Using Gratitude to Adapt to a Newly Diagnosed Condition: Dysautonomia

We Made it Through Another Year

Well, we did it! We made it through another year! 365 days. 8,760 hours. 525,600 minutes. 315,360,000 seconds. Quite an accomplishment, in my opinion, especially when a good many of us could only get through some of those seconds and minutes with clenched fists and clenched teeth. But we did it!

I hesitate to wish my survivor friends a happy new year because I know 2023 is going to be difficult, even if there are happy times. And it could be a terrible year, worse than 2022. So I compromise and say, “I wish you a safe, healthy(er), happy(er) new year.”

That wish is now going out to all of you reading this!

So Cute

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2023/jan/07/balloon-animals-beyond-the-poodle-in-pictures

Spencer is Fine 

For those of you who have just started reading my blog, I adopted the beautiful cat you see lounging in the header. We have been together now for three months. He is still very timid and spends a lot of time hiding. Once, I couldn’t find him for four whole days. He still spends so much time out of sight that his nickname is “Invisible Cat.”

Slowly, he’s getting used to being here. Baby step by baby step, he is getting to know his way around the apartment. He is also becoming more social. If he wants to be petted, he’ll let me know by putting his front paws on my knee as I sit at the computer. One day, he even jumped onto my lap – and then instantly exited on the other side. Oh well, maybe he will try again in a couple of weeks.

And I Am Fine – Even Grateful

Well, sort of. I’m old and creaky to start with, and I keep collecting diseases the way some old ladies collect cats.

I recently acquired a new diagnosis: dysautonomia, or autonomic nervous system failure. It’s unpredictable; it comes and goes, gets progressively worse, or mysteriously goes into remission after years. All the things that the body does without conscious thought can be affected. And it can’t be fixed, at least by Western medicine, and at least not quite yet.

These are the symptoms that most affect my quality of life:
     wide blood pressure variations
     inability to adapt to temperature changes
     loss of ability to smell and taste things
     poor balance

So far, I don’t feel rotten. I have to spend more time taking care of myself, which is a drag. But I am happy to say that I have discovered CBD. (I am not an early adopter.) So I bitch about having another disease, another specialist, and new symptoms to adapt to. I also sing with happiness because CBD works on all the different kinds of pain I have. And it is natural, herbal, vegan, and gluten-free. Many brands are non-GMO and organic, too. It has no side effects, as far as I can tell. My doctors all say, “Go for it.”

I imagine that it’s going to be challenging to adapt to this condition. The symptoms can change from day to day, and just as soon as I accept one configuration of symptoms, more will surely pop up.

I don’t know anybody with dysautonomia and therefore have nobody to turn to for information, advice, and comfort. I do know one person who had it, but her experience was very different from mine. She was stung by thousands of tiny jellyfish while swimming in Indonesian waters. The damaged nerves slowly repaired themselves, and, after 5-10 years, she was able to return to work. She even got pregnant and had a healthy baby! That is not going to be my story.

I did find two online support groups, but the members were a lot sicker than I am. I decided I needed a beginners’ group because reading the entries on these groups filled me with anxiety and dread. If I get that sick on down the road, I know those groups are available to me. But for now, there is no point in looking ahead – I need to concentrate on getting used to the present.

I have read that saying positive affirmations can ease the process of adapting to a new disease. It makes sense. The affirmations don’t erase the critical ways of thinking about oneself, but they do create a new set of neural pathways. I could then choose between old cult messages and the newly created ones, which hopefully will be more accurate and helpful. 

I can’t just start telling myself I am fantastic. I have to do it in a way that doesn’t enrage my Inner Cynic, who would argue long and loud and reinforce the old tapes.

Most affirmations, however, feel like bald-faced lies to me. Lying makes me very uncomfortable because, as a child, I had to lie about so many things.  I’m all for laying down new neural pathways, but I have to do it without lying.

I figured out how to contort myself in order to recast affirmations into a form I can tolerate, even if I cannot wholeheartedly embrace them. “Some other people think I am the greatest person in the world.” “I wish that I could honestly say that I am filled with love for my beautiful body.” 

I think I have found a way to solve the problem. I don’t have to choose – I can see different facets of a situation. Negative aspects and positive aspects can exist side-by-side. All I am trying to do is strengthen one set of neural pathways while leaving the other alone.

