SAPPING AND ZAPPING
Ralph B. Allison, M.D. 

	The practice of psychotherapy has never been considered to be a
particularly hazardous profession.  After all, what can happen
while sitting in an easy chair discussing  problems with a
patient?  But, in working with patients afflicted with multiple
personality disorder (MPD), I eventually became aware that such
a presumption is unwarranted.  Aside from the physical wear and
tear resulting from the long hours spent taking care of the
crises that these patients always found themselves in and the
professional distance they created between me and my colleagues
I discovered that they, themselves, seemed quite capable of
using psychic abilities to harm other living human beings.
Usually the therapist was exempted from this harm, as he/she was
needed  and valued as a helper.  But, as happens in all long
term psychotherapy, the relationship can develop into one of
disappointment, anger and intense hatred of the therapist when
all does not go well in the view of the multiple.  At those
times, the therapist is just as likely to be a victim of these
forces the MPD patients call sapping and zapping as have others
in the past.

	Sapping means the extraction of physical energy from another
person by the patient. It is a physical process, not an
emotional one. The sapper is an extremely self-centered person
who feels too weak to exist by herself alone, so she proceeds
to suck energy from those around her.  (The female pronoun will
be used for patients, since 85% of my patients were female.
This is not to say that men cannot accomplish the same actions.)

	Sapping was first used in print by Karagulla (1967) in
reporting her research with healthy women with psychic
abilities. A psychic woman claimed to be able to see the energy
transfer from the victim to the sapper while they were at a
social event together.  The point of entry could be from the
eyes (by staring), the mouth (by  talking), by the hand (by
touching) or  via the solar plexus.

	I believe this happened to me with by second MPD patient, a
twenty-two year old woman I shall call Gail. Once, in my office,
she told  me,  "Dr. Allison, you are so big and strong.  I wish
I could have some of your energy."  Feeling gallant, I replied, 
"If I knew how  to give you some, I'd be glad to do so."  Little
did I know that such would eventually happen.

	One Saturday night, I was at a dinner party when Gail called on
the phone in a panic.  Since she had been hospitalized several
times for self-destructive acts, and, since she never   called 
unless almost out of control, I left the party and drove to her
apartment. She greeted me  with outstretched arms, grabbing my
hands with hers. Then I saw that both her forearms were bloody
with many longitudinal slash wounds. In the bathroom I found the
bloody pocket knife  Laura, her persecutor alter-personality,
had used, after Gail had blacked out after calling me. I 
wrapped her arms with towels and drove her to the hospital
emergency room where I found a surgeon to sew her many  wounds.
 	To help the surgeon, I induced hypnoanalgesia of her arms to
avoid multiple injections of local anesthetic. To keep her arms
in place, I sat by the operating table during the ninety minute
procedure and kept my fingertips on the arm that was being
sutured at the time. All that time, I felt fine. The surgery
went well. The patient was well behaved and nothing went wrong.

	After bandages were applied, I drove her to the party where
her boyfriend was. He was the one she had been arguing with on
the phone prior to her calling me.  She felt rejected since he
did not want her to come to that party. When I let her out of
the car, I had to wait while she literally seduced him in the
driveway to let her stay with his. When he gave in, I drove back
to my party, feeling rather disgusted with her behavior. When I
returned, my wife handed me a plate of food.  I sat down to
eat but could barely lift the fork to my mouth.  Emotionally, I
felt normal, but I had barely enough energy to breathe.  My
wife told me I looked tired and suggested we go home
immediately. I must have looked terrible to her as this was a
very special annual party for her, and she always liked to stay
to the end.  The next day being Sunday, I rested and
recuperated.  Monday, I was back at work, feeling normal again.

	In my opinion, Gail started sapping me the moment she grabbed
my hands at the door of her apartment. I continued to touch
one of her hands on the operating table, which continued the
process. Little did I know that her desire to take some of  my
energy could be actualized.

	Gail was only the first multiple to sap me, not the only one. 
Since then I have learned that the most obvious sign that I
have been sapped is that my handwriting becomes very small, as
I cannot move my fingers as well while making notes. When that
happens, it is time to quit working, no matter what might be
the expectations of others.

