Education: MSW, Simmons College School of Social Work, 1991
License: LCSW (#L2929), Oregon State Board of Clinical Social Work, 2000-2021
Office: 530 NW 23rd Ave #109, Portland, OR 97210
Professional affiliation outside of private clinical practice:
- Lotus Heart Counseling, 2005-2012, 2014-2020
Psychotherapist, PTSD Coach, Reiki Practitioner, MSW Supervisor - Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, 2016-2017
Adjunct Faculty
Why Susan Pease Banitt is on our radar
Banitt is a strong believer in the narrative that a widespread and organized campaign of ritual torture and sophisticated mind control is leaving a wake of individuals with repressed memories and severe DID. She believes in organized abuse by Satanic cults. Banitt describes herself as having been a champion of evidence-based mental health, but also having recently evolved away from this with her 2019 book Wisdom, Attachment, and Love in Trauma Therapy: Beyond Evidence-Based Practice. In fact, her practice is replete with pseudoscientific and questionable beliefs and modalities.
- Practices Past Life Regression Therapy (PLRT).
- Promotes and practices recovered memory therapy (link, archive). In fact, she states that a therapist that does not believe traumatic memories can be repressed and later recovered in therapy is an “extremely poor” therapist (see #5 here, archive). In one post, she even writes that “[m]any of the people I see already have memories of trauma; they just don’t know that they do” (link, archive).
- Certified Reiki Master who practices and teaches Reiki (see wikipedia). Advertises supervision/consultation regarding “alternative and complementary modalities” including Reiki and other pseudoscientific practices including Shamanic Healing, “Energy Psychology,” “Ascension/Awakening symptoms,” and “Lightworkers or Starseed support” (link, archive). Elsewhere, she describes Reiki as an “evidence-based” practice (link, archive), recommends that parents of students who go to a school where there was a shooting seek out a Reiki practitioner (link, archive), and indicates that she uses Reiki during therapy sessions (link, archive).
- Advertises on her website that she treats, among other afflictions, “ritual abuse” and “mind control” (link, archive). She also states that she provides supervision and consultation on these topics (link, archive). She has numerous posts on her site that promote the idea of “ritual abuse” and “mind control.” In October 2019, she presented a Ritual Abuse Mind Control and Organized Abuse (RAMCOA) webinar called “RAMCOA: Working on the Cutting Edge.” Her abstract warns of a recent flood of ritual abuse and mind control survivors in therapy. She holds that this is due to a sophisticated effort to “engineer” subjects with “polyfragmented Dissociative Identity Disorder.” As usual, this engineering takes the form of extreme and ritualistic trauma.
- Perpetuates a conspiracy theory about Aurora shooter James Holmes being the subject of mind control techniques stemming from the Nazis and the CIAs MKUltra program, arguing that the CIA’s MKUltra program -- which attempted to develop mind control programming but failed, according to every reputable expert on the topic -- not only continues, but that many of her colleagues have treated victims of such mind control (link, archive).
- Argues that some people who have been subjected to trauma have psychic abilities. She says a child abused by caregivers “may begin to develop telepathic capacity, exquisite sensitivity to mirror neurons in the brain and a sensitivity to electromagnetic energies emanating from the person.” She further argues that “intergenerational trauma” may grant “psychic giftedness”; that abuse can harm the “chakras of the body” which “then allows the energy body to be more permeable than someone who has not had chakric damage, leading to many kinds of phenomena in nonordinary reality” (link, archive).
- She makes the vague suggestion that Dylan Farrow could have been the subject of mind control. In another post, she characterizes a Republican politician’s grotesque statement about rape as “a sophisticated hypnotic suggestion” (link, archive).
- In what is perhaps the most disturbing post (link, archive) on her website (it also happens to be the most recent), she endorses massive conspiracy theories about human trafficking, ritual abuse, and mind control, directly in line with QAnon.
- The publisher’s abstract to her book Wisdom, Attachment, and Love in Trauma Therapy: Beyond Evidence-Based Practice:
Wisdom, Attachment, and Love in Trauma Therapy focuses on the creation of the therapist as healing presence rather than technique administrator—in other words, how to be rather than what to do. Trauma survivors need wise therapists who practice with the union of intellect, knowledge, and intuition. Through self-work, therapists can learn to embody healing qualities that foster an appropriate, corrective, and loving experience in treatment that transcends any technique. This book shows how Eastern wisdom teachings and Western psychotherapeutic modalities combine with modern theory to support a knowledgeable, compassionate, and wise therapist who is equipped to help even the most traumatized person heal.
