It is bad enough to be a survivor of organised ritual abuse, but having to face the disbelief and denial which surrounds this crime, makes bearing it even more difficult. Society struggles hard enough to look honestly at child sexual abuse happening in so many families. Statistics from Rape Crisis England show that 1 in 6 children have been sexually abused. This is predominantly by someone known to them, usually a family member. Those figures are epidemic in scale. Yet society cannot talk openly about it. There is stigma and chronic victim blaming that persists. I have discovered as a survivor, that to talk openly and honestly, without shame, about surviving sexual abuse makes people so uncomfortable they will try to shut you down. They will also try to blame you, projecting their fear of looking at where true responsibility lies. This happens to women all the time. We are blamed, labelled as unstable, seen as having somehow brought the crime on ourselves. Such victim blaming and shaming never happens in others crimes , like burglary or murder. But when a female child/adult is raped, somehow there is a question raised, as to how she behaved prior to the abuse, as if that behaviour is responsible for the crime, rather than the perpetrator themselves. As Judith Herman says in her book Trauma and Recovery, ” the normal response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness, certain violations of the social contract are too terrible to utter aloud.”( Herman, 2001, Basic Books) And she is right. We have very few spaces we can talk openly about child sexual abuse, precisely because it happens mostly in the family, that cherished bastion of the patriarchy. God forbid we question that structure.
So how do we talk about being survivors of a crime most don’t want to acknowledge, or believe happens? How can we get the support we need, knowing we are believed, seen and understood. Well the truth is, if we are survivors of organised ritual abuse, the organised large scale sexual and physical abuse of children, by a network of perpetrators, we can’t talk about it with anyone. We have to seek out experts in the area, who have the experience of dealing with it. Those who know it is real in the world, that it’s way more prevalent than anyone wants to recognise. For me calling The Rape Crisis Help Line led to such help, with the belief I so desperately needed. I discovered I was not alone as a survivor of this awful crime, that there were others out there who had been through what I had. And as terrible as this fact was, it was such a relief at the time. I felt I was going insane, thinking I was alone with the knowledge of what I had seen and suffered. Through Rape Crisis I found a place that had been helping survivors of ritual abuse for years, they had heard unspeakable stories of violence and suffering at the hands of the most powerful people in our society. Then I was able to be pointed in the right direction to get the expert help I needed. That help is out there. Brave people who work together to help survivors like me, confronting through their work, the research and education, the evil that ritual abuse is. I remember the embarrassment and shame I felt when I first started talking about my childhood. The first thing I thought was, this person is not going to believe me, what I am telling her is just not believable. That’s the trouble with RA, it’s so bad it’s not believable. I talked to the amazing Dr Joan Coleman about this. She is sadly no longer with us, but she devoted so much of her life helping survivors like me, setting up and running The Ritual Abuse and Information Network in the UK. She’d worked with so many survivors, from all over the country. She was so knowledgable about those perpetrators involved, how they carried out their crimes, who they were and how they got away with it. It was deeply shocking to hear her tell me, after disclosing abuse to her, that she had heard the same stories from so many survivors, all over England, none of who knew each other. She told me she believed the groups involved made some of the abuse as horrific as it was, so it would not be believed. Given what I survived I would agree with this. I am not sure how these people came up with the ideas they had to make children suffer, but I do know they are and were incredibly wealthy and privileged. This position enables them to live lives where they seek and crave the most sadistic pleasure that affords them. They can buy anything, and so they do, proving their power above the rest of us. But it is not power, it is the cowardice and greed of the British aristocracy. It has persisted for generations in this country.
To describe the loneliness of being a survivor from a family involved in RA, is like explaining growing up in a Siberian wasteland. As isolated and barren as it gets. Recovering as an adult has meant getting in touch with how that felt as a child. To do that I’ve needed a lot of help. There are times of the year when life becomes more difficult for us as RA survivors, Summer Solstice and Halloween being 2 of those dates. The groups involved in the abuse operate their activities around a Pagan calendar. This is done on purpose, so that these dates become anniversaries that survivors are controlled by. These dates trigger us, we remember, especially I would say in the body. Like a deep calling, we feel what we had to numb. The body has so much integrity. I know how hard, how incredibly difficult it was for my poor body to hold all the suffering I was subjected to, in a dissociated state. It had to do that for years, until I was ready to recover, feeling its forgotten burden. The power the body has in needing to recall can’t be under estimated. Its need to release all the memories, once I reached a place of safety, finally having escaped my family, came immediately. That was when I needed the help I did with EMDR therapy. I’m at a place now where I have had years worth of these times of year behind me, and unfortunately I’m used to dealing with my body needing to share its truth with me. But it doesn’t get any easier. It’s become a process I go through, using the psychological tools and care I’ve learned to help me. It’s evolved with the more memories I’ve become familiar with. Integrating them as my known story, no longer needing to have flashbacks about, because they’re out, resolved once and for all. I think one of the most difficult things about experiencing such overwhelming pain of the emotions in your body, is not being able to speak about them with anyone, as you would if you had an argument with a partner, or were feeling depressed. Openly discussing these experiences of remembering, because of ritual abuse is not allowed. Because it is not believed. It’s too shocking. So you might be suffering all day. You can call Rape Crisis, but you have to get through. That’s not always possible. You can tell someone close, who is safe and supportive. But as the survivor only you can handle, manage these times within. It can feel intolerable, because it was intolerable when you were little. So that’s what you experience. The reality of the suffering in all its unbearableness, with very few to communicate it to, also because of the huge difficulty of trying to explain such pain. The reality is trauma like this has no words, stored as it is in the brain and body, beyond the function of language.
So we take it a day at a time over these periods. Some days are better than others. We try to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. We take really good care, with diet, exercise and sleep. But it doesn’t always work. Some days when the feelings are overwhelming, it feels almost impossible to function. Life moves very slowly, quicksand drowning. So I stick to the basics, do the least I need to do, try not to take on any extra stress, or chores at home. I always drink lots of water. The body is working very hard, so staying hydrated is important. I still self soothe and my drug of choice is skin care ! I buy lotions and potions that smell and feel beautiful. It’s obvious what this is about, the cosseting and cleansing of the skin which holds us so dearly. And of course chocolate and cake ! We hold the pain until it passes, and it does pass eventually. I pay a lot of attention at these times to self talk, parenting the parts of me that feel unsafe in the remembering. This works beautifully and is healthy self soothing. But through all of this the loneliness is still very real. There’s no getting away from it, it’s the nature of the beast with being a survivor of this shit. And this is why I try to share. To say I’m here, like you, you’re not alone. I saw what you saw, I survived very similar things to what you survived, and like you I know the unbearable pain of remembering the truth. It was a war zone of a childhood. If you are a survivor, you know. You also know you are a miracle of life, a beautiful light shining in the dark, just like you had to do back then. If you made it through this, you can make it through anything. Hold yourself tight, it will pass, like it always does, no matter how difficult. We deserve to know it will pass, and we will feel safe again !