Chapter 37: Nine Years of Healing
While the encounter with Jesus had infused me with new courage, I still struggled with constant extreme pain and panic. These symptoms come from the punishment programs that are triggered whenever parts think thoughts or take actions that defy their programming, and whenever any part disobeys an external trigger from a cult member. I am desperate to help the pain and panic go down inside, and work hard at contacting parts and helping them. As I find them and hear from them, I spend hours simply holding them and rocking them, telling them “I love you.” The emotional and physical pain is wearying and discouraging, but I keep praying, journaling, and letting parts know that I want to help them.
Earlier in my journey, I had struggled with rage at my abusers, shame and guilt at the things done to me and that I had done to others, as well as love for my abusers and all the confusion that comes from that. Now I find myself facing a very difficult emotion: hopelessness. While I felt that I had never been aware of such hopelessness in my system before, I suspect that this hopelessness has been present since my earliest days when I could never escape the abuse or resist being coerced into doing things repugnant to my soul; that in fact, this deep hopelessness drove my infantile failure to thrive. For the first two years after the encounter with Jesus, my healing work often focuses on addressing these three emotions. I memorize scriptures that speak to the hopelessness, panic and pain that I feel, and others that declare that God is my healer. I begin to do directed art therapy with a large pad, drawing and collaging, but the process is slow. Many days, it feels as if I am slogging uphill through mud.
Some of the hopelessness seems tied to feelings I have had since infancy that I will never really be loved or wanted and how my healing journey seems to ‘prove this fact’. Parts have been hurt, wounded and feel their trust in God – and in me – have been broken by how Tom and others have treated me, and understandably so. Many parts ask me, “Why do you want to leave the cult, when the people out here aren’t any better?” I listen, and sit with them, as the emotional pain pours out. What feels like Tom’s second and third abandonment – when he first refused to talk to me after I moved, then a year and a half later when he cut me off again – brought fresh layers of betrayal to work through. It takes about two years to start healing from Tom’s decision to never talk to me again.
I keep persisting in spite of the hopelessness I battle as I go deeper inside my systems. “God, I have to trust that You can heal me, even when I don’t believe it,” I tell Him, sobbing. As I journal, parts are drawing and writing difficult feelings, saying things such as “You left Rome, spent time with outsiders, and look what happened to us;” “you are so clueless, why should I ever trust you again? I have gotten hurt and/or abandoned every time I ‘tried to heal’”; and “I want to heal, but it feels as if it will take forever, and there is so much pain in here. Can I ever really get through it all, and feel alive again?” I journal back to my parts, responding to their emotional pain, and mainly sit with them as they share their feelings, their grief, their anger and hurt, and also how hard it is to keep saying “No” when cult members try to come by. “I miss my children” is a common journal theme; along with “I miss my husband (in Germany, or France, or the UK)”; or “I don’t want them to get hurt because of me” after being triggered by someone signing to me in a store that if I don’t come with them, they will get hurt, and having to turn away and shake my head “No”.
At times, I share my battles surrounding healing with Megan. She is on a similar journey of healing from complex mind control and it helps to know someone else who understands how hard it really is. After about two years, besides processing how difficult the past ten years had been, parts and I start to process more about the past again. Parts begin making extensive drawings about our life and loved ones in the Order.
I learn that the Order raises triplet sets, and that my siblings in my triplet set are Lizzie and Danny, and how much I have loved them over the years. I also learn that the Order’s genetic program produces several genetically identical children in each batch, so that these lookalike children can take turns playing particular identities or roles in various countries or jobs for years. I am amazed to remember that while I have been “Elsa” in America, all my life, Lizzie and these other genetic sisters of mine have also played “Elsa” when I had to be in other countries or on cult jobs. I am also just as amazed to realize that my son and daughter in America had also been played by several children who look alike. I journal extensively about how much I miss Lizzie and Danny, and discover that they have been trying to trigger me – and get me to go back to Rome with them – for years.
