#pseudopsychology

[creature-wizard]

Should I be concerned if a friend of mine seems to keep obliquely referencing ramcoa/ritual abuse and like. clams up entirely when alice in wonderland or wizard of oz are brought up too much? I don't think they're lying but I'm worried because it maps pretty neatly onto the conspiracy stuff i see you post about and idk what to do

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.

For anyone reading this who isn't aware: The term "Ritual Abuse, Mind Control & Organized Abuse", or RAMCOA, is not an innocent catch-all term for religious abuse, institutional abuse, sex trafficking, etc. It was coined by conspiracy theorists in order to repackage Satanic Ritual Abuse/Satanic Panic/Project Monarch alter programming conspiracy theories into something they could pass off as legitimate science/research. Essentially, it's a Trojan horse for far right bullshit. For more information, see Cathy O'Brien - The First Project Monarch "Survivor" and Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler: Two Of The Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theorists Most People Have Never Heard Of.

[bernie-buddy]

Another theory I have for far right stations like "NewsMax" is that they purposefully tell stories in a way that leaves them able to put in as much "Gosh what a ridiculously stupid thing the other side is doing! Isn't that right, other people within the carefully constructed 'in-group' on this channel?"

Just basic playing into old people's desire to fit in instilled in them from their old days at school when being in the 'out-group' was socially devastating so they built defenses to try and stay out of the out-group.

[magpiecrust]

If you genuinely believe in personality types (like MBTI), five stages of grief, "empaths", other pseudopsychology, or astrology, i will fucking kill you.

[creature-wizard]

Oh boy.

You know who else claimed that using your imagination = dissociation?

Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler, two conspiracy theorists who basically claimed that all fiction that didn't fit the most uberconservative Christian ideal of Pure Wholesome Entertainment was created to brainwash children into following the Antichrist.

So yeah, this impulse to pathologize everything has the potential to take us down some very dark roads.

[shmreduplication]

i hate the concept that queer people have a "delayed adolescence" due to being queer so it's really funny reading zach braff's concepts behind Garden State, a heterosexual romance(?) movie about an emotionally-numb coming-off-his-meds-for-the-first-time-in-his-adult-life cishet man (played by braff) and an epileptic compulsive liar manic pixie dream girl (played by Natalie Portman) and he describes it as a second puberty of the brain during a person's 20s. This movie came out in 2004

this is his quote from describing the basis for what the movie is about: "I have this theory that your body goes through puberty in its teens, and the mind goes through puberty in your twenties"

[torchickentacos]

you ever scroll past some sort of discourse that you didn't even know existed, and you have to take a second and realize that, while none of us are superior to others, some of us ARE much better at choosing which dumbass hills to die on? because I think sometimes you deserve to go 'huh. at least I'm not getting involved in all that'.

[runedscope]

Personality tests are astrology for people that think they're better than astrology because its science despite both of them having about the same level of basis in reality

[creature-wizard]

The "witch wound" is an alleged form of psychic trauma carried by women, supposedly created by the persecution of women who expressed their "feminine power." The concept is based on the myth/conspiracy theory that the early modern witch hunts targeted actual witches or wise women. (In reality, the witch hunts were primarily fueled by antisemitic conspiracy theories that spilled over onto gentile women when Jews weren't around to scapegoat. Few of the accused women could be considered witches in any meaningful sense.)

If you have the alleged symptoms of the witch wound, it's probably caused by trauma that you, personally suffered in this life. The patriarchal hellscape we live in right now is enough to traumatize anybody.

November 14, 2024 My latest blog is online now: Why I don't Buy the Idea of "Healing the Witch Wound" - And you don't need to either.

[creature-wizard]

hi!! i saw ur take on DID programming being a conspiracy theory, and i'd like a further elaboration if that's fine with you. i'm just curious and a bit confused, since i've met numerous systems claiming to be victims of programming

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.

So, hopefully this should answer things. I tried to keep this post as short as possible, but there's just a lot of history and context here. The very, very short version of this is that there are a lot of misled people who've unknowingly run afoul of 20th century conspiracy theories and psychiatric quackery.

[taraxacum-vulpes]

i keep getting true crime podcast ads. why would i find this entertaining at all

[baesharmi-ki-height]

I love whenever there is a drama in the indian psych community.

[that-cunning-witch]

I'd like to add my take on this take: MBTI is astrology for psychologists

Ive seen some people say that mbti is just astrology for people who dont believe in astrology and i was wondering what you think of that since you study occult stuff?

Yeah MBTI is essential magic. There's no actual basis for it other than social constructions.

[azothmahoushoujo]

It's quite obvious that a lot of people's hostility towards fetishes and kinks comes from the vast underestimation of the ability of the sentient human brain to distinguish between reality and fiction. There's more to it of course as implied, not any more well justified mind you, but people's grievences do tend to heavily rely on some pseudopsychological understanding of the human brain being stupider than it actually is.

[ecdysiscon]

"Why?" was a repeated theme in the girl's cries. Her desire to have an explanation for the pain was almost as strong as her desire to escape the pain.

The doll was entirely willing to oblige her curiosity. It explained calmly and patiently:

"This one bears no ill will towards you. However, it has the standardized drives of an infantry-class combat doll. It has been instilled with a Purpose of violence, and to faciliate this it has a strong pseudopsychological incentive to inflict pain. It is merely doing what it does. It is not at fault. It is not guilty."

The girl's last sensations were pain, of course, but also the sound of a monotone stream of self-platitudes.

[callmiani]

As a person who recently (today) discovered narcissistic tendencies within myself this now hits different.

Loading screen tip: 99% of the people who talk about narcissism a lot don't know what narcissism is and will try to sell you pseudoscience and spiritual bullshit.

[cryptotheism]

CT, do you happen to know if 'Human Design' is just harmless pseudopsychology mumbo jumbo or is there any red flags about it?

I haven't done a deep dive into it, but its basically just astrology with a lot of other stuff thrown in.