Remembering Lies: Interview with Psychiatric Abuse Victim Jeanette Bartha
“The Council finds that recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudomemories and not only fail to be more accurate, but actually appear to be less reliable than nonhypnotic recall.”
–American Medical Association, Council on Scientific Affairs, Scientific Status of Refreshing Recollections by the Use of Hypnosis, 1985.
“The evolution of pseudomemories is clearly demonstrated in the case of Jeannette Bartha v Hicks Richard and Friends Hospital in Philadelphia. In September 1994, this former patient sued her treating psychiatrist and hospital for negligence and reckless treatment beginning in March 1986. For the six and one-half years she was under the care of the defendant psychiatrist, the plaintiff’s condition deteriorated, according to her complaint […] the defendant psychiatrist failed to monitor the course of treatment and used hypnosis and prescribed medications, increasing the plaintiff’s tendency toward suggestion, coercion and manipulation. Over time, this caused the plaintiff to experience and display symptoms of supposed multiple personality in conformity with the defendant’s expectations, when in fact no such illness existed.”
“As a direct result of the negligence of the defendant, the plaintiff alleged, her ability to rationally function was destroyed. Moreover, she became convinced that she had hundreds of alternate personalities as a result of extended and repeated sexual and other traumatic abuses as a child. These experiences – which, in fact, did not occur – included participation in ritual murders, cannibalism, Satan worship and torture by members of her family, among others. The plaintiff alleged that these memories were the product of
coercion and suggestion […] The complaints led to a settlement, the amount of which is undisclosed.”
– Harold I. Lief, M.D., Patients Versus Therapists: Legal Actions Over Recovered Memory Therapy, Psychiatric Times. Vol. 16 No. 11, November 1, 1999
In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of “past lives”, [professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Chief of psychiatry at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Dr. Fred H. Frankel] notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can “remember” their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in [alien] abductee hypnosis. “These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,” Frankel says. “They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences.”
– Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1996
So – to start at the beginning: you turned yourself in for psychiatric treatment?
Right. I had suffered from depression for years. It was voluntary admission.
Was this on the recommendation of anybody?
The therapist I was seeing at the time. She was getting to know this doctor in Philadelphia – whose pseudonym I use as “Stratford” – because I have to be clear that I have a gag order through the court that prohibits me from saying who did it and where.
Because ultimately you won a settlement, but that gag order was a condition of the settlement…
Correct. They wanted to keep me from writing or talking about it completely, but I waited and got the permission to do what we’re doing right now.
So you’ve written a book, but it’s told with pseudonyms?
Everyone but me. That’s also for the privacy of certain individuals. The book is supported by volumes of hospital records, doctors’ notes, nurses’ notes, my personal journal that I kept at the time, and legal documents through litigation, through the discovery process. I was able to obtain all that information.
You are able to say which hospital it was, right?
I can not say that, however it’s easily accessible through the internet… like everything else is…
When you turned yourself over [for treatment], you must have signed away a certain degree of your freedom. To what degree was that? To what degree were you an autonomous individual, and to what degree were you held by hospital rules?
I learned, I would say, within six hours of the severity of what I had done. I would bet within the first two hours I said, Wait. What am I doing? I don’t want to be here. I made that clear to nursing staff, and they told me that I was on a seventy-two hour hold, that I had to stay. What they failed to tell me is that I could have gone against medical advice. I thought I had to stay, and it snow-balled from there.
To the point in which you felt you were not allowed to leave?
Well, I believed that when I was told I had to stay that first day, while the reality was that I could have left against medical advice, but I did not have that information. So I thought, yes, I had to stay.
But beyond that point, what was your situation in whether you wanted to stay or go?
Once I met the doctor, I believed he was very benevolent, very kind. I very quickly thought, maybe he can help me get through this depression. I rather quickly allied myself with him and… treatment began.
How long did it take him to determine that you had Multiple Personality Disorder?
I think that he had already decided that before he had ever met me, quite frankly. He had what I would loosely call an agenda, in that he had his beliefs of why women become depressed. He believes it is because they are repressing memories of sexual abuse. He did not disclose any of that – his expertise, if you will – to me.
His expertise in Multiple Personality Disorder?
Right. He was considered an expert. He actually stated that in his deposition: that others considered him an expert before he himself did. He was not a garden variety psychiatrist. He was a colleague of Bennett Braun, Colin Ross, Cornelia Wilbur, who is deceased and was the psychiatrist for “Sybil”. He used to meet with them, and they devised a way to “help” women –
Based on a diagnostic criteria that consisted almost entirely of depression and its surrounding symptoms?
It was broader than that. They basically determined that a lot of symptoms women were having – largely women – [were indicative of MPD]: inability to hold a job, etc. I think looking into the history would be better than me trying to recall it off the top of my head.
How long was the process of history gathering and interviewing before Multiple Personality Disorder was concluded?
Not long at all. There was a history taken, and that was in the admission process. However, I believe, and I do know that there were things like having a history of depression in my family were disregarded. That should have been a red flag. He just pushed that aside and went in what direction he wanted to go in.
Well, genetic histories of depression seems to be an inconvenient fact for the entire [Ritual Abuse] movement. That’s probably part of the reason they’ve developed a story of multi-generational Satanic Ritual Abuse within family lines, illuminati bloodlines, etc. How far did that go with you? Did your doctor develop a detailed story of your background based on conspiracy theory? Or was it kind of a general idea that you were somehow abused –
You’re talking about Satanic Ritual Abuse? Well, we need to back up a bit. For me it started with MPD. That went on at least a year or so before any Satanic Ritual Abuse started to be focused on.
How many years were you in?
I had 100% insurance coverage, so I was in 2 years straight. Then, I was in and out on public funding, so I was in the hospital for a total of 1,040 days – which was over a 6 and ½ year period of time.
Okay. Sorry, go ahead and describe the evolution from MPD to Satanic Ritual Abuse…
That’s where it went: coerced “memories” of what happened. I think this doctor had an insatiable appetite for detail. For example, what happened during cult meetings? How did they abuse you? The more detail he got, the more he wanted.
I was reading some of your work today on the S.M.A.R.T. conference. Most people, in my experience, that claim to be satanically abused, they are pretty high up in the [cult] hierarchy. For example, they are priestesses, they were abused by high-level government officials. You don’t ordinarily find SRA people who are just, you know, average people who go to meetings and go home.
(Laughs) That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
But had you noticed that? I don’t know how a group exists with that many high priestesses and that sort of thing.
I never got into Illuminati – I didn’t even know what that was at the time. I was sequestered a lot. I think once I got into Group Therapy and Art Therapy specifically with other women who were claiming to have multiple personalities and Satanic Ritual Abuse, things expanded quite quickly by hearing their stories [causing me to think], maybe these things happened to me.
I imagine that with the environment you were in, with the medical authorities around you, your own submission to their expertise, as well as your own acknowledgment that you were under mental distress and needed their help – I believe this would all make it easy for them to convince you that you were repressing memories from yourself…
Not only that, Doug, I think a large part of it was drugs — for example, getting me addicted to tranquilizers. It is indoctrination. If you look at any, say, religious cult – I read the work of Robert Jay Lifton and was appalled at the parallels [between Lifton’s criteria for thought reform (indoctrination), and what was taking place in therapy]. For example, having a charismatic leader: that would be the psychiatrist. A controlled environment: I was told when to eat, when to sleep, when to shower. The heat was controlled in the room. It would get hot and cold, hot and cold, hot and cold. Information from the outside by TV, mail, magazines, newspapers hardly existed at all. If there were magazines, they were so outdated. If there was a TV show that seemed to relate to the subject, we were not allowed to view it. Sleep medication, sleeping pills, were given out freely, and I also experienced sleep deprivation. There were sedatives, sleepers, truth serum drugs. Physical restraints: four-point leather restraints, or more, to a bed for – could be – 2 hours to 15 hours at a time, at which point I would also be injected with more medication.
And there is what I would call coerced confessions of childhood sexual abuse, Satanic Ritual Abuse. Separation from family and friends… I can go on, but those are the largest things. I lost my job… I lost my apartment… I lost everything…
And they were utilizing sodium amytal during the interviews?
It was probably only a couple months into it, we were using sodium amytal interviews. Are you familiar with those?
Yes, I’m familiar with the experiments done in attempts to develop a Truth Serum during the early years of the Cold War which made it apparent by – when were you in, the late eighties?
’86 through ’92, yeah.
So it was well documented by then how unreliable so-called memories surfaced through a sodium amytal interview really were. It’s difficult for me in this case to determine how deep the actual belief of the doctors were in this program. To what level was it just incompetence, and to what level is it…
Well, you’re raising a good point. I think it’s what made doctors like mine dangerous, if you will. They did fully believe in what they were doing. That made them “incompetent” because they were not listening to their governing bodies – the APA, AMA, etc. – when [those governing bodies] started to, years later, question the techniques. [The doctors] chose to disregard not only those facts, but in my case they disregarded how I was physically and emotionally going down-hill [after treatment began].
I went to that S.M.A.R.T. conference just this past August. This is well past the prime of the Satanic Panic and the MPD movement. So it had a lot of people who got into this during the peak in the ‘80s to early ‘90s, and I think at that point they may have truly believed in it, but since then, they’ve had a lot of difficulty believing it, and they have to work to maintain this belief. This is where I lose sympathy for them. At their talks during the conference there were some very nearly candid confessions of how they feel it is a matter of choice as to whether they maintain this fiction or not. For example, there was a woman there – goes by the name of Dejoly LaBrier – she said that while she was going through therapy she “had to trust what other people were telling me, whether I believed it at the time or not.” There was a criminologist by the name of Hal Pepinsky – a very nice guy, but a purveyor of this rubbish – he seems to struggle with all this now, and he said: “You need at least another human being to affirm your reality and bring it to consciousness, but that’s your reality.”
It seemed to me, by what I was hearing, that these people were trying to work through this idea that reality is strictly a matter of personal choice. They seem to be so taken with this sense of identity [as SRA advocates and survivors] that nothing you tell them now can possibly change their minds about it.
I agree. And the important word in that to me is: identity. Their whole identity is wrapped around them being a survivor of Satanic Ritual Abuse, or that they’re “multiples”, even though MPD is now called DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder]. In my view, all they’ve done is changed from going through the front door to going through the back door. While they used to say, you have too many personalities, now they say, you have a failure to be one.
Right. I think the leading proponent of DID today is Richard Kluft, and when I look through his material, he takes this moderate tone, essentially saying that obviously some of these stories of Satanic Ritual Abuse are over-the-top and probably not true. But there is something there, he’s saying. He doesn’t indicate any way in which we can distinguish a true recovered memory from confabulation, and if you don’t have that, the technique isn’t good for anything, as far as I’m concerned. Especially when you still have people taking blame for abuse that may never have happened.
If you look into confabulation, it’s why you get – like why in my case – [Recovered Memory Therapy] was able to work. It’s how I was convinced and coerced into believing in abuse that never happened… wasn’t true.
The lies were sprinkled with truths. For example: I was abused by an uncle. Okay, the uncle exists, but I can produce records from the United States Armed Forces that put him in another country during the time at which I was saying he’d abused me. That’s the kind of thing that had happened repeatedly. [The partial truth] made it more difficult to say, this didn’t happen, this is so bizarre. If you sprinkle facts in the fiction… that’s the way it works.
Yes. Maybe I’m misinterpreting Kluft, but it seems to me that if it sounds plausible enough, it works for him.
It goes back to a couple of things. You can’t really determine whether anybody really was abused or not. I’ve had people say, tell me if I’ve been abused. I can’t! I can’t do that to anyone. I can’t tell you that – whether your memories are true or not – what I can tell you is what some red flags are, where you might want to ask some questions.
Remember, all these big [MPD/DID] theorists have been sued. So they’ve dampened down their opinions… in my view.
How deeply did you believe the memories they were creating in you at any given point?
I actually wrote in a journal [at the time] that I believed 99.99%. But I did hold out for that .01%, and that’s the small hair-line that pulled me out of it. I wanted to make sure that in my own mind and in reality that if any “abuse” occurred, I wanted no question in my mind, and I was not going to accuse anybody unless I could prove it emphatically. And that’s why I held out that small percentage. That’s the part that saved me, if you will.
So you began looking for corroborative evidence?
Oh yeah. The doctor and I even took a trip to Fort Dix, New Jersey. An Army base, I think it is, where he wanted me to show him where this abuse and prostitution had taken place. It was a town I really didn’t know, and I couldn’t come up with anything. The event was never spoken of again, and it was the only time corroboration was attempted.
You have to understand, Doug, too, that there were so many instances where I would say – particularly under sodium amytal – this is not true, this didn’t happen, I’m making this up. It’s sprinkled all throughout the medical records throughout those 6 and ½ years. I would say it to a therapist, I would say it to a nurse, and no one ever followed up on that. No one. The doctor disregarded it every time I said it.
There is one thing about this [recovered memory] “therapy”: there is nothing you say or question that they don’t have an answer for. If you say, I don’t believe this ever happened, they say, that’s because another personality has it, you don’t have access to it. There was always an out, which at the time I didn’t realize.
So did you feel that you were encouraged to develop new personalities to access memories that were repressed?
Oh yeah. There were times I would say something and he’d ask, who am I talking to? He wanted the name of a personality. If I said Jeanette, that wasn’t good enough. And then there were times when a personality might split off into another one, and then split off into another one. When I wouldn’t remember what personality I was supposed to be half the time – that’s because it split off. They had an answer for everything.
How many personalities did you end up with?
That’s something I couldn’t even tell you, really. It’s not something – it’s in records he kept, I could have cared less.
You sent me transcripts from a session wherein you were clearly saying, this is bullshit.
I have 15 audio tapes of sodium amytal interviews.
You acquired those during the legal process?
Right… I did.
How did you eventually disentangle yourself from all this?
I was an elite athlete when I was in college. I was a fencer, and a high level one at that. During treatment I had gained a lot of weight and couldn’t do anything. Quite literally. I would go to therapy and take prescribed drugs, and he went away for vacation, as all good psychiatrists do, in August. While he was gone I decided that while I didn’t have any control over my mind, I did have control over my body and what I eat. I made a promise to myself that I would exercise for half an hour every day. Doing that – and I did it – I remember that I would walk to the store thinking, okay that’s about half an hour, and I would decide I’d jog it for a bit, and that would be about 30 seconds. I’d have to walk the rest of the way. I used to able to fence for hours and hours and days on end during a major competition. So that’s how much I’d lost. The more I exercised, the more I didn’t need medication to calm down. I started losing weight, and my mind started to clear. Difficult as I remember that time being, forcing myself to go out in sub-zero weather, jog in the snow through the streets of Philadelphia, It was worth it. I kept doing it, and doing it. I told him, and he said it was just another personality that probably wouldn’t last long.
He was wrong.
And ultimately you decided to leave his care?
That didn’t happen till at least a year later. When I started exercising I gave myself a year. Having been so out-of-shape, and so drug-addicted, I figured it would take me at least a year to get my body where it needed to be, and it didn’t really take as long. I still remember – I think it was the Summer of ’91 or ’92 – I was an outpatient, and I was in his office, and I said, look, this uncle I told you had abused me wasn’t even in the United States at that time. That couldn’t have happened. To this day, Doug, he still has not responded. He totally ignored me. And I recalled thinking, Oh my God, he doesn’t believe what I can prove to be true! Why? Why is it that he can remember all these new memories, but something I am telling him absolutely is true, he doesn’t believe me? That’s when I think things turned for me, when I started thinking there was something real wrong here.
Do you have your own idea as to why he cannot accept that?
It didn’t fit in with his theory.
Did you ever recover any memories that were of any value at all?
No.
I mean, I even have – I’m so happy that I have all of these medical records, personal journals, so that I can reconstruct what really happened. It’s not just my recall. For example, when my family and I started to get back together, I would start visiting, I saw them during my father’s birthday, and we had fun. Then I came back to the hospital, told the nurses about it, and in his notes he would say, is amnesiac about father’s birthday.
And that is in my book. That’s how I present the story in the book, in narrative form, my recollections. I started writing this way back in the mid-nineties when I first got out of therapy, so things were still fresh in my mind. I use the excerpts [from my journals] to show, this is what was going in on my life, and this is what was being written about me [in the doctor’s records]. [The doctor] had no regard for reality. Even if one of the nurses would disagree with him, or say that there was no evidence of dissociation, he would assert just the opposite on the very same day.
When will we be able to buy a copy of your book?
When a publisher decides to publish it. I put it back on the market. I would say that for a good 10 years it was politically incorrect. I got some of the best rejection letters saying, good story, great writing, can’t publish it. I used them for inspiration.
Way back when I was trying to find [legal] representation [to bring a claim against the doctor], members of the feminist movement were saying, you’re trying to silence our voices, we’ve been abused. That was not what was happening at all, but it wasn’t understood at the time. I think now people in the general public are considerably more educated. And with the increase in the popularity in memoirs, now may be the time.
You had trouble finding legal representation?
That’s in the book as well: that whole struggle, and how I would go from law firm to law firm and it seemed like the more money they had, the more reluctant they were to get involved. It was still very controversial at that time. If they said, well, there may be evidence that you have this [MPD], I would stand up, demand my records back, and move on to the next person.
I ended up with Richard Shapiro in Philadelphia who was a one-man firm with moral values, who saw this as a horrific thing that happened to me, and was hell-bent on helping me right along.
You have written a few essays for the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, have you experienced any angry backlash from those who still maintain identities as survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse?
None. Absolutely none. And that could be because they don’t have access to me personally. You’d have to ask the foundation if they’ve heard anything. If so, nothing was forwarded to me. I don’t know if it’s just because they haven’t been able to locate me. I find it a curious question.
Just wait until your book is published. For a group of so-called “victims”, they are a very mean-spirited and victimizing lot. [1]
Oh, I know. That’s another book I’m writing: there’s a whole underground society of people who believe that they have multiple personalities that has really dipped off the radar. I have done extensive research on these people and what they believe.
I think that the controversy is a good thing. Let’s get it out in the open. Let’s talk about it.
At this point, you have to understand that these women – and the vast majority of these [MPD cases] are women – they’ve been indoctrinated into this lifestyle, at this point, for a good 20 years. It’s their identity. That’s how they see themselves. I think that’s very difficult to give up. What do you have when you take that away?
I think that’s what I witnessed them trying to work through at that conference I went to.
I think you were. But say these women say, okay, my therapist is making me believe this, this didn’t really happen…? Well, what are they left with? They’re left with years of figuring out what the heck happened. They are going to lose their entire support system, which consists of other women who believe they have MPD. They are going to lose the attention of a devoted therapist.
It leaves a big hole in their lives. And then – like me – you have to figure out, now what do I do? How do I get my life back together? How do I get my life back?
Beyond that have you suffered any long-term effects from your psychiatric abuse?
Yeah. I still have PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome] from it. Sometimes it arises from the most innocuous thing. The one that hits me the most is my dog’s leather collar. If I smell that, I remember being strapped to a bed. I think there are health issues related to having been under a severe amount of stress. Unrelenting stress for over 6 ½ years while in therapy. Then I had to go underground in order to get away from him. So then there was that stress. I came out to Colorado and had to consider, okay, now what do I do? I had to get back on my feet. So after 6 ½ years of stress in therapy, there was an equal amount of stress 6 years later in trying to get my life back together.
Sounds like you’re doing well now, and I can’t wait for the book to come out.
Thank you. I’m anxious for it to come out, and to get the word out there. There are a lot of families, a lot of people, who have gone through this, and they have nothing to read – nothing to identify with – they have nothing to hold in their hand and say, see, this is what happened to my family. This is why, you know, my husband is in jail. This is why I’ve been saying there is something wrong with my sister. They have nothing.
Thank you very much for chatting with me…
- If you or somebody you are close to has had a similar experience to that of Jeanette Bartha regarding MPD, false memories, or psychiatric abuse, please contact Douglas Mesner at memory.abuse@gmail.com.
