Ritual Abuse – Blind Spot/Omission?

Ritual Abuse – Blind Spot/Omission?
Saturday February 17, 2007

Dear Alice,

Thank you so much for all of your revolutionary work! I want you to know that there *are* some enlightened, loving-witness therapists out there who have done their own healing work, who have read your books, and are fearless allies to their client’s inner children.

I am blessed enough to have had one for the last six years, and have done so much healing! She is trained as an Inner Bonding therapist (if you’re not familiar with Inner Bonding, created by Margaret Paul, PhD., visit www.innerbonding.com). My life is changed forever due to my work with her.

Rythea introduced me to your work, and it has been foundational to my healing — especially because of your sociological and historical research, knowledge and understanding.

i am an artist, but i majored in Sociology in college. I was obsessed with social problems from my teens through most of my twenties — it was a socially-allowable thing for me to intellectually focus on social problems and ask “what is so deeply wrong out there?” instead of relating to or understanding what was so deeply wrong in here.

Of course, at the time, it looked like sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, fascism, capitalism — you name it— but now i understand that all of those things are expressions/repetitions of cruelty and neglect learned at home.

The fact that i know you’re out there and that you’ve written such amazing books connecting child abuse and social problems helps me sleep at night and live my life!! And knowing that other people read and respect your stunning courage and articulation of the forbidden truth seriously helps me more than i can say.

I do have one important question/issue to raise:

Through my process of healing from child abuse (which involved separating from my family years ago), i learned that i survived Ritual Abuse. i also now understand, through people who are experts on the issue and have counselled countless RA survivors — that RA is huge, terrifyingly systemized, embedded, organized, and worldwide — and that it is connected to the deepest power-systems that run the world.

I assume you must be knowledgeable on this subject — that it’s not just our little families; a lot of times our families are connected to a much bigger system of control that is passed onto every new generation through RA– yet you never mention it (as far as i know). Why??

I am also generally just blown away at the number of unconscious RA movies that come out all the time– where the main themes have to do with presenting a little girl or boy (or a group of them) to the “devil,” their frighteneing journey in the dark side; adult characters setting them up on a dangerous/life-threatening test/ mission that holds the lives of adults in the balance (so that they can be scapegoated if they fail), often showing a girl character falling for a pedophillic devil-character, often involves some form of child sacrifice, and telling them the whole thing is for their own good, etc, etc. I could go on and on — there are *so* many of these movies!

The latest one seems to be Pan’s Labyrinth. In this one, the little girl’s step dad is *literally* a fascist dictator in Spain (so it’s socially permissible for her to fear/hate him) — but what about kids who’s “regular” dads are the fascist dictator, torturer, molester in private at home?! Anyway — she journeys into this other-“fantasy” world alone, is presented-to and falls in love with the devil, there are horrific monsters and torture and tests and tricks, and apparently a child sacrifice at the end.

But it is framed as though these things happen only in a “fantasy world” when actually these kinds of hells / nightmares are created by adults *in reality* to torture and control children in the real world. People who write and create these movies seem to be totally unconscious to their own story, and have little understanding of what their actually portraying and why. . .

Anyway — these are some of my thoughts, concerns, questions i wanted to share with you.

Thank you a million times for your work!

C

AM: You are right: “People who write and create these movies seem to be totally unconscious to their own story, and have little understanding of what their actually portraying and why. . .”
So what I am doing is to write time and again WHY they are doing this, why they are showing monsters and brutal sex in their films and sell it as their “art”, as a fantasy. Actually, it is the perversion they experienced as small children from their caregivers and deleted it from their memory. And children who watch these horror-films must pay the prize for the self-deception of the filmmakers.