This was originally written for and published by Ms Magazine's Daring to Remember: And End to Fear and Shame Blog, 7/19/2018.

My mother underwent two illegal, “kitchen table” abortions in New York City during World War II.  She was in her early 20’s, working as a secretary. These abortions were performed with no anesthetic, and she told me that, when she cried out in pain during one of them, the male abortionist threw down his instruments in a rage and threatened her: “If you do that again, I’m going to walk out of here and leave you like this.” Afterwards, she developed a very serious pelvic infection.

My mother carried enormous shame over these two pregnancies, as well as the trauma of the two dangerous abortions. When my father returned in 1945 to claim his bride and carry her down to his home Virginia, she was too afraid to tell him. At that time, a Yankee bride had a tough time entering society in the South, and her marginalized status only magnified her shame.
 
For ten years, my mother was unable to conceive. She was convinced that a non-sterile abortion and subsequent infection had destroyed her capacity to become pregnant. This was her punishment, the judgment on her youthful perfidy. Finally, in her mid-thirties, she found the courage to schedule an appointment with an out-of-state ob/gyn, far enough away to protect her anonymity. Finally, she shared her story with someone. After the examination, he told her that she was perfectly healthy and there was no reason why she couldn’t have a baby. She went home and promptly conceived.

My mother’s marriage was a miserable one. Her sailor-on-leave turned out to be physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive. Did she stay with him as part of her “punishment?” My mother’s shame spread over the years like blood on a sheet, staining everything in her life. Unable to bond with a female child, she pushed me into an unwanted marriage at nineteen, and I only saw her a few times after that.

In the final days of her life, she talked obliquely about the “terrible things” she had done in her life, forgetting that she had told me told me about the abortions three decades earlier.  I reminded her that abortions are legal today and that she didn’t need to feel frightened or ashamed anymore. There was a long pause before she said, “Well, I will think about that.”

Stop saying, “You have to understand."

Stop saying, "That was just the culture back then."

Stop saying, "It was a different time.”

Stop saying these things to get a pass on the hard work of revising your own history, relearning, making meaningful amends on behalf of victims of sexual predators and institutionalized sexual abuse.

But who in their right mind would give these as excuses? Well, I'll tell you... friends of mine (see Example 1), the Vatican (see Example 2), and, yes, Pema Chödrön  (see Example 3):
 
EXAMPLE 1:  I was talking to a French friend of mine about how two of the most prominent founders of post-postmodernism were pro-pedophilia activists, actually signing a public petition in France to abolish—I repeat "ABOLISH," not "lower"—the age of consent for sex. I was noting how post-modernism attempts to frame childhood as a social construct, and how queer theory has been used historically to defend and actually advocate for child rape. My friend, a citizen of France, became very agitated. She cut me off: "It was the 1960's! Sartre signed that petition! All the major intellectuals of France signed that petition! (not true) "It was published in the major French newspapers!" (true) "One has to understand the strikes of 1968 and the spirit of rebellion at the time!" 

But, no, actually, one does not. A two-year-old in 1968 is just like a two-year-old in 2019. Any idiot knows that.

EXAMPLE 2:  In 2019, a letter by ex-pope Benedict XVI was released, in which he blames the international epidemics of  priest rape scandals on the culture of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s--especially the social upheavals of 1968. Here is what he wrote:

“Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms.”

Benedict XVI goes on to talk about the need for school uniforms and a ban on “sex films” on passenger airlines, because of the tremendous risk that these might provoke aggression. 

Well, here's one for you, Benedict... How about taking a bunch of idealistic young men who feel a religious calling, and forcing them to to tie their aspirations of ministry to a lifetime of mandatory celibacy? Benedict's final verdict:  “Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.” And, again, any adult with a shred of decency, memory of their own childhood, or responsible caregiving experience knows that's crap.

EXAMPLE 3: Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön in 2019, responding to the revelations about widespread sexual abuse of students at Shambhala Institute:

“Recently, someone outside our community asked me if I thought Shambhala had a loose sexual culture. It was such a non-aggressive and straightforward question that I answered without even thinking, ‘it sure does!’ Then reflecting on this later, I had to admit that I had always thought of it this way. I entered Vajradhatu (as we were then called) in the 1970s as a fairly new celibate nun who had been instructed by my teacher Chögyam Trungpa, to keep my vows impeccably but to not be too uptight. I think that it’s no exaggeration to say that at that time the community was famous for being wild … a group that was characterized by a lot of drinking and a lot of sex. I was not put off by this, and it did not seem to me to be a problem. It was the 70s and free love was practically a cultural norm.... Women would come to me or to Judith Simmer-Brown or Judy Lief or other sympathetic women, and we would try to help but found there was almost nothing we could do to address the behavior. There was not what you would call a cover-up but rather the whole situation where complaints were most often met in Shambhala with the attitude of ‘what’s the big deal?’ or ‘oh that’s just what he’s like.’ In other words, this sexual behavior was considered no problem. The culture of looseness was systemic.”

Okay, no, Pema. Just no.  I was there. I was cleaning toilets for the Naropa Institute in Boulder in 1974, the year it was founded by your teacher. I was twenty-two, a good fifteen years younger than you, and still I knew better. 

I was managing a student rooming house that Naropa rented for their students. I also did custodial work for another rooming house that they leased. It was a total boys' club. It was like Animal House with time-outs for meditation. The founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was a notorious drunk and some members of the the faculty had criminal histories. It was a dangerous place for women, whose experiences were not the same as those of the male students. Yes, they were harassed. They were also raped. Sometimes these perpetrations had pretenses of spirituality about them, the perpetrators attempting to mask their agenda with talk of mystical unions and tantra. It was happening in my rooming house. None of the women were calling it a culture of looseness. None of the women were saying, “What’s the big deal?”

I don’t give my French friend a pass on her defense of Derrida and Foucault. I don’t give the Vatican a pass on blaming the 1960’s. And I don’t give Pema a pass on her euphemisms for rape culture.

Look, I grew up with a sex addict for a father. I was exposed to torture pornography as a child. I was raised in a predatory culture. I thought my environment and my role in it were normal. It's called grooming.

But, you know what? I grew up.I remembered. I had to revise almost every single memory of my childhood, and with that revision, I had to change my relationships to my entire extended and immediate family, whose interests were heavily identified with those of the perpetrator. I had to reprogram myself, reinvent myself. It was hard work, it was spiritual work, it came at a tremendous price in every area, and, thank the goddess, there was and there still is a community who support my recovery. You will never hear me say of my experience that it was a "looseness of culture" or "the physiognomy of the 1960's" or "boys will be boys."

I have to work hard every day against the hard-wiring of my childhood. I have to tear up my decades of childhood investment in that rape culture. I have no tolerance for the passive witnesses and bystanders in situations of abuse who indulge themselves in the privilege of refusing to grow up.

Stop saying these ignorant and dangerous things! Stop trying to pass off your enabling denial as some kind of justifiable or even sanctimonious moral relativism! Stop trying to brand denial and enabling as forms of spiritual detachment and transcendence!

Just listen to this moral idiocy: 

Tricycle [magazine]: "You don’t think it would be helpful to name names, to publicize those instances where Buddhist teachers have been repeatedly taken to task by students?" [The interviewer is referring to charges against Shambhala founder Sakyong Mipham for alleged sexual assault, emotional, physical, financial abuse and binge drinking.] 

Pema Chödrön: "That really does feel like McCarthyism to me. I wouldn’t want to see a list of the bad teachers and I wouldn’t want to see a list of the good ones—here are the saints and here are the sinners. For so many of us that’s our heritage, to make things one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong."

Seriously. No. Just no.

Here we see  Pema's dissociation in action: She is clearly able to identify someone, Joe McCarthy, as a dangerous man whose example is to be avoided. McCarthy was a self-styled leader of a cult-like movement for moral purity and spiritual reformation. I don't see any hesitation on her part to reference him as a bad guy who betrayed his own mission. It's only when the perpetrators are members of her own community, when the perpetrators constitute her mentors and colleagues, that Pema remembers to adopt the officially sanctioned position of "zen" neutrality--which, any victim can tell you, is anything but neutral. And, which any victim can tell you, is usually far more incentivized than standing with the victim.

We learn something of Pema's prior playbook from a Buddhist community initiative to expose the Shambhala abuses. In August 2018, this group issued their "Phase 3 Report," which included details of a situation where a woman reported to Pema that she had been raped by a Shambhala Center director and subsequently miscarried. According to the Phase 3 Report, the woman said that Pema told her “I don’t believe you” and “If it’s true I suspect that you were into it.”

Pema, under pressure, later met with this woman and issued a public apology... of sorts: "I hope to be a better listener and not again say such insensitive and hurtful remarks to those who come to me for help.”

Again, no. That is what you might say if you were dismissive of a friend with a bad haircut. This woman was reporting a criminal assault and a traumatic miscarriage. The appropriate amends Pema should have made would include actions taken to better educate herself about rape in religious communities, counseling sessions to understand the nature of her complicity and uncover conditioning and motives of which she is apparently unaware, a public apology to all of the victims she gaslit over the years with similar dismissals before she was finally exposed, and a commitment to supporting future victims in reporting rape to appropriate civil authorities as well as to the leadership of Shambhala. But all she says is that she will listen better and try to be more sensitive. In other words, she will still enable and protect the perpetrators.

This is not some small pocket of myopia on the part of an otherwise enlightened spiritual leader. This is foundational lack of moral integrity, to say nothing of an abysmally compromised capacity for critical thinking. This inability to identify with victims of oppression is pretty much a deal-breaker for spiritual leadership. It may be an asset for rising in the ranks of a religious institution, but, seriously, those who cannot or will not revise their experiences of immersion in toxic rape cultures forfeit their moral authority. Oh, they definitely try to hang onto it for dear life, but it is forfeit, and the followers who give them a pass are likely to upload their guru's systems of denial along with whatever philosophy undergirds their enabling and their perpetrations.

“If your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed… Make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit.”--Rebecca Solnit
 
German-Swedish, lesbian painter Lotter Laserstein not only made herself that “small republic of unconquered spirit,” but she created a body of work that documents that Amazonian domain. Most remarkable, she did this in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party.
 
