I sat very still for awhile. I asked my body: What is my relationship to power? My body answered clearly and immediately.
I can have what I want when I choose, she said.
I remember that I wanted to believe that before, but couldn't. I had to come to understand the effects that were stopping me from choosing.
Then, increasingly, I could choose.
After experiencing the necessary emergence of powers I had thought I could never choose to have myself, at times when no one else believed that such resolutions could be possible... I know it now.
I will have what I want when I choose.
Since being sex trafficked 2015-2016 and being forced to cross international borders to find safety, I have been challenged to steadily manifest with the toolsets I know how to use... while being continuously, more-or-less invisibly physically tortured, communications functions prevented, and cut off from most resources assumed to be available in communities.
The infrastructural and relational toolsets I have built over the last two decades, informed by collaborations in survivor-led groups I founded, funded, and continue to work with, have helped me to move in certain kinds of (usually digital) community spaces in a way that makes it difficult for others to realize how severely disabled I still am unless I reveal it to them.
I teach these toolsets to other invisible, severely disabled survivors as part of my usual activities; when more people know how to use the toolsets well, we use them together -- with exponential collective benefits.
Because of this practice, all of us are able to improve our outcomes on a day to day basis, even when everyone else around us might be trapped in fear, mired in chaos, or (intentionally or unwittingly) working at cross-purposes.
We were all disabled too greatly to survive individually; so we built new ways of doing things by combining our available strengths, even from isolated locations and dying bodies.
My recovery progress thus far has been phenomenally outside the expectations or experience of every professional I have met or researched, as far as has ever been conveyed to me.
Our search for those who recognize and practice modalities as effective as these continues ongoing.
My recovery progress is based on deeply-learned understandings of power from my own lived experiences and from the hard-won privilege of comparing notes with other severely disabled trafficking survivors who likewise would not have been able to reach one another if we had not succeeded in building this infrastructure.
We have tremendous power, even though our relationships, communities, minds and bodies have been continually fragmented by violence.
We are different beings than we thought we were, when we come into contact with this utter powerlessness… where deep and ancient power lives.
To begin to know better this intriguing dichotomy, we find great nourishment in being more properly introduced to one another.
Delightfully, relationship-building repairs relational neurology. Hello, nice to meet you again. It's lovely to see you here. These are our powers. These are our challenges. Shall we share and explore our powers and challenges together? There is much to discover.
There is immediate interpersonal power flow in repairing relational neurology, even when other resources are not available.
Survivors of the most brutal, most invisible forms of violence show rapid recovery when relational neurology is repaired first, followed by other important survival and recovery resources.
Interestingly, most professional networks do not know that relational neurology must be repaired first.
But if relational neurology is not repaired first… all other approaches may show less success than expected or simply won’t work.
To succeed, tend to the power source.
Relational power flows.
Our power from powerlessness is expansive.
We have found ourselves “topping from the bottom” as individuals targeted with severe disablement, isolated from relational assistance, and submitted to continuous physical torture.
Why? (And — how?!)
For many of us, sex trafficking organizations had hyper-evolved our creative, commanding, influential, pleomorphic functions — among other traits — making us especially brilliant and effective at holding the fascinated attention of clientele.
That’s how you make entertaining, expensive, mysterious, and… well… fundamentally unnerving… playthings, toys, and robots.
Something you can sell to someone else that disrupts the buyer’s power center, dazzles or disorients them in a pleasing way and keeps them buying.
But the same sex trafficking organizations needed to control us by making others afraid of us, by misleading us all about the capacities of our bodies and throwing our whole worlds into chaos.
They targeted our relational neurology through poisoning and traumatic brain injury; they targeted our community infrastructural neurologies.
It is relational neurological bondage that allows trafficking operatives to ply their trade most successfully uninterrupted.
Relational neurological bondage is only a solution for trafficking organizations so long as nobody else knows much about relational neurological bondage.
When we ask professionals to help us and they don’t realize that our relational neurology must be repaired first for other recovery efforts to succeed, they tend to think that we are unable to respond to their methods.
Sometimes, their methods are actually terrible.
But many times, it is the missing relational neurology that we need in order to benefit from any other particular approach. Their methods might turn out to be fine as long as we start with repairs to relational neurology — and keep it going.
Once we have that established, our recovery options expand.
Our relational neurology is repaired by interacting consistently in a respect-oriented environment that has full awareness of the needs of the community.
If those who are disabled through damage to their relational neurology cannot reach consistent interactions with respectful others for repair processes, it never surprises us when alternate recovery processes do not succeed.
Can you think of too many people — even around your own communities — who don’t seem to have the means to survive or succeed in their recoveries?
We can.
We choose for community recoveries to succeed.
Before we do anything else, we stabilize relational neurology.
What is my relationship with power?
You may not have realized yet how much power you yourself will have in your moments of most profound powerlessness.
We have had to study it. And I will say — with a glow — we are excellent at it.
The collective is growing.
All our minds and bodies are strengthened in continuing this work.
How can all our options — and all our powers — expand?
That’s the work we do every day. No matter where we’re at — no matter how bleak the landscape — we remember it more all the time, because it’s how we build together.
Our relational neurology powers us.