Date Rape: How forgiveness led to my gifts of healing and helping others!My Experience with Date Rape... A very powerful and personal example of how I have used forgiveness is illustrated in an experience that I had with rape. It was a classic situation where I was hanging with a guy, I got drunk and blacked out. When I awoke, he was on top of me having sex. I had no recollection of anything that happened prior to that time. What made this so sticky is that there was no violence. I felt so responsible for the date rape and hence guilt ridden. I was a classic date rape victim with post traumatic stress syndrome and I always thought something was wrong with me because I contracted a sexually transmitted disease (STD) as a result. I told very few people because I thought that I was wrong for being there and drinking in the first place and I felt so dirty as a result of finding out that I had an STD. Initially, I was not angry with the guy at all but over time, I added anger for this person to my guilt and shame. The date rape happened when I was 21 years old. At the age of 26, I could no longer stand feeling like there was always something wrong with me. I was married and wanted to move forward from this issue. It would be another 10 years of slow but steady work that I landed in what I have come to learn as radical forgiveness. It was scary to move to a place of forgiving this guy. I felt very wronged. What made me decide that I had to do something was that I was tired of feeling shame and guilt. At times I felt so ashamed and guilt ridden that I cringed at the thought of anyone knowing that I had experienced date rape. As time went on I began to realize that I needed to share my story because young women that I knew were heading off to college and I did not want them to have the same experience. What began to happen is that these young women expressed great compassion for me. How wonderfully the Great Mother worked through them! But also, some reported to me how my story helped to keep them from getting in the same situation as well as their friends. These stories began to transform how I looked at my experience. Slowly but surely sharing my experience helped me to peel away the layers of shame and guilt that I had piled on for many years. I began to share with young women who had contracted STD's my story so that they would not judge themselves and feel dirty as a result of having an STD. It always seemed that women who had STD's were judged more harshly than men. I desired to help women understand that what is best is to work toward healing and avoiding STD's in the future. Again, slowly but surely, I moved to a place where this date rape experience occupied less and less of my emotional body. I felt freer and freer. As I began doing deep forgiveness and releasing work, I came to a place of deep gratitude for the situation. I acknowledge that I could have chosen to learn these lessons a different way but since I did not, I felt gratitude for being able to help so many other young women deal with their rape and STD experiences. I no longer felt any anger or shame surrounding the experience or for the man who raped me. Within the larger picture of my life, I realize how this parallels with the higher purpose of my life. My victim archetype is one that is dominant. In so many instances I have felt like a victim. In fact, being a victim is the story that I have written for my life. But what I learned from reading Sacred Contracts by Caroline Myss is that the archetypes manifest in both positive and negative ways. When presenting in the positive, the victim archetype is the Guardian of Self-Esteem. Let me make a quick insert here: I once got what is called a Whole Life Spiritual reading from my Godparents. What was said to me was that I came into this life back to develop self-esteem. So, the way that I have set this up, metaphysically speaking, is that I have created the opposite of esteem, victimhood, in order to help facilitate the process of me developing esteem. This date rape situation is one of many that I created in order to help me in my life's purpose. It was so big and occupied so much of my being that I HAD to do something about it or else I would have created more disease in my body. And even now, 16 years later, I am learning from this experience. It was not until I sat and began writing my story to share with you that I even connected it to my victim archetype as well as my life's lesson of believing in myself. I stand in this moment truly expanded as I remember feeling completely and totally victimized after the date rape. I remember feeling so shameful. And now this situation has no power over me. It is a complete and utter blessing as it has helped me immensely in stepping into my Goddess power. I just give thanks. This is the power of forgiveness.
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