fragmentation – Page 2

How I Became Polyfragmented

November 11, 2020 by Jean, posted in and amnesia, fragmentation, ritual abuse

I have been meeting by ZOOM with another polyfragmented survivor. We would like to invite others to join us so that we can become a group. If you feel that all or part of your system is fragmented, please contact me through the comments section or email me directly. You will find my address in the comments section.

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I’m annoyed at my process. It seems that for all these years of work on myself, my past, how it shaped me, how it laid the ground for dysfunctional behavior, the guilt, the low-self esteem, etcetera, I should be further along than I am now. And then there are the years and years of therapy, years of another person being by my side and on my side, guiding me and cheering me along.

Don’t get me wrong – I am very grateful to have remembered and thus been able to enter this process. I’m intensely thankful for two exceptional therapists that I’ve worked with over the years. And to have been born in an era when ritual abuse and government/military mind control are talked about and studied, an era when survivors can find each other and share their experience and hard-gained wisdom. I have been so very lucky.

I think that AA and other 12-step groups, along with the women’s movement, laid the groundwork for us to remember and tell others our stories. It was in those meetings that people broke taboos right and left, talking about subjects that had been clothed in silence for generations. My parents didn’t talk about alcoholism. How could they? They did not even have the concept. It was the same with domestic violence and incest and other forms of sexual abuse – they did not even have the concept.

When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I read that incest occurred in one in a million families. That belief was not exactly conducive to realizing that your family was one of those 160 families. (The population of the United States was 160.2 million in 1953.) And of course, Satanism didn’t exist, and governments were benevolent and would never hurt a child.

Yes, it is so much better to know the truth. I am lucky and grateful, but I am still annoyed and frustrated by my healing process. And I am annoyed that I am annoyed because it’s not helpful!

Anyway, this is what set me off.

I’ve been pondering how my mind works with fragments and no real alters. No alters with specific jobs. No one to take care of this immensely complicated computer, learn to use a cell phone, or do the dishes. No one to decide who gets to be out. No one in charge, no one to hold memories. I don’t understand how the little scraps of my mind get together to get anything at all done.

However, I did find out how I got this way, which is progress, even though it sheds no light on what “this way” is. I found a large sheet of paper, dated 1994, which spelled out how I was fragmented. What is really weird is that I had forgotten that I figured it out years ago. I wonder how much else I don’t know that I once knew.

This is what I had forgotten for so long. I was electroshocked when I was about two, and the shocks were what splintered me. I don’t know how often it was done, how it was done, who did it, who arranged for it to be done, where it was done, why it was done, why I am not scared of electricity. I just know that my mind was left in little pieces that could not be reassembled.

These things I assume –

My parents must have consented to it or consented to a cover story about what would be done to me. However, there is no trace of anything in my baby book or my mother’s diaries that would indicate anything out of the ordinary happened to me around that age.

Somebody they knew must have put them in touch with whoever was running the program. They did not have the skills necessary to do it themselves. Neither had any technical or mechanical talent.

I am guessing that healthy, bright toddlers were collected from cult members and fragmented to be used later on in various programs.

That’s about as far as I have gotten.

Being electroshocked as a kid raises a lot of questions. I have no idea how I could come through that experience and still look “normal” from the outside. I met developmental milestones, and I seemed “normal” psychologically, except for being shy and timid. There was no obvious physical aftermath. How in the world is all of this possible? I may never know any of the answers.

Realizing that this happened to me is not what is frustrating to me. It feels like a weight on my heart and leaves me numb. What is frustrating is that I could have gotten this information many years ago and just plain forgotten it. Amnesia came roaring back, and I had to remember all over again.

I have long believed that no issue is totally resolved. The process is not linear; it is a spiral. You work on something and make good progress, then turn to something else. In time you come back to the same issue and work on it again, but at a deeper level. I thought that I would know what my issues are and remember the work I had done on them. Now I know that isn’t necessarily true.

It’s like making a complicated cake with many layers and spending hours decorating it beautifully, then dropping it on the floor.

Oh well, I can always start over again. I just did.

