Magnetized

anWhen I arrived in the US in 1985, I relived the high of privilege to which I had been exposed when I had been trafficked to this country as a nine year old girl. Without any effort I was asked to be a guest at parties in enormous apartments overlooking Central Park, invited to dinners over Krug champagne and marveled at by a business tycoon who told me, somewhat incredulously, that I - a 22-year old au pair - was on his level. Did I even realize that, he asked. I believe he thought of us as equals because I didn't want anything from him. At that time, I didn’t remember that an American billionaire had trafficked me to his homes in the area when I had been a child, that this wasn’t my first time in New York, or that being there was triggering programming I had received in these parts in the past. I unconsciously exuded all that the billionaire had projected on and predicted for me. Under the admiring gaze of the rich and powerful, I felt the same high that the billionaire trafficker had experienced: a dissociated state of lightness - as if lifted off the ground - living on a cloud above humanity, disconnected from the reality of life and from my own and others' sorrow and pain.

Living in Paris before moving to the US, I had felt burdened the entire time with the constant shame of a very different program than the one that started running when I set foot on American soil. At nine years old, I was sent to the US after first being noticed as a child slave in Belgium and chosen by the billionaire as his next project. He would turn me into his elite sex slave and prepare a platform for me as a French singer/actress, a star that would be controlled by him and the global network. Some of the promises made with regards to my future life was that I would live in the best apartments in Paris, that I would be admired and that I would live a sheltered celebrity life with a trusted network entourage. That project came to an abrupt halt one year later, when I was ten, when I failed the final test on obedience and was reprogrammed in the most brutal way, chained to a dungeon wall, screamed at that I was unworthy of success, of anything good. That reprogramming, which seemed to last for days, was so powerful that it overshadowed the years I lived in Paris as a young adult, when I constantly felt like a marginal underdog who had failed and should in fact be someone very different. Only I didn’t know who or what.

When as a nine year old child slave, I had first been “discovered” and flown from Belgium across the Atlantic on the billionaire’s private jet, I had been treated with his unwavering attention, positive projection and great expectations. His happy excitement had much to do with his thrill of secretly shaping an insignificant child into a celebrity persona who would greatly add to his billions. The first stage of this process was spending time with me in his homes to start my training, acquaint me with the lifestyle and find my innate abilities to plan how I could best be used for the network. I absorbed his quasi-fatherly focus on me as the nurturing I had never received. In the great luxury of his homes, he told me several times that he loved simplicity. He meant that it was vulgar to show off money and power.

As soon as I arrived for my au pair position in the Greenwich Village, I found myself learning Edith Piaf and Jacques Brel songs by heart, playing the cassette tapes on the stereo, writing down the lyrics and practicing the songs. I did find it strange that I was so drawn to these French songs, let alone want to sing them, now that I had just left France, when, while there, I’d had no such impulse or any desire to sing. Of course there wasn’t a thought in my head to sing for an audience; I was just singing when I was by myself. The fact that as a child I had once performed and that this concert had included songs by both of these artists was safely stored in my subconscious, while the trigger of coming to America revived some very specific elements of the life I was meant to have in the network context.

My incredible reception in the US did not last long. The story loops I entered into with some rich people with high expectations resulted in the inevitable repeat of me letting them down. They disappeared from my life as the magnetism of my past mimicked the billionaire’s arc from happy expectation to rejection, because I did not obey, because I did not want to be part of this exclusive club once I found out what it took to belong. I never physically ended up in any repetition of any of the horrors of my fall from grace in the network, but I quickly and mindlessly passed from being the new darling of New York’s elite to being just another nobody. Since everything had happened automatically, and since I was used to being a nobody, and since I’d never had any desire to belong in the circles of the wealthy, I also did not feel pained when my landscape changed.

I went to acting school at Stella Adler mostly to study English, and thoroughly enjoyed her Shakespeare class. She directed me in some scenes in which I ended up expressing all the lustful fury of a medieval queen about to behead her life-long enemy, or Jeanne D’Arc’s defiant last words before being burnt at the stake. These scenes brought out a long-forgotten intensity, previously evoked in situations of my young life with stakes as high as in these scenes. Stella Adler could bring it out of me; I never tried to get back there on my own.

During this time I wrote my first play and some poems. While my linguistic talent was spotted by the network and would have been used to have me sing in five different languages - the network languages French, German, Italian and English as well as my native Dutch, no one had ever mentioned writing; it came naturally. I was asked to write a short film that was produced at the American Film Institute, and at the director's urging, I applied to the Conservatory, which accepted students based on their work, not only their education. This is how I managed to complete a Masters program for screenwriting in Los Angeles when I had left school in Belgium at age fifteen.

It is not rare to be both extremely traumatized and privileged - that much I learned from my perpetrators - but it is rare that someone should not be physically dependent on their wealthy perpetrators and yet exude their aura. I was struggling to get by as a temp in menial jobs while suffering from horrific flashbacks and dealing with incest and child sexual abuse in therapy. The reprogramming in the dungeon at age ten was meant to have had me either commit suicide or end up a homeless, drug addicted prostitute. The fear of ending up this way overshadowed my entire young adult life, in spite of the momentary flare ups of other programs meant to make me a celebrated artist among the world’s elite. The final program that was running was what I had been told upon my release from the network at age eleven. The gangster who had negotiated for my freedom told me a list of instructions that began with never entering into prostitution, clear directives to never buy drugs, and that I should leave Belgium and go live in London, Paris, New York. I think he was just thinking out loud, but I lived in all three places. Ultimately he seemed to settle on New York, which is where I live to this day. He also ordered me to forget everything about the network, including him, and that I should never, ever speak about it.

At sixteen years old I ended up in the red district by the Antwerp Harbor, but my rule was that I would never sleep with any men, just have drinks with them. That rule saved me from the fate that was laid out for me in the reprogramming after my disobedience. I was completely unaware that his rule stemmed directly from the strong words of the gangster, the life instructions that saved me from prostitution and drug addiction.

In my healing process, which started in my mid-twenties and is ongoing today, I gradually came to see how almost every situation I attracted towards myself was rooted in my past, multi-layered trauma. I'm grateful for the unique circumstances that allowed me to spend thirty years to uncover that past and sort through the confusion, pain, betrayals, violence and perverted love. In the past, my love and all the ways in which I believed I received it and all the ways in which my heart was broken was relived in countless unconscious loops, every one meant to bring back the original situation in order to overcome it, seeking once again that love which was not complete, not real, not right. Yet invisibly, I was taken by the hand and guided all the way, loved with such sweetness that when I open myself to it even a little bit, I have to cry. The divine love is so great, so overwhelmingly beautiful, it takes all this healing work just to feel worthy of receiving it.

Love is in the small things, yet it is the same great unifying force that permeates all of creation, holding universes together, drawing every particle, every molecule, everything and every person back to its divine source - where we know we are one. We are all magnetized to find that oneness.