 DISTORTION: Good and Evil
In this article I would like to address how good is distorted into evil in the eyes of abuse survivors as a result of conditioning in childhood either in an abusive home or in cult/group environments. My thinking is the result of working with Satanic/Sadistic Ritual Abuse survivors and many others whom I have met in many circumstances and who have shared their experiences with me. This phenomenon embodies the insidious and soul-anihalating effect of distortion to which the child, and later, adult, entrenched in a cult/group or abuse situation and indoctrination, are exposed. I have been thinking of how I can learn to better help my clients or anyone to whom it applies. Since it is such a vast subject I will only speak to three relevant aspects that stand out to me as a therapist. Readers can give thought to the others. FAMILY I will begin with what used to be considered the primary base for development and growth. I say used to be, because in the States and perhaps in other countries also, the nuclear family ideology has given precedence to individual progress where married couples are away all day from home working, children fend for themselves, independence is promoted and praised and the "self-made" man or woman is regarded as being progressive and respected. This is not stating that the family concept has disappeared, rather, that it is now background rather than foreground in the picture of life. Hundreds of youngsters, and teenagers with whom I have worked and who have been/are gang members and wannabes, have related their attraction to gang life is because in the gang they find "family", a place where they feel they belong, where members are "there" for them whether it be to steal, kill or die for them. I do not think it too far out to say that the picture of a stable home where family meets, lives, loves and grows together, is something that is essentially good. The tragic truth, for the abused and cult/group survivor, is that an essentially good experience has become perverted into something devastatingly opposite. Life is coloured by our family (if we have one) and teachers, and from an infant we are molded by the hands that guide us. Studies of failure to thrive babies use the illustration of an experiment in which a baby monkey will go to and cling to an inanimate wire frame on which a fur covering has been placed, in preference to food. This, to demonstrate that nurturance and sense of belonging, feeling warm, close and held, surpasses even the instinct to feed and live. Research done with Orphans has shown that infants and toddlers left listless day after day with total lack of love and affection, died. As adults reflecting back on our lives we could ask the question, " Through whose glasses have we looked at the world, or have we been allowed to see through our own eyes?". Has our vision of life been seen through glasses placed on our noses by abusers ? People using power, terror, physical, mental, emotional and sexual abuse to control and force us to think and see as they do, or have we been allowed our OWN thoughts, ideas, opinions, and feelings to guide our lives? Cults/groups, will instill in their members that the group is their "family". That the only safe place where they are truly loved, cared for and belong is with, and in, this "family" If the Family concept is essentially GOOD - then why are all these cultish groups so secret? SO secret that in many countries there is total disbelief they actually exist. Yet survivors of Ritual Abuse, Satanic/Sadistic Ritual abuse and Mind Control, ALL tell the same story of torture, rape, sacrifice, brainwashing and terrorizing into silence with the threat that to talk is at pain of death. Literally. IF these "families" are so GOOD, then why are the members not telling everyone about how wonderful it is to be a part of such ? Is it not evil to start in infancy if possible, inflicting every kind of abuse in the name of love, care and belonging and entrenching this distortion so deeply it becomes a reality to the child ? A distortion of black really being white, of hideous unbelievable pain really being love, of betrayal in every sense of the word really being truly "there for you" This is perversion of good to evil at its acme. There is no higher form of it and no lower baseness to the depravity it takes a human soul. SENSE OF SELF The ubiquitous concept of high or low self-esteem is perhaps the most frequently used explanation people give for their behavior, reactions and attitudes towards life. How often do we hear the comment, " I have really low self-esteem so I never speak up or do this or that", or, " So-and-so has a really high self-esteem and they are really popular at school, work",etc. Self esteem, or how we see ourselves, think of ourselves, treat ourselves, is not the foundation on which a sense of self is built. The bricks that shape our Self, the sense of Self that houses all we think, do and say are put in place by those who have the closest