Tonight we met Luke. We've had a nauseous feeling a few times this week, which felt like a signal of something to come. Not true nausea, a queasiness with a wanting to be able to vomit to get rid of something. Tonight IMing with a friend, it came up further. We wondered before about one of our uncles, whom we knew was bad. The friend used the word uncle in the IM and it felt uncomfortable. I avoided this uncle starting after the father's death when we were 12. The feeling was dislike, mistrust and an unidentifiable antipathy toward him. It may have been based in part on my parents' comments about him being self-centered, stingy, immature. But now we know something else about him. He did something to us. I'm not entirely sure what it was. It doesn't seem quite as bad as some of the other abuse and Sphinx confirms this, if I can trust him. But it was enough to create Luke.
The intense rising and then surfacing of negative emotions which have no identifiable source tips me off that there's someone new, a new alter. I know I need to stay open and pay attention, lest I hurt them or not meet them. I spent too many years ignoring what I sensed and squashing all otherness that scared me and made me fear I was crazy. I'm not falling into that senseless pit anymore. It cost me too many years of my life.
Tonight Dan took over walking home and was doing a good job of it. At some point though, the feelings started coming and we chose to let them. They were real and raw. The body froze at some point and became flooded with fearful, hurt emotions in a public location close to work. This never happens because our system is careful about the job so we knew something was really off. A bit further, someone else was clearly in control of the body, a younger guy but not extremely young like so many others here. I had already had the name Luke float up into consciousness earlier but it seemed to be 'selected' somehow, as if other names were around. But once a name like this floats up, we can almost count on there being someone new. And I had a sense of farm-ness, an affinity for farms, images of specific farms we used to visit.
Before I left work, when I felt something coming and it felt associated to the uncle, I asked Sphinx if the uncle had done anything to us. I got conflicting stuff, as if telephone signals were crossed and I was getting interference that garbled the words. It was hard to stay focused and I nearly blanked out.
Once Luke was in the body, he began hyperventilating from fear. He looked around, had no idea where he was, he was very upset, scared. He took the body off the main sidewalk into a fairly dark area and stood there crying, wimpering and holding on to a tree for quite a while. The tree he understood but I could feel his unfamiliarity with tall buildings that I have seen and walked by a thousand times. We tried talking to him but he just got scared and confused. After a while, he addressed us as the voice. He had heard one before obviously, that of Sphinx. So we stopped trying to explain what was happening, it was too much for him. We kept the comments very simple the way Sphinx did in childhood. "You're safe, it's okay." "We can lead you home." And other reassuring things.
He carries the body differently from everyone else, kind of loping, lanky and off kilter. We asked his age and he said eight. When he arrived home, he wouldn't go up on the porch. He didn't believe he lived in this strange building he'd never seen before. I could feel the foreignness of our familiar house. We told him he had keys in his pocket. If they worked, it was proof he lived here. He did all this very slowly but of course the keys worked. We had to keep coaxing him to enter, "it's your home, it's okay." "You grew up and you live here." I think he started feeling something was familiar but he kept worrying that whoever lived here would find him in their house. "Somebody lives here," he said. He insisted on calling out "hello?" many times as he moved down the hall. He noticed his voice was wrong and spoke more lightly, higher. We wanted him to stick around tonight a while so we could get a good feel for him and so he could calm down. We told him to eat a salad even though he kept saying he wasn't hungry. He left us just before I began writing this and he doesn't feel far away. I'll invite him back in so he can climb in bed and drop off to sleep. We're very glad he's here with us. He seems like a sweet kid and he's truly safe now. We're tearing up as we write this.