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         MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 54
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         V E R I C O M M / MindNet         "Quid veritas est?"
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    The views and opinions expressed below are not necessarily the
    views and opinions of VERICOMM, MindNet, or the editors unless
    otherwise noted.

    The following is reproduced here with the express permission of
    the author.

    Permission is given to reproduce and redistribute, for
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    Editor: Mike Coyle

    Assistant Editor: Rick Lawler

    Research: Darrell Bross

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    THE GREAT DEBATE

    By Anne Hart

    1995

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       There has been a Great Debate recently between those who
    believe memories of trauma can be repressed and return later, and
    those who don't. On November 29, 1993, articles appeared in both
    U.S. News and World Report ("Unlocking Hidden Memories") and Time
    Magazine ("Lies of the Mind"). As indicated by the titles, they
    presented diametrically opposite views of this issue. Two
    national organizations, Believe the Children and False Memory
    Syndrome Foundation, lead the way in mirroring these polarities,
    one side championing damaged children, and the other, accused
    pedophiles.
       I would like to comment further on some of the background of
    the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, since this information
    rarely finds its way to the public.
       The FMSF was founded by Peter and Pamela Freyd in 1992, a year
    after their daughter Jennifer Freyd, a university professor and
    researcher, began therapy ("Theoretical and Personal Perspectives
    on the Debate" presented by Jennifer Freyd to Foote Hospital, Ann
    Arbor, Michigan, 1993.) Strangely, this Philadelphia foundation
    sprang into being long before any public allegations of sexual
    abuse were made by Dr. Freyd against her father. It was evidently
    designed in advance for the defense of an alcoholic man and his
    wife who felt the need for such a posture.
       There is no diagnosis of false memory syndrome in the
    Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It is the term created by
    those who needed the concept of self-defense. A video entitled
    "False Prophets of the False Memory Syndrome" clearly portrays
    the protagonists of this family drama in their respective roles.
    It can be ordered from Nancy Steck, 16 Kingwood Villas, Kingwood,
    Texas 77339 for $7.00 plus shipping, prepaid.
       The FMSF caught on. With an extensive media campaign, it has
    filled a great need as an advocacy group for accused pedophiles.
    It is difficult to discern those who are incorrectly accused from
    those who are genuine molesters desperately seeking escape from
    criminal and civil action, or from their own pain and guilt. The
    distinction becomes blurred in this self-serving organization. To
    deny being a perpetrator is a natural response of the
    perpetrator.
       Two of the early FMSF Advisory Board members, Ralph Underwager
    and his wife, Hollida Wakefield, were interviewed by "Paidike,
    Journal of Pedophilia", Vol. 3, No. 1, 1993. When asked if
    choosing pedophilia (sexual perversion in which children are the
    preferred sexual object) is a responsible choice for the
    individual, Underwager, a former Lutheran minister, replied,
    "Certainly it is responsible." He went on to assert,
    "Pedophiles are too defensive... What I think is that
    paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy
    and love is what they choose. With boldness they can say, `I
    believe that is part of God's will.'"
       Other members of the FMSF Advisory Board such as Elizabeth
    Loftus and Richard Ofshe have tirelessly promoted the denial of
    the epidemic of childhood sexual abuse that is becoming evident
    in our culture. Dr. Ofshe is quoted frequently, encouraging
    people to view their therapists as "as a new kind of sexual
    predator" rather than entertain the possibility that these
    children and adult survivors are telling the truth about their
    families. (Davis Enterprise, "Childhood abuse victims now
    question: did it really happen?", December 21, 1993).
       Most survivors have a great deal of trouble facing the
    terrible knowledge of sexual abuse, and the inevitable rift it
    causes in personal relationships. It is understandable that some
    would choose to deny their memories, preferring to endure the
    symptoms rather than the anguish of the remembering process.
       The False Memory Syndrome Foundation attempts to have us
    believe that delayed memories of trauma are untrue. This flies in
    the face of extensive scientific literature, research by the
    respected brain surgeon Wilder Penfield, and experiences of
    traumas survivors such as the Vietnam veterans who suffer from
    amnesia and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

       Certainly some memories can be false. Our mind can play tricks
    on us, and we find it hard to remember correctly what we ate for
    breakfast, or the name of a business associate. But there is a
    tremendous difference between regular, declarative memory which
    Elizabeth Loftus studies and memory produced by trauma.
       Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., Chief of Trauma Clinic at Harvard
    Medical School charts the evolving psychobiology of post
    traumatic stress in his updated paper titled "The Body Keeps the
    Score." He writes: "While memory ordinarily is an active
    constructive process, the PTSD, failure of declarative memory may
    lead to organization of trauma on a somatosensory level..."
       That is, the body remembers what the mind cannot. Complex
    biochemical changes take place, symptoms begin and often
    psychogenic amnesia of the event occurs. These are cases of
    Vietnam veterans being completely amnestic for their entire time
    in the military, despite the record of their time at war.
       Ivor Browne, M.D., professor of psychiatry at University
    College, Dublin and chief psychiatrist at Eastern Health Board,
    Dublin, concurs in his paper "Psychological Trauma, or
    Unexperienced Experience", ReVISION, Spring '90. He indicates
    that when memories return, they are remarkably intact and
    completely experienced, as if they were happening at the moment,
    rather than re-experienced.
       A person who has endured on-going child sexual abuse "suspends
    or inhibits one traumatic insult after another until with the
    holding back of the final trauma, the nervous system is literally
    exploding." The painful memories come out, one by miserable one,
    felt FOR THE FIRST TIME in abreaction. It is kind of "virtual
    reality" or instant replay in the affective realm. This emotion
    makes the reality of the remembered quite hard to deny.
       A computer can store information in its deep recesses for
    safekeeping if the delete key is pressed. It is unseen, not
    immediately accessible. Later the material can be downloaded in a
    form that can be viewed. The analogy with traumatic events stop
    there. Trauma recovery is not such a tidy process. Since a child
    cannot cope with the pain of severe abuse, the information is
    stored until there is a supportive environment. Then it sometimes
    bursts forth in a matter of shocks and overwhelms the recipient.
       This may explain why many substance abusers go into a
    treatment facility and suddenly begin having flashbacks of
    childhood abuse. The drugs that blocked the internal pain are
    gone, the environment is safe, and the "downloading" of stored
    information begins. Welcome to sobriety. Excruciating emotions
    become conscious and cause many to return to the drugs and
    alcohol they used originally to numb this very pain. However,
    after the information is made conscious, it can enter into
    normal, declarative memory and fade into the past, rather that
    being stored as symptoms. Pain without memory is replaced by
    memory without pain.
       Some people have blank spots in their memory: for example they
    cannot remember their second grade teacher or any birthday until
    teen years. Some can't recall anything before age twelve. Others
    have nightmares of decapitated bodies and wake in horror, unable
    to sleep in their beds any longer. Others have stabbing rectal
    pains with no medical explanations, searing phantom burns on the
    bottoms of their feet, scars they cannot recall having received.
    The body stores the information in a disguised way.
       No one wants to believe that terrible things happened to
    create those empty places in the mind. How wonderful to have a
    way out described by Dr. Ofshe: decide it never happened and
    blame the therapist, to whom the person turns for relief from the
    symptoms, only to have the memories return because of the
    therapy.
       The flaw in that reasoning is that most therapists sit quietly
    and listen, rather than brainwash a client. Deliberate mind
    control techniques occur in quite another arena during childhood,
    as many ritual child abuse survivors have pointed out. Many have
    developed multiple personalities due to the severity of the
    trauma. Steven Ray and Pamela Reagor, two therapists who treat
    persons with multiple personalities in California, have uncovered
    a "sophisticated external implantation, by someone other than the
    subject, of hundreds of complex personality fragments." There
    are even special personalities designed to commit suicide.
    "First, a structured multiple's internal structure and compliment
    of personalities is engineered largely by an external abuser or
    'programmer,' who may or may not participate in a satanic or
    other cult." (_Other Altars_ by Craig Lockwood, Compcare, 1993,
    pages 19 and 19.)
       Survivors report that standard brainwashing techniques are
    used on them during childhood. These include electroshock and
    hypnosis, along with drugs, torture and sexual abuse to create
    strong attachments to encouraged activities, and equal strong
    prohibitions against others. How convenient to create, for
    example, a phobia against disclosing, or even remembering, the
    abuse. Since many abuse survivors excel in order to cover up the
    awful feelings of shame and guilt, and frequently become very
    good students, it might explain the sudden suicide of an honors
    student in high school, or otherwise inexplicable
    life-threatening behavior such as severe anorexia/bulimia or
    crack cocaine use.
       The media has recently described the MKULTRA CIA experiments
    which attempted to create the perfect "guided animal" through
    torture masquerading as behavioral conditioning. ("Sins of a
    Paranoid Age", Newsweek Magazine, Dec. 27, 1993.) Rather than
    using animals or adults, perpetrators of ritual abuse appear to
    work hard to create the perfect guided toddler.
       Most therapists are appalled at the horrors they hear, and
    sometimes develop a type of secondary PTSD themselves from
    hearing about man's inhumanity to children. (_Lessons in Evil,
    Lessons from the Light_ by Gail Carr Feldman, Ph.D, Crown
    Publishers, Inc., 1993.)  Frequently they find that the survivor
    has tried to fill the empty places in the mind with the pretense
    of a happy childhood. A false memory, if you will. Many
    therapists go home and weep at night. And so do the survivors.
       "There are," understates one therapist, who wishes to remain
    anonymous, "easier ways to take a person's money." Most trauma
    specialists receive reduced fees from clients who are in
    financial distress due to inability to work caused by nightmares,
    insomnia, phobias, anxieties, suicide attempts, depression, mood
    swings, eating disorders, compulsive behaviors and addiction
    stemming from early childhood trauma. Furthermore, therapists who
    work with trauma survivors donate many hours of telephone support
    at no cost, since crisis occur at any hour of the day.
       And the good news is that most therapists see their clients
    slowly improve in all areas of their lives as they unburden
    themselves of dreadful secrets. Nightmares diminish. Phobias
    disappear permanently. Flashbacks are limited to acceptable times
    and locations, and eventually cease. Addictions are no longer
    needed to block the pain. Depression lifts.

       The most difficult repressed memories for the client, the
    therapists and the general public to cope with are those
    involving clandestine groups of U.S. citizens who abuse children
    and commit homicide as part of a religious rite. But don't we
    have ample historical evidence of this type of activity? Many
    religions, including Mayan (and Aztec, Hawaiian, Iroquois, etc.)
    used human sacrifices as a necessary mainstay of their faith.
    ("Lost Secrets of the Maya," Time Magazine, August 9, 1993.)
       The adults who performed these culturally condoned ceremonies
    of the past where pillars of their respective communities. In
    fact they were military men, the clergy, the government and the
    community leaders of their time. Today, according to research
    done by Caren Cook at the University of Colorado in 1991, "Most
    perpetrators noted by survivors (of ritual abuse) appear to be
    'well functioning' individuals in positions of authority."
    Physicians, ministers and teachers were the most frequently named
    as abusers.
       In the Old Testament there are countless references to the
    sacrifice of children to idols. Deliberate murder of innocent
    babies has occurred from early times. King Herod had every male
    under two years of age killed for political reasons. Ancient
    rituals that included infanticide, cannibalism and sexual abuse
    were documented by the Romans in the second century A.D.,
    Egyptian monks in the fourth century, secret societies and
    religions in the "civilized" and uncivilized world throughout
    history.
       "During the 1920's and 1930's, (W.B. Seabrook) attended Black
    Masses in Paris, Lyons, London, and New York and lived to write
    about it... Are such things occurring today? That they do is
    certain; when, where, how often, and for what reason is
    uncertain." (_Other Altars_, page 180.)
       Children and adults have been sold and raped, tortured in
    nearly all cultures, including our own, in far less exotic
    settings. Less than 150 years ago, in this country, humans were
    sold and tormented at will. In many homes all over our country
    today, women and children are treated in a very similar manner,
    and the legal system turns away.
       New, more humane laws replaced old rules, and the practice of
    barbarism has simply became more circumspect. In some areas,
    there has not been not much need of secrecy. In our country,
    grown men in robes have murdered at night, often with
    extraordinary impunity, in the southern states. And the Nazis,
    who often practiced Satanism, according to the PBS documentary
    "The Occult History of the Third Reich," made a slaughter house
    out of their country earlier this century. Cults in Jonestown and
    Waco, Texas demonstrate that children are being subjected to
    religious horrors in the present day. Recent convictions of day
    care operations that have ritual allegations are documented here
    and in other countries on an ongoing basis. This is not a small
    problem.
       We have, on one hand, thousands of missing children (and
    adults), kidnapped, a few found dead, quite often around holiday
    dates of the grisly religions. Some bodies are found, missing
    fingers or decapitated. Randy Cerny of the Ritual Crimes
    Investigators, Central Valley Consultants has photographs of a
    child's decapitated head, skinned. Ritual abuse crimes have been
    reported to the Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento police
    departments by several different families. In the past few years
    the Davis Enterprise has reported the finding of a decapitated
    animal head on one occasion, and a bag of human genitals on
    another occasion right in Davis.
       On the other hand, we hear adult survivors saying that there
    are children and adults tortured and killed in rituals,
    decapitated, skinned, with various body parts removed. It doesn't
    much of a leap of cognition to put two events logically together.
       In the video "Children at Risk" from Calvacade Productions,
    investigator Bill Carmody talks solemnly, eloquently, about
    infiltrating a satanic cult. This and other films on ritual abuse
    can be ordered by calling 707-734-1168. In Vallejo, a decapitated
    body was found and the lesbian lover confessed to a friend that
    she killed the woman during what was described as a satanic
    ritual (San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 22, 1993). We read about
    Jeffery Dahmers raping, torturing, killing, dismembering and
    refrigerating children and adults, and we wonder if these were
    things he learned as a child, repressed and acted out in
    adulthood. The media, from all over the world, is reporting
    similar events.
       The mafia murdered at will for over a half a century before
    the FBI noticed its existence. So there is certainly precedence
    for law enforcement, for reasons of its own, turning a blind eye
    and finding "not a shred of evidence" of satanic cult crimes of
    this nature, in the words of Ken Lanning, FBI investigator.
       _The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, Murder in
    Nebraska_ by Nebraska Senator John De Camp, AWT, Inc, 1992,
    describes a nationwide pedophile organization that includes
    Satanic human sacrifices. DeCamp documents the chilling
    activities apparently protected by the FBI, and names high-level
    perpetrators from Nebraska to Washington D.C. This excellent book
    can be purchased from EIR News Service, Inc. P.O. Box 17390,
    Washington D.C. 20041- 0390 for $9.95. If ours were a third world
    country, we would watch the television cameras play on the
    mothers of the disappeared. We would assume the police were
    involved, the judges corrupt, the clergy blind. But it is our
    community. And we choose to close our eyes.

       Most horrifying of all, child and adult survivors of cult
    abuse tell of being currently abducted from their homes, sedated
    and forced to attend terrible events on an on-going basis. They
    go to the police and clergy and are turned away for various
    reasons. What police set up a clever stake-out to find evidence,
    or follow a named perpetrator to see where he goes on high
    Satanic holidays? Instead, the overwhelmed legal and child
    protection systems turn away and leave the children unprotected,
    allowing the abusers to continue these practically perfect
    crimes.
       What pastor unites his congregation in prayer at specific
    ritual times to ask for divine help in protecting the innocent
    victims? What good people unite to shelter the victims? How many
    of us donate therapy funds to help with treatment for victims?
    What community organizes an investigation into these matters? We
    seem as a nation to focus on problems in far away places, rather
    on crimes that are being committed right under our noses.
       The therapists listen and believe. They sometimes receive, for
    their trouble, threats and lawsuits. What therapist knows how to
    even to begin to cope with such trauma and danger? These are the
    unsung heros, who persist in treating survivors of human-induced
    trauma, despite the difficulties. And more and more survivors are
    presenting themselves for treatment each day.
       Therapists are educating themselves, as must we all, on this
    subject. "As we begin to understand the etiologies of many
    diagnostic syndromes are based in defense against trauma (PTSD,
    borderline personality disorder, the dissociative disorders,
    adjustment disorders, and as well as some brief psychotic
    reactions, anxiety disorders, and paraphilias), we gain insight
    for the therapy of ritually abused persons that is tremendously
    helpful." (David Sakheim, Ph.D. and Susan Devine, R.N., _Out of
    Darkness, Exploring Satanism and Ritual Abuse_, Lexington Books,
    1992) The field of treatment of severe trauma is still in its
    infancy and there is much to learn.
       As a culture, we have searched diligently for the root cause
    of social ills. Now that research has found clear evidence that
    childhood sexual and ritual trauma leads to mental, physical and
    behavioral symptoms of distress, there is an outcry against
    findings by those who have the most to lose. We have seen this
    throughout history. Underneath the modern psychological jargon,
    the ancient cry is the same:

       "Kill the messenger."

       For information on political action that can be taken, The
    American Coalition for Abuse Awareness is beginning a broad based
    alliance to support national legislation to protect children.
    They can be reached at 202-426-4688. Believe the Children can be
    contacted at 708-515-5432 for information about ritual and sexual
    abuse of children. The American Prosecutors Research Institute's
    National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse in Alexandria,
    Virginia can be reached at 703-739-0321 for further legal
    information on this issue.
       California State Senator Newton Russell from Glendale has
    worked long and hard to develop a Ritual Abuse Task Force in
    California that will be based out of the Attorney General's
    office. He recently addressed The National Conference on Crimes
    Against Children in Washington, D.C. which included law
    enforcement and medical speakers from around the United States.
    This conference addressed ritual abuse directly, and will
    hopefully begin the slow, tedious process of acknowledging and
    halting these crimes against humanity. But they can't do it
    alone. We must all help.
       To quote Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph
    of evil is that good men do nothing." Perhaps a Task Force in
    our country would help to respond to the needs that are being
    addressed primarily by therapists. It is one thing to help
    survivors after the abuse has occurred. Would it not make more
    sense to find out where the attacks are occurring and identify
    the problem at its origin?
       Perhaps we could send this article to out mayor and council
    members to ask for an investigation into the ritual abuse that is
    occurring in our town.
       As for the survivors, the truth that they have finally and
    painfully found is often thrown back upon them, as the messengers
    are denied, reviled, ridiculed, disbelieved. In Scott Peck's
    words, "The truth will make you free, but first it will make you
    damn mad."
       The witnesses speak out, and like the mythological Cassandra,
    are not heard. And seated in comfortable armchairs, our
    collective society continues to fiddle the Great Debate, while we
    burn.

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