A Survivor’s Spiritual Journey – Neil Brick
The 2026 Online Annual Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference
August 16, 2026
A Survivor’s Spiritual Journey – Neil Brick
(Please use caution while reading this. It may be triggering. All accusations are alleged. None of the material on this page is meant as therapy, or to take the place of therapy.)
Neil will discuss how he has worked through his survivor experiences and has grown as a person. He will talk about how his advocacy and service have helped him learn more about himself and others. He will discuss the different spiritual paths he has worked with to lead a happier and more mindful life.
Neil Brick is a survivor of ritualistic abuse. His work continues to educate the public about child abuse, trauma and ritualistic abuse crimes. His child abuse and ritualistic abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. https://ritualabuse.us has been published for over 30 years. http://neilbrick.com
I was born in 1959 in the Boston area. I grew up in a suburb of Boston. As a young child, I developed strong attachment disorders due to severe abuse. I believe I suffer from Disorganized attachment style, which is an insecure attachment style. People with disorganized attachment can show inconsistent behavior or have trouble trusting others.
“Disorganized attachment style in children
Children with disorganized attachment style may appear confused much of the time. They may fear that something bad will happen. This is usually due to emotional inconsistencies of their primary caregiver. For example, a caregiver may give comfort to the child in some instances but instill fear in others. A child may not fully trust their caregiver because the same person who brings them harm may occasionally bring them comfort, as well. Children with disorganized attachment are often victims of abuse, trauma or neglect. (my bold)
Disorganized attachment style in adults
Adults with disorganized attachment often exhibit confusing or unpredictable behavior. They crave love and connection — yet they also fear these things. As a result, they may settle into a pattern of seeking out love only to reject it repeatedly. They might alternate between clinging to their partner and pushing them away. For example, they may be emotional one day and aloof the next.
Signs of disorganized attachment style
If you have disorganized attachment, you might have:
Difficulty trusting others.
Trouble regulating your emotions.
Signs of anxious and avoidant attachment styles.
A fear of rejection.
Confusing or contradictory behaviors.”
(Attachment Styles – Cleveland Clinic https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/25170-attachment-styles)
My primary caregiver, my mother, has serious emotional issues. I believe she may have suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder. She often presented like different people. She would sometimes state she did not remember things that happened previously. She also suffered from severe OCD. She was unable to touch anything unless she had a napkin or tissue in her hand.
My father, who was home less, could present as normal, but he could get very angry at times. Both parents suffered from food and tobacco addictions and had serious weight issues.
My mother worked until I was nine years old. When my mother was working, I used to eat lunch over a neighbor’s house with one of my childhood friends. During my childhood, my mother developed health problems and was later put on anti-anxiety medication. I remember being very afraid of her. I was so afraid, that I was afraid to eat. I remember being very small and skinny. Then when I became bigger than her, I remember pushing her away from me. After this, I was much less afraid of her and I was able to eat more again.
One of my older brothers was unable to make close relationships with other people and had major problems socializing with others. He lived with my parents until they sold my childhood home. I believe he was around forty years old at this time. He worked in my father’s business most of his professional life.
At age 18, I moved away to college. Even though my college was only a few miles away from where I grew up, I rarely went home, unless it was summer or a vacation. I remember having a great deal of problems controlling my emotions and socializing in college. I started drinking on weekends and got in trouble a few times due to this. Originally drinking helped me feel less scared when talking to people, especially women, but later it caused me embarrassment and problems.
I was always very co-dependent in relationships, having severe emotional breakdowns when relationships ended. I dated some in college, and I met my future wife there. After college, I tried to move to the New York City area (in New Jersey) but I only lasted three months. I accidentally moved into a bad apartment building with drugs and theft. I ended up trusting people that were not safe. I came back to the Boston area and started living with my future wife.
My wife (now ex-wife) was the first person I got close to in my life. I was very emotionally dependent on her. In a sense, I had my childhood with her. I did my own inner child work in our relationship. “Inner child healing focuses on addressing unmet childhood needs & emotional wounds to foster adult well being.” “Embracing & nurturing our inner child can lead to profound personal growth, resilience & healthier relationships.” (Inner Child Work: 15+ Practical Tools 8 Oct 2022 by Jeremy Sutton, PhD – Positive Psychology https://positivepsychology.com/inner-child-healing/ )
I tried to stop drinking alcohol in our relationship, but I would relapse every few months for a night. We got married in the mid-1980s and we got divorced in the early 1990s when I moved out of the Boston area to Western Massachusetts. The last few years of our relationship we began to move apart, as I had always had difficulty being close to people. I believe that possibly my psyche knew that I needed to do a lot of hard work on myself. For years I had been holding a lot of emotions in very tightly, mentally and physically.