The memories of loved ones in the Order comes with other memories of life in the Order. I remember more about the facilities, the group’s interactions with other occult societies and government agencies, the children’s training and education, the hierarchy and culture, and the yearly rhythm of activities. I am often moved to tears by the memories of the small ways that people tried to find joy and show their humanity amidst a brutal and inhuman system. Most of the memories, however, are horrible. Some of the most difficult memories come from the time when I was 14 and had become a Christian and ran away from the Order, and again in my late 30s when I had come to faith and tried to leave the cult again. I remember the negative sound room I was put in where I felt like I was losing my mind, the torture and betrayals by those I loved, my own betrayal of them, and all the lives that were wasted as they tried to break then reprogram me. I am horrified by the memories of the things they made me do to ‘prove’ my renewed loyalty after I broke. Some days, it is hard to keep going, as the memories seem to snowball, coming faster and faster, but I ask God for the strength, and He provides it.
As more memories come forward, the punishment systems designed to prevent healing kick in. These are extremely severe at first and I spend days feeling like I am in agony. Some days, I choose to force past the pain to keep working on healing, and on other days, I rest. At times, I feel as if I am “sparking” all over with electric shocks, and when my friends put their hands on my neck, they can feel the shocks, too. I realize that my body is remembering the shocks and waveforms experienced when parts were being programmed to self-punish. As parts and I process the memories of the punishment programming and show care for the parts who hold the pain, the pain levels slowly start to decrease. I am frustrated, however, that the improvement is so slow. I wonder what I am missing or what my system is still afraid of, that the punishment programs are still so robust.
A few years after I graduate from my MSW program, I move in with a friend, Rebecca (pseudonym) who is not dissociative. Living with her for three years gives me a very welcome break from the cult harassment that had been constant while I was renting a little house in town. More often than not, she goes to town to run errands like grocery shopping and picking up medications while I take care of housework and yard work. This gives me even more breaks from triggering by the cult than I have had in years. The increased safety facilitates healing and internal communication and cooperation increases.
I notice that parts and I are starting to work on two very different levels of my programming: the deepest systems that control and protect the core parts (and hence influence the rest of the systems), and my own programming as a front person. These deepest parts carry the earliest wounds that the programmers exploited to terrify me into compliance and to reward me for trusting them. As these parts share more and more about their experiences, I learn about the lying narratives that the cult wove for me as an infant and little girl so that I would never dare to believe differently such as, “If I stop believing what my birthmother tells me, I will no longer exist”. As these parts process their experiences and dare to try new thoughts and experience the reality of my current life, I can sense a sort of loosening up or shift in the rest of my systems regarding being afraid of defying cult control.
Much that I learn about my own front programming amazes me at first. I had known since I was at Connie’s that as the front person or presenter, I am a programmed part (technically, a group of parts), like any other part in my system. But I have not had memories of my own programming before; the only programming memories I had were the memories of other parts’ programming as they shared those with me. For example, I start to remember one of the many ways I was programmed to be ‘blind’ to any cult objects, people and activity: as a toddler, I was put in a programming studio made up to look like a room in the house I lived in as a child in Virginia. If I saw any cult object or person or activity taking place there, then it would become ‘real’ and hurt me and my family very, very badly. But if I ‘could not see’ them, then we were all ‘safe’. I also start to recall the many unspeakably cruel scenarios used by the programmers to teach me to never hear or see other parts inside, and to always disbelieve them.
What surprises me the most is to learn that I had promised to forget the Order out of love for the Fathers. In these memories, I am very, very little and as Alice, a presentation controller, I am sitting on Father Mattheo’s lap, and he is asking me to forget him out of love for him. I weep because I love him and cannot bear the thought of forgetting him. But he tells me that it is necessary because if I did not forget, then when I was around strangers, I might slip up and say or do something that would compromise the security and safety of the fathers and the other people I loved back in Rome. My forgetting would be a sign of how much I loved them, and a sacrifice that they would always cherish. Prior to recalling these memories, I had believed that the reason why I had no cult memories myself was because I never had any cult experiences, i.e., the programmers had set my system up in such a way that I was always tucked away ‘inside’ whenever I was in cult settings. I go through a period of rage and grief as I process that their coercing me into forgetting was not for ‘love’, but to facilitate the protection of their criminal activities and their abuse of me and other children.
Working on both the core and front programming brings about a very noticeable shift in the healing work. Journaling now involves trying to keep up with the flood of memories that come without prodding whenever I sit down and listen to parts. Parts are anxious to share with me their own stories and feelings as our trust increases without so much programming and trauma getting in the way. Without my front programming running in the background to make me want to make all other parts just like me or to fear or correct them, I am more able than I have ever been before see and feel that other parts, whether angry, hurt, despairing, blissful, loving, malicious, murderous, or prayerful, are all parts of me and I am part of them. It becomes easier to just sit, be with them, and listen as they share their stories and how their experiences impacted them, and for me to tell them about my own life.
