Never Good Enough

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.

Finding Happiness Among the Horrors of Ritual Abuse

Upcoming Holidays
October
10/5 Full Moon

10/13 Backwards Halloween

10/13 Friday the Thirteenth

10/22 – 10/29 Preparation for All Hallows’ Eve

10/31 Halloween/Samhain/All Hallows Eve
There are two previous posts on Halloween:
https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2016/10/11/halloween/
https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/samhainhalloween/  
November
11/S Full Moon

11/3 Satanic Revels

11/23 Thanksgiving
December
12/3 Full Moon  
12/21 St. Thomas’ Day/Fire Festival 
12/21 Yule/Winter Solstice
12/24 Christmas Eve/Satanic and demon revels/Da Meur/Grand High Climax
12/15 Christmas Day
12/31 New Year’s Eve

Important dates in Nazi groups
11/9 Kristallnacht

11/11 Veteran’s Day: Armistice, 1918
.

Finding Happiness Among the Horrors of Ritual Abuse

This picture was taken only a year or so after the memories flooded me. Looking at the photo, it’s hard to believe that I had been recently curled up in a ball in bed afraid that the force of the memories would kill me. I feared that my body could not take the stress of learning what had been done to me and that my heart would simply stop. Hour after hour of horror, the full strength of the emotions I had felt as a little child and had buried away for the sake of survival. I do not know how I pulled myself together to do what I needed to do – eat, sleep, shower, drive, work, pay bills – all the mechanics of daily life. But I did, somehow.

It isn’t just fear, anger, and sadness that are buried. All emotions are. After ritual abuse, who would dare show joy? The adults would disapprove and you would feel guilty to the core.

With some people, emotions burst through the amnesic barriers at times and show themselves with great force. With me, the world was dull and flat. I did have a full range of emotions, but they were faint, like ghosts of the buried ones. I had no idea what a “real” emotion felt like while I was amnesic for the ritual abuse. I was very timid, afraid of meeting new people. afraid of new places, afraid of getting lost. And once I had children, I was really afraid I would not understand what they were saying and not be able to protect them. I had no way of explaining to myself why I seemed so much more timid than others.

Just as the whole range of emotions had been buried, the whole range reappeared once the damn that held the memories at bay had broken. Enthusiasm, enjoyment, and even joy came back. Not at first: the reaction to the memories was too strong to let anything surface that was not related to the horrors I had seen and been a part of. But they did reappear.

So here I am, on a beach, with beautiful waves breaking and sand dunes and sea gulls. Hungry sea gulls. Brave sea gulls when they spotted food.

I had brought what? Bread? Cold cuts? I don’t remember. I do remember the gulls circled and one would get up the courage to take the food from my hand. I remember that their bills dripped, like a junky spotting cocaine. And I remember that if the piece of food was too big to swallow in one gulp they would fly away as fast as they could to escape their thieving pals.

I was ecstatic. When the food was all gone and the gulls had left, I felt satisfied and pleased that they had trusted me enough to eat from my hand. It had been perfect. I felt happy, I think it is called. And they didn’t even bite me!

Gratitude for Happy Things

If you are wondering which icky holidays are coming up, click on “Ritual Calendar: 2016″at the top right of this page.

Recently I’ve written about important but heavy and sometimes depressing things. So it is time to balance things out a bit. There are a lot of things I am pleased about and grateful for: here are just some of them.

I feel more sensual these days. The cats feel furrier, the sun warmer, the breezes softer. The same old sheets feel silkier. Everything is simply more itself.

All these years of exercise have started paying off in an unexpected way. When I move, I am aware of my muscles doing things. Some stretch, some tighten. The sensation is very pleasurable. And PT exercises faithfully done have made my core kick in by itself with no effort on my part when I get up from a chair or pick up something. Sometimes I notice it tightening at random for reasons of its own. Way cool.

I have great relationships with my daughters and sons-in-law. They picked guys that were right for them, lovable, loving, and steadfast. And things are good between me and my grandkids, some more than others, of course.

Given my start in life – Satanic ritual abuse – who would have expected this? It feels like a miracle. But the totally amazing miracle is that neither of my children were abused, not by me or their dad, not by my parents or their friends. Not by neighbors or teachers. And they protected their own children. The cycle of inter-generational abuse has been stopped cold in its tracks.

My home is getting tidier by the week – well, no, by the month. Parts of it look really great. Other parts still look like they belong to somebody who has trouble throwing things away. I do not feel guilty about this; rather I feel I will get to it fairly soon.

Today I reached my current weight goal. I plan to enjoy it for awhile and then set a goal of losing another five pounds. This take-it-slow strategy has worked very well for me. In ten pounds, I will get to where I want to be. And if I don’t, things aren’t at all bad as it is now.

The raccoons have left my garden for greener pastures. They have not been replaced by stray dogs or cats. Or buffaloes, for that matter.

Doves (not pigeons) made a nest between our house and the neighbor’s and raised two chicks. I think a hummingbird has a nest in my garden. I would love it if a mocking bird did, too.

I’m planning on going indoor sky diving with a friend. (I don’t have the courage to do it outdoors.) You put on a suit that make you look like a flying squirrel and lie down on top of a column of air. There is an instructor with you the whole time and, if you want, he can make you do some simple tricks.

I’ve found a new scheduling method called Bullet Journal. It is far better than index cards or “to do” lists on the computer because it is hard to lose. And it is better than the 31 day-folders/12 monthly-folders system because it takes up a lot less room. (That’s a little known efficient but bulky to-do list: one folder for each day of the month, one for each month. Works like a champ.)

Today has middle-of-the-road weather: not too hot, not too cold; partially sunny, partially cloudy; wind two miles an hour gusting to four. Perfect for picking lettuce.

There is more, of course, but this is enough to keep me happy for a loooong time.