Latest / System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation / Guest: Ellen Lacter

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Guest: Ellen Lacter · System Speak: Complex Trauma and Dissociation

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Over:
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Welcome to the System Speak Podcast, a podcast about Dissociative Identity Disorder. If you are new to the podcast, we recommend starting at the beginning episodes and listen in order to hear our story and what we have learned through this endeavor. Current episodes may be more applicable to long time listeners and are likely to contain more advanced topics, emotional or other triggering content, and or reference earlier episodes that provide more context to what we are currently learning and experiencing. As always, please care for yourself during and after listening to the podcast. Thank you.
• 1:01
  Today our guest is Ellen Lachter, PhD, who is a psychologist and academic coordinator of the play therapy certificate program at the University of California San Diego Division of Extended Studies. She specializes in the treatment of dissociative disorders and complex trauma, including victims of ritualistic abuse and mind control, has published on this subject and is an activist on behalf of victims and survivors based in her website, www.endritualabuse.org. A link to this will be on the blog. She has also written a coloring book of healing images for adult survivors of child abuse, illustrated by Robin Baird Lewis and Jen Callow. As we welcome Doctor.
• 1:50
  Lachter, we would like to give a trigger warning as this is an obviously intense and heavy subject. She defines dissociation and she talks about extreme abuse, including giving examples. She also discusses ritual abuse, child trafficking, and child pornography. Programming and mind control are also discussed. If you feel this is not the episode for you or that you're not able to listen to this episode safely, please skip it.
• 2:20
  And as always, please care for yourself well during and after listening to the podcast. So again, one more time before we get started, a heavy trigger warning for this episode. In addition, before the episode begins, she was asking questions of us just to get comfortable as we were working out audio. She asked a question about our cochlear implants. And because we get so many questions about that, we went ahead and left that in at the beginning of the interview.
• 2:53
  So we welcome Doctor. Lachter and encourage good self care while you listen and after you listen. Thank you.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: When I got my cochlear implants in 02/2010, the the program that they use for teaching you to speak and working on your sound, that is from Australia.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, you're kidding.
• 3:17
  Speaker 3: Isn't that funny? So I'm not I I have lived in Australia, but not when I could hear or speak. And I lived in Sydney. I grew up moving a lot. So I've lived all over the world, but my speech is just from it's just confused from speech therapy.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: Unbelievable. It's it's the cutest accent.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: Well, thank you. I mean, that's great.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: But why why not? I mean, it's just adorable, so whatever. Okay. So are you are you a survivor therapist? Yes.
• 3:53
  Okay. Fantastic. And do do you mind you don't have to answer this, but, I mean, is ritual abuse in your history? Or
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: I've not talked about that directly on the podcast, but I have had several guests who spoke about it, and it has been referenced.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Ritual abuse has referenced in your podcast by other speakers. Yes. And Okay.
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: And I've done one episode that was an introduction to it very, very, very carefully. But I am careful on the podcast not to do any kind of trauma disclosure anyway. So we're really careful about that. But the the listeners have that I was super careful with.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: I I I the listeners have had an introduction to ritual abuse? Yeah. Okay. But you you prefer not to answer the the question I just asked you about yourself?
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: I I'm not sure how to answer it yet. I could answer it
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: That's fine. That's fine. If you are and I I don't know if you know that I have a study that I've gotta get back on. I it's just it's such a huge project that I tend to go for the easier projects, but I have a study of that involves asking therapists who are survivors of ritual abuse a very long questionnaire about the nature of the abuse, but more importantly, a very depth. It's I'm doing it.
• 5:23
  Originally, I was gonna do it in an interview, but in the pilot study, it became just too way too involved. The the interviews are too long. The coding for what do you call it for qualitative research is just way too. Extensive, so I'm turning it into a very, very long questionnaire where I'm asking about how do you deal with this particular piece of this particular problem? Like, how do you make programming conscious?
