ghost girl (with a thousand lives)

therapist: and what do we say when we feel like this?

“When making love and having a memory, I asked myself, Is the abuse happening now or did it happen in the past? I turned my attention, gently, from the memories to the sensations in my body or to seeing myself or my partner or the room I was presently in. The memories came up less and less often. What I did was a twofold process. First I noticed myself thinking thoughts like: Here comes another memory. It’s going to destroy this whole evening. It is going to ruin my life. I’ll never be able to have sex. I would see this mental process and say, oh, that’s just a mental process. It isn’t necessarily telling me the truth. I didn’t spend much time with the fear because when I noticed the thinking, I would bring myself to what was real in the present moment, such as a hand touching my arm. Its realness was more compelling. Of course, I had to choose other times, when I wasn’t making love, to stay with the memories themselves, giving them the attention they needed. If I hadn’t also been doing that, I don’t think I could have let them go during sex times. I didn’t practice meditation to get rid of the memories. Doing anything to rid myself of the memories always backfires. To this day I have to be open to knowing that memories will arise sometimes during sex. I still have them, but the frequency has been drastically reduced. My attitude now, many years later, is when memories come up, they come up. Sometimes it means I have to let go of making love and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the memories go away after a moment. The key is the openness to it.”

falling star