Multiples Are All Different

The Next RA/MC Survivor Poetry Reading

Last call! It this Saturday, October 23, from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm (Pacific Daylight Time) 

Featured poets are Shana truthteller, Daniel, Jean (that’s me), and members of the audience.

Sign up here: eventbrite.com.au/e/ritual-abuse-survivors-read-their-poems-of-suffering-and-healing-tickets-179703978437

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I have been looking inward for many months trying to figure out what organizing principles are at work in my mind. Now I have come up for air and am looking at other people’s thinking patterns with fresh eyes. I’ve noticed how differently people’s minds work.

What strikes me the most is that each person seems unique to me. Even if they were subjected to the same types of mind control programming, they still are very different.

I think of identical twins. Even though they look identical, once you get to know them, you can see that there are small differences. One twin has a mole, the other doesn’t. One twin slouches more than the other. One is more outgoing than the other.

Even though they grew from the same fertilized egg, their environments were not exactly the same. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, they started to diverge in utero and keep on diverging for the rest of their lives.

So it is with survivors who were raised in the same family and programmed by the same programmer. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, they are not clones of each other. Their environments have been far more divergent than the environments identical twins inhabit. 

Qualities such as birth order, attractiveness, ability to adapt socially, and willingness to obey influence how adults treat children, which in turn influences how children react to repeated trauma. The programmer is not, by any means, handed a blank slate.

The characteristics that a child brings to the programming will influence how they react to that programming. If the programmer catches this, the system may be tweaked to correct for the divergence from protocol. That change in the system will continue to form the child’s reaction to subsequent programming.

I believe that all children have hidden parts of themselves from their abusers. Even with children programmed with the same structure, these parts may be hidden in different places in their systems. They may have been hidden at different times and different stages of the programming. As I said, the child is not a blank slate and continues to have some agency throughout.

I am what is known as polyfragmented. This means that I have been split so often that I am made up of very tiny pieces. I have always felt a little out of it with other survivors because I don’t have fully formed alters or an internal landscape. Or perhaps I do, but it is so well hidden that I can’t see it.

I belong to a support group where everybody is polyfragmented. I feel more at home than I do with most other survivors. But even there, I have found that nobody is entirely like me. Each person’s mind is unique. The way they think, the way they perceive themselves, the way they navigate life, all are unique. Some of them have more or less fully formed alters alongside the fragments. Their internal processes flow back and forth between the two different states, just as people with only fully formed alters switch between alters.

I am coming to terms with the fact that no two people are alike. If I base my sense of comfort — or rather alienation — on being unlike others, and therefore an outsider, rejected, not belonging, I will have to accept that I will never belong anywhere. And that nobody belongs anywhere.

How much simpler it is to stop fretting, to give up a lifetime of social anxiety. That way, I can choose to spend time with some groups of people and not others, based on my personal taste. I can flow between groups and I can enjoy people for themselves. I no longer have to search for people just like me. I can enjoy both the similarities and the differences between myself and others.

I belong in all groups because I, too, am a human being, just like everybody else. 

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Upcoming Holidays

 October

 10/20 Full Moon

 10/31 Halloween/start of Celtic New Year/start of the dark half of the year

November

 11/1 All Saints’ Day

 11/2 All Souls’ Day

 11/4 Satanic Revels

 11/11 (?) Veterans’ Day

 11/18-19 Partial Lunar Eclipse

 11/19 Full Moon

 11/25 Thanksgiving Day (United States)

 11/28 First Sunday of Advent

 11/30 St Andrew’s Day

December

 Sundays of advent: 11/28, 12/5, 12/12, 12/19

 12/4 Total Solar Eclipse

 12/18 Full Moon

 12/21 Winter solstice/Yule/St. Thomas’ Day

 12/24 Christmas Eve

 12/25 Christmas Day

 12/31 New Year’s Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

 10/20 Hitler’s half-birthday

11/9 Kristallnacht

11/29 -12/16 Chanukah/Hanukkah (Jewish Festival of Lights)

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

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You can find more information on the following holidays at: 

 Halloween (personal) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/halloween/ 

 Halloween (background) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/samhainhalloween/

 Thanksgiving – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/thanksgiving/

 Yule/Winter Solstice – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/yulewinter-solstice/ 

 Candlemas – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/candlemas/

 Valentine’s Day – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/valentines-day/

 Spring Equinox – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/the-spring-equinox/

 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/

 Fathers’ Day – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2020/06/20/ritual-abuse-and-fathers-day/

 Summer Solstice (corrected text) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/well-this-is-embarrassing/

 Lammas – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/category/lamas/

 and https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/august-ritual-dates/ 

 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/

 Fall Equinox – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-fall-equinox/