Matthew and Julian sit down for the second of a two-part examination of the 1988 bestseller at the heart of the recovered memory movement. This is episode 10 of the Swan Song Series.Show Notes Controversy Behind the False Memory Syndrome Foundation The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual AbuseTruth and reconciliationCases That Have Resulted in ConvictionsWhy The Courage to Heal Isn't on My Recommended Reading ListCreating Hysteria25 Years of Trauma Treatment Networker 2014
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello Conspiratuality listeners, it's Matthew here.
This is a special, unlocked episode from our Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
We'll be dropping these periodically into our main feed.
Thanks so much for your support.
Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
Welcome everyone to Swan Song Series, Episode 10, The Courage to Heal, Part 2.
Hey Julian, we are back in the writing workshop of Ellen Bass and Laura Davis.
How is your poetry writing going these days?
Have you got some good stuff?
Are you blocked up?
No.
You know, I used to write a lot more many years ago.
Every now and again I'll hit a little streak, but I haven't been writing poetry really.
Maybe we should do some grounding exercises before we begin?
Yeah, I mean it'd be good to really get in touch with the deeper layers before we put pen to paper.
For our listeners, welcome.
We're referring to some of what we began to uncover in part one of this examination of this incredible book, incredibly influential book.
You should really check out part one first.
We covered the very mixed reception that The Courage to Heal has had, and we really spent the balance of our time discussing how Bass and Davis, the authors, introduced their project.
And just to review, Bass says that she had no idea or implies that she had no idea that child sexual abuse existed until she started hearing stories at the age of 27 in her creative writing class, and that class eventually became a magnet for people with survivor stories.
Laura Davis, for her part, says that she plunged into the project to heal herself, and both of them were clear about not having any formal training.
And you said a very mixed reception of the book.
I think I want to just put a point on that, that very polarized Reception, right?
That's better, yeah.
Right?
Super, super passionate praise and alarm sounding from other people.
Right.
Now, we are going to continue with the introductory matter in which they begin to discuss their epistemology, their views on memory formation and recovery.
their views on how writing can be a good tool for navigating the territory of repressed memory.
And then we'll also look at some of the problematic content that they include in amongst their
stories that they have solicited from writing students and, you know, people who answered their
ads in a newspaper.
So, let's get going.
They mark their introduction with a piece of advice for the reader, saying that strong feelings are to be expected while reading the book, And that that should be fine, but let's check out the way this particular part of that piece is written.
Quote, If you have unfamiliar or uncomfortable feelings as you read this book, don't be alarmed.
Strong feelings are part of the healing process.
On the other hand, if you breeze through these chapters, you probably aren't feeling safe enough to confront these issues.
Or you may be coping with the book the same way you coped with the abuse, by separating your intellect from your feelings.
If that's the case, stop, take a break, talk to someone for support, and come back to it later.
It's important that you don't bear this book the way you bore the abuse, numb and alone.
If you come to a part that stops you, you may be having a hard time with the material in that section.
Don't force yourself to read it.
Try a different chapter.
So, Julian, this seems like pretty good advice, but there's a super heavy assumption going on here.
Yeah, I mean, I hear these two options, right?
It could be that you have really strong feelings.
In essence, that this is triggering for you and that's okay, that's to be expected, that's actually part of the healing process.
Keep going unless it really overwhelms you and you need to just change to another chapter.
But then there's this other implication that if you're not having strong feelings, well then that's probably evidence that you are in denial and you've gone into this split between your intellect and your feelings.
And either way, either way, you are recovering something real.
There's no real other option.
It's not that you're reading these stories and they are making you uncomfortable because they're stories of intimate abuse and you feel empathetic for the people who wrote them.
It must be about you.
It must be about you.
Yeah, and actually this, in the last episode I said that one of the things that was really complicated for me in terms of my interaction with this book and other books and My time in the forest yoga community was that I did know people and I had intimate relationships with a couple women who had really difficult family abuse histories.
And part of my process in my twenties was going, well, if I'm attracted to women who have these histories, what does it mean about me?
Oh wow.
And must it mean that they're mirroring something back to me
about my own history that I thus far have been unwilling to face?
And that must be it.
And if I can get to that, then maybe my next relationship will be more satisfying
or maybe I'll be with someone who doesn't have that issue because I've worked through it in myself.
So they offer some tools.
This is one of the first indications that we get of the book being also a self-help manual.
So, they advise that you take a break and so on.
You maybe try another chapter.
They're going to go on to talk about, you know, deep breathing and other aspects of self-regulation.
So, it's therapeutic advice.
And throughout the book, Bass and Davis, they do paint therapy and therapists in a positive light.
I didn't actually find any references where they criticized a therapeutic encounter that one of their interlocutors had had.
Maybe I missed it, but in general, there's this sense that, like, well, this is part of therapy, we like therapy, and this is all moving towards, you know, therapeutic resolution.
However, in this opening material, they also don't say, you know, if this book brings up memories for you, find someone qualified to talk with you.
They do say something similar in the chapter called the emergency stage, the emergency stage being the point at which the crisis of your memory erupts, where the details become more intense or more clear.
They do suggest there that you should seek professional help.
One of the stages, however, is called believing it happened.
And in it, they write, survivors often doubt their own perceptions.
Coming to believe that the abuse really happened, and that it really hurt you, is a vital part of the healing process.
And this sounds, I mean, to me, like a true statement on its own, or a reasonable statement, but it can also function I think as a threshold, or a kind of dare, or a trust, or a test.
And to underline the point I'm making here, let me just quote from this same section.
And here's where we get into their ideas about memory and how it's recovered.
Often the knowledge that you were abused starts with a tiny feeling of intuition.
It's important to trust that inner voice and work from there.
Assume your feelings are valid.
So far, no one we've talked to thought she might have been abused and then later discovered that she hadn't been.
The progression always goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation.
If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.
Julian's eyes are bugged out.
I mean, it's as definitive a statement as you can get of, and literally, confirmation bias.
There's also this flip from the validation of feelings to the validation of facts that happens from one sentence to another in the middle of that.
So, they write, assume your feelings are valid.
Well, of course, that's fine.
Like, what feeling about something wouldn't be valid?
And then, immediately after, so far, no one we've talked to thought she might have been abused and then later discovered that she hadn't been.
So there's this literalization that just sort of becomes concrete in the middle of the paragraph.
Now, we have to turn now to a piece in Salon that appeared in 2002, written by Julia Grayson, because Grayson charts how this particular paragraph doesn't show up in subsequent editions, which implies that, I mean, Grayson has a number of things to say about this, so we'll see, but it implies that they know that they need to backtrack.
So, here's Grayson.
Quote, by the third edition in 1994, Bass and Davis began to back away from their reassuring certainties.
This is great writing, by the way.
They're reassuring certainties.
They still tell their readers that, quote, you don't need the kind of proof that would stand up in a court of law, unquote, but the blanket validation of all recovered memories is gone.
In the revision, the authors write, and the changes are in tallix, so this is that same paragraph, it is rare that someone thinks she was sexually abused and then later discovers she wasn't.
The progression, new word, usually goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation.
If you, new word, genuinely think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, In italics, there is a strong likelihood that you were, so they hedged it.
Wow.
Wow, and I must report that it also lines up with my own experience in this domain, which is that there's a feeling here that, you know, not only is it trust your infallible intuition Your feelings are guiding you somewhere really important.
And it's good that they've made these changes, but there's still an underlying feeling that you're being initiated into a community of the rememberers.
And that's why you're reading the book.
And there's a strong likelihood this happened.
If you have a hunch that it did, well, they've backed away from it definitely happened too.
It's a strong likelihood.
Now, Grayson is able to interview Davis, which is fascinating, and Grayson writes, why the changes?
Quote, there were ways information in the first edition was misconstrued, unquote, Davis says, quote, that we couldn't have possibly anticipated when we wrote the book, unquote.
Grayson says, misconstrued or not, by the mid-1990s, it was impossible, even for the most militant believer in repressed memories, to ignore the spectacular embarrassments in the field.
At their worst, those included now-discredited reports of a vast, meticulously organized, multi-generational satanic conspiracy operating worldwide that committed thousands of undetected atrocities every year, from child rape to human sacrifice and cannibalism.
