safety after abuse – Ritual Abuse

Documentation to Increase the Safety of RA/MC Survivors

October 12, 2022 by Jean, posted in aminals, ritual abuse, safety after abuse

A Bit of Self-Care

I am so glad I gave myself permission to be late on posts or to skip one now and then. My lateness is explained by my cat’s behavior. Since I am still a bit hysterical, I made an even bigger decision.

After messing up part of the last post’s ritual dates section, I decided I would give myself a break from all that formatting. You can find the Satanic and Nazi calendars on the “2022 Ritual Calendar” page, as well as links to most major holidays described on the blog.

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Would anybody be willing to make the 2023 ritual calendar? You work off the 2022 one. Replace the dates of the full moon. Delete the 2022 eclipses and add the 2023 ones. Change the dates of the moveable holidays, like Thanksgiving and Easter. If you aren’t sure of some of the dates, look them up anyway. Make notes about anything you think might be wrong. Then I will send it on to somebody else to proofread and check the dates.

I would be very grateful – I have been doing this since 1999.

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If you haven’t gotten the October issue of the GrassRoots newsletter and would like to see it, write https://grassroots-ra-mc-collective.org/contact-us/ to subscribe.

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Cats- Bah, Humbug

Spencer, my new cat, is now in hiding. He is a Turkish Van, gorgeous like Baker but terrified of his new surroundings. I had him confined to my bedroom so he could get used to a small part of the house and have a safe place to return to when he started going out.

He slipped out when I was leaving the room, and I spent the weekend wandering around looking for him and crying. His previous owner even came and spent two hours meowing. Her husband crawled around on hands and knees looking under furniture and checking behind boxes of stuff. No cat.

On Sunday, I put food out in every room, and he ate the food in the office! I heard him meow in the middle of the night, so I came and gave him seconds. He had eaten the food in the office but hadn’t scoped out the other rooms. At least now I know he is alive and somewhere in the office.

Last night, he again meowed for seconds in the middle of the night. When I went to give it to him, he had not gotten all the way to his hiding place. I could hear him rustling the boxes under the coffee table in the office. Now I know where he is, or at least where he was last night.

Believe me, I looked there at least five times. Rick, his previous owner’s husband, took out every box and looked through them all. Spencer was, obviously, not found.

I am starting to calm down and trust he will come out someday. Somewhere, deep down, he knows I am a nice person who feeds him and brushes him and pets him where he likes it.

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Documentation to Increase the Safety of Survivors

Ellen Lacter has described in great detail how to create a “Safety Packet.” You can read the whole article here: https://endritualabuse.org/evidence-packets-increase-safety/

The basic idea is to describe your experiences in detail, naming names, and distribute this document to trusted people with instructions that it should be opened on your death and distributed to law enforcement and the media.

The people who have received the documentation should be given extra copies to distribute to other safe people so that the abusers cannot locate all the copies. And you should say, in public, that you have done this and that the shit will hit the fan if you are killed or disappear.

When you read the article, I imagine you will be overwhelmed by the amount of information you are being asked to put in this document. I imagine that working on it will stir up all your “don’t tell” programming. For me, it wasn’t the don’t the ‘don’t tell” programming that arose. It was the “I’m incompetent and worthless” programming. Either way, working on it will be emotional and challenging.

I did this once, a long time ago. I printed out a short version of what Ellen suggested and distributed it. Today, you can put it on a thumb drive – so much easier!

Here is a summary of what is in the safety packet. It doesn’t include everything, or I would have just posted Ellen’s article in full.

1. A summary of what is in the packet and how to use it.

2. A list of the kinds of evidence in the packet.

3. A list of what the abusers might do to kill or “disappear” you.

4. A list of the people who have been given the packet

5. Instructions to those people

6. A witnessed authorization to open the packet upon your death and instructions for distributing the information contained in it to law enforcement and the media.

7. Evidence, such as descriptions of the abuse, recent harassment, reports to law enforcement, and medical records. A list of the abusers, with names, descriptions, and locations of the abuses. A list of victims, alive or dead, and potential victims, with descriptions and photos.

