My Trauma is an inter-dimensional portal

Or, exploding the myth of the "healed" self

***The newsletter below is taken from a conversation I had recently with Bayo Akomolafe in his class ‘The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound,’ given through the non-profit Science & Non-Duality. It addresses topics of gender-based violence and abuse. Please claim your own agency and take care of yourself however you need as you read this—including reading this slowly, taking breaks, or ditching it altogether to go talk to the plants and stars.***

My story

I am a survivor.  While I had the great fortune to be born into a loving family—my parents were a pastor and a teacher—by the age of 18 I had been raped three times in three completely separate incidents by three entirely different men.  In college, I suffered what they used to call a “nervous breakdown,” and was plagued by several years of acute PTSD symptoms and crisis: nightmares, flashbacks, debilitating fear and anxiety, shortness of breath, panic attacks, short-term memory loss, chronic pain, etc etc etc.

Though I survived, it was as a skeleton of my childhood self.  For the next 20+ years, I was in and out of therapy.  I found myself entrapped in abusive relationships as an adult, and in my forties, I ended up literally becoming a fugitive with my then-small son.  Under the guidance of a small army of unimaginably courageous women, most of them women of color from backgrounds very different than my own, I entered the underground railroad of safehouses and shelters that makes up this country’s best hope of escape for victims of gender-based violence. 

I was one of the lucky ones, in that I have lived to tell the tale.  A lot of that has to do with my privilege: I am a white, American woman, and that fact allows me the luxury of having breakdowns and making mistakes.

And so, although my family of origin is by no means wealthy, I have been relatively successful in accessing therapy, pharmaceuticals, herbs, “alternative treatments,” and a lot of love from family and friends. At age 50, I can report that I and my son are stable and as relatively healthy one can be these days.  I have gone on to provide “survivor leadership” and guidance to other survivors of gender-based violence—survivors of human trafficking, young LGBTQ+ kids, and of course, folks caught in abusive relationships in need of escape.

All of which is to say that I am a reluctant expert on the lived experience of trauma, fugitivity, and “recovery.”

What is my point here? Simply this: I find the current understanding of trauma to be woefully limited in its focus on the incapacities trauma creates in the human body-mind-spirit.  In my experience it simply isn’t ontologically accurate, which is to say, it doesn’t conform with my lived experience of how the human body-mind-spirit processes wounds.

Portrait of the Poet as a Young Woman: my high school senior photo from 1989. I was one of only two girls in the entire high school without big hair. (It was Jersey, after all.)

A New Ontology of the Wound

Others have noted that we are encouraged by Western modernity to think of trauma as an injury or wound we should heal.  I want to emphasize here, that I absolutely do feel that in the acute stages of crisis, mainstream therapy and even pharmaceuticals can be powerful allies to one’s continued survival.  I would be long dead if not for the support I received from therapists, psychiatrists, and other “mainstream” caregivers at various points in my life, including today.  As brother Bayo says sometimes, we all need to make the dinner and pay the bills.  And we need to have at least the option of a functional self to do those things.

However, in my personal experience, none of these modern Western modalities—even those somatic or intergenerational trauma experts who are SO helpful to many people suffering from legacies of abuse, captivity, and genocide— none of them that I know of quite captures the full dimensionality of what actually happens in the moment of traumatic wounding.

Let me give an example, and I am speaking from my personal experience here.  As I am being attacked, "I" hover on the ceiling looking down at my body from outside, from a vantage point that is not from my own eyes. I also do not feel the totality of the pain in the moment, though the pain (experienced by me as an exteriorized feeling or sensation that overtakes me) comes back to haunt me later without my conscious knowledge or consent.  Nightmares.  Referred pain.  Panic attacks.  Flashbacks.  Hallucinations.

How do we explain this? Psychologists call this phenomenon of leaving the body "disassociation," but what is that except a fancy word to say that our “selves” exceed the limits of what we’ve been told is possible for humans to do?

And what are flashbacks if not the disruption of the linear timeline that we are told exists as a given?

As I see it, the moment of the traumatic wound is precisely a spilling over and outside of the bounds of the modern self.  The wound is therefore less a pothole to be filled than a portal through which we and other beings can pass.

Or let me put it even more audaciously: the wound is a birth canal through which a species of new and ancient human being emerges.

Having been forcefully “opened” up by trauma—in my case, I was literally penetrated—I became a different type of human: a being composed of tubes, tunnels, and networks through which other beings travel, and even, on occasion, make their home, like squirrels nesting on the pylons of telephone wires. 

“Healing” for me has involved learning how to attune myself to these new human capacities the trauma has laid bare.  And I’ve found them to be far more ancient than anything I could have imagined.

For instance, now, situating myself inside this portal/pylon self, I find I can hear voices of other beings that I am not “supposed” to hear—trees, stones, and birds speak to me as I pass them on my daily walk.  Predictive dreams come regularly, as my consciousness seems to be able to slip and slide back and forth through time.  I am sometimes accosted at random moments by the voices of ancestral spirits.  Ancient statues in museums speak my name.

A page from my dream journal. When I awoke, I knew that somehow this image was related to Saturn’s ingress to Pisces. My art and photo.

The ecstasy of becoming a dancing ground

Having become a dancing ground for other beings’ voices and experiences, I can revel in the ecstatic joy of being in communion with the star ancestors, stone beings, animal siblings, and plant elders.  And with other humans, too, I can sense into them across space and time. I connect using faculties that exceed the narrow bounds of the humanist self and its predictable cosmology.  And in doing so, the electric joy of bare-wired communion overtakes the gaping pothole of pain.

I want to make it clear:  I don’t think I have any special “superhuman” capacities.  I think we all have them, whether we know it or not.  Our ancient ancestors certainly did.  As do many people now—not just survivors of trauma, but also indigenous peoples, aunties, uncles, elders, and wise children who have not carve off these (to use brother Bayo’s phrase) tentacular appendages that reach out and beyond the confines of what we are told should be our discrete and “healed” self.

Exactly 40 years after my high school photo…at a photoshoot for Sanctuary for Families, an NYC organization fighting gender-based violence that I work with a Survivor Leader and advocate. Photo courtesy of Sanctuary for Families.

Mysteria Mundi, the project

This newsletter and substack site are where I will be exploring what it means to inhabit the body as dancing ground for other-than-human guests. As pylon along which these beings pass, as field in which they may curl up and nest.

I will let the cosmos tell me what to send you, and when. There will be more essays like this. Definitely some translations of Ancient Mediterranean hymns to the sun, moon, and stars. Some of my own poetry. Perhaps some audio and visuals too. If you find this useful or thought-provoking, please share widely. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid supporter so I can continue to dedicate myself to this work.

A parting invitation

Since it is October and we’re approaching the time of year in the Northern Hemisphere when the veil thins and the spectres of other-than-human beings walk the land, I will leave you all some haunting invitational questions to ponder:

Which other-than-human beings populate your portal/pylon wounds? 

And what songs do they whisper to you when you step through your own electric, livewire door?

A pothole on a Brooklyn street and a mysterious doorway in one of my favorite abandoned farmhouses in North Carolina. My photos.