Breaking the Silence Surrounding Acquaintance Rape

Lifelong Healing

I met Renee DeVesty on BraveHeartWomen.com, the social network for women who want to change themselves and save the world. Founder Ellie Drake says that this online community "brings together women from all around the world to share and receive inspiration. Through conversation, compassion, and community, BraveHeart Women empowers women of all ages to discover their own voices, expand their potential, and be the change they want for themselves, their family, community, and the world."

Renee Devesty is truly a BraveHeart woman, who was raped at 19, recovers daily as all survivors do, and tells her story to help other women break the silence and seek help so they, too, can begin to thrive, not just survive

She has agreed to be a guest blogger and share her story below.

BREAKING THE SILENCE SURROUNDING ACQUAINTANCE RAPE

It's been almost three decades since I was raped -- not by a stranger, but an acquaintance. The man who held me down was someone I knew and trusted. It happened among people who were lifelong friends; and like so many women, I was terrified, confused, and blamed myself for far too long. I'm telling my story now because I am ready for this with every bone in my body. I've been waiting to heal for 30 years. It's time for the silence to be broken.

What Happened
I'd gone for an overnight trip to my best friend's camp on a lake in upstate New York. There were 10 of us who'd gathered there, all 19 years old. We had all attended school together, lived nearby and knew each other most of our lives.

I rode to the camp with my best friend and her husband. They had married young because he had joined the Navy. Though they now lived out of town, they'd returned for the weekend while he was home on leave. When we got to the camp, my best friend told me I could have the best bedroom upstairs, since everyone else was sleeping on the floor. Excited, I put my belongings in the upstairs room and changed into my swimsuit for a day on the boat.

Back then, the legal drinking age in New York state was 18 and we'd been drinking on and off all day. When evening came, we were all hanging out on the deck enjoying ourselves. I wasn't much of a drinker and after being on the lake all day, I was the first to go to bed.

Betrayal
I awoke to a feeling of pressure. When I opened my eyes, there was my best friend's husband standing over me, one hand clamped against my mouth while he held me down with the other. He was a big guy and I was frozen with fear and intimidation; I absolutely could not move a muscle. His buddy, another friend I had known all my life, was now on top of me also holding me down and grabbing at my underwear. It was the middle of the night; I was half asleep and thought I must be dreaming.

Soon, it became evident I was not dreaming. It was real, but psychologically, it didn't make any sense.

Where was everyone? Where was my best friend? Why were these guys -- my friends -- doing this to me? It was all over quickly and they left immediately; but before he walked out, my best friend's husband warned me not to say anything or he'd deny it.

I was definitely afraid of him. I was raised a strict Catholic and immediately thoughts of fear, shame and disgust filled my head. I began to think this was all my fault. I thought I must have done something to encourage this. And then it hit me: Was it really an attack because I knew them? Was it actually rape since they were my friends? My head was spinning and I was physically sick to my stomach.

"I never said a word"
When I awoke next morning, I was still terrified, and it got worse when I went downstairs and saw my attackers in the kitchen. I didn't know what to think or say. My best friend's husband just stared at me. My best friend appeared to be acting normal. "She'll never believe you," I told myself. This is her husband and she loves him. Silently, I packed my things and rode the whole way home in the car with my rapist. And I never said a word.

I immediately blamed myself and thought if I had only slept downstairs with everyone else, it wouldn't have happened. Or if I didn't wear my swimsuit, I would have been safe. My mind could not comprehend this whole scenario, so in order to cope with it, I blocked it out as if it never happened. I shut down completely and decided I would never tell anyone about it.

Pregnant from the rape
A few months later I realized the nightmare wasn't over. I had become pregnant from the rape. I went into shock again. Being a strict Catholic, I thought, "How could God allow this to happen to me?" I was convinced I was being punished. I felt enormous shame and guilt. This was 30 years ago. Practically no one went to counseling then or openly sought help for such things. I could not tell my mother, and I was too ashamed to tell my friends. And who would believe me now two months later? I still could not believe it myself.

Because of my shame, fear, disgust and the belief I had no one to turn to, I regretfully made the decision to terminate the pregnancy.

Trauma and aftermath of being raped
The rape and then the trauma of the subsequent choices I had to make as a result of being raped haunted me for years. I found that although my body healed, my thought process and my inner core were deeply damaged. Because I blamed myself, I hated myself. I became a severe alcoholic, drinking seven days a week to numb myself.

