Crone with a Machete ~ How to Destroy a Society

How to Destroy a Society

The ugliest gift that keeps on giving

Crone Wisdom: Dispatches from the Frontline

A note before you read. This dispatch goes deep into sexual abuse and what it does to a person. Please read it when you're ready, and in a place where you can take care of yourself.

I sat with this one for a while, wondering whether to send it at all. In the end, I believe it's too important not to. Last week I promised to talk about sexual energy, and I will. But first we have to talk about its dark side, because that's where the healing is. We can't fully celebrate this sacred, creative force until we understand what happens when it's violated.

This was not an easy piece to write. Our society still doesn't recognize what abuse truly does to a person: to the body, the mind, and the soul. What follows are a few of the ways I've seen it take root. It's not something you just get over. Healing is a life journey. But it is a journey, and it does lead somewhere.

We all know the ugly sweater. Itchy, garish, handed to you with a smile you have to return. You wear it once for the photo, and then it goes to the back of the closet, or to the thrift store, or gets quietly regifted to some unsuspecting cousin next December.

This gift is uglier than that, and you can't return it.

Sexual abuse is the ugliest gift that keeps on giving. You didn't make it and you didn't choose it, but once it's handed to you, it becomes yours. And it keeps giving long after the hands that delivered it are gone: in the body, in the voice inside your head, in the people you choose to love. Like that sweater, it so often gets regifted, passed down the line to the next person.

For decades, we've treated abuse as something that lives in the mind. Talk it through. Reframe the story. That work has its place. But the mind is one room in the house, and what happened went into every room: the tissue, the breath, the pelvis, the spine, the throat, and the energy body that most of our healing culture still doesn't know how to see. That's the part almost nobody is talking about. So I'm going to talk about it, plainly.

Why Listen to Me

It's a fair question. We have psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, a whole shelf of clinical ways to look at people. Why listen to a woman with no PhD or MD after her name? Because for all those fields have given us, they still don't see the energetics of a person clearly. And energetics is where I've spent my life.

I started at twenty, working in a beauty salon, and something happened there that has followed me ever since: women talked to me. Really talked. Over the years I've sat with women from every walk of life. Some of the richest in the world, and women living on the street. Some of the most famous, and some of the most breathtakingly beautiful women you could imagine, in the moments nobody else ever sees. I've had sex workers as clients, and porn stars. Women have opened up to me in ways they won't with almost anyone else. Maybe it's my Gemini moon, with its gift of gab. Maybe it's my Taurus curiosity, or the Pisces mystic in me. Whatever it is, it's been with me from the start.

I went from sitting low on a stool scrubbing feet to becoming a healer, from a salon chair to a kundalini awakening. And along the way I came to see the world from an angle that almost nobody is writing about. Not because it isn't true, but because people like me are so quickly silenced or ignored. No letters after the name, no seat at the table.

I won't pretend science can keep up with the way I see; it wasn't built to. But you have your own way of seeing too, earned the hard way. This is mine. If you've noticed these dispatches turning toward society as a whole over the last few months, this is why: I'm taking what decades of sitting with women have taught me and pointing it at the bigger picture.

Take what resonates. But hear me out.

Three Cords

The first thing to understand is that sexual abuse is never only sexual. In the same moment, it is physical abuse and it is mental abuse. Body, mind, and spirit are three cords, and all three get yanked at once, by one act, by one person. Most pain comes in through a single door. This comes through every door at the same time, and that is what makes it a different kind of wound.

The spirit cord is where sexual energy lives, and it's the most misunderstood of the three. Sexual energy is life force. It's the energy of creation; it's literally how every one of us got here. But like every energy, frequency, and vibration on this planet, it has a dual nature. It can be used to create, and it can be used to destroy. That's the nature of the world we live in. Everything that can heal can also harm. Sexual abuse takes the most creative force a human being carries and turns it into a weapon.

My way of working is to take people into the parts of self, and then further down, into the program running beneath those parts. When I sit with someone who was sexually abused, the first thing that rises to meet me is almost always the same. Not grief, not fear, though both are there. It's self-hatred. Quiet, deep, and seemingly bottomless.

