ITALY: Caves & Compartmentalization
Rest & The Rest Is History
Listen to the story read by Jo. or read below. This post discusses incest abuse. If you’re a survivor or supporter seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
The only way to get to the top of the mountain was by foot or funicular. I could lug my body with its baggage up the steep, winding cobblestone steps. Or I could pay a few Euro, jump aboard the local tram, and take the ride until I arrived. Up, up, up.
Desperate for the bathroom, I delayed this decision as I ran to the Italian train agent, used every word in English to describe “restroom” until we rested on one he understood. I hobbled in the direction his hand pointed back outside in search of a toilet sign where I had just deboarded the train. So focused on my destination, I barely saw the familiar face belonging to a friend bouncing toward me.
“Jo!” She called redirecting my attention. Then I saw her.
“Kerri!” My body sighed a deep breath of relief as my dear, English speaking friend came near. Our arms wrapped around each other and for a moment we were one, smushed together in a great big hug.
“Don’t squeeze too hard, I have to pee.” Her grip relaxed around me. Then she pointed toward the restroom I was so desperately seeking.
When I finished, I found her at the same spot I had left her before right outside the bathroom door with two tickets to the funicular. Decision made. We headed that way. I boarded the tram, waited a bit, then watched as we effortlessly moved up the mountain. Kerri chewed on a chocolate croissant while my body rested relieved from carrying so much baggage inside and outside of me.
At the top, we walked off and onto the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, Italy. “Orvieto” means “Old Town” and it was. First inhabited by the Etruscans, they dug deep into the surface to create a series of caves and wells to survive on the mountaintop, while avoiding Roman occupation around the 3rd century BCE. Eventually though, the Romans won and with the extra stone — subsisting of turo: layered volcanic ash, and land, and water, turned to a soft, strong rock — they, then a number of other occupiers, built the city that stood before me.
Today a town of restaurants, and homes, and stores, and churches all sat atop those winding caves that served now as a memory, repurposed into tourists’ sights and wine cellars. The history of the place buried deeply beneath the ground my feet found themselves walking on toward their destination — right, left, right, left. A sweet rental home on the other side of the hill chosen by Kerri. She guided me.
Finally, we arrived together. Exhausted, I placed my baggage down on the ground in the living room, pulled open the sleeper sofa, and threw my body into bed. Then finally, I rested.
A fatigue had settled so deep into my bones long ago that only some of us know. It had become so familiar. Like it made a home within my body. Out of my body. An ache I could not shake. A wound in my womb I could not escape. My mind paced with memory as it often did when I finally rested. Even stillness a time delegated to process the pain of the past.
My body spent all times of day remembering the occupiers who came to visit me during the space between sleep and dreams as a child. There was no place to run, no place to hide, no hill to reside on to avoid the incest. So I climbed inside my own mountain, as my body bore the baggage of my father’s frame, my grandfather’s weight, my uncle’s shape. As I grew older, my inner life became a complex set of caves compartmentalized with vicious voices and hidden histories. As my identity shaped like a city on top of this vast network of living nightmares. My development was far too complex, so I left. I forgot the instances of incest and spent my days in a dream state, completely separate from my body wishing for the day life would feel like it did today.
The pillow held my head, as my joy friend who bounced more than she walked settled into the seat beside my bed. And we told stories. About how we had both arrived. Her from Seattle. Me from New York. Long plane flights, two trains, one funicular later. Her a week before. Me just now. But the longer history of our arrival was more complex. Her orphaned after caregiving for both of her parents for years witnessing their steady decline, then divorced and rebuilding her solo life in the joy she always deserved. Me, exiled, abandoned by my incestuous family in my early twenties after I remembered the abuse, then disclosed. They chose to side with those who harmed me.
Liberation began the moment I stepped out of my childhood home at 18 to go to college. First as a terrible tremble. My inner caves began to quake. My nerves felt as if they were shaking from the inside out. Then as blocked energy. My gut stopped releasing. Then as night terrors that shaped the space between ending one day and beginning the next. Repeated dreams that a man was attempting to rape me haunted my sleep. My body laid still as my mind awoke afraid. Debilitated for a moment, I would shake myself awake to meet the state of my brain and begin the day.
Then I began to lose my mind. Every neurological pathway unwinding. Once devoted to holding and hiding this horrible history, suddenly awakening all at once. My brain and body brought me back to the chaos no longer on the outside, but stored within. The reeling anxieties, the damaging depression, the internalized self-hatred. I could not build a stable life on top of these caves so shaken by lost memory. By the time I met the day reserved to walk across the stage and accept my diploma, I could hardly function. I stayed in bed most days. Not sleeping, but hardly awake. Bound to a state of dreaming of a day that felt like this day.
