Before False Memories

my friend was involved with a woman, Judith Peterson, who was in private practice and was prosecuted for inducing false memories of satanic cult victimization which led to a high profile court case (multiple counts of insurance fraud mainly). She worked at the Dissociative Unit at Spring Shadows and 'imported' at least one patient from Chicago, held her in involuntary commitment and dismantled her entire family. Her focus was that the patients who had been abused in Satanic cults didn't remember it, but would if restrained for "abreactions" and other sorts of 'therapeutic techniques'.--need reference for this

Spring Shadows Glen in Houston was one of my personal rehab sites (Charter in the Woodlands, the other) and I received excellent care there. I was not treated by the dissociative crew although one of them that I knew socially suggested to me that I had been sexually abused. When I asked her why she thought that, she replied vaguely, "you act like it".  The hospital was closed by the state of Texas in 1992 following the investigation of the Dissociative Unit.

Spring Shadows Glen and here

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Below text taken from: Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults By Mark Pendergrast

retrieved from http://www.rickross.com/reference/satanism/satanism14.html on 9/16/12

    Mark Pendergrast kindly posts this excerpt from the second 
    edition of his book,

                          VICTIMS OF MEMORY
                        (Upper Access, 1996)

                          From the chapter,
             "Multiple Personalities and Satanic Cults."

           [Among the 5 recently indicted in Houston were 
           Judith Peterson, Ph.D. and Richard Seward, M.D.]

  Another alarming example of MPD treatment in Texas was revealed in a recent article by Sally McDonald in the Journal of Psychosocial Nursing. Psychiatric nurse McDonald discusses how MPD specialist Judith Peterson, called "Dr. M." in the article, came to Houston's Spring Shadows Glen Hospital in 1990 to head the new dissociative disorders unit. McDonald's article makes startling assertions. 


Completely supported by new medical director Dr. Richard Seward, and by the hospital administration -- because her patients brought in $15,600 a day -- Peterson instituted a virtual reign of terror on the ward, according to McDonald. Peterson subscribed to Bennett Braun's methodology, hypnotizing patients and convincing them to relive supposedly forgotten traumas. She believed that virtually every patient harbored multiple personalities formed during satanic cult
abuse. "One young patient was placed in nine-point mechanical restraints for three days, " McDonald writes, "not because he was a threat to himself or others . . . but because those three days coincided with some satanic event."

 
"Then, in the last week of February, 1993, Medicare officials arrived for a routine hospital inspection. Within hours, they brought in Texas health
authorities, and on March 19, the dissociative unit was closed. Two
patients walked outside for the first time in two years."


"She is no longer so sure that her patients were actually involved in satanic ritual abuse cults. Rather, the ritual abuse may have been used "as a screen and creator of terror. Underneath it, in terms of complex alter layers, is organized crime." In other words, she believes that criminal gangs intentionally terrified her patients,often making them mistakenly believe that murders had taken place. "They have ways of tricking people; they're given drugs, and they're terrified and confused." The crime groups do this in order to produce "synthetic alters" who will act in pornographic films or become prostitutes. Other patients, she thinks, were thus treated by the Ku Klux Klan.

Of course, Peterson cannot tell for sure whether these memories are accurate. "My patients tell me very bizarre stories." She simply listens. "I'm a guide, asking `What happened next?' I don't lead them." Yes, she has heard stories of murdered babies. "It doesn't particularly matter if it's true or not. I wasn't there. The dilemma of true or not true is up to them." Of one thing she is certain, though: "These people don't make up the terror; that's pretty hard to do. They also don't make up the electric shocks. They have body memories of them." That accounts for the pseudo-seizures. "

"I've spent timeless moments, hours, days and years listening to those with souls that were shattered. I moved from being a therapist who thought incest was the worst thing imaginable, to hearing of abuses so unimaginable that I walked out of therapy sessions stunned.. . . . Sometimes I would just cry over the range and extent of human cruelty. There are no words to express what I have felt as I have heard people describe everything from having a broom handle stuffed up their anus to having their teeth electrically shocked. I have listened to a mother describe how she tied her small child to the bars of a crib before putting something in every orifice of the body a rag already in the mouth to prevent screaming. I've listened to descriptions of electroshock on a baby and the baby's seizures."


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http://www.smwane.dk/content/category/6/23/31/

http://www.fmsfonline.org/carl.html

http://www.rickross.com/reference/satanism/satanism14.html

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