How QAnon Speaks to our Collective Sexual Shadow
By Darshan Stevens.
Jessica Prim was arrested in May of 2020 after being radicalized into the QAnon/Pizzagate conspiracy theory. She threatened to kill Joe Biden and drove to New York with knives in her car. In her tearful live-stream arrest video she is pleading “help me” to the police officers.
Prim had hours of live-stream video on her Facebook page. In the video she says her daughter was sexually molested by Prim’s ex-boyfriend. Prim also hints at having a history of abuse herself. If it is true that Prim has a history of sexual trauma she may have been especially vulnerable to the extremely rapid QAnon radicalization she went through. (Her Facebook feed indicates she was initiated into the conspiracy via the QAnon recruitment video series, ‘Fall of the Cabal,’ only about three weeks before her drive to New York, her breakdown, and her arrest).
The face of Jessica Prim in her live-streamed video is the face of a person in extreme distress. With QAnon adherents, as with other cult followers, the line between perpetrator and victim often becomes very blurry.
QAnon is an alt-right extremist movement that believes Trump is going to save us from a “Deep State” cabal of Democrats, celebrities and “elites” who rape, torture, and murder children. The QAnon conspiracy theory may seem absurd and fringe, but chances are you have friends or family who are adherents and are actively sharing some aspect of it. According to a December 2020 IPSOS poll more than one in three persons in the United States believe a “Deep State” has conspired to undermine Donald Trump, and seventeen per cent agree with the statement: “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” Both of these tropes are basic tenets of the QAnon doctrine.
The reason QAnon has become so pervasive is because it uses the same tactics as cults in order to recruit and indoctrinate. Cult expert and researcher Steven Hassan, PhD, points out in his book, Freedom of Mind, that we are most likely to get recruited into a cult when we are: A: in a vulnerable place in our lives, and B: exposed to cult doctrine. The USA is currently in both of these positions: A: America is vulnerable due to political polarization, as well as wealth inequality and its subsequent poverty. The country has been living under a Presidential administration that actively engenders fear in its messaging such that it has become an ideal environment for cultivating scapegoats and clinging to a strong-man leader. B. Because QAnon is an online cult spread via disinformation on social media, all of us are exposed to it. And we are exposed to it through people we trust — most often our friends and family.
While there are many reasons why people are compelled to join the ranks of QAnon adherents — the repression of our sexual shadow is a primary one.
QAnon uses our own inner repressed sexual shadow as fuel for the fire of their distorted doctrine. When we repress or fragment the authentic expression of our own sexuality, or repress experiences of molestation and abuse, we create a kind of precedence for being hoodwinked.
This inner distortion resonates at a frequency similar to the external smoke and mirrors that is QAnon’s message; there is a deep intuitive sense of kinship and connection with this territory of secrets and shame and horrific things being done to innocents. We become vulnerable to blaming and pointing the finger at an outward fantasy projection and distortion of reality, instead of looking at the fragmentation within.
QAnon rhetoric hooks into this internal deception and followers feel a deep resonance and connection to the images and narrative shown. As a therapist, I’ve been witnessing what I speculate is a direct link between the wounded inner child parts of individuals who have experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse in their formative years and this compulsion toward the QAnon myth of the children held underground in dark, dank tunnels in states of constant suffering at the hands of sinister authority/adult figures. QAnon plugs into the dark unconscious realms of the psyche where the exiled and abandoned inner children wallow in states of constant pain as though the abuse is forever current.
These inner unresolved wounded parts of ourselves get projected outward onto imaginary long-suffering children who are now, as QAnon describes, on the cusp of being rescued by a God-sent and empowered figure (Trump). Any day now Trump will vanquish the darkness and evil in the world (Deep State Satanic forces) and we will be magically lifted into a new brighter utopian era known as the “Great Awakening.” This mythos might seem safer to embrace than inquiring within and beginning to companion the wounded, broken, and hurting parts of ourselves — especially if we don’t have reason or experience to trust that our own personal trauma can ever be resolved and because there are no magic outside forces at hand. The magic fix is especially attractive considering the current seemingly dystopian structure of North American society where resources for addressing the held trauma of abuse victims are mostly unavailable.
The circle of distortion and subsequent irony becomes complete with QAnon’s adherence to an accused sexual predator as a god-head for their cult.
When we are abused as children we often have no choice but to reinterpret the perpetrator as a good person. In our efforts to feel safe many wires get crossed, magical thinking becomes pervasive, and we lose a clear and intuitive ability to recognize that which is dangerous and bears us ill will. As children we are wholly dependent on our caregivers for our literal survival, so it is safer to make the adaptation that the abuser is a good person and that the abuse is happening because I am the one who is bad — I am inherently terrible, invisible, worthless. It is simply too terrifying to have the abusive attachment figure be what they actually are.
Horrifying abusive behavior can become normalized and if the perpetrator is a primary attachment figure the perpetrator can even become idolized — in part because the same person that has the most power to inflict terror also has the power to take that terror away. The perpetrator can then take on a kind of super-human all-powerful quality in the eyes of the abused child.
Judith Lewis Herman in her pivotal book ‘Trauma and Recovery,’ says:
The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness…..Children who develop in this climate of domination develop pathological attachments to those who abuse and neglect them, attachments that they will strive to maintain even at the sacrifice of their own welfare, their own reality, or their lives.
When abusive treatment is normalized at a young age a violating or abusive relationship with an authority figure feels natural. So when a perpetrator becomes the president it becomes a kind of trauma spell for people with a history of abuse because those neural-pathways have been wired in at a young age.
If we extrapolate this theory onto what’s happening politically, (the kind of propaganda we see and the kind of alternative facts we are asked to believe), we can understand how people who were forced to make sense of the un-make-sensable at a young age, are making sense of QAnon, despite its endless inconsistencies. In real time QAnon adherents recreate the past experience of normalizing and even worshiping a dangerous predator by appointing Donald Trump as their fearless and God-anointed leader.
