I am watching Elementary on Amazon Prime right now. It is without a doubt my current favorite show. I’ve seen every single episode a few times, and yet I am re-watching it the way that I re-watched WandaVision.
In this show there is a character called Kitty, who like me was taken, tortured, and raped for several days – the only difference is that I was raped and tortured in my own bedroom, over several nights or weeks, I can’t fully remember.
The show itself isn’t triggering in any way, the writers were very respectful with how they approach this storyline so far, although I confess I didn’t pay so much attention when I was watching it on “live” television.
I am thinking and have been for quite some time that I need a support group. Beyond my BudSista’s, I spend a great deal of time alone, and except for Wednesdays and Fridays I don’t really communicate with anyone visually except for Twitter.
Once or twice a week I try to visit my neighbor because like me she is very much alone, unlike me she’s older. We’ve known each other for years and she really has become like a second mother to me over the years. We get on quite well and we always have very good conversations, interestingly we used to fight a lot because of outside issues, but we’ve both come to an understanding that has helped us communicate a lot better.
Watching this show reminds me that the major difference between Kitty and myself is that she has friends that she lives with, and that are in her daily life. Over the last four years I have isolated myself from the world thinking that I needed to do all this healing stuff alone.
For the first time in months I’ve only had a few puffs off a joint, I’ve been trying to cut down on my usage because I have come to realize that I am far too dependant on the herb over the last several years. To a certain point cannabis has helped me get through so much, but like everything, cannabis can become a crutch if not used carefully.
I want to be able to function, and I want to be able to heal simultaniously. Working with cannabis has been super interesting, because for the first few months I was really focused on just releasing all of the pent up anger/resentment/fear/shame/guilt that I was carrying. Now that I’ve released that, I am sitting here every day wondering what the next step is.
I needed that time alone so that I could just be myself without anyone else’s influence, without their interpretations of my behavior, or my release of the toxic emotions that I’ve been carrying for so long.
But now I feel like the next step is to start going to a support group. I’ve been holding myself back from taking this step by thinking that no one can understand what it is like to go through what “I” went through, because what I went through was intense in the kind of way that a lot of people genuinely cannot understand.
To a certain extent that is true, there are a lot of things that I went through that other people just can’t fathom, but I do know that from one group that I chat with a lot there are more than one person who can understand precisely what I went through.
Specifically the cult rape angle, and I’ve never met anyone who can understand what that’s like, and so I would like to reach out to them, but I haven’t yet figured out how to do it without setting off any accidental triggers, the fact that there are other women who look like I do, who have been through cult rape, gives me hope.
They have successful productive lives, which means that maybe I can do, and this is something that I struggle with quite a bit.
I struggle with it, because after everything I’ve been through, I still have this mind blowing fear that God doesn’t want me to be successful or productive, this comes from years of brainwashing, deliberately done to make sure that I would be too afraid to talk.
If God wants you to be raped, who are you going to tell? The cops are immediately going to think you’re crazy if you tell them you got raped because your rapists said God sent them…right? Well ironically, the RCMP already thinks I am nuts, so at the end of the day what do I really have to lose?
These fears that I have about sharing my story with others, about really bonding over the pain, and finding healing in the releasing it all, comes specifically from being afraid to speak out. Again years and years of punishment based brainwashing will do that to you, and it will have a complete and total impact on your mental health.
I don’t have a step by step guide to healing for you, but I will say that at a certain point you need to spread your arms, and let yourself fall. Then you need to trust that those around you will be strong enough to catch you. In order for you to be around people you can trust, you have to be willing to take the risk to try something you haven’t done before.
In my case that means finding and perhaps one day starting a support group, for victims and survivors of gang and cult rape. I am finding that I am interested in this whole “self healing” thing, enough that I would like to perhaps go to school for it, but before that I need to actually heal myself. So here I go…once more into the breach.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 