CHAPTER TITLE I RITUAL ABUSE AND MIND CONTROL RITUAL ABUSE AND MIND CONTROL The Manipulation of Attachment Needs Edited by Orit Badouk Epstein, Joseph Schwartz, and Rachel Wingfield Schwartz The Bowlby Centre Published in 2011 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road, London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2011 to Orit Badouk Epstein, Joseph Schwartz, and Rachel Wingfield Schwartz for the edited collection, and the individual authors for their contributions. The rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted with §§77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978 1 85575 839 1 Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing Services Ltd www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk e-mail: [email protected] Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS ix INTRODUCTION by Joseph Schwartz xiii CHAPTER ONE What has changed in twenty years? 1 Valerie Sinason CHAPTER TWO “An evil cradling”? Cult practices and the manipulation 39 of attachment needs in ritual abuse Rachel Wingfield Schwartz CHAPTER THREE Torture-based mind control: psychological mechanisms 57 and psychotherapeutic approaches to overcoming mind control Ellen P. Lacter v vi CONTENTS CHAPTER FOUR Love is my religion 143 Anonymous CHAPTER FIVE Working with the Incredible Hulk 155 Orit Badouk Epstein CHAPTER SIX Maintaining agency: a therapist’s journey 169 Sue Richardson INDEX 179 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks and appreciation to the Conference organizing group: Natasha Roffe, Briony Mason, Elizabeth London, and Orit Badouk Epstein, for the skill, passion, and generosity they brought to pro- ducing this pioneering conference. It was a remarkable experience to work in the context of so much warmth, courage, and solidarity, never undermined by the traumatic nature of the material we were working on together. A very special thank you needs to go to Valerie Sinason and the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, who jointly hosted the conference. Without Valerie, no psychotherapy conference on this subject would ever have been held. Many thanks to the Executive of The Bowlby Centre, who had the integrity and political strength to back a conference on this issue and to associate the Centre’s name publicly with the treatment of ritual abuse survivors. Our heartfelt thanks also go to Oliver Rathbone for his willing- ness to publish a book which is not only ground-breaking, but also controversial, and for his continuing commitment to giving a voice to writers in the fields of attachment and trauma. vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Last, and most importantly, we would like to acknowledge the survivors of ritual abuse and mind control who have refused to be silenced and whose capacity to fight back in the face of extreme torture teaches every one of us what we need to understand about the human spirit—that love is stronger than hate. We dedicate this book to them. Rachel Wingfield Schwartz ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Anonymous is a survivor of organized ritual abuse, torture, and mind control, and a writer, campaigner, international speaker, and trainer specializing in psychosis and trauma. Orit Badouk Epstein is an attachment-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist and supervisor who trained at The Bowlby Centre, London where she is a member of the executive committee. She runs a private practice in North London and is one of the trustees of the Paracelsus Trust at the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. Orit has an interest in, and experience of, working with clients who have suffered from extensive trauma and abuse, including ritual abuse, sexual abuse, violence, and emotional abuse. Orit has pub- lished articles in the Attachment Journal and is on the editorial board of the ESTD news letter. She is committed to campaigns to counteract the denial and disbelief around Ritual Abuse. Email: [email protected] Ellen Lacter has been a clinical psychologist in California, USA for the past twenty-three years, and has specialized in the treatment of dissociative disorders and ritual abuse and mind control trauma in ix x ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS both children and adults for the past twelve years. She has a num- ber of published chapters in edited books on the subject of ritual abuse and mind control. She is programme co-ordinator for the Play Therapy Certificate Program at University of California San Diego-Extension. She is also an activist on behalf of victims of ritual abuse and mind control, and maintains a website to educate the public and mental health community on these subjects: http:// www.endritualabuse.org/ Sue Richardson is a member of The Bowlby Centre with over thirty years’ experience in the helping professions. Her personal and pro- fessional attachment networks are in the northeast of England, from where she provides training, consultation, and supervision for those working with complex trauma and dissociation. Sue is a member of the European Society for Trauma and Dissociation (ESTD) and the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSTD), and a founder member of their UK networks. She belongs to the training faculty of ISSTD and is the Training Co-ordinator for ESTD UK. She is the co-editor and co-author of two books and a number of published papers concerning child abuse trauma, attach- ment, and dissociation. [email protected] Joseph Schwartz is a training therapist and supervisor at the Bowlby Centre. His books include Cassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis in Europe and America (Penguin & Karnac). He is the author of numerous papers on clinical practice, the history of psychoanalysis, and the role of genetics in mental distress. joseph- [email protected] Valerie Sinason is a poet, writer, child and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and adult psychoanalyst. She is Director of the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, Honorary Consultant Psycho- therapist for Cape Town Child Guidance Clinic, and President of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability. She has been a Con- sultant at the Tavistock and Portman Clinics until 1998, when she left to start the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. She has also been a Consultant Research Psychotherapist at St George’s Hospital Medi- cal School. She specializes in trauma, disability, abuse, and dissoci- ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xi ation. In 1994, she published Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse (Routledge) as a result of a Department of Health funded clinical piece of research carried out at the Portman Clinic. Her most recent book, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity (Routledge), is coming out in a revised edition next year. [email protected] Rachel Wingfield Schwartz is a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist and was the Chair of the Bowlby Centre 2002–2009 (formerly Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy), where she is also a training supervisor and teacher. Rachel has a wide range of clinical experience in a variety of settings, including schools and prisons, and specializes in working with survivors of trauma and abuse, including sexual abuse, rape, domestic violence, war, state terror, and ritual and cult abuse. Rachel has been working with ritual abuse survivors since 1993 and is passionately committed to ending the disbelief and silence surrounding this issue. Rachel is also a psychotherapist with the Clinic for Dissociative Studies. rachelwingfi[email protected] Introduction Joseph Schwartz Twenty years ago I first heard Valerie Sinason describe her work with victims of ritual abuse. The cost to her was enormous. She could scarcely believe any of things she was told, the tortures and the horrifying involvement of trusted pillars of the community— doctors, lawyers, police. It was Rosemary’s Baby in spades. Valerie was terrified. I did know from Valerie’s work with mental handicap the kinds of abuse that can be perpetuated by those in power over the vulnerable, including the continuous reports of abuse per- petrated in old age homes, in the Catholic Church, and in the cel- lars of madmen like Josef Fritzl. But ritual abuse seemed a step too far. I felt myself rebelling at the words satanic abuse. What? In this day and age people believe in Satan? Surely not. But, actually, hor- rifying as it was, I had little trouble seeing ritual abuse more sim- ply as organized abuse. After all, in the USA, people organize themselves into lynching parties, the kind of terror that had never been far away during my time in Mississippi. I was further helped by one survivor saying, “Satanic abuse, Schmatanic abuse. What is going on here is torture.” xiii xiv INTRODUCTION Abu Ghraib, the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where Latin American police forces are trained in the techniques of torture: we are sur- rounded by examples of torture. Dr Sheila Cassidy testified elo- quently to the torture she endured at the hands of Chilean police during the coup against Allende (Cassidy, 1977). Bobby Sands starved himself to death in protest at torture at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. John Schlapobursky has turned his torture at the hands of the South African