The "Righting" Process and No Place to Hide (Was there ever?)

Lifelong Healing

GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS was published five years ago, but I kept it secret in my hometown. I had readings in Raleigh, Greensboro, Wilmington, and an invitation-only secret reading in Magnolia, NC. I was afraid to go public locally, afraid I could not stand the scrutiny, the judgment, the misunderstanding, the denials, and the anger my story of sexual and physical abuse could unleash.

A few months ago after being unemployed and wondering about my life's purpose for months, I read GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS again. I was surprised at the writing. Yes, by its quality, for it is certainly well written, thanks to the muses that be. But the lessons the book taught me, the understanding that came through the writing/righting process surprised me most, and I wondered that I had ever known them. Grateful, then, to learn them again.

Grateful, too, to understand that those lessons were meant for more than me, that writing the book was truly about making right again a pattern that had been warped in my life from an early age because I was abused by family -- by those who should have protected, nurtured, and honored me. Writing the book showed me that what had been warped in my life and stolen my power had been warped in the culture as a whole, and certainly in my hometown Southern culture.

All of us who have been sexually or physically abused know that healing is a lifelong process -- one that recurs, perhaps on a higher level each time, but must recur, must be revisited again and again. Not the searing pain. We can leave that behind most of the time when it has taught us all we need to know or can bear to know in the moment. Healing the continued pain caused by the vibrational patterning that was set askew and has made us unable to be ourselves and use our talents fully -- that healing is lifelong. And any knowledge about ways to create that healing belongs to everyone.

Tomorrow an article about my abuse, recovery, and book will appear in our local paper, THE DUPLIN TIMES. My community is small. I am known as a teacher, a wife of a prominent writer, and as an old schoolmate to many of the 3,000 residents in my town. Tomorrow there will be no place for me to hide this other previously unknown Sandra, no wondering if others know my dark secret and the lifelong warping it caused me.

Fortunately, neither will be there be a hiding place for the shadow side of family values that de-valued me and allowed the men in my family to abuse me.

In that exposure lies my hope that having owned that piece of the culture that I, unfortunately, know well, that having brought its ugliness to light, others may speak out in their own time, find their own healing, and together we can howl out loud till fathers and brothers and cousins and uncles and strangers no longer find cultural training or support for their dark deeds, and what's wrong in the culture is righted.