Category Archives: Jan’s Blog

Welcome!

Archived here are the blogs I write about inner life and outer life, inner nature and outer nature. Perhaps my writings on life, as I see it and experience it, may offer you some small insight or different perspective as you take your own journey.

With gratitude for all that life teaches me, I share my experiences.

Jan Ketchel

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Parent Child Dreaming

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Getting lost in the confusion... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Getting lost in the confusion… – Photo by Jan Ketchel

I dream. I am with a father and his son, meeting at a busy intersection where two highways intersect. We have to walk a long way to get where we are going. The child is young, about four or five, and I’m aware that it’s too far for him to walk. I find an old metal lounge chair on wheels in a ditch, pull it out, and set it up for the child. I intend to push him. The father wants to lie down and be pushed. “No,” I say, “it’s for the child.” Every time he attempts to lie down on the chair I yell at him. “No, stand up! It’s for the child.”

Next I dream that Chuck and I are at a restaurant with a young couple who have two young children, ages two and four. We have taken the kids to the bathroom and are just returning to the table with the two kids, now naked. As soon as the parents see the naked kids they reject them. “That’s not my kid!” the mother says. “He’s not mine. I don’t want him, he’s not my kid.” She is adamant, as is the father who also pipes up, “Those aren’t our kids, we don’t want them.”

I am stunned when I hear this because of course the kids belong to them. I also see that the two kids are deeply affected by this rejection by the parents. They are hurt, but they also don’t understand. How can they not be acceptable to their own parents? What have they done to deserve this? Nothing; they are innocent. This rejection is painful to behold. I see that the pain of the children is deep. “I don’t care what you think,” I say to the parents, leaning in close. “Even if you are going to reject your children, don’t ever let them hear you say that!” The parents are unaffected. They will not accept their children. Chuck and I stand there wondering what we’ll do now, but try as we might we just cannot convince the parents that these are their very own children. They continue to deny them, speaking loudly so that all in the restaurant can hear. The two children sit at the table looking lost, confused, and clearly in deep pain. These are inner world dreams, confronting the roles and dynamics of the inner parent and the inner child, how to be fully adult and accepting of our true innocence without fear and judgment.

Our role as responsible inner adult may have to go through several phases of development. And just as our childhood asked most of us to withstand some kind of rejection and confusion from our own parents, and from life itself, so does our inner child have to endure the same from us. We might have to be a rejecting inner parent before we can become the gentle and loving parent we are capable of. We might have to become a stern, judging parent before we can become a totally accepting nonjudgmental parent. But no matter what our process entails, in order to become wholly reconciled beings, we must achieve balance between these two personalities that dominate our inner world.

The process of achieving balance will most likely entail something like the dynamics in my dreams. We must accept that we are both the parent and the child. If I were a child, would I want to be treated like that? What kind of parent do I want to be?

We must keep in mind that the child, at its core, is innocent, unaware of the greater world and so what happens to the child is largely a mystery and a puzzle that must somehow be coped with and made sense of. With its limited capacities and knowledge of how the world works, the child will not necessarily have the resources to understand and so conclusions may be misconstrued or downright false. Ruled by feelings and emotions the child seeks only to return as quickly as possible to a state of equilibrium and safety, skewed though that state may be. And so the child is protected by its innocence in one way, but its innocence also makes it extremely vulnerable as well.

We must keep in mind that the parent, at its core, is just trying to figure life out. As adults we know that we had to find our way in the world all on our own. For no matter what kind of upbringing we had, we each had to go out into the world and encounter and live our own separate lives. We had to learn to be responsible for ourselves in a world that was often rejecting, judgmental, and unkind. We had to learn what it meant to be an adult. When we had children of our own we had to learn what it meant to be a parent. Life does not come with an owner’s manual, it has to be lived to be learned. Whether we have birthed our own children or not, does not matter, we all have an inner parent inside us somewhere, just as we all have an inner child inside too. We have all experienced childhood and we have all experienced adulthood first hand. For true reconciliation of our inner world, we must all become our own parents, both our own mother and our own father.

