Emancipation Proclamation
Two months ago - against the will of my subconscious - I went on a boating trip with most of the members of my family of origin. Due to the nature of trauma I’d been personally sorting through over the last few years, this wasn’t a good idea on any count. Beginning with my dad, I’ve experienced countless traumatic experiences with bully men. I’ve had a history of using “hope” as a way to cope, and a means to try to understand why someone who is supposed to love you, would inflict pain in the way that they did. Low-and-behold, I “hoped” that this trip would turn out peaceful.
One form of disassociation begets another when it comes to trauma. Cognitively, I understand that this list of men who have hurt me and supposedly loved me, were all disassociating through splitting: rage, substance use and leaving me. I in-turn, would disassociate by “hoping” they’d change. By hoping they’d stop yelling at me. By hoping they’d stop hitting me. By hoping they’d finally step off the substance-wagon-dance and be done with it, so they could finally love me more than the substance. I believed the love I gave them would help them heal.
I’ll spare the details and stick to the meaningful parts of the story. On the last day of a 3-day trip of near-constant intoxication of most members, I found myself on a boat with the member who took the crown of “most inebriated.” A beer in one hand, a marijuana vape in another, I found myself pleading with a poly-using bully to apologize to his daughter, as there had been a physical altercation moments before with her boyfriend.
When I asked him to stand up, be the adult, be the parent and be a Man, I pushed all of his shame buttons. Then came trauma no-man’s-land, as his only protection was to defend and project. I was sitting in the back seat of the moving boat. He was on a chair just a few feet opposite and facing me, yelling demeaning remarks with his smoke and beer breath. I’ve had to endure countless men in my personal space with this emotional lethal mixture; most bullying and/or abusing me. It’s an olfactory night-terror for me - quite literally - as the man who snuck in my bed and molested me, emanated this vapor. Smell is the sense most highly associated with memory; it has a direct route to the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hippocampus - structures related to emotion and memory.
Every time I smell this mixture, especially drunk beer breath, I’m met with a raging waterfall of terror throughout my entire body. I’ve had many nights where I’ve laid in bed with an ex (of some sort), barely breathing as an attempt to hold in terror and rage-related sensations because I was told I was “crazy, over-reacting, emotional and sensitive.” I’ve begun to call this form of gaslighting, spiritual homicide. It’s an annihilation so deep, one feels like every part of their being has - in an instant - been gutted from their body.
I distinctly recall sitting on that seat in the boat, and the quote, “If you can think in front of a tiger, you will surely succeed,” (for some oddly-placed reason) was playing in my head. In what was likely just a few seconds, but felt like a century, I attempted to obey my ego by sitting there and remaining calm, while “the tiger” was yelling and energetically inserting his toxic karmas into my body - like I’d obeyed and tolerated thousands of times. Then my beautiful, always-in-truth instincts rose up and said, “Fuck you ego! I’m not obeying anymore!” I literally stood up to the tiger, to the bully, and to all the men who had hurt me…to all of them who had used my kind demeanor as a route to my body as a host for their traumas. I began yelling in his face, “Stop it, Stop it, Stop it! Shut up, Shut Up, Shut up, “ over and over again.
While the boat was still moving, I suddenly jumped out and began swimming for shore. I had to flee - I was no longer going to endure abuse from bully men, even if it cost me my life. The sun was just setting - it had already been a long day of boating, skiing and coping with drunkenness - so I was very fatigued. It was a good mile to swim, and at about three-fourths of the way in, I began to tire - I’d never swam a long distance in my life. I looked at the shore and I still had a ways to go. Then my body started to feel heavy, my legs felt like they were being pulled downward…like I was sinking. The thought of dying was real. With concentrated effort, I raised my arm out of the water to usher help. I saw a man look my direction, but he was probably a few too many sheets-to-the-wind and incoherent, as most everyone on the hotel grounds was. It was a reoccurring scene that had been played out numerous times in my life: needing help, needing saving and the so-called savior was too checked out to do so.
The feeling of my life-force coming up to save me in that moment was something I’ll never forget. The will to survive is a miracle when we’re faced with dire circumstances. Tears stream as I write this because God spoke to me. God told me that my life-force would get me there, that I had to make it because I was swimming not only for me and my emancipation, but for all my clients and countless other women who needed validation in order to source their voice back to song. When I didn’t think I could swim anymore, something in me (God) told me to look down. There were rocks that allowed me to stand and take footing. That break got me to shore. And, when I got there, I felt like a sea urchin coming out of the water after a long period of hiding. Perhaps some messy version of Amphitrite who hid in Atlas, all weary, beaten-up but yet ready to fight to protect the sea; the goddess who embodied the moaning of the fish, seals and dolphins.
The gravitas and the symbolism of this recent experience only came to me three nights ago when, unable to sleep, God again rose up in me, this time in the form of a lucid dream. I was told to write down all the toxic experiences these bully men had put into my body without consent. Because men who bully are the most insecure animals in the pack, I wouldn’t be able to sit in front of them and read them the list - if they didn’t have the strength and capacity to take responsibility for their traumas then, why would they now? Within that frame of living in reality (and no longer in a disassociated state of hope), I was to find someone with whom I implicitly trusted to read my list to. The next step was to use this technique with my female clients - what all survivors are seeking (in order to heal) is for our experience, and the pain ensued to be validated; for the felt sense of being annihilated to dissolve.
On January 1st, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, changing the status of over 3.5 million enslaved African Americans to be free. In no way do I compare my experience to that of the enslaved African Americans. I do believe, however, as did Lincoln, that every human is deserving of freedom; that no other human has a right to take that away from another. Yoga too sees freedom (Moshka) as our birthright. I see the horrible traumas in the eyes and bodies of my female clients on a daily basis. I work with them slowly and safely, so that one day, they can have their day of Emancipation from the horrors of PTSD that they’ve endured for decades.
Like most of my female clients, I’m a survivor. This allows me a rare perspective of empathy. For some reason, I’ve been wholly gifted with a body of work (Somatics and Yoga) that allows me to witness the life-force, instincts, sense of existence, boundaries and felt-sense of safety come back online in my clients. As of late, I’ve freely cried with these beautiful humans who are showing up consistently to do the inner work so this cycle of annihilation ends.
If you are reading this and it resonates, hear me when I say: you are somatically deserving of freedom, peace, contentment, love, understanding, validation, safety and honesty (even when difficult). You are deserving of your story to be heard. There are superb humans who have the honesty, integrity, capacity and coherence to stay with you and your experience. Take an oath with me to never be left again. The greater intelligence in you and the universe is sending you heaps of love and support!