***If you are a SRA survivor, please take a moment to decided whether to read this story. It may trigger.***
Right now I am using all the courage I can muster to put this story into words that I know someone else might read. I will try to make this coherent.
The first time I accused anyone of sexually abusing me, I accused my father. I told two friends (one of which would later become my husband) that I thought I was pregnant with my father's child. Somewhere deep inside I knew this wasn't true. Plus, I didn't have any real memories of ever being abused by my father. I didn't have any memories of being abused by anyone, and I knew that I hadn't been sexually active. So, it was just the only thing I knew to say. They bought me a test, and I told them it came out negative and swore them to secrecy. I thought I was lying just to get attention.
Later that year, I took myself to the ER begging to be admitted to the hospital. I told them I was suicidal to get myself admitted. So, for the next two months, I was In-patient in a wonderful adolescent psych unit. I wasn't like other teens there though. I didn't want out. They had to FORCE me to leave the unit. It was the only safe place I knew (even though I didn't understand what I was being kept safe from). Well, my friends told my mother about my father abusing me. It was terrible. Nobody believed me when I said I made it up. I had to swear in writing before they would drop criminal charges. Everyone was so sure that he had done this terrible thing. Luckily, he was not mad at me. We did struggle, but he somehow understood that there was something going on that didn't have anything to do with him. They let me go home and transferred me to a Partial hospitalization program for a couple of months. I really trusted these people though. They were like the only family I ever wanted.
They broke my trust by sending me to a Residential treatment facility to finish High School. I did not fit there in MAJOR ways. I was terrified. This was nothing like the hospital. If anyone has ever lived in a place like this, then they understand what I mean. You are always on your best behavior because if you do anything wrong, you either get your privileges taken away by the staff, or even worse - you have to face the wrath of your peers. Halfway through my stay there I started self-mutilating. I have heard self-mutilation described as "silent screams." I would say that description is appropriate. I was withering and shrinking into myself.
A few weeks after I was released from the Residential program, I overdosed on pills. I was admitted again to the same hospital. While I was there I told them that I was starting to have memories of a boy that had raped me and having a miscarriage. I was having pictures in my head that I couldn't quite make out, but were scaring me. I pleaded with my doctor to do hypnosis or something. I was willing to do anything to get help. He said, "...to stop focusing on my problems and start getting ready for college." So, I did.
Three years later, I married. I was in college, and he was in the Navy. It seemed great. He was very supportive and understanding of all my problems. Of course, he only had to really deal with things a couple of weeks at a time when he had leave and could visit.
Towards the end of that school year, I started falling apart again. I decided to move to where my husband's ship was stationed for the summer and I withdrew from school. At first, things were as they had always been. He had to go to work, but it was okay. Being a housewife actually appealed to me (even though I was only 20). However, the calm did not last. I was "switching" all the time. All of a sudden I would be acting like a three year old. Then, a teen-ager, a prostitute, a run-away, etc... When I started leaving the house in the middle of the night and fighting with my husband to the point of violence, he pretty much insisted that I get help.
Suddenly, I had all these different parts of me acting out one by one. They were like different people altogether. Soon enough, we found out that they were different people. These were all parts of me created and separated from each other at different times in my life to deal with situations that I could not. The twenty-four thousand dollar question was, "What could have been THAT bad that I couldn't deal with?" I couldn't remember.
The first time I was ever intimate with anyone it was with my future husband. Neither of us knew it, but he was developing a relationship with my "virgin" alters - the ones who had a completely clean slate. (They may have even been created to be with him.) So, only once in a while would there be a break through of terrified victims. (When that would happen he would stop immediately and help them calm down.) I learned what it was like for things to feel good (or at least as good as my damaged anatomy would allow). Yea!!!! That was good. I loved sex when it could be like that. I understood the whole sex thing.
Then my "other" sexual alters found out that it was safe to have sex with him, and the jig was up. They would introduce perverse things into what used to be bliss. Not to my surprise, he found that wonderful and soon he preferred it that way. He started taking advantage of even my "other" sexual alters, and nobody felt good.
At the same time, he was becoming increasingly more abusive in general. Emotionally and verbally, I have never known anyone to be so manipulatively cruel. I should have recognized the signs. I am a smart person. It takes all kinds. When he started physically abusing me and my alters, I was not surprised. I mean, I had fought with him before, but I soon learned that fighting is not the same as being abused. Even the "fights" we had I now don't remember so clearly as being "fights" (if you know what I mean).
Soon all my beliefs that I was nothing were confirmed and I was beaten down into apathy. I tried to kill myself at one point. It was the first time I had attempted suicide where I really hoped I would die. It was the first time that I had to be admitted to the real hospital before they transferred me to the psychiatric hospital. I didn't want to be nothing anymore. I wanted to be dead.
