Day 61: Today is the Beginning of My Healing With Men
And Happy Birthday, Dad <3
Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
I am in intensive counselling right now. My counsellor has the most well rounded background, in not just talk therapy, but also shamanism and other healing modalities. I asked her if we could do eight sessions in the two weeks leading up to my retreat to India, so that I could be as well prepared as I could be for that experience.
This afternoon in our session, she asked me to recap how my weekend and day have been today.
I told her about going down to Uluwatu this weekend to teach yoga, and having a realization that I am not loving the energy there anymore. I told her about the realization that I only want to teach yoga to women now, which feels a lot more comfortable and safer. I don’t think it’s a trauma response - I think it’s really something I’ve been talking about for a while, that’s just been cemented by the experience.
Then I also told her about leading my first kirtan - and how helpful and healing that was for me.
Finally, I told her about the police station experience. I won’t fully express here what happened, but just say it went exactly how I expected it would. My Balinese friend Kadek took me.
My counsellor asked me, “How do you know him?”
I said “We’ve known each other forever. Well, not forever, but it feels like it. I stayed at his parents house when I first moved to Bali in 2021. And he drives all my retreats around. He’s kind of like my brother.”
She was glad I had someone to go with me to the police (and I was glad too. ) Kadek really advocated for me, and then on the way out he was a helpful support to debrief.
Then my counsellor said whatever happens in the report doesn’t matter - the experience of reporting it is what’s important. It’s more for the trauma victim - to verbalize what happened to them, to write it out, to express it, to heal it. And anything else is beyond your control.
Kadek and I left the station and went to the Australian Embassy - because my mom told me the Australian Embassy has a partnership to support Canadian citizens in Bali. And one thing that was helpful was that I was able to write out what happened there, and they forwarded this to the Canadian Embassy. By the end of the day the Canadian Embassy had sent me a WhatsApp asking to call me tomorrow morning.
I finished my recap of the day to my counsellor with, “But the best part of today was when I talked on the phone to my dad.”
I started to cry.
I told her how I hadn’t talked to him in a while, but it was his birthday this weekend. I tried to call him to wish him a happy birthday, but it didn’t go through. He texted me to say thanks, and ask me if everything was ok, and I said: “I got drugged and raped and attempted strangulation by someone I was dating. It’s been pretty horrific, but I’m doing better than I was.”
He wanted to have a phone call right away, but I already had too much going on. I was going to the water temple this morning for sunrise with my friend Zac who came up to stay a few nights, and then Kadek was taking me down to the police station. So I said that maybe we could speak on the phone when I was driving down to the station.
I think it was the best conversation I’ve ever had with him.
He listened for a while, he validated the horrific rise of drug-facilitated rape on college campuses, he asked if I was physically ok and validated that I was traumatized. Then he had a resource he’d already found to share with me, an NGO for sexual assault survivors in Bali. He said he was glad I told him. He didn’t put any shame on me. He asked me what he could do to support me, and asked if he could help me out with money (since he’d read on my substack that my bank account had shut down due to all the India transfers - still an issue that I can’t get figured out, however I am happily watching the business funds accumulate in the sky 😂). And then he ended the call with: “You are a survivor. You have been through so much and you will overcome this. It will be part of your story.”
It made me so emotional because this is probably the best conversation I’ve ever had with my dad ever.
My counsellor said to me, “It sounds like you have a lot of men supporting you right now.”
I started to cry.
I realized that I was so angry at men, for what some of them had done to women, that I hadn’t even noticed all the ones that had been helping.
Every single man that’s reached out to me about this incident and been able to hold space for this has stood out to me so much. So many men have seen it and shown up for it. One man told me he was going to talk about it with his mens circle group. One man emailed to say they’re going to pray for me. A few men have told me that reading my post made them cry.
After talking for a while, my counsellor and I did a breath work practice to help me move through the trauma. My counsellor wanted me to play through the whole story in my mind while I did the breath work. Everything - every moment - not just the painful parts. The moments of meeting him, the moments of texting him, the meals, every single memory I had with him. Even the ones he wasn’t there for. Even the memories that were just about him - conversations I had, moments.
