That amazing healer lady | Dangerous Memories Ep 1

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Speaker 2 Tortoise

Speaker 6 Just a warning before we start. This episode contains references to child abuse and to sexual assault.

Speaker 6 How are you feeling? I feel good.

Speaker 7 Shall we start? I'm happy to tell my story. Yeah, let's go for it.
Okay.

Speaker 6 I would love to start with Florence.

Speaker 7 Florence. That's a great place to start.

Speaker 5 Florence was the beginning, I think.

Speaker 6 Florence. Problems that we're talking about really began in Florence.
Were you when you first heard about her?

Speaker 7 So I was living in Florence.

Speaker 6 This story starts in Florence, in Italy. But I first heard it a bit closer to home.
I was staying with my mum and dad over the Christmas holidays in the countryside about four years ago now.

Speaker 6 My dad had just been for lunch nearby with friends and one of these friends told him a story about her daughter.

Speaker 6 This friend of my dad's, Sarah her name is, thought I might want to hear about it because she knows that I make documentaries and she wanted to talk to me about telling her story.

Speaker 6 She wasn't sure her daughter was ready yet, but she, Sarah, needed to tell someone, to warn someone, about this extraordinary experience that she told me her daughter had only just emerged from, or escaped from.

Speaker 6 How she'd finally returned home after years, Sarah told me, spent in the clutches of a woman who described herself as a teacher of personal development.

Speaker 6 In the end, it would take about four years before the women you're about to hear from were ready to tell me what they said happened to them.

Speaker 6 Sarah's daughter is just one of them.

Speaker 6 What they told me is a story about a woman with an interest in a very specific group of people. An extended circle of friends in their early 20s who were all in a word posh.

Speaker 6 They'd been to boarding schools, they had royal connections, they had inherited wealth.

Speaker 6 This woman led them to believe astonishing things about their families and about the social circle that they grew up in.

Speaker 6 Things that would destroy years of these young women's lives and the lives of their families too. You know, very severe abuse.
She's destroyed people's lives.

Speaker 6 You know, it was so shocking what she'd been put through. I was calling Anne when to eat, when to sleep, when to start writing, when to stop writing.
I was like a really fragile child.

Speaker 7 If I can stop anyone from seeing that woman and stop a family from being broken, then

Speaker 7 I can sleep better at night.

Speaker 6 For months now, I've been investigating what these women told me. interrogating their testimonies about the journey they went on with a woman called Anne Craig,

Speaker 6 a woman who described herself as a personal development coach.

Speaker 6 But from what I've been told by her clients, it appears she was offering something different to that. Something much bigger.
The promise of healing.

Speaker 6 It's something more and more of us are seeking these days. Often through therapy.
Talking therapy, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy.

Speaker 6 Google searches for the word therapist have doubled in the past decade. But if you want to be healed, you have to take a leap of faith in the healer.

Speaker 6 You've got to enter into a relationship with them and open up in ways you might not do even with your closest friends and family.

Speaker 6 To trust this person with your desires, with your secrets, your greatest fears.

Speaker 6 That's the deal. You trust them to help guide you through the labyrinth of your own mind and experiences.
And in the end, you hope you might emerge changed for the better.

Speaker 6 But with what Sarah was telling me about her daughter, the relationship between client and healer sounded very, very different to the one that I've just described.

Speaker 6 These young women had shunned their families, disappeared for years and became convinced that they weren't who they thought they were.

Speaker 6 They began to believe the very worst about the people closest to them. All apparently because of one woman.
I'm Grace Hughes Hallett, and from Tortoise, this is Dangerous Memories.

Speaker 6 A story that started with young women who wanted to be healed and became about the healer

Speaker 6 and what we risk when we let someone else into our mind and into our memory.

Speaker 6 Episode 1: That Amazing Healer Lady.

Speaker 6 Hi, Fipsy.

Speaker 6 This is Fipsy.

Speaker 6 She's an artist in her 30s.

Speaker 7 Come in, welcome, welcome, hi.

Speaker 6 She's a very upbeat, buzzing ball of energy. Someone it's hard not to warm to.

Speaker 6 And we're in her flat in East London.

