WHY THE NAME... PATTY’S KEYS?

Posted 13 September 2015
 
For as long as I can remember, I used to have nightmares about, me as a child, running through a huge building.  Not only was I frantically running away from “the enemy” chasing me, but also in a desperate effort to find and rescue “the mournfully wailing child”.
 
Everything in those nightmares was in black, greys and white.  Many long dark corridors all leading to a maze of more long dark corridors.  There were tall black doors with handles always too high for me to reach no matter how hard I tried. On one side of each corridor were high walls with a thin strip of small windows across the top allowing only dull rays of light to illuminate my way, and on the other side, the row of tall black doors reaching way up to the ceiling which seemed to be so high above.
 
Every now and then there would be a garbage or laundry chute in the walls between the doors which I would sometime have to dive into to hide and protect myself form whoever was chasing me. I’d always fall a long way down when I did this and land on mountains of dirty laundry or garbage. I’d never be hurt doing this.
 
There were always people chasing me.  I never saw them, I just knew that they were somewhere in the maize and the darkness and if I didn’t keep running, and taking new directions, they would soon find me and kill me.
 
All the time I was running, desperately trying to open doors along the way because I could hear that constant, muffled and mournful wailing of a child somewhere in the building... the sound mostly seemed to be coming from far away.  Sometimes I thought I’d found a door that would lead me to the wailing child, but once I reached the door, the wailing would suddenly seem to be coming from somewhere else down the corridors and my quest to save the suffering child and avoid being caught would have to continue. 
 
It was a never ending, desperate race against time... always in danger... always running... escaping the enemy in that horrible cold, hard and scary place, but I never gave up on trying to find and save that grief-stricken child.
 
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To this day, I can honestly not tell you if my dream was a night-time sleeping dream or a daydream that I dissociated into when I was feeling sad or for whatever reason I may have needed to find myself back in that place over and over again.
 
During therapy in my 50’s whilst working on this dream which still haunted me from some far distant place in the past where the abuse occurred, my therapist and I could not decide on exactly who the grief-stricken child was. 
 
Was she a haunting memory from that real-life nightmare time in my childhood? 
 
~ ~ ~ After having just been raped by my stepfather... flashbacks in therapy of him bathing me straight after the rape to make sure there was no evidence left when I woke in the morning.  While he is washing his evidence off, I am in a very dissociated state... falling-falling-falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderlands story... a nowhere place of protection created by my own mind to block out what had just happened to me... what was still happening to me and what might have been happening to my little sister ~ ~ ~
 
I have wondered if the mournful wailing of the child was my own crying voice which I could hear whilst in this dissociative state... or was that mournful wailing voice my inner child’s... as a part of me that became detached from another part of me... or other parts of me... (see my previous letter about this in a blog post I wrote on the 7th September, called, “Dissociation and Dissociative Identity Disorder”  Also known as DID.
 
And as mentioned briefly in that same post, could the wailing child have been my little sister’s crying voice which was all I might have still been able to desperately stay connected with as I drifted away to that awful place where I spent so much time running and searching to save her, while I was left lost and alone in the bath so that he could then have his pleasure with her.
 
My sister has no memory of having ever been raped by him... but she does remember vividly being raped by his younger brother, who was slightly older than us.  She remembers the horrors of a spidery, damp smelly drain pipe where he forced her into on more than one occasion, to have his pleasure and his way with her.
 
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Well... I do believe that it was because of this time in my life and the dreams I had of the long dark corridors and tall black doors, that I subconsciously became obsessed with collecting keys.  I think I may have been more aware of my key collecting habit when I was younger, but I was not consciously aware of the extent of it at all later on in life. 
 
In the last house I lived in for around 30 years, I had a load of hoarded “STUFF” suffocating us and cluttering up our entire house, but especially two rooms at the end of our house.  Dealing with “The Hoarding Monster” as I called it when we were moving in 2012, was the hardest thing ever for me.  I might talk more about it sometime or just leave it for my book which is now in the editing phases and still needs some work, but taking forever, because I am just too busy to get to it.  I ended up with quite a number of boxes filled with paper work, materials, and household items that I felt I needed to bring with us to our new home.  (When I speak about us, I refer to myself and my youngest son who struggles with “Asperger Syndrome”.) 
 
As we unpacked our boxes in our new home, I was astounded as hidden in among our all the contents, I kept finding keys.  I was not even aware that I had packed them at the time I was working on “The Hoarding Monster” and threw out so much “STUFF”.  It must have been done subconsciously. 
 
Once we had unpacked everything we decided to count the keys we had found... there were 266 of them! 
 
Don’t ask... I have no clue!  The mysteries of the mind are often something to be reckoned with.  Unbelievable!!!
 
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Today I feel I have come so far in my healing, that I would very much love for someone to weld all those keys together for me to make one large key to hang on a plaque on my wall, to represent my epiphany of my victory over suffering... That the one key made up of all those other keys, will represent the key to all those past doors and most importantly, the key to the door of my healing... my future... my coming to the true understanding and meaning of my life... the reason for my being... and a key I now hope to use to help unlock the many doors of suffering hearts out there to help others find their way to their freedom from suffering also. 
 
Gratefully I no longer have that awful nightmare of the past and I no longer hear the mournful crying of that lost child.
 
I believe now that my dream represented that every one of those doors that could not be opened before had a crying child behind it, and that maybe I can reach those children now if only they will give me a chance to in my own small way, be there for them.
 
Yes, I do still struggle each and every day as a result of my own past of abuses, but nothing like I used to.  Every day I grow stronger and closer to, and more into my own unique potential for greatness, and I now know it can be the same for other also.
 
You are not alone in this world.  If you too have tried many keys and they have not yet worked, then maybe, just maybe mine will work for you and that is why I would love to share my key made up of the many keys of my past with you...
 
Hence the name I chose for my blog... “Patty’s Keys”
 
~ Pana