THE SILENT ARMY
This is the ground I stand on. This is the call. It is raw, uncomfortable, and true.
If you speak this language, you are not alone.
This is the foundation for everything I build.
Meet you in the silence
Sarah Jane x
TRIGGER WARNING
(I resent having to write this.)
This piece contains raw descriptions of sexual violence, abuse, and systemic trauma. The system demands I warn you, to keep these realities contained, "sensitive," and separate from "normal" life.
Yet the same system will flood your feed with Charlie Kirk, war footage, and sensationalized violence… no warning required. It pathologizes our pain while normalizing the conditions that create it.
This warning is a symptom of the sickness. The content that follows is an attempt at a diagnosis.
Proceed with the understanding that you are entering a space of uncomfortable truth, not curated safety.
GRANDAD’S EYES
We are going to have to start doing a different dance around here, if we're going to beat this system.
I detest unsolicited advice. I've received enough to know it well. Its taste is bitter in my mouth. But silence is what keeps sick secrets buried. I know… I've been silenced over many sick things.
I already know I'm going to get pushback because I don't align with many mainstream narratives, and this one is loaded. Like a fucking gun. I think the only wound that may compare to this level of trigger is the God wound. I know my words will be uncomfortable for some, but in my experience, you've got to meet the uncomfortable to get to the comfortable.
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YESTERDAY'S HATRED
Yesterday I hated men, not a mild detest. A visceral, all-consuming, venomous hatred.
Hate for the harm I've seen them do. Hate for the countless women I've seen battered, raped, abused… the women closest to me. Hate for the man I loved deeply who beat and raped me while telling me he loved me. Hate for the men who came and told me they couldn't believe he beat me "he was so quiet."
I didn't speak about the rape until ten years later; the shame in me was too dense to hold it.
Hated them for the women who've been abused by their own fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles. I've witnessed the consequences of this pain directly, not read it in books or seen it in movies.
Another one of society's sick secrets that shame locks away and can't look in the face. Do you know how many people I know who have experienced incest? I thought it was rare. It's not, it's just invisible.
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THE SILENCING
Have you ever been in a situation where someone suddenly declares they've experienced any form of sexual abuse? I was in Bible study when a woman declared her abuse for the first time, and a trained Christian counsellor cuttingly shut her down and told her this wasn't the right place to share that.
I'd only been around a while and had no fucking concept of the correctness of this. I assumed a counsellor would know more than me, a lowly single parent, who ran a lowly cleaning business. But somewhere in me knew, something bad had just happened.
I thought I must have gotten it wrong. I've done that all my life. Thought it was me. Must have misunderstood. Missing some information others had but I didn't.
If you can't take that to God and God's people, I don't think I want to know this God anymore. The God I felt inside me, that I was trying to find in a faith outside of me, wasn't that.
I must be wrong. Maybe God isn't as friendly as I thought. Maybe what I was feeling inside wasn't God.
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HOLDING THE SHAME
I can still feel the weight of that feeling in my chest from that Bible study fifteen-plus years ago… of that woman who wasn't met.
I don't need to release it. I don't need to "let it go." I don't need to find forgiveness for myself. That is a lie of the matrix.
I need to hold that to my chest and honour it, that shame is the alarm of MY moral compass. A memory inside me where I did not serve my integrity, where I chose silence instead of my voice.
I don't torture myself with it. I don't self-harm with its memory. But I refuse to forget.
I didn't know I could use my voice then. Groomed and trained to keep the silence of sick secrets, of sick behaviours. Turn a blind eye, turn the other cheek. I didn't know better then.
This healthy shame is mine, not given or forced into me by societal expectations. A reminder that next time I'll use my voice.
Because the God inside me wants to know things like this. My God wants to know what's hurting. My God wants to hear your silenced sick secrets and tell you: you aren't that. You are not that experience. That isn't who you are. That shame is not yours.
My God does not say "there is a time and a place to meet me." My God says I am always available, I am constant, even when you think I am not.
