There’s a part of Persephone’s story that I did not write about before. After she rises up out of the underworld, she has to return, again and again, to the darkness and the deep. Here is where two interpretations of Persephone’s story diverge; if the story is a seasonal myth, it is a perfect circle, and Persephone will always descend and return with each winter and spring. But if one is using the story as a map of trauma and recovery, the circle becomes a spiral: jagged, uneven, but yearning/moving towards wholeness.
Persephone returns to the underworld intentionally sometimes, when she is examining and excavating her pain. But sometimes she is thrown back into the throes of trauma by something that triggers Her, by an unexpected sight or sound or smell that reminds Her of what happened. (I can’t tell you the number of books that I have been unable to finish because they include some reference to sexual violence.) And some of these triggers are cyclical, predictable: anniversaries.
It was about three years ago when I first remembered that my father had molested me. I don’t think that it’s an accident that I remembered during this time of year. Witches often say that Samhain is the time of year “when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grow thin.” The living and the dead; the present and the past; the familiar surface and that which has been buried, hidden.
I didn’t unearth all of the trauma at once. That would have overwhelmed me and my ability to process. And this is part of the reason that Persephone must return and return to the underworld. Even a Goddess cannot see all of Hell at once, much less swallow all that fire and anguish in one gulp. And so Persephone must go down and feel the pain in pieces, reintegrating each banished fragment in turn. She must return to the surface to breath, to maintain her connections to the world, her relationships, those tangible cords which bind her and prevent her from dissolving into chaos.
It’s a well-known principle of shadow work, that the “unpleasant” pieces of ourselves that we have banished from consciousness are inevitably part of, or entangled with, power and creativity and other hidden treasures. Just today I was talking with my therapist and he pointed out that an angry, vengeful part of myself that I was troubled by was also courageous, cocky, and defiant. These buried fragments can include not only emotions and personality traits but also memories, parts of our histories, our stories (which are indistinguishable, in a way, from ourselves). Re-membering becomes, literally, putting back together the pieces of ourselves that have been hacked into pieces and thrown down dark holes by violence and years of silence. While stitching a torn off limb or chunk of flesh back on and pumping blood and life force through it after years of disconnection can be excruciatingly painful, it has also, in my experience, been worth it for the renewed connection and joy and strength that follow. Putting ourselves back together is a form of rebirthing, a way of creating new life, a way of being our own nurturing parents, a way of giving the world the gift of our whole, shining selves.
I’m not ready yet to tell the whole story of my first re-membering of abuse, but I need to share some of it.
When I first remembered, on that autumn day in the woods, the memory did not come as images or sensations but as words. A long buried part of me spoke. It told me information. “You feel this way because your father molested you. It happened in the bathroom. It happened when you were four (or five.) It only happened once. Your father did it because he was molested himself. Your father does not remember doing so. He did not molest your sister, because she was a girl.” In a way, I knew immediately that it was true. But it also took me a long time to work through my own denial, and surprise at this sudden upheaval of my own history.
The interesting thing about this information is that I had no way of consciously knowing that my father had been molested himself. Yet this fact was later confirmed by my mother. A later integration of buried memory explained the ambiguity about the ages (“four… or five.”); my father abused me on, or very near, my fifth birthday.
Writing about this brings back some of the pain I experienced during that first time of re-membering. There’s pressure in my head, as if my consciousness were attempting to escape, to press itself out and away from the unspeakable horror surfacing within my own mind. This pain and pressure, this resurgence of trauma, has been close to the surface anyway lately, due to the anniversary, the re-turning of the cycle of the year. The trauma is overwhelming enough that it threatens to undo me, as if I were a a ball of yarn or a complicated knot.
And yet I know from experience that I can and will survive through this. Or most of me will, anyway. I also know from experience that being reborn requires dying; part of me must be sacrificed, changed so that the transformation can happen. Recently, I have been letting go of some deep illusions regarding destiny and the Divine (which I will write about soon.) I also need to let go of using anger as a block, as a wall to keep to out the world, and to let go of my fantasy that someone will rescue me, that someone other than myself will be the consistent, loving, responsible presence that my parents should have been. These two dynamics, the walling off and the longing to be rescued are two sides of the same imbalance. I am like a princess in a self-built tower waiting for my prince. Instead I must come down. I must climb down my own hair, and join the circle around the campfire crying and laughing and singing and dancing and sharing stories. I must become my own prince. I must start dismantling the tower, brick by brick.
So here I am, turning my complicated agony into a story for public consumption, into a shining thread showing one way out of the labyrinth of trauma. I do this as much for me as it do it for you, though I hope and pray that these words serve to empower, guide, and heal other survivors of sexual violence.
