Purple Lotus Alchemy

“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” — C.S. Lewis

I preface this writing by sharing that I’m honored you’ve chosen to read about me. In a fast-paced world where we often see others as a fleeting encounter with a human body, and rarely for the lived experiences that have shaped their inner world, it’s meaningful to me that you’ve dedicated this time to read my story. So I thank-you for choosing to show up here.

I share my journey with the intention of not only having others understand me and the depths of what I’ve overcome, but with the hope that perhaps in reading this, you too feel seen and understood, as I know my personal experiences are not an outlier in this world. But possibly more importantly, maybe my story will help awaken the remembrance of your True Self within you, and the inherent knowing that our past does not define us. With that being said, I provide a trigger warning of childhood SA, physical abuse, suicidal ideations.

I grew up in a dysfunctional family in semi-rural Pennsylvania with 5 siblings, in a religious Christian home, which I now view as more closely resembling a cult-like experience due to the forms of religious abuse my siblings and I endured. Though I don’t have many memories of my childhood the way my siblings do, a trauma response created from living in a perpetual state of nervous system dysregulation, I’ll start by sharing the moments of my childhood that shaped many years of my adult experience.

Living it, I didn’t really realize how dysfunctional my family was until I was many years beyond living at my childhood home. I didn’t consciously realize the depth of my traumatic childhood’s impact on my life, until I began to heal from my past. Instead, I normalized my experiences, and allowed them to perpetuate my owning suffering into adulthood. I suppose sometimes we don’t understand ourselves deeply, until the life has a way of showing us otherwise. And of course we had our beautiful moments and joyful experiences as a family, but it ended up being my trauma that shaped me in more ways than fleeting moments of joy ever did.

My father was a deacon at the Baptist church my family attended, and the dogma of Christianity was used by my parents as a method of enforcing obedience to strict rules. The rules often made no logical sense and contradicted both my parents’ actions and the loving God my parents proclaimed to believe in. I was taught that girls and women should dress modestly for God, and my sisters and I were forced to wear only skirts and dresses while my brothers had no Biblical dress code. I was teased at school for what I wore, until my mom came to a bit of her senses and allowed my sisters and I to wear pants and shorts in middle school and beyond. My sisters and I were forbidden from piercing our ears or cutting our hair, and my hair grew to below my waist, allowed only infrequent trims. Although we left the church when I was quite young, and I have little recollection of attending church events, my parents carried the distortions of religion into the way I was raised through my entire childhood.

I was largely sheltered, rarely allowed to watch TV or movies, nor granted the freedom listen to anything other than Christian music. I was told that God wouldn’t approve of it, until I bought my own car and finally began to listen to my own musical choices in high school. I never fit in at school, having little connection to the experiences other children shared in common. I had very few friends, living mostly in the insolation of my inner world instead. Growing up on 5 acres of farmland, my siblings and I were tasked with summers of working in a massive garden, as we grew, cooked, and canned a majority of our family’s food. It’s actually a small miracle that I love gardening today. And truly, I am deeply in gratitude for nature, as the land on which I grew up rescued and healed me in more ways than one.

My siblings and I were harshly physically punished for even the smallest of infractions, using the humiliating rituals of physical abuse, under the premise of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, a presumption not actually found in the Bible my parents proclaimed to be the ‘word of God’. I was forced to unclothe my lower half in front of my brothers and sisters, bent over a bed, chair, or my parents’ lap, while whatever tools my mom and dad had at their disposal, including belts, yardsticks, and wooden spoons, were used to spank us until we were screaming and crying in pain. It wasn’t even so much that I knew my actions sometimes deserved discipline, but that my mother especially seemed to enjoy hitting me. I recall that she’d get this vicious smile, scream ‘bend over’, and laugh as she hit me. Not only did I witness her rage all over her face, but I felt it deeply in every strike as well. This abuse went on well past puberty, and I vividly recall the humiliation I felt at being physically exposed in front of my siblings, and especially my father.

