I Hope I’m Not Traumatizing My Therapist

January 31st 2024

I always go to traditional talk therapy for fairly basic topics… but end up goin’ absolutely ham on ‘em with metaphysical experiences I still wanna process.

It’s pretty telling of what’s actually weighing on me and waiting to be accepted.

The thing is, thus far I’ve only found a small number of people in the spiritual community who seem to be processing and working through their own reality-bending experiences without using them to bypass the struggles of bein’ a regular ol’ human being.

It’s fairly common to see people with wide eyes and the donut-glazed glare of a Vietnam vet telling you they have all the answers and know all the rules but… they look… untethered. They can have an honest conversation with your spirit guides but not their own mother.

I know this sounds judgemental. And that’s cause it is.

I’m making a lot of judgments right now, but that’s not a bad thing. We’re allowed you know. To make judgements. It’s a kinda a cornerstone of integrity.

Ya might be making a few about me right now. And that’s also allowed!

But that’s my whole point.

Cause let’s be real, even if it’s a positive experience? Anything that tears apart our previous understanding of reality? Is a lil traumatizing and could probably use some support and processing. Sometimes significantly. Sage and crystals can only take ya so far.

It’s taken me years to understand quite a few of my experiences. Having the safety and space to ask questions and hypothesize and integrate, for me at least, has been far more healing than having someone give me quick definitive answers.

Usually, it’s not til I’ve acknowledged and begun to process something in myself that I’ve gone, “Ohhhhhh ok… now that makes a lotta sense! I think I’m beginning to see what was going on there.”

When I’m able to do this, I can once again bridge the gap between the mundane and the metaphysical and stop separating those parts of myself and my life.

I remember I’m the creator. And you’re the creator. This is not a one-size-fits-all. And the better we understand ourselves? The better we can slightly begin to comprehend the eternal compounding mysteries of the universe within us and around us.

So. I get why I do this thing with traditional therapists.

Why something in me just loves to discuss quantum riddles with people who are in different fields or assumedly see things in a very different light than I do.

If I can feel safe hypothesizing about it there… then my brain feels safer to continue entertaining all the questions from all sorts of angles.

So despite going to talk to this woman about boundaries with a family member and another’s recent passing, those topics were sufficiently discussed and assimilated within a couple of visits.

Now my mouth was yappin’ about something else entirely, and I was watching the rogue train speed through the tunnel.

Here comes what’s really been weighing on me…

I’d written about this experience previously in a blog post but had still found arguments not to share it aloud with more than a few people.

I’d fact-checked and revisited this over and over for nearly two decades.

And it wasn’t until recent years that I realized why I’d wrapped this specific clairvoyant experience in so much shame.

I feel like most of us expect to see things that terrify us when we’re alone.

At 3am.

On a dark and stormy night in a haunted bed and breakfast.

Not in the middle of a summer day surrounded by gaggles of tourists at an outlet mall.

I was a little stunned at the physical reaction my body was having while sharing this out loud at my weekly appt. The confusion and terror I’d felt so many years ago had gone nowhere. So I am grateful to my girl for holding space while I spilled these beans.

I was nineteen that summer, working at an outlet store that specialized in the kind of women’s intimates that would make a TSA agent assume you were carrying your grandmother's suitcase.

And thank God I was working the floor that day.

All the tourists had clocked in at least four days at their beach cottages and decided to give their sunburns a rest and go shopping. All three registers were a tizzy of clacking clothes hangers, plastic bags, and kids begging for pizza and ice cream for dinner.

I slid my box cutter down the seam of another shipment of fuzzy socks and pantyhose. After reaching the bottom, I’d look up to see if the lines were going down, check the time on my phone, and scan the store to see how the other girls were doing.

I was just hunching over another box when my eyes shifted to the entrance as the doorbell dinged.

My ribs contracted, freezing the last of the air in my lungs as I looked at the door.

A father was holding his daughter who looked to be about 4 years old, walking into the bustling store.

They had the same vacant eyes. And I mean that in the most literal sense. Because what they had were matching cavernous black holes where their eyes should have been.

Instead, they each had a pair of these jagged-edged ovals you’d expect to find on a roughly carved jack-o-lantern.