Laserstein painted “In My Studio” at the age of thirty. The year was 1928. She had just graduated from the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. It was a time of uncertainty and also exhilaration. For the first time, women were allowed to attend public art academies. For the first time, women were allowed to attend nude figure drawing classes. For the first time, women were allowed to sport traditionally male haircuts, the “Eton crop” or the “bubikopf.” They were allowed to wear straight-waist dresses and tuxedo jackets. The “Great War” had opened up employment in traditionally male trades and professions. Women had their own money and began to exercise their autonomy in ways that would have been inconceivable to their mothers.

Laserstein wanted the world to see that she had her own studio, a mark of her professionalism and her success—and that it was an impressive one in an upscale residential area of Berlin, with a panoramic, rooftop view.  She was a brilliant painter, had begun to rack up impressive credentials, and she was not afraid to flaunt it. To be absolutely clear, Laserstein titled the work “In My Studio.” She had, at thirty, achieved not only a room of her own, but a studio no less.
 
And what was happening in this studio of hers? No less than a miracle. Laserstein is painting a female nude, the traditional subject of centuries of male artists. An internet image search for “odalisque” will turn up hundreds of images of reclining female nudes. According to art historian Joan DelPlato, “By the eighteenth century the term odalisque referred to the eroticized artistic genre in which a nominally eastern woman lies on her side on display for the spectator.”

Laserstein was taking one of the most popular tropes in Western art history and subverting it and appropriating it to a lesbian and feminist context. A meticulous and classically trained painter, she executed numerous studies for this painting before settling on this precise position for the model. Fifty years later, Traute Rose could still recall her discomfort: “… the pose was very difficult to hold. Nevertheless, I held on because I saw it develop into a true masterpiece.” Where male painters would lasciviously or puritanically cache the pudendum in folds of fabric or behind a lifted thigh, Laserstein features her lover’s mons in full frontal nudity as the focal point of the painting, locating it at the intersection of two diagonals: one established by Rose’s body and the other by Laserstein’s oblong palette.
 
And what about this model? Her name is "Traute Rose," and was a model noted for an athletic and androgenous physique. Laserstein not only told people that Traute was her favorite model, but their intimacy is the subject of a number of her paintings... paintings that the artist would refer to as collaborations between her and Rose. In a letter to Rose in 1956, Laserstein was describing a painting of a nude that she was then working on, noting that it was “far from being as good as ours.” The relationship between male painters and the female nude models has historically been hierarchical, with the dominance of the painter made explicit in the paintings where they appear together.  Lasertein’s portraits of Rose bear witness to their mutuality and the trust between them. They appear to share an artistic investment in the painting. It is not a commercial relationship.

A year after "In My Studio," Laserstein would paint  “I and My Model,”  where Rose stands in a slip behind the painter, her hand resting with unconscious familiarity on the shoulder of Lasertain as she watches her process of painting. Laserstein is facing outward toward the viewer, presumably looking in a mirror that is reflecting this image of both the women.  The intimacy of their relationship as co-creaters is explicitly the theme in this painting. A year after this, Laserstein paints “At the Mirror” where Rose, naked, is positioning the mirror while Laserstein prepares her palette, again emphasizing their collaboration. Rose is looking into the mirror but not at her reflection.

The term “male gaze” was coined from feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s watershed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," published in 1971.  Since then, it has become a well-known and widely discussed theory. In the essay, Mulvaney argues that classical Hollywood cinema placed the spectator in a masculine and heterosexual subject position, where the figure of the woman on screen was depicted as an object of desire. In this era of cinema, the protagonists were overwhelmingly male and audience members, regardless of sex, were encouraged to identify with them... that is, to adopt the "male gaze."  The female charactes in these films  were coded with "to-be-looked-at-ness," objects of male voyeurs and fetishists. This "male gaze" informs most portraits in the traditional canon where naked women are the subject. Laserstein was challenging this head-on, with a "take no prisoner" attitude in these paintings of Rose.

The figure of Rose in "In My Studio" has been referred to by art critics as monumental. She sprawls across the foreground, and there is absolutely no attempt to titillate the spectator with partial concealment with drapery. The model is lost in her own thoughts, or perhaps asleep. There is no "come hither" expression. Her face is turned toward Laserstein, not us. Traute Rose, with her small breasts, her “Eton bob,” her lack of makeup, and her large and muscular hands, defies the expectations of "the male gaze."

Laserstein foregrounds these hands and the gender non-conformity of Rose in her painting "The Tennis Player."

Rose is not the model in "In the Tavern," but the subject is another Weimar "New Woman," sitting alone in a cafe and sporting the "bubikopf" haircut. Laserstein has highlighted the hands of her model, placing them in the foreground, as she unselfconsciously slides one of her suede gloves off her hand. Again the hands are large and muscular. The painting foregrounds the new freedom of women to sit in a tavern unaccompanied by a man. In the background there is another single woman, reading a menu or a magazine. Laserstein painted "In the Tavern" in 1927, and it was purchased by the City of Berlin a year later, presumably to hang in an administrative space. The painting was confiscated by Nazis in 1937 or 1938 as an example of "degenerate art." Long believed to have been destroyed, the work surfaced in 2012 at an art auction, but it is now once again in a private collection. The number 14607 is still visible on the back of the painting, from when it was part of the inventory of outlawed works.

Laserstein also painted "The Motorcycle Driver" in 1929. This painting is assumed to be a portrait of a young man. I challenge that assumption. World War I had created opportunities for young women to learn and practice auto mechanics, and the historical record of that era has noted garages and ambulance corps that were staffed entirely by lesbians. There are enough similarities in facial features to raise the question for me as to whether or not this is a self-portrait by a woman who was clearly pushing all the boundaries of gender presentation.

But let's return to "In My Studio..."  I am struck by the contrast between the sterile, flat rooftops of the boxy buildings in the background and the warm, sensuous curves of the figure in the forground. Clearly, it is a winter day. The trees are bare, the skies are grey and overcast, and snow covers the roofs. The studio walls are comprised of a series of large glass windows… and yet the model is unclothed, relaxed, and luminous. Clearly, the interior of Laserstein's studio generates its own climate and features it's own landscape and architecture--the anatomy of the female. “In My Studio” documents the features of  lesbian-controlled and lesbian-defined space, and in doing so, it establishes a beachhead in Western art for this space. This is a world that has historically been hidden in plain sight. Laserstein brings it out from the shadows and presents it to a world where women, for the first time, have achieved the possibility of financial autonomy that makes this dream attainable. Laserstein is saying, "Look, I am doing it. So can you." The revolution had arrived.

TBut the freedoms that "In My Studio" celebrated were being increasingly threatened as the Nazis rode to power. Traute Rose is featured in a painting by Laserstein that captures the period of the "calm before the storm," the uneasy uncertainty of the late Weimar period. The painting is "Abend Uber Potsdam," or "Evening Over Potsdam," painted in 1930 and featuring a group of friends having a meal on a rooftop overlooking Berlin. The painting has become an iconic "Last Supper" on the eve of the Holocaust. Rose is the figure on the far left, whose back is to the artist. There is a sense of foreboding, anxiety, and resignation in the work... as if these friends are waiting for the nightmare.

By 1935, Laserstein had been registered as one-quarter Jewish and forced to close her painting school. She was denied membership in the professional art organizations who sponsored exhibitions, meaning she could not longer show her work publicly. She was still able to show her work in London and in Paris, and in 1937, when she was invited to exhibit work in Sweden, she packed up her canvases, including "Evening Over Potsdam" and left Germany forever. The painting was eight feet in length, and her friends had to help her with packing and transporting it.

Laserstein's career, which had taken off so quickly and which was gaining so much recognition, was cut short and she was forced to start over in a foreign country where she did not speak the language. To survive, she painted portraits for members of the upper class. Word of mouth spread rapidly, and she became a successful painter who would eventually be able to afford a second summer home. But it came at a price: She had to paint what her clients wanted. The days of spending hundreds of hours painting rooftop Bohemian friends and nude portraits of her beloved Rose were over. Painting was a business now.

Laserstein had a sister, also a lesbian. She was unable to get her out of Germany, and the sister and her partner spent the last three years of the war hiding in a dark and unheated potting shed, where there was no water in the winter. She emerged from the war profoundly traumatized by this experience. Laserstein's mother was murdered in one of the camps.  As for Laserstein, she was embraced by the Jewish community in Sweden and they immediately arranged a marriage for her with an older Jewish man, which meant she could become a Swedish citizen and not be forced to return to Germany.  The marriage was a political expediency and existed only in name.

The war took a tremendous toll on Laserstein, as she struggled to learn a new language, to rebuild a career, and to help family members trapped in Germany. The boldness, ambition, and vision, so evident in her early works are absent from the Swedish years. Her life and her work had become about survival.

Laserstein lived to be ninety-five, dying in Sweden in 1993. Paintings by her continue to surface from private collections, appearing at auctions. Because her work was so original, not belonging to any particular school or tradition, and because she was censored and exiled from Germany, her genius has gone largely unrecognized until very recently. As a lesbian artist, it is important for me to embrace her as one of my greatest foremothers, and to celebrate the record of her lesbian life that she has left to us...  with her butch non-conformity, her radically non-hierarchical relationship to Traute Rose, her artistic resilience, and her resistance to the imperatives of "the male gaze."

My friend Linda J. Smith Koehler has just written and published a really wonderful songbook, One: Songs and Chants to Nurture Joy, Cultivate Peace, and Honor the Earth. To help her celebrate, I wanted to do an interview with her. I have had the privilege of attending concerts where she was musical director and where her songs were sung, and I have also had the privilege of being part of sacred singing groups she has led. The songs in this collection are affirmations and distillations that focus intention, unite, and heal. "Spiritual vitamins" is how I think of them. Easy to learn, easy to tuck away in your brain, and very accessible any time there is a need for perspective and connection.

One: Songs and Chants to Nurture Joy, Cultivate Peace, and Honor the Earth is a songbook containing 111 songs and chants, as well as 13 arrangements, AND... Linda' suggestions on how to use the songs in a singing circle, and encouragement for everyone to write their own songs. 

CG: So, Linda… I see in your description about this book that you talk about how these songs and chants are used in “Singing in Sacred Circles.” What does that mean… ? what is a Sacred Singing Circle? You lead the singing in a sacred circle group called Women with Wings in Bangor, Maine. How is a sacred circle group different from a chorus group? 
 
