The hurricane strength walls blocking positivity

Positivity. Such an awkward experience for me every day of my adult life. A foreign language I never understood, so I don’t even bother to try to process it in my brain or body. Mostly I am just numb to it, but occasionally I feel physical pain to someone else’s positivity toward me. I hate that pain.

Bounce, bounce, bounce.

No matter how many times, or how it is done, positivity from others just bounces off my being. Never internalized. Never understood. Always wishing the other person didn’t say it because it just leaves me feeling awkward and confused about what to do with it. As usual, when I reach this uncomfortable state, I use the only skill I can count on to provide me relief: dissociation. With dissociation I have no mental or physical memory of it. It is gone. And I am relieved and back to my baseline of nothingness.

Nothingness is my familiar, and where I belong.

My therapist, ever the hopeful optimist, seems to think I will one day break free of this pattern and be able to internalize positivity toward me (let me be clear I am aware this is what normal humans are supposed to do). I would like to believe her, but honestly, I am an expert in facts and patterns as they pertain to me, and I have never been given reason to believe it is possible. How old do I have to get to prove my point that the attachment damage and mental programming of my belief system is forever stuck?

I am not delusional about my parents. They were shit parents who did unspeakable things to me and I didn’t deserve it. No child deserves the emotional, physical, sexual, spiritual and neglectful abuse they raised me with. My parents would probably cry it is not their fault as they are just passing on generational trauma. Both my parents were raised by shit parents. Though I understand generational trauma is a thing, I also have to balance that understanding with the fact that I have not abused my own children. I would never, and I am not sure why my own parents chose differently.

Being raised in an environment where I was chronically abused and traumatized, my mind chose to survive instead of giving up. I don’t remember this negotiation within myself, but apparently I must have done so. There have definitely been many days where I am furious with my younger self for making this choice.

In order to survive, I had to make deals with god or the Devil or whoever was bargaining on any particular day. I suppose many times it was me negotiating with myself (or with my parts). I developed rules that I would follow to lessen the pain and suffering of my childhood. They didn’t always work, so I often had to refine them.

Refine, refine, refine.

In my adulthood, those rules became beliefs about myself and how to lessen the pain and suffering of life. I wish I could say pain and suffering ended with childhood, but it didn’t for me. The damage that was done to me delivered a very damaged adult to a hugely imperfect world filled with lots of damaged and cruel and sick people.

The rules don’t allow for a joyful life. I had to agree to give that up in order to survive. Joy is not allowed. Love is not allowed. Need is not allowed. Smiling is not allowed. Feeling good about myself is not allowed. Feeling accomplished or being accomplished is not allowed. Feeling smart is not allowed. Feeling like a good person is not allowed. Accepting anything good from anyone is not allowed. This list is never ending.

What is allowed? Hating myself. Feeling stupid. Criticizing myself. Giving myself negative internal messages all day long. Starving myself. Allowing myself to continue to be abused as an adult. Cutting myself. Smashing my head into a wall. Being a failure. Wasting my life. Giving to others what I don’t have or allow for myself. Not letting anyone care or love me. Staying isolated. Taking in every negative word any random piece of shit has to say about me. Believing the worst about me. Not giving myself any grace. And zero forgiveness to myself for the piece of shit I am even if it isn’t my fault.

These are the deals I made. The rules I agreed to live by. Apparently, I will be taking these to my death. It’s a shame that I am a person of my word and don’t break promises.

I will stick with the therapist who holds false beliefs about recovering from the childhood I endured. The alternative is death, and though many parts of me welcome it, most of us are not willing to do that to our children.

In her own selfishness, my mother didn’t teach me one ounce of selfishness. I will always sacrifice my own needs and desires for others, and I am glad my children will benefit from it. I won’t thank my mom for that, but I am grateful it is an unintended consequence of being severely abused by a narcissistic mother.

Sigh.

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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.

Missing memories

I am missing the memories of most of my childhood before age 12. What I can remember is about 90% traumatic memories. I know I probably had more than 10% of my childhood being good memories, but I don’t have them.

When I think back on everything I can remember from my childhood, I was always feeling fearful, even in moments where it doesn’t seem like there should be fear for any reason.

I can remember 3 memories when I was in kindergarten.

The first is remembering that the best thing about kindergarten was that on “your day,” you got to go out in the hall and finger-paint. I know it was a highlight for me, but at the same time I feel intense fear thinking about the memory, and the scariness of the hall I was in.

The second memory was when one of my best friends came to school without underwear on while she was wearing a dress. I remember how mortified I was for her, and I was fearful because I knew it had something to do with the community we lived in together.

The third thing I can remember was being in the kindergarten teacher’s office area with her and another teacher doing a lice check on me. I gathered from their conversation it was not the first time they had me back there for a lice check. I remember them being sure I had lice and stumped when they couldn’t find any. I imagine the lice check was because I was dirty and unkempt. It was a very shaming experience, and again I felt fearful.

For the next 5 years at school, I can only remember 3 or 4 memories, and all of those are very scary and traumatic.

