It’s been a year since I said the R-word. I remember because today is 2/22 and I sent the letter right before this date last year, because I was going to the beach the weekend of 2/22 and I wanted it to be sent before the three days I’d spend beside the ocean.
I hadn’t ever thought of it as the R-word. I’d said, “childhood abuse” and “sexual trauma” for years, but not the R-word.
Once last year, a counselor and healer I’ve seen for fifteen years was talking to me about the work I do and is my purpose to do in the world, and she was saying how I take all these life experiences and alchemize them into something to offer for others. And she said encouragingly, “You’re not meant to talk directly about incest, you’re meant to talk about love and all the things you’ve found on the other side.”
I hadn’t ever said “incest” either.
But then my sister got pregnant in 2021, with this baby that actually came to me three months before she was even pregnant, and it had said, “I’m coming, you have to tell her.” Yes, I’m talking about hearing from the Soul of the baby before it had incarnated. I heard it loud and clear, but I hadn’t spoken to my sister in a long time – nor my other sister or parents, and I waited to take action, wondering what exactly to do. Then, six months later, I found out that she was three months pregnant. I had stalled, and now it was time.
I’d asked to speak with her, but likely knowing what it was about, she declined. I pressed a bit, said I had to, and she drew a boundary.
I started to panic, actually having the first panic attacks in years. In my apartment, I have a meditation cushion inside a walk-in closet and one day I was in there just panting and praying, “What to do?!” and the voice said, “Well, let’s start with breathing.”
I was panicking because I couldn’t keep this child safe if she wouldn’t listen to me. And it was coming from the same deep-down knowing that came without words for all those years as a child that I wasn’t safe, and then the first years of my son’s life when I would keep him away from my father at all costs, because that was my instinct, but not ever directly saying why. The family just went on pretending like nothing was ever, nor had ever been, wrong, and that was why it had been such a mind fuck for decades about whether or not I was going to even believe myself. But why would your full and basic instinct be, “Keep the children away from your father” if that instinct wasn’t warranted? Don’t anyone dare try to negate or explain away that rhetorical question.
There was a fierceness that arose after the panic attack in the closet. If I had to drive ten hours and knock on her door, I’d do it. I was going to do whatever was needed. But then, I was in a session with a practitioner about what was happening, and afterward I knew what I needed to do. I didn’t need to drive to her house, I needed to expose this. It was almost a blessing that she wouldn’t listen, because if she had, then this silenced, festering thing would just stay among two women and still be protected. I had to expose the truth the whole way.
It was a knowing, a deep-down, clear as day knowing, the feeling I get when there is not another way forward.
I’d known since I was fifteen that something had happened to me. When I had my first boyfriend, memories came back, and clearly. But I don’t remember what exactly they were, because when I confided in my mother at that time, she told me not to be silly. I remember the day. It was summer time and she was driving and I remember her stoic face, looking forward focused on the road, telling me not to be silly. To say it more clearly, I told her that my father had sexually abused me, and her response was, “Don’t be silly.”
And so I spent about fifteen years trying not to be silly.
My mother says she doesn’t remember me ever telling her that. This is called “dissociation” and my mother has it. Big time. Because in the years that I’ve been uncovering and honoring the truth of what had happened to me and to my family back through the generations, for the purpose of healing, I have tried to sit and talk to my mother. I’ve asked her to sit on Zoom so that I could see her eyes and expression as I asked her questions. She denied ever knowing, or ever remembering me telling her, and yet, when I finally said the R-word, nothing changed then either.
This showed me that I was right all along. It’s an incredible thing to try to reconcile or even wrap one’s head around – that your mother may have known and didn’t protect you. That you were somehow her sacrificial lamb. It’s almost impossible to fathom, and I’ve been grateful to women like Eve Ensler over the years who named such choices of some mothers – to ignore the thing that would have to tear a family apart if acknowledged, in order to secure one’s own resources by acting as if nothing had ever happened. “Don’t be silly,” she’d said, as she discounted the thing she didn’t want to look at.
