For Survivors of Ritual Abuse, Mind Control and Torture, and Pro-Survivors

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Volume 21, Issue 4 Summer — June 2017

JOURNAL

For survivors of ritual abuse, mind control and torture, and pro-survivors

Copyright Information

SURVIVORSHIP JOURNAL, ISSN 046-2015, is published twice per year in Pacific Palisades, CA.

Editor: Wendy Hoffman, formatted by Neil Brick. Copyright 2017 by Survivorship. All rights reserved. The entire contents of this issue are copyrighted by Survivorship and/by the individual contributors. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing by the copyright owners. For permission to reprint, write: Survivorship 881 Alma Real Drive Ste 311 Pacific Palisades, CA 90272 or email
From the Editor

Wendy Hoffman

Dear survivors, friends, supporters, therapists, people starting out in recovery, people in the middle:

This issue has essays and art work by survivors and therapists. I hope they will help you gain clarity about what we are dealing with and encourage you.

Please send Survivorship your writing, art work, photography. We want to publish as much by survivors as possible.

Make sure there are no triggers in what you send us. We strive to make this website safe. We all deserve safety.

Please tell your therapists and support people that we have a column about what they have learned from working and being with survivors. Ask them to write an essay for us. This issue has an essay by Randy Noblitt, PhD, one of our newest board members.

We want to help keep you safe, break your isolation and give you hope,

Warmly,

Wendy, Editor

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Table of Contents

Page Author Title

2 Randy Noblitt My Best Teachers Were Survivors essay

4 Alison Miller Disinformation essay

6 Neil Brick Propaganda and Mind Control essay

9 Wendy Hoffman Portraits of My Mind art

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My Best Teachers Were Survivors

by Randy Noblitt1

I graduated from a clinical psychology program in 1978. While a student I wrote about psychotherapy outcome research, specifically discussing how length of training was related to the effectiveness of psychotherapists’ professional work with their clients. Surprisingly, the extent of training did not predict psychotherapy success. Therapists with many years of education were getting about the same results as those little or no formal instruction. How could that be?

This unexpected conclusion led me toward increasing skepticism about conventional psychotherapy training. It made me wonder if some of the basic psychotherapeutic presumptions were inaccurate or incomplete. Perhaps some fundamental or widely-believed psychological notions were wrong. This distrust also grew while serving as a psychotherapist for survivors of extreme abuse. Many psychotherapy training programs were inadequate in providing the needed skills and knowledge for trauma work—including mine. Other colleagues in similar circumstances were also discovering that their training had been incomplete. Why didn’t graduate programs spend more time addressing trauma and abuse? Fortunately, after graduating there were some good mentors available, and it became clear that trauma survivors themselves could be the critically needed teachers.

To learn from survivors, psychotherapists must be receptive. This requires humility and willingness to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers. Psychotherapists need to understand that survivors have important things to say, and these narratives must be respectfully heard. Many therapists have their own preconceived ideas that obstruct this kind of more open and mutually respectful communication. Under optimal conditions the client may be able to experience a healthy therapeutic alliance with the psychotherapist, and the therapeutic alliance consistently proves to be the single most important factor in the success of psychotherapy.

Survivors will sometimes test us. Are we worthy of their trust? They were typically threatened by their perpetrators, and told that they must not reveal information about their abuses. It takes a great deal of courage for them to share these traumatic experiences, and their abuse narratives are most likely to be told when there is a strong therapeutic alliance in place.

The process where survivors tell their stories is part of the course of recovery, but recounting these narratives does not necessarily bring recovery in and of itself. Usually there is more needed work. Most survivors of extreme abuse are responsive to particular triggers or cues. Some triggers are unique to individual survivors. Other triggers are generic and common among many survivors. In my experience identifying the triggers and desensitizing their effects are important components of successful treatment. Many survivors have access to pieces of the puzzle, but not to the entire puzzle representing their composite experience of abuse and traumatic learning. Some survivors acknowledge that they have been in therapy for years, but that they are aware of parts that exist behind what appears to be an impenetrable dissociative wall. Such dissociative experiences require gentle but persistent exploration, and many survivors find that they can dissolve dissociative barriers and increase healthy communication among their dissociated parts as they reduce their own trigger responsiveness. While telling these narratives, survivors also educate their psychotherapists about their unique needs and collaborate in the treatment process. Therapists who work with numerous survivors begin to see patterns that show how extreme abuse is perpetrated and how dissociative processes work in greater detail. Therapists who treat many survivors can apply the collective knowledge they have gotten from multiple narratives and treatment experiences to assist in providing more effective clinical services with other individual survivors.

During the 1980s the public became aware that survivors of extreme abuse were telling their own personal stories, sometimes in the popular media. In response, there was a vitriolic backlash that blamed survivors and their advocates, claiming that these narratives were the products of false memories. At that point, many survivors felt more vulnerable and more reluctant to disclose their abuse narratives, making recovery more difficult. Fearing for their own liability exposure some therapists refused to work with this underserved population. Nevertheless, many survivors continued to tell their stories, and by their example, they created opportunities to speak truth to power for other survivors and advocates.

