RITUAL ABUSE

AND

OTHER ACTS OF LOVE

BY

ELSPETH LIBERTY

The front cover art is by kind permission of Rebecca Arman and is
copyright. This is the picture I refer to regularly throughout the book.

Many people were gracious enough to allow me to use their real
names in the telling of my story. Some names have been changed
and some people are a composite in order to protect individual
privacy.

The poem “I Built My House By The Sea” is by Sr. Carol Bieleck, RSCJ.
I was unable to contact her to ask permission to use this poem.
Please contact me if you have an address for her.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love by
Elspeth Liberty is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No

Derivs 3.0 Unported License. For more information go to
www.creativecommons.org.au

ISBN: 978-0-646-55065-7

For more copies or to download this book in pdf please go to
elspethliberty.com.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 3

To Susan, John, Annette and Pushkin.

Each of you has shown me love

and enriched my life in your own unique way.

My deepest thanks.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 4

The Los Angeles County Commission for Women defines Ritual

Abuse as: A brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults,
consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving
the use of rituals. Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However,
most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic
worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and
practices. Ritual abuse rarely consists of a single episode. It usually
involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time.

The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and

killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, sadistic, and humiliating,
intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The
psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of
ritual/indoctrination, which includes mind control techniques and
mind altering drugs, and ritual/intimidation which conveys to the
victim a profound terror of the cult members and of the evil spirits
they believe cult members can command. Both during and after the
abuse, most victims are in a state of terror, mind control, and
dissociation in which disclosure is exceedingly difficult.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 5

CHAPTER ONE

O

n the wall of my sun-room is a wonderful, moody, abstract

seascape. It is made up of layer upon layer of paints. A wild abundance
of shapes and colours. Sometimes these colours merge together, other
times there are squiggles and squirts of paint that rise above the
general height of the painting. Some parts are enhanced by a thick
glaze and in other places the paint has been scraped back to the
canvas. These layers, and the light of the room, adds to the ever-
changing feel of the work. It has been a metaphor for me over the last
couple of years as I have worked on my manuscript, adding texture
and depth, scraping back, allowing memories to emerge higgledy-
piggledy, some blending with existing colours while others stand bold
and distinct. I try to make sense of them all.

I've written them all down, these memories of mine, and have

them lined up in chronological order like a row of beans, waiting to be
topped and tailed, to be part of an exciting, exotic and flavoursome
dish. I am proud of this work, the time I have put into remembering,
writing, going back into the extremes, the drama of my life.

The view from my window never ceases to thrill me. I overlook

Bass Strait so the seascape outside has even more moods and colours
than the one inside. The sky's colour ranges from the dramatic, vibrant
red and gold of the bursting sunrise; to the myriad muted mauves,
pinks, lilacs and silvers of evening; to the heavy, oppressive grey of
imminent rain. The sea changes from scintillating in the sunlight; to a
smooth surface that looks as if it should issue an invitation for ice
skaters to twirl, swirl and dance; to tumbling, roaring, troubled and
wild.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 6

Today is a crisp autumn day, the smell of salt comes in through

the open window and the park and surrounding hills are returning to
verdant green now that summer has almost let go her hold. The fruit
trees and weeping cherry have not started to lose their leaves but
there is just enough hint of autumn for my spirits to rise. There is a joy
that moves into my hips and legs, the cooler weather promises long
walks along the beach, windswept hair, salt spray, a wild ocean and
two dogs, heads bowed against the sand and wind, wondering why on
earth I have taken them away from their warm and comfortably
cushioned chairs.

Autumn in rural Tasmania, my favourite time of year. Ten years

I've been here now and I thank the breakup of my second marriage for
prompting my escape from inner-western Sydney with its pollution,
busyness, humidity, barrage of advertising, and bigness. A population
here of six thousand including the hinterland suits me just fine.

How strange it is to be content with this idyllic life, the bright lights

of the city hold no allure – they broke their promise to me long ago.

My move from Wollongong to Kings Cross was both a running away
from and a being drawn towards. Running away from a failed
marriage, my parents, and friends who were becoming increasingly
concerned about my drug-taking.

I was drawn towards the promise of bright lights: excitement, a

bohemian existence, philosophical conversations, bars that stayed
open until dawn and a whirlwind of social activity that would keep me
spinning above my heartache and loneliness.

I had married at eighteen to escape from home, having no idea it was
possible to get a job and a flat by myself. My parents saw themselves
as upper-middle-class. My mother viewed herself as a cut above most
people she met, my father considered the majority of the population
stupid. Marrying a wharfie's son who was on an invalid pension was
my rebellion.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 7

I met Steve at a party. He was sitting in a bamboo chair that hung

from the ceiling, he was climbing up the wall and back down again. I
thought he looked lonely. He was stoned. I was fifteen, he was twenty-
one. Steve was my first boyfriend. To begin with we had a lot of fun
together. He had a great sense of humour and we went to many
interesting parties where there was an eclectic mix of people, wearing
some of the most amazing clothes I had ever seen. I remember a guy
who would swan in wearing the most stunning dresses made up of all
different coloured patches of soft and shimmery fabric. He made the
dresses himself and they had a train, or varied hemline or dramatic
sleeves that he swished and swirled all around him. He wore masses of
silver filigree jewellery, and usually waved a lace handkerchief around
as he moved in a cloud of patchouli oil. That was Jeremy. I thought he
was utterly gorgeous. Everyone was older than me, many were at
university and there were always discussions on philosophy, literature,
fashion as art, the meaning of life and religion.

Not long after Steve and I consummated our relationship I was

worried about pregnancy and my parents' reaction. Steve said that if I
was pregnant he would marry me. Unfortunately, neither of us knew
how to get out of that proposal once there was no pregnancy. I could
not believe he wanted to marry me and acted out in all sorts of ways,
trying to prove he didn't love me, didn't care, didn't want to be with
me. I would frequently burst into floods of tears that left us both
bemused, confused and guilty. I would throw my engagement ring
back in his face and walk away saying it was all over, I was leaving him
before he could leave me. He did his best to reassure me but it was
impossible.

Since becoming a teenager I had struggled with life. I would cry or

curl up in a ball of depression and despair wishing my life would end,
that the earth would open up and consume me. I constantly thought of
death, hated my life and considered myself fat, ugly and unlovable. I
was sure my friends secretly hated me and could never trust their
friendship or loyalty. Earlier that year my parents sent me to see the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 8

school counsellor and when that failed they took me to see a
psychiatrist. He prescribed Stelazine, an anti-psychotic medication also
used for non-psychotic anxiety. It didn't help.

My parents opposition to our marriage was a source of pleasure to

me. I would do anything to hurt and upset them. I also wanted to
escape from them. Steve was my ticket to freedom, I knew no other
way. My parents had insisted we wait until I was eighteen before we
could marry. As the time drew near I knew I was making a huge
mistake. Our sex life had dwindled to non-existent. There was more
angst and arguments than good times and I did not want to marry him
but had no idea how to stop the wedding. It was a big white wedding
with all the trimmings. It seemed to have taken on a life of its own. As I
was agonising about this my parents suddenly went into panic mode.
They had stood back for a while knowing opposition would fuel my
determination but now they started to fear I really would marry him.
My father took me aside and told me I was killing my mother by
planning to go ahead with this marriage. My mother took me aside and
begged me to see sense because it was such a scandal, I was
embarrassing my father, and how would he ever be able to hold up his
head again. That was all it took for me to become determined to go
ahead.

The marriage lasted three years during which time Steve trained as

a metallurgist and got a good job with BHP. I was working for a bank,
my second job since leaving school. There were some fun times, great
holidays and firm friendships. And my crumbling emotional and
mental health.

I had an insatiable need to know I was loved while being completely

incapable of believing anyone could care for me. Steve was a good,
kind man without a shred of violence in him. My emotional fragility
and mental instability were way beyond his ability to understand or
deal with. I was desperately unhappy with no idea why. I was
disintegrating. I consistently tried to make Steve responsible for my life
and happiness.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 9

As the marriage fell apart I started drinking heavily. Steve worked

shift work and I developed separation anxiety. I would beg him not to
go to work, to not leave me. I would ring him at work sobbing for him
to come home because I was going crazy, convinced he was going to
leave me and I would die without him. How could anyone stay with
someone as revolting as me? We sought marriage counselling. Her
advice was that we separate. The counselling itself was unremarkable.
However, in one of life's strange twists, this woman was to play a role
in my life at a later date.

Steve was broken-hearted when I left. He had done nothing wrong

but had been unable to take away my pain. He did his best, but there
was no way it was going to work.

I moved back to my parent's place. That was a mistake of gigantic

proportions. If I had been unhappy there before, returning was now a
total disaster. My drinking was steadily increasing and I was consumed
with sadness and guilt over my failed marriage. I went to see the
mother of a friend of mine. Yvette worked at the local drug and alcohol
clinic. I didn't want help to stop drinking, I needed a supportive,
listening ear. Something she offered me on several occasions.

The home situation was untenable and could only be endured with

the anaesthetising effects of alcohol and hash. I now had a boring job
at a finance company. This too, could only be endured if stoned.
Breakfast, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea were always hash, in
the evenings it was mixed with alcohol.

I went out drinking every night. If I arrived home and the lights were

still on I would drive off and find another bar. One result of this
behaviour was I had sex with a lot of men I had no interest in. I was
trying to prove to myself that the lack of sex in my marriage to Steve
was not my fault. All I proved was my ability to have sex with a variety
of men, contributing to my growing self-hatred and despair.

My parents, understandably, were not happy with my lifestyle. I

would often arrive home with no idea where I had been or where my
car was. Many was the time my mother would open the door to a

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 10

complete stranger who was returning my car and keys. It is amazing I
was not raped or my car stolen.

I found a bar where I felt comfortable and got to know the staff.

They started to watch out for me, driving me home when I was too
drunk and protecting me from my worst excesses. Many of the staff
were gay and they would go out partying at the end of their shift. They
invited me to come along too. This was my introduction to the
Wollongong gay scene. I loved both the high drama of being with a
bunch of queens and dykes who were always in ecstasy or despair
about their relationships, and the glitz and glamour of the drag scene.
I'm a drama queen from way back so thrived on the exuberance,
intensity, humour and melodrama. There was something about a
screaming queen in full flight that warmed the cockles of my heart. It
was at one of these parties a queen first introduced me to
barbiturates, a relationship that blossomed. As far as blotting out the
pain went they were quick, cheap and effective. It was 1978 and a
hundred Seconal cost $2.50, courtesy of the Pharmaceutical Benefit
Scheme.

Some of the gay guys loved nothing more than getting all glammed

up in stunning evening gowns and strutting their stuff, a pastime that
found little acceptance in the rural/urban municipality of Wollongong.
It amazed me just how stunningly beautiful these guys could look. They
would spend hours on their hair and make-up. They would shave their
legs, manicure and paint their nails, and tuck a box full of tissues into
each bra, back then no one had heard of using chicken fillets for a
more natural look. They had the figure, style and grace to enter a room
and turn heads. They looked magnificent. I was the ugly step-sister; no
make-up, hairy legs and wearing Indian skirts and cheesecloth tops.
Glamour was never my style.

Often at the weekend we would head up to Sydney's Oxford Street

with its gay bars, or hang out around Kings Cross. It was through this I
made friends in Sydney. One night three of us decided to go to Les
Girls, the famous, or is that infamous, all-male revue theatre

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 11

restaurant. As we walked up the stairs a couple of plain-clothes
detectives were walking down. They made some disparaging remark
about the guy in my company, he replied in kind. Next thing he was
thrown down the stairs, bashed and shoved into the back of an
unmarked car. I was gobsmacked. Appalled. What was going on? I did
not understand. I asked the woman I was with. Her explanation “he's
gay”. That was my first experience of someone being victimised purely
on the basis of their sexual orientation. I was outraged. Furious. All set
to make a complaint. To report the police involved. Tell the story to the
newspapers. Do something!!! Anything!!! This, my friend informed me,
was part and parcel of being gay. There was no point in making a fuss,
that would just ensure more abuse. You just had to cop it sweet.

Up to this point I'd not given any thought to the fact that some of

my friends were gay. It was just how it was, it made no difference to
me at all, except I felt safe around gay guys. In the light of this incident
I made a decision. I chose to have gay friends, to see them as my
equals in every way and just accept them for who they were. This was a
political decision. I considered violence against people on the basis of
their sexual orientation to be wrong. I was prepared to stand up and
be counted.

I expected life in Sydney to be one long party, every night would be a
Friday or Saturday night. Drugs and alcohol were my social lubricants.
Barbiturates, amyl nitrite, speed; I was willing to try anything and
everything but my natural inclination was towards things that slowed
me down and bombed me out rather than sped me up or intensified
my reality. Reality certainly was not to be intensified; by combining
barbiturates and Southern Comfort I could reach a state of blackout.
That was my preferred condition. In that state there was no pain, no
thinking, no asking all the

WHY? questions about my life.

On a busy night Kings Cross and Oxford Street would be bulging at

the seams. Nothing and no one was out of place. Tourists gaped wide-
eyed at prostitutes, pushers and pimps. People came in from the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 12

suburbs by the beer-soaked mini-bus load. There was every possible
sexual orientation and expression, some wildly exotic, others sad and
unconvincing. Most people were out to have a good time. Many were
looking for drugs or sex of many varied kinds, or both. Free or paid for.
The bars were packed and the coffee shops buzzed with philosophical
conversations and discussion. Sex, drugs, art, theatre and music
pulsated through the streets with vibrant life, colour and diversity. This
was why I was here.

On a quiet night, or during the day, it was easier to see the Cross's

seedier side. The women standing on corners waiting for a trick so they
could earn enough money to buy their drugs. The pushers selling
heroin and speed, and the addicts strung out. The older men cruising
for boys and the drag queens and transvestites looking for love, or at
least acceptance. I would sit in a coffee shop or bar and watch the
workers, timing how long it took them to be back on their corner after
leaving with some guy, to fulfil whatever sexual fantasy he wanted to
enact that day. I would watch the young gay guys work

the wall at

Green Park and check out glamorous women trying to figure out if they
were actually men.

I wandered these streets in various states of consciousness and

with greater or lesser ability to stay upright due to the barbiturates
which made me belligerent and prone to falling over. What I wanted
was to be part of the bohemian lifestyle, the intelligentsia. In reality I
was an opinionated twenty-one year old whose world was spinning out
of control. I was falling apart and had no idea why.

I rented a bed-sit in Orwell Street. It was in the back streets of

Kings Cross. There was always garbage in the streets and empty bottles
and drunks. I feared discovering a body slumped in a doorway, either
overdosed or stabbed, with rats feasting on it. The bed-sit was two
doors up from the Venus Rooms, with its tawdry lights, promises of
sexual gratification and sale of many and varied accoutrements that
came out in plain, brown envelopes or paper bags. The flat was small,
grimy and dingy. It was also unbearably hot and humid. It offered

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 13

accommodation to giant cockroaches. I would walk in at night, turn the
light on, and the kitchen bench and stove-top would be heaving; a
seething mass of black life, scurrying away from the light. It was a dark
and depressing place that mirrored something deep inside me that I
didn't want to see. I was there as little as possible.

There was something about being in a bar, by myself, on a Monday
night. It was flat, empty and stale with lingering smells of alcohol,
semen, vomit and urine. It was like a ghost town. All the excitement,
the buzz, the noise, were nothing but a shadow, a memory, with the
music turned down. There were only a few desolate people propping
up the bar and I suspected that only those sad and lonely souls who
couldn't stand being at home alone were out, desperately searching for
something or someone to fill the gnawing emptiness inside them. They
had admitted me to their ranks. This was not how it was meant to be. A
gaping black hole opened before me. If there was a God he certainly
didn't hang out in this neighbourhood. This was hell.

I sat at the bar feeling miserable and dejected. In two weeks

Christmas would be upon me with all the expectations of children,
families, laughter, belonging and love. Christmas carols started to play.
The reality of my life broke in on me. I was twenty-one, did not get on
with my parents, had no one who knew and understood me, was living
in a hovel in Kings Cross, using a

shitload of drugs and alcohol and was

facing Christmas alone. What a woeful summing up of my life. Tears
began to flow.

Having a customer sitting at your bar sobbing is not good for

business, especially at Christmas. The drag queen who ran the bar did
her best to comfort me but basically she was saying: “Laugh and the
world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone”. It was fine for me to be
there, out of it on drugs, being the life and soul of the party, telling
funny stories and dancing the night away. But drop the façade and I
was bad for business.

I left the bar about 2.00 a.m., collected my car and headed for

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 14

Wollongong. That was the place I still called home. Driving, I continued
to think of everything that was wrong with my life. How I had walked
out on my marriage to a good, decent guy. I could no longer stay, not
because of him, but because of me. I was unhappy, empty, lonely and
running away from myself and my demons as fast as I could but had
no idea where to run.

Life was bleak and empty.
I put my foot on the accelerator.
And drove through the deserted streets of Sydney at breakneck

speed feeling wired, as if a current was running through me; I was
going to explode any second. If I did there would be shit everywhere.
All that was foul, putrid and wrong with my life would splatter all over
me and everything around me. I tried to outrun it.

One option when driving between Sydney and Wollongong is via

the National Park. I took this road seeking solace from nature, wanting
to escape the blare of neon lights and advertising along the Princes
Highway. I was too far gone to allow any healing to seep into my soul
that night. I drove fast to avoid exploding. I felt pursued. The faster I
went the hotter the breath on the back of my neck. Faster and faster;
not caring which side of the road I was on. Screaming around a tight
bend on the wrong side of the road the oncoming car was doing the
same thing. Had we collided death would have been instantaneous. I
burst into tears of angry disappointment.

At the other side of the National Park there is a steep descent to

the coast, Bulli Pass. It is advisable to go down in low gear. I went
down in top, all the way and arrived at my old place about three-
quarters of an hour after leaving Sydney. To my bitter disappointment
I was still in one piece.

The demons caught me. I fell apart.

Sunlight glitters on the panes of glass, dazzling me like the city lights
did on that wild, suicidal ride all those years ago. Shards of shadow,
like the broken dreams of Kings Cross point across the floor to the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 15

afternoon sun, reminding me of where I sit. The sudden release of my
breath filling my ears, I push my chair back and gaze around me.

The seascape is full of the chaos of shapes and colours, of tumult

and wildness. Looking closely I find demons hiding in those pounding
colours. Slowly they recede as I engage with the tranquillity of my
present day life.

Through my window is a breathless, calm day; there is not a puff

of wind anywhere. The trees are perfectly still. The ocean a sheet of
glass. Not a skerrick of movement, no sign of wind, wave or swell.

It is one of the many times my heart fills with gratitude for the

beautiful safe haven that is now my life.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 16

CHAPTER TWO

I

t is dark outside. Tonight I cannot see the ocean, or even hear it.

There are no stars, no moon, just the blackness of the sky after a sun-
filled autumn day. But there is promise. The promise of a blank, empty
canvas stretching across the heavens. It has been a clear day, the stars
will come.

The suicidal drive from Sydney the night before had shaken me, my life
was careering out of control and I needed help. I decided to talk to
Yvette, see if she could help me sort things out and get back on track. I
headed to the drug and alcohol centre engulfed in darkness and
despair, searching for any sign of hope or promise. The centre was
located on the fringe of Wollongong's CBD, in an old house with high
ceilings. There was a large backyard with a shady tree with a table and
chairs underneath. It was a pleasant place to sit.

The receptionist looked up as I walked in, drew in her breath and

said, “Oh my God!”

She picked up the phone, buzzed through to Yvette and said

“Elspeth is here to see you. I think you'd better get out here, NOW.”
Obviously, I was not looking my best.

Yvette came out, took one look at me and said “What on earth

have you done to yourself?” I must have looked as bad as I felt.

Yvette turned to the receptionist and said “Call Gary, tell him to get

here as soon as he possibly can.” Gary was the doctor attached to the
centre. I was beginning to feel scared. Yvette looked at me again and
her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh, my dear friend, what on earth has
happened?” she asked as she took me in her arms and held me. That
was a mistake. The tenderness in her voice and touch undid me. I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 17

started to cry, and cry, and cry, and then cry some more. In fact I was
still crying some forty minutes later when Gary arrived.

He examined me. I was a mess. A big mess. I was covered in

bruises. Had burns over my fingers where I hadn't noticed my
cigarettes burning. My heart was racing. I had a dreadful cough and I
was malnourished. And that was just my physical condition. I was also
hearing voices.

Yvette came up with a plan. First and foremost - detox. There were

two choices: the psychiatric ward of the local hospital, or a nursing
home where the centre had access to a couple of beds. Yvette
suggested the nursing home. She thought the psych ward might be
reluctant to let me go. After detox she would arrange a move to a
residential counselling centre.

I was willing to do whatever she suggested. I was shattering into

thousands of pieces. My heart was breaking, my mind was bending,
and there was a cast of thousands issuing a running commentary
inside my head. I had no idea of the way forward, what was wrong, or
why. I was desperately disappointed at having arrived back from
Sydney in one piece but would not have described myself as actively
suicidal. I felt achingly empty, misunderstood, different; I had no right
to exist.

Yvette decided to take me to the detox centre personally. She

knew my parents and felt we should call there first to let them know
what was happening. They were both horrified by the sight of me. My
father came towards me with his arms outstretched, saying “Oh my
God, what have I done to you?”

I started to scream, then cowered behind Yvette whimpering

“Don't let him touch me, don't let him near me”.

My father looked shattered. I was appalled. Why did I react like

that?

That scene haunted me for years.

If you had asked me about my childhood when I was twenty-two I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 18

would have assured you it had been OK, not great, but OK, unaware
that a broken marriage and problems with drugs and alcohol were
indicators all had not been well. Then as truth and memory started to
break into dissociation and repression something other than a happy
childhood started to emerge.

It was time to commence the journey of healing. If I'd had the

vaguest inkling of what was in store for me, the intense darkness I
would have to plumb, the reasons for my behaviour and mental
instability, I would have run screaming off to the nearest bottle or pill
determined to avoid it at all costs. But we cannot afford not to know
our past... however evil it may have been.

The nursing home, with a small detox section, was located in Thirroul,
north of Wollongong. It was perched on top of a hill overlooking the
suburb, the shopping precinct and the ocean. It was a forty-two bed
hospital. When I walked in forty of these beds were occupied by people
over seventy. I was given a private room.

If detox was hard, stopping running was even harder. My head

swirled with words and images. There was a chasm inside me. It
wanted to swallow me whole; if it did I would go mad and never re-
emerge. Its siren call was ceaseless. There were voices which taunted
me with accusations about my worth, my body, my mind and my right
to exist. I was inhabiting my own particular version of hell. I longed for
silence and would have welcomed death.

The forty-first bed was occupied by Dave who was coming off

long-term heroin addiction and had been using methadone for many
years. He was struggling too, yet somehow he seemed to be less
fragmented, more at peace. We spent a lot of time together.

It turned out he was a Christian – he offered Christianity as a

solution for my life. My first reaction was scorn and derision. “Yeah,
right. I don't think so.” But I was in no position to bargain. I had no
idea about my direction or purpose.

I knew a bit about Christianity. I'd had a teacher in primary school

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 19

who had been a Christian - an active, evangelical, try to save you, ram it
down your throat kind of Christian. I'd become a Christian in self-
defence but it didn't stick. However, the youth group I'd been a part of
as a teenager was run by people who were kind and fun and the group
was somewhere to go that wasn't home. Some of the leaders had
teased, stirred and cracked jokes; they had made fun of me but in a
way that left me feeling OK. There were leaders who had given me a
hug and that was all. Just a hug. Nothing sleazy, slimy or complicated.
God didn't seem to play a huge part in any of my involvement with
Christians but there were enough positive memories for me to be
willing to give it a go.

And now? What else could I do? I couldn't come up with a better

option and something had to give.

I told God about the awful mess of my life and how I needed help,

and lots of it. It was the honesty of desperation. And things changed.
The depth of my darkness lightened a little. My incredible despair
lessened slightly. The huge dark hole wasn't as black, deep or
overpowering. I wasn't quite so unbearably, unutterably alone. I felt
there was something other than me that was there to stop me from
being overwhelmed, to prevent me from drowning. None of my
problems were solved, nothing was miraculously changed but
sometimes I sensed God in the midst of it all. Instead of the future
being endless despair and blackness I now felt I might be able to figure
out where the next step was. There was a glimmer of hope, of light.

In the corner of my eye it winks at me, the evening star, the first star of
night. With tired eyes I stare at my work, the too-bright screen telling
me where it all started, the great religious conversion that changed the
course of my life. Two twenty-somethings in a home for the aged. That
willingness to open up to God, to ask for help, was to become the
background colour, no, the dominant colour of my life, everything was
influenced by that decision. When I asked for help God entered my life.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 20

To this day I believe that without that decision, without God, I would
have killed myself, overdosed or died of despair.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 21

CHAPTER THREE

I

t was a glorious dawn this morning. It seemed to explode with joy. An

unabashed strip of gold streaked across the horizon, the clouds
tumbled with delight in their vivacious shades of crimson, scarlet and
vermilion. The colours intensified to a point of uncontainable,
exuberant brilliance. Then, as the sun rose above the sea, they started
to fade and recede into their everyday beauty.

I was in the nursing home over Christmas which was depressing and
lonely. Yvette came to visit me a few times and would encourage me to
stay and continue to detox. She understood how difficult this was and
knew the despair I felt about my life. When I told her I had become a
Christian she dared to hope this would make a difference in my life,
that it would provide me with something to hang onto which would
make my life seem worthwhile. We talked about the options that were
available once I left the nursing home and decided I would go to a
Christian rehabilitation centre on the Hawkesbury River.

My detox was under medical supervision with medication to help

the withdrawal process. After ten days the physical withdrawal was
complete and the staff encouraged Dave and me to go into town for an
outing. We ended up at the pub, got pissed and arrived back at the
nursing home in high spirits, laughing, joking and creating a
disturbance. The staff were not impressed. It was time to leave.

When I left the nursing home I had completed the physical

withdrawal from drug and alcohol but now I had to face life without
the help prescribed by the doctor or the drugs and alcohol I had been
using to medicate myself. This was a challenge. I was still
psychologically in need of mood altering substances. My mind would

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 22

not stay still and I pulsated with pent-up energy that I had no idea how
to control. I felt an electric current of discontent pulsate through me.

The counselling centre was way out in the bush and I was the only

resident. I spent my time reading, thinking and listening to tapes but
found the isolation difficult. The people who ran the place decided I
needed significantly more help than they were able to give me and said
they would investigate different options. I rang Yvette and asked her to
do likewise. She suggested two possibilities. One was Ward One of
Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital, an experimental ward with a self-
referred, live-in programme. The other was a Christian counselling
community, at Maraylya on the Cattai River north-west of Sydney.
While Yvette was concerned that sending me to a psychiatric ward was
not a good idea, Ward One was reputed to be very different from
mainstream psychiatric institutions. I decided to check them both out.

The centre was owned and run by a couple named David and Marie.
David was a charismatic man with an obvious love of people. He was
tall, about six foot, deeply tanned and solid. He had long, grey hair and
laughing eyes. He wore stubbies, blue singlet, an Akubra hat and his
feet were bare; his hands were big, strong and dirt-encrusted. He
showed me around the seventy-three acres of the property. His love of
the place was obvious. We chatted easily, although at times he probed
in ways I found personal and intrusive. I told him about becoming a
Christian and said I had many questions. He infuriated me by saying
we could talk about them once I was staying there. That was an
arrogant assumption on his part! I hadn't decided to come as yet. In
fact, by the time we had finished the tour, I was pretty sure this was
not the place for me. The appointment with Ward One would be kept.
As I left I wound my car window down to say goodbye, David kissed his
thumb and placed it on the tip of my nose, saying “See you soon,
honey-child”. How dare he!!! I was outraged... and enchanted. I was not
going there!

It's hard to describe what that farewell did to me. It certainly

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 23

opened up a place in my closed and aching heart. There was obvious
love in his tone, manner and action. I was shit-scared of love but that
kiss on the nose bypassed many of my defences. It went straight to the
heart of the lonely, lovelorn child within. For reasons I could not
fathom I felt an inexplicable warmth, a flicker of joy and hope. “Honey-
child” he had called me, that was new. As much as I tried for disdain I
couldn't do it. I had caught a glimpse of something I liked. And I liked
him.

As I drove away a battle raged inside me. This did not seem a safe

place. My internal voices warned me to have nothing to do with David.

“Don't go there!!”
But that farewell kiss played over and over again.
“He seems like a nice guy.”
“Don't go there!”
“He's a Christian, that will be good.”
“He's not safe, not to be trusted.”
“Don't be an idiot, you can't possibly trust someone like him.”
“He's a counsellor, counselling would be a good thing.”
“Don't go there!!”
Into my battling mind dropped what I believed was the voice of

God. “That's where I want you to go”. I struggled against that voice yet
wanted to obey. It was an hour's drive back to where I was staying on
the Hawkesbury River and by the time I returned the battle was over. I
was going to Maraylya.

The centre at Maraylya was an old church camp. It was in the bush and
on the side of a river. The main buildings were on the top of a hill,
separated by outcrops of sandstone. There was a track that led
through the bush, down to the pasture where the cattle grazed
alongside the river. The property relied on a generator for its
electricity. Water for showers and toilets was pumped up from the
river, hot water was supplied by wood stoked into a furnace and
drinking water was collected in tanks. A big hut served as the dining

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 24

room, lounge room, group room and David and Marie's living quarters.
Next to this was a smaller hut that contained a simple kitchen. There
were another three buildings: one was the counselling room and office
and the other two were each divided into three residents' rooms. The
showers and toilets were separate from the living quarters, about fifty
metres, not far, but inconvenient at night or when it was cold or wet.
David and Marie were in the process of building a house for
themselves.

For the first four weeks I was the only resident and got a lot of

individual attention. Initially David didn’t do any formal counselling, I
was too fragile. He spent hours getting to know me, gaining my trust,
talking to me about God, Jesus and the Bible. We would sit up till all
hours of the night having long discussions. I wanted to understand
God's love, forgiveness and the purpose of Jesus' death. These were
concepts I had heard before but had not paid particular attention to. I
found church services contained language I did not understand, words
like

grace, redemption, salvation and sanctification seemed to be

clichés I could not fathom. I felt sure they were words that contained
deep truths but I was unable to unlock them. And then there was
eternal life, all I could ever manage to envisage was a continuation of
my miserable life here on earth. If Christianity was offering eternal life
I would pass, thank you. I needed to tussle with everything. Just
because it was in the Bible didn’t make it right. There were things I
strongly disagreed with - the teaching on homosexuality for example,
that was obviously wrong. I also wanted to know why I was here. What
was God like? Who was Jesus? How did this whole Jesus as the Son of
God thing work? Was God some kind of sadist who put us here to
suffer? Why was there evil in the world? What was my purpose? Why
was I so crazy? So unhappy? What were all the voices in my head? Did
God have a plan for me? I bombarded David with all these questions.
Some he answered, others he referred on to God saying God and I
would have to work that out together.

Counselling with David was intense. My previous experience with

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 25

the school counsellor and psychiatrist at fifteen felt light-weight
compared to David. I felt he was plumbing the very depths of my soul.
I tried to protect myself from David's intrusions, at the same time
knowing I needed his skill and help. I was vulnerable, in pain and had
no self-awareness. David offered hope.

It was at Maraylya I first discovered Transactional Analysis (TA).

This was the therapeutic approach David used for counselling. Here
were tools to make some sense of my life. It was exciting. It helped
answer some of my

why questions and taught me skills to look at

myself, how I related with others and how to take some responsibility
for myself. I wasn't quite so powerless. I devoured all the books David
had on TA.

One of the things TA partially explained were the voices in my

head. TA divides the personality into Parent, Adult and Child ego states
and describes how each ego state has its own coherent system of
thoughts, feelings and behaviour patterns. The Parent ego state stores
all the information we have received about how to be in the world,
what the rules are, how we are meant to behave. It contains both
critical and nurturing messages and I would often hear these played
loudly, clearly and in contradiction. The Adult ego state is the rational,
thinking part of the personality that assesses data and makes
reasonable decisions. The Child ego state is the feeling part, it
responds with freedom and delight, or anger and fear. This ego state
learns how to adapt to the world in order to survive. The voice of my
Child ego state was heard in my needs, fears and insecurities, and in its
response to the often vitriolic attacks from my Parent ego state.

This knowledge helped me make sense of the fights that so often

raged inside me. It didn't stop the voices but it did normalise them. I
began to understand that everyone had voices inside their head, that
these were made up of the different parts of us: the messages we had
received from our parents and other authority figures; the logical,
rational part of us; and the words that attached to the intense feelings
of the child part of me. These parts of me battled each other

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 26

relentlessly. There was extreme abuse going on inside my head.
Coming to understand this helped me to trust my sanity a little, to take
some responsibility for my thoughts and my life, and examine where
the messages came from. I made some decisions about whether these
were messages I could choose to live my life by. I felt empowered.

One session David asked me to describe my Mum and Dad. Mum

was a snob, clever, an alcoholic, vicious, mean and arrogant. Dad was
brilliant, aloof, cold, dismissive, intimidating and loving. David then
invited me to say my name followed by “I am Elspeth and I am a snob,
clever, an alcoholic, vicious, mean, arrogant, brilliant, aloof, cold,
dismissive, intimidating and loving.” I was furious and hurt. Was this a
trick designed to make me feel bad? How dare he suggest I was
anything like my parents, there were no similarities whatsoever. It took
many years for me to accept that description of myself.

David was a hugger. He hugged everyone. I would watch as visitors
arrived and he would always greet them, man, woman or child, with a
hug. He was genuinely pleased to see them, he enjoyed people. There
was a constant stream of visitors at Maraylya, mostly church people.
Their lives had been very different to mine and as they asked me
questions about my life experience I saw myself as some kind of alien
who had inserted herself into their nice, comfortable, middle-class
world. Some of the regulars had the patience and generosity to
tentatively offer me their friendship.

As soon as anyone arrived I would hide in my room, or take off to

some isolated part of the property, only to appear at meal times and
then disappear again as soon as possible. I was scared of people, had
no ability to make small talk and was sure they would judge me and
find me lacking. David assured me many of them were praying for me
and the work he and Marie were doing at Maraylya. The thought of
anyone caring enough to pray for me was incomprehensible.

I resented visitors, and the amount of time David spent with them,

because this was time he wasn't spending with me. I had come to

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 27

enjoy our time together and would take as much of it as was on offer.
Sometimes Marie got annoyed at how long David and I would talk to
one another, especially when it went on into the small hours of the
morning.

I was wary of Marie. She was always kind to me but she didn't

have David's natural warmth and she was much more likely to see who
I really was. David saw many positive things in me, things I couldn't see
myself, and I felt sure Marie didn't see them either.

Early in my stay at Maraylya David told me he loved me. That was

terrifying. I didn't want that, didn't want anybody that close. What did
he want? What would be the cost? The demand? A Simon and
Garfunkel song ran through my head: “I am a rock, I am an island”. It
reinforced my comforting isolation.

The people who got close were the other residents when they

arrived. They were more like me. Battered, bruised, traumatised by life
and screwed up. Much more comfortable to be around than good
Christians. Some people came to Maraylya for a few days just to get
some respite from the world, others, like me, came to stay for quite
some time.

Someone who came for a long time was Brian. He had the ability

to convince people he was terminally ill and to get an enormous
amount of care and support from them. He was a gay man, so
someone I was comfortable with. He had the room next to mine and
we became friends.

At a residential counselling centre the residents spend a lot of time

together. The up side of this is they can understand one another in a
way the counsellors can't. The down side is the sharing of pathologies,
the competitiveness of suffering – my life has been worse than yours -
and the ease with which they can manipulate one another. At their
best residential centres support and encourage new behaviour, at their
worst they reinforce negative behaviour and residents can teach each
other a whole new range of unhealthy activities. Maraylya was a
combination of both. Brian was a manipulator and used people

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 28

shamelessly and I needed to be needed. It was a match made in
heaven.

David and Marie were traditional in their beliefs but life at

Maraylya was also earthy, practical and focused on personal growth.
People were not expected to be perfect or have all the answers. It was
OK to be vulnerable and admit your insecurities and doubts. God was
someone you could be yourself with, be honest with, tell it how it was.
The relationship with God that was encouraged at Maraylya wasn't
about pretending and being holy. If you were scared, hurt, angry or
happy it was OK to say so. Most of the time I had no idea what I felt
except it was big and intense.

David began the process of teaching me to recognise my feelings.

While initially he accepted “blerk” as a description, he felt that some
nuances to that would be helpful. For the first couple of months he
also let me get away with “ouch” as a way of saying his questions were
too painful or intrusive. I look back in wonder at how emotionally
inarticulate and illiterate I was. I was a bundle of pain, what else was
there to know? Except perhaps why? That was unfathomable.

David and Marie lived by faith. By this I mean they had no income and
no government backing for their counselling centre. All funds came
from generous donations, anything David made from preaching or
running workshops and the meagre amount the residents were
charged. I found the kind of faith that could keep going while bills were
unpaid awe-inspiring. David was clear God was dependable and would
provide all their needs and at times give abundantly for treats or
holidays. Marie found it much harder. Often they would be waiting for
the mail to arrive or hope someone would turn up with the money so
they could pay a bill on time. Marie believed this was God testing her
faith and she found it wearying. I didn't blame her.

David started a Friday night group which was a combination of

study, self-awareness, and experiential learning. It became an
important part of my life. The group taught that self- awareness and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 29

personal growth were an intrinsic part of spirituality. This is a belief I
hold dear to this day. Often there were tears, anger, fear or excitement
as people looked deep into themselves and their motivations, and
opened their lives and hearts to the power of God's healing.

Residents were encouraged to attend church. David and Marie

were involved locally with both a mission church and the Anglican
parish. These churches always seemed staid and controlled compared
to the Friday night group, but I attended all three weekly, constantly
searching for a deeper relationship with God. I would hang onto every
word of the sermon hoping to hear God speak to me. The whole
concept of God's loved confused me. I didn't trust love. In my mind it
was never given freely, there were always hooks and conditions, or it
just plain hurt. But as I listened to the sermons and the stories of how
God acted in people's lives I got glimpses of a love that was very
different to the one I grew up with.

Residents were also expected to help out with various jobs around

the property such as milking the cow, fencing, helping out in the
kitchen, lighting the fires for hot water and many other chores. Part of
the reason for the work was to keep us occupied and develop self-
discipline but another was that while working alongside David we had
conversations with him that could be more revealing than the ones
held in counselling sessions.

Milking the cow was my favourite task. It was about a fifteen

minute downhill walk to where the milk cow and her calves were
grazing. We would boil water and pour it into the milking bucket so we
had warm water to wash down the cow's udder. My trust in David was
growing, he was reliable and safe. His hugs were wonderful, he would
give big, strong, bear hugs that could be returned without fear of
crushing or breaking him. There were times I would relax into David's
hugs seeking warmth and understanding. I felt a comfort that relieved
some of my aching emptiness.

The bush was magical in the early morning. The crispness of the

air, the smell of eucalypts fresh and clean, the crunch of leaves and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 30

twigs beneath our feet and the aroma of fresh earth and decaying
plant matter delighted me morning after morning. Spider webs were
everywhere, spun between grass blades, twigs and leaves; dew caught,
scintillating in the sunlight, myriad diamonds, refracting lights. They
were breathtaking in their beauty. The quiet of the bush befriended
me, held me. I could think and be alone there. I would often sit on a
rock and merge with it or seek its wisdom. Sometimes songs would
come to me; tunes and words flowed from the rocks to my head. I
heard words of prayer, or praise, songs of desperation or desolation,
tunes that would surprise me with their beauty and joy. The bush gave
to me without asking anything in return. There were no conditions;
maybe it understood I had little to give.

Some mornings David and I talked as we headed down the track,

other times we walked in silence, enjoying the crispness of the air, the
smells and the noises of the bush. Once we got the cow in the milking
pen we would take it in turns to milk unless David was in a hurry for
some reason and then he would do it all himself.

The rhythmic action of milking a cow and the sound of milk

splashing into the metal pail encouraged conversations. This was a
place where no one would intrude, no phone would ring or visitor
arrive. It became a sacred time and place for me where I revealed my
heart and risked giving voice to some of my fears and questions. We
often talked of God. David had a lively relationship with God who was
the boss of David's life. But I also felt David was familiar and
comfortable with God and vice versa. I envied this. David would
describe Jesus as his best friend. My Bible in those days often seemed
to have an electric current that ran through it underlining certain
passage or verses and speaking to me in powerful ways. We would
discuss these passages.

Here, in this less formal setting, David encouraged stories from my

past. I told of my mother's heavy drinking; her constant disapproval
and criticism; her snobbishness; my sense I could never get anything
right or be good enough. Then I spoke of my father's aloofness; the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 31

ivory tower he inhabited, only coming down to visit me occasionally,
when it suited him; my fear of his disdain and disapproval; and his
disappointment in my total lack of interest and ability in sport.

Alone here as we milked, David first talked to me of some of the

pains of his heart, his loneliness. How hard it was to be placed on a
pedestal by people; how difficult it was to live up to expectations, and
the heavy responsibility of revealing God to others. I was honoured by
his trust and felt our relationship changed when he opened his heart
to me. We were still resident and counsellor. There was no doubt
whatsoever that I still had him on a pedestal that was so high I could
barely see his feet, let alone his face, but we had moved towards
friendship. He trusted me, was prepared to be vulnerable and show
himself as frail and human. I was deeply honoured.

On our return we would boil the milk, skim off the cream and

leave the milk to cool before putting it in the fridge. The bucket had to
be washed and put away ready for milking that evening.

One day as we finished David kissed me lightly on the nose as I

was heading out the door, a heartbreakingly endearing habit.

“I love you” he said.
“I love you, too” I replied.
Once outside there was an explosion of voices inside my head.
“What did you just say?”
“Love!! You can't say love!! You're not allowed to love him.”
“For goodness sake, what on earth are you thinking of?”
“Now you're in for it, now he will want to fuck you.”
I was berated by my internal voices but another part of me was

giving a little skip of delight. The words were out there. They had been
said. All those times when he'd said he loved me and I'd not been able
to respond and today I'd just said it. It had slipped out unannounced,
unheralded, unpremeditated. “I love you, too”. Yes, that was true.

Later that morning I, oh so casually, asked him if he had noticed

what I'd said as I walked out the door after milking. His eyes sparkled.

“Oh yes, I wouldn't want to miss anything as monumental as that,”

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 32

he said.

“Why didn't you say anything?” I asked.
“I wasn't sure you'd noticed and I didn't want to scare you. I'm

honoured.” He grinned.

“

Honoured? Honoured? That I said “I love you”. Holy shit! What the

fuck?!

Honoured?” That was far beyond my comprehension, way too

scary and yet somewhere way down deep inside there was a tiny
wiggle of joy; right next to where my bowels were churning in fear.

Today the weather has alternated between rain and glorious sunshine,
dark ominous clouds and clear blue skies. Now there is a rainbow
arched across the bay. It begins right in front me, less than two
hundred metres away. It seems to emerge from the water, this
majestic arc of colour that traverses the sky. Encompassing the bay,
creating halos and mists of magical colour. Then its curve descends
once more to the water, shimmering, hazy, translucent light reminding
me of God's promise to never again wipe out the world by deluge. This
glorious arc of colour holds promise, portent and omen.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 33

CHAPTER FOUR

T

he variety of shapes and colours in my seascape remind me of the

different textures of the people in my life. These varying shapes and
hues represent the diversity of beliefs, opinions, ethics, values and
ways of being in the world. There are short, sharp splashes like the
people who passed through my life adding colour but moving on.
There are pockets of intense vibrancy, always my favourite kind of
person, but sometimes they burnt me with their intensity. Then the
occasional dab of beige, necessary but conservative and the blue that
provides the solid, sure foundation, those people who have been there
to support and care for me, whose friendships have endured over
time. All contribute to the whole.

One day Marie announced a new resident was arriving. We were told
he had been in jail for murder. Murder?! I didn't want some hardened
criminal coming in, making us all unsafe. I didn't ask any questions
about him. I reacted. I didn't want him there. Marie criticised my
selfishness and informed me it wasn't up to me to decide and, had I
bothered to ask some questions, would have learnt there was a story
about this man and the injustices he had suffered. I felt lower than low
but also angry and scared. We were told this at Friday lunch time and
that afternoon Brian and I took off to the pub. Alcohol was not
encouraged at Maraylya, nevertheless, I got very drunk and staggered
back just in time for the Friday night group. Both David and Marie were
furious. I kept saying “I couldn't help it”. David informed Brian and me
he would talk to us about our behaviour the next day, for now, he had
a group to run.

That night, anyone who wanted prayer could sit on the chair in the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 34

middle of the circle and people would lay on hands and pray for them.
People were asking for healing of physical conditions, help in
conceiving a child and the ability to let go of anger and resentments. I
felt people's lives were changing as a result of these prayers.

About half way though I felt a strong pull to sit on the chair and

ask for prayer. I felt an even stronger pull not to. I didn't want to draw
attention to myself. I was in the bad books and a long way off being
sober. The pull to sit in the chair grew stronger and stronger. So did my
resistance. Others took their turn on the chair. I had no idea what I
needed or wanted, or what to say, but the compulsion to sit in the
chair grew. I felt as if there was a hand on my back pushing me
towards the chair and I heard a voice inside my head that kept saying
“get up and go and sit in the chair NOW.” Finally, David asked one
more time if anyone wanted prayer. There was no one else who came
forward. I burst into tears. Bugger!!! That was not a good way to avoid
attention. David invited me to sit in the chair. “I can't, I can't” I said and
started to regress into a terrified child. It felt as if it was more than my
life was worth to sit in the chair, yet I felt God was compelling me to do
so. However angry David might have been he didn't allow it to
influence how he dealt with me.

He crouched down beside me and said gently, “What can't you

do?”

