The treatment of Esther: about harsh processing in wartime

Mrs A. Terpstra-van Hijum, GZ-psychologist, 16 February 2021

Summary

In this article, I take you through Esther's treatment process; Esther consists of many personality parts, each with its own life history, skills and sense of self. As treatment progresses, it turns out that parts of Esther still attend cult meetings, are tortured and do forced prostitution work. When she tries to stop doing this, a personality part of her turns out to be addicted to drugs that she receives monthly from one of her cult members. A tough battle with addiction follows and with enduring threats of all kinds. By reminding personality parts of Esther of unprocessed extreme trauma through texts, objects, people and photographs, among other things, Esther is lured back to them again and again. It turns out that manipulated attachment relationships with perpetrators play a major role in this, as do automatic reactions conditioned by extreme torture. Under great security pressure, trauma processing is required at a rapid pace. In addition, 'divide and conquer' turns out to be not only a method by which they keep Esther in their grip, but also a way to alienate her network, including me as a practitioner. Threatening e-mails with pictures of sexual torture to me and to loved ones around her delay the exit process. In addition, the cult blackmails her with photos they have of crimes Esther was forced to commit and with photos of torture of family members. When intensive trauma processing causes all their tricks to get Esther to return to her perpetrators herself to fail, they attempt murder in broad daylight. The article concludes with some of the principles that emerge from the treatment and what social change is at least needed to help people like Esther.

Introduction

Psychological treatment of clients who come from the world of satanic ritual abuse is complex. Many survivors of this abuse have developed programmed dissociative identity disorder (DIS, formerly called multiple personality disorder). This means that, through prolonged and severe abuse and purposeful torture at a very young age, the personality has been split into multiple identities, each with its own "sense of self", which have partial or total amnesia in relation to each other.

In the 1990s there were many reports of ritual abuse, both in the Netherlands and in other countries, including the United States. For various reasons (which will become clearer after reading the articles on this website), hard forensic evidence proved difficult to provide. As a result, an investigation was started in the Netherlands[1] The conclusion of which was: survivors who speak of satanic ritual abuse have suffered something terrible, but it is impossible to determine whether this is satanic ritual abuse. A second conclusion was that there should be follow-up research. This never happened, but as a result of radio programs of Argos about ritual abuse[2] In the autumn of 2020, a motion was passed in the Dutch Lower House that this research should still be carried out. In the same decade the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established in America.[3]which conquered the media and also gained a foothold in Western Europe. In a recent article in the New York (magazine)[4] the highly dubious roots and equally dubious scientific claims of this - now disbanded - movement are laid bare. However, there is no doubt that the work of this movement has protected many perpetrators from prosecution. Briefly, and usually in nicer terms, this psychological movement claims that memories of ritual abuse are made up by clients or talked up by therapists. In the 1990s - at the time of the wave of reports of ritual abuse - it was under the influence of this movement that many pioneering therapists were gagged. To this day, this makes many therapists afraid to burn their hands on these clients. At least as bad, this view has gained wide ground among the judiciary and police. In the Netherlands, the Landelijk Expertisebureau Bijzondere Zedenzaken (LEBZ), where all reports with ritual characteristics are submitted for advice, is demonstrably biased[5] and follows the thinking of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Members and ex-members assume that ritual abuse or even DIS does not exist and publish about it. It goes without saying that such bias makes the path to justice for survivors even more impassable than it already was.

In the following text, I would like to take professionals and non-professionals through the course of Esther's treatment, from my perspective as a practitioner.

Start of therapy

After gaining experience with a previous client who was found to have been ritually abused, a new client reported to me by phone 3 years ago (I call her Esther), who told me at telephone intake that she had been severely abused in multiple ways and ritual context, recounting several examples. She knew there were multiple personality parts living in her and said she 'missed' a lot of time. By this, she meant that she sometimes suddenly found herself in a situation where she had no idea how she had got there and then discovered that hours or even days had passed of which she had no recollection. She had previously had help from a counsellor for a few years, but that help had stopped. I was hesitant to take her into therapy as this was bound to be a lengthy, controversial and complex treatment and went on a literature search. It turned out there was now a groundbreaking book on the market 'healing the unimaginable' by Allison Miller[6]. Miller explained clearly why I should not try desperately to avoid switching personality parts, as I had often done with my previous client for fear that switching in therapy would strengthen the inner divisions. I learned from Miller that the essence of treatment is to build up a relationship of trust with as many personality parts as possible, so that they can tell their part of the traumatic life story. Later I discovered that this corresponded with the advice of Janine Fisscher[7]First the parts have to be separated, then the trauma has to be dealt with, then the synthesis has to be worked on. My attempts to refer Esther to the few institutions which are more focused on these problems and which are financed for long-term psychological help, were unsuccessful. Armed with new knowledge and with 10 years more experience in trauma treatment with EMDR and schema therapy, I decided to take on the adventure with Esther myself.

Intake

At intake, I meet Esther, a friendly, intelligent, well-groomed woman. She has a fine job and she and her partner are raising several children together. A big contrast to what else she tells me during intake. Esther grew up with parents who were busy with their businesses and barely paid attention to her. She has memories of abuse in different contexts and of giving birth in a ritual context, with people in black robes and strange chants. She misses a lot of time and knows that another part had 'dates in hotels' in recent years.

She appears to mean forced prostitution. Her partner, with whom she has then been together for years, says that he regularly noticed injuries on Esther in the morning that were not there the night before: symbols on her buttocks, soles of her feet, back and abdomen. He also says that Esther regularly 'falls away', where her body becomes completely limp and she becomes totally unresponsive for a while. This is often at night, especially on special cult 'holidays'. The urge to go out is very strong in Esther around these days and the fear increases as night approaches. Her husband regularly stays up on such nights to prevent Esther from going out the door after all. Earlier, it also happened that the partner slept unnaturally deep on cult nights. It will later be revealed that on those nights, a personality part of Esther had put a sleep aid in her husband's tea. Esther says she often found semen in the morning when showering, sometimes could not move for half a day after such a night and was regularly chased by cars. Right now, things seem calm and she thinks she has managed to stop participating in cult meetings. We start with a two-weekly contact of 2 hours. But during therapy, it is jointly decided to make additional appointments to keep the high processing rate necessary for safety feasible.

Start of treatment

After an extensive intake we start the treatment with a two-weekly session. It soon appears that the personality part of Esther (elsewhere in the literature the term alter is often used, I use the term '(personality) part') that took the initiative for this therapy, does not call herself Esther, but Ynsa. She knows of the existence of a whole number of parts, but finds it difficult to get in touch with them. After a number of conversations I receive an email from a child part, Emie. She writes: 'I'm not allowed to write you but I don't know what to do and you were going to help us so I want to write you but Esther doesn't know anything. She also writes: 'They want us to come and we don't want to but they are very hungry'. I write back. When I tell Ynsa about the email in the next conversation, she gets scared. I reassure her and give her permission for those who want to, to mail me.

In the months that follow, I get email contact with many parts. Each part emails from a different email address, and we decide to stay in touch between conversations via secure app. Each part has its own account. This makes the threshold much lower for parts that are too afraid to show themselves in face-to-face contact. Ynsa indicates that it is very important that the participants do not read each other's mail, because then they do not dare to tell me honest things for fear of each other.

Building a relationship of trust with sharing

I keep a file for each part, to keep track of what I discuss with the different parts. Ilze, a teenage part, is very cautious and wary in the contact, taking her time to probe who I am and whether I can be trusted. Bit by bit, she explains that she has to earn a certain amount of money every month by making nightly sex appointments in hotels through a secure website. That's not so bad, she adds, she used to have to do much worse things. Only sometimes it is bad when suddenly there are several men and they rape her at the same time. She is working on stopping, but is afraid that other parts will then have to go back to 'the group', as she calls the meetings. She takes the money from sex work to cult member Pieter every month to pay for the pills she gets then.

I connect with part Sasha, who is stuck in a memory after an admission to a hospital, where the metal bed is a big trigger. The fear and guilt surrounding this memory is extremely high. Remembering it takes a lot of effort: she has to work hard to overcome resistance and allow and bear the multitude of strong emotions, but eventually she succeeds in verbalizing the memory. First by a child part, Lisa, whom I did not know yet, in child language, helped by the central child part Emie. It's about giving birth in a ritual setting where Sasha, the body was 15, had to kill her own baby born on the spot. It is the sound of her own laughter in the process that haunts her most. She talks about having to look at the child, show that you are bonding. Because when you manage to attach and then kill while smiling, you are the most powerful. She really couldn't do that looking and bonding, and so Lisa split off: a child part holding the baby and looking at the baby. Then Sasha had to kill the baby. After becoming aware of this memory, Sasha makes a profound decision that she never wants to go to a cult meeting again, regardless of the threats that are sure to follow. She makes a list of 'my deeds', things she feels extremely guilty about. 'If I don't write it now, I may never dare again', she writes. What strikes me immediately is that the word 'others' on the list can just as easily mean another person as another part of the person Esther. The guilt that another part 'carried the torture of the well and the coffin', because she couldn't do it and 'left', seems to weigh as heavily as the guilt that she had to teach boys how to rape. What 'the torture of the well and the coffin' entail, I don't learn until much later.  

