“TAPPING” AND “LAYERING”
One day one of the grown-up women, Natalya Yevgenyevna, called me into her room and said she was going to give me a treatment. Everything was so absurd that I didn’t even question what I needed to be treated for. Indeed, would any child question authority, when they are totally abandoned and there is no one trustworthy to ask? She sat me in front of her, looked in my eyes and began in a confidential tone:
“Ania, I know you are angry and that you have resistance. Where would you say your anger is, on a scale of 1 to 10? And your resistance?”
Later I and all the other members of the cult were asked this question all the time. I always answered that my anger and resistance were somewhere between 7 and 10 on the 10-point scale. If the adults were so convinced that I was angry and full of resistance, why should I disappoint them?
Then Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to close my eyes and put both my hands face down on the table. Over the course of several minutes she tapped out a set rhythm on the table with a special wooden knocker in the shape of a mushroom, and I had a minute to copy the rhythm with my palms, keeping my eyes closed. For one tap I had to answer with the right hand, for two the left. The right hand corresponded to the left half of the brain, and the left to the right. It was considered good if you made mistakes with both hands, the more the better. Skewed results, where you made many more mistakes with one hand than the other, were evidence of brain dysfunction. If you made hardly any mistakes at all then it meant you were practically stupified from anger, aggression and resistance, and you needed active treatment right away. At this the educational psychologists would confer among themselves, concede to the authoritative opinion of the Chief, and then what ususally followed was a huge dose of therapy: speeches, mechanotherapy, and layering (explained below).
To sum up, it was with the help of this tapping that they measured a person’s level of aggression.
Besides this test there were others. They were all intended to measure the current condition and potential of the brain. There were auditory tests (where you had to remember and repeat combinations of words at speed), visual (remember combinations of cards, and then reproduce them, also under time pressure), and tactile (they would bend each of your fingers, and you had to remember and repeat the order, with eyes closed). These tests were all known as evidence, that’s what people would call it, “making evidence”.
Chloroethane After that first test, the tapping one, Natalya Yevgenyevna asked me to take my pants off and lie down on my side. She started to pour liquid chloroethane over my buttocks, first on one side then the other, and on special points on my toes. It was sore and I felt an unpleasant burning sensation on my skin. After the procedure you weren’t allowed to raise your head so the best thing was to make yourself fall asleep or at least lie with eyes closed. Later the skin would itch like crazy where the chloroethane had touched it, and would come out in small crusty burns. But with the years I got used to it. After that first time I got this treatment almost every day for six years. I never noticed any change. Everyone there got this same treatment all the time, adults as well as children. It was known as layering; “to layer a person”. I should say that at least there was never any sexual subtext to any of this treatment. No one ever touched my genitals.