* Detailed instructions for making comments are in “News Items.”
* These conferences address dissociation in general. Proposals for presentations on ritual abuse for the February 2020 conferences are welcomed.
An Infinite Mind is presenting a “Healing Together” regional conference.
September 21, 2019
McLean Hospital, Belmont, MA. (just outside Boston, MA.)
Space is limited to 100 attendees. Registration fee is $89.
Information, including agenda, at https://www.aninfinitemind.com/healing-together-boston.html
An Infinite Mind’s 10th annual “Healing Together” international conference.
February 7 – 9, 2020; Orlando, FL
Submit proposals for presentations before August 15.
Submission guidelines, vendor information, and hotel information at https://www.aninfinitemind.com/healing-together.html
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Survivors often find that they come back to issues they have worked on and go further, go deeper. They also often criticize themselves for not understanding everything about that issue on the first go-around. “OMG, how could I have missed that?” “I was weak and didn’t finish the work.” “I just peeked and then shut everything down because I didn’t want to know.”
This process is natural and happens over and over again. You realize something, you take time to absorb its impact, you move on to something else, believing the work was completed. Well, in a sense, it was completed because you have worked it through as thoroughly as possible given the sum of all the information you had at the moment and where you were in life. After all, this is only one piece of all that is on your plate. No matter how important it is, there are still dishes to do, bills to pay, addictions to struggle with, all the other many messy, demanding parts of life.
Later on, another trigger comes along, and the issue resurfaces. It’s human nature to get down on yourself and to feel you are not going about healing correctly. It’s human nature to need time to shift from self-criticism to acceptance. This is the way healing works, in a spiral fashion, always understanding and feeling on a deeper level.
The analogy that came to mind is not very glamorous – learning how to spell. Kindergarten brings the alphabet, first grade brings cat, dog, the, and, I, and me. Each year you feel you have stuffed your brain to the maximum, but the next year always brings additional challenges. I remember being seven and staring in dismay at the word “enough,” thinking I never in a million years would be able to learn to spell it. Yet I rose to the occasion. Year after year, I rose to the occasion and learned new words. I’m still at it, and I still get down on myself when I don’t effortlessly type some word I seldom use.
Acceptance, Jean, acceptance. You can’t know what you don’t know. There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. That’s the way the process works.
My denial weakened a bit more recently, thanks to being triggered by the news about Jeffrey Epstein, I’ll give you some background about my process.
Back in the early days of remembering, I read about people who remember being raped by Santa Claus or a cartoon character and figuring out the deception. (Mickey Mouse had a zipper in his crotch area, for example.) I was filled with relief! It was wonderful to believe that at least some of the scenes rising up through my amnesia were faked. And if you could trick a person into thinking it was Santa Claus, you probably could trick them into thinking it was a celebrity, too.
I knew that the perpetrators were braggarts and wanted me to believe they were far more powerful than they really were. I still believe that today. It’s a method of control and intimidation that all cults and other abusive groups employ.
Some claims seem too sweeping, too over-the-top, to be likely. Surely not all the presidents of the United States were Satanists. Surely not all current European royalty are Satanists. But I know for sure that many Satanists, especially those at the top, have an impeccable presentation. One would never think they ever did anything out of line. So I do not really know if those claims are real or not.
I’ve gone through the “Not me!” “Not my Daddy!” and “Not my Mommy!” phase and have come to the reluctant conclusion that, yes I was born into a generational cult and yes, my whole family was involved. Now I am being challenged to reassess how many influential people are involved.
What was the trigger? Reading that Prince Andrew attended many of Epstein’s parties. Perhaps he was set up and blackmailed and, out of fear, did what he was told. Perhaps he enjoyed the parties. Perhaps the parties “only” involved pedophilia, or perhaps there was lots more that has not yet come to the surface. I don’t know, and I probably never will.
What I do know for sure now is that pedophilia and ritual abuse are more common than I once thought. It’s not so much a question of being convinced by new evidence as having opened my mind and admitting to myself that I had been minimizing the prevalence of ritual abuse all these years.
Back in the 1990’s, Survivorship conducted a survey of its members: over 600 questionnaires were returned. One of the questions was, “Where did the abuse occur?” Most people listed more than one location. I never finished tabulating the results, but there must have been at least 3000 locations listed. Every conceivable kind of place was on that list, from small country towns to large cities, military bases, hospitals, even the Vatican.
