I believe that women have generational wounds that are passed down unconsciously. I discovered this myself by accident when I started a process six years ago of healing from childhood sexual abuse. In writing, meditating, and speaking to members of my family, a doorway opened and secrets spilled out containing long-held severe trauma that my mother, grandmother, and my sisters had experienced. It went even further, and I found aunts and cousins alike were not spared. Did I somehow absorb my mother’s wounds without even knowing it? Was I carrying generations of women’s shame in addition to my own? It hit me that the single most common theme in all the women in my family and myself was silence. We were invisible. I was silent when my molester was charged, as I was a minor, and after I smiled politely and quietly to spare myself and others who loved me further pain. Can this narrative of silence be broken? How far did I carry this into who I expressed into the world as a woman and in my relationships with others?
Looking back, I was eight when I gave my power away. This was when my cloak of invisibility began, and I disappeared. We spend so much of our lives not really being who we are. Our true nature is hidden out of fear. One of the first things to disappear is our voice. Especially as young girls.
In March 2021, I was invited to speak at a TEDx Talk, and it was here I shared my views on the power of ‘Speaking the Unspeakable’. Of bringing that which was in the dark into the light, to see the unseen. When we do this, we let go of issues that hold power over us, such as the shame I carried which made me complicit in my own disempowering narratives of silence. I relate how I eventually found my voice in my personal and professional life, grounded in my spiritual work and a reawakening to who I truly am. I was on a journey of self-discovery with a deeply felt sense of my own inner power and that of the women around me. It was ancestral healing and freedom at a most profound level.
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