You're Wrong About Ritual Abuse
The DID community on Tumblr has a sizable number of RAMCOA survivors in it, short for ritual abuse, mind control, and organized abuse. These systems often have particular presentations that they believe aren’t as common in non-RAMCOA systems, such as easy splitting, high numbers of alters, and internal structures like layering or subsystems. Complex trauma survivors sometimes deal with repressed memories, and when I was part of the community, I was surrounded by people that were terrified of the idea that they had experienced ritual abuse without even knowing it.
The thing is, most of the way survivors talk about ritual abuse on Tumblr is conspiratorial fiction.
I want to start by making it clear that many of the things people describe as RAMCOA are real and I don’t think systems that regurgitate conspiracy theories can’t be actual survivors. Cults are real, they’re not as uncommon as deniers think they are, and some perform abusive rituals on children. I’m not going to tell you that everyone who says they experienced ritual abuse is an antisemite or a liar because it’s not true. This isn’t about that.
My history with the Tumblr DID community starts in the mid 2010s. I haven’t been an active participant in more than half a decade but being plural online means I still fall down rabbit holes about it. Over the years, the number of RAMCOA survivors within the DID community has gone up quite a bit. I believe that this trend correlates with the increase in polyfragmented systems and subsequent increase in fake-claimers arguing that RAMCOA is required to have similarly complex system structures. The culture surrounding all this is mostly what I’m going to talk about.
A brief rundown on the terminology before we begin, as well as clarity on who this is about. “Polyfragmented” is an outdated, somewhat contentious term to describe systems with a large number of alters (100+) and usually the complex internal structures that help manage such a large system. There are less medicalized terms for the same concept but it’s the one I’ll be using here on the basis that I am generally referring to systems that explicitly refer to themselves as such. I will at times use the word “ritual abuse” alone when mind control or organized abuse is also applicable to make my life easier. I refer to the relevant type of system being discussed as DID systems, despite the fact that OSDD systems can also experience this, to avoid the pain in the ass that is writing DID/OSDD over and over. It’s also possible for non-dissociative systems to have a history with RAMCOA, but this essay isn’t about them because almost none of them engage in the same exclusionary behaviors being discussed. Lastly, much of what I describe here is applicable to well-known forums for multiples, however my direct experience is with Tumblr and so I will only mention the impact of those other websites in passing.
It’s gonna be a long one, so buckle up.
MKULTRA
MKULTRA is the RAMCOA boogieman. It’s a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream about a shadowy, all powerful government and people will not shut the fuck up about it. Nobody in the DID community seems to know what actually happened in MKULTRA because they can’t or won’t look into it and yet a lot of the bullshit starts here.
MKULTRA was a CIA mind control program that set out to determine whether they could manipulate human behavior, force confessions, and/or incapacitate agents using drugs (primarily LSD), hypnosis, electroshock, coercive interrogation, and other torture methods.1 A lot of subjects were simply dosed with LSD, with or without consent, so the CIA could see what would happen. Many subjects were voluntary, but many weren’t, such as incarcerated people, psychiatric patients, men that slept with sex workers, generally people that couldn’t fight back because they’re marginalized and/or didn’t know what was happening.2 The Nazis tried to create a “truth serum” and Americans hired the head doctor of that program for their own Project ARTICHOKE. This program, the predecessor of MKULTRA, tried to determine whether someone could be mind-controlled into involuntarily committing an assassination.3 MKULTRA led to MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, and MKCHICKWIT, all of which conducted similar experiments.4 That’s it, really.*
None of this was for a powerful government cult’s personal gratification. It wasn’t an attempt to make child sex slaves. There is no source beyond word of mouth saying that MKULTRA purposefully induced MPD in children or could even reliably use dissociation as a means for mind control. The Nazis did torture experiments and the Americans decided they wanted to do them too.
Many of the MKULTRA documents were destroyed, however the Freedom of Information Act revealed the twenty thousand of them that had been stored in the wrong building.5 Are there more abusive experiments that we just don’t have a record of? Absolutely. Are there legitimate MKULTRA victims who never go public with their story and only talk about it in spaces for survivors and DID systems in general? I’m sure. However, we know quite a lot about MKULTRA through the thousands of documents that still exist and we can’t just treat it like anything is possible, let alone plausible. To quote John Lisle, historian and author who has covered MKULTRA and its conspiracies extensively:
“We can’t know everything about MKULTRA, but we can know enough to form a good approximation of what it was, and an even better approximation of what it wasn’t. Here’s an analogy to illustrate the point. What shape is the Earth? A sphere, of course. But that’s not quite right. The Earth spins on its axis, causing the equator to bulge. So the Earth is actually an oblate spheroid. But that’s not quite right either. The Earth isn’t perfectly smooth. It has complicated topographical features—mountains, valleys, oceans, rivers, sand dunes, ice caps—that constantly change. We can’t know everything about the shape of the Earth, but we can know enough to form a good approximation of what it is (a sphere), and an even better approximation of what it isn’t (flat).”2
The most important thing you should take away from this is that MKULTRA and the other CIA mind control programs like it didn’t fucking work. They couldn’t wipe someone’s brain and program them into a robot agent. They couldn’t get a guy to kill someone upon hearing a special trigger phrase. The US Government, with its ability to provide near-infinite funding and resources to the program, could not successfully mind control a person to the point of completely stripping them of their free will and sense of self-preservation.
Antisemitism by Another Name
DeprogramWiki is a massive collection of documentation about ritual abuse and so-called mind control programming. Not every DID system on Tumblr uses it as a source, but the information on it definitely reflects what a lot of them believe. It asserts that most, if not all, programming follows specific guidelines that consistently create specific kinds of alters/inner worlds. It also claims that certain triggers can make someone instantly kill themselves or others due to their programming—because the CIA couldn’t do anything like that but a quirked up Satanist totally could. The primary sources it uses are self-published books by a single Tumblr user and the writings of a guy whose work is mostly about the Illuminati. I’m going to avoid naming these two people because I don’t want to direct a ton of negative attention towards them, but they’re not hard to find with the information I provided.
I assume that most systems who think of ritual abuse in the way Illuminati-believers do aren’t going to directly express antisemitic sentiments. However, their idea of what a cult looks like only really makes sense if they think there is something powerful that ties them all together. Having witnessed the fallout related to a particular DID YouTuber, I know that most systems who continue to believe in the conspiratorial kind of RAMCOA deny that it has anything to do with Jewish people, and I’m sure that in their mind it doesn’t. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the origin of the beliefs and the harm done by continuing to believe them. Whether someone thinks a Jewish cabal runs the world or not, the fictional uniformity of ritual abuse and level of secrecy the sources about it claim it has are inseparable from antisemitism.6
When the antisemitism becomes more overt, the RAMCOA survivors in the community overlook it or explain it away. The Tumblr blog I mentioned above has correlated Jews with Satanism countless times and that gets disregarded, by and large because the bulk of their information validates someone’s worldview or interpretation of their own trauma. I’ve seen numerous DID systems reference Project Monarch like it’s a real thing, a conspiracy theory that includes the claim that President George W. Bush showed the victim a hologram of himself shapeshifting into a lizard alien.7 This essay isn’t about calling out bigoted behaviors, but I feel it’s important to highlight that most Jewish systems would not be able to ignore this. The fact that non-Jews don’t notice it or simply don’t care reflects really serious issues within the community. Any resource that claims the Illuminati is real should immediately be seen as not credible, regardless of whether one relates to its other information about RAMCOA or not.
Lying, Delusional, or Misunderstood?
A lot of (often younger) DID systems that say they’ve been ritually abused are seen as liars within even their own sliver of the community, though fake-claimers are too afraid to call someone specific out directly unless there’s already a movement against them. Instead, they’ll make vague posts about how there are a bunch of liars and fake people that we really need to talk about more. So, let’s talk about that more.
