Can Healing Your Sexual Abuse Help Save the World?
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
“The greatest challenge to mobilising millions to stop the climate crisis isn’t education. It’s banishing the dangerous, violent story people have been told that they’re powerless to change their lived reality.”
Can Healing Your Sexual Abuse Help Save the World?
Amidst several days swathed in acute eco-anxiety and the dread feelings of another eruption of the never-ending war against the “other,”1 a childhood moment of deep and paralyzing existential horror returns to awareness…
Deeply constrictive paralysis. Major parts of my being contorted and frozen into psychically and physically painful postures, cinched down and compressed like bundles of kindling. A shutting out of the overwhelmingly unfathomable.
The truth-teller wanting to scream “I feel so scared and alone! Stop doing this to me!” bound and muffled by the dignity negating fear of more and worse degradation…
After many years of intensive work with plants in various contexts to untangle my lifelong reactions to the sexual abuse I experienced as a child, I now have the capacity and welcome opportunities to directly experience feelings such as these.
I now understand that in its wake, resistance to feelings leaves nothing but gaping trenches of hopelessly helpless experiential and perceptual narrowing and that adopting postures such as these, however necessary in the moment, completely precludes any possibility of effective response to harm.
Is it any wonder that the ecological catastrophes occurring now across the globe evoke in me the same reactions and equal feelings of terror?
Although my cultural conditioning has led me in the past to operate as if I am a unitary “me,” I have experienced otherwise. It is possible to be simultaneously present with multiple aspects of myself, with other-than-human beings, and with the ecological forces of this living Earth, and I’ve come to understand that this capacity for mutual indwelling is an inherent feature of our humanity.
Sitting here as I write this essay, opening up to express what needs to be said, I still feel so much fear constricting my body. Rather than letting this fear of sharing my story constrict my energy and distance me from relationship, I can now choose to work with fear as a grounding force that makes me more present with and available to my allies.
As I allow these allying ecological energies to support me, I feel tingling throughout my body. Previously frozen parts that have retreated in terror continue opening to life and more intimate connection. I feel myself ground even more deeply.
Calmness and a sense of dignity pervade my being. Within this field of interconnection I invite the scared parts of my being, holding them with love and care, to stand with the integrated parts who help the still traumatized parts remain present within these fields of fear.
Image by Johannes Plenio from Pixabay
The Support You Need is Already and Always Here
The decades-long work it took to get to this place was not easy. Under normal circumstances I ought to be dancing with joy at being mostly free of the constricting and sometimes debilitating physical, emotional, and psychological mechanisms that helped me endure and make it through the difficulties to which my experience of childhood trauma have given rise.
Instead as I step out of this energetic prison an even more intensely traumatizing situation confronts me: global ecological catastrophes that threaten the continued existence and well-being of every being on this planet.
Profound sorrow and hopelessness sometimes overwhelm me as I watch my human and nonhuman kin suffer and watch places that I love so dearly decline in vitality, abused in ways similar to my child-self via human-conceived systems comprising blocked-from-feeling actors lacking connections with self and the animate lands in which we live.
As I've shared the feelings moving through me during this particular moment of planetary reckoning with climate change intensified bushfires raging in Australia carbonizing countless plant beings and incinerating, displacing, or causing the starvation of at least one billion animals, people have suggested, so I don’t have to feel this way, that I stop reading news about the fires or of other recent events amplified by human-caused global warming. 2
With full acknowledgement that I have a choice unlike so many others in this world who have no alternative, I understand that there are moments when it’s appropriate to take a step back. I also know that to be a whole and healthy human, a good father, husband, and friend, and a fully integrated and aware citizen of the world it is my duty to feel into my own present-in-the-moment pains (whether they originate in seemingly past, present, or future moments) and to be present with the fields of individual and collective pain the aforementioned catastrophes generate.
I do not open myself in this way as punishment for my privilege nor to temporarily assuage feelings of shame. Actively choosing more intimately engaged ecological orientations such as these increases my availability to emergent ways of being that offer life-affirming alternatives to the separate-self conditioning that infects my being.
