torture vicious smile at me your cunning smile and lure me in again I long to breath your last request and sign from deep within my heart beats steady rhythm here as it throbs against my chest and as you raise the knife on high my grin seems kind at best you can't fathom why I won't run and why I can't leave you but just one look into my eyes and you will see the truth it's not you who holds the knife but in my hands it lies and you're the one who's scared of me but you've made your own disguise you've conned your way into my soul and now you want to run but it was you who set this up and now I'm having fun 000108 ... old hick someone inserting a glass rod in your urethra and then breaking it with a hammer so that everytime you piss, shards of glass work their way through the urinary tract. Kinda puts everything else in perspective, doesn't it? 000127 ... Tiffa this aching looping of my soul it drives me hard i want to scream but smile as i regain my self control. its like the tarot celtic cross all in the way you lay out the cards the tea leaves spelling out the Fates as if they can see my heart once you see that its not you its me that burns in this inferno choose the path that kills the flower even as it wilts 000522 ... silentbob You cut my heart with razor-blades by telling me things i love to hear you pin me to the weel. you spin me around. you throw knives, at me. almost plucking me in my arms, chest, my thighs. You put me down on concrete surrounded by rusty nails and broken glass. you send me down to the ground to break my skin and cut me. i bleed out the emotion, cry out in agony. YOu stand right in front of me...inches from my grasp....then you disappear. that is torture. also. Living a dark lonely pathetic self-loathing life for 17 years. finally finding light but then having it blinded by a difference of faiths. what the hell is that? fuck that shit! 000712 ... Tank knowing that you both care and don't. knowing that, most likely, nothing will ever happen. knowing that i am destined to be alone. knowing that i will miss out on a lot... 010201 ... birdmad! birdmad! birdmad! it is, and i'm almost there (scream some more) 010202 ... hallkwik Sitting inches away from the person you love most, knowing you can't be close to them.. 010202 ... birdmad too true 010202 ... G_wiz13 Sitting across the country from the one you love, and her room mate being another guy. Even thought i trust her i would still like to kick the shit out of him.but thats over now her room mate is a chick, but theres more of a twist she is bisexual so i am dieing in agony to be with her. and i completely agree with what was said above. sitting next to the one you love and not being able to be with her. sadly i was in that position once. 010202 ... NInnY Nu Nu it seems like were all in the same god dam position then, we all just have to live in misery for the rest of our lives. Bloody shit in it. What must be done about it. I'm living around some old cogers and I't driving me mad. 010513 ... doesitmatter? i sit here, facing this screen, reaching out to anyone. someone take this pain away, make it stop. after all these years I still can't shake the feel of sitting alone in that closet, the musky odor of my stepfather's coats scratching my skin. now its 15 years later and i still wake up at night, tortured by the memories. i still cant stand inside a closet to pick out a coat without feeling tears in my throat. and i still cant let anyone get close to me. someone help. 010625 ... baby satan okay. gimme. i'll take that pain and turn it into something green and sequinned. 010625 ... Casey mmmmmm...whips mmmmmm...the rack mmmmmm...iron maiden I think the chinese method is all wrong. Instead of tortuing, you just get a good long draen out shower...I think that method was invented in the 60's, beck when no one took showers 010625 ... anyway you torture me with those gentle words you call me such names! 'cute', 'perfect' whats wrong with you? Quit being so mean. You tease me with your loving embrace. stop giving me value! this is against the rules. you're cheating! maybe you never read my instructions, so I'll help. "she is not to be appreciated, liked, or given genuine affection, by/from anyone, anywhere, at any time whatsoever." I'm not what you say. i'm not what you think. I'm undeserving of your affection. what do i do?! must wreck happines... nothing good can last anyway. 010707 ... distorted tendencies I know how John feels because I feel the same way about you. 011006 ... distorted tendencies And he's not obsessed, no. He's merely in love and he can't get out of it. 011006 ... girl_jane -I wonder what he's thinking... 020303 ... *silent screams The worst torture in the world is when someone gives u something u dare not admit that u want. u refuse to give into the reality of it, then when u finally do itz the greatest comfort u've ever known. Then somewhere along the line of trust and betray they feel the need to take away the one thing u'll be left craving. U can't just give me something, then leave me here hying and waiting for it to come back.... 021206 ... Sam Vaknin There is one place in which one's privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed - one's body, a unique temple and a familiar territory of sensa and personal history. The torturer invades, defiles and desecrates this shrine. He does so publicly, deliberately, repeatedly and, often, sadistically and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence the all-pervasive, long-lasting, and, frequently, irreversible effects and outcomes of torture. In a way, the torture victim's own body is rendered his worse enemy. It is corporeal agony that compels the sufferer to mutate, his identity to fragment, his ideals and principles to crumble. The body becomes an accomplice of the tormentor, an uninterruptible channel of communication, a treasonous, poisoned territory. It fosters a humiliating dependency of the abused on the perpetrator. Bodily needs denied - sleep, toilet, food, water - are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct causes of his degradation and dehumanization. As he sees it, he is rendered bestial not by the sadistic bullies around him but by his own flesh. The concept of "body" can easily be extended to "family", or "home". Torture is often applied to kin and kith, compatriots, or colleagues. This intends to disrupt the continuity of "surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others", as the CIA put it in one of its manuals. A sense of cohesive self-identity depends crucially on the familiar and the continuous. By attacking both one's biological body and one's "social body", the victim's psyche is strained to the point of dissociation. Beatrice Patsalides describes this transmogrification thus in "Ethics of the unspeakable: Torture survivors in psychoanalytic treatment": "As the gap between the 'I' and the 'me' deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The subject that, under torture, was forced into the position of pure object has lost his or her