I’ve been waiting for Joss Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse, with a sort of queasy anticipation for months. On one hand, it’s obviously about government ritual abuse, and it’s a little shocking and exciting to have that portrayed on TV – even if it turns out to be in a subtle, “this doesn’t really happen we swear,” X-Files kind of way.

(I’m torn about whether the X-Files made people more suspicious of government cover-ups, or whether it crossed the line into making it seem more like all such ideas are fiction. I think it went back and forth during its time, but I don’t know what the ultimate impact on people was.)

On the other had, it’s obviously about government ritual abuse, and will I really enjoy watching that? Even if Dollhouse is obviously on the side of the people being manipulated and abused, and the process of finding yourself again?

Well, maybe a little FAQ will help people process this series. Or: maybe writing a little FAQ for you will help me process this series.

What is Government Ritual Abuse?

Simple answer: ritual abuse is any abuse that is connected to an ideology – religious, political, whatever. Genocide, holocausts, clergy abuse…. Government ritual abuse is abuse by governments. Most commonly, in the United States, this includes things like Project Monarch – mind control experiments, experimenting on people general without their consent – but also situations like prostituting children to government figures. It’s scary shit.

How is Dollhouse About Government Ritual Abuse?

So my understanding of Dollhouse is that it is about a secret (non-government) agency, a corporation that programs people to be whatever the client wants. Erases their memories, controls what they think about themselves, how they behave, et cetera. This is eerily similar to what the CIA (according to their own documents – see the link for Project Monarch for more info) tried for so long to do. The goal was to create a sort of super-spy, who could be extremely convincing while also being no threat to the government because everything they knew and believed could be controlled.

This worked to varying degrees; you can never control everything people think, but ritual abuse in general is often all about controlling what a situation seems like so that people are too traumatized and too confused to trust their own experiences and build the consistent, coherent memories that normally let us function on a day-to-day basis. Often, to the extent that this ever worked, it involved creating or training people within multiple systems (what used to be called MPD or DID) to serve various functions for the government without being aware of what was happening most of the time. (And, in fact, a lot of their early experimentation involved explicitly trying to “create MPD.”)

But It’s Not About the Government!

Yeah, that’s true. Which is very interesting to me, that the reality is that the government has done (and could still be doing) this kind of work, and the fiction (which will probably be much more widely disseminated) is that a corporation does it. Anti-capitalist? Pro-government? Hey, I’m just glad this is coming out at a time when Obama, not Bush, is president. Because this is the kind of thing that the Bush dynasty was very involved in, (my fiancee suggests “bunch of douches” as a substitute for “dynasty”) and if we’re going to even imply a sort of support for the government by changing it to the act of a corporation, I’d rather have someone who seems trustworthy in office.

But yes: it’s the acts that are redolent of government ritual abuse, not the organization. Technically, Dollhouse is not about government ritual abuse; but in showing a fictionalized way that those very acts and plans could play out, it is.

At least in theory. Now let’s see what happens on the small screen!

Related offsite articles (not from Facing Abuse):

• Joss Whedon interview: “Dollhouse” (gointothestory.com)
• Taxpayer-Sponsored Torture from your Friends at the CIA (lockergnome.com)

[I started to write about how being an addict is like being LGBT. Actually, being an active addict is like being a closeted attacked member of the LGBT community; being in recovery has a lot in common with being out and proud. But before I could explain all that, I got into this digression and I'm going to share it as its own post....]

Addiction seems very complicated. In reality, it’s incredibly simple. Simple like gravity. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground. Sure, you can get all obsessive and detailed – what’s the ball made of? How heavy is it? Are we outside? How far away is the ground? What’s the ground made of? Is there wind? Is the ground level? Am I dropping it, or sort of throwing it a little bit? – but ultimately none of that stuff really matters. The bottom line is still that the ball is going to hit the ground. (And I once took a class called Physics for Liberal Arts Majors, which I thought would be all about the lyrical splendor of the universe and which in fact was basically physics for people who hadn’t yet noticed that things fall when you drop them. So I know what I’m talking about here.)

Here is what happens. People are abused. (“How” and “for how long” matter, but so does “by whom.” Pretend I drew you a little graph here where intense infrequent abuse is high up on the chart, and so is living with people who have ever abused you in any way – and living with people who frequently abuse you intensely is especially crazy-making – and we’ll move on.)

More specifically, children are abused. And, since they are children and developmentally are supposed to think everything is about them, are in fact in a molten crucible of diverse experiences which are constantly creating and re-creating their vision of the world, what they learn from the abuse is that they are not worthy human beings. They learn that they deserve shame, pain, and disrespect; often, the bottom line to them is that they are not worthy of life. That’s the message of abuse, after all; that’s what distinguishes abuse and trauma.

Trauma, like falling out of a tree and breaking your leg, or losing your house to a hurricane, is genuinely random and obviously not about you. The only time that people take messages like “I’m not worthy” from trauma is if they’ve already been set up with those messages by abuse. Abuse, on the other hand, carries those messages whether it’s done on purpose or not – and it’s rarely on purpose. Most adults who abuse children think that they are doing their best, that yelling at their kids, hitting their kids, raping their kids, is an example of their shining love and excellent boundaries. Most adults who abuse children are kind of crazy. (Sidebar: it’s not always adults. Sometimes it’s the classmate or neighbor kid or babysitter, acting out their own abuse. Doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, in terms of its effects.)

So, abused kids melt that down. Their molten worldview hardens around “I am not good enough.” It can be conscious or subconscious, but it is there, rock-hard and deeply embedded.

And they do two things with it: dissociate, in any way they can, and choose more pain, because they think that is what they deserve. Which becomes a vicious cycle: more pain brings with it more need to dissociate, which means choosing more pain in an attempt to feel anything, which means dissociating from the feelings, which means worse choices because we can’t really make good choices if we can’t feel the effects of what we choose, (not to mention if we think that we don’t deserve good things), which means dissociating harder, which….

That cycle is addiction. That’s all that you need to know about addiction. It means doing something to check out of our feelings, or our lives. The popular perception is that it has to be something inherently harmful – but the reality is that checking out like that is the most harmful part. (All right, yes, there are drugs that will kill your body and soul faster than checking out. On the other hand, you could argue that people can’t really choose to keep doing drugs that harmful without checking out in the first place.)

Addiction doesn’t necessarily mean beer, pot, heroin, cigarettes, nice recognizable drugs. Just about every addict (abuse survivor) has a whole lot of options for what lets them check out. That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has an implicit rule against “thirteenth-stepping,” hitting on newcomers: because so many people put down the alcohol and switch right over to the sex and love addiction that they don’t even realize is a problem. That’s also why there is so much caffeine and cigarette consumption at a lot of meetings. People quit things in the order that those things are killing them, or at least in the order of most to least immediately painful killers. Not everyone can even stand to use drugs to check out: substance addictions have a genetic switch that gets flipped on by abuse, and lots of people lack that genetic component. But process addictions (codependency, emotional eating, sex addiction, compulsive debting, et cetera) are available to everyone who’s been abused. Isn’t that great? In fact, every addict, every abuse survivor, is a codependent, because codependency is all about trying to control the uncontrollable (like trying to control our emotions and histories) – and what else are these other addictions there for but the illusion of control?

There are more details. (Wind velocity. Density of the ball.) On another level, checking out is a way to try to avoid the emotional pain of the abuse, and of beliefs like “I am not good enough.” The flipside of that is that pain tells the body to check out – it presses the same “oh no, terrible things are happening and I have no other options – dissociate!” button that is installed by abuse. And seeking out pain is also a way to try to control the abuse. That’s why people date people who are like their parents – why they choose jobs and relationships and situations, over and over, that don’t work for them. Our brains, deep down, think “If I can get THIS one to treat me right, that will stop all the pain! It’ll erase all the abuse I ever experienced!” Maybe it’s a lizard-brain thing. It seems fine until we get it out into the open and actually give it some conscious thought.

But once you know all this, it boils down to something deeply simple. Abuse a kid, and they learn to harm themselves in order to check out. Abuse kids, and they become addicts.

I’ve been seeing a lot of visitors led here by queries about repressed memories. Especially over the past few days, seems like. People have come here by googling stuff like…

how do I know if I have repressed memories
can an 8 year old repress a sexual abuse incident?
memory loss sexual abuse
child abuse body memory

And only that last searcher found what they were looking for, if you believe the server stats. That was the only visitor of those four who stuck around and looked at various pages, anyway – but I am not sure whether to believe the stats when they say someone was here for “0 seconds,” so who knows what the other folks did.