“I can't let you know they are here. I can't let you see them. I'll get

into really BIG trouble” I sobbed without any idea of what I was saying.
My terror was rising by the second. David instinctively knew what was
happening. He called to Brent, a retired, ordained minister and a
member of the group, and asked for his help. They didn't make me sit
in the “hot seat”. They dealt with me where I was.

Brent knew I had arrived home drunk that evening. Even if he

hadn't known, my breath would have told him. He asked why and all I
could say was “I couldn't help it. It was not my fault. I know I have to
take responsibility for myself, but I couldn't help it, couldn't stop
myself.” As these words came out of my mouth I waited to be

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 35

confronted. David viewed taking responsibility for myself and my
actions as an intrinsic part of healing. Surely he was going to come
down on me like a ton of bricks. Here I was making such a fuss at the
end of a very powerful group. I was out of control and saying things I
recognised as unacceptable. Yet, somehow it was these words that told
David and Brent what it was they were dealing with.

What happened next can only be described as an exorcism. David

and Brent worked together. They claimed both protection and
authority through Jesus and demanded that the demon within me
name itself. The part of me that was watching all of this freaked out.
“The what? You have got to be kidding. This is way too weird. I'm out of
here.” Except I couldn't get up to leave. Couldn't speak. These two men
were speaking to me, or into me, with such authority. I knew people
were praying for me. I could sense it all around me. I was terrified yet
felt safe. I wanted to stay and I wanted to leave. I felt ripped in several
parts. I burst into tears. Again David demanded the demon name itself.
Out of my mouth came a torrent of abuse. He commanded it to stop
and with breathtaking power and authority demanded, in Jesus' name,
that the spirit name itself. The word “alcohol” came out of my mouth
but I did not feel it was me who had said it. Again abuse spewed forth
from within me, screaming at David and telling him it had no intention
of letting me go. What happened next wasn't a struggle and wasn't
violent. David and Brent together quietly informed this spirit that it
would leave, now, that it had no power or authority in my life and had
to go. It was done with gentleness yet great strength. The spirit left. I
knew the instant it had gone. I felt different, stone cold sober, empty
and spent. The entire group prayed asking the Holy Spirit to protect me
from any more spirits entering into me and for healing. I was
surrounded by love, understanding and compassion. I didn't have
another drink for over a year.

I do not deny the reality of what happened that night. Do I

understand it or have an adequate theological explanation for it? No.
Both David and Brent said it was something to do with me saying “I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 36

couldn't help it”. They knew it was different from me refusing to accept
responsibility for myself. They knew it was the truth. Within their frame
of reference the only explanation they had for that was possession.
They dealt with it accordingly and it was highly successful.

As a result of that experience I don't dismiss the possibility that

exorcism is real. There are things done by so called exorcists that are
nothing short of abuse. Exorcism can be a diabolic form of claiming
complete power over someone. I have heard from people with
multiple personalities (dissociative identity disorder) that they have
had exorcism inflicted upon them when it is not demons that were
present, just different parts of themselves moving in and out of
consciousness. All I can say of my exorcism was that it was positive. I
felt loved, supported and cared for. David and Brent knew what they
were doing. I was different as a result.

The people in my life in those days were good, caring, committed
Christians who believed they had a responsibility to support David and
Marie in their work at Maraylya, and who did their best to understand
and support me. Two of those people are still friends to this day –
some thirty-four years later.

Despite growing as a Christian, my self-esteem was low, and I felt

inferior to everyone else, especially anyone I saw as being “good” or
“holy”. I saw others as more confident in their beliefs and
understanding of the Bible, certain of what was right and wrong. To my
eyes the Christians I knew appeared to have no doubts at all that they
were loved by God. For me there were many times when surviving the
day was a challenge. Finding the words for my questions was
impossible. Believing that God loved me felt unobtainable. I knew
there was still a whole heap of stuff festering inside that wasn't good. I
knew I was bad: a deep-down, black, evil, putrid, poisonous kind of bad
and if people saw who I really was they would run, screaming in
horror.

It was to be many years before I plumbed the depth of these

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 37

beliefs and discovered the darkness they were born in.

In those early days of my faith I developed a relationship with the
Gospel figure of Mary Magdalene. Here was someone who understood
the reality of my life. I couldn't talk to God about my badness or about
woman's stuff or sex. I couldn't talk to God the Father about that! I
didn't talked to David about sex either. But Mary Magdalene
understood. She had been a prostitute, had been used and abused and
had seven demons cast out of her. I imagined her as real and gutsy
and earthy. I needed someone to talk to at the shame-filled level. All
the Christians I knew seemed too good and clean; they wouldn't
understand.

I would talk to Marie about my faith and listen to her experiences

of God. Her faith was not as showy as David's which made it feel more
achievable. She believed they were obeying God's call by being at
Maraylya, but it was obvious there were times she wished they had
been called to something else.

I liked Marie but was scared of her. She would call a spade a spade

and was often the one who assigned jobs. I could not get out of work
by starting a deep and meaningful conversation with Marie. She was
practical and efficient, and knew just how much work it took to keep
the place running.

As time went on David's importance in my life increased. Having

told him I loved him I then developed a complicated mixture of a crush
and wanting him as my Dad. In my mind I often called him Poppa but
didn't tell anyone this, it felt too intimate. My need for him became
intense. I would miss him dreadfully if he was working somewhere else
on the property. If he was away for the day or weekend, running a
training course or leading worship, I would go into withdrawal and
pine, and my body mourned his absence and did not stop aching until
he came home. I was scared he wouldn't return, that he would run
away from my need or some dreadful accident would befall him. I was
embarrassed by the depth of my longing and would take care to

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 38

appear calm and laid back about his absence but would be listening for
the sound of his car and would quiver with anticipation as he strode
from his car into the hut. Always on his return there was a hug.

David represented so much of what I had wanted from my own

father. He was loving and demonstrative, he gave praise easily and was
approachable and friendly. He was comfortable with himself and
power sat well on his shoulders. He did not use his strength to either
abuse or diminish me. He was ready to see the best in me and to find
something to love and believe in. David encouraged me to think I was
OK and that it was all right to be alive.

I focus on a particular shade of blue that makes its appearance many
times in the painting. Sometimes it is dominant in the midst of many
other tones and colours. Some patches of this particular blue catch
and hold the eye and create a unique oasis of colour. In other places it
just hangs out with the other colours, one of the gang.

What I learnt at Maraylya is like the blue of the painting. There are

some beliefs and ways of being I learnt from my time there that are
still distinct and dominant. Yet many have now melded in with the rest
of my life's learning and knowledge.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 39

CHAPTER FIVE

I

walked along the beach this morning. The sand slanted steeply

towards the water and I had to weave in and out of piles of seaweed,
trying to stay sure-footed on the pebbles and rocks that littered the
beach, or pick my way round rock pools. The smell of salt water and
seaweed was strong and fresh, and I inhaled great gulps of the tangy
air, pulling the good-to-be-aliveness of it into my lungs. Clouds were
gathering, piling up on top of each other, casting a shadow over the
day and giving notice of a coming storm.

My stay at Maraylya didn't fix all my problems, but it provided some
basic tools that have been of value throughout my life. My ability to
examine myself honestly and name my issues had their foundation
stones laid there. This framework was provided by TA with its easily
understood language that described the structure and function of our
personalities in a way which helped me understand myself and begin
to take responsibility for my life.

On leaving Maraylya I boarded with a woman in Parramatta. It was

uncomfortable living in someone else's home but I needed somewhere
to live and to figure out what to do next with my life.

I missed David with an intensity that was breathtaking; constantly

thinking about him, wanting to be with him all the time, to talk to him,
phone him, be hugged by him. It was awful. My whole being was
wracked with aching and longing. Fortunately for David, I would only
allow myself to ring him twice a week, unless of course there was a
crisis. There often was.

My attendance at the Friday nights group continued but now I was

just one of the many people who wanted David's time and attention. I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 40

couldn't just sit back and wait knowing my turn would come after
everyone else left. I would be leaving too. I was obsessed.

I started attending the same church as Brent and his wife. Both

were kind and supportive, helping me settle in to Sydney and their
church. They looked out for me at church knowing how crowds
overwhelmed me and how likely I was to either try and blend into the
wall or run away. They often invited me for meals and Brent was
always ready to discuss Christianity with me and to give me a hug.
They were generous and I was ungrateful. Brent wasn't David and their
home wasn't Maraylya.

Brent was more dogmatic in his beliefs than David. He would tell

me what to believe which was a sure way to get my back up and
engage my rebellious streak. He would give trite, clichéd answers to my
questions about God. I often felt Brent was defending God from my
lack of faith, as if this would wound God in some way. Or I was too
much for God, God had to be protected like a frail, ailing grandmother.
David would always let me be myself. He would let me rant and rave.
He never defended God and he trusted me to develop a relationship
with God based on honesty. David knew that would not happen if he
intervened. Brent tried to smooth out the rough bits. I got angry,
belligerent and went to extremes. If Brent told me what was
appropriate behaviour for a Christian I would embrace the opposite.
He told me Christians shouldn't smoke; my smoking increased. Then
he told me Christians shouldn't swear, so of course “fuck” and “shit”
studded my conversation more liberally in his presence. I made up
tests to challenge him, to prove he was not perceptive, that, in fact, he
was stupid. He would give me hugs. I always felt the hugs were for him
rather than for me. That he didn't truly know who I was. His hugs
lacked sincerity. I hated them. I had no idea how to stop him hugging
me.

I started a job in Green Valley, a large Housing Commission estate in
Sydney's south-west. David had some connections with the Sydney City

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 41

Mission and with his help I started as secretary for their first Vocational
Employment Training Scheme, which was designed to teach
unemployed people some basic skills in woodwork, typing or nursing
in order to increase their chances of finding a job. It was a pilot
programme that spread to other parts of NSW and Western and South
Australia.

My enthusiasm for the job was high to begin with but quickly

dwindled as it became boring and routine. I knew this was a
worthwhile project and it would change people's lives but answering
the phones and typing out worksheets didn't fulfil my desire to change
the world for the better.

One of the people who worked on the programme offered me

accommodation with his wife and three kids. Their house was closer to
work and they were offering me support and encouragement while I
tried to establish myself. This arrangement wasn't particularly
successful. Sharing with a family was difficult. I felt like the poor
relation but was terrified of the idea of finding a flat and living on my
own. For three months I searched for a flat, but there was always
something wrong. Eventually, my host pointed out that the reason I
couldn't find a suitable flat was that I saw everything through the eyes
of my fear. Nothing was going to look right. He told me it was time to
take a big breath and move out on my own.

I found a small garden flat in Cabramatta, which was much closer

to work, hired some furniture and set up home. For the first time in my
life I alone was responsible for my own cooking, cleaning, shopping
and finances. I was twenty-three and found living by myself terrifying
and lonely.

Friends from Maraylya visited regularly and I joined a nearby

church. I always expected miracles during the services. Hoped there
would be answers. Tried to wring personal messages out of the
sermon. I was consumed with doubt about what I should be doing with
my life. I didn't want to keep doing secretarial work, it was boring and
unfulfilling. I wanted more friends and to be in a relationship. Wasn't

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 42

this what God was meant to bring to my life? I always felt I had done
something wrong during the week and I found myself fervently
confessing my sins and asking forgiveness. Communion was important
because it gave me a clean slate, a new start. Each week would see me
doing my best to wrestle some kind of blessing out of the service.

The minister and his wife knew I was struggling with life. They

were supportive. They would invite me for meals, check up on me
during the week and make themselves available to talk and listen. I
was high maintenance.

Some months after leaving Maraylya a friend and I attended a
weekend workshop on TA. The workshop was led by Bernard, a
powerful, dynamic man in his late forties. He knew his stuff and was an
interesting combination of confrontation and compassion. He had
excellent intuition and beautiful eyes. Much of the weekend was
experiential and I threw myself into it with gusto, shed many tears and
learnt lots. We enrolled in the follow-up workshop. A move Bernard
seemed to approve.

The first weekend had been introductory TA. The follow-up

weekend was about Life Scripts, our unconscious plan for our lives in
response to the world around us. TA teaches that this plan, or script, is
pretty much in place by the time we are five.

One of the exercises was a questionnaire designed to reveal our

early decisions. What parts of life we had permissions for and what
were our restrictions. The questionnaire covered topics such as being
ourselves, trusting people, our right to exist, our sanity and whether
we felt it was OK to belong. We recorded our answers on a chart and at
the end of the exercise it was possible to see how many permission we
had and in what areas.

As I looked at my results Bernard caught my eye and without

seeing my piece of paper he commented “Not a lot of permissions,
huh?”

“Shit! How does he know that?” And a further “Shit!” as I looked at

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 43

my piece of paper and recognised all the restrictions there were in my
life. I felt unsettled, off balance, a victim of my past.

The next exercise was a life script questionnaire. Once again this

was a series of questions designed to reveal information about the
unconscious decisions we had made and the ways we had figured out
how to survive in the world. I felt a little safer as we started this
exercise having done one of these with David at Maraylya. I happily
answered questions like “What is the myth of your birth?”, “What was
your favourite story as a child?”, “What was the dominant feeling in
your home?” Then we got to “Where do you imagine you will be in
fifteen years' time?” and “Imagine yourself on your deathbed. Where
are you? How old are you? What are you dying of?”

We had time alone with the questions and then shared the

answers with another participant. However, when it came to answering
the questions about how and when to die Bernard

just happened to be

there. Thinking that six months counselling at Maraylya meant I had
new answers to these questions I confidently said “Once upon a time I
would have answered 'in the two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday,
by drug overdose', now it’s different.”

“What's the answer now?” asked Bernard.
“Um, err”. Oh! Bernard was waiting for an answer. I hung my head.
“Where did you picture yourself in fifteen years' time?” asked

Bernard gently.

“Nowhere, I couldn't see anything.” My confidence started to tilt.

Fear filled me.

Bernard sat down opposite me, looked me full in the eyes and in a

voice full of compassion and strength said “Will you state clearly that
you will neither harm nor kill yourself?”

I couldn't do it. I felt pinned to the wall. It was impossible. I

desperately wanted to say it. To lie if necessary. Anything to get out of
the place. To get away from Bernard and his disturbing questions and
his piercing eyes. There was silence for a long time. “I can't.” Tears
slipped down my face.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 44

“Then you need to take responsibility for yourself and stay alive

long enough to make some new decisions” said Bernard in a voice that
brooked no contradiction.

No one had ever spoken to me like that. I don't know which was

more shocking; that he held me responsible for my life or that my
choosing to stay alive was important to him. He was serious. He
insisted I stay behind at the end of the workshop in order to get
information from him about my options.

At Bernard's recommendation I went to see a psychiatrist, Bob Russell,
who had a private practice in Parramatta. He used TA. Bob was a gentle
man, with sandy hair and a psychiatrist's diffidence. In those early days
I felt he lacked both warmth and humour; I was wrong. He didn't have
the charisma of either Maraylya's David or Bernard. It was slow,
plodding, once a week work. It all seemed very

polite and wasn't

getting anywhere at all. We spent two whole sessions with me trying to
explain to him what it meant to me to be a Christian. This was
frustrating. Why did I have to waste time trying to explain it to him. I
can only assume that having named prayer as one of my coping
strategies he wanted to understand how this worked for me; or he was
checking for God delusions.

Apart from the slowness of the sessions, I was dying of boredom.

We were not getting anywhere and taking a damn long time about it. If
this was meant to deal with my suicidal thoughts, I was going to die of
old age long before we got there. Without Maraylya's supporting
people or the anaesthetising effects of drugs and alcohol, my coping
abilities were being stretched beyond their capacity. Just staying alive
and living alone was bloody hard work. I didn't want to live any more.
There was nothing to live for, no meaning or sense of purpose. I was in
constant mental pain, living with incessant hyper-vigilance, always
expecting danger or attack, with stress levels that meant every muscle
in my body was held tight and I would leap out of my skin at the
slightest, unexpected noise. I ached all over. I was exhausted and just

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 45

wanted a rest. If I tried to relax I feared going mad. I would give up the
control that kept me operating at some level of sanity and the voices
would take over. If I let myself go mad, I knew I would not be able to
come back. The temptation to madness was a constant seduction.

One day I asked Bob Russell if there was anything we could do that

would move things along a bit. He informed me that as well as being a
private practitioner he was the team leader of an experimental unit at
Ward One, Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital. He explained it was a unit
that he and Bernard had started together where they used a
combination of TA and Gestalt Therapy. He thought it would be helpful.

Hhhhmmmm. This was the place I had decided not to go to when I

went to Maraylya. Now I had a job, a place to live and was attending a
local church. Going to Ward One would involve giving up the job and
the place to live. That was two marks in its favour. Attending church
and the Friday night group would still be possible. I headed up to
Maraylya to discuss it with David and Marie. It was a huge decision, a
crossroad. I had been out of residential counselling for over a year.

David and Marie understood why Bob Russell had suggested Ward

One. It had become obvious that my problems were more deeply
entrenched than David and Marie first thought and that I needed on-
going psychotherapy, not just counselling. However, they had some
major concerns about me going into a psychiatric institution. They
knew how I could be sucked into the issues of other residents,
believing everything they said and supporting them in ways that were
not helpful or growth-promoting. My instinctive protection of the
underdog and passion for justice, coupled with my rebellion against
those in authority, had led to some less than helpful interventions on
my part while at Maraylya. There had been times when I passionately
defended someone against David's authority only to discover I had
been sucked in badly. They also knew my ability to absorb other
people's pathologies. We prayed about it together.

I decided to go for the admissions interview and see if Ward One

was willing to accept me.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 46

The promised storm came and I was in the mood to embrace it. I

walked back to the beach and strode along the sand, clearer now after
high tide, with the wind whipping at my hair and the sand stinging my
eyes. The roar of the waves were wild percussions, reaching a
crescendo and crashing on to the shore. Their white caps were
decapitated by the wind and blown back out to sea. The rain beat a
steady staccato, pock-marking the sand. It was wild and fabulous.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 47

CHAPTER SIX

T

his morning was cold, grey and misty. The heavy, rain-filled clouds

blocked out the sun. The horizon and ocean blended into the same
nondescript grey. I set out on a walk hoping to return before the rain
arrived. But it was a wonderful, surprising, transformative day. The air
started to warm, the clouds burnt away and there before me was
another perfect autumn day, full of delectable sunshine, dancing blue
ocean and the green of the hills becoming lush after recent rain. There
is always joy when what appears to be dark and gloomy transforms
into clear, blue delight.

Life at Ward One was like that – I dreaded the darkness of a

psychiatric institution but discovered a community full of hope and
life.

Rydalmere Psychiatric Hospital was a huge, rambling affair. The
buildings were old, some magnificent, some stark and institutional-
looking, others starting to rot and crumble. It had been an Institution
for the Insane since 1849. Just opposite Ward One was the three-storey
Female Orphan Institution building which was built in 1813, and is now
recognised as the oldest three-storey brick building in Australia. It has
recently been refurbished and is part of the Whitlam Institute within
the University of Western Sydney.

Ward One was situated towards the back of the hospital which

meant I had to to drive past patients walking around the grounds in
various states of attire and degrees of medication. Ward One was
housed within the old medical superintendent's house. It was a
splendid old, white, two-storey building with verandas around two
sides of the ground floor and balconies outside three of the upstairs

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 48

bedrooms. The rooms were spacious with twelve-foot-high ceilings and
casement windows through which the sun poured. Ward One
overlooked the Parramatta River on one side, and a beautiful
ornamental tree was on another, with its leaves beginning to show the
first hint of autumn. The third side was an old brickworks, a long since
abandoned part of the hospital, and the fourth was next to busy James
Ruse Drive.

Just finding the place the first time was a major undertaking and

then I had to enter the building and survive the interview. It was a
daunting process. On my arrival there were several people sitting
outside on the veranda, drinking coffee and talking. I was scared as I
walked past these people who were

inmates in a psychiatric institution

and therefore, I believed, scary and potentially dangerous. Bob met me
and took me into the staff meeting room. It was a huge room, with a
beautiful bay window that overlooked the grounds and the Parramatta
River. There were six people sitting around in a circle waiting to assess
me. I didn't know if I was meant to be together enough, or crazy
enough, to be allowed admittance.

During the interview the staff explained that the unit, as it was

called, was voluntary and residents could leave any time but were
expected to commit to a minimum stay of six months. The maximum
allowable stay was two years. They also explained there was minimal
medication prescribed, diagnostic labels were not given and residents
were encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and their
therapy. They were also expected to support one another and to this
end any resident who felt they were in crisis, could call a group day or
night and attendance was compulsory.

No doubt there was the usual talk of commitment and motivation,

and questions about what I hoped to achieve by coming. I don't
remember anything. I'm sure the fact Bob had recommended I come
meant that my interview was less rigorous than others. Even so, I felt
overwhelmed by the seriousness of it all. There were bound to be
deeply disturbed people here. This was heavy stuff. The staff said they

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 49

would let me know by the end of the week. I left not knowing if I
wanted admission or not. This would be therapy at an intensity I had
not yet experienced.

The call came two days later. They had accepted me and would

admit me the following week. I decided to give it a go. It felt like the
right thing to do. David and Marie offered me the option of staying at
Maraylya at weekends. It could be my home base. I was delighted. It
was a generous offer. They were concerned about such a new Christian
going into the psychiatric system, and, even though they knew it was
an experimental ward, they were troubled about negative influences.
They both knew I needed what Ward One could offer but they also
wanted to provide a less institutional place for me to escape to, if
needed.

With relief I relinquished my job and my flat.

Ward One was staffed by Bob, the head of the unit; the hospital
chaplain, who spent a great deal of his time at the ward; two social
workers; and at times welfare or social work students doing their
placements. There was also the nursing staff; during the day there
were two or three nurses, plus the charge nurse, then two nurses for
afternoon shift and one for night shift. Given there was a maximum of
sixteen residents at any one time the staff/patient ratio was high. It
was an expensive unit to run. However, it did achieve results; the re-
admittance rate was very low.

The basic philosophy of the ward was that people were

responsible for themselves and were not to be given a diagnosis. The
staff believed that referring to someone as a schizophrenic put them
into a box and set up expectations of behaviour and encouraged other
people to make assumptions rather than get to know the person as an
individual. Medication was kept to an absolute minimum, with
psychiatric drugs being used as a last resort and in minimal quantities.
Even such things as Panadol were limited and if you complained of a
headache you were expected to figure out why you had one. At times

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 50

this was painful and people tended to have their own illicit supply of
minor painkillers. Taking responsibility for yourself was one of the core
beliefs of the ward and transgressions were taken seriously. It was
perfectly acceptable to call to account anyone, resident or staff. It
worked well because we knew this was no holiday camp. If we wanted
drug therapy or someone diagnosing us and making decisions for us
there was plenty of that on offer elsewhere in the hospital.

Life at Ward One was intense. Although you had to be a voluntary

patient in order to be there, for many of the residents this was their
last chance. These were people who had been in back wards for a long
time; patients the system had given up on. Many of them had been
diagnosed as schizophrenic or with borderline personality disorder
and had not responded to traditional treatment.

Each morning there was a communication group to deal with the

everyday running of the ward. There was a Communications Book
where requests for leave or medication were recorded as well as any
interpersonal problems or perceived breach of rules. The duration of
the group varied depending on what was in the book. There were times
the group was fraught and went on for hours. Once this group was
over there was an half-hour break, and then a therapy group.
Residents were encouraged to participate in one another’s work. While
the staff were excellent, many of the residents had finely honed
bullshit detectors and gut instincts that had developed over many
years of struggling to stay alive and/or sane. In many ways they were
better therapists than the paid staff. They were more likely to get
straight to the point and confront anyone they thought was
bullshitting. Living together twenty-four hours a day we got to know
each other, we could tell when someone was being dishonest or
engaging in the same, old, negative behaviour and that person would
be confronted. It was like living in a hot house.

I lived in a permanent state of fear and anxiety. I sat next to a

door in the group room, needing to know there was a quick exit. I
fought the desire to curl up in a foetal position and tune out from life

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 51

and was exhausted just from the effort it took to engage with the
world. At the same time I could be loud, vociferous and gregarious; the
life of the party, laughing, joking and telling stories against myself.
Other times I would pray that the ground would open up beneath me,
and devour me, ending my struggle to stay alive.

One night while I was sitting in the day room, Andrew, another

resident, came looking for me. “Come with me,” he said “I want to
show you something.” He led me into the kitchen where there was a
tiny kitten. It was terrified and starving, there were a few residents
trying to be kind to it but it cowered beneath the sink, timidly lapping
at the milk someone had placed before it. Andrew pointed to the kitten
and said to me “Look, here is another creature every bit as terrified of
the world as you are”. It was an amazing moment, intense and
intimate.

Andrew had previously been diagnosed as having paranoid

schizophrenia. He had intense paranoid episodes. I learnt from him
that in every paranoid episode there is an element of truth. He would
often have episodes triggered by what he saw as the staff talking about
him behind his back, or them discounting his reality. It took very little
for him to be in a full blown paranoid state. He always sounded
incredibly angry. But what appeared to be rage was actually terror. He
was terrified of going mad and when people denied his reality it
triggered this terror. If I could find the grain of truth within the
paranoia and get the person responsible to acknowledge it, this would
defuse the situation. It wasn't always easy, Andrew was scary and to
have him screaming abuse and accusations at you was daunting. I
understood why people denied they had done anything to upset him.
It was easy to believe that if you acknowledged what you were accused
of, then the consequences would be violent. In reality, the
acknowledgement brought about calm. After a time Andrew's paranoid
episodes decreased because we all learnt how to help him defuse
them. He learnt to trust that no one at the unit was trying to make him
crazy.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 52

I first began to suspect I could become a good therapist while I

was at Ward One. I would watch other people’s therapeutic work with
great interest, often anticipating the interventions the therapists would
make. All residents were encouraged to contribute to one another's
therapy. I took this responsibility seriously and would contribute if I
felt I had something to add. Bob praised my intuition and perception. I
took it to heart. Maybe this was something I could do.

Being able to call a group any time of the day or night gave me a

sense of security. I felt my sanity wasn't totally my responsibility. There
was help and support close at hand. Although many of the residents
had great difficulty in functioning in ways that general society would
consider acceptable we had a deep commitment to one another. Never
since have I felt such a sense of love and community. Nor did I feel I
had to be anything other than myself. While change was encouraged it
was not demanded. And, because for so many this felt like their final
chance, we had a level of honesty and commitment to our therapy,
that although exhausting, was rewarding and life-giving to be a part of.

TA gave people the tools to change their lives but it was the love

and support that made it possible. There was never any judgement
about the things people needed to work on. People remembered
abuse, neglect, violence, betrayal, craziness and horror. We all knew
that we hadn't ended up in Ward One as the result of a happy
childhood. Pathology was understood as a necessary survival
mechanism, whether that was self-mutilation, suicidal behaviour or
fragmentation. Extremes of feelings were seen as either protection or
catharsis. It all made sense.

We all had serious issues, struggled to survive and had excellent

bullshit detectors. Raw honest need, no matter how dysfunctional,
would get enormous support. Manipulation, on the other hand, could
be confronted quite brutally. If someone was suicidal because the pain
was too great at that particular time, or they had been triggered, the
residents would offer support in whatever way they could. However, if
someone was manipulating for attention they would get short shrift

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 53

indeed. The therapists would not have got away with such harshness
because it was all too easy to think “they don't understand”, but with
the residents you knew they did. There was no use trying to pull the
wool over their eyes because they had been, or still were, there
themselves. Sometimes this got complicated. It was far easier to spot
and confront lies, deception and bullshit in someone else rather than
face the behaviour in yourself.

While the residents played a significant role in people's healing, it

was Bob who had final responsibility and if someone was a threat to
themselves or others, then even though it was a voluntary unit, they
would be scheduled. Scheduling a patient was done under the mental
health act and required the signature of a psychiatrist. The schedule
could only be for a brief period of time before being reviewed, long-
term involuntary admissions required the decision of a tribunal. I was
aware of three different categories of scheduling. D category meant
you were in day clothes and were allowed to walk around the hospital
grounds. B category meant you were in pyjamas and had to stay on the
ward and an A Category patient was in pyjamas and had to be within
sight of nursing staff at all times. If Bob scheduled a resident it was at
his discretion what category they were. They would be sent either to
Ward Twelve, an Admissions Ward, or, in extreme cases, to one of the
locked wards.

Caitlyn was twenty-four when she arrived at the unit and wore

thick Coke-bottle glasses that distorted her eyes. She was not present
in her body and was clutching a small teddy bear. She was dissociated,
regressed, suicidal and she heard voices. One Friday she called a group
because she felt too scared to go on living. Because it was during the
day all staff were obliged to attend. The staff had assessment
interviews that afternoon and Bob was anxious the group not go on for
too long. It was obvious that nothing was going to happen quickly.
Caitlyn was in deep distress and needed time and nurturing to come to
a place where she could make a tentative, temporary commitment to
staying alive. We understood that. Bob did not have time for it. He

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 54

closed the group saying that he and the staff had interviews. We were
angry at such treatment and were concerned for Caitlyn. The next
thing we knew one of the nurses came to get her, saying that Bob had
scheduled her, and she was to be taken to one of the locked wards for
her own safety.

The news spread through the unit like wildfire. This was not on,

this was peremptory and high-handed, being sent to a locked ward was
to be avoided at all costs. Too many of the residents knew their horror
and were willing to fight to stop Caitlyn being sent to one. We called a
group; the staff did not attend. They explained they were interviewing
a potential resident. Bad luck!!! I was nominated to go and knock on
the door. I did, informing all those in the room there was a group on
and the residents wanted them there “Now”. Bob, with a deep sigh,
asked what the group was about. I informed him “None of us feel
safe!” He came. We told him that we did not appreciate his autocratic
way of dealing with the situation and that, given this was a voluntary
unit, it was most distressing to realise that someone could not only be
scheduled, but sent to a locked ward, without the resident having any
power. Bob, who always appeared a meek, gentle man, told us that
ultimately the safety of people in the unit was his responsibility and in
the end it was his call. Caitlyn was to spend the weekend in a locked
ward. There was no discussion to be entered into. He left the group
and returned to his interview. It was a level of authority that rocked us.
It provided much substance for both the communication and the
therapy group for weeks to come. I found something comforting in
Bob's authority. It felt like being held.

As much as the unit was an intense place to live it was also a lot of

fun. The humour was black, sharp and funny. There were many
philosophical conversations that took place in the wee small hours of
the morning, over cigarettes and copious cups of tea. People had many
and varied understandings of God and spirituality and these
discussions were linked to their own suffering and the evil they had
experienced and saw continuing in the world. There were a couple of

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 55

nurses who requested permanent night shift at Ward One, to the
amazement of other nurses who avoided the place at all costs. They
were an integral part of these conversations offering perspective,
challenge and humour. We had a diversity of backgrounds, life
experiences, beliefs and philosophies. We were the people the rest of
the world had given up on. We had a wisdom born of pain that
contained profound truth and knowledge. We residents were
intelligent and articulate. We read widely and thought deeply in our
search for answers and meaning. We did not accept easy answers or
platitudes because they never spoke to our condition. They always felt
like an insult, as if the people uttering them failed to see the reality of
who we were. We may have been residents in a psychiatric hospital but
we were neither stupid nor of little account.

While I was at Ward One we had a student come to do her final

welfare work placement. Susan was tall, centred, had beautiful blue
eyes, a warm smile and was a natural. She didn't seem to be fazed by
the intensity or pathologies of the ward. She accepted people for who
they were and had genuine respect and compassion for the residents.
She fitted in and became a popular choice as a support person while
doing cathartic, therapeutic work. She was a superb therapist.

Some of the techniques used at the unit were based on Jacqui

Schiff's work with schizophrenia. Jacqui and her husband, Morris, took
people diagnosed with schizophrenia into their home and allowed
them to regress and re-experience childhood. They were given all the
permissions and physical nurturing that should be part of growing up.
This was ground-breaking, controversial work. It was intense and there
were some disasters along the way. This was re-parenting, and a
version of this was incorporated into the therapy offered at the unit.

Anyone walking into the day-room while a therapy group was in

full swing would see about twenty-four people. Some were sitting in
chairs, others in bean bags, some on cushions at the feet of others
having their head stroked or their back rubbed. There would be people
on mattresses being held and people doing intense face to face work

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 56

while others watched.

The first questions Bob would ask at the beginning of a group was

who wanted to work that day, on what and with whom. There would be
people who wanted to work on things such as their suicidality or their
sense of worthlessness. Perhaps they would want to process the
feelings and consequences of abuse or neglect. This work was always
done in the centre of the room. It would often start with the person
talking about how this problem was currently affecting their life. The
therapist would ask questions that would take them into the event and,
once there was a high level of engagement, they would ask questions
like “What's happening?”, “What can you see?”, “Who's there?” and
encourage the resident to tell the story of what they were seeing in the
present tense. For example: “I'm at home with Mum and Dad. We're in
the lounge room. I'm on the floor colouring in. Dad is really angry, he's
yelling at everyone. I just want to keep colouring in. I hate it when it's
like this. Dad's face is getting red and shiny and his eyes are bulging.
I'm feeling really scared 'cause he's going to start hitting soon. Oh no!”
When someone is this deeply into a memory you can

see what is

happening. You are looking at the child as they experience the
situation. The role of the therapist is to listen to the story and be there
as support but also to find out what decisions were made. This is done
by asking questions like ”So what did this mean about you?”, “What
does this tell you about the world and how to survive?” “What did you
figure out about anger?” “So becoming invisible was a really smart
thing to do, wasn't it?” The idea is that we make clever decisions in the
face of overwhelming circumstances. The trouble is we don't update
those decisions. This is called redecision therapy and is designed to get
us in touch with the original decisions and provide the opportunity to
make new ones and live life differently. Often strong emotions are
expressed as part of this work. Residents expressed their anger, fear or
sadness and were encouraged and supported by staff and residents
alike.

Anger work was done on a mattress, with the resident imagining

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 57

who they were angry with sitting on a cushion in front of them. They
would put words to their anger and were allowed to use whatever
language or images of violence they found useful. Once they were in
touch with the anger it was important to express it with the body and
they would pound the cushion or hit it with a rubber hose or rip up
telephone directories. Other times the person would be surrounded
with lots of cushions so they could punch, kick and flail, this was the
intense rage of a small, inarticulate, uncomprehending child.

Often residents needed to be held so they could experience safe,

non-sexual, non-abusive, nurturing touch. Sometimes this was support
while they cried or were in touch with their fear, other times it was
purely a new, positive experience. This would be done with a therapist
or another resident.

Re-parenting was always negotiated with the therapist. The

resident would pick who they wanted to work with and what messages
they needed to hear. A mattress would be set up so the therapist could
have their back against a wall and the resident would then lie across
them, being held. The therapist would give permissions such as “It's
fine for you to be here. I'm very happy to hold you and to care for you.
I will not hurt you and I want nothing from you. It's great that you are
alive. There are wonderful things in the world for you to explore.”
Often re-parenting would trigger strong emotions and the words would
change to “It's OK to have feelings. It's fine for you to feel whatever you
need to. You don't have to look after me or not have your feelings
around me. I am here to take care of you.” It was powerful stuff and it
changed lives.

I found re-parenting powerful and addictive. This was what I

needed to heal my pain and fill my emptiness. I wanted to suck every
last bit of care and nurture from the person providing it. At the same
time my body was defended against letting any love or care in. It would
go rigid and the therapist would keep reminding me to relax, to let my
full weight rest against them and allow them to support my head as
they held me. I would only receive a small amount of what was being

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 58

given and it used to frustrate me because I wanted and needed so
much more.

Often memories would emerge during a re-parenting session.

What started off as being safe, secure nurture would move into a
nightmare of remembered abuse and trauma. It was during a session
with Susan I first remembered being sexually abused by my father. I
was six years old and he anally raped me. Susan was gentle and
compassionate, she helped me face the memory and held me as I
sobbed.

This was the mid-1970s, nobody talked about sexual assault in

those days. To their very great credit all the members of staff believed
and supported me and other residents told me of similar things having
happened to them.

Bernard ran a therapy marathon. This was a weekend where a group of
twelve people came together to do therapy. Part of the power of a
marathon was its intensity. People could either gain from or be
triggered by other people's work. I wanted to work on being raped by
my father. Bernard looked horrified. “What on earth are you talking
about? When did this happen? Where is your proof? Was there any
blood? Were you hospitalised?”

I was devastated, I felt he didn't believe me.
I felt bad, dirty, wrong and didn't have answers to any of his

questions. Maybe I had imagined it. Or was making it up.

Traumatic memory never emerges with the kind of clarity or detail

that can answer Bernard's questions. My memory first and foremost
was of agonising pain in my anus. Then the feeling of my father's
hands all over me, touching my vagina and bottom, and him
whispering in my ear that he loved me; I was his good girl; he needed
to do this because it made me his special girl. I felt pain, filthy,
confused. And special. This meant he loved me more than he loved
Mum. That was a good feeling because Mum was mean and cruel. If
Dad loved me more than her then maybe he could protect me. If this

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 59

awful thing he was doing was part of that, well ... at least he loved me;
he said so.

While I was able to talk of the abuse at Ward One and be believed,

the fact it had been anal rape was unspeakable. I felt so filthy about
this, so ashamed. Somehow it was my fault and it proved I was utterly
disgusting. For years after this I wanted it to be known, yet was unable
to speak it out. I have no idea if those working with me knew and just
didn't spell it out, or whether it was the hideous, filthy secret I thought
it was.

I also remembered my mother trying to suffocate me when I was

two. She lived in an age when women were expected to have children.
There was no choice. My mother made no secret of the fact that she
neither liked nor understood children. She should never have had
them. She was not a patient woman and she found small children
difficult and tiresome. The memory in question is of me lying in a cot,
crying. I don't know why. Mum was yelling at me to be quiet, I
continued to cry. In sheer frustration she grabbed a pillow, rammed it
into my face and held it there. For days after remembering this I could
feel the pillow over my face, the force with which it was held there and
the words “she tried to kill me” running through my head. I don't know
why or how the pillow was taken off my face, whether she changed her
mind, I passed out, or my father entered the room.

Years later when my brother and I discussed this memory he told

me of the times Mum had slammed his head against a brick wall or
tried to choke him. He was not surprised by my memory.

Clouds have been building up all afternoon. Darkness layering upon
darkness. Ominous green-tinged clouds banking up over the hills. Air
becoming oppressive with the heaviness of moisture. And suddenly it
hailed. Completely unexpected. Rain yes, but not hail. I was sitting
working, occasionally watching the sky, when I heard ching ching ping
noises as hail bounced off the roof. I looked out the window and the
ground was covered with balls of ice dancing, bouncing, ricocheting …

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 60

and melting. And then the sun returned.

The depth of personal work at Ward One was like that. It would

build up, gathering momentum, threatening and ominous and then it
would burst out of my unconscious, often with a flurry of noise and
emotion. I would deal with it and my load would be lightened, and life
would go on.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 61

CHAPTER SEVEN

O

ne of the great delights of my seascape is how the colours and

shapes can maintain their identity and integrity, even though there are
so many different blocks and splashes of colour. They touch each
other and build on one another and the perception of colour is
influenced by the adjoining hues. In the creation of the work the artist
has prevented the paints from blending together, has stopped the
muddy, murky brown of indiscriminate mingling. Even as the paint
piles one on top of each other, building up layers and depth,
supporting one another, it hold its own. Each colour is true to itself, its
head held high with a gentle pride.

David and Marie were right. I picked up on other people's pathologies.
There were a couple of people in the unit who used self-mutilation as a
way of relieving pain. These were not suicide attempts, rather a release
of the build-up of unendurable pain. It was not something I had ever
thought of doing but hearing about it, it made sense and offered an
alternative to drugs and alcohol.

When the pain inside became unbearable I would take off in my

car and just drive, with no idea where I was going. The containment of
the car helped me to feel a little safer and more in control. The car
became a womb. No one could reach me there.

I learnt to create this womb-like safety in my head. I formed a

mental bubble around myself that no one could penetrate. It was at
least three feet thick, sometimes deep black, other times clear. I would
haze out as if in a thick fog. My brain would be numb and floaty and
everything would be a long way away. I would curl up and close in on
myself knowing no one could find me. The lights might have been on

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 62

but there was no one at home. I would stay in one spot rocking my
pain. Or, like an animal, withdraw from the world; waiting... hoping to
die. It was a very crazy space, skating right on the edge and if I toppled
over I might not be able to make it back. Cutting provided the way
back. I entered the bubble when the pain was unbearable. I had to be
invisible. I always felt no one had any idea how intense my pain was. If
I cut myself and there was blood then some of my pain was on the
outside, it was visible. The blood was proof of my pain. If there was
enough blood then I could return to my mind and body. The cutting
never hurt and the sound and feel of the skin being jagged open by the
knife or piece of glass was satisfying. As I sat and watched the blood
dripping I would feel the fog lifting and see reality breaking through.

Because there was such a high staff to patient ratio the unit was the
obvious choice when cut-backs were ordered at the hospital. We were
told Ward One was going to be closed down. My first reaction was to
feel overwhelmed; then I despaired, then I got angry. Many of the
residents were terrified. They knew this place was their only chance of
getting well. We wanted to do something. The staff were not allowed to
express their opinion or encourage us to take action. It was a measure
of their creativity that they managed to stick to the letter of the law
while providing us with a huge amount of support. Those restrictions
did not apply to Bernard who was no longer employed by the hospital.
He came and talked to the residents and we organised a fighting
campaign. Bernard had a lot of contacts and he was a strategist. He
organised for the story to be covered by A Current Affair; a nightly TV
programme. I talked to Caroline Jones on ABC radio. Several of us were
interviewed by Adele Horin of the National Times, a weekly newspaper
with a reputation for uncovering the facts behind the stories of the
day. This interview resulted in a two-page article with photos. Bernard
also knew a solicitor who was on our side and we threatened to sue
the hospital for breach of contract. We had entered the unit on the
understanding we could stay for a maximum of two years and the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 63

hospital was reneging on this agreement. We imagined the possible
headlines. “Hospital threatens to make psychiatric patients homeless!”
“Psychiatric patients threaten to sue government.”

People rang the unit to let us know they supported what we were

doing. They phoned the ABC and the A Current Affair office and there
were letters in the papers. We won; the Health Commission decided to
keep us open. It was an intoxicating victory for people who had little
experience of making a difference.

The Unit was closed 18 months later when the whole hospital was

shut down.

During my time at Ward One my parents went overseas for six months.
I entered the unit before they left and my mother was horrified her
daughter was going into a psychiatric hospital. “What on earth do you
expect me to tell my friends?” she lamented. I didn't give a damn.
Being at a counselling farm was fine because my mother could mutter
vague things about convalescence; the nut-house was more
confronting.

One Saturday morning I was sleeping in. It was one of the few

weekends I was not at Maraylya. One of the nurses came upstairs and
told me there were two visitors for me.

“Who?” I asked.
“No idea, a couple of older women,” the nurse said.
“I don't know any older women.” I grumbled, crawling out of bed.
“Well, they know you. You'd better get downstairs quickly, I've put

them in the day room but they look rather out of place.”

Five minutes later I walked into the day room to find two friends of

the family sitting sipping tea out of thick hospital cups. They looked
extremely uncomfortable. “What are you doing here?” I stammered.
My mother would have been horrified at my manners, surely a “hello”
first. It turns out they had seen a large photo of me in the National
Times and were concerned I was in a psychiatric hospital, especially
while my parents were overseas and not there to support me. I was

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 64

not gracious, telling them I was pleased that Mum and Dad were
overseas because they were not supportive when they were around. I
loved it here and received far more support from the other lunatics
than I could ever imagine receiving from my parents. I was cruel, rude
and ungrateful. I am sure they had come out of genuine compassion
but I resented them intruding into my world.

The more I talked to the other residents and watched them do their
work the more my admiration for people's tenacity and courage grew.
People were capable of surviving the most horrendous childhoods.
Terry was in his early twenties, thick-set, pugnacious. Rage pulsated
out of him. He had already served time in prison for violent crimes. He
was in the unit because he felt his violence was uncontrollable. The
staff were very clear that it was not uncontrollable and he was to obey
the same rules as everyone else: “no violence to self, others or
property”. These were the rules. They were, of course, broken by
people harming themselves. One time I damaged property when my
level of frustration was so high the only way I could relieve it was to
collect several plates, take them outside, and hurl them against the
side of the building. They made an intensely satisfying noise as they
smashed. That particular piece of behaviour met with mixed reactions
from the staff as it was the closest I had come to expressing anger,
something I was being encouraged to do. I got a very light rap over the
knuckles and was told to pay for the plates and asked, if I was going to
do it again, please let people know so I didn't frighten anyone. Terry
was the first resident whose breaking of the rules could well mean
harm to one of us. I was terrified of him, as were other residents.

It was difficult having a resident by whom we felt threatened.

While others could show anger and violence, it was either directed at
themselves or at the people in their past, with Terry we knew it could
be directed at us.

As Terry started to do work on his childhood we learnt that he,

too, was terrified of his violence. For him it felt like a volcano that

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 65

erupted with no warning, leaving devastation in its wake. The staff
insisted he was responsible. In situations like this Bob showed an
impressive authority and was non-negotiable on the rules. It helped us
to feel a little safer. We could also see that Terry wanted to take
responsibility for his rage, he just didn't know how. He started to
recognise the cues. Instead of dissociating and pushing down his rage
he began to learn the early signs of rage building up. He learnt to
recognise and understand feeling vexed, then irritated, then annoyed.
He longer moved from saying, and believing, he was fine to being
engulfed by murderous fury in one blinding flash.

As he continued to work he discovered that anger was what his

father had taught him. As a small boy if he had shown any sign of
sadness or fear his father had belted him until he lost consciousness,
all the while berating him and telling him not to be a sissy, real men
didn't cry. Terry learnt to cover every feeling with rage. In what was a
magnificent piece of work he finally managed to get in touch with his
terror. Vibrating with fear he imagined his father in front of him and
told him he was no longer going to do as he was told, he was no longer
going to lie about his feelings, he was going to be true to himself and
that meant being more of a man than he had been up to now. There
was hardly a dry eye in the place, it took incredible courage and we all
witnessed how terrified that small boy had been. I felt he deserved a
standing ovation.

