I have made references in a few stories on this blog to the sexual abuse I experienced throughout my childhood at the hands of a paedophile uncle, but have avoided specific details. It’s a difficult and uncomfortable subject for writer and reader alike, but I feel having context and a reference is necessary to reveal the remarkable guidance and transformational power of dreams, which has been my focus for this blog from the start. Two recent dreams convinced me I must address the problem directly to be able to write meaningfully about the dream healing process.
I am participating in an open-air religious service on the grounds of a temple. When it is over, a man places a hooded robe on me in preparation for a ritual I am to perform in the temple. Inside, a woman participant tells me of the time she was captured by soldiers or religious authorities and forced to witness them swinging her cat by the tail and bashing its head against a wall. The cat was not killed outright, and she was made to finish the job herself (I was spared the details). They then beat her baby bump in an attempt to kill the child she was carrying. She showed no outward signs of being traumatised as she spoke but was profoundly sad. As she told her story, I wondered to myself how anyone recovers from such trauma.
The following dream came 3 months later:
I had gone to a man’s house on an errand. On the coffee table was a book he had written, and I began reading it. It told how he and his family encountered a group of seven ‘interesting’ men, while on a camping trip in an isolated mountainous wooded area (‘interesting’ was in quotes). He was forced to watch these men rape his wife and three daughters. I thought: “How on earth does anyone get over that?” He had a cheerful disposition, and I wondered if it was genuine or if he had found a way to compartmentalise the trauma. He appeared to live alone; there was no sign of any female presence.
These dreams were quite different from the more than two decades-long series of intruder and burglary dreams where I was personally violated, and my house broken into and burglarised. As gruesome as they were, I felt a significant shift had occurred inasmuch as I wasn’t one of the victims but a second-hand witness to the events. The theme in both dreams was the same: the violation of the feminine, a perennial collective trauma in a world dominated by masculine values. Initially, the question posed in each, “How does anyone get over this level of trauma?” disturbed me. It was a response I often had to news stories of any type of distressing event, and I had never found a satisfactory answer. Even more disturbing was the deeper personal question, “Am I over my trauma?” As I sat with the dreams, I resolved to write about what I didn’t want to as a way of exploring these questions.
In 1962, I was 12 years old and living with my mother’s sister and her husband while my mother was hospitalised for a lengthy period with one of her many nervous breakdowns. I was always anxious about being separated from Mum, but my anxiety escalated when the drama of the Cuban missile crisis – the infamous 13 days in October – dominated the news. She was in Adelaide, 300 miles from where I was in Broken Hill; my only contact with her was by mail, and the world was on the brink of nuclear war. One day, when I was particularly distressed, my uncle took it upon himself to comfort me. I don’t recall the conversation, nor how I came to be in his bedroom, but certain aspects of the experience are vivid still, 60+ years later: him talking to me soothingly, putting Vaseline on me, the searing physical pain and resultant shock and then, blacking out.
The next thing I knew, I was up in the top right-hand corner of the room, a disembodied head, watching the catatonic one on the bed, aware of the inner turmoil that was masked by the blank look on her face. At the same time, I was taking in the whole scene from floor level. This aspect of me wasn’t aware of having a form of any kind, yet I could see as if through physical eyes. I could see my face at ceiling level, looking at my physical self on the bed and my uncle squatting alongside it. I have no idea how much time had elapsed and can’t recall any other details except for something most difficult to describe: I felt like a point of awareness within a larger field of awareness. The atmosphere was perfectly still, calm and silent, completely lacking in judgment or emotion. It was as if there were three of me – the physical body, the disembodied face near the ceiling and the formless observer below – all contained in something inexplicable.
I have little memory of what happened after that, how I came out of the state I was in, or what happened in the immediate aftermath. I was no doubt in severe shock. I imagine I got the usual lecture about “Our little secret” and “Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll go to jail, and so will I.” I do know that from then on, I wouldn’t let him near me again. The abuse had been going on from a very early age, and as distasteful and anxiety-provoking as ‘pleasuring’ him was, he had never physically hurt me before. He had ensured my compliance by playing on my affection and desire to please him, making me feel special and reminding me in subtle ways that I was obligated to him for taking me into his home and for his assistance to my family after our father’s disappearance.
