Denise Colby Integrative Wellness

The Trial, an Introduction

9/13/2024

That which we resist, persists.

When we resist a story that wants to be told, the story presses ever harder into our awareness until it becomes all we see or know. So it has been these past two weeks with this story, the story of a trial I went through in my late 20's regarding the sexual abuse of my teenage years. It's the story that has been pressing forward, despite my pleas with myself to please choose a different one to tell. If ever I were to write a book, The Trial might be what I would choose to write about. It's long, touching on just about every theme of my life and childhood. The story intersects with systems of justice and injustice, tactics used by the patriarchy to invalidate women, and how sometimes it can feel like the wrong person is on trial - like this is just a fall guy for a far greater injustice. Although I knew this story would come eventually, I wanted it to come later. For starters, it's too long and will likely span at least 5-10 posts. Secondly, it's a story I rarely tell to anyone. I've had therapists and healers that I've just 'forgotten' to tell this story to for years. Not very many of my friends even know about it. It can't help but touch into themes that I'm still deeply uncomfortable with.

This morning I drew an oracle card which, while not centered on unicorns, proudly features one on the card. When I refer to this story, I call it my 'unicorn' story because these kinds of trials are so rarely "successful." One of the great injustices exacted on victims of sexual abuse is that the grounds for "proof" according to our justice system are simply incompatible with the nature of sexual abuse. So the fact that my abuser did go to prison, 10 years after the abuse ended, due to little more than my testimony and a few corroborating anecdotes is unusual. The appearance of the unicorn with the message: "Own your medicine and who you are becoming," was the confirmation I needed to bring this story into the light on these pages. My medicine is human medicine. Heart medicine. I embody the archetype of the wounded healer. Although I have picked up many techniques and talents along the way, what makes me a healer is not what I have learned in any class, but what I have endured without losing myself to darkness. As I find my way home, again and again, I hold up a torch and try to help others find the way. My lived experience is the medicine.

One of the difficult aspects of this story is that people often expect it to be told as a sort of victory story, but at no point, even when it closed in my favor, did it ever feel like a "win." In a very small way, justice was served. But that justice did little to actually ameliorate my suffering. To be certain, if I had "lost" the trial, it would have compounded the shame, guilt, and doubt that I was already carrying and would have certainly made matters worse. This is the service we do for victims when we prosecute crimes successfully. We make it a little bit easier for them to process their victimization without blaming themselves. But no guilty verdict alone will ever make the pain go away.

The trial came to a close just over 15 years ago when he finally accepted a plea deal with multiple 7-year prison sentences, served concurrently. He was in prison for less than 4 years. I state these facts simply as that - facts. I feel neither satisfied nor disappointed by the outcome. It was left up to me to offer the plea deal and I wasn't pressured in any way. The DA was quite certain we would win at trial, but they were also very sensitive to the strain that would put on me. I chose the plea deal because I, too, was very sensitive to the strain I was already under, and because I knew, even then, that a lengthier prison sentence was unlikely to do anything of use for either him or me. One thing that I learned through this is that you can not quantify justice just as you can not quantify pain. How much is enough? Even now, as I sit with that question, my heart just opens and breaks... What was lost? What was gained? Were the scales of justice truly leveled?

In a sea of that much pain and compounded loss, how could anything ever make it right? And if nothing can ever make it right, then why do it? I sat with that question for a long time. I knew that pressing charges and going through the trial was not going to make things better for me, so what was I doing here? The only answer I've arrived at is that if we all do nothing, then there can never be change in the world. If we do not insist upon accountability on the part of the perpetrators, then we are tacitly allowing abuse and things will never change. I can never know whether my actions spared the world more victims, but I have to believe that the ramifications rippled out to the community and into my own life to assert that we will not hide, and we will stand by the truth and what is right.

This era marks an inflection point in my path. It was like a bulldozer came in and smashed my carefully constructed reality to pieces, leaving no boulder unturned. It upended all of the relationships in my life as I could no longer continue to sell myself the lies I'd been living under up to that point. The jig was up. The abuse I endured in my teenage years was but a symptom of the systemic rot I'd been raised with. It was not a random act and did not stand alone. It would open the gates to a deep healing of generational abuse and pain.