Inner and outer world are equally real... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Inner and outer world are equally real… – Photo by Jan Ketchel

The inner parent must be held accountable for its position of responsibility if we are to heal and evolve, if we are to achieve wholeness in our lifetime. The inner parent must be like the adult I was in my first dream, and say, “No, this is for the child,” as we protect and care for the inner child, appropriately attending to its real needs. When we slip into childish behavior and neediness, our inner parent must speak up and say, “You are the adult, so be one!” I saw clearly in that dream that the child was unfit for the long walk and I found appropriate means to remedy the situation. In my maternal role, however, I encountered the father who sought to be taken care of like a child, when another caring adult arrived and took over. Perhaps I should not have remedied the situation for him, but made him responsible for taking care of his own child to begin with, but my dream did not go that way. It was showing me something else. When someone outside of us takes over, we may very easily fall back into a regressive place, ignoring our own inner child’s real needs, abdicating our parental role of responsibility.

Just as acceptance of our innocence is crucial in achieving wholeness, so is the adult role. The adult self must be firmly established as the one who makes the decisions, fairly and judiciously, with the child’s interests in mind. Even those who have never had the joys and pains of parenting in real life, must face the same dilemmas that all parents face when presented with their inner child. Parenting is a daunting and frightening task and we all want to do a good job. We only have so much time to pour all we wish for our real children into them before they go out into the world. Our time with them is relatively short. The inner parent child relationship, however, has the advantage of longevity. We are together for a lifetime, perhaps even many.

At some point we must face our dual roles as our own parent and our own child. We must do the work of raising our inner child by becoming the loving and compassionate parent that we are all capable of being. We have the opportunity to get it right, even if our own parents didn’t get it right, for having been a child we know what the child needs and we know what we would like in a parent.

In the second dream, the parents reject their children outright. This does not bode well, but I am gifted with the child’s innocence in this dream, for I experience it quite palpably. The child’s reaction to the rejection by the parents is clearly felt, so easy to read. And so we must ask ourselves: Am I as rejecting of my inner child as these heartless parents are? Again I have an adult role in this dream, observer and teacher, and once again I call the adults to the carpet. “Be good parents, even if you have to fake it,” is really what I’m saying. “Just because your children are naked, their innocence exposed, don’t reject them.” Don’t reject your own innocence, in other words, for that is where the deepest issues lie, in what our innocent child self has been bearing, or baring.

These two dreams contain many more sublayers, but my point today is to impart how critical it is that as evolving spiritual beings we reconcile our inner dilemmas. We must be loving adults and parents to our inner children. We must be able to decipher the difference between regression states and states of innocence and real need. Our inner children may present us with just as many difficult situations as our real children do, and so we are asked to be good parents in our inner world, just as we are asked to be in our outer world.

Sometimes we must be firm before we can be soft. Sometimes our inner child must scream to be heard. Sometimes we must fail before we can make some progress. It’s just how life is, inner and outer life.

The inner world is as real as the outer world, as impacting and as important to our lives now as in the future. And so, if we continue to go deeper into our inner world, and resolve the issues of reality there, then our outer world issues will naturally resolve as well. And don’t forget to look closely at dreaming life, for dreams are part of the inner process, offering very personal, as well as universal, nightly guidance.

Seeking balance, parenting and innocent too,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Are We All Just Living The Same Life?

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We're all in the same golden universe, aren't we? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We’re all in the same golden universe, aren’t we? – Photo by Jan Ketchel

A year ago, during this first week in February, I was at Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. A dear relative lay dying. She had asked me to be with her. I got there at 9:20 in the morning. “Let’s do it,” she said, and then she closed her eyes. She didn’t open them or speak again. She died at 9:20 that night. Nonetheless, she was energetically present, in full awareness the entire time.

I sat beside her during those twelve hours, whispering in her ear, both guarding her energy and guiding her to take her journey. Many doors opened for both of us that day. I sat on the threshold of each door as she passed through. Our lives intermingled. Sometimes I was the person in the bed dying and she was guarding and guiding. Sometimes she was my mother, my father, my child, my sister, my brother, my lover. Sometimes I was her daughter, her mother, her father, her sister, her brother, her lover.

