MY HEALING JOURNEY

Warning: contains accounts of child sexual abuse

The only time I spent with my grandfather was a “tickle” game he played with me. It was the only time I ever saw him have any interest in me. I vividly remember the TV always on a specific channel, the volume turned up loud, and the smell of his apartment. It happened many times, that much I am sure about, but I have no idea how old I was when it started, or how many years it went on.

I do remember that one day when I was about 7, our class was visited by a travelling puppet show to teach us about “good touch and bad touch.” There, sitting on the floor of my classroom, I learned that the game I played with my grandfather was “bad touch.” I felt the blood drain from my face and the walls closing in on me. My first thought was a 7-year-old’s version of, “How could I be so naive?” followed by, “No one can know that I allowed this to happen. I’ll never let it happen again.”

So I stopped going to see him in his apartment, going straight upstairs to my grandmother’s where I thought I could keep myself safe. But eventually, he came to me. I was sitting on the bed watching TV in the spare room one day when he came and sat beside me to “play.” I froze. I allowed it. When I didn’t react, he asked “What’s wrong? You don’t like it?” I remember the last 4 words echoing in my head. “I never liked it!” I wanted to scream. But instead, I said nothing. He left, and after that, I told. I don’t remember who, or how, or what was said, all I know is that after that the adults did a lot of talking around me like I wasn’t there. The memory of them speaking to each other over my head, literally, is imprinted in my mind. Some other family members were part of this conversation, this shameful, deeply painful, personal, and quite frankly humiliating thing that now everyone was talking about as though I wasn’t there. I remember wanting to take it back. To make the conversation stop. The only time I remember being directly addressed was by a family member who said, “one day you will like being touched like that, but not now, not when you’re a child.” I felt sick to my stomach. I remember thinking “I will NEVER like being touched like that.” I was a child. This was my introduction to sexuality.

Trauma manifested itself in me in a number of ways that I would continue to uncover for decades afterwards. After studying trauma I now understand that this experience caused me to disconnect from my body. For so long I lived disconnected from its needs and desires, as though it didn’t belong to me at all. My body held on to the memory of what took place. One night I burst into tears when my husband touched me. I was instantly brought back to a terrifying moment when I was sleeping over at my grandmother’s house and I awoke in the middle of the night to find my grandfather lying next to me with his hand down my pants when I was about 10 years old.

This also manifested as a distrust for my own judgement. If I didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong, how could I possibly trust myself for other things? As it so often does, trauma had severed my relationship to myself and to my body.

Looking back at it today, I am in awe at the way in which my healing journey unfolded. I recognize my own strength and resilience for embracing the gradual process of bearing witness to the ways trauma manifested itself and for bravely seizing opportunities for healing as they presented themselves. My first step was accepting help in the form of psychoanalysis when I was in my early twenties, which involved reliving the abusive events, so they could be processed and integrated - a painful but necessary step for me at that time.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I received news that my grandfather was dying. I hadn’t seen him in over a decade and this was my last chance to see him. My husband drove an hour and a half to the nursing home with me and sat in the lobby while I went to see him. I wanted to do this alone. I had imagined that I would find my grandfather lying in his room semi-conscious, quite literally “on his death bed,” but to my surprise, he was having lunch in the common room. My legs were shaking as I walked up to his table where he sat alone. “Oh how nice for him to have visitors!” the nurses said. Yes, how nice indeed, I thought. He didn’t know who I was but remembered when I told him. He asked me questions about my life: Did I have kids? Was I married? It was the first time I could recall him showing any interest in me other than the times he molested me. And then I told him what I had come there to say: “I want you to know that I forgive you.” And then, much to my surprise, I heard myself ask: “Do you know what I’m talking about?” He said yes, he did, sort of, remember. “It’s affected me in so many ways, and it’s caused me a lot of pain,” I said, “but I’m going to be ok despite what you did to me.” To this he replied: “Thank you.” I didn’t expect, need, or get an apology, but I got an acknowledgement, and that was more than I had expected. When I got back to the lobby I collapsed on the ground in tears. I felt a weight had been lifted off me, and while I was beside myself with emotion, I also felt more empowered than I ever had. He no longer had power over me. I knew that to be true in every cell of my body.

