Recycling My Denial

* 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)

 

Minimization, Denial, and Amnesia

* Detailed instructions for making comments are in “News Items.”

* These conferences address dissociation in general and are open to survivors, their supporters, and therapists.

* 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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I’m writing this time about three defenses that protect us from overwhelming feelings. It isn’t only people who have endured extreme trauma as children or who are dissociative who employ these defenses; everybody does. It’s a matter how often they are used and how much they interfere with making good choices in life.

Sometimes people assume that defenses are “bad.” They aren’t good or bad; they are simply protective, Ask any one of us if it is agonizing to freak out all the time and you will get an earful. Luckily defenses smooth things out and calm things down so that there is less suffering over-all. But they can also be used to damp down feelings about situations that are dangerous, and, while it might feel better in the moment, it increases suffering in the long run. So are defenses good or bad? Like so many other things, it all depends.

These three defenses are related. I’ll start with the mildest one.

Minimization is down-playing the importance of something, either consciously or unconsciously, either to oneself or to others. “I was only five miles over the speed limit.” (Actually, it was twenty-five.) I wasn’t drunk last night – I only had three drinks. (Three drinks in an hour can get you pretty drunk.) “Don’t worry about me – I’m fine.” (Well, actually, I am feeling a little bit bad about…”)

If minimization is unconscious, it’s harder to break through than if it is conscious, and it’s almost impossible to do it alone. How can you know something you don’t know? Unless, of course, you have an alter who does know and who can tell you in such a way that you are able to listen.

Denial is more robust than minimization. Denial means you believe something that isn’t true. “We weren’t poor as children. We always had food on the table.” But the kids’ clothes were worn-out hand-me-downs, the electricity often was turned off, and, during the last week of the month, dinner was usually spaghetti or rice and beans, if that. Believing a fantasy allows you to hold your head high.

Denial can be deep-seated. I once worked with an alcoholic who believed with all sincerity that beer did not contain alcohol. Showing him the label with the percentage of alcohol clearly marked just elicited the response, “Oh, that’s only a marketing ploy.” If he didn’t believe it, he was doing a great job of irritating me.

Denial, by definition, is unconscious. If you know you are denying something, you aren’t in denial; you are lying to yourself. You may half believe your lie, but you half don’t. The truth of the matter is buried in the unconscious. Why? Because it is too unbearable to face, at least for now. Maybe later in life, when you have more resources, you will be able to come to grips with the issue, but not right now.

Amnesia is the strongest of these three defenses. It’s as if a fifty-foot high ten-feet deep stone wall has been erected around things that would be totally overwhelming if conscious. We think of amnesiac barriers as existing between alters to keep them apart. Imagine for a moment that the whole system has one mind. The system believes that if those alters were in contact it with each other would be extremely dangerous for everybody in the system. So the alters must stay apart, and the information they have must not be communicated.

As I said earlier, people who are not multiple can also have amnesia. A study was done where girls who had been sexually assaulted as teens were identified through hospital records and interviewed a few years later. Most did not remember either being assaulted or going to the hospital. (Wish I could remember the reference.) Some probably were dissociative to begin with, but undoubtedly many were not.

I believe that the phenomenon of amnesia for traumatic events in non-multiple people is less studied than in dissociative people. Perhaps I just am not up on the literature about people who aren’t like me! I don’t remember any explanation of why some women forgot their trauma and others didn’t. That would make a fascinating piece of research.

When it comes to survivors of ritual abuse or other forms of severe trauma, it’s intuitively easy to understand why intense pain and terror inflicted in a group setting before the age of six is bound to produce amnesia. If that weren’t enough, many of us have remembered hypnotic sessions when we were repeatedly told to forget and never remember. And many of us were manipulated to have only certain alters know certain things, and those alters were programmed to appear on command of the handlers. It’s little wonder out amnesia is so hard to overcome.

One personal thought. I do not seem to “lose time” in the sense that there is a gap in my consciousness. It’s not like being under anesthesia or in a an alcoholic black-out.  I don’t lose information instantaneously; the information doesn’t disappear like snow on the water. My memories fade out with time. Sometimes it takes hours, something months. The result is that there is precious little in my long-term memory.

I believe that I was taught so well not to remember that my mind was molded to forget things. The hypnotic command to forget is no longer confined to dangerous things; it applies to almost everything. It’s annoying to me and everybody around me, but there is little I can do except find work-arounds. For example, my keys are tied to my purse, and my purse is a vivid color that is nothing like anything else in my environment. It takes a lot of effort to think of ways around my forgetfulness, but when I figure things out, life does get simpler.

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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/


July
7/16 Full moon
7/16 – 7/17 Partial lunar eclipse. Visible in South America, Africa, most of Europe and Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.
7/25 St. James´ Day/Festival of the Horned God

August
8/1 Lammas/Lughnasadh
8/15 Full moon
8/15 Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8/24 St. Bartholomew’s Day

September
9/2 Labor Day (US)
9/5 – 9/7 Feast of the Beast/Marriage of the Beast
9/13 Full moon
9/13 Friday the Thirteenth
9/23 Fall equinox

October
10/13 Full moon
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
9/29 – 10/1 Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year, Day of Judgement)
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)