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* You can find more information on the following holidays at:

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Upcoming Holidays
November
11/11 Veterans’ Day (?)
11/13 Friday the thirteenth
11/26 Thanksgiving Day (United States)
11/30 Full moon
11/30 St Andrew’s Day
December
Sundays of advent: 11/28, 12/5, 12/12, 12/19
12/4 Total Solar Eclipse
12/14 Total solar eclipse. Totality will be visible in Chile and parts of Argentina. Partial eclipse will be visible in southern South America and south-east Africa. See https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2020-december-14
12/18 Full Moon
12/21 Winter solstice/Yule/St. Thomas’ Day
12/24 Christmas Eve
12/5 Christmas Day
12/29 Full moon
12/31 New Year’s Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
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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I Wish I Had Kept an RA Journal

May 21, 2018May 26, 2018 by Jean, posted in child parts, fragmentation, Mind Control, programming

* Detailed instructions for making comments are in “News Items.”
* Looking for people who have been used as breeders in a cult setting for submissions for an anthology I hope to put together. Even if you have not been abused this way, could you spread the word and tell all your survivor friends and supportive therapists or pastors about the project? They can write me at rahome@ra-info.org for more information. Thank you so much!

I Wish I Had Kept an RA Journal

The other day I came across a piece of paper. It was writing dating from sometime between 1994 and 1996, a time when many memories were surfacing. I have no recollection of writing it.

I’ve never been good at journaling. I start one, do a few pages, put it aside and forget about it. Then when I need to write something down I either start a new journal or grab any old piece of paper. Since there is no central place I keep all these writings, I cannot go back and look something up.

Many people have the organizational skills to keep their writing together, and maybe even date it or – wow! – index it. I wish I were that way, but I’m not, and never will be. I did make a small step toward organization and made a “locator book” where I write where I have put things. Now I have only one thing to lose instead of dozens…as long as I remember to use the book!

That piece of paper upset me and has been on my mind ever since I found it about two weeks before Beltane. Even though it’s important, I wasn’t ready to pursue it back in the ’90’s. I was so overwhelmed then, and I pursued the things that were pursuing me and taking over my life. I can’t fault myself: I think I made the right choice.

But now I am more stable and less often in relentless flashbacks. So I have the luxury of pursuing it now.

I have wondered for a long time why I am so fragmented. I learned that fragments were used in one of the experimental programming systems that were implanted in me. But I couldn’t have become fragmented then: I didn’t start being used for MC experimentation until I was six. And if fragmentation had been induced at that age, there would have been a trace, a memory, a longing for a less fragmented state. I never experienced any loss or yearning.

I don’t have trouble accepting that I was pretty well dissociated before the age of six because I remember what it felt like to be dissociated back then. Early photos show the vacant stare of a dissociated child. Before the age of about a year and a half I looked like a regular baby; my face was expressive and my body seemed to move freely.

Although I remember being dissociated, I don’t remember being multiple, in the classic sense, with inner parts with separate personalities and histories and places within my mind. I remember thinking just the way I think now and I remember freezing and going blank just the way I do now.

In the writing that I discovered, I was dialoguing with a two-year-old boy, a baby still. He did not know what happened to him, but he knew it hurt. I asked if somebody did know, and he pointed to another two-year-old boy whose body was covered with intersecting black lines. He reminded me of a picture puzzle. This boy could not talk. He understood me and nodded or shook his head to communicate. Since he couldn’t tell me what had happened. he pointed to another boy.

This one was in pieces, tiny pieces. The boy with the marks tried to reassemble him. He could only find pieces that fit for one little finger. That is where the writing stopped.

What it signals to me is heart-breaking. I feel that I was electroshocked when I was two and that was what caused the fragmentation. Recently I asked a survivor half my age what a feather symbolized, as I have doodled feathers on and off since childhood, and she told me it meant electroshock. I felt validated.

I had no words at the time to describe to anybody, even myself, what had happened, and no way to make myself whole again. But fragments could be assembled to make a small part of me, and that is how I have always experienced myself. Small groups of fragments come together to write a blog entry or feed the cats and then dissolve, waiting safely someplace until needed again.

I’ve also always had some confusion about my gender. I know I am a woman, and I don’t feel like a man in a woman’s body. There are times, however, especially when I first wake up, when I am surprised to find that I am a woman. I remembered abuse when I was five that explained the confusion to my satisfaction. Looking at the writing, though, it seems to me that messing with my beliefs about my gender started around the age of two. Why? I have no idea, at least consciously

It just now occurred to me that the first little boy I spoke with is, indeed an alter. He took me forward in time to the moment when he felt the electroshock and then to when he was fragmented and no longer himself. It shows me I was once unfragmented but have forgotten what that felt like. although I do have a couple of memories from before the age of two. Was I multiple then? I don’t know.

