Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

The Manipulation of Attachment Needs

Orit Badouk-Epstein, Joseph Schwartz, Rachel Wingfield Schwartz, Orit Badouk-Epstein, Joseph Schwartz, Rachel Wingfield Schwartz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429918704
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

People who have survived ritual abuse or mind control experiments have often been silenced, accused of lying, mocked and disbelieved. Clinicians working with survivors often find themselves isolated, facing the same levels of disbelief and denial from other professionals within the mental health field. This report - based on proceedings from a conference on the subject - presents knowledge and experience from both clinicians and survivors to promote understanding and recovery from organized and ritual abuse, mind control and programming. The book combines clinical presentations, survivors' voices, and research material to help address the ways in which we can work clinically with mind control and cult programming from the perspective of relational psychotherapy.

Chapter One
What has changed in twenty years?

Valerie Sinason

This subject is not easy. Indeed, this is a historic conference. It is an act of disobedience, of speaking out, of political, personal, and clinical ethics and advocacy. It comes from a crucial link between the Bowlby Centre, the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, and the Paracelsus Trust, which I started to aid clinic clients at the instigation of Pearl King, one of its benefactors. Now it is its own separate entity, which has the benefit of Pat Frankish as Chair, and Kate White, Orit Badouk Epstein, Deborah Briggs, Richard and Xenia Bowlby, Michael Curtis, and Brett Kahr as trustees. All agreed that this conference had an important educational aim.

It is the seminal work of John Bowlby and the relational approach to trauma that has offered the best way forward for many of us, together with a willingness to stand up and be counted. Indeed, just as John Bowlby recognized and acknowledged dissociative identity disorder (DID) and separation anxieties, his son, Sir Richard Bowlby, has continued to hold the torch, supporting unpopular and outcast areas of society and the mind.

Rachel Wingfield Schwartz and I were involved together with survivors who had been ritually abused over twenty years ago. It is also important that the Clinic for Dissociative Studies speaks up about this, as we have been very clear that the aetiology for DID that we witness in the consulting room comes largely, in our practice, from ritual organized crime.

For some people, some known and others invisible, coming to this conference has been an act of unbelievable heroism, of telling, of witnessing, of knowing. There will have been punishments for coming, for listening, for speaking. Some have not come, feeling that by staying away they have saved particular speakers and friends from being hurt. Others have come to stand between their protectors and the cult.

Last night, like many people here, I received e-mails and phone calls from different countries imploring me not to speak, as I would be killed. It was survivors who wrote, for whom the cruellest manipulation of attachment needs is exactly this: abusing someone’s capacity for love and concern.

It is perhaps the cruellest lie and trick to make a child or vulnerable adult feel that expressing care for someone else could lead to his or her death.

Survivors in the audience have shown so clearly, and with great protection for us, the listeners, something of what they have gone through—the dilemmas and choices given to Trish and Ellen sharply showed the techniques of how this was done in the flower game. (There are many other programmes with flower games, too. No system in any survivor is identical.)

No wonder the so-called “easy” choices of the ordinary non-abuse world are so unbearable. What dress shall I buy? Which food shall I buy? Any choice is linked with danger and death. Everything comes from tests, and all tests are lethal.

So, what is different over twenty years? I will start with what is the same.

What has not changed in twenty years

The law: duress and ritual crime

I have the permission of a brave survivor, a professional called Lisa, to state this. Lisa went to the police to speak of all the crimes she had been forced to commit from earliest childhood to her late thirties, as well as all the crimes of which she had been the victim. The litany was familiar to all of us in this work (Hale & Sinason, 1994). Murder, fake murder, necrophilia, bestiality, abortion, cannibalism, oral, anal, and vaginal abuse, drinking blood, semen, and urine, eating faeces and non-food substances, drugs, pornography, and so on. If every survivor spoke out, then slowly the awareness might spread of what people were forced to do.

The Detective Inspector she bravely spoke to was very sympathetic and said the judge and jury would make some remission of sentence, he was sure, but as there was no plea bargaining in this country, and no law on duress, she could face a custodial sentence of some twelve years.

Until we join together to ask for a law on duress, many survivors will be left with an unbearable and unfair guilt their abusers have projected into them, aided and abetted by a non-understanding legal system.

Also, we have do not have ritual crime as a separate category of criminal offence. This means that accounts of spiders, snakes, masks, and unusual costumes do not count as evidence, unlike in Idaho, in the USA. Making children and adults eat non-food substances is also not a crime, so checking a stomach for insects, etc., would not be done.

Reality remains the problem

Outside of the “Adam” case (the poor Nigerian child whose mutilated body was found in the Thames), the subject is still not bearable. The “Adam” case was somehow bearable for racist reasons: he was a black child from “over there”, not one of “ours”. However, the use of white British middle-class and upper-class women, men, and children is still invisible.

The cruel treatment of the Baby Ps and Victoria Climbies who carry on living and do not obtain the peace of dying is just as intolerable to face as it ever was.

The pool of practitioners has not enlarged adequately. However, we have been a rather stable group, and thank heavens for Dr Joan Coleman, still working as hard as ever in her seventh decade. Joan Coleman provided me with a sanity check when I had my first British case over twenty years ago, and I will never forget entering her warm, containing RAINS meeting and knowing I could say what I had been told and would be believed.

Indeed, the experience mental health practitioners go through when describing this work to sceptical colleagues provides us with a shadow of what survivors feel.

Yes, there are more referrals, and more people are aware of ritual abuse, but we remain an amnesic alter-personality representing unwanted reality! While DID at least has a neuroscientific “cachet” to sweeten the pill of reality, attitudes to ritual abuse, especially within our particular British culture, do not change.

MPs, journalists, and police cannot take this much further, as they fear for their popularity. Here was the difference between a former British DCI, Chris Healey, at a past RAINS conference and Colonel Kobus Jonker, who, at that time, had formed the Occult Squad in South Africa. While DCI Chris Healey warned that British police were not prepared to hear this, and someone from the CID should be asked for, with the preface that this was a difficult subject, Kobus instantly put up slides of ritual mutilation and pointed to evidence and its meaning.

Obedience, hierarchy, and professiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE What has changed in twenty years?
• CHAPTER TWO “An evil cradling”? Cult practices and the manipulation of attachment needs in ritual abuse
• CHAPTER THREE Torture-based mind control: psychological mechanisms and psychotherapeutic approaches to overcoming mind control
• CHAPTER FOUR Love is my religion
• CHAPTER FIVE Working with the Incredible Hulk
• CHAPTER SIX Maintaining agency: a therapist’s journey
• INDEX