Speaker 6 Fipsy isn't Sarah's daughter.

Speaker 6 She is a friend of Sarah's daughter though who had a similar experience. And she asked me to come to her flat because she was ready to tell her story for the first time.

Speaker 7 Well nowadays I would say that I paint classical old master head copies.

Speaker 7 And then I graffiti over the top of them using found slogans from toilet bathrooms.

Speaker 7 So I kind of butcher them. I slather the lowbrow onto the highbrow.

Speaker 6 After me and one of my producers, Immi, got through the door, we all had a cup of tea together. And Fipsy gave us a tour of the artwork that covers her double-height walls.

Speaker 6 Lots of it's her own work. And to my untrained eye, her oil portraits look kind of Renaissance-like.
They're really beautiful.

Speaker 7 So this is Tosca, and she sat for me many times while I was in Florence painting. I just thought she had really interesting kind of tones with her red hair and green eyes.

Speaker 7 She was also really nice and sweet.

Speaker 6 It was the mid-2000s when Fipsy arrived in Florence, where all of this started. She was in her late teens and there to learn her craft.

Speaker 7 So I heard about it through a friend that I was at school with and I remember speaking to her, I must have been 18, just before we'd left school, and telling her that I wanted to pursue art and I was thinking of some of the London colleges and she just buttered in and said you should go to this painting school in Florence.

Speaker 7 I hear it's amazing.

Speaker 6 And it does look amazing.

Speaker 6 The school her friend told her about is a prestigious classical portraiture atelier that only takes 20 students at a time.

Speaker 6 The studio is hidden amidst the cobbled streets that run behind the River Arno in the centre of the city. It's run by an American called Charles H.
Cecil.

Speaker 6 He's in his 70s now and he's trained some of the greatest portrait artists of our time.

Speaker 6 The school's alumni have gone on to become some of the royal family's favourite portrait painters.

Speaker 6 Like the ski slopes of the French Alps and the grouse moors of the Scottish Islands, the Italian region of Tuscany and its capital city of Florence has long held a special place in the hearts of well-heeled English families.

Speaker 6 At night, all the art school students mingle with young Florentines in the city's bars and clubs, and by day, they congregate in piazzas lined with those little metal tables where you can drink a cappuccino or an Aperol Spritz in the sunshine and just watch the world go by.

Speaker 6 It's really not difficult difficult to see the appeal for a young person seeking adventure after a childhood raised under the grey skies of England.

Speaker 7 I didn't need much more of a push, so I arrived and it was an amazing place. I just fell completely in love with it and the art training was fantastic.

Speaker 6 Students at the art school received rigorous training in drawing and painting people from life.

Speaker 7 There was like a big book of models and then you would find a face that you found interesting or wanted to paint, call them up, hire them, they would come in, they would sit patiently for a couple of hours at a time, have a break, another couple of hours, and that's how you built up your painting.

Speaker 6 Inside the walls of the art school it's disciplined and strict. You're not allowed to use paint until you've proven yourself with charcoal.
That can take a year.

Speaker 6 It's meticulous work but outside, with all of Florence waiting, there's freedom for students to live how they choose.

Speaker 6 Fipsy had left behind her childhood in Fulham in southwest London and the confines of an an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Berkshire where the girls were taught by nuns.

Speaker 7 Which was interesting and fun sometimes and horrible at other times. I was not sad to leave that place.

Speaker 6 In comparison to the old-fashioned regimented boarding school life she'd just left, her years in Florence began like a heady dream.

Speaker 7 I lived very near a square called Santa Spirito, which is where we would all gravitate in the evenings and play guitar and eat sandwiches from the square that were delicious and cost nothing.

Speaker 7 And there was always music around. It was just such a fun time.

Speaker 6 She wasn't alone on her Italian adventure. There were other English teens and 20-somethings just like her.
And what were the other students like?

Speaker 7 Great. Also some of my best friends to this day.
And obviously, you know, we were young adults, but we still felt like, you know, we were 19. You still, you're such a child at that age.

Speaker 7 We discovered life in a way together in those years in Italy.

Speaker 7 All the normal stuff, you know, getting too drunk, people going on their first dates, and, you know, heartbreak, the Italian heartbreakers, all that stuff.

Speaker 6 It was a group of talented, fortunate young people discovering their passion, figuring out what adult life could be and what to do next.

Speaker 6 But towards the end of her four years in Florence, Fipsy's sunny adventure turned into something

Speaker 6 more complex.

Speaker 7 I knew that I needed help, but I was so unwilling to deal with what I was dealing with.

Speaker 6 She found herself carrying a secret. In Florence, flatmates came and went.
There was a constant stream of students staying in Fipsy's apartment. Some became friends.

Speaker 6 Others drifted in and out in the way they do at that stage in your life.

Speaker 6 But then a new girl moved in during Fipsy's final year and that's when something important changed.

Speaker 7 In the very beginning I remember the sort of natural feelings overtaking me and I didn't have a problem with them initially and then at some point I thought am I allowed to swear?

Speaker 7 Yeah at some point I thought shit

Speaker 7 does this mean I'm a lesbian? That's not a good thing because I really didn't want to be gay.

Speaker 6 She developed a crush and soon enough her mind went to her parents.

Speaker 6 They're quite traditional Catholics and she was worried about what they'd think.

Speaker 7 I remember desperately scrabbling for answers thinking, is this because my ex-boyfriend was such a dick or, you know, what is this? And I was really trying to make excuses and find

Speaker 7 rationality that would herd me back into being straight. So I was basically trying to find a reason that I wasn't actually gay.

Speaker 6 All of this was new. Fipsy had only ever dated men.
She didn't know what to do with these feelings about a woman.

Speaker 6 She was in denial and she didn't tell a soul.

Speaker 7 So in my final year in Florence, I was very depressed and grappling with my sexuality and very worried and essentially falling apart quietly on the inside.

Speaker 6 When did you first hear the name Anne Craig?

Speaker 7 I first heard the name through some friends of mine. who had been recommended her services, if you will, by her daughter that that was kind of in Florence at the same time as us.

Speaker 7 She wasn't on the art course, but she was doing another course. And we got to know her a little bit because, you know, Florence is tiny, so you do get to know people easily and quickly.

Speaker 7 And at some point, she had mentioned her mother, Anne Craig, as a sort of healer slash counsellor, someone who worked within the scope of emotional development.

Speaker 7 And because of her, I suppose, testimonial about her own mother, some of my friends started to see her.

Speaker 6 Fipsy wasn't looking for help yet. She was trying to untangle the knot of her depression secretly.
But this name, Anne Craig, the healer back in London, entered her radar.

Speaker 6 Because some of Fipsy's art school friends had been seeing this personal development teacher when they were back in England for the holidays. What did that friend tell you about her experience?

Speaker 7 That she was being helped by her.

Speaker 7 You know, all good stuff.

Speaker 6 And how did she describe Anne Craig?

Speaker 7 From what I heard, it was all very positive. You know, she's amazing.
She's spiritual and she can see things in us which we can't even see in ourselves. You know, all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 7 It just sounded magical and alluring and by and large, extremely positive.

Speaker 6 Fipsy picked up little snippets about how she worked by osmosis.

Speaker 7 It was like a plan B. Oh, okay, well, if I don't sort this out, I guess I can always go and see that amazing healer lady.
You know, oh, well, not now. Now definitely is not the time.

Speaker 7 I can't deal with it now. But good to know that she could be there for when I dare to start moving into some kind of self-help within this.
So that's how I had it.

Speaker 7 It was sort of tucked in the back of my mind.

Speaker 6 This name, Anne Craig, remained tucked in the back of Fipsy's mind as she finished the course in Italy and moved back to London to begin the next chapter in her life.

Speaker 6 She still wasn't telling a single person about her secret. But that changed when sometime after leaving Florence, Anne Craig took a very deliberate step into Fhipsy's life and mind.

Speaker 6 Fipsy was back in London and back in her family home.

Speaker 7 And, you know, started trying to make my way as an artist and earn a living painting portraits.

Speaker 6 She was starting her career. She had clients commissioning portraits.
But the burden of what was happening inside was taking its toll.

