Spin Programming
A Newly Uncovered Technique
of Systematic Mind Control
John D. Lovern, Ph.D.
Presented at The Sixth Western Clinical Conference on
Multiple Personality and Dissociation, Irvine, CA, 1993
Revised April 20, 1995
Abstract
Information obtained clinically from seven multiple personality patients with recalled histories of ritual abuse has revealed a coercive technique previously unknown to psychotherapists. This technique here labeled “spin programming,” appears designed to spread effects such as pain, painful emotions, and other feelings or urges globally throughout a patient’s personality system for purposes of either designing and building a young victim’s personality system, or harassing older victims and disrupting psychotherapy. Spin programming appears to be based on a combination of physical spinning, cognitive and imagery training, and repetition and practice aimed at creating an internal multi-alter spinning “mechanism” that can transmit the pain or affective components of numerous traumatic memories simultaneously to large groups of targeted alters. This paper presents signs and symptoms commonly seen in patients subjected to spin programs, training methods apparently used to create spin programs, and an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of spin programming.
“Spin Programming”
That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well. Those icy fingers up an down my spine, the same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine, that same old tingle that I feel inside, and then that elevator starts its ride: Down and down I go, ‘round and ‘round I go, like a leaf that’s caught in a tide (...) Darling, down and down I go, ‘round and ‘round I go, in a spin, loving the spin I’m in, under that old black magic called love.
— Johnny Mercer, (c) 1942, 1969
Discussion of ritual abuse as a cause of multiple personality disorder is a fairly recent phenomenon (Coons & Grier, 1990; Ganaway, 1989; Hassan, 1990; Kluft, 1989; Los Angeles County Commission for Women, 1989; Mayer, 1991; Neswald, Gould, & Graham-Costain, 1991; and Van Benschoten, 1990). Use of the term “ritual abuse” here relies on the definition developed by the Los Angeles County Commission for Women (1989):
Ritual abuse is a brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals. Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and practices. Ritual abuse rarely consists of a single episode. It usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time.
The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, sadistic, and humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual/indoctrination, which includes mind control techniques and mind altering drugs, and ritual/intimidation which conveys to the victim a profound terror of the cult members and of the evil spirits they believe cult members can command. Both during and after the abuse, most victims are in a state of terror, mind control, and dissociation in which disclosure is exceedingly difficult. (p. 1)
The topic of ritual abuse is controversial (Kluft, 1989), and several authors have either questioned the credibility of reports of ritual abuse or have advised caution in interpreting the usually unsubstantiated accounts (Coons & Grier, 1990; Ganaway, 1989; Noll, 1989; and Van Benschoten, 1990). This paper avoids taking a position on the accuracy of clinically derived accounts of ritual abuse, and instead simply presents information that has come to light consistently and repeatedly during intensive psychotherapy with a number of different patients with recalled histories of ritual abuse.
The information presented here is offered in hopes of making available recently discovered and preliminary findings that may be of value to some members of the psychotherapeutic community and may stimulate additional investigation by some members of the scientific community. The information is admittedly too new, derived from too small a sample, and too unsubstantiated by other investigators to he presented as fact. Nevertheless, the description of spin programming, if valid, shines a valuable light on the techniques employed by ritual abuse perpetrators and provides important insight into how problems frequently seen in multiple personality patients with recalled ritual abuse histories might more successfully be approached.
Programming
Therapists working with victims of ritual abuse often discover (or encounter compelling evidence) that their patients have been subjected to sophisticated mind control techniques, often called “programming,” designed to compel them to do various things, including engaging in self-destructive behaviors such as suicide or self-mutilation; allowing access to perpetrators so that abuse may continue; responding to various cues, such as sounds, hand signals, lights, names or numbers, etc., by carrying out specific behaviors or behavior chains; disrupting psychotherapy in a number of ways, including thought-stealing or scrambling, outbursts of various emotions (anger, depression, terror, jealousy, apathy, etc.) and distancing from the therapist (by fearing the therapist, attempting to protect the therapist from harm by others or by the patient herself or himself, etc.). Neswald, Gould, and Graham-Costain (1991) provide a listing and descriptions of a number of typical ritual abuse programs.
Patients with histories of ritual abuse often reveal that programming techniques have been applied to them for at least two distinct purposes: (a) current or recent programming designed to harass or disrupt psychotherapy, and (b) programming begun early in life (often at birth), as the means by which programmers designed and built their victims’ entire personality systems in order to achieve and maintain control over them. One technique has recently come to light that appears to have had utility both for harassment/disruption and for system-building. The technique is based on spinning.
