Surviving the day with my mom

I stood next to my mom in the cashier line at the run down Macys. She is 87, battling dementia, and growing weaker. There is only one cashier and she is moving slowly, so the line doesn’t really move. I tell my mom to move back a little from the people in front of us as Covid is raging through the community again. My mom doesn’t have the wherewithal to navigate social distancing and masking without me.

A little girl, probably 4 years old, is twirling around with her mother in front of us. My mom is watching her closely and can’t take her attention off her. My mom says to me “she’s going to be a dancer” and when I don’t acknowledge her familiar comment, she says to the little girl “you’re going to be a dancer” and the little girl looks uncomfortable and then away as my mom can’t take her gaze off her.

I suddenly feel shame pouring into my body as my mom attempts to give this unwanted attention to the little girl. I know I can’t stop her, so I begin to dissociate just a little to try to pass this moment. But the line seems to be taking an eternity.

Time passes as I ease back into the present and find that the line has moved just a little. The little girl is doing her best to entertain herself while her mom waits to buy her the outfits she picked out for her.

I honestly am not looking very closely at the little girl other than to admire the cool shoes she was wearing. In a slightly dissociated state, I find myself only minimally present in the line with my mom. I am doing my very best to tough out bringing my mom and her boyfriend to the mall to get her a Bra and him a belt.

I have been trying to set boundaries around being with my mom. She was recently verbally abusive toward me, which had stirred up a lot of parts within me. I was doing a good job seeing her less at her assisted living home. But, she had called one of my little parts the day before.

Calling a little part is not something I am used to her doing. This is a new thing she is doing to “motivate” me to do whatever it is she wants. She had called on a part that she used to sexually abuse when she would have one of her episodes of drunkenness and despair when my father would disappear on her.

My sweet little part knows that it is the present, but they are still stuck in thinking like an abused child who has to take care of their mom, no matter what.

My therapist did her best at trying to help the little one with the way they were thinking, but these beliefs are strong and certainly not going to be undone in a 50 minute therapy session. The little one was in a significant amount of distress over these boundaries and us not doing more of what my mom wants from us.

I gave in and pulled together my protector parts who know how to be around my mom without any emotion. I stood there without emotion as my mom is talking to me without me really being present. Then, I heard it. I heard the sick words that weren’t quite right for my only halfway present brain to keep pretending like everything was normal.

“Look, she is already acting like a woman.”

My brain swerved to come present. Sounding angry, I said “what are you talking about??” At the same time I knew exactly what she was trying to tell me. She says with a smiling gaze, “you didn’t see it, but she is doing things to let us know she is ready to be a woman.” I glance at the little girl and she is only sitting there playing like a 4 year old.

Shame fills my body. The lights seem to go out for me briefly as I next found myself shopping for pillows while she was still in line. I see that she is finally about to reach the cashier and I come over because my mom has trouble remembering how to do things, so I help her pay for her bra.

I look to the exit at the Macys and wonder if we can make it that many steps without something else happening. I just need to pull it together and pretend like we are a normal family. No one can tell the perverse sickness accompanying me. I try to push the shame far away as I know I need to get us out of there and get her back away from me.

To someone else, her comments may have seemed benign, but I knew better. I grew up with this woman sex trafficking and abusing me and others, so I knew these were the words of a perpetrator who forgot her moment in time and was experiencing pleasure imagining taking the little girl’s innocence from her.

It is so weird because in my mind I think I can’t go back to the past and understand the how and the why of my abuse. And then this woman with dementia shows back up in my life. And with this dementia comes parts of her who are from our past. They are ugly and familiar. They are twisting up my dissociative system something good.

I want to believe that because I survived this day and didn’t go off the rails that some good will come out of this. Maybe I am in fantasy, but I try to be hopeful. I mean, I have been so afraid of this woman my entire life, and now I can stand next to her and realize she is sick and twisted and can’t hurt me unless I let her. I am the adult. I have more power than her. I just need for all my parts to believe this new reality.

