Thursday, May 26, 2011

Ritual Abuse and Torture-based Mind Control: Reducing and Preventing Re-contact with Abusers

End Ritual Abuse  The Website of Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D.

Cautionary Notes: This is one of the more distressing pages on my website. Survivors in therapy should  read this webpage only after their therapists have first read it and assessed that the survivor would benefit from reading it. If a survivor does not have a therapist, I strongly recommend that she/he obtain a therapist and only read this webpage with the therapist’s approval. Information on this website and webpage should not be construed as a substitute for therapy. Even if a survivor is certain that she or he is no longer in abuser contact, this material may exacerbate trauma-based fear, and should only be read with proper support. It is also important that this piece be read slowly, in small installments, taking time to cognitively and emotionally process the material, and to psychologically rest, even sleep, periodically. Finally, it is important to guard against quickly believing that all of the things discussed on this webpage apply to you.  Each survivor’s experience is unique and ultimately, the truth of one’s life must be discovered from within.

This page represents my current opinions on mind-sets and measures that help survivors of ritual abuse and torture-based mind control to reduce and prevent re-contact with their abusers.

Most definitions of the term “ritual abuse” refer to ceremonial practices that involve physical and sexual abuse of children and adults, and human sacrifice, to appease, win favor with, or empower deities whom the abusers believe demand abuse and sacrifice, such as Satan and other polytheistic gods and goddesses.

Torture-based mind control programming can be defined as systematic torture that blocks the victim’s capacity for conscious processing (through pain, terror, drugs, illusion, sensory deprivation, sensory over-stimulation, oxygen deprivation, cold, heat, spinning, brain stimulation, and often, near-death), and then employs suggestion and/or conditioning to implant thoughts, directives, and perceptions in the unconscious mind, often in newly-formed trauma-induced dissociated identities, that force the victim to do, feel, think, or perceive things for the purposes of the programmer. The objective is for the victim to follow directives with no conscious awareness, including execution of acts in clear violation of the victim’s volition, moral principles, and spiritual convictions.

Torture-based mind control is practiced by individuals and groups who seek to maximally control and exploit others, usually beginning in childhood. Included are practitioners of abusive religious rituals (e.g., Satanism and abusive witchcraft), organized crimes against children (child pornography, prostitution, and trafficking), and groups with political, military, and espionage agendas.

My opinions are based on a synthesis of 17 years of experience in providing psychotherapy to victims and survivors of ritual abuse and mind control and extensive interviews of other survivors, including many survivor-therapists, and my ongoing communication with therapist and clergy colleagues working with survivors.
The two primary forms of re-contact with abusers include reporting back by phone or written correspondence, and physically returning to abusers to be abused again. Perpetrators of ritual abuse and mind control attempt to coerce their victims into submission and service to the abuser group for a lifetime. Abuser methods of exerting long-term contact and control vary in relation to the level of psychological sophistication of the abusers and the size of the abusers’s criminal network.

Some abuser groups rely primarily on threats to force their victims into compliance and to prevent their victims from escaping. For some of these groups, these are empty threats. The groups may be limited to one or two extended families or a relatively small abuser network. They make claims of having more power than they have, and may even claim responsibility for murders that they did not commit, much like political terrorists. Some abuser groups have larger criminal networks and thus, more power to carry out their threats. But, they too reliably overstate their power to maximally terrorize their victims. This is not to dismiss the reality that these abusers commit murder, but it is to say that they lie and exaggerate their power. Clearly, people who systematically abuse others lie to further their own interests. Words are just one more tool of manipulation to control their victims. Everything they say should be questioned and examined for underlying motives and feasibility. This holds particularly true for their claims of having the man power, technological power, and magical/spiritual power to carry out their surveillance and threats.

Many of these abusers also manipulate their victims’ attachment needs, that is, their basic survival needs and needs for security and love, usually beginning in early childhood. They also go to great lengths to try to make their victims believe that the victims are accomplices to the abuse, that they are as evil as their abusers themselves, and that they are unworthy and incapable of belonging anywhere but with the abusers.

Some abuser groups go a step further and manipulate their victims’ psychological capacity to form dissociated self-states in response to extreme pain and terror. I am using the term, “dissociated self-states,” here to refer to states of consciousness with some sense of self that exist out of the conscious awareness of the most-often conscious parts of the psyche, and that typify DSM-IV Dissociative Identity Disorder, and forms of Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified in which self-states exist internally, affecting the psyche from within, but never assume complete control of executive functions (e.g., purposive action).

These Machiavellian abusers systematically torture their victims for the intended purpose of coercing their victims’ psyches into forming new dissociated self-states that they then work to exploit. They “torture-hypno-condition” these self-states, that is, they use torture, hypnosis, and behavioral conditioning, to try to coerce these dissociated self-states into fulfilling functions that serve the abusers. (I thank Hans Ulrich Gresch, Ph.D., psychologist, mind control survivor, and respected colleague, for the term, “torture-hypno-conditioning,” the most succinct descriptive phrase that I have found that explains what occurs in most torture-based mind control programming; see: http://www.mind-control.psychoprobleme.de/). These abusers “program” some of these dissociated self-states to take on “reporter” and “re-contact” functions, that is, to report to the abusers on a regular basis from a distance, and to return to the abusers as directed.

In many cases, even though the survivor is working hard to break free of her or his abusers, these programmed self-states continue to report to, and return to, the abusers, often out of the conscious awareness of the most-often conscious parts of the psyche. Ongoing access allows the abusers to retaliate against their victims for attempting to break free and to escalate their abuse and programming in efforts to increase their control of their victims.

The purpose of this article is to help survivors, therapists, clergy, and other support people, to understand the tactics, briefly outlined above, used by ritually abusive and mind control abusers to attempt to trap their victims into life-long submission, and to use this knowledge to help survivors to overcome these abuser tactics of control, to break free of their abusers more easily and more quickly, and to prevent re-contact. ..... (cont.)

 Please visit The Website of Ellen P. Lacter, Ph.D. for complete article

2 comments:

ritual abuse webpage said...

Excellent article.

More information on ritual abuse is at http://ritualabuse.us

Protective Parents of Massachusetts said...

Thank you for the article. We made sure and have the article linked to their page. We are a fairly new group in Massachusetts advocating for survivors as well as working with healing from abuse.