A few days ago, a comment appeared a social media post from someone who is convinced that she saw me in the network years after my rescue, as a 17-18 year old in Belgium, purportedly together with my biological father who was according to her also part of the network, and I supposedly had a lot of power and would have abused the child that she was.
She first contacted me on social media years ago, perhaps around the time of my TEDx talk. Her message was friendly even though she was correcting me on my own recollection of my past. I sat with the information, returning to those years. With induced dissociation it is always important to be open-minded. Also in general I think, even when someone attacks you, it is a good idea to calmly examine the allegations. Even if the mirror shows a unpleasant or even dark reflection, honest self-inquiry is the first step towards growth.
When I was 17 I had left home and was living with a 34-year old man in his house in the Belgian countryside. He got me an administrative job at the Swedish compressor factory where he worked as an engineer and I drove to work with him every day. On weekends I accompanied him to local rock concerts since his side gig was doing sound for bands and I helped with set-up and breakdown in the town halls and cafes of the Flanders. He was an aggressive alcoholic and though he technically trafficked me, he operated on an extremely narrow bandwidth. His biggest dream was fulfilled in drinking with the local musical legends. When I left him, I moved into my own studio apartment and continued on at my job, taking the early morning bus right from the square in Antwerp where I lived. That is when I first met my biological father. He might have been a better candidate for the network than the alcoholic boyfriend, but he spoke very plainly about the fact that though his parents had been Masons, he, while he had been invited, did not like the atmosphere and had no interest. As a classical composer, he always felt he deserved a lot more acknowledgment, perhaps not realizing that the Masons might have been able to help with that. Three months after meeting my father I left Belgium forever.
Not only was the time around my 18th year verifiably accounted for, also important is that, no matter how dissociated you are, when you meet someone with whom you have already had intense dealings while inhabiting another part of yourself, such as this woman described between me and my father who would have been my network handler, there is at the very least a deep familiarity, some sense of already knowing this person. When my father came up the steps of my apartment building and turned into view as I awaited him at my door, it was the first time that I saw him.
The great fear of all survivors is of course that they could be wrong, that if you point to a perpetrator, as this woman did with me, that this is not the right person. The False Memory movement took this idea, of people being falsely accused, to the hilt with a massive campaign that spread this concept as the only important element about survivors sharing recovered memories, shifting public empathy away from the pain of child sex abuse to the comparatively minor pain of reputation loss. While the False Memory movement is no more, the concept is perpetuated by influencers who primarily focus on false accusations of sexual misconduct, taking apart the accusers and their motives in defense of a few questionable men, rather than focus on the great number of believable survivors.
How can you tell if an accusation is real or false, when the mental/emotional state of victims is often ravaged by the abuse and healing is slow and rocky? I would say that it is by the attitude. That can mean speaking truth in spite of the risks, only for truth’s sake. It can also arise from the need to share that truth with just one person. Once a survivor speaks out publicly, usually they have traversed a long healing road and the revelation is the natural next step. However, if revenge is in the picture, it weakens the facts, even if they are true. Unhealed anger can easily be projected onto a third party.
I kindly responded to this woman who had shared what she believed were her memories of me. She followed up with a public attack, sharing her version on my social media, indicating that I am lying. While this was a public revelation of her own childhood abuse, she did it on my profile, where it remains indelibly linked to her projections onto me. Weaponizing her supposed knowledge perhaps gave her a sense of power over me.
Some years later, again on social media, she privately apologized for those attacks, but reiterated her belief about having met me in a network context that doesn’t match my experience. In her comment on my public profile a few days ago, she was back to attacking, this time adding a hashtag that revealed that she has had contact with another public detractor of mine, a Belgian therapist/survivor advocate who has been accusing me of lying. The therapist needed at all cost to be viewed as the ultimate authority on psychology, which I never accepted, not when we first met in the year 2000, not when she sent me a lengthy paper she wrote meant to correct my views - or at least her interpretation of my views - on forgiveness, and not when she informed me that, yes, I had been trafficked, but my true story was different from what I was saying. That hashtag helped me understand where that last snippet came from.
When I told a friend about the comment and hashtag, I heard anxiety in my voice and felt my chest tightening. A little girl was complaining, needing to prove herself. My friend addressed that part in me, and as I allowed it to reveal itself, tears came. Soon my body tensed up and it felt as though I were once again strapped down, feeling electrical shocks, hearing loud voices screaming in my right ear that if I ever dared to tell the truth, that those people who say that I am lying, are right. All these people calling me a liar would be holding an enormous, heavy grey blanket and pull it over me, so that I would be suffocated by their voices, and they would be right. I could never get out from under that blanket. In a previous healing I had seen many little shadows emerge from that little girl told she was a liar, that all were crouched down. Now I saw that it was the heavy blanket holding them down. Sitting in a bright living room with my friend, I felt the weight of the blanket and the sun hurt my eyes, even as the truth illumined my attitude towards these small-minded people that normally would not be able to upset me. The heavy grey blanket was removed.
