Vicious
Photo taken in France, close to Monaco
I lie on the bed weeping, feeling the 10-year old girl’s pain. It is she lying down, curled up, grieving the most extreme viciousness, the abuse that had the most long-lasting impact.
Just after I had turned ten years old, at an estate on Lake Como, Italy, during a performance I gave as I was being presented to network insiders - many of them celebrity singers and actors - I followed clear instructions given by the French singer/composer who had been assigned as my music teacher. My repertoire contained just a few songs, among them Edith Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien, which starts with:
Non, rien de rien, Non, je ne regrette rien
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait, Ni le mal
Tout ça m'est bien égal
“No, nothing, I regret nothing, not the good that has come to me, or the bad. It’s all the same to me.”
Upon the word “good” I had to pout as if I were unhappy. On the word “bad” which in French also means “evil,” I had to smile big. It was the song to usher me into the club, as I sang that I was wiping away my past completely, that it meant nothing anymore, that on this day my new life would start, and it would all begin with “you” - he - the man dressed up as a red devil, my owner and creator of the persona being revealed at this event. The composer was one of the guests in the audience and I suspect that the song was never really a love song, but a cult initiation song.
During the Jacques Brel song I had to indicate a woman with the line:
Il est paraît-il, des terres brûlées…
“There appear to exist scorched fields…”
The gesture towards the woman was referring to her maturity, to her being too old for the pedophiles, versus myself, the young fecund girl, more desirable in their minds, while the woman was burned up, infertile. In reality I was too young to get pregnant and the one woman I noticed, seated in the front row along with the other important guests, was in her early thirties, certainly not past child-bearing years. I only understood the meaning of this joke decades later. As a child, I had simply rehearsed the choreography and didn’t know what I was doing. I was even slightly surprised at the laughter, with some of it sounding incredulous, as if I were being risqué. I did notice the woman’s eyes narrowing with hatred.
Recently I learned that this woman in the first row, who was an actress and singer herself, had been trying to conceive with her husband of four years. I found this information out more than fifty years after the fact, so anyone who would have been aware of celebrity lives back in 1973 would also have known that she had unsuccessfully been trying to get pregnant when I casually gestured to her while singing the words “scorched fields.”
The song next insists that such scorched fields nevertheless can yield the best harvest, but clearly that was not a nuance that mattered in that moment, certainly not to her, being humiliated by a child in the presence of her famous and powerful peers.
This happened in the week leading up to April 30 when there were many events held at the estate in Italy. I don’t know exactly when this performance took place, I believe it was in the early part of the week and that I was still there a few more days before the woman and her director husband kidnapped me. He tied me up and threw me in the front trunk of a boxy Simca. They drove over five hours to Monaco where they dragged me into an apartment and horrifically abused me. Clearly, she believed that I had purposely meant to offend, hurt and humiliate her, that I was vicious and fully deserved her revenge. While he brutally raped me, she egged him on, shrieking, both calling me a “little bitch.” They meant to make me feel a thousand times the humiliation she had experienced during that unfortunate moment during my performance. These people, who were desperate to have a child, were unable to see that I was a child. Not only was I unaware of the portent of the choreography of my song and unaware of her trying to have a baby, I didn’t even know who she was. I didn’t go to the movies and didn’t know famous people’s faces. But they succeeded in their purpose; I felt utterly broken.
In the middle of the night, they took me to a church to which they had the key. I was tied over a stone placed on top of the altar, with my chest raised up and head hanging down with arms overhead, my body a tight backwards bow. They burned candles on the black and white marble sanctuary floor below the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands. She lowly chanted incantations. She seemed to be a powerful witch using her furious might to summon dark powers. The blackness of night turned into blackness of evil, like an enormous, malicious cloak enveloping the chancel from the high vaulted painted ceiling to the floor. She proclaimed that she was to have my voice, especially the purity and clarity of my singing. She was to have my body’s youth, the energy and suppleness of it. She was to have my breasts (which were like mosquito bites, just beginning to develop) and my girl’s body. My hands and feet were burning and the way I was tied up caused excruciating pain. Black smoke surrounded us. As I inhaled, my throat hurt as never before, with sharp pangs causing instant inflammation. When I felt hands on my breasts it felt extremely strange, as though my body were not my own anymore, and next it was as though I saw my chest ( I could not physically see it because my head was hanging upside down) as an etheric blue structure, being lifting up out of my own body. I heard her declare that in this exchange, I would receive self-hatred of my body and self-hatred of my voice.
