cults

Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed" has been implanted by rape.Ch29, p324

The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face-- I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy.

Persons Are Turned against Themselves Evil also turns a person against herself so that self is used against self. The case of the woman who received a dismissal letter from her pastor comes to mind again. The psychological decompensation she suffered was successfully used by her husband to intercede with a psychiatrist of his choosing to commit her to the mental unit of a hospital for an extended involuntary stay, which further worsened her condition. Additional examples abound. Some patients report cults using induced hypnotic states to encourage a subject's dissociated hands and arms to do something hurtful to someone else. In such cases, the subject is encouraged to watch the hand that is hers but not hers (because it is dissociated from her). The end result is often extreme guilt. self-loathing, and distrust of one's self and motives.An incestuous parent may use a child's own natural bodily responses to repeated sexual stimulation to make the point that the child really "wants and enjoys_ what is being forced upon her.

These hapless livers were probably not always mere myths, and these legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush or the rose were no idle poetic emblem of youth and beauty fleeting as the Summer flowers.

Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in.

The temple of truth has never suffered so much from woodpeckers on the outside as from termites within.

In sum, doubling is the psychological means by which one invokes the evil potential of the self. That evil is neither inherent in the self nor foreign to it. To live out the doubling and call forth the evil is a moral choice for which one is responsible, whatever the level of consciousness involved.

Those of us who work in the field of trauma and abuse, whether psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, doctors, counselors, or psychotherapists, have been provided with beautiful tools for understanding the impact of trauma. We become adept at understanding the dynamic of why the messenger is always shot and broadcast the Bionic insight of why the visionary is not bearable to the group.However, when it comes to military mind control, abuse within religious belief groups or cults, and deliberately created dissociative identity disorder, we enter the least resourced field of all.

Because the problem of ritual abuse and mind control has not gone away - the survivors are still there - many more therapists have learnt about it. Survivors have spoken out and written their stories, and therapists have learnt a great deal from those brave survivors who have discovered what was done to them. There is a large special interest group on Ritual Abuse and Mind Control within the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. Those therapists who have learnt in isolation or in small private online forums are once again sharing their knowledge widely, and books such as this one are beginning to be published again. The work is still very difficult and challenging, but we now know so much more than we did. We know that there is not one massive Satanic cult, but many different interrelated groups, including religious, military/political, and organized crime, using mind control on children and adult survivors. We know that there are effective treatments. We know that many of the paralyzing beliefs our clients lived by are the results of lies and tricks perpetrated by their abusers. And we know that, as therapists, we can combat this evil with wise and compassionate therapy.

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

The basic religious idea in all patriarchal religions is the negation of the sexual needs. Only in very primitive religions were religiosity and sexuality identical. When social organization passed from matriarchy to patriarchy and class society, the unity of religious and sexual cult underwent a split; the religious cult became the antithesis of the sexual. With that, the cult of sexuality went out of existence. It was replaced by the brothel, pornography and backstairs-sexuality. It goes without saying that when sexual experiences ceased to be one with the religious cults, when, instead, they became antithetical to them, religious excitation assumed a new function: that of being a substitute for the lost sexual pleasure, now no longer affirmed by society. Only this contradiction inherent in religious excitation makes the strength and the tenacity of the religions understandable: the contradiction of its being at one and the same time antisexual and a substitute for sexuality.

The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of __aedophilia_. Psychopathology alone is an inadequate explanation for environments in which sexual abuse has a social and symbolic function for groups of adults. Abusive groups do not emerge in a vacuum but rather they are formed within pre-existing social arrangements such as families, churches and schools.

Some churches, sects, cults or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.

Some churches, sects, cults, or religious movements are basically collective egoic entities, as rigidly identified with their mental positions as the followers of any political ideology that is closed to any alternative interpretation of reality.

How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life? We might, as a society, slowly find it possible to accept that one in four citizens are likely to have experience some form of emotional, psychical, sexual or spiritual abuse (McQueen, Itzin, Kennedy, Sinason, & Maxted, 2008), in itself a figure unimaginable and hidden twenty years ago. However, accepting the way a hurt and hurting parent or stranger re-enacts their disturbance with a vulnerable child or children remains far easier to digest than to consider the intellectually planned, scientific, methodical, procedures of organized child-abusing perpetrators-in other words, torture.

Since the 1980s, therapists have reported encountering clients or patients who had experienced extreme abuses featuring physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive aspects, along with a premeditated structure of torture-enforced lessons. The phenomena was first labeled "ritual abuse," and, later, as our understanding developed, "mind control.

Mind control is built on lies and manipulation of attachment needs.Valerie Sinason, (Forward)

The desire to experience new kinds of community led a number of thoughtful and idealistic people to reject the patterns of vocation, family life and religion with which they had grown up. Their attempt to establish new patterns of social bonding in uncontaminated rural retreats can be seen as a secular monasticism, but they often discovered that to abolish the boundaries of authority, family and property created a whole series of problems which they did not have the spiritual and personal resources to solve.At their best, such groups have opened up new horizons of discipleship, but they have often learned some hard lessons about the intractable sinfulness and selfishness of partly-redeemed human nature.