As my body rose from its slumber, new desires quickly filled my frame. To seek the history of this mountain topped place with its hidden caves. So I changed my clothes, pulled some walking shoes onto my feet, and found my body moving once again over those cobblestone streets to the local museum. The building made from stone featured old pottery, formed whole by its creator’s hands, then shattered into pieces through time and war and accidents. Then put back together again. They had been discovered in the caves that remained. The scars on their surface made me weep, the pots all appearing even more beautiful in their rebuilt complexity. In that moment, I learned to hold my body, brain, and being not as an ugly recreation of broken pieces Frankensteined to form some new fragmented sense of self — but instead a reflection of the beauty of someone’s caring hands putting me back together again.
Those of us abused as children were not built whole and then broken. We developed within a culture of violence. Often our systems don’t even know what safety is. Incest rarely leaves scars on the outside, but symptoms eventually show up. Coping mechanisms, psychological distress, psychosomatic pain, relational issues. Sometimes the psyche compartmentalizes in a number of different ways including dissociative amnesia — the temporary or lifelong forgetting of horrible events. The body stores them and then slowly reveals its secrets.
Sometimes with depression, dissociation, depersonalization, derealization. Sometimes anxiety, sometimes Complex-PTSD, sometimes fatigue, sometimes chronic pain. Sometimes self-harm. Sometimes consuming food and substances injuriously. Sometimes the inability to relate to others. Sometimes the need to constantly isolate to keep oneself safe. Sometimes moving so fast one cannot stop. Sometimes moving so slow one can hardly live. Sometimes too much sleep. Sometimes insomnia. Sometimes flashbacks. Sometimes night terrors. Sometimes suicidality.
My body, brain, and being were built fragmented. Fractured. Then, in order to heal, like a broken bone that mended itself incorrectly, I had to be rebroken and put back together again. Often told by therapists and the culture of healing, “The abuse was not your fault, but healing is your responsibility.” I took that responsibility so seriously to save my own life. Paid out of pocket keeping myself in a state of financial distress to have access to the talk therapists, the EMDR therapists, the physical therapists, the acupuncturists, the spiritual directors, the Reiki masters, the gastroenterologists, the neurologists, the psychologists, the psychiatrists, the life coaches, that helped me to travel back into the caves that served as the foundation of my psychology, my neurology, my spirituality, my physiology, my emotionality, my relationality, my sexuality, my identity, my ontology. For a great cost, professionals accompanied me as I psychologically relived every repeated rape, every narrative out of the lips of my abusers to keep me quiet and them safe, every internalized story to manage a life of submission.
Intrafamilial sexual abuse tends to happen at younger ages and be more serial due to ease of access to the children by the people who are harming them. Of reported cases of childhood sexual abuse, 93% of people who harm are known intimately by the child. 33% of them family members. Some adults. Some other children. Incest is common. However, childhood sexual abuse, especially incest, remains widely undisclosed and underreported, due to the complex nature of the bonds and bounds of the foundation of family systems.
Life in my cavernous haze was horrific, but what would happen to the city on top — the only life and identity I knew — if the hollowed out earth suddenly crumbled? This. When I disclosed, I lost my family. When I reported, the system betrayed me. Leaving “the responsibility” of my healing journey entirely up to me. No justice. No victim compensation. No communal validation. No pain alleviation. No social support. No safe place to land when I left the hands of violent men who both perpetrated and provided for me. They remained free to abuse the next generation of children. This haunted me. Due to the disabilities caused by the abuse, I could hardly support myself. Without family and systemic support, without the ability to share this issue openly due to social taboos, I was no one’s responsibility.
I spent my entire adult life to this point recovering hidden memory, rebuilding my body, rewiring my brain, exploring those caves buried beneath my frame. Trying to reinvent a new purpose for my being than to exist as the forced mistress of the men in my family. Learning to accept which consequences were temporary and which would need to be managed as chronic disabilities. My life consisted of the work to earn and the work to heal and it rarely felt worth it. I often considered giving up, but never had the courage. Liberation turned out to be just as traumatizing as the abuse itself.
Yet here I was. Finding myself free. Today, my only responsibility was to be on vacation. To spend time with this friend, within this home, in this old town built on top of caves compartmentalized below where fractured pots were discovered and made whole. I stepped out of the caves and hesitantly approached the duomo that sat in the center of town. A famous Catholic cathedral built so many years ago, its arches stretching into the sky just as high as the caves dug deep into the stone.