Speaker 6 She was still trying to convince herself that she was straight, but the feelings were becoming harder and harder to push down.

Speaker 6 A little over a year after arriving back in London, Fipsy knew she needed help.

Speaker 7 I was fervently struggling with my sexuality and also struggling with the fact that I was struggling because I wasn't very happy about the fact that I clearly had a lot of internalised homophobia.

Speaker 7 So I just wanted to deal with that because it's not great, really, is it? And you owe it to yourself to figure this out without bias and self-hatred, really, was shame.

Speaker 7 Shame was a really big part of it. So I, you know, I wanted to get that out and figure it out.
And it was tough because I think the worst thing about it is that I didn't tell a single soul.

Speaker 7 Nobody knew about any of this. I was just struggling alone.

Speaker 6 A friend of Fipsy's was seeing the healer, Anne Craig.

Speaker 6 And in one of her sessions, this friend mentioned Fipsy. She was worried about her.
And Anne listened.

Speaker 6 And then Anne apparently had a dream about Fipsy. And so Anne told the friend to pass the message on about the dream.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 it was put through to me that it would be a good time to go and see her. And I just thought I had nothing left to lose at this point.

Speaker 6 There's something undeniably curious about someone dreaming about you. And if you're desperately searching for answers and looking for clues, then it's probably going to pique your interest.

Speaker 7 I had been creeping forward into her radar and she into mine. And then I suppose one day I must have just picked up my phone and booked an appointment with her.
And that was it.

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Speaker 7 I remember very clearly walking down her street with my heart thumping in my ribcage. You know, oh my god, oh my god, am I going to tell her? Am I going to tell her? Am I going to tell her?

Speaker 7 Definitely not. Definitely not going to tell her.
Nope. Absolutely no way.
However, I'm very intrigued to see what this woman is all about. But I was.

Speaker 6 In 2009, Fipsy travelled across London for her first appointment in a smart-looking townhouse in Camberwell in the south of the city.

Speaker 6 When she arrived at the front door,

Speaker 6 she was greeted by a tall, slim, neatly dressed Irish woman with coffed hair.

Speaker 7 It was all very open, open arms, open front door. Come in, come in, come in.
Let me make you a cup of tea. And, you know, please make yourself at home, put your bag.

Speaker 6 Fipsy remembers big brown eyes and a warm, motherly presence.

Speaker 6 When they went inside, she was welcomed into a cozy, comfortable family home.

Speaker 7 You know, there she was greeting me like an old friend.

Speaker 6 Over a cup of chamomile tea in the downstairs kitchen,

Speaker 6 they began to get to know each other. She was very well talked about.
Small talk, really.

Speaker 6 And seemed very interested in Fipsy's life.

Speaker 6 Fipsy was now the latest of several members of the Florence Art School crowd to be sitting in Anne's kitchen.

Speaker 6 After the tea,

Speaker 6 Anne suggested they begin their session.

Speaker 7 And then we went upstairs to her therapy room and she opened the door and I was struck by how incredibly quiet it was. It was like you could hear a pin drop.
It was perfect.

Speaker 7 If you want to talk about yourself and you have to share things about yourself that

Speaker 7 you're vulnerable about, it was really the perfect place for that.

Speaker 6 The walls were a soft, muted pink. There was a massage table in the corner and two big comfy armchairs in the middle of the room.

Speaker 6 They sat across from each other and began to talk, mostly about Fipsy's background. The session was long.
It lasted several hours and it wasn't typical talking therapy.

Speaker 6 Standard therapy sessions usually last between 50 minutes and an hour, and the average first session might might include the therapist or counsellor running you through housekeeping type things, their background and qualifications, which professional body they're registered with, their confidentiality policy, etc.

Speaker 6 The ground rules to make you both feel comfortable in this exposing relationship you're about to enter into. But Anne's introduction was different.

Speaker 7 So she told me she worked with the spirit world and that she could see words floating above her clients' heads that would be prompts for her from the spirit world and inform what we would be speaking about in the session.

Speaker 7 So for example it was not unusual for me to walk into her house and for her to fix me with those big brown eyes and say, today we're going to talk about your mother Fipsy. And that was it.

