Sarah and Mike continue their journey into the book that launched a thousand lawsuits. Michelle and Dr. Pazder’s relationship grows more troubling by the chapter. Digressions include orgy etiquette, sheepskin jackets and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Neither co-host believes anything depicted in this book happened as described, but still want to warn you that it contains scenes of torture and sexual abuse.
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Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah and Mike continue their journey into the book that launched a thousand lawsuits. Michelle and Dr. Pazder’s relationship grows more troubling by the chapter. Digressions include orgy etiquette, sheepskin jackets and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Neither co-host believes anything depicted in this book happened as described, but still want to warn you that it contains scenes of torture and sexual abuse.
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah: What drives me crazy is that I've never heard of anyone recovering a memory of doing the chores in a satanic cult.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About the podcast where you're going down some stairs. You’re taking them slowly, one at a time, deeper and deeper.
Sarah: That’s creepy. I feel like you’re trying to hypnotize us.
Mike: You're now under my control and a heterosexual.
Sarah: Oh no, I don't want this podcast to manufacture straight people. That’s- no.
Mike: That's been our plan all along.
Sarah: No one suspected us.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic and a podcast about the Satanic Panic, which this is part two of.
Mike: Yes! And we are on Patreon at patreon.com/you'rewrongabout and we sell shirts and we're in other places and we feel weird about all of them because we know times are tough and don't feel like you have to support us if you can't right now or just don't want to.
Sarah: We had a picture tweeted at us that made me really happy from someone who was going to work that day in an ICU and showed us a picture of their Marcia Clark mug.
Mike: Oh yeah. We're helping you get through it. We're trying to help. Whatever you're going through…
Sarah: Here's what I would say, we are offering what we are best able to offer and what we are able to offer you is a philosophical cul-de-sac filled podcast about late 20th century America and tote bags. Mike, will you bring us up to speed? What has happened so far? What have we seen?
Mike: Basically, we're going through this book, Michelle Remembers, from 1980 and so far, we have met Lawrence Pazder, who is a doctor, and Michelle, who is his patient, and Michelle grew up with a somewhat troubled childhood. She went through four years of therapy with Dr. Pazder, and she seemed to be fine and then after a couple more years, she came back to Dr. Pazder and said, “There's something else. I don't know what it is.” And when last we left Lawrence and Michelle, she had started to tell him that she remembered a figure called Malakai.
Sarah: Yes. Great summary. And the thing that I thought of as I was listening to the last episode that we did, it felt to me like we were summer camp counselors reading aloud this lurid paperback contraband item to our campers and that is the atmosphere I want to strive to create.
Mike: I imagine you with, like, a flashlight held to your face right now.
Sarah: Yeah. There's like, loons outside on the line.
Mike: And two kids just snuck out to make out behind the cabin while you're reading, and you had no idea.
Sarah: Yes. Or maybe I do know and I'm like, “Yeah, that's a better use of your time.” Yeah. So just picture yourself at this 80’s summer camp and that's where we are. So, it's the second night. We had to break up last night because, you know, it was getting too late, and we have to be up early for archery but we're returning to the story now. It's time to continue.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: Okay. So I'll pick up where we left off last time, which is that Dr. Pazder has had a session with Michelle. She has allegedly screamed for 25 minutes, which might be found dubious and then the book describes her kind of spontaneously starting to speak in these dream-like sentence fragments. We talked last time about my hypothesis that hypnosis could be involved and so Dr. Pazder says, “Who is the man?” about what Michelle is describing to him and Michelle says, “It's Malachi.” Then she continues talking and she says, “He's pointing me. He says he's pointing me. He says north, west and he points me real hard. He said, if I want to stay alive, I better be a good girl. I was so afraid. ‘You listen, Michelle,’ he said, ‘You have to cooperate.’ I don't know what ‘cooperate’ means.” I have read you a condensed version of a page long passage.
Mike: Oh god. Thank you.
Sarah: You're welcome. Yeah. In the parts where we get them verbatim, you're going to see that it's very repetitive. It is very dreamlike language. It feels like someone describing, you know, a sort of semi-conscious, some kind of dream state that they're in.
Mike: Yeah. It’s like late seasons of The Sopranos.
Sarah: And so she says he's pointing her, which apparently means that he's picking her up, holding her up above his head, and just like pointing her, like her body, like, in different directions.
Mike: I also love that the ordinal directions, like north, south, east, west, are slightly more mystical than left and right. So those have to play into the fantasy.
Sarah: Right. We’re like, “Ooh, human compass.” Very scary. From the way that repressed memory therapy often worked during this period was the idea that if you're patient has issues and you determined that they must have repressed memories of some kind of abuse or trauma that they suffered and then you get them to recover those memories and describe them to you and then they don't get better, that means there's something worse that they're repressing.
Mike: Oooh, keep digging.
Sarah: Keep digging. And what this leads… I mean, I know that we've talked about this on the show before, but what this leads to some and eventually many patients and therapists on is this… yeah, this keep digging, kind of Oak Island of the memory pursuit for, like, worse and worse traumas because whatever memory the patient feels that they are recovering and is quite likely to be unconsciously fabricating with the therapist’s guidance – and the therapists themselves is often unwitting –
Mike: Right.
Sarah: But what you end up with is each memory has to be worse than the last, because you're being told that that's the only way you're going to get better.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: There has to be something even worse and so we can see Michelle doing that, whether or not she's being told that there has to be some even worse thing, that's the way that this therapy is escalating.
Mike: Right. Because all we have right now is she's being picked up by this demon.
Sarah: We don't even know he's a demon. We just know he's some kind of male-presenting entity named Malachi. It's not like his name is, like, Dave or something, but we don't know he's a demon and in fact he appears to not be. He appears to be a human Satanist. As far as I can tell, they're actually no demons. It is, like, just Satan himself.
Mike: Oooh!
Sarah: Yeah. There are no worker-demons in this. It's just the big cheese.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: And then Michelle continues to talk. The way the book describes it, in summary, is, “Malachi held one hand to her neck and the other to her groin as he pointed her, again and again. Then he began to flip her, head over heels, in front of himself, catching her rudely by the arms as she completed each somersault.” I can't really picture that.
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: Can you?
Mike: I just think that she would have to be really lithe to do that kind of athleticism,
Sarah: But like, I just don't know because it feels like this is describing she's in the air with no hands on her being sort of… going through, like, a high dive complete summersault aloft and then he's successfully grabbing her and then tossing her again. I don't know. It would be very impressive.
Mike: It seems like one of those WWE moves where you're sort of faking that, like, you hit somebody so hard that they spin around in the air, but what they're actually doing is jumping. Like, it's almost, it's more like dance than fighting.
Sarah: Right. It's like a Cirque du Soleil type thing. And she goes on, “All that was left of my insides was a tiny warm spot. That's all I was.” And then Dr. Pazder has what Oprah calls an “aha” moment and we read, “Dr. Pazder recognized suddenly that this was not 27 year old Michelle Smith speaking, but… who? A child? Yes, of course. In voice and gesture and language, there was no mistaking it. A girl of perhaps no more than five lay on the couch before him. He was odd and fascinated and moved.”
Mike: Oh my God. I mean, this is very early in the book too. It's kind of amazing that they're dropping all of this.
Sarah: This is page 25.
Mike: And this is only their second session together, so this is, like, a pretty big revelation to have.