He hoisted the child higher onto his hip, maneuvered effortlessly around a few tables, and then beelined for the last register.

I ducked behind the shelves of pantyhose, my eyes darting back and forth, trying to both compute and erase what I was seeing.

I scanned the faces of people around me.

No one was reacting.

Nothing had slowed down.

No credit cards had stopped running.

None of the children had frozen or begun pointing in terror.

I cautiously leaned my head back out into the open aisle and saw them standing there, calmly, at the far left register.

The child was now playing with the buttons on her father’s shirt as he talked with who I assumed was his wife and two other children as they emptied the rest of their clothes onto the counter.

No eyes at all. Just black holes.

And what made it even more unsettling to look at, was that the summer sun streaming through the front windows made their features even more pronounced. More out of place.

From where I stood I couldn’t tell if it was fresh blood, but it looked as if their eyelids had been cut from their orbital sockets leaving the edges to glow with an angry red, as if they’d been freshly cauterized.

I just stood there staring, studying them. Motionless. Waiting to hear a scream or stutter from another customer or employee when they were no longer distracted and finally saw what I was seeing.

But there was nothing. No one missed a beat. Not even a pause when my coworker looked up from the register and wished them a great vacation.

They grabbed the last of their bags and exited the store. My eyes followed them to the exit until they disappeared around the building.

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash

I spent the next 15+ years thinking about those eyes.

I researched every possible birth defect and deformity I could find.

Nothing even slightly resembled what I saw.

And all I could think for years after it had happened was, “How awful am I? Obviously, everyone else knew what this deformity was, and was kind and mature enough not to gawk in horror as I did. Even five-year-old children.”

It wasn’t until the age of 35 that I thought, “But wait, how come not one child in that store, not even one, stared or seemed startled? They had NO eyes. Not black eyes. No eyes. And no one said anything? How did he maneuver through the crowds and around the tables like that with straight up no eyes? That…that doesn’t make any sense.”

And yet. This is what I saw.

Why would I see something like that?

What is wrong with me?

Context and inner dialogue are everything.

So what happens when not a single person around you is seeing what you’re seeing? Experiencing the terror you’re experiencing? And it's 2 in the afternoon on a gorgeous July day, in a crowded cheerful place with friends only a few feet away? Surely someone would show some kind of reaction.

So when they don’t.

When no one reacts and everyone just goes about their business as usual? It can be really hard to make sense of what just happened without going into shame or fear and thinking, “Well then something must be wrong with me.”

I’ve always known the reason behind my suppressing and shaming a lot of my natural abilities out of self-preservation. But I did not realize just how much my childhood reactions to trauma, paralleled and informed my adult reactions to metaphysical experiences that also shattered my perception of reality.

Childhood trauma and paranormal activity have a lot in common. More people have experienced it than would care to mention or acknowledge. They understandably push against it, not wanting to think they’re inherently broken or insane. But even the most avid deniers and skeptics will at some point go, “Well…there was this one time. But I don’t think it matters.”

Our own lives are the best decoder ring we could ever ever use. The deeper we can understand ourselves and our own lives? The far greater we can see the fuller truth of the world around us in all its realities.

It was so validating to me when I randomly shared my experience of the no-eyed father and child with my book editor, and she gasped and said,

“Oh my God, do you think that maybe… you were recognizing what happened to you? What he was doing to that child?”

I nodded profusely. She had taken the words right outta my mouth.

“Yes.” I replied. Really wanting to scream THAT’S WHAT THE FUCK I WAS THINKIN’ MAN! But what I said was more like,

“Girl- that has been my gut feeling all along. That I recognized what was happening there, but wasn’t ready to actually interpret it as such because I hadn’t acknowledged the truth of it in myself yet. I mean… if there is a physical depiction of what generational abuse and robbing of a child’s innocence looks like? That’s it.”

This is gonna be continued because this month has been jam-packed, so I’ve had these stories rolling around in my melon for weeks before I sat to write, which of course meant the universe was like,

“You got it girl, we’re gonna put that order into the kitchen for more of those experiences right away. Would you like a side of ranch with that?”

You know I do.