When I was a kid — about 5-6 years old — my parents hired a woman to take care of me. She was responsible for me when my parents were out to work. One day, this woman led me to the shed behind our house, saying, “We’re going to play a game.” Once inside, she lifted up her saree and made me touch her. She then pulled my shorts down and touched me, asking me to say “I love you.”
This happened several times. She told me that this was a secret game — that I shouldn’t tell my parents about it. The child that I was, I thought I could play this same secret game with my peers. When I tried to do that, some of them refused. “Why don’t they want to play with me?” I wondered. I reached the conclusion that there must be something wrong with me!
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. "Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.
"Maybe," the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. "How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed!
"Maybe," replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
"Maybe," answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
"Maybe," said the farmer.
Human beings cannot help but judge and categorize. We like to put every experience in a neat little box. The sexual abuse that I experienced as a child was not classified as abuse in my mind though. It was not physically traumatizing and I was told that it’s a game — I believed what I was told. When my peers refused to play the game with me, I concluded that there’s something wrong with me. Why else would they not want to play with me?
I buried the memory of the incident and its aftermath deep in my psyche for the next 15 years. I felt lonely and lost and I didn’t know why! Eventually, in college, I read Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World in which he speaks about the widespread prevalence of child sexual abuse and its effect on development into adulthood. That’s when the memories came flooding back.
But at the time, I assumed that I was traumatized by the incident in the shed itself. I didn’t realize that it was what followed that had traumatized me. And so, I continued to live my life feeling lonely and lost.
“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.” — Bhagavad Gita, 2:47
Intentions are powerful. Earlier this year, on my birthday on 7th May, I set the intention to transmute trauma and increase incarnation. To digest distress and deepen embodiment. I was present to the sense of disembodiment — the feeling of being lost and lonely — I wanted to process it and put it behind me.
In the last few months, my friends and a few of their friends started playing Project 52 with me. Project 52 is a system for self-development through habit building and it’s built to feel like a game. I noticed that I was getting overly anxious when I felt like someone was not interested in playing. And I also noticed that I was getting overly desperate for people to continue playing.
At first, I thought that this was because I wanted a sense of community — which I had lost when I had questioned my faith in Christianity. But I wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. I was sure that there’s a deeper reason.
“Children don’t get traumatized when they get hurt. Children get traumatized when they are alone with their hurt.” — Gabor Maté
Recently, a friend suggested I watch a documentary called The Wisdom of Trauma — on the work of Gabor Maté, who is an expert on childhood development and trauma. In the documentary, he points out that trauma need not be about terrible things happening to you. It’s when we are unable to share our experiences with others — when we are forced to suppress them and bottle them up — that we get traumatized.
I am privileged to have loving parents. But because the woman who abused me said that ‘the game’ was to be a secret, I didn’t share my experiences with my parents or anyone else. When my peers refused to play the game with me, I reached the conclusion that there’s something wrong with me. And I have lived with that conclusion until now.
I did open up to my parents about the incident right after graduating from college in 2013. I’ve shared it with a few friends as well. But it’s only this week that I can say — I have finally made sense of my situation. I won’t say yet that I have fully digested the distress that I feel — I’ll have to do that in the coming weeks and months. But I am grateful to have reached here, now.
“The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin listening.
Simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you, listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as you listen to music. Don’t try to identify the sounds you are hearing, don’t put names on them, simply allow them to play with your eardrums. Let them go.
In other words, let your ears hear whatever they want to hear. Don’t judge the sounds: there are no proper sounds nor improper sounds, and it doesn’t matter if somebody coughs or sneezes or drops something — it’s all just sound.” — Alan Watts
Human beings cannot help but judge and categorize. By deciding that ‘there is something wrong with me’, I have caused a lot of suffering for myself. And hurt people, hurt people — I have caused suffering for others as well. If you are someone I have hurt, I seek your forgiveness.
Child sexual abuse is a widespread plague, but there is a stigma associated with opening up about your experiences. With this post, I hope to break through that stigma. I also want to show you that trauma is not as obvious as we think and processing trauma requires a sense of safety to be created first.
I want to thank my family, my friends, and the Project 52 habit builder community for creating the sense of safety for me to process my trauma, for giving me the courage to write this post, and for helping me to reach this point where I am today — with the possibility to heal and become whole again.