• 5:53
  Or did you have a a suicidality with some of the programs? How did you work it through? And then I'm coming up with very general categories of how people worked it through, which they can check, and then write a full paragraph explaining in-depth how that work was done. So it kind of I know if you know much about qualitative research, but what I'm doing is I'm basically asking the therapist survivors who are participating in the study to do their own coding by selecting the answer that most closely captures their work and then giving them a chance to elaborate, which gives you the benefit of what you would have in an interview so that when the stuff gets published, people can read in a little bit more depth about how to do that, how that person did the work. And then we're also getting into therapy methods that are not beneficial.
• 6:55
  We're getting into the questions of how much belief does a therapist needs to communicate. And so it's a very exciting project that I'm hoping will give people more room to do this work effectively by having I've got over 50 people signed up, over 50 therapists, survivors. So if you get to the if you are a survivor, and if you get to the point where you're comfortable telling me about it, you can do that. Just send me an email and say, you'd like to participate. Your identity would always be kept confidential.
• 7:31
  And there's a lot of things that I figured out to do to off be able to offer complete confidentiality to the participants, but it's a very exciting huge study. So I just wanted to let you know about that. But, anyway okay.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: That's amazing. Thank you.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: If you would like to go ahead and introduce yourself for the listeners. Okay. Yes. Hello. My name
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: is Ellen Lachter. I'm a psychologist in San Diego, California, and I've been working with child abuse since I became a psychologist in 1986. Actually, before that, in the mid seventies, I began as an art therapist working with child abuse, but not really understanding anywhere near as much as I wish I had about what I was working with. And then but I began working in play therapy in the mid 1980s as a marriage family therapist before I became a psychologist. Through my work with play therapy, I was working with a lot of abused children and learned a lot about that, and I was working with adult survivors.
• 8:49
  And then over time, I actually learned about ritual abuse before I learned about dissociative identity disorder, an unfortunate going backwards in that process. But luckily, I had been a therapist for almost more than fifteen years by the time I learned about that level of abuse because it's pretty challenging and frightening. So I'm glad that I had a lot of experience and some years under my belt as a person when I took that on. But then I became very immersed in the study of ritual abuse and other extreme abuse and learned a lot about dissociative identity disorder and over time have become one of the people who is writing about it, speaking about it, doing training to help other people understand and an activist on behalf of survivors.
• 9:52
  Speaker 3: That is very unusual for you to learn about ritual abuse before learning about DID. Yes. How how would you so if we switch it back for just a minute, how would you explain dissociation to someone who's just learning about it?
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Well, dissociation means a lot of things. The creation of personalities or different parts of self within severe abuse is only one kind of dissociation. A person can become amnestic for trauma, abuse without having dissociated identities. A person can go into a flashback, which is another dissociative response without having dissociated identities. There's a lot of, you know, experiencing yourself out of your body and looking down at your body is a dissociative experience that is the subset of feeling depersonalized, not connected to yourself, having a sense of the outside world as not real, often without color, without life, is another dissociative response.
• 11:15
  And forming dissociated identities is a definite dissociative response that I think is very common because if abuse is just too much to hold in your consciousness because it's too heartbreaking, too terrifying, because complete helplessness is intolerable. It's actually a very intelligent adaptive response to create a personality who holds the knowledge of that pain or heartbreak or terror or particular memories that are devastating or encountering evil is something I think is also intolerable to hold in one's consciousness, especially as a child. So it's very adaptive to for the mind to create parts who hold those kinds of knowledge apart from the part of the person who has to go to school, who has to look as if everything is okay because if they reveal that they've been abused, they are likely to be hurt more or they have been threatened that they will be hurt more if they reveal it. So they have to have a functional part of themselves who can go to school, who can interact socially, who can deal with teachers, and just navigate all of the things that we do in our interaction with the outside world. So the need to have a part who can do that and the need to have other parts who hold awareness of completely overwhelming experiences is a very adaptive response to abuse, and I believe it's a very common response to significant enough abuse.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: How would you introduce the even just the terms of ritual abuse to someone who's just realizing that's part of their history or when you're teaching someone to explain what that is? How do you explain that?
