A year and ten months ago I recovered memories of being sexually abused on multiple occasions and raped as a young child. I am forty now. I have spent the last almost two years of my life in active recovery, and I will be in recovery, in one way or another, for the rest of my life. Last night I said goodbye, for now, to the support group that has sustained me through the healing process, due to a schedule conflict with a class I am taking, one I would not miss for anything. The class is in the degree program I am taking, and it feels right to switch focus at this time, to focus all of my available energies on my studies. I do not, though, want to let recovery, or the memory of what happened to me, fade away unnoticed, unmarked. I do not want to deny the depth of my wounding, how much healing has already happened, and how much is yet to come. My studies now will be my healing path, but I will come back again to active recovery one day. Until then, I want to mark my progress, and celebrate my journey thus far, by telling the story of what happened to me. I've never written it all down and shared it openly, and I've always meant to. This telling feels like a necessary step in moving on. I feel a little sick to my stomach and my heart sticks in my throat at the prospect, so I'm probably on the right track. Here goes.
In the fall of 2013 I began a training, the Sacred Courtesan School, in which we spent one month learning, among other things, about each chakra and its attendant issues, both theoretically and personally. We were on the second month, in the emotional and sexual center, and I had been practicing a meditation daily that brought divine love, and personal acceptance, into my second chakra. I didn't know that much was happening yet, but I kept at it. One night, hot tubbing at a friend's house, I started to feel dizzy (and no it wasn't the tub). I said to my friend that I felt like something was bubbling up from deep inside of me, like through mud or quicksand, and the pressure of the mud boiling was making me dizzy. I had no idea what it was or what it meant, but remembered it.
Maybe a week or two later, after orgasm, I had a sudden vision of walking into the woods only to be stopped by an enormous white bear (more like a grizzly, not a polar bear) with brilliant, shining, ferocious crystal eyes. It stood and snarled and threatened to kill me if I kept walking, and I retreated. When I opened my eyes I realized that I had to find out what the bear was guarding, so I went back in and walked forward with an open heart, reassuring the bear that I meant no harm to him or what he was guarding. He relaxed and stepped aside and I walked forward. What I saw on the forest floor behind him was my little girl self, lying on the forest floor unconscious and bleeding. There the vision ended. I was shocked and upset by it, but even then didn't have any sense of what it meant. I did have knowledge of my grandfather sexually abusing others in our family, and even had heard a story suggesting reason to believe it had happened to me (to which I had a powerful somatic response), but I had had no memories, and never sought them as I didn't want to create something that wasn't there. When I saw this vision of myself the thought of sexual abuse did not occur to me.
Another week or two later, immediately after orgasm (in fact before disengaging with my partner), while still in the luxurious ripples of orgasmic energy, I was suddenly shocked out of them and my body went rigid. I saw the face of the main character in the movie Bliss, about tantric healing from sexual abuse. In my vision, she was a corpse floating in a canal in Milan, Italy (where I lived when the abuse ended), and then the corpse stood up out of the water. As I watched, horrified, her face morphed into the face of the woman who had been my grandfather's lover, leering over me, and the setting changed into a bedroom that I remember to be her house, and she was standing over me at the side of the bed, standing over me as her husband raped me. My grandfather stood at the back of the room at the foot of the bed, with detached, incredibly cold and predatory eyes, studying the scene. I saw no sign of the warm and charismatic grandfather I knew and loved. I was seven. The man inside me, I realized looking at his eyes, was unconscious. It was my impression from what I saw in the vision that he was hypnotized and not in control of himself (and I know my grandfather to have practiced hypnosis, apparently with a degree of success that became dangerous). He was in a rage, in a frenzied fury, and I fought back, kicking and punching and screaming. The woman put a pillow over my face and held it down, suffocating me, and though I tried to keep fighting, my seven year old body did not have enough strength to fight off multiple adults, and I faded in and out of consciousness while he drove into me until I was torn and bleeding. I was noticing, writing this, that I felt detached, had to be to be able to write it, still am detached, but still my throat is- well, I don't know what it is but I feel something there. Tears come and my belly is hot. When I stopped fighting they took the pillow off my face, and when he was done, when he pulled out of me I saw his face, I saw him, just for a moment, regain self-awareness. I saw his face when he saw the blood pooled between my legs (which I also saw from my perspective where part of me was, floating above it all by the ceiling) and the shock and horror hit him, and then he was gone again. He and my grandfather left the room, and the woman leaned over me with a cloth over my face (to clean or to drug me? I don't know.) saying, "There, there, you're alright, you had a bad dream, nothing happened," and I lost consciousness- whether I was drugged or just succumbed to the trauma I don't know. I do remember, before passing out, having this distinct knowing (from a very mammalian place it felt, it was not a thought construct but just an utter sureness) that I was ruined, ruined as a being, that I had no worth, no value left, I was destroyed. The next thing I knew I was sitting at her kitchen table eating Top Ramen, and she was telling me again I had a bad dream. I remembered nothing.
