I was trying to research how large of a presence ritual abuse survivors have on the internet yesterday. I found several blogs. There are several sites with resources. The experience project had even taken a poll to see how many people identified as a survivor of ritual abuse several years ago.
However, it still feels like there is no one to casually talk to about this that will understand the challenges I experience on a regular basis. Like the way, life can seem to slow down out of nowhere or the years I spent sleeping like I had narcolepsy or I was hibernating or I had just not been able to sleep well throughout childhood.
I’m reading Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needswhich I highly recommend. It says,
“There is evidence of the social change that has happened by the number of survivors present here today. And once survivors do all the talking and writing, we will truly have a paradigm shift that happened once the Women’s Movement took on domestic abuse and child abuse”
I would agree that this is true. There is a social change that is evident because there is a higher number of survivors present, and the age of the survivor keeps getting younger and younger. I am amazed at the number of young girls there are out there who are already starting to face the battle.
I was in my late 20’s. There weren’t very many books about ritual abuse by survivors that I could find about 10 years ago, but there were books about how some survivors experienced memory loss.
There was one book in particular called In My Father’s House A Memoir of Incest and of Healing where I finally felt like I had something in common with someone else, and I wasn’t the only person that had ever experienced something like this.
If I remember correctly, the writer started her recovery after her father died in her mid 40’s. This became the trend that I would find in survivor stories. They would begin treatment around 40, and they were able to find so much success doing this. They were even able to share their stories in books. What more could change if people were able to start treatment at a younger age?
I have seen them here and there. A lot of the blogs by survivors of ritual abuse are younger than I was when I started, and they are already accomplishing so much. Therefore, I think there is a good chance that being able to talk about this like regular people will continue to inspire more and more people will become able to tell their story.
Although, maybe you don’t feel ready to start your own blog or find some other way to tell your story, and it can be intimidating to see people who are able to do this. I have found as a survivor that it is very easy to start comparing myself with other survivors and what they are able to do. It can cause me to second guess whether something I have to say has any real value.
However, this is only because the experience of abuse can be so isolating. Even if we find other survivors, there is still no one else who was really there with me when the abuse happens. There is no one who could say that they felt the same way during the experience.
This is a good thing, but as human beings, we want to share experiences with other human beings; and sometimes seeing differences can still create fear of rejection or other negative consequences.
It is because of all of these things that I have decided to start a forum for survivors of ritual abuse. Time will tell whether being able to talk casually on a forum is helpful in deprogramming. It is still new and small, but anyone is welcome to come and test the waters of sharing their story with another person. Join the conversation.