Psychological Torture Quotes

Mind control is built on lies and manipulation of attachment needs. Valerie Sinason, (Forward)

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.

I’ve been told that I cannot change shit, so I might as well stop torturing myself. My emotions are ridiculed and branded as childish. I have been told that the world has given up on my people. I have been told, and realise that on many occasions, I myself am viewed as an outcast by some of those suffering. I’ve been confronted and my answer is always the same: I care even in my most fucked-up moments. I care even when gates of shit pour open to drown me; I care because I am a citizen of the world.

Emotional detachment from the plight of others — easily achieved by simply looking the other way — always favoured the perpetrators rather than the victims who were reduced to being inconsequential nonentities; were persecuted and denied legal and human rights; were starving, sick, and dying; were victims of Apartheid policies with racial segregations inclusive of political and economic discrimination; were harassed, internally displaced, or forcibly deported; were imprisoned, tortured, or simply “disappeared”; were enslaved, exploited, or trafficked; and were ultimately the victims of mindless massacres that defied the comprehension of anyone even remotely humane.

Nightmares are seldom a foreshadowing of real events, but always a showing of real fears.

We were just a group of people who survived psychological tortures and imprisonment at the hands of a tyrant.

At LeakyCon, a young lady asked me how I dealt with bullying. I wasn’t able to give her a very good answer, which troubles me. Well, there were lots of shouts of “It gets better” and “Stay strong” and “We love you”. But when I put myself back in time to when I was being bullied, none of those things would’ve helped me. Yes, absolutely it does get better. But when you are being physically and psychologically tortured, it is difficult to remove yourself from the pressingness of the moment at hand. Here’s how I dealt with bullying: I cried, I hated myself, I hated my life. I didn’t deal with it, I survived it, but I never dealt with it. So here are two tips from someone with lots of experience. 1: It’s not about you, it has nothing to do with you, it’s about the assholes doing it to you. 2: Your job is not to deal with it, your job is to survive it, which you CAN do because it WILL end. And then yes, it will get better.

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

Since the 1980s, therapists have reported encountering clients or patients who had experienced extreme abuses featuring physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive aspects, along with a premeditated structure of torture-enforced lessons. The phenomena was first labeled "ritual abuse," and, later, as our understanding developed, "mind control.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it.

When we say to people, 'I will pray for you,' we make a very important commitment. The sad thing is that this remark often remains nothing but a well-meant expression of concern. But when we learn to descend with our mind into our heart, then all those who have become part of our lives are led into the healing presence of God and touched by him in the center of our being. We are speaking here about a mystery for which words are inadequate. It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God's heart has become one with ours.

Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. […]any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

The healthy man does not torture others—generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers. — Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychologist (1875 - 1961)

...some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

can we find a way of living in which we don’t use another, psychologically, emotionally, not depend on another, not use another as a means of escape from our own tortures, from our own despairs, from our own loneliness? To

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

Oftentimes, the scapegoat feels worthless and powerless. After being beaten down, year after year, we have a strong sense of false guilt. Unconsciously, we take the narcissist’s guilt as if it were our own. As if it were our fault. As if we are deserving of mental torture and physical abuse.

How do we find words for describing levels of betrayal and emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual torture that fragment and destroy a child or cast and case traumatic shadows over the whole of adult life? We might, as a society, slowly find it possible to accept that one in four citizens are likely to have experience some form of emotional, psychical, sexual or spiritual abuse (McQueen, Itzin, Kennedy, Sinason, & Maxted, 2008), in itself a figure unimaginable and hidden twenty years ago. However, accepting the way a hurt and hurting parent or stranger re-enacts their disturbance with a vulnerable child or children remains far easier to digest than to consider the intellectually planned, scientific, methodical, procedures of organized child-abusing perpetrators-in other words, torture.

…is methodical abuse, often using indoctrination, aimed at breaking the will of another human being. In a 1989 report, the Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission for Women defined ritual abuse as: “Ritual Abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful,humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members …most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation” (Pg. 35-36)

The greatest monster that there is: fake news media: torture with bullying, psychological warfare, spying and then using truthful misleading to complete their plot. The cheapest job ever.

Perhaps you like to torture yourself by trying on some jeans from a few years ago to see if you can button them. Clothes do not exist to humiliate their owners. Please do not force garments into performing psychological tasks for which they were not designed.

Political prisoners describe: - extreme physical and emotional torture - distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality - sham killings - begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death - being forced to witness abusive acts on others - being forced to make impossible "choices" - boundaries smashed i.e. by the use of forced nakedness, shame, embarrassment - hoaxes, 'set ups', testing and tricks - being forced to hurt others Ritual abuse survivors often describe much the same things.

A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women.

Hate is self-inflicted torture. It hungers for revenge, damage, division, and violence, but is never satiated. Hate is a psychological hell to which we condemn ourselves and endeavor to burn others.

Once, in a three-day taping that included several sadists, the material was so overwhelming that both the film crew and I got sick - I with a sinus infection, and the entire film crew with a flu so severe they had to delay their departure from the motel. Our immune systems had weakened, I believe, from the beating out souls had taken.

Even torture that is only verbal reinforce the power of the torturer: The prisoner's imagination leads him to dread the next round of interrogations. And when it happens, the feeling of inferiority becomes more acute; it bores into the brain, and the cultural and psychological defenses that surround the brain disintegrate and vanish. The ego is dissolved.

Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4

Diseases of the mind can be more torturous than the diseases of the body.

