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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.

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Getting in Our Own Way

9/3/2024

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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.

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The Trial, an Introduction

Getting in Our Own Way

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