If things in your life have gone round in a circle – maybe in a triangle - sometimes the direction changes to its opposite. Makes sense? Doesn’t make sense? Seems to happen though?
Search for ‘drama triangle’ or ‘aggressor victim rescuer’ or ‘perpetrator rescuer victim’ and you’ll get my drift.
Prompted into looking at someone’s work by other people’s scepticism, I went along to his talk, discovering it just before it took place. A friend and I had been going to another event but had both changed our minds. ‘There must be a reason for this’ I thought – something which has got me into a lot of trouble over the years.
Probably it’s the same dynamic that took me into ‘rescuing situations’ where I felt I was ‘meant to be’ doing something because it arose in front of my eyes. Vicious triangles, you name it and I was there defending anyone who seemed to need it.
I had just defended a colleague of the speaker that night, to someone on an email group who was critical without having checked any basic facts,. He did not reply to my ’reasoned argument’ either! The strange thing – to me – was that he and the person he criticised seemed to be working along similar lines. Do I never learn what makes things tick?
Finding myself the recipient of many texts and phone calls from someone I recently met, I asked my husband why this ‘kept happening’. ‘Because people are vying for your sole attention,’ he said. ‘Plus the fact you were an only child.’ He could have made a fortune with such impromptu gems.
For several years I had been ‘rescuing’ someone who was indeed the victim of a perpetrator, actually a group of them. I felt it important to do what I could, although latterly came to believe that sadly it was not going to work unless something else entered into the situation to change things.
Briefly the victim had been severely abused and her personality would switch through various modes, some quite distinct from each other. This used to be called MPD (multiple personality disorder), but the tendency now is to call it DID for dissociative identity disorder.
Some people get into a bind, saying it doesn’t happen, i.e. not everyone agrees it does (when is that not the case about anything?). Or there is a conceptual problem because DID is often linked to trauma, sometimes of ritual abuse or satanic ritual abuse, RA or SRA. No-one likes to think about those so there’s another ‘big issue’. People may suggest that DID doesn’t happen because RA or SRA don’t happen. Ergo, they argue, if one out of DID or SRA does not exist, the other one must be invalidated, lock stock and barrel.
But what if . . . ?
That’s where I enter the scene as ‘Lady What if’ - and more besides.
The speaker I referred to whose talk I was almost unaware of but somehow was not, gave a talk on his work as a clairvoyant and healer, and I do appreciate that not everyone thinks much of this and may be diametrically opposed. As he whizzed through various concepts, a brief reference to MPD flashed on the screen behind him and was gone.
My experience with emailing speakers after a talk is that generally nothing happens. Maybe stuff goes in their spam box and stands no chance. I waited till everyone asked questions, then mentioned my interest.
He hypothesised that in some scenarios, MPD or DID can involve archetypes which lie at the root of concepts or behaviours, which I think he was saying can become ‘stuck’. My interpretation in simple terms would be a model that someone emulates, and then getting ‘stuck in role’
I do not know if I am interpreting his words correctly or rather putting things in a way I can handle, that I feel there could be some validity to this approach, having considered some other theories available to me as working hypotheses.
It does not matter that I did not interpret it the way in which he meant, because it meant something to me at the time. If we are influenced sometimes or in some ways by myths, fairy tales, or whatever belief or theme attracts us for a while, this could reflect in our behaviour. It could be a one-off event or situation, or it could run through our lives as a recurring pattern. We may or may not be aware of it. If someone else points it out to us, perhaps we accept that interpretation, perhaps not.
Some people form groups with a particular ideology and call it Satanism or something else. Whatever it is, it may or may not involve Satanism and it may or may not involve cruelty and sadism.
My own working hypothesis is that ‘It’, ‘Things’, ‘Anything’ may happen totally in a physical sense, being enacted in a reality structure that is there for people to see, photograph, gain evidence from. Alternatively, could it also be that sometimes it is not 100 per cent physical, and that some is a scenario played out as a mental or emotional strategy? The aim would be to scare people, keep them under control, and confuse them and other people in the process.
Cilla’s Blog also touches on Shamanism, the Unseen, Symbols, Realities, Urban Legend & Ritual Abuse, and Social Dynamics of Ritual Abuse. I do think we need to look at things a bit differently or we won’t get anywhere that could be helpful to people.
Whenever someone tries to address these issues it can fall into a problematic pit, because not everything will fit every situation, or person, or experience. Does one stop trying to achieve something?
Some people – scientists even – think we live in a universe where we affect ‘reality’, how things actually are, and how they might become. That is out of my field, and you can find plenty of information on it in books and on the Internet.