I didn’t see this coming, but my part “Wisdom” did. They told my therapist last week that maybe the ordeal I am going through with taking care of my abusive mom may be a blessing. Maybe so, but I am left feeling like I need to die a thousand deaths after today.

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Child Abuse and Cults

I question often why I survived what I believe is something not meant to be survived.

My memories from the late 1960s, early 1970s still control much of my everyday existence in 2019.

My brain as a child split into so many parts that on any given day I don’t truly know who is speaking or thinking in our body. The experts call this poly-fragmented Dissociative Identity Disorder. I call it a chaotic hell.

So many fragments of me. All holding different feelings, stories, images, and talents. So many of them still children no matter how old the body becomes.

The fact that so many parts of me are children causes me to hold beliefs that only a child would hold.

I have spent years trying to convince my therapist she just doesn’t understand what it means to be raised in a religious community. She doesn’t get that a child must accept the religion they are born into, well, at least as children.

The right and wrongness of it never seems to really matter in my story. It is just not relevant. I think all forms of religion probably involve degrees of brainwashing that become your core beliefs and understanding of the world.

My birth community has robbed me of my life. Yes, I still exist, but feel lost everyday wondering why.

My brain is twisted in ways that are terrifying to me, and frankly, unspeakable to others. It is an easy secret to keep. No one outside my therapist would believe me, except others trying to survive similar histories. Perhaps those from my community would know of what I speak, though I imagine none of them would speak of it back to me. It is the silence that binds us.

Quietly on the outside, but chaotic and noisy on the inside, I try to navigate the choice I still face every day since I was a toddler.

The people in my community did great harm to my soul and mind. They went to elaborate lengths to make me believe I need to choose each day whether I will choose LIFE with those from the underworld, who require constant sex and scary, dark secrets to be kept; or choose a loving god, which will still require constant sex as an expression of love for this god, and ultimately require SACRIFICING MYSELF through blood-letting to show my true allegiance to this loving god.

This daily decision torments me. The “loving god” people seem so much nicer, even with their demonstrations of blood-letting and requirements of group sex. These are happier people. Drugs are plentiful whether desired or not so as to make the experience wonderful for everyone. They don’t hold the darkness of the underworld. Yet, they require me to end my life to show true allegiance. This is what true Christians do. These happier people come from The Way International.

As a child, I did not want to die. Though today, I am constantly drawn to the sacrifice of myself. It seems so freeing. The ultimate expression of love. And escape.

Instead, I am crippled by my selfish desire to live which requires my allegiance to the underworld, and all the brutality it entails.

My therapist says this is not a decision. She says you cannot make a choice when one choice is your death. This is all confusing to me when she speaks of this.

My rational adult mind knows this is not a choice for a child to make. This was an elaborate creation by deeply disturbed adults. Yet, the hundreds of children who live in my mind face this decision daily with only their child minds to understand it all.

Religion. Smoke and mirrors. Drugs. Mind control. Power. Survival. Satan. God. Jesus. Love. Hate. Violence. Sex. Pain. Freedom from it all. Controlled by it all.

So many people message me everyday that I should not take my life. I should stay. It is wrong to commit suicide. I don’t really want to do it they say. And the final nail, they say I don’t know what is waiting for me if I do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get messages regularly instructing me to kill myself. Yes, I am aware that makes me sound psychotic or schizophrenic. I don’t really care what you call it.

My mind, body, and soul has been subjected to horrendous trauma. In all that mess, my mind has been altered in ways that benefit those who perpetrated this abuse. It is easy to mind control a child, and if you are smart enough to know how to induce dissociative parts, you are golden for life as the mind will forever be controlled.

My mind can often get controlled by symbols or words. I won’t describe them here as I am not stupid enough to believe there are not still people who would use this to harm me.

Look at our epidemic of sex-trafficking. So many people think this is a new, outrageous problem. It is not. It is simply another version of my childhood.

There is always a market for the sick and perverted. Today’s technology, culture, transportation, and political views allow this to prosper without much difficulty.