8. A video recording of yourself answering these questions.

What individuals or groups of individuals do you believe want you dead?
Why would these parties want you dead?
Can anyone support or corroborate that these parties have harmed you?
What methods do you believe these parties use to murder or disappear people?
Do you believe there have been any previous attempts on your life? If so, describe the suspected assailants and methods used.
Are you suicidal?
Why do you want to live?
Under what circumstances would you ever suicide?
Do you abuse life-threatening substances?
Do you have lethal weapons or substances in your home?
Do you drive safely? What is your record of traffic accidents and violations?
Do you have any desire to flee your current home and support persons?

My guess is that some of you are feeling overwhelmed just reading a summary of what to include in the safety packet. I know I am.

I believe you can do it. I believe you can pick the least difficult thing to do and give it a try. Then, when you finish it, give yourself a hug and a reward and celebrate your achievement in your own special way. Rest a bit, and then find the second least difficult thing to do.

I think it would be worthwhile to distribute it before you have finished because the process will be very time-consuming. Looking back over the summary of the safety packet contents, I would choose 4, 5, 6, and 8 to include before distributing it.

But don’t let yourself forget that there is more to do. Remember that you followed your plan of doing progressively harder things, and you have achieved your goal. You have gotten stronger by taking small step after small step. And a huge leap by making the video! Just reading over what else there is to be done has desensitized you quite a bit.

Use the same approach of leaving the hardest things for last. For example, write down the names of your abusers and pick the one you are least afraid of. Then, start filling in the information, again, starting with the easiest item and working up. There is no harm in leaving a mark like ???? or an emoji by an item you may want to skip for now and return to later.

I’ll share what I tell myself when the perfectionistic part takes over. “It’s better to do a half-assed job than no job at all.”

I’m not kidding. It’s true.

Finding Safety in These Chaotic Times

June 30, 2020 by Jean, posted in coronavirus, leaving the cult, safety after abuse

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I wrote about safety back in 2015. The focus was on protecting yourself from attacks by the cult. Here are the entries:

Safety on the Inside: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/safety-on-the-inside/
This entry also talks about creating inner safety. If the Abuse is Ongoing: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/if-the-abuse-is-ongoing/
Safety Issues: Email: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/safety-issues-email/
Safety Issues: Cars: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/safety-issues-cars/
Safety Issues: Documentation: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/safety-issues-documentation/
Personal Safety – Your Home: https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/personal-safety-your-home/

Not much of what I wrote five years ago is outdated, except that the Minnesota Police Department’s site isn’t nearly as useful. The information I offered in 2015 is still valid, but the coronavirus has changed our circumstances a lot. We can’t count on keeping our jobs, staying healthy, having decent medical insurance if we do get sick, or seeing our friends again any time soon. The outside world looks pretty shaky and unpredictable.

We can’t count on finding safety outside ourselves, not that we ever really could.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot thee days, and I feel that safety is created inside me. I look at the situation, assess it as best I can, and plot my course. Safety comes from trusting my own judgment. The “me” that is me is solid, smart, loyal, moral, kind. In a word, trustworthy.

Basically, I think that all steps toward safety begin on the inside, no matter what the outside conditions. I come back to the time when I started to try and leave the cult and my family because I had few skills at that age, and I had not tested myself. I did not know whether I would crumble or forge ahead despite setbacks.

I had to be able to conceptualize safety and to imagine that some people lead a life where they are not hurt by others, either physically or emotionally. Then I had to make the jump to… “I deserve to live that way. I want to live that way. It may be possible for me to get to live that way.”

This presumes that I had some way of learning about the world outside of my family and abusers. If you have never heard of France, you cannot imagine learning to speak French or visiting France. It isn’t even a word in your vocabulary.

I did know people who treated me well. They snuck in under my abusers’ radar and gave me a glimpse of other possibilities. I had a nanny until I was four who I loved dearly. She was kind and did not change into an evil person. A couple of teachers at school liked me. When I learned to read, I was fascinated by other people’s lives, real or made-up. I remember many long hours daydreaming that, like Mogli, I was raised by a wolf pack. Unlike Mogli, I did not return to my own kind.

