Episode 5: The Devil in Delaney

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall, Episode 5: “The Devil in Delaney”
Released: November 17, 2025 | CBC

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Episode Overview

In episode five, "The Devil in Delaney," Sarah Marshall dives deep into the personal story of Delaney, a Canadian woman whose life was profoundly affected by the widespread Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s. Through interviews with Delaney’s son, excerpts from her own writings (voiced by Janet Varney), and contextual analysis, the episode explores the intersections between personal trauma, memory recovery, and the broader cultural hysteria around supposed satanic cults. This is a nuanced, empathetic look at how societal narratives and therapeutic trends can shape—sometimes warp—an individual’s understanding of their own suffering.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Early Life of Delaney and Her Family

• Delaney’s Son Matt Remembers: Matt recalls his mother as a loving, resilient but often troubled woman who parented mostly on her own, moving multiple times due to his father’s work.
  • (00:32–01:45)
• Delaney’s Mental State: In her 30s, Delaney began having disturbing dreams and “flash” memories, which spiraled into dark moods and instability.
  • (01:54–02:40, 03:37 [Matt]: "The idea that know some of the abuse she faced was satanic came to her kind of organically while she was going through therapy.")

The Cultural Context: Feminism, Recovered Memory, and Satanic Panic

• Recognition of Abuse: The 70s and 80s saw a shift in how society acknowledged sexual abuse, trauma, and domestic violence.
  • (03:03)
• Rise of Recovered Memory Therapy: Influential books like Michelle Remembers and The Courage to Heal gave credence to the idea that deeply buried (and possibly satanic) memories could explain adult difficulties.
  • (03:51–05:10, 20:05–21:45)
  • (21:13) Notable Quote (Therapist on suggestibility): “One time there was a baby there—” (Patty Burgess: “And they stabbed the baby and killed it, and we all had to drink blood.”)

Therapy, Suggestion, and the Evolution of Delaney’s Memories

• Therapeutic Techniques: Delaney and other women of her era were encouraged to “recover” memories, through methods including journaling, guided imagery, group therapy, bodywork, and hypnosis.
  • (22:07–23:10)
• Blurred Lines Between Memory and Imagination: Delaney’s recollections shifted from a single event to ongoing, increasingly gory and elaborate scenarios. Her writing is described as a blend of memory, art, and imagination.
  • (11:46 [Sarah]: “This is the book where the line between memory and imagination is blurred.”)

The Personal Impact—On Delaney and Her Children

• Delaney’s Emotional World: Extracts from Delaney’s writings depict a woman overwhelmed by rage, depression, and a desire to heal despite her pain.
  • (15:15 [Delaney]: “There is some hidden violence within me, hidden even from myself. I can never escape. I want sometimes to pound someone to death with a club… So great is my rage, and I don't know why.”)
• Family Fallout: Matt describes a home environment shaped by instability, sudden shifts in his mother’s moods, and sometimes frightening outbursts—effects he recognizes as stemming from Delaney’s inner chaos.
  • (29:05 [Matt]: “I spent time alone in my room, Lego, Lego, Lego, all day, every day...I never got any of that [help regulating emotions].”)
  • (30:07 [Matt]: Recounts Delaney “pounding on the punching bag” as catharsis.)

The Escalation of Memories into the Occult

• Satanic Content Emerges: As therapy and social cues reinforced the possibility of extraordinary trauma, Delaney’s “memories” peaked in graphic ritual abuse, murder, and satanic ceremonies—mirroring the cultural scripts of the time.
  • (35:42 [Sarah]: “She wrote of a new memory of holding a baby and killing it with a knife…”)
  • (36:36 [Matt]: “I think, trying to come at this child's memory with an adult's understanding and also, you know, with kind of the popular vernacular at the time. This is evil, you know, from her perspective, pure evil. And what's the word that we have to associate with that? It's... satanic.”)
• Broader Societal Spread: Sarah explains how these narratives were amplified at professional conferences, on TV, and by both feminists and fundamentalists, leading to thousands of people becoming convinced of their own—or their loved ones’—victimization.
  • (38:14 [Conference Speaker]: “My best guess is...they want an army of Manchurian candidates, tens of thousands of mental robots…”)

The Pushback: False Memory Movement & Professional Reckoning

• Growing Backlash: As more former patients and skeptical scientists questioned the validity of recovered “satanic” memories, lawsuits and insurance clampdowns became widespread.
  • (41:22 [Therapist]: “He made you believe that all these pictures going on in your head was reality...Here I am, I'm sick. He's the specialist...and I'm gonna argue with him?”)
• Delaney’s Turn to Questioning: With time—and a somewhat more measured therapist—Delaney is encouraged to let go of the need for perfect recall and focus on her personal healing and well-being.
  • (43:51 [Sarah]: “Her therapist urged her to drop the question of [her memories’] validity and to look past that as the ultimate point...”)

Coming to Terms: Delaney’s Later Realizations & Legacy

• A Revelatory Conversation: In 2013, Delaney revisits her manuscript and speaks with an old friend about the memories’ origins. She considers local Masonic ceremonies as possible sources for her symbol-laden “memories” and recognizes the possibility of cultural contamination and suggestion.
  • (47:38 [Delaney]: “Finally, as I looked more closely, I saw far too many references to ritual and satanic abuse. Either this was a fantasy or a tragedy. I felt lost and confused. Why remember actions and circumstances I cannot imagine happening?”)
  • (48:38 [Delaney]: “An illusion created to scare a child into submission.”)
• Understanding the True Source: Sarah and Delaney both conclude that the real threat was not Satanism, but the mundane dangers of a patriarchal society—and that the fantasy of satanic cults was a way for people to explain inexpressible personal and cultural pain.
  • (49:28 [Delaney]: “Why? Because they could.”)

