The Seagull | Dangerous Memories Ep 2

The Seagull | Dangerous Memories Ep 2

July 09, 2024 43m S12E2

Fipsi starts to question what really happened in the soft pink room, and how to help her friends who are still on their journeys with Anne Craig. But for one of them it’s already too late, as she makes a series of life altering decisions.


This is episode 2 of 6 of Dangerous Memories. To binge-listen to all 6 episodes ad-free from today, subscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.


If you'd like to get in touch with us about your own experience, contact: dangerousmemories@tortoisemedia.com



To find out more about Tortoise:


Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalists


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Written and reported by Grace Hughes-Hallett & Gary Marshall


Producer: Gary Marshall


Additional reporting and production: Imogen Harper


Additional editing: Claudia Williams


Sound design and original composition: Tom Kinsella


Theme music: Far Gone (Don’t Leave) by Pictish Trail


Podcast artwork: Lola Williams


Commissioning editor: Basia Cummings


Executive producer: Ceri Thomas



Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Full Transcript

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Tortoise. Just a warning before we start.
This episode contains references to child abuse and to sexual assault. I cannot believe it.
I found it. Will you read me the email you sent her? Yes.
This is so surreal. I'm just going to grab my glasses.
I'm a bit on the blinder side of life. I cannot believe it.
There's going to be lots of stuff about Anne too. Are you ready? I'm ready.
I'm with Phipsy in her East London flat. We're sitting at her kitchen table and she's scrolling through old emails on her laptop from the time in her life that she spent with the healer, Anne Craig.
We recorded our conversation over a couple of days in the autumn of 2023. Like everyone I've talked to for this investigation, she had a lot to get off her chest.
It's not really the sort of story you can fit into one afternoon. It was the first time she'd really relived her experience in this way.
She told family and friends, but never in this depth. So once she started, I was part of a holistic therapy cult.
The words began to pour out. And on my second visit, she discovered something she thought she'd lost.
Her name is Anne Craig, and she tells people that she breaks them down and builds them back together. It's an email she wrote, detailing her experience with Anne from start to finish.
On her website, she states eight sessions as the ideal amount, but I saw her twice a month for two years, with no signs on her part of slowing down. The fact is, I got out two years in.
That was that. It's okay for me, sure, I must have some leftover trauma.
I'm sure of that. But what I'm most afraid of is my friends who still go and see her.
And I'm looking for help to help my friends who I love. So Phipsy got out.
But this experience wasn't over for her. Because a question was beginning to form in her head.
What is it that I've just got out of? And how can I get my friends out before they go deeper? It's the same question that's been driving me through these conversations. What was Anne Craig really trying to do? And why was she doing it? But by the time Phippsie was asking this question,

for another young woman, it was already too late.

I'm Grace Hughes-Hallett, and from Tortoise, this is Dangerous Memories, episode two, The Seagull. Let's rewind.

The last time you heard Phippsy in episode one, she was in her fourth session with Anne. She was years away from writing the email that you just heard.
It was during that fourth visit that she let Anne in on her big secret, that she was struggling with her sexuality. And it was then that Anne introduced Phippsie to the idea that there might be something else at play, something sinister, something at the root that explained it all.
She suggested that Phippsie might have been a victim of sexual abuse.

But Phippsie had no memory of being abused.

Anne said she'd repressed it.

It's a terrifying thought, but one that Anne Craig said they could deal with and unpick, if they work together.

So began a series of suggestions that would skew the way that Phipsy looked at the world

and the people closest to her.

And things started to escalate outside of the sessions too.

Along with a couple of the Florence Art School friends

who were also seeing Anne,

Phipsy was about to take another step

out of her own world

and further into Anne's.

One of my friends knew a guy who owned this disused pub that was to be demolished at some

point in the future and replaced with apartments, but he did not want squatters in there, so we were like the squatting anti-squatters. So Phipsy and the other two moved into what would become a sort of Anne Craig client commune.
It was a big, dilapidated, empty pub called The Cow Shed on Labrock Grove in West London. The disused pub itself was on the ground floor.
The girls' rooms were on the grubby floor above and a studio space on the top was where they worked on their art. There was no hot water and unreliable electricity.
Maybe not everyone's cup of tea but Phipsy and her friends were all bohemian artist

types. They found it exciting.
I mean, not only were we all seeing Anne, but we were also painting

and making music and we'd put on exhibitions and gig nights. So how many of you were there?

There were at least three of us. And all three of you were seeing Anne Gray? Yes.

One of the women who lived in the pub would prefer not to be named in this podcast the other was phipsy's friend huey a close friend from florence phipsy remembers how she felt when she found out huey was moving in huey moved in shortly after i moved in and i was really excited because she was one of my best mates and I couldn't wait to have her there. And she had just started seeing Anne, which made me even more excited because this is like great part of the inner circle.
I don't need to hide anything from her. So that was really nice for me at the time.
Huey was a year or two younger than Phippsy, but from a similar world. Posh family, all girls boarding school and with a passion and talent for painting.
Phippsy described Huey to me as a very kind, good friend and the life and soul of the party in Florence. A friend used to say that it looked like a dressing-up box had been sick on me.
This is Huey. I used to wear, you know, crazy tights and boots and tutus and waistcoats on a different waistcoat and, I don't know, different crazy-coloured hair.
Huey had also been told about this incredible healer lady by friends in Florence.

So I left Charles Cecil in December 2009 when I was 22 and I moved back to London and I was this tiny frog spawn in a massive lake and I didn't know who I was. and I for some reason just couldn't be the creative person that I'd been in Florence

and I just felt very lost and I remembered about this you know this woman and I asked my friend if I could have her contact details and I picked up the phone and and just called her. And shortly after After that, Huey began on her journey to discover the root of her problems.
When she moved into the pub in 2010, she'd been seeing Anne Craig for around six months. And Anne seemed pleased that the girls were all living together, all following her guidance under one roof.

All three of us were very devoted to the work.

Phipsy told me that by this point, they were all deep in their work with Anne and would spur each other on.

They could talk freely with each other about what was coming up in their sessions.

We didn't have to mind our P's and Q's, monitor the kind of extreme stuff that we would be sharing with each other about our own sessions with her. We could speak very authentically about our experiences with Anne without worrying about it.
And what kind of things were you talking about? What were the themes and what was the tone? The themes were how all these other people that were living from the head were so poor in spirit and so unenriched and unfulfilled. We had delusions of grandeur in a way.
You know, we were the special ones. We were the ones that didn't need to wear bike helmets because the spirits protected us from accidents.
Did she tell you that? Yep. Like Phipsy and a few others from the art school crowd, Huey was going to regular sessions at Anne's house.
They'd have a cup of chamomile tea, go up to the pink room, sit on the comfy chairs. They'd get down on the floor with rolls of paper and coloured pens to write things with their left hands for Anne to interpret.
Dreams would be analysed for hours and hours on end. But Anne required more from them than just the sessions, and Huey in particular was a very diligent student.
She was devoting huge chunks of every day to Anne. You'd wake up, write your dream down in the early days, and send it to her to analyse.
This is how Huey described a typical day. And then she will have sent emails back with questions.
So the writing work would be informed by her questions. So you'd write her question and then it's automatic writing.
So you'd write with your left hand so quickly that it's just squiggles, but it's your thought process. So squiggle, squiggle, squiggle and all the thoughts pouring out but that's where information would come or answers would come or you'd you'd work something out because you're not thinking you're just free flow writing so that's kind of the work involved a lot of writing like that and then you'd go and burn it and and release everything you'd written about if emotions came up through through the writing, I had to deal with it.
Burning was a core part of Anne's philosophy. The bad energy disappears into the atmosphere.
And I have to wonder if there was another reason. Given everything that's happened, I've wondered whether telling her clients to burn everything is perhaps an indicator of the fact that Anne knew what she was doing was unusual, unorthodox, or that it might even get her in trouble.
And that's not the only thing that makes me think that. I've also been told that Anne encouraged some of her clients to move from their usual email accounts to an encrypted email server called Hushmail.
Why would a therapist, healer, self-development coach, someone in that position tell their clients to do that? In those first few months

how many hours a day were you doing this work for Anne? I'd say when I moved into the cow shed, I stepped it up because I was more inspired by living with my friends who were working with her and wanting to do well and excel. You know, when you're in your room writing, which is quite lonely, it's comforting that you've got someone next door doing something similar so it was quite a yeah it's just like nice felt very normal didn't feel weird in any way so then I probably would do maybe I don't know a couple of hours in the morning and then maybe a couple of hours in the evening.

