Beltane 2023

Beltane is the worst day of the year for me. It’s more than just an excuse for an orgy; it is a cruel parody of the beauty of spring, a negation of abundant life force. Old guys raped little kids as well as any women that caught their eye. And the young guys followed suit. There were always a couple who looked miserable, and I hope they got out, remembered, and started their healing journey.

Actually, I wish they all could have remembered and come to their senses. It would have meant the end of this insanity.

I always wonder what happens to babies born on May Eve or Beltane. I have known one survivor born on Beltane, so they didn’t all get killed, as I fear. 

I don’t remember any babies at the ritual. That is because, in our cult, children were not allowed at rituals until they could “behave.” Instead, they were trained to be obedient, to be amnesic, to be sexual, and to kill. Those who trained the children – both men and women – did not have high status, but they were good at what they did and seemed to enjoy the work.

Some cults call children conceived on Beltane “spawn of Satan.” In our cult, they were considered special – it would make sense that any child of Satan would be pretty special. Just a few days ago, I put two and two together and realized my father could well have been conceived on Beltane. He was born a bit less than nine months later, a couple of days before Candlemas. He didn’t look at all like my grandfather, although his brother did. Well, I shall never know, for there is no way I can ask my grandmother, is there?

So here I am, feeling sad, angry, and afraid. Those feelings are absolutely appropriate for a Satanic cult survivor on May Eve but at odds with a sunny spring day. Flowers are blooming all over, and the wind is rustling through trees that are starting to leaf out. I look out the window at the gorgeous big street trees, wishing I had taken a picture of them every spring to track their growth. There is still so much beauty in the world, despite a surplus of ugliness.

I hope all of you are safe today and will stay safe through Beltane, through the rest of summer, and through the rest of your lives. I wish for your pain to ease and for you to find your place in your own post-cult world. 

Life may still be hard and painful, but it will never be as bad as when you were a powerless little kid surrounded by huge violent grown-ups constantly lying to you, tricking you, deceiving you, and hurting your body, mind, heart, and soul in every conceivable way. You have survived your childhood. You are resilient, strong, and creative. 

May you come through this Beltane with renewed hope and strength.

Spencer

Did I tell you he has thrown away his winter coat and is wearing his beautiful soft new summer coat? So pretty!

He has also learned how to drink from a water faucet. I let the faucet in the bathroom sink drip slowly, and he contorts himself to get every last drop. When he straightens out for a moment, the water falls on the top of his head and surprises him. He shakes himself and goes back for seconds.

I’m tempted to get him a drinking fountain of his own, but all the ones I have found are ugly plastic things that you have to clean all the time and keep supplied with filters to keep mold from growing. Why bother? He seems pleased enough with this free, low-tech set-up.

Announcements 

Sunlight Lives. I love this blog, especially the gentle healing story. https://sunlightlives.wordpress.com/ 

The videos of the RA/MC panel presented at last year’s Social Justice and Human Trafficking Conference are at: Part 1 –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855pdTCJ4_s and Part 2 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4asQx4cecI

The GrassRoots’ April Newsletter is ready. To be added to the mailing list, send your request to:  https://grassroots-ra-mc-collective.org/contact-us/ 

Survivorship 2023 Online Conference

Clinician’s Conference – Friday, May 19 – Survivors’ Conference – Saturday and Sunday, May 20 – 21    

Researching Ritual Abuse and Mind Control in Art and Literature: One Art Historian’s Journey – Lynn Brunet PhD

The Effects of Social Movements on Survivor Support Systems and Survivor Recovery – Neil Brick

The History of Ritual Abuse and the Effects of Social Trends on the Therapeutic Profession – Neil Brick

How to Create a Successful Recovery Path for Disassociated Survival Skills and DID – Shelby Rising Eagle

The Enmeshment of the British False Memory Society and the British Psychological Society. – Dr. Rainer Hermann Kurz 

Child Trafficking through Family Court Proceedings: A UK Case Study – Dr. Rainer Hermann Kurz

Some Evidence-Based Practice Guidelines and Standards Relevant to the Psychological Care of Extreme Abuse Survivors– Dr. Randall Noblitt 

Creating Calm – Patricia Quinn

Programmed and Internal Psychological Mechanisms that Perpetuate the Cycle of Extreme Abuse – Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D.

Of Mice, Memories, and Ritual Abuse

My New Blog Is Coming in April!

We are in the checklist/troubleshooting phase. Yeehaw! You know what I love best about SquareSpace? They have a helpful customer service/tech service department! And they hire real, live, intelligent, trained people. No pawing through message boards of customer problems to find our problem and its (possible) solution.