Sarah: They’ve been having a few sessions actually, but the timeline is pretty glossed over. According, at least to the way the book is choosing to tell the story, this is the first time that he has gotten her in any kind of a dream state like this and first time out the gate he's like, “Oh, she's a child of five.”
Mike: Yeah. That's also quite specific. Does he know that there's any significance with anything that happened to her when she was five?
Sarah: You know what? This has never occurred to me, but that's such a good point. Like, why is he not like, “Oh, she has the voice and mannerisms of a small child.” He's like “That is a five-year-old as I live and breathe. Not four. Not six. Five.”
Mike: Yeah. Thank you again for not doing the voice.
Sarah: Oh my God. No. I’m never doing the voice. This, of all of the aspects of this, is probably what makes me most uncomfortable actually.
Mike: Wait, why?
Sarah: Ugh, because this is how it goes for the rest of these sessions. They lower her into memory, and she is in the voice and demeanor of a five-year-old, at least to the extent that she's capable of accessing that.
Mike: Oh, so he reverts her back to her five-year-old self every time?
Sarah: Yeah and, according to the way the book tells it, this just all happens naturally, but yeah. That's the state and this therapy goes on for fourteen months and that's where she is during the sessions. She's in this very young, vulnerable, childlike state the whole time.
Mike: This makes the fact that they eventually started a relationship and got married much more disturbing if this is true.
Sarah: Yes! You know, there are good odds that they started having some kind of an affair while this therapy is going on.
Mike: But so nothing happened to her particularly when she was five? There's no particular significance with her being five that he knows of?
Sarah: Well, it's this kind of Mobius Strip situation because, you know, he's like, “You're clearly regressing to when you were five” and they're like, “Oh” and pretty soon they're like, “You must be reliving day by day the events of when you were five.” So five becomes the crucial age at which this satanic abuse began. So it's a self-confirming prophecy. It's like those glasses and the Star Trek movies.
Mike: I have no idea of that reference, but let’s move on.
Sarah: I told you this book was weird. You were like, “Yeah, I know, Sarah. I'm sure it is.” But you just had nothing to prepare you, did you?
Mike: We're on page 25. We're not even at the weird stuff yet.
Sarah: It's already so weird.
Mike: I know.
Sarah: Okay.
Mike: I'm going to be curled up into the little ball by the end of this.
Sarah: And that's the end of that vision for the day. That's vision one and the book says, “For fifteen minutes she lay silent, her eyelids fluttering occasionally,” which, again, eyelids fluttering happens with hypnosis.
Mike: Okay. Interesting.
Sarah: “Finally she opens her eyes completely.” So this is her reaction to the first time that she has one of these experiences. “Am I crazy?’ she asked Dr. Pazder softly, her voice regaining its usual tamber.”
Mike: Sure. Jeffrey. Yeah.
Sarah: “You’re not crazy, Michelle. I don't see you as crazy at all’ The tears began to flow again.
‘I'm so afraid that you're going to tell me that I'm crazy.’
‘Do you believe me?’
‘Yes, I do. You were obviously relating, almost re-experiencing some terrible memory about a time when you were a little girl.’
‘I was worried I was making that up because it didn't fit together. But where did it come from?’
‘I don't know. I'm wondering that myself,’ Dr. Pazder said, thoughtfully.” What do you think about that?”
Mike: I just liked that they keep giving him ways of making himself look like the hero in this narrative. Like, cause if he’s writing this…
Sarah: We don't even know how much ghost writing is involved in this but like, yeah. This book is very congratulatory of him and because it's written in the third person, it gets away with it much– like, he couldn't have written, “I said, thoughtfully.”
Mike: I have no idea how much of this to believe, but I guess it's sort of them almost forming a pact that like, “You're going to do this and I'm going to believe you” sort of thing, because you could easily imagine a situation where a therapist said, like, “I think we're on the wrong track here. Let's get back to some things that are a little bit more grounded. Like, what did you do last week? What are the things that make you feel sad now? How is your marriage?” Et cetera. But instead of doing that, he's kind of encouraging her. Like, “No, no, let's go deeper. That was good.” He's rewarding her for that kind of work that she's doing and so it's going to continue.
Sarah: Well, and I can also imagine a scenario where a therapist is like, “Okay, like, what do those visions say to you? Like, what does it mean to you that there are these images that come to you when you're in this vulnerable state? Like, do you have thoughts about this?” Or, you know, you can even be like “This, I would say, could symbolize what you're going through this emotionally” or like, “Do you think that this thing has anything to do with your miscarriage?”
Mike: Right.
Sarah: Like, I mean, I'm not even against taking hypnosis seriously as a therapeutic tool. Like, I think that it could be used that way and also the interesting thing about this book is that, you know, I think that even if its contents are totally truthful, which we know they're not, but even if they were, they've written scenes that are like, “Yes, this looks good for everyone.” And there are many ways that it doesn't and so that distance is always very interesting and, to me, a great example of that is when Dr. Pazder says, “You were obviously relating, almost re-experiencing some terrible memory about a time when you were a little girl.” Like, there are three major assumptions in this statement, actually four assumptions: that she's relating a memory; that it's obvious what she's doing and so it's not even like, “Oh, it was probably this.” It's like, “Duh, you’re relating a memory.”; that it was traumatic; and that it was from a time when she was a young child.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: So like, is she going to disagree with him? Is she going to be like, “No, Dr. Pazder. Actually, I think it might be something else.” Like, I don't think so.
Mike: Yeah. I just keep thinking of the field of psychology and the field of hypnosis must have a code of ethics.
Sarah: Yes! The first amendment of psychoanalysis is, “Don't fuck your patients.” Like, that is rule one.
Mike: But even, I mean, even putting the fucking aside, for somebody to have a vision like this when they're in a hypnotic state and for them to then come out of it and for you to say, “No, no, this is real. You're describing something that happened to you and that was so traumatic that you've suppressed it.” Like, you're making a very large factual claim and you're a figure of authority.
Sarah: It's also, I mean, hypnosis is such an interesting field, because I think the boom in hypnosis that we see around this period has to do with the wildly optimistic assumption that memory recovered through hypnosis is more real and more authentic than un-hypnotically accessed or refreshed memory, which isn't true. Like, to the extent that this has been studied, the results show that there's no more intrinsic truth to a hypnotically accessed memory to a non-hypnotically accessed one, but that there's a much higher possibility of interference by the hypnosis practitioner and that someone is in a much more vulnerable state under hypnosis and they're therefore much more prone to suggestion. So, we get into tough areas with this. For example, when police use hypnosis to refresh witness’ memories.
Mike: Police use hypnosis?! This is a thing?
Sarah: Oh yeah. Not to the extent that it used to be, but like, oh yeah and the issue with that is that a memory that a witness or a potential witness recovers under hypnosis, I think, would tend to be treated as more authentic by police and by prosecutors because that was the cultural assumption at that time and the issue is that if you are being hypnotized by someone who's affiliated with a police unit that kind of knows who they think they're looking for or what they think they're looking for, they can make you feel like you've seen something that corresponds to their version of the events.
Mike: Yeah, because I can imagine somebody being under hypnosis and then they say, “Oh, it was a guy wearing a black leather jacket” and then the questioner says, like, “Did he have tattoos? Did he have tattoos? What were his tattoos like?”
Sarah: “What kind of a hat was he wearing? What length of beard did he have?”
Mike: Yeah. You can plant those things and not realize that you're planting them.