Speaker 7 Okay, of course I took it.

Speaker 6 When Fipsy first heard that Anne communicated with the spirit world, she let out a little internal snort.

Speaker 6 I think many of us would.

Speaker 6 Though if I'm honest, I would probably also be a tiny bit intrigued if it was delivered by someone who seemed plausible.

Speaker 6 In any case, Fipsy was desperate, and any hesitation was settled by the warmth she felt towards Anne,

Speaker 6 and the many glowing reviews she'd heard from friends. Plus, Anne exuded confidence.
She told Fipsy she'd known that she was destined to be a healer from a very young age.

Speaker 6 She said she could see things in people that others couldn't.

Speaker 7 So the very first session, the first time I ever left Anne Craig's house, I felt a sense of hope and a sense of joy that I hadn't felt for ages

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 almost like a kind of drug-induced high.

Speaker 7 Of course I wasn't actually on drugs. It was psychological.
It was thrilling to feel shades of hope for the first time in quite a while. So I left with probably a bit of a skip in my step.

Speaker 7 She had no idea yet what was going on for me.

Speaker 7 So I kind of tucked it to the the side of my mind and I thought when I'm ready, this woman is going to be the person I tell everything to and I cannot wait.

Speaker 6 And so they got to work.

Speaker 6 Soon enough they were seeing each other every couple of weeks.

Speaker 7 What we would do is we would talk from our two comfortable chairs for at least two hours whilst scribbling or at least whilst I would scribble onto this very large bit of paper and she would have me use my left hand for all of this, even though I'm right-handed.

Speaker 7 She wanted me to use my left hand because it's connected directly to the heart, Fipsy. That was her vibe.
So she believed very much in people being and speaking and acting from the heart.

Speaker 7 That was her whole system of belief, was it's either you're from the heart equals good or you're from the head equals bad.

Speaker 6 Anne told Fipsy that the work they were doing together, the journey she would be going on, was all about finding the root of her problems.

Speaker 6 Anne wanted to look at relationships, Fipsy's background, find out just about everything about the person, and bring it all together to find out what the problem really was.

Speaker 6 At the time, Anne had a website. It doesn't exist anymore, but there are a few tools we can use to uncover these lost artefacts.
And we've been able to find it.

Speaker 6 There's an archive of the internet that exists. It's called the Way Back Machine.
And using it, we found what was the front page of anncraig.co.uk.

Speaker 6 It says, Difficult relationships within families very often repeat themselves in the next generation.

Speaker 6 Because these factors have such a significant effect across all aspects of our lives, they are frequently responsible for feelings of low self-esteem and low self-confidence.

Speaker 7 And she would prompt me with questions. What do you think your father thinks of this Fipsy? Or do you remember anything in your early life about this Fipsy?

Speaker 7 And then I would have to write with my left hand because it was directly linked to the heart. So therefore it was more likely to be an honest, heartfelt truth.

Speaker 7 Even if you think it's wrong or you think it's bad or you don't understand why you wrote, drew or said that, there's always a reason. Your spirit is always trying to tell me something.

Speaker 7 So there's no such thing as the wrong answer.

Speaker 6 It was an unusual approach.

Speaker 6 And after the sessions, the healing continued, in line with Anne's website, which stated,

Speaker 6 Patterns can be broken by learning to interpret your dreams. breaking the root and thus changing these patterns.
As part of this, Anne told Fipsy.

Speaker 7 And then you will email me your dreams in between. As many as you like.
If you have 30 dreams a night, you tell them all to me. That's fine.
So very generous.

Speaker 7 She was very generous with her time and clearly very devoted and passionate about her work.

Speaker 6 For the first three sessions, Fipsy was guarded. She skirted around the reason she was really there.

Speaker 6 This didn't seem to be a problem for Anne. She seemed less interested in what had brought Fipsy to her and and more interested in Fipsy's family.

Speaker 6 In Anne's view, the root of the problem would often run deep, all the way back to the client's childhood.

Speaker 7 And so I told her happily, you know, I've grown up in a very happy family environment and we have a lot of fun, we have a lot of laughter, a lot of music and we get along extremely well, all of which was true.

