Wayne Morris:
Welcome to the International Connection. This is Week 16 in the radio series on Mind Control, and to summarize what we have heard so far, we have had heard several shows laying the foundation of the documented reality of U.S. and Canadian government-sponsored mind control. We have also heard the accounts of survivors such as Claudia Mullen, Chris Denicola Ebner and Ronald Howard Cohen. Claudia Mullen is alleging that CIA doctors such as Martin Orne, Sidney Gottlieb and L. Wilson Greene experimented on her in childhood using drugs, hypnosis, sleep and sensory deprivation, radiation and physical and sexual and emotional abuse. Claudia is also alleging that Canadian doctor, Ewen Cameron, from McGill University in Montreal was involved in mind control experiments on children as an electroshock consultant to the CIA, shocking the child victims after experiments by the CIA to make them forget. Claudia has also told of being used as a mind control sex slave for the US government, being set up in situations as a child with military brass, politicians and other officials while the CIA videotaped them for blackmail and coercion purposes. We have heard the historic testimony at the Presidential Hearing on Radiation Experiments in 1995. The final report of those hearings included recommendations to declassify all information related to mind control experimental programs.
Today we are going to hear a presentation by Valerie Wolf, given at the Believe the Children Conference in Chicago in April, 1997 entitled Assessment and Treatment of Survivors of Sadistic Abuse. Valerie Wolf is the therapist of Claudia Mullen and Chris Denicola Ebner, both of whom gave testimony at the Radiation hearings. In this presentation, Valerie talks about her approaches in helping to heal mind control survivors and the techniques used by the CIA to control their victims. This program, which continues next week, is of particular interest to the therapy community that are dealing with survivors of mind control, ritual abuse and trauma. And just to explain a term that Valerie uses at the beginning of this, she refers to EMDR and that means Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing which is one therapy technique. And now, Valerie Wolf.
Valerie Wolf:
I am going to talk today about the treatment of mind control. I am going to start with grounding us with good therapy practice in terms of the model of treatment which is now called stage oriented trauma treatment which is becoming a standard of practice for trauma therapists. The way I work with mind control, I think is different than some of the approaches I have been hearing about. When I first heard about this in June of 1992, and started working with it in September, 1992 I essentially worked in isolation, totally by myself. I had nobody to talk to except my clients until we testified in Washington in March of 1995 and then the world opened up. Up until that point, I had worked pretty much alone with mind control and a lot of SRA clients. I sort of developed it out of what I knew, which is the therapy model. I have spent the last couple of years trying to figure what it is I was doing because what I am finding is that my clients are getting better. I have several clients who are through the process, and all of my other clients are just absolutely phenomenally better. I have also been providing consultation for some therapists, brief consultation with some therapists in Louisiana and across the country, and when they apply the kinds of things that I am going to tell you today, they have the same kind of success with this extremely difficult population. We are going to start with assessment, and I am going to talk about assessment in terms of mind control and as an ongoing process. Always you are making assessments about what is going on with your client. And then second stage safety and stabilization - this is really 80% of the treatment. Then trauma metabolism (which is the memory work) and then trauma resolution. When I get finished with this, I will talk specifically about treatment of mind control and how I conceptualize it in a way that makes treatment effective.
In assessment you do standard intake procedures. You want to know what is the thing that brought the client into treatment. Recently I did a consultation for a psychiatrist, and a woman came in to my office and I was asking her what it was, why she was coming, and the psychiatrist wanted me to use EMDR because I am trained in doing EMDR. You cannot use EMDR very well with mind control clients. She said she was here because she had a fear of doctors, and going to doctors' offices. I pursued this a little bit, and we got into talking about some of the things doctors did. She had some memories of doctors hurting her, and as I began to enquire more and more, this woman turned out to have mind control. One of the things you want to look at are current symptoms and functioning, and that is really important in terms of any kind of sex abuse. You know, most of the clients come in with depression or anxiety or some kind of behaviour, suicidal symptoms.
One of the primary things I look at when clients come in are the primary relationships because I know that however a client has related to parents or significant others in their lives, that's how they are going to relate to me. That's a real clue. Also, if there was a nurturing person somewhere in their background - because one of the things I am assessing for all the time, and understand that I get really difficult people referred to me, I have always ended up with clients that no one else wanted to treat - which is I guess how I kind of stumbled into this area. But I know if I explore previous relationships with other therapists, I am not so arrogant as to think I am going to do any better. I know the same things are going to come up with me, and I am prepared for it. The other thing I will look for is an ability to attach, and this is so important in this client population, and that's beginning to come out in the literature because if you are going to be involved in a long, prolonged, deep therapy relationship -- and if people are going to be able to sustain the kinds of work that they are going to have to do, they have to have the ability to attach. And I have to feel the attachment as well, and that is the thing, the connection that sustains the therapeutic relationship through a lot of really, really difficult work and I have had clients who are unable to attach and basically what I have done is referred them on to another therapist, but that is a very, very important thing and what you find is that a lot of these clients, can, for whatever reason ... even though they have had horrible horrible abuse throughout their lives, and cannot identify anybody in their background, there is a drive with children to attach to people and sometimes even the attachment to the perpetrator -- even though they would get abused -- even the attachment to the perpetrator can serve as a positive thing. If you can attach, it makes things easier in terms of jobs, making relationships with people and so I am really emphasizing that because I find that is probably the single best predictor of good outcome in therapy, is that ability to attach, and forming the therapeutic alliance.
I want to look at addiction issues and I am going to do this real quick. What I am giving you is a workshop that I did in seven hours two weeks ago. Addiction. Victimization as adults. We know that when people have been sexually abused and abused as children and if there is severe sadistic ritual abuse or mind control, that they tend to be re-victimized as adults. You don't often get told about that, so you need to enquire about it. Ask them if they are crime victims. That is not something that we standardly ask people, but it is also important, because that's another part of victimization. What some of my clients say that what has happened to them is crime, and they are crime victims, which is true. Any other trauma that has happened ... like death, divorce, and how they managed those because that also gives you a clue as to how the therapy is going to go. Whether they have committed crimes - and again, this is ongoing - but again, sometimes what I have found is that some of my clients identified as victims have in fact perpetrated with children that they have babysat in adolescence or they have done shoplifting or they have done other things, and that is a source of deep shame. You really want to know about those things at some point in the therapy in order to help them work through that. Their legal history -- and unfortunately in this day and age -- we have to be aware of lawsuits -- whether they have a current lawsuit -- or a previous lawsuit. This isn't just lawsuits against therapists, but any kind of lawsuit like for an accident, or whatever, because the litigation process produces certain kinds of effects and if they ever decide themselves, and the therapist should never suggest a lawsuit -- but if they should ever decide to go through one -- sometimes their experience with a previous lawsuit will determine that -- or they may have access to the information. It is important for you to know and to document if they have been through a lawsuit before.
If there is suicidal ideation -- self mutilation, self destructive behaviors -- a lot of this is hidden. People, if they are cutting, will cut on the inside of their thighs or parts of their body that you can't see. In fact how I started really treating mind control specifically is, I had a client who had carved an upside down cross in her chest and she had all the earmarks of what I had been told about and I thought, "well I guess I had better try this" because she was headed for the hospital. One of the ways that you can pick up on this is if you begin to think if you have a mind control victim or sadistic ritual abuse victim or survivor ... is that if you get "I have to die, I have to die, I have to die", compulsive behaviors, compulsive thoughts of suicide, compulsive thoughts of self destruction -- and on the other hand they are lucidly saying to you I don't understand why I am thinking this, because I really don't want to die. I don't understand why I am doing these behaviors but it's like something comes over me and I just have to follow through with it -- when I hear that kind of compulsive/compulsion kind of stuff, then I begin thinking about maybe that's what we have here. You want to look at their current support system and this is really important, because if they have a current support system, then that means there is not going to be so much pressure on me as a therapist to provide that support system. What I want to do is have another set of either friends, spouse, somebody who is out there, so that everything isn't dependent on me in therapy. Unfortunately one of the things that happens is that as people get better in therapy, they realize -- and this is a real loss issue -- that many of their friends were picked out of their dysfunction. In fact I have a client who is going through this right now, and she has basically dropped all of her friends that she thought were her really good friends because the kinds of relationships she had were, she was the helper, always doing stuff, always at her friends' beck and call, and they were extremely narcisstic and demanding. Now that she is healthier, and she is a mind control victim, now that she is healthier and she can see this, she is extremely lonely and she's beginning to build new and healthier relationships. So even the best laid plans in terms of building a support system, don't always endure. You need to be aware that's going to happen sometime down the road.
