Reflections on an Early Sexual Memories Workshop
The following are my reflections on Teresa Enrico’s March 2021 workshop, “Reclaiming Our Connections, Our Sense of Caring, and Closeness through Discharging on Early Sexual Memories.” [Teresa Enrico is the International Liberation Reference Person for Pacific Islander and Pilipino/a-Heritage People and the leader of many early sexual memories workshops.]
Re-evaluation Counseling is based on the premise that we started out as zestful, creative, intelligent, curious, loving human beings, capable of discharging our distress. It envisions and strives for a world set up around caring relationships, with individuals who possess the ability to think clearly. It is about re-emergence.
When we were young, we got hurt. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, young people’s oppression, and so on, hurt us into feeling less than creative, intelligent, curious, joyful, and loving. And oftentimes the people closest to us (unintentionally) imposed the oppression and trauma.
Because resources weren’t available for us to discharge, we were left responding rigidly, from frozen places, instead of from our flexible minds. When we are able to discharge our distress, it does not form dysfunctional patterns.
This week, as I finalized plans for a six-day training on sexual violence, the local newspaper, the Virgin Islands Daily News, had a story about a forty-year-old man who had raped a twelve-year-old over a four-year period. The public defender, a female, had argued, in an effort to reduce her client’s sentence, that the twelve-year-old child had not resisted and had been capable of giving consent. Fortunately, the judge had challenged that notion. (Ironically, the age of consent in the Virgin Islands is eighteen, so the judge and the public defender had known it was a moot argument.) I later contacted the judge to thank her for not allowing the public defender to revictimize the child.
WORKING ON EARLIEST MEMORIES
Teresa constantly emphasized the need to work on our earliest memories. Many of us can remember more easily the goodness and innocence of our two-year-old selves than we can our adult selves. A fundamental question when counseling on early sexual memories is “What is your earliest memory connected with sex in any way at all?”
RECOVERING OCCLUDED MEMORIES
Teresa talked about how occluded memories are memories that are not readily available. When we couldn’t discharge on an experience as children, our powerful minds often decided not to remember it—a good survival strategy at the time. But the distress is still there. When we have enough resource, the memories can come out of occlusion. We don’t need to go hunting for them.
On the second day of the workshop, it became clear to me that my disconnection and fear of intimacy are centered not around sexual trauma but on early childhood violence. So, modeling Teresa’s approach, in my sessions I’ve been contradicting the violence with statements like, “I love X—,” “I love Y—.” I will figure out how to systematically discharge with and about male partners, and males in general, to clean up my relationships with males and violence.
RECLAIMING CLOSENESS AND CONNECTIONS
Teresa said that discharging on early sexual memories is liberatory work, because it helps us connect with one another and contradict isolation.
A client who is working on trauma that led to fear of intimacy and closeness might be asked, “What is your earliest memory connected to closeness?” Getting close to other humans is inherently good. However, individuals like me may have been hurt so that human connections are painful and staying in present time is challenging.
Clients can’t change what happened, but they can change the effects of it on themselves by giving themselves the opportunity to discharge fully. We may feel heartbreak that parents and other adults did not come to our rescue. I have done work on this and am now able to feel some compassion for my parents, who themselves had been traumatized and then unintentionally traumatized my siblings and me. Co-Counselors may want to take time to discharge feelings of abandonment, despair, hopelessness, and betrayal.
Teresa reminded us about the RC Community that is now available for us. We can embrace the loving community and the connections. The counselor might say to the client, “I am sorry it took so long.”
SETTING UP POLICIES
Teresa talked about setting up policies or rules to help direct our actions. (They are not hard and fast rules; we can follow or change them as needed.) Such safeguards can help us be accountable. For instance, I might develop a personal policy of checking out my feelings and thoughts with a Co-Counselor when I meet someone I am attracted to. In the past my pattern was to engage with a person prematurely, in an effort to escape the emptiness and pain I often felt as a result of the early abuse. When the other party would reciprocate, I would push them away and find fault. While we need others in our lives to support and assist us, safeguards can remind us where the boundaries are.
HAVING A LIGHT TONE
Early sexual memories can be a heavy topic that can bring resistance. The counselor having a light (but not comedic) tone can help. It is important to support a client but not believe their distress.
DISCHARGING ON EARLY CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
I had a lifetime of resisting intimacy and keeping others at a distance, not allowing anyone to enter my heart zone. Not only were others unable to penetrate my defenses, but I had closed off my own feelings. My heart had become an impenetrable fortress. Yet I know, at least in theory, that I was once able to give and receive love. Teresa reminded us that “so many of us are hurt in our early years.”
Our economic system of capitalism reinforces oppression by only valuing those who were born “just right.” Therefore, People of the Global Majority, people with disabilities, and so on, are devalued since they are viewed as “other,” less than, and not “just right.”
In one of my sessions at the workshop, the counselor helped me feel safe by saying, “I’m going to sit on the floor next to little Qiyamah. There is nothing else you have to do right now. Just have and feel your feelings. Go ahead and discharge, and stop white knuckling [surviving with strained endurance] your way through life. I will be right here.” I cried like a baby.
Now that I know my childhood trauma from violence and abuse is what caused me to disconnect and fear intimacy, I continually discharge on it at every opportunity. In some sessions I can hit on a memory and begin discharging quickly and deeply, crying copiously.
RECLAIMING OURSELVES
In RC we work to create the connections and closeness that reflect who we are innately. Teresa reminded us that our hurts are not experienced in a vacuum but are connected to larger systems of oppression. Discharging can allow us a glimpse, a reminder, of who we were before oppression set in. We can uncover and reclaim that person. As we do it, we can remember that we are good and do not have to do it by ourselves.
I am so grateful I was introduced to RC in the early 1990s.
Thank you for the opportunity to share some of my journey as a Black African American elder female, mother, activist, and writer.
Warmest regards,
St. Croix, Virgin Islands
(Present Time 205, October 2021)