I had a job that I should have been fired from because I would show up late and sleep on the couch in the restroom during my lunch hour. Bill collectors called me non-stop. My relationships with men were abusive.

I was terrified to sleep alone at night, had horrible nightmares and finally resorted to sleeping with a baseball bat, a butcher knife and a cordless phone because of the fear that it would happen again. This act that had ended years and years ago continued to torture me every minute, every hour, every day of my life.

It wasn’t until I was married and then pregnant with my son that I became sober and started counseling. I was 31 years old, and it had been 12 years since I was raped. In my first session, I ran to the window and tried to physically open it because I felt like all the oxygen had left the room. I truly could not breathe. I stayed with it, but the pain of uncovering these old wounds was mentally and emotionally traumatizing.

Caught in the cycle of abuse
Because I stopped using alcohol to soothe the pain, I chose food as an addiction. My weight fluctuated constantly until I stopped eating at one point altogether. My counselor told me if I didn’t start eating I would be put in 30-day treatment facility. I remember days of physically forcing myself to eat one slice of cantaloupe, because I couldn’t bear the thought of being away from my son. I would eat not for me, but for him.

That’s how psychologically devastating rape can be. Rape takes away your sense of self. You disappear. In order to survive, you don’t exist in your mind. It is too painful to see yourself through the pain, through the action that has taken place. Your body is your canvas, the picture you show to the world. And if someone has violated your personal canvas, how do you remove that image in your mind? You become disconnected from your body and are convinced that nothing will ever erase the marks that are left behind. Nothing.

Recovering
Having my son forced me to take care of myself. I had someone I loved so much who needed me, I had to get better. I worked extremely hard to get the help I should have gotten for that beautiful, innocent teenager all those years ago.

Because of what happened to me and how deeply affected I was by the entire experience, today I am a rape survivor, not a rape victim. There are so many more places available to address issues similar to mine than there were 30 years ago, including many community-based rape crisis centers. No one should ever have to suffer in silence.

Helping others to survive and thrive
I currently am a high school youth leader and I conduct retreats for women and teenage girls on self-empowerment, teaching a sense of belief in and love for yourself, and how to make healthy choices despite your circumstances in life.

I've come forward with my story after so many years -- and am now an advocate for ending abuse and violence against women and girls -- because the psychological damage caused by rape takes its toll unless women seek immediate help. To reclaim their lives and become rape survivors, rape victims need to realize that they are not to blame The negative thoughts of self-destruction that follow rape or sexual abuse are so detrimental that it is imperative that some form of healing begin immediately.

We are pure, whole, and beautiful
We need to remember our beautiful canvas is ours and ours alone. Nothing or no one ever can -- or ever will -- be able to alter your inner core, your center of purity, wholeness and beauty. Only we have the power to continually wipe it clean and begin again.

And we must believe that, indeed, we are important enough to begin again.

Professionally, Renee is a Marketing Consultant with over 25 years experience in the management, coordination, and promotion of corporate and non-profit events, concerts and fundraisers. She is the founder of Blossom/Take Root & Grow, wellness retreats emphasizing the importance of emotional, physical, spiritual and financial health and well-being of women and teen girls.

She has been a featured public speaker at events including V-Day's Vagina Monologues, Junior Achievement's Young Women's Symposium, and an exhibitor at WISE—Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship in 2009 and 2010. She is also a member of WomenTies—Together Inspiring Entrepreneurial Success. As a high school youth leader, she works with teens on projects that emphasize service in the community, support of self-esteem and self-image issues, and how the choices you make directly impact your future. Renee is passionate about community service, and her commitment to helping others is at the forefront of everything she does.

For more about Renee visit http://www.reneedevesty.com

Connecting with the Divine through the Intuition for Discernment and Protection against Enchantment

(This is a Rowan Tree. Its red berries have an ancient magical symbol of protection --
a pentagram or five-pointed star opposite their stalks.*)

I was scheduled to drive to Greensboro yesterday to the NC Writers Conference at UNC-G, the same kind of conference I attended two years ago and where I felt like I was really out of place. Those I met were good people, and the seminar on memoir-writing was helpful, but I was back on the campus I fled 42 years earlier to join the consciousness-raising and anti-establishment movements of my youth.

At the earlier conference, I felt like I was an interloper, and a part of me wished I had stayed on a more traditional writer's path through academia. I skipped the conference last year.