Sources of Information for this Paper
This paper is based on information that came to light during psychotherapy sessions in which the author was the therapist or, in some cases, co-therapist. The patients, of whom there were seven, all carried diagnoses of complex multiple personality disorder and had clearly defined and consistently expressed histories of ritual abuse by satanic or similar cults. They had been in therapy intensively for at least a year before disclosing any information about spin programming. They were all female and ranged in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties. Their education levels ranged from two years of college to masters degrees. They were all white, the majority were married, and just over half were employed full-time. They disclosed some of the information about spin programming during conversations in which they and therapist were “brainstorming” about their programming histories, and they revealed the rest either spontaneously (generally making their discoveries between sessions) or in response to direct questioning carried out with due regard to the dangers of leading them by directly or indirectly suggesting desired responses. Before an item of information about spin programming and related phenomena could appear in this paper, it had to be verified by comparable experiences and reports from at least two patients. In most cases, information was verified by all patients, with only minor variations. Informal conversations with other therapists about their experiences with similar patients have consistently verified the information presented here.
Description of Spin Programming
Specific Versus Global Targeting of Programs
Programmers appear to rely on certain criteria in deciding which mind control strategies they will select. One meaningful criterion is specific versus global, that is, whether they intend to target a single alter (or a small, defined group of alters) in a specific way, or the entire system (or a large portion of it) in a global way. Spin-based programming is a globally targeted programming technique. Programmers apparently use it when they intend to disseminate an effect throughout either a large portion of a victim’s personality system, or the entire system.
Examples of the types of effects that may be spread in this way are physical pain, confusion, depression, self-destructive or suicidal urges, alienation, apathy, hopelessness, fear of abandonment or rejection, panic, terror, urges to run away, jealousy, doubt, suspicion, rage, violent urges, sexual arousal or urges, lethargy, immobility, sleepiness, sleeplessness, hunger, loss of appetite, and urges to use drugs or alcohol. Programmers may spread these effects throughout a personality system as a method of disrupting the total functioning of the person, or they may use the possibility of spreading them as a threat to enforce compliance with directives or prohibitions they have issued.
Spin programs are also useful in system-building, both because of their ability to quickly transmit information within or throughout a personality system, and because of their ability to establish power relationships between alters and groups of alters. How these links and power relationships are established will be explained in the section on training methods.
Signs and Symptoms of Spin Programs
Patients who are suffering the immediate effects of a currently activated spin program tend to present with a number of typical features. These features include: global effects, symptoms occurring like a “storm,” pressure, dizziness, a sense of spinning inside, physical movements related to the internal experience of spinning, and spinning-related imagery and vocabulary.
Global Effects. When a patient is affected by a specifically targeted program, she or he typically experiences one or a small number of alters having emotions or urges or manifesting behaviors, while most or all other alters remain unaffected. The patient might say, for example, “Somebody inside wants to cut,” or “Joey is feeling suicidal.” When a spin-based program is active, every alter with whom the therapist talks is likely to be suffering from the same or similar symptoms. At such times, the patient might say, “Everybody in the system is depressed;” “None of us has any hope or any energy or any interest in anything;” or “We are all terrified that you are going to abandon us.”
Stormlike Symptoms. The experience of dealing with a spin-programmed patient is, for patient and therapist alike, somewhat like riding out a storm. The flurries of pain, affect, or impulse tend to grow in intensity, build to a crescendo, maintain that peak for a time, and then gradually diminish before finally subsiding. Nearly every alter in the system is lashed by the “wind and rain” of the storm, often without understanding why these effects are occurring, and doing their best to minimize damages until the storm passes.
Pressure. As will be seen in a subsequent section, spin training relies in part on conditioning the patient to connect, through cognition and imagery, the experience of spinning with internal buildups of centrifugal force. When spin programs are active, the affected alters subjectively experience high levels of force or pressure, as if they were sitting at the outside edge of a rapidly rotating disc. They feel overwhelmed by this pressure, finding it impossible to resist, and they often complain of symptoms that would be caused by mounting internal pressure, such as headaches that feel like they are going to cause the head to explode from the inside, disruption of speech, vision problems, and similar phenomena.
