Channeling session with my mom #2

July 2023 session transcript

“Let us begin to drop into this energy,” Demi said, her eyes closed and her voice a velvety, rich calm. “Carole, please say your mom’s full name followed by saying your dad’s full name and please do so slowly with intention.”

I recited both my parents’ full names as directed.

“I’m invitingggg in these energiessss…,” Demi said slowly, her voice barely above a whisper.

“And as we invite in the energies of Nancy and Thomas, I also want to invite in the light of our angels and guides to wrap us in a ring of golden white light holding us in the frequency and vibration of love…allowing all energies that are not rooted and grounded in the frequency of love to fall away now…knowing that in this space there is no judgment, no fear, no blame…only bringing forward the messages of divine kinship as they are meant to serve the collective.”

Her eyes remained closed and her body began to sway ever so gently as she connected. A minute passed, then Demi opened her soft brown eyes, signaling her readiness to begin.

“As mom is coming through, she is showing me a younger version of herself. She has a little-girlish feeling on her energy today. I do feel that she is in this process of really coming back home to her true nature [of love] because, as we’ve discussed previously, she’s worked a lot on the other side with that heavier, denser energy she experienced a lot of in this lifetime.

“I am feeling her moving to age 19 or 20, just coming back to the earlier parts of her life when things still felt really innocent—INNOCENT is the word she is giving me—innocent, where things weren’t heavy.

“Yes, there were some situations that she had noticed inside of her life experience up to that point, but it didn’t really land in what it meant and things weren’t as serious yet.

“She is showing me this lighter part of herself and I am seeing dad as being really pleased with that, as well. He’s showing me that he’s very pleased with seeing her in this lighter way,” Demi said.

“This lighter part of her is how I always saw her. This is how I always knew her. This is how I always saw her in our relationship together,” my dad’s spirit said.

I can confirm my dad’s strong—and maybe desperate?—grasp on that version of her. They met on a blind date in 1960 when she was sixteen and got married a week after her high school graduation. He clung to the light in her like it was the last thread holding him to hope.

One morning during our pandemic caregiver stint in 2020, over our usual morning coffee ritual, he stunned me by speaking about the positive light he always saw her in. It floored me because she treated him so horribly. I expected him to resent her, fear her, and loathe her like I did at times. But he didn’t. Wasn’t I doing the same thing in my own way by extending compassion to her throughout my life?

I had witnessed her unleash cruelty on my defenseless dad over and over. I saw how she tested me, too. She knew my husband was protective so she experimented by starting small, shaming me subliminally and probing which of her methods might work best undetected. But, my dad was her primary target. And she went after him ruthlessly, especially between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. when I was asleep and couldn’t shield him from her calculated attacks.

One morning, I gathered the courage to ask him about his relationship with my mom. I needed courage because it was very hard for me to talk about their complicated bond and how terribly she treated him. It was a hard question to ask, but I needed to know. He slowly took a sip of his coffee, then replied thoughtfully, “Carole, at the end of the day, I still love the girl.”

“I am very pleased to be here and am very excited to be able to have this communication with you,” my mom’s spirit said.

I’m surprised she’s pleased to be here because she was never pleased about anything when she was alive! I have to remind myself that she’s talking to me from a higher perspective and frequency rooted in love.

“I do feel you talking to me. I want to confirm that when you talk to me it does feel very healing for me. When I died, I initially carried a lot of shame over to the other side and you just inviting me in and bringing in an air of forgiveness while also processing through your own experience with me as your mother has really given me a lot of clarity and has given me a lot of purpose.

“This is helping me recognize more deeply my purpose and the reason I went through so much in this lifetime as I see you moving through your process of healing yourself.

“When it comes to you, my precious girl, I see you and I’m really excited for all of the things you’re working on right now,” my mom said.

WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH HER CALLING ME HER PRECIOUS GIRL?!?

Her precious girl?!? NO! NO!

NO!

This is a strong punch straight into the center of every fucking childhood wound I’ve ever carried!

I couldn’t catch my breath! I couldn’t think! I’m pissed!

I WAITED MY ENTIRE LIFE TO HEAR THOSE WORDS!

And now, when it no longer matters the way I needed it to, SHE SAYS THEM?!? NO!

She never said anything like that when I was little or when I was a teenager. Not once when I was terrified. Not once when I was hurting. Not once when I tried to earn her love with good behavior, with silence, with self-erasure, with worshipping her. NO!

Now, suddenly, I’M FUCKING PRECIOUS!!!???

