These particular physical signs accentuated with make up were present when I was being abused. I was once given a police file with the faces of child victims of the Zandvoort CD Roms internet child porn scandal to help identify victims. The graphic parts had been cut out or covered, but it was still extremely triggering to see the images, and recognize my young self. The boys and young men in this fashion shoot look exactly like the victims of child porn, with a dead look in their eyes, or the sad arrogance that comes from feeling the power to arouse a man.

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In the moment of abuse in childhood, the first time, my natural reaction was one of indignant anger. In teaching in prisons, I like to mention anger a lot because it is a natural reaction to injustice, and yet when it is expressed to the abuser, it reflects their action back to them, and they will resort to intimidation so as not to be confronted with themselves. The prison system perpetuates the anger cycle. In my childhood, I was graphically threatened with death, and understood my anger and free expression would lead to death, and my silence and submission would keep me alive. The repression of anger led to all mental imbalances I struggled with for much of my adult life. After my mental health was restored, I continued to deal on subtler levels with repressed anger. I'm just getting in touch with how specifically I placated a certain type of man, who because of their wealth or status, reminded me of one perpetrator who had a great emotional impact.

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Severely mentally ill yet never diagnosed, she was unrelenting in her destructiveness towards the little girl in whom she saw the unloved little girl she had once been. She placated men with flirtation, submission and flattery, and on good days told me how troublesome they were, offering me a way to love her. This I did with all my heart, hoping she would one day receive my love, and begin to love me. But instead she would turn on me, starting by criticizing, jokingly, so I couldn't react.

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When broken people meet in romance, parts of the self hiding in the subconscious meet each other to play out trauma stories. The greater the similarity in underlying emotional issues, the greater the connection. In the game of love, partners are polarized in a power play, taking the role of either the child victim or the adult abuser. In the beginning of such a love cycle, there is admiration for the love object, so that person is lifted up, the way a child looks up to an authority figure. 

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There were three men - a politician, a world leader who ruled over the politicians, and a gangster - who influenced my upbringing most. They formed my character, my personality, the way I think. I watched an hourlong video interview with the world leader and was stunned how much the way I express myself resembles his. Ironically, my code of ethics originates in his everyday behavior. These men gave me what I couldn't find at home and verbally affirmed qualities in me that I had never known about. Two of the three, the world leader and the gangster, were emotionally attached to me, and came as close to love as they ever would in their lives I'm sure.

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Saying goodbye for now to Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat, a new place to call home with a beautiful, loving family awaiting. When I speak I never know how I will be received. I expected I might be asked to leave or ignored afterwards, because my story and the harsh truths it reveals is often hard to swallow. In the talk I also mentioned that I was once touched inappropriately by one of the Indian gurus who is highly revered in the West.

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Power gives the illusion of freedom. Self-empowerment is freedom. Freedom from what? From suffering. Preparing talk on forgiveness, it has not been easy to forgive these abusers, who are the darkest criminals on our planet, perpetrating the worst horror stories, in a calculated, organized way, skillfully hiding these crimes from the public, themselves above the law. It has been hard to overcome my envy, imagining my perpetrators in spectacular houses on the Mediterranean, on their yachts, respected and admired by the public, while I was struggling, feeling all the pain.

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Arriving in the US, everyone automatically assumed I was wealthy and educated. When I grew up in Belgium, people with working class jobs were proud of what they did, and while the class system was rigid, there was no great desire for most people to move up in society's echelon. This is not to say that there was no racism, of course. Remember the Belgians were the perpetrators of the greatest Holocaust on record, beginning during the reign of Leopold II, when we ravaged Congo and enslaved, tortured and killed 10 million of its inhabitants.

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I was born on Good Friday, and always felt its meaning because of the extreme violence and injustice of my past. Today is a day of resurrection. The New York Times published an article about my advocacy work. I'm in Philadelphia to speak at University of Pennsylvania about sex trafficking and healing. It's the start of a very industrious time of using what I learned to create change.

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True spirituality is grounded in true feeling, which equals consciousness. If we don’t understand psychopathy, we help create the platform for those responsible for wars, famine and the destruction of the earth. As we feel into our own pain, and open our eyes to our own shadow side, it invariably reveals itself as a young part of ourselves; shamed, hurt, afraid, and vulnerable - in need of acceptance, nurturing, understanding and love. That journey of healing towards our own integration, opens our eyes more fully to the pathology of the emotionally infantile men in power causing the destruction of the earth. The corporation executives, politicians, dictators and other plunderers need to be recognized for the infantile, sick people they are, because today, it is only our denial and disbelief about their destructiveness that keep them in power.

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I was 9 years old, wearing my favorite summer dress though it was getting too short, gifted by a perpetrator three months earlier, who took me with him on his private jet to go sailing the US East Coast for 2 weeks.

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One way to see if you are involved in such a dynamic, is when you focus excessively on the other. Once you stop speaking about yourself, you're off in projection land, and you can get so lost there you may never find your way back to the reality of the other person. Even if you think of yourself as the al-anon type, if you engage with a narcissist and focus on them and their actions, you are unconsciously setting yourself up to get your revenge.

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On the set of Real Women Real Stories in New York, I spoke about the sex trafficking bill, and also shared more about my story. There is always something rising to the surface, to be worked out more fully, to offer deeper understanding.

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Looking at that inability, it's easy to see the world we live in runs according to it, as fear mongering thrives, toddler-level greed rules, and we are fed violence from childhood onward. At the helm are those who never entered into the first stage of healing, fighting off their own truth and pain, imposing their emotional sickness on all.

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