Speaker 6 Whatever the dream or whatever Fipsy wrote on these big bits of paper, Anne always had concerns.

Speaker 7 The sessions were always about family members and the trauma that members of my family would be carrying in their DNA, like all humans in the whole world. This was this was her entire ethos.

Speaker 7 So, and my family was not exempt, so my family, like everybody, was carrying darkness in their DNA, both ancestral and national.

Speaker 7 And so, therefore, the kind of endless aim was to

Speaker 7 try and unburden ourselves from this trapped trauma.

Speaker 6 Did she tell you what you were going to get out of these sessions with her when you first saw her?

Speaker 7 The premise of what

Speaker 7 I would get through my sessions with her was kind of healing.

Speaker 7 Healing and being able to live my life in a more authentic way from the heart so that I could have healthy relationships, a career that I deserved, and live my life to its fullest potential.

Speaker 7 This is what was promised to me.

Speaker 6 It's what we all want.

Speaker 7 I know it sounds great, right?

Speaker 7 So I must have spent probably about 12 hours with her when I finally felt safe enough to reveal to her that, hey, by the way, this is what's actually going on for me.

Speaker 7 I went into the fourth session knowing that I was going to tell her finally, I was going to tell the first person in my whole life finally what I was struggling with, which was my sexuality.

Speaker 7 And I was terrified, but also pumped full of adrenaline with a sense of thrill as well because what it might feel like to unburden myself.

Speaker 6 So, in the safety of the soft pink room, Fipsy told Anne her secret, that she was struggling to understand her feelings, questioning if she was gay.

Speaker 7 She was completely calm and kind, entirely unjudgmental. She could probably tell this was a really big deal for me.

Speaker 7 Because we'd got to know each other a little bit, but you know, I'm sure I would have had a quaking voice and probably gone quite red.

Speaker 7 In a sense, I was coming out to her really, or at least coming out half about at least what I was worried about.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 7 she didn't kind of immediately comment.

Speaker 6 It's a moment Fipsy had been building to since Florence.

Speaker 6 There was relief, elation, exhaustion, and to this day, the memory of one particular feeling.

Speaker 7 That I asked her at the end of that session, do you know

Speaker 7 deep down, like knowledge profoundly, do you profoundly know whether or not someone is straight or gay when you meet them?

Speaker 7 And she fixed that big-eyed gaze very, very firmly into mine and said, Yes, Fipsy.

Speaker 7 And it truly felt like in that moment, I just handed her all of my power because she knew full well that what I really wanted to ask her was, Am I? What am I? Please tell me what I am.

Speaker 6 And didn't give her opinion straight away. She teased out her response over the next few sessions.
Eventually, she told Fipsy,

Speaker 6 you're not gay.

Speaker 6 And more than this, Anne presented Fipsy with an alternative theory for why she might be questioning her sexuality.

Speaker 6 This is Fipsy reading an email she sent to Anne.

Speaker 7 Dear Anne, in my dream I saw three vultures circling above my sister, my mother, and one of my grandmothers. Anne's reply.
Vultures, as you know, Fipsy, wait for the dead carcasses to feed off.

Speaker 7 So these three would be symbolizing that three generations of your family are dead spiritually, dead from the root. All their femininity is dead.

Speaker 7 So all three generations have a fear of coming out with their femininity, and this is blocking their personal growth.

Speaker 7 She said that since childhood, I had craved attention and affection from my mother mother and not received it, that my mother is an alcoholic and that my mother was selfish, none of which is true.

Speaker 7 I had apparently reacted from this by seeking these loving, trusting relationships with other women and confusing them with sexual feelings.

Speaker 6 It was all about her mother.

Speaker 6 And then she went further.

Speaker 7 She started to suggest in our sessions that I might be the victim of sexual abuse. I would say from that moment on

Speaker 7 was really the beginning of the brainwashing into her entire belief system.

Speaker 6 This suggestion of childhood sexual abuse came out of nowhere. Fipsy had never mentioned it to Anne, nor had she ever suspected it herself.

