Lifelong Healing
Reprinted with permission from THE DUPLIN TIMES
Todd
Wetherington
Staff
writer
WARSAW
— The Southern U.S. has long been known as a region where family is honored as
a source of strength and nurturing, where the ties that bind serve to both
protect and maintain values and traditions developed over generations. But
those ties can also serve darker purposes, ones not generally discussed in
polite company—to cloak secrets and actions of the most heinous, soul-deforming
nature.
Sandra
Pope is living testament to the damage families can inflict with those secrets.
Sitting in the living room at her home in Warsaw last week, her pale blue eyes
reflecting the early evening light spilling in through the blinds, the
65-year-old mother of two discussed the events that led her, five years ago, to
write a book detailing the sexual and psychological abuse she suffered at the
hands of family members as a young child. The book also recounts the years of
soul searching and recovery that would eventually lead her back to the
community where so many of her most troubling memories still linger.
In
her book “Growing Up Without The Goddess: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to theSacred Embrace of Mary Magdalene,” Pope vividly recalls her early childhood
years growing up in Greensboro and the central Tennessee mountains in the 1950s
with her mother and stepfather. The book
moves through Pope’s teenage years in the Duplin County of the mid ‘60s
and continues on to describe her attempts, as an emotionally troubled adult, to
free herself of the confusion and self destructive habits arising from her
past.
Pope’s
story eventually leads her back to the land of her father’s family, Warsaw, and
the decision to revisit her past by setting it down in book form.
“I think I was drawn to write it because there
was so much dysfunction and confusion in my life,” explained Pope. “I just
reached a time, after I came here and I had revisited many of the places that
had been a part of my childhood and a part of my wounding, that I just felt it
was ready to be told, that my personal story had places in it that many people
would intersect with.”
According
to Pope, beginning at the age of seven she was raped repeatedly over a period
of nearly four years by her brother, Arthur. As an adult, she would come to
believe that she had been sexually abused at an even earlier age, by her birth
father, who died when she was an infant.
The
book also recounts physical abuse Pope suffered at the hands of her stepfather,
known as Big Arthur, in the form of beatings that would leave her bloody and
bruised.
Though
the early chapters of “Growing Up Without the Goddess” graphically detail the circumstances of
Pope’s sexual and physical abuse, they also offer vivid and lovingly rendered
evocations of the southern landscape — woods, rivers, favorite trees — where
the budding bookworm and nature lover would seek refuge from her often
harrowing family life.
In
the book, Pope is also frank about the ambiguous nature of the abuse she
suffered at the hands of her brother, who she admits to loving unconditionally
throughout her childhood. “I was able to lose myself in school and nature
during the day, but at night, I lost myself in him. By then, it felt natural,”
she writes.
In
the fifth grade, Pope found an outlet that would prove to be key to her future
peace of mind and process of self-discovery — writing.
“I’ve
always found that it’s a way to, not just tell a story, but to figure things
out,” she commented.
At
the age of 11, Pope was separated from her brother and sent to live with her
paternal aunt and uncle in Warsaw — called “Wisteria” in the book — after a
court battle in which her mother was declared unfit to care for her.
Pope
describes her high school days as “the numb years,” a time when she attempted to
forget the disturbing events of her past by focusing on academics and
presenting herself as a “proper” young woman.
Though
she strained to conform to the wishes of her religiously conservative
relatives, the knowledge she had gained far too early in life as a result of
abuse set her apart from her peers, leaving her uniquely aware of the suffering
and hidden intentions of friends, family members, and strangers.
After
graduating from James Kenan High School in 1966 Pope attended the University of
North Carolina in Greensboro but dropped out after one year, turning her back
on two full scholarships.
Having
left college, Pope embarked on a life of political activism, working as a
community organizer for Lumbee Indians and African American populations in Greensboro and Fayetteville. Pope describes
her persona at this time as “a hard core politico, not an alternative life
style flower child.”
According
to Pope, this period in her life was marked by an inability to form lasting
relationships with men, and by the almost unconscious transformations she would
undergo in order to better accommodate each new partner.
“What
happens when you’re abused is you form other personalities, you dissociate, and
I was quite clever at that all my life,” she explained. “If I was with a man
who was a comedian, I could very quickly develop my talents that way; if was
with a political activist, I was an even better political activist. But there
was a hollowness that I wanted to fill.”
Pope
eventually landed in California, where after several divorces and the birth of
twin daughters, she would finally begin seeking answers to the emptiness she
sensed inside herself.
Pope
said the birth of her twin daughters, Ana and Dani, when she 32 coincided with
her realization that something profoundly disturbing was beginning to rise to
the surface of her consciousness. Shortly thereafter, she began attending
guided imagery sessions, a form of therapy in which a facilitator uses
descriptive language intended to psychologically invoke mental imagery, often
involving several or all of the senses, in the mind of the listener.
