Three or four brothers. But I don't specifically recall; I'd have to look at my secret-decoder ring dossier in order to answer that question more thoroughly. (roll eyes)

Supposedly there was as well a sister who died at a very young age.

Please forward NI numbers, phone numbers, addresses, dental history when you get a chance, cheers. ;-)

Lovely song from Yusuf Islam, Mal.

'Traditional song, a beautiful prayer for anyone that has some faith.'




'He also, whether he meant to or not, has also spread untruths about certain elements of his parents' past.'

I have drawn a complete veil over my parents and thus my own past, and refuse to discuss it with anybody at all.
My reasoning is that discussing it brings it back to the present for me--I have chronic PTSD--I have already revisited it myself, ad infinitum, over the years and have a sense of personal equanimity about it now. It is a hell I am no longer interested in revisiting or living in.
This is a personal decision and nobody elses to make, query, or criticise.

It took me many years of pain and confusion to get to this point, aint about to change now--and certainly not for any anonymous person on the internet.
Face-to-face I make on-the-spot choices about what I reveal, as I am ugly enough myself to deal with any adverse consequences.

I disagree, obviously, with the current therapy view that you should let it all hang out at all times. That never worked for me and I am essentially a pragmatic person. I like stuff that works.

I had'nt realised that sWord had such a good grasp on the funding and dynamics of the Wanker and his crew, very illuminating.
Still, as Ash was totally beguiled, I guess they did they did the only sensible thing and researched the devious Apostle and his devious business model themselves.

He's quite right about it taking 10 or more years to an ex to start openly talking. It takes at least that long to sort through the crap in your own head, if you ever get that far. It took me even longer to find the appropriate language to explain it to myself.

Exit counselling can help there in giving models and language, a bit of structure etc for the person to consider.

Nick has studied the JCs closely for years. I doubt there's anyone who knows more about the cult than him. He's got large parts of the JCs forum saved to discs, including various articles which the Apostle would rather keep from public view. He had the nous to do this before the devious Apostle deleted half his forum.

Quote
Stoic
I had'nt realised that sWord had such a good grasp on the funding and dynamics of the Wanker and his crew, very illuminating.
Still, as Ash was totally beguiled, I guess they did they did the only sensible thing and researched the devious Apostle and his devious business model themselves.

He's quite right about it taking 10 or more years to an ex to start openly talking. It takes at least that long to sort through the crap in your own head, if you ever get that far. It took me even longer to find the appropriate language to explain it to myself.

Exit counselling can help there in giving models and language, a bit of structure etc for the person to consider.

Yeah, Nick's work was really good there. My compliments.

Some other therapy terms that I stay well away from,
a) because I have never been able to figure out what exactly is meant by them and
b) because I am, even after many decades, in no mood to try to apply these terms to the behaviour I hate with a vengeance:

Forgiveness
Closure
Healing

The personal equanimity I have found does not include any of those concepts, and doesn't seem to require them either.
The behaviour I hate is described at its simplest as bullying by one person of another. There is plenty enough of that in the world to make 'forgiveness', 'closure' and 'healing' non-starters for me.
Years ago, when I traipsed around various psychotherapeutic 'healers,' my main point of dissatisfaction was that I felt bullied by them into accepting the need for me to 'forgive' my oppressors in order to get some 'healing' and 'closure.'
It had me wondering whose agenda these 'healers,' that I was paying hard-earned cash to, were promoting--it sure wasn't mine.

When I finally figured out my own agenda, in minute detail, I was able to find someone who really could help me with the skills I knew I was going to need to live it.

I never, ever forget. It is coded into every cell of my body.

Their suggested "Forgiveness" is nothing other than repression....

a repression of your right to challenge those who abused you...

..be healed by becoming a psychological "door-mat".....yea,...right!

I would have thought that there was only ever ONE particular brother of McKay, who ever posted on this forum....

Robert Lifton, who knew a bit about cult dynamics and brainwashing, on the 'American Apocalypse'----about the war on terror but applicable here also, I think, with regard to the inevitable accompanying paranoia. Well worth a read for some sanity:

[www.factnet.org]


'Warmaking can quickly become associated with "war fever," the mobilization of public excitement to the point of a collective experience of transcendence. War then becomes heroic, even mythic, a task that must be carried out for the defense of one's nation, to sustain its special historical destiny and the immortality of its people.'..............


......'War fever tends always to be sporadic and subject to disillusionment. Its underside is death anxiety, in this case related less to combat than to fears of new terrorist attacks at home'.......


......'The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil.'.......


......'We need to take a new and different lesson from Lord Acton's nineteenth-century assertion: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton was not quite right. The corruption begins not with the acquisition of power but with the quest for and claim to absolute power. Ever susceptible to the seductive promise that twenty-first-century technology can achieve world control, the superpower (or would-be superpower) can best resist that temptation by recognizing the corruption that follows upon its illusion.'


'We can do better. America is capable of wiser, more measured approaches, more humane applications of our considerable power and influence in the world. These may not be as far away as they now seem, and can be brought closer by bringing our maginations to bear on them. Change must be political, of course, but certain psychological contours seem necessary to it.

As a start, we do not have to partition the world into two contending apocalyptic forces. We are capable instead of reclaiming our moral compass, of finding further balance in our national behavior.'



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2011 10:52AM by Stoic.