In 1989 I took three months off from work and went to meditate mostly on my own at the Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge Mass. This changed my life. I learned to sit and not move no matter how much pain I felt. I believe this helped prepare me to break the amnesic barriers I needed to break to start remembering my trauma memories. I also started to get involved with light and sound machines. I read “Megabrain: New Tools and Techniques for Brain Growth and Mind Expansion Book by Michael Hutchison.” These machines helped me relax immediately, much faster than when I used alcohol. They put my brain into a meditative state very quickly. I learned about different brainwave states, from sleep states, to meditative and waking states. (Some of these machines may be dangerous for those with issues like epilepsy.)
When I moved to Western Massachusetts and was away from wife, I began to drink more. I had difficulty finding work and became increasingly depressed. I went to 12 step programs looking for help. First, I went to co-dependents anonymous. I was referred from there to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). I never liked drugs or tobacco, but I had always had issues with food and relationships. In AA, I was able to get sober fairly quickly (after three months) but I had trouble working the steps in the way they were written. I had two sponsors (the second was a therapist) and I worked through the steps, which helped me a lot. I used the fourth and fifth steps more to vent my memories, than to discuss my character defects. (Character defects are personality issues and emotions we work on to improve ourselves, which helps us avoid addictions.) Without fully realizing this at the time, this helped me stay sober by getting rid of a lot of my pressure holding things in. (Step 4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Step 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. – Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book – https://www.aa.org/alcoholics-anonymous-big-book-4th-edition )
I had bought a house, but I had trouble affording it, so I rented the rooms, trying to make it a sober house of sorts. I had the house about four years. Though it was a difficult experience for me, I learned a lot from this. I sold the house after four years. After this, I moved into an apartment with different roommates.
In the 1980s, I had worked as a traveling salesman. I was a good salesman. Sometimes I drove for long hours and flew all around the country. I learned a lot from this. I switched careers in the late 1980s from sales to the field of education. I wanted to help people by working in the service professions. Though I had a master’s degree, I had a great deal of trouble getting a teaching job due to my social difficulties. I worked as an aide or day care teacher in various settings for several years. In 1995, I got a job as an ESL teacher in an early elementary school. I was able to hold this job for nine years, though at times the job politics were very tumultuous. With the help of AA and living through different experiences, I began to learn how to work more smoothly with people.
I had therapy off and on in the 1990s. I was often unable to trust people to stay with them, and my financial situation made it difficult to find people also. I worked through most of my severe ritual abuse and mind control (RA/MC) memories on my own. I went to conferences and read RA/MC self-help books, like “ Safe Passage to Healing : A Guide for Survivors of Ritual Abuse
by Chrystine Oksana (https://archive.org/details/safepassagetohea0000oksa/page/n9/mode/2up )
As I have previously written, I had a lot of strong trauma memories come up during the early 1990s, which made it difficult for me to work full-time jobs. As I stabilized, I was able to work more in the mid-1990s.
One therapist I worked with mentioned I might be good at being a therapist. I was a good listener when people discussed their problems with me. In 2004, I got my second master’s degree in mental health counseling. Earlier in my career, I worked primarily as an Outpatient clinician in clinics and also worked as a counselor in Crisis Stabilization Units (CSU), which is a lower level and less acute level of care than an inpatient unit and also as a mental health crisis worker in a hospital and in the community. At times while working in the mental health field, I was a workaholic, working up to one hundred hours a week.
In the mental health field, I continued my progress building social and professional job skills. Toward the end of my full-time career, I was able to become a supervisor and even a clinic director for a few years. Now I am semi-retired, working part time as an outpatient clinician.
Working in the mental health field helped me in several ways. I learned the importance of service work (like I was taught in 12 step programs like AA – Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.) I learned the dangers of addictions from a different perspective by working with my clients. I learned the true meaning of the Serenity Prayer for myself “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.” (Original version by Reinhold Niebuhr – adapted by Alcoholics Anonymous) I learned how others managed to survive their often very traumatic childhoods and lives like I did. I was able to help a lot of people and I learned how important it is to help other people.