She
also became a practitioner of Jungian therapy, named for the Swiss psychiatrist
who developed the concepts of extraversion and introversion, archetypes, and
the collective unconscious.
Twenty years after leaving North Carolina,
Pope would reunite with her mother. “I was searching for the missing parts of
my story that might explain my brokenness,” she writes.
She
would also discover that her father had abused his own sister, Pope’s Aunt
Dolores, when they were children.
“There
were invisible forces at work in my life, suddenly pulling me in directions I
had not planned to go,” she remembers.
At
age 54, Pope reconnected with a man she had dated during her senior year in
high school, Bill Rollins, and returned to Warsaw. Pope and Rollins would
eventually marry, a bond that has provided a haven for her to delve deeply into
the past, with all its attendant shadows and traps.
“It’s
not the positive story that anybody wants to hear so that’s been hard, but I’m
okay with that now because I know consciousness is medicine, it has been for me
and I know it will be for other people.”
After
a four year process of writing, editing, and rewriting, “Growing Up Without The
Goddess: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace of Mary
Magdalene,” was published in 2008. Discussing the title of her book, Pope
explained that the Goddess, as personified by the figure of Mary Magdalene in
the Christian religion, represents the
sacred feminine energy that acts as a balance to masculine aggressiveness at
work in the world. Pope argues that any society that does not value and respect
that feminine image will ultimately accept and rationalize sexual abuse.
According
to Pope, the act of recalling past events brought about many of the same
feelings and reactions as the original experiences.
“I
was lucky that I was and still am in therapy, because I would get to a certain
part of the experience and start to describe it and I wouldn’t be able to breath
easily. I would have to go do something else. The thing about emotional
landscapes is that when you revisit them its as though it’s happening in
present time, so I would remind myself that I wasn’t eight anymore, or 11
anymore.”
Pope
describes the book as her attempt to unearth a certain aspect of male dominated
culture that allows men to mete out abuse on the women in their lives with
impunity. “That part of our culture is still active. It may not be as active
but it’s still active and there’s still people, both the perpetrators and the
victims, who are stuck in that dynamic.”
Pope
stressed that her book is not meant as an indictment of any particular region
or people. “I don’t think it’s a damning story. I think it’s a historical phase
where there are parts of a culture that need to be exposed so they can die off
and a new cycle can begin. And I don’t think it’s just limited to this area; of
course it isn’t. But this is where it happened to me, this is where it grew
from for me and this is where I am.”
Though
she has held readings of her book across North Carolina in the five years since
it was published, Pope said she has only now begun to feel comfortable
publicizing it in her home county.
“I
hadn’t been doing much writing so I went back to my book and started reading
it, and I realized my story is everybody’s story, even if they haven’t been
personally abused. I realized I was egotistical not to let this story go, to
pretend that it’s just mine.”
While
the raw details of the book read like a southern gothic novel, the facts as
Pope recalls them are all too familiar to thousands of women throughout the
U.S.
“According
to the statistics, one in four women in the U.S. has been abused. There’s a
really big cesspool there that has to be cleaned up.”
Pope
said she believes society as a whole has made significant gains in educating
its citizens about sexual abuse. She said many young people are now more aware
of the potential dangers from would be abusers.
“It’s
not as easy for perpetrators to groom their victims over time because of
information about what’s appropriate that is out there. It still happens and it
still happens way too much but I think the whistle might get blown a little
sooner and there might be help available a little sooner.”
Pope
said she has come to understand the perpetrators are often victims themselves.
“That doesn’t mean I want to be around them. But it means that I understand
that it has been a part of the culture that needs to be brought to light and
needs to be changed.”
According
to Pope, she has attempted to contact her brother since returning to Duplin
County. Though she has spoken to his daughter, there has been no reunion with
Arthur. “Does he fear me?” asks Pope in the book. “Does he feel the shadow of
the past fall across the path of the life he has built so painstakingly since
he closed the door on our dark deeds decades ago…”
Asked
to describe her present state of mind concerning the trauma that was visited on
her as a child, the strength of will that allowed a seven-year-old child of the
South to carry on in the face of her own terrible knowledge rises just beneath
Pope’s composed, seemingly fragile exterior.
“I’m
in total non-acceptance. I’m in total recovery and healing and resistance to
the ways of being that I learned in order to survive that weren’t right for me.
I will hold my peace; I will hold my tongue most of the time. But there are
times when I won’t. There’s no other way for me to be.”
Todd
Wetherington may be reached at twetherington@ncweeklies.com or 910-296-0239.
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