House of Psychotic Women (2012) by Kier-La Janisse
The first chapter discusses Janisse's slow crawling dread of birth, childhood, ghosts, and her mother.
Welcome.
If this has been recieved, the mail delivery sewage network is up and running this winter, and you may have spotted a large rat with a small postman’s hat either crawling out of the toilet or into the walls. He was simply ensuring the safety of this newsletter! We will continue discussing House of Psycothic Women by Kier-La Janisse, our focus today being the first chapter - Wound Gatherers. This is where the door shuts behind us, readers, and we are introduced to the front room of the House.
Featured in this chapter are discussions that some readers want to disengage or skip this chapter. A word of warning for: child abuse, sexual assault, domestic abuse, child neglect, and victim blaming.
With this in the forefront, we begin our tour with Kier-La.
Kier-La was born in Winnipeg1 and describes it and her birth:
“Winnipeg is an isolated city in the dead centre of Canada known for its long, harsh winters and its citizens’ tragic propensity for alcoholism and violent crime. This is where I was born. It was October of 1972, and my biological mother was a redheaded teenager from an outlying rural town, whose boyfriend – a year her junior – split when she became unexpectedly pregnant. The rural prairies were not then – as they likely remain – an accommodating climate for either single mothers or the quick-fix alternative of abortion, and so I was put up for adoption at the Women’s Hospital in Winnipeg, now known as the Health Sciences Centre.”
The crypt I sit in was built in the sub-arctic areas of the States as well, and totes alcoholism as the leading cause of death alongside the long, harsh winters, heavily mirroring Kier-La’s birthplace. Kier-La was an infant when her very young biological mother had to place her into the Women’s Hospital, for her to soon be picked by her adoptive parents: a psychologist named Merrill “Oates”2 and his wife Julie Janisse. The couple already had one son, but suffered a decade of difficult marriage, and her mother went through many miscarriages and stillbirths. Janisse was adopted into the family so their relationship could have another focal point, to mend and strengthen them. However, Oates was openly and vehemently unfaithful and the new adoption caused their strain to snap. By age two, Julie Janisse took her two children and left Oates behind to indulge on younger women. They moved to Windsor, Ontario, to be close to Julie’s family and have some semblance of support.
Janisse on her first memory was something your writer with rigor-mortis really fixated on, and read multiple times over, before she began to discuss a harrowing experience in her very early childhood:
“As a means of illustrating my early predilection for horror films, I have always told people that my first awareness of being alive is of watching the Granada/Benmar co-production Horror Express (1972) starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as rival anthropologists stuck on a Trans-Siberian train with a recently-reanimated alien life form, and, perhaps more unnervingly, Telly Savalas. Horror Express would play a pivotal role in my development, and watching it is likely my first fully-formed cognitive memory. But my very first memory is more fragmented, more abstract, and it would be over a decade before its meaning would become apparent. Knowing what I know now, it doesn’t make for pleasant conversation, which is why Horror Express has usurped its place in all pre-existing interviews or documentation on my formative years.”
What happened with this film to make such an extinction event sized impact on Janisse? All in time. The film cementing itself as Janisse’s first full and complete memory is the important focus here; as we walk from anthropologic rivals trying to survive a horror far from home, we tentatively move through her Windsor apartment’s hallway, to an awful real-world horror and its lingering presence following her mother, as it manifests in Janisse’s later life through her aunt’s reporting.
Janisse recollects that her earliest memory, though fragmented and blurry, was suddenly waking up in the middle of the night to a noise. She leaves the safety of her bed to see what the noise was - though a latch on her door from the outside locks her into her room for the night3. The memory fragments here: shadows, warped noises and then a swelling of fear - until Julie scoops Kier-La up to her and they take to Kier-La’s windowsill for safety and comfort. Janisse writes about her mother trying to comfort her with a shaking, terrified voice, and her younger self being very uncomforted by her mother’s attempts because of that recognition of fear. As a teenager, her aunt shed a floodlight on that night in hope to provide the truth in exchange for Janisse’s empathy, but what was supposed to be an explanation to bring equal understanding, was another weapon to stash under the bed:
“[…] My mother had sworn her to secrecy, but my aunt felt that knowing the truth might help me have more compassion for this woman I had come to despise and mistrust through the intervening years. It was a mistake – I was always looking for new ways to humiliate my parents, and the elucidation of what I had always thought was just a weird, recurring dream gave me ample ammunition.”
