A Huge Commitment to Myself

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

* Remember that two anthologies are seeking submissions:

1. Jade Miller is working on an anthology about the difficulty of finding a therapist who can work with DID or other forms of dissociation. Write her at thetraumasurvivorstale@gmail.com

2. I am seeking submissions for an anthology of accounts of forced abortion, sacrifice, or forced adoption of babies in a cult setting. Contact me through the comments section, rahome@ra-info.org or RA Projects, PO Box 14276, 4304 18th St., San Francisco CA 94114.

* The Plural Positivity World Conference is on March 30, March 31, and April 1, 2019.

Here is the link to the conference Itself: http://www.youtube.com/pluralevents

There is a panel which includes me scheduled for 
Sunday, March 31, 2019 10 AM – 11:30 Eastern Daylight Time (1:00 – 2:30 Pacific Daylight Time) “Coming Out & Being Plural in a Singular World” – Panelists: The Crisses, Sarah& Clark, PrincessProto, Dr. Serseción, Jean Riseman

My interview is on Sunday, March 31 at 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (4:30 pm – 6:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time) “(S)RA Myths Debunked – The benefits of connecting with other survivors.” – Jean Riseman

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I have done something very bold. I, who am quite risk-aversive, to say the least, have made a three-month, twelve-hours-a-week commitment to myself. I’m doing this in the hope that it will pay off in terms of improved health and that I will not sacrifice all the wonderful things I get from the Internet, nor my sleep, nor my social life, nor anything else that is really important to me. How I will do this is not yet evident.

Some of you probably know that I have osteoarthritis of the lower spine which limits my mobility and causes me a fair amount of pain most days. What I haven’t shared is that I am getting tingling and numbness in my hands, which strongly suggests that my neck is starting go, too. Since I plan to live another ten to fifteen years, this is serious.

I heard of a chiropractic clinic that uses very gentle techniques to correct imbalances due to injury and subsequent changes in posture: changes for the worse, of course. I had tried going to a chiropractor about twenty-five years ago and was terrified by the spinal adjustments. Not knowing when to expect them triggered flashbacks and I was also afraid that they would worsen my arthritis, not help it. I tried two different practitioners and each time quit after a few sessions. Going gave me no relief, only increased fear.

I had to overcome my initial impression of chiropractors in order to make this commitment. I was told about the clinic and its approach and I read up on it on the Net. It all seemed very sensible. Then I made a mini-commitment for an evaluation and found I was treated with respect and that the approach continued to make sense. The people were nice, too; they enjoyed their work and believed in it and were open and friendly.

I had an awful lot to overcome. There were negative core beliefs from childhood that argued strongly against my availing myself of this opportunity.

I think lots of people can relate to the feeling that I’m not worthy and I don’t deserve this. I can see that other people are deserving of care but I get uncomfortable when it’s pointed out that I do, too. After all, I wasn’t raised to see myself as just as good as others, just as entitled to having my physical and emotional needs met. I was raised to see myself as a tools of others with no intrinsic worth. If it pleased others to see a pretty little girl I was bought pretty clothes and if it pleased them see me filthy dirty and shaking with fear they made sure I was filthy and terrified.

Today I know better intellectually, but that early belief surfaces at times and gets in the way of taking care of myself. Even after years and years of challenging those teachings and coming to understand why I considered myself worthless and forgiving myself for having swallowed their lies, those core beliefs still sometimes show themselves.

There’s another barrier to accepting help for physical problems, especially those that cause pain. You see, the members of cult I was abused in were very pious. Pain was considered an offering to Satan, just as being moral and praying and helping others is a way of pleasing God in Christian churches. If you tried to get rid of pain, it was an insult to Satan, like shoplifting or having sex outside of marriage is considered a sin by Christians. I learned to bear pain stoically, without complaint, and even, at times, to welcome pain or seek it out. I’m going completely against my upbringing by trying to slow down the progression of the arthritis and diminish the amount of pain I live with.

Working hard and spending good money and lots of time every day for three months to avoid pain? The old tape says that Satan is not going to be pleased one little bit. I should be terrified. I should make sure I sabotage the treatment and get worse, not better. I should…I should….but I won’t. I’ve made the commitment and I am going to keep it. It will be a great adventure!