Another resident who taught us all was Roseanne. She was nearly

catatonic when she arrived at Ward One, having withdrawn almost
completely from the world. Her therapy was painstakingly slow while
she began to trust the staff and residents. The story of her intelligent,
dominating father emerged. His expectations of Roseanne were
unrealistic and her failures to live up to them were met with brutality.
As she began to claim her own life and intelligence she no longer
needed her thick glasses or the many protections she had from the
world. She emerged as a beautiful, loving, articulate woman.

Roseanne had been in mental institutions for a very long time. She

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 66

had an enormous file full of damaging diagnoses and records of many
symptoms of her distress which were often viewed as disordered and
pathological. One day her file went missing. The unit was searched and
a group was called, there was no sign of it. It was many years later I
discovered what had happened. Two people had decided the existence
of her file would be a great hindrance to Roseanne's future. They had
stolen it from Bob's desk and thrown it into the Parramatta River.

My time in Ward One convinced me the decisions we make as

children, in the midst of relentless abuse, neglect or trauma are
incredibly smart ways to survive the world as we see it. All of us at
Ward One, in the midst of what at times felt like unendurable pain,
could reach out and support one another in ways I had never
encountered before. I learnt about and experienced more love and
acceptance there than anywhere else.

My time at Ward One was one of enormous growth. Christianity,

psychology and philosophy came together, to inform and to challenge.
It was there I started to believe that no matter how damaged we are, it
is possible to heal. In the midst of that healing, in the struggle to create
a new life, God meets us and gives us the strength and courage to
embark on this sacred journey, together. I developed an unshakeable
conviction that we ultimately know what we need in order to heal. No
matter what evil we have endured, or how incomprehensible it may be,
within us there is a quest for life that impels us towards fullness of
being and lightness of spirit. The God within us calls us into wholeness.

I decided to leave Ward One before my parents returned from
overseas. Staff and residents confronted me over this decision because
they could see I was nowhere near ready. I, of course, knew best and
left anyway, grateful for the time I had spent there but eager to face
the world. I rented a bedsit in Glebe.

Bob wrote me an excellent reference. I would turn up to job

interviews, hand them his reference and explain I had been in a
psychiatric hospital for the last nine months. I did not get any of the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 67

jobs I applied for. I was naïve to think there would not be
discrimination against people with mental health issues. My belief that
they would value my honesty was misplaced. Lying proved a better
option. At the next interview I said I had been travelling for the last
year. I got the job. I don't remember that job. It didn't last long. I got
bored really quickly.

I was trying to establish a life. It took a lot of energy and work

added stress to the equation. I continued therapy. Susan, from Ward
One, had completed her welfare work training and had a small private
practice. She was living in the Blue Mountains and I would travel up
twice a week.

Many of my sessions with Susan started with my constant fear. In

the manner of Ward One Susan's therapy room contained a couple of
arm chairs and a mattress on the floor with lots of cushions. Time and
time again I would cower in the corner, trembling and terrified,
protecting myself with the cushions. Sometimes new memories of my
father sexually abusing me would emerge. Other times I would
remember either of my parents giving me messages or instructions
that were impossible to obey. My parents discounted my reality, telling
me what I experienced and felt was neither real nor valid and I was
being stupid and ridiculous. They set up double-binds and I could
never get anything right. Their continual changing of the rules and
moving the goal posts were crazy-making. My parents gave me no
messages that encouraged me to be alive, to think, to be myself or to
be sane. Needs were not to be articulated because that gave my
parents the power to taunt, ridicule and refuse me. These memories
and their consequences had been uncovered with Bernard at his
weekend workshop and now Susan and I continued to work on them
with a combination of re-parenting and redecision work.

This was hard, intense work and holding the pain these sessions

brought up was heavy going. I was neither drinking nor taking drugs
but I smoked heavily and tried my best to anaesthetise myself with
chocolate, fat and sugar.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 68

For a part of each session Susan would hold me gently and

lovingly as she sought to overwrite many of the destructive messages
bestowed on me by my parents. As she held me she would say over
and over again that it was OK for me to be here, it was OK to be alive,
to think, to feel, to have needs and to ask for what I want. Wonderful,
necessary stuff and I did my best to soak it all in. At the same time my
fear continued to block much of these messages. I longed to let go, but
held myself rigid and battled the voices in my head that were
sabotaging Susan's messages, only partially accepting her love,
believing she did this because I paid her (an incredibly small amount).
She was clear that I paid for her expertise; her love she gave freely.

I saw Susan for therapy until she dropped a bombshell and told

me she was going to study in America for six months.

One of the social workers from Ward One lived near me in Glebe and
she asked me to look after her two children, pick them up after school
and stay with them until she got home around six. I'm not great with
children but she was willing to pay me. At first it was OK but being
smart kids they soon realised I was way out of my depth. One
afternoon the eight-year-old was misbehaving and I told him to go to
his room, and he stood there, put his hands on his hips and said “Make
me!” I felt powerless, with no idea how to handle the situation, and
horrified by the violence that swept through me and the urge to grab
the child saying “Right, you little shit!”, belt him and then hurl him into
his bedroom. I decided it was time to stop babysitting.

Apart from my brief stint in Kings Cross this was the first time I had
lived in inner-city Sydney. A friend from Ward One was into folk music
and we used to attend the Folk Club upstairs in a pub in Elizabeth
Street then finish the evening at Oddy's café in Paddington. It was the
only café I've known to have the Moonlight Sonata as one of the
options on their Jukebox. I also frequented The Toucan Club in Glebe
Point Road, where everyone sat around on the floor, stoned, drinking

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 69

wine and listening to live music. I thought I was so cool. Surely a bit of
grass and some wine wasn't going to do me any harm.

Living in Glebe was lonely but it thrummed with life; a bright

kaleidoscope of colours, cultures and cuisines. I loved wandering
around breathing it all in. This was 1979 and the yuppification of the
inner-city suburbs hadn't begun. Glebe was full of uni students,
junkies, artists, the unemployed and mentally ill as well as low income
workers, people who had lived there all their lives and those who
worked on the boats at Blackwattle Bay. I felt safe there. I would walk
around the streets at night watching people, listening to the music that
spilled out of the pubs, breathing in the aromas of pizzas, pasta and
pide as they blended with incense, patchouli oil and marijuana. Often
there would be an addict overdosed on the footpath. I would always
ring 000 from a phone booth and time how long it took for the
ambulance to arrive. They were fast.

I volunteered at a drop-in coffee shop in Kings Cross that was run

by the Sydney City Mission. It provided meals, counselling and
somewhere to hang out. This was to be my opportunity to give back
and to find some meaning for my life. I worked there two evenings a
week chatting to the people who came in, playing cards or dominoes
and helping serve the meals that were provided. One of the other
volunteers and I developed a friendship that was also an attraction. I
had not the faintest idea how to deal with this or how to take
responsibility for my attraction. It was the first time I had felt like this
since my marriage break-up but my Christianity told me that sex
outside of marriage was not OK. I went up to Maraylya and talked to
David about it. I don't remember what he said at the time but after the
inevitable happened, which was me going out and getting drunk,
sleeping with the guy and then going into a meltdown of crazy self-
accusations and remorse, David told me he knew that it would happen.
When I asked him how, he told me that during my conversation about
how attracted I was to this man I had said nothing that showed I would
take responsibility for myself or the situation. David also commented

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 70

that me working in a drop-in centre in the Cross was an exceptionally
bad idea. He felt it was guaranteed I would end up drinking or using
drugs. I gave up being a volunteer.

A modern furniture company employed me to work in the office that
supported their showrooms. I worked the switchboard, was
responsible for placing orders and monitoring stock. Initially, it was
hard work and interesting. I couldn't get it all done in the hours
provided so I would work back for an hour or two each night. This
suited me because living alone in a bedsit was lonely.

Loneliness contributed to my undoing. My social skills were

negligible and starting conversations without alcohol as a lubricant was
impossible. Mixing folk music and alcohol and going to pubs alone
started to be the order of the day. My ability to take care of myself was
zero. It didn't matter who came up to me and started a conversation or
what they wanted from me, I went along with it. “No” was beyond my
comprehension and ability. My total lack of self-respect invited a
similar response from others. I was sucked up, spat out, discarded and
despised.

Bernard ran a weekly therapy group which I decided to join. My

struggle with suicidal thoughts and madness continued. No matter
how much therapy I did, madness continued to invite me to escape
from the world. It offered relief from my psychological pain,
exhaustion and the despair and loneliness that were part of my
everyday existence. I just wanted to hand over responsibility for myself
and have someone take care of me, hold me, look after me. There were
times I let go of the struggle to stay sane and the pain would stop, but
each time I would feel myself falling into insanity and would pull
back ... and the pain would start again.

Bernard, in his effort to support me, allowed me to phone him

once a week in between sessions. I wanted him to take care of me,
take responsibility for me. One night I was visiting friends who had
been in Ward One. I got very drunk, regressed and could not tell the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 71

difference between the present and the past. I was caught in a
memory of abuse and violence and was doing my best to implicate my
friends. I cast them in the role of my abuser and alternated between
terror and hurling abuse at them. They decided to call Bernard. Talking
to me he realised what a state I was in and said he would organise an
ambulance to come and take me to a psychiatric hospital. I felt
relieved and victorious. Ten minutes later he phoned back. On second
thoughts he would not take responsibility for me. I could ring an
ambulance myself. I most certainly needed to leave my friends' place
and stop causing them so much distress. He told me to phone him the
next morning at ten, either from Glebe or hospital. I rang from Glebe.
He made it abundantly clear that no matter what I did, he would not
take responsibility for me and he was not impressed with having his
evening disturbed. I felt humiliated and ashamed.

It works, you see, all those little bits of colours, the shapes, the
changes in thickness. It works because together they make something
that can be identified. A picture. A painting. Not everyone appreciates
it; too bold, too abstract, too blue, too wild, but it exists. It is a fact.
And I love it!

And it works as a metaphor for my life, all those things have been

said about me, but I have come to love and accept myself. All the
different pieces, colours, textures, combinations represent all the
myriad people, places and events of my life. The wildness and intensity
of the painting resonates within me.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 72

CHAPTER EIGHT

I

t's a glorious day, white fluffy clouds scudding across the blue sky

and masses of foaming, frothy peaks chopping up the surface of the
ocean. The only slight drawback is that it's blowing a gale. The house is
groaning with each onslaught, the outdoor furniture rolls and tumbles
across the deck. Trees are bending and the fronds of a palm tree are
being whipped into a frenzied and exotic dance. The radio issues a
severe weather warning for winds strong enough to cause major
damage and serious disruption.

Glorious yet causing major damage and serious disruption. That

was Barry.

I decided to visit Ward One. A few of the residents were going to the
pub and invited me to join them. One of the group was a new resident,
Barry. He had a savage wit, a great sense of satire, loved being the life
and soul of the party. By the end of the evening Barry and I were
knocking back triple shots of OP rum trying to drink each other under
the table. When the staff at Ward One heard we had met there was a
collective groan and deep concern, they knew us well enough to know
we would be dynamite together.

Barry was one of the most brilliant people I ever met. He devoured

books: philosophy, comparative religion, theosophy, psychology, art,
movies, literature and poetry. He questioned everything; thought
deeply; had an outrageous sense of humour; was gay; at times was an
over the top drama queen and was deeply unhappy. He would plunge
from the heights of extroverted, flamboyant mania to the depths of
darkest despair.

One of the people in Bernard's therapy group offered me a room

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 73

in a share house in Balmain. It wasn't long before Barry left Ward One
and joined me there. We became regulars at the pub around the
corner where we would drink and have long, intense discussions and
play pool. I was barely holding down my job at the furniture factory
and it was starting to interfere with my social life. We supplemented
our drinking by smoking dope and then quickly progressed to our
drugs of choice: Mandrax and barbiturates.

I'd been off drugs for two years. Within two days I was using more

than ever before. My tenuous hold on my job slipped. My boss spotted
me staggering down Glebe Point Road, stoned. I had phoned in sick.
He was not impressed. He had given me the job partly because I was a
Christian. He told me he was disappointed in me, he didn't feel I was
living the life Christ would want me to, and, with reluctance, he was
letting me go. Woohoo!! More time to party!!

Life with Barry was intense; he had enormous mood swings. At

times his depression was a dense black cloud that engulfed us both,
other times he would be wildly high and we would go out and do the
rounds of the gay bars in Oxford Street and Surry Hills, dancing into
the early morning and, in Barry's case, having lots of anonymous sex.

We used mostly prescription drugs obtained through the

Pharmaceutical Benefit Scheme so didn't need much money for them,
but we did need alcohol. Barry was great at getting people to buy us
drinks. He was a stunningly good-looking man, with flair and style. He
could be charming, entertaining and an outrageous flirt. He was
searching for a relationship that offered intellectual stimulation as well
as sex, but settled for encounters that left him dissatisfied and angry
with himself. He was often suicidal, and many was the time he
wouldn't come home for a couple of days and I would discover he had
been in hospital, having his stomach pumped, or his wrists stitched
and bandaged. Or, he had been dragged out of the ocean yet again. He
had walked into it in his desire to commit suicide with dramatic flair,
following in the footsteps of James Mason or Virginia Woolf.

Janet sometimes accompanied us on our nights out. She had been

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 74

in Ward One at the same time as Barry and they had become close
friends. Janet moved into our house when a room became available.
She had questions about her sexuality and fell in love with me. I was
infatuated with and consumed by Barry and he was looking for love
and sex anywhere he could find it, as long as it was male. We were a
fun trio. We nicknamed ourselves slut, whore and tart – all were terms
of endearment, though other people sometimes seemed shocked. We
were all trying to sort ourselves out, we were looking to belong and we
wanted to be loved in our own particular way. There was a lot of love
between us, and we had some amazing times together.

As my drug taking increased I, too, ended up in hospital having

overdosed. I used to the point of blackout and mornings would find me
in bed with a stranger with no memory of who? where? Or how?

Barry and I would do the rounds of different charities and

churches in order to get food and money. The local pub was great at
giving us credit until benefits day and we had enough sense to always
pay them back straight away. There were times when we had no
money at all and I would encourage Barry to go and sell himself on a
nearby corner. Far better him than me, he had done it before, he was
more attractive than me, and therefore more likely to make money. Off
he'd go, returning within an hour with money for us to head out for the
night. He didn't like to do it too often, “a girl's got to have some
morals” he would say with a tarty toss of his head, “far better to give it
away than sell it”.

I still considered myself a Christian. I had been taught to take the

Bible literally, to believe God was in control of everything. I did my
best, but it just didn't work. There were way too many contradictions
and being told to

just have faith or to hold the perceived contradictions

in creative tension didn't work. I always thought there were things I
wasn't being told. I figured if God was worthwhile then I needed to
encounter him in the struggles and contradictions of life. God had to
be found on the cutting-edge not in pious platitudes.

Barry nicknamed me Prudence Pureheart. He hated my

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 75

regurgitated statements of faith or simplistic answers to his deep
searching about life, suffering and God. He challenged my thinking and
railed against anything that was shallow. His favourite philosopher was
Nietzsche and he would read out great slabs of “Beyond Good and Evil”
demanding I stretch my brain and my beliefs. He insisted I read
Herman Hesse. He would confront me with questions about heaven
and hell, other religions, and what the Bible said. I loved and hated
these conversations. It was in such contrast to church and being told
by the minister what to believe and how to behave. We would go and
see art house movies, especially anything by Warhol, and he would
pressure me to read books that blew my mind. We had intense
discussions but Barry could cut through my arguments and annihilate
my logic. Nothing was sacred; everything could be questioned.

There was much about life with Barry I loved. It was wild, exciting,

flamboyant and fun; and a complete mess. God was right in the centre
of it and also relegated to the sidelines. I would do my best to offer
Barry understandable and believable explanations of God and
Christianity. Prayer was a daily part of my life but when I went out
partying God was left at home for fear of his disapproval. I would
apologise to him the next morning and ask for help to get my life back
into some sort of control, often as I headed out to the pub.

I decided to detox so went into Langton Clinic. After a few days

Barry came to visit; he thought I might be hanging out so he brought
me some drugs. I was grateful - the staff were not. I was kicked out.

My aggression while on barbs was starting to cause trouble. I was

banned from various bars and nightclubs, including French's in
Darlinghurst. This was quite an achievement and I was proud of being
banned from such a hell hole.

My world was a roller-coaster of trying to get straight and using. I

was in the middle of a battle for my soul. My Christianity knew I could
not continue life with Barry and stay off drugs. What I needed was to
return to a life where God was a constant, conscious part of each day.
Life with Barry was intense, vibrant, exciting and challenging. But I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 76

didn't want to do drugs any more, not because I disliked the drugs, I
loved them, but the lifestyle that went with them was getting out of
hand. If life had just been intense and fun it would have been great but
drugs for me meant blackouts, screwing around, picking fights, having
a body covered in bruises and ending up in hospital. Nor was I mature
enough to enjoy the challenge of Barry's attacks and critique of my
belief system.

I was back on a path of self-destruction and wanted to get off.
It was time to return to Ward One.
I was not prepared to stop my friendship with Barry and I

sabotaged my efforts to get straight. Ward One had a strict rule about
drug usage: it was not allowed and the consequence for breaking the
rule was to be put out of the ward for a week. This meant, of course,
that I would catch up with Barry for the week and resume our life
together. I was constantly using and getting straight. While at Ward
One I could see my behaviour clearly but whenever Barry said come, I
went. I begged God to help me say “No” to no avail. Following Barry
around meant finding out which hospital he was in, assuming we were
not in hospital together. The staff at Accident and Emergency were
never impressed with drug overdoses and they became seriously
pissed off with us, especially St Vincent's, which served both Oxford
Street and Kings Cross, our main stamping ground.

It soon became apparent to the staff at Ward One that putting me

out of the unit for a week was counter-productive. It was decided, in
consultation with me, that the consequence for my drug usage was to
be sent to the Admissions Ward for a week. That was a serious
consequence, admissions wards are hideous. They are where
everybody and anybody gets put when they first arrive at the hospital
whether through police, family or self-referral. People in Admissions
Wards are often in the midst of psychotic episodes or in the acute
stages of their illness and the staff have to do their best to maintain
order and control until medication, treatment and placement are
sorted out. This is often done with the use of strong tranquillisers and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 77

anti-psychotic medication, rarely in consultation with the patient. The
emotion in the Admission Wards was a mixture of anger, turmoil, fear
and despair. They were crazy-making places and everyone was treated
as if they were mad. They fostered ill-health and insanity and were the
complete antithesis of Ward One.

The first time I broke the rule and had to go to Admissions at Ward

12 I threw a major hissy fit. “I'm not going, you can't make me! Those
places are hideous, inhuman! If you make me go there I'll be so
distressed I'll have no choice but to cut myself. I'll be so depressed I
might kill myself.” Bob took me at my word and scheduled me! He
made me an A category patient which meant I was under constant
surveillance. I could not be more than an arm's length away from a
nurse even while on the toilet and had to stay in my pyjamas the whole
time. I shrieked, tantrumed and was pissed off. I implored my fellow
residents to stand up for me. “Are you kidding?” was their response.
“You're being a fucking pain in the arse and you deserve it”. So, off to
Ward 12 and, just to prove I could, I managed to cut myself, using my
watch, while under constant surveillance. A small moment of triumph.

I am sure the staff gave me many chances because they

remembered my previous stay when I had treated the unit with
respect and had contributed to it in many positive ways.

Felicity, a Ward One resident, was a bright, vivacious woman with
bouncy, curly hair and personality to match. She was always ready to
laugh and to tell a story. We shared a bedroom. One night when we
were the only two there she told me about life in prison, a place she
had spent most of her adult life. She explained that a prison sentence
was called a laggin; that there were more drugs inside jail than outside
and when drugs on the street dried up people would come to the jail to
score. She told me that prison officers were called “screws” with the
explanation “you have to be fucked to do the job.” She explained that
on arrival at the jail you had to hand over everything: clothes, money,
cigarettes and jewellery. You were strip-searched and then had to have

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 78

a shower while a screw watched you. The nasty ones would make
comments about your body, either insulting or sleazily flattering; either
way you had to cop it sweet.

Felicity explained the rules of prison life: see nothing, hear

nothing, say nothing. Remember them and you will probably survive.
She recounted stories of fights in the prison dormitories and how no
one would ever press the emergency bell because it was more than
their life was worth. When a prison officer entered the dormitories
after a fight and tried to find out what had happened, no one ever said
a word. If you did, you could be certain a serious

accident would befall

you. She spoke of the friendships within jail and of the many lesbian
relationships that developed; these arose from a need for love, sex and
comfort rather than anything to do with sexual orientation. She
explained that cigarettes and drugs were prison currency.

There was a moral code in jail and women who had committed

crimes against children were kept in the high-security, solitary section
of the jail in the same building as the hospital. During Felicity's last
time in jail a woman who had been convicted of murdering the three
children she babysat was in solitary. It was a matter of honour to
swear and spit at her if you caught sight of her. She would never be
allowed into the main section of the jail because there would be no
way of protecting her. Drug offences, crimes against property and
crimes of passion were all acceptable. People who were in jail because
they refused to pay fines or were on weekend detention were looked
down upon as insipid weaklings and fun to bully, but if you had
committed a crime against a child you were considered the scum of
the earth.

Felicity spoke of jail affectionately. She knew the rules, both silent

and stated, and how to survive. She had learnt well the lessons about
feelings; fear and tears were not to be shown, anger was OK because it
was tough, and loyalty was prized. Betrayals would be punished. She
was at Ward One in the hope of undoing some of this training and to
break the dependency she had on jail. While this was another

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 79

institution she hoped it would be a stepping stone to living in the
outside world.

It was this kind of conversation that was the life blood of Ward

One for me. I often got feedback that I listened well and I always felt
enlivened by these kind of conversations, where people told their story
at depth. Felicity must have talked about jail for at least three hours
that night. I was fascinated and kept asking questions that encouraged
her to continue her story. She told me afterwards it had helped her put
some things in perspective. I was glad. It turned out she did me the
greater service.

Barry decided he wanted to get straight, well, off drugs anyway. He
asked to return to Ward One; he was refused. There was a policy
residents could not return within six months of discharge. This was to
prevent the place being taken for granted and to maintain stability.
Nor would the staff allow both of us to be there at the same time; they
said we would be far too disruptive and damaging to the place. We
were incensed. We decided to leave Sydney together and go
somewhere where we could get off drugs and start a new life. The staff
made it clear they saw this as an extremely bad idea and I would not
be allowed re-admittance until my six months was up. If Barry was
there before me I would not be allowed back in. I knew they meant it -
but left anyway.

Lightning forks through the night sky. A blue-white, silver,
incandescent flash. I count: one...two...BOOM. The thunder crashes
then rumbles and rolls, the heavenly bowling ball must have scored a
strike by the sounds of that last clap. Another ragged bolt of lightning
flashes across the sky. It illuminates the night, unbearably bright – I
tense, waiting for the next clap of thunder, it crashes overhead. The
landscape is revealed in a dazzling brilliance of white and black. The
thunder continues to assault my senses. I am in the middle of the
storm.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 80

CHAPTER NINE

I

t is cold, wet and miserable. The rain is steady, constant, relentless.

Rain without let up, with no light, no sign of the sun, no chance of a
walk. The cold is the kind that chills you to the core, that oozes off the
walls and emanates up from the floor – even with the heater on the
cold seeps into my feet and travels upwards. The dogs and I huddle
miserably together. There must be snow somewhere near. Not close
enough to brighten the world with its beauty, but near enough to make
me bone-achingly cold.

Barry and I moved to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, a two-hour
train trip from Sydney. We took over the flat of one of the nurses at
Ward One. It was near the Three Sisters Lookout and Cliff Drive, about
a thirty-minute walk from the station. The flat was in a brick building,
built in the fifties. It was at the back of the building, with views of trees.
It was a dark flat, bitterly cold, except for the small kitchen which
caught the afternoon sun. We had little money so went to the various
charities around town in order to get food, clothes and a voucher to
get the electricity connected. It was early June and freezing. While we
were waiting for the electricity to be connected we sat at the kitchen
table wrapped in blankets, catching as much of the pale sunlight as
possible. We played backgammon for hours. We had no power to cook
but we did have some candles. I felt sure that a fry pan held over a
candle flame for long enough would manage to fry us a couple of eggs.
It didn't work.

Nights were bitter, below freezing. We would put on as many

clothes as we could then pile blankets, sheets, coats and towels on top

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 81

of the bed and spend the night shivering and freezing together. This
idyllic lifestyle paled rather quickly and Barry found an excuse to go to
Sydney for the day. He had a doctor he needed to see. I went with him
and he got a prescription for Rohypnol. This, according to Barry, was
not busting because they were not barbs. We still managed to
overdose. The nurse whose flat we were staying in came around and
saw what state we were in and called an ambulance. That was our
introduction to Katoomba hospital. At least it was warm.

Katoomba is a scenic, tourist destination. The town has some

grand old hotels, guest houses and homes as well as an Art Deco café
and shop fronts. The Three Sisters rock formation that towers above
the Jamison Valley is over nine hundred metres above sea level. A giant
stairway of eight hundred steps takes you to the valley floor. Katoomba
has magnificent scenery and wonderful, strenuous walks. We returned
to the flat with renewed promises of staying on the straight and
narrow and decided on a fitness campaign that meant walking all
around Katoomba and appreciating its beauty. This didn't last long and
by the time our benefit cheques arrived we were ready to party. We
went to the pub and had several drinks and brought some spirits to
take home with us. The next day we went to Sydney and both scored
scripts for barbiturates, Mandrax and Serepax. It's a boring trip back
up the mountains so we whiled the time away by popping pills. We
managed the long walk from the station to the flat and then settled in
for some serious drug taking.

I have no clear memory of the next couple of days. Barry

overdosed. I managed to strip him off and get him into the bath and
then went through the usual routine of splashing cold water over him
in an effort to bring him round. This was something I had done
successfully on previous occasions; this was not one of them. Barry
was a solid man, he was too heavy for me to get him out of the bath
without his co-operation. I went around the corner to the nearby motel
to ring for an ambulance. Waiting for the ambulance to arrive I took
more drugs and continued my attempts to revive Barry. He was turning

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 82

blue. I have a vague memory of going back round to the motel and
yelling at the ambulance people to hurry up and them telling me that
they were sick to death of us and they were not coming. I have no idea
if this is true or was one of my weird barbiturate dreams but the
ambulance didn't come. It was freezing cold.

The next thing I remember is waking up in Katoomba hospital with

a drip in my arm and a soreness in my throat that told me my stomach
had been pumped. I kept asking “Where's Barry?” Evidently I had asked
the question many times in the preceding twenty-four hours. The
nurse left the room to get the matron. The radio was on and the local
news reported that a man had been found naked and dead in a bath,
police were investigating, his name had not been released. Even then I
didn't understand that it was Barry. The matron had to tell me and
then she had to tell me again and again.

Then the police turned up. They were kind and polite and asked a

lot of questions I didn't know the answers to. They kept saying “That's
not what you said yesterday”. I had absolutely no recollection of them
interviewing me the previous day. The only possible explanation is
having used drugs to the point of blackout I was still in that space
when the police first interviewed me. Once I had slept it off and was
out of blackout I had no memory of what had happened after I got
Barry into the bath.

I was discharged from hospital in police custody to be interviewed

at Katoomba police station.

I had just learnt Barry was dead and was recovering from a major

overdose. I had been in blackout for quite some time and was in a
thick, dense fog. Any answers I managed to find came from a long way
away. The police asked me if I wanted a solicitor present. I asked
whether I needed one? They called the local legal aid guy. He asked me
if there was any likelihood of charges being laid. I said “No”. He advised
me to tell them the truth and then left. The police interviewed me for
three hours! They kept telling me the answers I was giving were
different from the answers in the hospital the day before. There was

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 83

nothing I could do about that. At the end of the interview they told me
they had to go and talk amongst themselves to figure out what to
charge me with. As naïve as this may sound it was not until that
moment that the thought of charges even entered my head. Up until
then I was just helping them to understand what had happened to
Barry and about his drug usage and his suicidal behaviour. There was
no way they would hold me responsible for his death.

Sometime later the policemen re-entered the room and told me I

was charged with manslaughter and possession and self-
administration of a restricted substance.

“What?”
I was given a bail form to fill out. I sat there stunned, I could not

believe it, there had been a mistake. I looked at the form, it may just as
well have been in Hebrew for all the sense it made. I was numb,
couldn't even remember my name and address. The policeman told
me I needed to fill in the form to be able to go home. I had enough
sense to know that going back to the flat was a recipe for disaster. I
told him so; if I went back there they would have me dead on their
hands within a couple of days. No question about it. I was naïve
enough to think there would still be a

shit-load of drugs there. He

asked me where I could go. I asked to go back to the hospital? That
was not an option. Then I suggested Ward One?

The police rang to see if that was possible. How awful for the staff

to learn of Barry's death that way. Did the police break it to them
gently? They refused the request. They were sticking to their policy of
no re-admission for six months. The police officer then suggested I go
home to my parents. “Ah, I don't think so, that would not be a good
idea, besides they wouldn't have me.”

I was sent to Silverwater Women's Prison.

There was no colour or glory, just an unheralded slipping from day

to night. Now it's dark. No stars. No moon. Just black. Deep, dark,

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 84

black. The kind of darkness where you can't see your way, can barely
place one foot in front of the other. All you can do is wait and pray.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 85

CHAPTER TEN

T

he rain continues to fall from grey, sodden, skies. A penetrating rain.

A rain that washes away the topsoil. I watch as the brown of good, rich
earth stains the water where the creek meets the ocean and dumps its
precious cargo without care or remorse.

Water streams down the walls. Windows fog with condensation. I

am trapped indoors, imprisoned by the foul weather. It feels endless,
relentless, with no sign of remission or reprieve.

I travelled from Katoomba to Silverwater in the back of a police van,
alone. I was terrified. I wondered why my life was such a mess and
why I couldn't seem to sort it out. And I prayed. There was nothing
eloquent about my prayers; I kept saying “Oh fuck, please help.” I
remembered my conversation with Felicity and knew I was about to be
strip searched. My terror increased.

The police at Katoomba had been kind and polite, admittedly they

had charged me with manslaughter, but they had been polite about it.
The admitting officer at Silverwater was officious and efficient. The
admissions process was degrading, humiliating and cold. I was
admitted to the jail hospital in order to detox. Detoxing in jail is as
good a place as any, at least you can't walk out when it gets too hard.
But it is not the place to deal with grief. I was incapable of sleeping and
would wait till two or three in the morning and hide myself under the
blankets in order to sob. Even at that hour it was a dangerous practice.

During those early morning hours I longed to follow Barry into

death. I had no desire to be alive and my life was spiralling ever more
dangerously out of control. At times I burned with fury at him for dying
and leaving me the blame. However, there were times Barry's presence

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 86

could be felt. It is hard to explain that sense of Barry. It was his energy
– but without the negativity. He hadn't become all sweetness and light
and fluttering angel's wings but somehow he convinced me to stay
alive. I sensed he was OK, happy and without all the soul-searching. He
seemed to hang around in order to see me through, to support me. He
told me I had to stay alive. That seemed most unfair but also offered a
small amount of solace. In later years I questioned whether this had
been Barry or my subconscious playing tricks to keep me alive. I have
no idea – whatever it was it worked at the time.

I made two friends in the hospital. One was there because her

mental health was such that she couldn't survive in the dormitories but
she wasn't ill enough to be sent to a locked ward in one of the
psychiatric hospitals. She was a gentle soul, very fragile and frayed
around the edges but we formed a connection and she talked to me. I
was always fearful she would disintegrate and jail would be a very bad
place for that to happen.

The other woman was in the hospital for a gynaecological

condition. She was a tiny, feisty woman who had been in jail, on and
off, for a long time. During one stretch of freedom she got pregnant
and now endured the heartbreak of her young daughter visiting her
weekly. She hated her daughter seeing the bars that kept her mother
imprisoned, and the limited influence she had on her daughter's life.
Being in jail in no way diminished her love for her daughter or her
desire for her to be well cared for. Despite her diminutive size she was
a force to be reckoned with and had a reputation for extreme violence.
She had hospitalised both screws and inmates. For some reason she
looked out for me. She did me one disservice though. I was a very large
woman and I was on a manslaughter charge. This offered me a certain
amount of protection, or at least it did until she nicknamed me “the
gentle giant”.

While I was still in the hospital the prison psychologist came to

visit me. In one of life's weird coincidences this woman had been the
counsellor my ex-husband and I had been to see a few years

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 87

previously when we were trying to save our marriage. She had
recognised my name and came to see if it was really me. She was a
God-send, here was someone who knew me when I wasn't a total
mess. Someone who had met me before I started taking drugs. She
made herself available to me and became my life raft.

Accommodation for those on remand and those with a prison

sentence was the same; all were housed in a large, old, two-storey
brick building. Downstairs were two dormitories while upstairs was the
TV lounge, the linen cupboard and clothes room and another
dormitory. On my release from hospital the downstairs section was
full. I was put upstairs – alone. Some of the prisoners protested the
inhumanity of this. It was a large, open dormitory many claimed was
haunted by the women who had suicided there. They said it was cruel
to put me there by myself. I thought it the kindest thing that had
happened since my arrival, and fervently thanked God for it. It was
somewhere to be alone, locked in, where no one could get to me and I
could cry in safety. Being alone only lasted a week, then I was moved
downstairs.

I was taken to Katoomba for a bail hearing, handcuffed and seated

between two police officers, like a criminal. What did they think I was
going to do? Jump out of the car as it sped along the highway? They
told me I would be surprised to know what some prisoners had
attempted. My efforts to keep the conversation going were
unsuccessful, they were not in the mood for a cosy chat. I was relieved
to be out of jail and felt sure bail would be granted.

Bail was refused. The grounds given were I was unsafe to myself,

unsafe to the general public, had been refused admission to a
psychiatric hospital, was a drug addict, had no fixed address and my
parents refused to have me live with them. An impressive list but who
did it belong to? Who on earth was this person they were talking
about? It couldn't be me, I didn't recognise myself at all. I had become
a psychopath, a criminal and an outcast.

At the next hearing bail was granted with a surety of $3,000. I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 88

didn't have $3 let alone $3,000. I rang my parents who said they would
do whatever they could to support me, except that under no
circumstances whatsoever was I to return home. That suited me fine.
As hideous as jail was it was a better option than home. My mother
said she would organise bail, I kept ringing her and she kept promising
but not organising anything. Eventually she told me they couldn't
borrow that much money from the bank because the bank wanted to
know why. She did not want the bank manager or any of her friends to
know her daughter was in jail. She was pleased my name was no
longer the same as hers, hopefully no one would know. It was not a
pleasant phone call. I told her not to worry about bail. I would organise
it myself. Her final words, before I hung up, were “well, don't think you
can come home, because you can't”. “I love you too, Mum.”

My father came to visit. That was hideous. We had nothing to say

to one another. He wanted to know why I was taking drugs. I didn't
know, couldn't explain it to myself let alone to him. He looked so hurt –
like this was a personal insult, an attack on his good name. As he left
he said “You know we love you.” That was such a complicated
sentence. In some ways it was true, at least of him but... it was just too
hard to understand or accept.

A friend came to visit. Being visited in jail was humiliating.

Everyone was in full view of the screws who were watching to make
sure no contraband was being passed in either direction. Both my
father and my friend brought me cigarettes not knowing this was
forbidden. Cigarettes were not allowed to be taken in from outside in
case there were drugs or weapons hidden within them. Even cigarette
packets still wrapped in cellophane were not permitted. It was
permissible to smoke the cigarettes of visitors, but only under the
eagle eye of a screw. My poor friend, who did not smoke, ended up
pretending she did. She coughed and spluttered so much it must have
been obvious she was not a smoker, but equally obvious was the fact
that this was all way too clumsy to be a drug-smuggling exercise. Each
prisoner was thoroughly searched after a visit. It was amazing so much

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 89

stuff went in and out of jail.

I felt guilty for putting my father and friend through the

discomfort of being searched and supervised. Normal conversation
was impossible because simple questions like “What have you been up
to lately?” really don't work as an opening gambit. My friend was
distressed; she had befriended me at Maraylya even though I was
different to the people she usually made friends with. Our friendship
had grown over the years and now she asked in anguish how she could
help, saying “Sometimes I think love is not enough.” I was damn sure
love, as I knew it, wasn't.

As I wended my way through the red tape of trying to organise bail

I fought with God. I wasn’t angry that Barry was dead but was furious
with him for dying. I knew he'd wanted to die, the countless overdoses
were evidence of that. I wanted him to have found some peace. My
Christianity informed me Barry would be in hell because he was gay.
That was intolerable, if it were true then God could go fuck himself. In
some ways I found it impossible to believe that God would condemn
homosexuality, but it was certainly what the Church, as I had
experienced it, was teaching.

The manslaughter charge was tough. It filled me with guilt,

remorse and self- hatred. I was charged with killing Barry; it must be
true. I fought and fought with God. It was unfair, unjust, unloving and
intolerable. Barry being in hell. Me being in jail. My life, everything.

Life in jail meant living with the constant threat of violence. Fights

would erupt, sometimes small and personal, other times escalating
into a form of gang warfare. There were also bullies and stand-over
women ever willing to intimidate or blackmail you for cigarettes or any
perceived advantage. As tough as these women were, many of them
had children and they found the disconnection from their children's
lives heartbreaking. The screws would make cruel and vicious
comments about the women's mothering abilities. Comments that
were designed to rip away defences and leave emotions raw and
exposed. Every kind of guilt and remorse would come crashing down

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 90

on these women as they wept or raged for their children.

The daily stress of being in jail was tearing away at my still fragile

mental stability. Jail terrified me. Despair, violence and hate seemed to
drip from the walls. It was like living with a time bomb. I wondered
how much more pain the walls could contain, surely they would either
shed tears or crumble … or I would.

Visiting the prison psychiatrist twice a week was compulsory. His

view of drug addicts was that they were all pieces of shit. “Once a
junkie, always a junkie” was his stance and he believed there was no
possible hope of rehabilitation. The fact that I been off drugs for two
years before Barry came on the scene was of no interest to him except
to prove his “once a junkie” theory. The fact that I had spent time in
Ward One only proved my instability. I challenged his theory and his
pathologising of me, demanding he treat me with respect. He laughed
in my face. I hated him. The feeling was mutual.

The psychologist was on my side. She was the one person I could

be myself with, without fear; she treated me with respect. I spent a
great deal of my time in jail planning to go mad, believing it would be
far better to be in a locked ward at Rydalmere Hospital than in jail for
any prolonged period of time. I knew without any shadow of a doubt I
could go completely mad. I had serious doubts about being able to
return. It was the promise of that escape and the support of the
psychologist that helped me survive.

It rains without ceasing. Night is falling. Huge, dark clouds are
rumbling across the sky disgorging their burden of rain. The ocean is
as dark as the sky: cold, remote.

On the horizon is a light, a small flickering light, piercing the grey

all around. Offering hope.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 91

CHAPTER ELEVEN

O

n the corner of my street, just by the traffic lights, is an Anglican

Church which was built in the early 1900s. It has seen better days. It is
in need of repair and a coat of paint. It has a shingled roof that needs
replacing. The Heritage Council says it must be replaced with shingles
even though there is only a small, elderly congregation and it is an
expensive renovation. A combination of the local council, the wider
church and the community have come up with the funds. The shingles
are being replaced. As I work I hear the doof, doof of the bass from the
workers' radio, the shouts one to the other, and the beep, beep of the
cherry picker as it raises the workers and their equipment up to the
roof or on to the scaffolding. Then there is the clatter as old shingles
are thrown to the ground and the petchoing as they staple on new
ones. On and on it goes.

Today I have to lure the words I need out of the ether and seduce

them onto the page. The doof doof of the radio seems to scare them
off. Every time the workers yell out to each other my precious words
go scurrying for cover. I watch them go unable to call them back.
Bereft at their departure.

This afternoon the workers decide to check the church bell –

several times. The bell is loud, clangy and insistent. It does not peal
out as a call to worship like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer; it
just clangs – on and on. Assaulting my senses, jarring my body.
Disturbing the peace. Every time it starts something deep inside cries
out: “Please, for the love of God, STOP.”

The daily threats of violence and abuse never ceased. The downstairs
dormitories were partitioned into cubicles containing four beds each

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 92

and six-foot high partitions, and windows along the front. They
provided some level of visual privacy but no audio privacy at all. Often
at night you would hear the sounds of sex, at times non-consensual.

One night a group of women came into my cubicle. They motioned

the other women to leave. They informed me it was time I was initiated
into prison life. I went cold with fear. I knew protest would be futile
and that there would be no rescue. Two women pushed me down on
the bed and held me there while another woman cut my pyjamas. She
sliced them all the way up one leg to the waistband. She ripped my top
open – buttons flying everywhere. Then came the lascivious comments
on my size, the perceived voluptuousness of my breasts, what they
could insert into my vagina. They said there was enough of me to be
shared amongst them all. Many hands started to grab, prod and poke.
My legs were pushed inexorably apart.

They reduced me to a state of snivelling terror. Then they started

to laugh and told me they were only joking. They left the room. The
ghosts of rapes past encircled me.

I have to get out and walk. Walk away from the memories of back then
and those circling ghosts. I stride out along the beach, going as fast as
I can, concentrating on my body, reclaiming it with each step. I hear
my breath starting to come fast from the exertion, I feel both the
warmth of the sun and the chill of the breeze on my body. With each
breath and each step I enter more into the now and the past starts to
trail behind.

On my return home the words come, the words I have been

searching for all day. They dance through my mind and across the
screen, wanting to tell their story, give their take on the events of my
life.

They want to form a song, an anthem, a shout of triumph, to let

the world know I have survived.

I attended my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Despite the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 93

psychiatrist's insistence I was a junkie and only a junkie I resisted this
limited definition of myself. I saw myself as more than that. Dawn, who
ran the weekly meeting, described herself as an addict and had spent
time in jail. She was down to earth, understood what jail life was like
and had a good sense of humour. I also thought she had courage. It
could not have been easy coming back into the jail once a week after
having spent a couple of years there as a prisoner. She was connected
to Westmount, a detox and rehabilitation centre in Katoomba. We
agreed my bail application was more likely to succeed if I was willing to
enter a rehabilitation programme. I went to the meetings, partly for
safety, partly so it would look good on my bail application,
unconvinced that NA had anything to offer me.

Church services were also offered and I went along to check them

out. They were putrid. To my eye the chaplain running them was a
condescending wimp who thought he was being big and brave coming
into the prison. He had no warmth or rapport. He was patronising and
seemed to believe that if only I would turn to Jesus all my problems
would be solved.

I had and they weren't.

I discovered that applying for bail was no easy matter. There seemed
to be endless court appearances. Often I wouldn't know when these
were or if I would be taken to them. Some happened without me and
some were sprung on me out of the blue. I would be taken to
Katoomba police station, sometimes in a car, other times in a paddy
wagon, and placed in the cells. The police station was old and from the
outside it was a beautiful building made of sandstone blocks. Inside
the cells were bitterly cold and damp. Winter in Katoomba lasts a long
time. There was a small, narrow bench to lie on, with a thin, plastic-
covered mattress; one threadbare blanket and a toilet with no seat,
just bitingly cold stainless steel, in full view of anyone walking past. I
would be put in the cell with no idea how long it would be till I had to
go into the court, or, if my case would even be called. However, the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 94

police attached to the station continued to be friendly and would joke
with me before placing me in the cells and always made sure my
handcuffs were removed, something my prison escort didn't always
remember. It was a courtesy I was most grateful for.

While my parents had not managed to find the money for bail they

did retain a QC, something I had not asked them to do. He was to meet
me before court at Katoomba. My mother said all I had to do was
whatever he told me and everything would be fine, he would get me
out of jail and it would all be over. Sounded good to me. I was taken
out of the cell and led to an interview room. I took one look at the QC
and terror struck strong and hard. I lost it. “Don't let him touch me. Get
him out of here. Now!! Please, help me!!” I screamed and backed
myself into a corner. I was rocking in terror, unable to breathe. The QC
stalked out in disgust. The police locked me in the cell again.

The QC returned to Sydney.
I travelled back to Silverwater and jail.
My mother was not impressed.
I had no idea what my reaction was about. I was left shaken and

perplexed.

In jail one day drags by very much the same as another. Same routine,
people, conversations, violence and high razor-wire fences keeping us
in, protecting society. The routine is strict – line up for meals, file in,
eat, file out. Nothing changes – if today is Tuesday it must be
meatballs. Lots of little things let you know you are a prisoner. You
can't have a cup of tea when you like; only at meal times and when you
are locked in for the night. You are limited to three phone calls a week
and have to explain to whom and why. Everyone is in the same clothes
and sandals – prison issue. No choice of who you share a room with, or
socialise with. No choice of what you watch on TV. You can't get out,
can't go for a walk, go shopping or catch up with friends. You are
locked in and people are watching over you the whole time, and you
know they do not wish you well. You have become an outcast, rejected

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 95

by society, branded pariah and you believe it of yourself. You are
locked into the dormitory building at night and locked out of it during
the day. And, just in case you still think you have any rights or dignity,
you can be moved around the dormitories at random. What's more,
you can't even vote.

I wanted to get out. The battle for bail and with God seemed to go

hand in hand. I had been in jail for three long months that felt like
years. I continued to console myself with fantasies of going mad and
ending up in a locked ward. I'd had it with God. If this was God's way of
looking after me then forget it. I couldn't get it out of my head that God
had condemned Barry to hell and that was unforgivable. I kept praying
for God to get me out of jail and to organise my bail. Then I would tell
God to fuck off out of my life. I felt I had to surrender, to hand over to
God. No fucking way. I had to stay in control. I thought God wanted to
punish me by keeping me in jail but I was not handing over. These
thoughts wore a groove and went round and round of their own
accord requiring a huge amount of energy and wearing me down. I
continued to do everything possible to get bail but my application kept
being knocked back or the hearing postponed. Every time that
happened I railed more at God, and every time I railed I heard God tell
me to let go control and to hand my life over to him. “No way!” The
battle continued.

