Maintaining External Safety

As survivors heal, they often learn things that are helpful to others. In this guest article, Olyssa shares what has helped her in maintaining safety from the cult. I admire her courage and her insights here as she shares from her heart.

The goal of external safety is to create an environment that will allow you to begin to decipher the complex inner workings of your system and how it has been programmed. Until my system knew it was safe it refused to disclose itself.

For this article, I am going to speak in the first person about my own experience. I would suggest that much of what I say will be applicable to the inner workings of your system since cults share similar programming techniques. Like the language of love, the language of programming is universal. Each of us is a unique human being with a unique experience of love, but love itself is consistent, based on respect, intimacy, safety, harmony etc. So too is programming consistent, based on instilling terror and obedience through violent betrayal and trauma bonding. In sharing what my process has been like, it is my hope you will better understand yourself and the ways programming has debilitated your freedom and recovery.

Once I was in an adequately safe environment it has been a painstaking process to break down the programs that keep me under the control of the cult. There are 4 ways in which I struggle against the cults presence in my life.

1) Actual external contacts from the cult including members appearing unexpectedly in public places, audio cues such as musical tones, beeps or distant sounds or phrases that seem benign to most people (including the “day self”) but set off programs.

2) Ongoing Phone Contacts as initiated by automaton programs in reporting alters. These phone contacts keep the cult informed of our activities and allow them to influence our perception of our circumstances to give them greater power over us.

3) Complex PTSD Anytime the least little similarity occurs bridging a trauma experience with present day it creates tremendous anxiety. It can often leave alters convinced they are back in the trauma. *Circumstances that are merely happenstance but create a bridge to a trauma experience can set off programs as powerfully as actual cult contacts.

4) Drug Addiction At the root of the ongoing phone reports are a layer of alters who have been carefully cultivated to have a drug addiction, a fix they can ONLY get when they stay in contact with the cult. Not only are they dependent on the drug for the fix, but to help mask the heinous graphic violence that they were only able to endure through being drugged. Without the drugs, they start to feel their feelings. Their terrible pain and suffering is unmanageable to them, The only way they know how to survive is to numb themselves. They are driven to keep reporting alters in contact so they can maintain their deep addiction.

For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Olyssa's Ritual Abuse topic, please visit the Discussions page.