So I thought maybe I could address some of that for this week’s Thursday Thirteen!

Thirteen Things about REPRESSED MEMORIES

1. Yes, an eight-year-old can repress an experience of sexual abuse. Even an adult can repress memories of a traumatic adult experience. Adults are likely, in my experience, to recover the memory sooner than a child would, for a few reasons:

2. Even an adult in an abusive relationship is safer, better-off, than a child in an abusive relationship, because they have more coping skills under their belt, and more freedom – more options in general.
3. Adults also have a better-developed sense of what’s normal. Kids, especially younger kids, are still learning what is “normal,” and so they are much more likely to accept that abuse is deserved and standard and unquestionable – even though it’s NOT. (It is, however, pretty common.) So an adult is more likely to notice something like missing time, because they know it’s not normal. They’re also more likely to have friends who are not part of the abusive system, who have strong senses of what is normal, who may point out blank spaces in their memory or effects of the trauma that aren’t apparent to the survivor themselves.
4. Adults, even those who have had parts of their emotional development arrested by childhood abuse, are usually farther along developmentally than children. Which means they have more reasoning skills to devote to the various clues of repressed memories that might come up. It also means their psyches are more willing to release the experience of trauma, because they know on some level that they are somewhat safe.
5. Repressed memories are surprisingly common. The most common argument I’ve heard against them is “How could anyone ever forget something so unusual and traumatic?” The answer, as Jennifer Freyd pointed out in Betrayal Trauma, is that people (most often children) repress traumatic experiences when there is secrecy, betrayal, involved: when they have the sense, for whatever reason, that it is not safe to talk about it. When we are denied any other options for healing, we try to protect ourselves by sealing away the traumatic experience – but we can’t seal away its effects.
6. Repressed memories come in several flavors. We can remember things – any memories, not just repressed ones – through feelings in our bodies (body memories), through emotions that seem to come out of nowhere and be connected to nothing in our everyday lives, through words that come out of our mouths (or our pens) when we had no intention of writing or saying or drawing any such thing, through dreams, through intrusive mental images, through phantom smells or sounds that aren’t coming from the present day, even through full-on surround-sound PTSD-style flashbacks which make it seem as though we are back in the abusive experience. And more.
7. Usually, it is sort of unreasonably undramatic. Our memories leak out of our psyches in all these more minor ways, waiting for us to put the pieces back together.
8. How do you know if you have repressed memories? The best way I know of is to look back at your life. What is missing? It’s easy for us to assume that our memories, however patchy they may be, are normal, unless we take time to examine them and compare them to others’.
9. For example: I always assumed it was “normal” (in the sense, I thought, of healthy – instead of just common) to not remember anything much before age 5. I could name a few memories, but I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be 5 – I had no sense of what my life was like, in general, before that. Even after that, I had some pretty fragmentary memories going on: I couldn’t honestly tell you all that much about any specific age in elementary school, but I knew a lot about what I did in elementary school and that let me overlook not having a sense of really being there for most of it. P.S.: that’s not “normal.”
10. For a while, I went around telling people I knew that I was taking a poll: if someone told them that they didn’t remember anything much before about age 5, what would they think? It was amazing how many people would say that they’d figure something terrible had happened to that person – and then, when asked when they started having real substantial memories, would quote some age like 5 or 7 or even in their early teens – and insist that there was no reason for it. I’m related to some of those people.
11. Repressed memories aren’t all Hideous Trauma. In my case, for example, I dissociated a whole lot of regular everyday stuff because what I learned from Hideous Trauma was that it wasn’t safe to be present in my life. Hence the lack of much of my elementary school years. I’ve heard other people talk about having tons of everyday memories of childhood but nothing after, say, bedtime or sunset, or all the school memories but nothing much at home, or just having little patches missing that they almost didn’t notice at first, or missing an entire year or two, or not having concrete memories of summer trips to relatives, or…. Those are more easily tagged as Probably Hiding Hideous Trauma – although there are also people who experience abuse both in school and home settings (for example) and lose most of their time because of that, not because of being generally dissociative.
12. Repressed memories, both of trivial everyday things and of abuse, can be recovered. I can think of three particular ways off the top of my head. One is to learn about repressed memories, read others’ experiences about them or more literature about how they work, in order to be able to recognize any that have been coming up for you. (I overlooked body memories of rape for years because I didn’t know what they meant – my survivor’s logic was something like “It’s either some horrible STD or nothing, and I don’t want it to be an STD so I won’t get it checked out.” Fortunately, it was not a horrible STD…. And I’ve known one person who was diagnosed with epilepsy and medicated for years, even though they could find no other indications of epilepsy, until he realized that his seizures were actually body memories of electroshock stuff. Which is fairly common in ritual abuse scenarios.)
13. A related way is, when memories come up (in any form), to see if you have a sense of what was coming next, or what came before, or where this stuff was happening. It’s easy to get caught up in the specificity of just a feeling of abuse or a remembered phrase, and not even think to see if your memory will throw anything else up there. Renee Fredrickson talks about this in her book Repressed Memories. And a third way – and my preferred way – is to work on recovery, even in seemingly unrelated ways. Like via working the twelve steps on abuse issues, or in general. Because working on our stuff makes life much safer and better. And in my experience, not only are memories more likely to come up in recognizable ways when I have safety in my life, but I am a million times more able to just learn from them, deal with the feelings in painless ways, understand everything better, and move on.