The missing children who crossed the Mexican border. It is certainly not the first time our government engaged in assisting with sex-trafficking.

Yeah, I know, these are simply ramblings from a crazy person. None of its true. We live in a lovely world with lovely people who would never do what I have suggested. Just ask my mother, I am sure she will tell you this is all crazy and you should not believe one word.

It’s cool. I have listened to her my entire life. She is quite persuasive and powerful.

Namaste.

The darkness of Halloween

It’s strange. Every year, I forget how much I hate Halloween until I start experiencing a cascade of shitty stuff until it finally hits me that it is Halloween month, and that never goes well for me.

Despite having inflatable Halloween blow ups in my front yard beginning October 1st (my spouse does this for our kids), I sort of dissociate that it is Halloween and that I don’t like Halloween and that it is usually a dark time for me. It takes me until about the week before Halloween to realize the darkness of Halloween is here.

Even with the constant reminder of Halloween staring me in the face, it takes imaginary messages from the devil penetrating me to understand the chaos and fear going on in my system this time of year.

I know many parts absolutely believe in these messages from the devil, but I want to say I do not, without being mean about their beliefs.

I don’t have the answer as to why parts of me feel with certainty the devil is sending messages to them through an inanimate object in my therapist’s office that looks like the face of the devil to them.

They are terrified. I just see a piece of metal that kind of looks like a scary face, but they see and feel the devil.

I try to focus on living a normal life, and fight to keep from being consumed with ideas that the devil is coming for us.

I hate the people who have scrambled my brain, body, and soul like this.

Instead of enjoying the candy and Halloween costumes of my kids, I focus on just getting through alive.

I don’t even know what all these scary feeling are about. I don’t know that I will ever know.

My brain still protects me from the madness of my childhood.

No matter how sane I try to create my life, madness will always be with me, as I am madness.

Hiding from my truth

I was getting too close to acknowledging the intense pain of my childhood abuse. It was coming for me. I got really scared.

As someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, I managed to dissociate it from my awareness, and eventually switch to an Identity that doesn’t experience abuse and lives in the here and now.

My system is mad that this Identity went to therapy this week and basically “wasted” the session by talking about mostly nothing.

Our experience seems normal on the outside. We are taking care of the kids and participating in life to some degree.

Our memory is still severely impaired. My son asked me my neighbor’s name, who I know well, and I couldn’t remember it. So, so frustrating.

I don’t know how long we can hold out in this safer position. I feel sadness and suicide creeping around nearby tonight.

I read an article about Designer Kate Spade’s suicide at age 55, and found myself jealous. She left a note to her 13 year old daughter telling the daughter it wasn’t her fault. My children have always kept me from doing it.

I have a mostly good life, yet I selfishly want to end it. What is wrong with me besides the obvious?

Stealing a life

I stole her life. She was young and badly hurt and didn’t care about what happened to her body, so I took it because I needed one.

I was a soul in need of a body. She was a body with a soul that had died.

Body theft. Besides sounding futuristic, it sounds like a shitty thing to do to someone.

But she didn’t want to live. She wasn’t using it. It would have gone unused and possibly destroyed if I had left her with it.

She didn’t care at all.

Still, I guess I shouldn’t have taken it. I have had it for so long I forget it was originally hers.

She’s coming back for it. I don’t think she knows I have it, but she will figure it out when she gets a little closer.

She’s been lost for a very, very long time. It is not that any part of me intentionally kept her lost. She just had no reason to find the body. When she was last in control of the body, she was a ghost. Or the walking dead. No one was home.

Most people think of me as a decent person. I would take a bullet for most people on earth.

But my therapist has learned a new side to me. She has learned I am not such a good person after all.

I abandoned a little girl who had no life in front of her because of the mental damage done to her from years of unthinkable child abuse.

My therapist thinks I should have saved her. She thinks people don’t get ruined beyond repair. I know this little girl, and there is no repairing the damage done to her mind, body, and soul.

She wanders the planet lost and broken. She does not seek to understand. She is way beyond that. At some point, it just doesn’t matter.

