Hi ((((Sallying))))
You survived a childhood that sounds very much like ritual abuse. Your strength amazes me. Please keep posting and talking about it.
Hi Amethyst,
It was ritual abuse and more.
I've been reluctant to share any details about what happened due to many reasons. I guess number one is how unbelievable the memories are. I had a very difficult time believing any of it could be true. So I can imagine what someone else might think.
Today on Dr. Phil, of all places, I heard a young man share some of his horror story about being in one foster home. What happened to him on a daily basis is eerily similar to what my bioNfather did to me. He was tied up in a garage and everyday the foster parents would throw cold water on him. I know most people could not fathom someone doing that to a helpless child. But I can because I have experienced that and more.
In my current memory (I am trying hard to write about in my book.) I was suspended upside down from the ceiling by one foot, restrained so that I could not fight my perpetrators, and then tortured by them. There were three men. I don't know how old I am but I do know that one of those men is my bioNfather who is a sadist. And I know who the other two men are. I have yet to see exactly what they are doing to me but know it must be bad to have had a warning dream of a memory about to surface.
I keep thinking - shouldn't I be done with this by now? I've been working on this for years and I'm 52 f***ing years old! Yet I never knew before that my own father was my perpetrator. When I accepted that fact this new layer of memories began to surface. I guess I should have foreseen this inevitable turn of events after my bday in July. Yet I was in serious denial - that river in Egypt. 
Hi ((((Sallying))))
I understand about the unbelievableness of memory. Please believe the memories and know that I believe you. NOBODY makes this stuff up. Sadly, I don't think incest survivors and abuse survivors are ever totally DONE. I have been really working on this for over 18 years and I am close to 60. Fragments still come up. It's more likely to be that way if abuse happened if we were pre-verbal when the abuse started. Dissociation also causes fragmenting...and we had to do that to survive. It also takes a long time for self abuse to stop. I only have recently dealt with the fact that I was a self-mutilator. I started scratching and picking when I was very young. Then I did some cutting, but I was afraid of being caught so I went back to scratching. I used to pull out my eyelashes and eyebrows, too. It took a long time to stop that. I still want to scratch when I get very nervous, but I find something else to do with my hands, like knitting.
I was overwhelmed by flashbacks during my freshman year of college and I thought I was going nuts. I had no framework for what I was seeing and feeling, except for having read Freud the summer before college as a prerequiste to our Freshman Studies courses....and probably everyone knows that Freud stated that memories of incest were due to the daughter's Electra complex. I absolutely could not believe what I was remembering at first. Then to top it off, here was Freud saying that I was imagining this crap because I had a hidden desire to get it on with my father. I finally decided Freud was either lying or nuts (we now know he was lying out of fear of running afoul of the prosperous Viennese fathers and being thrown out of town, losing his practice and his reputation) because, for as long as I could remember, I found my father so repulsive that I even hated the way he smelled and I recoiled from his touch. So, without even any therapeutic support, I began to understand that I wasn't making it up. At the time, 1965, there was nowhere to go with that. I began having panic attacks, developed full blown agoraphobia, and eventually tried to kill myself. I had a complete nervous breakdown. I was patched up and taught to cope by a psychiatrist, but we never discussed sexual abuse because the good doctor was my parents' employee and I knew he would not believe me.
My father was my chief perpetrator. The abuse started before I was verbal, as an infant, and continued probably up to age 7. I was also molested by a much older boy when I was six and a neighbor attempted to molest me when I was 12. My father again tried to molest me when I was 15, at my high school, while he was drunk. He was trying to force me to leave with him in the car and I was damned if I was going to because I knew that he would rape and beat me, not to mention the potential for an accident. I had already been in one car accident when my parents both were drunk, when I was 8, and that had been enough. I threw my insect collection that I had done in biology (full of jars of glass and formaldehyde) at him. It broke at his feet and he was covered with glass, formaldehyde and bug parts. When my classmates and a teacher heard the crash and my screaming at him, they rescued me. I told my father that if he ever laid a finger on me again, I would kill him in his sleep. I meant it. Before I started college, that was my only memory, which was totally concious.
It's very interesting that you are having the memory of being hung upside down. I have heard of that before. Very interesting is not the right way to put it...my reaction was one of those OMG recognitions...
Many years ago I took a course on body imaging, self defense, and grounding for incest survivors. All the work we did was based on the principals of Akido, and most of our time was spent learning how to ground ourselves, take our space, breathe and be assertive...all of which are a tall order for incest and ritual abuse survivors. Many of us, including me, had memories during the course. Two sisters that had been abused took the course together and remembered being hung upside down and tortured at their grandmother's house by several adults on something that reminded them of a jungle gym. They said the apparatus was not there most of the time, so it must have been brought in. They survived what I would call a form of ritual abuse.
Stay strong and believe in yourself, Sallying.. I know it can be so overwhelming at times. I can tell when I am getting new memories because I start to feel "small"....as if I am that little child again. I do lots of grounding and breathing to get through it.
It gets better every year. I really believe that the worst is at the beginning...breaking the denial.
Amethyst