Wow.
Right.
Impressive.
Yeah.
She nailed it.
it, 2002. By the 2008 edition, that whole little section is gone altogether. But here's
2002.
the thing.
In searching for it in the PDF, I used doubts as a keyword, and I didn't find the passage from the third edition that Grayson quotes with the altered words, but I did find an entirely new section which is called Strategies for Working with Persistent Doubt.
And that section gestures at the possibility that the entire project might be off course, but it also contains some chilling ironies.
I just want to say that that title, Strategies for Working with Persistent Doubt, sounds like it could be something out of a Christian, you know, bedside table book for Christians.
Or an MKUltra manual.
Sure.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
There's a Kafkaesque kind of... A little bit.
A little bit.
Now, they are such literati that they opened this section Which is in columns on the page with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke.
Quote, have patience toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
Okay, so they advise, look at the times doubts arrive.
They advise, know that there's a reason for your pain.
Heal from the things you are certain of.
It's okay if you're not sure.
Don't affirm anything you're not ready to affirm.
Assess your own therapeutic relationships.
This all sounds pretty solid.
Then we start getting a sense of what kind of feedback they have received as we move to the next page because they say, hold off on confronting your abuser or disclosing the abuse to family members who are likely to be extremely upset.
Like, if you're plagued by persistent doubt, then don't become one of these, like, many stories that we're starting to hear about people ripping their families apart with accusations, right?
Yeah, like my story.
Yeah.
Remember, you can trust yourself.
Yeah.
And this section ends with a subsection called, If Doubts Persist.
And it says, for some survivors, disturbing doubts about their abuse persist for a long time.
One survivor grew up in a family where her reality was so severely tampered with, it's no wonder she has trouble trusting her perceptions.
Quote, at night, before I went to sleep, my mother would tell me what went on during the day when I was awake was really a dream.
And what happened in my sleep, that was real.
She turned reality and dreams, awake and asleep, exactly opposite.
This is an extreme example, but some distortion of the truth is common in families where sexual abuse takes place.
If you've grown up unsure of what to believe, if your perceptions haven't matched what you were told, you may find it particularly hard to trust your own reality when it comes to sexual abuse.
However, consistent doubt can also be an indication that you're on the wrong track.
If you're genuinely unsure about what happened to you, don't rush yourself or allow anyone to rush you into giving it a label.
Take your time.
Explore your history, your feelings, your concerns.
Trust yourself.
Eventually, you will come to a fuller understanding of your experience.
So they're placing a little pressure valve in the 20th anniversary edition without really acknowledging that, you know, the forces that might make you feel like you should rush into giving yourself a label might come from, in part, the first edition of this book.
Okay, Julian, here's where we get into some very familiar territory for you, I think, more than me, but I'm pretty familiar with it, too.
I've titled this section, Somatic Epistemology.
Now, on 74, page 74 of the first edition, there's a section that's called, The Body Remembers What the Mind Chooses to Forget.
Quote, It is also possible to remember only feelings.
Memories are stored in our bodies, and it is possible to physically re-experience the terror of the abuse.
Your body may clutch tight, or you may feel the screams you could not scream as a child, or you may feel that you are suffocating and cannot breathe.
So, this sounds familiar, yes?
It's very familiar.
I mean, I get into conflicted territory here because from my own Therapeutic experience from the different practices that I've been involved in for a long time.
I do feel that there there's There's validity to within a certain context to exploring the somatic component the the like nonverbal nonconceptual component of traumatic experience or you know just just things from our
lives that we that we haven't looked at or gotten help with or felt.
Empathize with about that that there's there's a lot there that's really valid but it's it's this crossing over into
something that is.
That is more.
I don't know that's being marketed as a.
Special experience to the to the general public you know in a way that.
It's like there are actual truthful perspectives from a body of knowledge that is nascent, that is still developing, right?
The intersection between, say, neuroscience or our understanding of the nervous system and psychology and how the body is involved in the experiences of, shall we say, the mind and our emotional brain.
and even techniques that can help support that kind of process.
But it's how that then gets repurposed and how it gets literalized and how it gets sensationalized
and turned into something that is, I don't know.
To me, it all becomes very misguided, and what's unfortunate about it is that there is something valid and important there.
And a lot of people agree with you, and this is why I'm wondering if you would be surprised to learn that Bessel van der Kolk gives a blurb in the front matter of the 20th anniversary edition.
That is somewhat devastating.
I'm sorry to tell you, but this is what he writes.
The Courage to Heal is a wise and gentle book that should be read by all people trying to recover from having been sexually misused as a child, and by all friends, family members, and professionals with a genuine desire to understand both the experience of being a victim of sexual abuse and the arduous path to recovery.
The courage to heal has helped countless survivors of sexual abuse in their efforts to confront the realities of their lives and to take charge of them in the present.
Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.
Did he read the book?
Exactly my question.
Did he read the book?
Or was he high when he read the book?
Was he on an encounter retreat when he read the book?
I mean, this gets into the politics of book blurbing too, right?
Yeah.
And what do you want to associate your name with based upon how popular you think it might become, you know?
Yeah, but it's hard to imagine that he reads the book and goes, yeah, this is deeply problematic and misguided in certain ways that I understand because of my expertise.
I'm gonna blurb it anyway because it'll help my book sales.
That's hard to imagine he would do that.
It seems to me more likely that he had a generous interpretation of what they were doing, that maybe he was unaware of a lot of the surrounding controversies in the 20 years that had elapsed since the book was published.
Yeah, that's the thing, too, is that this is coming after waves and waves and waves of review.
He would have had to have been living under a rock to not know that this is an incredibly compromised book.
Yeah, and with his background, his education, the research that he's been involved in, you would think he would be up to speed on the phases of how memory is conceived of within the psychological and sort of neuroscience community around exactly this kind of topic.
Right.
So, this blurb, he writes six years before The Body Keeps the Score comes out.
So, I think, I mean, this is an amazing moment for a lot of people, I imagine, to see this blurb here.
But I also want to point out is that this is where we start to have this overlap.
between extremely popular and seemingly well-researched and mainstream trauma studies, and then stories of trauma that might actually provoke moral panickery.
Like, what happens with that blurb being in front of the book is that it kind of opens the doorway between forms of discipline and epistemology that are just, like, incompatible.
And Creates this impression that everybody's working on the same stuff, everybody's trying to recover in the same way.
All roads lead to healing and, you know, the paths are many and God is one.
Yes, exactly.
And that's what I was getting at before, that instead of being a narrowly kind of circumscribed, like here's this domain for people who specifically have this issue, which, you know, is more common than we might like to think, but doesn't happen to absolutely everyone.
Here's one way of approaching it and here's how it dovetails with sort of other tools and perspectives that we also have or that have come along since.
It's not that, it's more like this, I think what you start to get is an ontology that says the domain of personal growth and healing and sort of holistic self-care is going to include some of this because this is and it's hard not to feel like it becomes part of what's on the menu in the workshop circuit for where people are actually seeking
Entertainment and a kind of voyeuristic heroism in the name of spiritual growth or something like that.
You know, I made a comment last time about how it seems that there are books that become the talismans or the reliquaries of the charismatics that write them, and therefore they're untouched, they're untouchable by criticism.
Part of that happens in a kind of crossover blurb context like this, where we have a kind of a blessing from above, really.
That's right, that's right.
Yeah.
Yeah, a blessing.
You know what it is, too, Matthew?
It's a blessing from a current kind of prominent figure That then fits the narrative that says a book like Courage to Heal was ahead of its time.
Right, right, exactly.
Now we have mainstream acceptance via somatic psychology and figures like Bessel van der Kolk of what we knew all along.
And it's that same narrative that we see again and again, you know, around spirituality as well and quantum physics and what have you.
Like there's always these, we are the early adopters of something that later on will be widely accepted and this serves that.
Right.
Well, it goes on to wade in this territory of somatic experiencing and, you know, therapy and recovery and we find in it a number of relaxation exercises and I've just screenshot for you pages 214 to 215.
Maybe you'll recognize some of these exercises for connecting with your body.
We've got belly breathing.
Great thing to do when you panic.
We have relaxation exercises involving lying on your back or in any comfortable position.
