I spoil the whole episode:

Jack comes across a girl crying in the woods. He starts to walk toward her but as he does she becomes frightened and runs away, leaving behind a teddy bear. Jack picks up the bear and follows the girl so he can return it to her.

The girl enters a creepy house in the woods and Jack follows. While in the house, Jack starts having disorientating visions of a family with terrified expressions, being attacked by something he can’t see. He finds the little girl, and tells her they need to get out of the house because there is something very wrong with it. However, all the doors and windows have disappeared and they can’t get out. Jack decides they should sleep and try to figure it out in the morning.

When he awakes, Jack enters a kitchen where the little girl is sitting at a table, eating breakfast with her family, who seem happy. Confused, Jack accusses them of being an illusion. When he does this, the little girl shoots worried glances at her father. the father insists that everything is as it should be and is perfectly fine, however he does not sound sincere. Jack keeps asking questions about the house, and why the kitchen is impeccable while the rest of the house is run down and filthy. The mother says there was a storm, which doesn’t explain anything at all.

The son’s eyes start to roll back into his head and he convulses. Sweating, but smiling, the father asks “Why don’t you tell our guest about what you study?” but the son can’t speak. The same starts happing to his mother, and the father says they must not be feeling well. The little girl looks at Jack with sad eyes and apologises. Then the father starts convulsing as well. Everything flickers, and the illusion of the impeccable kitchen disappears – it is as dark and dirty as the rest of the house. The girl is the only member of the family not convulsing and she runs and hides as black shadows start emerging from the rest of the family.

The family members dissappear when the shadows have fully emerged and combined to form one big shadow. Jack has a vision of the shadow forming a dragon shape and engulfing the family members one by one, starting with the father. The shadow then sucks him into a silent, black and white world. Inside this place he is bound by an invisible force and can’t move. He sees the family members are bound also but they are smiling, seemingly not aware of that fact that they are paralyzed and in a bizzare dimension.

The dragon appears and tries to attack Jack, but recoils at the mere sight of his sword[truth!]. Noticing this, Jack frees the sword with his mind, and cuts the invisible ropes with it. He then tries to attack the dragon with his sword, but it only seems to get bigger. Jack realises that this world doesn’t follow physical laws. He can do anything he can think about. The dragon forms a ball of fire out of thin air and throws it at him, but he catches it and throws it back, destroying the dragon. The black and white world vanishes in an instant and Jack is back inside the house, which starts to cave in. Sunlight pours in through the gaps in the ceiling, upon the family who are now free of posession/entrapment by the dragon shadow and embrace each other.

The episode is a perfect allegory for a dysfunctional family. Doors and windows disappearing is a common theme in all kinds of media – when you’re in an abusive family, doors and windows are meaningless. You can’t leave even if you want to. They may as well not exist.

The youngest, the little girl, is terrified all the time, but not old enough yet to be possessed by the shadows. She apologises to Jack, as if she had done something wrong, but she is a powerless child.

The dynamics of an abusive power structure are all very apparent – the parents rushing in with excuses that don’t make sense like “there was a storm”, and sweating with the fear of their illusion being broken when the other family members are clearly in trouble, instead of actually helping them.

The stark black and white world represents the extreme black and white thinking of dysfunctional people; it is a psychological construct, thats why, of course, Jack can’t defeat the monster with physical force.

Sadly, in real life people can not be saved by an outside hero. They have to break their own invisible chains, and they so rarely do.

Screenshots:

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This stuff is still far to painful for me to discuss in public. But I thought it would be helpful for others to write about it here. it is my experience of sexual abuse and shame in childhood that i repressed, and the subsequent unconscious behaviour i exhibited as a child and adult.

My first, clearest memory, is of being very young – perhaps 2-3 years old, and being in hospital sorrounded by my whole maternal family, except my stepfather and biological father were not there. I have always thought this memory very unusual, because my maternal family has spread out across the continent, and the only other time they are all in a room together, is at christmas.

