2020 ritual calendar – Ritual Abuse

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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Fight, Flee, Freeze… and Tenderness

April 30, 2020 by Jean, posted in healing from ritual abuse, self-criticism

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

* Walpurgisnacht, Beltane

Well, tonight is Walpurgisnacht, or as we called it, May Eve. For us (my cult folk), holidays always started at midnight and, while we were waiting around with nothing to do, we often celebrated the eve of the holiday, starting whenever we felt like it. Some eves, like Christmas Eve, had prescribed rituals. They were more formal but not necessarily more brutal.

I’m anticipating having minimum reactions to these days and the coming weekend, partly because that’s how I have reacted to cult holidays for a good year now, partly because the depression numbs things out, even flashbacks. A good use for a depression! Fancy that.

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I remember, years ago, coming across a book about how people react to life-threatening emergencies. It focused on car crashes, but everything obviously applied to trauma, to child abuse. I learned a lot about fight, flight, and freeze and the physiological manifestations of each state. It also talked about how animals deal with the aftermath of each reaction. Fascinating!

Darn! I wish I could remember the name of the author.

Anyway, last week, a friend of mine who is a life coach wrote an article about these reactions to serious danger. Her style is very different from mine, much more exuberant. (There’s nothing wrong with my style, it’s just different.) Although I have written about this before, I thought I would share some of what she wrote.

I had to edit it down to only a third of her piece because of Internet technicalities. Lots of the good stuff got left out, but you can still get a sense of what she was saying.

If you want to read the whole thing – and I recommend you do so because there is much more, and it is both useful and hilarious – go to https://www.declaredominion.com/2019/02/01/this-will-help-with-adulting/. It’s one of Katherine North’s weekly letters to anybody who is interested. All you have to do is sign up!

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This Will Help with Adulting

When it feels like life is pummeling us, whether it’s body blows or just a dozen tiny paper cuts, most of us have a very natural human response.

We fight, we flee, or we freeze.

This isn’t always a bad thing.

In a bona fide emergency, your healthy “fight” response kicks in. This is what adrenaline is MADE for– so that you can move fast, you can mobilize, you can set up emergency hospital tents and run from tigers.

Adrenaline is wonderfully helpful in those situations. However, it’s designed to be the exception, not the rule.

Unfortunately, most people right now are on a steady drip of adrenaline.

When you’re living that way, it feels sort of like an ongoing low-level panic attack. It goes like “oh god, what about the – and I almost forgot that we have to – and shit what we will do if -” and so our brain revs and revs, sending little hits of panicky energy into our system but without any accompanying action to make things happen. It’s hard on our bodies to rev like this, and it’s hard on our spirits, too.

Another way some of us react to stress is to just freeze up. While this might be an adaptive response to a poisonous snake slithering through the grass, for most of us it’s LESS than helpful. Sometimes we can end up in a state of perpetual paralysis, where we’re so afraid of doing the WRONG thing that we do….well not much at all, really.

Sometimes we try to protect ourselves from the scariness of adult life not by fighting or freezing, but by attempting to flee. Usually, flight becomes a form of mental escape– scrolling numbly through social media or zoning out to a TV show whose characters you don’t give a fig about.

So whatever is going on, please do NOT do that thing where you’re feeling rolling, wild, nauseating waves of anxiety or paralysis or fear– and also yelling at yourself the whole time.

“Stop it, make a decision, do something, stop being such a wimp, lots of people have it worse than you do….” THAT. Don’t do that.

Because here’s the thing. You would never speak to somebody else like that when they are trapped in a wave of everything-is-too-muchness. I know you wouldn’t.

But you do it to yourself. We all do it because we’re trying to hold ourselves together, with brittleness and a positive attitude GODDAMIT.

Most of us worry that we’ll just end up huddled on the floor in a pool of snot and wailing.

So in this strange way, the mean things you say inside your head to yourself are a misguided-but-sweet attempt to take care of you.

You know what does work?

Tenderness.

It helps more than anything to try speaking to yourself the way you’d speak to a small scared child, because there’s almost certainly one living somewhere inside you.

“Oh sweetheart. This is so much, right now. You’re so scared, huh? It’s ok, kiddo, I’m here. I’ve got you. You’re all right, come let me hold you. You’re safe, little love.”

Tenderness just collapses the brittle revving cycle of adrenaline. It melts the fear. It dissolves the paralysis.

I do not know why this is.

Isn’t life an odd mystery?

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Upcoming Holidays

April
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
May
5/1 Beltane
5/7 Full moon
5/10 Mothers’ Day
5/12 Armed Forces Day
5/25 Memorial Day
5/31 Pentacost
June
6/5 Full moon
6/5-6 Penumbral lunar eclipse. The moon will turn a shade darker during the maximum phase, visible in Asia, Australia, Europe, and Africa. Most penumbral lunar eclipses cannot be easily distinguished from a usual full moon. See https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2020-june-5
6/19 Summer solstice
6/21 Fathers’ Day
6/21 Annular solar eclipse. Visible from parts of Africa (including the Central African Republic, Congo, and Ethiopia), south of Pakistan, northern India, and China. Partial eclipse is visible in south/east Europe, much of Asia, the north of Australia, and much of Africa, Pacific, Indian Ocean. See https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2020-june-21
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve
6/24 St. John’s Day

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups
5/8 V-E Day (Victory in Europe, WW2)
6/6 D-Day: invasion of France in WW2
(NOTE: Not all groups meet on Jewish holidays. Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lammas, Halloween, the solstices and the equinoxes.)

