Ritual Abuse and the Use of Mind Control
Mind control is the cornerstone of ritual abuse, the key element in the subjugation and silencing of its victims. Victims of ritual abuse are subjected to a rigorously applied system of mind control designed to rob them of their sense of free will and to impose upon them the will of the cult and its leaders. Most often these ritually abusive cults are motivated by a satanic belief system [only on the surface.] The mind control is achieved through an elaborate system of brainwashing, programming, indoctrination, hypnosis, and the use of various mind-altering drugs. The purpose of the mind control is to compel ritual abuse victims to keep the secret of their abuse, to conform to the beliefs and behaviors of the cult, and to become functioning members who serve the cult by carrying out the directives of its leaders without being detected within society at large.
The information available about how ritually abusive cults indoctrinate young children comes primarily from child and adult survivors who have been able to remember how the cult achieved mind control over them and others in the cult. Therapists who have worked extensively with ritual abuse victims have gleaned a significant, although still incomplete, degree of understanding of the process by which the mind control is achieved. A key element of the victim’s recovery from ritual abuse consists of understanding, unravelling, and undoing the mind control which usually persists for a long time, even in victims who no longer participate in the cult. Undoing these controls is critical, for victims may remain unable to disclose their abuse, or vulnerable to cult manipulation if the systematic programming is not dismantled. As more ritual abuse victims are helped to free themselves from cult mind control, the body of information about this important aspect of ritual abuse continues to grow.
Satanic cults focus their initial efforts to achieve mind control most frequently and strenuously with children under the age of six. Like developmental psychologists, satanists understand that people are most susceptible to having their character, beliefs, and behavior molded during this early period of development. This review of the mind control techniques utilized by satanic cults will focus primarily on the techniques used on very young children, both those in ritually abusive families, and those in extrafamilial settings, such as day-care and preschools. Children who are abused in intrafamilial setting are subjected to ongoing mind control that is often sustained in extreme forms throughout their childhood and adolescence.
There is a growing body of research into the indoctrination techniques which are used by a wide range of destructive cults. It is helpful to consider how statnic cults make use of these and other techniques to control their victims.
In “Cults, Quacks and Non-Professional Psychotherapists, West and Singer have described elements of cult indoctrination as follows:
- Isolation of the recruit and manipulation of his environment.
- Control over channels of communication and information.
- Debilitation through inadequate diet and fatigue.
- Degradation or diminution of the self.
- Induction of uncertainty, fear, and confusion, with joy and certainty through surrender to the group as a goal.
- Alternation of harshness and leniency in a context of discipline.
- Peer pressure generating guilt and requiring open confessions.
- Insistence by seemingly all-powerful hosts that the recruit’s survival — physical or spiritual — depends on identifying with the group.
- 9. Assignment of monotonous or repetitive tasks such as chanting or copying written materials.
- 10. Acts of symbolic betrayal or renunciation of self, family, and previously held values, designed to increase the psychological distance between the recruit and his previous way of life.
Satanic cults use many of the same techniques, but apply them in unique ways to indoctrinate and control very young children. To begin with, they impose a variety of physical, emotional, and cognitive conditions which are conductive to indoctrination.
Physical Conditions
1. Hunger and Thirst
Ritually abused children are often deprived of food and water for extended periods of time, and are told they will be left to die of hunger and thirst. Their deprivation and fear of dying make them willing to comply with virtually any behavior or belief necessary to be given food or water again. The cult member who finally does feed the child is perceived as an ally and benefactor. The child feels deeply grateful and is thus susceptible to bonding with that cult member, thereby increasing the child’s vulnerability to identifying with the cult and its beliefs and practices.
2. Pain
Ritually abused children are physically tormented and sexually abused in very painful ways. The pain can cause them to dissociate and, like prisoners of war subjected to torture, they become willing to do whatever is demanded of them in order to make the pain stop. For a young child who is ritually abused in an out-of-home care setting, even a brief encounter with intense pain profoundly impacts that child’s susceptibility to cult mind control. For those children raised in cults, the use of pain and the threat of pain continues for as long as they are submitted to the cult, causing an ongoing and deepening degree of subservience to the cult.