I also witnessed my dad’s severe beatings of my older brother, to the point that my mother recently admitted she almost called the police on several occasions to stop him. She never did, and from what she’s shared with me, believed a “good Christian wife” should always obey and submit to the leadership of her husband. My dad used pieces of wood, a belt, or whatever he could get his hands on in a moment of rage, and just take his anger out onto my brother. It was horrific to witness, and I felt completely powerless to do anything to prevent the beatings.

My dad beat one of our family’s dogs by enclosing him in the garage, for what I don’t even recall, though nothing would justify what my dad did. I heard the cries of Dippy’s torture from outside of the garage, again, feeling completely helpless to prevent it. Dippy’s blood was splattered all over the garage floor, and poor Dippy was shaking in fear and ran to hide when he was freed. He wasn’t the same after that incident, and neither was I. But I stayed silent, afraid my own father would then direct his rage at me instead. And though I don’t recall this specifically, other than of our family’s first dog’s just completely disappearing one day, but my brother believes my dad shot an killed our dog, Chauncy. He heard the gunshot early in the morning one day, and after that, Chauncy was never seen again, while my parents proclaimed he was taken to a new home.

I witnessed my dad verbally, physically, and emotionally abuse my mother. They yelled at each other often, and when they weren’t yelling, the energy of the air was thick with the friction between them. Often, it was the silence and unspoken strife between them that spoke louder than their words. But my dad would also call her names and complain about her spending because he was the sole financial provider, as my mom left her job permanently after becoming a mother. A memory permanently scarred in my brain was witnessing my mom screaming in pain while my dad twisted her arm behind her back and yelled at her, while my sister and I wailed and begged him to stop. He’d often tell my siblings and I that our mom was in a bad mood, and that we’d better behave, which helped shape my hypervigilance to others’ emotions, and also my people pleasing tendencies.

Both of my parents were also emotionally numb, negligent to the attunement of my emotional needs as a highly sensitive child. My dad was emotionally distant, and made little effort to connect with me as a child, maybe because I wasn’t a boy and didn’t share his love of fishing or hunting. He was often working or doing a chore for another family, and rarely made time to be present or engaging with me, especially as we grew older. My mom always carried this air of distance and perpetual sadness about her. I remember always doing my best to be a ‘good little girl’ so that I wouldn’t upset her further. While she worked endlessly to cook meals, clean, and do laundry for six children to meet our physical needs, she had little attunement or patience for my emotional needs, and so I begged to be seen by helping her with chores as much as possible.

But my mom’s emotional numbness also deepened to a physical incapacity to handle the depth of my emotional expression. Sometimes when I cried and wouldn't stop at her verbal command, she’d hold me on her lap with my back against her chest, holding her hands over both my nose and mouth, until she stifled my cries by suffocating the breath from my lungs. So I shut down. I stopped expressing my needs entirely. Whenever I was hurting, I suppressed my emotions, pretending to be fine, until I could find the privacy to cry on my own or not at all. This became a pattern that continued into adulthood. As is the case when we choose to view others through the lens of empathy, I now recognize that my mother did not have the capacity for addressing my emotional needs, as she likely wasn't even meeting her own needs.

I don’t recall being told that I was loved by my parents in childhood, and I grew up feeling largely unloved by my parents. Instead, I was told Jesus loved me so much that God sacrificed Jesus as his only son for MY sins, so that if I believed in Jesus as the only son of God and as Lord and savior, I wouldn't be doomed to burn in hell for eternity after death. Writing this today, I can’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of this claim that an unconditionally loving God would possibly condemn anyone to an eternity of suffering. Moreover, the use of this religious narrative to convince a child that they are personally responsible for the death of God himself in the flesh, as a means of controlling and enforcing obedience, is nothing short of emotional abuse, especially to the developing brain of a child.