I can have mixed feelings about things – hate part of them, but also love part of them. Love the rose, hate the thorns.

Look at this:

Situation: I experience wide blood pressure variations.
I am so grateful that they have finally found a diagnosis.
(That’s completely true,  even though it is a sucky diagnosis.)

Situation: inability to adapt to temperature changes.
I have wonderfully warm tee shirts, sweaters, and hoodies.
(Even though it’s annoying to wear layers in the house.)

Situation: loss of much of my ability to smell and taste things.
I am grateful I can easily feel textures and taste salty, sweet, and acid foods.
It is nice not to have to smell the kitty litter box.
(At the same time, I want to smell the roses! and the sweetpeas, basil, tarragon, hand soap, laundry detergent, and my clean hair.)

Situation: poor balance .
I am grateful for physical therapy.
(It had better work. PT is time-consuming, and the exercises are boring.)

I was surprised at how easy it is to find true, nice, kind things to say to myself. There are no long discussions with the Inner Cynic, no worrying about whether I am being dishonest or not, and no getting sick and tired of the whole damn thing. I wish I had discovered how to do this in high school.

I think it’s time to learn more about the process of forming a new neural pathway. Should I say the positive statement out loud? Do I have to use the same words each time? How often should it be said? At what intervals? How can you tell when the brain has made a new pathway? 

Is there a way to train the brain to go directly to positive thoughts, bypassing the negative ones? Is there an instruction manual available? A workbook?

I’m so glad I thought of using affirmations and gratitude statements, made especially for me, to learn to live with dysautonomia symptoms. And symptoms of everything else in life, too. If it works, why not?

Documentation to Increase the Safety of RA/MC Survivors

A Bit of Self-Care

I am so glad I gave myself permission to be late on posts or to skip one now and then. My lateness is explained by my cat’s behavior. Since I am still a bit hysterical, I made an even bigger decision.

After messing up part of the last post’s ritual dates section, I decided I would give myself a break from all that formatting. You can find the Satanic and Nazi calendars on the “2022 Ritual Calendar” page, as well as links to most major holidays described on the blog.

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Would anybody be willing to make the 2023 ritual calendar? You work off the 2022 one. Replace the dates of the full moon. Delete the 2022 eclipses and add the 2023 ones. Change the dates of the moveable holidays, like Thanksgiving and Easter. If you aren’t sure of some of the dates, look them up anyway. Make notes about anything you think might be wrong. Then I will send it on to somebody else to proofread and check the dates.

I would be very grateful – I have been doing this since 1999.

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If you haven’t gotten the October issue of the GrassRoots newsletter and would like to see it, write https://grassroots-ra-mc-collective.org/contact-us/ to subscribe.

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Cats- Bah, Humbug

Spencer, my new cat, is now in hiding. He is a Turkish Van, gorgeous like Baker but terrified of his new surroundings. I had him confined to my bedroom so he could get used to a small part of the house and have a safe place to return to when he started going out.

He slipped out when I was leaving the room, and I spent the weekend wandering around looking for him and crying. His previous owner even came and spent two hours meowing. Her husband crawled around on hands and knees looking under furniture and checking behind boxes of stuff. No cat.

On Sunday, I put food out in every room, and he ate the food in the office! I heard him meow in the middle of the night, so I came and gave him seconds. He had eaten the food in the office but hadn’t scoped out the other rooms. At least now I know he is alive and somewhere in the office.

Last night, he again meowed for seconds in the middle of the night. When I went to give it to him, he had not gotten all the way to his hiding place. I could hear him rustling the boxes under the coffee table in the office. Now I know where he is, or at least where he was last night.

Believe me, I looked there at least five times. Rick, his previous owner’s husband, took out every box and looked through them all. Spencer was, obviously, not found.

I am starting to calm down and trust he will come out someday. Somewhere, deep down, he knows I am a nice person who feeds him and brushes him and pets him where he likes it.

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Documentation to Increase the Safety of Survivors

Ellen Lacter has described in great detail how to create  a “Safety Packet.” You can read the whole article here: https://endritualabuse.org/evidence-packets-increase-safety/

The basic idea is to describe your experiences in detail, naming names, and distribute this document to trusted people with instructions that it should be opened on your death and distributed to law enforcement and the media.