Reflection & Healing

• Delaney's Acceptance: Delaney learns to live with ambiguity and focuses on healing through art, community, and service rather than through endless searching for “the truth” of every memory.
  • (45:19 [Delaney]: “I have moved from frantic distress to reluctance and embarrassment, to a wandering, comfortable roadmap where I can begin to build a sense of myself.”)
• Matt’s Retrospective: Matt comes to a place of understanding his mother’s struggles, appreciating her efforts under impossible circumstances.
  • (46:29 [Matt]: “Like, the house was on fire before you even started. And so how can you kind of expect to have a really good outcome here?”)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Silence and Secrets:
  • [05:10] Delaney: “Silence is the understood prerequisite for maintaining family secrets and family violence. Silence is taught.”
• On Therapy and Memory:
  • [08:40] Dr. Lenore Tur: “We know that this exists. And we also know that some of these children who go through repeated abuses or repeated terrible experiences do something with their memory so that at some point they don't remember part of it… Then, for some reason, in adulthood, these memories come tumbling out and they come on cue.”
• On Recovered Memory Therapy:
  • [21:45] Patty Burgess: “I clearly could see the moon was shining down...They were lighting him on fire.”
• False Memory Backlash:
  • [41:22] Therapist: “He made you believe that all these pictures going on in your head was reality, was real stuff.”
• On Acceptance:
  • [45:19] Delaney: “I have moved from frantic distress to reluctance and embarrassment, to a wandering, comfortable roadmap where I can begin to build a sense of myself.”
• Matt on Forgiveness:
  • [46:29] Matt: “Like, the house was on fire before you even started. And so how can you kind of expect to have a really good outcome here?”
• On Cultural Memory:
  • [50:52] Matt: “She recovered tremendously. But she was never going to go off and be like, well, that's done...Like, it was always going to be something that continued for her…”

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Selected Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:32–03:03 – Matt’s introduction & Delaney’s background
• 03:51–05:10 – Roots of Satanic Panic & Recovered Memory in pop culture
• 11:46–13:58 – Blurring memory and imagination in Delaney’s writings
• 20:05–22:07 – The impact of The Courage to Heal and therapy’s role in memory
• 29:00–30:35 – Family dynamics and the personal cost to Matt and his siblings
• 35:26–37:05 – From memory of abuse to claims of ritual satanic abuse
• 38:14–39:07 – Conferences, experts, and the spread of the Satanic cult narrative
• 47:38–49:28 – Delaney struggles with the implausibility of her memories; the Masonic Lodge connection
• 51:10–52:02 – Reflection on how moral panics repeat and the importance of building community

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Tone and Language

Sarah Marshall maintains a compassionate, probing, and sometimes poetic tone throughout, privileging nuance over sensationalism. Delaney’s journal and poetry excerpts contribute a deeply personal, raw voice. Matt’s reflections combine gratitude, sadness, and clarity. The episode is rich in empathy and focused on restoration and understanding, not blame.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a powerful, detailed case study of how personal pain, cultural anxieties, and flawed therapies can intertwine to create suffering—and how, in the end, finding peace often means accepting complexity rather than chasing an ever-receding certainty about the past. Through Delaney’s journey, listeners are encouraged to question both cultural scripts and clinical dogmas, and to value healing, connection, and acceptance over perfect clarity.

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

With stays under $250 a night, VRBO makes it easy to celebrate Sweater weather. Book a cabin with leaf views or a home with a fire pit for nights with friends with stays under $250 a night. Find a home for your exact needs book [e-mail] this is a CBC podcast. Just a heads up that this episode contains discussions about sexual abuse and domestic abuse, including some explicit mentions. Please take care while listening.

[Matt]

So I can remember, even when I was very young, she'd be sitting and having a cup of tea with some honey and some cream and she would invite me to try it. And it was. I can still remember, like being young and having tea for the first time with her while we were. While we were living in British Columbia. Hi, my name's Matt. I live in Winnipeg in Manitoba.

[Sarah Marshall]

In Matt's telling us about his mother, Delaney. She passed away in 2022.

[Matt]

She had kind of big, curly, light brown hair, really big smile, crinkly corners of her eyes and whatnot. She had a really lovely smile.

[Sarah Marshall]

Matt is a child of the 80s and the baby of his family. Delaney often found herself parenting solo throughout his childhood.

[Matt]

She was, I mean, very much so a housewife trying to do her best. I think in an impossible situation like she had these three young boys. We were constantly moving around the country due to my dad's work.

[Sarah Marshall]

This would naturally be stressful for any woman in her position. But there was something larger looming over Delaney during these years.

[Matt]

She was getting overwhelmed by starting to remember her past.

[Sarah Marshall]

When she was in her 30s, Delaney began experiencing strange dreams and seeing flashes of images, which often pushed her into dark moods.

[Matt]

You never knew what she was going to be like moment to moment. If she was having a good day, it could go bad without even knowing what caused it. It was very much so something that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Consumed her in drops, then a stream and then a flood. Delaney found herself submerged in what felt like memories of her past.

[Matt]

My understanding is very often these memories come up and they almost like, seem like a fever dream, almost. But if you've got going on almost 200 remembered events of sexual abuse at some point, it's just like, wow, that didn't come out of nowhere.

[Sarah Marshall]

By the 1980s, women were increasingly publicly talking about things that happened to them. Things like marital rape, domestic violence, and childhood sexual abuse. They were creating a culture that recognized these things as abuse. It may have been ordinary, but it didn't have to be normal. But this was the time of the satanic panic. So while women reframed these experiences, they often took on the era's idiom of distress.

[Matt]

The idea that know some of the abuse she faced was satanic came to her kind of organically while she was going through therapy.

[Sarah Marshall]

The satanic panic was ignited by the story of a woman who claimed to have recovered memories of ritual satanic abuse. In Of Course Michelle Remembers the idea that women's depression, anxiety and dissatisfaction with the expectations placed placed on them in society could all be explained by deeply buried trauma. And satanic torture was understandably an enticing one and a convenient way to offload responsibility for the sins of the patriarchy onto those theoretical satanists just over the horizon. Stories like Michelle Remembers and its imitators fueled the satanic panic as it spread throughout the 80s and 90s. And these stories told women that as long as they could remember what had happened to them, they could earn the right to be taken seriously as someone who had suffered and someone who deserved help. Because who are you if you can't even trust your own memories? I'm Sarah Marshall and this is the Devil youl Know.

[Delaney]

Silence is the understood prerequisite for maintaining family secrets and family violence. Silence is taught.

[Sarah Marshall]

In the 1970s, women across Canada and the U.S. refused to to be silent. The solidarity many women found within second wave feminism came partially from the growing realization that so many women had experienced some form of sexual violence or abuse and that an individual trauma could become a movement. Feminists coined and spread the idea of rape culture, A society where sexual violence is treated as the norm and where victims are blamed for their own assaults. Prior to this era, things like rape and sexual violence were, as one scholar memorably put it, hitherto as well known to conventional scholars as the dark side of the moon. There was a vast chasm between the mainstream beliefs within male dominated fields that stuff like this was rare and the lived experience of women who knew it was the norm. That chasm began to narrow in the 1970s as feminists in the field of psychology brought their politics into the workplace. Researchers who studied women's experiences of sexual assault were beginning to identify PTSD and trauma in women. Surprise. It was clear that a traumatic event could affect a person for a lifetime. It was becoming more and more possible for women to speak and for psychologists to hear about trauma in a new way. But Moving into the 1980s, the the social and political pendulum swung back and closer to the right. Professional anti feminists like Phyllis Schlafly insisted that women didn't really have it all that bad. The mainstream backlash against women's lib Meant that the regular crimes of regular men were somehow more politicized than ever, and therefore even more important to den. Surprisingly, there was one place where some feminists and anti feminists could find common ground in stories of recovered memories of satanic ritual abuse.

[Unknown Female Guest]

My next guest was used also in worshiping the devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals, rituals and cannibalism. She says her family has been involved in rituals for generations. She is currently in extinction. Extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she's blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood.

[Sarah Marshall]

The idea that a person could repress and later recover memories wasn't exactly new. Repression, after all, was kind of Sigmund Freud's whole deal. And in the face of the public reckoning with apparently ubiquitous abuse of women and children, many psychology practitioners of the 70s and 80s were drawn back to this paradigm. After all, they had just seen that countless people were walking around with invisible scars from previously hidden and unacknowledged abuse. Perhaps some abuse was so deeply hidden that it was unknown even to its victims. And so a new field emerged. Recovered memory therapy.

[Dr. Lenore Tur]

Well, we know, and I have studied.

[Delaney]

For years.

[Dr. Lenore Tur]

And we know that this exists. And we also know that some of these children who go through repeated abuses or repeated terrible experiences do something with their memory so that at some point they don't remember part of it. They remember only traces of it. Or sometimes they have no memory at all of it. Then, for some reason, in adulthood, these memories come tumbling out and they come on cue.

[Sarah Marshall]

That was Dr. Lenore Tur, a psychiatrist on Charlie Rose in 1994. We talked about this a little bit back in episode two with Michelle Remembers and Sybil. Both were stories of women who allegedly had suffered childhood abuse so severe that their minds engaged in a supposed defense mechanism in order to protect them from the trauma. These books told a story, and the story became a pattern. Troubled woman, dedicated shrink. Trauma in the past becoming trauma in the present. It was a pattern that would repeat in thousands of therapy sessions throughout the 80s and 90s for thousands of patients, Overwhelmingly women.

[Vanessa]

Vanessa originally sought psychiatric help for depression and eating disorders. But as her therapy continued, as she continued, she began to remember episodes of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Those memories then turned into vivid recollections of satanic rituals.

[Sarah Marshall]

It was premeditated and systematic, methodical.

[Therapist]

One time there was a baby there.

[Patty Burgess]

And they stabbed the baby and killed.

[Sarah Marshall]

It, and we all had to drink blood. The kind of satanic ritual abuse that had been detailed in Michelle remembers in high profile Daycare cases and in breathless primetime TV reports soon became a regularly occurring feature of recovered memory therapy.

[Conference Speaker]

The trial revolved around two Orange county sisters who accused their mother of subjecting them to a lifetime of satanic terror and sexual abuse.

[Therapist]

Hello, Satan.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hi.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Hi.

[Sarah Marshall]

How are you?

[Therapist]

Pretty good.

[Vanessa]

You called up a lot of personalities on Vanessa.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Vanessa]

You called up Satan.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

In many cases, women would come out on the other side of this therapy now fully convinced that they'd been abused in horrific satanic rituals replete with gory stories of murder, torture and cannibalism. We know a version of this story through Michelle remembers. But what was it like for someone who didn't have her therapist slash boyfriend write a bestseller, who was just trying to get through it and maybe even get better?