The body tells its side of the story too, if you know how to listen. Over and over, I see autoimmune patterns in these clients, and very often the thyroid. The throat and neck are where this energy jams up and settles. That makes a terrible kind of sense. The throat is the seat of the voice, and abuse is, among everything else, an event that cannot be spoken. What can't be said gets lodged right there, at the gate.

Now, self-hatred on its own isn't unique to survivors. Most of us carry some version of that little inner voice: the one that doubts, nitpicks, compares, and wants us thinner or smarter or better. Peel back its layers of judgment and perfectionism, and at the root you'll find hatred turned inward. I believe it's an ancient program, installed thousands of years ago with the alteration of our genome, and it hums quietly in nearly every human being alive.

Here's what I've learned, slowly, over years, because the people on my table kept showing me the same thing.

When someone is violated on all three levels at once, it blasts a gateway open inside them. Through that opening, the abuser leaves something behind: an imprint, an energy signature. And that imprint doesn't float around loose. It goes looking for a home, and it finds one in the part of self that already carries that old program. It attaches itself to the self-hatred like an entity.

You may have heard of cord cutting, the idea that when a relationship ends, energetic cords still bind you to the other person until you consciously cut them. This goes deeper than a cord. A cord stretches between two people. This moves in. The abuser's energy becomes a voice inside the survivor's head, and because it speaks through the old, familiar channel of self-hatred, the survivor hears it in their own voice. They don't think, that's him. They think, that's me. And that's exactly what makes it so hard to find.

Why hatred, of all things? Because hatred is what sat at the core of the act. Even hate isn't quite the right word. I can dislike someone. I can even hate someone. But I don't want to violate them. Violation is its own animal: disdain, contempt, a dark force that wants to take and degrade. That darkness is the signature, and it's what gets left behind on the one who was violated.

And it is not rare. Somewhere in the last thirty years, it became normal for a woman to keep her hand over her drink at a bar. When I was in my twenties, that wasn't something we had to think about. Now it's just what you do. That alone tells you something about the world we're living in.

As much as this happens to adults, though, the deepest damage, and the least understood, happens to children. So that's where I want to go next.

Out Through the Crown

People often ask how someone can be abused as a child and not remember it. When abuse happens in the teenage years, the memory usually stays. A teenager is more fully anchored in the body, and it isn't so easy for them to leave it. But a small child, especially one under ten, often carries no memory at all until years or even decades later. People find that hard to believe. I don't, because I've seen why.

The child leaves.

I mean that literally. In the moment of the abuse, at the very moment the root chakra is violated, the soul and the spirit leave the body. It isn't simply that the child is fragile or sensitive. It's the violation itself that drives them out. And they don't drift out sideways; they go up and out through the top of the head, through the crown.

To understand why, you have to understand that the root and the crown are directly connected. We like to think of ourselves in separate pieces, but energetically we're one continuous current, bottom to top. You already know this, even if you've never named it. Think of all the times you've been stuck on a problem, stepped away to use the bathroom, and walked back out with the answer. You cleared the lower body, and the mind cleared with it. Root and crown, talking to each other.

Now picture that same connection under assault. The violation enters at the root. That sexual energy, penetrating up from the root, slams into a small being who has nowhere to go but up. It blasts the child's soul and spirit straight out through the crown, and it blasts the crown open on the way out. That is the moment the child leaves. This is not the gentle, earned opening we seek in prayer or meditation. It's a rupture. A door kicked off its hinges. And that blast is where the damage is done.

So why does it happen to little ones and not, as often, to teenagers? Because a young child's crown isn't fully formed yet. Think of the soft spot on the top of a baby's head. A small child is still a being in formation, only partly settled into the body, and the way out through the top is still wide open. When the root is violated, there's almost nothing holding them in.

It's the same reason so many parents notice how intuitive their children are. In a young child, the pineal gland hasn't calcified yet. It's open, available, still taking in the unseen. For most people, somewhere around the ages of six to ten, the pineal begins to calcify and that wide-open channel starts to narrow. Some people stay decalcified their whole lives. But by the teenage years, most crowns have begun to close, the person is more anchored in the body, and the violation can't push them out so easily. They stay, and so they remember.