3. Drugs
Both child and adult victims of ritual abuse have described being abused with mind-altering drugs. Some drugs are injected or administered in suppositories. Others are hidden in food or drink, or simply swallowed under duress. [su_highlight]For this reason in particular, many survivors have legitimate phobias about accepting and ingesting food and liquids from others.[/su_highlight]
The drug effects include hypnotic and paralytic effects, causing victims to experience mental and emotional states ranging from confusion and drowsiness, to passivity and helplessness. Memory distortions occur as well. Victims tend to recall very real and painful experiences only with difficulty as though they were unreal or even just dreams. Additionally, in such drug-induced states, young children are even more pliable than they would otherwise be, and more open to the belief system into which the cult is attempting to indoctrinate them. Cult leaders capitalize on drug-induced reality distortions to create the illusion that they have absolute ppower to which the child must submit. [su_highlight]Some survivors have discovered that “running a fever” seems to somehow break that chemically created barrier. Others have noticed that when they ingest a substance made up of the same chemicals, the memory is also “unlocked.” Because most such drugs are illegal, this a method should not be used. 😉 [/su_highlight]
4. Exhaustion
Ritually abused children are often deprived of rest and sleep. In the extrafamilial settings in which ritual abuse occurs, children are frequently deprived of needed nap and rest periods. In ritually abusive family settings, children may be deprived of sleep for extended periods of time. The influence of repeated drugging further deepens their sense of exhaustion. People in a state of exhaustion are more open to mind control because fatigue saps their normal coping capacities. This effect is especially pronounced in young children.
5. Isolation
Ritually abused children are put into closets, holes, cages, coffins, and other confined, usually dark, spaces. The children are often isolated there and told they will be left to die. The sensory deprivation that may result can cause some degree of disorientation. The isolation causes the child to feel desperate and overwhelmed with fear and dread. An abusive parent who subsequently releases the child from confinement is perceived by the child as a rescuer, often causing the young child to bond to that cult member. The children’s bonding with one or more cult members increases the degree of the child’s identification with the values and beliefs of the cult. In other words, both the isolation and the rescue make the child more susceptible to indoctrination into the destructive beliefs and practices of the cult.
6. Sexual Abuse
Ritually abused children are subjected to brutal sexual abuse which involves severe pain and may involve sexual arousal with which the children are neither physically nor emotionally prepared to cope. Sometimes the sexual abuse is performed with symbolic instruments (e.g., penetration with a crucifix or wand) which reinforces the satanic belief system to the cult. The pain, expecially if in combination arousal, is extremely disorienting and overwhelming, again making the child willing to comply with the demands of the cult members in order to make the feelings stop. The sexual arousal can contribute to the formation of distorted bonds with the abusers, leading to identification with the abusive cult. [su_highlight]If one of the abusers openly abstains from sexually abusing the victim, while the others all take turns in the sexual abuse, the victim may also look to the perceived “non-abuser” as being more preferrable to bond with. Such a covertly abusive technique is also extremely effective, long-term.[/su_highlight]
7. Bright Lights
Adult and child victims of ritual abuse describe having harsh, intensely bright lights shined in their eyes immediately before and during indoctrination. The lights appear to disorient them and to induce a state of trance which lowers the victim’s resistance and heightens the susceptibility to indoctrination. [su_highlight]A number of survivors have also mentioned specific colored lights replacing white lights. Others have also mentioned successions of different colored blinking lights. Still others have mentioned rapidly flashing white lights. One survivor has mentioned that walking under a blinking fluorescent light, or driving down a road where the sunlight is intermittent with narrow tree shadows, seems to put the survivor into the same type of trance.[/su_highlight]
Emotional Conditions
1. Terror
Ritually abused children have been terrorized and are profoundly afraid of their abusers. They have endured physical torture and painful sexual assaults. They have witnessed the terror, torture, and murder of other children and adults in group settings, experiences which greatly intensify the child’s own overwhelming fears. Their terror is heightened by what they perceive as the omnipotence and omniscience of their abusers, including what they believe are their abusers’ abilities to control them through the use of demons and evil spirits.