I also notice that I am much less impelled to try to make parts “Christian” which was part of my own presenter “super Christian” or fake Christianity programming. I have a deep faith in God, but loving parts and myself as a result of that faith is very different from spouting religious dogma or scriptures (which were used in their programming, and are horrendous triggers) at parts. My approach now is much more accepting, regardless of beliefs and desires shared by various parts. I ask God to help me to truly listen and be present with all parts, and that His love would be experienced by all parts, at whatever pace and intensity that different parts preferred.
As more and more of my systems started to communicate and explore truth together, I could feel the rebellion against the cult swelling more and more, as parts experienced deep rage at the extent of the lies I had been told. I started to increasingly realize how completely controlled and programmed my life had been for the years before. I was starting to realize what had been done to me at a deeper level than ever before, and this realization made me swing between furious and depressed as I grieved and cried over never knowing a “normal” childhood. All I had ever wanted were parents, not programmers. I had needed a real safe and loving family, not to be rewarded for performance and obedience.
Two years after I had started to live with this non-dissociative friend, parts and I explore a place in my system that looks like pit. I’ve come across similar structures but this one is unusually deep and leads to several chambers guarded by parts responsible for preventing unauthorized access. Progress in is slow but steady as we work to listen to these guardian parts, help them with their traumas, and to help them consider other possibly more satisfying things to do. In one of these chambers, I find an excruciating memory of an event many years ago that had spanned three weeks. Of all the memories I have ever had since the 1990s, this is the one that floods me with more hopelessness, guilt, shame and self-hatred than I had ever consciously experienced before. I am rocked for months and cannot comprehend how any human being could survive an experience like that. But as I pray and process this memory with parts, and work on this memory with my prayer minister, I start to heal from this.
To my surprise, as I work through this memory from the pit, the pain programming starts to significantly diminish and the pain parts are much more able to share their own memories of how they were programmed and why it has been hard for them to allow their pain to heal. I had no idea that guilt and self-hate played so strongly into self-punishment and understand better why several years ago, God had told me that receiving love was key to healing. My prayers change from repeatedly begging God to forgive me (driven by my dissociated guilt from this and other events) to asking Him to help me to receive his love and to teach me to love myself.
As parts and I continue to release guilt, shame and self-hate, and build trust and learn to do life together, I notice another gradual shift. Now, instead of simply hearing about my past as reports by other parts, I was having the realization that I had always known these things had happened, deep inside; I had simply forgotten them (by intent), choosing not to look at them. Remembering my childhood in Rome, while usually emotionally painful, was not the terrible, frightening thing I had been told it would be, but instead, was a vast relief, as I no longer had to hide these things from my conscious knowledge. Instead of reacting with terror and dismay as I had earlier on my healing journey, now when parts shared, I would feel in my gut, “Oh, I’ve always known that!” I was coming home to me.
While my healing process is still not complete, I believe that it is nearly so. As I describe in this chapter and several others in this book, it is the result of many, many hours of journaling, of talking with parts, and listening to what they had to tell me without judgment, processing the emotions associated with the memories, and trying new things.
Not judging parts was by far the hardest for me, because I had extensive presenter programming to be terrified, horrified, and disgusted at the memories of cult parts, to deny and disbelieve the things that they shared with me. Or, even worse, to immediately begin prayer to “cast out demons” inside and to fervently pray for the “salvation” of these parts, instead of simply meeting them where they were at, and accepting that this is how they felt – and thus, how I felt. It took a lot of time and work on myself to stop doing these unhelpful things and to instead simply be present, offering love and listening to parts, regardless of what their experiences and beliefs were. It helped that Megan and my prayer minister were able to point out my presenter programming to distance myself emotionally or religiously from parts, and to lovingly tell me “stop that!” I did, and it opened up more communication inside.
The other big challenge was building trust within my systems. I blamed the ongoing internal conflict as being why I could not stand against access by the cult. This was in essence blaming other parts for our susceptibility to the cult’s strategies for continuing to control and intimidate us. It took time, hard work and prayer to stop this blaming and to embrace the hurts, fears, and vulnerabilities of all parts. At the same time, what was broken the most for me was my own trust in myself after discovering I had been re-accessed by my daughters while I was with Tom; I struggled at times with believing that I would never be truly free. Again, it took hours of prayer, positive self-talk, and encouraging parts, as well as the grace of the true God, to see myself as someone who did want to heal and stay free, and was capable of it.