For the small child, the blast tears the channels open and leaves them deeply vulnerable. The crown is the most sensitive chakra we have. It's a doorway, and once it's been forced open, other energies can come in and take up residence in a person.

When the child eventually comes back into the body, the memory isn't there to greet them. Their small physical form went through it, but the mind wasn't home to record it. The body keeps the score while the mind has checked out. And so the memory waits, sometimes for decades, stored in tissue instead of thought.

That door doesn't swing shut again on its own. The crown stays open, and this is why so many people who were sexually abused as children grow up to be deeply psychic.

I didn't learn that from a book. Out of plain curiosity, which is just how I am, I started asking every psychic I met whether they'd been sexually abused. Over the years, that's been more psychics than I can count. Every single one told me yes. As a child.

There's a catch, though, and it matters. A gift that opens this way comes clouded. The abuser's energy is still sitting in that field, so whatever comes through carries interference. It's why so many psychics are superstitious, and why a reading will often hand you a few true tidbits wrapped in a lot of fog. The channel is open, but there's static on the line.

I want to be clear here, because people love to make a villain of whatever they don't understand: these are not evil people. Psychics are not dark or dangerous by nature. Many are wounded people doing their best with a door that was forced open before they could choose to walk through it.

It's also why, years ago, I stayed away from groups that did meditations focused on the crown chakra. I could feel what some of them were really after. They weren't opening people to the divine; they were opening a door they could walk through themselves, to influence and manipulate. A crown is not something to hand over to anyone. And a child's crown, already so open, is the most unprotected doorway there is.

And not every gift comes from wounding. Some of us are simply born this way. I'm an empath, and at sixty-four I have no memory of ever being sexually abused. I was verbally abused, terribly, and that's a story for another dispatch. But I believe part of why survivors find their way to me is that my field doesn't carry that particular signature. It isn't perfect, and neither am I. But it's clean of that energy, and wounded people can feel the difference.

That difference matters, because like attracts like. Abused people tend to find each other. We've started calling it trauma bonding, and I'm honestly tired of the phrase, but what it describes is real. Two people meet at the wound, and the bond lets both of them keep living inside their dysfunction without ever being challenged on it. They're dysfunctionally compatible. It feels like recognition. Often it's just two imprints shaking hands.

There's one more consequence of the child leaving, and it may be the most quietly devastating of all. Many of these children never fully come back. They grow up ungrounded, hovering just above their own lives. And why would they come all the way home? The body is where the abuser's imprint lives. The body is the scene of the crime. To a spirit that fled it once, the body is simply not a safe place to be.

That's what a crown blown open does to a life. The channels at the top of the head stay wide, and with no one fully home in the body, nothing anchors the person to the ground. They feel everything and land nowhere. They can't get traction. Plans start and stall. Work, relationships, money, home: life never quite builds forward momentum, because momentum needs feet on the earth, and theirs barely touch it.

Live that way long enough, and it can tip into something close to madness. Not always dramatic. More often it's a quiet unmooring, a sense of drifting outside your own life and not knowing how to get back in.

You've probably heard the stories. She went to her uncle's house, and when she came back she was different. He just doesn't want to go over there anymore, and he won't say why. The change people notice is so often exactly this: a child who left, and only came partway home.

Coming Home

I once had a young woman on my table, late twenties, an athlete, strong and capable by every outward measure. Something in the way she held herself made me ask a question I've since asked many times.

When you're out in the world, in a crowd or with your friends, does it feel like you're hovering above your own head? Like you're seeing things from above instead of eye to eye?

She looked at me as if I'd read her diary. Yes. That's exactly how it felt. That's how it had always felt.

You're not in your body, I told her.

What?

You're not in your body.

Then the rest came out. She already knew she'd been sexually abused. She'd seen many healers about many things. Not one had noticed that she wasn't fully there.