sense of interiority, intimacy, and privacy. Time is experienced now, in the present only, and perspective - that which allows for a sense of relativity - is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams attack the mind and invade the body as if the protective skin that normally contains our thoughts, gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about, and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you, was lost." Torture robs the victim of the most basic modes of relating to reality and, thus, is the equivalent of cognitive death. Space and time are warped by sleep deprivation. The self ("I") is shattered. The tortured have nothing familiar to hold on to: family, home, personal belongings, loved ones, language, name. Gradually, they lose their mental resilience and sense of freedom. They feel alien - unable to communicate, relate, attach, or empathize with others. Torture splinters early childhood grandiose narcissistic fantasies of uniqueness, omnipotence, invulnerability, and impenetrability. But it enhances the fantasy of merger with an idealized and omnipotent (though not benign) other - the inflicter of agony. The twin processes of individuation and separation are reversed. Torture is the ultimate act of perverted intimacy. The torturer invades the victim's body, pervades his psyche, and possesses his mind. Deprived of contact with others and starved for human interactions, the prey bonds with the predator. "Traumatic bonding", akin to the Stockholm syndrome, is about hope and the search for meaning in the brutal and indifferent and nightmarish universe of the torture cell. The abuser becomes the black hole at the center of the victim's surrealistic galaxy, sucking in the sufferer's universal need for solace. The victim tries to "control" his tormentor by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by appealing to the monster's presumably dormant humanity and empathy. This bonding is especially strong when the torturer and the tortured form a dyad and "collaborate" in the rituals and acts of torture (for instance, when the victim is coerced into selecting the torture implements and the types of torment to be inflicted, or to choose between two evils). The psychologist Shirley Spitz offers this powerful overview of the contradictory nature of torture in a seminar titled "The Psychology of Torture" (1989): "Torture is an obscenity in that it joins what is most private with what is most public. Torture entails all the isolation and extreme solitude of privacy with none of the usual security embodied therein ... Torture entails at the same time all the self exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibilities for camaraderie or shared experience. (The presence of an all powerful other with whom to merge, without the security of the other's benign intentions.) A further obscenity of torture is the inversion it makes of intimate human relationships. The interrogation is a form of social encounter in which the normal rules of communicating, of relating, of intimacy are manipulated. Dependency needs are elicited by the interrogator, but not so they may be met as in close relationships, but to weaken and confuse. Independence that is offered in return for 'betrayal' is a lie. Silence is intentionally misinterpreted either as confirmation of information or as guilt for 'complicity'. Torture combines complete humiliating exposure with utter devastating isolation. The final products and outcome of torture are a scarred and often shattered victim and an empty display of the fiction of power." Obsessed by endless ruminations, demented by pain and a continuum of sleeplessness - the victim regresses, shedding all but the most primitive defense mechanisms: splitting, narcissism, dissociation, projective identification, introjection, and cognitive dissonance. The victim constructs an alternative world, often suffering from depersonalization and derealization, hallucinations, ideas of reference, delusions, and psychotic episodes. Sometimes the victim comes to crave pain - very much as self-mutilators do - because it is a proof and a reminder of his individuated existence otherwise blurred by the incessant torture. Pain shields the sufferer from disintegration and capitulation. It preserves the veracity of his unthinkable and unspeakable experiences. This dual process of the victim's alienation and addiction to anguish complements the perpetrator's view of his quarry as "inhuman", or "subhuman". The torturer assumes the position of the sole authority, the exclusive fount of meaning and interpretation, the source of both evil and good. Torture is about reprogramming the victim to succumb to an alternative exegesis of the world, proffered by the abuser. It is an act of deep, indelible, traumatic indoctrination. The abused also swallows whole and assimilates the torturer's negative view of him and often, as a result, is rendered suicidal, self-destructive, or self-defeating. Thus, torture has no cut-off date. The sounds, the voices, the smells, the sensations reverberate long after the episode has ended - both in nightmares and in waking moments. The victim's ability to trust other people - i.e., to assume that their motives are at least rational, if not necessarily benign - has been irrevocably undermined. Social institutions are perceived as precariously poised on the verge of an ominous, Kafkaesque mutation. Nothing is either safe, or credible anymore. Victims typically react by undulating between emotional numbing and increased arousal: insomnia, irritability, restlessness, and attention deficits. Recollections of the traumatic events intrude in the form of dreams, night terrors, flashbacks, and distressing associations. The tortured develop compulsive rituals to fend off obsessive thoughts. Other psychological sequelae reported include cognitive impairment, reduced capacity to learn, memory disorders, sexual dysfunction, social withdrawal, inability to maintain long-term relationships, or even mere intimacy, phobias, ideas of reference and superstitions, delusions, hallucinations, psychotic microepisodes, and emotional flatness. Depression and anxiety are very common. These are forms and manifestations of self-directed aggression. The sufferer rages at his own victimhood and resulting multiple dysfunction. He feels shamed by his new disabilities and responsible, or even guilty, somehow, for his predicament and the dire consequences borne by his nearest and dearest. His sense of self-worth and self-esteem are crippled. In a nutshell, torture victims suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their strong feelings of anxiety, guilt, and shame are also typical of victims of childhood abuse, domestic violence, and rape. They feel anxious because the perpetrator's behavior is seemingly arbitrary and unpredictable - or mechanically and inhumanly regular. They feel guilty and disgraced because, to restore a semblance of order to their shattered world and a modicum of dominion over their chaotic life, they need to