1. It seems that most everybody who has questioned the legitimacy of “recovered memories” has felt the wrath of the of those whose victim identities are threatened by the idea that hypnotically extracted scenarios might be confabulatory creations rather than inerrant recall. Susan Clancy was compelled to re-focus her own research, which had been exploring the creation of false memories in subjects claiming past sexual abuse, to alien abduction memories created in the same way, because of a frightful deluge of hate-mail and threats the former had brought upon her. Following the publication of my own S.M.A.R.T Conference report on Examiner.com, editors there were shaken by a number of apparently unbalanced and threatening phone calls. One Examiner editor went so far as to call me and suggest that I might be concerned for my own personal safety. Unfortunately, due to unrelenting phone calls, particularly from S.M.A.R.T. conference organizer, Neil Brick (who claims to be a former mind controlled Masonic/CIA assassin!), Examiner pulled the article entirely from their site, and even changed my beat from that of ‘Boston Skepticism Examiner’ to that of ‘Boston Underground Examiner’ in hopes that S.M.A.R.T. would lose track of me. No such luck. Within 24 hours of being re-assigned – and after nearly a month of inactivity – the first angry complaint against my even being on Examiner at all was registered, even though nothing posted had anything to do with Ritual Abuse. The ill-advised decision to pull my article did nothing to quell the uproar, and it only gave Neil Brick the opportunity to make the false claim that the article had been pulled for “defamation”.
Marked as: Abnormal Sociology • Belief Systems • Bunco — 29 comments (RSS)
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In my college days, instead of experimenting with drugs or alcohol, I chose sleep deprivation, self-hypnosis (meditation), and the occult.
One of the side-effects was the personification of my conscience as a separate entity. He didn’t always tell me to do the right thing. He was more focused no making sure I understood all the various angles of whatever decision I was contemplating. He was like the Windows “Are you sure?” button for my life.
I called him Isaac.
Isaac and I would talk about philosophy and human nature. It was nice to be able to converse with yourself out loud. You didn’t need other people around for interesting chats.
I “found” through past life regression that I had been present at the destruction of Atlantis. Indeed, I was partially responsible. The Golden Pyramid of Ar with its 3-story tall Van de Graaff generator was pushed too far, too well and detonated the entire continent in a burst of white light.
It was me (as Kasmine Argos), Mordlock, and Rochelle who had been overseeing the experiment and caused the destruction.
Kasmine did not manifest herself independently. Not yet.
I rekindled an old flame and found a girl friend who suffered undiagnosed DID. She knew only about one of the personalities. She was naive and proper.
Her first personality was male and was extremely protective of her. He did not like me. He did not like being with “another man” either.
To make her / him happy, I pulled Kasmine out of my brain and let her have a go. She called herself Jennifer to modernize her name. Her personality was very similar to my girlfriends main personality.
Now I had two people to talk to when I was alone.
My girlfriend had a strange, wild side. Involved in “cutting” and drinking blood. Drinking, smoking.
When confronted, another personality made itself known. This was another female personality. The main personality did not know about this one and the male personality promised dire consequences if I told her.
I referred to this new female as the demon succubus slut because she talked about Satanic rituals even going so far as to tell me what having sex with the Devil was like.
To deal with this personality, I decided I needed another one of my own to face her.
I found Jacob. He was ostensibly a sociopath, being a past life of mine, and a Nazi doctor. In reality, he desperately suppressed his emotions because of what happened to his mentally retarded brother during WWII.
Jacob was easily a counter to this demonic female personality and they would drink each others’ blood and perform other strange sexual rites.
Oddly, I never had sex with my girlfriend under any personality. The demonic one had a laugh… it was cold and seductive. Knowing. I did not want her.
She joined the Navy and we broke up.
I was now left with Isaac, the mediator; Jennifer, the innocent; and Jacob, the sociopath.
We talked about many things. So many things that my brain decided we needed more participants.
Jacob’s brother, Joseph was borne. He was a simple man with simple ideas.
So far, all of these personalities had been my decision. My choice. I enjoyed subdividing my own personality into distinct bits. It was a way to explore what made me, me without seeing a psychologist / psychiatrist which I could not afford.
I’d grown up suffering from depression. I was suicidal at 5 years old according to my mom and trouble controlling my anger.
Seeing myself from the outside made it easy to discover why I had these problems and gave me insight on how to fix them.
Then, the first uninvited personality came.
She called herself Isabel and was full of rage. She wanted equal time. She stormed the building where Isaac lived and demanded she be given voice. The inhuman monsters she brought with her made argument a bad idea.
We accepted her as another part of who I was. An uncontrolled, turbulent piece of my mind.
It was the night I was working alone and late, closing at the restaurant where I was employed.
Another voice came whispering in. He just slithered along side the rest of us and introduced himself. Belial, the Devil he called himself.
This was far from the medieval juggler Malachi I had been nurturing.
Belial was all that was evil and I did not want to give it a voice.
In trying to get rid of them, in trying to convince them to re-integrate themselves into my base personality, I realized I had somewhat of a dependency on them.
I called it an addiction to myself. As much as I feared them now, I still needed them. I wasn’t sure I could handle all of these different aspects as actual pieces of who I am.
Jacob was the first to volunteer. He knew by being re-integrated first, he would be given the most influence over my personality.
Once Jacob went, the others slowly allowed themselves to fade, as well.
I miss them all dearly. I occasionally write fiction and normally try to channel one or more of them into my stories.
As much as I miss them, I fear them far more.
I will never allow myself to experiment on my own consciousness like that again.
Self-directed psychological warfare is generally a bad idea.
I’ve been on medication for my depression and anxiety for about 11 years now. That has obviated the need that made me create them in the first place.
The human mind is an amazingly complicated and delicate thing. It is difficult for someone who hasn’t experienced a loss of control over one’s own thoughts to even imagine it is possible.
Yet, every time we watch a television commercial or listen to a political speech we are being programmed.
It is the nature of the mind. It cannot be helped.
To understand that the mind must take in all input does not mean you have no control over how it is processed.
Jeanette was able to keep that .1% of doubt alive. That saved her sanity.
Her strength is an inspiration. Her ability to question her situation and analyze it effectively while still living inside of it is nearly miraculous.
I understand there are a number of people who believe they have DID simply because they have been diagnosed as such.
Are your therapists working to help you integrate those alternates back into your core? Or are they simply working to discover “who else” is in there?
Which is better for your mental health in the long run? Do you want to be divided or unified?
I love you and pray for you all. Being one is far more manageable than being many. It makes life so much easier.
Please be well and make wise decisions.
I had sort of a breakthrough myself tonight…I listened to a G-Spot podcast about 42p.org and the whole experiment, for those of you who dont know, was sort of a try at making something viral, like a bogey man, as the creator called it.
But in it, was the idea of looking outside of the box, so to say, at yourself, as a change in perception. I have had the view that ‘the process’ not as the church of final judgement, was a set of ideas and practices, that allowed one to break the consensus ‘status quo’ of the time, or making yourself ‘clear’ as a scientologist would say….
But I then look at this Blog, and realized tonight, almost all of the postings to some degree make you see that picture without realizing it, at least in my mind; there should be no dogma with freeing a mind of its compulsive behaviors.
The Process Blog is a ‘process’ in itself, in my opinion, and I can see how as an art collective, it can be a powerful tool to shake minds! But underneath it all, its up to the courage of the viewer to see past themselves, and look at themselves in a way they have not before.
In this respect, I am glad that there is no cult, people would say, controlling a set of beliefs, to help people free themselves, as the best person that can do that is themselves…
I was the person that created a forum some of you may have seen, labeled ‘Thee Process Underground” It seems kind of immature to me that ive made that in the past, even though some good conversations were brought to mind there. Now I see why those topics seeded themselves, and it just now sprouted in my mind.
The Process is what you make it. I am glad that it is still here. I am glad that I have caught this virus. I hope that people ‘Spread the Disease’
Poor Unfortunate Soul November 17, 2009 9:59 am
Reply to the above:
I am glad you find strength from my expressions of experiences with junk-science based psychotherapy.
I want to make it clear that multiple personalities and all the “therapy” that goes along with it is crap. When I fled from therapy, all the nonsense ceased. That is to say, there never were other personalities, except in the mind of my incompetent psychiatrist.
Hi Mr. Mesner,
I think this article is well done. It shows what can happen when a doctor thinks they are the one’s that know what a patient has experienced. I have no use for psychiatrists, psychologists or therapists who tell their patients that because they are display certain behaviors means that they have had to survived certain things. I think getting the word out on this is very important. I also do not support anyone with an agenda. I think any professional that takes advantage of a client is terrible unethical and wrong.
I want to challenge you on something. I am at the other end of the spectrum. I have never had a psychiatrist, psychologist or therapist tell me what they thought was wrong with me or recovered memories for me. I was raised by a mother, Ruth who was into the occult, did seances, Ouija board, put spells on people and was involved in a cult that practiced the occult. There were people in her life that were terrified of her because of this. I remember at the age of 4 being put into a cellar stairway. At the top of the stairs was a statute of satan and I was put at the bottom of the stairs. I was being told that I needed to denounce God. I would tell Ruth about this happening and she would tell me that I had just had a bad dream. I survived terrible things at the hands of these people. Unfortunately there are people who do practice things that are so bizarre the media chooses to not believe.
My challenge to you is to interview me. Take my story apart be as skeptical as you seem to be. The whole debunking of SRA has been terrible for people like myself who have really, honestly survived it. It has done a grave injustice to what, for some people is very real. I wasn’t a high priestess, I wasn’t made to marry satan, I was buried in a coffin underground but, I did witness and participate in terrible things. My therapists never did “regressive or repressed memory therapy”. I do have traumatic amnesia, PTSD, panic and anxiety disorder due to what I survived. I am just now talking about this at the age of 50. Who the heck would really want to survive what I have survived. I am not crazy, I am a well adjusted professional. Who despite a childhood filled with extreme abuse, sexual, neglect, and physical has gone on to have a productive life. It hasn’t always been an easy life. I have had to get through many things but have managed to do well. I have a blog that shares not only my story, but that I would like to end up being a clearinghouse of sources for people who have survived multiple traumas in their lives. The reality is that there are extensive long term repercussions for survivors of child abuse. Our society as a whole doesn’t do enough about it. I would like to start a revolution to end child abuse. Please visit my blog at memoirofaredemptivelife.com. Please take me up on my challenge. I would find it an honor if you did. Rosie
Hello, Rosie,
Thank you for sharing your story. I hope Doug will do an interview on you as you request.
I think what he is pointing out in this interview is the incompetency of therapists who diagnose multiple personalities.
I find it interesting that, although you survived horror, you do not report having developed multiple personalities due to the repeated abuse like many others do.
I look forward to hearing from you further.
Rosie,
I’m not Doug Mesner, (and you’ve called him “David Mesner” on your blog), but as you are literally begging for a skeptical analysis of “your story”, I’ll be gentlemanly & do my best to accomodate your REQUEST. I will do this, not out of any desire to “shut you (or anyone else) up” – and in fact I hereby ENCOURAGE you to “share your story” as widely as it might please you to do – but because you have repeatedly ASKED to have this done, both implicitly throughout your blog and explicitly as in your solicitation to Doug right here.
1) I’ve read through all your blog postings that seemed relevant, (i.e., tagged “ritual abuse”, “occult abuse” or “dark subject”), and concluded that NO ONE could do a proper analysis of your ‘story’ – because you haven’t actually told it, there. At least, with regard to what your own definition of “ritual abuse” might be & why you believe that your life history involves such a series of events, there are only vague passing references to superficially ‘occult’ or ‘satanic’ subject manner/events.
If I missed some more explicit account of your personal “ritual abuse” experiences, please do direct me to specific postings. For the time being, I’m left with only the option of a skeptical analysis of your behaviour and what it might imply about your sincerity.
2) You’ve written a book, according to your blog, and are in the process of getting it published. You’re professed desire to have a skeptic analyze your ‘story’ could very well be a thinly veiled bid for publicity, for this book. As you said nothing about a book, in your “challenge” to Doug, if this is indeed any part of your motivation for issuing the challenge I would already conclude that your sincerity & truthfulness is questionable.
3) Your posting, above, begins with compliments and superficial conciliatory agreements; “I think this article is well done”, “It shows what can happen when a doctor thinks they are the one’s that know what a patient has experienced. I have no use for psychiatrists, psychologists or therapists who tell their patients that because they are display certain behaviors means that they have had to survived certain things” – but not long after this, you make an implicit claim that you and other “people like myself” have been harmed, (at the least, by suffering ‘injustice’), by “debunking of SRA”. Which is it…did you find the article to be factually accurate & yourself in agreement with Doug’s analysis, or did you suffer injustice by the article’s existence?
4) I’m only going to bother, here, with analysis of ONE factually invalid (false) statement from your blog;
From your Monday, October 31, 2011 posting:
“Facts; the occult bible reads from the right to the left”.
There is no such thing as “the occult bible”. If you meant to say, Levay’s “Satanic Bible”, your statement is false. (Except, of course, if was republished in one of the LANGUAGES that are read from right to left…)
Thank you, Rosie, Jeanette, GaianGuy —
I am pleased that Rosie has stopped by, and her willingness to accept any type of skeptical analysis puts her a cut well above most of the echo chamber isolated SRA crowd. I applaud her for reaching out, and I have emailed her offering to speak with her at some point in the near future. I have no doubt, though, that certain members of that die-hard SRA echo chamber will discourage her from speaking to me at all. I only hope she continues to question all the answers and doesn’t dismiss any skeptical analysis that runs contrary to a prescribed SRA narrative as “agenda-based research”. Unfortunately, claiming “agenda” has often been used in lieu of cohering arguments against actual facts… facts that are confirmable facts (in fact), regardless of source.
That said (and reiterating that I do indeed look forward to chatting with Rosie), I am not entirely certain that hers is a scenario that overlaps with the topic here. I have not scrutinized her blog yet, but on her comment above she claims continuous memory of abuse and makes no mention of Multiple Personality Disorder. She speaks of abuse suffered from an occult-obsessed mother. Of course, if this is all she is claiming, I would never suggest that this would be impossible. The alternative religions certainly have a lot of catching-up to do if they are to ever prove as much a danger to children as Christian (particularly Catholic) child-rearing often does, but I would never suggest that a crystal gazing, ouija board consulting, dippy new-ager need necessarily be a good parent.
The question of contention could be whether or not this qualifies as “Ritual Abuse”. The intentionally evasive and not-terribly-informative definition of Ritual Abuse posted by organizations that claim to be “expert” in this field are of little help, so it is necessary to understand what one means whenever one chooses to invoke the term.
To me, Ritual Abuse implies much more than a deranged parent abusing a child while in the throes of some religious frenzy. It implies religious/occult practices that intentionally incorporate child abuse as an explicit matter of procedure. It is not individual fantasies being deformed into a religious or occultic context. This is why, despite their horrendous record as a criminal paedophile organization, I reject “Ritual Abuse” as a descriptor for what has taken place within the Catholic Church. There is no evidence of a secret doctrine within the Church which actually calls for the abuse of children in the context of ritual. Rather, the organization is filled with individuals (attracted to it for more-or-less obvious reasons, I believe, but reasons I won’t explore here) who use it to conceal fetishes that they hold, but were not indoctrinated into.
One may argue that in the case of the Catholic Church, mine is an irrelevant splitting-of-hairs, and that the end result is the same: children are abused. But it isn’t, and how we understand the issue of child abuse makes a world of difference regarding how we combat it. The idea of a secret doctrine of abuse suggests the hope that once this doctrine can be rooted-out and exposed, this internal cult of paedophiles revealed, then the problem of the abuse can be solved. While we’re exploring this false avenue, the very real problems of systemic dysfunction are ignored.
Ritual Abuse implies that instances of child abuse within a single household are related to a broader regimen of abuse being carried out by secretive organizations toward some (usually Satanic) end. This scenario summons forth widespread conspiracies and cover-ups, and this is the scenario that I am highly skeptical of…
Hi GaiainGuy,
I honestly appreciate your writing. Thanks for correcting me on the fact that I had the wrong name on my blog. I had others who wrote to me to tell me that, which is why I fixed it. One thing about me is that I am open to admitting when I mess up. Something that has been very freeing for me. What I meant by being the debunking of SRA is that from what I have been reading and researching according to sites, news paper articles, books, and certain foundations is that any who claims they survived SRA is automatically debunked. I have read that this debunking is because of the “satanic panic”, overzealous therapists, and incorrect claims that children who suffer severe trauma/abuse do not dissociate. I for one have dissociated due to the trauma. I am fortunate that I do not have DID but I am diagnosed with severe PTSD, panic and anxiety disorder. My PTSD used to be very severe but isn’t any longer. I used to be on SSI because of this but chose to go back to college and get a degree in social work. Which I obtained in 1998. It took me 6 years to get through school but I did it. Then I worked my required 9 months to prove I could and I was taken off SSI, that was in 1999. I then made the decision to go back to graduate school and get a master’s degree in health science. Which I did and graduated in 2005. I don’t think Doug’s article with Jeannette debunked SRA I believe that he told an accurate story of someone whose Doctor made very poor choices due to having an agenda. Unfortunately this agenda involved SRA. I appreciated Doug telling Jeannette’s story and I appreciate that Jeannette was able to work hard and persevere despite what happened to her. That is something to be commended. That is the same thing that my story is about perseverance in the face of horrible circumstances.
You are right I have written my memoir hence Memoir of a Redemptive Life. I am actually enjoying writing the blog more then the book. I have to get back to focusing on the book though. Finishing the book has given me a sense of freedom that I haven’t experienced before in my life. Knowing that I am not afraid to talk about what happened to me, nor afraid of those who were involved in doing what they did to me feels better then I expected. As for not writing about all of my experiences with every trauma I suffered, because RA isn’t the only one. I didn’t want to start the blog delving into all of the things I survived because the social worker in me wants to make sure that I was focusing in on other people who have also survived terrible traumas. I want to have a dialog with my reader and I can’t if I just focus in on my RA. I believe this will turn some people off who otherwise would benefit from reading the blog. Once I have developed a solid following and have the dialog that is now starting I will feel more comfortable in sharing more with the reader. The reason for the title of the memoir is that in the face of horrible odds including surviving RA, child abuse; sexual, emotional and physical and domestic violence that was so serve that, in the State of Connecticut in 1992 I have a permanent restraining order against my ex as part of my divorce. According to my lawyer at the time she had never had a Judge do this before. Why I am even sharing my story is to help teach people that you can go through anything and with hard work and I mean hard work you can come out the other side and have a good life. I wouldn’t have been able to get to where I am in my life without God. Hence the word redemption.
As for publicity about the book that is not my agenda. I admit that it can be an outcome though. My agenda,because I have one and I admit it, is to be taken seriously about what I have survived. It is in my frustration that RA gets automatically debunked that I chose to write to Doug. I thought if someone who is skeptical and seriously research’s my story and will honestly tell it. Then I will be helping others like myself who have survived something that a lot of society would rather believe doesn’t exist. I would hope that then maybe other skeptics will look closer at other RA survivors and give them the same opportunity.
When all of the “satanic panic” was happening I had no idea it was other then my experience with Peggy that I wrote about on my blog. When this was happening I was to busy trying to pick up the pieces up of my life. It was very important for me to get mentally well so my children had a functional mother and, to go to college so I could support them without being on any assistance. My focus has never been to try to get those involved in my abuse in trouble. I was to afraid of those I knew who were involved to do something like that. My focus has never been on trying to connect my story to any one else’s story. If anything I was invited 20 years ago to attend RA support groups and I refused. Mostly because when you survive something like this you don’t want to admit you have survived something like this. I didn’t want to be part of this club, but unfortunately I am. My focus has and always will be on the fact that I survived something horrific and made choices in my life that not only bettered my life but the lives of my children.
As for the “satanic bible” I have never read one so thanks for correcting me. What I do know is that a lot of my experiences happened on the right sides of rooms/spaces. I have both a pentagram on my right shoulder and right ankle and I didn’t put them there. Again thanks for challanging me. A person doesn’t grow if they don’t get challenged. I plan on growing until the day I die. Rosie
Hi Jeanette, I agree that Doug was pointing out the incompetency of your therapist because in now way do I believe all therapists are incompetent. Exposing something that is wrong is very important. That is how change happens. Thanks for your response and I am looking forward to having Doug interview me.
Hi Doug,
I haven’t purposely shared all of my experiences of the RA with either the readers of my blog or you. I feel I have survived RA as per your definition: “To me, Ritual Abuse implies much more than a deranged parent abusing a child while in the throes of some religious frenzy. It implies religious/occult practices that intentionally incorporate child abuse as an explicit matter of procedure. It is not individual fantasies being deformed into a religious or occultic context.”
I was abused by what I would call a cult. There was between 25 or 30 people involved. They did worship an evil deity who they thought would give them power. Every thing they did was to obtain power. This did involve sexual abuse of me and other children who were involved. Sexual abuse was part of their ritual and some of the things they “abused” me with were definitely in response to denouncing God. Such as an upside down crucifix that was shoved into my vagina while I was held down by 4 adults and one who was shoving the crucifix into me. I was locked in boxes and basements with the intention of those involved trying to get me to denounce God. They believed that if a child denounces God that they would get power from this. I can’t say the number of hours I was kept in these things because I have no memory of denouncing God. I have the memories of refusing to denounce God. I was psychotic due to the trauma and drugs involved. I was also “haunted” which is another way of mind control to make sure I didn’t tell. This haunting occurred from the age of 6 or 7 until I left Ruth’s home at 18. One of the interesting things to me is that because I did tell my mother Ruth my memories I suffered more abuse as a way to keep me from talking. She especially liked knifes which were also involved in the cult. For years I couldn’t even use a knife without going into PTSD.
Sorry, I went on a tangent but wanted to make clear that I did survive RA. I have no memories of this particular cult being involved in a wider conspiracy so I can’t speak to that. I didn’t even know their was such a thing until I finished the book. When I finished it I decided to look for blogs that discussed RA and that is when I realized that others survivors experiences involved conspiracy. I can’t speak for others and I would never tell someone that they didn’t survive what they say they do. One of the worst things that happened to me was that I knew what was happening was really happening, but with severe trauma imposed on me was forced to believe it wasn’t happening. This taught me I couldn’t trust myself. That caused me more damage and took me years to learn to trust myself. Which by the way was one of the goals of this cult. I’m done ranting now. Rosie
Rosie –
I have told people, that they did not experience things which they have publicly claimed to have experienced. I have done this face-to-face in some cases – literally, in person – as well as direct interaction online like we are having here.
I don’t like having to do that. In some cases, it has been clear to me that the person making false claims REALLY HAS BEEN VICTIMIZED by someone, at some point in their lives. What I will confront is – specific claims about their victimization experiences which to me are obviously false, fraudulent and/or impossible/impossible to verify – and which involve allegations of criminal wrongdoing by members of a racial, ethnic, religious or social subculture.
I’d probably be interested in debunking some claims that you are making, which fall into the above categories. Some of your allegations about “demonic” cult abuse experiences for example. I will talk with you about that on your blog.
PLEASE, visit the blogsite: “Swallowing The Camel”:
and read through the “Prodigal Witch” series of postings:
http://swallowingthecamel.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Prodigal%20Witch
You need to know & understand that some things you have said about cult abuse experiences were debunked a long time ago. Just one example for now;
the concept of cult groups whose members “believed that if a child denounces God that they would get power from this”. That idea makes sense to some adherents of Judeo-Christian or Muslim faiths, because of THEIR OWN beliefs about God, Satan, “the origins of evil”, etc. – but it doesn’t make sense to actual, serious, practitioners of non-Judeo/Christian religions or the so-called “occult arts”. REAL “witches” and “magicians” DO NOT believe that a child “denouncing God” would “give them power” or even be of any relevance to their lives whatsoever.
I find this comment rather suspicious. I received an email from Doug this week asking me if I was available this weekend to interview. Then all of a sudden after several weeks Gaiain Guy responds to me. Not only does he respond he responds in a non-threatening, non-condensing way. Your tone is completely chill compared to your previous response. I purposely made the decision not to post the “potential” interview with Doug on my blog because it isn’t set in stone at this point. Can this be a ploy to get me to talk about him? I will answer your complete respond when I have more time. I will repeat that NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO TELL SOMEONE THAT THEY DIDN’T SURVIVE SOMETHING THEY SAY THEY DO!! For instance if I thought all skeptics were arrogant jerks does that make you one? I have learned in my life that you can’t believe everything but you always have to have an open mind. A skeptic with a closed mind isn’t truly a skeptic. No one is ever going to shut me up about what I survived. Later, Rosie
Hello Rosie —
I don’t exactly follow what is suspicious about Gaian Guy’s comment, or how it would seem to be provoking you to to talk about me. I think you may be suggesting that he and I are the same person. Of course, all I can say to that is that I’m not, nor would there really be much point in my posing as another person on this site. I am a bit surprised at how often the accusation seems to come up in this context, but I’ll refrain from speculation about that now.
Of course, I am happy to speak with you this weekend, please email me the best means of contact (whether via Skype, phone, etc.) and a time.
So that we might avoid any potential nonproductive stalemates in our conversation, let me make clear where I am coming from now. You state that “NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO TELL SOMEONE THAT THEY DIDN’T SURVIVE SOMETHING THEY SAY THEY DO!!”
I disagree.
The idea that nobody has a right to challenge ANY survival narrative suggests that the “truth” of any such narrative is entirely a matter of subjective interpretation, and these beliefs can’t properly be challenged by any open-minded and respectful listener. But SRA narrations often make absolute claims about alleged real-world events. It’s not a question of whether or not any individual may have “felt” abused, but whether or not the claimed abuse is based on real-world events.
Anecdote does us little good as evidence. I have spoken to people who seem to genuinely feel they were ritually abused by Satanists. I have also spoken with people who genuinely feel that they were abducted by aliens. I have collected interviews from individuals who have recovered traumatic memories of their deaths in past lives. None of these people have ever been able able to provide me with solid verifiable corroboration of what they say has occurred to them. Often, they will claim that they themselves have such corroboration, but it is never forthcoming, never available for my own scrutiny. I’m still waiting on an abductee who collected a gelatinous substance from his captors, that he in turn handed over to some secret scientists, who confirmed it was not of this planet. I’m still waiting for the coordinates of a mass-grave in Colorado where the Satanists are said to have buried their sacrifices.
Are these people lying to me when they tell me these things? I believe they believe in a certain “core truth: that these events are occurring. They are willing to embellish conveniently unobtainable-for-the-moment corroboration so that I might believe them too.
Nobody can ever state with absolute certainty what happened at any event where one was not present. I could never state with certainty that what you say about events of your childhood are either true or false insofar as these events don’t conflict with known and corroborated facts.
Sometimes, of course, we absolutely can tell someone they did not survive something they said they did. For instance, if a friend of mine were to claim he had “survived” the Holocaust… well, technically that’s true, but I would have every right to point out that nor did he experience the Holocaust for the fact that he was born many decades after it ended.
There are also many instances where a therapist not only has the “right”, but the duty to correct a client of his or her unlikely interpretations. Take, for instance, the client who declares that he is God, or that she is the reincarnation of Groucho Marx. It seems to be only with the question of abuse that it is suggested that any claim may be made with no questions asked. The idea seems to be that, on balance, it is far worse to NOT believe a true victim than it is to subscribe to an abuse fiction, thus we must uncritically swallow any narrative of abuse that comes our way. This is an oversimplification to the point of absurdity.
The accusation of abuse is almost never some harmless interpretation without real-world ramifications outside of the accuser’s therapy. The accusation of abuse necessarily demands an abuser, and we have to do better than “no one has a right to tell someone that they didn’t survive something they say they do” because what’s to prevent us from similarly claiming that we can’t accuse somebody of doing something they say they didn’t do? Clearly, accusations of abuse have been based on false evidence as well as false memories, as illustrated by the very interview we are commenting on.
This is not a matter of looking at two different scenarios and choosing one that sounds “true” to us with 50/50 probability ascribed to each. We need to look outside the anecdotal and find corroborative or disconfirming evidence and assign a level of probability from there. Stories such as Jeanette Bartha’s and Roma Hart’s (also on Process.org) tend to have a high level of corroborative evidence, while Satanic Ritual Abuse has literally nothing solid, and a good deal of the SRA literature has been entirely debunked.
Take, for instance, the case Lauren Stratford, author of Satan’s Underground. “Stratford” claimed Ritual Abuse and did the talk show circuit for a time. Her book was influential in the SRA scene. Nobody who witnessed her emotional telling of traumatic events questioned her sincerity, yet the outrageousness of her claims were suspect. Ultimately, a Christian publication, Cornerstone, challenged Stratford’s tale on factual details, finding the story to be false. Seeking her out later, journalists found that Stratford was then posing as a Holocaust survivor, though of course she had never been involved in the Holocaust on any level.
Was it wrong for Cornerstone to challenge Stratford? Is it wrong for any of us to say that she did not survive the Holocaust when in fact she was not in Europe during Hitler’s era (perhaps ever)?
(Michelle Remembers is a supernatural tale, and I won’t insult anybody by pretending that anybody here would take such a book seriously on any level despite its influence on Satanic Panic material.)
All that said, I reiterate that I am fully willing to speak with you still, but I hope you understand where I stand on the issue of anecdotal evidence beforehand…
Thanks — doug
Rosie –
As I said before – I encourage you to tell your story, just as much as it pleases you to do so. I had no idea that Doug had offered to interview you this weekend, I hope that goes well for both of you.
There are realities you need to be aware of, if you really intend to publish a book about your life which includes stories of ‘demonic’ cult abuse. I’m trying to make you aware of some of these realities, and whether you choose to believe me or not, my intention is to be kind to you by doing this.
One of those realities is – this mantra of yours: “No one has the right…”, isn’t going to stop me, or others, from publicly confronting someone’s nonsensical victimization claims.
I am a person who was victimized as a youth, myself, and I’ve been a real advocate for genuinely victimized persons, (in contrast to the self-serving apologists for frauds & con-artists that populate S.M.A.R.T.), for over 30 years.
As such, I understand that I have a RESPONSIBILITY to challenge claims of victimization – when such claims involve allegations of criminal wrong-doing by a racial, ethnic, religious or social subculture.
“NO ONE HAS A RIGHT TO TELL SOMEONE THAT THEY DIDN’T SURVIVE SOMETHING THEY SAY THEY DO” – doesn’t protect genuine victims, but it does enable and shelter con-artists, bigots, and lunatic ‘witch-hunters’.
A mild, but straight-forward and clear example for – why claims of victimization, which involve allegations of criminal wrong-doing by a racial, ethnic, religious or social subculture MUST be scrutinized can be found here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/11/italian-girl-rape-claim-gypsy
“A 16-year-old Italian girl whose claim that she was raped by Gypsies prompted a furious mob to launch an arson attack on a Turin Roma camp has admitted to police that she invented her story.
Hundreds of residents of the deprived Turin suburb of Vallette took to the streets on Saturday to protest after the girl, who has not been named, claimed she had been dragged behind a building and raped by two Gypsy men.
A splinter group of around 50 residents then marched towards a nearby camp where they reportedly called for all women and children to leave before throwing firecrackers and setting fire to caravans, shacks and cars.
Police officers evacuated the camp moments before the group arrived and no injuries were reported, but fire crews were unable to prevent the camp being destroyed.
The girl’s brother, who initially backed her story, arrived with police as the flames grew to announce his sister had confessed to inventing the episode, but his appeal to call off the attack came too late”.
Rosie –
It is with disappointment that I see your blog links to an organization known as S.M.A.R.T. (Stop Mind control and Ritual abuse Today). S.M.A.R.T. is very much a fringe organization that really has nothing to do with dissociative studies. And you don’t have to take my word for it if you sense some type of “agenda” at play. You can listen online to my interview with Kathy Steele of International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) and hear her describe S.M.A.R.T. as exactly that:
http://www.archive.org/details/WhatIsDissociativeIdentityDisorderAnInterviewWithAnIsstdPast
S.M.A.R.T. is organized by a conspiracy theorist named Neil Brick who describes himself as a former assassin for the CIA/Freemasons/Illuminati.
According to an article written for the Hartford Advocate in 2003:
“Neil Brick, himself an alleged survivor of ritual abuse, says his self-discovery of past lives began about 10 years ago during a troubled part of his life. ‘My whole life was very dysfunctional,’ Brick says. ‘I was always tense, always holding my emotions in very tightly. I had a lot of life issues — could not hold a job, had a failed marriage, drinking.’
Only after straightening his life out and seeking psychological help did he become aware of his past life. Short in stature, Brick says that ‘the government kept me small so that I could easily fit through ducts and crawlspaces when I was on missions.’
He claims to have recurring memories of his part in assassination missions behind the Iron Curtain.” (http://www.rickross.com/reference/satanism/satanism86.html)
Neil Brick posts copiously on a Yahoo! Group called “MindControl”, which is dedicated to “Serious theories, discussion of Mind Control, Ritual Abuse, False Alien Abduction, Real alien abduction. […]”
Whether or not Brick has a “real alien abduction” to tell us about, I’m not certain, but he does have copious material of at least one UFO abductee, William Schnoebelen, published in his newsletters. Schnoebelen also claims to be a recovered vampire, if that helps you get a better idea of how tightly held his grasp upon reality is.
In fact, no idea seems too lunatic to be presented as fact at a S.M.A.R.T. conference, and I attended one of theirs in 2009 where — I kid you not — a vendor was selling an electromagnetic beam-blocking baseball cap… the tin-foil hat for the modern, fashion-conscious paranoid. I listened to some disturbed woman talk about Dr. Mengele’s experiments in opening demonic portals.
When you first came here, Rosie, you made clear that you have continuous memory (rather than recovered memory) of your alleged abuse. Yet your website contains quite a bit of links regarding recovered memory and dissociation. Why is this?
For that matter, I find Neil Brick’s comment to the Wisconsin State Journal perplexing:
“Neil Brick, founder of SMART (Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse), a Massachusetts organization that works with survivors of extreme abuse, said it’s a misconception that there are therapists out there initiating courses of therapy that lead to the surfacing of repressed memories. Rather, something in the patient’s adult life may have triggered the memory, and the therapist helps him or her explore its relevancy, Brick said.” (http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/crime_and_courts/article_753791e0-2822-11e0-9cd7-001cc4c002e0.html#ixzz1gTDkx4o0)
Why does he say this when he directly endorses tales told by those who very openly underwent “courses of therapy that lead to the surfacing of repressed memories”? If he doesn’t mean to imply that such treatments are potentially harmful, or that such memories are grossly unreliable, what is he trying to say? Does even he know?
It is unknown to me whether Brick himself underwent any type of recovered memory therapy or if it was simply the overwhelming banality of his worthlessness (as he describes above) that drove him to “find” a more exciting autobiographical narrative. In any case, I don’t find him to be a reliable judge of information on any serious matter of discussion.
Rosie, I applaud you for hanging in there with this discussion.
I think that ritual abuse is real and does occur.
The classic “satanic ritual abuse” scenario? No. I do not believe it.
In my case, SRA was taught to me by the psychiatrist and reinforced by art therapy with other “SRA” victims.
If we look at the psychological mechanisms in place it is simply mind control & thought reform. When these 2 powerful coercive methods are in place they manipulate people.
Jeanette —
I think you need to be cautious to define what you mean by “ritual abuse” any time you assert that it is real and that it does occur, because for some (if not most) people the “classic satanic ritual abuse” scenario is all that comes to mind when this terminology is used. I generally reject the use of the term in most any circumstance because of its abuse and the risk that a more moderate and sensible usage only serves to conceal the outrageous claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse conspiracy theorists. When I confronted one self-proclaimed SRA victim’s counter-factual claims he ultimately evaded by replying that he was only trying to assert that “ritual abuse is real”. Of course, he was “only” asserting this because he feels that the “truth” of ritual abuse serves as evidence — the only evidence he has — that he was a victim of MK-ULTRA that saw him turned into a successful manchurian candidate (despite the documented failures in every procedure tested to get him to that alleged state). Naturally, “the government” kindly made him forget all this rather than simply kill him after he’d served his function, and in spite of the fact that they displayed murderous brutality in all other things, according to the narrative.
SRA conspiracists love to set up false syllogisms. It goes something like this:
1) Ritual Abuse is real
2) Recovered memories are real
3) Therefore, if I say I’ve recovered memories of myself as a Jedi Knight in a UFO fighting hordes of demons summoned through Dr. Mengele’s quantum portal, it must be true.
Another tiresome one invoked again and again is:
1) Child abuse is real
2) Conspiracy theory-based organizations like S.M.A.R.T. claim that they are opposed to child abuse.
3) Therefore, if you express doubt in the factual basis of S.M.A.R.T. lecturer narratives, no matter how outrageous they are, you obviously have an “agenda” which supports child abuse.
The second one is the most annoying and it is used in variation by supporters of recovered memory accuracy:
1) Recovered memories can be highly accurate recollections of true events that have been repressed.
2) Repressed memories most often involve traumatic Child Sexual Abuse.
3) Therefore, to deny the validity of recovered memories is to deny the existence of Child Abuse.
It’s a frustratingly ignorant and illogical argument, but I’m sure you recognize it from having followed — indeed having been an important part of — this debate.
Of course, many people both recognize the problem of Child Abuse AND recognize stories of Satanic/Illuminati/Freemason conspiracies as products of paranoid delusion.
Rosie’s own blog reports upon Anonymous’s take-down of certain pedophile sites. She applauds Anonymous for this, and I think that this is a good case in which one can demonstrate that one needs not subscribe to ridiculous conspiracy theories in order to fight Child Abuse. I affiliate with and support Anonymous. I think I am fully in a position to say that Anonymous will always bring down such exploitative criminality whenever they can wherever it exists, but that nobody truly working with Anonymous on such projects supports S.M.A.R.T. or any other conspiracy theory based groups. (unfortunately, Rosie also writes about “Darknet” and “TOR” [and that Anonymous managed to “get in” to this sinister Darknet!] with no understanding of what these things are — she seems to imagine that they are merely tools for child porn enthusiasts, but they aren’t any more than the internet itself is).
Doug –
I separate “ritual abuse” (however it’s defined) from “satanic ritual abuse”. I do this purposefully for two reasons:
1. ritual abuse exists in many cultures under many different circumstances. Religious rituals in one culture can be called abuse in another. In general, to declare that ritual abuse does not occur, in my opinion, is inaccurate.
“Ritual abuse” is an amorphous term. I have yet to find those who argue about its occurrence, when addressing how it creates multiple personalities, show any evidence that they are correct other than personal narratives – which unfortunately, people have been convinced that personal experience = accuracy.
2. I clearly state that I do not believe in the satanic ritual abuse scenario as it pertains to the argument that it exists and is the reason children create multiple personalities. There are satanists in this world. The beliefs, rituals and practices of these people clearly are not the same as the satanic ritual abuse reported by those claiming to have repressed those activities endured in childhood. I thought I was raised by satanists and that is why I developed multiple personalities. I understand how this thought process works and how it is that people come to this conclusion. I was wrong to accept someone else’s rendition of my past and I almost died because of my inability to recognize that. And I most definitely did not have multiple personalities any more than I had 3 heads.
We need to be clear on what we are addressing. Words like ritual abuse, childhood sexual abuse, satanic ritual abuse, repression, and recovered memories are so overused that they are nothing more than buzz words that evoke emotion rather than stimulate rational discourse.
Let’s tease these terms apart and define them. Then we can unlink the associations between them. For instance that repressed memories = child abuse or child abuse = forgetting OR multiple personalities = high intelligence & creativity.
The majority of people through the world who have endured the horrors of child abuse or sexual abuse do not have multiple personalities. Most people who have lived through trauma (however it is defined) do not develop multiple personalities.
We need to take these facts and place them on the table when discussing the associations that trauma = childhood sexual abuse = multiple personalities = high intelligence.
It is important that multiple personalities and dissociative identity disorder be viewed in a worldwide context. It is a fact that most people who survive repeated trauma of a sexual nature do Not develop multiple personalities and have not buried memories of satanic ritual abuse.
A link that we Must break is the trauma + (satanic) ritual abuse + multiple personalities = highly creative means to cope. Developing multiple personalities is Not creative and is not representative of highly intelligent people – as many researchers and therapists would have us believe.
This equation is void of the human capacity of resilience which most people worldwide show every day. Educated white women of affluent countries like the US and Britain, however, fall far below the capabilities of most people of third world nations who have no education and no medical or psychological resources. Taking this fact and misconstruing the reason this occurs is that those “other” people just don’t have the capacity to realize that they have multiple personalities is ridiculous. Once these notions are clearly debunked, the allure of satanic ritual abuse and multiple personalities may not be as appealing.
Jeanette & Doug – a very informative & insightful discussion, thank you!
I’d like to attempt to make a bridge between what each of you has just said, more explicit. (Please forgive me, if you think I fail in this).
Doug discusses the REALITY that; “…many people both recognize the problem of Child Abuse AND recognize stories of Satanic/Illuminati/Freemason conspiracies as products of paranoid delusion”,
and decries the “frustratingly ignorant and illogical arguments”, employed by S.M.A.R.T. and other ” ‘recovered memories’ are always valid and must never be questioned” zealots, to nullify this reality in their own and other people’s minds.
Jeanette exposes and wisely warns against an equally ignorant false logic, underlying the appeal that claiming to be a “satanic ritual abuse” generated MPD holds for some people;
“A link that we Must break is the trauma + (satanic) ritual abuse + multiple personalities = highly creative means to cope. Developing multiple personalities is Not creative and is not representative of highly intelligent people – as many researchers and therapists would have us believe”.
To be more explicit, some researchers and therapists promote the idea that “being an SRA MPD'” means the person must be an extraordinarily creative and gifted individual – a very appealing idea indeed. Some examples of this might help – here is a supposed “Disability Information Resource Centre”:
http://www.dircsa.org.au/factsheets/dissociative-identity-disorder/
claiming that; “DID/MPD ‘develops’ in childhood. It is the result of ongoing severe abuse (physical, emotional and/or sexual) or trauma. It is a HIGHLY CREATIVE survival technique that allows a child to escape…”
Note that this site specfically endorses the alleged SRA origin of MPD-DID; “Estimates of 40-60% of DID/MPD is caused by Satanic religious cults. This condition is often deliberately induced by the cult to produce compliance and amnesia”.
Another site where persons claiming to be MPD-DID are heaped with praise for making such claims, and told that allegedly being MPD-DID means they are; “extremely clever”, “brave”, “gifted” and “amazing” persons with extra-ordinary powers and abilities:
http://www.squidoo.com/dissociative-identity-disorder-did
Skeptical commentor “Justin Sanity” challenges the site owner about this, and demonstrates that such interpretations of MPD-DID imply that SEVERE CHILD ABUSE CAN BE A POSITIVE GROWTH INDUCING EXPERIENCE;
“I’m very uncomfortable with what is being expressed, here:
“…the carriers of these personalities have an amazing power…that many of us [i.e.,the average person?] cannot fathom…”
“I love to hear people say things like, “It is a power and not a disorder and it is amazing.” I hope everyone who visits this page will agree with you” – is that so?
Is it your intention, then, to communicate to your readers that persons diagnosed with DID are actually specially ‘blessed’ and/or ‘gifted’ by their DID? I hope you don’t intend to say that persons with a potentially disabling condition, believed to be overwhelmingly a result of serious child abuse, are actually blessed to have this condition & are gifted by it? You seem a caring person with good intentions, so I have to believe it is not your INTENT to suggest that serious child abuse could ever be “a blessing in disguise” or the root cause, (directly or indirectly), of any ‘giftedness’ that anyone might possess”.
“There is one other thing that I would ask you to contemplate, about how you are choosing to approach this topic & your desire to be supportive of “DID” persons. Some of your statements, particularly in response to comments, describe and promote a hierarchy of abuse experiences:
“…millions of children are abused during childhood and don’t develop DID…those who develop DID are usually subject to…SEVERE abuse…”torture”…unimaginable, horrific abuse…”
and a hierarchy of abuse survivors: DID abuse survivors being “extremely clever”, “brave”, “gifted” and “amazing” persons – IN CONTRAST TO other abused persons, who may have “drowned their lives in alcohol”, “abused themselves and others”, or “committed suicide” and therefore must have been stupid, cowardly, talentless and unremarkable – ?”
Therein lies the bridge between Doug’s and Jeanette’s insights – no matter how vociferously organizations like S.M.A.R.T. (and associated therapists & researchers) might claim to be “opposed to child abuse”, their insistence that MPD-DID would be a “highly creative way to cope with the trauma of child abuse” and therefore that THEY THEMSELVES must be “extremely clever”, “brave”, “gifted” and “amazing” persons with extra-ordinary powers & abilities, demonstrates that they are actually endorsing child abuse as a “positive growth inducing experience”.
Justin Sanity says; “there are people using “DID supportive” websites to promote the FALSE idea that child abusers can and do deliberately induce DID and other “special powers/abilities” in their victims BY ABUSING THEM in a systematic manner. That is impossible (thank goodness!), and promoting the idea that there could be “secret formulas” for using child rape and torture to generate desirable qualities in children – under the guise of “exposing abusers” – is an evil thing to do in my opinion”.
As for the use of the words “ritual abuse”…
Many years ago, academic Dr Steven Kent did a radio interview with Wayne Morris, part of the “CKLN-FM Mind Control Series”. This interview and Dr Kent’s 3 papers on the subject are very popular with the satanic ritual abuse – CIA mind control true believers crowd – almost every one of them with a webpage cites Dr Kent as part of their “proofs” for SRA being more than a sick fantasy.
BUT – not one of these people uses the words “ritual abuse” the way that Dr Kent defined them. Dr Kent said;
“Ritual abuse is any kind of systematic patterned disempowering violations. Ritual abuse can take place in a wide variety of contexts. They don’t necessarily have to be religious in nature; however, ritual abuse is systematic, patterned, disempowering violations …
In the allegations of ritual abuse that are say, outside a religious context, these kinds of abuses could involve a perpetrator who serially violates one person or one child repeatedly. In these cases the kind of violations would be patterned and the patterning can be important from the victim’s standpoint because each time the abuse begins, the victim knows what’s coming, having been through it several times before…”
Steve Kent defined “ritual abuse” as RITUALIZED abuse, i.e., “to make a ritual of” abusing a child. The patterned, repetitive nature of the abuse IS THE RITUAL, in the phrase “ritual abuse”. That is the only legitimate use of the words ritual & abuse as a phrase or term; “ritual abuse”.
Every SRA/mind control believer uses these words, in combination, incorrectly. ALL of them use the word “ritual” to mean “a religious/occult ceremony”, and “ritual abuse” to mean sexual abuse of a child while a religious ceremony is being performed. Used for this context, however, the phrase becomes totally meaningless.
Are children ever sexually abused while a religious ceremony is going on around them? Yes – if you believe the accounts of some victims of pedophile Priests, as I do, that’s undeniable. Altar boys have been sexually groped & fondled by such offenders, in such settings, for example. But calling THAT kind of occurence “ritual abuse” is nonsensical. It is the equivalent of calling sexual abuse of children that takes place in a school, “scholastic abuse”, or in the locker-room shower of a college footbal team “football abuse”. Abuse is abuse, there is no point to using the setting as an adjectival ‘descriptor’. Sexual abuse that happens while a ceremony is going on, should be called what it is – “abuse”, period.
I would like to make a few observations. The name Gaian is associated with bdsm. It refers to a dom. Whether that guy likes to roleplay on darknet as that name is suspicially displayed on process.org it seems that something stinks. It is perhaps true that process.org is a front for bdsm members or the less innocuous witchcraft element as the name of the blogger Loki suggests. That doug is obvlivious to this or is involved in bdsm would be curious. Anybody who thinks that owning a slave woman is desirable is a scumbag. Gaian tried to shred Rosie’s credibility and his ability to do this went unchecked by doug. Doug says that the catholics allowed abuse which they did with several priests having knowledge and transfers taking place. There are wiccan and witchcraft groups. That some like to light candles and perform benign rituals doesn’t imply that sadistic groups of satanic nature haven’t been around. Even in the psychiatric arena there have been criminal busts and one in particular was a cult like group of psychotherapists that were arrested for abusing their own children one of which was 3 years old and sexually abused in group settings. I understand your desire to elicit the truth but even you are oblivious to sadists who patrol this site.
Hello “stationary” —
I suppose I’ll reply to your delirious “observations” under the assumption that they were made in all seriousness, despite the rational (perhaps hopeful) inclination to believe otherwise.
You say,
“The name Gaian is associated with bdsm. It refers to a dom. Whether that guy likes to roleplay on darknet as that name is suspicially displayed on process.org it seems that something stinks.”
I did not know that the name “Gaian” is associated with “bdsm”. However, now that you mention it here, I haven’t found any confirmation of this, either. I entered ‘define: gaian’ in Google and, as far as I explored the results, nothing regarding bdsm appeared, though actual definitions are readily available. Wikipedia lists several definitions for ‘Gaian’, none of which have anything to do with bdsm, one of which reads:
Gaian — “an adherent of Gaianism — an Earth-centered (sometimes referred to as neo-Pagan) spiritual inclination with diverse and evolving religious expression whose central reference is Gaia as personification of the Earth as Mother to all life upon the planet. A Gaian typically adheres to beliefs that the Cosmos is an organic system within systems and that the Earth is a divine expression of this “being within beings.””
I’m not sure which corners of the web you are crawling in your lonely private hours of the night, but I will advise you that if you happen to be trolling bdsm chat boards and happen upon a reference to “Gaian”, it really makes no more sense for you to assume the word is bdsm-specific as it would make sense for you to assume all cat owners are “bdsm members” (as you call them) when you see a screen-name of, say, “pussyhandler8582”.
Further, your mention of “darknet” implies you have no idea what darknet is. What does it mean to “roleplay on darknet”, as you put it, and how would this be different from roleplaying on the internet where you can comment anonymously under the name of “stationary”? What compels you to engage in this roleplaying?
Then, you go on to say,
“It is perhaps true that process.org is a front for bdsm members or the less innocuous witchcraft element as the name of the blogger Loki suggests.”
You say that “It is perhaps true”, as though this asinine allegation has been presented elsewhere and you are only now just seeing that there may be truth to it, while in reality, this idea — as far as I’m aware — only has its origins in your fractured imagination, based upon your ignorance of the word “Gaian”… A word only presented in this forum as part of the screen name of another commenter like yourself. You go from attaching your own perverse definition onto another commenter’s name only to infer that this whole site may “perhaps” be a “front for bdsm members”. At this point, it may be worth asking what “bdsm” even means in your twisted mind, and how is it that a blog like this one could possibly act as a “front” for bdsm activities? Many people and many websites are openly dedicated to bdsm, to the point that nobody really needs some subtle front organization. And how could it even work to operate such a front online? Do you imagine that there are subtle hidden bdsm messages concealed within the text of process.org’s articles? Did you really think about this at all?
As for the “less innocuous witchcraft element” that the name Loki suggests to you — what do you mean by “less innocuous” and how is this suggested? Again, your amazing incompetence at doing a basic information search before jumping to conclusions is staggering. The name ‘Loki’ comes from a god of Norse mythology, the name ‘Loki’ on Process.org refers to theoretical physicist and musician Loki der Quaeler, co-editor of this site. In your apparently disturbed mind, “Loki” refers to malicious witchcraft. It seems there is simply no justification for this perception.
