Wholeness: My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse

By Suzie Burke

Wholeness (My Healing Journey from Ritual Abuse) is the courageous, unfathomable story of a womans recovery from a decade of childhood satanic ritual abuse.

The book provides hope and inspiration for the estimated hundreds of thousands of victims of such torture.
For counselors and other psychology professionals, her journey offers techniques and approaches that should benefit other survivors.
And for the general public, the story sheds light on the subjects of ritual abuse, as well as how the mind stores and can recover traumatic memories.

Wholeness also demonstrates the undeniable power of repressed memory and disassociation. As a psychology doctoral student, Suzie Burke (pen name) studied how the mind can repress and wall off traumatic events for defensive purposes. The ability of the mind to hide traumatic memories deep within our unconscious mind in disassociated parts of ourselves is well documented with those who have survived early-age sexual abuse, torture and many other instances of severe psychological trauma.

In her first-hand experience, Dr. Burke tells how the reality of her own childhood was hidden in her unconscious until events nearly three decades later provided triggers that could not be ignored. Her journey to wholeness was filled with incidents of re-living events which included body memories of physiological shock, choking and vomiting.

The account goes beyond the psychological elements of her recovery. It is also a spiritual journey to wholeness in which she discovers that she is indeed a loving, compassionate woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456723606

Suzie Burke

Suzie Burke, R.N., Ph.D. is the pen name of a real woman who is a registered nurse and licensed professional counselor with a doctorate in psychology. She sought professional counseling for herself when she experienced an episode of major depression. Initially, she assumed the mental and physical signs of her depression were caused by the family’s move across the country with her business executive husband. She discovered, however, her depression was deeper and darker than most. In order to survive the trauma of horrific ritual abuse she suffered as a child, her mind had long ago repressed those memories. The10-year path to health, happiness and wholeness was a result of a savvy counselor, her own determination not to let her perpetrators “win,” plus a family that never wavered. Suzie Burke is now thriving. It has been nearly a decade since she ended her inward journey of self discovery. She has not, as of this writing, had any further triggers that caused attacks: no unexplainable vomiting, no shock episodes, no migraines, no strange body memories—nothing. Her life is now joyful and peaceful—not perfect, but far better than it was. She now practices as a licensed professional counselor, fulfilling not only her life-long dream but her soul’s purpose.  

Book preview

Contents

Prologue

Living a Whole Life

Chapter 1

The Early Years

Chapter 2

Uprooted

Chapter 3

Dr. Francisco Paoli

Chapter 4

Memories

Chapter 5

Help My Children

Chapter 6

Body Memories

Chapter 7

Eye-to-Eye with Francisco

Chapter 8

Little Suzie

Chapter 9

Living It

Chapter 10

Is There Life Before Life?

Chapter 11

Hard to Believe

Chapter 12

Gladiators, Past and Present

Chapter 13

Roller Coaster

Chapter 14

Golden Hands

Chapter 15

Spiritual Eyes

Chapter 16

Dressed for War

Chapter 17

Zelda

Chapter 18

Hell

Chapter 19

The Brass Ring

Acknowledgements

Afterword

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Prologue

Living a Whole Life

This is not a life sentence. I, too, have been in your prison and there is a way out.

This is a story about satanic ritual abuse. This is not an attempt to prove the reality of satanic ritual abuse. Instead, I want to give the subject another voice… my voice. I was a victim of such abuse from the time I was two years old until I was nearly thirteen. Satanic ritual abuse is a reality. It is hard to calculate how many hundreds or thousands of people suffer from such abuse because the memories are so traumatic and so walled off from our conscious minds to protect us.

This is also a story about the undeniable power of repressed memory and dissociation. I have no doubt that the mind represses and walls off certain memories for purely defensive reasons. Our continued existence at the time of certain events requires the mind to hide those memories deep within our unconscious mind in dissociated parts of ourselves.

Finally, this is a story about the psychological and spiritual journey I embarked upon into my unconscious mind to resurrect repressed memories and dissociated parts and to heal the trauma caused by the abuse I endured. Along the way, I discovered within me a deeply spiritual being. I discovered that I was, indeed, the loving, compassionate woman I always believed I was. And I discovered that I am an educator driven to speak out on disturbing, controversial issues such as dissociative identity disorder, satanic ritual abuse and repressed memories.

This was a difficult book to write. The memories were extraordinarily powerful. They tore at the very fabric of who I thought I was. I spent hour after hour crying, sometimes uncontrollably. Very often I would have to put aside my pen or close my computer simply because the tears were so blinding. But I pressed on. I was doing this for myself, to become a whole person again, but I was also doing it for my family: a husband and two daughters who stayed by me through the process and who healed as I was healing—even if they were unaware of it. I was also doing this for you, the unheard survivors and your families, to give you hope.

While the term dissociative identity disorder (DID) appears often in the media of our culture, there is surely more misunderstanding than knowledge. Some know of DID, or multiple personality disorder as it was previous called, from movies like The Three Faces of Eve in which her three personality parts exhibited behavior unknown to the other parts. That Eve is on one end of the DID continuum. In my case, my various parts were expressed via somatic reactions but never in my ordinary life. Indeed, in one session my therapist asked if I had ever lost track of time… his way of determining if my parts impacted my day-to-day living as seen by others, but I had not.

With this writing, I am supporting the human mind as a wonderfully complex and creative thing fully capable of convincing itself to split and not remember feelings by obscuring the truth of certain events. Why? Simply because the conscious mind is not yet ready to accept the events and deal with them. It is a survival mechanism.

So let’s begin…

When and where did satanic rituals first appear? While they may well date back to the time of Christ, they definitely became a significant form of aberrant expression in Europe during the 12th century, with the advent of the Black Mass. How satanism got to the United States, however, no one knows for sure.

For me, I began as a victim of satanism as a toddler and I suffered satanic ritual abuse for about ten years. My own father initiated and inflicted this horrific abuse. He was a member of a satanic cult that included four men and one woman from a small town in Illinois. What could possibly have drawn him down that path? I have asked myself that question many times. My father was a medical practitioner. He was a respected anesthesiologist. Why would a man of medicine be tempted by a practice and a theology founded upon sin and disobedience? We think of physicians as healing souls, but a physician with a fascination for darkness and death does not fit this description. People placed their lives in his hands every day and I have often wondered whether he would have preferred them to live or die. I do not know the answer to that question, but I do vividly recall him sitting at the dinner table and ridiculing patients as if they were lesser forms of life. I didn’t realize back then how unfavorably he viewed the human race.

A father who engages an unsuspecting child in his cult’s sick rituals is worse, far worse, than a doctor of medicine who chooses to participate in satanic worship. Satanic rituals were not a phase my father and his friends went through. They were not dabbling out of boredom, the way a teenager might, and this was not their way of finding freedom from some false morality. This was their way of life. And, yes, my own mother was also involved. Though not actively involved, she was complicit. She allowed it to happen. The sickness had deep roots, not just in my home as I once thought, but in my town.

I discovered this when I attended a conference on ritual abuse a few years ago. I sat with a woman who described herself as a ritual abuse survivor. She was a pleasant woman, ten years younger than me and from the Midwest, but not from just anywhere in the Midwest. She had been born and raised in my hometown. I was, of course, stunned. It was another fact which pushed me to accept that ritual abuse did indeed occur in a small Illinois town.

That belief had not come quickly, nor had it come without painful discovery. It came after years of internal struggle and healing. It came with the help of my own internal resources and their whisperings to me. It came through grace and with the help of one extraordinary therapist.

Chapter 1

The Early Years

You’re dumb.

My father often told me this when I was a small child.

Growing up, I believed his statements, tucked away in my unconscious mind, to be true. They impacted my self-esteem and the decisions I made.

Little did I know that my life hung on the liminal edge between the ordinary and the nightmarish for a very long time. Survival instincts hid experiences that were horrific. I hung on that liminal edge into adulthood, believing that I had lived an ordinary childhood. My regular headaches, paralyzing loneliness and ever present melancholy—did not make me question whether my childhood had been ordinary. Similarly, I didn’t realize my sister Marcia was withdrawn and bleak. She frequently threatened to run away from home. Eventually she carried out those threats, but, thankfully, she returned home.

I was afraid of everything as a youth, especially failure, which probably contributed to my academic success in school.

I tackled nursing school because my father, whom I loved, said that medical school was meant only for men. I believed him. And besides, I was dumb. He also told me that women were nurses, not doctors, so I enrolled in the Augustine School of Nursing in a nearby state. I thrived. As a young adult, I was bound and determined to prove my father wrong about his dumb daughter. I only had one problem: blood. Seeing it made me ill. I couldn’t jab a needle into someone’s arm without wanting to throw up. My reaction to blood went well beyond normal squeamishness, but I was years away from discovering its cause.

After graduation, and armed with my RN degree, I moved to a nearby state capital to work in a hospital and live with other newly graduated nurses. A year later, I gave up that great job to move back home and help my mother tend to my ailing father, the victim of five heart attacks.

A couple years later, I married the most eligible man in town. I was the classic nurse-nerd, and he made me feel that I belonged with his cool friends and cool lifestyle. Belonging was a completely foreign concept to me, something I had not experienced the first twenty-three years of my life.

My husband turned out to be lazy, unfaithful, and deceitful. My marriage failed, along with my father’s health. My dad died a terrible death in a rented hospital bed in the living room of the house in which I had grown up. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.

After my divorce and my father’s death, I became a workaholic to combat the loneliness and emptiness. Every night I prayed I would find a new love.

I was twenty-eight when I met Tom, my second husband. He worked for my hometown paper, and an early friendship blossomed into the true love I had longed for.

Instead of spending the rest of our married life in the familiar surroundings of my hometown as I expected, Tom’s newspaper career immediately took us in 1981 to Washington, D.C. He loved the challenges and thrilled in the successes at work. Meanwhile, I nearly perished with the immense changes of a new relationship and the totally different culture of D.C. On top of that, I had a torturous pregnancy. I spent all day, every day, nauseous and vomiting. I sank into an existence permeated by profound sadness. It should have been a grand and glorious time in my life, but it wasn’t. The only upside was the birth of our first child, a beautiful baby girl named Annie.

When the DC paper Tom was working for went out of business, he accepted a position in a small Illinois town, serving as publisher of a paper called the Daily Bugle. Ironically, the town’s primary employer was the mental hospital where I had done a practicum as a student nurse.

Two years later, in the spring of 1984, I was pregnant again with our second child. Three months into the pregnancy, the baby threatened to abort. I was put on Ritodrine and ordered to stay in bed until delivery. Somehow, I made it. We christened our baby Joan. I should have been ecstatic, but I was drowning in depression. I suppose I should have sought medical help and/or medication, but I kept telling myself it was just situational because of the new baby and hormone changes. However, that didn’t explain the previous thirty years of headaches and random bouts of vomiting.

For me, there was no comfort in small town living. In 1987, when the newspaper chain Tom was working for offered him a new position in northern California, I jumped at the chance. Anything to combat the eternal exhaustion I was feeling, and what better antidote than a healthy dose of California sunshine?

The town we would call home for the next six years was in the mountains, just a short commute away from Sacramento. To say it was idyllic and welcoming from the outset would be an immense misrepresentation. The townies did not particularly welcome us, and the commuters took almost no notice. Tom had been called to take over their newspaper. I think they found us strange and uptight, and coming from the Midwest by way of Washington, DC, we were probably a bit of both. The newspaper publisher was still on the job, despite being well past normal retirement age, and his relationship with Tom reminded me of the gimpy veteran quarterback reluctantly giving way to the upstart rookie.

As for me, I suffered a head-on collision with culture shock. I had never seen a sky so blue or so vast. I had to believe this would be a better place to raise our children, if only our new neighbors would stop discussing Mother Earth long enough to realize the world extended beyond the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

We had not only relocated, we had entered a New Age where Birkenstocks were all the rage, the women wore crystal rocks around their necks and no makeup, and everyone seemed to be driving BMWs and Volvos. I thought our Ford station wagon stood out like a pink elephant in the Racquet Club parking lot. Not long after we moved, I looked out the window at my new surroundings and thought, We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto!

Annie and Joan were five and two, respectively, at the time and seemed to cry and whine incessantly. It was heart wrenching and I spent a great deal of time questioning my abilities as a mother. Things began to change, however, when they began school.

From the very first day, I volunteered as much of my time as possible. It was a common practice in those days for parents to take an active interest in their schools, because Proposition 13 had gone into effect in California and public school funding was practically nil. The schools deteriorated. Classroom sizes grew from twenty children to forty. There were no aides to speak of, no school nurses, and no counselors. The parents jumped in feet first to fill the void. As a result, I met some very dedicated and caring men and women.

I made friends with some of the other mothers in the neighborhood, started to play tennis, and began feeling comfortable in our new home. Most importantly, the nightmares went away. I slept soundly. My head wasn’t pounding every second, the way it had for so many years.

I didn’t analyze it. I only knew that Annie and Joan had both blossomed. They had many friends and most of the tears had been replaced with laughter. We skied as often as we could, swam almost every day, and played tennis. It took a few years, but we were eventually asked to join the elite and very private Dance Club. The club had been founded two decades earlier and was an exclusive gathering place for the twenty-five or so couples who gathered to dance, socialize and network. This was a very big deal, especially for Tom and his business interests, because it put us in touch with the movers and shakers of this close-knit community.

The state of the school system was a topic of serious discussion whenever the Dance Club came together. I decided I could do more if I had the proper training. I was told the local college had an excellent social sciences program, and I had long dreamed of becoming a psychologist, despite my father’s disdain for the profession. I decided to enroll. A master’s degree would allow me to become a school counselor. More than that, it would allow me to make a real contribution to the system and maybe even get paid for it.

It would be a serious commitment of time and energy, but Tom was all for it. In fact, it was Tom who spotted the university’s advertisement for thirty adults to enroll in a new counseling program. I applied the next day. The entry process included a personal interview with the program chair, an esteemed professor of counseling education named Dr. Francisco Paoli. Dr. Paoli would ultimately become my thesis advisor. Later in life, he would also prove to be my savior.

From the outset, Dr. Paoli reintroduced me to intellectual discipline. True, I had always thrived in school. I had graduated with honors from high school and had been fourth in my class at Augustine School of Nursing. Getting my B.S. degree, I had a 4.0 grade point. I took pride in my academic success, but it would be more accurate to say my success had been a matter of pure survival because I had been combating a thousand demons. School had always been a safe haven and academic success another way to prove my father wrong.

Dr. Paoli’s program was different. Now, the hard work and the discipline were manifestations of my desire to do well and to gain something for myself. For the first time, I had a goal that was not driven by the need to suppress my demons.

After undergoing some grueling class work in his trial adult program, I came to treasure Dr. Paoli’s approach to psychology and counseling. He introduced me to a model that de-emphasized biological psychiatry in favor of a cultural, anthropological, and spiritual point of view. I also viewed him as the model I wanted to emulate while working with elementary school-age children. His rapport with small children who had undergone trauma was nothing short of miraculous. He was infinitely patient and approached therapy with reason and a humble, soothing style. If he became aware of a situation in which a child was being mistreated, he spared no effort on the child’s behalf. I was fortunate that fate had led me to this man.

It was from Francisco Paoli that I learned the art of counseling. Under his tutelage, I studied the nuances of the diverse and often contradictory theories regarding human behavior. I learned about the immense power of human defense mechanisms, such as denial and repression. We explored the unconscious mind and what drives it. I became intimately familiar with many therapy models, including Rogerian, Cognitive Behavioral, Reality, Psychodynamic, Adlerian, Psychosynthesis and Jungian. This was new terrain for me, and I was wildly excited about what I was learning.

Not unexpectedly, I was drawn deeper into the world of psychology and the study of the self, the seat of an