Julie was a nurse that took care of the elderly living with dementia and Janisse describes her as a good caretaker and very physically attractive - but had a difficult time keeping up with the state of her home. The landlord of their apartment often sent recovering addicts from a halfway house close by to fix and attend to simple problems that required some different tool sets than Julie had.4
“[…] My brother, who was 5 or 6 at the time, often stayed over at my grandmother’s house, and that’s where he was when one of these guys put a jam in the lock on the window after fixing the sink. From what I’m told, the noise that awoke me that night was the sound of my mother being raped.”
Her aunt continued:
“She heard me banging on my door trying to get out of my room, followed by a loud crack as the latch outside the door ripped off and I came running down the hallway toward them. Her room was dark, and she was pinned on the floor beneath her much larger assailant. As I appeared in her doorway, my mother begged the man to leave, convincing him that she hadn’t seen his face and couldn’t identify him. But if I were to turn on the light, he would have two witnesses.”
The man left. Julie picked Kier-La up and ran down the hall back into her bedroom and shut the door. The man returned for his cigarettes, breaking in a second time, then leaving again. After the terrifying incident, Janisse was sent to stay with her aunt because her mother had attempted suicide following the assault. It caused a very sharp chasm to begin forming between Janisse and her mother:
“[…] While she considered it lucky that I’d been around to cause a diversion, I later got the feeling that she never recovered from the embarrassment of the whole thing; that she somehow held it against me that I’d been witness to the most traumatic experience of her life. Resentment bounced back and forth between us, well, forever. Actually, a mix of resentment and pity.”
When Janisse was a bit older - she believes it was at or around ten years old - she overheard her mother talking about a very upsetting film she had either seen or read about:
“[…] The film was shrouded in controversy, so I don’t doubt that a newspaper article may have prompted her reaction. As a teenager I would eventually see the film, and I understood why it upset her, just as it upset many women at the time. It was Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity.”
The Entity was released in 1982 and based on an actual event that was going on to an actual person - but the film had been painted as a supernatural horror so as not to give away the equally horrifying and much more disturbing plot focus.
The actual event happened in 1974: two parapsychologists at UCLA named Dr. Kerry Gaynor and Dr. Barry Taff were asked for help by a woman named Doris Bither, who had a ghost in her home and needed some help. They conducted an interview lasting two hours, and Doris informed them about this ghost, which had beaten and raped her with the help of two other spirits who would hold her down while she was raped by the central ghost. Kerry and Taff weren’t leaning into her claims at first, but multiple close friends of Doris confirmed that these things happened, and that they were either there or could confirm this had been happening for quite a while now. Kerry and Taff investigated and documented this phenomena, where Janisse gives an example of Doris’ son being thrown across a room and his arm breaking on impact.5 Through their investigation, they witnessed many physical assaults, took photos, but verbally claimed they at most saw strange forms made of weird light. Both were on set of The Entity to offer a source of technical consultation.
The film discussion in this chapter only discusses a large chunk of the film, and not its entirety in detail. However, that simply means those readers who have not indulged in such an infuriating film, absolutely could. Or not.
We are introduced to our main character and the main problem: a woman named Carla Moran (played by Barbara Hershey) is a struggling single mother with a terrifying ghost problem. Janisse notes the ghost is: “[…] extremely violent, foul smelling, and distinctly masculine” and brutally batters and rapes Carla throughout the film including very extensive scenes while she is asleep and in front of her young children. Carla does have her absent work-centric boyfriend Jerry (played by Alex Rocco) that we don’t know much else about and is used as a character to further raise suspicion towards Carla's problems and fill a very small and thin space. Utterly alone in any form of support emotionally from Jerry or protection physically, the ghost continues to violently assault Carla more and more often.6
It isn’t sequestered to Carla’s home either, the violence continuing at her friends’ houses, inside her car, and eventually she decides to visit a psychiatrist to grapple with whatever is happening to her. Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver) is exactly how we would expect, and have a quote from him - pulled by Janisse - that are sure to make readers audibly groan in frustration:
“I’ve seen cases of hysteria that have raised welts, caused blindness, loss of hearing…”
The older white man writes out a slip for tranquilizers and asks Carla to tell him about her childhood - classic. Carla openly discusses her father - a minister - terrifying her and molesting her as a child, being scared of the dark, and running from it all at sixteen, getting married, and immediately finding herself pregnant. The pregnancy caused her equally young husband to panic and he started taking drugs, but before it could really start to escalate, he is killed in a motorcycle accident before Carla was even born. Carla’s mother tried to remarry another man much older, but it’s inferred they had divorced after a short time as well. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Sneiderman doesn’t believe Carla’s situation involves a ghost at all - he believes Carla is doing this to herself because of some repressive feelings and a secret wish to be raped7. Despite the mountain of sound evidence that is supported through scientists, her friends and her children, the psychologist convinces Carla this is the case and she agrees to his theory that if there’s a possibility that she could be sick, it has to be treated, and it must be stopped for the betterment of her family and friends.
