Review at Backward Messages

At Backward Messages, Beth Winegarner (author of The Columbine Effect) reviews Twenty-Two Faces, cautioning readers: "Just when you thought we were safe from the 'Satanic ritual abuse' moral panic," Judy Byington "resurrects the disproven ideas of multiple personality disorder and Satanic ritual abuse ... a syndrome many believe is actually the result of brainwashing by therapists."

According to Byington, “Satanic mind control programming" created 22 personalities in Jenny Hill. "Well," sighs Messages, "at least [Byington]’s right about the 'mind control' part." [1]

Many believe that these false memories are ... exploited by therapists, who claim it will take many years of treatment for people to heal — thus ensuring a steady, paying client base for the therapist.

Messages also notes that Byington is the founder of the "Trauma Research Center" (which appears to exist as a website only).

There, she sells copies of her books and offers for-pay “webinars” on dissociative identity disorder/multiple personality disorder and other topics..... According to a guest post over on She Writes, she has another book on the way, Saints, Sinners and Satan, “a first person account of her own experiences with multiple personality survivors and Occult crime.”

Messages is careful to point out the offense Byington gives actual sexual assault victims and the mentally ill. "We do need outlets for legitimate sufferers of trauma," writes Messages. Byington instead offers up a mix of the exploitative, the prurient, and the ridiculous.

But does Byington think she can really sell this idea in 2012, when most people are pretty skeptical of Satanic-abuse claims — and with good reason? Is society tipping back to a place of superstition and fear?

Read the rest at Backward Messages: "Retired therapist invents 22 ways to make money, and all of them involve 'Satanic ritual abuse"

[1] "Retired therapist invents 22 ways to make money, and all of them involve 'Satanic ritual abuse.'" Backward Messages. 30 July 2012. http://backwardmessages.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/retired-therapist-invents-22-ways-to-make-money-and-all-of-them-involve-satanic-ritual-abuse/

Promotional Interview

In a form interview at BrooWaHa, provided by a unnamed "PR Specialist and Tour Coordinator with Pump Up Your Book Promotion," Judy Byington repeats her claims to work "as a consultant on Occult crime with the Utah Attorney General’s office"--a claim that the Utah AG's office has denied.

Twenty-Two Faces isn't just a book, says Byington.

It is a mission. Each year there are an estimated thousands of children born to parents who worship Satan and thus most likely are forced to endure entire childhoods filled with torture.

Blogcritics Review

In a BlogCritics "review" penned by Tracee Gleichner, PR Specialist at Pump Up Your Book Promotion (whose services Byington has contracted), readers learn that "even at age five Jenny Hill had learned how turning to prayer subconsciously" helped her to utilize "alter personalities" to "compartmentalize abuse at the hands of a master mind-control expert from Nazi Germany." But even with the help of prayer and twenty-two separate personalities,

blank periods resulting from the competing alters taking over her mind and body caused the confused child to lose minutes, hours, days even months of time while they experienced for her, the pain and memory of rapes, tortures and extreme stress of being forced to view a human sacrifice ceremony.

"After Heavenly intervention saved the child from certain death," readers learn, "men in hooded robes no longer contacted Jenny, but were ever-present in her nightmares."

Nor were Satanists the last of her problems: Jenny's father "continued to pursue his salacious bedroom activities"; one of Jenny's personalities suggested she take a different route on her way home, into "an alley where she was gang-raped by a dozen older boys"; after which Jenny fell into prostitution, drugs, and smoking cigarettes.

"Meanwhile," the review continues, the "core personality" of Jenny Hill--that is, the person whom the rest of the world new as Jenny Hill--

completed army medic training, was crowned a beauty queen, graduated from college, prepared for a church mission, worked as a nurse and gave birth to sons, all while Jenny was unaware of her multiple personalities and their takeovers.

With some grammatical confusion, but also free of actual psychological jargon, the review concludes that "Twenty-Two Faces is a journey into the ever-evolving human psyche from which can uncover not only long-term affects of child abuse so severe it results in multiplicity, but new insights into the mind's thinking patterns."