For example, recently while working with the plant Juniper I asked: how can I be more present and attuned to the needs of my family as I navigate the challenges of everyday life?
wisps of aromatic foliage fill my nostrils…from behind a hand reaches out…gently grabbing ahold it covers and squeezes my own with grandfatherly care…my hand in turn enfolds another smaller hand…
Juniper’s presence: a guiding light of acceptance…an invitation to allow edges to soften…an interpenetration of energies…support whenever I am able to receive it…
more vulnerability to counter habitual trauma response retreats into isolation or angry reaction which seek to protect distressed nervous system overwhelm…and a relationally embodied reciprocal presence that encourages connection…
Juniper embodying the triumph of the human spirit. Image by author. All rights reserved.
Transform Trauma by Cultivating Stable Relational Foundations
In staying present I keep finding that my individual story of degradation intertwines with countless other instances of ecological devastation now spreading and surfacing all across the Earth.
In staying present I've found that the old maxim that the cure resides within the disease affirms its own truth and that the transformation of relationships to our individual and collective traumas share a similar prescription.
Willfully turning away and surrendering my agency to unmatured leaders or unintegrated aspects of myself is no longer an option. Hiding from the realities of our pain, sorrow, and grief or waving them away with technological and pharmaceutical distractions or dreams of “green” yet still-extractive, non-regenerative economies that require little personal sacrifice or deviation from the economic imperatives of western techno-industrial civilization will not help change our course.
By engaging in a years-long process of transforming my relationship to childhood sexual abuse, I have learned that making it through requires the continual cultivation of a calmness that is forged within crucibles of trust in the ecological intelligence that permeates the energetic and physical systems of Earth.
The calmness of which I write is not a calmness that distracts or creates distance from anxiety-inducing experience but is an engaged calmness rooted in stable relational ecosystemic foundations. Cultivation of this calmness allows our most sensitive parts, the ones that retreat most when we experience traumatic events, to return to their positions of receptive prominence within the energetic architecture of our beings.
It is these parts with their capacity for sensitive interconnectivity that allow us to be present with and experience our own pain and that of those being harmed all across the planet under the influence of the Earth-degrading economic systems of techno-industrial humanity.
Held in synergistic vulnerability by the strength and firmness of our ecologically oriented relational foundations, these delicate extensions of our empathetic sensory systems bestow upon us the fortitude and capacity to inter/act in ways that align with our feelings and perceptions.
Put another way, it is the thick-trunked stability of the cottonwood that allows its delicate and sensitive root hairs to extend out and into the soil at the tips of its wide-ranging root systems, and it is the feedback the root hairs provide that allows the cottonwood to fully realize the substantiality and vigor of its rooted anchoring.
With awareness of the intimate ecosystemic relationships that encourage these processes, I will invite you now to connect with the parts of yourself that have never forgotten, the parts that know how to access deep states of calmness rooted in a trust and faith in the forces that make life possible.
Breathe deeply into those places and allow the calm to permeate your entire body. When you feel sufficiently aligned with this calmness assess the foundations of your being.
What do you need to thrive and to continue to be of service? Do you feel balanced and supported?
Open yourself widely to the flows of ecological intelligence, and call in the allies who can help you find balance where it is lacking.
Be present with the energies that arrive as they begin to interweave with your own, and without involving mental aspects of awareness allow the work to proceed on its own.
Starting with yourself welcome the elements of this strong, sustaining, and balanced foundation from which you can live your life. Once you feel firm in these relationships add in piece by piece—your family, your friends, your work in the world, and other aspects of your life—imagining the ways they fit into this new way of sustainable being.
Now ask yourself: What does this new orientation no longer accommodate in its process of balancing? Rather than work to release these hindrances ask: how do I continue cultivating these relationships to further stabilize and firm my foundations?
From orientations such as these I and others with whom I work are creating conditions to “fall apart” without fear of losing ourselves in the rising tides of immense sorrow and suffering that seem to constantly threaten us with overwhelm.