I'll toot my own horn for a moment, because it may be useful, especially to the healers reading this. I tend to see what others miss, and I'm convinced it's because of how I walk into a session. I walk in not knowing. I come with curiosity instead of a checklist. Before anything else, I ask: Spirit, heart, guides, show me what I need to know to help this person.

Pattern recognition is a wonderful tool, and after three decades I have plenty of it. But what you already know can only show you what you already know. What you don't know is the doorway in. When I hold space from not knowing, the person steps forward and shows me, usually without realizing they're doing it. It happens organically, the way water finds low ground.

So with this young woman, I went to her feet. The feet are where my work as a healer began, where my gifts first showed up and slowly built on each other over the years. And once I was there, I noticed something I've never forgotten. Her lower body was almost atrophied. Her shoulders were strong, an athlete's shoulders, but her hips were narrow and small, like a young teenager's. It was as though part of her had simply stopped growing at the moment she left.

I stood at her feet and opened her body so her soul and spirit could come all the way down and back in, instead of hovering above. It wasn't dramatic. It was more like holding a door open and waiting.

In the weeks that followed, she told me it had changed her whole life. Her circumstances were the same: same job, same people. What changed was how she moved through them. She could actually see what was happening around her. She could actually live in the world, from inside her own skin, maybe for the first time since she was small.

Years earlier, when foot work was my whole practice, another woman came to me who would pass out. Without warning, she'd get overwhelmed and simply drop. She'd been to every doctor and every healer. Herbs, pharmaceuticals, nothing touched it. By the time she found me, she could no longer drive, and someone had to be with her everywhere she went. Her world had shrunk to the size of whoever was available to escort her through it.

Her feet were in the water, and my hands were on her feet in the water. Water is a tremendous ally in this work; it carries communication in a way that's hard to explain. She'd told me about the fainting, how she'd just drop, and somewhere in that moment I looked her in the eye and heard myself say it out loud:

Were you ever sexually abused?

She knew she had been. She said yes.

That's why you leave your body, I said. That's why you pass out.

Crowds, gatherings, any place where too much came at her too fast: those were her triggers. I won't share the details of what happened to her, because she may well be reading this. But when the overwhelm hit, some part of her recognized the old feeling and did the only thing it had ever learned to do. It left. And her body, with no one home, went down.

So I called her back. Come on back in here. It's safe now.

This is the piece I most want people to understand: when you're in your body, you are safer, not less safe. Your body is your alarm system. It's the thing that tells you when something is truly wrong. What kept pulling her out wasn't her body at all. It was her mind, scanning the crowd and screaming nope, gotta go, gotta go, because the scene rhymed with something it remembered. The body was never the danger. The body was her protection.

Bringing someone back is, in the end, a kind of command followed by a conversation. You speak to the spirit directly and show it the truth: You are safer in this body than out of it. When you leave, you leave her on the floor, and who knows who'll be there to pick her up.

She never passed out again. Not once.

The body remembers everything, and it chooses its own time to speak. Once real healing begins, memories often come flooding in, because the body has been holding them the whole time, waiting for a moment safe enough to set them down.

Sometimes the timing is uncanny. Others have written about this, and I've witnessed it myself: a woman gets married, and on her wedding night, of all nights, the memory of childhood abuse comes rushing up. I've counseled the husbands. They tell me the same bewildered story. The night we got married, she changed. She went cold as ice, and I didn't know what I'd done.

He didn't do anything. She remembered. And then, out of shame, out of not wanting to bring that darkness into her brand-new marriage with the man she loves, she pushes it back down. She pretends. She carries on. But what's stored in the body doesn't stay put forever. It surfaces, sometimes on a healing path, sometimes at menopause, when the body goes through its great shedding and whatever was packed away in the tissue finally rises to be seen.

The Face in the Hatred

Most of the people who come to me for this work don't arrive saying I was abused. They say I'm a perfectionist. Or I can't get anything right. Or I can't move forward. I keep repeating the same pattern, and I can't break it.

