Dream: The full consequences of escalation (OR: How I learned to stop worrying and love my Warhammer)

[Jeremi]

Where I give a backdrop to my self-knowledge journey so far

 

I suppose my journey over the last few months has reached something of a full cinematic conclusion within my dreams, one of which I have not previously experienced in my life. I don't experience lucid dreams, and this one surely wouldn't qualify as one, but it was at least tangential to a lucid dream in its intensity.

 

I should start by saying that I was raised in a life of fear. My parents through their carefully crafted manipulation put me through a gradual process of transformation from a curious and outgoing young child into a shell of a person by age 11 with a crippling panic of public interaction rendering me nearly catatonic when it came to simple tasks such as checking out at a cash register. I was changed countries 3 times, I was relocated through multiple states and cities, I changed schools nearly every year from age 4 to 12, having to adapt myself to each new public school prison and its corresponding juvenile inmates.

 

Empathy and love never existed in my childhood, only from a few good teachers and older models did I learn any sense of a faint echo of what these things might be. My mom was and is a narcissist, she learned this from a childhood of poverty surrounded by 5 older sisters who would strangle the life out of her and dominate her will, something I assume she resolved to never allow to happen again in her adult life. Consequently she sought out to only find those she could exercise control over. Not a big surprise she became a staunch leftist. She was and is full of feminist venom and malice, though she would never say as much in words. To her I was the distant reflection of an alcoholic absent father who might leave again (which ultimately lead to the one thing she feared in any case). She was a master manipulator, she developed a method of affection and affection withdrawal that would leave me constantly seeking her good graces. If at any early age I did not demonstrate any consideration for the "error of my ways", if I was not apologetic, she would escalate the situation by increasing my punishments until I relented. My mom loved to echo socialist rhetoric in a manner, it was always for what was "good for the family as a whole", especially the last move we made at age 12 when I was finally starting to make friends at the school I was at in the suburbs of Chicago. The entire family moved for the last time to South Florida, for "the good of the family" which was in actuality nothing more than her desire to live in warmer climate, there was zero economic reason to move otherwise, my father did not change companies, he just transferred offices. She was also very fond of forcing me to apologize to her or my sister or anyone regardless of whether I agreed with her reasoning or not. This was the most vile brainwashing of all, having to affirm something I did not believe over and over. Consequently my inate intelligence which far surpassed anyone else in my family became subdued and I behaved aloof and brutish, like my father.

 

My father was and is a shell of a human being. His childhood from what I can gather from uncles and hearsay, was incredibly violent. So violent that he refuses to discuss it. He was my mom's enforcer. When I was "misbehaving" she would send me to my room and then send my father late at night upon his return from work to give me the verdict and the threat of escalation if I continued disobeying. This threat dominated my entire childhood. He rarely hit me but it was enough to issue these threats in his aggressive tones to continuously keep me at bay. I wanted to have nothing to do with him and really despised him as a person, his cowardice disgusted me to my soul, but I did not know to what degree I felt this until recently. He enjoyed humiliating me at public gatherings he had with office workers or his mom's friends. Always cracking a joke at my expense when I felt the most vulnerable as a forced social introvert; the betrayal would tear at me and make me feel like I could die. On one occassion I was dreading giving a speech in class that had been offered as an extra credit opportunity, and I decided to seek his advice the night before to see if he'd reassure me it would be ok to not do it. It was an extreme rarity for me to seek any sort of counsel from my father but I was so terrified of the speech I thought I might convince my father it would not be necessary. He responded with rage at the idea of abandoning the chance to marginally improve my grade and when I told him I didn't want to do it and I would not do it, he threw the chair he was sitting in at me. It was a plastic lawn chair and didn't really hurt physically, but the sense of sociopathy and betrayal of confidence echoes within me to this day.

 

At times I would feel so exasparated and hopeless from the complete lack of understanding of my feelings I would explode with rage within my room lashing out violently at any inanimate object I could find until my mom would knock on the door and threaten to make things worse for me if I didn't stop, and so I learned that I must resign to be a slave and live passively within that existence or else not survive. Even at the age of 13 they managed to subdue me; the first overwhelming passionate rebeliousness when puberty was hitting me hard and all my understanding of the world was being flipped and inverted. The threat of sending me off to military school was sufficient in that case.

 

Is it not bizarre and yet completely logical how that which deeply repulses us the most as a child is what we come to depend on the most to exist? At age 20, still living with my parents, I developed severe and devastating panic attacks. They would often last entire nights and leave me in complete fear for my life and drained and exhausted once they had passed. Eventually I went on antidepressants for it and subdued all these feelings for a time, but I had to increase dosage as time went on to continue to subdue the feelings. After a time the antidepressants had me so sick I could barely digest food or get out of bed. It wasn't until later on when I had changed my dietary habits, quit the meds, and left my parents' home that I began to slowly recover. Unfortunately,  that was not until 26 years old. I was somehow stuck within the cycle of abuse and dependency at home, I became the same as a prisoner who had grown too institutionalized to exist outside in the real world on his own. I went to the local university though I had plenty of opportunity to leave. I took trips to Europe to try to escape them with some faint dream of finding a job with my EU passport and never coming back. Inevitably I would come home after only a week suffering from a depressive meltdown of loneliness. My mom had bred dependency in me to the point I was a cripple without her presence. I did not keep romantic relationships and my parents had no problem with the state I was in so long as I remained submissive. I could not talk to strangers or even make a phone call to a business without difficulty. In time I managed to become more independent but it was with great difficulty.