Every answer brings up more questions. I know that this process will continue for the rest of my life. Each time I get an answer, with its accompanying questions, I know myself a little better. I know for sure that there will not be enough time to answer all the questions raised, and so I shall never completely know my past. Some days that makes me sad and angry, other days I think I know all too much about my past, and that too makes me sad and angry.

Upcoming Holidays
May
5/28 Memorial Day
5/29 Full moon
June
6/17 Fathers’ Day
6/21 Summer Solstice
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve
6/23 St John’s Eve
6/28 Full moon
July
7/4 Fourth of July/US Independence Day
7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God
7/27 Full Moon

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups
6/6 D-Day: invasion of France in WW2
7/29 Hitler proclaimed leader of the Nazi party
(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons.)

Ritual Abuse and Polyfragmentation

June 30, 2016 by Jean, posted in alters, dissociation, fragmentation, multiplicity, ritual abuse

Back in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s, when I first started down this long, difficult, amazingly rewarding path, the word polyfragmentation wasn’t used in connection with multiplicity. Or if it was, it didn’t pop up in any of the myriad books about ritual abuse that I read at the time and so I didn’t know about it. Well, I knew about it intuitively, and so did many others, but we had no words to describe it.

Now most all survivors know what polyfragmentation is and feel a lot less lonely and crazy. Which is great!

But do they really know? Poking around, I found that the term seems to be used in several different ways. Just knowing that the word comes from poly = many and fragmented = the state of being broken off, detached, or incomplete doesn’t help a whole lot. (from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fragment)

Here are some of the ways the term is used:

1. More than 100 alters. I assume that means alters with names, ages, personal histories, etc. Some may be more fully formed than others, but basically they are all like people. That’s a lot, but it seems to me that it’s more a crowd than a group of fragments. Though I suppose if you consider that all alters either come from the original personality or from alters that have already split off, you can consider all the alters fragments. But wouldn’t that be true of people with 79 alters, or 5, or 3?

2. Parts with only one function, or formed during one specific instance of abuse. These parts might not have personalities and probably would not appear too often. They were split off from an existing alter and, because they are so limited, could be considered a fragment.

3. Parts arranged in layers throughout the system, generally isolated and not in communication with other parts of the system. Here I start getting confused: I can see that the system could be considered fragmented, but I can’t see the parts as fragments. They seem to me more like “sleeper alters.” I think my confusion has something to do with the type of system organization: it generally indicates government/military programming, which I always have trouble understanding. This pattern may co-exist with either or both of the other two described.

4. And then there is my kind of fragmentation, which I don’t consider confusing at all, of course, because it is normal for me. There are little bits of things floating around with no consciousness or purpose, sort of like dust particles in the air. When I want to do something, a number of these things coalesce into what might be considered an alter, or a group of alters (for more complicated tasks.) It’s not necessarily the same particles each time. All this is very logical and simple to me…except…who/what decides what to do? who/what picks the group of fragments? who/what decides when the action is complete and the particles can disperse?

The mind is never simple, is it?

In a sense, we don’t have to know how our mind works. We have been doing what we do for years and years and by now it is automatic. It takes no effort for me to assemble an internal crew to do the dishes (once I stop procrastinating) and being able to describe it as clearly as I can makes no difference. I still can’t decide if I am a proper multiple or not; I’ve just stopped worrying about it. I have better things to do with my spare time.

I have to end this post by telling you about a man I knew years ago whose mind was totally different yet remarkably similar to mine. I think it is so fascinating.

He said his mind was a slide rule. He lined up all the components of an action, and if he got it right, it went smoothly. If one part was missing, he froze until he could find it and put it in place. And if he picked a wrong part, he risked acting inappropriately.

Here’s an example. Phone rings. Select ‘phone.” Select “answer phone.’ Woman says, “Hello, may I talk to Bill.” Select ‘woman.’ Select ‘identify self as Bill.’ Woman says, “Would you like to join us for dinner Thursday?” Select ‘mother.’ Select ‘find excuse.’ You get the idea.

It all happened at lightning speed. The only way he could analyze what was going on was to further dissociate and have a part look at the process as it was happening. After observing it many times, he found a simile for how his mind worked and was able to describe it to others. But, like me, he had no idea who or what was observing the process or who or what made the decisions – who selected ‘mother’ rather than ‘bill collector.’

I wonder if there are others like him out there. And I wonder if others truly understand polyfragmentation.

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I Wish I Had Kept an RA Journal

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