I, like you, have been told that I am only worthy if I am "good." Yet people cry about how beautiful nature is, but so cruel. Yet they forget nature is always purposeful. Even in the rot, there is purpose.
My God's wondering where the fuck this "Hell" is and who created it? For they didn't. That is distortion thrown to cover God's love.
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THE NATURE OF SHAME
Did you know the origins of shame means "to cover"? The irony is, once you learn to hold your own shame, it becomes your shield and covers your moral compass, not the world's interpretation of what is correct.
The younger me knew no better, but I know now I have a duty to speak when I witness a silencing, because that's what happened in that moment. A woman was silenced when she found the courage to speak into something that had been silenced for years.
How must that have felt for her? To receive exactly what had helped keep the sick secret invisible. Silencing.
I know it hurt her. We became good friends. It hurt me too, in a different way...it hurt me because of my silence. Confused by my silence.
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THE CONFUSION OF LOVE AND PAIN
I didn't understand why I chose to be silent when I was beaten by the man who loved me and I him. I never thought I'd be a battered woman. Never thought I'd be a woman who covered for a man's violence.
But things look so different when you're looking from the outside. On the "in," it's not so clean.
Information is everywhere about the manipulation and behaviours, how you blame yourself and somehow, it's your fault. How perpetrators like to reinforce this narrative. The push-pull dynamic. The coercion and control.
Believing the lie that if I loved him enough, he would heal so he could trust me.
But what you don't hear, what's so fucking confusing, is that love was there. It was there for me and him. It wasn't just purely toxic love that evaporated to reveal a new truth once I'd healed the pain of the relationship.
I know what love is. There will always be a part of me that will love him. I don't hanker after him or long for him. I just know it was true on both sides.
Sadly, the love was as deep as the pain.
I knew he didn't wake up in the morning thinking, "Tonight I'm going to beat the woman I love." I know some men do. I'm not speaking across the board here; I'm speaking from my lived experience.
To anyone, male or female: if violence comes, get out. You can't fix them; they must meet that darkness themselves. You need to meet the part of you that tells you it's your place to fix them.
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MEETING THE SILENCE
I found that part of me when I met a woman who had the capacity to hold me without silencing me. I learned to listen to the silence, which ironically felt like the loudest sound my body had ever heard.
Silence isn't silent.
In my silence, I found the terror I'd been avoiding all my life, and it was fucking harrowing. I had blocked trauma that I didn't know was there. No clue at all.
I always knew something didn't make sense, but when I got a diagnosis for autism as an adult, I thought that was the reason. This constant pool of confusion inside me that never truly seemed to get full clarity. Like a permanent glitch that I couldn't trace fully or remove.
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PART 2: THE REVELATION
When my memories returned, it was like someone had turned the lights on to reveal what had been in the room all the time.
I was like, how the fuck have I missed this??? How is it possible to have forgotten this?! I understand the process intellectually, my system blocked what it needed to, in order to survive.
I've witnessed and supported people going through this process, but fuck me, man, nothing prepares you for the reality!!!
Every single aspect of my world changed. The closest people to me who I loved were the ones causing the deepest harms, and I was rageful. So fucking rageful.
Forty-eight years of age and only just realized who the fuck I actually am and why I've made such fucking tragic choices.
Trained to pacify, trained to shrink, to disappear. To be invisible.
TRAINED TO BE FUCKING SILENT.
Be complicit in tucking the terror and fear behind the edges of the silence. For no one knew how to speak the language of silence. We just knew how to use it. We were born into it. We didn't even know it was something you could understand.
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TRUST YOUR RAGE
When I spoke with my mentor after I had this realization in full rage, she didn't silence me when I said, "I wanted to slice the jugular of a family member with my very own fingernails."
She didn't soften the edges. She trusted my rage. She trusted me with my rage.
For this rage is sacred. This rage is the energy that allows you to meet terror. It is the force that will sit you down and allow you to listen to the silence and let it reveal the sick secrets that don't have a voice… only shadows that profoundly hurt.
