11 - The Monster in the Basement

Transcript

 

I've been reading a book called Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis. Rachel Hollis is a Christian, and I know that not everybody listening to the podcast really want to read things written by Christians. But I’m here to tell you that in what I’ve read so far, she is not one of those people who beat the reader over the head with Christianity.

She is just sharing common-sense, practical wisdom, things that she has experienced. I’m only about 4 chapters in - it could change, but that’s what it seems like so far.

 

So here’s what Rachel has to say in her chapter where she talks about fear, and how fear can hold us back.

 

She says: “...let’s take the fear away.  The best way I know to do that is to talk about it.

The Bible says, let that which is in the darkness be brought into the light. when things are allowed to sit in the darkness, when we’re afraid to speak them aloud, we give them power. the darkness lets those fears fester and grow until they become stronger over time. if you never allow your fears out then how in the world can you disseminate them?”

 

I think she meant dissipate right there, not disseminate, and that’s the way I’m going to be looking at this. So how do I dissipate those fears?  And the answer is, by looking at them, and talking about them.

 

 Hi, I'm Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on Lessons From Life. Today, we are talking about the monster in the basement, also known as “sometimes you gotta look at the stuff that you'd really rather hide.”

 

When I was growing up, I used to have recurring nightmares. Now, I did not know they were recurring nightmares, because I didn't know the concept, and some of them were the standard stress nightmares that we've all heard about. Like you're walking down the hallway of the school buck naked during finals week, for classes that you haven't studied for, and haven't even attended since the first or second day of class. That’s one thing. Those are just stress nightmares.

 

But I had three nightmares that followed me all the way through college, and came back again as a young adult. I'm not going to go into huge detail about them here, because I don't want to spend two hours on this podcast, but in all three nightmares there were some similarities.

• There was a monster.
• It was chasing me.
• I was the target, and I could not hide.
• Every time I got to someplace that I thought was safe, the safe person would tell the monster where I was.

 

And I have to stop and take a couple deep breaths just after saying that, because even though it's been 20 years since I've had one of those nightmares, I can still feel the terror of that little girl trying to hide.

 

When I watched Schindler's list - and if you've seen it, you know it’s a black-and-white movie. But there’s one scene where a little girl’s wearing a pink coat, and she's trying to hide from the Nazis. And when I watched that, I was right back in my nightmare land, with my monster.

 

Interestingly, when I went to therapy, it wasn't two or three visits in, and I had another monster nightmare. But this one was different. Usually in my monster nightmares, I was being chased. The monster wanted me for something. This one wasn't like that.

 

In this nightmare, the monster, which I always kept locked in the basement hidden away from everybody, had gotten loose. And scientists knew that I had a monster, and they wanted to study it. And I've seen enough science fiction movies to know that when a scientist starts to study the alien, the alien dies. And I had to protect that monster.

 

I was doing the best I could to get that monster back into the house. I got it back into the house, and I'm trying to get it back into the basement, and it doesn't want to go there, and it's running from me, hiding in different rooms in the house. I finally got it locked in the bathroom just as the scientists were knocking on my door, and so I could pretend that I was home alone. 

 

“That noise?”

 

“No, I don't know what that noise is, there's nothing here.”

 

And then BOOM!

 

The monster breaks out of the bathroom by kicking the door down, and all I could think was I have to protect the monster.

 

And I’m going to make myself cry just saying that out loud.

 

Because if you are a survivor... if you were a sexual abuse victim when you were a child, or an emotional abuse or physical abuse victim... if your abuser taught you that this was our secret and we can't let anybody know ,then you are also protecting your monster.

 

Because that's what we were taught to do.

 

Don’t protect the monster.

 

Let it out of the basement.

 

Study it.

 

HEAL.

 

Everything that I did as an adult, every behavior I took, every reaction I had, was a direct result of the fear that lived in me from the time that I was a very small child because of that monster, and because I was afraid people would find out about that monster. And I say this, knowing that I didn't even know there was a monster.

 

I repressed all my memories because they were too hard to look at, and too hard to remember. Even so, subconsciously, I knew that there was a monster that I needed to protect. And that dream?  When I shared it with my therapist, we were both going yeah, you know, you can't get much plainer. We don't need to do any analyzing on that one. It was so obvious.

 

And the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is spend time with my therapist looking at the monster.

 

Looking at what happened to me.

 

Looking at how what it happened to me affected me 40 years later. Even 50 years later.  

 

I still find things and I've been emotionally healthier for years. Okay, I can't put a time on how long I’ve been healthier, because it's not a black and white thing, it's a continuum. It’s not two sides of the bridge, where this side is healthy and that side’s unhealthy. It’s a continuum. But I have been on the healthier side of the continuum since 2001, and then I moved even farther along the healthier side of the continuum in 2012 or 2013, while I was in my second round of therapy.

 

I do consider myself healed. Although there will always be healing that needs to take place, I feel like it's more now just normal dealing with life stuff. My therapist and I do still find some things that carry back to those early childhood experiences.

 

But here's my point.

 

You can't hide the monster and expect to heal and grow.

 

You can hide the monster, OR you can heal and grow.

 

You can't do both.

 

If you choose healing, then at some point, and it doesn't have to be right now, but at some point you are going to have to let the monster out of the basement.

 

In a safe, trusted environment, preferably with a good healing partner like a therapist.

 

But you have to look.

 

You have to look, and you have to let yourself feel, and you have to let yourself heal, because if you don't, that monster that's hiding in your basement is going to control your life from now to the day that you die.

 

And you deserve so very much better than that.

 

You are worth more than that.

 

You are worth healing.

 

Find the courage to take that first step, and don't forget to be gentle with yourself.

 

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

 

Go out and make it a great week.