Names tend to be confusing when talking about a Multiple. When you talk about the handle of a multiple that is also the name of one or possibly more "alters," well, we can't blame you for being confused. We are.

But what I tell most people is that Bob King is our name, which it is, and we don't bother going into deep discussions of our internal landscape, because it doesn't matter. We are well behaved and don't change eye colour or mannerisms at the drop of a hat. Not usually. And even when we do, most folks don't seem to pay it much mind.

Therefore, for all intents and purposes, we are Bob King. If you send mail to that address, it gets to us. Same if you walk up to me and say, "hey, Bob!"

So who is this Bob King guy, anyway? Well, I (using the singular for biographical purposes) was born at Sec. 30, Tpe. 40, Rge23, W3rd, Saskatchewan in the country of Canada, the Year of our Lord, 1957.

I find birthdays depressing in the extreme, so I'll just admit to being a Scorpio and an INFJ, leaving the exact date vague enough for my comfort.

I escaped from Saskatchewan within two years. I ended up in Grays Harbor County, Washington State, USA after a year or two in British Columbia. In 1974 we moved from an isolated home in the country to a house in Aberdeen.

Aberdeen was the birthplace of Curt Cobain, and I want to say for the record that we were wearing "grunge" in the seventies. Grunge is what you wear in the woods, setting chokers and dodging draglines.

Curt was a child of that culture; about the main difference between him and me is that he could play guitar and I can't. The essential angst, that I have, but it gets expressed in different ways.

I've had an extreme interest in art since I was a child. (We draw in several different styles, each one of us has one or more favorites.)

That, and huge childhood/adolescent passion for all things Tolkien (save the Simarillion, which is as dry as Leviticus being read by Phil Graham) brought me by roundabout ways to Dungeons & Dragons (TM). But I escaped ... although not within two years. And this allows a narrative convention that allows me to gloss lightly over my childhood for now.

This was back in the dark ages, before Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (TM).

I was at DeVry Technical Institute in Phoenix, AZ, learning how badly suited I was to a life as an Electronic Technician. In my spare time - like when I should have been fruitlessly studying my textbooks - I was plotting and planning my way through two Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. This was waaaaay back there, before "Greyhawk" appeared.

Anyway, I dropped out of DeVry, went back home and proceeded to freelance artwork to The Judges Guild Journal and The Dungeoneer, which had appeared to bring game-aids to time-starved dungeon delvers and elf-bashers everywhere.

Presently, I found myself in Decatur, Illinois, working for Judges Guild. But like all my employment, it didn't last terribly long. The problem with being a multiple and not knowing it is that you can never be consistent at anything and you have no idea why. Well, that's how it worked for me, anyway. I fubared in a major way and left rather than face the embarrassment of staying.

All of that is ancient history and I'm much better now. Heh. But I was there at the first explosion of the role-playing phenomenon; at Judges Guild in 1978. I did some good work there, had some fun and made some friends that I immediately lost track of.

I've since realized that is a symptom of how my mind works; no sense of time, little sense of connection. Sigh.

It would be nice to be normal, I suppose, but I am instructed by the examples of friends from high-school who, in the quest for normalcy variously committed suicide, became alcoholic and developed peptic ulcers.

From there I bounced around a bit; a job illustrating board games, a stint at a small newspaper; I tried to sell freezer beef.

Between the board games and the newspaper I ended up in British Columbia again, where I lived for a time with my father. When my job disappeared he kicked me out of the house and during the ensuing extreme depression I got myself involved in a cult. That sucked ten years from my life, one damn boring endless minute at a time.

During that time my father died; I hadn't spoken to him for over two years and the only emotion that I truly felt was relief; relief and a sense of freedom, of a huge oppression being lifted from me. He was a truly evil man and the world is a better place, etc.

Why did I stay? Oh, jeez! Well, because I thought I belonged. Belonging is a powerful feeling, especially if you have never really felt it.

But I escaped from there too, into a three-year relationship with someone as wounded and needy as I was.

I had been having increasing problems that seemed to be neurological. It became obvious that stress, particularly relationship stress was having a profound effect on my condition. I was unemployed and trying to make a mark as a free-lance game-aid designer while all of this was happening, having horrible equipment and software problems and out of the blue she asks "is this because you are mad at me?"

Actually, I probably was pissed off beyond endurance. But the unspoken contract we worked under was that since we loved each other, we could never be angry at each other. Anger, in her mind, equaled abuse. And I knew that if I expressed my anger, I would lose her. At the time I loved her very much, or I thought I did. So I repressed it so well that I never consciously felt any anger at all.