The people who have received the documentation should be given extra copies to distribute to other safe people so that the abusers cannot locate all the copies. And you should say, in public, that you have done this and that the shit will hit the fan if you are killed or disappear.

When you read the article, I imagine you will be overwhelmed by the amount of information you are being asked to put in this document. I imagine that working on it will stir up all your “don’t tell” programming. For me, it wasn’t the don’t the ‘don’t tell” programming that arose. It was the “I’m incompetent and worthless” programming. Either way, working on it will be emotional and challenging.

I did this once, a long time ago. I printed out a short version of what Ellen suggested and distributed it. Today, you can put it on a thumb drive – so much easier!

Here is a summary of what is in the safety packet. It doesn’t include everything, or I would have just posted Ellen’s article in full.

1. A summary of what is in the packet and how to use it.

2. A list of the kinds of evidence in the packet.

3. A list of what the abusers might do to kill or “disappear” you.

4. A list of the people who have been given the packet

5. Instructions to those people

6. A witnessed authorization to open the packet upon your death and instructions for distributing the information contained in it to law enforcement and the media.

7. Evidence, such as descriptions of the abuse, recent harassment, reports to law enforcement, and medical records. A list of the abusers, with names, descriptions, and locations of the abuses. A list of victims, alive or dead, and potential victims, with descriptions and photos.

8. A video recording of yourself answering these questions.

What individuals or groups of individuals do you believe want you dead?
Why would these parties want you dead?
Can anyone support or corroborate that these parties have harmed you?
What methods do you believe these parties use to murder or disappear people?
Do you believe there have been any previous attempts on your life? If so, describe the suspected assailants and methods used.
Are you suicidal?
Why do you want to live?
Under what circumstances would you ever suicide?
Do you abuse life-threatening substances?
Do you have lethal weapons or substances in your home?
Do you drive safely? What is your record of traffic accidents and violations?
Do you have any desire to flee your current home and support persons?

My guess is that some of you are feeling overwhelmed just reading a summary of what to include in the safety packet. I know I am.

I believe you can do it. I believe you can pick the least difficult thing to do and give it a try. Then, when you finish it, give yourself a hug and a reward and celebrate your achievement in your own special way. Rest a bit, and then find the second least difficult thing to do.

I think it would be worthwhile to distribute it before you have finished because the process will be very time-consuming. Looking back over the summary of the safety packet contents, I would choose 4, 5, 6, and 8 to include before distributing it.

But don’t let yourself forget that there is more to do. Remember that you followed your plan of doing progressively harder things, and you have achieved your goal. You have gotten stronger by taking small step after small step. And a huge leap by making the video! Just reading over what else there is to be done has desensitized you quite a bit.

Use the same approach of leaving the hardest things for last. For example, write down the names of your abusers and pick the one you are least afraid of. Then, start filling in the information, again, starting with the easiest item and working up. There is no harm in leaving a mark like ???? or an emoji by an item you may want to skip for now and return to later.

I’ll share what I tell myself when the perfectionistic part takes over. “It’s better to do a half-assed job than no job at all.”

I’m not kidding. It’s true.

Thoughts on Past Depression

May Eve and Beltane

Beltane is absolutely the worst holiday for me. It’s a perversion of a lovely Pagan celebration of spring and the promise of new birth in plants, animals and humans. It’s yin to Halloween’s yang, fecundity to death. You can imagine how easy it would be to pervert.

I went back and read an article about the origins of Beltane that I posted in 2004. It’s still worth a read.  https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/beltane/

I hope you can all do something, however small, to counter the messages from the past that you may receive tonight and tomorrow. Try and be kind to yourself, to your body, to the parts of you that were forced to live through those things. The survival of the child that was you is a miracle that is worth celebrating.

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So Excited!

I am really happy to tell you all that both our proposals were accepted by the International Human Trafficking and Social Justice Conference. We will be presenting sometime on Wednesday, September 21, Thursday ,September 22, or Friday,September 22. I’ll let you know when we are assigned days and times.

Anybody who would like to hear about “The Interface between Sex Trafficking, Ritual Abuse, and Mind Control Programming” or see what Donna, River, Mary (sparrow), Anneka, and I look like, here is your chance! 

And I am also happy to tell you that fees are waived for all survivors! 

