Psychopathic Father
Forcing the Hand
08/11/17 16:57
Before I learned the full extent of what happened to me with my father I drew this. While looking at myself in a reflective surface which distorted my image, I drew and painted Forcing The Hand. I used both hands at the same time.
Forcing The Hand showed many of the emotions my father and I experienced including rage and terror respectively. The amber and blue eyes depicted a wolf’s eyes. My father called himself a wolf. He hunted often and preyed on innocent children.
There's more to this than I wrote last. This work also represents the first time my father used physical abuse to keep me silent about his identity. Forcing The Hand is about my father breaking my forearm. And then he refused to get my arm casted as a punishment and also for me to remember what happened when I disclosed his name to other people. He was super secretive about his identity. I didn't understand why until this year, 2017, when I remembered that he had two professions: he was a serial killer and worked for the law enforcement in the US government.
Comments
Forced to Participate
12/02/13 09:41
I did not get a choice. I could not refuse my father’s desires. I was forced to participate against my will. The last thing I wanted to do at three or five or ten was to hold a knife in my tiny hand. My father wrapped his huge hand around mine and plunged the knife into the victim’s heart. I remembered the sound of crushing cartilage, the blood spurting outward and coating the knife and my hand and his, and the coppery odor filling the air around me.
There is a show on television, a new one, and I find it so triggering. It is called The Following. The show is about teaching others to become serial killers. Something is warped and wrong about that show. I have not been able to watch it all the way through. I literally zone out and go to sleep. The truth smacks me on the face. It is not easy to live with it.
I did not want to be involved with my father’s criminal acts. Yet at age three or five or ten I knew I could not refuse or be the victim of his violence.
My Dog's Illness Triggers Feelings From My Childhood
23/12/12 07:14
I wrote this two days before my dog's death.
Back in September 2012, one of our dogs fell ill after receiving of his vaccines. His first symptom was a high fever. More symptoms gradually emerged including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, poly-arthritis, neurological symptoms, lameness, and high fever. We received numerous diagnoses which were all incorrect and at the same time our dog was prescribed medication after medication without lasting improvement. At the same time, we watched our beloved family member waste away from the horrible disease riddling his whole body.
I decided to take matters into my own hands and researched online for a vet close to us yet in another city. A specialist was recommended and their business was over an hour one way from our home. I found a vet with a specialty in internal medicine and brought our sick dog to him that day. The vet took one look at our dog and thought of only two diseases which could cause his symptoms: Addison’s Disease and Ehrlichiosis. He tested for both diseases. After spending almost $2000 we had a diagnosis: Anaplasmosis Phagocytophilum, another tick borne disease or TBD with a much deadlier potential.
We left the vet’s office with a very sick dog who had lost over 30 pounds. Two days later we brought him back again, believing he was about to die. His gums, tongue, and ears were gray. The vet told us he thought our dog would possibly die before morning. He survived the night and limped forward for almost two more weeks.
Our dog’s condition worsened again and we decided to euthanize him. I could no longer watch our once beautiful, lively, and funny dog dwindle away. By this time, he had lost almost 40 pounds. I called the mobile vet in our town and told him about our dog. He asked several questions about the medicine our dog had been prescribed and told me he would get back to me later on that day. When he called back the first thing he said was the antibiotic dose was incorrect. Instead of 600 mg/day it should be 1000/mg a day. After our dog died, I learned the correct dose should have been 600 mg twice daily. A lot more could have been done had we known how TBDs are treated. I told him we needed more antibiotic and he agreed to take our dog on as a patient. The vet visited later on that day and told us unless our dog was comatose he would not euthanize him. That was both a relief and scary to hear. By the time he came over to see our dog we had given our dog the increased dose.
After a day on the new dose of antibiotic and some medicine to help coat his stomach, our dog had improved in some ways and weakened in other as the disease took over more of his body and mind. Our has experienced bouts of confusion, not knowing where he is in the house; running into walls at times; his hind legs lacking function and he has collapsed to the floor before he can get out the door to go to the bathroom and numerous other problems.