Several years later my grandmother moved out of the home where she and my grandfather had spent most of their lives. It was a mess after decades of hoarding and neglect and I volunteered to undertake the task of emptying it. For months I went regularly to purge the space, and it became somewhat of an obsession. There was something very cathartic about clearing out the physical space that had been the setting for so many painful childhood memories.

When the house finally sold, I visited it one last time before the new owners took over. I brought my camera without knowing why and ended up setting it up to take self-portraits in the two places where the abuse had taken place. I held myself, my inner child, and told her she was safe now. I cried, I yelled, I found peace. And in my vulnerability, I found that shame no longer had a place within me. And, I had taken back this space; it was no longer haunted by the memories of these events.

A few days later I left for Costa Rica to sit with Ayahuasca for the first time. The divine timing of having said goodbye to this home, on top of the forgiveness I had offered my grandfather years earlier just before he died, was not lost on me.

Ayahuasca continued my healing almost immediately on the first night. In my vision space, I hovered above the street corner where my grandparents lived, next to a men’s prison that was still operating when I was a little girl but was later converted into condos. I felt the energy of the wounded masculine closing in on me; a tangled lasso of barbed wire making it hard for me to breathe, suffocating me. But then I relaxed. I gave it love and it released its grip on me. The more I relaxed and felt my heart open, the more it loosened until I felt myself rising up above the street corner, watching a wild garden of vines grow over it. I was releasing it, and myself, from the darkness through my open heart, through my inner strength.

During my second ceremony the following night, I was shown myself as a child, sitting on the couch next to my grandfather as he molested me. I saw the little girl and wasn’t worried for her. I knew she would be ok. Despite all of this, I knew she would be ok. But I looked at him and felt compassion. Who would do such a thing to an innocent child? I had compassion for the wounded human, the lost soul who would take the innocence of a child this way. It was the healing I didn’t expect… compassion for the one who hurt me.

In my studies of trauma, I’ve learned that it is passed down from generation to generation. As my teacher Regina Hess says, “trauma doesn’t start with you.” I can’t change what happened to me, but I can make sure it stops here.

So can I sit here now and say that I am fully healed? Well, if the sexual abuse I experienced was a cut, it is no longer a gaping, bleeding wound, and it no longer hurts to the touch either. But it has left a scar, one I will likely wear for the rest of my life. What I do know is that today I am in absolute awe of my body; for its resilience, its partnership, for what it is capable of. I regularly cultivate this reverence, this gratitude, through various embodiment practices, including intuitive movement and sacred sexuality. Reclaiming my sexuality has been particularly empowering. Because I had vowed to never enjoy being touched the way my grandfather touched me, it took a lot of rewiring for me to embrace my sexuality as an adult. This belief was so unconscious, it took me a long time to identify it but once I did, I could begin to rewrite it. This is where I got my power back.

Healing can come from so many different places, some we might not expect, and I am so grateful for the tools and events that have played a role in my journey. I am also really proud of myself because none of it has been easy, yet here I am. I would not be who I am today without all this journey, and for that, I regret nothing.

It is with an open, humble, and hopeful heart that I hold space for all womxn regardless of what they have experienced or where they are on their journey. I believe in the power of embodied practices for restoring wholeness within us and in the power of safe spaces for collective healing. In fact, I’ve dedicated much of post-graduate education to these exploring the transformative potential of women’s circles, embodied practices, trauma research, feminist approaches to transpersonal psychology, mutual healing with the natural world, and shadow work. One thing I have learned is that when we heal ourselves we help heal the collective.

Thank you for bearing witness to my story.

Love, Davina

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