This isn’t fair! THIS IS WRETCHEDLY CRUEL!

I needed to hear it when she was my mama on Earth! When I was a child sobbing behind my bedroom door, silently begging her with my heart to just fucking love me! When I was trying not to cry too loud because she always said she’d give me something worse to cry about.

Where was precious then, bitch!

Instead, I got screamed at, shamed, manipulated, controlled, hurt, silenced, humiliated, bullied.

And now, from a safe distance somewhere in the afterlife, she calls me precious?!?

This hurts more than I can explain! THE HEARTACHE IS UNBEARABLE!

My inner child—my quiet, terrified, sweet little girl—was already on her knees when she heard it. She didn’t know whether to collapse or run. My adult self wanted to angrily punch something and scream.

I am 56 years old. Hearing my mother’s spirit call me precious as she speaks from the other side is agonizing because I’m unable to physically receive it from her in the way I’ve always needed.

I’m ready to ask her a question, but I’m more focused on fighting back tears as the full recognition of her calling me her precious girl sinks in hard and fierce. 

I take a deep breath…

“I’m excited to have this communication with you, too, Mom. Thank you for being here in this space with me and Demi. I’m glad you’re able to feel some healing.

“Now that you’re on the other side, what are the top things you want me to know about your time on earth as my mom? Do you see me differently now than you did when you were on earth?” I asked.

She just called me her precious girl, but I still needed to hear how she saw me.

“She’s showing me the head. We’ve talked about this previously. I’m shown a barn, a horse, and a fall. She could’ve been thrown off a horse. The situation wasn’t that serious, which is the reason why nobody ever realized it happened. It wasn’t like a big concussion that kept her down for days. It was truly a small fall that didn’t necessarily warrant any big ordeal.

“But it did knock loose a neural pathway that affected her ability to communicate. This head injury honestly kept her from being able to communicate what she was experiencing. That was part of the frustration that really turned into her anger and her rage later in life,” Demi said.

As the person on the receiving end of her abuse, I find my mom’s earthly inability to communicate shocking because she always had something to scream about to the point where I believed she made stuff up just to have an excuse to explode. I’m pretty sure she did.

But, now I’m beginning to understand: all that noise wasn’t real communication. It was frustration, rage, and pain boiling over. Because the real words—the vulnerable ones—were locked inside.

“You always were so precious to me,” my mom repeated, cutting right through my thoughts like a hot piercing blade.

There it was again. That damn word. PRECIOUS.

Did she keep saying it because she needed me to believe it? Like she needed to convince me it was true?

I wasn’t prepared for the intense wave of longing I felt deep within me. I wanted her love so badly. So fucking badly! Not in spirit. Not in retrospect. But in real time when I was little. When I was a teen. When I was struggling through life’s challenges as a young woman. When I was bruised and broken from her rage. When I needed a hug, not humiliation and shame. When I needed safety, not screams and punishments and harm.

As a child and teenager, I desperately yearned for her to want me, to love me, to care about me, to hug me, to console me, to accept me, to be nice to me, to hold me, to like me, to be proud of me, to be interested in me, to support me, to unconditionally love me.

And now she’s telling me I was always precious?

How is this fair?!?

How is this fucking fair?!?

I hate how much I want to believe it.

I’m so angry right now!

“She’s showing me how she would hold you when you were a baby,” Demi said gently, “and it’s the same imagery she shows me when she was there with you when your granddaughter was born a few weeks ago—just gently smoothing the fine little baby hairs across the forehead, looking down in adoration and complete, total awe of this sweet little spirit.”

That’s exactly what I did when I met my granddaughter for the first time. I invited my parents’ spirits to join me.

“You have always been precious to me,” my mom repeated for the third time, driving home her point.

PRECIOUS.

I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t reject it either. I’m struggling between feeling resentful and grateful, eventually landing in the abyss separating them.

The only positive words I remember her saying to me: “You are my most prized possession.” I was a possession to her! She viewed me as a possession that she could control and manipulate, abuse and shame, scream at and humiliate.

Not beloved. Not cherished. Not loved.

Possession. Something to own.

That’s what I was to her: something to feed on, control, manipulate, forcibly mold, and break.

Her possession.

“She’s now showing me some more of the anger and rage she experienced,” Demi announced.

“It felt so triggering to me as you got older that you were such a free spirit and you were so light loving, so light, so caring, and so wholesome. By the time you reached 8-9 years old, I was well within my own manifestation of life. I was so in my own shit and dis-please-ment of life—this is what spilled over onto you,” my mom’s spirit said.