That was when I took a mighty gulp and came to the realization that ritual abuse was far, far, more common than I ever thought.
Here I am now, once again coming to the realization that ritual abuse is far, far, more common than I ever thought.
(I think this post his more disorganized than usual. It’s because my mind is hopping all over the place, picking up little pieces of the picture. In a few weeks, I will have settled down and become more coherent – and probably less interested in writing about the continuous process of trying to figure out what is real and what is not.)
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Upcoming Holidays
Note: Additional information on the following holidays is available at
Lammas – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/category/lamas/
August Ritual Dates – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/august-ritual-dates/
Fall Equinox – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-fall-equinox/
Halloween – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/samhainhalloween/
Halloween (more personal) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/halloween/
August
8/1 Lammas/Lughnasadh
8/15 Full moon
September
9/2 Labor Day (US)
9/5 – 9/7 Feast of the Beast/Marriage of the Beast
9/13 Full moon
9/23 Fall equinox
October
10/13 Full moon
9/13 Friday the Thirteenth
10/14 (?) Columbus Day
10/31 Halloween/start of Celtic New Year/start of the dark half of the year
Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
7/29 Hitler proclaimed leader of the Nazi party
9/1 Start of WW2
9/29 – 10/1 Rosh Hashanah (New Year, Day of Judgement)
10/16 Death of Rosenburg
10/19 Death of Goering
10/20 Hitler´s actual half-birthday
10/21 Hitler’s alternative half-birthday (Note: Hitler was born on Easter, so Nazis celebrate his actual birthday and half-birthday on 4/20 and 10/20. His alternate birthday is celebrated on Easter of the current year and his alternate half-birthday six months later.)
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)
my views are shaped by the Bible. Apart from God’s protection, Satan has full power and authority over the earth to prove his points. He failed to get Jesus so he lost the ultimate battle and will have to die. but he wants to take as many with him as he can. So his reach does not know any limiits, except the limits set by God. As long as we stay away from the practices of the devil and are devoted to God, we don’t nee to be too concerned about Satan. But he controls every aspect of our day to day life thru his earthly followers. All rulers, all the super wealthy, all celebrities, and the like. That’s my view.
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It sounds to me that your faith guides and sustains you. I am happy for you.
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Well, it is no doubt easier to decide what is or is not, when you brain has not been brutalized. It bothers me a lot that things like MK ULTRA are going on. Nothing is sacred to evil.
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Jean,
this post was just what I needed to read. I liked the title “Recycling My Denial”. There are times I still question the validity of my memories or the existance of such cruelty done to humans by other humans. Or the lies we believed because we didn’t know any better.
One of the hardest truths for me to accept was my mother’s role in the whole scheme of things. I always thought my father was the ‘mean bad guy’. Over the years I came to see he was a drunken pawn used in perpetrating some of the abuse. Not that that is an excuse for what he did. But acknowledging the mother’s part was devastating.
The deeper I get in my healing work I too see and recognize how widespread ritual abuse and pedophilia is. Going from “I must be crazy for thinking so much garbage occurred in my early years” to ” my goodness, so many people are telling the same stories from all walks of life and parts of the world.”
My question is “will it ever stop?”
One can only hope so by it being exposed and it being harder to get away with. Maybe not in my lifetime but perhaps in someone’s lifetime.
Meanwhile for me I can work on myself and by rallying with other survivors, believe that our hard work makes a difference.
Beth
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Well, I still question whether I am making it all up. Not often, and not for long, and not with much emotion. It’s sort of a knee-jerk reaction to new stuff.
It was much harder to accept that my mother was involved. She didn’t seem particularly disturbed in any way, although she was passive, shallow, restricted, generally out of it from my point of view. And she didn’t “leak” the way my father did. About the only hint she gave was that she was afraid of phones and called the phone “the black spider.”
Just had a thought. What we need to make it stop is to treat it like a public health issue. Campaigns like the stop smoking campaigns – make it socially unacceptable! Make the kids who get out cool!!!
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thank you Jean… always an interesting topic. I too came to the conclusion many years ago, with a lot of angst, that ritual abuse is far more extensive than I had once imagined. Maybe I thought mine was a special situation. But the more I spoke around the country, the more people came forward and told me of their experience. It’s a horrible situation when human beings can hurt others in the way we were hurt. May our journey of healing be at least touched by love and joy…
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I sometimes almost wish I were the only one, then nobody else would have to suffer. Boy, wouldn’t that be lonely, though!!
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