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Excerpts from a research study by Jean Wadge M.Sc. into the experiences of therapists who work with victims and survivors of Satanist Ritual Abuse.

 

 

I am a person centred/integrative counsellor working in primary care as part of a team of general practitioners and healthcare professionals. I have been working for 6 years with a survivor of Satanist Ritual Abuse. The biggest obstacle in the way of her recovery is her trauma attachment to the Satanist cult with whom she grew up. The cult still contact her in an effort to force her to return to their activities.

 

Because of the contentious nature of this subject I was aware that I needed to interview participants who were well respected in their profession, as well as those who like myself had only met one survivor in the course of their daily work.

 

 

My participants were as follows:

 

• Joan Coleman
• Norma Howes
• Sandy Gaskins
• Valerie Sinason.

 

 

Imagine for a moment that you are a child born into a generational Satanist family...

 

• SRA happened to you not just any child. Your parents chose to do it to you.
• If you had been a victim of wartime atrocities, the same thing would have happened, perhaps to all of your village, or your political group, but isolated in your misery as an SRA victim you have probably never known what it is like to live in a “normal” family situation, and you are not allowed to talk to the other children in your “cult family” either.
• Your immediate family are connected to the extended family of the 12 members of your cult, whom you are taught to obey, and to protect their guilty secrets.
• You are constantly told that you are bad, but because you are still egocentric, it is not possible for you to conceive of a reason outside yourself why these terrible things are happening to you.
• You think it must be your fault, and when you dare to question, or give vent to some of the anger and frustration you are feeling you are told that you are “attention seeking” and punished for it.
• You believe that if only you could redeem yourself in the eyes of your parents, you could make this nightmare stop, but only end up blaming yourself.
• You are made to persecute other children, and animals, during ceremonies, and deep down, know that this is not right, but you are terrified, and have no choice. You begin to harm yourself, as your self-loathing grows.
• As you grow up, you know that others do not live as you do, and try to resist and “get out” of the cult and its activities. This in itself is a terrifying decision, because whilst you are part of it you are cognitively not fully aware of the extent to which you were abused.
• When you walk away, you leave behind your history, and your family who can verify your history.
• You leave behind your hopes of love. You have made promises to this “family” under duress, and you have conflicting feelings about a mother who sometimes said she loved you, but held you in terror.
• The act of walking away from the cult and its rituals causes you to have flashbacks as the dissociated material you have stored in your brain seeps into your awareness. You begin to think that whilst you were still “in” you were in less pain.
• You become painfully aware of what you have been involved in, and your hopes of safety are marred by the feelings of guilt. The feelings of self-blame are unbearable, leading you to mental breakdown, and thoughts of suicide.
• You feel again the body memories of the torture you received, wondering why you have strange pains and emotions that reflect the ceremonial horrors you endured.
• Your doctor concludes that your pain is “psychosomatic”
• If you dare to tell anyone in authority, you risk their disbelief.
• Because you feel so guilty about your involvement with the cult activities, you seek to make amends to the world at large.
• This leads you once again into the role of victim, as those in search of power steal yours!
• You have a need to be accepted and to be popular, and get used by selfish and demanding people who see you as “a soft touch”
• You are still terrified of authority figures, so that when you are taken into hospital, having cut your wrists because you desperately need someone to have tangible evidence of your pain, the casualty officer repeats your earlier trauma by saying “silly girl, you are just attention seeking”!
• You have been brought up to hate everything that Christianity stands for, and so in an effort to “turn things round” you join the Church. Some people there misunderstand you, and may even reinforce the myth that you were told as a child that you are “possessed by the Devil”
• You pluck up courage and go to the Police, but they tell you that you are “not very well” and send you back to the doctor.

 

 

From the Therapist’s point of view:

 

• As therapists new to the prospect of counselling a survivor/victim of SRA we must be prepared to be taken out of our personal comfort-zone, and go frighteningly beyond our familiar world. We must stick with our clients in a journey which takes us into an “underground world”. We will almost certainly be tempted to reframe the client’s narrative to fit our frame of reference, but in doing this we will risk denying the client’s truth.
• We can expect to feel deskilled, unable to understand the client’s narrative, and unwilling to believe it’s content.
• When we try to discuss and explore this strange new phenomenon, we become undermined by the kneejerk reactions of our governing institutions, and organisations.
• We somehow feel a shadow of what our clients feel
• Our colleagues fail to support us, in their need “not to know” about such terrible happenings.
• Our social world becomes more isolated because we cannot discuss what is happening to us for fear of the stigmatising effect discrediting reports of our work may have.
• The media, will make their own interpretations of our narrative.
• We feel traumatised in turn by our clients’ revelations of their terror.
• We review our lives and make changes, such as seeking a new supervisor, who is more in tune we the new us, or reviewing our career choice.
• Our existing universe has been demolished, and we feel uncertain about everything.

 

 

So what does work?

 

• An open-minded attitude on the behalf of the therapist to whatever the client brings, including the possibility of dissociated process.
• Staying with the client despite our own feelings at the horrific disclosures.
• Logic not magic Give opportunity to demystify the trickery of the cult and explore the logical explanations for what is believed to be magic, or the work of supernatural forces.
• Whose responsibility is therapy? Good therapeutic practice tells us that we should encourage autonomy, even with a “dissociated community of selves”. If we take responsibility for the client, we are hindering her process.
• Promises were made under duress: Try to find out what was promised and give opportunity and permission to look at these objectively, and reverse the rules, all of which seem to be for the benefit of the cult, not the benefit of the client.
• Encourage information sharing between dissociated parts, and if possible look for an “internal supervisor” of the system, who works for the good of the whole.
• Encourage the client to put some distance between themselves and the perpetrator family but be aware of the attachment behaviours, which will make it difficult for them to detach.

 

 

Hindrances?

 

• Reframing is very tempting, when it brings the content of the narrative in line with our view of the world, but could deny the client’s truth.
• Denial of the Client’s dissociative process hinders therapy, as the client dare not bring forward their dissociated “parts” for individual attention.
• Our Clients have almost certainly been forced to be perpetrators. It is tempting to deny this to ourselves, and render the subject impossible for the Client to come to terms with.
• Retraumatisation happens when we allow flooding of traumatic memories to occur without grounding the client in the present. If we concentrate on what effect the trauma had on the client, and how they coped with it, rather than the intricate traumatising detail of what happened to them, we avoid too much abreaction.
• Ignoring the fact that attachment needs and behaviour play a large part in the whole scenario of SRA. It is helpful if we have a good working knowledge of the theory of attachment. If we ignore this fact we are in danger of missing a vital piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
• Remember, each client is an individual, there is no recipe!