When do we get to the interesting part—the tortured souls, the impossible dreams, the agony and the ecstasy of creation?

A horrified scream erupted from the deepest reaches of her subconscious as the image of the body surfaced, and the sound echoed through her tortured thoughts.

...the groveling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.

When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain rather than left, or left rather than right. In my mind there were many rooms and, just as I still got lost in the labyrinth of corridors at college, I often found myself lost, with a sense of déjà vu, in some obscure part of my cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that plays a key role in perceptual awareness, attention and memory. Everything I had lived through or imagined or dreamed appeared to have been backed up on a video clip and then scattered among those alien rooms. I could stumble into any number of scenes, from the horrifically sexual, horror-movie sequences that were crude and painful, to visualizing Grandpa polishing his shoes.

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if from a dream, which made the playback of my father and other men abusing me seem I even less real, fantasies conjured up from my imagination, not my memory. Perhaps somebody else’s memory. I didn’t think of myself as having mental-health problems. You don’t at sixteen. I thought of myself as being special, highly strung, moody.

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale’s story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full (1998).52

The cross is the burden of life. It is a place of betrayal, torture, and death. It is therefore a fundamental symbol of mortal vulnerability. In the Christian drama, it is also the place where vulnerability is transcended, as a consequence of its acceptance. [...] By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.

but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

Because you're a sick fuck who tortures people!" He wagged his finger at me. "You make it sound so simple. It isn't. Not at all. Torture covers a broad spectrum. The two main subgroups are physiological and psychological, but these can be divided into the subcategories of spiritual, emotional, physical, and sexual. Everyone has at least one weakness in at least one of these areas that can be exploited. Finding it only requires patience, and a suspension of societal norms.

Les souvenirs pénibles s’effacent difficilement, reviennent sans cesse, quoi qu'on fasse pour les étouffer, et vous torturent sans répit.

The healthy man does not torture others; generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

The healthy man does not torture others—generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Therefore you must die to every thing that you know psychologically, so that your mind is clear, not tortured, so that it sees things as they are, both outwardly and inwardly.

People think pain is the worse form of torture, but boredom is. Running out of things to do can actually make you go insane.

Religion, with its metaphysical error of absolute guilt, dominated the broadest, the cosmic realm. From there, it infiltrated the subordinate realms of biological, social and moral existence with its errors of the absolute and inherited guilt. Humanity, split up into millions of factions, groups, nations and states, lacerated itself with mutual accusations. "The Greeks are to blame," the Romans said, and "The Romans are to blame," the Greeks said. So they warred against one another. "The ancient Jewish priests are to blame," the early Christians shouted. "The Christians have preached the wrong Messiah," the Jews shouted and crucified the harmless Jesus. "The Muslims and Turks and Huns are guilty," the crusaders screamed. "The witches and heretics are to blame," the later Christians howled for centuries, murdering, hanging, torturing and burning heretics. It remains to investigate the sources from which the Jesus legend derives its grandeur, emotional power and perseverance. Let us continue to stay outside this St. Vitus dance. The longer we look around, the crazier it seems. Hundreds of minor patriarchs, self-proclaimed kings and princes, accused one another of this or that sin and made war, scorched the land, brought famine and epidemics to the populations. Later, this became known as "history." And the historians did not doubt the rationality of this history. Gradually the common people appeared on the scene. "The Queen is to blame," the people's representatives shouted, and beheaded the Queen. Howling, the populace danced around the guillotine. From the ranks of the people arose Napoleon. "The Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians are to blame," it was now said. "Napoleon is to blame," came the reply. "The machines are to blame!" the weavers screamed, and "The lumpenproletariat is to blame," sounded back. "The Monarchy is to blame, long live the Constitution!" the burgers shouted. "The middle classes and the Constitution are to blame; wipe them out; long live the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the proletarian dictators shout, and "The Russians are to blame," is hurled back. "Germany is to blame," the Japanese and the Italians shouted in 1915. "England is to blame," the fathers of the proletarians shouted in 1939. And "Germany is to blame," the self-same fathers shouted in 1942. "Italy, Germany and Japan are to blame," it was said in 1940. It is only by keeping strictly outside this inferno that one can be amazed that the human animal continues to shriek "Guilty!" without doubting its own sanity, without even once asking about the origin of this guilt. Such mass psychoses have an origin and a function. Only human beings who are forced to hide something catastrophic are capable of erring so consistently and punishing so relentlessly any attempt at clarifying such errors.

When sleep came, I would dream bad dreams. Not the baby and the big man with a cigarette-lighter dream. Another dream. The castle dream. A little girl of about six who looks -like me, but isn’t me, is happy as she steps out of the car with her daddy. They enter the castle and go down the steps to the dungeon where people move like shadows in the glow of burning candles. There are carpets and funny pictures on the walls. Some of the people wear hoods and robes. Sometimes they chant in droning voices that make the little girl afraid. There are other children, some of them without any clothes on. There is an altar like the altar in nearby St Mildred’s Church. The children take turns lying on that altar so the people, mostly men, but a few women, can kiss and lick their private parts. The daddy holds the hand of the little girl tightly. She looks up at him and he smiles. The little girl likes going out with her daddy. I did want to tell Dr Purvis these dreams but I didn’t want her to think I was crazy, and so kept them to myself. The psychiatrist was wiser than I appreciated at the time; sixteen-year-olds imagine they are cleverer than they really are. Dr Purvis knew I had suffered psychological damage as a child, that’s why she kept making a fresh appointment week after week. But I was unable to give her the tools and clues to find out exactly what had happened.

Sensory deprivation has a devastating psychological impact and can lead to the complete dissolution of the personality accompanied by hallucinations, delusional thinking and general incoherence. It is presently acknowledged as a form of torture; in fact, it is one of a group of “enhanced techniques” that are entirely psychological in nature and unique in that they do not conform to the general public understanding of what torture is.

The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both knowledgeable and 'unwitting' volunteers. They were subjected to sensory overload, isolation, drugs and hypnosis, all used on bodies that had been weakened from mild hunger. The horror of the programme was that it would be like having an elementary school sex education class conducted by a paedophile rapist. It would have been banned had the American government signed the Helsinki Accords. But, of course, they hadn't. For the test that day and in those that followed, Cheryl Hersha was positioned so she faced a portable movie screen. A 16mm movie projector was on a platform, along with several reels of film. Each was a short pornographic film meant to make her aware of sexuality in a variety of forms...

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as 'fragments'. which are 'relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the person's life. A fragment might be a frightened child who holds the memory of one particular abuse incident.' In complex multiples, Dr Ross continues, the 'personalities are relatively full-bodied, complete states capable of a range of emotions and behaviours.' The alters will have 'executive control some substantial amount of time over the person's life'. He stresses, and I repeat his emphasis, 'Complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesia barriers are associated with 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse.' Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.

Although there are more than six million documents on the Internet addressing the issue of ritual abuse, few take as fair and comprehensive approach as this; many of the writings deny the existence of ritual abuse despite masses of evidence to the contrary. As a consequence, some victims are persistently re-abused psychologically by having to deal with the fact that organised abusers, their defenders and even police refute their realities and dismiss their reports as fantasy or mental illness. - Ritual Abuse & Torture in Australia (introduction)

Shakespeare's sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) was a profoundly important analysis of human states of mind - a kind of early philosophical/ psychological study. He sees 'melancholy' as part of the human condition, especially love melancholy and religious melancholy. His concerns are remarkably close to those which Shakespeare explores in his plays. Ambition, for example, Burton describes as 'a proud covetousness or a dry thirst of Honour, a great torture of the mind, composed of envy, pride and covetousness, a gallant madness' - words which could well be applied to Macbeth.

If you in fact had no gold, then your situation was hopeless. You would be beaten, burned, tortured, and steamed to the point of death or until they finally came to believe you. But if you had gold, you could determine the extent of your torture, the limits of your endurance, and your own fate. Psychologically, this situation was, incidentally, not easier but more difficult, because if you made an error you would always be ridden by a guilty conscience. Of course, anyone who had already mastered the rules of the institution would yield and give up his gold—that was easier. But it was a mistake to give it up too readily. They would refuse to believe you had coughed it all up, and they would continue to hold you. But you'd be wrong, too, to wait too long before yielding: you'd end up kicking the bucket or they'd paste a term on you out of meanness. One of the Tatar draymen endured all the tortures: he had no gold! They imprisoned his wife, too, and tortured her, but the Tatar stuck to his story: no gold! Then they arrested his daughter: the Tatar couldn't take it any more. He coughed up 100,000 rubles. At this point they let his family go, but slapped a prison term on him.

Belief is the unmitigated, simplest form of mental representation. It’s a psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true, one of the integral building bricks of conscious thought itself, therefore capable of radically affecting your mindset, attitude, confidence and ultimately your success

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence. Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but simply because they are ‘black’, and sometimes because they listened to too much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

I'm just asking you to accept that there are some people who will go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the facts that they are abusing children. What words are there to describe what happened to me, what was done to me? Some call it ritual abuse, others call it organised abuse. There are those that call it satanic. I've heard all the phrases, not just in relation to me, but also with regard to those I work with and try to help. Do you know what I think? It doesn't matter how you dress it up, it doesn't matter what label you put on it. It is abuse, pure and simple. It is adults abusing children. It is adults deciding - actually making a conscious decision, a conscious choices that what they want, what they convince themselves they need, is more important than anything else; certainly more important than the safety or feelings or sanity of a child. However, there can be differences which are layered on top of that abuse. I'm not saying that some abuse is worse than others, or that someone 'wins' the competition to have the worst abuse inflicted on them, but ritual and organised abuse is at the extreme end of the spectrum. If we try to think of a continuum where there are lots of different things imposed on children (or, for that matter, anyone who is forced into these things — and that force can take many forms, it can be threats and promises, as well as kicks and punches), then ritual and organised abuse is intense and complicated. It often involves multiple abusers of both sexes. There can be extreme violence, mind control, systematic torture and even, in some cases, a complex belief system which is sometimes described as religion. I say 'described as' religion because, to me, I think that when this aspect is involved, it is window dressing. I'm not religious. I cried many times for God to save me. I was always ignored — how could I believe? However, I think that ritual abusers who do use religious imagery or 'beliefs' are doing so to justify it all to themselves, or to confuse the victim, or to hide their activities. Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet.

No mutt is good. All are meant to damage you. Some take your life, like the monkeys. Others your reason, like the tracker jackers. However, the true atrocities, the most frightening, incorporate a perverse psychological twist designed to terrify the victim. The sight of the wolf mutts with the dead tributes’ eyes. The sound of the jabberjays replicating Prim’s tortured screams. The smell of Snow’s

He didn’t even attempt to guess at what that delusion might be. He knew at the heart of it there was nothing poetic or metaphorical about it. The core motivation for all serial killers was the same: they got sexual release from rape, torture, pain, and murder. There was no other “why.” Trying to wrap it up in some elaborate psychological package was less than useless. Aloud he continued, “Also it’s notable

Men as Victims: Challenging Cultural Myths Judith Herman’s recent treatise on “complex PTSD" (Herman, 1992) is an extremely articulate and compelling analysis of some of the failings of the current PTSD diagnosis, and of some of the psychological legacies of prolonged, repeated trauma. However, there was one aspect of the article which concerned me and which I wish to address. Throughout the article, "Complex PTSD: A Syndrome in Survivors of Prolonged and Repeated Trauma," whenever reference is made by pronoun to perpetrators or "captors," the pronoun "he" or "him' is used. There are four such references. Whenever reference is made by pronoun to victims or survivors, the pronoun "her" or "she" is used. There are 11 such references. This is not simply an issue of the use of sexist language, which it is. By uniformly linking perpetration with males and victimhood with females, a misconception is perpetuated, one that is shared by the public and by mental health professionals. While there is evidence that most perpetrators of sexual abuse are male, and that there are more female victims of sexual abuse than male victims, it is not true that all perpetrators are male and all victims are female. In fact, in the article, some of the traumas from which Dr. Herman was deriving her argument—political torture, concentration camp survivors, for example—affect as many males as females. Even in the case of sexual abuse, there is increasing evidence that the sexual abuse of males is far more prevalent than has heretofore been believed. Research on male sexual victimization lags more than a decade behind that of female victimization, but several recent studies have reported prevalence rates near or above 20% (Finkelhor et at, 1990; Urquiza, 1988, cited in Urquiza and Keating, 1990; Lisak and Luster, 1992).

The psychology of sanction.’ ‘If you’re right, then why does anyone protest against torture? Why don’t we all just go, “Oh well, we’ve seen how well it works in the movies, let’s just go along with it”?’ Carol leaned on her fists on the edge of his bed as she spoke, her tumbled blonde hair falling into her eyes. ‘Carol, you might not have noticed, but there’s a significant number of people out there who do say just that. Look at the opposition in the US when the Senate decided to outlaw torture just the other year. People believe in its efficacy precisely because they’ve seen it in the movies. And some of those believers are in positions of power. The reason we don’t all fall for it is that we’re not all equally credulous. Some of us are much more critical of what we see and read than others. But you can fool some of the people all of the time. And when spooks and cops go bad, that’s what they rely on.’ She

Far greater numbers of Americans experienced psychological trauma than in the previous war, and anyone who could relieve the troops’ tortures and, better still, send them back to duty, would be a hero to the military. Between Pearl Harbor and the end of the war, the US military was overwhelmed by 1.1 million disabling, psychiatric traumas. Fear and stress were most often responsible. Kelley, serving as an army psychiatrist, called the problem “combat neurosis” and “combat exhaustion.

As far back as 1563 the courageous Dutch physician Johannes Wier published his masterwork, De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Delusions About Demons) in which he states that the collective and voluntary self-accusation of older women through which they exposed themselves to torture and death by their inquisitors was in itself an act inspired by the devil, a trick of demons, whose aim it was to doom not only the innocent women but also their reckless judges. Wier was the first medical man to introduce what became the psychiatric concept of DELUSION and mental blindness. Wherever his book had influence, the persecution of witches ceased, in some countries more than one hundred and fifty years before it was finally brought to an end throughout the civilized world. His work and his insights became one of the main instruments for fighting the witch delusion and physical torture (Baschwitz). Wier realized even then that witches were scapegoats for the inner confusion and desperation of their judges and of the “Zeitgeist” in general.

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

In one of the few memoirs of self-injury, Caroline Kettlewell describes her recovery in terms of neural pathways—the “groove” worn into her mind, the “wrong turns and dark corridors” marked by her history of cutting. Once she learns how to stand “the awful agony of unhappiness” without reverting to the bodily jolt of broken skin, she changes the map of psychological struggle in her mind. “[E]very time I gut it through and survive,” she concludes, “I’m reshaping the structure and the chemistry of my thoughts, wearing new paths less tortured and convoluted than the old ones.”   Cutting

Anti-blackness is rooted in misinformation, fables, perversions, projections, and lies. It is also rooted in a lack of historical knowledge and an inability or unwillingness to trace the effects of history into the present. But perhaps most fundamentally, anti-blackness comes from deep guilt about what we have done and continue to do; the unbearable knowledge of our complicity with the profound torture of black people from past to present. While the full trauma of this torture in its various forms—both physically and psychologically—is only borne by African Americans, there is a kind of moral trauma in it for the white collective.

It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God’s heart has become one with ours. Here we catch sight of the meaning of Jesus’ words, “Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light” (Matthew 11:29–30).

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the bed had disappeared into my backpack. I’d look inside my books and be shocked to find that the homework had been done. Sometimes it had been done well, at others it was slapdash, the writing careless, my own handwriting but scrawled across the page. As I read the work through, I would get the creepy feeling that someone was watching me. I would turn quickly, trying to catch them out, but the door would be closed. There was never anyone there. Just me. My throat would turn dry. My shoulders would feel numb. The tic in my neck would start dancing as if an insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the skin. The symptoms would intensify into migraines that lasted for days and did not respond to treatment or drugs. The attack would come like a sudden storm, blow itself out of its own accord or unexpectedly vanish. Objects repeatedly went missing: a favourite pen, a cassette, money. They usually turned up, although once the money had gone it had gone for ever and I would find in the chest of drawers a T-shirt I didn’t remember buying, a Depeche Mode cassette I didn’t like, a box of sketching pencils, some Lego.

Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph—one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess. Before

Delusions Dissociative disorders, even those created by mind controllers, are not psychosis, but this program will create the most common symptom used to diagnose schizophrenia. The child is hurt while on a turntable, with people and television sets and cartoons and photographs all around the turntable. New alters created by the torture are instructed that they must obey their instructions and become the people around them, people on television, or other alters when they are told to. When this program is triggered, the survivor will hear “voices” of the people whom the "copy alters” are imitating, or will have many confused alters popping out who think they are actually other people or movie stars. The identities of the copy alters change when the survivor's surrounding change.

It is necessary to make this point in answer to the `iatrogenic' theory that the unveiling of repressed memories in MPD sufferers, paranoids and schizophrenics can be created in analysis; a fabrication of the doctor—patient relationship. According to Dr Ross, this theory, a sort of psychiatric ping-pong 'has never been stated in print in a complete and clearly argued way'. My case endorses Dr Ross's assertions. My memories were coming back to me in fragments and flashbacks long before I began therapy. Indications of that abuse, ritual or otherwise, can be found in my medical records and in notebooks and poems dating back before Adele Armstrong and Jo Lewin entered my life. There have been a number of cases in recent years where the police have charged groups of people with subjecting children to so-called satanic or ritual abuse in paedophile rings. Few cases result in a conviction. But that is not proof that the abuse didn't take place, and the police must have been very certain of the evidence to have brought the cases to court in the first place. The abuse happens. I know it happens. Girls in psychiatric units don't always talk to the shrinks, but they need to talk and they talk to each other. As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. (Alice refers to her constant infections as a child, which were never recognised as caused by sexual abuse)

When our senses become muffled, we no longer feel fully alive. In an article called “What Is an Emotion?” (1884),3 William James, the father of American psychology, reported a striking case of “sensory insensibility” in a woman he interviewed: “I have . . . no human sensations,” she told him. “[I am] surrounded by all that can render life happy and agreeable, still to me the faculty of enjoyment and of feeling is wanting. . . . Each of my senses, each part of my proper self, is as it were separated from me and can no longer afford me any feeling; this impossibility seems to depend upon a void which I feel in the front of my head, and to be due to the diminution of the sensibility over the whole surface of my body, for it seems to me that I never actually reach the objects which I touch. All this would be a small matter enough, but for its frightful result, which is that of the impossibility of any other kind of feeling and of any sort of enjoyment, although I experience a need and desire of them that render my life an incomprehensible torture.

On another plane, only a brute in a state of irrational fury can imagine that men should be sadistically tortured in order to obtain their consent. Such an act only accomplishes the subjugation of one man by another, in an outrageous relationship between persons. The representative of rational totality is content, on the contrary, to allow the object to subdue the person in the soul of man. The highest mind is first of all reduced to the level of the lowest by the police technique of joint accusation. Then five, ten, twenty nights of insomnia will culminate an illusory conviction and will bring yet another dead soul into the world. From this point of view, the only psychological revolution known to our times since Freud's has been brought about by the NKVD and the political police in general. Guided by a determinist hypothesis that calculates the weak points and the degree of elasticity of the soul, these new techniques have once again thrust aside one of man's limits and have attempted to demonstrate that no individual psychology is original and that the common measure of all human character is matter. They have literally created the physics of the soul.

Everything is going to be alright" we often say to ourselves or to others - when we are faced with problems, before falling asleep, after we have been disappointed. "Things may be unpleasant and difficult at the moment, but in the end everything is going to be alright." As far as the animals are concerned, nothing is going to be alright! Everything is bad, getting worse and the end will be more terrible than all fearful anticipations: on the death transport, on the slaughterhouse floor, on the chair of torture. "Everything is going to be alright!" This pacifying phrase for human beings is not valid for animals, because we have transformed their world into a singular hell. What we invented in horror movies or psychological thrillers to send pleasant shivers down our spine, is what animals are subjected to in reality: everywhere, continuously, in our midst, at this very moment - right now. Everybody knows, everybody remains silent, nobody takes action. Can it go on like this? It must not go on like this! Anyone who feels bound in earnest by any moral principles at all has the absolute duty to stand up against these crimes, which are in utter contradiction to every kind of morality.

Fine-Tune Your Mind to the Benefits of Feedback When you’re in anxiety mode, it’s easy to think of feedback as something wholly torturous and psychologically painful. Can you nudge this thinking by attuning to some of the benefits? --You may find out you’ve done something well. --You may discover that things you perceive as minor aspects of your work are seen by other people as major strengths. --You may achieve more success because what you produce after feedback is better. For example, someone gives you a tip or suggests a change that improves your work. You realize you like the new version, but it wasn’t something you would’ve attempted without a push in that direction. --Through feedback, you may get new insights that help you solve problems you’ve been stuck with. The feedback giver may offer useful information about how he or she previously solved the problem you’re currently having. --Lastly, the process of receiving feedback can strengthen your relationship with the person giving the feedback. It can be a bonding experience. Experiment: Try one (or both) of these options: Option 1: Think of one specific instance in the past when negative feedback has actually been useful to you. Option 2: Go through each of the listed benefits of feedback, and write one example of a specific situation in which you received that benefit.

It was also revealed that the reason I am cruel to others is because I have low-self-esteem. Because I don’t love myself, I am unable to understand those who do love me in spite of it all, and so I test them. “You love me even when I do this? Or this? Or this?” Even when the other person forgives me, I am unable to understand their forgiveness, and when they give up on me, I torture and console myself with the “fact” that no one could ever love me. That goddamn self-esteem. [...] Looking more closely at myself, there are parts that I've improved on. I still remain someone who is unable to love herself. But as I had that thought, I had another: light and darkness are part of the same thing. Happiness and unhappiness alternate throughout life, as in a dance. So as long as I keep going and don’t give up, surely I will keep having moments of tears and laughter. This book, therefore, ends not with answers but with a wish. I want to love and be loved. I want to find a way where I don’t hurt myself. I want to live a life where I say things are good more than things are bad. I want to keep failing and discovering new and better directions. I want to enjoy the tides of feeling in me as the rhythms of life. I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time. Some day, I will.

What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war. But for Hoa and countless other loved comrades, nameless ordinary soldiers, those who sacrificed for others and for their Vietnam, raising the name of Vietnam high and proud, creating a spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict, the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise. Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling. After 1975, all that had quieted. The wind of war had stopped. The branches of conflict had stopped rustling. As we had won, Kien thought, then that meant justice had won; that had been some consolation. Or had it? Think carefully; look at your own existence. Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and sad. And look at who won the war. To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But for those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death, and inhuman violence have also won. Just look and think: it is the truth. Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired, and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.

Pagans were not impressed by the torture of Christians merely because it showed that they honestly held their opinion; they knew that millions of people honestly held all sorts of opinions. The point of such extreme martyrdom is much more subtle. It is that it gives an appearance of a man having something quite specially strong to back him up, of his drawing upon some power. And this can only be proved when all his physical contentment is destroyed; when all the current of his bodily being is reversed and turned to pain. If a man is seen to be roaring with laughter all the time that he is skinned alive, it would not be unreasonable to deduce that somewhere in the recesses of his mind he had thought of a rather good joke. Similarly, if men smiled and sang (as they did) while they were being boiled or torn in pieces, the spectators felt the presence of something more than mere mental honesty: they felt the presence of some new and unintelligible kind of pleasure, which, presumably, came from somewhere. It might be a strength of madness, or a lying spirit from Hell; but it was something quite positive and extraordinary; as positive as brandy and as extraordinary as conjuring. The Pagan said to himself: "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" The Secularists laboriously explain that martyrdoms do not prove a faith to be true, as if anybody was ever such a fool as to suppose that they did. What they did prove, or, rather, strongly suggest, was that something had entered human psychology which was stronger than strong pain. If a young girl, scourged and bleeding to death, saw nothing but a crown descending on her from God, the first mental step was not that her philosophy was correct, but that she was certainly feeding on something.

The psychological impact of trauma in both the military and civilian arenas has been documented for well over 100 years [1], but the validity of the traumatic neuroses and their key symptoms have been continuously questioned. This is particularly true for posttraumatic amnesia and therapeutically recovered traumatic memories. Freud’s [2] abandonment of his seduction theory was followed by decades of denial of sexual trauma in the psychoanalytic and broader sociocultural realms [3]. Concomitant negation of posttraumatic symptomatology was noted in regard to the war neuroses, emanating equally from military, medical and social spheres [4]. Thus, Karon and Widener [5] drew attention to professional abandonment of the literature on posttraumatic amnesia in World War II combatants. They considered this to be due to a collective forgetting, comparable to the repression of soldiers, but instead occurring on account of social prejudices. He further noted that the validity of memories was never challenged at the time since there was ample corroborating evidence. Recent research confirms the findings of earlier investigators such as Janet [6], validating posttraumatic amnesia of both civilian and military origin. Van der Hart and Nijenhuis [7] cited clinical studies reporting total amnesia for combat trauma, experiences in Nazi concentration camps, torture and robbery. There is also increasing evidence for the existence of amnesia for child sexual abuse. Thus, Scheflen and Brown [8] concluded from their analysis of 25 empirical studies that such amnesia is a robust finding. Since then, new studies, for example those of Elliott [9], have appeared supporting their conclusion. This paper examines posttraumatic amnesia in World War I (WWI) combatants. The findings are offered as an historical cross-validation of posttraumatic amnesia in all populations, including those subjected to childhood sexual abuse.

See how cruel the whites look. Their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and dis­torted by folds. Their eyes have a staring expression; they are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something; they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad." I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. "They say that they think with their heads," he replied. "Why of course. What do you think with?" I asked him in surprise. "We think here," he said, indicating his heart. I fell into a long meditation. For the first time in my life, so it seemed to me, someone had drawn for me a picture of the real white man. It was as though until now I had seen nothing but sentimental, prettified color prints. This Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. I felt rising within me like a shapeless mist something unknown and yet deeply familiar. And out of this mist, image upon image detached itself: first Roman legions smashing into the cities of Gaul, and the keenly incised features of Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, and Pompey. I saw the Roman eagle on the North Sea and on the banks of the White Nile. Then I saw St. Augus­tine transmitting the Christian creed to the Britons on the tips of Roman lances, and Charlemagne's most glorious forced con­versions of the heathen; then the pillaging and murdering bands of the Crusading armies. With a secret stab I realized the hol­lowness of that old romanticism about the Crusades. Then fol­lowed Columbus, Cortes, and the other conquistadors who with fire, sword, torture, and Christianity came down upon even these remote pueblos dreaming peacefully in the Sun, their Father. I saw, too, the peoples of the Pacific islands decimated by firewater, syphilis, and scarlet fever carried in the clothes the missionaries forced on them. It was enough. What we from our point of view call coloniza­tion, missions to the heathen, spread of civilization, etc., has another face - the face of a bird of prey seeking with cruel in­tentness for distant quarry - a face worthy of a race of pirates and highwaymen. All the eagles and other predatory creatures that adorn our coats of arms seem to me apt psychological representatives of our true nature.

