I’ve spent nearly a lifetime separated from my body. It isn’t something I was really aware of and I didn’t realize how much I was missing until last year. That magnificient year when my body and I reunited and I was finally able to feel the fullness of life.
I haven’t shared this story publicly before. I feel nervous and, at the same time, ready. I am on the other side of the pain, finally. I am sharing now because I know there are so many men and women out there suffering in silence - maybe not even realizing they are suffering - and I want all of them to know, there is a way through and they are not alone. Below you’ll find an updated version of a personal essay I wrote titled, Rising. In this version, I share how the work that Mina Samuels and I created unwittingly became the key to unlock my whole self.
Rising
When will you get it over it? It’s a question I get asked, often, after I share the story of a personal trauma that happened when I was a teenager. It is an odd question and it has taken me a long time to realize that it likely has more to do with the person asking than with me. But, that’s how it works. The lesson is the lesson is the lesson until you embrace the lesson.
Pennsylvania. March 1985. I am 15 years old. I remember. Peace Valley. The smell of a burgeoning Spring. The brittle grasses spirited with small green life pushing through. Skip Day with friends. Jack Daniels. Closing of the day sunshine. Drunkenness. Friendship. Trust. Revelry. Time to go. Laughing and stumbling against him, helping me. Off the trail. Unsure and leaning against a big tree. Where are we going? Where are the others? Darkness. Awake from a dream? No. Still in the woods. In the leaves. On the ground. Fear. Panic. What happened? What did I do? What is all of this blood from? Did I fall? He is on top of me. Helping me? What happened? Why is he apologizing? Blood everywhere. Leaves in my hair. Wait, what happened? I see my pants are down. Blood on my pink shoes. He is panicked. He is apologizing. The words, I didn’t know you were a virgin float and catch. The word virgin floats by and I catch it. Virgin = never had sex. Waiting. Waiting for the right time. The right boy. Waiting for not this. Is this sex? Is that what happened?
Six years go by before I get the answer to that question. Six years of reaction that never came in the woods playing out everywhere in my life. Two of those years didn’t feel quiet to anyone but me. Those were the years when I had to go back to a school where he was or hang out in groups that he was in and not know the answer. And pretend like everything was ok. Or pretend like I was a train wreck with intention. Not be the victim. Be in charge. Be on purpose. Be the one to blame and the one who could fix it. Or, please deep down somewhere where I want to ask but feel like I should know, does sex just happen to you? His answer was yes, it was sex. But. Was it?
I didn’t have more to add to that for a long time. It has been a life-long unfolding. That was a lifetime ago and I still see parts of myself rising up out of the grass and asking for healing. All the parts of me that were assaulted that day and in the days that followed were not just fractured but pulverized. Shattered and scattered within.
Four years after being raped. That’s what it was, by the way. Raped. Not sex. Sex requires consent. At a minimum, it requires consciousness. Someone taught me that. Later. I learned that if someone has intercourse with you while you are unconscious it is rape. And, just in case you want to blame the 15-year-old for being drunk, knock it off. She’s done plenty of that. She was 15 and he was 18. She was a Sophomore and he a Senior. She thought it would be a fun day with older friends. She was naïve but she wasn’t asking for it. To be fair, she didn’t even know it was possible. She didn’t know it could be taken from you. Your autonomy. Your trust in the world. Your innocence. She. I. I didn’t know. And in not knowing I made myself the responsible fool. Instead, #metoo, I was a victim. With innocence lost, I couldn’t bear that word. Victim = weak. Not me.
Four years after being the victim of rape, I was in a car accident. Just before the car barreling toward us made impact, I passed out. I woke up hearing myself hyperventilating and didn’t know where all that loud breathing was coming from. There was a moment where I heard it so loud outside of me and then something shifted and I realized it was me. Like that. Six years of like that. In the accident, my spine fractured in two places. I broke four ribs. One punctured my left kidney twice. Two of those ribs, fractured and shattered, blew apart internally. More than six months later, I would visit a different hospital with pain that wouldn’t go away and the doctor rushed in and asked, “Did you forget to tell me about an accident?” I told him I was in one more than six months ago. He put my X-ray on the light screen and showed me my broken rib particles. He said my ribs hadn’t just broken but they had pulverized. The pain was the bone fragments pulling through my body to reunite. That. That is what I have spent my whole life doing. Working through the pain to reunite. Reuniting with innocence instead of blame. That’s where it starts. I don’t know where it ends.