But this year, I thought that, with my book published, it would be a good time to return to the conference. I felt that I would not feel displaced this time because now I was a "published writer." I had paid my fees, had everything packed and in the car, and I even got up at 4:30 a.m., so I could get dressed and leave on time.

I sat on the side of my bed, and feeling exhausted, I remembered how I always tell my clients that they are never required to do more than their bodies can stand, that only when their "cup runneth over" can they be certain that their work in the world is of the Divine and not of the ego, from the high heart chakra and not the human heart chakra.

I remembered that Clarissa Pinkola-Estes said we sometimes have to remind even the angels, who visit us with inspiration, that we are not like them, that we need rest, and food, and time for recovery. I had been working non-stop on all sorts of projects: I had been eating most of my meals standing up, had canceled dream analysis and therapy sessions so I could work more, and had minimized or eliminated exercise and meditation time. I reached under my pillow, found my Magdalene Rosary, and I used it as a pendulum to ask if "we" should go to the conference.

NO. That was the answer.

I didn't like the answer. I had pictures in my mind of being able to read at the open mic, display my books (maybe even sell some), and introduce myself in my seminar as a "published writer." But my body held the wisdom of "NO," and my vibrational field, which moved the pendulum, showed me this "NO." It was a big one, too. The pendulum did not hesitate. It rocked back and forth vigorously.

Okay. So, what then? I went down to my healing room, and asked for tolerance from the Divine, as I asked that same question from the pendulum I use in daily life and healing work. Again, "NO."

I got tricky. I decided to ask: "Is it okay if we go?" I got a "Yes," which, of course, is what I always get when I frame questions that way because the Divine is always embracing of me, even when I don't do what's best for me.

I meditated, watching the clock with one eye just in case when I asked again, I'd still have time to get ready and go. I still got "No." Three times was all I dared to ask the same question, out of at least minimal respect for the process. The Divine knows I am not dumb enough to need to be told more than three times -- at least told in the same way, the tricky mind said.

So, instead I looked for the Celtic Tree Oracle deck I bought three years ago, when my ever-present connection to dream life faltered. My therapist and dream analyst said that images are the language of the Soul, and she suggested that introducing a system of images as a shared language between me and my inner wisdom might fill the void the dreams left.

Working with the Ogham (pronounced Ohm!) has been wonderful, whether I pull a single card in a moment of distress or do a complete reading, I always feel re-harmonized with the inner, the "Otherworld." The Celts say that the Otherworld exists right alongside this one. One of my favorite quotes comes from a book I lost and forgot the title of long ago, but I remembered this quote and even kept it in amongst my bills during a particularly difficult time in life: "The mundane is the edge of glory." Indeed!

I took the deck from its special place, unwrapped the card from the scarf that acupuncturist Sally Norton bought for me when she was visiting Sai Baba ten years ago, and I asked my simple question in this way: "I have been told not to go to the writers conference today? What is the situation concerning this?"

I shuffled the cards, cut the deck, and drew the card with the Rowan tree on it. The Rowan tree protects from "enchantment, " from the "evil eye," according to *THE CELTIC TREE ORACLE by Liz and Colin Murray.

Because I had done a full reading when GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS first came out, I recognized the card. The Rowan tree was the only tree that had shown up in all three circles in the reading-- once in the past or foundational state of mind that created the current situation; once in the present, as the balance needed because of the confusion created by the past; and again in the third circle as "the way forward," "the future perhaps. . .or even the creative force" that could resolve the confusion of the present (Murray, THE CELTIC TREE ORACLE).

At the time I did the full reading, I understood that my challenge would be to let the book's healing message find its way the world and to avoid being "enchanted" by seeking praise for myself as the writer.

The Rowan card counsels: "Undoubtedly if you are in danger of 'enchantment," being swayed or mesmerized by harmful or vindictive powers, keep your wits about you. Choosing this Ogham card will help you . . . distinguish bad from good, harm from help, using your spiritual strength to turn away anything that threatens your serenity and purpose. . . You must use your sense and intuition to distinguish one from another, and so be protected"(Murray).

The guidance was perfect!

I was not serene. I had forgotten my purpose, the book's purpose, was to heal me and share my healing story with others, so that its vibrations could be a part of their healing process, if they choose.

And as a survivor of neglect and physical and sexual abuse, enchantment and mesmerizing were very familiar to me, for enchantment and mesmerizing are consequences and survival modes for those of us who have been abused.

"Enchantment and mesmerizing" answers the question many still ask about abused women "Why doesn't she leave him?"