I was moved to another part of the dormitory, a cubicle with three
older women. I knew nothing about them but they looked hard and
mean. Being moved was always scary because you had to figure out
the rules and your new cell mates always had to show you that you
were a worthless piece of shit, right at the bottom of the pecking order.
You couldn't just say “It's OK, I know my place”, it had to be
established. Always a terrifying process.

Once again a bail hearing hadn't happened. I felt utter despair;

finally in the wee small hours of the morning I gave in. I just knew that
as long as I told God I wanted him to have nothing to do with my life I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 96

was going to be stuck in jail. I was furious with God and still could not
cope with the thought of Barry being in hell. However, my life was such
an unmitigated disaster I had to give in.

The next day while I was having lunch, one of the screws came up

and told me bail had been granted. “What?! I didn't even know there
had been a hearing today.” She told me I had half an hour to gather my
stuff and say my goodbyes. Dawn was meeting me and would take me
up to Westmount at Katoomba. I was delighted and furious! Furious
with God! How dare he get me out the instant I gave in. What a
complete and total bastard - but I wasn't game to go back to fighting. I
wasn’t making a success of my life so I'd better take whatever help was
on offer. I said a terse thank you to the screw and declared a reluctant
and ungracious truce with God.

Dawn met me just outside the jail walls. I stood there not

understanding why the whole world didn't change. Nothing happened.
It was just a cold winter's day in Sydney. “Kind of disappointing isn't it?”
she said “At the very least there should be trumpets heralding your
freedom”. Absolutely.

Peace comes with the setting sun. The workers leave for home. No

more clanging bells. Beyond the church the town is tinged with silver,
mauve, tangerine and pink. The ocean is breathtaking in its gentleness,
its muted tones soothe away the discordant clamour of the day, a
gentle breeze blows away any residue of the assault on my senses.
Once again this idyllic place applies the balm of its beauty.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 97

CHAPTER TWELVE

A

s I ventured out for my walk today the sky was blue and the wind

was gusting, challenging but pleasant. Within five minutes the sky was
black, needle-sharp rain was hurled at my face by gusts of wind which
swirled around attacking from every direction. I huddled under a tree
for protection. The sun returned luring me out to continue my walk.
But then the wind again, this time so strong I struggled to stay upright.
Bracing myself and clinging onto fences as I went, I returned home.

Westmount was like that. A constant bracing myself against unpleasant
conditions.

Returning to Katoomba was difficult. The police station and courthouse
were at the very beginning of Katoomba so trips from jail had not
extended to the main street or the area Barry and I had lived in. Our
great effort in leaving Sydney and going straight had lasted eighteen
days. It was a complete failure.

Westmount Detoxification and Rehabilitation Centre was in a

large, rambling house five minutes' walk from the main street of
Katoomba. It had been started by a recovered addict and a recovered
alcoholic and they prided themselves on the fact the place was run by
addicts, for addicts. It did not employ counsellors or social workers,
although it had access to them and to doctors, nor did it receive
government funding. The detox unit was staffed by the residents and
the drugs used to assist in detoxing were given out by the staff. It
housed about twenty people.

On our arrival Dawn took me into the office and introduced me to

Alan, the manager and an ex-speed-freak. He was in his mid-forties

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 98

with long hair and beard. He appeared laid back and easy going but I
also got the sense that it would not be a good idea to cross him as
there was a sense of power about him that unsettled me. Dawn
showed me to the room I was to share with four other women and
then took me into the dining room and introduced me to some of the
residents. They seemed friendly enough but it was daunting to be in a
new place with new people and new rules to learn.

There were some very definite rules. Rule One - No drug or alcohol

usage or knowledge of it. If you were caught using drugs or it was
discovered that you knew someone else was using drugs the
consequence was instant eviction, no questions, no arguments. Rule
Two – Attendance at five NA meetings a week. Rule Three – no sex with
other residents.

My conditions of bail were to report to the police three times a

week and to stay at Westmount until the staff deemed I was
sufficiently rehabilitated or my court case was resolved. In effect I was
still in prison but the bars were further apart. Knowing I had to be
there did not sit well with me, in fact it got right up my nose, because it
was used as a threat. If I disagreed with, or expressed a different
opinion to, staff members they would remind me that if I didn't like it I
could leave...and return to jail. I seethed at this as I saw it as unfair and
abusive.

There was lots of work to do at Westmount in order to keep it

operating: cleaning, cooking, gardening and office work as well as
staffing the detox centre. The idea was to keep us busy to help keep
our minds off drugs. There were regular house meetings where
problems between residents or with the running of the house were
discussed. This was also the forum to ask for leave. Once you were
detoxed and had been there for a week you were allowed to go up the
street in the company of other residents. After another fortnight you
could go unaccompanied and after a month you could have weekend
leave.

Alan had an uncanny ability to know if someone had used drugs

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 99

while they were on leave. He said it affected the whole energy of the
house. Once his suspicions were aroused he was like a terrier after
prey. The place was awful until he discovered the culprit and sent them
packing. I wondered if he was always right.

The general atmosphere of Westmount was very different to Ward

One. Lots of people were there because, as in my case, the courts had
ordered it. Others were there on their umpteenth attempt to get
straight. There was a much higher turnover of residents than Ward
One and the revolving door seemed to positively spin as people got
straight, left, used drugs again, returned to Westmount, got straight,
left – on and on it went. Ward One always had a high level of honesty
and introspection and a looking out for one another. Westmount did
not have that. Alan told us that he knew junkies were a pack of lying,
thieving bastards who would sell their grandmothers to get a fix. He
also told us that he had used every trick in the book while he was using
therefore there was nothing we could do that he wouldn't be on to. I
hated this. He expected us all to be the same – all bad. He reminded
me of the psychiatrist in jail and he took no account of the fact that I
had been drug free for two years and had gained many insights and
made important changes while at Ward One. Alan consistently mocked
both my introspection and my Christianity. My anger about this
simmered under the surface.

The main help in figuring out how to stay straight came from NA

meetings. I would attend six a week, many of them in Sydney. There
was a minibus or a couple of cars that would travel down. I soon
discovered that different meetings had different energies and some
were more helpful than others. I made friends at the meetings and
learnt who were the good speakers who had valuable things to say and
who were total bores. The good speakers often had a spirituality and
embraced the NA idea of a power greater than themselves restoring
them to sanity. They had wisdom and showed me a different facet of
God. They accepted they could do nothing without God's help. These
people showed me a spirituality that was a combination of humility,

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 100

surrender and responsibility. The inherent spirituality of NA soothed
some of the anger I felt towards Alan and his ridicule but I felt there
was hypocrisy in his stance. He bagged me out constantly, appeared to
have no respect for my spirituality, yet insisted that the Twelve Step
Programme was the only way addicts and alcoholics could get straight.

There were times Alan did his version of counselling. This was

brutal and confronting and full of put downs. Any suggestion that drug
and alcohol addiction might have its root cause in childhood was
scoffed at as psycho-babble. As far as Alan was concerned addiction
was a disease and rehabilitation was achieved through NA meetings
and will power. I begged to differ. I couldn't just keep my mouth shut
which would have made life so much easier. I hated the way Alan
treated people and said so, arguing that gentleness was a far more
effective way of dealing with people than ridicule. He always pointed
out that I was the one who had to be there, the one on drug charges.
“Yes,” I would scream “but that's not the point, that's not the whole
story.” He wouldn't listen, he was right and I was wrong. I writhed and
cringed with the frustration of being disagreed with. I hated it. I knew
what he was doing was not helpful.

Most weekends I chose to stay at Westmount rather than go to

Sydney, it was safer. Occasionally friends from Maraylya would come
and visit. The main street of Katoomba always brought back memories
of Barry, and walking into the police station three times a week was a
frequent reminder I had a court case hanging over my head.

At times it was difficult to take the manslaughter charge seriously;

it had to be a mistake. Anyone who knew Barry knew he had been so
suicidal. I found it incomprehensible that I was charged with his death.
That didn't stop me from feeling immensely guilty about his death, but
to be charged with it, no, that couldn't be real.

One night, when I was being particularly uncooperative and had

expressed my displeasure at being at Westmount yet again, one of the
staff came into my room and told me a few home truths. He explained
succinctly that manslaughter was a serious charge and it was likely I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 101

would end up back in jail and would be looking at a minimum sentence
of one year, possibly as much as ten. My only chance was to stay in
rehabilitation, prove I was serious about mending my ways and “earn”
a good report to take to court with me. None of this would happen if I
continued to behave like a total arsehole. If I didn't lift my game I
could piss off. I wanted to piss off, with all my heart I wanted to tell
him to get fucked and to pack my bag and head on out of
there...but...that would mean back to jail and I had enough sense to
realise that the jail of Westmount was better than the jail at
Silverwater. I lifted my game, begrudgingly.

With the Committal Hearing coming up the staff at Westmount

sent me to see a counsellor at the local community health centre in
order to get a court report. She thought I was there for counselling and
started asking a lot of very boring and tedious questions which I
answered as minimally as I could. My boredom and disdain were
apparent and she had the good sense to realise I was ten steps ahead
of her and there wasn't anything she could do to help. There was
something about the way she said this that made me think that just
possibly she actually wanted to help. I told her what I really wanted
was to be able to see my previous therapist. I told her about Susan,
who was now back from America, and about Ward One and explained
it would be far better for me to see someone who knew all about me.
She achieved what I had been unable to. Gaining permission for me to
see Susan – weekly. Not because staff at Westmount thought it was a
good idea but because it might help my court case. Susan and her
partner, Georgia, were living in Faulconbridge, a thirty-five minute train
ride away.

My time at Susan's became the highlight of my week. It was so

good to escape the negativity of Westmount and enter the loving,
healing feel of Susan and Georgia's home. Here I could talk about the
coldness and harshness I experienced at Westmount. I could also talk
about my insights, my insecurities, the things I still needed to work on.
It was also the place I could deal with my grief over Barry's death.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 102

Much of my time with Susan was spent dealing with the terror that

still permeated my life and always seemed to come to the fore in a
therapy session. This was often the lead into memories of my
childhood. Memories of Dad sexually abusing me were part of it but at
more insidious and crazy-making levels were the memories of never
getting it right, never being good enough, of the rules constantly
changing. What was considered good and cute behaviour one day
would be greeted with anger and displeasure another. Memories of my
childhood seemed to be full of my parent's disapproval and rejection
of me and believing I should die.

Susan's constant love and compassion were a balm to my

wounded spirit. She treated the small, distressed child within me with
consistency and love. She would spend a large portion of each session
holding me, stroking me, caring for me and giving me messages of her
love and her conviction of my worth and right to exist. She encouraged
me to recognise what my needs were and ask for them to be met. She
became the mum I never had, my good mum, the mum inside my head
who said kind things and counteracted the maniacal messages of my
flesh and blood mother. I started to believe her. I had a choice. When
the messages in my head started up telling me I was useless, hopeless
and a piece of shit I could choose to listen to Susan's messages
instead.

Georgia was an effervescent, warm and gregarious woman. She

was also a musician who composed her own songs and played piano
and dulcimer. Georgia's songs came from her heart, speaking of both
the joy and pain of life. In her teens she had spent time in a psychiatric
hospital so she was full of care and empathy for Susan's work and her
clients. There was a grand piano in their lounge room and often after a
therapy session Georgia would sing some of her songs for me.
Listening to her singing or losing myself in her music provided me with
a small period of escape from the intensity of my life at that time.

Sometimes the bad weather can last for days. On and on it goes, tiring

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 103

me out, wearing me down. But if I'm on the alert I can take advantage
of small breaks in the weather, when the rain eases and the wind
drops. As I scurry out to get some air and exercise I smile
conspiratorially with people and dogs who are out doing the same.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 104

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T

oday I am drawn to the dark places in my seascape. The black holes

that suck me in, down into the depths of the painting, into the chaos
and the deep beyond. Today I imagine myself trapped under the
surface, below the life, colour and texture. Caught in a cold, dark place;
breath held, nervously waiting for what will come.

Waiting for court was like that, there was part of me that lived a

separate, anxious, below-the-surface kind of life.

The day came for the committal hearing, when the court would decide
if there was enough of a case against me to stand trial. My father and a
solicitor friend of his were in attendance. I don't know if my father was
there to support me or to make sure I didn't send this solicitor packing.
There was also a staff member from Westmount, someone I felt was
on my side. I had reports from Westmount and Susan and a perfect
record of reporting to the police three times a week. I hoped it would
all be over that day.

The content of the committal hearing was awful. There were all

sorts of witnesses: the people from the motel where I phoned the
ambulance, the ambulance officers explaining what a nuisance Barry
and I had been, doctors and nurses from the hospital and Barry's
uncle. There was also a report from Ward One. Barry's uncle stated
that Barry had been suicidal for many years and his death had not
come as a surprise. The report from Ward One also talked of his
suicidality. These things were difficult to hear but I felt sure they would
work in my favour.

Then came the photos. They had taken photos of Barry, naked,

dead, in the bath. Colour photos. He was lying in the bath, blue from

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 105

the cold. I knew he was dead, but he still looked like Barry. No one had
warned me there would be photos. I felt as if someone had taken hold
of my heart and my stomach and stretched them out as far as they
could go then tied them in knots and let them go flying back into place.
I thought I was going to go mad with the pain of seeing those photos;
instead I went numb and far, far away.

A recess was called. I was expected to have lunch with my father,

the solicitor and my support person from Westmount. We all sat
around, no doubt making polite conversation, while the police
prosecutor and his assistant ate their lunch at a nearby table. I sat
there in an impenetrable fog oblivious to them all, hoping that if I
didn't move the pain would go away.

After an hour and a half we all filed back into court and the

proceedings continued. By three-thirty it was decided, I had not done
all that was reasonable to ensure and protect the life of another
human being. I was committed for trial.

I left the court in a daze. I returned to Westmount and crawled

into bed. A few hours later my support person came in to see if I was
all right, dragging me from another world, on a different planet. I
didn't want to come back to earth. He insisted. He needed to make
sure I wasn't stoned or overdosed. I wish. He made me get up and
walk around. Once he left I returned to my other planet.

While in jail I had fought the guilt associated with the charge of

manslaughter. I reminded myself of how suicidal Barry had been and
how much he had wanted to die. Now it was official. The criminal
justice system believed that there was enough evidence to convict me
of manslaughter. They were saying I had killed Barry and they had the
photos to prove it. I wanted to die. The pain was unbearable, the guilt
relentless. And I was scared. The images in the photos kept going
around and around inside my head. I could end up back in jail. Suicide
became a stronger temptation; I would not survive jail again. And then
the rage came; I was furious with Barry. How dare he do this to me? I
was consumed with anger. In my head I was screaming and swearing

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 106

at Barry for dying and leaving me the blame.

I had to learn to live with the trial hanging over my head. I still had

to report to the police, live at Westmount and attend at least five NA
meetings a week. I couldn't stand the thought of having to stay at
Westmount until the trial. Over time I managed to convince Alan I
could leave. He said he only agreed to prove I wasn't ready to make it
on my own.

I moved back to Glebe to a bedsit two minutes walk from my

previous one. This was a mistake as I knew where to score drugs and I
was familiar with the pubs and felt comfortable walking into them
alone. For a period of time I would use, get straight, use, get straight,
always turning up at NA meetings when I wanted to get straight, but
sometimes also turning up at meetings when I wanted to score.
Somehow or other I always managed to hold it together when
reporting to the police.

For a while I used lots of drugs and went out drinking every night.

I ripped people off and got ripped off. I was aggressive and picked
fights with people, friends and strangers. I turned up at NA meetings
and disrupted them. I screwed around and I tried out some of the
things I had learnt at Westmount, like shooting up barbs and scoring
narcotics from doctors. Friends offered me acid and mushrooms but I
didn't have that much faith in my mental stability. I heard enough
voices smoking dope without risking hallucinogens.

I was visiting a couple of friends in the Cross when another friend

arrived with some heroin. We had all been together at Westmount. Out
came the needle, candle and spoon and they prepared to shoot up.

“I want to try it,” I said.
“Have you used it before?” one of them asked.
“No, but I want to.”
“No way – I'm not going to be responsible for giving someone their

first hit of heroin.”

“It's not your responsibility,” I said. “It's my choice.”
It wasn't a very long argument. He cooked up some heroin and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 107

injected it into my arm. If I close my eyes I can still feel the glorious
rush of that first hit – it was exquisite, superb, fantastic. It was warm
and euphoric, a well-being spread throughout my body. I sat on the
couch gently nodding, knowing this was heaven.

I used heroin a few times. I loved it – it was the most fantastic

feeling and that scared me – it was too good, way too good. I knew well
my addictive nature and, by some miracle, had enough sense to stay
away from it most of the time.

Whenever I went on a binge the people in NA were supportive.

They would turn up at my place, encourage me and take me to
meetings where lots of wisdom and support was available. Often I felt
there was a vast, painful hole inside me that longed to be filled. I
discovered other people felt as I did which made me a little less lonely
and not quite so different from everyone else. A good meeting or
conversation with a group of NA members was reminiscent of
conversations at Ward One. There was sometimes a rawness and
honesty about NA as people struggled to find the necessary skills and
motivation to stay alive. I came to depend on meetings. If I was
struggling to stay straight I would tell myself to wait until after a
meeting. If I still felt like it I could go out and score then but often after
a meeting the need had passed.

My twenty-fifth birthday loomed. I became convinced that my life
script, which I had uncovered at the TA workshop, was going to come
true. I would overdose in the two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday.
I felt I had no choice in the matter, no power, no responsibility. When
death was staring me in the face I ran screaming from it all the way to
Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital and admitted myself to McKinnon, the
hospital's detox ward, and then voluntarily transferred to the
Admissions Ward until the two week

danger period was over.

It was time to stop piss-farting around and get serious.
Georgia pointed out to me one day that the problem with twelve-

step programmes was you defined yourself as an addict and an

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 108

alcoholic and therefore problem-solved as an addict and an alcoholic.
You used drugs and drank, to excess.

“Have you ever had any other way of defining yourself?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said “as a Christian.”
“How do Christians problem-solve?” was her next question.
“By praying.”
Well, that was it.
Those words of Georgia's were like a lifebuoy thrown to me as I

struggled in a raging sea.

That was the turning point. At NA meetings instead of introducing

myself as an addict and an alcoholic I would say I was a human being
and a Christian. It was an introduction that got up the noses of some
people and I was accused of being a smart-arse and a wanker. I'm sure
I was an obnoxious shit. But it worked, it made all the difference in the
world. I no longer defined myself as an addict therefore I no longer
behaved like one.

I prayed heaps in order to stay straight. There were times I begged
God to take away the longing for drugs, times I literally hung onto the
bed-head to stop myself going out and scoring. Often the prayers were
as simple as “please help me” other times they were as desperate as
“for fuck's sake, do something, NOW”. I longed to be free from the
cravings. I was determined to stay straight, not because I hated drugs,
I didn't. I still loved drugs but had come to hate the lifestyle that went
with them. The lying and cheating, the sleazy sex, being ripped off by
people, having so-called friends steal from me and coming to and
discovering my flat had degenerated into a pigsty. I had also seen what
a mess long-term drug usage made of peoples' lives and how many
times people would turn up at detox. I didn't want to be like that.

Before I knew it, it was the anniversary of Barry's death. I went out

and completely trashed myself. I used barbs, heroin and alcohol to the
point I couldn't stand up and was in blackout. I was picked up in the
gutter at Bondi Junction bus interchange and ended up in the cells at

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 109

Bondi with some policemen who were nowhere near as pleasant as
those at Katoomba. The NA member who came to bail me out told me
I was very lucky the police knew someone was coming because when
he arrived they were showing every sign of wanting to beat the living
crap out of me. I was being difficult. How unusual! I was charged with
possession and self-administration. I had to report this to the solicitor
my father had organised. He sent me a letter stating he was most
disgruntled.

I returned to Westmount for a month. This time I felt I was

serious. I felt I'd had enough, it was time to get it right. One month was
all that was needed to convince me I didn't want to do this any more. I
was sick of the drug scene, of my life being a mess and of having God
as a part of my life I felt embarrassed about. I returned to Sydney as a
Christian not as a junkie. I moved to Concord, an inner-west suburb,
which was far enough away from my previous stamping ground to
make a difference. I rented a two-bedroom unfurnished flat on
Parramatta Road above a restaurant. The bedrooms and lounge room
were spacious with atrocious floral wallpaper peeling off the walls. The
bathroom and kitchen were each the size of a telephone booth. I stuck
the wallpaper back up with toothpaste and furnished the place with
milk crates.

I started work in the city with a company that provided aluminium

cladding for houses. My main duties were reception, switchboard,
processing and placing orders and extending invoices. It was deathly
boring. My direct boss was an older woman with a history of being in
relationships with alcoholics and addicts. She had children my age. She
recognised the telltale signs of addiction in me and we became firm
friends. She provided support, understanding and encouragement. She
was someone to talk to on a daily basis.

Once I had been working for a while I stopped seeing Susan. It was

time to manage on my own. I continued to attend NA meetings. The
hardest thing to deal with was my intense emptiness and loneliness. I
would walk home from Strathfield station, after a day at work, with

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 110

tears pouring down my face, not wanting to go home to an empty flat.
I prayed for someone to come along and take away my loneliness.

I joined a charismatic church in the city. At first this was fantastic
because the ministers had answers and rules for everything so I didn’t
have to think. The musicians and singing were terrific, not so the
dancing and praying in tongues. It seemed to me the music was
manipulative. It started softly then got louder and more intense. The
perceived presence of the Holy Spirit always seemed to increase in
intensity right along with the music, people would be yelling out,
singing in tongues, dancing in their seats or in the aisle, or falling to the
ground. It didn't sit comfortably with me. I didn't feel the Holy Spirit
needed this much help.

This church was big on Satan. As far as they were concerned many

personal problems and the dire state of the world were due to Satan.
We were told to resist Satan and to claim victory in Jesus. Often the
preacher would perform dramatic “healings” where he would renounce
the spirit of lust/addiction/drunkenness within a person or situation. I
always felt myself take several steps back from this. It seemed very
staged and was a long way from the quiet authority of that exorcism at
Maraylya.

I wanted to be happy and this church promised it had the

answers. Follow their teaching and relationships, prosperity, joy, peace,
happiness and freedom were promised in abundance. However, I
didn’t have an answer for the longing within me which I still wanted to
fill with drugs. They told me I needed to fill it with God but they didn't
tell me how. I wondered if the reason it couldn't be filled with God was
it was already filled with Satan. I was too scared to suggest this to
anyone because I didn't like the hoopla that went on when the pastor
thought Satan was involved and to my mind he thought Satan was
involved far more than I felt reasonable. The pastor thought there
were demons everywhere.

I prayed, begged and claimed in faith, I read books on how to get

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 111

prayers answered, and still the emptiness persisted. When the pastor
yelled out “Isn’t it great to be in the house of the Lord, is everybody
happy?” I used to quietly say “No”. I felt guilty for not being healed or
happy, as if I were tricking him by not saying maybe I was possessed
by demons. But if I was, surely he should know. Wouldn't God tell him?
I wasn't going to pretend to be healed when I knew I wasn't.

I went to church twice on Sundays, each service lasted two to

three hours. I hoped to fill up enough on Sunday to see me through
the week. The sermons were Bible-based and told me what to do, how
to be and what to think. Fabulous, for a while. The trouble was I could
never manage to be as good as anybody else. I was never as certain. I
always felt there was something wrong with me.

The pastor would call forward anyone in need of prayer and lay

hands on them telling them to be open to being “slain in the Spirit”.
Being slain in the Spirit involves falling over backwards. There were
people who would stand behind me waiting to lower me to the ground.
The only problem was I was big, really big, and was sure that if I fell
backwards the person behind me was going to fall backwards too and
we were all going to end up in a large, ungraceful heap on the floor. So,
I would stand there and the pastor would place his hand on my
forehead praying for healing and he would push and I would stand,
and he would push harder and I would stand firmer, he would push
harder, hard enough to push anyone with the slightest inclination to
fall backwards over. I did not have that inclination, I was staying
upright. He would mutter about my lack of faith and I would think
about his manipulation. If God wanted me lying flat on my back at the
front of the church then God would have ways of doing that that did
not involve being pushed.

There were three pastors at the church, a father and two sons. The

elder son went on to establish Hillsong which is now a mega-church in
Sydney with over 20,000 people attending services each week. I soon
discovered that the younger son was nowhere near as gung-ho as his
father or brother. His services were lower key and when he preached

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 112

he seemed to have humanity and humility. His sermons went for forty-
five minutes to an hour and I found them real, nourishing and
grounded in the Bible. There was a gentleness about him that soothed
my aching spirit.

The church had lots of house meetings, all over Sydney. I joined

one and tried hard to fit in. Nice, good people attended but that was
the problem. I was not comfortable in a room full of nice, good people.
I felt like an impostor, an alien and found the studies trite. We were
expected to come up with the right answers rather than struggle with
the questions. This was completely different to the Friday night group
at Maraylya. As much as I wanted to be easy and comfortable and to
just accept the answers, I couldn't do it. I always had questions, I
struggled and I was difficult and different. After a year I could no
longer tolerate the clichéd answers or being told not to think, to just
have faith. I left and joined the local Anglicans.

Eventually, my court case was “No Billed” on the grounds I had
rehabilitated myself and it was considered unlikely I would commit a
similar crime in the future. That was not a declaration of my innocence
but a decision that it was not worth the expense of proceeding to trial.
The possession and self-administration charges attached to the
manslaughter charge disappeared into the system, the others were
viewed as a first offence and I received an $80 fine.

The nightmare was over. I heaved an enormous sigh of relief and I

stayed straight. Surely the worst part of my life was over, from here on
in everything would be smooth sailing, wouldn't it?

What a loyal companion my seascape has been. Reflecting my moods,
filling my life with colour, taking me back into wild and chaotic places
in my life, giving me the courage to go deep and to scrape off the
surface detritus as I search for truth.

The ocean too, has mirrored mood and memory, filled me with

fear, anticipation and delight. As I've looked out across Bass Strait,

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 113

memories, that first emerged as stick figures, have gained flesh and
substance, finding courage and voice as I immerse myself in the
beauty of the ocean.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 114

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I

t took me thirty seconds to decide to buy my seascape. I walked into

the exhibition and the painting was hanging in the far corner. It
grabbed me. My gaze slid over all the other pieces of work and my soul
rose up in sheer delight as soon as I saw it. I had to have it. It was
meant for me and I knew where to hang it. Every so often, amongst all
the stuff of consumerism, I purchase something whose beauty brings
me constant joy and I view as a gift from God.

Certain people enter my life who I also view as gifts. Dominic was

one of them.

The Anglican church was across the road from where I lived in
Concord. Peter, the minister, was a down-to-earth guy in his early
fifties who had been a professional boxer in his youth. He had a
hearing aid he used to turn off when he was in meetings that bored
him. He was laid-back, approachable and took people as he found
them. I liked him but did not feel I could talk to him about my past.

The church had a morning congregation of about sixty and an

evening congregation, the same people just fewer of them, of about
twenty. There were a few people of my age including two women,
Cheryl and Deirdre, who shared a house together and we became firm
friends.

Returning to the Australian Prayer Book after the spontaneity of a

charismatic church took a bit of doing. The services only lasted an hour
and it was all a predictable but pleasant change from the hype of
Pentecostalism. I valued being part of a congregation of sixty rather
than six hundred. It meant I grew to know people and would often stay
after church for a cup of tea and a chat. The people who attended the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 115

church all lived locally. I felt like I was a part of the community.

One day early in 1982 a young man came to church. He was from
England on a year's working holiday before returning to study for the
Anglican priesthood. He stayed for a cup of tea and Peter, the minister,
introduced Dominic and explained he was looking for somewhere to
stay. I offered him my spare room. I could not believe I had done it,
the words were out of my mouth before I knew it. What on earth was I
thinking? I had no idea who he was, or what he was like. I was very
nervous for the first few days until I established he was neither a rapist
nor a thief.

Dominic, in fact, was a breath of fresh air. He was nineteen, I was

twenty-six. He was upper-class English, forthright, dedicated to his
Anglican faith and in pain due to his parents' recent divorce. I had
spent a year in England with my parents when I was five and another
year when I was thirteen so I provided him with a connection to home.
We spent many a long hour discussing Christianity and our different
perspectives. I told him my story and found him understanding and
supportive, or at least willing to ask questions when he did not
understand. It was through his support I reduced my attendance at NA
meetings and grew in both my faith and identity as a Christian. He was
positive and encouraging. He embraced life and seemed to enjoy it. I
longed to do the same.

Dominic had a voracious appetite for life and people. He wanted

to understand himself and his relationships so I introduced him to TA.
He would get me to teach him all I could and then would use that
knowledge on himself to further his self-awareness. TA helped him
make some sense of his relationship with his parents and to deal with
his grief over their divorce. He needed someone who would listen to
his hopes and dreams for the future, something I was more than
happy to do. We got to know each other in depth; we were willing to
share some of our secrets, our dreams and the parts we preferred to
keep hidden from the rest of the world. An intimacy grew between us

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 116

which was at least partly due to Dominic's determination to meet life
full on and extract the most out of every moment and situation.

We fell in love.
Because we knew our time was limited we gave all we could to the

relationship, determined to enjoy its riches and learn about life and
love from one another. This was a wonderfully happy time.

One issue that was difficult for us both, but in different ways, was

sex. Dominic had always accepted the Christian teaching that sex
outside of marriage was wrong but he wanted our relationship to be
sexual. Even though there were quite a few young adults at church, the
subject of sex was never brought up. There was nothing said about
what was and what was not OK, and, therefore, there was nothing said
about how to deal with

temptation or how to make moral decisions. It

was something Dominic took very seriously.

For me the issue of sex was like the issue of homosexuality,

something I had been taught about since becoming a Christian but a
teaching I disagreed with. When I was fifteen my mother had said “If
you're going to have sex go on the pill, if you get pregnant you will
have an abortion, there will be no choice”. This had been augmented
once I was married with her advice and rules on conducting an affair.
My own morality said it was fine to have sex with someone you loved.
Marriage was irrelevant but commitment was important. Affairs, in my
opinion, were wrong. However, the reality of my life was many sexual
encounters that had nothing to do with love or commitment. They had
been sordid grapplings I had taken no responsibility for. I had been
drunk and stoned and they

just happened. Now I was with someone

who had never been in a sexual relationship before and was treating
the whole issue with integrity. This was just as much a part of his faith
journey as his call to the priesthood. I was having to take responsibility
for my actions, decisions and sexuality. This was new to me and I didn't
know how to do it. I also felt a sense of responsibility for Dominic, not
wanting to talk him into something that was wrong for him. We didn't
have anyone we felt we could talk to about this, who would understand

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 117

and not condemn us. We worked it through with as much honesty and
integrity as we could. We decided we would consummate the
relationship and it was a beautiful and joyous thing.

This was the first loving relationship I had been in since my marriage
ended five years earlier. Dominic enjoyed sex and he wanted me to as
well, which meant I needed to have some idea of what felt good and
what didn't and to be able to talk about it. That was excruciatingly
painful because I didn't know. Part of me felt guilty for being in the
relationship. What if the church was right and God hated what we were
doing and would punish us? I was also terrified Dominic would die
because of this relationship. I felt I was poisoning him in some way;
that loving me was a dangerous business, life-threatening in fact. I was
contaminating him because of my many previous liaisons. I had felt
that way before we consummated our relationship, but after was
convinced of it and didn't know what to do to protect him.

Dominic, on the other hand, had no problems about sex at all. For

him it was about love, enjoyment, closeness and spirituality. This
countered some of my fears and there was much in our sexual
relationship that was enjoyable and healing. Dominic had the ability to
honour sex in a way that was counter to anything I had ever known.
Unfortunately, after six to eight months I found myself becoming less
and less interested in sex, less willing to participate, and felt I had no
choice in the matter. I lost the ability to see sex as a loving act and
started to experience it as brutal. I was unable to communicate this to
Dominic. He would have been horrified to know that was how I felt and
I denied myself the right to refuse him. This was my issue, it was all in
my head; the same thing had happened in my marriage. Then or now I
had no idea what to do. As much as I dreaded our time together
coming to an end there was part of me that looked forward to it as a
release from a situation I could neither understand nor fix.

Most of our time together was enriching. Dominic filled some of

my emptiness and took the edge off my loneliness. While I was with

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 118

him drugs and alcohol became a thing of the past. I no longer used
them at all. I learned how to live without them. We enjoyed each other
and had similar senses of humour. We were both passionate about
Christianity and thrived on having deep and meaningful discussions.
Our backgrounds were miles apart and our dreams for the future were
vastly different but this added to the breadth of our conversations.
Dominic was an extrovert. He loved people, loved spending time with
them and he needed to be with people every day. This was what gave
him life and energy. He had a missionary's zeal and planned to work in
the slums of the world once he was ordained.

Dominic and I spent a lot of time with Cheryl and Deirdre from

church. We were all trying to figure out what it meant to be Christians,
how this should change our lives and in what ways we experienced
God. When we came together we would talk of our experiences and
questions with one another. We made a commitment to each other to
share as honestly as we could, so we talked about the truth of our
experiences, the bad times and the struggles, never just the good times
or how we thought it ought to be. Often I would lead a prayer and
worship time that had its roots in Maraylya's Friday night group. We
would also celebrate Eucharist. This was an important part of our faith.
The Holy Communion service we attended each Sunday morning was
not meaningful to us. Peter's consecration more closely resembled the
calling of a horse race than the celebration of a sacrament. Sharing
communion together was something that nourished our faith and
strengthened the friendship between Dominic, Cheryl, Deirdre and me.
Cheryl, who came from a Catholic background, and Dominic, who was
high-church Anglican, had misgivings about us doing this in the
absence of a priest, but we talked to Peter about it and he had no
qualms at all and encouraged us to continue. He did not see it as a
slight against his Sunday morning services.

Peter sometimes talked with us about how he could make his

services more interesting. We suggested sometimes having a play
instead of the sermon. He thought this was a great idea and asked us if

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 119

we would be willing to do them. Us? Really? Absolutely!! We had a ball.
We would brainstorm what we wanted to say and how we would say it.
We scripted the plays ourselves and rehearsed several nights a week.
Peter would call in to see how we were going and to offer any support
he could but he left us with a free hand as to content. One day he
came in as we were having an argument about whether we could say
“fuck” in church; we thought it best to ask him. He understood why we
wanted to use it in this particular drama but overall he felt the use of
the word would inhibit people's ability to hear our message, “Best not.”
he advised. However, he encouraged us to be provocative in other
ways as he felt we would get away with being far more confronting
than he could.

One of the plays started with Cheryl walking in from the back of

the church wearing an incredibly short dress, screaming out ,“Are you
in here God? Those Christians say you are.” Several members of the
congregation jumped with shock. She walked down the aisle then
collapsed in the sanctuary sobbing. The play evolved to show she was a
prostitute who was desperate about her life but felt bad and unable to
change. She was convinced good, clean people would not accept her. It
was a rewrite of the Good Samaritan. It was also an expression of how
I felt in the presence of the majority of the congregation.

Our plays always confronted the safe and comfortable. We took on

social justice, poverty and peace and did our best to challenge people
to think and ask themselves questions about their life and values. We
got a lot of positive feedback and some grumbles; we were thrilled
with the response. It strengthened our friendship. We always prayed
together as part of rehearsals, and the co-operative script writing
meant we learnt how to be honest with one other, giving criticism and
encouragement. Cheryl was a natural actress. We had no choice but to
give her the best parts as she brought them to life.

God was right in the middle of my life and I was in the middle of

God. I felt alive. At times I even felt happy and safe.

We became involved in the Bible study and prayer group that was

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an essential part of the church. These meetings were in the home of a
couple who had been attending the church for a long time. The wife
believed it was her responsibility to have answers for any questions or
problems people might have. I always seemed to be questioning God,
life and faith and she found it difficult to deal with me because I would
not accept easy answers. They didn't work for me.

I always dressed down for church. I would turn up in my old, torn,

wrap-round Indian skirts, t-shirt and thongs. I sat up the front and was
a few minutes late so made an entrance in front of all these well-
dressed people. They were kind and tried to include me but somehow I
felt if they knew who I was they would not want anything to do with
me. I felt an alien amongst them.

Peter asked if I would lead the Bible study one week. I knew I had

to do something that was real for me so thought long and hard. Then
one morning as I was having my shower the words “I know you are
Christians but who are you as people?” kept going around and around
in my head. I got out of the shower and wrote a few pages that
expanded on this theme. It was searingly honest. It spoke of how I did
not belong, how I had done many bad things, including using drugs
and screwing around, how I feared if they knew the truth of my past
they would not want to know me. I talked about my constant doubts
and how everyone else always seemed so sure, so certain. Did they
know the questions I had? The thoughts that went around inside my
head? Would they still want to know me? I had no idea who they were,
I saw their goodness and generosity but who were they underneath?
Did they have questions? Did they have doubts? Again and again I
repeated the refrain “I know you are Christians but who are you as
people?”

The night of the study I was very nervous indeed. What on earth

would they think of me? Would I be kicked out? Would they understand
what I was trying to say? I read it out, there was total silence. I was
standing before them naked...and asking them to join me in my
nakedness. For the most part people didn't get it, or they wouldn't let it

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 121

in. Once I finished they gathered round me, hugged me and reassured
me, reminding me I had been forgiven therefore it didn't matter what I
had done; it didn't matter who I was. I felt they missed what I was
trying to say. I was trying to get a sense of who they were underneath
their goodness, underneath their Christianity. I was trying to bridge the
divide I felt separated us. I didn't believe I was either forgivable or
loveable. I was desperate for a sense of identity and to know that who I
was

did matter. I also wanted to know I wasn't so very different from

them.

I noticed two of the men in the group having quite profound

reactions. One had tears in his eyes and at the end of the night he
came up to me, squeezed my hand and said “thank you”. He never
spoke about it to me but I knew I had touched something deep within
him. The other response came from the husband of the household
where we met. His wife was foremost amongst the “you are forgiven”
crowd who were telling me of course I was OK. He came up to me and
whispered “round about now I imagine you feel you are surrounded by
Job's comforters”. It was magic. We just exchanged a glance that said it
all. Later he told me his story; he was an alcoholic and he had done
many things he was not proud of, that he continued to feel bad about.
He wasn't able to accept God's forgiveness either. He became a little
haven of comfort within the church. He didn't have the ability to talk to
me about all I had been through but somehow he was often just there.
He was a big man and I could lean up against him for a couple of
seconds and that would give me encouragement. I often felt his wife
wondered why I shunned her wisdom but would listen to her husband
whom she so obviously saw as inferior.

The church needed to raise some funds so they decided to have a
fashion parade. They were to have clothes ranging in size from small
through to extra large. Fashion shows are not my thing, and, as I have
said before, I did my best to dress down for church. But because it was
a fund raiser, I agreed to participate. Mine was the job of modelling the

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extra large size clothes, which included having my hair done and make-
up applied. I hated it. With a passion. But it was for the church so I put
up with it. What I hadn't bargained on was how delighted everyone
was with how I looked. There were numerous compliments, countless
people told me how lovely I looked, how much better I looked with
nice clothes and make up. They told me I was attractive and if I would
only go to a little effort, would be able to attract a nice man. I received
more compliments in the couple of hours of the fashion parade than in
the rest of my time at the church. I was hurt, invalidated, devastated. I
started to cry. People were distressed. What had they said? What had
they done? I couldn't find the words to explain it, the very fact they
didn't get it added to my wounded isolation. I went home and sobbed
and sobbed. They hadn't allowed me to be me; they liked this made-
up, dressed-up fake. They liked what I wasn't more than who I was. I
was heartbroken. I was NOT going to become some nice, neat, well-
dressed, middle-class Christian. They could get fucked. If they liked this
pretence so much, this false, respectable me, what on earth would they
think if they discovered how much of a façade I was putting on so they
would not see the seething poison that lurked beneath the surface. I
took several steps backwards after that. I no longer hoped that one day
I would feel safe enough to be myself with these people.

I was right about where to hang my seascape. It is close to the window
on another wall and both the view and the seascape give me ongoing
pleasure. Each has its own integrity, authenticity and life. Both can
draw me into their beauty and mood and encourage memory and
creativity.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 123

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I

t's easterly weather today and I'm feeling flat, achy and have no

energy. When the easterly blows (they say) river fish won't bite, roo go
hiding, the kids are cranky, bread takes longer to rise and meringues
won't harden.

1

It also coats the windows with a salty, misty film that

diminishes the view. It is weather that descends and settles in an
oppressive manner and it takes all the shine out of the day.

Visiting my parents was always oppressive.

I was living a more predictable life so started visiting my parents on a
regular basis. This I did out of guilt and duty. I felt as if I was still tied
to my parents, unable to escape and live my own life without them in
it. I no longer had a car but Mum would pay for a hire car for the day
and we would go out for lunch and a drive.

I dreaded visits. The very thought of them was stressful. I would

start feeling ill on the drive to my parents' place. By the time I arrived a
migraine would have wrapped its tentacles around my head and
stomach and be squeezing me tight. I would wear my worst or most
outrageous clothes and look as dreadful as possible. An Indian skirt
with a dinner jacket was a particular success. My theory was Mum was
going to criticise me no matter how much trouble I took over my
appearance, I may as well make it easy for her. Besides, this took away
a small amount of the disappointment of never being good enough.

Two minutes after I arrived Mum would start criticising my

clothing, moving onto my hair, my weight, my life, me. Nothing about
my life or my interests ever met with her approval. I was never good

1 http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/418385?lookfor=mesibov

%20spider:%27s&offset=1&max=1

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 124

enough. Mum would use words like silly, stupid, dope, ridiculous and
asinine to describe me. Anything I said that she didn't agree with or
approve of would be denied. It wasn't true; it did not exist. It did not
matter if I had all the facts at my disposal, she would say in her most
haughty voice “It is not true. I do not believe you”. She always messed
my head, made me feel I was made of marshmallow or was trying to
negotiate my way through a sea of molasses. My brain would turn to
mush, I would be incapable of thinking and would become fuzzed out
and confused. I always lost myself.

Mum would tell me who I was meant to be and what to think but it

was never anything near who or what I wanted for my life. I also knew
from bitter experience that if I tried to become what she wanted,
somewhere in the process, the goal post would move.

My sobriety was a source of great embarrassment to her. She

would always ask what sort of wine to order for lunch and yet again I
would tell her I didn't drink any more. She found this deeply shameful
and acted as if my sole intention was to humiliate her.

However, she did approve of Dominic, or at least the sound of

Dominic. I did not take him to meet them. No one deserved that.
Dominic had two things in his favour: he was English and he was
upper-class. My mother insisted we marry. It didn't matter that he was
only in Australia for a year and was returning to England to train for
the priesthood, without me. She made it clear that if I did not marry
him this would be further proof of my complete ineptitude and moral
failing. There was no way to win, she had the ability to make my head
spin and my sanity slip.

My father would play Mum and me off against each other. He

would pay me more attention than her. He would take my side in any
argument Mum and I were having and he would criticise Mum and
praise me. It never felt good because it never felt real. Mum would get
upset, she would get jealous and I would rub salt into any wound I
glimpsed in her. Dad listened to me more than Mum, and he took
more of a genuine interest, for small stretches of time. It was mind-

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 125

bending to realise this was the man I remembered sexually abusing
me. There was nothing about him to indicate he had ever done this or
ever would again. Had I made it all up? Imagined it? At the same time,
if there was any physical contact between us I would shudder and feel
ill.

The only way to stay grounded and sane around my parents was

to spend a lot of time in the toilet. Every time I started to feel
overwhelmed, invaded or invalidated I would escape there. It was the
best I could do.

The people at church were always pleased when I was going to

visit my parents. They thought this was a good thing to do. They did
not want to hear how much I loathed my parents. I mentioned this
hatred to a woman at church, and was told no matter what my parents
had done to me, there was nothing they could have done that was not
forgivable, and it was my Christian duty to love them. I was furious.
How dare she? What did she know of my parents? She didn't want to
hear what it was they had done. I believed I had every right to hate my
parents! Now I felt she was telling me I was wrong and bad for hating
them. And, not only did I have to love and obey them but forgive them
as well. That was way too much to ask.

I came home ranting and raving and calling this woman everything

under the sun. Dominic listened and then, to my surprise, told me how
much he hated it when I visited my parents. He said I was difficult to
live with leading up to a visit and was always ill when I came home.
Often bedridden for a day or two with a migraine, not to mention
nausea and diarrhoea, and my moods were disgusting. He informed
me I was always disinterested in sex for a couple of weeks and was
angry, bitchy, super-sensitive and not nice to be around for at least a
week. I was flabbergasted; I had no idea my parents had such a
profound effect on me.

Dominic made a huge difference in my life. I knew that he loved me
even though I couldn't understand why. He filled some of my

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 126

emptiness but I continued to struggle, trying to fill the bottomless pit
within me that devoured everything I poured in and then would
scream out for more. The fact the emptiness would not go away
reinforced my belief that at my core I was so bad and evil God could
not love me. As a Christian I was meant to be forgiven but I knew with
all the surety of my being this did not apply to me. I was too wrong for
forgiveness. It wasn't just what I had done, it was who I was. I was
black, poisonous and evil. I both hid from God and prayed to be
transformed by God.

Out of my desperation to know and serve God I convinced myself

God was calling me to be a missionary in China. To my way of thinking
you had to be holy to be a missionary. This could be my path to
sanctification. It was also an attempt to match Dominic's missionary
zeal, to try to be as

good as him.