Knowledge of memory and trauma. You want to ask what do they know, and if someone is coming in with memories or at the point at which they start remembering things, or revealing things to you that they were abused, you want to find out and document what have they heard in the media, what have they read, what do they know, who have they talked to? And document this. You want to know what their impressions are about memory and their information. This is really important because if people are reading books and whatever, doesn't necessarily mean that's causing the memory, it could be triggering memories, but you always want to begin developing a list of triggers. So not only for protection in terms of educating them about memory work, and memories, and what goes on in therapy, but also because you want to begin to identify triggers and there are a lot of triggers in the media. It is really important for you to begin to take note of that. Then you ask is there anything else significant in your life that you want me to know? This is a question we sometimes don't ask. I remember a very long time ago, I had a woman in therapy, she was a survivor, and we got to the end of therapy, the very last session, it was planned, and all of a sudden in the session, she revealed to me that she had an abortion when she was 19. I am sitting there thinking, what do I do now? She went into an intense abreaction of the event, and so what I did was I re-framed it into thank you so much, what a gift that you have shared this with me, and she informed me that's all I needed to do. I just needed to tell you, I needed to remember, I am fine with it now. And she really was. But I have now started asking for that information a little bit earlier more for my comfort, so that I don't get surprised at the end of therapy with something. But there may be things that they are not telling you. Again, this is an ongoing thing -- all these questions, always thinking about.
Another part of the assessment is -- if you are assessing and have started getting the compulsive ideation, the message kinds of stuff -- you want to assess also the kinds of things they are telling you as a therapist. One of my clients whom I had for about two and a half years -- I had no idea there was any mind control in her back ground -- all of a sudden one day she came in and lambasted from up one side and down the other. She was really angry with me; no real specified reason -- I was just "in it for the money ... really didn't care about her ... just like every other bad person in her life" -- on and on and on. And that's when I first began thinking about her -- that maybe there was some mind control there, and sure enough there did turn out to be. So what you want to look for are those kinds of flooding messages or therapist messages in terms of picking up ... Another thing you want to do in assessment of a mind control survivor is to look at body pain. There are real specific types of body pain -- headaches specifically around the temples that feel like electric shock; body pains all over the body; pain in the mouth and teeth; pain in the face and the jaw; pain in the ears. Or like one of my clients was talking about -- always hearing a radio just below the threshhold of hearing. What that is is where they put a recorder in the ear -- in the right ear in order to disable (this is the theory) -- in the left ear they would put pain or a sound. In the left ear to go into the right brain which is known for reasoning, the creative part of you, they would put messages. They would be for example -- "you have to die". One of my clients had this whole elaborate set of ritual abuse instructions -- "in the full moon, in the third day of September, you have to go and get blood, and drink blood and put needles in your arm" -- and sure enough we found that, cyclically, she was putting pins in her arm at certain times of the year and they were actual messages. What you find is that kind of -- things in your ear, being choked -- other kinds of body pain. A lot of these clients have been to doctors, many many doctors with exploratory surgeries and other kinds of surgeries that find nothing because some of the symptoms mimic other diseases. With the mind control survivors and the SRA survivors, I find the body pain is more serious than with people that don't have those kinds of histories. You want to go through -- whether there is pain in the tips of their fingers sometimes. Or, how are they sleeping at night? Mind control survivors tend to wake up every two hours or on some schedule of waking up at night, like every hour or every two hours and I will talk about why that is. Those are the kinds of things that you begin to hear.
When I begin to hear those kinds of things, and some of the symptoms, one of the questions I will ask is, "if there were a doctor involved in your abuse and his name were a colour, what would that be?" Typically what you get is red, black and then green. If you get Dr. Green, it's Dr. Green and every survivor I have talked to will tell you Dr. Green. They may also give you a bunch of other colours and then at the end they will say, "okay, green" or I had one client, the one who came in and lambasted me that day, and I started asking those questions -- six months later she came into therapy and said "well, all right I am ready to talk about it now, it was Dr. Green and I knew that's who you were asking about, but we weren't ready to deal with it yet." So -- that's one thing that you can ask. You can also begin to ask more specifically, depending on what they are telling you. And the approach I have used is I have really listened to my clients -- really listened to them. They direct the treatment. In the assessment phase, when we are making the contracts about how we are going to work in therapy, my contract with my clients is that they are responsible for their therapy, that I don't know specifically what happened. They have to give me information in order for us to work together. My part of the contract is to make sure that they are safe, to help them design interventions to deal with whatever it is, and to be supportive, and to remember. I have a very good verbal memory, I remember everything I am told ... so we can make connections to things that otherwise they wouldn't be able to make. That's my part of it. Their part is to talk or draw -- because not all people can communicate verbally and if you think of the mind control where everything is right brain, and with people who are DID -- what you are getting is a lot of right brain communication. They don't tell you directly what is going on -- they drop a lot of clues. In fact one of my clients describes it as "the game of Clue" - "Colonel Mustard did it with the knife in the study" and with her, that is exactly what it is like. I have to help her put it together. You have a lot of right brain, a lot of hypnotic trance communication, which is different than logical conscious communication. Trance logic - (a) does not go to (b) does not go to (c) - and you have to understand that something you are being told does not make sense to you but it may make sense to the person telling you.
My contract is -- basically my clients tell me what to do. I don't direct the therapy except to keep them safe. If somebody is cutting themself, mutilating -- I jump up and down -- and sometimes I get really angry and we deal with that, and I will tell you another way of dealing with that that works really well later. If you get nothing else from this -- and I hear from people all over the country -- and the most common complaint I hear about therapists all over the country is "my therapist doesn't listen to me, my therapist is telling me that I am resistant, that I am uncooperative, that I am not following the program" -- well that tells me that the therapist is directing the treatment and in the case of mind control and SRA, I firmly believe with all of my clients they know what to do to heal and I have never been disappointed about that. I listen. And if you get nothing else from this, this is really important. In fact I was talking to a woman the other day who was looking for a therapist and what she had done is she has always gone in logically, left brain and picked a therapist who was experienced, and knew stuff, and whatever -- and I suggested to her (she is DID) -- why don't you let your system pick the next therapist? She left me a message and said an hour later, this name floated to the top of her mind and she went to a therapist that she thought was really intuitive, and she realized that she had been picking people with the left brain, and she needed someone who could intuitively hear who was also able to understand right brain communication.
I also think it is really important to do a differential diagnosis. These are some of the typical diagnoses that get attached to our clients -- one that I have found common -- obsessive compulsive disorder. I will give you an example of that. I had a client, had been seeing her for a while, had been treating her for OCD -- she came in and said "omigod, I had a nightmare last night that my father sexually abused me". There was nothing in her history or her behavior to indicate that was the case, and we did some very careful questions -- I asked her what is that connected to in your past ... what she remembered was that when she was 13, she picked up an article in the newspaper and it was an article about a child being sexually abused, and her thought went to "omigod what if my dad does that to me?" and she started imagining what it would be like, and her anxiety went way up, and she started ritualizing it, but she never metabolized it. This thought had been ritualized, and every time it came up or she got triggered, she would start ritualizing this imaginary act. When she realized she had read the article, and what happened, then the anxiety went down and she realized she had not been sexually abused. I think a really good differential diagnosis is good.
Borderline Personality Disorder I consider to be a perfect description of survivor behavior. If you look in the DSM what you will see is everything we talke about is characteristics of sexual abuse. When I treat it like that it's much easier, I don't get frustrated with all this "borderline" behavior.
Q. from audience ("Can you give us a simple explanation of all of these things?" [slide content]
Valerie Wolf:
Okay. Paranoid is when you think someone is out to get you. Schizoid means that you absolutely do not react to anything and it could be a dissociative response. Schizotypal is another type of disorder where you don't react to stuff, you don't have relationships, not a lot of feeling. Antisocial is people who commit crimes, who have very little feeling or affect and basically are out for their own good. Borderline, as I said, are people who are shallow, frequently move from relationship to relationship, have very intense relationships with the therapist but really fear intimacy. Histrionic is someone who is hysterical and emoting all over the place, but again that can be a dissociative response. Narcissistic -- what I have found is that a lot of survivors can look very narcissistic and that means very self-centered and everything is for them. I had one client, who, every time she went to see her psychiatrist, her psychiatrist said to me, "where the hell are you in this therapy?" And what had happened was she would go in and tell him all these things that were going on in therapy -- now I was working my butt, she was mind control, but it was like I didn't exist and she came across as extremely narcissistic. When we got to the bottom of this, what it turned out was -- she had a lot of suicidal programming and a lot of body pain -- was that, she was so focused on her survival and what she needed to stay alive she had no energy or room for focusing on others and that happens with our clients. Now that she is through the process, she is not narcissistic at all. What I also cautiion about is if you are looking at narcissistic behavior, check to see if maybe there is a deep-rooted survival thing going on there, because if people are surviving, you better believe they are narcissistic because that's all that exists if it is basic survival. Avoidant is avoiding people. Dependent is dependent on others, not being able to make decisions. This could be one of the things you see with mind control -- a lot of my clients are still very dependent on their perpetrators, still dependent on a lot of other people in their lives, can't imagine making decisions on their own and a large part of the treatment process is teaching people they have choices. They can make decisions. But they will fight me on it. Obsessive compulsive is when people do rituals -- like the handwashing -- but it can be more subtle than that -- counting in your head. I have a mind control survivor who counts in her head but is not Obsessive Compulsive -- it's a memory. They made her count backwards or forwards every time they put her in trance. Whenever she switches, she counts forwards or backwards.
She read something about Obsessive Compulsive Disorders and she came in saying, "I'm obsessive compulsive". She is not. Passive Aggressive is by inaction, making other people mad, and being aggressive by not doing anything, sitting like a lump. Some of these kids in the mind control experiments -- I have two that were dropped at the age of six and seven -- and the reason was because they became very passive aggressive. They still have some of a lot of the problems because they did a lot to shut them down, but one way of fighting "them" is to comply but not really, okay? I have one client that pretended she was stupid - "I don't understand what you what me to do" - and no matter what they did to her, she never "understood" what they wanted her to do. Ways of fighting, that's passive aggressive behaviors. But again, this is survival sometimes for mind control survivors.
Eating disorders are very common - anorexia (not eating), bulemia (throwing up) and as part of the mind control, they actually tried to deliberately induce eating disorders. I have clients on both ends - both anorexic and overeating. They really messed with that. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - again intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, stress where the trauma keeps intruding on the current life. Dissociative Disorders - there is a whole continuum of dissociative disorders from PTSD where you can just kind of go numb for an event or something that is happening to what is called NOS or DID Not Otherwise Specified - and there is a continuum here that I am seeing where people who have ego states or feelings that they split because they couldn't feel the feelings when they were being abused - but there are also people who are not quite as fully developed as someone with full blown DID - what you have is the parts inside may have names but they don't take over the body in the same way. The core birth personality is conscious. What the parts do is blend - because parts can blend. And that's a lot of what we see in terms of behavior - parts blending, parts that have jobs. But a lot of the clients that I see with mind control are not full blown DID; some of them are what we would call "fuzzy DID" because it's not real clear; it's not discrete states however there are more fragments holding memories and feelings.
I am going to talk to you really quickly about DID. I am just going to tell you, I am not going to go through all this. I am going to tell you how I understand DID, because if you are working with mind control or DDNOS, this is what my clients have told me, this is what I have heard. And I have talked with some of the survivors here, and they tell me that I really understand so ... I am going to pass this on. First of all you have the core birth personality - this is generally the part that is the age of the body. It is the part, that if all the parts were to integrate that's who they would integrate with. The Core Birth Personality is not that baby inside who did not develop. It is actually the one that is the age of the body. It is really important that you know who the core birth personality is in a DID system because that's who you have to work through - that's who has to get the memories back. That's who has to construct a safe place and do the work because if the core birth personality doesn't do it, it won't stick and why is that? The reason is that all of the alters, or the parts, or the kids in this system were created by the core birth personality -- kids do not, or parts do not, create parts. The core birth personality creates every single part and they are created to have a job. Their primary job is to protect the core birth personality to allow that core birth personality to grow and develop and be able to function while they take the pain, or the trauma, or the feelings, or whatever. The core birth personality is really the central part of the system.
If you have the concept that every part has a job, and they do -- that means there are no perpetrator alters, and this is so important. What happens is, even if an alter comes out and cuts, they think they are doing their job and protecting their core birth personality, no matter what the behavior. The answer to them is "you did a wonderful job, too good a job, but a wonderful job. Now you finished that job, you have done it so well, you don't have to do it any more, now you can have another job." And they will take new jobs. It's a re-frame, but it works. And this you can get through. Sometimes I get upset because I try to get through to the system "no hurting the body". We do talk a lot about that, but if you conceive of it as a job, then you can praise them and give them A+'s and they can graduate to the next level and this really works. Also, it doesn't matter what behaviors they are doing. This is in any DID system. In mind control, the researchers knew about these parts and gave them jobs. The jobs they were given were calling them, keeping in contact for later. They also had jobs to carry out -- whatever their job was -- if it was a sexual job, or a courier, or an assassin -- but they were taught and given specific jobs. Again, it is the same response. "You have done a good job." And a lot of times they are really willing -- a lot of times they are really relieved.
Sometimes you have parts that mimic perpetrators. There are a lot of Dr. Green parts. They are so relieved. How do you get them convinced that they are not the real perpetrator? All I do is say, "think back - and what position are you in? Are you being hurt or are you hurting?" And they think about it, and all of a sudden get crying, and say "I'm being hurt." You can't be the perpetrator. It's a really quick way of turning somebody and then they take another name and go inside or go to the safe place and whatever. These are the concepts I work with that have been very useful for me, and they also work with regular DID clients. I think this is real important for you to understand.
Safety and Containment/Stabilization. This is the majority of the treatment. Again, working on establishing the therapeutic relationship -- with DID you have to continuously establish a therapeutic relationship as you get different parts of the system.
Developing an Internal Safe Place. This is really important, and this is a central piece of containment for mind control, and also DID and severely abused people. Basically, we will start with talking about a safe place. What do you do when someone says there is no safe place? My answer to that is, aw c'mon ... there is a secret place inside that nobody knows about and nobody can get to, that's the place I'm talking about. And you get this little grin, and yeah, you're right. If the word "safe" isn't good, because sometimes they are told there is no safe place ... then the word "secret" place can be used. There are certain elements that need to be in this safe place. It needs to be inaccessible by anybody, including me. I give suggestions for elements -- find out what is there, find out what makes it safe, where it is (mountains, clouds, etc). If they don't have one I will ask them where they want. But they need to clear where - even if they have an already established safe place, because a lot of people do - you have to clear a football size field around and I ask them to place walls of water light around the outside - water light that nobody can get through and makes it invisible. The reason why you want the football size field is so you can see if anybody is coming. Then you want to construct a building, a shelter of some kind in the centre, and in the shelter there needs to be a swimming pool or a healing pool. For some people they want it partly inside the house, and partly outside. This is incredibly important for mind control. Did you know that water dissolves the crap off their bodies? And I said that to one of my clients and she said, "oh, that's why they didn't want us to cry" and so I use that now. Water will wash off and dissolve -- because it did -- if there are electrodes and there is gunk put on you what did they wash it off with? Water. Water washes the stuff off. There is an association there.
The other thing that is useful for some people is if you have microwaves ... to have some of these mechanical things, the robots. Actually what they did is they took kids and packed them inside these big things that looked like robots and put them inside and did all kinds of things to make the core create parts (they don't create parts, the core does) and then what you do is, if you encounter one of these contrivances, you can disable it with microwaves and there is a switch on it somewhere, disable the switch, take off its head, get all the kids out of there. They will show up in the safe place sometimes. You also want to have a nursery for the very little ones with cribs. You want to have food, you want to have toys, and you want to have an infirmary because there are going to be kids that you are going to be uncovering that are absolutely wrecked that need to be healed. They need to be helped. You have helper alters inside, and I am sorry, I am going to use the word "alters" - I know some people don't like that. But they have helper alters inside that help and take care of the kids as they come up. No doctors and nurses, unless they want them. One of my clients has Beverley Crusher and her Tricord as an interject who comes and runs the tricorder over everybody and heals everybody -- so they can also produce interjects that they know are not -- but it's part of the imagery. They are very very good at imaging.
Grounding techniques basically are based on changing the senses. One of the most effective ones is changing the sense of smell, carrying something with a little bit of perfume that is soothing, or the sense of touch. All my life I have had this sense in my fingers that I think about -- as silky and bumpy. I always think about it when I am in periods of stress. I feel it in my fingers as a body memory. And when my son was born twenty years ago, and I got this baby blanket, it's a chenille baby blanket and I didn't remember what that was. But to get them connected to some kind of touch that is soothing. If they start to go into flashback, to change the senses. It is really important. A client was in the doctor's office and they were running around trying to get her ice, because if you hold ice, it hurts. It's kind of like cutting but it doesn't do any damage -- it is a change of senses. That's why people cut. You can focus on the pain and it gets you away from the emotional pain. Ice will do that and it can be an intermediate step to get people away from self mutilating and self cutting. You want to develop self soothing techniques - bubble baths, favourite blankets, stuffed animals. A lot of these people have stuffed animals and they really feel ashamed about it. I have a chair of stuffed animals, and when I go out of town they become transitional objects some times. People take them home, and it's really good. And people bring me, as parts integrate, parts donate stuffed animals to me as they integrate and they know they are going to have a good home.
Purpose and Function of Self Destructive Thoughts/Behaviors. There is a purpose to that, as I have said. There are lots of reasons why people do that and you need to find out why. Always why? What is the purpose of this behavior? What is the function? With mind control, if it is messages, and you know it is messages, you know they are being flooded and it is based on post-hypnotic suggestions or conditioned responses - what I will do with that kind of thing is I want to cut/you don't have to cut, and I just repeat it. I have to die/you don't have to die/you don't have to die. It make come up during memory work, or it may come up consciously. Another part of this is that if they are lambasting you into this thicket of therapist programming or alienation from others programming (people are bad/this is bad/that's wrong) I will sit there and say, "and what else, and what else, and what else?" And it drives people nuts sometimes; however, it gets you through quickly. It isn't worth interpreting, it isn't worth spending time on. They will let you know. You say, "and what else?" And they will say, "well, you know little kids - a lot of times they just want to tell you something, they don't want you to solve it, or discuss it at length." I have had one child and he would just come in, "Mommy! Mommy!" crying, whatever. He would tell me, then he would be fine, then he would go out. It's the same thing. The "and what else?" is a really helpful way of getting through a lot of messages quickly.
Decreasing and Stopping Self Destructive Thoughts/Behaviors. I have used contracting with this sometimes in terms of it's the core birth personality's responsibility because one of the things I know is that if the core birth personality absolutely does not want something to happen, it will not happen. There is an implicit permission given - and I have talked to a lot of systems about this, and a lot of kids. For example, if someone cancels an appointment and the kids bring her to therapy, it's because she wants to be brought. I have a couple of clients who do that. and they always come. Once or twice they have absolutely said "I can't do that, she really doesn't want to come." They have given me the clue. They do what subconsciously she wants. The core birth personality really does determine, so I contract with the core birth personality and with as many people as possible, but the systems are so complex it is really hard to that, but it really is the core birth personality's responsibility, and that is another concept that is really hard. She is responsible for her own safety, and her own behavior, whether she dies or not. I learned this through hard experience. And I find by taking that stance, yes they will fight you on it, but they know it's right. I can't keep people alive, it would kill me, with all the phone calls, and the hours, and the panic and all the rest of it. I can't, and it's not within my power. That is another concept, of making them responsible, or taking the real responsibility. If they know they are responsible, that's part of beginning to make choices. When you think of mind control, everything was controlled including their lives and the fact whether they stayed alive or they died. By saying "you are in charge of this now" it is a really liberating kind of thing.
I also form a lot of hypotheses. I am always asking questions. Again, I have to get the information from the person sitting in front of me. I don't know. I ask a ton of questions. What is that related to? What is going on? What is the purpose of this? What is the function of this? I hear a set of symptoms - okay what is going on? Who is blending? If the core birth personality comes in and is in all this body pain, I know someone in the system is blending. Who is blending? What you want to teach is that they can step back. This is a containment strategy. They need to learn to step back. They don't have to blend with the core birth personality.
For some people what you can do is have the core birth personality go into the safe place surrounded by light, where nobody can blend with her, not everybody can do that - but that is one way of containing that. Let me just say a little bit about the switching place ... did you know there is a switching place in the head? Every DID NOS person has a place where they switch and the switching place is where the core birth personality is out in the body and an alter stands beside her or him and starts to blend - that's the switching place - it's an actual place. The researchers messed with this big time. You will find bugs in there. Little bugs running around on the floor. We know they were meant to be listening devices. You need to get the bug stomper or someone to get rid of those. Little kids heard the word "bugs" and thought they were real bugs. How you find the switching place is - you have the core birth personality come out into the body and an alter stand either behind or beside her and start to blend. Where the blending takes place is the switching place. In the switching place are cameras, bugs, torture devices, all kinds of stuff. They can clean it out. Bugs, cobwebs, satan, skeletons, whatever. They need to clean that out thoroughly and keep it clean. In the switching place, there are also lots of holes in the floor. Where the holes go to is where the alters stay. The alters stay in a place, and I guess we are calling it a matrix, and basically they started at the age of three with a very simple matrix and the simplest one is a tic tac toe 3-D block and in each of those spaces resides an alter or an alter system. What they would do is each alter was given a number and a name or a letter, and given a designated place where they had to stay. They couldn't talk to each other, they couldn't communicate with anybody, and they had to stay in their rooms. It started like that. There are more complicated ones and I will talk about those. You have this 3 dimensional thing and that's where alters come from. They started with a simple one at about age 3 and by about the age of 12 or 14, it was much more complex. We find kabbalas, which is the kabbalistic tree, the triangle with the lines with the circles. That was an early one, but it is too complicated. There are people who have it but there are alters within the lines and the circles, that's where they live or where they stay. There are decahedrons, giant crystals on each facet. One of my clients that is just a scrambled mess like spaghetti and they suggested to her that it was like spaghetti. You find upside down triangles, you find all kinds of shapes. How they put that in ... they would project an image on a screen, like this, and then they would put electrodes on the face where they wanted them to think it was and move the screen closer and closer and closer while increasing the pain until it disappeared into the head, and that's how they convinced the kids that they had this place inside of them. Now they changed it. Kids changed this. Basically they were told "do not come out of your room, ever". What would happen is these alters or the parts would be tortured, hurt, raped, whatever and then in the middle of that, would go inside to their place in the matrix. So that when they come out, guess what? They come out in the middle of a re-live. Now how do they that? You know those spirals that we used to see on SRA drawings? Those are elevators. They belong in the matrix. They are elevators and they go directly into the switching place. What happens is, somebody is triggered out inside, or they could call them out because they knew their number and they would get on the elevator, spiral up into the switching place. While they are in the switching place, they are right out into the body. Any of those connections - there will be one, two or three -- move away from the switching place into the safe place -- they can move this around. It's a tunnel basically. So you can move it. Basically you put a waterfall over it so they come out into water so it kind of cleans them up and you have a kind of warning system so the helpers -- one of my clients put a computer there with a greeting "greetings ... welcome to so-and-so's system" and it gave time then for the helpers to get there and then what they would do as the alters came out into the safe place -- is take off all the electrodes, whatever was on them, clean them off, get them into the pool, then get them into the safe place. This is a really good containment strategy. Then you don't have people coming up in your face and out into the body doing destructive stuff or uncontrolled flashbacks.
Another part of this is that you will find black holes that come up into the switching place, and again if a black hole appears -- and what a black hole is that either an IV with a slow drip of medication that slowly made them unconscious and they would fade away into nothingness -- and sometimes you get that effect where the core disappears, alters disappear -- it's a memory of that. What you do with black holes is, you fill them in from the bottom. Just fill them in with dirt, cement, whatever. Make sure you get all the alters out - you can't fill it in if there are any alters there - just pull them out. It's happened to me in my office where someone has literally fallen on the floor, being pulled into a black hole, and I just pick them up and pull them out -- pulling you out, pulling you out, opening up everything that needs to be opened, pulling you out, pulling you out, (you can do this over the phone too) until they are out. Or if you are talking to someone on the phone, and they start to fade, they are likely going into a black hole. You fill it up, and pull them out. That's really helpful.
That's a really important containment kind of - this is something that is real different than what we have talked about. That helps with the containment and pacing of flashbacks and memories. Another way I do that is, basically you can, and I do this initially with them in my office -- I give them their twice a day -- in the morning when people are in their showers, washing -- they are to do an inventory. Looking for kids that have come up during the night. Cleaning themselves off. Taking off any electrodes, things out of their ears, and I will literally go up to someone in my office. They will be talking about the radio playing. Let's get that out of there! And I will just put my hands like this, and pull. The reason that works is because at some point, whatever was in their ears [eyes?] got taken out. It fast forwards the memory to the end. Or if the electrodes are on them, and you take them off, at some point they were taken off. Needles - limbs dislocated. I have literally taken someone's arm and just given a little tug to put it back in, and this imagery really works. So they are to do that in the morning ... do a complete body inventory, cleaning out anything in their nose, in their mouth, in their ears, around their necks (sometimes there is stuff choking), anything on their bodies, inside their vaginas, or anything around that area, off their legs, off their fingers and their toes. Because what they would do is put electrodes on the fingers and toes, play the messages at night and shock them awake in the sleep deprivation and keep them awake for days while planting these suggestions in their minds. So you take all that stuff off ... I have them do it. I have this one client who is a very creat ive artist and they wanted to convince her that she couldn't draw. She is now beginning to be able to draw, and she is fifty-three years old and has been very frustrated because she couldn't. She had this thing where her fingers would curl and it was a memory. What we did was ... she learned how to get out of the suit they put her in that would then jerk her fingers down to convince her that she couldn't draw, or that she wasn't creative. Stuff like that.
They will visualize it. Then the helper alters who are coming out of the matrix get all cleaned off, and then they go into the safe place. Sometimes they will go there when they are finished ... and they may, in the process, give their information to the core birth personality. A lot of times what we will do is wait til later because we need to get stuff contained, or we need to get people functional. The do the same thing at night, they do the same thing if they have any kind of body pain or body symptom during the day - what is it? what is going on? Very non-leading. I am not telling them anything. What is going on? And then they clean off whatever it is and that has become a really good way of doing this.
The other thing is ... you need to listen to the client language -- how they describe stuff. Not everybody can talk to you verbally. Some times they have to lie -- it is part of their job. I learned a game with one of my clients. It is called The Game of Opposites for people who have to lie to you. Tell me exactly what you want me to know, and put a Not in the sentence. And so it's the tone of voice - "I ~don't~ want you to know this information" - they are lying to me. They want me to know. Or "it's ~not~ dangerous at all" -- go to that place. Sometimes you can say opposites -- it's not dangerous to go that place or it's too dangerous to go that place -- but it's a way of communicating. I have one client who went through a period where she had to be silent. Two hours she had to come into therapy and not say a word. That was somebody's job. What this part did was brought in (I have a tape recorder) ... spent I don't know how long putting together music on tape to tell me what I needed to know. It was okay. No one said they couldn't play music. It was incredibly creative. I have had people write to me, journal, draw pictures ... all of those are ways of communicating. None of those are accidental. They are always trying to tell you something, and if you don't get it, or you are being stupid, that's okay, they will keep telling you until you get it. Sometimes therapists can be awfully stupid about this stuff ... (laughter) ... I say I know I am being stupid about this and I need a little before I 'get it' ... eventually of course they don't give you any information ... It is really important to catch their language and how they talk about stuff and to just keep asking.
Managing Transference and Counter Transference: Transference does show up. I mean if they had a bad relationship with their mother, that's going to show up with you. If they have a Monster Mom and they want to scream at Monster Mom, guess who gets screamed at? It just goes with the territory. Most of the time I am really patient with it -- sometimes people will hit a button and I will get angry but that's okay because I am modelling appropriate anger. People are amazed I don't immediately fly into a rage and beat them up, but I don't. Very patient. Counter Transference is difficult. Now I am a lot more familiar ... but you can imagine in the beginning when I had no one to talk to ... how difficult this was with all this behavior, all this stuff going on ... I have just learned to hold my breath and to take note of my natural reaction which sometimes was really angry and really upset and thinking "oh what are we doing here? why am I doing this?" on and on and on. Because that's how I am suppo sed to feel and I know that's how I am supposed to feel. And then I would be very patient ... very, very patient because we are going through something really important and a lot of it is somebody has a job to "distance" me or to distance the people in their lives. You really have to manage -- because every single button -- you have to know your transference and counter transference issues. I have a peer support group that has been meeting since about 1982. We know each other really well and we really get into counter transference stuff. You need that. I get confronted all the time. (re: question - counter transference is the feeling the therapist has for the client. You really need that. I really care, and sometimes I care too much and I get confronted about that. What I mean by caring too much -- to the point where I am beginning to get vicarious post traumatic stress, when I am starting to get nightmares, starting to cry, when I am starting to really be affected by the material I a m hearing ... I used my peer group to confront me and they really do a good job of helping me to get grounded. We meet twice a month now. Some of them are starting to do this kind of work too, so we provide a really good support for each other.
Time. Basically I plan sessions with my clients. I don't have unplanned -- it almost never happens now that I know what I am working with here. I plan sessions but they are longer sessions, a minimum of an hour and a half. This is with most of my clients whether they are DID or mind control or not, it takes usually a half hour to get settled down and then we get an hour of work. If we are working on something really intensive, it can take a lot more time -- four hours sometimes, or more. We plan ahead of time what we are going to do and then we stick to the time. Occasionally I have an unstructured time, so I have a Tuesday night where people can rotate in and out of -- if you find that you start on a series of memories and it keeps looping back to the beginning -- what you have is the core birth personality isn't getting the memory. You have an alter doing the memory work. You need to be sure the core birth personality is present, but it means sometimes that you really have to pace the work c arefully, and allow breaks. Don't drive people into the ground. This is really difficult work. But even at this stage, we plan pretty much a lot of times what our sessions are going to be. That's really important. Again, team work ... a concept that is really hard for some of these clients to understand. They get really angry about this teamwork. I have a client right now who left the office on Tuesday basically saying "you're supposed to be asking the questions ... this isn't therapy". She's getting better, but she wants me to take responsibility but I won't. Unfortunately her previous therapist did. Two years of asking questions and dragging stuff out. I am not going to do that because that's not good therapy.
Doing Reality Checks. Reality is really distorted. People can contact me through my machine. I don't wear a beeper. I worked at a psychiatric hospital for two and a half years I don't want to wear a beeper ... I work really hard ... and I am not going to be at anybody's beck and call for 24 hours a day, seven days a week again. It works fine. People can leave as many messages as they want on my machine, I will get back to them. If it is a real emergency, they have my home phone. In the last five years that I have been in private practice, I have been called at home maybe four or five times ... which, with this population, is phenomenal. I have a lot of DID and trauma clients. They really respect that boundary. And I am real clear -- only in the direst of emergencies. They can leave as many messages as they want on my machine and they do, and that's great, and I listen to every single one of them and take them seriously. I always listen to my tape before I go to bed at night. My agreement is i f I can do it, I will call them back at least by the next day if they need to talk to me. But a lot of times it's just little kids telling me stuff ... they just want to say this happened, or this information or whatever, and I don't have to call back. There are a lot of distorted perceptions, and this is good therapy stuff. Keep confronting the perceptions and working with the perceptions.
