My situation is that I have no memory or records of getting ECT/electroshock. Yet I claim, and speak about myself as having brain damage from ECT. How do I justify it?
Here are some of the reasons why I talk about myself as a survivor of ECT:
- memory loss from before 15, the time I conclude I had the most recent ECT. Because I can hardly recall anything from before I was 15, before grade 10, I cant know for sure if I got ECT at other times before that.
- strong emotional reaction to the topic, similar to other topics that relate to ways I have been harmed, such as circumcision.
- a very significant nightmare, relating to electricity being applied to me
- guided visualizations where ECT effects were discovered.
- similar outcomes to known ECT survivors, including not having any recollection of getting ECT
- like other ECT survivors, I also am not very upset about what memories are lost because of ECT. I have the saying about memories lost by ECT: “You cant miss what you never had”. Thats what ECT does to memories – It makes them the same as never having existed.
- in late secondary school, grade 10 onward, I was teased by other students about being “stupid”.
- I recall math being so easy in grade 9, and getting an A without trying, thats my impression of what happened. Yet from grade 10 onward, I struggled to pass most of my subjects, and graduate from high school. Math and some other things) became, and remain even now, so difficult for me. I have tried to learn math, such as matrices and calculus, and was unable to get it. Yet I am able to learn to code – just not able to do it day after day. From my grade 10 progress reports, i see that teachers observed my drop in performance and just noted that I wasn’t trying enough.
- I have documents from the time I went to a government child psychiatrist clinic in grade 3, and information about that clinic states that it also used experimental methods including electroshock. This time corresponds to all the inner 6 year old me’s that I have dug up and healed.
- spending a large amount of time trying to organize my life in a simple enough way so I can get my head around it again and again – because I cannot preserve in my mind the plan of my life. (This ability is an executive function that is often destroyed by ECT, and may be a core reason why ECT survivors can no longer work, run businesses, keep on top of personal finances, even take care of themselves properly.)
If I visualize my life as a long jigsaw puzzle, I can follow it back, and see what my experience of life was, what it was like to be there, what was going on day to day, week to week. I dont have all the pieces, but I can see the picture it makes. Then at 15 it just drops off and I have hardly any pieces at all, and theres no way to make a picture from the few that exist. Thats my childhood. Some of the few memories are vivid, but they are so few I cannot recall my experience of life. The drop off in amount of memory is sudden, not gradual, and its at about 15, not about 5. For example, I dont have a single memory of the experience of going through puberty. Not a single one.
ECT is one of the topics I get negatively emotional about, angry about. I dont get upset about all kinds of crimes against humanity, but the ones I suffered make me angry. ECT is one of the crimes against humanity that angers me.
Watching videos made my ECT survivors talking about what it is like for them, and describe other aspects of their lives, lets me know that many of the issues I deal with in my life are shared by others who have survived ECT.
I spend a lot of time trying to organize myself, primarily because I cannot preserve in my mind a complex picture of my life. In high school and university, I tried to organize my studies into folders, and tried to keep lists of what needed to be done. But this was not effective. I was not able to maintain or use the organizing methods properly. My inner life remained a relatively unorganized chaos that constantly interfered with my daily life.
As my life progressed, I gradually reduced that inner chaos by reducing possessions. I found that the less possessions I had, the more I was able to manage them. Eventually, I began to do this with information that I had kept. But there was so much I wanted to keep, organizing it into a hierarchy was not practical, and didnt make that information accessible. Eventually I simplified the format of the information, that is, I collected the information into 2 categories – media and text. All the text became digitized and is collected together. All the media is collected together as much as possible.
This has resulted in a searchable collection, rather than a structured hierarchy. The searchable collection is the one that I can actually use. An example of this, is that it is easier for me to search the internet each time I want to find something out, than to use that same information that I had kept from past searches, that sits in a hierarchy – even if I have a sense that I have already kept that information. I cant do hierarchies well, yet sometimes they are unavoidable.
