Alison Miller - Healing the Unimaginable; Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

HEALING THE UNIMAGINABLE

Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

Alison Miller

First published 2012 by Karnac Books Ltd.

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 2012 to Alison Miller.

The right of Alison Miller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 9781855758827 (pbk)

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by E. Sue Blume

by Valerie Sinason

This book is dedicated to the many courageous therapists who have taken on the challenge of facing the unimaginable with their clients.

Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.

Marshall McCluhan

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

Ben Okri, Nigerian Poet & Novelist

Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.

Mohandas Gandhi

First of all, I want to thank all the clients who, over the past twenty years, have shared with me their painful stories of ritual abuse and mind control. They have been my most important teachers, and without them I would not have been able to even conceive of writing such a book. Some of them will recognize themselves in these pages, and I know it will be important to them to know they have contributed to the knowledge and skills of many therapists.

Beyond that, words cannot express how grateful I am to those courageous survivors who contributed to this book: Old Lady, Adriana Green, Trish Fotheringham, Jeannie Riseman, Stella Katz, LisaBri, Robin Morgan, Carol Rutz, and Jen Callow. Their bravery in facing their experiences, their hard-won internal cooperation and maturity, and their willingness to speak up constitute a unique contribution to our understanding both of these abuses and to their healing process.

I want to express my appreciation to my local friend, Adrienne Carter, who uses her vacations to work with trauma survivors in disaster areas all over the planet. She has been my support for many years in facing my clients difficult memories and recovery issues.

Over the years of my learning, many online friends and colleagues have been an ongoing support system, as we all struggle together to understand and deal with these monstrosities. I particularly appreciate the contributions of Eroca Shaler and Jeannie Riseman in reading some early chapters of this book and giving me feedback, as well as all the critters with whom I have had dialogue over the years. (They will know what that message means, and who they are.)

There is one person without whom this book would never have come to fruition: my online friend, author and therapist E. Sue Blume, whom I have never met in person. She has supported me, insisted on the importance of my book, criticized my writing, found synonyms, sorted out my paragraphs, told me what is missing, and been the most creative and practical editor anyone can imagine, all before my publisher, Karnac Books, became involved. Thank you so much, E. Sue.

This book is designed to give information to licensed and credentialed psychotherapists for the purpose of understanding and helping clients or patients who report memories of ritual abuse or mind control.

It is not designed for individuals who believe they may have had these experiences themselves, and want to explore what that entails.

This area is one about which understanding is developing slowly, as the practices of organized child abusing perpetrator groups are generally hidden from view, and often intentionally disguised by the perpetrators. Therefore, some of the information in here may be either incomplete or inaccurate.

The author and Karnac Books shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused, or alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by the information contained in this book.

If you do not wish to be bound by the above, you may return this book to the publisher for a full refund.

Alison Miller is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She worked for many years in child and youth mental health services, treating children and families. She is the original developer of the Living in Families Effectively (LIFE) Seminars (www.lifeseminars.com), and has co-authored two books on parenting with Dr Allison Rees. Since 1991, Dr Miller has been treating and learning from persons with dissociative disorders, in particular survivors of ritual abuse and mind control, and has developed a protocol for effective treatment.

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act

(George Orwell)

From the beginning, ritual abuse and other forms of child abuse aimed at creating mind control have presented unique challenges to treatment professionals. After all, when we therapists first heard about these crimes in our offices, we were only in the infancy of understanding childhood sexual trauma. Available texts on incest could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the late 1980s, when I was preparing my own book, Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and its Aftereffects in Women, I knew nothing of ritual abuse. I had to negotiate with my first publisher, John Wiley, to allow me to add a brief mention of it just before the book went to press.

Ritual abuse was a complex and intimidating phenomenon for which we were totally unprepared, both professionally and personally. Therapists in the USA, Canada, the UK, and elsewhere around the world found themselves listening to horrifying, shocking, and sometimes unbelievable disclosures by terrorized clients. Survivors reported being accessed and abused while in treatment. They also conveyed threats that were made against us, some of which were carried out. Clients and often therapistsbecame convinced that they were being tracked by an invisible network of omnipresent and omnipotent abusers, with no escape. These abuses continued even when survivors appeared to follow all the recommended rules of self-protection. Desperate staffs turned hospital-based inpatient treatment protocols on their ears to protect patients from a force no one totally understood, but some patients reported being abused while in hospitals.