We don’t necessarily have to have a personal experience of sexual molestation to be carrying sexual trauma and not all QAnon followers will have a sexual abuse history. However, the dominant culture’s messaging around sexuality is in itself abusive and traumatizing. To more or less of a degree we all have distorted programming within us. For example, what is often considered sexual deviance is deviant only in relation to the religiously-based, hetero-normative narrative of our dominant culture — a narrative that is indoctrinated into us through explicit and implicit messaging from birth.
Whether it is the implicit messaging of our culture’s view of sexuality or a more direct personal experience of sexual molestation or assault, the attraction of QAnon is predicated on the unconscious compulsion to view the repressed aspects of our sexuality as horrific, deviant, and maybe even satanic.
This traumatic programming creates a tendency for one to make a leap of faith that bypasses logic and critical thinking. The fear of the dark evil of the cabal blinds us to some very gaping holes and endless failed prophecies in the QAnon plot line. Common sense gets left at the door in favor of a highly-charged emotional reactivity that spins and purrs in the same key as the fear of our own repressed sexual trauma.
My experience as an IFS (Internal Family Systems) therapist, working with different “parts” of ourselves, is that we often have a young/vulnerable part that carries a traumatic experience and feels a great deal of distress — the experience of this part is then repressed by other parts of our personality. Often the parts doing the repressing paint the part holding the trauma as horrific, dark, dirty, gross, terrifying. So it becomes normalized within us to attempt to disown that wounded part and to exile it — even though that part of us was merely an innocent victim of the original traumatic experience.
Often the part that had the traumatic experience takes on the belief that what happened was her fault. We then develop protective parts that try to defend our personality structure from that belief, pointing the finger outwards. These protective parts feel that it would be too vulnerable and dangerous to have the feelings of that exiled part close to the surface. They believe that degree of woundedness is unpalatable to the outside world; from the perspective of these protective parts they are simply trying to protect us from certain rejection and ridicule.
In therapy when we get in direct contact with the exiled part of us we usually find that the traumatic experience it carries can be worked through and was not as worthy of self-condemnation as other parts of ourselves would have us believe.
The unconscious compartmentalization and fragmentation needed to keep the checks and balances of the QAnon belief system flowing may seem impossible for many outside the QAnon cult to comprehend. However this kind of fragmentation is very common to survivors of abuse, where many aspects of the personality are hidden from conscious awareness.
The child victim prefers to believe the abuse did not occur. In the service of this wish, she tries to keep the abuse a secret from herself. The means she has at her disposal are frank denial, voluntary suppression of thoughts, and a legion of dissociative reactions….. They may learn to ignore severe pain, to hide their memories in complex amnesia’s, to alter their sense of time, place, or person, and to induce hallucinations or possession states.
— Judith Lewis Herman, in her book ‘Trauma & Recovery’
People who adhere to faith in a magical force of good also tend to suffer a pervasive fear of a magical force of evil. This shadow of the bright utopia, its polarity, resides in those of us with unprocessed trauma. It manifests in an innate shame-based self-contempt that operates unconsciously alongside the more-consciously held faith in QAnon’s “Great Awakening,” a golden dawn of universal love where all beings are to be accepted as equals.
This polarized self-loathing part of us is broadcast into the world as a pointed hatred of scapegoats perceived to be standing in the way of the Awakening. In QAnon logic, all hatred, venom and violence towards perceived enemies of the Awakening (and thereby enemies of Trump), is justified and ennobled as a means to an end. Fabricating and affixing accusations of Satanic pedophilia to these enemies helps make the blood lust more palatable.
North American society’s more commonly disowned parts: Jews, blacks, immigrants, empowered women, and anyone who expresses sexuality that deviates from the norm, are also the insidious targets of QAnon’s demonizing and “othering.” The disowned “other” that is really a projection of the disowned “inner.”
The distortion of reality that our inner world projects into the outer has us supporting an overtly racist, misogynist sexual predator. The less light, exposure, and support we show towards this repressed sexual shame and abuse, the more momentum there will be for toxic movements such as QAnon.
In the months after Jessica Prim’s arrest she went right back to long and convoluted facebook rants. Often posting more than 50 times in the span of 24 hours with no likes or comments on anything in her feed. Her posts vary from a devotional love and adoration for Trump as her savior fighting the Deep State, to her hatred towards Child Protective Services, the organization that she says took her away from her own family when she was a child, and now have taken Prim’s own children away from her.
Jessica Prim’s experience both past and present is a tragic story and a common one. As she posts endlessly into the void like a cry for help, the empty space is made all the more hollow by the stripping away of social services needed to support people like Prim — and needed to support people like all of us. When our society does not support the victims of trauma and their subsequent mental health issues these victims can easily turn towards a kind of cult leader who claims to have a solution to their woes. Inevitably the cult leader heralded as a means to salvation instead ends up throwing fuel on the fire of our despair and misery.
Many QAnon adherents claim to be in the service of a bright utopian future, free of tyranny, oppression, and evil. But what would our inner darkness cling to if we truly lived in such a world? We don’t yet live this utopian dream because the frequency of our internal collective trauma, sexual and otherwise, would not resonate with an external utopian world.
An outside magical force does not exist, and even if it did it wouldn’t be able to bring about a sustainable change to our collective trauma-ridden species. For transformative change to happen sustainably we have to bring light and a kind companionship to our inner darkness, individually and collectively. And we can only do that when we are resourced — through social programs, education, and community support, (the exact opposite of the agenda that Trump and the alt-right push). It is only through a society that supports the most marginalized among us that we can move towards anything resembling a utopian dream.
