Satanic Panic, The False Memory Foundationâs Shaky Origins, and Why You Should Believe RAMCOA Survivors
(TW: mentions of RAMCOA, False Memory Foundation, child torture & death, cults, trafficking)
Pretty disappointed to see a fairly popular and well known blog on tumblr is encouraging the idea that RAMCOA doesnât exist. Just came across this post and was pretty bummed to see the comments too.
For those that agree with them (most of my followers wonât but who knows who will stumble across this), please know that RAMCOA has been going on for much longer than the Satanic Panic. The Satanic Panic was fabricated in an effort to discredit RAMCOA survivors. It was supported by the False Memory Foundation, which was created by a man (and his wife) trying to prove his daughterâs repressed memories of trauma involving him did not really happen. [Explained further in the third article further down in this post]
For the record, false memory/planting false memories has been disproven, itâs not possible to fully plant false memories in patients. Some memories can be altered to an extent because memories can be disjointed and influence from others can cause memories to shift slightly, which is why itâs not encouraged for trauma patients to share exact detailed memories with each other. For example, if two trauma patients were abused by their father and had a similar situation happen and patient A spoke about their experience in detail, if both fathers wore glasses and patient A describes their father to have black rimmed glasses, patient Bâs memory might shift to believe that their father also had black rimmed glasses, even though his glasses were gold rimmed. However, itâs not possible to fully plant memories that do not exist in a patientâs memory. The âbase memoryâ so to speak has to be there in order for any alterations to occur, and those alterations that are possible are often rather minuscule, such as glasses or whether or not their abuser had facial hair or not, or the color of the personâs eyes. Not an entire scene of RA. [Again, explained well by the third article below.]
Repressed memory has been proven to exist. (Though itâs more accurately called dissociated memories by clinicians) It can even exist in people who have traumas that happen in adulthood. Pieces of a traumatic event may go missing in a patientâs working memory, and they may not retrieve it until they are ready to process the memory and all the emotions and information that comes with it. However, it still exists stored in the brain, just in a different area than working memory. Itâs why triggers to the traumatic event (that the patient may not even realize are triggers until they occur) can cause flashbacks and memory resurfacing during said flashbacks.
Some sources explaining the False Memory Foundation and the harm theyâve caused: [a good overview of a woman who was major in the development of the idea of repressed memory being a myth, by a researcher of child psychiatry], [while this is a psychology today article, I think this explains well how misused the idea of FMS - false memory syndrome - is.] [A comprehensive article explaining the roots of the FMF and how the studies used to âproveâ false memory are terrible and easily debunked, with several assertions from professionals in the field.] I want to add that while the FMF has dissolved and rightfully so, the British False Memory Society is still alive and well, as well as the Satanic Templeâs Grey Faction, and both groups still cite False Memory Syndrome as being real and claim that RAMCOA survivors have false memories of their abuse.
However, before Satanic Panic happened, people were starting to actually believe in the existence of RAMCOA and the concept of DID was brought into the mainstream. A survivor on tiktok has a very good video on this situation. And that scared people, especially the abusers themselves who didnât want to get caught. Thatâs when the False Memory Foundation stepped in on the heels of Satanic Panic and literally rewrote the textbooks therapists learned from, and basically taught everyone that repressed memory doesnât exist. Any therapists that spoke about their patientsâ experiences with RAMCOA were sued. Therapists stopped wanting to treat RAMCOA patients for fear of being sued and/or losing their license or being told they planted these memories in their patientsâ heads and possibly losing their licenses. It led to generations of old therapists not treating RAMCOA patients and generations of new therapists learning it doesnât exist.
But it does exist. To outright deny that child torture cannot exist is absurd. 1-2% of reported child abuse falls under the definition of child torture. [source, TW: photos of children with serious injuries from torture included on page 7 of this document] For the record, my abuse was never and has never been reported, and most survivorsâRAMCOA and non-RAMCOA, whose trauma falls under the definition of tortureânever reported or plan to report.
Even if you find the mind control aspect to be far-fetched, ritual abuse most certainly does exist. Iâve seen videos on the surface web on fucking tiktok of all places of child torture and ritual abuse. Organized abuse such as sex trafficking and labor trafficking does exist. Two out of those three things in the acronym are well documented to exist. And for the record, ritual abuse and cult abuse even in adults can cause extreme mind and identity alteration, upwards to the point of nearly being mind control. Look up OSDD-2 in the DSM-V. Look up just about any cult survivors testimonies and hear how they talk about how they nearly became a different person within their cult, how the cult uses torture and mind altering drugs to get their initiates to commit terrible acts of violence to each other. Now imagine if that same stuff were happening to a child whose mind is significantly easier to mold and change. Even if the child RAMCOA survivor does not develop DID, it can cause extreme conditioned responses in which the child (or now grown adult or teen) will still do the responses even now because as a child they were threatened with torture or death if they didnât do it.
