Dreams, flashbacks, and self-image (trigger warning: emotional rape)

On Wednesday morning, I woke to the sound of a loud bang. I had been having a nightmare. I called for Matt, but he had already left. The bang I heard was probably just his car rolling over the metal plates in the parking lot. I felt alone and vulnerable, but glad to be awake in this reality, and not the one I had been dreaming.

In the dream, I had never met Matt. It was as if he had been erased from my memory entirely. I was living with my mother. The dream took place over a long period of time-- several weeks or months, I can't be sure which. There was the odd comfort of being alone in my room at my mother's. That was a place that I had worked hard to make into a sanctuary, and I felt safe there, especially during the days when she was at work. I was online, and my ex-husband, Blair, contacted me for the first time in many years. He said that he wanted me back. He was going to come back to the US and marry me again, and bring me back to the UK with him. At first, I was happy, but I felt like I was forgetting something. I didn't know what it was. Flash-forward to a scene of me and Blair at the courthouse in my mother's hometown. They ask me my name. "It's Morgan W-- Wagner," I say, and suddenly, all of the memories of Matt come flooding back. "No, wait, I can't marry you. I don't want to marry you, I'm already married!" I say to Blair. But he doesn't hear me. No one does. I watch myself start to sign the papers. Then I wake up.

I suppose this isn't so unusual. It speaks to my fear of losing Matt, of my feeling that my life would be much worse had we not met. It speaks to my fear of back-pedalling, of somehow losing all the progress I've made in the last decade or so. I do wish I could have the time back, yet keep the experience. Maybe my brain was trying to show me what would have happened. I'm sure some episode of Doctor Who had influence as well, because, y'know, time travel.

It was a bad dream, but it reinforced my gratefulness to have such a wonderful person in my life. It also reminded me of how emotionally dependent I am on him, and that part bothers me. One of the issues I had with Blair was that he would never, ever say that he needed me. Yet, I needed him, in every way. I need Matt. Does he need me? Is need bad? Does "need" automatically lead to co-dependency? I am very afraid of that dynamic. I do not think Matt and I are co-dependent, but because of my past and my upbringing, the fears remain. 

I guess I need to examine what is co-dependency is, how to identify it, and how to deal with it if the relationship starts to tip in that direction, but that's something to discuss with my therapist. I can sit here and list traits I think are common in co-dependent relationships, but it isn't that helpful from the inside. I'm in need of validation from an outside source on this one.

There were other elements of the dream that were nightmarish aside from the apparent loss of memory. I looked different. I remember looking in the mirror and seeing myself as someone much older. In fact, I looked a lot like my mother, but, you know, with way better hair. Obvious metaphor: becoming my mother. Not something I want to do, ever, in any way. 

I actually envy people who want to be like their parents. People who look up to their mom and say, "I wanna be just like her when I grow up." I never had that. I looked at both my parents and said, "I don't want to be anything like them at all." I didn't even care if I turned out any better than they were; I just didn't want to be like them. I remember having a secret list of stuff I would never do to my own kids when or if I had them. My mother, of course, confiscated the list, but that's another story.

She isn't a bad person. Yes, I can say that. She isn't a bad person. She is a sick person, so trapped in her own labyrinth of twisted thinking that I doubt she would know happiness if it bit her on the ass. I still think that everything she has ever done to me, she did because she truly believed it was right. She does love me, she just has no idea how to express that love in a meaningful way. I hate the things she's done, the things she still does sometimes. I hate the way she broke me. I hate the way she is broken, but I do not hate her. Hating her as a person isn't constructive to me. She does try. She just has a lot fewer mental resources than I do.  I remind myself of these things because hating her takes too much energy. It would also necessitate hating a part of myself, because no matter how much distance I try to put between us, I am still her daughter and always will be.

Three days after that dream, on Friday, I had two separate PTSD flashbacks involving her. The first one happened while I was taking a shower. I had my eyes closed as I rinsed my hair, and suddenly I actually saw myself in her shower at her house. I thought I heard her calling me from the other room. I knew that I couldn't actually be there, but I rinsed my face as quickly as I could so that I could open my eyes and be sure of where I was and what I was doing. The feeling passed fairly quickly, but it still shook me up for a while. 

The second episode happened while I was in the bathroom again. It's going to sound stupid, but I was squeezing this tiny little zit just below my eyebrow. Suddenly, a memory came flooding back of my mother actually holding me down under a bright light on her bed, plucking my eyebrows with tweezers and squeezing pimples with her long, sharp fingernails. What the actual fuck? Why would she do that? I was crying. I can't have been more than ten or eleven years old. Was it so important to her that I have perfect eyebrows? What was that even about?

I recognise this now as a kind of emotional incest. She violated my personal space and my body in order to alter my image to suit her ideal. I also remembered that she would chastise me for not shaving my legs correctly, and tell me that only "horrid women" shaved their private parts. She was also obsessed with my weight, and forced me onto a Slim-Fast diet when I was only nine years old. Yeah, that's healthy.

These bathroom flashbacks are very telling, I think. They illustrate the way my mother taught me to hate my body and to be ashamed of all of my imperfections, from stray hairs to extra pounds. I don't know how I made it through childhood and my teenage years without having some kind of eating disorder, to be honest. I don't know how I managed to become an adult who does not hate her body, at least most days. It makes me sad, really, because she must still hate herself so much. I know my grandmother abused laxatives and monitored her own weight obsessively, fretting over every inch even into her 60s. They tried to teach me to do the same thing. It didn't take. Thank the gods.

I think what I will try to take from all this-- the dream and the flashbacks-- is gratefulness. Gratefulness that my life did not turn out the way it could have. Gratefulness that I have a mostly-healthy physical self-image. Gratefulness that I have a wonderful husband who would love me no matter how many zits I have or how much I weigh. Gratefulness that I have managed to find people throughout my life who give me a feeling of validation and bolster my resolve to become a better person. I think I have become a good person, and I'm grateful for that, too.