Trust YOUR rage, trust YOUR shame.
Don’t trust their shame injected into you with words. Don't trust silence. It's never fucking worked.
You don't need to be rescued; you just need to find the ones who have learned the language of silence and sit with them. I've found they aren't that easy to find… like I wouldn't recommend that Christian counsellor!
Paradoxically, the greatest people I've walked with on this planet have been Christians without exception. This isn't about religion, this is about how we are silenced.
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WHERE SILENCE BEGINS
Silence, like shame, doesn't begin in the rooms where religious people silence the courageous. It begins in homes. In front of the fire, watching shit on TV on Sunday evenings. Sharing teas and breakfasts. Weekends together, holidays, play fighting, snotty noses, taking the piss and dark humour. Bonding over music and shared dramas for entertainment.
Sharing is caring.
Sharing terror. Sharing fear. Sharing the silence that covered the fears.
As we cloaked ourselves with shame. Looking for an enemy to blame for the pain.
Silence is the perfect environment for shame to grow. If you are silenced, you can't ask if the shame is yours.
We learned to ignore the aloneness we all felt. Filling the silence with noise when we could. But the silence kept getting louder.
Then you start learning how to escape the silence.
People. Places, things, experiences, drugs, drink, sex, chaos, music.
Just don't be still. Just keep fucking moving. Don't sit in the silence… it's too LOUD!!!!
I need noise. I need distraction. I need drama, I need it LOUD!! I need to drown out THIS FUCKING SILENCE!!!
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THE CYCLE OF PAIN
I know he never planned on hitting me. Like every morning when I woke up, I promised I wouldn't have a drink for years. And every morning I meant it, and every night I failed.
It hurts real bad when the love of your kids can't even generate the willpower to stop. That's a special kind of pain, reserved especially for what feels like the biggest twat on the planet. That's another level of failure that torments.
I don't drink now. I don't seek the guaranteed oblivion that alcohol brought to the noise of my silence. I had no conscious awareness I was doing this at the time. I just knew that in drink and drugs, I somehow met the peace of God that evaded me in my reality. In that escape, the silence wasn't the loudest sound.
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THE ANGER
Last week really was the week of, "Can any man be a bigger twat than what they actually are?!" All the experiences that littered mine and my loved ones' world seemed to involve "toxic men." Add a sprinkling of the wonderful (and IMHO sexy!) Mr Louis Theroux artform of delivering uncomfortable topics, with Manosphere the world lit up with “my people”. Who aligned with my sentiments that men generally are "twats”.
I felt very justified in calling certain men twats, with a sense of relief that these topics are being highlighted. At last, these twats are being outed… and rightly so, they need to be made accountable. Women should be kept safe. The righteous battle. TWATS!
A man reached out to me for support this week, yet when I reached for some in return, I wasn't met. This situation escalated rapidly, and I used what has always protected me when I had the ability to choose it: my voice.
I have been raised in an unhealed family, unmet family. I refuse the narrative that it was a toxic family. I think "toxic" somehow defines choice. My family didn't have a choice… that choice was stolen generations before when silence was chosen over truth.
I've hurt this man with my words. I haven't asked him. I haven't spoken to him since. I have blocked him.
But the craft of my words have been honed in an unhealed, unmet home, and I know how to strike with precision at the wound. I know how to load my words, so they smash through your chest and rattle in your head for years. I know how to create that reaction inside of you… because I know how to listen to the silence.
I have been raised in the art of silence.
To never speak to what is in front of you. Just speak to the stories that drown out the silence that covers the terror hiding in plain sight. Covered over like decorator sheets on furniture with silence. The only language cultivated was the language of defence and war.
I don't feel bad. If you step into my temple and expect to take from me what you're looking for inside yourself and try to silence me, you will feel my wrath.
Do no harm, take no shit… is how I try to live. I am aware I need some work on my delivery on occasions, perhaps... Okay, a lot of work on delivery. (Give us a break- I only worked out who the fuck I really am a couple of years ago. It isn’t easy.)