She reached a point of no return, which happens to those who suffer ungodly acts like she did.

She does not understand the complexity of the system of people living in her body. Not sure she will care as I think she doesn’t care about anything.

Yet, my therapist thinks I should embrace her and care for her. It sounds so lovely, doesn’t it? Except for the fact that it will kill me and every part living in this body.

We survived horror, and have only lived this long because that little girl stayed lost in our internal la-la land.

If she makes her way to us, and she is getting closer, I have no doubt we will all die.

She had the unfortunate burden of taking the brunt of the everyday trauma we experienced. She died so we could live. Yet, somehow, her pulse still beats, though her mind runs close to flatline.

I have seen her and felt her from time-to-time over the years. I have always known she was still lost and damaged and hidden within.

I felt her close by today. I could see her. If she truly comes to me, and it is entirely up to her, her pain will overwhelm and kill me.

So, for a change, I am not the strong one. I am afraid. I am afraid she will become me, and I have already seen what it has done to her. I am no stronger than her.

Complex trauma, the gift that keeps on giving.

My journey has changed

Some of you may have noticed that I have been missing in action for the past month or so.

I was really not doing well and needed intensive inpatient help with managing the symptoms of my DID and PTSD, particularly the level of suicidality I was experiencing.

I decided to go inpatient and it lasted longer than I expected. If I wouldn’t have really pushed to get out, I still easily met the criteria of someone who needed to be inpatient. But alas, I always feel terribly restless and triggered when I am inpatient, so a month was as much as I could do.

I am now happily home with my family and working to transition back into my real life. Still figuring this out and hope to share it with you as I uncover the new path of my journey.

I experienced incredible levels of amnesia and confusion while inpatient, but I was still able to gain some important insights into a new direction for my life.

I plan to share these new plans with you as I unpack myself back into the real world and my real life.

For now, I can say I realize I do have a life to live while doing this work, and I don’t have to “fix” my life before I can start living it.

I am also happy to say I am not currently feeling suicidal, which is remarkable because that is my typical normal. I know better than to get overly excited about this as I know it can change on a dime, but I do feel a sliver of hope that it is currently absent.

Speaking of hope, I did manage to gain some hope despite the incredible amnesia, confusion, transference, and uncomfortableness I experienced staying in this inpatient unit. Nothing like being locked up and power taken from you as a survivor that is seemingly required for inpatient treatment.

I am feeling well today and I am looking forward to sharing my new journey with you, and my experience during my inpatient stay.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the support I received from you all.

With love and hope to you all,

Kathy

Mommy of fire

My therapist doesn’t think I am telling the truth when I say my mom has special powers. She says she doesn’t trust my mom and thinks my mom lied and manipulated me into thinking she has special powers.

It is true my mom would medicate me often with mood altering drugs. When I think back, things seem blurry and scary about her. I think of fires and ceremonies to demonstrate her power.

My mom always knew what I was doing, and controlled everything about me. She decided whether I would eat, sleep, talk, or be hurt. In essence, she decided whether I lived or died.

My mom’s energy force is getting weak. I haven’t talked to her, but I can feel it. She is getting old, frail, and demented.

I am worried she is going to die. While others inside me would be happy about that, I wonder what it means to me or us.

I fear without her we will die also. She has had total control of most of us, so what does it mean to have her no longer there?

My therapist thinks it will be a good thing to no longer have her around, but she doesn’t understand. When someone controls your every move your entire life, you can’t just remove the person and think things will be good or even fine.

A person needs to know how to live. How to make decisions. My mom was literally blurred into my physical body–there were no boundaries. I have no sense of self without her.

I keep thinking of conjoined twins that need to be separated. If it is not done with extreme precision, they both die.

My silence about cults

I come out today as a cult survivor in the hopes of being one more person to speak truth to the unimaginable trauma caused by these cults. It is a very scary thing for me to do as I have been taught my whole life to keep this secret, or risk death.

