Quarantine Book Club: “Michelle Remembers” (Week 1)

Sarah describes the spark that ignited the Satanic Panic. Our setting is a therapist’s office in 1976 Victoria, B.C., and our digressions include Sybil, scary paperbacks from the 80s and shouting "Fire!" on a crowded theater. This episode describes child abuse.

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Transcript

You know, what I was thinking yesterday is that in the sixties, and you know, in the nuclear age, there were like three channels and the Twilight zone, it was on one of them.

Welcome to You're Wrong About. The podcast where we discuss old moral panics to convince ourselves that the one we're living through now, isn't real. Are we living in a moral panic or a regular panic? That's true. It's like a moral panic, but like a, a good moral panic, like a real one. But I don't know if that makes it a moral panic.

I think it would be moral panic if we had like almost no coronavirus and we were circulating unsubstantiated Facebook names talking about like fake coronavirus stories. But really coronavirus was like this really minor problem. There were much worse virus. I've never hoped for a moral panic before, but here we are.

Yeah, no, we're not going to get that out of this. Dammit. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for the Huffington post. I'm Sarah Marshall. And I'm working on a book about the St. Panic panic. And at this very second, I'm working on a podcast about the panic panic right now. And we are on patrion@patrion.com slash you're wrong about, and we did a long intro about our thoughts on how to support us during the virus last week.

And don't feel obligated to, but you can go back and listen to the last one, if you want to refresh your memory on that. Yeah. And so today we're doing something a little bit different. We're kind of doing a you're wrong about. Book club, partly because I realized recently that a lot of the episodes that I have most enjoyed doing, and then I feel like listeners have most enjoyed.

At least the ones who've been letting me know are the ones where I'm basically reading a book to you in tiny increments. And I wanted to do that today. We're doing, I mean, I guess that's kind of a bonus episode. It's sort of like an addendum to our previous. Podcast about the satanic. It's kind of a weird episode because this is about my shower members, which is something that I have long classified for years classified to myself as the patient, zero of say panic, panic texts.

Ooh, it's really fascinating. It's weird. It's dance. It's out of print. And so you don't tend to happen across copies of it that often. I think it's cause such an interesting text in terms of. What had helped create in terms of history, but also what's going on in the book itself. Yeah. So we're going to go through this book in sort of slow drip narrative style and just kind of talk about as we go along slow drip, that's kind of scary and it sounds like torture.

Okay. Let's put it this way. Some of our episodes are really eventful and have twists and turns and. You go through a lot. And this episode is going to be more like the pirates of the Caribbean. They're just going around, looking at all the little situations saying, oh, that's why. So we're going to save her this one, we're going to do it.

Dual Sumo. Because I just watched true lies. We're going to do this, like a tube float down a lake busy river. Ooh. Yeah, that's kind of that one. Yes. Let's let's keep that. There we go. Yeah. Tell me fair Verona layer scene. Let's do this. So, so Michelle remembers was published in 1980. It was published as non-fiction.

It told the story of a woman who had gone into therapy and whose therapist had. By regressing her to her childhood helped her recover memories of being tortured, Faye, satanic cult that her mother gave her too. And it was published in what I believe to be an earnest attempt on the part of its authors.

To raise awareness of what they believe to be the reality of St. Hannan, Colts, torturing other little children, like the cult that had tortured Michelle. But the issue with Michelle's memories was that they seemed implausible and several significant ways, which included her saying that she had there had been a Satanist doctor who had sewed.

Horns and a tail onto her. There were no scars on her and the narrative. Michelle remembers explains that she has no scars because the Virgin Mary appears at the end as a character and blesses Michelle and heels and wipes away. All of the scars from all of the. Scar leaving experimentation and torture.

Yeah. And so that, that's the, the end text reason supplied for the plausibility of the story, which has just like it's plausible. If you believe. That the Virgin Mary can intervene in the life of a person. And some people do believe that. And I think Michelle does, but I don't. And so it's not persuasive to me.

You know, our friend, Emma Eisenberg, one of her causes is the fact that. Non-fiction books are not automatically fact checked by the publishers. And so Michelle remembers is a great example of that. Like a really, maybe one of the Cardinal examples that it's published as non-fiction, it is then given to social workers in the early eighties who were being trained on how to recognize signs of child abuse.

And Dr. Pastor speaks at a convention for psychiatrists. Where he says, I treated a patient who was ritually abused and repressed the memory. And here are the symptoms, and maybe you should look for this and your own patients and therapists start looking for signs of this and their own patients. And start generating false positives.

And it's just so interesting to me that this book that is being marketed as non-fiction, and that is being essentially used as a textbook is one where the Virgin Mary appears as a character, the acknowledgements. And again, like, I don't want to belittle anyone, I believe so because the Virgin Mary is a really important figure to a lot of people and yeah.

