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.

Lifelong Healing

A Certain Refusal, Other People's Lives, and Wasps

In my daily work world I was assaulted twice in the last three years --physically by a favorite older student and emotionally by a trusted colleague. Now a certain, very specific refusal to work has arisen within me.

It is not laziness. It is not fear. It is not willful or intentional. It is almost paralyzing.

I simply cannot even imagine a job site without seeing danger everywhere and becoming unable to summon the old perfectionist, hyper-vigilant, appeasing energies that fueled my out-in-the-world work for decades. I look at my resume and wonder who that person is, who has those skills and talents, who held those jobs for decades.  I want to believe the refusal has purpose, allows a slow dissolving of false selves -- the secretary, the teacher, the tutor, even the writer. What will be left of me then? Will my work personas never rise again?

I don't know.

So, I fill up with other people's lives.  A critic of television and a mother, who years ago only allowed my daughters two hours of watching a week, I am now a detective mystery television show addict. I log many hours on Netflix with Luther, Rosemary, Lewis, Endeavor, Frost, Jane, Morse, Poirot, Columbo, and others.

There is one reprieve I have received that relieves the paralysis:  the old love of the inner world that Nancy Drew activated in my early years retains its power. Personal versions of these televised lives have begun to inhabit my dreams, and through them I can see what parts of myself have been cut off, separated, made vile and need re-integration. Each day I enter that dreamworld and speak with my fractured selves. There is much inner work to be done, to dispel the constructed selves, the destructive energies, break up the vibrational pathways set down by that early abuse and re-activated by workplace assaults.

Occasionally, I break away from both the inner dreamworld and the television world. I set a simple task in the outer world and eventually finish it. It may take months of looking at the same unfinished work before I can act -- like the bullet-shaped bird feeder that hangs from its metal staff by the Bradford pear tree that I see many times a day from my kitchen windows.

The feeder drew a wasp in the spring that built its nest inside. Once, in summer, I tried to oust her with blasts of water from the garden hose, my own serpent in her garden, but she returned. Remembering the bees, I left her to her work and watched from a safe distance as the weeks passed. The nest grew. Newborn, the wasps emerged.

Mid-January now. Cold. The water in the birds' dish freezes nightly. The feeder, glazed green with mold, is empty. No birds come.  Today I bring the feeder inside. Hot water and dish detergent, simple non-anti-bacterial natural dish soap, fill my kitchen sink where the bullet feeder lies submerged for hours. Gloved, I scrub it, remembering the wasps. Dry it.

Why did it take me so long to wash this feeder for its return to the birds, not the wasps? I suspect the wasps, some of whom arose from sleep during our last unseasonably warm spell, will swarm again in springtime around this remembered womb.  No matter how hot the water, nor strong the soap, I cannot dispel the vibrations that will draw those wasps again.

I do not know how.

But the birds, if they come, will know. I spill some seeds as I fill the feeder, leave them where they fall upon the ground -- a simple flirtation with fate, perhaps, a momentary conjunction of chance and will.

The Tend and Befriend Magdalene

Lifelong Healing

The Tend and Befriend Magdalene Response

When I read about Joan Norton's Magdalene Circle radio broadcast on "The Weeping Magdalene," I  was struck by the wisdom that weeping connects us to wholeness and harmony.

At first, I thought that weeping in times of challenge and crisis, like Mary Magdalene did, must cause the goddess-in-our-cells to release the tend and befriend harmonizing hormone oxytocin.

A closer look showed I was half-right:  While weeping does not produce oxytocin, it does remove its opposite, the fight or flight adreno-cortisol hormone from our blood. And this clears the way for a tend and befriend response by the parasympathetic nervous system.

The  parasympathetic nervous system is located in the brain stem, called the "old brain" by some. This  nervous system has to do with emotions, is felt in the body -- often in the stomach -- and produces the hormone oxytocin.

Oxytocin is sometimes called the birth hormone because it is released during childbirth. It is also produced during breastfeeding, hugging, cuddling, and all kinds of intimacy. It causes us to tend and befriend ourselves and others, especially in times of crisis.

Many sources say that as we women evolved, we developed the tend and befriend response as we reacted differently to threats than men did. The masculine fight or flight reaction, which dumps adrenalin and cortisol  into the body, didn't work for women -- then or now -- because we women could not fight or flee when we had small children, oldsters, heart-life, and hearths to care for.

Interestingly, men evolved so that their bodies process and eliminate adrenalin and cortisol much more rapidly than women's bodies do.  Since adreno-cortisol can cause all kinds of health problems  from diabetes to heart disease, getting rid of it fast is important.

Because we women can't discharge adreno-cortisol quickly, we're much better off if we don't go into the fight or flight response when we encounter non-life-threatening challenges in our daily life.

On the other hand, adrenalin and cortisol work well for men in daily life. These hormones allow men to be successful warriors every day in a business environment they created "in their own image" and that fits their biology, not women's.

Knowing this, women are beginning to experiment with consciously bypassing the fight or flight response and going into the tend and befriend response. I connect this tend and befriend response with qualities of the Goddess and with Mary Magdalene as the "Goddess in the Gospels." 

Fortunately, if we women find ourselves overcome by stress and unable to bypass the fight or flight response, then weeping can restore balance. Weeping is purposeful crying.

Researchers, including William H. Frey II, a biochemist at the University of Minnesota, report that crying eliminates stress hormones, specifically, the flight or fight adrenocorticotropic hormones. He reports that women cry more easily than men and five times more often. It seems that women are hard-wired to cry often because our bodies need to release toxins that men's bodies generally release in other ways.

The process for women to manage stress well and to be in harmony with the goddess-in-the-cells may be twofold:

• Learn to activate the oxytocin/tend and befriend response before flight or flight takes over.  We can do this by taking a few conscious breaths and asking for this response, by meditating, by praying, or by creating a connection to the inner goddess in some other manner.
  

• Alternately, if we women are overcome by stress, we can allow ourselves, like Mary Magdalene, to have the natural response of crying, which releases the stress hormones from our bodies.

The Goddess Earth Mother has also given us several plants, whose essential oils help release and sustain the oxytocin response in women. They include sandalwood, myrrh, cedarwood, and possibly frankincense. These oils activate the parasympathetic nervous system along with the limbic system, which some scientists say will counteract the fight or flight response.

Sources:  Dr. Ellie Drake, who founded Braveheart Women, a social network for women.
                 THE FEMALE BRAIN by Dr. Louann Brizendine, M.D.