	The other intrapsychic process these patients may use is called
zapping.  This word comes from the comic book hero drawn with
his index finger pointing at the villain, while a lightning
bolt shoots from his finger. ZAP is written in bold print on
the background. Zapping is the opposite of sapping, in
direction, and may be used in conjunction with sapping. It is the
injection of a psychic force into the victim, which can cause as
much harm to the mental apparatus as any bullet or arrow can to
the physical apparatus.

	There are three types of zapping: emotional, ideational, and
physical. I have reason to believe that I have been the victim
of all three at one time or another.  

	Emotional zapping is the injection of unwanted emotions into
another person.  Anger is the most common, leading the victim
to feel hostile, when they have no appropriate reason to be so
at the time, in regard to the people around them. The actual
source of the anger is the zapper who is angry at the zappee,
at least on an unconscious basis. Lust would be another emotion
that would be used when seduction is the motive.

	Ideational zapping is the injection of a foreign belief system
or thought pattern into another.  These patients call it
"mindfucking."  This can be a severe problem when the therapist
tries to be "open-minded." As one very conservative mentor once
told a young psychiatrist,  "When you are open-minded, people
will throw garbage in there."  The conflict is that, if the
therapist is not accepting and open-minded, therapeutic progress
is impossible.  But if the therapist does not have a stable
belief system, the therapist has nothing to use to match against
the patient's twisted view of the world.

	Physical zapping is the causation of actual physical injury to
another person by psychic means.  This would mean anything from
severe headaches to broken bones to death. The ultimate would be
what is seen in voodoo death.

	One  experience I had with emotional zapping involved Liz, a
multiple in a halfway house where only one staff member accepted
her multiplicity.  The other staff members told her she was
playacting and could stop anytime she wanted to.  This stirred
up great anger in her,  Barbara, her angry personality.  She
knew that, if she didn't get rid of Barbara, she might lose 
control and be expelled from the house. On a Saturday afternoon,
she called me and asked me to come over.  With the supportive
staff member present, using a ritual I had developed to get  rid
of unwanted anger, she and I tried to have her expel Barbara,
and we thought we had succeeded.  However, on Sunday, when the
unaccepting crew came on duty, the anger rose in  her, and she
recognized that Barbara was still there. She called me at six
p.m., so I came out to try to complete the project.  I felt
fine leaving the halfway house both times. But when I arrived
home the second time, I started folding the family laundry, my
usual weekly chore.   My wife asked me politely if I wanted
her to help.  I blew up at her in an angry rage, telling her
that I could fold clothes perfectly well and didn't need her
implying that I was incompetent.  She quietly took the tirade
and then asked, "Why are you acting like this? You haven't been
this way all week."  That struck home, since I knew I was being
irrational, but I couldn't help myself.  I thought, "What is
different? Oh, yes. I went to the halfway house today and
yesterday to get rid of an angry personality.  She might have
dumped some of her anger on me, and I brought it home. If that
is so, I had better do what I teach the multiples to do with
their excess anger."

	That evening when I went to bed, I lay there with my fingers
outstretched and thought and visualized about anger flowing out
of my body through my fingers into the universe.  I kept it up
until I felt I had discharged all the anger that Barbara might
have dumped on me.

	A  few days later, I asked another entity inside Liz, one that
knew everything, what had  really happened. She told me that,
the first time I tried to get rid of Barbara, it was obviously  
unsuccessful.  Barbara was furious with me and zapped  me with
anger as I was leaving the room.  I carried it home, but it did
not have an effect until after the second visit. Since I
was called out a second time the same weekend,  I naturally
resented it, but I kept my anger repressed while I performed my
professional role. When that role was completed and returned 
home, my wife's benign question triggered an outpouring of anger
from the day before.