Speaker 6 In the middle of a session, where Fipsy was talking about memories that she knew to be true,

Speaker 6 Anne gently introduced an idea that was not.

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Speaker 15 It's a very complex, very difficult, and you're dealing here with the malleability of memory.

Speaker 15 And as you and I know, memory is a very fragile anchor to our past.

Speaker 6 In 2016, A story about young women who had gone missing from their families landed on the desk of Mick Brown. He's a journalist at the Daily Telegraph.

Speaker 6 Mick decided to investigate further and he ended up interviewing Anne, her clients and their families, who by that point were making very serious allegations about Anne and what she was doing to the young women seeking her help.

Speaker 15 The allegation was that in the course of these sessions Anne Craig was implanting false memories. of these girls having been abused.

Speaker 15 Two of the girls ended up accusing their parents of having sexually abused them and that it was as a consequence of that that the girls had cut themselves off from their families, their friends, with completely disastrous consequences.

Speaker 6 It unfolded over years

Speaker 6 and Fipsy was not the only one. But for every woman, their story always started the same way in that soft pink room in Anne Anne Craig's house.
And there was a problem with Anne.

Speaker 6 Behind her reassuring self-confidence, her consultation room with its comfy chairs, her session fees and her therapy speak was

Speaker 6 nothing.

Speaker 6 She was not a trained psychiatrist, therapist or counsellor.

Speaker 6 She was not a regulated or supervised professional. Her professional background was as a training and development manager for companies.

Speaker 6 And she's told people in the past that her time working in professional development, training staff at an airline and then at a mushroom supplier, had given her the experience she needed to do this work with the young women.

Speaker 6 And Fipsy had just given her a precious gift. Access to her,

Speaker 6 her life story, her secrets, her trust.

Speaker 15 She took them apart

Speaker 15 by these prolonged, intensive sessions that would go on and on and on.

Speaker 15 Sessions in person, sessions over email, sessions by telephone. Taking them apart, directing them about what they should be thinking, directing them about what they should be believing.

Speaker 15 directing them about what they should be remembering.

Speaker 15 And in doing that, she went far beyond the bounds of therapy or psychoanalysis or anything that we would recognise as being in any way a legitimate way of dealing with problems.

Speaker 6 In the months and years after Fipsy's first fateful sessions, more women followed in her footsteps.

Speaker 6 For some, the decision to explore, to open themselves up to being healed, led to a series of extraordinary events which they're still recovering from today.

Speaker 6 And despite the damage it caused them, this was all happening freely, in plain sight.

Speaker 6 No rules were being bent, no laws were broken. That's the incredible truth when it comes to healing, wellness and the industry around it that has been so rapidly expanding over the past few years.

Speaker 6 So I've been delving into Anne's world and I've been learning about the desperate attempts to recover the young women in her care,

Speaker 6 the families who wanted their daughters back, and how they tried everything they could. Private investigators, experts, lawyers, politicians, police.

Speaker 6 And I've been searching for the answer to a simple question.

Speaker 6 What was this healer really doing and why in that upstairs room? to the young women who were listening to her.

Speaker 6 Coming up on dangerous dangerous memories. And I remember leaving feeling, this doesn't feel right.

Speaker 6 Something just down the steps, got onto her bicycle, and I said, 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.

Speaker 7 What does she believe now? Is she still the same person? Maybe she regrets this. Will she want to come on and apologize?

Speaker 7 I'm seriously curious as to where she is today and what has become of her.

Speaker 6 In the past, Anne Craig has issued categorical denials of any wrongdoing. She has denied responsibility for mentally abusing or psychologically manipulating clients.

Speaker 6 She has said she is the victim of a campaign of harassment.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Just go to bacp.co.uk.

Speaker 6 If you'd like to get in touch with us about your own experience, you can send us an email. It's dangerousmemories at tortoesmedia.com.

Speaker 6 Thank you for listening to Dangerous Memories.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And you can listen to our previous investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates.

Speaker 6 Or to hear more podcasts from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 Podcast artwork by Lola Williams. The commissioning editor was Basher Cummings.

Speaker 6 The executive producer was Kerry Thomas.

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