might add.) I personally believe he's a narcissist. he makes his wife and son do everything, and tries to buy them off with gifts...and blames his wife for everything that goes wrong...he's the manipulative type, he twists everything around so that he's holier-than-thou and everyone else is scum. he even managed to do that when he cheated on his wife, he twisted it so that it was her fault. but...when you look at his past...his father was wheelchair-bound, so his mother did everything. he was the only son, so he got spoiled as such...it's entirely logical that he'd come out of that experience believing that gifts equate to love, and that women should do all the work, if he never bothered to look at that situation and think about why the women were doing all the work in the household. as such, I can understand why he's such a jerk, and I forgive him. I do actually hate it, and I hate that he has hurt and continues to hurt his wife and son, I hate that they can't escape the situation (she's financially bound to him, she has health problems and can't work) but I can understand why he thinks the way he does, and that's how I can forgive him...and I also understand why they're both in that situation, as much as I don't like the situation. his wife longs for revenge. I disagree with her attitude about it; the way I see it, what goes around has come around. he has pushed away anyone that could ever be there for him...he is alone. I don't pity him. I believe he has a lesson in this to learn, and he is oblivious to it...and until he learns that lesson, he will continue to push away everyone. I wish that he would open his eyes, see what he's doing to everyone, what he's doing to himself...but no one can do that for him. there's a lesson for his wife in this too...one that she's blind to as well...but that's getting off the topic. anyways, something else to think about. it may not apply to your situation...but at the same time, it might...I hope it helps. we're here for you...
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Post by Kivawolfspeaker on Mar 21, 2006 15:20:50 GMT -5
Gemma,
I'm here for you and hope you can resolve whatever issues are present in your life. I send you love.
Jen
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Post by muirrin on Mar 22, 2006 1:54:17 GMT -5
*hugs back* It certainly is good to see how comfortable we are with sharing here, and how quickly others will offer advice and comfort. If only we could take this out to the real world with the knowledge that as we pass this on to others, they in turn will pass it onto still more people, and before we know it a ripple of love and understanding has spread over the earth!
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Post by muirrin on Mar 24, 2006 0:05:41 GMT -5
That sounded so much like me I couldn't help but grin ;D
I'm certainly looking forward to the meditation on Sunday now!
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