We lived through many lives that day, easily flowing in and out of them, reliving experiences and relationships, without attachment letting everything go. As each door opened we said our goodbyes at the threshold, fully aware that we had done this so many times before, with exactly the same intent and awareness, unafraid of death, knowing that it led only to new life and new adventures. Finally, I sat back and told her it was time to go the rest of the way alone. I would be present to witness, but it was time for her to take over. She had done her life well, her journey here was done, she could leave anytime she was ready. I kissed her one last time, let her hand go, and sat quietly beside her. Shortly thereafter, without a backward glance, she leapt into the light of new life.

Even so, I have a sense of her energetic presence in my life still. Though we completed many relationships in this world on that day, we began a new relationship too. Since her passing, I have continued to honor her each week on her death day; for all that she gifted me, for who she was, for taking her journey like the strong, independent being she always was, for continuing to guide me. I feel her energy the same way I feel Jeanne’s energy—Jeanne, a being who did not know me in this world, who nonetheless connected with me in the same fashion as someone who did know me well and who I knew very well too.

I hear from people all the time. People report that my experiences are their experiences, that my life parallels theirs, that my story is their story. I have thoughts coursing through my head that belong to the petty tyrants in my life, thoughts that I’ve long ago detached myself from, yet they return unbidden, asking for my attention. I wake up and find that I have dreamed the same dream as Chuck, that we hear words spoken when neither of us has opened our mouths. We often hear music playing in our house, old-timey music—a jukebox playing jazz, swing, the blues—when there is no one else in the house and no music being played. I have walked through glitches in the universe and experienced scenes from the past, sometimes as a participant and sometimes as an observer. Like a spy, I have entered parallel universes in energetic awareness and returned awed and shaken.

I am you and you are me. - Photo by Jan Ketchel
I am you and you are me. – Photo by Jan Ketchel

And so, I wonder, are we all just living the same life? Are we all dreaming the same dream? Are your thoughts my thoughts? Are all experiences in constant flow, being relived again and again? Are the air molecules that we’re breathing in and out today the same air molecules once breathed in and out by dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, Buddha and Jesus, by Lincoln and George Washington, by Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda? This is an interesting question that has been circulating for some time now. Are we all the same energy, the same being? Are we all living each other’s lives?

When I once asked Jeanne how she was able to use her energy now, how she could be in so many places at once, helping so many people, she described it as being like an exploding roman candle, like fireworks bursting, one candle opening into many other candles, sparkles of light and energy, an endless array of energy free to go in any direction. Intent, she said, was the catalyst.

I’m aware how intent works; that it’s available in both positive and negative form, for both giving and taking. We might set a conscious intent to be more open, kind and loving, or we might unconsciously set an intent to retreat, to be depressed and angry. Perhaps we’ve tapped into someone else’s intent. We might be living a universal intent, a political intent, an energetic intent not our own. We might be caught unaware by intent that is flowing through the universe that is negative or downright evil.

As I sat beside my dying relative last year, I very strongly experienced the intent of energy as it flows through the universe, falling now here and now there, giving and taking, yet always moving on to new experiences. And so I sense that now again, as I ponder where we are now, as the world continues to progress in the direction it is going. If my personal experiences are anything to go on, I believe that we are all the same, that indeed we are one being and we’re all having the same experiences. We live them over and over again until we don’t need them anymore. When we finally take leave of this earth for the last lifetime, and our energy rejoins the source from which it came, we discover that we are not who we thought we were. Our individuality that we are all so attached to is, at that point, revealed for what it is: a myth. Our ego is not where we reside; our energy is.

And yet, that being said, it’s of the utmost importance how we choose to live our lives. How we choose to live every day of every life, no matter who we are, is critical—because our choices impact all of us. If my energy is also your energy, if my breath is also your breath, if my thoughts are also your thoughts, then the responsibility lies heavily upon me to make sure that what flows out of me is good, healthy, positive, healing, and loving energy. If my experiences are your experiences, it behovs me greatly to make sure that I resolve my internal difficulties—my anger, my pain, my negativity and my judgments—so that you need not suffer. If my intent is to spiritually evolve then that too is your intent. It’s this kind of energetic awareness that is so badly needed now. I believe it’s how we can all be part of a changing world.