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Well, I wouldn't bring in those words with a client who was beginning to remember what I would consider to be ritualistic elements of abuse because that can really frighten somebody, and it can cause them to go on the Internet and read everything about different kinds of ritual abuse. And for some people, it can cause them to think that everything that they have read happened to them. For others, if they read things, they're very clear. That did not happen to me. Oh, that definitely happened to me.
• 14:14
  So I think people fall into one of two categories there. The the ones who can get overwhelmed and influenced by what they read and those who can read very much to their own advantage because they can they they have clarity about what did happen to them that they read about and what did not happen to them that they read about. Now if I'm talking to professionals, I will go into great depth about what ritual abuse and other forms of extreme abuse are. So are you wanting me to say a little bit about how I would explain it to colleagues? Yes.
• 15:06
  The term ritual abuse or ritualistic abuse has had an interesting history. I think when people first started hearing accounts of abuse involving cult groups with spiritual beliefs, often with, a belief in some kind of deity who they believed endorsed abuse of children or endorsed killing children to sacrifice them, to propitiate, to empower, to worship that deity. I think the term ritual abuse pretty simply applied to those kinds of abuse, because it was abuse with rituals and a spiritual element. But it wasn't too long after that that other forms of very extreme abuse started being reported often by those same individuals. So people who had experienced abuse with within cult groups often also recalled being abused in projects such as MK Ultra, the CIA's Cold War projects to learn how to control the mind, to learn how to get information out of people, to create Manchurian candidates, etcetera.
• 16:56
  So that kind of abuse within politically motivated entities, whether it's the military, the CIA, intelligence projects within other countries, kind of got lumped in under the term ritual abuse even though it did not involve rituals in the sense that we usually think of that would be religious rituals, rituals in some form of, worship. So that kinda became part of how people use the term ritual abuse. And then other types of political agendas, ethnic hate, religious hate, KKK abuse kinda if that was done in a within a cult setting or group setting of an abuser network perpetrating against a number of victims, usually a number of children, often a number of perpetrators, that all kind of fell under the category of ritual abuse. So if it it it could have a political or a hate agenda or a religious agenda, and that tended to all be thought of under the rubric of ritual abuse. Now other organized abuse like production of child rape and torture materials, production of child abuse materials.
• 18:37
  I I I say production of child and rape materials because it's often usually getting more and more sadistic, younger and younger children. So I don't would I would never call it child pornography that has a completely different. I hear the word pornography. It has a whole other meaning. It's child abuse materials.
• 18:59
  That would be the legal term, production of child abuse materials, but it's not just child abuse materials. It's actually child rape and torture materials. I I don't use the term ritual abuse for that. I would use the broader umbrella of extreme abuse. So all of these things that I described would fall under extreme abuse.
• 19:22
  Should projects by political or military groups be termed ritual abuse? Maybe not. But that has become a way of using the terms term because so many victims of spiritual types of abuse were also victims of projects that were sponsored by a government of some kind. Now all all of these extreme forms of abuse also tend to involve psychologically savvy manipulation of dissociated identities toward the ends of the abuser. So what I mean by that is that all of these groups that I have just described have an understanding that they can manipulate the parts of the person such that the memories are stored only in the parts who are actively involved in being abused and such that other parts will not have a memory of the abuse.
• 20:40
  So before I was describing how creating personalities is a very adaptive response to extreme abuse and overwhelming experience. And now I'm saying that, sophisticated abusers deliberately exploit the mind's response of creating parts to their own advantage to keep the memories of the abuse sequestered behind a very opaque amnestic barrier from the parts who navigate normal life. So for instance, let's say a child is taken out of a corrupt daycare and abused on film for the production of child abuse materials. It's terrifying, and the child may very quickly create the mind may create another part to be the one who is taking the torture. But the abusers will whether the child did that or not, the abusers will work to to make sure that the memory is held only in the part who is the one who is hurt in this way.
• 22:09
  So they may say after that very first episode, when you are here, you are Mary. And when you go home, you are again Nancy. And Nancy will not remember anything that happened here, and Mary, will not tell her. And when you come back, Mary, I expect to see you. So even if the child did not create Mary during this horrible event, the abusers will do what I just described to cause the mind of that victim to create a Mary who will be the one who takes the abuse and to make sure that Nancy, who is the the child who lives at home, will not know about Mary or about what happened to Mary.
• 23:03
  So a lot of different kinds of abusers have learned how to do these kinds of things to protect themselves. And that would be called mind control or programming, but it's kind of useful to think of it as psychological psychologically savvy manipulation of dissociative responses or of dissociated identities, because that describes it and makes it a little less ominous and less frightening to the victims, less frightening and ominous to the therapists, and it in a sense provides some direction for what to do about it within the description. But for shorthand purposes, because we can't go around saying such a long phrase every time we're talking about it, victims and therapists have been talking about it as programming and mind control for decades and decades. And I believe many of the abuser the abusers themselves call it programming. I I do not know if they also if the abusers also call it mind control, but I do believe they call it programming and that they call themselves programmers.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: You've done so much. I don't know where you want to start if if you want to share about, that help is available for this and and give people some hope or if you want to help clinicians know where they can get help or if you wanna talk about some of your advocacy work, any of those things?
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a big question. Well, I I do have a website that I started about twenty years ago, endritualabuse.org, end as in stop, end ritual abuse Org. And I have a lot of articles on there, and I've included a few articles from a few of my colleagues. And that is a place that I hope offers hope and compassion and helps people not blame themselves for having been made to hurt other victims because that is a mainstay of all forms of extreme abuse is to force victims to hurt other victims for a number of reasons in the the production of rape and torture materials, anything that hurts the child, including breaking the child's heart, is something that they enjoy. They're cruel, and they feel powerful, and they think it's funny to hurt a child in every possible way and to try to destroy the kindness and love within the child is one way that they another way that they can hurt the child.
• 26:09
  So that's why they do it. Do they also do it to make the child feel like an accomplice? To some degree, even though I think their primary motive is sadism. But the other groups, I believe, do it to make the child feel like an accomplice, to make the child believe herself or himself to be evil, and in order to groom them to take on abuser roles in the future, and also to stop them from ever telling anybody for fear that they will be seen as a criminal, that they will be thrown in jail, that people will believe them to be evil, etcetera. So I have a number of articles on my website in the last few years where I tried very, very hard to help victims not blame themselves for horrible things that they were forced to do under torture or through psychological manipulation and threats because these work cleanly on all of us.
• 27:13
  I tell my clients if they did to me what they did to you, I would have also followed their orders immediately to kill somebody else, etcetera. That we're all basically the same. They are not evil. They absolutely had no choice. They don't have a choice to die.
• 27:37
  They don't let them die. If somebody who was torturing a child wanted a dead child, they would kill the child, but but they they don't want that. They want a perpetually tortured child, or they wanna torture the child to make the child believe that she or he is evil, or they wanna do it as the cameras roll to make money or all of these motives. They're not gonna let the kid die. So you don't have a choice of dying.
• 28:04
  You have to do what they say because they have all the control in a torture situation. So I have articles on my website that I'm trying to that I've written to try to help people to love themselves. I think they deserve the most love of all of anybody and not condemnation, and I don't want them to judge themselves. I think it's just horrible that they would judge themselves from the fear of how somebody else would view it rather than from the understanding of how it all works and what it's like to be in that situation. A lot of people viewing it on the outside might say something like, oh, I, you know, I would never hurt somebody else.
• 28:43
  I would sooner die, but they don't understand how it works, that you're not allowed to die. So and I'm sorry I'm talking about such horrible things, but these things need to be said for the victims.
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: And the other people need to open their minds and their hearts to them and to face that they too would have been helpless in these situations rather than holding on to the illusion of that we are always able to do something to protect ourselves because it's just not true. So that's one of the things I've done on my website. A lot of other education about the broader nature of these kinds of abuse. Lots of articles to try to support survivors. Now there's other there's wonderful books available.
• 29:35
  Alison Miller has two books. One is, like, healing the unimaginable and becoming yourself, I think is the name of the one for survivors. And there's a book where I have an 80 page chapter that I really like, which is called the book is called Ritual Abuse and Mind Control, Manipulation of Attachment Needs, and I have a very long chapter in that book that talks about how mind control is done. I give examples of how it's done, and then it provides a lot of ideas about how to overcome it, how to become conscious of what was done, and how to defy the abuser's directives giving given during torture, which have a devastating fear driven effect on the person. But if you become conscious of it, if you can remember exactly what was done, you could go, no.
• 30:38
  No. I'm not going to obey that directive anymore. And there's also a lot of tricks and illusions that are done to make a person believe that the abusers are all powerful, that they, you know, they for instance, very often victims have memories of a implant being put into their brain to read their thoughts and to deliver thoughts from the abusers, and they remember if if they work through the memory in-depth, they'll be able to figure out that it was a trick, that yes, there was a surgical tray, yes, there was an incision, but that there to make them believe that some kind of implant was put in their mind, but the fact is that any little device put in one location in the brain cannot read the thoughts across the relatively large scale geography of the brain with all of its synaptic connections. Thoughts are very complicated. You can't an an electromagnetic chip cannot follow and interpret the that intricate network that involves each thought.
• 32:03
  And so it it they can't read their minds, and they can't deliver a thought through a microchip that will that lots of victims had pseudosurgeries to make them believe that they have the device inside their mind like that, and that can make them terrified. So all of this stuff has to be realized, how they tricked these children, how they terrorized these children, and help each of the parts to no longer experience itself in that within that horrible ritual wherever the ritual took place in the forest and the basement of some building on some big estate in some horrible, you know, place, or in a laboratory in the case of a lot of projects that are government sponsored. If you can help that part to remember what happened, to realize it's not there anymore, and to help relocate that part of the person from the place where it is stuck experiencing itself, still being abused, still being tortured, still under the thumb of the abusers. If you can move that part into an enter an internal place of healing, then that part is no longer experience experiencing itself as being tortured and no longer has to be terrified that if it does not do x or y, that it will be tortured.
• 33:39
  Now it can know that the abusers are not torturing it still and that it does not have to obey the commands of the abusers. So I wish we we there are therapists, many, many therapists doing this work. I know many of them, but I'm sure I don't even know half of them, because a lot of people are doing this work very quietly, because there's so much there's there are so many attacks on the Internet against therapists who stand up about the realities of these kinds of abuse. So a lot of the therapists doing this work are very, very, very quiet. They get clients only sometimes through local referrals.
• 34:26
  Other therapists know that they do this work and send them people. I do know quite a few therapists who do this work, though, and people are free to contact me through my website. My email's on my website, and my email also, it's Ellen Lachter, e l l e n l a c t e r at earth link dot net, and they can contact me and send me the phone area codes in their like, within hundred miles of where they live. And then I'll search my list, and I will share with them possible referrals in their areas, and they can call those people, or they can ask those people if they know other people, etc. But we need a lot more therapists who understand that this these kinds of abuse happen and who understand about dissociated identities, who understand about the challenges and in making conscious the memories that the abusers work very hard to try to prevent the person from ever accessing.
• 35:34
  So this is challenging work, but we have there are a lot of us who help other therapists to be able to do this work. So if if if a therapist contacts me and they're they say, you know, well, do you do Skype work? You know, here I am. I'm in, you know, Oklahoma, and, you know, will you see my client? Well, I can't.
• 35:58
  I I I can't treat anybody outside of my state. I'm only licensed in California, and I'm only one person. So we're we're all most of us are only allowed to practice in the state in which we are licensed. But so so what what if if the client has a good relationship with that therapist, I want to encourage that therapist to keep working with that client, because to be a caring person who can hear this stuff to the degree that the person has now been able to share this kind of stuff, and, you know, to sit with that, to not be afraid of it, to not dismiss it, to be able to grasp the evil involved, how horrible it is to do to have gotten that far with a person. That's a person who can do the work.
• 36:48
  So I a lot of us who have a lot of experience with this stuff, we like to provide consultation to these I I like to call it having an open heart and an open mind. So if a therapist has an open heart and an open mind, then that therapist can be trained, in my opinion, by those of us who do this work to to come up to speed on the other elements of the work. So I'd rather teach those people and have other colleagues teach those people to be able to help them because we need more people, and everybody has to have their first case. And, you know, we all, you know, we're do we're doggy paddling through our first case, but that's how it has to be. And we get we can get consultation, and we can, you know, and and there's still there's so much to lose if that person gets transferred.
• 37:47
  That person finally has somebody that they trust, and I'm talking about the survivor now, find a therapist that they can trust. They don't wanna lose that person. So it's like, to me, it's worse to lose that person and start over maybe with somebody who has more knowledge than it is to keep a therapist who the person's come to deeply trust, and then to train that person to, you know, and suggest readings to that therapist, etcetera, to help that therapist be able to work with the client who trusts them, and then to be able to see more clients like this because we need an army. We need thousands of therapists who can do this work and who are willing to do this work and who are willing to hear about this level of horror. So that's another reason for my website is I want to help therapists to learn.
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: The activism that you were talking about, did you wanna share anything about that? Well,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: you know, my activism, you know, I I I wish I was doing more. I'm I'm not really sure what else I can do, though. So my activism is mostly educating through my website, trying to connect survivors up with therapists, providing training. So I I present at conferences. I teach play therapy.
• 39:22
  I have a a I'm in charge of a play therapy program at UCSD Extension, and I teach a class there on let me see. It's called ritual abuse victims of ritual abuse and child trafficking, recognition, play therapy, and symbolic communication. And it's about working with children who are victims of extreme abuse. So the teaching is a piece of it. I have a an Internet forum for therapists and researchers and investigators who are doing this work so that we can share with each other.
• 40:01
  I know I try to network with other people who are you know, I'm going to a child trafficking conference in a few weeks, and I'm hoping that they talk about some of these extreme forms of abuse that I'm talking about here, but if they talk about some of the less extreme, but of course not okay, kinds of child trafficking, like using young girls to as sex workers and, you know, international trafficking for of people for labor or for for sex work or whatever. I mean, all of those things. I'm gonna bring with me some of the materials, you know, especially a couple of New York Times articles that came out in the fall on the child abuse materials and how it's become so sadistic and how the children are younger and younger and how it's a multibillion dollar industry. I'm gonna, you know, share that there. So, you know, the those are the kinds of activism I do.
• 41:18
  I I can't be advocates for individuals because it's just not feasible because I I get a few times a week, I get emails from people who want me to be an advocate for them. And it's just impossible because I'm just one person. But also research. So I'm involved with research to try to define better the different kinds of abuse that happen within this extreme abuse and to talk about effective therapy. So most of my activism is as a psychologist, not so much as a political activist.
• 41:55
  It's pretty hard to get institutions to do more. The the New York Times article articles that came out is it's a series called exploited. That's excellent. They were they they talk about how there's inadequate funding of for investigation of the production of child abuse materials, inadequate staffing, how some of the money the the the the small amount of money allocated to trying to find and arrest these people. Some of it got diverted into other government projects.