When I turned 12, my parents had quit drinking and moved our family away from the community we grew up in, and we literally became new people who had pretend normal backgrounds. There was never any mention or recognition of the past.

For whatever reason, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. In fact, I didn’t think anything of it until a therapist of mine some 38 years later pointed out how odd it was that my family had done that. I just shrugged it off because I never had the expectation that my childhood and family should make sense.

As a very grown adult, it is super frustrating to not have memories of my childhood and a lot of my adult life. Even though my adult life has not been terribly traumatic by my childhood standards, I still can’t remember things all the time.

The answer to this problem as I have come to believe is that because parts of me did not developmentally integrate when I was in childhood, I need to integrate us into one as an adult. Or, at the very least get parts of me who are stuck living in past trauma into the present.

To accomplish integration or removing active trauma from our head, we have to remember and process some of the memories. This is a difficult task for someone who can’t remember as much as I do.

I have been pushing my system for memories for a while now. I gamed my system and forced the process. As a result, I recently had some new memories come in rapid fire succession.

The memories I had before these new memories were horrific, so I wasn’t particularly worried as I honestly felt like things couldn’t be much worse. I was wrong.

There was a reason those memories were being kept from me. It has been almost a month since they first came up, and they have ruined me. I can’t seem to pull out of this constant suicidal crisis for longer than 10 minutes.

The new memories have shook me to the core. It has made it so I am not who I thought I was. A parent who I thought loved me and cared for me was not that at all.

It leaves me feeling like I was truly nothing to no one growing up. No one.

It is a hard pill to swallow.

I got what I wanted. I forced memories to come that probably should have never come.

I honestly don’t know if I will survive this suicidal crisis I am in. Everyday I just barely scrape by.

I am not sure I want to exist with this new sense of my identity. I wish I could just shake it off and go on with my ok adult life. But, I can’t let go of my past, and don’t know if I ever will. And if I never let go, living this haunted life until the end is an awful existence.

I don’t know if anyone understands what it feels like to have this haunting day-in-and-out.

It is like living in sheer terror everyday. Who the hell wants that?

The obliteration of DID walls

I usually have a somewhat manageable life, though still difficult for sure. I typically manage with a lot of amnesia and a balancing of the competing ideas and feelings from the other souls who reside in my body.

There are souls in my body who feel hopeless, hurt, and angry, and usually deal with those feelings by wanting to commit suicide.

Usually I can help our system of souls through these tough times, but lately it has become increasingly more difficult.

Having had the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder for 30 years, I have reached a place where the system works pretty well together on most days.

We all seem to have co-consciousness as far as I can tell, and we don’t hate each other as far as I know. I explain it this way because new souls seem to appear often in therapy. In fact, I do not even try to keep track of them, and I don’t mean any disrespect to those souls, but my mind literally cannot remember it all.

As a system, there are some rules that we agree to live by. One of the most important ones is to not kill ourselves because of the damage it would do to our children (or my children, since not everyone claims them).

We also have the rule of not committing adultery since some of us are married. Some souls don’t like this, but they have agreed to it anyway in the spirit of cooperation and living a life with less chaos.

Another rule would be that younger souls, or noticeably different acting/sounding older souls, are not to interact with the outside children in our family as I believe this would cause great harm to my children.

These rules are usually followed fairly well by most everyone in the system. Sometimes a soul might be so upset that they choose to ignore the rule about no suicide or self-harm, but we have systems in place to stop those parts from acting on these feelings, or at least minimizing the expression of them. This is something we routinely have to deal with, and something we stay hyper vigilant about.

In our 20s, we had one soul in our system who decided to quietly kill ourselves. This soul was almost successful, so it is something we are always watching out for, and thankfully, haven’t had a serious attempt since then, though we have had less serious attempts.

My system has been slapped in the face with a lot of new revelations lately, namely, it is becoming crystal clear who our family was, and the awful things they have done to us.

In the past, we have always had these memories, but what is new is the ability to start putting it together in a narrative of our lives, which means a whole lot of grief is staring us down.

Our new narrative is honest, but incredibly painful to face this truth and stay planted on earth.

This new narrative has left souls scrambling to make sense of it all. To hold the truth in our hearts and not die is quite the challenge.

Our system has become quite destabilized. We find ourselves switching from one soul to the next without any control or order to it. Our memory and executive function has dropped to whatever the lowest score would be on that scale. We can barely complete a thought in conversation without switching to another soul and then back.

We have not honored the rule of not switching souls in front of my children. I have put every last piece of energy into trying to stay present for them, but have found myself “waking up” to another soul interacting with my children. This has never happened before.

I find it difficult to complete thoughts I am trying to express, and found myself borrowing the thoughts of other souls to try to complete an idea I was speaking about. This has not worked out very well as most of us are very different from one another, and many inside have some very destructive ways of thinking.

My internal world feels like it is being obliterated, which leaves a dissociative person like myself extremely confused and barely able to function. The neat and orderly walls of our system have been something manageable for the system. But suddenly those walls don’t seem to be there so much.