For those of you who enjoy astrology, the trial erupted just as Pluto danced forwards and back across the Capricorn cusp in my first house of the self. My Saturn return was in full swing, and by the end of 2009, Saturn would return to its natal position in Libra, conjunct my midheaven and natal Jupiter. My upending would be visible to the world, impacting my career path and all of my relationships. It would rattle my sense of self down to its foundation, demanding a total rebuild, and would involve themes of justice, balance, and relationship. Somehow I survived this mess. This is the story of that survival.

0 Comments

Getting in Our Own Way

9/3/2024

0 Comments

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again

- Navajo Prayer

Story #2. I've been wanting to write for years. Even before I had my kids, my long-term goal was to begin to get my stories out there in a helpful and meaningful way. I find writing internally organizing. It helps me to draw out the essence of an experience without getting mired down in unhelpful details. It reminds me of the path I've walked and the one I'm walking. That all of experience is just that - experience. "You are the universe experiencing itself as human for a little while."

So I didn't really expect to hit a block immediately following story #1. I have loads more to tell - why am I suddenly completely clammed up? My first post was an experiment and assertion of will. I feel like I've been hiding for some time, paralyzed in various ways, and feeling a pull, for once, to conjure my own magic, rather than always following the magic of others. One of my 'tried and true' strategies that I have used in my own life and frequently offer to clients when they are stuck is what I call the "Do Something" approach. If you feel lost or unsure, wanting to make a change but not sure how, just pick a thing and do it. Don't worry whether it's the right thing to do, it may well not be, but it's an assertion of your life energy into the world in a particular way. The universe can't really work on you if you're standing still - you've got to get yourself moving. So feel into your intention, pick a thing that is currently possible for you, and do it. From there, doors can open, and that thing you're doing will lead you to the next thing and the next thing and before you know it, you're living what was once only a dream. These posts were my "Do Something" in response to some dreams and what felt like a stagnating path.

And now I'm stuck. The first story was an easy story. One with a happy ending in which, 10 years later, we're not just surviving but thriving. The vulnerabilities tucked within it are easy ones because I've overcome them. They're not really vulnerabilities anymore. I'm not sure the rest of my stories are quite so tidy. I also encountered a whole bunch of feelings I hadn't really expected. A feeling of apology. Who am I to think...? Who am I to take up space? Who am I to tell a story? It was an ambush of internal criticism - as soon as I hit 'publish' I began to crumble under the weight of shame and doubt.

There's a familiar story - shame and doubt. My existence an apology that I'm always having to make up for. Ugh. I know this story. How did we get here again? How are we still here?

When I sat down to write this post, I didn't quite know where it would go. But as I sit and write, a story does come. A story of internalized shame, handed down through the generations. So it is with most of our shame. It isn't really ours at all. As Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body is not an Apology, giving back our internalized shame is like peeling off the ugliest of black sweaters and returning it to the store you got it from, walking out in your dazzling birthday suit. It was never yours to begin with. You just carried it because you were told you should. Because it felt too dangerous not to.

When I was in elementary school, probably 1st grade, we were given an assignment to write a small book about what we wanted to be when we grew up. It was maybe 3-5 sheets of that beige paper with the top half blank for pictures and the bottom half with those big blue lines for little kids to write their story on. I was 6, maybe 7 years old and my memory of the events are a touch sparse. But I vividly remember picking out my two favorite Crayola markers, lavender and turquoise, and drawing stars. I remember a page covered in purple and teal stars, planets, and a floating astronaut. I remember a feeling perhaps of wonder that I now see in my own children from time to time. Apparently, I wanted to be an astronaut, and in my mind, space was
AH-MAZE-ING!

Then I remember nothing. But in the next frame of the memory is a pencil-drawing of a woman in a skirt, smiling and sweeping, carefully colored in with muted crayon. On the blue lines below, in neat pencil, were the words "When I grow up I want to be a housewife." I felt sad and scared. That I had done something horribly wrong in both wanting to be an astronaut and in the messy outpouring of those two outlandishly colored pens. I'd had too much fun with them. The blue and purple stars, like my dreams, were just too much.

