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When it comes to a patient presenting such an improbable story as her father raping her as part of a complex, supremely well-organized underground network of satanic cults, Ross says he adheres to the principle of "therapeutic neutrality."

"You don't believe the memories and you don't not believe the memories," Ross says. Whether or not the events happened as described in the aforementioned scenario is beside the point; the result is that the patient likely has unresolved conflicted emotions toward her father, he says. On one hand, the child may feel the biological impulse of love and loyalty to her parent; and on the other, she is angered and saddened by what she believes was her father's cruelty. So the goal then is to reconcile these opposing forces and work toward an emotional stability that will allow the child to reconcile with the father. Ross says he's dealt with patients who, after years of therapy, come to realize that the satanic ritual abuse never occurred, while others can be healed and still maintain it ­happened.

Ultimately, it's a win-win situation. If the old man truly did force his daughter to drink cow's blood and chop her own baby's head off to welcome the winter solstice, reconciliation is possible. And if the daughter only thinks this happened, reconciliation is still possible. (In that event, the best-case scenario would be one in which the family hasn't already been torn apart by the daughter's accusations, because in that case, Ross says, the father never even has to know what his daughter is ­thinking.)

But Ross says that, even in the event where the child has previously screamed satanic abuse from the hilltops, a loving father-daughter relationship is still ­possible.

This might be a good time to clarify that not every person diagnosed with DID has claimed satanic ritual abuse.

There does not appear to be a study that has ever tabulated the different types of claims, and such a study would be a massive undertaking, given that DID exists on a continuum of alleged maltreatment running from neglect (i.e., parents who actually do nothing to the child) to incest and cannibalism (i.e., parents who put a terrific amount of planning and creativity into the torture of their child). Skeptics point that not only does the psychiatric diagnosis manual, DSM-IV, not adequately define the "abuse" necessary to trigger DID, they argue that the manual does not give a clear explanation of just what constitutes an alternate personality. How long must this alter stick around, and what purpose(s) must it serve to be properly labeled a true separate personality?

For example, in a 2004 article in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, DID skeptic August Piper cited a study by a leading DID researcher who had a patient with an alter whose sole responsibility was to "gaily [walk] in the fields picking flowers — usually ­dandelions."

This wide net of criteria allows an amazing volume of alters to exist in one host. When DID first appeared in DSM-III in 1980, the condition allowed up to 100 alters. Yet, judging by some researchers' subsequent claims, that number seems downright paltry. Piper points to another leading researcher's study of two patients with more than 4,000 alters between them.

Piper, a psychiatrist practicing in Seattle, believes the research and logic behind DID are often flawed. For example, if alters are born from severe trauma and are charged with protecting the host from the awareness of the abuse, why is it easy to summon them in such non-stressful environments as a therapist's office?

"The fundamental question here is...how does a scientist know things?" Piper says by phone from Seattle. "You shouldn't be asking the little questions about what [DID experts say], because they're always going to give you some kind of bullshit answer. Or I will always give you a bullshit answer. It isn't the question 'What you know,' it's how you got there."

And while many people living with DID allegedly experienced abuse so savage and relentless that it actually caused the brain to think it belonged to a completely different person, and, in some cases, repress memories of the torture for decades, it's pretty easy to find online support groups and individual blogs where those living with DID air it all — every last excruciating detail.
_____________________

In Hodgin's office, Rachel braces herself and tries to explain the horror.

The abuse started when she was about three. Her grandparents lived nearby, and she'd often spend weekends there, with cousins and other children in the extended family. Her mother wouldn't come around, but her father did. He had to. Rachel's grandfather was His Highest, the cult leader. Therefore, her father played an important role.

From day one, Rachel was groomed to give them a child, a sacrifice to be offered to Satan. So the cult had to let her know her body belonged to them; it existed for their purposes. When she was too tiny for penile penetration, they used fingers and small objects. As she grew older, she graduated to intercourse, and they warned that if she ever told, they would kill her or other members of her family. So she was raped vaginally, orally, anally, and she kept the secret to save herself and others. Her mother never knew a thing.

The Press could not find any records of criminal charges involving children for either her grandfather or her father in the state of Texas. Her father, who now resides in a different state, was charged in 2006 for aggravated assault and ultimately received probation. The victim was not a minor. (Both men declined to comment for this story).

Rachel says the ceremonies took place in her grandfather's house, or in the woods behind it, in cemeteries and mysterious buildings. Cult members wore flowing robes of black and red, the children white. They lit fires and chanted in a foreign tongue. Their high holidays fell on the same days as Christian celebrations, only theirs were, of course, for unimaginable evil.

Rachel pauses and lets out a deep breath.

"I'm trying to stay here," she says, and the room is silent for a time.

Write Your Comment show comments (7)

  1. "DO YOU HAVE MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER?"
    Is this con still making the rounds? I would have thought this dropped out of sight like all those people who claim to have had anal probes aboard flying saucers, or the Salem witchcraft trials.

    This nonsense started about 30 years ago with the publication of a book titled MICHELLE REMEMBERS and it's been kept going through the publication of similar fake memoirs.

    Among the common threads in these con artists: Always girls, always betrayed by their parents (almost invariably by both parents), always recruited into cults of Satan worshippers -- never Methodists or even Mormons or Jews, always pregnant young, also always scarred and/or tattooed, always gang-raped every night for several years in a row any by an enormous group that always included the town's leading citizens.

    Always Satanists; you might find bleeding hearts and shrinks who might make find some sort of excuse or mitigation for a child molesters, but add outright Satan worship to the mix and NOBODY will breathe a word in their favor. And not even bashful about Satan worship -- never a (heretical) Christian cult or a make-believe Mayan or Egyptian religion -- always straight for the Ultimate Loser.

    Always pregnant young. Yeah, they've already known morning sickness, and they've already suffered the terrible loss of a child. And always earlier and more vulnerable than anyone you might have already been sympathizing with.

    And always these large Satanic covens that included the town's leading citizens. In daylight these kids may have lived in modest homes, even trailer parks, and been mostly ignored by the cool kids in high school, but, by golly, when that evening sun goes down they're always partying with the elite and tons of them. And it's just astonishing the sexual stamina of the town banker and school principal at their advanced age! Why, it's better than Viagra. And, isn't it amazing, all these movers and shakers never include anyone who's not into young girls -- it turns out, every night of every week, the town's leading interior decorator was (gasp) hetero ... and he liked 'em young.

    An yet nobody ever knew: They supposedly were in orgies every night -- but the high school yearbook shows they were in the cheerleading squad and the Alpha Club and in attendance at every game. They supposedly had scars and tats but nobody else ever noticed even in the shower room. They were even preggers, but nobody caught on - not even doctors who examined them years later. And each one of them was the absolute sexual star of these covens -- no two teenage girls ever shared the enormous parade of gang-rapists at a coven; there's no old high school chum who can come forward to corroborate these stories (nor an older or younger girl who can attest to having been either replaced by or replacing our talkative heroine in the coven's affections). Some of the dozens and dozens of people orgying every night must have had kids at home, but even those kids won't attest to so much as the fact that mom and dad were out every night.

    In other words, these women appear dull and uninteresting now but only a decade or so ago they were really the life of the party, with the town's bestest people, and being, y'know, really decadent.

    In the case of Michelle Remembers, it turned out the purported shrink who was writing this account of an actual case was actually "Michelle's" second husband. Her first husband had courted and married her in high school and no only could he not remember her having any of the scars or tats that she claims the Satanists put all over her body, he says that she was a virgin when they married. It turned out that backtracking her real life showed she was an honor student and very active in sports and afterschool events, even when she claimed she was continuously partying at drug-soaked orgies. And, although her narrative suggested that she spent her pre-teenage and teenage years as the sex goddess of one cover, her family actually changed towns a couple of times. In none of those towns - either before, during or after her purported sex slave careers there - was there even any evidence, or even rumor, of orgies, satanism or human sacrifices.