The seed of safety and freedom had been planted, and nobody could take it away from me. I knew what I wanted; the only question was, can I get it? And how?

It’s tempting to believe that all the barriers to getting what you want are external. I couldn’t wait to be twenty-one when I would be legally free of my parents and could do what I wanted. I thought my ideal life would start when I stopped interacting with them. Looking back, being unrealistic about how easy it would be to lead a new, independent life was a huge gift. It gave me hope, and the hope kept me alive.

Back then, I didn’t know was that getting away is a process, not an event. There was no one moment when I was free. I tried to get out but was pulled back by threats, guilt-trips, or post-hypnotic suggestions. (I like to call programming post-hypnotic suggestion – it sounds much less formidable.) I did not know when I was finally free, any more than I knew that the last time I tried to stop smoking was truly the last, that it wasn’t going to be another failed attempt.

In healthy families, parents prepare their children to live independently. They teach them how to do laundry, how to manage finances, how to make friends. They let them practice leaving home in age-appropriate ways. First, it is a play date, then a sleepover. If children can leave, knowing they will come back to safe, loving parents, they naturally pick up life skills. But I had no safety to return to, and my parents had little interest in teaching me how to get along without them. Why would they want to relinquish control over their children, when their whole lives were centered around power and control?

So when I did make the break, I had lots and lots of stuff to learn. I entered college not knowing how to do laundry, and my cooking consisted of Jello and instant coffee. I had not been allowed to work and, without my own money, I could not buy my own clothes. I was an awkward, badly dressed outsider with zero social skills. I did not get my first job until I was twenty.

But I had that dream, and I kept on learning the things my parents should have taught me years before. It wasn’t smooth sailing, but I learned a lot as I went along and, more important, I never gain up for very long.

I never made a complete break from my parents. We were very distant, which I think suited them as much as it suited me. They did not control me, and I gave them very little thought because I was just too busy with my shiny new life. It took their deaths to make the separation complete.

All those years devoted to creating safety and freedom and – do I dare say it? – happiness have made me trust myself to do it once again. Yes, I feel under house arrest. Yes, it gives me flashbacks at times. Yes, I have cabin fever to the max. And yes, I am scared to go out now.

But I know, if I can escape a Satanic cult, I can handle this. t I am choosing to stay home and protect myself. I feel in control. I am not in control of the pandemic and the devastation it is causing, and I am not in control of my reactions to the situation, but I am in control of my behavior and my intent.

And so, cooped up in my apartment, I am safe and free.

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Upcoming Holidays

July
7/4 Independence Day
7/4 Full moon
7/4-5 Penumbral lunar eclipse. The moon will turn a shade darker during the maximum phase, visible in North and South America, and Africa. Most penumbral lunar eclipses cannot easily be distinguished from a usual full moon. See https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2020-july-5
7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God

August
8/1 Lammas/Lughnasadh
8/3 Full moon
8/15 Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
8/24 St. Bartholomew’s Day

September
9/1 Full moon
9/5 – 9/7 Feast of the Beast/Marriage of the Beast
9/7 Labor Day (United States)
9/22 Fall Equinox
9/29 Michaelmas/Feast of Archangel Michael and of all Angels

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
7/30 Tisha B’Av (Day of Mourning)
7/29 Hitler proclaimed leader of the Nazi party

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

School Shootings

July 20, 2018July 30, 2018 by Jean, posted in safety after abuse, triggers

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

 * If you are concerned about being tracked through your search engine, here is one that, unlike even duckduckgo.com, is encrypted https://www.searchencrypt.com/.

There are some topics that I never feel ready to write about but are always in the back of my mind. This is one of them. I still am not ready, but I’m doing it anyway.

There are many reasons why am I not ready. I’m too upset to spend all the time it takes to write a post that stirs up such intense feelings. It feels like an invitation for several nights of dreaming about the topic. I don’t know enough about it to say anything interesting. It has nothing to do with ritual abuse. I just plain don’t want to, not today.