and most influence on us in our most vulnerable and susceptible years - childhood and adolescence. Let's give an example of evil perverting something that should be experienced as good. This experience is triggering time after time for abuse survivors. The inability to believe and accept compliments and praise. How often have we seen folk trying to 'convince' someone who is unmoved and disbelieving when receiving a compliment, that, " You should be proud of yourself, we are so proud of you", " Don't you understand, you've done BRILLIANTLY!", " Look at your scores, your grades, your degrees, your CV", etc., etc. We simply do NOT understand that the person TRULY is NOT affected by what is socially accepted as not only GOOD, but praiseworthy. A secret thought has slipped in has it not, when there is no response that perhaps they are really fishing for compliments, or they really DO believe what is being told them but are being modest, or wanting to hear more, or seeking attention - a plethora of possible reasons for the inadmission of having done something of note. So how is this essentially good experience become perverted into a Self-destroying evil? For,to me,to rob a person of their sense of Self, their soul, their feeling of being worthy to be in the world, is Evil. I will give an example of my thinking. Let's look for a minute at the child's home life where an authoritarian figure(s), a parent, grandparent, or older sibling demand an expectation that ONLY the highest degree of accomplishment is to be attained. Anything less is unacceptable and a grade report from school of having top marks is an expected given. I, personally, lived in terror of my mother's reaction to my school reports. I feel it writing this. She could have competed with Dickens to write, "Great Expectations". When the child strives to achieve what is expected and brings home a report of placing top of the class, but barely above second place. THAT is not good enough. So the child struggles even harder and this time places first with a good margin ahead of the second position. An A+ as opposed to a B. However, another tirade. This time, a guilt trip about not knowing how to be modest. Wanting A's and A+'s is seen as pride, of wanting attention, of boasting, etc. My own failure from A's and A+'s was my one unheard of debacle of getting D's in Math at which I am hopeless. I will not enlarge on the consequences of such a disgrace. So achievement is not a good thing, it is actually, failure and associated with fear/terror and punishment. If this no-win situation can be truly grasped and understood, especially by therapists, then the inability of children or adults unable to receive and believe a compliment would not be thought abnormal, crazy, or stupid. Also, the praise-giver would NOT try to convince an abuse survivor of something they cannot possibly see as being true. It never was, so what has changed that now it IS ? This is something to work through in therapy but it is a very understandable and normal phenomenon if the root of the matter is dealt with. I still do not accept compliments with any sense of belief in the words. ( Am working on it!). There are myriad such examples where distortion in no-win situations is not only crazy-making, but insidiously attacks the core sense of Self in a child's development to where it becomes a part of how they perceive themselves to truly BE. Such a sufferer needs to be validated in their belief - that they are BELIEVED that this is their TRUE self-image and not a pretense for some ulterior motive. Until this occurs, nothing will change for them, and no amount of "convincing" or persuasion will succeed. Hopefully from this, the reader can glimpse the perversion dynamic in good and evil distortion. THERAPY How does this juxtaposition of good and evil affect therapy ? If the therapist is unaware of this phenomenon, grave mistakes will occur and the client will feel unheard, apart from being retraumatized. I believe strongly in bringing both good and evil into the room where the patient can struggle with the question of having both within the whole self. We can look together at the light and shadow sides of us, the yin and yang. Also, to consider this phenomenon in others and in the dynamic of abuse distortions. If this can be worked through in therapy, then possibly one of the greatest burdens of all survivors can be shared and explored, especially for cult/group survivors due to the nature of their experiences. There is another burden that is perhaps the hardest, most difficult to come to terms with, to voice ones fears about, and to overcome the terror associated with it. The burden of , " how much is there of good and how much of there is evil in me ? How much have I been abused and how much have I been the abuser?" One of the things that is so important to keep in mind is the HUGE difference between willing enactment of evil and FORCED enactment. I will speak here to another common and little confronted topic where something that