I don’t remember how long this ritual lasted, only what followed, being brought to an office in a building where he tied me up once again and left me sitting on a scratchy grey carpet that exacerbated the burns on my hands and feet. I had lost my voice and it would take weeks before I would be able to speak normally again.
This was the moment I decided that I did not want to belong to this club. I would never again be a willing participant in their events and soon afterwards would be tested on my willingness, fail the test, and get violently ejected from the circle of network-controlled celebrities.
I have been working on this abuse for years. When the memory first returned, I suddenly noticed that I didn’t have a critical thought seeing myself in the mirror. It was shocking, to realize that every time I had caught a glimpse of myself, her spell had been active and I had seen myself through the lens of self-hatred. It was an incredible relief to just neutrally observe my image. I never sang again until I got back the memory nearly five decades later. I took up playing the harmonium and started leading meditation services that required me to also sing chants. I noticed how my voice increasingly went up in range, reaching higher octaves with ease. Singing and preparing for the meditations by rehearsing the chants brings me great joy.
In the past weeks, I lost my voice once again as the dregs of this memory surfaced. I had to learn just how much this most vicious of all the abuse I suffered in childhood had affected me throughout my life. She was more cruel than even the insanely sadistic noblemen in Belgium, who were so out of touch with their humanity that their horror felt more impersonal. You could certainly die, only it was purely by chance if you did or did not, depending on their demented whims. But for her, it was personal. Her meanness, their abuse, treatment and the ritual affected many aspects of my life.
Of the thousands of wheels I have done in my 30-plus years of practicing yoga, every one of them has started with fear - though I never knew that it was fear of being tied backwards across an altar. Sometimes I would dissociate before going into wheel, and lay on my mat, feet and hands ready but unable to push into the pose. Once a teacher came over to ask what I was doing. In my home practice, sometimes I would remain in the ready-to-go supine position so long that when I came to, I was cold and ended my practice there. I noticed in the past few days that this fear, finally, has not been present anymore.
There were small moments in my adult life when I would suddenly turn cold when certain people expected kindness. Though these were small incidents, usually not even involving a verbal exchange, I had always remembered them with regret, never realizing until just these past days that their origin lay in this trauma and that my sudden switch was an unconscious act of revenge. In the past weeks my anger finally turned towards its source and I wanted to get revenge by exposing the actress, only, I was not interested in hurting her when I was ten, and I am still not interested.
Some months ago I asked God to cure me of all my remaining anger. Sometimes I would suddenly get furious over some very small frustration. This was a lifelong problem. When I got in touch with the anger over this abuse, I felt furious, and as I could feel it in connection with its psychological source, I felt it leaving me at last. The instinctual first survival response of anger, when adrenaline is released in the body in a furious wave to give the victim the temporary strength to kill the object of of it’s life endangerment, was finally given its due and as a result, I felt myself softening.
In the last months, the online attacks and defamation on my person have increased in viciousness, with several commenters calling for my death, using truly horrific name-calling. The network seems to like using absolutely basic lies in order to create the greatest possible field of dissension. The first trigger came from reading such a comment, calling for my public hanging. The sheer violence set me off, and landed me back into the most vicious abuse of my life. First I vowed to never read comments again, but I was going through the feelings and experienced the inner transformation, I also did not care anymore what people say, no matter how vile.
Anger is the first response in our body/mind system to regain some type of control over a situation of helplessness and powerlessness. Anger that has not been connected to its original trauma creates the need for power. Revenge is completely part of that. The power mongers are lost in eternal games just to get the upper hand, whether it is over one person who has consciously or unconsciously insulted them or over the masses. They are stuck in the polarized state of forever trying to overcome their original hurts and humiliations using their aggression to feel power, and any child or adult who triggers them will meet with their limitless wrath.
Anyone who endeavors to reveal inconvenient truths from behind the scenes of the rich and famous must learn never to come from a place of anger, to never to fight power with power, because then you are stuck in their game, and then you can only lose, because they are more vindictive and resourceful than you are. The network only has one thing to offer, and that is power, so it is important not to need or want it.
I am glad I got to the tears. They finally cleansed me from all the negative impact that this horrific experience had left behind. The grief and pain brought me into the opposite place of worldly power, the most humble and private place, one with that little girl. I became more embodied as she integrated and got closer to my true self, more empowered from within, more self-loving and more able to love others.