Chapter Six:  Fear, How To Take Away It's GLORY!

I would like to share with you the hope that we can learn to go forward on our own momentum, and not the momentum of FEAR.

When I first came to the town I am in now, I went to a counseling group of abused women, not ritual abuse, but spousal abuse.  The lady helping us first told us that we had to LOVE OURSELVES.  I was appalled at this.  Then she told us that we SHOULD TAKE FEAR BY THE HAND AND WALK WITH IT AS IF IT WERE OUR FRIEND.

I will now tell you how these things helped me, as I was willing to try to understand them. It took me a year to realize that I was an individual with feelings of my own that had importance.  Then I was willing to try to do what she said about fear.  I separated out in my mind the fears that I knew I had and each time they appeared in my life, which was almost daily, I would try to not be afraid and see the fear as something that could somehow help me.  I know that seems the opposite of what it is, but it worked.  After doing this for over 2 years I learned the following principle which I put into an email for some on a chat line.

Here is the email:

Dear XXXXX,

Hi.  I haven't posted for awhile.  Please forgive yourself for caring.  It is wonderful.  Ideas:  When I was a teenager, not knowing my past, as it was all black, that means no memories, I had to deal with just what was there.  I heard three voices constantly in my head that told me I was bad, ugly, and stupid.  Being myself I chose to be an intellectual to survive instead of dealing with feelings.  In doing this I joined a cult not knowing at the time it was one.  Anyway I was lucky enough to take some good out of what I was being taught.  They taught that you had to have affinity for things in order to have control over them.  So instead of pushing the thoughts away, I decided to like them.  I guess I was disassociating in a way and didn't even know it.  So when I decided to like these thoughts and this caused them to leave.  I never had them again.  All the bad things I had done to myself I did because I knew I was bad and ugly and stupid, even after the voices left.  When I realized for whatever habit I was trying to change, that that part of me wasn't bad or stupid or ugly and liked myself for it, I instead became in control of that habit or part of me.

[Just a note concerting the following paragraph. The Torah/Bible says in Matthew 5:26 - the words of Jesus = "resist not evil, but overcome evil with good." - In other words, don't try to 'beat up' the darkness, but simply turn on the LIGHT and the darkness will flee - Branton]

What we fear we constantly push into and away from ourselves.  That action of pushing away from ourselves is just like gluing ourselves to it.  Go stand next to a wall.  Put your hands up against the wall just slightly above your shoulders.  Now Push.  Push Hard!  Push Harder!  Imagine this is something you FEAR.  You are pushing against the fear.  It is solid isn't it?  You can't move it.  It is now controlling you.  This wall is now in control.  If you can understand this about fear, you can take and change it into love.  Take your hands off the wall.  The fear or the wall is still there but you are free of it to the degree that you are not glued to it.  You can stand there and stare at it forever, or when you are ready, you can turn your head aside and begin to walk away.  Your client probably has no safe place.  Meaning her inside world in her mind is so dangerous so she escapes to the outside world and there needs to turn to whatever makes it safe, i.e. drugs, sex, etc.  For me, I always ran to where it was safest.  In my room, to a man, on my knees, or being cold hearted where I didn't have to experience any emotions.  In learning how to deal with my fears I bridged a large gap inside myself so it became okay to be inside with my feelings.

Denial vs. Healing

Let me briefly discuss denial.  Denial is a normal human function that everyone does every day.  In the mental health world it's only addressed in the extreme.  When my little boy comes to me and says, "Mommy, I lost my candy bar," and it’s all over his face, you could call it denial or lying.  I think that they are closely related.  When a grown woman starts recovering memories as horrific as I have had, it’s normal and natural to think that you are crazy.  I even attended a 12-week class put out by The National Alliance for Mentally Ill, NAMI, which taught me the difference in a real physical mental illness, real delusions, and paranoia and fear.  I learned that I was not crazy, but had phobias and fears instead.

The greatest tool I gained in my journey of healing was this datum: If you really believe that you are crazy...YOUR’RE NOT!  Any therapist, psychiatrist, psychologist uses this datum.  A person who constantly says that there is nothing wrong with them and has many signs and symptoms they discuss and disclose (I will not try to give examples), has a problem.

On the chat lines many, many, many would say, "I thought I was crazy."  In the books I have read written by survivors they would say over and over and over, "I thought I was crazy."

We are NOT crazy.  We are extremely traumatized to the degree our bodies created walls of amnesia within our minds at the time the trauma occurred.

In doing my research I found some consistent statistics.

I will not reference these but one can find any proof of anything and I am not writing this book to start arguing with those who disagree with me.  This book is for MY healing, not for any one else.  It is a very selfish undertaking of which I alone am responsible and PROUD!  !  !

