When A Cult Is Not A Cult Part 1: Suzanne James Is A Bad Therapist

One of the oddest features of Cultland is how destructive a cult can be when it’s not a cult at all. For instance, there are many stories from the 1980s and 90s of faux Satan-worshipping cults that put innocent people behind bars for crimes they had no involvement in. Looking back on this period today, we call this wave of pretend cults Satanic Panic, but the phenomenon didn’t die out in the 90s as many perceive it did, nor did it pop up out of nowhere in the 80s.

In reality, this phenomenon probably dates back to around the time human beings invented concepts like evil spirits and devils to associate their bothersome neighbors with. There is certainly an ancient track record of people getting rid of their enemies by convincing others that those who vex them are united against God.  

There are commonly known stories if you want to view this phenomenon through the lens of American history. A long time ago, a few Christian groups settled stateside after England told them to GTFO with their unorthodox religions, and a group called the Puritans famously got down to some inner-squad Satanic Panic with deadly results. What were the women tortured to death accused of? Conspiring with the red-skinned Satan of course!

It should be said here that Satan worshippers and satanic cults are the rarest kind of religious entities out there and it doesn’t take much digging to figure out why that is.

You see, in order for Satan to have any power in your life, you have to have a pretty good understanding of what Satan IS. It’s sort of like how you have to know the rules of baseball to understand what’s happening in a game. Satan, is pretty exclusively centralized to the Christian faith, so in order to have a decent understanding of who this character is, you kinda have to be Christian. If you’re already Christian, you probably don’t have a lot of faith real estate in your heart to devote to worshipping Satan, the figure in the Christian fantasy who tortures you for eternity for breaking the church’s rules. Former Christians don’t seem to be turning to Satan the way a person might swap political parties at a crossroads in their life. Non-Christians don’t really get into worshipping the bad guy in Christianity either because, why would they give a shit about Satan? The guy has no power to spook those who aren’t playing the game he’s a character in. That would be like being super into Darth Vader without seeing Star Wars.

You just don’t see followers of an institution like the Catholic church break away from their religion and pick up satanic worship. It’s antithetical to the way identity and religious beliefs work. This is one of the reasons you’ve never seen a satanic church in your life despite them being protected by the 1st amendment. It’s about as likely you’ll meet a person who worships Santa as it is you’ll have a run in with a Satan worshipper.

In spite of all this, logic gets pushed aside and the myth persists.

If this makes sense, a good rule of thumb to follow when you hear about people worshipping Satan is to assume the story is total bullshit right off the bat until you’re proven to be incorrect, which you won’t be. This goes double for Satanic cults.   

One thing every cult needs is members, and to get members in the door every cult needs to appeal initially to people who are not looking to join a cult and are not yet brainwashed. Satan is not a figure with broad appeal in society so that would be a pretty tough and wholly unnecessary sell to newbies. It would be much easier to sell outsiders on your cult if you chose a religious figure people with a better reputation, like Jesus Christ for instance.

This is why if you rounded up all the Christian cults that have existed since the 1960s explosion, you could repopulate Florida. And if you rounded up all the satanic cult members from that same period you might be able to repopulate a small brownstone. All the satanic cult members may actually all fit in a duplex or even a sedan.    

If someone told me they worshipped Satan I’d take it a pinch less seriously than if someone told me they were a minister in the church of the flying spaghetti monster and a hair more seriously than if they told me they were a vampire. That’s how vanishingly rare a Satanist is.

If you’re on this website and know a thing or two about cults you might be thinking, what about bad guy Charles Manson? He said some shit about Satan. That’s a satanic cult.

To that I’ll say that he also carved swastikas into his forehead. Chuck was the kind of malignant narcissist who craved attention no matter what kind of attention it was. When his back was against the wall after shooting Lotsapoppa, Manson embraced his most extreme tendencies and tried to make himself out to be the baddest guy on the planet, which included a fake conversion to Satanism. His affinity for the devil was just something he thought made him seem tough. If you actually look back at the history of that cult, Satan doesn’t appear anywhere until the final chapter. The Manson family was not actually a satanic cult.

What Chaz did contribute, inadvertently, was to create the idea of the modern satanic cult. He threw a little gas on the fire to freak out the squares and this irrational fear is part of the reason the myth became so popular in the minds of Christians. It’s a seed that was already in the soil of Christianity that got watered until people just started seeing satanic cults in their communities and sad stories of cults that don’t exist started ruining people’s lives.

You might know some of the insane cases of prosecutors having cult vision goggles on and putting innocent people on trial with no real evidence and heaps of hearsay. The McMartin trial in the 80s was about a fake cult, and it turned out to be the longest and most expensive trial in California history. In that case, some incredibly shoddy police work created enough sex cult victims to fill a few classrooms even though the original report contained metaphysical elements detectives should have paid attention to, because the presence of the metaphysical is usually an indication that someone’s story is just a story. A favorite detail of that case involves a child pointing to a picture of Hollywood martial arts superstar Chuck Norris, telling the cops he molested them, and the cops treating this information like it was an actual lead.    

Then there’s the story of the West Memphis Three where some young men spent a whole lot of time behind bars for a ritualistic satanic murder when what they were really guilty of was being goth, which is not against the law in the United States.

These stories have been well covered in the press and are easy to read about on the internet, but in this column, we’re going to explore some lesser-known incidents of not-cults wreaking havoc in the real world. To kick things off, we’ll be talking about a phenomenon where fake cults show up in a place that’s pretty difficult to rationalize with: the psychologist’s office.

You’d think this is a safe arena where reason and rational minds would prevail, but that is just not always the case. Bad ideas can enter the mind of anyone and there is no profession that’s 100% safe from them.

Incidents like the ones in this article have occurred all across the country but you’re guide on this trip of pseudo-cult zaniness is from Minnesota and is a homer for all things Gopher adjacent, so these are all from the land of 10,000 lakes. Incredibly, these are all true stories that are easily verifiable.

In 1998, Minnesota psychologist Tom Heyer got in some hot water after suggesting to a few women that satanic cult abuse might be at the root of their disorders. Tom held intensive therapy session where he pulled out of these client’s heads all kinds of stories of ritualistic abuse and murder. When two of these ladies shared the hot goss’ of their therapy sessions at the semi-infirmary they were patients at, they were astonished at how similar the stories they “recovered” were and their bullshit detectors both exploded. They did the right thing, got the hell out of there, and sued Tom for being a ridiculous therapist. Justice in Cultland is a rare bird however, they lost the suit and Tom got to keep his license.

What’s truly buckwild about the case of Tom Heyer is that money seemed to be Tom’s motive for turning up the heat in therapy and extending the treatments of his clients. It just so happens that manipulating people into believing things that aren’t real and doing so in a way you can bill them for is the stuff of genuine cult leaders. It’s hard to rule out the possibility Tom Heyer is not a simple idiot but a psychopath.     

A year after that Renee Fredrickson of St. Paul was permanently barred from practicing psychology involving repressed memories. Fredrickson admitted to telling at least three of her clients they had memories of sexual abuse by a satanic cult they needed to recover to advance in therapy. She had to pay $15,000 for that, though she was allowed to keep her license.
In an interesting twist, it came out when Fredrickson was under review that she’d called the police on some potential ne’er-do-wells in her neighborhood during this same period when she was pulling cults out of her ass on a regular basis. In her official complaint she accused these young men of, you guessed it, being in a satanic cult, which is not a crime or a real thing.

Was Renee Fredrickson a common moron? Her behavior seems to indicate so. At the same time, becoming a licenced psychologist is no simple task. It’s hard to square.    

More recently, two Minnesota women took part in a lawsuit filed against psychologist Mark Schwartz claiming they were told their eating disorders were caused by repressed memories of a homicidal cult. It’s worth mentioning that cult abuse can cause someone to have an eating disorder but only if said cult is a real thing with people who inside it. This was not the case in Schwartz’ fantasy, yet he got the lawsuit dismissed and kept his license.

These are all appalling stories involving professionals therapists, vulnerable adults, and fake cults. Each is bizarrely similar and they all should make a reasonable person consider what the hell these therapist’s intentions were. Were these acts done with malice? Why satanic cults?

These terrible therapists recede into the background, however, when to the ‘91 Jordan of this brand of psychology enters the picture. Suzanne James is the maverick who dunks on the heads of other therapists who invent cult stories.

In the early 2000’s the St. Cloud psychologist had a client we’re going to call Jane who had a personality disorder. Jane was legitimately afraid a cult she became convinced was out to get her that her therapist implanted in her mind. It starts off like the other stories, but Suzanne James was more prone to improvisation and asking the crowd for suggestions than her peers. While James and her client workshopped the cult story, the cult naturally morphed into satanic cult and it was decided that this cult’s weapon of choice was deadly lasers.

H-O-L-Y C-A-T-S. The satanic cult that isn’t real has lasers!

Here Suzanne James thought it was a good idea to encourage the unnecessary and very real fear her client felt by role playing. She brought a pair of sunglasses to therapy that she told Jane would shield her from the cult’s lasers.

Here at The Body International we don’t yet have a professional psychologist on staff, but it seems safe to say this kind of world building with a patient is clearly out of bounds and is precisely the opposite of what a professional should do with a client whose perception of reality was already fragile.

The ethical blackhole of a relationship churned on and things got little more looney as therapy wended. James, who by the way specialized in clients with personality disorders and held a PhD, made a calendar for exactly which personality Jane was supposed to inhabit at different times and dates, which is not how personality disorders work. I guess you have to give her credit for thinking outside the box, though someone else’s brain seems like the wrong venue for this kind of freestyling.

James also, of course, pulled a bunch of repressed memories out of Jane’s head during their sessions as time went on. She told Jane she was “in denial” when she couldn’t come up with her own made up stories of cult abuse, so they dug deeper. Soon a murder and ritualistic torture filled family history was established. There were other memories James implanted in Jane’s head involving government experiments with mind control. James was so concerned by this clearly phoney revelation that she alerted a state agency to blow the whistle, which should have been the end of this story but no one on the board spit out their coffee and intervened.

James told the board that Jane, “appears to have been a survivor of the U.S. Government mind control experiments,” and added that Jane’s story, “fits with historical accounts of such programs.” Would an adult have stepped in if she mentioned the lasers?

There was one rational mind that entered the equation around three years into James’ tenure of terrorizing the vulnerable. That was the Jane’s psychiatrist who got wind of the story of the satanic cult and the fact that James was encouraging the existence of it. It’s unclear exactly what element of the story the psychiatrist found concerning since it’s not in the record and there were no elements of Jane’s therapy that were therapeutic. The good doctor did try to intervene and encouraged the client to stop seeing her psychologist immediately. However, when James intercepted the news she told Jane that the psychiatrist was the one who was crazy and helped her take the necessary steps to discharge the only person looking out for her best interest.  

Soon after that, James would have an epiphany and realize her method of therapy was seriously harming the defenseless mind of her client. She let go of the reigns and referred Jane to another clinician who didn’t allow satanic cults in the door.

Kidding! The madness continued until things really got out of hand.

Important Note: Even though the cult in this story is fake, we’re still in Cultland where things typically just get worse until the authorities step in. It’s just how the jurisdiction operates.
This is where you have to cut James some slack and accept that she probably wasn’t the malicious type and in reality was just a giant fucking idiot with no understanding of empathy or business being a therapist. You see, Jane wasn’t the only one who was terrified of the fake satanic cult. Suzanne James was getting quite paranoid about the fabrication she brought into existence too.

The crescendo of this story starts with James’ interpretation of an improvised proclamation from cult headquarters that the phantoms were planning on kidnapping Jane on her 50th birthday and inserting her as queen. Jane was going to be forced into preside over human sacrifices in this imaginary scenario.

You can imagine a human being with lived in knowledge of how the world works saying something like, “You don’t need to worry about that because, I promise you, it’s not really going to happen,” or something along those lines, but that’s not the direction James took with the football. No, James was spooked and she wasn’t going to allow her client to be hauled off and turned into laser cult royalty.          
 
As Jane’s birthday approached, Suzanne James took to hiding out in a hotel room with her client. To add some spice to the self-inflicted fiasco, James invited another one of her vulnerable clients who we’ll call Jamie to the mix, and convinced her to hide out in the hotel too. Coincidentally, Jamie and Jane had the satanic cult thing in common.

Yes, James was a serial offender when it came to convincing her clients they were under threat of a satanic cult. Jamie and Jane were two of the five clients listed in James’ eventual review with remarkably similar stories.  

So, the three ladies hid out at the hotel and no one was vaporized by lasers, to James’ credit. It wasn’t a totally safe place for Jane, however. Jamie had a personality disorder too, and she had a history of violence and at the time had a pending gun charge. Maybe James scheduled Jamie to not be a loose cannon that day, but it seems irresponsible to pose that kind of risk to Jane, who James was attempting to be protect.

When this slumber party was over Suzanne took another step step towards thwarting the fake cult and drove with Jane to a laser-proof public library in St. Cloud. The plan was to attract the attention of an authority figure who could presumably get Jane to safety. There was a rendezvous with a police officer where James spilled the beans about the evil laser-cult and it’s plans to insert a mentally disabled woman as it’s queen. According to the police report, James told the officer of Jane, “This is going to sound looney tunes. She was set up from conception to become the bride of the High One at age 50 and at that point she would supervise the cult rituals.” She nailed the part about it sounding looney tunes.       

The police officer did some light investigating of the imaginary cult story and realized pretty quickly that Suzanne James’ world was an unreliable place to inhabit, to say the least. This incident with the police report mercifully made its way to the Minnesota Board of Psychology where it was determined that James’ therapy wasn’t doing Jane any good for really obvious reasons, and they separated the shrink and her victim.

This might sound like the kind of behavior that would result in license revocation, but James’ punishment was counseling and training on professional boundaries. She was, amazingly, allowed to continue treating clients with personality disorders. There was some good news for her clients however, as James retired on her own reconnaissance shortly after finishing her own therapy.

There’s no word on what happened to Jane, but we’re going to go out on a limb and assume she wasn’t married off to the High One against her will and inserted as queen in a satanic cult.

So there you have it, folks. There’s no need to fear satanic cults because they aren’t real, it’s really fucking hard to lose a psychology license in Minnesota, and Suzanne James is the Michael Bay of ridiculous psychologists who’ve drank the satanic cult Kool-Aid.

What a world.