By the time I was eight or nine years old, I was absolutely and completely and wholly terrified of her. I tiptoed on eggshells daily. I lived in constant fear. I was always on high alert. I was scared to say anything to her. I was even afraid to chew food near her, even though I always chewed quietly with my mouth closed, because she’d attack if she heard chewing (and believe me, she listened for chewing!).

I was confused nonstop. I hid from her at all costs.

Then a hard-hitting, mind-blowing revelation hit me like a freight train: I WAS A FREE SPIRIT?!?????

Wait! What?!? I WAS A FREE SPIRIT AS A CHILD?!?

How in the world did I not know this about my childhood self?!?

I don’t have a single memory of feeling free spirited or behaving like one as a kid.

I don’t remember being lighthearted or bubbly as a child, either. All I remember is getting in trouble and I never understood why. She abused me out of my free spiritedness and into existing in a state of fear and panic and survival, never able to trust myself or feel safe with my feelings.

“It wasn’t ever anything you did wrong. I didn’t know the healthy way to separate my experience from the way that it triggered me to see you running around so lighthearted and so excited about life,” my mom’s spirit said.

Demi gently stepped in. “We’re going to take a breath here because I want her to calm her energy a little bit. This is one of the things she’s working out from the soul frequency of really allowing herself to not get so worked up.

“I think this is what her energy was like a lot of times: she was good, she was good, she was good, then the top blew off like it came out of nowhere.  You could be having a completely perfect day, then all of a sudden it was this big blow up and the abuse started.”

I nodded emphatically because yes—YES! That was exactly what I experienced! I had never told Demi about my mom’s blow-ups and never described the way they came out of nowhere.

“YES, YES, YES! She was so unpredictable and so very mean and hateful after the top blew off! I lived in an anticipatory state of fear and panic because everything would seem so wonderful and fine, then out of the blue she’d explode into a fit of rage and anger. It was so scary, especially when I was a child. Can you imagine your tender, innocent child living like that every single day?!?”

I constantly braced for jump scares. I cannot tolerate horror movies because of jump scares, yet my daily life under her roof was one.

“I want to just sit with her for a moment and take a breath together,” Demi said soothingly.

[Pause for deep breath.]

“When the emotions got too much—anything from overstimulation to even too much joy, anything that felt like I didn’t have control—as long as everything was buttoned up and everything was good and everything was predictable, I was fine. The moment anything became unpredictable, it triggered me and it triggered the anger. If you were running around, being a child, having fun—that’s when I felt out of control. In those moments of me feeling out of control, that’s where the blowup and abuse poured over onto you.” my mom’s spirit said.

Yep. She’s right.

I got in trouble every time she saw me having fun or sensed me being happy. If she caught me crying, she told me she’d give me something worse to cry about. The amount of confusion, panic, dread, and fear I felt being on the receiving end of her unpredictable, volatile wrath is inexplicable.

So, in order to protect myself from her:

• I taught myself how to regulate, control, and suppress all emotions

• I taught myself how to read her energy and scan the energy in a room

• I learned how to read her facial expressions and decode her tone of voice

• I avoided all forms of desire and creativity

• I filtered all of my opinions, beliefs, and decisions to match hers until I didn’t have any of my own

• I honed an extreme attention to detail because precision sometimes spared me punishment

• I hid my intelligence

• I walked on eggshells every single day, hoping not to be seen or heard by anyone because every time my presence was detected, it usually didn’t turn out well

• I became hypervigilant

• I took extreme care with my tone of voice, my gaze, my posture, and my facial expressions

• I carefully edited my words, avoiding any sentence that used “I”

• I put my mother’s needs first and abandoned my own

• I pretended I didn’t have a memory

• I pretended to be dumb

• I acted like I didn’t care about things that deeply mattered to me

• I became a quick, flexible thinker constantly on alert for the safest next move

• I became a creative solution finder because pleasing her required strategy and could reduce harm

• I ignored my true state of being by acting like everything was okay

• I made do with what I had because asking for more was dangerous.

These weren’t personality traits. They were survival mechanisms and they followed me from early childhood into midlife.

Do any of these reflect a free-spirited child? Absolutely not!

“I want you to know how smart you are. You’ve always been a little bit coy and mischievous, but with a very sweet aspect of yourself. This is a quality that I really, really love about you. It’s almost like this teasing and playful energy that you have. You’re never arrogant about it; you were just being sweet and playful. I wish I hadn’t beat that out of you,” my mom’s spirit confessed.

