Becoming Yourself Quotes

“The child who attends school does not remember the abuse that happens at home or via the family; those memories are held in another part of the child's mind. The child does not even remember abuse that happened the preceding night.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim.p324”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Although it is important to be able to recognise and disclose symptom of physical illnesses or injury, you need to be more careful about revealing psychiatric symptoms. Unless you know that your doctor understands trauma symptoms, including dissociation, you are wise not to reveal too much. Too many medical professionals, including psychiatrists, believe that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia, that mood swings mean bipolar disorder which has to be medicated, and that depression requires electro-convulsive therapy if medication does not relieve it sufficiently. The “medical model” simply does not work for dissociation, and many treatments can do more harm than good... You do not have to tell someone everything just because he is she is a doctor. However, if you have a therapist, even a psychiatrist, who does understand, you need to encourage your parts to be honest with that person. Then you can get appropriate help.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“This book is dedicated to those who have died as a result of mind control and/or ritual abuse, and those who have lived when they would rather have died.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Most organised abuser groups call each particular training a “programme”, as if you were a computer. Many specific trained behaviours have “on” and “off” triggers or switches. Some personality systems are set up with an inner world full of wires or strings that connect switches to their effects. These can facilitate a series of actions by a series of insiders. For example, one part watches the person function in the outside world, and presses a button if he or she sees the person disobeying instructions. The button is connected to an internal wire, which rings a bell in the ear of another part. This part then engages in his or her trained behaviour, opening a door to release the pain of a rape, or cutting the person's arm in a certain pattern, or pushing out a child part. So the watcher has no idea of who the other part is or what she or he does. These events can be quite complicated.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Many ritually abusive cults deliberately divide the personality system down the middle of the head, making sure that there is no communication between the two sides. “Left side" parts might be instructed to speak to no one other than the perpetrators.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Over centuries, organised perpetrator groups have observed and studied the way in which extreme childhood traumas, such as accidents, bereavement, war, natural disasters, repeated hospitalisations and surgeries, and (most commonly) child abuse (sexual, physical, and emotional) cause a child's mind to be split into compartments. Occult groups originally utilised this phenomenon to create alternative identities and what they believed to be “possession” by various spirits. In the twentieth century, probably beginning with the Nazis, other organised groups developed ways to harm children and deliberately structure their victims' minds in such a way that they would not remember what happened, or that if they began to remember they would disbelieve their own memories. Consequently, the memories of what has happened to a survivor are hidden within his or her inside parts.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed" has been implanted by rape.
Ch29, p324”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days.

Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while.

Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“We worked through the “alien abduction” memory and discovered that the “spaceship” was parked in the courtyard of the cult training centre. An insider had been instructed that if the survivor began to remember the ritual abuse, she was to make her remember the alien abduction, so that nobody would believe her account of the ritual abuse. This programme did not work in this case, but you can imagine the larger consequences of such a ruse.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Deliberately placed triggers for learned behaviours (programmes)
Although all abuse and trauma survivors may be “triggered” into intrusive flashbacks by present-day experiences that remind them of the trauma, the triggers deliberately installed by mind controllers are different, in that they are cues for conditioned behaviours. Some of these are behaviours such as going home, going outside (where someone is waiting), coming to the person who uses the trigger, or switching to a particular insider. Others are psychiatric symptoms such as flashbacks, self-harm, or suicide attempts, which are actually punishments given by insiders for disobedience or disloyalty. For many survivors, every trigger causes a switch to a part programmed to perform a particular behaviour associated with that trigger. For others, the front person remains present in the world but has an irresistible compulsion to perform the behaviour.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. (Ben Okri, Nigerian poet and novelist)”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Booby traps or fail-safes
Booby traps or fail-safes are dangerous internal events that are triggered to happen if the survivor investigates too much of his or her own training, and/or talks about or becomes aware of memories he or she (the front person) is not supposed to know. The effects of booby traps include such things as suicide attempts, serious self-harm, or falling into terrible depression. It is important to know that the overwhelming emotions experienced when a booby trap is set off actually belong to real, specific memories. A booby trap can be set off without the knowledge of the main outside personality. Because of such traps, it is very important to go very slowly in discovering what happened, if you are a survivor of this kind of abuse. Even though parts of you are involved in setting off the booby traps, they may not know the effects of what they are doing (pushing buttons, turning switches, and so forth), and it might be difficult to anticipate what will happen.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Do not show favouritism
Remember that it is very important to treat all parts with equal kindness; do not pick favourites. Every part is there for a purpose, and is an important part of the system. So, for instance, do not be afraid of hostile parts. It has been said that every persecutor is a misguided protector. Its protector job was important and necessary when it first developed, but it can be a handicap later in life when your needs are different. Most hostile insiders are using anger to protect vulnerable parts inside, usually younger children. If they seem dangerous, talk with them at first through another alter. But if you act scared, you will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Watch outfor good kid–bad kid dichotomies. You need to appreciate all your parts, just as they all need to accept one another.”
― Alison miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Punishment symptoms Many of the other types of programming produce psychiatric symptoms, usually administered as punishments by insiders who are trained to administer them, if the survivor has breached security or disobeyed the abusers' instructions in other ways. These symptoms serve a variety of purposes, such as disrupting therapy, getting the survivor into hospital, or getting the survivor to return to the perpetrators to have the programming reinforced.
p126”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Spinner parts, who do not themselves become dizzy, have the job of spinning internally to send out feelings or impulses to all the other parts, the main person, or a group of selected parts. Many of the “booby traps" or “fail-safe" programmes involve spinning. Often, when a programme (that is, a particular training) is in operation, the survivor feels dizzy, as though something or someone is “spinning" inside his or her head. If this is happening to you, you can speak to the spinner and ask that part to stop spinning or to slow down the spin. If this does not work, ask to speak with whoever is making the spinner part spin.
This strategy, of working up through the chain of command, applies to mind control treatment recovery in general. Another tactic you can use is to ask the spinner to spin in the opposite direction, which will often put away whatever is being spun. If permitted by those in charge, a spinner can also replace whatever lesson is being spun with something positive, such as a feeling of calmness, taken from a positive memory.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“As soon as realized that I was treating MPD clients, I read the few existing books on the condition, attended a workshop at the Justice Institute, and used some sexual abuse prevention money to organize a workshop where therapists could exchange information and educate each other about dissociation. There, I learnt something that I found really shocking. Many people suffering from MPD had been severely abused throughout their childhood years by organized groups, including Satanic and other "dark-side” religious cults. Moreover, quite a few of them were still involved in those groups, although they were not aware of their involvement, because it was other "personalities"—dissociated parts of them—who went off to the groups’ rituals. I was skeptical, to say the least.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Threateners and punishers.
The structured personality system of a mind control survivor is always protected by a security system. The observers and reporters watch any parts who are “out” in the body, and sometimes those who speak to one another internally. They report to others in the hierarchy, who then issue threats and order punishments to be administered by those parts who are trained to punish. Punishments include such things as flashbacks, flooding of unbearable emotions, painful body memories, self-harm, suicide attempts, and flooding of memories in which the survivor perpetrated against others. Each insider who punishes has his or her place in the hierarchy, and if he or she fails to do the assigned job, a backup will do it while the disloyal punisher himself experiences punishment or is banished. Parts who believe themselves to be soldiers or guards are common in mind-controlled (including ritually abused) systems, and, like real soldiers, they are trained to both obey the abusers' instructions and enforce obedience in other parts.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Shortly after I began work with Teresa, I acquired another MPD client, a supposedly schizophrenic young man I will call Tony. He called in to the clinic on a day I was on telephone duty, saying he was having flashbacks of "ritual abuse.” I did not yet know what that was. Tony became my client. He could be quite entertaining. I have a vivid memory of him as a three-year-old, "Tiny Tony,” standing on his head on my office couch, and running down the hall to try unsuccessfully to make it to the bathroom. He had in his head the entire rock band of Guns’n’Roses, and I got to know Axl, the band leader, quite well. I remember the time Tony was in hospital and I went to visit him; Axl popped out and said, "Remember, we’re schizophrenic in here!”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse