Trigger Warning
Nothing here is sensationalized or gratuitous, but it includes
frank (and therefore horrific) descriptions and examples of ritual abuse
and trauma-based mind control.
If you are in a healthy state of balance, then becoming educated
about these monstrous crimes can help you to bear witness for those who have
endured unimaginable trauma, preparing you to be a powerful ally for
truth, justice and healing.
However, your individual health and healing is of primary
importance. In order for the content here to serve a productive purpose,
you need to be well-resourced — not re-traumatized. Please be cautious. For information that is less potentially triggering, please see About Trauma or Trauma-Based Victimization: Healing Resources.
Addressing colleagues who work with clients who have experienced ritual abuse and mind control, world-renowned expert Alison Miller wrote:
We All Must Pay Attention to Our Vicarious Traumatization
First of all, there is the sheer horror of the memories they are disclosing… You name it, you will hear about it. Your clients need you to be able to hear these memories with calm compassion… We are all traumatized [by the disclosures], especially by the first few clients with these kinds of experiences that we encounter. We have to pay attention to our own vicarious traumatization and make sure we take care of ourselves so that we are not constantly living in a state of trauma.
— Alison Miller
Introduction
The subject of trauma-based victimization is horrific, which is exactly why understanding, empowerment and action is vital. A synonym for “horrific” is “unspeakable.” The goal here is to bring light to this horrific topic in order to change this world so that such horrors are no longer unspeakable, but rather nonexistent.
Here we explore what exactly happens to victims of trauma-based mind control. Survivors, therapists and whistleblowers have come to learn the science behind trauma-based mind control and know it to be extraordinarily precise and effective. It’s possible (and necessary for supporters) to come to understand how a victim’s mind can be “programmed.” Here is a series of steps for learning how trauma-based mind control works:
- Familiarize yourself with the natural process of dissociation.
- Learn how traumatic memory works.
- Explore the process by which the mind creates alternate states, which many have called personalities but are perhaps better understood as states or “parts.” This is challenging to understand, but is made easier through listening to the experiences of survivors and supportive professionals.
Dissociation
The foundation for understanding how trauma-based victimization and mind control works is understanding how the natural human process of dissociation works.
Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own.
— Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
A fundamental part of the human ability to survive trauma is a natural, protective response that dissociates the experience so that the person can endure the pain and horror, and continue to go on.
- Dissociation is the separation of things that are usually together.
- In the case of trauma, dissociation refers to specific psychological processes that naturally happen and change the way a person experiences themselves.
- The processes of dissociation are described with various clinical terms and diagnoses such as depersonalization, derealization, dissociative amnesia and dissociative identity disorder.
- Dissociation can be viewed as an attempt by the individual to “prevent overwhelming flooding of consciousness at the time of trauma.” (source)
Dissociation… is a psychological and physiological response to childhood trauma…. a normal reaction to an abnormal situation… I like to tell clients that a dissociative disorder is mental injury rather than mental illness and, therefore requires a different treatment.
— Alison Miller
How Traumatic Memory Works
- While a typical memory is of a whole event (sights, sounds, feelings and meaning are all associated), dissociation causes the event to be separated from meaning or feelings, and various parts of the event are stored separately.
- Thus, memory recall of dissociated events is unlike typical memory where all associated elements are recalled at once.
- Dissociated memories are recalled in fragments, perhaps as a “flash” without the typical context. Sights can be separated from sounds, which can be separated from feelings and so on.
- In the case of severe child abuse, “many events are experienced in a state of shock, stored in a dissociative state, and recalled in fragments.” (source)
- Over time, survivors may recall enough fragments to piece together the event which caused the mind to dissociate at the time of the trauma.
See Also
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) / MPD
Different self-states separated by walls of amnesia, so total that one state doesn’t remember what another state has done.
— Alison Miller
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) was previously called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Expert Alison Miller explains that the name change from MPD to DID was designed to reflect that a person with this disorder is one person who has been fragmented as opposed to different people sharing one body. However, with her characteristic empathy for survivors, Miller explains, that “most who have the disorder feel more as if it is MPD.”
The clinical definition of DID is “the presence of two or more personality states or distinct identities that repeatedly take control of one’s behavior. The patient has an inability to recall personal information. The extent of this lack of recall is too great to be explained by normal forgetfulness. The disorder cannot be due to the direct physical effects of a general medical condition or substance. DID entails a failure to integrate certain aspects of memory, consciousness and identity. Patients experience frequent gaps in their memory for their personal history, past and present.” (source)
Parts / Alternate Personalities / Alters / Multiplicity
The dissociated states are not fully-formed personalities, but rather represent a fragmented sense of identity… with different identity states remembering different aspects of autobiographical information.
— International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISST-D)
Although the definition of DID explains what multiplicity is (dissociated states), it’s difficult for non-experiencers to understand. Reading survivor accounts seems one of the only ways to really “get” what this process is.
This survivor points out how the process removes awareness and experience from the conscious mind:
My handlers focused a great deal on creating dissociation. Their intentional use of traumatic situations (torture and electrochock) along with psychoactive drugs made it possible for them to selectively disconnect from my conscious mind aspects of awareness or experience; these were contained in dissociated identities, or alters, that they created. The alters would serve other purposes as well.
— Trish Fotheringham, survivor
A More Profound Understanding
The following account is extremely traumatizing — but sensible — and provides a visceral understanding of what must be happening:
Those of us who have not experienced this can only imagine how destructive [the horrific traumas] are to the spirit of the child… As in war, the “choice” presented to the child is “kill or be killed.” … Perpetrator groups know that many children will choose to die rather than to kill, but this really only results in that particular alter being “killed” — tortured to the point of unconsciousness — and a new alter being split off, until the child produces an alter who will do the killing. By now the child — the alter — is likely to kill robotically, with little or no awareness of what it is doing. Abusers will continue to train and refine the alters who do the harm, making sure that they do not feel compassion.
— Alison Miller
Thus, we learn that trauma does not kill a human. Even a small child who experiences the most horrific experiences imaginable will not physically die… but something must die as a result of such soul-shattering experiences. It seems that such severe trauma is a psychic killing of sorts, causing the effects we see in DID.
Going Deeper
After taking time to process the learning found here, the next step is to learn about the science of mind control. The horrors are difficult to stomach, but it’s the only way to truly understand how and why it works. And the “how and why” is arguably a major part of people’s resistance to believing victims. (Granted, other issues contribute to such resistance, notably the fact that a person’s entire worldview must change. Nevertheless, the nuts and bolts of how such crimes are possible is one significant block as well.)
To go even further than the basic how and why, you can attempt to get a sense for the complexity built into the intentional programming of a person’s mind. It is astonishing to say the least. It takes time to wrap your mind around.
There is likely nothing more dark and horrific than trauma-based victimization and mind control, and the science behind it is highly refined. It makes a great deal of sense to learn that many of these techniques were honed through immoral human experiments performed by the psychopathic doctors and scientists during the Holocaust and later through the many mind control programs spawned after Operation Paperclip.
Sources & Resources
See here for a list of sources and resources for the entire Trauma-Based Victimization section.