I spent my twenties in a codependent relationship with one man, which was a way my psyche sought safety because both he and I knew that I’d been abused, but within the relationship, we could deal with it. I spent my thirties reclaiming my body from trauma patterns, reclaiming the truth and my power, reclaiming the health of the gut with “inexplicable” lifelong stomach pains and trouble digesting. Reclaiming, reclaiming, reclaiming. I had the worst digestive issues when intimacy with a new man would become a possibility. I learned to identify how I was overriding trauma symptoms and entering relationships with men too quickly, and I learned how and why I was attracted to men who seemed to love me but then would discard of me – not surprising since my father stopped talking to me long before I said the R-word, but when I stopped taking his money and removed myself from the power dynamics.
When I gave my TEDx and started telling even a little bit of the truth that had been kept behind the curtain, I lost contact with them more and more. I always had the sense that owning the truth would mean losing them. It did, and I knew I had to keep choosing my path. I also knew that to exist within the family unit meant to participate in a great pretending. I instinctively knew this, but I had no idea how right I was.
I spent years reclaiming my ability to tell my own truth, and to even use my voice, as it had been stuck in my throat for so many years. I spent over a decade in various therapies trying to figure out my trauma-ridden brain and its sense of enoughness, lovability, worthiness, and just where all of the tendrils of coercion and abuse had reached. It was an extensive search. And a maddening one. Eventually this coincided with a rich spiritual, sacred journey as well.
In 2020, I wrote and delivered an original monologue for the classic Vagina Monologues V-Day event on two stages in Asheville about the sins of the Father (double entendre) and the hidden abuses in the church. Because the R-action had actually occurred at least once in a church. IN the church. I was under five, and he broke me, on purpose. Very much on purpose.
He was raised in a satanic cult as a child. No one in my family talks about this, nor do they really know – another reason I’ve stayed kind-of quiet. My deep spiritual journey whereupon I asked questions such as “Why does patriarchy and separation even exist in the first place?” had lead me to actually discover the truth of the S R A in 2019. History explained through good vs. evil and the systemic mechanisms of keeping people away from unity and a unified Source – the S R A has been very instrumental in that.
And then I found out that it had infiltrated my family lineage, and that my father had been affected very, very directly and personally. Isn’t it amazing how life just lines up the pieces for you to discover the truth of who you really are? I had been healing trauma for over seven years at that point and was living a life committed to the journey of the soul when I found this out. In the beginning, I wouldn’t have been equipped to handle the news. In fact, I spent about a year even integrating what this even meant. It explained so much, and yet, now I knew the tendrils went much, much deeper. Because if he had been raised in a cult, then he had also raised me with cult-like mind control and tendencies of coercion, abuse, and soul-breaking. I knew a lot about trauma at that point and began trying to wrap my head around the potential effects of intergenerational trauma from cult abuse, let alone sa ta nic rit ual cult abuse. Most people dismiss that this even exists, because it is so hard to accept and because it involves far more people and people in power than anyone wants you to know, and I found one psychiatric doctor who validates patients who have these stories. He was too busy to talk with me about my intergenerational curiosities.
I was raised by a man who was raised in the most horrific circumstances, who witnessed brutal, indescribable things. The worst of human behavior. They broke him. And he never had the therapies, the trauma interventions, the parenting classes, or anything that would prevent him from passing on what he had learned, and from using the cult tactics on his family. He’d married a teacher and I was their first born daughter. He had the devil inside of him and I know he wanted to do well also, because he spent a lot of time in church, gave a lot of money to charity, and tried to give us a good and prosperous life. So we didn’t talk about the devilish parts, because my mother wanted the white house on the suburban street with the photos of a normal family in frames in the stairwell. So she kept it looking good and we didn’t talk about his episodes. In the same “don’t be silly” strategy, she’d go on serving dinner if there had just been a fight or if he had disappeared again and she didn’t know where her husband was.
My body was always confused about what it felt and sensed, the inexplicable fears and digestive issues, the fierce rebellion I felt. And as an adult, I spent many years breaking free – slowly at first, and then fiercely as if my life depended on it, and then, just when I thought I was pretty regulated about it all, this letter had to be written and that sent an unexpected fire alarm to my brain. Fuck if it doesn’t take so much longer to heal than you think it will. Even after years of reclamation, and teaching other women to reclaim their voice and truth from patriarchal traumas and silence, I wasn’t exempt from a deeply embedded trauma reaction, probably in response to a deep threat made long ago about what might happen if I ever told. No doubt, and I remember many such incidents now, it was a threat on my life.
