Emergency self-empathy

TW: death, sexual assault

It began when I saw my daughter asleep in the backseat of the car. Her head was leaning back, and her mouth was agape. I was reminded of how my grandmother looked when she died and I was brought into her hospital room at 11 years old to see her body. I had enough anxiety to try and pat her legs and move her a little to encourage her to shift around so I could make sure she was alive. I could only feel relieved when she shut her mouth and moved a little in her sleep.

I started to think about how I sometimes get a lot of anxiety at night, with intrusive thoughts of scenarios where she is in danger or dies in some way, and I'm often brought to tears until I try to aggressively interrupt the thoughts because I know they are not real situations. I was then reminded of the nightmare I had the night before of her going into video chat rooms and accidentally exposing her private parts, and then getting messages from pedophiles. Since she was naive and innocent she believed they were just being friendly when in reality they were hoping to manipulate her into meeting with them to then rape and kill her. 

This touched something in me about the times in my life when I was younger and had been sexually assaulted. I especially remembered when I was with my mom and sister in an empty train at night and they sat together while I sat across from them alone. A middle aged man came in and made a beeline to sit next to me. I was afraid to be impolite and didn't realize I had a choice to simply say "NO, I don't want you to sit here." He then "fell asleep" and slowly leaned toward me, and I could see the outline of his penis under his clothes pointing at me. I remember looking at my mom and her being oblivious to the whole thing. I debated waking him up and telling him I want to change seats but then worrying about if I face toward him or against him when leaving the seat since I was boxed in by him, my body would still be uncomfortably close to him anyway. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore and decided to stand on the seat and hop over to the seat in front. I saw him "wake up" startled but didn't do anything after that. I moved to a seat farther away but was filled with rage, disgust, humiliation. I remembered another time of being in a crowded bus and someone grabbing my ass from behind, and again, my turning around wanting to punch whoever did it but not being able to know who did. I sometimes fantasized about that time because there was a man behind me and I would've loved to just spit on him and punch him because it was so unfair to have this done to me and feel powerless to do anything about it. 

As I was aware and watching all of this happening in me, I made the connection that the intensity of these feelings around my daughter and wanting to protect her was because of the failure of anyone to protect me from the same kind of situation. Once I recognized this I felt as if a younger part of me came up to say this, "Why didn't my dad protect me from my mom?" My mom would have such chaotic mood swings and he never stepped in to say she was going overboard because he wanted to avoid it himself. There was even a time when she was unleashing herself on him and he told her something about me that I had confided to him in private because he knew she would get mad and come barging into my room instead, taking him off the hook. It didn't help that a song from my teenagerhood came onto the music player while remmebering this, "I'm only happy when it rains" by Garbage. Listening to this I was reminded of how dark life felt, and how even feeling terribile and angry, powerless and in pain was familiar and comfortable to me in a strange way.

I thought to myself, is this really needing to happen right now? I'm in the car. It's not the best time. But yes, this was happening now. The parts of me that feel safe to bring their pain to me just happened to want to do it in that moment. So I just put my hand on my chest as a form of emergency self-empathy to be with what was alive in me, without either blocking it off nor indulging in it. This is the best I could do, with a promise to come back to it at a later date. In this experience I learned self-empathy in the way I prefer is not always possible. Sometimes the environment and situation make it impossible to fully go into my own pain. And this is OK. The amount that I'm able to be with myself is much more welcome than not doing so at all. 

Today, I was able to come back to that fear now that it wasn't so activated in me and mixed with other parts who also had stories to tell, increasing the emotional intensity. The first point was to recognize that such a strong fear response was directly correlated to the amount that I care about my daughter. So it really helped to know that all of the fear and anger was because she was so important to me, that it was due to the huge, huge amount of love I have for her. And when I connected with that, it felt a lot better. The fear can be seen for what it is, which is an indication of the large amount of capacity for love that I have. Touching into this was soothing. This was the first layer. 

The second was to be with the part of me that projected this need for safety onto my own daughter. This was a part of me that needed its own care and attention. And I let it speak to me without trying to change its experience, just being with presence. I accompanied it and reflected back to her that need for safety, the anger of ultimate abandonment when somebody should've come and saved her, the pain of feeling alone in a situation where she was made to feel responsible for the irrational and out of control emotions of her mother. I imagined my adult self and little me back in the situation of my mother raging at us, and me speaking as the adult, standing in front of little me as a shield, letting my mother know that it's not little me's responsibility to make her feel better, again and again. Finally I took little me away from the scene to a place that was safe, and she was so relieved to finally have someone to rely on, to speak up for her when everything was so unfair. 

I am not sure if this was enough to fully unburden this part of myself, but the palpable relief I felt was certainly a step in the right direction.