Trigger Warning: Rape and healing are the main subjects of this story. It was originally going to included in a weekly newsletter, but that didn’t feel right so here it is. There’s a lot about memory, recognizing when you may be repressing memories that need to be healed, the weird ways the subconscious changes behavior to get you to pay attention when you really really need to to process something from the past.
It began a month ago. I felt compelled to read stories about break-ins and violent crimes. Could. Not. Stop. Then there was the night a week and a half ago of the Eclipse and Full Moon. I still feel a little ashamed to say this, but I found myself compelled to read one article after another about serial rapists who had gotten away with their crimes for many years, while evidence that could have tracked them down and convicted them, sat in storage in forgotten closets in dusty police station basements. This evidence is what they call rape kits, a term that frankly gives me the creeps. It’s the evidence that’s gathered at the scene of a rape crime and at a hospital where the victim’s body itself is investigated as the scene of the crime. Semen, hairs and other evidence is collected by medical personnel and given to the police. But in a horrendous number of cities, that evidence is never analyzed. So at the Full Moon about 5pm through the next 11 hours I went through every on-line article about serial rapists, the womyn they hurt or murdered, and about the police departments that couldn’t be bothered to investigate the crimes. Interviews with detectives made it clear they just don’t consider rape all that serious of a crime unless it’s also a homicide. Sickening!
As you can imagine, I felt slimy and awful after 11 hours of reading this shit and was having a major ‘what the hell is wrong with me?’ moment. Then in a flash, I remembered it was the exact date I was raped in 1981 by an intruder. I woke up with a stranger on top of me and a knife at my throat. Yes it was a horrible, life threatening experience and there’ s no need to go into more details here. The rapist was never caught.
For many years I remembered the date, but not very often in the past 15 years or so. That’s a good thing. I believe it was the intensity of the Eclipse, Full Moon and a few recent experiences that left me feeling scarily aware of the vulnerability of an independent woman who likes to go places alone. I was blocking the memory of the rape although the pain and anger was retriggered. I’d had weird feelings of people waiting to attack me and of paranoia. For the first time ever I felt unsafe at a peaceful, special place I often housesit.
Though I’d long ago received psychological and energy work to heal from the rape, my subconscious was determined to bring this memory back up so that another level of injury and new anxieties that had attached to it. For the next week I recapitulated memories about the rape and also a lot of other things that happened that hadn’t been processed and healed at all. A feeling of devastating loneliness from the reaction of some of my family to it, the police, the hundreds of mug shots I had to look at, the burden it put on my relationship with a man I deeply loved, and on and on. There was still a lot of my energy and head space trapped in those memories from long ago.
The process of Recapitulation is so powerful, that almost at once I began to feel lighter, better and bigger than the crime and the injury it caused. It’s probably not the first thing you’d turn to if you have just had a severe trauma, but it helps so much in crawling out of the belly of the beast, the beast that is the past. One of the most noticeable benefits I’ve felt in the past few days is feeling alive and grounded in the present moment and without the confusion of feeling my energy split between now and a horrible event many decades ago.