I have always known I have cult experiences in my background, but I chose not to mention it to people because I did not want to get dismissed as “crazy” because I have seen how people react to this topic.

I have two cult experiences in my background, and in some ways they were related. Both of my cult experiences revolve around an extremely twisted Christianity.

I was raised in what I call The Community. If it had another name, I wasn’t aware of it. The Community involved sexual abuse, sex trafficking, money, drugs, mind control, pedophilia based on the teachings of Jesus Christ, sadism, ceremonies, and what is now an extremely powerful church in the world.

The Community is something I am still reluctant to talk about openly, even though many of its members are dead or elderly. They were, and quite possibly still, very powerful.

The Community morphed from nothing into an extremely powerful church, which scares me in that I would imagine the current church stewards would go to any lengths to protect it, and not allow its beginnings to be public. I don’t disclose the church name out of fear.

Growing up, I lived in a Middle Class neighborhood that only as an adult did I realize was out of the ordinary or peculiar.

My neighborhood was unusual in that all of our family friends (other Community members) were both tied to the beginning of a church, and the children were involved in all types of sexual behavior from a very young age.

They raised us to be extremely obedient, and to not discuss what went on in our community to those outside. In fact, we didn’t discuss it in Community either. We just did what we were told.

As a very young child, I was told by my mother to show up at different places in the Community. Sometimes this involved meeting men who were considered prominent members of the greater community, but they all had ties back to the church.

When I met these men at their places of work, homes, or in a specific meeting place that was designated for these pickups, I was expected to do whatever these men wanted without complaint or any type of resistance. It was through these experiences, I learned my value to my family and the Community was sexual.

Obedience was life or death, so I complied and died a little inside with each occurrence.

One especially sick member of our Community was involved in the mind control piece. He would lock us in a little room for hours and scream at us in the name of Jesus Christ, and no response from us was the right answer to get him to stop. He always finished by telling us because we had not accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts, we were going to Hell. Then he would sexually abuse us while talking in a whisper to Jesus.

My grandmother was a big player in this church. She gave a lot of her time and money to it. It was all she had since her husband was abusive to her.

My parents would periodically leave me at my grandmother’s house, and I always feared they wouldn’t come back for me.

My grandmother had very rigid religious beliefs. Her house was spotless, and there was no room for a normal child in that environment. She had very strict rituals about how meals were to be eaten, and no amount of crying would change the rules. When she bathed you, she scrubbed your skin in the most painful way to clean all dirt and sin from your body.

Still, my grandmother’s house was less abusive than what I experienced at home.

From time-to-time, a well known cult called The Way International (you can Google them or find them on Facebook) would come to town and my grandmother would give me to them. I would ride in the back of a station wagon with other kids I did not know to the bonfire in the woods where other Way members were gathered.

These Way members were all fairly young, mostly in their early 20s. At these gatherings, the Way members would drug us, and teach us about our destinies as children who were chosen to sacrifice themselves in the way Jesus did. They also would talk of bloodletting as a practice to show our allegiance to God. After our religious teachings, the Way members would take turns having sex with us.

Some would say this is fantasy, and that’s ok. I don’t need anyone to believe me at this point in my life. I live with the scars, and have no interest except to try to heal from this.

Part of my point of this writing is to express that the work of the Devil can also be done through those who believe they are practicing Christianity.

In my cult experiences, the only time Satan was brought into the picture was to teach me if I did not embrace these Christian teachings, then Satan would be waiting for me.

When your foundation in life comes from this type of disturbing beginning, you don’t escape unscathed. Your mind is damaged almost beyond repair, and for me, this beginning was partially responsible for my development of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

This is not simply religious extremism. This is a perfect example of how children are subjected to organized abuse.

As much as I would like to believe these people and groups don’t exist, they do. My memories are clear, and always have been.

Unfortunately, every single child I know from this Community suffers from mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Many of us may have physically escaped a cult, but find we can never seem to outrun the cult indoctrination completely. It lingers in our minds and comes out at certain times of the year and through certain triggers we may not even understand.