[Delaney]

I can feel my mother patting me on my hand, shushing me into good behavior, stopping my words of anger or fear they could not exist. Instead, she instructs me to be good, be silent, smile.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is Delaney. Well, sort of. Over Delany's life, she kept journals, wrote poetry and short stories, and produced visual art pretty much non stop. Throughout the 90s, she began to compile it all into a narrative manuscript. So throughout this episode, you'll hear Delaney's words and thoughts, but voiced by the talented Janet Varney. And it's worth noting, this is the book where the line between memory and imagination is blurred. And yes, that ambiguity is sometimes frustrating, especially for those of us that pride ourselves in fact finding. So for now, let's put aside the question of where it does and does not represent reality in an effort to understand Delaney's reality.

[Matt]

But yeah, she was incredibly powerful and incredibly driven, absolutely tenacious and unrelenting in her approach to just about anything.

[Sarah Marshall]

And once again, this is Matt Delaney's son. He remembers a lot about his mum, but he's also gained new insights and information from before his birth from reading this book that she compiled. Delaney was born in rural Manitoba in the 1950s. There she grew up in a home that was always tidy, where the beds were always made and where she and her siblings were dressed well and ate well, as she described it. She remembers gathering eggs from the hens at her grandmother's farm, walking safely through the woods near home, and skating at the local rink. These pristine snapshots formed the majority of her memories of early childhood. Her years as a teenager were more of a fog. Every so often, that fog would be broken by a feeling as sharp as a knife that she wanted to die. When she finished high school, she left home as soon as she could. And in the 70s, Delany met the man she would eventually marry. When her husband began to talk about having children, she felt uneasy. Despite this, she became pregnant two years later and gave birth to her first son. Motherhood seemed to give her a new identity.

[Delaney]

Once pregnant, a new person is created. The great Defending MOTHER I am unaware of the lack of knowledge I possess concerning child raising. I believe with absolute certainty that children are snotty nosed, dirty, diapered brats, an utter nuisance, a waste of anyone's time. To my infinite amazement, instead of a snotty nosed brat, I am given perfection. No one prepared me for this pleasure. Why did I not know that children were lovely?

[Sarah Marshall]

The family moved to Calgary and she soon had another son. Delaney was often alone with her two young boys as her husband was on the road for work.

[Matt]

Even from two weeks after I was born, we moved from where we were living and the family moved two years before I was born. We kept moving and kept moving, and I think at one point we stayed somewhere for like four years and everyone was like, oh, wow, that was a really long time.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney was, safe to say, stressed. She was straining to be the perfect mother with perfect kids. Usually she plastered on a smile and went about her day, but inside she was angry.

[Delaney]

There is some hidden violence within me, hidden even from myself. I can never escape. I want sometimes to pound someone to death with a club, to smash them into a bloody pulp. So great is my rage, and I don't know why.

[Sarah Marshall]

In 1984, Delaney had one more son, Matt. Just as her first pregnancy triggered a new awareness in her, so did this one.

[Delaney]

I am back in that familiar place, the sweet black cushion of depression. Sitting on the living room sofa, I gaze out across the fields that border our street. I know I am trapped inside this dark, familiar place.

[Sarah Marshall]

She reminded herself the way she had as a teenager, that she did not want to die for no reason. The next day, she asked her husband to call a psychiatrist.

[Delaney]

I cannot imagine where to go or what to do to ease my discomfort. In fact, I know there is nowhere to go.

[Sarah Marshall]

But when she saw the doctor, she feared he would dismiss her and pronounce her crazy. So she shared little of this inner turmoil with him. After Delaney rejected the psychiatrist, she turned to the buffet of alternatives that sprung up in the new age of the 1970s. She tried meditation, vegetarianism and positive thinking. She read Carl Jung's work, Memories, Dreams and Reflections. She remained deeply spiritual throughout her life, believing in a loving, affirming God, being who listened and answered prayer. Even so, she felt isolated, and her anger and self loathing never seemed to truly abate.

[Delaney]

I sense a hint of something within. Something dark, ugly and hated.

[Narrator/Announcer]

Hello, it's Ray Winstone. I'm here to tell you about my podcast on BBC Radio 4, History's Toughest Heroes. I got stories about the pioneers, the rebels, the outcasts who define tough. And that was the first, first time that anybody ever ran a car up that fast with no tires on. It almost feels like your eyeballs are going to come out of your head. Tough enough for you? Subscribe to History's Toughest Heroes wherever you get your podcast.

[Matt]

It was daily like when we were children, just generally in the household. To us or to my dad, she would be raging about how awful and disgusting and vile men are. So as a kid, you're not going to think about that super critically. You're just going to be like, yeah, I guess men are vile. That's. That's going to be pretty rough because I don't want to be vile, but I guess I'm. I'm going to grow up to be vile. That sucks.

[Sarah Marshall]

In 1987, Delaney began to see a counselor that's a therapist for you American listeners. She felt loved and respected and listened to.

[Matt]

She found this counselor who was just like, just kind of told her what she was feeling about what she was thinking made sense, and that she still had value just as a person, just as she was.

[Sarah Marshall]

She began to realize that those pristine, silent images of her childhood weren't the full picture. She recalled coming home from school and finding her mother drunk, her father using corporal punishment on her and her siblings. She remembered harsh words, yelling and chaos. Delany described this two year period of counseling as peeling the onion. Still in her mind's eye, Delaney saw a deep black pit. It was usually surrounded by a thick fog, allowing her to forget about it. But every so often, as she probed her inner self through therapy and meditation, the fog shifted as if in a breeze. It both repulsed and drew her in.

[Delaney]

One day, curious, I venture closer to the pit, and it is as if I am approaching a nightmare. Cold brushes my skin. The stench grasps my ankle and I draw away, repulsed, afraid, ghosts and echoes of violence arising from its depths and haunt me in nightmares and fear, spontaneous weeping and eruptions of rage.