The further along into the film we get, we are shown Carla’s struggle to bounce back after the time spent with Dr. Sneiderman. She is resigned, the light gone from her eyes, and isolates herself within her home, causing a heavy cloud of depression to permeate8. Sneiderman calls her, suggesting she talks to or visit with someone outside of her home for support, but she refuses to do so. Janisse explains the decision Carla makes as:
“[…] she exhibits the behaviour of the masochistic woman who repeatedly returns to an abusive lover. In a sense, it’s traumatic bonding – the abuse only strengthens the ties between the abused and her abuser, because it is a shameful secret9 that is shared between them.”
But not to worry, it gets even worse! Dr. Sneiderman invites Carla out with him to a psychiatric panel to solidify that the ‘ghost’ issue is actually just a ‘Carla’ issue. The internal ‘Carla’ issue symptom list includes:
“[…] she is acting out some adolescent masturbation fantasy and repressing the desire to have intercourse with her son, who is the spitting image of her dead husband. She is analyzed as having a fear of sex bred into her by a strict Christian upbringing, and as ‘imagining’ her father to have had incestuous designs on her. Any chance of having a normal, healthy relationship with a man is sabotaged by her need to have ‘safe sex’, meaning sex through which she derives no real pleasure; so she creates a destructive fantasy to intervene. But the panel’s observations don’t sit right with her; these people are objectifying her, and are insensitive in their accusations. A female psychiatrist on the board cuts to the chase: “Would it be a reflection on you as a woman if [the entity] left you, if you were cured?”
If the reader, like your author, the author of this book, and her mother, are outraged, confused, insulted, disturbed, or otherwise - you are not alone in your disgust, as it is shared. Would Carla snap out of her imaginative self-induced rape fantasy ghost story if the torture and harm was taken away from a manifestation she created - if she turned the blame fully to herself, as the panel holds a mirror up to show what the cause of this trauma was? If she could look into her own eyes and convince herself the truth? There was no ghost, you are starved for attention, you are a liar, you want to get back at your dead partner for dying by sexually assaulting your child. The Freudian toxic sludge oozes out of the panel and fills the room in hopes to cut all oxygen off from Carla’s brain.
Janisse pulls us free of the sludge filling up this room in the house to return us to the reason she talked about it in the first place - her mother. After the split from her husband10 , the traumatic sexual assault, and The Entity, Julie remarried and Janisse’s stepfather became their own entity. Janisse describes her stepfather as a man with an unchecked temper, that wasn’t addressed by her mother because of a sound theory Janisse posits: if Julie couldn’t allow her second husband to get away with his harmful behavior and had to initiate a second divorce, it would render her a failure. She continues:
“If one views Carla’s situation in The Entity as the equivalent of domestic violence, Sneiderman’s assessment is not far off the mark: women who cyclically pair up with or return to abusive partners are more often than not re-enacting residual experiences, constantly returning to the source of trauma in an attempt to master it, to get it right.11 In The Entity, Carla is eventually driven from her home; but as the film’s closing credits indicate, the entity follows her, and the attacks on her real-life counterpart were supposedly still occurring after the film had been made. If the film had provided some sort of closure – if Carla Moran had somehow defeated her spectral assailant – perhaps the film would have been received more favourably. Any misogynist elements would have been softened by the triumph of the woman at the end. But Carla doesn’t win. She remains the victim.
In the end, Carla’s ghost and Doris’ ghosts, continue to attack both character and woman. Doris died in 1999, with many continuing to speculate and condemn her and brush the entire incident off as a tabloid story. Carla is immortalized on film as a loser, a victim, a resignation, an unreliable narrator, a crazy woman. Audiences from premiere to today openly hate the film adaptation with validation. Janisse ponders on The Entity’s disappointing ending - would things be less awful if Carla overcame this ghost? If she went to a priest or exorcist, or a friend the parapsychologists had a connection to, maybe the female psychologist could have realized the panel’s gross assessment and decided not to say what she had and instead helped her, or had opportunities to listen to her friends over the phone about research they found at the library, or fully believed in herself with support from those around her to once and for all face the ghost and destroy it, would it be better? We can only dream alternatives for Carla that are kinder, empowering, resulting in peaceful days.
