Open Thread: Disclosures of Government Drug Complicity a Limited Hangout for Much Worse?

bibliotecapleyades |  We’ve got a lot to cover today and let me give you a rough approximate outline of the the things that I’d like us to get into. First, let me ask how many of you have had at least one course or workshop on hypnosis? Can I see the hands? Wonderful. That makes our job easier.

Okay. I want to start off by talking a little about trance-training and the use of hypnotic phenomena with an MPD dissociative-disorder population, to talk some about unconscious exploration, methods of doing that, the use of imagery and symbolic imagery techniques for managing physical symptoms, input overload, things like that. Before the day’s out, I want to spend some time talking about something I think has been completely neglected in the field of dissociative disorder, and that’s talking about methods of profound calming for automatic hyper-arousal that’s been conditioned in these patients.

We’re going to spend a considerable length of time talking about age-regression and abreaction in working through a trauma. I’ll show you with a non-MPD patient -- some of that kind of work -- and then extrapolate from what I find so similar and different with MPD cases. Part of that, I would add, by the way, is that I’ve been very sensitive through the years about taping MPD cases or ritual-abuse cases, part of it being that some of that feels a little like using patients and I think that this population has been used enough. That’s part of the reason, by choice, that I don’t generally videotape my work.

I also want to talk a bunch about hypnotic relapse-prevention strategies and post- integration therapy today. Finally, I hope to find somewhere in our time-frame to spend on hour or so talking specifically about ritual abuse and about mind-control programming and brainwashing -- how it’s done, how to get on the inside with that -- which is a topic that in the past I haven’t been willing to speak about publicly, have done that in small groups and in consultations, but recently decided that it was high time that somebody started doing it. So we’re going to talk about specifics today.

[Applause]

In Chicago at the first international congress where ritual abuse was talked about I can remember thinking, "How strange and interesting." I can recall many people listening to an example given that somebody thought was so idiosyncratic and rare, and all the people coming up after saying, "Gee, you’re treating one, too? You’re in Seattle"...Well, I’m in Toronto...Well, I’m in Florida...Well, I’m in Cincinnati." I didn’t know what to think at that point.

It wasn’t too long after that I found my first ritual-abuse patient in somebody I was already treating and we hadn’t gotten that deep yet. Things in that case made me very curious about the use of mind-control techniques and hypnosis and other brainwashing techniques. So I started studying brainwashing and some of the literature in that area and became acquainted with, in fact, one of the people who’d written one of the better books in that area.

Then I decided to do a survey, and from the ISSMP&D [International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation] folks I picked out about a dozen and a half therapists that I though were seeing more of that than probably anyone else around and I started surveying them. The interview protocol, that I had. got the same reaction almost without exception. Those therapists said, "You’re asking questions I don’t know the answers to. You’re asking more specific questions than I’ve ever asked my patients." Many of those same therapists said, "Let me ask those questions and I’ll get back to you with the answer." Many of them not only got back with answers, but said, "You’ve got to talk to this patient or these two patients." I ended up doing hundred of dollars worth of telephone interviewing.

What I came out of that was a grasp of a variety of brainwashing methods being used all over the country. I started to hear some similarities. Whereas I hadn’t known, to begin with, how widespread things were, I was now getting a feeling that there were a lot of people reporting some similar things and that there must be some degree of communication here.