My mother has told me that around this age I became very, very sick – in fact I lost so much weight, that I almost died. I believe that the weight loss was a possible psychological indicator of the sexual abuse, and I was taken to hospital, where I possibly admitted to the abuse upon examination. I don’t know how I can be sure, but it makes sense to me. Eating disorders are very common in sexual abuse victims. The behaviour of losing weight to draw attention to my sadness and of gaining sympathy through real or fabricated illness continued right up to my adulthood.

I was told at age 17 that i was abused by a teenage boy when i was 3 – but I believe the abuse started in the home, with my father, and that is why my mother eventually left him. The reason i believe this is because all throughout my childhood I was a terrible insomniac, which is a symptom. I think it’s less likely that a 14 year old neighbour had access to me at night than my own father did. Also, my mother has admitted that my biological father once threatened to rape my sister and me. I don’t think the capacity to threaten rape and the capacity to actually rape are mutually exclusive.

I had reccurring dreams for years and years about lying in the middle of a road, paralysed, while a single car was oncoming. i can still remember the terror and helplessness i felt in these dreams. they could be connected to the dissociation and fear i felt during the abuse.

I was terrified of being alone in the dark. I became so terrified that sometimes I would hallucinate. Objects in my room turned into terrifying monsters that might kill me. I believed that if I kept a blanket over my head that I would be safe from them. This speaks of very early abuse and developmental stunting I think. Up until the age of 2 or 3 children lack object constancy, so if you show them an object and then hide it, they actually believe it has disappeared. I was trying to dissappear by hiding under the blankets. Every night was sheer and absolute terror – I would run crying from my bedroom, and I was always punished for being “difficult”.

Looking back on my childhood, I feel an intense sexual shame hanging over every aspect of my life. Wearing dresses and girly clothes was intensely shameful for me.
up until 5 or 6 years old my stepfather would bathe me, and I always hated it. I felt prone lying back in the bathtub to wash my hair and I tried to contort my body to hide my private areas. My stepfather always told me to stop being silly and to lie still.

The games I played with other children were usually very sexual. I had a friend growing up who’s mother was best friends with mine, and they were always at our house. I remember one time being in the backyard playing alone with this boy. I was lying spread eagled on the ground and I was “tied up” with imaginary ropes. My mother eventually came storming out of the house, absolutely infuriated, and told us to stop playing.

As it turns out later, this boy and his sister suffered long term sexual abuse at the hands of their father.

I thought of myself as a boy, right up until my early teen years. I do not know if this is a natural kind of transgenderism, or if it is an effect of sexual abuse that causes me to identify with my attacker, or possibly a kind of gender ’splitting’ caused by the abuse. The last possibility makes most sense to me. Young children also lack gender constancy like they lack object constancy. Two characters that have appeared in my mecosystem i call “jack” and “emilie” – jack is a very boyish, tough attitude female, and emilie is a hypersexual, very childish and “cute” girl. i think they represent the split in my gender identification. I have shocked myself at times by realising that I have been unconsciously acting out the “emilie” persona around significant others, by speaking in a babyish voice. I used sexuality and a “cute” persona to gain affection and admiration from these people.

Although i was not conscious of it at the time, before i even knew, the signs of my sexual abuse were very obvious – of course the sexual acting out and terror of my childhood, and as i grew into a teenager, the fact that i was sorrounded by people who had often suffered very severe long term sexual abuse.
Many of them didn’t know it consciously, but looking back, i see the signs in them, and it is none too surprising, considering like attracts like. My second relatioship, and first sexual relationship, was with an anorexic girl i had met in a mental boarding house for teenagers. she had the feeling something had happened to her but could not remember it consciously, like me in my early teens. her father would often tease her about the size of her breasts and other things. i believe that this is a way to re-inflict sexual shame upon a child who is old enough to complain about physical sexual abuse.

My relationship with her and others was sexually violent – consensual violence, but still violence. Realising how this was connected to my sexual abuse later on gave me a sickening feeling.

Something i find interesting that i have only begun to realise recently is the fact that i kept all my relationships secret. I do believe this was an acting out of the abuse – while messing around in my parent’s house, there was a kind of thrill in the thought of being caught. i look at it as a kind of ‘hidden exhibitionism’. I wanted to be caught because as a child, i had longed for my parents to catch my abuser in the act.

