Satanic Ritual Abuse, ritual abuse, sexual abuse :: hope, inspiration, help and healing

My name is Charlotte and this is my personal story of healing from Satanic Ritual Abuse. I began what I told my husband would be “short-term therapy” in 1984. It turned out to be 13 years. We had moved to a new home we had designed and built, and I was feeling totally undeserving of the pretty house on 6 acres of forested land outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. I had been married for nearly 9 years and had a 7-year-old son, a 5-year-old daughter and a dog. I worked part time as a Medical Social Worker in a hospital, and my husband Tom, was an engineer. I started drinking in a way I called “bad,” hidden drinking, and I knew I needed to do something before it became worse. At that time I had not made the association of the drinking and the feeling of not deserving the house and the other good things in my life, much less an association with any abuse issues.

According to my former therapist, when I first walked into her office, I looked like a “scared animal,” and I was going to run with every step I took. I scanned and rescanned the room and was extremely cautious. There was stiffness in my body. After a while when I was out of the extremely scared place, there was a defensive, hostile edge to my talk. The therapist wondered if I was really ready to do the therapy. All she could tell was that I was extremely wounded in some way. I later figured out that my mother was in a satanic cult and was our church organist. My father was a minister in the Evangelical United Brethren church and he sexually abused me.

I was very dissociative, not actually a “multiple,” but very “fragmented.” By this I mean, I had different “parts” but they weren't fully separated. In the early stages of my therapy, I gradually went through the process of remembering and admitting the sexual abuse, and then the memories became more scary and odd. Church rituals caused flashbacks. My therapist had never dealt with satanic ritual abuse so it was confusing to both of us. She talked with another therapist and learned how to be more helpful to me. She saw herself as a “witness” to my story and was able to sit, listen, and tell me over and over that it was safe in her office and she would protect me and not hurt me.

This period of my life was so hard. I had continuous flashbacks about former events in my life and thought I was an “evil” person. The drinking became worse and I cut myself. Our sex life was often non-existent and I was paranoid about being followed in my car. People on the street often scared me, and I had terrible nightmares with a stiffness in my body and convulsions. My husband recalls my speaking in the voice of a child begging people not to harm me. The pain of Good Friday and Halloween were incredible. I felt terror inside the church, was very suicidal and felt crazy most of the time and so alone. If you have this feeling, I'm assuring you that you are NOT alone.

The Road to Healing

My therapist and I sometimes pictured my “fears” as a cement wall. She encouraged me to take down the wall a brick at a time. Each brick contained a different fear. I needed to appreciate the wall and dismantle it in a safe way. I wasn't sure that I wanted to dismantle it. The wall had kept me sane and it was frightening to take it down. But now the wall was beginning to block me from getting what I wanted in life. I wanted freedom to do and be what I chose. I used the butterfly coming out of a cocoon as an analogy to what was happening to me, ever so slowly.

I needed to handle my fears in a very concrete way (like a child would). I used dolls purchased at a second-hand store, as the various “parts” or “fragments” of myself. I took them to therapy; it wasn't safe to deal with them at home. But with my therapist, I explored the feelings those parts of Charlotte had held for years and years. I did some writing to get out some of the feelings those parts held. It wasn't on a regular basis, but it helped some when I had particularly strong fears or reactions. I made collages and drawings. The drawings were very crude and elementary, pure emotion, but they showed the “raw” fear and other feelings. The collages were useful in occupying my mind for a longer time because I had to comb through magazines and newspapers for pictures and words that I wanted to use. I once stayed up most of a night making “muslin dolls” in honor of people who had died before Easter or at other times.

My therapist learned to do the technique of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing). This is where by use of a hand motion, both sides of the brain are involved with reprocessing an event or feeling. We used this technique often to lesson the effect of my fears. What did I do when I wasn't with my therapist to feel safe? I needed to connect with a living person. I would call a friend. I carried phone numbers with me. I often stopped and used a pay phone. Back then I didn't have a cell phone, so I would get myself home and call a friend. Returning home or knowing someone was there (even though at times I was also scared of my home) helped “ground” me and helped me feel more “safe.”

