From Survivor to Healer: The Journey of tree turtle

“Most of the people who start being abused as I was as an infant do not survive. Then there’s the group of us whose lives become unmanageable because the sheer weight of all we’ve gotten is so hard. Then there’s the ones who have to find a way within themselves to become the force of change, not just for themselves, but for others.” ~ tree turtle (Miss Cleis Abeni)

TRIGGER WARNING: content includes mention of sex-trafficking, abuse, and rape.

This story is a journey from the brutal abuse and sex-trafficking of a small child to her healing, spiritual growth, and visionary adult work in an urban community ravaged by violence and poverty.

Today, tree turtle (her legal name, intentionally lowercase) is a healer, peacemaker, organizer, educator, designer, editor, writer, & storymaker. She is an ordained Buddhist Upāsikā and the executive director of Wisdom Projects, Inc., a “Baltimore-based secular nonprofit organization committed to peace, safety, and justice for low-income youth, adults, and families who have survived violence and who struggle to overcome mental health challenges.”

tree turtle and I first connected when she commented on a post in LIVEdammit’s earlier incarnation, Survivors’ Haven. She recognized something in the site that few others had—a commitment to the transformative power of storytelling and the healing it can bring. I am honored to share her story and wisdom today.

Enduring the Unimaginable: Surviving a Childhood of Poverty and Violence

“My whole entire lifetime has been dedicated to this one issue, preventing violence,” says tree: “not just one form of violence, because the violence is integrative. The violence of poverty that I endured as a child was caught up within my being sex-trafficked as a four-year-old, five-year-old, six-year-old, seven-year-old.”

She was among the child victims of a group of adult male predators that included a famous television and film actor and the major head of a Catholic home for impoverished children. One of the leaders of this group was an entertainment manager, former actor, director, and children’s drama teacher who, under the cover of representing the children as their theatrical agent, drove them to supposed “auditions” in hotels across the United States during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Instead of auditions, the children were photographed, filmed, or videotaped while being raped by the predators.

tree was born autistic-hyperlexic and not fully verbal, but at two and a half, she exhibited advanced reading and writing skills. “I found a way to speak through writing, through drawing,” she says, “and I never shut up.” When the rounds of abuse left her ill with STDs, tree’s aunt took her to a pioneering pediatrician named Dr. Margaret Mary Nicholson, who diagnosed and reported her condition to the authorities.

But it was only a reprieve: after suffering further abuse and gang-rape as she was shuffled through more foster facilities, tree was eventually sent back to her mother in a D.C. housing project, where her mother subjected her and her brother to “unbelievable violence,” she says.  It ended when her mother took her and her brother across town on a murderous rampage against one of her mother’s partners. As the man rushed out with a baseball bat, tree’s mother pushed her forward with a paring knife, ordering her to kill him. He struck tree, knocking her out.

“I fully regained consciousness about a few days later,” she says, in another foster facility, and “I was being interfered with when I woke up. Then the preying upon me began.” Despite the fierce protection of an older girl, the first gang rape occurred within several weeks. “Then the second, 24 hours later. They broke my arm and they destroyed me internally. I had to be hospitalized for six months. I had two surgeries. I said to myself in the hospital, I’m either going to die (because I had a series of rolling infections), or I’m going to live. I’m going to get out of this.”

And with that decision, tree strategically began to change her life. She was in her early adolescence.

Breaking Free: A Path to Healing and Purpose

“I asked one of the social workers, ‘How do I become an adult if I am a child?’…I don’t want to go back to any foster facility. I want to take care of myself.” That question was tree’s first step into the process of legal emancipation, with the help of pioneering social service provider named Dr. Brenda Strong Nixon, one of the founders of the Consortium for Youth Services and Consortium for Child Welfare.

Once free and responsible for herself, she joined Baltimore’s summer youth employment program, working as a researcher and curatorial assistant with art historian Dr. Guy C. McElroy, who also provided her with safe housing. “He was the first man who did not interfere with me in any way,” tree says.  He also introduced tree to Buddhism, and soon after, she took a freight ship from the Port of Baltimore to Thailand and began her studies at the Wat Dhammakaya, one of the few Buddhist temples founded and run by a woman, eventually ordaining as an Upāsikā or secular nun living and working outside of a temple.

By ordaining at a young age, under the teaching of temple founder Maechi Chandra Khonnokyoong, tree established the structure that would support her healing and future work. She learned to “edit out and establish hard and fast boundaries against the things that usually leave multiple-trauma survivors unable to cope.” She made a “powerful groundwork [of] taking vows of the Five Precepts, leading a life of celibacy and sobriety and total harmlessness, and maintaining my vows for 30+ years.”

During her eight years of Buddhist studies, tree also earned her GED, then studied nursing under the mentorship of Chuck Davis at the National Capital School for Nursing.

“Baba Chuck Davis, he was a nursing teacher,” tree says, “but he was also the head of Dance Africa, a huge organization that was devoted to the preservation of African dances in America. And he also sensed what I needed.” His guidance as tree became first a nurse, then a registered nurse in psychiatry, also gave her a vocation: to be a healer. She supplemented her nursing training with fieldwork in neighborhood violence prevention and studies in trauma-informed care, anti-racist social psychology, herbology, African holistic health and more.

Healing Herself to Heal Others

The lessons in healing also encompassed self-healing. While the physical and emotional scars of her traumas remained – and remain – tree also learned the value of choosing her associations carefully and setting up a lifestyle that would support and nurture her.

“It’s a daily struggle, maintaining this path,” she adds.  “And though I meditate every single day, the particular challenge comes at night. Almost all of the terror I endured, the abuse, the rape, the beating, the breaking of bones, even the things I endured as an adult, the muggings, all of them occurred at night. Being woken up in the night – I remember at the age of 3, one of my earliest memories was being woken up by an elder sibling to be burned with a hot-pressing comb. The burn mark is still on my face. The burning occurred in the middle of the night, so in semiconsciousness, you’re not alert and can’t protect yourself, even to run.”

“So although I’ve worked very hard across 45 or more years about sleep and rest, it becomes quite a challenge to me. And you have to have a very strong mind and body and constitution to prepare yourself for rest.”

She describes the bedtime routine she’s developed to overcome those night fears: “I take what might seem to some people unusual steps: I watch episodes of Scooby-Doo, I play forest sounds, and I have big plush animals around me to hold onto if something happens and I have a flashback. And even though I’m old now, I’ve worked through the shame of those mitigations so I can get my rest and feel safe and comforted.”

Underlying all her personal healing work, however, is a deeper driving force: focusing her life, her skills, and her energy on making a difference.

“I want you to know that the most important thing is really not me,” she says. “The most important thing is deciding to live a life in contribution to others. And if something happens and I pass away tomorrow, I have left a legacy of uplifting hundreds of people almost every day of my life in very structured and well-thought-out ways, applying all of my skill and training to uplift survivors and guide them on a path of wholeness and healing. And to say to them, ‘No one is broken. They can attempt to break you, but you are whole, you just have to maintain it.’”