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Sadie sits on the therapist's couch, ­whimpering.

She's somewhere between two and three years old, and already the most horrible things have happened to her. That finger twisting through her hair is a tell-tale sign of sexual abuse, according to her therapist, Richard Hodgin.

"Hey kiddo," Hodgin says gently. "Need help?"

Sadie looks like she's about to cry, and she bows her head.

Hodgin understands. He asks Sadie to summon Rachel.

Sadie exhales and retreats into the fractured mind of a woman in her mid-­twenties whom Hodgin is treating for multiple personality disorder. Sadie exists only in Rachel's head, among more than a dozen other personalities, or "alters." Rachel sits beside her husband in Hodgin's Woodlands office. It's after hours; the building is deserted and Hodgin reclines comfortably in his chair, sans shoes.

"She just has that little-bitty baby way of seeking comfort," Rachel [not her real name] says of Sadie. Rachel says her abuse started around the time she was two or three; hence Sadie, the youngest alter.

Rachel says she grew up in a satanic cult, where she was molested and forced to participate in animal sacrifice. When she was about 16, she says, the cult got her pregnant in order to offer the child to the devil. She says her own grandfather and father are important members of this cult, which operates mostly out of the grand­father's house north of ­Houston.

Now Hodgin says, "Pick a teenager, please."

"Tabitha's 12," Rachel says. "Is that teenager enough?"

Enter Tabitha, a detail-oriented alter whose age marks the time Rachel's parents separated. Tabitha says her mother didn't know about the abuse, and Tabitha never told.

"They had my sisters," Tabitha says of the cult. "They had my cousin."

Hodgin says he's seen many cult cases, and that's how it works. They scare the kids into silence. So even as Rachel says she was raped over a 15-year span, her mother never knew. Apparently there was no physical evidence that sounded an alarm to Rachel's mother and doctors.

Multiple personality disorder, clinically labeled "dissociative identity disorder," entered popular culture with The Three Faces of Eve, a 1957 book and movie about a woman who claimed to have two alternate personalities (besides the host, or "real," personality). Enormously popular, the movie netted an Academy Award for Joanne Woodward, in the title role. Woodward turned up about 20 years later in another popular movie based on a book about DID, Sybil. A story about a woman whose mother's abuse allegedly split her into 16 alters, Sybil revived the popular interest of DID sparked by Eve.

Although numbers vary, data indicates that there were only a handful of reported cases of DID worldwide prior to Sybil, and an explosion in the United States alone afterwards.

It was greeted with considerable skepticism in the psychiatric community. But it's been in the DSM, the psychiatric diagnosis manual, for nearly 30 years, and renowned physicians at prestigious institutions have conducted studies and treated thousands of patients diagnosed with DID. Each year, hundreds of mental health professionals come to the Houston-Galveston Trauma Institute for a conference devoted to DID treatment.

In 2007, Switching Time, a Chicago psychologist's account of treating a woman with 17 alters, attracted national attention and was seen as another validation by those who felt shunned by doctors who had dismissed their claims of DID. This year, former Dallas Cowboy Herschel Walker's memoirs hit the shelves, revealing his struggle with the condition. (Walker recently discussed his battle with the condition on Good Morning America, and was scheduled to appear on Nightline.) Unfortunately, professionals treating DID disagree on what level of trauma can cause a person to split into dozens — in some cases, thousands — of alters, including those of different ­species.

Whether you grew up with parents who neglected you or had cow's blood forcibly injected into an orifice as part of a demonic ritual, you can wind up with DID. Hodgin says there are thousands of undiagnosed cases in Houston alone. So the resurgence of interest in DID could be a good thing if it spreads awareness and shows people there is a solution.

Or, it could mean a whole new generation of delusional people will be diagnosed with a disorder that doesn't exist, and they won't get the help they need.
_____________________

Here's one scenario:

A patient walks into a therapist's office for the first time. She says she's been traumatized by years of ritualistic abuse by men in red and black robes who held secret ceremonies where animals were slaughtered and young girls were raped with the mission of producing a sacrificial lamb for Lucifer.

