The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him. – Psalm 28:7
Trigger warning: topics in this blog post may trigger people who have experienced abuse as children.
Continuing on in Dr. Richard Gallagher’s book, Demonic Foes, I have been reading his pages where he wrote about past ritual abuse reported by many people.
For years in the 1980’s or thereabouts, there were many cases reported of ritual satanic abuse of children.
Living in California at the time, I remember this was a popular topic that I heard about over the years.
Some were reports of children being kidnapped for ritual abuse by individuals or couples who were reportedly dangerous to children.
Reading on this topic in Dr. Gallagher’s book brought back memories of reported cases that caused fearfulness and concern by social workers and other professionals who worked with children and families.
There was a big push to stop ritual satanic abuse by possible secret groups across America.
Dr. Gallagher wrote about this being a phase where many people were falsely accused in courts because people were inexperienced in this kind of information, or self-reporting victims were delusional about the subject.
The courts went through a phase where they had to think about proving innocence or guilt in these cases more carefully.
Repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse was also a big topic related to this issue. But how could these claims ever be proved? I wondered.
This was confusing at the time for me. I wondered how people could have repressed memories of being ritually satanically abused that would come up in their therapy sessions. Why so many all of a sudden, and how could these repressed memories ever be proved? I wondered.
Dr. Gallagher wrote,
Unfortunately, their stories have been, and still are, too frequently accepted at face value by poorly trained or overly credulous therapists.
It seemed to be a common occurrence.
The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect located in Davis, California, did a nation wide study of that found,
no evidence for large-scale cults that sexually abuse children.
However there were lone perpetrators or couples reporting they were involved with Satanic worship, whether true or just to intimidate people, who did abuse children.
Dr. Gallagher wrote that there have still been a large number of people who,
claim exposure to Satanists and abuse by them.
One of his patients who claimed to be possessed by demons was a highly impressionable female who he determined was not suffering from demonic activity, but her own mental illness. She made up stories and acted out possessions because she lacked getting parental attention when she was a child.
There were other issues combined causing her need for attention.
You don’t hear about repressed memories and satanic ritual abuse these days. It seems that our culture has moved on to other strange claims involving gender fluidity and more.
Impressionable people seeking attention along with having other mental health issues are being taken seriously again by health professionals who seem to accept people’s claims of being born in the wrong sexually assigned gender and want to change themselves from man to woman, or vice versa.
Again, we have defenders of youthful claims of needing hormone changing prescriptions. It seems this has been widely spread across social media.
Again, delusions and attention-seeking histrionic behaviors seize the day.
There are true mental illnesses which are different than spiritual attacks.
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