It’s mine, belongs to me. I know that now. More than know. I feel it. Because I live within it, I found my way back. Back to a girl’s home, one she had never known, so how could she know how it would feel ? How long it would take to get back here, or the terrible, terrible pain she would have to hold to get back in ? The body. Stolen from us by sexual abuse. Taken. Out in the ether, floating, divided, broken into parts, straining to come back together. There’s been so much grief, but the loss of my body, its ownership and exploitation at the hands of others, is one of the worst to manage. If I’m going to talk about organised ritual abuse, human trafficking and the business of sexual abuse by the rich and powerful, then what I’m talking about is how they steal children’s bodies, for their own sadistic pleasure. And for the child, this feels like death. Is death. Death of the authentic self. To return to our body through whatever healing process you may choose, involves also the extremely painful death of denials we created to leave our bodies, behind in their hands, so we could continue to breathe, to live. To survive.
Finding my way back into my body has made me really physically ill. As I went within in therapy, to explore and shine a light on the truths I’d had to forget, there were so many layers of emotions, of pain my body had had to carry in that forgetting, in the not being there. The illnesses I have developed, some of them resolved now, some of them lasting, have spoken out this pain, revealed it right out of its hiding. Everything that my body once stored, came forward, with my permission, to feel all the pain, to hold it. Like the greatest release you could have, but over time. It’s taken me a very long time, years, to come back into my body. But once you start this process the wisdom of your body takes over if you allow it. It knows what it has to do to heal, what it has to let go of. I had to stand back and let my body go, because I so desperately wanted to be free. The body wants to be well, so does the mind, I just had to get out of their way. Trust , which is so hard when it hurts as much as it does. But I came to know how much better, that word doesn’t cover it, I felt intense bliss, coming home to my body. Once we’d joined to sweep out the pain, sorrow and filth of what they’d done to us, falling apart going through this, we came out the other side, purged, glowing, free. And was that pain worth it to feel this free?! You don’t know what freedom feels like if you’ve never had it before. But it’s good, oh so good.
I talk a lot about EMDR therapy on my blog, on Instagram and in all my work. Because it’s EMDR that allowed me to do all I’ve described. It’s EMDR that allowed my mind and body to really remember, all I had to forget, to leave behind. It’s a therapy for life, for living, for feeling, all the pain, all the joy, all the way back into my skin. It’s not for the faint hearted. It’s an intense, powerful tool, that takes you right back to the centre of the abuse and trauma. You relive it, feel it all, if you allow. But in that process you start at the beginning of the horror, see it for all that is, and then take the child you were out of it. Reclaim her and begin the way back to who she really is. If I sound evangelical about it, maybe I am. Since I was small, a prisoner, all I wanted was to be free from them. That’s not who I was. And I’d tried so many ways to become free all my life. But EMDR was the only way I could go right back into the eye of the storm to that child, who had to survive by forgetting. Sometimes, many times I have wished I never started EMDR, such were the doors to the truth it opened. I have been suicidal , desperate for the pain to stop. But that pain was what they did to me, and I have no business holding it as mine. It wasn’t, it needed a way out and that’s what EMDR gave it. A way out and a new way to live. Without fear and dissconnection. To live within myself and know this self as the wonder she was and is.