I am learning to use my voice that is still scarred, from a past that taught it that if you use it freely, it reveals the terror hidden in the silence.
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HIDDEN IN SIGHT
Outsiders probably wouldn't have known we held such fear as a family. It wasn't obvious in the physical world, but it was always just behind the eyes. My brothers’ eyes, my dad's, my mother's, mine.
The eyes is where it couldn't hide… no matter what words were being said. No matter how much the noise covered the silence.
Eyes don't lie, tense bodies don't lie, held breaths don't lie.
I don't speak to any of my family members apart from my kids. You don't realize when you speak to your own terror that you meet the family shared terror that lives in the silence.
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REFUSING THE LABEL
I called my family narcissistic and they fit that model. The model that reinforces that my family is the problem. That we are the problem. That we are to blame, and if I am not to blame, THEN YOU MUST BE!
I know where this blame lies, this blame lies at the feet of a system that told my grandfather that fighting in a war would protect freedom. They didn't say he would lose a freedom of a different type.
PTSD wasn't recognized then, and heroes returned broken into a society unaware of how to support what they had not met themselves.
Instead of the system soaking up this trauma and caring for its heroes, that pain was left in the silence. Just the news of victory was the noise over the terror then. That was where the terror was tucked into the edges of silence then.
We won a war, we got victory! We won THEIR war, for if this was a joint victory, the heroes would be honoured for all of it: the PTSD, the night sweats, the fears. But you're only rewarded for bravery.
Be a hero, speak of victory. Then when the terror breaks through the silence, when that dread hits you like a bolt of lightning, usually in your sleep… don't speak into that.
Let the womenfolk absorb that, let the children absorb it. For it still moves, invisibly, silently. Just don't speak into the bad bits. Claim the glory. Cover yourself in shame, cover the terror in silence, and play the blame game.
Emotionally shooting the person in front of you for harms that were done generations before that have been left out in the silence.
I refuse to call my family narcissistic because it fits. It fits perfectly if you just listen to the noise and observe the patterns and how it plays out.
But I have been trained in the Art of Silence… and narcissism doesn't lay at my family's door; it lays at the feet of this system that doesn't hold a duty of care to its people.
Sending young men to fight their wars, burying the pain and honouring the victory. That isn't truth.
Shouting "You are a hero, rejoice!" yet when he is in the bosom of his family, and he sees the terror his presence generates in the eyes of his children, that triggers the memory of the terror held in the eyes of the men he shot.
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GENERATIONAL SILENCE
I wonder how loud my grandad's silence was.
I wonder if part of his silence became part of mine somehow. I wonder if the dread that woke him up…. sudden, sweating, sharp… felt like mine when it woke me up, two generations later?
I don't have to wonder if he was tortured. One of the few emotional reactions I ever experienced from my stoic grandfather was when I asked if he had killed a man when I was little.
Before the words left my mouth, he responded with, "Don't ask me that," with a sharp aggression that shocked us both. In that moment, as we locked eyes, we recognised terror, yet neither one could understand why the other held it.
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PART 3: GENERATIONAL UNDERSTANDING & SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS
I refuse to continue to call my mother narcissistic when she hasn't had the privilege of being able to hear her silence and the ability to use her voice.
Yet this is the jagged pill… I can't walk with her right now. I can understand as much as I can, forgive her, hope she forgives me, but I can't step near that silence that she holds.
The family silence. It's too loud for me now, and it's so loud for her, she can't hear me.
Like I couldn't hear myself. Like I couldn't hear my own kids, my partners. Trained to be silenced in my own homes. Told we are the problem of what is silenced in society.
I refuse it. I refuse it. No more at the door of my family. NO MORE.
I am not allowing the system to place the blame at the wrong door. It is not my mother's fault… she is not to blame, but she is responsible. There is a difference.
