*CW: SA, CSA, SA denialism, DID denialism*

Original post made on Tumblr.com

A lot of people hear about The Satanic Temple and think they’re very cool and do a lot of good work.

We would question that (the Temple is ineffective at what it promises to do while its owners have troubling histories and keep TST’s finances opaque in regard to where money actually ends up).

What few people know, and presumably none of the members and supporters of The Satanic Temple who themselves are plural know, is that the Grey Faction also claims Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is fake.

Full thread and more under the break.

The Rings System @TheRingsSystem

TW: S*t*n/ic words mentioned
We just found out that @/satanic_temple_ has a project named grey faction, which among it’s many goals that align with supporting the false memory syndrome foundation, involves disproving/disbelieving in DID. We are incredibly disappointed and hurt.

Right on it’s home page.

“The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry.”

“A position we have made crystal clear: Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder (MPD/DID) is not “fake,” but typically iatrogenic, cultivated by unscrupulous mental health professionals.”

“We do not believe people diagnosed with DID are “faking” their symptoms; we believe people really do suffer from symptoms of mental illness… However, we are skeptical that people really can have multiple personalities… in an objective sense.”

They also reduce alters down to “behavioral components” such as rocking back and forth. Which is especially reproachable to take mentally ill folk’s description of their lived experience and twist it into something so 2 dimensional as this. Especially when it strips us of agency.

There is an important line to walk when it comes to the era of the false memory syndrome foundation. There are true, horrible instances of carceral care and medical malpractice forced on patients that must be addressed. But you cross that line when you disbelieve survivors & DID.

We’re just really, really fucking disappointed in the organization that was supposed to be leftist, and is leaving one of the most harmed & stigmatized communities to rot in the pursuit of taking down some of the very the people who harmed us the most.

The Satanic Temple @satanic_temple_

Calling for standards of mental health care that don’t allow for the propagation of crippling conspracist delusions is leaving which community to “rot”? In pursuit of taking down whom?

The Rings System @TheRingsSystem

Also, I want to make it clear that this thread does not contest your fight against “recovered memory therapy” of the 80’s (rebranded incarceration & forced meds). That’s important work, and we are all working against the people who incacerated our community for decades

This thread is specifically about my disappointment that in that fight against people who used sodium Amytal, incarceration, etc as “treatment” you choose to drag down the people who were hurt by it as well. (folks with DID).

Specifically, by all the quotes that I have mentioned. They are the focus of this thread. Many members of the grey faction constantly repeat these ideas, which invalidate, harm, and strip agency of a marginalized population (folks w DID). That’s what’s disappointing.

The Satanic Temple @satanic_temple_

We think people diagnosed with DID are the MOST vulnerable to these irresponsible conspiracist practitioners.

The Rings System @TheRingsSystem

Thank you. You could do better to support our community by believing our lived experiences, and stop encouraging and spreading discourse that directly invalidates what we experience.

You can say people “diagnosed with DID” are the most harmed, but that does nothing to address my point. You can say that and still believe our experiences aren’t real, still work to discredit our community. Undermining our experiences is not helpful if your goal is to help.

The Satanic Temple @satanic_temple_

We focus on cases of recovered memory testimony that clearly are not accurate. We can’t ignore those because somebody else thinks it negates their experience, nor can we ignore the methods whereby those false claims are cultivated.

The Rings System @TheRingsSystem

Respectfully, addressing the cases where people were inaccurately convinced they had DID in carceral care settings does not require you to state on your website that your “crystal clear point” is that all DID is iatrogenic, and that multiplicity is not something we experience.

I am not asking you to ignore them, and I am not saying that I feel invalidated by them. I am saddened and enraged by what they underwent, and they deserve justice.

You can do that justice work without dragging down people with DID in the process. Without insinuating that our experiences are implanted and inauthentic, when many of our community has never once seen a therapist.

Adding this [The Satanic Temple’s tweet reply above] to the end of the thread, as it’s where we have continued our discussion of the issue at hand. I’d also like to note that they have offered to continue discussion with us off Twitter, and we reached out yesterday and are awaiting a response. I can keep folks updated.

When we checked in a few months later, The Rings System said, “No, they [TST] ended up not responding to my email chain and haven’t made any of the requested changes to any of their online content.”

Grey Faction did make some changes between April 2021 and June 2021, largely removing a much longer section titled “What about Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)?” quoted from in that thread, replacing it with:

The connection between Satanic Panic and MPD/DID is undeniable. Patients convinced that they were (or are) victims of ritual abuse are nearly always diagnosed with DID, and retractors — people who come to realize their memories of ritual abuse are false — typically find that they were misdiagnosed with DID. However, we recognize that the existence of misdiagnoses does not by itself invalidate an entire disorder. There is ongoing discussion and debate within the field regarding the nature of DID and its causes; that discussion is largely independent of our work combating the modern Satanic Panic.

So, quite a bit shorter.

By November 2021, then one further edit was made to this section, which is where it stands today:

…modern Satanic Panic. [code word 1: pseudoscience]

This isn’t surprising, and we would bet we know who in particular added it back in.

Compared with corporate structures and legal case proceedings, we don’t talk a lot about is how TST owner Doug Misicko has, under the pseudonyms “Doug Mesner” and later “Lucien Greaves”, spent the last two decades at least involving himself in conflicts of mental health diagnoses based more at this point seemingly on a pursuit of personal grudges than any higher ideal.

The first version of that FAQ section from 2019 until January 2021 likely was the product of Misicko solely:

The modern tide of academic writing on MPD begins around 1980, and the 1980s saw a wealth of literature presenting the condition in very simplistic terms. Therein a case is made that even a single traumatic event in childhood could be so damaging to the psyche so as to fracture it into pieces, or “alters,” that are literal personalities within the individual. These personalities were reported to have their own life histories and accompanying memories, proclivities, tastes, allergies, and even eye colors. Memory, in particular, has been regarded as central to the condition ever since DSM-III R (1987), and memory recovery and processing was, and remains, the central component of treatment.

Due to the catastrophic fallout from the Satanic Panic, MPD has been the subject of controversy within the mental health community as well as in popular circles. Accordingly, the academic literature on MPD has evolved over the last three decades. Some of this was little more than obfuscation intended to stem the tide of push-back (e.g. renaming to MPD to DID to retain parity with a more circumspect DSM-IV in 1994). Some of the evolution, however, represents genuine nuance in part of the community. In developmental models of DID, for example, the condition is seen as a sort of coping mechanism for traumatic episodes that are part of an extended pattern of both trauma and love and support. In effect, an “alter state” here might not be so dissimilar from a sort of more durable “thousand yard stare” common in battle-induced PTSD cases. It would be a stretch to call this sort of state even a metaphorical personality. Even if it had some behavioral components (rocking back and forth, etc.) that were unique to it, it is a very far cry from the literal “alters” of the earlier writing.

Thus, there is a range of interpretation as to what DID even is within the relatively small segment of the mental health community that entertains its legitimacy as a traumagenic disorder in the first place. There is also sometimes a troubling dichotomy in the way it is discussed in public-facing venues vs. within the “trauma community.” One encounters eyebrow-raising statements made at ISSTD conferences by individuals that would be difficult to recognize from their relatively respectable academic writing, for example.

This is an intolerable situation for a supposedly professional community. Foundational ambiguity of this magnitude, an unwillingness by some practitioners to talk openly about their real views, and the pervasive use of a clearly dangerous treatment method mean that patients currently diagnosed with DID should be treated by qualified professionals outside this circle.

Here’s an interview Misicko, again as “Lucien Greaves” gave to one of TST’s in-house journalists back in 2018.

Guest Post: Lucien Greaves on Dissociative Identity Disorder

Lately, it’s been a popular hobby of those who are still trying to legitimize DID to merely illustrate by way of PET or MRI that their are demonstrable indicators of DID, which avoids all of the real questions in this entire controversy, which is whether or not the condition is primarily or entirely cultivated in therapy, or the result of earlier trauma.

I’ve met with and corresponded with, interviewed, and read the case studies of many people who felt that they very much did, at one time, have Dissociative Identity Disorder, but who came to realize that the condition was iatrogenically imposed, meaning that it was a dysfunction that was created and cultivated for them during the course of the therapy itself.

So, in short: If there are, somewhere, credible rare cases of naturally occurring (as opposed to iatrogenically created) DID, we still have very little understanding of what that would look like because the scientifically ignorant quacks who have inextricably tied their theory and treatment to Recovered Memory Therapies.

In a former attempt at a career as a self-styled journalist under the name “Doug Mesner”, Misicko devoted a lot of time and energy to for lack of a better term debunking Dissociative Identity Disorder entirely.

What is Dissociative Identity Disorder? An Interview With an ISSTD Past President : Doug Mesner

In 2013 in Vice, under both pseudonyms “Doug Mesner” and “Lucien Greaves”, Misicko explained that one of his goals with The Satanic Temple was to “destroy this harmful pseudoscientific practice“, although you can read that more or less charitably as you see fit:

In 2009, I went to a “Ritual Abuse/Mind-Control” conference in Connecticut where I listened to “experts” elaborate upon their beliefs in Satanic Ritual crimes. I thought they would be a fringe grouping of delusional people holding firmly to incredible beliefs, hurting nobody but themselves. What I found instead was a twisted subculture of licensed therapists, and their clients, who subscribe to a pseudoscientific belief in “dissociative amnesia”: The theory that some events—particularly sexual abuse—can be so uniquely traumatic that the conscious mind cannot comprehend it, and thus those memories are “repressed.” This school of “therapy” breeds conspiracy theory and literally indoctrinates clients into false beliefs in a Satanic threat. Clients are encouraged to “remember” episodes of abuse that are presumed to have been concealed from their conscious minds, and when the evidence doesn’t match their confabulatory false memories, they explain it away as evidence of a much larger conspiracy—a Satanic conspiracy. With the false veneer of science, these “experts” in dissociation have kept a witch-hunt alive. Innocent people have been convicted and imprisoned on the “evidence” of recovered memory testimony, even though this is the exact same “evidence” we have for alien abduction, and is the same “therapeutic” process by which people practice “past life regression.” I have a long and complex body of writing, much of which can be read at www.process.org, where I detail in a number of articles how this cult-like therapy subculture continues to ruin the lives of innocent people. So one of my own goals is to destroy this harmful pseudoscientific practice, and dispel the myth of an international Satanic conspiracy. The broader goal of the Satanic Temple in general is to advocate for all of those who are unjustly maligned, demonized, or marginalized—victimized by conspiracy theorists and dogmatic supernaturalists. We seek to assert the rights of religious non-believers and skeptics. We also hope to provide the philosophical framework by which our membership may hone their cognitive tools and never fall victim to those forces.

So it’s not that they don’t know.

Misicko just doesn’t believe in DID (there’s also a whole thing with Misicko about C-PTSD we won’t get into here) and directs The Satanic Temple and its projects like Grey Faction accordingly. There are many good people in TST and its various organs who legitimately want to do good work.

But Misicko is co- or sole-owner of all of the various corporations that make up the Temple, and there is no overruling him. He (and Cevin Soling) sit atop the hierarchy. You cannot reform it.

So think about that when you’re thinking about organizations you want to support and provide resources to.

When it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more and it’s always worse.

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Speaking of which, one more thing:

As “Lucien Greaves”, Doug Misicko will sometimes claim to have attended Harvard, but it’s not clear what evidence has ever been provided for this.

Co-owner Cevin Soling (a.k.a. “Malcolm Jarry”) seems to legitimately have several degrees, including post-graduate degrees, but he came from money, so that’s not surprising.

For Misicko, we’d really like to see some evidence he ever did more than take some Harvard Extension School courses and hang around on campus.

Sincerely, correct us if that exists somewhere because our searching has not turned up anything, even admission or a stray reference to him being a student, much less an alumnus.

All of that is to say, Misicko doesn’t really seem to have any authority for having strong opinions about this psychological and neuroscience stuff, but he speaks as if he does, directs Grey Faction to his interests as if he does, and the effects are quite harmful.

The least defensible of these is Misicko’s continued role as one of the diehards championing the now-shuttered “False Memory Syndrome” Foundation. We’re mentioned this before as it’s specific to Misicko and TST, but New York Magazine‘s Katie Heaney wrote what’s likely the definitive post-mortem on that.

The Memory War

On December 31, 2019, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation abruptly announced it would dissolve. In some ways, this wasn’t surprising. Pam and Peter Freyd are both in their 80s, and nearly half the group’s board members are listed as “deceased.” The FMSF had raised more than $7.7 million since its founding, but the donations and dues tapered off over the years, and it ceased publishing its newsletter in 2011. The foundation gave birth to a number of offshoots; its Australian counterpart is also defunct, while the British False Memory Society remains active. The Satanic Temple, a religious group with chapters in 21 states, has a vocal false-memory subgroup called the Grey Faction. The temple’s co-founder, a 43-year-old man named Doug Misicko (who uses the pseudonym Lucien Greaves), earns a living creating content for 1,097 fans on Patreon. If the FMSF are the genteel, gray-haired grandparents, the Grey Faction are their online, cult-obsessed sons.

Misicko (as “Greaves”) naturally responded with his own blog, calling the journalist a liar and worse names. This is sort of a pattern for him when he gets criticism from anyone except the far-right.

Other than the fact that under yet another pseudonym (Mikoto Niikura), Misicko continues to help run “False Memory Syndrome Action Network” a FMSF spinoff group, this association isn’t exactly hidden, clearly.

It’s just all done with the justification that “false memory syndrome” is primarily about the since-disproved Satanic panic rather than utilized for bog-standard sexual abuse excuses and apologism.

Anyway, not good!