News Items and “What Is Poyfragmentatyion?”

Pornhub Loses Again

An email from Laila Mickelwait, founder of the Traffickinghub movement, arrived in my inbox with more inspiring news. It said:

“YouTube and TikTok permanently shut down Pornhub’s accounts in just one week!

Last week, after mounting pressure and reporting from organizations, survivors, and advocates, both YouTube and TikTok shut down Pornhub’s accounts for good. Why? Because impunity is finally ending for companies like Pornhub that knowingly profit from illegal content such as child abuse, rape, and sex trafficking. 

“First, I highlighted Pornhub’s presence on TikTok and asked my followers on social media to report the account. Then hundreds of #Traffickinghub advocates began reporting Pornhub on TikTok. When it came to the attention of The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), they immediately met with TikTok to flag the issue. Within hours, the account was shut down. Subsequently, NCOSE met with YouTube to share evidence of Pornhub’s involvement in child abuse, rape, and sex trafficking. The following day Pornhub’s YouTube account was removed. These victories came on the heels of Instagram permanently shutting down Pornhub’s 13 million follower account. 

“This is an example of what is possible when individual citizens, survivors, and organizations of all backgrounds unite around a just cause. Pornhub is the flagship site of the international porn behemoth called MindGeek, which has been named one of the largest “Criminal Enterprises” in the world engaged in profiting from sexual crime.

“Pornhub is now removed from all major social media platforms except for Twitter, and we are putting pressure on Twitter to shut down their account right now, even as you read this email.

“Let’s keep fighting together because we are winning battle after battle. We can see victory if we keep at it and don’t give up.”

Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in Los Angeles of three charges of rape and sexual assault against Jane Doe 1. He was acquitted of one count of sexual battery by restraint against another woman. The jury could not decide on the final three counts related to the two other women.

He faces 24 years in prison, in addition to the 23 years he is currently serving from the rape conviction in a 2020 New York trial. He has appealed the verdict in the New York case and is expected to appeal the Los Angeles conviction as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/12/19/us/weinstein-trial-verdict

Spencer’s News

My cat scared me half to death the other morning.

I was sitting at my computer and heard a rustling, which got louder and louder. Then he rushed out of hiding with the handle of a small paper bag looped over his head and raced back and forth through the apartment at full speed. I closed him in my bedroom, figuring I had the best chance of catching him there.

Indeed, he ran under the bed, his original safe spot. I crawled next to him, removed the bag, patted him a little, and left him to calm down. It took a good 24 hours for him to come out from under the bed.

Later in the day, I found my nail polish, nail polish remover, and nail files scattered across the floor. They weren’t heavy, just bulky. Poor kitty! How did he manage to do that?

What Is Polyfragmentation?

Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I first started down this long, difficult, amazingly rewarding path, the word polyfragmentation wasn’t used in connection with multiplicity. I knew about it intuitively because that was the way my mind is put together. So did many other survivors, but we had no words to describe it.

As people began talking and writing about multiplicity, the idea started coming into focus.

Initially, the term was used to mean many alters – at first, more than 12 alters, then more than 100. I assume that means alters with names, ages, personal histories, etc. Some may be more fully formed than others, but basically, they are all like people. That’s a lot, but it seems to me that it’s more a crowd than a group of fragments. Though I suppose if you consider that all alters either come from the original personality or from alters that have already split off, you can consider all the alters fragments. But wouldn’t that be true of people with 79 alters, or 5, or 3?

Then the parts with only one function, or those formed during one specific instance of abuse, were studied. There might be a part that experienced terror and nothing else. Or a part that knows how to brush teeth and nothing else. These parts might not have personalities and probably are not fully conscious in the way we think of consciousness. They were split off from an existing alter and, because they are so limited, can be considered fragments.

There are more complex systems formed deliberately during mind control. The term fragments is sometimes used to describe parts arranged in layers throughout such a system. The layers are generally isolated and not in communication with the parts of the system in other layers.