This blog will stay up for reference for a long, long time. It may live forever through the WayBack Machine at https://web.archive.org/.

The new blog will be online sometime in April. As soon as we go live, I will let you know!

Spencer and the Dentist

My dentist, not his. Once again, I asked the assistant to talk to me as much as possible about anything at all. She chose to talk about her cats. Thanks to Annie, I didn’t have a flashback the whole time.

She likes cats, has four cats, fosters other cats, takes care of feral cats…and has a Turkish Angora. She was happy to talk about them for an hour, non-stop. I couldn’t ask for anything better. Except I did ask for something even better, something I really need.

I told her I was 85 and planned to live forever, but was prudently making arrangements for other contingencies. One of the things that I want to have in place is a foster home for Spencer should I become unable to take care of him. I described Spencer’s personality in detail, and she said, “Sure, I’d be glad to! I am used to timid cats and that should be no problem.” That was my lucky day!

As for Spencer’s dentist, his regular vet will see to his teeth. However, I thought it would be good idea to give him preventative care. I am pretty sure I would fail miserably if I tried to brush his teeth because I have more than enough trouble brushing my own.

Mr. Google told me that there were treats called Greenies that keep cats’ teeth clean, preventing the build-up of tartar. So I ordered some. I am supposed to give him eight treats in the morning and eight at night. Of course, since he’s a cat, there was no guarantee he would eat them. 

He LOVES them! But he doesn’t want to stop at eight. He wants the whole bag. And he doesn’t want it twice a day, he wants it available all day long. Plus which, he remembers exactly where he was given them and haunts those places seeking more. 

Sometimes, even a reasonably-priced product from a legitimate company with good customer ratings is so popular with the end users that nobody wants to buy it.

Of Mice, Memories, and Ritual Abuse

I get a lot of medical news – announcements of newly-approved drugs, articles, research findings, social and economic issues. Recently, a research article on mice memories caught my attention. Here is the abstract of the article. Scroll down to see the figures and captions, which are also interesting. “Activating positive memory engrams suppresses depression-like behaviour.”  https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14514#Sec23.

(Sorry folks – I can’t make this link work. You will have to copy and paste.)

I have no idea how they did this because it was described in other papers. Apparently, they could isolate the tiny part of the brain that contained a memory. They could even obtain an image of the shape of the configuration that corresponded to the neural network that held the memory. They then injected a substance that made the image of that particular memory glow when exposed to laser light. Green for memories of fear and pain, red for memories of pleasure.

Now here comes the fun part. They triggered the fear memory, then triggered a pleasant memory. Lo and behold, the green dots became fainter and started to disappear. The pleasant memory was taking the fear out of the unpleasant one!

Just think! No more flashbacks. Constantly diminishing anxiety. No psych meds. No payments to therapists or psychopharmacologists. Just remember to think happy thoughts. Easy peasy!

I can’t remember how many nights I have lain awake at 3 AM thinking, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you think of anything pleasant? Just one little happy memory? Or you can make up a happy little story. Come on, you can do it.”

But the dark thoughts flowed back in and usurped my mind. I could not think of anything even remotely pleasant. I probably was making each unpleasant memory worse by remembering other unhappy and frightening things and thus reinforcing the fear.

I am split between cynicism and hope. Cheer up! Don’t be so negative! Just think of happy things, and the fear will melt away. Say affirmations daily, and you will no longer feel you are the lowest of the low. Buy a book on cognitive behavior therapy. Make a cheery playlist of uplifting songs.

I believe that these things work. I conceptualize the process in terms of brain plasticity. If you repeat something often enough, that thought becomes readily available. A new neural pathway has been created and strengthened by use. The image that comes to mind is one of a rutted dirt road. Each time a car passes over the road, the ruts become deeper and more visible. Instead of looking like a long-abandoned road, it looks well-traveled.

This is why cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectic behavioral therapy works. Positive thoughts weaken negative ones. It’s not instantaneous by any means, though. You have to be persistent and keep repeating positive thoughts and acting positively.

This was true in the mouse study. If a memory of a negative experience was triggered, and then, before it had faded, a positive memory was triggered, the amount of fear diminished. But the next time, the fear was just as strong. It took many repetitions of pairing memories of negative and positive experiences to extinguish the fear.

I know that mice aren’t people and that not all the discoveries using mice as research subjects apply to humans. Still, this paper has chipped away at my cynicism. So next time I think badly of myself or ruminate on past actions I regret, I will try my hardest to counter these thoughts with positive ones.