Through conversations with Sasha, it becomes clear that the from childhood forced visits to the (often) nocturnal cult meetings have never stopped. There is complete amnesia between Ilze and Sasha and they do not know about each other. I act as an 'external frontal cortex' (note) and relay information from Sasha to Ilze. Ilze feels cheated by cult member Pieter and others when she hears through me that Sasha is still going to cult meetings and is extra motivated to stop forced prostitution work. I encourage Ilze and Sasha to seek each other out and get to know each other on the inside, this proves to be an arduous process that involves trial and error.  

Security Letters and Cameras

Now that it has become clear that Esther is far from free from the cult, we decide to take a safety measure. The parts of Esther that know a lot about their past and present in the cult are asked to write down as many names, places, dates and other details of crimes they were involved in as victim, 'perpetrator' or witness. Digital material is also stored. This is a huge internal struggle for Esther, because some parts of the group want this very much and other parts absolutely not. But even those parts that find writing it down life-threatening recognize that it could be their only life insurance. The letters arrive, in many duplicates, and are deposited via a clever system in many places that nobody knows about.

If it turns out that there are parts who still let offenders into the house, after which camera images have been erased, we also have new cameras installed at the house. The images go directly to someone, so erasing the images is no longer possible. This turns out to be a huge improvement in safety at home.

Addiction

A pressing problem arises: Ilze appears to swallow a daily handful of the pills she gets monthly from cult member Pieter. As the month progresses, Ilze has no idea what kind of pills they are and also dares not hand over a pill to me for testing at any price. She is convinced that the cult will then find out immediately, 'they are everywhere and know everything'. The fear is extremely high. After months of talking and negotiating, I get 1 pill with the agreement that I will have it tested by a friend of mine in another part of the country. It turns out to be hard drugs, a trip drug that stimulates lust for sex. An arduous and brave path of tapering off follows in collaboration with a psychiatrist. The pills turn out to suppress anxiety, stress and highly traumatic memories, being able to think more clearly with fewer and later without pills makes the constant re-experiencing of terrible memories feel much stronger.

Threats

At a face-to-face meeting, Sasha shows me weird text messages she gets. They make her visibly anxious. They are codes in 4 or 5 digits. The last number indicates the day. It's about having to give information, I understand that a certain part has to call on the day in question. But there is also a threatening mail in words: 'you are cursed to the 2^e black rose'. That's Christmas, Sasha tells me. And there will be a code that means suicide. This recurs regularly in the years that follow, along with changing numbers that I understand designate the part that is supposed to do this. Each part has its own instructions on how to commit suicide. One time that code is written in blood on the outside of her bathroom window. The pastor of her church, who is now involved in a networking meeting we convene from time to time, is there when this is observed. Another time, her partner sends me a picture of a car following them that has a similar code written on its side window. But as it turns out, they have many more arrows in their sights.

Backup sharing and other sharing

Ilza and Sasha quitting their 'duties' as they call it, creates a storm throughout the person. Two 'backup parts' of Ilze show up, which have to force her to resume her duties as a sex worker. They turn out to be addicted to white powder, which sometimes suddenly appears on the mat, and they sometimes get it from someone on the street. That someone turns out to be André, who plays a pimping role towards Ilze. These childlike and little developed parts of the personality know him as a nice man who gives them white powder which makes them feel better. They have very traumatic memories, but no bad experiences with André. When they 'accidentally' encounter him near their home on the street, they take the white powder and use it. There their memory stops and Ilze, it turns out, takes over. She suddenly finds herself in a van and is abused terribly. Again and again it becomes clear to me that the memory walls between the different parts are often hermetically sealed. When I meet a new character, he or she is usually still living in his or her own little world and has no idea what has changed in Esther's life in the past six months.

I get to know all kinds of parts. Some, like Ilze's backups, only know their own piece of 'life' and have no idea of the effect of their actions on other parts or the whole person. Some are tasked with minutely informing someone from the cult at set times about what they are going to do this week. Behind them lie tortures as a young child in which she had to remember and report exactly all the details of her day. A missed detail meant waterboarding, a successful report earned a candy. There are parts in English and a part in German, which carry memories of abuse abroad.

Other parts know a lot about the inner world, but are completely stuck in the cult's thinking. They have a 'task' inside to hurt another part that disobeys the cult. They do this by bringing memories of torture from this particular part into everyday consciousness. These parts are furious with me for causing chaos within. Some are deeply convinced that Satan is the almighty and the Illumination are going to take over the world. You are powerful when you have power over others and eating someone's heart makes you strong. What makes me think that is not true? I use cognitive techniques that sometimes help a little and shoot holes in fixed beliefs. But usually the breakthrough comes only when you manage to get into conversation about when that part was split off or 'programmed', through extreme conditioning. Always a memory with extreme torture at a very young age: the first time anal rape, after being raped by multiple men locked in a coffin for hours underground, locked in a cage with body parts of a child, 2 nights in a forest on a chain with men coming every few hours to rape, giving birth on an altar and seeing your baby raped afterwards, while being raped having to make a promise that you will always belong to a certain perpetrator, having to rape another child for the first time. 

The enraged part that identifies so strongly with the cult's values then has only a small piece of memory: the worst pain, the moment it felt like its body was tearing apart, the moment of reciting the promise to Satan.

If it is possible to tell the whole memory together with other parts, which are already willing to cooperate for freedom, the part appears to be willing to stop his or her self-destructive task. For the other parts this is a very difficult task, because they too have only a piece of the memory and now they have to realise the whole terrible event, including the split-off worst physical feelings and emotions. However, it is the only way to freedom for the sabotaging part and therefore the whole person.

Divide and rule

Divide and conquer seems to be the guiding principle of the satanic cult. A first way they achieve this is, that the memories of horrible events are stored in pieces in different parts. There is horizontal dissociation (parts carry in time a different part of the torture) and vertical dissociation (parts carry from the same moment different sensory aspects: the sound of the saw, the laughter of the men, the pain in the body). As we know from all kinds of theories about trauma processing, memories cannot be processed if the most difficult, painful, shameful or repulsive parts of them are avoided. Without external help this is not possible with these extreme traumas. 

Another way they pit the parts against each other is by having different personality parts have very different experiences with the same person. We already saw this with pimp André. But the same trick has also been used with several uncles and other perpetrators in the cult. For example, Esther is locked by perpetrator 1, naked, in a coffin for a long time that is also actually buried, along with another girl. Every movement makes earth fall through the cracks and makes it harder for the other to breathe. At the moment when the personality part present only wishes to die and splits in the person, the girls are 'freed' by perpetrator 2. The latter comforts the newly arrived part, wraps a blanket around her naked body, gives her drinks and a hot shower and indignantly says he will see to it that the perpetrator is punished. The extreme relief and security experienced by the new part with perpetrator 2 creates a strong attachment bond. That the same perpetrator 2 rapes and otherwise tortures at other times remains hidden from this part.

A third way in which personality parts are played off against each other is through mutual guilt, shame and anger. We saw this with Sasha, who feels guilty towards another part because she 'left' and 'let another part carry the torture down the well', in her words. This refers to a torture in which Esther had to descend into a well in which there was exactly so much water that if she strained and stood on her toes, she just barely avoided drowning. When her body couldn't take it anymore because of the cold, fear and exertion and she gave up and almost drowned, a new part split off. Sasha feels very guilty afterwards towards the new part that she let them pay for 'her' misery, she should have been able to endure this herself. This guilt is aggravated

because this new part after the pit gets extra torture because she doesn't know previously trained behavior (because of the amnesia between her and Sasha), which cult perpetrators (who undoubtedly knew there was amnesia) charge her with 'deliberately playing dumb'.

But there is also anger between them, e.g. one part that got a knife in her hand (she is a young teenager then) and refused to kill her baby. In the cult there is no "no" and eventually another part took over and killed the baby. Resulting in anger from the first part to the newly arrived part. As 'assistant-cortex[8] I have a bridging function between the different parts. I explain, explain, encourage them to 'meet' each other and see how that other part in her or his way helped the whole person survive at that moment. There really was no way out then and there. All around her were perpetrators and so were able to keep the abuse hidden. Even suicide attempts were not allowed and neither was really dying. Often there was a medic - GP in everyday life - who stitched just in time or stemmed the bleeding or gave an appropriate injection.

When I ask the central child part to draw the inner world, a tightly organised pyramid-shaped figure appears on paper. All the parts have separate places with spaces in between. A particular drawing she had to make with someone as a child is also significant: it is the drawing of a chest of drawers, a place to safely store memories.

