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Women, Trauma, and Spiritual Surrender

Writer's picture: Caroline AllenCaroline Allen

Often, when women are called to surrender to Spirit, we rightfully resist. Surrender feels too much like submission, and we've had centuries of that. As a tarot reader for decades, I've seen this resistance to surrendering to a spiritual calling play out in numerous women all over the world.


I was a journalist in London in the 1990s when I had a sudden psychic opening and a call to spiritual surrender. I was reporting the abuse of disabled children in a nonprofit organization and going through a divorce. Both were traumatizing to me.


Was it trauma that suddenly opened my psychic doors? I don’t know.


I just know that I could suddenly read everyone’s mind. I’d be walking to the tube in Brixton, and

I’d hear hundreds of thoughts. On the tube to work, hundreds more.


A cacophony of desire.


A chorus of despair.


What was happening to me?


It was my first time seeing a therapist. She was a spiritual counselor. I’d never heard of such a thing, all I knew was that as I walked toward her home office in Bethnal Green, I’d feel a love I hadn’t felt in years. I felt like I was coming home.


I was a wreck. Less than 100 lbs, filled with anxiety, and coming to a breaking point. Besides the mind-reading, I had no idea how to manage all of the spirits visiting me daily.


I know now what I didn’t know then -- I was being called to surrender in two ways…surrender to the truth of my need for profound healing from childhood abuse, and surrender to this new way of seeing the world.


Surrender. It’s a horrible word for abuse survivors.


I moved to Seattle and ultimately used this new gift to help thousands of people, but the journey there was terrifying.


Terrifying.


I’d do soul-sucking jobs to make money, the entire time, the universe telling me clearly to surrender to the psychic gifts, to help heal people, to make money that way. Surrender to a higher power? A white, bearded MAN in the sky? Surrender to a man? Every trigger in the world was activated inside me. Never. I would never surrender. I’d worked too hard to become a woman of power, a journalist who wrote articles that made a difference.


Still the call was strong. Spirit needed me to surrender so it could work through me.


Let’s say I could get over the abuse trigger, what would surrender look like?


I’d become some born again nut job? I’d be some white trash tarot reader? I’d be broke? Other people would see me as crazy? I’d be so on the fringe, there would be no chance of any kind of normal life? I’d become some cookie-cutter spiritual person who spouted neo-religious claptrap? The cookie-cutter fear was the greatest of the fears.

I wanted my European life back! I wanted my jet-setting life back! I wanted it back!

What I learned -- excruciatingly slowly -- was that the more I surrendered, the happier I became. The more I humbled it up, the more purpose I felt. The more I bowed to something higher than myself, the quirkier I became. I came out of a three-year-long “awakening”, looked up, and realized that my Spirit was quirky and passionate and wild, and the cookie-cutter people were actually the mainstream.

During this time, I started using the tarot to try to give the mind-reading/visionary energy some kind of organized outlet. I learned that the only way I could really help heal someone was if I totally surrendered myself to whatever Spirit wanted me to pass on. I could give a reading that was OK without surrendering, but the real transformation and healing happened with full surrender.


I also quit smoking weed and cigarettes, quit drinking, quit my favorite drug, ecstasy, started biking and hiking--not because I thought I should, but because I wanted to. I wanted the simple pleasures. I wanted life.


Surrender asks that we not focus on ourselves, but instead on the greatest and highest good for all. And in so doing, we get exactly what we’ve always wanted.

One of the things I worry about in writing a blog about surrender is this: Does it put women back in the role of the subservient caregiver?

The devaluing of the Divine Feminine is core to that question and is the subject of another blog. For now, I'll simply say, the more I surrender the more my art and writing flourish. The muses work through me at rocket speed, spiritual and creative energy are one, and this moves through me, mixes with my personality and my individuality, and comes out of my hands as a work of art or a novel.

Surrender is nothing like care giving. It’s alignment with the great Creator.






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