And I'll be honest, a little frustratingly, they usually come to me last. They've already seen the Western doctor, who can't explain why the autoimmune condition won't resolve. They've had acupuncture, chiropractic, herbs, energy work. They do yoga. They meditate. They've done everything right, and they've done a lot of genuine healing along the way. Yet something at the bottom won't budge.

By the time they're sitting across from me, many already know they were abused. They just don't really remember it, or they remember it the way you'd remember a fact you read somewhere. It hasn't been processed out of the body. And they know, with a weary kind of certainty, that the self-hatred is still there.

Part of the problem is that the whole conversation about self-love has been watered down, the way so much spiritual language gets watered down once it goes mainstream. Real self-love isn't affirmations in the mirror. It's learning to look at your shadow. And I don't mean the version where you announce I accept my shadow and then walk off and keep being an asshole. I mean looking at it honestly. Some of your shadow serves you; it kept you alive. Some of it is destructive. Loving yourself means being willing to tell the difference, and to do something about the part that's doing harm.

Self-hatred, in my experience, is a multifaceted ball of goo. It doesn't come apart in one pull. You dismantle it thread by thread, and the people who reach me have often spent years doing exactly that, patiently and sincerely. What they haven't found is the thing at the center that all those threads are wound around and anchored to.

That thing is the imprint of the abuser.

I learned this the way I've learned most things: a client showed me. But first you need to understand how I work.

Years ago, I studied a technique called subpersonality work, built on Jung's idea that the archetypes live inside us as parts of self. Through my own work, I discovered we have far more parts than the archetypes. We carry many, many parts of self. And a lot of them are programmed. Self-hatred is one of those programmed parts, the old program I spoke of earlier.

In session, I move people in and out of their parts of self. I'll ask a person to step directly into one and embody it. Not think about it; become it. Then I let that part speak, and I have a conversation with it.

So I have them step into the part that carries their self-hatred. And again and again, when they're inside it and look around, they see a face. The face holding it. Not their own.

Oh my God. That's him. That's the person who abused me.

My father. My mother. My brother. My uncle. The neighbor. The man at the bar.

Most often, someone from childhood.

I also work with people who were abused as adults, and that path is a little different, because the memory is usually there. But it's no less disorienting, because violation simply doesn't make sense to a healthy mind. Why would a stranger slip a drug into a woman's drink and then rape her? There's no logic that can hold it. And yet it exists in our world, and the mind keeps circling it, trying to make a shape out of something shapeless.

Let me tell you about one woman, because her story shows how close the answer can be, and how long it can hide.

She'd been told by family that she was sexually abused as a small child, but she had no memory of it herself. She'd been through healer after healer. I told her, Give me five weeks, and we'll get to it. We met weekly.

By the fourth session, we still hadn't touched it. I'll admit I was frustrated, for her, and honestly for myself. I'd made her a promise.

In my sessions, the client simply sits in a chair across from me while I guide them into the different parts of self. And I drop into a particular space that's hard to describe until you've felt it. It's like being outside of time. In that no-time, things become possible that aren't possible in an ordinary hour. The body feels safe enough to speak. Information arrives out of nowhere. What I can tell you is that it's my heart holding that space. The heart has its own toroidal field, and stepping into it is like stepping into zero point, the still center where anything is possible. From there, my job is to ask the right question. Everything depends on the right question.

In the fifth session, I noticed her foot. You know the way people bounce a foot without thinking, the knee jittering, the whole leg going. Hers hadn't stopped.

So I asked. What is that? Let's take a couple of steps to the right and see what's making that foot do that.

And we stepped straight into it.

The abuse had begun before she was a year old and continued for years after. Her older sister had remembered all along. I'll leave that part there. What surfaced was, to be honest, horrific. It also explained so much: why, in her fifties, after all that sincere work, she was still trying to get free of something she couldn't name.

Looking back, I can see what those first four weeks really were. We hadn't been stalling. Without either of us quite knowing it, we'd been building a container strong enough to hold what was coming. We went into her own internal mother. We went into her inner healer, because she was a healer too, and a writer, and a businesswoman. Week by week, we were building up her confidence and her sense of self in those other parts, so that when the truth finally surfaced, when we could see what had really happened in her infant years, she would be able to hold it.

