When Healing Replicates Grooming

I couldn’t make sense of how childhood trauma had tangled my sexual experiences. Therapists said it could be a side effect of childhood abuse. Their voices were even. Pens moved. Eyes dipped to the notebook, then up over the rims of their glasses. A story they heard most days.

I sat in a small room with small windows. Old carpet. Worn chairs. The sharp breath of cleaner in the fabric. I felt like another file in a stack. Words cooled before they reached the air.

I needed a human heart, brave enough to feel with me. Not notes, not theory—warmth that melts what’s been buried for years. The pain had set into a web that pinned my mind, my heart, my body in place.

So I turned to energy healers.

I sit in her waiting room and try to breathe. For years I’ve watched my sexual trauma get minimized—by family, therapists, healers. I learned to minimize it too. No one asks follow-up questions. The injury is deep.

I keep thinking the brokenness is me, not what was done to me. I don’t trust myself; a childhood like mine trained that out. When professionals wave it off, I doubt myself more. That doubt brings me here.

She greets me with a beatific smile and a silent nod, leads me into her office. Amber light pools across the room. Crystals wink along the sill. Statues of Lakshmi, Kuan Yin, and Archangel Michael guard the corners. Lavender—or rose—floats in the air. A salt lamp glows beside a massage table dressed in white linen.

A sanctuary, I think.

I climb up slowly: mid-thirties body, thirteen-year-old pulse—hopeful. When I name childhood sexual abuse, she tips her head and moves on—no questions. No anchoring follow-up.

Mid-session she closes her eyes and declares she is reading the Akashic Records, the cosmic ledger of every lifetime. In her vision I’d once been ruthless, powerful. Her voice stays satin-soft. Her lids flutter. Her arms paint fluid arcs in the air. The story mattered less than the performance—poised, theatrical, unassailable.

Before the next appointment, she calls. Her voice is even. “I am triggered,” she says, and then asks, “Have you ever hurt anyone?”

I say no. I tell her I’ve never had violent impulses. I tell her I struggle to find my voice, that my body shakes and my throat closes when I feel threatened or harassed. This is what I need help with.

I continue to see her. Perhaps the divine she proclaims flows through her can help me.

Visit after visit, she speaks of lifetimes, karma, debt, atonement. I listen—not because it rings true, but because trauma has stolen my compass, and I’m too hopeless to question anything that promises relief. Her suggestions thicken into verdicts: my wounds were earned, my soul fractured long ago, the abuse inevitably my fault. She wields spirit to override consent, calling it intuition.

“You have no heart for human beings,” she declares in one of the sessions.

Something in me—thirteen and unguarded—falls under her authority. Her questions plant seeds I never carried. She fertilizes them, and they grow. I do with her what I did with my abuser. I let her reality replace mine.

On her table, violent images begin to appear. I tell her. We talk about past lives. With her guidance, I come to believe the abuse I suffered must have been punishment for what I did in those imagined lifetimes.

Another session. I bring a list of goals. One line reads: stronger legs. She says, “Your legs are weak because you chopped people’s legs in a past life.”

I bring what confuses me most: my attraction to men, and the grief of a lost childhood. I ask to stay with that pain. She guides the session everywhere but where I want to focus—“divine” will overrules mine. I don’t protest.

As I’m leaving, she says kindly, “You are female from inside. You should be friends with a client you met at our last social event.” The client liked to dress like a woman.

I step into the hallway and put my palm on the wall. The building hums. I wait for the spin to pass. The thirteen-year-old is still here—quiet, waiting for someone to ask how he feels, what happened to him.

After more than a decade moving through different energy-healing spaces, I’ve learned this about myself: when someone tracks my inner world for me, when they lead my process instead of following it, my agency quietly slips away. No one can enter that terrain without bringing their own wounds with them. I felt those wounds land in my body long before I had language for them.

What heals me now is simpler, and harder to fake. Healing doesn’t arrive as oracle speech or bury pain beneath cosmic stories. It happens in relationship—one human heart willing to be affected by another, someone choosing to stand beside me, not above me.