LK: A traditional chorus stands or sits in rows facing the director and learns songs by reading sheet music. Their focus is usually on preparing for a performance. At Women With Wings we stand or sit in a circle with a candle-lit table in the center, lights off. We learn songs through listening, with no written music or lyric sheets. Our focus is on joining together in song and spirit. On an average Thursday night, you might not recognize that I am the music director because anyone can start a song. Our process is organic in that one song suggests the next. Every evening is different within a consistent flow.
 
Singing in Sacred Circle is a term we use when talking about a group that sings with the intention of simply singing songs that build ourselves into our strongest, most loving selves. We sing to lose ourselves in the music only to find ourselves connected as one voice and energy, individually renewed and inspired.
 
Our songs are mostly short, 4-8 lines each, so are easy to pick up by listening. They are affirmational; the lyrics express what we want to be true, in ourselves, in our relationships, in the world. We use the oral tradition rather than reading from sheet music. This allows us to move quickly from thinking about how to sing a song to singing from our hearts with eyes free to see each other or to close.
 
Women With Wings doesn’t gather to “rehearse,” we just sing. We spend two hours every Thursday singing these powerful affirmational songs. We are not a polished performance group, though we do share what we do in public on occasion, usually to support an organization or cause we agree with. We have sung for organizations that support women, equality, social justice, and the environment.

 
CG: How did you get into this kind of music?  Did you come at it from other forms of music… folk music? Religious music?  What was your first experience?
 
LK: I came to this kind of music through Kay Gardner. The women’s community of my church, Unitarian Universalist Society of Bangor, hired Kay to lead a workshop at our retreat. Someone asked her if she would start a women’s singing group in Bangor and she agreed. They put an ad in the paper and on our first night in October of 1993, 35 women showed up to sing. We’ve been singing every Thursday since, for more than 25 years!

CG: I think that one of the things I experience with these songs is how “sing-able” they are: short and with memorable tunes.  It’s like having a spiritually empowering soundtrack on tap. As a child of the 1960’s, I experienced the power of inspiring music in the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War movement. I think about how so much of our popular music is obsessively focused on falling in love, or falling out of love… Music can do so much more!
 
LK: Absolutely! The messages we repeat to ourselves can have a powerful impact on our internal landscape. Choose those messages consciously. The songs we sing paint a picture of the world we want to live in, with peace and unity among people, care for our planet, strength, kindness, and beauty within ourselves. The songs help us feel empowered and connected, with a sturdiness that helps us face the world as it is and act to improve it for all. We know hundreds of songs so I often find myself saying, “We’ve got a song for that.”

CG: I’m curious about your process… Can you pick one of your songs and share with us what inspired it, or how you came to write it?
 
LK: My process is organic; I don’t sit down to write a song. I’ll be thinking about a topic while walking in the woods, driving, or in the shower, and a line will come to me, words and tune together. I’ll play around with that, winnowing down the thoughts into their pithiest expression of what I want to say while fitting it to the tune that started with that first line. Sometimes this happens quickly, all in one day, but more often it takes a week or two, and occasionally it takes years. My subconscious mind is in charge. My conscious mind can help but I can’t force a song into being. I have to wait for it to clarify from of natural inspiration.
 
As an example, the song Awe started while I was camping at Baxter State Park in northern Maine in 2012. While gazing up at the night sky that was ablaze with every star that has ever burned, the first line popped into my mind, “Under the sky of a billion stars I am so small.” In the following days I got the next few lines but I couldn’t find the rest. Three years later while floating in the waves on Scarborough Beach in southern Maine, the rest of the song flowed in, ending with, “I am a voice of the universe singing back to itself in awe.”

CG: What would you say to someone who is reading this who might be thinking… “Oh, I don’t think this is for me. I’m not very musical…” or who is thinking, “Well, you really need to have a group to do this…” 
 
LK: We’ve heard a lot lately about the benefits of singing. It calms the mind, reduces stress, lowers heart rate, improves cognition, boost the endocrine and immune systems. People in ancient times knew this as they chanted. Practitioners from many spiritual traditions throughout time have been chanting. The tunes vibrate through our cells, attune our beings with the universe and our highest selves. The chants in this book are in English so they hold the impact of knowing what you’re singing about.
 
To someone who says they’re not musical: Women With Wings and other circles I’ve sung with are full of women who had given up on singing around other people. They thought their voice wasn’t good enough or that they were tone deaf. True tone deafness is very rare; it’s more often a matter of learning. When these women join the circle, after a few months they find they can carry a tune, the range of notes they can match gets wider, and they are no longer afraid to sing in public. This empowerment has spread to using our voices to speak up for ourselves and others in all aspects of life.
 
While singing with a group is a powerful experience, singing these songs to yourself is also powerful. We need to be very selective in the songs we sing so we are filling our hearts and minds with messages that are positive, promote our well-being, and inspire us to make the world a better place for all beings. What you sing to yourself matters. The songs in this book are positive affirmations, calls to get up and do what you can to make things better, and celebrations of the Earth and all her beings. We can replace old messages with these positive, life-affirming, loving ones. These songs, and this kind of singing, color the lenses I view the world through with positivity and light.

"Keep a song in your heart, let it be a key to your soul, let it open you wide, and bring you back to whole."
 
Women With Wings is always open to new women. Join us!

Links:
Women With Wings
Linda's Website
Ordering the songbook
 

 “The story of [American] women’s suffrage has been told in the same fashion for 100 years: it is familiar, repetitive, and overwhelmingly white."--from press release.

BUT... no more! There is a new history book that has just been published, and it is GLORIOUS! 

Seriously. This book is a terrific read, a complete page-turner. I could barely put it down. The only reason I would put it down was that it was 500 pages long, and, periodically, I actually had to eat and sleep. I was really sad to see it end, even if it did mean we finally got the vote.

So how did Sally Roesch Wagner turn the history of women’s suffrage into the best beach read of the summer?  I’ll let her answer:
 
“I was inspired by nearly 50 years of learning from my students. They taught me what stories they shared with their friends; what information impacted and empowered them; what made them angry; and, most importantly, what they had never been told.”
 
She gives the reader what she wants!  And she also does not give her what she doesn’t want:
 
“I also had to avoid the impulse to replace the ‘great-men-great-wars’ narrative with a ‘great-women' one—not a task for the faint-hearted or the perfectionist.”
 
Sally Roesch Wagner has widened the lens of Suffrage history and refocused the narrative to include the women of color whose presence has always informed the struggle. She does not minimize or excuse the racism of white women, and this is one of the reasons why the book is such a page-turner: The divisions, the issues, the strategies of appeasement vs. radical action are heart-poundingly relevant to the divisions, issues and strategies of today. The major players find their counterparts in today’s Black Lives Matter and across the spectrum of Congressional leadership. In the words of Susan B. Anthony: “Every generation of converts [to feminism] threshes over the same old straw.”

The book is packed with fascinating, complicated, passionate, flawed women practicing radical and visionary politics—and also engaging in abysmal, good-old-white-boy deals-with-the-devil. Roesch shows us the backroom trades, the rhetoric, the scandals, the pernicious impact of mixing religion with politics, and the cautionary divisions that historians have attempted to hide.
 
And the men! Many women have been caught off-guard by the recent tsunami of misogyny that appears to have arisen from nowhere.  Well, it wasn’t “from nowhere” at all! The Women’s Suffrage Movement plunges us deep below the surface of this present wave to experience the historical, bottomless ocean of men’s hatred of women and compulsion to dominate every single aspect of our lives. There are no Sith or Terran Empires, no Necrons, Tyranids, Weeping Angels or other sci-fi villains who can compare with the fiendish forces of white men arrayed against women, and especially against women of color, in the struggle for women’s liberation.
 
So how does this book work?

It works because it is so user-friendly. Wagner pulls us in with her first two “I-did-not-see-that-coming” chapters: “Women Voted Before the United States Was Formed” and “Women Organized Before Seneca Falls.”
 
Just one example. There was an informal meeting of five women on Sunday, July 9, 1848 in Waterloo, New York. History books might tells us that this was where the idea for the first women’s rights convention was birthed. *yawn*
 
Wagner puts us in the room with the women. Four of them had just come from a Quaker meeting. Possibly they decided to meet in the home of the woman with the two-week-old baby, because she was still nursing. A newcomer to the meeting was a mother of five children who lived at the end of a dead-end road, two miles from her nearest neighbor, with an often-absent husband. The four Quaker women all lived in homes that were on the Underground Railroad. Even as they sat there sipping, they were breaking the law. One of these abolitionist activists had traveled all the way to London to attend an abolitionist convention, only to discover they would not seat her because she was female. WOMEN WITH ISSUES.
 
And… one of the women had just gotten home from a month-long visit with the Seneca Nation near the Pennsylvania border, as these indigenous people debated whether or not to abandon their traditional clan-based government and replace it with with a US election system. It was not lost on her that the indigenous women had more voice, dignity, and respect under their own form of government. As they sit in the room with the new-born and her mother, they most likely discussed how the Haudenosaunee people had a visionary provision that all treaties had to be approved by three fourths of all the mothers in the nation.  This provision appears to me to be an acknowledgement of the unique and very physical connection and investment that mothers have with their offspring, connection and investment that incentivizes them to priorize long-term consequences with regards to dispensation of land. And here we are today where female biology is not just considered irrelevant, but taboo to reference!  I often have wished that our government had a Cabinet position, “Secretary of Long-Term Consequences” from the Department of the Future. The Haudenosaunee were on it a thousand years ago.

ANYWAY… The old history books would simply reel off the five names. Wagner puts us in the room with all of those multicultural, multi-generational, trans-European, multi-issue cross-currents swirling around our heads. THAT’s how it’s done, women. Personal frustrations, political indignities, humble acknowledgement that indigenous people have more evolved systems of government, and white women putting their freedom on the line for the liberation of people of color. Given a context like that, almost anything could be the flashpoint for revolution.
 
So then, after these eye-opening chapters, Wagner devotes each chapter to a decade, from the 1850’s up to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally passed. Bonus: At the end of each chapter, Wagner includes riveting, primary-source samples of speeches, reports, editorials and other documents from that decade. Why? As Wagner says, “Primary sources take us onto the field where we watch the action, listen to the players, and figure out for ourselves what is going on.”
 
One of my favorite examples of the value of primary resources are the editorials debating dress reform. There is an obnoxious editorial by a master mansplainer, informing Suffrage women that they are forfeiting their right to all respect and credibility in his eyes (oh, no!), because they have abandoned wearing the Bloomer costume. He, of course, never wore anything in his life that would cause threatening mobs of people to follow him down the street, to throw horse manure all over him, and to subject him to endless catcalls and threats of rape everywhere he went. Elizabeth Cady Stanton cleans his clock quite handily and I savored every word she wrote.

Well… I don’t want to give too many spoilers… but in terms of relevance, there is domestic worker Hester Vaughan who either miscarried or aborted a child borne of rape, and who was given the death penalty. What saved her?  Women who organized.
 
There is a 19th century #MeToo moment when Victoria Woodhull, slut-shamed as a "Free Love" advocate, calls out the womanizing preacher Henry Ward Beecher on his adulterous relations with a married parishioner.
 
There is Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, rising to the podium and throwing out the most radical challenge of her career: making the same demands of religion that the movement has made of the State. She is an utter badass and her speech is a complete barn burner. And I am sure that half the women who had baked the cake and put up the party decorations where offended as hell. Because that's how it's done when you are eighty.
 
There is Alice Paul, radicalized by the militant Suffragettes in England, who wants to have a ton of parades and protests. The by-then conservative movement says, “Fine, sweetie. Just raise your own money, because we won’t give you any.” She does, and she hosts rallies and protests that are wildly, insanely successful in terms of attendance and PR… so they kick her out of the organization. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I am thinking of you so hard.
 
There is the “you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up” melodrama of the Tennessee vote to ratify the 19th amendment. It’s the final state vote that will make it law, and it comes right down to the wire, with a senator racing the clock to cast the vote and still make it home to attend the dying of his child. He’s escorted there by the women, who then have to race back to get him. He jumps from a moving train… Dirty tricks, last minute reversals, women staying one step ahead of their enemies. Really, someone needs to make a film.

One of the strongest through-lines of the book is white women’s betrayal of women of color in the movement. The pivotal moment happened in a midnight session of a national conference. It happened with a non-representational body of that organization. It was a dirty trick. But the groundwork for the division had been laid by complex grids of historical, social, and political matrices. 
 
There had been the “divide and conquer” tactics of the 14th amendment. Ostensibly granting citizenship to former slaves, the amendment introduces the word “male” into the Constitution... as a qualifier for voting rights. Should the Suffrage Movement oppose this amendment, so critical to spelling out citizens' rights to African Americans, if it was going to come at the expense of women's suffrage rights... including women of color?  Not surprisingly, women of color in the movement had a very different perspective from many of the white women. 

And then there was the temperance movement. Their organization had twice the membership of all the suffrage parties combined. Why? As Lucy Stone put it, “It’s so much easier to to see a drunkard than it is to see a principle.” The temperance movement has been framed today as a movement made up of Miss Grundy-type Puritanical school marms. In fact, in an era when women had almost no rights, it was a movement to stem domestic violence and especially rape. It was a movement filled with battered women and victims of sexual abuse, including incest. And it was a deeply religious movement, where women were reaching for a higher power than their human lords and masters, to legitimize their claims.

Susan B. Anthony wanted their numbers, and she was willing to do whatever was necessary to join forces with the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The price was an unholy alliance with organized, conservative, deeply racist religion.

And, finally, there was an appalling level of pandering to the racism of the Southern states. Women's suffrage was sold to them as a way to counter the rising political voice of African American men in the South.
 
In a conversation with Sally Roesch Wagner, she is asked, “What do you think are the most important takeaways from the women’s suffrage movement for social justice movements of today?”
 
Here is her answer:
 
“Eschew expediency. I’d like to see that on a big poster on every activist’s wall, and especially on the wall of organizations. When you abandon principle in order to win, like the later suffragists did, you may indeed win the battle, but you lose the war for justice. You create a legacy of division that continues for centuries.”
 
This is the best reason of all the many reasons to buy and read and treasure this delightful, intrepid, RELEVANT, page-turning, truth-telling book. It offers clarity and vision for our future. Eschew expediency right now and go out and get it.

I’m just going to put this right out there:  I did not like Fun Home: The Musical.
 
I liked the original graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel’s  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. I thought it was brilliant, overwhelming, honest, searing… and a masterful execution of graphic art. I thought it deserved the American Book Award and the Lambda Literary Book Award.
 
So why did I feel so differently about the musical?  To be perfectly honest, I have not worked that out yet. But I do have some ideas. First, musical theatre is a very different genre than a memoir, even when that memoir is an illustrated one.
 
Theatre has its own conventions and tropes. The American family is a familiar subject for American theatre: Raisin in the Sun, Fences, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Little Foxes, Fifth of July, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Awake and Sing, August: Osage County, Death of a Salesman, and so on. The yearning for connection with an emotionally unavailable parent is a frequent theme. These family dramas are filled with bittersweet nostalgia for a bygone era and the lost innocence of childhood.  And of course infidelity and broken homes are also common themes.

Plays transpire in real time and in real—and restricted—space. You can’t turn down the corner of a play and come back to it later. This reality dictates a structure with suspense, momentum, audience identification, and investment. Good live theatre has much in common with spectator sports… because of that “actual bodies in actual seats in real time” thing. The art of playwriting is the art of compression. Biographical/ autobiographical material has to undergo a lot of pruning and grafting, because real life rarely has well-defined plot points and resolutions.
 
Also, authorship is important. The writer of a memoir is telling her own story, often with a motive just to get it out and on paper. The musical-theatre adaptors of a best-selling memoir have a different motive. It’s not their story, clearly. They are incentivized to tailor the material to the genre. I may or may not agree with the memoirist’s perception or interpretation of her experiences, but I appreciate that she is entitled to her confusions, her “in-process” status as a human being. She is inviting me to look over her shoulder and I am aware that this is a privilege.
 
Musical theatre is something different. It is an incredibly powerful medium, and I am acutely aware of when and how musical theatre can be used to manipulate emotions and reshape values.
 
So… at this point, let me just move on to my objections…

So here is the story of Fun Home, memoir and musical,  in a nutshell:  The protagonist of the play, Alison, grew up in a town in rural Pennsylvania, in a dysfunctional, middle-class family filled with secrets. The biggest secret was that the father was a stalker and sexual abuser of children. He was also a closeted gay man and an adulterer. But the serial, pedophilic predation is—or should be—the most significant of the secrets.
 
In the musical, three actresses portray the different incarnations of the protagonist at different ages in her life. “Small Alison” is a little girl, “Medium Alison” is a budding lesbian in her first year of college, and “Alison” is an adult cartoonist in mid-career, in the act of  creating the memoir that is the basis of the play. The plot turns around all the Alisons’ relationship to the father.
 
In the musical, the child sexual abuse is obliquely alluded to, but only presented factually in one line of a song sung by the mother. The song is a lament about her husband’s adultery and the line is,  “some of them underage.” That’s it. The pedophilic predation is presented as a footnote to the father’s infidelity and his homosexuality. It’s also presented as a victimless crime. The reactions of all the characters are consistent with those of a family who discovers a history of cheating by the patriarch. It’s a play about a cheater, not a criminal sexual predator. It’s about adultery, not child rape.

At the point where his history is unmasked, Medium Alison is in her first year at college, coming out as lesbian, and in her first relationship. She comes out to her parents. She brings her girlfriend home. Her mother tells her the truth about her father. Shortly after this visit her father steps in front of a truck in what appears to have been a suicide.
 
I get it. All of this must have been overwhelming for a nineteen-year-old. I see why it took decades for Bechdel to be able to write about it. I see why there are so many conflicting emotions, so much confusion in the telling. These are all reasons why her story makes for such a powerful memoir. And they are all reasons why it should never have been shaped into a mainstream musical about a dysfunctional American family.
 
Here is my question to theatre audiences who love Fun Home: What if the family secret was that the father had been stalking and murdering his students and his barely-legal, former students, but the dialogue had remained fixated on his cheating and the daughter’s desire for connection with him?  Would that have changed your experience of the play?
 
I ask this, because, for me, as a survivor of child sexual abuse, I experienced the father as a kind of serial murderer. He was a murderer of childhood, a soul murderer. I sit in meetings with grown men who were the teenaged victims of men like Mr. Bechdel. I hear how they were confused, how some of them believed they were consenting or participating at the time, how it took them years to remember, to sort out the shame, to figure out what their sexual orientation was, or even just to recognize that they had been victimized. It took them decades to trace their self-harming behaviors and addictions back to the betrayal by their trusted teacher, priest, parent, and so on.

I am going to answer my own question here: Yes, my experience of the play changed when I understood the father was a soul-murderer of children. I could no longer relate to an adult who was still obsessing over her failure to connect with her father. I no longer sympathized with the wife/mother who was solely focused on the pain of being abandoned. And the ending of the play, sentimentalizing the rare moments of tenuous, father-daughter connection, left me stone cold. I was watching a nest of enablers, a system of incest, in a theatre of folks who were feeling uplifted by this indulgence of sentimentality.
 
When one is in a family, a difficult family with complicated and damaged individuals each struggling with their personal demons… and then it is revealed that one of them is a child-raper, the entire paradigm should shift. Every memory should become subject to  revision, every emotion cut loose from its moorings. Trauma occurs. Something utterly unthinkable, completely unacceptable must be thought, must be accepted. But it can’t be. But it must be. But it can’t be. And that schism, that impossible conundrum, that trauma, is what happened to me in the theatre, because the writers of the show chose to elide the criminal behavior with sexual orientation and adultery.
 
Here is another question: What would Fun Home look like if the members of the family came out of denial and responded appropriately to information that the father is a pedophilic predator?

Well, how about this for a potential scenario:  At the moment where the mother sings the infamous line, “some of them underage,” the lights are cut, the music stops mid-lyric. A single spotlight comes up on the adult Alison. She is surrounded by darkness, in sudden limbo.
 
She sings a song, “Oh, my god… I didn’t know… and yet… those boys… those boys he taught… Oh my god… I didn’t know… And yet my mother did… And yet my mother stayed… And those boys… those boys…”
 
And then we see Small Alison and Medium Alison appear. They are both frightened. Alison puts her arms around both of them.
 
And then the Boys appear, one by one. They each sing a song about the time Mr. Bechdel picked them up when they were walking on the road and how he offered them beer, even though they were underage. They sing how he said he would take them home and then drove them somewhere else, to “get to know them.”  They sing about the  time he hired them to work in his yard. They sing their stories… and then their adult selves appear and sing about the years of doubt and shame, the nights of terror, the secrecy, the sexual confusion, the self-hatred, the shattered relationships, the addictions. 
 