While there’s really no way to prove it, I just don’t think most people who say they’ve experienced RAMCOA when they haven’t are knowingly lying. One of the few types of survivors I’ve seen get called liars far more openly are systems who say they were part of MKULTRA or one of the later mind control programs that don’t actually exist (not that the fake-claimers know those aren’t real) because they’re not old enough. The amount of toxicity towards systems who don’t give 100% accurate accounts of their own life within the DID community is insane to me given the fact that it’s a disorder that involves amnesia. The average millennial DID system who says they’re a victim of MKULTRA is no more of a liar than a schizophrenic who says they’re being gangstalked by the government. It’s a delusion, guys, and some of them could easily be legitimate survivors whose first exposure to the concept of RAMCOA beyond their lived experience was MKULTRA.
The shifting of mental health language has profoundly impacted the way we talk about trauma, and that most certainly is also a contributing factor to the increasing number of DID systems that identify as RAMCOA survivors. When we reduce the word “gaslighting” to mean manipulative lying or telling someone how to feel, actual gaslighting gets power-leveled into being called mind control. This is a societal issue, not a personal one. Likewise, there aren’t really strict definitions for a lot of these terms outside of the conspiracy theorist’s mind to begin with. Where is the line between religious abuse and ritual abuse when a defining trait of religion is the use of rituals? For some, it feels like it should be obvious, but the best most survivors can do is just choose the word that validates the feelings that the trauma left them with.
Childhood trauma survivors have a lot of insecurity about how bad their PTSD is, even within communities for said survivors. Without intense terminology to describe it, systems question how the abuse was bad enough for it to have caused the amount of damage that it did, especially with some polyfragmented systems insisting that their immense pain is exclusive and incomparable to other types of trauma. All children are suggestible, practically hardwired to trust their caregivers, and it’s completely reasonable for an abuser’s lies meant to change their behavior to affect them long-term without mind control being involved. Abuse from multiple perpetrators who all know each other, enable each other’s abuse, and maybe even commit acts of abuse as a group can cause just as much harm as the same dynamic where money is exchanged. Emotional neglect alone can have devastating impacts on a child, especially when their only caregivers are the ones that won’t support them.8 Dissociative identity disorder correlates with chronic distress in childhood, yes, but the threshold of what causes chronic stress is much lower for a child than it is for an adult.
An exclusionary community forces people to talk differently about their trauma in order to appease the exclusionists. One under-discussed part of DID is what systems do to blend in with unexplained amnesia and how that impacts their behavior even after they become more aware of it.9, see note Growing up, I had a lot of moments where I filled gaps in my memory either by drawing from what I already knew or completely making something up if I was put on the spot, and this experience is far from unique. What happens when you enter a community with a system that looks like “Highly Complex DID” and get told that that can only be the result of ritual abuse? If you don’t have the capacity to say, “I don’t know why I’m like this,” or, “That’s not true,” then you’re probably going to say you experienced ritual abuse. You’re going to stretch the definition of ritual abuse until it fits what you already know about your past or you’re going to make something up to fill the gaps. I think a lot of systems don’t even know that they’re doing this, they just know that they are the way that they are and get pressured for an explanation why. They want to be accepted, and they should be allowed to without needing to justify their existence.
And, of course, there are still people who lie intentionally because they want attention, a sick role, an excuse for bad behavior, or some other personal gain. These people may be as overt as a teenager who says they were a victim of MKULTRA, but they might also be a well-liked, popular user that accuses other systems of faking in a private Discord server with their friends to hide the fact that they’re a fraud. Given the harm it can cause a genuine-but-inconsistent survivor to be called a liar, I just don’t think the people demanding more discussion on all the fakers in their community can be trusted to know the difference.
Repressed Memories
A moral panic about Satanic ritual abuse exploded in North America during the 80s, spread across the world by the late 90s, and still persists to this day. A major contributor to the rise in accusations was a book written by a woman named Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, her psychiatrist and later husband, who retrieved her “repressed” memories of Satanic ritual abuse through recovered-memory therapy. Michelle claimed that her final Satanic torture session, which went on for eighty-one days, ended with Jesus and the archangel Michael helping her defeat Satan. The Virgin Mary then took away her scars and memories so she could live a normal life.10 Also, she was diagnosed with MPD.
A large number of people that reported Satanic ritual abuse were MPD patients. In the end, none of the twelve thousand accusations of SRA in the 80s-90s led to any evidence of large-scale intergenerational Satanic cults, but there was certainly evidence of children being abused on an individual basis.11 Despite this, many trauma specialists at the time promoted the idea of Satanic cults without question.12 It seems noteworthy to me that historical cases of multiple personalities were seen as Satanic possessions, which surely impacts what the supposed SRA survivor patients were led to believe about their unknown pasts as they were also treated with the same recovered-memory therapy that could produce false memories of things like an alien abduction.13, 14 It’s not arbitrary that a fear of repressed, hidden ritual abuse is so present in the DID community.
Repressed memories are real, but you don’t uncover them with six hundred hours of hypnotism and sodium amytal. After her parents came up with “False Memory Syndrome” to discredit her accusations of abuse, Jennifer Freyd introduced several theories about how memory repression occurs. One is the betrayal trauma theory—if a child fundamentally depends on a caregiver, they will dissociate away the memories of things like sexual abuse from said caregiver, not simply because the memories are painful, but because it’s necessary to survive.15 We can push the trauma away, but we don’t forget literally everything around it. Your emotionally abusive though well-adjusted parents probably aren’t secretly part of a Satanic cult that made you eat human flesh in the basement as a five-year-old, but it’s possible that the abuse got physical at times. A previous therapist of mine once described repressed memories like a box hidden at the bottom of a pile. You can’t see it, but there’s a good chance that you notice that the pile is stacked on top of something. You also can’t really know what’s in it until you unpack everything else around it, but one thing you can know for sure is that whatever it is, it will be something that actually fits inside the box.
Reality Under the Myth
The secret subgroup within NXIVM called Dominus Obsequious Sororium, or DOS for short, was a pyramid scheme sex cult with slaves and masters. Recruited women were branded with the founder’s initials and made to provide explicit or compromising material as “collateral” upon joining.16 The Children of God (now known as the Family International) is a Christian cult that once used a form of evangelism they called Flirty Fishing, where female members (flirty fishers, bait, or fisherwomen) were made to have sex with men outside of the cult (fish) in order to proselytize them and/or gain donations. Sexuality through the lens of “fishing” was taught at a very young age for its members.17 The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints practiced placement marriages, where young teenage girls were placed in arranged polygamous marriages with adult men according to worthiness because they believed a man must have three wives at minimum in order to reach the highest form of salvation.18 These practices could all be described as RAMCOA by someone that felt victimized by them, but they’re incredibly varied and shaped by the individual cults’ beliefs. This is the reality of being in a high-control group.**
Programming scripts as described on websites like DeprogramWiki can be incredibly broad or have a lot of variability. Even when they’re hyperspecific, survivors of ritualized abuse can still see their lived experiences described in enough bits and pieces to identify with it. No cult leader uses these terms to describe what they’re doing to people, so it’s up to the survivor to find the words to understand it themselves. Seeing a name given to something that most people deny ever happening to you is incredibly validating, and I think that’s why so many “RAMCOA” systems will fight tooth and nail about how it’s legitimate.
I have spoken with and been friends with people that escaped cults. Some of them described the abuse they experienced using the language I see from Illuminati conspiracy theorists for the sake of posting it on their blog without getting into the details. When they got into the details with me in private, however, their experiences were far from what a conspiracy theorist thinks RA is. Their specific cult defined the rituals, but if the survivor were to always describe those rituals with all of their specificities, they would not be able to easily identify other survivors who have a similar enough experience to understand them in a way that almost no one else can.
Why It Matters
Around when I graduated college, some people on Twitter noticed that random pieces of furniture given human names in the Wayfair catalogue were duplicates of others with weirdly high prices compared to others. It was an error, but this sparked a conspiracy theory that Wayfair was a human trafficking front. I was applying to be a 3D modeler for Wayfair, and knowing nothing about trafficking beyond conspiracy theories that my mom told me, I was pretty upset. A friend of mine that has experienced actual organized abuse told me it was scary and upsetting for them too. Shortly after the initial outburst, I realized that human trafficking isn’t actually like this and sent them an article by an organization that does advocacy for survivors disavowing the conspiracy. Only after things died down was my friend able to believe me.
Conspiracy theories about Satanic cults run by the Illuminati make it harder for someone who is in the average cult to know that they’re in a cult. The same can be said about someone who’s trafficked without being kidnapped and sold no differently than furniture. Survivors who could describe their complex trauma in a more honest way are only given conspiratorial language to use and/or are forced to exaggerate their experiences. The fearmongering around repressed ritual abuse negatively affects everyone’s health. People who would otherwise only be triggered by things related to their personal trauma have new triggers introduced through a fictionalized version of mind control programming; the number of systems I’ve seen that become destabilized by mentions of the Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland despite none having experienced any abusive rituals related to them is staggering. There has to be a way we can criticize this without saying that the whole concept of ritualized abuse is fake.
I won’t call survivors who say they’ve experienced Satanic-Jewish ritual abuse or something straight out of Project Monarch all liars because they’re already highly suggestible people who have been further victimized by conspiracy theories. They are victims. The things I've described in this essay aren’t exclusive to Tumblr, online DID communities, or even the internet itself. This is a societal issue, not a personal one.
Personal Experience
When I first joined the DID community and made friends with more veteran members, they fed me the idea that ritual abuse lurked in the most repressed memories of countless systems without them even knowing it. However, there are always hints of it, such as system structure, the manner of which alters split, and behaviors that neatly line up with well-known programming scripts. I never believed that I was in a cult, but a childhood friend abused me in what I considered a ritualistic manner, and the idea that she was projecting her experience of being in a cult onto me planted seeds that I too experienced ritual abuse. My presentation was pretty similar to those who experienced RA, particularly the easy splitting, large number of alters, and very quick switch triggers. Nowadays, I know that this type of multiplicity can occur in any system, regardless of trauma history (or lack thereof).
I avoided mentions of ritual abuse, frightened over the thought that a specific trigger could instantly threaten my life as DeprogramWiki insisted it could. Any kind of cult joke made me so furious that I shook. MKULTRA in particular was immensely triggering to think about; I thought it was a torture program made to intentionally give people DID. I believed these things because of my friends’ paranoia, the community’s paranoia, and my own mother’s paranoia—she was convinced that all of our private conversations were monitored by the government. The cracks started showing when I realized that the Tumblr blog so many ritual abuse survivors clung to as a good resource was constantly posting Satanic artwork with Jewish iconography in it and claimed that every US president had their own personal mind-controlled child sex slave. When I brought this up to a friend who was even more paranoid about experiencing repressed ritual abuse than I was, they simply told me that cults can be any religion and so there are some cults that are Jewish.
Trauma survivors often have to deal with people telling them that they must forgive or at least sympathize with their abusers. They’ll hear about how they love them, how they didn’t mean to cause harm, how they didn’t know any better. When these survivors make their own community, they tell each other that abusers hurt them because they willingly, purposefully chose to hurt them. For many systems, especially polyfragmented ones, it feels like having alters is so intense that the trauma which caused them to exist must be equally intense. This belief is amplified by other community members that insist ritual abuse is the only cause of specific “types” of polyfragmentation. It gives people a lot of validation to believe that their abusers not only fully knew that what they were doing was abuse, but intentionally created their alters. They’re called liars when they say multiple people abused them until they almost believe it themselves, and the one thing that gives them reassurance is thinking that it was all connected. My childhood friend repeatedly harmed me in a location that most people would consider unrealistic. I downplayed the sadisticness of it when I told people my story because I was sure they’d never believe that an eleven-year-old girl would do that. I had a hard time believing it. The only way I could get myself to believe it really happened was by thinking she was programmed to act this way and know how to get away with it.
I believed that my abusive childhood friend did what DeprogramWiki describes as “dog programming,” despite her not having the tools it insists are required for this programming script, because it was similar enough and the alter that endured much of what she did was a dog person. Being treated like an animal when you’re already a system is probably going to make an alter believe they’re an animal whether it was purposeful or not, but I didn’t know that. I also thought that her immense need for control over play pretend, which heavily influenced the formation of a few alters, had intention to it. I never really talked about my experiences with “ritual abuse” in the open regardless, I was too ashamed and I felt it wasn’t comparable to people that had been in cults.