These are just some of the thoughts I woke up with today, thoughts that have been circulating through me for a long time. Did they come from you? Wherever they came from, they’re out there, and they flow through others as well. If more of us pay attention to them, quell those old negative voices that say, “Oh, that can’t be true,” and just let it be true for even a little while we may offer someone else the opportunity to not just sit on the threshold to new thoughts and ideas, but actually dare to leap—with full awareness—into a new and changing world too.

Letting your thoughts flow through me,
Jan

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Omens Of Crow Magic & Energy

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Why is crow calling? -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Why is crow calling? -Photo by Jan Ketchel

It’s Monday morning, early, still dark. I awaken to the sounds of crows. The sun has perhaps risen, but it’s cloudy and I have no sense of the dawn, yet the crows are calling, already wide awake. Their harsh cries penetrate the darkness. I sense them close to the house, ominous in their intensity. I wonder what they portend. My immediate reaction is negative. Is someone going to die? Is this the dark energy that Jeanne messaged about last week and that I’m supposed to turn away from?

Chuck and I sit and have our coffee by the fire, the door of the wood stove open so we can enjoy a quick blast of heat. I try to settle into the coziness of this winter morning, a dream still fresh, buzzing through my body, an old dream. It’s startling to me that I’ve dreamed of being in old crumbling warehouses, trying to get a baby to safety, a dominant dream theme of my recapitulation. I wonder why I’m back there. Again, I hear the crows.

“The crows are so loud!” I remark.

The morning progresses and still I hear the crows, so many, so close, so loud. What does it mean? Now they’re in the trees of the front yard. I see them in the field across the street pecking at the frozen ground. I hear them calling from the woods in the backyard, loud and insistent. Eventually, I push their energy aside, detaching as instructed by Jeanne last week, and sit down to channel a new message from Jeanne.

This week’s message is quite different from last week’s I think, speaking of positive energy and attaching to it, as opposed to last week’s, which admonished being aware of the energy as negative and largely seeking sustenance for its own purposes. Don’t attach, was the message then.

As I finish the message I notice the crows again. They’re swooping in close to the house now. Startled, I suddenly understand. They’re looking for food. The weather is ominous, not the crows, who are only looking for the crumbs of bread I leave for them on a large flat stone in the front yard. They call to each other. “Yes,” they seem to be saying. “She left us food! Come and get it!”

In abruptly switching my perspective regarding the crows, I accept the positive aspects of the energy of the day as relayed in the message from Jeanne. As I change my perspective I notice how relieved I become. I shed my fears and tension and I am no longer attached to the idea of crow energy as dark energy today.

For the most part I know crow energy is good energy, that crow brings messages of transformation and new life, that they are magical. But do I remember this, even for more than a few minutes? No! Because before long several enormous crows swoop through the front yard. I notice them, sweeping back and forth, as I sit and type up the channeled message. Each time I catch a glimpse of their large black wings, cut at such an angle as to appear threatening and ominous again, I startle. I get drawn right back into an old place and fear takes over. I can’t help but shake a little and wonder once again what they’re doing here so close, so many, so big, so threatening.

Magical Crow -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Magical Crow -Photo by Jan Ketchel

A blue jay swoops down to snatch some crumbs of bread from the stone. Immediately a crow swoops in after it, chasing it off so that it flies with a loud SMACK right into the window. I jump! And then I have to stop myself, I have to laugh. This is just what Jeanne’s message is about, not taking this energy of this day in a negative, fearful way, but in a positive way. And so I calm myself and shake off the energy that seeks attachment. In this moment I’m aware that even though last week’s message and this week’s message appear to be quite the opposite they are really saying the same thing: Be aware of how you perceive the energy in your life, what comes to you, and how you react to it.

Jeanne’s message this week says that life cannot help but evolve, life cannot help but flow. And so I see the crows and the blue jay as life in action, unstoppable. Nature has no problems acquiescing to the moment, to now. Nature does not fear what comes next. Nature does not hesitate to go for what it needs, when it needs it. And so I know I must learn this from nature. From my own abilities to channel I know how to flow with nature, how to detach from my thoughts and let nature flow through me uninhibited.

