Repression means 'to restrain or hold back'. Repression is the process by which traumatic memories are restrained, or held back, from normal waking consciousness. The word 'repression' describes precisely the same mechanism as its sister-word 'depression'. In other words: The global epidemic in depression (meaning: To push down) is a consequence of widespread repression (meaning: To hold back).
Given that many clinicians freely use the words 'depression' and 'depressive patient', it is interesting to note that these clinicians rarely ask what the 'patient' is pushing down. Depression is mistakenly viewed as a state of being rather than an active process.
The symptom of 'pushing down' (depression) is treated as if it is a problem with no discernable root. Typically, the medical solution has been to presume imbalance in a person's brain chemistry, and to attempt to re-adjust this imbalance using drugs.
Many survivors are treated for 'depression' and not for the underlying cause: 'trauma'. Sadly, of course, the 'depressed' trauma is precisely what necessitates the 'depression'. Depression is simply a crude label for the biochemical means by which memory is repressed and dissociated.
Because the Western medical model is apt to call symptom-clusters a 'disease', and reject further exploration of the underlying causes of these symptom clusters, we live in a world where most survivors of childhood abuse are told they have 'depression', rather than the truth: That they were hurt.
Those suffering 'depression' are actively 'pushing down' feelings and associated trauma memories. Ironically, perhaps, this simple knowledge itself is repressed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
Repression therefore takes place as if parts of a fractal: 'Patients' depress their memories and feelings, 'doctors' depress the knowledge that depression is a function of unresolved trauma.
Depression is an adaptive process of self-preservation
What is being 'pushed down' in a 'depressive patient'? Typically, a constellation of pain, confusion and the fear of fully experiencing a traumatic past.
When an initial trauma threatens to completely overwhelm the survivor's nervous system, the survivor adapts to this by fracturing the internal landscape so that the traumatizing experience is effectively quarantined from normal-waking-consciousness. This selective amnesia allows the organism to continue living under abusive circumstances.
By the time the survivor reaches adulthood, the psyche may contain a labyrinth of secret doors and hidden rooms, each containing a psycho-emotional snapshot of one overwhelming traumatic experience. This is true even of adults who were not brutally abused — the socialization experience of early 21st Century Earth is not kind to children. It would be fair to say that society itself is split, or compartmentalized — for example, 1 in 3 women in our societies are sexually abused before the age of 18. The average, relatively 'well-adjusted' human will typically contain several splits, or part-selves. However, these splits will not present themselves overtly.
However, for the survivor of ritual abuse, splitting and compartmentalizing was the objective of the perpetrating group. The survivor is likely to contain many child part-selves, each with independent motivations, programming, fears and needs. The process by which these need and fears are contained is often a complex biochemical-symphony in which the brain up- and down-modulates various neurotransmitters and other chemicals, to maintain the unhealed survivor in a state of relative amnesia to their past.
There has been a mistake made by modern medicine. Clinicians have attempted to analyze the biochemical-symphony undertaken by the brain to repress traumatic material. They have then presumed that this chemical-symphony itself is the problem. As a result, an entire battalion of psychiatrists have galloped into a dead-end: They have tinkered with the biochemistry of the mind, as if it is a malfunctioning internal-combustion engine that simply needs its mix of gasoline and oxygen more carefully regulated.
But the human nervous system is not a purely mechanical system, and medication is no long-term solution to the underlying causes of depression.
As Alice Miller so aptly puts it:
"Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood."
With the ritual abuse survivor, this awareness is all the more important: The truth of childhood for survivors requires, first, acknowledging that something more than an abstract chemical-imbalance underlies their depression, and second that they will take all steps necessary to excavate and heal the roots of their pain. For many survivors, this task is near-impossible. Yet it can be done.
Although survivors have typically spent their entire lifetime seeking to forget what happened to them; it is possible, with time, to reverse the architecture of the brain from a default state of forgetting into a default state of remembering. Naturally, this reversal of habituated neural-processing is a massive undertaking. It is akin to teaching a person to cycle backwards when they have spent their whole life cycling forwards. Yet, it can be done.
Believing in the past
A society with 'depressed' people within it will, naturally, itself be depressed. And we see this most vividly in the hesitancy of some people in accepting the memories and accounts of abuse survivors.
It is useful to remember that the entire reason children are ritually abused is that society often does not listen to, or care, about children. In short: Children are not believed.
Adult survivors typically confront this disbelief again, in adulthood.
The idea that children are prone to lie is often encoded into society's myths. After all, it is important to powerful perpetrator groups to widely circulate the idea that children are 'less than' adults; not to believed; and are 'owned' by their parents. These myths serve the objectives of the abusers well: They create a society in which they can freely abuse children, and in which children have been stereotyped as untrustworthy.
