HEALING IS A PROCESS

Photo by Patricia– my secret garden

Healing doesn’t mean triggering is over. Ghosts from the past come out of the grave and crack me in two.

My younger brother Stevie, so needy of ‘family’ gave my email along with everyone else in the so called ‘family’ to a daughter-in-law of Chet, a brother who attacked me repeatedly, the first time violently.

Learning that suffocation could occur with his large body on me while fighting him, becoming still and feigning sleep at least let me survive, but gave him full use of my body whenever he liked.

And with Mom working after Dad’s death, Chet had plenty of time to do with me whatever he wanted.

So Stevie, who has his own sufferings; a 40 year old son living with him with schizophrenia who will never work, be married, or have friends, and losing his daughter at 30 from an overdose, has enough tragedy and pain which makes me hesitate to speak up at all when he oversteps boundaries treating me as non-existent.

When this woman emailed about coming up from a far-away state so that her teen sons, Chet’s grandsons could get to know the ‘family’, I deleted the email but felt invaded, as if a monster dead had come back.

Where has all this healing gone? Didn’t I just say I had healed?

Stevie responds to the email inviting her to come, blah, blah, blah.

That’s it, my need to protect myself from emails overrode my need to protect Stevie from hearing any negativity from me. My email to Stevie:

________________________

Please do not include me in further correspondence. Not sure how she got my email but I don’t need to be triggered by horrific memories of Chuck or his descendants. His attacks were constant, repetitive and traumatic.

He is/was NO brother. Do you know he gave me crabs? He told me it was nothing yet he went and was treated by a doctor. Mom gave me a toxic, unsafe, poison to put on (DDT) because she was so terrified of the SECRET getting out. No one helped or stopped it.

All the traumas came flooding back with these emails despite the decades of my trying to heal.

I didn’t want to give you money when you went there for the funeral and I thought you had an understanding of why, but I guess not.

You do not know the horrors I suffered by 4 of the people who were supposed to be brothers, one memory so horrific (rape) that to this day have blocked out, the memory too violent for even a 71 year old to allow to surface.

These people are NOT family.

_____________________________________________________

Stevie wrote back with an apology, and I wrote back- “I’m always here for you and love you, always.”