Purposeful separation of personality parts

As the treatment progresses, it becomes more and more apparent to me that this satanic cult works very thoughtfully, armed with highly developed psychological knowledge. Parts have 'spontaneously' split off because the limit of what a person can bear was reached during torture, causing the personality part present to split (again). But most of the parts I talk to and bond with, the cult had them split off on purpose and then trained them through new torture for a specific task. This becomes much clearer to me when, in addition to memories of abuse and torture at home, in barns and in ritual settings (church, forest), memories are also told of torture in a place some parts call the 'school': a hospital-like place with professional torture equipment. Most or perhaps all of the memories where electroshock is mentioned relate to this location, but in addition to electroshock, there is a host of torture options available. Esther indicates that this was also where she was taken when secrecy of events was especially important. This was always the case after abuse by high-ups. If this abuse by high-ups took place abroad, torture for the purpose of secrecy took place at such a location in the country in question.

Treatment relationship: between distrust and fragile trust

When you grow up in a sadistic environment as is true, except for the name-bearing part (see below), for all of Esther's personality parts, learning to trust people is a huge and almost impossible task. How should you ever trust your partner, when people around you, were cosy with you at the table one moment and were your executioners in another context? How are you ever supposed to trust a human being when other perpetrators at times deliberately tried to win your trust by giving loving attention and shortly after destroyed your fragile hope again through rape and torture? Who is to say that one evil day your partner will not do something similar anyway? Who guarantees that I, as a practitioner, will not suddenly give up or hang up my commitment?

The distinction between someone with a good heart who sometimes makes mistakes and someone with malicious intentions is hard to make for many parts at the start of the treatment. If I promise to be online at 11 o'clock for an appointment, the most damaged parts will immediately distrust me if I am there at 3 past 11. Reliability must be experienced again and again. Mistakes I make need to be named clearly and explicitly and, if they are justified, I need to say I'm sorry. Most parts of the personality do not dare to address me directly when the fragile trust is emotionally damaged; I notice it in the withdrawing movement in the contact, there is less or no sharing anymore. Noticing this, finding out what went wrong in the contact and repairing it, is essential. Distance in our contact and not being able to share what is going on inside, makes Esther immediately more vulnerable to the attempts of the cult to get her back in their clutches.

The cult knows this, of course. Divide and rule' is a principle they apply to the personality parts of their prey, but also to the supporting relationships of their prey. Only in the course of the years, with bits and pieces, I get more insight in the ingeniously malicious way they try to destroy the treatment relationship. Ilze, perhaps the most damaged and therefore most distrustful personality part, tells that she receives 'copies' of mails that seem to come from my mail address. In them, I communicate with the cult about her, suggesting that I am actually being used by the cult. She tells of being invited to dial into a phone call that someone from the cult is supposedly having with me, in which 'my' voice sounds very convincing to her. Including a curious snort that I seem to have, of which I am not aware. She indicates that she receives photos of me talking to people who belong to the cult. Deep fake methods are apparently abundantly available to them. For Ilze it remains a fight for a long time: what if they are right after all? They often lie, but not always. So many people have turned out to be fake. Why shouldn't that apply to me as well?

As the treatment relationship grows through trial and error, she gradually dares to share more about it, sometimes with others, sometimes with me. The 'poison' that this kind of cult message spreads in the person comes to light more quickly and does less damage. In the end, what is real and true will win from lies, deception and deceit.

Threatening emails, police and follow cars

Meanwhile the threatening mails keep coming in to Esther, now that there is no reaction to the codes, in the form of little poems with sentences or words that trigger specific traumas. To stop the automatic responses that this triggers, we are working together very hard to uncover the triggered memories in their entirety. Ilza, who has been kicked out of rehab, regularly struggles with her desire for drugs and extreme pain, the only ways she has learned to deal with emotional pain. With all the memories coming up one after the other, it's a very tough fight. 

I get a few threatening emails addressed specifically to me. 'Let your chosen one go or you will be dead,' is among the messages. I inform the neighbourhood police officer and give her a copy. I cut out the mail address; I have no illusions that following that address will get us to the perpetrators. Besides, I know by now that the word police causes enormous stress to my client. A number of child parts have told me of torture at the age of 5, where men in police uniform first provoked her to tell what a main perpetrator was doing and then violently sexually abused her. The child parts I speak to are adamant that an eraser stick is there to put in your vagina.

My client is very regularly followed on the bumper on the way home by cars or vans with blinded windows, with flashing lights. With the network we set up a system that there is contact with her on the road, to help her stay in control. This often works, but sometimes not. Then a part automatically follows the signaling car to a parking lot, where rape and threats take place. The cult's goal is always to get a part so far back in its automatic response that it will come of its own accord in the night to a cult site, where they have all the time and resources they need to reprogram parts with extensive torture.

Attempt to break relationship with social worker?

Our bi-weekly appointments are always at the same time and day. When an unexpected appointment falls through, my husband and I spend that morning working in our garden, which is still in the construction phase. My husband finds, neatly tucked under the leg of a fence along the adjoining path, a bright red wallet that turns out to be full of all kinds of drugs. We are highly surprised: who would leave a stash of drugs for someone else so conspicuously? The path is sandwiched between our garden and a police station, which is equipped with cameras at the back. It strikes me that the wallet lies exactly on the spot where both police cameras are pointing at it. I don't understand a thing, until my eye falls on the initials on the wallet. I send a picture of the wallet to my client. A child part lets me know that the wallet is theirs from before, but that they lost it a long time ago. Ilza is angry with me, she could use some drugs because the struggle is so heavy. I puzzle and puzzle: Was it the intention to send her a text message, that she would pick up that wallet herself, after she had been with me? And would the cult have threatened her that they have it on film and will send those videos to me if she doesn't stop by my place herself? Knowing Ilza that would have caused so much shame that she would indeed never have wanted to come back. Further on in the therapy it becomes more and more clear to me that this must indeed have been the intention. I take some pictures, call the police and have them pick up the purse.

Nameplate part

In the midst of all the parts I meet and with whom I make contact, I notice that one part is missing. The literature speaks of an 'outer part', the name bearer who knows nothing of the abuse and the cult world in which she is enmeshed. After one and a half years of intensive collaboration, I have not yet met such a part. Every part that I meet knows fragments of abuse and the cult world. I do not discuss this with my client or her partner, but keep it as a question mark in the back of my mind.

Then, a few weeks before I go on holiday, I meet her via app. She doesn't know me. Who am I, and why does she need to app with me? She has a very ordinary life and no problems at all. Her only problem is that she is forgetful. Sometimes she misses days, weeks or months. But everyone has that, don't they? Or maybe she is psychotic? Although I was expecting her, meeting her is still a bizarre sensation after 1.5 years of intense work on the most horrifying memories. Step by step, I have to gain her trust. Occasionally I get an email from another part, but very much less than before. I give her psychoeducation about DIS. Tell her about the process of the past one-and-a-half years; what other parts have told me, piece by piece. She laughs at me. Well no, cult member Pieter is always very nice. She does have very bad dreams about people in black robes, something bloody she has to eat. They become flashes while she is awake. What she tells me I recognise all from what other parts told me earlier and in much more detail. Finally, without consulting me, she takes the test and goes to friendly cult member Pieter to ask if the abuse is true. She explains that he became furious when she arrived and said 'it's about time hey Ilze?'. After that, she doesn't remember anything. She does know that she has a huge headache when she returns to her body hours later. From another part, I hear that she took the beating, the abuse afterwards, and the pain of carving cult symbols into her body. This encounter with cult member Pieter is a turning point for the name-bearing part. She gets more and more dreams and flashbacks, most of which are not new to me.

Processing in wartime

Meanwhile, the flood of emails, pictures of torture and anonymous phone calls the part Ilze receives from the cult continues. Invariably, the aim is to frighten her so much that she breaks contact with other inner parts and me, and returns to cult perpetrators. In addition, the pictures of previous torture trigger all sorts of unprocessed terrible memories, which repeatedly disrupts the fragile communication between the parts. They work very hard to process memories that have been laid open too much as a result. One part starts writing what she knows about it and leaves the document open on the computer. Other parts that know how it went on take over. A memory emerges in bits and pieces, some bits in good Dutch, others in the language of a 4-year-old or an angry teenager. It is about abuse in many locations and by many perpetrators, at school and other places. About being delivered via 2 intermediate stations to men in a house or in a forest. About childbirth in cult settings, sex with dogs, rape and murder of a baby and more.

EMDR[9] with personality parts and the whole person

If the processing gets stuck, I sometimes use EMDR via the chat. For example when Ilze gets stuck in a reliving of a dog with its penis stuck in her vagina. She gets stuck writing it down. Instead of clicks or eye movements, I give her sums which she has to calculate while focusing on the physical sensations. This seems to work well.

Writing down all those memories is a very intensive task for Esther. That's why I try face-to-face EMDR a few times around a certain trauma, hoping to speed up the processing. This works overpoweringly after only a few sets. We return to writing therapy. Further down the line, the name-bearer part gets stuck in processing a gang rape during childbirth. The feelings of panic and intense physical pain and being trapped on all sides are overwhelming. Another part gives me the names of the perpetrators, which the name-bearer part doesn't know yet. She gives me the tip to print out the photos that belong to the names and to do EMDR with them. When Esther comes, the photos indeed appear to start a fierce process of processing. I see all kinds of emotions pass by, including panic, hyperventilation and vomiting reflexes, but gradually all the pieces of the memory fall into place. Extremely relieved, Esther leaves my office 2 hours later.

Forced perpetration part of programming strategy

As the Argos documentary on ritual abuse also shows, forcing victims to commit crimes is an essential part of this cult's modus operandi. When pictures of torture don't trigger Ilze sufficiently anymore to make her panic to them, they send pictures of this kind to Ilze. For example, pictures where she, as a child, has to rape another child, but also pictures where she, as an adult, has to do such things. What's not in the photo, of course, is the context of extreme coercion, where the only choice is between evil and worse. For example, she tells me about a moment where she and a group of 4 children between the ages of 6 and 8 had to rape another group of slightly younger children. If she refuses or hesitates in her 'task', one of the men supervising took over and raped the child many times worse and then her as well. Obeying the task makes you guilty, refusing the task also: then it is because of your disobedience that another child suffers even more. This example is exemplary for the moral clampdown she is put in again and again. As every trauma therapist knows, shame and especially guilt are the hardest emotions to deal with. So it is also for Ilze. I don't get to see any of these pictures, but I am a frequent witness of the extreme self-hatred they evoke. Talking about this is surrounded by a lot of shame, guilt and fear. Often she refuses to talk or 'walks away' from an app conversation after which another part takes over who knows nothing about this. I feel like an executioner when I persist and pull the sentences out of her again and again. By now I know that such intense emotions with Ilze, if she can't share them in any way, always lead to a growing need for extreme pain and pills. Those are the only ways the cult has taught her to deal with heavy emotional pain. Both are available from the cult and sometimes make her go back to people from the cult in that way 'by herself'.

Threatening emails to me and police involvement?

As I said, none of the 'culprit pictures' I get to see. The shame and self-hatred and the fear that I'll give up is far too great. What I do get to see is an offensive of threatening emails, including photos, sent to my work email address. There's a build-up to it. First only threatening texts, then a picture of the face of a dead young woman with visible signs of torture. Then photos of women or girls having sex with animals, naked women tied to a metal bed, hanging from trees, a naked woman completely wrapped in plastic, a starving, bloodied and desperate teenage girl in a concrete cell. Most of the photos I can't show here, because they are pornographic and/or to protect the privacy of the victims depicted. To illustrate two examples of these cult emails.

Most of the photos also go to people in the network that has grown up around Esther. Especially around cult holidays, there are periods when such an email comes in daily. Sometimes it is a recognizable series, like around Halloween 2020, always with the title 'because of you nr1, nr2 etc.' with a picture of a child or adult being tortured.

Ilze's panic always increases when I tell her I've received such an email, and gradually it becomes clear to me why. She receives mails with the same titles as we do, but with her 'offender pictures' are added. The suggestion the cult makes is that we get them too, and even later they explicitly suggest they will succeed in getting us to go to the police with them. She will be convicted while they will escape, is the message. While I am talking to her on the phone when she is driving home from work, she tells me with fear in her voice that there is a police car behind her and a police motorcycle in front of her. The next day she sends me an e-mail, sent from the address I know by now, with a photo of a woman being electrocuted. To her left and right a uniformed officer is standing, with the text: 'Didn't you dare to stop? Were you afraid?

Such intimidation with the use of police cars/motorcycles, strengthens her fear that indeed she will be arrested by the police on the basis of her offender pictures one day.

The way up

The perpetrators constantly pull out new triggers to make personality parts respond automatically. When photos and triggers of certain torture memories are sufficiently processed, there is no longer an automatic response to the triggers associated with those memories. The perpetrators notice this too and come up with new photos, other perpetrators who walk or drive by, trigger words, or certain gestures that partly have a threatening meaning. Sometimes I notice this myself, for example when I walk with her to the car.

The balance between the parts is therefore in constant flux. Processing memories makes personality parts that have not done any cult work for years stronger. It calms small, separated parts of the personality that no longer run outside in an ultimate panic when they hear a certain sound signal, for example. It also strengthens the relationships between them. Many memories pass by several times, are first processed by a number of personality parts that do not often act in daily life. In a next stage, when a new balance has been found, the parts that are active in daily life can also participate. 

This requires constant alertness to what is happening in the outside world and what it is doing in the inner world. Disturbances to the vulnerable inner balance must be noticed immediately and 'defused'. In addition to all the emails and photos that come in, this involves cars with flashing lights in the parking lot in front of the work window; cars with flashing lights that follow along the way; men who walk past in front of the house or work window and make subtle finger gestures; certain farms where people are usually at the door when she drives home, with a cage in their hands or a certain hat on, attributes that have been used in certain tortures and therefore trigger certain parts. Perpetrators who call and say trigger words or texts, whether or not on the work phone which she has to answer. Two at a time they come to the door with a laptop in their hands, showing pictures of the perpetrator in order to create a shock effect. A number of times, however, someone broke into the workplace, pretending to be a handyman. Several times, also during my treatment, Esther is lured into a trap, raped, forced to swallow a pill, forced to promise to come at night.

But through all the struggles and relapses, two steps forward and one step back, the inner cooperation increases little by little. A very clear sign of progress is that the 'falling away', which she and her partner talked about at the intake and which I also experience on the phone several times when her partner calls for help in such a situation, no longer occurs after about a year.

Blackmail with torture of loved ones

After about two years of treatment, a new blackmail tool emerges for me, used by the perpetrators to lure my client back to them. They threaten to torture mother or others with whom my client has a relationship if she does not come at an agreed time. The desire to 'save' them proves strong and the urge this gives to give in to their demand to come anyway. Photographs of a loved one come while they are being tortured. Hung by chains, raped. Return and this will stop, is the message. First, the photos arrive in part Ilze's 'own' mailbox, to which other parts do not know the password. If she does not respond, the photos go to Esther's general mailbox. Ilze wants to hide the photos at all costs from the other parts, who can no longer work and educate if they know about this, is her fear. She starts negotiating with the cult, which creates dangerous situations.

With fits and starts, the remembering around this person gets underway in Esther's personality system, causing a lot of anxiety, guilt and grief. The illusion that she managed to keep this one safe has to be punctured. It is the only way to break the power of this blackmail tool of the cult. Ilze then no longer has to hide these photos at all costs from the other parts in their person. She no longer has to be constantly alert and remove the emails containing these photos from the mailbox in a timely manner. And, now that she can exchange about this with other personality parts, she can better understand that not responding to these photos and videos at all is the best way to stop this extra torture from him. This is a process that goes through trial and error

Attempted murder

As has been argued in this article, one of the main reasons why this cult and pedosexual network is so difficult to 'catch' is the fact that many of their victims are ingeniously 'programmed' through torture to keep returning 'of their own accord' to their offenders. Many therapists will recognize the powerlessness that this can evoke in themselves, but certainly also in the survivors and their environment.

The cult offenders, as I have noticed over the past three years, are very patient. They take as little risk as possible, continue to hunt for their prey, and wait for a weak moment when they can trigger frozen traumatic reactions strong enough to make the victim react so that he or she walks up to their car or van and gets in or drives to a location on their own.

After months of hunting Esther down, during which this was no longer possible, apparently their patience had run out. On December 3, 2020, I had her on the phone, helping her get home safely from work. It was already dark outside. Suddenly I heard 'nooooo' and the connection was broken. Twenty minutes later she appted me again. She was standing in a deserted parking spot, unable to drive. She told me that, at the moment of her 'noeeee' she was at a traffic light and someone had gotten into the back seat. With a knife at her throat, she was forced to drive to an abandoned parking spot nearby. He indicated he would kill her, but was disturbed when there was a knock on the side window of the car.

Esther herself described the detailed course of this apparent murder attempt in an open letter to her perpetrators, which can be found elsewhere on this website.

It was clear to her that the only protection she has - besides divine intervention - lies in the incriminating information she has about this criminal cult and paedon network. With her open letter, she has made it clear to her perpetrators that, in the event of the next physical violation of her or her loved ones, she will bring out incriminating information.

Esther goes on

My aim with this article was to give an impression of the enormous task facing victims of ongoing ritual abuse if they want to break free permanently from the cult and its associated paedosexual and porn network. Esther's struggle is not over yet. Much of the processing work she will have to do herself, but as every trauma therapist knows, processing severe trauma can only be done in connection with others. Not just with me, as the therapist, but also with a strong partner standing beside her and with a network of trusted people who can help and support practically. Practical help can take shape through hanging and maintaining cameras, riding along on the route from work to home, literally or through telephone support and through other practical help.

Some remarks about the treatment of Esther

Looking at the literature on trauma and dissociative identity disorder, a few things stand out:

First, with ongoing abuse, in the context of programmed DIS, stabilizing first and then processing is not an option. Processing must be done, and done very quickly, in order to stay out of the hands of the perpetrators. This makes a big demand on the flexibility and commitment of the therapist. In my opinion this process is not feasible with a therapy of 1 or 2 hours a week.

Secondly, processing works, in principle, according to the usual psychological mechanisms which we already know from trauma processing, only this one is much more complex because of the presence of expressly created self-defeating parts and the continual disturbance from outside. The principles, however, remain the same: Processing trauma stagnates if the client is not able or willing to admit all the unpleasant elements of the trauma. Whether it is about horrible images, murderous guilt or extreme shame, as long as this is kept away, the memory remains unprocessed. That is, the feelings associated with it are not extinguished or diminished, but the memory is kept in a "deep freeze" in the brain. Where, through nightmares or triggers in daily life, it sometimes suddenly forces its way into consciousness. This principle is exploited in this satanic and sadistic network in an extremely cunning way, as I wanted to show in this article.

Third, the cult is way ahead of us in their knowledge of DIS. It seems that the satanic cult has been perfecting their programming for at least almost three quarters of a century. Whether there are lines of cooperation with e.g. the CIA or whether they build upon knowledge that has been or is being gained there, is an important question. What is certain is that war criminals who were brought to the US after WWII have used their knowledge in the service of the CIA to develop mind control methods.[10]. It has been widely acknowledged that the CIA, in projects with names like BLUEBIRD and MKULTRA[11] has been guilty of serious crimes by performing experiments on people using means such as hypnosis, forced drug use and torture. Goals included creating multiple personality parts, causing total amnesia for a committed crime such as crashing an airplane, making people commit crimes against their own moral convictions. To illustrate, one of the questions asked in the BLUEBIRD experiment was: 'Can we create by post-H (post-hypnotic?) control an action contrary to the individual's basic moral principles?'[12] Although the CIA officially claims that these kinds of experiments are a thing of the past, at least one former CIA agent insists otherwise[13].

Whatever the relationship may be between the satanic cult and the knowledge developed by the CIA, it is clear to me from Esther's treatment that this satanic cult is very, very adept at abusing the ability of the human personality to split when tortured at a very young age. Partly due to the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, the research on DIS and programmed DIS in the 'normal' psychological world is still in its infancy.

To conclude

In short, there is work to be done. We need therapists who can provide long-term, intensive treatment to cult survivors and who, in the absence of sufficient knowledge, will dare to pioneer.

It is important that therapists do what they always do: assume that what clients say is true, unless the contrary has been proven beyond doubt. The fact that something is too horribly and ingeniously evil to be believed is insufficient reason to deviate from this principle. From many wars, terror regimes, and individual stories of mistreatment and abuse past and present, it is clear that humans are capable of any atrocity.

Insurers are needed who will provide money for this. Reliable, committed people are needed who are willing to offer a temporary place of refuge or who are willing to help with the many practical matters that are necessary. It requires awareness in society and in judicial circles that acquittal is just when crimes are committed under heavy coercion and blackmail and with a split personality. Society needs to be prepared to really listen to survivors and be willing to believe their story. Even if it means drastically and definitively shattering our illusion of a relatively safe Western world. The children of our society, some of whom grow up in a sadistic universe, are entitled to this.

'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, said the French philosopher Edmund Burke.' 'The children of darkness proceed with more deliberation than the children of light, said Jesus Christ.' It doesn't have to stay that way. The choice is ours.

[1] https://docplayer.nl/12949948-Rapport-van-de-werkgroep-ritueel-misbruik.html

[2] https://www.vpro.nl/argos/media/afleveringen/2018/Het-verhaal-van-Lisa.html

https://www.vpro.nl/argos/media/luister/argos-radio/onderwerpen/2019/mocht-haagse-rechter-oordelen-

   about-child-abuse-.html

https://www.vpro.nl/argos/media/afleveringen/2020/uitzending-27-juni-ritueel-misbruik.html

[3] https://www.fmsfonline.org/

[4] https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html

[5] See letters to the Lower House about the LEBZ, elsewhere on this website

[6] Miller, A. (2012), Healing the unimaginable, treating ritual abuse and Mind Control. London: Karnac Books

[7] Fisher, J. (2017), Distinguishing and uniting personality parts. Eeserveen! Man!

[8] A concept I borrow from Janine Fischer, see p. 95 in her book Overcoming inner self alienation after trauma. 2017, Eeserveen: publisher Mens!

[9] Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing is a method currently used by psychologists for processing traumatic memories. By asking specific questions the most unpleasant 'memory picture' of the traumatic event is retrieved from the working memory, together with the accompanying unpleasant thought. The assignment for the client is, with this picture as a starting point, to follow the feelings, thoughts, images or body sensations that present themselves from within, without eliminating anything. At the same time, a simple second task must be performed, usually following a moving light or listening to beeps through headphones. 

[10] Miller, A. Healing the unimaginable, p. 15-17

[11] https://www.thoughtco.com/mk-ultra-cia-mind-control-4174691consulted on 14 February 2021

[12] https://publicintelligence.net/cia-bluebird/consulted on 14 February 2021

[13] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK-ULTRAconsulted on 14 February 2021

Why I believe Esther

Mrs A. Terpstra-van Hijum, GZ-psychologist, 16 February 2021

Summary

"Why do you believe what Esther tells you?" is the question I am asked again and again when I tell about my treatment of Esther, who is breaking away from a large network of organised ritual violence. I do understand that question. Some 15 years ago, I might have asked the same question. In this article, I want to answer this question as concretely as possible. After the introduction and my insights on why believing someone like Esther is apparently so difficult for us, there follows a long list of reasons why I believe Esther. First, the reasons that stem directly from the treatment, then things I have experienced around Esther herself over the past 3-plus years that confirm her story. Finally, I briefly discuss testimonies from other victims and how they support Esther's story. Unfortunately, there are some reasons that I cannot mention, partly because they are so specific that they directly compromise Esther's privacy. But even without these reasons, the list is already long.

My deep hope is that this article will help, not only to make victims believe, but also to bring helping hands from all sides to expose and stop this horrible injustice.

Introduction

Why we can't believe victims like Esther

Nuance

Why I believe Esther: reasons from the treatment

Why I believe Esther: External Indications

Why I Believe Esther: Testimonies of Other Victims

Introduction

Many people have experienced as a child or as an adult how unpleasant it is when you have not done something (or done something) and you are not believed, no matter what you say or how loudly you shout. It makes you powerless and angry, and if it happens frequently or about important things, it damages your relationships with the people who don't believe you.

For Esther, and many victims of ritual abuse, this is the story of her life. In hundreds of ways, she was trained from an early age to never speak. As a result of long, repeated, purposeful and severe abuse and torture at a very young age, Esther developed a dissociative identity disorder (DIS): the personality split into several identities, each with its own 'I-awareness', that have a complete or partial loss of memory with regard to each other. In this article I use the term 'personality parts', other authors also use the term 'alters' or 'personalities'. 

The DIS made it even more difficult for her to ask for help from those around her. Whenever she did drop something about the abuse in ordinary life and thus - against all orders of silence - raised a cry for help, the adults around her dismissed it as fantasy.

In her teens, Esther starts treatment at the RIAGG because of - according to the RIAGG letter to the GP - physical complaints for which no medical explanation has been found. In addition, the parents' request for help is uncritically adopted in this letter, without nuance or addition: 'Parents ask for an investigation into the background of the untrue stories Esther tells them when she is registered'.

Eighteen months and suicide notes and a runaway attempt later, a clinic for child and adolescent psychiatry, where Esther was admitted, wrote as 'reason for admission': 'clinical observation in connection with a possible dissociative disorder NAO. The patient told all kinds of fantasy stories (about rape, pregnancies and abuse), ran away from home and wrote suicide notes of which she later denied the existence. It is shocking to see how the mental health service does not even seem to have considered the possibility that her baffling stories could be true. While they did consider dissociative disorder. Even back then, the last decade of the last century, it was- despite the recently unleashed memory war[1] This is not to say that there is no dissociative disorder, but rather that there is a widespread belief in psychologists that a dissociative disorder only arises as a result of very severe and long-lasting early childhood trauma. This makes it even less understandable that they did not take Esther's stories seriously.

Why we can't believe victims like Esther

The crimes that victims of ritual abuse like Esther tell about are so heinous that the world would rather not believe that they exist in our Western civilization. They are crimes on the level of IS and Jozef Mengele, but purposeful, prolonged, with great regularity and with the explicit secondary goal of pulling the wool over the eyes of the world about the existence of these crimes. In addition, in the testimony of many of them, including Esther, (very) high-ranking personalities play a prominent role in the network. Who then misuse their influence as minister, politician, judge, lawyer, professor, journalist, police chief or head of investigation in order to cover up these crimes. As Esther tells it, these high-ranking people did not get into these positions by accident. They help each other to get these positions and through mutual blackmail (photos of pedosexual crimes of each other) they are condemned to support each other at all costs. This saws the legs from under our entire vision of our reasonably just and reasonably safe democratic constitutional state. We need a revolution in our thinking about our society, a paradigm shift. There was a lot of evidence needed before the majority of people in the 16^e century came to the realization that the earth is round and not flat, as had been believed until then. Unfortunately, the majority of humanity did not believe in the existence of the holocaust until after it was over. What will it take to open our eyes to the extreme injustice of ritual abuse and the forces behind it?

Nuance

The fact that I believe Esther does not mean that I think Esther cannot be wrong in any detail (see point 5, which shows that she is wrong about her age).

When I say that I believe Esther, I mean that I believe that what she tells about her past really happened. And that what she tells about what is happening to her in the present is also true. Even if she were to make mistakes on a detailed level.

I invite you, the reader, to join me in thinking about what I encountered during my treatment of Esther and why I believe her testimony about these heinous crimes. First, the reasons directly related to the treatment.

Why I believe Esther: reasons from the treatment

The three years that I have been treating Esther intensively (since February 2018), during which I have gradually heard the most horrific stories about abuse in a network, can be summarized in a few words: authentic, consistent and supported by external evidence that her testimony is true. Below is a concretization from a treatment perspective

1. Principles of trauma processing also apply to Esther.

In trauma counseling, whether it is through writing, talking, EMDR or another tool, it is about looking all guilt (feelings), fear, powerlessness, pain, anger, shame or whatever emotion, straight in the eye and feeling it in the body. All thoughts and feelings that are then released need space and attention. Only then nightmares, flashbacks, disproportionate emotional reactions to daily events that are emotionally linked to the trauma and other trauma-related complaints will disappear.

In Esther's case this is no different. Because of the memory walls between the personality parts and because of the personality parts which have been conditioned to sabotage this process, bringing all the elements of a memory to the surface is a very complex and time-consuming process. But once these are to the surface, it is 'old school' trauma processing. And every time it turns out that looking into the eyes of the horrors calms the sabotaging personality parts, brings the personality parts closer together and reduces the stress in the body.

2. What Esther says is and remains internally consistent..

Esther's life story is incredibly complicated, but always internally consistent. I will give an example. As described before (link) the part that calls itself Esther is not present during the first 1,5 years in therapy. When I meet her after 1,5 years for the first time she has absolutely no knowledge of her enormous traumas. The only thing she knows is that she has lost hours, days, sometimes weeks of time. When she starts participating in the therapy process, she starts dreaming about her memories. The content of the dreams that she shares with me and writes down correspond to memories that I - in other words, but with the same content in detail - had heard before from other personality parts. And which those personality parts had often written down as well

Another example: because of the stratification of the personality, memories often have to go through a process of processing several times: first through deeper hidden parts of the personality in the consciousness and when the worst emotional charge is off, still through higher situated parts. These sometimes have their own part of the memory or their own aspects. This contradicts never told memories, but often expands them. Think of an old overhead projector. Every personality part (involved in this memory) is as it were a sheet on which a part of the total image is placed. The total picture is created by superimposing the sheets. By 'picture' we should not only think of the visual 'film' of the memory, but also of smell, taste, sounds and emotions and physical feelings.

3. Incomprehensible behavior toward me makes sense the more I know.

Behavior of personality parts that I cannot place at the beginning, becomes clearer and very understandable as parts dare to tell me more.

E.g. a sudden acute distrust of the personality part Ilze. Seemingly without any reason at all, she suddenly closes all doors: 'I don't talk to you anymore, you talk to others about me, you're not honest, etc.'. Whatever I say, I suddenly don't succeed anymore in helping her to tell what is going on and why she suddenly shuts herself off from me.

In hindsight, days but sometimes weeks or months later, she sometimes lets slip something of what was going on then. It's always about the cult that tried to torpedo our fragile bond of trust: by having her call in a so-called conversation where I report to the cult; a (deep fake?) video recording of me telling the media about her forced crimes, a 'photo' she got of me talking to one of her abusers.

Another example of behavior that is incomprehensible to me at first is a child part that shoots into a cramped position with its hands over its ears, rocking itself back and forth. When an older child tells me that she has remembered the sound of the saw, with which a bigger part had to work on another child, I can understand what I saw before.

4. I'm immediately corrected if I misremember a detail.

I am careful not to fill in anything myself at all, but to let everything come from personality parts themselves. It regularly happens that I have already heard something from personality part A. about a particular memory. Then, when I talk to personality part B about the same memory or recent event, I sometimes repeat something I heard from part A to help B get over the threshold of telling her piece. If I have misremembered something, I am immediately corrected, e.g. 'no Dirk was not standing when that man held me on the bed, Dirk was sitting on a chair in the corner. '

5. GP's file confirms on several points what Esther told me much earlier

After 2 years of therapy, Esther changes doctor and asks for her (thick) file. What she had told me earlier about a police report, running away from home and clinical admission at an adolescent age, all appears to be confirmed by this file. Apart from a not quite correct year: according to the GP file, Esther was 14 at the time and not 12, as she told me.

What is also true are the frequent seizures, which she has suffered from for a long time. The file shows that in the early adolescence, but also later on (when she came to me for treatment) she sometimes suddenly faints. She does not react anymore when people talk to her. She is described as having a shaking upper body, her legs trembling slightly, her tongue often between her teeth, her eyes closed or half open, her body is limp. The frequency is up to 10 times a day and the attacks can last from 15 minutes up to hours.

She has been to the ER several times and was once admitted to a special ward for a longer period. Conclusion was 'pseudo-epileptic seizures' and years later in a neurology department 'functional seizures'.[2].

6. The existence of multiple personality parts I see with my own eyes

By no means can I observe all switches between personality parts. Switching between adult personality parts is often very subtle and I often infer mainly from what the parts I am talking to know or do not know. Child parts that are suddenly triggered is a different story: suddenly jumping up in acute panic and diving away into a cupboard in a way that looks painful; subsequently, I cannot get through to that part for a while; a part that suddenly collapses, literally staring ahead with its hands in its hair and completely blank stare and appears acutely panicked by the ticking of my clock; a part that wiggles anxiously back and forth with a thumb in its mouth and can only indicate something with nods and shakes, are just a few examples of child parts that come across very authentically. Added to this, the partner sometimes encounters the same personality parts, with similar behaviour.

7. The treatment has an effect

Last but not least, the treatment has an effect. The 'disappearing' that regularly occurred at the start of treatment gradually decreased during the first year and then almost disappeared. The frequency and severity of self-harm (cuts in the arms, thighs and groin) decreases and virtually stops after the second year of treatment.

Through trial and error, they work better and better together inside. This makes Esther as a 'whole' less and less susceptible to the lies and manipulations of the cult. Automatic reactions of personality parts, learned during torture, stop after processing. As a result, there is less and less response to commands from cult members, transmitted through flashing car lights, emails, men outside giving finger language commands. The result is far fewer new traumas like rape and new torture.

The cooperation between the personality parts also makes 'ordinary things' possible, such as calling in sick for a day if things really don't go well. At the beginning of the treatment this was unthinkable, because the parts that were working couldn't bear it. Now that these parts know more about the struggle of other parts that are being harassed by the cult, they are able to think more flexibly. The ability to feel and enjoy several 'big' parts is also increasing. Enjoying the green and the sun outside is a new experience. After almost 3 years of treatment I see real tears for the first time.

In addition to all these reasons why I believe Esther, which stem from the treatment, there are also many external indications that her testimony is true.

Why I believe Esther: External Indications

1. Threatening emails with torture pictures and texts that I receive and the fear that this evokes in Esther.

About a year after Esther comes to my treatment, I receive an email with a death threat if I do not release her within 3 days. In the following 2 years, I receive similar texts with some regularity, later with pictures in increasing degrees of horror: a photo of the face of a woman apparently dying of injuries, photos of sexual torture, a naked woman tied to a steel bed with a bucket for defecation, naked women in all sorts of positions hung from trees or with their heads in the ground, a coffin, a gory photo of a horribly raped woman, photos of a girl being raped by a dog, photos of a woman completely wrapped in plastic except for her genitals, a teenager in agony in a cell-like room, a girl (lookalike of my daughter) with a meat hook hanging from her neck, a woman impaled on a pole, etcetera. Thereby - usually in rhyme form - threatening texts like "which of your children shall I choose?". Because of the gruesomeness - and so as not to give cause for censorship - I cannot post by far most of them here. Some of them have been seen by 2 journalists, Wierd Duk of the Telegraaf and Hans Zuurman of the Nederlands Dagblad.

In addition, I get a number of threatening emails with obscure illustrations and one with an animated film of a cartoon-like figure beheading someone, which I can publish here without risk of censorship.

In some parts of Esther's personality, the fact that I receive such mails evokes extreme fear. Only in the course of the months I start to understand better why. There are a number of reasons

1. The fear that I would 'see who she really is' (a whore, which has been said to her endlessly in all kinds of tones) and therefore reject her or stop helping her. 
2. The fear that pictures will be sent where she has sex or has to rape or kill. She tells me how the cult keeps threatening to do this. Again enormous shame, guilt and the fear that I will stop helping if such pictures are sent to me
3. The fear that I will go to the police if I were to get perpetrator photos of her. The cult seems to actively push for this several times, when they send pictures every day for a week in increasing horror.

2. Threatening emails with torture pictures and texts sent to people in the support network further down the line, and the enormous anxiety that this also causes in some of my client's personality parts

The fears of these parts are the same as above, but even more intense because the images now go to more people, whom she knows less about than she knows me. Who also know less about her than I know by now and have yet to see the horrifically evil and sadistic methods in which she has been made a co-perpetrator.