I realize I’m being challenged in my dream to be fully aware that it’s a very old dream. I’m being challenged by the crows and the jays to notice how old negative thoughts are so easily conjured. I’m being challenged to heed the warnings of my unconscious as it asks me to notice that change really is constant. I’m being asked if I’m going to flow with it, or am I going to keep feeding those old perspectives old notions of an old reality. Am I going to finally free myself of the stuff that I no longer need, that in fact I’ve really already detached from by fully putting it to rest?

I’ve been hard at work editing the final draft of my next book and so I’m aware that I’m rehashing and sifting through old stuff, my second year of intense recapitulation. And so I get the message of my dream, prompting me to take a good look at just how much work I did, and to face the complete truth of it, attempting to startle me by taking me into an old place, to alert me to the fact that I don’t need to run around in old crumbling buildings anymore. There is nothing to attach to there. There are no more babies to save. It’s time to get out of the old dreams and move into the new dreams already in progress. I’m aware that as we move forward in life, daring ourselves to take the next step, old things come to pull us back, seeking to keep us in old comfortable and comforting places, places that are unhealthy, unnecessary, and unevolving. It’s just the nature of the human struggle.

As I put these thoughts down, it begins to snow. Another winter storm has arrived. Nature doing what nature does. I am thankful for the messages from my unconscious, from my dream world, and from Jeanne, all in alignment with the energy of now, which states: Just keep going—whether the energy you sense is negative or positive, whether you feel pulled in an old direction, whether you feel stuck in old thoughts or ideas, whether you feel sad or lonely, fearful or apathetic—just keep moving and changing, looking always for the silver lining, the truth, a new perspective. And that’s what I take with me into this week.

Stay connected to the magic in every moment... -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Stay connected to the magic in every moment… -Photo by Jan Ketchel

No matter where I am, I must constantly pull myself back to the moment, to the present, reassessing my evolutionary journey, knowing that as a being of energetic potential I am responsible for getting myself out of old places, as Jeanne suggests in her messages. I’ve learned the power of the mind to control and I’ve experienced the mind totally free. I look around me now on this day and know which I prefer.

I know how to read energy, we all do. It’s just a matter of constantly checking in with our own energy, questioning what makes us feel energetically alive, and what makes us feel energetically dead, what makes us feel good and what makes us feel bad. And that’s what Jeanne’s trying to teach us to do, feel our own energy, so we can really understand that although her messages over the past two weeks at first appear to be the opposite of each other, in reality they are exactly the same.

Watch your personal energy, guard it closely and let it guide you. Learn to flow with your life the same way that nature flows. Let life flow to you and take you on your journey. Let life make the most of you, as Jeanne says, just as one day flows into the next, night into day and then into night again. Our choice is in how we want to live, and so as each snowflake falls I look at it from a new perspective and shed some attachment that I no longer need. For I am certain that we are all evolving beings.

Love,
Jan

Here is an excerpt from Animal Speak by Ted Andrews regarding crows. I think it very nicely sums up my experience and Jeanne’s messages to us all: The cawing out of the crow should remind us that magic and creation are cawing out to us every day.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: The Voice Deep Inside

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That calm voice deep inside... Photo by Jan Ketchel
That calm voice deep inside… Photo by Jan Ketchel

“I tried to die young, boy did I try, but the voice deep inside would not let me succumb…” These words were written by Melanie Safka in a song from her recent album Ever Since You Never Heard of Me. Both Chuck and I have had this song playing in our heads for weeks now, its significance struggling to emerge.

I already know that when I hear a song over and over again like that it usually means something, either to me or someone I know. Sometimes before I do a channeling I might hear a song and so I know it relates to the person I’m channeling for. Once when this happened the person told me that it was the song that was played at her wedding, and it meant a lot to her. In fact, it figured significantly into the process she was struggling to make sense of, and so I trust such things.

In this particular song, of most significance to me are the words: “the voice deep inside.” This is the voice of the other mind that Chuck wrote about in his blog the other day, the voice of direct knowledge, the instinctual mind that knows we are here for a reason, that our journeys are journeys of the utmost importance. We all have access to this voice deep inside; at some time in our lives we’ve all heard it. Whether or not we’ve paid attention to its messages is one thing, but we can’t deny that it exists.