And then in the day I'd be doing art, painting or seeing friends.

It was all pretty light at the start.

The fact that Huey describes four hours a day of locking herself in her room

and doing her homework for Anne as light is pretty revealing.

During that time, Phipsy and the others were encouraged to follow some guidelines from Anne. I remember she also told me to be very careful about other things that I was reading and she discouraged me fervently from reading any newspapers, listening to the radio, reading any other books, in fact reading anything at all.
Not all of Anne's clients ended up in the pub and not all ended up seeing her long term and not all of them wanted to speak on the podcast but we have spoken with many of them. Some were spooked by Anne's approach and stopped seeing her after a couple of sessions.
Anne's parting message to one of them, you better start wearing your bike helmet. There are lots of parallels in Huey and Phippsie's stories, and there's something they both mentioned to me which I think is important, because it feels like a clue to what Anne's goals or intentions might have been.
It's a book she gave to both of them. It's called Jonathan Livingstone's Seagull.
Phippsey described it as a short novella, a parable. About a seagull that is breaking, breaking, literally flying the nest and breaking free

from its family unit in order to go against the grain because the seagull has always felt different.

So the seagull should live its best life and not act like the seagull that is expected of it.

That was my first segue into being brainwashed, was reading that book

and cutting out all other bits of information.

What did you see in that book? What did it make you feel? It made me feel like Anne could see me, funnily enough, and I've never thought about this before, so it's a really good question, but it made me feel validated in some way because she had seen something. It felt as though she had seen something in me and almost in a bespoke manner offered me this book because she knew that I personally would benefit from it.
And so when I read it, I felt like I was Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It acted a bit like a poetic instruction manual.
Follow these steps and you too will become the seagull. It's become a helpful way of thinking about the journey she wanted Phippsie and Huey to embark on.
But if it's an insight into Anne's methodology, it still doesn't take me to the why. Once you become the seagull, what's next? For Huey in particular, the book had a real effect.
It really stuck with me because being alone and working alone and just dedicating himself to his gift, he reached enlightenment, but he had to give up everyone to do it. I kept thinking about it this idea of you have to leave the flock if you if you're going to make any change within yourself or find your true purpose you have to leave the flock and Anne also talked about she'd always say we come into the world alone and we leave the world alone and no one wants to see it no one wants to accept it but we're always alone and I remember once lying on the floor in my flat and I just felt I think I was crying and I was just terrified about this idea that I was truly alone and I had to accept it and I had to leave everyone and I definitely didn't know what was coming.
It's hard to wrap your head around. Huey was taking it to heart.
She was preparing to leave the flock. Why would she follow this hugely upsetting piece of advice without question? It's something that Huey's often brought up in our conversations.
She really worries that people will listen to this and think to themselves, oh, well, this is just a bunch of silly posh girls falling into a silly trap. But Huey thinks there's a significant detail from her own life that it's important to share, which she believes is what made her so vulnerable to Anne from the start.
When Huey was in her early 20s, living in Florence, she was sexually assaulted, an experience that, understandably, really affected her. Anne explained to her that that would not have happened to her if she had not been assaulted as a child.
And Huey says that Anne focused on this event, questioning why this had happened to Huey, and if it meant there was something more sinister to uncover about her childhood. It had a profound effect on Huey to hear that from Anne.
And remember, she was spending hours and hours with this woman, over weeks, months and years. She was a frog in boiling water.
The temperature was rising, but so slowly that she didn't notice. Whatever her ultimate objective, Anne Craig succeeded in the first crucial step.
Whilst drumming in this mantra of isolation and independence, she was simultaneously training them to be entirely dependent on and answerable to her. Hi, who here loves when their nails are perfectly done? Me, I'm Sarah Gibson Tuttle, and I started Olive in June because let's be real, we all deserve to have gorgeous nails, but who wants to spend a fortune or half their day at the salon? And that's why I created the Manny System, so you can have that salon-perfect manicure right at home.
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Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, LLC, member SIPC Huey and Phippsie's paths diverged.

