One Big Sorrow and Two Big Joys

This has been a very emotional week.

The sorrow was the loss of my elderly orange-and-white Cornish Rex cat. His death was not unexpected – he was eighteen and a half and had been sick for several days with all the symptoms of pancreatitis. I thought he was turning the corner because, after three or four days of zero appetite, he asked for chicken at lunchtime Saturday and also ate some dry food.

Saturday night he spent a little time on my bed, which I also took as a good sign, as he had been sleeping on the couch since he got sick. When I woke up, I didn’t see him in any of his usually napping places, so I went to the computer, expecting him to come jump on my lap and help me type. 

When he didn’t show up, I went looking for him again. I spotted him on the floor, motionless, between the couch and the potted ficus tree. I understand that cats usually look for an unusual place to die, preferably a small enclosed one. The space between the pot and the wall would have been ideal, but he didn’t quite make it.

The grief is so strong this time around! It has kicked up left-over grief from my two previous cats, the two dogs from my adult life, and the two dogs from my childhood. The animals from my adulthood were all eased out of life by their veterinarians and the childhood pets were “returned to the breeder so that they could have puppies.” I sincerely doubt that was so; I believe they were sacrificed. This was the first natural death (except for mice and hamsters) that I have experienced. 

And it was the first time that the death of an animal stirred up grief for the people in my life that I have lost. Perhaps it was because it was a natural death, perhaps because I am older now and death is closer to the forefront of my mind.

Besides the grief, I have had to contend with urges to do things to his body that are reminiscent of things that were done in the cult when an animal was sacrificed. The urges are strong, but I know that I will not act on them. It feels good to be so sure I am in control of my behavior that the images in my mind do not make me anxious. I can remember times when I was not as confident and I was terrified that the urges would overpower me. Now they are only an opportunity to process death in the cult at a deeper level.

Enough of the sorrow; now on to the joy.

I have a very good friend who had been extremely sick (not COVID) and was hospitalized for over a month. Everybody, including him, expected him to die, but he fooled his friends and family, his doctors, and himself and made it through. He is now discharged home and gaining his strength back. 

During the period when it was touch and go, I remembered all the good times we had had together and cried a lot. We went back a long time – to our teens – so there was a lot to cry over. There was laughter mixed in with the tears and that made me happy even as I was grieving. Now my heart is light again! Of course, since he is the human equivalent of eighteen-and-a-half cat years he probably won’t be with us for a long, long time, but every day is precious. Always has been, always will be.

I don’t feel comfortable saying much more – I don’t like talking about other people. So on to the other joy.

This one isn’t as dramatic, and that is just fine by me. I had a birthday last week and celebrated with a ZOOM call with my family. Last year it was a bigger celebration because I had asked all my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids. I had also asked everybody to provide themselves with a cake (preferably chocolate with raspberry jam filling and chocolate fudge icing) and celebrate with me. There was one slice of last year’s cake in the freezer but I forgot all about it and so we all had a cakeless celebration.

No cake, no candles, no presents, but lots of love and another good memory for all. We had such a good time that we started talking about doing it for other family members’ birthdays. That would average out to just under one ZOOM celebration a month! 

For years I had dreaded my birthday because birthdays were so horrible when I was a child. For a good twenty years, I didn’t know why I could barely tolerate them, and then – boom! bye-bye, amnesia! – I totally got it. I was happy to celebrate others’ birthdays, but not mine. I acted out in behavior the feelings of wishing to have never been born. 

I asked for no presents on my birthday or Christmas. To make up for it, my family received presents at random times during the year and one set of grandkids got presents on Lobster Day. That was fine by them. I tried to institute a form of Lobster Day with the other set, but they thought it was too hokey and rejected the idea.

When I turned eighty, though, I realized I was depriving my kids of happy memories and asked for a big bash. No presents for me, just a request to pay something forward. That was shortly after I had decided to say “fuck the camera phobia.” Suddenly, avoiding cameras no longer seemed a loving, self-protective thing to do; it seemed selfish. I was going to leave photos for my kids to remember me by no matter how uncomfortable it made me.

It wasn’t as hard as I had anticipated, and it was great preparation for the ZOOM days ahead. 

I’ve always known that I could be happy about some things and sad about other things at the same time, but one emotion has always been far more powerful at the time than the other. This time they were pretty well balanced.

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Upcoming Holiday

September 

9/29 Michaelmas/Feast of Archangel Michael and of all Angels

9/22 Fall Equinox

October

10/11 (?) Columbus Day

10/13 Backward Halloween

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

12/24 Christmas Eve

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

12/25 Christmas Day

12/31 New Year’s Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

9/21 – 9/27 Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles, Jewish harvest festival

10/4 Hitler’s alternate half-birthday (Note: Hitler was born on Easter, so Nazis celebrate his actual half-birthday, 10/20, and his alternate half-birthdate six months after Easter, which falls on 4/4 this year.)

10/16 Death of Rosenburg

10/19 Death of Goering

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: 

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

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/

“My Love Is Poison”

There are two announcements after the main part of this post.

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Once, way back in the late ’70s, I was working as a social worker. I was lucky; I had an ideal job that included a little bit of everything – individual, group, and family therapy, and plenty of interesting clients. Plus some teaching and some program design and grant writing. I loved the people I worked with, too.

I also had a brilliant supervisor. He had a way of compressing ideas into short sentences that were spot on and impossible to forget. He was also very funny. One of his sayings, which I have never forgotten, was, “He believes his love is poison.”

How many survivors have distorted beliefs about their love? Either that they are incapable of loving, or that love means hurting somebody on purpose, or that, no matter how hard they try, they always end up hurting the person they love.

I had a lot of those beliefs. They were so deep in my unconscious that I only had glimpses of them. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. I wasn’t sure what love felt like, but I was pretty sure that nobody loved me and that I loved nobody. And I was certain I had no friends because nobody wanted to play with me at recess or sit next to me at lunch. I thought it was because I wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t fun to be around. I had no idea how I got that  way or what to do about it.

As I grew older, I did make a couple of friends, but they soon moved away. I started noticing how I often messed things up when somebody wanted to spend time with me. It was as if I was so scared that I wouldn’t be liked that I withdrew from people. You can’t be rejected if you send out “leave me alone” vibes. I was a sad, lonely kid alternating between rushing at people with my arms wide open and running away from them.

When I was able to form more complicated mental pictures, I found that I seemed to hurt people without knowing I was doing so. This upset me terribly. Despite gaining some social skills and working on the issue for years, for decades, I just couldn’t shake the belief that I harmed people.

After I had remembered my abuse for about ten years, I told my survivor friends that I felt like a poisonous toad. They did the sweetest thing – they started to shower me with cute toads, or in some cases, cute frogs. Figurines, stuffed animals, drawings. There was even a magnificent poisonous toad that sang Jingle Bells! Obviously, their image of me didn’t resemble my image of myself.

I finally got that it was a childhood belief and had little to do with my current behavior. I decided to express what was going on in art. I bought some chicken wire and planned to make a toad-shaped form filled with soil. Inside would be a tiny naked baby from my dollhouse. It was only about half an inch long, the weakest, most vulnerable creature imaginable. Finally, I would place the toad in the garden and plant flowers in the chicken wire holes. I got as far as trying to make the toad’s skin but found that chicken wire is really hard to work with and gave up. It was enough to have imagined the piece.

I also figured out that I had repeatedly been set up in double-bind situations. I would be told to hurt an animal or another child, then given an alternative of hurting them less severely. Sometimes I was given the choice of hurting them or hurting myself. But it was always a trick. The lesser of two evils, the action I chose, always turned out to be the greater of two evils.

The explicit and implicit message was, “You freely chose to do this. You LIKE hurting people! You LIKE causing pain! You LIKE violence!” That was how I came to believe that my altruism hurt people, that my love was dangerous and poisonous.

But it was a total lie. If I had liked to hurt others, it would not have bothered me. I would have found it pleasurable and looked forward to opportunities to be sadistic. Or I would have simply had the attitude, “What’s the big deal? Doesn’t everybody?”

And I will tell you, the vast majority of the survivors I have met have been kind and loving people, even if, like me, they held (or still hold) distorted beliefs about their ability to love or be loved. They, too, were told big fat lies day after day after day.They may have heard those lies in their head, but deep down, they remained true to their own loving center.

~~~~~~~~~~ 

Remember my posts about the campaign against Pornhub by Traffickinghub? https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2020/11/21/great-good-news-pornhub/

Here’s an update.

The Canadian Parliament’s Ethics Committee is investigating MindGeek, which is headquartered in Montreal, for profiting from criminal content. MindGeek is the parent company of Pornhub. (Pornhub executives were forced to appear before the Ethics Committee on February 5, 2021.) Laila Mickelwait, the founder of the Traffickinghub movement: https://traffickinghub.com, testified on February 26, 2021. She is a powerful speaker.

Laila Mickelwait writes: 

“The day before I was scheduled to speak, these executives tried to silence me because they were afraid of my testimony. The CEO and COO of MindGeek sent a personal letter to the committee slandering me and asking the committee not to allow me to speak.

The Members of Parliament said it was the first time someone under investigation tried to attack and discredit a witness. They were shocked but not deterred. 

MindGeek’s attempts failed miserably.

I was able to present the stories of many victims who personally reached out to me, expose the lies that CEO Feras Antoon and COO David Tassillo displayed in their testimony, and offer practical solutions for uprooting exploitation on porn tube sites like Pornhub.”

Here is her full testimony:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppiF9dR31qI&feature=youtu.be&goal=0_c15bff8d91-ecaf5834ab-86660702&mc_cid=ecaf5834ab&mc_eid=a2265e2517

 Here are highlights of her testimony:
 https://www.instagram.com/p/CLf8ParjEnW/?goal=0_c15bff8d91-ecaf5834ab-86660702&mc_cid=ecaf5834ab&mc_eid=a2265e2517

~~~~~~~~~~

Some Background on MindGeek

MindGeek is the name of a company that owns dozens of other companies related to pornography. Some, like Pornhub, are popular on the Web and can be located using search engines. They even own a site dedicated to pornographic video games! It ranks 758 in world-wide popularity and 410 in popularity in the United States. You can check out its stats on https://www.similarweb.com/website/nutaku.net/

