The Questions…Compassion for Sex Traffickers? Part 1

Quote for Reflection: Sharing the truth doesn’t mean to put one’s life in danger. ~ Judy Dragon

The Questions
The questions were asked to a group of people I was participating with. The group was supposed to have a spiritual focus…at least that is why I thought I was being asked to join initially.

These were important questions, ones that all of us could spend some time contemplating. For me, any response to such deep questions would need to come from one’s truth/experience and heart. All else would be opinions or unhealed/unprocessed responses which need discernment. There would need a pause to feel into myself, asking within if their response resonates with spiritual principles and virtues that I hold sacred.

The questions were around Compassion:

Could we have compassion towards those who are guilty of sex trafficking?
Are they worthy to be given compassion?
Knowing about what happens in sex trafficking, what would we do with those feelings in order to demonstrate compassion to those who offended?
Should we not even consider it?
What is the right thing?

Considering that only one person had sex trafficking as part of their childhood experience in the group, me (though no one knew this initially), I found it very interesting in the kind of responses that came from this ‘spiritually-minded’ group.

Sex Traffickers Exposed
In people’s comments, it was shared by most that they wanted sex traffickers exposed. I’m fine about them being exposed, but when, where and to whose expense or benefit are the other questions that needs to be asked. There’s a lot more that this response involves.

When sex traffickers and offenders are heads of state, popular political, religious or public figures, police and governments involved, world-renown doctors and scientists in respected medical facilities, admired teachers, famous Hollywood & TV personalities, how often are those they victimized even believed?

I can easily say that it’s only recently that this exposure has happened where the media reports it (and then often suppresses it). There is either sensationalizing and/or victim-blaming.

What about staying alive if those who were trafficked name their abusers? For many, if they don’t gather with others who are also speaking up and hiring lawyers, it could be difficult territory. I’m sure you’ve heard that some deaths of those who had gone public were determined to have ‘committed suicide’ after, with little investigation by police or lack of reporting by the major press outlets.

Survivors Speakers’ Bureau
I was on a Survivors Speakers’ Bureau in the early 90’s where I was asked to share about the abuse I had remembered at that time on a well-known national TV talk show. I had only started my deeper journey in ’87. In what I know now, I was really being brave…and completely naïve…to think I could go public in anyway then!

The producer of the show, rather than having the hostess interview me, wanted to bring one of the perpetrators, a relative, onto the show with me. The relative was very wealthy, prominent and ‘admired’ by my childhood community.

I know! I know! It could be a toss back to some scene of being thrown into the lions’ den in Rome. I had enough sense, even being very dissociated at the time, to say NO.

I really did wonder why the producer would even ask me to volunteer for such a situation knowing I was abused. I believe that they attempt to use a person’s lack of self esteem and their deepest vulnerabilities to manipulate them. It was the same pattern of being objectified and used for others’ purpose in being trafficked.

Unless the person has worked the process for quite awhile including building their inner strength, resiliency, trust within, accepting fully their truth, and feeling deep conviction about it, then more disempowerment, shame and humiliation can occur when it’s premature. I didn’t recognize this at the time, but my gut reaction and spiritual protection served me well.

It would never have been a benefit for me to be sensationalized or set up as a sacrificial lamb. Sharing the truth doesn’t mean to put one’s life in danger, and that would have happened.

Punishment and Revenge
Part two of the responses from the questions, was about the other participants’ need for punishment and revenge. It reminded me of the path of spiritual warrior archetype from the 5^th Plane of Existence (Plane of Duality).

I wrote in January ’19 blog about revenge and what occurs. [https://theflowofhealing.com/2020/01/01/interconnective-communication-consciously-respond/] I had great hopes that what I was about to share with them would be able to be received. I mean, ya can’t get closer to the situation than me and others who lived it and have actually committed themselves to deep healing.

Only one or two got it. The other responses were typical of what I consider the ‘confusion of mainstream humanity’.