Another recent and very difficult to proccess discovery is my mother’s emotional incest of me. my mother would tell highly innappropriate jokes and take me to watch adult movies. i always felt a deep sense of shame when this happened, and dissociated from it by acting like i didn’t understand the sexual nature of the joke or movie when i did. as my stepfather grew more and more emotionally distant, my mother leant on me for emotional support, and made me the ‘man’ of the house. i hated her for this and felt completely disgusted by it. early in my childhood there was also quasi incestuous physical touching and voyeurism. my mother would ask me to get her something while she was in the bathtub or shower and always left the bathroom door open when using the toilet.

I have been considering hypno-therapy for some time to deal with this. the thought being that i can only truly begin to proccess the abuse, shame and dissociation if i re-experience it.

I hope this post is helpful for those who have been abused or suspect they have. i want you to know you are not alone.

I don’t think I’ve gone into detail about my deFOO before. It hasn’t really entered my mind thus far.

I deFOO’d around the beginning of 2008, maybe a week or two after leaving on a trip to America. However I would say the process began a long time before this – around my mid teens. After years of suffering severe physical and mental torture from my mother, such as beatings, sexual innappropriateness, and mind twisting manipulation, I finally began to fight back. We began to have horrendous fights that became violent, with me smashing plates or punching walls, and I would either be kicked out or leave the house myself.

I was in and out of youth homeless shelters and mental institutions during this time. I would return to my mothers when I had nowhere else to go and the proccess would start all over again. I hated, hated, hated my mother, but the psychological defenses inflicted on me through years of abuse compelled me to return, and re-enact this drama.

I always believed that one should have nothing to do with those who abuse him, even family members.. however, no one I knew supported me on this, until I joined Freedomain Radio. Finally, here, I discovered that yes – leaving an abusive family is an option.

In February of 2008 I went overseas to visit my then girlfriend. My mother and grandmother both saw me off at the airport. I believe that they could sense what was going to happen – they were verbally attacking me the entire time, so viciously that I became dissociated and robot like in my behaviour.

Finally, when the time came to catch my plane, I snapped out of my zombified state – I walked as fast as I could without running toward the gate, and I didn’t look back.

After a 24 hour plane ride and then a nice, long sleep, I became struck with terror at the thought of ever returning to my parent’s house. I cried to my girlfriend and repeated over and over that I couldn’t go back there. However, it took a while for me to send an email to my mother. When I did, I asked her why she had kept the fact that I was sexually abused as a very young child hidden from me, even when I was depressed and suicidal throughout my teenage years. This information could have helped me understand the depression I was going through better, but she kept it hidden from me.

Her response to my question was “We talked about this when you were 17. I thought you were fine about it” which was totally dismissive of my feelings in a heinous way, and completely enraging to me. Nobody just “gets over” being sexually abused – I did not even consciously remember the abuse, and yet I had been acting out because of it my whole life. That is how deeply sexual abuse is imprinted on the unconscious memory.

I told her not to pick me up at the airport when I came back and not to contact me again. She sent me several emails within a few minutes threatening to call the police and accusing me of being rash. The truth is this had been coming for a while and she knew it – and she knew that threatening me with coercion would only drive me further away. No one honestly believes that threatening someone with guns will make them LIKE you. She wanted me to leave – as did the rest of my family, none of whom have made a single attempt to contact me, to find out why I left, or even to guilt trip me into staying. That’s a pretty clear message to me, that I mean so, so little to them they wouldn’t even write an abusive email, let alone a compassionate and curious one.

Which, of course, only justifies my deFOO even more.

As Stef has said – you do not deFOO your family, they deFOO you. This, I believe, is very clear in my case.

Although I am living on my own now, and I am poor, I have discovered a great capacity for joy and love that could never have been explored while I still had my monstrous family members in my life. For the first time I have firm friendships where I can be vulnerable without fear, and I rejoice in simply being alive – a stark contrast to the suicidal, friendless, “mentally ill” teenager that I was. I’m not looking back. Nothing in the world could make me.