Over the next month I recovered two more memories. In the next one, I was two years old, and my grandparents came to visit my family in Houston, Texas. My parents were not around for some reason, and my grandmother left me alone in the room with my grandfather. I think I had been napping, I was lying down, and he put his penis in my mouth, choking me (I've had a horrible gag reflex my whole life). I couldn't breath, and I thought, "I don't know where my mother is, and my dad doesn't know, and my grandmother is letting him do this to me." In the third memory, I was ten, visiting alone at my grandparents' house, and was asleep in bed when I heard my grandfather open the door and walk in. I lay there, heart pounding in the dark, squeezing my eyes shut and pretending to sleep, feeling terrified and hoping that he would go away.
After recovering these memories, I began to feel some of what I had never felt for almost four decades, the hurt, the terror, the trauma. I was suicidal for the first two months, it was difficult to leave the house, and I had an exaggerated sense of the feeling I'd had my whole life, that I was being attacked all the time. I took everything personally, and nothing was safe, I was in fight or flight on the adrenaline my body was producing in the wake of the remembered trauma. I survived through good support. I had the course I was taking with positive focus and counseling and support there, a partner who was instrumental in my healing process and endlessly supportive of it, and a circle of good women friends, and when I was driving and had the urge to swerve my car off a mountain road into a canyon, I was able to pull over, stop, call someone, and have them talk me down and back to breathing. I immediately got The Courage to Heal which was a lifeline, and found a local therapist specializing in healing from abuse to thriving (Pat Grabianowski at Sequoia Counseling in Redwood City, if anyone needs someone) and joined her weekly support group. It has been an unimaginably tough road. And I want to speak here, as horrific as my experience was, to others who have had it as bad or worse. Over 50% of all women and a third or more of all men have been sexually abused or raped. I was torn and bleeding at seven and had, unbeknownst to me until I recovered full functioning along with my memories, limited sexual function, but I had no serious permanent scar tissue. I've borne two beautiful healthy babies. There are women, raped until their wombs are literally ruined, until there is nothing left in which to grow a baby. This has been done by our own military, in the name of progress and peace. There are women (and men, and transgendered women and men) raped and left for dead. There are humans who go through this unspeakable horror and don't have support, who receive no healing. This needs to change. Toward this end I tell my story, and add my voice to the tide of voices demanding change, because fuck shame. I am not ruined, I am not worthless, and neither is anyone else who has been sexually abused or raped. We will heal. The world will heal. Blessed be.
In the fall of 2013 I began a training, the Sacred Courtesan School, in which we spent one month learning, among other things, about each chakra and its attendant issues, both theoretically and personally. We were on the second month, in the emotional and sexual center, and I had been practicing a meditation daily that brought divine love, and personal acceptance, into my second chakra. I didn't know that much was happening yet, but I kept at it. One night, hot tubbing at a friend's house, I started to feel dizzy (and no it wasn't the tub). I said to my friend that I felt like something was bubbling up from deep inside of me, like through mud or quicksand, and the pressure of the mud boiling was making me dizzy. I had no idea what it was or what it meant, but remembered it.
Maybe a week or two later, after orgasm, I had a sudden vision of walking into the woods only to be stopped by an enormous white bear (more like a grizzly, not a polar bear) with brilliant, shining, ferocious crystal eyes. It stood and snarled and threatened to kill me if I kept walking, and I retreated. When I opened my eyes I realized that I had to find out what the bear was guarding, so I went back in and walked forward with an open heart, reassuring the bear that I meant no harm to him or what he was guarding. He relaxed and stepped aside and I walked forward. What I saw on the forest floor behind him was my little girl self, lying on the forest floor unconscious and bleeding. There the vision ended. I was shocked and upset by it, but even then didn't have any sense of what it meant. I did have knowledge of my grandfather sexually abusing others in our family, and even had heard a story suggesting reason to believe it had happened to me (to which I had a powerful somatic response), but I had had no memories, and never sought them as I didn't want to create something that wasn't there. When I saw this vision of myself the thought of sexual abuse did not occur to me.