The terrified child became a terrified parent. I know this because I did the same. You think you are keeping them safe. Trouble is, if you haven't learned how true safety feels, you don't know how to give it.
I didn't know I was locking them into my unconscious, unprocessed fears. Teaching them to be silent by example, by proxy, by default.
Letting the shame enforced into me by society lead me, not the shame I feel when I have broken my own integrity.
My shame, my shield, the signal to my moral compass.
No one gets to decide my shame, it is mine and God's, not for others to declare over me and weaponize.
We are not here for each other's approval. We are not here to be "good." We are here to be authentic, how simple does that sound, yet how hard is this to be?
If you are like me, my authentic self was left out in the silence, like the rest of my family.
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THE REAL WAR
We have a problem people. Men blaming women, women blaming men, horrifying stories justifying both realities.
I'm tired of hearing stories. Stories that have kept me awake at night. The stories are the noise; I want to hear what has been left out in the silence.
Why are we buying arms as people starve? Why are there wars when only a few want them?
Because this system creates the war inside of us, leaving us to self-police with myths of beliefs, telling us that the ultimate goal is to be fucking "good."
While it continues to govern with control dressed as care, rewarding the obedient, punishing the ones who refuse to be ANYMORE FUCKING SILENCED.
I refuse it. I refuse.
This is not of God that I bear witness to, this is not what I want to be part of anymore.
I'm useful to them in this manufactured, constructed internalized war. My rage is a powerful weapon to unleash on others to perpetuate the cycles of silence.
I won't be used in their war of emotions. I won't be a weapon in their war any longer.
Blaming our men, our mothers, fucking God in this manufactured bullshit that perpetuates silence whilst denying the truth, that this is a symptomatic, corrosive, corruption of our authentic truth that is seeded in our generational lines woven in with terror and fear, that is silenced by the very system that caused it.
We are being pitted against each other while they enjoy the fruits gained from their victories of wars, as the pains gathered to reach that victory of unsung heroes and their families and the generational consequences, are entirely ignored.
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A MESSAGE TO MEN
Men, we don't need you to be heroes, that is a lie of this system.
We need you to be real... authentic. Most of all, we need your safety.
We need you to unlearn the lie that you aren't enough as you are. That power isn't control. Possessions aren't worth. Wealth is more than just money.
And your value isn't measured on your ability to be a silent hero. You are more than that, you are more than the scripted lie of this fucked system.
Don't listen to it, that is not who you are. I refuse it.
That is a lie that is held in place by the silence, and I refuse to align with the silence that this war lies at the doors of men.
It doesn't rest there, nor at my door, my mother's, my abuser's door, it rests at the gates of this system that holds no duty of care while lying to us that it does.
The responsibility is ours; we cannot escape that.
But the blame, that started generations ago when the system lied to us, broke our communities from the inside, as we fought wars that weren't our own, protecting a freedom that shouldn't even have to be fucking protected.
Telling young men to kill each other and be a fucking hero. Don't be scared when you take another man's life, at the request of another man you will probably never meet. Be a fucking hero when you return a stranger to your family. A stranger to yourself. A stranger to your life.
Be a fucking hero when you meet the terror in your grandchild's eyes as you both wonder how it is even possible for us to hold the same terror?
They have lied to us.
We don't need you to be heroes, we need you to be the men you are.
We need your safety.
Not a curated story of the system's expectations of you. It is a lie that you aren't enough… IT IS A LIE.
Step forward, claim your place. You are a man… that is enough.
You don't have to be a fucking hero to claim your place as a man.
IT IS YOUR BIRTHRIGHT.
You don't need to rescue us… that isn't your place. It is my place to rescue me.
I am the only one that can do that for me, and you are the only one that can do that for you. I can't reach inside of you, as you can't reach inside of me and put the broken bits back together.
We need to be held in safety so we can do that for ourselves.
We need your voice to speak to the men who create fear and tell them: abuse of power is not being a man.
