Content Preview: discussion of carceral systems and mentions of systemic & relational abuse

I have been enduring an ongoing court process in Belize for several months relating to domestic violence. I have the sense that the court is dragging out the process in hopes to encourage me to give up.

During this process I have been so grateful for my somatic training and practice. I’ve also been really grateful for my Gemini sun conjunct Chiron in the 8th house, and my Scorpio ascendant conjunct Pluto, who can look directly at the taboo, the dark underbelly of human society, the traumatic, and view it with curiosity and study it with a penetrating scientific mind. This is what made me a great child protective services investigator. These days, I do regular energetic cleansing as I have been taught by some indigenous Shipibo shamans and Black community elders to clear the residue of the things I have witnessed that lingers with me. However, in the moment, I often can view things with strategic distance and be intrigued by the patterns I recognize in the chaos. I can look long upon the darkness until the patterns rise up to meet my gaze. And that is 100% my 8th house Gemini sun, and Scorpio rising at work.

As I sit in court proceedings, because of my two years of Somatic Abolition training with Resmaa Menakem, I am able to sense the overlay of a colonial system’s traumatic reenactment performed today by black and brown bodies located on this land due to enslavement and forced diaspora. I feel the pull of the reenactment in my body, but I pause and choose to stand outside the performance, observing it. I witness a room full of black bodied people in these diaspora conditions competing to prove they can please the British colonizer — who isn’t in the room for decades now — better than the next one. We are back on the plantation regardless that the British massa abandoned Belize before most of us were born in the mid to late 80s. The fealty to plantation hierarchy is stunning, earnest, and fierce, pleading for massa’s approval. It’s horrifying, fascinating, and profoundly sad. I feel enraged to be caught up in this system, and I also feel deep compassion for the level of cultural conditioning and brutality that led the people in this room to feel that deference to the British system of justice imposed on their ancestors violently is their best survival strategy.

The pattern I am observing in court is not random. It is the surface of a deeper cultural wound. I heard an attorney say this week that judges in Belize believe women are filing protection and occupation orders against their male partners not for protection and safety, but just to get the house to themselves. They have already forgotten October 2025. I was told this is impacting the way judges are ruling before they ever see any evidence of abuse. That is evidence of systemic bias that is risking women’s lives. It indicates that the court system here is predisposed to disbelieve women — and that this disbelief is shared by the very people who are supposed to protect them.

Belize desperately needs a decolonial movement, a gender revolution, a worker’s rights uprising, and a children’s human rights campaign. I cannot see progress happening towards sustainability without at least two of these things happening in the next 10 years.

The reality is that Belize is on the front lines of climate collapse. It is somatically undeniable here in a way that it is not felt in many other parts of the world. Even if Belizeans are not consciously noticing this, their bodies are picking up on the growing precarity every day. That can put a body into survival mode, into collapse, into a fight or flight or freeze response that won’t abate. It can make conflict intractable as thousands of people linger outside their window of tolerance due to existential fear that sits right below their conscious awareness. As that dysregulation becomes more pervasive and contagious, instance of abuse increases, trauma replicates, and after a while the possibility for change begins to slip away as more and more of the people who might have led the needed changes — the sensitive people, the artists, the creatives and the visionaries — dissociate long-term, or escape literally into other countries. This dissociation can look like substance abuse, workaholism, binging and numbing out on media, and persistent social isolation.

I am not comparing Belize to other countries. This country stands on its own and I consciously and deliberately chose to be here out of all the other countries I could have chosen. So when I name these patterns, I am naming the gap between what I see on the precipice of possibility for this country, and what it is in truth. I am naming that Belize is in pain on so many levels, and these are destructive choices being made out of deep intergenerational woundedness. I can see it so well because I am in pain too. My loving wish for Belize is for people here to recognize that they have more choices and power available than their colonial trauma tells them.

And so I sit with this complexity in deep compassion.

Belize is a very small country and not particularly influential in international politics. To me this is a unique strength because it means Belize actually can be free to be left alone because there is not much to be gained by trying to control Belize in the eyes of most countries. Being “overlooked” could be to Belize’s benefit. Yes there are territorial disputes, and those are a real threat. Yes there is the potential for US occupation if Belize openly opposed them. However, the amount of resources required to occupy a country with population density as low as Belize has probably low return on investment for countries trying to be efficient colonizers.

There is so much possibility for amazing creative expression, radical transformation of human rights, preservation of culture, community-led economics and other things that could make this place a vibrant and nourishing place to live for everyone without the need for excessive involvement in global capitalism as it collapses. Belize could be shoring up their abundant ancestral wisdom practices around heritage foods and drought resistant crops, remembering its ancestral music and cultural practices to feed the spirits of its people through the transition, and actively preparing for the energy crisis and collapse. But the leaders in Belize are allegedly more interested in gaining the approval of global north funders while lining their family coffers than in doing what is needed to create sustainability and survival resilience for their fellow Belizeans enduring these poly-crises. And while Belizeans know this, they have accepted the status quo much like its inevitable.