Upcoming Holidays

April
4/1 April Fool´s Day
4/8 Day of the Masters
4/14 Palm Sunday
4/19 Full moon
4/19 Good Friday
4/20 Holy Saturday
4/21 Easter Sunday
4/26 Grand Climax/De Meur
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
May
5/1 Beltane
5/12 Mothers’ Day
5/18 Full moon
5/18 Armed Forces Day
5/27 Memorial Day
June
6/9 – 6/10 Pentecost
6/16 Father’s Day
6/17 Full moon
6/21 Summer solstice
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
4/19 – 4/27 Passover/Pesach (Deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt)
4/20 Hitler´s actual birthday
4/21 Hitler’s alternative birthday (Note: Hitler was born on Easter, so Nazis celebrate his actual birthday and half-birthday on 4/20 and his actual birthday and half-birthday on Easter of the current year.)
4/30 Anniversary of Hitler’s death
5/1 – 5/2 Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day)
5/7 – 5/8 Yom HaZikaron (Memorial Day, Day of Remembrance)
5/8 – 5/9 Yom HaAtzma´ut (Israeli Independence Day)
5/8 V-E Day (Victory in Europe, WW2)
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark

The Unconscious

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

* Candlemas is right around the corner, on February 2. I always found that this was a hard Satanic holiday to remember, as it lives on only as Groundhog Day. I hope that all of you have remembered it is coming up and have made plans for safety and to minimize the amount of misery that flashbacks may bring.

You can read about the background of Candlemas at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/candlemas/ The history of Valentine’s Day is at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/valentines-day/

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The idea of an unconscious has always seemed peculiar to me. How can I know something, remember something, feel something physically and emotionally, and not know I know, remember or feel it? When I think about that, it is really spooky.

Where are all these things I don’t know located? It’s not like I have a giant filing cabinet in my brain stuffed full of things unknown to me. Or a library of microfiches, which would take up less room. Does it have its own little corner of the brain, or does it piggyback on a part that stores things that I am conscious of?

Apparently, the conscious and the unconscious mind are pretty much the same thing, so there is no separate place for information stored in the unconscious. When things happen, the same areas of the brain light up – and almost all the brain is active in processing sensory information and storing it, whether we later can access it or not. The main difference is that trauma memories are stored as blocks of sensory information, while non-trauma memories are stored as narrative.

We, can, however, direct our awareness only to certain things; what we are doing in the moment and what we can remember if we wish. The amount of things we can easily remember is quite small compared to all the things that we have lived through. I know what I ate for breakfast this morning and one marvelous breakfast in Italy comes to mind easily but that leaves about 29,000 unaccounted for.

We can stretch our minds and get access to some stuff that was previously inaccessible. For example, I studied calculus in high school. About the only memory I have of calculus is that I spent a year studying it and that I liked it. And the phrase “asymptotically approaching zero.” The rest is lost to me – it is in my unconscious.

Now if I start studying calculus again, chunks of what I learned in high school will come back to me and I will learn more quickly than I did back then. Part of my unconscious has become once more conscious.

But I still find it spooky. How do some things get forgotten and others remembered? How can we forget something even as it is happening? This has happened to me, in everyday life, when I lost control of my car on a snowy road. I remember the moment I lost control, then nothing until I found myself in a snow bank with no idea of how far I skidded or whether I had spun or not.

It gets more complicated when multiplicity is added to the mix.

Okay, I know the theory. Trauma causes the mind to split and, if the same trauma is repeated, that split continues to evolve until it appears to have a separate identity with its own history, memories, and its own unconscious. Alter A may not know a word of German and Alter B may speak German fluently. Alter C remembers going to college and Alter D has no memories of anything that happened after age six. And all these alters may have forgotten some of the same things and so, in a very real sense, they share the same unconscious as well as having their own unconsciousnesses.

Back to how one piece of information is selected for conscious recall and the myriad other memories are not.
I fondly recall knowing a young gay man named Bobby who called himself Sonny when he went out dancing.

No problem, very normal. He only began to consider that he might be multiple when Karen came on the scene to choose whether he went out clubbing and therefore was Sonny or whether he stayed home as Bobby.

So do I have a Karen that chooses what I can remember and what stays firmly in my unconscious? I doubt it. But even if I did, it wouldn’t explain how Karen chooses. Does Karen have access to everything that happened to me? Does she have no unconscious? And what would motivate her to choose one thing to share with me and not another?

And animals? Do they have an unconscious, or do they have access to everything that ever happened to them? How could we tell, anyway?

The more I brood over these things, the spookier it gets. Multiple or singleton, the mind is mysterious and will surely not give up its secrets in my lifetime. It’s best just to accept that some things are so without worrying about why or how it works.