Janisse compares The Entity to another entity-antagonizing film more readers might have watched - Paranormal Activity (2007). Though not focused on sexual politics of the time, Paranormal Activity sets a similar story up: woman experiences violent entity, man ignores the woman, woman is isolated, entity kills or continues torturing woman. There are some major differences to equate to the similarities, as all good and proper comparison/contrasting film analysis goes. For those who have not watched the film, Paranormal Activity follows Micah and Kate, a couple who have recently moved into a home together. Kate is harassed by an unseen force that starts to make its presence more and more aware through the film - much to the delight of Micah. He keeps a camera or three always on within the home12 though Kate pleads with him not to. She feels as if the cameras are making the ghost angry but her worries are unheard by her husband. It gets worse after a psychic confirms the force is demonic and drawn to Kate specifically.
“Kate objects to her boyfriend’s liberal use of the camera around the house – which acts as a buffer obscuring their personal communication – and his increasingly macho attitude about handling the problem himself, without the assistance of a professional demonologist. He challenges and taunts the entity even as Kate begs him to stop inviting more horror upon her. Micah thinks it’s a game though, and to emphasize this, he brings a Ouija board into the house, to Kate’s furious objection. With the Ouija board left alone during an argument that takes the couple out of the room, the camera records the movement of the planchette across the board, spelling out a word that appears to be the name ‘Diane’ before spontaneously bursting into flames.”
After researching, Micah shares with Kate that he found some information about this ‘Diane’ the board had spelled out. Diane was a young girl who was also haunted by something and it stopped momentarily after her entire home was set on fire and burned down. Years after, Diane was visited by the spirit again, but died from the surprise visit. The demon that followed Diane around ran her into the ground and Kate is terrified in learning that the demonic spirit in their home could be the same one that had killed Diane. Of course, Micah finds this improbable and ridiculous.13 The reason he gets angry about the situation and offers no support to Kate is because he feels shunned as Kate did not mention that she had been haunted by something before they moved in together. Micah takes the situation into his own hands once more, bitter and angry. He forces Kate into a spiral because she had ‘kept’ the information from him. Micah openly states:
“You’re my girlfriend, and I’ll handle this myself.”
Kate, much like Clara, regresses into herself, powerless to pursue something that is affecting her. Janisse continues:
“In Peter Tscherkassky’s experimental shorts Outer Space (1999) and Dream Work (2001) – whose images are derived from The Entity – the filmmaker’s hands themselves become the entity, prodding, breaking and doubling her image with sadistic detachment. But unlike The Entity, Paranormal Activity doesn’t delve too deeply into Kate’s history or how the haunting may have affected her psychologically, other than illustrating an associated sense of shame that lends to her evasiveness as an adult. These kinds of films, in which an invisible antagonist returns again and again to an increasingly defeated victim – while operating superficially as ghost stories – are almost always analogous to other psychological issues, most notably the repression of traumatic memories and the cyclical acceptance of abuse.”
In both examples of The Entity and Paranormal Activity, the (adult, female) lead characters are stripped of all traits, replaced with identifiers of shame and hopelessness, and eventually their own thoughts and voices are also taken away. Ghosts as a story device to refer or be traumatic memory repression and the abuse cycle make sense within both films because to be haunted is traumatic, let alone your fellow human beings assisting in repressing and accepting the continual wheel of self-blame, neuroses, and in isolating them, turning the person themselves experiencing the abuse or trauma into a ghost themselves.
“The notion of a haunting coming back intermittently is something that has always interested me, based on the fact that many of the traumatic events of my own life have patterns of reappearance. A haunting is very much like a memory, as Barry Curtis noted in his book Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film (2008)14: “The experience of being haunted is accompanied by a crisis of objectivity and demands a process supplementing unreliable vision with other kinds of knowledge.” As she grew older, my mother would wrestle with unwanted memories and delusional visions, just as I struggled with identical, recurring nightmares for most of my childhood, followed by a hysterically violent adolescence that repeated much of what my stepsister had gone through before. No one in that house was okay. We mistrusted and manipulated each other, creating an epic drama in which the unreal became real, the foundation of which has been lost over time.”
