Sexual perpetrators returning as animals and the Devil in reminesnces

A 48 year old woman who suffers from severe fibromyalgia symptoms, along with a number of painful physical illnesses, that arose in her primarily as a response to sexual abuse from age of 9 onwards and which had lasted well in to her late twenties, reported some bizarre psychotic symptoms.

She reported seeing animals, half-man half-animal figures, and the devil himself. They would also mock and scare her.It is interesting that she kept the experience of these hallucinations well hidden from the world and did not allow them to affect her daily conduct.

Besides her stepfather, with whom she had relationship till in her twenties, she had been abused by other men in her prepubertal period. However, these abuses were limited to just inappropriate touching. At the age of 16 she was raped on a blind date. She claimed these animals were the men who had abused her and the Devil was the step-father himself.

Now the consequences of these abuses, and premature sexual arousal, was a life long pattern of victimization. Not only she placed herself in social situations that led to her being humiliated, exploited or taken advantage of, but her self abuse extended into the physical sphere as well. She tended to fall and hurt herself, that had for example destroyed her knee joints. She also had developed many self-destructive psychosomatic illnesses as hypertension, chronic back pain and asthma.

She suffered from physical pain all the time and felt her muscles throb all night long.

In contrast to hallucinations in dreams, her molesters returned, but interestingly not as animals or the devil, but as themselves. This is the opposite of what usually dreamwork does. Generally people return in disguise, not as themselves.

In dreams she would threaten these men with telling on them to her mother. Which she never did during childhood, because she was afraid the blame will fall on her and not on the perpetrators. She was trying to do now what she should have done then, with the advantage of having the experience of 40 years. She was now rectifying the errors of omission. She would also tell the evil men in her dreams to leave her alone, not to touch her, and preach to them as to why they should not have sex.

She also reported that while watching TV, she would suddenly see a black pastor in one corner of the screen preaching verses from Bible. This icon like little black minister would also pop up in movie theaters.

Now what was the purpose of these hallucinations and the relentless pain and suffering?

They were the repetitions of her unwanted sexual stimulation. She had been sexually stimulated when her body was not mature enough to discharge out the physical pain and sexual arousal that was thrust upon her by her stepfather and other men.

Her whole life had become an exercise in getting out of her system the trauma of that premature stimulation. It was undoing of the traumas.

Conversion of those men into animals was lessening of their significance as human beings. Turning stepfather into devil, was to make him the bad guy, whose destruction she could now hope to achieve by the forces of good. The preacher at the corner of the TV and movie screen quoting Bible versus were intended as a counter-weapon to the evil powers of her stepfather. In the dreams she was taking the role of the preacher herself, admonishing those molesters.

One should notice that the desire was not just for undoing the whole thing and getting rid of the molesters. The molestation had left such a strong impression that it had become the core of her being. Her whole life, day as well as night, was about nothing but reliving the sexual abuse. Without such a hypothesis it is impossible to explain as to why the molesters in form of animals, ghosts and other stalkers followed her all the time