The inner harmony circle: the love that returnes to me

For 15 years, I have embarked on a healing journey without knowing where it would lead, but with a clear vision of how I wanted to feel. I recall the first time I spoke about my experience of sexual abuse. I was starting my psychology degree, and in a group exercise, the words of that painful and distressing experience at the age of 17 began to flow from my mouth, almost involuntarily. As I shared, I felt the love of the community surrounding me, reminding me that I was not alone. It was the first time I felt heard and supported.

Yet, fear also seized me, appearing larger than ever. My mind and body bore many traces of shame, and every attempt to speak about my experience, even using the word "victim," was met with tears. I would narrate the experience in fragments, omitting details that were painful for me and made me fear that I wouldn't be believed.

I made numerous attempts to heal, exploring various paths to address the scars of abuse. Over the years, what I initially considered false attempts were timid steps toward reclaiming the power I felt I had lost in that experience. Many of these steps led me to connect with my feminine strength, and without ever reading about feminism, I became a feminist.

Whenever I observed a diminished woman, I felt a desire to empower her, to make her feel recognized, heard, and loved, as I hadn't felt in many moments before. Armed with courage, I eventually tried to discuss it with my family, understanding deep within me that it wasn't just my experience. This led to uncomfortable moments, witnessing my mother's deep and irrational fear every time I mentioned it. At that time, I didn't yet comprehend that her inability to listen and acknowledge was likely due to her own experiences of abuse, where she found survival in silence.

Despite my family's limited understanding, I continued to speak about it because my body began to scream that it needed healing—for me, for my past generations, and, above all, for those to come.

My journey hasn't followed a perfect formula. I often found myself in relationships that were only there to remind me that I held the value of who I am. In other relationships, I realized that if I didn't have a loving relationship with myself, I couldn't share who I am with someone else.

I rarely felt understood, beyond that moment in university where I'm sure many of us who chose psychology did so because we wanted to recognize and probably later recognize in others the scars and pains we carried.

There were many therapeutic processes and internal searches, even delving into early experiences I didn't remember, and I went through moments of intense pain. But I also began to rediscover myself. Reiki has been my anchor, integration, and liberation for over seven years. I gave myself permission to feel, process, and transform.

Recently, doubts about the violence, abuse, and harassment that people inflict on each other started to resurface in my life, but from a different perspective. The abuse led me to question gender roles, fearing I wouldn't find conscious, loving, and caring men. Interestingly, I also encountered women who went from being victims to victimizers. Gender didn't matter; unprocessed pain turns into anger and potentially violence.

One day, I wanted to do more with the pain, to offer more to the world than resentment. I wanted to explore what more I could achieve with these experiences and my individual observations of them. I began reading and listening to stories of people who repair, wondering if I could ever be in that place. This is where the Inner Harmony Circle comes in—a proposal to cultivate the present, evolving into a safe space for women to listen, recognize, and lovingly support each other in the journey to heal the layers and scars left by abuse, harassment, and sexual violence.

This group, along with my participation in a masculinity circle as co-host of the podcast iMANcipados, has brought love back to me. It has restored my desire to repair relationships among peers who, for years, saw each other as enemies. Within all femininities, I like to think of myself as part of those reclaiming intersectional conversations because every person deserves to inhabit this world being recognized, valued, and heard.