What Does it Do to Us?

What do our experiences do to us? Do they make us forget who we are? What does culture do?  These are the sort of questions I have been contemplating.

I have been seeing a somatic therapist for quite a while now, and every week since early spring. What I find striking about it is that for the very first time in my life I am telling my story which seemed to be completely locked down inside of my body. In the past, I have tried to write my story a couple of times, but it has always come out in disjointed, somewhat incoherent mini-stories with no overarching storyline and has not been shared. But, as I tell my life story to the therapist, piece by piece, the real story, a true story starts to reveal itself. This "true" story, I am not sure it is a story that can be told in words; perhaps this story exists in a world without, or before words. It is like a myth. The myth can be told, but the true meaning has no words.

My experiences I always assumed didn’t matter; of course I grew up under the impression that nothing about me really mattered. And maybe it doesn’t. 

There are also the stories adults told about me that I adopted as my own, like that since I am a Leo I am self –centered and that since no one listened to me, what I have to say must not matter, and since people get mad or jealous when I do something extraordinary, I must stop that.  And then I wonder, how do those experiences I had that I don’t really remember have on me?

When I was less than one, my mother and I were held at knifepoint for over 8 hours, though much of the time it was my mother at knifepoint and me alone on the dark forest floor, crying.  When I was two my mother attempted suicide. As she lay on the floor unconscious she said an angel came and told her she had to live or I had no chance and I needed that chance. Around my fourth birthday my best friend’s father killed his mother and just weeks after sentencing, killed himself.  I was aware of my missing friend and my parents spending time in the courtroom as witnesses. They lost two friends. But I didn’t understand. Not like adults understand. Those were my first four and a half years.

Why would a life begin like this and what does this sort of beginning do? Do the parts of our lives we don't remember matter, do the dreams we don't remember, matter?  And why have I had so much trauma and loss in my life? And why didn't I realize this until recently?  I often think it is simply in my lineage, which is also full of betrayal, death, neglect, secrets, abuse, incest, rape, slaves and slave-owners, ... But I have determined that it stop with me.  I am determined not to pass this dysfunction along. And I see the only way out as personal transformation. And I wonder, what does our lineage do to us? Lineage is another integral piece of a life. How do our ancestors find their way into us? And why?

And then I mourn for our cultures lack of closeness. As I tell my story to this therapist, who is thankfully diligently being paid for by my insurance, but is also a women I know and respect from the community, I wonder why don’t we tell our stories to each other?  I want us to share our lives with each other.