is normal and natural and can be part of true intimacy, closeness and a loving relationship, becomes perverted into evil. Namely: Sex. The struggle that arises in the mind of the survivor is the thought of times when there has been pleasure felt in the sexual abuse of another. One child sexually molests another, and the guilt and shame for this is overwhelming on reflection in later years. One needs to remember that one of the symptoms of sexual molestation in a child who has been violated this way is for them to act out sexually. Physiologically, there is a pleasure response to sexual stimulation completely dissociated from mental thought. It is involuntary and instinctual, and for the sexually abused child who has been repeatedly raped or taught to seduce adults and other children, and who has been aroused sexually without any knowledge of the concept of arousal pleasure, becomes swamped with feelings of self- loathing, guilt and self-hatred when faced with the possibility or actual acting on sexual impulses outside the cutl/group setting. i.e. with siblings at home. Cult programmers use this pleasure-instinct to inflict increasing levels of pain and shame along with the humiliation associated with the conditions in which the victims are trained to become sex slaves, (known as Beta programming in Mind Control experiments), pornographic subjects and objects of group rape, sex rituals and sex assigments. All the child knows is that there is a certain pleasure in what it is doing, and even worse, there has been pleasure in being sexually abused. Inspite of the pain, fear and unwillingness associated not only with terror to comply with the molesting adults, but the admonition that this is the ONLY way to gain the approval, praise or any attention craved by the child who so desperately needs to be noticed and acknowledged by them. The sooner the lessons are learned to the satisfaction of the trainer or abuser, the sooner the pain will ease up, the approval will be gained, and hope of reprieve. That the abuser is so often a parent or someone known and loved, compounds the dilemma for the child a thousand fold. . The sexual acting out with other children can be a less threatening/dangerous way of attempting what cannot be attained by compliance to abusers, as well as desiring the pleasure it does not, and cannot, understand. For those cult/group survivors who have been deliberately sexually stimulated to unbearable pain levels of arousal which continue to assault them when away from the group environment, they struggle desperately with the accompanying guilt and self-loathing because of this. Self-harm is often a release in violent masturbation or other self-inflicted injury to achieve painful orgasm. Taking just this one aspect, sex, and the distortion of what can be essentially a good and loving experience changed into an evil pain-wracked and mentally tormenting one, (seen only as bad, unacceptable and guilt-ridden), we can appreciate the enormity of the therapeutic task in dealing with all aspects of perversion. However, if the concept of this distortion is understood, it can be explored, worked through and bring a measure of relief to the sufferer. It sometimes helps to know that they are by no means alone in their agony, that there are hundreds struggling with the same tormenting memories, who present the same feelings. To know many HAVE been able to free themselves of the shame and guilt of what was done to them in situations where they held no power, no say and no opportunity to do differently. CONCLUSION. There are, of course, many,many other things that fall into the category of evil where survivors and abuse victims dread to think about the possibility of being an abuser along with having been abused. Thus, it is in understanding HOW it could be possible to ourselves enact what has been done to us that is abusive that determines how we perceive the three factors above i.e. what is "family" for us, how we feel and think about our sense of Self, and how we work in therapy with the struggle to come to grips with our light and dark, good and evil, the opposing facets of our whole. We explore, discover and find our answers in the path to wholeness. It takes incredible courage, incredible risk-taking, incredible vulnerability, incredible hard and limit-stretching work, it tests our body, mind and soul to incredible frontiers never before faced. To undo the distortions, to find the essential GOOD in us and overcome the influence of evil is worth every step we take in healing, and IT CAN BE DONE! Goessoftly Retired Therapist www.goessoftlyishere.com (permission for reprints is required)   | Normalizing and Demystifying DID | DID and Littles.(Child/Young Alters) | ISOLATION | Mono's Disbelief | Distortion: Good and Evil | ASPECTS OF BODY CHANGES | Relationships | Across The Board | Across The Board | FORGIVENESS | I am BAD | Headaches | LYING AND DECEPTION | LOST and LOSS | EYES | Controversy. 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