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lb_leeBack from the con! It went well! We are very tired but want to upload the notes of Tape #2: "Treatment of Adult RA Survivors," from the 3rd Annual Orange County Conference on Multiple Personality and Dissociation, Hypnosis, and other Strategies, 1990. Hope y'all got your shit-wading boots!
Besides the chair (who isn't really relevant for this one, she just introduces the speakers and ends the discussion), there are three speakers: Bonnie Een(? not sure how to spell that one), Linda Detling(?), and Steven Ray.
Bonnie Een speaks first, and for the record, she is totally fine. She was hoping to start work on figuring out a checklist of ritual abuse symptoms--sensible enough. She did a little research on 32 RA cases in practice with 13 therapists--obviously too small a research sample to generalize from, but she just recites what findings she had, she finishes her presentation a little ahead of time (which proves good because HOO BOY). By the sound of it, she was reciting what her slides said, which probably made her very boring in person but was a godsend for an audio tape. And frankly, on tapes like these, boring and fine is great. Please, tapes, give me all the boring, fine presenters you have!
So anyway, the notes we took on Een's research:
He used the term "the cult" and "MPD cult" a few times, leading me to suspect that he thinks that RA multiples... it's all one grand unified cult creating multis for their own profit and benefit. We'll get more into that later.
He goes on to talk about cult hierarchy and programming. There's a time delay between a "program" being removed from a multiple and new programs being uncovered. He talks about digging into the multis' heads to get them to regurgitate "verbatim programming," which sounds ungodly. (Like, we will sometimes have memories of words and such come up during our memories, but we know better than to believe they're word-for-word true. Even the phrases that stood out in the memory for their sheer strangeness, we don't know how seriously to take.) The structures and roles of the cult are all hidden between headmates, everyone siloed off and kept ignorant about each other.
"Some words of caution," he says, "if you move too quickly, you'll activate cult injunctions" and they'll get reprogrammed--that is, one of these hidden siloed headmates will feel compelled to return to the cult and be reprogrammed, or they'll feel compelled to hurt or kill themselves. (He doesn't mention this, but I also suspect he includes doing things like trying to leave therapy and crap, because you want to nope the fuck out of this kookbat cave!)
As to the difference between "Garden variety MPD" and "ritual MPD," garden variety MPD comes from "a spontaneous reaction," that is, it's caused by accident. An abuser or attacker doesn't MEAN to create a multi, it just happens, and is thus a little more under the multi's control. (For example, Mori was created to fight back against our mother. Our mother did NOT intend for Mori to get created, and she would've been much happier had Mori not been there. Mori was not under her control, and was sorta a wildcard in the whole situation.) In "garden variety" MPD, alters are for survival.
RA MPD, on the other hand, is supposedly created on purpose, through specific means that these groups have learned over "centuries of practice." (At this point, my notes say, "CITATION NEEDED!") "They know exactly how to do that," using dissociative drugs given to 4-7-year-old children, combined with programs of trauma and fear. Unlike other multis, these headmates are not created for survival, but for the cult's purposes. The cult carefully crafts amnesiac barriers for storage purposes. (How? Don't say!) And of course, ritual abuse multis are completely incapable of solving this for themselves; they NEED a therapist to help them. How convenient!
Also very conveniently, all ritual abuse multis have the same structure. (Why? I suspect the answer is because all the cults are connected, in true Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory. Thanks so much for that term,wolfy_writing, it's so useful for this!) Supposedly all RA multis have the same 7 layers to their system, all of which are kept extremely siloed from each other:
They talk about getting to Level 6 by emphasizing to victims things like "you are weak, you are helpless," and later add that it should be "they took advantage of you, that's not okay," to break the defensive feeling of invulnerability that... the cult for some reason wants? I truly am confused by this. They claim completely different things at different times in this talk. I didn't have this problem with Een. "There's always a way to access them." The cult can always "access" them. (And this was when I realized whatpolyfrazzlemented were talking about when they talked about me being accessed and I wanted to throw my tablet out the window.)
In RA MPD memories are constantly moved around and removed from awareness, making progress incredibly difficult. (To me this just says plain heavy dissociation--we've definitely known multiples who keep losing their memory over and over.) "Names are threatening to ritual abuse systems," but we can testify that plenty of other plurals don't like being pinned down with names.
Oh boy, here we go, suicidal and trigger programs! Trigger programs include triggered behavior like: go to cult (for reprogramming), harm self, or kill self. These triggers are created and maintained three different ways:
Suicide programs are created to remove cult members who are no longer useful, or to get rid of people when they start resisting the cult. (This is also incredibly easy to monkeywrench for abuse. The reason you're feeling suicidal in this bogus therapy is, you're getting close to the truth! It's just the programming!) Bizarrely, Steven Ray also claims that these suicide programs are supposed to tell the cult how effective therapy is??? He doesn't explain that at all. Oh, but cults don't ACTUALLY want their foot soldiers to kill themselves, because that'd be inconvenient, so the suicide programs are actually intended to "scare them into compliance" which makes no sense but whatever, FINE, this guy is a moonbrained kookbat, whatever.
"It's not enough if you get cognitive reappraisal" of the cult beliefs. It's "not sufficient" if the multi swears they'll never return to the cult, because they aren't in control of their own behavior! "If the medication is administered," the programs will still happen, so the RA multi must remember everything, of course, even though even he admits it's "traumatic." But they must! For their own good! Or they'll never escape the cult.
According to that monster bibliography of multi citations I bookscanned, Steven Ray wrote an article on "Managing dissociative memory pain" for Beyond Survival vol. 2 #6 in 1991. Yeah, I bet he fucking did!
He talks about "merging" headmates for "stability," though he acknowledges that it may not be permanent and seems to treat that as okay.
"I do not encourage hypnosis with ritual MPDs," he says. "I do not recommend hypnosis or physical expression of anger. It'll access level 6." (I hate that I agree with him on anything. UGH.) He especially said not to move people around inside, which... yes. Yes, I agree that is a bad idea.
Detling was speaking as well back and forth doing this; she and Ray worked together and at times it was hard to know whether they were in it together or what, they swapped back and forth discussing what seemed to be the same ideas. Detling talked about "combatting post-hypnotic suggestions" with reframing so as to allow orders to be followed and not followed simultaneously. (In other words, it's exploiting loopholes. That's it, that's all it is.) On the verge of death, loopholes seem easier to find and follow.
"Satanists often speak in opposites and reversals." Sure, why the hell not. I admit, I did kinda like how Detling chose to deal with one client shouting that everything they'd just said in session was a lie; he response was, paraphrased: "I'm so proud of you! I've worked so hard to build you a safe space to try new behavior! Please, keep lying! That's great that you feel safe enough to do that!" Like, on the one hand, that's a great way to defang that situation... but if this is a case of therapeutic abuse where a therapist keeps trying to convince you that you were part of a Satanic cult, it could very easily just become more gaslighting and, "see, this is just proof we're getting through to the TRUTH!" Blah.
And that's it for Tape #2!
Bonnie Een speaks first, and for the record, she is totally fine. She was hoping to start work on figuring out a checklist of ritual abuse symptoms--sensible enough. She did a little research on 32 RA cases in practice with 13 therapists--obviously too small a research sample to generalize from, but she just recites what findings she had, she finishes her presentation a little ahead of time (which proves good because HOO BOY). By the sound of it, she was reciting what her slides said, which probably made her very boring in person but was a godsend for an audio tape. And frankly, on tapes like these, boring and fine is great. Please, tapes, give me all the boring, fine presenters you have!
So anyway, the notes we took on Een's research:
- All 32 cases were female, ranging in age from 24-56 years old, with 36 the average age at intake. 46% were college grads. 19% presented with MPD, 25% with depression, 13% relationship problems, 6% sexual abuse, Other problems included drinking, agoraphobia, lack of sexual desire, and confusion. 59% were married, 22% divorced, 19% single. 38% had two kids. 47% of fathers died before therapy, 53% were still alive. (I'm not clear from my notes whether these were THEIR fathers or the fathers of their children.)