We get introduced then, to Janisse’s new home and new family, which she was very excited to learn about. Adam, her stepfather, had Julie and her children move into a house his parents had owned for a while, and had two teenage daughters of his own. Karen, one of the teenage daughters, caught the attention of Janisse. She idolized her older stepsister for being a rocker, defiant, someone who spoke their mind and did as she wanted. Karen also caught Julie’s attention by constantly fighting her for Adam’s attention and affection. It didn’t take long to become a full blown war between Karen and Julie, resulting in physical abuse from Adam. Fists were raised towards his daughter whenever she angrily responded to his questions about the situation. Janisse’s brother Burl was never part of these altercations, but at age five, Janisse was fighting her stepfather’s violence against her older sibling with her own breed of violence. After about a year, Karen ran away from home and left all of the things in her room to Janisse - who made it into a shrine, a safe place to hang out in, try her platform shoes on, and listen to Karen’s CDs.
“[…] I would think of her when watching Disney’s sole venture into horror territory, The Watcher in the Woods (1980) in which ‘Karen’ was the name of the missing daughter who haunted the forest from a parallel dimension. Karen’s room always figured heavily in my dreams; except in my dreams it was my room, which I took to be an unconscious wish to be her. I didn’t become my sister, but I soon filled the same role in our house.”
Janisse goes on to describe Adam as a usually grumpy man who hated his job and refused to see a doctor for chronic pain in one of his legs. Julie had asked both Burl and Janisse not to bother their stepfather unless he engaged them, but Janisse thought that the mood her stepfather wore was not her fault - which was correct - and shouldn’t be exiled for it. She did not have to be a quiet and invisible ghost within the house she lives in, so she made herself loudly and obviously known. A year later, Janisse was eating breakfast and her stepfather demanded it to stop, and after a couple minutes of being mindful of the noise, slipped back into the open-mouthed chewing of her cereal. Adam forced food into her mouth, cutting her mouth up with dry toast, hurling frozen shrimp at her, and dragged her back into the kitchen when she attempted to run for her mother’s room for help. Throwing her into the basement, down the stairs and into the pitch black, he threatened to break her fingers if she turned the lights on, and left.
“I was afraid of the dark, and stayed down there for what seemed an eternity before I heard the sound of my mother getting up from her room to go to the bathroom. I bolted up the stairs to the bathroom door and began pounding on it, screaming for my mother’s attention. She opened the door and looked at me, a mess, welts on my face and blood lining my kneecaps and the corners of my mouth. She stood there for a moment before saying “I can’t deal with this”, and then went back into her room and closed the door, ignoring my continued pleas for her help15. This would become the familiar response whenever my stepfather lost his temper with me, although it would never again reach the same level of physical violence.”
The fighting between Janisse and her stepfather continued for years her mother, adoptive father, and extended family refusing to comment or become involved. However, Janisse’s awarded respite from violence was fictional violence:
“Despite everything I was probably closer to my stepfather than anyone else in my immediate family. Both possessed of volatile tempers, he and I would engage in brutal, noisy, violent altercations that would have everyone else in the house hiding from a flurry of projectiles. After a particularly vicious fight, the routine was always the same: my stepfather would wake me up in the middle of the night for the late-night creature feature on some Detroit station, bowl of popcorn in hand, and say, “Remember this next time you get mad at me.” In other words, my tolerance for real-life violence was rewarded with horror films.”
But Janisse also found the aftermaths where it was particularly rough brought more attention from adults outside of the home:
“The police were at our house frequently, although I never knew who called them. I loved the attention, the tension, the probing questions, knowing full well that if I said the right thing, my stepfather might go to jail. But I didn’t want him to go to jail. I just wanted him to stop being in a bad mood all the time.”
She continues to reflect on her magnetism to violence and firmly planting herself into situations where she understood and weighed an outcome of more violence:
“Part of me must have thrived on the drama of the violence, otherwise I would have adopted my brother’s seemingly neutral stance instead of engaging in what now seems to me deliberate sabotage. My mischievous nature made it easy for me to be blamed for everything, while my brother sailed through any threat of punishment just by keeping his mouth shut. In retrospect I think he had the right idea. But there was something attractive about being able to endure the violence, and it wasn’t just the popcorn and horror movies I would get afterwards. As I mentioned, my mother tolerated it because she felt to do otherwise made her a failure. Why I put up with it was for a totally different reason: I knew it made my parents failures, and the more I could take, the more morally superior I felt.”