So, the statement that my best teachers were survivors is not hyperbole, it is literally true. I am one psychotherapist among many who are grateful that survivors have entrusted us with their knowledge, experience, and secrets. As this knowledge base grows, it will hopefully make recovery possible for more individuals within the survivor community. It will continue to inspire all of us with the courage and integrity that is at the center of the survivor movement.

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The opinions expressed are the author’s, and not necessarily representative of any other affiliated organizations. Randy Noblitt, PhD is currently a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Alliant International University, Los Angeles campus.

Disinformation

Alison Miller

This essay is from a book which will be published by Karnac Books later this year.

Today I looked at the description of yet another book about ritual abuse and mind control, purporting to describe what really goes on and offering a cure. Books, websites, youtube videos, speakers at conferences, you name it—plenty of information is out there. But how do you tell the difference between genuinely helpful information and disinformation, which means information that purports to be true but is designed to mislead you?

The trick with disinformation is to include lots of correct information. But that correct information consists of things that are already known, so the writer isn't revealing anything new. When you have become hooked on reading the writing of someone who seems to know the truth, you suddenly discover that the truth you know has been mixed with something you haven't heard before, which may on first reading seem utterly outrageous, such as ""All ritual abuse and mind control is being managed at the highest level by aliens, or "The cult is breeding half-human, half-animal creatures (chimeras) and keeps them in secret underground locations." Besides disinformation about what the abusers do, there is disinformation about the healing process, such as "The true subconscious can instantly heal all the parts if they just say they want healing," or "The way to resolve dissociated traumatic memories is to just avoid the negative and focus instead on the details of positive memories," or "If you rebalance your body's energies you will be healed."

In order to sort out truth from deliberately planted fiction, you need to engage your critical thinking skills. A philosophy web page (http://philosophy.hku.hk/think/criticalct.php) defines critical thinking as "the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking," and includes understanding the logical connections between ideas, evaluating arguments, and detecting inconsistencies and mistakes in reasoning." These are skills the abuser group did not want you to develop. They wanted you to believe what they said and obey them without questioning. Learning critical thinking is an important part of recovery.

Let's apply critical thinking skills to the examples I gave above from disinformation sources. "All ritual abuse and mind control is being managed at the highest level by aliens." Some versions of this one involve human-sized lizard-like creatures, others the gray aliens we see in abduction stories. I have been a reader of science fiction since I was about fourteen, and one thing I have learned is that creatures from other planets would not be two-legged and two-armed creatures like us, or like the lizards and grays. Genuine aliens might well breathe other gases than oxygen and have different shapes from any living earthly creatures. However, human beings could easily put on the kind of rubber masks you can buy around Halloween in order to look like aliens. Which is more likely?

How about "The cult is breeding half-human, half-animal creatures and keeps them in secret underground locations?" You can't disprove this. However, I know (because my son is a researcher on the human genome in the world's leading university for this subject) that genomics has not advanced anywhere near the point where something like this could be done, and this would hold true even if there were secret cult or government research somewhere else. The speaker I heard on this topic believed she had given birth to such beings and was communicating with them telepathically. She was very sincere. Very sincerely deluded. When I spoke with another ritual abuse survivor who had an inside part who believed itself to be a chimera, I investigated a little more and discovered it was a young girl who could run fast and was told she was half horse. As for the speaker who heard her "children" telepathically, my logical thinking tells me that the voices she heard were probably dissociated child parts of herself who had been told they were her children and were chimeras.

Another purpose of disinformation is to make the general public, including therapists, believe that if they think ritual abuse or mind control is real, they also have to believe in things they find completely impossible, such as some of the more outrageous claims made by the disinformation websites. So they dismiss the truth along with the falsehoods.

What about the healing methods which might be disinformation? As a survivor, you are hungry for anything that will help relieve your distress, especially if it is quick and easy rather than requiring you to work through what really happened to you. So you seize upon the correct descriptions of your experiences, and then think that if the author was able to describe what happened to you, he or she must be offering a correct understanding and proposal for cure. But this isn't so.

Perpetrator groups are very eager to divert survivors away from anything which will genuinely help them heal, as healing will involve discovering what happened to you and even why it happened. These are secrets the perpetrator groups guard closely. The disinformation books and websites are meant for you to discover and share with other survivors, and they will lead you away from the truths you don't yet know, not towards them.

"The true subconscious can instantly heal all the parts if they just say they want healing:" Apply your critical thinking skills and say "I wish," but know it won't happen. This one seems a bit more plausible: "The way to resolve dissociated traumatic memories is to just avoid the negative and focus instead on the details of positive memories." There are plenty of actual therapists who try to do this. If you've had such a therapist, you may be aware of whether or not it actually works. Many ritual abuse and mind control survivors have to struggle very hard to come up with any positive memories, and might end up inventing them to please such a therapist. Finally, "If you rebalance your body's energies you will be healed." This requires moving your body in certain ways and allowing someone to touch your body. Be very careful about this: body movements and touches and signals can actually set off programming in survivors. Some "energy therapists" are very sincere and accidentally do this; others are working for the bad guys, and what they do will close down your personality system and prevent you from healing.