I've written quite a bit about the concept of disassociation and how many abuse victims will be trapped by this process. I've sometimes described the results as leaving a "hole in the soul". Other spiritual writers have called clerical sexual abuse "soul murder". In Shamanic traditions, practitioners refer to the process of healing as "retrieving pieces of the soul". Conventional psychology talks about healing as the 'reintegration' of the dominant ego.
Rarely have I come across writing from a victim of abuse which so vividly describes the experience of disassociation from the victim's perspective. The following is a written reflection from a male abuse victim and comes directly after a session with his therapist.
In my session today I was explaining yet another incident which happened to me at school between me and another boy - one of the tough and popular ones - it was an extremely humiliating experience for me and embarrassing - I always felt the runt of the litter being one year younger than everyone always. But I decided to mention this event because I was fascinated by something else - my mum often reminded me of that day or about what I looked like when I came home - she always said how I was white as a ghost and something obviously very upsetting had happened to me. But can I remember the emotions? I have since relegated the event to 'normal' and that my reaction was more a reflection of my patheticness.
I mentioned this in the context of the two sexual assaults I experienced as a teenager - for both I can remember clearly just before (leading up to them) and then after the event but nothing in between though there was never any doubt as to what had occurred was sexual and unwanted. He (again) explained about dissociation and then mentioned another client who had worked through his abuse and said that when he first regained contact with the emotions and pain of his abuse it was as if his soul re-entered his body - he felt it almost as exactly that.
I think I am starting to understand what that means.
For all my life I have constructed what I believe to be 'normal' only to now start realising how ab/non-normal things, my behaviours, thoughts are. There is swimming around me a disembodied collections of emotions and memories from many events - but they are not yet IN me.
I spent yesterday working in my garden, cleaning up my chook pen and my junk (man) shed and pottering with plant cutting in my hot house - all the while I was listening to music with my headphones on and really getting into it and basically enjoying myself. But then a wave of emotion would come over me and I would want to sit down in the middle of the lawn and rage against God and life , and then cry - but I can't: All a part of the disembodied emotions, I guess.
But, you see, I have seen being like this, acting like this, thinking like this as 'normal' - life. I have grown up thinking that children being molested by adults, family friends, priests is somehow normal, that a peer thrusting his hands down my pants and telling everyone in the class watching that I had no hair and mocking me while at that very same time in my life I was being molested by an adult family friend. How else can I have worked this out - it had to be normal because it was happening and when I looked around me at the faces and saw that they could see nothing wrong with this then I suppose I saw that I was the weird one and that all this was normal life. (There was no other way to work it out because his experiential rolodex didn't have enough cards, and so his 'brain' literally threw out experiences that couldn't be catalogued. That doesn't mean they go away. They literally hang around needing to be acknowledged and integrated.)
But it hurt so crushingly and was so confusing given what the church constantly told us about sexual purity, and it just didn't feel right - so what does a child do? Dissociate, block out the painful confusing, frightening memories/emotions, but they stay somewhere, outside like buzzing flies, or like shadows that you think should be yours (and they are) but they seem to be someone or something else's, or, inside like illness, body pains and depression, the origins of which lie hidden underneath them.
So, I want to learn what is normal, what is/was acceptable in my childhood, school-life, upbringing, teens because
I don't think I really got to learn this: It's why I am almost shocked when Brian, for example, expressed so much abhorrence and anger in his first posts on
this thread - I didn't know how to react, I was almost embarrassed but I could also feel it triggered some deep anger and hurt of my own - I think that's why I appreciated it so much - here was another man saying what had happened to me and so many others wasn't right or normal, but disgusting and very, very wrong and
it felt so good to hear someone saying this and so strongly. Things I have seen as normal for decades especially in regards to what it means to be me, to be a man, a human being in society - I thought I knew, I am learning otherwise - and my long and much loved church and religion is all very much part of that.