I was also sexually abused, by not one, but at least two family members. I never told anyone about the abuse until my late 30s and early 40s, and carried the burden of my abusers’ own trauma for many years without ever allowing myself to feel that pain. I didn’t even consciously remember the earliest abuses until my body and mind recalled it in a physical somatic healing just a few years ago. But though for many years I didn’t consciously recall my earliest sexual abuse, my body knew and I held onto the trauma. While I knew something happened to me around age 3, it wasn’t until I chose to start facing the pain of my later sexual molestation that occurred when I was about 9 or 10, that conscious memories of my earliest abuse began to surface through several modalities of healing.

I always remembered that when I was young, I was deeply afraid of being kidnapped, and as I lay my head on my pillow each night to fall asleep, I would hear what sounded to me like footsteps walking up my family’s gravel driveway as my heartbeat’s blood rushed through my ear in a likely state of sheer panic within my tiny little body. I fell asleep each night thinking someone was coming up my family’s driveway to kidnap me. But I could never understand why I was terrified of being kidnapped, to the point of waking with nightmares often, while my siblings never were. A few years ago, during a craniosacral therapy session with my trusted and spiritually attuned practitioner, Myrna, my body experienced a profound physical and emotional release, as I recalled the sexual assault of my early years. A flood of memory washed through me, of my abuser assaulting me on the ground outside of my childhood home. He held onto my leg as I tried to escape and threatened to kidnap me from my family if I ever told anyone, suffocating me with the smell of cigarette smoke. And finally, after 40 years, it made sense to me why I had been deathly afraid of being kidnapped as a child. My childhood self carried the burden of the assault all alone, for decades of my child and adult life.

Within the past two years, after keeping my abuse a secret most of my adult life to protect myself and my abusers, I shared with my mom that I had been sexually abused as a child. Her reaction alone was quite unpleasant, as she demanded to know whom and proclaimed that I needed to reveal my abusers to bring them to justice. One is dead, and the other I rarely speak to. But perhaps what she told me later on in subsequent discussions, after I wouldn’t tell her whom, she disclosed to me that she knew at what age I had been when the abuse had happened. Shocked, I asked her how, and she revealed that at around 3 or 4 years old, our family’s pediatrician advised her, and I will spare you the details, that I had physical signs of sexual assault. No one did anything then, just brushed it off like nothing had happened. No one asked me questions, nor followed up. And just like that, my little self was shown yet again, that she wasn’t worthy of being protected. It has taken me quite some time to process the depth of that betrayal, and I will share more about that later on.

Around 9 or 10 years old, another family member sexually abused me as well. He lured me into his hiding place with the promise of spare change, and exposed himself to me and attempted to force himself upon my little body. I don’t actually recall the extent of his abuse, nor how many times it actually occurred. If you understand the brain’s survival mechanism, we often hold conscious memories of only bits and pieces of sexual trauma. This same person also sexually molested my sister, apologizing to her later in life, but never to me. I can’t quite put into words the shame that forms from multiple events of incestual abuse. It led to deep shame, shame that was never mine to carry. And I didn't share what had happened to me with anyone until I realized that avoidance of feeling the emotions of those experiences was deeply hurting me, and causing patterns of reactivity, avoidance, emotional numbness, and normalizing and enabling of abusive actions of others towards me.

To add to these traumatic experiences, my parents were (and still are) hoarders of physical possessions, collecting an astronomical amount of items from junk mail and clothing filling the house, to old vehicles, tools, and miscellaneous yard sale items scattered in piles throughout yard and filling the garage. I still cringe at the sight of my childhood home, as it slowly deteriorates into an unlivable home for my parents, who still occupy the home. As a child, I never brought the few friends I had to my home, embarrassed at the state of my home. And really, that house never really felt like a home to me. It was never a safe, nurturing space for little me. So instead, I spent most of my time outside of the house, as many of us that grew up in the 80’s and 90’s did. With 5 acres, we had a large space to play outdoors, and it became my escape, and place of safety and peace. My siblings and I spent our days building forts in the woods, picking wild berries. and playing in the creek in summers, and sledding and building snow forts in the winters. In that way, I fully attribute the natural creations of God for healing parts of my wounded child self.

Deep-rooted emotions of fear, guilt, shame, anger, and sadness were born within my child self from my childhood experiences of physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and religious abuse. My inner child learned very young that simply existing in life was unsafe, and that the very people who claimed to love you, hurt you immensely, especially when you made a mistake. And emotion that doesn’t get seen, understood, and released gets stored within the body, and the nervous system seeks ways to resolve these experiences in adult relationships.

I went off to college at 18, two hours away, happy to be finally free from the horrors and shame of my childhood home. Because I hadn’t yet fully developed a healthy sense of self-worth, self sabotaging patterns began to emerge in my behaviors throughout college. I drank heavily and sometimes blacked out. I didn't always honor my body. I made two unsuccessful attempts at taking my own life in college, feeling as though I was unlovable and unworthy. I couldn’t yet see why patterns kept showing up in my life, and didn’t have the capacity to understand the impact my past traumas were having in exacerbating my harmful choices.

In my junior year of college, I met the man who would later become my husband. The red flags were always there, from the beginning. He mirrored the childhood abuse I experienced, expressing as first as verbal abuse and sexual abuse, and deepening into emotional and physical abuse later on. That version of me wasn’t yet capable of recognizing that by staying in the relationship, I was teaching him it was okay to treat me with disrespect and harm, while simultaneously enabling his abusive actions to continue. But he made me feel loved, telling me he loved me at first sight, and saying “I love you” quite promptly after our relationship began. It wasn’t until much later in our relationship that I recognized it wasn’t actually love at all, rather a bond over shared experiences of childhood trauma, a bond that mirrored the same chaos in which we were both raised.

I became pregnant with our oldest daughter at 23, and gave birth to her at 24. I loved the way he was unafraid to face the fear of becoming a dad so young, just like me. But the unresolved emotions of our childhood traumas continued to show up throughout our relationship. We’d have huge blow up fights, screaming at each other, and sometimes shut down for days afterwards, barely speaking to one another. He would say horrific things to me, using a slur of insults any time he would get angry with me. “I wish you would get in a car accident and die” and “I hate you” became a regular insults towards me his fits of rage, and he threatened divorce often. The abuse progressed to me being hit and strangled on a few occasions, and I sometimes reacted physically in response, on one occasion even giving him a black eye in return.

Over a 20+ year relationship, after getting married after I gave birth to our second daughter, and having two more daughters after a ten year gap, the cycle of abuse continued. It began to feel like running on a hamster wheel from which I could see no path to escape. With four daughters, and the underlying Christian distortion that marriage meant ‘until death do us part’ running my subconscious choices, I remained in the marriage, until I eventually hit rock bottom. There was never a defining moment in which I chose to end our marriage, rather a series of events that slowly revealed to me over years that nothing would ever change between us until I chose to prioritize myself and my own emotional wellbeing above protecting him and his false image.

My decision to begin healing my childhood wounds began when I started to despise the mother that I was becoming to my daughters. I noticed how snappy, reactive, numb, exhausted, and burnout I had become, all the while pretending that I was fine and portraying just that to the world around me. I felt all alone in my marriage, and entirely unsupported in raising our daughters, as he worked long hours for his business and was rarely present physically or emotionally when he was home. I took on the role of caring for our four children and our home, while simultaneously working from home for his business. I even continued to work for his business immediately after giving birth to our two younger daughters, without taking maternity leaves. Carrying the burdens of what should have been shared responsibilities between him and I, while neglecting my own needs deeply wore me down over time. Our relationship had progressed to such deep disconnection that he slept on the couch for years of our marriage, and rarely spent any time with one another. Feeling alone in my marriage, the cracks between us continued to deepen even further.

As it often goes, when we begin to awaken to the ways in which we perpetuate our own suffering with our choices, we are led to exactly the right people and spaces that can expand our journey. I connected to a woman via social media who shed light on the fact that my traumas were running the show. I joined her group of women that were led by her in dedication to fitness, trauma healing, and soul expansion. I dove deep into healing, addressing every wound, belief, and story about my past that was running my subconscious programming. I started to share bits and pieces of the depth of my traumatic childhood experiences with others and my then husband, after exposing little to him over the years, out of fear he would judge me, in particular over the incest.