- 75% of the cases had some symptoms of child sexual abuse but no memory of it. 69% had previous therapy, ranging from a few months to over ten years. 69% had "conscious memory" of physical abuse. 59% had parents dealing with addiction. 53% had attempted suicide, from the age of 4 on up. (Bennett G. Braun, who's a disaster who lost his medical license but was a little tin god at the time of this con, apparently claimed something involving suicide attempts "every third year," but Een states that she did NOT find this in her sample.) 44% had siblings with major issues.
- The following symptoms of MPD appeared in the sample: 88% with memory loss, 72% had time loss, 72% showed signs of dissociating during the interview, 69% heard voices in their heard, 66% manifested changes in handwriting, 66% had recurring headaches.
- My notes don't make it clear whether this was from Een's study or someone else like Braun, but supposedly 70% of ritual abuse survivors had MPD.
- The following symptoms of PTSD appeared in her sample: 78% scared of men, 75% scared of dcotors, 72% fear of authority figures, 72% fear of the night, darkness, and the color black, 69% had fears of the color red, eating, or attachment. 65% were afraid of being raped, 63% were afraid of being alone or meeting new people, 53% were afraid of snakes or hypnosis(!), 50% were scared of religious stuff or drugs. Oh, and 45% of them were scared of spiders. Een noted that some people, far from being scared of these experiences, seemed to seek them out, specifically getting raped or acting sexually promiscuously. (We don't have time to unpack all that right now.)
- 2 therapists reported their patients having (or reporting? unclear) few dreams. Of the therapists who DID have their sampled patients report dreams, 88% had dreams of violent death or blood, being chased or hiding, 85% had anxiety dreams over children or small animals, 66% had dreams of witches, black people(!), or people in black, and 50% had medical dreams. (I am a little baffled by the black people dreams. Were they nightmares? Surely dreaming about black people isn't shocking all on its own, come on!)
- Sexual fantasies: 31% of the sample claimed no sexual fantasies at all, on account of wanting nothing to do with the whole business. Of the remainder, 55% had rape fantasies, 50% gay or S/M fantasies, 41% rescue fantasies, 23% had fantasies involving children. (I will note that the rape fantasy thing seems to be roughly as common as in the general public.)
- Art: 28% of the therapists didn't use it, but of the remainder, 92% of the sample drew knives, 87% frequently drew in red or black, 83% drew blood, 70% devils/demons or bloody body, 65% bloody tears, 61% eyes, 48% dicks, 39% cunts. (Een mentioned Dee Spring, who made a book we've seen, Image and Mirage: Art Therapy with Dissociative Clients. We made a snarky post about it ten years ago, might have to revisit it.)
- Other troubles: 91% had sleep trouble, 87% had an eating disorder, 75% had sexual dysfunction (usually lack, of desire), 72% had unexplained stomach, back, or cunt pain, 63% self-harmed, 53% dealt with substance abuse, and 22% had rectal or vaginal scarring, though usually rectal. 22% had TMJ. 15% had had a hysterectomy. 15% had unexplained scars or tattoos.
- An audience member asked whether there was a control group of MPD folk without ritual abuse history, and credit where credit is due, Een was very forthright in saying that sadly no, there wasn't. Good question, audience member!
- Een also noted that symbols in art therapy included grids or mazes, which she pondered as possible road maps to inner system pathways, which I'm not sure I agree but find an interesting thing to think about!
He used the term "the cult" and "MPD cult" a few times, leading me to suspect that he thinks that RA multiples... it's all one grand unified cult creating multis for their own profit and benefit. We'll get more into that later.
He claimed that RA multiples have predictable layers. (Also more on that later.) The idea of Braun's that 40% of MPDs have ritual abuse? "Grossly underestimated." The 70% stat mentioned earlier? "Grossly underestimated." (At this point, my notes literally read, "Okay, so this guy's a crank, got it.")
"Many of the healed multiples were healed of family incest or healed by integrating or consolidating only the superficial layers of the multiplicity, and the ritual abuse was never touched." At least he does distinguish between "garden variety multiple" and "ritual multiple." (He also refers to headmates as people, which irrationally irks me. I don't want to have to agree with this guy on anything, haha.)
