Jung's Syncronicity

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a supposedly meaningful manner which are unlikely to occur together by chance.

I had a dream. In my dream, there were two girls. I was one of them. We were in a small room, more like a closet, sitting on the floor, scared. In the distance, I could hear a little girl singing in a disturbing hollow voice while skipping her way towards us: “I know about food… I know about fear… I know about twins…” and as if in a horror movie, she grabbed the other girl with a swift hand and they both disappeared. I woke up screaming. I was confused and shaken. Was it my subconscious trying to tell me something? Or was it testing the ground, trying to find out if I was ready to know more about my past? Because the answer is no, I’m not. I am perfectly fine with oblivion now that I know the substance of it. But the dream really shook me up. Ready or not, I could feel that forces stronger than me were at work. Something was shifting.

A week earlier, the office had organized a fundraising event where used books were sold. Whatever was left at the end of the day was given to a charity. The day after I had the nightmare, my Superior and I were checking some inventories in a room where only the two of us had access. As we talked, I noticed a book which had been left on a table. I picked it up. It was an odd place for anyone to leave a book. I glanced at the title “My father’s house - a memoire of incest and healing”. How odd! All along my therapy, I referred to “My mother’s house” as the place where all hell broke loose, the similitude struck me. I took the book with me to my desk and then brought it home that night without further thinking about it. I threw it on a pile of books “to read”. In the evening, I kept glancing at it. Finally I picked it up and read the back cover: “Somewhere around the age of seven, Sylvia created a “twin” who shared her body while living a life apart from hers, with separate memories and experiences. For forty years, the existence of that twin and of the secret life she led while growing in her father’s house was unknown to the author.” Someone had circled the word “twin” with a dark pen, making it visible only at a certain angle. This really caught by surprise. I could feel the hair stand up on the back of my neck. This was definitely a sign, too many coincidences to be random. That’s when I knew I was on the right track about the twins, about the dissociation, about healing.

I read the book diligently. The author was a Canadian woman. Her story was very similar to mine, so was her background. Her reactions were identical, and also her conclusions. I felt validated. I was not so different after all from all the people I had met in my life; only, I had just not met those who had suffered similar life experiences. My reactions had been normal, so was my self-ostracizing from the world. Now, all that was left for me to do was to learn how to interact on the same level as the others, those who apparently never suffered traumas.

Mine is a story of early loss – of innocence, of childhood, of love, of magic, of illusion. It was a hazardous life which began in guilt and self-hate, requiring me to learn self-forgiveness. My life was structured on the uncovering of a mystery. As a child I survived by forgetting. Later, the amnesia became a problem as large as the one it was meant to conceal.

Children who were in some ways abused, abuse others; victims become villains. Like Sleeping Beauty I was both cursed and bless at birth. I was given the poison and the antidote at the same time and by the same people. The well that poisoned me also provided me with the ability to resist that poison. I believe that it is not so much the calamity that we are subjected to which destroys the soul more, but the one we inflict upon others.

In early retrospect - early – since the healing process started only recently, I feel about my life the way some people feel about war. If you survive, then it becomes a good war. Danger makes you active, it makes you alert, it forces you to experience and thus to learn.

As Katherine Anne Porter once said during an interview, we spend all our lives preparing to be somebody and one day we find we have irrevocably become that person.