Different Ways of Knowing

* I probably won’t have any material ready for the scheduled 7/10 entry. Why? Because I am hosting our poetry reading and there is so very much to do!

Hope to see lots and lots of you there!!!!

Free Online Poetry Reading
Saturday, July 10, 2021
4 PM Pacific Time
“Ritual Abuse Survivors Read Their Poems of Suffering and Healing”

Register at
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/ritual-abuse-survivors-read-their-poems-of-suffering-and-healing-tickets-154638336427

How to prepare for the reading:
2. Choose a comfortable place
3. Stock up on tea, soft drinks, and munchies
4. Add important extras, like Kleenex and stuffies

Tips:
1. Mute your microphone unless you are speaking during the Q&A period.
2. If you don’t want to be seen, hover over your image and click the three little dots. Choose “Hide Self.” To turn your image back on, click the “View” button, then click “Show Self View” on the menu.
3. You can change the name displayed on your video. Click on the “Participants” icon (two heads with a number next to them.) A list of Participants will appear. Hover your mouse over your name and click on “Rename.” Enter the name you want others to see. Remember to change it back next time you use ZOOM.

* One more announcement about Pornhub is at the end of the article.

Different Ways of Knowing

I used to think that the only way to learn was to go to school, study real hard, and do things exactly the way they told you to. Then you took a test and found out whether or not you knew something.

I gave those teachers far too much power! There are many ways of learning, and that is only one way, a way that was popular in the early ’40s.

Children learn a lot by watching, listening, touching, smelling. They don’t need another person to do this. For the most part, what they learn is true. Snow is cold. Sunlight is warm. Water is wet. Some grownups paint their lips red, some don’t. Some have hair around their mouths, some don’t. They eat with little sticks, not their hands. Depending on where they live, they call these sticks chopsticks or forks. These are facts. The information comes through the senses, which do not lie.

Actually, senses can lie – if grownups spend a lot of time teaching the children how to ignore the input of their senses and how to misremember an experience as something else. Grownups in cults are particularly adept at negating children’s experiences. “That didn’t hurt.” “That didn’t happen.” “You liked that, didn’t you?” “That was just a dream.” “No, you were at Gramma’s house yesterday.”

Cults also play games with the mind. Double binds are one of their tricks. “Do you want to kill the orange kitten or the spotted kitten? Choose!” “Do you want me to hit you, or do you want to hit your little sister? Choose!” Another trick is inverting values. Good becomes bad; evil becomes good. Words are given meanings that are the opposite of what the larger society assigns to them. You can make kids believe anything if you work hard enough at it.

I think that these learning experiences are processed differently, at least for me. This is because I remember them differently.

Things that were taught to me while being abused come back in flashbacks and through drawing or free-association writing. They had been forgotten, covered over by amnesia. This makes sense to me because everything they taught me was accompanied by a command to forget, to “not know” what had happened or what I had learned. All these things were stuffed way down into my unconscious.

When the amnesia broke spontaneously, they came shooting through in flashback form – images, body feelings, smell, emotions. (Oddly enough, I do not have sound flashbacks.) When I prodded my unconscious through writing or drawing, there were no flashbacks – the memory was there on the page, more or less disguised.

But the things I learned on my own during those dark days and nights come back in a very different form. I just know. All I have to do is join a conversation about a given subject, open my mouth, and out comes the information. It isn’t disguised, it isn’t chaotic. It comes out in a clear, concise, matter-of-fact form. I guess that’s because the information hasn’t been distorted by my abuser’s lies and manipulations.

These days, I know what I am talking about when ”I just open my mouth and out it comes,” but back when I first remembered, I didn’t have enough context to always know what I was saying.

I came across a notebook from 1988/1989 and read some things which surprised and amused me.

“The facade is an integral part of the building.” Hmm. And I thought I was being so original when I wrote that blog entry! But I knew what I meant back then. The “fake me” I constructed when I had to hide the abuse became an important part of my personality, of the “real” me. Then I turned my attention to other things and forgot all about the facade and the building.

I also found two pages in which I referred to myself as fragmented. The one I want to find I can’t, of course. I think these are the exact words, but I’m not 100% sure. It was part of a wish list–

“I want to be whole
I am tired of offering people fragments of myself”

The other entry is a record of a rather sophisticated dream.

“I dreamed that there were discrete roles or psychological states and when I was in one state I felt coherent. It was slipping from one to the other that made me feel crazy.

This is true, except that I’m always in several and so I feel crazy all the time – fragmented consciousness or identity.”

I knew I was fragmented back then. I knew without knowing I knew. Then I put that knowledge aside for decades and here it is again, front and center in my mind, rather than slipping in and out of consciousness.

Boy, the mind is a wonderfully complex thing.

~~~~~~~~~~

* I am writing this as a note because there is more and more news about the successful fight against Pornhub and Mindgeek. This time it’s the announcement of the filing of a lawsuit. I could easily write about Pornhub three times a month . . . but that is a different blog.

34 victims, 14 of whom were children at the time they were abused, have filed a RICO – racketeering, trafficking, and child pornography – lawsuit against Pornhub and MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company. You can read all 179 pages of the complaint at https://mindgeeklitigation.com/asset/2021.06.17%20-%20Dkt.%20001%20-%20Complaint.pdf.

~~~~~~~~~~

Upcoming Holidays

July

7/4 Independence Day
7/23 Full Moon
7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God
7/27 Grand Climax

August

8/1 Lammas/Lughnasadh
8/13 Friday the 13th
8/15 (?) Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8/22 Full Moon
8/24 St. Bartholomew’s Day

September

9/5 – 9/7 Feast of the Beast/Marriage of the Beast
9/7 Labor Day (United States)
9/20 Full moon
9/22 Fall Equinox
9/29 Michaelmas/Feast of Archangel Michael and of all Angels

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

7/18 Tisha B’Av (Jewish Day of Mourning)
7/29 Hitler proclaimed leader of the Nazi party
9/1 Start of WW2
9/7 Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year, Day of Judgement)
9/16 Yom Kippur (Jewish Day of Atonement)
9/17 Hitler’s alternate half-birthday
9/21 – 9/27 Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles, Jewish harvest festival

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

~~~~~~~~~~

Additional information on various holidays:

Upcoming Holidays

Rate this:

Share this:

Like this:

Related

Leave a Reply Cancel reply