• 42:40
  So the the you know, I'm not specifically trying to get more funding. I'm not an activist political activist in that kind of a way. So I'm mostly just trying to give hope to survivors and, resources to survivors and trying to educate, other mental health professionals.
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: Do you think that terminology is changing so that more often people now talk about trafficking when sometimes they mean ritual abuse?
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: I I don't I think the people who know about ritual abuse, who who are kind of part of the army trying to wake the world, and who are working with clients with that level of abuse, I don't think we are going to call
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: it trafficking because- They're able to distinguish it.
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: And, well and and because the the world of child trafficking is focused largely on sex work. The child trafficking people well, or the human trafficking people, they their focuses are largely in trying to help young girls, young women not be exploited sexually for profit. It's the international you know, it come taking people from other countries, imprisoning them, and using them for labor also. It tends to focus a lot on the intern so prostitution is not a good word, but, that realm is a big concern for them. They know it's not These girls are not prostitutes.
• 44:38
  These girls are victims, and that's a lot of where their focus is. They're trying to do something about online predators who are expert at luring young children and teenagers into blackmail, you know, getting them into, you know, making them believe that they're a same age peer and getting them to share a photograph that they then will use to blackmail them into giving more Photographs or they'll tell their parents and or and you don't have to come and let me abuse you. And yes, that can lead to bringing a child into production of very horrible child abuse materials. But the human trafficking people tend to stay. They they're less aware of the fact that children are imprisoned in places and tortured around the clock on film.
• 45:47
  They're more aware of the lower levels of entrapping these kids. So I think those of us who know about these more sadistic forms of abuse, these more calculated torture based and mind control based forms of abuse, we're not gonna use the term child trafficking because we wanna stick with the terms that really explain that we're talking about the most extreme forms of abuse. And so some of us also dislike the term organized abuse because a a network of abusers having parties where kids are sexually abused, etcetera, or selling them to each other and that kind of thing. That's organized abuse, but it's and it's bad, but it's not necessarily torture level. It's not as extreme.
• 46:56
  So I think that those of us deep in this work are going to be using the terms we've been using for a long time. Ritual abuse, mind control, and and now I'm hoping that the term production of child rape and torture materials is gonna catch on. The abusers call that hurt core, h u r t c o r e. It's an okay term, but still almost a little too connected to hardcore, and the sexually toned words like pornography. I kinda like staying away from those.
• 47:33
  I like using the word abuse or torture. So but extreme abuse has become a useful term to to capture these most extreme kinds of abuse, and human trafficking does not necessarily is not necessarily the best term for extreme abuse. So I think we're not gonna, give those terms up. We don't get it wanna get lost under the larger umbrella.
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry. Go ahead. It really differentiates.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: Yes. Exactly.
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: Thank you for talking to us today. Was there anything else that you wanted to share before we finished?
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: I guess, I I just think the people who have been horribly abused deserve the most lovable and the least judgment of all and the least attack. So it's just not okay to attack these people as having false memories or making things up. It's not okay to attack the therapists as implanting memories or creating dissociated personalities in people, which you really can't create them unless you're torturing them. So I just I just really want to kind of send out a message of love to the to the victims and also to the therapists who are, you know, in the trenches with them. So all these people deserve a lot of a lot of love and care and not the negative judgments, the horrible, ferocious judgments flying all around the Internet to try to invalidate and dismiss and silence and intimidate, you know, I I these people, I I want them to you know, those of us who work with them and get it feel a lot of a lot of compassion, a lot of love, and I I want them to love themselves.
• 49:29
  Speaker 3: So I'll leave it at Thank you for sharing with us.
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you very much for letting me do it.
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: Thank you for listening. Your support of the podcast, the workbooks, and the community means so much to us as we try to create something together that's never been done before, not like this. Connection brings healing, and you can join us on the community at www.systemspeak.com. We'll see
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: you there.