“You will not remember the words of your enemies, but the silence of your friends.” Martin Luther King Jr. ` Have you ever signed up for a class and when you entered you knew immediately it wasn’t going to be like you thought. That right away, just on seeing who else was in the classroom, you knew this was so not something you signed up for, but regardless you were going along for the ride. I was going to learn, I just had no idea what. I came wanting to learn more about her. So I watched her intently, but you could say I had my eye on the wrong ball! As the class proceeded and information was given, I soon learned that this was an impossible task that she was asking us all to do, she wanted us to believe her words, to listen and follow along. She lost me at hello, or perhaps she never even seen me. She knew what she needed to teach, but it seems that she couldn’t see the students, where they were and what they needed. I now believe that experience is the only teacher we have. Can I teach a person to feel abandonment? Can you teach a person about love? Can fear be untaught? Is peace, love and joy a course to take? Are there teachers who are skillful enough to erase or delete the affects of abuse, to make us unwounded, to go inside and make a correction? The other night when I walked into a classroom, the first person my eyes connected with was my sister’s childhood friend. She was molested by my father, but was also a perpetrator herself in acts with my sisters. (Yes, I know our neighborhood was run amuck with dark sexual energies.) When I seen her there I could not believe that this was for me! It seems like I am forever responsible for my father’s or my family’s collateral damage! How am I going to participate in this room with her right in front of me, her back close enough to tap her shoulder? I now have half my mind on her and the other half on the class, I watch her participate and wonder what is going on inside? I wonder how this class is helping her or is it? I wonder about her. I wonder about her wondering about me. Distracted and disjointed and off balance I know am in the middle of some great Lesson! What am I supposed to get here, what is the message? I try blogging this out, I have written over 20 pages and I don’t get it! Until it comes to me that the Teacher Girl is annoying me, she is overbright. I know, that isn’t a word, but she is overbright. Her smile is wide, it stays only on her face or her lips and teeth and the rest of her body doesn’t agree. Her voice is a pretend sunshine voice it is coming from her neck. She is trying really hard to convince us, to make us feel something, to bring us to a place, like a pretend island for us to sit on for a while, a strange and deserted island. What is making me so mad about this overbright girl who is just taking us to a pretend place to sit awhile? How is that so upsetting? Guess what, she is my past mind! Yes, that is where I lived when the darkness came in when things were happening that I could not compute. She is showing me my voice in my head! Oh MY God! She is avoiding the darkness and re-directing us, using mantras, overtalking (I know, not a word again) to take our minds off of our suffering, to ‘think’ positive, to do motions to remove the negative energies. It seemed like a pretend game to me. She is a representation of the voice in the head, she is there to show me how denial works, how the left- brain can deal with trauma, how it can just re-classify our experiences, like overwriting our reality. Skipping over darkness in a happy delightful way, “let’s rephrase that….” When the class was over, I asked a few pointed questions. “I am trying to figure out where it is you are coming from, how are you approaching this?” No answer. “I just can’t seem to understand what it is you are doing here.” No answer. Reality is asking her and she has no answer. Since she couldn’t tell me herself, I will go ahead and surmise from my experience of her class. Now I am not a scientist, nor do I have a degree in anything, but my life experience has taught me, that there was no one coming, that I had to do this myself, I had to dredge up old files and see their contents, to feel what I never allowed my self to feel, I had to go backwards inch by inch and really see reality. No one could do this for me. There wasn’t enough sunshine in the world to change what was! We need the sunshine to shine in the darkness and see. What I needed the most was for someone to see Molestation is an area that is still in the dark, whispered about, in the arena of shame, blame and guilt! We have no relay for life or pink ribbons….. Imperfect Ladies, us girls who were wounded, who set forth in this life a little off kilter, scrambling to just remain upright, little did we know that our files were on backwards, our emotions a mess, parts left out and behind, we were left alone in our minds to sort this all out. Doesn’t it seem insane, that when a little girl (or boy) gets abused, they are left alone to lick their wounds? Hard to visualize a raped small child making sense of this land, this world, society and adults, what a cruel place this must seem. Darkness and whispers are the perfect place for molestation. We need light to shine in the darkness not over the top. We need voices to speak out loud the names of those who hurt us. We need to walk tall, in courage and strength and what we need the most, is when we do, for you to be ok. Will you be ok to hear what it is we have to say, or will you try and take us to a pretend island, trying to re-phrase our experience, changing our perceptions? A father raping his child cannot be overtalked and overbrightened, it is not pretty, it never will be, but when you can’t go there, the child is left alone. Left alone in a hellhole of monumental proportions, it raises itself. In the class I learned we have two choices to speak in reality or in pretend. The voice I have is a voice in reality.