As the fears grew less intense, I would try to reframe them, change them by finding another way to look at them. I would talk with my husband or my therapist about the fear, take it apart and try to more cognitively understand it and thus make the “fear” less frightening, e.g., the “smoke” that scared me could just be the steam coming out of the dishwasher. I gradually learned to talk with myself about a fear when it arose. I'd tell myself to be quiet and look at the pieces of the fear and see them for what they really were. Slowly I grew to be able to do this more successfully. I still sometimes need my husband to say “it's just steam” to me, but that's all it takes.

The hardest thing about pushing through the fear was the parts of me that just wanted to curl up and ignore everything. My therapist used to always use the words “push-pull” when something came up that indicated my desire to push through the fear, yet the obvious greater desire was also to run away from it by pulling into myself. This reminded me that I needed to push toward healing with extra effort. It was also difficult because I was so afraid of just the idea of talking. I would be hurt or my therapist would be hurt. She constantly had to reassure me. Another very difficult part about pushing through the fear was the very nature of “fear” itself. It seemed that to touch the fear (to mention it) meant it was going to be activated and harm me again. Some of the fears paralyzed me so I was unable to do much to get through them. It was a very slow process.

You have to have a real commitment to staying with the therapy process. You have to go to every appointment no matter how scared you are or how many parts of you say it's useless or it's too expensive, etc. You need to go even if your significant other doesn't understand why you are still going, or it doesn't seem like you are getting much better. You also need to find someone you can work with. I'm not saying “feel comfortable with” because I never was “comfortable,” but someone who you feel accepts you and is willing to work with “trauma” and all that that entails. Pay attention to your “gut” reactions as you talk with the therapist and “listen” to yourself!! You know inside what you need!! You need to be willing to contribute to a relationship with your therapist. It's difficult I know, but you need to let someone support you in order to learn another level of trust. You need someone in your life who can keep encouraging you and telling you that it's worth the pain. From my own experience, I can tell you that it is worth it but I didn't see much good in all of the pain for years!

When you can't see the end to the terror and fear, you just have to grab every bit of courage you have and get through the next hour, day, or until the next therapy appointment. Develop a support system of people to call on when you need encouragement. Make a list of them because you will forget that you have anyone available when you are overwhelmed.

All of the pain of the healing process was worth it to me because now I'm free of my parents and the abuse. My life is full of doing great activities that I choose and I have people who I am able to say love me and I am able to love and care about them. Spirituality is a large part of my life and for me, the prayers of others and my own make a difference in my healing. Every one of us is different in what the pivotal spiritual experience will be, but I believe we all have a spiritual side. I am happy with my life. It's not perfect, no one's life is. I get discouraged at times, or handle things in a less than perfect manner but all of these things happen to every human being. I am able to feel emotions including sadness, anger and grief, and deal with them. I can also feel joy, love and happiness. I can figure out what to do to get my needs met. I am able to give and receive love. I am able to keep myself safe.

I used to fear my emotions, but I do this less now. I like the way this is stated in the book Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom. “Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, ‘all right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me. I see it for what it is.' Then you say, ‘I'm going to put fear aside and know that there are other emotions in the world and I'm going to experience them as well.'”

I used to hear this phrase that said, “we needed to be more than just survivors, we need to become thrivers.” I don't know that I'm always there but it's a goal worth striving for!!! Booker T. Washington said, “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles one has overcome while trying to succeed.”

So wherever you are today in your own healing just take a step, even a baby-step toward some aspect of the healing process. These little steps (even when there are some natural backward slides) will continue to add up over time. When I was very discouraged with my healing process, my therapist had me look at where I was one year before. This enabled me to see where there had been growth and change when I could not see it myself because of the muddle of “stuff” I was still dealing with. Just keep at therapy, forging new relationships, and trying to believe you deserve to be healed and free!