You're Wrong About - Quarantine Book Club: “Michelle Remembers” (Week 2)

Episode Date: April 6, 2020

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 PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseContinue reading →Support the show

What drives me crazy is that I've never heard of anyone recovering a memory of doing the chores in a satanic cult. 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. Ah, that's creepy. I feel like you're trying to hypnotize us. You're now under my control and a heterosexual. Oh, no. I don't want this podcast to manufacture straight people. No. This has been our plan all along.

Oh, no one suspected us. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm 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. And we're on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about 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. 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. Oh, yeah. We're helping you get through it. We're trying to help. That's whatever you're going through. 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? Basically, we're going through this book, Michelle remembers from 1980. And so far,

we have met Lawrence Pasder, 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. Pasder and she seemed to be fine. And then after a couple more years, she came back to Dr. Pasder 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 Malachi. 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 like our campers. And that is the atmosphere I want to strive to create.

Ooh, I'm imagining you with like a flashlight held to your face right now. Yeah, there's like loons outside on the lake. And two kids just snuck out to make out behind the cabin while you're reading. Yeah. You have no idea. 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 80s summer camp and that's where we are. Yes. So it's the second night. We had to break up last night because, you know, it was getting

too late. We have to be up early for archery, but we're we're returning to the story now. It's time to continue. Yes. Okay, so I'll pick up where we left off last time, which is that Dr. Paster has had a session with Michelle. She has allegedly screamed for 25 minutes, which might be find dubious. And then the book describes her kind of spontaneously starting to speak in these dreamlike sentence fragments. We talked last time about my hypothesis that hypnosis could be involved. And so Dr. Paster says, who is the man about what Michelle is describing to him?

And Michelle says, it's Malachi. Thanks. She continues talking. And he says, he's pointing me. He says, he's pointing me. He says, Northwest. 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. Oh, God, thank you. You're welcome. Yeah. In the parts where we got them verbatim, you're going to see that it's in like, 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. Yeah, it's like late seasons of the Sopranos. 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. 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. Right. We're like, ooh, human compass. Yeah. Very scary. From the way that repressed memory therapy often worked during this period, was the idea that if your patient has issues and you determine 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. Oh, keep digging. Keep digging. And what this leads, I mean, I know that we've talked about this on this show before, but what this leads some and eventually many patients and therapists on is this, yeah, this keep digging, this kind of like 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 therapist themselves is often unwitting. Right. 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. Right. There has to be something even worse. And so we can see Michelle doing that,

whether or not she's being told, but like there has to be some even worse thing. That's the way that this therapy is escalating. Right. Because all we have right now is she's being picked up by this demon. 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. Right. But we don't know he's a demon. Right. And in fact, he appears to not be he appears to be a human satanist. Oh, as far as I can tell, there are actually no demons. It is like just Satan himself. Oh, yeah, there are no like worker demons in this. It's just a big cheese. Okay. 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. Yeah. Can you? I just think that she would have to be really lithe to do that kind of athleticism. 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 somersault aloft, and then he's successfully grabbing her and then tossing her again. I don't know. It would be very impressive. It seems like one of those WWE moves where you're sort of you're 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. Right. It's like a Cirque du Soleil type thing. Yeah. And she goes on, all that was left of my insides was a tiny warm spot. That's all I was. And then Dr. Pasteur has what Oprah calls an aha moment. And we read, Dr. Pasteur recognized suddenly that this was not 27 year old Michelle Smith speaking, but dot dot dot. Who? A child? Yes, of course. And voice and gesture and language. There was no mistaking it. A girl of perhaps no more than five lay on the couch before him. Oh my God. He was odd and fascinated and moved. Oh my God. This I mean, this is very early in the book too. It's kind of amazing that they're dropping all of this. This is page 25. Yeah. That like, and this is only their second

session together. So this is like a pretty big revelation to have. They've been having a few sessions actually, but the timeline is pretty glossed over like, yeah, 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 the first time at the gate, he's like, oh, she's a child of five. Yeah. That's also quite specific. Does he know that there's any significance with anything that happened to her when she was five? 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, like not four, not six, five. Yeah.