We are learning to welcome our “wounding” as a way of breaking up blockages that inhibit our solidarity with other forms of life, and as we cultivate these stable relational foundations we become even more available to the many other-than-human worlds that interpenetrate our own.
Within these fields of interconnection we are orchestrating the emergence of self-organizing vessels comprising the stable, integrated parts of our beings. In these spaces we welcome home the traumatized parts who have retreated from life.
In so doing we are finding ways to receive feedback messages from the interlocking systems of Earth so that they can inform the continued unfurling of individual and collective balance-restoring pathways. 3
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
“We must pull out the bad roots in order to plant the new tree that we want.… We must uproot and plant, plant and uproot; leave aside the old life and plant a new life. Only with our own actions and participation will we put our rights into practice…Liberation will not fall like a miracle from the sky; we must construct it ourselves. So let’s not wait, let us begin.”
Creating Conditions for a Livable World
Through the work of my own personal healing I have ended a cycle of abuse. The debilitating experience of sexual trauma won’t plague my boys as it did me, but what can I as an individual do to make a difference as ecological catastrophe continues to ravage the Earth?
Contemplating what the future holds for my children and those of every other being on this planet provides pressures that inspire me to move beyond the limitations of my own childhood traumas.
I am being called to step up and more publicly give voice to the intersection between sexual abuse and the abuse of the Earth, but even writing this makes my stomach churn and brings up acute anxiety.
My whole life I’ve been plagued with feelings of being unable to change my situation, a resignation to just suffer through whatever circumstance comes my way. What will it take for me to overcome the apprehension I feel when I consider standing up in a more public way to say, No! This is not okay! Stop now! to the powerful forces that are recklessly abusing Earth and driving us down this path of planetary destruction?
Can I really do this? I waver between feelings of helplessness relating to the still scared, traumatized, and unintegrated parts of myself and the fierce warrior aspect that knows I can overcome anything if I align myself with my allies and the elemental forces of life. Whatever the case I have no right to know the final outcome before choosing to act in more conscientious and vocal ways. 4
As I continue to integrate the wounded parts of my being and unwind the self-constricting limitations that allowed me to survive childhood sexual abuse, I am able to be more consistently present with the massive global challenges we collectively face. As I continue to transform my relationship to trauma, I am applying the lessons I’ve learned in service of this work. Writing this essay is another step on the path.
So at this moment (or any other) of heightened eco-anxiety, I'll ask you:
Can you be present with the feelings of hopelessness and despair that you feel in relation to your traumas whether they be past or current, personal or ecological?
What would life be like if each of us, in spite of our histories of trauma, finds a way to maintain our presence as we participate in the Great Work that is calling us to co-creatively imagine and birth new life-affirming, multi-species economic and governing systems? 5
Of course this is not really about saving the world. It’s about remembering our place as humans within the web of life.
Listen…can you hear the call? It reverberates throughout these fields of interconnected awareness and through every ecosystem on Earth. It is calling us to work in solidarity with our planetary kin and to open ourselves to wider connection and feeling with all life. Despite my trepidation, I am heeding the call. Will you join me?
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At the time of writing the current president of the U.S. and his advisers are paving the way for war against Iran. ↩
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Such as the destructive torrential rains inundating Indonesia, the dire prospects in this rapidly warming world that food production will keep pace with global nutritional needs in the not-so-distant future, and fears of runaway climate feedback loops coming to fruition before our very eyes. ↩
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I am indebted to the participants of my Ecological Intelligence Mentorship program with whom some of these understandings have emerged. ↩
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I first heard Stephen Jenkinson speak on this concept during the Rewild Yourself podcast episode "Ancestral Amnesia and the Village Mind." ↩
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For more info please see my review of Thomas Berry's 1999 classic text, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future." ↩
The Varshini Prakash quote is from “Through song, passion and protest, Varshini Prakash’s Sunrise Movement is changing US climate politics” by Eric Holthaus published in The Correspondent.
Quoted material from the Zapatista pamphlet is from chapter 8, “Uproot and Plant, Plant and Uproot” in Hilary Klein's book Compañeras: Zapatista Women's Stories. Seven Stories Press. Kindle Edition.