Should the therapist accept that as the patient's reality and work toward the goal of making the person well again, or should she explore the possibility that the incidents described might not be entirely accurate?

If you're Jean Goodwin, co-founder of the Houston-Galveston Trauma Institute and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, you accept the story at face value. Whether or not it happened is an issue for law enforcement, not for a mental health expert.

Goodwin earned a medical degree at Harvard and a master's in public health and epidemiology from UCLA. She has researched DID for decades, publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals; testifying as an expert witness in trials where trauma and dissociation were key elements; treating DID clients in her private practice; and participating in the Trauma Institute's annual DID ­conferences.

She told the Houston Press that her job isn't to determine the accuracy of a client's story, and that treatment should not depend on whether the supposed cause of the trauma actually occurred.

Here's another scenario:

Write Your Comment show comments (7)

  1. "DO YOU HAVE MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISORDER?"
    Is this con still making the rounds? I would have thought this dropped out of sight like all those people who claim to have had anal probes aboard flying saucers, or the Salem witchcraft trials.

    This nonsense started about 30 years ago with the publication of a book titled MICHELLE REMEMBERS and it's been kept going through the publication of similar fake memoirs.

    Among the common threads in these con artists: Always girls, always betrayed by their parents (almost invariably by both parents), always recruited into cults of Satan worshippers -- never Methodists or even Mormons or Jews, always pregnant young, also always scarred and/or tattooed, always gang-raped every night for several years in a row any by an enormous group that always included the town's leading citizens.

    Always Satanists; you might find bleeding hearts and shrinks who might make find some sort of excuse or mitigation for a child molesters, but add outright Satan worship to the mix and NOBODY will breathe a word in their favor. And not even bashful about Satan worship -- never a (heretical) Christian cult or a make-believe Mayan or Egyptian religion -- always straight for the Ultimate Loser.

    Always pregnant young. Yeah, they've already known morning sickness, and they've already suffered the terrible loss of a child. And always earlier and more vulnerable than anyone you might have already been sympathizing with.

    And always these large Satanic covens that included the town's leading citizens. In daylight these kids may have lived in modest homes, even trailer parks, and been mostly ignored by the cool kids in high school, but, by golly, when that evening sun goes down they're always partying with the elite and tons of them. And it's just astonishing the sexual stamina of the town banker and school principal at their advanced age! Why, it's better than Viagra. And, isn't it amazing, all these movers and shakers never include anyone who's not into young girls -- it turns out, every night of every week, the town's leading interior decorator was (gasp) hetero ... and he liked 'em young.

    An yet nobody ever knew: They supposedly were in orgies every night -- but the high school yearbook shows they were in the cheerleading squad and the Alpha Club and in attendance at every game. They supposedly had scars and tats but nobody else ever noticed even in the shower room. They were even preggers, but nobody caught on - not even doctors who examined them years later. And each one of them was the absolute sexual star of these covens -- no two teenage girls ever shared the enormous parade of gang-rapists at a coven; there's no old high school chum who can come forward to corroborate these stories (nor an older or younger girl who can attest to having been either replaced by or replacing our talkative heroine in the coven's affections). Some of the dozens and dozens of people orgying every night must have had kids at home, but even those kids won't attest to so much as the fact that mom and dad were out every night.

    In other words, these women appear dull and uninteresting now but only a decade or so ago they were really the life of the party, with the town's bestest people, and being, y'know, really decadent.

    In the case of Michelle Remembers, it turned out the purported shrink who was writing this account of an actual case was actually "Michelle's" second husband. Her first husband had courted and married her in high school and no only could he not remember her having any of the scars or tats that she claims the Satanists put all over her body, he says that she was a virgin when they married. It turned out that backtracking her real life showed she was an honor student and very active in sports and afterschool events, even when she claimed she was continuously partying at drug-soaked orgies. And, although her narrative suggested that she spent her pre-teenage and teenage years as the sex goddess of one cover, her family actually changed towns a couple of times. In none of those towns - either before, during or after her purported sex slave careers there - was there even any evidence, or even rumor, of orgies, satanism or human sacrifices.