Guess I am lucky to have a mind, lucky to be able to ask unanswerable questions, lucky to be able to live with uncertainty.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Upcoming Holidays

February
2/2 S Candlemas/Imbolc/Satanic Revels
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/18 President’s Day/Washington’s Birthday
2/19 Full moon
2/25 Walpurgis Day

March
3/1 St. Eichstadt’s Day
3/5 Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
3/6 Ash Wednesday/Beginning of Lent
3/17 St. Patrick’s Day
3/20 Full moon
3/20 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan

April
4/1 April Fool´s Day
4/8 Day of the Masters
4/14 Palm Sunday
4/19 Full moon
4/19 Good Friday
4/20 Holy Saturday
4/21 Easter Sunday
4/26 Grand Climax/De Meur
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
3/20 – 3/21 Purim (Deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman in Persia)
4/19 – 4/27 Passover/Pesach (Deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt)
4/20 Hitler´s actual birthday
4/21 Hitler’s alternative 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.)
4/30 Anniversary of Hitler’s death

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

Anger and Sadness

* In case you didn’t notice, the ritual calendar has been updated and the 2019 version is now available.

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

* You might miss this, as it is down at the bottom of the post. 1/20 – 1/21 Total lunar eclipse. (Super Blood Wolf Moon) Visible in all of North and South America and partially visible in Europe. See https://www.space.com/42830-supermoon-blood-moon-total-lunar-eclipse-2019.html The first moon the year is called the Wolf Moon because wolves howl at the moon with hunger. For information on Super Blood Moons, see  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/the-september-28-2015-super-blood-moon-full-eclipse/

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I was thinking how anger often masks sadness. If I am feeling angry and manage to stay with my feelings without acting on them in any way, I eventually feel the anger cracking. Tears start running down my face. I feel so hurt and sad that somebody could treat me like that – it’s painful in a way that anger is not.

I feel very vulnerable when I express my sadness. If I dare to let anybody know, I fear I will be hurt again. If I have been unable to protect myself in the past and “allowed” myself to be hurt, others will know and take advantage of my weakness. At times I am so afraid that I shake. It is far safer to show anger because anger can frighten people and make them stay away.

Either way, it is lonely, but anger provides a rush that makes me feel energized and gives me the hope that I can control others and prevent them from hurting me. As long as that adrenaline is flowing, I feel safe and protected.

At the same time, my anger  frightens me. I am not sure I can control it. It could go beyond protecting me into attacking others tooth and nail. It’s tricky. Too little anger and nobody would take me seriously. Too much and I might do real harm. I don’t like destruction and I do not want to kill or maim somebody or throw furniture around wantonly.

I know that these are old, old feelings. My anger, at best, could hurt somebody’s feelings. My body is no longer in shape to toss furniture around the room or do serious physical damage to a person. Rationally, I have nothing to fear from my anger, but not all of me knows that. Anger sure talks a good line, though! It’s got me fearing it could destroy the entire city.

Sadness – what am I sad about? Mainly death. The deaths of animals and children in the cult. Deaths in my family before we could resolve anything. Deaths of so many survivors, so many friends. The passing of still another year and knowing very few more are left to me.

I’m sad about lesser things, too. The cat I had to give away because he started to act viciously toward my other cat. The fact that it is raining and I cannot go do things in my garden. (Except I am glad for the rain.) I broke my favorite necklace. And the list goes on.

Now that I know what lies underneath my anger, I get angry much less often. Its as if the genie has been let out of the bottle and doesn’t want to go back in again. Anger just doesn’t work very well as a distraction – I am on to myself. And that’s okay with me. My sadness can’t hurt anybody, and grieving my losses lightens my burden in time. I feel calmer…and more real.

~~~~~

Upcoming Holidays

January
1/20 St. Agnes’ Eve
1/20 Full moon
1/21 Martin Luther King Day
1/20 – 1/21 Total lunar eclipse. (Super Blood Wolf Moon) Visible in all of North and South America and partially visible in Europe. See https://www.space.com/42830-supermoon-blood-moon-total-lunar-eclipse-2019.html The first moon the year is called the Wolf Moon because wolves howl at the moon with hunger. For information on Super Blood Moons, see  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/the-september-28-2015-super-blood-moon-full-eclipse/

February
2/2 Candlemas/Imbolc/Satanic Revels
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/18 President’s Day/Washington’s Birthday
2/19 Full moon
2/25 Walpurgis Day

March
3/1 St. Eichstadt’s Day
3/5 Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
3/6 Ash Wednesday/Beginning of Lent
3/17 St Patrick’s Day
3/20 Full moon
3/20 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
1/20 – 1/21 Tu B´Shvat (Celebration of spring)
1/30 Hitler named Chancellor of Germany
3/20 – 3/21 Purim (Deliverance of the Jewish people from Haman in Persia)
(Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes)