During my undergraduate work, a professor discussed incest briefly, and then with some disdain, assured us that we would probably never see such a thing, since it only occurred in the "Hills of Kentucky." I believed him. The idea of such a horrible thing happening to another human being never crossed my mind again for many years. During my masters program, I again received no information about sexual abuse, or for that matter, any other abuse. I did not learn about addictions. I learned about research, and how to do it. That is an over-simplification of my experience, but suffice it to say, it did not prepare me for what I was to learn in the field of social work as I came to know it.

I was assigned an internship as a unit social worker in a freestanding psychiatric hospital. Thus began my real education. In October of that year, I experienced a poignant moment, branded in my mind. One of the nurses on the unit was commenting on the unusually high number of sexual abuse cases we had on the unit, when another nurse commented, "Oh, didn't you know this is borderline season?" I was shocked to hear such a statement, but it was a long time before I understood the full implications of that remark.

Following my internship, I was then employed as the unit social worker at this hospital. It was here that I began to hear bizarre stories of satanic ritual abuse from several of the patients. We also saw several cases of self-mutilation, something I sincerely did not know ever happened, much less in such massive numbers. Cutting, burning, using acid to burn the skin, even one patient who purposely put a screw in her leg and let it get infected. This was all new to me. I didn't know what to make of the ritual abuse stories; they were extremely serious in nature, and beyond my ability to believe. I had never heard of such a thing, and yet, hearing the same type of thing over and over from so many different patients, confused me. Something was most certainly not right, but I still had no idea what was really going on.