My therapist pointed out the possibility that the souls within my body may be “transitioning” to a place of more wholeness (or integration), which understandably has left me completely confused and overwhelmed to suddenly be experiencing their thoughts and feelings in no particular orderly process.

I’ll be honest, this last week I have had many moments where I haven’t been coherent in what I was trying to express. I have changed the way I have sounded 5 times in a ten minute period.

In this moment of rest, I would like to be happy about this possibility of integration (yes, we are in the camp who wants it), but we are also in a state of extreme suicidal ideation, planning, and acting out. I am trying my best to stay vigilant, but I also know I don’t have the skills or the strong desire for this vigilance because of the passive influence from the other souls.

I should be in a hospital given the level of chaos and difficulty in me stopping the serious suicidal feelings and plans. I just don’t have the energy or inclination to go to a hospital.

If I go into a hospital for safety, I travel out of state to one of the few places that understands DID. I can’t just go up the road to psych hospitals in my city because they will not believe in my DID, so will more than likely shoot me up with antipsychotics to “fix” me. Not willing to do that.

When I am more of a clear thinking person, I would not risk what I am risking. I keep hoping I will wake up to a better day because I know this won’t last forever. But, I also need to keep in mind the people with DID who successfully kill themselves.

This is an evolving situation. I am hoping things become more manageable again, but not at the expense of possible progress.

I will try to update you again as to where I land next. Stay tuned.

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.

Not able to name my perpetrators

I have been struggling a lot lately with the idea of naming my abusers, or even publicly claiming my abuse.

I realize I am still holding overwhelming shame and fear about the abuse I suffered. With every mention of child abuse on my Facebook page, I worry what my mother would do to me if she found out I was telling anyone. What would my oldest brother do to me who is a narcissistic, psychopath living a seemingly proper life?

I have more abusers than I could actually name if I wanted to. I did name one recently who was a very public figure, and now I am being asked to help others take him down in a very public way (he is actually dead, but still has prominence in the world). Not sure what I will do about this situation.

My abusers did a really good job in keeping me quiet. Even at my very adult age I still fear naming those I could name.

It is complicated for me. Every day it is a struggle to keep my fragile mind intact with regards to the severe trauma I endured during my childhood.

My brain was so fragile before age 11 that I truly cannot remember most of my childhood. I mostly remember snippets of abuse, but I can’t remember hardly any “normal” or good memories.

Most of my abuse happened before age 11, but still lots of abuse happened after age 11, too. Once you get branded with the invisible “V” on your forehead to let the predators out there know you are a victim, new predators can find you easily.

Because my child abuse was severe and happened when I was so young, my mind did not come together the way it should have through proper development. Instead, the trauma caused me to develop Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which can still wreak havoc on my life today.

My mind is a jumbled mess of brokenness.

My emotions, memories, capabilities, and needs are broken into separate parts of myself. Though I can appear very strong, there are many days when I am at my breaking point and no one outside of myself even knows it.

I know I must stay functioning and strong for my children. They need me and are more important to me than anything else in this world.

Sadly, I don’t even feel a need for justice toward my perpetrators by naming them.

I barely survived my childhood, and still struggle to survive in my adult self.

Just about every kind of abuse has been done to me, including mind control. And I am weak because of this.

So, forgive me if I am not in a place to name my perpetrators. I believe I would do it if I knew of someone in imminent harm by one of these people.

One day I will be stronger, but that day is not today.

The mind’s willing descent into madness

I have found myself coming apart in a way I don’t understand this past week. I have had trouble functioning outside of taking care of my kids.

When I am away from my kids, my mind immediately starts its descent into madness.

My mind is drawn to an alternative universe that only lives in my head, but was built there during my childhood.

It is an evil world. It feels awful to go there, but I find my parts are drawn to it like a magnet. I think maybe because this awful place feels so familiar to them they want to be there?

This world is dangerous for me as it stops my rational thinking for myself. I start listening to the programmed messages that reside there telling me to kill myself. I can’t find my normal reasons for not even considering that option as I am hijacked into a world that shakes my brain dizzy until it can’t string together two sentences or thoughts that make sense.

I approached a dangerous memory last week. One in which I am certain outside people went to great lengths for me to not remember. I stumbled into it somehow, or someone inside decided to give me another piece of the puzzle.

The facts of this puzzle don’t make sense in a real world, but I didn’t grow up in a real or normal world.

Facts didn’t matter, as our reality was easily challenged by the adults in our lives. Our brains grew to accept this world and dismiss our own versions of reality.

My brain feels broken and battered this week. I always wonder if I will make it out of these situations as each time the beatings on my brain gets worse.

My brain is driven to go on a fact-finding mission in the depths of hell that exist in my brain.

My therapist tried to keep me from doing this, but we can’t keep going without understanding our abuse better.

She is right, it is too fast, too soon. We should be pacing looking at our trauma better, but we just can’t let go.

The magnet pulls us in and we get stuck viewing and feeling the horror of it all.

This is our life, and sometimes I really hate it.

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.