Stop Attacks on Survivors of Trauma by The Satanic Temple's Grey Faction

Petition is at: https://www.change.org/p/trauma-survivors-and-their-helpers-stop-attacks-on-survivors-of-trauma-by-the-satanic-temple-s-grey-faction

Stop Misinformation and Attacks on Survivors of Trauma and Their Helpers by The Satanic Temple's Grey Faction

Historical Information

For over a decade Lucien Greaves (also known as Doug Mesner - both names are aliases) has harassed groups helping child abuse, rape and trauma survivors. He has also harassed groups providing research in support of child abuse, rape and trauma survivors.

In 2013, he and others created a group called the Satanic Temple. One part of this group is called the Grey Faction. The Grey Faction states they “invade” conferences. These conferences are provided to help and educate child abuse, rape and trauma survivors and their helpers.

The Grey Faction representatives that invade these conferences misrepresent their reasons for attending these conferences. They film people at these conferences without permission and publish these films without the permission of those filmed. The Grey Faction misrepresents the research and statements of the people at these conferences. They use ad hominem attacks against child abuse and trauma researchers without rebutting their research or stories.

Their organization uses propaganda techniques in its articles, movies and social media pages to manipulate readers’ opinions. They continue to repeat inaccurate information, even though it has been clearly rebutted in several of the articles listed below.
Grey Faction, Satanic Temple and Lucien Greaves Fact Sheet
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/grey-faction-satanic-temple-and-lucien-greaves-fact-sheet/
 

 Misinformation and Pseudoscience

The Satanic Temple’s Grey Faction criticizes the strong research and theories of ritual abuse survivors  and those with years of research, experience and education in the trauma field. (The members of the Grey Faction have unknown credentials and may not have the experience to accurately determine trauma theory and research.)

The Grey Faction claims they are combating pseudoscience with rational inquiry, but this rational inquiry is actually predetermined opinion, bolstered by name calling, ad hominem attacks and insults. There is no real rational inquiry because there is no evidence that all of the facts were looked at neutrally to derive a conclusion. It appears the only facts considered were the ones that back their arguments. In its articles, the Grey Faction hides behind the name of science and rationality, when in reality it appears it is an advocacy organization used to discredit ritual abuse survivors realities’ and their resources.
Misinformation Campaigns Against Survivors
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/misinformation-campaigns-against-survivors-neil-brick/

Child and ritual abuse survivors and their advocates have been attacked by misinformation campaigns the last several years including those of The Satanic Temple's Grey Faction. These campaigns use various harassment and propaganda techniques to distort the research and silence the efforts of those who are working to help trauma survivors and rape victims. These techniques have distorted information and used unethical tactics to manipulate public opinion. Propaganda and suggestion techniques used are discussed and analyzed.

The Satanic Temple's Grey Faction calls proven and well researched scientific theories pseudoscience, while promoting pseudoscientific theories.

Calling science pseudoscience:

1) Denial that memories can be repressed.
“The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry." (Grey Faction website)

Actual science:

Recovered memories have been defined as the phenomenon of partially or fully losing parts of memories of traumatic events, and then later recovering part or all of the memories into conscious awareness. They have also been defined as the recollections of memories that are believed to have been unavailable for a certain period of time. There is very strong scientific evidence that recovered memories exist. This has been shown in many scientific studies. The content of recovered memories have fairly high corroboration rates.

2) Denial that DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) is caused by trauma.
In regard to DID: "I’m not convinced that it was real in the sense that it was a naturally occurring phenomenon, as opposed to something that had occurred through the power of suggestion." (Grey Faction website)

Actual science:

The causes of dissociative identity disorder are theoretically linked with the interaction of overwhelming stress, traumatic antecedents, insufficient childhood nurturing, and an innate ability to dissociate memories or experiences from consciousness. Prolonged child abuse is frequently a factor, with a very high percentage of patients reporting documented abuse often confirmed by objective evidence. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders states that patients with DID often report having a history of severe physical and sexual abuse. The reports of patients suffering from DID are "often confirmed by objective evidence," and the DSM notes that the abusers in those situations may be inclined to "deny or distort” these acts. Research has consistently shown that DID is characterized by reports of extensive childhood trauma, usually child abuse. Dissociation is recognized as a symptomatic presentation in response to psychological trauma, extreme emotional stress, and in association with emotional dysregulation and borderline personality disorder. A study of 12 murderers established the connection between early severe abuse and DID. A recent psychobiological study shows that dissociative identity disorder (DID) sufferers' "origins of their ailment stem more likely from trauma" than sociogenic or iatrogenic origins

Cultural Gaslighting
Cultural Gaslighting; or, “Falsified History Syndrome”

“….Collective or cultural gaslighting, pushing society at large to question the sanity of its members who perceive politics counter-hegemonically and question the falsified historiographies of the ruling class. A linchpin of this societal gaslighting is formed by mechanisms which trigger the attribution of the “conspiracist ideation” label to certain discourses and by efforts to cause certain discourses to become dominated by or associated with faulty conspiracist ideational reasoning.”

“….the allegation that someone is a “conspiracy theorist” is almost always a figurative way to charge them with faulty reasoning or, at the very least, to imply skepticism of their claims.”

“we have seen that (Lucien Greaves) often ridicules his opponents as believers in conspiracy theories related to “MK Ultra,” comparing them to believers in “UFO’s” and “Past Life Regression”

Antisemitism

On the Psychological Projection of Antisemitism by Satanists
Doug Mesner (Lucien Greaves, Satanic Temple) Alleged Anti-Semitic Statements
(audio excerpt) "“Like, I think it’s okay to hate Jews if you hate them because they’re Jewish and they wear a stupid fuckin’ frisbie on their head..."

Hate Groups

Possible Hate Groups – How Do They Effect Survivors and Their Resources
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Discusses groups that attack survivors and their helpers due to their diagnosis of dissociation and dissociative identity disorder and work recovering from trauma.

A hate group is a social group that advocates and practices hatred or hostility towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society.

As per the definition above, survivors of severe abuse and their helpers are often targeted for verbal attacks, harassment and abuse as “(an)other designated sector of society.” A hate group’s primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against person’s belonging to a disability (dissociative disorders, dissociative identity disorder and trauma survivors and their helpers) which differs from that of the members of the organization.

Though trauma therapists continue to help survivors of abuse, this destructive disinformation campaign which includes misrepresenting legal and treatment cases as well as the scientific literature at times may have made it difficult to help those in need of help, including survivors of severe abuse.
Those presenting this misinformation to the best of our knowledge have no experience in the field, cherry picking data from minority opinions in the field of psychology who apparently have ignored the data and come to unproven pseudoscientific conclusions.

They believe that certain types of dissociative conditions are created in professionals’ office, even though the research clearly shows otherwise, at times that those abused in cults and abusive religious groups have not been abused, even though personal, legal and research accounts have shown otherwise and that repressed memory is a “controversial theory” going against theories of cognitive science, when repeated studies and legal case studies show otherwise.

The groups attacking child abuse survivors and their supporters may use a variety of tactics, regardless of ethics, to attempt to discredit those that disagree with their side. This includes possible hate speech, hostility and harassment, intended to demean and brutalize another, or the use of cruel and derogatory language.

Doug Mesner’s connection to the book “Might is Right”
First published in 1890, it heavily advocates egoist anarchism, amorality, consequentialism and psychological hedonism. In Might Is Right, Redbeard rejects conventional ideas of human and natural rights and argues that only strength or physical might can establish moral right.

There are also controversial parts of the book that deal with race and male–female relations, claiming that the woman and the family as a whole are the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.
The author and Doug at a book signing for Might Is Right, 2004…. Lucien Greaves of the Satanic Temple first showed up at my door over a decade ago. He wanted a copy of a book I had republished called Might Is Right....I reprinted a limited edition version of Might Is Right and asked Doug to illustrate the chapter headings for it. His work on the book was truly excellent.

Please Sign Our Petition

Dear Readers,

We are asking you to sign this petition and let others know about it. It is crucial that accurate information is distributed about trauma and ritual abuse. Attacks on trauma survivors and their helpers need to be exposed and misinformation needs to be discredited. Please help stop the attacks against trauma and ritual abuse survivors.

Scientific Research
Research showing the veracity of child abuse, ritual abuse, trauma and dissociation:
(Note: These are only a few of the hundreds of webpages at the ritualabuse.us and other websites verifying our claims and rebutting the information by the Grey Faction and Lucien Greaves.)

Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today  https://ritualabuse.us/
We publish scientific information about ritual abuse and trauma crimes.

Proof That Ritual Abuse Exists
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/

Large List of Ritual Abuse and Child Abuse References
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/satanic-ritual-abuse-evidence-with-information-on-the-mcmartin-preschool-case/

Research and Information on Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder) https://ritualabuse.us/research/did/

Day Care and Child Abuse Cases
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/day-care-and-child-abuse-cases/

Data rebutting skeptical viewpoints.
Scientific Evidence that Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD) is caused by Childhood Trauma
 
False memory syndrome proponents tactics
https://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/false-memory-syndrome-proponents-tactics/
“False memory syndrome proponents have done the following to try and ensure that only their point of view is in the public view. Harassing debate opponents, misrepresenting the data in the field and controlling the media.”
(Note: This article shows the history of the harassment of child abuse survivors' helpers.)

Recovered Memories and Dissociative Amnesia – Scientific Evidence and Accuracy Rates
Recovered memories have been defined as the phenomenon of partially or fully losing parts of memories of traumatic events, and then later recovering part or all of the memories into conscious awareness. There is very strong scientific evidence that recovered memories exist.This has been shown in many scientific studies. The content of recovered memories have fairly high corroboration rates.

A body of empirical evidence indicates that it is common for abused children to reach adulthood without conscious awareness of the trauma.

There is scientific evidence in support of the phenomena of dissociation and recovered memory in Holocaust survivors. https://ritualabuse.us/research/recovered-memories-and-dissociative-amnesia-scientific-evidence-and-accuracy-rates/

Recovered memory corroboration rates
https://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/recovered-memory-corroboration-rates/
There are many studies that show fairly high corroboration rates for recovered memories.

Hell Minus One
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/survivor-stories/hell-minus-one-signed-verified-confessions-of-satanic-ritual-abuse/
Signed verified confessions of satanic ritual abuse – Anne’s parents confessed their atrocities – both in writing and verbally.

False allegations of child sexual abuse by children are rare
https://ritualabuse.us/research/false-allegations-of-child-sexual-abuse-by-children-are-rare/
allegations made by child victims match closely with confessions of pedophiles, The evidence indicates that very few (children) lied originally. children tend to minimize and deny abuse, not exaggerate or over-report such incidents

Previous petition:
Petition to Stop Attacks Against Child Abuse and Ritual Abuse Survivors and Neil Brick
https://www.change.org/p/protect-child-abuse-survivors-petition-to-stop-attacks-against-child-abuse-and-ritual-abuse-survivors-and-neil-brick/
 

Misinformation Campaigns Against Survivors – Neil Brick

Misinformation Campaigns Against Survivors – Neil Brick

Child and ritual abuse survivors and their advocates have been attacked by misinformation campaigns the last several years. These campaigns use various harassment and propaganda techniques to distort the research and silence the efforts of those who are working to help trauma survivors and rape victims. These techniques will be compared to past and present public campaigns that have distorted information and used unethical tactics to manipulate public opinion. Propaganda and suggestion techniques used will be discussed and analyzed.

Neil Brick is a survivor of ritual abuse and mind control. His work continues to educate the public about child abuse, trauma and ritual abuse crimes. His child abuse and ritual abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. https://ritualabuse.us has been published for over 25 years. http://neilbrick.com

Today we will be comparing three different negative social movements. All three movements had different goals and different levels of popular support in their times. Comparisons of their techniques will be made.

For the purposes of this lecture, the term social movement will be defined as a group of people sharing common goals to effect social change.

1) Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945

2) Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020

3) The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020

Origins:

1) Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945: Some believe that the origins of Nazism include the historical belief in a unified Germany. A unified Germany developed in the mid 19th century. It was considered authoritarian and undemocratic. Nazism was also influenced by ethnic nationalism. (Volkisch groups) Some German nationalists were strong anti-semites.
https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/the-origins-of-nazism/

2) Modern American Right Wing Political Movement: The Republican party conservative and pro-business philosophies of the 20th century led to present day right wing political movement. Republicans often opposed progressive economic social programs, like the New Deal (Roosevelt), though at times moderates and conservative in the party clashed and fought for power. Far right social positions and anti-immigrant policies were endorsed by Donald Trump, who was elected in 2016 as president.

3) Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves – considers themselves to be “a clean break from LaVeyan Satanism.” “From the beginning, The Satanic Temple offered a stark contrast to the Church of Satan’s anti-altruistic philosophy of self interest.” The Satanic Temple endorses several political and social causes.

https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/what-is-the-difference-between-the-satanic-temple-and-the-church-of-satan

Misinformation and Propaganda:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:
In 1924, Adolf Hitler wrote that propaganda’s
“task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.” Nazi propaganda was distributed through a wide variety of media and social channels. Jewish people in particular were the targets of Nazi propaganda and negative social policies which led to the Holocaust and murder of millions of Jewish people as well as others.
Film portrayed a large role in the development of pro-Nazi and anti-Semitism in Germany. Film and propaganda were used to cover up the atrocities and murders in the concentration camps.
Like many countries, propaganda was used to encourage public support of war.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
Fox News has been considered the right wing’s “Ministry of Truth.”
https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-donald-trumps-ministry-truth-cia-analyst-1378208

From Orwell’s 1984: “The government puts into manufacturing its own version of reality, from rewriting history to producing propaganda to trying to remove as many words as possible from the English language to reduce people’s ability to think. Its main role is to help control the population through misinformation, outright lies and lack of information so that the state can maintain total power over the people.” https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/book-1984-what-was-main-role-ministry-truth-720

At times, the modern American right wing has been compared to Nazi Germany and other previous fascist movements. The American Alt-Right at times quotes Hitler and promotes racist and anti-Semitic philosophies. https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/trump-and-fascism/

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
The Grey Faction uses a wide variety of propaganda techniques to misrepresent the pro-survivor movement.

“….Collective or cultural gaslighting, pushing society at large to question the sanity of its members who perceive politics counter-hegemonically and question the falsified historiographies of the ruling class. A linchpin of this societal gaslighting is formed by mechanisms which trigger the attribution of the “conspiracist ideation” label to certain discourses and by efforts to cause certain discourses to become dominated by or associated with faulty conspiracist ideational reasoning.”

“….the allegation that someone is a “conspiracy theorist” is almost always a figurative way to charge them with faulty reasoning or, at the very least, to imply skepticism of their claims.”

“we have seen that Misicko often ridicules his opponents as believers in conspiracy theories related to “MK Ultra,” comparing them to believers in “UFO’s” and “Past Life Regression”

Cultural Gaslighting; or, “Falsified History Syndrome”

Propaganda and Mind Control:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:
“The Nazi propaganda machine exploited ordinary Germans by encouraging them to be co-producers of a false reality….

Joseph Goebbels, the appointed minister of propaganda of Nazi Germany, once said: “There are two ways to make a revolution. You can blast your enemy with machine guns until he acknowledges the superiority of those holding the machine guns. That is one way. Or you can transform the nation through a revolution of the spirit …4”

Propaganda was the operational method of the Third Reich, the idea that projected the ideology. Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, told the Nuremberg Tribunal “that what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”5 Hitler was a magician of illusion.”….

Repetition
The essence of the Nazi propaganda method was repetition. Goebbels argued that the skill of British propagandists during the Great War resided in the fact that they used just a few powerful slogans and kept repeating them.”

Enemies
“Hitler understood, as few others had ever done, the need for the serial creation of enemies. He was a political entrepreneur possessed of the truly devastating insight that all recent enemies could eventually merge into the one super-enemy, the Jews.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/how-nazi-propaganda-encouraged-the-masses-to-co-produce-a-false-reality.html

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:

Fox News is Donald Trump’s ‘De Facto Ministry of Truth,’ Ex-CIA Analyst Says
“With Fox News covering his back with the Republican base, he has a fighting chance, because he has something no other president in American history has ever had at his disposal—a servile propaganda operation,” Taylor said.

Trump has made his appreciation of Fox News well known. The president regularly compliments the conservative network while bashing competitors including CNN and MSNBC.”

https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-donald-trumps-ministry-truth-cia-analyst-1378208

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
Name Calling
“The organization S.M.A.R.T is run by this little shit named Neil Brick, he’s actually when I first saw him, he’s this staggering little moron with this greasy combover and thick glasses, and he’s very short and very frail …” The Grey Faction repeatedly uses the term “quacks” to describe trauma practitioners.
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Exaggeration
“The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs.”
The use of one event or occurrence to purposefully mischaracterize the work of an organization and movement. The Grey Faction does this frequently, looking for licensing complaints against therapists and taking quotes out of context to mischaracterize and malign trauma professionals.

Repetition
The Grey Faction repeats the same propaganda as prior pro-false memory organizations, calling survivors “crazy” “delusional” and “conspiracy theorists.” Use of term “Satanic Panic”
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Enemies
Ritual abuse survivors and their helpers

Propaganda Film
“Mental Health Counselor Paranoid Presentation”
https://  youtu.be/btQaGxTp_m8
This video was taken and published without my permission at a Survivorship conference.
This video incredibly has scary music played in the background and mislabels my statements asking people not to use cult hand signals during the conference as “paranoid.”
This video purposefully mischaracterizes my work, including their attacks on my professional license, all of which failed.

False Analogy
“In the technique of false analogy, two things are compared that may or may not really be similar are presented as being similar. In most false analogies, there isn’t enough evidence available to support the comparison.
Mesner compares ritual abuse survivors to alien abductees. In this false comparison, he lists what he considers certain parallels between the two. Yet, this does not prove that either are the same. One can take any item or concept and then list hundreds of qualities and then take another item and do the same thing. Then one could make a short list of the similar qualities on these lists. This does not make either item similar, nor does it prove that ritual abuse memories are not real.”
http://neilbrick.com/articles/douglas-misicko-alias-douglas-mesner/

Bullying:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:
Auschwitz Exhibition
@auschwitzxhibit
Before their killing nazis tried to dehumanize Jewish men and women in multiple ways. In these pictures, SS men forcing a Jew to bathe in a large basin in the street and German soldiers and local people watch a local man spray Jews with water before their murder at Kovno (1941)
https://twitter.com/auschwitzxhibit/status/1229561176968908801

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
Trump’s Nicknames and the Psychology of Bullying By Ronald Pies, M.D.
“During and after the presidential campaign, Trump bestowed offensive nicknames on several of his opponents. There was, famously, “Crooked Hillary”, but there was also “Little Marco”, “Crazy Bernie” and “Lyin Ted” for Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz, respectively. Trump also repeatedly referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” a jibe at her assertion of Native American heritage. More recently, Trump has given Sen. Chuck Schumer a series of nicknames, including “Head Clown,” “Fake Tears” and “Cryin’ Chuck.”
https://psychcentral.com/blog/trumps-nicknames-and-the-psychology-of-bullying/

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
Mesner: “The conference is so self-evidently full of bullshit that exposing it may seem no more productive than pulling the false beard from a shopping mall Santa Claus. But, absurd as the premise of the S.M.A.R.T. conference is, and deranged as the speaker’s tales clearly are…”
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/harassment-by-false-memory-proponents/

Hate Speech and Hate Groups (including antisemitism):

“A hate group is a social group that advocates and practices hatred, hostility, or violence towards members of a race, ethnicity, nation, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other designated sector of society. According to the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a hate group’s “primary purpose is to promote animosity, hostility, and malice against persons belonging to a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin which differs from that of the members of the organization.”
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the most notorious and widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times. Its lies about Jews, which have been repeatedly discredited, continue to circulate today, especially on the Internet. The individuals and groups who have used the Protocols are all linked by a common purpose: to spread hatred of Jews.

The Protocols is entirely a work of fiction, intentionally written to blame Jews for a variety of ills. Those who distribute it claim that it documents a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. The conspiracy and its alleged leaders, the so-called Elders of Zion, never existed.”

“Beginning in 1920, auto magnate Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, published a series of articles based in part on the Protocols. The International Jew, the book that included this series, was translated into at least 16 languages. Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, later head of the propaganda ministry, praised Ford and The International Jew.”

“Nazi Party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg introduced Hitler to the Protocols during the early 1920s, as Hitler was developing his worldview. Hitler referred to the Protocols in some of his early political speeches, and, throughout his career, he exploited the myth that “Jewish-Bolshevists” were conspiring to control the world.

During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.”
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
“We won. America belongs to white men.” – Richard Spencer
Another clip recorded by Winkler — and a live stream of the entire event posted online by the school’s student newspaper, The Battalion — shows that Spencer went on to praise Donald Trump as “an alt-right hero” for reminding white Americans of what, he said, “makes the white race truly unique and truly wonderful.”
Richard Spencer praises Donald Trump as an alt-right hero
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/07/america-belongs-white-men-alt-right-founder-says/

Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/alt-right-salutes-donald-trump.html
But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

Fascism spread in 1930s America. It could spread again today.
“At the time, Jews served the same role for U.S. fascists that immigrants, Muslims and other minorities serve today: a vague but malicious threat they believed to be undermining America’s greatness. Surveys of U.S. public opinion from the 1930s are a startling reminder of just how widespread these attitudes became. As late as July 1942, a Gallup poll showed that 1 in 6 Americans thought Hitler was “doing the right thing” to the Jews. A 1940 poll found that nearly a fifth of Americans saw Jews as a national “menace” — more than any other group, including Germans. Almost a third anticipated “a widespread campaign against the Jews” — a campaign that 12 percent of Americans were willing to support.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-trump-fascism-nazis-hitler-0170816-story.html

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
Examples:
Where the Witch-Hunters are: Satanic Panic & Mental Health Malpractice
By Douglas Mesner and Sarah Ponto Rivera
“But where is Randy “L’il Knob” Noblitt today, now that social conditions aren’t nearly so amenable to the tin-foil hat Torquemada whose doctoral thesis was on The Celestial Concomitants of Human Behavior, more colloquially known as Astrology?”
(“Deeper Dive” Grey Faction Website)

Report from the S.M.A.R.T. Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control Conference 2009, Part 1
by doug — August 25, 2009
On the weekend of August 15-16, journalist Douglas Mesner (process.org) attended a conference for alleged victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse and Mind-Control in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. This is the first of his 2-part report:
“The crude sales booth at the far end of the conference room marketing a more advanced species of tin-foil hat does nothing to allay the suspicion that this is to be a congregation of raving delusional paranoiacs.”

Doug Mesner’s connection to the book “Might is Right”
“First published in 1890, it heavily advocates egoist anarchism, amorality, consequentialism and psychological hedonism. In Might Is Right, Redbeard rejects conventional ideas of human and natural rights and argues that only strength or physical might can establish moral right….
There are also controversial parts of the book that deal with race and male–female relations, claiming that the woman and the family as a whole are the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.”

“The author and Doug at a book signing for Might Is Right, 2004…. Lucien Greaves of the Satanic Temple first showed up at my door over a decade ago. He wanted a copy of a book I had republished called Might Is Right. It was a 100-year-old tome, long forgotten by most, with the exception of Anton LaVey,… The release of this new version of Might Is Right became a phenomenon within the underground, and that is what brought the future leader of the Satanic Temple to my door. Only his name wasn’t Lucien Greaves at the time, it was Doug Mesner. (This isn’t the first time Doug has been connected with the Temple, though it is the first time he has publicly admitted his involvement.) When he first came to my home, Doug brought a stack of his drawings and writings with him. It was amazing stuff, and much to my surprise he left it with me. Not long after our first meeting, and after reviewing his sketchbooks at length, I reprinted a limited edition version of Might Is Right and asked Doug to illustrate the chapter headings for it. His work on the book was truly excellent.” https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w7adn/unmasking-lucien-greaves-aka-doug-mesner-leader-of-the-satanic-temple
http://childabusedata.blogspot.com/2019/07/might-is-right-lucien-greaves-satanic.html

Anti-Semitism connected to Doug Mesner:
“Like, I think it’s okay to hate Jews if you hate them because they’re Jewish and they wear a stupid fuckin’ frisbie on their head [correct term: yarmulke or kippah] and walk around [and] think their God’s chosen people, but it’s not okay to hate somebody [‘born of Jewish blood’] just because their parents were stupid fuckin’ Jews and wore stupid frisbies on their head and thought the Jews were God’s chosen people […] Not everybody of Jewish blood is okay with me, it depends on if they follow the Jewish, uh… […] Satanic Jews are fine,” (Adam, “Doug Mesner [Lucien Greaves/Douglas Misicko] Satanic Temple Anti-Semitic Rant” (transcribed).”
On the Psychological Projection of Antisemitism by Satanists https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/

Doug Mesner (Lucien Greaves, Satanic Temple) Alleged Anti-Semitic Statements
https://www.videosprout.com/video?id=98aafea9-df67-416d-998d-46348a626005&fbclid=IwAR3uIHF8pl3sgLGCSsdJKyE9QJK3JpfH4j2H8DLhd1yYHuc_pPLFdPHIMtE
(audio excerpt)

Discusses several false memory movement attacks and hate speech allegations including Doug Mesner’s against survivors:
https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/2019-conference/possible-hate-groups-how-do-they-effect-survivors-and-their-resources/

Harassment:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:
“Through hundreds of legal measures, the Nazi-led German government gradually excluded Jews from public life, the professions, and public education. The goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize Jews and to create a climate of hostility and indifference toward their plight. On Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed in the first act of state-sponsored violence against the Jewish community. Many Jews who had the means tried to leave Germany but encountered countless bureaucratic hurdles.”
“The goal of Nazi propaganda was to demonize Jews and encourage Germans to see Jews as dangerous outsiders in their midst. After 1935, everyday antisemitism was a regular part of carnival parades and floats. Public displays of antisemitism reinforced a climate of hostility toward Jews in Germany, or at the least, indifference to their treatment.”
https://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust/path-to-nazi-genocide/chapter-3/from-citizens-to-outcasts-1933-1938

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
Neo-Nazi website founder owes $14 million to woman he urged readers to harass, judge says
Tanya Gersh said she and her family received threatening and horrifying messages for months after Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin encouraged a “troll storm.”
HELENA, Mont. — A judge on Thursday ordered the publisher of a neo-Nazi website to pay a Jewish real estate agent $14 million for inciting his readers to harass her family with hundreds of threatening and anti-Semitic messages and calls.
U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen entered Tanya Gersh a default judgment in her civil lawsuit after The Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin refused to appear for a scheduled deposition in the case.
He ordered Anglin to pay Gersh over $4 million in compensatory damages, $10 million in punitive damages and told him to permanently remove all posts, comments and images about Gersh, her husband and son.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/neo-nazi-website-founder-owes-14-million-woman-he-urged-n1040671

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
Grey Faction, Satanic Temple and Lucien Greaves Fact Sheet:
For over a decade Douglas Misicko using several aliases (including Douglas Mesner and Lucien Greaves) has harassed groups helping child abuse, rape and trauma survivors. He has also harassed groups providing research in support of child abuse, rape and trauma survivors.
In 2013, he and others created a group called the Satanic Temple. One part of this group is called the Grey Faction. The Grey Faction states they “invade” conferences. These conferences are provided to help and educate child abuse, rape and trauma survivors and their helpers.
Their representatives that invade these conferences misrepresent their reasons for attending these conferences. They film people at these conferences without permission and publish these films without the permission of those filmed. The Grey Faction repeatedly misrepresents the research and statements of the people at these conferences. It uses repeated ad hominem attacks against child abuse and trauma researchers without rebutting their research or stories.
https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/grey-faction-satanic-temple-and-lucien-greaves-fact-sheet/

The website muckrock.com has been used by the Grey Faction to investigate and then attack clinicians working with cult survivors.

Petition to Stop Attacks Against Child Abuse and Ritual Abuse Survivors and Neil Brick
https://www.change.org/p/protect-child-abuse-survivors-petition-to-stop-attacks-against-child-abuse-and-ritual-abuse-survivors-and-neil-brick
Rebuttals to attacks, harassment and attacks on licensure.

Pseudoscience:

Nazism – The Third Reich 1920 – 1945:
“From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to “cleanse” German society of individuals viewed as biological threats to the nation’s “health.” Enlisting the help of physicians and medically trained geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, the Nazis developed racial health policies that began with the mass sterilization of “genetically diseased” persons and ended with the near annihilation of European Jewry. With the patina of legitimacy provided by “racial” science experts, the Nazi regime carried out a program of approximately 400,000 forced sterilizations and over 275,000 euthanasia deaths that found its most radical manifestation in the death of millions of “racial” enemies in the Holocaust.

This campaign was based in part on ideas about public health and genetic “fitness” that had grown out of the inclination of many late nineteenth century scientists and intellectuals to apply the Darwinian concepts of evolution to the problems of human society. These ideas became known as eugenics and found a receptive audience in countries as varied as Brazil, France, Great Britain, and the United States. But in Germany, in the traumatic aftermath of World War I and the subsequent economic upheavals of the twenties, eugenic ideas found a more virulent expression when combined with the Nazi worldview that espoused both German racial superiority and militaristic ultranationalism.”

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazi-racial-science

Modern American Right Wing Political Movement – 2016 – 2020:
What does Trump actually believe on climate change?
US President Donald Trump’s position on climate change has been in the spotlight again, after he criticised “prophets of doom” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

At the event, which had sustainability as its main theme, and activist Greta Thunberg as its star guest, Mr Trump dismissed “alarmists” who wanted to “control every aspect of our lives” – while also expressing the US’s support for an initiative to plant one trillion trees.

If you judge the president based on his words alone, his views on climate change appear contradictory – and confusing.

He has called climate change “mythical”, “nonexistent”, or “an expensive hoax” – but also subsequently described it as a “serious subject” that is “very important to me”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51213003

The Satanic Temple – Grey Faction and Doug Mesner/Lucien Greaves (both aliases)
– 2000 – 2020
Calling science pseudoscience:

1) Denial that memories can be repressed.
“The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry. It has provided the theoretical basis for ‘recovered memory therapy’ — the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.” Prof. Richard McNally” “ the scourge of repressed memory pseudoscience in mental health care” https://greyfaction.org/

Actual science:
http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Recovered_Memories

https://www.theravive.com/therapedia/dissociative-amnesia-dsm–5-300.12-(f44.0)
“Dissociative amnesia (DA) is one of three dissociative disorders listed under DSM-V. The disorder involves the temporary loss of recall memory caused by disassociation, which may last for a period of seconds or years. The interruption in memory may be voluntary or involuntary and is most often a result of psychological trauma. DA involves episodic autobiographical memory loss inconsistent with normal forgetfulness. Episodic autobiographical information is associated with contextual information, such as what happened in the minutes leading up to a traumatic event. The individual may, however, remember semantic autobiographical information such as the date, time and weather conditions of the accident. Dissociative amnesia often arises from traumatic childhood events.”

2) Denial that DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) is caused by trauma.
Pope Interview
You’ve treated some thousand-odd patients, many of whom experienced extreme trauma, from what I understand –
Yes.
And you didn’t see evidence of DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, otherwise known as Multiple Personality Disorder) in any of them?
I have seen a number of people who were diagnosed with DID, or where the patients themselves felt that they had DID, so it depends on what you mean by the question. In other words, there are certainly people that I’ve seen that were quite convinced that they did have different personalities that had amnesia for one another. But, even though it was “real” in the sense that the patients believed that they had it, I’m not convinced that it was real in the sense that it was a naturally occurring phenomenon, as opposed to something that had occurred through the power of suggestion. https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/pope-interview/

Actual science:
http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Dissociative_Identity_Disorder

“Dissociative identity disorder. Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, this disorder is characterized by alternating between multiple identities. A person may feel like one or more voices are trying to take control in their head. Often these identities may have unique names, characteristics, mannerisms and voices. People with DID will experience gaps in memory of every day events, personal information and trauma…
Causes
Dissociative disorders usually develop as a way of dealing with trauma. Dissociative disorders most often form in children exposed to long-term physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Natural disasters and combat can also cause dissociative disorders.”
https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-conditions/dissociative-disorders

Conclusions

It could be stated that each of the three negative social movements above served a purpose (at least in part) to help the rich get richer.

Nazism was used to stop communism. The American Conservative Movement has been used to shift wealth from the poor and middle classes to the upper classes. The Grey Faction has been used to discredit those fighting cult abuse. Cults at times are used for sex trafficking, drug smuggling and other high profit activities.

All three negative social movements have used nefarious techniques to manipulate and control opinion and stifle accurate social debate through harassment and misrepresentation of facts. The Grey Faction has attacked theories regarding different forms of social suggestion, such as post hypnotic suggestion and the existence of certain cults and mind control techniques controlling different aspects of society.

Knowledge is power. It appears these groups share techniques causing harm to those around them. By exposing these techniques, we can develop healthy social movements meant to help and not hurt others.

Information on Ellen Lacter and Her Research

copied with permission

Ellen Lacter  

Information on Ellen Lacter and Her Research

Common Forms of Misinformation and Tactics of Disinformation about Psychotherapy for Trauma Originating in Ritual Abuse and Mind Control By Ellen Lacter, Ph.D. December 18, 2012. This page on my website seeks to expose a number of common forms of misinformation and tactics of disinformation about psychotherapy for trauma originating in ritual abuse and mind control.  http://endritualabuse.org/activism/misinfo/  http://childabusedata.blogspot.com/2016/02/common-forms-of-misinformation-and.html

Brief Synopsis of the Literature on the Existence of Ritualistic Abuse By Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D., Psychological and legal evidence of the existence of ritual abuse is substantial and rapidly growing. http://endritualabuse.org/evidence/brief-synopsis-of-the-literature-on-the-existence-of-ritualistic-abuse/

Publications on Ritual Abuse and Mind Control in 2008
from End Ritual Abuse – The Website of Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D http://endritualabuse.org/evidence/publications-on-ritual-abuse-and-mind-control-in-2008/

Data on Survivors of Ritual Abuse, Mind Control, and Healing Methods   Results of 2007 “International Survey for Adult Survivors of Extreme Abuse” http://endritualabuse.org/about/eas-data-on-survivors-of-ritual-abuse-mind-control-and-healing-methods/

Ritual Abuse Evidence with information on the McMartin Case http://endritualabuse.org/evidence/ritual-abuse-evidence-with-information-on-the-mcmartin-case/

Mind Control: Simple to Complex  Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D.    Organizations with a wide range of political and criminal agendas have historically relied on coercive interrogation and brainwashing of various types to force submission and information from enemies and victims, and to indoctrinate and increase cooperation in members and captors.  http://endritualabuse.org/about/mind-control-simple-to-complex/

Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008). Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members. http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/ritual-abuse-diagnosis-research-2/

Lacter, E.; Lehman, K. (2008). “Guidelines to Diagnosis of Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress“. Karnac Books Ltd. Issue Volume 2, Number 2 / July 2008 Pages 159‑181
A Coloring Book of Healing Images: For Adult Survivors of Child Abuse  Ellen Lacter, Robin Baird Lewis, Jen Callow https://books.google.com/books?id=1rDTrQEACAAJ&dq=A+Coloring+Book+of+Healing+Images:+For+Adult+Survivors+of+Child+Abuse&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiUtPabx4rMAhWCQSYKHV4fC0gQ6AEIHTAA

Wikipedia Blacklisted Four Important Websites on Ritual Abuse on July 18, 2009
By Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D.  http://endritualabuse.org/activism/wikipedia-blacklisted-four-important-websites/

(Date of this article is July 27, 2009)
On July 18, 2009, at about 9:30pm Pacific time, Wikipedia blacklisted the following important websites on ritual abuse: http://abusearticles.wordpress.com http://extreme-abuse-survey.net http://ritualabuse.us http://endritualabuse.org
My website is endritualabuse.org

I have attempted to get information from Wikipedia on why my website was blacklisted and to get it de-blacklisted. I have been stonewalled on both counts.

Since February, 2008, on Wikipedia’s page on “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” Wikipedia’s staff has been suppressing and deleting credible posts from credible sources (including my posts- I am a licensed California psychologist) that have documented substantial criminal and psychological evidence of criminal ritual abuse, and instead has completely discounted the existence of ritual abuse. As of July 27, 2009, Wikipedia’s page on “Satanic ritual abuse” begins as follows: “Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organised abuse, sadistic abuse and other variants) refers to a moral panic that originated in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout the country and eventually to many parts of the world, before subsiding in the late 1990s.”
Wikipedia has now escalated its censorship of all information supporting the existence of ritual abuse by blacklisting four important websites about ritual abuse on July 18, 2009.     https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/ritualabuse-us-blacklisted-by-wikipedia/

It is clear that Wikipedia refuses to consider any documentation about the existence of ritual abuse.

Common Forms of Misinformation and Tactics of Disinformation about Psychotherapy for Trauma Originating in Ritual Abuse and Mind Control By Ellen Lacter, Ph.D.

Common Forms of Misinformation and Tactics of Disinformation about Psychotherapy for Trauma Originating in Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

By Ellen Lacter, Ph.D., December 18, 2012.

Please note: This article and page is strictly the opinion of the article author and not necessarily the opinion of this website. All accusations are alleged.  This article was copied with permission from http://endritualabuse.org/activism/misinfo/

This page on my website seeks to expose a number of common forms of misinformation and tactics of disinformation about psychotherapy for trauma originating in ritual abuse and mind control. Disinformation is distinguished from misinformation in that it is intentionally fraudulent.

Misinformation and disinformation about ritual abuse and mind control trauma and psychotherapy to treat such trauma appear in both paper and electronic media, but are particularly abundant on the Internet on websites of individuals and organizations, bookseller reviews, blogs, newsletters, online encyclopedias, social networking sites, and e-group listservs.

Disclaimer: This page neither cites, quotes, names, nor alludes to any specific paper or electronic articles or statements by individual. Any similarity between examples of misinformation or disinformation used herein and actual articles or other statements is purely coincidental.
The following are common forms of misinformation and tactics of disinformation concerning the treatment of trauma originating in ritual abuse and mind control:

1. Allegations of Malpractice Can Be Circulated Unopposed

When allegations of malpractice are made or when lawsuits are brought against psychotherapists or institutions for (a) inducing or implanting false memories of ritual abuse or mind control in clients, (b) inducing or implanting false memories of ritual abuse by family members that then alienated clients from these family members, (c) inaccurate reporting of ritual abuse to child abuse or law enforcement authorities, or (d) the suicide of a client based in therapists treating the client’s psychological problems as originating in a history of ritual abuse or mind control, etc., inaccurate, exaggerated, or malicious information about these therapists and institutions can be circulated unopposed.

This is because treating therapists and institutions cannot legally or ethically reveal anything related to a client’s psychotherapy as it is protected by confidentiality and psychotherapist-patient privilege.
Therapists and institutions are further restricted in cases involved in litigation because:

a) their attorneys usually advise against any discussion of the matter
b) their malpractice carriers often prohibit any discussion
c) in some cases, judges’ gag orders may prohibit discussion

Allegations that a client’s suicide was based in therapy addressing ritual abuse or mind control trauma is a particularly hostile form of causal reductionism. Any combination of factors may have been at play and can never be fully known. Also, it is not realistic to expect that all highly suicidal clients can be helped, no matter how skilled and properly focused the treatment.

2. Misrepresentation of Psychotherapists’ Credentials, Professional Qualifications, and Personal Characteristics

Non-professionals who oppose that ritual abuse and mind control exist can readily, usually without consequence, publicly misrepresent the credentials, professional education, qualifications, and experience of psychotherapists who provide educational materials about ritual abuse and mind control or who treat trauma originating in ritual abuse or mind control.

Non-professionals can also exaggerate or fabricate their own credentials, professional education, qualifications, and experience, generally without consequence.

In contrast, credentialed psychotherapists are ethically and legally required to be accurate in how they represent their credentials, qualifications, etc., and can suffer grave consequences for misrepresenting these. The upshot of these conflicting standards is that psychotherapists treating trauma for ritual abuse and mind control can be misrepresented as having non-credible qualifications while their opponents can misrepresent themselves with exaggerated credentials.

Non-professionals can also misrepresent the personal characteristics, religious beliefs, and appearance, of these therapists, can name-call and otherwise mock them, and can attribute false agendas to them, such as assigning religious motives to secular therapists working with ritual abuse or mind control survivors.

For example, there is little to prevent someone from claiming on his or her own website that a psychotherapist is a fundamentalist Christian zealot at war with Satan, when that therapist might be an atheist, Jew, Buddhist, etc., who places no stock in the existence of Satan. But such a claim, when spoken as if it is fact, accomplishes its intended purpose of maligning that therapist.

3. Exploitation of the Constraints on Communication by Credentialed Psychotherapists

Psychotherapists are legally and ethically mandated to maintain high professional standards of scientific caution, integrity, honesty, and respectful treatment of other people. Non-therapists are free of such strict mandates. This creates an uneven playing field.

Non-professionals can make unsupported claims and put forth disinformation about research on ritual abuse or mind control and about therapy for ritual abuse or mind control trauma that therapists cannot refute without substantial basis for their assertions, such as citing published research addressing each specific issue, a very tall order.

Non-professionals can also misrepresent the therapy approaches of specific therapists, build false arguments about their therapy practices, and employ sarcasm, ridicule, provocation, ad hominem attacks, fear-mongering, hate-mongering, and all assortment of verbal manipulation, that psychotherapists can only respond to with great reserve and caution.

So, therapists who seek to respond to such accusations and manipulations can appear relatively powerless and passive, as they are corralled into dodging verbal abuse, rather than having any hope of engaging in any reasonable or productive discourse.

And if they do not respond, which is often the most judicious option, the faulty assumption can be made that they are defeated.

4. Stacking the Deck: Omission of Information Contrary to the Position that Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Exist

Psychotherapists are obligated to be scientific and objective about what they report. They cannot ethically present one side of a matter, knowingly omitting or failing to review the literature or legal evidence on the other side. This standard does not exist for non-professionals.

Therefore, non-professionals can, usually without consequence, stack the deck in their Internet publications about ritual abuse to portray it as non-existent, disregarding the legal and psychological evidence of its existence (see next section on Straw Man Arguments).

5. Straw Man Arguments

When substantial evidence of ritual abuse is provided, such as criminal convictions for ritual abuse (see endnotes 1 and 2), criminal convictions for crimes with ritual abuse components (see endnotes 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8), and research on ritual abuse (see endnote 9), individuals who oppose that ritual abuse and mind control exist often respond by shifting the focus to exaggerated or caricatured representations of ritual abuse, e.g., “This fails to prove the existence of large-scale, hierarchical, international, multi-generational, baby-breeding, baby-sacrificing, satanic cults,” when no such claims were put forward. This grouping of words carries a tone of sarcasm and derision even when limited to the written word.

There are a great many faults with such caricatures. I believe, as do many of my colleagues who also treat clients with ritual abuse or mind control trauma, that ritually abusive groups have a multitude of agendas, including a variety of spiritual agendas, of which Satanism is only one.

And it is my impression that therapists who treat clients with ritual abuse or mind control trauma believe that there are many different levels of organization and scale among abusers who employ ritualistically abusive practices, including:

(a) small-scale ritual abuse, confined to an individual abuser or nuclear or extended family
(b) localized abusive cults larger than one extended family
(c) localized groups that coordinate their abuse and other criminal activity with other localized groups for specific purposes, such as facilitation of the production and distribution of filmed child sexual abuse and torture and to unite for specific abusive rituals
(d) localized groups that interface with abusers in other regions with some level of hierarchical organization
(e) groups that interface internationally in organized criminal efforts, e.g., to enable distribution of filmed child sexual abuse and torture in other countries where, if these films were confiscated, victims would be less able to be identified by law enforcement

There is ample evidence of widespread organized crime among purveyors of filmed child sexual abuse and torture (for a recent case, see endnote 10). Why would anyone wish to discount that some of these criminals might employ ritualistic torture, terror-tactics, and practices to further their ends? For example, there is ample evidence of the Mexican drug trade’s use of ritual sacrifice to attempt to shield itself from law enforcement (endnote 11).

It is true that there is a paucity of criminal convictions specific to ritual abuse relative to other crimes. But this has many causes, including the following:

(a) The victims are generally terrified and usually have extreme posttraumatic stress disorder and dissociative disorders, which reduces their ability to disclose their crimes and diminish their credibility as witnesses.
(b) Even when there is substantial evidence of ritual practices within crimes, that evidence is generally omitted from criminal charges as, in most states and countries, there are no laws on the books specifically prohibiting ritual abuse, and,
(c) When prosecutors have alleged ritual practices in legal actions in the past. defense attorneys have often used straw man tactics to muddy the waters with allegations of religious persecution or agenda, so prosecutors have since generally not introduced such material.

Given these considerations, it is a logical fallacy to claim that a relatively low conviction rate proves that ritual abuse and mind control do not exist, or that organized ritual abuse does not exist, especially when we consider proven cases of organized child abuse and cover-up, such as the well-publicized cover-up of child abuse within the Catholic church and the well-documented cover-up of a pedophile network in The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal (Bryant, 2009).

6. Use of Ridicule and Emotionally-loaded Language to Discredit the Issue of Ritual Abuse and  Psychotherapists Treating Related Trauma

Opponents of the position that ritual abuse exists frequently use phrases such as “baby-breeding, baby-sacrificing cult,” “satanic panic,” and “bizarre rituals” to refer to reports and claims made about ritual abuse by therapists, educators and researchers.

Through the devices of alliteration, rhyme, buzz words, sarcasm, and ridicule, and conjuring up excessively repulsive imagery, such phrases inflame, cause people to recoil in disdain and disbelief, and the capacity to critically evaluate the possibility of the phenomenon goes out the window.
Psychotherapists generally use objective language when reporting the atrocities described by their clients, such as:

(a) “Survivor A reported being impregnated in a ritual.”
(b) “Survivor B reported that her abusers induced early labor to have a fetus to ritually sacrifice.”
(c) “Survivor C reported that a homeless man was abducted by her abuser group and sacrificed.”

Such examples are often accompanied by explanations for the normal questions that arise, such as, “Survivor C reported that a mortician with a crematorium was a member of the abuser group.” This kind of descriptive language is a far cry from the phrasing used by people who employ straw man tactics.

Researchers on ritual abuse and mind control use even more cautious and scientific language to describe their findings, as required by their professional ethical codes, and as exemplified in this excerpt from a book chapter (Lacter & Lehman, 2008) co-authored by this writer: http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/studies/ritual-abuse-diagnosis-research-2/.

7. Misrepresentation of Psychotherapists as Witch-hunters, Satan-hunters, Zealots, and Religious Crusaders

Psychotherapists who publicly state that they treat trauma for ritual abuse or mind control or who educate on the subject are often depicted as religious zealots hunting down witches or Satan himself, are charged with fostering moral panic, urban legends, and mass hysteria, and are accused of trying to find histories of ritual abuse and mind control in all of their psychotherapy clients. These kinds of misrepresentations are so ubiquitous on the Internet that they can easily be mistaken as fact.
It is my experience that psychotherapists who treat clients reporting such trauma are generally very cautious about what they say about ritual abuse or mind control and that many psychotherapists who previously publicly shared their opinions that these forms of abuse exist are now silent on these issues.

This is largely because of the effective use of the kinds of disinformation tactics described on this webpage to ridicule such beliefs, to slander therapists who profess them, and to sway public opinion, etc., and the sharp rise in lawsuits against psychotherapists alleging induction or implantation of false memories of abuse in the 1990s.

Of the many therapists I know who have treated clients with ritual abuse or mind control trauma, all of these therapists, including pastoral counselors and Christian therapists, deeply hope that their clients have never suffered these devastating kinds of abuse. These forms of abuse leave clients with stores of pain that are hard for most people to imagine, and that emotionally grieve anyone who bears witness to accounts of them, including therapists.

Victims and survivors of these atrocities are also among the most challenging clients to treat, because they are often highly suicidal, terrified, may still be suffering the abuse, require more crisis intervention and out-of-therapy contact than other clients, often have little or no funding for therapy, and usually require long-term treatment.

Yet, the hope that clients did not suffer these abuses does not justify a clinical failure to correctly assess and treat trauma originating in ritual abuse or mind control, no matter how harshly therapists may be criticized for this. The costs of such errors include:

(a) lack of treatment for this trauma, causing people to believe themselves defiled and evil at their core rather than understanding that these feelings and beliefs originated in their ritual abuse and mind control
(b) reinforcement of victims’ fears that they are hopelessly crazy and untreatable
(c) mis-diagnosis, often for Schizophrenia or Delusional Disorder, that often leads to incorrect and excessive use of medications and possible long-term hospitalization or involuntary hospital commitment

8. Misrepresentation of Psychotherapists as Inducing or Implanting False Memories of Child Abuse and “False Memory Syndrome”

On the Internet, it is relatively effortless to portray psychotherapy as the primary source of clients’ memories of child abuse with absolutely no scientific basis.

It is also common to designate specific therapists, especially those who state that they treat clients with trauma originating in ritual abuse or mind control, as “recovered memory therapists” who are then alleged to chase down memories of child abuse in their clients, to thereby induce or implant false memories of abuse, and to thus cause their clients to suffer “False Memory Syndrome.”
It is well-documented that “False Memory Syndrome” is a pseudo-psychiatric disorder contrived by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF), an organization widely known to have been “formed to provide legal and emotional support to those accused of sexual abuse” (Murphy, 1997, p. 57). It is possible that most of the misinformation and disinformation circulating about child abuse, ritual abuse, mind control, dissociative disorders (see below, #10: Misrepresentation of Psychotherapists as Inducing Dissociative Identity Disorder), and recovered memories of child abuse originate in the efforts of the FMSF and its affiliates.

Evidence of misrepresentation of information by the FMSF is documented in the book, Misinformation Concerning Child Sexual Abuse and Adult Survivors (Whitfield, Silberg, & Fink, 2002).

“Recovered memory therapy” is as contrived a concept as “False Memory Syndrome.” Psychotherapy has the goal of helping clients to deal with whatever psychological issues are troubling them, not of searching for memories of abuse.

Of course, there are cases of therapists prematurely jumping to conclusions that a client may have been abused and even of suggesting this to a client, including findings of malpractice in this regard in lawsuits and by professional licensing boards. But it is a dishonest to tar all therapists with the same brush and to represent such errors as common practice.

In an unusual case of a psychotherapist defending herself against claims of irresponsibility in this regard, in 1992, psychologist Neomi Mattis sued University of Utah psychology professor David Raskin for defamation after he criticized Dr. Mattis, co-leader of a Utah task force on ritual abuse at the time, and other therapists who treat patients with purportedly recovered memories of child-sexual abuse in his speech to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Provo, Utah. The Deseret Times of Salt Lake City, Utah, (See endnote 12) states:

He said those practitioners ‘do not know the scientific literature’ and ‘have no reality orientation.’ Raskin said Mattis lacked the credentials to be a graduate student, let alone a professor in the school’s psychology department.

In April, 1995, the defamation suit was settled for an undisclosed amount of money.
Misrepresentations about psychotherapy and memory for abuse ignore the vast body of literature substantiating that:

(a) trauma memories recovered in therapy represent a small proportion of total recovered memory reports (Elliott, 1997; Wilsnack, Wonderlich, Kristjanson, Vogeltanz-Holm, & Wilsnack, 2002)
(b) recovered memories of abuse are often accurate (Dalenberg, 1996)
(c) memory for verified abuse is often forgotten or dissociated (Williams, 1994)

Accurate information on the issue of recovered memory can be found at: The Recovered Memory Project: http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/.

9. Misrepresentation of Research to Minimize the Effects of Child Abuse and to Represent the Traumatic Effects as the Result of the Reactions of Psychotherapists and Other Adults

It is hard to believe that anyone would seek to misrepresent and minimize the damaging effects of child abuse and to blame psychotherapists for victims feeling traumatized, but this is just the case in Susan Clancy’s 2010 book, The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children– and its Aftermath.

In this book, Clancy uses circular reasoning to misrepresent child sexual abuse as non-traumatic when it occurs and to posit that it is adult interpretations, especially those of psychotherapists, that cause people to experience their child sexual abuse as traumatic.

Clancy’s book is based in part on an article she co-authored with Richard J. McNally, titled, “Who Needs Repression? Normal Memory Processes Can Explain ‘Forgetting’ of Childhood Sexual Abuse,” published in The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice (2005/2006).

In this study, Clancy asked 27 adults who reported sexual abuse as children to rate their levels of trauma at the time of their abuse on a 10-point scale, with #10 to indicate “extremely traumatic” and #1 to indicate “not traumatic at all.” The average rating was 7.5.

Any logical person would consider 7.5 on a 10-point scale to be quite high. Yet Susan Clancy concludes that their child sexual abuse “experiences were unpleasant, distressing, or confusing, but not traumatic (e.g., terrifying) at the time they occurred” (p. 70).

This is clearly a misrepresentation of her own data. Clancy justifies this conclusion by limiting her definition of “trauma” to abuse that was “overwhelmingly terrifying or perceived as life threatening” (p. 67). Then she determined that only two of her subjects perceived that level of threat, and parenthetically dismissed one of these subjects’ reports as “bizarre” and “questionable” (p. 68). Then, she discounted all lesser levels of distress as nontraumatic, essentially re-rating them all as #1 on her 10-point trauma scale.

It is academically dishonest to ask these 27 adults to rate their levels of trauma and to then ignore this data.
Clancy considered the following reports of two of her subjects as lacking in trauma: “I went from confused to bewildered to scared . . . it culminated in me feeling somewhat angry and betrayed,” and “I didn’t think of it as sex, I just thought of it as disgusting . . .”

To further make her case, she wrote that two men
…while reporting that the [rape] was painful, did not describe it as traumatic [apparently relying on her definition of trauma as: “overwhelmingly terrifying or perceived as life threatening”]. In the words of one of the victims, “He would always say if you love me you’ll do it. It hurt, and after a while I knew it was wrong, but not at the beginning.” The other victim of penetration reported, “I didn’t like it– I knew it was wrong– but it was better than having to go back to DYS [Department of Youth Services custody].”

So, Clancy dismisses painful rape of a child as nontraumatic simply because the victims did not describe the abuse as “overwhelmingly terrifying or perceived as life threatening”.
Clancy also dismissed as nontraumatic all other painful emotional states described by her 27 subjects, including:

(a) “definitely feeling dirty.”
(b) “I couldn’t breathe.”
(c) “I was shocked at what was happening, and I think I was afraid, there was a lot of weirdness, insecurity, a lot of anger.”
(d) “I thought it was my fault.”

Clancy categorizes all such psychological reactions as, “unpleasant, distressing, or confusing, but not traumatic.”

Clancy acknowledges that: “All of our subjects (1) had either symptoms or diagnoses of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] and (2) reported negative life effects from the abuse” (p. 71). Yet, this does not influence Clancy to consider that they might have suffered trauma at the time of their abuse.
Instead, she states that since child sexual abuse is, “not necessarily traumatic at the time it occurs,” “it may be the retrospective interpretation of the event, rather than the event itself, that mediates its subsequent impact” (p. 72). In her words, the later PTSD is the result of, “an understandable tendency to project our adult fears, repulsion, and horror onto child victims.”

Thus, Clancy argues that it is adults, especially therapists, who cause the trauma in sexual abuse victims, ignoring the reports of her own  subjects of contemporaneous fear, repulsion, and horror. And then she titles her book, “The Trauma Myth”, categorically painting sexual abuse as nontraumatic with one sweeping brush stroke.

Clancy has no objective basis to dismiss as a myth her subjects’ experiences of having been traumatized by their sexual abuse, simply because their reports did not meet her overly-restrictive criteria of overwhelming terror or having feared for their lives.

Clancy’s book also oddly neglects to adequately incorporate the vast body of psychological research documenting the myriad short-term damaging effects of sexual abuse on children. It is standard for psychologists to first conduct an unbiased review of the literature on a subject and to include that review in our books and papers. Clancy failed to conduct such a review. Instead, she selectively cites only a few studies that support her position. This approach exposes that Clancy has a biased agenda rather than an objective of honestly representing the work in the field. This raises questions of potential bias in her research methods, her interviews of victims, and her interpretation of her results.
As a psychologist for 24 years, I have treated hundreds of abused children and adults abused as children. Cases of children experiencing only “confusion” (her thesis) during the time period of their abuse are very rare. In most cases, abused children and adults abused as children report that during the time in which they were abused, in addition to confusion of various types, they experienced a combination of many of the following:

(a) Physical pain, in some cases extreme
(b) Disgust for the sexual acts, abuser genitalia and emissions
(c) Terror in cases of extreme force, restraint, or restriction of the child’s breathing, gagging, etc.
(d) Terror based in threats to self, loved one, pets, etc., to ensure compliance and/or to prevent disclosure
(e) Fear based in the abuser over-riding their attempts to escape, ignoring their pleas for the abuser to stop, etc.
(f) Fear, shame, and guilt, based in an awareness that private parts should be covered and not bothered (molested), and an awareness that the abuser was making great efforts to hide the abuse, to keep it secret, and to ensure that they kept it secret, causing the child to understand that these acts were harmful and morally wrong, as in hitting someone, stealing, lying, etc.
(g) Betrayal and hurt in cases of abuse by loved ones, based in an awareness that the abuser was engaging them in harmful and immoral acts, and in many cases, that family members were allowing the abuse to continue
(h) Guilt and shame for not escaping or physically fighting off the abuser (The truth is that children usually understand in the moment that they will be overpowered or assaulted for resisting.)
(i) Feeling like an “accomplice” based in receiving gifts and special privileges from the abuser. Clancy portrays these “gifts” as “benefits” that the child derives from sexual abuse. This equates child victims with prostitutes who trade money and goods for sex. But, children cannot enter “contracts” to be sexually exploited. Sexual abuse is imposed on children against their will and with little or no knowledge of the meaning of sexuality. Abusers then use gifts and favors to further manipulate and entrap children.
(j) Anxiety-producing sexual arousal during the abuse, in cases in which the abuser took precautions to prevent or minimize the perception of pain
(k) Residual sexual feelings and responses that caused great anxiety, crying, tantrums, pleas to caregivers to, “Make it [the sexual response] stop,” etc.
(l) Rage at the abuser for inflicting the above
m) Social, behavioral, and cognitive (including academic) problems driven by the above
(n) Physical damage, including damage to internal organs, sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, and in some cases, death

In addition, when children first disclose their abuse, the supportive caregivers in their life typically are devastated to have discovered the true basis for their children’s recent psychological and physical problems, such as separation anxiety, nightmares and night terrors, frequent crying, assorted fears, defiance, temper tantrums, academic problems, urinary and bowel “accidents,” etc. All of these are clear indicators that the sexual abuse was damaging to the child prior to his or her disclosure of the abuse.

I do not discount the rare cases of children feeling only “confused” during the period of their sexual abuse. However, this reaction usually occurs only in cases that do not involve pain, coercion, and threats, that involve more “mild” sexual acts, that are very short-term, and in younger children.
It is significant to note that Susan Clancy is a member of the International Committee of Social, Psychiatric, Psychological, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Neurological Scientists, a group that submitted an amicus brief in on behalf of Roman Catholic priest Paul M. Shanley in his appeal of his 2005 conviction of child sexual abuse. Shanley’s sexual assault convictions were upheld on appeal in January, 2010.

It is also important to note that the McNally-Clancy article was published in the journal, “The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice,” which claims to be peer-reviewed and endorsed by, The Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (CSMMH). Scott Lilienfeld is founder and editor of this journal and of the CSMMH. Many of the coordinating committee and fellows of the CSMMH have a long history of affiliation with the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and of advocating on behalf of accused sex abuse offenders in legal actions. These fellows include Elizabeth Loftus, Paul McHugh, and Harrison Pope. I believe it is necessary to question the degree of scientific objectivity of the peer-review process of this article by Clancy and McNally.

10. Misrepresentation of Psychotherapists as Inducing Dissociative Identity Disorder

Similar to misrepresenting child sexual abuse as non-traumatic, the Internet is replete with assertions that Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is not an actual psychiatric disorder based in histories of child abuse and other psychological trauma (e.g., significant loss, medical trauma), but is primarily an artifact of psychotherapy or specific therapists inducing its formation, suggestible individuals being exposed to material about child abuse or the concept of DID, and/or fantasy-proneness in particular individuals.

These assertions ignore the abundance of research that substantiates that DID is a valid, vs. rare or factitious, psychiatric disorder usually based in childhood trauma, although this documentation is readily available (see endnote 13).

Why would parties that oppose that ritual abuse and mind control exist be so motivated to  misrepresent DID as a non-disorder?

Psychotherapists commonly diagnose DID in clients who report histories of ritual abuse and mind control. And these clients commonly report that their abusers used torture, hypnosis and conditioning to intentionally induce their psyches to form dissociated self-states that their abusers could then exploit for nefarious purposes. For a full treatise on this thesis, see my chapter, “Torture-based mind control: Psychological mechanisms and psychotherapeutic approaches to overcoming mind control” in the book, Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: the Manipulation of Attachment Needs (2011).
We also have a historical record of manipulation of amnestic and dissociative states for purposes of mind control to serve espionage and military purposes. The declassified documents of Cold War MKULTRA program of  the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) expose a program that included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes (again, see Lacter, 2011).

Colin Ross, in his book, Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists (2000), cites a May 13, 1968, article in the Providence Evening Bulletin, that states that George Estabrooks, who is described as a former consultant for the FBI and CIA, is quoted to have stated, “the key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man’s personality, or creating multipersonality” (Ross, 2000, p. 162). Multiple Personality Disorder is precursor designation for what we now call Dissociative Identity Disorder.

It is important to note that The False Memory Syndrome Foundation and its affiliates have a long history of representing DID as a pseudo-psychiatric disorder and as an artifact of psychotherapy.
In the context of this history, it is significant to note the following citation related to funding by the United States Office of Naval Research (citation provided by Colin Ross, 2000):

On December 11, 1996, in a posting on the internet list WITCHNT@MITVAMA.MIT.EDU, Dr. Peter Freyd, husband of the Executive Director of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, wrote:
“Since we all want to be open about any money we might have received from military-related sources, let me confess. I, too must go on record. Starting in 1988, I’ve been getting a lot of money from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.” (p. 154)

Colin Ross (2000) succinctly helps us to connect the dots between disinformation on DID and the United States CIA Cold War mind control projects:
“If clinical multiple personality is buried and forgotten, then the Manchurian Candidate Programs will be safe from public scrutiny.” ( p. 141)

11. Use of Aliases to Inflate Statistics

Individuals can use as many aliases as they wish on many websites, e.g., sites that permit book reviews, to artificially inflate the number of people who appear to support their positions, to vote multiple times to endorse particular comments, etc.

12. Blitzkrieg Tactics

Opponents of the position that ritual abuse and mind control exist can readily lodge voluminous, repetitious, and vehement accusations on the Internet against psychotherapists who provide therapy or education for ritual abuse or mind control trauma. These attacks sometimes amount to harassment.
Psychotherapists, researchers, and educators cannot feasibly respond to this kind of barrage of accusations and still have time to fulfill their professional functions. This strategy also carries psychological costs, including personal stress, professional humiliation, as well as potentially frightening the clients of the therapists being attacked, and steering potential clients away from these therapists, objectives that may be part of the aim of some accusers.

There is often no venue to respond to accusations on the website where the accusations are lodged. And if a venue to respond is available, attempts to engage in rational discourse with people who use Blitzkrieg tactics are likely to be futile.

In Conclusion

As we consider these common forms of misinformation and tactics of disinformation used to discredit psychotherapy for trauma originating in ritual abuse and mind control, we are obliged to ask: Who would be motivated to launch such a vehement and deceitful attack against these therapists? Who stands to lose if these therapists do this work?

If the bulk of these attacks came from clients who claimed that their therapists induced or implanted false memories in them, we might find an answer to our question. But, this does not seem to be the case.

Instead, these attacks appear to usually come from parties who do not disclose the basis of their interest in this issue, and from organizations, and members and affiliates of such organizations, that directly advocate for people accused of crimes against children and from organizations that appear to share that agenda if one scratches just beneath the surface.

Such organizations include:

(a) The False Memory Syndrome Foundation “formed to provide legal and emotional support to those accused of sexual abuse” (Murphy, 1997)

(b) The National Center for Reason and Justice, that states that it “supports people who are falsely accused or convicted of crimes against children” (see: http://ncrj.org/ and its resources listed here: http://ncrj.org/resources/bibliography/)

(c) The International Committee of Social, Psychiatric, Psychological, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Neurological Scientists, which submitted an amicus brief on behalf of Roman Catholic priest Paul M. Shanley in his appeal of his conviction of child sexual abuse (Shanley’s sexual assault convictions were upheld on appeal)

(d) The National Association for Consumer Protection in Mental Health Practices, that states that it was “founded in 1994, due to the alarming number of False Memory cases” (see: http://www.hermanohme.com)

(e) http://www.hermanohme.com/),The Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health (the sister organization of “d” (above) which has the stated goal to “call for the reform of the mental health system, restricting it to those mental health treatments proven reasonably safe and effective by reliable scientific methods” (the last two organizations share a website here: http://www.hermanohme.com/)

Therefore, the Internet serves as something of an unregulated court of public opinion, where, to a large degree, allegedly falsely accused perpetrators of child abuse and their advocates and alleged victims of child abuse and their therapists and advocates, argue about:

(a) whether child abuse is in itself traumatic
(b) the existence of ritual abuse and mind control
(c) the validity of recovered memories of abuse
(d) the validity of dissociative disorders, especially DID
(e) the practice of psychotherapy in relation to all of the above

All of this occurs with no rules of order, no penalties for perjury, and an uneven playing field that causes psychotherapists and psychology researchers to have to pull their punches.

I believe that this fight is being waged, in great part, to prevent child abuse survivors, especially survivors of ritual abuse and mind control, from receiving the help and support that they need to heal from their abuse, from receiving any sense of validation about their abuse, from recalling any dissociated parts of their abuse, from reporting their abusers to the authorities, from suing their abusers, from activism against child abuse, ritual abuse, and mind control, and in some cases, from even breaking away from their abusers.

It is my opinion that most victims of ritual abuse and mind control need the support of another person to recover from these kinds of abuse. This is normally a psychotherapist. It may also include clergy, friends, significant others, and other survivors. For some survivor-therapists, it is a colleague. But rarely can a survivor of these abuses bear to process this trauma alone. It is usually too painful, frightening, and disorienting to face without an external anchor for support.

Psychotherapy may be the most common and effective means of breaking the bonds of ritual abuse and mind control. I believe this is a large basis for the war being waged against it.

Furthermore, it is a lot less vulgar and cruel to attack therapists of victims and survivors than to attack the victims directly. For example, legal defenses for those accused of child abuse focus on painting the therapist of the child or adult as inducing or implanting “false memories” of abuse rather than painting the alleged victim as a liar.

It follows that psychotherapists receive the brunt of the attacks in the battle to discredit the realities of ritual abuse and mind control, as a group, and often as individuals.

It is my pleasure to expose these forms of misinformation and tactics of disinformation about ritual abuse and mind control trauma and about psychotherapy to treat such trauma.

I do so on the 25th anniversary of the death of my father, a man of great ethics and integrity, who taught me to stand up for the oppressed and to fight fairly.

Endnotes:

1. In 2011, Colin Batley was convicted of for leading a “satanic” sex cult in of West Wales, UK (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/09/paedophile-satanic-cult-batley-kidwelly and: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/11/sex-cult-leader-colin-batley-sentenced).

2. In 2006, Gerald Robinson was convicted for the murder of Sister Margaret Ann Pahl in Ohio, USA. Significant evidence suggests the murder may have been a ritual sacrifice (see: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/071203, for a chapter from, Sin, Shame, and Secrets: The Murder of a Nun, the Conviction of a Priest, and Cover-up in the Catholic Church,” by David Yonke, 2006,  http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2006/05/12/Priest-found-guilty-cleric-gets-15-years-to-life-in-nun-s-murder.html, and http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2004/04/27/Area-authorities-no-strangers-to-cult-ritual-probes.html).

3. In December, 2012, in Cornwall, England, Peter Petrauske and Jack Kemp were convicted of carrying out ritualistic sex abuse on young girls. (See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/dec/14/cornish-white-witches-guilty-ritual-abuse
and: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/nov/28/witches-sex-abuse-allegations-children-court).

4. In April 2005, Pastor Louis D. Lamonica of the Hosanna Church in Louisiana, USA, walked into the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office and allegedly confessed to abusing children and animals in a Satanic ritual, although he later recanted his confession (see: http://www.pet-abuse.com/cases/4626/LA/US/). Austin “Trey” Bernard, III, of the same church confessed to ritual elements within his abuse of children to FBI Special Agents Lisa Marie Freitas and Joseph Edwards (see: http://wallsofsilence.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=196) Both men were convicted of child rape, Bernard in 2007 and Lamonica 2008 (http://www.hammondstar.com/articles/2007/12/03/top_stories/9453.txt). Also see:   http://religiouschildabuse.blogspot.com/2008/10/ex-pastor-gets-concurrent-life-terms-in.html,
http://www.hammondstar.com/articles/2007/12/18/top_stories/9455.txt, and
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2007/11_12/2007_12_04_KATC_FirstCharged.htm)

5. In June, 1993, in London, a man aged 67, his daughter, aged 29, and his two sons- in-law, aged 41 and 31, were imprisoned for between 18 months and life for the sexual abuse of seven children of the same extended family over an eleven-year period (see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/four-people-in-one-family-are-jailed-for-child-sex-1494769.html)
The 10-year-old daughter of the 41-year-old man “described being taken late at night by her father and others to a ‘devil church’ where she was stripped, tied up, had knives held in front of her face and was abused by adults in black cloaks and balaclavas” (see:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/girl-10-tells-of-sexual-abuse-in-devil-church-child-accuses-relatives-in-video-shown-to-jury-1490468.html and  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/girl-was-abused-in-churchyard-1490250.html)

6. In 1991, in Perth, Australia, Scott Brian Gozenton was convicted on 22 charges of indecent assault and dealing and of evil intent. The head of Western Australia’s child sex abuse unit, Detective-Sergeant Roger Smart, said the conviction demonstrated a link between organized child sex abuse and devil worship (see: http://ra-watch.livejournal.com/4950.html)

7. In 1982, following guilty pleas to a series of serious sexual offences against young children, Malcolm and Susan Smith, and Albert and Carole Hickman, of Telford, England, were jailed, Malcolm Smith for 14  years, Albert Hickman  for ten years, Carole Hickman for five years, and Susan Smith for two years. The ritualistic and satanic elements of their crimes are discussed briefly here: rituals. http://usminc.org/crime3.html and by Tim Tate in Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse, edited by Valerie Sinason (1994) on page 191.

8. A conviction list of cases with elements of ritual abuse was archived in 1997 by Michael Newton of Believe the Children. (See: http://ra-info.org/for-researchers/bibliographies/conviction-list-ritual-child-abuse/cases-that-have-resulted-in-convictions/) There have been significant developments in some of these cases since this was published. E.g., in 1994, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley of West Memphis, Tennessee, USA, were convicted in the cult murders of three boys, but in 2011, they were released from prison on an Alford plea (see: http://www.nowpublic.com/world/west-memphis-three-freed-alford-plea-public-hearing-live-stream-2827425.html)
In an Alford plea, “the criminal defendant does not admit the act, but admits that the prosecution could likely prove the charge” (definition from: http://definitions.uslegal.com/a/alford-plea/)

9. A good deal of the research about ritual abuse is summarized in an article by Randy Noblitt, PhD.: “An Empirical Look at the Ritual Abuse Controversy,” by (See:  http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/an-empirical-look-at-the-ritual-abuse-controversy-randy-noblitt-phd/).

10. A news piece of 12/8/2012 in the National Post (nationalpost.com), documents an international ring engaged in distribution of filmed child sexual abuse: “Spain arrests 28 people suspected of links to Toronto-based child porn ring,” states, “The investigation began when Interpol told Spanish police in April about a network headquartered in Toronto, dedicated to the sale of child pornography videos. Spain’s Interior Ministry said Saturday that the videos were created by abusing minors in Ukraine, Romania and Germany” (see: http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/12/08/spain-arrests-28-people-suspected-of-links-to-toronto-based-child-porn-ring/).

11. See: Buried Secrets: A True Story of Drug Running, Black Magic, and Human Sacrifice (1991), by Edward Humes, and Cauldron of Blood: The Matamoros Cult Killings (1989), by Jim Schutze.

12. See: “Defamation Case Settled for an Undisclosed Sum,” April 23, 1995, in The Deseret Times of Salt Lake City, Utah:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/417014/DEFAMATION-CASE-SETTLED-FOR-AN-UNDISCLOSED-SUM.html?pg=all

13. Accurate information on DID can be found in the Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision (2011) of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (see: http://www.isst-d.org/jtd/GUIDELINES_REVISED2011.pdf) and in this 2012 comprehensive review by Dalenberg et al.: Evaluation of the Evidence for the Trauma and Fantasy Models of Dissociation (see: http://goo.gl/RERhc; click the box that says “view” to the right, then scroll down)

References:

Bryant, N. (2009). The Franklin scandal: A story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal. TrineDay.

Clancy, S. A. (2010). The Trauma myth: The truth about the sexual abuse of children–and its aftermath. Basic Books.

Clancy, S.A. & McNally, R.J. (2005/2006). Who Needs Repression? Normal Memory Processes Can Explain “Forgetting” of Childhood Sexual Abuse. The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice (2005/2006, Fall/Winter 4(2).

Dalenberg, C. J. (1996). Accuracy, timing and circumstances of disclosure in therapy of recovered and continuous memories of abuse. Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 24, 229-275.

Dalenberg, C.J; Brand, B.; Gleaves, D.D.; Dorahy, M. J.; Loewenstein, R.J.; Cardeña, E.; Frewen, P.A.; Carlson, E. B.; and Spiegel, D. (2012) Evaluation of the Evidence for the Trauma and Fantasy Models of Dissociation. Psychological Bulletin, 03/2012; 138(3):550-88. DOI:10.1037/a0027447

Elliott, D. M. (1997). Traumatic events: Prevalence and delayed recall in the general population. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 65. doi:10.1037/0022-006X.65.5.811

Lacter, E. (2011). Torture-based mind control: Psychological mechanisms and psychotherapeutic approaches to overcoming mind control. In O.B. Epstein, J. Schwartz, & R. Wingfield (Eds.) Ritual abuse and mind control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs, pp. 57-141. London: Karnac.

Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008). Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin (Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers.

Murphy, W. (1997, November). Debunking “false memory” myths in sexual abuse cases. Trial, 54-60.

Ross, C. A. (2000). Bluebird: Deliberate creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists.
Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications.

Whitfield, Silberg, & Fink (2002). Misinformation concerning Child Sexual Abuse and Adult Survivors. Haworth Maltreatment & Trauma Press.

Williams, L. M. (1994). Recall of childhood trauma: A prospective study of women’s memories of child sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 62, 1167-1176.

Wilsnack, S. C., Wonderlich, S. A., Kristjanson, A. F., Vogeltanz-Holm, N. D., & Wilsnack, H. W. (2002). Self-reports of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse in a nationally representative sample of US women. Child Abuse & Neglect, 26, 139–147. doi:10.1016/S0145-2134(01)00313-1