Despite Phippsie opening up to Anne in her fourth session,

months later she was no closer to understanding herself or to getting an answer to her burning question, am I gay? Have you ever heard the Philip Larkin poem that begins, they fuck you up your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do. It's really not uncommon for therapists or counsellors to be interested in a client's childhood, or in their early relationships with their parents.
But Anne seemed to Phippsie to be singularly focused on that. In all the hours of sessions, whenever she steered the conversation to her sexuality, Anne redirected it back to Phippsie's parents.
Anne's entry point was always through my parents. Over time, Phippsie's thinking shifted.
Through the work with Anne, an altered version of Phippsie's childhood was being created. Always through destroying the happy relationship that I had with them and she would find a way to poison that and I was so vulnerable I just took it.
It was her family that was the problem. They were the blockage preventing her from going on her journey to healing.
If you remember, I mentioned that Anne's big belief system was centered around people who are from the heart and people who are from the head. Heart equals good, head equals bad.
Suddenly, automatically, almost everyone I know is from the head and therefore automatically a kind of enemy.

Us versus them, heart versus head, good versus bad. So it was very easy in that sense.
Once she'd

blanketed this hue over everything in my world and life and everyone's world and lives, for me to

find it selfish when my friends called me,

to find it outrageous if my parents said

they wanted to see me

because they hadn't seen me for three months,

to find it despicable that the same friend

has called me three times in a row.

How dare they?

They are jutting and jabbing into my life.

They are pecking away at my,

the work and the journey that I'm on,

And then, we'll see you next time. dare they they are jutting and jabbing into my life they are picking away at my the work and the journey that i'm on that i'm trying to do they are interrupting my healing and they're all from the head phipsy pulled away from her parents her siblings and her friends she ignored all of their calls as she stopped answering their messages.
And over time, the suggestions became darker, more troubling and harder to ignore. Anne raised the possibility over and over again that Phipsy's parents had sexually abused her when she was a child.
There were periods where I worried that I was a victim and that I just hadn't seen it yet. Again with the two sides of my mind.
One side telling me what if it's true, what if it's true, what if it's true and the other side telling me no it's not. How did you land on being sure that it wasn't true? Gut instinct, knowledge of myself, the fact that I'd never once questioned that before meeting her, and the fact that I'd lived a very happy life up until my grappling with my sexuality.
Everything had been great. I'd had a lovely childhood.
You know, with really unconditionally loving parents, that's the sad thing, is that she totally managed to change the way i saw that for a while it's just interesting that others fell into that trap and you didn't i think my gayness saved me i was starting to get really really angry about the fact that every time i brought up my original purpose for going to see her, she would bat it out of the court and just continue to talk about my family, my mother, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandmother, my great-great, this, that, and the other, and it really started to piss me off. How would you bring it up? I would, in a session, say something like, Anne, you know, this thing, I'm still worrying about being gay.
And then she would say, Fipsy, it's because we still haven't done the work about your mother. We still haven't finished the work on your father.
We still haven't finished this, that or the other. She would just deflect, deflect, deflect.
And so something in me was like, excuse me, we're still here and you just keep ignoring me. What are you going to do about it? So that little inner bit of me, the poor tiny gay bit that was just knocking on the door of my consciousness and was just being fervently ignored, was starting to get pissed off.
Six months into her time at the cow shed pub, Phipsy was offered a job. Someone wanted her to travel to Austria and paint.
A big commission. It was a big, big canvas.
And I was asked to depict a scene around the dinner table with three brothers who were all adults. So I remember being really nervous to tell Anne that I would be relocating to Vienna for three months.
something in my instinct told me that that would anger her. Phipsy's instinct was right.
When she told Anne about this big opportunity, the news did not go down well. She was really annoyed with me.
She fought against that trip, big time. Why did she fight against the trip? To Anne's mind, me going away for three months was a huge disservice to the work we were doing and a huge disservice to her personally because what it would mean for her is that she would have to work triply hard to tap into my energy and that was selfish of me.
Even though I was still very devoted to her, I was starting to get annoyed. And I eventually told her, look, I have to go to Vienna.
Fipsy bought her ticket and got on the plane, leaving Anne behind in London. It was like the cutting of the umbilical cord, because just by virtue of that distance, I didn't speak to her every day.
Without Anne, Fipssy was free to think. And then one day I woke up and I had simply had enough.
Enough was enough. I was done.
And I just thought, right, I've got to figure this out once and for all. The truth is in me and nobody else, which is important because remember, I thought she had the truth.
She hadn't helped me. So I did just that.
I sat in the bath. I made a bath and I sat in it.
I have to admit, I rolled a gigantic joint and I sat there for five hours, simply visualizing my exoskeleton being broken open. My skin, let's say, just my outside self just opening up and for the truth of my sexuality to make itself known to me.
And then I woke up the next morning and it was just knowledge and that was it. I woke up and just realised I'm gay.
Guess who the first person was that I told? Anne fucking Craig. Phipsy called Anne almost immediately.
She wanted to tell her more than anyone else that she'd finally arrived at her answer.