We need you to stop being silent. Silent in holding other men accountable. Silent in self-accountability. Silent in talking into your fears, not your problems, not your issues, your fears.
Silent in telling us how loud your silence is.
We need your protection, not your direction. We are not lost to ourselves; we are lost from each other.
For we all fell for the lie that silence is always silent and somehow it is a better offering than truth.
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THE FINAL REFUSAL
I refuse that lie. The same lie that tells men they aren't enough. That shames women for their sex and beauty. That tells traumatized children it is their fault. That tells me I am only worthy if I am good, and if I am bad, I will always be bad.
Fuck those lies.
I refuse to be silenced. I refuse to let this system lay this blame at the wrong doors anymore.
This is not who you are… this is not who we are.
I refuse to see the same terror I saw in my grandad's eyes in the eyes of the men, women, and children in my world and say that this is okay.
My grandad fought for freedom, not for fear.
This is not okay. It is not okay.
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A DIFFERENT DANCE
We need to start doing a different dance people. Stop letting this system play us and lay the blame at the wrong fucking enemy’s door.
It is not our mothers’ fault, our fathers, our brothers, our sisters, men’s, women’s….
IT IS THE SYSTEM'S.
Yes, these people are responsible for the harms they have caused, this is not the argument I am bringing to the table, that is an entirely different topic.
Where I am trying to align here is, a plant can only grow according to its environment.
The system is breaking our environments, then blaming us for it. As we fight each other.
Manipulating our wounding through the media. Crafted by a system that holds no duty of care. Held in place by silence…..
Silence isn’t silent. It is a cover.
I refuse to cover myself with shame and silence and continue with this reign of terror that I see in people’s eyes. In their tense bodies. In their held breath.
My grandad fought for freedom… we are not free.
We are held in invisible cages and told we are free. We are being lied to, and we have lied to ourselves.
We are being silenced in our very own homes.
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THE REAL BATTLEFIELD
This war we are in now isn’t on a battlefield. It’s in our minds, in our bodies, in our homes.
The battlefield… your nervous system.
Instead of landmines that explode bodies, we have triggers that explode psyches.
Shame and Silence the Generals leading the army, organising battleplans with the media. All in top secret of course, you don’t even know it’s going on.
Because it’s all done….. in fucking silence.
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WHAT THE SYSTEM HAS FORGOTTEN
But this is what the system has forgotten… we have been trained in the Art of silence. We had no choice for we were born into it. We know its movements, its pulse, we have witnessed how it works. It can’t hide from us; we know it intimately.
The Silent Army.
It’s time to start using our language of silence, for we know it isn’t silent.
We need to give voice to what has been cast out there. The only way to rid the silence from us, that holds false shame in place, is to use our voice. For silence cannot be silence with a voice in it.
My grandad fought for freedom.
Who stands with me to reclaim that freedom?
What was earned by our ancestors… the men, the women and the children who held the silence with their bravery… and their pain.
Especially their pain.
I will not leave that legacy in the silence anymore. This is our freedom to claim.
I’m calling in the Silent Army.
The ones fluent in the language of silence.
It’s time you were heard.
Even if your voice shakes....especially then.
The silence needs to be filled with your voice
It doesn’t has to be loud to break silence.
The silence you just read about operates on energetic patterns. Its architecture manipulates your energy, trapping us in invisible cycles.
I am building a counter-system. A sacred space to reclaim that energy. Your energy. It is called The Temple of – Have You Forgotten?
The core structure is up. The lights are on. But it is under construction.
I am seeking a pilot group to be the first to walk through the scaffolding. Your role is to move through the initial chambers and tell me where the energy flows and where it gets stuck. Your experience will directly shape the final build for the Silent Army.
If selected for the pilot group, you will receive:
Lifetime access to the completed Temple.
The first tools to map and reclaim your energy from the silent patterns.
A direct hand in stress-testing the architecture of this space.
This is a live build site, not a finished product. I need the first people inside to feel if the foundations hold.
Spots are limited to the size of a true pilot group. Application required.