Now after almost four days on the new dose, our dog’s pale gums, tongue, and ears are starting to look pink again. His diarrhea has started to change over to brown from blood streaked.
Sadly on Christmas Day 2012 our dog succumbed to this horrible disease. He fought hard and we fought right along side him. His life dwindled before us and we decided to euthanize him. I miss him so much. It was the worst disease to see a dog go through. No wonder it is called “doggy AIDS.”
On top of all this, the whole disease process and watching my dog dying triggered me. Throughout my dog’s illness I suffered with my own illness, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. I felt hopelessness. It was the same feeling I felt during my father’s rampages. There was nothing I could do to help those children he kidnapped and nothing I could do to stop my beloved family member from dying.
The first times I suffered from PTSD was during the time I attended nursing school in 1977. Along with my best friend we visited the East Coast and her relatives. From the moment I stepped off the plane I was triggered. I was 25 years old. After returning to nursing school in the Fall of 1977, a teacher suggested I see a counselor.
I witnessed in nursing school what I had witnessed with my father, hurting and/or dying people. I became unable to function around those sickly patients and suffered from the same hopelessness as I experienced with my dog.
The disturbing images and intrusive thoughts which arose in 1977 and when my beloved dog was ill continue to haunt me months later. Over three months have passed since my dog died. The images come from the abuse I suffered and watched as others succumbed by the hands of my father.
Anxiety fueled the feelings years ago just as it does now. And below that feeling is terror. The same terror I felt while hiding under the basement stairs after my father killed a boy. I felt a complete hopelessness. I could not stop what my father had done. I would crawl into that space behind the stairs, trembling and hyperventilating. I curled into the tightest fetal position I could manage, trying to keep present and sane and pushing away the horrible images which were still there before my eyes.
When I have playacted I purposely hyperventilated to both relive and relieve myself of the horrors I saw when I was with my father. Hyperventilation caused anxiety and then I relieved my anxiety.
Forcing the Hand, Revisited
25/06/12 04:28
While reading a book, Eyes of A Pedophile: Detecting Child Predators, by Betty J Kuffel MD, I got triggered by the description of the pedophile’s eyes. The man had a condition called Heterchromia Iridum where the irises of the eye can be two different colors. I drew the one picture, Forcing the Hand, which depicted my father with two different colored irises. In addition my father made me call him a wolf. Most wolves have a blue eye and an amber eye. I remember my father’s eyes were creepy and spooky. One was a deep blue, and the other was an amber brown.
At 10 years old, I noticed my father’s eyes had changed color to both amber, the color of a tiger’s eye.
I researched the condition and discovered there are several different types of Heterchromia Iridum and it is hereditary. I remembered for years my mother told me I had hazel eyes. However, she suddenly changed her viewpoint when I got to be an adult. She told me, “Your eyes are definitely a deep blue with colors around the pupil.”
Heterchromia Iridum encompasses several types. Mine is termed central where the eyes are blue and there is coloration around the pupil. When I studied pictures of this type I easily found my eye color.
My eye doctor told me my eyes are blue as well not hazel.
Another mystery….
Mind Altering Experience
22/04/12 05:26
While viewing myself in a distorted reflective surface, I rendered this drawing in watercolor pencils using both hands at the same time. I drew and painted this before I knew I had a different father than my stepdad, and before I knew what happened to me at age ten. Nine years later in 2010, I started to remember what my father did. The first memory of his crimes surfaced in 1989. However due to a horrible therapist those memories were buried again.
A close study of this drawing/painting revealed pencil lines above the eyes where the forehead and top of the head would be. I remembered when I decided to leave the forehead and top of the head blank. Thus I named this artwork, Mind Altering Experience.
Four and half months after I first wrote this, I figured out what I drew back in 2001. I looked into a mirror and drew my father’s face. His eyes had turned amber around the time I visited him in 1963.