| EMDR Heals the Wounded Soul | |
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When I first met Leeny I immediately liked her. She had a sharp sense of humor, a fierce love for her kids and an inner warmth that always made me feel better for my time with her. She also had a quiet pain within her that was evidenced by the way she shied away from hugs, even the cyber kind so popular in our chat room. I wondered what could have happened to make someone so afraid of showing affection.
Leeny later revealed to us that she had been molested by her brothers as a child. Her older sisters were also abused and related to her that their mother told them "they can't help themselves", and to "stay out of their way". She admitted that she had very little real memory of her childhood, having blocked it out to a large extent. Much of what she knew she had learned from her sisters.
One of Leeny's more poignant memories is of the first time she wanted to die at the age of perhaps 8 or 9. She places it in this timeframe because she was "chest high to the kitchen sink." She recalls, "I took a butcher knife and placed it under my sternum. I knew that my heart was under that bone and if I fell it would kill me. I didn't do it because I knew that my mother would be mad at me because of the blood on the kitchen floor."
When she became an adult she was still not free of the abuse, however. Although the physical abuse had stopped long ago, she was left lonely and confused. She began drinking and using drugs to quiet the pain inside her. She says, "It was the 60's and anything was fair game. There were binges that lasted for days at a time." She began to manifest her uncertainties about love and affection through promiscuity. Says Leeny, "It was the 'sexual revolution'. One night I couldn't sleep. I started counting my various sex partners. I quit counting after 30. I was lucky. None of them killed me."
Eventually she became involved with the man who would give her the two children who are still the light of her life. Unfortunately he also gave her numerous bruises and emotional abuse. When then time came that his abuse was also affecting her children, she made the courageous decision to leave.
Today Leeny is married to a man whom she describes as deserving "a Nobel prize at the very least". He has stayed by her side through four hospitalizations and has patiently allowed her the space she needs as she comes to term with the fact that physical displays of affection do not have to equal pain and humilation.
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