A Deeper Well: The Story of Jane Doe

Like many, I have been aware of the increasing number of posts on social media regarding Jane Doe and the Cornell 7. Fragments of stories swirling around in the dark waters coalescing to form a single story with infinite reflections: The Story of Jane Doe.

The story of Jane Doe is gaining momentum, rising to the surface of our individual and collective psyche, in the same vein as the “Me too” movement that surged to global prominence in October 2017.

On Thursday 5 October 2017, The New York Times published an investigative report detailing decades of sexual harassment and sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein. Then on Sunday 15th October the “Me Too” movement became a dominant viral news headline.

Here we are exactly 9 years later. What has changed?

Campaigns against sexual violence flow back through the timeline to the 1860s when organised resistance in the United States was pioneered by black women who stood against gender-based violence.

Less than 100 years before that, in 1782, the last legal execution in Europe for witchcraft took place in Switzerland. Her name was Anna Goeldi.

Reading the testaments of women who are stepping forward to tell their story has impacted me; old scars, never quite healed, bleed again. Far beneath the earth stagnant waters, like coagulated pools of blood, are disturbed and begin to flow and seep through to our daily awareness.

Movements, I believe, begin because the surge of unconscious and repressed material swells to a level where it threatens to break through the barriers. These barriers are constructed containers held in place to maintain the social order. When the river rises high enough the banks will burst; dams will break; and sea levels will rise, threatening flood and devastation.

I these containers as grids loosening from ancient and holy wells. Galvanised steel or iron grates, or else full bolted down metal covers, required by law in the UK, Europe, and the United States, that are installed to contain active and historical water wells.

This is an apt metaphor for contained aspects of the feminine psyche that are deemed too dangerous to flow freely.

Movements and campaigns take root to contain the deluge of emotion that threatens to disturb the system. But here’s the thing, although the material that is surfacing is very real and is often only the tip of the iceberg, movements and campaigns can have the effect of quelling the intensity and controlling the upsurge. It is damage limitation. It prevents things from becoming too raw, too real, and too close to uncovering deeper truths.

Any movement or campaign that gains global traction to saturate media channels and provoke a reaction in tens of millions of people, is also subject to manipulation. Dark and unacknowledged content from the unconscious is dangerous and without some form of mediation is likely to incite chaos and breakdown. Our culture is carefully designed to prevent this from happening.

By co-opting movements, those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, cleverly allow the material to flow into the collective sphere which presents an illusion of acknowledgement, while at the same time using raw emotion and unhealed wounds for any nefarious purpose. Here we are in the shady territory of trauma-based mind control and manipulation, that can also act as a covert tool of retraumatisation.

It is no coincidence that this material is surfacing at a time when women and men are increasingly set against each other.

That is not to say I am not in full and unequivocal agreement with the Jane Doe campaign. On the contrary I recognise it as part of a much deeper mobilisation of repressed energy in the collective psyche that will need to be released. If we are to evolve organically and retain our humanity–rather than evolve inorganically– wounds of the past must be brought to the light of consciousness and healed.

Healing happens when we can clearly see the underlying forces that have led to the current situation. This requires a descent. The past is never done with us. We cannot simply erase it, or wipe it clean like a computer programme.

When women declare “I am Jane Doe” I am 100% behind them, and I encourage them to tell their stories. But I also encourage them to tell it in their own way from the depths of their own being and in the first person. Identifying with Jane Doe is a positive and valuable step however it potentially perpetuates and even deepens a split.

For me the journey is to own my experiences as my experiences while placing them within a systemic framework. The danger of movements and campaigns like “Me Too” is that the power of psychic energy released from the unconscious is manufactured and co-opted by the system. It flows from the outside in instead of the inside out. In other words, it is controlled by the very system that would otherwise fall under scrutiny.

Yes, I am Jane Doe, but today I also say:

I am Karen Smith. Since childhood and into adulthood I have had experiences of sexual abuse, assault, sexual shaming, and coercion. I have on occasion been blamed for what has happened to me. I have never spoken about it fully because I have not felt safe to do so, and when I have attempted to I have been silenced. I have also been disbelieved. At times when I did try to integrate these exiled parts of myself and bring them to the conversation, I have been further victim shamed. This shaming has happened with women as well as men.

The question I am sitting with today is how do we individually and collectively lift the lids that cover the waters of life so that the waters run clear once again?

Ultimately, how do we free ourselves from systems, both internally and externally, that inhibit or distort the truth of who we truly are. How do we do this by honouring the humanity of ourselves and each other, men and women?

And how do I own my story, not just tell it but own it as part of me, while not allowing it to reduce me?