What I read from them was an eye-for-an- eye mindset, lack of hope, lack of trust in humanity, lack of possibilities, and no vision of restorative justice. They shared:

“We want this to stop… bring back public hanging.”
“They can’t be rehabilitated.”
“The guilty don’t have compassion so they don’t deserve it either.”
“Hog tie them.”
“Medieval torture.”
“When I get them, they would plead to be hanged.”
“’Forgive them’ and then cause them so much pain and anguish they wish they were dead.”
“Put them down like a dog who bites.”
“Death penalty”

Honestly, I totally understood why they said all of this and where they were coming from. In the distant past, I had similar sentiments and actually experienced these deep agonizing thoughts to my core, of lashing out and revenge.

Inner World
Instead, I was taught to feel and express it in my inner world, in my sacred space, by a therapist and hypnotherapist early on in my journey. I pounded pillows with a bat, screamed until the sun rose, cussed profanities at the perpetrators, cried through boxes of tissue, hit a punching bag with my fists, took my hands into a lock hold as if strangling their necks, stomped my feet on the floor squashing their imagined faces, stabbed them all over like a zombie doll in the etherics, visualized them buried alive or burning to death, and sent them on buses to re-education camps. The mind can be creative!

Doing it this way for years helped me to get through the integration of my different personalities and their feelings. I gave full allowance to my inner world to have their day and way in remembering what was done to them.

Through a great deal of my early healing, having revenge on the inner helped me to stop projecting my feelings onto others when triggered. I realized later, though, that I was feeling motivated to also use this revenge–violence on others within–to feel my own power and strength. In a sense, I wasn’t being any different than those who abused me though I was keeping it all well-contained.

From a deeper perspective, violence is most likely what occurred to those who continue to abuse and traffic–they probably had the same things happening to them as children or adults whether they remembered it or not. They acted it out in real time and with real humans (and animals) through their ways of dissociating and internalizing those unprocessed emotional freezes. They learned to objectify others. They lost the feeling of their humanity through experiencing being forced to shut down their feelings in being traumatized. OR they were put in compromising positions where they had little choice but to follow orders, demands, or die.

Some of this goes on for generations in families, cultures and religions. And the cycles were and are being continued of abuse, greed, objectifying and dehumanizing.

Yet, feeding them hatred and contempt only adds to their energy. It makes them stronger! Imagine my personal energy and power leaching into them. The hatred, contempt and revenge I attach resonates with their energetics thus it feeds them, powers them to continue their misaligned and evil ways.

Horror schlock
Did you ever see the ’59 horror classic, ‘The Tingler’ with Vincent Price? As a kid, I was a horror schlock in what I watched on TV. I was attempting to wake myself up to the real horrors, to know they were true. I even wrote in my diaries in elementary school about all the scary movies that I watched on TV.

Unless you’re around my age or like horror, this movie will not be on your viewing list. The reason I even bring it up is that it’s about a creature that feeds off the fear in people’s spines. If a person is kind, loving, and caring, the creature falls off to die.

Interestingly, this is how it similarly works when we keep these heavy feelings of resentment, hatred, revenge, and fear running into others. But when we bring in Love (with forgiveness), it disengages.

At an unconscious level, I feel that the movie was reminding me of a way out of the horror at the time as well…that LOVE is the way.

Divine Creator gets the wrath
Divine Creator energy that is part of all of us and through everything, gets the wrath by many. Why is this? Many feel that IT abandons, rejects, disappears, punishes, hurts or betrays us. Were (and are) we waiting for this Unconditional Love to save us?

During my earlier healing process, I can’t tell you how many times I yelled and raged at God/Creator for allowing all the shocking memories to surface and in de-structuring the limited reality of my denial. It’s a huge mind/time warp to experience much of one’s childhood spliced together with most of it missing that actually happened. I’d walk into a scene of my life, the next hours or days went missing, and I’d remember being at the next scene that put things back together somehow. Nothing seemed out of place. Hollywood editors couldn’t have done it better.

As a child, I waited every year to die on Yom Kipper because the perpetrating rabbi taught us in Sunday School that God would write us in the Book of Living or Dying. If we weren’t good, we’d be in the book of death.

Being ‘good’ was keeping the rabbi and his cohorts’ abuse as a secret and separated from my conscious mind. I created unconscious beliefs thinking they were true, that God would kill me, and this is somehow connected to Love. What else does a child do but go outside herself to find the supposed answers that would keep her alive and piece life together to appear ‘normal’?

No one taught me that I am always connected to Love, or that God is really pure Unconditional LOVE. And what meaning would it have given to me at that time when Love meant abuse then? Many of the perpetrators claimed they loved me as they abused and passed me on.

So this Divine Love energy was perceived through the wounded Inner child part/s. The distortion was also passed on through the indoctrination that many of us experienced from our ancestors, cultures and religions as well.

This Unconditional Love energy is also experienced as separate from the self–the guy in the sky with a thunderbolt like Zeus, any patriarchal male god, an authority figure (which often relates to our parents, guardians and abusers), and/or the Supreme judge of another’s freewill.

All of these beliefs and programs are not what I consider Truths in spirituality. The beliefs and memories block what can be experienced as Divine Love. There are also virtues that are needed like faith and trust to be practiced.

In blaming God/All-That-Is/Unconditional Love, this kept me experiencing the Divine Energy outside myself, just like the wounded child. That is how most people think about this Love. I was losing focus on what spirituality was really about. I wasn’t reaping the healing at a deeper level. It felt heavy and harsh. I felt positioned in the victim spot and feeling alone even though I had many dissociative parts inside and loving friends on the outside.

Becoming ‘One me’
Becoming ‘One me’ from having multiple parts (DID) that once ran my energy needed a more heart-based healing experience. I discuss DID in the August ‘19 Blog For the Soul. [https://theflowofhealing.com/2019/08/01/still_whole]

I asked myself after integration/fusion:

“How many times have I played the role of the persecutor/ perpetrator in other lifetime experiences (past lives/ simultaneous experiences)?” I have recalled well over 300 experiences, so I’ve played a lot of polarizing roles.
“How many times was I put in the most heinous positions in being forced to make decisions which entailed either abusing others in order to survive, or be hurt or killed myself?” ‘Sophie’s Choice’ is often a reoccurring theme in trafficking.
“Can I forgive myself for my choices or those lack of choices at that level of consciousness then–as a child, as a teen, as a young adult–even though I had a Dissociative Disorder that kept amnesiac barriers in my mind so not to remember?” Toxic shame can run very deeply in witnessing and forced participation.
“What makes me unforgivable to this Divine Unconditional Love or to myself?”

Part 2 of “The Questions…” will continue in April ’20 Blog for the Soul.
I will answer these questions, share how I feel about compassion towards those who trafficked and abused me, and my approach in how I’ve healed. I felt that the blog was getting too long and needed to be digested in smaller portions. So many feelings can arise for others with loaded topics as this. And that’s important to acknowledge and work with…more slowly.

With compassion and care in all we experience,

Judy

I extracted possible ‘theme’ beliefs from the story. Energy test yourself, practice clearing through digging if applicable, check if they are your ancestors’ beliefs, and use Creator’s teachings including the ones below if they fit. If you’d like more support, consider a session.

Beliefs:

I’m unable to have compassion towards those who sex traffic.
Sharing my truth means putting my life in danger.
Truth is dangerous. (remember that Truth is just Truth)
I have to sacrifice myself for my truth.
I need be shamed and humiliated to be courageous.
I have to doubt myself to know how strong I am.
I need shame and humiliation to grow stronger.
Unconditional Love has to be separate from me to feel safe…or to have free will of my life.
I am always connected to Unconditional love.
I am unforgivable for what I’ve done. (no)
I am forgivable in anything I’ve done harmful. (yes)
I allow myself to be objectified.

Helpful Creator’s teachings/downloads

I know what it feels like to, how to, when to, that it’s safe, that I’m worthy, deserving and good enough, that it’s possible, that I can, I do (or I am/am able to be):

To have compassion towards those who sex traffic
The difference between my truth and others’ opinions
To stay with my truth even if others disagree or disbelieve
To know my strength without proving it through All that IS
To agree to disagree where appropriate
To be courageous without being shamed or humiliated
To claim my safety, free will and birthright as part of Unconditional love
To be connected to Unconditional love
To be forgivable through and by Unconditional Love for the mistakes I have acted out in harm to others and to myself
To create better boundaries for myself
To live without being objectified
Be a true power in my own life