I have a vague and foggy memory of my mother yelling. That I couldn't turn in such messy slop and I needed to take pride in my work. That I thought I was too good to be a housewife. That I thought I was better than her. A vague feeling of her vitriolic defense of her position in life. In my childhood, when my mother's rage was activated, my self-preservation mechanism was dissociation, and those memories, if they return at all, come back as a foggy jumble of words and sensation with no definitive narrative. I wouldn't be able to tell you her words, or what actually happened in that gap in my memory, but by trusting the story my body tells, her violent disapproval was made very clear, I absorbed it all, and I shrunk my volition immediately so as not to threaten her further. I had been handed a big box of patriarchy, tied with a very jagged bow.

My mother was a feminist of the worst sort. Angry and vitriolic, she was the embodiment of the patriarchy via the feminine - a classic case of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Her rage at the oppression and violence that she experienced in life became internalized as a deep seated hatred of her own femininity, and a violent display of power over any man that happened to enter her sphere. She desperately sought male power in the subversive ways that were available to her, and I had the poor luck of being the third girl born to a mother with a bizarre fantasy of birthing a 'male heir' as a path to her own power. What a start. The story goes that I did not cry at birth and rarely cried as a baby, not even waking to eat. I was losing so much weight that my mother had to wake me for timed feedings. Somehow, even then, I knew that it was safer to just try and be invisible. Not make a fuss. They would eventually have the boy that was so wanted, and I would love him deeply, only to see him lost to my mother's machinations.

My mother was born in 1951, the first of six children in a deeply impoverished family. Her father was abusive and her stepfather was abusive and an alcoholic. At 13, she met my father. His mother, born in 1918, had attended college and taught school for a time before having children. All of his sisters were expected to attend college. Although modest by today's standard, his family had a level of generational wealth that must have seemed dream-like to my mother. My mother's parents did not support college education for women, and so at 18, my mother married my father - it was the best she could do with the hand she had been dealt.

I don't believe that motherhood came naturally to my mother. She had her first child at 20 and the remaining three would follow over the next 12 years. It wouldn't be until she was in her 40's that she would go to the local community college and eventually join the workforce. Things actually got a little bit better once she was working. For one, there was more money, but more importantly, I think working gave her something that we, as children, never could: a sense of herself that she could feel good about. The patriarchal lie that motherhood would complete her was a difficult blow. It did not. And her response was that of an ensnared animal, all teeth and claws. Had my mother been born male and with more options, I believe her life would have looked very different, and might have even contained a sort of peace. My mother's life was a casualty of poverty and patriarchy, and so when she saw those big teal and lavender stars and my big dreams to get to space, the pain of her own lost dreams was too much to bear. And so she passed the box of her shame and shrinking on to me. It wasn't mine. You could solidly make the argument that it wasn't even hers. And yet, here it is, poisoning the well of our entire family.

My childhood was a deep lesson in how patriarchal ideas are genderless and equally ruthless in their evisceration of both feminine and masculine bodies. I watched my father become hollowed by my mother, and I watched my brother begin to contort in the same way. I do not wish to portray them as hapless victims of my mother - they most certainly were not. But that is a different story, and this is this story.

Giving back the box of shame is important, but it's only the first step. Dismantling the beliefs you've held about yourself and reality as a consequence of the shame can take time. Grieving all that has been lost to the shame and illusion can be difficult. Changing your current relationships to reflect healthier relational patterns can feel like (and be) a Herculean task. But as you move through this work, life begins to feel lighter and new possibilities abound. What ugly black sweaters are you still wearing that you'd be better off without? What have you inherited from your family and culture that serves only to poison and shame? Freedom is possible, and every inch of progress we make in our own journeys is a gift not only to ourselves, but will ripple outwards to every person we touch. Keep fighting the good fight. It's worth it.

