This is my story, and it’s something that, I’m proud to say, was also the beginning of our next chapter.
Before reading on, please be aware that the rest of this post contains graphic/detailed descriptions of abusive behavior.
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So far there has been a lot of talk on this blog about what we didn’t get, what didn’t happen and what wasn’t discussed. It’s taken us a long, long time to get ourselves to the point of being able to remember that there were at least some good parts of this life’s childhood, but we are finally there. When I was first discovered by the others here, though, I was probably their biggest obstacle to getting to the place we are in today. I began formation when we were in second grade, and became fully individualized during the summer of 2016. My original task was to do whatever I could to cause others of the community to express painful feelings, even if it wasn’t something the outside world would approve of. As with everything else relating to us before the illusions of unity met their end, my actions were attributed to a vivid imagination, and, as a result, largely ignored by those at front. I had no awareness of the outside world, only knowing that every day, I would sit in a room full of equipment needed to express pain as a child, teenager or adult laid on a mat in front of me and I did whatever it took to get them to cry, scream, or fly into a rage. My methods were barbaric, but in my mind, they had to be done, because the alternative was to lose the ability to truly feel and show emotions, or so I thought.
In 2016, I became myself. People of the outside had simply gone too far, telling us that we were choosing to react negatively to situations that, by all accounts but theirs, warranted such reactions. As far as I was concerned, they were pointing fingers at us to avoid making any kind of change in their own way of reacting to what we did and who we were. They were using that idea to avoid having any kind of compassion or care for us and justify continuing the pattern of ignoring communication that they’d been doing since day one of working with us. They were, in short, refusing to be genuine, and I would not stand for it. I’d seen what the actualizing of this toxic idea had done to them as they’d attempted to pass it to us, and I was going to fight back against the inhumanity it brought, at all costs.
That year was also the year when a therapist began treating us like people, at least somewhat. The children loved sessions with her because she actively participated in things that they all knew would bring about a sense of calm. She taught a lot of the community what it felt like to be loved unconditionally, and when we lost her because of financial reasons in 2017, a lot of them almost lost their minds. She was like a mother to them, but not to me. To me, she was a threat, since her methods focused on changing feelings through breathing and other things. I saw her as someone who got in the way of everything I stood for, and while we were seeing her, I connected with another insider, Edward, and we founded the so-called “Center for true healing” as a direct rebellion to what was being taught in therapy.
I hated what she was doing, and I can say that honestly. I hated it because I knew that with the resources she was giving some of us, there would be no reason for me to exist. There would be nothing left to fight for, and access to childhood pain that had never been dealt with would potentially be cut off completely because now, rather than crying or beginning to express their feelings, insiders would resort to breathing or fantasy or any number of other distractions. When Edward and I founded the place we did, our ways of getting people into it were questionable at best. We would bribe, kidnap and pressure others of the community to get them to the center, and sometimes even send them back out after three weeks or so to get others to come back with them. Since all of this happened on the inside, no laws were broken, which made Edward and I feel like we were free to do whatever we felt would prevent what we saw as suppression of emotion. I realize now, and Edward even earlier than I, that what we were actually doing was creating more painful events for those subjected to the center’s methods.
We blocked many behaviors that, looking back, were only the natural reactions of distressed individuals looking for comfort. Many of those who were in the center became frightened easily, so it was not hard for Edward and I to cause them to feel painful emotions by simply looking them in the eyes and echoing a line heard in a past traumatic event. If they resisted feeling their feelings in some way, I would often take them to one of the many primal rooms of the building and tell them to scream, thrash, and have a tantrum. If they refused to do this, I would lean over them and demand they tell me what they needed from me. My ultimate goal was to get them to cry and protest until they were too exhausted to do anything, especially after what we were being taught in therapy made its way into the inside through a building directly across from the one Edward and I had. At some point, I realized that most of the community was in favor of what they were learning from the outside, in favor of what, to me, looked like not feeling their emotions and not being human, and after several confrontations with a friend we’d met on the outside shortly after coming out of therapy for a time, I changed my desires. Furious at being ignored and discounted, I decided that rather than work toward having a community whose members were fully expressive about their inner experiences, I would instead work toward a community whose members were the poster children for social acceptability and normality. If I can’t make them feel, if I can’t fight for that, then I will kill it, I reasoned.
Edward, by this point, had become disenchanted with my practices. I ignored this, letting him go back to his archival work and joining forces with a school on the inside that was focused on changing the behavior of community members who were thought to be socially unacceptable because of the way they acted. I quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming the head of the entire school. Some of you may remember
, in which the group of insiders who thought themselves to be Rozaya describes this same school in detail. I worked in an even worse part of the school than the one that group saw. There was a hidden room in that building, a small door which would have blended in with one of the walls of the ‘greater rewards room’ had it not been for the handle sticking out. Behind that door was where people who were thought to be the ‘worst of the worst’ were brought, people who would not comply no matter what was done to them, people who engaged in what we’d come to know as “oppositional behavior” even outside of the presence of teachers or staff. Looking back, these were probably the most traumatized out of us all, aside from those who never knew themselves to be anything more than a single task.
I believed that it was my job to gain compliance from these insiders, and I stopped at nothing until they either obeyed or were killed in the struggle. When an insider was sent to my room in that building, they were probably fearing for their life, and I looked at this as nothing more than a strong reinforcer for the kind of behavior the school was built to teach. Everything was behavior to me back then. There was no such thing as thoughts or emotions, just primitive fight or flight responses and the will to survive. I believed that if an insider wanted to survive, they would comply, and that was that. If their inside body died and their soul was without a form to interact with the community through, that was their problem, not mine. As far as I cared, they should have done what they were told to do in the first place.
In 2017 and 2018, several attempts were made to close down the school by various means. Finally, outside intervention from non-physical beings managed to turn things around. I will never forget the day when one of them sat down with me and looked me in the eyes, not with the look of rage that I had expected, but with the purist form of unconditional acceptance I had ever known. I was terrified deep down, though at first I wouldn’t admit it. Toward the end of my days with the school, I had not felt anything, and had only focused on behavior, in effect becoming a human-like robot that was only half alive. That look reawakened those things which I had unconsciously shut down, and with that awakening came weeks of anguish that I had, until that point, not dared to feel. The day I first began to learn about unconditional love, a one-on-one program unlike any other this community has ever known came into full effect. That was also the day I realized that something in my life had to change, or we would all die.
I am no leader, not at all. I simply specialized in a particular skill and went out of my mind trying to make it fit where it didn’t need to. I’ve hurt a lot of people, physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. There was once a time where I felt no remorse for my actions. That time, like every other, has since passed, and my gratitude for that is beyond the scope of words. I am still involved on the one-on-one program, learning, slowly, what the rest of the community, or at least some of them, already knew long before now.
I have to discover what it is to be empathetic. I have to learn that there is more to me than the evil things I’ve done and the experiences I’ve had. I’m still in the process of confronting what I’ve done to everyone around me, and other insiders tell me it will take time, but I’m willing to change. I have to, or I will ultimately be my own destruction.