There had been times in my life, like when I moved to Maraylya,

when I had heard God. Now there was a resounding silence. I was
desperate for a sense of call and to hear God's will for my life. I
decided God needed some help. I would walk to the station and say, “If
the train is there when I arrive I am meant to go to China” or “If the lift
doors are open when I arrive at work I am meant to go”. The problem
with this method of discernment was sometimes the train or lift door
would be in the yes position and other times in the no. Arriving at work
to a closed lift door could plunge me into despair for the rest of the
day. I would interpret it as proof God couldn't possibly love me. I
would beg God to please let me serve him, please give me some
purpose in life.

I went on a Whitsuntide weekend retreat where a New Testament

scholar was giving a series of talks based on the book of Romans. He
was a man whose life was being torn apart. He was struggling with
decisions he needed to make and was battling with his conscience. The
result was he was profoundly human in what he said and he
acknowledged his sinfulness and his struggles. He spoke to my heart.
He talked of how Christians put on a pretence of perfection and how

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 127

alienating this can be to those of us who are aware of our flaws and
failings. He talked about his own emptiness and deep sense of failure.
He appeared to be in agony. My heart went out to him and I felt
understood by him. He was the first Christian I had met with whom I
could identify.

As well as bringing the book of Romans alive he talked about the

messages Christians so often gave to the rest of the world, about
bumper stickers and signs outside churches and what they said to
people who had no knowledge of the Christian faith. One in particular
was “Christians are not perfect, just forgiven”. He asked us to think
about what that would mean to a prostitute who could not entertain
the concept of forgiveness but was desperate for a different life. He
asked us to imagine how much that sign would alienate her and make
her think that Christians were superior to her and she would not be
accepted by them. It took all my self-control to not stand up and
applaud. Yes, Yes, YES – that's it exactly. It was a powerful experience
of hearing my truth spoken by a person in a position of power within
the church. My spirit soared with delight.

After that weekend he was teaching a course on the New

Testament for six Tuesday nights. It was held at North Parramatta at
the ELM centre. He drove past my place to get there so offered me a
lift. The course was good but even better were the conversations we
had in the car. I talked to him of my questions, of how much of what I
had been taught about God and the Bible didn't make sense to me and
how frustrated I got with thought-terminating clichés and glib answers.
He thought perhaps a theological education would help. He taught at
the United Theological College and suggested I talk to the Principal.

The easterly weather rarely lasts more than a couple of days. The wind
has swung round to the west and is blowing the debilitating
consequences of the easterly out to sea, the air is clearing, the
heaviness lifting and meringue shells will once again be crisp.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 128

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

F

rom my deck I have views to the creek with its resident platypus and

waddling, quacking ducks. Beyond this, the church stands facing Bass
Strait, a beautiful building whether viewed from land or sea. Beyond
the town are the nearby hills and hinterland, houses dotting some
hills, but further on cattle, sheep or an occasional horse. Colour and
movement forever calling my eyes beyond the small domain of my
home.

Today I shorten my gaze and rediscover the apple tree in my backyard.
It grows four different kinds of apples: two red, one yellow and one
green, each with a different taste and texture. Each apple has its
season. They don't all fruit at once, they take it in turns, making space
for one another, yet for a time co-existing. I take delight in the fact one
tree can supports diversity like this. My view offers such an abundance
of choice. So much beauty to observe, sink into, and marvel at.
Opinions and points of view can be like this, a source of interest,
excitement and challenge.

The Principal later described our interview as

enchanting; that was

generous of him, I was naïve. He explained to me that the doors for
missionaries to China had been closed for quite some time and there
were no signs of them opening again in the near future. China was
closed, and anyone seeking to do any kind of missionary work there
would be risking death. I was not to be daunted, I told him if that was
where God wanted me then he would work out the details. He
suggested that perhaps, while God was working them out, I could
study at United Theological College. I could train to be a minister if I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 129

chose. I had never heard of a woman minister; it was such a foreign
concept I didn't even consider it.

UTC was at Enfield and consisted of three buildings. The two-

storey Victorian-style principal's residence was built between 1883 and
1886. It was a magnificent building with high ceilings, a grand staircase
and formal dining room. The theological college was a neo-Georgian
revival building consisting of classrooms, staff and administration
offices and a common-room. In 1927, when the whole campus was
Leigh College, belonging to the Methodists, a memorial chapel was
built.

UTC taught liberal theology; my background was conservative. UTC

was a shock. I had been asking questions and struggling with answers
before I arrived at UTC. Now I was discovered that most people on
campus did the same and this was considered a good thing. I had
never heard of liberal theology. No one had ever even suggested the
Bible not be taken literally, let alone that it was not the inerrant,
inspired Word of God. My Old Testament lecturer talked about the
creation myth and how it was similar to the creation stories from many
other civilisations. I was shocked and shaken - and intrigued.

I enjoyed college, especially worship in the chapel every Friday.

Each student was in a support group that met weekly and one of the
responsibilities of these groups was to take a chapel service. Vast
amounts of ideas, energy and creativity were poured into them. Within
our group we would start with the wildest, over-the-top ideas and
refine them down to something that was confronting, topical but still
worshipful. Services varied from traditional to avant garde, from
contemplative to exuberant celebration, from flamboyant and multi-
cultural to deeply ritualistic and stylised. Services were alive, creative,
exciting process that could adapt themselves to many moods and
forms.

Conversations at UTC were challenging and diverse. Students and

lecturers had different understandings of God, Jesus and the Bible:
different from mine and different from one another's. Diversity of

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 130

opinion was encouraged. That in itself was shocking, disturbing and
wonderful.

I went to my Anglican prayer meeting and asked them to pray for

me, to help me discern the truth. This was a sincere request for the
abundance of opinions at times was quite terrifying and I didn't want
to go down the wrong path. Part of my relationship with God was still
based on terror and I clung on for dear life, fearful of tumbling back
into the excesses of drugs and alcohol. I had no concept of God
rejoicing in my exploration and questions. I asked for prayer in
discerning truth, wherever truth might lie. My time with Barry had not
been wasted. I did know there could be many different opinions and
versions of truth. My Anglican friends prayed my lecturers would see
the error of their ways and teach God’s truth, meaning teach what the
Anglicans believed. I was not impressed. I didn't want to be limited to
their way of thinking. There were things I heard talk of at college that
were liberating, exciting and different.

It was during my first term at UTC that Dominic returned to

England. His leaving was hard but we had always known it would
happen. That didn't stop it hurting like hell.

Dominic and I corresponded for many years, and it was exciting to

hear of his dreams coming true. He did become a priest and he worked
in the slums of London and Manchester as well as spending time in
Haiti and India.

Cheryl and Deirdre missed Dominic too. We would often meet at

their place to support each other in our grief and remember all the
great times we'd had together. Sometimes I handled my pain well,
other times an achingly deep chasm would open up inside me and
threaten to overpower me with pain, longing and loneliness. One night
as I sobbed Cheryl put her arms around me and said “Life's a shit!” It
was complete acceptance. Yes, at that moment that was how I felt. She
wasn't trying to make it better, to take away my pain or to justify God,
she just named my truth in a way that gave me far more comfort than
any reassurances of Dominic's departure being God's will. It probably

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 131

was – but at that moment life was a shit.

Dominic's leaving did not send me back to drugs and alcohol.

My older brother, Bruce, came over from New Zealand for a few days.
He thought it would cheer me up. Bruce had left home when he was
seventeen and at twenty he had hitch-hiked his way from Sydney to
London, through Asia and India. He worked in bars and restaurants. He
based himself in York and travelled around Europe as much as
possible. He claims to have introduced the Turks to instant coffee and
English markets to Turkish puzzle rings. He set out to return home via
Russia and Japan and then to New Zealand. There he met and married
a woman but I never could quite figure out why. It didn't last, of
course. My brother was gay. He stayed in New Zealand believing that
was far enough from Mum and Dad. Occasionally he would travel to
Australia and catch up with me. Even more occasionally he would visit
our parents.

This was one of those rare occasions. Bruce was an alcoholic and

there were definite signs of him having had the same struggles with his
mental health as me. It was a long time since he had seen Mum and
Dad. His line was, “How bad can they be?” My answer – “Very.” Visiting
was a stupid, stupid idea. After six hours with Mum and Dad we ended
up in Kings Cross on a three-day bender, consuming copious amounts
of alcohol and with me trying to score drugs and Bruce stopping me.
His comment afterwards was “Now I know why I live in New Zealand”.
Lucky him.

The good news was that once he left I returned to my life as a

church-going, theology-studying Christian. Even a three-day bender
was not enough to return me to my former life. That gave me a level of
confidence in my sobriety I had not previously had.

With Dominic gone and my studies taking up so much time we

stopped producing plays for the church. We did not have the heart for
it any more. On a couple of occasions Peter asked if I wanted to
preach, an opportunity I grabbed with both hands. For all my

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 132

insecurities and lack of self-worth there was a part of me that loved an
audience and the opportunity to put my world view across.

Next Peter asked if I would be his representative on the Parish

Council. People had to be nominated and voted for by members of the
congregation but there was also a place on the council the minister
could fill at his discretion. I was astounded. Why on earth would he
want me on the Parish Council? He was very clear about it. He wanted
someone who would shake the others up and challenge them. He said
I was to be the devil's advocate.

I found Parish Council meetings unbearable. We could spend

hours on whether to fix the door to the outside toilet or how much
milk was needed for morning tea. I felt like screaming. After a few
meetings I was itching for something to get my teeth into. The issue of
the 40 Hour Famine came up. Would we support it? Unlike agenda
items such as the milk issue, there was no discussion about this at all,
it was just assumed we would participate. Tact never being my strong
suit I let loose with “Why on earth would we support the 40 Hour
Fake?” I noticed Peter cringe a little, but I figured this was what he
wanted my input on. Someone asked me why I called it a fake and I
was off. How on earth could any of us in the West understand the
relentlessness of grinding poverty? How dare we go without food for
forty hours, knowing there was food in the fridge, that we could choose
to eat at any time, that at the end of the forty hours we could gorge
ourselves on anything and everything we wanted? How could we even
begin to think this would give us the slightest inkling of understanding
for those who were starving? It was tokenism, it was patronising and it
was obscene. I then launched into an attack on World Vision's way of
operating. I thought sponsoring a child pandered to the West's desire
to feel warm and fuzzy and did not consider what a sponsored child
would do to village life. What happened to the children who were not
sponsored? What kind of competitions or jealousies were created?
Where was the political analysis and consultation with the villagers to
figure out what changes needed to take place that would bring about

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 133

systemic change rather than offering a hand out? There was a rather
stunned silence once I had finished. After a little while the chairperson
asked if anybody else had anything to say. I looked at Peter who made
sure not to look at me. The chairperson said it was a complex issue and
perhaps we should just leave it to people to make up their own minds.
This, of course, meant they were not going to think through any of the
issues. My disgust, especially with Peter, was obvious. That was the
beginning of the end of my Anglican days.

I left theological college, not because of the challenges to my faith, but
because it was not what I was looking for. It was an academic course
and I was looking for something more heart-centred and spiritual. I
gave up on going to China. I was grateful for the way college had
broadened my thinking even though my foundations had been shaken
to the core. In some ways college had been far more challenging than
Barry's barrage of questions, because it was systematic and structured
in its teaching and questions. I never had accepted simple answers, but
now I knew it was OK to question and that there was far more to God,
Jesus and the Bible than I had been taught in church. In my two terms
at theological college the foundations of my faith were ripped away
and the scaffolding for a new faith shakily erected.

Those two terms of college changed my relationship with God. I

felt a new freedom to think, read and question as widely as I liked.

As well as my apple tree I have a peach, an apricot, a pear and a

cherry tree. All drawing nourishment from the earth. Each requiring
the co-operations of another tree and the birds and bees in order to
be pollinated and bear fruit. At their best different ideas and opinions
provide the cross-pollination necessary for human thoughts to bear
new fruit.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 134

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

W

hen I went to bed last night the wind was howling and rain was

pounding on the roof. The dogs huddled close for warmth and
protection. When I first opened my eyes this morning there was a
small, furry head on the pillow next to mine with the white parts of her
coat glittering silver in the sunshine. Colour was splashed across the
sky, the left-over clouds providing abundant canvas for an effusive
outpouring of joyous creativity – a new day had burst into life.

Life after Dominic and Theological College consisted of work, home
and spending time with friends. More days than not I would see Cheryl
and Deirdre and they provided me with much support and some
protection against my loneliness. Cheryl seemed to have a sixth sense
about how I was and often on days when I was struggling she would
ring my door bell and say “I just felt you needed a hug.” or “I just knew
you were having a hard time.” I saw these visits as gifts from God,
believing God had prompted Cheryl's “knowing”.

One day followed the next. Time passed and I grew stronger

within myself, my faith and my sobriety. I started to look outward and
take an interest in the world around me. The arms race was sweeping
us towards destruction. Marcos was in power in the Philippines and
the CIA were involved in Nicaragua and El Salvador and apartheid was
the rule of law in South Africa. The world seemed like an awful place. I
decided to do something about it. I became a volunteer at Action for
World Development and joined People for Nuclear Disarmament.

As a teenager both my father and I had participated in Vietnam

moratorium marches. As a result of my volunteer work I once again
attended peace marches, meetings for peace, peace vigils and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 135

consciousness-raising groups. I was both passionate about peace and
overwhelmed by terror and despair. Convinced we were facing
imminent annihilation, or, far worse, slow agonising death from
radiation poisoning. Why couldn't everyone else see the urgency of the
situation and join me in working towards peace? I became obsessed,
fanatical, rabid and, according to my friends, a pain in the arse and a
bore.

One day my uncle, my father's brother, rang me. We were not a close
family so I was surprised to hear from him. He was ringing to let me
know my parents were going into a nursing home. I knew they were
unwell. I had visited them in hospital. He told me he was selling their
unit and asked me if there was anything I wanted. They had some
beautiful pieces of antique furniture. I didn't want them, besides I had
nowhere to put them and didn't want to live with a constant reminder
of my parents. My uncle told me this was my chance to escape. He
encouraged me to break all ties with them, assuring me that my father
was “a mad bastard, always has been” and I owed them nothing. “Get
them out of your life” said my uncle. I was surprised by this
conversation. I was fond of my uncle, he had always been good to me
on the rare occasions we met.

A mad bastard he reckoned. Given my

uncle's propensity for driving home with a string of sausages wrapped
around his neck, or chasing any number of his five children around the
yard with hot barbecue tongs,

mad must cover quite extreme

behaviour. Being given permission to walk away felt amazing. Freedom
beckoned.

I backed away from my parents but could not break contact. I still

felt tied to them. I attended a weekend Group Life Laboratory. There
were ten participants and two facilitators. There was no agenda and no
explanation of the process. The idea was to all meet together in a room
and without any direction from the facilitators allow the group to
develop its own direction. The idea was that people would talk about
problems they were having in their life but there was none of the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 136

structure of a therapy marathon. I talked about wanting to be free
from my feelings of guilt and responsibility towards my parents. One of
the workshop leaders was a Uniting Church minister who invited trust
and also a bestowal of priestly power and authority. Given my limited
experience of priests I was surprised by this way of viewing him but
there was something about his relationship with God and his surety
about issues of faith that encouraged me to see him as a positive
authority figure. I talked about my need to let go of responsibility for
my parents and of my desire to be free of my sense of duty and guilt.
Realisation dawned; what I needed was permission and absolution. I
asked the minister if he was willing to give it. He felt uncomfortable in
this role. He did not feel he had invited it in any way. I didn't care
whether he had invited the role or not. I needed to feel the permission
to have nothing more to do with my parents came from God. This man
felt like someone I could trust to be God's representative.

Once he agreed to the role he fulfilled it brilliantly. He spoke

in

God's name freeing me from my parents and explaining that the
biblical command to honour my parents had been broken by their
abuse and they had not fulfilled their responsibilities, therefore I was
not bound by the Bible. He acknowledged there had been wrongdoings
on my part but I was free and forgiven. He anointed me with oil then
prayed for me and pronounced me free to go and live my life to the
full. This was exactly what I needed. I felt free. I wrote to my parents
telling them I would not be visiting them again, thanking them for all
the good things they had done for me - clothes, housing, an education
- but saying the bad far outweighed the good and I was no longer
prepared to pay the price of being their daughter.

A year later I went on a three-day, silent retreat. I joined the religious
community of the retreat house for meals and the rest of the time I
spent alone except for meeting with a spiritual director each day. He
listened as I spoke of my experience of the silence and offered
direction and Bible readings designed to deepen my experience and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 137

help me be open to God. The director was also a priest and a
singer/songwriter and he gave me some of his music to listen to. His
songs were personal and moving. His lyrics spoke with honesty about
his relationship with God and others and his efforts to live a good life.
Something in the openness of his struggle touched my heart. If a priest
could struggle like that maybe I wasn't so bad after all. I left wishing I
had stayed longer and feeling seen and understood.

Some months later I returned but this time had a different

spiritual director. She wanted me to focus on God's love for me. She
could not have picked a worse topic. I still did not believe that God
loved me. I wanted to believe it, felt guilty for not believing but the
reality was I did not and could not accept that God loved me. The
retreat leader gave me a hard time for being so stupid and stubborn. I
wanted to scream at her, to tell her I was desperate to believe God
loved me but I just couldn't. I did not believe it and there was no point
pretending. I felt bad. Bad that I couldn't accept God's love. Bad
because I didn't believe in God's love for me and bad that there was
something foundationally wrong with me. Surely, if God did love me I
would know it, feel it. Somehow God would be able to get the message
through. I felt nothing, except guilt and emptiness.

After several months of voluntary work at Action for World
Development I applied for a job as secretary for the Mission and
Justice Education Programme run by the Catholic Church. Perhaps it
was a combination of proving my interest in development and peace
issues and AWD providing me with a good reference – I got the job. It
was wonderful! Fantastic! This was social justice, mission,
development, peace and feminism. I loved this teaching with a passion
because it gave breadth and depth to my understanding of social
justice. Dominic had prepared the way with his talk about the
importance of a social gospel. That is a gospel that demanded equity.
Now I had access to books, videos, talks and religious who committed
their entire lives to this. A whole new world opened up to me.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 138

The team was generous in their teaching of me and encouraged

me to take home videos and books and arranged for me to attend a
couple of their workshops. Even without this I would have been
immersed in their world. These people ate, drank and slept social
justice. This was their work, vocation and passion. They focused on
Jesus' teaching in the gospels and did their best to live their lives based
on gospel values. They showed me another form of Christianity with a
different way of understanding God and reading the Bible. I worked
there for two years, by far the longest time I had ever stayed in a job.

I stopped going to church because I felt more nourished by my

work than by church on Sunday. Liberation Theology was wonderful,
inspirational, challenging teaching. It was a theology that cared
passionately about the poor and oppressed. For me, this was
Catholicism at its very best: an exciting combination of intellectual
stimulation and an understanding that a commitment to justice
required conversion and transformation. If I truly engaged with these
teachings I could not stay the same. I was stretched both intellectually
and emotionally and a whole new dimension was added to my faith. I
thrived.

One day one of the team came back from lunch saying he had just

bumped into a fellow Christian Brother who was about to run a ten-
week Enneagram workshop and he was most insistent I attend. So I
did.

So much of this time of my life was new beginnings. Bright and shiny
new dawns. The sun pouring in on my life. There were many new
pathways to discover and explore. My life had colour: intense, bright
and vibrant. I was joyful.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 139

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

S

cattered along the beach are rock formations. Some form small rock

pools filled with sand, flora and fauna: myriad miracles from the
ocean. At the end of the beach some of the rocks rise up over three
metres high. My dogs love to scramble up them and will stand proudly
at the summit, king and queen of all they survey as they enjoy the
different perspective. The wind ruffles their fur giving them the look of
intrepid adventurers. I always smile looking at these two small animals
standing on a rock that sinks deep down into the earth that is as old as
time itself. I wish I could hear its wisdom and the tales of formation,
erosion, changing sea levels and varied vegetation. I wish I could listen
to the earth and hear a perspective that spans millennia.

John was in his fifties, greying and with intense brown eyes. He was
contained and focused. John gave an overview of the Enneagram,
telling us how the Sufis had developed it but it had fallen from use and
been rediscovered by Catholic teachers a few years previously. John
had learnt about the Enneagram at a spirituality centre in Chicago. He
used it as a tool for people to understand themselves, spiritually and
psychologically, and for awareness and growth.

The Enneagram is diagrammed as a circle with nine different

points. Each point is connected to two other points, one being the way
of growth, the other the least productive way a person can live. Each
point has a detailed description of the strengths and weaknesses of
that personality type, what motivates them and how they operate in
the world and whether they function predominantly from the heart,
head or gut. It is not meant to be used to give yourself a hard time or
point out your failings, rather it is an aid to self-awareness and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 140

acceptance.

In order to get some idea of where people were on the

Enneagram, John handed out worksheets for each point. Each sheet
contained a series of statements and he encouraged us to tick which
statements we resonated with. The more ticks you had on a particular
sheet the more likely this was your position. On the first sheet I ticked
some and left some blank because, while some statements sounded
like me, overall I did not feel the statements provided an accurate
description of me. The second sheet was nothing like me at all so there
were very few ticks. However, the third sheet felt as if someone had
looked inside my life and knew my deepest and, I had hoped, well kept
secrets.

That first evening John described the Two, Three and Four

personality types. As he talked about the Four he spoke my life. He
talked about how this type finds it virtually impossible to accept God’s
love and grace. He just said it as a statement of fact, no judgement, no
condemnation. Waves of relief and gratitude washed over me. He
talked about the need to be special and the feelings of superiority and
melancholy that were part of my life. There were certain statements
such as “sometimes I feel like an aristocrat in exile” that were so
accurate I squirmed with embarrassment. Other statements such as “I
have a vague sense of loss and abandonment in my childhood” made
me chuckle with the sheer understatement of it and reference to
“drama queens” left me in no doubt this was me. I had to speak to this
man.

Three days later I was sitting in the visitor's room of the Christian

Brother's monastery, in Burwood in Sydney's inner-west, telling John of
my struggles with, and search for, God over the years. I felt listened to
and understood. Whatever I had to say was honoured and then
returned to me without judgement. It was a profound and wonderful
experience.

As we had a cuppa together afterwards I asked him what else he

did apart from run Enneagram workshops. He said he was a Spiritual

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 141

Director and explained that he met with people on a regular basis,
listened to where God was and was not in their lives and went more
deeply into the God moments. Instantly I knew this was for me. This
was what I had been looking for. There began a spiritual direction
relationship that lasted eighteen years and a friendship that has
survived my move to Tasmania.

Spiritual direction was perfect for me. It dealt with my relationship

with God on a one to one basis. John did not impose teachings, nor did
he imply I had to conform, or be good enough, or have the same
relationship with God everyone else did. I could be honest about my
search for God, my fears, doubts and insecurities. I always had to
understand things. They had to make sense and I needed to be in
control. In direction John taught me to listen to my body and value the
truth it would reveal. I started to open up to God and experience God
in ways I never had before. I discovered there is a place beyond
rational thought, beyond both the head and the heart where truth lies.
As I began to trust my body more and more, so my trust in God grew.

Direction taught me discernment, how to check out if my

perception of the voice of God was indeed God’s voice; again by
listening to the resonances of my body. While I didn't have total
success with this it was a vast improvement on such things as praying,
opening my Bible and stabbing my finger on a verse, any verse, or
seeing if the train was in when I got to the station.

John always encouraged me to just turn up at sessions with my

life. I didn’t have to be good enough or

holy enough, or arrive with

special

sacred moments to talk about. We always found God in the

midst of living. I would talk about the major events of my week and
John seemed to know what moments to focus on and enter into and to
ask the question “Where was God in that?” At first I didn't have an
answer but soon learnt to be open to the Spirit who surprised and
delighted me. God was revealing himself to me in wonderful, new
ways.

After direction we would have a cuppa together and talk for an

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 142

hour or two. During these times John would listen to the day to day
living of my life and would he talk about his life and his understanding
of God. We became friends within the structure of these sessions. This
time was every bit as important as direction. I felt love, care,
compassion and enjoyment of me and it was of incalculable value.

As my trust grew I started telling John about my parents, Dominic,

my time in therapy and Ward One, my drug usage, Barry's death and
being in jail. I told him of my fights with God over Barry being in hell
and, without resorting to doctrine, he got me to question if this fitted
with the God I was developing a relationship with. No, it didn't. I
started to fully believe that God had no qualms about a persons' sexual
orientation. I had always asserted that being gay was OK but since
becoming a Christian fear and guilt had been nibbling around the
edges of this belief. These fears began to fade.

John and I could discuss anything and everything. We talked about

Dominic and how much I missed him. We spoke of my sexual
attraction for a woman friend of mine. We explored where I found God
in novels, films and nature. John never told me to read the Bible or go
to church or become a Catholic. We explored my emerging relationship
with God. A relationship John both honoured and stretched.

We revisited many of the major traumas of my life in order to

bring about a greater depth of healing, the healing of my spirit. For all
my hunger for God it was a confused relationship. I still had a lot of
fear. I found God difficult at times.

Yet, God was able to challenge me without me feeling condemned

or belittled. If God pointed out a particular behaviour which was
unhealthy the challenge always felt clean and light, an invitation to
change, not a condemnation. For years I had been obsessed with
doing. If I had a problem or was stuck I would yell at God, or at John,
or both, “Just tell me what to do and I'll do it”. While I was obsessing
over and worrying at an issue not only did I stay stuck but I felt like I
was entwined in an ever-tightening net of my own making. Letting go
and being was not an easy lesson to learn. John often reminded me

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 143

that God loved us into letting go, we were loved so we could change,
we didn't have to change in order to be loved.

Because direction was relational and experiential my relationship

with God developed unencumbered by

appropriate language, theology

or doctrine. I found the image of God Almighty problematic. This was a
God to be terrified of. A God who knew everything, saw everything and
would judge and condemn. I was learning new ways of seeing God.
God would not bombard me, or violate me. I came to know that God
would never enter into any part of my life through force. God treated
me with the utmost respect and only ever entered into the dark places
of my life by invitation. Never as Almighty or All Powerful or as a
shining light that burns. This was the God of shadows and gentle
candle light. The God who invited change but never insisted. This was a
God I could trust and feel safe with.

At the beginning of direction I was still pretty messy and

fragmented and it provided cohesion in my life. John's was the place I
could go every week and be myself and talk about all that was
happening in a context of God. The relief was enormous.

I came to trust that God wanted to be in relationship with me.

I'm sitting here with a big smile on my face. One of the joys of writing
is I discover new things about my life. I have realised what an amazing
foundation was formed through my time with John. It makes me think
of those rocks my dogs climb, the ones that go deep down into the
earth.

John and I never got waylaid by dogma or creeds or right beliefs.

Direction was all about experience, relationship and heart connection.
There have been times since then that people have tried to coerce me
into their idea of right belief and I've lost my footing for a while, but
the depth of those foundations have been there for me to return to, to
scramble up again like my dogs on the rocks. Tonight I've got a sense
of how far down into the earth, into God, those foundations go. And
from the depths of them bubbles joy.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 144

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T

he colours in my seascape swirl, tumble and twist. There are times I

can almost hear the roar of the ocean, the pounding of the waves,
sense the surging power within them.

Storm clouds are gathering. Thick, heavy, blue-grey-black with an

ominous tinge of green, rolling in. There is a sense of electricity in the
air, that special charge when there is an impending storm. The ocean
is roaring, announcing the change in the weather. Far off in the
distance I hear a noise, the rumble of approaching thunder?

I started to think about what to do with the rest of my life. Although I
loved the atmosphere at the Mission and Justice Education Programme
being a secretary did not give me job satisfaction.

I was told of a Marist Brother and two lay people who were

practising as rebirthers at a Marist monastery. I went along to check
them out and was impressed. They were well-trained in spirituality and
Jungian theory as well as rebirthing. Rebirthing is a form of continuous
breathing and meditation that helps you enter your unconscious. It
often results in connecting to long suppressed emotions which are
then released. Sometimes you will connect to your birth trauma and
then a more positive birth experience is facilitated. Rebirthing was
developed by Stanislav Grof at the Esalen Institute in the US.

A typical session involved the client lying on a mattress, music

playing, the rebirther sitting at her head encouraging her to focus on a
particular issue as she starts to breathe deeply in the prescribed
fashion. People would yell, shout and sob as they released intense
feelings and energetic blocks. The practitioners offered containment
and encouragement. My rebirthers were involved and in tune with the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 145

work I was doing and well able to follow where my work went. They
provided me with a sense of security and of being held within a safe
environment. Even though I expressed intense feelings I never feared I
would lose control. At the end of a session I was given crayons and
paper to draw my response to the session before I tried to put words
on my experience. Then I would talk about what had happened during
the session.

I did a five-day retreat at the monastery. It was full of rebirthing,

dream analysis, sandplay therapy, painting and spiritual direction. It
was a very busy retreat, but I found the opportunity to delve into my
unconscious and express what I found therein a range of creative
options. It was enriching and fun.

I decided to become a rebirther. I left the Mission and Justice

Programme and attended a three-month residential course in order to
get my Associate Diploma of Rebirthing and Transpersonal
Psychodynamics. I wondered how impressed future employers would
be with this addition to any résumé. The course was not run by the
people with whom I had been doing rebirthing. I did not enjoy the
course because the staff provided little containment. I was floundering
in an amorphous fog of intensity and feelings without purpose,
direction or insight and with no structure at the end of a session to
help process or understand what had taken place. No feedback was
given by the rebirther. Just being able to express feelings without a
framework for understanding them was not helpful and did not
facilitate change or self-responsibility. Healing needs to engage as
many of our faculties as possible.

We were expected to do a few hours of what was called

Hatha

Yoga each day. This was, in effect, housework or gardening. Given that
the course was expensive I resented this. One of my jobs was cleaning
the toilets, this took me back to my Westmount days. Surely I had paid
my dues by now.

One afternoon the training centre held an open day. This was an

opportunity for anyone interested in rebirthing to come and ask

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 146

questions. Wine and cheese were provided. It had been quite some
time since I'd had a drink, surely one or two wouldn't hurt; I could stop
after that. After considerably more than one or two I started having
auditory and visual hallucinations. I wanted a rebirthing session to deal
with whatever was going on. I don't recommend rebirthing sessions
while drunk and, in hindsight, am staggered that a member of staff was
willing to rebirth me while I was obviously drunk, but rebirth me she
did.

I still remember the feel of that session. I became powerful and

evil. I soared above the world and drew a huge amount of energy into
me. I was in the middle of a forest. Under a full moon. Dressed all in
black and howling and crowing with power: “All power is mine. I will
destroy you. I have the power to kill, to maim and to banish,” I
screamed as I swirled my black cape around me. I was drunk and
crazed with power; murderous and invincible. I was connected to the
earth. Dark and evil power was pulsating through me, filling every part
of my body, overflowing, spilling out onto everything around me. This
was how it should be. This was right and familiar. My destiny.

Once the session was over I was exhausted, shocked and shaken.

What on earth was all that about? It felt evil; satanic in fact. The woman
who rebirthed me wrote it off as a past life experience. I was not
impressed. It felt too real to be a past life and I was horrified by the
power and evil at my command. I had no idea how to process this
session, so it was left to rattle around in my psyche, which it did for
years.

On completing the course I didn't want to set up practice as a

rebirther; with such limited training I could do damage. I wanted to
train as a therapist but didn't want to go to university and study either
psychology or social work. Academia was the pathway my father had
wanted for me so I had avoided it at all costs and I was not about to
change my mind now. I got a job with a counselling agency as an
administration assistant. I hoped working close to what I wanted
would be enough. It wasn't.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 147

I imagine if I could enter my seascape I would experience power that
could bring death. It is such a heaving mass of boiling ocean that I
doubt survival would be possible. Yet in capturing this image the artist
has created an image of great beauty. Power still pulsates through it,
still lives and breathes within it, but without the ability to maim or
destroy. The very heartbeat of the universe calls forth creative power;
full of energy, full of life. It is humans who seek to control this power
and use it to bring about death.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 148

CHAPTER TWENTY

W

ithin my seascape there are places where the paints are piled one

on top of each other, layer after layer. There are other places where
the colours get their beauty from the contrast of being next to one
another. Sometimes the paints blend together, co-operating and new
colours and shades are born. The soul of the painting continues to
enchant.

A friend of mine worked at the local Pregnancy Counselling and
Support service and believed I had what it took to be a counsellor
there. She encouraged me to apply for the position of co-ordinator
which was mostly administration but also carried a small case load. I
got the job. While I enjoyed the job I chafed against the restrictions.
Our mandate was to only deal with the issues of pregnancy, not to go
into anything else that may have contributed to why the person
became pregnant. We were a pro-life organisation so, according to the
constitution, we were not allowed to refer for abortions. However, we
did not believe we could do our jobs ethically without giving people full
information about their options. It was a tightrope to be walked with
great delicacy. I became an expert at saying things without actually
saying them.

Over the years my brother and I stayed in intermittent contact. I
received a letter from him telling me that he now understood what I
was talking about when I had written to him of my Christianity. He had
become a Christian and believed God had healed him of his
alcoholism. After this we wrote to each other regularly. Bruce was off
the booze and had joined the Anglican Church in New Zealand.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 149

He wrote telling me of his struggles with his sexuality. God had

certainly cured his alcoholism but for some unfathomable reason was
not curing his homosexuality. At this time the laws concerning
homosexuality in New Zealand were changing and it was a divisive
topic. My brother was going to a church that believed homosexuality
was a sin. He felt incapable of telling them that he was gay. I was sure
God didn't think homosexuality was a sin and sent him some books
with that point of view. To my regret, what I didn't do was listen to the
struggle he was having, I just tried to make him feel better. Bruce
ended up in a vicious cycle of trying to be straight, finding it too
difficult, so going out and having a fling. Then he would feel guilty and
would start drinking which inevitably led to more sex. He would have
benders and then would try and sort himself out again. His letters were
full of guilt and anguish and the constant cry to know why God
wouldn't heal him. Slowly his letters became incoherent and then
stopped. I got the occasional drunken phone call and put together the
pieces. He had left New Zealand and moved to Papua New Guinea
where he was working for a company that flew into the highlands and
worked with tribal people. Papua New Guinea was experiencing a great
deal of unrest at the time. My brother drunk and actively gay in that
situation sounded like a recipe for disaster.

It was sixteen years until I heard of him again. Fourteen years

after his death the Public Trustee finally managed to track me down.
My brother had died alone in Wellington Hospital, New Zealand. He
had died of an AIDS related illness. I was his sole beneficiary. That
broke my heart. Was there no one of significance in his life?

Greg was tall, slender and introverted. I met him through Deirdre. He
was her boyfriend's best friend. For a while he went out with a friend
of mine. This was a relationship that concerned me because I felt she
was using him and Greg didn't strike me as the sort of person you
should use. I thought he would get hurt. Out of this concern a
friendship developed and we often went out to dinner together, or to

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 150

movies or out of Sydney at weekends. Greg was a kind, gentle man
with not an ounce of violence in him. I was attracted to his gentleness
and grew to love him. It took quite some time until Greg reciprocated,
but eventually he did and we married. It was never a passionate
relationship and Greg did not share my commitment to spirituality but
we were good friends.

For our honeymoon we went to Singapore and Hong Kong. This

was Greg's first time overseas; I had travelled as a child with my family.
We both revelled in being in different countries and cultures,
surrounded by unusual and interesting people, smells, foods,
languages, religious artefacts, and new and exciting scenery. We
decided we wanted to travel overseas again, this time to Europe.

Shortly after our return home from our honeymoon I started

having back pain. My GP diagnosed a urinary tract infection. Her
treatment did not ease the pain. I saw a physiotherapist who put me in
traction twice a week, this didn't help either. The pain increased and
spread down my leg. I went to see an orthopaedic surgeon who told
me I needed to lose weight. While this was true it was not helpful,
especially as any kind of movement was becoming increasingly
difficult. I had to stop work. Eventually I went to see the doctor of a
friend of mine who took one look at me and said “Why on earth aren't
you in hospital?” He rang a neurosurgeon, pulled some strings, and got
me an appointment for two weeks time. By this stage I was bed-ridden
and any kind of movement was excruciating. One night, struggling out
of bed to go to the toilet, I lost my balance, fell backwards onto the bed
and heard a nasty snap sound. Agony comes nowhere near it. I
convinced Greg that it was serious enough to warrant calling an
ambulance and got taken to the local hospital where I begged for
painkillers. I was admitted and, after a couple of days, the doctors
decided surgery was needed. As far as I was concerned being operated
on in the local hospital was not an option. Thank goodness I had
private health insurance. The neurosurgeon I had the appointment
with operated at St. Vincent's; I requested they transfer me. After three

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 151

days of not being transferred I got fed up and asked for the papers to
sign myself out. It was only then they took me seriously. Within two
hours I was transferred. The next day I had a myelogram, an
unpleasant procedure where dye that can be seen by an X-ray is
injected into the sac around the nerve roots. This showed that a piece
of my disc had splintered off and was impinging on the sciatic nerve.
No wonder I was in pain. The surgeon performed a lumbar
laminectomy. The reduction in pain was wonderful. It didn't all go
away and I had to have various procedures over the next couple of
years and then another laminectomy. This resulted in nerve damage.
My foot is now partially numb and I have little ability to control its
movements. But eventually I ended up with pain that I could live with
and was able to get around reasonably well most of the time. A vast
improvement on being bed-ridden. All up I was off work for eighteen
months.

Between my two lots of surgery I felt my pain was tolerable.

Travelling with a small pharmacy of painkillers and anti-inflammatories
Greg and I went to Europe for three months where we leased a car. We
had worked out an itinerary before we left but after four weeks we
were tired of major cities and big buildings and we ditched the
itinerary and took to the minor roads and by-ways and explored the
countryside. We stayed in B&Bs, ate in small restaurants, bought local
wine, bread and cheese and had a fantastic time.

Returning to Australia I had my second lot of surgery.
I was still searching for the right career. I had enjoyed working as

a counsellor for Pregnancy Counselling and Support and had applied
for other counselling jobs but did not have enough qualifications. Greg
encouraged me to get them. So, while recovering from surgery, I
started the Institute of Counselling's two-year course. It was a highly
respected course which provided good basic listening and counselling
skills as well as tasters for a variety of different counselling modalities
and genres.

The combination of doing the counselling course and being a

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 152

survivor of sexual assault helped me get a part-time job with a non-
government sexual assault agency. It was a feminist-based agency with
a commitment to caring for their staff. A generous training budget was
provided, supervision was compulsory as was stress leave. We had to
take a week off every thirteen weeks. We could add this onto holidays
but stress leave was not cumulative. The whole idea was to take the
leave in order to be able to continue doing the work.

The agency was in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, a low socio-

economic area with many single-parent families. There was a lack of
services and infrastructure to meet the needs of a rapidly growing,
mostly unemployed, predominantly female population. It was not a
place where people minded their Ps and Qs, what you saw was what
you got. People talked about their lives with a rawness and openness
that I admired and found life-giving. I was very comfortable with raw
and gutsy people who called a spade a fucking shovel. It was a
fabulous place to work.

Without any formal qualifications and only my own personal

experience and my time at Pregnancy Counselling and Support I felt
daunted by the responsibility of my position. The other staff and the
management collective were supportive and encouraged me to get as
much supervision as I needed. At its best supervision deals with the
way your work impacts on you: what buttons get pushed and personal
issues arise, as well as giving advice on how to work with your client.

I discovered I had a gift for going into people’s pain and was

comfortable going into the depths of their memories. I was also willing
to allow their pain to have an effect on me and to name that to my
clients. My own therapy proved to be fantastic training and I
remembered with deep gratitude all Susan had given me and the tears
she had shed on my behalf.

I attended a myriad of short courses on working with sexual

assault but needed some kind of foundational course. I was still
reluctant to attend university. One evening at the Institute of
Counselling a woman spoke on Transactional Analysis and my love of,

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 153

and respect for, this modality was re-ignited. I decided to train as a
Transactional Analyst. This involved four years of training: a mixture of
clinical work, supervision and theory. Our trainer challenged us to
think. She told us that in the thirty-eight essays we were required to
write we would get good marks for showing our understanding of the
theory but better ones for original thought and creativity in applying
the theory. We had wonderfully heated discussions. Did we agree with
what we were being taught? Was it relevant? How would we use it?
What did we disagree with? What would we do instead? We were never
expected to just learn the theory and regurgitate it. I discovered I loved
writing essays and would do my best to critique the theory and offer
alternate positions when I thought them appropriate. We also did role
plays where we used material from our clients, and did our own
personal work. It was rigorous, extensive and exciting training.

Life was full. I was married and had a demanding job I thrived on.

I was completing the Institute of Counselling course and my TA
training, and I continued to be in spiritual direction. Life was great.

Once I finished the first part of my TA training, the thirty-eight

essays and accumulating the necessary clinical, supervision and
training hours, and had only my oral exams to go, I decided to attend
university and study psychology. The results gained for my TA essays
convinced me university would be easy and I would enjoy the mental
stimulation. I applied as a mature-age student and was rejected!! I was
devastated.

Australia was in the middle of a recession and unemployment was

high and places at university were at a premium. Nevertheless I could
not believe I didn't get in. Not going to university had always been my
choice and an act of rebellion against my father. I was hurt, rejected
and very angry. No one seemed to understand that – so I was also
lonely, unsupported and misunderstood. Friends suggested I apply
again next semester. Absolutely not. I would NEVER go to university.
They'd had their chance and they had rejected me. They could go to
hell. I would not apply next semester, next year or ever. They had

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 154

missed their chance and they could wear the consequences.

I had been working in child sexual assault for a while and decided I
needed a different supervisor. My first two supervisors were helpful
and encouraging. They taught me how to work with children, how to
write Victim Impact Statements and how to prepare a child for court.
However, the more I worked in sexual assault the more my passion
was for adult survivors. My work with children was adequate,
especially children under five, but my work with adolescents was
woeful; I had no rapport. I was passionate about working with adult
survivors and the feedback I got from my supervisors and from clients
helped me have faith in my ability to do good work.

I met up with Susan at a workshop on Psychodrama and was

amazed to find the old connection and spark was still there. I wanted
Susan as my supervisor, as the person I saw fortnightly to talk through
my work. Susan would be excellent at spotting if my own sexual abuse
was hindering my work. It had been eleven years since I had seen her
and I still felt a strong connection to her. I felt like I had gone home to
my roots. Many of my skills as a therapist came from her. A large part
of her philosophical and psychological underpinning and her way of
understanding the personality came from TA - as did mine. Having
Susan as my supervisor reminded me of all that had been most
valuable in our previous time together and showed me how much my
therapeutic style was based on Susan. I still had enormous respect for
her.

If my work in sexual assault triggered any of my issues, then I

would do whatever personal work was necessary. If that meant going
back into therapy for a period of time, that was fine. Greg and I
understood this was the underpinning of me working in sexual assault.

My seascape has hung on my wall for over three years now. I have
spent hours gazing at it from different parts of the room, in different
lights, in all sorts of moods.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 155

Today two faces emerged. One is of a mythic beast: old, deep-set

eyes, pug nose and face covered in fur-like hair, moustache and long
beard merging together. The face frowns, scowls. The other face is
beautiful. It is in profile. Accentuating the high cheek bones is a filigree
pattern and radiating out from the eye are circles and lines of blue
increasing the eye's intensity. The nose is snub and the mouth and
chin refuse to be pinned down as somehow they change between soft,
gentle smiling lips to a firm and determined chin and jaw line. These
two faces are staring at each other, looking into each other's eyes, in
the midst of the riotous abundance of colour and movement.

They represent different parts of me. That scowling hirsute face

contains the wisdom gained through pain while the beautiful face with
her intricate markings shows the freshness that can be birthed out of a
life reflected upon and transformed. Both emerge from the amniotic
fluids of my unconscious. I can feel them rooted in the depth of my
being. How easily I embrace these different parts of me knowing they
come out of all that has been before me. They will give me power,
wisdom and creativity to face all that is still to come.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 156

I

built my house by the sea.

Not on the sands, mind you;

not on the shifting sand.

And I built it of rock.

A strong house

by a strong sea.

And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.

Good neighbours.

Not that we spoke much.

We met in silences.

Respectful, keeping our distance,

but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.

Always, the fence of sand our barrier,

always, the sand between.

And then one day,

-and I still don’t know how it happened-

the sea came.

Without warning.

Without welcome, even

Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,

less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.

Slow, but coming.

Slow, but flowing like an open wound.

And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of

death.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 157

And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.

And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.

That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbours,

Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbours,

And you give your house for a coral castle,

And you learn to breathe underwater.

- Sr. Carol Bieleck, RSCJ

From an unpublished work

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 158

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

O

ur winters here on the coast are milder than the word Tasmania

conjures up for most people. We have our share of storms, rain, wind
and cold, but not the extremes people expect. So when we do have a
patch of truly nasty weather it still manages to surprise, shock and
even scare people, locals included. My time remembering ritual abuse
was like that for me. I already knew bad stuff had happened to me. I
knew worse existed in the world. But I was not prepared for the
storms and tempestuous seas I had to navigate.

It's wild out there today. The rain is pounding on my roof and windows
and the clouds are so dark I feel it should be evening. It's not even 9
a.m. yet. I can barely hear the sound of the waves over the wind and
rain but I can see them, tumultuous, pounding, surging, rising above
the containment of the breakwall and splashing onto the pathway –
threatening to pour onto the road. It is a day when rising sea levels
show their ominous and destructive potential.

But this wild, bleak weather makes me think today might be the

day for writing about ritual abuse. It seems to create the right mood.
Brooding darkness.

Sometimes life prepares us for what is to come. During a spiritual
direction session with John I felt God asking me to do something that
was huge, time-consuming and extremely painful. I saw an image of an
enormous concrete room without any windows. The room was below
the ground but had none of the dankness of a dungeon. Was I
prepared to enter the room? I had no idea what I was saying yes to,
but said yes, nonetheless.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 159

Saying yes was easy. I felt content with my life and happy in my

marriage. I was secure in my faith and believed all the trauma and
drama of my past was behind me. Greg and I were paying off a unit in
Bankstown in Sydney's south-west. This was further from the city than
our previous flat but we were buying, not renting, and were excited
about owning our first home. We went away for weekends regularly
and had great holidays. We ate out regularly at a mixture of first-class
restaurants and fabulous cheap and cheerful places we delighted in
discovering. We led the life of many dual-income-no-kids couples. At
long last life was a good thing. Being alive was no longer a struggle and
I was enjoying the challenge of working as a sexual assault counsellor
and training both at the Institute of Counselling and through the
International Transactional Analysis Association. I was in my late
thirties and had reached a place of calm seas and smooth sailing. I was
confident that everything that lay ahead was going to be great.