    Two books of the early 1990s, Trance Formation and Thanks for the Memories, pretend to be the memoirs of two former secret CIA-Illuminati sex slaves. One of them claims that she was used to sexually bribe major school board administrators into adopting some sort of liberal agenda; amazing - not a single one of those educational bureaucrats was gay, faithful to his wife, or a woman. The other claims to have been used to, uumm, "reward" members of an enormous political conspiracy that included Henry Kissinger, Bod Hope, and - wait for it - Kris Kristofferson. Her more recent photos don't make her look like much, but it would seem that back in the 1980s she was exactly what Everyone wanted at the other end of their favorite body part.

    Even now people laying claim to these exciting pasts as clandestine sex stars have formed their own networks and conventions. Odd that none of them seem to have crossed paths while in the business. Odder still that none has a story that corroborates another story. And the announcement for such conventions emphasizes that these sexual veterans who are more than willing to tell (often for money) how many people - and especially how many important people - have boinked them are still so terribly fragile that nobody who harbors any doubts about their bona fides or who was ask them any awkward questions will be allowed to attend; this usually keeps out real shrinks and real cops.

    It was at such a convention about fifteen years ago that the Perfect Villian for this craziness was conjured up. A Utah hypnotherapist, Corydon Hammond, gave a lecture (transcript and audio available on several websites) to the effect that all this child molesting was not at the result of an occasional and individualistic perversion -- nope, you had to have a membership card because ALL child molesting was organized and by someone that nobody could love: a supposed "Doctor Green" who had attained a trifecta of being indefensible -- he was, all at the same time, a Jew, a Nazi and a CIA operative. Supposedly the Nazis had recruited this "Greenbaum", then a brilliant teenage Hassidic Jew, with an enormous grasp of the Kaballah, and kept him alive to run experiments in an unnamed concentration camp on the sexual urges of untermenschen of very tender years. This Hassidic Jew who supposedly read Hebrew and Aramaic and also spoke German, used the Greek alphabet to give his posthypnotic orders to the very young (Jewish) children who were his living guinea pigs. And, nowadays, there's virtually no freelance pedophilia going on, it's all linked to this "Doctor Green". That no book on the history of Hassidic Judaism mentions a family named Greenbaum or anything close to it, that no Holocaust survivor has come forward with any supporting story, that the U.S. Holocaust Museum (and similar institutions around the world) has detailed diagrams of every concentration camp and absolutely no evidence that anyone anywhere was doing anything like what Hammond descried, that he couldn't find a single supportive line in authentic Kaballah for any of this, meant nothing to Hammond, who assured his audience that if you didn't believe this crazy story you were "either ignorant or dirty". For some reason Hammond has not further elaborated on this nonsense but his one lecture has taken on a life of its own.

    I am amazed that this crap is still going strong.

    Sincerely, Bernard J. Sussman, Potomac, MD 20854

    Comment by Bernard Sussman — April 20, 2008 @ 05:52AM

  2. "People live in fear of discrimination and, consequently hide their sexual orientation, hide their families, their children and their lifestyle as a result," Johnson said. "I believe it will positively impact the health of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gendered community". So I think we should give GLBT more support and understanding. Or GLBT may want to try biloves.com to release them and come out here totally.

    Comment by selly — April 20, 2008 @ 08:06AM

  3. This article mentions extreme situations that contribute to people disbelieving that DID exists. I'm not saying that these extremes do not exist, but DID happens without cults too. It is very common where there is severe child abuse which starts when a child is less than six years old. If you want to know how a child of age 3 copes with chronic sexual abuse by an adult, it is not difficult to understand that the child must go inside his/her head and disappear. I have met others with this (dis)order, which is a creative coping skill, and everything looks fine on the outside, but on the inside there is trouble. When an experienced therapist comes into ones shattered life, then the pain that has been hidden for so long comes out. Nobody can make this up. In fact most everyone with it does not want to believe it themselves. Society knows that there are perps that prey on young children, but when they grow up to become adults, noone wants to believe!

