Letting Go of the Victim Label

It is with great joy that I introduce you this week to Annie Addington. We connected this past February and I knew right away that we were kindred spirits. Annie has been on this journey for decades and that means she has a wealth of knowledge and perspective about healing. In this first post, Annie shares a bit of her story and the importance of letting go of the "victim" label.

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I have been living with and through the effects of my childhood abuse for most of my life. Through deep work with exceptional teachers, however, I became conscious of the multiple processes that move me. I learned how to reach the part of me that was pure and unbroken, the part that knows Love and the holds the power to create. 

I am also a vocalist and a songwriter. I have written many songs. This is the first verse of one of them, and the beginning of the journey. 

Sexual Tears

I was 8 years old

When he said to me,

What a sweet little darlin’ you turned out to be

Come on over here; Let me show you somethin’,

Somethin’ I’m so sure you ain’t never had a hold of

He was 18, he was a man to me,

He was taller than the birches, taller than the trees

And lord knows, he loved Rock and Roll

I waited all night long to feel a piece of his soul

And now I’m cryin’ sexual tears, sexual tears,

Although my body’s achin’

I’ll never trust another man.

The abuse from my 18-year-old, 6’5” stepbrother lasted from the age of 8-13. In the meantime, my stepfather also attempted it; my girlfriend’s father took me into the basement to “show me what he was giving her for Christmas”, and later there were more and more incidences, my one-time Guru even ‘copped a feel’.  And later, the (multiple) boyfriends, the abusive husbands.

There are so many of us. It has happened to us in a myriad of ways.  We each have a unique experience, but the devastating effects are the same.   

Those effects are anxiety, anger, self-destructive behaviors, alcoholism or drugs, deep feelings of being betrayed, learned helplessness (a feeling of absolute powerlessness), a deeply damaged feeling of self-worth, and inabilities in creating a healthy relationship. Many, if not all of us, have recreated the trauma and experienced abuse in later life. 

In my work with women, I found that one of the most important paths to the way out is the de-identification with the ‘victim’,  be it conscious or unconscious. There is so much to uncover and so much to discover.  

The goal is to be centered in your Creative Consciousness, where you can create the Life you envision, no longer hindered by unconscious patterns. 

I truly believe that we create our adult life through our beliefs and our thoughts. But, in order to do that in a positive way, we have to get to know them, listen to them and understand them, because the unconscious thoughts and beliefs create as well. That is the process I am addressing. Getting to Know You.     

We WERE victimized as children, but the identification with the Victim is the ultimate sabotage.  It brings constant repetition of the trauma.  Healing demands a deep understanding of what and how you feel and why.

I want to share the process that will lead you out of this self -betraying dynamic, and my own struggle.    

First, let me tell you where I come from. You know about my abuse, but I want to share about my training, which involved Bodypsychotherapy, Helpership, and more recently, Coaching. 

First, I studied for four years under the tutelage of Dr. John C. Pierrakos and his wife, Eva Pierrakos. John P. had been a student of Wilhelm Reich (Character Analysis), and later in life, he worked together with Alexander Lowen in the development of a therapeutic method called Bioenergetics.

John later expanded on this work by creating CORE Energetics. CORE standing for the Center of Right Energy. In Core Energetics, one works through different levels of embodied emotions to reach the Core, where the True Self, Love and Absolute Creativity lives. 

This method was devised to help people, through body work and consciousness raising, to release the embodied emotions.

Embodiment of emotion. I like to look to Science for answers. 

“Recent theories of embodied cognition suggest new ways to look at how we process emotional information. The theories suggest that perceiving and thinking about emotion involve perceptual, somatovisceral, and motoric reexperiencing (collectively referred to as “embodiment”) of the relevant emotion in one's self”.

Science  18 May 2007:

Vol. 316, Issue 5827, pp. 1002-1005

DOI: 10.1126/science.1136930

Where the energy is blocked in the body, it is also unable to flow naturally in the emotional self, the intellect, and the spiritual self. Why? Because it’s all connected. 

Eva had delivered a series of lectures in trance. (She always told us not to focus on where it came from but rather, on the content itself.) So, the work of John P. dealt with the energy in the body, and the conceptual, deep study of psychology and human behavior came from the lectures of Eva. These lectures also offered a path of understanding where we have come from and where we can go.

It makes sense that when John read one of Eva’s lectures, he insisted on getting to know her and they fell in love and married. Their work together offered the greatest learning of my (long) life.  

Read Part 2: Escaping the Trap of Learned Helplessness

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My life has been filled with constant change. I survived and rose from the ashes of childhood abuse, an ever-hungry and curious spirit, seeking growth, knowledge and change.

My first time in college, I was a theater major. I had been acting for several years in Community theater and in Summer Stock, where I played Luisa, (the Girl) in the Fantastiks, for instance. After two years at UCONN, I received an award for my acting, and thought I was to become a great actress, so I left school and moved to NYC, where I studied acting at Herbert Berghof Studios. But, it was 1967 and an influx of Love and Consciousness was happening. Woodstock!! Music!!! Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll!

So off I went, into a new world. The abuse that I experienced in my childhood went very deep and I experienced all of the after effects of this violation. Depression, anxiety, promiscuity and parties.

In 1978, I found the Pathwork and Core Energetics and my life turned around. I entered into deep studies and personal work with amazing teachers.

I moved to Amsterdam in 1981, where there was a strong Pathwork, with the idea of living in Europe for one year. I reconnected with my ex-husband, whom I had met at the Pathwork Center. We co-founded an institute in Germany in which we worked with and trained people to further the teachings of John and Eva Pierrakos, to explore the depths of oneself; one's thought processes, one's physical condition and one's feelings.

In the Institute, we also gave teachings of the different character structures, the feelings associated with them, their beginnings and their effects on self and others in the form of communication, transferences and counter-transferences, i.e. a deep approach to enhanced Emotional Intelligence and the level of exchange it can elicit.

My son, Christian was born in 1984, in Holland, where I was living.

I was longing to work with people, to teach, to raise consciousness, so I did my certifications as a Coach and ELI-MP through iPEC Coaching, where all the values of my earlier training and exciting new ways of looking at the work became alive again. I signed up right away.

So now, the Core Energy Coaching Process from iPEC Coaching and the experience I gained from my studies and work in Core Energetics, meet, as one.

This is my commitment to be of service to others; I am excited, a child in awe, to see others rise and grow…to contribute to the healing process of others. I

I am planning an online women’s group where survivors can grow together, and I look so forward to reignite this process.

I also am singing and preparing my CDs for distribution. The End/The Beginning

Learn more at http://quantumtransitions.com/