People who’ve been traumatized have direct access to that voice more than most, the voice that says: You will not succumb; you will survive. This is the voice that kept many people alive during the Holocaust, the voice that will not succumb, that will not give in, the omnipotent optimist inside us that will not ever give up. Every one has this voice inside them, but for some reason in some people, as Viktor Frankl suggests in Man’s Search for Meaning, it’s a dominant force.

It’s definitely dominant in anyone who suffered through sexual abuse or other trauma as a child. If you have survived a childhood of sexual or physical abuse you definitely have had direct access to that voice, and if it hasn’t reawoken yet, it will, because it’s the voice that knows everything that happened, it’s the voice that speaks the truth. But that voice goes even deeper, beyond the trauma, to our very soul and this, I believe, is where the answers to surviving the most horrific of traumatic events lie. I believe we do not succumb, because our soul’s journey has a different intent. And so we are charged with discovering just what that intent is. Why did I survive my trauma when so many others don’t survive theirs?

As a child I heard that voice deep inside a lot. It came to my rescue when no one else did. It instructed me in how to survive. It gave me access to tools of survival that could only be fully realized because I was being brutally abused. Had I not been sexually abused as a child I might not even now have such direct access to that voice. I might not trust it the way I do now. I might not have direct knowledge of out-of-body experiences, of the innate abilities we all have inside us. I might not be so sure of what happens when we die, if I had not been traumatized as a child and had direct experiences of leaving the body, of leaving the thinking mind behind as my awareness left my body and went elsewhere. In addition, since I had direct access to that inner voice deep inside me from a very young age, it got plenty of exercise and it strengthened significantly so that today I’m very comfortable with it.

In fact, I feel lucky now that the voice deep inside was actively present in my life. I cannot deny it nor the access to a greater awareness it brings me. And so I would even have to say that in many ways I’m lucky to have been sexually abused as a child; I’m lucky I found that voice at such an early age. That voice helped me to survive, but it also taught me that there is more to life than meets the eye. It gave me direct access to my soul and the knowledge that I am on a journey of the utmost importance. Even if that journey is only partially completed in this lifetime, I am aware that in my next lifetime the work I am doing now to fulfill that soul’s journey will have great impact and significance.

That voice deep inside continues to teach me every day now, as I meditate, as I channel, and as I go about my day, hearing songs playing in my head, asking me to go deeper, to pay attention. And as I continue taking my soul’s journey, one day at a time, I can’t help but wonder how far I can go, who else I might become, in this lifetime or the next.

At one time I was a victim of sexual abuse, mesmerized by trauma I could not access, yet my life was severely limited because of it. Then it all came back to me and I became a survivor, strengthened by the knowledge that if my child self could survive what she had gone through, then certainly I could survive the recapitulation of it. Now I’ve advanced beyond survivorhood, for staying there held no appeal. Once I was done with reliving the trauma I had no need of it anymore. Except as a teaching tool it has been put to rest. I became interested only in facing life, life as I had never been able to envision it before. Having taken the diamonds out of the blackness that once was my life, all I wanted was to live among those diamonds, in a world that was aglitter, alive, vibrant and exciting.

All I’m interested in now is looking forward into life, wondering what other gifts I’m going to receive, what other songs I’ll be hearing, what other experiences I’ll have. I live from that place deep inside every day. I don’t have time or inclination to do otherwise. I wake up each day and that voice pipes up and happily asks: I wonder what this day will bring?

It is my sincerest wish that others find and trust that voice deep inside themselves. Trauma gave me access to it, as it has many others. There are diamonds hidden in the darkness of traumatic memory. Listening to that voice inside leads right to them. For those who have not had the gift of trauma to find that voice, it may just be a matter of listening a little more closely, paying attention in a new way.

It’s the dreaming voice, the sober voice of truth, the voice that acts on our behalf and shows us its ultimate gift—the power of the human spirit to transcend the body—that our awareness exists outside our human form. It’s the voice that acts on our behalf unbeknownst to us. Perhaps not until our traumatic event is over do we realize we’ve been aided by something other than what our brain or our will could conjure up. It’s the voice that says, “No, that’s not the choice you should make,” but do we listen, even when we know it’s right? It’s that mystical something, unexplainable by the rational mind, that just will not let us rest back in an old world once we’ve experienced it. We might even want more or it!