At the time I was disappointed it took so long. Now I see it as a beautiful progression. The abuse came forward in the fifth session because that was when she was ready to meet it. Her body had been knocking the whole time, through that bouncing foot. It just needed a container strong enough to open the door, and someone to stop and ask what it was trying to say.

Once we've reached the entity and the abuse itself, the real work begins, and it's not something most people can do for themselves. To remove an imprint, you have to be able to see it. You have to recognize what it's done to you. You have to hear its voice clearly enough to know it isn't yours, and when it's been speaking through you since you were small, that's nearly impossible from the inside.

Here's the distinction that matters. Self-hatred is a part of self. The abuser's imprint is something else: it's attached to that part like an entity, and it can behave exactly like one. Dark, shadowy, demonic. (Not every entity is dark, for what it's worth. I've found benevolent ones on people too. This one is not.)

So I hold a space that separates the part of self from the thing that's been riding on it. And then I do something that surprises people: I talk to it. I have a conversation directly with the abuser's imprint.

I'm not afraid of it. In a very real sense, it's like dealing with a demon, and I'm not afraid of demons. Inside the space I hold, it can't touch me, and it knows it.

Every one of these entities has its own operating system. We all share the same basic programming, but what's been installed on top of it is different in each person. Picture two laptops of the same brand and model, side by side. What's running on yours and what's running on mine are completely different, especially if one of us is running a whole business off of it. So no two clearings look alike.

I go in surgically, energetically, with a kind of laser focus, and I dissect it out. I find each way it has been operating inside the person and pull those threads loose. How it hijacked them. How it took the small, ordinary seed of self-hatred we all carry and fed it, year after year, until it grew into a monster.

Regifted

So let me say the most important thing as plainly as I can: the imprint of the abuser is not you.

It never was. It was left in you, and it doesn't belong there. But as long as it stays, it runs the show, and it runs it quietly enough that you'll swear every choice is your own.

This is how the ugliest gift gets regifted. It's why people who were abused so often go on to abuse, in every shape and form. Sometimes they abuse others. Very often they keep abusing themselves.

I've met my share of women who worked as prostitutes and call girls, and every single one I've met was sexually abused. Look at what happens next. They keep placing themselves in abusive situations. Some become abusers. Some become dominatrixes. Some turn to drugs, which is just another way of continuing the abuse from the inside. In my experience, these aren't rare or extreme cases. This is simply how it goes.

And here's the cruel twist. Many of them will tell you they feel empowered, that they've taken their power back. I don't doubt they feel it. But so often it's the entity that has found its way back into the driver's seat, dressed up in the costume of empowerment. That's how clever these things are.

I've been speaking mostly about women, because most of the survivors who come to me are women. But I've counseled many men who were sexually abused, and it needs saying plainly: it happens to boys, and what it does to them is different. In my experience, women tend to move through it more readily, strange as that may sound. With men, the image seems to burn into the memory bank and stay there. They can't erase it, and they can't seem to let it move through them the way women often eventually can.

The damage rarely announces itself honestly, in anyone. At the very least, it plants a staggering amount of self-hatred and self-annihilation, and from there people make unwise choices. They don't know how to take care of themselves. But it can also look like the opposite of damage. It can look like discipline. I love it when a runner comes to see me, because the first thing I want to ask is What are you trying to outrun? The woman with the flawless home, everything in its place, may be the woman who was abused. So might the overachiever, the caretaker, the one who never rests. The wound wears a thousand masks, and many of them get applauded.

It's also true, and uncomfortable to say, that being a survivor doesn't make someone a saint. Survivors can be manipulative. They can operate from shadow. They can carry hatred toward others as well as toward themselves. I say that not to blame anyone, but because it's part of the picture, and because it explains why the healing is so hard. They don't know there's an entity riding on them. So they whittle away at the edges of their pain, around it and around it and around it, sometimes for decades, without ever touching the thing at the center.

Power Over

Let's get one thing very clear, because it's the biggest misconception of all: sexual abuse is not about sex. It's about power. Power over another human being.

