I finally got some real down time and recouped sleep lost during two solid months of theatrical production. The dinner I planned for Brandon and his housemates, as I mentioned last week in “Too Close to Home,” went beautifully. I even cleaned out my refrigerator and I’m starting work on the closets.
This week has given me a chance to reflect, not only on Brandon’s recent episode with police, but also on how other parts of Brandon’s life will now be altered because of his recent experience.
Then I began to think about what happens silently, secretly, behind the closed doors of our homes and in the confines of family, starting from the very beginning of our lives. I began thinking on various forms of trauma experienced in this country by most at various stages in our lives and in various forms.
As dramaturg for the Medea Project, I have had experiences that were both challenging and deeply rewarding. Getting someone to write about what happened to them is hard enough. Getting them to write on “The History of My Body” is another.
“The History of My Body” is the recurring theme of our last big production — “Birthright?” — in collaboration with Planned Parenthood, which opened for a two-week run in 2015. The stories ranged from drug abuse and running away from home as a child, to swallowing and burying the experience of severe child abuse. This is what Cassandra, a core member of our company who we met through University of California San Francisco’s Women’s HIV clinic, wrote:
I don’t have a lot of memories from my childhood which I am thankful for, but the ones I do have are painful — flashbacks of my body being touched without my permission. Why were these men and my own brother doing this to me? Where was everyone? Where was my mother?
I was afraid. I thought this was all my fault. I thought I must have done something to encourage this. Was it really an attack because I knew them? Was it actually rape since they were my parents’ friends and my brother?
As a result, I became pregnant when I was 12, and had to have an abortion. My head was spinning and I was physically sick. My mind could not comprehend this. In order to cope, I blocked it out as if it never happened. I shut down completely and decided I would never tell anyone about it. I could feel my body and myself and they were not the same.
I found with the rape that my body healed, but my thought process and inner core were deeply damaged. I blamed myself. I hated myself. I became severely drug addicted. Physical wounds were just the beginning of my struggle. I have emotional scars I’m not sure will ever go away. I try to heal the inner wounds, but new ones are always opened in the process.
Questions that could never be answered hung over my head. I questioned things that I did in order to be put in that situation. As a survivor of child abuse, rape, domestic violence, with an adulthood overcoming drug addiction and living with HIV, I don’t think I will ever escape the emotional scars earned from a childhood of physical abuse. To this day, I will never understand why they did what they did. All I know is that on that night in that moment, they forever changed who I am and how I view the world.
I could feel my body and myself, and they were not the same.
It took a long time for me to get to where I am today. I now know that there was nothing I said or did that caused them to rape me. No matter how well I knew him, or what our prior history was, they were the ones who made the decision. Not me.
From what I have seen in twenty-five years working with at-risk women, the cyclic pattern of abuse/self-abuse is connected — not only for the victim, but also for the perpetrators. What happened to someone that caused them to do something so heinous as to rape a child?
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For her own reasons, Cassandra did not do her piece for our “Birthright?” show in 2015. Since then she has mastered herself, and performed this piece recently in a short show we did last weekend under the theme “How I Cheated Death.”
Cassandra will also be doing it for our next show on trauma, the working title of which is “When Did Your Hands Become a Weapon?” She feels ready to exorcise this demon on stage. I am glad we’re there to provide her the safety net to do so.
Broadly speaking, there is the social trauma Americans are coping with from their treatment by the criminal justice system, and there’s the physical-psychological trauma that happens to young people of both sexes — including children and infants — in the home. I pose this question to you, our Planet Waves community: how far do you think the ramifications of trauma plays in our society, and ultimately out in the world? I think war and its havoc is not to be ruled out in this discussion.
I am asking this in the name of research for our next show, and to lay down some context based on Hexagram 37 from the I Ching — The Family, of which it is written: “The Family shows the laws operative within the household that, transferred to outside life, keep the state and the world in order.” Looking at our world today through the lens of experiencing trauma, how true is that? See you in the comments section.
I don’t think I would have anything to work with from a personal perspective Fe, but doesn’t this fit in with the polarization of so many dichotomies in our everyday lives? Especially that of the man-woman polarity, or the powerful vs. the powerless. Things like what you have written about would have, in past decades (or centuries), been kept quiet. Family members, or close friends who could be trusted with this “shame”, for that would be how it was viewed, would ever know for sure that it happened.
In astrology, we think of Nessus when the topic of rape is brought up. Being a centaur and associated with generations of abuse, Nessus aspects in transit (and in the birth chart) would reveal possible psychological motivations for the abuser or of the abused. The person receiving the abuse would likely be “where the buck stops”. In other words, Cassandra could have “accepted the duty” of bringing forth the repugnant truth about family or familial abuse. In any case, it goes back to ingrained beliefs about what a woman is in terms of value and what a man is. It goes back to even before the patriarchy when it was the matriarchy in charge; in each case it was inequality of power and authority.
