Vous êtes faite de peines étranges

You Are Made Of Strange Pains

I have spent long days and nights and months and years spinning my way - like a very dedicated and obsessive spider - back to the source of my inner sadness and darkness and my trauma and the secrets of my family. As my journey is not (hopefully not) finished yet - I have a lot to discover more - I need to acknowledge that it has brought me - and still brings me gifts and understandings - beyond my wildest expectations.
When I embarked on this journey, I quickly understood that my own pain are the result of unresolved - silenced - hidden traumas.

They say trauma is passed down through genetics - and even reading the most elaborate scientific papers - I am still not convinced. Of course, I need to be humble and maybe I don’t understand science at all. But to me, we are far far away from understanding how all this is passed down.

Ancestral patterns, emotions, traumatic events are felt and fed in the field (what we call commonly the energy field) and this is how their presence, actions and energies are affecting our lives.
Becoming aware of the ancestral patterns that vibrate inside of us - in disharmony within us, is a gift.
It is a signal, and it takes a life time, sometimes more, to be transformed.

One layer at a time, I have been diving deeper into the inner sea of my family stories, specially with the distorted relationships between Mothers and Daughters. And also, not to forget the Men, who by the way, tend to disappear from my family tree. Aouch. They are killed. They die suddenly. They get sick. They leave. They are expelled. They drink themselves to death. They mysteriously disappear ....

Family Photo of my Mother with her Mother and her Grand Mother. From the series “Harvest of Memory”

I would like to bring here Ferenczi´s theory¹ on the impact of child abuse in families. It is very important to understand, specially to get a certain context about the story I am about to share next.

Ferenczi observed that abuse and sexual assault against children are followed by something that adds very much to the trauma, something very damaging - I would add even more damaging. It is the silence, the hypocrisy and the family’s denial. The consequences are that it makes the child identify with the aggressor, complying with the mistreatment, and the phony story, in order to protect themselves and not be emotionally cast out. The child sacrifices their own perceptions and critical thinking, which threatens further isolation. They accept blame (“something must be wrong with me”), as the family requires. Their helplessness and sense of shameful defect persist. Such self-negation and internalisation of oppression is typical whenever people feel helpless in the face of overwhelming threat, both on individual and on a broader scale. What it also does and this is equally important here : the abuse and the assault is NOT possible without agents or enablers around the abuser and his acts. They need a cover-up. A number of people will be close a Predator and they will not know. A crowd of mute or muted people, who really - genuinely - do not know what is happening. Others will close eyes and ears; they cannot do otherwise. And like this, just by being around are enabling the crime to happen. I would even go further: the abuser alone could not do much without them.

Last week, a horrific event happened and it put me back to the source of an intense aching.

In the small town close to where we live, in Moss (Norway), a man² has been arrested and is now in detention for sexual assault against minors, more specifically young girls under 14. He has also been found guilty (he admitted everything) of possessing and producing pedo-pornographic material. For some years now, he was responsible of a teenager´s club, the oldest and most popular one, where he organised events, parties and concerts with and for young people (13 to 18). Tom Poulsen - I really need to name him publicly - I guess you understand by now the reasons why - is well known in town. I have heard of him in many different occasions. I have heard good things about him - I can add “of course” to this sentence. One of the first time I heard about him, was by the psychologist of my daughter in her former school. Yes! You read right. The psychologist! She was working closely with him and she was openly praising his work for the youngsters.

Alfie, my daughter, has been invited to go to that club many times. The psychologist invited her. Her friends invited her. Tom, himself, invited her. He had her mobile phone number (hers and other kids who he was communicating with). He was sending messages and I knew about that. Alfie was always saying that this was really weird and expressing that Tom was a little too close to them. “He is too nice, Do you think it is normal Maman?” I remember her saying.

The horrible thing is that I may have told my daughter : “Its part of his job!!”

Horrific. A nightmare. I feel dirty. I feel disgust. I feel terror.

I remember saying at times: “Why don’t you go to Kråkereiret this weekend?” “Are you not going there on Sunday ?” “Oh, it would be so nice to go there and hang with your friends…”

Remember the muted crowd enabling the deed of the predator?

Alfie is doing fine.

I took 2 days off my schedule just to be with her and to talk with her.

In fact, she is amazing.

I told her how proud I am of her. That she was so right. That feeling of something is not right, she should always listen to exactly that. It is a very important voice. She should always trust her feelings. She was able - better than me - to recognise, to doubt, to interrogate the purpose of that man.

Unfortunately for me, her old mother, the hardships, the violence and abuses experienced in the past, have left a deep open wound, that even with a lot of work, even if I will try to heal all my life, it seems that I am still under the spell. It takes so much time, so much pain. You see some ghosts will always be present, you can’t annihilate them so easily….some ghosts are just around the corner, they sleep in the cracks.

This weekend I had a drum journey. I needed it to invite the spirits of all my well-ancestors to join me and help me heal within. As I journeyed back in time seeking answers, old wounds and forgotten memories concealed within my subconscious came back to the surface. I saw the faces of my ancestors and I could see in their eyes the tremendous and deeply ingrained amount of pain that had been torturing them. I could feel how their own life experiences, their struggles to survive and the wars they had to endure had shaped them. I could see how this transpired from one generation to the next and how it had been defining a long line of individuals, and in the end, haunting me.

I sat among the shadows and I listened to those distant whispers. As I held space for them, it became clear to me that what they had been craving for all along was nurture, safety and care. As this part of me emerged from the underworld, I met the darkness with love, and I breathed in the life energy it had been withholding.

And as this transcending stream of energy rose from within, I met my daughter again, as a being of light, free as an elf, beautiful, dancing with the wilderness, feeling the ecstasy of life.

She and me are not the same.

My shadows and her light makes me whole again, on this ever-going process of transformation, acknowledging both the wounded and the healer within.

I am reminded everyday of the magic of this world.

I am also reminded what was given to me, motherhood, therapy, art, writing all giving me ways to express myself where I otherwise would become mute.

1. https://www.alsf-chile.org/Indepsi/Articulos/Trauma-Abuso/Ferenczis-Trauma-Theory.pdf

2. https://www.moss-avis.no/ungdomsklubbarbeider-etterforskes-for-seksuelle-overgrep-na-ber-politiet-om-tips/s/5-67-1683583