When the psyche walls off experiences that are too big for us to heal at the time of their occurrence, it is so we can move on with our lives. When left unresolved, those old experiences call out to us like long lost ghosts yearning to be resettled to a peaceful place.
During a shamanic journey with my healer Chris Faulconer in 1989. I was taken by my interior guides to a crystal cave. There were many framed portraits on the walls and several doors leading to different rooms filled with experiences that had been encapsulated and labeled for later learning, sifting and sorting and eventual healing.
One of the doors dropped me down a long vertical tunnel. Howling voices surrounded me. I was in free-fall and panicked until I began to recognize the faces of the screaming women whose portraits lined this tube. They were my ancestors - all of whom had suffered a similar fate as I had. Each had been sexually abused, brutalized, molested, violated, or discounted. The aha moment came. I was not suffering from terminal uniqueness on top of it all. I was one (with millions) of women whose early lives were marked by horrors too big to make sense of at the time.
My take-away from that crystal cave was that the human condition is to be conditioned by our experiences. What messages we choose to take away from what we're dealt determine our future actions. I was dead set not to hand down to my two daughters the imprint of my ancestors. With what was at risk, it was essential that I continue my own healing in order to support them to meet whatever lay ahead with their boundaries intact and a whole host of healed "folks in the balcony." I do believe that when we heal ourselves, the waves of healing extend both forward and backward. To heal ourselves means that our efforts benefit those who came before us, healing retroactively those dear ones who did not have the resource or the privilege or luxury to use tools to heal themselves when they were alive. So many women have gone to their graves (men too) with unspeakable horrors living in their cells.
Healing ourselves also frees future generations from growing up in the shadow of unresolved issues of their elders.
Composting those earliest events is an active process. Just as the detritus of making a meal - eggshells, onion skins, garlic husks - don't go to waste, but break down in the soil and make it richer, so, too, the terrible horrible no-good very bad stuff that happens to each of us along the path of life can be composted and used to make our lives richer. It's not that we discount or look away or pretend that the status quo is OK, (ie: churches condoning and hiding what clergy has done to children) but rather we can look at what befell us as an opportunity to both heal ourselves and to stand up and help heal our community and society as a whole.
Sexual violence perpetrated against children is abhorrent when we think about it, but we rarely do. We think it happens over there - to kids far away from our clean and tidy existence. In fact, one in four boys is likely to experience molest in his lifetime; one in three girls is. If you count male and female circumcision - at birth or at a later age, around the globe, the numbers go much higher. What is the unhealed trauma that is at the root of acting out against children? Probably exactly what the perpetrator experienced as a child, leaving him/her compelled to repeat the cycle... trying to make sense of the non-sensical. What happens to us that does not get resolved and made sense of in some useful way calls to us from that haunted cave of walled off experiences.
The usefulness of forgetting what happened is that we can move forward - crippled, but moving. The usefulness of heeding the call to come back to those walled off places within us is to make sense of the senseless, heal it within ourselves so we do NOT act out on others in our tribe of humans.
"Shift Happens," reads the bumper sticker.
I'm grateful for shift and for my compost bin!
CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates)
has some useful statistics and ideas for supporting survivors of sexual abuse. Here is their website:
http://www.cacgrd.org/facts-about-sexual-abuse/
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