[Sarah Marshall]

In 1989, Delaney picked up a book, the Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. It was published in 1988 and subtitled A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. The book came to be known as the Bible of the Recovered Memory movement. The book's central thesis was if you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were. The authors believed that if a woman felt uneasy, unsatisfied, or uncomfortable in life, the root cause was very likely to be childhood sexual abuse. Crucially, the book told women that if they didn't remember any abuse, that didn't mean it didn't happen. But the only way to heal your trauma was to remember what caused it. Michelle Remembers popularized this idea. The courage to heal popularized it even further. According to checklists of the day, repressed memory was the disease of a million symptoms. Anything from migraines to lack of motivation to wearing baggy clothes to having sex or not having sex could be signs. When patients said they remembered nothing, therapists developed various techniques for drawing the repressed memories out. Some therapists asked their patients to visualize or journal about what it might have been like if a family member had abused them to effectively try on abuse memories and see if they fit. When patients experienced nightmares or intrusive thoughts about sexual abuse, therapists could then argue that these dreams and flashes were actually memories.

[Patty Burgess]

I clearly could see the moon was shining down, that there was a little bonfire off to one side of a table, but on that table there was a man laying there, and the man on the altar had candles on each side and they were lighting him on fire.

[Narrator/Announcer]

She dreamt it over and over again, so she sought psychiatric help. That's when the wall came tumbling down.

[Sarah Marshall]

Therapists also argued that you should tell other people the story of your abuse or over and over again, possibly in group therapy sessions where others with similar experiences could stimulate you to remember more. For other practitioners, bodywork like massage could be used to identify where in the body patients were holding on to their traumatic memories. Some therapists took it up a notch and used hypnosis.

[Therapist]

Let your mind go deeper and deeper and deeper.

[Vanessa]

In cadence, slow and reassuring, a therapist leads his patient into her past, deeper.

[Therapist]

And deeper and deeper.

[Vanessa]

During two days of therapy, Vanessa, the name she's asked us to use, will drift through dozens of emotions and personalities.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, God. Rosa, what is your job?

[Delaney]

I'm Dr. Susie.

[Therapist]

How old are you?

[Dr. Lenore Tur]

Three.

[Sarah Marshall]

Whatever the technique, the common thread was suggestion and reinforcement.

[Delaney]

I move or stumble, depending on the day, between my inner and my outer world.

[Sarah Marshall]

Reading the Courage to Heal seemed to lift the fog around the foreboding pit in her mind. Delaney wrote that she had, quote, always remembered being molested by a farmhand as a five year old, but said she'd never dwelt on it or thought it had affected her very much. She vividly recounted the story of her molestation to her therapist. Soon there were more flashes of images, physical sensations, voices of abusers. They came into her mind like an assault.

[Delaney]

One late evening, I have just settled into bed. A man enters the room. He is as real as if he were alive. I am transported back to my childhood. He turns at the end of the bed and approaches me. I want to remain with the memory, yet my fear rises with each advancing step.

[Matt]

So often she was dealing with what was going on for her in that moment, like just constantly overwhelmed by trying to deal with the reality that's existing here and the reality that's existing in her body, which is full of anxiety and, you know, having these flashbacks. And so as a kid, you can see your. Your parent is suffering in, in, you know, some capacity you don't understand. You're going to ask them about it and they're just, oh, yeah, I just have a lot of sadness.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney began to circle the pit in her mind.

[Delaney]

I am sitting at the edge of the pit, my legs hanging into the muck, even as I am unaware of having done so. I have waited and waited for this moment.

[Sarah Marshall]

The closer she got to it, the more she began to see and feel images of men touching her and hurting her. Real physical pain. She dreamed about being taken captive and being beaten and raped. Soon these were not just dreams, but images, sounds, and sensations she experienced while awake.

[Delaney]

And as the stink floats up from its depths, I am immersed in a darkness that often drowns reason.

[Matt]

It kind of became untenable, getting absolutely wracked with violent and horrendous flashbacks, sensations in your body. You're going to want to. To look into it.

[Delaney]

If I had known the pain I would encounter in facing my past, I doubt that I ever would have begun the journey.

[Sarah Marshall]

She picked up meditation again, visualizing an internal sanctuary, a cozy home on a hill surrounded by woods, meadows, a beautiful lake, and an impregnable invisible dome. Sometimes she would see a door and walk through it to explore this inner landscape, encountering kind creatures along the way. They would guide her safely from the idyllic meadows to the swamp where the pit awaited her.

[Delaney]

What I have found is that my interior world is a dark and gruesome place. Yet I have accepted that for whatever reason, that is a part of me. And I am willing and determined to heal this pain. So I continue to search and face whatever my inner self reveals to me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney doesn't write very much about what happened inside her own therapy Sessions over the decade or so that's covered in her manuscript. She saw multiple counselors and psychiatrists, both men and women. She regularly went to group therapy sessions where women shared their experiences of sexual abuse. She even saw a spiritual healer for a time. We can't pinpoint who or what introduced Delany to the idea of recovered memories, but. And that strikes me as very telling. By the time Delaney was ready to work on her mental health, it was, in a word, unavoidable. Despite all that's in question, one thing is always Delaney was in pain. And that pain was real. It was pain that came from the scenarios she unearthed, whether they were memories or waking nightmares or some combination of the two. And it was pain that also came, perhaps, from no longer knowing her own mind. Over the course of about three years, Delaney came to believe that she had experienced severe childhood sexual abuse. And not just from one person, but.

