The Unhappy childhood

When Tom was alive, I’d asked him about his childhood, he’d reluctantly confessed that, even as a very young child, he’d often tried to protect his mother from his violently abusive father. That has to be another reason why love is so terrifying to him. Violence, physical pain, injustice, and chaos are the feelings he associated with love. 

Another dream revealed more of Tom’s subconscious world to me. All three of us, including our son, are in Cuba, living under a communist tyranny. The Cuban police have taken some prisoners to a beach for an outing, but no one is allowed to swim for fear they might try to escape. In other words, the pleasure and release of being in the water is forbidden. This is interesting because Tom had an actual phobia of large bodies of water. Once, when we canoed down the Delaware, whose depth was about four feet, he nevertheless was visibly terrified to be in the middle of the river many feet from shore, even though at six feet five inches tall he could easily have walked to dry land.

Water often is symbolic of emotions. Due to his childhood physical abuse, Tom learned that survival meant keeping a firm grip on showing his emotions, repressing and locking them up so tightly that any sensation that threatened to release them was frightened him. As a child, if he’d responded emotionally to his father’s violence, he was sure to get smacked around even more.

As I have previously said, he showed almost no emotion at all for the whole year when he was suffering so horribly and dying of esophageal cancer. Nothing. No fear, he let not even one tear fall. Yes, he’d learned very early never to let go of his feelings and ride the waves of emotion. This accounts for his strange difficulty in orgasming the first night we were together. It was practically impossible for Tom to let go and experience any feeling, good or bad.

To continue with the Cuban dream, Tom puts on blackened glasses that actually obscure his vision as well as make him appear to be a helpless blind man to the guards. They relax their vigilance, believing that my son and I cannot escape without Tom’s help. When their backs are turned, with Tom running interference, my son and I sneak into the water and swim to freedom. Tom’s ruse has allowed our escape.

Tom is showing me that he experienced his mental problems as a powerful and blinding tyranny, which Tom, the good father and husband, could only deceive, not vanquish. His deception allowed him a brief beach holiday, but he couldn’t indulge in any swimming, (emotion) or escape the oppression of his guards. He sacrificed himself so we could be free.

During our marriage, I learned a great deal about who Tom’s father was, so the parallels to life in a tyrannical state are very revealing. His father was a brutal, bullying, joyless, and jealous narcissist, who was unable to experience any pleasure but anger.

Tom had once told me that a psychiatrist had diagnosed him as suffering from a fear of annihilation. I think that fear was deeply embedded in Tom’s character and so internalized that it was beyond the reach of his rational mind.

The emotional overload of Tom’s early sexual violation added to the terror of his father’s violence must have been unbearably intense. The experience of helplessness, terror, and sex on an unformed child’s mind appears to have literally shattered his soul into two identities.

Tragically, this brutal father and his reign of terror became part of Tom’s unconscious. Some part of his mind was possessed by a constant fear of the jealous, violent father. I believe this internal mental fear is why Tom was afraid to hang on to his success, his possessions, and even to his wife. Any good feelings made him a target for the ruthless overlord who ruled his subconscious. He was convinced that success would always be followed by something awful. Those brutal beatings by his father scarred his mind for life.

The guards in the dream represent his childhood terrors, his father’s secret police, who never allowed him to feel safe or to relax and enjoy his life. Tom never allowed himself to experience any joy, except at Christmas. Somehow, Christmas was the only event which entitled him to safely risk a brief period of emotional release. It was only by divine dispensation that he was allowed a taste of earthly happiness. His childhood fears turned everything he enjoyed into dangerous contraband.