Perhaps one of the more defining moments of the deepening fractures within our relationship, was when I eventually disclosed to him that I had been sexually abused as a child. We were driving home from a rare night out together, and he began to accuse me of cheating on him, saying I had become distant and suggesting that I was cheating during the times that I had been attending yoga classes. Furious that he was falsely accusing me of cheating, and adding insult to injury by accusing me of such while I was trying to connect and restore safety in my body from childhood sexual assaults, I abruptly disclosed that I had been sexually abused as a child. It just came out. I blurted it out like vomit that was being held within me for decades. He slammed on the brakes of the car, stopping the car mid drive home, and flew into a fit of rage, demanding I tell him who had abused me. I refused to disclose, feeling unsafe to do so, and his rage deepened as we returned home. He continued to demand that I reveal my abusers, and when I refused, he hit me across the face twice, sending jolts of pain through my head and jaw and ringing though my ears, while I struggled to regain my composure. It was the worst physical blow he’d ever had towards me, after I shared one of the most vulnerable aspects of my life. I guess I always knew it wasn't safe for me to reveal my abuse, and later on, I understood why he reacted that way. But that is not my place to reveal here, as that is a part of his own story. I left that night to drive an hour to my sister’s home, fearful of what he would do to me if I stayed, while he repeatedly called me and my sisters, leaving enraged voicemails. But as I always did, over the weeks beyond this incident, I let him back in to my heart and my life.

Facing my childhood sexual abuse divinely led to Saprea, an organization that holds free healing retreats for adult women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I flew to a retreat where I met 7 other survivors of sexual abuse of all ages, and shared, cried and healed alongside them. This experience deepened my understanding of how sexual traumas in particular shape a child’s brain, and how this had been shaping my adult choices. While feeling less alone, I didn’t actually feel much better after that retreat, feeling even further ‘broken’ and ‘damaged’. It did allow me to become more attuned to my own emotions and reactivity, and to begin to notice my self-sabotaging patterns. But what that experience really did was crack me further open to begin to ask, “Who am I, outside of my past experiences that have shaped my adult choices? What do I really want in life, beyond healing from my past?”

I was divinely led to partake in a plant medicine journey several months after returning home from the retreat, and there, my journey began to unravel and gain momentum. I met and deeply connected to two very precious souls, Kara and Ashley, who have become soul sisters to me. It was as if we had known each other for lifetimes, and honestly, we probably have. Their support and encouragement led me through some of the darkest days of my life. I will share more of the plant medicine experience itself at a later time, as the profound nature of that experience deserves its own spotlight, and in hindsight, that is where so much began to shift for me, both internally and externally. Through the revelations of that experience, I gained a newfound connection to God, not in the distorted religious sense, but spiritually, beyond any connection I had ever had with the religious ‘god’ I was taught of in my youth. And finally, I had connected with people who truly saw me, for me.

More beliefs I had previously held as truth began to crumble, revealing the distortions underneath. I questioned everything I had previously thought to be true, seeking and consuming spiritual books, content, and courses that revealed new perspectives and shed light on the questions I had always held within me. Shortly after I returned from the plant medicine retreat, I finally gained the courage to end my marriage. I was finally fully awake to the depth of pain he continued to project onto me, revealed to me through several more experiences of abuse, gaslighting, and manipulation. One night, I even finally called the police on him for the first time ever in all of the multiple events of abuse. I recognized that nothing would ever change between us until I took action, especially when I found out he had lied to the police about the nature of the incident, falsely proclaiming our fight was over ‘multiple infidelities’, when the truth was that our argument involved his gun that he had given to me for safe-keeping. I finally decided that I needed to prioritize myself over him, and stopped protecting him above myself.