You then go on to say several disjointed, seemingly unconnected and pointless things:
“Anybody who thinks that owning a slave woman is desirable is a scumbag.”
Okay. No argument here. Nor did anybody suggest otherwise here.
“Gaian tried to shred Rosie’s credibility and his ability to do this went unchecked by doug.”
Was I supposed to make Rosie’s argument for her?
“Doug says that the catholics allowed abuse which they did with several priests having knowledge and transfers taking place.”
Yes. And…?
“There are wiccan and witchcraft groups. That some like to light candles and perform benign rituals doesn’t imply that sadistic groups of satanic nature haven’t been around.”
No, one can’t prove a negative. The inability to prove something doesn’t exist can’t prove that it does. This is very (VERY) basic logic.
Then you go on to reference some case without providing ANY source material:
“Even in the psychiatric arena there have been criminal busts and one in particular was a cult like group of psychotherapists that were arrested for abusing their own children one of which was 3 years old and sexually abused in group settings.”
What case is this? Who was involved? Further, what is this supposed to tell us? Was this “cult like group” part of a larger ring of Satanic Gaian Loki-ites? Where can we read about this case?
And then you end with a conciliatory: “I understand your desire to elicit the truth but even you are oblivious to sadists who patrol this site.”
The “sadists”, by which you mean the false inferences you drew merely on the basis of names?
…I really don’t know what to tell you. If your critical thinking skills are as unrefined as your comment indicates, you really don’t need to be berated by me. Your daily life must be fraught with difficulties enough.
Yes you are right that I didn’t bother checking my facts on certain names. It’s just that this whole site is comical. You may think that you are changing history but if you spend all your time arguing with a deliriou person how will you take over the world? What kind of name is “the process” anyway? What comes to mind is a tyrannical state jargon vaguely remeniscient of fascism. And also you oould change your symbol. A slight variation turns it into a Nazi symbol. Why not a bunny rabbit symbol? Perhaps that guy at the convention was fraudulent. We’ll never know, but you weren’t much of an upfront man to kindly have a chat with him. That’s why he sued you. See it’s all very conenient for you and Gaian guy to engage somebody who in all liklyhood was abused by a satanic group and then be dismissive at every turn. I’m not saying it’s your fault. Perhaps you are not conscious of your lack of subtlety of your disdain of those entrapped by the psychological and psychiatric faction or those truly abused at levels your mind is incapable of processing. But I digress. I’m afraid the operation of logic in man must be operated by intelligence and although you can sppot simple logical errors the fact that you can’t see past your own bullshit or be stymied to not open your mouth in situations even a child would know makes you look rather incomplete. Perhaps you can go find some silly cause that only dumbasses know.
Doug – I like this one, from Religious Tolerance.org:
“[They further define Gaian beliefs as referring “to any and all conceptions of the Earth as a single living organism of which humans are part, and, in particular, those which regard this Earth organism as sacred, holy, or divine.”]”
But, of course, I can’t tell user Stationary what “Gaian” really means to me – that would spoil his/her/it’s desire to make up paranoid & threatening definitions for terms that they don’t understand.
Another profoundly under-educated person, this “stationary”, either too dimwitted or too lazy to make the effort of educating themselves. It’s so much easier for them to go around making up ignorant nonsense, in feeble attempts to compensate for their knowledge deficits, and then hurl hateful diatribes at genuinely knowledgeable person who take the time & point out the falsehoods in what they’ve said.
“What comes to mind is a tyrannical state jargon vaguely remeniscient of fascism…”
and
“I’m afraid the operation of logic in man must be operated by intelligence and although you can sppot simple logical errors the fact that you can’t see past your own bullshit or be stymied to not open your mouth in situations even a child would know makes you look rather incomplete. Perhaps you can go find some silly cause that only dumbasses know”
That second paragraph is totally incoherent rambling. Perhaps a child, trying to sound insightful or profound? I encountered similarly nonsensical ramblings on a forum devoted to “the occult”, and suspected children were posting them.
Seems to be rather upset, that I didn’t let Rosie get away with blatantly making up things such as “the occult bible”. Where do I get off, eh? I mean…occult means hidden, eh, that means secret, eh, that means nobody knows nothin’ about it and you can make up whatever you want to.
No?
Gaian, the matter of Rosie’s story is undecided as to whether it is true. Rosie is a human being. You seem to be the one out of touch with reality. Your manner of questioning is a bit too extreme. I noticed you immedietely backed off when she stood up to you. But maybe you’re too involved in trying to debunk occultism as you call it for you to engage in normal conversation on the matter. I will not try to defend occult belief but your comments about the occult do not disprove its existence.
I will say as I said in the first line of my second post here that I confused a couple of names. Gaian was confused with Gor. That I galloped on to make further comments about the nature of the site is true. I just thought that somebody who managed to be sued for trespassing in a private group is the type of person who would be capable of using your username in a clandestine manner to also post to find some type of truth or prove a point with sra people. Doug knows what he did damaged his character even to those on here and perhaps he should apologize to that man and sra members not for their sake but to restore decency to the truth finding cause. And GaianGuy you should apologize to Rosie. I was off-based in commenting about possible s and m ties. I would erase all stories about that meeting on here with doug and that man and move on. In terms of advertising the name process could signify many things but ulltimately it means nothing to people who come to this site so perhaps an explanation is due. Let’s move on. I will acknowledge that even people who seek the truth make judgement mistakes. Perhaps I in fact unfairly trashed you GaianGuy and perhaps I could have concentrated on the behavior and not the person.
stationary —
it’s becoming apparent that you are quite concerned with my SMART conference report. here again, you are confused. my entry into the SMART conference was not based upon “misrepresentation”, despite subsequent crying that journalists are supposed to identify themselves as such before attending. in fact, i did not attend the conference as a “journalist”. no news agency subsidized my travel or expenses, nor was the fact that i would write an article about the conference even a foregone conclusion at the time at which i attended.
in your first comment, you said:
“Perhaps that guy at the convention was fraudulent. We’ll never know, but you weren’t much of an upfront man to kindly have a chat with him. That’s why he sued you.”
by “that guy”, you clearly mean neil brick, organizer of SMART. you concede that perhaps he “was fraudulent”, but i’m wondering why you assume we can never really know? maybe we can’t know, just as we can’t know anything, really, with 100% certainty, but wouldn’t you agree that we can set varying levels of probability? i’m curious as to what it would take, hypothetically, to make you agree that certain satanic abuse/conspiracy narratives are almost certainly not true? in the case of neil brick, he claims that he was part of a government brain-washing project during his childhood, during which he was shaped into a CIA/Illuminati assassin. at what point would you agree that this probably isn’t true? if we were able to establish a timeline of his childhood which detailed his schooling from elementary school on, would you agree that he could not have also been undergoing any rigorous training within the CIA at that time?
stationary, you seem to make the same mistake that many of the SRA faithful make: the idea that it is better to error on the side of believing the self-proclaimed victim of satanic abuse, even if all the facts don’t add up, than to risk dismissing and belittling a real victim. here again, there is no sense of probability. the idea seems to be that we can never know the full truth, so on balance it is better to “believe the victim”. of course, it is not that simple. let me frame it for you with a different scenario: take the salem witch trials (just an earlier manifestation of our own satanic panic). from your point of view, we could say, ‘we will never know if these girls were victims of witchcraft or not. therefore, we had best assume that they are…’ the problem in this position is that it is not a victimless position. if we accept that the girls are victims of witchcraft, we then accept that the culprits they named are, in fact, witches. in turn, we then victimize people based on false allegations. you see, “stationary”, we are both trying to advocate for victims, the dispute is in the question of who is actually being victimized. i feel that false claims of abuse are an injustice not only to the falsely accused, but also of real victims of actual abuse who find their cause hijacked by the paranoid and/or opportunistic.
i find this comment by you very curious: “I would erase all stories about that meeting on here with doug and that man and move on.” by “that man”, you clearly again mean neil brick. obviously, you find my report from the SMART conference very disturbing. i actually think this is a good sign. i hope that ultimately, some of the information you find here can help you to think differently, critically evaluate information better, and maybe eventually you’ll be happy that — no matter what — these things i’ve written will always be available online.
stationary – I haven’t made up my mind, as to whether you are the same ‘operative’ that called themselves “Rosie”, or yet another. In any case, Rosie very obviously had motivations far different from what she stated, both for commenting here and also for her blog writings. I chose to go along with the ‘game’ for as long as that amused me, and when it was no longer interesting I stopped going there.
Doug has done nothing wrong, whatsoever, that I am aware of. His attendance of that SMART conference and his subsequent report on it, was HEROIC!
Cultesque organizations & individuals who are engaged in efforts to influence public health policies and/or legal reforms, have no right to cloister themselves off from the public, to declare that only ‘true believers’ can attend their conferences – not when they are registered as charities and possibly funded in part through government grant monies. Bringing forth the truth of their activities, into the light of day as Doug did, is frankly an important & praisworthy public service.
I don’t believe you gathered any new evidece at the conference led by Brick. The aspect of defamation was probably your description of his height and whether his shirt was two sizes too big. Come now. There is no way for us to know whether in fact his shirt was two sizes too big or whether you made it up to concoct a story.
This is not the way to entice those who somehow bellieve they were abused to roll over and think like you do when they come to this site. Certain aspects of this type of evidence gathering and reporting do not lend to objective analysis of your writings by those unfamiliar with these topics when it’s all in a mockery fashion and bar comedy routine. We know that lots of people believe in Jesus. Would it be appropriate to attend a church and come back with a story that they all said amen when the minister talks about their savior having rose from the dead-literally? All the atheists don’t believe this story but I wonder how many would approve that one should mock them. It’s much easier to destroy a marginalised group like the conspiracy theorists when flaws are discovered in them but much harder to change people’s perceptions of more secure groups. For example even though hardly anybody likes psychiatrists people will still recommend somebody they know in distress to see one. Inconsistencies over what works in the mental health regime as treatment are ignored when they see examples and case studies of raving psychotics return to a balanced state with a couple of medications. These types of examples are carted out and on top of the respect that doctors have, allow psychiatrists to make up new definitions of illness and employ disabling treatments such as ect. For a really great story to report look up the main ect doctor searched on the internet under ect hall of shame. That man is under five feet tall and has spread lies about ect and is responsible for directing government funds for research on ect.