My maternal grandmother, whom I have never met, nor ever known, gave up my mother for adoption. Historically, Vietnam was split in half after the 1954 Geneva Accords, creating a communist north and a non-communist south - which created displacement and extreme poverty.

This woman gave up her child, an act of complete desperation, and that was her medicine for the world, one that she would never know in her lifetime.

Just before turning 40, I opened Pandora’s box - trying out EMDR therapy on a voice I heard in my head. It turned out to sound like bombs and gunfire going off in the distance, and eventually to hearing the screaming voice of my own mother while in utero on her refugee journey out of Vietnam.

The first mother gave up her child. The second mother fled her home.

I am now 45.

Five years of therapy later, and making small reps over and over in my life while the ground beneath me crumbles, I found enough internal capacity to look back.

There has always been an existential imperative to always look forward, never look back, and to keep going - all the perfect ingredients to be a soldier of what bell hooks called "the white-suprmacist capistlist patriarchy.”

Even with all that work I put in for the past five years, my life was crumbling before me.

I engaged with another EMDR therapist to go back to that in utero moment, now with brighter colors and more capacity to feel.

In my body, I feel the clenching of my front body, my shoulders roll forward, and my arms clench like t-rex. My back feels exposed. When I lean back, there’s nothing there. It’s a black hole, a void of nothingness.

The darkness was the womb, flooded with annihilation energy of war. More bombs were dropped onto SE Asia than World War II combined, times 2, including the two nuclear bombs. Go back further, and the brutality of French colonization on the locals equated similar to the colonization across the world, extracting local resources like rubber from the trees to make tires.

My westernized brain tries to make a hero out of this, but the reality was utter annihilation and destruction, and the feelings of anguish.

She fled her home, her country on a wooden river boat - where nearly 400k Vietnamese refugees parished at the bottom of the South China sea.

Seven days at sea, attacked by sea pirates.

I was around 12 weeks of gestation, a fetus forming, swimming in the experience of the outside world.

Her experience, her terror breaks past the placenta barrier, and it becomes my world. Her dissassociation from the world, to survive the trauma, the energetic and somatic sense of the holding container of the womb vanishes, and I’m floating in a vast, cold, unanchored void.

In this moment, all that annihilation energy she carried, and all the ancestral memories, transfers to me, the energy turned inward because it had nowhere to go.

I felt this strong desire to self-destruct, but the inability to make it stop.

As an adult, I’m sometimes making maladaptive decisions and behaviors, and when questioned why, I have no answers. I am in a terror state, and I want to end myself to make it stop.

Now as an adult, there are somatic therapies where I can go back to that moment, and then put in the physical contact that I needed back then, in utero, a loving contact that everything is okay, I’m safe, I’m loved.

When that contact came, my body shook.

The years of energy started to move.

Bubbles of joy, started to ripple up the black tar that oozed over me.

In that moment, my body found the felt sense of safety in stillness, held by a body that was regulated, grounded, and contained.

In my 20s, I spent a lot of times at dance clubs, with loud blasting music and lots of moving bodies. It was chaotic, and I lost myself there. It wasn’t till now that I realized what my body was trying to do.

Today, my jam is estatic dance where I can be in an unstructured space with those on a similar journey. Here, the space can be held so that I can find that felt sense of safety in movement, the opposite of the fleeing.

As an adult, I spent my life seeking out someone that would give me permission to stop. I wasn’t able to articulate it into words, just maladaptive behaviors.

I was a fetus in an adult body trying to tell another adult what I needed.

Years went by, and a path of destruction left behind.

The wave would come like always. The existential feelings in my body would build up. And when no one gave me permission, or took it for me, I turned that energy inward to myself, often seeking self medication, and all the vices I could find.

This wave would crash again and again, often onto me.

Over and over.

Breaking me.

And as that felt sense of safety in stillness and movement brought by mind, body, and spirit back into alignment - I came to the realization, that I am an adult, and I do not need permission.

I am the adult I was seeking for to get permission to stop.

I am the adult I needed to be there with me.

I am an adult.

My writing is slowly evolving into myths, narratives, and lore rather than a logical accounting of the inner work I’m doing. And in the spirit of serving my readers, I’m listing out the

EDMR - Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

Psychodrama - Chapter 18 of The Body Keeps the Score, or via Linda Thai

Somatic Experiencing - method developed by Peter Lavine for titrating the nervous system

Estatic Dance

5Rhythms - I didn’t write above but this form of dance has been incredibly healing for me

School of Lost Borders

Animas Valley Institute

And also in the spirit of growth and support, as you read this (or not), what comes up for you. I found in my own journey that sometimes our soul needs to hear the words come out of our mouths (or fingers via keyboards).

Remember that the exercise is what moved within you, not a putting me or my own story on display (you can if you want). I am but just another human in the sea of waves crashing.

I will read it with loving care, and write back what you ask for (reflection, acknowledgement, guidance, validation, etc.).