Regarding archetypes and myths, again a lot of work has been done by psychotherapists, anthropologists, and people from other disciplines. Perhaps one of the problems is that we are different, each in our own ways. Someone like Jung can lay his theories out for us, and if they are not meaningful for us, then they are not. But other people may interpret them in some way that strikes a chord.
You may or may not think it possible that some people at least can reincarnate. You can find work by authors and therapists on this and related issues. My reason for mentioning the concept is that someone working as a Jungian therapist, writes that he has to deal with each person and their imagery individually, in a way that is meaningful for them.
Sometimes people make money from all kinds of concepts without recognised qualifications. Fashions in thinking can come and go over centuries with many of the same basic themes and controversies. I think there is a place for analysis and scepticism, but not to the exclusion of anything which could be helpful or valid for some people.
Dare I speculate that some of us are simply in-fighting over beliefs or ‘reality’ because of a relevant past life experience! We could be in one camp or the other because of something we believed before, or something we now choose the opposite of for some reason, perhaps someone we wish to identify with.
Sounds crazy? That does not matter at all
It takes the theme back to swings and roundabouts, reversals of direction, of emphasis, belief or action. I wonder about Catastrophe Theory, where events seem to go smoothly along a continuum and suddenly there is a kind of switchback effect. I believe that prisons have used this model to try to predict when an eruption of violent behaviour is likely to occur.
There’s a saying about it always being darkest before the dawn, as if whoever said it knew a thing or two about life’s rich mysteries and dynamics. The I-Ching takes into account changing lines, which cater for this aspect of existence.
In the last 25 years or so there have been swings in belief and massive increases in the amount of information available to people, with access to the Internet particularly but also in TV and other media. Where there used to be a few different Tarot packs there are now many more in a wide range of styles. But many of them reflect the original designs and concepts based on the same archetypal concepts.
I have known people with no prior experience of working with archetypes or tarot cards, virtually pick up a pack and start giving meaningful readings. For other people including myself, they never found anything that really clicks with them to get to first base, which does not of itself invalidate the concepts or processes involved in gaining insight.
Some people theorise that tarot cards represent all the different types of personality and all types of event that can happen during life’s struggles, and this seems to make more sense than attempting to tie people into one of just a few categories.
These days, whether people are drawn to tarot, astrology, past lives, or any other approach, more of us are in some way aware of what the concepts relate to, such as sun signs and personality, or what the Hanged Man card may mean.
I wonder whether -
The phenomenon of ritual abuse or SRA occurring towards the end of the last century could be a particular phase that humanity is experiencing, with relevance to the path through the tarot, where it gets to the card of ‘the Devil’. Clearly not all people are undergoing the same things, and I mean this in relation to those for whom it is their path to be involved in some way.
When people experience ritual abuse or SRA from the point of view of being victims, they would be at one point of the dramatic triangle of perpetrator/victim/rescuer, and one can see where the other people are around that particular triangle.
My concluding questions at this time, i.e. my ’reality for today’, relate to:
If there is a theme running through of the ‘poor victim’ needing help against ‘the horrible person’ or ‘people‘, that is a ‘myth’ we could be living by, in whichever setting we are doing that.
In a ritual abuse or SRA scenario, whatever other factors may be involved, there could be a ‘myth’ being lived out in a literal or symbolic sense.
Vulnerable people are like the child victims in the wood who go where they think it is safe but end up with a wicked-witch archetype who ‘gets away with it’. There is no-one to believe in the children, and no-one to help them.
Anyone attempting to help would get swiped at.
What myth or myths are any of us living out if we are involved, in whatever ways that we are?
There are people who do not come across these situations, are not affected by them and do not become interested.
There are people who take the role of detractors, making it their business to proclaim that such things have not happened. The inference to be drawn presumably would be that they do not happen, will not happen, cannot happen.
I am not sure where that fits into the drama triangle. Perhaps it just adds another corner making the figure into a square. Square it all off? Invalidate it? Round it off and what the heck?
The problem is that those who are not involved can find themselves believing the so-called ‘non-believers’ - who may not actually be ‘non-believers’.
And the ‘perpetrators’ may not actually be ‘non-perpetrators’, and they could be let off-the-hook through a thesis that ‘it doesn’t happen’.
That would not be a nice ‘myth’ to look forward to
Would it ?
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Note from Cilla:
You can visit Magentine's site - see the above link - or leave a message in this section addressed for her attention.
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Would it ?
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Note from Cilla:
You can visit Magentine's site - see the above link - or leave a message in this section addressed for her attention.
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