Into Another World
"These memories are 22 years old. At the time
"Child sex trafficking" were not words being used by people in the
field of child abuse. Words like "multi-perpetrator" and "ritual
abuse" and "satanism" were the politically correct words for the
kind of abuse I was remembering. Today, August,23,2012, after having read many
stories of children used in the sex trade, I know that this is what was
happening to me. My dad and his buddies had a for-profit business going on and
me and other kids were the commodities they were offering. The masks, rituals
and satanic symbols were just a way of instilling fear into us children and
helping the abusers believe that what they did was okay. But the johns were
ordinary men and some women who were attracted to kids and had found a way to
live out their fantasies. This was just
one of the groups my father had me in that sold kids for sex. Over the next 8
years there would be 6 more, all different and all with their own bents for
evil. The one thread they had in common was the sale of kids for sex.The memories
are being told as they were remembered including the language that we used at
that time."
These new memories came more slowly and took much longer
to process. One of the hardest parts was
determining whether they were real.
Sexual abuse was easy to understand and it was validated by the men she
knew in her men's group. Even though
people did not want to talk about it, everyone knew it was going on. Estimates ranged from 25% to 40% of adults
were sexually abused as children. But
this was something different; it stretched credulity. Aside from the one group leader--no one we
knew had heard of ritual abuse; it wasn’t real.
The emotional strain on Vicki was certainly real—much
more so than the memories of sexual abuse.
To be raped by half a dozen men at a gathering was not unusual. And the fact that she had been handed over to
the group by her father invoked more shame.
But there was also torture and violence in these groups. In another memory of the Hawaii group, she
witnessed the leader call one of the women into the center of a circle of
members. “You told!” he railed at her,
“you know what you must do.” The leader
handed her a large knife and she stabbed herself in the stomach. “This is what happens to people that tell,”
he intoned to the group. With the hindsight of twenty years on this
memory work, I don't know if this happened for real. I know it seemed real to me as a child and
that was the terror that I remembered some thirty-five years later as an
adult. Real or not it was meant to
instill fear and it certainly did that.
It was a potent form of brainwashing.
The feelings of needing to stab
myself in the belly were so dangerously real. But my maternal feelings of needing to protect
my unborn baby were stronger and I knew I could never hurt her. After this memory Vicki, more than once, was grateful
for being pregnant. While an incident 35
years old in a very dimly lit past seemed to hold an immense amount of sway on
her present life, there was no way she was going to kill her own baby.
As winter deepened Vicki was unable to make therapy sessions
in either direction. With spring she
made a couple more sessions with Isaac before closing down therapy for the
birth of her baby. Isaac was initially
puzzled by these new memories and seconded her notion to postpone any memory
work until after the baby was born. But
her memories had their own schedule. As
a present to herself after the baby was born, she bought a set of expensive
cotton sheets for our bed. They had a
rich and colorful tropical floral print and as soon as she put them on our bed
she knew she had made a mistake. She was
reminded of Hawaii and the jungle where the meetings were held. A series of flashbacks came and more horrific
nightmares. Those sheets went off our
bed and were not used for several years.
When she returned to Isaac in mid-summer, his attitude
was different. He had been reading about
ritual abuse because another of his clients was revealing similar recovered
memories. He did not want to work with
Vicki anymore, ending the relationship of over two years abruptly. The truth was that Isaac was afraid. Like Vicki, Isaac wondered whether her father
was still involved. Therapists were
often a target of these groups. And when
Vicki came home with that bit of startling information, she was more terrified
than ever. Isaac had been her trusted
talisman and now she didn’t have a counselor to help and guide her. Besides,
if Issac was scared enough to drop me, I knew there was good reason to be
afraid. Isaac was ex-military and packed
a gun. Life was so hard at that point, surrounded by
fear--it was part of every waking moment and impossible to explain. Also, I was taking care of a houseful of 8
kids and getting little sleep at night, becoming more and more undone. Jody, angry and confused that things were
getting worse and not better, was always there to do memory work with me, no
matter how strange, but he could not do night duty--and that was the time I
dreaded. The routine of housework and the love of
family kept me going. The kids were
always needing love and attention and giving lots of love in return.
One of the main differences between the incest work and
this new memory work was the level of fear.
According to her memories it had been programmed into her from her
childhood. If she ever told, she needed
to self-destruct and if she didn’t they
would come after her and do it themselves.
And now she was telling. It was
usually only me she was telling as I listened to her remember out of the
forgotten abyss of her childhood, but she was breaking the silence. Fear swept through our lives. While I was less fearful than Vicki, she had
enough for the both of us and more. Was
her father still involved? We didn’t
think so but we didn’t know for sure. For
the first time in our lives she locked the doors each night and paid careful
attention to where the kids were at all times.
Could our phone be tapped? These
men from her past were her father’s age.
Had they been keeping up with her all these years? How much did they know about our lives? Were our kids in danger?
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