u/Alarmed-Elk4229

I recently read Heal the Witch Wound by Celeste Larsen and it has activated a lot of the painful isolation I feel from the feminine and female friends. All my last female friendships ended badly or we lost touch or I felt so scared or didn’t know how to connect that I lost touch. It was my fault. I have so much internalized patriarchy that it isolates me from my fellow women. Right now socially I lean on my boyfriend and a couple of trans femme and nonbinary friends. They feel less uncomfortable and easier. With female friends I feel so scared, jealous, small, insecure, judgmental. I hate it. I am healing from CSA as well and reigniting a lot of anger towards men and the patriarchy and it makes me feel alone. Like I have no one to talk to because I’ve pushed away all my female friends. I joined a women’s group through meetup that will meet this Friday. And I’m going to talk about it. Curious if other people here can offer support or have gone through the same thing?

I realized I feel sad and I miss my mom and my dad my grandma and my family even though I’m not talking to them because of how they handled it when I told them my brother was molesting me at 9. I told them when I was 9, they told my brother and it stopped but then they brushed it under the rug and acted like it didn’t happen. Life went on as normal.

when I was 15 and spoke up about it again, my mom gaslit me, minimized it, made me feel guilty for not wanting to see my brother. And my dad has just always been so fragmented that it’s like he doesn’t even understand how much of a tragedy it is that his son molested his daughter. He still maintained the idea we could be a happy family and just acted like it didn’t happen.

As an adult, I realized all this and moved out from living with my parents and my brother who abused me at 9. I stopped talking to my grandma who said “it was just playing. it was so long ago. forgive and forget” and doesn’t understand. I am no contact with my brother and I probably will be for the rest of my life.

Tonight I cried heavily because I miss them. I feel guilty that I don’t want to see them or talk to them, even though I believe it’s right. I deserve to be around people that understand what I went through and understand it was a big deal. And won’t minimize it, or emotionally abandon me.

of course i miss them. It hurts to leave your family. Even if they didn’t understand you. It’s not natural for the human body. I wonder though if I made the right choice. If I should’ve just accepted they won’t be the way I want them to and still love them anyways. Maybe that’s a big ask from me. I still miss my mom and I know she loves me and she’s sorry to an extent. She doesn’t fully take responsibility she says things like “I can’t change the past. We just didn’t know what to do.” But never says what she should’ve done instead. To her, life moves on. She told me that once.

Maybe one day we could reconnect. It’s just sad. I don’t have a choice in grieving this. It just is.

TLDR: I got a cigar psychic reading from a man in a spiritual shop who told me that in order to cleanse me of my blockages I needed to take my clothes off and put them on the table while he smoked.

For context I am a survivor of CSA and incest by my brother when I was 9 years old.
The other day I was looking to buy a new tarot deck and stumbled into this spiritual shop in Echo park los angeles where everything was in Spanish and the small shop was empty except one man in an office in the back listening to some video in spanish. I looked around while he was busy and when he saw me he invited me into his office, a little room in the back. It was a little eery but spooky in an inviting way so I came in. I felt safe enough as I’m closer to the exit than he is.
I asked him if he had any cards for readings and he said that I should get a cigar reading and he only spoke Spanish, so all of our conversations were translated through Siri. He showed me a picture of the cigars that he has burnt during readings and one of them had a face which was super intriguing. I’m super spiritual, and I believe in magic and esoteric and spiritual beliefs. He asked if I wanted one and I asked how much and he said 150 I said that was too much for me and he said how much is better and I said I would pay 50 and he said he would do it for 75.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted one yet, but the conversation changed and he looked at my ring, put a pendulum over it and said that my ring had some energy and he wanted to clean it. I asked how much and he said he would do it for free so I let him clean my ring I thought it was a nice moment and I felt safe enough.
eventually, we talked, and I agreed to do a cigar reading so he asked me to shut the door and and set a prayer and set up cigar on a plate. He marked the cigar on top with a red marker and told me that if the cigar burned to the left. It was good if it burned to the right, it was bad and if it burned to the bottom, it was really bad. when he started burning it, it burned on the bottom and it continued to burn on the bottom for the rest of the reading pretty much throughout the time that the cigar was burning he picked up on a lot of intuition that were really correct for me like that I was lonely and that someone had taken my sexual energy and that I had cramps in my feet because my root chakra was blocked. It was pretty eerie that he knew that I had cramps in my feet because I I have literally been having beat cramps lately, and I knew it was because I feel disconnected from my feet because of sexual trauma and abuse. He picked up on a lot of the energies and I kept saying that he was correct and then eventually he said we can cleanse it if you want to cleanse it you have to take off all your clothes put them on the table and I will sit here and smoke. The smoke would cleanse me, and my energy would be clear of blockages.
when he said that I had to take off my clothes, my heart dropped, but I stayed stuck in the sort of limbo where I doubted myself if he was trying to take advantage of me abuse me or if it was legitimate that he really in order to cleanse them needed for somebody to be naked. But when I really think about it, I don’t even believe that because I think you can do a lot of spiritual healing and cleansing with your clothes on.
It’s weird because I believed a lot of the things that he said about me before he asked me to take my clothes off so it makes it sad and it makes me really angry because if he is trying to take advantage of me, it’s really disgusting if he’s not trying to take advantage of me, it just feels really inaccessible to sexual abuse victims that want to spiritually heal using a ritual facilitated by him. I told him that I couldn’t do that and that I wouldn’t do it because I need to protect myself and I’ve been abused before I told him about how my brother abuse me and he was genuinely sad. I cannot tell if he was trying to take advantage of me or not he said he wouldn’t touch me and that he wouldn’t hurt me or do anything wrong, but I don’t even want a man to ask me to take my clothes off because the world and men has ruined any sort of innocence that could have in any context. There’s too many men too many spiritual leaders, priest authority. Figure figures, power holders that put themselves in a position to be the most enlightened, the smartest, the most morally superior people just so they can take advantage of vulnerable people and extract their sexual energy, see them naked, touch them abuse them for their own selfish reasons. I would appreciate if we could all have a discussion of this.

But please no comments about don’t believe in psychic stuff because you’re wasting your time. I am very spiritual. I believe in that stuff so if you’re gonna comment something like that, don’t. please no comments criticizing, mocking my beliefs, or victim blaming me.