While I felt both the depth of getting in touch with a painful memory from the mind control training in the Heidelberg basement as well as the resulting renewed clarity of mind, the healing process did not end there. I remained in a slightly altered state until the tightness in my chest returned and became almost unbearable. The physical tension brought me back to the incredible unease which I felt the entire year after being chosen for bigger things in the network, at age nine. The billionaire who had me flown to the US clearly believed that I was the luckiest girl on earth to have attracted his attention. I wanted to believe this was true. I shared the high he experienced over his earthly paradise and found his humanness in his love for nature. My future was laid bare and the lavish detailed promises painted a life of which most people can only dream. I was grateful, or felt that I certainly should be. For that entire year, there was a vague sense that something was wrong.
It had been impressed on me that I belonged to “the family,” to the most select and enviable group on the globe. All I had to do was to obey. The threat of what were to happen if I didn’t obey was always hanging in the air. This sense was different from the punishment in the mind control training; that was supposedly “to make me strong,” but it was rather when everything seemed good, when the promises began to manifest, when abusers admired me and an entourage spoiled me, that I felt such pressure that it hurt my chest.
These past days, I got in touch with the origin, which was the actual original encounter with the billionaire, at a ritual. I saw the monster in him when I first met him. That experience was pushed out of my awareness. It would never have been possible to absorb his quasi-fatherly attentions if I had remained consciously aware of that darkest of nights, when my innocent little friend was murdered in his honor, how he had forced me to watch while he raped me.
That truth had to be dissociated in order to believe all the lies I was being fed and to live the fake life I was being promised. I was in anxious pleasing mode the entire time, intuitively aware of the danger I had already witnessed with my own eyes.
One night recently, my right leg hurt, especially the ankle and foot. I knew that I hadn’t hurt myself, that this was a body memory. Towards morning, the memory crystallized, of being hunted in an English manor park with crossbows. I woke up from having been drugged into a long sleep, lying barefoot in the brush, and noticed arrows flying at me. I ran panicked between the trees and, with the uneven terrain, fell and hurt my ankle. An arrow lodged in a tree trunk, inches above where my head lay. I extricated myself from my prostrate position and ran. After a few minutes of absolute terror, three hunters walked towards me from different directions holding their crossbows up high to show they would not shoot anymore. I never saw if there were more hunters or other children. The three yelled in a strong Cockney accent to reassure me. I was incredibly confused and scared.
One tightened his electric blue crossbow, put a bolt in and gave it to me, briefly instructing me how to use it and that I should watch carefully, because "the hunted has become the hunter.” Another released a tuxedo tomcat from a small wooden cage.
I became enraged. I hated these men and their accents and wanted nothing more than to shoot them. I had never been taught to use a crossbow and the unfairness of having to start in this way fueled my volcanic anger. I had been forced to witness what it does to the intended victim if you refuse to kill - I did not risk disobeying. My murderous anger never switched to the poor animal as the network intends, constantly projecting anger upon new victims, never on the perpetrators. Let your rage kill, but let it never kill the one who murdered your soul. That is the essence of what the network is about: do not heal; instead pass on all the pain and then turn that into your philosophy which of course has to be kept secret, because it is a lie. I shot, furious with these strangers and the entire network. I struck but did not kill the poor cat. One of the Cockneys gave me a short knife and told me to skin the animal as they held the shocked creature up in front of me. He said it so casually he could have been asking me to cut a balloon loose. I hated his nonchalance, his own dissociation, his unthinking manner in which life meant absolutely nothing and this pet was not an innocent, terrified being.
This was the moment I reached bottom. A seething question arose from the core of my being: “This is it?”
The entire network had completely lost my respect. I was told to cut from the bottom to the top on the front of the poor cat’s body, which I did quickly, making sure that he would not survive, because the Cockneys had more in mind for me to do to the poor creature. They didn’t notice that I purposely sped up the process. As I obeyed their insanely cruel orders, all three of them, in that light, nothing-matters tone in their strange English accents, told me that, see, I would always come out on top. I would always end up the victor.
I was being re-trained after having been humiliated, which should not have happened, and this was what should bring me back into the fold in case the unforeseen event would have broken my network persona. For them, forced, mindless violence is equated with victory and overcoming rather than the true overcoming, which means healing, which requires courage and real work. I was utterly disgusted.
In the last days, I have been feeling the extreme anger I felt then.”This is it?” This, being the entire lie of what the network is all about, the lie that had consumed an entire year of my young life. Before I had been “discovered” by the billionaire I had freedom in being treated as the lowest of the low, because I could hold on to the truth that I was a child and the adults were abusers. After being picked to become part of the meanest clique on the planet, I was forced to accept their lies. The monster became a mentor, but inside I never forgot how it had started, that the monster could re-emerge if I didn’t obey. It was unavoidable that I would become disobedient and attract the monster once again. This healing process has helped me to understand that no circumstances would ever have been able to keep me in the network, because I knew that all of it was a lie; the pressure had been telling me all along.
All those who are part of the network must constantly feel that same pressure I felt during that year. There is a price to pay to be part of this club and multi-level dissociation may not make it perfectly obvious that this price is too steep, that it always goes against the self. Perhaps material rewards and status bring some comfort, but do they ever fully cover the lies? Does it remove the truth that nothing of what is gained in the network is substantial? Does it stop you from knowing that the truth can truly set you free?