Toxic Ties Feed the Horror
As a psychotherapist and writer, I treat and write about unhealthy emotional ties as horror-making. Sick ties exert toxic effects that can be felt as anxiety and depression. They can eventually make their way into the body. The body cries out when the mind is in pain, writes one psychologist. And it’s true. In Goddess of Everything, Consuela, Gabriél’s wife, tries to help him see the source of his suffering. But getting through to one enmeshed in a toxic relationship is challenging, to say the least.
The good thing for Gabriél is that he has a wife who loves him. She’s willing to give him time and space to figure things out. The bottom line for him is that he has to see what he needs to see, or the horror will continue to be fed. He keeps it alive by keeping the tie alive and feeding it—literally, as you’ll see in the story.
Writing horror for me as a trauma specialist is natural since trauma is horror, and horror always springs from trauma. It’s a Jack-In-Box that pops up in your life and can be terrifying and terrorizing. Horror is the dark gift that keeps on terrorizing us unless we see what we need to see. And reading horror allows us the chance to hone our horror-spotting skills. It helps us to read on and spot the horror at work behind the scenes of the story. Then, we may be able to hone our horror-spotting skills in daily life.
Spotting horror is vital for us to be healthy psychically, denying horror, keeping it alive, and making our mind uneasy and even ill. This passage in Goddess of Everything speaks to this dynamic: “Uneasiness stole over Consuela. It was in the way she shifted in the green webbed lawn chair, got a faraway look, grit her teeth, jaw muscles taut. Then she turned to him, brow furrowed. ‘Things go from top down, Gabriél. . .. Maybe you’re too close. Facts get blurry when you’re emotionally tied’ “(p.169).
Gabriél denied what stared him in the face and so kept the horror alive. Blurred then denied emotional reality leads to emotional and physical suffering and trauma. Only moving from emotional doubting and denial offers hope from the affliction of horror in Goddess of Everything and in the realm of everyday life.
As you’ll see as you read Goddess of Everything, toxic ties are real, and so is the horror that comes with them. So, it comes down to a decision to keep the denial going and, therefore, to keep the horror alive, or risk what needs to be risked and see what happens!
Live Deeply . . . Read Daily!
