I was 24 years old when it hit me for the first time. My children had been kidnapped by strangers, and we couldn't find them. I had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a state mental hospital. While I was there, I kept getting triggered. I hadn't realized that I'd been programmed to never talk, and when I had to talk about things to my therapist, I'd trip over a word and suddenly I was being tortured because I'd opened my mouth, then I'd "wake up" and find I was still in the mental hospital. I was there for two years. They finally did ECT until I had no memory of who I was. But it didn't wipe out the triggers that had been programmed into me by my family.
When I was about 9 years old, I'd run away from my uncle's home, and when the courts made me go back, I was taught to never, ever speak of what was being done. When I was 17 I was sold to one of my uncle's group, and married at 18, then, over the next two years had two children by him. If he hadn't been with me the night they were kidnapped I would swear it was the group who stole them. The only reason he bought me was to give him children, and I'd told him I didn't want more children by him. He was a bad father. I even went so far as to break into his mother's home to see if they were there. I called one of my foster brothers and had him take me to my uncle's house and I stayed there for days to see if he had the children. But it wasn't them.
(I found out last year my husband got them back while I was in the hospital and he and my father knew all these years but never told me. My ex-husband and father moved out of the state so I never found out.)
When my home was broken into in 1969 I flashed back to my early childhood, and from the abuse I was experiencing I floated on the ceiling watching everything for 3 days and nights. I got pregnant and staying in a dissociated state for a year. But during that time I married and had the child and was relatively happy for the first time. Then I got cancer, and once again, I flipped out. I stayed in a back and forth state for years. Doctor's had told me I was going to die, yet I lived. I had several more traumas after that, but none hit me as hard as that first time. All the others I just consider bad experiences.
Just this past October 6th, I got triggered by things my Uncle's group had brain washed me with. I only came back to myself a couple of days ago to recognize it. Intellectually, I could say what happened, but I wasn't totally back to who I am 100% until just the other day. Too much trauma can rule your life in so many different levels. Triggers that are programmed never can be defused, because they are subconscious. Even under hypnoses they can't discover all of them, because the training makes you not be able to speak of them. That why children of cults have a hard time being deprogrammed.
I've learned to live in all sorts of situations, and through all sorts of trials and traumas. But it has never been easy. It wasn't until 1986 that I finally got it together for the first time. And I'm still working on it today.