I had been developing an interest in feminine images of God. Over the
years my view of my womanhood as a tragic accident of birth had
changed, now it was a cause for joy and celebration. I thought having
some images of God other than a bigger version of my father or an
octogenarian benefactor might be helpful. My first encounters with
feminine images were tentative. Was I was wrong and sinful to even
contemplate these images? I feared they were unbiblical and I should
have nothing to do with them. However, I was a feminist and
participated in a Women's Theology Group which was liberating. It was
wonderfully exciting to listen to biblical interpretation from a feminist
perspective and to explore the old stories from a new slant or hear
unfamiliar stories told by women of scholarship who engaged in an
“hermeneutics of suspicion”: they asked different questions of the text
than had been asked up to this point.

I started reading books on the feminine face of God. They were

the next stop forward from my relationship with Mary Magdalene. I
needed feminine images but these books didn't do it for me. I tried

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 160

using feminine pronouns for God and was wracked with guilt. Was I
indulging in Goddess worship or a barbaric, pagan understanding of
God? It felt wrong, bad and sinful yet I knew there was life in these
ideas. I remembered all the novels I had read about matriarchal
worship and priestesses and their reverence of the earth, or about
Asclepieian dreaming and healing centres and how these books had
always resonated in a way I couldn't understand. The spirituality, both
matriarchal and pagan, and the healing and magic would enter my
psyche in a way that called me home to truth, to where I belonged.

My work environment encouraged me in my pursuit. We were a

feminist collective. Staff and management were committed to a
feminist analysis of power and abuse. This created a rewarding and
challenging environment stretching me to think about issues of power
and gender in new ways. I began to see how viewing God as male fed
into the patriarchal structures of the church which saw priests as God's
representatives on earth but often barred women from these
positions. This was justified by interpreting scripture from a male
perspective and viewing male experience as normative. Many parts of
the church were not willing to listen to the experience of women,
people of colour, the poor and homosexuals. Nor were they open to
see examples of God's life-changing power within these groups. For a
long time God had been viewed as the prerogative of male, middle-
class, western, heterosexual men.

A friend of mine told me of a woman who was training for the

ministry, was a lesbian and collected feminine images of God. I
decided to go and speak with her. Sonia was a big woman in size,
personality and energy. She invited me to her home. In her lounge
room were sculptures of feminine faces that were serene, holy,
beautiful, and one of a woman's body, voluptuous and sensual. These
images were infused with the feminine spirit of God and I felt this spirit
started to melt my resistances and entwine herself around my heart.

Sonia told me of the work she did helping those who were caught

up in the covens and cults that abounded in inner-city Sydney. She

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 161

talked about the dark energies that were at work in the world and the
black magic that was practised with its powerfully dark consequences. I
thought her language a little extreme and florid, but I

got what she was

doing.

One day, a couple of months after being knocked back from university,
I was having supervision with Susan when I started to sob. Over and
over I sobbed “Why did you leave me? Why did you go?” I had no idea
where this sadness came from or what had triggered it. It came from a
deep place and had been brooding there for a long time. This was not
appropriate to deal with in supervision. I made an appointment to see
Susan for a therapy session.

Again the tears came and we followed them back through time. I

was on the mattress and I had backed myself into a corner and
surrounded myself with cushions, clutching onto them for dear life,
trembling and sobbing in terror. I kept shaking my bowed head and
saying “No”.

With exquisite tenderness and compassion Susan said “Tell me

what's happening. What is it you don't want to see?” I kept sobbing and
shaking my head, but eventually, over an eternity, sobbed out my
story. I was in a dungeon ... underneath a castle ... in England … it was
cold and damp … there were manacles and stocks ... there was an altar
... on it was something/someone living ... there were three men in
black robes ... priests ... each took their turn with the being on the
altar... then one cut its throat … the blood ran into a groove carved into
the altar for that purpose ... the blood was collected in the chalice –
held high above the priests' head as powerful, booming words were
spoken ... the dead body was hacked … the chalice and flesh were
handed to the third man who passed them around the assembled
people … we were expected to drink and eat “in remembrance” … the
man who had collected the blood was looking straight at me ... I feared
for my life.

Throughout my telling Susan had known when to encourage and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 162

when to wait and give me time. Now as I looked into the face of that
priest I was vehemently shaking my head saying “no! No! NO!!” With
gentle strength Susan inexorably took me to the point where I looked
at that face and in an almost inaudible whisper said “It's my father.”

When I was able to look up there were tears pouring down Susan's

face.

How desperately I wanted that memory not to be true. How gently

Susan told me that only a mad woman would make up something like
that and I wasn't mad. What I remembered was true. It had happened
and she believed me.

I left that session feeling the need to be hospitalised. I felt

battered and bruised. My body ached and I felt there should be visible
signs of my pain; blood and bruises. I was in shock and kept saying to
myself , “It can't be true. It just CAN NOT be true. What was all that
robes and dungeons stuff? What on earth am I remembering?” Oh,
how I longed for these memories not to be true.

Goodness only knows how I managed to drive the hour home

from that session. My body felt it had been slammed up against an
enormous stainless steel freezer over and over again. It hurt to
breathe. Even my hair follicles ached. An avalanche of grief towered
over me. Inside was a five year old child rocking backwards and
forwards, sobbing, shaking her head and saying “NO, NO, NO, not my
Dad, my Dad is a good Dad. My Dad loves me. Not my Dad. It's NOT
true.”

Except it was.
I arrived home, dragged myself up the stairs and collapsed into a

chair. Greg asked how my session had been. I was incoherent,
shattered and exhausted. I managed to stammer it out through a fog
of pain, grief and my own disbelief. Greg looked pale but didn't doubt
me for a minute. Susan rang. That penetrated the fog swirling around
me for in all the years I had seen Susan as a therapist she had never
rung to see how I was. It was not something she did. Many years later

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 163

she told me how disturbed and distressed she had been by that initial
session.

The rain is pelting on the windows. Huge, noisy drops. The storm
continues and it has been frightening to watch the waves crash into,
and then leap high above, the containment of the breakwall. There is a
break in the weather, I walk along the foreshore beside an
exceptionally high tide. The wind is blowing the ocean into shore. The
waves pound against the breakwall, almost at its top where it meets
concrete opposition. Surging back the water smashes into the next
great swell heading inwards. They meet with an enormous crash,
forcing each other upwards, high into the air. Most of the water
collapses back down into the huge expanse of ocean but some is
gathered up, and dashed onto the pathway and the grass beyond the
breakwall. The noise is deafening. The great roar of potential and
power scares me. It would only take a freak wave in these extreme
conditions and I could be swept off the pathway and into the clutches
of the tempestuous sea.
That is how memories were for me. Crashing into one another as they
tumbled out. I was scared I would be swept away by them.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 164

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

C

louds mass on the horizon in their darkening shades of grey

through black, blown there by gale force winds they are a disordered,
jumbled pile. No joyous sunset tonight. The only colour a steely
battleship grey. Cold, hard, frozen. No sign of warmth; or hope.

The adjustment required in my life to accommodate remembering

this kind of abuse was enormous. To start with I had no name for this
abuse nor knowledge of it. I knew nobody who had been abused in this
way and I wanted my memories to go away. They wouldn't. The
memories tumbled out. I saw them as extreme, bizarre and evil.
Working with those memories demanded massive amounts of time,
energy, support and money. Right from the beginning Greg was
prepared to offer me as much of those as was necessary. I felt him
stand by my side as if to say “we will get through this together.” It was
to become the major focus of our lives for the next five years.
Everything else paled into insignificance.

Shortly after my first memory John, my spiritual director, left to

spend five years overseas. This left me without a director at a time I
needed someone to help me maintain balance. Someone to help with
all the questions that whizzed around in my mind. How could such
things possibly exist in God’s world? How could God allow little
children to suffer? Why didn’t God answer my prayers? Why had this
happened to me?

I needed to talk to a Christian. Susan offered enormous support

and I had great respect for her spirituality but her background was
Sufism. I needed someone who spoke a similar spiritual language to
my own and who would pray with me and stop me being swamped by

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 165

my confusion and questions about God. I rang Sonia. She understood
and said she was willing to provide support.

I decided to face these memories full on and to deal with them

quickly, cleanly and get them over and done with. To this end I
organised an eight-day retreat where Sonia came and gave direction
every day and I went to Susan for therapy every second day,
determined to deal with it all in that time. I spent much of the retreat
feeling very young and praying I would die. I cried buckets and spent a
vast amount of time sitting under a tree pouring my heart out to a
sympathetic cow in the next paddock. I have no idea if she was the
same cow who came up to the fence each time, but those beautiful,
deep, brown eyes were one of the threads I hung onto as I tried to find
a way out of my labyrinth of memories and emotions.

More memories came.

One therapy session there was ringing in my ears and I was having
trouble hearing. My body was vibrating with terror. Again I was five
years old. In England, in the same dungeon. Again there were men in
robes, and a man showing me a gun. “Do you know what a gun is? Do
you know what a gun can do?” he asked. He fired the gun close to my
head. Into the stone wall and then again. I got the idea of what a gun
was and the damage it could cause.

Next, I was tied up on the altar and was raped by one of the men

in robes as my father watched. Once he had finished my father went
over to the man with the gun and spoke to him. The man came over
and stood by the altar where I lay, my whole body suffused with the
violence of the rape that had just taken place. He inserted the gun into
my vagina and asked me if he should pull the trigger. I was incoherent
with terror. I soiled myself. The trigger was pulled. There was no bullet.
He removed the gun from my vagina and walked over to my father
who gave him money. My father then cleaned me up and carried me
home all the time saying “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You
know that I love you.” Mind fuck!!

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 166

How could I make room in my life for a memory like this? This was

the father I loved, who said he loved me. Yes, I had remembered
sexual assault, but had kept hold of my belief in a father who loved me
and treated me better than my mother did. What was this? Had he
risked my death? Had he truly paid to witness my rape and to have a
man insert a gun into his five-year-old daughter's vagina? I felt
completely overwhelmed at the thought of expressing the anger that
went with this memory. Surely it would consume me. It would
consume the world. Much of the anger turned inwards. I wanted to
die. Some of the anger slipped out sideways, in small doses.

Throughout the retreat I was overwhelmed with my fear and

impotence. With the awfulness of it all. With questions about God. How
did I make sense of God? How on earth was I meant to believe God
loved me when God allowed this to happen? What kind of fucking
bastard was God anyway? I was terrified of what was to come. I had
worked on my sexual assault for years and I knew what a profound
effect it had had on my life. That abuse was chicken shit compared to
what I was facing now. How was I going to survive? Where would I find
the strength? Who would support me? I didn't trust God because God
had let the abuse happen. Rage and terror battled within me. I missed
John. I wanted someone to rescue me and to take the pain and
memories away. To make it all better. “Please, don't make me have to
remember and deal with this. Will someone please come and pick me
up and hold me and keep me safe.” I felt small and vulnerable.

No one came.

Obviously I wasn't going to be all better in the eight days of the retreat:
not in eight days, or weeks, or months. I was bitterly disappointed and
I was angry, but I swallowed it as best I could. I was scared of my anger
at God. John had always encouraged me to be honest with God no
matter what was going on in my life. But this felt huge. Was I safe to be
this angry? Would God punish me? Abandon me? I was hanging onto
him because I had no idea how to survive.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 167

My anger seeped out towards Susan. I blamed her for the fact I

hadn't managed to deal with it all within the eight days of the retreat.
Blamed her for not rescuing me. She became the mother I hated for
not protecting me. For the first time I projected my anger and fear
onto Susan. She had always been my good mother, the mother of love
and nurture and new and positive messages. Now I was furious at her
because I saw her as the mother who had not protected me. So began
my demand that she protect me and save me – back then.

The retreat finished and I felt unsettled, incomplete, squirmy. I no
longer seemed to fit my body or my life. I had no idea how to proceed.
Sonia was willing to have another session with me and she drove me to
the lookout over Tamarama beach. We walked around for a while
watching the wildness of the ocean and the waves breaking against the
rocks. On returning to her car she suggested she take me through a
guided meditation. I couldn't see how this would ease my distress but
after her generosity in leading my retreat I felt it would be churlish of
me to say no. So, reluctantly I closed my eyes, followed her
instructions to still both my breathing and my mind, and found myself
on a path leading up a mountain.

Many years previously, during a meditation with John, I had

climbed this same mountain searching for guidance and wisdom. High
up was a ledge where there was a crystal clear pool. Behind the pool
was the entrance to a cave. Standing on the ledge looking out at the
world below stood a caped woman holding a lantern above her head.
She was archetypal, similar to the hermit figure in the tarot deck, only
female. She was holy wisdom. I had returned to this image often when
needing guidance. When I entered the cave my wisdom figure was
within. She had deep, brown eyes brimming with compassion and
there were crinkles around the edges, the memories of laughter. She
was taller than me, solid, in a safe, dependable kind of way. She
embraced me. A safe embrace that accepted me as I was.

The cave itself was in muted tones of pink and purple, warm,

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 168

womb-like and secure. It wrapped itself around me, surrounding me
with healing. The cave felt safe, impenetrable, inviolate.

Sonia suggested asking Holy Wisdom why she had allowed the

abuse to happen. Sobbing, I asked my question. Tears poured down
her face as she told me she did not have the power to stop it, she was
not an all-powerful God. She told me her heart broke when such things
happened in the world and all she could offer was to walk with me and
support me on my journey of healing.

The cave became my Healing Room, my safe place. The woman my

sanctuary and refuge; she was Woman-God. They became central to
my healing. She was the embodiment of nurture and compassion. This
is where I took all the bruised, battered and shattered parts of my life.
Over the years that small cave housed magical baths where the water
kept running till it ran clean. Comfortable chairs and beds furnished
the cave as well as an abundance of toys and books. The cave was able
to adapt itself to whatever was needed at the time. Woman-God never
seemed to worry if she was hanging out with a terrified two-year old, a
blood-and shit-covered eight-year old or an articulate, angry, Bolshie
teenager or any combination of the above. She always dealt with them
with gentle wisdom and compassion.

This was the God who suffers with us in the midst of our sorrow.
This was the gift of God who was there every step along the way.

I sit quietly, steady my breathing and visualise the darkness I feel

inside me. I imagine myself breathing in white light and breathing out
the darkness of these memories. Breathe in light, breathe out dark.
Breathe in light, breathe out dark. As I am doing this a blue light
descends and tumbles over my body, cascading through me, getting
into my blood-stream and oxygenating my blood, purifying it,
removing the residue poison. It's light. Effervescent. I become aware
that I am breathing out light, I am breathing light in and out. I feel
clean.

It's still raining outside. A gentle, grieving rain matching the grief I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 169

continue to feel for the child I was, trapped in abuse, and the grown-
up me at the beginning of my journey. I had no idea what was in store,
or how hard it would be. How typical of me to believe I could deal with
it all in eight days. Always I want it NOW.

Despite the clouds, wind and rain there is a glimmer on the

horizon that reveals itself as the moon rising, faithfully present. She
has to struggle for visibility tonight. Vying with the clouds for position.
Their blackness threatening to overpower her. But she manages to
shine through in glimpses, letting me know the darkness is not
complete. She reminds me of my search for God within my memories
of abuse.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 170

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

C

urled up in bed, two dogs snuggled close for love and warmth, I

start to become aware of the sounds and smells around me. Rain.
Heavy rain. Beating on my roof and windows, and then the different
sound of water droplets rolling off plants and trees, splashing onto the
leaves below as they journey downwards to the earth, bringing life and
nourishment. There is a wonderful clean smell of cold sea air and of
nature washed clean. It's morning.

In the room where I write I look at my seascape with all its vitality

and out my window with all its bleak greyness and the two merge
together, calling me back into memories and writing. Reminding me
that both vitality and greyness are the truth of those years.

With the Healing Room and Woman-God in place the work of
remembering my abuse started in earnest. As a child I lived in two
separate worlds; the world of ritual abuse and the everyday world of a
normal family doing normal family things. The wall between the two
was impenetrable. Now, as an adult, I spent five years living in two
worlds, the world of work, marriage, home and study and the world of
therapy, memories and the Healing Room. This time the wall was
permeable. Healing was a full-time occupation. I would spend all my
spare time processing my memories through writing and art.

Greg was magnificently supportive. Often by the time I finished

work I'd run out of energy to function as an adult. Greg would arrive
home to be greeted by a small and needy child. I always took
responsibility for my moods. No matter what emotions I was dealing
with I would make sure Greg knew what they were and tell him it was
my stuff, not his. He was always willing to hear how therapy had been

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 171

and to be part of the process in whatever way he could. Often, I would
need to walk by water. There was a river twenty minutes away in
tranquil bush, but often I needed the ocean with its pounding waves.
This was an hour and a quarter's drive. Greg would drive me there and
listen to me as I tried to sort out the latest lot of memories. He would
walk with me as I splashed along the water's edge, hoping the wind
and roar of the ocean would blow away some of the negativity I often
felt engulfing me.

There were times I didn't have what it took to organise dinner. He

never complained. Sometimes he would cook and often we ate out.
One of the joys of Sydney was eating out cheaply. I was conscious of
how lucky I was to have Greg's support. I was never totally alone. The
stress and strain of this time both brought us closer together and put a
lot of pressure on our relationship.

Working with memories was full on. My memories did not surface in
uncontrollable flashbacks. My body or mind would let me know what
was coming and I could always contain the memory enough for it to
emerge in a therapy session. However, once the memory appeared it
became all-consuming. In therapy I would follow either a flash of
memory or body sensations and travel back to a scene of abuse.

Once in the memory it was total. I was only vaguely aware of

Susan's presence as I curled in on myself and my pain. I struggled to
believe Susan cared for me, convinced she saw me as disgusting as a
result of the abuse. I regret not being able to make more eye contact
with her because when I did her eyes were full of love, compassion and
concern, and at times tears.

I tied myself up in all sorts of knots around Susan. I wanted her to

hold me but didn't want her to. I wanted her to guess what I needed,
she refused to guess, I had to ask. I wanted to be consumed by her or
to crawl inside her and be safe. This, of course, was impossible. Often
she would hold me as I sobbed. Sometimes the touching of little
fingers together was almost too much to bear. What she consistently

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 172

offered was her compassionate belief in what had happened to me.
Her willingness to accompany me into many different hells, and her
gentle assurance that I was not bad, but bad things had happened to
me.

I felt really alone in those early days of memories. While both

Susan and Greg were magnificent it was incredibly difficult for me to
come to terms with these new memories of abuse. I constantly moved
between my belief in my Dad who loved me and my memories of my
father who had perpetrated such barbarous cruelty. Was I the only
person in the world such things had happened to?

Working as a sexual assault counsellor I started to hear snippets

about ritual abuse. I attended a workshop on the topic. An occasional
article appeared in journals and it was referred to as satanic ritual
abuse. Ritual abuse was coming into public consciousness as sexual
assault had before it. One day I asked Susan if she thought what we
were dealing with was satanic abuse. Her response: “Well, it most
certainly isn't Godly!” She had a point.

I rang some book shops to see if they had any books on the

subject. They had never heard of ritual abuse. I tried a variety of
approaches from saying I was a therapist looking for information, to
the standard “I have a friend who...” line. In one of my efforts to
describe what it was I was looking for I gave the wrong impression and
the sales person became most indignant, assuring me they most
certainly did NOT stock books detailing how to perform such acts. Oh
dear! This really was the very beginning of ritual abuse becoming
known. It was at least another year before books on the subject started
to appear.

A magazine arrived at work with the number of a ritual abuse

information line. I took a few weeks to get up enough courage to ring.
A friendly and helpful woman named Lynda answered the phone and
offered to come and talk to me. We arranged a time. Once she arrived
she suggested that before I tell her what had happened to me and ask
my questions she tell me a little of her story. She proceeded to do so. I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 173

couldn't believe it. She was telling my story. The things that had
happened to me had happened to her. How could this be? Of course
the setting and people were different but she was talking of men robed
in black, performing ritualised acts of “worship”, abuse and murder in
the presence of others. She then told me people were remembering
ritual abuse across Australia, Britain, the US and Europe.

Remembering ritual abuse is one thing, discovering it has

happened to untold numbers of people across the world is quite
another. This abuse was not just my father and some of his cronies.
This was organised and happened in many different countries. It
happened inside churches, within educational institutions, through
paedophile rings, in the bush, in towns, capital cities and in small rural
communities. It was pervasive. I was shocked but no longer so
isolated.

During our first meeting Lynda made numerous assumptions

about me and what I had been through, most of which were correct. I
found it unnerving to have a complete stranger know so much.

One of the first questions Lynda asked me was: “Are you a

multiple?” “A multiple what?” I had no idea what she was talking about.
Multiple personality! According to her, anyone who was a survivor of
ritual abuse by definition was also someone who had multiple
personalities. I was horrified. No, I did not have multiple personalities.
Yes, there were a whole heap of internal voices but that was perfectly
normal. Everyone had those. These could be explained rationally
within a TA framework as different ego states or different aspects of
the Child ego state. I had a large collection of teddy bears who had
different names and personalities. Again, this was normal behaviour.
The bears were a source of comfort and a way to nurture myself. If I
wanted to be technical they were transitional objects.

Lynda told me there was a support group for ritual abuse survivors

that met on a Saturday afternoon and I would be most welcome to
come along. The thought was terrifying, as was the experience itself.
Somehow to discover there were enough survivors to need a support

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 174

group started to make this all very real indeed. Summoning all my
courage I went along.

That first group was overwhelming. Six of us were present and

some of the women were having a far harder time of it than me. There
was a level of dissociation, despair and of being overwhelmed by life
that was palpable and terrifying. Obviously, for some of these women
just being alive was an enormous effort for there was little
functionality and they were only just present in the room. One
woman's wrists and forearms were covered with thick, angry scars that
spoke of repeated serious suicide attempts.

The group was my introduction to multiple personalities. I could

see massive changes of energy move across the face and body of these
women. I was used to seeing people move in and out of different ego
states and the accompanying energetic changes. This was much more
extreme. In my work as a therapist I assumed that my clients always
knew what was going on. No matter what ego state they were in there
was part of them that would be observing the work they were doing.
This was not the impression these women gave. One group member
was curled up in the foetal position in a bean bag and her changes of
energies were constant. When she first spoke she sounded like a
terrified three-year old, moments later her manner and voice were that
of an angry teenager, then she appeared to be pre-verbal. These
changes felt disconnected from the previous

energy. There did not

seem to be any functioning adult part to take care of, or responsibility
for, her.

Someone explained to me later that for some people the

experience of multiple personalities was of discrete personalities with
varying levels of mutual awareness. For some survivors it was possible
for different parts to be in control for considerable periods of time and
for the main personality to come back into the body with no idea of
what had been happening, where they had been or how they got there.

Being caught up in a cult was a major issue for people. I had no

idea of the when, why or how of my escape from the cult but knew I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 175

had. I was holding down a good job and studying for my Transactional
Analysis certification and was married to Greg who guaranteed I was
not losing time. I did not live in fear of being tricked into going to cult
events or of finding myself in strange places with no memory of
travelling there. Nor were there huge, inexplicable gaps in my life.
Comparatively, I was in very good shape indeed. I went home from
that first meeting exhausted, subdued and absolutely certain I did not
have multiple personalities.

I attended the group for quite a while, becoming friends with

some of the other women. The group was extremely heavy-going. What
we needed was a qualified therapist to facilitate but we didn't have
one. While I could not completely leave my therapy skills at the door I
would not take on that role. We muddled along as best we could. I
learnt a great deal in that group but invariably left drained and
depleted.

Certain events were especially triggering for people. Easter and

Christmas were difficult for those whose cult had heavy Christian
influences while other people found full moon, moon dark and solstice
trying. Halloween and Beltane were the

high holy days of the cult I

grew up in, even though it had Christian overtones as well.

Much ritual abuse was perpetrated either within the church with

the priest or minister involved or by members of a congregation with
their church membership being a cover. It seemed to me the more
hierarchical and liturgical a church was, the more likely there was ritual
abuse occurring somewhere within. This was satanic ritual abuse, by
which I mean they engaged in the worship of Satan. The traditional
sacraments of the church such as Baptism and Eucharist were inverted
and perverted, for example, an animal or human would be sacrificed
and then the dismembered body would be

consecrated and

distributed in a manner similar to the mass.

The issue of human sacrifice was always fraught. Survivors didn't

want to believe it, therapists doubted it, police disbelieved it and
organisations such as the False Memory Foundation talked of

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therapists implanting memories into susceptible, vulnerable clients.
There was also the issue of proof and questions of where the bodies
came from and where they were disposed of.

I have memories of people being murdered in front of me and

similar stories from other survivors. These murders have similarities to
atrocities committed by sections of the armed forces or by serial
killers. When these events are reported in the news much of the
population gasps in horror and asks how humans can commit such
heinous acts. I just accepts that behaviour as part of life: for me there
is nothing shocking in it at all.

The support group was organised by a group called RASS (Ritual

Abuse Survivors and Supporters) who produced a magazine called
Beyond Survival. This was a mixture of poetry, people telling their
stories, people talking about how they were surviving, educational
articles, research and strategies for coping. This magazine became the
Bible for many survivors. It validated our reality but could also be
disturbing as it spoke about things that would cause flashbacks or
body memories. Reading it was difficult and triggering yet at the same
time comforting. Group members contributed to it on a regular basis.

Being in a group with people recounting similar memories, or

reading about them in a magazine, raised the problem of suggestibility.
Did this happen to me or was I making it up because someone else had
talked about it? I am sure there was a level of influence that took place.
It was possible listening to someone else's story loosened a memory.
Maybe some of the details of my abuse got confused with someone
else's story. But would someone pretend to be a ritual abuse survivor
through hearing these horrific stories? I doubted it. My friends'
reactions, when they could listen at all, was overwhelming relief this
had never happened to them.

Many of the women I knew who were healing from abuse

constantly struggled with the questions “Did this really happen? Am I
making it up?” In so many ways it would be preferable to be making it
up. For whatever reasons this was never a great issue for me. Whether

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 177

it was Susan and Greg's implicit belief in me or the powerful way I felt
memories in my body or the fact that it rang true and made sense of
my earlier life I don't know. But I'm grateful it was one battle I didn't
have to engage in.

The friendships that came out of this group were intense. We

struggled to keep our heads above water and make sense of what we
remembered. A few of us lived near each other and we spent a lot of
time together. We did our best to be available and to encourage each
other through the heights and depths of the journey. Again, this took
enormous energy. Here were women who understood exactly what I
was talking about because they had been through it. There is often a
language and empathy that comes from shared experience and ritual
abuse was no different.

These friendships took some of the pressure off Greg. Being the

supporter of a ritual abuse survivor was hard work. I would encourage
him to get the support he needed but he always declined, saying he
was fine.

There are always ups and downs to any kind of support group but

what was fantastic was hearing other people's stories and witnessing
the incredible strength and courage some of these women displayed in
confronting their abuse and dealing with memories. Many of us viewed
our healing as a spiritual journey and sought strength and courage
from our different understandings of God. We respected each other's
spirituality and acknowledged that ritual abuse included spiritual
abuse. While this had dire consequences, there was also a sense that it
scraped out a deep hollow within us that only the sacred could fill. I
always found listening to people's journey was like walking on holy
ground.

Survivors are the only people who want to talk about ritual abuse

ad infinitum. Reluctantly, I recognised my friends didn't want to hear
about it. They could only ever manage tiny glimpses into my world. It
was dark, awful and terrifying and they couldn't hear it. They would
not, could not enter my darkness. I resented what I perceived as their

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 178

uncomplicated lives. It was a lonely journey. Greg consistently gave all
he could but I was aware of the huge strain this put on him and did my
best to live at least part of my life in his world, although my thoughts
were never far away from memories and healing.

The longer I attended the group the more I was spooked by

people who were still cult-active. As I learned about the lengths cults
went to, fear started to invade my world. Week after week I watched
women who were trying desperately hard to get out but were still
trapped within the power of programming and dissociation. There
were personalities who would take over and take them to cult events,
or cult members would come to their homes and abduct them, or seize
them as they walked along the street. Trying to escape from the cult
led to violent assertions of power and control from those in power
within the cult. I was scared of this. Scared they would find out who I
was and then abduct me and take me into their cult. Or they would
reprogramme me to become obedient to their high priests. Or they
would bash, rape or mutilate me. Paranoia nibbled at the edges of my
mind.

I became clear on two things. First, as a psychotherapist I was not

willing to work with ritual abuse survivors. I was still in the middle of
my own work and knew I did not have the distance or the skills to help.
There were therapists who were threatened and intimidated because
of their work with ritual abuse survivors. A therapist friend of mine had
her car brakes tampered with and on a couple of occasions found dead
animals on her doorstep.

Second, in order to feel safe, I could not have contact with anyone

who was still involved in a cult in any way. This was an immensely
unpopular decision. I was seen as betraying the other members of the
group. The general understanding was that as ritual abuse survivors
we had a responsibility to do anything and everything we could to help
other survivors. I was not willing to accept those rules. It was a hard
decision to make but was necessary for my own wellbeing. I stopped
going to the support group but continued my friendships with some of

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 179

the women.

Then came the day one of the women who had been of enormous

help, support and encouragement to me, revealed she believed she
was being abducted and taken to cult events. She had

come to a

couple of times quite a distance from home in the small hours of the
morning with the smell of rape on her body. I was torn in two.

This woman was a brave, articulate, compassionate, sensitive

woman. If she was still being accessed by the cult she deserved all the
support in the world. She had given so much of herself to me and she
deserved my support. In what was one of the hardest decisions of my
life I told her I would not have anything to do with her until she was
clear she was not involved with the cult in any way. She told me to fuck
off and go to hell. She didn't want anything to do with me ever again. I
couldn't blame her. I was heartbroken and guilt-ridden.

The view from my window includes the pathway along the foreshore.
The rain has stopped and I can see the wind buffeting the waves and
trees. People out walking are leaning forward bracing themselves
against the wind. Tendrils of guilt and regret are wrapping themselves
around my heart, but there is also pride in my ability to stand my
ground and honour my decisions. I jump up and head out into the
wind, hoping it will blow through these old cobwebs, blow through my
heart and mind freeing me of the residue of a decision long since
made.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 180

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I

fear the vast expanse of the sea. There are times I have been on a

boat in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by nothing but water as
far as the eye could see, terrified as waves crashed over the deck. An
infinitesimal dot clinging onto the rails of a structure incapable of
protecting me should the depths call forth their immense, surging
power and go wild. Remembering ritual abuse sometimes felt like I
was adrift in a wild sea.

There was a support group in my old home town. I wrote to the person
running it mentioning my father's name and the names of a couple of
people I remembered from childhood. Had she come across these
names before? In hindsight it was a naïve and dangerous thing to do.
Fortunately for me, the woman who received my letter was not cult-
active and rang to suggest we meet. I travelled to her place nervous
about being back on home turf. On arrival I was greeted by Annette
who was slim, athletic, warm and welcoming. She had a light within her
that was deeply attractive and a depth of spirituality that had survived
the cult and shone brightly. There was a lightness about Annette I had
not found in other survivors and was certain did not exist within me.
She told me she was a feminist and a Baha'i.

Annette had been part of the Al-Anon twelve-step program for a

number of years and in therapy since she had remembered her abuse
two years previously. She was further along the healing path than me
and had a gentle wisdom and a way of looking at abuse issues that
challenged me to claim my power and stop believing I was a victim. I
greatly admired Annette for her spirituality and her perspective. We
decided to meet together often.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 181

So developed a friendship that became an essential part of my

healing and one of the great joys of my life. Annette had an infectious
sense of humour and we would often laugh at ourselves and the
intensity of the healing process. No matter how difficult a time Annette
might be going through I would never walk away from our time
together feeling exhausted. Our conversations were nourishing and
life-giving. It was always a privilege to be part of her journey and my
own load was lightened by our time together.

When I was five my family lived in England for a year. During that time
we made a trip to Boston, USA for Halloween. I looked forward to trick
or treat and lots of lollies and to a Halloween party with other children
and fancy dress.

Halloween connected with a family story about how sick I had

been while we were in Boston. I had come down with pneumonia and
had a high temperature and they feared for my life. The doctor visited
regularly and prescribed Coke and ice-cream.

In a therapy session the memory emerged of being at the

Halloween party where my parents socialised with the adults and I
played with the children. Then my father came and collected me to
take me downstairs into the basement where some of the guests from
upstairs were now gathering, both adults and children. I was told that
what was to happen was extremely important to my father, it was a
great honour for us both to be here, and to behave myself. Once
downstairs there were priests, an altar, and the attendant
paraphernalia that meant very bad things were about to happen.

The high priest welcomed my father as a brother from Australia

and called him forward, offering him the honour of serving at the altar.
My father officiated at a black mass that included the sacrifice of a
goat. Then the high priest asked him what gifts he brought from
Australia. He looked straight at me and said “I bring my daughter” and
beckoned to me. I started to scream and tried to run. He grabbed me. I
screamed, kicked and tried to bite. “Shut up you little bitch,” he hissed

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 182

in my ear “you're embarrassing me.” I fought for dear life believing I
would be offered to the priests so they could slit my throat the way
they had the previous occupant of the altar.

I could feel my father's mounting fury. I didn't care. There was

nothing he could do that would be worse than what would happen in
this room. He swallowed his rage and said to one of the priests I
needed to cool down a little and asked if there was a door to outside
that was accessible. He was shown the door. He took me outside and
shook me within an inch of my life then threw me to the ground, telling
me to cool down. I landed in deep snow. My father went back inside. I
lay in the snow shaking with fear and sobbing. It was a long time
before my father collected me and by then I was half dead with cold.
As he picked me up to carry me to join my mother he started his usual
mantra “You don't remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love
you.” Over and over again. After this I didn't fight.

As these two stories connected another memory opened up. I was

lying in my bed extremely ill and could hear my parents' muffled voices
in the next room. Then I heard my mother's voice: “I don't know what
it is you are doing, but it has got to stop. She almost died. I am not
going to stand by and …” Her words were cut off by the sickening
sound of a fist connecting to flesh – hard; and then the sound of her
crumpling to the floor.

Nothing else was said.
I recovered and the family story developed about how sick I'd

been while we were in Boston and how much I liked American doctors.

I was five years old and I had been abused on three continents.

Another memory recorded. I'm exhausted. It still takes so much to
extract the memory, to go back into those places and bring the
fragments out. Then I have to look at each one and figure out how they
fit together and compare them to the shards that have remained in my
conscious memory since first reclaiming them. There are gaps,
questions and I don't want to stir these memories. I don't want them

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 183

to fully waken, stretch and roar, and do their best to devour me once
again.

As I spoke to other survivors I learned that cults were often made up of
professional, intelligent people such as academics, doctors, surgeons,
solicitors, QCs and police commissioners. They were patriarchal and
hierarchical in its structure. With the cult I grew up in there was a
theology that accompanied the abuse and members were
indoctrinated to believe Satan was more powerful than God and that
allegiance to God would result in death. Love, trust and hope were
mortal sins. Being good was bad, you have to be bad in order to be
good so you should be bad because that was good.

That stuff still scrambles my brain. It wasn't just that good was bad

and bad was good. Somehow the cult made it more complicated than
that. It was like someone pulled out different strands of my brain and
tied a knot. Then they tied a knot on top the first knot. Then another
knot, and another, and another. Once there was a jumble of knots
different threads were picked up, stretched to the point of breaking,
and then let go so they twanged back and forced my brain to rebound
inside my head.

Allegiance to, and worship of, Satan and his manifestations was

compulsory. The cult was satanic and engaged in distortions of
Christian sacraments. Many rituals were in the form of a black mass:
animals were sacrificed, as were humans.

I remembered something similar to a baptism, a dedication to

Satan when I was six months old. Then at age five I had to swear
allegiance to Satan. These sacraments were reinforced with
brainwashing and torture and no-win choices to prove my inherent
evilness. Electric shock and other torture methods were used to take
me to the point of losing consciousness. It was sophisticated and
efficient and combined pain and fear. As these memories emerged it
was increasingly difficult to hold onto a powerful and positive image of
God.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 184

My parents sent me to Sunday School. One therapy session I

remembered a scene when at age four I came bouncing into the house
full of joy and excitement calling out “Mummy, mummy guess what,
guess what. Jesus loves me!!!! The Sunday School teacher said so.”

My mother looked down at me and said “Don't be so utterly

ridiculous, no one could love anybody as disgusting as you.” My joy
evaporated.

There were times I despaired of ever being able to undo the

damage of that line. It ricocheted through time undermining my belief
in a loving Jesus and preventing me believing in my own worth.

At age six or seven I was dragged outside and thrown into a deep pit. It
was full of snakes, spiders, rats and cockroaches. I spent hours
huddled in the corner of that dank, oozing pit, terrified of each and
every thing that was in there, convinced they were all poisonous. At
first I went almost hysterical as snakes slithered over me or rats
scurried by. Then I tried to disappear into a ball of nothingness as
spiders stalked up to me and started to clamber over my flesh. I had
nothing to protect myself with, no stick, no rocks. Screaming was futile,
but the terror boiled inside me, a frenetic energy that desperately
wanted to escape as every inch of my skin shrank in petrified horror. I
wanted to claw the skin off my body where these hideous creatures
had been. Would they bite me? Would I die? Dear God, let it be now!!

After an eternity my father came to collect me. He brought a

ladder, climbed down, picked me up and carried me out. Then he held
me in his arms, rocking me, saying “you poor girl, my poor, poor
darling girl, I'm so sorry that happened to you, it must have been
awful.” Was it really him who had thrown me in? It couldn't possibly
be. And then of course his mantra: “You don't remember. It didn't
happen. You know that I love you.” Over and over again.

It was him, it really was my father who did that and who then

came and offered sympathy. Who then loved me, cleaned me up and
cared for me. Until next time.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 185

Terrifying as it was to be in the middle of the surging sea in a boat
battered by waves, the miracle is I survived. The boat stayed upright
and kept ploughing on to its destination. It was a long, dark night.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 186

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I

look at my seascape and ponder the limits of nature and creativity.

How, with so much colour and energy, did the artist manage to confine
herself to the canvas? I can imagine her joyous celebration of the
expanse available to her. Did she slop paint all over the floor? Did she
sometimes long for a bigger canvas? A whole wall? Did she try and
limit the amount of paint she used or, within the boundaries of the
canvas, abandon herself to the joy and abundance of creativity and
keep applying layer after layer until she got the effect she desired?

I continued to see Sonia on an irregular basis and at times would write
to her. She was the only person in my life who understood ritual abuse
and Christianity. I needed her input. My need was such that I didn't
manage to read the signals that I was asking too much. A few times she
told me that she was busy and wouldn't be able to see me for a couple
of weeks. Once two weeks were up I rang again, she was still too busy.
At another time of my life I would have been able to interpret this as
the brush off, but not then. After a few such instances Sonia agreed to
meet me. We met at a restaurant for lunch and during the meal she
gave me a long lecture on how demanding, thoughtless and totally
unable to take a hint I was. She accused me of being self-absorbed and
incapable of taking anyone else's needs into account. I was devastated
and deeply ashamed and could only just manage to tell Greg about it
when I got home. I took nine months to tell Susan, terrified she would
agree with Sonia. Instead she was angry and indignant on my behalf.
Susan was clear it was not my job to look after Sonia and that she,
Sonia, needed to have much clearer boundaries and to maintain them,
not blame me for her lack of them.

Boundaries were something Susan had in abundance. When she

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 187

said there would be consequences for unacceptable behaviour, there
were. Oh, how I loved her boundaries and how I tested them. Hurling
myself full force against the wall of her limits to see if it held. It did. It
did not matter how much I ranted, screamed, raged or sobbed they
held firm. This was safety. This was containment. No longer was I
confined to the middle of my life. Now there was space. Nor did I have
to keep going as far out as I could just to try and find the edges
because Susan told me where they were. If I did overstep the mark
consequences were enforced, but they were never violent and she
didn't disappear.

One of Susan's foundational rules was no suicide and no self-

harm. She would not work with me unless I had a commitment to
staying alive. She demanded a contract from me that I not kill or harm
myself, accidentally or on purpose. The word

demand may sound

harsh but it didn't feel harsh, it felt rock-solid and non-negotiable. It
gave me the assurance that there was someone in my world who
actually cared whether I lived or died.

No-suicide contracts originated in TA. For me a no-suicide contract

provided containment and safety.

One day while preparing pumpkin for dinner I cut my thumb.

When Susan saw the band-aid she asked what had happened. I had
held the pumpkin in my hand and moved the knife towards me. She
told me that was a dangerous way to peel pumpkin, to stop peeling it
that way, and if I had another injury she would consider me in breach
of contract. Bloody hell!!

Not long after this I was bitten by a mosquito and was over-

enthusiastic in scratching the bite producing a scabby sore the size of a
five-cent piece. For the couple of days leading up to my next
appointment I was totally obsessed with this injury. Was it bad enough
for her to see it as self-harm? Should I ring her and tell her what had
happened? I dreaded the thought of her not working with me, of being
angry with me. I didn't want to go home and tell Greg I had driven all
the way to therapy, paid her fee, but not had a session.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 188

Understandably he would view that as a waste of money and be
annoyed.

The day of the session arrived. I walked in, sat down and instantly

Susan asked “What happened to your arm?”

“It's just a mosquito bite,” I told her.
“Are you allergic to mosquitoes?” she asked me.
“No” I said, “I've just scratched it, that's all.”
“That is not just a scratch.” she stated. “Why are you here? You are

obviously in breach of your contract.”

“But I wasn't sure,” I protested. “It's borderline, I thought maybe

you wouldn't notice.”

She didn't miss a beat. “If you didn't want me to see you could

have worn long sleeves. You are in breach of contract.”

“But that's not fair,” I wailed. “I need to talk to you about it.”
“It is perfectly fair,” said Susan. “We have an agreement. I am

keeping to my side of it. We will talk about it next session. Now, would
you like a hug before you go?”

I started to cry. I was devastated. I hated her. I was furious. And of

course I wanted a hug but I was unable to answer. Susan stood up and
said “It is time to go now.”

My internal voices were screaming at me: “Look what you have

done. We are missing out! You know how much we hang out for these
sessions.”

I walked to the office with Susan, paid for the session, and then

she firmly said “I'll see you next week” and left.

I dragged myself to the car and started the long trip home, tears

pouring down my face. After about ten minutes I could feel a strange
sort of gurgling feeling inside. I realised it was joy. “She did it!! She did
it!! She kept her word”. I was flooded with feelings of relief and safety.
She hadn't yelled, screamed or been violent in any way, but she had
done exactly what she said she would. I felt valued and relieved and
less tense and fearful. She cared enough about me to maintain the
boundaries she said she would, and to keep me safe.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 189

Maintaining boundaries and confronting me as she had would

have been costly to Susan but she had done it anyway. I knew what a
truly excellent session it had been. I had not wasted my money. I had
experienced something of tremendous power and importance.

Convincing Greg of this took some doing. He found it difficult to

understand how driving for two hours there and back and paying for a
session I didn't have could be valuable. My therapy put a considerable
hole in our weekly budget. He never complained, but I'm sure this
particular occasion rankled.

The fact Susan could keep strong and powerful boundaries was of

incalculable value. Boundaries provided me with a sense of
containment, of having limits, of being held. They stopped me from
being able to waft to the other side of eternity and made my world a
safer place to be. Susan provided the model for me to be able to set
limits for myself and the clients I worked with.

Susan's limit setting was consistently clear. It always impressed

me. There was nothing muddy or murky about it and only once do I
remember her being angry about my testing her limits around my
safety.

Oh, how I loved those limits. Even now, remembering, I get the

sense of Susan's arms wrapped around me in a loving embrace. That's
what it felt like. Someone cared. I actually mattered to her. She cared
that I didn't harm myself and that I stayed alive. The truth of that was
constantly surprising.

After I had recovered from Sonia's rejection it was time to find a
spiritual director. I often wrote to John and was amazed at the
responses he gave from the other side of the world. I felt he reached
across the world and into the black void I inhabited while working with
memories.

I was given a name of a possible director, rang, made an

appointment, went for one session and was so appalled I didn't go
back. I had to wait two months until I could see the next potential

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 190

director. It was a long two months. At the initial interview I poured out
all that ritual abuse was and its effects on my life. She decided she
didn't have the space to take on something that heavy. With hindsight I
see that as responsible behaviour on her part but at the time I saw it
as a judgement on my depravity.

She gave me the name of a couple of other directors, and this time

I told them about ritual abuse over the phone. They were not willing to
take me on, either. I was drowning. I needed someone to support me
at a spiritual level. While Susan was extremely supportive of Woman-
God and deeply spiritual herself she did not understand my
Christianity and I often felt we spoke a different language when it came
to our respective spiritual beliefs.

Eventually someone told me about Noel, who had once been a

member of a religious community of Catholic brothers. I talked to him
on the phone and he thought the best thing we could do was have
three sessions together and see what we both thought at the end of
them. At first I found it difficult to talk to someone new, someone who
wasn't John. Fortunately, I hung in there and discovered that Noel had
a lot to offer. Like John he was a great listener. I poured out my filth
and shame and talked about the different parts of myself who were
telling their story in therapy. I told him I didn't know where God had
been in the midst of my abuse. Noel accepted that absence and didn't
argue against it.