Fear now overrode everything. It gave me the strength and resolve to resist his manipulations, but I paid the price. From then on, the psychological warfare intensified, and what I had realised in that moment of terror was reinforced daily; without my compliance, I no longer had any value to him, and the love and affection I had received were withdrawn. I was still living under his roof, and it would be another 6 months before I rejoined my mother. In the interim, my schoolwork suffered for the first time; school was no longer the place of refuge from home life it had always been for me. I still attended church, my other place of refuge, but in my confused mental state, it, too, lost its sense of safety and security. I became hyper-vigilant and started having panic attacks, which escalated over the next 17 years, becoming so debilitating that I felt I would go mad or commit suicide if I didn’t get help. And so I entered therapy for the first time.
The help turned out to be a mixed blessing, as during the therapy, I decided to tell Mum and Aunt about the abuse. I never mentioned details, just that he had molested me. It was the only language I had at the time. In fact, I hadn’t even told my therapists about the rape. I couldn’t bring myself to face that until many years later. My disclosure caused trouble between the two sisters, and Mum didn’t speak to me for 9 months. I never told anyone else, but somehow word got out in the family, and my cousin’s wife, who I later learned had been harassed by my uncle (her father-in-law), took out a court order to prevent her young children from being allowed in their grandparents’ house. Word came to me that my aunt said, “This is all that damn Gloria’s fault.” I became a pariah in the family. The knowledge that I might have helped protect the children was some consolation for being an outcast, but still, I was devastated.
The hostility unleashed on me, the inadequate means of dealing with it, and the lack of support caused tremendous anxiety. I was re-traumatised, and this time, it was worse because I was made the scapegoat for everyone’s guilt. The therapist couple I was seeing were out of their depth. The Transactional Analysis framework they operated within was a brilliant system but inadequate for what I was dealing with. Sexual abuse wasn’t on the radar much in 1980, nor was the knowledge of PTSD and its treatment. I continued with the therapy, and the panic attacks eventually subsided enough for me to feel relatively stable. I decided the way to cope was to get on with life as best I could and forget about what had happened, as I had done initially. This worked, after a fashion, until my husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis 17 years later.
During Roger’s illness, we attended a healing retreat, and there was a discussion about the emotional and psychological factors contributing to cancer. A woman with breast cancer reported that she believed it had been triggered by unresolved issues around the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child. I thought about my history of migraines and wondered if there was a connection. The panic attacks had ceased to be a problem but the migraines I’d had since childhood had worsened significantly over the years, often seeing me bedridden for days at a time and relying on dangerous doses of painkillers. They weren’t life-threatening like cancer, but living with them often made me feel suicidal. I wondered if I could be tempting fate by not dealing with the past.
I learned of a hypnotherapist who had recently started practicing in my area. Serendipitously, Dr. Patricia Burgess was at the very medical centre I attended. At the first session, she said it would not be appropriate to look at any deep issues because of the situation with Roger, so we focused on gentle relaxation hypnosis. She taped the sessions, and I listened to them daily. These, and the sessions I had with her, were my port in the storm. As it turned out, I saw her only hours before Roger died, and during the 10-minute drive from her office to the hospice, I was in a state of peace that felt like it would last forever. Of course, it didn’t, but it stayed with me throughout that night, enabling me to remain calm and fully present as Roger took his final breath, and lasted long enough to get me through the worst of the days ahead.
I stopped seeing Pat at this point but I continued using the tapes as a meditation practice. This was an enormous help in a very difficult time, but as the headaches were still quite debilitating, I resumed working with her two years later. This time, she asked me if I was sure I wanted to go into the abuse issue, as it could be opening a Pandora’s box. I felt I had no choice, as the box had already been well and truly opened, and there was no closing it. I’d had a vision of Jesus and a profound energetic awakening experience during Roger’s illness, which led to unusual psychic phenomena, and my dream life had exploded almost the minute he died. Something was clearly trying to get my attention. I had been writing the dreams down and often had intuitive insights into them, but was at a loss for how to work with them. I decided to plunge in.
It would be impossible to describe in a short blog post what I experienced over the next three years; suffice it to say that working with the unconscious is exhilarating, confronting, and very challenging, with real-life consequences. During this time, I found where my father was buried and visited his grave in Sydney. I had contact with my uncle, which brought to the surface a rage I didn’t know I was capable of experiencing. I returned to Uni, which lasted 6 months, and I remarried, which lasted 21 months. I saw Pat off and on during this time, and in between, I tried various alternative treatments like acupuncture, reiki, bodywork and various groups and workshops. There were promising times of respite, but consistent relief would be a long way off.
