The Elephant in the Room

I had a conversation recently (this blog is from 2014) about the work I do to assist those who have experienced sexual abuse and assault. It’s true that people don’t really like to talk about it. It makes people uncomfortable. But, as AT LEAST 1 in 4 people will have experienced it in their lifetime, maybe it’s time we did start talking about it. 

Most people won’t disclose their experiences. There’s a lot of judgement around it. There’s a lot of guilt, shame, embarrassment and confusion involved. They try to get on with life as if it never happened. The thing is, an experience like this does enormous damage on a quantum level. You can’t run from that. It changes your vibrational matrix. It can distort your whole relationship with yourself, and your ability to relate to others. It results in a whole bunch of compensatory patterns and belief structures (none of them helpful). 

When we don’t acknowledge the experience, it becomes encapsulated. This distorted moment in time, tangled in with a whole pile of projected beliefs about what it means – becomes preserved forever, all shiny and new, as though it just happened. This means that you are at the mercy of circumstances that can trip you back into a trauma response. It can even become encoded in DNA and passed down through generations. Even if the abuse itself is not repeated, the effects are passed on. I have seen the evidence of this. It’s quite destructive. 

I advocate acknowledging these experiences. Even if it’s just to yourself, at first. It’s OK to do that. Regardless of the circumstances, if this experience did damage to you, then you need to address it. It doesn’t matter if you’re not even sure what happened. Something happened. Own that and work from there. 

Then, get it out of your own head. It will do you no good in there. I promise you that sharing the experience with someone you trust (perhaps a professional therapist or counsellor), will set you free. I recently did this with something I had been unable to talk about for 26 years. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I expected judgement. But, really, nothing could have surpassed the judgement that I already battered myself with (because the funny thing was, that I blamed myself more than the other person). What I got was a great deal of compassion and also some insights that allowed me to view the experience in an entirely different light. 

Once I was able to forgive myself, a whole lot of the emotional charge dissipated and I was freed from the weight of dragging around my “dirty little secret”. It no longer had the power to drain energy from me. I saw it for what it was, and in the light of day I saw that it really didn’t need to have been such a large figure on my internal landscape. If I’d disclosed it at the time, I would have had the opportunity to see it as such much earlier. And you know what? I robbed myself of understanding for all those years. Nobody else did it to me.

It’s time. Our paradigms are shifting in a big way and we have the capacity to greet ourselves anew. We can’t do that effectively while we are still hanging onto yesterday’s pain. When that pain is buried so deep that it’s inaccessible (or you don’t remember), things are a little trickier. Not impossible though. Remember how I said that there were quantum changes? That means that our cells will retain traces of these experiences. Our cells are mostly water, which makes them susceptible to vibrational imprint. This means we can RE-imprint and we can release. A skilled energy or body worker will be able to facilitate this for you. 

Go and do it. Do it because it will benefit you. Until you find compassion for your own experiences, nobody else will be able to either. What effect might this ripple of compassion have on the planet? If the many released themselves from the grip of their distorted perceptions and judgements, maybe we could change the conversation around sexual assault completely. We are doomed to repeat only what remains unconscious. What we recognise and acknowledge, we can change. 

So, who could you talk to? Let’s start that conversation.

*Photo by Harvey Sapir from Pexels.