Surely the Universe…

In 1992 I began a healing process that feels as if might be winding down this year. It’s taken a long time, but then, the abuse that I endured was profound and lasted for around 18 years. The ramifications of those 18 years on my personal life were in full effect well into my forties which is where I found myself in 1992, diagnosed with a disease that had crippled and deformed me and was scheduled to end my life. It had turned my entire body inside and out, into scar tissue. Logical really, since I was a walking wound at the time.

My healing from that condition may have been no more than pure luck. None of the other guinea pigs in the experimental program in which I’d been installed, healed. I had been undergoing the experimental treatment — extra-corporal photopheresis — for only one year when I’d been declared free of the disease but the doctors were leery of setting me go as others who had left the program — usually because of the pain and the inconvenience involved — had died. In my heart, I knew that I would not die if I opted out but I also felt that I owed the physicians whatever I could give them for saving my life, so I continued the experimental treatments for another two years until the program was stopped for lack of funding.

On the day before my scheduled final treatment, my father died. It was no surprise; he been working on it for a while. I was at work when I got the call. Spontaneously — and somewhat to my embarrassment — upon hearing the news from my daughter my body released a wail that brought people running from the far corners of the building. Somewhat chagrined by my body’s gut response, I muttered apologies; my father had died. They understood what they imagined was grief. Never mind that his death didn’t really matter to me. I had literally no idea where that sound had come from or why. I was as shocked as everyone else.

Two days later, as I was being released on the second and last day of my final treatment, the doctors and nurses who had attended me throughout my tenure in the experiment came to say goodbye, all clearly distressed at what they imagined to be my prospects. I, on the other hand, felt like a bird being set free from a cage. I was beside myself with delight. On the way home I stopped at my favorite gem shop and bought myself a necklace I couldn’t afford: a silver chain from which hung a silver bird claw clutching a clear quartz crystal. The claw reminded me reminded me of my hands which had been severely crippled by the disease process.

Shortly after I arrived at home one of my sisters came to wish me well. She, like I, was positive about my having been cured… or at least she did a good job of pretending she was. We had a playful conversation as we stood by her SUV which was parked in front of my townhouse. Her kids were asleep in their car seats and we were joking about one of her kids being our maternal grandfather reincarnated. The conversation ended with me bitching about that grandfather groping me and her reminding me that our father was no better… I was apparently visibly stunned by her remark and rendered mute.

“You mean he didn’t get you?” she’d said.

The next thing I was conscious of was that I was leaning up against one of the kitchen counters in my house. My sister, her kids and her car were gone. I was seeing something like a series of movie clips from my life unfolding before my eyes. What I was seeing seemed familiar; I remembered some of it; my father, my mother, my mother’s mother, and her father… and all kinds of sex and death. I was stunned and practically unable to breathe. After lying down for an undetermined amount of time, I called my siblings one at a time to tell them about the aspects of what I had seen that seemed OK to share. In retrospect, I am not sure why I did that, but it changed all of our lives. I called my mother as well. She confessed to me that she knew about my father which would’ve been foolish to deny as she was there. But then she exclaimed that she knew nothing about what I was saying about her father and the various activities that I was describing to her which went well beyond simple groping and well beyond just him. She became mildly hysterical, telling me that she couldn’t talk about it. She hung up the phone.

My mother was world-famous in her field. She was a remarkable woman and, back in the 1920’s, the youngest woman ever to have entered medical school in this country. I mention all of this just to preface the fact that less than two weeks later I got a call from her secretary who expressed concern about her. My mother had jetted off somewhere to serve as an expert witness at a trial and had called her secretary to ask why it was that she was in the particular city that she was in. What was she doing there? She wanted to know.

That was the beginning of the end of my mother’s formerly magnificent mind. I don’t think it was coincidental. She lived another couple of decades, much of that in assisted living. She recognized most of her children most of the time but that was about it. When we knew that her death was imminent, we made sure to visit more regularly, some of us brought our children, many of whom she did not remember at all. She’d developed a routine for the visits, and at the end of each one she would hug the offspring who had come and tell them that she loved them… she did that for everyone, except me. I got one arm around the shoulder and her telling me that I was her buddy.