Dizziness. As the internal spinning associated with spin programming increases in speed and force, patients frequently complain of dizziness. At these times, they may be literally feeling the sensations caused by the original spinning, because they are experiencing a planned (i.e., produced by intervention of the abusers) revivification or flashback of that event.
Sense of Spinning Internally. Along with the dizziness, patients experiencing active spin programs often notice a sense of spinning internally, or comment that “everything seems to be spinning.” If they do not mention this feeling spontaneously, they will often admit it when questioned, for example, by answering in the affirmative when asked, “Do you feel as if someone inside is spinning a mile a minute?”
Physical Movements. When the internal spinning is at its most intense, patients often move in ways that a person might move while being physically spun. These movements tend to be rhythmic and repetitive, they may involve any part of the body, and they are subtle and may escape the therapist’s attention unless the therapist is looking for them. For example, a patient may stare blankly or appear to be wincing from pain or closing her eyes tightly, then move her head or upper body very slightly and rhythmically from side to side, forward and back, or in a circular motion. Feet or hands and arms are also often involved in these movements. The movements tend to be slower, smoother, more fluid, more subtle, and more regular and rhythmic than typical “nervous” movements.
Spinning-Related Imagery and Vocabulary. When describing their subjective sensations during an active spin program, patients often utilize imagery or words that are related to the experience of spinning, possibly because these images and words are literal descriptions of their experiences, and possibly because they were taught these images during the original spin training. Patients may use this kind of imagery spontaneously during sessions or in writings or drawings produced outside of sessions, or they may only describe them in response to questioning. Typical words used include: vortex, whirlpool, whirlwind, tornado, cyclone, abyss, falling, drowning, sinking, being pulled or sucked down, being blown or shot or exploded out, tumbling, hurling, whirling, swirling, and twirling. Typical visual images include drawings depicting the ideas listed above and various doodles that will be described later in the section on training. Some alters have programmer-assigned names related to spinning (e.g., Spinner,) which is a name that was independently assigned to alters in the personality systems of several different patients.
Training Methods
Pain Contests, Pain as Power, and Multiples within Multiples. A patient disclosed during a psychotherapy session some time ago that the most powerful alters in her system were those who had endured the most pain. Subsequent exploration of this notion, combined with abreactions of memories of “pain contests” eventually led to the discovery of spin programming.
Many patients with cult abuse histories have had to endure contests in which they and another person received steadily mounting pain until one of them (the loser) could not stand it anymore. Generally, only one alter was allowed to remain out during the contest, or else worse abuse would follow. The requirement that only one alter remain out had some profound ramifications, leading to the conjecture that this condition (only one alter staying out), not the outcome of the contest, was the primary purpose of the competitions.
In order to stay out continuously instead of leaving the body to a rapidly switching succession of alters (the more typical pattern of dissociation during trauma), the single alter had to create a group of internal alters to whom she or he could send the pain. The typical result of this type of experience appears to be the creation of an internal analogue of multiple personality disorder, or a “multiple within a multiple.”
In other words, just as traumatic experiences in general can lead to the creation of a number of alters in one “outside” body to produce multiple personality disorder, this specific type of experience can create a similar phenomenon one level in, consisting of a number of alters “within” the alter undergoing the contest. However, since the alter has no physical body, the newly created alters do not necessarily exist “inside” that alter, but more likely coexist with or near the original alter in internal space—(the “inside world”).
One source of internal power arising from this arrangement stems from the ability of the original alter to send pain to her or his next level of alters inside the multiple within a multiple subsystem, allowing her or him to intimidate them by threatening to activate a flashback of the original training, thus forcing them to re-experience the pain. The multiple within a multiple subsystem taken as a unit is more powerful than other, simple alters, because, as a system, it possesses or is capable of possessing greater and more varied capabilities than a lone alter might be able to produce.
Graphic Depiction. Another patient, after looking at a drawing of a tree structure that was my rough attempt to depict the connection between pain transmission and power (Figure la), suggested that the drawing ought to be circular instead of tree shaped (Figure lb). The original alter, according to this new view, was located at the center of a circle of alters, and the ring (or rings) of alters surrounding this alter comprised the “multiple within a multiple” system. Secondary alters could dissociate further by creating alters of their own, resulting in branches of tertiary (and beyond) alters. She indicated further that her entire personality system, not just individual multiple within multiple systems, was arranged in this kind of circular array consisting of concentric rings, with the most powerful alters located at the center.