A few moths later, I went to a women's shelter. That only lasted for about three days. I was losing my mind. It was either go back to my husband or go into the hospital again. I went back to my husband.
I left my husband three months later. He had won my trust, and the trust of these different parts of me, but had used me (and them), and abused me (and them). He was uncannily manipulative. I was torn in pieces not being able to reconcile his behavior with what he had shown me in the past.
He followed me a short while later. I let him back into my life for whatever stupid reason. After he had been back a while, I was ready to call it quits but couldn't. It was so hard to do it the first time when I could put distance between us! He gave me reason to.
He told me that while we had been separated, he had cheated on me. He said that I was selfish in our sexual relationship and that I bored him. I took this in, and even agreed with him!
Then one morning when I was still asleep and groggy from all the medicines my shrink was making me take to sleep, he raped me. I was so paralyzed. He didn't even know he had done anything wrong! We had been having problems in our sex life anyway because I had been experiencing pain and burning during sex. So I knew even if I could have cried out, he wouldn't have understood why. He probably just thought I was giving him what he wanted for a change. I was so beaten down. I'm sorry. I never talk about this.
I never saw him after that. I told him over the phone that I didn't want to see him, and then I filed for divorce.
I was in therapy again by then. WITHOUT digging for anything (using hypnosis, or doing any other type or recovery work), I finally started to remember what had happened to me. All the pieces started falling into place for the first time.
What I remember is called "ritual abuse." This means that I was involved in, or witness to, rituals involving rape, torture, murder, cannibalism, and abuse. If you don't understand how this could happen, I am telling you that it does. If you don't believe it happens, I ask you only to respect that this was my experience. Since the age of four, this was the part of my life I had no memory of. The cult taught you what they wanted you to know in harsh and permanent ways. It is very common in child abuse to threaten to kill you if you told what was going on. Well, in the cult they would kill someone in front of you, or make you participate in their death so that you would feel that threat in every fiber of your being. For me, I know that there was also self-destruct programming if I told anyone what happened to me. Every time I tell, I have strong (and sometimes unbearable) urges to kill myself. You see, they try to make things as surreal as possible, so that even if you remember, you won't believe it. It is very hard to share with others because if you don't always understand or believe, why would anyone else? How could you expect rescue if you didn't even think anybody would believe you? I had to forget these things in order to survive. Moving up in the ranks of these sick people meant greater amounts of pain, and more parts of myself being shattered. When I told my therapist, she was relieved in a way. You see, she had been suspecting this, but unable to say anything for fear of corrupting my memories. She told me not to be surprised if I remembered things even worse than this, however. I thought she was nuts!!! What could be worse than being manipulated by pure evil?
What I thought wasn't possible happened. I remembered something worse. I learned how I "escaped" the cult at the age of sixteen, and why I checked myself in to the hospital. I took a set of memories that were very conflicting and pulled them into a reality I wish I could forget again. For days I had a nagging thought in my mind that I had given birth to a baby. My accusations against my father were present in my head, as were the "memories" I had of the boy from the hospital and having the miscarriage. However, I knew that I had not been abused by my father, and there were things about the other memories that were just not right. I had to understand that when I accused these others it was to protect my memories of what really happened. I don't know what the effects could have been if I had originally know the truth. I mean, I remember being raped, and I remembered blood, but the boy didn't fit. It wasn't the boy. The blood wasn't right either. I just knew that I had a BABY. In a rush, I realized what happened. It was a boy from the cult who had raped me (kind of like a date-rape), and a leader who had beaten me so badly that I went into labor. After the "labor" he took my baby away. I was still lying on the floor very disoriented. When they came back with her she was screaming (so I know she was alive), and he smashed her head into the rock (of the floor, or the wall - I can't decipher which). She was dead. I had never even held her, and she was dead. I was forced to "clean up the mess," and then paraded around as an example. I was being punished for getting pregnant outside of ritual. They banished me and left me for dead, bleeding figuratively and literally. No wonder I needed an escape.
It has been more than a year since I have recalled all of this. I am on disability because I cannot work or go to school. I still have extreme bouts of depression and times when I am suicidal. I still self-mutilate. The flashbacks are just as vivid. Sometimes I can feel the ropes around my wrists and ankles. I can go into a sort of psychosis where I do not even know where I am. I do not call myself a survivor because I am still living with it. When I can say I am a survivor, I will. Until then, I will say I am a fighter - because I do fight every day just to say alive. Sometimes I don't do it for myself, and some days I do it in spite of my own wishes to die, but I do it.
When I read other survivor stories and they feel hopeless, there is nothing more I can give to them except the knowledge that they are not alone, and that they too possess strength and courage.
blue girl's links
Ritual Abuse, Ritual Crime and Healing
Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
Mosaic Minds
WeRMany Home Page