I sent the letter it to everyone in my family my generation and above. I sent it to the parents of the daughter I’d placed for adoption at birth. I said, “He raped me.” I said, “I believe she knew about it.” I said, “Do not leave children in their presence.” I did not feel fear when I sent it, I felt clarity. I knew it had to be done, and I would do it a thousand times over so that the lineage of secrecy and child abuse stop. And it did. It feels a bit, in hindsight, like willingly stepping in front of a train that has been picking up cargo and momentum for a very long time. Thankfully, I suppose I was strong enough at that point to not even realize the personal risk. That train just had to stop.
My aunt wrote me a card with hand-drawn heart balloons that said how sorry she was that she hadn’t known and didn’t protect me as a child. I heard from my cousin, “My mom believes you….” and then the trailing off of that sentence made me realize that others didn’t.
Oh. Well, I suppose denial is a strategy that’s been at play for a long time, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised that they just “opted out” of believing me. I’m not necessarily offended by this, but I also have no time or tolerance for it. Some never reached out at all.
The letter did elicit a reply from my sister and we scheduled a phone call. While she wouldn’t directly talk about it, I was able to ask her a series of yes/no questions such that I finally understood that she understood me, and that this child would be protected. That’s all I cared about. This was the first grandchild born into the family since my son thirteen years prior. I’d protected my children but I wasn’t going to be there to directly ensure the safety of my niece or nephew.
But then interesting things happened. The sex I was having with a partner began to feel rammy at best. I didn’t feel his heart and I felt a lot of his anxiety in the sex. Because he struggled with erectile dysfunction, I tried to be loving and kind, and yet the sex was not connected enough for me. I tried to work with him through it – always the coach, always the one to see some soul-potential and hope they walk through that door, always the one to give too much or stay too long. (Former habits, I’m now happy to say.) Eventually he stopped trying to find access to his heart by ramming himself into my vagina and he left. Not great timing in the grand scheme of things. Ram-ram-goodbye as a pattern was a significant trigger for me, and it contributed toward a… well, a breakage of sorts. A deep heartbreak occurred from it all. It was all too much.
My family was so far gone. I still haven’t met my nephew. My other sister is pretty much best friends with my parents, and no one acts like I ever said rape. My grandmother served him Thanksgiving dinner and my mother sat beside him, which I was surprised to find was another hit to my heart. I didn’t know that I’d care about the added layers of loss and I didn’t see them coming.
I had always been the strong one. I was resilient, strong, ran on adrenaline when I had to. In my years of deep reclamation that felt like survival and liberation both, I got a lot of black tattoos. At first, I got big black flowers on my shoulder blades and around my shoulders, and then realized that I’d subconsciously given myself self-protective armor. So I got more tattoos down my arms so it didn’t look so much like armor, but I did look like a badass. I was frequently called a badass.
People have told me things like: they assume I’m always fine, they assume I am always able to make money, they assume I don’t need anything because I don’t ask, that I’m always strong. Because that’s how I learned to be. I learned from my mother to pretend like everything was under control even when it wasn’t. I’m writing these things in retrospect, as I realized them while looking in a really authentic mirror this year.
This year, amidst all of this, the most beautiful things also happened. I went so deeply into the gaping hole of unlovability that I felt – a foundation that had been set long ago – and there I sat, not self-abandoning. My friend Audrey recognized where I was and sent me homeopathic potions and love notes for support. I did the emotional freedom technique, hiked in the woods in the mornings with my dog, treated my body with care, and increased my nutrition – every day. I did parasite cleanses, enemas, kundalini yoga, EMDR, energy healing and more. These are a few of my favorite things to get free of abuse frequencies and lingering wtf cult mind control programming.
I aligned with Source. I partnered with the Divine. I healed with the Earth and with the earth grids. I lived Heartland – this work that I began calling “my dharma” during this time. I was pissed I wasn’t finishing writing a book and it felt like an eight-month set back in the journey. Of course it wasn’t.