[Delaney]

Many weary of the inner battles. Finally, I am ready. I say, okay, yeah, this happened. I get it. It's real. I was raped and tortured when I was a child. He did this to me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Matt was still young, but he knew something was wrong. His mom's moods and reactions were unpredictable. Some days she wanted them all to sit in silence. Other days were full of yelling.

[Matt]

You never knew what she was going to be like, moment to moment. Basically, you could just say the wrong thing to her and her day would be over. You know, either she'd be in a rage and she needed to go be alone, or she would let it out at you a little bit, or she was brutally sad and she's like, well, I'm not going to be any fun to be around.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And what did. What did you do when things got just too hot to handle?

[Matt]

I spent time alone in my room, like, Lego, Lego, Lego, all day, every day. And, like, there was no. I don't want to say no parenting there, but having a step kid and, you know, watching them grow up and seeing really what a child needs to be able to regulate themselves and to regulate their emotions. I never got any of that.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney herself wrote about the realization that the environment at home was like the one she grew up in and had wanted to escape. But every day was a struggle for her. She could not hide it.

[Delaney]

At home, my husband installs a makeshift punching bag. I tell the boys that I am pounding on the bag because I am angry. Not at them, but about stuff that happened to me when I was a child. I want them to know anger is fine as long as it is not hurting someone, Someone.

[Matt]

But I definitely remember the punching bag hanging in the basement and the piece of hose that she would beat the hell out of that punching bag with. You know, I, I think she still knew full well that, that she was messing us up and there was nothing else she could do. And, and she knew that her very presence was kind of damaging to us because she, she couldn't control herself.

[Delaney]

The grief remains with me as a low lying depression, never really leaving. Yet I am continually called upon to engage in the world with my children. In truth, it is a blessing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Supporters of recovered memory therapy often used the metaphor of memories being like a videotape. And so a repressed memory was like a videotape in a safe. The mind could hide it away from you until you were ready to take it out and understand what really happened. But as far as we can tell today, memory changes with each revisitation. And some of the things we do our best to forget remain all that we can think about, or worse, in a way, we can never really know exactly what happened. But when did knowing exactly what happened to you become a requirement for receiving the care that you need? As you know, today, more and more people are confronting ugly memories of childhood sexual abuse. But did you realize there is a growing network of psychiatrists and psychologists who believe their patients, particularly the female patients, were abused in satanic rituals? As recovered memories spread in the early 90s, more and more questions started to emerge. For many patients, therapy dragged on for years. And the longer this therapy dragged on, the less some of these patients were able to function in their day to day lives. At a certain point, the therapy that was sold as necessary for them to process their past trauma began to seem like the very trauma they were processing.

[Conference Speaker]

Remember the memory. Remember the memory of what they did with it.

[Delaney]

You know what, you know what's coming.

[Sarah Marshall]

Up, coming up is Christmas. Gotta get ready for Satan. Many of the movement's basic toolshipnosis, therapists prescribed tranquilizers and guided imagery seemed all but designed to generate false positives. A therapist who assumed a new patient had been abused could guide that patient toward apparent abuse memories, especially if they were hypnotized or in another state of heightened sleep suggestibility. A therapist who assumed satanic abuse could start asking innocent questions about whether a hypnotized patient saw any alters or babies. And suddenly, maybe the patient did. This happened to many people, including a woman named Patty Burgess. She spent three years in a psychiatric unit until her insurance coverage finally ran out and she owed $3 million. But not before she became convinced that she had been raised as a princess in a satanic cult, had eaten human bodies and developed hundreds of different personalities due to the trauma. Patty also came to believe that she had molested her two young sons and that they were also members of the satanic cult. Soon, her sons were also institutionalized. The staff encouraged them to produce memories of satanic abuse by giving them stickers. Patty spoke about the experience in the 1995 documentary the Search for Satan, produced by PBS Frontline.

[Patty Burgess]

I believed that I was a satanic high priestess, that I was controlling a satanic cult in a nine state region. All reality and fantasy just blended together. I was drugged, I was hypnotized, and I was mentally ill. But I was told that, you know, until I hit bottom, until I dug all of this stuff out, I would never get better.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney continued her journey into the deep pit inside her mind.

[Delaney]

I am thigh deep in a sludge that is putrid with blood and feces and vomit. Darkness pervades the entire landscape.

[Sarah Marshall]

She kept remembering new things, but her memories began to take on an even more sinister tone than before.

[Delaney]

I am surrounded by demons and witches, my abuser clutching my face with his hand, his angry face close to mine, saying, if you ever tell anyone, you will die. You will sleep with the devil.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney writes that she cannot control the images and feelings that bubble up to the surface. She saw images of someone in a mask with devil horns raping her during the day. She felt the sensation of a dagger in her hand and the motion of stabbing downward into flesh. She was inundated with incoherent images of ropes, blood, black robes, people chanting, and death.

[Delaney]

One night, I awake with the words, I am a Satanist ringing solid through my mind. The words are as clear and true as if they were planted on my brain. What does it mean?

[Sarah Marshall]

She wrote of a new memory of holding a baby and killing it with a knife. She wrote of another memory of being in a dimly lit room with many people. They were all dressed in robes. They brought in a body covered in sheets and told her that it was her mother. They were chanting, and then they forced her to stab her mother. They told her that she had killed her mother. Delaney was confused. She knew that her mother was alive, so why did she remember this?

[Delaney]

Now I am walking on the edge of satanic ritual abuse.

[Matt]

Some of the things that she remembers were being abused by groups of individuals.

[Sarah Marshall]

Here again is Delaney's son, Matt, and.

[Matt]

I think, trying to come at this child's memory with an adult's understanding and also, you know, with kind of the popular vernacular at the time. This is evil, you know, from her perspective, pure evil. And what's the word that we have to associate with that? It's. It's satanic.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney believes she needs to accept this truth of ritual abuse so that she can recover.

[Delaney]

Everything inside of me says I was ritually abused.

[Sarah Marshall]

By the time Delaney reached this point, the satanic panic had become an integral part of the recovered memory movement.

[Vanessa]

Thousands of patients are now claiming that they have been victims of sexual abuse and torture carried out by satanic cults.

[Sarah Marshall]

That is from an ABC primetime report aired in 1993. Conferences in fields like counseling and psychiatry were vectors for the spread of satanic ritual abuse narratives, just like they were during the height of the daycare cases in the early 80s. And there were a few very loud and seemingly very authoritative voices to lend credence to the claims. Dr. D.C. hammond, a psychologist and hypnotherapist, was one of them. Hammond and his ilk asserted that tens of thousands of patients were victims of satanic abuse and that anyone from your local doctor to your local mortician was likely involved in the COVID up. Here he is speaking at a professional industry conference in 1992.

[Conference Speaker]

My best guess is that the purpose of it is that they want an army of Manchurian candidates, tens of thousands of mental robots who will do prostitution, do child pornography, smuggle drugs, engage in international arms smuggling, do snuff films, all sorts of very lucrative things, and do their bidding, and eventually the megalomaniacs at the top believe create a satanic order that will rule the world.

[Sarah Marshall]

The satanic panic also made odd bedfellows out of some feminists and many anti feminist fundamentalist Christians. As we saw with the daycare cases, questioning the validity of abuse stories could draw accusations that you didn't really care about children's safety, or worse, that you were a Satanist yourself.

[Narrator/Announcer]

This little girl sees the world much differently than most people. At only three years of age, she has eight distinct people living inside her head. What was it that made her shatter into so many pieces? The answer lies deep in her past, her first years inside a satanic culture.

[Sarah Marshall]

And as the panic began to uncover alleged adult victims, the same could be said about them. How could you be a feminist if you were denying women's abuse claims? It's bad optics. And looking at all this with the distance of history and the benefit of hindsight, it feels like an inevitable escalation. Women had gone for so long with their trauma ignored. Perhaps now they were being implicitly told that their Trauma wasn't enough, that because being sexualized or experiencing physical violence as a girl was such a mundane experience, they needed something more to explain their intense reactions and feelings. In 1994, Delaney began to see a counselor who, she writes, worked with ritual abuse survivors and multiples. She attended a ritual abuse support group where others shared their stories. She writes about a friend who says she was ritually abused and completely dissociated to survive. Still, Delaney had doubts.

[Delaney]

Am I making this up? As the so called false memory people assert. Why would I? What does it benefit me? If so, why can I not imagine going to the Mediterranean?

[Sarah Marshall]

The false memory people Delany's referring to were a faction of psychologists who mainly worked in memory studies and a growing group of former patients and their families. Their assertion was not necessarily that patients were making everything up, but that they had been unduly influenced while in vulnerable states by their therapists. Because now many former patients were discovering that what they thought they remembered in therapy was just wasn't true. Here's what one woman told Primetime in 1993.

[Therapist]

He made you believe that all these pictures going on in your head was reality, was real stuff. Here I am, I'm sick. He's the specialist. He's the one supposed to be saving lives, you know, and I'm gonna argue with him.

[Vanessa]

So the therapist was giving you a reason, an explanation for your problem?

[Therapist]

Yes.

[Vanessa]

And it seemed reasonable to you?

[Therapist]

I was desperate. I was desperate.

[Sarah Marshall]

This woman, along with three others, were suing their former therapist, Michael Moore. And they weren't the only ones. In the 1990s, dozens of patients sued their former therapists for allegedly implanting false memories and for negligence, fraud, and more. Patty Burgess, who we heard about earlier, was one of them. Because many patients whose insurance ran out found that without all that treatment, they began to feel better. Once plaintiffs like Patty Burgess began winning millions of dollars in settlements from insurance companies, insurance companies became a lot more hesitant to cover the hours of hypnosis therapy that practitioners had relied on. But the story isn't over. The trauma these patients sought therapy for never went away. Neither has the abuse. All too often, families are terrifying and unsafe, and the terrifying is made to look normal. And no one is there to help you get away. The question to me is not about the reality of the trauma these patients suffered. The question is whether the treatment made it worse. If one patient involved in recovered memory therapy had experienced what Patty Burgess did, it would still be one too many. Delaney's therapy didn't quite follow this classic pattern. In part, it seems because at a crucial moment, the therapist she was seeing didn't become obsessed with playing detective. Delaney began to question her memories. But when she did, her therapist urged her to drop the question of their validity and to look past that as the ultimate point. He explained that a specific memory might not match to a specific event, but the focus should be on the whole picture. Meaning herself. She is still suffering and in need of help. Delany concludes that it is a waste of energy to try to understand the why or how. Delany's manuscript ends in the year 2000. During the period it describes, she remained plagued by suicidal orgasm, thoughts, massive mood swings, and self loathing. The one constant visible in this manuscript is grief for the childhood she believed she had and for the woman she believes she may never be. But she continued regular therapy, both individual and group. She began exhibiting some of the art she made to represent her inner state of trauma and turmoil. She started working as a teacher's aide. She and her husband split up and then remarried in 2007. Her sons grew up.

[Delaney]

I see the faces of women who care about me looking back at me with compassion, individually, thoughtfully, they respond, saying, yes, I saw your pain. I hear that you are hurting. I care about you. I am perplexed by their acceptance, but I decide to accept that it is real and simply something I do not easily understand. Maybe someday I will.

[Sarah Marshall]

In the end, Delaney seemed to settle on the idea that this is never something she will fully overcome. But that acceptance brings her a kind of peace, a peace she still has to fight for every day.

[Delaney]

I have moved from frantic distress to reluctance and embarrassment, to a wandering, comfortable roadmap where I can begin to build a sense of myself.

[Sarah Marshall]

Maybe this is the heart of Delany's story and of the recovered memory panic. Because the kind of forgetting proposed by satanic ritual abuse stories is basically amnesia. It's a profound loss of the self. More than loss, a theft of the self by villainous operatives. It's telling that at one point, this amnesia was linked to the most evil people we could culturally come up with. Satanists. Because who are you if you cannot remember your past? Especially if, as we seem to be telling women and children at the time, your past has to justify your present struggles. And we have a story that does exactly that. For Delaney's son Matt, finding the courage to grieve has been crucial to his coming to terms with the mother he knew and the childhood she gave him.

[Matt]

With my mom's passing, it was such a complicated relationship that I haven't been able to begin that process yet. But I just like, recently finished reading her book, and now that I've kind of gone through and understand kind of where she was at in her headspace during so much of her life, I can understand who she was as a person so much better. So I can now actually, I think, go into that process and be like, you know, you were really, really doing your best and you were never going to be really successful in this. Like, the house was on fire before you even started. And so how can you kind of expect to have a really good outcome here?

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney had always hoped to get her manuscript published one day. And so in 2013, she returned to edit it and realized something surprising.

[Delaney]

Finally, as I looked more closely, I saw far too many references to ritual and satanic abuse. Either this was a fantasy or a tragedy. I felt lost and confused. Why remember actions and circumstances I cannot imagine happening?

[Sarah Marshall]

This simmered in the back of her mind for a while. Eventually, she talked with a childhood friend from her hometown about it. And this friend brought up something else Delaney had apparently forgotten. The community she grew up in was home to a Masonic Lodge chapter, a group whose members have been known to perform ceremonies in strange clothing, ornate jewelry and esoteric symbols.

[Delaney]

We lived in a small rural community. People knew one another. No children or adults were being killed during these rituals.

[Sarah Marshall]

And that was when it clicked. These memories of chanting, bloody sacrifices, murders.

[Delaney]

An illusion created to scare a child into submission.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delaney came to believe that she wasn't remembering a satanic cult, but simply men. Perhaps these satanic images were, in the end, the result of cultural seepage, of therapeutic suggestion, of the trappings of a hometown civic organization, and of the tropes present in so many other satanic abuse stories. As with Michelle Remembers, the threat was never the Satanists. And for the record, nor was it the Freemasons. Whatever it was that Delany did experience, it would have been at the hands of everyday men who took advantage of their positions in a patriarchal social system system to wield power and fear over women and girls around them.

[Delaney]

Why? Because they could.

[Sarah Marshall]

Delany's manuscript is precious to me partly because it was written by a woman who didn't have to change her story to meet the needs of a publisher of that other kind of satanic panic story. There are many. Throughout Delany's manuscript, she's attempting to glean coherent narratives out of flashes of images and sensations. But she often represents these moments through art, drawings, poems and disconnected fragments. It's very stream of consciousness which has the effect of reminding the reader that memory is malleable and fragile. Delany's story makes me wonder what Michelle remembers, or even Sybil could have been if the professionals these women sought help from hadn't sold them a fantasy. A fantasy that their depression, their trauma and their disaffection was so out of the realm of this world that it could only be explained by supernatural evil. A fantasy that to relive these horrific memories was to release them and be effectively cured. A fantasy in which therapy provided a kind of emotional liposuction rather than the arduous lifelong journey that healing truly is.

[Matt]

From seeing her and knowing her throughout her life. She recovered tremendously. But she was never going to go off and be like, well, that's done. Don't ever need to think about that again. Like it was always going to be something that continued for her in more all panics.

[Sarah Marshall]

There's this weird simultaneous refusal to remember the past while repeating the past like a willful cultural amnesia. That one hypnotherapist's idea that cults were abusing people to create an army of Manchurian candidates is a recycling of an older idea that Soviet and Korean agents were brainwashing people into becoming communists. It's the same fear behind colonial accusations and of demonic possession. And in the current moral panic over trans people's existence, especially over trans kids. It's right there on the nose, the idea that people's identities, their very souls, are at risk from some nebulous other. So what can we do if we remember the past but we're repeating it anyway?

[Matt]

I guess what we should do is build community.

[Sarah Marshall]

That is exactly what Delaney did. She built community. She never stopped making art. She published short writings in a women's literature journal. She supported local art galleries and exhibited her paintings. She volunteered as a literacy tutor for formerly incarcerated people. She was a vital member of support groups for sex abuse survivors in her town. She even helped found an organization that provided aid to residential school survivors for 20 years. Years. One of my biggest questions behind this whole project has been how can the satanic panic make us love humanity more, not less? Delaney is one of the answers. Thank you for listening to the W Know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact Checking by Katherine Barner. Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. Thanks to Jay Cowett for voice coaching. Your voice actor in this episode was Janet Varney. I've been your host. Sarah Marshall. Our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Roshni Nair is our coordinating presentation producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is Manager of Growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is Director of CBC Podcasts. Listen to every episode early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. For early and ad free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium Channel on Apple Podcasts.

[Vanessa]

For more cbc podcasts, go to cbc ca podcasts.