The Renaissance was the culture of a wealthy and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individually and disorder, were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but of wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individually. But at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging which the medieval social structure had offered. They were more free, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class. All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one's fellow man—or at least with the members of one's own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as "objects" to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one's own ends. The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, an insatiable greed for power and wealth. As a result of all this, the successful individual's relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often portrayed. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophical writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy.

You have unfairly tasked me with three very difficult questions. I was very interested in your comments about Christ’s atheism on the cross. That final moment of atheism, that’s something I have never thought about in that way. It’s a very interesting thought because what it really ….it’s an unbelievably merciful idea in some sense. That the burden of life is so unbearable and you see in the Christian passion, of course, torture, unfair judgement by society, betrayal by friends and then a low death. That’s about …as bad as it gets. Right? Which is why it is an archetypal story. It’s about as bad as it gets. And the story that you describe points out that it’s so bad that even God himself might despair about the essential quality of being. Right? Right. So that is merciful in some sense because it does say that there is something that’s built into the fabric of existence, that tests us so severely in our faith about being itself that even God himself falls prey to the temptation to doubt. So that’s…ok now… There is a very large critical literature that suggests that if you want to develop optimal resilience, what you do is lay out a pathway towards somewhere better, someone comes in, they have a problem, you try to figure out what the problem is and then you try to figure out what might constitute a solution. So you have a map. And it’s a tentative map of how you get from where things aren’t so good to where they are better. And then you have the person go out in the world and confront those things that they are avoiding, that are stopping them from moving to that higher place. And there’s an archetypal reality to that, you’re in a fallen state, you are attempting to redeem yourself and there is a process by which that has to occur. And that process involves voluntary confrontation with what you’re afraid of, disgusted by and inclined to avoid. And that’s works. Every psychological school agrees upon that exposure therapy, psychoanalysts expose you to the tragedies of your past, and redeem you in that manner, the behaviourists expose you to the terrors of the present and redeem you in that manner, but there is a broad agreement between psychological schools that that works. My sense is that we are called upon as individuals precisely to do that in our life. We are faced by this unbearable reality, that you made reference to when you talked about the situation on the cross, life itself is fundamentally - and this is a pessimism that we might share - it’s fundamentally suffering and malevolence. But this is I think where we differ, I believe that the evidence suggests that the light that you discover in your life is proportionate to the amount of darkness that you are willing to forthrightly confront and that there is no necessarily upper limit to that. So I think that the good that people are capable of it’s a higher good than the evil that people are capable of. And believe me that I do not say that lightly, given that I know about the evil that people are capable of. And I believe that the central psychological message of the biblical corpus fundamentally it’s that. That’s why it culminates in some sense with the idea that it is necessary to confront the devil and to accept the unjustness of your tortured mortality. If you can do that, and that’s a challenge sufficient to challenge even God himself, you have the best chance of transcending it, and living the kind of life that would set your house in order and everyone’s house in order at the same time. And I think that’s true even in states like North Korea...

For its part, the Washington Post, in an article written shortly after the Islamic Revolution, acknowledges that “the CIA ‘definitely’ trained SAVAK agents in ‘both physical and psychological’ torture techniques….”4 The article explained that there were “joint activities ” between the SAVAK and the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, and that “the Israelis even wrote SAVAK’s manuals … and prepared an ill-fated effort … to undermine the growing religious impact of the revolution.” Well-trained by the CIA, the “Savak—Sazman-i Etelaat va Amniyat-I Keshvar, the “National Information and Security Organization”—was to become the most notorious and murderous [of the Shah’s security services], its torture chambers among the Middle East’s most terrible institutions.”5

There is no reason to have something taking up space in your closet that does not make you feel good. These items must go. Perhaps you like to torture yourself by trying on some jeans from a few years ago to see if you can button them. Clothes do not exist to humiliate their owners. Please do not force garments into performing psychological tasks for which they were not designed.

I magine a civilization here on earth that exists covertly inside and alongside of those we know about, with access to the most advanced technologies, technologies straight off the drawing boards of Hollywood production companies and special effects artists, a civilization with nearly bottomless sources of funding, staging events for the gullible, torturing others and driving them into mental and emotional breakdown, and waging a covert war with its own members using its own “apocalyptic technologies,” and masking that war behind the perfect plausible deniability: mother nature. This breakaway civilization, moreover, has its own ideology, and its own dubious “morality”, as was evidenced by its first real incarnation: Nazi Germany. Unlike Nazi Germany, or for that matter, civilizations in general, it has no “core area” where it is centered; it comprises not one nation, but many; its peoples are drawn from all groups and languages, for it speaks but one language, the language of power. It is, in part, the resurrection of Atlantis, and in part, like a bad nightmare version of superhero comic books, with the villains, and not the superheroes, possessing all the superhuman powers and technologies. If the idea of such a breakaway civilization sounds fanciful or even absurd, then hold on, because this book attempts to outline its components, structure, and initial postwar history.

