Sarah’s Healing Journey from Sexual Abuse
Sarah had been abused by everyone in her family. She felt an eerie sense of doom and a paralyzing fear whenever she thought about her childhood.
As a girl, she had been raped and beaten by her father; she had also been verbally abused and humiliated by her mother and all her brothers and sisters.
She was the youngest child in her family and the family scapegoat.
She knew that she wanted to recover, but the memories were too painful to recall. How could she go back there? I suggested to her that she could go back into her past little by little. She could create a feeling of safety for herself before confronting the most difficult parts of her past. I suggested that she begin by imagining that she was throwing a blanket of protective light over all her childhood memories to make them safe to remember.
Feeling safe now, she decided that it was okay to do some more exploration in trance. Having a rich imagination, she found herself in a castle. She opened a door, and before her she saw a gorgeous display of multi-colored jars. Picking up the ruby red jar, she drank it; it was a special remedy for her blood. As she drank the blue one, it calmed her heart, and the clear one cleansed her system.
She was beginning to heal her physical body first.
Now she felt more courageous, and she opened herself to experiencing the old and terrible wounds. The first image she saw was of herself as a small girl lying on the floor in bandages, and she protected both herself and the girl with healing light.
I asked her if she were ready to go back to her childhood environment.
She went back to a garage where she had been attacked by her father; it brought up a feeling of rage in her. She said, “I have to destroy this room.” She chose to bomb it from above, and it made a large hole in the earth. Images of healing came up next, as she filled the hole with new earth; next she planted a rain forest there – complete with exotic parrots and trees.
Again she covered the young girl with protective healing light.
More visions came. Her psyche was opening up to reveal more and more information. She was hiding in a laundry bin, curled up in the fetal position.
Her father was on a rampage, and she had found a good place to hide; she knew he’d never look for her in the laundry bin. I suggested that she could rescue the child.
In trance, Sarah took the little girl out of the bin and brought her to a tree in the yard where they both climbed up into the tree house far away from harm. The two of them, adult and child, sat huddled together, both of them comforted.
In another trance session, she was a little girl, very sick with the measles.
Something was terrifying her; she screamed piercingly. There was a monster there with large yellow eyes peering down on her. Again, she reached into her arsenal and took out a fire bomb and blasted the monster. This time, she asked to be covered with silver light.
Back in the apothecary room, she saw another red bottle – beautiful and hot and dangerous. This time the bottle was filled with the fire of fury. As she drank it, she felt a fire within her. The fire was now her power. She was really able now to get in touch with the fury that she had held inside. I suggested that she not only feel the fire as anger, but also as a powerful energy of creativity. Then I suggested that she experience it as a healing that comes in the form of light.
Another time, she saw herself as four years old, standing there with no clothes on after her father had beaten her. She threw her toys at her father until she was exhausted, and then she went into a mountain stream to cleanse and wash away the terrible feelings. She felt the healing water all over her body as it washed away the fear and the rage, and then a sunbeam dried her off and soothed her.
In another picture, she was now ten, dressed in red sandals and a green dress, and she was lying on the ground, desolate and devastated. Her dress was raised up, and she was saying, “My daddy….” In trance, she brought in the adult Sarah to rescue this devastated child. She wrapped her in a blanket, washed her and gave her some special healing remedies. She held her and loved her and took her home.
In trance, she began to speak out loud to her father, telling him how his rage had left lifelong scars on her, but that now she is in touch with another force within her, her own power to heal.
The Healing Power of Her Essence
At first Sarah had been too fearful to even look at her childhood, especially at her father’s sexual abuse.
Gradually, she began to feel safer as she created “protection” by putting healing light around her entire childhood. Soon the powerful and imaginative parts of her began to emerge as the images became more specific and graphic. When she saw the apothecary jars, her outer behaviour changed as the imagined medicines soothed her. She felt more safe and protected; she became less irritable and more calm. She said, “I don’t feel like the past is creeping into the present so much more.” She was paving the way to
go more deeply.
When she “bombed” the garage, the improvements became even more noticeable. She realized that there is a power of the present that can heal the events of the past. As she continually covered the young girl with healing light, she was actually creating healing experiences that were now a part of her “history.”
She developed more courage to experience events of the past. She was coming closer to her essence as a powerful being. This “power of the present” gave her fuel. And although many of her own healing choices were to destroy (by bombing, for example), others were tender and gentle. She almost playfully brought the young girl to a tree house for protection. Another time, she wrapped her in a blanket and washed her. Going to the healing water was another act of tenderness. Finding her own essence helped her to find sources of both power
and love.
This is how she was able to develop a healing consciousness. She could call upon this healing power inside of her to make the wounded parts whole. She could confront and mend these ancient traumas that had been incapacitating her for years. One time, she remarked, “I didn’t realize that I had been walking around in shock all this time.”
At one point, an old familiar pain, similar to menstrual pain, had come up in her body, and as she became aware of it, the pain disappeared. She had recognized its origins in this event that had happened when she was just a girl of ten. She began to cry, releasing the old wounds.
She noticed discernable changes in her life. One day, she said, “I’ve been more lighthearted. I feel like a burden has been lifted. I’ve had a massive sense of release. I haven’t felt as furious. When I saw the desperate tired person behind the anger, it helped me. When I was getting angry, I stood back and said, ‘This fury has been hurting me; I don’t have to let it hurt me anymore.’ I’ve been fatigued all my life, and my energy is coming back. My shame is gone; I realize that I wasn’t bad and I didn’t do it. I feel so much more calm.”
She had been able to develop more witness consciousness and more wisdom – and this opened up new areas for her in being able to come to terms with the terror and anger that had been controlling her life for years.
The Healing Principles
You can overcome your fear of dealing with the past.
Not everyone is afraid of “going back there” – but you may be. The traumas may have been so great, that you are still terrorized by them. If you have a desire to heal, you can overcome the fear by going slowly, by creating safety, and by remembering the power and love of your essence that can help you do your healing work.
You can bring more love into your “history”.
Your love can reach back into your past to “repaint” it, and you can actually change your brain’s imprinting about past events. When you give love and attention to yourself as a child, for example, you may be able to experience actual changes in old feelings of alienation that you’ve been carrying around.
You can empower yourself to stand up to those who abuse you.
It is possible in trance to experience your own ability to assert yourself, and then you can create the actual experience in your life. You find out how to do it by tapping into your own essential power while in trance where you can then “rehearse” its actual expression. (See more on “Trance Rehearsal”).
You can experience and transmute your anger.
You need not keep your anger inside to let it fester and turn into depression and lack of self-love. You can experience it in imagery or in your body or in sounds. There is an alchemy to anger; fire becomes fuel for action becomes the light of healing. The heat of your fury can ignite your creative forces. You can then experience this energy as the force of light.
You can confront your “monsters.”
You can look a monster in the eye and say, “If you think you’re going to scare me, you’re wrong!” Fairy tales and myths describe the archetypal journeys of souls going through the dark forest of their lives on their quest for whatever their holy grail might be (relationships, empowerment, enlightenment).
The challenges or the monsters they meet up with serve to strengthen these souls.
Your “monster” may be a repetitive thought or fear, and it’s inspiring to realize that you can stare it down and let it know that it can’t have power over you anymore.
You can observe your own spontaneous imagery and let it show you what’s deep inside.
On the screen of your mind, watch your own pictures, and observe what’s going on in your psyche. Because in trance you have a heightened awareness, you can often see interrelationships between events and their causes, and you can access information that may have been hidden from you.
