2023

2023

We are, all of us, together standing in the dark, waiting to hear the heartbeat of a new beginning.  Waiting to find our voice and become the people who our ancestors promised we would become.[1]     
-Patty Krawec, Anishinaabe Reserve

I greet you today, at the start of 2023, with a heart full of promise and resolve.

If you are reading this, you may be on a journey with no name or clear path when you look to the coming year.  No matter how you inhabit your current body or the lineage you find yourselves, there is  much in your DNA that makes up the richness of who you are.  We each hold a particular ancestral bundle from many sources, cultures, and histories.  Our individual life bundle holds the trauma and wounding, the progress and wisdom, that has been accumulated over thousands of years.

Think of the people in your life, those alive and those dead, who inhabit your heart¾who have depleted or nourished you¾directly or as ancestors.  Some have been stuck in their own particular toxic concoctions.  You could not always fix what or who was present in your life, but you can work to change the responses that help you be whole and true to yourself. And it may be easier said than done to find a way to detach from loyalty to poisonous relationships or inner voices that harm you. Make an alliance with darkness and use it as a nutrient for the future. The greatest challenge and gift as you make your way forward are to have some compassion for this challenge and the process.

Respect your own struggle and movement as you turn and return to yourself. This is not easy, especially for survivors who have been abused or neglected.  We know the world is struggling and many are dancing with their eyes shut and their hearts closed. You may need to look to the potential of a kinder vision with fresh resources and habits of connection, finding other ways to give and receive. Honor and find those in your life who were or are doing the work of change and possibility, even if imperfectly. We will all do better together.

Consider deeply who you are, respecting how far you have come this time around. Your struggle is compost for what is ahead, and there is immense potential in the rich soil of your life. However you do it, I invite you to write or draw or sing your own song today:  tracking your grief and hope, your losses and possibilities.  Remember, you are not alone in this.

We as humans are kin, perhaps more than we may ever realize. 

Happy New Year!

Mikele Rauch
Taking Back Ourselves

[1] Krawec, Patty.  (2022Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future.

Thanksgiving 2022

I am making a home inside myself. 

A shelter of kindness where everything is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch of sunlight to stretch out without hurry,

where all that has been banished

and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to

—released. 

A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own. 

I am throwing arms open

to the whole of myself—especially the fearful,

fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing

every seed and weed, every drop of rain, has made the soil richer.

                                          Julia Fehrenbacher--The Most Important Thing

Thanksgiving 2022....

As survivors, we may enter this holiday season with mixed emotions, triggering memories, some complicated family and challenging relationships.  This is a time when grief and loss can bring our hopes and our longings to the surface.

So, however you spend the coming days, we encourage you to decide how you keep the holidays—choosing to separate from situations that do not feel safe, or making courageous or quiet stands in your own truths, no matter who you engage with. 

Find the space to step away if need be; to breathe, to find humor or bemusement even in the vast ironies of situations you cannot always control.  Reach out to those who are connected to you in your recovery. But most of all, be generous and compassionate within yourself.

In the meantime, may the holiday season be full of possibility and new sources of gratitude.

And as always,

 ever thankful to be on this journey with you.

Mikele

When There Is No Hope

You, a survivor not only of sexual trauma but all that may have accompanied it: family secrets , Church secrets, military and organization secrets and silencing, incarceration, profound neglect in any category, being invisible and made mute--being blamed or blaming oneself, gaslighted, demonized, legally thwarted, financially strapped, physically demoralized in health and mind, addicted, shamed by the system and shamed within--exhausted--alone.

It feels like the perpetrator won...

Since the beginning of human interaction, the phenomena of evil has competed to overtake truth and power.

We could freeze, capitulate, or self destruct in despair. But here’s the thing. There is power in standing in your own truth. It is why you are still here, against the odds.

Don’t give up on yourself, or a community that sees you, hears you, believes you. You may have to take the plunge and risk the possibility of connection that is real, where you are truly seen and heard.

There are those of us who do see you, who can hear you, and whom you can join. We may not look like you, or come from your familiar spaces. But here we are, ready to stand together. This may not seem like much when you have been so alone. But it is there and it is strong.

We are with you.

Grief: The Final Frontier

keep speaking the years from

their hiding places.

keep coughing up smoke

from all the deaths you have

died.

keep the rage tender.

because the soft season will

come.

it will come...

—Nayyirah Waheed

We lose homes, beloved animals. We lose our health or limbs. We lose capability and

sometimes our skill sets. We lose agency. Sometimes we lose our freedom. We can lose

our dreams.

We lose people. (delete: things) We lose those who depart from this life, sometimes far

too soon, and often without any resolution for who and what they were to us.

Sometimes we lose faith, or whatever we conceive of as God. We grieve the lack of the

communities that we thought would sustain us but perhaps shun us with silence or

denial of our realities.

We think of the places that shame us now, but were once sources of survival at another

time.

We grieve the periods that we lived outside of our own hearts, our own warmth, our own

kindness just to survive.

We mourn for what we lost through the sexual, physical and psychological violations

that created a warped sense of what it means to be the gender we inhabit. We may have

lost the sense of what it means to be sexual, affectionate, playful, or powerful in the body

we live in.

We grieve for what is within us that was never touched by love or never touched period.

We struggle with the worn out strategies to survive, that no longer give anything to us

and in fact harm us: our addictions, our old patterns that used to seem like they were

helpful to others that neither served ourselves nor the ones we were trying to fix.

Our healing has to include finding a way to reckon--and perhaps respect with kindness--

all we hate inside ourselves and all we that we reject because of shame. This is the

demon of self-contempt that spilled over on us from the perpetrator’s own self-hatred.

Our healing has to incorporate the present circumstances of the time we are in now: the

world, the climate, the wars, the body of the earth, the landscape of fear and violence we

ourselves may be victims of. Our healing may need to face how we somehow contribute

to these circumstances by our own actions or inaction.

We grieve the loss of species, environments, cultures, disparities. We recognize the

horrific conscious and unconscious racial injustice, and profound violence to the

genders who love one another differently than we do. We note our own blindness and

disgust toward those who do not see the world as we do. Yes, this is also grief.

We ache for the loss of country, culture, family, histories, or what we hoped would be

family that would sustain us.

We look at the selfishness that we witness or engage in because of our fear.

In the words of Francis Weller, we grieve the soul of this world.

Mending ourselves must involve touching into that complicated space called

compassion--for ourselves and for others-even those we cannot love or forgive. This is a

word that has been overused and perhaps compromised with shallow lip service. The

work of recovery and grief is about release. We do not need to pretend everything has to

be okay with what has transpired nor allow rage and revenge to infect us with its own

toxicity. We release ourselves.

If we can include honest unflinching truth about ourselves, we can grieve our

depression, our isolation, our fear, our anger, our crippling disappointments and

discouragement. We can let go of the coldness or numbness that we take on as shields

of defense against the pain.

We grieve for all the time we still believe the lie that we are small, that we are unworthy.

We grieve for the ways we might have bloated our persona to be included or recognized

in ways that were not authentic to our own true self. All of this is grief beneath the mask

of who we really are and how, in the end, we long to love and be loved.

This journey is essential to being human and healed. This is recovery. It will set us free.