Working in the survivor advocacy field also helped me grow greatly as a person. I started doing this in the early 1990s. I had a small mini-conference for child abuse survivors in Springfield Mass where a few people attended. I wrote an article in 1993 for Survivors of Abusive Rituals (SOAR). An edited version of this article is in SMART Issue #4 – September 1995 online at https://ritualabuse.us/2008/10/issue-4-september-1995/ )
Article excerpts:
“My recovery started when I left home at 18 and went to college, though I still had contact with my family on and off until a couple of years ago. I even worked for my family for a period of time in my twenties. The bulk of my recovery work actually started in the summer of 1990. I was going through a separation from a long-term relationship.”
“Did you remember any abuse before that time ?
No, I had always suffered total amnesia. I relocated at the same time that I got separated. Six months after the relocation, I went through addiction withdrawal for a variety of things. I was addicted to alcohol; I drank on weekends; I started to become addicted to 900 numbers phone sex and things like that. I didn’t know why. My belief system was always totally against those things, so I didn’t understand the attraction I felt. I was addicted to food. I ate to stuff my feelings. But the biggest addiction for me was codependency on people. It was relationships I got hooked on the worst.”
“When you say you were addicted to codependency, what do you mean?
I was addicted to people. I had very poor internal boundaries. If someone said something to me about myself, I believed it was the truth and that was it. That’s still true to some degree, but not like it was. I had very low self-esteem. But the relationships were my drug I got the “love,” the touch and the sex I needed, and I was able to talk to someone on a regular basis. All those draws were so powerful. I wasn’t loved or nurtured as a child at all, so those were the kinds of things I went outside of myself to look for. Sometimes, that’s okay, as long as it’s not dysfunctional, as long as I’m not getting abused, or hooked to someone who definitely doesn’t want me or isn’t good for me.
So, I went to 12-step programs. I went to variety of 12-step programs. In late 1990, I was in several programs just trying to sort things out.
I started getting memories about two months into the addiction withdrawal process. They came very quickly. First there were very clear emotions, like severe anger. Unbelievable anger, like my skin was going to explode. I just felt like my whole body was going to burst, I was so hot and tense.”
“An affordable alternative to therapy was to journal, usually on my own. That way everybody inside gets to see, everybody can read it, and I can review the journals. One of my dreams is to get a small computer and try to put my journals into book form. There aren’t very many male ritual abuse survivors that have come out of denial yet.
Another alternative therapy I use is self-defense classes (specifically Karate). I’ve been doing this for three years now. I found a school where I can work really hard. I can put my work ethic to the maximum and not be put down. If I need a correction, I get it without derision. It’s a good school. I’ve felt numerous benefits from it. I’m growing in confidence every week from the classes. I’m making breakthroughs like I was in my early months in the 12-step programs. Self-defense is hard because you have to look up at someone, and it took me 4 or 5 months to do that. But if I don’t look up, I can’t see what’s going on, and I’ll get hurt. So it’s very important to look up at people, not at the floor. Most people are taught to make eye contact with others, but I was trained (as a child) to look at the floor. It was the way the cult controlled us. Just being able to walk tall and defend myself is so important. It’s a spiritual process that’s hard to explain in words. But I recommend it. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve trusted an authority figure and feel safe in my gut about doing that.
Something else I’ve done is body work, especially massage and energy work. I think it can bring a lot of stuff really fast. It’s also a healing process. Once I had enough body work done, I learned how to use the techniques on myself. But I needed to find someone I could talk to when things came up some place I could feel safe.
Yoga is a great alternative therapy, because I could teach myself the postures. A lot of stuff comes up in yoga, but it also moves the energy through the body. I’d always suffered chronic body pain, especially in my neck and shoulders, and I used yoga to release the tension.”
“There isn’t a lot of support out there for ritual abuse survivors. So it’s really a do-it-yourself sort of thing, to take at one’s own pace.
It was important for me to find a way to get on with my life. But I realize now that it’s not a matter of getting on with it. Recovery is going to be a lifetime thing, for me at least. But it changes. I focus less on memories, and more on exposing abusers and cults. I also focus more on my career and relationships, than on memories. But I’ll never forget where I came from, and I always try to permanently stop abusers and cults from hurting others.
You sound as though you’re handling it better now.