It took some coding and processing of the information to standardize the formatting, and I dont know how I would have done it if I couldnt write scripts to automate parts of the process. The following descriptions of my inner work is included here because it is part of a searchable collection, which I accessed to dig out relevant parts.
My own mind holds some clues to ECT, including dreams and nightmares. One of these, from 14mar2002 I share here:
In the nightmare, I was riding along a bike path at night, my bike light was nearly flat. A man in a suit was around and when I rode past, he asked me to help him out with a torch, to read some map or something he had. So with that help, he goes up to a power grid facility that was in the park and after looking at it and verbally pointing out some points labeled with a “V”, gets out this chunky insulated electrical cable. He holds it up to certain points, and as he nearly gets it in place I realize he’s going to short something out.
So then I move it fast and ride away as quick as I can, but I suddenly get this strong feeling of being irradiated with some energy, but its so strong its affecting my ability to move. I rush home to my unit which is on the edge of a park, as quickly as I can. A man is running after me. I wonder if there was two of them. I lock my door in fear and grab the phone to call triple zero.
I feel like Im getting fried and my body temperature is rising. Its like the feeling or an x-ray but crippling – the feeling of my entire body being “buzzed” or “zapped” on a molecular level. I try to call triple zero but I cant hear properly or tell if my phone is working properly. When I find that I seem to be talking to someone, I say to him where I am and that someone has done something to the power supply. I can hardly talk, I feel like Im dying.
About the aftereffects of this nightmare I wrote:
I woke up from this nightmare feeling physically uncomfortable, incapacitated. I found soon enough that I wasnt. A rather extraordinary nightmare. I havent had one before that involved so much physical sensation. It was very strange. And the nightmare was about a very strange thing.
At the time I had the nightmare, I didnt understand what it represented, but about a month later when I revisited what I wrote, it became clear that it was about ECT:
I put the dream analysis of my nightmare onto a CD. While listening back to it, I realized that the dream was about electroshock treatment, and the feeling of being zapped is the feeling of getting electroshock. The cable that the man held the 2 ends of represents the electrodes. I was what was being shorted out.
Later on I learned more about ECT, especially how it destroys past memories. In 2004 when I watched the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, I reacted quite strongly to it and I felt that it had disturbed many parts of my subconscious mind, which I could feel being active. I was so disturbed I had to leave my friend and spend some time alone. I dont think the movie is an accurate description of ECT, but I think it gets the message across of what ECT does to memories, except that ECT is indiscriminate with its effects. It really is a matter of indiscriminately killing part of the brain and seeing if that fixes the ‘problem’.
Nore recently, in late 2015, I had another inner revelation about ECT. I was doing a healing process using the tools of melanietoniaevans.com, and I had asked my subconscious to direct me to that location in my body that corresponded to the issue I was addressing.
It is in my heart – solar plexus area, very close to the front, about the base of my sternum. The child there is about 4 or 5. When I asked what it was all about I got some flashes of being in a room scared, but not more info. I then somehow got the understanding that my survival strategy was to break up into pieces and “scatter”, as a way of escaping the bad things that were happening to me. That is the way I have lived my whole life. […] I asked the inner child to take me to the place that shows what happened. He took, me, running, with the environment whizzing by in a blur, to a small room, like a lab, with a central table for a person to lay on. My inner child said “this is what destroyed us”. “This” refers to ECT (electroshock).
[…] One thing I notice from my visualization is that my inner child referred to us as being destroyed. I know I often come up against the belief that I will never get better, never recover, but I keep trying anyway.
I know there are more parts of my mind, tucked away, that have more pieces of this puzzle. This healing process showed me that they exist and can be retrieved.