Sarah: Right. This really gets to one of the major themes of this book and of the flaws in the legal system and of the flaws in the legal system that allowed the panhandle brush fire that was the Satanic Panic to just burn everything in its path and that is that the legal system that we have is very reverent of human memory and it shouldn't be. So, back in the session, after coming up from what this book calls “her depths,” Michelle is pretty much accepting of what Dr. Pazder says. She says, “I never even knew about any of this before today, but now when I think about it, I'm really frightened. When I think back to that night and I still remember what his face, what Malakai's face looked like and everything,’ abruptly Michelle has shifted gears, ‘I'm not going crazy?’
‘No,’ the doctor replied.
‘But I don't understand any of what was happening,’ Michelle insisted.
‘Don't try to. Okay? Stop trying to make sense of it. Just let it come out,’ Dr. Pazder said gently.”
Mike: Right. Keep the fire hose coming. Let's continue down this route and eventually marry each other. Normal therapy stuff.
Sarah: “You did well, Michelle,’ Dr. Pazder said. ‘You’ll be free of it in time.’
‘That's what I believe,’ Michelle said sitting up on the couch. ‘I honestly believe that.’” And then the next session the following week, they go right back in.
Mike: Oh god.
Sarah: Once again, Michelle spoke in the voice of a frightened little girl and she describes wearing this big shirt and being in a room where she's being kept prisoner and then a group of women enter. The book says, “They walked in a single file, oblivious to the child's presence. She watched in fear and awe as they went about their bizarre tasks, methodical, coldly efficient, each of them doing a particular chore.” And then they put Michelle up. Well, first they decorate. They tack up large black sheets.
Mike: Wait, what? They're doing chores? Wait…
Sarah: They’re doing satanic chores.
Mike: Where are we? Is this, like, in somebody's basement?
Sarah: We're in a room. We're suddenly– we're just in a room.
Mike: We don't know. Okay.
Sarah: We don't know. We're in a darkened space. So, they tack up large black sheets on all four walls and set up candles, perhaps twenty or thirty in all.
Mike: I love that we can imagine a world in which Satanists are invoking actual Satan and doing all these elaborate rituals, but we can't imagine a world where men are helping with the household tasks. Like, no, no, it's the women putting up the sheets. Don’t worry.
Sarah: Okay. And Michelle, speaking in child Michelle voice, again says, “I thought mommies. I thought, oh boy, there's going to be a party. They're all looking at me. They're staring at me, all of them, all their eyes.’” And then a woman in a hood comes in and Michelle thinks, “A princess!’
‘How hurt you are,’ the woman cooed, ‘How sad. How sad I am that you are hurt’.” But then she kisses Michelle on the mouth in an inappropriate and sexual fashion.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Yes, and that's kind of the first act of non-pointing abuse that takes place in this book. There's very little sexual abuse in this book, actually and it's mostly like that. It's, like, sexual abuse from someone you expect to be a kind of mother, caretaker figure.
Mike: Interesting.
Sarah: Yeah. It's pretty rare in these pages, which is interesting because, of course, the Satanic Panic, the allegations that this book inspires are going to be primarily about sexual abuse. This is more of a torture book than a book about sexual abuse.
Mike: Some light quarantine reading. Great.
Sarah: Yeah. It's funny because it's like, I think there are aspects of this that are traumatic to read, but also so much of it is so divorced from anything that I think people listening have experienced.
Mike: I mean, also, I don't actually believe that any of this is true.
Sarah: Right. And then we get to the thing of like, is it still– like, how much can a book whose events you don't believe ever actually happened be upsetting to you?
Mike: Yeah, because to me they're not upsetting because I fundamentally don't believe that a satanic, assistant regional manager flipped her around a bunch of times against her will. I don't believe that that happened. So it's hard for me to be like, “Oh, this poor girl,” when, like, I don't think that it's true. I do think that the stuff about her mom being not a great mom and her dad being absent, like, that seems true. Like, that's kind of upsetting but the stuff about being kissed on the lips by a weird satanic lady who's hanging up cloth, it's just like, okay!
Sarah: Right. You're like, “I'm already checked out. I checked out with the somersaults.”
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: So, this is not… yeah.
Mike: I checked out right around page twenty-five, I think we've learned. So, I'm not going to find this stuff super traumatic, unless there's evidence that some of this stuff happened, but it seems like there isn’t evidence that any of that's happened.
Sarah: Yeah. There's nothing that I've encountered that convinces me or has even made me think seriously about the idea that any of this took place, but it's interesting because I think one of the other tragedies of recovered memory therapy and the popularity that it enjoyed is that experiencing a memory in a very suggestible, dreamlike state where you were being told over and over again, that yes, this happened to you, like, that can be traumatic for the person who's undergoing it and I think one of the reasons that these therapies continued into such miserable territory for everyone is that with each successive and more traumatic memory that you attempt to unearth, you potentially are forced to try and integrate something even more upsetting about your idea of yourself and your therapist is telling you to just double down on the thing that's making you sick to try and get better.
Mike: Oh, interesting. So incorporating the fact that, like, your mother slapped you once when you were growing up and incorporating that like, “Oh, that happened and I forgot it”, is a more easy thing to integrate than, like, “My father raped me every week for years and I forgot it.” Like, those two memories have a different effect on you right now.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: That makes sense.
Sarah: Especially if you, like… you know, say you're thirty years old, you have believed your whole life that you have experienced the kind of family discord that no one was calling abuse yet, which I think is something that a lot of recovered memory therapy seekers have experienced, you know, and say your dad was alcoholic and, like, your mom was really cold and distant, but that's not abuse. You're fine. You were middle-class. And through recovered memory therapy, you uncover this scenario of like, “Actually my parents were Satanists and they forced me to give birth to a baby and then sacrifice it.” Suddenly everything you thought you experienced was a lie, like every seemingly benign memory your parents were just acting and masterminding this fake childhood that you had. It fucks with your entire perception of reality and what you thought your past was.
Mike: Yeah, and then you can't heal from what really happened because you're healing from this thing that didn't happen.
Sarah: Right and the extremity of your alleged memory, like, I think that these experiences are potentially emotionally shattering, like the therapy.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: So, back in this vision she says, “Someone's rubbing something on me, on my chest. It smells icky. It’s mucky’
Mike: Vick’s VapoRub.
Sarah: ‘Where's my mommy? Those are other kids' moms. I don't want this mom. I want my mom.’” And they continue to rub this kind of paste, ointment, kind of a thing on her and then – this is the first thing that makes Dr. Pazder think cults, apparently – the book says, “Several of the women fetch a handful of colorful sticks. They handed them to the woman in the cape. She held them in her hand for a moment, pounded them roughly on the floor, then loosened her grip and allowed them to spill to the ground. The other women had taken up a chant. The woman in the cape studied the arrangement of the stakes, selected one of them, dipped it in a silver goblet, and inserted it in Michelle's rectum.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: “Again and again, she repeated this ugly performance, each time introducing the vile mixture from the goblet into the little girl's body, her nostrils, her mouth, her ears” and Michelle, as she's regressing says, “They're putting ugly in me. I don't want any more ugly in me. The lady is sealing it in now. She says it's permanent. She's making it permanent.’ Michelle was crying openly as she spoke, crying like a young child in uncontrollable, shuttering gasps.” And she's lifted up and placed in this circle of candles and then she says suddenly everyone goes and washes up. All of these ritual doers go and clean themselves and leave her lying there surrounded by candles and she says, “I thought I was lying on a birthday cake. I'm afraid I am the birthday cake.” And then there's chanting and then they paint her again with a different substance and then, “Abruptly, almost as one body, they turn their heads from her and then they filed out departing as coolly and noiselessly as they had come in.” And then Michelle sort of floats up out of that memory as the book has it.
Mike: I mean this is… I feel like only Christians would come up with this because this posits some version of Satanists where, like, they're not actually getting any pleasure from this, right? It's not sexual assault in the way that, like, someone else is deriving pleasure from forcing you to have sex with them. It's sexual assault in a way that doesn't give anyone pleasure. It's being done as a group. It's being done ritualistically. There's, like, chanting. Like, there's all this stuff that doesn't actually sound like what real cults are or what real sexual abuse is. It's like what Christians think Satanists are doing.
Sarah: It's like Christianity, because it's like, “Well, you know, once a week we get together and we take part in this highly ritualized performance” and it's like, “Oh, is that fun for you?” and it's like, “No.” “Is it a lot of work?” “Yeah.” “Do the women do that? Does it seem to involve a lot of laundry?” “Yes.”
Mike: It's also really interesting to me that part of her memory is not how she got into that place and how she got out.
Sarah: Well, you know how in a dream you never know how you got there.
Mike: Yeah, because who picked her up after this in the candles? Who drove her home? Who drove her there? Who got her into the clothes?
Sarah: Who washed the stuff off of her?
Mike: Yeah. Like, I'm sure that there are exceptions to this, but, in general, you would remember something about the path that got you there and the path that got you home.
Sarah: Right. And then the argument that you would be confronted by, if you were bringing this approach to a recovered memory therapist, is “Well, traumatic memories are more memorable.”
Mike: Right.
Sarah: They're first, less memorable and then they're more memorable. So, it makes sense that she would remember quotidian stuff.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: And so after Michelle emerges, she says, “Do you understand now?’
‘Understand what?’
‘That I'm ugly. Do you hate me?’
‘Nothing in the world could make me feel you are hateful. How could I hate you?’
‘I've done such awful things.’
‘No, you haven't,’ the doctor corrected her. ‘They clearly did awful things to you. You did nothing bad.’ Over and over again, he repeated this assurance attempting to explain to Michelle, to make her understand that these people had wanted to make her feel as though she were to blame, as though she had committed some horrendous act. ‘There is no reason for you to feel this way’, he finished. ‘No reason at all.’ Privately, Dr. Pazder was convinced that the group, whoever they were, had been using very sophisticated techniques of ego-destruction. He knew also, from his studies and from work he had done in Africa, that the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria, among others, used kola bean pods in a fashion similar to the way these people appeared to use sticks.”
Mike: Nooo. Whenever white people are like, “This is how they do it in Africa,” be very worried. It also strikes me how much weird flirting there is going on after the session where she's like, “Do you hate me?” and he's like, “I could never hate you.” She's clearly wanting his approval and he's like, “I’ll like you, no matter what.” Like, I don't know.
Sarah: And just imagine, you know, he's married. He has four kids.
Mike: He's super lithe. He has a body like a tennis coach.
Sarah: Apparently. And imagine just, you know, the former Mrs. Pazder reading this book and being like, “Well, I don't have four and a half hours in my day to regress into a five-year-old and talk about being tortured by witches. Like, I have soccer practice to take kids to. Like, I'm sorry.”
Mike: She's probably not constantly seeking his approval. I mean, there's something about a woman who's like, that you're in a position of authority over and she wants to please you.
Sarah: Oh yeah and he's the only one who can help her and he's so lithe. He's so lithe. But in the previous vision, the one that we had with the sticks and the candles and the women filing in and out, I realized this just as I was rereading the section preparing for this show. There's something that that reminds me of. This is a scenario where she's wearing a big shirt. She's laid out on a table. She is being tended to by all these mysterious women who are kind of Solomon unspeaking and scary and not communicating with her and they're taking these instruments and sticking ointment or some kind of goop, like, in her rectum and vagina and on her body. It makes her feel ugly and dirty and then at another point, they all silently file out and don't explain to her what just happened. What does that sound like to you?
Mike: Like a fetish party, actually, but I don't think that's where you're going with this.
Sarah: Okay. To me, I mean, yes, you're right. But also, to me, it sounds like the experience of having a DC while in Twilight sleep, which is potentially something that just happened to her.
Mike: Wait, I don't know what any of that means.
Sarah: Okay. D&C is a dilation and curettage, which I might be pronouncing wrong, but that's what you do after a miscarriage to basically remove any fetal matter, any remaining products of the pregnancy from the uterus.
Mike: Oh, okay.
Sarah: As we've kind of talked about in the last episode, we know that she's just had a miscarriage. We know that her doctor has told Dr. Pazder that she's had repeated D&Cs.
Mike: Oh!
Sarah: We actually have it from other sources that she had repeated miscarriages.
Mike: Oh.
Sarah: And so here she's turning in this vision where she's in this room. She doesn't remember how she got there. I mean, it seems very plausible to me that she could have been under some form of sedation during these procedures because we loved sedating women in the seventies and here are these sort of stern women who aren't talking to her. She doesn't know what's going on. There's sticks being put in her vagina. There's these invasive, kind of dispassionate procedures being performed on her body. No one's talking to her and then at a certain point they all just leave.
Mike: I mean, this is exactly the kind of insight that she would benefit from if she had a real doctor.
Sarah: Who wasn't trying to have sex with her.
Mike: Yes. Because this is the kind of thing that a doctor would be able to draw a connection between.
Sarah: You know and maybe I'm totally wrong. Like, there might be no grounds to this, but I think the, you know, the difference is that if I were in Dr Pazder's place, first of all, I would be like, “You know, this occurs to me. I'm not saying this has anything to do with anything, but what do you think about that, Michelle?”
Mike: Right. And that she's– because miscarriages were something that nobody was allowed to talk about for decades, this is probably the kind of thing that she has to discuss obliquely that she isn't able to say, like, “I'm actually really messed up from this and it really hurts me that this has happened, I guess, more than once.”
Sarah: “And I feel ugly inside.” And also that she's essentially tried to talk about it, like not super directly, but, I mean, she's been referred to him. He's been like, “I can't imagine why you're in such distress. Like, we've gone over everything, including the miscarriage and just what could it be? I'm at a loss.” I mean, if this trauma is her trying to express the trauma of the miscarriage, then she would be doing so because he has essentially sealed off the route that she would have to take to directly be like, “This was really hard for me, and I need to have it taken seriously.”
Mike: Right. She goes to one male doctor who's like, “It's weird you haven't gotten over this yet. I'm going to refer you to another doctor and then she goes to another doctor and he's like, “Sounds like you were in a satanic cult.”
Sarah: She's like, “Sure.”
Mike: Yeah. And like, these are figures of authority. So she's like, “Yeah, I guess. Sure.” Like, I can see them going down this path because it feels right to be exploring this more because she doesn't have any other language to talk about this.
Sarah: Yeah. And if you're being told that the trauma that you can describe having experienced doesn't matter and that you don't have a right to be having a difficult time because of it then how do you access care for that? If everyone's like, “Well, I just don't think you should be in pain so it's not relevant”?
Mike: So basically, you're a better therapist than the lithe, tennis coach so far. It's good for us to know.
Sarah: I haven’t had any patients and therefore I have been deprived of the opportunity to marry any of them. So I think, by default, yeah. So chapter four opens, we're three months deep into this now and Dr. Pazder is sitting in his office, “staring out the window, and thinking of Michelle. She was due any minute to resume the amazing testimony she had embarked upon the day before. Once again, as he had been so many times in the hours since he had last seen her, he was struck by the persistence of the child's innocence.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: They've done 200 hours of regression therapy so far and Michelle comes in. She's drawn, intense, but resolute, and she says, “I wish I could have a sort of a link to the present, something to connect with so that when I go down there, I won't get caught by it.’
‘I could put my hand on your head again,’ he said, ‘the way I did yesterday and look here, I'll put my chair all the way over to the sofa next to you.’ But that was not close enough. Still Michelle felt alone and endangered.”
Mike: Guys. I'm pulling up the code of ethics now. This is not ethical.
Sarah: Are you seeing if there's any anti-snuggling clause?
Mike: It just seems like cuddling with your patients is not ideal. Like, you should not have hands on your patients while doing this.
Sarah: Michael, she's a scared five-year-old. She has to be cuddled with.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: I know. I know. I know. It's too much and yet it's happening.
Mike: My hands are curled up right now. Like little Tyrannosaur arms. Just like, ahh.
Sarah: “He experimented with sitting beside her on the sofa and for a while, it seemed as if that would suffice, but then the terror thickened her voice again and they shifted so that he could sit on the sofa with her head against his shoulder. This seemed to give her the closeness and security she needed. It made checking the tapes and coping with the telephone a bit awkward, but he could manage.” And that's because– you know, every time he gets closer, she's like, “I am still even more scared, still more scared.” She keeps plateauing and it's just like, you guys just have a normal affair!
Mike: Yeah, and then take her to Benihana and just do it like normal people in a strip mall.
Sarah: So, Michelle starts describing more satanic rituals and, “Once again, her body was painted in a ghastly manner, a thick, red, repulsive smelling liquid down one side of her and a scummy, uncolored liquid on the other.”
Mike: It's reassuring that the Satanists were watching super sloppy, double dare, like the rest of us. Just goop everywhere.
Sarah: Yeah. Satanists love slime, actually. So, now they all have YouTube channels. Okay. So Dr. Pazder and Michelle are all snuggled up at this point or maybe he just has his hand on her head and they're going to progress snuggling later. They’re at least at base camp on snuggle mountain. So in this memory, Michelle is walking around in what eventually it appears is an orgy looking for her mother. She can't find her.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: And then she does find her mom.
Mike: At the orgy?
Sarah: At the orgy. And the book says, “But Michelle couldn't make her mother notice. Her mother's eyes were closed. She seemed to be in pain. There was something under the skirt.”
Mike: It's a dream!
Sarah: And Michelle says, “It's a– a lump, a lump under her skirt. My mom looked like she was being hurt. I didn't understand. No, no, no!’ [She screamed in extreme horror for some twenty minutes.]”
Mike: Again, probably not. But anyway…
Sarah: “As Dr Pazder listened, he reflected that whoever these people were and whatever they were doing, ritual sex apparently, they seem to be moving towards some sort of controlled, deliberate frenzy. A kind of dissociated state in which any sort of action would be possible. He found himself petrified for the five-year-old child whose voice was calling to him so urgently now.”
So something that's really interesting about these transcript sections is that we have basically blocks of texts where Michelle is talking and then a lot of ellipses in them and I presume that some of those are for clarity because stuff is condensed but I also imagine some of them are for the parts where Dr. Pazder is talking and he's like, “What does that look like? What about this thing?” And what's missing from this book is his guidance to her when she is in this regressed state. Like, we don't hear what he's telling her or what he's asking her about anything.
Mike: So it could be like, “What did the hat look like? What did the beard look like?” type stuff. Like, he's guiding her to describe these more and more extreme versions of events.
Sarah: He could be. I mean, we have no idea, right? We just don't know.
Mike: Another thing, just on the orgies point, as a gay man, if I can just step into a topic I feel comfortable talking about…
Sarah: Go for it. As a non-Satanist, like, this is your time to shine.
Mike: I just feel like this idea that an orgy is going on and then it's going to reach some mass crescendo where sort of anything could happen…
Sarah: Like a showstopper in a Broadway musical.
Mike: Yeah. Like, people are not synced up like that and also people in the sort of orgy, kink, fetish, community think more about morality in sex than anyone else on the planet. Like, things like consent, things like “let's not get carried away”, checking in with each other, affirmatively saying “Yes, let's go forward.” Like, that's what they do. So the idea that an orgy becomes this, like, almost riot or like a mass, sort of, loss of control, just is not how orgies work.
Sarah: Also an actual orgy hosted by actual Satanists, you know, most people who self-identify as Satanist in the United States at this moment are pretty much secular humanists and so it would be really nice. I can imagine going to a really nice, satanic orgy in Minnesota or something and before or after orgy-ing you would have these side conversations about, like, ballot initiatives. Then you’re like, “Well, time to orgy” and I would say that all of these ideas are really condensed and popularized by how Lindsey's classic Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, which makes the argument that the Age of Aquarius has plowed the earth to ready it for satanic seeds and that all of this mysticism and interest in astrology and stuff is making people vulnerable to becoming supporters of Satan.
Mike: I mean, that sounds familiar to me from every Sunday my entire childhood.
Sarah: Yes. Right.
Mike: I mean, one of my big beefs with the moral education that I received as a Christian child was this binary between there's good stuff and there's bad stuff and within the bad stuff, there is no differentiation. Like, all stuff is equally bad.
Sarah: So like, sodomy is as bad as molesting a child.
Mike: Exactly. So it's like, once you've defined, like, premarital sex in the same category as molesting a child, because they're both bad, you lose the ability to deal with the reality of what these things look like and, to me, it feels like that's a big part of what's behind these constant moral panics that often begin in evangelicals is that when you live in a country where you believe, you know, over 90% of the population is having premarital sex and other forms of sex that you deem immoral, it's not that big of a leap to go to, like, trafficking children and selling them on the internet.
If you know people in the fetish community or in these sort of having-group-sex-often community, they draw a huge line between, for example, spanking someone who wants it and spanking someone who doesn't want it. But for people outside that community or people who have no interest in it, they're like, “Eh, it’s all the same.”
Sarah: Right. Yes. So back to the coalface, Michelle has found her mother at this orgy, her mother isn't paying attention to her, there's a lump under her mother's skirt, who Michelle presumes to be hurting it, and Michelle grabs a bottle and she says, “I just had to smash that thing under my mother's skirt. Oh no. I smashed that lump. Everyone turned their eyes on me. I hate those eyes. No, no! They're all smashing the lump. No! It got all bloody.” And then she says, “You're not going to want to know me. I did awful things. I put my hand on the lump. It was all bloody. It was all bloody and I wiped it all over my face. Then I ran around. That's why they didn't want me to touch them. I wanted to put blood on them.”
Mike: What?
Sarah: “I ran all over and put blood on all of them. They stopped. You see? I had to make it stop. Do you understand that?’ Dr. Pazder spoke to the child within the woman.
‘I do understand that,’ he said softly. ‘Very much.” She says, ‘It's okay if you don't want to touch me.’
Mike: Uh…
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: And then this also just seems like a weird orgy because in the events that she's describing, they're all having an orgy. There's a five-year-old there. The five-year-old finds their mother. The five-year-old hits her with a bottle on her stomach and then everyone else comes over to her and also hits her on her stomach.
Sarah: Well, she hits the person under her mother's skirt.
Mike: Oh, is that what the lump was?
