Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs

People who have survived ritual abuse or mind control experiments have often been silenced, accused of lying, mocked and disbelieved. Clinicians working with survivors often find themselves isolated, facing the same levels of disbelief and denial from other professionals within the mental health field. This report - based on proceedings from a conference on the subject - presents knowledge and experience from both clinicians and survivors to promote understanding and recovery from organized and ritual abuse, mind control and programming. The book combines clinical presentations, survivors' voices, and research material to help address the ways in which we can work clinically with mind control and cult programming from the perspective of relational psychotherapy.

Table of Contents:
Introduction , What has changed in twenty years? , “An evil cradling”? Cult practices and the manipulation of attachment needs in ritual abuse , Torture-based mind control: psychological mechanisms and psychotherapeutic approaches to overcoming mind control , Love is my religion , Working with the Incredible Hulk , Maintaining agency: a therapist’s journey

About the Author :
Orit Badouk Epstein

Review :
"All books written by mental health professionals require intelligence, compassion, and sensitivity from their authors, but few demand courage. The contributors to this impressive and chilling collection of essays deserve our deepest thanks for their bravery in exploring and exposing the most ugly underbelly of human psychology. In sensitive and measured prose, these cutting-edge colleagues have managed to help us understand that extreme abuse, mind control, torture, and other forms of multi-perpetrator assault do exist, and that to deny the personal testimony of survivors, as well the growing body of clinical and forensic evidence, represents a horrific attack. The editors and authors of this collection share their moving psychotherapeutic work in a modest manner, helping all contemporary workers to develop a greater appreciation of the important work that demands our respect and our attention. I recommend this book as necessary reading for all who care about human dignity."--Professor Brett Kahr "Although my father wrote about dissociation and multiple personality, it wasn't until Valerie Sinason asked me to do some filming for a survivor of ritual abuse that the penny really dropped. We had been filming the locations where much of the abuse had occurred and the woman asked me 'Do you believe me?' And I realized that I did. This book of papers from a pioneering conference of survivors and therapists stands as a testament to the courage of those willing to come forward to name and identify the horrors of organized abuse practiced on children in our society. Every therapist should read it."--Sir Richard Bowlby "This book, and the remarkable conference it documents, has brought together an impressive group of experts, professional and experiential, to discuss one of the most controversial issues in the fields of trauma and mental health. Attachment theory can definitely throw new light on a topic that some sceptics might prefer be left in the dark altogether."--John Read, Professor of Clinical Psychology