- Subscribes to an extremely simplistic model of memory to explain traumatic amnesia and recovery.
- Argues that the reason abusers use ritual elements is that these close spiritual doors to escape and recovery, and it is generally by spiritual means that extreme abuse survivors achieve these aims. The ritual elements are part of the sophisticated programming we hear so much about - it builds in defenses against escape routes. This argument is actually kind of clever, but it’s also an ahistorical account of fictitious events.
- Argues that the history of “witch hunts” - including the Salem witch hunt - is in part a pogrom against psychics, psionics, intuitives, witches, wisdom people, healers, etc. She considers herself to have extraordinary intuitive abilities. She argues that this pogrom and Western cultural attitudes towards these alternative notions feed off each other in a kind of inquisition (her word) that Western culture is just now coming out of. She cites as evidence of this the mass embrace of alternative medicine, psychic phenomena, etc.
- Describes herself as a “wisdom-teacher.”
In her own words
In response to the question Do you believe that people can have repressed memories of trauma that they recall later in their life?
From the course description of "Navigating Countertransference with Ritually Abused Clients":
Survivors of ritual abuse and mind control are stepping forward in unprecedented numbers on social media and revealing themselves in therapy settings. These clients are almost universally engineered with techniques that involve creation of polyfragmented Dissociative Identity Disorder. Treating such clients requires a high degree of skill, especially in forming and maintaining a caring treatment relationship. In many cases these clients have been conditioned to accept that they are unlovable and untreatable. Their experiences are extreme and highly traumatic. In some cases their handlers (abusers) have even mimicked psychologists and/or psychiatrists creating aversive conditioning to therapy itself.
From a post on her website titled "Five Unbearable Things I Want You to Know about Human Trafficking and Slavery" (archive):
Pioneered in the Nazi concentration camps and continued after Project Paperclip had brought Nazi scientists to America there had been a deep and effective dive into gaining total control over human beings starting in early childhood or even later by government agencies and other interested parties. Immediately I realized that I had encountered some of these victims professionally, both as colleagues and as patients. I have spent the time since researching and treating survivors of what is called “sex trafficking” “mind control” “organized abuse” “ritual abuse” “cults” “mkultra” and other monikers, all of which are related to each other.
The ‘training’ to become a human slave often begins in infancy and nearly always includes torture and ritual abuse.
To gain control and mastery over an entire personality requires creating multiple compartments (alters or ANPs) and then handing the switching over to handlers. This requires extreme and prolonged torture, as well as extravagant rewards. The earlier handlers can start this process the easier it is, and they do, even before birth. This is a very sophisticated process where a computer like system is created to categorize different personalities and subpersonalities for different skill sets, memories, and behavioral programs, including ones that maintain the amnesia of the ‘front’ or ‘shell’ personality which is supposed to be very normal appearing.
According to several of my clients, assets that appear as multiples are considered ‘programming failures’. Switching of personalities is something that is very subtle and supposed to happen ‘behind the scenes’ in response to subtle cues given by handlers in person, by media or by preprogramming. For the average therapist and citizen well programmed children and adults are nearly impossible to casually detect. I usually end up seeing somebody in whom programming has gone sideways through handler error causing severe psychological damage or because something happened which caused the victim to exert superhuman effort to extricate themselves.
Children can be sold into slavery before they are born, after they are born and sometimes a couple of generations earlier. They are used repeatedly for the rest of their lives unless they escape.
People do not sign up for mind control or trafficking or being a super soldier. Most of the time they are born into it. I have had some clients whose families appear to have been given government favors in exchange for surrendering them to these programs. In other cases, pedophiles have been given immunity in exchange for children. Sometimes the families are literally paid money, as was written about in therapist and survivor Wendy Hoffman’s autobiography, The Enslaved Queen: A Memoir About Electricity and Mind Control (2019). I have had clients who were born into ‘illuminati’ and/or masonic families where this kind of conditioning is business as usual for the family members, who are then groomed for wealth and power. Although high achieving and well to do, the level of dysfunction in these families is off the charts.
Trafficked people may live apparently normal lives or lives of extreme dysfunction. You know some of them.
