Let It Shape You

Recently I was sexually assaulted by a body worker, energy worker and coach.

No.

Recently a body worker and coach whom I trusted sexually assaulted me.

[Language matters. A point we will return to later. Passive voice is disempowering to the victim and gives an energetic pass to the perpetrator.]

I do not use the words “sexual assault” lightly and I thought a lot about saying “violated” or “boundaries severely crossed” so as not to totally freak out the people who care for me. What happened with this man was not rape, yet it was a gross non-consensual intrusion. He has been a trusted member of a sacred community for quite some time. So I trusted.

I had entrusted myself to this person for a month of private coaching without consequence. Until, in our final appointment, he transitioned mid-session into intimate and totally bastardized “tantric” practice without any notice or informed consent. The details of the episode are moot for this discussion — except that he severely violated my boundaries without consent and took a sharp left turn from what I expected our work to be. My body shut down, my mind meandered up above my head to literally “space out”, and I have been processing the trauma for many weeks now.

When I recounted the story to a friend of mine, he said something to me that had already been on repeat in my own mind, “Don’t let it shape you.” He spoke of how I had the tools and the strength to not let this shape or define me. He was speaking to my deepest fear: that this would carve an indelible chasm into my identity and draw me backwards down the slope of a decade of personal growth work I had done.

And I was on board with that up until it occurred to me — while I was doing the dishes — that anything less than my full acceptance of the experience would ensure that it would live on in my musculature and my psyche as a hold over my life. Not only that, the deep insights I have gained from this heartbreaking experience would not be honored.

My fear of this experience shaping me prevented me from fully moving through its disgusting truths and from connecting to the ancestral lineage of strong women who suffered the same: a loss of voice and a frozen body.

In my experience I recognized with crystal clarity the compounded impact of women throughout the ages stifling our words in order to remain alive. And no, not with predators in dark alleys (we’ve got that covered)… with men who have gained access to our inner spaces. With friends and partners, with doctors and therapists, with shamans and priests, with uncles and fathers, with teachers and coaches.

Here in this middle space we are silent. Here in these relationships that have made up the paradigm of trust we are frozen in disbelief and bound to an instinct of survival. Here in these offices and hotel rooms, here on these exam tables and our own beds, we are the patterned voiceless.

Here in this zone of implicit trust is where nobody has prepared us to act. It’s where society’s efforts to mitigate violence have utterly failed. We are not practiced in confronting the known. And as a society we miss the mark in assuming sexual violence is in the realm of “other” — in stairwells and alleys and car parks, by villains.

Feminist movements and practices have also failed in this arena, as none do the work of bringing body and voice back together in the realm of everyday life. They are two elements seemingly at odds with each other, body and voice. The voice is used to fight and push. The pleasures and power of the body are returned to in private. And one movement shuns the other.

The only way forward is to reconnect our embodied feminine ownership with our vocal chords. To pave a pathway from our root to our mouth. To practice in the realm of safe spaces.

We can take back our bodies all we want. We can raise our voices powerfully against injustices all we like. But unless and until we do the work of recalibrating our everyday words to our inner truth, we stand to lie frozen in terror and confusion during what was supposed to be a benign moment… as I did.

From what we want for dinner, to what we want in a partner, to when a trusted man is taking liberties with our bodies. From the mundane to the absolute mind fucks. We need to reunite vulva and voice.

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A tree trunk is no less strong for winding itself around a fence to reach the sunlight. To resist the fence would be to risk death. The tree persists. The fence becomes part of the inherent natural structure — and the will of the tree lives on.

So I say, let it shape you. Let your experiences carve grand canyons in your empathy and draw forth your understanding. Allow your traumas to tremor like earthquakes through your muscles and bones, creating a sonic wave of resonance with other human beings.

I will let it shape me.

But the shape I take is up to me.