I appreciate that. But also, like, I don't believe that it's responsible to publish as a psychiatric textbook, a book where the reason that someone's. Repressed torture didn't leave. The scars that it inevitably would have is a miracle like it has value, but maybe not necessarily as, as a training manual, I'm not convinced it has value, but

from what you've said so far, I'm really not going to treat this as any value. In my opinion, it does have value. Not. Well, we'll get to that. That's what this, that's what this episode is really about. My issue with things like this is that we hold nonfiction stories to a completely different set of standards than we hold fiction stories.

This is why things like James Frey faking his memoir. Offend us so much because things like a boss running away with his secretary, that's a kind of thing that if it happens in fiction, you're like, ah, that's a little bit of a cliche. Like you can do better than that. But if it's happening in a true story, you're like, well, it sounds like a cliche, but you know, it happens.

So I'm not really gonna hold the author to account for the lack of originality here. And so there's just a completely different set of aesthetic and moral standards that we apply to non-fiction and I think this allows. Is to basically say don't judge me by narrative conventions. Don't judge me by coherence.

Don't judge me by plausibility. Hmm. Well, and I think even beyond or below that level of sophistication, I think people just. Are really vulnerable to books. Like if it's in a book, people are like, well, it's in a book fuck books. And this is like a mass market paper back. Like this was a best seller. It did very well.

It got around. We trust stuff that, that seems brought to us by authority. And I think we do treat the publishing industry that way. So can you, can you walk me through the cultural context of. Satanic panic minus at the time that this book comes out, is this a totally unheard of concept? Yes. Okay. Ritual abuse is a term that Lauren's pastor the coauthor of this coins.

So it didn't exist before this book and before he took it on the road. Wow. And so in 1983, And the McMartin case, which is the first safe, panic, panic case in the United States and the case that kicks off a wave of similar cases at other daycares across the nation, the social workers, because they've been primed by Michelle remembers are looking for say tannic ritual abuse.

And because they quest the children in a way that it later turns out is accidentally engineered to generate. False positives of whatever they suspect is going on. For example, if a child denies abuse has taken place, you take that as a sign that abuse has taken place. Seeing a bunch of the components of other moral panics, where we've got the raising awareness industrial complex, we've got training and we've got the lack of evidence is evidence.

That's actually a good point. Did this book also popularize the idea of repressed memories or was that around before repressed memories had been around before as a concept, but this, I think certainly gave that a shot in the arm and I think the previous. Texts that had really popularized them as an idea was Sibyl, which we talked about in our multiple personality disorder episode.

But that was before, that was before 1980. Yeah. Sibyl, the book was published in 1973, tremendously successful much more so than Michelle remembers and civil. The TV movie came out in 1976 and was watched by tremendous numbers of Americans. So this book Michelle remembers is not seeding the idea of.

Satanic abuse and repressed memories. Like our society is already printed. Yeah. Society is primed. And also Michelle is primed. I think, you know, cause this is, this isn't a post-Civil world. Right. Because people exist in the world that media creates. I always forget the sort of reinforcing loop of how media creates more media.

Yeah. Like how cops watch cops. Yeah. Yeah. And so I can't show you my copy because I'm at my parents' house and the internet is too slow for. Us to have video, but would you like to Google Michelle remembers and look at the cover images that you find? Yeah.

Ooh, these are good. I mean, you can tell it's out of print because all of these covers look like they're from the early eighties. There's no like, updated, like nice Helvetica cover. There's no arts. Yes. I'm Michelle remembers. I mean, the one I'm seeing is she looks, it's like a, it's a drawing of a little girl who looks like an American girl doll.

That is the addition that I have. Yeah, it was it. And she's holding a little dog and she's surrounded by candles. And then. Above her is like a smiling maniacal demon face. Like looking down upon her and Michael, I don't want to spoil too much, but like it's not kissed any demon. It is literally Satan.

Satan is also a character in this. There's also the up on the top. It says the shocking, true story of the ultimate evil.dot dot. Dot.dot a child's possession by the devil exclamation point. Yeah. Although actually it's interesting because this is not a story of possession at no point that she claimed to be possessed by the devil or any demon.

This isn't an Exorcist story, but I think maybe it's being marketed as like, if you liked the Exorcist, you might also enjoy this book. This is such a crossover event. We've got the exercise, we've got repressed memories. I'm seeing an excerpt of members in Christianity today. Yeah. The interesting things about this book is how mainstream it was, you know, just how far its message got.

And that also has to do with how un-diverse media was at the time. And I don't mean in terms of who's being represented even. I mean, that's true also, but I just literally mean like, There were just fewer stories out there. So I guess I think that when you look at media, even from 1980, you would have huge swaths of people who had all taken the same story at once.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. Where are we? Where are we starting? So as is  of paperback publishing in my experience, there is a little preview of the kind of book that this is on the very first page, which is the kind of thing. You can read while you're like looking through the supermarket rack of paperbacks and then you, you open it and you're like, what kind of book is this?

Oh, so in bold letters, we have turned the light burn, burn burn, and then the scene goes, the words lingered in the air. Michelle could feel their pressure. And then the horror of it overtook her. It's burning, it's burning. She cried. Okay. So I could say that much of the book is like this. It's Michelle describing what she's seeing in her repressed memory to Dr.

Pastor. And she is speaking in the voice of a five-year-old girl, which I am not going to do. Thank you. Michelle began to look frantically around her, moving her head from side to side to watch what was happening. The child stood there in a panic, choking and gasping and crying. Suddenly she stiffened. Yes.

Yes. Yes I listen. Yes, sir. No, no. Don't want to be burned again. The lead in voice came from the fire.dot dot. Okay. This is really boring. I mean, it just sounds like somebody's describing their dream. It is a thoughtful response. It just seems like, it just seems so outlandishly. Not true. Yeah, it does feel dreamlike.

And that's a theme here. Um, one of the other interesting things about the book that I'm just going to talk about now is hypnosis because hypnosis was very commonly used by therapists as a way to age regress patients, to get them to recover what the therapists believed to be repressed memories often of abuse.

Dr. Cornelia Wilbur used it in her treatment of the woman who's, who was known to America's civil. And so Michelle remembers never refers directly to hypnosis, but it uses a lot of language that suggests Michelle is under hypnosis. And I don't know if she was, but this is my personal theory because it talks about like Michelle being in her depths, Michelle coming back up.

Which feels to me, suggestive of her being under hypnosis during all this and making it up without realizing that that's what she's doing. That's what hypnosis does because you go into a state where you are very focused on what a certain part of your brain is doing. You lose certain innovations and you are potentially very open to suggestion.

I have done. Past life regression hypnosis, because I wanted to see what it was like. And I was like, I don't literally believe that that was my past life. Like, I don't think that. I lived a past life that I could coherently recall, you know, in like an office by the antique mall that I like to go to and like an hour.

Yeah. That scenario doesn't make sense to me. But I did go into a state that I feel was hypnosis. The hypnotizer person, the hypnotherapist did sort of like full body relaxation exercise. Now wiggle your little toe count backwards from 10, I went to an ex-gay therapist. You tried to do this on me. Oh my God.

Remember this stuff too. Wait, did they try to do gay conversion therapy on you by hypnotizing you? I mean, not like as aggressively as that, but like, they were definitely trying to convince me to like, be into boob, but they're using hypnotic techniques. Yeah. It was like count backwards from a hundred. Huh?

It was mostly guided, like the guided meditations that you see on YouTube and then like you get super tired and then like they tell you stuff, but it didn't work on me. And I was completely awake for the entire time. Oh my God. You're still gay. Shockingly. I haven't announced. Relaxation technique. No, unfortunately guided meditation does not make one heterosexual extremely disappointing.

Uh, it feels like being straight. Isn't that kind of thing you should have to like concentrate on, but what did they, what did they suggest to you? Or like, what did, what did. What was your experience like? Well, so, you know, we did the thing of like, you know, you're going down a staircase and with each step you become more relaxed and et cetera.

And we did that like three times. And actually also there's kind of a lot of stairs in Michelle's recovered memories where I tend to think in my theory that there's hypnosis involved, I'm like, Hm, stairs. And so the bottom of the third set of stairs, you know, she's like, you know, look down and, and. See what you're wearing or like, where are you standing?

And I was like, I'm on a lawn. I'm in a fancy house in Michigan. It just rained. And like, where did that image come from? I don't know. Why am I in Michigan? Why did I decide that? Yeah. And it's gets like, what's next? What's next? What's next? It's like, what do you see next? What do you do next? You know, often you're like, I get married or like I have a child or something, and then you describe it.

And I found it very easy to. Describe image by image this allegorical life. So I came out of it and I guess felt really peaceful. I felt great. I feel the way I felt after like a really great yoga class. I mean, the hip, the hypnosis technique sounds like it's doing what a lot of unrelated activities do.

They just make you feel more at peace. They make you sort of take a break and stop and reevaluate your life. But then in the hands of a therapist that needs extreme stories out of you to write their book or to confirm their thesis or whatever. It can be a much more dangerous technique. Right. And, and, you know, my whole experience of this was that I created a story that felt in the moment very real to me, like as vivid as some of my real memories, probably because they're constructed of pieces of them.

And it was a story where not me, but someone who was like this past life for a hint of may went through. An allegorical version of what I was going through and dealing with in my own life. And because it was this other figure and not myself, I could have this compassion for them for this past version and then bring that radical self-compassion home.

So it was like a really useful tool for me. And I'm glad I did it, then it felt good also because I went to. A responsible practitioner who is just like, you want to access your past life. She had absolutely no agenda because that's not the kind of hypnotherapy that she was practicing. You aren't gay anymore.

I just want to point out on some level. Yeah. So as a heterosexual, every heterosexual has undergone hypnosis. That's the only reason they're heterosexuals. That's the way we make straight people. That's why there's getting to be a shortage is because it's federally underfunded now. Okay. So this book begins with several notes.

We have the comment of Ramy. Daru Bishop of the diocese of Victoria, British Columbia on September 28th, 1977 Ramian to Rue will later become a character in this book. I do not question that from Michelle, this experience was real in time. We will know how much of it can be validated. It will require prolonged and careful study in such mysterious matters.

Hasty conclusions could prove unwise. I think that this is the most accurate prediction of the satanic panic that anyone uttered before it he's presaging. Like what's going to happen. Like the disaster that this book is going to produce. I think he is. Yeah. I think he's like, wow, this is really interesting.

It's clear that this feels real to Michelle. I also think that we should be really careful in our approach to this and I love. That his request to not shout fire in a crowded theater is published in like the opening pages of a book called fire. Then we have a note from the publisher Thomas Condon, who basically describes, listen, I know this book that I'm giving you is weird, but I don't know.

It seems credible to me. He says the source material was scrutinized. The many thousands of pages of transcript of the tape recordings that Dr. Pastor and Mrs. Smith made of their psychiatric sessions were read and digested both the audio and the video are powerfully convincing. It is nearly unthinkable that the protracted agony they record could have been fabricated.

Okay. Tell me your thoughts on that paragraph. I mean, it's basically like we know this sounds. Bananas like it doesn't pass the smell test, but there's been all these procedures to verify it. It's interesting. This is all described in the passive voice, like who is viewing these things who is concluding that it is plausible, but the essential argument I think is like, listen, like this woman seems 100% sincere and.

If she seems sincere, then I just don't know what to do with believe her. Right. Which is a logical bind. A lot of people are going to find themselves in, in the coming years. Yeah. And as we've discussed, children have not been believed for a long time. And so if you're questioning this account, you're not believing children.

All right. We had our opening pieces and then we have a pro-life. Like if you're sitting, if you're standing in a grocery store trying to see if you want to buy this, like you're really paging through a lot of stuff. So our prologue has Michelle and Dr. Pastor going to the Vatican and February, 1978 to petition the Vatican.

To investigate her case of Saint tannic ritual abuse. They're getting the Vatican to investigate it. They're attempting to do so well at the idea that the Vatican would investigate abuse, should their real concern over there. And really they're just going to run back child being abused. We had to put a stop to this speak.

Okay. And then this whole book is, you know, we're, we're going to get this view of the Catholic church has like, they are the entity where like, If the police don't care, if the other authorities don't care, like if a child is being abused somewhere like the Vatican Ken has on it, it's deeply not funny, but it's also kind of funny.

It is the least funny thing in the world. And it's there for a funny, it's just so indicative of the different world that this was. Yeah. And, and the place of belief that the people in the story are coming from also. So they have a meeting with a Cardinal and they describe Michelle's memories. And the book tells us as she spoke, she saw the Cardinal's mobile face become grave and then angry, impossible.

He interrupted. I know Canada. It is a civilized country. These things could not happen there. And then basically they submit. Michelle's testimony for study and give it to the person in the Vatican. Who's in charge of this. And that's the, that's the grabber, that's the introduction that grabs you into the story like, oh, the Vatican is investigating.

This is serious. And the Vatican. Yeah. And they've put it in their biggest filing drawer. Okay. Chapter one. Victoria, the capital of British Columbia is a jewel of a city, a tiny metropolis on the edge of the Pacific. That in its primness seems more English than Canadian, many Canadians consider Victoria a modern garden of Eden, not so far-fetched to notion.

If one recalls that there was a serpent in the garden of Eden. Oh my God. That's very good. It's very good. That Dan brown level. Yeah, it's better than Dan brown. I would say Dan brown would be like renowned serpents. Was it in a certain garden? Um, The other weird thing about this book is that it's credited to both Dr.

Pastor and Michelle. And so I believe at the time that it was being published by the time it was coming out and being promoted, Michelle and Dr. Pastor had both left their respective spouses and married each other. It was like a giant ethical. Problem at the center of this book, along with all the other ethical problems with this book.

Oh my God. Yes. This book should be called ethical problems. I mean, and also, like it's not mentioned in the book, but then as they're promoting it, it's like, yeah, they're married to each other and they're, there's so much media I haven't encountered, but I have not found anything from the time that this book was being promoted.

That's like, Huh? Yeah. It's kind of like a breach of like the Cardinal rule of psychoanalysis to develop a sexual relationship with your patient. But it apparently in 1980 people were like, well, you know, we all have to meet our prince charming somewhere. Yeah. Okay. But the weird thing about this being credited to these two people as co-writers is that they're both talked about in the third person and they're both written about.

In this way, that suggests that like each of them is describing this person to whom they are by now married, I guess. Oh, and so on the first page we introduced Lawrence pastor who we learned is a handsome man in his early forties, the pastor was warm, manly. Soft-spoken what people who live elsewhere consider the typical westerner.

He was lie than athletic tennis player and skier and had earned a brown belt in judo. I'm sorry. Oh my God. His hair was brown beginning to turn silver on the Midsummer day in 1976, when the receptionist of the Fort world medical center buzzed him to report a call from Dr. John McCracken, there was far less silver than there soon would be.

Oh my God, that's actually pretty good at the end, but I love it. The rest of it. I mean, it's like us writing a book together and being like. Michael Hobbes was dashingly handsome, just small stature, concealed intellect. And then Michelle, who's going to be introduced very soon is a pretty young woman of 27 with a heart shaped face, a delicate mouth and bountiful brown.

Oh God. I thought it was gonna say bountiful brown breasts. Thank you. So glad I went there, not where I thought it was going to go. Yeah. And it's not just that they're flattering descriptions. It's that? It's like when you describe someone is live, it's like, you're basically implying that you're attracted to them.

Like I've never heard, it's not, it's not a neutral descriptor. Right? Just say the therapist could get it. That's shorter. Yeah. He was his daddy. And so the call that Dr. Pastor gets on this day, you know, as he's lively entering his office is from, uh, Dr. John McCracken. Who's calling about a former patient of his Michelle.

He says I've had to hospitalized her. She's having some trouble with bleeding. She had a miscarriage six weeks ago, and despite repeated DNCs and medication, she continues to hemorrhage. Not only that, but her grief over the miscarriage is extremely severe and persistent. I'm beginning to think the problem.

Isn't his physiological. I love that this book starts. With Michelle's doctor being like, Michelle's really sad about this miscarriage and that's weird. Yeah. Yeah. And so he calls her former therapist, Dr. Pastor. Who goes and visits her. And Michelle tells him that she has been hospitalized in the same ward where her mother died of cancer.

And he thinks has perhaps contributed to this grief response in her. And then she says, I had a dream last week. It was clear to Dr. Pastor that this was no ordinary dream. She says, I dreamed that I had an icky place on my hand. And when I scratched it, all these bugs came out of where I was scratching it.

Little spiders is pouring out of the skin. On my hand, as a psychiatrist, doctor, pastor had learned how to listen to dreams, to gauge the emotional tone, to pick up the reference points to the certain, just how serious the dream was. This one was nightmarish, but it was more than that. It was blatantly symbolic.

It connected subconsciously to something very important. He was sure of that. There was perhaps something wrong about the pregnancy and her acceptance of it. There had to be something on that order to produce a dream like this. Jesus Christ. Okay. What do you think about that? I'm slightly skeptical of the whole thing of reading dreams anyway, because there's a lot of taro Cardi kind of stuff that you can see what you want to see.

And so it's much more about the person who's interpreting them than any objective classification. Like that's actually seems like a relatively common dream. If you have a phobia of spiders, To have your phobia be reflected in your dream. It doesn't seem that weird, but like, if you want to see it as like, oh, this was no ordinary dream, right?

Like you easily, right? Like this, this isn't an ordinary spider dream. The stream must be about something really important. Yeah. I think that the idea that you can tell from the dream that someone is having about their life, whether it's something really severe insignificant is going on, I think it's a comforting way to believe that.

Therapy and dream analysis works. Yeah. I mean, I've read these, you know, these things, things about handwriting analysis. Like you can tell from like the curvature of your lowercase D that like you're a depressive person or whatever. I've read studies on this, that show that usually what people are doing with that kind of analysis is they're taking what they already know about a person.

Like, they give you a little description of someone like she's been hospitalized twice and her mother died last year and all this other stuff. And then you look at her handwriting and it's like, oh, she's a sad person. And it's like, no, you're just filtering what you already know about her through this external stimulus.

And I think. That's basically what he's doing, that he already knows something about this patient, and then he's adding significance to this dream, but actually he just, he has these preconceptions about her and he's like, the dream magically reinforces my preconceptions. It's amazing. Right. And also that, like, maybe this is a way to be like, oh, like you're clearly going through something like, yes, this is an important dream.

Like I'm validating. Your feelings. Like it can come from a place of good faith, but like still not reflect maybe the thing that objectively you're trying to say with it. Yeah. Um, and so then we get into Michelle's history. We learn that she is the child of two parents who had really wanted a boy. They wanted to name her Michael and instead named her Michelle.

It says the birth was apparently very disturbing for Jessica who's Michelle's mother. She became emotionally exhausted and developed medical complications. The child was taken away and lived with the grandparents for the first six months of her life. The strain on the maternal bonds was perhaps very great.

Her parents married. He was a stormy one. There were nights when her father erupted and drank and raid his and beat her mother. Michelle used to cower in her bed, frightened that he might kill her mother feeling that she had to stop him. Knowing that she could not. And then we learned there's periods where her father is kissed away, um, off somewhere.

And that this is where she has increased closeness with her mother. Who's apparently at times, emotionally present. And at times emotionally absent. So she's growing up in this unstable and abusive household. Right. And instead of dealing with the quotidian trauma that she's experienced, we're dealing with this exotic trauma that she's in.

Yeah. And so according to the book, her mother dies abruptly of cancer. When she's 14, her father disappears, she goes to live with her mother's parents. They send her to a Catholic boarding school. Um, despite the fact that she's not Catholic. And then within the next few years, her grandparents die. This is according to the book, there are conflicting accounts.

From elsewhere, but we will talk about that later. Okay. And so she seeks therapy to essentially try and, you know, to, for the reasons people seek therapy, being like, oh, Hey, I have been through some stuff. She should seek therapy. It sounds like she had a really rough childhood. Yeah. He starts seeing Dr.

Pastor who apparently has rarely seen a patient so motivated. Okay. Do. Therapy together for four years. Wow. And during that period, she meets a guy named Doug and gets engaged and gets married and they start building a forest dream home by Shawnigan lake, which is 30 miles from Victoria, which is where Dr.

Pastor is practicing. And Dr. Pastor's feeling is like, well, we. Worked through all your issues when you were in therapy before boom that's a therapy works fixed. Yeah. We've talked about it. All the book says he felt that in the earlier four year analysis, he had dealt with all the issues of any significance during her therapy.

He'd been impressed with the unusual detailing consistency of her childhood memories. They had traced all the threads and unraveled all the knots. How could they have missed a matter of sexual parent consequence? There was nothing to do, but look again, to review what they had previously covered to take inventory, to see if they'd missed something.

So the evidence that she needs more therapy, is it like she still wants therapy? That's it, right. It's not the evidence that she needs therapy. It's the evidence that there's some part of her life that they don't know about yet. And that must be the reason that she needs more therapy. And it's not that people just.

Determined their own need for therapy. He's like, but we already talked about everything peak psychoanalysis time, because we need to do an episode on this at some stage. I want to say peak psychoanalysis time is the fifties and sixties. I think mid sanctuary was when it really, but yes, we do. I mean, that's certainly a part of all this.

So what is, what, what kind of therapy. She goes, do we know? I don't know what, what Dr. Pastor is calling the particular type of therapy he's practicing. I mean, it's talk therapy that seems directly influenced by Freudian analysis. If it is not technically that. Okay. So it's Friday, but not necessarily. It's it's at least Friday.

Yeah. Okay. And so after he visits her in the hospital, Michelle starts seeing Dr. Pastor again, and she comes in to a session and says, I know there's something I want to tell you, but I don't know what it is. Okay. Do you think that the thing he wants to tell him is that he's live.

And also that he's not going gray. He's going silver. He's getting sober. Okay. She says, I sit up at night, wishing I could write you a letter. I actually try to write the letter to put it down on paper, but then I look at what I've written and there's nothing there just slash marks with the pencil. She suddenly took Dr.

Pastor's hand and both of hers and squeezed it desperately hard. He was astounded. Dr. Pastor himself was quite at home, a touching. He had been reared in a warm and tactile family, plenty of hugging and kissing. And he freely offered an arm around a shoulder. It was part of his personal and professional style.

But Michelle hadn't asked for that type of reassurance during the four years of sessions. Now she was clutching his hand and shaking it. I know there's something there. She said beginning to cry. I'm feeling this pressure that is so much worse than any pressure I've ever felt before. Uh, this is going to be one of those stories where it's like, somebody clearly is in need of actual help.

And then somebody takes advantage of her because despite all of our tittering, like this, isn't funny. And like she clearly needs someone to something, but what she doesn't need is for somebody to go shoveling around in her subconscious. For some made up ritual abuse. I think what's interesting too, is that unlike the therapist who will be influenced by this work, Dr.

Pastor doesn't set out looking for abuse or for ritual abuse. I mean, according to him. Right, right. That's true. That's true. According to this book, which does have factual and consistencies that we do know about. So yeah. Cause in my work I'm like I had no idea when I looked into this, that. Elon Musk would be such a Dick head.

You don't write that though. You wouldn't write a book and be like, I had no idea that Elon Musk was a robber Baron district. Are you sure? I mean, I do think there's like a writerly nonfiction trope that you have to have this blank slate going in. Right, right. And publishers want that like deep down, apparently what we all secretly want is Rob Schneider thought he had it all.

Do you want an arc, right? Like an arc. You want an arc for the writer and an arc for the character as well. And so you couldn't start a book with, like, I was pretty sure this was some satanic stuff. Although subsequent other books will start that way. So clearly that is a publishable narrative. And it's also what we talked about with kitty Genovese and this thing of like, Why didn't anyone call nine one one and it's like, well, nine 11 was invented, partly because of how much difficulty people had connecting with the police to report her screams.

Yeah. So this also, I think, could be in a similar vein to that where like he, might've not gotten in. Looking for a satanic ritual abuse because he invented the concept of satanic ritual abuse. Ah, okay. So it could be fake or it could be legit. So at this point, don't, you know, Michelle comes in and she's collecting his hand.

She's like, there's something I need to tell you, but I just can't. And he says, I'll tell you what, realizing that he was about to go farther than he usually did with a patient. He firmly believed that problems should be solved during the office sessions. And that the psychiatrist who allowed a patient to break into his schedule or into his private life was risking the development of an unhealthy manipulation.

Of doctor by patient, but Michelle was different and her plate was alarming. He told her seriously, I'll be available. If things get really bad, give me a call. I'll make time for you. Right. So he clearly is attracted to her. She's attracted to him, right? I mean, yeah. The question at this point is, are they aware that they are attracted to each other?

Not whether the attraction is there. And he's like, you know, call me any time for your lovers lovers out. Call me. Thank you. And then four days later, Michelle calls. And so she was watering her plants when all of a sudden she suddenly had this epiphany, which is an experience I very identify with. And so she comes in for their session dressed in all black and pastor's like, I've never seen her wear black before.

And I like to think it's like when Luke Skywalker shows up in return of the Jedi and you're like, oh yeah, And the book says it seemed an unmistakable sign to him that something was up. So did her demeanor, she was somber ready. Her eyes were right there. He thought, and her manner was serious. No small talk.

She was like a high diver standing at the edge of the board on tip toes. And so then she lies on the sofa, which he says she's never done before. She, that she's like not a fan of TAC previously and not a fan of the sofa previously. And now she's doing both. And I mean, what do you think of this? I'm just very uncomfortable in this scene.

Are you, are you like feeling like, oh, like something bad is going to happen? Like, don't go in the basement. We both know what's going to happen next, but it's like, it just seems like the ethicalness of like these two people that are attracted to each other. And she comes in wearing different clothes and she like lies down and he's like, Ooh, she's like a diver and he's alive.

I don't know. It just seems like a fucking ethical minefield what's happening right now. I will tell you that like nothing sexual between Michelle and Dr. Pastor happens in this book that did happen during this period, they are not telling us about it. So we're not going to get any of that content, but yeah, we're talking about someone taking advantage of their power over someone else.

That is what the story is. Yeah. So basically Michelle lives there looking terrified and can't say anything and he's like, okay, I'm here for you. I'm ready to hear it. Whenever you're ready to talk to me. It's good. A little hunting the first 20 minutes of Goodland. And he's like, tomorrow's Saturday. So like let's not leave this a whole week.

Like, come in tomorrow. Like, we'll come back to this. Let's you know, I wouldn't normally do this, but I'm doing it for you. Not good. Who's going to be torture for you. I'm sorry. And then on the next page it says. He had the strongest sense that he and Michelle were about to embark on something significant.

And then he calls her and asked if he can bring a tape recorder the next day, because he wants to be more fully present. And she says, I'm glad of that. I think I'm going to need you. He says, it's sort of like going back to a haunted house. You can't go back all alone. And she says, it's safe with you. I feel very safe with you.

It's like porno movie dialogue. It's like, I'm scared doctor I'll come in in the morning. It'll be just the two of us and the tape recorder. I don't know. So that's chapter one, chapter two, she comes back in for another session and this is the one where she starts talking. She comes in and she initially says I was going to try to talk about my weight a bit, because up until the last three weeks, I had been able to keep it under control.

Oh my God. And then she's saying that she's been eating more and putting on weight. That's fine. I let her wear sweat pants and hang out. It's fine. But this is something now, somehow this is the thing that leads them into all of this material, which is really like, this is the door somehow. So she says, when I think about being overweight, I guess get in knots, it really makes me uptight.

Somehow it's connected with being small. Like they, something back then that is really bugging me something that's on resolved. It's so hard to tell you how I felt then. And she basically wants him to come closer. And so he does, and then he comes and sits closer to her and she just lies there screaming for 25 minutes.

I don't know. I don't know how much to believe of this. This is weird. I've never tried screaming for 25 minutes. I don't know if my throat could sustain. I mean, we have a tape, so that does seem. Of all the things in this book, this is one of the more plausible, I will say that Jesus Christ we're in dark territory now.

