Survivors experience different severities, intensities, and complexities of traumatization. Each survivor exists in a different state of egression from these conditions. There may be survivors in our group who were deliberately born victims; still egressing active conditions; and/or otherwise remaining entirely disabled and lacking agency. Our relational agreements function as kind guardrails that enable us to benefit from each other's company, without being harmed by the harms of each other’s experiences.

 

Peer Facilitation. There are no facilitators in our groups. Our groups are run by peers in mutual aid, where no one is hierarchically superior to another. We are all helping ourselves and others cultivate community for benefiting survivors.

 

Privacy. We do not reveal the identities of people inside of the group with people outside of the group.

 

Intention of kindness. Our primary action together is acknowledging reality with the intention of kindness.

 

Ongoing access and reaccessing. For many of us abuse is not only in the past but is active and ongoing. This is just reality.

 

Triggers. If you are here, it is likely that you are already triggered all of the time. When people have complex trauma, triggering is just the normal state of the nervous system. The number of different things that can trigger others are pretty much impossible to avoid. While we seek to be skillful and respectful together, it is necessary that we also may be explicit and direct about our experiences because we have nowhere else to process any of this. We are cultivating community wherein reality is not ignored, but is observed, engaged, attuned with, and responded to—while individual members maintain their own agency in terms of contact with traumatic and disturbing material.

 

Suicidality. If someone states that they are actively suicidal, we acknowledge this in the check-in and offer support throughout the meeting.

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No assumptions about identity. Survivors born into slavery, slavery-like conditions, and organized network abuse, from infancy onward had lives and identities formed by torture. Should we ever egress our in-born conditions, we are not restoring a whole self to a former state––we are just existing for the first time. Our identity must be formed, not repaired. These survivors become further damaged by demanding that their attention be placed on identity. Some survivors are here as people who have no outside identity, other than being a survivor, trying to survive a day at a time. Children in slavery grew up with identities defined entirely by submission, obedience, utility to others, fear conditioning, survival strategies, and roles imposed by captors/family/cult/traffickers with no internalized sense of who they are, what choices they may have, what rights they may have, what aspirations they could have, and what may be possible for them.

 

No assumptions about shared culture. Survivors raised in captivity or inside of environments engineered by abuser groups above the law and with conventionally unlimited resources are disabled from experiencing shared culture. Not only is there an absence of shared culture, but there is an exponentially harmful effect deliberately created to ensure that what is co-regulating and comforting for the general population is torturous and gaslighting for these survivors amongst them.

 

Resources. Any access to resources that survivors may appear to have does not reflect their ability or agency to interact with those resources, including socioeconomic assets, relationships of family, friends, spouses, children, and non-harmful and accurate therapy. Survivors born into torture trafficking may be permanently disabled from abuse and actually disabled from joining a working class. The most traumatized survivors just need 24/7 careproviding and supportive housing. This must be acknowledged. 

 

Sometimes, when survivors appear to have resources, they may actually be imprisoned by the gaslighting appearance serving to further enslave them right in front of everybody, and this disables them from accessing help because of assumed agency that they cannot act upon.

 

Media and technology. Survivors are primed in childhood to interact with media and political events differently than the general population. Cultural artifacts including religion, politics, celebrity, media, and technology are vectors in mind control programming, and survivors experience different effects dependent on how they were programmed. Given the degree to which media and technology were used in our slavery, programming, and torture––and also used to maintain the effects of such in our systems––and given how much these artifacts pervade all of our lives––it is on topic to process how media and technology have affected us, but not for the sake of small-talk or co-regulating based on assumptions of shared culture. 

 

Compare and despair. In reverence of survivors born into slavery and slavery-like conditions––the reality of the effects of mind control and social engineering at the population level must be acknowledged. At the population level, people are conditioned, culturally shaped, and socially engineered to measure their own pain and suffering against the pain and suffering of others, instead of just directly being able to meet unmet needs, as a function of population control. Comparison leads to despair by functioning to disconnect us from our needs and replace our actual needs with competition for worth. This creates guilt and shame and turns survival into a trial rather than a right.

 

For survivors born into the most extreme iterations of mind control slavery, perpetrators deliberately apply comparison as a weapon inside of socially engineered environments to determine which children and adults are special and survive, versus not special and die. Being special does not mean being loved or valued—it means being kept alive for enduring more suffering and chosen for the endurance of taking and inflicting pain that other children and adults could not. We were chosen by surviving what was meant to destroy a person, while others were discarded, deemed expendable, and ultimately sacrificed based on their responses to torture. The phenomenon of celebrity is socially engineered and is built on foundations of survival in ritual sacrifice.

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The effects of this mind control shape our relationships by forcing love and survivability to appear as scarce and conditional inside a double bind of limited resources and survivability. Socially engineered competition for survivability exists at the population level too and is also based on the demonstrability of (non-torture-based) forms of “specialness.”

“Compare and despair” refers to the effects of this particular function of mind control. At a population level, the effect of this is achieved vis-a-vie resource control, identity interpellation, and mimetic warfare. While controllable resources cannot actually include love, people at population levels are mind controlled to abandon love as a scarce and conditional resource.

 

Outside of the implementation of mind control, there is no actual ranking system that determines who is and on what basis are they worthy of love. In reality, being loved and valued does not necessitate others being harmed. Part of recovery is discovering that love actually exists and you are actually worthy of love. We are learning together that having love does not require sacrifice and that nobody is replaceable because everybody is worth more than the harm their body can take and the harm their body can inflict. The only route out is to love ourselves and each other to freedom.