One interesting, and enduring myth, that contains this societal message is Aesop's fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. In this story, a boy decides to shout about a wolf threatening to attack the village. However (we are told), the boy is lying. He 'cries wolf' so often that the villagers stop paying attention to him. Then a real wolf turns up, the boy tries to warn the villagers, but they ignore him and the wolf goes on a rampage — eating the boy and his sheep.
Superficially, this story seems to be about a boy tricking villagers into being scared of a wolf. Then the boy gets his moral comeuppance, as a real wolf attacks.
A more accurate interpretation of this fable for our modern world is that the boy repeatedly does see a wolf. The villagers tell him he is lying, because they do not want to face the uncomfortable reality that they are under threat. Then the wolf finally seizes his moment and attacks.
The problem the boy faces in our modern retelling is this: The villagers simply cannot see the wolf. This is because the wolf is a brother; an uncle; a police officer; a schoolteacher. The boy who is being ritually abused in our world is typically abused by integral members of a dysfunctional society. The wolves are hidden in plain sight; and supported through widespread denial. Look, for example, to the activities of pedophile rings like the Catholic Church, who have raped children on an industrial scale for centuries, while installing the perpetrators throughout the ranks of high-society.
Often when the survivor of ritual abuse in our world 'cries wolf', they are told they are lying. Or punished for speaking out.
By this process, the 'villagers' of our planet sacrifice their young trans-generationally: Each generation refuses to acknowledge the wolves that roam in their 'village' and will blame the children for 'lying'. This is the situation many survivors face today: Until there is widespread medical acknowledgement of the roots of depression, many of those who claim there are 'wolves' causing it will be silenced by their fractured communities.
The child survivor is typically surrounded by a community that does not want to talk about 'wolves' (sexual abusers) and, in fact, punishes those who speak out (just as they themselves were punished as children). Because of this, the child survivor will typically internalize the punitive rules of their family and community: The survivor will 'depress' internally the memories of what is 'repressed' externally. Both the external threats of the perpetrator to keep quiet; and the numerous, subtle, non-verbal indications from the family to keep quiet, become perpetrator introjects in the child's mind. In other words: The child learns to depress themselves, to avoid the pain of external repression by their 'community'.
Every external, societal repression therefore necessitates an internal, personal depression.
'Depression' serves multiple functions: First, the mechanism of depression pushes away the affect-storm from the abuse which would otherwise overwhelm the nervous system. Second, depression serves to maintain societal-silence on the topic of childhood sexual abuse. The survivor internalises society's taboos.
Information about the causes of depression, is itself depressed. As a result, we can observe huge swathes of our global population living in a listless twilight: These survivors are condemned to bounce between physicians who elect to treat the 'blood' coming out of their patient's 'wounds', but never to remove the 'bullet'.
Without excavation of the core, traumatic causes of depression, there can only ever be superficial healing. True resolution of disease or dis-ease (the state of not being at ease) requires that we determine what the survivor is not at ease on account of.
There is invariably a cause for a person's 'depression' — we live in a causative universe. The greater the 'depression' the more significant the material being depressed. This simple formula is so often disregarded by medical 'professionals'. And yet, in the realm of physics (which we inhabit), we know that certain rules have been established. As Newton's Third Law of Physics states:
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The task then, for our new generation of clinicians, and friends of survivors, is to support the process of remembering, on both an individual and societal level. This process of remembering threatens many powerful institutions who rely on societal amnesia and the blind indoctrination of 'tradition' to perpetuate their crimes. The greatest gift any human can give to our modern civilization is simply this: To stop pushing down; to remember; and to speak out.
You can read the next chapter of this book here.
Previously published sections:
1.0 Our village is sick
1.1 What is Mind control?
1.2 Engineered Ignorance of the Occult
1.3 The History of Mind Control
2.0, 2.1 Splitting and Spinning
2.2 Near-drowning
2.3 Live burials
2.4 Use of animals and insects
2.5 Association of creativity with pain
2.6 Use of electric shocks as a programming method
2.7 Ritual Murders and their Meaning
2.8 (Part I) Sexual morality, violence, and Power
2.8 (Part II) Sexual morality, violence, and Power
2.9 (Part I) Ritual abuse of babies and infanticide
2.9 (Part II) Ritual abuse of babies and infanticide
2.10 Masks and costumes as common features in trauma-based conditioning
2.11 Food deprivation as a popular technique used by mind-control programmers
2.12 Use of Drugs and Sedatives during Trauma-Based Mind Control
2.13 Use of Music in Trauma-Based Mind-Control programs)
2.14 Burning and Cutting in Trauma-Based Mind-control systems
2.15 Indicators of successful mind control
2.16 Splits in the internal-landscape of mind-control survivors
NOTE:
If you are reading this sometime in the distant future, please be aware that this is a draft chapter section from the book Secret Doors, Hidden Rooms: Understanding and Deprogramming Trauma-Based Mind-Control systems which may now be available as a complete and finished book. It will contain much more detail and an updated text. Try searching for it online.