On top of that, the cult always throws a spanner in the works. Often she receives an e-mail with the same title as us, but with a different picture. For example the title is 'your fault'. Esther receives a perpetrator picture of herself. The network and I receive the said picture with the same title (see here) of a toddler suggesting that it had been raped and that it was our fault.

Sometimes it is more direct. An email to network friends with a photo and the title: "sinful, right?" explicitly has the text:

"If only this were the only thing, but alas.
Murder and mayhem. She's the boss.
She's not a sweetheart, I have proof of that.
Ilze shall I send it? Or will you be frightened now?"

Each time there is the huge fear that this time the cult really did send a picture of her. Maybe not to all of them, but to one of them. Every time again, the personality system is in turmoil about this for days. I agree with the network friends that everyone will forward the emails to me. I check all attachments and tell Ilze exactly what was in each email and what picture was attached to it. This helps a little

In May 2020, the cult starts a mail offensive: for over a week, the network of friends, Esther's partner and myself receive almost daily mail with dark texts and pictures or satanic symbols. A toddler nibbling on a seemingly severed hand, a corpse in decomposition, a toddler in a forest, a man dressed in black with a knife threatening next to him, etc. It starts with 'day 7' and counts down to the 'final day'. Sometimes a day is skipped and not every day the mail is sent to the entire network. This is clearly meant to feed the distrust and fear of the Ilze-personality part extra: why hasn't network friend Kevin sent anything to Aline today while all the others have? Is he holding something back? Did he get something different than the others? Is he now on his way to the police with it?

Around Halloween 2020 they try another such mail offensive, this time for 14 days. It starts on the 18th of October, an email with the title 'because of you number 1', a picture of a 4 year old girl with her throat cut and the text 'every day 1 as long as you stop her'. After that a daily mail with 'by you number 2' until 'by you number 14' on the 31st of October. Each time a picture of a horribly tortured human being was added, from fetus to adult in all kinds of positions.  

The psychological game that is played with these horrible mails is cunningly malicious and almost flawlessly attuned to the (for them apparently predictable) reactions of various personality parts of Esther. From part Ilze I also hear how through the mail she is taunted with texts like that they will succeed in getting her friends to report her to the police.

3. The forged mails that I eventually get, which makes me understand the distrust towards the man in the support network. Later the same trick is used with a man from the new network

Another type of e-mail that sometimes comes in and of which I only gradually understand the reason, from a cult point of view, are e-mails with titles such as "party, are you in?" or "reply 9 p.m.". They are a kind of invitation to join their orgy. Only much later I understand that they use these mails to put together a fakemail towards Ilze. This seems to be a forwarded mail from e.g. male network member Folkert who confirms or submissively responds to the cult that he will definitely come. The cult then sends this 'for info' to Ilze with the invitation to come then and there (location in code language) to see for herself that this is really true.

What happens then within the personality system of Esther, is that her Ilz part panics: there is someone in her network who is in the power of the cult! That Folkert seemed so nice and helped doesn't say anything, after all, so did her uncles and so many others. Who also could turn around like a leaf on a tree. She doesn't dare share this with other personality parts and keeps this information within her 'memory walls'. Something seeps through to other parts, but more in a diffuse uncanny feeling towards Folkert, which they cannot place.

I also notice that the attitude towards this person has changed. Small mistakes (responding late, just not the right tone), which are always awkward, now become very big. Only when Ilze plucks up the courage to forward the forged mail to me (which looks very real indeed), do the pieces of the puzzle fall back into place for me. When Ilze moves and we try to build a new network in the new place, a similar trick is tried with another male network member. This time, Ilze dares to be much more open about the forged email the cult sent her, and that chill is out of the air relatively quickly.

4. The pill-testing agency does not know the drugs that part of Esther indicates she used daily through the cult for 24 years , well.

In the beginning of treatment, part of Esther appears to have been made addicted to pills from a young age (8 years old) (link to treatment article). When we struggle to find a way to have this tested anonymously (2018), it turns out to be 2 CB fly. The person testing it writes the following about this:

There is not much to say about the distribution of the drug. The drug has been around for a long time in the Netherlands and was legal until 1997. In that year it was placed on list 1 and it is sold in the illegal circuit. 2C-B is not a very common drug and is seen much less often than XTC, cocaine or cannabis. 2C-B is mainly used by young people as part of a group of substances categorized as NPS (New Psychoactive Substances), although as an illegal substance 2C-B does not formally fall under this category.

In this case we're talking about 2C-B fly, a much less common variant of this drug; I hadn't seen this variant before in the 15 years I've been involved with (name of organization).'

The fact that it is such an unknown drug makes it more likely that it is supplied by a club outside the 'normal' drugs trade. Because the craving for the drug is sometimes extremely strong even after it has been discontinued, a number of Esther's personality parts decide at some point to order 2 CB-fly via the Internet as an emergency measure. This is to prevent the vulnerable personality part from going back to the cult because of craving. These pills turn out to be a disappointment in comparison with the cult pills: they work less powerfully and differently.

The literature indicates that this is a drug, belonging to the group of psychostimulants, which is normally used incidentally. There is no information about the effects or possible withdrawal symptoms when this drug is used daily for decades. There is however information that the drug also increases sexual desires. The psychiatrist who supervises the withdrawal, notes that the fear and emotional pain increase considerably during the withdrawal process.

5. GP record shows a lifelong pattern of a range of apparently incoherent physical symptoms, which become understandable when trauma history is involved

The general practitioner's file shows that Esther has had a wide range of complaints over the course of her life, such as periods of continuous vaginal bleeding, hernia's, fainting and passing out, problems with her stool, urinary tract infections as a toddler, hearing problems, problems with her locomotor system (neurologist: 'complex picture, certainly in view of her age and no previous tumours') and premature births.

Various studies have shown[3] It is now known that chronic early childhood and repeated trauma, due to changes in the immune and hormonal systems, has all kinds of physical and long-term consequences. Repeated urinary tract infections, vaginal bleeding, and problems with defecation are not strange if you are regularly raped vaginally and anally. Unexplained problems in the musculoskeletal system are easily understood as conversion, where the brain, as a result of extreme stress, temporarily or permanently blocks the functioning of bodily functions.

6. GP file shows multiple outpatient mental health treatments and multiple periods of inpatient admissions, consistent with DIS and ongoing traumatization

It is striking that the possible diagnosis of Dissociative Disorder NAO is mentioned in the GP's file at a young age (14 years), as well as the diagnosis of conversion disorder (15 years, 17 years). The latter because of the extreme convulsions that can last for hours at a time. Unfortunately, the file does not show that at any given moment extensive research into DID was started, followed by a subsequent treatment. What is striking is the multitude of different psychiatric diagnoses and the totally different views that the therapists have on what is going on. This is a fact that frequently occurs with patients with DID. The clinical admissions concern a long stay at the age of 14 after she ran away from home and suicide notes were found; at the age of 16 a one week stay in a hospital because of feverishness, diagnosed as conversion; at the age of 17 an admission of more than two weeks for research because of falling away, after a number of emergency admissions during a holiday abroad.

7. Indirectly, I am very regularly witness to cars that follow her - usually with flashing lights - on the bumper or are parked near her work with flashing lights for a long time.

I am present by phone when cars follow and signal with lights and sometimes I am sent pictures or a short film recording immediately.

While driving she often passes on license plates of cars with flashing lights behind her, often these are cars with brands like Tesla or Mercedes. When I unexpectedly accompany her by video call instead of by phone, I see the flashing lights of the next car for about 20 minutes.

8. Also her husband sends me pictures of the following cars when he is on the road with Esther

Sometimes the partner is also present in the car when cars are following. Sometimes he sends a video or photo of this. A number of times, these are cars with a code written on the side window or windshield that has meaning for parts of Esther's personality.

9. Esther or her partner sends me photos of men hanging around the house or at her workplace

Very anxious personality parts regularly apprise me of offenders hanging around outside the window at work or on the bench in the park across from home. In doing so, the offenders sometimes make finger signals that are meaningful to these personality parts. If I get permission from this part - which is not always possible - to share this information with a 'higher' daily life part, this always turns out to be correct. Sometimes this 'higher' personality part dares to make a photo. What I heard earlier from the fearful part always turns out to be correct: the place where the person was standing or how he/she looked.

10. I'm pretty sure a car is following her around on purpose.

After an evening appointment I walk with the client to her car. From my office she can follow two routes in the direction of her home. Just as she is leaving, I see a parked car break away from the row of cars, quickly turn 180 degrees and follow Esther at great speed. Her partner accompanies Esther on the app during the journey home, for safety reasons. Indeed, it turns out that Esther is being followed by a car with flashing lights. She passes on the number plate; when I google the number plate, the car model appears to match the car I saw following her.