Make sure your clothing isn't constricting you in any way.
Take off your shoes.
Undo your belt.
Sounds like the opening of yoga class.
Grounding exercises.
Imagine that you are a tree sending your roots deep into the earth.
Sounds like tree pose.
You know, find a comfortable position with your feet on the floor or standing.
This is all very, I mean, this is everywhere, right?
And it seems to make the process of memory recovery that they are speaking about I don't know, coherent with and normalized within a broader context of wellness that is quite actually accepted and becoming part of everyday American countercultural life.
Yeah, I would endorse these pages with no problem.
There's nothing here that I see that's not just like, oh, this is nice self-regulation stuff.
And it bears mentioning that part of what happens is that with the advent of more contemporary somatic psychology, and you said somatic experiencing I think in a more generic sense, but the actual technique developed by Peter Levine called somatic experiencing.
Levine and Bessel van der Kolk and there's a group of people like this, Dan Siegel, I'm
not remembering all of their names but there's a whole list of them.
They represent a turn away from more cathartic unearthing of material going into really big
experiences.
There's a notion that a lot of that could be re-traumatizing and might actually be unnecessary.
You may not need to do that in order to heal and that it can lead to a lot of this very
confusing, the confusion that we've been describing.
So let me just pause for a moment there and ask whether if something that, if one of the
things that van der Kolk is recognizing in The Courage to Heal is the ostensibly gentle
practice of journaling and writing, am I missing the fact that in the background of what Bass
and Davis are doing is the… The more cathartic, primal scream stuff that is also getting to the same truths that maybe people like Van Der Kolk and Siegel and so on would not approve of?
Might it seem to them like this process of creative writing and the sort of gentle, communal disclosure of stories is actually gentle and trauma-aware?
I think that's a very good observation, right?
Because if we go back into early somatic psychology, it's like Alexander Lowen and Wilhelm Reich is the sort of granddaddy of all of this, and then Janow and Primal Scream, and there is this intensity.
about what they're describing and that, you know, a writing workshop does seem like a kinder,
gentler, communal way for people to explore material.
And I think that someone like Vander Kolk is gonna come along and say, you know,
there are these other techniques that are really good for self-regulating
so that people don't get too overwhelmed, so that they're not re-traumatized by what is being
triggered And if we add some of this, I could see how this might be a pretty useful methodology that Bass and Davis are doing with their writing workshops.
You can fashion a way in which it does seem legitimate and maybe even safe.
Yeah, and I would just point out too that, you know, you said that you would endorse all of those grounding and self-regulation practices without any problem.
The problem here is that there's this implication, given where they stand in the book, that the body, when it's relaxed, when it's grounded, will offer up the truth.
Yeah.
Because the body in Ellen Bassett and Laura Davis' work is at the center of the epistemology of memory.
And I think this is why it becomes a very powerful and popular book within wellness circles because most people in yoga and other movement practices and other somatic practices I think are often taken by this idea that the practices themselves will let them see some kind of truth.
Yes, and this is actually the place where I think that the yoga experiment in the West is informed and sort of is swimming in the waters of all of this stuff in ways that I think a lot of people don't even realize.
Right.
That some of these ideas that your body will tell you the truth and that you're going to need to get out of your head and into your heart and trust your intuition and that this is a practice, this is not actually about concepts.
None of which, by the way, has anything to do with Hatha Yoga or anything that happens in India before... Well, I mean, it didn't happen in India in the 1930s either.
If it's happening in India now, it's the pizza effect with somatic yoga being imported back into the middle-class neighborhoods of Bangalore, right?
Totally, yeah.
And so then what goes along with this is that the Orientalism and the idealizing of Eastern cultures gets woven through with this assumption that all manner of somatic techniques that are profoundly Western and that come actually much more out of the counterculture revolution, and Freud and Reich and the rest of them, is something that originates, this idea of body wisdom originates in the ancient East, and it's just really not true.
Yeah, or at least we don't know where it happens, if it is true.
I mean, it might be true, it's just that it didn't come from the yoga that got globalized.
I mean, I always am amazed to remember that BKS Iyengar Um, never spoke about how the postures felt for him or inside his body.
Like he just did not, it's almost as if he, I mean because he was a yoga performer, basically a calisthenics performer.
He had no real interest in communicating this posture will reveal the truth of some kind of experience.
It wasn't like that at all.
It was, put your body into this shape and innervate these nerves so that your entire body can become aware of God.
That was what he was doing, if it was metaphysical at all.
Yeah, and in essence, so much of this particular kind of philosophy in terms of how it's a philosophy that is also a psychology, right?
It's essentially saying the way to become psychologically and spiritually liberated is to is to disconnect from what Freud would describe as the unconscious that you need to go into.
Yes, exactly!
And it's so fascinating because if Iyengar had had that approach to yoga, had had a westernized, somaticized, psychologically informed approach to yoga, he would have quit!
He would have quit!
Like, when he was 40 years old and realizing that he was just doing all of this shit and it was causing him intense pain, and that he wanted to do something else.
Maybe gardening or something like that.
Like, he would have fucking quit.
He would have quit.
But that's not what he was doing.
He would have written, the light turns on after yoga.
Yeah, something like that.
Or after yoga, the dishes, or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, I'm just going to backtrack a little bit.
We've already mentioned it in relation to, like, is writing a gentle pathway that somebody like Van Der Kolk might have appreciated.
For Bass and Davis, writing is part of somatic truth-seeking.
And, you know, this makes sense.
They're both writing instructors.
That's their professional income.
Bass has published many books of poetry.
They have a lot of solid things to say about the benefits of writing when it comes to sorting out your thoughts.
And just like with the exercises, Julian, I will endorse most of what they have to say about writing.
But I want to highlight the last two paragraphs in this instructional section that lays out how readers should approach the writing exercises that are littered throughout the text.
So they write.
The basic method.
Try to forget everything you've ever been told about writing.
What you're going to do is a kind of free writing, or stream-of-consciousness writing.
It's not about making art, or polished crafting, or trying to make sense to someone else.
Rather, it's a way to short-circuit some of your sensors to get what you need to say.
Write without stopping.
Go at a pace that's comfortable for you and don't stop.
If you get stuck or can't think of anything to say, you can write, this is the stupidest exercise I ever heard of, or I'm hungry, I wonder if time's up yet.
One woman who was writing about her abuse stopped every few lines and wrote, I cannot say anymore.
And then she went on to say more.
Allowing herself to refuse to go on, saying no, made it possible for her to go one more step each time.
Now she doesn't say, they don't say whether this woman was in a workshop or not.
Whether she was alone or whether she was being encouraged in person.
Anyway, last bit.
You don't need to use full sentences.
You needn't spell or punctuate properly.
It can be in English or in another language.
Sometimes, if another language was spoken when you were a child, you will remember in that language.
If you were abused before you learned to talk, your writing may come out as baby talk.
Wow.
Okay, so as personally, as a veteran of many writing classes and workshops, this is 1000% familiar.
And it makes me super uncomfortable if we're talking about trying to remember something accurately.
Why?
Because these are exactly the same exercises one would use to break through writer's block when trying to create fiction or poetry.
But that's not exactly what we're doing in this book.
Let me just re-read this last paragraph because it perfectly just blends with the automatic writing prompts, with the idea that pure sound sometimes can come from a regressed self.
So, they say you needn't use full sentences, you needn't spell or punctuate properly.
It can be in English or in another language.
Sometimes, if in another language was spoken when you were a child, you will remember in that language.
If you were abused before you learned to talk, your writing may come out as baby talk.
So, now we're in Mallory DeMille territory and light language TikTok.
But Bass and Davis are saying, don't stop.
They're saying, when you wind up babbling because you don't stop, this might reflect the true voice of the traumatized child instead of the artifact of being asked not to stop.
And so, to me, this just feels like it rolls out the red carpet for a kind of disorganized and magical thinking.
Julian, what do you think?
Absolutely, when you said it's automatic writing prompts, that's it, right?
And there you can easily find other texts that are guiding people into the process of learning how to either be a trans channel or to be someone who communicates with the dead, to be a medium.
Or to be someone who is allowing some other force to come through and write for them in the way that many prophetic texts claim to be.
You know, we're just in this territory where ultimately anything goes.
And so, as you say, keep writing, don't stop writing.
You might start writing babbling, the babbling then will mean this other thing.
It might just mean that nothing else is coming out right now and you're being faithful to the exercise.
And in another context, it could be like, well, when that starts coming out, it's light language or it's the Galactic Federation has finally made contact with you because you've gotten out of your head.
Or, like I made the point, you know, I don't know how clear it was, but in the episode on light language that we did, it could also be a part of a sincere examination of what the roots of language mean and feel like to you.
In a Dadaist sense, like, it could be that as well.
And what kills me about this is that I don't think that any writing instructor in, you know, 1974, 1988, or 2008 would be unaware of the connection between automatic writing and the surreal Dadaist or sound poetry of the early 20th century.
If they were well-educated.
Well, okay, I'm expecting that.
I'm hoping that they're well-educated as writing instructors because they're not educated as therapists.
So, I don't know.
I mean, I want there to be some expertise.
Yeah, and also, part of what I also hear, what I take from that is that in a more Well boundary exploration there could be space for like hey this weird thing may happen when you start you start actually finding that the way that your brain processes language and sound and ascribes meaning to words starts to get a little jumbled and scrambled and maybe starts to.
Let's sort of enter territory where you're maybe touching in on something a little more elemental.
Let's not leap into making any kind of strange epistemological assumptions about that, but let's see where that phenomenon goes for you because there's something there.
And in fact, here's a quote from one of the Dadaists who had explored that territory that you might find interesting.
Yeah, you know, but with Bass and Davis, what we have is the opening and loosening and, I guess, liberating practices of automatic writing being instrumentalized to point towards a single conclusion, a single original sin, a single crisis point that must be resolved.
And that's just not what it does.
That's not how it works.
That's not how it has ever worked, those writing prompts.
Far from being a kinder, gentler form of trauma work, I think we get a little bit into, you know, crucible kind of territory.
It's like, look, there it is.
The babbling is happening.
This must mean that you were molested when you were pre-verbal.
Oh, right.
Because that's what that means when that happens.
Yeah, right.
Oh, and so now we're going to focus our attention on you in that way.
Right.
So the writing prompt actually can produce a symptomology.
It's priming.
That is then diagnosable.
Yep.
Very problematic.
So, let's get to the stories, which are incredibly moving, heartbreaking.
They're in part 5 of the book.
In the first edition, there's 16 stories.
They're all presented through, you know, the authenticity ritual of writing first-person narrative.
Now, again, there's no reason to disbelieve any of these stories.
It's actually very worthwhile to engage with them and the depth of their emotionality.
And then we come to the story of Annette.
So, the intro to her story is written by Bass and Davis.
Quote, Annette is 60 years old.
She is divorced and has three grown sons.
Seven years ago, she founded Incest Survivors Anonymous, a national self-help organization built on the Alcoholics Anonymous model.
Annette grew up in an upper middle class town in the Midwest.
Her father held the same managerial job for over 30 years.
Both her parents were community leaders active in church affairs.
Secretly, they were involved with a group that performed ritualized abuse according to a satanic calendar.
Town leaders, business people, and church officials were all involved in this cult.
From infancy, Annette was abused in rituals that included sexual abuse, torture, murder, pornography, and systematic brainwashing through drugs and electric shock.
Quote, I was what they called a breeder.
I was less than 12 years old.
They overpowered me and got me pregnant and then they took my babies.
They killed them right in front of me.
Unquote.
I mean, wow, okay, so here we are in the full blossoming of the worst possible outcomes of this approach.
So, Julian, do you remember this passage in this book?
I do not.
It's possible that you didn't read it.
Yeah.
But, I mean, there it is.
It's right there.
And all of it straight out of Michelle Remembers.
With the addition of breeding babies for slaughter.
So, after this introduction, Annette tells her story, and it's abject, it's also vague.
And then, here's a treat for you, her section closes with an interview with Sandy Gallant.
Julian, does this name ring a bell for you?
It doesn't.
Who is this?
Well, how about this voice?
Do you find missing children sometimes fall prey to these people?
I believe that they do.
We can't prove that they do.
But as a law enforcement officer, I question two million children missing in the United States knowing That many, many of those are not runaways and are so young that they couldn't run away anyway.
Yes, it's Sandy Gallant, the San Francisco Police Department officer from the Devil Worshippers 2020 special that aired in 1985.
Here she claims that two million children are missing per year.
And this is three years before The Courage to Heal, so it's not like Bass and Davis are citing an expert who then goes off a deep end, right?
Like, Gallant is a satanic panicker from the word go.
Now, do they know that?
Did they see that 2020 special?
I mean, I think the better question is, like, who would not have seen it, especially if they were interested in ritual abuse stories?
It makes me think of, you know, we've covered a lot with anti-vax strategies and there's this always referencing VAERS, right?
Yeah.
And that VAERS is this completely, you know, open source, unverified, raw data where just anyone who wants to can submit any kind of report they like.
And so you end up with these incredibly, incredibly inflated numbers.
And then if you're bought in, Then it becomes the snowball effect where the prevalence of this is, you know, a thousand times more than normies realize.
And of course then there's an incredible urgency and sense of mission around it.
So much here depends upon inflation and urgency.
But I want to turn to what happens after the book has been in circulation for a few years.
It's selling like hotcakes, the reviews are effusive, but then there's also an avalanche of backlash against the methodology, the plausibility, the effect it's having on families, and the inclusion of the satanic panic material.
In their third edition, released in 1994, Bass and Davis respond with a new chapter called Honoring the Truth, Response to the Backlash.
And I read through it.
I found a PDF of it.
It's long.
It's about 80 pages long.
It's pretty meandering.
It really doesn't address any of the evidentiary or methodological criticisms.
I found it quite boring, and so eventually what I did was I just word-searched Satan to see whether or not they at least walked that back or not.
So, here's the first hit for the word Satan.
Can I just say that this is probably a really good practice in general, is that any time you have access to...
So there's a section called Facing Sadistic Ritual Abuse in this new chapter.
Satan as an initial kind of test for red flags. A little scan, right. So there's a section called
facing sadistic ritual abuse in this new chapter. Now that actually shows up in a different form in
the 2008 edition so we'll get to that. And this section starts with a quote from somebody called
Margaret Smith who says, if there is even a small chance that one ritual abuse claim is true, we owe
it to all potential victims to explore the problem of ritual abuse in greater depth.
And we'll see you next time.
Okay, so they write, Some of the propaganda of the backlash has attempted to discredit survivors' stories by ridiculing their reports of extreme abuse, including the torture of sadistic ritual abuse.
It is understandable that as a society and as individuals we are reluctant to face such atrocities, but our inability to believe is what leaves victims vulnerable and survivors bereft of compassion or even acknowledgement.
Eli Weissel, renowned author and survivor of the Holocaust, was recently interviewed by Oprah Winfrey.
In response to her acclamation of how unbelievable his experiences were, Weissel responded, the enemy counted on the disbelief of the world.
Wow.
Now, whose writing is this?
This is Bass and Davis writing in their third edition.
So they're quoting Eli Weissel, referring to, you know, Prime Minister Chamberlain not believing that Hitler was going to do more than invade Poland, and of course Mein Kampf wasn't really, you know, a set of plans for eliminating the Jews.
There's a very bizarre and I think very predictive comparison going on here.
That we see show up in recent memory.
So they go on.
This is the situation we face now, and the dangers of our collective denial are grave.
Psychologist Susan Van Benschoten says, quote, to realize the danger in not taking patients' accounts of satanic abuse seriously, one only has to consider instances in which reports of atrocities were initially denied and later found to be true.
Two vivid examples from this century are the tragedy at Jonestown, Guyana, and the Holocaust.
In both instances, accounts of the events unfolding were available long before they were believed.
That is truly astonishing and so incredibly familiar.
And you have two things going on there, right?
One is that the perceived phenomenon of satanic ritual abuse is being compared to the Holocaust.
Yes.
In terms of its level of seriousness.
Right.
And the other is that anyone who is Referencing the problem with recovered memories as being something that's been called into question is a propagandist.
Right.
Wow.
And then she's quoting some crank who is suggesting that no one understood what the people's temple was up to.
But also, was there any claim that Jones was a practicing Satanist?
That's not part of the story.
Was there any claim that in esoteric Nazism there was some sort of fascination with Satanism?
I've never heard that.
Absolutely not.
I think the implication here is that These are examples of absolutely calamitous events in history where before they happened, people were not taking them seriously.
People were on denial of them, right?
People were wanting to say, oh, it's not such a big deal, you're exaggerating, but look at what a big deal it really was.
Right, right.
So, it's not Satanism per se, it's just the huge thing that you have ignored to your peril.
That people don't want to believe.
That's the point, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Alright, so there's one other hit for Satan in this extra chapter, and here it is.
Yet, sadistic crime, including crime involving satanic belief systems, exists.
Larry Jones, a police lieutenant in Boise, Idaho, reminds us, "...we've got confessed killers on death row throughout the country who have said they killed because they worshipped Satan.
We've got child molesters who have confessed that their satanic belief system places a positive value on torturing children.
Any detective knows there are unsolved murders in every jurisdiction around the country."
I didn't survey the additions between 1994 and when Grayson interviews Davis by email for her 2002 article, but somewhere in there, they just dropped that whole chapter.
So they produced this, you know, protesting too much chapter against the backlash, and then they dropped it.
Along with Annette's story, again with no note, no correction, no errata.
So, here's Grayson again writing in Salon.
Grayson writes, when I asked Davis in email whether her modifications to The Courage to Heal acknowledged the concept of false memories, she wrote, quote, although I support survivors with all my heart and believe that most people claiming to have been falsely accused are perpetrators in hiding.
There have been instances in which people have been mistakenly accused, though this is a far smaller number than the proponents of false memory claim, So, although to Davis, this is Grayson writing, it's not a large or important problem, quote, nevertheless, if even one person is falsely accused of anything, it is a terrible tragedy, and I have great sympathy for anyone in that situation.
I pray every day for those families to find healing and peace.
Thoughts and prayers.
Yeah, and this is a far smaller number than the Proponents of False Memory claim.
Now, I don't know about the Proponents of False Memory, but let's just recall that there are 12,000 criminal cases against satanic ritual abusers.
None of which are ever corroborated.
Satanic ritual abusers, right.
None of which are ever corroborated.
In the 2008 edition, I'm unclear as to whether Bass and Davis are doubling down or not.
They seem to do a dance a little bit about their past claims.
There is no Annette story, but it also seems that they retain the kind of vibe and the specter of satanic ritual abuse by laundering the satanic part out of a replacement story, which is attributed to the pseudonymous Sheila O'Connell.
Now, Sheila describes a very Michelle-Remembers type childhood with an uncle taking her to cultic abuse rituals five times per year.
At one point, she is implicated in child murder, according to her story.
Now, the only occurrence of the word satanic appears here in this passage, which is subtitled, I had to forgive myself.
Quote, I had grown up as a Catholic where it was a mortal sin to kill someone.
I knew I would go straight to hell for what I had done.
I also grew up in a satanic world where sacrifice and murder occurred.
The fact that they were overlaid on top of each other was extremely disturbing.
I went to talk to a minister about it. She said, these events happened. You were a child.
You have done enough penance." I'm just so stunned by the language, the juxtaposition of
the language that's being used and the thing that is being gestured towards or claimed, right?
Right. And then in a larger framework, there's also this justification or this juxtaposition,
sorry, between here are new agey wellness this. Um,
modes of self-care for you to, you know, help nurture your healing process, and then here is all of this abject material for you to consider that's coming from other people, but it might actually be reflective of your own inner reality that you haven't accepted yet.
Like, there's a real contrast, page by page, in what this book is offering, and there's a couple of great examples coming up.
Yeah, and I just, I'm struck by, because I had grown up Catholic, you know, in Catholicism it's a mortal sin to kill someone.
Whereas for everyone else it may not be such a big deal.
Right.
And then I talked to my minister and he said, you've done enough penance.
It's, whoa.
I mean, it's as if you're talking about the time that you, you know, stole a piece of candy from the corner store.
In the 2008 edition, there's a whole new page that recoups some of the added chapter from 1994 because the subtitle is Facing Ritualized Abuse, and here I have to confess that, like, To really do forensic analysis on this book, I would have to have multiple copies open in front of me and go page by page and see how it actually evolved over time.
So I'm really pointing out very obvious changes, but they made a lot of changes over the years and they didn't really track any of them.
So, this page, like the inserted chapter from 1994, it meanders, it doesn't offer any statistics or stories, names, places, police reports, court charges.
It basically, vaguely says, we read about this stuff in the paper.
And it's really not much more than a repetition of, you know, this happens and we really, really don't want to talk about it.
So, on the page it says, facing ritualized abuse.
There's a definition.
Ritualized abuse is severe physical, sexual, and psychological abuse involving the use of rituals and carried out by members of a group.
The abuse is premeditated and may include sadistic torture, illusion, mind control, and the use of drugs as well as sexual abuse.
Because the ritual elements are so extreme, ritualized abuse can seem unbelievable even to its victims.
So, a fairly straightforward description of what their idea of ritualized abuse is, but again, no statistics on how often this is happening, no citations of court cases, nothing like that.
But here again, and this is why I think they've kind of folded in the material from the extra chapter from 1994, they quote Eli Weissel again on the Holocaust.
So, there's another Holocaust dog whistle in there.
You know, the analogy is that, you know, as you mentioned, Julian, the sufferers of ritual abuse are like Jews, and we don't believe that the Nazis are everywhere and that they're ready to slaughter everyone.
And we also have, in addition to the Holocaust survivor legitimacy, we have the Oprah Winfrey name drop.
Name drop.
She carries a lot of weight.
Opposite this page, called Facing Ritualized Abuse, is a poem from Ellen Bass.
And I want to double down on the trigger warning here because this poem is extremely rough.
I'm going to read it because I think the fact that it is a poem and it's juxtaposed against the most non-credible page perhaps in the book is very significant.
The poem is called Bearing Witness, and it is about bearing witness.
Remember, let's just remember that Ellen Bass does not claim to be a survivor of abuse, but a facilitator of workshops in which people are telling their stories of abuse.
So, bearing witness is really kind of in the theme of her work.
And there's an epigraph from Holly Near that says, If you have lived it, then it seems I must hear it.
When the long-fingered leaves of the sycamore flutter in the wind, spiky seed balls swinging, and a child throws his aqua lunch bag over the schoolyard railing, the last thing, the very last thing you want to think about is what happens to children when they're crushed like grain in the worn mortar of the cruel.
We weep at tragedy, a baby sailing through the windshield like a cabbage, a shoe.
The young remnants of war, arms sheared and eyeless, they lie like eggs on the rescue center's bare floor.
But we draw a line at the sadistic, as if our yellow plastic tape would keep harm confined.
We don't want to know what generations of terror do to the young who are fed like cloth under the machine's relentless needle.
In the paper, we'll read about the ordinary neighbor who chopped up boys at the movies we pay to shoot up that adrenaline rush and the spent aftermath relief like a long-awaited piss.
But face to face with the living prey, we turn away, rev the motor, as though we've seen a ghost, which in a way we have.
One who wanders the world, tugging on sleeves, trying to find the road home.
And if we stop, all our fears will come to pass.
The knowledge of evil will coat us like grease from a long shift at the griddle.
Our sweat will smell like the sweat of the victims.
And this is why you do it.
Listen at the outskirts of what our species has accomplished.
Listen until the world is flat again and you are standing on its edge.
This is why you hold them in your arms, allowing their snot to smear your skin,
their sour breath to mist your face.
You listen to slash the membrane that divides us, to plant the hard, shiny seed of yourself in the common earth.
You crank open the rusty hinge of your heart like an old beach umbrella, because God is not a flash of diamond light.
God is the kicked child, the child who rocks alone in the basement, the one fucked so many times she does not know her name, her mind burning like a star.
That's Ellen Bass.
It's from a book she's written called Mules of Love.
And I have to say, happy to read it because it's a pretty good poem.
And, well, Julian, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, it's a pretty good poem.
It's really, really disturbing and really...
Oh my gosh, it's like the imagery and especially that last turn of phrase, it's so disturbing, it's so graphic.
It's clear that she is in some kind of very complex love relationship with this subject matter.
And it is revelatory to her.
And of utmost importance.
Of utmost importance.
So, I've got some thoughts on this as somebody who's been in this type of writing world, but let me just put a series of things together to review.
For the 2008 edition, which is blurbed by Bessel van der Kolk.
Annette is taken out, but Sheila is put in.
The Defense Against the Backlash chapter is taken out, which means that there's no discussion or correction of previous references to satanic ritual abuse.
Sandy Gallant's interview is taken out, but her name appears in the acknowledgements in the end.
There's a new page, Facing Ritual Abuse.
And it's extremely vague, and then it's faced with a page that wields the poetic and moral authority of Ellen Bass, with a poem called Bearing Witness, and it depicts such salvation through violence that I believe most readers would be stunned into a kind of respectful receptivity.
Which leads me to ask, who is this book about, really?
Who is this book for?
And I hesitate, but I want to look at that last few lines again, because here's where the child survivor merges with the indigo child savior.
According to Bass, at least in this poem, the survivor is God.
Is God.
The survivor is God.
The survivor is God, and her trauma is a burning star that, what, lights the way?
And that burning star comes from the abuse.
So, What I want to say is that it doesn't seem to matter whether we are feminists, poets, progressives, queers, whatever.
There's an insane conflation of suffering with salvation that is at the root of our culture.
It's at the primal root of ancient Christianity, and it just doesn't go away.
On one side of the page, you have Davis and Bass asking the reader to simply believe in the terrible fact of ritual abuse, and on the other, Bass offers a poem called Bearing Witness and offers an abject, sublime vision of the abused child as God.
Now, how is anyone going to argue with that?
How is that combination of pages going to stimulate I have a bit of a tangent here, a little bit of a rant, apologies in advance.
what might be happening inside a person trying to remember something difficult.
And here's like I really I have a bit of a tangent here a little bit of a rant apologies in advance
this is so personally disquieting to me and the reason is that in 1994 I was 23 years old and I
published a novel called Dying for Veronica a sub-catholic dream with mind music.
Now, you might be able to guess from the title and the subtitle that this was a very strange book, and it was.
It was postmodern, it's surreal, it's gothic, it's macabre, and at the center of it is the incestuous relationship between the narrator and his slightly older sister.
The first page opens with a sex act between the narrator and the slightly older sister.
Now, what was I doing with that?
Was I secretly or unconsciously revealing my own inner history?
I mean, in a way.
However, I don't have a sister.
Was I accessing things that I couldn't otherwise access without that conceit?
Well, yes.
But why was that my focus?
I don't actually know.
I mean, I was Catholic, that was a big part of the aesthetics and the tensions of the book, but I also think that I was completely soaking in the environment of the news that proliferated at the time and that spun out from the satanic panic.
Like, I believe that I was influenced by all of the materials that we've been covered in some way that I didn't really understand.
I didn't know what the details were of the Satanic Panic.
I couldn't have outlined what it meant, but there is a visceral intensity to those stories that I believe came into my imagination.
And it's unparalleled.
And so what my brain did, and what a lot of writers did during this time, I'll list some in a bit, for good or ill, in that milieu, was to use the constellation of incest or abuse as a metaphor for intimate betrayal, for claustrophobia, for isolation, for the conflicts of pleasure and shame.
I was not alone in this territory.
I'm not sure what novels y'all zoomers are writing and reading these days, but back in the early 90s, I was reading Kathy Acker, Jim Carroll, Leonard Cohen, William Vollman, and there's a writer here in Toronto named Lynn Crosby who's incredibly talented and who freaked the shit out of everyone by writing a book-length love poem to a local serial killer.
What I know for sure, I don't know where this book came from.
I don't know what I was trying to do with it.
It was well regarded at the time, you know, I was happy to be praised for my creativity and whatever and my weird imagination, but I don't really know why I settled on that particular theme.
It just sort of came to me as a piece of music would.
What I do know for sure is that I was very consciously a creative writer.
I was very consciously a novelist.
I think I had an aggrandized understanding of what that meant.
I had a romantic attitude towards that vocation.
I thought much more of it than I think was warranted, but I never thought to myself, I am doing something for the rest of humanity.
I am uncovering a deep cultural scandal.
In fact, I had a much more antagonistic attitude towards the world, which is, I have a fucked up brain and it's interesting and you should probably pay me for it.
And it was much more about disclosing an internal world that might resonate with a reader's internal world, with all of its confusions and shadows and contradictions and paradoxes, with all of its pain and suffering, joy and trouble.
So, I shudder to think what might have happened if a writing instructor like Ellen Bass or Linda Davis had gotten hold of me.
Because I think that The impulse would have been to interpret what I was doing fictionally and poetically and to literalize a series of metaphors that maybe I shouldn't have been playing with, but yet I was.
And I can imagine being told that my life was different from what it actually was.
But, you know, maybe I also wouldn't have gotten hooked.
Because the idea is really so absurd that a novelist or a poet should, like, have insight to help another person.
Like, that's not how we talked about it back then!
I mean, everyone I knew Who was a writer, a serious writer at that time, knew that they were a writer because they were confused, they were fucked up, they were depressive, they were strung out, they were heroin addicts.
I can't remember a single writer from those days who presumed to gather people into workshops and tell them what they should write about.
Um, we were kind of like those, like, non-parent adults who say, yeah, like, I'm way too unstable to have kids, you know?
But then something happened, I think, in the late 1990s, which is not unlike what happened with the yoga and wellness industry, because suddenly there were, you know, MFA programs and creative writing popping up everywhere in all of these bourgeois places.
And then the accomplished writer was also somehow supposed to be a facilitator, and that was one of the ways that they were going to make money.
So, all of this is to say is that when I see how Bass has inserted her creative work opposite a page in which the facts of the matter are already obscured by potential layers of insinuation, projection, and fantasy, and that's impacting real lives, I just, like I know I'm looking at something profoundly flawed and certainly tone-deaf, maybe irresponsible, because the thing is, just to repeat, she is not a child sexual abuse survivor any more than I am.
So, what is she doing when she takes that constellation of the abused child and writes a poem about it?
She's not disclosing.
She's not mining her own memories.
It is an act of imagination.
She might actually be mining the memories of others for creative purposes.
Not in a mean-spirited way.
I'm not saying this is manipulative, but it's just something that really should have gone through multiple layers of diverse oversight.
Like, not fellow writers in your MFA program or at your local crunchy bookstore.
Like, those are not the people who are going to give you the feedback who say, you know, these are different categories of thing and you probably shouldn't put them on opposite pages.
So, rant over.
With you.
There's one other opposite page sort of butterfly leaf thing that I want to point to which is kind of brings us into the present age a little bit and shows how proximal the ritual abuse and self-care industries became through a book like this or how that began to happen.
So, on the left, we have a series of resources under the title of Spirituality.
So, are you familiar with some of these titles here, Julian?
Oh yeah, very familiar.
Okay, so what have we got?
What have we got?
I'm not going to read the description for each of them, but the titles are Charlotte Jo Quebec, Nothing Special.
She's a Zen Buddhist teacher who I loved in my 20s.
Tara Brach, Radical Self Acceptance, Embracing Your Life with the Heart of the Buddha, Psychotherapist and Meditation Teacher.
Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart, also a book I've read multiple times.
Daniel Gottlieb, Letters to Sam, A Grandfather's Lessons on Love, Loss, and the Gifts of Life.
Not familiar, but it sounds like a bestseller.
Byron Katie?
Oh no!
With Stephen Mitchell?
No!
Oh, you knew they were married, right?
You know they're married.
No, I didn't know that!
Oh man, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry to tell you.
King awful.
Yeah, Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell are married.
That's bizarre.
Loving What Is, four questions that can change your life.
life, you would think he might have actually translated her work into something a little
better.
Right?
She didn't, she didn't make out well in that bargain.
Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart, an all-time favorite.
Wayne Muller, Sabbath, Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives, 1999 book, yeah, sounds right on point.
Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, of course, of course, Insight Meditation, an in-depth correspondence course.
And that's from, that's actually one of those Sounds True audio programs.
Right, yeah.
Alright, now, that's on the left side of this leaf.
On the right, we have a page with another set of resources, and the title is Ritualized Abuse and Torture.
So, we have organizations and websites.
We have a website, Ritual Abuse, Ritual Crime and Healing.
We have SMART, which is a bimonthly newsletter.
We have survivorship.org.
We have a series of books, Drawn Swords, My Victory Over Childhood Ritual Abuse, Where the Rivers Join, a personal account.
So there's a number of books that I've looked up some of them.
They not big print runs.
I don't think there's any best sellers here.
There's one book referenced in the first edition by Judith Spencer, which is quite a famous kind of Sibyl level, you know, multiple personality text that also describes satanic ritual abuse.
They've removed that as a reference.
Maybe they came under fire for that.
But yeah, we have a lot of ritual abuse resources Facing the page that lists Sharon Salzberg, Pema Chodron, and so on.
Jack Kornfield.
And most of these books, as I look through them, that are listed under this other heading, have ritual abuse in the title or the subtitle.
Right.
You know what, I'm wrong about them having removed Judith Spencer's book from the 2008 edition because actually it's here too in this resource list.
It's called Suffer the Child.
A powerful first-hand account of sadistic ritual abuse and resulting multiple personalities, her 1997 book, Satan's High Priest, A True Story, is a gripping case history of a cult that shows the way dissociation and amnesia is created in child victims.
Okay, so what do you feel in your heart?
Let's do a little bit of journaling here, Julian.
When you encounter this juxtaposition, Pema Chodron, Byron Katie, Jack Kornfield on the left, and Judith Spencer and ritualized abuse and torture resources on the right.
It's so glaring.
It's like one side just seems reasonable and familiar and useful and the other side is like, you know, it's like it's been ripped out of some other source and pasted in.
You know, it's so It's a feeling that I often have, which is that something incredibly outlandish is being presented as, you know, everyday, normalized.
Totally normal, yeah.
Here are some resources for you.
You might want to read this variety of tales about, you know, people who were ritually abused in satanic cults and developed multiple personalities, because that's just the thing, and you may encounter it through the course of this book, so these will help you.
Yeah, and as you do, you can do the Insight Meditation course to ground your breath and to watch your thoughts come and go.
Yeah, whereas actually, I think if you're really using any of these approaches that I would say are more legitimate, You might actually be unraveling some of this nightmarish belief system and coming to a different place in terms of how you sit with difficult experience, with unsettling emotions, with how you are interpreting the nature of reality and biography and that sort of thing.
They should actually lead in the direction of being I'm less caught up in the stuff that's on the facing page.
Right.
Well, here's the big reveal on the ritual abuse sources.
I mean, I know that as you look through them, Julian, you'll understand that they're all highly credible, that they're really top shelf, they have really good information, but, you know, we'll just take a look at ritual abuse You know, when you open up the homepage, it's a jam-packed site.
The top link leads to a calendar of satanic celebrations, so you can prepare for when people around you will be going missing, I suppose.
And I was particularly, however, interested in the tab that said, Cases that have resulted in convictions.
And so I wanted to show you, you're very familiar with this, what that page pulls up.
So cases that have resulted in convictions, and they say that the text here is copyright 1997, Believe the Children.
And they have a note at the top and it says, please note that this list was compiled and copyrighted by Believe the Children in 1997.
It has not been updated since then.
Well, it's 2022.
And what's the first case at the top of their list here?
Cases that resulted in convictions?
Well, it happens to be the case in West Memphis, Arkansas, of Damian Eccles, Jesse Baldwin, and, oh, they don't list the other kid.
Oh, Jesse Miskelly and Jason Baldwin, yeah, they're all eventually listed.
But yeah, this is basically the West Memphis Three case, and they go into great detail on how these three teenagers were found guilty of these crimes.
Yeah, so this is their top example of a satanic ritual abuse case or a ritual abuse case that has resulted in a conviction.
And they haven't updated that entry on that page since 1997.
Now, websites go dead all the time.
The three were released in 2011.
Right.
Okay, so we have a 2008 book that's pointing to a website that hasn't been updated since 1997.
But that book is still out there, still pointing to this website, which is still up and moving.
There's a lot of stuff on it.
They're keeping that satanic calendar updated.
Yeah, and I was just thinking, can you imagine the paranoia?
Can you imagine just the mindset of people who take this all to heart, sincerely, and now they have this calendar of like, oh, we need to be aware that on specific days it's going to, you know, protect your kids.
Well, all the better that you have the insight meditation correspondence course.
Well, it's important that you stay informed and not be in denial about the satanic advent calendar, but here are some tools to help you not to feel too anxious about it.
And if you've taken the right measures.
If you happen to go out during a particular satanic feast day, you know, and something bad happens, you've got When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.
No, I can't.
We're becoming punchy now.
Yeah, okay.
Alright, well, I think that means that it's a good time to finish up with two remarkable statements that we received.
One from friend of the pod, Rachel Bernstein, the licensed marriage and family therapist who has been on the show a number of times and she's just an excellent resource in all things deculting.
And then there's another statement, pardon me, There's another statement from a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous, and between these two statements, I think we have a really well-rounded but also incomplete and yet disquieting ending point or pause point for our discussion of how this book has spun out its impacts.
So, first of all, do you want to read Rachel Bernstein's note to us?
I was getting my Master's at USC in Counseling Psychology when this book was published, so it is inextricably tied to my formative years in counseling.
It came on the heels of the McMartin Trial and so-called Satanic Panic.
The notion of all repressed memories having the same diagnostic origin is no less a form of pseudoscience as evil intentions coming from body thetans.
That's a Scientology reference for anyone who doesn't know.
I'm aware that for many years people went through the pain of not being taken seriously when they finally reported any kind of childhood abuse.
And many people were not believed and still to this day are not believed if the person they are accusing of this has some standing in the community or are loved by all.
I support people finally telling their stories and getting the validation and support they need and deserve.
But I saw firsthand the devastation that this book caused.
By defining a lapse in memory as an absolute affirmation that something horribly unspeakable occurred.
I worked with clients who were feeling emboldened by this book to accuse people of abuse when there were periods of their past they could not quite recall.
And I also had many clients who had been falsely accused of abuse because of the overreaching conclusion given by this book.
The title itself is problematic.
The word courage in the title gives the impression that somehow you are being encouraged to be brave enough to say that abuse had occurred, even if you don't recall it.
As we know from learning about manipulation, When people are challenged and potentially seen as weak for not stepping up and doing something or saying something, they want to rise to the challenge.
It's caused many people to say things that in many cases were just not true because they felt it was a sign of bravery, and then they were able to be supported by the ever-growing community of people who also believed that repressed or forgotten memories formed a conclusive sign of abuse.
People will do a lot and say a lot to be validated by and encircled by a supportive community.
While I'm not particularly religious, I was raised within the Jewish tradition.
And something I will never forget is the Jewish teaching that it is worse to ruin someone's reputation than it is to kill them.
Because when you ruin their reputation, it is something they have to live with forever.
People were not only devastated by false accusations because of this book, but further devastated by being marked, being under suspicion permanently.
I saw people lose their jobs or lose their right to be close to other children, always seen from that moment forth as potentially dangerous people.
In the 80s and 90s, I had at least 100 clients who were sure that a loved one had abused them because they couldn't recall it, and others who had been accused of things that made them nauseous to even talk about as they read the complaint against them that left them with shock and horror, interspersed with numerous people who had been told they had been part of a satanic cult and had been ritually abused, or that they have multiple personalities.
All of these diagnoses were trends at the time, and therapy should never be guided by trends.
It's also important to note that the person who wrote this book had no credentials.
It would take an inordinate amount of hubris, I believe, to write a book about healing So, Rachel, thank you for sending that in.
or a license, or at the very least, years of experience in that field.
So Rachel, thank you for sending that in.
So here's the statement from an anonymous colleague.
I think one of the things to realize about persistent in-family abuse is how difficult
the process of disclosure and self-realization is.
In order to even envision extricating oneself from an abusive family, you have to start thinking of what has happened to you as abusive, and that first revelation most often comes, by default, whilst still in the family.