Ritually abused children have also been threatened repeatedly with death to themselves and their families should they disclose. This state of terror causes the child to be willing to do or believe anything to appease the abusers, thereby reducing the degree of threat the child feels from them.
2. Guilt and Shame
Ritually abused children have been forced to engage in humiliating and degrading activities such as handling, smearing, and ingesting urine, feces, blood, and human flesh. They have been photographed pornographically and, sometimes, been made to view these pictures. They have been forced to participate in the abuse, torture, and killing of animals, and the murder of children and adults.
They are then made to feel responsible for their actions as though these actions were freely chosen by them. They are threatened with exposure as perpetrators, and fear being rejected completely by their families or even being arrested and jailed. Their feelings of guilt and shame contribute to a perception that through their actions, they have already shown their loyalty to the cult and its beliefs. They are made to feel that the abusive group itself is their only refuge of acceptance. By turning to the abusive group for a sense of acceptance and protection, these children are open to even further indoctrination.
3. Emotional Isolation and Despair
Children who are ritually abused are made to feel cut off and rejected by their families and the rest of the world. They are often told that their “real parents” have died or have abandoned them, and that the people with whom they live are pretenders. Sometimes they are told that the cult members are their “real parents” who will someday “rescue” them from their homes. These ritually abused children often come to fee emotionally estranged from their families. The deep loneliness which results opens them to bonding with abusive cult members, identifying with them, and thus becoming open to indoctrination into the cult’s system of beliefs and practices.
In addition, children who are ritually abused are profoundly sad. They experience tragedy and horror, as well as isolation, at an intensity which would induce an overwhelming sadness in a mature adult. They may come to feel utterly hopeless, and in their despair they are likely to feel that cult abuse and cult membership are all that they deserve and all that they can imagine for their future. The cult convinces them that there is no place to turn for help, and thus no way out of the cult.
4. Rage
Ritual abuse provokes children to feel enormous rage, because the violation which they experience is so great. This rage within the child contributes to the cult’s efforts to indoctrinate that child into a belief system in which violence and rage are valued and encouraged. A child who has been repeatedly violated by the cult over time, and not permitted to express any emotion about his/her abuse, may be eager to vent his/her rage by striking out and victimizing others. The assaultive behavior which ensues is encouraged and rewarded by adult cult members, and is used to make the child feel s/he already is just like the abusive adults who have provoked the rage. [su_highlight]This is clinically referred to as “identification,” a crucial stage in mind-control.[/su_highlight]
Cognitive Conditions
1. Lack of Information
Young children who are being ritually abused lack sufficient information and experience to know that much of what their abusers tell them is untrue. They lack the cognitive development to perceive the contradictions in some of the lies they are told. They are likely to accept the misinformation offered by the cult members as part of the mind control process.
2. Confusion
Ritually abused children are confused by the infliction of pain, the extreme sexual arousal caused by sexual abuse, the incessant directives to do things theyy know are wrong, the extensive lying and deception by cult members, and the perceived loss of control over their own behavior and the behavior of those around them. Children in such situations long for explanations from adults to reduce their confusion about what is happening to them. The result again is an increased vulnerability to indoctrination as they open themselves to any explanations offered by the adults in the cult.
The Role of Trance States
These conditions–physical, emotional, and cognitive–exacerbate the impact of the child’s ritual abuse, expecially in combination with the used trance states. It is important to look at the role of trance states in achieving mind control over the ritually abused child. When children are in a state of trance, they are more open to indoctrination and other techniques for attaining control over their minds and behavior. For example, a child who hears an adult state repeatedly, “Satan has the power,” is much more likely to incorporate that as a deeply held belief if the child is in a state of trance, than if the child is in a normal waking state.
There are many means by which trance states can be achieved with children during the course of ritual abuse. The rituals themselves contain many trance inducing elements, among them, chanting, isolation, sensory deprivation, pain, and other forms of extreme physical discomfort. Trance states are also induced in ritual abuse victims by using hypnosis and hypnotic drugs.
Traumatic experiences which occur while the victim is in a trance state can be used to indoctrinate victims. These experiences have a profound and long-lasting impact on the belief, feelings, and even the behavior of victims, despite the fact that these experiences cannot always be remembered consciously. Only later in life, usually with the help of a highly skilled therapist, are some ritual abuse victims able to painstakingly reconstruct what happened to them while they were in various states of trance or dissociation.
[su_highlight]Many such victims, especially adults, have also remembered having done illegal activities in such trance states for covert govt. agencies and black-market affiliated organizations. Such recollected activities have included, but are not limited to: involvement in illegal pornography (such as bestiality, snuff/murder films, and kiddy porn); transportation of kidnapped, black-marketed children; transportation and/or distribution of large quantities of illegal drugs and/or arms; ritual murders, often filmed; contract murders; “black” (illegal, covert) govt. ops; torture/intimidation; sexual blackmail; bombings; and sexual “servicing” of politicians, businessmen, and members of law enforcement agencies.[/su_highlight]The fact that certain events are not easily remembered does not mean that they do not have a significant impact on the ife of the individual. Until the memories are surfaced and worked through in a safe environment, the survivor of such abuse is still controlled to some extent by these past experiences. Typically, the survivor will react most strongly to past indoctrination when triggered by an event which is a reminder of it. For example, if the survivor was abused in childhood by a cult that conducted abusive rituals on every full moon, s/he may feel compelled as an adult to seek out a cult and participate in rituals whenever the moon is full. Or s/he may be triggered to perform a physically or sexually assaultive act on the full moon without seeking out a cult. Alternatively s/he may act out in some other compulsive way to cope with the anxiety associated with the dissociated memory of this traumatic event.
Survivors experience triggering of certain beliefs into which they were indoctrinated, or certain behaviors that they are programmed to enact. They are usually unaware of what it is that is triggering them. With help, a victim can bring the triggering events to conscious awareness, and then can gradually become empowered to free him/herself from these compulsions.
Behaviors that can be triggered spontaneously by cues that by chance happen to remind the individual of past indoctrination or programming. Cues may be implanted by the cult during indoctrination which can also be employed deliberately by cult members to elicit particular behaviors from a victim. For example, a survivor who was ritually abused and indoctrinated in early childhood can often be called back into the cult years after the indoctrination occurred when approaced by a cult member who knows what trigger words or signs to use to access that individual’s programming and gain the desired response. [su_highlight]To better understand such “trigger” methods, rent and view the videos “Telefon” and “The Manchurian Candidate.”[/su_highlight]
The abusive system of mind control described has distinct emotional consequences, as well as a major impact upon the cognitive and religious beliefs under which the victims function
Emotional Consequences of ritual abuse and mind control for both adult and child survivors include the following.
1. Terror
Ritually abused children are overwhelmed with profound fear. They are hypervigilant, feeling that they are constantly being watched. They are anxious and agitated, sometimes mistakenly perceived as “hyperactive.”
2. Guilt and Fear of Discovery
Ritually abused children experience profound fear both of punishment and loss of love from family and friends. They have been made to feel that their participation in heinous acts was freely chosen and that they are responsible for their actions. They are especially fearful of being found responsible by their families or by the authorities (e.g., police) and of being punished for their participation in the violence, sexual contacts, pornography, and murders.
3. Loneliness
Children abused ritually outside of their families feel painfully cut off from their families and deeply lonely. They feel that the acts they have committed, and the voew they have been forced to make to the cult and to Satan [and/or Lucifer, pagan gods or goddesses, etc.], separate them from their families irrevocably. This kind of emotional estrangement from their parents is often accompanied by profound despair.
4. Identification with the Group and a Sense of Personal Badness
Ritually abused children tend to feel identified with the evil performed by the cult. This feeling of being “one of the bad people” often leads to compulsions to behave in physically and sexually assaultive ways.
5. Rage over Victimization
Enraged child victims are encouraged to act out their anger by assaulting others and are then told that this is evidence that they are truly becoming members of the abusive group. Thus, even their own rage is turned against ritually abused children, thereby heightening their sense of hopelessness and entrapment.
