#pseudopsychiatry

Sure! It's kind of a long story, but I'll try and summarize things as best as I can.

So, back in the early 20th century, mystical types were looking at hypnosis, trancework, and even drugs as a way to retrieve memories of past lives. The idea that you could retrieve lost memories made it way into ufology communities, where people tried to remember alien abductions. It also got into actual psychology, with therapists attempting to help patients retrieve lost early life memories. There was never any real evidence that these practices actually worked the way these people thought they did, and today we know that you can get people to confabulate memories of just about anything under the right circumstances. (If you need evidence, I can show you some very obvious examples here and here.)

Edit to add: In 1952, the book The Manchurian Candidate came out. It was basically a political thriller about a guy who'd been captured by Russians and brainwashed into being their secret assassin, complete with special triggers to activate his programming and everything. This had everything to do with the US painting communism as something subversive that people were sinisterly brainwashed into. In 1962, a film adaptation was released to theaters.

In the 1950s, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur started treating her patient Shirley Mason for seeming DID. (Which, Mason did not actually have.) Dr. Wilbur was extremely irresponsible and unprofessional in general, and very notably gave Mason sodium pentothal to help her remember. (Yikes!) Dr. Wilbur would push the baseless myth that DID could only be caused by severe childhood abuse (such as SA), and push drugs and hypnosis as methods for finding said abuse if the patients didn't seem to remember it. The 1973 book Sybil was based on Wilbur and Mason.

In the 1970s, radio host, notorious prankster, and platformer of weird fringe content Long John Nebel apparently started using hypnosis on his wife, Candy Jones to try and figure out the reason for her mental health issues. Supposedly, he helped her "remember" being a CIA agent, whose alter Arlene had been trained as a spy. The 1976 book The Control of Candy Jones describes what they supposedly uncovered. Also, here's an article that talks about some of their claims, and the context around what happened.

Also in the 1970s, Dr. Lawrence Pazder (who was inspired by Sybil) attempted to find the source of his patient Michelle Smith's issues by helping her remember supposedly lost memories. Under his coaching, Smith "remembered" being abused by a Satanic cult. They didn't use hypnosis as most of us know it, but Smith was putting herself into a kind of trance. Now like, this whole book is extremely discredited. They made a lot of claims that were very easy to check, and each time somebody checked said claims, it turned out they were full of shit. Like just for one example, her school yearbook picture from the year she was supposedly being tortured by the cult doesn't show any sign of the abuses she claims she was suffering, which would have been very, very obvious.

Then in 1988, Mark Philips used hypnosis on Cathy O'Brien to help her "remember" being a mind-controlled slave for the New World Order under the CIA program Project Monarch. They published what O'Brien supposedly remembered in the 1995 book Trance-Formation of America. O'Brien claimed that she and her daughter were tortured to induce DID, with the alters being programmed to carry out specific tasks for the CIA/NWO. The whole thing was an extremely racist crock of pure conspiracy theory bullshit; it claimed, for example, that the NWO was letting Mexicans ruin America and shipping white women off to Saudi Arabia as sex slaves.

In 1994, Fritz Springmeier used hypnosis on Cisco Wheeler to supposedly uncover her memories as a member of the NWO/Illuminati. In their three books published across the mid to late 90's, Springmeier and Wheeler gave an incredibly elaborate narrative around alter programming, incorporating elements from just about every other conspiracy theory you can name. They claimed alter programming was an ancient practice developed by pagan priests, and used in modern times by a global cult that intended to enthrone the Antichrist in the year 2000. The pair of them made so many claims that are absolutely beyond ludicrous, and I posted a sample of them over here.

Basically everyone who claims that alter programming is a real thing these days is downstream of Springmeier and Wheeler, whether they realize it or not. One reason we know this is that a lot of them cite a blogger who calls herself Svali, or cite people who cite Svali (such as Dr. Alison Miller and Dr. Ellen Lacter). Svali first popped up in the early 2000s claiming to be a former Illuminati/NWO programmer. She described the same kind of Illuminati and the same kind of practices as Springmeier and Wheeler. If you need examples, here she is claiming that color, metal, and jewel programming are things. And here she is claiming Disney moves are made for Illuminati programming.

Unwelcome Ozian is another clear case of someone who's getting their material from Springmeier and Wheeler; for example, their book Chainless Slaves not only describes the same methods and styles of alter programming; it even reproduces complete paragraphs from Springmeier and Wheeler's work. Edit to add: Unwelcome Ozian's other book, Rules of Programming, reproduces material not only from Springmeier and Wheeler's work, but also from a lot of literature on topics such as abuse, cults, and self-help in general. I have a post exposing this over here.

Basically, the whole idea of alter programming/trauma-based mind control has a long, long history of medical malpractice, pseudoscience, fraud, and conspiracy theory behind it. It just doesn't take very long to start finding it once you actually start digging. Meanwhile, real evidence just never turns up, and what we do find often just flat-out contradicts these claims. Like, many people who claim to have undergone brutal tortures or major surgeries at the hands of programmers don't have the scars to show for it. The sites, tools, and costumes for the elaborate rituals described by a lot of these people are just never found.

What's very notably missing are technical manuals for the actual programming process. I'm talking about literature that fully describes the actual procedures in full, step-by-step detail, rather than the vague, suggestive descriptions you find in conspiracist literature. The fact that nothing of the sort has ever turned up anywhere you might expect it to in over seventy years is pretty damning, because this isn't the kind of thing that a bunch of random, unconnected people would just independently invent on their own.

Meanwhile, what very demonstrably does exist are therapists who still believe the in the pseudoscience and misinformation pushed by Dr. Wilbur, Dr. Pazder, etc, who will push people both with and without actual DID to try and uncover repressed memories. There are websites and articles that suggest guided imagery and hypnosis for retrieving memories you think you might have suppressed. There are hypnosis videos on YouTube that will supposedly help you recover repressed memories. We have clear cases of memory confabulation within the New Age movement, where people vividly "remember" traumatic events that very obviously never happened because they take place in non-existent places such as Lemuria and incorporate narratives from the pseudoscientific and racist ancient astronaut hypothesis.

Yes, you should absolutely be concerned. There are people out there on the Internet pushing the kind of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience that were originally put out there by far right conspiracy theorists such as Cathy O'Brien and Fritz Springmeier in abuse recovery spaces, DID spaces, and even some spirituality spaces, and some therapists still believe in this stuff and try to push it on their patients.

I also agree it's unlikely your friend is lying; it's far more likely that they're simply misled. This whole thing is essentially designed to prime people (who may or may not actually have DID) into confabulating memories of events that never actually took place.

(For anyone who isn't already aware - confabulated memories are very real; we can observe them among people who "remember" past lives in places that never existed. This isn't to say that these people were never abused in some way; just that stuff like giving people DID on purpose, using movies to program the alters, and stuff like color programming, metal programming, etc. aren't real things.)

As to what you might do, it depends heavily on what kind of headspace your friend is in. You could try reading through the #deradicalization tag and see if anything looks helpful, and you might check out The Debunking Handbook 2020.

I say this as a system who has skirted the edge of ROMCOA stuff for reasons like those stated above, but I wondered if you'd have any thoughts on it. (If it's of any interest, I'll send a separate ask with thoughts on the why/how we've dodged the ROMCOA bullet despite being drawn to it, but that's a significant tangent. Also sorry to be anon, I'm shy.)

(To anyone reading this: If you've heard the term "RAMCOA" but haven't heard how it originated among conspiracy theorists and was always meant to push conspiracy theories within legitimate psychiatry, further information is provided at the end.)

Oh yeah, you are absolutely right. I've been comparing these two things for awhile now, and it's basically two presentations of the same exact social phenomena.

You usually have somebody with psychological or physical problems that seem to defy explanation, but are very likely related to something like anxiety, depression, chronic stress, PTSD, C-PTSD, BPD, schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, ADHD, allergies, mast cell activation syndrome, or fibromyalgia. Y'know, a lot of the kinds of things that doctors will dismiss as "all in your head," or that just aren't that well-understood by the public, or might not seem possible because they underestimate just how traumatizing their life actually was.

The way they fall into it is nearly always the same; they never really "remember" any of it until they start coming across literature and people who introduce them to the idea of RAMCOA or alien abduction. And of course by this point a lot of them are absolutely desperate for some kind of explanation or validation, so they look deeper into it. They start learning and absorbing the tropes and narratives that go along with whatever mythology, so to speak, that they've fallen into. Then when they undergo hypnosis, they start "remembering" events that just so happen to line up with whichever narrative they've been exposing themselves to.