The Boys fade into the shadows and Small Alison starts to sing a song she opened the show with: “Daddy! Hey, Daddy, come here, okay? I need you/ What are you doing? I said come here…” Alison stops her and sings about how she, adult Alison, will take care of her now. She tells Small Alison that her father is gone forever, but that she doesn’t need to be afraid, because adult Alison will be her parent now.

And then Medium Alison starts singing “Say something! Talk to him! Say something! Anything!”  This is a song from a car ride she had with her father right before he died. Again adult Alison stops her. She sings to her that her father can’t talk to her, because he is a very sick man, because he has sexually abused children. Medium Alison is confused and wants to talk about how he is gay, like her. Alison says that his being gay has nothing to do with his being sick and raping children. Medium Alison, still confused, wants to talk about how he betrayed her mother and the family. Alison tells her that his cheating has nothing to do with how he is sick and a pedophilic predator. Finally she tells Medium Alison that her mother knew he was harming children and was an enabler of his crimes.  Medium Alison puts her fingers in her ears and starts to repeat “Say something! Talk to him!” Alison tries to interrupt, but Medium Alison shoves her and runs away.
 
Alison and Small Alison end the show standing together. Alison explains to the child how they can never go home again, but that they can go forward and help the children like the Boys their father victimized. She sings about how they can tell their story to help victims be believed, to show that they don’t need to feel ashamed about what happened to them, but that they can find other survivors and build a different world. She tells her that it is not up to them to find a way to patch up or save the family. It’s gone.
 
Would my version make it to Broadway and win a Tony for “best musical?” No, of course not.  For starts, there is a huge continuity problem. It’s actually made up of two completely different plays: the slightly comedic, dysfunctional dramedy and then the shocking paradigm shift. Which is the experience of child sexual abuse. Welcome to my world.  The perpetrator’s suicide is not only not the dramatic climax, it’s not even relevant. There is nothing bittersweet or sentimental about the situation. The closure must occur outside of the family, in affiliation with other survivors.

I am saddened that this first major musical with a lesbian protagonist had to hitch its ride to Broadway on the coattails of denial about the seriousness of sexual abuse of children. I am shocked to see the intentional blurring of lines between pedophilia and sexual orientation. I was angry, but not surprised, to see the wife/mother framed as a tragic and damaged victim, instead of a very active enabler. Finally, there was a very charming subplot about the daughter’s coming out that deserved a better vehicle.
 
In conclusion: We need to hear the voices of survivors. #MeToo is old news to most women. The only thing trendy about it was that men are believing us for the first time. For all the publicity and Congressional hearings about rape in the military, sexual assaults are at the highest levels ever this year. And no, it’s not about “better reporting.” Stop that. Child sexual abuse and trafficking are big business globally, and the Pope has still not mandated reporting child-rapists to civil authorities. That’s an outrage. Broadway’s response to sexual harassment in the academy was Oleanna, a play about those manipulative lesbians in Women’s Studies encouraging false accusations against innocent men. Broadway’s response to the priesthood scandals? Doubt, whose title says it all. Prostitution? How about Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?
 
We all have to speak up. We really do. And it’s always going to feel scary. Do what you can. I gave Fun Home a standing ovation, because I was in a post-traumatic panic attack when the curtain went down, and I felt it was the more dangerous choice to draw attention to myself by staying seated. But I am home now. I have gathered Small Carolyn and Medium Carolyn and all the others around me, and together we are writing this blog.
 
Love to all my survivor brothers and sisters. You are not alone. “We must say to every member of our society: If you violate your children, they may not speak today, but as we gather our strength and stand beside them, they will, one day, speak your name. They will speak every single name.”—Marilyn Van Derbur

______________________________________________________________

Thanks to Eleanor Cowan, the author of A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer, for her feedback on this blog. Click here for my blog about her book. I have several blogs on the subject of child sexual abuse and incest.

I want to talk about theatre today—how I see it and my understanding of how it works to change people’s lives.
 
So bear with me, because I’m going to present three little stories which may seem to have nothing to do with each other. Then I’m going to connect them. And then, I am going to… well…  wait and see.
 
So here are the three things that don’t seem connected:

ONE: The Busking Drummer
 
Years ago, I read an interview with a woman drummer. I am sorry to say that I did not take note of her name at the time, because I did not know that her story would take root inside me and become so central to my understanding of my own craft. This drummer was talking about a period of her life when she was busking—playing on the sidewalk for donations. She explained how a passer-by would come and stand in front of her, listening, and how she would start trying to “read” them, rhythmically. She would begin to drum the rhythm and patterns that she was picking up from them. And she said that when she did that, their energy would change almost immediately. In a good way.  Okay. That’s the first story.

TWO: A Slogan
 
There is this slogan, "The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance."  Much as folks fear and resist change,  the accepted wisdom is that the first two steps are actually the most challenging. Once awareness and acceptance are achieved, often the change just happens organically. Because change is a law of nature.

THREE: The Tuning Fork
 
A tuning fork is that thing that folks use to tune a piano and other instruments. It looks like a long, skinny, two-pronged fork that’s not pointed on the ends. When the piano tuner takes the tuning fork and strikes it against a surface, it vibrates, giving off a very pure musical tone. This tone is a much more reliable standard for tuning an instrument than human guesswork.
 
Sympathetic vibration is a phenomenon that can be demonstrated with a tuning fork: Take two tuning forks and mount them upright on separate wooden boxes. Strike one of the forks, and once you hear the tone, silence it… probably by grabbing it. You will hear the second fork—the one that you did not strike—giving off the tone!  Magic, right? No, sympathetic vibration. Wikipedia defines it as, “a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness.” Hold that thought.

So… we have a busking drummer. We have a recovery slogan. And we have a tuning fork with sympathetic vibration going on.
 
What does this have to do with theatre?
 
Well, like the busking drummer, theatre has an audience. It has people sitting in front of the performers, giving them their attention.  As the slogan says, awareness and acceptance are a sequence or process that lead to change.  And finally, theatre tells as story with characters, situations, and themes—and all of these have a resonance, like a tuning fork that has been struck.  And—stay with me—I am going to make a daring suggestion. I am going to suggest that audiences, like that second, unstruck tuning fork, are “vibratory bodies.” They may have been passive when they stepped into the theatre, but, if there is anything in the play (character, situation, theme) which resonates with their own inner truth (in physics lingo “sufficient harmonic relations”), they are going to respond to those vibrations with their own vibration. And, just like the people facing the drummer and hearing their own rhythms reflected in her drumming, they will change. They become aware; they accept; they change.

One of my most recent plays is about a woman who is attempting to maintain a professional persona in the face of intrusive post-traumatic memories and affect. I wrote it because it offers strong and interesting work for a solo actor, and I also wrote it because I believe it can offer healing to survivors in my audience.
 
This play, Miss Le Gallienne Announces the Season, puts something on stage that is rarely seen and even more rarely discussed. It puts something on the stage that goes against the grain in a patriarchal, rape culture. It shows that “getting right back up on the horse” after a traumatic experience is not a path to healing and a pretty risky way to signal recovery.

This little ten-minute play whacks the stage like a tuning fork, sending out a strong, counter-cultural, taboo vibration. I visualize the strings in the “vibratory bodies” of the audience resonating with sympathetic vibration.  I visualize that vibration traveling up to their brain, activating sympathetic synaptic connections that awaken consciousness of post-traumatic affect that is being denied or minimized. Finally, I visualize, after a period of disturbance and rearrangement, an acceptance of the truth that trauma changes everything, often permanently.

My job as a playwright is done. The change is not my job.

This was originally published as "Sermon on Stories" in Sermons for a Hot Kitchen From the Lesbian Tent Revival.

Stories are great things. Stories can be maps. They can be templates. They can be guidebooks. They can be cautionary tales. They can be mirrors. They can be latitude and longitude. They can be spiritual vitamins. They can be precious heritage. Lesbian poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” That sounds kind of poetic until you look hard at what we call reality, at quantum physics. Then it’s actually pretty scientific.  And here’s poet Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Which brings me back to that great quotation from the Gospel of St. Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 
 
Now you can bring forth that “thing that is in you” in poetry, or painting, or dance, or theatre, or music, or story. And if you bring it forth as story, it may be a story that only you can interpret, and that’s okay.
 
But stories can also be propaganda. That’s why we’re going to synapse around the whole thing of “story” today. Because the propaganda stories can get us thinking along lines that will cause us to betray our own best interests… and often, in scrubbing off the layers of falsehood in popular myths, like fairy tales or folklore or patriotic myths, we can recognize some life-saving truths that underlie the distortion or the appropriation. Kinda like when you find a masterpiece underneath that painting of dogs playing cards.
 
So that’s what we’re doing today.

We’re going to look at a very popular story in the colonization of America. We’re going to look at the story of Sacagawea. Most of us will remember that she was the Native American woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition in their efforts to locate a route across the western half of the continent, to the Pacific Ocean. She’s a big heroine in American history, and her image—or some artist’s idea of her image—is on a dollar coin, and she’s been on a postage stamp, and folks love to tell the traditional story about her, because it’s about a strong woman on a bold adventure, and it’s also about interracial harmony.
 
Now, those aren’t bad reasons for telling stories… except that in the case of Sacagawea, they aren’t the whole truth. And the parts of the truth that they are hiding are really, really important parts of the story. And there is also a story underneath that is not being told.
 
So, let’s get out those tools for scraping off those layers of cultural whitewash and mansplainery,  and see a little bit more of what’s really going on in this story.
 
Sacagawea was born into the Shoshone tribe in Idaho around 1788, and when she was eleven or twelve years old, she was in a Shoshone hunting camp near what today is Three Forks, Montana, that was attacked by the Hidatsa, a Siouan tribe of Native Americans. In this raid, four Shoshone men and four Shoshone women, and several boys were killed. Sacagawea was taken captive and enslaved. Remember, she’s eleven or twelve years old. And these Hidatsa force her to walk with them back to where they live in North Dakota, which is about five hundred miles away, as the crow flies. So here’s this eleven or twelve-year-old child who has survived a massacre of family and friends, and she’s now enslaved, and she’s having to march for hundreds of miles back into North Dakota from Montana, and when she gets there, she is—you know—she’s still an enslaved child.

And then, one night, there is this French trapper who shows up in the village, and he plays some kind of gambling game with the Hidatsa, and he wins. And to pay off their debt, the Hidatsa give him Sacagawea. Who is twelve by now, or possibly thirteen. So now she’s his slave. He already has bought another Shoshone captive girl, “Otter Woman,” from the Hidatsa. He calls these enslaved children his “wives.” It is a formalized child-rape arrangement brokered by adults.  And, sisters, remember, every single time you read or hear something about Sacagawea’s French trapper husband and you do not raise hell, you are actually participating in legitimizing this child-rape arrangement. He was her owner, her captor, and her rapist. Period.
 
Sacagawea conceived around the age of fourteen, and the reason we know this is because she was pregnant in the winter of 1804-5, when Lewis and Clark showed up in the Hidatsa village and started negotiating with Sacagawea’s perpetrator for his services as a guide. Lewis and Clark were the two men leading this expedition commissioned by the US government. They were leading twenty-nine white men and one African American man, who was enslaved. Sacagawea’s perpetrator told Lewis and Clark that the pregnant child was his wife, and he negotiated a fee for her services as a Shoshone translator—a fee that would be paid to him, of course. As her captor’s so-called wife, Sacagawea never received a dime for her services—or any form of compensation—for the work that she did.

So here we are, with this fourteen-year-old, pregnant girl, in the company of thirty-two men, most of whom speak a language she can’t understand. She is the only Native American among them, and the only female. She gave birth en route, and, according to Lewis, who attended the birth, it was a very painful and violent delivery. Afterwards, she became desperately ill with what, from Lewis’ journal notes, appears to have been a severe pelvic inflammatory infection, possibly due to her enslaver’s continual postpartum rape of her. In his journal, Lewis expressed a suspicion that she was a victim of a transmitted venereal disease. She came very close to dying, but she managed to recover. She spent the rest of the trip with her baby strapped to her back.
 
Sacagawea trekked on this expedition for two years, four months, and ten days. Sisters, she walked eight thousand miles with these white men and the African American enslaved man… with a baby on her back. She forded rivers and climbed steep mountains and crossed deserts and swamps in snow and rain and sweltering sun. She translated for the men, she foraged for them, she cooked for them, and she did the sewing, mending, and cleaning of their clothes… you know, the “women’s work.”
 
There have been whitewashing and mansplaining efforts to downplay her work as a guide, but the truth is, she was responsible for pointing out the pass they should take through the Rockies and the pass they should take into the Yellowstone basin… the Bozeman Pass. Kind of a big deal, locating these passes.

Oh, and by the way, the only reason we have the record of this expedition is because Sacagawea had the foresight and agility to rescue Lewis’s journals when they were tumbling out of a capsized boat. For her pains, she had a river named after her. But no pay.
 
One of the greatest services that Sacagawea provided was protection. By this time, Native American tribes had come to assume, and assume rightly, that any group of white men traveling into their territory probably constituted some kind of war party. They had learned that it was better to attack first and then try to figure out who they were later. But the fact that this group included a Native American woman with a baby was taken as evidence that these men came in peace. In other words, Sacagawea saved all their lives and probably many times over.
 
So, eventually, the expedition gets to the western part of Oregon, to the coast. And they set up a camp and start sending parties down to the beach to see the actual ocean. And these parties are reporting that some kind of “great fish” has washed up on the beach—possibly a whale. And, unbelievably, these men were not going to allow Sacagawea to leave the camp to go see it. Unbelievable. She had to beg and plead with them, and this was so unusual on her part, that Lewis wrote about it in his journal. And it really pisses me off that she did all this enormous work, as a child, with a newborn, involuntarily, and then when they finally reach their goal—the Pacific Ocean—where there’s this magical, giant fish, this eighth wonder of the world, they make Sacagawea beg and plead just to be able to see it. If there is ever any historical doubt about her degree of autonomy on this expedition, that should lay it to rest finally and forever. She had none.

Sacagawea was dead by the age of twenty-five. Still with her rapist/captor, she was living at a fur trading post in Montana at the time of her death. She was very sick and wanted to go home to her people. She reportedly died of typhus, a disease transmitted by a human body louse—a disease associated with conditions of poor hygiene and sanitation. But, if Lewis was correct in suspecting that Sacagawea had been infected with a venereal disease by her rapist, she may have died from a fever associated with that. We know that she left behind an infant girl, and the typhus or the venereal disease may have taken hold during postpartum weakness. The daughter appears not to have survived. The son was taken in by Meriwether Lewis, who paid for his schooling.
 
I know. It’s a horrible story, isn’t it? Sacagawea was obviously heroically strong, but she was a victim throughout her short life. From age eleven, she was separated from her people and enslaved. She was a victim of ongoing rape from puberty and subjected to involuntary pregnancies. 
 
It’s a story of endurance, but it’s not the story of multi-cultural diversity in the early years of the US. Sacagawea is not the poster woman for biracial marriage.  She was obviously powerful, but she was not empowered. If there is any multi-cultural story to be told here, it is a shameful story of the collusion of powerful men—French, Hidatsa, and Anglo American—in the exploitation of an enslaved, female child. It’s a disgusting tale of adult males bonding through the bartering for forced labor and victimization of a Shoshone girl. However divergent their cultures, these men were all in agreement in their misogyny. They all colluded in characterizing the formalized child-rape arrangement as a legalized marriage.

But, there is another story… one that is very important. It’s actually found between the lines in Lewis’ journal.  Let’s take a look… Bear with me, because we’re going to have to backtrack a little bit in the story before we get to it…
 
So at one point in their travels, the expedition ended up camping at the very place where Sacagawea was captured and abducted by the Hidatsa as a little girl. This was the place where she lost her tribe, her family, her history, her culture, her freedom... and, sadly, her childhood. This was the place from which she was forced to undertake a journey of a thousand miles with her enemy.
 
So, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived at this former Shoshone hunting camp, Sacagawea told them the story of the massacre and here is what Lewis wrote in his journal: “I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event, or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.” 
 
He seems to be describing her as someone who is kind of shallow or emotionally under-developed… “primitive” in the sense of being in some early stage of evolution or history. He appears to be comparing her affect to that which he believes he might experience, had he been in her shoes… which is as ridiculous as it is unfair. As a white, male colonizer, he has absolutely no context for understanding the trauma of her past, or the context of her ongoing rape and enslavement. He does not appear to understand that he is complicit in enabling her ongoing enslavement.

It sounds to me like Sacagawea was experiencing very severe post-traumatic stress syndromes. She sounds numb, possibly experiencing dissociation from her situation, or maybe even depersonalization… which is a post-traumatic syndrome where your own thoughts and feelings seem unreal, or like they don’t belong to you.

Depersonalization is a kind of complete loss of identity, which makes sense when you consider that her trauma was far from over. And when we consider that this is what Lewis wrote in his journal, it’s a description of Sacagawea that lets him off the hook.  Since she doesn’t seem to register any kind of emotional response to this terrible massacre and abduction… he doesn’t have to feel bad about not paying her, or pretending she’s a married woman, when he knows damn well she’s a slave. It’s kind of convenient for him to see her as someone who doesn’t feel any pain…  It’s like the way they tell you that lobsters don’t feel it when you drop them in the boiling water. What they mean is we don’t have to feel it.
 
This part of the story tells a sad truth about much of human nature. We are incentivized to see and hear what will benefit us. That is a fact. Which is why we, should spend  time working to reprogram our brains so that we can make a primary commitment to the truth. We do that reprogramming by learning to incentivize ourselves against the grain of a culture that will punish us for knowing or speaking the truth. We do this because any time the truth is not a primary commitment, we are greatly at risk of not seeing it, of deluding ourselves… because this is patriarchy, and knowing the truth, our truth, women’s truth… well, that can get you killed.

But let’s get back to the truth about Sacagawea, who is most often depicted as a grown woman making her own choices about helping these heroic white pathfinders, blazing a trail that will “civilize” the West… We, as a nation, are not much incentivized to adjust that soft-focus lens to bring into sharp definition the fourteen-year-old slave child on a mission that will spell defeat for her people. And one of the reasons why we love that grown-woman-in-charge-of-her-own-life narrative is because it tells us she is choosing—sisters, choosing—to help men. There are no other women anywhere in sight for most of those eight thousand miles. A Native woman choosing to help the white men… and even though she has a baby, she takes total, complete responsibility for him. Straps that baby on her back and never skips a beat while she does all the domestic work of caring for these thirty-three grown-ass men. And then she turns her paycheck over to her “husband!” What a fine example. Look at what she did!  Now, surely women today, with all the conveniences of modern civilization, can take those three days of maternity leave and turn their kid over to day care and get right back to work. Be like Sacagawea! Don’t be thinking of motherhood as a second job or a sacred responsibility! Don’t be missing your women friends! Don’t be hoarding that paycheck! Don’t be complaining and comparing! Do it all and don’t take any credit for it!  Be like Sacagawea!
 
Story is everything. It’s the web of synapses we weave to make meaning. As astrologist Caroline Casey says, “Imagination lays the track for the reality train.” It surely does, sisters. And a story is like a line on a railroad… like the Long Island Rail Road or the Staten Island Railway. The story is a route with a destination. We take these stories in when we hear them. We pass them along. We put them in our toolkits for how to live our lives. Story is everything. We have to think critically about the stories we are given. Who is doing the giving and for what purpose? Who is going to benefit from them? We have never had so many stories. Not just books… but Hulu and Netflix and Youtube and cable and movies and podcasts. So many stories…  But how many of them tell our truths?  Women’s truths? Lesbian truths? 

African American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote an essay titled, “The Issue is Salvation,” and in it she says, “I work to produce stories that save our lives.” That’s what we should all be doing.  And if we can’t write them, then we can go into uncovering the truth about the ones they hand us.

And that’s exactly what we are going to do now. We are going to go digging for that story that is hidden between the lines of Lewis’ journal. And keep in mind that Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the one that Sacagawea dove into the water to rescue, is five thousand pages long. That’s a lot of pages. But the part that we are are digging for is just two sentences. Two sentences out of five thousand pages. Kind of like a needle in a haystack. But, sisters, if you know what you are needing to hear, if you have a pretty good idea of what these patriarchs are trying to hide… you can find that needle. It’s going to be like a magnetized needle… a compass needle, pointing us to the truth.

So here they are… Here are those precious sentences from Meriwether Lewis’ journal… the needle in the haystack…  This was on August 15, 1805. Lewis is talking about when the expedition came to the camp where Sacagawea’s people lived… where her tribe was—her family—before that massacre and abduction when she was eleven. And keep in mind, she’s been enslaved this whole time. She’s never been back to her people. This is the first time she’s seeing them in four years.