A lot of Belizeans have complexes about inferiority and inadequacy. I truly don’t see foreigners looking down on Belize, but Belizeans look down on themselves as a general cultural habit, and the impact of that is palpable and visible in the way people engage in their society here. So many people assume anything made Belizean is bound to be worse than what is created elsewhere, and are not open to the incredible contributions and ideas of their own visionaries. They may even actively sabotage progress, like the crabs in a barrel metaphor. As a witness, I am naming a cultural pattern many Belizeans have spoken to me and also written about, not indicting any individual Belizean.

Why am I saying this? To speak ill of Belize? No, actually. Because I’m still only at the tip of the iceberg in my observations. And these patterns are not unique to Belize. However, in the legal system, really the only system available to protect people from the harm of persistent ongoing intimate partner abuse and relational violence, the cultural misogyny and the nonchalant attitude towards women’s (and children’s) safety costs Belizeans their lives. Costs their health. The present situation is grinding me into exhaustion, but I know that I have the right to leave if I choose to, and that gives me a reserve of resilience that I know is a privilege. That escape hatch is not available to most women here. A woman without wealth, advanced education, or supportive family here is, (forgive me), royally fucked.

What does that constant grinding between a rock and a hard place do to a body? To the collective of bodies assigned female at birth? To generations of women and girls who see powerlessness as their only viable option? This is how you destroy a nation from the inside out. It is how a nation eats itself alive.

One of the metaphors I see in this behavior, this kind of self-loathing on a cultural level is autoimmunity. I came to Belize with autoimmunity and then my symptoms got worse because of the oppressive impacts of gender-based violence and climate collapse. I wrote about this previously. However, it was also here in Belize that I was finally properly diagnosed and able to get life-affirming treatment for my illness for the first time. That made me feel hopeful that dis-ease recognition and healing was part of the energetic signature of this country.

Yet, as I have lived here longer, I see the people of this country I have come to love and be attached to turning on each other and destroying themselves. I believe that too is driven by the poly-crises of climate, social fabric, and economic collapse. And while I know post-colonial healing is very possible, without recognizing these patterns on a cultural and structural level, people caught in them begin to believe there is no other possibility available to them, and either collapse themselves inward like a dying star or join in the self-destruction. As I write this I feel heartbroken. I sit reverently in the grief of loving a country that does not love itself.

My autoimmunity metaphor is intentional. This is a sickness that has been passed down in many black and indigenous diaspora peoples because of colonial trauma that never was confronted, not a moral failing of the individual people living within it. It is not unique to Belize, but because Belize is so small, it is particularly potent here.

So I fully understand why women here do not leave abusive relationships with their men. I understand why my estranged spouse said to me that “there is no accountability for men who abuse and murder women in Belize”. While that was intended to psychologically torture me, truth is, in this moment, that is an accurate statement. There is no community accountability, no legal accountability, no personal accountability, no professional accountability. Cultural misogyny is pervasive and normalized, and most people will never question it unless something radical forces them to reconsider.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I just wonder, because of the inferiority complex many Belizeans have, if many men here feel that they cannot afford to let go of machismo and patriarchy because if they did, they would feel completely powerless in the world. They feel entitled to claim dominance over women here through control and violence as their consolation prize for feeling small on the world stage. At least they can dominate, control, sexually assault, and kill the women here with impunity. At least they know the culture will never hold them accountable or demand they change. At least they feel secure in their social standing here, as blatant misogyny, violence or abuse will never cost them a loss of an election, reputation, jobs, or social connections. At least.

But the cost of that environment is a lack of investment in cultural creativity in the country (something very commonly discussed among Belize’s local artists and musicians). A devaluation of things considered feminine, such as music, art, creative writing, and dance. A major threat is economic stagnation and collapse as women — more than half the population, are prevented from educational opportunities, and from meaningfully and robustly contributing to build businesses. Brain drain as many people who see the meaningful contributions they would like to make in the world unwelcome in Belize, and if they can, leave for places that will tangibly offer their appreciation. The cost is a growing sense of hopelessness and despair among young people and millennials who are approaching middle age.

I am getting to the point of hopelessness myself. I see many needed contributions I could make to this country, but I don’t believe they will be welcomed here. I am not sure that fighting against an abuser and his wealthy and influential family forever trying to terrorize me is a sustainable use of my energy. If Belizeans choose to allow a few families and political figures who do very little to support their broader community to rule their country from the sidelines, beating their wives and girlfriends with impunity, or even running them out of the country — far be it from me to demand systemic change. I can fight for myself but it’s not in me to lead a social movement among people committed to learned helplessness.

I haven’t made a decision yet, but I am doing a somatic experiment of sharing my story, and then noticing how the behavioral response to this story shows up within my sphere of influence. I don’t really care what people think about me if I don’t respect them or have a close relationship with them. So a smear campaign by my abuser is — whatever. But over the next few months I am observing the somatic resonance of my story within my social networks and making note of whether people turn away, victim blame and attack me, stand firmly in place alongside me, and all the responses in between. And that will be what ultimately helps me decide whether my organizing principle of “go where you are invited, and stay where the love is” is possible to be met here. My body will tell me when or if leaving is what best serves me. I don’t care what my enemies are doing; I will keep fighting in the court system to provide a record if that’s what it takes ongoing. But what I will not do is fight standing alone.

cross posted on Medium

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