I left the Catholic Church years ago. Walked away from the spiritualization of violence, the justification of male power, the god who intended his only son to be murdered to save the rest of us from our sins. But this story offered me no salvation. So I accepted a theology of liberation learned years before in El Salvador, a country named, “The Savior”. The man, Jesus, was murdered due to political subversion in an unjust system. We are not to glorify crosses, claim them as divine intention or intervention, but instead name them as grave injustices. Then take each other off of them.
Churches reminded me of how hard it was to reshape an entire worldview, a new spiritual identity and community. Churches showed a man dead on the cross and 14 stations about how he got there. They recalled all the years children were told that incest and child sexual abuse were just a cross they had to bear for the salvation of someone else’s sins like parents and priests passed from parish to parish. Of the abandonment of my Catholic congregation who couldn’t hold the complexity of incest so called me crazy at worst or were silent at best.
But the beauty of the architectural design of this cathedral called me to open the doors and step in. So I did. Suddenly I was surprised to see not the crucifixion, but the resurrection. A Jesus standing center stage, his wounds on view, to show the world what he could do. Violence would not have the last word. Resurrection would. The mosaics that graced the inside and the outside of this place showed his meaningful memories. His presentation as a baby to the community, his baptism, his miracles, his acceptance of Mary of Nazareth into heaven to sit by his side. This church surprised me with an invitation to life. Suddenly joy filled memories flooded my mind. Glimmers not triggers.
The friends I met after I left home when I finally stabilized enough to participate in social settings who came to accompany me through my healing. Those who bought me dinner, listened to me cry, let me sleep on their sofas, when I couldn’t support myself by myself. The ones who invited me into their holiday celebrations and took me on vacations. Who invited me to places like this one, Orvieto. The places that held space for infinite exploration as I traveled to redefine my understanding of home. The boundaries of the bay of San Francisco, the endless horizon at the beaches in San Diego, the hopeful sunshine in El Salvador, the interdependency between the moss and trees in Seattle, the past history of Washington DC, the future possibilities of NYC, the medicine of movement now internalized in Italy.
I began to share my story publicly after #MeToo went viral because incest continued to be left out of the conversation about sexual violence. I made a bible of my body and canonized my past weaving together both the history of harm and the salvific nature of friendship, place, wellness, and stubbornness. In doing so, I found other activists passionate about incest prevention, intervention, recovery, and justice. Today I am a part of an alliance of survivors and supporters who know what it's like to be me and refuse to let children be victimized by the historic silencing of our stories. Adults who take responsibility for the issue of incest and improve social and systemic supports so children can be safe in the first place and those who have been harmed can heal within competent communities. So survivors can take the easy way up that steep hill via a proverbial funicular with others, so they don’t have to hike on foot mostly solo like I had to through healing.
This church reminded me that to live free is to claim a resurrected reality communally. To hold my story in a way that will always honor the pain of the past and celebrate the arrival of the present, the potential of the future. Reverence and renewal. Grief and gratitude. Wholeness and hope. Home.
So here I am. Taking it all in. Standing in front of you on this virtual stage showing you what I can do. My wounds not erased. Invisible on the outside, but forever marked. I share my story. I take others back to tour my past, into the caves, where together we find shattered memory and glue them back in some sort of integrated complexity. Often those who join come to discover their own cavernous crevices and together we find their fragmented pieces and learn how we can make each other whole. Then we sit in a place we feel is holy and find room to rest and release. Feel relieved. Slowly becoming the resurrection.
Later that day, Kerri met me for dinner and brought a friend with her, Maya. Together, this trinity stuffed ourselves with pizza, and meat, and cake, while we dreamed of fulfilling futures shared in joyful community. “You can heal in Orvieto,” Maya shared, “because this place has healed over and over again.” Halfway through the celebration, I took a break. Overwhelmed with gratitude, I walked alone around Orvieto, that old town, built down due to oppression and up after recreation and wept wondering how a life that began in such horror could become this whole. This beautiful. Just like this place.
I asked Maya to read this piece because she had held Orvieto’s history for longer. She did. Then wrote in reply her own disclosure. “I’m an incest survivor, too.” This is what we do. We tell our stories, to bring out your stories. We makes caves into waves. A movement to ensure the next generation of children are safe.
Feel free to like this post or leave a comment below. If you’re a paid subscriber, join the chat and share your experience of the piece, any thoughts you have, or questions with the community!