Another week or two later, immediately after orgasm (in fact before disengaging with my partner), while still in the luxurious ripples of orgasmic energy, I was suddenly shocked out of them and my body went rigid. I saw the face of the main character in the movie Bliss, about tantric healing from sexual abuse. In my vision, she was a corpse floating in a canal in Milan, Italy (where I lived when the abuse ended), and then the corpse stood up out of the water. As I watched, horrified, her face morphed into the face of the woman who had been my grandfather's lover, leering over me, and the setting changed into a bedroom that I remember to be her house, and she was standing over me at the side of the bed, standing over me as her husband raped me. My grandfather stood at the back of the room at the foot of the bed, with detached, incredibly cold and predatory eyes, studying the scene. I saw no sign of the warm and charismatic grandfather I knew and loved. I was seven. The man inside me, I realized looking at his eyes, was unconscious. It was my impression from what I saw in the vision that he was hypnotized and not in control of himself (and I know my grandfather to have practiced hypnosis, apparently with a degree of success that became dangerous). He was in a rage, in a frenzied fury, and I fought back, kicking and punching and screaming. The woman put a pillow over my face and held it down, suffocating me, and though I tried to keep fighting, my seven year old body did not have enough strength to fight off multiple adults, and I faded in and out of consciousness while he drove into me until I was torn and bleeding. I was noticing, writing this, that I felt detached, had to be to be able to write it, still am detached, but still my throat is- well, I don't know what it is but I feel something there. Tears come and my belly is hot. When I stopped fighting they took the pillow off my face, and when he was done, when he pulled out of me I saw his face, I saw him, just for a moment, regain self-awareness. I saw his face when he saw the blood pooled between my legs (which I also saw from my perspective where part of me was, floating above it all by the ceiling) and the shock and horror hit him, and then he was gone again. He and my grandfather left the room, and the woman leaned over me with a cloth over my face (to clean or to drug me? I don't know.) saying, "There, there, you're alright, you had a bad dream, nothing happened," and I lost consciousness- whether I was drugged or just succumbed to the trauma I don't know. I do remember, before passing out, having this distinct knowing (from a very mammalian place it felt, it was not a thought construct but just an utter sureness) that I was ruined, ruined as a being, that I had no worth, no value left, I was destroyed. The next thing I knew I was sitting at her kitchen table eating Top Ramen, and she was telling me again I had a bad dream. I remembered nothing.
Over the next month I recovered two more memories. In the next one, I was two years old, and my grandparents came to visit my family in Houston, Texas. My parents were not around for some reason, and my grandmother left me alone in the room with my grandfather. I think I had been napping, I was lying down, and he put his penis in my mouth, choking me (I've had a horrible gag reflex my whole life). I couldn't breath, and I thought, "I don't know where my mother is, and my dad doesn't know, and my grandmother is letting him do this to me." In the third memory, I was ten, visiting alone at my grandparents' house, and was asleep in bed when I heard my grandfather open the door and walk in. I lay there, heart pounding in the dark, squeezing my eyes shut and pretending to sleep, feeling terrified and hoping that he would go away.
After recovering these memories, I began to feel some of what I had never felt for almost four decades, the hurt, the terror, the trauma. I was suicidal for the first two months, it was difficult to leave the house, and I had an exaggerated sense of the feeling I'd had my whole life, that I was being attacked all the time. I took everything personally, and nothing was safe, I was in fight or flight on the adrenaline my body was producing in the wake of the remembered trauma. I survived through good support. I had the course I was taking with positive focus and counseling and support there, a partner who was instrumental in my healing process and endlessly supportive of it, and a circle of good women friends, and when I was driving and had the urge to swerve my car off a mountain road into a canyon, I was able to pull over, stop, call someone, and have them talk me down and back to breathing. I immediately got The Courage to Heal which was a lifeline, and found a local therapist specializing in healing from abuse to thriving (Pat Grabianowski at Sequoia Counseling in Redwood City, if anyone needs someone) and joined her weekly support group. It has been an unimaginably tough road. And I want to speak here, as horrific as my experience was, to others who have had it as bad or worse. Over 50% of all women and a third or more of all men have been sexually abused or raped. I was torn and bleeding at seven and had, unbeknownst to me until I recovered full functioning along with my memories, limited sexual function, but I had no serious permanent scar tissue. I've borne two beautiful healthy babies. There are women, raped until their wombs are literally ruined, until there is nothing left in which to grow a baby. This has been done by our own military, in the name of progress and peace. There are women (and men, and transgendered women and men) raped and left for dead. There are humans who go through this unspeakable horror and don't have support, who receive no healing. This needs to change. Toward this end I tell my story, and add my voice to the tide of voices demanding change, because fuck shame. I am not ruined, I am not worthless, and neither is anyone else who has been sexually abused or raped. We will heal. The world will heal. Blessed be.