0 Comments

Love is as Love Does

8/26/2024

0 Comments

"All stories are love stories."

Love is always at the center of our stories. There are more myths and ideas about the purpose of this human incarnation than I could ever tally, but my personal theory is that the purpose of a human life is to learn about love. Whether we admit it or not, it seems to be what we're all here doing, at times disastrously and at other times miraculously. So really, every story I will write here is ultimately a love story. But I thought I'd start with a classic love story - the messy business of romantic partnership.

It was 2014. Just days after I had ended my career as a chemist to commit myself fully to the path of a healer, the man I was seeing abruptly and with no real explanation ended our relationship. While my friends all breathed a sigh of relief, I was devastated. Not because I thought he was some amazing catch that I couldn't live without, but because he served as yet another example of how I could never get it right. I would never be chosen. No one would ever find me worthy enough to stay. No matter how hard I tried, it was a story I just couldn't shake because it kept on bearing itself out. I had been deeply on the path for about a decade at that point. I had worked on my worthiness from a hundred different angles. I was working really hard at the business of self-love. And yet, this just kept happening.

The pattern went something like this - I would meet someone and there would be a spark, a certain magnetic pull towards one another. Things would start off with a burst of attraction and fun, everything looking rosy and promising. And then slowly, after a few weeks, the red flags would start to come in. I would brush them aside because I believed so much in the feelings of love, and the story that love would overcome all obstacles. I had bought into all of our cultural illusions of love, and felt that if I could just be more accepting, less needy, more independent, less this, more that, less, more, less, more, then surely one day I would get it right and someone would stay. The red flags would catch fire. I would allow myself to be treated in increasingly degrading and toxic ways, until finally the whole thing would blow up. I would often demand to be treated better, only to have my demands twisted and shoved in my face in some kind of narcissistic victim-perpetrator inversion, convincing me that I was the wrong one here. It was my relationship with my mother played out in different costumes over and over again.

It wasn't lost on me that this was a repeating pattern, based in my childhood wounding, but no matter how much healing work I did, I felt powerless to change it. It just kept happening, no matter how much inner child work I did, and how much I tried to dedicate myself to self love. I remember my mentor, the intuitive astrologer Kay Taylor, saying to me once that people like me couldn't date based on feelings. People like me needed a checklist. Does he do what he says he's going to do, show up on time, take me on actual dates, behave responsibly in all areas of life, etc etc etc. She might have been right, but it certainly didn't sound like very much fun... In any event, her advice went against the deeply held story I just couldn't let go of - that my soulmate was out there and that one should do anything, endure anything, be anything for love.

In the summer of 2014, I was still juggling a particularly toxic relationship that I'd had going in the background for years. He was a spiritual narcissist, the trickiest kind, and knew exactly how to use spiritual principles to justify his abuse and make it seem like the way he was treating you was an important part of your path. Let me give you some free advice - if you ever date a man that tells you he's reached enlightenment on your first few dates, run. Simultaneously, a new romantic interest was taking shape, with all the pull and promise of my usual fairy tales. Another sun I wanted to shine on me, to choose me. And in the middle of all of this, I met my husband.

Sometimes, if you're really not getting the memo, the universe will do a triple backflip to try and get you to see. This was one of those times. He was different from all the others. He did what he said he would do. He showed up on time, took me on actual dates, behaved responsibly in all areas of life, etc etc etc. I felt relaxed in his presence, free from the compulsions and tensions of more intense relationships. But I had my doubts. That magnetic pull just wasn't there. In all of my other relationships, I'd always felt almost powerless against the wave of feelings that would arise around a potential partner. It was like I was in a trance, dancing as if a marionette, bewildered as to who was holding the strings. It was as if I had no choice but to see the dance through to its predictably miserable end. But this time was different. There was no trance, and for once, it was all about choice.

Somewhere around our 3rd or 4th date, the universe presented me with that choice. I was invited out by that new sun. But the event conflicted with a date I'd just said yes to with my future husband. I would have to choose. I called up a dear friend and talked through my dilemma, and I still remember her response, clear as day: "Well, on the one hand I see someone who feels like a repeating pattern of every relationship you've ever had, and on the other hand I see someone who is finally treating you the way you deserve to be treated. You're going to do what you're going to do. But you should ask yourself why you're turning away from something that is so obviously good?" Some friends are serious gems.

