*******trigger warning – ritual and emotional abuse; religious triggers*******
I have been having dreams lately of a “little dog,” which symbolized that I had another really big traumatic memory to work through. Two of my most traumatizing memories involved dogs – watching my abusers kill my dog and being raped by a dog. I knew this was going to be a difficult memory to recover.
I recovered it last night. It is a variation of what I already shared about being forced to “kill” another child, only this happened before the ruse was pulled on me.
I knew the memory needed to come. I looked into the dog’s crate, opened the door, and peeked inside. Suddenly, it was like I was beamed back into my eight-year-old body. I was standing outside under very bright stars. Everything in the world seemed larger because I was viewing it from an eight-year-old child’s perspective. I took in the bonfire, the tables, and the people in robes filing in. This was different because I was not at my place at the table. I was just standing there observing the ritual.
Just as what I described here, I watched the same ritual with a child who was a little bit older than I was. The child was in a robe with the head robed man standing behind the child. A large knife was placed in the child’s hands, and the man put his hands around the child’s hands to force him/her to hold it.
Then, they carried out my sleeping (drugged) six-year-old sister and laid her at the feet of the child. I knew what was coming. I began screaming and sobbing in my head, but not one muscle on my face belied my internal emotions. I watched as the head man droned on and on and couldn’t see them replace my sister with a slab of meat. I watched as the knife plunged into what I thought was my sister, and I watched as what I thought was my sister’s blood saturated the child who “killed” her. Inside, I was screaming and crying. Outside, I was completely stoic – not one trace of emotion.
The next morning, my sister was there with me going to breakfast – alive with no marks on her body. As Chrystine Oksana says, “the real unreal.” I saw her die, and yet here she was. What can I believe? What is true? What is not?
I get it all from the adult perspective, especially since I already worked through being on the “killing end” of this dynamic. However, I still have to process the emotions of the eight-year-old girl who believed she saw her baby sister murdered.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 