Producer/Interviewer Wayne Morris:
Good morning and welcome to the International Connection. Today is show number 44 in the radio series on mind control and we are bringing you Part 1 of an interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor, a psychotherapist working with survivors of trauma. We are going to talk about the nature of memory, and particularly traumatic memory. This will be the final interview in the radio series on mind control in Canada and the U.S. To end off the series, we are going to have a panel discussion on February 22, 1998 about ritual abuse and healing for survivors with Alys Murphy, Caryn Stardancer and Gail Fisher-Taylor. On March 1st, a panel on government military mind control with Walter Bowart. And now the interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor.
Wayne Morris:
I am here with Gail Fisher-Taylor, a psychotherapist who works with abuse survivors. Welcome to the show Gail. I would like to start off with asking you what is the current work you are doing?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I am a psychotherapist, a consultant, and I also do training and education particularly around trauma. I work with people who basically want change in their lives, or they want to change something in their life. I work with a whole range of issues that people have, but I definitely specialize in the area of trauma. That includes adult survivors of sexual abuse and various kinds of sadistic abuse, and some who have been survivors of mind control.
Wayne Morris:
Throughout this radio series, the term "ritual abuse" has come up, both within a cult setting and within a government mind control context. I know in talking with you previously, you have some trouble talking with that term, "ritual abuse". How do you feel about how that is being used currently?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Well let me talk a little bit about the trouble I have with the term. I think it emphasizes the wrong thing. It emphasizes ritual, and what we are really talking about here is criminal activity. We are talking about things like sexual abuse, confinement, forms of mind control, child pornography rings, child prostitution rings as well as adult pornography and prostitution rings. We are also talking about rituals that involve criminal activity such as murder and torture. I think what needs to be emphasized in the abuse is that it is criminal activity often done by multi perpetrators, multi victims in the crimes. Many times it is cult activity, much of which is illegal, and I think that the term "ritual abuse" emphasizes the belief system, which is part of it, but I think it's easy for the media and other people to sensationalize that aspect of things. I think sadistic cult abuse is a good term, but it's not totally comprehensive either. We have a problem with language here, defining what we are talking about and emphasizing the correct thing. In terms of this kind of abuse, I would just like to point out that what is involved is crimes against humanity - the kinds of crimes that we see in wars. The kinds of crimes that we know exist and I think that when the ritual aspects are emphasized or sensationalized in the media, that it distances people from the reality of what is really going on.
Wayne Morris:
You would prefer to be more specific about what is actually involved in a particular case, whether it does involve child prostitution, pornography or whatever kinds of criminal activities in terms of the context that abuse is taking place in ...
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
What I like to do is try to talk about these kinds of abuse that a lot of people want to distance themselves from, and want to disbelieve, because they are so horrific. I think if we ground our discussions in events and incidents that we know exist, what we start doing is making it more difficult for people to concentrate on the sensational aspects of the crimes basically. What we need to do is - we both need to relate this kind of abuse to what people know exists in our society, and we also need to relate it to what everyone can relate to. I look at a lot of things on a continuum and this kind of abuse is very much on a continuum -- it's not separate from other kinds of abuse -- it is very much related to a lot of phenomena that many people have some sort of experience with, and we all have experienced this just by watching tv and reading the newspaper.
Wayne Morris:
I think people, particularly the media, when they hear the term "ritual abuse" automatically tend to think of satanic ritual abuse and it involves some kind of satanic cults, which does exist out there but a lot of people do have a hard time believing that goes on. As you mentioned, it takes away from the actual criminal activities that are happening whether it's in the context of that kind of belief system or not.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think there's another point here too. All repeated abuse is basically ritualized. What I mean by that is that, for instance, if somebody is a serial killer, they develop patterns of behaviour so that when a serial killer murders a number of different people the police are able to at least speculate that it's the same murderer because there are patterns within the way that murder is done. If somebody sexually abuses children, a pedophile, there are often ritualized aspects to the way that they sexually abuse children and what it relates to probably is the traumatic re-enactment of the actual perpretrator who is committing those crimes. In other words, what I am saying here is that when somebody has been traumatized as a child and hasn't resolved that trauma, not everybody does this -- there are lots of people who have been traumatized who don't re-enact that on other people. But there are also a proportion of people who have been traumatized who then go on to commit the same crimes against other people later on in their lives.
Wayne Morris:
I would like to talk about the process of 'processing' experience into memory because as you know there is a big debate going on in public about so-called memories which are linked to traumatic experience. I wonder if you could talk just a bit about how the human mind does process experience.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I would like to start by talking a little bit about one way that we think, which is dissociatively. What I mean by that is, let's say we are walking along the street and it starts to snow, and the snowflakes are really large flakes, and we had an experience a long time ago, or even recently, we might start to get feelings that we had in that experience. Say that we start remembering a snowfort when we were young, and what happens is that all of those feelings - say it was a wonderful experience - all those feelings may start to come back just by the fact that we see those large snowflakes that remind us of an experience. We may start to get all kinds of sensory input from that previous time, even though the air might be different in the present, we might remember what the air was like at that particular time. We might smell certain smells that aren't there in the present that were there at that particular time. We might hear sounds that aren't there in the present that were there at that particular time. What happens is that we remember in all kinds of ways and we encode our experience in all kinds of ways and there is an implicit kind of remembering, which is a sensory motor experience, emotional experience that we remember, and there is the explicit which is more of a narrative kind of remembering - sequential. Explicit is actually a less reliable kind of remembering. We can get the details wrong, we can get the sequences wrong. The implicit we might get confused because we have to interpret that explicitly, but those body sensations, those sensory sensations, those emotions will relate - we know they are from somewhere. We might get mixed up about what they relate to, but we know that they relate to a specific event or events in our lives.
Wayne Morris:
How does traumatic experience affect that process of dissociation?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
It affects it in a number of ways. It depends on the traumatic experience and it depends upon the emotional significance of the traumatic experience. It also depends upon whether it is repeated traumatic experience, or one time traumatic experience. Clinically what we start to see is that trauma creates blocks. It can keep a person in certain areas of his or her lives sort of locked into a certain belief system, certain ways of interpreting things. What it can also do is that the associations are fragmented. In other words what I mean is that if we remember in all of these different ways and the experience is encoded in a sensory motor way, emotionally, and in all of the senses - so that we hear certain sounds, smell certain smells, taste certain tastes, and that this is also in a non-traumatic experience - we would relate that to the narrative. We would have an idea about the wholeness of the event. What can happen in trauma, especially if it is repeated trauma, or really profound trauma, is that this gets fragmented and it is really a protective device. If something terrible is happening that the individual has a hard time coping with is that their actual internal opiods which are chemicals inside our bodies that are like opium and create an effect that is similar to opium and are related to the shock people go into - let's say in an automobile accident or another trauma - and they slow down the body and it seems that with other kinds of neurochemicals in the nervous system - what happens is that there is a fragmentation that occurs so that we may have a recollection - there may be a lot of terror involved in a particular traumatic event. But we may block out completely what that terror is related to. For instance, I think psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk gave a really excellent example about how it all works, and how it is different for different people. He was giving a talk and he said, "now if I suddenly exploded here most of you in the audience would have [what he calls] flashbulb memory." In other words a very vivid memory, an enhanced memory for the rest of our lives for that event occurring. But he also had with him colleagues with him who knew him very well, with whom I imagine he was fairly close with. And he said, "now to my colleague, probably what would happen is that she would have a very vague memory if she had any memory at all," and that would be because of the emotional significance of the event to her. It would be very different for someone who knew him directly, it would be much more traumatic for her, than it would be for those of us who were in the audience who didn't have an emotional relationship with him.
And I think this is really significant in terms of children and adult survivors who as children have been abused by particularly a parent, or some other person who has a strong relationship with them. So if say a child was abused by a father, or a mother, because we are finding more and more that there is abuse by women, and if that children is dependent upon that individual for survival there is a real dilemma for that child. Because she [and I will just say "she" because it happens to "he's" a lot too] she will need to remain attached to that individual for survival and yet the fact that this person who might be reading her bedtime stories is then sexually abusing her later on is extraordinarily confusing, and there's a tremendous amount of betrayal involved there. So one thing that we see clinically is that these are the kinds of traumatic experiences that get dissociated quite frequently, and it is the element of betrayal that is often a very important factor in how much somebody will or will not remember about a particular sexual or other kind of abuse by a parent.
Wayne Morris:
What is your understanding of the phenomenon of dissociation and the different levels of dissociation that can happen? You brought up betrayal as a significant factor, and repeated extreme forms of trauma, but can you talk about, from the victim's point of view, what is going on there.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Let me start first with dissociation because again I think is very much on the continuum, and everybody dissociates to a certain extent. If somebody is reading a book or playing an instrument, doing artwork - there is often a fair bit of dissociation involved in those activities. What that is is a form of hyper-concentration and in that hyper-concentration there is a splitting off and splitting away from other things that are going on in the environment. And what also happens - everybody has ego states which are basically parts of our selves that take on different roles and that feel different ways, so we all have child ego states that are there from childhood and have certain experiences and those experiences remain in that kind of age within us. So for instance when someone who let's say hasn't been traumatized at all is in a particular situation and let's say a particular ego state has had some injustice in his life. What may happen is in another situation in the present day that child ego state may be basically triggered to come out and maybe react in a very strong way to an injustice in 1977. What happens is when somebody has been traumatized the splits between the ego states become much more distinct and what happens is that they become the dissociation in the way that somebody can split off and maybe not be as conscious of things in the external environment but other kinds of things inside that person. We all have places in ourselves where we aren't aware of why, when we say 'I am not going to do that ever again' and suddenly we find ourselves doing that right away. The way that I explain that is that basically one ego state says 'I am never going to do that again' and out pops another one who says 'oh you aren't? I am going to do it right now!' It's a phenomenon that occurs in everybody.
Wayne Morris:
Is this happening more on a subconscious level?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Yeah, it would be happening on a subconscious or an unconscious level. But what happens when somebody is traumatized is that these ego states become more and more distinctive and more and more operative as distinctive personalities basically, or identities ...
Wayne Morris:
On a conscious level ...
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Well what happens is that sometimes the person is totally not conscious this is going on. The extremes of this would be when somebody has what used to be called Multiple Personality which is now Dissociative Identity Disorder in the medical field. That person may not be aware there are these different identities that are coming out and acting in certain ways, dressing in certain ways, and there is a kind of sensation that somehow time has jumped ahead, or that there is a confusion about what day it is. When somebody is traumatized there will be a part, or ego state or identity that will come forward and handle certain aspects of their trauma, and during one particular trauma - let's say the person is being abused in some kind of way - there might even be a number of different identities that come out and handle different aspects of the abuse. It is again a very important protective mechanism when this is happening. The person is not having to handle everything and be totally overwhelmed, there is a fragmentation of experience in the different identities. One identity might be handling ie. the demand to act like that identity is enjoying the sexual abuse. So there might be one identity who comes out and learns to enjoy the sexual abuse and then there might be another identity that is in a rage about the sexual abuse and holds the rage, and those two identities don't have any co-consciousness with each other. They don't know that each other exists, and they don't know that the feelings are there. It would work like that. There might be another part that feels very vulnerable and wants to cry during it, and again there wouldn't be the co-consciousness with the other identity.
Wayne Morris:
I guess the difference I was trying to get at with the normal ego states that we all have on a subconscious level don't ever really come out to the forefront usually - whereas in people with the extreme end of that - Dissociative Identity Disorder - can have different identities come out to the forefront where they take on the voice and mannerisms of a child and so forth ...
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
In a way it's not so clearcut as that. Certainly if somebody who has Dissociative Identity - there are very noticeable changes and with somebody who has normal ego states that aren't so distinctive - if you start understanding ego states you can start identifying that a particular ego state is there. They might not have exactly that childlike voice in an extreme way, but what they may have is that they may be saying things that make sense in a 3 year old context, from a 3 year old's point view, but don't make sense in that adult's point of view. When somebody is sounding that way what is really happening is that there is another ego state there that's operating at a different stage of development. When you start to understand these mechanisms you start to see them, and they do come to the forefront. It's just that they are more subtle than in somebody who has Dissociative Identity.
Wayne Morris:
So from what I am hearing in terms of ego states in people who have not had a traumatic history or been severely traumatized, there is a certain amount of communication going on there between ego states. What accounts for the amnesia between identities or the non-communication or non-awareness of the other identities within somebody that is dissociative.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I am not sure I can answer what accounts for it but we can guess at it and we can basically say that one of the determining factors for the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, as it is called, is that somebody has to be amnestic - they have to have amnesia for certain blocks of time and from my experience and those of us who are working in this field I think would agree with this is that the amnesia (and particularly survivors would agree with this) really does protect in lots of ways. Somehow it seems to be a survival mechanism and this protective mechanism that allows the fragmentation of experience to happen so that the individual isn't overwhelmed right in the midst of it, nor is the individual overwhelmed when these memories may be coming back, or the ego states or the identities start getting together and start giving some of the knowledge of this experience.
Wayne Morris:
The term "disorder" is really a misnomer - it's really a natural defense mechanism ...
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think it is. I think a better word would be "dynamic". It's a very dynamic coping strategy and I think that sure it can be maladaptive in adulthood and can cause problems, but in a lot of ways what it does in the midst of the trauma it can allow someone to survive who might not otherwise survive.
Wayne Morris:
With people who have been severely traumatized and are dissociative, I understand that there isn't that kind of move between implicit memory and explicit - there isn't somehow a processing of that experience fully. They can't in their conscious state or their main persona - they can't narratively tell what happened in an abusive situation. Why isn't that implicit memory processed?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
There are basically some theories about this and there is research that seems to be backing some of these theories. It seems that what is happening when somebody is being traumatized is that in the limbic systems in our brains, the amygdala which basically gives emotional significance to things (at least that's the theory) is very, very key in traumatic experience. Implicit memory, sensory/motor/emotional will be there - the person may feel terror in this particular circumstance. It seems that the hippocampus bypasses this - at least that's the hypothesis and that the hippocampus is what is needed to give order to things, to create a narrative.
Wayne Morris:
Or to create the associations?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Well, there are going to be associations without the hippocampus. I am over-simplifying here. It seems that what happens in overwhelming trauma is that people often do not remember the specific narrative. Let's say that someone is mugged - let's go with something as simple as this - what they may remember about the event is not the face. They may not have been looking at the face. They may be able to remember what the weapon looked like - let's say it was a gun. They certainly will be able to remember the terror that they felt. They may not be able to remember all the events around it, that may be completely dissociated away. Or if it wasn't that terrifying it seems to have to do with the adrenalin level. When the adrenalin is at a certain level the memory will be, as Bessel Van Der Kolk talks about, a flashbulb memory. In other words it will be remembered very vividly. But it's almost as if when the adrenaline level gets too high what happens is that the memory will get vague - or there will be that fragmentation involved. Somebody knows that something terrible happened. They may know something of the event, or they may know nothing of the event, particularly if it is repeated trauma. It gets dissociated away.
Wayne Morris:
There seems to be a lot of confusion in the debate about recovered memories about the nature and the difference of traumatic memory versus memory that can be recalled in a narrative way. We have been talking about some of the factors about why that happens and the physical and physiological workings of the brain not being able to process that through the hippocampus, or the hippocampus being overwhelmed by the experience and not being able to take that in, and give sense to it.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
One thing that is very interesting is that some of the research has demonstrated that in Vietnam Veterans for instance - they have smaller hippocampi which doesn't prove the theory, but it supports the theory. I think what is significant here, and what is really important in the debate about recovered memory is that traumatic memory seems to be quite different from ordinary memory. There's that difference Bessel Van Der Kolk talks about between implicit memory and explicit memory. I believe people are remembering their traumas in certain ways probably almost every second of their lives and they are reliving it emotionally, their belief system is affected by them. They may feel as if they have been abused, they may feel totally worthless and that comes out of how they have been treated as a child. That is being relived all the time. The terror may be relived practically every second of their lives and in some ways all that has to happen is that the various fragments have to come together, and the awareness has to be connected.
But let's say they are having particular recurring dreams or images that actually relate to traumatic experience when they were a child, and let's say there are certain fantasies and they don't know why they have these fantasies. Let's say they are feeling a high level of panic or fear or grief or rage that is related to what happened to them. What has to happen is that they have to understand, somehow be able to connect all of these implicit kind of experiences with the explicit knowledge of what it is connected to. The fact that we have to interpret implicit experience with explicit knowledge can get problematic because our narrative memories are not that accurate in certain ways. For instance ten people witness a car accident. Everybody knows that a car accident happened but they may have ten completely different versions of how it happened and who was at fault and what the sequence of events was. There are inaccuracies and confusion in explicit memory and there can be misinterpretations because we have to use explicit means to interpret the implicit information. That can be difficult but it is important to try and make those connections and it is also has to do with making connections between the right and left brain - that more intuitive, sensory, emotional experience in trauma has to be reunited with verbal processing and understanding the beliefs that have come out of that traumatic experience.
Wayne Morris:
Even though somebody may be living with the implicit memories of a traumatic experience that happened even decades before ... throughout the series I have been talking to the more extreme forms of trauma in terms of government mind control which is very systematic and repeated. Often the people will be amnesic in terms of being able to say 'I was involved in this experiment' but at some point in their lives something triggers this memory back, and they are able to put the pieces of the implicit memory back together. I wonder if you could talk about that process - of remembering things that had happened decades before.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think first we need to talk about "triggering" which is basically very much related to the associations we make. Let's say that someone was abused in a room of a particular colour - blue - a particular shade of blue. What may happen is that every time they walk into a room or every time they see that colour in somebody's clothing, they might start feeling sick, they might feeling the rage, they might start having all kinds of reactions that they don't understand because the explicit memory of that event has been dissociated. Basically what they are doing is getting certain kinds of implicit memory back in relation to that traumatic event. They just have a fragmentation that occurred so they don't know what it actually relates to. In fact what they may then do is think that it relates to something in the present and they may try to find an explanation in the present day for all of those intense feelings that have just been triggered off - in other words - that have been associated with that colour blue. What happens is that it is kind of a process where the amnestic barriers are starting to come down or the dissociative barriers are starting to not be so strong, and there is more co-consciousness among states. When the dissociation happened, there will be states that know what happened. Colin Ross talks about the fact that it is not really because of memory - because some part of the individual has retained that memory all along which is very interesting. What happens is that identity may not have let that information become co-conscious with other identities within the community of identities within that one person. What starts to happen if that person is involved in some sort of life circumstance or often when they are in psychotherapy there is more of an awareness of what is going on internally. That's what psychotherapy is about - to look at what is going on inside and what prevents the changes they want to make and then how do you work towards making those changes so their life can become better.
What then starts to happen is that once these dissociations get recognized and once the person starts to understand the way these mechanisms are working inside him or herself - it can actually be an opening for developing more and more awareness and give some of those identities or ego states (because not everyone who has traumatic experiences has Dissociative Identity). A lot of people have a kind of dissociation where they have very active ego states that are holding these kinds of experiences inside them, but they are not operating as what we used to call multiples. When the recollection of this person starts it is really a process of increased awareness. There is connecting, so there is less fragmentation among what the sensory experiences are and what the emotional experiences are, and the explicit knowledge of the experiences. In other words if these experiences are related to a particular kind of abuse and a particular kind of experience, that may start to come back. We can misremember something that happened last week. We get the general drift of what happened, but we can get the details wrong. We have to be very careful with how we do that recollection process. There are certain aspects of the recollection, that yes, that's right - and aspects of it because of the implicit information we can have, and then it's yes, this really did happen in this way. If you know the smell of your father and that smell was in the room when the abuse was happening you can be pretty certain that's who it was. Or if you have a flashbulb memory of his face, you can probably pretty accurately explicitly interpret that. But there are other aspects that can get confused in that explicit interpretation of the implicit information.
Wayne Morris:
How does abreaction play a part in that in terms of remembering and making sense of the implicit memory - how is that related to having flashbacks in terms of eg. Vietnam Vets?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Basically that is reliving traumatic events, and it is reliving in probably a much less fragmented way, getting a piece of it - say getting a visual flashback. An abreaction can involve many of the senses - it often involves very strong emotional responses. It can involve body sensations where the person can be feeling the pressure on their chest or can be feeling the electric current (let's say they have been electroshocked) going through their body. Those are very powerful ways of remembering. They are basically a reliving of the experience. It means that there is some way it can be much more whole than just getting a piece of the memory here, a piece of the memory there. Getting a smell here, getting just one image almost as if it is a photographic image. Often people will get images of something they may have focused on when something traumatic was happening. Something a lot of survivors have done is when something unbearable was happening, they focused on a picture on the wall, or a crack in the floor, a crack in the ceiling. That might be an image that is always with them but they don't know what the significance of it is. In an abreaction what would happen is they might be looking at that crack in the abreaction, but what they are experiencing is what was happening to their body and what they were feeling inside themselves - all the powerful emotional experience.
Wayne Morris:
Is the process of abreaction just accessing a certain identity or a part of yourself that does remember what actually happened during the trauma, or is it the process of creating that co-cognition between the core self and those dissociated parts?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think it can be either, but it depends what part of the self actually experienced the original trauma. If the original trauma is experienced by a number of different identities, then the co-cognition would be necessary in order to have a full abreaction - the co-cognition of all the identities who were there during the original experience. If the original experience was basically experienced by one identity, then there isn't any co-cognition that is necessary.
Wayne Morris:
But in terms of bringing that into say, that experience happened within the one identity, does the abreaction somehow allow the person to be able to understand what happened in terms of being able to explicitly explain it after the abreaction? Is there some kind of recognition in the person of what caused the trauma?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Often yes. It is amazing to witness abreactions because if somebody is going through abreacting an oral rape - as a witness in the room it is pretty definite that's what is going on. I am never suggesting that or never ask a leading question. My questions are always open-ended, something like "can you tell me something about what you have just gone through?" It is frequently, if not always, that I have had a pretty guess as to what was happening to that person when they were going through the abreaction. When they then report what their experience was, it is usually very much what I guessed it was from what their body was doing in that abreaction. They may come out of an abreaction and say 'what I was going through was an oral rape' but they may not know who did it at that point, and they may then explictly try to guess, or they may wait for other kinds of abreactions and flashbacks and other aspects of memory to get clues as to who it was. Or they may never know who it was.
Wayne Morris:
You mention body memories as being one of the kinds of implicit types of memory. Some of the people I have interviewed have talked about the body actually physically having eg. reappearing burn marks or marks right on the body that relate to a memory of an experience that happened in the past. Have you come across this?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Yes I have. There's some research going on in this area speculating that there is such a thing as cellular memory. It is very interesting to think about, but we don't know exactly what is going on here. Certainly, this experience of having eg. a burn mark reappear, it does happen. I have witnessed that happening, and it is quite profound. Somebody walks in the room and they don't have that mark on them and then they go through an abreaction or they start a memory (they may not even be in abreaction) and suddenly this mark appears. Maybe that's the beginning of an abreaction or it may take weeks or months to get the memory that goes along with that. I think it's part of that same experience of how memory has been coded in many different ways. It seems to be encoded in some way in our bodies so that when we have an abreaction of something that happened 20, or 30 or 40 years back - our bodies re-experience it in an abreaction as if it is happening right there and then in that moment. Somebody can think they can't breathe because part of what happened to them was they were smothered - or somebody feels a pressure on their chest, or is choking ... the way the body is going during an abreaction is something that the person probably couldn't make themselves do consciously. It's a very different kind of phenomenon than when somebody is just acting something out.
Wayne Morris:
It is amazing to think - just in terms of your example of someone who experienced electroshock and to feel the feelings of the electricity again. So that may be not just a memory in their brain - there may actually be something going on in their nervous system that they can actually feel that electricity again, or their cells of their body is re-experiencing that reaction again ...
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Our reactions, our emotions - there is a neurochemical change. Different neurotransmitters are activated when we are burned. It may be - it would be interesting to look at this. If somebody was going through an abreaction or they are having a body memory, eg. a burn mark appears, it would be very interesting to look at what biochemically is happening in that person's body to see if the kinds of neurotransmitters are being stimulated or activated and their levels are being elevated.
Wayne Morris:
For somebody who has had repeated experiences of abuse and are dissociative, what is the process of healing, in terms of your understanding?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think one of the important things that has to happen is that the person has to overcome the fragmentation. If there isn't co-consciousness, if the emotions aren't related to that visual flashback, the whole of that memory hasn't been processed and it is still a block, almost like a neurological block that operates like a scratch in a record. It just seems to make that experience repeat and repeat and repeat in some sort of form, that fragmented experience. What has to happen in the healing process is the person needs to overcome the fragmentation - bring the implicit memory together with explicit, process verbally so the experience is not just a traumatic experience locked in implicit memory, but there is a processing and an understanding. I think there is some serious cognitive work that needs to be done too. Look at how that trauma affected the person's belief system. What patterns developed that caused that person to act in certain ways? What kinds of interferences are there in relationships? There needs to be some real working on understanding the effect of the trauma throughout their lives, and also looking at 'how do I then move forward?' and change this in our lives now. I think we are realizing now it's a process that can be done in a lot of different ways. There are a lot of new therapies coming out that different people have had different kinds of success with. For instance something like EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)- there are many ways to do it - but basically somebody moves their eyes back and forth. It is similar to how someone's eyes move in rapid eye movement sleep. For some reason, and there are theories about why this works, it really seems to open up memory. It can also help the person reprocess beliefs they have in relation to those memories. It seems to overcome certain kinds of dissociative barriers. It is a therapy you have to be very careful with, because it is very powerful. There are other kinds of therapies like thought-feel therapy that are based on the energy, like the meridians that Chinese medicine acknowledges in our bodies - that manipulates the fields in relation to people's history.
I think that we don't know completely how the healing needs to take place. We have certain techniques, we have certain kinds of things we have varying success rates with, but I think that there are approaches that we know if they are used in conjunction with other approaches, can be very successful. For instance too much abreaction can mean that somebody gets overwhelmed and has trouble functioning in their lives, but a certain amount of abreaction can be very powerful. Also paired with other kinds of therapy - looking at cognitive therapy, psychodynamic therapy, different kinds of ways of really processing what happened to the person and what is the meaning of it. Ego state therapy is very important to try to get the various identities to know each other. There is a kind of group therapy you have to do in ego state therapy basically - so that the identities who are in conflict can learn how to navigate the world together and build alliances with each other so they are operating in the world in harmony not in adversity.
Wayne Morris:
Do you feel different people have to have different ways of healing and do you feel it is related to how people process information, either visually or orally or kinesthetically?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Very much so. What I find fascinating, and wonderful, and challenging as a psychotherapist is that each person's process is individual. I draw from my knowledge and draw from various modalities, but really the individual herself or himself is going to have specific needs and specific knowledge about what they need to do in the process.
Wayne Morris:
I would like to talk about how you understand mind control versus more innocuous forms of social influence.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
For me it's not a versus - it's a continuum again. Let's go back to Pavlov and his dogs. Pavlov played a metronome before he fed a dog food. Eventually after doing this a number of times, the dog would start to salivate any time he heard the metronome to the point where even when he didn't get food, when he heard the metronome he would start salivating. What's happening here is there is an association the dog is making between the metronome and getting food, and so it becomes a physiological mechanism that is triggered off so the dog starts to salivate. Learning and socialization is based on this. For instance if a child, every time he or she gets angry, is told that she's misbehaving because she is angry and say she is punished or maybe even abused when she gets angry, what she is going to start learning is that her anger or what she is starting to express or how she is behaving is not all right - maybe then fear comes in because she is abused horribly when she gets angry. She may learn then to dissociate away from the anger. What's happening is a phenomenon that is exactly the same as Pavlov's dog salivating. When somebody learns there are associations that are made. Say they are learning to read - when they learn words they get rewarded for those words - so they are motivated to read. Or somebody has a learning disability and they try to read but they get very frustrated, then the association is made that 'I try to read and I am frustrated'. These are just regular processes that everyone goes through. We learn certain things by our experiences when they occur.
Wayne Morris:
Good morning. Welcome to the International Connection once again. This is show #45 in the radio series on mind control and the last show with interviews. We are finishing the series with a few panel discussions - next week on ritual abuse and the following week on government military mind control. Today we are airing Part 2 of an interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor, a Toronto-based psychotherapist who works with trauma survivors. Also today we will have a short interview with Dr. Connie Kristiansen, a social psychologist and professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. You are listening to CKLN.
Wayne Morris:
In terms of the healing process - what has to happen in order to break that conditioning? Examples of using dissociation for that conditioning or not. How does a person break that control?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
There are number of factors in the short term and in the long term. In the long term, the dissociative barriers have to come down and in some way the person has to recognize how this programming has happened, how this conditioning has happened - what they are supposed to do, and why they believe they are supposed to do those things. Primary emotion, even though it may be very masked, will be terror if they don't do what they are told to do, what they are conditioned to do, what they are programmed to do.
In breaking down the dissociative barriers, let's say that this particular identity believes that they love the perpetrator and they would never think of not doing what the perpetrator said unless the perpetrator is telling them to do absolutely horrific things. Part of what needs to happen is that they need to go back to how that relationship formed with that perpetrator and they need to go back to what beliefs they had. They need to get the whole experience to understand both what they are believing and why they are acting in the way that they are, and to integrate that with the emotions that are probably dissociated away, and may in fact be in another identity. Often what has to happen in programming is that various identities have to be sharing information, and have to somehow find a way to build those alliances so that there isn't the control over separate identities - so they form an alliance against the people who have done the mind control.That's just one aspect. It can be very complicated and multi-layered.
Wayne Morris:
What is your approach to undoing that conditioning, that programming in terms of therapeutic approaches?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
There are many of them. There are many stages to the therapy. It can be very difficult to predetermine exactly what that road is going to be because different people's programming happens in different ways. Part of what is really important to do is to be understanding what the structure of the identities is, and what kind of co-consciousness is there in the system. What kind of programming is there. How do the layers of programming work, how the layers of identities work? There are layers of memory, layers of identities, and it can get very very complex. There are techniques that can start to expedite some of this but what makes it very complicated in working with survivors of purposeful mind control is that often part of the programming is that if the person starts to tell, starts to remember, starts to undo the programming - there are other programs in there that can be triggered off. There might be suicide attempts. If there is a cult they were supposed to return to and they have been able to resist returning, they can't resist any more. They end up going back to the group that will be using them.
Wayne Morris:
I have also heard of "reporting" alters, simply reporting back what has happened.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Reporting identities, and compliant identities. Even if a person relocates to get away from a group that is doing this, it can be very difficult because they have identities inside who will call the group and tell them exactly where they are. Part of the strategy has to be to work with those and get them aligned with therapy and compliance. That's another technique. You work with the programming that is there for the perpetrator and you try to use it therapeutically, you try to turn it around. For instance a reporting identity will not only report to a cult, they will also report to the therapist.
Let's say there is some sort of scrambling programming - that means the person is sitting there and they can't hear clearly what somebody is saying in therapy. That scrambling programming can be very useful when there is something overwhelming that takes over. It can be useful to use scrambling programming to scramble it so it is not overwhelming, let's say an abreaction, or a flashback, or an emotional state.
There are many ways to do it. It is very complex and it's very dependent on that particular survivor's history and mind that has happened.
Wayne Morris:
I would like to change the topic a little bit. I want to talk about how the Canadian Legal system has handled cases involving mind control or sadistic abuse?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I am talking from a therapist's point of view, and just what I have some sort of knowledge of. I think that there is lot of disbelief that these things happen in our society. The criminal justice system - if a prosecutor is going to go ahead with a criminal charge against somebody, the Crown Attorney is going to try to win the case. They don't prosecute unless they think they can win a case. The media is so full of information that discredits the existence of this kind of abuse and who is reading these papers but people who are on juries, judges, lawyers. Usually what happens is that part of the evidence is left out or minimized or the Crown Attorney talks about - well, not all of this, you don't have to believe this in order to prosecute on sexual abuse. We do have a problem because there is a kind of conservative atmosphere in the criminal justice system. It's probably going to be the last to change. Twenty-five years ago it was much more difficult to prosecute on an incest charge. I understand there are still psychiatric textbooks in use that say incest occurs in one in a million families. Our beliefs about abuse have been totally out of line. As more and more information is released from bodies like the CIA in the States that document the kind of mind control and mind control experimentation that has been going - we start getting much more validation, more and more survivors of mind control start speaking out, start going into the legal system, start basically getting together and sharing experiences and forming advocacy groups. I think that "the personal is political" - that old feminist cliche - this is what I think will eventually allow more and more gradual credibility. But we have a long way to go, especially with organizations like the False Memory (I refuse to call it syndrome) Foundation.
Wayne Morris:
Media has certainly played a large part in the public attitude in contributing to that - I will say disinformation has done (in my opinion) a real irresponsible or unthorough job of looking into these issues. What is your opinion of how the mainstream media has done in covering issues like mind control and ritual abuse.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
We have some basic problems because dissociation is very complicated. It's not something that somebody is going to understand in a five minute sound bite, or in a sound bite, let alone five minutes. Dissociation, traumatic memory, all of that kind of contextual information that lends credibility, provides the context for things that when somebody first meets them, may sound very sensational, but if they are taken out of context it may be very hard for somebody to understand and believe. If there is then that media bias against the existence of these forms of abuse - mind control, various kinds of sadistic abuse, cult abuse - what starts to happen is that there is a kind of public brainwashing that is going on, and there is a mass dissociation away from the existence of these really terrible crimes. If people start to believe in them, they start to feel a lot less safe living in our society. They start to feel a lot less comfortable about sending their children off to school or off to a birthday party when they realize these kinds of things happen in those kinds of places.
Wayne Morris:
I think the public guilt has a part to play in that. If they do recognize and start to believe that these kinds of things have gone on, it begs public action and people may be at a loss about what to do about it as well.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think definitely you are making an important point. If people do believe, then they have to act, and you are right. People don't know exactly what to do but I think the survivor movement can lend some real direction here because I think there are a lot of very strong survivors out there advocating, informing, forming organizations that are doing some really good work and it has to become - in a way there is a really good metaphor here. In the way the dissociative barriers inside someone who has been traumatized have to come down, those barriers have to come down between people so there is a group momentum that starts to force the existence of this reality into the public mind.
Wayne Morris:
Mainstream media are so geared towards very quick sound bite oriented information. It has taken me now on this show, forty hours to go through all this material and it does take a fair bit of understanding and really looking at it thoroughly to understand all the issues around it in order to be able to believe this is going on.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think you are right. I think also there is something socially that goes on that has a lot to do with our denial about the existence of all kinds of abuse - and that's just the way we deal with emotion. I have been talking a lot about how, in the healing process, what has to happen is the emotions have to be joined with flashbacks for instance. That's part of the dissociation - people dissociate from their emotions and that reality can change shape. I think what part of what happens in our society is that there is real emotional oppression in our culture. What I mean by that is that when people start getting very emotional - it goes back to childhood really. If all individuals in a particular culture - when their children get sad, or start to cry and they are told "don't cry" or they start to distract them with a toy. The message gets across very clearly, that crying is not something that child is supposed to do. Same thing with anger.
What happens to that child is that child dissociates from those emotions. When the child dissociates from their emotions, what then happens is when someone comes along with those emotions - let's say we are talking about sadness. Let's say the child was never allowed to cry. What then starts to happen is when someone else cries, that child may start to get very angry because the child doesn't have access to his or her own tears, and there is fear around the tears. Little boys often will be conditioned or programmed not to cry, but it's okay maybe to get angry. So that what will then start to happen is that the tears inside that little boy might be there in empathy with another child or adult crying - but it will come out as anger. Or maybe what happens is that the child learns that when somebody cries you walk away.
What we are talking about horrific events that the normal response to is tremendous emotion - anger, rage, fear, terror - all of these emotions are normal responses to horrific events. But if a person starts gaining access to these emotions and then tries to express events that bring up these emotions in someone else, what's going to happen is dissociation away from them in individual after individual. So as a culture there is a moving away from intense emotion and what happens in that kind of dissociation is that there is denial. It is much easier to deny the terrible purposeful mind control that happens, or that sadistic cults are abusing children in a terrible way or that the neighbour is a pedophile.
It does demand action as you are saying, but it also means that in order to empathize someone has to feel. If, as a culture, people have learned or been conditioned to suppress their emotions,they are going to rationalize something that prevents those emotions from coming out. Part of that rationalization is the denial that this even exists. It does a number of things. It allows the person to remain in homeostasis, in other words, to not get upset because if it doesn't exist you don't have to be upset about it. If it does exist, you not only have to be upset about it, you have to do something about it. You have to keep your children safe.
I think the media really feeds into this as well.
We were also talking about earlier the whole aspect of betrayal. For instance - in a family - and this happens over and over again. Let's say that one member of the family starts to recall these kinds of events - some sort of multi-perpetrator sexual abuse or being in a child pornography ring and the father and mother were part of how that child got into the pornography ring or were even part of that pornography ring. Let's say it is one parent, the father. If then the other children in the family are in the position of being confronted with this - let's say the same thing has happened to them and they have also dissociated the memory. This information means that they can't maintain the same relationship with that father. It means there is a betrayal that has to go on somewhere, either they were betrayed by that father and they have to change that relationship with that father, or else they then can say that is a betrayal by the child who is telling, and the child is making up a story.
This is part of the way both the criminal justice and the False Memory Foundation have manipulated things. It has become a wonderful legal defence to blame the therapist because that way the adult survivor is not being blamed. And that doesn't work well in the courts. Adult survivors who were in a lot of pain and who were basically talking about horrifics events that happened to them - the courts would often lean in their direction a number of years ago. It wasn't until the attorney started getting this defence of "well okay they are not really doing this to the parent, it was that terrible therapist who is just out there to make money who is implanting these memories in order to get this person to come back, so they can earn money. It is the therapist's fault. It is not this poor victim who is not a victim of sexual abuse, but is a victim of the therapist."
Wayne Morris:
While we are on the topic of False Memory Foundation, they have had a tremendous effect on the field of psychotherapy. In your opinion how do you feel this foundation has affected the quality of care?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
In a number of ways. The existence of the False Memory Foundation and the kinds of issues they are talking about, the kinds of court cases they have encouraged their members to proceed with, against therapists - I think have made all therapists careful, if it hasn't made all of us careful, it should make all of us careful. In some ways I think it has had a very positive effect, but in some ways it has had a very negative, harmful effect.
Let me talk about the positive first. I think that it has helped a lot of therapists be aware that it is not only not safe for them in terms of ending up in court, but it's not good therapy to have suggestive, leading questions. It's much better to ask open-ended questions like "can you tell me more?" rather than to ask a leading question like, "was it your father who was doing that?" That's not good therapy to do that, and it can have an influence on someone if a therapist or anyone continues to suggest something to someone who is suggestible. It's probably a minority of the population who are suggestible.
The harmful effect is that it has certainly elevated the level of fear for therapists. I think that anyone in therapy, not just in therapy - we all need to have experiences validated. We need to do reality checks. If I talk at one of my children's PTA meetings and I may want to do a check with somebody who was there - 'was that reasonable what I said?' And if I do a check with a number of people who were there, what they say is going to influence how I feel about what I said. And that is important for us. We are social beings. We need that kind of validation. If someone has been abused - particularly if they have gone through the kind of abuse that a lot of people don't know exists - like mind control or various kinds of sadistic abuse - they need to have some sort of validation.
This becomes a dilemma. What is being recommended in a lot of the workshops and training that psychiatrists and psychologists and other kinds of psychotherapists go through, is that basically the message you give to the person who is recovering memory is, you have to find out for yourself what your own experience is. On one level that is very true. No one can tell another human being what their experience, what their truth is. But on another level - if the therapist is saying 'I don't know whether ritual abuse really exists' - what they are saying in a way is 'I don't know whether you are psychotic or not'. Psychosis is a disconnection from reality. There are some really profound implications of the directions that therapists are taking for their own safety that I think really, as a profession, we have to examine. Discussion is good and operating with challenges is very healthy, but I think operating out of fear can be incredibly harmful and I think that is what's happening with a lot of therapists and as a result, a lot of therapists are refusing to work with clients who are dissociative.
We have to be looking at how can there be good therapy that protects everybody, but also doesn't do the client a disservice.
Wayne Morris:
And that expression of disbelief in a general sense of whether ritual abuse exists or not is not great therapy from my understanding. It creates tremendous trauma in the client again.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
This brings up another whole area. People don't want to believe these things have happened to them. Part of the whole process, a healthy kind of therapeutic process, involves self questioning. It's very important for the therapist not to come in and say, 'yes this happened to you' when the survivor is still wondering 'did it happen or did it not?' But I think that if the therapist is saying 'I don't know whether this kind of thing can exist or whether this could have happened to you' and is basically implanting doubts, that's what happening. The doubts are being fed. It is much better not to feed the doubts, nor to feed the certainty. It is important to stay in some sort of position where the client is able to continue to take the information that is coming up, and try to process it in an ethical way for herself or himself, but to also look at 'what kind of outside corroboration is there here?' For instance if there is another sibling who has similar kinds of experiences and if the person is not planning on going to court (because you wouldn't want them to be sharing those experiences to avoid contamination of evidence if they were going into the legal system or the criminal justice system). That can be one form of corroboration - if the sharing happens after both people have been in their therapeutic processes for a period of time. There can be other kinds of corroboration. Let's say they have a memory of something happening, being transported in a particular kind of car. This is explicit memory and it could be wrong. But if it's right, it could be very powerful - that they didn't know for example, they had a red Ford in 1964. Or they didn't know this little building was located there and they go back and there it was. Maybe there were - as in Sybil - marks that were made that they remember making during a particular incident.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Those kinds of reality checks can be very powerful and they may not hold in court, but ultimately this is not what this process is about. It's about the person reclaiming self, and having that kind of external validation can be extraordinarily helpful for a person.