And thus began the rest of my life.

Suddenly I was all in love with life again.

And literally, exactly in this period, I started souring against Anne.

Anne didn't seem excited for her.

With this new knowledge, Phipsy's dependence on Anne had been broken. They had an argument in a session when Phipsy challenged Anne over her interpretation of a dream.
Phipsy stopped going to Anne after that and stopped calling her as well. And then a little while later, Anne called Phipsy to say that she thought they should stop seeing each other.

That was it. It was over.

In the months after her breakup with Anne, once the initial wave of relief had passed, Phipsy started to really think about what she'd just been through. She read a lot.
And she started comparing her experience to similar testimonies she found online. And the more she read, the more she began to think that she hadn't just escaped a rogue healer, but maybe she had been brainwashed into something more sinister.
And a year later, she was sitting at her laptop, writing that email. Her name is Anne Craig, and she tells people that she breaks them down and builds them back together.
To an expert in cults. It's okay for me, sure, I must have some leftover trauma, I am sure of that.
But what I am most afraid of is my friends who still go and see her. And I am looking for help, to help my friends friends who I love I need to coax them into a

place of trust but somehow help them understand that they are victims of a sick disturbing cult masquerading as a compassionate kind and most of all knowledgeable woman who has contact with the spirit world and at the end of the day always knows best what can I do I've wondered if Phipsy's right.

Was she sucked into a cult?

Maybe not a cult like the ones that might come to mind. The Moonies or Jonestown with hundreds of followers.
But then, they're not all like that. Sometimes they exist on a smaller scale, hidden from view.
What makes them similar and cultish is how the leader exerts their control. So let's say Anne was using cult tactics.
What was it all about? Was it sex? If it had been a male therapist, that probably would have been my first thought, but there's no evidence so far to suggest that. Was it money? She was charging the women around £90 a session, which was a pretty standard London rate for the time.
Was it power? Perhaps. But to what end? The only person who knows the answers to these questions is Anne.

And we do want to get in touch with her.

But some of her former clients are wary about Anne.

They've been nervous that she might try and talk them out of appearing on this podcast.

Which is why, for now,

Huey is the best way to get closer to the truth.

Because if Phipsy managed to escape Anne's web,

Huey became completely entangled in it.

And in doing so,

discovered more about Anne Craig

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Me and one of my producers went to meet Huey's mum, Sarah,

and her stepdad, Henry.

Sarah is the friend of my dad

who told him about this story

four years ago,

where it all started for me.