11. I notice remarkably strange behaviour in some men when I am with Esther on the street or in a restaurant.

Because a cult member seems to hang around my office when she visits me (I observe this person's strange behavior myself), we meet a number of times in a McDonalds or other catering establishment, or in corona time even once in a parking lot. During these meetings I observe striking behavior in 'random passers-by'. For instance, I see two men entering the McDonalds, one of whom turns around without any reason and stares at Esther for seconds with cold eyes. This repeats itself when he leaves. I see a lorry driver in the parking lot staring intrusively at the car in which we are sitting and then staring at the sky, this repeats itself.

12. the purse with drugs that I find in my garden on April 22, 2019. As I learn more about the cult's methods of treatment, I understand why that wallet was there and why it contained what was in it.

Wallet, the initials at the bottom right are cut from the picture

Our bi-weekly appointments are always at the same time and day. When unexpectedly an appointment falls through, my husband and I go to work in our garden on Monday, April 22, 2019. My husband finds, neatly tucked under the leg of a fence along the adjacent path, a bright red wallet that turns out to be full of all kinds of drugs. We are highly surprised: who would leave a stash of drugs for someone else so conspicuously? The path is sandwiched between our garden and the back of a police station, which is equipped with cameras. It strikes me that the wallet lies exactly on the spot where both police cameras are pointing at it. I don't understand a thing, until my eye catches the initials on the wallet: those of Esther.

At that moment a personality part is in the middle of the withdrawal of 2B-fly, but to my surprise those pills are not in it. Esther does recognize the wallet as hers, she had lost it for years.

During the treatment I get more insight in the way the cult tries to undermine her trust in people who help her. They try to make me look bad towards her (I talk with the press about her, talk behind her back with people from the cult about her, etc., see point 3). This action fits into that as well. I think their plan A was to take advantage of a weak moment of Ilze, the personality part that was in rehab just then. I suspect that the intention was to send her a text message or something like that after she left my house where they had prepared drugs for her, namely on the edge of my garden. If she had then gone to get them, they had later threatened her that they had film footage of her and threatened to send it to me if she did not come to them or stop coming to me, etc. When I later presented this hypothesis to Ilze, she said that in that case she would certainly never have dared to come back to me.

The cult likes to leave little to chance, so I suspect there was also a plan B: if I found the wallet, it would give me the impression that Esther is a poly-drug user and a liar. Perhaps that would cast doubt on her intentions on my part and I'd pull my hands away from her.

13. The box that was delivered to her work, which supposedly contained her son's finger.

On July 28, 2020, I have a personality part of Esther in great panic at night on the app. It happens more often that the cult threatens to torture her adult son if she does not obey an order to come. This time, they send her a picture of a severed finger. It is said to be her son's finger, which will be delivered to her at work tomorrow.

The fear is so great that I can't manage to help this personality part share the burden with other personality parts inside. Reassuring her that this is too risky an action for the cult and that the photo is probably not of his finger doesn't really help either. I agree to drive past her work the next morning, when the mail has arrived. When I drive by her work the next morning, I find that there was indeed a box waiting for her at the reception desk. The fear is enormous. The box turns out to be empty, except for a printed photograph of a decomposing corpse.

14. the assassination attempt (see letter to perpetrators) after which I pick Esther up in the parking lot, and Esther's reaction to that

On December 3, I have Esther on the phone at around 17:00 while she is on her way home from work. Suddenly I hear 'noeeeeee' and the connection is broken. Only after some time I get back in touch with Esther and she tells me how they tried to kill her.

When I finally find Esther at the parking lot where she was left, it turns out that she can no longer drive herself because her body is shaking. Her 'normal' ability after a trauma to switch acutely to another personality part, who knows nothing, no longer works. Just like any other human being who has been cut with a knife and almost killed, her body is in shock and cannot function for a while.

15. The pictures the partner sends me in the evening of the wounds from it (incised cult symbols on belly, back and buttock).

Because I know how great the shame is, and how difficult it is already for Esther to allow me to help her after the attempted murder, I do not ask Esther on the spot to show me her wounds. In the evening, her partner sends me photos of the wounds: inverted crosses and an inverted cross in a triangle. About a week later, Esther herself shows me the scar on her belly.

0. Finally, there is no reason not to believe her

In Esther I meet an intelligent, well-groomed woman with a good job and a beautiful family, which she runs with her partner. On the face of it, she has a good life, excellent social skills, looks good and has everything that makes life worth living. I can't think of a single reason why she would purposefully come up with an unimaginably complex horrific history, spending hours a day wrestling with it and writing it down. At the expense of a lot of fun and nice things she can't do with the people she loves as a result. In addition, she would have to use all kinds of men to support her in order to give me, her partner and a colleague the impression that she is being watched over. She would have to arrange this on an almost daily basis, for years. She would have to send emails to herself, me and her support network with horrific pictures of torture and then fake extremely well that she is utterly panicked about what she herself is receiving and about me and others getting these kinds of emails.

Esther is not the only victim who receives threatening emails. In the broadcast of Argos about ritual abuse, the mother-in-law of Marinke tells about threatening emails that Marinke receives, which she could not send herself. 

If Esther were to come up with everything herself, she would also have to use cars to follow her around with flashing lights, several times a week, for years on end. She and her partner can just about make ends meet by working two part-time jobs, but that's about it.

She would have to have put together the attempted murder of her, including the agony I saw and felt when I found her in the abandoned parking lot. She would have had to have self-inflicted the wounds of which I saw the photos and at one the scar. That's kind of awkward on your back.

She would have to have invented that she was addicted or have been addicted to a drug that was quite unknown in the Netherlands. She must have faked the 'falling away' from her teenage years onwards, but in such a way that all kinds of doctors wrote down observations about it and she was even hospitalized for it for a longer period. After that she must have consciously chosen, during her therapy with me, to stop.

She would have to very convincingly fake amnesia between an enormously complex system of personality parts, meticulously remember all the bits of memory (which bit belongs to which part etc), which I can barely manage with an extensive file already. She would have to keep that up for 3 years in a completely consistent way to me, and to her partner for 7 years. What her partner tells me about certain personality parts, which for example are briefly present at night, always fits with what I already know about these parts or at least does not conflict with it.

In short, as C.S. Lewis in his famous Narnia Chronicles has the Professor say to 2 children who think their sister is lying about the existence of the land of Narnia, which the other two children have not seen for themselves:

'Think logically!' said the Professor half to himself:'Why don't they teach those children in those schools to think logically? There are only three possibilities in this case. Either your sister is lying, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she never lies and it is obvious to see that she is not crazy. So at this point, and while we have no further evidence, we do have to assume that she is telling the truth."

And then there are the many, many testimonies of other victims who confirm Esther's story. 

Why I Believe Esther: Testimonies of Other Victims

Esther is certainly not the only one who tells about satanic ritual abuse. In my direct environment as a social worker I know directly or indirectly 13 persons who tell stories that show striking similarities with Esther's. These are clients of direct colleagues about whom I work in peer review, victims or relatives who contacted me after my interview. They are clients of direct colleagues who I work with in peer review groups, victims or next of kin who contacted me after my interview in the Dutch daily newspaper, and family caregivers who in one way or another have a caring role for a victim. I hear similarities when it comes to the traumas these people struggle with, including being forced to watch murder or to murder themselves, death by stoning, having to run naked through the woods as a little girl while rich people hunt you down, small children who are hanged, description of a torture instrument that I recognize from one of the photos I received as a threatening email, traumatic reactions to seeing certain well-known persons on television, etc.

At the annual symposia of the Knowledge Centre on Transgenerational Violence, I also speak to colleagues who treat many clients with similar stories. Argos conducted research and received a response from no less than 140 victims of organised pedosexual and ritual abuse. That is in the Netherlands alone. Also on the internet you can find many testimonies of victims of ritual abuse from all kinds of western countries, some of which show striking similarities with what Esther tells me.

Maybe not all of these testimonies are true, I don't know these people personally. It is a fact that one of the tactics of the satanscult, following the serpent in the Garden of Eden, is sowing confusion by mixing truth and lies. It would surprise me if the satanic cult has not put testimonies on internet itself that seem real, but on closer investigation don't (can't) be true. A very cunning tactic to make the testimonies that are true, seem implausible.

Also internationally, when I read the work of colleagues, I recognize many of the cult strategies they encounter in helping their clients. Noteworthy is Ellen Lactor, an american therapist who writes very good articles about forced crimes in the context of organized ritual abuse, see http://endritualabuse.org/.

There's an article on her website, http://endritualabuse.org/empirical-and-forensic-evidence-of-ritual-abuse/ in which she provides an impressive list of many studies done over the years in all kinds of countries in Western europe among sometimes large groups of children and adults who tell about ritual abuse. Some in the context of child care centers, others in the context of intergenerational ritual abuse. The similarities in the many testimonies and the number of children and adults involved are shocking.

In short, every reason to believe Esther and other victims and to extend a big, firm and persistent helping hand. Which journalists, politicians, judges, lawyers, fellow therapists are willing to look into this and contribute their stone to stopping this extreme injustice in our Western civilization?

[1]                     https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html

[2]                     For general information on what is meant by a functional seizure, see https://www.stichtingfns.nl/

[3]                     see for example the following summary https://ggz.nl/deskundigen-aan-het-woord-vroegkinderlijke-chronische-traumatisering