Trigger warning: this story is about abuse.
I’ve written about my little girls in white, all safe in their white rooms along the corridor who stay insulated and warm inside those rooms, that are a sanctuary for them.
I imagine I see them in white dresses because they represent the purity and innocence of the souls they are trying to protect by breaking away. Their white dresses don’t make them completely pure. That was taken from them.
I think they also represent the need to cover what had already been done to them and shield them from any deeper damage. They dress up all in white, enter a white room and close the door. When I have an EMDR session, I am able to access them, hold their hands and walk through the trauma memories with them. Those sessions can be incredibly intense. Each time I connect a little more with one of them, and I had begun to see some of the doors opening, and windows in some of the rooms to let in sunlight.
Tonight, I went to a breathwork sound healing session.
I didn’t know how breathing in a certain pattern was going to work on my conscious mind, but actually it was a bit like an EMDR experience. During those sessions, my therapist is there, tapping or moving her finger as I track it, and she is my guide of sorts.
As it turned out, in the breathwork session, another guide showed up for me.
As I did the breathing exercise, I became slowly aware of drifting, and saw the image of an animal, at first I thought a lion, then a very large dog, and a wolf, as it morphed a bit, strong and silent, beside me, just lying there, watchful, still, waiting. I didn’t know what to do but focus on the eyes, which bore into mine with a silent message that I would be watched over.
That made me feel safe, and I drifted more and then I found myself in the bedroom of the house I’d lived in ages 8-11. I saw shadows around the room, my closet door, the bottom of my dresser.
Suddenly I felt I was sucked into a vortex as the room spun and I saw dark shapes and the light that comes in from the moon and stars into a room at night and saw a little girl, under the bed. Her hair was in her face, wet from tears, and tangled and she was in a nightgown that hung in strips on her as if it had been ripped to shreds by something. She was shaking, cold, and sobbing like something wild.
Her words came out in gasps between the sobs, “You left me here… you left me here… you left me here, ” over and over, to nobody, really.
I don’t think she knows who left her there.
I realize that there was a night when something happened, and she hid under that bed, and never left. This wild, crazy-scared little girl didn’t find a room in white for some reason, and she is not safe.
She is alone, under the bed, and I want to reach my arms to her to pull her out, and let her see that she is safe, and not alone any more, but then I am sucked in and under the bed, and it is just me there, and I am hiding and alone and feel the full impact of being in that dark room, under the bed.
Somehow I can’t crawl out, because it isn’t safe, and I don’t see a light anywhere, and I start to panic.
As I’m gasping the same mantra, “you left me here…you left me here…you left me here,” with the sure knowledge that nobody will ever find me, I become vaguely aware that a woman in the room where the session is taking place kneels beside me and strokes my forehead for a moment.
As she does that, I envision a person, strong, gentle, loving, kneeling down, reaching under the bed and slowly pulling me out from under it, and I collapse into those arms and cry, not terrified, but sad because I understand why this little girl was under that bed, the thing that happened so suddenly, violently waking her from a sound sleep, that she didn’t have time to float away into a white room.
She dove under the bed and curled into a ball, fists tightly clenched. And that is where she stayed. In the dark, afraid to come out, knowing nobody would come for her.
I hear the leader of the session call out that there are just a couple more songs, and I start to become more aware of my surroundings. I also become aware of exactly when this little girl went under the bed, and what was happening at the time.
That is not a story I could start to process there, but when we reached the time in the session where we were encourage to shout and scream, I got glimpses of it, and screamed out, with both the voice of the little girl from under the bed, and mine, words I would never have been aloud to say back then, and we became one full voice.
After a while, I turned over on my side, curled up, pulled my pillow under my head, and cried quietly for what seemed like a long time, for what happened in that bedroom, and for the little girl who never left it.
– Songbird Karen (Bend, USA)
P.S. I invite you to read more about my story on my blog Songbirds Fly.