Through the grueling process of divorce, selling our home, and moving into a home on my own with my daughters, I slowly began to remember, to reawaken to the divine truth about myself. That I am not my traumas. I am not my past experiences, choices, or mistakes. I am not the hurt that was projected onto me, nor the stories I told myself as a result of a lifetime of abuse. Safety of being in a home on my own slowly began to heal me, in body, mind, and soul, unraveling decades of generational trauma that had been passed onto me. I finally had the courage to face the fact that by enabling abuse in my marriage, I had been setting a horrible example for my daughters. I turned inward, deepening with courage to face all the ways I had not only let myself down, but also my daughters, and even my ex-husband by enabling his abusive actions over the years. Love doesn’t enable, coddle, or settle for disrespect and abuse. Love reveals and exposes distortions, and I now understood that his actions were operating as a divine mirror, to expose within me all the ways my actions reflected a lack of self-love. And I can personally confirm that what they say is true, love heals.

My journey over the past several years has led me down a path of seeking healing through an expansive list of modalities, including somatic movement, breathwork practices, journaling, mediation, craniosacral therapy, talk therapy, shadow work, body work practices, and various modalities of energy healing, even completing Reiki and IET trainings. Each of these healing modalities had their role in my journey, but I started to realize another pattern: I was chasing something outside of me to ‘fix’ me, to make me feel whole again. I was still identifying as that wounded inner child version of myself that experienced multiple abuses, and the adult version of me that had experienced domestic violence. But those versions of me aren’t me and never were, because we are not our bodies, or even our minds, nor the past experiences that have shaped brains and programmed our later responses. I have since decided to stop carrying the burden of my childhood traumas, recognizing that they never were my burden to carry, choosing instead to remember the truth about myself, and that all I really had to do was let go of every false identity I ever held about myself, so that I could remember the single truth about myself: I am love.

Love is the only thing that is real and eternal. Everything else is a distortion, born from the illusion of separation and the human actions that resulted from repressed emotions, both within myself and within others. We have a choice to use our emotions as teachers to lead us back home to love, to wholeness within our hearts. All I had to do was accept my emotions, feel them, and let them go. And yes, that’s much easier said than done. But in doing so, I learned to surrender to the truth that we are all divine expressions of One Unified Infinite and Eternal Consciousness, ever connected to God, to the Source of all creation. All of my experiences and the pain born from abuse were not orchestrated to break me, nor to punish me. Instead, they were the doorway to remembrance of divinity, within me and every other expression of divine nature.

I’m not asking you to believe or even to understand what I’ve shared here in the last paragraph. I simply share my own journey, and I don’t proclaim to have the answers for anyone else’s path or understanding. Maybe what I’ve shared was been revealing, but perhaps also deeply triggering, as often is information that challenges much of what we’ve been led to believe is truth. I have suffered from feeling like I have been a victim of my experiences, instead of being empowered by them. I have also bypassed the suffering of my human experience by avoiding my emotions entirely, and I most certainly don’t recommend doing so. And so I leave you with this beautiful quote by Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist,

“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

In love and light,

Holly

Below are a few resources I feel called to share that significantly supported my spiritual journey:

Religious Healing: @AaronAbke, former Christian pastor who left religion, after awakening to multiple distortions held within Christianity. Aaron is the host of The Jesus Way Podcast, and author of The Three Beliefs of Ego. His work guided me through deep transformation of religious trauma and expanded my understanding of the nature of God and of unity consciousness.

Multidimensional Healing: Myrna Triano, owner and practitioner of TriAngel Rivers LLC. Myrna is a Licensed Massage Therapist, Quantum Blueprint Facilitator, Craniosacral Practitioner, Master Teacher and Practitioner of Integrated Energy Therapy®

Childhood Trauma Healing: @TheHolisticPsychologist, psychologist Dr. Nicole LaPera, author of several books, including How to Be the Love You Seek, which I have found profoundly insightful. Dr. Nicole is also the founder of the online group healing program, SelfHealers Circle, and she shares about human psychology, trauma, and healing from a spiritual perspective.

Sexual Abuse Healing: Saprea.org, a non-profit organization that hosts free retreats for adult women survivors of childhood sexual abuse.