Perhaps then, it is your (our) responsibility to examine these egregious acts in a public way so as to better understand how they came to be almost ritualistic in society, with the goal of eliminating them (a centaur purpose).
Consider that in the U.S. natal (Sibly version) chart that Ceres (the mother), Nessus (the rapist) and Child (the child) are in consecutive degrees – 8, 9, 10+ Pisces – and at this very moment transiting Mars is square them (for weeks) as he stations retrograde at 8+ Sagittarius.
Also consider that the U.S. Uranus at 8+ Gemini is in a permanent square with U.S. Ceres-Nessus-Child conjunction in Pisces and that transiting Neptune in Pisces , having already made conjunctions to our country’s natal Ceres and Nessus, is presently conjunct the U.S. Child, as well as square U.S. Uranus in Gemini and as well, square transiting Mars in Sagittarius.
This could no doubt be part of the big pattern of the transiting square between Neptune in Pisces and Saturn (society) in Sagittarius who have already made one of their 3 squares last December. The remaining squares will come in June and September and the last one will have transiting Neptune conjunct the U.S. Child.
For Mars’ part, he and transiting Mercury were opposite transiting Pluto when they began their cycle and it was right in the heart of the U.S. natal Sun-square-Saturn pattern. Therefore, we might want to examine transiting Mercury’s path as well. Already he has made a recent conjunction to transiting Uranus, thus beginning a new cycle of awakening. Today he is at 10+ Taurus and sextile the U.S. Child and here you are writing about a child’s abuse at the hands of friends and family. By Sunday morning trans. Mercury will trine transiting Pluto, so there you go; mission accomplished, for the moment anyway.
In June transiting Mars and Mercury will reach opposition, the half-way point in their cycle (that was opposite transiting Pluto and conjunct the U.S. Sun), and perhaps you will be able to evaluate your efforts to bring forth understanding as well as movement toward abolishing heinous acts such as the rape of a child.
It’s all in the little details isn’t it? Looking at the big picture can boggle the mind as we grapple with our destiny, but it is in the small details that we make progress toward that goal. Keep up the good work my dear.
be
B:
As usual, your words are a feast — and I will try to respond.
Nessus helps explain a lot of what I’ve been feeling, about the silencing of victims, the sheer numbers of people who are not able to speak up. Giving voice to the silenced has always been our strongest tool in the toolkit — in Medea and elsewhere in my history.
I found it interesting that the National Endowment for the Arts agreed to funding what will be our strongest artistic piece yet, investigating in part the growing trend in finding the root causes of addiction, anti-social behavior and crime, and risky behavior leading to HIV among poor women — white and black. It stems from trauma.
Our chief proponent is the head of UCSF’s Women’s HIV clinic who put together a new study on the direct correlation of early childhood trauma to the later behavior that ultimately leads to HIV exposure. Its more than unprotected sex. Its also about needles. This study was conducted over a three year period beginning in 2009, and published in 2012, and presented before the Annual Conference on HIV and HEP C in Washington DC. Some of the women researched in the survey are members of our company. Little by little, the pieces are being put together, gathering steam like when cells reach momentum building into a completely new organism.
Toni Morrison’s new book, “God Help the Child” came out last year on the very subject of childhood trauma — including not only physical, but verbal abuse of children. The key words from her book, “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.”
Perhaps my own Ceres progressed, sitting two degrees past transiting Pluto in my 11th coming right at the point of sextiling my 20-Scorpio Saturn in the 9th impels me into the house of teaching on the subject. This time, by the shadow, flesh, bone and song of theater. We hope to have a show by the fall. September even. Workshops are going to begin soon to invite women to participate.
From your words, Barb, the time seems to be right.
“Yes”, Fe. And thank you. It IS all too close to home….make that, it HAS all started at “home”. My natal astrology cries out for resolution to family karma; yet there are always more questions than answers.
Your I Ching? I don’t know where to begin. Another resounding “yes”. Indeed. Even now, as cousins I have not seen in decades resurface, I bite my tongue to not reveal how my very different experience of the inner home I grew up in has nothing to do with their outer experience of it. Thank goodness for a few good friends who “get it” — and “got it” before I did.
I’m studying Victorian culture right now– remembering this was spread far and wide by British Imperialism etc– opens some windows to understanding at least a few underlying patterns.
Hooray for Cassandra’s spirit /perseverance, and to you, for the work that you do.
aWord:
Thank you.
Yes, its the women who tell their stories who we respect the most for their courage and honesty. As dramaturg, my job is the equivalent of midwife, a doula. Neither important or not important, but helpful in a very critical process of transformation. After nearly a quarter century of doing this, I feel happily in love with the life I’ve made. I am grateful and in awe of what has happened. (In a silent prayer of gratitude.)
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On my most realistic days, I tend to think the ramifications of trauma absolutely permeate everything and can be insidiously subtle or pronounced. I tend to recognize us as a culture (species at this point?) with collective PTSD. And in my belief system, that stuff — the imprints that survive the trauma of death — travel between lifetimes.