Henry picked us up from the local station and drove us to his and Sarah's home. They live in an enormous 16th century manor house.
To get to it, you drive through big gates, past the gatehouse, and through the grounds down a long drive. The house itself looks out over manicured lawns and topiary, stretching all the way down to a sparkling river below.
Sarah came out to greet me and producer Immy on the front lawn when we arrived. Wow, this is amazing.
This is amazing. Amazing.
How are you? How are you feeling? A bit vulnerable. Yeah.
It was so weird. Hi, Immy.
Hi, Sarah. It's so funny.
It's what I said so confidently to you you know, I can talk about getting her back, you know, like it's my favourite subject, you know, and I hadn't gone back until last night. And then I started sort of crying, and I thought, oh, I can't deal with this tonight, so I've just been trying to go over it this morning.
It's interesting. You're allowed to cry.
It's OK. I actually meant to buy some tissues.
Before we'd even put our bags down, she was offering us plates of homemade cheese biscuits. The biscuits were followed by a lunch that she and her husband Henry had made for us.
Cold pea soup, pheasant stew, wine and pavlova. All laid out beautifully at a large garden table on the terrace.
And then this table. So this fell down.
Help yourself, hear me? Oh, thanks. I've got this very good guy who does some forestry around here, and he's got this sort of thing.
Sarah, her home, her hospitality, exuded warmth and ease of spirit. But as we were setting up our microphones,

the weight of this experience for her was clear.

And actually, one other.

Go on.

What am I going to call her?

Because I hate using her name.

But if I say that woman, that's going to come across really badly.

I always refer to her as AC, but then that doesn't work.

You don't like to say her name?

Well, I'll that doesn't work. You don't like to say her name.
Well, I mean, do you think it's better if I do? Yes, probably, if you can. Yeah, all right.
Why don't you like to say it? Well, because it makes her human, you know. She's got a name.
Yeah's inhuman. When Hughie first told Sarah about Anne, Sarah felt optimistic.
And the main thing I remember her saying was, Mum, she only takes the very special ones. And at the time I thought, well, obviously Hughie's very special, so obviously she'd accept Hughie.
Sarah had benefited from practising yoga over the years and she thought, maybe this is a similar kind of thing. We all need a bit of help.
And, you know, yoga was great for me and this lady maybe will be great for Hughie. And her friends were going.
It was a few months in though when Sarah's optimism turned to something else. Huey had told her that she was putting on an art exhibition at the Cow Shed pub and invited her along.
Huey's style was true to life seated portraits in oil. Sarah was really excited to see her latest work.
And there was this pile of dead bodies, and so the subjects were very sinister and very gruesome. Of Huey's paintings? Huey's paintings, you know, weren't lovely portraits anymore.
I mean, there was this pile of dead bodies. For a mother, it left a worrying mark, signalled a change, a window into what was going on with her daughter.
There were two other girls in the cow shed who their mothers were definitely worried about them. And I think one of the girls may have cut off contact with her mother altogether, I think.
So there was definitely a worry, you know, that something really odd was going on. Something odd was going on.
Huey was becoming more engrossed in her work with Anne, and closer to the root. Was there a turning point for you when things stopped being such a positive experience? Yeah, which I guess is quite a few months on.
And I think in a session it came up that maybe something had happened with a family member. And Anne asked me one evening to ask in my dream, you know, what happened.

So that's what I did.

And I had this dream that was cryptic to me, didn't make sense.

I was sitting, the dream was I was sitting in a flying car and flying above the sky and I was holding a teddy bear.

And she called me and she was like, Huey, I know exactly what's happened to come for the come for the session so I went and did the usual you know had a cup of tea went upstairs sat on the floor chose a color um and started asking so she'd ask what happened to you what did person do? And I'd get nothing. I'd maybe draw things or get a word, a cryptic word.
And the sessions, my sessions were quite long. It was sort of like for like three or four hours.
And so I was pretty exhausted. And she said, look, I know what happened.
Okay, I'll tell you what happened. Your dream and and you holding the teddy bear told me that this person already raped you and that was the first time where anything around sexual abuse had come up Huey left the session feeling strange She fell asleep on the bus home and when she woke up, her muscles and bones were aching and I think at the time it was like oh maybe this is this must be real because I'm feeling so much from it it's hard to remember the details isn't it but I was I was just felt very frightened about going home I don't know if I should go I'm quite scared um so a lot of mistrust was coming she like, you need to go back for Christmas with your family and this will be the last time that you ever have Christmas with them again.
So Huey did as instructed. Christmases are a big deal in Sarah and Huey's family.
There's lots of drinking and dancing and Huey was usually at the centre of it.