A lot of the treatment is the management of shame, anger and sadness, especially in the mind control -- that's what they hit at -- trying to make people feel responsible, trying to make them feel ashamed ("it's your fault"). One of my clients has just gone through a series where if she looks one way, she sees films of the Holocaust victims -- emaciated, being tortured, horrible pictures on this side; if she looks the other way, there are really erotic pictures of people having sex while they are sexually stimulating her. What a choice ... Because she chooses to not look at the Holocaust, she is told you are choosing to do this, see, it's turning you on, it's your fault. At the same time, reading the bible to her, she was brought up in a very strict Catholic family -- priests and nuns and all this kind of stuff -- and then reinforcing the shame. Because most survivors of any kind of abuse feel guilty and ashamed and it is their fault. They really hit at this. So a lot of this is management of anger and shame and sadness. Anger is tough, because they got severely punished for being angry. One of my clients who was in a facility in Colorado -- actually two of my clients were in this facility -- it's interesting how the corroboration of the details comes -- she really went out of the box with hysteria when they first started with her and they ducked her in water tanks to calm her down, and half drown her, and then as she got more calmed down, she got really angry at what they were doing to her. They had a decompression chamber some place outside of Denver -- I have two clients that talk about this decompression chamber. It's a medical facility, but it is attached to an Air Force base. This a place where they were brought to as children, with the mind control stuff. What they would do is put them in there, and increase the pressue ... do you know how much that hurts? Or decrease the pressure, pump air out, so they couldn't breathe and have a difficult time breathing, and one of my clients said it was like her lungs were stuck together. That's what they told her, her lungs were stuck together.The issue of being at fault was a big one.
Attachment to the Perpetrator. There was so much done to attach them, "the doctors are your friends, we are the ones who know you, we are your family, we love you. One of the criteria was to pick kids from abusive families, or neglectful families ... they were already abused anyway and I think parents were instructed to do abuse. "We are the ones who love you, we are your family" ... a lot of the SRA kind of stuff.
Safety. A lot of the safety has to do with where you see the control." You" in control of your own self, or "you" being controlled externally. This is the issue, too, of responsibility for safety, and you really have to deal with this one because these kids have been taught that there is only external control, they have no internal control. That's something you really have to work with in terms of responsibility for their own safety -- that other people don't control them. In talking about this, the other thing that you want to do, and the whole concept of the treatment of this -- as we move into -- we are going to talk about doing memories and what this all about real briefly -- the concept is -- we talked about how each of the alters or alter systems is in the matrix. So how you start this (and I was told wrong basically - all it did was succeed in flooding my clients and exhausting me for three months until I just started setting limits all over the place -- normal therapeutic limits and boundaries apply. I had to learn that. Your task is to get every single one of those alters out of the matrix and into the safe place. How do you do that? One of the secrets in the system is that as fast as people were being put in the room, behind it they were building tunnels, caves and mazes to connect everything. That's the working place because what you are doing then is working through the maze, going through however, and getting all those kids out of the matrix and into the safe place. Now, into the safe place can mean they automatically integrate once they have done their work, or it can mean they can stay on to be helper alters, or whatever job they take after that is completed. That's the concept. One of the things I learned to say to people, and it seemed to make sense is "before we start this, turn upside down, cut off the top, and bury it as deep as you can". The reason is when they finished the programming, and they put a cap on it, and it was something so horrible that no one would ever want to remember it. You don't want to start with that. Whatever shape it is -- if it's an upside down triangle and I will use that one -- if it's an upside down triangle and you start at the broad end, tap in there, which is what I did initially ... what have you got? All those memories just start flooding in layers ... and it is in layers ... they layered it by degree of trauma and by degree of pain in the mind. What happens is, you turn it upside down so you have a regular triangle, cut off the top because there is serious trauma poison is what one of my clients said, bury it as deep as you can because that is the last thing you are going to do. And then you start where it makes sense. This isn't leading. I mean, if someone didn't have mind control, and you said that to them, they are going to look at you and say, 'what the hell are you talking about?' You would be amazed ... people go, "oh, okay!" and then they think about it, and then they do it. Then there's more confirmation.
Things my clients have said to me have been "oh, you mean start with the little big memories" "oh, you mean start when I was old enough to understand what was going on" "oh you mean start at the point where I was beginning to understand" but they will determine, they will know where to start. And again, you are working through the maze, getting all the kids out and doing whatever it is you have to do, and they know -- they are the guides and getting them into the safe place.
The other thing you need to know about DID too -- you have an internal system that is only internal, but does not interact with the outside world, generally. They can, but they don't. You have bridge parts, which are few, who can pull out inside parts. You have outside parts that just deal with the outside -- the CEO, parts that go to school, but they may carry trauma but they are not as traumatized as the ones inside. Your bridge parts are the ones that are the most helpful, because they know who to get and they are the guides through the matrix. It's a really important concept ... you don't even have to talk about it - it's automatic - but you need to have the conceptualization because it is real useful to know who the bridge parts are and they will become apparent. They are also the ones that -- there is an historian who knows everything. Some parts watched everything. So no matter what happens, my answer is, "yeah I know ... somebody knows ... even though they were told not to watch and not to communicate inside".
I am going to talk really specifically about memories. Unless I have somebody who has had a lot of therapy, who has been through those stages of therapy and has it down, and is pretty functional and can contain, I don't move into doing memory work. I have several guidelines in terms of how I do memories.
#1 We do not have to do every memory. #2 We need to plan sessions. If kids are coming out of the matrix, we are working through the maze, they give their memory back to the core birth personality or whatever it is that they carry. Not everyone has to do it. Some just have to be cleaned off. When we do memories we are looking for information. What is the information we are looking for? We are looking for information on what they did. It is not sufficient to just cathart or abreact a memory. There is always something we are looking for. Post hypnotic suggestions. We are looking for this kind of information ... when survivors remember what the people actually did, they undo the programming. One of the most profound things ... and I am realizing now how profound ... I have struggled for almost four and a half years to figure this out, because I just did it so naturally and my clients have accepted it so well ... programs are memories. Those of you who are working with this -- think about that. The implications of that statement. Programs are memories. Therefore, what I have found is that regardless of what you are dealing with, it has a concrete physical basis then ... something had to be done to this child to make them behave, feel, sense on their bodies (body pain) and know what they know (I am going through the BASK model behavior, affect, sensation, knowledge). So everything is memory. If you are working with "programs" -- if you are working at the level of decoding and getting codes and doing all that -- and once the person tells you they have to -- and that it's necessary -- I am not ruling that out -- but generally I have found that's not necessary. We are working at the level at which the researchers wanted us to work. We are also, I think, dehumanizing our clients. What I am proposing is grounding this back into our treatment model of memory work, and really good solid memory work. I do not do memories unless I have some idea of what the memory is going to be. I don't go fishing. It has to be somewhere in conscious memory. We plan it. We know generally what alters -- I have clients who write it down. I have one client who just comes in and does what she has to do. She gets on the couch. The alter gives the core birth personality the information about what happened. If the experience now has a concrete physical basis then -- if, for example, you have behavior modification techniques that taught alters how to do certain things -- you go back and look at what actually was done -- then you don't have to do it anymore. If you have classical conditioning and you see how behaviors were linked through aversion or repetition or whatever -- you don't have to do it anymore. And that's what we are looking for: what did they actually do?