Anyway…

When I was in grade school, we had fire drills and also air raid drills. (This was during Word War Two.) We had to hide under our desks, which, even in second grade, seemed pretty useless to me. Surely, if a bomb came through the roof, it would come through our desks, too. I was too busy thinking how dumb it was to be scared.

At night, the whole city was blacked out. No street lights, no headlights, and heavy black shades throughout the city were taped to the wall so that no light could get through the windows. My mother went out with flashcards to identify planes – were they ours or theirs? I’m not sure what she could have done if it were one of theirs, except scream. She felt useful, while I lay in bed terrified. To this day I like at least some light to come into my bedroom and I getting anxious when planes fly overhead, especially if they are low.

Today schools have lockdown drills and active shooter drills as well as fire drills. In lockdown drills the school doors are locked, the classroom doors locked, the blinds all pulled, and the kids hide in a closet or other sheltered place and stay silent for the duration of the drill, which can be up to ten minutes. I think this happens all across the country, in all grades. Active shooter drills vary more: some are lockdowns, except the school itself remains open for SWAT teams and first responders. Some have all or some of the kids evacuate, sometimes with instructions to bring thing to throw at the shooter if they can.

These drills really scare students. They don’t know whether it is real or a drill. And it reminds them, just as vividly as TV coverage, that the adults no longer consider schools safe. One woman recently told me that her daughter said she wasn’t going to college. “What’s the point? I’ll just get shot.” It’s an ever-present possibility in their minds.

It really upsets me that the kids feel so endangered. They feel helpless in the face of attack, and they feel their teachers and parents are helpless, too. There is no one person or group that they can direct their fear toward – the attacker could be anybody, even somebody they know. And when anybody can be the attacker, everybody is feared.

And then there are the shootings in churches. And clubs and malls and offices. Trucks being driven into groups of pedestrians. Car bombs and bombs in backpacks. The world certainly is dangerous in a way it wasn’t when I was a child.

Of course there are parts of the world where this kind of attack is a normal everyday occurrence. Parts of our country, too, where there are gang wars and drug deals gone bad. And so many parts of the world where violence is far, far worse, and is accompanied by rape, torture, murder, burning of villages and cities, disease, and famine. In comparison, most of us are living in a bubble of safety.

Few people, though, believe they live in a safe place. They see the increase in mass shootings and their sense of safety is shattered. They don’t know how to handle it, and they don’t know what to say when their kids ask questions like,

“Why do the bad guys want to shoot little kids?” Actually, the only honest answer I have for that question is, “I don’t know.”

I believe that none of this, or very little, has anything to do with cults. For one thing, there is no money in it. Cults like money and so have better things to do, like traffic kids, make hard-core porn, run guns, or sell drugs. Cults are not responsible for every bad thing that happens in the world, even though they brag to the kids that all these things are their doing. They have no monopoly on evil – there is plenty to go around, unfortunately.

I have a double dose of fear and confusion. Part is caused by the events that are happening today, and my emotions are appropriate and warranted. Part is a resurgence of feelings about threats they made to me as a kid and things I saw or experienced, both in the ordinary world and the cult world. At least I know that I am triggered and I can sort out how much is from the past and how much from the present. And at least I know that the chances of being shot or having somebody I know be shot are very slim.

But I am still frightened and confused, and that sucks.

Upcoming Holidays

July
7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God
7/27 Full Moon
August
8/1 Lammas/Lughnasadh
8/26 Full moon
September
9/3 Labor Day
9/5 – 9/7 Marriage to the Beast (Satan)
9/7 Feast of the Beast
9/22 Fall Equinox

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups
9/1 N Start of WW2
(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons

Upcoming Holidays
July

7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God

7/27 Full Moon

August

8/1 Lammas/Lughnasadh

8/26 Full moon

September

9/3 Labor Day

9/5 – 9/7 Marriage to the Beast (Satan)

9/7 Feast of the Beast

9/22 Fall Equinox

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups

9/1 N Start of WW2

(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons.)

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Upcoming Holidays

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Upcoming Holidays

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