This is a fairly common thought process now, with more resources to recognize and tools to help escape our parents and their parents from cyclical abuse inflicted throughout our life. More people recognize a continual, generational, cycle of violence from their caregivers because their caregivers did the exact same methods, and are open to state that recognition. If a parent hits, their parent hit, and their parent hit them, because that is how they learned a punishment physically harmful and scary enough to leave a mark on the skin and the brain.16 Alcohol abuse was also common in Janisse’s household, again, as many of us would understand.
Janisse closes the chapter with this:
“I’m tempted to say she never had a chance, but we all have a chance. We all make choices. Barbara Hershey in The Entity, Florinda Bolkan in Footprints, Mimsy Farmer in The Perfume of the Lady in Black, Daliah Lavi in The Whip and the Body, Daria Nicolodi in Shock, Seo Won in Bad Guy – they all make choices. But what choices do they make and why do they make them?”
What choices do women in horror make - and why do they make them? Why is that so scrutinized under multiple magnified lenses? Are the choices used to place blame on them? Did they make those choices without knowing the outcome? Or did they make those choices knowing the possibilities? Do they walk a path already placed in front of them with or without full knowledge? Do they know the destination? The end? The consequences? The triumphs?
Readers, your homework is to watch The Entity or Paranormal Activity and experience women becoming ghosts against their will. Try to think about and theorize their choice. We can discuss it next time.
Closing the crawlspace door,
Han
For non-States or Canadian readers, Winnipeg is the capital city of the Manitoba province in Canada, and was built on Anishinabe, Ininew, Oji-Cree, Dene, and Dakota lands, as well as the homelands of the Métis Nation.
Janisse calls her adoptive father ‘Oates’ after Warren Oates, an actor who shared similar physical characteristics with her father.
Janisse explains that her mother installed it due to Janisse’s extremely violent tantrums as a child.
By this, I mean small issues with pipes, water, and electricity were handled by these guys - trades skill sets that Julie probably didn’t know how to approach, fix, or have the literal tools to remedy.
Janisse also gives us a creepy note: “[…] (strangely, the actor who played her son in the film also had his arm broken while shooting the scene based on this event).”
Janisse notes the ghost becomes the stand-in for a violently drunken husband, in turn defining Carla in the abused housewife role. It is not at all subtle in context and viewing that this is definitely the case and set up, absent boyfriend and all.
Janisse discusses this being an advocacy or validation of therapeutic rape, which is hardly nor solidly defined by modern psychologists if at all and mythical. For more on this, Janisse sources everyone’s favorite guy Freud, and his text in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).
As one would do if you are being left alone to a violent ghost that is assaulting you physically and sexually while you sleep, unable to escape a torment that you are being convinced is your own fault.
In this context, it’s a shameful ‘secret’ that many people close to Clara have not only been subject to, but were witnesses to multiple times and support her through extremely traumatic events.
Who, Janisse recalls, did not believe in the real incident of Doris Bither in 1974, and insisted it ‘never happened’.
Though not fully agreeing with Janisse on this statement, there is the strange internet phenomena of ‘I can fix him/her/etc.’ and it is often that both abusers or the abused see the other or a person as a ‘project’ to be ‘maintained’ or ‘worked on’ or ‘fixed’ which is another issue entirely. Sometimes, you can be born into a situation of heavy abuse and become accustomed to that way of living and being treated, so it feels foreign and ‘wrong’ if removed. Or they can never leave in the first place. As a victim of a lifetime of abusers, I do not ‘return’ to these situations to ‘get it right this time around’, but I can understand and empathize with those who do.
As is the tradition of found footage films!
As it is not directly affecting him, he can further distance himself from it, and doesn’t feel as if this fear that Kate openly displays is warranted nor is he responsible.
Yes there will be newsletters on this book as well, your scribe adores it.
This is a similar dynamic to my own guardian ghouls as a smaller creature, and full recognition I could not ask for help was cemented into me. I still find it extremely difficult to accept let alone request help and advice or openly speak about troubles.
Janisse kept herself going through her developmental years by putting one foot over that threshold, along a thought process, perhaps similar to: my parents were unhappy with themselves and their lives, and because they are miserable and dole that abuse to me in differing ways, and I have no support besides myself, it proves they failed themselves and their children. They are broken. But they cannot break me and that shows them and it shows myself just how much more they are failing.