I'd had powerful experiences of Woman-God who wept with and

for me over my abuse. She wept with the children who had such
hideous acts inflicted upon them and she was always present in the
Healing Room to offer love and support, but ultimately, she was a
powerless God, unable to stop the abuse. Susan would encourage me
to experience her as being present back then, during the abuse, but
that was never my truth. Woman-God could be taken back into a
memory or would be waiting for the child to return from the memory
in need of her healing, but Woman-God was not to be found in the
original abuse.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 191

God, in any of the ways I had encountered either him or her, was

not there.

It would have been intolerable to have God there.
If God

was there what kind of bastard would God be? I would hurl

questions at God. “Why didn't you rescue me? Why didn't you rescue
all the other children? Given that death would have been preferable to
life, why didn't you let us die? WHERE WERE YOU? What kind of
heartless, fucking bastard are you? How dare you leave me in the midst
of such unmitigated horror.” I was furious with God. At times this was
terrifying because I was scared God would let me go, drop me, walk
away. Yet, I could also hear John encouraging me to be honest. Telling
me the greatest gift we can give to God is our uncensored honesty. So
internally I screamed in rage and fury. The honesty was freeing and
liberating. The questions persisted. What kind of a loving God are you?
Why didn't you come storming into the situation and rescue me? You
don't look like a God of love to me. You look like an unconscionable
bastard. You weren't there.

In the midst of the horror God was absent.
That was my truth, and as devastating as that was, the alternative

would have been worse.

Conventional wisdom claimed God was all-loving and all-powerful.

That was absolute crap as far as I was concerned. It was impossible. I
didn't believe either of those statements, let alone both. People told
me God didn't interfere with free will. That line always made my skin
crawl. It was a cop-out and something about the free will argument
always felt deeply dishonest, as if people were trying to protect God
rather than asking difficult questions and wrestling with them. Ritual
abuse was most certainly not about my free will.

Noel allowed me to stay in the struggle with these questions. In no

way did he try to justify or defend God. My ultimate question was how
do I stay believing in God, believing in the love of God?

I fought to avoid the death of God within my soul. So did God. We

were not going to let each other go.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 192

I did this with Woman-God. Having an image of God that was

female reduced my fear of God and got around many of the illusions
and tricks the cult had put in place regarding God. Obviously a
feminine God had never entered their heads. So I was able to build a
relationship with her free from brain-washing and guilt. I had a divided
image of God. Anything that spoke of violence, power or coercion I
viewed as male, while anything that was loving, nurturing or life-giving
belonged to Woman-God.

I had a strong fear reaction if anyone implied there were no

secrets from God, that God would always shine a bright light into the
hidden corners of our lives. This spoke to me of abuse, coercion and
violation. Then one day a memory emerged that explained why the
image of God's light was so terrifying.

I was tied onto a contraption where they could slide me backwards

and forwards for several metres. At one end it was dark and cold and
at the other end there were huge, incandescent, theatre lights. My
father dressed in black robes towered over me saying “I am Satan, you
must honour and worship me. Do you choose the light ... or the dark?”
As he said “the light” I was moved to the end of the contraption where
the lights were so bright they hurt my eyes and so hot they burnt my
skin. Then when he said “the dark” I was moved down to the other end
where it was dark and cold. He moved me back and forward several
times. When I was near the light he would say: “This is where God is,
God is so bright he wants to burn you! God is so bright he can see into
every corner of your being and he knows how bad and evil you are.
God is disgusted by you.” When I was down the dark end he would tell
me: “Satan is the God you should worship. I am Satan, I am ultimate
evil and therefore worthy of all honour.” Then he would slide me back
up to those blinding lights where he would ask, “Is this what you want?
Do you want to be burnt because of your evil?” Back to the darkness.
“This is where you belong, it's cool here. Is your skin burnt from those
dreadful lights? This is where love is, this is where power is. Stay with
me and I will share my power, give you power. You know I love you, I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 193

know you love me.” Backwards and forwards. God was good which was
bad. Satan was bad which was good. I had to choose. I had to choose
between God and my father. My choice. Except, of course, there was
none. And always at the end of it my father's words “You don't
remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you.” Over and over
again. Drugging me into dissociation, amnesia and sleep. I don't
remember my age.

Being made to choose evil and reaffirm my commitment to Satan

reinforced how vile, evil and poisonous I was. I had

deliberately chosen

Satan over God. My father constantly reminded me of how
unforgivable that was while at the same time telling me he was proud
of me. Once I'd been brainwashed and programmed at this level I had
no chance of finding God within the abuse. God was not there. There
was no use asking, praying or searching because it was my fault God
was not present.

I raged at God for allowing this to happen, for not being big

enough, strong enough, powerful enough to put a stop to it. If God
really loved me he would have protected me. The fact that he didn't
proved I was unlovable, therefore, I didn't deserve to live.

As more memories came my feelings of filth increased. I was

convinced I was putrid, vile and poisonous, and that my innermost
core was utterly evil with nothing of light or goodness within me. At the
same time, and seemingly contradictory to this, I was convinced of a
small, delicate candle within that emitted a fragile light. This light
became a central metaphor for my healing. Often when the filth and
darkness overwhelmed me I would physically light a candle so I had an
external representation of my fragile internal truth. Then I would
simply sit and look at the candle.

I spent years of my life focusing on those candles, both internal

and external. My private psychotherapy practice was called the Healing
Room and the logo was a small candle in a partly opened doorway with
the words “discovering the light within” underneath.

I still have a reaction if people try to tell me that God shines his

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 194

light into every corner of my life. It is not one of fear but frustration
with images of God I see as unhelpful. I am convinced that for me God
will always issue gentle invitations for me to work with her. She never
speaks to me in ways that have any hint of abuse, force or coercion.
Rather I sense a wonderfully warm invitation to join her in acts of co-
creation, working together to create the best out of any situation.

Noel understood about that delicate candle and had a reverence for
the shadow places of life and the growth that takes place there. He
never tried to bring the blinding light of God's healing to me. Instead
he encouraged me to stay in those shadow-lands and nurture the small
seeds of growth and faith I found there. Noel supported me in viewing
God as female and allowed me to discover who God was for me in
whatever places I encountered her. I never felt I had to believe any
prescribed articles of faith. God was about my truth and relationship.

One session Noel suggested a ritual cleansing. I have long believed

the Catholic sacrament of confession has healing power. Shame breeds
in darkness and silence. Being able to name what we are ashamed of
before God and another human being has the potential to evaporate
that shame. With this in mind I told both God and Noel all I was most
ashamed of: my despicable acts, my shameful emotions and my bodily
reactions that were almost impossible to put into words, not only
because of my shame but my deep sense of being betrayed by my
body. Noel maintained eye contact throughout. He didn't look away
revolted or sickened and once I was finished he anointed me with oil,
proclaiming my forgiveness. It was like a spring cleaning, so much shit
had piled up, this swept some of it away, making room for the next
batch to arrive.

These days I take up my space in the world, stretch out and allow
myself to be as big as I am. I can splash colour around and experiment
with big, bold images, in clothes and in art. I no longer live my life
terrified of people's disapproval, hardly daring to breathe. I can stride

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 195

out into the world and explore the far edges of who I am. Life has
become a joyous canvas inviting me to play and create.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 196

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I

love food, all sorts of food, but especially I love “foreign food”. That's

the catch-all phrase I use to describe any food that is not Tasmanian.
Tasmanian food is fabulous; it is fresh, simple and uncomplicated.
Sometimes I like complicated. I want variety and choice. There is
nothing better than a banquet – Indian, Lebanese or Greek. A glorious
abundance of spice, herbs, aroma, colour and taste. A plethora of
dishes piled high with colour and shape: vegetables, meat and fish
each with its own distinctive spice and sauce; its own story and
tradition. Then there is the absolute delight of yum cha, all those
wonderful wicker baskets trundling by with tasty morsels, steamed or
fried, with or without chilli or soy sauce, friendly in their familiarity or
slightly scary in their exotic difference. But each little package
containing someone's bite-size piece of heaven.

The question of multiple personalities continued to haunt me. I
certainly felt there were far more voices and opinions than there had
been before I remembered ritual abuse.

My friend Annette had a way of trying things out for a little while

to see if they worked for her or not. She called it doing a social
experiment. I thought this was a great system because I wasn't actually
committing to something, I was just acting

as if.

As I was driving to Annette's place contemplating the issue of

multiplicity I decided to conduct my own social experiment. For a
month I would act

as if I had multiple personalities and see what

difference that made. Internal cheering erupted and an enormous
clamour. “At long last!”

“Hurray!”

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 197

“Now we might be heard.”
“This has got to be better.”
“I want to tell my story.” It was a full-on response and not one I

had been expecting.

It was the beginning of a wonderful and exhausting adventure.
In some ways nothing was different but in other ways everything

changed. These parts of me had always been there but now I was
looking at them more closely and was prepared to acknowledge they
existed, on their terms.

Simple things like breakfast became complicated. There would be

a fight over what to put on my toast.

“I think I'll have Vegemite today.”
“I don't like Vegemite.”
“You had Vegemite yesterday.”
“I want jam.”
“Jam's yucky.”
“You always get what you want, it's my turn and I want jam.”
“Why do we always have to have toast, I want porridge.”
“For fuck's sake!! Will the cast of thousands please shut the fuck

up!”

I read a lot about multiple personalities but it wasn't helpful as it

didn't describe my reality or experience. The authors pathologised the
condition and always referred to it as a disorder. I took great exception
to that word. We did not view ourselves as suffering from a disorder.
We saw it as a consequence of abuse and a creative way of surviving
relentless, unmitigated horror. A strategy of resourcefulness, courage
and a determination to survive. I always avoid referring to people as
suffering from multiple personalities, as well. Greg, after a particularly
torrid time dealing with all the different parts of me, felt that perhaps
he was the one suffering from multiple personalities.

Around the time I was coming to terms with the idea of

multiplicity the psychiatric profession decided to rename multiplicity
DID, dissociative identity disorder. I liked this nomenclature even less.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 198

It sounded clinical, cold and crazy. I knew then, as I know now, that
these personalities had done a wonderful job of surviving. No matter
what their task was, they had come into existence in the face of
excruciating pain and overwhelming abuse. They were courageous,
gutsy, fragile, broken, angry, suicidal, self-mutilating, terrified,
aggressive, manipulative, addicted, frozen, sad, despairing, raging,
surviving parts of me. What they were not was crazy; nor were they
satanic. They had absolutely nothing to do with Satanic possession. I
did not need an exorcism. They were an expression of my creativity
and ability to survive. I grew to have enormous love and respect for
them.

Given the overwhelming relief in my internal world, I decided to

stay with viewing myself as someone who had lots of different parts – I
chose to call this multiplicity.

Learning to live with a lot of distressed and damaged kids, and, as

time went on, teenagers, was difficult. I found myself reading books on
parenting and developmental stages in order to have some idea of how
to parent them all. As much as was possible I was the overseer of all
that went on. When another personality was to the fore I always had a
witnessing presence, sometimes a strong one; at other times it was a
tenuous connection.

Susan was willing to go along with it once she realised looking at

myself in terms of multiplicity was going to be useful. She formed
separate relationships with lots of different parts of me. These parts
would negotiate about who did what in therapy and how much time
they would get. We developed rules. In spite of all the internal activity
and the switching between different personalities I maintained a sense
of self, a sense of an “I” who had always been there. It was this “I” who
had to drive the car at all times and who was to enter and leave the
therapy room. It was not OK to switch personalities without letting
Susan know what was happening. Times with Susan and for therapy
had to be assigned.

Once different parts told their story they still wanted to be around.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 199

They were not going to just disappear again. They wanted to be in
relationship with Susan, Woman-God, Greg and me. The Healing Room
was invaluable. I would take all the different parts of me there and
Woman-God was always available to help me look after them. It always
surprised me that on my departure they might be painting or listening
to a story and when I next checked in on them they were doing
something different. The Healing Room had its own reality outside my
conscious awareness. I also developed the habit of spending time at
home allowing them to be out and about. They often wanted to write,
or paint, or make cards, and they adored stickers and glitter. Half an
hour of each therapy session was devoted to the Littlies as

show and

tell, for them to ask Susan questions or just to be held.

In all of this Greg was supportive and compassionate. He became

an expert at recognising the different parts of me. He didn't need to be
told who was out because he would know them from their energy. He
developed relationships with all of them. He would talk to them and
admire their art work. He had no problems going on bush walks and
having numerous conversations as the different parts of me popped in
and out chatting about their lives or just wanting to spend time with
him.

During a session one of the Littlies mentioned she had her school case
with her.

“What have you got in there?” Susan asked.
She opened it up. “I've got some sandwiches, a drink and an apple.

And I've got some drawings, too.” Then in a whisper she said “Can I tell
you what else's in here? It's a secret, and you've got to promise not to
tell. Promise?”

“I promise,” Susan solemnly replied.
“Look, here, underneath the drawings. It's my soul, that's where I

hid it.”

“Why did you hide it?”
“Because they wanted to kill it and I didn't think that was a very

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 200

good thing for them to do, so I hid it in here.”

“That was clever of you,” Susan said with a definite catch in her

voice.

“I thought so,” said the Littlie with pride.
“What are you going to do with it now?”
“I think maybe now it's safe enough to take it out of hiding and put

it back inside me. What do you think?”

“I think that would be a very good thing to do. I'm so glad you kept

it safe.”

The Littlie picked up her soul. It was beautiful, gold with all the

intricacies of a snowflake. She held it up to her chest and felt it slip into
that place deep, deep inside where it belonged. “That's better,” she
said smiling up at Susan.

For me, holidays are about food. Travel is about immersing myself in
the culinary delights of other cultures. Trying things that are unusual
and being adventurous. Embracing the exotic. Trips to the mainland
are about indulging in as many different kinds of food as is possible in
the time available. The variety, colour, flavour and spices of food are
great delights of my life. They bring joy to my day. What a gift food is.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 201

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

T

he sand forms a barrier between the world of sea and land, yet also

underpins the water. It's a negotiable barrier at times. But mostly it is
overridden by the strength of the ocean. So many of my memories
lived in the sand that was underneath the sea. Protected by its
immensity. Submerged deep below. It was a world of not
remembering. Of keeping things at bay. Making them go away.
Underground, undersea. I learnt to inhabit those depths. Learnt that
those memories could be dragged up from the deep; uncovered,
released onto dry land. Sometimes they arrived like giant piles of
seaweed or detritus littering the beach. They would cling tenaciously to
the outcrop of rocks, refusing to accompany the tide as she travelled
outwards. Other times they were pale, ornate, a single piece of
driftwood, gently placed on unmarked sand. Potent in its aloneness
and impact.

I made sure that being in therapy did not affect my ability to work as a
therapist. Susan and I decided that it was not appropriate for me to
continue to see her for supervision as well as do such intensive therapy
together. I found an excellent new supervisor and explained to her I
was working on ritual abuse and I wanted to be scrupulous in making
sure it didn't impact on my work. We discussed this in great detail and
she agreed to join me in my vigilance.

The majority of ritual abuse survivors I talked to said their abuse had
started from birth. This matched my own memories. The earliest
memory I had was of lying on an altar with a sword dangling above my
heart that was held by a fine thread. There seemed to be a threat that

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 202

the thread could break.

Priests asked my father “Who brings this child to this place?”
“I do,” replied my father.
“Do you dedicate her to Satan to serve him and work for him and

to bring about his purposes?”

“I do,” he said.
An animal was slaughtered. Its blood collected and used by the

priests to mark me as a child of Satan. It was the equivalent of a
Christian baptism. My fate had been sealed. I was six months old.

The depth of these memories were the consequence of three

hours of therapy a week over a five year period plus all the therapy I
had done previously. Not only had I given myself permission to
remember, I also actively prayed that God would bring to the surface
whatever I needed to deal with. I was constantly aware of being in the
process of remembering and healing. Therapy was a defrosting
process. I was getting in touch with memories deep within ice and
slowly and gently allowing them to thaw. The more memories, the
more distinct, discrete parts of me wanted to tell their story. It was
getting crowded inside my head.

Imagine an old vase crazed with cracks. Most of the time I

functioned as a whole vase, able to hold water and flowers, but
sometimes all the different pieces of the vase separated and floated
away from one another. I was no longer a vase. I was myriad isolated
shards.

It always amazed me how well I could operate even in the midst of

this fragmentation. If the phone rang, a client calling because they
were in distress, it took just seconds for all those pieces to realign,
reassemble themselves and function as a vase once more.

In wars people are tortured to make them talk but in ritual abuse
victims are tortured to make sure they never talk. The most common
way a cult will seek this silence is through programming. It is their
attempt to maintain total control.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 203

I was programmed to believe I was poisonous. I can't remember it

ever not being there. I believed that if you cut me I would ooze poison.
That anyone who loved me or touched me would die. This was how I
saw myself. I knew it to be true.

To show me how poisonous I was they forced people to have

intercourse with me. Sometimes it was with people who had been kind
to me and other times with complete strangers. Either way their death
was inevitable. Or my father, or someone else in the cult, made it
appear that way. They'd had

intimate contact with me. They'd touched

my poison. They would die.

That was what they trained me to believe.
What I saw was a slow, gruesome death. I was forced to watch. It

was my fault.

Whether it was a complicated illusion or reality I have no way of

knowing. At the time I was convinced it was real. When I remembered
it, it felt real.

Any time I did anything evil that the cult approved of, like hurting
another child, I was told this was a good thing and would increase my
core blackness. If I did something wrong, that was against the rules,
like trusting, loving or questioning their authority, that was a bad thing
and my core blackness would decrease. Things would be done to
increase the level of my internal poison. Despair increased my core
blackness. The more trapped, brutalised or betrayed I felt the deeper
and darker the blackness became. It was hideously confusing because
anything that felt bad and wrong was defined as evil, which was good.
Anything I did that felt right or had a lightness to it they would also
define as bad. Really bad. Not good bad. So I would be punished. Often
when I felt I'd done something I was deeply ashamed of they would be
proud of me. I hated that.

If I did something they deemed worthy of punishment they had an

hideous contraption made of metal that went around my neck and
over my head. It was connected to another piece of metal that went

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 204

around my chest and clamped onto my nipples. Punishment meant
being suspended from the ceiling in this contraption.

I can feel the clamp of metal and the excruciating pain. Breathe,

keep breathing. Take your time. Come back to now. As I do I can hear
the sound of snoring. Loud snoring. One small dog, curled up on a
cushion on the lounge chair, sound asleep and making a lot of noise in
the process. The other dog is struggling to breathe. He has asthma and
he's been having a hard time of it of late. I'm always sympathetic, but
as I feel the memory of steel clamped round my neck and the fear of
strangulation, I go over to him and tell him I know just how awful it is
to be unsure you'll be able to manage the next breath. He seems to
appreciate the sympathy.

The perpetrators of my abuse always aimed to overload my system. To
bombard me with every kind of pain imaginable. I wouldn't just be
raped, I would be raped by my father who would later say he loved me.
It was rarely just one person. They would humiliate me in the process;
blood, urine or shit would be smeared over me. They gave me drugs to
dull my senses and befuddle my mind. They used electric shock to
send pain surging through my body or further scramble my brain. They
threatened me with extreme violence in order to ensure my
compliance. I was told no one would or could help me. It was my fault
this was happening. Every rape or piece of torture was further proof I
was bad. So bad that no one would ever want to help me or rescue me.
There was no escape, no point even thinking of escape. If I tried they
would make me intensely sorry. They could make the physical pain
continue for days. The psychological pain seemed endless. The
spiritual pain was unspeakable. They would inflict pain or death on
someone I cared about. They aimed to kill everything good within me.
To create an internal world of total blackness and destroy hope, love,
joy and faith. Those things were viewed as crimes. Secretly I continued
to hold them dear.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 205

Their ultimate aim was the destruction of my soul.
The perpetrators' stock in trade was terror, torture, humiliation,

intimidation, confusion and violence. All of these were used to ensure
my silence. They also used trickery and illusion. They implanted a
magic time bomb and said if I ever even thought of telling or escaping
the bomb would start to tick. I was drugged. Woke up to discover blood
all over my chest. Was sore where

the surgery had taken place. If I

even began to think of telling or leaving fear would kick in. My heart
would start to pound. Consciously or unconsciously, I knew this was
the time bomb starting. I had to stop thinking immediately. Otherwise I
would be blown to smithereens.

It wasn't difficult to keep me, an already terrified child, in a

constant state of dissociation using a combination of violence and
illusion. I could not live with ongoing memories of terror, torture,
abuse, murder, violence and hate. I dissociated to protect myself from
going mad. I felt there was a smoke machine with putrid, grey smog
billowing out. Poisoning my body. Hijacking my mind. I would be
thinking clearly and well one minute and then the stultifying black
smog would start to seep throughout my brain which would turn to
mush. A dense fog would engulf me which took hours, if not days, to
emerge from. When this happened I could not think straight or trust
my body's knowing. Over the years I had developed a clear way of
telling if something felt right for me or not. If I felt clean then it was
good. If I felt murky it was wrong. I trusted this knowing, programming
annihilated it. I would watch the clear and the good fade from view
and be engulfed in a fog of impenetrable confusion. Believing that if I
cut myself a foul, putrid, black ooze would exude from my veins, not
blood. I felt like it penetrated and polluted the very core of me.

Again and again I would struggle through a morass of poison and

illness, writing it off as the usual consequences of working on
memories. I would be vomiting and wonder what I had eaten that
disagreed with me. I would feel poisoned to the core and just accept it
as the truth of my life. I would hardly be able to crawl out of bed

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 206

because of a migraine and would accept it as inevitable. I viewed these
symptoms as the

punishment for talking about ritual abuse.

Over time I started to recognise them for what they were:

programming. Naming them helped. Then I would try and fight them,
would tell myself I was not bad or poisonous and people didn't die
from loving me. I felt as if it was a battle I could never win.

The best thing I could do was light a candle. That was all, just light

a candle. Internally, externally, both. It was my symbol that my
allegiance was now with God and with the light. Doing this kept me out
of the battle and sooner or later the darkness would lift.

I was made to believe that programming was inescapable. That's

how I felt. But this was another of the cult's lies. Programming was not
a death sentence and didn't always have the power to incapacitate.
There were ways out. Recognising and naming it helped. Seeing it as a
lie was liberating. Having friends and a therapist who were strongly on
my side and who would offer me a lifeline to help me out of the pit
that programming plunged me into was invaluable. Finding the truth
and holding onto it worked.

There were many times I talked through programming with

Annette, worked out what was the lie, what was the hook that kept me
dangling in their darkness. There were times when I would say over
and over again: “It's not true, it's a lie, it's not true, I'm not what they
say.”

I learnt to not enter into the battle. Not surrender, but not fight

either. To simply hold on to my beliefs. I had escaped the cult. I was
free and they no longer had any power over me. More and more I
believed God had hold of me. I could sense a safety and security that
surrounded me. I was coming to believe that this was God's work I was
doing and no way would she abandon me. No way could I fall back into
their power. When I realised this I would light a candle.

How much of my life still lives at the bottom of the ocean? How much
is embedded in the sand; trapped, submerged, unable to escape? What

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 207

movements of tide, current, thaw or swell dislodge a secret, a memory,
and free it so it may start its journey upward, into sunlight, air and
consciousness?

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 208

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

S

ome days are so beautiful they are like a caress. The gentle touch of

sun warming my body and wind playfully ruffling my hair. There is a
sensuousness to the smell of salt in my nose and its tang on my
tongue as my body becomes one with the beauty that abounds. The
sounds of ocean, trees and wind wrap themselves around me
whispering a love song. How wonderful it is to have a body that can
now recognise and enjoy these subtle delights. How grateful I am to
Susan for showing me gentle touch.

One of the ongoing battles Susan and I had was how much of my
nurturing she should do and how much was my responsibility. I
wanted her to do it all. She believed the purpose of her nurturing was
to give me positive experience and structure that I could draw on to
nurture myself. I did not want to take responsibility for myself. Many
of my internal children were so damaged that making any contact with
them was a long drawn-out process requiring patience and tentative,
gentle offers of help and of touch.

Touch was vital. Good, safe, loving, non-sexual touch. I have heard

it argued that the problem with touch is it opens up a cavernous
longing that can never be filled. For me it certainly opened up a
cavernous longing. At times I wanted to swallow Susan whole to try
and fill the emptiness. To this day there are times when the depth of
my need and longing are devastating in their intensity. Is this because
Susan used therapeutic touch or because there was a big hole left by
the inadequacies of my parents' parenting? I would say the latter.

Touch, and being held by Susan, complicated and intensified our

relationship. I am grateful for Susan's willingness to navigate and

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 209

contain all those added difficulties. My journey would have been
nowhere near as rich without her touch. Nor would I have had the
ability to

create an image of God, Woman-God, who could generously

shower me with love and nurture, if I did not have Susan's many years
of re-parenting to fall back on. She showed me what good parenting
was. To start with I could not help but create God in the image of my
father. Susan provided an alternative.

Going into a memory meant travelling back in time. I would use
feelings, flashes of memory or body sensations as the thread to follow.
This invariably led me to a place of intense pain. I would curl up on the
mattress, hugging a cushion, rocking, as the images of a memory
would start to run through my mind: Sometimes in fits and starts,
sometimes a jumble, other times in a more or less co-ordinated
sequence. Often I would get a sense of my age, of location, perhaps
images of who was there, or the equipment that was being used. If I
only had glimpses then the observer part of me would run ahead with
the possibilities. They had specialised equipment for inflicting pain and
for electric shocks. Seeing an altar was bad, as was seeing manacles.
There were also drugs to induce confusion or hallucination. Memory
work involved feeling the abuse as it happened. I would experience
myself as a small child, overwhelmed by terror, watching enormous
adults prepare to use both themselves and hideous equipment for the
purpose of causing pain. There were always words that went with it.
Words of blame, of accusation, of dogma and ritual. Words that were
designed to confuse, bewilder or belittle and always to let me know
that this was my fault. I asked for it; this was what I deserved. Then
there were words of incantation and summoning power. Sonorous
ritual phrases designed to invoke the power of Satan, to engulf us and
subject us to his power. Words that reinforced subservience,
obedience and humility.

As I hunched over my pain I would whisper the emerging details

to Susan trying to create a picture for her. The level of touch I wanted

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 210

varied enormously. Sometime, while actually remembering, any kind of
touch was unbearable. I felt I had been flayed alive and touch was
excruciating. Other times I needed her to sit beside me and hold my
hand giving me the strength to remember. Sometimes I longed to be
held but was overwhelmed with terror and mistrust and couldn't or
wouldn't ask Susan for what I needed. Again and again Susan would
have to explain to me that not all touch was bad. She would never hurt
me and didn't want anything from me except for me to be myself.
Small parts of me would ask her if she was going to fuck me, beat me,
electrocute me or harm me in some way. Over and over she would
reassure me. As therapy progressed and more parts of me were healed
it was possible for the unhealed parts to hear from those who now
understood about safe and loving touch and gain some courage from
them. It was a long, slow process.

Memories could take weeks or months to fully emerge because to

get them all at once would totally overload my system. Once I had
done the memory work of a session Susan would hold me and
together we would try and undo the damage. The small wounded child
would say to Susan: “They said I was bad. They told me it was my fault.
He shouldn't have done that, should he?” Susan would consistently,
lovingly answer my questions and assure me I was not bad, it was not
my fault, and no, under no circumstances whatsoever should he have
done that. The unanswerable questions were “Why? What did I do to
deserve that?” I accepted there were no satisfactory answers but
constantly needed reassurance.

To my amazement Susan not only allowed but encouraged me to

ring her between sessions. She was generous in her love and support
and understood my need for reassurance. She knew that the time
between therapy sessions was an eternity for me. She would also leave
messages on my answer machine so I could replay them, something I
would do repeatedly, possibly even obsessively.

There were times in my work with Susan I would lose sight of her care

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 211

for me and would stop believing she was on my side. Convinced she
was out to get me I would think what she was asking of me was unfair
and unreasonable. This was usually a request that I accept
responsibility for myself, ask for what I want, and stop waiting for the
world to meet me on my terms. I battled over this regularly.

Often Susan seemed to me to be the idealised parent, perfect in

every way, but then I would change my view of her and would
transform her into an evil monster and see her as someone
determined to withhold love and care. At these times the battles
between Susan and I were intense. She would point out to me that I
was seeing her as either my Mum or Dad and I was being
unreasonable. I would either rage at her that I was only responding to
her provocation or, more likely, sink into a sullen, manipulative sulking
in an effort to get her to be what I wanted. This never worked, but it
was a process I repeated over and over again.

Slowly I learnt that with Susan asking for what I wanted often

meant I got it. Whereas with my parents letting them know what I
wanted guaranteed it was the last thing on earth I would get. Susan
always expected me to remember this difference.

I also came to realise that entering into a battle with Susan was a

sure indicator that a new memory was emerging. This was how my
subconscious way avoided it. Nevertheless, there were times that even
though I knew what I was doing I would continue the behaviour rather
than face the memory.

Susan's touch helped undo the harm of the past. Helped scrape off

the abuse, confusion and ugliness and helped me find the strength to
keep working on my memories. She consistently provided me with
potent, powerful, positive permissions and new experiences of love,
life and touch.

My seascape too, is a caress, a feast to the senses. It teaches me

about essence, colour and texture. It vibrates with passion and beauty.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 212

How grateful I am that I no longer live in a body tensed against
tenderness, walled in against life.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 213

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

D

uring winter, when it's cold and still, wood smoke settles over the

town. People with respiratory conditions complain it is hard to breathe
and my view is muted by the smoke haze. After a while my eyes start
to sting and I long for a wind to come and blow through the town.

When Liberty arrived she blew through my life. She was more than

a breath of fresh air, she was a hurricane.

One day a new personality emerged. She was angry, prickly, smart and
sassy. She had been watching from the background for a while and she
was both intrigued by the relationship the Littlies had with Susan and
terrified of it. She was scathing in her attitude towards kindness and
tenderness. She didn't believe anybody ever did anything for you
without getting something in return and knew that in any relationship
she ended up being fucked: metaphorically, physically or both.

Her arrival upped the ante. She was a cult-wise teenager of

thirteen. She was aggressive, bitter and despised any displays of
weakness. Touch and being held were anathema to her. She had a wall
around her that was as deep as it was high and she used language that
made even me, a seasoned swearer, blush. She questioned and
challenged everything and words like love made her want to vomit. She
was a thinker and had a gutsy, honest determination.

Once she got the hang of therapy she was tireless and courageous.

She realised many of the things she had been taught about life, love,
God, faith, sex and the cult were lies. So she determined to examine it
all. She bombarded Susan with questions. What was normal? What was
life like for other thirteen-year olds? Were they fucked by their Dads?
What did they think? What would they do with their boyfriends? What

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 214

did they think about God? What would they have been taught about
their body? Sex? Boundaries? Limits? She wanted to know it all. She
thought about who she was. What her purpose might be and how she
could best fulfil it. She asked questions about evil, suffering and the
cult and where God was in the midst of it all. She wanted to
understand power, its uses and misuses. She began to understand that
her demands to have a God every bit as powerful as the cult would
mean believing in a God who misused power. She came to see that in
the midst of all the shit and horror, right on the raw, festering edge of
her life, was God. Waiting, smiling; right in the middle of hell.

She was relentless and she was magnificent.
For quite some time Susan, Greg and I called her

the thirteen

year-old, but as she started to mellow a little and some of her rough
edges started to soften she decided she wanted a name. As she talked
about it in a therapy session we saw a name coming towards us. It
arrived as a gift:

Liberty.

This was a name that spoke of freedom from oppression and

incarceration, the right to self-determination, to act according to one's
will, the right and power to act, believe, or express oneself in a manner
of one's own choosing, and immunity from the arbitrary exercise of
authority. It was a fabulous name.

Liberty formed a relationship with Greg. It was fascinating to

watch. Greg was a shy, quiet man, intelligent but not a deep thinker.
Liberty wanted to discuss her thoughts and ponderings with him. He
was always a willing listener but this was not enough for Liberty, she
wanted to know his opinion. If he didn't have one because he'd never
thought about it she would challenge him. Liberty embraced

the

unexamined life is not worth living whereas Greg was a peace at any
price kind of guy. With Liberty around there certainly wasn't any peace.
She demanded the best out of everyone. What was fascinating was the
effect she had on Greg. Questions or discussions I had tried to initiate
with no luck, meeting closed doors, she ploughed into, demanding and
getting thoughts and answers. She was a whirlwind that blew through

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 215

all our lives.

Liberty had questions about her sexual orientation. She hated sex

with men. She felt more comfortable around women and she adored
Susan. Did this mean she was a lesbian? She talked to Susan about it,
asking how she could figure this out. Susan explained that in normal
situations a young woman would have opportunities to explore her
sexuality and to experiment. Liberty remembered an encounter with
the daughter of a family friend which had been exploratory and
enjoyable. She wanted to explore her sexuality. She asked both Susan
and Greg if she could do so. The answer from both was “NO”.

One of the consequences of working on memories was I had no

interest in a sexual relationship at all. In my mind sex was linked with
abuse, pain, humiliation and torture. Greg was unstintingly generous in
providing me with non-sexual touch and support and he did his utmost
to put as little sexual pressure on me as was possible. At times this
became difficult for him and it was something I was unable to change.
I had completely shut down that area of my life and had no interest in
opening it back up again. This slowly impacted on our marriage. It was
a complicated situation. I now shared my body with a lot of other
personalities. Here was Liberty, in my body, but a different personality,
who wanted to experiment sexually.

We started seeing a couples' counsellor. Ritual abuse put many

strains on our relationship and Greg kept giving support without
talking to anyone about it or receiving support himself. Not only was
he providing support for me in my healing work he was also
encouraging me in my studies. At this time I was writing the thirty-
eight essays that were part of my training in TA. Greg was always
willing to proofread and edit them and gained a thorough grounding in
TA himself.

Liberty, more than me, got the whole idea of God being the opposite of
evil and that meant God wasn't going to be huge and big and powerful.
God wasn't going to match the intensity of the cult. Wasn't the blazing

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 216

light that would burn her to a crisp, or violate by barging into the
hidden corners of her soul. God wasn't omnipotent, omnipresent,
omniscient. Rather God was the still, small voice, the gentle breeze and
the healing hand. God would enter my life only at my invitation.

During a therapy session one day Liberty remembered, or

imagined, herself in the presence of God before she was born. A being
of infinite compassion was showing her the darkness of the world and
the cult. She wasn't frightened but she could sense a deep grief, a
mourning. God was heartbroken. Then she felt God asking her if she
would be willing to be born into that family. A family that was
surrounded by darkness and was part of a satanic cult. Liberty
experienced God asking her to enter into their world in order to bring
light.

She agreed.
After that she believed that every piece of therapy we did, every

change we made, every time we managed to bring a little more light to
our world it made a difference to the world back then. And it made a
difference to the world now. Every bit of freedom we gained was
freedom for other ritual abuse survivors as well. As we gained the
courage to remember and face the horror it became a little bit easier
for another survivor somewhere else to face their demons. She had a
deep knowing of the interconnectedness healing could bring. This
experience added to her feisty determination to face everything that
had happened to her and to transform it.

Liberty added to my life in so many ways. Her integrity and

essence were intensely attractive. She could be rough as guts and
seriously anarchic but she had an enormous heart and monumental
courage. She was also more than capable of giving me a hard kick up
the bum when I needed it. There were times when the ongoingness of
therapy overwhelmed me and I would want to give up, or give in, or
just stay stuck. In Liberty's opinion this was cowardice, laziness,
wimping out or just plain stupid.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 217

Liberty and I struggled with believing Dad had done all those dreadful
things. There must be some mistake. We didn't doubt they had
happened, just that it was our father who had perpetrated them. With
all the tenacity we could muster we hung onto our belief that Dad was
a good Dad and, if we could only figure out the magical formula,
everything would be OK and all would be well. We constantly,
desperately longed for our father's love. We wanted to know what it
would be like to see ourselves reflected in his eyes and see beauty and
potential not ugliness, violence, hatred and rape.

I hung on like that, waiting for my father's perfect love, for months

and years. Stuck. Suffering. Within myself and at other people, trying to
make them feel bad or make them responsible for easing my pain. I
was not willing to move forward. I was trying to extort from the world
what I believed I needed – a perfect childhood – back then.

Liberty shared my longing but she moved through it and saw it far

more clearly than me. Her advice: “Get over it. What you want is never
going to happen, it's sheer fantasy and it's bullshit! Dad was an
arsehole!!!! An evil, murdering, raping bastard!!!! Move on.”

Liberty had the courage to face what needed to be faced, our utter

powerlessness. The cold, hard truth was that I had absolutely no
power. I could not escape from the cult, could not avoid them or
programming. I had to witness every vile act they perpetrated. I could
not protect myself.

I had held on to a belief that much of what had happened was

because of me, because I was bad, wrong, evil, poisonous and if only I
could figure out a way to be good enough and to make Dad love me
then everything would be OK. Not true. I could do nothing. I had
absolutely no power. It was devastating to face that truth.

There were ways that Liberty lightened the load for me. In other ways
life was even harder. Watching Liberty's struggles was far more heart-
breaking than watching my own. I was less equipped to offer support
to Liberty than to the Littlies. They were grateful for the care I gave

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 218

them. Liberty always demanded authenticity and integrity. Her
intensity and passion were both a delight and a burden.

As the winds roared around the house last night I found myself
holding my breath. Tense, scared, listening. Were the trees still
standing? The roof still on? The fence upright? All things I feared every
time the wind howled. Again and again the wind buffeted the house.
Eddies of wind came through the gaps in the doorways, up through the
floorboards and swept down the chimney, scampering across the
floor, disturbing papers and ruffling the dogs' fur. One dog's nose kept
twitching with delight as all sorts of exciting aromas arrived, delivered
right to his nostrils. No fear of the storm for him, just delight in the
moment.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 219

CHAPTER THIRTY

O

n days like today when the ocean is rough and the waves are

pounding against the shore I'm glad there is more than the breakwall
to keep them contained. I'm relieved there is some kind of limit, an
invisible barricade so the ocean comes this far and no further. Today I
am fearful that one day the ocean will disobey. It will decide to come
calling, and may knock on my door, seeking entrance.

Liberty struggled with self-harm and suicidality and if I had loved
boundaries and needed to push them it was nothing to Liberty's
amazement and wonder that such things existed. She thought they
were fantastic and set about testing them with all the force of her
personality.

Liberty had to test every rule. It had to make sense to her

otherwise she couldn't see any point in keeping it. “Because I said so”,
which was my father's favourite reason, was intolerable, no kind of
reason at all. Up until Liberty's arrival Susan and I didn't have any rules
about alcohol. By this stage of my life I could have a couple of glasses
of wine with dinner and they didn't set up any addictive cravings at all.
However, a couple of glasses of wine with Liberty around meant I was
a little less in control and failed in my duty of care.

The call to suicide and self-harm continued. Sometimes this was

just part of the general background noise, other times it was both
deafening and exhausting. A

constant call to darkness and oblivion.

These thoughts permeated my life. It was because of their
relentlessness that Susan and I ended up including a

no alcohol part to

my contract. This meant I had to take responsibility for myself. I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 220

couldn't use the excuse I'd had a couple of drinks therefore I couldn't
help it.

Susan had great compassion for my ongoing struggle with suicide.

I imagine she could well understand why it so often appeared as solace
and comfort. However, she was non-negotiable about me having a
contract and was not prepared to work with me unless I was prepared
to do at least 50% of the work and matched her commitment to
keeping me alive.

She understood there were times when the best I could manage

was to reaffirm my contract on a sessional basis, and occasionally on a
daily basis. This re-contracting was important. It kept my commitment
to staying alive in the forefront of my mind and it reduced, but by no
means eliminated, my internal battles around suicide. It also became
one of the ways I knew Susan cared for me. My contract became a
security blanket.

One of the things I used to do in a session as a memory emerged

was scratch and pound at my arms. Having no fingernails to speak of, I
would rarely break skin but I used a deal of force and often Susan
would tell me to stop. Somehow or other it was understood that this
was behaviour Susan helped me be conscious of and control. She was
rock-solid on her consequences around self-harm.

Then, one day, she showed me that she was also able to be flexible

when appropriate. Liberty was working on some memories with all the
angst and heartbreak that involved. As the memories and feelings were
surfacing the pain felt uncontainable. Liberty was rocking backwards
and forwards not knowing how to hold it all. She started clawing and
scratching at her arms. As usual Susan told her to stop. In the midst of
the horror of emerging memories, somewhere at the corners of
consciousness, Liberty decided to push the limits of this arm-clawing
behaviour. So, as she continued to face the horror, she also continued
to claw, scratch and pound her arms. When Susan was conscious of it
she would tell her to stop. No skin was broken. But the next day there
were enormous bruises on both arms. Oh shit!! What was this going to

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 221

mean? At this stage I was seeing Susan three times a fortnight and
sessions went for either one and a half hours or two hours. Dividing up
the time was always fraught because everyone wanted as much time
as possible. However, there was also a real understanding between us
all of how important it was, so going overtime tended not to happen.
In fact, in extreme cases one part would give up her precious time to
allow someone else to have enough time to do important work.
Considering the large range of personalities and needs there were
remarkably few battles over this area of my life, far less than disputes
about what was to go on my toast in the mornings.

The week Liberty bruised her arms was a two-session week. We

were meant to be going again in two days' time and the session was to
be divided up between Liberty and the Littlies. Well!! The Littlies were
furious!! “How dare you take away our time!!” “That is NOT fair.” First
they read Liberty the riot act. Then me, for not supervising her and
protecting us all from Liberty's bad and selfish behaviour. There is no
fury like Littlies deprived of their needs.

I arrived at the session with Liberty scared and sulking in the

background and the Littlies full of indignation. Of course as soon as I
sat down Susan noticed my arms and asked what I had done. Let's be
honest here, I would have been bitterly disappointed if she hadn't. I
told her it

had happened during the previous session, Liberty's session.

Of course Susan would not let me get away with saying

it had

happened or with putting all the blame on Liberty. Susan insisted I
accept ultimate control and responsibility. “So why did you come?”
asked Susan. The honest answer would have been “So I could watch
you enforce the consequences of my contract” – but I didn't fully
realise that. I explained I thought it was borderline and very tentatively
said that she usually helped Liberty be aware of her self-harming
behaviour within a session. I waited for the axe to fall. To be ordered
home. Certainly to be told there was no way it was Susan's
responsibility. Susan took time to think, then said she would accept
some of the responsibility. Her decision: Liberty would miss out on her

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 222

session but Susan would spend thirty minutes with the Littlies as
negotiated, then I would leave.

What the............? Who the..............? How the.............? I was

gobsmacked. What was that!?!? How had she done that? It was the
most amazing decision. The Littlies inundated her with questions. They
couldn't believe that Liberty had been punished, their word, but they
were getting what they needed. Susan admitted she should have been
more aware of what Liberty was doing in the previous session and
done something different, therefore a compromise was necessary.
However, she was still upholding the rules, and closing the loophole
against the future.

We were all so impressed. We learnt that even non-negotiable

rules can be negotiated in certain circumstances and have flexibility.
Susan explained that to not negotiate would mean the rules had
become rigid and that is when they are no longer loving and have the
potential to do harm. We were awestruck. How did she know to do
that? We could not have been more impressed had she done magic
tricks. Liberty was over the moon. It was a transformative moment of
therapy.

There are moments in a lifetime that are defining. That was one of

them. I knew about implacability, about black and white, about no
compromise, but this, this was about justice. It showed compassion,
compromise, the ability to look at all sides of a situation and to take
everyone's needs into account. It was flexible, gentle, yet it had more
strength than anything I had experienced at my parent's hands.

The problem with transformative moments of therapy was I would

try to recreate them. I loved limits but there was no therapeutic value
in breaking my contract again and again just for the sake of breaking it.
That took away valuable therapy time and it lost its potency.

At the conclusion of one session Susan asked me to restate my

contract. There were times doing so was difficult and required my
drawing on my commitment to the process. This was one of those
difficult times and I decided to push the boundaries and would not

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 223

renew my contract. Once it became clear I meant it Susan asked me to
hand over my car keys. She would not allow me to leave until I had
renewed my contract. I handed over the keys. She was not going to
stay and do battle with me. She told me to come to the office and pay
for my session. After I had paid she again asked me to renew my
contract, I said no. She suggested I go and sit for thirty minutes and
think about what I was doing. I still would not renew my contract. I was
stuck. I wanted the security of her sticking to the limits but it wasn't
working. I wanted to give in but didn't know how. It felt like I had the
upper hand but I sure as hell wasn't winning. Susan had taken my car
keys and it was up to me when I would allow her to give them back.
This was not a good situation. This was one of the few times Susan got
angry. She told me I was playing games and she didn't like it. She was
not going to stay and argue with me – she had a group to lead that
night and she was going to prepare for it. Part of me wanted to push it
to the point of still being there when her group turned up. But this
wasn't feeling right, it didn't feel like containment and I knew if I won
this I would lose something far bigger and more important. Once
Susan came back I spat out my renewed contract at her with as much
ungraciousness as I could muster. She said thank you, returned my
keys and left. No hug that evening.

As a result of that evening we came up with a new way of helping

me feel contained. The mattress in the therapy room had many
cushions on it. We started to experiment and to explore ways of
placing the cushions around my body then Susan pushing on them or
lying on them providing firm, consistent pressure. It took time,
patience and the ability to stay in control if something we tried was
triggering. However, because it was an experiment we embarked on
together I don't recall ever losing control or going into flashback or
regression for more than a second or two. Eventually, we discovered
that if I lay on the mattress, with cushions against the wall, and me as
close to the cushions as possible, and then big cushions the other side
of me and on top of me, with Susan applying firm pressure, I would

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feel contained. I LOVED IT. I felt safe. My body soaked it up like a
sponge. This was good touch, safe touch, love, containment with no
violence and no sex. This was healing at a cellular level.

Many years later I saw a TV programme on autism where they

used a

squeeze machine to give all over deep pressure as a way of

comforting people with autism. I understood the need.

There have been times when the ocean hasn't kept to the rules. When
it has come over the breakwall, or onto the grass beyond the sand.
One time, when it had been raining for days, a dam upstream from the
creek that runs through the park broke. Thousands of litres of water
came downstream as the tide turned and water from the ocean was
heading upstream. The tide was inexorably on its way in. It couldn't
turn nor could it adapt and take the excess water away.