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Mrs. S. said something I really identified with in reply to my last post. And I realized that my comment was turning into a whole blog post of its own, so I decided I’d better do it here. We can do lots of Sunday Salons, right? I don’t see any rules about this

So, she had written:

I have a similar issue when I’m travelling. Like tomorrow I have to spend about 3.5 hours ona train – so what should I read. The book I want to read next is heavy – so not good for travelling – so I need to pick another – but what if I finish it? Then I need a spare one – or what if I don’t like either of them once I’ve started?? EEk.

Now this is why I want to buy a Kindle… then I’d have 200 books in my pocket and no stress

Exactly! That’s the exact issue! I don’t think Kindle is the solution tho, at least for me. I mean, it’s one solution for that particular problem… although if I had had Kindle I think I would have then freaked out about whether any of the 200 books it had on it were going to be What I Wanted To Read or not.

The problem, for me, was… basically a lack of serenity. Not trusting that I could sit without books. Not trusting that I would feel okay if I didn’t have something to use to check out. It was a total carryover from using books to survive in childhood. I used them to escape bullying (and got bullied for that!), I used them to have my own life outside of my dysfunctional family, I used them to find my own voice and write about what happened to me… they were a great escape valve, but there was a point where I hadn’t yet truly escaped, where I was still clinging really hard to the books.

I think that there are layers of escape from abuse. There’s actually getting out, of course, but even after leaving abusive relationships or situations there’s still a lot more to go through to get the abuse out of our heads. Because it’s natural to internalize it to some extent. Especially as children. And often we get out of abusive adult relationships without knowing about the internalized stuff from our childhoods that brought us into an abusive relationship in the first place. And often we internalize a lot more of an adult partner’s abuse than we otherwise might in the process of trying to make the relationship work. Adapting and adapting and adapting to a partner (or boss, or friend, or whoever) who isn’t meeting us halfway. (and how much more so as children, when escape is so much harder?)

I think a lot of readers are like me: we have many many reasons to love books, and one is that they were a great escape. And when something saves your life like that, it’s hard to let go of – and it’s also hard to trust that it’s not necessary anymore. I don’t think I set out consciously to Not Need Books All The Time, in any kind of planned way. I set out to escape the abuse in my head: codependency, shame, control issues, dissociation. I worked on my trust issues, and learned how to tell who was trustworthy. I learned what my boundaries were and how to set boundaries with others. I learned what I really liked and disliked and what I felt at any given moment. I learned how to turn things over when I had done whatever I could to change them (or when there was no need to do anything). I learned to listen to and follow my intuition. I learned how I had harmed myself and others as a result of my abuse and to heal that harm so I could trust and love myself. A lot of things just fell away in the process; compulsive reading was one of them. I still read a lot; my relationship with reading has just evolved.

And that’s the kind of stuff that Life More Awesome is going to be about. Near-daily writing and weekly challenges for making our lives more awesome – in part, how to set boundaries, how to trust ourselves, how to love ourselves, how to deal with feelings and shame and control issues and all that other crap that gets in the way of truly enjoying life. That gets between us and serenity, so that we have to work around it, carrying around extra books and extra work and extra beliefs that don’t end up serving us. Taking those big rocks out of the stream of life.

The first challenge will be posted soon….