Energy, Assault, and Psychic Damage

TW: sexual assault, abuse, gaslighting

I started studying energy in 2013 or 2014. I signed up for a class at a community center that integrated ancestral & traditional Philippine frameworks on energy and energy healing. It went over various things, like Dr. Emoto’s rice experiment, frequency healing, hilot diagnosis and treatment, and practices to build energetic connection with rocks, plants, and more. Even though I started learning these things so long ago, I didn’t recognize the connection between how I treat and think about myself, how I allow others to treat and speak about me, and how it got stored in my energy and body.

When my ex-slash-abuser first started dating, I was blind to the ways he was mistreating me. He was aloof for the most part, and the few times he did something kind (like making me breakfast after sleeping over) I treated it as something I won—an affection of his that I finally earned. This set off a pattern of me accepting the breadcrumbs he left behind for me.

We used to go hiking a lot, and one hiking trip (I forget where we went), we made plans to sneak off into a less-visible area so we could have sex. I ended up going down on him and I when I was ready to stop, he grabbed my head to push himself deeper into my throat. I was uncomfortable, trying to push him out of me, and was crying from the physical pain. At this point in our relationship, he had gaslit me enough times, that part of me recognized I would be safer if I waited until we were home to confront him about this. I pushed past my discomfort and let him finish into my throat. I wiped my mouth, stood up and turned away from him to catch my breath so it wouldn’t be obvious that I was upset. We walked back onto the trail and finished our hike. I didn’t bring it up to him until we were both home, and I texted him about this because I was too afraid to challenge him in person.

I couldn’t tell you how the conflict went, because there are a lot of things that I blacked out of my memory. But what I can tell you is that I believed his gaslighting to the point that when I shared this experience with a friend, I defended him, even when she was openly disturbed and disgusted with him.

A month or so later, the artist commune that he was living at was hosting an art show featuring the artists that lived there. (I ended up moving into this artist commune during the pandemic.. and.. boy, that’s several more stories to tell later…) He invited me to attend the art show, especially because he had a ‘performance’ art piece he was presenting that he wanted me to see. I went to the art show, and realized his art piece was to be experienced up the stairs on the way to the roof. In the stairwell on the way to the roof, I was pointed to continue upstairs. When I got to the roof, my ex was sitting there with a notebook with instructions. The instructions read: you have the opportunity to yell all the things you wished you had yelled at a man for — the person sitting will not react or respond.

I was a bit confused, and it took me a while to understand what was happening. Did he really think he turned himself into an outlet for women & femmes to pour their anger and trauma into? Did he realize the offensive irony of having me participate in this when he gaslit me several weeks before this for assaulting me & forcing me to take him in my mouth? My blood was boiling. My body was shaking, and tears were quickly falling down my face. I left down the stairs and exited the building—humiliated, scared, enraged, and a million other feelings all in one.

In our text conversation later that evening, I explained to him how self-centered, inconsiderate, and harmful that experience was for me. He was a master gaslighter, and continued with what he knew best so he could remain self righteous and unbothered by an experience that was clearly re-traumatizing for me. He even shared it with some of the white women he lived with, and was able to garner sympathy for himself. To add insult to injury, he told me the opinions of these WW: that the art piece was good and I was foolish for taking offense to it. I was disgusted.

It took a long time to recognize how harmful he had been to me all these years. I think back on what happened often so I can recognize what I did to build better discernment with how I was allowing myself to be treated. Fast forward from the time that assault and art show ocurred, I was deeply on a spiritual healing journey and was in a daily practice of doing energy clearing across all 5 dimensions. I like to think that this made it easier for me to see the dark and corrupted energy he was trying to give me. It made me see his actions and words for what it was: his attempts to make me small and easy to manipulate so he could maintain his power over me.

I’m still on a journey to clear the psychic damage that was done to me all those years, in efforts to heal the trauma that is stored in my body. When I reflect back on it, the way he assaulted my throat had energetic ramifications on me. Since then, it was always really difficult for me to speak up in relationships (professional, personal, and romantic). Even though I’m in a much safer relationship now, I still carry heavy fear and anxiety about the kind of backlash I think I might experience. But with every breakthrough, there’s a lot of healing that happens for both me and my line. I’ve learned that the breakthroughs don’t mean the work is complete: it’s shedding layers of more work that needs to be done. All of this takes time, and I realize now that this will be lifelong work.

Even though it’s been three years since I was able to save myself from his abuse, it has still been a difficult journey of reprogramming how I think about myself, how I treat myself, and not allowing others to treat me any less than I deserve. Just because I was finally in a “safe” place away from him, I still have a lot of work to do in creating safety for myself. Part of this is reclaiming my narrative and centering myself in my healing — which is partly why I’ve come to write about my experiences in this way. If you’ve gotten this far: thank you for witnessing me.