Okay, well. We shared her husband. I could see why she didn’t love me… I wasn’t all that fond of her either but not for the same reasons. She’d basically sacrificed me both to her husband and to her father for his even more nefarious purposes. She’d known what my father was up to; she had a hand in that, but I never did know for sure if she understood what her father was doing with me and my sister. I’d like to think she didn’t…

Having had my memories unceremoniously returned to me in that way, I sought psychological help. I’d tried to get help while I was still living at home, as a teen-ager, but my mother wasn’t having that. So now I sought it on my own because the life I had lived in between the time that I lived at home with my family of origin and where I currently was, had been a living testimony to what massive sexual abuse will do to a person, not to mention the other things I was exposed to, the things I dare not say. I had become, to quote an eighteenth-century novel, “a wanton harlot.” I seemed absolutely unable to stop myself from having sex with strangers. I behaved so badly that my children’s father was easily able to blackmail me into taking my children from me when we divorced by telling me that he would tell them who I really was. And they were my children; he’d never wanted either of them except, ultimately, to spite me. (In fairness to him, he did grow into his role and, I think, even learned to love them.)

Psychological help for me was definitely in order. At least now I had a clue as to why my behavior had been so bad. I wanted, and I desperately needed, help, but I was turned away by more psychotherapists than I can now recall. They would ask why I was there; I would tell them; they would show me the door. None of them wanted to deal with the ritual abuse aspect of my problems that my grandfather had provided. Not a one. So I turned to alternative therapists and energy healers. The process of working with them, if nothing else, helped me to heal my soul. Eventually, after some years, I went to school and became an ordained minister. (This was before the days when people could do that online for 10 bucks; I spent four years studying.) Ultimately I trained as a hands-on healer myself. I had, I was told, “a gift.”

Bit by bit I got better and better. Losing my children had made me more determined than ever to become a different person no matter what it took and took a lot. It took a lot of time and a lot of very generous people who were willing to accept what I could give them for their help. From time to time I would be triggered by something. The biggest trigger of all, hands down, occurred long after I’d imagined myself to be out of the woods. It was the election of the current president of the United States who represented for me all the people that had been involved in the ritual abuse that I had endured as a child. I knew those people all too well. They’d had power over me; now they were in charge of the whole country. I knew as well that people like that stop at nothing to get what they want. I took a serious emotional nosedive after what had seemed like 15 years of being “normal.”

Happily, in 2003, in a dream, a voice had come to me telling me how I could help myself change, how I could let go of emotions and information that I was holding inside me, information I didn’t want to be holding inside me. So I’d worked nightly and had at least felt confident by 2015 that I had tools with which I could deal with the memories that were re-surfacing and the dreams I was having. In the work that I’d been doing with other people since my ordination I had been teaching them to do the work that the dream voice had taught me and by 2015 I had actually acquired a publisher for a book about it, so while I was feeling trepidatious about the current situation of both the country my life, I also felt prepared to at least handle it. I wasn’t getting any better but at least I wasn’t getting any worse.

One thing led to another and by chance, last year, I went to see an acupuncturist because I was having digestive issues. No surprise there. I was having a hard time digesting what was going on in the world. Probably because the link between my history and the people involved in the current political atmosphere was so dramatic, the acupuncture treatments began releasing a lot of emotion, and on the nights after my treatments I’d have horrifying nightmares based on my childhood. I would awaken crying aloud and/or running in place, trying to escape. During my most recent treatment, the nightmare happened while I was wide awake and still on the acupuncturist’s table. I left my body, as I used to do when I was a child, and entered some kind of altered state in which I was ‘explaining’ to the acupuncturist, in halting gasps, what I was seeing. It was the deepest I’d ever gone into my memories except for once, under hypnosis many years before, and as soon as I’d felt myself going there when I was under hypnosis, I’d bailed in the midst of trying to crawl up a wall in order to get away from what I was witnessing, and I pulled myself out of the trance. But this time, on the acupuncturist’s table, I let it happen… I let myself re-experience the horror of the rituals I’d been exposed to.

Afterwards, it took me quite some time to become reoriented in the world. I felt very different in ways that are difficult to describe. The word “empty” comes to mind.

I hesitate to say that my healing process is over. There are probably countless subtleties that might express themselves one day although I believe that I can confidently say that it feels as if the worst of it has finally been processed and passed.

This morning — and the reason I’m writing this now — for reasons unknown to me then I suddenly heard, in my mind’s ear, my mother’s voice uttering a phrase that I’d heard from her as a child over and over and over again, “Surely the universe is unfolding as it should.”

I’m glad now that I had those words then. I think those words helped to get me through everything with my sanity intact, those words and my ability to leave my body behind when I needed to. My sister was not so fortunate.

My sister died almost three months ago, four days after an acupuncture-induced dream I’d had in which she and I were — finally! — able to escape from our abusers. We were running from the men, from the horrors we were exposed to, and in that dream, for the first time, we got away. We got free! She was out ahead of me, running like the wind…

Surely, the Universe is unfolding as it should? Perhaps it could find some better way.