I was on a desert hike recently, feet pounding, music jamming, puppy bouncing at my side—despite the loud volume in my earbuds I heard the reverberating signal of a nearby rattlesnake. Have you heard one in the wild before? I feel their rattle inside my body in the same way you feel treble, more like an intense purr or swarm of locusts, as if whomever named the rattle meant it to be read with a capital R to differentiate what kind of snake was near, Rrrrrrrrrrrrr. Not a roar mind you—a rhythm, flamenco, fiery, full, a series of r’s rolling off the tongue letting you know that while she doesn’t want to strike, she can, she will, best listen to the boundary that sound is setting before the rest of her shows up.
People forget, a rattlesnake doesn’t alert her prey when she’s hunting.
She’s generous to warn when she perceives a threat: move on, disengage.
The puppy and I stood there transfixed for a minute, beholden to her presence, witnessing her power, letting the reverberation of her rattle be felt by my limbic and nervous systems before leaving to honor her space. We continued and within ten minutes encountered an older couple whom I shared the experience with, hoping they’d tread cautiously as they walked the path, honoring her boundary as they neared her space.
The man told me that recent studies are showing rattlesnakes are shifting from rattling-to-warn to silencing-to-survive. As evolutionary wisdom would have it, snakes are adapting to their changing environment due to the frequency of humans responding to snakes by harming them, whether from fear, gross dominion and/or sport, snakes are intuiting that humans aren’t safe enough to warn anymore. The threat of being killed is living differently in their systems, to such an extent that they’re ignoring their evolutionary instinct to signal.
Admittedly, my first thought was one of awe, what a savvy, creative, adaptable force within them! In fact, what a savvy, creative, adaptable force within our world’s wild nature. Our survival instincts are fucking brilliant, how could it be argued that the source within us is anything but an arc hellbent on life’s survival. I affirm this often in my work as a therapist when I provide education about trauma responses to my clients, especially those who judge themselves for freezing or fawning. It’s not often I see it modeled on my own desert trail.
That awe remained, settling into cracks of me that were dry, needing to be reminded of how nature finds a way, we find a way—women always find a way. However over the next few weeks other reflections settled and I started to feel other things too: sad, angry, discouraged—I suppose the word grief best encapsulates it. Snakes shouldn’t have to evolve—there is nothing wrong with their system of warning, only humans’ interpretation and response towards it...silence or be silenced, kill or be killed.
Awe / Grief.
Both / And.
I’ve been exploring reclamation work with a deep, traumatized part of me that’s young, so young in fact that she’s pre-verbal. The rattlesnake encounter and the man’s description of how snakes are adapting to silence their instincts, in order to increase safety through invisibility, reminds me of what many of us have learned to do in unsafe relationships and communities. It ought not be this way—yet it is.
To be fair, I don’t know that I’ve ever been who you’d call…quiet. I’ve been spitting out mouthfuls of my experience as long as I can remember, a rattlesnake that didn’t ever seem to stop shake-shake-shaking. In turn, people have interpreted me as dangerous even as my body quaked to warn them of a threat approaching.
What surfaced for me while doing this inner reclamation work were specific memories where I tried to signal danger. Clear times when things weren’t okay, no one seemed okay—I wasn’t okay—in all my childhood nightmares I alone am the one who sees the bad things happening. Later, in conversations and acts of self-harm, my body tried to warn others about danger only to again be left alone with the truth or shamed for telling it.
There was even one broken season where I stopped telling myself the truth about the danger I was in. Remaining a witness when everyone else defaults to a blindfold is a specific type of trauma. In my recent healing work I pulled one memory thread after another, noticing how desperate my younger self was to be believed and protected. What I also noticed though was how intentionally I’ve chosen relationships today where I tell the truth, where I’m believed, am mic’d louder by others in the moments I hesitate, relationships where I’m trusted when I give due warning, called in and out when I tell myself a lesser truth, am seen, elevated and celebrated for the kind of woman I have become.
Which is to say: I am the kind of woman who is very much a rattlesnake—who doesn’t intend harm yet will warn you when you are in her lane. I am the kind of woman who generously gives you time to change your mind, to move on and disengage, who is prepared to strike when you trespass. The kind of woman who despite the safer option of staying silent, often still chooses to reverberate a third-way, warning on principle because I want us to do more than survive, I achingly want us to LIVE.
I am very much the kind of woman who is like that snake I encountered that day.
I reckon—So. Are. You.
+ This week’s post is written by our dear friend and colleague,
, MSW, LCSW (she/her). Mel is a licensed clinician in private practice in Phoenix, Arizona, on land that belongs to the Akimel O'odham tribe. She specializes in supporting those healing from Complex PTSD, significant attachment disruption, religious abuse, and disempowerment. Mel is also a consent researcher, educator, author, and most of all, identifies as human. You can find more of her writing in her debut book, In The House of Me: A path from self-abandonment to self-reclamation through the practice of embodied consent, as well as her Substack, .+ + A note from the author: The following piece was a reflection of my inner territory work. I hold deep reverence for the variety of ways our bodies respond to threats—our stress and trauma responses are not ones we cognitively choose but rather adaptive, split-second responses based on our bodies’ best interpretation of what is going to provide us safety. Please hold yourself with curiosity and compassion, risk being more good to you.
I explore the nuances of embodied consent in my book, In The House Of Me, alongside the systems that hijack us from developing and practicing consent, namely patriarchy, white supremacy and religious fundamentalism.
 | A guest post by
|