Even in the darkest corners, where children are the target, it's still about power. It breaks my heart to say it, but a child is simply the easiest place for a certain kind of person to get it.

Now look at the world we live in. This planet is practically designed around power over others. Factions everywhere, in governments, corporations, religions, families, all jockeying to be the one on top. Add sexual abuse to that picture, and you get an individual who has been violated and imprinted, who feels utterly disempowered, and who now goes looking for power with the only tool the entity knows how to use: power over someone else. Very often, their sexual energy becomes the lever.

So the survivor goes seeking power for two reasons at once. The abuser's imprint is steering, and it only knows one move. And the person themselves feels so stripped of power that they're starving to get some back, any way they can.

The need for power over others can be subtle, or it can be dramatic. Walk into a party, and you can usually spot the person who has to command the room, who needs every eye on them and every conversation orbiting them. We could talk about narcissism here, and sometimes that's exactly what it is. But it isn't only narcissists. I've watched empaths do it too, using their sensitivity to read people and quietly steer them. Power over others can wear a loud costume or a very soft one.

That's how it moves down the line: from abuser to victim, from that victim to the next, on and on and on. Someone who has been abused is going to go looking for power. And that is exactly why it's the ugliest gift that keeps on giving.

Women do abuse; it happens. But the women who abuse don't come to me, and neither do the men who were abused and went on to abuse others. My table holds the ones who were harmed, not the ones who passed it along. Still, from where I sit, I've learned to recognize the signature. A hunger for power over others is one of the clearest indicators I know that someone was sexually abused.

Some play it out in ways the whole world ends up watching. When I see a woman in the public eye behaving destructively, tearing through everyone around her, I don't see a villain. I see a woman who suffered at someone's hands and is now trying to get her power back the only way the entity will let her. That's why I'll take a woman's side even when she behaves badly. The bad behavior is the parasite talking.

Think of the women history remembers for the worst things they did: Lizzie Borden, Betty Broderick, Brenda Spencer, women who have killed. Think of Cathy in East of Eden. When I look at them, I see the signature of abuse, whether or not the world ever got the full story.

The guru is dead. Religion is dead. Even the New Age community is taking a beating, and frankly, much of it is earned. I've sat in some pretty awful rooms myself. I've sat at the feet of so-called teachers and felt it in my body: this person was abused, something terrible happened here, and now they need power over everyone in this room.

They're everywhere. In every religion, every philosophy, every church and synagogue, every yoga studio, every sacred circle. They're there because  60 to 70 percent] of our society has been sexually abused. That isn't a fringe problem. It's the water we're all swimming in.

The Need to Be Desired

The timing of this dispatch isn't an accident. We're in a Venus retrograde right now, and Venus rules desire: what we want, and how badly we want to be wanted.

Let's be fair here. Everyone wants to be desired. Everyone wants to be liked. Being attractive, drawing people toward us, is part of being human, and there's nothing wrong with it.

The question is how far we go. Do we put on a little lipstick and mascara, or do we get a facelift? Each of us has to decide where our own line is, and I'm not here to draw it for you.

But when the pursuit of being desired tips into self-annihilation, when someone is willing to destroy themselves to be wanted, we're looking at a whole other mindset. And then I have to ask: was this person abused, too?

When so much of humanity has suffered sexual abuse in some way, shape, or form, we have to ask what that does to all of us. How does it show up as dysfunction in a person's life? What will people do, without ever knowing why, to keep the cycle turning? So much of it comes back to the same two hungers: to be desired, and to have power over others.

How to Destroy a Society

If you wanted to destroy a society, you wouldn't need armies. You would sexually abuse it.

You would plant self-hatred deep in its people, in the unconscious, beneath both the conscious and the subconscious mind, where they can't easily get to it. And the imprint you left behind would be clever. It would hide behind other parts of self: the good girl, the helper, the one who's always fine. It would work through them, quietly and manipulatively, which makes it so very hard to reach.

You would teach them to fear their own bodies, so they'd dissociate and drift out, ungrounded and never fully home, unable to feel when something is wrong.

