Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Child Abuse 2012 Conference
Our Healing Journey: Past, Present, Future
Two days of survivor and professional workshops, a safe room, great price, good food, safe environment, a chance to mingle with others who share your experience, a chance to move the movement forward…
On May 19 – 20, 2012
Survivorship will hold a conference at
Executive Inn & Suite
1755 Embaracadero
Oakland, CA 94606
http://survivorship.org/2012conference.html
The keynote speaker will be: Caryn Stardancer
Caryn Stardancer was a pioneer in establishing a grassroots network for survivors of Caryn Stardancersadistic ritualistic abuse. She co-founded Survivorship with Catherine Raggazzi, and served at the helm of that organization for a decade. During that time Caryn wrote and spoke both nationally and internationally, served as a mentor-counselor, taught professional service providers through UC Davis Entension classes and San Francisco General Hospital Grand Rounds, and exhibited her survivorship-inspired artwork in publications, galleries and exhibitions. She is currently retired to her rural home, where she is a proudly active grandma, homemaker and gardener.
Survivorship is one of the oldest and most respected organizations supporting survivors of extreme child abuse, including sadistic sexual abuse, ritualistic abuse, mind control, and torture.
Survivorship provides resources, healing, and community for survivors; training and education for professionals who may serve survivors; and support for survivors’ partners and other allies. The organization functions as a lifeline for survivors who may be isolated emotionally or geographically. Through community outreach and training, Survivorship also raises awareness about these difficult issues.
The purpose of the conference will be to help survivors of ritual abuse and their allies. The conference will be for survivors, cosurvivors, helping professionals and others interested in this topic.
Saturday Evening Concert
There will be a concert held Saturday night 7-9 PM at the Executive Inn and Suites. The concert will feature:
Lisa Cohen
Lisa Cohen: www.lisacohenmusic.com
Lisa Cohen is a truly gifted & unique Bay area blues, jazz & gospel vocalist. She has been wowing audiences on the Women’s Music circuit for years with her soulful voice & stage presence. A voice so powerful and dynamic, that she has been compared to both Odetta & Luciano Pavarotti.
”Call it jazz, call it blues, call it gospel, call it what you will, this is one singer who really brings all that she is through Spirit, into the song she’s singing into life. Opening her heart, singing from the soul, reaching deep one soul to another, to another, to another.“ – LuAnn Topp Womyn’s Words Magazine
Joining Lisa will be the Bay area’s legendary composer and pianist,
Mary Watkins
Mary Watkins: www.marywatkins.net
Mary Watkins is a composer and pianist with a vision. When you listen to her you will swear the heavens have opened up and sent an angel into our midst to play a heavenly blend of blues, folk and jazz. At the piano, she becomes a master improvisationalist, giving a huge range of emotion, form and substance, to her music and when she and Lisa play together it is truly magical.
Also featuring,
Deborah Tisdale
Deborah Tisdale is a Bay Area vocalist who began singing while growing up in Los Angeles, California. In addition to singing in various church choirs, she sang with the Pacific Chorale of Orange County. After moving to the Bay Area, she joined and sang with the East Bay Church of Religious Science Choir and has sung with the Berkeley Community Chorus. In the spring of 2008 she performed as a back-up singer for San Francisco jazz singer Paula West, and has further expanded her musical interests into jazz and pop. Currently, she sings with Dominion A Cappella Ensemble and the gospel group Sharon D. Henderson & Friends, and is a sought-after guest soloist in Bay Area New Thought churches.
Survivor Workshops – Saturday
David Shurter
Rabbit Hole: A Satanic Ritual Abuse Survivor’s Story
David Shurter, author of the just published Rabbit Hole: A Satanic Ritual Abuse Survivor’s Story, a book about SRA and events that surrounded Omaha NE and his life, is concerned that we are in a modern day rabbit hole concerning the allegations that have come out in our nation lately concerning child abuse, and details his life and the events that surrounded him as a comparison to what we are seeing today in hopes to educate people thus preventing history from repeating itself. Speaking of the societal implications that the child and drug trafficking had on the people involved with it, his focus is to explore the events that surrounded a failed savings and loan and his family and their affairs in order to explain what exactly was occurring in the middle of the country when he was inducted into a cult as a child- up to his adulthood, when the cult members sought him out again. Affirming that which has been kept hidden under the guise of conspiracy theories, it is his hope to bring survivors forward in a way that we no longer have to bother with the doubt of what happened because we already know, in order to help shape the newly developing consciousness concerning our plight. Exploring his past in Omaha, he brings a new perspective to satanic ritual abuse in such a way that it can no longer be denied, and it is his hopes to share his enthusiasm for the shift that is happening and to explore the concept that people are actually waking up.
Bio: David Shurter was intimately connected to events in Omaha surrounding a failed credit union and to the elite who were involved in a drug and child trafficking ring. Having written Rabbit Hole: A Satanic Ritual Abuse Survivor’s Story, it is David’s hope to expose the SRA that occurred in his childhood.
Kitty Downey
How Pets Help Healing, Comfort and Living
Over view of various helper animals and birds including:
service, court, therapy, assistance, seeing eye, and less known psychiatric.
Research on how the presence of pets and interaction with them affects moods, depression, mental state, alertness, and even physical readings (e.g. blood pressure.)
Benefits from ownership of pet or visiting elsewhere.
Classification under American and Canadian rules.
How to qualify a psychiatric dog.
What organizations provide and what can be done on your own. Animals do NOT have to be purchased or donated from an official organization.
Healing benefits and suggestions in case some parts inside are afraid of the pet.
Being with the pet publicly, answering nosy questions, practical concerns, tips and warnings, choices so that public reaction and laws do not turn more restrictive.
Bio: Kitty Downey is a survivor of extreme child abuse of many types along with mind control, hypnosis and amateur programming. She has been learning and healing for decades using psychotherapy, faith, music, animals and self-help techniques. She volunteers with Survivorship as a webinar presenter and editor of the Journal.
Shelby
Empowering your SRA/RA Recovery
DID vs. DSS when is one a disorder and the other a survival skill?
Memories: know if it is real or fake.
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Good memories and how we feel, smell, experience taken back to that time and happiness experienced.
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Bad memories, how we feel, smell, experience taken back to that time and the trauma experienced.
Bio: Shelby was born in northern California. Her Mother was a multigenerational Mormon and The Father was a convert from a Masonic background. She has had her name removed from the Mormon Church and no longer affiliates with this organization.
Shelby owns her own martial arts school where she has been very successful in working with all ages of people and promoting a positive life.
She wants to tell her story to give hope, courage and inspiration to other victims/survivors.
“what you did to survive, you can use to heal”
Survivor Workshops – Sunday
Chaya Malika
Healing Ethnic Violence: a Story about Surviving My Family’s Nazi Cult
With the help of my many selves, I’ll tell my story, that of an Arab Jew raised in a Nazi/KKK cult. I’ll describe my recovery from ethnic violence and invite participants who want to share their own experiences. My love of dancing will be woven throughout my talk.
Bio: Chaya Malika is a writer, dancer, artist, healer, and survivor of ritual abuse and government torture. Her life is getting better and better.
Jen Cross
Writing Ourselves Whole – A Healing Writing Workshop
Many of us who are survivors of sexual trauma feel fragmented or disjointed and have come to believe we must always live our lives this way. Transforming our language is one way we transform our lives; we can create new art and new beauty out of the difficult and complicated realities of our lives. During this workshop, you’ll write in response to exercises chosen to elicit deep-heart writing, engaging with such subjects as family/community, dreams, love, faith, and more. This is a space in which you will be welcome to write in whatever voice(s) arise for you – no singular narrative or/of self is required in this space or on these pages.
Although the setting is a supportive one, this workshop is different from a therapy group, as the focus of the workshop itself will be on each person’s writing. Also, even as we come together as survivors, we are never required to write any particular version of our “abuse story.” In this space, you have the opportunity to write as you feel called to write, no matter what the subject. You’ll leave this workshop with: a renewed sense of yourself as resiliently creative, a rich body of new creative writing, feedback from your peers about what’s already strong in your new writing, and connection with a new writing community.
Bio: Jen Cross (MA-Transformative Language Arts) has facilitated survivors writing workshops since 2002. She worked with survivors of domestic violence and other traumas, individually and in groups, before beginning to lead workshops through which trauma survivors could express complicated truths through writing. She is the founder/facilitator of Writing Ourselves Whole.
Leslene della-Madre
Survivor Track: Shamanism and Healing Trauma
Shamanism is an age-old, cross-cultural healing practice. In using shamanism in healing I have discovered what I believe to be the root cause of all trauma and have created my own unique shamanic pathways in addressing this wounding. I will discuss this perspective and offer teachings on soul retrieval, power animal retrieval, the sacred Medicine Wheel and the retrieval of the Sacred Feminine. In shamanic teachings, there are parts of the soul that are never abused, never wounded, no matter what our experiences may have been. While we do need to heal our pain, if we can access what is known as the ‘nagual’ within, we can find hidden strengths that we never knew were there, learn to dis-identify from our wounded-ness and claim inner power that is stronger than the effects of any abuse.
Bio: Leslene della-Madre, author, spiritual “midwife,” shamanic practitioner, teacher and founder of Winged Women Return, a center for shamanic healing in Sebastopol, CA, incorporates the use of innovative shamanic techniques in the healing of trauma and serves as spiritual adjunct and colleague in the community of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists.
Professional Workshops – Saturday
Lynette Danylchuk
Treating Ritual Abuse Survivors
At this point, there are many theoretical approaches to dealing with trauma survivors. They are all helpful, to a point. However, when the survivor has had to deal with ritual abuse, there are issues and dynamics that go beyond what most therapists are taught.
This workshop targets specific issues and patterns common to survivors of ritual abuse, along with some ways to deal with them, empowering both the therapist and the survivor.
The topics that will be covered include: the ordeal, double bind, illusion of choice, deliberate targeting of any attachment, training in external locus of control, use/misuse of magical thinking, attributing power to abusers that doesn’t exist, triangle, trauma bond, and the theological, alogical mind traps
Bio: Lynette Danylchuk, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in San Mateo, Calif. She has served on the Board of Directors of Survivorship from 1989-2002. She is currently on the Board of Directors of ISSTD and Chair of their Professional Training Program. She has worked with survivors for over 25 years.
Randy Noblitt
Accessing Dissociated Mental States: Techniques, Ethics and Risk Management
This PowerPoint-assisted workshop teaches clinical skills for mental health professionals who work with survivors of extreme abuse. More specifically, we will discuss the clinical strategy that I call Accessing Dissociated Mental States (Noblitt, 1997; Noblitt & Perskin, 2000). We will review the narratives of survivors that explain how they were trained to experience trauma-mediated amnesia and dissociation of identity in response to particular triggering stimuli. We will discuss the details of how such abusive training is often done and how therapists can integrate this knowledge in their own clinical assessments and treatment planning. Included will be some of the common and more generic triggers as well as methods for discovering more idiosyncratic cues. Unfortunately many of these survivors are in therapy for years before these problems are accurately identified. Are there quicker, more efficient ways for detecting these cue-controlled behaviors and providing appropriate treatment? What are some of the common hand signals, touch methods and other programming cues? Should therapists know about these so that they can avoid those that may be harmful? On the other hand, can therapists use triggers as part of therapy to facilitate the survivor’s recover? We will consider these questions and others in the context of ethical practice and risk management. A survivor of extreme abuse will participate in the actual demonstration of specific techniques.
Bio: Randy Noblitt is Professor of Clinical Psychology at The California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University in Los Angeles, California. He is also an author and educator and has acted as consultant, expert witness, and fact witness in civil and criminal cases involving allegations of child abuse, ritual abuse, and cult affiliation.
Panels
Survivor Panel:
Therapists can ask questions to survivors about different issues.
Moderator – Neil Brick
Participants – dejoly Labrier, Dvora Gordon, Carmen Yana Holiday
Dvora is a survivor of child prostitution and ritualized abuse. She has been a member of Survivorship since 1998. She served as President of the Survivorship Bd of Directors for 4 years. She is honored to do work for Survivorship and feels really good about giving back to a community that was so essential in her own healing process.
Carmen Yana Holiday is a survivor of systematic Freemason and US government abuse including torture and deliberate dissociation, child pornography and human trafficking. She has facilitated recovery workshops for survivors of extreme abuse and presented as a survivor for several organizations.
Final Panel for All: Advocacy and the Future of the Survivor Movement
Jenny is a survivor of satanic abuse who experienced her first RA memories in 1990. She served for five years on Survivorship’s board of Directors in the early 2000′s, and continues to support Survivorship and other survivors in every way she can.
Neil Brick is a survivor of Masonic based Ritual Abuse and MK-ULTRA. He is the editor of S.M.A.R.T. A Ritual Abuse Newsletter and coordinator of annual ritual abuse conferences.
deJoly LaBrier is a survivor of extreme abuse in the forms of a military child sex ring, government experimentation, satanic ritual abuse, mind control and the resulting MPD/DID. She has written two books, Diary of A Survivor in Art and Poetry; and All Together Now, A Multiple’s Story of Hope and Healing. deJoly is an advocate, mentor and public speaker on the issues of sexual abuse, mind control and government experimentation. She feels that by giving voice to the truth of what has happened to her, others who are unable to speak, either out of fear or not believing they will be heard or believed, will find hope in their recovery from the abuse.
Professional Workshops – Sunday
Ani Rose Whaleswan
The Language of Integration and Altered States: Honoring our Dissociative Capacities
Living with multiplicity myself, and being a friend to many other survivors, I have long felt hurt, angered, and frustrated by the traditional definitions and limits put on the words: integration, altered states (alters), and dissociation (as a disorder). This eventually led me to start looking into other cultural and global uses of those words. Suddenly a lot of things began to make sense, to support my vision for new definitions and ways of discussing these words (and all that they mean in healing). It’s not the words so much as how we use them, which will transform and bring about healing. We have the power to change our own old ways of defining ourselves through expanding and transforming the words we use. If we can expand our definitions, then treatment visions and modalities can expand. Healing is a life-long process for all people. To limit the meaning of words solely to the understanding in the psychiatric/psychological field, limits treatment and hope.
This workshop will compare various uses of words, and expand their meaning for victims of trauma, and those that serve them, those that live with them, and those who seek to understand them as equals.
Bio: Ani Rose Whaleswan is a mom, writer and artist originally from the Pacific NW and now in Colorado. She is a survivor of severe trauma from early childhood. Besides her own healing work, she has several years’ experience as a group facilitator and in various kinds of ministry. As an advocate she believes deeply in the healing process and likes to share that, “art is healing, and healing is an art.”
Sonia Connolly
From Shame to Compassion: Reconciling with Ourselves after Abuse
Sonia Connolly, LMT, shares practical, try-it-now tools to move from shame to compassion as we heal from abuse. She recently published Wellspring of Compassion: Self-Care for Sensitive People Healing from Trauma.
When we start to heal from abuse, we interpret the metaphor of a healing journey as taking us from broken to whole, from deeply unsatisfactory Here to much improved There. We are ashamed of our wounds and set goals to appear normal and functional to outside eyes. We can journey instead from shame to compassion, from seeing with outside eyes to inside eyes. Our most important healing task is to reconcile with ourselves.
The metaphor of a growing tree expresses the process of becoming more ourselves as we heal. We are rooted in the past and in our physical bodies. We stretch our branches into new possibilities, shaped by the obstacles and open spaces we find. We can acknowledge our weaknesses and strengths, our goals and obstacles, and our rhythms of activity and rest as we grow into our unique shapes.
Rather than strive to eliminate our trauma symptoms, we can learn to respond to them differently. For example, one common result of abuse is suicidal thoughts and feelings. Both survivors and healers often react with judgment or panic. Once physical safety is assured, we can respond with acceptance and look at what is underneath. Some possibilities are exhaustion, shame, flashbacks, and past threats for telling about abuse.
As we journey from outside eyes to inside eyes, from shame to compassion, we create room for self-forgiveness. Survivors are urged to forgive their abusers, but little attention is focused on forgiving ourselves. Self-forgiveness is giving up all hope of being a different person. In healing, we forgive ourselves for action and inaction, for vulnerability and strength, for standing out and fitting in. We reconcile with ourselves and feel the support and acceptance we longed for.
Bio: Sonia Connolly, LMT offers intuitive, compassionate bodywork in Portland, Oregon for sensitive trauma survivors. Her new book Wellspring of Compassion: Self-Care for Sensitive People Healing from Trauma is inspired by twelve years of client sessions and twenty years of self-observation while healing from abuse.
Heather Dawn
Working with Nightmares
Nightmares are intense, frightening experiences that disrupt sleep and leave the dreamer in a heightened state of physiological arousal and emotional discomfort. Common reactions on awakening from a nightmare include increased heart and respiratory rates, sweating, sharpened attention, fear, anger, panic, or feeling helpless or out of control.
Nightmare may contain images of abandonment, falling, fear of failure or even replay waking life events which occurs in PTSD so often that it is one of the identifying factors.
In this workshop the methods for working with dreams and nightmares will be reviewed.
Bio: Heather Dawn is completing her Doctors in Clinical Psychology (PsyD) with a Specialization in Dreams at Saybrook University and also holds an MA in Consciousness Studies from John F Kennedy University. She has attended conferences of the International Association for the Study of Dreams and numerous symposiums on trauma. These experiences have given her the opportunity to study with some of the most well known people in the areas of dreams and trauma. Her ancestry roots are Celtic and Germanic. She has lived her life according to her dreams for over 30 years.
Co-sponsors
1. The North American Truth & Reconciliation Coalition (NATRC) seeks to raise public awareness about historical and ongoing human rights violations in North America, and works to establish an accurate and truthful historical record of such crimes, including human trafficking, organized ritual crime, child soldiering, mind control experimentation and other forms of torture, in both the private and public spheres.
The North American Truth & Reconciliation Coalition (NATRC)
PO Box 401
Council Bluffs, IA 51502-0401
http://natrcoalition.org/
2. S.M.A.R.T., a newsletter that examines the possible connections between ritual abuse and secretive organizations.
S.M.A.R.T
P. O. Box 1295
Easthampton, MA, 01027
E-mail: SMARTNEWS@aol.com
http://ritualabuse.us/
3. CPPA
The Mission of the California Protective Parents Association is to protect children from incest and family violence through research, education and advocacy.
California Protective Parents Association
PO Box 15284
Sacramento CA 95851-0284
E-mail: cppa001@aol.com
http://www.protectiveparents.com/
4. deJoly LaBrier is a survivor of extreme abuse in the forms of a military child sex ring, government experimentation, satanic ritual abuse, mind control and the resulting MPD/DID. She has written two books, Diary of A Survivor in Art and Poetry; and All Together Now, A Multiple’s Story of Hope and Healing. deJoly is an advocate, mentor and public speaker on the issues of sexual abuse, mind control and government experimentation. She feels that by giving voice to the truth of what has happened to her, others who are unable to speak, either out of fear or not believing they will be heard or believed, will find hope in their recovery from the abuse.
5. BAWAR
Bay Area Women Against Rape (BAWAR), the nation’s first rape crisis center, was formed in 1971 to provide 24-hour comprehensive, services for survivors of sexual assault and their significant others. We have a 24hr crisis line 510-845-7273; accompaniment/advocacy to hospitals, police departmens and through the court system; in-person counseling and community education programs. All of BAWAR services free of charge and available in English and Spanish. www.bawar.org
Bay Area Women Against Rape
470 27th Street
Oakland, CA 94612
E-mail: bawar@bawar.org
http://www.bawar.org/
24-hour Confidential Rape Crisis Hotline: (510) 845-7273
for information for the conference:
http://survivorship.org/2012conference.html