This is a really dumb thing to do, by the way. It's a one-way ticket to a six-month "vacation" in a place with one television and no magazines from the current decade.

The question put me into a full-blown seizure. I found myself lying on the bed, unable to move, unable to think, simply repeating the word "no" endlessly.

This went on for an undetermined time during which she just picked up and left. That was the end of the relationship although afterwards we tried to be friends. That didn't work either, and we fell out of touch, one of the few occasions when I haven't regretted allowing someone to pass out of my life.

I've come to realize that our relationship was one of co-dependency, not of love. As such, it's not really worth regretting, other than as a tragic waste of time.

But there is nothing I can do about that; even as there are many other things in my life that I bitterly regret; things that I have done, things I have failed to do, things I allowed to happen to myself and to others. Dust in the wind, all of it unless God grants me the opportunity to fix some of it.

I share this highly subjective testimony in order to pinpoint the things that I feel contributed to my current situation and mental state. I harbour great anger, obviously, and a great deal of guilt and regret over things that should have gone much differently.

Besides my family of birth, I've managed to loose two entire families during all of this, with six children in total. Whatever the right of it might be, immaterial of fault and recrimination it's one hell of a blow. And I believe that this chain of events caused my latent, hidden multiplicity to erupt into full manifestation.

Sometimes I think that we are more defined by our regrets and our losses than our successes and acquisitions.

That seizure event was the classic sign of emergent, overt multiplicity. It took a couple more years for it to be obvious to me what was happening, no thanks to the therapeutic community. I found out about multiplicity on alt.sexual.abuse.recovery.

I tried forming a relationship with a woman who was as damaged as myself, in different ways. At the time we formed it, my major requriement is that she not be demanding or irritating. So I ended up with someone who was childlike and who had nothing in common with me, other than a difference in gender. We didn't hit it off well, and after a brief experimentation with being intimate, we reverted to being just room-mates. Well, it was more and somewhat less than that. She needed to be controlled somewhat and I needed to feel in control. So that woked for three years, more or less, until she left because of some fundamental issues that we couldn't talk away.

That was as it should be, by the way. Staying in a situation that doesn't meet your needs is dumb. Either change the situation or get out. Being miserable isn't good for anyone.

One factor in her leaving, by the way, was the formation of a wonderful romance between myself and a woman in texas, a woman I'm still madly in love with and who wears my rings. We'll be married soon, God willing and the crick don't rise.

Our dream is to get together and create a place where people like us will feel welcome and secure.

I've become increasingly interested in the issues of Ritual Abuse, Mind Control and - far more importantly - the social conditions that allow such abuses to exist and occur without a great deal of comment or notice. Such abuses are rooted in simular patterns that are not abusive in themselves, or are at least not considered abusive, but which produce a climate where such things can occur or pattern people in ways that make it possible to take advantage of them. And that's about as clear as I can be in one paragraph.

I'm considered disabled because of my multiplicity, chronic depression and contributory physical problems that are annoyingly invisible but hurt like hell. I do stuff like this to pass the time.

Oddly, I find that I'm usually happy; my self-image no longer depends on the views of others and I contribute to society in ways that are suited to my talents and abilities.

And that's really all anyone can ask, isn't it?

Childhood sucked.

Perhaps mercifully I recall very little prior to seventh grade. I do know that I experienced constant neglect, emotional and physical abuse at home and in school. But the roots of my problems are undoubtedly buried far deeper than that, in an area of childhood that I have absolutely no coherent memory of at all; the period between birth and five years.

Experts believe that for multiplicity to exist there must be profound trauma during the formative years. And I'm multiple. At least a dozen distinct alters, probably more. So something is lurking below a merciful blanket of repression. {Shudder}

I do have a few clues. I believe that my father may have been involved in some kind of racist group, possibly one with pseudo-Masonic trappings.

It would have fitted his nature.

I think all of that stopped because of my mother, who would have no truck with stuff like that. But she is not blameless either; she is responsible for neglecting me and screwing up my socialization to the point that I have difficulty interacting with people in a productive way.

Anyway, thank God, it's all over now. I can't simply put it behind me and move on to where everyone else is because I started somewhere else entirely. But I think I've made a good start on getting my life into some sort of order.

I can talk about this only in the most general terms; it's still very painful to think about.