Enchantment and mesmerizing answers that question this way: "Because she is under his influence and controlled by his 'evil-eye,' by his way of seeing her, by the man-culture way of seeing her, so she thinks she deserves what he, the god-man in patriarchal society, gives."

So there it was:

I wasn't going to the conference because I was interested in any of the workshops, though they were all wonderful and led by lifelong writers with developed expertise and much, much to offer writers learning their craft. I wasn't going to hear the keynote speaker, the faculty reading, or even to have lunch with a faculty member or an author.

For me, the "Writers Conference" had changed into something other than what it really was -- talented, dedicated writers and willing, hardworking students, who were coming together to enjoy one another's writing and to enjoy learning from one another. For me, decades ago when I attended, colleges and universities carried and disseminated the vibrational field of the patriarchy, of "Daddy's way." There I was, thinking of going to what had become, in my mesmerization, an enchanted version of the writers conference where I would be noticed, where I would be acknowledged, where my Daddy would love, not abuse, me.

So, the pendulum and the Ogham, which connected me to my own inner Divine, said, "NO."

The Divine said, "NO," because I do not need to be mesmerized or enchanted by outer world acknowledgment -- I never, never need to return to seek "his" approval.

The more I go out and read my book to people who come because they know what the book, not the author, is about, the more I am humbled by how survivors daily transform their pain into strength. Author Joan Norton said in a review of GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS that "the inner journey of recovery of the 'feminine face of God' is the great work we are all engaged in – and maybe it is abused women who are leading the way."

There! Within that inner journey of recovery is where my Rowan tree grows and where my protection from self-enchantment lies.

Blessing and Rainbows!

Sandra

P.S. Receiving praise is healing and the praise for this book has been abundant. Thank you all for your generous praise! Seeking it for its own sake, for me, is enchantment.

Guest Blog: I, too, found the Mother I so badly needed in the Goddess

What follows is a commentary by Merry Stetson Hall about how she entered the story I tell in my spiritual memoir GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS and discovered that we shared similar hidden abusive experiences growing up in a culture that does not honor the feminine as divine. Her story touched me deeply and affirmed that this is our collective story and that as each one of us heals by finding the Goddess within, that healing spreads out to all others, too. Thank you, Merry!

Dear Sandra,

I commandeered GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS right out from under Burl's nose for two days! I intended to look at the format and presentation because I'm almost committed to using BookSurge to publish BRINGING FOOD HOME. I found your story too compelling to put down, however, and read every word greedily.

A review follows, but first I wanted to share with you more personally.

You are, indeed, right that your story bespeaks the gender abuse all women suffer in one form or another in our patriarchal culture, whether or not the abuse manifests in sexual rape. It pervades our sexuality, our relationships, our self-esteem, our spirituality, our employment, our status, and every conceivable aspect of our being on earth. It perverts our fathers, brothers, sons, and lovers too in a different way. You are right on target, too, when you suggest that the sexual manifestation of this abuse is inevitably rampant throughout our homes and families, because it is based on misogyny. You offer the painful details of your personal experience with eloquence and courage. Because you also trace your recovery in ongoing detail, your story stands as a guidepost for the acknowledging and healing journey we all must take. Your understanding that we can never be fully healed in a culture that continues its patriarchal abuse and asks us to turn to an all-male Father/Son God for guidance out of sin is invaluable. We heal ourselves by resurrecting the Goddess; we resurrect the Goddess by healing ourselves. This is our ongoing mission.

I, too, found the Mother I so badly needed in the Goddess as she variously manifests within me, within nature, within human history, within the universal energy that flows through us all, within my therapists, and eventually even within the female abusers who became my personal teachers. I am especially gifted to see and hear Her present in my husband Burl's experience, relationship, and voice--a rare blessing.

I cannot yet fathom whether the story I have woven from my own experience with my father is shrouded memory or personal mythology. I have decided that it really doesn't matter, because it requires a story of that scope to account for who I am and how I am wounded. My story goes that he used me and my vagina as a "mule" for black market goods when I was 3-4 years old and we were in Japan right after World War II. He then abandoned me in mind and spirit while still a part of the family in body as he sank into psychosis and frequent sexual liaisons that took him from home.

My mother's coping mechanism of putting a "normal" face on all this, moving the family whenever the truth started to catch up with us, mothering/nursing/forgiving her husband, and encouraging me to love/respect him as a father, only deepened the abuse and delayed my recovery. As a young mother, I ended up stepping into the role of my mother's mother, comforting her and getting her legal representation when my father finally threatened to leave her/us for his newest lover.