    Comment by Sherry — April 22, 2008 @ 11:05AM

  4. As a follow-up to my original comment (nr. 1) ...
    The Michelle Remembers and several other bogus SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) stories were debunked some years ago by the Chicago-based religious magazine, Cornerstone. In that particular case and some others, Cornerstone managed to find that not only was the family not quite as pictured in the fake memoirs, but there were siblings -- not mentioned at all in the memoirs -- who seemed perfectly normal and energetically denied just about every part of the published narrative. The family photo album tended to be very persuasive.
    The people making these claims are going for oneupmanship against everyone who's life wasn't picture book perfect: Your parents were mean; mine were serial murders. Your uncle once touched you inappropriately; my parents had me raped - gang raped - night after night for years on end. You knew your town's mayor; I knew my town's mayor, banker, police chief, etc., - biblically. Your family was dysfunctional; mine were Devil Worshippers.

    In many instances, the people (almost all women) making these claims are making a good living running their traveling one-woman sideshows to churches in small towns and occasional police department workshops (although there's a story that one of these women ran out the back door when a cop in the audience actually started asking questions about the purported human sacrifices that indicated he was willing to go out an arrest someone), selling their books on the side.

    Comment by Bernard Sussman — April 22, 2008 @ 01:04PM

  5. I totally agree that there is a reality which includes SRA, but it's not limited to this. Look up "MK-ULTRA" and see if there isn't something interesting there. It was touched upon a bit in this article.

    To the first commenter: you sound like a professional disinformation artist.

    Comment by MK — April 25, 2008 @ 07:07AM

  6. Thank you, B. Sussman, for pointing out some of the absolutely outrageous stuff that these folks claim. It's amazing how, no matter what community they grew up in, they have exactly the same story to tell about alleged Satanic abuse. Of course, the police never caught any of these gatherings -- they were in on it! etc. It reminds me a lot of the great book "The Three Christs of Ypsilanti," in which a psychiatrist moved three men with delusions of being Christ to the same facility to see whether two would have their delusions disappear. Actually, all three had their delusions get STRONGER -- they believed that the other two were imitating them.

    The sad thing is, I don't think the patients are making anything up -- they really do seem to feel that this happened to them. And, as you point out, the couple of them I've met seem to be quite ordinary people, susceptible to something that would make them feel special & set apart from others, even if that something were bad. Of course, when anyone tries to look into the validity of the therapeutic backgrounds of the therapists who foment this mess, they claim to be the only ones who really care about their patients and that they are being persecuted by authorities who don't want anyone to know. Really, really sad stuff.

    Comment by Ellen — April 27, 2008 @ 10:05AM

  7. In the interests of accuracy and honesty, I had confused in my memory the story of "Michelle Remembers", with the true story behind Lauren Stratford, who made a chunk of money telling a very similar saga. See [b][url]http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss090/sideshow.htm [/url][/b]. But Michelle Remembers has been debunked in different ways, to the point where the author no longer claims that any of the events described actually occurred.

    Cornerstone Magazine, a religious quarterly (approximately), published out of Chicago, has carried a number of exposes of several "I was a teenage satanist" memoirs. It turns out, serious investigation of each of these stories show the utter impossibility of the memoir.

    It's a perfect gimmick in dozens of ways: One might feel some tiny bit of concern for a child molester - as a person with a severe psychiatric problem - but not if we also add that he is a devotee of the Bible's Ultimate Loser. Hey, this gimmick worked in Salem.
    It's also an excuse for faithful church goers to hear (and share) sex stories.

    Comment by Bernard Sussman — May 2, 2008 @ 06:17PM

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