A lot of the work I did with Pat at this time was an imaginative exploration of my dreams, and this was my introduction to their healing power. Even the nightmares began to lose their terrifying aspect. She had a deep interest in Jung’s work, which I had also begun to explore, and she helped me appreciate his holistic approach to living a meaningful life. When my marriage broke up, all the childhood abandonment, rejection, and betrayal issues surfaced with a vengeance, the dreams intensified, and I was thrown into an existential crisis. Ultimately, this would prove to be just the catalyst I needed for a descent into the depths of the psyche and to take the dreams seriously. Pat retired her practice soon after, but in the meantime, I had lucked onto Jane Teresa Anderson’s dream forum, and the knowledge and support I experienced there from Jane and the other members were a real lifesaver.
When Pat was clear of her commitments, we continued the work informally, meeting up at Jung meetings, sharing resources, working through dreams over lunch and having in-depth discussions about what we were reading at the time. On several occasions when I was in crisis, she did hypnotherapy with me at my home. I simply don’t know what I would have done without her. One night in 1999, soon after beginning the serious work with her, I had an extraordinary conversation with a voice in my head, described here, in which I was told “I have sent you to Pat.” To me, she was, very literally, a Godsend, and I count myself fortunate to have her as a friend to this day.
Over the years, I have done countless dream workshops and groups of various kinds, devoured books and had many different teachers, but I always came back to Jung, eventually entering into Jungian analysis with Dr Robert Matthews and making a firm commitment to the individuation path that is the core of Jung’s approach. It is challenging work and not something I would have embarked on voluntarily, but having come this far, I can only be thankful I did. I now regard it as valuable and important work, not just for me individually, but for the collective consciousness.
This brings me back to the questions posed by the dreams I opened with: how does anyone get over severe trauma, and am I over my own trauma? I know of no definitive answers to the first, but it does seem to require a willingness to turn within and face whatever demons are guarding the hidden treasure. The treasure, I choose to believe, is love. I have learned through my own experience that there is an inner guiding light, if only it can be accessed. The double tragedy of trauma, especially deliberate and premeditated abuse, is that the connection with this inner self is damaged, sometimes beyond repair. I recall sitting in a psychotherapist’s room once, practically choking on the words that were trying to emerge: “I feel like I’ve been irredeemably contaminated.” Making that confession was a turning point.
As for being ‘over it,’ I have been taken by surprise too often by what emerges from the unconscious to give an unequivocal answer. What I can say is that it no longer feels personal. The violation of the feminine is deeply embedded in the collective psyche and acted out in the world in ways that are truly heartbreaking. These days, when I am confronted with an unexpected trigger, I know how to work with it and seek help if I need to. The proper orientation is required.
Several years ago, I had a dream in which I was doing an exam. The question wasn’t clear in the dream, but the answer had to be in the form of an essay. I started out answering in terms of what I thought was required, but then I switched to a more personal style, and it took on a spiritual theme. As I wrote, my enthusiasm grew and I ended with a flourish by saying, My religious attitude, as Jung calls it, has given my life a meaning and purpose that was hitherto missing in the days when I believed myself to be an atheist, and for that I feel very, very grateful and very, very blessed.
I wasn’t altogether thrilled with the term religious at the time, equating it as I did with organised religion, but I had learned by then that my dream self is wiser than my waking self. Clear and explicit statements such as this are a rare gift, so I took notice, and over time, my understanding of the way Jung uses the term solidified, and my religious attitude became more refined. The most succinct definition comes from Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon:
Religious attitude. Psychologically, an attitude informed by the careful observation of, and respect for, invisible forces and personal experience.
It sounds so dry and academic! What it means to me is that I learn to value and honour my own personal experiences and trust them and their source. I now regard the out-of-body-experience (OOBE) I had at the time of the rape as a numinous experience – a religious experience – and a forerunner to the energetic awakening experience mentioned earlier, and the meeting with Christ as a vortex of energy in a recent post. The taste of the ‘peace which passeth all understanding’ I experienced as a 12-year-old has had to be rediscovered and reinforced over and over, a sacred calling which has now become a privilege rather than the impossible dream it once seemed.
I have procrastinated on writing this story for years, hoping the subject matter would disappear and release me from the task. That didn’t happen, and I find myself posting it on Easter Monday, the final day of the celebration of the modern world’s most well-known version of the ancient motif of the dying and resurrecting God-man. Writing it has been harrowing – what to put in, what to leave out, how to avoid sounding like a victim and demonising others – but it didn’t put me into a tailspin as it has when I’ve attempted it in the past. I have exceeded my preferred maximum word count for a blog post, yet what made it onto the page has barely scratched the surface. Still, I am content and hope it is of use.