So he and Detling talk about "the Cult," which they claim comes in three levels:
- Aggressive. There's attackers and victims, and rarely the twain doth meet, though eventually some victims may start doing "dirty work for the cults." May say they love Satan, because of course they fucking do. Involve gangs, maybe the Mafia, and their Satanic rites usually just look like parties with drugs. They may not be overtly Satanic at all, but oh, don't worry, totally Satanic, we promise.
- MPD. Family abuse. Doing Satanic things in the name of Christ. Incest. Apparently they pay dues, are more white-collar and religious. It's all really vague? A lot of the stuff this guy said had me going, "wait, hold up, go back." He kinda blazes by without covering things in detail.
- Structures. No family bonds necessary, involves far bigger groups, organized circles, done for gain. Pedophile rings, MK ULTRA crap, stuff like that. They have their own preschools and active religions, which are of course all about Satan. They create MPD intentionally and boot victims who show no signs of becoming multi; they specifically want young children with the knack for dissociating. These were the kinds of cults the people I know who went rabbitholing tended to talk about.
He goes on to talk about cult hierarchy and programming. There's a time delay between a "program" being removed from a multiple and new programs being uncovered. He talks about digging into the multis' heads to get them to regurgitate "verbatim programming," which sounds ungodly. (Like, we will sometimes have memories of words and such come up during our memories, but we know better than to believe they're word-for-word true. Even the phrases that stood out in the memory for their sheer strangeness, we don't know how seriously to take.) The structures and roles of the cult are all hidden between headmates, everyone siloed off and kept ignorant about each other.
"Some words of caution," he says, "if you move too quickly, you'll activate cult injunctions" and they'll get reprogrammed--that is, one of these hidden siloed headmates will feel compelled to return to the cult and be reprogrammed, or they'll feel compelled to hurt or kill themselves. (He doesn't mention this, but I also suspect he includes doing things like trying to leave therapy and crap, because you want to nope the fuck out of this kookbat cave!)
As to the difference between "Garden variety MPD" and "ritual MPD," garden variety MPD comes from "a spontaneous reaction," that is, it's caused by accident. An abuser or attacker doesn't MEAN to create a multi, it just happens, and is thus a little more under the multi's control. (For example, Mori was created to fight back against our mother. Our mother did NOT intend for Mori to get created, and she would've been much happier had Mori not been there. Mori was not under her control, and was sorta a wildcard in the whole situation.) In "garden variety" MPD, alters are for survival.
RA MPD, on the other hand, is supposedly created on purpose, through specific means that these groups have learned over "centuries of practice." (At this point, my notes say, "CITATION NEEDED!") "They know exactly how to do that," using dissociative drugs given to 4-7-year-old children, combined with programs of trauma and fear. Unlike other multis, these headmates are not created for survival, but for the cult's purposes. The cult carefully crafts amnesiac barriers for storage purposes. (How? Don't say!) And of course, ritual abuse multis are completely incapable of solving this for themselves; they NEED a therapist to help them. How convenient!
Also very conveniently, all ritual abuse multis have the same structure. (Why? I suspect the answer is because all the cults are connected, in true Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory. Thanks so much for that term,
wolfy_writing, it's so useful for this!) Supposedly all RA multis have the same 7 layers to their system, all of which are kept extremely siloed from each other:- The "everyday level." The main fronter, who can be changed according to need, interest, or cult desire.
- Back-ups who take over for the main fronter and are generally aware enough of fronting life to be able to cover for it. An example in our case would maybe be Sneak, who regularly pinch-hits but usually doesn't front solid and alone for super long periods. These headmates get changed regularly from age as the cult creates new headmates for each age... and of course, very conveniently, they may be completely unaware of this. (This is an ongoing theme in this talk, the idea that headmates will constantly be interacting with the cult and forget it immediately because of amnesiac siloing.) They can apparently give you basic safety info, but nothing about the programs, can maybe connect you with level 3. (This all seems vague and self-contradictory, and I'm not sure how much of the problem was how well I was understanding or how much Steven Ray was just like this.)
- Pain-holders, have to be called out by cult members or triggers. Contain the suicide and trigger programs the cult has put in.
- Memory fragments, spontaneously created others (AKA: headmates not made by the cult). Necessary to put memories and info together.
- Headmates who know the ceremony ritual specifics, how to do it, but not why or even what it is. Often kids. Continue to be involved in the cult, but once again, may have no memory of doing so.