Wayne Morris:
Do you think there might be possible dangers or pitfalls of the therapist in helping their clients get that corroborative evidence?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
It shouldn't be for evidence. A therapist is not a lawyer. Their job is not to go out and help the person form a legal case. The therapist's job is to help the person do what he or she needs to do to heal. I think it is very important to do reality checks, and I guess maybe reality check is a better way of talking about it than getting evidence. It is basically looking at 'does this explicit way I am interpreting my implicit memory have an accuracy to it?'
Wayne Morris:
How do you think the False Memory Foundation has affected resources for survivors of sexual or ritual abuse, or mind control?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
In terms of access to therapy, to groups which are dealing with this kind of material; in terms of funding. The False Memory Foundation has really impaired access to these kinds of resources. In terms of books, discussion groups, in terms of the internet - I don't think there has been impairment at all. I think in some ways it has brought a lot of people together to try to advocate against the False Memory Foundation in terms of what they are saying.
I do think that what the FMF says can be very harmful to people who are at the beginning or in the midst of their processes. There is this cultural denial that the FMF is feeding, and it has an impact on a very personal level. Families use this in their arguments against the survivor if there has been some kind of confrontation.
The kinds of strategies which the FMF is encouraging are extremely intrusive and violating as Judith Lewis-Herman said at the recent ISSD conference, they are using the same kind of intimidation tactics that perpetrators have used in the abuse. There is a lot of 'perpetrator rage' there and the FMF is harbouring a lot of perpetrators - maybe not every person who belongs - but there are a lot of people who do belong, who I believe, have perpetrated and are using this as a front.
Wayne Morris:
Certainly there has been documented evidence of members of the Advisory Board being involved in CIA mind control, active pedophiles, and so forth. One of the arguments they repeatedly use against therapists is that false memories have been implanted in their clients. Do you feel that it is possible that people may have false memories of sexual abuse?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
I think a lot of people have false memories, most of us have some false memories. The way false memories often go is that we tend to idealize people, idealize our families and what happened in our families. We tend to not remember uncomfortable events vividly, we might change them, we might think we had a wonderful family when in fact we had a family that argued all the time. Those are the kinds of things that people tend to block out and there is research that really backs that up. It shows that when there has been documented abuse or abusive situations (ie a group of boys were interviewed many years later, and they tended to minimize the abuse rather than remember exactly how horrific it was. People have false memories that idealize and minimize.
I have been talking about homeostasis. We try to find the things that are going to make us feel better, so we tend to try to think that people are nicer than they are, or situations are safer than they really are. We try to bring down our anxiety levels, we try to make ourselves feel better. And it makes a lot of sense to me.
In terms of false memories in therapy, I've really had to look at that and realize that of course that can happen. People are interpreting their experiences in ways that are inaccurate, that can be found to be inaccurate. Explicit memory - they can remember something that happened yesterday in an accurate way. But this also has to do with our adrenalin level. If an experience happens and we don't pay attention to it, our adrenalin is pretty low. We don't remember all the details. We also filter out - something in our brains called the 'reticular formation' which helps to filter out experiences. If we weren't filtering out, and we were paying attention to the sounds, and the sights, and the smells, our emotions - all the things at once - we would be overwhelmed. Our nervous systems wouldn't be able to handle it.
Filtering is a very important part of how we experience things, and how we remember our experiences. If we are in a particular circumstance one day and we try to recall it the next, and our adrenaline wasn't particularly high because it wasn't a significant moment in our lives, we may not remember things very accurately. If it's much more significant to us, our adrenaline level will be higher and the adrenaline level really affects how we remember things.
If something was really emotionally significant to us, we may remember certain aspects of things while someone else who was involved in the same experience may remember totally different aspects. Other things may have been significant to that person. Let's say the visual things were very important to us and the other person was really tuned into the sounds. Let's say I am asked a question about the sounds - I may be really inaccurate about the sounds and try to guess at things to try to answer the questions. If the other person was asked about visual - the same thing may be happening to him or her. Accurate on the sounds, but inaccurate on the visual. There are aspects of each person's experience that might be more accurate and less accurate of a particular event.
In a therapy context, we do tend to fill in gaps. The research is very clear. We try to explain things that made us uncomfortable and we might not have an explanation for. Good therapy will help the person remain in uncertainty in those areas where there is uncertainty and to encourage a person not to do that very natural process - not to exaggerate - it becomes very clear. What are the major areas of concentration for someone who is a visual person, an auditory person, etc. What are the senses that are most important for that person? How do they live their lives? It is very distressing to people, but they need to learn that if they have a fragment of a memory here and a fragment there, and another there, it is important not to force them altogether in a way that they won't fit. It's a very complex, difficult layered process. It is very important though, when things do fit, to look at the correlations, but also to look at that this may or may not be the way that it was.
Wayne Morris:
How does a group like the False Memory Spindrome Foundation use the nature of inaccurate memory against survivors who have had legitimate histories of sexual abuse?
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
They take research about one kind of memory and they apply it to traumatic memory. And they take research about ordinary, everyday explicit memory and they apply it. They act as if all memory operates the same way everyday memory would operate. Now they are being a bit less extreme - they are acknowledging that dissociation does occur. And it's not just one person. There are different people speaking out for the organization. Different people have different takes. The whole argument about 'is there such a thing as repressed memory?'
One of the people who is very active in the False Memory Foundation whose research has been used and mis-used by the FMS is Elizabeth Loftus. Her studies are not done on traumatized people. She has argued against the existence of repressed memory, and yet in a study she did with a number of other colleagues, even though it was a smaller sample that had repressed memory - I believe it was 19% of people who had repressed memory - even in Elizabeth Loftus' study. It's harder and harder as the research accumulates to deny the existence of dissociation.
Wayne Morris:
I would like to thank you very much, Gail, for joining us. It has been fascinating talking to you.
Gail Fisher-Taylor:
Thank you.
Wayne Morris:
That was an interview with Gail Fisher-Taylor sharing her views and insights into the effects of trauma, ritual abuse and mind control. Gail is a psychotherapist working in Toronto with trauma survivors.