The mind control programming that goes with cults is extremely challenging to overcome, and with so many people skeptical of the cult concept to begin with, there are very few people in the world who even know how to help people who have received this type of programming.

I would like to say I am in a place where the programming and fear from the cults no longer affects me. Unfortunately, I still have parts of me who believe in these teachings, and when I try to talk with my therapist about these experiences, sometimes my brain takes off like a rocket into paranoia and dangerous false beliefs.

The darkness from within

Today I went to therapy and had parts that have relationships with cults and religion out in session.

I am not happy about it because I do not like people to see this side of me, not even my therapist. It just seems like it is better left unsaid and unexperienced by the outside world.

My strongest cult part came out when they weren’t satisfied by the way the part before them was handling the discussion with my therapist. This part is quite intelligent, definitely more so than me. It has access to knowledge of religion and cults that I don’t keep in my accessible part of our brain. They can be scary and mean, too.

The time before when this part came out we were at a residential treatment facility in California. The therapist there really wanted to speak to this part, and I was surprised it came out.

He debated religion and discussed his feelings about the value of modern day human sacrifice as similar to what Jesus did. He believes in bloodletting and human sacrifice and claims this is necessary so other people can continue to live on this planet.

By the time he finished speaking to our California therapist, she was visibly rattled, and ended up calling the emergency crisis team to evaluate me. Though we didn’t get admitted to a hospital because we know that game, we were discharged from that program a couple of days later for reasons that are unclear to us.

Today, our regular therapist got her first glimpse of him, and I don’t think she likes him or us any more. She would deny this because that is the type of person she is.

But, let’s face it, no one wants to go down this rabbit hole with us. It is scary and dark and no good can come from it.

Evil scares people, and they fear this is what evil looks like up close.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Mind Control and Me

I don't know exactly how this happened to me, but somehow I have a program, like a computer program that runs in my brain. It makes it so I don't always have free will, and I am terrified of this program.

I realize this is what psychotic people say, but I will say it nonetheless, and if you need to believe I am psychotic, it is certainly your prerogative.

Every day for as long as I can remember, I fear people who might do something to alter my brain. This comes out in situations where someone wants me to put on headphones, has medical instruments on their desk, does guided meditation, says certain statements, or wants me to do therapies like neurofeedback, brain spotting, or EMDR.

It is terribly distressing for me, and no matter how much I try to convince myself that there is nothing to fear, I get filled with overwhelming fear.

I don't know exactly how, but I know my brain was programmed when I was a child. I suppose everyone's is to a certain extent. For me, though, I think mine is a little more like the Manchurian Candidate if you have seen that movie.

My brain works kind of like this: it can be free-flowing along like a normal brain and then someone says or does X. My brain stops the free-flow and a program becomes activated in my brain. These programs are never any good, especially for me. My brain's program is activated as if it something that I must do, and it was not my idea, nor do I have free will to decide to do it or not.

Today, I was working with a therapist, and she was talking about guided imagery as a skill to relax or be mindful. I don't understand much about the programming in my head, but I do know guided imagery is the quickest way someone can access my programs, and so I avoid it at all costs.

Unfortunately, with the therapist from earlier today, we had different ideas of guided imagery, and so she started into something that in my mind was guided imagery, which puts me into an instant trance or hypnotic state, and my brain went crazy from there.

I am fairly sure she was rambling about some safe bubble around me, but my brain deciphered that into meaning I was supposed to cut my wrists. And down the spiral with that command did I go.

And though I have not carried out that command from my program, not doing so has made me incredibly mentally sick.

I am preoccupied with cutting my wrists and imagine what that would look like here. My brain is filled with psychotic feeling thoughts, and I imagine myself as a very young child sucking my thumb as bad stuff is happening around me or to me.

People want me to be optimistic about stopping the programs that are in my head, but the truth is most people don't understand what I am talking about, and there are only a handful of people in the world who help unprogram a programmed person.

So my optimism is low. And the world is a terrifying place at the moment.

Sigh.