I got off the phone, still heavily conflicted, honestly leaning towards my old patterning. It's embarrassing to admit that now, but I share it only to convey just how strong the pull of the old story truly was, how deeply the trance took hold. I laid down on the living room floor and closed my eyes to think. I remember the quality of the late afternoon light streaming in through my big bay windows. How comforting it felt. And as I laid there in the sun with my choice, some voice rose up from deep inside of me. What she said was this; "Listen. Your attraction compass is broken. It's completely untrustworthy. It is pointing you in the wrong direction. If you keep following it, you will only end up hurt. You are going to turn down that invitation and you are going to make the healthy choice, and you are going to keep making the healthy choice. Do not f- this up for us." It wasn't the first time I'd heard that voice. I hadn't fully identified it at the time, but it was the voice of my higher self, who only got this vocal (and bossy!) when she was sick to death of getting the run-around. It would take years, but I would eventually learn to just ask her to take the wheel on the daily. Things really run a lot better when your higher self is (mostly) at the wheel...

So I got up off the floor, declined the invitation, and made the healthy choice. Then continued to make the healthy choice. I began to learn about love. Real love. A love like nothing I've ever known. A year later we were pregnant, and I had no idea what love was about to ask of me. I'm glad I was able to get some time on the training wheels first. At some point, maybe a few months into our relationship, I woke up in the morning in bed next to him and felt the acceptance and care he just always extended to me, the security and stability of our relationship. And the thought washed over me that this was how it should be, how it was supposed to be, how it always should have been. In that moment, all of my younger selves felt the relief and joy at finally knowing love. But it didn't just happen to me. I had to choose it.

Exactly two years after our first meeting, we were married in our living room with our 3-month old in attendance. The lovely Kay Taylor officiated and we each had a witness - mine was the dear friend who'd given me the good wake up call on the phone years earlier. We wrote our own vows, a vulnerability we might have struggled with in a larger audience. While it wasn't our intention, our barebones but meaningful ceremony reflected precisely our commitments to each other. To do love differently than how we'd been shown. To do love our own way. We had none of the pageantry of traditional wedding ceremonies. But we did have an altar of our own design and an unforgettable wedding cake. Love, meaning, and sweetness. Not a bad way to start.

Over the past year or two, I've been reading bell hooks' books on love. They're not particularly new books, in fact they're over 20 years old, but somehow it seems that her ideas have yet to really take hold. Over the past decade (lifetime?) I've been a student of love, the fiercest of teachers. When I came to hooks' works, I so wished I'd found them when they were first written. Most everything that I've learned to be true about love aligns with her words. She defines love not as a feeling at all, but rather as a set of actions or behaviors. That magnetic pull of attraction and all the feelings that I'd previously defined as love weren't love at all. I think those feelings are best defined as karma, or my intense attraction to resolving my childhood wounds. I was magnetically pulled towards what would recreate my childhood experience of love, and thus, would always leave me wanting. In some cases and for some people, this could work out as a path to healing. If the person you're attracted to in this way also chooses love and chooses to heal, you could do it together and it could be a beautiful healing journey in relationship. But sometimes we are attracted to people who won't change, and we, too, need to honestly look in the mirror and address our own willingness to change, for without change the love we wish for will always be just beyond the predictable and painful walls of defensive maneuvering.

To me, love is a commitment of behavior. You can not proclaim to love someone and then treat them poorly. Love and abuse simply can not coexist. I grew up in a household where the only love available to you was various forms of abusive love, and I've been untangling the wires within my own system for decades, slowly grooming out every narcissistic flea that I may have picked up along the way. This takes an unflinching commitment to treating the people in my life with trust, respect, care, affection, and nurturance, no exceptions. If I love you, then I have a responsibility to you and to myself to manage my reactivity and address my lower impulses so that my behavior towards you is ever-more-consistently respectful. None of us will be perfect in this, but when we err, we must accept responsibility for our poor behavior, apologize, and sincerely resolve to do better. Without that last bit - sincerely resolving to do better - the whole thing is otherwise a repetitive waste. There is no real apology without personal change.