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Thoughts on Past Depression

I walked into my bedroom this morning and stood looking at the sunlight on the sheets and pillows of my unmade bed. Just stood still, admiring it. I thought about how beautiful it was and how I was so happy that I could now see beauty in everyday things. I remembered the days when everything looked drab and dreary. Sometimes I could recognize beauty, but it was so painful I could hardly stand it. Anything beautiful contrasted vividly with the pain and hopelessness inside – bleak, ugly despair. 

I wonder if anybody has been able to forget a deep depression. I’m glad I don’t have flashbacks to feeling like that!

For several years I was clinically depressed. I had plenty of suicidal thoughts, and I knew how to kill myself. I didn’t want to, though. I didn’t want to hurt my kids that way, to abandon them so violently. And I didn’t want to miss the rest of my life if, by some miracle, the depression ever lifted.

Nothing could distract me from my despair. Not people, not food, not music, not dancing, not reading, not animals, not plants, nothing that I remembered I had once enjoyed. I couldn’t soothe or console myself. I just gritted my teeth and slogged through the endless days. It was like walking in waist-high molasses.

I was in therapy at the time and my therapist directed me to talk about my childhood. Of course, the childhood I remembered was plenty bleak, so there was a fair amount to talk about. But it didn’t help. I kept saying, “There’s something more.” And he kept reassuring me that the early losses I was describing were enough to explain my depression. So I kept working on childhood, but it never helped. Once, he lost his patience and told me of a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy tells Charley Brown, “You like being depressed.” 

That was cruel. Did he think I would have stayed depressed had I known how to get out of it? I hope he was ashamed of blurting that out.

Tricyclics had been invented by then, but he did not discuss them with me. Later, after I had terminated with him, I was put on imipramine. It worked. It stopped the suicidal thoughts, and I no longer felt the pain that had been my 24/7 companion for so long. However, I no longer felt much of anything. It was like I had been given a rhinoceros tranquilizer.

I tolerated the side effects because they were better than the depression. However, I stopped taking it in a panic when I suddenly started gaining weight – at the rate of a pound a day. That went on every day for thirty straight days even though I wasn’t eating more. How is that physically possible??? I remained undepressed for a couple of years, then went back on imipramine. This time I stopped after 3-4 days of a-pound-a-day weight gain, but it continued for the whole month.

I am so glad those days are over. I finally know what caused the depression, and lo and behold, talking about it and seeing my childhood from a different angle really does help. 

I think what helps even more is being understood. I have surrounded myself with people who have experienced severe trauma and are kind, not critical.

Yes, it takes courage to disclose, not knowing what response you will get. It takes perseverance to break the habit of thinking you are at fault.

I rushed rashly ahead, disclosing right and left without thought for the consequences. Luckily nobody came after me to shut me up. The other responses were, for the most part, supportive and loving.

These days, the person who sees beauty in an unmade bed is standing up for herself, full of ideas for projects, and bursting with energy. I think I am getting a glimpse of what I would have been like all along if I had not been born into a Satanic cult and not been used in child pornography.

I like that person.

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upcoming holidays

April
4/30 Partial solar eclipse visible in west South America and Antarctica.  https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2022-april-30
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve

May
5/1 Beltane
5/8 Mothers’ Day
5/15 Full Moon
5/15 – 5/16 Total lunar eclipse visible in south and west Europe, south and west Asia, Africa, much North America, South America, and Antarctica. https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/lunar/2022-may-16
5/21 (?) Armed Forces Day
5/26 (?) Ascension Day
5/30 Memorial Day

June
6/5 Pentecost
6/6 (?) Whit Monday
6/12 (?) Trinity Sunday
6/14 Full Moon
6/16 (?) Corpus Christi/Feast of the Body of Christ
6/19 Fathers’ Day
6/21 Summer solstice
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve

6/24 (?) St John’s Day

 

July
7/4 Independence Day

7/13 Full Moon

7/25 St. James’ Day/Festival of the Horned God


7/27 Grand Climax

Dates Important to Nazi and Neo-Nazi groups

4/15-4/23 Passover/Pesach (Celebration of the deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt.)
4/30 Anniversary of Hitler’s death
6/4 – 6/6  Shavuot (Harvest Festival, Festival of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments)

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

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You can find more information on the following holidays at:

Candlemas – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/candlemas/
Valentine’s Day – https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/valentines-
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/
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/