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Survivorship Webinar 2022: Healing the Unimaginable: A Ten-Session Course – PowerPoint Text
Survivorship Webinar 2022: Healing the Unimaginable: A Ten-Session Course in Treating Survivors of Organized and Extreme Abuse
Alison Miller, Ph.D., Retired Psychologist
Website with video presentations and PowerPoints:
https://survivorship.org/survivorship-webinar-2022-healing-the-unimaginable-a-ten-session-course/
This page has all ten PowerPoints from the webinar series converted into text.
Alison Miller, Ph.D. is a retired clinical psychologist who practised in Victoria, B.C., Canada and worked with survivors of organized abuse, including ritual abuse and mind control from 1990 to 2017. She has twice chaired the RAMCOA (ritual abuse/mind control/organized abuse) special interest group of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. She is the author of Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control (for therapists), Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse (for survivors), and co-author with survivor Wendy Hoffman of From the Trenches: A Victim and Therapist Talk about Mind Control and Ritual Abuse. She has published several other book chapters and articles, as well as being the originator of the LIFE Seminars parent education programs.
This course is based on Dr. Miller’s 2012 book Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control. It incorporates other material from Dr. Miller’s more recent publications and those of others. It was presented for clinicians in the mental health field. These videos may remind survivors of their trauma. Survivors may want to watch this with a support person. None of the material on this page, on linked pages or at the webinar is meant as therapy, or to take the place of therapy.
The ten sessions are:
1. Understanding dissociative disorders and organized abuse - Thursday February 17th 2022
Dissociation and Organized Abuse
Dissociation
Recognizing complex dissociative disorders
Relating to different parts (alter personalities)
What is Dissociation? (Sidran Institute definition)
Dissociation is a disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of who he or she is. This is a normal process that everyone has experienced. Examples of mild common dissociation include daydreaming, highway hypnosis or “getting lost” in a book or movie, all of which involve “losing touch” with awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.
During a traumatic experience such as an accident, disaster or crime victimization, dissociation can help a person tolerate what might otherwise be too difficult to bear. In situations like these, a person may dissociate the memory of the place, circumstances, or feelings about the overwhelming event, mentally escaping from the fear, pain and horror. This may make it difficult to later remember the details of the experience, as reported by many disaster and accident survivors.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
PTSD may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, or rape or who have been threatened with death, sexual violence or serious injury. The experience may be indirect, such as learning of harm or death of a close family member or friend, or police officers exposed to horrible details of trauma.
People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have negative reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch.
People of colour are more likely to have PTSD, and women are twice as likely as men. This is probably because of more traumatic experiences in these groups.
PTSD Symptoms
Intrusion: Intrusive thoughts such as repeated, involuntary memories; distressing dreams, or flashbacks of the traumatic event. Flashbacks may be so vivid that people feel they are re-living the traumatic experience or seeing it before their eyes.
Avoidance: Avoiding reminders of the traumatic event may include avoiding people, places, activities, objects and situations that may trigger distressing memories. People may avoid remembering or thinking about the traumatic event. They may resist talking about what happened or how they feel about it.
Alterations in cognition and mood: Inability to remember important aspects of the traumatic event, negative thoughts and feelings leading to ongoing and distorted beliefs about the cause or others (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted”); distorted thoughts about the cause or consequences of the event leading to wrongly blaming self or other; ongoing fear, horror, anger, guilt or shame; much less interest in activities previously enjoyed; feeling detached or estranged from others; or being unable to experience positive emotions.
Alterations in arousal and reactivity: being irritable and having angry outbursts; behaving recklessly or in a self-destructive way; being overly watchful of one’s surroundings in a suspecting way; being easily startled; or having problems concentrating or sleeping.
Complex Trauma
Complex trauma describes both children’s exposure to multiple traumatic events—often of an invasive, interpersonal nature—and the wide-ranging, long-term effects of this exposure.
These events are severe and pervasive, such as abuse or profound neglect. They usually occur early in life and can disrupt many aspects of the child’s development and the formation of a sense of self.
Since these events often occur with a caregiver, they interfere with the child’s ability to form a secure attachment.
Many aspects of a child’s healthy physical and mental development rely on this primary source of safety and stability.
(definition by National Child Traumatic Stress network)
Dissociative Splitting
Dissociative splitting is an adaptation which enables a child to live with ongoing trauma, in many or most cases involving his or her own parents or caregivers.
Dissociative splitting affects survivors’ awareness of some or all of the traumatic events, the circumstances surrounding the events, and the identity of the abusers, for some period of their lives.
When there are specific parts who “come out” into the world separately, have their own histories, and are often amnestic for what happens when other parts are in control of the body, we call it DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). When parts do not “come out” in everyday life but there is evidence of their internal presence, we call it OSDD (Other Specified Dissociative Disorder).
Lesser Dissociative Disorders
Dissociative Amnesia
Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder
Depersonalization: Experiences of unreality or detachment from one’s mind, self or body. People may feel as if they are outside their bodies and watching events happen.
Derealization: Experiences of unreality or detachment from one’s surroundings. People may feel as if things and people in the world around them are not real.
During these experiences the person is aware of reality and that their experience is unreal. Symptoms begin in adolescence or childhood.
Both Acute Stress Disorder and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder may involve dissociative symptoms, such as amnesia and depersonalization or derealization.
DID and OSDD
All survivors of extreme organized abuse have DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) or OSDD (Other Specified Dissociative Disorder), whether or not they are aware of it. I think of it as mental injury, rather than mental illness. They grow differently because of injury.
For simplicity I shall refer to people with both these conditions as “multiples.” This acknowledges their internal experience. And I’ll call those of us who do not have split minds or brains as “singletons.”
Organized groups who abuse children deliberately try to split and structure their victims’ minds in such a way that they will not remember what happened, or that if they begin to remember they will disbelieve their own memories. Their goal is OSDD. The deliberately created inner parts come out upon instructions or triggers by perpetrators.
The Experience of Multiplicity
What Being the “Front Person” of a Multiple is Like
Feeling as if you are somehow unreal (depersonalization)
Feeling as if the world is unreal or you are in the wrong time or place (derealization)
Hearing voices, often critical or giving orders or commenting on your life and behavior
Not remembering things you have apparently done and having to guess what happened
“Blanking out” (without alcohol) and waking up somewhere else later
Feeling differently or having different opinions at different times
Being accused of lying about things you can’t remember
Inconsistency and Amnesia
Multiples grow up in families which are arbitrary dictatorships, where you have to obey adults out of fear, and rules are inconsistent.
You have to “know and not know”—not know when you’re at school that your parents do horrible things to you at night.
Parts are specialized to take pain, have sex, be angry, etc., and often don’t like parts with different specialties.
One part breaks the rules, another part gets punished.
Don’t expect the front person to know what another part has done or to be able to control it.
Most parts expect abuse and changeability from others.
Talking with Someone Who’s Multiple
Understanding Living with Multiplicity
Treat a dissociative person with dignity and respect, as you would a foreigner, not as a curiosity.
Ask your client to be your teacher about multiplicity.
He or she may assume that you and everyone else lose time, disappear from consciousness and wake up somewhere else without knowing what happened, and hear voices.
Often a person who is multiple imitates singletons, like a foreigner trying to pronounce a foreign language.
Child parts in adult bodies feel especially misunderstood.
Many Parts (“People”), One Body
We singletons expect to be conversing with one person.
But it’s more like talking with identical brothers or sisters who impersonate one another, change places fast, and look the same but act differently.
Look for the physical evidence of them changing places.
Learn to recognize body language and maturity level of different parts.
The front person may be just a “shell” who bridges the transitions so switching is not obvious.
Do not assume the front person is the “real” person and the others less real, or that the front person can control behavior of the other parts
Do not assume continuity of memory. Some multiples lie to cover for periods of time they don’t remember.
Parts new to the present are often confused about time and place and date
It’s Like Speaking with Many Housemates on the Phone
One at a time can control the voice and speak with you.
The house has a speaker phone so those nearby (but not everyone) can hear you.
You can talk through to others in the house.
You can send messages to ones far from the phone.
You can ask that others in the house give information to the one on the phone.
You’re not really on the phone, but you see the person’s body, and you may notice he or she pauses as if listening. If this happens, speak more slowly, pause, and repeat yourself, so that the one you’re talking with can talk “inside” as well as with you.
You are actually communicating with several people at once.
Issues with Young Child Parts
I believe child parts are still developmentally children, though not “normal” children.
Find out the age of the part you are speaking with to assess cognitive maturity; talk as if to a child of that age;
Remember others are listening and you should be clear to those ones too.
Young child parts have concrete and literal thinking. They may not understand words or concepts such as “lying”, “then versus now,” “memory.”
The inner world may be as real to them
as the external world.
Systems run by very young child parts tend to be chaotic.
Infant parts may need to process memories nonverbally with assistance of older parts, so they mature upon joining. They can share their nonverbal memories with parts slightly older, who can ‘translate’ for them.
Detecting Switches
In early therapy, clients switch subtly.
Language may change.
Content may change while voice sounds the same.
“Word salad” indicates rapid switching.
Emotional state may be quite different.
Ask if this is someone new, if they know you, if they know where they are.
If you suspect it’s a child part, ask the age so you can communicate appropriately. Do not ask names.
Detecting Co-Presence
You may sense a change in emotional state.
Ask “Is someone else here?”
“I sense someone is feeling scared – Is that you or someone else?”
“Can you tell them who I am and where we are so they won’t be so scared?”
Always assume more than one part is present.
I get so I can almost see the new part– for example, over the client’s right eye or right behind her.
Do You Work with the Front Person?
It depends on the functionality of the front person (the one who normally is present for daily life.) If a front person has years of high functioning, you may be able to work with the parts through that front person, and the parts may respect that one, as they bring much strength and experience.
If the front person is only a shell, it’s wiser not to bother. Just make sure you talk with someone who knows about everyday life, illness, work, etc. every so often.
Front person and insider parts often hate one another. You need to do mediation, explaining to each what the other’s purpose is, and why they are the way they are. Front people are specialized for handling day to day life and have little or no awareness of the trauma history because that awareness would interfere with their functioning. Insiders hide the pain and the anger and overwhelming knowledge and emotions.
Match Your Style to the Part(s) Presenting …
It’s a dance—You shift with their state, as with a baby who laughs then cries. It’s attunement.
You are often talking with an “insider” when you think it’s the front person, the adult.
See how old the person appears from their speech and body language, and match your language to that age.
Sound assertive with tough parts, but be careful, as even a slightly raised voice can engender terror.
Client may ask or think: “Are you going to shout? Are you going to hit me?”
Some tough parts have tender ones hidden underneath the surface. Parts can themselves be multiple.
Using Inner Voices to Establish Communication with Parts
Notice when the client seems to be listening internally.
“Did someone say something to you? … What did they say? … Do you know what they mean?”
“Could you ask the person who said that why they said that? Can they explain for me?”
“Do they have any questions for me? … They can talk through you.”
“Would they be willing to come out and talk to me so I can understand them better?”
Noticing Subtle Reactions, Misunderstandings & Triggering
Notice these and address them immediately.
“Is someone inside reacting to something I said or did?”
“I scratched my ear because it was itchy. It wasn’t supposed to be a signal to any of you.”
“Is there something in this room which makes you feel unsafe? Do you need to look around? Should I remove something?”
Watch for reactions to trigger words which have opposite meanings, e.g. “free,” “love.” Try to avoid these words. Figure out what are trigger words for each client.
Improving Inner Communication
Demystify multiplicity by explaining how trauma creates a compartmentalized brain, so DID is mental injury, not mental illness.
Frequently suggest that the client “Ask inside.”
“Just think it in your head, and then listen for an answer. It could be words, or a thought, or a picture.”
“Tell me what answer you received. Do you understand it?”
Now enter dialogue with the insider through the presenting part. “Ask them ….”
Make “ask inside” a habit in your dialogue with clients.
Complex Multi-System Clients
It is all one brain. Information does often reach through barriers even when it isn’t supposed to.
Some deeper part of the brain holds enough wisdom to know which things to bring up, in what order.
It is a system. You don’t work with Susie, or Enforcer, or The Whore. You work with the system.
Important Therapist Qualities
Consistency
Patience for the long haul
They sense your sincerity, your tiredness and your fear. They probe you for weaknesses. Acknowledge these; don’t pretend they aren’t there.
Firm and flexible boundaries – You can’t meet the infant parts’ needs; you can’t keep them safe. Don’t make promises you can’t keep
Look for opportunities to apologize. Perpetrators don’t.
Intuition in experts is just accumulated learning which is at your fingertips.
Practice makes perfect. So take more dissociative clients so you get better at it!
Organized Abuse
Definitions
Indicators
Creation and Training of Parts
What is Organized Abuse?
Organized abuse involves multiple adults who conspire to sexually abuse one or more children. Organized abuse can include the sexual exchange of children between perpetrators as well as the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material (organisedabuse.com).
Types of Organized Abuse
(Michael Salter)
Network abuse—extra-familial, targeting vulnerable teens, many victims
Institutional abuse—by staff in child-focused institutions
Familial abuse—cultures of sexual abuse within families, a small number of victims extensively victimized, early initiation, quick progression to serious abuse, long duration of victimization
Ritual abuse—structured in a ceremonial or ritualistic fashion, highly abusive, involves torture of children and adults and the manufacture of child abuse material
Technology facilitated organized abuse—groups of adult abusers connected over the internet
What is Mind Control?
Abuse of children (and adults) by an organized group which deliberately creates, indoctrinates, and trains internal parts (alter personalities)
Deliberate creation of inside parts in infancy
Creation of a planned structured personality system
Creation of inner structures and/or an inner world where parts “live”
Beliefs implanted and parts trained to do their jobs through torture, drugs, training and stage magic
There are lesser forms of mind control, e.g. through media and/or peer pressure.
What is Ritual Abuse?
Ritual abuse is mind control by a religious group.
There are organized groups whose religion involves sacrifice to a deity such as Satan and Lucifer.
Although Satanic trappings (costumes etc.) are used for the purpose of frightening child victims in pornographic settings, there are also genuine religious groups.
There are well-organized Satanic and Luciferian groups who use mind control for the purposes of their religion.
Some people define ritual abuse as any abuse done in a ritualized repetitive manner, whether or not religious.
Programming
“Programming is the act of installing internal, pre-established reactions to external stimuli so that a person will automatically react in a predetermined manner to things like an auditory, visual or tactile signal or perform a specific set of actions according to a date and/or time.” (Arauna Morgan)
Certain persons within organized abuser groups have the job title of programmer, and are supposed to program victims’ brains.
There is only one way to create persons who can engage in spying, sex slavery, assassination, or ritual murder without any conscious awareness of this. The way is through abuse and torture of small children, separating parts of their minds that are then indoctrinated and trained individually as the abusers see fit.
Groups Who Engage in Mind Control
Military or political groups (CIA MK-Ultra, Nazis, KKK)
Traditional organized crime (child prostitution, child pornography, drug couriers, assassinations)
Religious groups (Satanists, Luciferians, Druids, ancient religions)
Secret Societies (e.g. Illuminati, Freemasons—occult/political conspiracy)
Groups are interconnected.
If a person has been trained by one abuser group, he or she is likely to have training by other groups as well.
Training centers will train children for different groups, as requested.
Recognizing a Survivor Client
Some Mind Control Indicators
Your client has been diagnosed with DID or OSDD.
Your client hears voices or thoughts ordering him or her not to talk or to be quiet.
If your client talks about what may have happened to him or her, s/he experiences symptoms like bodily pain, nausea, a severe headache, spasms as if receiving an electric shock, or flashbacks of violent events.
Sometimes your client feels that there is something foreign inside his or her body which can do harm to the client or others, or can signal the client’s location or thoughts to abusers.
Your client has unexplained scars on his/her body, or scars with a nonsensical explanation.
Sometimes your client feels that his or her energy will poison those s/he is close to.
Your client worries that he or she will harm or murder someone or that s/he has done so.
Your client is preoccupied with or needing to avoid newscasts, articles, or conversations about ritual abuse or mind control.
Some Ritual Abuse Indicators
Your client has made drawings characterized by ritual-like features, e.g., lots of red and black, knives, fire, cages, robes, body parts, blood.
Your client has worse psychiatric symptoms around his/her birthday, family members’ birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, May Day, and early September.
Your client has cut patterns, symbols, or letters on his/her own body.
Your client finds odd, ritualistic songs or chants running through his/her head, sometimes with a sexual, bizarre, or "you’d better not tell" theme.
Your client has intrusive thoughts or impulses regarding violent sex, sex with children, or sex with animals.
Your client’s dreams and/or flashbacks include rituals.
Indicators—Fears and Phobias
birthdays and weddings
religion and church
Christmas and Easter
doctors, dentists, hospitals
injections and needles
bodily fluids and excretions
red meat and/or certain other foods
cameras and being photographed
specific colors or shapes
harm being done to your loved ones or your pets
ropes, being tied up, being hung
confined spaces basements, crawl spaces, pits, cages
death and burial
weapons
police, jails and cages
baths and drowning
insects, snakes, spiders and rats
Qualifiers of Indicators
Some of the fears (like needles or insects or the dentist) are common. If your client has these, does s/he have a way to account for them in his or her life history?
Others of the fears, and the non-fear items, are uncommon. Does your client experience any of the uncommon ones? Does s/he have a way to account for them in his or her life history?
If you gave your client the list of indicators to check off, look at the entire pattern of the client’s answers. No single one of these items means he or she has a history of ritual abuse or mind control. However, if s/he says yes to a large number of them, you might suspect such a history.
(Thanks to Pamela Reagor, Catherine Gould, & Ellen Lacter for earlier lists)
So, We Covered
Trauma, complex trauma, and dissociative disorders (definitions)
Communicating with persons who are multiple
Organized abuse, mind control and ritual abuse (definitions)
Recognizing survivor clients
2. The therapeutic relationship - Thursday March 10th 2022
Why Do Survivors Come to Therapy?
Anything may be the presenting problem.
Parenting issues, depression, sexual perpetration, sexual abuse by a parent, whatever your specialty is.
Or it may be fragmentary memories of extreme abuse, which the client
doesn’t know whether or not to remember or believe.
Or it may be first awareness of multiplicity within: hearing voices, messages from parts, etc.
Underneath the surface, the client is assessing you to see whether you can handle what they need to tell someone, and whether they can trust you.
The Therapeutic Bond
Maternal and Infant Love
Adah Sachs Study (2012)
A pilot study of 163 professional therapists by Adah Sachs found that therapists had different boundaries with dissociative clients than with other clients. 85% of those studied did so.
“This case, I don’t even take to supervision.”
They felt these boundary changes were necessary parts of their duty of care.
Modifications: offering time outside normal working hours, outside the office, and during therapists’ holidays.
Risked themselves professionally and personally
More experienced and qualified therapists made the most modifications.
Psychiatrists and medical doctors made most modifications.
There was a high burnout rate.
Sachs, Adah (2012). Boundary modifications in the treatment of people with dissociative disorders: a pilot study. Journal of
Trauma and Dissociation, 14(2), 159-169.
Falling in Love with Your Baby
Any parent knows the wonderful enthrallment of being with this new little
person.
The bond between parents and babies is one of the strongest forces in nature.
Parents are hardwired to love their babies. As your due date nears, your brain starts producing more and more oxytocin … a switch that turns on parental instincts.
New fathers aren’t immune to the bewitching power of babies… Men’s
testosterone levels tend to plummet after they become dads for the first time.
Some men start to produce extra estrogen.
As you hold, rock, or nurse your baby, each of you gets a rush of dopamine, the main currency of pleasure in the brain.
Adoptive parents enjoy hits of oxytocin and dopamine, too.
Bonding can be delayed.
(Chris Woolston, HealthDay website, Dec. 31, 2020)
Falling in Maternal or Paternal Love with our Dissociative Clients
This is what happens to an attuned therapist when s/he encounters a DID
client for the first time. We fall in maternal or paternal love with the client
because we sense the unbonded infant parts who desperately need this
bond.
But most of us don’t understand what is happening. We may think it’s
romantic love. Or we may want to adopt the client as one would adopt a
child, add this person to our family.
And the client too may be confused, when very young parts fall in infant
love with the therapist as with a nurturing parent, and want to be held or
hugged, despite the terror of other parts.
Therapeutic Attunement
Farber (2018) suggests that therapists experience a ‘dissociative attunement’
which activates the client’s internal infant’s symbiotic fantasy of being one
with the good mother, as “the analyst’s attuned unconscious receptivity …
makes possible a form of human experience not quite like any other, through
sharing elements in common with other relationships of intense resonance,
intimacy, care, vulnerability and mutual personal and interpersonal
knowledge… The therapist must become a microtonal tuning fork, having a dissociative attunement that is an implicit knowing.”
Farber, Sharon K. The relationship of mental telepathy to trauma and dissociation. Frontiers in the Psychotherapy of
Trauma and Dissociation, 2018, 1(2), 267-289.
What’s It Like to Be Attuned?
I wouldn’t call that attunement dissociative, at least on the part of the therapist.
It is something we are aware of, something that guides our therapy.
I become aware of parts who are present, almost as if I can see them behind
the client’s eyes. I modify the way I speak to the client on the basis of which
parts are present. I make comments like “someone else is listening. Is there
something they’d like to say?”
I have dreamed things clients hadn’t told me, e.g. the primary structure of
Wendy Hoffman’s internal system, and the name of another client’s system leader part.
The relationship is mutual. The babies within the dissociative client glom on to you, like a baby glomming on to its mother. They yearn desperately for the ‘good enough mother’ they never had.
The strength of the attunement, the parental love, is what carries us through all the enormous ups and downs of the long-term therapy process.
Therapist Enmeshment with Clients
It is easy for a therapist to become enmeshed with such a client. The
vulnerability arising from hurt infant parts leads us to “fall in maternal love” with them. We want to be constantly there for them, protect them, and we let go of our boundaries in this process. The neglect and constant boundary invasion they have received leads them to want nurturing like little babies without “object constancy.” They are insensitive to their own and others’ boundaries.
We promise what we can’t deliver. This leads to eventual abandonment of
these clients. Several of my long-term dissociative clients came from therapists who had abandoned them after promising the moon.
Some therapists believe what they are experiencing is romantic or sexual love. Survivors’ child parts expect sexual abuse, and some are trained to seduce therapists. Misunderstanding the feeling of love can lead to serious ethical violations.
How Abusers Try to Prevent the Therapeutic Bond
How Mind Controllers Prevent the Therapeutic (or any) Bond
They know the importance of this relationship, because it is where the secrets of the client’s abuse can be disclosed. They go to extra trouble to make sure such a bond never happens, or if it does happen, that it will be disrupted and broken.
They give pregnant women victims electric shocks which cause them to leave the fetus emotionally. After the child is born, the abusers test the infant to see whether it will accept comfort, because if it does it is not programmable, and may be killed.
Mothers who are victims are not permitted to bond with their children. There is severe neglect and deliberate breaking of potential bonds. Mothers are made to walk by their screaming infant, paying no attention to its suffering or hunger.
Parents are ordered to sexually abuse their children (in fear that the children will be killed if they don’t.)
Training Not to Form Bonds
Cult children are given animals to pet and love, and then the animals are killed, with the child either being blamed or being forced to hold the weapon which kills the pet.
