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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Abused again: Trying not to give up on myself

I woke today with a busy schedule ahead of me. I have been dealing with a lot lately, particularly a very chronically sick child. It was also the day I was going to slip in taking care of myself by getting an x-ray of my hip that I injured 2 months ago and have been dealing with chronic pain ever since.

I wasn’t seeing my normal orthopedic doctor because I needed to get in quickly as I don’t have many self care openings in my schedule these days. In retrospect, I should have caught the red flag of this particular doctor having multiple openings for a next day appointment at one of the top orthopedic practices in town.

Nope. I jumped out of bed to get to the appointment early in the hopes they would take me early so I wouldn’t miss my therapy appointment afterward.

Of course, I sat in the waiting room past my appointment time before the front desk even called me up to fill out additional paperwork. So much for arriving 20 minutes early.

You know those doctors always have more important schedules than the people, so let’s make sure that is reinforced.

As I am finally walking back to meet the doctor, who incidentally wasn’t seeing any patients but me, I noticed in the paperwork they handed me to give the doctor that it has all the prescriptions listed that I have filled at my local drug store. On it, a long list of many types of psychiatric medications.

Great. I am going to get labeled a psych patient and treated poorly, as I have been through that scenario more than a few times.

The doctor pops in and spends 95% of the appointment time talking about himself, his health, the death of his brother, his age, how he doesn’t suntan anymore, what he watched on tv last night, his experience with his last colonoscopy, the cost of medications he takes, and how he treats his his rosacea.

I am feeling really grounded, but taken aback by this strange doctor showing no interest in me, and the clock ticking in my head for my next appointment.

I do my best several times to bring up the pain I am feeling on my side.

Finally, the doctor comes toward me to examine me. He starts touching me and says over and over as he moves his hands around my body “does this hurt?” When he found where it hurt he pushed in really hard and I almost jumped off the table. He says he knew that was where the pain was coming from. It was high up on my left side.

I continue to feel grounded but focused on trying to accurately answer this man’s questions about my pain as he touches me. I am so focused on trying to accurately answer him I don’t realize he is now touching me in my vaginal area and talking about bones in the pelvic area—that have nothing to do with why I am there.

I hear a couple of voices in my head calling me stupid because I don’t realize this man is touching my vaginal area for no reason and talking about how my pelvis bones touch each other.

In a slowed reaction, I realize the voices are right and this man is touching me inappropriately. And I do nothing about it.

I freeze.

I don’t stop him or tell him to stop.

It’s as if it is not happening to me, but I can hear this man’s words and feel his touch that it is happening.

Fortunately, the man seemed spooked for some reason and jumped up to go get an anatomical dummy to show me the bones in the pelvic area, which again had nothing to do with why I was there.

I couldn’t hear him so well any more as my internal world was starting to come undone.

I knew I had to get to my car before I acknowledged to myself what had just happened, so as soon as he asked me if I had any other issues I wanted to discuss, I said “nope” and raced out of there.

I tried my best to drive to my therapist’s office without coming completely undone. I made it there and then felt dead.

I let it happen again. My therapist probably doesn’t even believe me. How can these things keep happening to me?

I lost hours of time in my therapist’s parking lot as I switched between parts trying to process what had happened. I fought tooth and nail to not let other parts cut open my throat. The rage inside me is at its worst when this idea is present.

I am extremely angry at myself this happened to me today as I was just speaking about how this happened to me with another doctor some years ago, and I thought I had grown so it wouldn’t happen again.

My therapist asked me if I wanted to file a complaint. I didn’t. I know full well that my list of psych meds alone discredits anything I might have to say happened to me, which is probably why he targeted me to begin with.

I told 3 people today this happened to me. That is progress, but still I am awash in confusion how I keep letting this happen to me. Where are those strong parts of me when this happens?

Will it ever stop?

Drifting

Drifting toward health.

Drifting toward death.

It doesn’t seem like this should be so confusing, but it is.

Some days ago, a little girl, maybe 4 or 5, stood in my childhood bedroom watching in freeze mind as my mother threw out her toys into the big green dumpster my mother had wheeled into the room.

This child did not understand, as any reasonable person wouldn’t, why her mother insisted on stripping every bit of humanity out of her.

She caused no trouble in the house. She did everything her mother or brothers told her to do. She had sex with whoever wanted it. She tried not to breathe as she was afraid it would upset them. Her existence was so minimal.

Still, with trying to do everything right, her mother hated her with such sadistic pleasure.

Her mother had made sure to strip her of everything.

Decency. Humanity. Love. Free thought. All gone.

She was forced to live in a room that only had a bed and a piece of office furniture. There could be no signs of a human child living there. Only nothingness, so she would always know she was nothing and nobody.

The little girl is stuck in this place, long past trying to understand her life.

Confusion, obedience, and an ounce of pain belonged to her.

I watched her for days. She was stuck there. I was stuck watching her. I had no explanation to give her. Yes, it was all vaguely familiar to me, but I wanted to keep it “not me” because that looks like such a painful, awful existence. Who would want that?

Feelings of suicide had been circling us as a system. I was not in as much control as I usually am, partly because watching this little girl made me want to die.

So I let the others inside me deprive the body of oxygen until I reached an altered state of consciousness. Here, I could go to the little girl in the bedroom.

Like I would do with my own wounded outside children, I reached down and picked her up and held her. She had never been held before, but she did not resist me and gave in to trusting me and let me carry her away.

I held her tightly against me, with her legs wrapped around me, and I could feel her pain and confusion. It is stuck in my heart.

I wanted to promise her that she would never be hurt again, but I knew I couldn’t do that in this very imperfect world.

She had endured more pain and suffering than a nation of people.

She would experience it no more.

I delivered her to the angels in heaven as I knew of no other place that promises the end of suffering. I told her she would be safe there, and the angels would love her and take care of her.

After I delivered her, I gasped for breath to get some oxygen in my earthly body. I was barely there. I was barely making it out alive.

I struggle to care about the damage done to my brain, or my almost lost life. It seems unimportant in the scheme of things.

I look to my childhood bedroom everyday since then, and it is empty. She is gone. She is free from the cruelty dealt to her.

I am relieved to have set her free. And uncertain as to what this means for me.

Namaste

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.

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.

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.

The mistaken survival of the soul-less child

 

I have walked through my entire life a fraud. A nonexistent soul using the mortal body of no one. I am a fraud because from time-to-time, I would use this body to pretend as if I was a normal human being. Though, I always return to my place of nothingness. The place where those without souls return.

As a child I tried my best to be as invisible as possible. I tried being very still and quiet. I do not want to be noticed because I know I do not belong to this world. This world is confusing and cruel and scary. I don’t like it, so I am happy to not really belong to it. Yet, somehow, I got stuck with this mortal body that always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There is no making sense of the life this mortal body was given. The people who come in and out of it. The constant desire for it to die.

To be human is to claw your way through everything to survive. This soul-less being does not wish to survive this cruel human world.

This body does not know love, comfort, happiness, safety, or anything that would be good or pleasurable. This body knows darkness, sadness, hatred, pain, evil, death, anger, and a strong desire to turn out the lights on this mortal body.

Without hope, there is death.

This soul-less body was created from birth with lies, pain, shame, fear, and brutality. It was programed to be obedient, to never disobey, and to serve the greater human species to which it did not belong.

How can an entire species be so cruel, even to the soul-less body who was never one of them? But it is true, and that is the way it is.

A wrecked soul-less child body who mistakenly survived. It was never supposed to survive. There is not upside for this being. There is no better. No nothing. Especially a real life on the human planet.

It is so confusing to figure out what to do with this fraud of a soul-less body. Oh children, why did you survive? I suppose some instinct, or maybe they made you with their confusing lies. I don’t blame you. I promise I hold no anger toward you. You were only babies and toddlers and youngsters doing what you thought you were supposed to do.

Now we have this fraudulent body built through evil lies, and there is nothing for it to do but to lay in bed until it dies. Oh wise one, you are correct in that we could take it from this earth sooner by our own hands. But, they say it will ruin the human children in this new family.

I know we don’t belong. But there is a speck of dust, maybe love, in this soul-less body that makes me think how sad it would be for these human children to be ruined by our actions.

We may know we never belonged, and wouldn’t have ever wanted to belong to this world, but now we have somehow become connected to these two children who look to us to keep behaving in a fraudulent way because they need us to.

Why, with no soul inside, do we have to always be the good guys? Why?

Because that’s the way it is.

 

Jesus, tomorrow is Mother’s Day

In my fog and crises of the week, I blocked out that Mother’s Day is tomorrow. I know so many of you are excited to celebrate this day with you wonderful moms. For me, it just puts me in a predicament of how do I handle it this year.

She is getting older and older, and I know some time soon I won’t have a live mother to celebrate or even talk to.

She also won’t be able to hurt me, and I know my insiders who know her true colors will be glad she is gone. I am sure there are those who will be sad and are already begging me to stop writing this.

Oh the internal conflict over mom. Some believe she was an okay mom, who just had a drinking problem when were growing up. Others, think she is the child of the devil, evil and sadistic and narcissistic, and should be killed in gruesome ways.

Why do they hate her so much, said the core. You know bloody fucking well said a protector. 

The spouse sent her a Mother’s Day card for us. I suppose we will be obedient and call her tomorrow, or maybe we will forget the day. Disobedience is always scary when it comes to her.

We have kids of our own, so they will remind us it is Mother’s Day. 

I wish we had the Hallmark card mother that so many other people get. We didn’t win that lottery, or any for that matter. No, not true. We did win the lottery with the beautiful children we have.

So Jesus, tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Forgive me for what I think or do/not do. I am really not a bad person.