That's hard enough if you are, for example, an adult leaving an abusive relationship, but remember, for many of us, this realization comes when we are still technically underage.
There is no easy or gentle way to explore this, no time for long conversations and realizations.
If you disclose to a responsible adult, the family will immediately implode.
Social services get involved.
Extended families tear themselves apart.
Schooling is disrupted.
There's no way to get help that isn't traumatic.
The weight of possibly destroying so many lives is more than most of us can bear.
All this to say then, when we think of survivors of child abuse, we might think of children already scooped up by the care system, or we might think of independent adults making sense of their upbringing in therapy.
But there is another common scenario, that of the adolescent trying to leave home and disclose as safely as possible.
These people, like me, disclose overwhelmingly to our peers rather than to professionals.
In my case, probably the most dangerous time of my life was the last six months I lived at home, waiting for my university course to begin.
In that time, I was already disclosing to close friends, but I had no support, and I was still living with my abusers, playing for time, dissociating as much as possible.
One day my stepfather picked a fight with me, told me I acted like a stranger in the house.
Without thinking, I replied that I felt like a stranger.
It was the only time he actually hit me.
On some level, this was the unspoken cloud now ever present in our house, the elephant in the room everyone could sense but not see.
After a decade or more of feeling like I was the only one who could see, and thus endure the family secrets, this was a bomb I was responsible for setting, a fuse that I had lit.
I managed to make that fuse burn long enough that I had left home before it blew.
I don't know what would have happened if everything had blown up while I was still at home.
I'm not sure I would have survived if two men whose lives I was responsible for destroying had still known where I lived.
Of course, in the end, their lives recovered a lot quicker than mine did, but that's another story.
Within a year of leaving home, I was in crisis and in counseling.
Within a few months after that, I was estranged from my whole family, having disclosed to pretty much everyone in a series of letters that were written like binding spells.
I then changed my name, and I found a good therapist who I saw for the next three years as I fell apart, put myself back together, and, incidentally, got a degree.
But the crucial time, the pivot point for getting out and surviving, was the space in the middle, from six months before I left home to a year after.
In that time, again, I was supported only by other adolescents and young adults.
Any alternative was unthinkable.
It was into that space that the courage to heal dropped.
I think it might have been a boyfriend who found it, or possibly a best friend.
But it was what we could find.
A roadmap, and a talisman, a compass for getting out without being destroyed by the process.
I still have my copy somewhere.
It is an angry book, a vicious book, a book that pulls no punches.
I haven't needed to read it for a long time.
But I still remember being 17, 18, and reading it, shaken by the realization that I was not alone, and by the confirmation that what had happened to me night after night for over a decade was not right and was not my fault.
It taught me about triggers, which helped me realize that I wasn't insane.
It also told me, rightly or not, I don't remember any references, that the average abuser will come into contact with 200 children in their lifetimes.
It was that sentence playing over and over in my mind that gave me the courage to go to the police and tell them enough for them to arrest a man whose entire career involved teaching vulnerable children.
And I remember, again with no references, the book saying that about a third of abused children go on to abuse, a third are destroyed or institutionalized by the trauma, and a third go on to end the cycle.
I have no idea how true that statistic is, but I know it fueled my determination to heal.
One in three was a mantra that held me through panic attacks and flashbacks and insomnia and grief and rage.
Funnily enough, I don't remember anything about satanic abuse or ritual collective experiences.
I don't remember mention of organized abuse at all.
I just remember the book helping.
I also remember talking to friends and finding out that every one of us had suffered some form of indecent exposure or harassment on public transport, or boyfriends who didn't easily take no for an answer.
It was still difficult, even in that context, to talk about systemic abuse that had started in my prepubescent years and lasted almost until I left home.
But that lesser, constant, low-level harassment was a world we knew so well as female children and adolescents, one that adults wouldn't discuss, or they pretended it didn't matter.
Bad things happened to everyone, we were told.
Meanwhile, I remember sharing tips on which streets were dangerous to walk down after dark, how to hold your keys like a weapon, which men not to accept a drink or a ride home from, Like homework answers and makeup tutorials, it was just part of the currency we shared, and as far as I know, young women still share.
Remember that for most of us, however severe or mild, our sexual exploitation starts as young as 8, 9, 10 years old, with men catcalling us on the street or sidling up to us on buses.
This book landed into that world as a kind of gift.
We felt seen and recognized in our struggle to push back against the normalization of our exploitation.
It's not a book I would read now, nor one I would recommend.
But I did.
I lent it to new friends for years, following disclosure after disclosure.
But I also remember when I finally talked to my father about what I had suffered.
My parents divorced when I was young.
He gently asked me if I'd ever heard of Recovered Memory Syndrome.
I looked him in the eyes and said, you can't recover what you never forgot.
We have never talked about it again.
It's been nearly 30 years.
I'm guessing my stepfather has retired now.
My stepbrother probably has grandchildren by now.
There is no justice, by the way.
There is only mutual aid in the grieving and healing.
I think it's important that you know this, because I do think this book saved lives.
And the fact that it is so flawed, so dangerous, and that this is still true, tells you how little there was and is for survivors to cling to.
Wow, that's powerful.
Thank you so much.
The person who shared that with us covers a lot of ground.
Yeah, and it also, I think, elevates our conversation out of the close reading that can make a book into our own kind of fetish object, where I think it's easy to make the assumption that everybody will read it in the same way.
This is somebody who doesn't even remember the parts that didn't apply to her, to them.
Um, this is somebody who didn't, yeah, who took something that they needed from the collective act of Bass and Davis gathering these stories together.
And that's what was valuable.
They took solace in it.
I mean, you know, I have to say that I've heard the argument so often over the years about a range of different texts and teachers.
Media, where people say, oh, well, you know, you just take what works for you and forget the rest.
And in a way, it appears that this person did this, but I also hear this very powerful observation at the end that there wasn't anything else.
And so this is what was clung to this particular text, which made this person and perhaps many others feel less alone in the process.
Yeah, and for me, it really informs my thoughts around, like, as you could tell, it's very easy for me to look at what Bass did with inserting that poem and bring up, churn up my own countertransference.
As I imagine what it must be like to interject oneself creatively into a scenario like that.
But, you know, if we miss the context that this colleague points out, that there is a vacuum of care and resources The self-centered or perhaps even narcissistic impulse to become the center point of a discussion around child sexual abuse and how it gets disclosed and what the nature of memory is, even when one has no training in that, that particular impulse is not just a matter of kind of
Opportunism.
It's also an answer to a call, a meeting of a kind of need.
And she does open by saying, you know, survivor was not part of the vocabulary when we started.
This was all new.
So, you know, I hope that this reflection provided by our colleague adds just another rich layer of perspective
to how difficult the topic is.
And I hope that our discussion, our critical lens, also allows people to evaluate this book
in a more lucid fashion.
But perhaps more importantly, that it provides some kind of, you know, guardrail system
for future explorations.
Like, if you're going to investigate such a difficult and charged subject, you've got to take a lot of care, because if you don't, you wind up You know, creating a kind of dry wood for the fire of something like QAnon.
Yeah, and also that perhaps the unsatisfyingly cautious constraints of a more institutional approach to this are based more in sort of well-considered, well-informed perspectives than, you know, merely not being open-minded enough to consider this or being captured in some kind of way.
by a desire to just cover things up that yeah, caution is warranted.
Yeah, caution, and I would say, especially from the perspective of the creative writing professional, a real sense of humility around what the nature of the imagination is and whether or not you are channeling something from it, especially in relation to other people that tells us something about the nature of reality.
That's a real leap.
And I think that the real responsibility of the poet is to recognize that they don't know what the fuck the thing means.
Yeah, so some combination of a humble open-endedness and a real respect for the value of the metaphorical.
Yeah.
That the rush to literalize and make final statements about what this means in the world outside of our imaginations is almost antithetical to the process.
Well, Julian, thank you so much for reading through this with me.
I really, really enjoyed this, and I also looked through the podcast universe and I didn't really see anybody covering this book, so I hope this contributes something to a wider discussion.
Next time, I think we're going to just look at the last two months of Teal Swan's content and see what she's up to.
Okay, and that'll be a good note to wrap up on this long and winding series.