I did not have a brother (unless the half-Japanese half-brother I fantasize we left in Japan is real and not imaginary), but I have a now-deceased, abusive older sister, more deeply wounded than I, who spent her time on earth hating herself, life, our father, and most especially me for stealing from her the scant amount of love, attention, and affirmation my mother had left after mothering our father and nursing the wounds he inflicted on her. By the time mother had coped with my father, my sister, and her own pain, there was little energy left to mother me though she meant well. To gain at least her approval I identified with her and took on the role of "the healthy one who would succeed and uphold the family honor."

Only through my willingness to fail, to hurt, to do the incredibly painful work of acknowledging and healing have I grown now as a 65-year-old into a true though shaky manifestation of that role. Like the velveteen rabbit, I have become real. Only Sophia could have placed and nurtured the wisdom, willingness, courage, patience, and forgiveness in me that this transformation required.

Here's my book review. I hope you find it helpful.

GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS gives story and form to the abuse all women suffer in one form or another in our patriarchal culture. Sandra Pope offers the painful details of her personal experience with eloquence and courage. She shows how the denial of the Goddess has blighted both men and women from generation to generation in her family and the human family. She reveals how rape and incest team up with denial, neglect, and the perversion of victims to maim us. She shows how both the egregious and the subtle forms of sexual abuse pervade our families, our sexuality, our relationships, our self-esteem, our spirituality, our status, and every conceivable aspect of our being on earth. Her message that we heal ourselves by resurrecting the Goddess and resurrect the Goddess by healing ourselves is much needed in today's world.

Merry Stetson Hall
Author of BRINGING FOOD HOME: The Maine Example. Her book profiles local farmers, gardeners, homesteaders, processors, distributors, merchants, restauranteurs, consumers, and advocates. Through these profiles, it explores how a healthier community, economy, ecology, and ethic are growing up around local food in Maine.

Going Home to Tell the Truth!

Promoting GROWING UP WITHOUT THE GODDESS: A Journey through Sexual Abuse to the Sacred Embrace of Mary Magdalene

I didn't know where to begin promoting my book, but when a friend, Rev. Mary Catherine (Kitty) Bass, suggested I contact the Women's Studies departments of colleges and universities, I knew she was right. She doesn't take credit for the suggestion; she says she never had the idea before she spoke it and that it came from the Divine Mother of us all.

I started with UNC-Greensboro because I was born and abused in Greensboro. Not only does UNC-G have a women's studies department, but it turns out it is one of the oldest departments in the country, and it has over 100 faculty affiliates involved in a multi-disciplinary approach to women's studies.

I spoke with a young woman who referred me to the Greensboro Hive, which has a childhood abuse survivor's group that is planning a spring film series on abuse.

When I went to the Hive website map, I was amazed to see that the center is located right next to the park, Morris Farrow Park, where I used to play. The house where I lived and was abused (1302 Portland Street) was about two blocks from the center! The large, old two-story house of my youth is no longer there, but it is in my memory and in my book.

I visited that neighborhood three years ago when I began to write my book. I visited Morris Farrow Park where I used to run wild with my brother and the neighborhood boys and where I was certain that there were trolls in the culvert that connected the two parts of the park. My life was dark and troubled because of early hidden sexual abuse and because of the constant beatings from my step-father. No wonder I thought I saw trolls!

I have stones on my altar that I picked up while I was there and that helped me anchor my Self as I wrote my story. While I was picking up the stones, a young girl about 11 or 12 years old mooned me as she was swinging. That act of inappropriate exposure pierced my nostalgia and made me remember more about the wounding I received at 1302 Portland Street when I was just a baby, wounding that left me unable to establish appropriate boundaries -- like the young girl on the swing.

Looking at the map, I was awed by the coincidence, and I knew that my neighborhood of 60 years ago was the exact right place to promote my book about sexual wounding, about cultural complicity in the sexual abuse of women, and about the inevitability of sexual abuse when women are not imaged as divine while men are.

I took the plunge, wrote an e-mail to the woman in charge and told her this story. I was immediately welcomed by her. She invited me to be a part of the spring film series, which will include Angela Shelton's film about abuse, Finding Angela Shelton.

Just like that!

I said, YES!

The Divine Feminine, the Great Mother of us all, guided me home, so I could be a part of healing that place, and so my healing could continue. I am in awe and in gratitude.

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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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