Tilly screamed. Anna__ shocked brain only registered annoyance at the sound. Really, when had someone screaming ever solved a problem? She recognized her fixation on this irritation as her own way of avoiding the horror in front of her, but only in a distant and dreamy sort of way.

Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person__ shadow is embodied in a person__ conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

Denial returned, like a nagging cough you can never quite shake. Actually, it was always close at hand, and even though "satanic ritual abuse" did describe what had happened to me when I was a child. the concept was so foreign and so horrific that some part of me still wanted to stay in denial.Devil worship dominated my childhood. That was undeniable, even if it was still nearly impossible to contemplate. Both of my parents and any number of their friends, as well as "respected" members of our community, had worshipped Satan.I pushed the notion aside with all the power I could muster. I kept thinking to myself that it was ridiculous and impossible.p157

It was her turn to hold him up.

Seeing you with that guy tonight made me nuts, because every bone in my body says you__e mine.

For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice.