[Disclaimer: I have used aliases to protect the confidentiality and identity of clients or patients. No other names have been changed.]

Toward the end of the last chapter, I had mentioned that I was speculating on the impact that words and ideas can have on a person's mental health. I was referring to the situation in which Tracy had been confused about her diagnosis or her mental health condition.

I noticed a theme that was developing in the "memories" and flashbacks or "triggers" that were being presented to me. Triggers are things in our environment – something we see, hear, or feel (a tactile sensation) that trigger certain images, thoughts, and feelings.

Sadie had finished her therapy and Patricia, who had started therapy at the same time as Sadie, was not coming very often. But she had believed for a long time that she had Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) because she had been aware of different personalities.

I had two other clients that had DID and they both were coming from the Myrtle Beach area named Vanessa and Michelle. They had not previously known each other. Vanessa had been in therapy before with different therapists and she had a psychiatrist that had agreed that her diagnosis was DID. She had been the only client of mine who had been in the hospital for her condition before she started working with me.

I felt bad that others had failed her, and I had a release to speak to her psychiatrist as well. Michelle had not started working with me until some time in 2000, whereas Vanessa had started working with me in 1999.

At that same support/therapy group they had all met one another, and I would learn from them that they exchanged telephone numbers.

Patricia was the only one who had DID or a dissociative disorder who never came to the group sessions. That would turn out to be good for her. She didn't know any of my other clients and they didn't know about her.

I mentioned that there was a theme to what they were beginning to report. I don't have all the facts to prove how this happened or who is to blame. I can only speculate on what was happening at the time.

What Jessica and Vanessa were describing had a religious nature to it. They were both very religious. Jessica was a member of the Pentecostal religious denomination – a protestant Christian denomination. She described how in church services people would speak in tongues – a language that God would understand.

Jessica also spoke of a baptism of the spirit where one has a spiritual experience that sounded to me like a hypnotic trance. Both she and Vanessa were very religious in their sessions. They both described healing services where the movement of God or "the spirit" through them would heal them of certain problems. They might see people fall to the ground as if in a trance and something miraculous was happening as they believed.

They brought in drawings they made. It seemed like a child had drawn these. I had no idea if they were talking about these matters outside of therapy. But I saw that both were presenting images of upside-down crosses and what they described as "the people in the cult who wore robes."

Like me, you're probably wondering "what cult?" and "what does this mean?"

I started looking online for more information. The words of Louise Coggins came back to me. "Ritual Abuse." Louise had offered the workshop on DID in January of 1999 for clinical social workers.

I had some keywords to use in my searches. DID, ritual abuse, cult(s), child abuse, and trauma. It was some time in mid-2000 when I ventured down the proverbial rabbit hole. With the internet so much a part of our lives in the 21st century it's hard to imagine a moment's delay between hearing something unusual and doing a Google search on it.

Google wasn't even the major search engine back then. YouTube wasn't as popular then as it is now because not even half the population in America had internet access that was fast enough to stream video like it is now. Lynn and I were using dialup until 1995, a time after I had started graduate school.

One of the most intriguing discoveries was an article called "The Greenbaum Speech." The article was by D. Cory Hammond, Ph.D. I knew that name because he was the editor of the big book entitled "Handbook of Hypnotic Scripts and Metaphors" which was an American Society of Clinical Hypnosis book. He was a prestigious psychologist in Utah, but I had known of him.

I am jumping ahead in my narrative. The following two chapters describe events that happened earlier, in April of 2000.

In this speech, called "The Greenbaum Speech", Dr. Hammond details a set of programming that is based on the Greek letters of the alphabet. It was all very vague and strange. According to him, this was widespread.

I noticed that the speech had been given in 1992, more than eight years earlier but I had never heard anything about this.

The idea that he put forth was that alter personalities were deliberately created that could be accessed or identified by letters of the Greek alphabet. Using hypnosis, you would ask if any alters were known as or who understood about personalities that knew about "Alpha," "Beta," "Gamma," or "Theta."

I would learn years later that he was giving this presentation to rooms of 50 or more psychotherapists. He was far more senior as a psychotherapist than I was at the time that I discovered this.

Dr. Hammond didn't try to explain how this was done. He implied that there was a shared set of practices that existed across America and Canada. The sense that the meaning of "Alpha," "Beta," "Gamma" and "Theta" was shared across parts of America and elsewhere and had the same bizarre meaning was sufficiently vague and disturbing.

It was implied from this and other research that I found online that this was part of a shared conspiracy among certain groups of people – a cabal – that had deliberately harmed children to create these personalities. And the process of creating the different personalities was called "programming" – as in programming the human mind.

I started getting more frequent calls from Jessica, Vanessa, and then Michelle. Jessica was the only one of them that I knew had been receiving what I would call "therapy" from John.

I knew that John had helped Jessica, Tracy, and Alice create their "inner worlds." It was more than a home with different rooms. Most of my knowledge of this came from Jessica because Tracy had left the area after two sessions and Alice had not been very forthcoming at all.

Alice was the most ardent defender of John and his treatment approach. I also had no clear sense that she was living within the world that John had created for her or that she even had DID.

I'll offer just one example of the bizarre "triggers" of flashbacks that I heard about from Vanessa and Michelle. Neither of them had been referred to me by John but since they both came from the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina, about 90 miles from Wilmington, they started staying together on the extended weekends around their therapy sessions with me.

Somehow, they had connected with another client of mine who had been waiting in the lobby around the same time that they had their appointments with me. That other client, Rebecca was seeing me for an entirely different problem. Anyway, they were renting the apartment that Rebecca had because she was trying to get back with her husband after a period of separation.

I got a call from Vanessa in late July of 2000. She and Michelle were watching the movie "Conspiracy Theory" and it had triggered some flashbacks. I had a second phone line that rang at my home with a distinctive ring. Vanessa said that something about the blinking lights in a dark scene had triggered a memory of something that had been happened to them or was done to them.

"But you are safe, now, right?" I asked her.

Vanessa answered "yes" but then she added, "but Michelle needs you, now?"

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't know, she is just rocking back and forth and acting like she is freaking out," she said.

"Can you put her on the phone?" I asked.

I heard her say "Bruce wants to talk to you." And then Michelle said "Okay."

"Hello," I said then I asked, "are you okay?"

"Yes, I'll be okay, Bruce," she answered. She seemed okay to me and normal.

After a pause, I said, "so, I'll see you Monday, right?" It was Saturday night.

"Yes, Monday at 2 PM," she answered.

"Okay, bye," I said and hung up the phone.

With that, we will back up a bit in time and talk about events that happened about two and a half to three months earlier.