It is better. We’re talking about 18 years of some of the most heinous crimes that can be done to a person, and those things were done to me. They were very severe.
Do you find that your perspective has changed positively since you started doing this work?
I think I always had a sense of right and wrong. I think I grew up with that. Somehow it happened, regardless of the way I was treated. I grew up knowing what honesty was and what truth was. That way I could tell who the good people were and who the mean people were. Some people are good sometimes and bad other times. I’d been lied to so much and hurt so badly, I just wanted to know the truth to know why I was so confused and in so much pain.
Now I know why. And now I can rebuild my life and try to be happy. I feel much better about myself, and much stronger than I have ever been. I have come a long way and have a long way to go. I realize that some people can be trusted, and that I can be good. My lifelong goal is to have inner peace and to stop others from suffering ritual abuse and other forms of abuse.”
In 1995, I started the SMART Newsletter ( https://ritualabuse.us/newsletter/ ) which now has 189 issues online. The newsletter originally started as a printed offline publication. In 1996 it went on the Internet with a SMART webpage and emailing. Now all issues are available online for free. The newsletter helped my recovery process by teaching me to speak out and share my story and others’ stories, to help me to research more about trauma, dissociation and severe abuse and by helping me advocate for our movement against false memory type forces. Presently I have a very large online database for survivors of trauma and dissociation.
In the last few years, as I have moved toward full retirement, I begun working on myself more deeply again, like I did in the early 1990s. I started attending AA again, trying to make meetings daily. In early recovery, years before, I was very emotional in AA. I had trouble maintaining good boundaries, standing up for myself and deeply understanding the spiritual path and meaning of the steps. I was able to decrease my addictive impulses a lot and stay sober. I also found help with other addictions. Like the meditation I had done years before, I was able to become much more mindful about what I was thinking and feelings. I am now able to have better boundaries, stand up for myself and what needs to be done in certain situations and analyze my reactions, apologizing when necessary.
Another piece I have been working on is God and it’s meaning to me. For years I had varying opinions on God or a higher power. In my experiences of severe ritual abuse, I was told God did not exist, was powerless or was evil. These beliefs were embedded in my psyche. At times during my life I believed in God, didn’t believe in God or I was an atheist. The 12 step programs give people the choice to believe in a higher power of their own choosing. AA (and other 12 step programs) are spiritual programs and not religious, meaning that no specific faith or religious text is required.) Some people in AA may have different religious beliefs of their own. The 12 steps helped me create my own meaning of God. For me God or a higher power is the energy (this is the best way I can explain it in language) in the universe that I am a part of. I believe that our senses help interpret this energy but are simply a human classification of this energy. The energy can guide me if I ask it for help (prayer is a part of this). This helps me drop my ego and helps me realize there is more than me in the world. I feel more of a connection to people and the world now, which helps decrease my attachment disorder. It helps me realize more that other people have needs and wants also. This way I can be more empathetic with others.
Twelve step meetings and increased socialization in other healthy situations have helped me connect better with other people and trust them more. Due to my severe trauma, I was taught not to trust people. The caregivers in my life were unable to be trustworthy or supportive due to their severe trauma. They were not given the gift or the opportunity to work on themselves. I am now able to ask people for help in certain situations and discuss my feelings appropriately and fully in groups. I feel as if I am guided in doing this at times, as my inner psyche speaks out when it is a good time to do so, in a way that helps me and hopefully others.
I was born Jewish. The last few years have been a very difficult time for my being Jewish due to the growing antisemitism in the world. Sadly, hate against my religion and other minority groups has been normalized by some. My religious beliefs have ranged from very religious to not being religious during my life. Nowadays I am more secular, but I still have a strong belief in defending myself and my own religion in an appropriate way. I use research and discourse to try to do this. On social media and in media in general, the world has descended into inappropriate speech and action. I work hard to follow a moral code where I interact and react appropriately as best as I can. Of course, this is always a work in progress for everyone, but I believe I have greatly improved at this from before I was in recovery years ago.
I have worked in the RA/MC field for over thirty years now. My hope is that I have been able to help a lot of people heal and find some peace in their lives. I am learning that things happen when they are supposed to happen. I realize that though I have had a difficult path in my life, I have been able to grow and learn from it. I am always looking for ways to improve in my life and my actions. I work to maintain right action and right speech in my life. My hope is that I can continue to help others by improving myself and speaking out about my beliefs.
