Here are two compelling images on songwriter Cici
Porter's website. One is a stark black-and-white photo of a young girl whose
shy, dark eyes, deep with secrets, stare into the lens, unaware of the pain
that will come with age. The other is a spirited, energized painting of a bird
in flight, a hawk or a falcon perhaps, rendered in all shades of gold,
butter-yellow, daffodil, and ivory. One is the songwriter's past; the other is
her future.
These two things are blended
for any songwriter, of course. A past is part of the fabric of any artist's
life, and therefore her material. But for Porter, a San Diego native who has
been making music for more than 20 years, this past brands her work with a
unique mark: the mark of a painful childhood checkered with memories of incest
and betrayal. But like the photo of the young girl, pale and unaware, Porter
herself has come out of a haze of gray pain and, like the bird in her painting,
has transmuted the raw elements into gold.
"The impetus for this was
simply a crisis in my own life." Porter, a renowned singer-songwriter in San
Diego, refers to the creation of her Journey to Wholeness Project, now a
nationwide musical endeavor. With it, she has evolved from, in her words, a
"pothead PTA queen" to an expert on child sexual abuse who approaches the issue
from the perspective of both a survivor and an artist/healer. Earlier this
year, she was asked to perform her very personal and powerful songs for Surgeon
General Richard Carmona at a National Institute of Health conference on the
issue; she has been instrumental in working with schools in Georgia to help
bring training to teachers and other mandated reporters about what constitutes
child abuse of all kinds.
Why would a member of such
hot local bands as Bordertown and Wooden Angel choose to put herself through
this kind of agony to express publicly something that most people won't even
discuss in private? That is, in essence, the story of Journey to Wholeness and
of Cici Porter's mission as an artist.
"There's something about
music that gets under the skin," she says. "People are inspired by humanity, by
people getting through it, making mistakes and coming through anyway."
Getting through child sexual
abuse is a trauma that most people don't have to deal with. Porter wasn't even
consciously aware of the issue until she'd already been married and was
pregnant at 27 with her first daughter, Chelsea. "I was so angry all the time.
My husband was a wonderful guy, he didn't deserve all that anger," she recalls.
After two years of this upheaval and general anxiety, with a two-year-old
daughter and husband, Porter began attending a women's anger support group that
changed her life.
"One of the women came out
and said she had been molested. When she told the group that, I just burst into
tears," Porter remembers. "I had no idea why I was having such an emotional
reaction."
After starting individual
therapy, Porter began to explore her picture-perfect childhood. "I realized how
invested we were in looking good." That was the beginning of her journey of
self-discovery, which took her through years of therapy, periods of depression,
back problems, and habits that allowed her to "numb out." When Porter was able
to recover specific memories of her childhood history after much intense
self-exploration and the birth of her second daughter, Maya, she says, "I felt
like I was splitting into a million pieces." With the support of her then
husband, she escaped for two weeks to a crisis center. Her near breakdown
eventually led to the songs that culminated in the Journey to Wholeness. In
about 2000, Porter said she "started to feel like I was on the other side of
this whole issue. I hadn't had a flashback for a while. I was divorced,
remarried [to husband Larry Groupe, a renowned musician in his own right], and
my life was back on track. And I'd known for years that I had songs sitting in
this notebook - close to 50 songs - that were the hell I had gone through. I
had to take them, put them all in one place, record them, and be done with them.
I knew this would complete the whole issue for me if I could say what I wanted
to say to the people who mattered most."
In 1998, an art therapist
introduced Porter to the coordinator of a conference in San Diego centering on
creativity and the healing process for survivors of child sexual abuse. "I'd
never done anything like that, but I went in and sang a few of the songs, told
the story for this audience. And everybody in the room knew what I was talking
about. Everybody was crying and nodding their heads. I felt this thing I'd
never felt before, this complete understanding of something I never thought I'd
ever be able to explain to anyone, and they got it. They were getting healed
and I was getting healed."
The exhilaration she felt
from sharing these very private songs was on a different level from the high
praise she received from audiences and critics alike for her "normal music."