    Two books of the early 1990s, Trance Formation and Thanks for the Memories, pretend to be the memoirs of two former secret CIA-Illuminati sex slaves. One of them claims that she was used to sexually bribe major school board administrators into adopting some sort of liberal agenda; amazing - not a single one of those educational bureaucrats was gay, faithful to his wife, or a woman. The other claims to have been used to, uumm, "reward" members of an enormous political conspiracy that included Henry Kissinger, Bod Hope, and - wait for it - Kris Kristofferson. Her more recent photos don't make her look like much, but it would seem that back in the 1980s she was exactly what Everyone wanted at the other end of their favorite body part.

    Even now people laying claim to these exciting pasts as clandestine sex stars have formed their own networks and conventions. Odd that none of them seem to have crossed paths while in the business. Odder still that none has a story that corroborates another story. And the announcement for such conventions emphasizes that these sexual veterans who are more than willing to tell (often for money) how many people - and especially how many important people - have boinked them are still so terribly fragile that nobody who harbors any doubts about their bona fides or who was ask them any awkward questions will be allowed to attend; this usually keeps out real shrinks and real cops.

    It was at such a convention about fifteen years ago that the Perfect Villian for this craziness was conjured up. A Utah hypnotherapist, Corydon Hammond, gave a lecture (transcript and audio available on several websites) to the effect that all this child molesting was not at the result of an occasional and individualistic perversion -- nope, you had to have a membership card because ALL child molesting was organized and by someone that nobody could love: a supposed "Doctor Green" who had attained a trifecta of being indefensible -- he was, all at the same time, a Jew, a Nazi and a CIA operative. Supposedly the Nazis had recruited this "Greenbaum", then a brilliant teenage Hassidic Jew, with an enormous grasp of the Kaballah, and kept him alive to run experiments in an unnamed concentration camp on the sexual urges of untermenschen of very tender years. This Hassidic Jew who supposedly read Hebrew and Aramaic and also spoke German, used the Greek alphabet to give his posthypnotic orders to the very young (Jewish) children who were his living guinea pigs. And, nowadays, there's virtually no freelance pedophilia going on, it's all linked to this "Doctor Green". That no book on the history of Hassidic Judaism mentions a family named Greenbaum or anything close to it, that no Holocaust survivor has come forward with any supporting story, that the U.S. Holocaust Museum (and similar institutions around the world) has detailed diagrams of every concentration camp and absolutely no evidence that anyone anywhere was doing anything like what Hammond descried, that he couldn't find a single supportive line in authentic Kaballah for any of this, meant nothing to Hammond, who assured his audience that if you didn't believe this crazy story you were "either ignorant or dirty". For some reason Hammond has not further elaborated on this nonsense but his one lecture has taken on a life of its own.

    I am amazed that this crap is still going strong.

    Sincerely, Bernard J. Sussman, Potomac, MD 20854

    Comment by Bernard Sussman — April 20, 2008 @ 05:52AM

  2. "People live in fear of discrimination and, consequently hide their sexual orientation, hide their families, their children and their lifestyle as a result," Johnson said. "I believe it will positively impact the health of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gendered community". So I think we should give GLBT more support and understanding. Or GLBT may want to try biloves.com to release them and come out here totally.

    Comment by selly — April 20, 2008 @ 08:06AM

  3. This article mentions extreme situations that contribute to people disbelieving that DID exists. I'm not saying that these extremes do not exist, but DID happens without cults too. It is very common where there is severe child abuse which starts when a child is less than six years old. If you want to know how a child of age 3 copes with chronic sexual abuse by an adult, it is not difficult to understand that the child must go inside his/her head and disappear. I have met others with this (dis)order, which is a creative coping skill, and everything looks fine on the outside, but on the inside there is trouble. When an experienced therapist comes into ones shattered life, then the pain that has been hidden for so long comes out. Nobody can make this up. In fact most everyone with it does not want to believe it themselves. Society knows that there are perps that prey on young children, but when they grow up to become adults, noone wants to believe!