I didn’t really think that my abusive friend did anything else, but I once panicked when I got triggered by something on DeprogramWiki, blacked out, and switched back in to find myself watching a strobe light video while her favorite song played in another tab. I never made any claims about this, I just told my friends when it happened because it was freaky and I didn’t know what it meant. When I got called out a few years later, one former friend who was part of that conversation accused me of lying about experiencing “flash programming” because there was no way a kid that abused me in the place that she did would have the resources required to do that. I had no idea what the fuck flash programming was for literal years and couldn’t find it via Google until something clicked and I added “MKULTRA” to the search. The only place I could find anything that even used the words “flash programming” was a fringe conspiracy theorist’s blog about their podcast, where they mentioned that Project Monarch did flash programming in the abstract without actually saying what that entails. I later realized that strobe lights remind me of my theme park special interest, something that calms me down. The song choice is a little harder to explain; from my understanding, the alter that fronted never saw this friend as abusive but did know that playing her favorite song ended conflicts between us, so they played the song to essentially make their own conflicting thoughts go away. Multiplicity can, in fact, just be this strange without ritual abuse causing it.
Weed helped me start actually processing my trauma alongside Internal Family Systems and EMDR. My then-therapist was… old, to say the least, so I started doing a lot more work by myself. Realizing I could remember things once repressed and put all the pieces together, I started digging. There are many things I remember that, in the abstract, fit with the rest of my story. However, without stable footing, getting triggered by a crisis worker that asked too many questions made me fill the gaps with details that were too intense to make sense. Thinking an elementary school teacher harmed me in a really violent way made me feel incredibly unstable for weeks. After I calmed down enough to tell myself that the remaining gaps in my memory don’t need to be explained in order to make sense of why it felt so bad, it wasn’t hard to accept that most of my stress at the time had to do with a bad behavior chart and a teacher’s more subtle exploitation of my desire to be good.
I tried not to dig anymore, knowing some of the memories were bound to be unintentionally constructed for the sake of filling gaps, but being stoned while alone made me too vulnerable. It didn’t take long for me to uncover something that, at the time, I really should’ve left alone. The memory resembled organized abuse without context, so I freaked out and spent months jumping between pretending it was just part of my imagination and doing really intense compulsions to make the stress go away. I remembered stuff with my teacher that didn’t really happen that way, surely this was the same when I had no idea who the people involved were—or maybe I was trafficked, maybe my mom trafficked me, because how else could something like that have happened with people I didn’t even know? I just couldn’t let it go because I knew in my gut that there was still something underneath the pile. Eventually, I figured out the context and realized it was the only thing that made sense given my actual life history. I unpacked all the boxes and opened the one at the bottom. I learned why my friend abused me in such a sadistic, repetitive way. It still fucks me up to think about it too hard, but having real answers genuinely helps. Once my co-host Frey made a joke about it for the first time, I laughed with tears in my eyes and knew I’d be okay.
The friend that hurt me was being abused by a group of police officers, likely including her father. Abuse does not need to be organized, ritualistic, or mind-controlled focused in order to cause such devastating harm to a child with little support. When an abuser is someone that knowingly causes harm without remorse, they do so because they are power-hungry, especially when violent displays of power are already rewarded like they are with cops. Abusers want control over their victims and it doesn’t take Satanic rituals to do that. There isn’t a shadowy network that connects cults together, there is no programming bible. The worst of our monsters openly walk our streets with badges on their chests and get called heroes.
Believing that you’ve been ritually abused provides validation, but it also creates deep paranoia that gets worse and worse with time. Even actual survivors of ritualized abuse are subject to this paranoia. A former friend’s deranged, conspiratorial beliefs made them unable to distinguish between a lie and something they assumed based on behavior that I never even tried to explain myself. It radicalizes people to right wing ideology and creates self-organized high-control groups, like Q Anon. When it doesn’t turn you into a fucked up reactionary, it pushes you away from other trauma survivors that could otherwise support you. It makes you tell yourself that you are so deeply traumatized that no one with “less severe” abuse could ever understand you and you end up alone.