I mean, does that set off alarm bells for you specifically? Twenty-five minutes is a really long time to be screaming. It's a, it's a kind of, we have a malleable phrase too. Like that doesn't mean she has to be screaming every second. Like maybe she, like she screams and then she cries and then she screams and then he's like so uncomfortable with this entire scene.

This is the most comfortable you were ever going to be for the rest of this book. Can you believe that? There is a nice little part where they get, talk about Christmas for like three pages. But I just, I mean, she's clearly she's feeling messed up. Somehow need to process something she's suffering the human condition in some way.

Yeah. I do wonder I have zero evidence, but I do wonder. If he's like coaxing her to get this more extreme stuff out rather than relatively every day. Like my parents were weird about food and I have body issues, like things that are work on them. Yeah. It's, it's interesting that you take it in that direction because my assumption has always been.

That it's, it's totally plausible that she could be in this MicroVest state when she comes in and could need to just do this screaming. And I think one of the things I find interesting too, kind of researching recovered memory therapy and MPD therapy and this kind of therapeutic wave that we are seeing in this book.

And then because of this book, Is it a key part of it seems to be at times being able to be guest beside yourself and going through almost this primal scene of like screaming or crying or just losing control, like a baby and having this therapist. Give you this kind of parental love and unconditional positive regard by just being like, okay, you have to scream and cry and just, that's fine.

Like his, get it out. You know, it's just, this is the place to do it. And so I think that I can understand a scenario where she has comes in and needs to do this and needs to fall apart, and certainly has reason to, you know, like we all have reasons to fall apart and we know that he's just had a miscarriage and that's.

A traumatic event that I think the trauma of is under-recognized now. And so think about how seriously people took it in 1976. So I can see her doing this all without any prodding from him, but we aren't going to see, you know, yeah. That's a, some of the, the kind of steering he does with this is right there on the page, but it is after the screaming session.

That Michelle first begins to describe sort of things or ideas of things that are going to gel into the visions. And I want to wrap up for today by talking about that. Tell me, tell me, tell me. Okay, I'll read you this next passage. After 25 minutes, the screaming began to EB. Michelle was shaking uncontrollably, almost convulsively.

As the Christ died away, he could see that she was struggling to speak. She was straining to get words out. He hoped the struggle would be a kind of birth. And then we have transcription of Michelle saying, oh God, help me. Oh, God help. I don't know what to do. I feel so sick. I feel like my heart's going to stop.

Oh, I hate this. I'm on the bed. I'm in the air. I'm in the air and I'm upside down. There's this man. And he's turning me around and around. Who is the man? Doctor? Pastor asks softly it's Malakai. So is that like a demon person? We will find out. Next time. Oh, do you, what do you think actually going on with her?

Because I'm assuming you don't think that she was actually like ritually sacrificed in a satanic cult. So what do you think this is to me? You know, the only way to answer that question is to go through the rest of this book. But I mean, I guess my broad answer to that is that I think that she had a need for care and for filling some kind of emotional void.

And that this therapeutic relationship was a way for her to do that. And that part of the way that she ended up as the main character of the story is that there was someone that she could get what she needed from that the way to get it was to. Have some dramatic past trauma that he didn't know about yet, a lot of us have need for care, I suppose we all do.

But that's the kind of thing, as we've learned so many times on this show, that that is the kind of thing that can be taken advantage of very easily, especially for people who have their antenna up for those. Types of people and those types of needs. I don't ha I don't see Dr. Pastor as a self-consciously predatory figure at all.

I think that one of the really interesting things about the satanic panic and about this book and about so many of the other building blocks of this as a phenomenon is that no one has to have malicious intentions and no one has to think that they're doing anything, but being a Crusader for what's good in order to obtain.

A very bad result, right? That's going to be the story of this book. Also, I got to say, I'm suspicious of this live silver Fox already. I may have a darker view of this live gentlemen of lights, silver foxes. I mean, I dunno, I just don't even the transcripts. I don't know how much to believe of all this, just because there's, I mean, I have no evidence of anything.

Obviously. I've only heard of this book like this morning, but, but you have to comment on the incentives that there's an incentive for the doctor to. Embellish some of these early sessions, just because we're talking about a bestselling book here. Yes. Yeah. Again, add that all of this can have taken place without either of the authors of this book.

Even having wanted to write a best-selling book as a primary goal, or even as a significant goal, like they might have gone through all of this. And as they claim at the end of it been like, oh my God, there's this terrible problem with Satanism. We must raise awareness about it. We must write a book about it.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but I think that is on the bingo. You're right. I'm assuming that they set out to write a best seller when 99% of people who write bestsellers do not set out to do that. You tend to assume a cynical motive in people. And I tend to assume that people are like well-intentioned idiots who just accidentally.

You know, destroy the world and we're both right. Like I think we are probably both right and equal number of times. That's because I have cynical motives for everything that I do, because I'm a well-intentioned idiot.

But you're also very live well, you have a delicate now. .