Thank you again for not doing the voice. Oh my God. No, I'm never doing the voice. That I it's really this of all of the aspects of this is probably what makes me most uncomfortable actually. Why? 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 is capable of accessing that. Oh, so he like reverts her back to her five year old self every time. Yeah. And according to the way the book tells it, this crystal happens naturally. But yeah, that's the state and this therapy goes on for 14 months. And that's where she is during the sessions. She's in this very young, vulnerable, childlike state the whole time. This makes the

fact that they eventually started a relationship and got married much like more disturbing, if this is true. You know, there are good odds that they started having some kind of an affair while this therapy is going on. But so nothing happened to her particularly when she was five. There's no particular significance with her being five that he knows that. 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, like, 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. I have no idea that reference, but let's move on. I told you this book was weird. You were like, yeah, I know, Sarah, I'm sure it is. And but you just had nothing to prepare you, did you? We're on page 25. We're not even at the weird stuff yet. It's already so weird. No. Okay, I'm gonna be curled up into a little ball by the end of this. And that's the end of that vision for the day. That's vision one. And the book says, for 15 minutes, she lay silent, her eyelids fluttering occasionally, which again, eyelid fluttering is a happens with hypnosis. Okay, interesting. Finally, she opened 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 timbre. Sure. Timbre. Jeffrey, yeah. 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? I just like that they keep giving him ways of making himself look like the hero in this narrative, like, because he's writing this.

We don't even know how much ghost writing is involved in this. But like, yeah, this book is like 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. I mean, I have no idea how much of this to believe. But I guess it's sort of them almost forming like 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 last week? What are things that make you feel sad now? How is your marriage, etc. But instead of doing that, he's kind of encouraging

her like, no, no, let's go deeper. That was good. He's, he's rewarding her for that kind of work that she's doing. And so it's going to continue. Well, and I can also imagine a scenario where a therapist is like, okay, like, what do those visions say to you? Like what, 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 like, that you're going through this emotionally, or like, do you think that this thing has anything to do with your miscarriage? Like, right, I mean, I'm not even against taking hypnosis seriously as a therapeutic tool. Like I think that it could be used that way. Yeah. 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 is, this looks good for everyone. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Pazter 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 like, it's not even like, oh, it was probably this, it's like, we'll die, you're

relating a memory, that it was traumatic, and that it was from a time when she was a young child. Right. Right. So like, is she going to disagree with him? Is she going to be like, no, Dr. Pazter? Actually, I think it might be something else. Like, I don't think so. Yeah. I just keep thinking of the field of psychology and the field of hypnosis must have a code of ethics. Yes. The like, first amendment of psychoanalysis is don't fuck your patients. Yeah. Like that is rule one. I mean, 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, 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. 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 unhypnotically 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 witnesses' memories. Police use hypnosis? This is a thing? 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. Yeah, because I can imagine somebody being under hypnosis, and then they say like, 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? What kind of a hat was he wearing? Yeah. What length of beard did he have? Yeah, they're like, you can plant those things and not realize that you're planting them. Right. This really gets to one of the major themes of this book and of 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. Right. So back in the session, after coming up from what this book calls her dups, Michelle is pretty much accepting of what Dr. Pasner 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 Malachi's face looked like and everything, abruptly Michelle 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. Pasner

said gently. Right. Keep the fire hose coming. Let's continue down this route and eventually marry each other. Normal therapy stuff. You did well, Michelle, Dr. Pasner 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. Oh, God. 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. Wait, what? They're doing chores? Wait, they're doing satanic chores. Where are we? Is this like in somebody's basement? We're in a room where we're suddenly, we're just in a room. We don't know. Okay. 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 20 or 30 and all. 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. It's like, no, no, it's the women putting up the sheets. Don't worry. 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 could, how sad, how sad I am that you are hurt. But then she kisses Michelle on the mouth in an inappropriate and sexual fashion. What? Yes. And that's kind of the first act of non pointing abuse that takes place in this book. There's really, 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. Interesting. Yeah, it's pretty rare in these pages, which is interesting, because of course,

to say panic panic, the allegations that this book inspires are going to be primarily about sexual abuse. Yeah, this is more of a torture book than a book about sexual abuse. So some light quarantine reading. Great. 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. I mean, also, I don't actually believe that any of this is true. 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? Yeah, because to me, they're not upsetting because I fundamentally don't believe that like a satanic assistant regional manager flipped her around a