If you want to see a shokcing statistic, check out https://www.similarweb.com/website/pornhub.com/

Many, if not most, of their companies, though, post on the Dark Web. These sites contain the more extreme forms of pornography: child pornography, extreme sadism (including torture), and snuff films. It will be very interesting to watch the campaign against MindGeeks’s Dark Web holdings. 

~~~~~~~~~~ 

Upcoming Holidays

March
3/1 St David’s Day (patron saint of Wales)
3/1 St. Eichstadt’s Day
3/17 St. Patrick’s Day (patron saint of Ireland)
3/21 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan
3/28 Full Moon
3/28 Palm Sunday

April
4/1 April Fool’s Day
4/1 Maundy Thursday (commemoration of the Last Super)
4/2 Good Friday
4/3 Holy Saturday
4/4 Easter Sunday
4/8 Day of the Masters
4/26 Grand Climax/De Meur
4/26 Full Moon
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve

May
5/1 Beltane
5/9 Mothers’ Day
5/12 (?) Armed Forces Day
5/23 Pentecost
5/26 Total Lunar Eclipse
5/26 Full Moon
5/31 Memorial Day

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

3/28 – 4/4 Passover/Pesach (Deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt)
4/4 Hitler’s alternate birthday (Note: Hitler was born on Easter, so Nazis celebrate his actual birthday, 4/20, and Easter of the current year. This year Easter falls on 4/12.)
4/20 Hitler’s birthday
5/8 V-E Day (Victory in Europe, WW2)
5/17 Shavuot (Festival of Harvest, Festival of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments)
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices, and the equinoxes.)

~~~~~~~~~~

You can find more information on the following holidays at: 

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/
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/

Missing My Brother

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

* Background on Pagan winter holidays is at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/yulewinter-solstice/

* And here is a post on how I handled Christmas through the years. https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2014/12/20/ephemeral-equilibrium-another-christmas/

* Don’t forget that I’m putting together an anthology of accounts of survivor’s loss of a baby through forced abortion, sacrifice, or forced adoption. I am also looking for submissions from husbands, partners, close friends, therapists, or pastors.

You can ask me questions or send your submission through this blog’s comment section, rahome@ra-info.org, or PO Box 14276, 4304 18th Street, San Francisco CA 94114. And tell your friends!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I’ve been in a funk for the best part of the last two weeks without knowing why. I didn’t think I was triggered, but one never knows. I thought I was just overtired from poor sleep due to pain from arthritis.

My new friend, Starling, and I meet weekly to discuss cult matters and life in general. We talk uninterrupted for ten minutes and then ask for feedback. I chose to describe my low mood and Starling said that she thought I was grieving. I talked about my Australian friend David, who died last year, for a while and then suddenly remembered that my brother’s birthday had passed unnoticed.

My brother has always been very important to me, as he was the only person in my family I liked or loved. We were close as children but grew apart as adults, mostly thanks to his extreme social anxiety. Then in 2001 he had a massive stroke which left him almost completely paralyzed and unable to talk. He spent the next eight years in a nursing home before dying of MRSA.

All my adult life, I had watched him slowly disappear and I had grieved the progressive loss of our relationship. And now he really is gone and there is nothing I can do about it. There are so many things I wish I had said to him even though it would have made him uncomfortable. I hope he knew how much I cared about him and how sad I was – and am – that his life was so hard.

One didn’t talk about important things in our family. It just wasn’t done. We pretended that unimportant things were important, things like the kind of clothes you wore or whether you went to a fancy school. Or table manners. You wouldn’t believe the amount of energy my parents put into criticizing our table manners. All this attention to trivia masked the family secrets.

By then, I was talking a little more freely about real things and so disclosed the ritual abuse to him. He said, “I am sorry I can’t help you. I have no memories.” But he didn’t reject me or think I was crazy. Under the shock of having me disclose, he leaked some information. He told me that the reason he couldn’t look people in the eye was that he saw a knife in their eye and blood. Tell me that is not a cult memory trying to push up to the surface! He never wanted to hear anything about my abuse after that. It was too much, and his defenses tightened up.

I am sorry he never had a chance to remember and to feel the relief of knowing what actually happened, knowing that his symptoms made sense and were not his fault. I sometimes irrationally feel that I prevented him from remembering, that I magically took all the memories and all the healing and left him with nothing.

But it doesn’t work that way. It is a mystery why one person remembers and another doesn’t, why one person’s defenses crack and another’s stay rigidly in place. All I can do is accept that fact and be very sad for him, and for my parents, too.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Upcoming Holidays

December
12/21 Yule/Winter Solstice
12/22 Full Moon
12/24 Christmas Eve
12/25 Christmas Day
12/31 New Year’s Eve
12/31 New Year’s Eve
January
1/1 New Year’s Day
1/13 Satanic New Year
1/20 Full moon
February
2/2 S Candlemas/Imbolc
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/19 Full moon

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups
11/9 Kristallnacht
(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons, as well as some Christian and Jewish holidays.)