I am a high-maintenance client.
I am a sad scared little girl.
I am an angry rebellious teenager.
I am a self-reliant woman with above average intelligence.
I am sad and small.
I am overbearing and demanding.
I am questioning and untrusting.
I am sarcastic and amusing.
I am outgoing and reserved.
I am determined and strong but also fearful and weak.
I am honest but withholding.
I am compassionate and giving and yet also hard and cold.
I am stubborn and willful.
I hide behind the facade of a woman I want to be.
I feel nothing and too much at the same time.
I am the life of the party but never really present.
I am beautiful crystal on the outside but shards of broken glass on the inside.
I will endure a hurricane to take away someone else’s pain and turmoil
and yet I cannot seem to do the same for myself.*
  
I am the product of a man who wanted me in controlling and abusive ways.

It’s funny…because no one ‘gets it’.
And the coping techniques that are ‘offered’…
Well, they’re like putting a band-aid over a wound that needs a tourniquet!

“The little girl is suffering a loss and grief that she will need your permission,
patience and love to help her with.”
That’s what Dear Therapist says.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
Matthew 5:4… that’s what the Bible says.

“I need to “grieve” and “mourn” that which I never had?”
That’s what Nita asks.

Really?
Is this mourning?
Is this what mourning feels like?
A hole in the middle of your gut that gets
Wider and wider each time you try to plug it up?
The bleeding that continues no matter how much pressure you apply?
Is mourning talking about what happened to you?

What comes next, after the mourning period?
Is it “closure”?
And what does that mean, exactly, ‘closure’?
Is closure when you’re supposed to realize that all this
Is just something you should ‘get over’?
Like losing ½ your money in the stock market, or staining a favorite white shirt?

Is this the period of time where I pretend it’s ”business as usual”?
Or is this the time I should “pour out my grief”
“release my anger” and “face my emptiness”
Then feel comforted because you care?
Or maybe this is the time where I call upon the aid of my friends and family
For support, a shoulder to cry on
Someone to walk along side me down this road of pain and anguish.
Sit with me while I grieve the fact that I will never have a childhood,
And that deep down at the very core of my being,
I will always have a feeling of emptiness…
Yet I should rest easy because I shall be comforted…
And somehow find peace with that?
I don’t understand why I can’t do that!
Why I instead I feel myself dissolving.

I sit in your office, my eyes filled with tears,
As I reach for another tissue I actually pretend that you really care.
Maybe in some strange way that makes me feel better
That somehow  to think you actually understand
How hopeless it all feels so much of the time.

You know, when you grow up
unloved and unwanted and abused
You become almost super human.
You develop this ability to disappear
Even when it looks like you’re still there, present, in your body.
You can scream but nobody hears a sound escaping from your mouth.
You are invisible and you can fly far away from your body.
You are the thing who was born normal…
But that was so long ago you don’t even remember what it was like.
You don’t remember, you only remember “this”.

The band-aid doesn’t work,
The blood is continues to seep through
I continue to bleed and to grow weaker each moment.
But it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter…just bleed out, Nita.
You know the rules.

Just bleed out.

I internalized all the bad things he said to me.
I hear them, I feel them.
But I don’t feel the good.
That’s it in a nutshell.
I watch the “good” Nita from outside of this body
  I don’t know her, I don’t see her as part of me.
I have no idea who she is even though she is “me”.
Instead I carry around this sense of ‘badness’
that was drilled into my head for so many years:
You are bad.
You will never be anything.
You are worthless.
You are an evil.
You are unlovable.
No one will ever care about you.
And I see that as the “real” Nita.
I believed those things.
I built walls to keep people out so they would not see the “real” me…
the badness.

But I still see that girl.
She is five, eight, ten…
They are still inside me,
Screaming in pain,
Yelling at me to help them
And here I am 30 years later,
Standing here alone with all of these girls
So wounded and afraid and I am unable to help them.
All of this pain from recent years has shattered me,
Ghosts haunt me, and I realize just how much hurt I never let go of.
Every night takes me back to the most painful times in that girl’s life
I see just how little I have recovered from the destruction he left behind
the wreckage that was supposed to be me!
All of the pain,
All of the baggage
He put on me,
Forced me to carry,
It is too heavy!
And I am so tired.

I plead with them at night,
“Please don’t be like this…”
And it is so frustrating because
I don’t know how to make them be any other way.
Every night I feel like I am trapped behind this one-way mirror
And I can see everyone but no one can see me.
And I am screaming for help but no one hears me.
No one sees me.
No one will help me manage them
and I have no idea how to do it on my own.
I feel diminutive and insignificant in a way that feels simply dreadful
It makes me feel worthless.
I feel a bit like I don’t exist.
I watch and listen and look
and I am pleading…
please help me…
please see me here…
but they don’t.

I know that’s not true.
I know that can’t be true.
People care about me,
People love me,
Want to be with me,
Offer me help,
Try to get me to talk to them,
But no one really SEES me.
No one sees beyond the obvious projection
of who I appear to be
Into my shattered heart
And deep into my soul.
No one really knows her
That is what makes it feel so extraordinarily lonely,
That’s what pushes me over the edge of the cliff
And into the darkness…
Falling, falling, falling…
There’s no one to catch me.
Where is everybody?
Where are you?
I can’t see the bottom
It’s so black and cold
I’m so afraid…
But I have to believe that there is someone
Down there in the darkness that is strong enough to catch me
Because I’m not strong enough to catch myself.
Because I am not strong enough to say out loud,
“Please take my hand and help me, I am dying.”

And of course now I am crying
I can barely see the computer screen
And my dog, Starr, is pressing her face under my arm
Putting her paw in my lap as she tries to get as close to me as possible.
She loves me and she’s trying to tell me,
"It’s going to be okay Nita, I promise, we’re gonna make it after all.”

I need to take a deep breath
Know that it’s okay.
Because it is.
**Because it has to be.