lb_lee: A B-movie blond young man with a pompadour, resembling a Cabbage Patch Elvis, grins weirdly into the camera. (wowzy wow wow!)
[personal profile] lb_lee
Back 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:
  • 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!
So that was Een! Nice and boring, right? Well, then Steven Ray and Linda Detling come up and HOO FUCKING BOY. So, Ray worked under Braun, and he and Detling seem to have both chugged that Koolaid pretty hard. My warning that this train was going off the rails was when Steven used the term "MPD cult." At first, I thought, "wait, is he arguing that MPD as a concept is a cult? Is he a FMSF sorta guy who infiltrated somehow?" But then he said, "Forget everything you know" about it and I went oh no. Oh no, this man sounds like he's interesting, and that is very, very bad in these tapes. Interesting people are generally BONKERS.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
As I listened with increasing bug-eyed flabbergastery, Ray even dealt with the whole problem of people having memories of, say, being cut open for human sacrifice purposes, only to have no scars or marks from it: you see, these Satanists are so smart and full of forethought, they make sure those sacrifices get "stitched up by a plastic surgeon." They just have their own on-call plastic surgeons on staff in the group!

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, [personal profile] 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:
  1. The "everyday level." The main fronter, who can be changed according to need, interest, or cult desire.
  2. 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.)
  3. Pain-holders, have to be called out by cult members or triggers. Contain the suicide and trigger programs the cult has put in.
  4. Memory fragments, spontaneously created others (AKA: headmates not made by the cult). Necessary to put memories and info together.
  5. 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.
  6. 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)"
  7. Only act by cult leaders??? The ISH??? They're extremely vague about level 7 but oh, it's there, they promise!
  8. or more??? for incest and crap??? MYSTERY!
(At this point our notes read "WTF is this shit. These guys are cranks. If [their patients] get hostile, it's because [they] hit [level] 6, how convenient. They say they won't give specifics of course.")
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 [personal profile] 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:
  1. pain (if the triggered behavior isn't performed, the multiple is overwhelmed with agony)
  2. threat (if the triggered behavior isn't performed, the multi becomes unable to stop thinking that something terrible will happen to their loved ones)
  3. conditioned (the multiple has been so thoroughly programmed that the idea of disobeying is inconceivable)
And of course, all these triggers have back-up triggers! And those triggers can be so automatic that the multi doesn't even know about them or notice them happening! CONVENIENTLY.

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!

Date: 2025-10-19 04:46 am (UTC)
wolfy_writing: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wolfy_writing
Oh yeah, this is completely off the rails.

I think learning about Cold War government weirdness did strange things to some people's heads. Like if you learn about what actually happened, there's the shock of learning that a lot of things that seem like it would be too weird, too immoral, or just too stupid to be real actually happened. And if you're bad at understanding logistics or other practical barriers limiting what governments can do, then that leaves you primed to swallow down all kinds of wild conspiracy theories. (Like I know enough about the Stargate Project and the First Earth Battalion to confirm that during the Cold War the U.S. government was trying to do some wild paranormal shit, and I know enough about MKULTRA to know that there were definitely efforts to develop mind control, but I also know enough about the world to recognize that "Powerful government people tried to do these things" doesn't mean "These things actually worked.")

The big about fear of doctors reminds me of an idea I heard about alien abduction memory retrieval. The idea I heard is that if someone with unaddressed medical trauma (which may involve medication or other things that lead to garbled or incomplete memories) seeks out help but finds a hypnotist with an agenda, that can lead to distorting the original trauma into unrecognizable form. (And, having read writing by some alien abduction hypnotists engaging in memory recovery, they very much do have an agenda and a sense of Heroic Mission about Uncovering The Truth.) I imagine you could have something similar with trauma (medical, abuse, etc.) and hypnotists who are very convinced it's their Heroic Mission to find the secret all-powerful cult.

might Bonnie "Een" be...

Date: 2025-10-19 01:28 pm (UTC)
storyheight: (demonHuh)
From: [personal profile] storyheight
"Bonnie Ian"? "Ian" a name that people sometimes have as (usual as a first name but y'know..). Of course in all likelyhood its "Ein" or some other non-english word or unusual last name etc just thought i had something to add..

cuz yeah don't got much to say for the rest of the Buffy the Demonic Cult Slayer fanfic that passes as the next presenters' Medical Fables

Date: 2025-10-19 02:52 pm (UTC)
starfallhaven: our collective flag. (Default)
From: [personal profile] starfallhaven
The thing about every bit of 'programming' I've ever seen is that it is all extremely explainable as a natural consequence of regular emotional and physical abuse--like specifically I always think of the "some alters will be loyal to their abusers or try to prevent the truth from being known" and it's like. Yeah. A lot of times when an abuser does something they know is wrong they tell a child bad things will happen if they tell anyone. That happened to us, but it was just because one man was too much of a coward to admit that he had anger problems.

And also the obvious problem of, hey, if random people know how to create systems and have been doing so for so long...how come no one has ever found a manual? Any kind of written instructions? Literally any evidence? If we embrace the idea that not everyone reacts to trauma in the same predictable way, because that's fairly self-evident, how do these people know which children will develop a system and which kids will just have super bad PTSD? And therefore I guess not be as useful for whatever project this seemingly is about?