More came out with another of Melanie’s guided processes in mid 2017. (Not all processes deal with this issue. There’s plenty of other abuse issues that also get worked on):
While I was listening, and didnt really have a particular thing in mind to begin with, I had a strange thing come up in my minds eye, and it was me in the front driveway of Curdies st [secondary school house], looking toward the street, about level with the corner of the house. In the visualization I was confused, and didnt know much about myself. I knew I was Gary and I didnt know why I was there at that moment, I didnt know how I got there. And then a car drove into the driveway. At first it was a random house in […] then I recognized it as Curdies st. The car that drove up had a male driver, he came out, and walked up to me and asked me who I was etc. My eyes were at his neck height. So Im not a little kid. But not fully grown. And Im really vague. Im not sure who the man is. While Im thinking this it arises that my temples are bleeding a little. Slowly I realized in my current self that this is about ECT, and maybe is of the time I was wiped. I cried in my current self while observing this in my minds eye. Yet there was not trauma in the recollection. Just not knowing anything much. Not confused, just kind of zombie like, not able to talk properly. The weather is not cold or warm. Im wearing long sleeves and pants, so its not summer. It is between March and October probably, but not winter either. March April, or September October, I think. The car that drives in is big, but no particular brand or shape. Its wide like the Ford, not the Torana. And not shaped like the Beetle, its sedan shaped. Maybe it was the Falcon, maybe not. […] I was actually in the first person in this recollection. Then I began to take steps to go on there as my current self and rescue the me from that recollection. It really gives me a clue as to how much I was wiped. I could hardly talk. I knew my name but I didnt know how I came to be in that place at that time.
When I began the process a physical pain arose in a very small location next the my spine, just to the right, just below my shoulder blades. Im not sure what it relates to but maybe its something to do with electroshock. Its possible that the spinal column is used to carry electricity to the brain. Im not sure. I still have that painful spot. Its a tensed muscle, and quite small.
[…] I did the second shift in section 1. Another me, not long after that wiping event, came up with strong feelings about being stupid, and being aware of having become stupid and also that I was made stupid by something, but I didnt know what that was. More crying came out over that one. I knew something had happened to me to make me stupid, but later on I had forgotten that anything happened to me.
In mid 2018 I came across, in a visualization, many hundreds of teenager me’s, maybe about 15, that were all wearing very pale blue tops and pants, like yoga clothes or hospital clothes – looking like an army in uniform. In the visualization I had previously found my “trance-breaker”, who instructed me how to break the trance of subconscious parts by touching their left hand with my right hand (The color and the hand touching instructions relate to mind control programming). In my subconscious, I have many children about age 5 or 6, and many teenagers about age 14. Those are the 2 biggest groups.
Following is another part of the healing process, afterward:
So Ive rescued myself, and rose up above that, above my timeline. And Im kind of still agitated, that part of me is still agitated and cant, not really able to communicate, not able to calm down and express whats going on. Hes still really agitated and doesnt know whats going on. Hes really like, I suppose just confused. Part of me suspects that it is a post electroshock state, before that phase passes and I kind of return to reality. Its such a disconnected feeling, such a lot of agitation that goes with it, and with that feeling across my upper chest.
[…] So I did a partial merging with that part of me, it was a bit difficult to do. He was not able to give his permission to merge, or be communicated with at all, so I just went ahead and did it, and got a little bit of the merging shivers and stuff like that. And I felt that agitated feeling while merging and stuff like that. Yeah, quite strongly. And it reminds me of that agitated feeling that I used to get. when I was writing about it I would describe it as ‘I dont want to do anything but I cant do nothing’. It was really just an agitated and disturbed feeling, and this is that feeling, or very similar to it. […] Im guessing, but not sure – that could be the state of mind that exists after getting electroshock, and before that effect wears off and before I get my sense of reality back.
As I was 15 when I was ‘wiped’, its not possible for me to demonstrate that the ECT took away my ability to live independently and function well, because at that time I was still completely dependent on my stepfamily.
I cant recall enough from before getting wiped, to sense much about what I was like, what I was able to do – not enough to understand what I would be able to do if I was not given an electric lobotomy – without my permission – by what amounts to a serial killer in a white coat.
A serial killer in a white coat.