6. Loss of Sense of Self
Ritual abuse victims feel a loss of boundaries between the self and the group. Often, they come to be so identified with the group that they feel like an extension of it. This loss of the sense of self contributes to feelings of personal badness and of rage.
7. Absense of Free Will
As a result of techniques like magic surgery, the perception that controlling evil spirits are present, that cult members know everything that the child thinks or does, and the use of impossible double binds (e.g., stab or be stabbed), the victim comes to feel that there is no choice but to comply, and yet is still burdened by guilt and shame.
Cognitive Beliefs imparted by ritual abuse and mind control, seen in both adults and child survivors, include the following.
1. There Is No Escape
“The cult members are everywhere. The spirits, monsters, demons, devils, etc. that the cult controls, surround me, too. They know if I violate any of the rules of the cult, and they will punish me. I can never leave.”
2. The Cult Completely Controls me
“I am controlled by the cult and by the demon which the cult has placed in me to both control and monitor my behavior. I have no freedom and must follow the orders of the cult leaders in all things. I must be ready to assault others and neither trust nor make any close associations with anyone outside the cult.”
3. I Am Incapable of Protecting Myself
“I am inadequate. I have no control and no power. I am paralyzed.”
4. The Cult Is My Only True Family
(In extrafamilial cases)–“My family is dangerous to me and only the cult members accept me. I will eventually live with them forever because they are my true family.”
5. Memories Are Dangerous
“I must hurt myself if I begin to remember. [I have yet to meet a R.A./M.C. survivor who has not experienced such powerful urges, upon remembering…many having grievously acted-out the programming. The fortunate ones have survived, so far.] I must cut myself, beat myself, or kill myself if I remember what happened. Terrible things will happen to me and my family if I remember.”
6. Disclosures Are Dangerous
“The cult will know if I tell anyone. If I do tell, I or my family will be hurt by them, or I will be compelled to hurt myself.” [su_highlight]There is unfortunately some truth to this programmed belief. Many R.A./M.C. survivors have found, to their great dismay, that when they went to the authorities to report remembering criminalities, they and/or their loved ones were subsequently harassed, physically attacked, murdered, and/or threatened with bodily harm.[/su_highlight]
Religious Beliefs imparted by ritual abuse and mind control, seen in both adult and child survivors, include the following.
1. Satan Is Stronger than God
“Satan has all the power. He is stronger than God. God has not been able to do anything to protect me from what has happened.”
2. God Does Not Love me
“I am despised and rejected by God. I am guilty of crimes that God could never forgive. I am evil and beyond hope for redemption or restoration.” [su_highlight]The most practical concept that has helped me so far with this particularly painful false belief is: “Now that you have free will, are you going around doing those hurtful activities? If not, you are NOT GUILTY of what your body did while under the control of the true criminals.”[/su_highlight]
3. God Wants to Punish me
“I am profoundly afraid of God who must want to destroy me.”
4. My Life Is Controlled by Satan
“I belong to Satan irrevocably. His power lives inside me and has taken over my life. I am possessed by an evil spirit or demon that controls my life.” [su_highlight]Important note: Many awakening survivors have great difficulty in accepting that they have a dissociative disorder. If they have fundamental religious backgrounds, it is unfortunately much easier for them to choose to believe that the alter-entities co-residing in their bodies are not human. Some have even been convinced that they are at least partially, genetically “alien.” Such an externally reinforced belief unfortunately aids the victim in continuing to dissociate, or to stay “split-off” mentally and emotionally from the other parts his or her original personality. Again it is crucial to help the person to understand that what he or she was used to do, in externally controlled states, neither was nor is his or her responsibility. He or she was also a victim during such experiences.[/su_highlight]
5. My Life Is Dedicated to Satan
“I have taken vows to serve Satan throughout my life. I will serve him by willingly committing acts of evil and destruction. In turn, he will protect me from harm and allow me to gratify all of my desires.” [su_highlight]Experience itself will help such victims eventually learn that such a belief system is completely fake.[/su_highlight]