Once we’re in total alignment with it—the voice of our personal truth—we’re right in alignment with our deeper, spiritual self, taking our soul’s journey. Paying attention to that voice deep inside is what got me started, my spirit calling out to me, asking me to heed its call, and I did pay attention, and boy did it take me on a journey of a lifetime.

And I’m still going!
Love,
Jan

Thank you to Melanie for all the songs and for her voice deep inside that keeps her singing! Thank you to Viktor Frankl for having so deeply investigated the human condition.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Healing The Wounds Of Childhood Sexual Abuse

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Pierce the darkness...
Pierce the darkness…

It has taken me several days to figure out the value of writing this essay when I have already written so much about the subject of childhood sexual abuse, already published one book about my encounters with a sexual predator, and am in the final stages of completing the second book in the series entitled The Recapitulation Diaries. I let my dreaming self become part of the decision. In the middle of the night I woke up and finally knew I had to write this blog because something that Barry Lopez and Terry Gross decided and stated at the beginning of an interview on Fresh Air would not leave me.

Here is what Terry Gross says at the beginning of the interview: “We agree, you and I, that there is no need to drag you, in this interview, through a traumatic retelling of the details of what happened to you…“

Barry Lopez is an American writer who published an essay in the January edition of Harper’s magazine about the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. In that article he is forthcoming about what happened to him, giving descriptive details, and I commend him for his honesty and bravery in sharing his story. Between that publication and the Fresh Air interview, both of which are worthy reading and listening to on the subject of childhood sexual abuse—I link to both of them at the end of this article—something seems to have happened to Mr. Lopez.

Considering the position he’s in, invited to speak publicly and then to not tell the details, leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as if there’s still something wrong with speaking frankly and openly about sexual abuse, something bad about it, a distasteful stigma attached to being sexually abused, even after all that’s recently been exposed. It’s just something not talked about in polite society. Those were my first thoughts upon hearing Terry Gross make the above statement, but as I listened to what she was really saying, “no need to drag you…through a traumatic retelling of the details,” I understood that Mr. Lopez has not healed from the wounds of his childhood sexual abuse, for if he had the retelling of the details would no longer haunt him. And as the interview proceeds it becomes clear that this is so, in spite of the deep work he has done.

I read the article, ‘Sliver of Sky,’ in Harper’s first, and to his credit Mr. Lopez does a magnificent job of telling his story, replete with details, but even there something bothered me. It was only in listening to Mr. Lopez speak with Terry Gross that I finally understood what it was, for the radio interview more clearly reveals the difficulties Mr. Lopez still faces. I felt the same thing after reading Marilyn Van Derbur’s book, Miss America By Day, who wrote so bravely of being sexually abused by her father and in which she states that she could only go so far in healing. People are not finding the means to heal from the deep wounds of childhood sexual abuse.

Mr. Lopez is compassionate, articulate, and completely honest about the many aspects of living with PTSD, though he states near the end of the Fresh Air interview that he has a sense of “falling backward into places he has not been for years, terrified.” He states that “It never leaves you.” I beg to differ, and so I must write this essay today, in hopes of sharing, once again, insights that I’ve learned during my own process of healing, really healing from the sixteen years of childhood sexual abuse that I suffered and that dogged me long into adulthood.

Mr. Lopez seems to question, as he confronts the aftermath of the article in Harper’s, whether or not it was right for him to have gone public. He has been receiving letters and calls for aid, it seems, and although he is clearly a good spokesman for the truth of sexual abuse, he states that he holds no credentials. He questions, it seems, whether or not he was really ready to face the whirlwind he finds himself in now, as a public figure speaking on such a sensitive subject. He also questions what comes next, for facing sexual abuse and what to do about it is a common dilemma that we all must face. I say, keep talking, Mr. Lopez; keep facing the abusers, keep writing and speaking the details so others, those not sexually abused especially, really understand what it means to be a child in a compromised position, unable to find a way out.