You would leave a voice inside them that wasn't theirs and teach them to mistake it for their own. And then you would send them out to choose partners, raise children, and lead congregations and circles and companies, all from inside the wound, regifting it down the line without ever knowing they'd been handed anything at all.

And none of this is new. It reaches all the way back to that ancient program I mentioned at the beginning, installed thousands of years ago with the alteration of our genome. Pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath: the old seven deadly sins read almost like a list of symptoms of that program once it's been fed. And sexual abuse is one of the most efficient ways ever devised to feed it.

It Is Not About Forgiveness

Which brings me to something I need to say very clearly, because it's where so many good people get stuck.

This is not about forgiving them.

Forgiveness does not take the entity out of the body.

Nearly every person who has ever sat across from me has said some version of the same sentence: But I forgave them. They say it the way you'd hold up a receipt, as proof the work is finished.

I don't care whether you forgave them. I'm not here to measure your forgiveness or make a moral judgment about it. In fact, I'd rather you hadn't. I'd prefer you carried an enormous amount of resentment toward the person who did this to you. That's healthier. That's more honest. Resentment, at least, knows where the harm came from. Premature forgiveness often just smooths a lid over the wound and calls it healed.

And honesty is exactly what this work takes. Going after the entity, going after the abuser who laid this imprint on your body and getting them out, requires pure, raw honesty. As a healer, one of the first things I have to wade through is that glossy goo of but I forgave them, because it so often sits right on top of the thing we're looking for.

If forgiveness comes someday, let it come on its own, from a clean body, freely given. But it is not the key to this door. It has nothing to do with forgiveness, and everything to do with getting that entity out so you can have your body back.

Your Temple, Clean

So what actually happens when it's gone?

Honestly, it's amazing. Think of the young woman who came back into her body and found her whole world had changed. Nothing outside her had moved. She was simply, finally, seeing the truth of her life and feeling her way into it. When the entity leaves, it makes room. Space opens and expands in the physical form, in the mind, and in the heart.

The body responds. Aches and pains ease. I've watched the thyroid come back into balance, and the adrenals right along with it.

The woman with the shaking foot called me in the days after our session. Over those days, she told me, she'd had bowel movements that came out like black tar. Black tar, leaving her body. It's the same thing people report from a deep cleanse, the kind practitioners like Dr. Richard Schulze have documented: the body finally letting go of what it's been holding.

Because that's what these energies do. Energy, frequency, vibration: once they infect your being, they make you sick, mentally, emotionally, and physically. And when they're removed, the way you'd remove any entity, the expansion that follows on every level is honestly indescribable. In all my years, nothing has been more rewarding than witnessing it.

I know many people who've gone on long, sincere journeys to heal this. And I'll go so far as to say it: until the entity of the abuser is removed, the work isn't done. I don't know another way to put it. It simply isn't done.

That's also why I keep saying sovereignty takes work. Everyone wants to be sovereign now, and I understand the longing. But you don't get there by declaring it. At twenty, at thirty, I couldn't have been a sovereign spiritual being if my life depended on it. I needed healers. I needed acupuncture and chiropractors, sacred circles, years in yoga rooms, endless hours of meditation. I needed help until I'd healed enough to carry on by myself.

And I still have blind spots. So do you. Every one of us will leave this planet with blind spots, because no human being can see their own life from a full 360-degree view above it. That isn't failure. It's simply what it means to live in a body, and it's why we need each other.

You cannot return the ugliest gift. But you can unwrap it, all the way down to what's hiding in the bottom of the box, and you can refuse to pass it on.

And when it's finally gone, you get yourself back. Your body. Your mind. Your heart. Your soul and your spirit, living fully inside that glorious thing called a human body.

Your temple.

And now your temple is clean.

 

the crone and her machete 

Narayan

 

I keep coming back and wanting to add more to this article , I feel it leaves a lot of questions which is good , it gets us all thinking and pondering. I will be writing more on this, as I could have dove deeper into many aspects of this subject , I have opened a door , more to come .