my love is poison – Ritual Abuse

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.

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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

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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.

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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.)

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You can find more information on the following holidays at:

Upcoming Holidays

January 
1/13 Satanic New Year
1/17 Feast of Fools/Old Twelfth Night/Satanic and demon revels
1/31 Full Moon (Blue Moon)
1/31 Total lunar eclipse
February 
2/2 Candlemas/Imbolc
2/13 Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
2/14 Ash Wednesday/Beginning of Lent
2/15 Partial solar eclipse
2/14 Valentine’s Day
2/25 Walpurgis Day
March 
3/1 Full Moon
3/20 Spring Equinox
3/24 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan
3/30 Good Friday/Death of Jesus Christ
3/31 Full Moon (Blue Moon)

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups
1/30 Hitler named Chancellor of Germany
(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons.)

It’s good to be back. I cannot believe I was away for so long! I missed you-all!! This is the longest I have been away from the blog since early 2013. Maybe this means I am less driven, more relaxed and better able to take care of myself?

Here’s a not very good picture that shows red rocks and me in a too-large but nice warm red jacket. I tried to crop it but got totally stuck. It was taken at Sedona, Arizona, a town near a ridge of mountains popular with psychics, monks, and mystics because there are many places where some people feel vortexes of energy. I didn’t, though, and did not explore their meaning because I was too busy drinking in the beauty all around me.

Never Good Enough

I thought of this topic while in Arizona, along with its evil twin, Never Bad Enough. I’ll save that for another time.

My mother wanted me to be perfect. Needless to say, I was a huge disappointment to her. She had been the “plain one,” born nine years after her beautiful and charming sister. I learned that her childhood nickname had been Piggy, which explained a lot. She wanted me to be everything she wasn’t and to have all the material things she hadn’t had. I understood this, and found it sad, but that didn’t stop me from taking it very personally.

I wasn’t pretty enough. My manners weren’t good enough. I wasn’t socially skilled enough. I wasn’t popular enough – as a matter of fact, I didn’t have any friends until sixth grade. And to make things worse, I became overweight when I was five and stayed that way until high school. The more I tried, the more I failed to live up to her expectations and the worse I felt about myself.

The cult also taught me that I was a failure, inferior to everybody else, hopelessly stupid. I suppose there are some cults that tell the kids that they are wonderful and are being hurt so that they will grow up to be brave and strong and able to save their country single-handedly or some such thing. But my cult taught the kids that they were being punished for failure, for not trying hard enough. They had displeased Satan and let down the whole cult. I can’t ever remember being told I did something well.

The cult teachings affected me far more than my mother’s. They seared my soul and they gave me the conviction that I was bad to the core. When I tried to do something good, I was far more evil than when I tried to do something bad. Attempts to help or protect animals or other children resulted in them being hurt even more than I was. I learned that my love and compassion were poisonous.

When I was grown and separated from the cult and my family, the ritual abuse ended but those beliefs stayed with me. Looking back, some were clearly delusional. My manners were just fine and I was slim and pretty and dressed well. (That wasn’t too hard in the ’60’s!) Others were self-fulfilling prophecies. If you don’t believe you have any friends, you will not notice that others like you and will overlook their attempts to befriend you. If you don’t believe you have good social skills, you will stammer and say dumb things and retreat into solitude.

And if you believe your love is poison…well, it is really hard to love anybody at all, including yourself. And when you are aware that you love somebody, it makes you a total panicky, anxious wreck.

It took remembering the cult experiences and seeing how they implanted those self-hating beliefs. And then it took years and years of working on myself to see how those beliefs play out in my current life. I couldn’t just throw a switch and see myself differently.

“Oh! I’m not a bad person! I am a good person who was horribly mistreated! Now I can get on with my life and love myself and be self-confident and live a full and satisfying life.” Nope, didn’t work that way.

I’d get something intellectually, but my emotions and behavior didn’t change much. I’d get something one day and it was gone the next. I would do something positive for myself or somebody else and be filled with fear and guilt. It took a lot of slow, discouraging work, day after day after day, to turn things around.

Am I good enough now? I was good enough to come this far, that’s clear. I am certain l will not become perfect any time soon. I never will live up to my mother’ standards, for she wanted to be an idealized her, and you can’t be another person. And I doubt if I can ever entirely shake off all that the cult taught be about myself and the world.

I hope I will become better as time goes on, but for now, I’m just fine, considering. And that is enough.

Tag: my love is poison

“My Love Is Poison”

Upcoming Holidays

Never Good Enough

Upcoming Holidays

Never Good Enough

Upcoming Holidays

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Upcoming Holidays

Never Good Enough

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