With albums like Wide Open Spaces and Over Oceans that enjoyed success locally,
Porter could have walked away from sharing her painful personal experiences,
but instead a "divinely-timed collaboration" occurred according to friend Jean
Panella.
Panella, a core volunteer
with Chakti Rising, a holistic recovery center for young women in San Diego,
invited Porter to help her with a community project she was doing for a class.
Porter calls Panella "the driving force - or more like the twinkle in the wand"
that helped spearhead her First Flight Concert, which was the true genesis of
the Journey to Wholeness project. For both women, that first real concert was
magical and had the ring of a true miracle about it. "My soul had been telling
me to do this for ten years," Porter recalls. After advertising the concert,
which was held in an Encinitas church, Porter had no idea how many people, if
any, would attend such a show. But when nearly 100 people did come, she
remembers feeling terrified at the prospect of sharing such painful, personal
songs with a crowd.
What resulted was a concert
that was so raw and so honest, that it continues to be the most effective tool
Porter has for spreading her message of hope for child abuse survivors. The
concert was taped that night, and despite the awkwardness she felt, Porter and
her supporters say that First Flight is a live concert recording that
transcends music. "By the end of the evening there was just this joy and
freedom in that room. That's the metaphor for what I'm trying to put across.
Shit happens, and if you're willing to walk through it consciously, there's
freedom on the other side."
Following this
emotionally-charged performance, Porter released the live recording of the
concert, an album she describes as "sloppy and emotional?but the one that makes
the difference to people. That's the one where people break down crying. That's
the one the therapists use." Subsequently, she went into a studio with
top-flight musicians like Peter Sprague and re-recorded the songs from the
concert and released them as a much slicker, more expensive piece titled
Emergence. "The irony is that I sell both of these now, and their favorite is
First Flight."
Porter began to send copies
of the First Flight CD to various national organizations to see if it would be
useful in helping others deal with their child abuse histories. That one small
concert in Encinitas blossomed into Porter's involvement nationwide as an
advocate for child abuse survivors, and her music and her message have been
incorporated in many programs and conferences across the country. Ironically,
something that was a secret for so long has now made her perhaps more
well-known than the music she was doing before.
In March she sang her songs
for the Surgeon General, who, she is delighted to tell, "wants to take on child
abuse as his thing. If he's serious about making some noise about this, that is
phenomenal." Of the concert she gave at the National Institute of Health, she
says, "It was an amazing collection of people. I thought I was dreaming. There
were experts, people doing phenomenal things around the country. I consider
them all to be heroes. That I was included was such an honor."
One of her tunes is also
being used in a training video that is being distributed to every mandated
abuse reporter in Georgia, and she's pushing for that same tape, or something
like it, to be used in California. "One in four girls in the United States has
been molested, and with boys it's one in six," she notes. "There are people who
have been sitting around with these secrets their whole life." Why is music so
vital to the healing process? "It gives people permission to talk about the
issue."
"As this started to unfold,"
says Panella, the person who helped Porter put on the first concert, "you
couldn't help but feel that the timing of it was so perfect. Even with all the
conversation and awareness there is now, I still feel like this is a
significant piece because music deals with it very directly. It's so powerful."
In order to break the cycle
of abuse, Porter says, perpetrators must also be treated and society must
realize that they, too, are victims, something most abuse survivor groups do
not address. "In public safety figures, 90 percent of sexual offenders are
released eventually. We need to make sure they don't do it again. They need
treatment, very specific treatment."
Panella adds, "The other
thing is there is so much anger toward the perpetrators and Cici's compassion
for the disease and its cycle and her commitment is unique. Her life is such a
testament to what's possible. It tells about the level of success you can have
in your life even with something devastating that's happening."
Both women cite a recent
film, The Woodsman, which deals directly with the issue of the effect of abuse
on the perpetrators. "It's a compassionate portrait of someone who'd done this
and has that disease, and what someone who has served their time and been
rehabilitated has gone through," Panella says.
Perhaps the perfect metaphor
for the whole journey is that sunshine-yellow bird that Porter painted for the
cover of First Flight, the one featured on her website. "A bird has always been
a symbol of freedom. Birds sing and birds fly; they symbolize the hope of the
soul." And if birds freed from cages can go anywhere, Porter is living proof.