I see that the system could be considered fragmented, but I can’t assume that the parts as fragments. They might have personalities, ages, and histories They all have a purpose in the system, a job to perform, either internally or in the outside world. Some “sleeper alters” may be dead, hidden, or invisible. Some might be clones – exact copies of an alter, complete in all details. But, as far as I know, they all are either people or things. That’s not my understanding of fragments.

My fragments are little bits of things floating around with no consciousness or purpose, sort of like dust particles in the air. When I want to do something, a number of these things coalesce into a clump, like a dust bunny. I don’t know how, but this little cloud of dust can learn to use a new operating system, write, tie my shoes, and do all the other things of daily life. After the job is complete, the clump disperses. The next time that job needs to be done, a new clump forms. A few of the tiny little pieces might be recycled, but not many. 

So there are no lasting dust bunnies that drive cars, sing in the shower, or talk to the furniture. There is nothing that holds them together once they have finished the task that they were assembled to do.

On a day-to-day basis, I don’t consider this confusing at all because it is normal for me. I can’t remember a time when I was not like this, and I have to work hard to imagine what it would be like to be organized in any other way. (If, of course, I am presumptuous enough to call myself organized.)

All this is very logical and simple to me…except…who/what decides what to do? Who/what selects the group of fragments? Who/what decides when the action is complete and the particles can disperse? I have never met anyone or anything in charge of making little clouds that function like a recognizabe American woman of a certain age.

Is each little fragment conscious in some way? If the little pieces aren’t conscious, what is? Is there a layer that I am not aware of that contains more formed parts that make these decisions?

If anybody understands any of this — please explain it to me!!

It sure seems that dissociated states can be more complicated than we realize. We survivors are constantly revising our instruction manuals in a desire to understand our inner workings and to heal. We have to figure out polyfragmentation for ourselves because there is precious little in the literature. When we learn more, we will teach therapists, who will then write articles that we can Google. We will decide if the articles apply to us or not and modify our instruction manuals accordingly.

P.S. To illustrate how diverse or minds can be, in the early 90s I met a man who described his mind as a slide rule. He lined up all the components of an action, and, if he got it right, everything went smoothly. If one part was missing, he froze until he could find it and put it in place. And if he picked the wrong part, he risked acting inappropriately.

Here’s an example. Phone rings. Select ‘phone.’ Select ‘answer phone.’ Woman says, “Hello, may I talk to Bill?” Select ‘woman.’ Select ‘identify self as Bill.’ Woman says, “Would you like to join us for dinner Thursday?” Select ‘mother.’ Select ‘find excuse.’ You get the idea.

It all happened at lightning speed. The only way he could analyze what was going on was to further dissociate and have a part look at the process as it was happening. After observing it many times, he found a simile for how his mind worked and was able to describe it to others. 

But, like me, he had no idea who or what was observing the process or who or what made the decisions – who selected ‘mother’ rather than ‘bill collector.’

Multiples Are All Different

The Next RA/MC Survivor Poetry Reading

Last call! It this Saturday, October 23, from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm (Pacific Daylight Time) 

Featured poets are Shana truthteller, Daniel, Jean (that’s me), and members of the audience.

Sign up here: eventbrite.com.au/e/ritual-abuse-survivors-read-their-poems-of-suffering-and-healing-tickets-179703978437

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I have been looking inward for many months trying to figure out what organizing principles are at work in my mind. Now I have come up for air and am looking at other people’s thinking patterns with fresh eyes. I’ve noticed how differently people’s minds work.

What strikes me the most is that each person seems unique to me. Even if they were subjected to the same types of mind control programming, they still are very different.

I think of identical twins. Even though they look identical, once you get to know them, you can see that there are small differences. One twin has a mole, the other doesn’t. One twin slouches more than the other. One is more outgoing than the other.

Even though they grew from the same fertilized egg, their environments were not exactly the same. Physically, mentally, and emotionally, they started to diverge in utero and keep on diverging for the rest of their lives.

