Lex's Liberation: How The Promise Of Death Lead To My Violent Awakening

What is a spiritual awakening?

Some would describe it as a “Come to Jesus moment.”

Not mine…

Mine was the Devil biting, clawing and ripping his way through the very fragments of my psyche and skin.

⚠️ Trigger Warning ⚠️…there is no love and light here. That will be for another post. This…this is the Shadow and Underworld side of spiritual awakening. Content includes graphic details of rape, domestic violence, gun violence, torture, suicide, and revenge porn. This blog post is not for the weak of heart or spirit, nor for children. I understand if you need to close this blog out at this time and not read any further. Here goes…

And don't worry, there's a happy ending…

People often ask me how I became what I am today…a spiritual guide, intuitive energy channeler, woo-woo girly, aura seer, etc…and I always find myself pausing, needing to think about it. It's because the real, true reason would scare them and turn them off from their own spiritual journey that might, and I pray does, include rainbows, butterflies and all the love and light they are so deserving of. 

The path towards my gifts started at 15 years old, when I was a freshman in high school. My small, tight knit Kentucky town was all I’d ever known and me and my friends were so excited about high school. I’ll admit, I was popular. I always had friends and looking back, can even admit how pretty I was. I always had the things I wanted and needed. I was smart, loved music and movies, got invited to sleepovers and made good grades. I was, at my heart, an all American Girl. 

Because of my PTSD, getting to the next part is confusing for me to write because the trauma that happened caused my brain to disassociate again and again over a 4 year period in order to keep me safe and alive. I’ve come to learn that this is similar to what war veterans experience with nightmares and flashbacks. It's me trying to rebuild the scenes over and over so I can face them and process them. It's taken YEARS. So bear with me, things get a little fuzzy…

My freshmen year of high school, I jumped into a relationship with one of my older brother’s friends. By all accounts, those first couple of months were great. Then came the first breakup and two weeks later getting asked to his prom (he was a senior at the time). Confusion was setting in with my young mind, but hey, I rolled with it… He was the first person to tell me how pretty, beautiful and gorgeous I was. And he meant it. He was the first guy to tell me he loved me. And he meant it. We danced at prom. I lost my virginity to him soon after. Then things got weird.

The summer I lost my virginity, things got intense. He didn’t talk to me for two weeks. Confusing. Looking back, this was probably when my dark spiritual awakening started to happen. He retreated, stopped calling and ghosted me. And I retreated into myself. He just wanted sex. I fell for the teenage stereotype. Damn it. I started to loathe myself for being so stupid.

Over that summer, there would be rumors he was out with other girls, drinking, partying, popping pills. He had just graduated high school and was going crazy. And then he called me…to this day this conversation is still burned in my memory because it's like something had taken over his voice. A desperate, deep plea…

“You are a drug.” He was pleading with me to be his fix. Something he couldn’t get anywhere else. And I let that energy in…desperate for attention and adventure, desperate for anything that would make me feel not so trapped in this small town. 

Over the next 3 years it would be constant ghosting, getting back together, cheating, gaslighting, and love bombing. And I started to realize, I was trapped in it. I couldn’t go anywhere until I turned 18 or graduated high school. But I was still that popular girl, keeping my cool and acting like everything was fine. 

I noticed my spirit started to decline. It started to decline when the first bruises started to appear. No, at first he didn’t hit me. Maybe if he did it wouldn’t have been so confusing. He liked to bite me. Biting. Even as I write this, it's so hard for my brain to understand why. He would bite my arms, my neck, and especially my thighs. And we aren’t talking little nibbles, these bites left black, blue, green and purple layers of color on my skin with diameters of up to 3-4 inches. He bit down hard. I’ve researched why this might be and even my therapist now only has a few guesses. Cannibalistic tendencies? Some Fruedian complex of his two year-old-self? Wanting me to not look attractive to other guys? I might never know. But that’s when my descent into the Underworld started. My body wasn’t protecting me. No one was.

As I began to retreat into myself, I became more isolated. More quiet and shut off. In my room late at night, I remember looking up at my ceiling. I begged God to either take me out of my misery, or take me out of here. The confusion was unreal. Especially the sexual confusion. You see, I was 16 years old but my chest and hips said otherwise. I filled out early and was painfully aware of it. I became a product of infatuation with my very identity being stripped away from me before it even had time to develop.

I soon started to notice my boyfriend’s (if you could really call him that) plunge into sadism. He was starting to get off on inflicting pain. He would do it to himself first, then push the boundaries with me. He held me down and forced me to watch him burn cigarette holes into both sides of his hands like stigmata wounds. A God Complex perhaps? Taking the form of the wounds of Jesus to be more like him? After he was done with himself, he’d hold me down and get as close to my navel and the sensitive parts of my stomach until I was screaming and squirming under his weight to not burn me. He finally gave in if I got too loud or someone walked into his house. A brother, his roommates…he was always careful to keep the facade of the nice guy.