I was thankfully not using social media when I came to terms with this, so nobody I didn’t already trust had to see me rip off the bandaid. I think it’d be harder for someone that has surrounded themselves in the culture of so-called RAMCOA, especially when they’re friends with genuine survivors who may or may not frame things with the same conspiratorial lens. If you see yourself in my story, I want you to know that accepting the messy reality of abuse can take your abusers’ power away. I was so terrified of being a RAMCOA survivor that my brain literally shorted out every time I thought about it. Once I let that go, I saw the most evil of my abusers for what they were—pathetic, power-obsessed losers that got a job that lets them hurt people and victimized children because they’re too weak to control anyone that isn’t already made powerless by their authority. It was painful to realize I was wrong about something so serious, but the relief after the hurt set me free.
Citation and Notes
* This is a very brief summary of MKULTRA and the programs that predate/succeed it. If I were to explain everything about it in detail, most of this essay would be MKULTRA history, which isn’t what I wanted. That doesn’t mean that details of which would disprove my point were omitted. Please read the sources I’ve cited within this section if you would like a more thorough explanation of the program.
** These high-control groups engage/engaged in far more abusive practices than what I chose to feature in this paragraph, especially the Children of God/Family International. Please note that you will likely see the full extent of their systematic sexual abuse, much of which is/was directed towards children, if you choose to look into them more on your own.
1. Nofil, B. (2019). The CIA’s Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control. HISTORY; A&E Television Networks. LINK.
2. Eslami, S. (2025, May 19). The MKULTRA Conspiracy - The History Reader. The History Reader. LINK.
3. Jones, N. (2010, April 23). Document Friday: Project ARTICHOKE, or the CIA Attempt to Create an Unwitting Assassin Through Hypnosis. UNREDACTED. LINK.
4. (1977). Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense. General Counsel of the Department of Defense. LINK.
5. Project MKUltra, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification: Joint Hearings before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, 95th Cong. (1977). LINK.
6. Flores, M. (2022, May 30). The New World Order: The Historical Origins of a Dangerous Modern Conspiracy Theory. Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. LINK.
7. O’Brien, C., & Phillips, M. (1995). Trance Formation of America (pp. 166–167). Reality Marketing. LINK.
8. Van Der Kolk, B. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score (p. 151-170). Penguin Books.
9. David Spiegel. (2016). Dissociative Amnesia. Merck Manuals Professional Edition; Merck Manuals. LINK.
The experience of having dissociative amnesia is best explained by people that are in the community, not a medical document about them. That being said, I’m not going to cite social media posts or forum threads.
10. Horlor, S. (2024, January 5). This book plunged the world into a terrifying obsession with satanic cults in the 1980s. CBC. LINK.
11. Goleman, D. (2018, May 21). Proof Lacking for Ritual Abuse by Satanists. New York Times. LINK.
12. Noll, R. (2013). When Psychiatry Battled the Devil. Psychiatric Times. LINK.
13. van der Hart, O., Lierens, R., & Goodwin, J. (1996). Jeanne Fery: A Sixteen Century Case of Dissociative Identity Disorder. The Journal of Psychohistory, 24(1), 1–5. LINK.
14. Lief, H. I. (1999). Patients Versus Therapists: Legal Actions Over Recovered Memory Therapy. In Psychiatric Times. Psychiatric Times. LINK.
15. Higgins, D. J., Wolford-Clevenger, C., Ramaswamy, M., & Rogers, R. G. (n.d.). Betrayal Trauma - an overview. Science Direct. LINK.
16. Keith Raniere: NXIVM leader charged with sex trafficking. (2018, March 27). BBC News. LINK.
17. Niebuhr, G. (1993, June 2). Children of God: 'The Family' and Final Harvest. Washington Post. LINK.
18. Watson, M. T. (2024, March 14). The 1948 Secret Marriage of Louis J. Barlow: Origins of FLDS Placement Marriage. Dialogue Journal. LINK.