I wish I hadn’t beat that out of you…

My mother’s spirit just admitted to punishing me for WHO I WAS AT MY CORE UNTIL I NO LONGER IDENTIFIED WITH MYSELF!!!

The woman whose rage sculpted the skin of my being just confirmed that she beat me out of myself!

That she took the sweet, mischievous, light-filled version of me and completely broke her!

That she didn’t just abuse me, she annihilated me!

She punished me for WHO I WAS AT MY CORE UNTIL I NO LONGER IDENTIFIED WITH MYSELF!

I feel so disgusted by this!

She punished my joy. She choked my light. She rewired my nervous system until I couldn’t recognize myself!

Her confession hits me violently. I feel sick, dizzy, furious, and so heartbroken!

What the fuck am I supposed to do with this information?!?

I understand bad things happened to her. I understand trauma cycles and karmic blueprints and soul contracts. But this? This is too much. This is a truth too sharp to hold with grace.

This is unforgivable. And unfixable.

“You did, Mom!!!” I said, very angrily. “You beat it right out of me and you were very effective in doing so. You beat it right out of me and you were very effective in doing so!!! What you did to me has affected me my entire life, long after your initial explosions! My entire life!”

“Stop letting me and what I did to you keep you from being you!” she said. I imagine she said this in a tone similar to mine, but does a spirit match anger? Probably not.

“What?!? How the fuck am I supposed to do that?!? I don’t even know who I am thanks to you and the cruel way you treated me! And now you’re telling me to start being me?!? I’m working hard on it, but it’s not easy at all! I’ve come a long way since you died two years ago and I’m proud of how far I’ve come. Every day I feel safer.”

Now I was the one who needed to take a deep grounding breath!

The anger I felt was real and so was my stupid compassion for her.

Especially now that I knew about some of the traumas she lived through.

But in this moment, I was still holding the rage, the desperate need, the longing, and the heartache.

“Thank you for saying you love my natural personality and you’re sorry for beating it out of me,” I finally said, feeling calmer. “Maybe me walking back into my true self will help you on the other side.”

My compassion, on full display yet again. [rolls eyes]

“One of the things that I hold up for myself is that I won’t give myself permission to…” Her voice stopped abruptly.

Things were heating up and I think her spirit could feel it.

“She’s still really holding a wall up for herself,” Demi said, explaining why my mom’s spirit had suddenly stopped communicating. “When we first started this session, it was like she let herself be in a playful energy for a quick moment, then she shut it off when we got to the serious part of this conversation.”

Damnit! I’d come too far for her to drop her communication now!

I took the lead in an authoritative, yet encouraging tone. “Mom! Get back in that playful energy right now! If I can do it, you can do it, too! Come on, meet me here. Meet me at this playful energy. This heals both of us. Come!”

Demi, eyes closed and her facial expression focused, slowly formed a soft grin as she read my mom’s improving energy. “Yes. Yes, that’s beautiful,” she said. “As soon as you said, ‘Meet me at this playful energy,’ it was like this big, beautiful lightheartedness came forward.”

“That lightheartedness—sometimes I felt that from her when she wasn’t in an abusive state. That’s the mom I wanted to have all the time! That’s the mom I always tried to see! That’s the mom I still love despite everything she did to me.” I said, the realization landing hard. Now I understand what my dad’s spirit meant when he said he always saw the light side of her.

“I have your playful energy, don’t I, Mom?” I asked, softening my tone, offering her spirit a neutral question to draw her closer.

“Yes, you got this playful energy from me.”

“Your mom is nodding in acknowledgment,” Demi confirmed.

“I think I can understand how my playfulness and liveliness triggered you,” I added, “because that’s how you initially were, but you weren’t able to show it or maybe you were abused out of it,” I said.

So much is starting to make sense as the awareness of my core personality traits of free spiritedness, playfulness, light filled, and joyfulness sink in and combine with the awareness that she was initially that way, too. It’s almost unsettling, but somehow I accept it.

My joy. Her rage.

My light. Her shame.

My freedom. Her fear.

Like a mirror, I reflected what she couldn’t reclaim in herself.

And what she saw in me—what she had lost in herself—was too painful for her to face.

So, instead of reaching for it, she punished me for it.

This is a big fucking moment of clarity!

“I feel that there was a lot I had to step up with in the earlier years of your life. Your father was away for work a lot and not present in the home. I felt like I couldn’t raise you properly because I had to be both mom and dad, plus be the disciplinarian as well as try to be playful, too.