    Comment by Sherry — April 22, 2008 @ 11:05AM

  4. As a follow-up to my original comment (nr. 1) ...
    The Michelle Remembers and several other bogus SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) stories were debunked some years ago by the Chicago-based religious magazine, Cornerstone. In that particular case and some others, Cornerstone managed to find that not only was the family not quite as pictured in the fake memoirs, but there were siblings -- not mentioned at all in the memoirs -- who seemed perfectly normal and energetically denied just about every part of the published narrative. The family photo album tended to be very persuasive.
    The people making these claims are going for oneupmanship against everyone who's life wasn't picture book perfect: Your parents were mean; mine were serial murders. Your uncle once touched you inappropriately; my parents had me raped - gang raped - night after night for years on end. You knew your town's mayor; I knew my town's mayor, banker, police chief, etc., - biblically. Your family was dysfunctional; mine were Devil Worshippers.

    In many instances, the people (almost all women) making these claims are making a good living running their traveling one-woman sideshows to churches in small towns and occasional police department workshops (although there's a story that one of these women ran out the back door when a cop in the audience actually started asking questions about the purported human sacrifices that indicated he was willing to go out an arrest someone), selling their books on the side.

    Comment by Bernard Sussman — April 22, 2008 @ 01:04PM

  5. I totally agree that there is a reality which includes SRA, but it's not limited to this. Look up "MK-ULTRA" and see if there isn't something interesting there. It was touched upon a bit in this article.

    To the first commenter: you sound like a professional disinformation artist.

    Comment by MK — April 25, 2008 @ 07:07AM

  6. Thank you, B. Sussman, for pointing out some of the absolutely outrageous stuff that these folks claim. It's amazing how, no matter what community they grew up in, they have exactly the same story to tell about alleged Satanic abuse. Of course, the police never caught any of these gatherings -- they were in on it! etc. It reminds me a lot of the great book "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti," in which a psychiatrist moved three men with delusions of being Christ to the same facility to see whether two would have their delusions disappear. Actually, all three had their delusions get STRONGER -- they believed that the other two were imitating them.

    The sad thing is, I don't think the patients are making anything up -- they really do seem to feel that this happened to them. And, as you point out, the couple of them I've met seem to be quite ordinary people, susceptible to something that would make them feel special & set apart from others, even if that something were bad. Of course, when anyone tries to look into the validity of the therapeutic backgrounds of the therapists who foment this mess, they claim to be the only ones who really care about their patients and that they are being persecuted by authorities who don't want anyone to know. Really, really sad stuff.

    Comment by Ellen — April 27, 2008 @ 10:05AM

  7. In the interests of accuracy and honesty, I had confused in my memory the story of "Michelle Remembers", with the true story behind Lauren Stratford, who made a chunk of money telling a very similar saga. See [b][url]http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss090/sideshow.htm [/url][/b]. But Michelle Remembers has been debunked in different ways, to the point where the author no longer claims that any of the events described actually occurred.

    Cornerstone Magazine, a religious quarterly (approximately), published out of Chicago, has carried a number of exposes of several "I was a teenage satanist" memoirs. It turns out, serious investigation of each of these stories show the utter impossibility of the memoir.

    It's a perfect gimmick in dozens of ways: One might feel some tiny bit of concern for a child molester - as a person with a severe psychiatric problem - but not if we also add that he is a devotee of the Bible's Ultimate Loser. Hey, this gimmick worked in Salem.
    It's also an excuse for faithful church goers to hear (and share) sex stories.

    Comment by Bernard Sussman — May 2, 2008 @ 06:17PM

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