On the sixth year of my silence, a new friend told me, completely out of the blue, about date rape. She was teaching at fraternities and was telling me how stunned she was at what the boys didn’t seem to know. She marveled at her experience on this day where the boys had asked “If she passes out drunk while having sex is it rape?” My friend was indignant, “How could they not know that?” She answered them to me loudly, “If she can’t say yes then it is a no. If she says no, it is a no; it doesn’t matter when she says it.” Now, her voice got louder as she went to crescendo, “AND IF SHE IS UNCONSCIOUS WHAT ARE YOU DOING? IT IS NO!”
And just like that the breathing wasn’t outside me. I felt the parts of myself that had been outside crash into my body. I sat very still for a while. Then, quietly said, “I think that happened to me.” Date Rape. Something else. It was not sex. I had not said yes. Said yes to what? I would have said no. I had not wanted that. At all. And not with him. Date Rape. It was rape not sex. Step one in my reunification.
In the life coaching sector there is a lot of time spent on the power of words; on the power of naming your experience. In the legal, political world where women are a minority, the words are evolving. Currently, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network(RAINN) is the largest organization in the United States devoted to fighting sexual violence. It defines sexual assault as "sexual contact or behavior that occurs without explicit consent of the victim." RAINN quotes the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s definition of rape: "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim." *
There is power in reading these words. This is what happened. It would be years before it would be more than re-wording the experience. Years before it wouldn’t be my fault. Years before I would stop calling it my rape – owning it. And still years after that, when I would stop saying a friend raped me. Friend? And years before time would correct itself, restart, and the larger truth would be revealed.
I languished because I could not remove myself from responsibility. Of course, there were things I would do differently. This in some ways is the challenge. Innocence got in the way of these things. Innocence and blind trust in the goodness of the world. And so stolen, it feels stupid. I have words for that. It is my fault for being so stupid. Enter rage. At everyone. At everything that makes me feel stupid. Mostly, at me.
After decades of trying to reunite as a whole person, I landed on the Grandmother of all experiences, a ceremony borne by our Native People usually for boys to go call for a vision. It is a Vision Quest. In my experience, it is fourteen days away from my family. It is fourteen days on the land. It is four days on the land with no tent, no contact with others and no food. It is ceremonial time across the threshold into the spirit realm. It is as woo woo as it gets. This is a different story. It is the bedrock of my life’s transformation. Here I will share just the outcome: Time started again.
When time started again, I could look back at that moment and see what was really going on. Things that had never made sense: he kept apologizing. He looked scared. He kept bringing up my being a virgin. In the stoppage of time, just looking at that exact moment alone, I had thought he had some odd respect for my virginity. I know, it doesn’t make sense but I just made what I could of it.
When time started again, when I saw this not just as my experience but through the lens of the perpetrator: why would that matter to him? I saw what I had previously been blind to, this was not his first rape. He had done this before and knew the difference. Knew what my virginity would mean. My virginity would protect me. My innocence, should I have owned it instead of vilified it, would have protected me. He knew what I didn’t in a thousand ways. If I cried foul, underage and a virgin then all of the evidence would be incontrovertible. Couldn’t use my slutty ways as a defense because I didn’t have them. Couldn’t claim consent because it didn’t happen. And my virginity would bring my age into full color. I was a misguided child becoming a young woman; he a predator who knew just how to be patient, available and ready.
Time re-started and I saw a new truth, my silence had protected him and not me. My demonizing myself had likely created more victims. My internalized process had given him freedom to roam.
