My Healing Journey
Warning: contains accounts of child sexual abuse
The only time I spent with my grandfather was this “tickle” game he played with me. It was the only time I ever saw him have any interest in me. I can remember the tv always on a specific channel, volume turned up loud, the smell of his apartment, the way that he smelled... It happened many times, that much I am sure about, but I have no idea how old I was when it started, or how long it went on for.
One day when I was about 7, our class was visited by a travelling puppet show that talked about “good touch, bad touch.” As I sat there and learned that the game I played with my grandfather was “bad touch,” I felt the blood drain from my face and the classroom closing in on me. My first thought was something like “how could I be so naive?” Followed by “no one can know that I allowed this to happen. I’ll never let it happen again.”
So I stopped going to see him in his apartment. I’d go straight upstairs to my grandmother’s. But eventually he came to me. I remember sitting on the bed watching TV in the spare room when he came and sat beside me to play the “game”. When I didn’t laugh or react, he asked “What’s wrong? You don’t like it?” I remember the last 4 words echoing in my head. I never liked it! I wanted to scream. But instead I said nothing. He left, and after that I told. I don’t remember who, or how, or what was said, all I know is that after that the adults did a lot of talking around me like I wasn’t there. I have a vivid image of them talking about it literally over my head, their physical height towering over my tiny self. Some other family members were part of the conversation. It was a shameful, personal experience for me, and it felt like everyone was talking about it. I remember wanting to take it back. To make the conversation stop. The only time I remember being directly addressed was by a family member who said, “one day you will like being touched like that, but not now, not when you’re a child.” I felt sick to my stomach. I remember thinking “I will NEVER like being touched like that.” At that age I believed that I had done something wrong by letting this happen to me, and now I had learned my lesson.
Trauma manifested itself in me in a number of ways that I am still uncovering to this day. For instance, it took me a long time to realize that I’ve always had a hard time trusting my own judgment. I think a part of me has believed for a long time that if I didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong, then how could I possibly trust myself for other things?
My body didn’t forget either. I realized this decades later when I was in bed with my husband and I burst into tears when he caressed my butt. I was instantly brought back to a moment when I was about 7 years old and I awoke to find my grandfather lying next to me in with his hand down my pants… a memory my body was evidently holding onto without me realizing.
My healing journey has been a gradual process of bearing witness to the ways in which trauma has manifested itself in me like this event with my husband, but it’s also involved seizing the healing opportunities that presented themselves. My first step was seeing a psychoanalyst when I was in my early twenties, which involved reliving the abusive events, helping me to process them and begin my journey of healing.
Years later, I received news that my grandfather was dying. I hadn’t seen him in over a decade and this was my last chance to see him. My husband drove an hour and half to the nursing home with me and sat in the lobby while I went to see him. I wanted to do this alone. I had imagined that he would be lying in bed semi-conscious, quite literally “on his death bed,” but to my surprise he was having lunch in the common room. He didn’t know who I was, but remembered when I told him. He asked me questions about my life; it was the first time he had shown any interest in me other than the times he molested me. And then I told him what I had come there to say: “I want you to know that I forgive you.” And then I asked a question I hadn’t planned on asking: “do you know what I’m talking about?” And he said yes, he did sort of remember. I said “it’s affected me in so many ways, and it’s caused me a lot of pain, but I’m going to be ok despite what you did to me.” He said, “thank you.” I didn’t expect, need, or get an apology, but I got acknowledgement, and that was even more than I had hoped for. When I got back to the lobby I collapsed on the ground in tears. I felt a weight had been lifted off me, and while I was beside myself with emotion, I also felt more empowered than I ever had.
The next healing opportunity for me was several years later, just this past year. My grandmother finally moved out of the home where they had spent most of their lives in Canada. It was a mess after decades of hoarding and neglect. I took on the project of emptying it out, and for months I went regularly to purge the space. It became an obsession for me. I can’t explain how good it felt to clear out the physical space that had been the environment for my most traumatic childhood memories.
Months later they sold the house and I had my last chance to say goodbye. I brought my camera without knowing why, and I ended up setting it up and taking self portraits in the two places where the abuse had taken place. I cried, releasing more, healing more, but also felt strong. I had taken back this space, it wasn’t haunted by the memories of these terrible events.
A few days later I left for Costa Rica to sit for Ayahuasca. The divine timing of having said goodbye to this home, on top of the forgiveness I had offered my grandfather years later before he died, was not lost on me.
Ayahuasca continued my healing almost immediately on the first night. In my vision I was hovering above the street corner where my grandparents lived, next to a men’s prison that was still operating when I was a little girl but was converted into condos since. I felt the energy of toxic masculinity closing in on me, like a tangled lasso of barbed wire making it hard for me to breathe, suffocating me. But then I relaxed. I gave it love and it released its grip on me. The more I relaxed and felt my heart open, the more it loosened until I felt myself rising up above the street corner, watching a wild garden of vines grow over it. I was releasing it, and myself, from the darkness through my love and open heart.
At one point on my second night of ayahuasca I was shown myself as a child, sitting on the couch next to my grandfather as he molested me. I saw the little girl and wasn’t worried for her. I knew she would be ok. Despite all of this, I knew she would be ok. But I looked at him and felt compassion. Who would do such a thing to an innocent child? I had compassion for the wounded human, the lost soul who would take the innocence of a child this way. It was the healing I didn’t expect, and I was so grateful for it.
I can’t say that I am healed, but I have healed a lot and will continue this healing journey throughout my life.
I still have a complicated relationship with sexuality, I believe this is another piece of the puzzle in my healing. Because I vowed to never enjoy being touched the way my grandfather touched me, it’s taken a lot of rewiring for me to embrace my sexuality as an adult. This belief was so unconscious, it’s taken me a long time to identify it but now that I have, I can begin to rewrite it.
Healing can come from so many different places, some we might not expect, and I am so grateful for the tools and events that have played a role in my healing journey. I am also really proud of myself because none of it has been easy, yet here I stand.
It is with an open, humble, and hopeful heart that I invite other women to share their stories of healing, regardless of where they are at in their journey. When we heal ourselves we help heal the collective, and that’s what we’re doing right now.
Thank you for bearing witness to my story. By doing so you are playing a part in the healing too.
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