Sarah: Yeah. Again, this is the logic of a dream. Like, a whole person wouldn't really fit under… I don’t know. I don't know how big this skirt is. So, yeah. She causes this person to be smashed to death.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: And so Michelle continues with the memory, and she gets more and more beside herself. She's sobbing hysterically. It even says, “Dr. Pazder tried to comfort her, but her flailing arms and legs, her writhing body, made it all but impossible.”
Mike: So he's basically wrapped himself around her, like a snake, at this point and is holding her.
Sarah: I guess. And she finds her mom and says, “Mommy, I'm scared.’ And that's when she hit me and yelled, ‘Look at your ugly face. I wouldn't touch any of it. It's disgusting. Get her out of my sight.’ Once again, wild, desperate crying, a small child trying to deny the unthinkable, total, brutal rejection by her own mother.
‘That's when Malakai threw me in the bathroom.’
Mike: And what a downer of an orgy, somebody yelling at her kid.
Sarah: I know that's the thing too. It's like, actually at an orgy, like, ideally no one gets murdered, and you all just have sex with each other. That's kind of the point.
Mike: No one's kid is there.
Sarah: Yeah. Seriously, who wants that? And so the end of this vision is Michelle having been thrown out of the room so the adults can discuss how to cover up this murder they just escalated into because they were having sex and sex makes you murder people.
Mike: Wait, so they murdered a guy? This is where we're at?
Sarah: No, they've smashed the lump to death. Have you been paying attention?
Mike: But it's still– did it ever establish that the lump was a person?
Sarah: No. This is the reveal at the end of this chapter, Michelle says, “I didn't want to tell anybody ever. The lump, the lump had shoes, red shoes.” So yeah. That was a whole person apparently.
Mike: So they beat someone to death for no particular reason?
Sarah: And Michelle started it and she's, again, trying to convey to Dr. Pazder some idea of, like, “I'm a murderer. Maybe not directly, but in that way that when you have guilt over a miscarriage, you might describe.”
Mike: This is just someone with a lot of self-esteem stuff and, like, she's just blaming herself for everything and her doctor's taking advantage of her, basically. This sucks.
Sarah: And then we go to their next session, which is on Christmas Eve, which is very festive.
Mike: I'm sure he hangs mistletoe over the couch where she lays down or something.
Sarah: “Dr. Pazder took her hand and held it tightly, ‘You spent your whole life holding all that down there in that dark place. Half of you is doing everything it can to keep it down and the other half is letting it come and wants very much to get it all out so you can rest. It knows you have to face whatever it was. We can face it together.”
Mike: Again, ethics.
Sarah: So in this vision she is in the house where this orgy took place apparently, but there's no one there. She tries to clean the goop off of herself and then she's taken out of the house where she hears foghorns. So, she thinks they're near the ocean. Malakai is wearing a trench coat and a hat, and he orders her to get into the backseat of a car and stay on the floor and “The car was rolling down the mountain road as Malakai laughed his cruel laugh and jumped out. The car gained speed and Michelle saw it was heading for a rock embankment. The car smashed into the rock wall. The lifeless body in the front seat shot forward then came violently back. Its head spun freely around, all the way around as if the vertebrae were shattered, the face suddenly stopping inches from the child's. It's eyes were rolled up into the head.” Mike, you probably don't know this because of your stance on scary movies, but can you think of a film where a head rolls freely around?
Mike: Isn’t it The Exorcist? That's like the main thing?
Sarah: Yeah. That's one of the big things and that came out three years before this session is happening.
Mike: Is this scene supposed to be they're taking this dead body of the clown that they just killed and they're smashing him into a tree?
Sarah: There’s no clown.
Mike: Oh. But he had red shoes on?
Sarah: But human women wear red shoes.
Mike: Oh, that's what they meant by… oh, it's a woman?
Sarah: It's supposed to be a woman in red shoes. Yeah. Sorry. God, it would be so much scarier if it was a clown. I'm so glad it's not.
Mike: That’s so heteronormative of me to assume that the lump under her dress was a man.
Sarah: It's not heteronormative to assume that it was a clown though. That's something else.
Mike: So the scene is allegedly describing they've killed this person from the orgy. They've put this person into a car with Michelle in the back seat or not?
Sarah: Yes. Michelle is lying down in the car and then Malachi apparently plowed it into a rock embankment and then, according to the book, the car burst into flames.
Mike: Ford Pinto.
Sarah: Yeah! I know! God, so sematic. And so Michelle escapes and that's basically the end of that vision.
Mike: This scene makes no sense. Does the doctor not be like, “Well, this obviously did not fucking happen”?
Sarah: He says, “I'm right here, Michelle. I'm right here.” And then he puts his arm around her shoulders.
Mike: We’re just skating right past this as if, like, “Wow. She must've experienced a really traumatic event, that is logistically wildly sketchy.”
Sarah: Yeah. And the people who later debunked this book, you know, look into, “Were there any car crashes in this area where they're saying this happened during this date range?” and you know, no. And then, of course, the counter-argument that you get to that among the Satan truthers…
Mike: Ooooh, can I guess? Can I guess?
Sarah: I bet you know.
Mike: Is it that the cops and the city council or whatever, they're all Satanists so they've, like, hidden the car so nobody can find it?
Sarah: It is that, and it is also that the Satanists are so powerful that if there is a dearth of evidence, it means it's because the Satanists have covered it up because they’re able to do that.
Mike: Yes. Obviously.
Sarah: The lack of evidence is evidence.
Mike: Yes. Always. But, of course, Lawrence is just like, “Let's continue. You have a delicate mouth. Let's keep cuddling. It's Christmas Eve.”
Sarah: Dr. Pazder says, “How did you get out of the car?’ to his credit and Michelle says, ‘I don't know. I don't remember that.’
He says, ‘What day was it? Do you have any idea?’
She says, ‘I don't know. Although, before they made me go to the car, my mom and Malakai said something like, ‘They won't pay much attention to it. They'll just think it's tragic this time of year.”
Mike: Car crash season.
Sarah: “I didn't know what tragic was. I thought it meant fire, because that was what one policeman did say, ‘What a tragic thing to happen at Christmas.” So, notice that she goes very quickly from, “I don't know,” to “Wait, maybe” to “Yep. Christmas” and it's Christmas at the time that this session is taking place. I can imagine an accident seeming extra memorable if it happened at Christmas, to be fair. But you know, I think that he expects her to know, and she offers him something basically. She says, “I wish I could drive you home, but I can't.” So imagine Michelle driving home and listening to The Cars. That's the montage. Then, chapter seven, we get that respite from all the torture I was telling you about where he just talks about Christmas for a while.
Mike: Oh, this is like the happy chapter.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, it's the happy two pages. But I'll read you a little of the Christmas description, because it's a nice break.
Mike: I want to know if Pazder describes his wife and kids that he's about to leave.
Sarah: He does not, Michael.
Mike: He went home to his harpy of a wife and his mewling children.
Sarah: We’re going to hear his wife sort of described in a second. It's going to be uncomfortable. Don’t worry. But let's hear about Michelle. “It was the nicest Christmas that Michelle had ever had. She and Doug were in their beautiful new home together. He gave her an afghan and a pretty brass lamp, warmth and light, ideal gifts. Later that evening, after all the celebrating was over and Michelle and Doug were sitting by the fire having eggnog, she began to tell him a bit about what she had discovered during her session with Dr. Pazder on Christmas Eve.”
Mike: Wow. Has she told him anything at this point? I mean, they've been in the therapy for like four months now.
Sarah: I don't know, actually.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: “There apparently had been a car accident,’ she said, ‘and an ambulance had come to take the little girl to the hospital.’ As she spoke, Michelle began to cough. She couldn't stop. She coughed all night and the next day she went to her physician who gave her some antibiotics. Still the cough persisted and by the time she arrived for her appointment with Dr. Pazder, her throat was sore, and she ached all over. Dr. Pazder listened to her severe cough, and he examined her throat. He felt quite certain the cough had nothing to do with disease and wondered if it was connected to the smoke and flames of the car accident. Again, perhaps, Michelle's body was remembering.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: “We've got a lot to cover today,’ he said. “Tomorrow, I'm leaving for Mexico and at the end of our session we have to talk with Dr. Arneaux about his being available to you while I'm gone.’ Michelle had known of Dr. Pazder’s impending months’ vacation with his wife, and Michelle was glad for Dr. Pazder to have a rest, for he clearly needed it.”
Mike: Oh my god.
Sarah: Uh huh.
Mike: I mean, none of it sounds true at all. She seems like she's probably really bummed that he's going off with his wife.
Sarah: You don't think that she feels fine about this guy who's been cuddling with her for four hours a session going to Mexico with his wife for a month? And she has to go home to Doug, who isn't even given a personality in this book. That's how little he matters.
So, during this vision Michelle is in the hospital after the car caught fire. And after she comes out of that vision, she says, “No child should feel as guilty as they made me feel. I was just a child.” Because in these visions, the adults are blaming her for the death of the woman in red shoes, the non-clown.
Mike: What, why are they, oh because she started beating the lump.
Sarah: Right. So, again, she's returning again and again to this theme of, like, “I'm a killer. Exonerate me” and he's like, “Yes. Hold my hand while I tell you that you're not bad,” which I think has therapeutic value, but you don't have to come up with this frame narrative in order to do that and you don't have to hold hands the whole time.
Michelle is crying and beside herself, and Dr. Pazder says, “You've got to go back there, Michelle, and embrace that little girl, that little girl who was so abandoned and wounded. The only thing she really has and needs now is you. She needs you to look after her. That's what you're going to have to learn how to do,” which is like… it's good advice. Like, I listen to that in my own life, but the kind of attachment he has for that little girl is upsetting to me.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, there's not a whole lot of academic literature that implies that this is an effective way to treat a patient either.
Sarah: Right. They're kind of embarking on a brand new experiment.
Mike: Yeah. And like, you have to keep sending them back into these traumatic memories again and again and again, like, more detail, more stories. What happened then? It's not clear to me that, even if it was true, this is an effective way to treat a patient.
Sarah: Right. I mean, it's– recovered memory therapy often goes on for years and years, as it's practiced in the eighties, and the fact that it takes so long is seen as proof of its usefulness, because it's like, wow, this patient has so many problems. We need to do therapy for this long, as opposed to, the therapy is creating many of the problems that it is claiming to address.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: And then, you know, they're preparing for Dr. Pazder to be away for a month, which, when you think about it, they've been having twice weekly sessions now. You know, we've heard of sessions going on for four and a half hours at this point.
Mike: Which is a lot.
Sarah: And she says to Dr. Pazder, “Will my cough go away?’
He says, ‘It does sound as if your body is remembering coughing from all that smoke. It will probably get better when your chest gets better back there. You know… ’ he paused.
‘Know what?’
‘Well, it does seem that you were reliving everything that went on back there day for day, almost hour by hour. It's absolutely amazing. It's almost too much to believe that you’re exactly on a cycle with this moment twenty-two years ago. I mean, every psychiatrist knows of anniversary reactions. For example, some people who get sad and can't imagine why and then it turns out that something terrible, a death or something, occurred exactly a year ago, but this is the most astounding anniversary reaction I've ever heard of.”
Mike: I mean, first of all, there's a long and proud history of male physicians telling women that their medical problems are only in their head. We’re following a long line of just good faith efforts to be like, “Are you, though?”
Sarah: There's also a proud tradition of male psychiatrists inducing symptoms in female patients.
Mike: I mean, he's also, I think all of this stuff about cyclical things, I think that's also bullshit.
Sarah: Yes! Memory isn't that accessible unfortunately! Like, all of these myths about memory, it's like, gee, I wish memory worked that way. I wish documentary recall were available to us years or even hours after an event, but like, you know, it's just this substance made of contradictions and we really want it to be this linear, helpful thing and I really think it's not.
Mike: It's also, like, January and she probably just has the fucking flu.
Sarah: Right. Or, you know, coughing is a very easy psychosomatic symptom. Like, if she thinks she should be coughing, she can keep coughing. I'm sure a lot of our listeners know what it's like to suddenly develop a cough out of anxiety lately.
Mike: Like, how I climbed the stairs the other day and I thought I had COVID-19, but then it turned out I'm just in really bad shape. I was like, “I've got it. I've definitely got it.”
Sarah: So, end of this chapter, he's preparing to go. We're going to look at one final chapter before we finish this episode and I have to do lights out and Dr. Pazder says, “I'm leaving you the tape recorder. If you feel more comfortable using my office, come on in, but check with Sue first to make sure it's available. I also want you to have my sheepskin coat to help you keep warm and know that it's okay.’ Footnote: Michelle had been using the doctor's old coat as a blanket to warm her against the chill she often felt in her depths.”
Mike: What? There's no other reason why he would have just a normal blanket in his office. It has to be his actual clothes.
Sarah: No, he can't have blankets. He has to, she has to lie underneath his scent.
Mike: Oh my God. Where is the medium post by one of his other patients? It's like, he tried this bullshit on me and it didn't work.
Sarah: Oh, good point. Yeah. I wonder about that.
Mike: Would you like my sheepskin coat? Actually, I just like the therapy. Could we just have the therapy?
Sarah: Can I talk about my day? Chapter eight. “It's December 28th,’ Michelle said into the tape recorder. ‘I feel pretty silly, sitting here in bed with a hot water bottle and your sheepskin coat pulled up to my chin like a comforter, but a comforter is exactly what it is. I'm doing this because I've got to tell you some things. Some of it will make sense. Some of it won't. Some of it will just be words here and there. Reminders. Things I can't deal with right now. I get so frightened at night. I think it's just being alone. Alone then, alone now. It hurts so much. I hadn't thought I could get through today. It's not just because you've gone. Being alone has a lot to do with then, with awfully long nights alone in that hospital room knowing there was no one I could reach out to. Well, it's getting late and Doug wants to go to bed. So I guess I'm going to have to go.”
Mike: Fucking Doug wants me. This fucking loser wants me to come back in bed.
Sarah: Damnit, Doug. Oh God.
Mike: This is fucking cold.
Sarah: Imagine for a second that you're Doug. You’re just, according to this book, a stalwart, young Viking, which… okay. You're remodeling this house, you know, in rural British Columbia and who knows? Maybe Doug sucks or maybe he's great. We have no way of knowing, but, you know, imagine for a second that Doug is a well-intentioned guy just, you know, with this young wife and this young family he's trying to start.
Mike: And this mysterious sheepskin coat that has appeared in their life and he's like, “Whose coat is this?” and she's like, “I found it at the bus stop.” He’s like, “That sounds a little weird.”
Sarah: I just feel bad for Doug. Like, he didn't have a chance. Like, this is not like a love triangle where he seemed to have a shot. He had no shot.
Mike: No. Doug stopped existing like six pages into this book, in her mind.
Sarah: “Well, it's getting late, and Doug wants to go to bed. So I guess I'm going to have to go. I wish I could hear your voice telling me it's going to be alright. The fact is I just don't know it's going to be alright” and it talks about how these memories are trying to surface apparently, but Michelle couldn't allow herself to remember fully without Dr. Pazder there to hear it and help her deal with what came out.
Mike: Which is a sign that she can't recall these memories without him, meaning there might be some coaching.
Sarah: That's such a good point.
Mike: There’s a tacit acknowledgement that there might be some coaching involved that like, oh, these kind of disappear into nothingness like a dream upon waking when I'm not with you. It's only when I'm with you that I can recall these. It's like, well maybe he's creating them without you knowing it or him knowing him it.
Sarah: Right and instead she’s reading into it as, like, I know I can't cope with these memories if you're not there so I can't access them if you're not around because it's too unsafe for me. So it turns into a confirmation of his power.
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: She starts experiencing all these physical symptoms as well. She gets chills. She gets a rash, or she had a rash before and now it comes back and, about the rash, she says, “Where they show up and their patterns all explain something to me. My body is my only clue. It's the one thing I couldn't compromise or rationalize. It's all there.” On December 30th, Michelle phoned Dr. Arno, who shares office space with Dr. Pazder and who he said to contact if she needed a therapist to talk to while he's away, to tell him that serious memories were beginning to surface. So she is starting to get flashes of things and images of her mom again, specifically. “He asked her to come to the office, but he knew that for him to step in and attempt to work with Michelle, to try to substitute for Dr. Pazder, would not be wise. The effect might be to break all the bonds and allow the process to run amuck and her gasping coughs were in themselves truly alarming. Dr. Arno told her that, under the circumstances, it seemed best that she tried to phone Dr. Pazder.”
Mike: Great. Let's just make up some other science. Sure. You're in grave danger unless you talk to the same therapist. Sure. Why not?
Sarah: “I really don't want to do that,’ she replied, but she desperately did and the next day, New Year's Eve, after talking it over with her husband, she placed a call to Dr. Pazder in Mexico. ‘Something's wrong. It's not all over back there,’ she cried across the thousands of miles. ‘The memories keep coming. I feel like I'm going to die.’ Dr. Pazder was shocked. He had been having a wonderful vacation full of swimming and sun. He had thought about Michelle, but only peripherally as, for example, once when he had seen a pigtailed little girl playing on the beach. He had not been worried about Michelle and he had been a psychiatrist too long to bring his patients troubles along with him on holiday. That did no one any good.”
Mike: Such bullshit. This guy's so full of shit. It's incredible.
Sarah: “But as he listened to Michelle blurting out the fragments of memory through her coughing, he was grateful she had called. When she said, ‘I'm not going to make it,’ he believed her.
‘Thank God, you called me,’ he told her.
Mike: I love the fake thing. He's like, I was so reluctant to form a closer bond with this patient who I'm totally having a normal one with. Like, I gave her my jacket. I'm seeing her, like, eight hours a week. I gave her the key to my office and a tape recorder. Normal psychiatrist stuff.
Sarah: Okay. This is a quiet section, but I really like it for two reasons. One, that it involves plants and also fiber arts and the other, that it says something about how Michelle sees her and Dr. Pazder's relationship. So they have this call. He says, “Yes. Please call me as the memories surface. Like, I am available to you.” And we get, “Michelle was greatly relieved that Dr. Pazder had heard and understood. The contact between them made it possible for her to keep the memories under better control and she was able to enjoy the rest of the month. She and Doug went to the movies. She set about repotting her large collection of tropical plants, some 200 of them. She went out to the university where she had taught a course in fiber sculpture and, choosing tones of white and gray and brown from the stores, of course, hand spun wool, she wove a tea cozy.” I also like the section because it's one of the only ones that isn't about torture. “She was pleased with it if she did say so herself. She took it to the Fort Royal Medical Center along with an assortment of her best plants. Now she wanted to bring the joy of these natural, glowing things into Dr. Pazder's admittedly drab office.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: I know what it means to give someone your best plants.
Mike: She's not going to redecorate his office, is she?
Sarah: She is! She's decorating. She's moving in her plants and she's giving him a tea cozy.
Mike: Are there toothbrushes involved? Is this where we're going?
Sarah: Maybe she does need a toothbrush there. I mean, we don't get into it, but if you're spending that much time there, you might have to brush occasionally. And I also feel like, I mean, the thing about this book is that it's so unself-aware, so I don't think it's aware of the implication that like, she calls him, she crosses this boundary that he's set up. He's like, never mind, fuck that boundary. And then she's like, okay, yeah. Fuck that boundary. I'm going to move my stuff into your office.
Mike: And of course he's super chill with it because like, he wants her as much as she wants him. So he's like, yeah, sure. My patient redecorated my office, a thing that patients do.
Sarah: And so this chapter ends with just, he's in Mexico. She keeps calling him. The memories keep coming and she's saying to him, “There is something really scary that happens with my mom when she comes to visit me. I don't know what it is, but I know it has something to do with why I feel as if I'm dying.’ Then came tears that were so achingly genuine that Dr. Pazder, despite the distance and his wife's obvious confusion as to why he was sitting with the phone to his ear for a quarter of an hour without saying anything, allowed them to go freely on and on.” And that is the end of the chapter and the end of our show for today.
Mike: I like that we're in even more of an ethical minefield than we were last episode.
Sarah: I know. You thought last time was bad, but that was nothing and this is nothing compared to where we're going to be at the end of the next one. Let me tell you. The visions haven't even gotten weird yet. This is just– we're still in, like, the tea cozy has just migrated. You know? It's like, this is kind of the end of the first act.
Mike: Oh my God. I'm so excited.
Sarah: Yeah, it's a… Mike, I'm going to take you to your depths and you're going to call me on my romantic vacation in Mexico. Do you have any wrapping up thoughts about, you know, what the fuck is all this? What the fuck? I guess I've read this book so many times and so few people have read it and I have so rarely had the experience of just commiserating with someone about it and I almost feel like I did this really just so that I could do that with you and now our listeners. So, yeah. What do you think?
Mike: I can just hear the sound of the flapping of red flags every single time you're reading this. I think it's another example of this idea that we keep coming back to with moral panics of, like, what do you not need evidence to believe? Because this account– if this was about any other religion, if this was about a deity from Hinduism and somebody was being haunted by a deity of a religion that you don't follow, you'd be like, “Hang on just a second here, bub.”
Sarah: Which is one of the reasons why Temple of Doom is a less loved Indiana Jones movie, because I think people really did, in a gut way, like, American viewers responded to like, “Oh my God. Don't look at the Ark of the Covenant, Marion.” But this thing where Hinduism is literally true also, I think we were like, “Oh, I don't know.” Also, it's kind of an unpleasant and racist and sexist and mean movie. So, there’s that.
Mike: I think there's a lot of things going on in that movie.
Sarah: Yeah. There's a lot of reasons.
Mike: So, yeah. I'm excited for the next chapter and until then, enjoy your quarantine and don't bring your kids to any orgies.
Sarah: God, no, please. No. Yeah. I don't think that anyone… I don't think anyone would ever be tempted to do that.
Mike: Get a sitter.
Sarah: Call your local babysitters’ union chapter. It's a callback joke. And uhh, I'll see you all at archery tomorrow.