New awareness creates freedom and new pain. I could go on but have I answered that question: when will I get over it? Never. I share part of my process with you so you can see that it is on-going. I am better. And yet, I created a new victimhood by not allowing myself to be a victim. Damn, getting over it sounds amazing but it doesn’t work like that. She is still rising out of the grass and leaves. She is still hurt. I am still rising. It doesn’t rule my world. Like my bones that finally healed after the accident, it is still obvious that they’ve been traumatized when a doctor sees them. They did not repair back to the way they once were.
I hope it will give opportunity for you to get over that there is no getting over it. I assume you’re asking that question because a) you’ve victimized (in the best case, perhaps, like the boys in the fraternity, you may suddenly see some actions of your own in this story), b) judged or blamed victims or, c) have the luck of not having experienced assault, you want to abbreviate the impact and pain. I get it. I kind of want that too but it’s not real. And it’s not okay but you’re not alone. The lesson is the lesson is the lesson.
I am still working on re-inventing the world as I see it. For instance, I am learning that there is power in innocence, that there is beauty in the unknown and that I can rely on others. I have had these cast out as bad things for so long. I’ve worked so hard to learn everything I could about everything, tried hard to create stability, predictability and stay away from situations that are unplanned and yet, it has not served me at all. Instead, it has kept the lesson knocking at my door.
The irony isn’t lost on me that Mina and I created a program through ImagiNation Playshops that finally helped me reunite with my body. The practice of the Emotional Scales has made such a difference in my life. It is an active, full body, emotional engagement and meditation. When I commit to practicing it regularly and with verve, I find that I can stand in my body, in my emotions and in my whole being and feel safe. This is brand new and enlivening.
That is deepened even more – for me – by doing it as part of a group. Many of us have had things that have created some form of severance from our full knowing: our body integration; our intellect; our emotional intelligence; our intuition; our presence.
There is the practice of the actual scales and then there is the process of using the scales to name and claim my emotional being. Giving words and rank to my emotions, helps me get back into my body and calibrate. It reminds me to include my body. Once there, I have a better sense of what I need. Of when to ask for help. And not just help in trauma either. It could be I need help celebrating. I need help announcing my awesomeness to the world. I now know that when I am in my wholeness I also know when I need to include others in my process.
When our entirety isn’t present, we run the risk of being compromised because part of our knowing is missing. In my case, it could be that I didn’t acknowledge the hair standing up on the back of my neck, the desire to yell and scream, the urge to tear at the trees and at the top of my lungs and call for help. My body separated and when my brain took over it said to be quiet until I knew what had happened. No more.
Mina and I started ImagiNation Playshops because we wanted to create a place where we could be our whole selves, stand in our full expression and dream bold new futures into being.
We have a lot of different programming we want to share. And yet, the Emotional Scales practice and process has already changed my life and helped me dream bold and ask for what I want.
So perhaps, to the one who asks the question, might I ask you to re-frame? Now that you can see it is a shame-filled question, some options are: “When I hear you express your pain, I feel sad, scared and mad. How are you feeling right now?” Or, “I love you. I am so sorry that happened to you and that you’re re-experiencing part of it now. I’m here for you as long as you need me.“ Or, “Hearing and seeing your pain makes me question my own behavior in the past and I feel sad and scared for things I might have done to hurt others.”
These are just a very few options and would go a long way to creating trust. If we have genuine trust, then we can just own ourselves in the present. We can be loving to ourselves and each other in the moment which opens up the opportunity to heal, grow, accept, reunite and be whole, one day. And then, perhaps, the lesson will be the lesson will be the lesson learned. #silentnomore #emotionalscales #metoo #emotionalintelligenceonhigh
* Excerpt from Was it Rape? By Stephanie Auteri published in Pacific Standard, January 27, 2016.
I hope my story encourages you to join us for our playshops. Whehter or not we’ve endured trauma, the embodiment of our emotional intelligence is a powerful reclamation for many and a tremedous aid in integrating new aspects of ourselves as we work to grow and become our fullest selves.
Sending gratitude and love, Julia