I deeply cared for myself differently than I ever had. I wasn’t surviving anymore. I was loving myself and wanting to know how I felt truly free and beyond what had been. I stopped being defined – energetically and otherwise – as the one who this had happened to. It was done.
I found myself in an uncharted place – the territory of my true heart. It was messy and pure. I took down the guards and learned more deeply how to have clarity about what gets my resources without having to defend myself. As a result of childhood abuse, including emotional and though it’s an overused word, narcissistic abuse, I had a habit of giving myself to things in hopes that I’d be valued after the fact. This resulted in habits of over-giving or what I call “giving to get” which are both unsustainable and inauthentic. I believe I have learned authentic love, and what do you know, straight through the authentic portal of my own heart as the pathway to God.
During this time, my business both financially failed and there was a wisdom to allow it to disassemble its previous structure in order to be rebuilt on different energetics. Even though I have had (before this year?) a knack for holding things together and making it look like I was successful, after the letter and the rammy sex trigger, my money stopped flowing. Spiritual people say, “You’ll always have what you need.” Well, I didn’t. And I also couldn’t push myself to “sell” anything anymore because I just wanted to do things authentically, with people who wanted the same. So I let go. There are different energetics at play regarding money when you have had this kind of trauma, which I now understand better and am devoted to helping women get free. Rape trauma, combined with psychological trauma around safety and money, is a different beast that is not going to be easily overcome with positive thoughts or affirmations. It is way, way more than that and getting through it, I have found, requires focus and devotion. I couldn’t beat this before when I’d tried toughness or resiliency or manifestation techniques or spirituality alone. It has required a daily grit inside of a daily love inside of a daily faith. This I will share in Heartland – we have to be able to clear the residual trauma energetics that steal our life force and make it difficult to secure or hold money, and we get to be prosperous in our own Source-Alignment. Our Soul is enough. In fact, it’s so powerful that that is why we were harmed to begin with – to make us forget.
My father had used money to manipulate my compliance in more fucked-up ways than I can even figure out, and so my psyche never wanted to need help, but this past year I did. I had the opportunity to really undo patterns of both believing I needed the rescue while simultaneously fearing it, learning that to receive help was safe, and doing the soul work of trusting that my business, finances and psyche were all likely perfectly reorganizing themselves in tandem with the divine. But it was a mess and I had to face the fears I thought were long-past about having enough and being supported. Hint: it comes from within. The more aligned I am to my authentic frequency, sacredness, creativity and soul, the more fulfilling and resourced it all gets.
The other thing that happened was that I became far more loving and graceful, and this continues. My business became a ministry. My membership stopped being an aspect of a sales funnel and instead a joyful community with growing purpose and cohesion. I stopped sharing unless I really had something to say. I started creating again – like, real, soul-activating, right brain electrifying, eros-derived creativity. I’m still diving into that, most recently with a frame drum. On all those walks in the woods, I was more and more deeply activated into gridwork, earth relationship, my divine sight, and how the fucked up earthly circumstances are all part of the bigger invitation to return to love. I deeply realized the human need for belonging, on the other side of all of that fierce independence, leadership and resiliency. I need connection and belonging. I need it still.
I have known for years that I was walking a “soul journey” that I was then meant to share back, but I took a break in that. I didn’t know if I was done or broken or unmoved or what, but I honored the time to go inward and had no idea when or if I’d come out. And what I want to say about this space is that it is a holy mess. It is a holy becoming, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, at the risk of sounding cliche. I’ve known that I’m on this walk that quests, “What does Union actually look like in this lifetime?” and yet, actually exiting the matrix reality of “I was violated by my father and it didn’t stop there” is a wild ride in the lived experience. It is a story of separation, for certain. I call finding our way through these 3D “realities” in a separation matrix and then allowing ourselves to choose love, to be who we landed on earth to become, the Sacred Remembering path.
Maybe it was the reality of losing family seemingly once and for all last year, or maybe it was a little invisible string in my brain, implanted long ago by an old, satanic threat, that got pulled when I spoke out that said, “If you say this, you will be killed and the people you love will be killed.” Maybe it was the pattern of abandonment showing up again from men. I didn’t realize what had happened as it was happening, but my brain just got stuck. I just did the best I could do to love myself in the day to day.
