Coming Face to Face with the Strangest Part of Myself, Part II

I wanted to explore a particular fear I’ve had for years, a fear that won’t go away no matter how much I try to talk myself out of it.  The fear has to do with disease and getting medical tests:  I can’t make myself get a mammogram, no matter how strongly my doctor and even my friends urge me to and no matter how much I know it could actually save my life.  When I dig down to the bottom of that fear, that stuck-ness, I find an unshakeable conviction that if I go for that test something unspeakable will be discovered; I’ll be marginalized in some way – suddenly not quite human, in other people’s eyes and even my own; my life will be no longer be my own; and I’ll die a horrible death.  Which isn’t all that unreasonable, given the things that having cancer can do to us:  It can ravage and ruin and take away our ordinary lives, transform how we see ourselves and even how others see us, and cause us to have horrible deaths.   But still.  Not getting a mammogram won’t keep me from getting cancer, it might even keep me from dying of cancer.  But I can’t make myself get one.

So I started out my EMDR with that problem.  I wanted to go into the wilderness of myself and see what spirits I’d encounter, I wanted to resolve the problems of my psyche and find the treasures of my soul.  I wanted to find out what part or parts of me were preventing me from being able to get a simple ordinary medical test.

            So I put on the headphones and held onto the hand things and went down in the EMDR submarine to the deep ocean inside myself.   After a while my friend asked if there were any parts of me that would like to come forward, and that’s when I started to sense the presence of an old woman.  Not really strongly, just sort of, but sort of persistently – it, she, whatever, would not go away.  And even though I kept thinking I must’ve been making it all up I decided to go with it, because there was something about it that felt good – it felt good to bring this imaginary old woman out of the dark where she’s been living inside me for God knows how long, bring her up, out, into the light of my everyday consciousness.  (Even though I wasn’t exactly in ordinary consciousness, there in my EMDR trance, there was a part of me, there’s always a part of me when I do EMDR, which is witnessing what I’m finding, witnessing it with my ordinary conscious mind and reporting it to my therapist, or in this case, to my friend.) 

So I asked that old lady who she was and what she wanted.  She told me, not exactly in words, but through what I can only call felt images, that a long time ago, centuries ago, who knows when, she was accused of being a witch.  There was a trial – the feeling of this is being translated in my current life into the fear of having a medical test, where something can be revealed, decided, that can affect your life and death; you can either get a thumbs up or a thumbs down.  At the old lady’s trial it was going to be determined whether she got to live or die, decided by a terrifyingly distant and unfriendly male authority figure – sort of like a doctor, only worse -- the distant echo of which is affecting how I perceive doctors here in this life.  Of course, at the trial it was determined that she was a witch and that she had to die.  Suddenly, her life was wrenched brutally away from her; she lost everything, home, safety, all the lovely homely pleasures of ordinary life – the way I picture what it would be to know you have cancer.  Even worse, she became marginalized, non-humanized, a total pariah in the eyes of everyone around her – which is not the way people look at cancer victims these days but is sort of how they looked at them when I was a kid acquiring my present-day attitudes, and who says this is reality-based anyway.  And then she died a horrible death being burned as a witch.

I don’t know who she is and I can’t even pretend to know how she got inside me.    We don’t even have language to describe how something like that might come to be, except to say, in the superficial, literal-minded, spiritual pop-culture language of today, that she was me in some past life.  She doesn’t feel like me or even like part of me, but somehow I ended up with her fears, I’ve translated them into the circumstances of my everyday life.  She doesn’t feel like me, but strangely – maybe the strangest thing of all -- is that she sort of feels like my mother.