My faith in the Christian God has been a real source of love, comfort and support. This is not to say that faith was ‘easy’. It took time and much wrestling with God about the wrenching questions of “If you loved me, why was I abused?”, “If you are powerful, why do you allow people to hurt children?”, “Why did you let the cult kill my brother when I was trying to follow You?” and more. He did respond to these questions, not with answers, but with His love. While there are losses that I still do not understand, I do not think that my systems would have had the courage to face some of our most painful memories without His caring for us.
Without Him, I would also not have had the courage to try new things that were absolutely terrifying at first, such as obtaining an MSW. God has been faithful, and His love is the reason I was able to persist in trying to get free, and to keep working on healing. His Holy Spirit gave me the hope that I could heal even when all I could feel was complete despair at what had been done to me. The comfort that God’s spirit brought enabled me many times to continue living in spite of triggers and commands to suicide from cult members who were unhappy with me. He also gave me the faith to believe that He can do what I had been trained to believe was impossible: healing the extensive mind control and programming in an individual who was raised in a cult facility for much of her life.
God too has been the one to help me dispel the spiritual darkness that tormented many parts. I will admit that I made many mistakes very early in my healing journey when I tried to ‘cast out’ parts who looked like ‘demons’ or other ‘evil entities’. I was programmed to do so and none of the churches I attended or books I read taught me any better. Fortunately, other parts in my system set me straight on this issue, and I soon learned that many of the ‘demons’ and other ‘entities’ inside were really parts (usually very young parts) who needed help and understanding. Working through the other side of the programming for some parts to be triggered (e.g., taken to an internal ‘hell’; refuse to communicate any further, etc.) by any Christian prayer, especially prayer for healing and removal of any demonic, took time. While parts are not demons, I believe that demons and other dark forces do take advantage of the brokenness that trauma brings to a person’s soul and will try to ‘attach’ to those parts to enhance their suffering. To address this, I simply ask God to remove any demonic forces or tormenting spirits that are hurting parts, and welcome parts to communicate if this prayer is unhelpful, bothers them in any way or triggers a program.
I know too that the people who came alongside me have made all the difference to my healing and thriving: Connie in Texas (thank you for that two years); Tom, who was a faithful friend during an extremely difficult part of the journey, and who understandably chose to leave my journey to take care of himself; Megan, who understands and encourages; Rebecca, who allowed me to live with her for three years; and Dick, my former prayer minister who “has a clue” and who listened. I am forever grateful to each of them. They gave their time, their love, and were willing to go to the battlefront and support those who are leaving Satan’s army. I believe they will each have a special crown in heaven for their courageous love.
Each period of rest that Connie and Rebecca gave me from being constantly triggered and pressured by the cult led to accelerations in my healing. I wish that more survivors could have this kind of respite from cult harassment, at least for the first few years of their journeys out of their respective cults. I am thankful that the Order and the Illuminati in my case prefer to stop their harassment when I am with non-dissociative people. Not all groups will do so; some will also start harassing the survivors’ supporters, doing things like threatening phone calls, driving dangerously near the supporters’ vehicle while they are on the road, and leaving unpleasant things on the supporters’ front porch. In those situations, what I’ve heard is that those groups are seeking to intimidate the supporters into not helping the survivor anymore and/or trigger the survivors’ programming that anyone trying to help her would get hurt or killed so that he/she would stop taking help from the supporter. I believe that one reason why my cult chose to not flag their presence to my non-dissociative supporters is that it would be very validating to me and facilitate the breakdown of my denial and amnesia programming (which was one of my huge barriers to healing).
One thing I wish I had during my healing was more support who understood what it means to heal from ritual abuse and mind control. I do not just mean support in a therapeutic sense, but also just friends who could hear a little about it without judgment or fear. I know that some survivors find mutual support in online or in-person groups. While I would love to be part of giving and receiving support and just being able to talk about these issues that such groups involve, I am cautious about the potential for survivors (myself included) being forced by their groups to access or trigger others in the group. I have experienced being triggered in this way several times. It was not good and impeded my own healing. In light of the risk of being accessed or accessing others, at this point of my healing, I have also chosen not become a therapist or prayer minister although I have the degrees and credentials to do so, in order to protect other survivors.
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