The cult I was involved in was not terribly successful as cults go; it had no large membership, no income to speak of except for the welfare cheques of it's members. It was essentially a monument to the ego of the cult leader who was the head of a multilateral extended family.

Nevertheless, it was a cult, in the distructive sense of the word.

In a purely technical, religious sense it was not a cult, since it was not an offshoot of any established religion. It was a syncretic encrustation of bits and pieces stolen from Taoism, Christianity and just about anything else that would hold still long enough to be ripped off.

Everything revolved around the leader who claimed the ability to "channel angels." He would also channel persons from "other realities." Oddly enough, these realities always seemed to express his own views about how things should work.

The cult believed in and practised slavery and female subordination. Everyone was subordinate to the leader, of course, but females were particularly subordinate. Various forms of programming and persuasion were used; skillfully, I have to say, and with an impressive degree of patience and subtlety.

The cult practised ritual magic. Or rather, the leader said it did. He never got around to codifying it, much less practising it in any coherent sense. But individual sex magic was used and while blood sacrifice was not part of the practice as far as I know, pain and deprivation were parts of it.

These aspects alone do not make it abusive, of course. Nearly every system of anthropological magic uses pain, deprivation and exposure as ways to train the mind and to winnow out those that are not serious. I suppose the key question would be whether these techniques were used to enhance the power of the student or the power of the teacher.

In the case of the cult the power of the teacher was always emphasized to the point that the Leader was unwilling to recognize growth or progress in a student.

In a way I'm fortunate that this was the case, because this was the thing that brought me to the realization that the cult was all about the Leader and not at all about the selfless and noble causes he paid lip service to. Even so, it took forever for me to see this.

You will notice that I have not named names.

I wish to maintain a bit of privacy regarding this. Furthermore, I have every reason to believe that I would be threatened if I were more specific. Undoubtedly cult members and friends of members will read this as they are quite familiar with my Bob King handle. But if they do they should realize that any threat will make me talk more, not less.

And besides, perhaps perversely, I believe in the original goals and ideals. Since I have been so out of touch, it's possible that Fearless Leader has pulled his socks up. If so the potential for much that is positive is there. I'm skeptical, but the possibility, though faint, does exist.

I'm not afraid of a confrontation, but frankly I've got better things to do. No amount of windmill-tilting is going to convince someone to leave the cult until they are good and ready. If and when they are, they know where I am.

In general, if you are being solicited and flattered by someone; someone who has a way of sounding more learned than further discussion proves them to be, you should be wary.

This is particularly true if the person represents themselves as clergy of some religion you have never heard of that allegedly has a long history of clandestine, persecuted existence. This is a favourite way of making a cult seem more respectable than it is while making it impossible to check on it's bona fides.

Secret societies are generally something to be concerned about because they don't tell you what the secrets are until it's too late to back out. Often those secrets would gag a maggot although in my case the secret was that the only secret teachings were those the leader had yet to invent.

We tend to automatically sympathize with those who are persecuted, forgetting that at times there is damn good reason for the practice. The more secretive the cult is and the more concentrated the power of the cult, the more likely it is that there is a rot inside that will consume all that it touches.

And that is despite any spiritual validity the cult may otherwise have. Spirituality is a matter for GodEssence; power is a thing of the world. If the cult is all about concentrating power any spiritual precepts they might have are probably no more than fairly sincere window-dressing.

For more general information on cults and cult abuse, you can jump to my ABUSE page which has links to various resources.

Recovery is both harder and easier than I thought. I'm far enough in now that I have some perspective on it and although I regret the time it's taken, it's been an education I could not have gotten in any other way.

I tend to put the start of my recovery at the point of my final breakdown and suicide attempt, although things got a lot worse before they got better.

During my recovery I've given up a lot of things. I've given up trying to meet other people's expectations. I've given up trying to be all things to all people - although I treasure the flexibilty the effort brought me. I've stopped looking to others to solve my problems for me and I've stopped trying to fix other people's lives for them. That doesn't mean I've stopped listening or stopped helping, but I've learned to trust my own instincts and abilities and when I help, that's what I advise them to do.

I'm now at a point where some hints of very early memories are starting to surface. They are as disturbing as they are puzzling; existing as they do without context and containing details that hint at some truly bizarre things; things that I would never have believed, things that I currently have difficulty believing now. Which is why I won't be more specific, not until I have some better idea of the context.

At any rate, it seems that it doesn't get easier, it just gets different. Ah well, what's life without a challange?

This page hosted by:

Get your own Free Home Page!

Copyright 1995,

Bob King