I will give you an example. At this conference last year, I was talking to a survivor and she said to me, "what happens in the brain when you have blue out of this side, and red out of this side?" She had been walking around for months. She read out of a blue filter on this side, a red filter on the other side and I automatically just said to her, "What do you see?" And she had done all this research on brain chemistry and neurology, really seriously searching through looking for physical condition, and I said, "what do you see?" A little voice comes up and says "oh we are looking into a -- you know like the thing in the eye doctor's office? but it's a blue lens on this side, and a red lens on this side, and that's what we were looking into." And I said, "well what would happen if you looked away?" "I never thought of that ..." She looked away, "oh, it's gone". I said, "well you don't have to look at it anymore" and she said, "oh okay." Core birth personality came back and she had been dysfunctional for three months and unable to read, work, drive ... because of this. I have another client who kept choking. She had been in therapy with a previous therapist who really did a mess. Basically what she did was she was choking, and the therapist did an interpretative for her, without asking, that it was a penis in her mouth and it was all sex etc etc. I don't assume anything. I said, "well what is that associated with, or what does that remind you of?" and she thought a minute, and she said, "oh goddamit. they put a sock in my mouth" ... it was a sock, and they were trying to choke her to make her anorexic. There were other incidents of other things, but that's what it was. So you cannot assume that you know what they are telling you about. So ask.
They used a lot of hypnosis. A lot of the behavior that you see today is the result of post hypnotic suggestion. Well, I went and got training in hypnosis -- I have had a lot of training over the last five years to help me deal with this. But I don't use hypnosis to look for memories.
I don't use hypnosis to look for memories. I don't put people in trance. These clients are very good at doing it themselves. They are very highly susceptible and if they are ready, to have the conscious memory or at least something about it, they are the ones who decide if they go into trance or not. I have clients that don't have to abreact. I have clients where the alters just tell them or they just close their eyes or get the information and an alter goes to a safe place. I have other clients who have to do a full-blown abreactions. It has something to do with individual personality and the way that people learn. Some people need to totally experience things. Other people need to visualize, other people need to hear it. You need to know hypnosis in terms of managing trance and knowing what you are looking at. The other thing is you need to counter the post-hypnotic suggestion. A lot of times, people go into memory, they will go "you have to die", and I will say "you don't have to die". You don't have to die, you don't have to cut ... I have one client who says, "Destruct! Destruct!" and starts choking herself and what I say is, "Do not destruct, do not destruct" and after a while she says, "Do not destruct". You find a lot of those nasty post-hypnotic suggestions. Another client has a whole litany of things she is supposed to do to commit suicide in every memory -- it's called a Meta-Level Program. We undo those each time and keep repeating "you don't have to ____, you don't have to ____" or "don't do ____" and just keep repeating it. You undo post-hypnotic suggestions which can be very enduring.
They also used drugs. One of the ways I deal with drugs is to say "you don't have any drugs in your system right now, you can clear your head" because the memories will be kind of fuzzy, and that is okay, you just need to get the information that they were drugged. Get a sense of what the drugs did to them.
Tricks and Traps. There is a lot of double bind stuff with this, unbelievable amounts of double bind. I had a client who they put in chains, electric shock all over her body, and they would open the door and say "you can leave if you want to ... all you have to do is just walk out that door ..." So she would start to head for the door and they would shock her and she would fall down, and they would say, "get up, get up, it's obvious you don't want to leave, you must like it here". Have you ever tried to get to your feet with your hands tied behind your back? It is almost impossible. And being shocked? And calling her "a wimp, a wimp" all the time. That was a big issue with her, being a wimp. She is not a wimp, but I had to keep saying that, "you are not a wimp, you are not a wimp...." Countering all of those messages in any way I can. Another way with Tricks and Traps is when alters come out with really aversive behavior or doing things that look like one thing, but there is really something else. I had a client (this is before I knew she was mind control) - she got out of hospital and I was seeing her and an alter went to the kitchen and got a butter knife, and barricaded me in the room with the desk. This alter was male, in a female clilent. And I just sat there until the obsession was over and I said, "Okay you can give me the knife now, you have done a really good job ..." "Oh, I have?" "Okay, give me the knife now ..." That was the end of the session. But if I didn't know what was going on, or intuit or know this client, it could have been really serious grounds for termination ... (laughter). She is still my client and doing extremely well.
You need a sense of humour ... my clients and I laugh and stuff. I remember one of my clients doing this horrible memory -- they pricked her all over her body with needles then poured alcohol on her and then told her they were peeling her skin off and eating it. Sometimes things don't quite fit right, and I will say "look at that again ... what are they really eating ..." "Chicken." What it turned out was they were having lunch. There was a bowl of chicken on the table. So disgusting. They were having lunch, and pulling the skin off the chicken and persuading her this was off her body. And pouring ketchup on her and making think it was blood. So cruel. But this is the mentality of what we are dealing with. We both just cracked up ... it wasn't funny, but what it became then, was "is this another chicken?" You can develop this kind of private language - which teaches them intimacy as well, and develops that feeling in terms of your own language with each other.
Another trick can be an alter that comes out that doesn't know you, or doesn't know the rest of the system. This is an alter persona type program. It is a part that wasn't allowed to know there were other parts inside -- it was put away totally, with lots and lots of amnesia for the system. That part can be fully developed. I have encountered it, like "Who are you lady?" I am going, "I am Valerie, so?" and they really don't know who I am. But there have also been reports of alter personas that have been so well developed that they have a separate history from the person that is in your office, and if they get accessed they flip to that person ... and they just don't know who the therapist is or anything that is going on. That can also happen. When they begin to remember they realize the history was manufactured. Can you imagine if you were you, and then found out that you weren't, that you were really part of a DID system? This is what the experience is like.
Also, dealing with Blocks. Blocks can be cursing you out. If I get cursed out, "you goddam mother-fucker, what are you doing messing with ..." I will say, "okay, what else?" What happens after a while, clients will start laughing because they know what's coming, and we can have fun with it because it has become a game. Or what I will say with clients, and again it is very individual because different people deal with this in different ways -- I have a client who comes out with this, and I say to her, "I am so sorry that you hurt, and I know you are really scared, and I know you are trying so hard to protect, and you are doing a really good job." I really believe this when I say "you are doing a really good job". What happens is they will start to get teary. This is a client who I met in the psychiatric hospital, had been there for nine months, spent 45 days in the "quiet" room because she was so out of control. They would strap her down, and what I noticed one day is that she would be fighting and it would take like eight people to get her down. She is this tall but she is big, and tough. Even though she was swinging, this is as close as she came to anybody. So there was some thought there, some control there. I started talking to her alters before I knew about mind control. What she was doing, her alters told me, she learned the only time she ever got hugged or touched, was when she was being abused and held down. She was recreating it through her behavior -- being held down was better than ... From that time on, I forbad restraints with her and basically I would go in there, or two staff would go in there, and let her do her thing, keep her safe off the walls so she couldn't hurt herself, but she never got put in restraints again. We developed a signal (because she couldn't ask directly) where she would pound on the wall if she wanted a hug. So the whole staff got into this. I was clinical director so I could do these kinds of things. If the wall got banged, she got an instant hug and it was so healing for her. Those are the kinds of things you can also do. But that could have been really disastrous.
When people are doing memories, a lot of times they will try to bite, they will try to pull their hair, they will try to punch themselves, choke themselves. I am right on top of it. I make sure they are safe. The other thing you have to watch too, is they will contort and get into positions where limbs can become dislocated. I am very very careful to make sure this does not happen. I have no compunction about doing electric shock flashbacks, I have no problem with that. I have dealt with convulsions - in the beginning it was really scary - but in reality it is like a block, they have to go through the pain to get to the information imbedded in the memory. Once they get the information, they don't have to do any more. But sometimes they have to go through the pain. I make sure people are safe - I literally follow them around like this (demonstrates action) - I may not be touching them - but I am right there. If I touch anybody, in any way, shape, or form - I always get their permission. I never, ever, ever touch anybody without their permission. I can see someone for eight years, would you like a hug, is it okay if I touch your arm. Because sometimes it is not okay depending on what is going on -- I think this is extremely important. It empowers them as well -- if they don't want something, and they can tell you "No", guess who else they are telling "No"? It's very healing and this is very, very important.
Disinformation. They used time distortion, they tried to mix people up, planting disinformation through post-hypnotic suggestions. One of the things I have come across in some of the memories is when they traumatized somebody and then used electric shock to create amnesia, they also would, when the person came out of it, and couldn't remember -- they had to give them a cover story, like a screen memory. I have run into screen memories, some planted, some not. Basically, I had a client who thought she had been in all these car accidents because she was drunk throughout high school. Guess what? She was not drunk, and she was not in car accidents. It was because of experiments that she was constantly being hurt. Those kinds of things become apparent. There is disinformation. People are told that the President of the United States is involved, or whatever. Sometimes people are involved whom they say, but there are also people who are not involved. So it is really hard to tell. Every President has been named since the late 1940's as being part of this and I think there were some that were, but I don't think all of them ...
Psychic Driving is another technique where electrodes were put on the fingers and the toes ... days or weeks of sleep deprivation with messages going into the ears ... and then they would take all that off, continue the messages and keep them asleep for a couple of weeks, and it was to drive the messages in as deep as they could get. And how did they pick messages? This is important to know too ... they were doing research on these kids all the time. They would pick messages -- they found their greatest, deepest fears, the things they were most afraid of, the things that affected them the most and that's what they used. It was different for everybody, that's why it is so individualized and that would get driven home with a lot of shame and a lot of difficulty.
Programs are memories so in order to defeat them, you go back to the original source of what they actually did. Think about the implications of this. They can make programming more sophisticated, but there is always a memory of it, what they actually did. What we see is the behavior as a result, which is a memory. Behavior, feelings, sensations and knowledge always has to come -- that's the order in which memories come back generally in my experience. Behavior - what do we see - behavior. It has a specific thing attached. The reason I say take off the electrodes, just clean them off is because at some point that did happen, and they just go to that memory. They don't have to go through the whole thing ... skip to the end ... it's there. Somebody knows. If you are getting a lot of body pain, who is blending? Who is blending -- you have to teach them not to blend so much. Why are you blending? What's your job? What is it you are trying to do? The other thing is the core birth personality has to be cleaned off periodically ... cleaning off alters, cleaning off the core birth personality. If you say who's blending and you get a smile, no answer -- but the symptoms don't go away with the core birth personality -- have her stand in the sun and someone check her shadow -- at about 2pm. If you see lumps and bumps on the shadow -- what those are are alters who have come up out of the matrix and are clinging to the core birth personality giving her their memories. You get the helpers to peel them off because they are clinging for dear life, clean them off, get them to the safe place.
Blending is when you have the core birth personality out in the body and an alter comes and blends with the core birth personality but doesn't come all the way out until it's over. They are in the background, you can't see them, the core doesn't always know they are there, but you are getting all these symptoms. Symptoms of their memory.
(Q. A. I don't bring up stuff until they bring it up with me. This whole model is great in terms of non-leading, non-directive ... if someone describes stuff to me, or tells me stuff, then I will give them information. But we will do the safe place stuff as standard therapy stuff. I don't go into it like I am doing today.)
Alienation from God - a lot of the treatment is spiritual, and that's toward the end, or whenever they bring it up, because they will. There is a lot of stuff around God doesn't care about you, do you think God would really let this happen.
Black holes aren't talked about ... move them out of the safe place ... if you have a black hole effect -- where someone feels like they are disappearing, that's a black hole. You basically say, get everybody out, fill it in from the bottom. If you can't find it, use spray paint. Spray and what happens is the black holes show up black. It works.
Spin programs are when kids were put on tables, strapped down in the spread eagle - every one of my clients draws those pictures - and the tables were spun. Symptoms of spin programming are dizziness, nausea, disorganization, they feel like they are spinning. I will say "Oh that's a spin program. Just turn off the switch." At the end of the memory -- these were electric tables that went around -- or sometimes they were gyroscope or whatever -- there is always a switch or something to turn it off -- because at some point it did stop in the memory. I have a client who kind of gropes behind on the wall and turns the switch off and it stops instantly. Again, it's a memory, but you want to get them to the end of the memory, because they are coming out in a re-live.
Vortex, tornados, whirlpools. These are like swirling things and again -- how you can tell the difference between a spin program and a vortex is that a vortex is a combination of a black hole and a spin program if you think about it -- they are slowly being put out while they are spun so they have this feeling of being sucked down into something. They have a movie showing of a tornado that even increases the effect. This is how sophisticated some of this was. What you do with this -- create a counter tornado, vortex, or whatever going the opposite way -- make them merge -- and it cancels it out.
Body pain. Take off the electrodes. Take out the needles. Sometimes I have to do this with my clients, teach them initially and then they do this a couple of times a day. It is really important to teach them the difference between body pain and real physical pain. I always take them to this wonderful doctor to get things checked out. Find a wonderful doctor who will take you seriously and not think you are crazy, who will really investigate symptoms. But I seriously try to teach clients the difference. I have clients who come in and say "I have a headache" and I will say "okay, we have work to do" and they will say "Valerie, well sometimes an apple is just an apple" and then she will get on the couch, and she will do her work, and then "oh the headache is gone" and I will say, "well, I guess you had work to do".
Lock in, lock out. Basically what that is, they physically put a child in a box with a lock, or behind a door in a room with a lock. Some of my clients have had the experience of being bricked in or cemented into a room, again, and again and again. These kids were trained to be spies, right? Well we have lockpickers inside, so who is a good lockpicker? We send in the "lockpickers" to get whoever is locked in, out, untie them. Sometimes they are chained to the wall, sometimes they are hanging, whatever, but we get them out. You know it's a Lock in, Lock out, when the core birth personality has disappeared and nobody knows where she is. Somebody knows. She is locked in somewhere. Or sometimes the core birth personality is locked out into the body and can't get back inside. So when you loose that freedom of movement, you've got in a lock in, lock out program. Just look for the doors and the locks and again you just ask them. Get the lockpickers. I had a client who was stuck in a room, it was metal, and you couldn't tell where the doors were. I said "somebody knows because they saw the doors close". The person said "I know the door that we can't go through". "The one with the tiger behind it." I said, "Great, that's the one we go through." Whatever they said "Don't do", then that's what we had better do it, because since when did they ever give good advice for anything that would help you ... that's a good reframe.
Split brain. We've talked about and there's more to that but I am not ....
Chutes are like ladders, and they are sort of related to black holes where all of a sudden someone who is doing great, then all of a sudden they are suicidal -- it's sort of like a black hole but it's like a slide-down, a chute, into a thicket of nasty messages. Again, we just pull them out, fill it up, get rid of the slime.
Serial programs are date specific where they literally ... one of the things to bear in mind ... and it can look SRA and they used a lot of satanic ritual abuse imagery to confuse them and make them think it was ritual abuse ... which is how they come to us ... but, the date specifics coincide with school holidays. They are also roughly, loosely around Satanic holidays -- Easter, spring break, before you go to school in August, not Hallowe'en so much but they did, Christmastime ... so they coincide ... or they might actually have gotten kids on the Satanic holidays if they were that specific.
Mirror programs. It's like a maze of mirrors, fun-house mirrors, they are caught in it. Somebody actually physically went through this. All the distortions when they look in the mirrors ... What you do is take the mirrors down, unlock them because they are all locked together, just stack them up very carefully, you don't want to break them, and then just throw them in the sun (garbage disposal is the sun in the sky) and get rid of them.
I hope I have given you a flavour of how concrete and literal this is. One of my clients said to me "I bet you have a lot of clients this time of year who are just hanging by a thread." My answer, " Who inside is hanging by a thread?" This is how you listen. And sure enough there was a whole group hanging by a thread. It is very concrete, very literal. Really getting very concretely into the memories, because that is how it ends up being undone.
Wayne Morris:
We have been listening to a presentation by Valerie Wolf entitled Assessment and Treatment of Survivors of Sadistic Abuse that she gave at the recent Believe the Children Conference in Chicago in April, 1997. You are listening to CKLN, The International Connection. We are in the middle of the extended radio series on mind control, and this is show #17. This will be continuing until October of this year. Transcripts of these shows are available on www.mk.net/~mcf/ckln-hm.htm and you can call the station 416-595-1655 if you want to get that address again if you didn't catch it.