“We soon drew near to the [Shoshone] camp, and just as we approached it a woman made her way through the crowd towards Sacagawea, and recognizing each other, they embraced with the most tender affection. The meeting of these two young women had in it something peculiarly touching, not only in the ardent manner in which their feelings were expressed, but from the real interest of their situation…”

I like that Meriwether Lewis is noticing the “real interest of their situation.” And I like that, after describing Sacagawea as pretty emotionless and shallow, he is now going back on that completely and describing a scene that is ardent… which means passionate, and tender, touching and overflowing with affection. Obviously, Sacagawea had been keeping her emotional life sacred… for another female and a woman of her tribe.
 
So who is this other fifteen-year-old Shoshone girl who is embracing Sacagawea so ardently?  Well, her name was Pop-pank. She and Sacagawea grew up together, and they were at that hunting camp together when the massacre happened and Sacagawea was taken prisoner. Pop-pank had jumped into the river and, leaping like a fish, had managed to get to the other side and escape capture.
 
And here she was when the Lewis and Clark expedition showed up to try to buy some horses on their way to the Pacific. And here she was seeing again her beloved girlhood friend, Sacagawea… now with a baby and enslaved. And this is what Lewis recorded: the reunion of these two girls—and they were both still girls—embracing each other, tender and passionate at the same time.

We can hold onto that story as tightly as Sacagawea held onto Pop-pank. It is a story of an authenticity that resists colonization, of a memory that resists the distortions and erasures of trauma, of a bond that defies appropriation in the colonial narrative.
 
Let us not be fooled by the fact it only warrants two sentences in the journal of Lewis, or that it was only a few stationary minutes out of a journey of hundreds of days and thousands of miles. It is a glimpse into reality, into eternity. It shows up the colonial, patriarchal, misogynist pageant for what it is: an utter sham.
 
I think of something that 19th century feminist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman said… She said, “Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.” And every now and then we can part the curtain and catch that glimpse. Maybe only a glimpse, but it contains all that we need.
 
Sisters, let us hold close those two sentences that Meriwether Lewis wrote, not understanding even as he wrote them, because they illuminate the pages of history more than all the rest of the words in his journal.
 

This is the second of a two-part interview with Keita Whitten. Click here to read  Part One.

SE spoke openly about terms like “transference” and “counter-transference,” reminding us this is ALWAYS occurring. Yes, professional protocol and ethical practices of standards are important to guide our professional relationships. The truth is --when you embrace the science of epigenetics--elements and their environments are not static and they are constantly shifting, exchanging information--even in a sterile room. And, rather than ignoring this, what I now know is that every interaction with a person, an environment or an animal involves a certain amount of transference and countertransference of information through adaptation--in this case the nervous system. In reality our nervous systems are constantly responding and adapting to environmental cues, internally and externally, all the time. In contrast, traditional psychology and allopathic medicine teaches that we--the practitioners-are the experts, and that, to guard against biases, we must remain objective--distant from the other, “the client” and that  environments are to be controlled/ manipulated in order to have untainted outcomes.

I know I am veering off subject, but I think is an important divergence. I would go a step further to say, transference and countertransference are how we understand how things work or don’t work. We, people, animals, are constantly evaluating and adapting to the world around us. SE taught us how we do this through our nervous systems each day, each moment. You can’t shut it off. And when we try to, we are missing vital sensory information. For example, we all talk about cognitive dissonance, right? There are lots of explanations about what it is and why it happens, right? Let’s’ agree for a moment with the basic understanding-- it’s a mental discomfort resulting from a clash of values or beliefs. Here’s the thing: What if I said there is also sensory dissonance? No, scratch that. I propose cognitive dissonance is actually a result of sensory discomfort--a stress response to a threat in the external environment. And it shows up as cognitive dissonance when we have overridden our sensory information.

When I have worked with clients who experience explosive anger, I now call it "sensory dissonance." What that means is that they are receiving cues both internally and externally, but trying to override this with reason. Ultimately,  whatever they are trying to override with reason--fear, despair or the feelings of betrayal-- will manifest as sideways behaviors and cognitive dissonance. Working through an SE lens, I help people to identify sensory cues both inside and outside of themselves--cues that are often become overridden and lead up to these sideways expressions such as explosive anger and rage.  Here's another way to look at this: By the time one is raging, it’s usually because the person has already overridden the sensory inputs--including the role of transferences and countertransferences. Today, somatic psychology is a lens through which I observe everything, everyone--including myself.

Coming back to your question, SE and Yoga were ways that helped me frame an embodied holistic approach with the science to back up how it worked. Teaching yoga taught me the importance of mindfulness, the ability to slow down and to practice awareness of our embodied consciousness. With SE, I now had the science to demonstrate these connections between embodied consciousness with stress responses and how to support the body’s own healing process. Early on in my practice, I  learned this level of practice would ultimately uncover an adversities and traumatic experiences. In the ACEs study with Kaiser Health and the CDC, they found that, out of 17,000 participants (white and upper middle class with access to private health care), about 70% had like  adverse experience scores before the age of seven.

Dr. Nadine Burke, now the first appointed Surgeon General for the state of California, educates about the vital health implications of toxic stress and the wear-and-tear on the immune system, when we do not address trauma and ACEs from a biological, embodied approach.  

This data made me pause and think for a moment. I then started to realize that the way we diagnose people is all wrong--the DSM5 is wrong! And, we (therapist, counselors, psychiatrists, all of us) are continuing to prescribe pills, diagnoses and apply psychology like all Western allopathic medicine--WE TREAT SYMPTOMS, not root causes.

For example, one of my clients taught me a different way to understand bipolor disorder. Assessment took months to uncover contributing external factors like the fact she was exposed to longterm neglect before the age of seven, manipulation like gaslighting,  and rape and other sexual abuse--and therefore the needed treatment was not pharmaceutical (in some cases medication may be required initially to calm/stabilize a “wacked” nervous system), but required a holistic approach based an understanding of ACEs and  mind-body-soul synergy to support the creation of balance/homeostats. Over time this client began to discover the need for changes in her lifestylem including proper rest, diet changes, and letting go of toxic relationships. With these changes, our sessions, and additional support from homeopathy, she was able to lower her lithium dosage, and her symptoms--including manic flares--began to minimize, which were possible due to her new understanding of the "pain body." The difference was this: These behaviors were there, but less intense, so that she was able to build the capacity to recognize the buildup before the flare-up, allowing   the pain body to chillaxe  and begin to heal its soul wounds.  

Then I realized, another profound aspect of the ACEs study: What about ALE (Adult Lived Experiences)? If the ACEs study surveyed a majority white population, then what would be true for people of color, women, and women of color? What would external stress factors such as poverty, racism, and oppression-- including substance abuse and domestic violence play in the role mental /physical health and dis-ease? While genetics does not determine health and emotional well-being, epigenetics does!
 
You  asked about my new THRIVE initiative for 2019. Based on this new understanding, I knew then I could not see all clients because I no longer wanted to do "bandaid work." I wanted to help heal soul wounds. I instantly became aware I had to change how I practiced, including who I saw. And this why today I only work with trauma. Back to the original ACEs population study: With all the recent research about health disparities for communities of color, including women, I realized I wanted to serve the most vulnerable populations--that is, girls and women of color.

CW:  I am seeing more and more healers who are not taking insurance. Can you talk about that?

KW: Why don't I take insurance? The simple answer is, SE a, like acupuncture, reiki or homeopathy does not provide enough “empirical” evidence to support how it works for insurance companies to pay for our services. Insurance companies need justification to pay for services. With this justification comes the demand for qualitative, evidence-based practices using levers of variables to determine outcomes. Clinicians have to provide a diagnosis during your first visit, then write up goals and objectives that support the diagnoses, and the come up with arbitrary phrases like, "Client/subject will manage emotional outburst by 50%, by learning how to express their feelings."

We clinicians spend numerous hours trying to add it all  up to justify services, and  many make it up, and we all know it's BS--but it’s the only way one can get paid. There are insurance discrepancies in terms of what gets paid out, based on what is called "pay-out tiers," which are different with every company.  For example, one company might pay you $99 while another might pay you only $65--for the exact same service. And confidentiality? There is no confidentiality with insurance companies.  Your information belongs to them to use to qualify or disqualify you.

When I was taking insurance, I received a notice stating  I was over-using a diagnostic code based on the demographics of my colleagues who practiced in the area! Can you guess what it was? The code for trauma. This was  a real eye-opener! Apparently my colleagues in the field really do not have an informed lens on ACEs and trauma. To be fair, it's probably more of a billing issue, but this means I can't record what I see and suspect, because I will not be paid, and I will not be paid for using a model like SE, because it’s not  sanctioned by Big Pharma and the medical communities.
 
When I feel doubt about what I do, I like to recalled the words of one of my clinical supervisors, “You may not have chosen to work with trauma, but trauma has defiantly called you!"  Looking back on my life, I would agree. Each experience has been very informative. And because of my story, I feel I am able to relate to people’s pain, which disarms the power imbalance very quickly.

Nadine Burke says that when people ask her how she can you work with trauma,  she gets excited and replies, “because its fundamental hopeful work.” I would agree, and this is especially so working with women of color.  I’d like to end with a reference to the works of Anne Wilson Schaef’s book, Meditations For Women Who Do Too Much.  Her daily affirmations are a reminder of the vitality of why I do what I do. I  know intergenerational healing will take two generations. I will not live to see it, but through the work I do I have hope my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will experience healing through collective and conscious community parenting. I am still unpacking fifty-three years of experiences,

Ashe

Redefining Therapy website

Keita Whitten…  one of the most amazing women I have ever met, and it’s my privilege to interview her today! Keita is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Masters in Social Work, specializing in trauma. She is launching an initiative in her practice to focus on women and girls with trauma/PTSD history, especially women of color.
 
What is so radical and so powerful about Keita is that, in an age of hyper-specialization where every malady must be micro-coded for the insurance companies and superficial resolution, she is conscientiously doing the opposite—slowing down and widening the concept of diagnosis to look at all aspects of the mind-body-spirit connection, as well as the socio-politico-economic-environmental contexts that are impacting her clients.