Depression, Coronavirus, and Flashbacks

April 20, 2020 by Jean, posted in Beltaine, coronavirus, flashbacks

Easter came real close to Beltane this year. There is hardly time to catch our breath and then, boom!

Beltane is the worst day of the year for me. I think there are several reasons this is so.

First of all, it was a really big deal. It’s the opposite of Halloween, which was also a really big deal. Both are really ancient holidays, and there are layers and layers of symbolism and tradition. And both were multi-day holidays.

Also, they occurred on the same day each year. This means that the anniversary reactions piled up rather than being spread out over a matter of days, as happens with Easter.

On a more personal note, it was the first ritual I attended. What an impact that had!!! Also, almost two decades later, the last, I might add.

It will be really interesting to see what happens this year, between being depressed and having reacted so minimally to all the other holidays over the last year.

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I’m feeling marginally better because I have taken steps to add on a supplementary medication. I contacted my primary care physician, and she said she would prescribe for me and chose Lexapro. I checked the side effects and medication interactions, we discussed my findings and decided it was best to check with my cardiologist first. I wrote him but haven’t heard back yet. Waiting is hard.

Nothing has happened yet, but the machinery has been set in motion. That, in itself, makes me feel less helpless. Except that as soon as I felt 1% better I started second-guessing myself. “Am I over-reacting? Maybe I’m not depressed after all. Maybe I’m doing this just to get some attention. I haven’t been getting much attention recently, which is great, because I don’t want attention. Oh wait, that’s a sign of depression – just leave me alone!!!!” Going around in circles can take all day.

I want to point out that all of this (depression, a world-wide virus, social isolation, more depression) involves a constant background chatter of flashbacks. Everything reminds me of something from the past. (I suppose that comes with having a long life!) Usually, it’s a feeling-flashback. I have felt this way before, many times before.

Here’s a dream I had last night that illustrates how the coronavirus and the cult merge together in my mind.

I dreamed that I was in the hospital with a really bad case of the virus and was writhing in pain. In the dream, I had a flashback to being tortured. I was begging for them to stop hurting me and screaming that I would do anything if they only would stop, anything they wanted. While I was pleading for the pain to stop, I was also deeply ashamed of myself and fearful of what they would make me do. It was a pretty awful dream made worse because it was triggered by present-day pain from arthritis, which then kept me awake. The dream kept circling through my mind for a few hours until I fell back into a fitful sleep.

How many times, as a child, did I feel hopeless, with no desire to live? I can’t possibly tell you. It wasn’t a one-time event; it was a constant state of mind. How many times did I feel distant from other people, forbidden to touch them? Constantly. Moment after moment, day after day, year after year. Today, I feel hopeless thanks to the depression. I feel isolated from others, like an alien, thanks to, well, being isolated from others for protection against coronavirus. This is very familiar territory.

Coronavirus, however, is a different experience for the vast majority of us. We have never lived through a pandemic and have no idea what to expect. This tiny little bit of almost-life started infecting humans only a few months ago. There has been nothing like it in my life, except perhaps for polio, which didn’t affect my daily life.

If I had been alive during days of the Spanish flu, I would be having lots of flashbacks to those days. People were terrified. My mother was twelve at the time, my father was ten. I don’t remember either of them talking about it. Looking back, anything to do with their childhood either was not to be mentioned or was presented as misinformation.

For example, I had always believed that my mother’s parents and her sister all died in 1918 during the flu epidemic. My mother was without any immediate relatives and started college alone. I figured she had a good reason to be depressed. Because I was not allowed to doubt what I was told or to ask questions, it didn’t occur to me that she was too young to enter college.

When I started researching, however, I found that my grandfather died in 1927, and my aunt died of the flu in 1920. (At the moment, I cannot find the date of my grandmother’s death.) My mother was born in 1906, which meant that she graduated high school in 1923 and that her father was alive when she graduated from college. The reality is a lot less dramatic than the myth.

Like most people, I wanted to find validation for what I believed. Yet what I learned was that my beliefs about my family were a myth. In a sense, this was a relief because the things I had been told didn’t quite seem to make sense to me, and I felt less crazy with the revised version. I guess you work with what you have at the time and adapt, as needed, to changing perceptions of the truth.

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Upcoming Holidays

April
4/26 Grand Climax/De Meur
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve

May
5/1 Beltane
5/7 Full moon
5/10 Mothers’ Day
5/12 Armed Forces Day
5/25 Memorial Day
5/31 Pentecost

June
6/5 Full moon
6/5-6 Penumbral lunar eclipse. The moon will turn a shade darker during the maximum phase, visible in Asia, Australia, Europe, and Africa. Most penumbral lunar eclipses cannot be easily distinguished from a usual full moon. See https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2020-june-5
6/19 Summer solstice
6/21 Fathers’ Day
6/21 Annular solar eclipse. Visible from parts of Africa (including the Central African Republic, Congo, and Ethiopia), south of Pakistan, northern India, and China. Partial eclipse is visible in south/east Europe, much of Asia, the north of Australia, and much of Africa, Pacific, Indian Ocean. See https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2020-june-21
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve
6/24 St. John’s Day

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

4/20 Hitler’s birthday
4/21 Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day)
4/29 Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day)
5/8 V-E Day (Victory in Europe, WW2)
6/6 D-Day: invasion of France in WW2

(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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This Will Help with Adulting

Upcoming Holidays

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Upcoming Holidays

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