- Scary terror-holders. "Do not try to reach level 6 on your own. Wait until next year's conference; you'll be ready then. (laughter)"
- Only act by cult leaders??? The ISH??? They're extremely vague about level 7 but oh, it's there, they promise!
- or more??? for incest and crap??? MYSTERY!
They talk about getting to Level 6 by emphasizing to victims things like "you are weak, you are helpless," and later add that it should be "they took advantage of you, that's not okay," to break the defensive feeling of invulnerability that... the cult for some reason wants? I truly am confused by this. They claim completely different things at different times in this talk. I didn't have this problem with Een. "There's always a way to access them." The cult can always "access" them. (And this was when I realized what
polyfrazzlemented were talking about when they talked about me being accessed and I wanted to throw my tablet out the window.)In RA MPD memories are constantly moved around and removed from awareness, making progress incredibly difficult. (To me this just says plain heavy dissociation--we've definitely known multiples who keep losing their memory over and over.) "Names are threatening to ritual abuse systems," but we can testify that plenty of other plurals don't like being pinned down with names.
Oh boy, here we go, suicidal and trigger programs! Trigger programs include triggered behavior like: go to cult (for reprogramming), harm self, or kill self. These triggers are created and maintained three different ways:
- pain (if the triggered behavior isn't performed, the multiple is overwhelmed with agony)
- threat (if the triggered behavior isn't performed, the multi becomes unable to stop thinking that something terrible will happen to their loved ones)
- conditioned (the multiple has been so thoroughly programmed that the idea of disobeying is inconceivable)
Suicide programs are created to remove cult members who are no longer useful, or to get rid of people when they start resisting the cult. (This is also incredibly easy to monkeywrench for abuse. The reason you're feeling suicidal in this bogus therapy is, you're getting close to the truth! It's just the programming!) Bizarrely, Steven Ray also claims that these suicide programs are supposed to tell the cult how effective therapy is??? He doesn't explain that at all. Oh, but cults don't ACTUALLY want their foot soldiers to kill themselves, because that'd be inconvenient, so the suicide programs are actually intended to "scare them into compliance" which makes no sense but whatever, FINE, this guy is a moonbrained kookbat, whatever.
"It's not enough if you get cognitive reappraisal" of the cult beliefs. It's "not sufficient" if the multi swears they'll never return to the cult, because they aren't in control of their own behavior! "If the medication is administered," the programs will still happen, so the RA multi must remember everything, of course, even though even he admits it's "traumatic." But they must! For their own good! Or they'll never escape the cult.
According to that monster bibliography of multi citations I bookscanned, Steven Ray wrote an article on "Managing dissociative memory pain" for Beyond Survival vol. 2 #6 in 1991. Yeah, I bet he fucking did!
He talks about "merging" headmates for "stability," though he acknowledges that it may not be permanent and seems to treat that as okay.
"I do not encourage hypnosis with ritual MPDs," he says. "I do not recommend hypnosis or physical expression of anger. It'll access level 6." (I hate that I agree with him on anything. UGH.) He especially said not to move people around inside, which... yes. Yes, I agree that is a bad idea.
Detling was speaking as well back and forth doing this; she and Ray worked together and at times it was hard to know whether they were in it together or what, they swapped back and forth discussing what seemed to be the same ideas. Detling talked about "combatting post-hypnotic suggestions" with reframing so as to allow orders to be followed and not followed simultaneously. (In other words, it's exploiting loopholes. That's it, that's all it is.) On the verge of death, loopholes seem easier to find and follow.
"Satanists often speak in opposites and reversals." Sure, why the hell not. I admit, I did kinda like how Detling chose to deal with one client shouting that everything they'd just said in session was a lie; he response was, paraphrased: "I'm so proud of you! I've worked so hard to build you a safe space to try new behavior! Please, keep lying! That's great that you feel safe enough to do that!" Like, on the one hand, that's a great way to defang that situation... but if this is a case of therapeutic abuse where a therapist keeps trying to convince you that you were part of a Satanic cult, it could very easily just become more gaslighting and, "see, this is just proof we're getting through to the TRUTH!" Blah.
And that's it for Tape #2!
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