“When things weren’t getting done like cleaning and laundry, it had to be that more militant style of approach because you didn’t take me seriously if I was in my playful energy. This is just a general thing, nothing to do with you.”

My dad, a ceramic engineer, traveled a lot for work. He was typically out of town Monday through Thursday, three weeks out of most months from the 1960s until technology finally allowed him to work remotely.

I could only imagine how difficult it must have been for my emotionally-unstable mother to bear the brunt of parenting two young children alone. But, as I thought back on those decades of business travel, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was actually a godsend for him to escape her abuse. In a future channeling session with just his spirit, I would receive confirmation that it was.

Unfortunately and unbeknownst to my dad, I became her full-on target when he was gone.

“My view of you has never changed. The view has never changed! I have always seen you as the light you’ve always been. The only view that changed was later in life when your husband and you were in Florida with me and your dad as caregivers. I was carrying SO much shame then.

“But this was never about you. My distance in the energy and my distance in the affection toward you was always the wall of protection for me. I always knew…,” my mom said, but again she trailed off before completing what she was saying.

“They’re all showing me right now, your guides included, that yes, in the physical world the label is NARCISSISTIC. In the spiritual aspect, this is somebody who is deeply disconnected from their truth,” Demi clarified.

“I’m very thankful to receive spirit’s validation about the narcissistic label,” I said. “I’ve actually wondered if narcissism is a playbook of sorts for the other side that—”

“No,” Demi interrupted to calmly reassure me. “It’s not a playbook. It is a person who is deeply disconnected from their truth. And one of the things that everyone on the other side is coming through to say is that this was her path.

“This was the path she chose in order to see what it was like to completely forget the deep connection to Source [God] because it brings a different aspect of the soul through when we step into the next incarnation. I felt a lot of release in your body as that question and answer comes through.”

“Yes! It’s a powerful understanding for me.”

“You are here to not only share the human experience of what it’s like to grow up with somebody who is that far removed from their truth, but also share the coming home to your truth in the process,” Demi said.

“100% yes! It’s so good for me to have this validation!”

Spoiler alert: that’s exactly what I’ve done. I grew up inside the wreckage of my mother’s disconnection from Source. I lived through the storms she created. I spent decades gaslighting myself, denying the reality of the abuse even as I was living inside it.

And still, somehow, I made it home to myself.

That homecoming started the day I finally allowed myself to name what was happening to me. The day I stopped editing her cruelty. The day I chose my truth over hers.

That day was December 20, 2020.

We were living under their roof as caregivers during the height of the covid pandemic. I was actively receiving her cruelty while watching her humiliate and abuse my defenseless father. That’s when I finally, finally said the word out loud to myself.

ABUSE

And it hurt to say it because who wants to believe their mother is abusive?!?

But it also saved me because it was the first time I stopped protecting her story and chose to protect mine instead.

Demi began, “There are a lot of souls, yours included, who are here to help bridge this gap of what’s happened generation upon generation. Throughout each generation we began to forget that connection.

“Your awakening back in December 2020 was that switch back into your deeper knowing and the truth of who you are. But, just like with your mom, you had to go through a period of forgetting and a period of being disconnected in some kind of way in order to really feel the depth of your truth.

“This certainly does not automatically heal everything you went through as a child, teen, early motherhood, and even as a woman growing into her life—this doesn’t discredit any of that. Yet, you are called to continually look at the deeper truth of it.

“There are going to be times when your human self and your inner child are going to need care, protection, and permission to play and to see what life feels like from that state of connection. But, at the same time, always know that the deeper truth is available. There is nothing that keeps you removed from the deeper truth.

“And truly, even with mom in terms of what happened in her life, there was always an aspect of her that knew her deeper truth, yet consciously she forgot. This is part of the reason why she experienced the head injury—to facilitate this disconnection from her truth,” Demi said.

My December 2020 awakening wasn’t gentle. It didn’t arrive wrapped in clarity or peace. It came in like a rocket, tearing through every rationalization I had ever made for her.

The day I allowed myself to see what was happening in that house—and name it—was the day the fog slowly began to lift.

But I didn’t just name it in hindsight. I named it while it was still happening and while I was living inside the lion’s den as a caregiver. Still dodging her manipulations. Still waking up to the sound of her screaming at my dying father in the middle of the night. Still feeling that icy hatred aimed at me the second my protective husband left the room. Still trying to protect both of us while walking on splintered eggshells.