Reliable numbers are hard to come by because 1) the networks of enslaved people and their handlers extend to the media, science and government who will not report them; 2) many trafficked people are not awake to their plight yet – they are too dissociative, and 3) the masterminds go to great lengths to hide their tracks, and they are very, very good at it. Many of my colleagues give a rough estimate based on decades at work that at least 1% of people in the USA are trafficked through extreme behavioral conditioning. I said this to one of my clients and they actually laughed, “1 percent?! Well, maybe if you are not talking about the sleepers (people who have been conditioned but not called up into use). Everybody in my public school class was taken out for conditioning”. This client was believable. They were not given to histrionics or exaggeration and had a very high IQ, as most of these people do.
I have a colleague who believes we are all screened for mind control usefulness at a young age; she has a longer time in this field than even I do. I do not know if that could possibly be true, although I am now willing to entertain many possibilities that I used to not entertain. I do know that if 1 in a 100 people have this history, you have encountered them. If it is 1 in 30, you have sat in classes with them, know them, and possibly have them as close friends. Even if, against all odds, they are aware of their history they are VERY unlikely to tell anybody except their therapist and/or their partner. Many people have come to me because they know their therapist cannot handle their history and/or will not believe them.
Trafficking and mind control (behavioral) networks are extensive and are based in white supremacy. They are in every state and include members inside of the cultural institutions that are supposed to protect citizens: police departments, hospitals, justice departments and governments.
Everyone in child abuse protection knows about those few judges that just will not give a pedophile a meaningful sentence. They know who they are, but not why they are doing this and who they are connected to. Everyone in the business knows that there are good cops, but also bad ones who are not willing to believe or follow up on child abuse cases involving ritual abuse. And then there is the former False Memory Syndrome Foundation which folded at the end of 2019. This apparent CIA op (there were at least 3 known CIA operatives on the board) hurt a lot of therapists and clients. They were very successful in infiltrating the media to such an extent that it seems unlikely they were able to do that without help from networks.
I have had clients from every part of this country. They have disclosed abuse and conditioning in: military bases, churches (Mormon and Catholic figure predominantly), schools, neighbor’s houses, dental offices, remote estates, and mental institutions. Colleagues have fleshed out some of these networks and connections. We know that the CIA and other alphabet agencies had a big hand in developing sophisticated mind control techniques in league with major medical institutions and prominent universities around the country and in Canada. (For more on the CIA’s involvement I recommend my sister’s book A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, 2018.)
Eventually my clients and colleagues begin talking about white supremacy and how viciously white supremacist the abusers were. They start to draw connections to the Masons, the Mormons, the Illuminati and local government systems. They can’t get records. They can’t find records. They are afraid to talk to family.
What really concerns me about the Freemasons is how pervasive yet quiet they are. My family and I have RV’d all over thousands of miles of the Western United States. I have yet to find the town that is too small for a prominent Masonic Hall. Think about it – an all male, mostly all white group of individuals that are everywhere and yet totally secret. (And just in case you know a Mason or are a Mason, only certain people from certain levels are let in on the most nefarious parts of the organization. The rest of the people just have a good bonding and educational experience.) From the point of view of systems theory, if a system is “as sick as its secrets” then the Freemasons are catastrophically ill.
There is plenty of evidence of widespread collusion, conspiracy and control. Research MKUltra. Look up Svali Speaks. Or just start to open your eyes to the patterns around you. Why can cops kill black people with so much impunity and stare in the camera while they do it? Look at Epstein. This is HARD to look at, harder than systemic racism (which it includes) and that is plenty hard. Hard because we cannot believe the wool has been pulled that far over our eyes and hard because the evidence is almost unreadable. Hard because people who believe in collusion are called ‘conspiracy theorists’ – in itself a term used by the CIA to discredit observers. Hard now, because people who see these patterns tend to be conservatives and Republicans so liberals dismiss them. In the 1970s the conspiracy observers were Democrats. Hard because you are going to see some people that you really like or love emerge as part of this nefarious system. Some of that knowledge comes from the primary source of my clients, but there are plenty of other resources for information including many autobiographies, books, podcasts and websites. Lastly, it is hard because it is overwhelming and once you really see the scope of it, you cannot unsee it, and it is easy to lose hope. DON’T LOSE HOPE! Lots of good is happening. But first, we have to deal with this mess.
All trafficked people have dissociative disorders that are exceedingly difficult to treat, and most therapists do not have the first clue about doing this work.
