My feed the last several weeks has been flooded with posts on pedophilia and child endangerment. (Is that just me?) I also work with clients who are dealing with sexual trauma, experienced in adulthood and/or as children. I see the aftermath. I've lived the aftermath. The common thread between the cause, the effect, and the healing is one Energetic Truth.
Energetic Law: We call all experiences, things, and people into our lives.
Regardless of how old we are. Regardless of our level of consciousness around the event.
I don't typically say this out loud because I am acutely aware of how unpopular this understanding is. There are huge aspects of it that I am uncomfortable with myself. It's a squicky position. But the only thing avoiding this type of discomfort helps us do is avoid the Truth.
And it is the Truth.
Is that to say that children deserve to have horrible things happen to them? That people who are raped or assaulted want to be raped or assaulted? That anyone who experiences violence is "asking" for it?
Fuck. No.
It does mean that we have control in spaces where we typically decide we are out of control. It means that the people who are living with PTS(d), depression, low self esteem, anxiety, trust issues, pain, and all the other adaptive responses to trauma can permanently release those symptoms. It means that we can change the facts.
It also means that we (individually and societally) are far more responsible for creating the undesirable circumstances and events we resist, reject, and revile with such vehemence.
Societally, our biggest issue is that we treat children as almost human, as delicate, uncivilized savages we must mold into humans. One manifested element of this belief is that we quash children's sexual urges (totally developmentally normal and healthy for toddlers to masturbate btw). Another is that we have shit Sex Ed that starts way late.
The result is lack of sexual agency and diminished agency over our bodies as a whole.
Another societal problem is our narrow definition of acceptable, or even possible, sexual expression. In ways this is an extension of the above point because culturally we want to think about a child's sexuality about as much as you want to think about your parents having sex.
The most prevalent example for this Ted Talk is that pedophilia is a sexual orientation. (If you were scandalized by Netflix's Cuties poster, you too see sex appeal in children. Welcome to the sliding scale of human sexuality.) By choke holding certain sexual behaviors or inclinations, we prevent ourselves from looking too hard at the inconsistencies in our social and legal structures and give our drama instincts something to latch onto when the horrendous inevitably happens. When we automatically label internal orientations as inherently wrong, especially those that when acted upon can cause harm, we stifle the possibility for an individual to seek help. Combine this with the still prevalent belief that sexual urges are uncontrollable and you get lots of at risk children. The hard label also allows us to ignore the similarities between acts such as grooming practices and events leading to date rape, the contemplation of which would helpfully lead us to even deeper patterns to change, as well as to greater psychic dissonance that we want to avoid.
Individually, we internalize the societal conditioning and do not question our agency, or our supposed lack thereof, past superficial levels.
Manifestations: we feel powerless to change the systems (even though human systems only exist by grace of our compliance), and we get stuck in trauma symptoms because we have little experiential resources beyond feeling unsafe and out of control with with to initially navigate negative events.
Those are tough pills to swallow because we equate responsibility with culpability. We feel the need to assign blame, and therefore shame, to someone or something before we correct a condition. Placing that blame/shame outside of ourselves is infinitely easier than taking it onto ourselves. It's why there is such a big emphasis on self forgiveness in the trauma healing process; it is meant to soften the blow of the acceptance of our own fault and mitigate shame.
Yet, fault is not the issue. And the shame we conditionally couple with it is far beside the point. The point is that by continuing to deny this Energetic Truth, we set ourselves up to perpetrate these cycles; we set ourselves up to experience and be witness to more acts of violence; we set ourselves up to be lost and alone waiting for someone to save us.
I have been raped twice in my adult life and assaulted on multiple occasions as both an adult and as a child. Some of those events I can only imagine what discord they reaped in my life under my conscious awareness. Others I could give you a detailed list of how they fucked me up for years.
I did All the things to rebuild my self trust. I did All the things to manage my depression. I did All the things to quell my anxiety. I did All the things to relieve my vaginismus and vestibulitis. Talk therapy. Pelvic floor physical therapy. Antidepressants and antianxiety meds. Dilators. Bodywork. Capsaicin cream. Lidocaine. Grin and bear it and pretend. All. The. Things.
I reclaimed my life and freed myself from all my trauma chains when I worked on my Energy. And part of that was embracing this Energetic Law.
We are not Victims. We are Creators. We call in every experience, thing, and person into our lives.
We can have Utopia. We have to own our shit first.
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