Like, I have my own biases--I don't really believe in RA as put forward by these guys, it's all pretty rooted in conspiracy and antisemitic tropes from the satanic panic (I do think religious abuse happens, but that's far less 'flashy' and frankly mostly committed by Christians and not a secret evil cult--not to mention actual cult abuse as has been documented by scientology and other cults, I may have a hyperfixation). But the logical problems have never been addressed except to claim they have unprecedented money and power and ability to make physical evidence conveniently disappear.

Date: 2025-10-19 09:16 pm (UTC)
starfallhaven: our collective flag. (Default)
From: [personal profile] starfallhaven
The antisemitism is fucking bonkers. The next tape on the list is one by Corydon Hammond, and even my Texan ass was going “oh shit, this is blood libel.”

Ohhhh no. Godspeed

Date: 2025-10-19 09:44 pm (UTC)
wolffyluna: A green unicorn holding her tail in her mouth (Default)
From: [personal profile] wolffyluna
It's sort of... impressive? How it starts sort of reasonable, then goes to "fear of eating and the colour red is the same thing, right?" to "THERES A SECRET WORLDWIDE CULT MAKING SYSTEMS FOR REASONS". (It's also... something, that there's no evidence that could convince them they are wrong.)

Date: 2025-10-19 10:53 pm (UTC)
wolfy_writing: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wolfy_writing
It sounds like it would be very possible! The Barney and Betty Hill abduction account, which was one of the first documented abduction accounts, only had them describing an alien abduction weeks later under hypnosis (multiple sessions over the course of weeks, with them talking to each other between sessions) and what they described had elements of what sounds like medical procedures mixed with what sounds like a a police stop (they were an interracial married couple traveling through a rural area in 1961). And things like anesthetic awareness went for decades without being properly researched.

Oh yeah, some of the MKULTRA stuff gets dark. It does give some good ideas of what can and can't be done with mind control, though. (You'll probably find it similar to a lot of the abuse and cult stuff you already know about.)

Very much that, yes! And yeah, a lot of it is very real evidence that powerful government people were willing to do bizarre things mixed with a lack of evidence for them being able to accomplish the things they were trying to do.

Date: 2025-10-20 12:04 am (UTC)
wolfy_writing: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wolfy_writing
It's interesting seeing how this all fits together. And I've dug into alien abduction accounts a bit and have found some information online. (Also I had a brief and fortuitously non-traumatic experience of waking up mid-procedure under general anesthetic, and the whole topic of anesthetic awareness is an interest of mine. From what I've read, there's a lot of complexity with the impact of the drugs used, which increase the odds of people experiencing states that are neither "full conscious recall" nor "complete unconsciousness and total lack of memory.")

MKULTRA is a lot of weird connections. (There's occasionally funny bits, and I think there's room for a comedy film around the role of CIA-funded LSD experiences accidentally contributing to the creation of hippies. Ken Kesey, who was recruited as a test subject for CIA-funded experiments with LSD, went on to run parties he called "Acid Tests" where he'd invite this band he liked called the Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead to play while giving people LSD. Guests at the party included Alan Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. Kesey and some of his friends would form the Merry Pranksters who cruised around in a colorfully-painted bus called Further and were big influences on psychedelic/hippie culture and the popularization of LSD, and it's not clear how much of this would have happened without the CIA exposing Kesey to LSD.)

Learning the Stargate Project stuff helped make sense of why there was that cultural thing during the seventies with psychic abilities presumed to be based in science. A

Date: 2025-10-20 03:07 am (UTC)
wolfy_writing: (Default)
From: [personal profile] wolfy_writing
It's a Cold War-era U.S. government project to investigate psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence work. This specific unit started in 1977, but there were a number of precursor projects based on the belief that the Soviet Union was spending a lot on psychics and might have a breakthrough. Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit). (The book The Men Who Stare At Goats has more information, and gets into the idea of the First Earth Battalion, which was the U.S. military trying to go New Age.)

Date: 2025-10-20 04:35 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] phoenix_council
I wonder if the "black people" is like, shadow people/silhouettes? God I hope so. Wouldn't put it past these researchers to equate the two either.

Also, there's so much batshittery in that presentation... Like, it's not even TRYING to sound scientific, it sounds like brainwashy cult bullshit. Which I guess is the point. Never forgiving these asshats for their bullshit, cuz they're largely the reason we don't trust any therapist that lists Dissociation as a specialty. The 90s was not that long ago, and the folks these wackjobs trained are either still practicing or mentoring new therapists.

Date: 2025-10-20 09:48 pm (UTC)
wolffyluna: A green unicorn holding her tail in her mouth (Default)
From: [personal profile] wolffyluna
Fair enough! I think the fear of darkness and fear of the colour black is a bit more likely to be combined in the original.

Date: 2025-10-22 08:57 pm (UTC)
sploosh543: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sploosh543
So as someone who was told by a anthro cartoon alligator in a Luffy One Piece cosplay that there's like 12 layers of headspace in here:

What the fuck is this guy on.

Date: 2025-10-28 05:00 pm (UTC)
sploosh543: (Default)
From: [personal profile] sploosh543
i should probably note the alligator was a headmate
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