It was the most courageous act of my entire life and it was the beginning of everything!

“It feels so good to be able to communicate with you now. This communication is something that wasn’t available to me in my life, especially my later years,” my mom’s spirit said.

“In your later years you screamed at me that I didn’t know what you went through, yet every time I’d ask you about what happened, you’d bluntly and angrily refuse to tell me. Were you raped or beaten or abused?

“I didn’t know if you were lying to me when you said bad stuff happened to you. Lying is a narcissistic trait. Obviously, it was your right to not tell me anything you didn’t want me to know.”

“This bad stuff I went through is stuff I always wanted to shield and protect you from,” she said.

“As I go deeper into the head injury, it shows me why she wasn’t sharing some of the bad stuff she went through. It looks like there were three men who took her and raped her when she was a young woman. How old was your mom when she had you?” Demi asked.

I quickly did the math in my head. “She was 22 years old when she had me. Is my dad not my dad?!?” My voice cracked as the question came out. I couldn’t believe I was even asking it.

Demi nodded reassuringly. “Your dad is your dad. I do feel this gang rape is something that happened when they were together. Your dad didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“My poor mom.” The words spilled out of me without hesitation. “I knew there were awful things that happened to her,” I said, tears rolling down my face as the impact of what my mom went through began to land.

Confusion landed in, too, because my sympathetic feelings for her were yet again conflicting with how mean she was to me. Alas, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way.

“There was rape and sexual abuse. She had a day out. There’s a lot that isn’t coming through, though,” Demi said, indicating that there could be more traumatic incidences, but my mom’s spirit wasn’t going to reveal them because she still held her protective stance over me, even in spirit form.

And suddenly, a memory snapped into focus: the newspaper clippings! In the late 1970s, my mom started taping articles to our harvest-gold colored refrigerator’s door. Articles about women who’d been raped and murdered. I’d open the fridge to get a snack and be met with bold headlines about sexually violated women and their violent deaths. It terrified me!

I grew up never wanting anything to do with sex because I connected it to violence and death. It’s a miracle I have three children of my own.

I now realize she was trying to protect me the only way she knew how. Worse, she was carrying the unprocessed and unhealed traumas from being gang raped and sexually abused.

“The details don’t matter,” my mom’s spirit said. “What you need to know is yes, your assumptions about bad stuff happening to me are correct.”

“This is a lot of the reason why I always understood her,” my dad’s spirit said. He was a deep feeler, wired for empathy. He carried a tenderhearted understanding of her all the way to the end, even as her abuse toward him skyrocketed as they aged.

“They didn’t take action in terms of prosecution for the rape. This was very much swept under the rug because she didn’t want people to know. She was very embarrassed,” Demi said.

I could feel it. The shame. The silence. The rot of secrets brewing beneath her skin. And then, without hesitation, I said it: “I was raped on a college campus at age 18. I understand how she felt and I deeply know how traumatic the experience was.”

“When she hears you just now say that you were raped, she put her hand on her heart,” Demi said gently.

Of course she did because now she knew.

“Mom, you didn’t know I was raped because I was too terrified to tell you. I was worried you’d think it was my fault. I was afraid you’d scrutinize me, scream at me, harshly criticize me, or worse yet—shame and humiliate me for being raped. I hate knowing both of us experienced rape.”

I said it out loud and I meant it because rape changes everything. It breaks you in ways no one can see. It burns away your sense of safety and replaces it with a lifelong ache I learned to hide behind smiles, sarcasm, humor, and silence.

The rape I survived devastated and traumatized me. I thought I was going to die.

I don’t know how many perpetrators were involved—between the drug slipped into what I was drinking, the instant haze that overtook me, and the trauma-induced shutdown of my nervous system, parts of that night disappeared into blackness where they belonged and still remain. I remember begging and pleading with the person (people?) to stop.

When it was over, someone redressed me. They put my jeans on inside out. Then they drove me home.

I don’t know how I was able to give him directions as I sat dazed, crumpled, and broken in his passenger seat.

Thank God the front door was unlocked. I stumbled to my room while praying I wouldn’t be seen by anyone. I locked the door behind me and curled up in the fetal position on my bed. I felt dirty. Violated. in pain and vulnerable. Scared. I cried silently and alone until my body gave out. The physical pain and the emotional pain were too much to bear!

The hours, days, and weeks afterward were dark and agonizing. I had no one to talk to. There was no internet in 1985—no anonymous searches, no online therapy, no language for what had just happened. I tried to process the atrocity that I experienced while also enduring the bullying, toxicity, and abuse inside my family. I honestly don’t know how I did it.