bunch of times against her will. I don't believe that that happened. 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 like a weird satanic lady who's hanging up cloth, it's just like, okay. Right. You're like, I'm already checked out. I checked out with the somersault thing. So yeah, I checked out around page 25, I think we've learned. So I'm not, 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 is an evidence that any of this happened. Yeah,

it's 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. Right. 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 dream light 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. Oh, interesting. So incorporating the fact that like your 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. Yeah, like those two memories have a different effect on you right now. Yeah, that makes sense. And especially if you like, you know, say you're 30 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, I 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. Yeah. And through recovered memory therapy, you uncover the 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 when we're masterminding this fake childhood that you have. It affects with your entire perception of reality and what you thought your past was. Yeah, and then you can't heal from what really happened because you're healing from this thing

that didn't happen. Right. And the extremity of your alleged memory, like I think that these experiences are potentially emotionally shattering, like the therapy. Right. So back in this vision, she says, someone's rubbing something on me on my chest. It smells icky. It's mucky. Fixed papo rub. 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. Pasteur think cults, apparently. The book says several of the women fetched 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 sticks, selected one of them, dipped it in a silver goblet, and inserted it in Michelle's rectum. My God. 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 are 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 the 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 candles. And she says, I thought I was lying on a birthday cake. I'm afraid I am the birthday cake. My God. 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. I mean, this is, I feel like only Christians would come up with this because this posits some version of Satanists were 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 like sexual assault in a way that like 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. 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? Uh-huh. Yeah. Does it seem to involve a lot

of laundry? Yes. It's also, yeah, it's, it's really interesting to me that part of her memory is not how she got into that place and how she got out. Well, you know how in a dream you never know how you got there? 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? Who washed the stuff off of her? Yeah. Like, I'm sure that there are exceptions to this, but in general you would remember something about like the path that got you there and the path that got you home. Right. And then the argument that you would be confronted by if you were bringing this approach to a recovered memory therapist as well, traumatic memories are more memorable. Right. They're first less

memorable and then they're more memorable. So it makes sense that she wouldn't remember Quotity and stuff. Right. Right. 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? Oh my God. 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. Oh my God. There is no reason for you to feel this

way. He finished no reason at all. Privately, Dr. Paster 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 cola bean pods in a fashion similar to the way these people appeared to use sticks. No. Whenever white people are like, this is how they do it in Africa, be very worried. It also strikes me how much like weird flirting there is going on after this session where she's like, do you hate me? And he's like, I could never hate you. Yeah. She's clearly wanting his approval. And he's like, oh, like you, no matter what, like, I don't know. I used to imagine,

you know, he's married. He has four kids. He's super live. He has a body like a tennis coach. Apparently. And imagine just, you know, the former Mrs. Paster 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. And 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. Oh yeah. And he's the only one who can help her. Yeah. And he's so live. He's so live. 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 solemn and 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. Yes. What does that sound like to you? Like a fetish party, actually, but I don't think that's where you're going with this. Okay. To me, I mean, yes, you're right. But also,

to me, it sounds like the experience of having a DNC while in twilight sleep, which is potentially something that has just happened to her. I don't know what any of that means. Okay. A DNC is a dilation and curatage, 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. Okay. 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. Pasteur that she's had repeated DNCs. We actually have it from other sources that she had repeated miscarriage. 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 70s. 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. I mean, this is exactly the kind of insight that she would benefit from if she had a real doctor who wasn't trying to have sex with her. Yes. Because this is the kind of thing that a doctor would be able to draw a connection between. 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. Pasteur'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 like I mean, what do you think about that, Michelle? 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 sort of has to discuss obliquely. That like, she isn't able to say like, I'm actually really messed up from this. And like, it really hurts me that this has happened, I guess, more than once. And I feel ugly inside. Yeah. And also that she's, 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 like, she would be doing so because he has essentially sealed off the route that she would have to take to, you know, directly be like, this was really hard for me. And I need to have it taken seriously. 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. And she's like, sure. Yeah. And like, these are figures of authority. So she's like,

yeah, I guess, sure, like that, 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. 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 like, how do you access care for that? If everyone's like, well, I don't think you should be in pain. So it's not relevant. Yeah. So basically, you're a better therapist than the live tennis coach so far. I mean, it's good for us to know. 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. Pazter 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. Oh my God. 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. Oh my God. 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. Guys. He experienced. I'm pulling up the code of ethics now. This is not ethical. Are you seeing if there's an anti snuggling clause? It just seems like cuddling with your patients is not ideal. Like you should not have hands on your patients while doing this. But Michael, if she's a scared five year old, she has to be cuddled with. Oh my God. I know, I know, I know. It's too much. It's too much. And yet it's happening. My hands are curled up right now like little tyrannous or arms. 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. Oh, come on. This seemed to give her the closeness and security she needed and made checking the tapes and coping with the telephone a bit awkward. But he could manage. And it's just, you know, and every time he gets closer, she's like, I'm still even more scared. Still more like she keeps plateauing. And it's just like, you guys just have a normal affair. Yeah. And then take her to Benny Hanna and just do it like normal people in a strip mall. 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 in a scummy, uncolored liquid on the other.

It's reassuring that the Satanists were watching Super Sloppy Double Dare like the rest of us. And they're just like goop everywhere. Yeah, Satanists love slime actually. So now they all have YouTube channels. Okay, so Dr. Pastor and Michelle are all 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. Okay. And then she does find her mom at the orgy at the orgy. Okay. 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. It's a dream. And Michelle says it's a lump, a lump under her skirt. My mom looked like she was being hurt. I didn't understand. No, no, no. Brackets. She screamed in extreme horror for some 20 minutes. Again, probably not, but anyway. As Dr. Pastor listened, he reflected that whoever these people were and whatever they were doing, ritual sacks, apparently, they seem to be moving towards some sort of controlled, deliberate frenzy, a kind of dissociative 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 text

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 mentioned some of them are for the parts where Dr. Pasdur 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. 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. He could be. I mean, we have no idea, right? Yeah. We just don't know.

Another thing, just on the orgies point, if I can, as a gay man, if I can just step into a topic I feel comfortable talking about. Go for it. As a non-Satanist, like this is your time to I just feel like this idea that like an orgies going on and then it's going to reach some like mass crescendo where sort of anything could happen. Like a showstopper in a Broadway musical. Yeah, like that's people are not like synced up like that. And also people in the sort of orgy kink fetish community think more about like morality and 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. Also an actual orgy hosted by actual Satanists, you know, most people who self identify as Satanists 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 like Minnesota or something. And before or after orgying, you would have these side conversations about like ballot initiatives. You'd be like, well, time to orgy. Yeah. And I would say that all of these ideas are really condensed and popularized by Hal 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. Yeah, I mean, that sounds familiar to me from every Sunday, my entire childhood. Yes. Right. 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. So like sodomy is as bad as molesting a child. Exactly. And 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 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 the 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. Right. Yes. So back to the cold face. Yes. Michelle has found her mother at this orgy.

Her mother isn't paying attention to her. There is 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. 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. Yeah. 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. Well, she hits the person under her mother's skirt. Oh, was that what the lump was? Yeah. Again, this is the logic of a dream. 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. Okay. And so Michelle continues with the memory. 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. She's basically wrapped himself around her like a snake at this point and is like holding her. I guess. Okay. 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 Malachi threw me in the bathroom. And what a downer of an orgy. Somebody yelling at her kid. I know that's the thing too. It's like,

actually at an orgy, ideally no one gets murdered and you all just have sex with each other. That's kind of the point. And no one's kid is there. 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. Wait, so they'd murdered a guy? This is where we're at? No, no, no. They've smashed the lump to death. Have you been paying attention? But it still, did it ever establish that the lump was a person? 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. So they beat someone to death for no particular reason. And Michelle started it. And she's again, like trying to convey to Dr. Pazter 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 maybe. Yeah. This is just someone with a lot of like self-esteem stuff. And like, she's just blaming herself for everything. And her doctor is like taking advantage of her basically. This sucks. And then we go to their next session, which is on Christmas Eve. She's very festive. I'm sure he hangs mistletoe over the couch where she laid down or something. It's fucking creep. Dr. Pazter 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. Again, ethics. So in this fiction, 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 fog horns. So she thinks they're near the ocean. Malachi 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 Malachi laughed his cruel laugh and jumped out.

The car gained speed and Michelle saw that 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. What? All the way around as if the vertebrae were shattered. The face suddenly stopping inches from the child's. Its 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 it had rolls freely around? Isn't it the exercise that's like the main thing? Yeah, that's one of the big things. And that came out three years before this session is happening. 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? There's no clown. He had red shoes on. Oh, but no, but human women wear red shoes. Oh, that's what they meant by oh, it's a woman? 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. That's so heteronormative of me to assume that the lump under her dress was a man. It's not heteronormative to assume that it was a clown, though. That's something else. So this 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? 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. Fort Pinto. Yeah, I know. God, it's so thematic. And so Michelle escapes. And that's basically the end of that vision. This scene makes no sense. Does the doctor not be like, well, this obviously didn't fucking happen. He says, I'm right here, Michelle. I'm right here. And then he puts his arm around her shoulders. We're just like skating right past this as if like, wow, she must have experienced a really traumatic event that is like logistically wildly sketchy. Yeah. And the people who later debunked this book, you know, look into whether any car crashes in this area where they're saying this happened during this date range and, you know, no. Yeah.

And then of course, the counterargument that you got to that among the Satan truthers. Ooh, can I guess? Can I guess? I bet you know. Is it like that the cops and the city council and whatever, they're all Satanists. So they've like hidden the car so nobody can find it. 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. Obviously. The lack of evidence is evidence. 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. Dr. Pasteur says, how did he 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 Malachi said something like, they won't pay much attention to it. They'll just think it's tragic this time of year. Car crash season. 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, oh wait, maybe, to, yep, Christmas. Right. 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 listening to the cars. That's the montage. And then chapter seven, we got that respite from all the torture I was telling you about where he just talks about Christmas for a while. Oh, this is like the happy chapter. 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. I don't know if Pasdur describes his wife and kids that he's about to leave. He did not, Michael. He went home to his harpy of a wife and his mulling children. We're gonna hear his wife sort of described in a second. It's gonna 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. Pasdur on Christmas Eve. Wow. Has she told him anything at this point? I mean, they've been in the therapy for like four months now. I don't know, actually. Okay. 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. Pasdur, her throat was sore and she ached all over. Dr. Pasdur 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. Oh my God. Again, perhaps Michelle's body was remembering. Oh my God. 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. Arno about his being available to you while I'm gone. Michelle had known of Dr. Pasdur's impending month's vacation with his wife and Michelle was

glad for Dr. Pasdur to have her rest for he clearly needed it. Oh my God. Uh-huh. I mean, just none of it sounds true at all. She seems like she's probably really bummed that he's going off with his wife. 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 vacation, Michelle is in the hospital after the car caught fire. Okay. 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. What? Why are they? Oh, because she started beating the lump. 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. Yeah. Which I think has therapeutic value because you don't have to come up with this frame narrative in order to do that. Right. And you don't have to hold hands the whole time. And 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 a 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. Yeah. I mean, there's not a whole lot of like academic literature that implies that this is an effective way to treat a patient either. Right. They're kind of embarking on a brand new experiment. 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 that this is an effective way to treat a patient. Right. I mean, it's, and recovered memory therapy often goes on for years and years as it's practiced in the 80s. 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. Right. 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. Yeah. You know, we've heard of sessions going on for four and a half hours at this point. Which is a lot. 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, be 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 22 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. I mean, 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 for following a long line of just good faith efforts to be like, are you though? There's also a proud tradition

of male psychiatrists inducing symptoms in female patients. Yeah, I mean, he's also, I think, all of this stuff about like cyclical things. I think that's also bullshit. Yes. Memory isn't that accessible. Unfortunately, like all of these myths about memory, it's like, gee, like I wish memory worked that way. Yeah. I wish documentary recall were available to us years or even hours after an event. But like, yeah, you know, it's just this, this substance made of contradictions. And we really want it to be this linear helpful thing. And I really think it's not. But also it's January, and she probably just has the fucking flu. 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. 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've got it. I've definitely got it. 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 have to do lights out. And Dr. Pazzer says, I'm leaving you the tape recorder. If you feel more comfortable using my office, come on in, but check with Sioux 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. Fuck note, Michelle had been using the doctor's old coat as a blanket

to warm her against the chill she often felt in her depths. There's no other reason why he would have just like a normal blanket in his office. It has to be his actual clothes. No, he can't have blankets. He has to, she has to lie underneath the scent. Oh my god. Where is the medium post by one of his other patients who's like, he tried this bullshit on me and it didn't work. Oh, good point. Yeah, I wonder about that. Would you like my sheepskin coat? Actually, I just like the therapy. Can we just have the therapy? 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. Fucking Doug wants me. This fucking loser wants me to come back and bed. Damn it, Doug.

Oh, God. This is fucking cold. Poor Doug. 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 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 just a well-intentioned guy just with this young wife and this young family he's trying to start. 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. I was like, that sounds a little weird. I just feel bad for Doug. Like he didn't have a chance. Like this is not like a love triangle where like he seemed to have a shot. He had no shot. No.

Doug stopped existing like six pages into the soap in her mind. Okay. 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 all right. The fact is, I just don't know it's going to be all right. And it talks about how these memories are trying to surface apparently, but Michelle couldn't allow herself to remember fully without Dr. Pasteur there to hear it and help her deal with what came out. Which is a sign that she can't recall these memories without him, meaning there might be some coaching. Like that's a tacit acknowledgement that there might be some coaching involved that like, oh, these 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 it. Right. And instead she's reading it as like, I know I can't cope with these memories if you're not there. So I have to, 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. 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 rashes, she says where they show up in their patterns, I'll 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. Arnaud, who shares office space with Dr. Pasteur and who he set 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. Pasteur would not be wise. The effect might be to break all the bonds and allow the process to run amok. And her gasping coughs were in themselves truly alarming. Dr. Arnaud told her that under the circumstances, it seemed best that she tried to phone Dr. Pasteur. Right, 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? 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. Pasteur in Mexico. Something's wrong. It's not all over back there. She cried across thousands of miles. The memories keep coming. I feel like I'm going to die. Dr. Pasteur 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. Suck bullshit. This guy's so full of shit. It's incredible. But as he listened to Michelle blurring 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. I love the fake thing how 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. 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 in Dr. Pasteur's relationship. So they have this call. He says, yes, please call me as the memory surface. Like, I am available to you. And we get, Michelle was greatly relieved that Dr. Pasteur 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 coarse hand spun wool. She wove a tea cozy. I also like this

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 and a Dr. Pasteur's admittedly drab office. Oh my God. I know what it means to give someone your best plants. She's not going to redecorate his office, is she? She is. She's decorating. She's moving in her plants and she's giving him a tea cozy. Are there toothbrushes involved? Is this where we're going? 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. Jesus Christ. 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 set up. He's like, never mind, fuck that boundary. Yeah. And then she's like, okay, yeah, fuck that boundary. I'm going to move my stuff into your office then. And of course he's super chill with it because like he wants, 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. 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, the Dr. Pasteur, 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 on the end of our show for today. I like that we're in even more of an ethical minefield than we were last episode. 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 Jesus Christ, the visions haven't even gotten weird yet. This is just we're still in like the T cozy has just migrated, you know, it's like, this is kind of the end of the first

act. Oh my God, I'm so excited. Yeah, it's 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? I mean, 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? 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 like a deity from Hinduism, and somebody who's being haunted by a deity of a religion that you don't follow, you'd be like, hang on like just a second here, bub. 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 like, Hinduism is literally true also, I think we were like, oh, I don't know. Also, it's kind of, it's an unpleasant and racist and sexist and mean movie, so there's that.

I think there's a lot of things going on in that movie. Yeah, there's a lot of reasons. But so, yeah, I'm excited for the next chapter, and until then, enjoy your quarantine and don't bring your kids to any orgies. Oh god, please no, yeah, I don't think that anyone, I don't think anyone would ever be tempted to do that. Yeah, I think get a sitter. Call your local babysitter's union chapter. It's a callback joke. And I'll see you all at archery tomorrow.