If it wasn’t physical pain he was trying to inflict, it was psychological. During the early days of the internet, around 2006-2007, you could find horrific videos and imagery of the War in Iraq and he liked to hold my head in place as I was forced to watch a soldier or hostage get their throat slit and bleed out. 

I always knew pills and alcohol were involved in various ways, but without question I knew when Xanax was in his system. That’s when things got really dark. Its also when I started to rebel. My senior year of high school I vowed to myself that I was going to have fun. No questions asked. But I always fell back into his trap. Love bombings and “I miss you, come over” wrapped me up in a vicious cycle of codependency. And I started to slowly understand that it wasn’t going to stop or get better. I was wising up. My wisdom turned out to be VERY inconvenient for him. I was starting to see through him. And whatever demons were in his eyes were beginning to realize that my energy supply was becoming limited. His demons were about to double down.

As if my entire relationship with this guy wasn’t grounds for Complex PTSD, there are 3 main events that rocked me to my core. The first was a fight. I don’t remember what caused it but it was probably some variation of his paranoia accusing me of cheating on him. My brain still won’t let me remember the details, but I can see myself underneath him. One of his hands around my neck with my vision fading and his other hand waving a gun to my head and back to his. Then my memories go black again. The next event was some variation of us fighting and making up in my car. But the “making up” part turned angry and I found myself getting raped in my own backseat. I can still hear his voice in my head: “You better not fucking cry.” And the third event happened when I was 17. He filmed us having sex, promising it was just for his use. I fell for it. A week later, I began to hear the small town gossip that he had what can only be described as a watch party with all his friends. To this day, as far as I know, he still has a sex tape of 17 year old me.

I started to see a light at the end of the tunnel though my senior year of high school. I would be 18 and college wasn’t far away. My friends were pulling me to parties every weekend and thank God for it. By that time, we all had boyfriends…and they were all shit. On my 18th birthday, something clicked. The Awakening. The first of many after what seemed like a million tiny deaths everyday since I was 15. A voice came to me. It felt like a woman. Maybe it was my future self. Maybe it was my Higher Self. Maybe it was my grandmother who had recently passed. Maybe it was God. Could God be a woman? I wasn’t sure of anything except that I had hit rock bottom. Eating disorders, rape, sodomy, sneaking out, threats of suicide if I broke up with him, stalking, my dad getting the police involved…things were bad and it was getting hard to hide it. 

My Awakening started to slowly unravel when I became aware of the people surrounding me at the time. My father became desperate for me to get away from my relationship. My mom would later say how her and my dad talked over the phone (they were divorced) for hours on what to do. My brother would try to help in the only way he knew how…tough love. Calling me dumb and stupid for staying with a guy like that. But still letting me retreat to his college apartment an hour away on the weekends. My favorite teacher in the entire world even setting me down and instilling in me not to waste my talents and mind over someone so hellbent on doing the same. My friends. God, my friends. The friends I called crying after having a glass bottle launched at my face. The friends I got drunk with and laughed my ass off with on country back roads. That was my Spiritual Awakening. Friendship. Girlhood. Sisterhood.

The day came when I knew I had to be done, and for good this time. High school graduation came and went and was an absolute nightmare. Tension in my so-called relationship hit a boiling point when I was called over to his place so he could give me my graduation present. When I got there, still decked out in my beautiful white graduation dress, he met me at my car as I got out and forced me to shotgun a beer. Holding it to my mouth, choking me and ruining my dress that I felt so beautiful and graceful in. I pushed him back. Wrong move. He launched the can at me and said some curse I don’t recall. I got back into my car and left. I wasn’t going to take this anymore. I had to find a way out. 

The months after my high school graduation are fuzzy because I entered into a vortex of trying to escape. Getting my college classes booked, keeping a social life and doing all the regular coming-of-age stuff required to become a productive member of society. The last time I ever saw him was when he truly threatened to kill me. He threw me up against a wall, I can still feel the back of my head being thrashed. I ran to my car. He was right behind me and he was angry. Pure rage. He grabbed my hair and slammed my head against my steering wheel over and over. I threw the car in reverse. He dragged himself with the car until, for a brief moment, I saw regret in his face before I pulled out of his driveway and put the car in drive. 

I’m 33 years old now and if you were to ask me how I obtained my gifts of channeling, healing, and energy work, I’d say it’s because I lived a million tiny deaths over and over and over again until I embraced Death. Because Death brings Rebirth. I was pushed to the very edge of my psyche…and what I found there was hope. Through the darkness, there was a bright light of consciousness. In that darkness there is a doorway of limitless possibilities and potential. The darkness I was sitting in began to show light in my friends, my family, and my desperate plea for meaning in this life. My Awakening was violent and took me to Death’s door, and in return, I was given a gift and have since been able to trust that we are not alone in this Universe.