I go ecstatic dancing every week. It’s a time and space where I get to be in my body and my authentic self-expression, and it’s a practice that has become deeply important to me. At the beginning of each dance, the facilitators remind the participants about consent. On the dance floor, nonverbal, attunement-style consent is used, relying on eye contact and body language to express interest or lack of interest, with a hand gesture as a clear ‘no’ when needed. A lot of people just dance on their own, and sometimes people initiate dance with others, so it’s important that people have a sense for how to navigate consent practices in this nonverbal context.
Ecstatic dance puts me in a kind of trance state and at the end I often need some time to come back into normal reality. Recently, at the end of one particularly intense practice, after we had all joined to sit in a closing circle, I remained sitting on the floor, in my own process, letting the waves of thoughts and sensations that still needed to pass through me, do so. During this sacred and personal moment, I suddenly felt hands squeeze my shoulders. Thinking it was maybe someone I knew, I turned around to see who it was. I looked up and saw a man who I had noticed coming near me a few times during the dance, perhaps expressing interest in dancing, but I had always turned away from him. He was not someone I had ever spoken to or interacted with, and he had just approached me from behind and touched me.
My internal experience when I saw who it was, was a clear no. I felt anger, repulsion, and a desire to assert my boundary. But my external behaviour immediately fell into an old pattern: appeasement. I smiled at him. This was automatic and unconscious. I immediately overrode my no. I immediately repressed my anger and disgust and responded with a friendly and fake acceptance of his unwanted touch. And then, I quickly began to forget about it. I let it fade into the background as no big deal. The doublethink that I learned so well in my abusive childhood caused me to push the experience away, forget about it, and pretend it never happened. It had happened but it also had not happened, so there was no reason to think about it anymore.
I think this experience can be hard to understand for people who aren’t survivors of repetitive, normalized abuse. Forgetting about it becomes an immediate reaction. In my years and years of therapy I have become better at noticing this forgetting and intervening on it with new behaviour, but it still comes over me automatically. The unwanted behaviour (ranging from inappropriate touch from a stranger like in this case, to more serious outright threats and assaults) takes on a quality of unrealness. It’s not that I have amnesia and truly forget, but the thing takes on an unknowability. It becomes normal, unremarkable, and the imperative to forget it and let it go is like a roar of sound that drowns out my authentic reaction and my impulse to stand up for myself.
A couple examples to make this clear:
When I was in my first year of recovery I was dating this guy. He knew I was a domestic violence survivor still going through the court system due to a previous violent relationship. One day we were hanging out at his place. We were in his kitchen and I had my back against the counter and he was standing directly in front of me. Out of nowhere he said “I’m going to do something fucked up” then he picked up a butcher knife off the counter and held it at me, expressionless. We stared at each other in silence for a few moments, me obviously feeling terror and panic that I was about to be killed, and then he ended the moment by laughing and saying he was just kidding, putting the knife down. I acted normal. Continued to hang out with him. Spent the night. By the morning what had happened did not seem real. It was slipping away. Why would I make a big deal out of it? I couldn’t look at it head on or hold on to it. As the day unfolded it was settling into the forgetting. I was prepared to go on as if nothing had happened. It was only at an AA meeting that evening where the topic was the absolute indispensability of honesty in recovery, that I found a way to make myself look at it. I knew I had to say something to make it real so after the meeting I told my friends and their reactions confirmed that this was, in fact, a big deal. I broke up with the guy over text that night.
A more recent example from a couple summers ago, more than ten years into recovery — I went to a fancy spa for a massage and the water circuit afterwards. During the massage the massage therapist began to slowly start touching my breasts. Having had many massages before this, I knew this was not normal or appropriate, but I also kept questioning if it was really happening. He progressively increased what he was doing until he was definitely feeling me up. I was frozen and unable to do anything — I was only wearing underwear and my robe was on the opposite side of the room from the door. He was between me and the door. What was I going to do: jump up and scream and try to run out of the room? I didn’t know what to do and any action felt extreme because there was a part of me insisting that nothing was really happening. At the end of the massage he handed me a little envelope for a tip. I put on my robe and went to shower and put on my bathing suit and then went to the water circuit. I love the water circuit. But I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. For some reason I felt really bad and I couldn’t relax. I kept thinking I didn’t know why I was feeling so bad, and the unthinkable thing on the edge of my consciousness presented itself as a nonevent, something obviously unreal, something I couldn’t make something of. It wasn’t until I changed, left, got in my car, and drove back to where I was staying that I realized I might have been sexually assaulted. “Might have been.”
I could give you many other examples of this process from my life and they all mirror the impossible logic of growing in a family with incest. What was happening could not be happening so it wasn’t. Any expression on my part that indicated that it was happening, was punished. My mind split from reality and from myself. I learned to know and not know. I learned to repress my anger and disgust, to exile them to some place buried deep inside of me. I learned to not make a big deal out of it. To wrap everything in a cushion of air that blurred the edges. It wasn’t happening and it wasn’t real. To think that it was, was strange. It couldn’t be, so it wasn’t. So I navigated around the absences that represented the things that could not be. The evidence of what-could-not-be remained visible only in my moods and the behaviours I could not repress, and these seemed strange and wrong, and more evidence of something that was wrong with me than of something that was happening to me. Because nothing was happening. It couldn’t be.
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