	Ideational zapping is usually mixed with verbal persuasion,
when belief systems are involved.  In the case of female
multiples, who have histrionic personality disorders 
(previously known as hysteria), the message they usually wish to
implant in another, usually a male, is that the patient is a
greatly attractive sexy female who is more than willing to fall
into the man's arms. One physically unattractive female
multiple patient of  mine had created an evil monster of a
personality that sent such seductive messages for the purpose of
controlling men. While working on a project with two other
professional men and me, she found the two associates of mine
making passes at her, even though she didn't consciously want
them to do so. In both cases, she found herself having sex with
them, and afterwards, neither man could tell her why he had done
so.  She reported this to me, but I didn't dare ask my
associates if her stories were true, so I cannot vouch for the
accuracy of her report. But I did hear both sides of the story
when her seductive thoughts involved another patient of mine, a
young ex-convict who became her husband of three months.  In
that case, he zapped her first for the same reason, she
recognized the process, and succumbed to it.

	With physical zapping, one person can cause physical damage to
the body of the person they hate.  The unwitting seductress
mentioned above told of an episode in grade school when  she had
been repeatedly pestered by a boy on the playground at school. 
She complained to the adults in charge, but none were able to
make him stop his harassment.  One night in desperation, she
visualized him in his bed asleep.  She visualized his leg broken
in several places as her punishment of him. The next day he did
not come to school.  His friends told her he woke up with his
leg broken in several places, and everyone assumed he must have
fallen out of bed  in the middle of the night. She felt very
guilty about it, having no doubts she was responsible.  Most
therapists would say that that was just wishful thinking and
would reassure her that she really could have had nothing to do
with his injury.  But how could they know for sure? My  most
extreme exposure to physical zapping came one evening at the
hospital when, with a nurse, I tried to help a multiple named 
Helen eject her angriest personality, a major error in technique
I now  realize. We spent two hours making an unsuccessful
attempt to help this woman.  Afterwards, the nurse had a severe
headache, and I was sapped of energy, as evidenced by my
cramped handwriting when trying to write progress notes. I
barely had the strength to drive home.  After going to bed, I
felt nauseous and headed for the bathroom.  There I
suddenly expelled blood from both ends of my gastrointestinal 
tract. I fell to the floor, unable to move, and my wife called
our family doctor.  She drove me to the hospital where I spent 
the next eleven days recuperating from a bleeding duodenal
ulcer. Before that, I had been expending my energies in too
many directions, so I was a prime candidate for trouble. But
what I had that night was an acute stress ulcer.

	When I questioned this patient later, I was told that the
entity I had thought was an alter-personality claimed to be the
spirit of a witch who had died in England in 1890.  She claimed
to be possessing my patient, and I had angered her, so she had
struck back at me, using my vulnerable site, my duodenum. 
Later, this patient's landlady called me to report the patient
was advertising herself as a witch, which greatly alarmed the
landlady. The patient's boyfriend conducted an exorcism of an
alter-personality, not the spirit, and delivered the tape 
recording to me. Shortly thereafter, the boyfriend became a
religious fanatic and called me and a priest friend of mine,
trying to convert us to his new found religion. He then returned
to his hometown in Florida where he continued to proselytize. 
Unfortunately, one of  his subjects objected too vigorously,
and the boyfriend beat the man to death.  The last I heard, he
was on trial for murder. Such can be the fate of those who get
too close to the dangerous multiple.

	Why would patients with multiple personality disorder want to
do such mental harm to anyone? When they were willing to be open
with me, they told me that they considered themselves as having
"powerful minds."  That phrase meant nothing to me for a while.
Then I realized that most of the multiples had been physically,
sexually, and emotionally abused as children by adults, usually 
parents, who were physically powerful persons, in contrast to the 
child victim. They therefore saw themselves as weak and powerless 
in the physical sense.  To cope with their miserable situations, 
they ran away inside their minds, since they could not run away 
physically.  Therefore, their minds became their most powerful 
part of the whole person.

	If a man with a powerful set of muscles dislikes you, he can
break every bone in your body.  Having a powerful body means
there is potential energy available. If a person with a powerful
mind dislikes you, he or she can damage your emotional
stability and the soundness of your thinking processes.  Such
is the use of sapping and zapping.

REFERENCE CITED

Karagulla, S. 1967  Breakthrough  to Creativity,  Santa  Monica,
CA: DeVorss.

Printed in AASC Newsletter (of the Association for the
Anthropological Study of Consciousness, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1986, p.
1-2, 8-10