There are other groups doing this same thing with their own narratives, of course. In New Age and neopagan contexts, people often seek explanation and validation by trying to uncover past lives. In fact, the whole entire practice of undergoing hypnosis to recover lost memories actually began with people trying to find their past lives.

A common thread is that people remember something that pretty much everybody would agree would be absolutely terrible to endure. Whether you're "remembering" being burned at the stake for witchcraft, eating the heart of a ritually murdered child, fleeing the destruction of Atlantis, or aliens performing invasive procedures on your body, there's no ambiguity or uncertainty that what supposedly happened is horrible. In a society that constantly tells people that they haven't had it bad enough to be traumatized, because real trauma can only come from something way more severe than what they're experiencing, it's just no surprise that this keeps happening. Their subconscious minds seek the images and narratives that seem to align with the distress they're feeling.

It's been observed that what people experience while under hypnosis is basically the same as what they experience while dreaming. What they experience isn't necessarily logical; in fact, it's often far from it. Weird, surreal stuff just happens out of nowhere. People just do things with no genuinely reasonable motive.

In the context of RAMCOA, this is often handwaved away with "well, they're cultists, this is obviously part of their weird cult practices." This is not only an incredibly weak explanation for most of this stuff, but when you look at other supposedly recovered memories, you just can't help but notice that this is a pattern in every belief system people try to recover memories in, so trying to do this for supposed cases of SRA and the like is just special pleading.

And yeah, if you wanna share your story, I'd love to hear it!

Consider the industry that tells you that all natural herbs can fix all of your health problems. It conjures up ideas of pretty plants and flowers. Maybe you're even growing them yourself. Either way, plants and flowers are pretty. They're aesthetically pleasing.

Same goes for the industry that tells you crystals can fix all of your health problems. Crystals are shiny and pretty. Part of you wants them just because they're pretty.

Within the alter programming framework, you don't have trouble speaking up for yourself and asserting autonomy because your parents invalidated or even punished you whenever you tried as a child, you have amethyst programming. You haven't learned to not want because you were constantly neglected, you have sapphire programming. You're not feeling dizzy when you talk to the therapist because you're accustomed to receiving invalidation and punishment when you tried to open up about your feelings to your parents, you have carousel programming. You're not having a panic attack and falling back on old indoctrination because it's what's most deeply ingrained in you; you have princess programming.

Jewels, carousels, princesses, castles, dolls, ribbons, masks, mirrors; this framework is essentially full of aesthetically-pleasing toys, trinkets, and fairy tale landscapes.

Illuminati Satanists have been infiltrating Good Christian Churches since the 1940s and 1950s.

Illuminati Satanists frequently give their slaves good Christian front alters, so they can blend in perfectly in Good Christian Society.

Said front alters can be completely unaware that they are actually Illuminati Satanists.

In fact, Illuminati slaves are typically given "screen memories" so they'll think they were living a perfectly normal childhood when they were actually experiencing ritual abuse.

Entire families can be Illuminati Satanists with programmed DID, and not realize it.

Do you have an abusive parent whom you miss and want to call? It can't just be that abusive parents are rarely ever all bad and it's perfectly normal to love and miss them to some extent, or that it's normal to hope that they might have become better people and become more like the parent you wanted and deserved. No, you were clearly programmed with an alter created for the sole purpose of getting you back in touch with your abuser.

Do you have a hard time talking about your trauma? It can't just be that talking about trauma is inherently hard because it's trauma; you must have been programmed with an alter intended to keep you silent.

Do you experience dizziness, hot flashes, and the urge to self-harm when you get stressed out? These can't just be symptoms of PTSD or C-PTSD in and of themselves; they must be programs your abusers deliberately installed in your brain to punish you for disobeying them.

Did you go under hypnosis to remember who supposedly programmed you? Did the person you "remembered" make absolutely no sense whatsoever? Well, see, that's because they have a front alter. Your pious Evangelical Christian neighbor is an Illuminati Satanist just like you saw, you see, because his pious Evangelical Christian person is just the front alter given to him by other Illuminati programmers as a cover.

Did someone accuse you of alter programming? Do you protest because you'd never do anything like that, because you're not into anything remotely like that? Well sweetie, you are guilty. You just don't remember it because the memories are locked away in another alter.