My Journey — Lorena Palazzo

From the sweet and innocent age of 9 through to 14.5 years, I was sexually abused by my step father, who was a brutal and moody in that volcano kind of way person. The sexual abuse was accompanied by severe physical and mental abuse. My mother, may she rest in peace, had little to no ability to connect to her partners, her family, or her daughters. She coped with her immediately failing second marriage by working or being at church, or partying or being back at church, in a cycle she couldn't break. She enabled the abuse through absence, denial, and outright lying. My 2 sisters, one 7 years older and one 6 years younger, and myself were often at home with his tyrannous outbreaks and physical abuse. We were left to fend for ourselves inside a living nightmare. At almost 15, I felt I had to run away from home.

Shortly after running away, I experienced my first saving grace. My sister, who was recently married, took me under her wing and let me live in her home. I am eternally grateful for the deep sense of motherly and sisterly nurturance I experienced with her for the first time in my life. I’m certain that my younger sister and I were able to maintain some sense of sanity due to my older sister’s fierce protective love and care.

The psychological damage of the abuse, however, lived in me. Weighed down with heavy guilt and shame and longing to be saved, I spent most of my adolescence in and out of various Christian religions of the fire and brimstone variety.

When confessing my sins failed to get me saved, I turned to drugs, alcohol, and sex for relief. My compulsions often got me in very precarious relationships and situations, but my survival skills would reliably land me on my feet. In time, I embraced the strategy of hiding it all from the world, presenting to it the confident exterior of one who had it going on. It worked brilliantly, based on how often I was told I was lucky. No one knew how badly and how often I wanted to run away, how painfully awkward and out of place I felt, how desperately I was trying to belong somewhere. I never ever felt like I fit in - and I wouldn’t let anyone in either.

Hitting womanhood and divorcing at 31 years old brought the clarity that something fundamental about my way of moving through the world was off and needed to shift. One consistent aspect of my nature, which has been with me for as long as I can remember, was the desire to make sense of my life - to know what had happened to me wasn’t all for naught. I moved toward this desire by starting therapy and diving deeply into self help and self growth, learning and implementing as much as I could grasp. I became certified in the fields of life coaching and relational awareness, because I intuited that some sense making was to be found in giving back and creating healthy relationships.

Even within these drives, I could still sense something wasn’t quite allowing me to fully embrace the tapestry of my life. Until, eventually, I found journey work. This ancient approach to healing and the medicine from another world gave me the safety and the permission to open to a deeper sense of who I really was, see beyond the hurt, and find wellness within myself.

Both the support of my therapist and the practices of the journey world, with the continued guidance from Great Spirit, have been essential to my growing into a sovereign being. I believe our healing and wholeness require the intelligence of our modern world as much as the intelligence of the ancient worlds. My sovereign path is to stand at the confluence of ritual and ceremony with Internal Family Systems (parts work), somatic awareness, relational awareness, and the Enneagram, and to create an ethical, safe container for others to be witnessed and to experience themselves with full permission.

I can only do this by standing in integrity and honesty within myself and in my community. I am a sovereign priestess type on a tremendous path of healing and self-acceptance. My story is still unfolding. The path is not done - I am walking it every day.