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I have participated in a Native ritual called the "Washing of the Hands" which is a three day ceremony whose object is to help victims of abuse or PTSD put the pieces of their souls back in their bodies. It is one of the most powerful healing ceremonies I have ever been associated with, even though the results do not appear to human eyes to be as spectacular as some other healing ceremonies in which MRI's and CAT scans prove spontaneous healing of a physical disease.
The truth seems to be that results in both psychological and physical healing come from the same source--the reintegration and restoration of the totality of what Catholics call the 'human soul' or secular sources sometimes call the totality of human consciousness.
In Shamanic healing, there is a defined technique from a theory of human consciousness in which the kinds of conversions and miraculous cures associated with Catholic healing sites are expected as a result of the technique of soul retrieval. As an aside observation, I've never worked with any native practitioner who felt one of the constants in the paradigm was a particular spiritual or religious belief system. Shamanic healing can work results no matter if one is Catholic or Native or Shinto, just as scientific theory crosses cultural lines and works even if a person doesn't believe in it. But just as with scientific theory, shamanic technique can be used to harm as well as heal. The principles can be used to dis-integrate a soul as well as re integrate a soul and the process doesn't have to be intentional. At this point humanity is much better at the disintegration part than it is the healing part.
The CIA's Project Bluebird, a part of the MKULTRA program of sixties and seventies, intentionally disintegrated the personality/soul complex of young children in an effort to create a kind of Manchurian Candidate or super psi soldier. They were successful in the disintegration part, but not all that successful in the end objectives. The psychiatric community has been dealing with the victims for the last forty years. The story of Project Bluebird is a perfect illustration of how fear of communism and the cash associated with it, co opted the professional ethics of many of that eras most lauded psychiatric professionals. Unlike the results of sexual abuse in Catholicism, the soul destruction promulgated in Project Bluebird was intentional and an outgrowth of techniques used in Nazi Germany. It was done with the co operation of scientists from the US, Britian, Canada, and of course, Germany and Argentina. It was evil.
I bring all this up to illustrate the point that we don't know much about how the energy of human consciousness interacts with human biology and neurological perception. We certainly know enough to force disintegration of the holistic link between the three, but our healing sciences are floundering when it comes to re assembling the three, preferring the Newtonian/Cartesian approaches of modern medicine with it's reliance on bio mechanical and chemical approaches. Our western spiritual approaches rely on a poorly conceived theology of sin and leave healing up to a kind of Godly random selection.
Drugging away the symptoms of a soldier with PTSD does not deal with the cause of the symptoms. It is not truly healing. It is symptom reduction. It is a life long maintenance program and it is expensive. As a counter to this approach, I have seen healing for victims of abuse and atrocities in war healed permanently when they underwent the process of soul reintegration through the Washing of the Hands ceremony--and it didn't work just for Native American soldiers or abuse victims. I have seen the same thing happen through Shamanic healing journeys. I have participated in such journeys and ceremonies. I have seen 'rational' psychiatrists completely befuddled by the changes in their clients and oncologists just as confused by the sudden remissions in stage four cancer. I don't believe for one second any of these changes are the result of spiritual magic, pagan woo woo, or God's random healing roulette wheel.
There is something real and verifiable going on that points far more to what we don't know about human consciousness and how it interacts with creation, than what we think we know. The real contribution from sexual abuse victims may not only be in reforming Catholicism's power structures, but may also lie in reforming our understanding of our individually unique human consciousness, how it is both harmed and healed and how mankind really works with and in creation.
Catholicism will lag behind in the study of human consciousness unless it modifies it's sacramental/ritual power structures and begins to take the literal power of love on the deeper levels of human consciousness very seriously. The TRUTH is Jesus tried to teach us about these facts of our earthly existence, but over time Western Christianity opted for sacrificing Jesus's truth about the power of love for the more tangible love of power. How many more abuse victims must Catholicism create before it returns to Jesus's command to create through love and not control through abuse?
