Why Don't You Just Get Over It?

Chapter 69

Why Don’t You Just Get Over It?

Often I am asked, even by close friends or family members why I don't just get over having been sexually abused. To them I say: I do. I have. I will. I may. Every single day.

For mine is a story about sexual abuse that is so ordinary that one in four young women will be abused before they are eighteen years old. Mine is a story about an ordinary wounding so profound that the fourth one who is abused, who is me, who is my sister, who is my mother, will feel the repercussions all her life. And for some of us, who were abused before consciousness had dawned fully enough to allow memory to record the act, the consequences will exist without a known cause and without proof, like the world demands, that the abuse ever occurred.

The repercussions of abuse vary from one woman to another in their particulars, but a destructive pattern emerges and ensnares and drives each abused one as it did me. For decades, I let the following pattern govern me:

• I fell into my wounded consciousness.

• Though I thought myself a feminist, I acted as though I were fit only for service to a man.

• I projected all of my goodness onto another.

• I fell in love with the other.

• I mistook him for the god/goddess energies.

• Sex bound me to him for a season.

• I did not recognize the abusing or using energies of the other.

• I blamed myself for the problems I encountered in the relationship.

• To compensate and because I felt the pain so deeply, I went into a helping profession, thinking it was the pain of others I felt.

• The projection of my goodness onto the other started to slip.

• He was certainly no god.

• I began to feel his abuse or misuse of me – sometimes it was physical abuse, sometimes sexual, sometimes intellectual or emotional.

• I felt my own wound again, but I mistook its source.

• I always thought it was the particular partner I had chosen who had caused me the pain.

• I left. Him. Home. Jobs. Friends. Family.

• I repeated the cycle, leaving this man for that man and that one for still another. And none of them was the Goddess I was looking for, and surely, that is what I was doing even when I didn’t know it. This was an imprint I picked up from my father’s search for Her that ended in his abuse of me, and that caused me to seek Her in relationships, which abused me as he had.

• I would start a new life. I would discover it was the old life, maybe a little better in some ways, maybe a little worse. But it was the same pattern, and I would have to make life work all over again. New home. Sometimes an apartment. Sometimes a house. Sometimes a pauper. Sometimes a millionaire.

After many repetitions of this pattern, finally, I brought it into the light. Then I let the wound itself preoccupy me, and I sought to find out and prove that I had been wounded. Those were stages I could not by-pass. I wonder if anyone can.

Still, the woman that I have become turns away from being consumed and goes inward, goes inward daily, because she knows that is where the Source is, where growth and safety lie, and where all that has been lost will be regained.

My healing has been life-long and my pattern of my healing is this:

Through dream guidance and psychotherapy, through visions, meditation, prayer, reflective reading, channeled guidance from Tamara and Mary Magdalene, Chi Gong, and through healing others, I attend to my holiness and remake my wholeness each day. When I abandon my daily rituals of healing, I become sick. I become ensnared in the dis-eased pattern again, and even my old second chakra bladder pain returns.

Though I long for it and may yet create it through my longing, so far for me, there has been no one moment of complete healing. Perhaps while I remain in the outer world that created my woundedness and more importantly, continues to wound me energetically through thought and deed with it patriarchal men’s-locker-room consciousness, my healing must remain a continuous process, a continual “getting over it,” full of falls and full of recoveries and full of openings to the Goddess within me, who it turns out, has traveled through the goddess-less years with me and endured the accumulated misogyny of the last four thousand years because I have, and you have, held her in our collective memories.

Now as she rises in me, as she comes because I call her name, and as she rises in others, she will come back to the world and heal it the way she heals me daily. Eventually, the pattern of energy, the matrix, will shift so that the wounding of the Goddess within each of us is no longer possible. And each day I “get over it,” without denying or repressing the original wound, I am helping to call her healing forth.

-Excerpted from Growing Up Without the Goddess: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace of Mary Magdalene by Sandra Pope

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