Did my mom black out, too?

Did parts of her memory go dark like mine did?

Did she cry in silence afterward? Did she curl into herself the way I did—numb, aching, too broken to move?

Did she carry the same kind of shame I carried?

I don’t know what happened to her after. I don’t know how she processed it—or if she ever did.

But I wonder if we were more alike in that moment than I ever realized…

“Don’t pity me! I still want to hold my protective stance for you!” she burst forward.

She’s reading my mind!

“She’s becoming more vocal and very fiery as she communicates right now,” Demi added.

“Don’t let this be an excuse for the way that I treated you or for my behavior! The gang rape and sexual abuse is something that happened and it is part of the story, but it is not the whole story! The story is your story!

“I want you to know that what you write is your story. Yes, you could always trust your intuition and you were always right about that, but my traumas are not the main course of the story. The main course is your experience within it,” my mom’s spirit said.

“OK. Thank you for saying that, Mom.”

Time to switch gears. I had a list of questions to get to.

Another deep breath.

“I want to talk about lying because it’s a common trait in narcissists. Did you lie a lot when you were my mom? I have memories of being so confused about the things you’d say to me, but you instilled so much fear in me I never, ever thought of you as a liar nor did I question you.”

“There are several ways to tell a lie,” my mom’s spirit replied jokingly. “I mainly chose to withhold information in its fullness. I only gave pieces that I felt people needed to know or that felt relevant to the experience. Even though I was narcissistic and disconnected, I was very much a people pleaser and I needed for everything to look a certain way. Sometimes, all the details weren’t needed to paint the picture I needed to paint in order to be good.”

Wait—my mom was a people pleaser?!?

It made a weird kind of sense to me. The performative perfectionism, the rigid roles, the spotless house, the obsession with cleaning, the lies she told by omission because reality didn’t match the narrative she needed to present.

She was lying to manipulate the truth and she was lying to protect the image.

“Those were different times and the rules of society were different then,” my parents’ spirits said in unison.

And then she clarified, as if she needed me to know this wasn’t just about image. It was about fear. “As much as I wanted to give you the space to develop into a bold and bright, beautiful woman, it was almost like your light was too big. I feared for you because your light was so big.

“Back then in the 1960s and 1970s, having a big light, being free, and having your own way of doing things was very much frowned upon. I didn’t understand I was gaslighting you. In my mind, it was being a good mom because I had to conform you into societal standards of what a woman should be.”

“I get it,” I said, my voice shaking, “but at the same time you didn’t have to be so cruel and harsh and mean and hateful to me! Did you ever realize how scared I was of you as a child, as a woman, even when we lived with you in Florida as caregivers when I was 53 years old?!? A 53 year old woman scared of her mother!”

“I didn’t see the damage of what I had done. Back in those days they called it respect. It was a badge of honor for how well children respected their mother and how well behaved they were,” my mom’s spirit replied.

She’d frequently yell at me: “I.AM.YOUR.MOTHER!!!”—that shit snapped me into obedience pronto! The last time she screamed that at me was when I was 53. I actually looked at her and said, “I don’t need a biology lesson. I know who you are and I will no longer tolerate your speaking to me that way.” That didn’t go over well, but I didn’t care.

“She’s showing me you at age 15,” Demi said.

“When you were 15 years old is when I began to see the impact of your fear of me and the impact of you not being able to share certain things with me as you were coming into your womanhood. Once you hit that age, it was like you really shut yourself off from me.

“Even up to a certain point you tried to gain my approval by being a certain way or showing me different aspects of yourself. You even shut that part off, too, which is when I really began to see how afraid you were to come to me with things.”

“I remember trying to gain your approval by being a certain way or showing you different aspects of myself. I was scared to death of you, Mom! That fear never went away!”

Of course I shut parts of myself off from her and stopped sharing myself with her! I was the product of her abuse!

“Even during the fun times we had together I was still scared of you. I was especially scared of you when we lived as caregivers with you and Dad. In fact, I was extremely disgusted by you and by the things you did to hurt dad and how you treated me. I saw every little side-eyed sneer and hateful look you gave me when I helped Dad. I even caught you baiting my small dog into fights with your bigger dog! Who the hell does that?!?”

“By the time you were in Florida with us, in my human experience I was so far gone between the alcohol, the prescription pain pills, and the mental impact that I couldn’t see how scared and fearful you were of me. The last 10-15 years of my life were like a fog to me because I worked so hard to keep myself numb.”

