When shadow meets shadow

Transcending the victim/perpetrator trap

When I used to facilitate boundary exercises years ago, I was fascinated by a pattern I observed over time: those who had the least ability to feel and express their boundaries mostly ended up ‘randomly’ choosing partners for the exercise who had a tendency to override people’s boundaries. It was uncanny - like two sides of a coin coming together. As though people were unconsciously choosing the perfect person to confront them and wake them up out of their patterns and bring the unconscious into consciousness.

In conversation a few days ago, I was talking with a friend about another phenomena I’ve witnessed over years: that the most popular conscious sexuality schools and facilitators, all have a bit of a culty feel to them with leaders tending towards narcissism. Could it be, we mused, that the unconscious shadow material in participants was drawn to the unconscious shadows in the leaders, so that ultimately they could become more aware and face the ways they were giving their power away?

What with all our projections on authority, could it be that the claiming of our own sovereignty is a larger collective theme that’s being worked through by humanity right now?

The world would be a very different place if we collectively understood the phenomenas at play described above.

Looking back from where I am now, I’m shocked and saddened at some of the things I’ve put myself through, led by the guidance of ‘experts’ and in the name of ‘healing,’ whether that’s participating in personal growth and healing-centred trainings and workshops but also including medical professionals.

I remember in my Sexological Bodywork training in 2010, doing an exercise where my genitals were touched and massaged by every man in the group, one by one. I went into such an intense trauma response that I couldn’t look anyone in the eye or speak for 24 hours. In this training, we were told that any resistance was a bad thing and should be pushed through. I don’t remember any talk of boundaries (they were simply ‘resistance’) and despite qualifying to touch strangers genitals, we had no training in trauma awareness. Inconceivable from today’s perspective.

Do I feel judgement towards those I looked up to as leaders who created and led trainings such as this? Yes, I do. And I also understand that they were doing the best they could at the time, and that these incidents were painful lessons and wake up calls in listening to the wisdom of my own body, over any outside authority. After processing the hurt, I’ve learned a lot of painful lessons in life which were ultimately ‘gifts,’ as I excavated what my part in them was.

In our culture, honouring the complexity of violations and owning our possible responsibility as victims is not something we’re able to talk about. If you try and raise the phenomena, you’ll likely be accused of victim blaming and letting the perpetrator off the hook. And it’s true that this framing is used by those who have acted poorly and inflicted suffering on others, in order to excuse their behaviour and bypass their own responsibility.

And I think it’s also true that before we can talk about it, we need to honour our hurt. And there is seemingly a bottomless pit of hurt in the world that wants to be honoured and felt. So much abuse, so much violation, so much trauma.

It is with this understanding that I’ve stood with various friends and clients over the years who have been accused of sexual misconduct and witnessed their journey of facing their demons, making movements towards reconciliation and bearing being at the brunt of our post-me too culture, where there is little space for the complexities and moving beyond black and white thinking of good/bad and victim/perpetrator.

I don’t think it’s been the right time for looking at complexities. It’s been time to process hurt and call out wrongs, but it’s meant there’s been a lot of collateral damage in the process.

When I was asked late last year to be an expert witness for a sexual healing therapist’s defence team in which he was accused of rape in a sexual healing session by his client, I said yes.

As someone with a background in the sexual healing fields, my job was to remain impartial and to share about the norms and protocols of this field in London in 2016, the time the incident occurred. And so rather naively, without having a clue of what I was actually throwing myself into, in April of this year I found myself in the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

There is so much I could write about here, but I will just summarise and say I found it a loud and ugly wake up call for humanity to look the ways in which:

• the shame and stigma around sexuality has led to a toxic blend of creating sexual dysfunction, a lack of expertise in how to work with it and a lack of regulation with the industry that’s emerged around it.

• we project so much on to outside authorities, expecting them to save us and abandon our own wisdom and sovereignty in the process.

• our leaders are often unconsciously being steered by their own shadow material such as needing validation, hunger for power and control or in the case of many healers, needing to ‘rescue’ others.

• we’ve wrongly internalised healing as something we ‘do’ and that requires intensity and ‘fixing’, rather than something that we allow, through gentle and loving holding and spaciousness.

• the court system encourages people to defend themselves and not take any personal responsibility. It encourages conflict and catharsis without any real movement towards actual healing and reconciliation. It also dangerously oversimplifies, encourages black and white thinking, polarises between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people and gives no room to the complexities that real life actually consists of and that supports our evolution in consciousness.

• When we don’t make space for holding the complexity and creating possibilities for healing, we may unwittingly create scenarios where the perpetrator ends up taking on elements of the victim and the victim the perpetrator, and the roles can blur.

I hadn’t planned on writing about my involvement in the court case as it was intensely stressful for me and feels very edgy to write about these themes, but I woke up and started writing at 4:30am this morning, feeling it was time. As I write, I notice how vulnerable and how tender it feels to risk causing pain being triggered in others, to risk being misinterpreted, to risk being put in a box I don’t belong, to risk sharing my voice when I have my own shadows lurking in the background.

I’ve been told off for addressing these themes in the past. I was hissed at in court, sent hate mail by the claimant’s friends and accused of victim blaming and supporting the perpetrator. In a rather below the belt move, screenshots of comments I made on someone’s rather shadowy and polarising facebook post were sent to the claimant’s barrister to try and further discredit me during the three hour often humiliating cross-examination I endured.

What I care about is our evolution as humans and bringing light to our blindspots. Often following this breadcrumb trail means I am in the position of the contrarian, the unspoken voice.

I am also a victim of sexual abuse and carry hurt.

I am also a casualty of sexual healing.

I also carry fear that I have caused harm in my workshops in the past and there are people out there who have never spoken up. This was one reason I stepped down from full-time facilitation as I needed time to address my own shadows and look more closely at what it is to take responsibility in offering spaces of healing.

How do we continue to learn and grow from cases like this? How do we honour hurt and injustice while simultaneously honouring the complexity and intelligence of life that seemingly brings us together to ultimately wake up and heal?

I’m not exactly sure, but I don’t think that keeping quiet will help.

How does this all land in you? I’d love to hear from you (disrespectful comments will be removed).