And then Spirit pulled me forward. My friend Lisa began walking beside me daily on the spiritual path helping to activate me toward strength and an integrated high-heart and monad. My kundalini yoga practice became a daily practice as I watched my brain changing for the better, clearing the fog and patterning of mind control. At the turn of this year, my soul said, “Enough EMDR, enough therapy and trying to figure it out, look forward.” Special miracles happened. I heard Spirit say, “It is done.” I heard the guidance, “Go beyond your Earthly parents and realize that you are a child of the Divine.” When I said yes to that, I realized something new called the Holy Daughter Template, which is more divine information about the feminine beyond patriarchy and what this actually feels like.
So why am I writing this?
Well, it’s 2/22 and something in me said to do it. I realized that I subconsciously pulled the red shirt out of my closet that I’d worn for our Sovereign Womb Ceremony on 2/22/22 where over 80 women and men joined for the remembrance of the sovereign feminine before the Fall of Lyra – before separation. I’d sent the letter right before that ceremony, and then something in me committed as I led the ceremony, and as I stood on the beach in the following days, something in me knew to open Heartland again for a group of women, which I did.
Spirit’s always there.
The soul is always trying to integrate truth, light, and wholeness.
Life is always life and then it is so much more.
Was there a turning point? If I had to say that there was one, it was realizing (again) that what the destroyer energy of domination, patriarchy, and control does is to interrupt love, to try to destroy it, and to separate union. It is the greatest pain I can imagine, and I’ve felt it very deeply in this lifetime and countless others. My heart has been working some deep, deep alchemy in recent years to heal the pain of separation. To say that it’s hard sometimes is an understatement.
To be resilient in the nervous system is not enough. It is not enough to fight these forces of separation, and to fight them only exhausts you. It requires an epic re-connection to Source, a re-devotion of the entire soul, and to source strength from Source. Otherwise, and I know from experience, one will be knocked down, again and again, in an attempt to stop Union from happening. I don’t doubt that they especially seek to attack those who carry the light of the Christos Sophia, those of us on the Unity team. It is absolutely true, and we have to be strong through Union, through Source.
To name the truth to keep the next generation of children safe (and yes the lineage lines were cleared, and yes it was worth it), I ended up experiencing more separation than I’d ever known to expect. With the end of another relationship that borderline triggered my sexual trauma and all the way triggered the pain of unlovability, I got to alchemize the pain and know the heart and love in a new and reclaimed way, and to know the Beloved beyond form.
And then I realized – the pain of separation is how the bad guys win. It’s their whole, cowardly gig. And so I choose love. I choose to move beyond the energetics of separation, and I choose to remember the frequency of pure love and try to live inside the integrity of that as many moments of the day as I can remember to do so. More and more, I touch the spaces beyond separation. My gut is healing another layer of tension that I recently discovered. My mood and my blood sugar don’t tank anymore. I’m calmer. I don’t get as caught up in triggers and I re-Source back to the Divine. My nervous system is pretty regulated thanks to Kundalini yoga. My mind is strong and beyond gads and gads of mental programming that I didn’t even see until I was ready to go beyond it.
I will never again feel shame or silence about my past, I will hold it like sacred, swaddled truth, and I will create with it, because of it, because of it all. I will no longer live in separation.
I’ve said this so many times in my work, and I have to remember it myself – this year being one big example. In the old template of separation, we orient and operate as women in response and reactivity to external masculine. If we are living our lives watching what patriarchy is doing, watching what men are doing and protecting ourselves from how they might take from us, we are living in response to the perpetrator. Any real-life perpetrator can be long gone from your life and the remnants still there. Isn’t that just how the evil works? Controlling you long after they are gone. When we orient to that, we define ourself as “the child who was raped,” “the woman who has endured trauma,” and so on. We become defined in the fight against it. But there is another freedom and another template altogether, when we realize and leave that all behind. When we set it free, and remember it is Union that we came for and Union that we ARE.
It’s been a year. And that’s enough. I am sacred, I am sovereign, I am free. I am the child of the divine. My creation doesn’t depend on the external, rather my womb creates with the light of God.
I am the Holy Daughter. I am love. I AM.
*** Blessing this space within the love of the Unified Field and within the clear and sacred grids of Gaia.***