“Does this confirm that you were addicted to alcohol and prescription painkillers?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Because that’s the only way you could survive and stay numb?”

“Yes. As soon as you and your sibling came of age to move out of the house, I was able to finally let my breath out and numb myself even more. I got my children raised, I got them out of the house, and now I can numb myself from this life experience that I’ve been having.”

My mother waited for us to grow up so she could shut down. So she could finally disappear into the oblivion she craved. She white-knuckled her way through motherhood until she was able to check out entirely.

“It breaks my heart you suffered so much, mom. I have a lot of compassion for you. You never got to where I am now healing-wise,” I said with my abundant compassion on full display yet again.

“She’s still working on it during the interlife now,” Demi added, “to come to that peace and compassion for herself and for what was experienced. This is one of the misconceptions that happens in the modern day: ‘The minute I cross over [die], I’m relieved of all the human condition.’ This isn’t true.

“We bring some of that energy and emotion with us to the interlife to alchemize, to be with, to learn from. She is still in that process, which I do feel is almost complete. I see the number 3—in three months our time she’ll be through this transition process and really be on the other side of being able to live fully in the joy, the freedom, the peace of the experience of spirit,” Demi said.

She brought her shame with her to the other side. Even in death, she couldn’t escape the things she did in life. Part of me is happy about this, but my compassionate side is cheering for her.

“I’ll celebrate that with her! Does she enjoy these weekly conversations with me and you as the channel?”

“She is a little outspoken about this.”

“I don’t understand why I just can’t talk to you directly,” my mom’s spirit said.

“Because I can’t hear you like Demi can, Mom.”

“I think not being able to talk to you directly is getting her frustrated about where she’s at in the interlife process because once she is more in that space of clarity she’ll be able to communicate from a space of pure love, joy, and overflowing loving essence. She hasn’t tapped back into that quite yet, but she’s close,” Demi said.

“I do love conversing with you and I do love the invitation to converse with you,” my mom said.

“Remember the communication piece we’ve talked about. This was an issue for her lifetime. She’s still learning how to communicate,” Demi reminded me.

“I love the communication and having this time with you, but I’d love to talk to you without having her [Demi] here,” my mom said.

“Well, here we are for now,” Demi said with a giggle.

This space is already more honest and connected than anything we ever had on earth.

“I’m grateful for Demi channeling this communication for us during our time together. The information you’re giving me is helping me heal.” I said.

“Let me see what else wants to come through here,” Demi said.

We were quiet for a few moments.

“I do feel the progression in her soul. The first time we channeled her through was very much a sunken, depressive experience. I did feel her lightheartedness when we started this session and as we were calling her in. She is still having some of her human experience inside of her soul and I can feel the energy pulling her back to her truth.

“When I sit with her, I can feel her human essence and I can feel what she experienced here in this lifetime, but I’m seeing a lot more of the light body coming in than we experienced in our previous channeling session. This is a really positive thing because the lessons are integrating and she’s seeing and feeling her light body, even if it is in these little snippets of time,” Demi said.

“She’s making progress?”

“Yes,” Demi said.

“I’m assuming my dad is further along than she is, right? My dad was such a kind, smart, compassionate, patient man.”

“Yes. I’m seeing your dad in complete and total embodiment of the light. He is able to be more of that elder energy, that higher perspective on everything where your mom is a little in the emotion of it all.”

Of course he is. My dad always held the light, even while living in the shadow of her rage and while being destroyed by her poison.

“Mom, is there anything else you want me to know before we end this session? What do you want me to take with me?”

“Just begin writing your story. You have what you need to just begin. Whatever it is, begin. Because this is something that is meant to be brought forward very soon. Just begin where you are. Don’t let the analysis hold you back,” my mom advised.

“You must know me or something,” I said, laughing. My over analyzing skills are a byproduct of the abuse I experienced. Analysis was my armor and it followed me into adulthood.

“I’m working on walking back into those free spirited aspects of myself again,” I said to her. “Do you see me working on it?”

“I do.”

And for once, I believed her.

I am doing it—I’m walking myself back home to who I was before the fear.

I’m dismantling the armor I built to survive her.

I’m reclaiming the light she feared in me.

I’m choosing to live in a world where precious no longer hurts.

I’m becoming the version of me she tried to extinguish and in doing so I’m setting us both free.

PHOTO: My 39-year-old mother in the kitchen, standing near the harvest-gold refrigerator where she taped rape articles for me to read as a young teenager.