The psychological significance of the doctrine of predestination is a twofold one. It expresses and enhances the feeling of individual powerlessness and insignificance. No doctrine could express more strongly than this the worthlessness of human will and effort. The decision over man's fate is taken completely out of his own hands and there is nothing man can do to change this decision. He is a powerless tool in God's hands. The other meaning of this doctrine, like that of Luther's, consists in its function to silence the irrational doubt which was the same in Calvin and his followers as in Luther. At first glance the doctrine of predestination seems to enhance the doubt rather than silence it. Must not the individual be torn by even more torturing doubts than before to learn that he was predestined either to eternal damnation or to salvation before he was born? How can he ever be sure what his lot will be? Although Calvin did not teach that there was any concrete proof of such certainty, he and his followers actually had the conviction that they belonged to the chosen ones. They got this conviction by the same mechanism of self-humiliation which we have analyzed with regard to Luther's doctrine. Having such conviction, the doctrine of predestination implied utmost certainty; one could not do anything which would endanger the state of salvation, since one's salvation did not depend on one's own actions but was decided upon before one was ever born. Again, as with Luther, the fundamental doubt resulted in the quest for absolute certainty, but though the doctrine of predestination gave such certainty, the doubt remained in the background and had to be silenced again and again by an ever-growing fanatic belief that the religious community to which one belonged represented that part of mankind which had been chosen by God.

In fact, the whole place was filled with little conflicts like this: beautiful next to disgusting, free next to confined, compassion next to torture, death next to life.

To cut a long story short, thus far the contribution of logical philosophy to metaphysics has been entirely negative. The verdict seems to be that, under logical scrutiny, the entire body of metaphysical doctrine consists either of tautology or nonsense. But this amounts to a total “debunking” of metaphysics only as it has been understood in the West—as consisting of meaningful statements conveying information about “transcendental objects.” Asian philosophy has never been of the serious opinion that metaphysical statements convey information of a positive character. Their function is not to denote “Reality” as an object of knowledge, but to “cure” a psychological process by which man frustrates and tortures himself with all kinds of unreal problems. To the Asian mind, “Reality” cannot be expressed; it can only be known intuitively by getting rid of unreality, of contradictory and absurd ways of thinking and feeling. The

How are we affected by an absence of love? Why should being ignored drive us to a "rage and impotent despair" beside which torture itself would be a relief?- The Importance of Love

This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in social psychology, but it is also the most difficult for many people to accept because of the enormous dissonance it produces: “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly’s great character Pogo, who famously said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.

Carolyn believes organized religion is another form of mind control and Catholic doctrine, in particular, is a form of psychological torture as emotional terrorism. It serves no one but itself as a morbid, historically shameful blight on humanity. A plague on mankind: self-possessed, self-perpetuating, self-indulgent and self-absorbed.

Rape jokes are very far from rebellious, subversive, or oppositional. They are fascist salutes to male supremacy. Laughing about the sexual (and thus the physical, emotional, and psychological) torture of females, signals one’s servile obedience to the misogynistic status quo.

We went back to John’s place, and Amy initiated a FaceTime call. If you’re reading this in the future and you don’t know what that is, I’ll just say that technology in this era was deviously designed to alternately coddle and torture introverts. For example, a FaceTime call would suddenly make a stranger’s big, scary face appear on your phone out of nowhere, and answering it would automatically turn on your own camera, so it had the psychological impact of someone barging into your bathroom to demand a meeting while you are struggling with a stubborn poop.

Harlow is recovering,” Hunter grinds out. “From long-term imprisonment, abuse and psychological torture. I know, I’m familiar with it.

The bridge between a psychopath and a murderer is often drawn paper thin. There are psychopaths who twist you inside out with psychological torture, while others make it a reality, twisting you to pieces with blades of steel. They’re all geniuses in their own little fantasies. Some feel trapped and need to find a way through the reality of this harsh world. Some will never be free.

So far in our nation visionary feminist movement is the only struggle for justice that emphasizes the need to end patriarchy. No mass body of women has challenged patriarchy and neither has any group of men come together to lead the struggle. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat. Distinguishing political patriarchy, which he sees as largely committed to ending sexism, therapist Terrence Real makes clear that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our psyches: Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them. By highlighting psychological patriarchy, we see that everyone is implicated and we are freed from the misperception that men are the enemy. To end patriarchy we must challenge both its psychological and its concrete manifestations in daily life. There are folks who are able to critique patriarchy but unable to act in an antipatriarchal manner.

How did he die? The question pushes itself whilst in my mind. I want to ask her. I want to ask her so, so bad. Ottie’s mention of it in the dream: the fragments of my cognitively-created film torture me while my mother brings up Cace, over, and over, and over again, yet never fully reaching a consensus about the whole topic. What is she trying to entail? What is she thinking? I want to ask her the question. But don’t you already know the answer?

Metin Başoğlu, a psychiatrist and trauma researcher, studied the psychological effects of torture on political POWs and war survivors from Yugoslavia and Turkey by comparing continuous versus intermittent torture. His findings showed that torture with breaks between abuses induced more severe psychological effects than continuous torture. Victims of intermittent torture had higher rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. The unpredictability and anticipation of more abuse heightened stress and anxiety, which then caused “learned helplessness,” making victims feel powerless and passive over time. This increased compliance because resistance seemed futile.

Creating the Weather in the Classroom As Haim Ginott suggests, teachers “create the weather” in the classroom:   I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture, or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate, or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child is humanized or dehumanized [p. x].

The costs of engaging in the black market of religion in China are very high. Once found by the authorities, leaders and believers may suffer psychological abuse, physical torture, monetary fines,

As conscious beings, we are capable of understanding that we will die some day. We also have the ability to imagine a world after we die. Religion hijacks this ability and injects fear of eternal torture and abandonment as well as the promise of eternal bliss. A perfect carrot and stick approach. The ability to imagine what is beyond the horizon of death is what allows religion to take control and make us do unnatural things.