So it is with survivors who were raised in the same family and programmed by the same programmer. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, they are not clones of each other. Their environments have been far more divergent than the environments identical twins inhabit. 

Qualities such as birth order, attractiveness, ability to adapt socially, and willingness to obey influence how adults treat children, which in turn influences how children react to repeated trauma. The programmer is not, by any means, handed a blank slate.

The characteristics that a child brings to the programming will influence how they react to that programming. If the programmer catches this, the system may be tweaked to correct for the divergence from protocol. That change in the system will continue to form the child’s reaction to subsequent programming.

I believe that all children have hidden parts of themselves from their abusers. Even with children programmed with the same structure, these parts may be hidden in different places in their systems. They may have been hidden at different times and different stages of the programming. As I said, the child is not a blank slate and continues to have some agency throughout.

I am what is known as polyfragmented. This means that I have been split so often that I am made up of very tiny pieces. I have always felt a little out of it with other survivors because I don’t have fully formed alters or an internal landscape. Or perhaps I do, but it is so well hidden that I can’t see it.

I belong to a support group where everybody is polyfragmented. I feel more at home than I do with most other survivors. But even there, I have found that nobody is entirely like me. Each person’s mind is unique. The way they think, the way they perceive themselves, the way they navigate life, all are unique. Some of them have more or less fully formed alters alongside the fragments. Their internal processes flow back and forth between the two different states, just as people with only fully formed alters switch between alters.

I am coming to terms with the fact that no two people are alike. If I base my sense of comfort — or rather alienation — on being unlike others, and therefore an outsider, rejected, not belonging, I will have to accept that I will never belong anywhere. And that nobody belongs anywhere.

How much simpler it is to stop fretting, to give up a lifetime of social anxiety. That way, I can choose to spend time with some groups of people and not others, based on my personal taste. I can flow between groups and I can enjoy people for themselves. I no longer have to search for people just like me. I can enjoy both the similarities and the differences between myself and others.

I belong in all groups because I, too, am a human being, just like everybody else. 

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Upcoming Holidays

 October

 10/20 Full Moon

 10/31 Halloween/start of Celtic New Year/start of the dark half of the year

November

 11/1 All Saints’ Day

 11/2 All Souls’ Day

 11/4 Satanic Revels

 11/11 (?) Veterans’ Day

 11/18-19 Partial Lunar Eclipse

 11/19 Full Moon

 11/25 Thanksgiving Day (United States)

 11/28 First Sunday of Advent

 11/30 St Andrew’s Day

December

 Sundays of advent: 11/28, 12/5, 12/12, 12/19

 12/4 Total Solar Eclipse

 12/18 Full Moon

 12/21 Winter solstice/Yule/St. Thomas’ Day

 12/24 Christmas Eve

 12/25 Christmas Day

 12/31 New Year’s Eve

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

 10/20 Hitler’s half-birthday

11/9 Kristallnacht

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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You can find more information on the following holidays at: 

 Halloween (personal) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/halloween/ 

 Halloween (background) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/samhainhalloween/

 Thanksgiving – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/thanksgiving/

 Yule/Winter Solstice – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/yulewinter-solstice/ 

 Candlemas – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/candlemas/

 Valentine’s Day – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/valentines-day/

 Spring Equinox – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/the-spring-equinox/

 Easter: personal – (for background, see Spring Equinox) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2014/04/21/easter-blues/

 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/walpurgisnacht/

 Beltane – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/beltane/

 Mothers’ Day – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/mothers-day/

 Fathers’ Day – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2020/06/20/ritual-abuse-and-fathers-day/

 Summer Solstice (corrected text) – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/well-this-is-embarrassing/

 Lammas – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/category/lamas/

 and https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/august-ritual-dates/ 

 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan: Part 1 –  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/the-feast-of-the-beast/

 Feast of the Beast/Bride of Satan: Part 2 –  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/feast-of-the-beast-part-ii/

 Fall Equinox – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-fall-equinox/