One third of trauma victims never remember anything, one third remember partial events and one third remember what I would call everything.  The physical mind seems to break down the walls of amnesia sometime after 30 years to 60 years of storing them.  It is totally different for each individual.  It would be degrading to try to classify scientifically how this works and use this scenario in counseling.

Those who don't want us to remember have tried to do this.  They call it false memories.  They have created this to try to hide what they are currently doing in human experimentation's and mind control.  It is very sad.  It hurts deeply to know that our brothers and sisters in humankind can be so evil of their own free will and choice. 

(Please see Chapter Eight - Concern For You)

Because of this, and how society for generations has dealt with hiding its own evils, it’s almost impossible to accept one’s own memories without trying to justify them with self-created guilt.  In doing this one locks oneself up in a whirlwind of denial trying to find acceptance where none exists.

  It is a very painful process and one must essentially become ones own counselor, friend, and teacher to survive the healing process.

So, denial for us is simply the natural reaction to life as we have been taught.  It is not the denial whereby you are committing crimes and need to repent of them.  It is completely opposite.

A child in their minds' eye, as a gift from God, loves their parents unconditionally.  In this, if things are unpleasant in their life, they try to change them not knowing what is wrong or how to change it.  If this continues throughout their childhood they never gain any self-esteem or self-confidence that they are loved and don't know what real love is.  They can reverse the natural knowledge of love gained by being raised with goodly parents; to thinking love is pain and torment.  In this they will seek out what they know as love and repeatedly place themselves in situations where they hurt themselves thinking they are being loved.  This happened to me.  I ran from anyone loving me.  I sought pain.  I still have this problem today.

In reading a book about how they created multiple personalities with drugs, hypnosis and other forms of trauma, it describes in detail how they would do this.  First they would have the child bonded to its parent, whether this was the biological parent didn't matter, it was what the child saw as its parent.  At a certain age, I think it was 18 months old, they intentionally reversed this process.  They would place the child in situations of great pain.  Now the child seeks someone to rescue it.  Well the person who is inflicting the pain is the same one to rescue it.  This teaches the child that pain is love.  It builds a condition of co-dependence and the child never even as an adult feels safe alone.  They must always have their rescuer there with them.  I can personally attest to that.

A Story:

To describe how this affected me I will tell a little story.

You are sitting in a room.  It’s your room. You feel safe there. It’s got everything you need to survive. This room from your view is wonderful. You are loved, fed, played with and you seek nothing.

Then one day this awful thing happens. 

Someone comes along and opens a door. A door that you have never seen before. 

This door lets in this terrible frightening stuff.  It hurts. It causes you great pain. It makes you afraid. It tears you apart. It confuses you. You try to hide but there is nowhere to go. You scream inside for release, but there is none to be found.

What has happened is that the door in your house was opened and Light came in.  You had lived without Light all your life and didn't know it, as if you had been blind and someone restored your natural sight.

The pain of this light and the knowledge it brings is greater than any suffering you have ever known in any way.  It hurts so bad to even think about the light coming in that you run and try to shut the door and don't even try to learn what it is.

You run and run and run and run and run and run...

Some may never let the light come in or never have anyone to open the door.

Some may kill themselves because it’s so painful.

Some may go insane at its very first glimmer.

It takes great courage and perseverance to allow the light to enter our heart.

If you only let it into your mind, it will kill you as it only means pain.

Only your heart knowing the truth about love and hate, good and bad can let it in, in the right place and at the right time.

It is almost like being reborn.

In looking over my life I have can see how I did this with many people trying to love me.

I thought they were trying to hurt me.

I apologize.

That is all I can do.

Now, love still hurts and pain is still a comfort.

But I am able to begin to see the difference and I seek to learn more.

In others I can see them doing this, as it is with all of us.

**********************

We see in others what we cannot see in ourselves.

To sum up my discussion, denial for a survivor is what we must overcome to heal. Then when the shock comes that we must seek this new light, we have a new form of denial; that we are Beautiful, Intelligent and that WE ARE LOVED...

Group Acceptance and Healing

    Dear Wendella,

    It certainly fits in with my stuff!

    (Response from someone on chat line to my post.)

I read the book called,  “Double Vision - A Travelogue of Recovery from Ritual Abuse", by Anna Richardson. In it she describes many different kinds of feelings we have in the situations a cult forces us to be in. One of them is the desire, which is I think a natural desire, to be accepted by the group we are with, especially as a young innocent child. In this desire, if the group causes you and others pain, confusion sets in, and when you desire to feel love and know its wrong to love pain, the child is or becomes lost. Do I love the group I am with and desire to be like them, or do I hate myself? I think this is a conflict I have had for years. No group, good or bad would accept me. I had no clue how to belong. If the good part in you still wanted to be accepted, but you had to deny your own self to be accepted, pain and torture within yourself results.  Is that too complicated an explanation? Maybe someone else can make it simpler?