Mind control is essentially an extreme form of conditioning, and with the plethoras of research on DID and how it functions, itâs not even a difficult concept to grasp that a cult member might learn how to split new alters in a child via torture and then manipulate those alters to do what they want individually. Anyone who knows fuck all about DID knows that alters can be triggered out via positive and negative triggers. All mind control programming is, is creating a specific trigger for a specific alter and then when that child is exposed to that trigger, that alter comes out and does the task it was taught to doâusually via torture, manipulation, and threats of harm to the child or those the child loves. Itâs not a difficult concept to grasp, and with how long TBMC (torture based mind control) programmers have had to perfect their work, itâs no surprise that theyâve learned how to make alters do extremely complex tasks or hold onto specific functions, always at the ready for their specific trigger.
RAMCOA research doesnât exist in mainstream spaces because itâs nearly impossible to be taken seriously because of people who claim it doesnât exist when itâs not even a complex topic to understand. They just donât want to accept that it exists. The concept is terrifying, harrowing, and at some times almost absurdâand that combination makes it easier for people to put their blinders up and decide it doesnât exist. [Edited to add: On top of this, what little research is done on it is steeped in conspiracy theories that often have roots in antisemitism. While Iâve asserted that Millerâs deprogramming books are good reads for RAMCOA survivors, she does often sound conspiratorial, and quotes Svali, a known antisemite. While I donât think RAMCOA is exclusively related to the Illuminati stuff she often talks about, Millerâs work cannot be completely discounted because of her beliefs of where the abuse originated. Where it originates matters much less than the fact that it happens. However, not from dark, underground, secret societiesâbut from normal places like churches, childrenâs own homes (yes, RAMCOA can be done by a single parent to a single child, it just may look different than say, a trafficking ring), trafficking rings, militaristic groups, political cults, etc. I wanted to put the above put there because I know someone is going to come at me and try to say the researchers who talk about it were conspiracy theorists. Yeah, they were. Maybe they were the only ones willing to talk openly about it because of the fact theyâre conspiracy theorists? I donât know. However, I think it should also be noted that just because the researchers sucked doesnât mean the information taken from them isnât useful when you weed out the conspiracy stuff. For example, a LOT of modern understanding of medicine was taken from Nazi and Japanese experiments during WWII. Arguably some of the worst doctors on earth. Do we discount everything we learned because they were horrible, evil, people? No. While those who studied RAMCOA went about it in shit ways, that doesnât discount the information learned completely. Likewise, much of modern psych understanding came from roots that included incredibly unethical experiments that would never be allowed today. Do we throw out all of that info too? No, we donât. Iâm not saying that we shouldnât hold these people accountable, Iâm saying we cannot throw out all discussion of RAMCOA because the doctors who talked about it were shitty people.]
I wish I could decide it doesnât exist. I have permanent scarring that proves what happened did happen. I have doctorâs visits that prove I am disabled because of the traumas I went through. I have a DID specialist who didnât even know programming to our extent even existed before our parts started telling her what they went through and she heard it from our own mouth. She had to learn how to deprogram us on the fly because sheâd never done so before. So fuck off with your âoh, RAMCOA patients only have RAMCOA because theyâve been influenced by their therapist to believe they doâ bullshit.
I relive my traumas in flashbacks and nightmares daily. There have been periods in my healing process where I couldnât leave the house without someone with me for months. I couldnât hold a job for nearly a year. I didnât know any of this happened to me until I was in my 20s. I thought my memory was just bad and the only parts of my childhood I remembered were little blips of good things, usually involving my parent that was not involved with the cult or memories with friends at school or when I was hanging out with my sports teammates. Living with this stuff is hell. You think I want to live with this stuff? If I could permanently erase it all from my memory forever I would. But I canât. I donât have that luxury.
It happened. And Iâm not the only child it happened to, both in the area of my country I live in and in areas all over my country and the world. This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is more common than anyone tends to realize (though still rarer than most DID cases, thank fuck). I was lucky to survive. I survived because they wanted me to. I saw a lot of children, teens, and adults who were not as âluckyâ as I was. If you wonât respect survivors and their stories, at least respect the ones who didnât survive. They didnât deserve their final moments to be so full of pain. All of the children in these groups deserved to be loved and cared for and treated with softness and compassion. So do adult survivors like me and many others.
If I could end on one thing, it would be to urge the doubters to have some fucking compassion and empathy for people who have been through things they cannot even begin to understand. My past feels like a nightmare I will never be able to escape. I cannot erase it. I can only try to heal from it. So heal I will do, and in the process I will continue to speak the truth of my experience as safely as I can.
You want proof itâs real? Survivors are your proof.
[Edit: changed some wording for clarification + added a section after rereading a couple hours later]
[Edit 2: I realized I said my abuse has never been reported, I meant my RAMCOA related abuse. Want to make that clear. I reported sexual abuse done by my church to CPS and nothing came of it. CPS actually wrongfully claimed that since they had no reports existing of that church harming kids they wouldnât pursue it since it happened so long ago, when a cursory google search of said location shows theyâve been reported multiple times and all reports were dropped. Why, Iâm not sure.]