But this time she stayed quiet.

She observed her family from the sidelines,

looked for clues to understand who these people really were

and what they were hiding.

And then came back from Christmas and that was sort of when I really started to cut them off. And that's when things start to get more unusual, I suppose.
I found myself feeling very attached to her and very in need of her because she has these answers that I can't access any other way other than through her. I don't know what was going on in my brain but I guess the need to prove that I could be strong meant that I just went along and expelled everyone from my life and around this time a couple of Ann's clients who had been friends of mine stopped working with her.
I don't know if it was a really big rejection for Anne, but Anne really sort of ramped up her focus on me, I felt. And I started seeing her once a week and she started saying, oh, I don't need those women to do this work.
I don't need them to get to the light.

After Christmas, Sarah received a letter from Huey.

In it, Huey said she needed time out from Sarah

and wouldn't be seeing her for a while.

Sarah was panicking now.

So, despite Huey having asked for space,

Sarah tried calling her to ask her directly what was going on. Was there something she didn't know? And as soon as Huey heard my voice, she put the telephone down.
And I thought, oh, maybe it was a mistake. So I called from the landline, different number.
Huey picks it up. Here's my voice.
Puts the telephone down. And at this point, I go into complete panic.
And I think I'm pretty sure I just come out of the shower. And I have no idea what sort of undress I was in, but I know I had streaming wet hair.
And I just ran out of our flat. At the time, Sarah was staying in a flat she owns in London.
She ran out the door to where she knew Hughie was living nearby. The door opened and out came Hughie and I can see it like yesterday.
She saw me, she looked very surprised to see me. Her eyes sort of, you know, widened and looked amazed, surprised.
And then they glazed over and they just literally glazed over like a zombie. And she walked down the steps, got onto her bicycle and I said, Huey, Huey, don't cut me out of your life.
Don't cut me out of your life. And she bicycled away and that was the last time I saw her in six years.
Coming up on Dangerous Memories. And I just broke down on her floor and was like, please help me.
Whatever you do, when you go in there, do not say my name. Do not say that you're working.

Somebody, some kind person,

gave me the number of a private detective.

And then she told me all the kind of things

that they'd found out about Anne,

and I don't know, just slowly, everything was falling into place.

And I was like, that's my mother.

Why is my mother outside Anne's house? In the past, Anne Craig has issued categorical denials of any wrongdoing. She has denied responsibility for mentally abusing or psychologically manipulating clients.
She has said she is the victim of a campaign of harassment. If you're looking to speak to a reputable therapist or know someone who is, you can search the Therapist Directory compiled by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy or BACP.
Only registered members accredited by the Professional Standards Authority are listed, which ensures they meet high professional and ethical standards and are fully trained and qualified. Just go to bacp.co.uk If you'd like to get in touch with us about your own experience, you can send us an email.
It's dangerousmemories at tortoisemedia.com. Thank you for listening to Dangerous Memories.
If you're enjoying this podcast, you can listen to all episodes today by subscribing to Tortoise Plus on Apple Podcasts or by downloading the Tortoise app. And you can listen to our previous investigations

right here on Tortoise Investigates.

Or to hear more podcasts from our award-winning newsroom,

search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts.

Dangerous Memories was written and reported

by me, Grace Hughes-Hallett, and by Gary Marshall.

The producer is Gary Marshall. Additional reporting and production from Imogen Harper.
Additional editing from Claudia Williams. Fact-checking was by Xavier Greenwood.
Sound design and original composition from Tom Kinsella. The theme music is Far Gone, Don't Leave by Pictish Trail.

Podcast artwork by Lola Williams.

The commissioning editor was Basher Cummings.

The executive producer was Kerry Thomas.

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