She said this practice will not only heal me - but it will even start to heal him from afar. And hopefully he will stop doing this to women. Holding that intention in my heart made me feel really good. I started to smile.
When we began the practice, there were two points in this process that made me burst into tears.
The first was on the morning after I got drugged. I didn’t know that I had been drugged yet, and was actually feeling pretty happy. I chanted a Kirtan song on my harmonium, and then I came out of my guesthouse, on the way back to have breakfast with him. I was stopped by like maybe 30 butterflies flying around. 30 butterflies! I took videos and pictures of all of them. I was probably still on a high from the drugs, lol. But it was amazing. I had actually forgotten this moment had even happened that day - but I recently I had been going through my phone trying to piece together the day, and saw that it had occurred.
I remembered my counsellor saying something about how when you’re assaulted and you don’t know what happened, it’s like your soul leaves your body. I started to imagine that all of these butterflies were parts of my soul leaving my body. And I started to cry.
Then I started saying to myself, that every time I see a butterfly now, I know it’s my soul retrieval process working. I can say to myself, my soul is coming back to my body.
When I explained all this to my counsellor after the breath work, she fully supported my interpretation of the butterflies. But then she added - “I want to tell you what butterflies symbolize in shamanism. They symbolize your ancestors coming to be with you. To support you.” And that made me cry too. A few days after he drugged me, I themed a whole yoga class around the presence of the ancestors. I spoke about how the three empty yoga mats in the room were space for the ancestors. It’s like I knew - but I didn’t even know.
The second moment that made me cry was thinking about this morning. I was driven down to the police station by my Balinese brother, and my Dad was on the WhatsApp video call with us. And it was so unintentional that he was there - it was just the time that it worked to speak to him - but I felt like I was really supported by men in that moment. And I thought to myself, “this moment is the moment of the beginning of my healing with men.”
At the end of my phone call this morning with my dad, which was 60 minutes, I said one last thing. “Oh yes, dad - happy birthday.”
He said, “Thank you. It’s not a conversation I wanted to be having on my birthday, but thank you.”
I hung up the phone. I’m at a place of just making humor about the situation. Kadek said to me, “Was it his birthday today?”
I said, “yes, but I almost forgot. Could you imagine getting that call? I was drugged and raped and strangled by a psychopath? Oh yeah, and happy birthday?”
We both burst out laughing almost synchronistically.
I thought as the day went on…you know that may not have been the conversation my dad wanted to have with me - and I also didn’t want to talk about that specific conversation - but he was the dad that I exactly wanted him to be in that moment. And I will remember that forever.
I am growing and changing and he is growing and changing, too.
As the day went on, my amazing friend and meditation teacher in Australia, Rory and I got on a call, and he asked how I was doing, and just listened. And at the end, he said, “I’m so proud of you for how you’re dealing with it - and so publicly too.”
And then, after this, it was my weekly call with my Uncle Rick, who is like a third parent for me. He’s my mom’s brother and I love him so much. I wasn’t sure if he had seen the post I’d done about it but he actually hadn’t - which kind of relieved me, because I’d rather have personally told him over the phone than for him to have seen it on Instagram. He broke down into tears (I think the first time I’ve ever heard him cry.) And he said,
“I don’t know what to say, Alex. It’s just so awful. I am thinking of you right now when you were one or two years old and it was so easy to protect you. And I wish I could just protect you now.”
I think today was the best day for me since it happened. Because I felt held and supported by so many men.
It’s the beginning of my healing with men.
I’m grateful I’m writing all this. I truly think the shame of these incidents is what makes so many of us sick. We carry this trauma silently within us. It festers at us. It lives in our body and bones. So I keep talking about it, so it moves through me and out of me - unlike some of the early traumas I had that I held in with shame.
After the session with my counsellor today, I decided to walk over to the hotel restaurant next door and grab dinner. On the way out of my house I walked down the staircase. I paused.
And flying right in front of my face,
Was a butterfly.
A piece of my soul returning to my body.
And an ancestor, coming to say, “we got you.”
All in one.
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Gratitude Corner
Thank you to my dad who is my newest paid subscriber.