CG: So… Keita… I love the description of THRIVE, your new healing initiative with women and girls. But before we get to that, can you fill us in on your journey toward finding your niche in the world of counseling and healing.  It’s been a journey with some seeming dead-ends and detours, and I think that these are an important part of your perspective today.
 
KW: Yes, and you’re right the journey of how I have come to build “Thrive” is a personal journey which is also reflected in how I approach my art and my writing. The reasons I shifted from a traditional therapy practice to a practice that involves healing includes a very personal journey of unpacking and healing my own soul wounds.
 
The idea of focusing on women and girls started in the late 80s, after I suddenly found myself violently divorced after just 3 years of marriage. I was living in the bohemian artist community of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York.  Looking back I now realized I had severed these ties, because I had bought into the belief I had to grow up- “Adulting” is the term my second son (now a Man) uses to describe putting his own art on the back burner to “be a responsible productive adult.” I cringe every time I hear him use this word. It’s a word I still struggle with to justify why I do not embrace my own art.

I can recall the immensity of the financial stress, we were shouldering as new parents. We were not making it on his electrician’s apprentice salary. And I remember feeling personally responsible for our financial situation. After all, I was a stay-at-home mom. I remember thinking I could be like the frontier wife from The Little House on the Prairie. She did everything by hand. She took care of their home, never complained, while he built their home, hunted worked at the mill. They were partnering, a team. I so desperately wanted them to be us—a team. In addition to the night feedings, cloth diapers, homemade baby food, all domestic duties- involving a 3-story walkup each day (with an infant and stroller), carrying laundry to the laundromat, going to the grocery store, getting up at 5 AM to prepare his breakfast, packing his lunch (with little notes of appreciation and encouragements tucked inside), planning and preparing dinner, and then cleaning up afterwards! I began searching for ways to bring in extra income to help alleviate my husband’s erratic mood swings. I discovered I could take in other people’s children – so they could go to “work”—to help provide extra income for my family.  Deep inside I wanted to pursue my art too, but it was a luxury “we” just could not afford.

Adulting meant I had to continue to prove I could take care of myself without being a burden. I keep searching for options. Around this time, I began attending Boricua College. One of our required classes was called “colloquium.” Looking back, I now realize this class was designed for student success and retention. I enjoyed colloquium. It was the only place I could connect with other adults and check in about our experiences in school and lives outside of school. A couple of times after class my instructor would pull me aside, asking me about comments I had made about my home life, and husband. One day after class she handed me a Domestic Violence Wheel. I had no idea what it was. This was the first time I had ever heard anything about domestic violence. I didn’t even know there were names for the things I was experiencing.  I just thought the sudden violent moods swings, the yelling, the drunken episodes, and disappearing acts were all part of normal everyday married life. I can recall thinking I had to hide this wheel at home and read it when he was not around.
 
I want to fast forward for a moment. In my field of somatic trauma phycology, we identify 4 responses to threat, AKA “adverse and/or traumatic experiences.” Most only know about “Fight or Flight.” There is also Freeze and Fawn.  Today I will focus on Fawn because I view Fawn as an opposite response to Fight with gender specific implications. For example, in traditional forms of psychotherapy Fawn responses are often people who are misdiagnosed as codependent or victim. Characteristics include Appease / Submit / Resignation /Befriend. Fawn people adjectives include pleasing others, scared to say what they really think/feel, talking about others instead of self, are Angels of Mercy, overcaring, suckers, easily exploited by others, hugely concerned with what others think of them, a yes person. A collage of mine describes Fawn this way: It [Fawn] has also been referred to as the Stockholm syndrome, and historically more females respond in this way than males, who tend to have the physicality to fight or flee more easily. It takes self-blame and shame out of the equation, for example, when the victim is befriending and going along with the abuser/ perpetrator and not understanding later why they acquiesced in the situation and didn’t respond with  fighting or fleeing.

Looking back to my experiences today I realize how sad it was to know back then I had no realization, no connection to what I was feeling inside me—or around me—and how living this way was guiding my actions, my decisions about life and related behaviors. I was simply in survival mode. It wasn’t until about 20 years later, living in Maine, training with the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (when we as students were required to unpack our own lives), I started to understand my lived adverse experiences with trauma and abuse were also shaped by the intersect of gender, race and heteronormativity. The holding pattern of Fawn reminds me of the macro shift out of the Goddess era in response to rising concerns regarding “male fragility”. This shift fueled by misogyny gave birth to patriarchy as a means to secure male leadership and dominance. As a society we continue to pay the high price of this legacy.

So how did you get from "super mom/abused woman" to the amazing healer that you are today?
 
I arrived in Maine in 1995 with a five-year-old, broke, pregnant with my second child, homeless- fleeing another abusive relationship. I decided to try college again for the third time.  I just had to get it right. There were two children depending on me. And I despised the shame of public housing and welfare. I had an opportunity to go to school under the Parents as Scholars Program (PAS). [PAS was a Maine initiative in response to the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act (under the Clinton Administration) championed by a Republican Olympia Snowe (go figure!) to create educational opportunities for TANF (welfare) eligible recipients.] Even with transferable credits, it took me six semesters—not including summer school—years to finish. I was excited about my BSW—yes! No more welfare! However, my first professional social work job was a child protection agent. (Yep—we even had badges) This lasted only eighteen months before I realized I could not stomach the work.  Colleagues who managed to survive for decades did so using anti-depressants or drinking,  or they suffered from a superiority complex. I knew I wasn’t actually helping “these” mothers or their broken families (who also came from broken families). Instead, what I did see in them were bits and pieces of me. So decided I needed to go back to school to get a better degree.

Needless to say, grad school was disappointing. I found myself taking expectational notice of the language used to teach “human behavior” and psychology, which ultimately blamed and pathologized people—especially women—for their current circumstances. These were the same words (language) used in macro and micro economic classes to describe poverty and who poor people were. I remember having a visceral reaction to a male instructor who glorified himself for his work with “welfare (black- single women) families” back in New York City, as if he was the great White Hope for these poor black families. The more I would try to question  these perspectives as points of concerns, the more hopeless, frustrated, and sickened I began to feel about wanting to “now” become a therapist. And forget about trauma—trauma was not even in the syllabus. I didn’t even know about trauma until my therapist diagnosed me with PTSD—whoa! Looking back, I guess it was naiveté on my part to expect a school of social work to be exempt from the willingness to explore the significance of race, gender, class, and white privilege as crucial underpinnings informing identity politics, juxtaposed against the backdrop of continuous and laborious debates concerning the rights of “the deserving” vs the “undeserving” poor. Having had multiple experiences of being that “population” on the other side of the table, I decided I could not participate in good conscience being yet another “good intentioned” practitioner. I vowed if I made it out of my MSW program, I would not practice therapy.

The reason I am an LCSW today is because of Yoga. After my graduate school experience, I took up adjunct work and Kripalu yoga. And surprisingly I found both very healing. One day in yoga class I literally sprang off my mat and announced to my instructor I wanted to teach, and next thing you know, the resources I needed to attend found me and there I was at Kripalu undergoing my teacher training. When I began to teach yoga I started witnessing emotional shifts occurring within my students on the mat. Some would begin to weep, others would burst out in laughter. I wanted to understand not only what was going on but how could I use “it” to help other people.
 
This led me to rethink my LCSW. However, 3+ years had passed since graduation, and trying to find a clinical track to be supervised proved to be more difficult than I imagined. I was bummed but determined. I had to work my way back into the field starting with BSW entry positions. Finally, I landed a grant position with Community Counseling Center who agreed to supervise my LCSW. This was the same time I heard about the work of Dr. Gabor Maté When The Body Says No and Peter Lavine’s Walking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and brought these two books into my interview stating how I intended to explore these concepts as a therapist in training. My supervisor at the time chuckled, you may not have chosen to work with trauma, but trauma has definitely called you! Little did we both know at the time, she would be spot on. About six months later I found myself registered in the first session SEP training session.

 You see, what I really believe is, it was divine interference through yoga coupled with my graduate school experience and Somatic Experiencing Trauma trainings that called me back to work with people to support their trauma healing journey.

CG: When you were talking about your work, you named Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot and her influence on your thinking. Who is she and what was it about her work that inspired you?
 
KW: Oh yes, one of the requirements of my master’s program was to create a research project. Knowing me, I couldn’t just do a simple quantitative study—no! LOL— I had to explore things, probe and search for deeper understandings. Besides I hated statistics and SPS! I needed something tangible, relatable and alive. When I heard we could conduct a qualitative study, this peeked my interest. My core instructor however was mired in the postpositivist approach to research and told me something to this effect, “qualitative research is merely a quasi- form of research conducted in the field that is not reliable due to the fact that the environment containments the findings unless its conducted in a controlled environment…” I then proceeded to the department dean who tried to reframe what “He meant”. I paused and then announced I would consider a quantitative study if I could explore the implications of psychoimmunology as a lens for clinical intervention in social work. She stood speechless for a second, rolled her eyes and proceeded to tell me that it would be too hard for me, and besides I would have to be a medical student to do that type of analyses. I pouted. I felt like the cat who just lost its prey (huh, looking back on this I can now see how this would have begun a preliminary exploration into what we now call ACEs—“Adverse Childhood Experiences.” No longer feeling enthusiastic about research, I dropped the course until the following semester.

Little did I know there were new instructors recently hired who heard about my research ideas and wanted to support my qualitative endeavors. This is when I was introduced to feminist and womanist ideologies and participatory action research and deconstructing methodologies, which lead me to a qualitative style of research called Portraiture by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot.  Her method is a social science inquiry that is able to blend art, environment and science, “capturing the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life.”  Of course, that made sense to me—I am an artist, right? Needless to say, I created an elaborate explorative thesis that took more than two semesters to complete, documenting the results of a multicultural program called Dialogues in Diversity at the University of Southern Maine by attempting to combine all approaches. Oy vey!

All this to say, what I took away from this experiment is the fact that Portraiture provides an in-depth layering of how to approach any subject and debunks the idea that environments are sterile. In fact, the researcher is a major part of an environment too, who views and makes meaning of the world based on her own schema, which can and does influence the outcome.  Portraiture taught me to always view things from the eagle’s eye down, the from-the-ground-up view of an ant, and the surrounding context one one’s environment including culture, his-story, art, religion, sociostatus, and geographical location, including climate. And now with my SE training I also include the internal environment of the nervous system. This is what I mean when I say I take a holistic view of trauma and ACES.
 
End of  Part 1
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