Yesterday, a 22-year-old woman we work with made a difficult decision to surrender everything she has known for the last 9 years and dive deep into her healing journey. It probably sounds silly and cliché, but at HealEx we think about it like a caterpillar entering a cocoon. Intense transformation is about to happen, and when she emerges, she will be free. What's the story?
Imagine this. Your mother is struggling with a drug addiction and before you can walk you are taken into custody by the government. You grow up in a foster care system, going from one house to the next. Eventually someone adopts you and tries their very best, but you are deeply traumatized at your core.
At 13 years old you reconnect with your biological mother, and it rocks you! So many deep wounds that have gone unhealed begin to bleed. It's emotionally painful and you have a lot of incredibly anxious moments.
During one of those moments, a friend introduces you to cigarettes and you start smoking with them. It makes you feel a little more calm and you feel like you're finally fitting in. But cigarettes aren't super easy to come by when you're 13... so you take them when you can get them.
On your way home from school you see that same friend talking to a man in a car and he hands her a cigarette. You walk over and he offers you one too. As you light it up he says he can take you to the corner store down the road and buy you a pack. So you get in the car.
20 minutes later you're way past the corner store, pulling up to an old house in a neighborhood you've never been to. 30 minutes later you've been gang raped in a crack house. And you have now entered a cycle of shame, abuse, and exploitation. One of these men sells you for sex on and off for the next 2 years of your life.
You don't have the social skills or self-worth to realize that smoking cigarettes at 13-years-old doesn't mean you deserve to be sex trafficked.
Years of abuse and shame go by, at the age of 17, you're addicted to meth and heroin. You use the drugs to numb your emotional and psychological pain. You get kicked out of your final foster home and end up homeless on the streets. And the sexual exploitation continues as your only known means of survival.
Fast forward through 6 years of horror.
Yesterday, someone from HealEx sat down with you and said, "Hey, do you want to be done with all this trauma? Do you want to get out of this horrible situation?"
You courageously surrender everything you've known - your identity as a throwaway youth, as a prostitute, as a drug addict. You let go of those silly labels, and embrace the reality that you are a human being, and you are worth healing.
Yesterday, we facilitated that girl's entry into a rehabilitation program. Now she's curling up in her cocoon. She is ready to dig deep into her soul and heal the old trauma that has been holding her captive. When she emerges, she will be free to fly.
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