Despite the Coronavirus, I’m Still Growing and Changing

* ISSTD has canceled all its upcoming conferences and is re-designing them to be online.

* For all other conferences, world-wide, check their webpage for updates. And remember, although online presentations lack the immediacy of face-to-face ones, they give you the same information. Sometimes they are better organized, there are more handouts, and the speaker is more relaxed. 

* You can find more information on the following holidays at:
Walpurgis Day: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/walpurgisnacht/
Spring Equinox: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/the-spring-equinox/
Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan: Part 1: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/the-feast-of-the-beast/
Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan: Part 2: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/feast-of-the-beast-part-ii/
Easter: personal (for background, see Spring Equinox)  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/easter-blues/
Walpurgisnacht/May Eve: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/walpurgisnacht/
Beltane: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/beltane/
Mothers’ Day: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/mothers-day/

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 First, some miscellaneous things.

A silver lining to social distancing. (Maybe this isn’t funny.) I am wondering if cult members are deciding to keep six feet away from each other. Perhaps. if they are over 60 or have chronic illnesses, they are being even more cautious and skipping rituals to self-isolate. Wouldn’t that be great!

The New York Times has many free newsletters. (You can’t get the crossword for free, though.) I get the Morning Briefing, California Today, Coronavirus Briefing, and The New York Times Magazine. Here is where you choose the Newsletter you want: https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters. As I remember, you open an account (don’t subscribe) and then get to see the list of newsletters available.

I missed the Spring Equinox because it came early this year. In my mind, equinoxes are always on the 21st, but this year the Spring Equinox was on the 19th. I wonder if we felt anticipatory dread on the 19th as usual, and had our anniversary reaction on the 20th or 21st.

The last time the equinox fell on March 19 was in 1896, 124 years ago. I think that Satanic groups that take the meaning of their holidays seriously will have done some pretty horrible things in honor of the rarity of this event.

I haven’t researched when it next will fall on March 19, but, from 2021 to 2102, it will always be on March 20. It will finally return to March 21 in 2103. So for the rest of this century, it won’t be anything special.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac has a light-hearted article on the Spring Equinox at https://www.almanac.com/content/first-day-spring-vernal-equinox\.

I have not managed to learn anything new about the spring Feast of the Beast. All I know is contained in these two posts: Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan: Part 1: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/the-feast-of-the-beast/
and Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan: Part 2: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/feast-of-the-beast-part-ii/.

In trying to clean up my computer files, I found this. It is me to a T!
Did you hear about the psychic amnesiac?
He knew in advance what he was going to forget.

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Okay, on to living with my ritual abuse past in the age of coronavirus.

I am doing amazingly well, so well that I am not sure I recognize myself. My mood is good, and I am not in denial. I know this because I am taking all the precautions I would have if I were a paranoid mess!

Many times I have said that it takes time to live in the present after doing a whole bunch of work on your past. I knew this intellectually but had not fully experienced it. I often used the simile of being teleported into a foreign country, not knowing the language, not having a place to live or a job, and without friends. You have to learn a lot, very fast.

Now I have woken up and found myself in a foreign country. I was partially right, in that it’s going to take some getting used to, but the rest of my description was wrong, The scenery is foreign, but I feel at home. I can speak the language, and I still have all my old friends. I have brought everything with me – my home, my work, my friends, my cat, everything.

A more apt simile for what I am experiencing now is having a cataract operation. Nothing has changed, except everything is different. The colors are brighter, and distant things are sharp and in focus. It’s like my brain, rather than my eyes, is wearing glasses, and it is a total delight.

For me, learning seems to have been unconscious. It perked along under the surface, and I was not aware of anything happening. Then suddenly I became conscious of a vast change. I know how to “be” in this new way and I am not upset by the newness. I’m somewhat puzzled because I have not, to my knowledge, worked on any related issues. I’m not aware of any angels or spirit animals bringing me this gift, I did not pray for it, wish for it, or even imagine it. It just happened.

I’m not sure whether people close to me feel that I have changed significantly. I tend to think not, because nobody has said anything. That’s okay. There is no need for them to know or not know. There is no need for me to talk about it or not talk about it. All I need to do is accept and enjoy it.

I still get triggered at times, and I don’t expect that to change. The reaction to a trigger, though, is soft, muted. The voices don’t scream, they sound almost like part of a conversation with pleasant people. The visuals do not seem to be in the present; they are a gentle reminder of something from the past.

Mind you, I don’t attribute these changes to the coronavirus. I think they would have happened anyway. Perhaps they occurred about a year ago when I stopped being affected by holiday anniversary reactions. It took several months to recognize that change and several more months to recognize this deeper change. I feel like the person I would have been if I hadn’t suffered through ritual abuse in my childhood.

In going through those old computer files, I found correspondence from 1999. I was totally flipped out about the upcoming New Year – 2000. I was not afraid that computers couldn’t handle the change. What terrified me was the belief that Satanists in sleeper cells all over the world would wake up and do destructive things at midnight with poison and A-bombs. Fellow survivors told me it was programming and that I should fight it just like any other sort of programming. I wasn’t afraid of doing anything destructive, it was other people I was terrified of. Nothing was in my control, and all I could do was try and soothe myself.

I can’t remember how I made it through those difficult weeks. I do, however, vividly remember buying a jar of real caviar to eat before I went to bed as a farewell to life….and another one for breakfast, just in case I was still alive and wanted to celebrate. I was totally amazed that nothing bad had happened, nothing all. My friends were right. I had fallen for the programming, and it was all a lie, after all.

It was great to come across that correspondence and to be able to contrast it with how I feel now.

I also found emails between myself and a survivor friend I admired and trusted. She had the same kind of polyfragmentation that I do, and she was a lot further along in coming to understand how her system worked. She told me that the fragments, when they came together, were an alter, and that that alters did not cease to exist when she perceived the fragments as coming apart. They just went back inside. Once she figured this out, she could start working with alters, finding out their jobs, thanking them, suggesting new jobs, and increasing internal communication. Just like everybody else with DID – MPD back then.

What if this were so for me, also? What if, unconsciously, my alters have been working together? Working behind my back, so to speak? What if this new state I am in is what integration feels like?

It’s all pretty mind-blowing.

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Upcoming Holidays

March
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan
April
4/1 April Fool’s Day
4/5 Palm Sunday
4/7 Full moon
4/8 Day of the Masters
4/9 Maundy Thursday (commemoration of the Last Supper)
4/10 Good Friday
4/11 Holy Saturday
4/12 Easter Sunday
4/26 Grand Climax/De Meur
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
May 
5/1 Beltane
5/7 Full moon
5/10 Mothers’ Day
5/12 Armed Forces Day
5/25 Memorial Day
5/31 Pentecost

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
3/10 Purim (Deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman in Persia)
4/9 – 4/16 Passover/Pesach (Deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt)
4/21 Yom HaShoah
4/29 Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day)
5/12 Lag BaOmer

(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes.)