Break on through to the other side!!!

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Since some of you have been reading my discussions about my post-traumatic stress disorder and other issues in my life for months now, I thought I'd post about a breakthrough I had recently. Part of this relates to my other discussion about not worrying about changing the past, in case some of you are wondering. I've learned how to deal with nightmares over the years, and my favorite way to do so is through use of a lucid dreaming technique where I insert a "warrior-self" into my dream to defeat either whomever or whatever is harming me, or the dream itself. This warrior-self started with an idea given to me by a doctor for an approach to my physical health, but was expanded upon by my meditative techniques and spiritual practice. Until recently, there was one specific point in my worst nightmare/memory beyond which I would completely lose control: that moment where I took the throwing knives I always wore up my sleeve out and set them on the table before going out to walk. What happened after that, in real life as well as in the nightmare, is that the person I was walking with brutally raped me and left me for dead, bleeding from a knife wound. I was 11 years old when this happened, and the nightmares had thus been plaguing me for about 16 years. Of course in my thought process (as the strong person I am), I always get tripped up over the fact that I left my knives, trusting someone else to protect me, when that person wound up being the one I needed to be protected from. So I would never be able to change anything past that point, because that laying aside of the knives would be where I lost my control. The two popular ways of looking at this were: 1) You couldn't have done anything with those knives anyway, and it wouldn't have made a difference, so nothing is your fault. 2) You COULD have stopped him with the knives, which is why you torment yourself, and you HAVE to take part of the blame for what happened to move past it because of your nature as a strong person. Neither of these ideas really worked for me, because I had used the knives very well to defend myself before that point, BUT I couldn't accept part of the blame because that would in my mind mean other people who had been raped were partially to blame. I couldn't get past that. My breakthrough was this: I might have been able to change that incident, and I might not have, but in the end, what does it matter? If that incident had changed, everything in my life after it would have changed. Do I want an entire different life than the one I have now? I like the person I am now, so why would I want to change that? (See now how this ties into my other discussion.) This thought came up in therapy first, and then continued to form over the next few days. So last night, I had that same dream, I laid the knives on the table, we walked out the door... and my warrior self (who is of course my current age), tore the fabric of the dream to ribbons with a spear. Ahhh. I hope someone actually reads my dismally long discussion starter here, but I figured since some of my friends had been following my issues for a while now, someone would. :P