I watched from my window as the water rose and spilt over the

banks of the creek, swallowing up the trees and submerging the park
and heading for the road. Gardens nearby disappeared underwater
and fences were totally immersed and the water lapped just
underneath balconies and back doors. A couple of metres higher and it
would have come inside.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 225

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I

'm scared by the thought of rising sea levels. Sometimes I imagine

looking out my window, or walking along the foreshore, and seeing a
tsunami heading towards me. When I watch documentaries on
extreme weather I quake as I view towering waves battering small
boats, or wreaking destruction on coastal towns and villages. I hate the
thought of being so overwhelmed by water turned violent that
breathing is impossible, escape inconceivable, with my body tossed
about like so much flotsam and jetsam, eventually smashed against
some indifferent shore.

Some memories were like that. I feared I would be left smashed,

battered, unable to recover.

My father used to promise I would rise up through the ranks of the cult
and become a high priestess, a promise often made to cult victims but
rarely fulfilled. In order to be a priestess I had to be a woman and once
a woman I was to be married to Satan. This was one of the biggest
events within cult life and Dad was proud.

I was dressed all in white with a veil, white shoes, the works. The

women who helped me to prepare told me what an honour it was to
marry Satan. This meant I was “chosen” and destined for greatness.
Two men led me to the altar where I was made to lie down and was
examined. My purity had to be established. I know, I would have
thought that a bit tricky too – but they managed to brandish a blood
soaked cloth around. Once that was done Satan, cloaked, hooded and
masked in black, entered. I had to kneel before him and acknowledge I
had been dedicated to him and baptised in his name as a child, then
swear my continued allegiance to him. Swearing allegiance renounced

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 226

all claims to purity. I was stripped and forced to kneel again vowing to
serve him forever. He then raised me to my feet saying he chose me
for his bride and promised I would share his power. As we exchanged
marriage vows we presented our wrists to a priest holding a sharp
knife. Blood was drawn, then our wrists were bound together, blood
mingling.

The

marriage was consummated in full view of the many who had

gathered. It was violent, humiliating and with an inordinate amount of
blood. Once it was over I was forced to stand sore, naked, blood
smeared and semen dripping while they placed a black cape around
me.

The role of Satan was played by my father. I became pregnant.

Liberty held this memory. She was thirteen.

I was ecstatic about being pregnant. I desperately wanted this

baby. To have something, someone to love and protect. A baby would
provide me with the strength and motivation to escape the cult. Dad
promised I could keep the baby. Our baby. Our special secret. A sign of
how much he loved me. This baby would be loved like no baby before
or since and would be my salvation. I would protect it with my life.

I was three months pregnant and once again I was the centre of
attention. I was stripped. Tied to the altar. My legs were forced
upwards and apart. Something cold and sharp was inserted into me.
Cramps gripped me. I was scraped clean. The pain was excruciating
with no anaesthetic. They aborted my baby. Then held high the foetus
proclaiming it the spawn of Satan.

They placed the foetus on the altar. My baby. The priest said

words of invocation. My baby was then hacked into several pieces. The
priest bought a piece of flesh over to me. I was forced to eat it. Then
punished for vomiting. The hacked foetus was distributed to those
assembled. It was a bizarre, cannibalistic perversion of the Christian
mass.

That was the death of hope.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 227

The effects on Liberty of remembering that abortion are impossible to
describe. Liberty with all her vitality, passion and intensity. Both the
pain and the guilt were overwhelming. She had longed for that child.
Believed that it would provide her with the necessary catalyst for
escape. Her inability to protect it to the point of birth caused great
angst and diatribes of self-hatred and abuse. That she had been
incapable of not participating in the cannibalistic Eucharist tore at her
soul. Despair overtook her.

I placed Liberty in the intensive care part of the Healing Room. She

was like a burns victim with wounds over the majority of her body. She
was in constant agony. Her remorse was endless. The pain relentless.
The promise of suicide and self-mutilation held out the only hope of
pain relief but Liberty didn't feel she deserved this modicum of
comfort. She had not been able to protect her baby so she had no right
to solace of any kind. She withdrew from the world and from therapy.
She curled into a ball of comatose pain and started to disappear. She
wrote:

Shadows on my soul
Loss of hope
loss of love
loss of trust
Shadows on my soul.

Death by abandonment
Death through despair
Death through their poison

Vile and putrid and poison?
I think not

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 228

This darkness
This comatose me
Is not made up of their evil
but is a consequence of their evil
I think perhaps she is solid pain
I think she may be utter despair
I think maybe she is deeper than that
She is loss of hope
And that is the greatest call to death of all

And yet now I take a risk
I reveal her presence
Comatose
Poisoned
Almost dead
This may well be her final call.

I constantly longed for total oblivion. For a long time she kept

profoundly still, hardly daring to breathe, not wanting to risk disturbing
the wounds. It was months before Liberty could start to express her
pain. Then her broken-hearted sobs wracked her body and were
almost too much to bear.

And then she got angry, and in touch with white-hot fury: flaming,

blazing, intense and pure. Rage poured out of every pore of her body.

Eventually Liberty was able to speak to the aborted foetus in a piece of
therapeutic work. Susan encouraged her to see the foetus in front of
her, represented by a cushion, and to talk to it. Liberty sat on the
mattress and haltingly began to put words to her pain, her sorrow, her
remorse.

“I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I wanted you so much. I would have

loved you, but I couldn't protect you. I couldn't keep you safe. I tried,
please believe that I tried.” Tears poured down her face. “Oh God!! This

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 229

hurts so much!. I wanted to protect you. I would have done anything,
everything I could to get you out. To keep you safe. To let you be born.
To have a good life. I used to imagine what it would be like to care for
you and carry you. Look after you. I imagined playing with you and
watching you grow up. I always knew you would be beautiful...and
special. I'm so sorry you didn't get to be born. So sorry you didn't get
to live your life and be who you were meant to be. I would have loved
you, encouraged you, shared in your dreams and hopes.” Liberty fell
silent. Then: “Her name is Kelly Kate. I would have called her that.”

“That's a beautiful name,” said Susan softly. “Does she have

anything she wants to say to you?”

Liberty took some time to become Kelly Kate and to hear what she

wanted to say. “It was not your fault. You couldn't save me. You could
never win against them,” said Kelly Kate. “Truly, it was not your fault.”

At that Liberty grabbed the cushion representing her lost child and

hugged it to her, sobbing. As she reached out to Susan for support she
saw Susan's face was streaked with tears. Susan held Liberty as she
sobbed and rocked, holding Kelly Kate, saying over and over again “I
am so sorry, I am so, so sorry”. Susan said those same words to
Liberty, over and over again.

Then there was nothing left but complete exhaustion. Liberty lay

down still holding Kelly Kate. Susan placed a blanket over her and left
her to sleep for a while. That night Susan rang me at home to see how
I was. Always a precious occasion.

For months Liberty carried Kelly Kate around with her pouring out

all the love she had stored up from so long ago.

I have been avoiding writing this for days. I am hardly breathing.
Always with this memory comes the question is this why I chose not to
have children? Is this the reason I never felt it possible? And still I do
not have the courage to answer the question. That would unleash a
tsunami of grief I could not bear.

Tears are pouring down my face. My heart aches and I feel so

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 230

desperately sad. Sad for the me I was back then, but also for the
childless me now. Grief, loss, regret break over me like the towering
waves of the ocean as once again I face this tragedy.

My father's actions were unconscionable. On top of that my body
betrayed me. I was not able to hold on to what I wanted most in all the
world. Had not been strong enough to protect this foetus. To stand up
to them. To stop them. I did not have the strength or ability to resist
their bizarre and gruesome rituals.

Liberty decided she hated being a woman. Womanhood was

frightening and way too vulnerable. There were a multitude of reasons
for me hating sex. One of the fundamental ones was not trusting my
body. I did not trust it to not get pregnant and, if pregnant, to complete
the pregnancy. While intercourse itself held many hideous memories
of barbarism and brutality and all the attendant pain and shame, these
things paled into insignificance compared to the utter devastation of
losing a desperately wanted child who was to provide the means of
escape and who was to lead us into a new life.

In the middle of the desolation and devastation of being a victim of
ritual abuse, I became a survivor. I recognised the amazing gifts
inherent in this hell. Admiration and self-respect started to bloom in
me as I discovered my tenacity and courage. Forgiveness of myself
blossomed because so much of the mess that had been my life now
made sense. If I had survived ritual abuse and was healing from it then
I knew I could survive anything else that life dished up.

In the midst of my healing was also the ongoing reality of everyday life.
By now I had completed my TA essays. The oral exams were held in
Adelaide as part of an international conference. To add to the stress of
sitting my exams I also agreed to present a workshop at the
conference on using TA with adult survivors of childhood sexual
assault. The only hint that I wasn't like any other person sitting their

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 231

exams was I took a small teddy bear into the exam room with me; his
name was Morgan. I introduced him to the examination panel and
explained that he was an invaluable part of my work and he was there
as my support bear. He did a wonderful job and I passed with flying
colours. After that I presented my workshop and enjoyed the
conference, then Greg and I had a week's well-deserved holiday in
Adelaide.

Several months after remembering the abortion, Liberty decided she
needed to do something symbolic to break the power of the allegiance
she had sworn to Satan. Because rituals are powerful in their
symbolism and they use the body, mind and senses I knew we had to
do something embodied, symbolic and potent. I wanted to deal with
the rituals that had bound me to Satan: the baptism, swearing
allegiance at age five, and the marriage. Susan was to be my witness.

I had three ribbons: black, red and brown. I wrapped them around

my wrists and tied them together saying: “This black ribbon represents
Satan, evil, lies, death and hate. It represents all the evil I have done in
the name of Satan and because of my allegiance to Satan. I have
committed acts of violence, hatred and death. I have done things I am
unspeakably ashamed of and have added to the evil of this world.

“This red ribbon represents blood, sex, murder and dominating

power. Because of my allegiance to Satan and my involvement in ritual
abuse I have participated in every kind of violent sexual act imaginable.
I have sought power over people in order to do them harm and I have
been involved in the murder of both humans and animals. I have used
sex for power and manipulation.

“This brown ribbon represents my parents and how I have been

bound to them. How I have sought their love and approval and obeyed
their commands. Living the life they have ordained for me.”

I then cut the ribbons and unbound my wrists saying: “I renounce

Satan, evil and dominating power. I renounce my allegiance to Satan
and sever all connections with him and his realm. From here on I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 232

choose peace over violence, love over hate, freedom over coercion and
abuse. I no longer seek domination and control and will do my best to
cause no harm to humans or animals. I sever all ties with my parents,
and will no longer follow in their footsteps or accept their values.”

I asked Woman-God to be the new source of power in my life. I

placed three new ribbons in front of me: white for truth, yellow for
light and gold for love. I acknowledged that these were the ideals I
wanted to base my life on. Susan offered each ribbon to me,
expanding on what they meant. I accepted and held each ribbon. Then
to symbolise the change in allegiance and the

baptism into a new life

Susan made a sign of a heart on me and also gave me a magnificent
yellow rose. I bought myself a Russian wedding ring, with its three
bands of differently coloured gold, to represent my change in
allegiance. I felt clean.

Using my body to claim my freedom was powerful as was using

symbols with all their potency as a way of severing the old and
embracing the new. I had closed the door on the power of the past and
now there was a new beginning.

God glimmers in the most unexpected places. In raging storms

drops of water are flung into the air, suspended in time, caught by
light, flash like diamonds and join the surging swell again. In the midst
of utter heartbreak and despair moments of love and courage break
in, shine for awhile, give strength and hope and then fall away. In the
face of utter evil and destruction life continues, injured, shattered,
unsound. Yet, somehow, the broken parts manage to reach out,
connect and interlink in order to form a fragile, damaged whole that
tentatively holds itself together and creates new life.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 233

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

T

oday the ocean is being demure: calm, gentle waves softly lapping at

the shore. I am not fooled. I am always aware of the enormous energy
that swells and pounds not far from my window. I know Bass Strait can
become a wild and stormy stretch of water. It has claimed numerous
lives, and many boats; some have vanished without a trace. It is
considered far more dangerous than the English Channel.

Unexpected, life-threatening and wild. That was how I viewed the

Vengeful One's entry into my life.

The pull towards suicide and self-mutilation fluctuated in its intensity.
There were times when my constant suicidal thoughts were nothing
more than boring, constant, nagging companions, that I wished would
go away, but basically ignored. Other times their insistence and
intensity were exhausting.

To begin with there was a

logical thought progression. “This work

is difficult and exhausting. I'm remembering all sorts of dreadful, awful
things. How long is it going to take to come out the other side? I'm sick
to death of this. I feel bad, evil and poisonous. I feel so sick all the
time. There is no hope. It's never going to get any better. I'm going to
keep remembering this horror for the rest of my life. I can't stand this
any more. Please make it stop. No one is ever going to believe me or
love me or care about me. I want to die. Death would be so much
easier than life. Why don't I kill myself?” But on a bad day I could get
from “this is really hard” to “I'm unlovable, I might just as well be dead”
in about three seconds flat. Sometimes this tore away at me but other
times it was unutterably boring. Yes, boring. There is something
wearying and dreary about hearing a voice inside your head say the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 234

same thing over and over again. It's like a nagging child. “Are we there
yet? Are we there yet? I want, I want, I want” but this was “die, die, die”.
There were days when my response to suicide was “you're not getting
it, now piss off”. Other days I longed for death.

Sometimes I could make contracts with Susan about my safety for

a month or more, it was a routine thing that took hardly any energy at
all. Other times it was more difficult and occasionally it felt impossible
when I couldn't even manage a contract from one session to the next.
Then we would break it down to every couple of days and I would ring
Susan to restate my contract and to get the support I needed to stay
alive and keep going. These were scary times and Susan was generous
in her love and support.

Then came a time when my struggle to make a contract came from

a different place. I was angry and rebellious, not scared and little. I
couldn't understand what was going on. Why had it suddenly got this
difficult. What was happening? I longed to use drugs again. I felt I had
a volcano inside me that wanted to erupt with fury and hate.

I started to hear a voice. A loud, angry, aggressive voice, full of

strength and hate. I did my best to push it down. To not listen. I would
have flashes where my body surged with a wild, uncontrollable, evil
power that soared over everyone and everything and scared me to
death.

I started to hear my mother's voice: “Use, abuse, go crazy, die.”

And glimpsed a room in a house we had lived in. It was like a pantry
and was filled with bottles of insects, snakes, spiders; a plethora of
creepy, crawly, scary things. I saw myself lying strapped, naked, spread
eagled on a table as my mother placed these things all over my body:
they crawled over my face, into my nose and ears, through my hair,
everywhere. My whole body shrank, cringing in disgust and revulsion. I
wanted to scream in terror.

My mother kept telling me I was no good and would amount to

nothing. I was a slut and a whore and would end my days as a cheap,
pathetic prostitute selling my body for sex just to get enough money to

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 235

buy drugs, but ultimately my fate was insanity and death. Over and
over again she told me this. “Use, abuse, go crazy, die” spilled from her
lips and inserted itself as a feedback loop inside my brain. When she
had finished she untied me and threw my clothes at me and told me to
get out of her sight. I disgusted her so much she wanted to vomit.

Often my response to memories was to collapse into sadness or to

feel overwhelmed by the awfulness of it all. I would curl in on myself
and succumb to an agony of self-pity and loathing. Not this time. There
were flashes of fury and hate and of power that towered over my
mother. I was capable of murder and would delight in it. These feelings
terrified me. I begged God to take the memory away, then begged for
the courage to face it.

I recognised these flashes as the beginning of memories and I

knew a new part of me was about to emerge. I tried a tentative “Who
are you?”

I was greeted with “I am the Vengeful One, I am full of power and

hate and you, you are despicable. You are worthless scum. I despise
you.”

Oh great!! “Nice to meet you, too.” I knew this wasn't going to be

good. Not that memories ever were but this one was showing all the
signs of being a real doozy.

The Vengeful One was terrifying. She exploded into my internal

world using stand-over, bullying tactics. She despised everyone and
was full of power and hate. She reeked of sex. She reminded me of the
drunken rebirthing session all those years ago when I'd experienced
myself full of intoxicating power.

One of the promises my father always made was that I would

follow in his footsteps. Just as he was a high priest I would become a
priestess, then a high priestess and would have the same kind of
power he had. I would no longer be the victim. I would have power to
kill, hurt and abuse. He told me how wonderful this power was, how
exciting, gratifying and how it made sex fantastic. He explained that the
orgasm that comes with murder is greater than any other.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 236

I didn't want to know.
One of the consequences of my

marriage to Satan was they now

considered me an adult. Time for me to be initiated into adult rites, the
rites of a priestess. It was time for me to have power.

Becoming a priestess moved me from being a victim to becoming

a perpetrator.

That sentence takes my breath away. Do I want you to know that?
The training was to continue my desensitisation to murder and

abuse. It was meant to make me enjoy it and be stimulated by it. I
hated it, but resistance was futile. The consequences were violent in
the extreme.

There was no way out.
Now I was a woman I was to be honoured. They told me many

people would love to have the position of power being bestowed upon
me. Besides, my father would not only be embarrassed if I didn't
embrace this role, he would be punished. I could not, would not, let
him down.

Susan and Greg were amazed at how much I hated my mother and

how, in the face of memory after memory, I would stand up for my
father and say he was my good Dad, he loved me and I loved him. I
clung to this love. Obviously his oft repeated mantra of “You don't
remember. It didn't happen. You know that I love you,” worked. I

knew

that he loved me.

In my defence, my everyday memories - that other world I

inhabited that was not ritual abuse - contained memories of sitting up
late at night having philosophical conversations with my father. It was
Dad who listened to me and was interested in my life and sometimes
helped me with my homework. What feeble crumbs these were, and
how hungrily I gulped them down.

I allowed the Vengeful One's memories to emerge. Her power was
awesome. She was clothed in a black cape at the altar. Full of pride,
she was standing by it rather than lying on it. Her energy filled the

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 237

room. Sexual excitement, lust and maniacal power. Tied to the altar
was a naked child. Her task was to inflict pain and humiliation.
Systematically and tortuously. Enjoyment was compulsory.

Susan tried to reach out to her with compassion. Her care was

slapped away with disdain and treated as soft, mushy and pathetic.
She didn't need love. She didn't need understanding. All she wanted
was power. I was terrified of her. Greg avoided her at all costs. Susan
did her best to make contact but without much success. It was Annette
who formed a relationship with her and called her “Venge”. No one
else would have dared. I always thought she was twenty-seven. In my
mind she was a towering adult presence. I now realise she would have
been somewhere between thirteen and fourteen. She had no choice.

I did not want to acknowledge her as a part of me. I hated what

she stood for and how I felt when she was around. Part of me was
seduced by her and wanted that power, thrilled to it, responded, lit up
with it. Part of me loved being the perpetrator because it meant I
caused the pain. I was in control and no one could get me. I was no
longer the victim. I was exhilarated by her power roaring through my
body and would gulp in air, feeling alive, every cell in my body
pulsating with sexual energy. I felt invincible, and it felt fantastic.

The cloak she wrapped around herself was made up of sexual

power and my father's lusts. It was imbued with violence and
manipulation and could extinguish light and love with the merest flick.
Around her vulnerability was a crime, love was treason – the penalty:
death.

Often in the middle of a memory I would curl completely in on myself,
totally consumed by my pain. Other times I would look out the window
of the counselling room and disappear into the beauty of the bush
outside. Perhaps a blue-winged butterfly would catch my attention, or
a red-breasted robin would hop from bush to shrub. Lizards would
scurry past and ants would be involved in creating a world a million
light-years from mine. I would visit their world for a moment, seeking

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 238

solace, respite and strength. Then, taking a deep breath or uttering a
quick prayer, I would return to my world of horror.

Coming to terms with the Vengeful One was hard work. I was in shock
for days or weeks and wandered around in a daze with nothing much
getting out or coming in, except of course at work. Somehow, in the
midst of it all, I kept working.

The memory of being a perpetrator tore me to shreds. I had taken

the moral high ground as a victim of abuse; at least I had never
harmed others deliberately. Now, not only was I remembering having
abused and killed others, I was remembering the sheer ecstasy of
power and the delight of sexual gratification I had felt in the process.

I'm breathing hard. Panting. My body is tingling and my head swirling
from going back to that place. Her power was immense. I want to
vomit. Power is such a seductive force. I can hear an echo of her in the
corner of my mind. She is telling me what a fool I am. How ridiculous
to be living in a small country town. How absurd to be satisfied with
this life. She tells me I could harness her power, change my life,
become successful, high-powered, important. Move back to the city.
Into the heartbeat of the world. I admit there is something tempting in
the intensity of her energy. She was always the seductress. I love the
sense of passion I get from her. But move back to the city? No. No
temptation there.

The split between myself and the Vengeful One was huge. I felt
enormous grief over these memories. I felt so sad and lost; a deep,
deep-down-in-my-depths sadness. Sometimes I would wake up in the
morning and hear crying. It was the Littlies, upset, distressed. If I didn't
have to get up and go to work I would lay in bed for hours, holding a
pillow, holding a child, rocking them, crooning, promising them it
would be all right. I wasn't sure how it was going to be all right but I

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 239

was determined to do my best to shelter the Littlies from the Vengeful
One.

I called her a murderer, whore and slut. But then would ask myself

to what extent her stuff was my own. I kept trying to keep it in a
separate world. My self-hatred was already intense without adding this
to it. How could I live with myself owning those truths? I believed that
knowing the truth was the way to freedom and that liberation lay in
facing the truth and accepting each and every part. This time I
struggled. Where was the freedom in accepting I had murdered and
abused? Which way was redemption? Through pain? Hadn't anyone
come up with an alternate route yet?

This was a call to face the depths of me. Prayer was always an

essential part of my memory work. Prayers of despair, disgust,
desolation. Prayers asking for strength and perseverance. I felt the call
to total honesty, to face myself and God without pretence. I could not
have done it without Annette. She saw very little difference between
Liberty and the Vengeful One, for her it was the obvious progression.
She also held on to the fact the Vengeful One was thirteen or fourteen,
not an adult, not responsible, incapable of standing up to the cult and
refusing. Annette had a great line she'd read somewhere “Never trust
anyone who hasn't come to terms with their inner-murderer.” She
believed it was only through facing the murderous parts of ourselves
that we could take complete responsibility for them. It is nothing less
than total honesty that transforms the violence within.

Between God, Annette and Liberty I found the courage to face the

truth.

What we had to face was horrendous. The Vengeful One used her

immense power to manipulate, humiliate, degrade, debase and torture
children. The cult forced her to rape and humiliate grown men. It felt
as if she had the power to dominate the world. She felt inviolate,
invincible, unassailable. She had the power of Satan and all evil at her
beck and call.

I resisted this knowledge every step of the way and I was deeply

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suicidal.
Writing this even now is difficult. I have spent days sitting at the
computer looking out into space, eking out a word here and there and
then seeking refuge in mindless computer games. I haven't
remembered this stuff in a long time. I don't want to remember it now.
Do I want to tell the world I have done such things? Will I dare to show
this to anybody? To publish? In my real name? Could I stand the
thought of friends reading this? Why on earth am I doing this to
myself? Because I believe in the power of truth, and I want to reach
out to the reader who is going through their version of this hell. Or any
other hell that my truth may lighten.

The hell continued. For the first time I was dealing with a part of me
that revelled in sex and it was disgusting. Susan tried to explain to me
that having a sexual response was understandable. I didn't want to
hear it. The Vengeful One's sexuality was repugnant. One day in
exasperation Susan exclaimed “for goodness sake, she has murdered
people, that is far worse!”

I looked at her in utter astonishment and said “Sex is worse than

murder.”

Susan was stunned by this response. When I talked to a friend, a

ritual abuse survivor, her response was “Yes, absolutely!! Sex is far
worse than murder.”

I wrote at the time:

Sex is worse than murder!!
What could possibly be going on that I won't make a contract?
That I actively want to die?
That I long for – yearn for – the oblivion of drugs?
Move towards insanity as the preferred choice?
What could possibly be so bad?
That I would choose - “use, abuse, go crazy, die”?
Instead of continue my commitment to healing?

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 241

What could it possibly be?

SEX!!!

Oh my God!!
Everything inside me curls up in horror
Everything inside me screams out NO!!
Is revolted
Horrified
Repulsed
Disgusted
Nauseated
Sickened
Repelled
Everything inside me curls into a tight little ball
And screams NO!! NO!! a million times NO!!

I will not do it
I will never own it
I will not turn it around
I will not learn to like it, enjoy it, see it as part of love
Part of spirituality
Some sacred gift

I will not do it
I refuse
And I will cut my body into a million pieces before I let it respond
I will slice myself
Kill myself
Obliterate myself
Anything
Everything
Rather than own sex

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 242

Face sex
Have sex

I will not do it
I will not face it
I will not look at it
I will not feel it
Sex as good
Sex as enjoyment
Sex as pleasure or love
I would far, far rather die

This is something utterly, completely, devastatingly repulsive

“This is an invitation to learn about sex.”
NO WAY
But this voice says I have to
This voice says it is part of my healing
Part of growth
Part of being alive and human
This voice says it is the next step along the way
NO – GIVE ME DEATH
A THOUSAND TIMES OVER GIVE ME DEATH

When I took the above piece of writing to therapy Susan was

shocked at the intensity of it. She would often try to tell me that sex
could be a beautiful, nurturing, sacred, loving expression between two
people. I would ask her questions about that, so did Liberty, but we
could never believe her answers, not in our hearts. For us sex was all
about abuse, degradation, violation and horror.

I imagine many victims of ritual abuse if given the choice between

sex or death would choose death. It was a choice I had tried to make
many times, either at my own hands or to force the cult to kill me. It

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 243

never happened. It would have been a release. Sex on the other hand
went on and on and on. Sex was the worst of all the tortures because it
happened inside the body as well as outside. It always seemed to
violate the soul. So often they would force my body to betray itself
increasing my level of humiliation and shame. Sex or murder? Surely
murder was kinder than sex.

In the midst of dealing with all this my work situation changed. The
sexual assault agency where I worked had a policy of working with
both adult survivors and child victims of sexual assault. My counselling
gifts were with adults. My work with children was adequate but
certainly not great. Because of inadequate funding for sexual assault
agencies many services were struggling with long waiting lists. People
were having to wait for months before being seen. This put stress on
everyone; staff and management had numerous meetings trying to
decide how best to deal with the problem. The final decision was made
that it was more appropriate and efficient to see children who were
recent victims of assault than to work with adults. Working with adults
often took many months or years. Working with children could bring
about change more quickly and prevented many of the ongoing
problems that arose from not having counselling soon after the abuse
became known. While I understood the decision I couldn't work under
those circumstances. My passion and my gift was for adults. I wanted
to provide long-term counselling for adults who had been abused as
children. I started a private practice called The Healing Room; the
name was an external honouring of my inner reality. I seemed to
attract people who were survivors of extreme abuse and became an
expert at spotting a ritual abuse survivor within the first few minutes of
an initial interview. These people I always referred on. I could not do
my own work and have ritual abuse clients at the same time.
Fortunately, I knew someone I respected to whom I could refer clients.

As for the Vengeful One, she was full of a hatred that was both white

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 244

hot and ice cold. Millimetre by millimetre she entered into the
therapeutic process and started to form a relationship with me. During
my years in therapy there were many, many times I did anger work
and the Vengeful One was the only part of me that did hate work.
Within her was a hatred I had never experienced before, hatred of my
parents, the cult and of all that she had been forced to do. Hatred
poured out of every part of her body. There were no words she could
use, all she could do was make guttural sounds and scream, scream
and scream. She pushed every skerrick of hatred out of my body in
whatever way came to mind. She kicked, hit, thumped, pounded, bit
and ripped. At the end of the session I was exhausted, hoarse and
empty. Susan commented that she had never known hatred to be so
clean. There was nothing hidden or shameful about it. I had
consciously asked God to be present. Everything I said was done
knowing God was listening. There was no judgement, only release and
relief.

Underneath the hate was remorse and shame. The Vengeful One

was consumed with guilt. The barriers between us started to fade as
together we remembered all she had done. The very few people I
dared talk to about it constantly told me it was not my fault, to not
blame myself, or her. I had been trained into this behaviour.
Brainwashed. Coerced. I had no choice. Every time someone said this I
felt bad, wrong and the Vengeful One got angry. This wasn't what we
needed to hear. It was wrong, terribly, dreadfully wrong. I continued to
berate myself. Susan constantly assured me it was not my fault, that I
wasn't bad. My distress mounted. I felt my safe world, the world I
considered reality, tilting out of shape. I was begging Susan to see what
I had done as bad, I couldn't stand it that she kept saying it was OK.

IT WAS NOT OK.
And then she got it.
In her firmest voice, the one she used for maintaining boundaries,

she told me that what I had done was bad. It was dreadfully bad. It
was wrong. It was immoral and it was illegal.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 245

Thank goodness.
I heaved an enormous sigh of relief. That's what I thought. It's

what I thought God thought, but desperately needed someone with
authority to say. The cult thought it was OK. I knew it wasn't. But when
others kept saying it was not my fault, I heard them tell me what I had
done was OK. It took me back to never knowing if bad was good or
bad. It messed with my mind, my reality. Once Susan told me how bad
and wrong these things were my reality was confirmed and I could
start to accept they were not my fault.

This work had a powerful effect on the Vengeful One. It allowed

her to embrace her truth. She no longer had to be a murderous, adult
presence. She became the teenager she really was. Annette had always
known she was just an older version of Liberty. It took me a long time
to realise that but once I did my terror changed to love and
admiration. The Vengeful One changed her name to Verity and learnt
to speak truth to power.

She was another ally in my healing and a further step in the

amazing transformation that kept taking place as the horror of the past
was opened up to the gentle light of Woman-God's healing power. She
was another of the beautiful jewels I unearthed along the way.

It has been raining all day but as I drove home late this afternoon the
sun unexpectedly burst through the layers of clouds on the horizon.
The sea became the colour of a good merlot. The clouds sought to
outdo each other in hue and intensity. In shades of red, orange, grey
and black that shouldn't be seen in a sky but strode across the horizon
in proud glory, spraying colour everywhere. The sky went every shade
of blue imaginable from the palest, wispy blue to an intense royal that
clashed against the clouds and the wine dark sea.

It was so breathtakingly beautiful I drove through town to a

lookout so I could stop and gape and wonder. It was inconceivable
that Bass Strait could ever cause harm.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 246

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

T

he constant pounding of waves changes the landscape. The power of

the water alters the shape and texture of the beach daily. Some days it
is flat, unmarked sand, others days there are rocks, seaweed, pebbles
and shells scattered all over in wild disarray. One day a large tree
branch sat in the middle of the sand. Even though it was bereft of
leaves it had not metamorphosed into driftwood, and looked
incongruous against its aquatic backdrop. Sometimes the sand piles
high with sharp, steep edges dropping down to where new, temporary
river beds cut through. Stand on the edge at your peril. There are days
when the sand is firm to walk on, other days when it looks safe and
hard, but it turns treacherous underfoot, as it resembles quicksand,
greedily sucking my unsuspecting feet into its depths.

It was not often that ritual abuse memories revealed events that had
happened at home. Usually the abuse took place in set-aside venues.
However, as we worked with Verity, once again my mother's voice
could be heard telling me to “use, abuse, go crazy, die” along with her
assurance I would end up as nothing but a low-class whore.

Then one day memories came that I couldn't get clear. Verity was

towering over men, treating them with utter contempt but with great
sexual prowess. Mingled with this memory were images of me in my
bedroom at home with various

family friends coming into my room

and having sex with me. My mother was collecting money for my
services as they left.

My mother prostituted me! Bloody hell, is there no end to this

horror?! This was not the worst memory, not by a long shot but it was
disturbing. I had come so close to living the life my mother had set out
for me. The way to win my mother's love and approval, the way to get

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 247

her to be proud of me, was to use drugs, go crazy and be a whore.

This was a lie. The reason I knew it was a lie was because I had

done everything she had said. I had sold myself a thousand times over
in a million different ways. Ended up in hospital with tubes up my nose
and down my throat. Gone to the brink of insanity again and again.
Once I got to the precipice of sanity her love was meant to bring me
back. Huh!!! Once I got to that edge it was me who had taken care of
myself and got me into Ward One. All my mother had done was deny I
was even in a psychiatric institution. And still she didn't love me. Still
she wasn't proud of me.

Did I really do that? Did I really try and win my mother's love that

way? Yes. I did. And I've done it again and again since then. Turned
myself inside out and back to front in order to be looked after, loved,
cared for. Recreated myself in whatever image I thought would bring
me love. I even did it when I first moved to Tasmania. It didn't work
then either.

As I was dealing with these memories I was also reading Edwina
Gateley's “A Warm, Moist, Salty God”. Great title. It took me away from
images of an all-powerful God. Reading Gateley's experience of God as
mother I wept. She talked about a God who cared, who cared about
her hurting children, responded to them, embraced and healed their
wounds. As a mother. With a heart overflowing with love. Who could
do nothing other than love, with generosity, intensity, passion. This
was Woman-God, the God I experienced, but it was the first time I had
read anyone else talk of God in this way. This God seemed bigger than
my experiences of her so far. This was a God who was connected to the
earth. Who was Mother. I desperately wanted to reach out to her, but
couldn't believe in a God who would be mother … to me. I hated my
mother so much for that. Hated her for my fear. Fear that if I reached
out to this God, who seemed to offer so much, she would be a trick,
she would laugh in my face and tell me to fuck off.

I was bone weary with the constant effort of moving forward. To

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 248

keep looking for God. To keep staying alive. I was worn out. Somehow I
kept putting one foot in front of the other. It was all I could do.

If I go to the beach at the wrong time walking is hard work. If the tide
is in I'm consigned to walking along the soft sand. I never know how
far into the sand I'm going to sink and it is a constant effort to keep
pulling my foot out in order to place it in front of me so it can sink all
over again. On and on I go, struggling forward, making hard, slow
progress. I never feel quite stable when it is like this. I'm scared I will
lose my balance and stumble, maybe even fall. On these days I feel the
beach is not my friend.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 249

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A

s I walked along the pathway by the beach I noticed a crack in the

concrete with a single blade of grass poking through. I watched them
make this pathway. Saw all the effort they went to, to make sure there
was no grass underneath that could cause this kind of problem. I
looked on as they flattened and rolled the earth and put in the metal
reinforcements and poured vast amounts of concrete. Finally
roughening the surface to make it grip in the wet. And despite it all a
blade of grass has broken through, a single blade of grass – strong
enough to crack cement. I am delighted.

Ritual abuse is designed to kill the life force in people. It is meant

to take away the will to live and sap all the joy of life from you. But
despite all their best efforts, all the concrete they poured over me and
everything they did to stop me being me, the power of life reigns
supreme, and within me is the ability to be that blade of grass that can
crack cement.

After I had been seeing Susan for more than four and a half years she
announced she was finishing work as a therapist and was going to
concentrate on her spiritual work. She would be taking six months to
finish up with all her clients. I was devastated. Often during therapy I
had been scared there wouldn't be enough time to finish my work and
would feel compulsive about trying to get everything done. Susan had
always assured me I had all the time I needed. She would be there for
as long as it took. The adult in me could understand the decision she
had made but I was heartbroken. As far as the Littlies were concerned
– she lied.

That final stint of therapy was exhausting. As well as trying to deal

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 250

with as much ritual abuse as possible it was important to deal with the
ending of our relationship. I was furious. I did not want to work with
anyone else. The thought of having to tell so much of my story to
another therapist was abhorrent. I wasn't prepared to do it. I became
obsessive, wanting more sessions, trying to rush through memories
and get everything all tied up. It didn't work of course. Susan kept
calling me to be honest about the end of our therapeutic relationship
and to deal with it with integrity.

Again and again during therapy, as the different parts of me told

their story and this story was listened to and allowed to impact on
those who heard it, those parts managed to let go all the intensity of
their memories and feelings. In their place was a jewel, a gem. An
amazing strength or treasure that was forged in the fire of this work.
Somehow out of it all was birthed an incredible gratitude that this was
what I was doing. I believed this was my life's work. This was growth in
a way I had never believed possible. It scooped out all that was wrong,
dark and poisonous and showed me the depths that were now
available to be filled with a different understanding of life. To be filled
with God. To be open to love.

As I worked with Woman-God co-creating this transformed life, its

power and influence went far beyond anything I could imagine. Once
the memories were defrosted, they merged in with the rest of me, but
they also joined an interconnected web of being, and they made a
difference.

I learnt at the deepest possible level that ultimately the truth does

set us free - but it is one hell of a process.

Of major importance in finishing therapy was the fact I still

operated as someone who lived their life with multiple personalities.
The subject of integration, all personalities merging into one, had
always been a difficult one because I had grown to have enormous
love and respect for all these parts of me. Not only had they kept me
sane and alive during the abuse, they had become an integral part of
my healing, offering their courage, perspective and, thank heavens,

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 251

their humour. I felt integration was a way of

killing off my

personalities. I was passionately opposed to the idea.

I read a book that talked about reunion, rather than integration.

This was a word I could live with, that held the possibility of each part
still maintaining her individuality yet also coming together as a whole.

I needed to do something symbolic. I found a small wooden jigsaw

puzzle with twenty pieces to it and spent hours decorating each piece,
making it represent different personalities and including things that
symbolised the relationships these parts had with Susan, Greg and me.
Then during a session I placed all the different pieces on the floor and
one by one picked them up. Susan and I reminisced. We spoke of them
and to them, with love and respect. I placed each piece in its section of
the jigsaw. By the end of the session all pieces were contained within
the wooden frame. They were still separate, you could see the outlines
of each one, but they were also part of a whole. This ritual brought a
sense of solidity to my life without betraying or abandoning myself.

I look back on that part of my life and I feel such fondness for all

those different parts of me. Yes, it was hard, exhausting work and their
stories broke my heart, but they brought such richness to my life. This
was one place I could see God in action within the abuse – multiplicity.
God didn't rescue me, but she did give me the coping mechanism to
survive. Having so many perspectives on things was wonderful, as was
reliving the delights and fascinations of childhood and the awed
wonder at the intricacies of the natural world as we walked in the
bush, and the sheer enchantment of paddling in the ocean.

I look back at the energy of those small parts of me and the time

and effort they would spend on paintings or moulding clay. The
enjoyment of stories read. The incredible courage and determination
to heal. They gained so much during that time. They had the
opportunities for love, laughter and creativity that had not been there
when I was a child. Learning to love those children were huge steps in
learning to love myself.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 252

Life is easier and quieter without them, but not as rich. They were

enchanting.

During this final stage of therapy I started attending some of the
spiritual workshops Susan and her partner, Georgia, were offering.
While I found the workshops themselves nourishing, and I met some
warm and caring people, I found it too difficult. I would have an
intense session with Susan, then would spend a couple of hours
walking around the property and then attend an evening meeting. I
could not manage the switch from Susan as therapist, Mum, support,
nurturer, to Susan the teacher and spiritual guide. It was too big an
ask. However, it was understood that once I finished with Susan, after
a break of a couple of months, I could return and attend spiritual
groups.

In the meantime Susan and I needed to say our goodbyes to the

relationship that had been an essential part of my life and healing,
more on than off, for over twenty years. Our final session was full of
honesty, love, gratitude and tears. And every possible good wish and
blessing for each others' future.

Once therapy finished Greg and I had a seven-week holiday to Greece
and Ireland which was an excellent way to get distance, put things in
perspective, and have some fun together free from the preoccupation
of therapy. Of all the places Greg and I had holidayed together the
Greek Islands were my favourite holiday destination. I loved the
colour, the light, the food, the people. The Greeks exude a joy for life
and living that is contagious.

I decided not to seek another therapist, but see how I went

without therapy and hope I had done enough work to be able to
resume a normal life. I also decided it would not work for me to
become part of Susan's spiritual community. I did not feel able to
operate at the level that would be required.

For the first few months being without therapy was extremely

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 253

uncomfortable. I had spent the last five years intensely involved in my
process, working constantly. It left an enormous gap in my life.

Shortly after my finishing therapy, John returned from overseas.

With great respect and gratitude for his journeying with me I bid Noel
farewell and returned to spiritual direction with John.

This gave me a sense of an intense period of my life being over

and normal life resuming. As before, John and I revisited many of the
memories I had initially faced with Susan. Once again there were
places that needed to be re-entered. With God. It was the next layer of
healing. We returned without the intensity of feelings and with a much
deeper sense of unity within myself. We filed off the jagged edges. It
was like putting salve onto the wounds of my scars. They started to
heal.

It was much lower key than therapy. It did not consume all my

energies. It helped me to transition back to a life where ritual abuse
was not the major focus. I regained the ability to engage in the world
again.

One day in the city, I became aware I was dazzled by the intensity of
colour everywhere and by the presence of people. Faces radiated
energy. I couldn't help but notice them; I was drawn to them,
especially their eyes. Then I realised I was seeing people again. They
had been faceless blurs for months and years. Now I was back,
present, able to see and to connect with life and with people.

These days I walk along the beach, looking out at the ocean and realise
that underneath the surface of the water, no matter if it is calm or
tumultuous, there is power and peace. Below all the surface tensions
the underwater world continues unperturbed.

I don't fear wild weather as much these days. I don't fear anything

as much. Certainly not living life. Not because the fear no longer exists,
but because it is no longer the dominant note, the foundational colour,
of my life. My painting reminds me of that. I look at its wild slaps of

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 254

colour, the diversity of brush strokes and its tenacious vibrancy and
know that each and every colour and stroke contributes to the richness
of the whole. There, beneath the curves and splashes of blue, purple,
white, brown and orange I float, no longer tossed about in its chaos
but, immersed within it, surrounded, part of the whole. And I relax.

Because at last I have learnt to breathe underwater.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 255

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 256

EPILOGUE

L

ooking out my window the joy of spring is all around. My fruit trees

have blossoms and are promising the delight of apples, peaches and
apricots. In the park the weeping cherry has just a tinge of green to it.
Across the road new shoots on the poplars and willows announce that
new life has come again.

My seascape still keeps me company and other paintings have

been added, so the room is bursting with images and colour.

It's been fourteen years since finishing therapy and much has

happened in that time. Sadly, my marriage to Greg came to an end
four years after the conclusion of my therapy. In some ways it was due
to the pressures of that time but also because Greg developed major
depression and decided he needed to live by himself. The pain of his
departure was intense but we parted as friends and continued to
support each other as we learnt to go our separate ways.

As time went on I found a strength and vitality emerging that

surprised me. I came to realise just how much of myself I had
submerged in my marriage. Bit by bit I reclaimed those parts of myself,
embracing my passion and intensity.

In my ongoing quest for a deeper relationship with God I decided

to study for a Bachelor of Theology. I wanted to understand Scripture.
People talked about the importance, the sacredness, of Scripture but I
never seemed to get it. It didn't matter how much I read the Bible or
explanations of it; I found it boring. I decided to study the Bible from
an academic point of view to see if this would open up a new world to
me and bring the Scriptures to life but that didn't work either. In fact, I
had some huge arguments with the Scriptures. They broke my heart
with their barbarism, sexism, brutality and violence. I raged against

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 257

them and wept bucket loads of tears in horror, fury and frustration.
And ultimately – they left me stone cold.

What I discovered was theology. I loved theology! Here was life,

questing, passion, yearning, longing, questioning, imagination – all
those words that described my relationship with God. Also screaming,
raging and demanding. In short - honesty. I was seriously hooked, and
unbelievably excited because here were people who were asking my
kinds of questions. They were trying to figure out the problem of evil
and suffering in the world, and it had a name – theodicy. People were
asking questions I'd never even thought of: interesting and intelligent
questions. Theology opened up a whole new world. I listened to
women's voices, the voices of the poor, third-world voices, black
voices, lesbian voices and post-colonial voices. I had the time of my
life. I knew God delighted in my questioning and enjoyment.

The journey of writing this book has been one of letting go the

remnants of the abuse that continued to ensnare me. The most
significant of these has been my weight. As I have written my truth I
have let go the protection I believed my weight gave me. In the past
eighteen months I have lost sixty-five kilos and have found a joy in my
body I never thought possible.

These days I hold my life gently. I continue to be nourished by the

beauty of this place. At my deepest level I long to be loved and
understood. I now believe this is possible because I have some
understanding of what love is. I no longer believe the lie of my father
that ritual abuse was an act of love.

I gaze out the window, knowing these are the last words of my

book. The next stage of my life is waiting to emerge and reveal itself. I
have no idea what comes next but whatever it may be I have the
strength to embrace it and live it to the full. No matter what life throws
at me I have the courage and faith to survive it. I now have a life that is
brimming with possibilities and sparkling with God.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 258

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
There are many people who supported me on the long road of healing
and got me to the point of writing this book. To all of you who
journeyed with me, who helped keep me going in body, mind and
spirit: friends, fellow group members, residents, 12-step-programme
participants and other survivors; healers; herbalists; massage
therapist; physiotherapists; colleagues; nurses; doctors; ministers and
counsellors, my heartfelt thanks.

To all my friends who encouraged me to tell my story and those who
kept me going with support, suggestions and critique – always over
mocha and food, thank you for your belief in me.

I am also grateful to those in my writing class who read, encouraged
and gave honest feed-back and had great ideas.

To those who got my body going again, who helped transform me from
pain-riddled immobility to a fit and active

iron woman, my eternal

gratitude. I never believed I would like my body – now it gives me joy
and pleasure.

My appreciation goes to those who put in monumental efforts of
reading, feedback, advising and editing. They took my raw story and
provided a structure, insisted I apply the rules of grammar and
punctuation to my manuscript and helped me clarify what I wanted to
say.

Finally, my thanks to the designer of my website elspethliberty.com for
his generosity, patience and perfectionism.

Each and every one of you has contributed in some way to the sum
total of my life and to this book. My love and thanks to you all.

Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 259

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Ritual Abuse and Other Acts of Love 260

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