M. Scott Peck defines love as: "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." I've also heard it paraphrased as, "the expansion of the self to include the other." He goes on to say, "Love is as love does. Love is an act of will - namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."

I'll admit that while my husband was a lovely set of training wheels, the rubber really hit the road when I had kids. Nothing will bring forward your unresolved "stuff" quite like having children will.... Through my children, I have learned about the importance of self-forgiveness. Despite all of my commitments, I screw love up every day, not just with my kids but with everyone in my sphere. We are all a little mindless sometimes. We get tired or hungry. We lose our patience. Our reactivity gets the better of us (especially when we're tired or hungry). There's no ideal to be reached, and besides, it's unreachable. That's why being human is such a deep training in love and compassion. We just do our best, and breathe through the rest. What matters the most is that we're trying. Every effort you make is a point in favor of love. So keep going, and the garden of your love will blossom.

0 Comments

The Power of Story

8/22/2024

0 Comments

"The world is full of stories, and from birth to death, we are all living out our own mythologies."
Joseph Campbell

"With a flicker of the fire, the Storyteller begins his tale, like all tales, with a simple invocation..." And so it begins. The opening card of this particular tarot deck highlights the power and potential of a story. A story arises out of nothing; open space, listening ears, pure potential. Out of that nothing, the Storyteller weaves a reality into being, leaving an indelible mark on all who hear the tale.

We are all living our stories, moment to moment, whether we know it or not. If you want to know what your life will look like in 5 years, look at the stories you're weaving today. Our worldview, our sense of self, and the meaning and purpose we find in life are simply a collection of lived stories; if we want to change our lives, we must begin by looking at our stories.

As a healer-therapist, my favorite session with a new client is our very first one. In that first, often-too-brief meeting, a person bravely meets their vulnerability and begins to tell you their story. When I'm listening to their stories of pain and joy, what I am most moved by, and most aware of, is not the things that have happened to them, but rather, how they tell the tale of the things that have happened to them. Like all good storytellers, people reveal themselves not through the words themselves but in the shape of the words, what is emphasized and avoided, the walls and wellsprings they color and foreshadow through their tale. As I listen to the way someone tells their story, I am hearing their mythology, and tucked inside the mythology are the keys to unlocking their suffering.

I love a good story. For those of you who love the stories of astrology, I've got Sagittarius rising conjunct Neptune, opposite a full Gemini line-up including sun and Mercury, all flavored with a Pisces moon in the house of the mind. Stories are my ultimate form of self-expression. They're how I understand myself and they're the divine alchemy I invoke to create change in my life. For years, I've longed to share these stories of change and evolution with a broader audience with the hope of helping people orient in their own stories. To enlighten some dark place and help them find their way, just as so many have been the light in my dark places. These writings will be the beginning of that. I've lamented in the past that I struggle to write because there's no one theme, no singular thread that feels particularly meaningful or authentic to the realities of my experience. So I've decided to experiment with vignettes. Tiny windows into my lived experience and the lessons that arose from that particular telling of the tale, highlighting the ways that healing that layer of reality changed my mythology, my lived story.

The truth is complex and nuanced. This is perhaps a hard reality that people seem to be really struggling with on the national level these days. Many things can be true simultaneously, sometimes even things that would seem to contradict one another. And so it is with these stories. The truth that each of them holds is but a single lens. As time goes by and more stories are told, you might begin to see the same event told through multiple lenses, with different truths emerging as the facet shifts. Each facet holds a set of lessons that are like a balm when applied appropriately, but take those lessons into a different facet, and they might feel like salt in a wound. True, but unhelpful, and probably painful.

I'll begin next time with the best kind of story, a love story.

0 Comments

The Trial, an Introduction

Getting in Our Own Way

Love is as Love Does

The Power of Story

Archives

Categories