Children in Satanic and Luciferian cults are paired with a “disposable”
unregistered or kidnapped child, given a chance to make friends with that
child, then forced to participate in the child’s murder.
The children are told that if they love someone, that person will be killed.
If a child begins to form a loving or trusting relationship with someone, that
person’s murder may be simulated.
If a victim has a relative or classmate who is ill or dies, the victim is told it was his/her/their energy that caused this to happen.
A child has to choose between people in hooded robes and people in ordinary clothes. The ordinary ones abuse her; the robed ones are nice to her.
A child is allowed to build trust with someone who turns out to be an abuser.
Abusers’ Lies that Isolate Survivors
‘You must not become close to anyone outside the group or tell them
anything.’
‘You can never trust anyone who is not part of the “family.”’
‘People you know and like or love will always leave and will end up
hating you.’
‘If you get attached to anyone, something bad will happen to them.’
‘Anyone you tell will be hurt or killed, as well as their families.’
Training Not to Trust Therapists
A child is taken to a “therapist” (real or fake) and told not to look at him.
When he later tell her to look at him, he is wearing a devil mask and horns
and he rapes the child.
“Never look at therapists.” This sets the scene for later impersonation of
genuine therapists who might help. Notice if your client won’t look at you.
Words frequently used by therapists such as feel, touch, safe, free are said to the victim accompanied by torture, and given opposite meanings.
“They told me about people like you, they told me you would say that,”
when you try to explain your role.
Children (who later become child parts) are trained to believe they must
behave properly by seducing therapists.
Abusers’ Lies and Tricks that Prevent Disclosures to Therapists
“If you show physical evidence or tell of the abuse to any professional, that
person will not believe you and will lock you up in a mental hospital where
you will be drugged and abused.”
“Any therapist you talk to will sexually abuse you.”
Staged therapy sessions for children result in being sexually abused, or locked up, drugged and abused in what appears to be a mental hospital.
“If you tell anyone about the abuse, a bomb will go off inside your body or
a rat or snake will eat you up from inside.”
Simulated operations place the bomb or animal apparently in the child’s belly. An X-ray is used to prove this. Dissociation make it possible for parts who go through these experiences to send their fear to other parts without conscious memories of the deceptions.
What Have Survivors Been Taught About Therapists?
Therapists’ purpose is to get you to disclose the secrets of the perpetrator
group, which is strictly forbidden and extreme loyalty to the only family you
will ever have.
They only want you to talk about memories.
They will sexually abuse you.
They will lock you up for ever.
They are all members of the perpetrator group and will report on you.
Impersonation of Therapists
Members of the abusive group study therapists by attending their lectures,
becoming their clients briefly, or sending a client in to a session with a
recording device. They observe what clothing you wear, what you smell
like, and all the intonations of your voice.
They find a way into the therapist’s office, or use another space which is
similar. Then an actor impersonates the therapist and abuses the drugged
client.
If you have evidence that you are being impersonated, you may want to
tell your client about something unique about you (not on your face) which
is difficult to simulate.
Developing the Relationship
Attachment Styles of Parts in DID
Some parts will act out the type of attachment behavior which worked with
their original caregivers.
Some other parts will still reach out for the safe, secure attachment which might be possible with you. And you will respond.
But be aware that the other parts are present.
And many survivors are still involved with the original perpetrators or the
group culture to which those perpetrators/parents belonged. There may be
intense dependency. And it’s very hard for these people to explore, learn
and develop a sense of Self.
Having had at least one safe attachment tells the child that this is possible, even if it was brief.
Dissociated Relational Needs of Survivors
Dissociated healthy relational needs and longings come up in therapy in very crude ways:
empathy affect attunement, mirroring, calming and soothing, admiration,
security, recognition,
sense of alikeness with another, loving confrontation
Attachment-Related Transference
Parts competing for therapy time, trying to get reparenting
Manipulating you through crises like self-harm
Seeking constant reassurance and expressions of affection and caring
Smothering neediness, attempting to blend or fuse with you
Expecting you to be an almighty rescuer
Wanting too much time, energy and commitment
Perceiving rejection or abandonment where it isn’t and reacting with self-harm, suicide attempts, fugues and missed sessions
Overreacting to your vacations and business trips, thinking everything will
change during these
Being “a bottomless pit of parts, pain, and crises”
Trauma-Related Transference
Accusing you of incompetence
Pumping up your vanity then pricking it with a pin, challenging you and
catching every error you make
Blaming you for compounding their suffering
Inviting you into power struggles, trying to provoke you to be hurtful and
abusive, and re-enact the trauma in therapy
Sharing graphic details of abusive incidents which traumatize you
All these transferences are exploited by abuser groups which train parts to
engage in these behaviors.
Time and Trust
There is no substitute for time in building trust.
Your clients will watch your every move and every word to see whether or
not you are trustworthy, believing that it is most likely that you are not, but
hoping desperately that you will prove to be a person they can trust.
Take your time, and be patient with yourself, too.
At the start, just deal with the presenting problem. The client will let you
know when they are ready to go deeper.
Treat all parts with consistency and fairness.
When new parts emerge, they may have no sense of time. Suggest they
talk with parts who have a history with you, so they can catch up on what
the other parts have learned about you.
Developing Trust: What You Can Say
“I don’t expect you to trust me. I don’t trust you yet either. Trust takes time; it has to be earned.”
“Are you waiting for me to change? Become angry, or sexual? I won’t do that.
The parts/inside people who protect you can watch me and see if I switch.”
(If this is true:) “Actually, I can’t switch. There’s no one else inside me. I do have emotions but I can’t change that much because there’s only one of me.”
Invite them to ask you questions.
Give the client opportunities to disagree with you. Tell them explicitly that you like them to disagree and you accept it and won’t punish them. Show
appreciation when they disagree.
Apologize when you have made a mistake.
Explaining Your Role
“What are you scared of? Me?” Explain who you are and where you are. State clearly that you aren’t like the people who hurt them, and they can send out their protector parts to question you. State the rules of your office.
State that your role is not to make them talk about what happened to them, but to help them heal from those events, and it’s up to them what they tell you.
The internal leaders put out little ones and watch how you treat them.
“Who outside you knows what we talk about?”
“You’re scared the abusers will know you talked? How will they know? Who will tell them? I won’t. Will one of you tell them?”…
If client believes that They know by magic, technology, etc., address the Big Lie, which is that They (the abusers) know everything the person says or does or even thinks.
Guidelines About Boundaries
You need to work out a set of explicit boundaries and stick to them. Issues of trust will arise no matter where the boundaries are placed, but the boundaries do help.
These clients are desperate for connection, and once past the initial fear, they want to move in with you. They want your constant availability.
Giving in to this understandable desire ignores our real human limitations, leads to increasing dependence on us, and fails to prepare clients for real life.
Some clients are trained to burn you out with increasing demands.
I find one 90-minute session per week can work well, though I’ve also done “intensives” with several hours per week for a specified length of time.
If you say you’ll only respond in a crisis, clients will manufacture crises. It may help to leave the client a little recorded message each week.
Set clear limits on contact outside of therapy sessions, e.g. emails, phone calls, texts.
My Office Rules
1. Don’t hurt people.
2. Don’t break things.
3. Don’t take clothes off (except coats).
Tell your clients that the rules apply to you as well as to them. This gives some reassurance you may not abuse them.
Touching
It may be abusive not to touch people who have been so massively
neglected and abused.
I do hug, touch and occasionally hold clients, or hold their hands. They may have been told they will poison anyone who touches them.
Always ask permission of the particular part who is present, so he or she can set his own boundaries.
If you detect a sexual response in the client, discuss it openly and state
explicitly that you will not be sexual with them.
Commitment and Money
Working with a client with a major dissociative disorder is a very long-term commitment. Do not take them on unless you know you want to and are
able to follow through.
Do not start with anyone who cannot pay something, unless there are very
special circumstances. If funding runs out, it is not ethical to just terminate
the client.
Do not allow the client to owe you money. Negotiate payment clearly at
the start.
Make sure you have sufficient income from other sources before making
commitments to pro bono clients.
Dealing with Boundary Violations
Always say “You are not in trouble.” In trouble means a severe beating or
rape which happened when they disobeyed their abusers.
Boundary violations are inevitable.
Write out your own feelings and discharge them in private, then write what
you will say to the client, so you don’t explode, blame, or fail to state your
concerns assertively.
Confront sooner rather than later, so you don’t have stored-up anger and
hurt.
If boundary violations are frequent, ask the parts to turn off whatever
programming is making them do this.
Noticing Subtle Reactions, Misunderstandings & Triggering
Notice these and address them immediately.
“Is someone inside reacting to something I said or did?”
“I scratched my ear because it was itchy. It wasn’t supposed to be a signal to any of you.”
“Is there something in this room which makes you feel unsafe? Do you need to look around? Should I remove something?”
Watch for reactions to trigger words which have opposite meanings, e.g. “free,” “love.” Try to avoid these words. Figure out what are trigger words for each client.
Things that Interfere with Therapy
Some are at a busy stage of life (e.g. teens or young parenthood) and just can’t work at therapy as well.
Watch for distractor parts—cute playful kids, whiners and complainers, game players and arguers. When you see it, name it. “Your job is to distract me, isn’t it?”
When the client is being phoney or off-topic, don’t just go along with it. Tentatively name whatever you sense.
Some parts may have instructions to harass or burn out therapists with constant neediness.
You need clear boundaries so this can’t happen.
Clients may seem unworkable because they are still involved with perpetrator groups. A single disclosure, or even the fact of seeing a therapist, can lead to renewed contact with abusers.
Threats to others and to you, and current actual danger, can be the basis of them not
working in therapy. Bring these out into the open and assess how realistic the danger is.
Clients can be plants, to get you to ask leading questions, invite a lawsuit, burn yourself out, or divulge information. Be careful.
Clients’ Capacity for Self-Care
When we are overinvolved, there is a risk “that the client will lose her
existing capacity for self-care. Although she has survived many years of
abuse and neglect, her unmet need for a nurturing parent may lead her to
rely on you instead of herself whenever there’s a crisis. As Margo Rivera
pointed out in a workshop on ‘Depotentiating Suicide as Negotiating
Currency,’ clients tend to commit suicide either in hospital or when just
released from hospital, because they have turned over to us the job of
keeping them safe. Think of your DID client as a baby wild animal. If you
pick her up and take her home, she will lose her skills for surviving in the wild, and her (internal) mother will abandon her when you release her again, so you will have to look after her for ever!” (Miller, 2003)
Developing Internal Nurturing in Clients
Treat each alter as the age it presents at, recognizing the developmental
needs it presents.
Give hugs, hold a client’s hand as she remembers something painful.
Give the child her wishes in fantasy: “I wish I’d been there when you were
being hurt, and taken you away from those people.”
Give small transitional objects such as a pretty stone.
For between session contact, suggest clients listen to your voice mail
message and then hang up. Leave a message on their phone in their
presence, which they can listen to.
Allow emails within limits; don’t respond other than with an
acknowledgement.
Developing Internal Nurturing
(continued)
Speculate out loud with adult parts about how a little child needs someone
there constantly, pointing out that it’s impossible now in the outside world
but not in the inner world.
Encourage the client to designate parental nurturing alters.
Encourage the system to internalize any positive examples of nurturing and parenting they see (books, TV, emotionally healthy adult friends)
Loan parent education materials.
Suggest internal places be created where the needs of child parts can be
met: playroom, library of books and movies.
Remembering the Abuse
Reasons Survivors of Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Don’t Remember
Dissociation protected the child and continues to protect the front parts of the adult survivor.
Training by perpetrator groups makes survivors unaware of their dissociation, by creating “walls” between the front people and the inside parts and using memories of antipsychotic drugs to suppress internal voices;
Important training experiences are surrounded with a barrier of torture, pain, spinning, and drugs (before and after) which are re-experienced if the memory is to be accessed
If a survivor remembers anything, they will remember being an apparent perpetrator.
A child is wakened and abused at night, then her parent comes in and tells her it was a
dream.
Children attend a simulated murder and next day see the murdered person alive and are told they imagined it.
Implausible scenarios—alien abductions, cartoon characters, etc. are deliberately staged,
and designed for recall if other things are remembered.
Incentives are offered to survivors who recant (family love, money).
How Parents Discourage Children from Remembering
Parents are instructed to respond to disclosures with:
“You made up all those things you think you remember.”
“You have a vivid imagination, those things aren’t real.”
“It was a dream.”
“You got those weird ideas from TV, the Internet, something you read, someone
else’s experience, or from a therapist.”
“If you “see” awful things, those are dreams or imagination or signs that you are crazy.”
“If you hear voices it means you are psychotic and should be hospitalized.”
“Do you believe me?”
You’re damned if you say you do believe your client (encouraging client in
inventing things, inviting a lawsuit)
and you’re damned if you don’t say you do (client feels invalidated).
“Therapeutic Neutrality”
I had a debate with Colin Ross in the online journal Frontiers about this. Ross had written an article giving an example of his supposed therapeutic neutrality. In the article he suggested saying to a self-identified ritual abuse survivor “I don’t believe you and I don’t disbelieve you. I believe in therapeutic neutrality.” At the same time he clearly indicated
that he believed certain things the client said and disbelieved others.
After reading Ross’s article, I asked a dissociative survivor with whom I worked for many years what she would have said if I had told her this She responded that she would have said “Thank you for your time. Goodbye.” She would have felt disbelieved and unsupported.
Miller, A. (2019). Commentary: Therapeutic neutrality, ritual abuse, and maladaptive daydreaming.
Frontiers in the Psychotherapy of Trauma & Dissociation. DOI: 10.46716/ftpd.2019.0018.
“Bearing witness to uncorroborated trauma: the clinician’s
development of reflective belief.” article by van der Hart & Nijenhuis
Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 1999, 30 (1), 37-44.
“Clinicians should not reflexively accept or reject as fact a client’s initial report of uncorroborated abuse. However, by maintaining a neutral stance, clinicians may fall short of therapeutic honesty and transparency, may fail to promote reality testing, and may not perform the necessary step of bearing witness to the client’s victimization.”
“Persistent therapeutic neutrality often becomes problematic for the client, the therapist, or both. This approach ultimately may make the client feel doubted or, worse, may be experienced as actively malignant if it is felt to
represent a repetition of the negation of his or her selfhood by victimizers. The failure of others to bear witness to the clients’ victimization and suffering can have devastating consequences for their ability to heal.” (p. 37)
They quote Laub regarding Holocaust survivors: “This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself … is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well… It is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. This joint responsibility is the source of the reemerging truth.” (pp. 67, 69)
They recommend that therapists “should delay forming a belief about the validity of reported memories of trauma,” but “develop a reflective belief in collaboration with their clients” (p. 38)
Responses to ‘Do You Believe Me?’
When asked “Do you believe me?” I prefer to say something like “I’m a
psychologist, not a detective. I wasn’t there when your traumas happened. My job is to support you in making sense of it all. It is your life, and it is up to you to decide what is real by listening to all parts of yourself.”
“There is a difference between believing that bad experiences happened, and believing what your child parts were led to believe. It will be your job (not mine) to figure out what’s real, what’s unreal, and what may be a result of abusers’ tricks.”
This empowers the client in taking back control of his or her life. There is no need to make a point of my neutrality, and the only reason I can think of for making such a point is self-protection, at the expense of the therapeutic relationship.
Wait for the Evidence to Emerge
Don’t suggest things, while remaining aware of what could be going on.
Respond to disclosures with empathy and with confidence, letting the client know you can handle such disclosures.
Don’t get caught up in the false memory controversy, but stay with the client’s experience.
Your client will disbelieve his or her own memories.
Explore the personality system and inner world before exploring the traumatic memories.
When everything seems to fit together – symptoms, story, etc. – over time we can come to reflective rather than reflexive belief (Van der Hart & Niejenhuis).
There’s a difference between believing what the client believes (which may result from deceptions) and believing that something very bad happened.
A Word to Survivors
Organized perpetrator groups have members trained as therapists.
Some are actual programmers for the abuser groups, and do considerable damage to the inside parts while the front people are unaware of it.
Some are just survivors who want to help others but generally follow their
training to discourage remembering or awareness of parts. Those are being monitored by the perpetrator groups.
Check internally with your parts and be sure that any therapist you go to is
not harming you, reporting on you to perpetrators, or discouraging you
from the things you need to do to recover fully.
3. Engineered personality systems resulting from organized abuse - Thursday April 7th 2022
Engineered Personality Systems
Alison Miller, Ph.D., Psychologist (Retired)
Abusers’ Deliberate Use of Dissociation
Organized abuser groups are aware that severe childhood trauma, built upon a base of disorganized attachment, can split a person’s brain into dissociated parts.
Severe infant and childhood trauma separates brain circuits with separate sense of self, each of which can be given a task or ‘job’ in which it is trained through harsh conditioning.
This is achieved through prolonged and repetitive torture of the victim,
beginning in infancy.
It is still one person, one brain. One badly hurt person, and a brain that had to adapt to living with hidden torture.
Understanding the kinds of training programs and the jobs parts have been assigned enables a therapist, to help the parts work together to resolve the trauma and create a cooperative and gradually integrating personality system.
Training or “Programming”
Programs (the term used by some perpetrator groups) are behavioral
conditioning sequences used to condition individuals or parts of
dissociative people to behave in certain ways without the front person
knowing why. Most programmed behavior results from terror.
Drugs, extreme arousal, pain, torture, and life-threatening situations are
used, beginning in infancy or even pre-natally.
The memory of each conditioning sequence is split between several parts
of the person, so that the parts who have to produce the programmed
behavior are amnestic for the conditioning sequence.
The programming has the effect of a post-hypnotic suggestion.
Certain parts are instructed to implement the programs in response to
specific conditioned stimuli.
Sections Within the Brain
Early in the child victim’s life, the group creates the different sections of inner people, beginning with one part (alter) from whom the rest of the parts of a particular type are to be split: e.g. sex slaves, pain holders, perpetrators, animals, witches, couriers, reporters,
spies, assassins.
Each initial insider is given a set of cues , each of which will bring him or her out to do his or her job. A cue may be visual, like a playing card or a picture or a raised eyebrow, or auditory like a song hummed or a series of knocks, or tactile, like a particular touch. Many different insiders respond to such cues.
Over the years, the personality system is developed, like a tree with branches, until there are many parts of each type. Sections may be assigned specific colors to identify them.
Most of the people are not very substantial but may just have one skill or obey one order.
When a particular skill combination is needed for a task, the cues for each skill needed are shown, resulting in a temporary person who has that combination of abilities or traits. The temporary part may have a hyphenated name like Mary-Louise, because it combines Mary and Louise.
13 Foundational Blocks of Parts
(Stella Katz, Kaballah Training)
1. Spirit
2. Language
3. Guards
4. Touch (harming own or other’s
body)
5. Magik
6. Sacrifice (killing, cutting,
dissection)
7. Pain
8. Sex
9. Demons
10. Animal
11. Re-activators
12. Doubles (backups)
13. Garbage bin
These are ‘located’ in the chakras through harm to those points.
Insiders’ Jobs
Most insiders have specialized “jobs” in which they have been trained.
Some jobs are always to be done; other jobs are to be done in response to certain types of events in the inner or outer world.
Some jobs involve action in the outside world (e.g. reporting to family
members, opening doors, answering phones, coming when called,
conveying messages, sexual slavery, assassination, ritual sacrifice, using
Satanic languages).
Other jobs are done in the inside world (e.g. keeping records, watching the person’s behavior, distributing programs, giving orders, punishing
noncompliant parts, turning programs on, frightening child parts,
reactivating programs).
Most insiders engage in “forced labor,” doing jobs out of fear of themselves or others being killed or tortured.
Child parts (probably all those with “jobs” are children) memorize and
respond to deliberately placed touch, sound or sight “triggers” or signals for
accessing specific insiders or giving instructions.
Backups (Doubles)
All insiders with jobs have several backups, others who will take over their
jobs if an original insider decides not to do its job.
When negotiating with insiders to quit their jobs, be sure to include the
backups.
Where Inside “People” (Insiders) Live, in Deliberately Structured Personality Systems
Each system has sections, each section built from one original split-off infant. Different sectors contain different kinds of insiders, some groups hidden.
There may be a primary “structure” in which the group-created parts are located, e.g. a pyramid, or a spider web. There is an original design for each personality system, with one major structure, or a series of related structures.
There may be control rooms with control panels, wiring and switches, in which trained parts turn programs on and off in response to cues or dates.
Different programmers over time may create new sections and place them somewhere in the system, often hidden from insiders created by the original trainers.
There may be a complicated inner world with deliberately encouraged
internalization of external places.
In most cases the personality system is deliberately structured into layers or levels as well as sections, and everyone has to stay in their place. With ritual abuse, there’s often a layer of parts created each year on the birthday.
How the Inner World is Created
A very young child is given building toys and a diagram of the structure he
is to build. When a part succeeds in completing this task, he becomes the
primary builder part. After the model of the structure is built, the child (not
necessarily the same part) is told to put it inside his or her mind.
A young child is taken to specific places which the perpetrator group
wants him or her to replicate internally.
Theatres are used for special effects and stage settings.
Movies, virtual reality and video games are used to help the child visualize
the places the perpetrator group wants in the child’s head. Survivors from
earlier generations may have been shown pictures in books.
Builders
These are young (age 3 to 6) children who were taught to build structures
with building toys, structures that were then internalized and used to house
the various insiders. They may envision themselves as adults with skills in
building houses or more complex structures.
They can use their skills to help redesign the inner world or create better
structures than the ones provided by the abuser group.
Basic Programming for All Parts
Loyalty and obedience
Silence/don’t talk (about the abuse or the abusers)
Don’t love anyone (or they will die, or your energy will harm them)
Accept only the ‘friends’ or partners the group sends you
Don’t trust outsiders
Appearing Normal: The Front
Front People
Front people are the parts of the person that handle everyday life (“apparently normal personalities.”) They are trained not to be aware of or remember the abuse, even if it is ongoing.
Survivors usually have a series of front people from different ages. When one finds the job too stressful, s/he may be replaced. Different ones have different skills but they seem to share recent memory (not of trauma).
Several front people may share the job at any particular time, and what the person remembers or how s/he behaves depends on which ones are present.
Often the front person is a “shell” which contains different combinations of parts at different times.
Or it may be a stage upon which different groups of players act out their roles.
There is usually a strong barrier against the front people knowing anything about the other inside parts or communicating with them. A huge crevasse, or a wall of fire. Communication through the barrier is strictly forbidden.
Programming for Front People
Appear normal
Keep emotions under control
Don’t hear voices
Don’t communicate internally
Don’t remember the abuse
Types of Denial Programming
Forget (abuse memories)
Don’t remember
No internal communication; only front people come out
Don’t believe your own memories
Remember impossible things (cover memories)
Moderators and Modulators
These parts operate behind the scenes (behind the front people in
everyday life, including therapy sessions) to smooth things out.
A Moderator I met had the job of making the person’s speech sound like
an adult of the age she was, regardless of the age of the part who was
communicating, so that a listener would not recognize the presence of a
child part.
A Modulator I met smoothed things out in other ways, making sure that
communications to other people were all reviewed and made acceptable
to the listener, while not revealing protected or sensitive information.
Programs You See in the Therapy Room
Sleep (usual use: other parts sleep while one goes out to a ritual)
Remember (that you are a perpetrator; that therapists are
abusers, etc.)
Itching (as distraction and reminder; each itch carries a
message)
Remember impossible cover memories
Don’t remember faces
Paranoia (“We can hear you”)
Don’t look at therapist
Don’t trust therapists, doctors, law enforcement, fear them
Therapy interference (distract, seduce, overload and burn out
the therapist)
Kill or harm someone who is kind to you
Lie to therapist
See your handler in the room
Run from helpers
Distractors and Confusers
Many types:
Disrupt therapy sessions by being cute, mute, or itchy
Cause client to fall asleep in session
Cause client to forget what just happened or what she just remembered
Could divert client’s attention to other things when getting close to
important information. Especially current events causing anxiety.
There may be “Chameleon” parts who pretend to be other specific parts
Programs and Jobs of Parts
Internal Hierarchies
In most mind-controlled or cult personality systems, parts are set up in one or more hierarchies.
Hierarchies often result from progressive splits with a new layer built each year (e.g. Satan 1, Satan 2, Satan…9). Each layer will have one of each
important alter type, split from the previous one. The last-made layer is in
charge.
A survivor may have different hierarchies with different bosses, created by
different perpetrator groups. Often these clash.
The bosses at various levels issue threats to those under them who disobey the rules.
The enforcers administer punishments for disobedience, such as flashbacks or self-harm or pain (from memories).
Bosses (Higher-Ups)
These higher-ups may have impressive names and titles. One Nazi-created system, for example, had a series of Hitlers, with the one at the top being the “real Hitler.” A Satanic system had a series of Satans, with various adjectives attached, the first few layers numbered Satan 1 through 9, and then the Most High Satan.
Many bosses may have the names of actual perpetrators (trainers or
programmers) who were in the abused child’s life.
Just because an insider is named Hitler or Satan or the name of someone who abused the child doe not mean that part wants to be like that person.
The higher-up parts, who rarely if ever come out in everyday life, may not know about how the survivor’s life circumstances have changed.
To really change things, you (the therapist) need to work your way up to the top of the hierarchy and talk to those in charge. Start with the punishers, then those who give them orders.
Enforcers, Soldiers and Guards
In the internal world, enforcers administer punishments, which are
usually pain from memories, when the person has broken the rules of
the perpetrators. They are obeying the orders of higher-ups.
If the person is considering breaking the rules (such as telling a therapist
something), there are parts who issue threats regarding what will
happen (externally as well as internally) if the rules are violated.
In some systems, there has been systematic training of child soldiers,
who then become soldier parts. While they have internal jobs, they
might be called on at some time to become actual fighters in the
external world. Some are trained to use weapons, including guns. They
are highly trained in loyalty, much like real adult soldiers. They may
believe they have killed other soldiers, as this has been simulated.
Punishment Programs
Various kinds of pain (controlled bodily flashbacks from memories)
Seeing horrendous scenes (controlled visual flashbacks)
Self-harm (specific: cut, burn or scratch)
Eating disorders (also used to hide pregnancies)
Internal homicide
Suicide
Internal disasters (the structures in the internal world crash, burn—tidal
wave, flood, fire, earthquake, etc.)
Steve Frankel’s Warsaw Ghetto Analogy
A. Internal managers who cooperated with the Nazis: The co-opted
government (Judenraten), the ghetto police (enforce rules: don’t leave,
don’t call for help, don’t smuggle anything in or out), loyalists and deniers
(spies for the Nazis, those who denied the severity of Nazi intentions)
B. Victims – most of the inhabitants, fearful and traumatized, engaged in
forced labour, no contacts outside the ghetto.
C. Opposition, tried to create change: social service providers and nurturers, the underground or resistance, the archivists, observers who told the outside
D. Independents and anarchists (observers, thieves, food smugglers)
Record Keepers
File keepers, librarians and record keepers are some of the job titles given to these parts.
Records they may have:
A copy of the victim’s “black book” about his or her training experiences
The memories of training experiences
A record of all traumatic memories
A record of all insiders, their locations and their jobs
Getting them to work with you can speed up therapy and make things
intelligible, as you can access their knowledge.
These parts may have memorized entire conversations word for word in order to be able to repeat them back.
Internal Programmers or Switch
Controllers
Switch controllers (also known as internal programmers) turn
“programs” on and off by internal switches and buttons which have
specific effects, like putting parts to sleep or making them suicidal or
creating hallucinations.
They are mid-age children who were placed in physical locations with
these switches and control boards where they were trained to respond
to cues and do their jobs. They may never have seen the actual outside
world, other than these places.
They usually don’t know what the switches they control do, although
they may know the names of the programs they are turning on and off.
They only know that they must do their jobs immediately when given
the signal to do so.
Signals to them may be external or internal (e.g. some other part
pushing a button connected to a wire)
Gatekeepers
Gatekeepers hold in or release inside people or memories. They act on
instructions but have some latitude to make decisions if they are not being
told directly what to do.
Generally a gatekeeper does not allow most trained parts “out” into the
body unless given a signal such as a touch on the left shoulder combined
with the name of the part who is called for.
Kaballah groups create a single Gatekeeper who is the first split after birth, is never again abused, and grows up with the body and observes
everything. (see Stella Katz’s chapter in Healing the Unimaginable)
Pain Holders
These are usually very young infants. Some hold physical pain. Particular ones may hold pain in different body locations. This pain can be drawn upon by the punisher parts, who send it to the front people or others who were disobedient to the abusers.
Certain parts (e.g. soldiers, sexual masochists) are not supposed to feel pain, so pain holders (who may be sub-parts within the soldiers) hold the pain for them.
Some are specialized for holding emotional pain. Particular ones may hold
despair, sadness, anger, frustration, anxiety, etc. These feelings are generally held in and not experienced by the front people, but they may be drawn upon to punish, just like the physical pain. Anger may be given to perpetrator parts when the group needs it; despair to front people to motivate a suicide attempt.
Some hold empathic pain for other people who are suffering or being hurt.
When this pain is kept separate, perpetrator parts can do their jobs without
feeling the pain of those they hurt. To help perpetrator parts stop doing these jobs, the healing system can share the empathic pain with them.
Spinners
Spinning infants and children on turntables makes them off balance. It also distributes the lesson the child is being taught to the rest of the personality system.
Spinning is often used at the end of an abusive episode or programming session to distribute the lesson to other parts.
A child part is taught to physically spin round and round, making all other parts of her dizzy while the one doing the spinning does not feel dizzy and keeps her balance. Her job is to do this internally to distribute feelings and impulses through the system.
If your client reports a sensation of spinning, it is an indication that a program may be running.
Spinner parts (if you ask nicely) can reverse the spin in order to stop a program from working, and can slowly spin something soothing and pleasant through the system to help stabilize things.
Types of Access Programming
Return:
Return for rewards (sex and drugs)
Return to save someone
Return to avoid punishment of self or others
Return on scheduled ritual dates
Report
Come when Called
Respond to hand signals, gestures,
facial movements, touch triggers
Answer phone
Open door
Leave door unlocked
Go outside
Phone mother or other apparently
innocent family member
Left shoulder touch along with
name brings out desired part
Report the person’s disclosures
Don’t leave town
Report relocations
Report on other people
Watchers and Reporters
Watchers and reporters observe the survivor’s behavior and thoughts and report
disobedience to internal or external bosses.
They may be trained to report every word of a conversation to the perpetrators, especially therapy sessions, and to always tell the truth to perpetrators, who they believe already know everything.
They can work towards healing by reporting instead to the therapist or to inner helpers about what is going on in the person’s life.
Sometimes they can learn to lie to abusers so that therapy sessions sound innocuous when the sessions are actually destroying the programming. This begins with helping them realize that abusers don’t know everything.
Or they can be made to forget most of a therapy session (by those who hold the Forget programs) so that they report only the innocuous parts of the session.
Programs to Get Survivor into Hospital
Rapid switch
Hallucinate
Only child alters come out
Flood feelings
Hear threatening voices
Depression
Scramble
Paranoia
Behave like an animal
Anorexia
Believe you’re a famous person
(have “copy alters” of such people)
Some of these are also to discredit a survivor who remembers too much.
Programs for Use in Rituals
Training not to sleep (preparation for ritual)
Training not to eat (preparation for ritual)
Training to hold urine and feces
Training to keep still and silent, training to make the usual front person sleep
Training not to run
Training not to feel pain
Training to use a knife for killing or dissection
Training to kill
Training in occult languages
Training to dance like a snake (Serpents cult)
Types of Sexual Parts
Breeders (who give birth to infants for sacrifice or sale), and may be mothers to unregistered children for years
Nymphomaniacs
Masochists
Necrophiliacs
Sexual perpetrators including killers
Seducers (for example, of therapists)
Mixing parts is important here. Pain holder parts are paired with the masochist and perpetrator parts so they don't feel the pain they experience or inflict.
Frequently the victim is trained that he or she cannot experience orgasm unless in a violent situation, either hurting someone or being hurt by someone. Killers are trained to experience orgasm when someone is killed. Drugs enhance this.
Kids are trained by being masturbated while watching filmed then actual violence.
Perpetrator groups thus produce the customers for sadomasochistic sex which they sell.
“Demons”
Demons and devils are usually small child parts, split off at ages 3 to 5,
costumed and taught to make demon sounds by larger (adult) demon
impersonators.
They may have the names of demons found in ancient books.
They have been taught no one will ever want them.
They may have been taught they will harm anyone they speak with.
Do not try to banish them or they will retaliate by destabilizing the client.
“Satans,” “gods” or other supposedly demonic alters may have a hierarchy and may be in charge of the system if it’s one of religious (ritual) abuse.
“Animals”
Parts who believe themselves to be animals (or chimeras, half-animals and half-human) are used for doing what those animals do. Horses run fast, cats sneak out at night, dogs beg and come when called, snakes do dances at rituals.
These parts are trained by being costumed, put in cages with animals, told they are that kind of animal, and only fed when they behave like that
animal.
One system’s recorder parts believed themselves to be orcas, and were actually trained in a tank with orcas. They believed they couldn’t speak.
Language Speakers
For Satanic or Luciferian cults
May write in “mirror language” or speak in backwards English
Can speak fluent Enochian or other occult languages
May also have languages from childhood when family has moved
Some may not know English or the language of the country the survivor
lives in
Some also know English and can be used as internal translators
Knife Wielders
Stella Katz (in Healing the Unimaginable) writes of a category of insider called “the Touch block.” These are their duties.
Performing sacrifices at rituals (with a knife)
Dissection of bodies (usually for consumption)
Self-harm, usually as punishment for disobedience (the part receiving the
pain feels it; the part doing the cutting or burning does not). Some other
part may be making the cutter do it.
Those designated to be assassins in the real world have a combination of
parts to perform the assassinations—one who is trained in the particular
type of violence, others to handle different parts of what leads up to the
event and what comes afterwards.
Witches, Psychics, Spiritual Leaders
Sophisticated perpetrator groups such as military agencies assess children for known ESP abilities (telepathy, “remote viewing” capability, etc.)
Those found to have such abilities are trained to use them on behalf of the
group. Remote viewing experiments were done by military agencies.
Ritually abusive groups create parts known as “witches” whose abilities are used to curse people. These parts may only be used if they show some psychic skill.
These parts believe they can kill with their minds, as this has been simulated
(they were told to kill someone, then this person fell to the ground.)
Parts called witches can disobey and curse the wrong person, and the group will not know.
Some parts, whether or not they are trained, can use their psychic abilities to see what is inside other people, and whom they can trust. Often floaters do this.
Ghosts and Aliens and Spirits and Gods
“Ghosts” and other incorporeal entities are insider parts who were led to believe they do not belong to the body.
Anaesthetic drugs make non-human parts unable to feel anything in the body so they believe they do not belong to it.
Sometimes they represent suicide programs (internal homicide) – “kill this traitor’s body.”
Sometimes they hold knowledge which they supposedly can’t disclose because they can’t speak.
Sometimes they check up on and discipline the system leaders.
You won’t get to these for a long time; they are hidden and may be outside the system structure.
Prove to them that they are in the body.
Re-Activators of Programs
Perpetrator groups need to have a way to re-activate any programs which have been de-activated through a survivor’s healing process.
They create reactivator parts for this purpose. Some of these insiders are instructed to take a particular part of a training memory, such as a sound or a word—something crucial that will let the perpetrators know what program was being created. These parts are hidden, and they keep this piece of memory separate, so that if the survivor puts the training memory together, the piece is not included.
Reactivator parts also let the perpetrators know that the memory has been worked on; by giving the perpetrator group their piece of memory, the group can know what training of theirs was disabled, and can repeat it.
Other insiders are trained to put their piece on an internal turntable which will regrow the program. I don’t know just how this works, but it reactivates the program. To destroy a program permanently, it is necessary to put together all training memories for this program, and include every single part of those memories, especially the pieces held by the reactivators.
Paired Programs
Programs are often taught in pairs of opposites, in which only one pole is
activated at a time.
Sleep/insomnia
Eat/don’t eat
Tell (report)/Don’t tell
Run/don’t run
Die/don’t die
Recognizing Programming
You can recognize specific programs by their effects.
The part “out” in the world is not the one in control of programmed behavior. It won’t do any good to ask that part about it, though they can “ask inside” to get information from other parts.
If you suspect that a program is operating, check on whether the survivor feels dizzy, as though something is spinning inside her or his head, as internal spinning is the way in which a program is distributed to parts.
Perpetrator group members in churches or similar groups take leadership
positions and send messages through hand signals or facial signals. Zoom gives them a helpful platform.
I realized that one client was a survivor by watching her do a trigger for “Forget” on her own face. If you know hand signals or facial signals, you might observe parts trying to send messages to you via these.
Turning Programs On or Off
Programs are activated by remembering the abuse, talking about the
abuse, everyday “accidental” triggers (words, touches, sounds, sights),
deliberate triggers, events and dates.
Many programs have “off” triggers as well as “on” triggers. If you know the
triggers, you can turn a program off, but this should only be used in an
emergency because it might make your client suspect you are a
perpetrator. Programs turned off can always be turned on again.
Sometimes the same trigger will activate or turn off different programs in
different survivors.
You can only permanently deactivate a program by putting together the
memories which created the program, with all involved parts.
Attaching Programs to places or events
Perpetrator groups can attach programs to particular events or places, e.g. a program may be activated by entering the therapist’s office.
Programs can be attached to one another (e.g. if a therapist attempts to
undo the “suicide” program it activates the “attack therapist” program.)
If current contact with perpetrators is suspected, you might discuss such linkages by telephone with internal programmers before an appointment.
Some parts of the client may be able to make a “wiring diagram” of how
the programs are attached to one another.
Parts the Abusers Don’t Like … and don’t deliberately create
Garbage Kids (discarded for disobedience)
Floaters (hidden observers)
Inner self-helpers, caregivers, nurturers (usually self-created)
In the ghetto, these are Group C: the resistance and the archivists and the social service providers. All these can be helpful in recovery.
Find the “garbage kids,” as they have the strength to resist orders from the
perpetrators. Enroll them in healing.
More About Floaters
In a traumatic babyhood and infancy, floaters are frequently split off,
sometimes many during one event.
I’ve heard repeatedly of floaters seeing what is going on behind the
scenes, things that can’t be seen from the body’s viewpoint.
Besides the floater parts who are simply observers of events, there can be many floaters who hold emotions.
To fully resolve infant memories, the floaters must be invited back into the
body, and to share their perceptions and emotions with the rest of the
system.
Floaters must be included for full integration.
I have heard of floaters who can act in the outside world even though
invisible, for example break objects to distract abusers (like “poltergeists”).
Making Changes
All parts, no matter what they have been told, are human, and most are
children. Relate to them with this in mind. In there is a human soul, longing
for connection and healing.
No one inside is a ‘bad guy’; those who enforce perpetrators’ rules are
working for the safety of the system.
As parts with jobs identify themselves and join the internal coalition for
healing, they can be given new jobs which use the skills they developed for
the original perpetrator-assigned jobs.
Do not fire internal leaders assigned by the perpetrators until and unless an alternative internal government has been developed. It works better to
work with the assigned leaders, who can give orders to those under them,
while helping them move towards a more democratic system.
4. Engineered Personality Systems - Part II - An in depth look at system development and interactions.- Thursday May 5th 2022
Alison Miller, Ph.D. with particular appreciation for Wendy Hoffman’s
contributions in From the Trenches and her memoirs: The Enslaved Queen, White Witch in a Black Robe, A Brain of My Own, and After Amnesia.
Infancy
(most information here comes from Wendy Hoffman (essays in From the Trenches and memoirs such as The Enslaved Queen and from Stella Katz (chapter 8 in Healing the Unimaginable)as well as from memories of other clients of mine
Imagine …
You are a baby conceived in a cult family, or
You are an expectant mother in a cult family, or
You’re just the therapist for someone who was one or both of these …
Before this baby is born …
Electroshock is administered to the mother’s belly at regular
intervals, beginning in the 6th month of pregnancy, sowing seeds of
an attachment disorder. It is to make the mother withdraw her
connection from the child.
Groups believe you can’t mind-control a bonded child.
Physical pain is given right after birth, making the baby cry, to see
whether it accepts comfort. If yes, the child cannot hold a leadership position and might not be allowed to live.
Deprivation, Neglect, Abandonment, Rejection
No breastfeeding is allowed. The baby is kept hungry and thirsty, fed at irregular intervals. Hunger and dehydration are essential. Mother has to walk by and ignore it. She may feed a sibling while the starving infant watches.
The child is left cold and wet, with hands bound so it can't suck its thumb.
The baby longs to be touched and held. A massage of the feet ends with
needles inserted between the toes. Touch leads to pain. Mother is restrained from giving comfort.
The child is deliberately hurt, the parent is forced to walk by and isn’t permitted to help, then the trainer rescues the child.
Programmers teach the mother to insert fingers and then special rods to stretch the child’s orifices so rapes will be manageable at an early age. If the mother won’t do it, the trainer or the father does it.
The Result
The child forms a trauma bond with the handler and/or the group,
from desperation and deprivation, not love and abundance. This is
a big problem with future relationships.
Infant feelings ‘form an unrelenting sack placed under the solar
plexus that can follow the survivor throughout life, unless they locate
these parts, rescue, and heal them.’
The baby feels feel suicidal.
Assessment
The infant is frightened with loud noises, and assessed to see how fast it settles.
The infant is assessed for strength of will and dissociative ability.
Helping Inner Infants
Encourage your client to reach out to those inner infants within the mind,
hold, feed and comfort them, expressing love to them, rocking and singing
to them, keeping them warm and fed.
Your client might become aware her mother was forced to reject her,
being a powerless victim trapped in a web of evil.
Earliest Teaching
In some groups, the baby’s crib has coloured cloths on the sides with pockets for dolls representing the inside “people,” to show parts who they are and where they are located.
There are also magical symbols and faces. The child is taught how to put each foundational part in its own pocket.
Infants are taught to pee on command and are beaten if they wet.
‘Don’t cry’ programming is usually done by suffocation with a pillow. A head vise may be used. No release of feelings is permitted.
The ‘silence touch’ is taught—rubbing on the top of the head (soft spot), which will apparently calm down a survivor.
Touch triggers are taught to the infant; many look like loving touches but are reminders of pain administered while the child was semi-conscious and drugged.
Important words are spoken. Babies memorize words and understand them later: ‘You are our possession. We own you. You will do whatever we say.’
System Building – First Splits
6 weeks to 6 months ( in Kabbalah based ritual abuse groups, according to former programmer Stella Katz):
The “Firstborn” is the first split, is not hurt again, grows up with the body and is designated guardian of the “birth child.”
The Gatekeeper is the next split, keeps records of all deliberate splits, and is never hurt after his “birth”, grows up with the body.
13 original parts are split off, each the start of a section (“block”) with a
particular type of job.
The splits are made by annoying sounds, needles in feet, electrodes in orifices, and small painful shocks.
The trainer watches and sees the child split, and gives each split a name,
colour, and symbol.
The trainer keeps records in the child’s “black book.”
Hand Signals
Abusers flutter their hands in babies’ faces to sensitize them to hand
motions and teach them to watch hands closely.
Children learn the specific hand sequence to sit, go, lie down, fall asleep,
be quiet, run, leave, enter, drop the evidence, hide something in specific
places, deny, murder, shoot, kidnap, steal, poison, drop a pill in a drink,
forget everything, or remember nothing.
A hand signal coupled with a visual cue or sound is sufficient for a trained, programmed assassin part of a person to perform a murder in public. The
JFK murder shows signs of this: a left shoulder tap, a polka dot dress …
Victims are sent to survivor’s conferences to give vulnerable speakers and participants hand signals. Most who use their hands this way do not know what they are doing. Some do.
Spinning
The infant is spun on a baby scale when it cries or doesn’t comply.
Survivors often have a sense of spinning.
After every programming session, the programmers spin victims in
electroshock chairs, in floor rotatable chairs, on spinning boards. The
spinning is meant to be a barricade to keep them from knowing what
happened.
One part has the job of releasing the spinning sensations if the memory
comes close to consciousness.
The spinning also spreads the feeling or message of the memory to which it is attached throughout the session.
Infancy – Training and Teaching
Some infant parts are spoken to in occult languages.
The child is hurt without visible marks (electroshock works best).
Touch triggers are taught to the infant; many look like loving touches but
are reminders of pain administered while the child was semi-conscious and drugged.
The child is taught the “Silence touch” on the crown of the head.
There is sexual abuse with fingers and a set of dildos in graduated sizes, to enlarge orifices so the child can be raped at an early age.
The child is frightened and assessed to see how fast it settles.
The child is assessed for strength of will and dissociative ability.
Placement of original splits
In Illuminati programming, the 13 original splits are accomplished by age 6
months. They are separated and placed in containers, e.g. coffins. These
are sealed and placed below the structure that has yet to be built
internally, starting at three years old.
These containers below the structure will feed the subsequent structures
with feelings of hopelessness and despair.
Then programmers cement the splits, color-code them, assign them visual cues and hand signals.
Some subversive programmers deliberately and secretly leave in cracks.
Trish Fotheringham (survivor of organized abuse
connected with military):
“During my first weeks of life, my handlers established as much controllable dissociation as possible, as soon as possible. Negative emotional states such as fear, helplessness, stifled anger, and loneliness, as well as positive ones such as pleasure, contentment and safety, were isolated into separate alters. Some of these splits initially involved trauma; all were developed by giving each alter experiences that locked them steadily deeper into their emotional state… As each base alter had enough time "out" in the body, their reality steadily began
to solidify. Dissociative barriers limited their awareness to only their own pieces of my overall life.”
Childhood
Growing Up in the Cult
Two lives are going on simultaneously: one of tortuous mind control and
inner parts that on command emerge for assignments.
Ordinary life: work and school, family meals, weekend outings, parties,
shopping, films, sports, house cleaning, laundry, children’s sports and music recitals and homework and projects. Cult families do what normal families do in normal life. Many survivors idealize their perpetrator families.
Every kind of abuse: mental, physical, sexual (incest, perversion), spiritual.
Incest is enforced with parents and pets. Cult leaders mandate sexual
abuse and threaten to kill kids if parents don’t participate. Parents have
been so abused themselves that they have their own perversions.
Some parents find ways to mess up a little of their children’s programming.
Evaluation of Victims
Experts evaluate each child to see what will motivate him or her.
Will this person place her own survival first, or others’ survival?
Does a victim fear professional or public humiliation more, or physical
torture more?
Children’s talents and interests can be usurped for the group’s purposes.
Abilities may be used only in cult life, where the person can be ‘important’
and special and apparently needed.
‘Matriarchs’ are cult members who know how to court people, build them
up, and make and keep them dependent, in a helpless, childish state.
Victims who were stripped of self-esteem are offered positions of power.
Preschool Years – “Foundation” is built
In some groups, the baby’s crib has coloured cloths on the sides with pockets for dolls representing the inside “people,” to show parts who they are and where they are located. There are also magical symbols and faces. The young child is taught how to put each foundational part in its own pocket.
The inner world is created by artificial means: hypnosis, drugs, picture books, films, stories. Stage magic, scenery and props are used to make the child believe he or she is in heaven, hell, spaceships, Nazi Germany, other worlds, over the rainbow, etc.
A builder part may be designated to build a model of the system structure(s) with building toys in the real world.
Each originally created part is split further to make a group of parts with the same job and type of training. Groups may have designated colors.
Parts are sealed in at ages where they cannot tell fantasy from reality
Physical Methods of Training
Psychoactive Drugs create separate biological states: tranquillizers for
compliant parts, amphetamines for rageful perpetrator parts;
hallucinogens for demons and others who are not to be “part of the
body.”
Pain: Torture (all known methods), electroshock (leaves no trace), shock helmet which delivers shock to specific brain areas, special chair
delivers shocks as well as drugs and spinning and sensation of flight. Pain
in particular spots on the body may be used to create parts who “live”
there.
Terror: threats to life with guns, whips, waterboarding, suffocation to point of unconsciousness. Child believes he or she will be killed if noncompliant.
Emotional Methods of Training
Deprivation: Sensory deprivation – deprivation room, pit, crawl space,
cages, chains; sleep and food deprivation used in preparation for rituals;
solitary confinement as punishment; “garbage kids” are left in these places
(and live there internally).
Overwhelm: Sensory overload combined with hallucinogens for “crazy”
programming; spinning used from infancy to overwhelm child, teach child
s/he has no control over body; distribute “lessons” to parts. Internal spinner
parts are trained to spin a sensation from a memory to alters chosen to
receive it.
Shame: double binds, forced choices (“You kill this animal or we kill this
child”); deliberate shaming, humiliation, belittlement; simulation of heaven
and hell; rejection by “God” and “Jesus”; acceptance by “Satan” and
“Lucifer” with invitation to perpetrate instead of being harmed.
Deception in Training
Hypnosis combined with drugs and stage magic
Hidden cameras & microphones
Theatrics, illusion, sets, sounds, smells, costumes, makeup, elaborate
role-plays
Older victims remember picture cards, photographs, mirrors, story
books, nursery rhymes, fairy tales.
Middle-aged victims remember films.
Younger victims remember virtual reality, holograms, computer generated images.
Music accompanies switches and trained behaviours.
Fake surgeries implant bombs, a black heart, Satan’s brain, tracking
devices, etc.
Indoctrination: the Superiority of the Perpetrator Group
“We have superior knowledge and wisdom. We serve the correct deity in the correct way. Our way of life is the only right way, and our leader or
deity deserves obedience and loyalty.”
“You can trust our group because we are your family, the only ones who
care about you.”
“We do these things (abuses) for your own good, to train you and make
you strong.”
“We are going to make the world a better place when we run it.”
These beliefs are hammered in over and over through religious ceremonies, military drills, songs and chants and rhymes, rewards and punishments.
Obedience
You belong to us (a slave, though this word is not always used).
You are good if you obey us and bad if you disobey.
You must remain loyal and obedient because you made vows or promises.
You are a robot, a computer, a sex machine, a killing machine, not a person.
You were created only to do the job assigned to you. You will have no purpose and will not exist if you don’t do it.
You are a soldier whose duty is to obey without thinking, never think for yourself.
If you obey you will rise to be a general (or another high rank).
If you fight back you are a traitor and will be punished.
Abusers dress children up in uniforms, put them through military exercises, show them movies of soldiers marching or fighting, give promotions, talk about pride in the cause. Children who cry, vomit,
show fear or sadness, or show compassion for others being hurt are punished. Meanwhile, the front parts know nothing about all this.
Loyalty
A disloyal member is called a traitor and said to deserve rape and/or torture and/or death.
“We can kill you or take you away at any time, and no one can stop us because we are all-powerful.”
“If you are disloyal, someone you love or another vulnerable child will be killed or punished instead of you.”
“Your higher-ups inside must make the other parts obey, and punish them if they disobey, or we will punish the higher-ups.”
Enforced through:
Vows of loyalty, signing documents (sometimes in blood)
Rewards (drugs, sex, getting to abuse, stripes, rings, tokens)
Punishment for minor infractions
Threats and demonstrations of severe punishment of the child and others, killing of “traitors”
Lies They Tell
Each specific lie has a specific purpose.
Lies are backed up by trickery (fake stage magic, illusions, and drugs).
Your client may want to write down things abusers said which they suspect may be lies, but they aren’t sure.
My list of 50 lies has the lie, the truth, why They told this lie, how They made their victims believe it, and what to do about it. (From the Trenches)
The trick with disinformation is to include lots of correct information which is already known, so the speaker or writer is not revealing anything new.
Learning critical thinking is an important part of recovery.
Types of Lies
About the reality of the abuse
About the abusers’ power and character
About obedience and disobedience
About keeping in contact with the abusers
About what will happen if the victim tells someone
About life and death and reality
About who the victim is
The BIG LIE
We know everything and are all-powerful. We have magical (for young children) or technological (for older children) ways of knowing what you think and do and say.
The walls have ears.
Satan’s eyes/the All-Seeing Eye watch you.
We live in the shadows or in the walls.
The crows/squirrels/spiders report to us.
Your stuffed animals report to us.
A microchip/device implanted in your body tell us where you are and what you are thinking/saying.
A bomb in your body will go off if you are disloyal.
Everyone you know is linked to us and will report to us.
God/Lucifer/Satan (who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-present) is always watching you.
All these things are simulated in childhood, using hidden microphones, one-way mirrors, fake surgeries, and other deceptions.
The Orchestrated Sacrifice of a Friend
(Healing the Unimaginable, p. 211; The Enslaved Queen pp. 85-96)
Around age 6 the child is given a friend, usually another child, carefully chosen from the sacrificial victims bred for this purpose.
The relationship lasts about a year, and then the child who has tasted love is forced to participate in the murder of his or her friend.
The mind control message is that love is not allowed, that the cult leaders will murder any person or animal you love.
After that, if anyone the child knows becomes ill or injured or dies, the child is told it is his or her fault.
This can backfire, as the victim now knows what love is, and knows that she or he can be loved by someone who is capable of love.
In some cases, the deceased special friend may remain with the victim and shield him or her from the full impact of the torture.
Forced Perpetration
Occult groups force children to participate in torture, rape, animal
sacrifice, and real and simulated murders
Even if the murder is a simulation, the child does not know it
Training begins with forcing the child to kill a pet with which they have
been allowed to bond.
The trainer’s hand is over the child’s hand, then the child is blamed for the
death and told s/he is evil.
As in war, the child is ‘kill or be killed.’
Cover Memories
The perpetrator groups are always aware of the danger of memories of
their abuses leaking out, and the survivor telling someone who might
believe them, even though there is strong ‘Don’t Tell’ programming.
So they set up cover memories.
One cover memory is the murder of a person the child knows in the ‘real’
world. The child attends a ritual or other event in which that person is
apparently murdered. The child is encouraged to report this to the police.
The police investigate, and find the person alive and well.
Another cover memory is the standard alien abduction, complete with
spaceship and ‘aliens’ doing things to the child’s body with instruments.
Sexual Horrors
Sexual trainings take place in electroshock chairs, where children are
masturbated and then electroshocked on the genitals and nipples, to
couple their premature sexual feelings with physical pain.
Children are sexually stimulated while being placed next to dead bodies.
They are forced to engage in sex with animals. They are forced to sexually
abuse animals and other children, and may be sexually pleasured while
they do it, to turn them into perpetrators.
Children are taught to have sexual feelings with relation to any person the
trainer points to. These sexual programs are sometimes turned on
accidentally.
Most survivors become divorced from their bodies. They may only be able
to feel sexual pleasure when it’s coupled with violence, or with near-death.
Types of Sexual Parts
Breeders (who give birth to infants for sacrifice or sale), and may be mothers to unregistered children for years
Nymphomaniacs
Masochists
Necrophiliacs
Sexual perpetrators including killers
Seducers (for example, of therapists)
Mixing parts is important here. Pain holder parts are paired with the masochist and perpetrator parts so they don't feel the pain they experience or inflict.
Frequently the victim is trained that he or she cannot experience orgasm unless in a violent situation, either hurting someone or being hurt by someone. Killers are trained to experience orgasm when someone is killed. Drugs enhance this.
Kids are trained by being masturbated while watching filmed then actual violence. Perpetrator groups thus produce the customers for sadomasochistic sex which they sell.
Anger Displacement Training
‘Programmers manipulate anger in children, starting almost at birth. They deliberately frustrate and enrage infants by taking away love, bottles,
pacifiers, soft objects to cuddle. By the time their victims are toddlers, they
are training them to kill.’
At 4 to 6 years old kids are taught to direct their anger to the group’s
enemies, including anyone who tries to help the child victims escape.
Child (soldier part) is given a stimulant drug, made to send anger to the
designated target. Child has to walk to target, then suddenly pivot to the
next target, while perps shoot at the previous spot.
Love felt for the sacrificed friend is similarly displaced to a target person
designated to be the child’s friend or lover. But this first love may be too
strong for this displacement to work well.
The ‘Angel’ of Suicide
Controllers deliver an apparent angel to lead the way into supposed
paradise of comfort and peace. The angel looks beautiful, like a
Renaissance painting.
In the crib, before the infant knows speech, handlers show images of the
angel as they stroke, soothe, drug, and feed the famished baby. They use
technical equipment to project the fake angel’s movement around and
across the room.
Programmers torture the child, then drug it and show the angel, which
becomes associated with relief. In cult training centres, after much torture
and terror, in the last room at the end of each pathway, is a woman
dressed up as the angel, who drugs the child and soothes her into sleep.
Suicide (by means previously taught) is commanded through a signal
which elicits the internal image of the angel.
Ritual Abuse
Events Specific to Satanic Ritual Abuse
Satanic baptism, age 12-18 months (rape by man in devil suit)
Demon simulation by puppets, film; kids are costumed and told they are
demons
Kids are costumed and told they are animals
Satanic rebirth, around age 6 (from body of a beast)
Marriage to Satan, age 9, official loss of virginity
Kabbalah training (reversed) with Hebrew letters and/or tarot cards; child walks pathways, inviting "angels" at the end are suicide traps
Firstborn male child is "Satan's child" and is sacrificed
Breeders produce babies for sacrifice or trade
Simulation of religious figures and the afterlife
Rituals
The child is trained not to sleep or eat in preparation for a ritual; your client
may do this and the front parts not know why.
Rituals occur on Christian and pagan holidays.
The child has been trained to hold urine and feces, to keep still and silent,
not to run, not to feel pain, and to make the usual front person sleep
Some parts are trained to use a knife for killing or dissection
Training to kill
Some parts are trained in occult languages
Not all ritual abuse stars Satan. There is ritual abuse in the name of Christ.
“Demon” Parts
Demons and devils are usually small child parts, split off
through special rituals at ages 3 to 5, costumed and taught to
make demon sounds by larger (adult) demon impersonators.
They may have the names of demons found in ancient books.
They have been taught no one will ever want them.
They may have been taught they will harm anyone they
speak with.
Do not try to banish them or they will retaliate by destabilizing
the client.
Language Speaker Parts
For Satanic or Luciferian cults
May write in “mirror language” or speak in backwards English
Can speak fluent Enochian or other occult languages
May also have languages from childhood when family has moved
Some may not know English or the language of the country the survivor
lives in
Some also know English and can be used as internal translators
Adulthood
Arranged Adult Lives
Victims’ lives are arranged by the perpetrator group, even when they believe they have made their own choices.
Careers are chosen by the perpetrator group.
Most cult marriages are pre-arranged. Only some parts of the victims are aware of this.
Living locations are chosen by the group on the basis of access by the group or relative exile for victims in old age or no longer of use. There are cult neighborhoods.
Perpetrators often want a victim to have a child or a pet, to motivate the victim to be compliant.
Survivors are sent to cult-involved therapists.
Survivor therapists are sent cult-involved clients.
Spies
All victims are taught to report on other victims—in other words, to be spies for the perpetrator group.
At conferences, in online discussion groups, in ordinary apparent
friendships, victims spy and report on other victims.
Friendships are arranged. If a survivor has any apparent friends, chances
are that some of them are spying on that survivor.
If a new person appears in a survivor’s life, that person may be sent by the perpetrator group, as a handler or a spy.
Handlers
A victim is likely to have a handler until he or she escapes or dies.
A handler makes sure you follow all commands, that your programs remain intact, that you make no moves toward breaking free.
Reporting parts make sure handlers know what is going on.
The same handler can monitor many people’s lives.
They can be parents, siblings, spouses, lovers, relatives, friends, therapists— or clients.
People in important visible positions have solidly loyal handlers, who will be demoted and punished if they break free.
If you know who your handler is, you can lie to that person, and not report what you think and feel.
‘Conscious’ Perpetrators
There is a program for certain higher-up cult members to become ‘conscious’ perpetrators when they reach a certain age, usually 33 or 39.
A ‘conscious’ member is fully identified with the goals of the group, rewarded with status and power and freedom from being tortured.
The opportunity to go conscious is presented and the person must agree to it.
Conscious members are aware of what they are triggering and why. They may become programmers or matriarchs, or have other positions where they are responsible for advancing the agenda of the perpetrator group, often high
positions in society.
The cult-identified parts of the person integrate with the front people, keeping the hidden tortured child parts buried deep inside, never to emerge.
Some handlers are ‘conscious.’
This is the Victim’s Life Trajectory
Unless the victim makes an enormous effort to break free
And we can help that happen!
5. Stabilization (internal safety) - Thursday June 2nd 2022
See Chapter 11 in Healing the Unimaginable:
‘Stabilization takes on a new meaning.’
Destabilizing Symptoms in Trauma
Survivors
Include traumatic intrusions such as flashbacks, nightmares, body memories, and emotional states of sadness, anxiety and despair. These are post-traumatic symptoms. Self-harm is a method trauma survivors use to try and reduce these intrusions. Physical pain can drive away emotional pain. Suicide attempts can also be a way to flee these unbearable states.
In mind control survivors, there are often severe headaches, apparent seizures, and other physical symptoms.
But in survivors of sophisticated organized abuse, physical pain, traumatic intrusive symptoms, and self-harm and suicide attempts, can also be programmed responses—inside parts doing their “jobs” to punish the survivor for remembering or talking about the abuse.
When your usual stabilization methods are ineffective, it may be because you’re dealing with an organized personality system acting on programming.
A Major Therapeutic Mistake
Not recognizing that survivors’ flooding of feelings or flashbacks
or physical pain or suicide attempts or self-harm are often deliberately created by inside parts doing their assigned jobs
Kinds of Triggering Clients Experience
Accidental post-traumatic triggering: Something reminds a survivor client of a trauma, and this client experiences a partial flashback, emotional state or
body memory.
Handle this with grounding: Look around, name objects, listen to sounds in
room, touch your clothes, etc.
Programmed triggering: parts do their jobs in response to a cue, a date, or
an act of disobedience.
Mind control and ritual abuse survivors have both post-traumatic and
programmed responses (which are also post-traumatic).
Grounding Suggestions for Flashbacks
Find 5 things you can see (name them)
4 things you can feel
3 things you can hear
2 things you can smell
1 thing you can taste
Touch your clothes (reassures that clothes are on)
Place your feet on the ground and touch the arms of the chair
Wiggle your toes inside your shoes and feel the sensation
Programmed Triggering
Cued triggering: The survivor gets an external cue like a hand or facial
signal from an abuser group member and parts respond as they were
trained. Usually it is something about loyalty or not remembering or
attending a ritual.
Triggering in response to a date: Parts do a job because they were trained
to do this job on a particular date. The job may be to attend an event or
meeting. It might be to create a physical illness.
Programmed punishment triggering: The survivor disobeys the rules of an
abuser or an organized abusive group, and inner parts punish with
reminders of a trauma.
Handle all these by discussion with those in the personality system
responsible for the triggering.
The Abuser Groups’ Basic Rules
Silence – don’t disclose about the abuse
Maintain a façade of normalcy, or of craziness if you’ve been discarded for
Obedience to past and present abusers
Loyalty to past and present abusers
Isolation from outsiders
Breaking these rules brings on internal punishment (and, in some cases,
external punishment.)
Slow down disclosures if punishment is frequent or severe.
Programmed Punishments
Organized criminal groups set up security programming in victims’
personality systems, so that if a survivor or a therapist makes discoveries
about the personality system or memories, the survivor is likely to destabilize.
A huge percentage of programming is about the group’s security.
Most punishment consists of releasing parts of traumatic memories (e.g.
overwhelming emotions, pain, scary sights, scary sounds) to the front
person. These are usually warnings of what might happen if the person
continues to disobey the abusers.
In survivors of ritual abuse and mind control, self-harm and suicide attempts are frequently programmed behaviors, internal punishments for
disobedience, administered by enforcer parts. These are trained child parts who fear death or torture to themselves or others if they don’t “do their jobs.”
Some Kinds of Internal Punishment
Causing physical pain or apparent illness with no current cause
Causing apparent seizures (using electroshock memories)
Creating hallucinations, usually of the presence of perpetrators
Causing flashbacks and nightmares
Causing paranoid delusions, e.g. that a bomb will go off in the body
Causing parts to cut or burn the body, especially with patterns or symbols of loyalty
Unsuccessful suicide attempts
Causing extreme depression, mood swings, flooding of unpleasant emotions
Causing intermittent learning disabilities, or scrambling of sensory information, distorting what people say
Causing internal world disasters (flood, lightning, fire, tornado, earthquake)
System Structure Disasters
Many survivors have programs which cause the structures in their systems to suffer various disasters such as earthquakes, floods, and fires. Inner people can re-experience the pain from the original programming.
These disasters are simulated in childhood with a model of the child’s
system structures and the child being put sprayed with a fire hose (flood),
shaken on an infirm base, or set on fire.
These are used for punishment for disobedience.
There are external triggers, e.g. hearing a particular song.
How Most Internal Punishments and Warnings Work
The inside part with the job accesses a piece of a traumatic memory, such as the feeling of despair or the sight of someone dressed up as Satan or God, or the sound of a baby crying, or the sensation of pain. This is probably done by finding the inner person who holds this sensation.
The part in charge of the punishment ‘is like a conductor of an orchestra.
He calls out the musicians who play instruments but does not play an
instrument him or herself.’ (Wendy Hoffman in From the Trenches)
Spinner parts spin the piece of memory out to the rest of the system so that the front person and others will experience it as if is happening to them in the present.
Even the bizarre symptoms come from memories of bizarre events and are deliberately designed.
Another Therapeutic Mistake
Helping one side of the personality system battle with the other side
(fostering internal splitting instead of resolving internal conflicts)
This definitely makes things worse!
Instead, reassure, reason with, and educate the parts who do their jobs.
Stopping Programmed Symptoms
(Warnings or Punishments)
Negotiate with the insiders causing the flashback or self-harm or hallucinations, not the ones experiencing it.
Recognize that these parts are not really malevolent; they are just doing what they have to in order to avoid what they have been told will happen if they don’t do their jobs.
Ask to speak to the one who gave the pain, showed the picture, made the person dizzy, made her sleepy, or made her want to cut.
Reassure that internal person that s/he isn’t in trouble, and ask what message s/he is giving to the client’s front person, and what rule might have been broken.
Look for the threat behind the warning. Ask “What are you afraid might happen if she breaks that rule?” Bring the threat out into the open.
Suggest that words would be more effective, and promise to listen to spoken warnings and pass them on to the parts who have broken the group’s rules. Ask the front people to do this, while the punishers listen.
Remember that everyone inside has a boss, who is listening and considering what you say.
When Your Client Winces or Self-Harms in Your Office
You can say “Hey! You’re not allowed to hurt bodies in here. I don’t do it
and you aren’t allowed to either. Stop it!”
Then more softly – “You aren’t in trouble. You just need to learn the rules of my office.” Even internal punishers expect punishment!
Reiterate the rules of your office. Mine are: Don’t hurt bodies, don’t break
things, don’t take clothes off. Emphasize that the rules are for you as well as for clients.
Sometimes they hear you mention something and think one of their parts
must have disclosed this information. You can say “Don’t punish him for
what I said. I didn’t learn it from you.”
If the Message is for You (the Therapist)
(If the symptom is caused to get your attention and warn the client about you)
Speak through to whoever gave the warning: “What do you think I’m trying to do?”
“You think I know too much? … But you need a therapist who knows what kind of thing you’re dealing with.”
“I learned about this from my clients/ from a book/ from a workshop. Not from you. I already knew it before you said anything, so you shouldn’t be in trouble for telling me.”
“You think I’m here to get you to tell all your memories? No, that’s not my
purpose at all. My purpose is to help all of you to have a better life and to be in charge of your own life rather than the slave of someone else.”
“What do you expect me to do? … You think I’ll abuse you? Why do you think that? … Did someone tell you I’d do that?... Did someone else do those things to you? … Ask the parts who know me whether I’ve ever done that.”
Finding Common Ground
ASK open-ended, genuinely curious, non-judgmental questions
LISTEN to what people say and deepen your understanding with follow-up
questions
REFLECT back on their point of view by summarizing their answers and
noting underlying emotions
AGREE before challenging them by pointing out your areas of common
ground
SHARE your thinking by telling a story about a personal experience.
(from David Suzuki Foundation’s newsletter Finding Solutions, regarding how to talk with people who hold an opposing position re. climate change, vaccines, etc.)
Self-Harm Training
Certain inside parts are trained to harm the body in specific ways if
the person is disloyal or discloses secrets. E.g. a child is branded with
a pentagram, told it marks her as a servant of Satan, and if she is
disloyal she must make this mark on her own body to prove her
loyalty. Introject parts of the perpetrators must do what those actual
perpetrators did.
The parts who do the harm do not feel the pain. Physical pain can
banish emotional pain. Some victims are trained to experience
sexual pleasure with self-harm, and it can become an addiction.
The parts who do this do their jobs out of terror.
External Triggering of Self-Harm
Perpetrators or other survivors can give cues to trigger this behavior. (cut or burn) may be triggered by abusers in order to get a survivor
into a hospital where s/he can be accessed.
Patterns of cuts and burns give visible messages that the person has been abused by a cult group, so local cult members, e.g. in a psychiatric
hospital, can recruit the survivor.
Cult members can injure a client in this way in the hope that the therapist
will see the harm and hospitalize the person for self-harm.
Much effort is put by perpetrators into infiltrating psychiatric hospitals,
finding survivors there and re-training them.
Suicide Attempt Training
Perpetrator groups put a lot of time and effort into training their victims, and do not like them to die or to draw attention through a successful suicide.
Groups don’t like to waste all their training by having their victims die. There’s a “Don’t Die” program, usually involving fear of going to hell.
RA/MC survivors attempt suicide more than other extreme abuse survivors, but their success rate is no higher.
Suicide attempt training is given to children in very specific ways (e.g. take one or two pills less than a lethal amount.) Perpetrators or other survivors can give cues to trigger this behavior.
Suicide attempts are not intended to be lethal unless important disclosures have been made. As with self-harm, the attempts may be made to convince the therapist to hospitalize the client.
‘Depotentiate suicide as negotiating currency.’ (Margo Rivera)
Booby Traps
Booby traps are set off if the person tries to break the code of conduct.
Some are designed to kill; some are designed to make the person seem
insane and tell wild stories, some make the system crash and the person
lose all memory.
One very bad booby trap is an overwhelming feeling of guilt and
depression, feelings so overwhelming that the person gets trapped in the
emotion. These emotions come from the death of a loved one or pet, or
abandonment and being told they are unlovable even by God. The angel
of suicide can stop this pain.
The ‘Angel’ of Suicide
(see Wendy Hoffman’s essay on this in From the Trenches, pp. 167-9)
Controllers deliver an apparent angel to lead the way into supposed
paradise of comfort and peace. The angel looks beautiful, like a
Renaissance painting.
In the crib, before the infant knows speech, handlers show images of the
angel as they stroke, soothe, drug, and feed the famished baby. They use
technical equipment to project the fake angel’s movement around and
across the room.
Programmers torture the child, then drug it and show the angel, which
becomes associated with relief. In cult training centres, after much torture
and terror, in the last room at the end of each pathway, is a woman
dressed up as the angel, who drugs the child and soothes her into sleep.
Suicide (by means previously taught) is commanded through a signal
which elicits the internal image of the angel.
Internal Homicide Training
Certain parts are trained to believe they do not belong to the body, and will not die when the body dies.
With someone with DID, it is not easy to tell if there is a serious suicide risk. One part can have a pleasant therapy session, then another part jump off the building. You need to assess whether the group might want the person to die, risking an investigation.
Parts who harm or try to kill the body often don’t feel pain, and believe they aren’t part of the body. They can jump off buildings, set fire to themselves, etc. But this programming isn’t triggered by the group until the perpetrator group has given up on the person and also considers the person a serious security threat.
Show these parts that they are in the same body with the others. Draw on the body’s hand, then ask the parts who are supposed to harm or kill the body to come out and look at it.
Traditional Psychiatric Treatment
When you’re overwhelmed, you may want to send your client for
psychiatric evaluation, medication, and/or inpatient treatment. But there
are complications.
Antipsychotic medications can interfere with internal communication.
Many hospitals are infiltrated. Programs can be triggered by other patients.
Perpetrators on staff can conduct cult events and trigger programs.
Group therapy and/or hospitalization can learn to victims being identified
and enrolled in local cult activities when they were previously safe.
Mental injury requires different treatment from mental illness.
Brief hospitalization in some cases provides time with reduced suicide risk.
There is a danger of the client becoming dependent on such resources,
and losing previous self-care capability.
Don’t Hurry and Don’t Investigate
Slow Down to Stabilize
You are a therapist, not a detective. The client may assume your purpose is to find out the secrets. Reassure them that it isn’t; your purpose is healing and improving life.
Don’t let detective parts of your survivor client hurry you into discovering things too fast.
Do not rush to find things out before the inside parts in charge have developed sufficient trust.
If you push for disclosures or memories, this will provoke parts to do their jobs of destabilization and reporting to abusers.
Delay memory work until physical safety and cooperation with internal leaders are established. Your aim must be to develop rapport with those internal leaders.
But you’ll get nowhere if you delay until there is complete stability.
6. Working with internal leaders - Thursday July 7th 2022
A Few Reminders
Of how to talk with someone who is multiple …
Many Parts (“People”), One Body
We singletons expect to be conversing with one person.
But it’s more like talking with identical brothers or sisters who impersonate one
Look for the physical evidence of them changing places.
Learn to recognize body language and maturity level of different parts.
The front person may be just a “shell” who bridges the transitions so switching is not obvious.
Do not assume the front person is the “real” person and the others less real, or that the front person can control behavior of the other parts
Do not assume continuity of memory. Some multiples lie to cover for periods of time they don’t remember.
Parts new to the present are often confused about time and place and date
It’s Like Speaking with Many Housemates on the Phone
One at a time can control the voice and speak with you.
The house has a speaker phone so those nearby (but not everyone) can
hear you.
You can talk through to others in the house.
You can send messages to ones far from the phone.
You can ask that others in the house give information to the one on the
phone.
You’re not really on the phone, but you see the person’s body, and you
may notice he or she pauses as if listening. If this happens, speak more
slowly, pause, and repeat yourself, so that the one you’re talking with can
talk “inside” as well as with you. You are actually communicating with
several people at once.
Match Your Style to the Part(s)
Presenting …
It’s a dance—You shift with their state, as with a baby who laughs then
cries. It’s attunement.
You are often talking with an “insider” when you think it’s the front person,
the adult.
See how old the person appears from their speech and body language,
and match your language to that age.
Sound assertive with tough parts, but be careful, as even a slightly raised
voice can engender terror.
Client may ask or think: “Are you going to shout? Are you going to hit me?”
Some tough parts have tender ones hidden underneath the surface. Parts
can themselves be multiple.
Using Inner Voices to Establish Communication with Parts
Notice when the client seems to be listening internally.
“Did someone say something to you? … What did they say? … Do you
know what they mean?”
“Could you ask the person who said that why they said that? Can they
explain for me?”
“Do they have any questions for me? … They can talk through you.”
“Would they be willing to come out and talk to me so I can understand
them better?”
Attachment Styles of Parts in DID
Some parts will act out the type of attachment behavior which worked with their original caregivers.
Some other parts will still reach out for the safe, secure attachment which might be possible with you. And you will respond.
But be aware that the other parts are present.
And many survivors are still involved with the original perpetrators or the
group culture to which those perpetrators/parents belonged. There may be
intense dependency. And it’s very hard for these people to explore, learn
and develop a sense of Self.
Having had at least one safe attachment tells the child that this is possible, even if it was brief.
Time and Trust
There is no substitute for time in building trust.
Your clients will watch your every move and every word to see whether or
not you are trustworthy, believing that it is most likely that you are not, but
hoping desperately that you will prove to be a person they can trust.
Take your time, and be patient with yourself, too.
At the start, just deal with the presenting problem. The client will let you
know when they are ready to go deeper.
Treat all parts with consistency and fairness.
When new parts emerge, they may have no sense of time. Suggest they
talk with parts who have a history with you, so they can catch up on what
the other parts have learned about you.
Internal Hierarchies and Leaders
Hierarchies
Many organized personality systems have internal hierarchies, which may
mirror the structure of the abuser groups.
It is easier to work with a hierarchical system than with one which is formed by training individual parts without placing them under any internal
authority.
With a hierarchy, you can work with the internal leaders who can then shut down any programming until you are able to work with the actual
memories which created the programs.
When there is little or no hierarchy, lots of internal children will continue to
do their jobs, believing in the lies the abusers told them, and fearing abusers who are long gone. The survivor needs to form a new internal government which can seek out these child parts and re-educate them internally and/or work through their training memories.
Internal Leaders are Crucial to Recovery
The internal bosses and their enforcers issue threats when the survivor
disobeys the rules, and administer punishment for disobedience or
disclosures through flashbacks or self-harm or ordering “programs” to be
turned on.
To really change things, those parts in charge, at the top of the hierarchy,
need to decide to make a break for freedom.
Those parts, who rarely if ever come out in everyday life, need to learn
about how the survivor’s life circumstances have changed, so that in
adulthood freedom is possible.
The internal leaders also need to discover that they were deceived by the
mind controllers, that their power is only internal, and that they do not
deserve lifelong slavery.
Sally’s Example— the Higher-Ups' Statement:
“We were created to keep everyone [inside] in line so that they would
remain loyal to the organizations who made us. They were our family,
not the parents, and we owed our lives to them; they were our leaders,
fathers, mothers, military trainers, confidantes and family. They would
always protect us if we obeyed them and were loyal. From the body’s
first anointment at birth, we had to keep the body in line via the little
ones being told to follow commands, acting like robots for us, and thus
not asking or whining or thinking, just doing regardless of the
consequences.”
Trainers’ Words to Higher-Ups:
Obey or be killed. Obey or suffer. Obey and do.
Do not think—just do it.
You belong to us, you are ours, you are property, to be owned only by us
and for our use and no other.
We will tell you what to do and when.
You will listen or be punished and sent to hell, for God is not the leader
here, we are—the Luciferians, SS and KKK.
Do not deceive us or we will find you and bring you back or dispose of you
or make you self-destruct.
Trainers’ Words to Higher-Ups
(continued):
For your work little ones, you will be rewarded by not being harmed,
thrown into prison, into caves or coffins or killed or tortured or have your
friends killed or sacrificed.
Obeying and being able to take pain via training makes you stronger
and more determined to follow our light, the light of darkness, the way
of truth, of light, of power and the superiority and power of the Aryan
race over all humans and life.
Obey us and be strong and do not let any outsider fool you into
believing their lies. You are free with us not with them, you don’t need
to think, for we think for you and for your safety and your power, so that
you may have power over life itself, and the blood of all humanity, and
animals.
You are superior and will honor us till death or be called a traitor and
die with the outsiders in mind, spirit and body. We will make it so.
Facts About Higher-Ups
Giving a part a perpetrator name does not mean it wants to become that
perpetrator.
Many higher-ups have no experience in the real world.
They are typically aged 12 or 13.
They do not know that the body is an adult now, or that they are far away
from the abusers.
Their power is only internal.
Often they hate the abusers.
Higher-ups watch how you treat the lower level insiders.
Beginning to Deal with a Hierarchy
If a child part considers stopping his job, he may hear a voice threatening
him. When you see your client pause and seem to be listening, s/he may be hearing a warning or a threat.
Talk to that voice. Even if it appears to be an internal copy of an abuser, or
a fearsome demon, it is a part just like everyone else inside.
Ask its age. Make your conversation appropriate for that age group. Do not
ask for names, as abusers use them to call out parts for punishment.
Reach out with compassion towards increasingly higher levels.
Talk to those parts who give threats or punishments such as pain.
Be gentle with curiosity; don't interrogate or confront.
Working with the Hierarchy
Demonstrate understanding of jobs.
Tell them you're an outsider and ask about what they've been told about
outsiders.
Pacing is crucial; don't go too fast.
Get to know each one until it is replaced (in the front) by its boss or backup.
Tell them you know that their trust has to be earned.
Work to get them to think for themselves.
Dialogue Which Exposes the Deceptions
Don't argue with them, join them, agree, point out where & how they are absolutely correct.
You can ask (repeatedly)
“Is that right? Huh. Who told you that?" or
"Hmm. I wonder when was the first time you heard that statement?" or
“Mmm. That's interesting. I wonder who on the outside of you says such things?" or even
"You know, you weren't born with that belief, so how did you get that belief?“
Stay objective, neutral, and matter of fact –and curious & interested and wanting to understand.
See long examples in my book Becoming Yourself or my article “Talking with the higher-ups” in Ralf Vogt’s book Perpetrator Introjects.
Making Your Way up the Hierarchy
If a part considers stopping his job or being disloyal to the abusers, he may be hearing a voice threatening him.
When you see your client pause and seem to be listening, he or she may be hearing a warning or a threat.
Ask what the client is listening to. If it’s a voice, ask what it’s saying. Then ask to talk to the voice.
Even if it appears to be an internal copy of an abuser, or a fearsome demon, it is a part just like everyone else inside. Ask its age. Make your conversation appropriate for that age.
If you convince this voice you are safe, another voice may appear with a different threat or causing a different symptom.
Ask to talk to the new one, then do this repeatedly until you get to someone with some authority. Get to know each one until it is replaced by its boss or backup.
It takes time. Be content not to know many things for a long time.
Topics for Dialogue
What they believe or were taught about outsiders like you
Why they believe the group owns them
Why they believe they have to obey
The truth of what they were taught
Safety, protection and freedom (Watch your use of these words,
as abusers may have reversed their meanings.)
Unmasking the Deceptions
Frequently update the whole system about time and place.
Ask parts who know the truth about something to communicate it internally to those who don’t.
Demonstrate a similar trick to one the abusers used, without abuse. E.g. a mirror with something covering it (Abusers do this to convince a child s/he is a demon.)
Write on one part’s hand then show it to another part who believes it’s in a
different body.
Have parts together view an event in which they had different parts (e.g.
the one the rat was put inside, and the one who believes she gave birth to
the rat).
Effects of the Dialogue
(according to Sally’s internal leaders)
Alerting the security system to turn on programs which can make the client appear inaccessible, hostile, or overwhelmed;
Making the insiders, including the higher-ups, begin to think for themselves and wonder about the answers to your questions and whether your statements are true;
Shaking the foundation of the beliefs indoctrinated into them;
Exposing the ways in which they were deceived;
Giving the insiders the opportunity to talk on an equal basis with someone who is kind and curious, as opposed to their abusers who gave orders and were cruel;
Reducing dissociation by encouraging insiders to obtain information from one another and from the front person.
More Effects of the Dialogue
Making the unemotional higher-ups aware of the emotional and physical pain which created them, which is still held in the discarded and lower-down insiders;
Making the loyal higher-ups begin to feel or at least be aware of the unmet needs, sadness and loss, and constant fear and anxiety experienced by other insiders;
Making memories of hurt insiders accessible to unhurt perpetrator insiders (to end the desire to perpetrate);
Helping parts stuck in the past become aware of present-day reality and giving hope for freedom and recovery in the present and future;
Getting the head of the system to engage and begin to think;
Gradually dissolving the programming;
Connecting parts of the person to the person’s own spiritual essence, and helping
the person regain control over their own life.
Building Inner Community
At first, allow those the abuser group put in charge to remain in charge, so there won’t be chaos.
Teach these internal leaders to use their authority wisely and kindly.
Gradually move towards democracy in which the leaders in the governing council represent all parts’ needs.
Research each group of insiders—age, likes and dislikes, needs. How could the system provide for their needs in the external world? In the inner world?
Insiders often have names which reflect their roles in the abuse; they can choose different names.
Costumed insiders can take off the costumes. Those who resemble perpetrators can become kids again.
You can ask parts to stop doing harmful jobs. You can ask parts to do their jobs when they are helpful, e.g. put away memories, make everyone forget, help parts stuck in trauma to go to sleep temporarily.
Switch controllers and internal programmers can turn off programs, and can provide a list of programs to be dismantled by working through the training memories.
Giving Insiders New Jobs
The system can use insiders’ job skills to assist in recovery. New jobs may
resemble old jobs but in the service of help.
File keepers can keep memories contained and then bring them up when
ready to process them.
Observers and recorders can watch the survivor’s present life to make sure he or she is safe.
Spinners can spin away bad feelings and spin peaceful and calm feelings out into the system.
Pain holders can help with medical and dental appointments.
Soldier parts can get the body to exercise.
“Forget” program holders can make reporters forget anything they may have been trained to report.
Example: Soldiers vs. Garbage Kids
For difficult tasks in the inside or outside world, soldiers are not the best
choice. Soldiers are trained in instant obedience to perpetrators.
Garbage kids are the ones who refused to act on their training, refused to
do what the perpetrators told them to do, even at great personal cost.
They are the ones your client wants for tasks which involve standing up to
perpetrators.
Ways Parts Can Improve their Inner World
Cut wires, destroy control towers, etc. (with permission).
Rescue parts who are “stuck” in inner copies of the places where the abuse occurred: boxes, cages, cold basement rooms, garbage pits, bedrooms where a rapist found them.
Give inner kids their own rooms with locks on the inside, comfortable beds or couches, etc.
Make nurseries for babies, caregivers, stuffed animals, toys, blankets, pets.
Create mansions, tree houses, whatever is most helpful.
Make places for exercise, sports, anger release.
Create inner TV screens for safely viewing the outer world.
Create an inner movie of present-day life to update insiders.
Import movie or TV or book characters as helpers, e.g. nannies, doctors.
Ask, Negotiate, Command …
With some personality systems, asking and negotiating does not work, and verbal commands are necessary with some parts.
This is because you are speaking with very young parts who are trained to respond only to commands, often phrased in a particular way. They are
concrete and literalistic. They are not offended by commands.
“Turn it off!”
This useful command can with some systems work to get programs which are running temporarily turned off. (Sometimes you need to add “in the name of Satan, whom I don’t believe in.”)
E.g. “I command you in the name of Satan, whom I don’t believe in, to
stop, turn off, and put away the Suicide program.” Internal programmers
are always listening.
If they are afraid to turn a program off, they can turn it down so it is barely
noticeable.
Spinners can spin in the opposite direction, spinning the effects of the
program back to the part it originally affected.
Using Program Codes
(See example in Healing the Unimaginable, p. 160)
Program codes are sequences of letters and numbers which, when spoken or written correctly, will turn programs on or off or even destroy them.
You can obtain codes from the client’s internal programmers.
Internal programmers are kids who turn apparently electrical switches on and off in response to cues.
Knowing codes and saying the “off” codes can help in undoing programming.
It can neutralize programs so they do not get in the way of the therapy.
This shortcut does not remove the trauma, just temporarily keeps parts from doing their jobs.
You can ask for program lists or charts with their codes (when you get that far and are planning systematic memory work).
Much “deprogramming” is simply using such codes. It does not resolve the trauma.
Two Useful Triggers (for some survivors)
Grasping your client’s arms firmly and briefly halfway between the
shoulders and elbows will turn off a spinning program temporarily.
Holding your hands out in front of you, palms upward, then drawing them
quickly towards your chest and closing them will temporarily turn off all
programs.
If you use triggers (e.g. special touches or hand signals), make sure that
your client has confirmed what effect they will have and agreed to allow
you to use them. Also, explain how you learned these triggers. You can do
the triggers on your own body first, to confirm with the client that they are
correct and will not do harm.
Using Programs & Triggers
You can use perpetrator-created triggers for useful purposes.
“No pain” can reduce pain from illness or abuse.
“Sleep” can put to sleep parts tired from memory work or programmed to
harm the body or go to the group.
“Forget” can keep the memories from the front person so that he or she
can function better, or can make a reporter part forget to report.
Calling out a particular part can be used in an emergency.
Cooperation is always to be preferred to coercion, so ask or suggest rather than just doing such things.
If you use triggers, especially without permission, parts may believe you are a perpetrator.
Programs Attached to Places or Events
Perpetrator groups can attach programs to particular events or places, e.g. a program may be activated by entering the therapist’s office.
Programs can be attached to one another (e.g. if a therapist attempts to
undo the “suicide” program it activates the “attack therapist” program.)
As you plan your memory work, you can ask “What will happen if we try to
undo the Suicide/Pain/Report/Open Door program?”
“What will happen if …” is a very useful question.
If current contact with perpetrators is suspected, you might discuss such
linkages by telephone with internal programmers before an appointment.
Some parts of the client may be able to make a “wiring diagram” of how
the programs are attached to one another.
Internal Cooperation
When the whole personality system works together, and those insiders in
charge work for healing, your client can make it all the way to full recovery,
given:
Careful timing and containment
Maintaining current physical safety
Updating the parts
Encouraging internal communication
Memory work when the system is ready
A good therapeutic relationship
7. Present-day physical safety - Thursday August 4th 2022
Present-Day Physical Safety
Avoiding Ongoing or Renewed Contact with Perpetrators
Extreme Abuse Survey:
Heightened Safety Issues for Client
Therapist discovered survivor was reporting to perpetrators about therapy:
Other EA 20%
RA/MC 50%
Therapist discovered abuse was ongoing:
Other EA 40%
RA/MC 64%
… and this is when the therapist had found out about it.
It took me a long time to discover my first RA/MC clients were still involved with the perpetrator group.
Problems with Assessing Safety
Child parts are brought out by perpetrators for re-abuse and retraining.
Survivors experience body memories of abuse frequently, usually as
punishment for disobedience.
Survivors are frequently in pain.
Survivors have difficulty telling the difference between current illness, recent injury, and body memories.
Young parts live in the past, and don’t realize much time has gone by. They may believe perpetrators are around when they are dead and/or gone.
There is usually extensive programming for the front parts not to remember current events involving the abuser group. ‘This did not happen.’ Front parts are switched out when abuser contact happens.
Use of Internal Children for Deceiving Adults Being Currently Abused
During rituals, retrainings, and other significant events where belief is important, only child parts are brought out.
Current abusers have the victim’s ‘black book’ and know which parts to call out with which signals.
Young child parts believe the deceptions that were originally used on them as well as new deceptions. They believe the BIG LIE.
They live in the past, at the point where their growth stopped.
They don’t understand lying.
They don’t understand past vs. present, or hallucination vs. reality.
To help them disbelieve in deceptions and to understand concepts they are not developmentally ready for, they may need to join at least temporarily with older parts, or be supervised by older parts.
The Perpetrators’ BIG LIE
“We know everything and are all-powerful. We have magical (for young children) or technological (for older children) ways of knowing what you think and do and say.”
The walls have ears.
Satan’s eyes/the All-Seeing Eye watch you.
We live in the shadows or in the walls.
The crows/squirrels/spiders report to us.
Your stuffed animals report to us.
A microchip/device implanted in your body tell us where you are and
that you are thinking/saying.
Everyone you know is linked to us and will report to us.
God/Lucifer/Satan (who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-present) is
always watching you.
Taught with hidden microphones, one-way mirrors, fake surgeries, and other deceptions.
Common Mistakes of Therapists
Not recognizing
Buying into the that current or renewed contact with perpetrators survivor’s belief and possible re-abuse is a major concern, and that client may report anything disclosed in therapy to perpetrators and be punished for disclosures. that perpetrators know everything and are everywhere and all-powerful and that the client and/or the therapist will be killed for talking.
Slow Down Disclosures in early Stages of Therapy
Access programming is designed by the perpetrators to immediately put
the survivor in contact with the perpetrator group if any disclosures are
made about the abuse.
Reassure the client that your purpose is not to make them tell what
happened.
Work in early stages on establishing rapport and safety.
Access Programming
All survivors have “access programming” to ensure they make contact with abuser group members and tell the group if they are beginning to
remember the abuse, or if any outsider like a therapist is finding out about
the memories or inner parts.
Survivors are often not physically safe from abusers.
Survivors are often mistaken about whether they’re currently safe.
Healing goes much faster if you can establish and maintain physical safety.
Perpetrator groups have more manpower hours available than we do, to
undo any gains our clients make.
Perpetrator groups are very bold and aggressive in retraumatizing and
threatening survivors who are in therapy.
Insiders who Maintain Group Contact
Returners have been told to return to the group on significant dates
like birthdays, or predetermined ritual dates, or years when the
survivor reaches a certain age, or if security has been
compromised.
Reporters report about disclosures the survivor has made, therapy
sessions & plans to relocate.
Inside parts who “come when called” feel compelled to respond to
access triggers (answer the phone, open the door, leave the
window open, cross the street in response to a hand signal).
“Front people” (parts who handle daily life) are called to go home
for supposed family emergencies.
Training to Return
Often the survivor is supposed to return to the perpetrators if some of his/her parts have been disloyal.
He or she may feel a desperate need to return to the group to avoid punishment, have a disabling program turned off (be “fixed”),
find out the facts,
save someone else,
get revenge, or
receive rewards—sex, drugs, or a promotion.
Some parts have memorized specific dates to “wake up” and return to the group.
There are scheduled ritual dates and callback dates.
If a Survivor Returns after Making Disclosures:
Reporting parts report disclosures the survivor has made.
Punishment is administered for disobedience or disloyalty.
Disobedient parts are replaced in their jobs with backups.
Old program training is repeated.
Threats are made to the survivor and others—”If you disobey again, a child will be hurt.”
The survivor may be drugged and his or her therapist may be
impersonated. The therapist impersonator assaults the survivor verbally,
physically or sexually.
The survivor may be forced to harm someone else to demonstrate loyalty.
There is electroshock to make the survivor forget.
Report Programming
Reporter parts include
innocent kids who just phone an apparently innocent family
member, and terrified kids who believe the BIG LIE and must tell the handler
They report the person’s disclosures
relocations
Activities of other survivors
Reporters are also observers.
Calling Home
If a survivor discloses secrets, a part who loves family may feel an
urge to call home.
This part calls (or answers the phone when family calls) and
remembers only a normal conversation.
The family member calls out a reporter part who tells what is
happening in therapy and describes any disloyalty.
The family member calls out other parts and gives them orders, e.g.
harass the therapist, cut your arms, come to the next ritual.
Preventing or Stopping Reporting
Suggest that your client’s internal leaders find out how the abusers
said they knew things, and how they proved it. Then have them ask
the whole system how the perpetrators’ “magic” knowledge was
actually obtained.
Ask to speak with the reporter parts. Help them understand that
reporting causes re-abuse. Internal leaders can also tell them this.
Point out that it’s easy for adults to keep track of a child, but not so
easy with an adult who’s moved away.
Relocation is useless until reporting is disabled.
Personality System Leaders are not told
… about the reporters inside, who are usually young kids. Inner
leaders are supposed to believe the group knows things by magic
or science or surveillance.
… how the perpetrator group gets hold of them. They just find
themselves called out by the perpetrators and don’t know how
they got there.
Instead, they believe the BIG LIE.
They have been told they are in charge of all inside parts.
They will be indignant at discovering (from you) that there are
reporter parts who are not under their authority.
Speak to Your Client’s Inner Leaders
You can talk to them through the presenting part:
“I want your inner leaders to pay attention; I am talking to you, not
the front person. You are the key to recovery. You can tell the rest of
the system to change their loyalty, to be loyal to your own true self.
“Why should you do this?... Because you have been deceived by
the abusers. The biggest deception is that the abusers know
everything you do. They don’t. They create reporter parts whom
they hide from you.
“If the abusers knew everything about you, why would they need
to create reporter parts to tell them things?”
Inner leaders are not little kids and can think this through.
If reporter parts are telling perpetrators
about therapy sessions
If reporters won’t cooperate, have the system put them
to sleep after the first five minutes of your therapy session
and wake up near the end when you’re talking about
nothing much.
Another method is to make the reporters forget what
happened, substituting a memory of a harmless session,
You can have reporters report to the inner leaders or to
inner copies of the abusers instead of to outside people.
Any other ideas?
Training to Respond to Signals
When the survivor is no longer returning or reporting, he or she may still be
accessible because of parts trained to respond to cues from the perpetrators.
Cards or gifts or emails or texts from family may contain deliberate triggers to set off programs or give instructions.
Specific auditory triggers such as 3 phone rings, a car honk, beeping
sounds, or a pattern of knocks on the door
Visual hand signals and face signals.
Some parts are trained to answer the phone or open the door or go to the
handler, afraid for their lives if they don’t. “Always answer when Satan
calls.”
Addicted parts are trained to go outside to get drugs; they feel withdrawal
when triggered.
A touch on the left shoulder with the name of a part forces that part out.
More about Hand (and Face)Signals
Hand signals are used to give messages to particular parts in a mind-controlled personality system. They may say “Come here,” “Don’t listen to that person,” “Turn on the flashbacks” or various other things.
Perpetrator group leaders take leadership positions in churches and support groups in order to give these signals.
When survivors are going to be around other survivors, perpetrators may give some people’s insiders instructions to use hand signals on the other survivors.
An survivor may give another survivor a hand signal while their front parts are unaware it is happening.
Many hand signals are disguised as ordinary movements, such as brushing hair back from your face or adjusting your glasses.
Cult members hang around downtowns flashing signals to find survivors from other groups.
Availability Programming
Leave the door unlocked or the window open (survivor may feel
suffocated if it is closed)
Don’t leave town (taught with simulated crashes)
Don’t run
Don’t make a noise
Don’t move
Handlers
Disobedient survivors of organized abuse may be sent handlers—persons who keep contact with them on behalf of the perpetrator group.
Often a spouse is a handler.
Be suspicious of a new boyfriend or a new bosom buddy who appears in a survivor’s life suddenly.
There are also traveling programmers who pay visits to survivors to keep them in line.
Such people are sent when reporter parts alert the group that the survivor is making disclosures.
A Little Pessimism
If your client comes from a family with important status in a big
multigenerational group, it may be very difficult to achieve physical safety,
as she may be followed and tortured repeatedly.
If your client has been publicly disclosing important secrets of the
perpetrator group, it may be very difficult for the client to remain safe.
Groups are aggressive and bold in harassing survivors; they rely on the
survivor’s dissociation to keep their harassment from memory but maintain obedience.
Some Safety Precautions for Survivors
If there’s current danger, try to have a safe spouse or roommate who can be informed and stay with you whenever you go out.
Turn off the phone ringer. Erase texts without reading them except from people you know are safe.
Leave your cellphone in the fridge or remove its battery so it can’t be tracked.
Change your email address.
Open letters and parcels only in the therapy office, where you can discuss the meaning of any triggers with your therapist.
If you are ready, work through the memories of the access trainings so that the parts involved no longer feel the urge to do their jobs.
Record all information about present abusers, and give it to more than one person unknown to abusers who will give this information to police if any harm comes to you.
Make sure the abusers know you have done this.
www.endritualabuse.org/ safety
(Ellen Lacter’s website)
This has quite a few good ideas, and also references to other articles on safety for survivors.
Kathleen Sullivan recommends being as public as you can about being a survivor.
Perpetrator Groups’ Motivation
(Bas Kremer of the Netherlands on the OEA discussion list of ISSTD)
We do not only have to deal with the intelligence of a few cross-border
perpetrators, but with the combined intelligence of generations in
exercising total control and above all [the groups] being able to stay safe
and silence and isolate their victims. We are dealing not only with the most
serious crime imaginable, but also with networks that over generations
have refined how to protect themselves.
This is literally about the survival of these networks. This means that often a cluster of parts is involved in reporting and must do everything possible to keep the network safe and eliminate anything threatening. This is not only about reporting, but also, for example, that a lot of attention has been paid to sabotaging a therapeutic process.
Attempts to Intimidate the Therapist
(quotations from other therapists)
In a discussion on the OEA special interest group of the ISSTD, a therapist reported that a drone flew over her back yard, and her ritually abused client reported that the abuser group often flew drones over her home. Should she be worried?
In my years of working with this population intimidation has come in many forms, from survivors telling me that insect nanotechnology is in my home, to the "white van" intimidation, to weaponry in the session room, to finally the disclosure of what orders and threats had been given, to a military chopper flying through my yard so low the ground trembled. These are just a few. (Amy Bradley)
BIG DUH: going up against organized crime and government projects means pushback - especially when we are successful… They know who you are. They know who everybody is doing this work. "The good news is you're not paranoid. The bad news is you're not paranoid!" (Susan Pease Banitt)
They can only tip their hand so far without us networking with each other or becoming too "real" in the eyes of the public. Take reasonable precautions. Get the highest levels of insurance and licensure defense. (Susan Pease Banitt)
Technology for Spying on Therapy
There are of course specialized apps to monitor or eavesdrop on someone via his or her smartphone. Even in a standard app like Whatsapp it is easy to turn on your location and make it specifically visible where you are. These types of apps will no doubt be used, including by network
loyal parts inside our clients. It is also always a good idea to ask your client in case of ongoing abuse or doubt about it, to physically switch off your smartphone completely [in the therapy session]. (Bas Kremer)
It makes sense they are using drones now - cheaper and less obtrusive than the old school helicopter/light plane surveillance that older patients of mind reported. That being said, I'd go out and give that drone the finger - consider that a clinical boundary setting intervention. (Susan
Pease Banitt)
If it were me, I think I might make a report to law enforcement, with a photo of the drone if I could catch one, and state that I believe it was sent by people who are endangering one of my clients, but that I cannot disclose the identity of the client or the perpetrators I suspect for client
confidentiality and client safety reasons, but that if any harm were to come to me, that information will be held by my legal representative and turned over to the police at such time. The fact that I made such a report might find its way back to the perpetrators and make them think twice about continuing to do harass me.
I would think and consult quite a bit before doing anything[about the spying]. (Ellen Lacter)
Psychic Attacks
Whether or not you believe it is real, these groups do use their psychic
adepts to attack us, our mental health, and our physical health. It is useful
to put up boundaries for this.
These groups are knowledgeable about karmic blow back. They know if
they attack saintly beings (who most of us are) who are doing divine work
they are limited in what they can do to us without tremendous karmic
repercussions for themselves and their organizations. (Susan Pease Banitt)
How to Handle Intimidation Attempts
(Amy Bradley on the OEA Discussion List)
RAMC survivors first come to us extremely skilled and often with alternative motives at first, perhaps sent by their networks and with very little awareness of who they are collectively. This brings about the important consideration that they might be there with an intent to program us. Early on they are watching me, as well, to perceive my responses and reactions and to figure out how quickly I will jump to where they direct me. It is important they feel my solidity, security, and steady nature so that the whole system can assess what space I am capable of holding with them.
If they are trying to program me, they will be unsuccessful (i.e. if I recognize intimidation tactics I refuse to be intimidated.). This takes a progressive calm sense of introspection, reasoning, planning, and acting (b/c what safety steps are possible need to be considered)… I feel it is important to model "out here" what it looks like to not stay in secrecy from a place of intimidation.
I will always be checking in with myself internally about my own state of
regulation because the world we live in is the world we live in and we are
important too.
External Safety – Summary
Be aware that many if not most survivors of RA/MC/OA are still involved
with perpetrators and will report to them any disclosures they make.
Be aware that pressing for memories too soon will trigger this. The work is much easier if they are not reporting.
Look for signs of ongoing abuse and group involvement.
Recognize that your client’s front person probably does not know whether
or not s/he is safe. Make it a priority for them to gain awareness of present
intimidation.
Recognize that your client may be re-abused and tortured regularly, but it
is their decision whether to continue in therapy and they may well decide
that it is worth it. You can’t keep them physically safe.
8. Working through the traumatic memories - Thursday September 8th, 2022
Working Through the Traumatic
Memories of Mind-Controlled Clients
…and destroying the mind control
Basic Biology of Memory
Association and Dissociation
Components of Any Experience
When we experience something, we put together fragments of the
experience from:
the different senses
and the various emotions (reactions to the sensations and the meaning we have made of these sensations).
In normal life, these fragments are woven together in the hippocampus and
sent as a whole experience to the cerebral cortex. We are generally unaware of the complexity of what we are experiencing. These fragments, put together, tell the story of what happened to us.
Trauma causes dissociation, which keeps the fragments separate.
Sensations
Eyes: what we see
Ears: what we hear (including background noise)
Nose: what we smell
Mouth: what we taste
Bodily sensations: generally located in specific parts of the body
The softness or hardness or spikiness of what we touch or what touches us;
Itches
sexual feelings
Pain (dull, sharp, prolonged, brief)
Sensations of motion, balance, dizziness
Drugged sensations
Emotions
We interpret our sensations and emotions arise in response, in particular to the interpersonal situation.
Sadness, loneliness, despair, nostalgia
Boredom, excitement, exhaustion
Anxiety, fear, horror
Anger, fury, frustration, disgust
Guilt, shame
Comfort, serenity, joy, happiness, delight, amusement, awe
Triumph, satisfaction
Confusion, turmoil, awkwardness
Sympathy, empathic pain, envy, pity, love, admiration
A single experience can produce a variety of emotions.
Trauma Prevents Full Association of the Elements of Experience
Especially in infancy and childhood, an overwhelming experience,
particularly one with physical and emotional pain, cannot be fully put
together.
When the amygdala (the brain’s alarm bell) shuts down the
hippocampus because of overload, the fragments of the experience
are never integrated.
The brain circuit which entered this traumatic experience is replaced
by new ones which hold different aspects of the experience.
Insiders develop to hold particular types of fragments of experience.
Each insider (part, alter) is (in my opinion) a separate brain circuit.
Every feeling has certain insiders who have the job of holding that
feeling.
The Biology of Memory Reconstitution
A memory can be reconstituted if it is relived while the person knows he
or she is in a safe place with a safe person. Or completely alone.
The fragments of experience belonging to the different senses and
emotions are brought together, and fed through the hippocampus to
the cerebral cortex, where they become integrated.
In this way the memory fragments move from the unconscious to the
conscious mind. What was formerly a dissociated, “forgotten” memory
is now consciously remembered. It no longer erupts in disturbing ways.
It loses much of its emotional punch. And it begins to be less clear and
can be contaminated by other contents of consciousness.
When a memory is put together, some dissociative barriers are no
longer necessary, and parts of the person involved in that memory
often join together.
Whether and When to do Memory Work
Resolving Traumas through Memory Processing
At the time a memory is processed, it is as if it is experienced for the first
time; it has not been contaminated because its components have been
kept separate from one another and from other memories.
A trauma is not resolved until all aspects of it have been joined: knowledge, sight, hearing, touch and taste, pain, drugs, and each emotion involved.
Organized abuser groups know this, and put in programming to prevent
memories being fully reconstituted.
Reactivator parts are trained to take and withhold specific parts of
important training memories.
A memory usually involves several insider parts of the person (inner people), each of whom holds a particular feeling, sensory modality or piece of knowledge.
Importance of Memory Work with Organized Abuse Survivors
If a survivor doesn’t work through the memories, he or she remains fragmented and constantly fighting against impulses or feelings. Genuine integration of parts will not occur, though they may learn to cooperate.
If a survivor gets the full story (sight and sound content) of the memory without the feelings, it may make it easier for the person (front parts) to be aware of the deceptions, and resist mind-controlled behaviors.
But there is a risk of the feelings flooding the survivor because a partially
completed memory struggles to complete itself. And without the emotions
worked through, the “rational” parts of the person may continue to be unaware of the evil of what happened.
The most effective method of freeing survivors from the mind control, fears and behavioral compulsions (“jobs”) assigned to parts is working through the memories of the training which created the mind control.
Deciding Whether & When to Pursue Memories
Initially memories come up as punishment for disclosures, so it is unwise to try to work them through. The fact that memories (usually flashbacks of parts of memories)
come up does not indicate the survivor is ready to work them through.
If you try to work with memories early in the recovery process, the security system is triggered and parts do their jobs, such as punishing and reporting to perpetrators.
Don’t do memory work until those in charge of the system agree to it, or agree to certain relatively innocuous memories being worked on. This may (of course) still trigger parts to do their jobs.
Don’t do memory work during periods of current life stress for the survivor, as it can cause bodily and emotional symptoms when memories are only partially processed.
A survivor should not work on several memories at once. Emotions may flood and memories may remain incomplete.
Dealing with Flashbacks
A flashback is a memory fragment, a “closed physiological loop of re-abuse,” which can be
Visual (hallucinations)
Auditory (voices, screams)
Emotional (panic, despair, shame)
Physiological (“body memory”, e.g. of rape or drugs or shock).
Do not chase flashbacks. With mind control or ritual abuse survivors, most are deliberately sent as punishment.
Use the memory storage (“files”) built in by the abusers and ask that those
in charge of these files put the flashbacks away.
Closing down Flashbacks
Non-programming memories can flash back on their own and the abusers’ memory storage system may not work for them.
For flashbacks in the therapy session, use grounding: tell client to open their eyes, name things in the room, name the sounds they hear in the room, touch their clothing.
Use a signal to bring client back to the present, e.g. right hand on their right shoulder with word “Stop!”
If you know “off” triggers and the client knows how you know them, you can use them.
Teach client to do grounding and “off” triggers when alone.
Teach client internal negotiation (with the parts causing the flashback, not the ones experiencing it).
Beginning Memory Work
At a certain point you can tell that those in charge of the system are letting some memories or parts come out and those are ready to be dealt with, and internal punishment for disclosure will be light. Then you can proceed cautiously.
With “regular” abuse survivors, you wait for the memories to emerge and work with those that are emerging. With mind control survivors, you choose the memories strategically in order to dismantle the programming, beginning with safety issues.
You do not need to know what the memory contains before you begin. Just something like ‘The memory that makes you cut your arms,’ or ‘The memory that makes you leave your window open.’
Mind controlling groups deliberately install storage systems for memories,
particularly training memories. This storage records everything you need to
know—which parts (alters) are in a memory, when the event occurred, what it was training for, etc.
A Process for Memory Work
Choosing Memories to Work With
There is already a filing system for memories, especially the ones that constitute programs. Use it!
Begin with easy traumatic memories, minor traumas without too much shock or horror or physical pain, which are not part of the programming.
Working through these more accessible memories allows the survivor to learn the process.
Other parts can observe and see how it resolves the trauma of those parts involved in these memories.
Then have the system choose memories on a logical basis, with the goal being safety. Suicide and self-harm and access programs are a priority.
Eventually you can work chronologically to clean up unprocessed memories, or internal programmers can write out a chart or list of the programs to be worked through.
Don’t forget the infant memories of the original splits.
Planning Memory Work
As things come up in therapy, the survivor or the therapist should keep a
record of groups of parts (insiders) who need memory work, or of particular memories which need to be dealt with.
Keep a record of all memories worked with, and their purpose if they are
training memories. Then if new parts emerge who have pieces of them,
you can return to them.
You can put together many similar memories into one piece of memory
resolution, e.g. all the oral rapes in the bedroom.
Memory work sessions need to be at least 90 minutes long.
Memories of trainings may be linked – if you resolve one, it sets off another program – if so, get a “wiring diagram.”
Example of a ‘Wiring Diagram’
If you try to put together the memory that causes the survivor to return home, it triggers the Insomnia program.
If you try to put together the memory that causes insomnia, it triggers the program to cut the arms.
If you try to put together the memory that causes arm cutting, it triggers the Paranoia program (fear that a device in the body is reporting to perpetrators).
But you have already dealt with the Paranoia program, so it is safe to work on the memory that causes arm cutting. And then the one that causes insomnia. And then the one that causes a return home.
You can put all this into a diagram to find out which memories are safe to approach.
Some Issues Regarding Feelings
My method involves deliberately separating out the feelings while putting
together the story, then adding in the feelings. Not every survivor can do
this. Some survivors need to experience the emotions and bodily sensations
first before they can access the visual and auditory components of a
memory. They are often unaware that these feelings belong to a memory.
Survivors often have great difficulty distinguishing between feelings which
belong to memories, feelings which belong to recent trauma, and feelings
which are indicators of illness. It is important that they find insider parts who are able to tell the difference.
Early attempts to work with memories need to see what method works best for the particular survivor, regarding feelings.
Include Reactivator Parts
Reactivator parts are trained to deliberately withhold and hide a small part
of each training memory, so that the training effect (program) cannot be
destroyed, and the perpetrator group can re-create the damaged
program from the missing piece.
Whole groups of reactivator parts may be hidden.
Their portion may be words, incidental details, emotion, or physical pain.
Look for reactivator parts: ask if anyone inside has the job of keeping
pieces of the memories separate.
Dialogue with these parts and make sure their piece is included every time you process a memory.
Beginning a Memory Work Session
Use the internal filing system to access “videos” of memories.
Gather all parts of the person who are involved in the chosen memory in a
safe internal place with a video screen.
The parts (front people) who handle everyday life need not be involved. If
they are ready, the memory content will leak through to them later. If not,
leave it alone. They may remember the very start or very end of the event.
Have the survivor choose a narrator part to tell the story.
Prepare to take notes or tape the narration. This is the best record of the
trauma, as the memory details will fade once it is consciously known.
Create an internal container for feelings (bodily and emotional).
Preparing to Dissociate the Feelings
Emotions and bodily pain can overwhelm a survivor when processing a
memory, so they can be separated into a container while all involved parts
watch the story the first time.
Create in the inner world a place where unprocessed memories and
feelings are kept in containers, and some containers: a cave with barrels, or a bank vault with storage lockers, or a storage room with jars on shelves.
You also need a place for partially processed memories (left unfinished
between memory work sessions).
Containers should have a way to add to them without the contents spilling
out (spout, straw, doggie door).
Dissociating the Feelings
Instruct the gathered insiders to “Put in, bit by bit:
Pain, hurts, “owies”
Fearful, terrified, scared, worried, anxious feelings
Angry and mad and frustrated feelings
Sad and hopeless feelings
Drugged feelings
Sexual feelings
Anything else, anything you felt in any part of your body or in any part of your feelings
Then close the container and lock it up tightly, so that nothing escapes but you can add to it if you need to.”
Processing the Story of a Memory
All insiders involved in the memory watch the video of the memory (sight and sound only) while the feelings remain in the container.
The client holds the remote control and can make the picture bigger or smaller, speed up or slow down, rewind, fast forward, pause, or stop.
The narrator tells what s/he is seeing and hearing. If sound is not mentioned, ask for it.
I interact constantly with the client, asking clarification questions, giving
reassurances that it is not happening now, and correcting cognitive distortions as they happen, pointing out lies and tricks as they are observed.
Go through the story from safety through trauma to safety again. There are often “real-life” insiders present at the beginning and again at the end.
If the memory is too long for this, you may need to place it in temporary storage and return to it in subsequent sessions.
Adding in the Feelings
If the emotions and the pain are not processed, the entire memory can easily be redissociated, pain-holder parts remain stuck in that experience, flashbacks may occur, and programming is not destroyed.
Take a breather in the real world after the story has been told.
You can even lock up the memory and process the feelings in the next session.
Once the story is complete and all involved parts know it, have the survivor go through the video again with feelings, either once very slowly or several times, adding more feelings each time.
The feelings and physical sensations do not have to be experienced for the duration for which they were originally felt, but they do have to be acknowledged and incorporated into the memory with the story (pictures and sound).
When feelings have been felt, put the whole memory into the container and store it (labeled) in a new place.
Some survivors need to allow the feelings to be felt and released gradually over days.
Completing the Processing
“Put away in the container:
Everything you saw
Everything you heard, all the sounds, all the words
Everything you tasted, everything you smelled
Everything you felt in any part of your body (name specific body
sensations like pain with location, sexual feelings, drugged feelings)
And everything you felt in any part of your emotions (name specific
emotions such as fear, anxiety, sadness, despair which might have
been felt.
Now lock up the container, label it, and put it away in permanent
storage.”
Closure and Integration of Material
End with a symbolic cleansing in light or water (I prefer a warm, breathable
waterfall) where all insiders who took part in the memory are cleansed,
inside and out, from any dirty or contaminated feelings, and any remnants
of the memory are washed away.
The waterfall (or light) will wash away any boundaries between inside
people who no longer need to be separate, and will strengthen boundaries
if they need to stay separate.
After memory work, have a talk or writing session in which the survivor can deal with his or her current reactions to what happened, including guilt,
shame, horror, and possible integrations of parts.
Things to Keep in Mind
Special Situations
Very young parts may want to tell through play therapy.
Similar memories such as different occasions of training for a particular program can be processed together with a split screen.
When skilled, survivors can process some memories on their own (especially embarrassing ones).
Baby memories need to be processed for full integration. The whole personality system may be involved and may regress to infancy, so don’t ask for narration, just have touch signals for “stop” (like squeezing the hand). You can do it in short segments, then after each segment let a part become old enough to tell you what happened. In other cases, a child part may “translate” what an infant part shows to him or her.
Memories of dying or becoming unconscious: If the person didn’t die (or stay dead) when it happened, they won’t die while processing it now. Near-death (afterlife) experiences may be hidden within these memories, and can give hope.
Trouble-Shooting Memory Work
Keep monitoring the emotional state; if feelings become overwhelming, remind the insiders to put them into the container.
If the memory is confused, get the drugs into the container. Some survivors need to process drugs and strong emotions prior to the session in which they get the content of the memory. Many survivors get
these sensations in the period just before the memory is to be processed.
It is easy to miss a segment because some insider who has part of it is missing. Insiders often avoid embarrassing parts of memories like sexual feelings, shameful ones like perpetration, or extreme pain. If the story gets stuck, take a break to talk with the parts and find out why. Look for missing insiders, especially censoring ones re. sex or shame. Make sure the recycler puts his or her piece in.
The “sound track” involving instructions is very important to destroy programming.
If the chronological order of the experience is confused, have someone inside line up the insiders in the order in which their pieces come.
Look for “incidental training,” accidental events (e.g. sounds from outside) which were incorporated into the training session.
Similar memories can sometimes be processed together.
Skilled survivors can process some memories on their own.
Survivors Can Do Their Own Memory Work
Memory work can take a huge number of therapy sessions. There were
thousands of traumas which the ritual abuse/mind control/organized abuse
survivor experienced, especially in childhood.
If a survivor has a very good therapist, memory work can be done in
therapy sessions. But if the survivor can learn the method and has strong
internal leaders and/or front people, the survivor can work through many of
the traumatic and training memories without the therapist present.
The presence of a supportive friend can help, as long as that friend is not
connected with the perpetrator group.
Survivors without therapists can learn this process and do their own memory work, even to the point of integration.
Reviewing Memory Work
Get a written narrative if possible.
Are there discontinuities in the narrative, suggesting that bits may have
been omitted?
Is the survivor experiencing physical symptoms such as pain, indicating that these need to be put together with the part of the memory in which they happened?
Is the survivor experiencing emotional symptoms which belong to the event itself, rather than a present-day reaction?
Search for the parts of the survivor who hold the missing pieces, and help
them contribute to the completion of the memory.
9. Confronting the spiritual issues - Thursday October 13th, 2022
Confronting the Spiritual Issues
Ritual Abuse
Spiritual Abuse
Making Meaning of It All
in
A Brief History of Satan
(the man in the skin-tight red suit with horns and a tail)
Some Ancient Beliefs
Bad/unfortunate = bad/evil. Little kids don’t know the difference. “If I feel bad, I must be bad.”
Many primitive societies believed that if bad things happen to people, those people must deserve it.
Natural disasters are called “acts of God” by those who don’t understand what causes them. Primitive people believed that if a disaster happened, it must be a divine punishment for something bad someone did.
Because disasters don’t kill everyone, some think that it is God who saves some people from disasters and lets others die; He chooses the good people to save. If you thank God for saving you from a disaster which killed some people, you are really thanking Him for killing all those other people.
Before science explained things, people believed that if diseases weren’t the fault of people who got them, they must be caused by some external being. They thought that someone could curse someone else and make them sick (germs were not yet discovered.)
Ritually abused kids are told all these things by abusers.
Mythical Beings in Ancient Religions
People feared wild animals, so they created deities which were a combination of animal and human.
Some of those were beneficent; some were malign.
A person merged with a powerful beast would have great power.
Different ancient religions had different ones. Think of centaurs, Hanuman the Indian monkey god, Egyptian cat gods.
Modern people recognize the external forces causing problems as bacteria, viruses, faults in the earth’s crust, all discovered by science.
Ancient people imagined the gods, good or bad, as being the external forces which affected things, because science hadn’t yet been invented.
Some religions imagined “devils” or “demons” which caused illnesses.
Mythical Beings of Judaism and Christianity
In the Bible, there is a “satan” character who is an adversary, accuser, or
tempter. The only physical description of him is in Revelation, which is full of mythical creatures having descriptions which indicate their nature or power rather than their actual physical experience.
In Revelation the “satan” looks like a snake or a dragon, not like the
animal/human hybrid which later began to dominate our mythology,
something with red skin, a human physiology, and horns and a tail like a
goat.
Then the poet John Milton in 1667 wrote Paradise Lost, a long and exciting
tale about an entire class of supernatural beings who rebelled against God
and were banished from heaven, led by a “fallen angel” called Lucifer.
Paradise Lost
Milton combined 3 ideas which are in the Bible:
1) the adversary or tempter character ("Satan", e.g. in the book of Job,
or in the story of Jesus in the wilderness) who has the job of testing
people's motives to strengthen their character,
2) the notion of "devils" (external forces causing diseases), and
3) Two prophecies about Lucifer, the light-bringer. This name usually
referred to the planet Venus, the brightest star in the sky. In Ezekiel 28 it
refers to the king of Tyre. In Isaiah 14 it refers to the king of Babylon. In
each case, the prophet is prophesying doom for a foreign king who
was oppressing his people, a man who appeared temporarily bright
but would be brought down. Evangelical Christians have taken these
prophecies as referring to an angelic being called Lucifer rather than
a politician, even though these prophecies are surrounded by other
prophecies about the fall of other neighboring rulers.
The story of Lucifer’s fall is NOT in the Bible. Yet Christians and Satanists think it is. There are only these two prophetic chapters using that name to refer to neighboring kings.
Evangelical theology has knitted Lucifer and Satan together, as follows:
https://www.christianity.com/wiki/angels-and-demons/how-did-lucifer-fall-and-becomesatan-11557519.html
Lucifer’s pride caused him to rebel against God: ‘As a result of [his] heinous sin against God, Lucifer was banished from living in heaven. He became corrupt, and his name changed from Lucifer (“morning star”) to Satan (“adversary”).’
Christians have elaborated on all the supposed fallen angels or devils/demons who are under the direction of Satan or Lucifer, giving them names and identities, much like the Hindu gods.
Occult groups, along with fundamentalist Christians, have adopted Milton’s story as if it were true. Some believe Satan and Lucifer are the same; others believe that they are two different beings vying for power, and take the side of one or the other. So there are Satanists and Luciferians.
Abuser Groups Simulate Religious Scenarios
(Trigger Warning)
Satan, Lucifer and Hell
A child is put in coffin, drugged, falls asleep and wakes up in “hell.”
Hell is simulated for various rituals. Fire, smoke (made with “dry ice”). Satan appears out of the fire. Also Beelzebub, Satan’s messenger, the Beast, Lucifer—men in costumes and masks.
The “marriage to Satan” (a painful rape by the man in the red Satan suit)
occurs in “hell.” “Satanic baptism” also involves a rape of a child by this
man at a very young age.
‘Demon’ parts are “created” (split off) in “hell” through abuse by costumed
adults (big demons).
Victims are given a choice between torturing and being tortured.
A child may be made to sign a contract giving his or her soul to Satan or
Lucifer. Such contracts are not legal.
God and Jesus
A bright “light of God” is used for interrogation.
“God” is an older white-bearded man dressed in a robe, who rapes or
verbally abuses a child, an act of utter rejection, saying the child must go
to hell.
“Jesus” looks like the traditional pictures. He may turn his back on a child,
rape the child, or spit on the child. The child may have to hurt him while
“Jesus” is on a cross.
The child may be tied to the cross and tortured by “Jesus.”
The child’s hands may be used to kill the “baby Jesus.”
Angels
The abuser groups simulate angels for their own purposes.
The “angel of mercy” or “angel of the sunset” is simulated for children,
through art work or someone in a costume, when the child has been badly
hurt. This “angel” invites the child to come to it by means of dying,
promising comfort and freedom from pain.
This is a serious suicide program, and as far as I know all survivors of ritual abuse have it.
Other Religious Scenarios
Ancient Egyptian and other deities may be simulated.
New age beliefs may be used instead of Christian ones, with internal voices representing God or spiritual guides, and “spiritual” messages giving directions which benefit the perpetrator group. Inside parts of the survivor are given the job of speaking the “voice of the gods” to the other parts.
God Doesn’t Rescue
A child is being tortured and the abusers tell that child to pray to God or
Jesus to be rescued.
The child prays, and nothing happens; the torture continues.
The abusers suggest praying to Satan instead, then the man in the red suit shows up and the torture stops.
Now this child part of the survivor believes he or she is too evil for God’s
help, and only Satan will help.
It is a reality that God doesn’t rescue.
Spiritual Abuse:
Making Victims Believe They’re Evil
(Trigger warning)
Making Kids Think They Are Evil Beings
Simulated surgeries put a “black heart” or “Satan’s brain”
inside the child, followed by an event to make the child
think she or he is now evil because of the black heart.
Children are drugged to unconsciousness, then dressed
up as demons or monsters or aliens. They wake up in
costume, and people act as if they are evil and
frightening.
Parts of a child are trained as psychic killers (witches):
they watch someone apparently dying and are told they
killed them psychically. It’s a trick.
Forced Inviting in “Demons”
A child is placed in a triangle inside a pentagram and
given a hallucinogenic drug.
He or she is told to invite in a demon. This is timed for the
moment the drug will take effect.
The child is tortured until a new part is split off.
Everyone hails the new part as a demon, and pretends
to be afraid of it.
The child feels weird and disoriented, and figures it must
be really a demon.
Types of Perpetration Expected
Forced participation in human and animal sacrifices.
The black mass—eating human flesh and drinking blood.
Killing (with help) a “disposable” friend, around age 6.
Sacrificing “Satan’s child” (a girl’s own first baby), age 11 to 13.
Giving birth to babies who are sacrificed or kept hidden and repeatedly
abused.
Suffocating your baby whenever it cries.
Sexually abusing your own children (believing they will be killed if you
don’t.)
All these events violate the person’s own spirituality and capacity for empathy, splitting off parts who don’t or can’t feel empathy.
Training for Perpetration
Certain parts are trained to dissect sacrifices, take out the
heart, etc. And some are trained to kill.
Certain parts are taught to rape (girls are taught to use
objects).
Those who steadfastly refuse to rape or kill have to watch
other people do it more violently and are told it is their fault
that the victim suffered so much.
“Soldier” parts undergo behavioral conditioning to kill or
harm without thinking.
Military/political and organized crime groups train kids as
assassins.
Forced Perpetration
Ritual groups involve children in real and simulated animal and human
sacrifices. The child is told to kill the animal or human victim. If the child
won’t cooperate (and various parts are split off in the process), the man
forces the child’s hand to do the act.
But they want the child to do it without being physically forced.
Kids are put in double binds, and given forced choices of the lesser of two
evils:
“You kill this animal or we kill this child”
“Kill the person quickly or we kill them slowly and painfully”
Forced killing is often an act of mercy.
After forced perpetration, children are shamed, humiliated and belittled,
told they are evil.
Shaming of Victim-Perpetrators
“You are one of us, Satan’s child, evil, a killer, a rapist, an evil witch.”
“You are a child of the devil and belong only to the coven and the devil.”
“No one but us will ever want you.”
“God hates you.”
“You are going to hell, and your only choice is to be hurt or to hurt others
there.”
“You (especially “demon” or “demonized” parts) will harm anyone you get
close to; you have special powers that can destroy people’s lives.”
“If you remember any of this, you will remember that you did these evil
things.” A part is given the job of making the person remember.
‘Possession’
Are Survivors Demon-Possessed?
‘Demons’ and ‘devils’ in a survivor are usually small child parts, split
off at ages 3 to 5, costumed and taught to make demon sounds by
an adult-sized demon impersonator.
People say you can tell real demons from alter personalities by their
manner; real demons sound very threatening and react to the
name of Jesus. But child parts are taught to sound and behave this
way. Well-trained child parts can sound very convincing.
Other ‘demonic’ parts are older, 11 to 13, and may have important
jobs in the personality system. If you banish them, you will not be
able to undo important programs.
They have been taught no one will ever want them. They hide.
They have been taught they will harm anyone they speak with.
What about “Human Spirits”?
These are insider parts split off by particular abusers, and given the names of those abusers: deliberately created introjects.
They often have important responsibilities in the personality system, and are in charge of other parts, making sure those parts do their jobs.
Again, if you banish them or lock them away, your survivor client will not be able to fully heal or to undo important programs.
What about Ghosts and Spirits?
“Ghosts” and other incorporeal entities in a survivor are parts who
were led to believe they do not belong to the body (using drugs
and stage magic.)
Sometimes they represent suicide programs (internal homicide) –
“kill this traitor’s body.”
Sometimes they hold knowledge which they supposedly can’t
disclose because they can’t speak.
Sometimes they check up on and discipline the system leaders.
You won’t get to these for a long time; they are hidden.
It’s important to prove to them that they are in the body.
Hearing the Voice of Jesus or God
It may be simply a playback of a memory involving the person who dressed up as Jesus or God. There will be insiders who have the job of playing this memory back.
Or, like a ‘human spirit’, it may be a part who believes that Jesus or God is
its name, and it has to say the things the man in the Jesus or God costume used to say.
It will give the survivor messages the perpetrator group wants them to hear and obey and believe—false messages.
Survivors should not obey instructions from this kind of voice. Instead they
need to talk with it as they would with any other internal voice, recognizing
it is a child or teenage part of them.
How Does Evil Really Work?
through temptation
How Evil Doesn’t Work
Being forced to do something evil feels horrible, but it is the person who
forced the victim to do it who is evil, not the victim who was forced.
Making a lesser-of-two evils choice feels horrible, but is often an act of
mercy and kindness rather than genuinely evil.
The costumes and fake demons have nothing to do with genuine evil.
Putting a ‘demon’ in a child doesn’t actually work; it only splits off a new
part. Having such a part does not make the child evil.
Evil adults telling a child he or she is evil doesn’t mean that child is really
evil.
The people who direct the international perpetrator networks are not
themselves deceived by the trappings.
What are Good and Evil?
The Golden Rule is “Treat others the way you would like them to treat you.”
Jesus’ version is “Love your neighbor as yourself” (not instead of yourself; self love is good).
Doing wrong is, simply, violating the Golden Rule.
We all do this sometimes.
Evildoers violate it repeatedly. The more you do this, the less empathy and
compassion you have.
Some perpetrators seem to be genuinely evil, and perhaps possessed by evil.
But this a result of the choices they made, not because some adults put
demons in them when they were helpless children.
Some victims choose to become active perpetrators when given the choice; others choose not to.
Temptation
It is repeated yielding to temptation that destroys the soul.
This is a primary objective of satanic groups.
The choices that lead to evil are the same within and outside Satanism.
The truly demonic takes control of us when we repeatedly yield to what is
commonly known as sin—envy, lust for power, control, cruelty, or sexual
sadism. Or the simpler lust for material possessions or status, at the expense of others.
Harvey Schwartz: “The potential for perpetration festers in any environment rife with petty behavior, lies, gossip, objectification or demonization of others, self-absorption, greed, competition, and personal betrayal.”
Ritually abused people, when they choose evil, have the opportunity to do
great damage, and pass on their evil.
The Essence of Evil Perpetration
Harvey Schwartz: The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep:
“Evil is the attempt to inflict one’s doom on others, becoming doom, rather
than living subject to it. (Alford, 1997)”
“The perpetrator evacuates intolerable feelings into the victim’s mind and
body.”
“The essence of perpetration is objectification and the systematic
undermining of the victim’s sense of agency.”
“Perpetration’s annihilation of subjectivity is a quintessential vehicle for the
transmission and enactment of evil.”
Guilt, Shame and Forgiveness
Moral Injury
Moral injury is the damage done to your conscience or moral compass
when you perpetrate, witness or fail to prevent acts that transgress your
own moral beliefs, values or ethical code of conduct.
It can lead to serious distress, depression and suicidality.
It is damage done to the soul of a person.
Our clients have been made to rape and to kill. The horror of coming to
know this is extreme.
They failed to save others. They may have allowed one victim to be
harmed in order to prevent harm to another they loved more.
Even perpetrator group leaders may do their jobs to prevent harm to their
own children or loved ones.
Relevance of Near-Death Experiences
A child victim temporarily died as a result of abuse by the mother. She had a ‘near-death experience’ including a life review, in which she learned that
the acts of forced evil were not judged as true evil, but small acts of petty
meanness or unkindness were judged to be evil.
Another child victim died while the ‘Satan’s ghost’ part was in the front.
Unexpectedly, he (‘Satan’s ghost’) found himself being welcomed into a
beautiful place, not the hell that he expected. His forced identity didn’t
matter. He was a hurt child being accepted by the goodness of the
afterworld.
Articles on Moral Injury in Survivors
http://endritualabuse.org/ coerced-under-torture/
http://endritualabuse.org/ are-victims-responsible/
Things to Say to Survivors about Guilt and Shame
Truly evil people do not feel guilty for what they do. If you feel guilty, it means you still have an inner core of goodness.
Much of your shame comes from being told it was your fault when some person or creature was harmed.
If someone bigger and stronger was using your hands to do that harm, it is not your fault.
If someone else did that harm and told you that your energy was responsible, that is a lie.
If you were given a forced choice of the lesser of two evils, this does not make you evil.
Do not isolate the parts of you who were told they are bad.
It’s important to forgive yourself.
Things to Say to Survivors about Accountability and Remorse
Some survivors have parts who have done bad things, such as harmed
children, without realizing these things were bad or that the children felt
pain.
If parts of you who were harmed in those ways share how they feel with the parts of you who did those bad things, the parts who did the harm will
begin to feel empathy and remorse. (e.g. A pedophile part may believe
the child victims liked what he did, until he comes to feel the emotions of
the victim parts within the body as him.)
It is important not to cut off parts who did bad things either because they
were forced to or because they didn’t understand those things were bad.
It is important to forgive parts of you who are truly sorry.
We all sometimes make the wrong choice, and need to be forgiven.
Forgiveness
When someone says to me “Get rid of that part,” I reply “I can’t get rid of
him but I can help him to change.”
Anger and hate are signs of recovery in survivors, signs that they finally
believe they have worth and do not deserve what was done to them.
Too many therapists push for premature forgiveness of perpetrators, without recognizing the magnitude of the harm that was done.
Just because someone is a family member doesn’t mean their victim
should forgive them.
Only if someone is truly remorseful and genuinely wants to change, should the victim forgive that person.
Even then, the victim does not have to have that person in their life.
Making Meaning
Making Spiritual Meaning
God does NOT rescue survivors or provide escape other than dissociation.
Even if we believe in God, we have to conclude that God does not
micromanage people’s lives.
How can we believe that God is all-good, and all-powerful, but these
atrocities happen?
I believe we need a different theology from the abuser groups. They teach
about the guy in the red suit and his minions as if they are literal physical
beings, along with angels. They speak as if demons are bacteria who can
be introduced into people’s bodies through a mechanical method. That is
a childish view, and it is taught to children.
Yet we have to acknowledge that evil is very real, and some people seem
entirely devoted to it.
Making Sense of Suffering
(ideas from Rev. Lynn James)
Innocent people suffer, and God does not prevent it or rescue them.
These 3 assertions cannot all be true, so when people are struggling to
make sense of suffering, they have to let go of one of these:
1. God is all powerful
2. God is all good.
3. Evil and suffering exist.
Some version of 3 is what is let go of most often, even by people who
courageously bear witness to and work to ease suffering. This is done by
asserting that the suffering accomplishes some greater good.
You may not realize that you are denying the reality of evil and
suffering, but certain statements commonly used show that:
“Evil and Suffering Aren’t Real” (#3)
“Everything happens for a reason”
But some people are sadistic, greedy, or broken and intentionally inflict
pain.
“The suffering was necessary to teach a lesson”
This makes perpetrators instruments of goodness, and negates the
reality of evil.
“Suffering is your karma, payback for a previous life”
To interpret the concept of Karma in this way implies that the universe
is "just" and "good" and that atrocities are necessary and even
instruments of healing and purification. It blames the victim.
“Evil and Suffering are Helpful”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”
When people do emerge from hell, and heal and are
even, some of them, especially strong at the broken
places, it is because of their own inner wisdom and healing
abilities, plus the love, the comfort, the attunement, the
connection, the listeners, and the helpers. It is NOT the
atrocity that made them strong.
“God is not all-Good”,
or “There is no God” (#1)
“There is no hope, no comfort, no meaning-making; but there is a survivor's speaking of the evil endured, telling the story, and asserting that there is meaning in telling the story in order to fulfill his promise to bear witness on behalf of those "turned to smoke" so that their story, the horror of their truth, the desecration of their tormenters who not only killed them but also intended to erase their very existence, would not be turned to smoke and lost forever too.” Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and novelist
People who take this view speak no platitudes, pretend no happy endings, do no whitewashing of the agony of surviving and the ambivalence of living.
Wiesel and other like him challenge those who stand by and do nothing, and those who hide behind their "neutrality" as "spectators" and "observers".
If there is an all-powerful God, living becomes a protest against Him for His moral corruption.
“God is not All-Powerful” (#2)
Rev. Lynn James: “The notion of an "all powerful" God is what I have had to let go. I miss it.” I agree with her.
Rev. Lynn James: “We are conditioned to imagine power as force, as
domination, as combative. But Divine power is love, compassion,
connection, collaboration. God and creation are interdependent. At every
moment God is actively, passionately, powerfully at work to bring the best
possible outcome and at every moment God is also necessarily limited,
particularly by human free will and the laws of nature. He cannot poke His
finger in and stop the action whenever a human being chooses to inflict
evil on others. “
So it is possible to believe God is loving—but limited in his power.
Where was God?
If there is a God, I see God as weeping with those who weep, the
God who suffers with victims rather than the God who sides with evil
or does nothing.
Jesus said “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of these little ones,
you have done it unto Me.”
Perhaps God is within the victim, suffering with them, understanding
and valuing them even when they were treated like dirt.
Perhaps God is at every victim’s core, giving them moral strength,
whenever they choose not to be like the abusers, whenever they
choose compassion over hatred or power.
10. Healing the unimaginable - Thursday November 10th, 2022
The Unimaginable
I wish
I wish I lived in the world my siblings live in, where they are appalled by
some recent political events but are happy to spend their time gardening
or travelling as tourists and playing golf, where law enforcement catches
the perpetrators, where the biggest enemies are old age and cancer.
I wish I lived in the world I lived in when I was young, where children played
on the street and (as far as I knew) the neighbors looked after them safely.
I wish I lived in the world I thought I lived in as a young adult, where God
looked after those who tried to live good lives, and we could trust Him not
to send us more than we could bear.
Things I Learned through this Work
Early childhood is most important stage of life
People do the most horrible things within families
People can be more than one person
What society knows as abuse is just the top layer of what goes on
There is really a conspiracy, more than one, but not the ones the
conspiracy theorists publicize
High up people are involved in abuser groups
Law enforcement and countries’ militaries engage in hidden torture etc.
The extent of human capacity for evil is profound
The holocaust continues, focusing on children
Some Things I Wish I Did Not Know
Perpetrator groups collaborate and teach one another techniques of
torturing children, splitting the infant mind, and training mind-controlled
victims.
It is psychologically sophisticated organized crime, which runs in families.
There is a high level of national and international organization of these
groups.
Survivors bear the unbearable through dissociation, which is exploited by
abusers to control those segmented brains, piece by piece. Many of us
helpers do not have this ability.
Some therapists work for the perpetrator groups. Some of them teach self help techniques which are actually program triggers, sometimes in
complete conscious unawareness.
A Growing Knowing
“It makes sense that we are marked by the work. The deeper I go into
learning about extreme abuse, the more important it becomes for me to
actively practice joy and space in my body and the somatic knowing of
love and connection and ease, just so I can hold my growing knowing that
the world is full of unspeakable harms, and that sexual harms are so
commonplace that they feel like the fabric of society and our
intergenerational shaping, the same as misogyny and racism and
colonialism and war and all the forms of dominance and subjugation – and
– that there is love and goodness and possibility for repair.”
Lysa Toye
Horrendous Sexual Abuse
Pedosexual Networks
Bas Kremer of the Center for Knowledge on Transgenerational Organized
Violence (TGOV) in the Netherlands sent me an article explaining why his
group changed the name of what we are dealing with from Sadistic
Ritualistic Abuse (SRA) to TGOV. They suggest we all do that.
Their research delineates two primary groups survivors are involved with:
one a closed transgenerational group which trains the children; the other a
private pedosexual network which makes huge profits selling children for
organized sexual violence.
They note that most therapists do not understand the connection between
the two groups. Therapists focus on the trauma; law enforcement focuses
on the human trafficking. But these are deeply connected. Law
enforcement is skeptical about ritual, Satanism, etc. but is very aware of the child trafficking.
Sexual Experiences of Victims
Children are forced to engage in mixed pain and pleasure
and extreme sexual perpetration with one another, adults,
dead bodies and animals. The child is masturbated while
these other things occur.
As the child gets older, s/he is introduced to the pleasure of
having sex with younger children. This creates pedophilia.
Pairing intense sexual pleasure with violence can lead to the
creation of child parts who are incapable of empathy and
associate sexual pleasure only with violence. Many survivors
require violence to reach an orgasm. Others require a child.
Treatment Recommendations
Pedophilic and violent sexual offenders should be
routinely assessed for dissociative disorders.
It is possible to remove urges for harmful sexual behavior
such as pedophilia, by processing memories which
cause the split between pain or empathy parts and
sexual pleasure parts
Reconnecting sexuality with love and caring is a major
task and can only be attempted after other recovery
work. Celibacy may be preferable in the meantime.
Effects of the Sexual Abuse
(a survivor’s statement)
Patterns of vulnerability: early sexual abuse incidents left me with
fear/compliance patterns; I drew abusers throughout childhood, on
into adulthood (despite discreet presentation.)
Sought a good father/mother/mentor: I longed for respectful
interchange, a clean kind fatherly hug; predators easily groomed me,
moving towards sexual exploitation.
Few real-life healthy marriage templates: difficulty verbalizing needs
when in a sexually intimate space; marital coitus (though nice to be
viewed as attractive), I was beset by internal conflict due to graphic
flashbacks and pain.
Physical sexual injury: I had chronic groin/vaginal soreness/pain.
First Tasks in Sexual Recovery
Learning to accept the body you have
Getting in touch with your body and your senses
Figuring out your sexual orientation
Dealing with sexual acting out
Figuring out your sexual values
Partner communication
Then, if a survivor chooses to attempt full sexual healing, there are many more steps. Many survivors choose not to go further with this. “Tell me I never have to have sex again.”
Steps in Sexual Healing
(Becoming Yourself, pp. 255-274)
Getting to know your personality system
Accessing your history of sexual victimization
Facing up to your history of sexual perpetration
Having victim parts share their feelings with perpetrator parts, to stop perpetration
Working through all the sexual training memories of victim and perpetrator parts
Dealing with your history of "breeder" pregnancies (if your body is female)
Solo sex
Noticing and permitting unusual arousing thoughts or fantasies without acting on them in inappropriate ways
Sex with a kind, patient and non-threatening partner
Learning not to allow yourself to be used
Giving sexual parts permission to love your sexual partner, and
Allowing yourself sexual enjoyment with this partner
Perpetrator Groups’ Activities in the larger World
(much information here is from Wendy Hoffman and in From the Trenches)
Assassin Training
Little girls are trained to seduce, perform lap dances, drop pills in victims’ drinks, and escape as the victims become drowsy, sick, or die. Also to pull the triggers of guns.
Kids are trained to aim at archery and shooting ranges. For the big job they are trained to arrive at the destination, switch, position themselves, switch, aim, switch, watch for handler’s signal, switch, practice aim and reposition, switch, obey a signal, switch, shoot, switch into a part who knows nothing about what just happened.
The same part does not perform the whole act. A sequence of 7 to 10 parts, isolated from the rest of the brain, are trained with a metronome to hypnotize and a stick pounding to accelerate the switches from one brain part to the next. A sequence of songs in the head can be used.
Words, hand and foot signals, icons, or sounds open the program.
Assassins have suicide pills. Some are trained to stay put and be captured, some to run and be captured, some to escape. They are kept as fringe citizens.
Other killers shooting from other directions disappear undetected; the known assassin is discovered with a gun. There are cult people among the investigators.
Politicians’ Use of Victims
The major cults select persons among their members who are scheduled to be in political power eventually.
Victims are trained to service these people—as sexual slaves, memorizers, and messengers.
Memorizers are taught to use their brains as a camera or tape recorder,
recording words and documents.
Messengers deliver elite drugs and/or messages and instructions in writing.
Some are trained to assassinate politicians.
The perpetrator groups work hard to disguise politically visible perpetrators’ identities to victims.
Gang Wars and the Bandwagon
There is training for joining an angry cause, e.g. on an online discussion
board for survivors, a ‘freedom convoy’, a political group, and doing or
saying whatever you are told to do or say by the leader.
“You will always follow your leader. You will always join your team. You will
always protest when they protest injustice.” Injustice is the key false-word.
“You express the anger while your team leader is quiet. Sometimes you will not know who your team leader is. You are the voice for justice…. This is a government command.”
Gathering Survivors
Survivors are told where to live. Cult neighbourhoods. Dumping
grounds. Cult retirement communities. Properties around
graveyards.
In some cases, parts are trained to remain loyally with one religious
group, which has enough members of the perpetrator group in
leadership to control victims through out life.
Conferences for survivors, websites, online discussion groups are all
infiltrated by programmers and spies and slaves who give triggers
on behalf of programmers.
Some resources for survivors are actually run by perpetrator groups.
Recognizing Cult Therapists (Plants)
Coincidental timing of the survivor getting to see them
Over-friendliness, appearing to have too much in common with the survivor, or flattering them
Too much forgetfulness
Lack of compassion, operating from just intellect
Knowing too little about areas in which they claim expertise
Being rigidly attached to one approach, speaking as if reciting without
tolerating interruption
Twisting the truth about other people, accusing innocent people of being
perpetrators or plants; making accusations against one another to confuse us all
Entitled, demanding, or demeaning behavior
Recognizing Plants in Survivors’ Social Situations
Coincidental timing of the meeting with the survivor
Over-friendliness, appearing to have too much in common with the
survivor, or flattering them
People who know more than they should about ritual abuse, mind control, abuser networks, dissociative disorders
Too much forgetfulness
Entitled, demanding, or demeaning behavior; unexpected rudeness
The wonderful new friend may be the new handler.
How The Groups Kill Survivors (or more rarely Therapists?)
Preferred method is to make homicide look like suicide. Overdosing
a victim with his or her own pills. Slitting a drugged survivor’s wrists.
Tampering with a survivor’s (or a therapist’s) car. Having a suicide
soldier drive into the survivor’s car.
Pushing someone off a bridge. Ordering them to jump off a
building.
Slipping poison into someone’s food, especially at events.
Putting cyanide pills on top of someone’s usual pills.
Major Issues in Healing
Losses and Deprivations of Survivors
Childhood pets killed
For many, their only friend was killed
Their babies killed or stolen
For those whose families were abusers, the permanent loss of family
Family means abuse and neglect and torture
Isolation from peers who don’t understand
Victims forbidden to have friends outside the perpetrator group
Years spent with therapists who don’t understand
For older survivors, the chance to live a fulfilling life
For many, poverty, lack of financial security
Normal Experiences Survivors Never Had
Parents who didn’t abuse them; good role models
Emotional security and bonding, someone they could trust
Physical safety and health
Healthy brain development with sufficient sleep
Enjoyment and play
Relationships with friends
Chance to relax rather than being in constant overdrive
Education which developed their true abilities and interests
Independent thought
Ability to know and meet their own needs and develop purpose
Healthy development of sexuality in loving relationships
Physical Effects of the Abuse
Most victims have chronic inflammation and pain with injuries to the
neck/spine, joints
vagina/urethra,
anus/rectum,
abdomen/large intestine
The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study shows that most
severe and chronic illnesses are more common on the basis of how
many different kinds of adverse childhood experiences the victim
experienced. Our clients, of course, have the most.
Chronic Physical Symptoms (survivor account)
physical/psychological pain, body pain (leg/arm/bone),
abuse-caused inflammation of
cranium/face/neck/spine/coccyx;
migraines (average weekly), headaches (daily)
vagina (pain, scarring, dysbiosis, and dyspareunia), urethritis,
anal damage (small protruding flap after anal rape injury),
skin irritation, sinusitis, burning eyes, lung-oxygen
insufficiency/low-grade chronic asthma
impaired digestion, food intolerance, abdominal cramps,
eating disorders
sleep deficit, chronic exhaustion
Denial
Denial is programmed into survivors and is very tempting.
Not knowing gives a survivor an illusion of a happy childhood and a loving
family.
Families involved in perpetrator groups offer survivors some semblance of
family life in exchange for not remembering and not telling.
We are tempted to deny the reality, along with our clients.
Denial must be overcome in order to grieve. This is true for our clients and
also for us.
Therapists’ Denial of Current Abuse
Why do therapists not see when their clients are being tortured?
We need to do due diligence to ascertain whether there is ongoing
torture which is dissociated even when our clients are in therapy
with us.
Therapists' ears should perk up when clients say they left the cult at
14, 22, 35, etc. Professionals actually believe that is possible.
Even when therapists know that ongoing abuse in adulthood
happens (and most do by now), they still choose not to see.
Wendy Hoffman (survivor therapist, author of 4 memoirs, beginning
with The Enslaved Queen)
Major Issues in Recovery
Recovering and expressing emotions
Grieving for losses and deprivations
Overcoming shame; developing self-esteem
Becoming one person, a single self –or, failing that, a
cooperative system of selves with internal punishment at
an end
Emotional Healing
Anger needs healthy expression through art, noise,
writing.
Sadness needs to be cried out with someone who cares,
overcoming the terrifying “don’t cry” training.
“Booby traps” installed by abusers involve despair,
feeling unloved, with the emotions of parts who live in
cages or in “hell” or in the garbage pit. Such insiders
may see the whole world as like their abuse scenarios.
They need to be rescued.
Grieving
As awareness of what has happened grows, survivors
must grieve, one loss at a time, the loss of illusions about
their life.
Grief has always been meant to be shared. Religions of
all sorts have arranged for people to sit together and
share loss. In these mind control cults, however, grief and
the parts that hold it are isolated, without comfort, or
communion, or anything that will replace the
loss.(Wendy Hoffman)
Dealing with Your Client’s Grief
Don’t dismiss or minimize the depth of your client’s horrendous experiences
and losses.
Don’t catch your client’s depression and despair and paranoia. Allow the
client’s feelings to come into you but recognize they are not your own.
“Lean in but don’t fall in.”
Your client needs a compassionate witness who doesn’t minimize or
overreact.
Don’t give answers. Just ‘sit with a shattered soul.’
Seek knowledgeable supervision and peer support.
Your client must grieve about what happened to them, and you must
grieve about what happens in the world.
Self-Esteem for Survivors
(Ideas from Wendy Hoffman)
The real work of mind control is to make victims feel wretched about themselves.
Perpetrators believe that reducing their victims’ self-esteem is a necessary condition of mind
control.
We are born thinking we are worthy of love, but that belief was systemically crushed. We have to rebuild it.
One of the hardest jobs for mind controlled people is to believe in yourself. Programmers—all mind controlled people have programmers—make you think that you deserve nothing in life and are just a marionette on a tight string and a means for your controllers to get what they want.
They are lying to you. You are not whom they attempted to make you to be.
Programmers take an event that you innocently participated in, change the facts so that you think you did something bad and feel guilty. They show you fabricated pictures to “prove” your guilt. They want you to go through life thinking you are a bad person.
To heal, you will need confidence, belief and trust in yourself.
Perpetrators’ main weapon to have you not belong to yourself is their creation of amnesia with you.
Steps in Achieving Self-Esteem for Survivors (Hoffman)
Step one: believe in yourself. No matter what you’ve been taught about yourself, you are okay and deserve to be on earth. Start working to believe that.
Step two: be kind to yourself. Think of ways to comfort yourself and give yourself what you want. Self-kindness grates against all the programs in you.
Step three: you are not bad. Infants and children in you will feel the most unworthy. You may have to start with a front person and change those beliefs first. They will penetrate your inside system and reach your desolate children.
Step four: learn who you are: Children who have been mind controlled never got the chance to learn who they are. Programmers usurped their potential identity. Controllers told them who they are, mostly lies.
Step five: think for yourself. Stop letting other people hold your life. Begin to be aware that you do not think for yourself and that you are used to having others think for you.
Many of those others are enemies. In your regular life, try to stop asking others to make decisions for you or avoid people who want to decide for you. Choose what you want, what you think is best. That is a muscle in your brain that has not been used but can be developed. Start with little or big things. Think. Begin the long journey into independence.
Further Steps Towards Self-Esteem
Step Six: Try to rid yourself of emotions that perpetrators put in you and find out how you really feel.
Step Seven: Don’t accept blame. Mind controllers specialize in blaming victims. The programming goes something like this: you are bad because… It’s your fault that… They make up scenes and events.
Step eight: Forgive yourself. We have to forgive ourselves for what others do to us. It is not what we would have chosen to do. We have to forgive ourselves for being slaves. The only way out of this kind of entrapment is by becoming aware. It is not our fault that we were born into generational cults. It is not our fault that we had parents who were prisoners themselves and could not or were not willing to help their children.
It is not our fault that mind control has reached new heights and is hard to decipher, hard but not impossible. All that is reason to respect yourself, value yourself, cherish yourself and fight. Fight for the right to be who you are. Not someone else’s creation of you but who you really
are on your own. There are pleasures in life, the pleasure of sleep, satisfying hunger, walking in the sun, shade, clean air. And the greatest pleasure, discovering who you are.
Wendy’s Words to Survivors
I can’t stress enough how we were not treated as people, how our bodies were considered objects to abuse, to use for perpetrators’ selfish desires. A part of you may think they were right, justified. That misinformed part may be buried deep inside but may be there feeding your thoughts and beliefs. They were not right. They are wrong. You are human and alive. Your body is part of you. It deserves respect, it is worthwhile, precious. It has integrity. Love: Self-esteem and love go together. People can’t love unless they believe they bring something to the table. Enemies taught that the natural force within me turns into murder, that I had to suppress what earnestly comes out of me so as not to destroy. That I have to destroy my self in order not to destroy another or others. That I had to stunt development. That I could not grow. When they forbade love, they made me forbid my self.
Self-Love for the Integrated
“The new me looks back and feels love and tenderness for these old parts who no longer have to exist and perform. The strings of these marionettes are clipped, the chains of the slaves broken. They are free now. They reach out their arms to the new emerging self, the new emerging self reaches out their arms to them. They love one another. The essential is to love yourself, to comfort yourself, to be true to yourself. For many of us who have to leave our families behind, the self is the new family. Be kind, accepting, stick by yourself. It is what you have now.” Wendy Hoffman
Integration?
Assume your client is polyfragmented and had years of abuse, so may need years of treatment.
Work towards cooperative co-consciousness and improving the inner world where parts live. For some clients, this is the best achievable outcome.
Forced integrations will traumatize front parts with unresolved memories and will come apart.
Joining of parts happens naturally when memories they share are resolved.
Child parts have been told that integration means their death. It doesn’t. Have integrated parts let unintegrated parts know what it is like for them.
Teach your client to work through some of his or her own memories to save years of therapy and also embarrassment about some memories.
It’s possible for all parts within a particular subsystem to fully integrate, while another subsystem remains untouched. Ongoing harassment targets the untouched subsystem.
Therapists’ Vicarious
Traumatization
Vicarious Traumatization
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZsaorjIo1Yc
https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=A1i7m1By8Nw
https://ovc.ojp.gov/program/vtt/what-is-vicarious-trauma
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/your-wellbeing/vicarioustrauma/vicarious-trauma-signs-and-strategies-for-coping
This is not the same as burnout. Burnout is from working too hard without a break. This is the effect of hearing horrendous stories, week after week, for years.
Why are Therapists Overwhelmed?
The darkness and the horror of what has happened to our clients
The vicarious traumatization from empathizing with persons who have
suffered in “the hidden Holocaust” from birth onward
Awareness that persons we have come to care about are being tortured
on an ongoing basis, and may be harassed for years
Awareness that many clients, especially older ones, may not be able to
achieve high quality of life even after therapy
The necessarily long duration of the work
The complexity of the work (which is also an interesting challenge)
The lack of sufficient clear guidelines on how to proceed (which provides
room for creativity)
Symptoms of Vicarious Trauma
Difficulty managing emotions
Feeling emotionally numb or shut down
Fatigue, sleepiness, or difficulty falling asleep
Aches, pains, and decreased resistance to illness
Loss of a sense of meaning in life and/or feeling hopeless about the future
Relationship problems
Feeling vulnerable or worrying excessively about dangers and loved ones’
safety
Irritability, aggressive or explosive outbursts
Decreased participation in activities you used to enjoy
Symptoms of Therapists
Lingering feelings of anger, rage and sadness about client’s victimization
Overinvolvement emotionally with the client
Bystander guilt, shame, self-doubt
Preoccupation with thoughts about client outside work situation
Horror and rescue fantasies
Loss of hope, pessimism, cynicism
Distancing, numbing, detachment, not listening
Difficulty in maintaining professional boundaries, overextending self
Feeling Your Client’s Emotions
Feel with them but don’t let those feelings take over
Hold on to yourself and your perspective
It’s good to show you feel compassion and sadness
(when these are genuine). Let the client see that you
care but are not overwhelmed.
It’s like a parent with an upset child. Don’t let their feelings
overwhelm you; remain calm and confident, but mirror
their feelings within your heart or soul.
Strategies to Reduce Risk to Your Own Mental Health
ABC: awareness, balance, and connection
Increase your self-observation
Relaxing and self-nurturing activities, look after your physical and mental
wellbeing
Healthy work/life balance
Realism about what you can accomplish
Supply your client with tools for self-care; don’t take it all on yourself
Balance your caseload with non-victim clients
Take regular breaks and time off
Seek support from colleagues, debrief with peers
Personal therapy
Some Ideas about Recharging
Keep strong boundaries about private time
Exercise every day
Spend time in nature
Spend time with friends outside of work
Soothing the body soothes the whole self: baths, walking in nature, eating mangoes, getting comfortable as we watch TV or go to sleep, wear soft clothing, self-massage, always pet your pets and say hi to other pets (Ellen Lacter)
Buy or grow or walk by and smell flowers, enjoy nice odors
Limit other trauma exposures
Watch enjoyable TV, read enjoyable books
It’s an Honor
‘I still struggle with traumatic overlays each time I see a small child or baby or animals. I experience intrusive thoughts. My experiences would technically be considered as PTSD. But—excuse my language—who f***ing wouldn’t experience this, doing what we do? If we don’t bring in the relational piece to session or don’t lean into our empathy or don’t make space to process what we’ve just heard or witnessed, we couldn’t do our jobs. Or, more importantly, be present with the incredible human beings whom we’re honored to work with. Part of it is the cost of the work, part of it is a reason to give ourselves what we need more often and lean into sources of joy more than anyone else. - Kristen Muche
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. Jimi Hendrix (on Ellen Lacter’s peace pens)
Post-Traumatic Growth: Areas of Growth
Appreciation of life and what we have
Relationships with others—the depth of our relationship with our clients and like-minded peers
New possibilities in life—moving into an area of work which challenges us
and forces us to develop strength and creativity
Personal strength—we are amazed at what we have done
Spiritual change—we have a more realistic faith, based on reality not on
wishful thinking or lies we’ve been told
Sources of Hope for Us
Knowing we’ve helped someone
Knowing we’ve done something good
Knowing we have the capacity to help
‘Winging it’ and seeing that this worked
Seeing detective work with a personality system pay off
How I Got Into The Field of Psychology
I wanted to help people
I wanted to know what makes people tick
I recognized early that listening is paramount in encouraging
healing
I recognized early that trauma causes most ‘mental illnesses’
I wanted to do real clinical psychology, not dispense medications.
I read science fiction before it was popular, seeing what amazing
things might happen.
I read detective novels and learned to recognize clues.
How I Moved into the Dissociative Disorder Field
At work I had a lot of continuing education regarding family
therapy. (Working with DID is a lot like doing family therapy.)
I took whatever clients came to me and studied them.
I felt curiosity about clients I didn’t understand, didn’t accept their
prior diagnoses, wanted to figure them out, and felt they had been
mistreated by the system. And then my first four (recognized) DID
clients appeared all at once, and taught me.
And once I was known to treat DID, everyone sent me their DID
clients. And, of course, almost of them were survivors of organized
abuse.
How This Work Has Been Fulfilling for Me
It has satisfied my childhood need to be a detective, and to live in a science fiction world which is real—to figure out the universe. (Now I know too much.)
It has answered some of my basic questions about the universe and people.
It is real psychology, deals with how the human brain/mind/psyche/spirit works.
It provides healing for the grievously wounded.
It saves lives in more than one way.
It prevents the next generation from going through such abuse.
It allowed and required me to ‘wing it,’ be creative, develop new methods.
It has been the best way to use the gifts I have been given.
It has allowed me to contribute to making the world a better place.