I think the positive thoughts don’t have to be on the same subject. Any thought that engenders a sense of well-being will do.

If I can’t think of anything positive in the whole wide world, I can try doing something engrossing. Move furniture? Timed writing prompts? I’ll make a list of activities that require focus and concentration so that I don’t have to remember them in the middle of a negativity storm.

Thank you, little mice!

Animal Rape, Part 2

Spencer

He hasn’t done anything new or spectacular in the last ten days, except for being sooo cute! He comes up to me and puts his paws on my knee when he wants to be petted or when he is hungry. I hope he will hop up on my lap someday and find he likes it.

Saying Goodbye to WordPress

My friend Rishi is setting up a blog at SquareSpace. She says it is much easier than WordPress and is fun to work with! And it does the SEO automatically. I don’t understand how that could be possible, but we shall see. If all goes well, this may be the last post on the WordPress blog. Or the next to last!

This blog will remain on the Web, so you can always read back articles. I plan to republish the most popular articles, along with a couple that I believe should be popular but aren’t. The new blog will look like this, with a new picture in the header every so often. (I’m change-aversive.)

Animal Rape, Part 2

I figured out what percentage of my readers experienced being abused by animals based on the number of people disclosing in the comments, the number of followers, and the number of visitors to the article. It came to 0.5% for followers and 4% for viewers. 

The odds of these numbers being too high are very low but the odds of them being too low are quite good. Even a thousandth of a percent, though, would break my heart. So I decided to continue writing about it in case Mr. Google mistakes it for the next viral topic. (Thank goodness I can still laugh.)

Categories do not usually have tight boundaries; on close inspection, they seem to blend into each other. So it is with animal rape and bestiality. Animal rape is a form of bestiality. It is weaponizing the animal to bring pain and fear to another human being. The animal is used to force sex on the child, just as a stick or gun barrel is used for penetration.

I think it is reasonable to assume that anything that is done to an animal in a cult setting is terribly traumatic for a child. Seeing an animal tortured or killed, whether it be in a ritual sacrifice, an experiment, or at a “party” will leave a huge wound. The animal is smaller and has far less power than the adults, and it is not lost on a child that they, too, are small and powerless to defend themselves. And what if the child loves that animal? It might have been a puppy or kitten that they were allowed to feed and pet before it was killed. 

Since children identify with animals through size and strength, they can easily imagine that they could be treated as the animal is being treated. I still remember the scene in “When Rabbit Howls” when the family is driving along a rural road, the mother at the wheel. She spots a rabbit and stops the car so that they can watch it. The father grabs his gun and shoots it. Trudi immediately makes the connection: “If he could do that to a bunny rabbit he could do that to me.” Why did he do it? Not for a sacrifice, not for the blood, and not for the meat. He did it because he could.

Seeing animals being abused in any way is traumatic for a child. Seeing them being raped is horrifying. Seeing a child rape an animal brings the realization that they may be the next one coerced into sexually attacking an animal. Seeing a child being forced to endure being licked on the genitals or penetrated by an animal is equally if not more horrifying. (When I imagine these scenes, I identify with the animal when the abuse is by adults, but I identify with both the animal and the child regardless of whether the child is cast as the perpetrator or the victim.)

So how can we heal from these things? The same way we heal from everything else. We cry, we throw up, we wash our face and get some sleep. We journal and draw and talk to our parts. We tell the little child that we once were, now frozen in that moment of long-ago horror, that it is over. We say it wasn’t their fault, ever, and we love them. 

And, if we can, we find somebody who can bear to hear what happened. We need somebody to believe us and can tell us that our reactions were normal back then and are normal now. We need to hear that we weren’t given a choice, we were forced into doing it, and all the blame and the shame belongs to the people who made us do that. And yes, we need validation, we need to hear that it happened to others, too. 

If we are very lucky, we may meet another person who had something similar happen and who wants to talk about it. Each believes the other, even if they don’t completely believe themselves. Each sees the other as blameless, even if they are wracked with guilt. 

The other person serves as a mirror, in a way. Except that the image we see is innocent and blameless. After a while, it occurs to us that we, too, might be innocent. We might truly not be to blame, and we can allow ourselves to lay down our burden of guilt.

I want to say one more thing about dealing with animal rape and other forms of abuse using animals. Chances are that you have remembered other things before this came into your consciousness. You already have tools to deal with it – what worked in the past will, in all probability, work again. You are the expert in what you need to grieve, to understand what happened to you, and to recognize the lies they told you and made you believe through their actions. You have done it before, and you can do it again.