 

Fast forward to two years ago, I discovered FDR and began to examine very critically everything I'd been taught. After reading On Truth and RTR I began to seriously question the falsities behind my family, but it still took me a great deal of time to unravel just how deep the trench was. 6 months ago I began a relationship with a girl who was a self-proclaimed libertarian. In the initial period I told my mom about her and she immediately went snooping on her facebook profile to try to dissect her, subsequently telling me she might potentially be trying to use me or kidnap me. She was actively trying to sabotage my relationship before it had began and this from an entirely different state. Incidently she has repeated this pattern in the past and yet I allowed for her abuse and manipulatition to continue in order not to upset her. Unfortunately my ex was not at all what I had initially expected (though for entirely different reasons than my mom's initial paranoias), demonstrating serious irrationality steming from a fire and brimstone strict Christian childhood. When things inevitably broke apart between us I realized at the time I had really just been trying to replace the affections of my mom with someone else, not actually solving any of my own problems or exploring self knowledge in any meaningful way (in spite of the material I had read up until then).

For the first time in my life I was honest about what I wanted out of my relationship with my mother: Nothing.

 

I told her I didn't want to talk to her anymore and blocked her everywhere I had her as a contact online. She of course sent me a pitiful narcissistic email about how I spent my whole life trying to run away from her in spite of her best efforts.

 

It's important to note here that I did not defoo my father. At that time I was so angry with my mother and the realization of how deep her manipulation was, that I felt some pity for my father as this empty shell who was being driven around by her for decades. I had the naive view that a sense of empathy still might inhabit my father and upon a confrontation he might feel remorse for the past reign of fear and bullying and humiliation he had exposed me to. So I kept communication with on a very casual basis by phone only discussing the bare minimum until he came into town last week.

 

Where I confront my father and all illusions are destroyed

 

The entire night before my father and I were scheduled to meet outside a Panera Bread near my house I was filled with trepidation and enormous fear. I felt as if I might arrive at the meeting and die right there on the spot, such was the intensity of the fear.

 

When I got there he was sitting in a table outside the restaurant with the family dog, a tiny perfectly groomed Maltese who my mom had molded into her perfect specimen of affection and loyalty.. He'd dropped off my mom beforehand at a mall to go shopping, thankfully she had no desire to see me either.

 

I was immediately emotional and it took me at least 5 minutes stewing in fear to finally mutter anything of significance. Finally I broke loose.

 

"Do you know the difference between sympathy and empathy?"

 

"Yes, of course," he said.

 

"Well, I have been thinking about it for a while, and I don't think there was ever any empathy in our family"

 

My father rolled his eyes, "Why does this matter, why do you bring this up?"

 

"Because there was never any consideration for my feelings, no curiosity as to why I felt a certain way, why I was acting out, nothing"

 

"I wasn't a psychologist, I was your father, I wasn't responsible for you feelings, only for raising you" (wtf?!)

 

"So you mean that my feelings didn't matter to you, you had no interest in learning about them?"

 

He dodged the question, "when you turned 12 years old you started to despise us and think we were terrible people, I have no idea why you decided we were terrible people but I think we were very leniet with you considering your attitude in that time."

 

I get indignant, "did you never stop to think how destructive it is to change a kid from a school every year for 8 years in a row, did you not think it would have been helpful to understand what I felt about that?"

 

"So what if you changed schools? I don't see a problem with that. My responsibility was to be your father not to fix the whole family around your feelings."

 

"Was it your responsibility also to humiliate and make fun of me at your private parties with friends, to throw a chair at me when I came for your advise the one damn time I had the guts to do so?"

 

He laughed nervously and pathetically.

 

"It's not funny, I said, half in tears.

 

My father became all of a sudden tranquil and with a very seemingly introspective tone he blurted out the following abomination, "you're right about me throwing a chair at you, that wasn't right, but let me tell you, in that time I really feel that I should have hit you more to teach you respect back then, you were out of control and we let you get away with it then."

 

My illusions all suddenly ended with that exact moment. How could I possibly still be afraid of this pathetic human being? He'd not only not shown any empathy but actually doubled down in spite of seeing me in clear emotional pain when expressing these things.

 

"Ok," I said. "I see that you don't get it."

 

 

I immediately stopped feeling overwhelmed and calmed down pretty quickly. I resolved to reserve my inevitable and unavoidable defoo with him for some other time and continued with some petty small talk for a few minutes more, which was all I could stomach before getting the hell out of there.

 

 

It is amazing how greatly illusion and mythology can obscure the truth about relationships. In spite of all the self knowledge work I had already done, in spite of all the reading and journaling and exploring of some painful subdued emotions, I had not been aware of how disjointed from a logical perception of reality I was when it came to my father. I realized that my father for me had just been a sort of last chance desperation for me to salvage and reconcile my past. I had known all along that my father was completely unfeeling, but I simply hadn't been ready to accept it. The fear was too enormous and crippling.

 

After the encounter I had very little fear left of him at all, it was all relegated to remnants of past fear and emotion. It was within this context that I had an incredibly powerful and vivid dream only 10 days later. A true gem of a dream.

 

Where the dream happens and I discover my rage

 

I was in the kitchen inside a strange home I did not recognize. I was sitting at a table apparently waiting for dinner to be prepared while my father and mother were actively cooking. My dad was holding a knife and actively cutting away at something imperceptible. I apparently muttered a comment which irritated my dad and he feigned a motion with the knife in his hand as if he was going to throw it at me. This seemed to me to be something I had seen him do before but I could not place it. I immediately reacted with unusual anger and blurted out "Why don't you try it you fucking coward?!"

 

Incredibly, this enraged him so much that he actually threw the knife at me but missed. I was initially shocked and appalled that he'd gone through with it but did not let my anger subside, "I can't believe you did that, I'm calling the police immediately!"

 

Suddenly my father and mother seemed to grow panicked at the realization of what he had done and my father started throwing other knives at me. As I dodged them I ran out of the kitchen and up a flight of stairs I did not recognize to the second floor. I ran into a room and in a panic tried to lock the door behind me but it would not lock. I looked around the room for something to use to defend myself and found lying next to the bed my warhammer.

 

A warhammer is an enormous medieval hammer used for piercing and brutal blunting of armor piercing. In an era where swords would not penetrate armor with ease, the warhammer was devastating. This was the only object in the entire dream that I recognized, because I own one in real life and also keep it next to my bed as a home defense tool. As soon as I grabbed the warhammer my fear of dying ended, I felt suddenly empowered and ready to face the attack. I discovered my rage.

 

My father burst into the room with a baseball bat and swung at me but missed. I walloped him across the torso hard with the blunt end of the hammer and he went down. I then ran from that room onto a balcony and resolved to jump but just then my mom popped out from behind me and started firing a cross bow. She missed me and I turned and knocked the crossbow away from her as she was loading another arrow and pushed her away. I then finally jumped out of the window and began running as I hit the ground. Decades of fear began to fade away.

 

I woke up calm and relaxed, though tired.

 

As I type this I am smiling and still reflecting upon the complete relief at finally escalating to the point I always longed for in past confrontations before the pang of regret would hit, the inevitable realization that the threat to my life would be too much to bare, the resignation to slavery.

 

No longer will I be slave to ghosts or the living dead. I know now I am so much stronger than they, that their decades of abuse could not enslave me. I am free.

 

The warhammer is still propped up next to my bed and it will stay there.

[Lens]

I admire your clarity in the dream but also in the real life after confronting your "father". 

I am glad you discovered your anger and rage through your dream. for me it is the child you once were (memory) is telling you how much danger there was surrounding you, it is overwhelming to see how much a concentration camp you were living in. 

 

What a delight also to see that you smiled at the end of your text, it's like your body is fully relaxed after saying the TRUTH about your childhood and in time you will discover more and know yourself more. I believe that your fear and panic when you met your father were the illusion of losing "love" if you said and expressed your true feelings but after seeing his coldness your expectation for him to show empathy vanished and the fear vanished with it. I think that is how healing works when we stop to expect the love that we didn't get and will never get for them because they are monsters. You are so courageous my friend you did a very important step. 

 

What if your father showed you love now? Would that heal your wounds ? Absolutely not! Your childhood pain is still alive in your body and you can feel it and also dream from/about it, it showing you why you feel what you feel now so you can make the connections and have peace. It is those feelings of the child that are yet to be expressed slowly and fully so you can live free, the love of your father or mother will not change anything in the present, now that you begin to take good care of yourself you'll be able to receive the love of people as gift, free, guiltless and shameless in the present moment without illusions. 

 

Congratulations you are becoming who you really are. I am so so happy for you!

 

Lens

[Holo Cene]

Bravo sir.

[cynicist]

That was quite an epic tale

 

I was sickened to read that your father admitted threatening you with violence was wrong but then claimed he should have actually been violent in order to control you. What a twisted mind that vile creature has. I'm curious, how do you feel about your relationship to others at this point? I mean has it changed, or do you think it will take more time and patience to heal? Congratulations on your achievement.

[Seleneccentric]

Wow! Congratulations on so many big breakthroughs! Your courage is inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing.

[Jiminy Vishnu]

Wow. First off, I admire your real life courage for meeting your father and talking to him. And I'm sorry that you were raised by a man who feels beating you would have done the job a chair didn't. Appalling.

 

"Why don't you try it you fucking coward?!"...Isn't it amazing to experience unfiltered emotion in a dream like that? I felt your dragon fire there Jeremie.  Thanks for sharing.

[Yeravos]

This has got to be one of the most incredible reads I have ever had. What a horrible story of a child being broken down by his own parents, and what an incredibly story of that same child breaking out of his prison and smashing his chains to bits.

 

Congratulations on breaking the chains Jeremie! You are an inspiration, to say the least!