I feel deep compassion for Barry Lopez. I am also grateful to him for keeping the dialogue fresh, for daring to carry a torch he never sought. It’s important. It’s helpful to so many, to those in the process but also to those who have not yet confronted their own issues of sexual abuse. At the same time, I must protest some of his conclusions, though I realize they are made in the context of where he is in his own healing process and so I apologize if I seem judgmental, I do not mean to be, but I cannot accept that “It never leaves you.” In making that statement, a door of possibility slams shut. I say, don’t close any doors, leave them all open, look into them and find the means of healing, because with the right process there is healing from even the deepest of trauma, and at the risk of sounding pompous, I must also say that I have experienced it. I am healed. There is a way to heal.

At one time I too was terrified, in constant heightened alert, traumatically impacted for far longer than the actual years of abuse. It was only through the work I did, by taking a journey of recapitulation that I was able to fully heal. The word recapitulation comes from a shamanic practice used by the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, but through the work I did with Chuck Ketchel, my husband, we discovered its value as a healing treatment for PTSD. And we have, for the past ten years, been slowly introducing it to others.

There is healing light...
There is healing light…

That process of recapitulation involved reliving the years of abuse in detail—investigating them from many different perspectives, speaking of them over and over again in a supportive environment, facing the disintegration of their hold on me by allowing myself to totally change how I viewed the world and my place in it—and in so doing I was able to emerge from the process of recapitulation fully healed. By healing, I mean that I am no longer attached to the trauma that once dragged me into terror. I no longer have deeply entrenched feelings of low self-worth. I no longer walk in fear. I no longer hide out. The past no longer has a hold over me. I can go back to any memory, in full detail, and have no emotional reaction. I can write about it, talk about it, without any dissociation, trauma, or shame—it’s simply a fact of my past.

I chose to write about the recapitulation journey I took. I knew it was important, that it offered something to others. In the introduction of my first book, The Man in the Woods, I state the reasons for writing the details of what happened to me. It was important at the time for me to be explicit, and it still is, for I know that people do not really understand what happens when a child is sexually abused. It’s too hard to imagine that anyone would or could rape and sodomize a child, even an infant, but guess what, it happens. It happens far more often than any of us like to imagine. If one in three girls and one in seven boys are being sexually abused, the statistics that Mr. Lopez cites in his Harper’s article, that’s an awful lot of sexual abuse going on that no one is catching.

The sexual abuse discussion has to be brought out of the darkness and into the light. People need to know that it’s possible to heal. To his credit, in the Harper’s article, Mr. Lopez describes his lengthy therapeutic process, realizing that he could only confront what happened to him when he was ready, and this must be taken into consideration. We will know when we are ready when something just won’t let us rest until we attend to it. In my own case, it was my dying spirit that finally alerted me to the truth that if I didn’t attend to it, I might really die.

In our blogs, in my books, and in the psychotherapy work Chuck does addressing PTSD and sexual abuse, we seek to offer some new methods of healing from even the most traumatic of events. And so I write this blog today, in hopes of changing some minds about that idea that one cannot heal, that just because you have been sexually abused you will remain terrified for the rest of your life. It just isn’t so.

Seek help. Don’t be afraid to speak or write to someone you feel safe with. Keep the dialogue going. In the right circles it will be perfectly acceptable to do so. As circles go, they have a tendency to widen, and so if we keep writing, talking, sharing, and helping each other to face our fears we may pretty soon erase the stigmas that keep us from our deeper truths and get down to addressing the real issues of our society and why we have gone so deviant. There is something wrong at the core of humanity, and it does not lie in the sexually abused, but in humanity’s aberrant relationship to the sexual instinct. And if we can’t talk about it in real descriptive terms, how are we ever going to heal? But that’s another blog.

To her credit, Terry Gross is sensitive to the fact that a discussion of details could trigger a traumatic reaction and nobody should have something like that imposed on them. However, the idea that a trauma is forever lurking creates a framework where the legacy of the abuser continues, for a lifetime, to hold a victim in check. And if this is accepted as the best one can do then full healing has not happened. Full healing means the ability to stare the full intimate details of traumatic experience in the face without discomfort and to be able to discuss those details without discomfort too.

Thanks to Barry Lopez and Terry Gross for getting a new dialogue going. Wishing you all good healing options and love to carry you forward,
Jan

Here are the links: Fresh Air and Sliver of Sky. I notice that the Harper’s article is only available to subscribers in its fullness. I’ll see if I can find a link to the full article elsewhere, or if you happen to see the magazine buy it. It’s worth the read.